Singapore taps IBM to upgrade local businesses

SINGAPORE – This city state’s economic development agency has tapped global information and communications technology giant IBM to help local businesses improve their products and services.

Kwee Eng Thien, assistant managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), and Tim Greisinger, IBM Singapore managing director, last week signed a partnership contract to establish the IBM Smarter Commerce Center of Competency (SCCOC) as one of the major activities at the IBM Connect 2015 Executive Exchange conference held at the Resorts World Sentosa.

“With the establishment of the Center of Competency, IBM is well positioned to help clients improve process efficiency, create new market opportunities and accelerate the digitization of businesses,” Thien said.

The SCCOC, IBM said, will bring together technology innovations from their cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security portfolios to create secure, intuitive and elegantly designed solutions, and will focus on enabling new business processes that help companies provide integrated customer experiences across the commerce cycle, from the front office to the back office.

IBM will lead the development of Commerce Proof of Concepts across diverse industries that include selected functionalities of customer analytics, automated campaign management, omni-channel marketing, digital marketing optimization, IBM Watson engagement advisor, real time personalization, distributed order management and predictive analytics for supply chain management.

Through the SCCOC, IBM and the EDB will also team up with industry associations such as the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation, and the Marketing Institute of Singapore to reach out to marketing professionals through events and seminars on how they can leverage technology to transform marketing professionals through events and seminars on how they can leverage technology to transform the way they work.

Hwee Lee Yeo, IBM Software Group Asia Pacific director for software services, said the EDB has given them a broad agenda in putting up the SCCOC.

“The EDB has actually given us a very broad agenda. It was not really predefined from an IBM perspective,” Yeo said.

“We are starting with four industries – the banking, telco, retail and manufacturing. And after that, we’ll definitely extend to other industries,” Yeo said.

“We are excited to be partnering with the EDB to bring our global experiences in commerce to Singapore and the region. Through the Center of Competency, we intend to bring an integrated lifecycle approach to e-commerce, to improve how businesses connect with their supply chain and customers through their websites and even social networks,” Greisinger said.

“We will also be building critical capabilities and deepen skills to raise the competency of professionals in the industry and generate higher value for our clients in the region,” he added.

The SCCOC is expected to be fully operational by yearend and will be based in the IBM Singapore Technology Park (ISTP) at the city-state’s Tampines area.

The center is seen to employ over 30 research scientists and engineers to oversee the development of products and solutions by end of 2017. They will be involved in defining analytics guidelines and solutions, developing advanced algorithms, data mining for platforms, testing and evaluation of programmatic models, and deploying plan models.