This year, the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group) is planning a feasibility study and then the implementation of cloud computing in order to build ready-to-use IT services, especially for its storage infrastructure that cannot expand fast enough to meet users' needs.
Cloud computing is a next-generation infrastructure to support business scalability with easy maintenance and support, and allows them to utilize service-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS) and Web 2.0.
The technology is now in its emerging stage as Google is trying to persuade developers to use cloud computing for social networking projects, while Microsoft will launch its Cloud Platform for businesses and IBM is offering Blue Cloud, a series of cloud computing offerings.
CP's corporate development and improvement office management consultant Poonlab Chatchawalkhosit, said he would also consider using multi-core CPU technology which could support more dynamic applications and greater workloads.
Apart from cloud computing, CP uses "federated search", which allows users to have a single sign-on/password for any service of the company. This helped internal users leverage information and the services of the CP group, he said.
Nowadays, subsidiaries of companies have their own IT teams responsible for their business group, while federated search allows the integration of different systems and the ability to leverage existing knowledge management (KM).
In 2002, CP's research and development software team which comprised 20 people, started looking to use SOA, which required retraining and within a year became a paradigm shift for software development.
Today, users can define service requests by themselves, which accelerates the development of services, which had become easier and faster to create with no need to send requirements to the central IT system team. SOA provides users with an on-demand system with software that can adapt to human processes while helping to reduce redundancy in systems.
SOA allows the user to reuse software, providing flexibility and extensibility and is designed for use in the software-as-a-service model. Poonlab sees this market as continuing to grow and said it was a useful concept for developers, users and for an organization.
According to a Forrester Research report on the IT management Service market, SaaS now contributes 1 percent of this US$18 billion market and this would increase to 10 percent in 2013. He suggested that SOA and SaaS were emerging technologies that Thai software developers could adopt in order to capture new opportunities because everyone would start at same level, unlike packaged software that were already dominated by big players.
In addition, CP already uses Web 2.0 technology such as blogs and Web boards, and it was easy to use a system that allowed users to build or change their own system as well as increase communications efficiencies between users in various ways. He noted that weakest point of Thai developers with Web 2.0 was they were mostly at the design or configuring the user interface level, while those in other countries were more advanced, allowing users to design or configure databases, business logic in addition to the interface.
"We learned that if we want to use such new technologies we had to use business process management (BPM), which involves procedures and work flow in the organization because it enables IT to be applied more easily, is more agile and serves business change," Poonlab said.
He added that BPM would become more attractive at the global level, and especially in Thailand, because corporate management trends included total quality assurance, new standards like ISO 26000 for corporate social responsibility, and new tools such as Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen as well as a demand for use SOA and SaaS in business.
"Today's economic crisis is the driving force for IT to respond as fast as business needs in order to survive in a highly-competitive world," he said.
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