Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.

Asia's Digital Dragons

Asia's Digital Appetite

According to experts in McKinsey, Asia is grabbing the opportunities available from digital to try and leapfrog traditional economic leaders in the west and compensate for historic lack of investment in infrastructure. They single out India, Indonesia and China as the countries with the most energetic approaches and the most innovation. They cite greater appetite for social media take up and openess to mobile and other new technologies as drivers to greater innovation.

This position is supported by Gartner's identification of Asia's 10 leading digital disruptors:

• Tencent
• AliBaba
• Baidu
• Ant Financial
• JD.com
• DiDi
• Xiaomi
• Yahoo Japan
• Naver
• Lufax

The interesting fact about this list is that it is dominated by Consumer oriented businesses. B2B opportunities are yet to be exploited. Even so, the power house that is AliBaba is reputed to dwarf western giants such as Amazon. So Asia is currently playing to its numbers and culture to establish scale.

Garnter recommends that western enterprises operating in Asia should consider adopting local platforms to guarantee penetration and better customer experience in Asian Markets.

Future Digital Directions in Asia

A recent survey of global CIOs by Logicalis showed that CIOs in the Asia Pacific area have been disappointed by slow progress overall in adopting digital business models. Like CIOs in other parts of the world they have seen typical barriers such as Organisational Culture, Scale of Investment, Legacy Infrastructure, Skills and Security holding them back.

However, overall they are typically planning to address them with moves to simplify and modernise infrastructure, work closely with other business colleagues to address specific opportunities, improve training, invest in culture change and generally increase security investments.

In doing so, they are preparing to lead change and more B2B services are likely to emerge, balancing Asia's digital economy.