Vietnam telecommunications provider Viettel Corporation established a research and development center to develop new technologies. Domestic enterprises, like Viettel, have adapted to new technlogies and taken it as a way of developing their business. — Photo courtesy of Viettel Research and Development Institute

Tan Jee Toon, general manager of IBM Vietnam, said this at the IBM Solutions Connect 2014 on March 11 in Ha Noi.

He added that the information technology industry has seen three main shifts in data, cloud and engagement, and these contribute to transforming the way enterprises do business today.

In reality, domestic firms have adapted to new technologies and taken it as a way of developing their business. Phung Van Cuong, IT Director of Viettel Corporation, said that the group has recognised the saturation of the telecommunications market, and that the continuous change of technology has impacted service providers.

Cuong said that users shift from computers to smartphones and use over-the-top (OTT, which offers free calls and text messages on Internet-based infrastructure) services instead of regular voice calls and SMS texting.

"Change is inevitable and we should not reverse the trend. IT becomes a driving force for us to shift to new concepts: internet of things, big data, cloud and mobility," he pointed out.

"With our current 80 million mobile phone subscribers, we can use big data to analyse personal information to offer proactive care for customers. Cloud and mobility can be implemented fast at costs that lower the price and attract the common people."

In the past few years, Viettel has invested in building research and development centres with 3000 engineers to develop new technologies such as big data, mobility and cloud. Cuong said that the group has set a goal of providing new products and services, and decreasing the revenue from traditional services, including calls and texts, to less than 40 per cent by 2018.

According to IBM statistics, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily and 62 per cent of the workload will move to the cloud by 2016. Its 2012 report also pointed out that there was a big difference between CEOs and customers. Eighty per cent of the CEOs think they deliver a superior customer experience, but only eight per cent of their consumers agree.

Tan Ser Yean, head of technical sales, business analytics unit at IBM Software group, said that customers now don't get information on products from the official websites of enterprises but from reviews on social networks such as Facebook.

Using big data, enterprises can understand customer behaviour and treat them the way they want.

"Not every customer can bring benefits. We need to go out and acquire new customers and realize who the potential customers are. We can then predict and treat them well, and we will get their loyalty," Tan said.

At the moment, big data has been applied in five major sectors: telecommunications, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and government. Le Bui Hung, IBM's senior ASEAN big data solution consultant, said big data stemmed from large companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter, and these use the largest amount of data.

"It started to change five years ago, with the new concepts of interconnection and instrumentation. With the great amount of information generated every day, it requires investment on new technology," he said.

"There are still a few firms implementing big data and analytics but they have seen many potentialities in these."

IBM Solutions Connect is a series of conferences being held by the US-based IBM in six ASEAN countries in the first quarter of 2014. It aims at introducing technologies and solutions for enterprises and organizations to achieve their business objectives. — VNS