Cloud database software company Couchbase helps Philippine businesses keep pace with the fast evolving technology especially in areas with intermittent network or in internet dead zones.
“At Couchbase, we are targeting opportunities in various sectors in the Philippines, especially in online gaming and business process outsourcing. Impressive growth in online gaming and BPO, as well as other sectors like banking and financial services, remote support, IT development and retail, combined with increased adoption of cloud, big data and Internet of Things make the Philippines a lucrative market,” said Couchbase regional vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan Stuart Fisher.
With a big slice of the pie, developers need to react quickly. They need to thrive in the open-source community, where Couchbase solutions are well suited and positioned to support digitalization strategies and enable growth.
Couchbase is a proud supporter of DEVCON, the Philippines’ largest community of experts working to promote the collaborative growth and global competence of Filipino developers.
“We are pleased to contribute to the organizing of hackathons and conferences involving academia and IT practitioners as part of our commitment to developing the industry in the Philippines,” Fisher said.
Couchbase also has the expertise in vertical sectors such as media and entertainment, gaming, healthcare, travel, retail, energy, finance, manufacturing, logistics and technology.
“Our solution is valuable for companies with a large database of information that requires low down time and 24/7 availability. Clients who use our services are empowered to address their catalog and inventory in real time and update content throughout the infrastructure at low latency levels,” Fischer said.
“Our target clients tend to have several offices with remote working employees who contribute data to the company. We aim to support their work with our IoT management systems, where organizations and their stakeholders can rely on a responsive and secure application to capture and sync data across devices,” he said.
“Ultimately, the companies we seek to serve are searching for greater flexibility in integrating data from multiple sources and scalability to accommodate growing business needs,” he said.
Challenges
The Philippines faces unique challenges including low digital adoption rates among smaller businesses, a lack of awareness around initiatives facilitating digitization and digitalization as well as gaps in access and skills.
“On the flip side, the government is taking stringent steps to address these challenges, crafting several roadmaps to guide policymaking, such as the e-Commerce Philippine 2022 Roadmap, among others. To fully realize its potential, these efforts should be backed by digital skills training and education, as well as promote public-private partnerships that create opportunities for modernization,” Fisher said.
Businesses should also take stock of the lessons of recent years, and that there is no magic bullet to digital transformation without a well-thought-out process tailored to business objectives, he said.
Failed projects and delays are the blight of businesses trying to innovate. Not being held back by these shortcomings rests on leaving behind legacy technology and problems accessing or managing the relevant data.
These issues often boil down to approach and strategy, which can be overcome with better budgeting for digital transformation as well as pursuing more realistic projects, he said.
According to National ICT Household Survey conducted by the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the Philippine Statistical Research and Training Institute, cellular signal reaches 92 percent of surveyed communities, with 3G technology is still prevalent in rural areas. Despite near-universal access to electricity, some communities have low access to telecommunication towers, fiber optic cable and free Wi-Fi.
This is where Couchbase can deploy its expertise in providing services that promote remote work in internet dead zones.
Couchbase is well placed to support the Philippines government in this endeavor, with a server that handles client-to-cluster, node-to-node and cluster-to-cluster communications through high availability and protection against significant infrastructure failure.
Scalable solutions
In the Philippines, Couchbased introduced types of edge solutions that are available for micro, small and medium energizes as well for both public and private organizations. The first is Micro Edge, which is deployed in hardware machines, such as mobile phones or embedded systems. These devices have limited processing power and storage capacity and are designed to handle simple tasks such as data collection, pre-processing and basic analytics.
Mini Edge, on the other hand, is deployed at the building or campus level. These devices have more capabilities than Micro Edge devices, allowing them to perform more complex actions, such as data processing, advanced analytics and ML.
Medium Edge, which is set up at the city or regional level, can handle the same operations as Mini Edge devices while having more power and capacity to deliver complex use cases like augmented reality and virtual reality, whereas Heavy Edge are devices have the most processing power and storage capacity of all edge computing solutions and are designed to handle most tasks. They are also able to administer advanced applications such as artificial intelligence and deep learning functions.
The Multi-Access Edge, a type of edge computing architecture where components are deployed at multiple levels of the network, work in unison for seamless and efficient service experiences, with each tier providing different functions and resources.
With the recent announcement of the general availability of Capella App Services on Google Cloud Platform, Couchbase expanded cloud support for fully managed offline-first data sync.
As an application backend that brings Couchbase Mobile to fully managed as-a-service offering, Capella App Services can execute offline data synchronization seamlessly.
This type of support, Couchbase said, could help various sectors in the Philippines step up their digitization efforts especially in manufacturing, retail and the healthcare sector by helping them hook up into edge computing. Othel V. Campos
