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How technology can help relaunch the global travel industry

The global travel industry has been devastated by conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic but there is hope on the digital horizon. Lenovo Data Center Group APAC President Sumir Bhatia says there are different ways that technology can help, “Tech was and is a key player in accelerating the distribution of vaccinations across the world, but if we take another step back, tech was also very critical in developing the vaccines and developing these aspects of it. Without technology, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Data is a very, very key aspect of it and it’s about how we mine the data, how we make insights of the data, right from the development of vaccines to the distribution of the vaccines.”

Sumir Bhatia, Lenovo Data Center Group APAC President

Sumir said tech will also be the key to seamless travel with the medical, diagnostic, and track and tracing playing a vital role. Lenovo has a solution for medical researchers. It’s called GOAST (pronounced ghost), which stands for Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool.  “It really combines the power of high-performance computing which is used for a lot of scientific research and development, and artificial intelligence in a CPU-based architecture optimised specifically for genomics analytics,” Sumir said.

He continued, “Imagine that with GOAST, processing a single human genome has been sped up from 150 hours to a record-breaking 48 minutes…which really helps the research world in developing not just the vaccine but any sort of processing they need to do very, very quickly.”

With lots of pent-up demand for travel, tech will again play a role in helping to meet it. Even after the community is vaccinated, travel in the smart normal has been transformed to become more technology-driven. Automation and AI are ensuring safe travel and minimising inter-human contact. Right from buying tickets, to going to the airport and flying in and landing and going to a hotel, a lot of it will be contact-less.

Checkpoints will be using AI to augment health screening. AI’s ability to personalise experiences and streamline processes based on customer data will prove invaluable over the coming months to customers who now want their tailored experience to also be safe.

One of the key assets Lenovo DCG has is infrastructure but their DNA is around partnerships. So, they collaborate with AI solution partners, like AddFor, who provide solutions like FEVERCheck – which measures body temperature automatically without contact. Additional solutions AddFor has are SAFEworkspace and FACEfind. VISIONsentry analyses video streams of surveillance cameras or transmitted by drones that identify or count people at airports. They can determine who is in violation, who is standing close or breaking the close-proximity laws, social distancing, etc.

All these solutions need infrastructure, and these are aspects that Lenovo DCG is helping customers with to transform during this very difficult time.

Sumir acknowledged many businesses found it hard to adopt technology to accommodate the new pandemic inducted protocols. He explained it with an analogy, “When you have a house and there’s a big hole in the roof, and it’s raining, what’s the first thing that you do? You’re running helter-skelter to fix that roof, so the rain doesn’t come in and flood your house.”

And that’s where many organisations were – scrambling to put things in place that would “plug that hole”.

Businesses had no time to strategise when the pandemic struck and he considers those in charge of tech to be the real heroes, “CIO’s and IT departments were suddenly being asked for a ten-fold increase in bandwidth, computing capacity and storage that they didn’t have a budget for or had planned resources for. How do they do that?”

Accompanying all the remote working and transitions online, gave rise to more cyber-attacks than ever before so security also became very critical.

This is where Lenovo made a tangible difference – working with key customers, across segments. Whether it was governments or large accounts, small and medium businesses, health, or education or end-to-end, one aspect that worked well was the virtual desktop interface, the VDI solutions. They were designed to tackle all the challenges by improving overall security and compliance.

Lenovo was focused on a data centered approach and a smart, intelligent transformation. First and foremost, organisations needed to ensure that employees had limited interpersonal contact. People were going into lockdown, so they needed to maintain contact and have full access to business data while working from home. Organisations had to ensure that employees were able to access the information securely and were able to do their work.

Sumir explained, “If you really look at it, these solutions were already there. It’s not that these were overnight builds and let’s go help them. But this pandemic really accelerated the use of it because VDI brings the ability to help people work remotely in a secure manner.”

He recalled that one of the most useful solutions they were able to offer was Lenovo DCG’s ThinkAgile integrated appliances and systems. They are all certified nodes that are designed to make it easier for the customer to deploy and manage the entire workflow from end-to-end. Based on its simplified infrastructure and its accelerated time-to-value, it has the ability to free up the customer to focus on the business. This was very critical at that point in time.

Going forward in 2021 and beyond into the post-pandemic world, Sumir believes prioritisation will be the game-changer. Lenovo DCG’s technologies have always existed, but during the pandemic, they suddenly rose to prominence. He feels that aspects of AI, HPC and Edge Computing will be key. Cloud computing and 5G are trends that will persist. But as consumers are consuming a lot of this data remotely “AI will be very, very key.”

In the post-pandemic world, remote working will continue to be the norm. Consumption of business data will no longer be just in the office, but also from homes, cafés and basically everywhere. This makes security a critical and essential component.

“Tech needs to ensure and reinvent agility, flexibility and security in the way we are consuming and leveraging data.  At the Lenovo Data Center Group, it’s people who transform work, and people actually reinvent. Tech needs to support this reinvention and transformation, and help customers grow and thrive,” Sumir concluded.

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Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

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SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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