Innovating the DX journey at Cloud Expo Asia 2018

In an environment of rapid change and technological disruptions, companies find themselves having to perform business processes and engage their customers in an increasingly agile manner. Transforming digitally to enable delivery of new and better services or products calls for new technology building blocks for a digital economy.

And in an era of hyper-connected enterprises, these ‘new building blocks’ face an increasing risk of cyber-attacks that demand a secure-by-design mindset at its core and fueled by intelligent,  innovative enabling technologies.

Encouraging enterprises to ‘Innovate your DX journey with insight-driven infrastructure to drive global growth’, the Singtel showcased featured a curated customer journey at the Cloud Expo Asia 2018 with three focus areas – Liquid Infrastructure™, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud. The live demo booths invited visitors to experience Singtel’s innovative take on digitalisation with a suite of network and connectivity solutions.

A key Singtel innovation is its new integrated, data-driven network paradigm, Liquid Infrastructure™ Singtel - a next generation enterprise platform. Touted as an intelligent, self-healing network, Liquid Infrastructure™ delivers a suite of data-driven services that would allow enterprises to ‘solve problems before they occur,’ said Goh Boon Huat, Vice President of Global Products at Singtel’s Group Enterprise.

Engineered on a software-defined (SD) platform, Liquid Infrastructure™’s cloud-centric network toolkits enable enterprises to configure their networks with ease. Network administrators can easily add or remove services on-the-fly, as well as scale or shrink connectivity and bandwidth dynamically. The on-demand bandwidth scaling is available on a pay-as-you-consume model, to help companies respond faster to unpredictable conditions. Companies will have greater control and agility over their network to support their changing business requirements.

Taking network intelligence further, Liquid Infrastructure™ is autonomous, deploying embedded network analytics to monitor changes in the infrastructure that can perform dynamic routing, detecting congestion and outages on top of remediating network issues independently, and as needed.

These network insights are achieved via the Liquid Infrastructure™ Portal - a secure and unified dashboard that offers enterprises enhanced visibility to monitor, control and troubleshoot the network, gaining better control over performance, bandwidth and security across hybrid multi-cloud network environments.

Extending the enterprise beyond the network perimeter, Singtel highlighted its commitment to the burgeoning field of the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Singtel IoT demo showcased an ecosystem of plug and play solutions, as well as next-generation IoT connectivity, inviting enterprises to engage an IoT future of always-on device logins and continuous data feedback loops. 

Some of the IoT-enabled solutions on display included non-intrusive, smart building sensors and a JITR (just in time device registration) collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), that automatically simplifies complex device authentication processes. Singtel also exhibited IoT Sense, IoT Precision and IoT Smart Locks which were launched at the show alongside a display of IoT DevOps, Singtel’s rapid IoT software deployment model for enterprises.

Speaking at a special IoT keynote at Cloud Expo Asia 2018, Diomedes Kastanis, Singtel’s Head of IoT, walked the audience through a demonstration of Singtel’s JITR IoT onboarding process. With JITR, IoT devices are instantly and securely logged into the AWS IoT platform via Singtel’s authenticated SIMs – a process which previously took up weeks. Kastanis also highlighted the benefits of processing data at the edge that would make sense of the voluminous data IoT devices can generate more efficiently.

These IoT solutions are designed to help enterprises achieve go-to-market (GTM) faster and securely with frictionless device onboarding processes and a programmable network. Businesses will be able to turn actions into insight, and value-add to their customers at a much faster speed than before.

Forming the core of its innovations in digitalising enterprises, Singtel also featured its new enterprise workflows for hybrid cloud environments designed to help businesses reduce time, risk and cost of transforming applications and workloads to the cloud.

Noting the rapid adoption of hybrid cloud networks amongst large corporations, Singtel showcased technologies and platforms to aid enterprises seeking to optimise the hybrid cloud experience. These include Singtel’s Digital Transformation Foundry (DTF) which brings together VMware and AWS to simplify the hybrid cloud migration journey, securely at scale and speed as well as Singtel’s LiquidSky™, a workload automation, orchestration, and governance suite of toolsets and services that help manage enterprise cloud environments - be it public, private or hybrid.

Whether on the network, in the cloud or at the network edge, Singtel drives all its innovations with a keen emphasis on enabling digital transformation securely, efficiently and seamlessly. But innovation must be balanced with insights as we move to an intelligence-based digital future.

For its part, Singtel believes companies that do not provide their workforces with the right tools, technologies and insights to make impactful decisions will be at a huge competitive disadvantage. The broader the transformation strategies, the deeper the technological innovation and the more holistic the approach, the bigger the payoff is likely to be.