Coming up: virtual-reality conferencing. Working with Hollywood studio DreamWorks, HP is developing Halo, which requires special rooms with very high bandwidth connectivity and wall-to-wall projection screens. "You can have a user sitting here in Singapore and one in California and one in New York and essentially it looks like you are sitting in a single room talking to a group of people across the desk," says Steve Huhn, HP's worldwide vice president of IT outsourcing/managed services. "Halo is engineered to make people feel intimate, to have the ability for eye contact, and see facial expressions and body language."
These collaborative technologies work just as well with third-party providers, helping boost the trend of global multi-sourcing, in which companies hire a multitude of specialists from anywhere around the world to handle various business processes so they can focus on their core competency. By 2009, predicts Gartner, Asia Pacific companies will be spending US$7.8 billion on business process outsourcing, 79 percent more than in 2004, and US$15 billion on outsourced IT services, up 63 percent in five years.
Among the new service providers will be pay-as-you-go public grid computing centers. In March, Sun will open in the U.S. a "retail grid" with thousands of Sun Fire x64 servers. It will charge clients US$1 per CPU per hour to run complex calculations such as Monte Carlo simulations of risks and analysis of geological surveys.
Multi-sourcing should be helped along by virtualization technologies that make various databases running on multiple servers work as one. Virtualization will be extended to the hardware level this year when Intel ships VT chips that allow multiple applications to run in the same space. Users will see a single, unified interface that masks the complex of resources fueling the company's operations, from multi-location data centers to supplier and customer networks to global outsourcing providers. And because a company's servers and PCs are, in effect, one virtual machine, workloads can be parceled dynamically depending on which parts of the network are underutilized.
Your Move, CFO
How long do companies in Asia have before this tsunami of IT changes descends on them? Not that much, it appears. "In the old days, you spent millions on an IT project with a three- to four-year life cycle," says Sybase's Chow. "No one wants that today. Now, the treasury department wants this, credit cards wants that. They cannot wait for the entire organization to move. They need business intelligence, RFID, whatever, now, this minute." This poses a challenge to the CFO and the CIO, who have to make sure that the various systems can eventually be knitted together.
More and more, it is the business side, rather than the IT department, that drives technology adoption across Asia. Says Chow: "Some IT people tell me, 'If I know one more thing, I'm going to explode.' But the business people always show interest. They would say, 'That guy down the road is doing this, so I have to do it too.'" Often, IT simply executes what the business units decide to do, all the more reason for the CFO and CIO to keep lines open.
The good news is that companies that are reasonably up to date with their IT systems will need only incremental upgrades, not a total overhaul. "It's not like you have to change everything," says Lai of NCS. "You must be very clear about what is serving you well and which you don't have to change so much." The question of best-of-breed solutions versus one vendor responsible for everything will resurface with new urgency, as will the issue of open source versus proprietary software. Dion Wiggins, vice president and research director at Gartner, expects open-source software solutions to directly compete with closed-source products in all software infrastructure markets by 2008.
"Open source is already mature in key areas such as development tools, operating systems, and security," he says. "Directory services, management, and application services are a little bit behind, with relational databases further down." Wiggins notes the rise of Asianux, a consortium between Hansoft in Korea, Miracle Linux in Japan, and Red Flag Linux in China. The three-country coverage (with the prospect of more joining) may encourage global vendors to certify their applications on this open-source platform.
As they move forward, however, CFOs must not forget that machines do not determine success. As vice president for finance, Asia, at U.S. software company Computer Associates, Jeff Hunt has business-intelligence applications at his fingertips. "BI is very, very powerful because it gives you a view across your business with a dashboard, rather than having to go to 20 or 30 places and ask the same questions," he says. But has the system ever told him something that his gut instinct says is plain wrong? "Absolutely," says Hunt. As it was in the past and as it is today, the human software will remain the most important technology in the office of the future.
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