PH firms urged to take closer look at data

As digital processes become the norm in conducting business across all industries, a technology solutions firm is calling on companies to prepare for the inevitable: that is, to paraphrase one of today’s literary geniuses, data—huge amounts of it—is coming.

“Your [data] repository will only continue to grow. It will never go down,” says Praveen Kumar, ASG Technologies general manager for Asia Pacific. With expertise on addressing such a challenge, Kumar says ASG Technologies is in a strong position to continue serving the Philippine market, in which they are also keen on investing more, since “among all the Asean markets, we believe the Philippines has the strongest growth potential.”

A 25-year-old company based in Florida, ASG has some of the world’s most “leading edge” solutions when it comes to data storage and management. They have “content warehouses” which can store all kinds of files—documents, audio, video—in whatever format, from where companies can easily retrieve such content once needed.

Kumar explains how their content management solution works: “It’s not like a search engine, which is easier because you search for keywords. Here you need to search for documents, search for content on certain documents, which are stored in different formats. You’re also storing audio (e.g. recorded phone conversations), and video, [such as] CCTV footage.

“As any company grows, each department will store its own content, and they will store it in any form convenient to them. So suddenly you have islands of information that aren’t talking to each other. Then comes access: How can you access all these data securely and at any given point in time? That’s where our solution comes in.  As long as you have a browser, you can access any content stored in those repositories,” he says.

ASG also does digital archiving using data tapes, “where you can store everything on tape directly, and read from tape directly,” Kumar says. “Today, what people need to do is, if it’s on tape, they need to bring it back to the hard disk, and then read it. With our solution, [the tapes are read] like a hard disk.”

“Today, name any large production company in the United States—all of these companies have huge volumes, and all of them use our solution for archives,” he adds.

And to protect personal data stored by their clients, ASG has another tool called Workspaces, which allows companies to access data through any device through a browser but prevents such data from being downloaded into the end-user’s device.

Here in the Philippines, ASG has been servicing around 100 clients for over 10 years, mostly from the banking, telecommunications, insurance, retail, and BPO industries. What they’ve seen, says Kumar, is that many of local companies’ storage solutions are still done manually—giving ASG much room to further grow and strengthen their business.

“When you do check processing [here in the Philippines], it takes two or three days, but technically if you have core banking you should be able to do it the next minute. If you’re banking between two banks, you should have real-time gross settlement, so maximum, one hour,” he says.

The good news, however, is that the Philippines is already “going in that direction,” Kumar adds.

“When it comes to content, you’re fairly ahead. You haven’t implemented a warehouse, but [have done so] in buckets, but over time you will get to that,” he says.

Kumar also expects that in the next three to four years, as business relies more heavily on digital technology, archiving systems such as ASG’s will play a more significant role across all industries.

“The Philippines has a market that spends a lot on infrastructure. I think the new government is very stable—at least, the way it looks like—so there is a lot of infrastructure-spend that’s bound  to happen, which means the economy is booming,” says Kumar. “We’ve noticed significant appetite for investment.”