Gauging an experience-driven economy emerging from digital infrastructure
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Gauging an experience-driven economy emerging from digital infrastructure

Ravindran Mahalingam - HGC 16.9.png

Our world is digital first, real time and super-fast. However, this new age requires a multi-approach to the experience-driven digital economy to deliver the ultimate benefits to businesses and users.

Ravindran Mahalingam, SVP, International Business of HGC Global Communications, a fully-fledged ICT service provider and network operator with extensive global coverage, shares how technology is transforming a new level of satisfaction.

What trends and technologies are shaping the experience-driven economy?

RM: The trends really are around adaptability allied to service-oriented thinking. There is a clear need for industry-specific and optimized experiences that deliver customer value.

This is where the balance point between centralization and decentralization of data workloads becomes interesting. Cloud and edge respectively, hold the key to bringing computing closer to the user, making it safer, faster and more reliable with the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) mindset complementing this new architecture.

This is key to all sectors, especially delay-intolerant applications and high-value industries like healthcare, legislation, and finance, which also have stricter compliance requirements to fulfil.

How is HGC digital infrastructure changing to serve such world?

RM: Digital infrastructure provides the foundation path for an organization's IT and operations to uplift efficiency, ease provisioning and enhance accessibility, over the best-in-class subsea and terrestrial fibre optics infra and data centres.

HGC is a strong global player here with an internationally established solid network infrastructure providing digitalized platforms to serve customers in all verticals and expediate the running of business applications on top of the infrastructure. For example, HGC’s dedicated digital path to cloud platforms (AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) is facilitating customer innovation pipeline with guaranteed service experience on top of HGC’s fine-tuned global network; HGC streamlined global network ordering with MEF LSO Sonata APIs and enabled Order to Cash for data services at Warp Speed.

Telecoms and OTTs are driving new business that delivers low latency and uplift QoE. How is HGC’s flagship Eyeball-as-a-ServiceTM suite (“EaaS”) contributing to this new 5G edge age?

RM:  As we evolve in the experience-driven economy, we will see that UX-heavy applications, e.g. Cloud Gaming, VR, AR, nanotechnology, require different criticality levels of short lead times, robust capacity and low latency broadband networks.

For example, mainland China and the Asia-10 (India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam) represent more than 50% of the world’s mobile games market revenue. We understand that the industry should collaborate to create a game-changing infrastructure and ICT technology ecosystem to support such latency-critical traffic.

As we enter this new edge computing age, network management and complexity continue to be the greatest challenge for service providers, as millions of nodes are deployed which require maintenance, upgrades, scaling, etc. At HGC we have a wide-ranging portfolio of options to ease that complexity.

By creating a great edge partner ecosystem with MNOs, ISPs, IXs, HGC EaaS offers OTTs super-fast access to digital infrastructure to reach nearly 100% of Internet eyeballs with enhanced network performance (achieving ultra-low latency of <10ms) and fulfil a satisfied end-user experience.

Since its initial launch in Singapore in February this year, EaaS is extending in the Philippines in August and is rolling out rapidly for servicing 400 million users across Southeast Asia. The ready-to-go platform provides customizable and pertinent architectures that are easy to set up globally in weeks’ time. Since the launch of EaaS, we have observed our customers experiencing a significant reduction in operational costs with accelerated digital agendas and increasing footprints into omni-channel experiences.

Mobile plays a crucial role in the experience economy. How do you see opportunities between fixed/mobile service providers?

RM:  The shift to digital has transformed banking, finance, e-commerce, gaming, healthcare, you name it. Our data-driven Mobile Intelligence suite, built for seamless engaging experiences, is a key ally to operators, service providers as well as users. It increases security without increasing user friction. Service providers that have adopted this kind of API-driven services report reduced customer drop-off rates during onboarding and authentication as well as reduced fraud levels.

More, HGC strategically bridges the digital world with the MNO world with its 400-partner network and extensive global reach. Taking a total approach to A2P monetization and securitization, we adopt best-in-class SMS-filtering technology to enhance threat protection against spamming, flooding, spoofing and fraud, sophisticated content and pattern recognition as well as SIM box, Grey Route detection, Smart Content filtering and blocking capabilities, creating frictionless customer experience.

The digital economy is a big space for change, and we constantly keep our eyes open to new trends and future market changes such as the coming of 6G by the end of this decade.

Some recent work we have done: Deloitte Cyber which has partnered up with HGC Group to provide adaptive security protection from cyber risks during digital era; HGC and AMS-IX are bordering Internet Exchange portfolio and reached a new remarkable traffic peak.

With us, we like to say: go ahead, we’ve got your back.

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