By Denise A. Valdez, Reporter
GLOBE Telecom, Inc. said it is looking to complete its migration to the cloud by the middle of the year as it records close to $5 million in savings from the digital transformation that started in 2014.
Pebbles L. Sy-Manalang, Globe’s chief information officer, said in a recent interview the telecommunications giant is eager to become a cloud-native company in the coming months.
“Right now all new requirements go to the cloud. But we still have legacy that we’re trying to finish. But the target is… by midyear (2019), we would be done, everything would be in the cloud,” she said.
Ms. Sy-Manalang noted that in 2017, Globe was able to record $1-2 million in savings since the company moved to the cloud.
“The expectation is when you go to the cloud, at the minimum you’ll save 30% to 40%, and that’s just on infrastructure. But if you start developing your applications na (as) cloud-ready, you actually can save more,” she said.
Cloud migration is done by organizations and enterprises to move their data, information technology services, applications and other digital resources to a cloud-computing platform from a server.
Globe started using the public cloud of Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) in 2014 with the goal of hastening its internal business processes.
Since then, Ms. Sy-Manalang said Globe is now down to the last 100 servers left for migration from close to 2,000 servers when it started its cloud journey.
“The reason really to go to the cloud is speed. Like time to market, cost efficiency. These are the main reasons why you would go into the cloud,” Ms. Sy-Manalang said.
The Globe information chief added even with the massive progress in the digital transformation over the past years, she expects Globe to continue seeing further savings from optimizing and developing cloud-native applications.
“Once an application is in the cloud, you become more flexible. Kasi if wala ka sa [Because if you’re not in the] cloud and you have to grow that application or that system, you have to buy servers. It takes time,” Ms. Sy-Manalang said.
She noted that for businesses intending to move to the cloud, top-down support from the company is imperative to its success.
“In 2014, it was actually our CEO who said ‘cloud first.’… Even if you’re just buying one server, we made it more difficult. Since people didn’t want to justify to the CEO why they’re buying a server, it really helped us in our journey,” Ms. Sy-Manalang said.
Globe posted an attributable net income of P15.15 billion in the first three quarters of 2018, up 17% from in the same period last year on 9% higher consolidated service revenues at P103.3 billion.
