THERE was Filipino pride in the country’s information communications technology (ICT) sector when Amihan Global Strategies launched on April 25 its Cloud Native product, a solution developed by an all-Filipino team.
“I want to prove that Filipinos are capable of developing leading-edge technologies in ICT. It is always been like that for me,” PLDT Inc. Chief Strategy Officer Winston Damarillo told the BusinessMirror. “I always go home to the country to touch base with Filipinos and talk with them to keep us updated with the latest development in software.”
Damarillo led the launch of the Cloud Native product on April 25 in Makati City.
“We beat the big boys in the bidding of some projects,” he said at the sidelines of the launch. “If we need some advanced studies or skill sets, I can ask the Filipinos in the US to come to the country and share their expertise.”
Damarillo said Amihan entered the Philippine market at the right time, as local enterprises are starting to implement their respective digital-transformation programs. He observed enterprise-level organizations have always been facing challenges, such as becoming more nimble on their path towards digital transformation.
Nevertheless, Damarillo pointed out Amihan has developed its CloudBlocks to give enterprise more ability to become faster innovation and introduce new solutions.
Developed in Cebu and Manila by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, CloudBlocks enables companies to deploy new services faster, harmonize legacy and next-generation apps in a unified ecosystem, and perform complex data analytics all in a single platform, he explained. It aims to transform the IT infrastructure of legacy companies, starting with their data center: the nucleus that powers business applications and houses business intelligence.
Kubernetes
AMIHAN CloudBlocks is based on Kubernetes, a container management tool, that was initially developed by Google, and is now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), of which Amihan is a member. Furthermore, Amihan CloudBlocks is built on the NEC DX 2000 hardware platform, which delivers world-leading density of compute, memory and storage.
It merges the technology based on Google’s pioneering Kubernetes Platform and regional expertise, catering to the specific needs of the largest enterprises in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region. Designed as a fully managed service solution, the CloudBlocks fits the requirements of the Southeast Asian market, Damarillo said.
He explained the rationale behind targeting the Asean trading bloc, composed of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, is because it is one of the fastest growing regions in the world.
“By experiencing rapid growth, Asean needs fast changing technologies to keep its dynamism,” Damarillo noted.
He also pointed out a lot of companies in the region are not quite keen on investing more on hardware that will lead to rise in their capital expenditure. Second, a lot of companies don’t want to invest more in capital expenditure. The other products developed by Amihan are Nimble (mobile apps), Unawa (Big Data and analytics) and a cyber-security solution. He said Amihan’s security product is currently undergoing beta testing before it goes into the market.
Targets
DAMARILLO said Amihan’s products will cater initially to the enterprise-level organizations. “The cloud is step one of digital transformation,” he said. “It’s the infrastructure for innovation that allows you to experiment, grow and adapt in ways that are necessary to keep up with the pace of customers’ digital appetites.”
Damarillo, a veteran technopreneur, stressed digital transformation is a complex process that involves drastic changes in culture, business practices and IT systems. He said the team focused in developing CloudBlocks capabilities to simplify compatibility issues, unifying data sources, investing in new systems and ensuring latest cyber-security and data-privacy standards.
Amihan CloudBlocks enables a deliberate transformation of a company’s existing IT systems to the cloud through its virtualization platform based on OpenStack, which will house legacy Linux and windows servers; Acaleph Storage, a data-secure enterprise widestorage platform; and Kubernetes-managed Docker to accelerate application development.
“Enterprises are using open source technologies, like Kubernetes, to deploy cloud native architecture models that support fast, agile application development,” Cloud Native Computing Foundation Executive Director Dan Kohn was quoted in a statement as saying.
Image credits: Nonoy Lacza