As
announced on 10 April, Singtel signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU)
with enterprise software innovator VMware to jointly provide solutions to
accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises across the Asia Pacific
region.
The two companies will set up their first Digital Transformation Foundry in Singapore to co-create new generation cloud solutions.
The Foundry is designed as a “virtual sandbox” for customers to conduct proof-of-concept
experiments to help bring their digital solutions to market more quickly.
Enterprises can test their solutions in a hybrid cloud
environment, for example, allowing them to implement cloud-enabled workplaces
more smoothly, in turn lowering costs, achieving better operational
efficiencies and improving productivity.
By allowing
customers to test and learn in a hybrid cloud environment, the Digital
Transformation Foundry will pave the way for them to implement cloud-enabled
workplace and digital services more smoothly to harness the benefits of better cost and operational efficiencies and
improved productivity.
“Digitalisation lies at the heart of most companies’
transformation. Many companies share the need to migrate to and operate in the
cloud, get their networks software-driven in order to create workplaces of the
future,” said Singtel CEO for Group Enterprise Mr Bill Chang.
“The Foundry will empower customers to implement an
integrated cloud solution with ease. We will help them design, secure and
deploy cloud-enabled solutions, in short, customise the flexible infrastructure
they need to accelerate digital transformation, adopt new and disruptive
technologies, and boost competitiveness.”
According to VMware CEO Mr Pat Gelsinger, Singtel and VMware
have worked very closely for many years to deliver great solutions to their
mutual customers.
“I’m delighted to
further expand this collaboration to deliver digital transformation solutions
to customers throughout Asia-Pacific who are looking to improve their IT
capabilities to meet the ever-growing demands of their businesses to be more
agile, cost effective, secure and responsive to their customer needs. Together with Singtel we aim to meet the
needs of CIOs through the Foundry’s new offerings.”
With similar foundries slated for Australia and Hong Kong,
Singtel and VMware will initially focus on delivering a suite of 4 cloud
services to enable customers to modernise their data centres, integrate public
and private clouds, transform information security and create digital workspace
of the future.
This suite of 4 cloud services include:
(1)
A private cloud service where customers will
attain the agility, scalability and efficiency similar to that of public
clouds, but with the greater levels of control and security of a single tenant
with a dedicated hosted environment either on the customers’ premises or in Singtel’s
data centres
(2)
A hybrid cloud service that will provide a more
secure, inter-operable multi-cloud solution designed to facilitate seamless
application mobility, disaster recovery and migration across multiple clouds
(3)
A digital workplace service which combines
devices, connectivity, data management and security to enable employees to work
on any device, anywhere, anytime
(4)
A multi-cloud managed security service which
will secure customers’ applications across both private and public clouds
The signing
of the MoU took place at the annual VMware CIO Forum in Singapore. The Forum
was attended by more than 120 c-suite executives from Southeast Asia and Korea.
