Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

During VMworld 2020, organisations from all over the world shared their stories on how VMware solutions have benefited them in their digital journey. From large enterprises like Nike to small businesses, VMware continues to provide them with the technology and support needed to improve and become more efficient.

Over in Southeast Asia, two prominent customers of VMware highlighted during VMworld 2020, which are SingTel, Singapore’s largest telco service provider and DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank. Two different companies from two totally different industries, but both with their own success story with VMware.

In a session with  VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta discussed the current business climate, including the growth opportunities of shifting to run like an agile tech company and the partnership between the two organisations allowing for innovation to thrive.

According to Piyush, the bank began looking at the technology around seven years ago and decided to mirror what the tech giants were doing. Feeling that banks could also apply the same transformation, they embarked on their digital journey.

Initially, DBS faced a lot of challenges, especially with the migration from their legacy systems. But even so, Piyush explained that most tech companies had the same challenges as well with legacy systems.

For DBS, their journey included getting efficiency through virtualisation, getting onto open-source, changing the methods of app development to be more agile, embracing and moving to cloud and move from running projects to creating and running platforms.

And they seemed to have done everything right with the bank being one of the most advanced banks in digital adoption in the world. Piyush also highlighted how the bank was able to manage their costs efficiently as new technology was much cheaper, allowing them to allocate available funding for other tech development.

“We have an important partnership with VMware. They have the right culture and attitude in a company. They have the best virtualisation, giving us 70 to 80 times compression to allow us to shrink our data centres and also save our carbon emission. Their containerisation tools allows us to use VMware capabilities to manage the whole process without having to be held hostage to a single provider,” said Piyush.

Meanwhile, Mark Chong, Group CTO of SingTel, explained how the telco company is looking to leverage VMware in the rollout of 5G services. 5G is expected to deliver far more superior speeds, much lower latency and allow massive connectivity of devices undermining what SingTel would like to see in IoT for Singapore as a smart nation.

“To reap all these benefits, it requires operators like us to transform backend of the network. We are working with VMware on virtualisation network on 5G,” said Mark in his session. As 5G promises low latency, Mark added that they are already looking to early use cases of 5G, whereby they are making use of the high throughput in the uplink for 5G.

Examples of 5G use cases in Singapore include the use of 5G throughput at Singapore Port, whereby port operators use the uplink of video on containers to remote operates the stacking of containers in a more accurate manner. Singapore Port was using 4G and Wi-Fi network previously, which could not deliver the desired high uplink speed.

The technology will also be used for asset management in the shipyard. As there are many types of equipment in the shipyard, port operators are able to use 5G to track their equipment more efficiently, resulting in time-saving.

For consumers, Mark explained that SingTel is currently on trial with a cloud gaming company. The lower latency of 5G allows application on the mobile edge to provide a more seamless experience for gamers.

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