As the new financial year approaches, it’s time for Australian small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to focus on IT planning and budgeting. This is not just a routine task; it’s a critical step that bolsters business resilience and promotes growth.

In an environment marked by inflation, rapid technological advancement, talent shortages, cloud adoption, and cyber security threats, strategic planning is essential. The Missing Link simplify these complex factors, providing clear guidance to refine your IT strategies for the coming financial year.

1.    Economic Factors Influencing IT Budgets

Today’s economy is tough on SMEs, with high inflation and operational costs. Volatile financial markets and high interest rates make long-term planning difficult and expensive.

Fluctuating financial markets and high interest rates make long-term investment planning difficult and raise borrowing costs. These changes impact IT budgets, particularly affecting costs related to infrastructure maintenance and upgrades.

Strategies for IT Budget Optimisation

To mitigate these economic pressures, you can adopt several strategies:

• Use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Leverage to lower upfront costs and adjust expenses based on your business needs.
• Review Existing Contracts: Negotiate vendor contracts to secure rates aligned with the current market and explore cost-reduction clauses.
• Optimise Licencing: Conduct licence audits and software consolidation to cut unnecessary expenses.
• Highlight IT Efficiencies: Track and show IT’s financial benefits with clear metrics.
• Device Refresh Strategy: Plan device updates wisely to save costs without sacrificing tech needs.

By adopting these strategies, you can better navigate the pressures of the economic climate on your IT budget, ensuring they remain agile and competitive. In this process, IT strategy consulting can provide valuable insights to optimise your IT spending and align it with business goals.

Source: The Missing Link

2. The Rise of AI Technologies

Generative AI is transforming how businesses operate by automating tasks and improving decision-making. Tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot automate routine functions, analyse data, and help with coding. Integrating these tools into IT strategies encourages innovation and agility but requires careful budgeting due to upfront costs.

To harness AI effectively, consider the following key aspects:

Source: The Missing Link

By focusing on these areas, you can make the most of artificial intelligence. This will help you balance the initial expenses of adopting and learning the technology with its benefits, including more efficient operations and the opportunity to grow your business.

Research from Accenture reinforces this approach, indicating that AI could boost productivity by as much as 30% in certain industries. This could result in cost savings of roughly $140 billion by 2025, emphasising the critical role of AI in driving continuous success and innovation.

3. IT Talent Shortages

Despite recent shifts, Australia still faces challenges in filing certain IT roles. As the IT job market evolves, SMEs face challenges and opportunities to strengthen their workforce strategically. The focus should shift towards outsourcing roles where internal talent shortages continue, complementing efforts to enhance in-house capabilities.

Here’s how SMEs can effectively navigate IT talent shortages:

Source: The Missing Link

• Outsourcing critical skills: Address internal talent shortages by outsourcing critical skills while simultaneously enhancing internal capabilities to maintain a balanced and resilient IT workforce.
• Flexible Work and Benefits: Attract and retain top talent with flexible work options and development opportunities, going beyond competitive salaries.
• Remote work: Expand the talent pool by adopting remote work policies, allowing access to a broader range of IT professionals not limited by geographic location.
• Internal Training: Develop staff skills for future tech challenges, reducing reliance on external hires. This strategy complements short-term outsourcing, ensuring a balanced workforce approach.

Alignment of Talent and Projects

As the IT job market undergoes significant changes, there’s a prime opportunity for SMEs to attract skilled IT professionals, particularly in areas experiencing acute skills shortages. SMEs can offer unique advantages such as greater flexibility, a tight-knit work environment, and specialised opportunities, to appeal to top talent. With Australia’s tech sector projected to need an additional 445,000 technology-skilled workers by 2030, aligning your workforce with these evolving demands is crucial to alleviate pressure in critical roles.

The Missing Link understands your business’s challenges in adapting to these changes. By offering managed IT Support Services, they free your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives, boosting efficiency, driving innovation, and enhancing productivity.

4. Ongoing Migration to Cloud and SaaS Solutions

Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) for flexibility, scalability, and cost savings. This shift allows companies to use software without investing heavily in on-site infrastructure.

To optimise financial planning in the cloud, consider these budgeting essentials:

• Serverless Computing: Serverless computing cuts server costs by charging only for used resources, moving from capital to operational expenses.
• Subscription Costs: SaaS can lead to recurring fees that may constitute a growing share of expenses.
• Data Costs: Expect data transfer and storage costs to rise with increased usage.
• Scaling Expenses: The cost of scaling cloud services can escalate in line with business expansion.
• Backup and Recovery: Robust backup and disaster recovery are vital in cloud strategy to mitigate financial risks from downtime or data loss and should be included in cloud budgeting.
• Strategic IaaS Savings: Opt for long-term IaaS contracts, such as Azure Reserved Instances, which offer reduced rates for one or three-year terms. This improves budget predictability for stable workloads.

By addressing these cloud budgeting essentials, you can effectively manage the shift to cloud and SaaS solutions, ensuring cost-effective scalability and operational resilience.

5. The Evolving Cyber Security Landscape

Cyber security has become a key concern for SMEs who operate online. As advanced security services have become more accessible and affordable, they offer tailored security measures that align with your specific needs and budget.

• Strategic Investment in Security:
  Investing in solid backup and disaster recovery systems is crucial for maintaining business continuity during disruptions. These systems provide essential support and comply with the “Essential Eight” cyber security strategies recommended by the Australian Signals Directorate. This compliance ensures alignment with Australian business standards, reinforcing the security framework of your business.
• The Dual Benefit of Regulatory Compliance:
  There’s an increasing focus on cyber security in the media, emphasising the importance of strong data protection. Australian businesses can avoid fines, build customer trust, and access international markets by following regulations like the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Source: The Missing Link

Align your IT Budget for Future Growth

The rapid pace of digital change calls for SMEs to prioritise cyber security and strategic IT planning in your core operations. Doing so enhances resilience and growth and adheres to basic legal compliance, establishing trust signals with customers and unlocking new market opportunities.

A smart IT strategy, supported by a detailed maturity assessment, is essential. This strategy will enable you to:

• Clearly understand your current technological capabilities,
• Identify areas for improvement,
• Ensure your IT initiatives are aligned with your boarder business goals.

Implementing these strategies effectively supports your business’s long-term success and positions you within the competitive tech landscape.

Ready to transform your IT budget for the new financial year?

As the new financial year approaches, The Missing Links’ Maturity Assessment Services are perfectly positioned to assess your current IT maturity level and provide a detailed roadmap for improvement. Together with The Missing Links’ IT strategy consulting, they’ll help you build a strong, future-ready IT framework that aligns with your fiscal planning.

To receive a customised IT strategy consulting and maturity assessment, get in touch with The Missing Link. The team will work with you to streamline IT operations and enhance your competitive edge, preparing you for next year’s challenges and opportunities.

The post Top 5 Drivers Shaping IT Budgets This Financial Year appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

What can AI do for you? A lot, as the recent Intel® AI Summit 2021 has shown. Artificial intelligence opens up a broad range of possibilities, from tiny devices to the massive cloud. Suppose you don’t know where to start or how to develop and scale up your ideas and innovation further. In that case, the two-day summit’s contents are now available on-demand to inspire you with the latest from the Intel® AI technology stack, as well as successful customer use cases from the Asia Pacific and Japan Territory (APJ-T).

AI is no longer the purview of those in the know. In the executive keynote, Dr. Nash Palaniswamy gave an overview of Intel®’s AI strategy: “Taking AI from being specialized, proprietary and for the few – to being ubiquitous, open and for all.” The Vice President, SMG, General Manager, AI, HPC, and Datacenter Accelerators Solutions and Sales at Intel® also shared the company’s cutting-edge offerings in the field – from hardware and software applications to AI deployment in the cloud and edge ecosystems. His address was just the beginning of a virtual event featuring over 20 industry expert speakers leading more than 25 innovative sessions, which you can view at your leisure until May 2022.

An overview of how users implement AI on the Intel® Architecture (IA) platform was presented by Hong Wei Yi, Asia AI Sales Director, DCG Sales Group at Intel®. She curated some examples of how AI and the platform led to easier deployment, better performance, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in various applications such as drug discovery, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and more.

Get a front-row seat to the fireside chats and hear how organisations make wonderful things with Intel® AI, such as Tokopedia, the largest e-commerce start-up in Indonesia, and Max Kelson, an AI consultancy based in Australia.

The fireside chat with Tokopedia brought together three speakers representing the collaboration between the start-up, Intel® and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), that helped the company scale up and turn AI into ROI (return on investment): Tahir Hashmi, technical fellow, and VP of growth engineering at Tokopedia; Erwin Huizenga, APAC Solution Lead Machine Learning at GCP; and Ayu Ginanti, APJ-T Cloud Lead at Intel®.  They discussed how they achieved success, from overcoming funding shortfalls, skills, and data challenges to measuring the success of AI projects as they went from lab demo to live, daily.

Tokopedia was launched in 2009 and became a unicorn six years later. It has been using Google Cloud since 2018. In May, it merged with ride-hailing and payments unicorn GoJek to create the GoTo Group. GoTo is currently Indonesia’s most prominent digital services platform and contributes about 2% of the country’s GDP, with more than 100 million active users. Last July, GoTo announced its collaboration with Google Cloud for its next growth phase.

“We look forward to our continued partnership with Intel® and Google Cloud  as a key technology partner to support GoTo’s continued expansion across cloud infrastructure, data with cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as productivity and collaboration needs with Google Workspace. We hope that this partnership can also empower us to provide the convenience of accessing high availability and scalable services from anywhere at any time for business, especially MSMEs, and consumers,” said Herman Widjaja, Chief Technology Officer, Tokopedia, in the announcement.

Google Cloud is supported by Intel® architecture, which provides the most demanding enterprise workloads and applications’ security, compute, and memory requirements.

Meanwhile, the meldCX breakout presentation shed light on how GCP built its Edge AI solutions on Intel® technology. Joy Chua, EVP of strategy and development at meldCX, shared how the independent software vendor (ISV) overcame its business challenges and accelerated its IoT (Internet of Things) journey with AI building blocks. She illustrated the process from product ideation to deployment for its customers like Australia Post and Westpac.

Australia Post upgraded its package shipping with meldCX Concept SALi (Smart Automated Lodgement API) self-service kiosks last year. The kiosks use machine learning and computer vision technology to scan and detect each package, thus automating the parcel delivery operations. This led to a 67% reduction in queues and 95% accuracy in recognizing handwritten labels at Australia’s number one provider of postal services. Concept SALi leverages Intel® AI technology such as Intel® Core Processors, Intel® Movidius™, and the Intel® OpenVINO™ Toolkit.

The Intel® AI Summit on-demand sessions also featured Demo Showcases with a line-up of specialists from Intel® and its partners, namely Databricks, Dell Technologies, Fortanix, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, LAB3, Lenovo Global Technology, and L&T Technology Services. All sessions from Day 2 of the summit are also available such as the keynote address by Pradeep K Dubey, senior fellow and director of parallel computing lab at Intel®, and his special guests. They talked about how Intel® technology, software, and innovations help clear the path forward in AI by making it more scalable, productive, performant, and intelligent.

The Intel® AI Summit 2021 on-demand can be accessed here. Begin something extraordinary with AI today.

The post Expand your horizon with the Intel® AI Summit 2021 on-demand appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Recently, Shopee Head of Regional Marketing Agatha Soh sat down for an interview with Tech Wire Asia, where she answered questions about the company’s strategy for expansion, its focus on small businesses, and its plans for the immediate future.

SHOPEE MOVES INTO LAZADA’S PHILIPPINE E-COMMERCE TERRITORY

Simon Alvarez | 6 December, 2017

What makes Shopee perfect for small-and-medium scale business owners in the Philippines?

We want to make sure that we will be able to break down barriers for all entrepreneurs, regardless of the size of their business operations. We all know that Internet penetration is on the rise in Southeast Asia. We’re focusing on mobile, so even SMEs with very little infrastructure can grow and thrive.

One interesting trend in the region is the transition from offline to desktop to mobile shopping. This is something important. Mobile is more accessible. Thus, it’s very easy for entrepreneurs to sell their products.

For us, we believe a lot in the sellers. We want to make sure that we can cater to small businesses. In terms of the kind of support, we try to customize the solutions we provide as well.

ANALYZING MALAYSIA’S TOP E-COMMERCE PLAYERS OF 2017

Taylor Bragg | 2 January, 2018

What advantage does Shopee have over its competitors such as Lazada or Zalora?

First of all, our focus on mobile is significant. At Shopee, we have a laser-sharp focus on user experience for mobile customers and merchants. We believe this is the future and we have allocated resources for both buyers and sellers in this regard.

Along with this, we have a strong focus on localization. I don’t just mean tailoring our message for each market, either. Every market is so different in Southeast Asia. Thus, in any country, we provide localized support for buyers and sellers alike. We also make it a point to hire local talent for each country’s operations.

What security measures are in place for consumers? Does Shopee enforce sanctions on merchants? If so, when and how is this done?

Shopee takes this really seriously. If we want to provide a good user experience, we have to provide a good, secure system. We have a very big team in place that controls quality for all our listings. If there is an item that does not fulfill regulations, we might even ban the seller. We also have an ongoing effort to educate our merchants.

The concept of security is very important to us. We provide the Shopee Guarantee, an insurance-type offering for our buyers that has been very successful on our platform. This reduces any barriers or reservations in the minds of users. We have found that once users experience Shopee, they do not leave.

MAINSTREAM CASHLESS PAYMENTS FINALLY ARRIVE IN PHILIPPINES

Simon Alvarez | 23 January, 2018

One of the things customers love about Shopee is the fact customers can decide when merchants receive their payment? Is this feature unique to Shopee or was it inspired by another firm?

It’s something we partly modeled after successful businesses. However, we enhanced it, built it, and rolled it out over time. In countries that have not fully warmed up to the concept of online shopping, we focus on educating consumers and merchants on the benefits of e-commerce.

HOW OTHER E-RETAILERS CASHED IN ON ALIBABA’S ‘SINGLES’ DAY’ SALE

A. Azim Idris | 15 November, 2017

Shopee’s payment options are quite interesting in the way that a credit card option is unavailable. Will Shopee be open to the idea of using cryptocurrency-based payments in the future?

So far, we do not have plans for this [cryptocurrencies] yet. In the Philippines, we are still investing resources to develop our infrastructure. We are working on introducing other payment options in the near future, however.

What is Shopee’s primary target for 2018?

I think for 2018, we would like to be the No 1 online shopping destination in the Philippines. We would continue to focus on improving the product and user experience we offer by introducing new features. We would also aggressively expand our number of sellers to keep pace with the market landscape.

We want to focus on our sellers. Whether you’re big or small, we want to bring you online. There’s a lot of education to be done. We have to educate everyone and show how easy it is to use our platform.

The post Shopee insider reveals 2018 plans for Filipino SMEs appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Media and Entertainment

Media and entertainment appears to be the area that Alibaba is pushing most aggressively. Its acquisition of the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s oldest English language newspaper, at the end of 2015 marked its push into traditional media. It also bought up video-streaming company Youku Tudou, in a deal that was reportedly worth US$5 billion. Youku was the company’s largest investment to date and is a part of its content generation and entertainment ecosystem development strategy.

Youku's Founder To Head Alibaba's $15 Billion Culture & Entertainment Investment Fund https://t.co/yHfD87Qlde #china #tech #youku #alibaba pic.twitter.com/CpRd1nvc1o

— TMTPost (@tmtpostenglish) November 3, 2016

Why: Owning a reputable English language newspaper not only gives it a voice in political circles and also follows in the footsteps of Jeff Bezos of Amazon buying up the Washington Post. The Youku deal was critical for Alibaba after it launched Alibaba Pictures Group and also because its rivals Tencent and Baidu have also been pushing aggressively into content.

E-commerce

Buying up competitors in attractive markets in this space is a no-brainer for Alibaba as it looks to extend its reach outside of China. In April 2016 of this year, it acquired a majority stake in Rocket Internet’s Lazada for US$1 billion and invested US$500 million alongside Foxconn and SoftBank into Indian online marketplace Snapdeal. Lazada, now under the stewardship of Alibaba is also making its own acquisitions as it bought up grocery-delivery startup Redmart last month.

Why #Lazada’s acquisition of #RedMart is a win-win https://t.co/xbRhAoID1U #ecommerce #logistics #alibaba #southeastasia #blk71 #zalora

— Brian F (@furm_b) November 21, 2016

Why: Alibaba’s acquisitions in the e-commerce space are a straightforward expansion strategy into neighboring markets and investing in Lazada and Snapdeal will give it a strong foothold in both Southeast Asian and Indian markets.

SEE ALSO: Alibaba’s Jack Ma has been a busy man, inks deal with Spielberg’s film company

Mobile and Transport

Mobile and transport are perhaps on the sidelines of Alibaba’s growth strategy compared with media and e-commerce, but still significant. Last year, Alibaba invested almost US$600 million into Chinese smartphone maker Meizu. It’s also an investor in China’s top ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, which signifies Alibaba’s push into areas outside of digital commerce and content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqlTtEm-FS8

Why: Backing Meizu makes sense because Alibaba has been determined to have its YunOS operating systems integrated with more smartphones to battle Android and iOS in China. It’s rival Tencent was also an investor in Didi (the companies became co-investors as Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache merged) so it’s a space that makes sense for Alibaba to invest in if it wants to stay competitive.

The post A year in review: Making sense of Alibaba’s acquisitions, investments, and strategies appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.