SOLUTIONS provider Kyndryl Philippines is expecting continuing growth in demand for information technology (IT) services from the financial sector, its top official said.
“The financial segment will be an area where there is a lot of continuing investments in technology. A lot of banks right now are trying to go digital, that’s the current trend at the marketplace right now,” Wilson Go, managing director at Kyndryl Philippines, said in a briefing on Tuesday.
Mr. Go said that it is a way for financial institutions to help the unbanked get into the banking ecosystem.
Aside from the financial sector, Kyndryl Philippines is also seeing growing investments from the manufacturing and consumer packaged goods (CPG) sectors.
“In the area of manufacturing, we see the adoption of technologies such as 5G and VPNs (virtual private networks). We also have customers in the CPGs. They are also having continuing investments because now they are starting to go and engage their customers directly,” Mr. Go said.
This trend in CPGs arose from the pandemic, which shifted the companies’ strategy of going through distributors to engage with customers, he added.
This is also the same for the whole of Kyndryl, which its global cloud practice leader, Harish Grama, said is working with a lot of banks.
“I would say our banking or financial services make up about 45% of our customers but it is also very strong in retail, telco, healthcare and manufacturing,” Mr. Grama said,
Susan Follis, managing director at Kyndryl ASEAN, said that travel and transportation could also be an area of growth for Kyndryl in the region.
“We certainly are doing mission-critical travel and transportation businesses as well, whether they will be airline or rail lines, whatever they may be, automation plays a big part there,” she said.
Mr. Grama said that organizations need to embrace business and IT modernization to survive the unprecedented challenges brought about by unstable inflation and rising interest rates.
“As businesses today face unprecedented — and operationally disruptive — challenges, unstable inflation and rising interest rates have led organizations to manage their spending and drive efficiencies wherever possible,” he said. “To survive, organizations have no choice but to embrace business and IT modernization.”
Quoting a commissioned survey from Forrester Consulting, Mr. Grama said businesses have to overcome three major roadblocks to reach their modernization goals. These roadblocks are operational inefficiencies, shortage of in-house IT skills, and slow adoption of automation.
“Many businesses still use legacy architecture, which is far more complicated to manage and update,” he said.
The survey showed that only 55% of organizations can scale operations as needed, while only 52% can quickly respond to disruptions.
“Just 48% are able to easily adapt to unforeseen events [and] nearly h alf of organizations surveyed said they struggle to control and predict their IT costs in the cloud,” Mr. Grama added.
The US-listed service provider said that for its fiscal year that ended March 31, revenues hit $17 billion, while fourth-quarter revenues reached $4.3 billion. — Justine Irish D. Tabile