PLDT SME Nation together with SMART Enterprise and SUN Business has gathered techies and SMEs last week for a day of inspirational tech talks and breakout sessions at the first ever PLDT Tech Island. Sharing their industry expertise and talking about the global best practices and ICT trends are panel of speakers including Kat Luna-Abelarde, First Vice President and Head of PLDT SME Nation, Nerissa Ramos, Group Chief Operating Officer of ePLDT, Luigi Lopa, General Manager of ABM Global Solutions, Earl Martin Valencia, President and Founder of IdeaSpace Foundation, Raymund Villanueva, Head of Marketing and Analytics of Voyager Innovations Inc and Ireen Catane Head of Samsung Enterprise Business.
The morning session kicked off with a quick introduction about the PLDT Tech Island from PLDT SME Nation Assistant Vice President and Head of Marketing, Amil Azurin followed by inspiring talks from BURST Founder and Silicon Valley Serial Enterpreneur Gary Whitehill talking about Why End-to-End is Imperative for SMBs Today. Next to go on stage was SMART Developer Evangelist Paul Pajo with his energetic presentation on Curating Collaborative Collisions Consciously.
The 700 participants were divided into groups for the afternoon breakout sessions and got to choose on specific focuses including Creative Collaboration, Disaster Defiance and Seamleass Process Integration participated by brands including Microsoft, Samsung, Cisco, Asigra, IPC, Symantec, SAP, SalesForce and TackThis.
Creative Collaboration
It was an afternoon full of insights as we learned how SMEs and businesses can be more effective with less resources and how employees can collaborate with their colleagues anytime, anywhere using any device from the presentations of Microsoft, Samsung and Cisco.
Microsoft Business Group Lead Tovia Va’aelua discussed how to Become a market leader (for less than 20 pesos a day) leveraging on Microsoft business solutions and collaboration tools including the cloud-powered Office 365.
Samsung R&D Director for Mobile Solution Lab Julius Gorospe discussed the future according to Samsung and new network features, technologies and capabilities that help power up SMEs and businesses. Samsung is bullish on Smart wearables and the Internet of Things in general, investing more on wearables and smart devices as well as smart appliances, even acquiring SmartThings. Samsung has also shared the development of its open-source software platform, Tizen and how it’s gaining strong community support and what their company is doing in creating a richer ecosystem for their product. Tizen-powered commercialized devices are already out in the market and Samsung shared that Smart watch market by 2020 is projected to hit 373 million units.
The Samsung R&D Director also presented its new network features, technologies and capabilities including Knox mobile security solutions currently used by 24 Samsung phone models, powering over 87M Knox enabled devices. Gorospe also highlighted the implementation of LTE multimedia broadcast and VoLTE in the country and its business usage, sighting Smart’s eMBMS trial last November. These technologies provide great values to the mobile workforce with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets.
PLDT has always been helping SMEs expand their businesses, recognizing them as the backbone of the economy. PLDT has always provided SMEs and start-ups entrepreneurs with the necessary business solutions and tools they needed to achieve their goals from Accounting, Asset Tracking, HR & Payroll to POS solutions as well as conducting talks to empower their business knowledge.
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