Singapore’s ST Telemedia, an investor group specialising in the communications, media, data centres and Infratech sectors and which has stewardship of iconic local brands like StarHub and STT Global Data Centres (STTGDC), has been eyeing new business opportunities which are cloud-native and run out of Singapore.
The Temasek-owned company established Ollion this year as its first cloud-native consulting company with operations in Singapore, the US, India and Indonesia, among other countries by amalgamating existing portfolio companies.
In February this year, ST Telemedia CEO, Stephen Miller, in his annual message to the company noted that the strategic investor’s Infratech portfolio of companies “continued to gain market and industry recognition”.
Giving an update, Miller noted that the group had made “important progress” in the execution of its vision of developing a “global born-in-cloud business”.
This has translated into the integration of the group’s STT Cloud unit, comprising the former businesses of Cloud Comrade, with CloudCover, and US-based 2nd Watch to form Ollion.
Unique skill sets
Each of the companies brings to the table unique skill sets, STT said.
US-based 2nd Watch specialises cloud migration, cloud management, IT assessment and strategic consulting to many of the world’s biggest companies since 2010, and is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Partner, Microsoft Azure Gold Partner and a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Partner.
The company acquired the specialist data and analytics firm, Aptitive, a Snowflake Services Partner, in 2022 to better address the holistic digital transformation needs of enterprise organisations.
Singapore-based Cloud Comrade’s specialisation lies in cloud computing consultancy focused on building and implementing bespoke technology solutions on top of cloud infrastructure platforms and is also an AWS and GCP Premier Partner and Microsoft Azure Gold Partner.
CloudCover is a cloud-native product and services firm focused on automation and scale, working with scaled start-ups and agile enterprises to drive innovation, speed and business value.
As a GCP Premier Partner, CloudCover accelerated migrations for key Google customers such as BBM, ShareChat, Tokopedia and Bukalapak.
In January 2019 STT completed a majority stake acquisition in Cloud Comrade. In October of the same year STT acquired a majority stake in 2nd Watch and for the first time shared its vision of building a global platform that combines our cloud and technology capabilities.
In March 2020 STT acquired a majority stake in CloudCover.
Miller noted: “We are excited at the emergence of Ollion and their global position in the cloud-native ecosystem. With strong and experienced shareholders, Ollion is a credible enterprise change partner capable of working with clients over the long term. We look forward to Ollion developing long-lasting relationships with enterprises and government entities, as well as the CSPs.”
Engineering solutions
Speaking to iTnews Asia, Ollion’s CEO Peter Wright, noted that market research by the company showed that, apart from consulting, companies are also looking for engineering solutions.
As a result, the consulting model is changing and a top-down approach no longer works, he said.
I think the expectation going forward as technology becomes the enabler to express ideas customers don’t want voluminous reports and instead are looking for ideas, working code or prototypes, he said.
“The benefit of that is we can not only test the hypothesis, but we can understand the operational implications or the scaling implications of this so we can better fine-tune the recommendation,” Wright said.
This helps to better plan the path to delivery, he added.
“Now, as the service provider, or consultant, if you’re working from the conception of the idea, with the enterprise, then you’re also accountable for turning that idea into practical real benefits. That’s where the accountability comes in,” he added.
He noted that this is what the future of consulting will look like and this is a result of the impact digital transformation has had on the professional services industry.
He added that Ollion is seeing the customers are not just looking for advice but also the technology and the IP being delivered in a much more accountable way.
Miller noted that initial market research done by Ollion revealed enterprises felt the existing professional services model was falling short of meeting the contemporary needs of the enterprise.
Instead of a top-down approach business units themselves have a greater role to play in the development of strategy.
We are moving away from a centralised top-down strategy to a grassroots strategy work that is much more user-centred, and the central function becomes more of a coordination and control function, rather than, you know, a dissemination function, he noted.
Miller added that Ollion’s approach was to bring the expertise, in a manner that is visible and accountable – and then use it to empower its clients to do the work on their own.
“It will help boost the skills of clients’ employees, so they become cloud experts,” he said.