What advice would you have for those who want to play a role in the next stage of Asia Pacific growth?
Three things are vital. The first is focus. When you have so much
opportunity, don't go chasing after rainbows. It's a bit like a surfer hoping the next wave will be bigger. One of the reasons we do well is that we are focused on a few key priorities and we have not wavered, we have not gone chasing after rainbows. The second is managed growth. Over-trading is as dangerous as not having enough business. Managed growth - I guess that sometimes means not growing as much as you could, but as much as you can manage. The third is sustained high performance. All that movement - up and down performance - will create issues associated with confidence. When you are always hiring and firing, you become known as an employer that is not reliable.

Mr Williams: One of the reasons we do well is that we are focused on a few key priorities and we have not wavered.

Asia is not a one-size-fits-all market. How do you sell to the Asian market?
It's different in different places, even in different cities in the same country. Oracle was an early entrant in the market - we entered China in 1990. We have three golden rules.

The first is total commitment, locally, on the ground, working 24x7 with partners and customers. One hundred per cent local commitment. There is nothing worse than flying in, flying out. You create the excitement but you are not there to
follow through. The second is partnering, working with local partners because we may not have the local expertise and you need geographic coverage. Partnership is absolutely critical. The third golden rule is localisation. A product that works perfectly well in the US, United Kingdom or in Germany may not be fit for purpose for the local market. You may get early success but not sustained high performance if you do not localise.

What can Singapore do to enrich its infocomm ecosystem?
A company like ours is always keeping an eye on cost. Singapore can be a more costly environment compared with other parts of the world, so we have to balance the benefits of Singapore with the cost of doing business here. The infrastructure, the communications, transportation are very important benefits, but we control costs very carefully. The second thing is to get more students to join the IT industry. The challenge is to find high quality, good young people. The third is communication. Communicate what is available - the programmes and incentives, and how organisations can benefit from them.
This should be a continuous campaign because there are new people moving
in every day.

What are the necessary skills to survive and thrive in this industry?
The one skill which is critical, regardless of industry, is communication. Technology has created a global communications network, but how often do people send emails instead of talking to each other? No matter how good the technology is, the intelligence, the government support, if you do not have good communication skills, it's really tough.

At the recent Technology Foresight Seminar organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Mr Mike Liebhold, Senior Researcher with the Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org), talked about some of the exciting possibilities in a world of digital abundance. Here are some excerpts from
his presentation:

About digital abundance
Digital abundance is built on three technologies. One of them is abundant storage. Already the current generation of iPod has 160 GB on a mobile device. Within five to 10 years, we will have enormous data storage not only on devices but also on the network.

The second basic technological development is the continuing improvement in communications bandwidth. We're seeing the rapid evolution from first generation wireless communications all the way up to 3G and Wifi, and soon we will have WiMAX, and major improvements in fixed optical networks.

The third major component of digital abundance is unlimited computing power. These technology enablers give people access to unlimited computing power. With this, applications are going to change, and the way we interact with digital resources will change.

Transcending Moore's Law
Now we're into the era of sensing, and sensemaking with really cheap sensing devices allowing us to gather and make sense of all kinds of information into a combined information environment. Along with this, we see continual changes in computing resources that allow all these to happen - technologies that transcend Moore's Law.

It is particularly important to look at supercomputers because the kind of things people do with supercomputing will soon be accessible to all of us. There have been interesting developments, first of all in the design of chips. It started with AMD with their dual core processors. Now one researcher, Anant Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer of startup Tilera forecasts a Moore's Law for cores – "every 18 months, the number of cores increases. By 2017, embedded processors could have more than 4,000 cores, and server CPUs will have
512 cores."

This will change the way we use our computers. We will enter an era of sensing, with computing power that allows us to do new kinds of things.

Mr Liebhold: Digital abundance allows broader, multidisciplinary thinking.

Cloud computing
The other fundamental development is the emergence of cloud computing – the idea of harnessing hundreds or even thousands of computers to work in parallel. Many big names in technology worldwide have efforts in this area - Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard...

Amazon has something called the
Amazon S3, which allows anyone including many Silicon Valley startups to start operations with zero capital investment. Amazon gives them a virtual machine and all they have to do is write the code and run their services on the Amazon platform. Google has also announced cloud computing services. Google probably has an estimated million generic Linux boxes in the Google infrastructure and is now offering a service called App Engine, which is a cloud computing service. There is a strong feeling in Silicon Valley that cloud computing is an important development.

Transforming our mobile experience
As we establish a network foundation of supercomputing, we have to think about what it means for our mobile experience. We're rapidly moving to a world where everyone has a mobile computing device. In five to 10 years, almost everyone in the world will have the equivalent to an iPhone. Laptops and mobile phones will morph into cheap PCs and give users access to supercomputing resources on the network, in the cloud.

At the same time, new wireless protocols – WiMAX, LTE (Long Term Evolution), 4G, UWB, Wireless HDMi - will increase bandwidth to our mobile devices. We will have really high-speed wireless broadband comparable in some environments to fibre broadband.

There are other major developments. The wireless device will become a hub for Body Area Networks which are connected to wearable sensors to monitor our heart rate, blood pressure, all kinds of things... And we're seeing sensors that are not only wearable but also embedded in the environment, for example, in smart homes. For both ends of the age range, this is very important – for the very young children, and for the very old or the disabled.

One of the most popular applications of sensing is geo-positioning - our devices will all know where we are. Today we use GPS, but in the new era it will be sensor fusion. Today geo-positioning is slow, with accuracy of 5-20 metres. In 2015, we may be able to fuse many sensors to give submillimetre accuracy, in real time.

Invisible computing
This will be the beginning of invisible computing, where we have sensors embedded in the environment and a data layer draped across the world. There will be implications for recognition, mining and synthesis – which are large category descriptions of the kinds of applications that we will be able to develop. Recognition is the ability to recognise faces or patterns; mining – to take that pattern and search for other similar patterns; and synthesis – taking all the results and modelling it in a very interesting way.

One example is face recognition. In the future, we may not need a mobile phone. We can walk up to a sensor, it will recognise you, and we can start interacting over the cloud.

It is now also possible for us to model a very complex environment. We're seeing the beginning of multidisciplinary science. This notion of multidisciplinary science is very, very important because many problem sets cannot be solved in isolation. We cannot understand any ecosystem without understanding how the different systems work together. With digital abundance, we now have the ability to think in broader, multidisciplinary ways.