18 July 2013 - Speech by Mr Andrew Khaw, Senior Director, Industry Development Group, IDA Singapore Opening Address at Amazon Web Services Summit, Marina Bay Sands, Thursday, 18 July 2013, 9.10am
Speech by Mr Andrew Khaw, Senior Director, Industry Development Group, IDA Singapore Opening Address at Amazon Web Services Summit, Marina Bay Sands, Thursday, 18 July 2013, 9.10am.
Ms Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector
Mr Frank DiGiammarino, Director, Worldwide Public Sector
Mr Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director APAC
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen:
Good Morning!
1. I am glad to be at this inaugural Amazon Web Services Summit for South East Asia.
2. Let me share three thoughts this morning: first, it is a great time to be in tech; second, Singapore continues to invest to enable cloud computing to thrive here; and third, IDA is actively looking for partners who can serve as enabling platforms to increase the rate of on-boarding of tech innovations.
3. So why do I say it is a great time to be in tech today? Let me share an observation: with the advent of hyper connectivity, the consumerisation of tech, and the move towards social sharing of personal data, there is a great opportunity for new value from data analytics. Some people have called data the currency of the 21st century!
4. When I was in the US last week, I had the opportunity to see a lab demo of an analytics machine that could fuse data and use powerful algorithms to help draw out correlations between seemingly unrelated events and help the user play with the graph to learn from these correlations. It was pretty cool!
5. One of the major crises however that this analytics phenomenon appears headed for is the severe shortage of data scientists. I am glad to share that IDA and our partner agencies have been working hard with the universities and polytechnics to roll out courses for analytics.
6. What caught my attention was the seeming rise of start-ups especially in Silicon Valley who have figured out how to gather and fuse structured and unstructured data and how to present the data with sophisticated visualisation approaches such as semantic webs, graph analytics, etc. These start-ups were answering the call to blunt the sharp demand for data scientists. The impressive thing was how they seem to be able to deliver services that traditionally require big compute, memory and storage power quite readily.
7. Quoting Marc Andresseen's "Software is eating the world", it is truly a great time to be in tech today – the capability and price point of technology today is tearing down barriers and opening up new opportunities for start-ups and entrepreneurs. Cloud computing is one of the major enablers of this phenomenon!
8. On the second point of Singapore's continued investment to enable cloud computing, here is some data on the cloud computing landscape in Singapore today:
- Singapore is ranked third in Asia-Pacific in cloud adoption, after Australia and Japan, according to AMI Partners December 2012;
- Adoption is forecast to reach 33 percent of all enterprises by 2015;
- Through IDA's multi-agency SaaS Call-for-Collaboration in June 2012, tech companies will develop or adapt almost 30 SaaS products to serve at least 500 SMEs in 10 sectors at the pilot stage and up to 3000 SMEs when fully deployed;
- On the training front, 500 professionals have been trained over the past few years on cloud computing. Singapore's Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) have built up an annual training capacity of 700 students.
- On infrastructure, in addition to investing to be highly connected internationally, Singapore has also put in place the Nationwide Broadband Network and the Singapore Internet Exchange.
9. My third point is that IDA is actively looking for partners who can serve as enabling platforms to increase the rate of on-boarding of tech innovations.
10. I am glad to announce the collaboration between IDA and AWS to enable ISVs to embrace the SaaS business model and extend their offerings beyond the shores of Singapore.
11. This collaboration seeks to support 100 Singapore-based ISVs to train up to 100 SaaS specialists over two years. Central to the collaboration is a three-month programme where ISVs will be trained to develop a prototype, and go through a process of market validation.
12. Under this programme, ISVs will first undergo an intensive one-month training which comprises:
- Technical training by AWS technical teams to develop SaaS products or convert their existing on-premise solutions into a SaaS-deployable model;
- Business mentoring by the AWS Business Development Venture Capital team, Venture Capitalists (VC) and incubators on topics such as developing a SaaS business model, attracting Venture Capitalists and developing Go-To-Market strategies;
- Interaction with the successful SaaS community where they can build networks and gain best practices and tips from successful regional SaaS providers and VCs;
- Interaction to regional end users who will share their problem statements and experiences in adopting SaaS solutions;
13. The ISVs will then embark on a two-month rapid prototyping phase to either develop a new SaaS offering or convert their on-premise offerings into SaaS offerings. At the end of the rapid prototyping phase, the ISVs will have the opportunity to place their prototypes in a Sandbox environment offered by AWS where their prototypes will be made accessible to regional end users for market validation.
14. I am glad that Amazon Web Services has committed to help the Singapore ISV community in this manner. I look forward to hearing good reports from both the ISVs and AWS from this initiative.
15. I would also encourage SaaS incubators and aggregators and cloud training academies to join AWS to enrich Singapore's cloud computing journey.
Conclusion
16. Finally, let me wish each of you an enjoyable and fruitful time at the Amazon Web Services Summit.
17. Thank you.
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