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Fabric architectures: Are they being stretched in Asia?
Amid the continuing growth in Asia, financial services companies in the region require a solid computing network system. They require better IT ROI
Timothy Mak 3 Dec 2014
 
   

Amid the continuing growth in Asia, financial services companies in the region require a solid computing network system. They require better IT ROI.

 
Companies aiming to tap into the Asian growth are seeking reduced costs, risk mitigation and clear productivity enhancements. This explains the industry-wide push for virtualization and cloud migration “internally” or within a company network to deliver a more efficient, risk-compliant back office, as well as multi-service client experiences.
 
Internally, productivity-enhancing tools can deliver better engagement levels among teams, faster and better decision-making, growth initiatives, lower costs, and greater insight into customer needs. Mobile, multi-platform solutions such as mobile video collaboration enable all of these.
 
Given the broad consensus that mobile-enabled services in a private or hybrid cloud environment are essential, many financial services firms are upgrading their often cumbersome legacy data network architecture, to accommodate today’s fast-evolving, app-riddled digital environment.
 
Older networks with multiple protocols and piecemeal, incremental additions present complexities in engagements.
 
A new fabric-based architecture can equip firms with simpler network management, rapid app deployment, straightforward one-touch and foolproof service provisioning, and on-the-fly maintenance that can give companies better control of their systems.
 
Asia’s diverse economies, regional fragmentation, and fast-paced change and growth all reinforce the need for agile, flexible and extensible solutions, built on open-standards, cloud-enabled and mobile-ready.
 
Asia’s comparatively immature legacy systems can create an opportunity to leapfrog Western economies, by deploying state-of-the-art architectures.
 
However, technology is critical to achieving this goal. The systems it creates have to be accessible anywhere via any device, with communications capabilities embedded in core systems and processes.
 
Outsourcing is one potential strategy for firms looking both to upgrade and to upscale their networks, but in financial services this is complicated by the sector’s historic predilection for large in-house IT platforms.
 
Operational and capital cost control remains a leading factor in decisions to utilize outsourced or out-tasked solutions, or keep capabilities in-house. But increasing network complexity, growing pressure to control IT and telecom expenses, and sustained focus on core business activities are likely to drive continued demand for managed or hosted services.
 
In Asia, financial services companies continue to face network challenges.
 
In a survey of network managers across Asia Pacific, Avaya found 86% of respondents were experiencing network downtime issues associated with human error, and 98% experienced reporting delays to business improvements as they need to wait for maintenance windows.
 
Among business leaders, 97% of respondents said Customer Experience Management (CEM) was important to them, but only 58% had a comprehensive program in place.
 
From the client side, 87% of end users were looking for strong CEM, and over two thirds expected personalized services. In addition, 79% of those companies who experienced significant profit increases in the last year have a CEM program in place, rising to 98% for financial services businesses.
 
CEM, an integral part of financial services network development, impacts business improvement. Engaged customers are more loyal, deliver more revenue and become advocates of a business. But customer engagement requires communications technology that can create the end-to-end customer experience, which nowadays has to be delivered via multiple channels –voice, video, email, text, self-service and in person.
 
In a marketplace where this is fast-becoming the standard, such customer experience is now only achievable through a well thought-out, IT-enhanced CEM strategy.
 
One final side benefit of the new generation of fabric-based architectures is the environmental benefits they deliver.
 
Videoconferencing that goes beyond expensive Telepresence rooms is revolutionizing business processes and travel expenses.
 
Cloud-based platforms can scale on demand rather than requiring IT hardware and software purchases, reducing the environmental burden while helping the budget.
 
Data center consolidation, involving reduced floor space, server or storage virtualization, requires careful implementation, but it can cut costs and improve efficiency dramatically, while answering the pressure to deploy green initiatives. All this can help a financial services firm’s CSR profile, while simultaneously enhancing its bottom line.
 
Asia is a regional market that can bring out the strengths of the new fabric-based architectures, but also one that can punish the financial services firms that fail to rise to the new-generation IT challenge.
 
Asia’s solid growth prospects, developing economies, a growing middle class and “long tail of HNW individuals” together create strong opportunities for financial services firms.
 
But the region also have engendered a fast-evolving and disparate market that is highly competitive and demanding, and insistent on global best standards in CEM and in robust, secure back office systems.
 
Financial services companies that can stay ahead of these demands and ride Asia’s continuing growth are likely to fast outdistance those that cannot. By definition, fabric stretches. In Asia, that is exactly what it will have to do.
 
Timothy Mak is managing director, HK & Taiwan of Avaya

 

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