Credit: IDG
Channel Asia is proud to announce the launch of State of Innovation, an exclusive virtual experience for business technology leaders across Southeast Asia, built on the foundations of education, recognition and advancement.
Set for Thursday 21 January, this experience will house two leading Channel Asia initiatives - Innovation Awards and State of the Channel - to offer step-by-step guidance around revised end-user priorities in the months ahead, supported by honouring outstanding work through customer value and innovation at partner, distributor and vendor levels. To register - click here.
State of Innovation has been designed with the executive in mind and built to respect business leader commitments. Delivered through succinct and strategic sessions, this virtual experience is centred around three core pillars; Customer Insights, Partner Actions and Executive Coaching.
Shaped by local market research, insights in relation to revised end-user investment priorities will be delivered, backed by CIO deep-dives and new-look partner requirements. In addition, partner attendees will receive advice on how to create customer opportunity, how to run a modern business and how to prepare for future growth.
Central to this will be an executive speaker line-up featuring leading CIOs from across Southeast Asia, including Ivan Ng as CTO of City Developments Limited (Singapore); Dennis Omila as CIO of UnionBank (Philippines) and K. Ruangroj Poonpol as President of Technology at Kasikorn Bank (Thailand). This is in addition to Herman Widjaja as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Tokopedia (Indonesia), Rahul Shinde as CIO of Coca-Cola (Vietnam) and Saiful Bakhtiar Osman as Head of ICT at Malaysian Aviation Commission (Malaysia).
Customer insights will be complemented by expert analyst commentary from Mark Iles as Executive Analyst of Tech Research Asia and Jay McBain as Principal Analyst of Channels at Forrester, alongside a Hall of Fame session featuring inductees Tian Beng Ng, Francis Choo and Elson Chia.
Innovation Awards
The Innovation Awards segment will honour outstanding work through customer value and innovation, with a record-breaking 332 nominations submitted across seven countries.
Overall, the Awards will celebrate the channel across seven categories - Partner Value; Emerging Tech; Vendor Value; Distributor Value; Personal Innovation; Channel Choice and Hall of Fame.
In total, more than 90 organisations are represented across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar, in addition to regional success at ASEAN, Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific levels.
More than 45 partners make the finalist shortlist, spanning value-added resellers, system integrators and managed service providers, in addition to consultancy firms, cloud specialists and independent software vendors. Completing the finalist line-up, over 35 vendor organisations are also in the running, in addition to more than 10 distributors.
The most competitive field is at partner level, with the Emerging Tech category housing a multitude of nominations across Cloud, Smart Technology and Digital Transformation, in addition to a jam-packed Enterprise line-up in the Partner category.
Finalists were chosen by an IDG shortlist committee and will now be assessed by a hand-picked judging panel, comprising of the leading executives at partner, vendor and distributor levels across ASEAN. To ensure objectivity, partners cannot vote on partner categories, vendors cannot vote on vendor categories and distributors cannot vote on distributor categories.
State of the Channel
Through newly launched research in Southeast Asia, State of the Channel will provide a collaborative and educational environment designed to offer partners, vendors and distributors the competitive advantage required to be successful.
Delivered alongside the Awards, research will offer the clearest indication yet as to whether the ecosystem is aligned with the end-user market following the economic disruption of Covid-19.
Partners, distributors and vendors located across Southeast Asia are now invited to complete the research - set to take approximately 15 minutes - by clicking here, to help provide guidance on the future priorities of the local market.
Delivered in partnership with Tech Research Asia, this research will focus on the short- to medium-term opportunities ahead for the channel, spanning customer, partner and vendor / distributor organisations, assessing similarities and differences across the wider industry. Key markets include Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, in addition to Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam.
For partners, findings will uncover what makes end-users tick across Southeast Asia, alongside insights into the purchasing patterns of businesses, assessing how customers define value in the modern market, and the key attributes required for future success.
Alongside technology - both established and emerging - investment plans, this research will equip partners with the knowledge of future customer trends specific to the local market, and crucially, how to add new levels of value as the buyer evolves post-pandemic.
Delving deeper, findings will also outline what customers truly think of solution providers from a pros and cons perspective, offering critical advice from an engagement and selling standpoint. Likewise, the research will benchmark partner answers against that of customers and vendors / distributors, providing an opportunity to assess whether the channel is aligned in terms of value and investment.
Maintaining the partner theme, the research will also assess the health of the ecosystem across Southeast Asia, probing the channel’s handling of Covid-19, alongside its ability to respond and recover in the months ahead.
Collectively, this research will provide a clear picture of local end-user spending habits, offering in-depth insight into how the channel can be successful in the months and years ahead.
Exclusive audience
Attendance at State of Innovation is open to decision-makers shaping the technology landscape across partner, vendor and distributor organisations - reflective of a diverse, innovative and expanding ecosystem in Southeast Asia.
As the world becomes more collaborative, so is the network of providers delivering transformational solutions to customers. Different technology buyers are requiring different technology partners, challenging the market status quo in the process.
Mirroring the market, State of Innovation brings together emerging and established technology players, spanning bleeding edge start-ups and cloud specialists to independent software vendors and application developers. This is complemented with business consultants and boutique agencies, alongside solution providers and system integrators – all collaborating, all contributing.
State of Innovation will run as a virtual experience on Thursday 21 January from 2:00-6:30pm SGT. To register, click here
