TechTouch Asia

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has ranked Xiaomi 29th on its 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 list, two places higher than last year. The designation is recognition that Xiaomi makes innovation a priority, commits investment and talent to it, and works to transform investment into results. In this year's first quarter, Xiaomi's research and development (R&D) expenses increased by 17.7% compared to the year before, reaching RMB4.1 B. Xiaomi's R&D efforts have yielded the company more than 32,000 patents worldwide as of March 31, 2023. Total R&D investment for 2023 is expected to exceed RMB20 billion. The company has embraced technological transformation, including artificial intelligence (AI). The company will continue to expand AI-related user scenarios, maximise advances in technology, and explore opportunities with potential partners. BCG’s Most Innovative Companies ranking is based on a survey of more than 1,000 global innovation executives w...

by Gibu Mathew, VP and GM APAC, Zoho Corp Source: Zoho. Mathew. When data abuse is discussed, people immediately think of data breaches or data leaks. While data privacy and data security are interrelated, the two are not the same. Data breaches are easier to identify, and during the pandemic, Interpol* found a surge in cybercrime and data theft throughout the Southeast Asia region. It is no surprise that findings from IDC note that Asia Pacific spending on security-related products has been increasing year after year, and would reach US$39 B by 2025. Improving data security is always a good idea, but is merely scratching the surface of data privacy abuse, as the same tools to fight hacks cannot be applied for data privacy. Fortunately, data privacy has gained greater attention recently with regulators and technology companies pushing the privacy agenda for end consumers. However, this is still insufficient. Data privacy adoption has been at differing rates in Southeast Asia, where so...

UiPath , an enterprise automation software company, has found that 69% of workers in Singapore believed that automation can address burnout and improve job fulfillment, higher than the global average (58%) and third-highest of all countries surveyed* globally. In the Asia-Pacific region, the numbers range from Japan at 36%, and India at 86%. Nearly three quarters (73%) of workers in Singapore also reported that they view employers that use business automation to help support employees and modernise operations more favourably than those that do not. Employees are being asked to do more work with less support, with 47% of all Singapore respondents saying they’ve been asked to take on more tasks at work in the past six months because of layoffs or hiring freezes (globally, 28%; Australia 32%; India 53%, and Japan, 5%). As work piles up, it takes a toll on employees — about one in four workers (26%) in Singapore report feelings of burnout — more staffers are leaning on AI tools to provide...

Forrester Research has named CrowdStrike a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Q2 2023 report*. According to the report, “few companies can boast a string of successes like CrowdStrike. The vendor became a pre-eminent incident response firm and a dominant player in the endpoint security space. It delivers an exceptional MDR service and taught cybersecurity firms how SaaS businesses work.” As the Forrester report states, “CrowdStrike’s extensive view of the threat landscape and incident response services give it an advantage when it comes to threat intelligence and managed detection...For companies that are looking to source products, platforms and services from one provider and that want superior threat intelligence added in, then CrowdStrike is the right choice.” In Forrester’s evaluation, CrowdStrike received the highest score possible in 12 of the 23 criteria: - Current offering: Threat hunting, threat intelligence, managed detection, m...

Nokia and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (Indosat) have completed a network consolidation programme that provides a superior experience for Indosat’s growing subscriber base. The programme, which covers major cities in Java (Surabaya, Semarang and Yogyakarta), and the regions of Sumatera and Kalimantan, will improve Indosat’s network performance and capacity. Nokia is an Indosat partner and has helped it to optimise the total number of physical sites across its sub-brands, IM3 and Tri, by a combined 30%. Indosat has also deployed sites in new regions, providing better indoor coverage and faster speeds. The combined spectrum assets from both service providers were leveraged, improving the performance for IM3 by up to 42% and up to 170% for Tri. Nokia’s latest AirScale portfolio helped Indosat modernise its network, enhancing the capacity and operational efficiency which will support 5G services and accelerate time to market. Nokia also supported with the design process, enabling Indosat to...

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is collaborating with IBM to provide a security solution for businesses in Asia Pacific (APAC) markets. The co-developed solution aims to mitigate mounting cybersecurity risks while creating a secure, stable and protected cloud environment for clients. Designed to help companies - particularly those in the internet, finance, retail and manufacturing industries - to meet their respective security requirements and obligations, the solution integrates features of IBM’s security products, QRadar SIEM and QRadar SOAR , with Alibaba Cloud’s security capabilities. It provides services including real-time reporting and centralised visibility into the cloud environment to detect threats such as ransomware, insider threats and cloud attacks. According to IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023 , there were twice as many threat hijacking attempts per month in 2022, compared to 2021 data. Asia-Pacific retaine...

Salesforce has recently announced new artificial intelligence (AI) additions across Data Cloud , its real-time data platform, and Customer 360 , its integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The innovations seek to help businesses connect with their audiences in new and more personalised ways. New Einstein GPT and Data Cloud capabilities are added to Flow , Salesforce’s portfolio of automation tools. By powering Flow with Data Cloud — which unifies customer data across channels and interactions into single, real-time customer profiles — customers can now automate complex workflows and trigger actions based on real-time changes. For instance, business users and admins can describe what kind of flow they want to build and see it built for them in near real-time, instead of having to build each flow manually, step by step. Einstein GPT Einstein GPT is Salesforce’s generative AI CRM technology, and by combining it with Flow , users can create and modify automat...