Re-tooling for globalisation

Dinesh Malkani, Cisco System’s managing director of collaboration sales in Asia Pacific, Japan and China, discussed these issues with VIR’s Ngoc Linh.

How do you evaluate the opportunities between Cisco and partners in Vietnam?

We feel that Asia-Pacific, including Vietnam, is a very export-oriented economy. We also know that a lot of IT products are now - even if it is software, hardware or services - are done in Asia-Pacific.

At present, a lot of companies have offices in almost every market, so they need to communicate with each other, they need to collaborate with each other, they need to have communication going on so that they can be fast, and they need to think about cost and the different time zones, they need to think about how do they become most competitive.

That is one of the biggest reasons why collaboration has been doing well in Asia. The style of communication in Asia is changing. Almost 50 per cent of the workforce is less than the age of 30 in countries like India and Vietnam also, lots of young people in the workforce. For young people, the style of communication is now different. They don’t pick up the phone and call, they do SMS, they do video and they do social media.

And the best way for us to be competitive in global market is to use these forms of communication, video customers, video partners, and video all organisations. That’s why collaboration is explained as an important part in the growth of Asia Pacific, including Vietnam and other countries.

How do you develop collaboration in Vietnam?

Our customers in Vietnam, for example, want to communicate and collaborate with their suppliers in Indonesia or their suppliers in Singapore. So we work with our customers to provide them all the software and hardware and services. And we do that either working with our partners on climate which means we can cloud storage for them and set it up, all from the cloud, so that they can access it anywhere.

You know our big customers and partners are on the journey of globalisation, we help them set up the collaboration infrastructure to be able to do that. In Vietnam, we are working with service providers and we have strong partnership with service providers. Vietnam is one of the markets where service providers are very active in combining their network along with video and other collaborations and selling them to the market through our channel partners.

Which collaboration will you focus on in Vietnam?

In collaboration we focus on video, so virtual communication are focusing on unified communication, which means through smartphones, tablets, through all the different devices. Previously people communicated through PCs, but now all communicate through smartphones and through tablets. We have software and hardware solutions to let our customers communicate using smartphones, tablets, even PC, TV, any device. And for businesses they won’t secure communication.

How will your customers, especially in emerging markets benefit from your solutions?

For internal communication, it is about speed and productivity. In emerging markets like Vietnam, the speed of internal communication is very important. But you can do the same thing with your customer, because your customers may be in the US or in Indonesia.

For example, a businessman can have a video conference with an agent who is based in some other countries. You think about education, how you deliver education to students in rural areas? So using video communication, we can deliver education. You think about healthcare, in many smaller districts in Vietnam, maybe you cannot set up a hospital, maybe you can set up a small clinic and the doctor can be in somewhere, in Ho Chi Minh City for example.

So we are working with emerging economies to help them in education, in medical services, to help them globalise and be more competitive. That’s really what we do in emerging markets. It doesn’t matter what device you have, we will let you communicate and collaborate using your devices.

What about security issues?

That’s a very good point. Because when you communicate and collaborate, you have to think about security. Our recommendation is that in Cisco we have validated design to help our customers with security aspect in device. So the first thing is a company should not let people download sensitive data on their devices. We have solutions to protect our data. Even when you lose your device, data can be recovered.