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Friday, March 29, 2024

Strategy, execution, and culture

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I recently attended the Telco Strategies 2015 conference held in Jakarta, attended by hundreds of telco executives from around the globe. The first night was a glorious one, as I accepted the Best Emerging Market Operator award on behalf of Globe Telecom—a deserving one having finished 2014 with a record performance and ending the first quarter this year with 25-percent growth.

Growing the cloud business

The following day, I shared an operator case study about growing the cloud business. This is a hot topic these days as telco operators all over scramble to find new revenue streams amid the commoditization of the traditional telco services such as connectivity and voice. Cloud services are seen as a logical source of new revenue streams as it uses the Internet to deliver the various services, such as storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive or the company’s dedicated server.

I shared my experience in leading and growing the business of IT Enabled Services Group, a two-year old business unit under Globe Business, which is tasked to lead the information and communications industry to develop and provide cloud services, apart from the traditional datacenter services, to enterprise, and small and medium business clients.

Our trajectory says we are. Our business results in 2014 indicate a cloud infrastructure growth of 63 percent while the business applications cloud grew 288 percent compared to previous year. Overall, IG grew 18.7 percent year-on-year which includes our datacenter business. This is far outperforming the IT industry growth of 11 percent in 2014.

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Leading the market

So how are we leading this market? I shared to the audience three critical components to scale a new business like cloud services – strategy, execution and culture.

My group’s strategy comes from the direction of our CEO, which is cascaded to all business units. IG’s strategy is summed up in understanding the markets we serve, may it be enterprise or SMB, and developing cloud products that suit various industries and segments. Key to our strategy is to partner with world-class cloud business applications, such as Google Apps, Microsoft O365 and Canvas for digital forms.

Our cloud infrastructure offering (also known as virtual private cloud or VPC) is developed for business customers interested in taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing but who have concerns over certain aspects of the cloud. Since VPC is provided within our data centers and is provisioned for private use by a single business user, it addresses concerns on data security.

Execution is also important in scaling a cloud business. This involves having the right structure in place, the right people with the right skills to communicate the benefits of cloud to business buyers and a set of customer-centric processes such as provision and billing.

Having the right culture

Lastly, and most importantly, is having the right culture to support a sound strategy and execution. This is Globe’s competitive advantage. Our culture is not simply making things possible for customers and pushing its employees towards common goals; but also a culture of happiness at work as fun activities and gatherings are organized by the company, guided by work-life balance and a fun environment. The logic here is that happy employees leads to happy customers which results in happy shareholders; hence the Circle of Happiness.

My talk ended with a lot of attestations from the audience that, indeed, Globe is leading the ICT industry in the Philippines.

 

The author is the Vice President for IT Enabled Services, Globe Telecom.  He also teaches management and marketing courses in the MBA Program of De La Salle University, Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business. He may be e-mailed at rlugtu2002@yahoo.com, or visit his blog at http://rlugtu.blogspot.com.

 

The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty, and its administrators.

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