Small and medium business enterprises in the Philippines are likely punished by rising inflation averaging at least 5.4 percent this year, making it imperative for SMBs of close to a million to embrace technology and cut operating costs by 10 percent or larger.
This was made clear by Gunish Chawla, head of SMB ASEAN at Amazon Web Services (AWS), who said the hotter-than-expected inflation readings have already caused the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to recalibrate its forecast inflation this year to 6.1 percent instead of only 4.5 percent in a previous forecast.
According to Chawla, the economic headwinds that push inflation still higher make it even more imperative for cost-conscious SMBs to experiment with cloud computing which is way cheaper than adopting an in-house infrastructure that costs thousands of dollars and costly to maintain as well.
He said operating costs are a challenge for often resource lacked SMBs who number 950,000 in the Philippines and 60 million across ASEAN, the same SMBs that the global market advisory and intelligence provider International Data Corp. (IDC) found that 55 percent of its members are optimistic of business recovery this year.
“In dealing with customers in the Philippines, they know and accept the economic challenges but are also very much looking forward to more business” transactions ahead, Chawla said.
Amazon Web Services cater to both commercial and public sector clients in the Philippines and compete with cloud rivals in the $85 billion enterprise seen growing 20 percent over the next five years.
He said the 300-unit Philippine franchise of Kentucky Fried Chicken, for instance, uses AWS cloud service and quickly reported a boost in efficiency as did the Ramcar Group and Shaley’s Pizza.
Chawla said AWS works with startups, large enterprise and SMBs of all stripes in the Philippines for their data warehousing requirements. Promptly, their AWS subscription improved client access to their respective websites by 50 percent, he said.
Broadcast companies and several local banks are AWS subscribers as well and all benefit from a service that has not failed anyone since the enterprise began in 2010, according to Chawla.
AWS operates in six countries across the ASEAN with offices in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos, he said.
The service allows so-called credit subscriptions for SMBs who are charged only for the services they take rather than a fixed tariff the small enterprises particularly shun because the cost is simply prohibitive.
Chawla said there had been a shift in the way SMBs look at cloud computing the past three years when more of their number partake of cloud services from AWS and its rivals as cloud computing makes business transactions not only faster and more accessible but cheaper as well.
