We are moving into an era where enterprise customers find themselves in a rapidly changing business environment. As decisions are increasingly made on a regional or even global basis, companies are looking for a trusted partner to provide one-stop, end-to-end ICT solutions.

To capture these opportunities, we have integrated our enterprise-related units into Group ICT. As a unit, Group ICT supports businesses with a global perspective and delivers locally relevant solutions. With a vast network of offices in 40 cities across 22 countries and territories, we are well-positioned to understand both the regional and local challenges our customers face as well as to develop and implement relevant solutions in a fast-changing world.

Group ICT has the assets, scale, resources and expertise to cater to customers’ specific ICT needs, whether they are small, medium or large corporations. Along with our global network and delivery model, we offer a comprehensive range of managed ICT services, from unified communications to cloud and mobility solutions, as well as IT consulting and applications.

Increasing our cloud firepower

Harnessing our innovative cloud solutions, we are committed to reducing complexity, increasing productivity, as well as providing greater control and scalability on demand.

During the year, we increased our cloud firepower through strong partnerships with software market leaders. In Singapore, we partnered Intuit to provide QuickBooks Online, a world-class financial management solution that helps businesses manage critical tasks, such as creating invoices and tracking cash flow. We also worked with SAP to offer the Singtel-SAP Business One solution, which enables small-medium enterprises (SMEs) to streamline and manage their sales, customer relationships, inventory, business processes and operations on the go via smartphones, tablets and PCs. Singtel is the leading telco provider of cloud services in the region, with over 180,000 enterprise users and more than 800 enterprises on our cloud solutions.

We broke new ground with the introduction of Singtel PowerON Compute, enabled by VMware® vCloudTM Datacenter Service. This state-of-the-art cloud solution provides enterprises with the business agility and cost effectiveness of public clouds without compromising on portability, compatibility, security and control demanded by enterprise IT organisations. In Australia, Optus also gained accreditation to deliver VMware vCloud® Datacenter Services. This common platform will enable Group ICT to provide regional cloud services across Asia Pacific in the future.

Optus and Alphawest announced “Your IT as a Service”, a private cloud solution hosting data on-premise, which features a centralised catalogue of virtualised IT products and services, including servers, storage, networking, and security applications, from a single web portal. It enables customers to ‘automate’ their IT architecture as a service, significantly reducing deployment time from weeks to potentially a matter of minutes.

We also partnered Symantec Corp. to offer Singtel PowerON Security, a comprehensive Security as a Service solution that provides on-demand protection from viruses and other online threats, whether customers are in the office or on the move. Similarly, Optus Business boosted Internet security for enterprise customers with Optus Evolve Internet Security as a Service and Optus Evolve Distributed Denial of Service. These offerings help ensure security threats, viruses and malware are proactively detected and blocked at the network level so customers do not have to deploy their own premise-based solutions.

Championing emerging technologies for mobility

With the proliferation of smart devices and unprecedented mobile network speeds, the workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, leading to the consumerisation of IT, where workers use their personal devices for work. This presents new challenges to enterprises as they look for ways to keep their employees connected, secure and productive.

To address these challenges, we introduced the Singtel Mobility Device Manager (MDM) to manage various mobile devices and ensure data security via a simple web-based portal. MDM is compatible with all mobile operating system platforms and independent of location and mobile network, enabling IT departments to control mobile devices globally. Similarly, Optus integrated MDM as part of its enterprise mobility portfolio offering to provide inventory management, remote lock and wipe and user self-service. This helps customers easily manage and track their mobile workforce.

Another emerging space is Machine-to-Machine (M2M). M2M enables devices to communicate with one another via built-in mobile SIM cards without human intervention. This opens up new possibilities for businesses to improve efficiency and services, and to simplify administration. Singtel’s M2M platform empowers customers with end-to-end information control of their connected devices and helps them reach new markets quickly and easily.

We are also making headway with Unified Communications (UC), which integrates multiple communication platforms from fixed to mobile, enabling our customers to communicate more effectively with a consistent user experience. The introduction of mobile UC and Fixed Mobile Cloud Convergence helps users eliminate reachability issues, reduce costs and communicate easily, whether they are at their desks or on the move.

Leveraging the combined strengths of the Singtel Group, Bridge Alliance and other strategic partnerships, we offer an integrated and managed suite of mobility products and services across the Asia Pacific region. Our one-stop mobility solutions include harmonised regional offerings, such as roaming services and the delivery and coordination of localised products and services.

Boosting our infrastructure, the backbone of our ICT solutions

We continually improve our networks to serve our enterprise customers better. In Singapore, we are the only home-grown company to own commercial satellites, and we successfully launched the ST-2 satellite in May 2011. We consistently increase capacity to meet growing customer demand for fixed and mobile satellite services with wide-ranging footprints of C-band and Ku-band coverage for the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

In Australia, Optus is the only full service telco that can harness the geographical reach of satellite communications for customers. Optus has five satellites in orbit and will be launching a new satellite, Optus 10, in 2013. Our fixed networks, HFC, DSL and fibre, enable us to provide services to four million Australian premises, including 18,000 corporate premises.

During the year, we extended coverage for our Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) services with new Points of Presence (POPs) in several cities, such as Zurich, Manama and Kolkata, bringing our total of POPs to 130, spanning 80 cities globally, of which 100 POPs are in 56 cities in Asia. In addition, several new communications cables were introduced to provide customers with more choices for routes and to reduce latency. We rolled out direct routes from India to the Middle East and from Hong Kong to Europe. We also procured various cables to introduce new routes into the network for our dedicated point-to-point services.

Our IP VPN networks were enhanced with new solutions during the year. To cater to the low latency requirements of our financial customers, ConnectPlus Ultra Low Latency was introduced to direct connections to financial exchanges and to deliver the lowest latency for time-sensitive activities such as algorithmic trading. We also introduced Electronic Bandwidth on Demand to give our customers full control of their bandwidth usage and to enable them to take advantage of on-demand cloud services for better network and cost efficiencies. Through a convenient self-service online portal, customers can temporarily increase the bandwidth for their IP VPN networks in under 24 hours.