Recently, the “sacred mountain” has become a popular topic among people. They’re not talking about how many shares they bought, but about the industrial resilience and R&D strength displayed by Taiwan after the pandemic instead. As a matter of fact, the software strength of Taiwan is also very powerful. iKala, which got into the cloud business recently, is committed to creating another “cloud mountain chain”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation and reshuffled the market. The world’s supply chains rely heavily on Taiwan’s semiconductors, which shows just how important Taiwan is in the global industrial layout. However, the “soft” power of Taiwan must not be underestimated either. The operational strategies of iKala, established 10 years ago, have been keeping abreast of the times, and now show differentiated advantages. iKala’s goal is to build another mountain chain for Taiwan’s cloud industry. So what unique innovations does iKala have in its cloud products and services?
Cultivating an innovative bottom-up R&D culture and refusing to be a follower in the market – accumulating a decade of cloud experience
“Human-centered” sounds somewhat abstract. Alex Lin, iKala’s executive advisor to directors, stated: “We saw that the talents cultivated by Taiwan’s software industry are usually followers in terms of technology and product thinking, but iKala overturned tradition and created a bottom-up atmosphere for innovation, allowing every engineer to be a creator.” The bottom-up mentioned by Alex Lin refers to the implementation of the OKR system along with the brainstorming meeting held once every two weeks. From the CEO to developers, every employee can share new industry knowledge and technology publicly, and hold small POCs quickly internally, allowing iKala to continually find feasible entry points.
In other words, the “speed” accumulated by iKala in the past decade is the decisive strength that allows it to continue to stay ahead of the market.
The power of Google Cloud Anthos: Helping large enterprises manage multi-cloud environments and enjoy the benefits of both the cloud and the ground
iKala recently obtained the Google Cloud Anthos partner certification. The main reason it was approved by Google was because of iKala’s many years of establishment in the local market. It is very familiar with the pain points that Taiwanese enterprises face in digital transformation, and can further provide one-stop technical support from system launching, operations, and maintenance to after-sales services. As for which enterprises are suitable for the implementation of Anthos, Frank Gong said: “The Anthos core can help large enterprises relocate and integrate the IT infrastructure on the “ground” with the “cloud” more efficiently, and is committed to satisfying the various complicated needs for managing hybrid cloud and cross-cloud platforms.”
Frank Gong then said that operating an enterprise of a certain scale require accumulating thousands of servers and storage machines, while the cloud has a large number of VMs and databases. There are usually many “hidden costs” during the operation and maintenance process that are neglected, such as the strengthening of data protection and performing remote backup, or adopting DR and having drills for service interruptions due to sudden software or hardware issues. There are potential costs that must be considered for every link. Anthos is used to help the IT management of enterprises be more lightweight so that the engineering workforce does not have to waste large amounts of time executing daily operations and maintenance, but can instead invest in development work with a higher output value.
“We observed that Taiwan’s high-tech, manufacturing and finance industries are all very suitable for the deployment of Anthos.” Alex Lin added that these types of industries usually need to implement cloud computing resources on a large scale within a very short time, but if traditional purchasing modes are used, it will prolong the time to market cycle of the products/services significantly. Anthos can quickly unleash cloud performance to build AI models to save on the ground end; it does not require investing a large amount of investment costs at once, but it can provide immediate results. It is a very appealing solution for industries that focus on ROI.
The strength of iKala AIOps: One-stop hosting locked on to small and medium enterprises, investing small IT costs to create explosive revenues
For SMEs with relatively simpler IT environments with smaller cloud architectures, iKala has another weapon that can help enterprises begin their digital transformation. Looking at the contents of the iKala AIOps Services solution, not only can it help clients conduct education and training, system planning and monitoring alarms, it can also provide one-stop cloud hosting services. Seeing Taiwan’s challenges in the talent gap for the cloud, iKala is committed to assisting the IT department of enterprises to implement automated operations and maintenance systems with a limited workforce.
In addition to providing modular tools for hosting, the even greater value of AIOps is to help clients optimize the development process and even drive corporate revenue. Frank Gong explained: “We can get a grasp on the needs of each industry for cloud system usage. Not only has iKala accumulated years of technical capabilities, we also provide our success cases overseas as reference to Taiwanese enterprises through our close cooperation with Google. We discovered that after many enterprises implemented AIOps, their revenues also increased significantly; however, the cost of their IT workforce did not have to be increased by much.”
iKala shared a case of its recent cooperation with the finance industry. In response to the explosive transactions in e-commerce during the November 11 sale, the assistance of iKala was urgently needed to implement cloud management and create AI tools to effectively grasp the error contents or fraudulent behaviors during the transaction processes. Frank Gong’s analysis was that iKala can help the client use the cloud computing resources of AIOps to perform large amounts of data analysis and error detection for rule-based systems, as well as for training machine learning; then, the client can make good use of the technical resources such as the AI empowerment of AIOps to enhance the intelligence of the AI module for its ability to read data and grasp daily transaction information more efficiently while uncovering potential business opportunities. This proves that AIOps is one of the best solutions for assisting enterprises in pushing digital transformation.
Deepening industrial cooperation for win-win situations as iKala hopes to become another sacred mountain for cloud services
iKala has so far served hundreds of domestic and overseas clients. The reason it is deeply favored by the market is because the cloud solutions of iKala can provide corresponding product combinations in response to the different needs of industrial clients. Alex Lin stressed: “More importantly, we see that more and more enterprises are willing to leave their cloud operations and maintenance to iKala so that they can focus more on increasing the competitiveness of their core business services, and therefore truly enjoy the benefits of IT automation and scale.”
On the other hand, business models of cloud services focus more on the upstream and downstream supply chains complementing one another. When the scale of the user’s organization continues to grow and the user penetration rate increases, as a cloud technical service provider, iKala must also work with its partners in the cloud ecosystem to create win-win situations.
Alex Lin and Frank Gong stated unanimously that “iKala wishes to become a leading AI company in Asia so the world can see that in addition to the semiconductor strength of Taiwan, we have another sacred mountain chain that has the cloud as its core, and that Taiwan can also create cutting-edge products that lead the world in the fields of AI and software. iKala is committed to becoming an innovative creator in the industry and marching forward together with its partners.”
(This article was reproduced from The News Lens.)