This modern-day solution at the venerable compound comes thanks to an agreement signed on Friday by the museum and Huawei Co, the telecommunication giant, to build a “smart network” using 5G technology, the fifth generation of mobile network communications.

Under the agreement, 5G Wi-Fi signals will cover the 720,000-square-meter compound, China’s imperial palace from 1420 to 1911 and also known as the Forbidden City, and the branch museum of the institution under construction in northwestern Beijing.

But visitor comfort is not the only benefit of a 5G smart network.

Huawei will also provide the museum with cutting-edge technologies for the internet of things－devices or objects linked in a network－cloud computing and artificial intelligence to facilitate such functions as management, security and preservation of cultural relics.

“It’s essential to always stay close to the latest technology to better serve the public,” said Shan Jixiang, director of the Palace Museum.

Shan said there is still much room for improvement in the handling of a huge number of cultural relics, such as when the priceless painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival is exhibited again next year.

The Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) landscape painting is considered the best-known ancient Chinese work of art. When it was last exhibited in 2015, visitors stood in long lines until 3 am to get a glimpse. The museum ended up preparing instant noodles to serve the hungry visitors.

“I don’t want that scenario to recur,” Shan said. “Our operation can be done in a more scientific way.”

The new system will make use of the more than 3,000 closed-circuit television cameras that are installed all over the Palace Museum. Shan said facial-recognition technology will determine which areas are most popular with frequent visitors in order to analyze their preferences.

“We can later, accordingly, provide useful information on our exhibitions,” he said.

The CCTV cameras also are used to safeguard the museum’s precious relics. More than 1.86 million of them are housed at the museum, which logged 17.5 million visits from the public in 2018, topping all museums worldwide.

“How can we make sure no single visitor who might have evil ideas threatens these treasures?” Shan said. “After adopting the internet of things, we can instantly detect any motion involving the artifacts to prevent such threats.”

Such a networked system also will be used to facilitate management of inventory and closely supervise transportation and exhibition of cultural relics.

New technologies can assist the museum staff in other ways, too, said Wang Tao, a member of Huawei’s board of directors.

The company will use algorithms to more efficiently draft tailored plans for restoring cultural relics after information on similar pieces and files on each collection are included in a database.

“We can thus combine old craftsmen’s experience and artificial intelligence,” Wang said.

The 5G network also will be used to improve remote consultation through webcams, which will facilitate conversations with overseas scholars to jointly find the best answers for restoration and preservation issues, he said.

The latest in drones are being unveiled at Japan Drone 2019, one of the nation’s largest drone fairs, which runs through Friday at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba.

Flying out of sight

“We’ll change the airspace where only birds and radio waves flew into a place to do our business,” said Keisuke Toji, representing start-up Aeronext Inc., during his speech Wednesday at the venue.

 The company’s drones unveiled at the show are made to stay balanced for stable flight during times of strong wind or gusts. The company also improved the performance of the motor so that the drones can be used for deliveries that usually require the aircraft to fly a longer distance.

Before deregulation, the operation of drones in Japan had been limited to those within the user’s sight. This made drones usable only in areas such as aerial photography and surveying. To promote the use of drones, the government revised aviation rules in September last year to allow drones to fly out of sight of the user, as long as the drones fly over remote islands, mountainous areas and other places people are unlikely to set foot in.

The government plans to allow such drone flights in urban areas from 2022 as a way to cope with the shortage of workers in the parcel delivery business.

Market set to boom

Taking advantage of deregulation, from June telecommunications giant KDDI Corp. will offer services to fly drones over out-of-sight places to inspect infrastructure and for search operations during alpine accidents.

Rakuten Inc., which runs e-commerce services among other activities, will start deliveries by drones in less-populated areas within fiscal 2019. It has already cooperated with companies and local governments to conduct proving tests for drone deliveries.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is among the organizations that are planning to put into practical use by 2020 a system to manage drones’ routes to avoid air collisions.

According to research firm Impress Corp., the domestic drone market is expected to increase tenfold from ¥50.3 billion ($452 million) in fiscal 2017 to ¥507.3 billion in fiscal 2024. Fields such as parcel delivery are expected to grow and new entrants to the market are likely to accelerate.

The 80-year Thai conglomerate, Loxley, has recently undergone its fourth business transformation in shifting from a telecom business to a service business under its fourth generation leader, Suroj Lamsam.

The company has changed its business direction and reorganised to be lean and highly focused on its new potential. Once composed of 50 companies under Loxley, it has slimmed down to 15 companies under five strategic business groups (SBG) – information technology, food service and distribution, energy, network solutions, and services.

Suroj Lamsam, president of  Loxley Public Company Limited, said the company in the past had too many companies doing many kinds of business, causing a lack of focus that limited its success.

In the two years since he taking over as president of the conglomerate, he has reorganised it and aligned its business units in a new direction to offer “services” across business groups rather than relying primarily on trading products.

“We are aiming to shift our core revenue stream to rely on a service or transaction fee model,” explained Suroj. “Therefore, we need to specialise in each business area that we call a ‘strategic business group’. Now we have five strategic business groups, and are adjusting our approach to focus more on offering ‘service’ in each business.”

He said Loxley is now in its fourth generation of business direction, from a trading company to office automation and IT, and then to a telecom before its current services-oriented incarnation.

“We need to be lean and to focus on where the business potential lies, rather than running so many businesses without being strong in any one,” said Suroj.

Under his lead, Loxley will focus on only five business groups. In each group, the business is heading in the direction of offering services rather than a trading approach. The trading-business model is being disrupted by digital technology, and the company can no longer rely on revenue from that model.

“In many of the past years, our revenue was not stable, but swung wildly because most of our businesses relied on revenue from ‘projects’, especially from the government market. Therefore, in the years where we won the projects, our revenue was high. On the other hand, in some years we did not have the projects and our revenue greatly decreased,” said Suroj.

In 2019, Loxley aims to have business growth of 20 to 25 per cent above 2018’s around Bt15 billion.

Under Suroj’s direction, each business group has a greater focus on “service”. For example, the IT business previously performed as a system integrator offering hardware and software solution implementation, but now has shifted to offering management services.

Meanwhile, the energy group has announced that it would leave power plant production to be an engineering procurement contractor. Similarly, the network solution group, which mostly relies on winning government projects, will maintain that revenue stream while shifting its focus to specific

projects.

“Ideally, we would like to turn to offer ‘service’ to the government. However, we need to maintain this part of the business, which remains our main revenue stream. But we will increase revenue in other

businesses with rising potential, especially the services and food industry,” said Suroj.

The two main sectors with potential for Loxley are services and food business. Suroj said that the company’s service business will focus on security for both manpower and intelligent systems. The service business is operated by ASM Security Management Company, which has focused on the aviation sector, included air-site security, passenger security, cargo, airline security and so on.

ASM Security Management has around 6,000 employees, with around 3,000 of them in the aviation business and the remainder in other businesses, including the general security guard business. “We are the leader in aviation security, since we have been in this business since Suvarnabhumi Airport opened 14 years ago. We have penetrated almost all the major airports in Thailand except Don Mueang

Airport, Samui Airport and Chiang Mai Airport,” said Suroj.

As well as offering security for the aviation sector, the company can expand to other services to meet the huge demand in the sector. It is particularly interested in general security guarding services for large corporates such as PTT and Bangchak.

And it is also expanding to provide maid and healthcare services.

“Since it is a service business which relies on people, the usual turnover rate is around 10 per cent. Therefore we need other related businesses, recruitment and training businesses, to make sure that we have enough manpower for the

business,” said Suroj.

Under the service group, aviation is the major revenue contributor at around 70 to 80 per cent. Housemaid and other services, including gardening, cleaning and pet control services, together contribute around 20 to 30 per cent to the service group’s revenue.

Meanwhile, he said, the food business continues to offer potential for Loxley. The Loxley Trading Company leads this business group, with a long history as a large distributor for consumer foods. It is now expanding into imported food from Japan as well as the WAQ Yakiniku Japanese restaurant. “We abolished and merged companies down from 50 to 15 companies in two years, as well as reorganised the business groups,” said Suroj. “We are confident that we are lean enough. And with the new business direction, we will maintain stable revenues of Bt1.5 billion, avoiding the big swings of past years.”

For emerging new startups, he said, Loxley has invested through its K2 Venture Capital.

It also recently set up Travel Ad Network Thailand, which is a travel ad network business. It is Loxley’s latest startup business and includes an overseas partner.

“Loxley is now lean enough to do business during the era of digital disruption,” he proudly summed up.

It aims continue to grow along with the market by focusing on those challenges. According to IDC, the global cloud market’s compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2021 is expected to reach 21.9 per cent.

Chawapol Jariyawiroj, country manager of AWS Thailand, said the company’s role as a platform and enabler will help businesses throughout the entire ecosystem to build their competitive capacity in the era of digital disruption.

Cloud platforms can help democratise digital access and competitive advantage.

The cloud is having an impact on this country, as it is being widely adopted by businesses of all sizes, as well as by digital and startup businesses and the public sector, especially government and education.

Chawapol said that this year the company is focusing on five business segments – large enterprises, emerging enterprises, digital native businesses, integrated solution vendors, and territory businesses.

The large enterprise customers are made up of large traditional businesses  across vertical industries, including banking, insurance, telecom, retail, real estate and construction. These businesses are being disrupted. Their challenges are to create new revenue streams, create end-user experiences and to reduce the cost of business operations.

“This group invests in cloud solutions to increase competitiveness,” said Chawapol. “They need to undergo transformation, so we have a dedicated team to provide consulting, as well as solution architecture customised for each customer.”

The emerging enterprise

customers are also traditional

businesses, but have a medium-sized organisational structure and a

workload that is not as complex.Their

challenge is similar to that of large corporates, but they are more flexible. They are looking to invest in transformation while increasing competitive performance – and cloud is the answer.

Digital native businesses –mainly tech startups – are another focus area for AWS Thailand this year. They are found across industries, including financial technology, online businesses, tech firms, property tech, insurance tech, healthcare and retail.

“For them, technology is the key factor driving the business. Most of their business is based on the cloud platform. They are born in the cloud. Their nature is to move fast, experiment quickly, be highly agile, and quickly create user experience,” said Chawapol.

Integrated solution vendors (ISV) are similar to business-to-business service providers such as payment gateway service providers. It is a new business segment and is a focus for ASW this year.

“Many large successful startups are using ASW’s cloud platform, such as aCommerce, 2C2P, WiseSlight, Wongnai, Sunday Insurance, and even the Stock Exchange of Thailand [SET],” said Chawapol.

Meanwhile, “territory businesses” are small and medium-size traditional businesses, as well as small digital and startup businesses. With this market segment AWS Thailand will work with business partners to provide support for customers, while it takes the lead with the other four market segments.

For the past three years, large corporates – especially banks, telcos, retail, and real estate – have shifted to the cloud platform to meet the innovation challenge.

The key technology solutions include artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, and blockchain. With a jump in corporates seeing the advantages of migrating to the cloud, AWS Thailand is providing professional services including system design, platform and security, architecture, security policy and landing zone.

“We have been here in the Thai market for four years and now the norm is ‘Why not cloud?’ or ‘Cloud first’. The cloud platform has rapidly grown over the past few years and will continue growing quickly for many years in the future,” said Chawapol.

Early adoption stage

AWS has led the global cloud market share, with 51.8 per cent in 2018, growing from 47 per cent in 2017. Still, when cloud penetration is compared to the whole of technology spending, it remains in the early-adoption stage, providing lots of room for global and local growth.

Globally, ASW has 20 regional sites and 61 availability zones. Each regional site has two to three availability zones, while each availability zone has around two to three data centres. Among the 20 regional sites, six are in Asia Pacific – Singapore, Japan, Korea, India, Hong Kong and China.

“We have our own submarine cable linking all 20 regional sites. That allows customers to use their own virtual private network over our platform. This is to help reduce the total cost of ownership when compared to the traditional technology approach. For example, DoHome PLC, the large retail for construction products, reduced costs by 30 per cent after it moved to the cloud,” said Chawapol.

The benefit of going to the cloud go beyond reducing the total cost of ownership, he said. It includes the agility, scalability, security, and speed capability to deliver and to launch new services, as well as data analytic capability. These are inestimable benefits, said Chawapol.

“Now with everyone going to omni-channel, they have both online and office customer/user touch points. Cloud is really to address their online part, to collect and analyse data for their offline part of the business,” said Chawapol.

Thailand is an important market for ASW, he said, and so the company has devoted a lot of resources to increase the office, team and other resources in the Thai market. The new office, at 1,300 square metres, will be opened in April. It will house a training room, workshop lab, as well as host fireside chats and customer experience-sharing across industries.

It will also recruit a lot more talent in security, analytics, artificial intelligent, machine learning and customer support teams.

“This year is the big move for ASW Thailand, since cloud is the new normal while cloud adoption in Thailand is in its early stage the same as in the other countries around the world. There are many jobs to be done,” said Chawapol.