The conference was hosted by Seoul Broadcasting System of Korea, or SBS, which is the organizer of Seoul Digital Forum 2012, an annual brainstorming gathering of global IT visionaries.
The followings are excerpts from his Q & A session.
Mike Harris) It’s a pleasure to be here today. I hope you have enjoyed today so far. I have realized that this is a great forum to see new technologies.
One point that I wanted to emphasize is that the personal computer won’t go away it simply stops being the center of your digital workforce.
One of the important aspects that we find about personal aspect is the distribution it brings. If you saw Mr. Ballmer’s presentation, earlier he elaborated on Windows 8. However, he barely mentioned Google and androids and that’s because Samsung and Androids are competitors on what Microsoft is trying to do.
That is where the battle is raging. It’s between platform providers, but imagine how destructive it is to Apple, Google, and Amazon.
We have 800 expert analysts, some of who are based here in Seoul. Even though my talk was based on the consumer market, it also has a lot to do with the business market.
When I see our incredible opportunities here in Korea, it actually started in Korea before being adopted globally, so I see the people of Korea leading in the IT industry and it extending around the world.
One other point is if you think of this trend of personalization of resources that are behind the device combined with personal innovation, and imagine the challenges businesses have to face with privacy. So, what we at Gartner do is find out how you deal with this change and are constantly doing research in this area.
Question) What are the implications for the personal cloud in the Asia Pacific region?
Mike Harris) That’s a good question because the usage of cloud is higher in the Asia Pacific region, compared to any other region. So South Korea has some fastest high speed internet. This is an anomaly of Asia overall. Thus we will see constant growth in this region.
Question) We are seeing a great change in telecommunication environment and cloud technology. And I believe Gartner can also affect media, so what are your plans for the future?
Mike Harris) I had a conversation with chief information officer in Spain. He had worked as a behind the scenes director and was incredibly frustrated because his CEO said to reduce costs driven by cloud and infrastructure.
We worked with this CIO to re-imagine his role for revenue production. Broadcast and media has a similar relationship like factories have with products. Produce it once and you broadcast to as many as you can. To answer your question is how can you personalize the content and if not the content how you engage with the content in multiple devices and people. This drives advertisement which is still the driving force of media.
Question) What you didn’t point out in your speech on the private level is people think my data is still the safest place to save all things. At some point it will be a nightmare when all my personal data is somewhere it can be hacked. When it comes to business it is even more complicated. I want to know …
Mike Harris) You used an excellent word 'trust'. Embodied in it is privacy and protection and the implication we are often asked is that there are thousands of medias that we can buy products from then what is our brand value. Intuitively we see our brand value going up.
There certainly will be breaches of trust, but a successful business will try their best to protect that trust and earn it from the consumers and create an ecosystem, so that it is constant. If I may I’ll provide one point in the business environment.
We have a thousand CIOs as partners and we asked them at what point of your transactions will happen in the public cloud. Over half said that they would like to do over half of their transactions over cloud technology within the next year or two. It is a much more rapid adoption than we had imagined, which means they are trusting their providers and using this technology.
Question) Who do you think is going to lead the personal cloud era and what will be Google’s impact. However many see OS being limited.
Mark Harris)To understand who wins in the personal cloud era is to see revenue sources. Apple Inc. gets only 5% of its revenue from iTunes. Apple makes all of its money by selling devices. Microsoft also does this, but they are embedding their OS.
Google makes it from selling ads based on your usage. Of those three, the most beneficial one would be Google, because they want it to expand to multiple platforms, but there is enormous room for Naver, Daum, etc. to provide these services and monetize through this.
Regarding the question about if you think about evolution of technology it starts with a standard. Hardware value is limited while software dominates. In this space it would be up Samsung and LG to partner with additional software companies that would work well on their platforms. We would expect that to take place in the Korea.
Question) When it comes to the commercialization of cloud. They can save money on infrastructure, but we are going to see job opportunities reduce and today’s theme is coexistence. How is cloud technology going to affect the work force?
Mike Harris) That is an excellent question. Cloud reduces cost and that is the first interest from customers. The reality is that it can save a little, but it really lowers risk in where they can try new business opportunities without having to spend large amounts of money.
Cloud is a small enabling platform that helps jobs evolve. In jobs that don’t By reducing costs and risk with deploying a new data center, it frees up your workers to do more innovative works and can add value to that workers’ , thus we see it as a very optimistic thing in the business aspect.