VSTECS Phils. Inc. recently mounted a virtual forum to talked about the impact of COVID-19 on businesses and organizations, and how industries cope up with the difficult times.
Are they struggling and grappling just like everyone else? And what are the solutions that they’ve come across to be enabled to go with the flow from this health crisis?
Executive officers from Dell EMC Philippines, Fortinet Philippines, Oracle, and Hitachi joined the webinar series moderated by Maurice Acosta Altar, AVP, Marketing Communications, VSTECS Phils. last August 18 as part of the company’s commitment to bring awareness of what is happening around and how the pandemic affects business organizations.
Valerie Fontano, Client Technologist, Dell EMC Philippines, shared that she has been able to manage time and everything. “There’s not much of an issue internally,” said Fontano with regards to the impact of COVID-19 in their company structure. Valerie later suggested to have a roadmap that will create and identify goals inside an organization. “You have to have a goal, have a plan - short, mid and long-term plans,” she added.
As far as customer engagement is concern, Gayathri Periasamy, JAPAC Channel Sales Director, Oracle said that they’ve launched virtual advisory bots and conduct monthly review of flexible business models that their organization can deploy. “Surprisingly, it was the last quarter of the year, 2019, we were predicting lower outcome for the next year,” said Gayathri.
“On a regional perspective, with this pandemic we will have a new normal as we continue to approach the world. All will be digitally enabled,” added Gayathri.
On predicting the future of business organizations for 2021 and next years to come, Louie Castaneda, Country Manager, Fortinet Philippines, said that it’s quite difficult to answer given that even the government is perplexed on how things and people will go back to the normal. “Business will adapt. SMBs are really impacted by this pandemic. Either way, this pandemic accelerates digital transformation. Everyone can now adapt to technology. A lot of companies change their architecture and change to digitization,” he said.
“Technologies have been around for a long time. And a lot of companies do not have a choice, either you transform, or you die. And COVID-19 placed companies in a corner,” Robin Fong, VP, Lumada Data Management and Analytics, APAC Digital Solutions, Hitachi said on how the pandemic greatly affected organizations and one solution is to keep up with technology and digital transformation.
“One of the things that I’ve realized now is I could not meet people freely. Work perspective is working from home and suddenly I can see my family 24/7. But friction sometimes do exist in the family. We must be mindful of the noise level,” Fong continued.
Castaneda acknowledged what Fong mentioned and said that meeting up with customers is the real challenge nowadays, and the solution to this problem is to go on digital.
“Everyone is doing now, engaging with digital payments, like PayMaya and GCash, and online banking. People are trying to shift and do what they can in this pandemic. Businesses also found new ways to adapt to engage with customers adapting cloud networking solutions.,” Castaneda explained.
“They need to accept and if they don’t transform themselves in this new situation, they will be left behind. That’s the key mentality, to stay afloat. Surprisingly many people started online selling,” added Valerie.
“In times like these, we must be more customer focus, offer scheme of support. Hitachi has been on the data space and these are the things that we do. We start and we end with a customer in hand. I don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen next year, but human beings will adapt. The way I see it, it will be a hybrid, workforce environment where we can go online, while the brick and mortar will still be there,” said Fong.
“We are all in this together,” added Castaneda.
Before the webinar ended, Fong invited everyone to watch a short clip of slides he prepared showing the ‘new normal’ life he’s experiencing now. “Count your blessings. Enjoy the best things in life,” said Fong as the webinar concluded.