If the packed ballroom at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore during NetSuite’s recent stopover to officially launch its new SuiteCommerce platform(opens in new tab) is any indication, it is safe to assume that Singapore is indeed a strategic market for cloud adoption. A recentwhite paper by Frost & Sullivan established that Singapore is behind only Australia and New Zealand in the adoption of the cloud, and is ahead of most other countries in the Asia Pacific region.
Furthermore, ecommerce(opens in new tab) has been an increasingly important factor in Singapore’s economic activity. The Frost & Sullivan white paper suggests that the use of Internet to sell is already more advanced in Singapore than in Australia. Accounting for an estimated 28% of all customer interactions in Singapore, the Internet has overtaken other channels such as the telephone and mail. And although it trails traditional brick-and-mortar stores and field sales forces, the Internet is the fastest growing channel for customer and business interactions.
But given the continuously changing technology landscape, ecommerce adoption is bound to run into some complexities. Case in point—the growing range of digital channels customers use to access the Internet and to interact with suppliers (smart TV, smartphones, tablets, machine-to-machine, etc.) requires businesses to deliver an optimized customer experience regardless of channel, maintain security across all channels, create seamless and real-time integration of all customer touchpoints and link channels to internal systems such as ERP and CRM.
Running ecommerce in such a multichannel world creates opportunities for businesses to reach a wider market, but also introduces significant challenges that need to be faced head-on. And this is where Singaporean organizations’ fondness of cloud computing plays a big role. According to Frost & Sullivan, using the cloud to host ecommerce systems offers key solutions to such challenges.
The cloud provides the agility organizations need to power whatever channels their businesses require, as well as access to these channels wherever business needs to happen. The cloud also provides high levels of security and reliability, while reducing capital and operational expenses.
With NetSuite’s successful launch of SuiteCommerce in Singapore, it surely is safe to say that Singaporean companies are seeing the importance of the cloud in effectively running their ecommerce efforts, and that NetSuite has the ideal platform for such an important task.
Read more about NetSuite SuiteCommerce(opens in new tab) and download the Frost & Sullivan white paper (opens in new tab)to find out more about how the cloud answers the challenges of running ecommerce in a multichannel world.
-Andy Lloyd - GM of Commerce Products