This article was published in Manila Bulletin on September 28, 2022.
Globe recognizes the need to provide its nearly 92 million customers with more than just phone and data services in order to remain relevant if the company intends to provide Filipinos a digital lifestyle.
PH telcos’ existing positions are now experiencing a surge in ICT demand. The Philippines, from having been known as the ‘texting capital of the world has now taken the global lead in social media usage, with the average Filipino spending 4 hours and 7 minutes per day on social media sites, according to the Digital Report in 2017 by Hootsuite and We Are Social.
To ensure that the company is able to address the changing needs of its customers, Globe deployed a steady stream of applications and technologies to support a digital lifestyle. These include an online store for mobile gadgets and telco services, self-service applications for phone, data, and rewards monitoring, a convenient online payment service, and many more. In compliance with their cloud-first strategy, these apps are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud service provider of choice.
Acquiring physical hardware to host an application typically takes months. When Globe put in place a cloud-first strategy, the timeline was significantly reduced into days. Still, the telco giant keeps accelerating when it comes to innovations that will elevate their service levels and increase their market share.
On year one of the engagement, the company had 70 projects lined up to be hosted in AWS. Setting up the technical environments of a large volume of projects can be challenging since a mere delay of one day affects the entire project and possibly other projects that need support from the same team.
Through Stratpoint, Globe’s long-time partner for its many technology requirements, it initially deployed over 30 cloud professionals to handle and oversee the implementation, management, and support of the AWS environments for Globe’s projects in the pipeline.
Stratpoint is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Solutions Provider, with certified AWS professionals skilled in technical architecture, cloud engineering, database management, network administration, infrastructure service operationalization, service operations instrumentation, automations and innovations, and more. The team’s mission is to help Globe optimize their AWS investment, hasten provisioning times, and ensure that their applications work excellently in AWS.
A few months into the engagement, Stratpoint and Globe already realized significant improvements in the process by shortening the average environment provisioning time by 67%. It also achieved zero percent project defect month-on-month and realized more than US$200,000 in savings in one year due to cloud optimization.
RJ Mendiola, Globe’s Director for Operations and Maintenance Division, Infrastructure Technology and Services, welcomes Stratpoint’s support. “Stratpoint has proven to be a superb business partner to Globe for some years now. Above and beyond the technical capability, they imbibed the ‘malasakit’ culture, which transformed their services from transactional to relational. Stratpoint being on our backside allows us to focus on creating more values and better experiences for our customers.”
MR dela Cruz, Stratpoint’s Chief Executive Officer said: “As an IT company, we take delight in helping enable lifestyles and businesses to be successful through tech. As a Filipino firm, continuous partnerships with forward-looking companies like Globe mean that we can contribute more to nation-building with our technological capabilities and by providing career opportunities for Filipinos.”