Singapore-based fintech startup SuperAtom has raised US$22 million in Series C financing led by Malaysia-based digital investment fund Nue 3 Capital.

The startup will use the funding to expand its global digital banking and credit products, starting with Mexico and the greater Latin America region.

Scarlett Xiao, Founder and CEO of SuperAtom, said: “In the coming months, we will begin establishing a local presence in these countries by hiring local talent, applying for local financial licenses, and focusing on new product development.”

Also Read: ‘Asia’s BNPL sector has great potential’, says Akulaku CEO William Li

Founded in 2018 by Cheetah Mobile Co-Founder Scarlett Xiao, SuperAtom has developed UangMe, a credit platform providing access to low-cost financing in Indonesia. UangMe claims to have attracted millions of users and disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans since launching in 2018.

In addition to this, SuperAtom also offers a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) feature.

SuperAtom sees comprehensive financial services for emerging market users as an essential move to win market share. It said that its lending and BNPL businesses have paved the way to serve consumers better and build trust with commercial partners, while other add-on features would gain significant consumer adoption.

In the future, the firm plans to introduce wealthtech products.

In September 2019, SuperAtom raised US$24 million from Gobi Partners and a consortium of investors.

According to research by Bain & Company, over six in ten Southeast Asians remain underbanked or unbanked today with limited access to credit, and an even larger portion of the population is unfamiliar with wealth management.

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DART, a Manila-based quick commerce startup, has announced a pre-seed funding round of US$1.3 million led by Robinsons Retail Holdings Inc. and existing investor Kaya Founders.

The startup, which currently serves Makati and Mandaluyong, will use the funds to expand to new cities shortly.

DART was founded in early 2022 by Harm-Julian Schumacher (CEO) and Tommy Campos (COO).

Schumacher was formerly deputy GM (Germany) European Q-commerce major Gorillas and previously worked with Bain & Company and Rocket Internet. Campos has built up his operational expertise at delivery behemoths Uber and Postmates.

DART promises grocery delivery within 15 minutes of placing an order. It provides various goods, including popular snacks, drinks, fresh produce, dry and frozen goods, and local partnership brands.

Also Read: The future of social and quick commerce for developing countries

The firm plans to tap the underserved online grocery market to grow its presence in the Philippines. With its 110 million people and an annual grocery spend of above US$50 billion, the country represents one of the most attractive markets in Southeast Asia for quick delivery service companies, it said.

The Q-commerce firm has also entered into an operational and supply partnership with Robinsons Supermarket. “This partnership provides an extreme value to our business, from the access to a large assortment, advantageous prices as well as leveraging Robinsons existing supply chain infrastructure,” Schumacher said.

Campos added, “We have tested many orders in the last months to understand our customers and operations better and fine-tune our offering. We have seen that 99 per cent of our orders are getting delivered within 15 minutes and are now confident to scale our business to more customers.

According to the e-Conomy study by Google, Bain & Company and Temasek, the penetration level is only 2 per cent compared to 25 per cent in the non-grocery space.

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Malaysia-based TNG Digital, the owner and operator of Touch’ n Go eWallet, has secured RM 750 (US$168.3) million in its latest equity financing round.

Lazada Group led this round and is joined by TNG Digital’s parent company Touch’ n Go Sdn. Bhd.

This round of funding brings the total amount raised by TNG Digital over the last 18 months to over RM 1 billion (US$224 million).

In addition to Touch’ n Go and Lazada, other shareholders of TNG Digital include Ant Group, insurers AIA Group and US-based venture fund BowWave Capital.

Also Read: The future of fintech: The latest trends in the industry

“We feel this collaboration will bring next-level value propositions to users and merchant bases across the Lazada and Touch’ n Go ecosystem. I look forward to seeing the teams roll out these exciting collaboration opportunities to our users,” said Effendy Shahul Hamid, Group CEO of Touch’ n Go Group. “We will continue expanding in all digital financial services areas.”

Alan Chan, CEO of Lazada Malaysia, added: “We see digital payment services as a critical bolt-on to bring the best customer experience on Lazada. Lazada is fully committed to providing a seamless customer journey and being a catalyst to stimulate capacity building among our sellers, primarily local SMEs and MSMEs.”

Started in 1997, Touch’ n Go is one of the early companies that led the digital transformation within Malaysia’s mobility ecosystem.

In 2021, TNG Digital expanded its cross-border payments capability to Singapore, led by the e-wallet’s acceptance at ComfortDelGro taxis.

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Redundancy, the ability to scale to meet large traffic demands and expand globally has never been more important for companies, from content publishers to ed-tech platforms, app discovery platforms, and even sports organisations, especially in an increasingly digital economy where online users’ patience is at an all-time low and churn rate translates to missed opportunities for brands.

Evidently so, IDC recently found that 68.7 per cent of enterprises view application delivery services as relevant to their organisation’s edge strategy with 75 per cent of these enterprises expecting less than five ms latency.

As such, how can organisations minimise latency or sluggish site movements to deliver an optimal user experience in the modern digital era?

One solution is to implement a multi-CDN strategy.

What’s a multi-CDN?

A Content Delivery Network is a system of geographically dispersed servers that facilitates the delivery of digital content with high performance and high availability. The idea behind a CDN is to move content much closer to end users.

Also Read: Diversity and inclusion marketing campaigns: Everyone, everyday, forever

Instead of centralising digital content, such as web applications, web objects, files, downloadable media and streaming media, on a relatively small number of servers, the content is cached across many servers distributed around the globe.

End-users now retrieve the content they’re looking for from the closest Content Delivery Network edge server, rather than going all the way back to the origin to retrieve it. A website empowered by a CDN can see up to 30 per cent more organic traffic, 200 per cent higher conversions, 60 per cent lower bounce rates, and a 40 per cent lift in revenue.

A CDN can also instantly create a TV broadcast-quality experience while converting live streams on-the-fly into the right device formats. This results in much better performance (lower latency) for your customers. It also avoids overloading your origin and allows your audience to scale.

What are the benefits of a multi-CDN?

There are several reasons to consider a multi-CDN strategy:

Availability

While an outage may not rise to the level of global notoriety, it’s likely just as devastating for your business. As the Internet has become more critical to every aspect of business, minutes of downtime can impact your bottom line and damage customer relationships. Multi-CDN can minimise single points of failure by providing alternate delivery options in the event of an outage.

Performance

Whether delivering online video, web content, or software over the Internet, poor performance results in abandonment, customer frustration and a negative impact on your brand. It’s unlikely that any single CDN delivers the best performance for all traffic types, in all regions, all of the time.

By intelligently balancing your content delivery needs across multiple CDN providers, you can mitigate the impact of the performance glitches of specific providers, in specific regions, for specific traffic types.

Capacity

Large-scale content delivery events may create choke points in individual CDN providers or in certain locations. Multi-CDN alleviates these bottlenecks by distributing the data load amongst multiple CDNs rather than from a centralised location.

For large live events such as the Olympics, rapid scaling is a critical function of CDNs. If a match is tied near the end of regulation time, there are usually massive spikes with fans logging in to watch the final minutes.

Security

Internet security is an increasing concern globally. In fact, cybercrime represents the fastest growing cause of data centre outages. If a CDN is compromised it could negatively impact the ability of customers trying to access your digital content or their experience in accessing that content.

Also Read: How cloud computing is helping startups navigate the new normal

Having multiple CDN providers allows you to minimise exposure, or bypass compromised CDNs altogether, in the event of a cyberattack.

Is Multi-CDN right for you?

Multi-CDN has some compelling benefits, but it is not necessarily for everyone. Ask yourself these questions when considering if a multi-CDN strategy is right for you.

What is the impact of an outage on your business? Can you afford minutes or hours of downtime? The less tolerant your business is of an outage, the more advantageous a multi-CDN strategy will be

How much traffic does your digital content generate? Do you exceed usage limits or have traffic spikes that could be alleviated with an overflow capability to other CDNs? The more traffic, the greater potential benefit derives from multiple CDNs.

How performance-sensitive are your digital content delivery needs? Performance is really important in some applications, e.g. video streaming, but may not be as important in others, e.g. downloading software patches. Multi-CDN is likely to have greater benefits in performance-sensitive cases.

How big is your audience and where are they located? The larger, and more distributed the audience, the greater the need for multiple CDNs.

How is content being stored? Is your digital content stored in the CDN or outside of it? Storing your content in the CDN should result in performance and cost benefits, but it will mean replicating your content when using multiple CDNs or picking a CDN that allows origin access from other CDNs.

How will you switch traffic between multiple CDNs? There are a number of methods as previously discussed, but which makes the most sense for your business? Do you have the time to manage manual DNS approaches, or the expertise to tune performance methods?

What performance metrics are most important for your business? Does the performance-based switching solution you’re considering support the metrics most important to your specific content delivery application, e.g. rebuffer ratios, bit rate, availability, throughput, and response time?

How many CDNs will you deploy? There is a point of diminishing returns as more CDNs are added. Adding CDNs introduces a measure of complexity because each CDN has its own user interface, set of APIs, billing methodology, functional capabilities etc. Your development and operations teams will need to understand and manage these differences. Is your audience distributed across the globe?

If your answer is yes to these questions, multi-CDN may be most beneficial to your organisation.

Selecting the right CDN partner

Once you have determined that adding a CDN to your content delivery environment makes sense, the next question becomes which partner to select. Here are some important factors to consider:

Geographic coverage

Important questions to consider: where are your users located? Where are you looking to expand? Look for a partner that has a presence in the regions or countries where most of your users are located. When considering your global traffic distribution, it’s also important to think about future growth.

Also Read: How can lean startups build a resilient cybersecurity posture

If you expect to see increased traffic coming from emerging markets like India for example, a factor that into your decision now to avoid having to renegotiate your CDN contract or prematurely move CDN providers. Look for a partner that has a presence in places where most of your current and future users are located.

Performance metrics

Performance is a complex topic because it’s unique to different content delivery environments and workloads. It is fundamental to take into consideration the types of content you’re delivering and what performance metrics are most important to your customers’ experience.

Performance measurement

There are several performance monitoring tools commercially available, however, in many cases, results can be misleading. The best approach to evaluate performance is to do a trial or proof of concept with one or more CDNs, using your actual workload in the geographical regions that are most important to you.

Service and support

In times of need, excellent customer support can make all the difference. Consider how important it is for you to have access to live customer support. Will that support be available outside of business hours? What kind of support is offered in your region? Is the support free or is there a premium charged for this service? If you deliver live events what relevant experience does the partner have and are they willing to participate on a bridge before or during the event? Is the CDN vendor able to assist with onboarding or migrating from another CDN?

Content storage

Choices about content storage have a direct impact on workflow, total cost, and access speed. Poorly integrated storage can make it much more difficult to manage a large content library. You will have to consider whether there is a need to offload your content origin to a CDN and if so, how important is the performance of the CDN storage or mid-tier cache solution? Does the CDN storage solution support multi-CDN environments, and if so, how will the CDN storage solution you select to operate in a multi-CDN environment?

Final thoughts

Using multiple CDNs to deliver these digital content experiences promises even greater levels of availability and performance. By leveraging the right combination of providers, and enterprises you can simultaneously improve end-user quality of experience while lowering costs.

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According to the most recent Glassdoor data, it took 40.8 days for companies to hire a software developer. To add more, software developers were contacted by recruiters four times per week.

So if your company has managed to employ the right remote software engineers for your openings (You have done a great job!), please don’t let your guard down just yet. It’s time to focus on how to retain them in your team.

Here are the five ways that help companies to manage their remote software engineers effectively, as proven by research.

Work should be judged by the ability to meet goals, not hours

Companies have changed the way they measure their employees’ work performance. Considering a software engineer a hero because (s)he has pulled an all-nighter to work is all in the past. Rather than evaluating employees’ work based on their daily activities where work hours are typically used, organizations have switched to focusing on results.

More employers are allowing workers to set their work schedules as they have shown they are trusted to get the job done during their chosen hours. Firms adopting flexible working have experienced employee loyalty, engagement, and higher job satisfaction. “The effects for us have been overwhelmingly positive,” says the UK recruitment agency Austin Fraser.

• According to data from Owl Labs’ state of remote work report, companies that allow remote work have 25 per cent lower employee turnover than those that don’t.
• 76 per cent of workers would be more willing to stay with their current employer if they could work flexible hours.
• Fractl’s survey also found that after health insurance, employees attach the most to flexible hours and the work-from-home option, which are relatively low-cost for employers.

Structured daily check-in setups

Set up regular calls so your remote software engineers understand their questions and concerns will be heard. While one-on-one meetings suit folks that work more independently from each other, team catch-ups go well with highly collaborative employees.

Be emotionally supportive of your remote software engineers

Research on emotional intelligence emphasizes that emotional contagion significantly influences individual-level attitudes and group processes. A leader’s responses to sudden changes are likely to be adopted by his employees. So be aware of the way you react in such circumstances.

While feeling stressed and anxious is inevitable, leaders may provide support and affirmation for confidence to their teams. Assure the employees that you acknowledge the tough situation, yet you know your team can handle it. With this approach, your remote software engineers are more likely to have a sense of purpose in taking up the challenge.

Also Read: How remote work has changed the salary scale in Taiwan

Also, be sure you frequently catch up with your remote software engineers. We cannot stress enough how important it is for organizations to communicate, especially through uncertainty. People tend to open up to those they feel trusted and empathized.

Listen to employees’ stress and concerns. Let them know their opinions matter to the organisations. Data from Harvard Business Review, SHRM, Great Place to Work, Accenture, Gallup, and Trust Edge have demonstrated that when employees trust their employers, they are much more likely to work together towards achieving the same ultimate business goals.

• Video conferencing helps reduce the sense of isolation among teams and is also useful for complicating or sensitive conversations. So for weekly team meetings, one-on-one performance reviews, and frequent catch-ups, this option may do better than written or audio-only communication.
• Mobile-enabled individual messaging functionality tools are usually used where simpler, less formal conversations and time-sensitive collaboration are preferred.
• Fix the frequency, means, and timing of the team’s communication. For example, Zoom video call for daily check-in meetings and Telegram for instant messaging on urgent updates.

Get the help you need for your remote software engineers

Making sure your remote software engineers stay focused and happy requires great investment in the company’s money and effort.

You need people to be in charge of the remote software engineers’ instant support daily and their well-being. More importantly, those people need to know what they are doing: what aligns with the remote software engineers’ cultural preferences and what doesn’t.

Thus, more companies find it more optimal to partner with tech recruitment teams that possess local intelligence and solid experience in the field to attract and retain remote software engineers for them.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

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Singapore-based HR automation platform Omni HR has announced closing an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of US$2.4 million co-led by Alpha JWC Ventures and Picus Capital.

FEBE Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Ratio Ventures, Frances Kang at Horizons Ventures, and several prominent angel investors, including former executives at Namely and Ultimate Software, also participated.

With the new funding, Omni HR will further enhance its all-in-one product offering, including launching a recruitment module by Q3 and a performance management module by Q4. 

Founded in 2021 by Brian Ip and YC Chan, Omni HR provides a system that helps companies digitise and automate the end-to-end employee lifecycle on a single platform. It enables organisations to digitise employee records, automate administrative tasks, and interact employee data across different systems. 

Also Read: Human capital is the biggest enabler of digital transformation. Here’s how to enhance it

Omni HR believes that with the ongoing digital transformation and software adoption trends in Southeast Asia, its platform will ultimately become an important piece of software infrastructure for the region. 

The company is ready to expand across Southeast Asia, starting with Singapore and Indonesia.

“Most companies in Southeast Asia are currently using local HR software that supports only basic admin functions, leaving many HR processes to be done manually. Meanwhile, HR software is one of the software categories that require the most localisation due to the differing employment rules in different countries. This effectively creates a unique opportunity for local players to build a modern, scalable employee management platform based out of Southeast Asia,” said Co-Founder Ip.

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When it comes to growing and scaling your startup, you need a variety of assistance. That support can come in the form of mentorships, grants, networks, and even access to a physical space where you can test out your products and services.

With all of these forms of support, your startup can take on larger goals at a faster rate and at a much wider scale! Isn’t this the dream? If so, then look no further because SLINGSHOT 2022 is extending its application deadline to 31 July to give more young and promising startups the opportunity of a lifetime!

SLINGSHOT 2022

Enterprise Singapore has extended the application deadline for SLINGSHOT — its global startup pitching competition – for an additional week to July 31, 2022. SLINGSHOT aims to provide exciting new startups a platform to launch their best tech and business ideas into the global market.

Last year, Quantumcyte — an artificial intelligence-integrated tissue dissection solution that provides more accurate test results for cancer patients — walked away with a Startup SG Grant of S$200,000 (in addition to the Startup SG Grant of S$50,000 for being a Sector winner), and 18 months worth of rent-free space at JTC Launchpad.

Also read: Lalamove: Driving growth in eCommerce with last-mile deliveries

In its sixth edition this year, SLINGSHOT will feature an inaugural physical immersion programme for its top 50 startup finalists to be announced in September. According to Enterprise Singapore, the top 50 finalists of the SLINGSHOT competition will be participating in a 10-day physical programme to experience the startup and innovation ecosystem in Singapore, and better understand how Enterprise Singapore can help these startups accelerate their growth and scale their business to the Southeast Asian region.

Along with the physical immersion programme, SLINGSHOT is also collaborating with the AWS Startup Ramp programme to connect its startup finalists to AWS’s global community of partners for collaborative opportunities, as well as training and credits provided by AWS.

Who can join?

Deep tech startups operating in diverse sectors are welcome to join. For its sixth edition, SLINGSHOT is looking for startups that have a particular emphasis on a variety of key innovations, namely transformative digital technologies; health and biomedical; manufacturing, trade and connectivity; environment, energy and green technology; and consumer media, goods and services.

Through SLINGSHOT 2022, startups that belong to these categories can network with global leading investors, accelerators and corporates, from regional demo days, deal-mixers, and qualifiers to finals, immerse in exclusive pitch coaching, corporate site visits, and lab crawls in the vibrant Singapore startup ecosystem, ideate and co-innovate with MNCs and homegrown players to fast-track your ideas into the market, and present to a global audience at the Finals and win up to S$1.2m (US$800,000) worth of grant prizes.

Stand to win exciting prizes

Enterprise Singapore is offering more than US$800,000 in total grant prizes for startup winners, with the top three winners of SLINGSHOT winning up to 18 months’ rent-free space at Singapore’s LaunchPad @ one-north or LaunchPad @ Jurong Innovation District.

Also read: How Singapore startups explore opportunities in Japan—and vice versa

NextBillion, SLINGSHOT 2020’s grand winner, recently raised US$21 million in a Series B round in May. According to Enterprise Singapore, SLINGSHOT’s top 40 winners have gone on to raise almost US$400 million in investments.

The top 50 finalists of SLINGSHOT 2022 will be pitching physically during the finals to be held from October 25 to 27 during the Singapore Week of Innovation & Technology.

With the most important investors, corporates, industry leaders, mentors, media, and tech-savvy early adopters all gathered in one space, SLINGSHOT 2022 offers your startup a golden opportunity to connect with businesses and funding opportunities in the region. Don’t miss your chance to strike the deal of a lifetime.

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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Enterprise Singapore

We can share your story at e27, too. Engage the Southeast Asian tech ecosystem by bringing your story to the world. Visit us at e27.co/advertise to get started.

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The recent crypto bear market has cast a shadow over Web3 games. Whilst Axie Infinity brought Web3 gaming to mainstream consciousness, and it is now frowned upon by builders and investors alike.

Just as excitement over the “play-to-earn” phenomenon emerged suddenly and rapidly in 2021, the scepticism over the very same phenomenon has accumulated similarly, with more than a handful “writing off” Web3 games as a fad.

Yet I believe we are at the cusp of an evolution, where we can look to the next generation of web3 games emerging as higher quality, more sustainable and most importantly, more enjoyable.

As Stanford Graduate School of Business students wrote, “Gen one Web3 games were built by crypto natives, game enthusiasts and traditional finance professionals”. This led to the fallacy, “We enjoy playing games, so we know how to build games.” The equivalent of this would be, “I enjoy eating delicious food, so I know how to be a Michelin-star chef,” a misguided belief that can unravel quickly.

The next phase of Web3 games will be built by strong game developers who already have experience building fun and engaging games without the shackles of rushed token launches or Ponzi-like game economies and are now looking to elevate the game with Web3 tools.

These builders understand that a Web3 game is first and foremost, while tokens are accompaniments that deepen engagement and engineer incentives but cannot replace intense gameplay.

These Web3 games will be more than games; they will be economies, driven by supply and demand, possibly underwritten by tokens and access gated by NFTs.

This multi-part series explores building health economies, discusses mental models for supply and demand, and highlights best practices around Web3 game tokenomics.

Also Read: All hands on deck: How Iron Sail strengthens blockchain gaming ecosystem through collaboration

We have started this conversation with the ‘demand-side’ of the equation before discussing the ‘supply-side’ of tokenomics because tokenomics are not sustainable without a product (in this case, a game) that is in demand. A game with no demand is effectively dead.

Patrons, players and farmers of Web3 games

Demand for Web3 games comes from three persona groups: patrons, players and farmers.

• Patrons are die-hard believers who often have an ironclad belief in and support of the game. Patrons are often the early adopters in the community, the investor who writes a cheque before a line of code is written, or the individual who joins a new Discord server and starts conversation religiously. Patrons often feel emotionally connected to the game or the team behind the game: a passionate but small group.
• Players are true gamers who participate in the gameplay for various non-financial reasons. The player is someone who invests a non-trivial amount of time in engaging in the game and, at best, considers the financial reward as a fringe benefit.
• Farmers focus almost exclusively on the financial upside of the gameplay. The primary objective of investing time in the game is to earn a financial return exceeding the initial participation cost in the shortest possible time period.
• Examples include the popular Axie Infinity scholarship model, where farmers would invest in in-game character NFTs and rent the characters out to players on a revenue-sharing model instead of playing.

Persona	Mindset	Play the game?	Leave when earning stops?
Patrons	I am here to support	N	N
Players	I am here to have fun	Y	N
Farmers	I am here to make money	Y	Y

These three personas are not mutually exclusive, even within the same game. An individual who begins as a Patron (before the game is launched) can transition to a Player (when the game launches), then onto a Farmer, due to a change in family circumstances.

Also Read: Exploring the creator economy in gaming

All three personas are usually present to some extent, yet one will be the dominant persona at a time.

The challenge for game developers is to keep a close pulse on the demographics of their population and how they shift over time. All three personas are necessary to build a healthy web3 game ecosystem.

The Patron is needed to seed initial confidence, attracting Players and Farmers; the Player is needed to engage with the game and consume/utilise game assets produced by Farmers; the Farmer is needed to produce game assets for the Player, especially those who are time poor.

The impact of an imbalanced population is evident among “Gen 1” Web3 games like Axie Infinity, especially between Players and Farmers. When the population’s majority are Farmers, excessive value is extracted from the game, while there are insufficient Players to consume the economy.

This leads to “Ponzi-nomics”, where new entrants largely support the value of game assets until the supply of players and the token price craters.

Patrons will always remain a small but important proportion of participants and have a less material impact. So, what then is the Goldilocks ratio between Players and Farmers? 

A quick online literature review does not reveal much insight, but having informally surveyed several game studios with a track record of building games with decent traction among non-Web3 audiences, the consensus is 7:3, out of every 10 participants in a fun, seven or more have to be Players who consume game assets. At the same time, three or fewer should create assets as Farmers.

This ratio is anecdotal: if you have evidence to prove or disprove this, please reach out at qinen@saisoncapital.com; we would love to engage.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

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One of the major enablers of new digital products and business models for the current and future transformation of enterprises is agility.

Enterprises need the flexibility to redesign the connectivity for each location and operations in line with their ongoing transformation process. Connectivity used to be an enabler, but as new products are developed and portfolios evolve in modern digital business, it is becoming an intrinsic part of the product itself; take the connected car as an example.

Therefore, enterprises will need even greater flexibility in all aspects of their connectivity to make it fit for the future, including the capability to adjust bandwidths, optimise latency and security, and reinforce the resilience of their connectivity in line with the business demands and application requirements.

And creating secure and customisable connections to new business partners as and when needed. Not to mention time-independent booking and adjustment of services and intelligent automation.

Comparing the new demands with legacy enterprise connectivity is a bit like comparing an elite athlete with a couch potato. The couch is comfortable, but modern digital business requires strength, resilience, and flexibility to win the game.

Understanding the connectivity landscape of the modern enterprise

So how is the enterprise connectivity landscape transforming?

A digitally transformed factory, for example, has more data requiring storage and processing than a legacy factory. This data will most likely be stored and processed in the cloud to enable access from geographically dispersed company locations to monitor KPIs and QA in a centralised way and to provide management with aggregated data for making decisions.

As a result, modern enterprises have an increased demand for aggregating and transporting data. But beyond this, a factory is no longer the preserve of the manufacturing company alone. With concepts like robotics as a service, a factory provides a home for intelligent machines owned and operated by external partners.

Consequently, it is necessary to optimise the connectivity to headquarters, branches, production plants and specific external parties. Intelligent production processes, be that the use of robots, smart quality assurance, or additive manufacturing (3D printing techniques), place much greater demands on the resilience of the connectivity. This requires guarantees in the form of high-level service level agreements (SLAs), dedicated bandwidth, and flexibility.

Also Read: Amidst uncertainty, digitalisation requires reliable connectivity

Added to this, companies also want to consume more services from centralised clouds from multiple cloud providers simultaneously as part of their multi-cloud strategy. In this case, end-to-end flexibility is required to guarantee the bandwidth needed for the given service.

Companies today no longer consider the historical A-to-B locational conception of connectivity. Instead, they require more fine-grained connectivity between applications, workloads, devices, and users.

The conception of connectivity is no longer about connecting sites in, for example, two particular cities; rather, the focus is on goals like setting up connectivity between the company’s AI cluster in a centralised hyper-scale and the locally hosted on-prem SQL database.

The importance of resilient, fast, high-bandwidth, and flexible connectivity from the enterprise network to the cloud and to other digital infrastructure service providers, as well as to any service providers involved in the company’s digital value chains, cannot be underestimated. The evolution of modern interconnection services must follow and reflect the needs of modern business.

Designing these modern interconnection services, therefore, needs to be approached in two ways: firstly, by creating a robust, secure, resilient, and high-performance physical infrastructure, and then by adding flexibility and simplicity through virtualisation and automation, thus enabling a range of customisable services.

Resilience is essential for keeping data traffic safe and flowing

For a digital business, trust in its connectivity infrastructure is essential. Day-to-day operations depend on fail-safe transportation of data, be that customer data, maintenance of systems, analytics, or any other of a myriad of essential data-driven use-cases.

Unfortunately, in the real world, incidents and outages are a part of life, and it is necessary to build connectivity in such a way as to minimise their impact of these. Just as a resilient immune system helps the body avoid infection or bounce back rapidly from health-related setbacks, connectivity requires its own form of resilience.

A company can design its critical digital infrastructure to be more immune to real-world events by building multiple layers of redundancy in technology, geography, and business partners.

Also Read: Conservation technology: The role of data and tech in addressing the biodiversity crisis

Sounds great, you say, but how is this even possible?

Redundancy, neutrality, and diversity in digital infrastructure are key to the greatest level of resilience. This must be factored into the design of enterprise connectivity from top to bottom.

Take what we do at DE-CIX as an example: Physical redundancy is an essential hallmark of the design of DE-CIX platforms, necessary to support the SLAs we guarantee our customers. The distributed nature of our platforms, accessible in many geographically dispersed data centres, and redundant deployment of our core and edge infrastructure ensures resilience against localised outages.

Furthermore, we purchase connections as diversely as possible along multiple routes so that connectivity can be maintained between locations, even in the case of localised outages along one pathway.

This means we ensure redundant and non-overlapping cable connections between every data centre where our platform is accessible, creating a highly robust and resilient, failure-safe interconnection environment.

We seek the highest levels of diversity on multiple levels: different operators, different cable stretches, and different upstream products. Interconnecting our platforms globally, the same applies: we share our capacities across different sub-sea cable routes and ensure that these paths do not overlap.

Enterprises should also apply this best practice approach to ensure resilient connectivity for their critical data flows and value chains, the foundation of business continuity in the digital economy.

How enterprises can get what they need when they need it

Bearing in mind the need for resilient connectivity, it is not surprising that enterprises are looking for secure and resilient alternative means to access their chosen cloud services. The demand for private cloud connectivity is constantly growing, and digital businesses meanwhile understand the pitfalls of connecting to clouds via the public Internet.

At the same time, flexibility and simplicity in handling interconnection services are paramount to enterprise agility. An access model (one access, multiple services) for the booking of interconnection services, paired with a self-service portal and API capabilities, ensures easy booking, scaling, and adjusting services. This makes a multi-cloud strategy feasible and manageable and simplifies general interconnection.

No matter whether it’s for direct access to hyper-scale and specialised clouds, for sourcing and using specific applications from the cloud (like Microsoft 365), or for securely connecting and exchanging data with business partners in a secure and exclusive environment, enterprises require a dedicated infrastructure to consume the services they are using.

Therefore, even when the underlying infrastructure is necessarily shared (such as the global Internet backbone and interconnection platforms like those operated by DE-CIX), enterprise customers need a virtual point-to-point private line, meaning that the enterprise connectivity is logically separated and has guaranteed reserve bandwidth on the infrastructure.

Also Read: Why Asia Pacific is a hotbed for bold ideas in material technology and sustainability

The further evolution of cloud connectivity will involve greater interoperability and cloud-to-cloud communication.

Technology-neutral integration enables the service edge

Technology-neutral integration allowing the service to the edge is needed to fulfil the interconnection needs of future enterprises. Here again, DE-CIX, the world’s leading operator of neutral interconnection platforms, can stand as a model.

The DE-CIX ecosystems are home to all the digital service providers that the business world needs access to, the data centres, the network operators, the cloud and content providers, the content distribution networks, and many more.

As an innovative interconnection specialist, we are responsible for providing flexible integrated solutions in terms of an on-demand network as a service and customers beyond the scope of traditional interconnection services.

The best way for enterprises to ensure the greatest resilience of their connectivity to locations, partners, and resources in the cloud is to not only build out their redundant connectivity with multiple contractual partners but also to capitalise on the redundancy and diversity built into the distributed and neutral nature of the DE-CIX infrastructure.

As an agile facilitator, an interconnection specialist like DE-CIX can simplify and streamline the process of creating resilient connectivity for the digital transformation challenges of the modern enterprise.

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The cryptocurrency regulations need to evolve since the existing laws are based on a centralised system, said Atsushi Taira, Managing Director of startup investor Mistletoe Singapore.

Smaller but advanced countries like Singapore and Estonia can take the lead and introduce innovative regulations.

“Blockchain is part of society. Regulators need to consider the decentralised nature of blockchain [while drafting laws]. Although they cannot control everything, they can at least put a minimum requirement like KYC (know your customer) for crypto transfer between two parties. It is necessary to prevent instances of anti-money laundering,” Taira said in an interview with e27.

There are different kinds of KYC models. For example, blockchain-based distributed KYC or zero-knowledge proof or ZKP (ZKP is a cryptographic method to prove that something is known to a third party without having to reveal the underlying information).

“Regulators need to be savvy enough to understand the technology and then accept new types of KYC,” said Taira, previously Senior VP (Global Business Strategy) at SoftBank Group. “If regulators push the existing KYC system (based on the concept of a centralised banking system), people won’t accept that. So regulators must be more advanced and adapt to the blockchain-based regulation.”

Taira also stressed that if Singapore and Estonia (economies where the financial system is advanced) can change the regulatory framework to accept the new forms of KYC, it can be a good starting point. Changing regulations may not be possible in big countries like Japan and the US because it’s hard to reach a consensus among various stakeholders.

Also Read: The brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is heading to Singapore, following Eduardo Saverin’s footprints

According to Taira, the ongoing financial crisis is a course correction and is good for the global startup ecosystem. When a recession occurs, all the bad guys and mediocre startups will go, and only strong ones will remain. In addition, the valuation will become reasonable. In that sense, it is an opportunity for the startup ecosystem.

“In 2009, when the economic recession happened, it proved to be a great vintage for VCs because they could find great startups and invest with a reasonable valuation. The return on investment was also good. So a legitimate startup and technology don’t need to worry about the current slowdown. Plus, it is a temporary phenomenon.

In his view, there is a good demand for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) around the world, especially in the wake of the recent Luna and UST crashes. “We will require stablecoins in the future irrespective of the Luna and UST crashes. This will prompt central governments to introduce digital currency. When a country, for example, China introduces a CBDC, the US may be freaking out: ‘Oh my god, if China’s CBDCs spread worldwide, it will impact USD’. Because of that kind of attention, I think governments will consider introducing digital coins. I don’t know if it is good or bad for blockchain, but they will do it anyway.”

Mistletoe Singapore is a unit of Mistletoe Japan Inc., which was started in 2013 by Taizo Son, the youngest brother of SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son. It primarily invests in hardware solutions across the globe and has invested in over 60 companies, including Ninjacart, Golden Equator, and Hatcher+.

The firm recently started investing in the Web3 domain. The primary focus is next-generation Web3 companies that are striving to make a social impact. For example, tokenisation of energy/electricity, carbon credit, and solutions targeting the unbanked population (it has already invested in an investment DAO in Vietnam).

“In that sense, we focus on linking with the real world. We hope that Web3 will change society,” Taira concluded.

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