SmartX Ranked 1st in China HCI SW Financial Vertical Market for 2 Consecutive Years

BEIJING, July 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — IDC recently published “China SDS and HCI Market Overview, 2021Q4,” in which SmartX shows rapid growth in HCI market share. Particularly, SmartX is recognized as one of the key vendors with the fastest growth in China HCI software market due to its achievement in the financial services industry (FSI). In fact, this is the 2nd year in a row that SmartX ranked 1st in China HCI software financial vertical market.

The report shows that SmartX is also the No.1 pure-play vendor in China HCI market. In 2021, SmartX claimed 2.6% of the China HCI market (with an 84.7% YoY growth), and 4.1% of the China HCI software market (with a 69.9% YoY growth), following large DC vendors and cloud providers.

IDC attributed SmartX’s outstanding growth to its achievement in product performance & stability and financial vertical market:

“Software-driven HCI products have great potential in the Chinese market. Industries that seek flexibility, for example, telecommunications and financial services industries, have already increased the procurement of HCI software. Vendors such as SmartX took this opportunity and kept up the product stability and performance, which helped the company earn a good reputation among financial institutions and achieve an increase in the market share.”

In 2021, SmartX made substantial market progress, especially in the FSI industry, as SmartX claimed 25% of the China HCI software financial vertical market share. SmartX HCI’s stability and flexibility have been proven by customers, as they:

• Deployed SmartX HCI on large scale in production; one customer even deployed over 300 nodes in total, which has stably supported the systems for over 3 years.
• Deployed SmartX HCI on different servers to form heterogeneous clusters.
• Deployed SmartX HCI with various hypervisors, including VMware ESXi, SmartX’s native hypervisor ELF (choice of over 40% of customers), and Citrix XenServer.

Beyond the FSI industry, SmartX is also actively working with industry leaders in healthcare, manufacturing, retail and real estate, etc., with a footprint across countries and regions including APAC, the Middle East, and Europe.

With its ability to develop solutions that respond to clients’ needs, True IDC cements its position as a leader in Thailand’s data center service segment.

SAN ANTONIO, July 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Frost & Sullivan recently evaluated the Thailand data center services industry and, based on its findings, recognizes True Internet Data Center Co. Ltd (True IDC) with the 2022 Thailand Data Center Services Company of the Year Award. The company focuses on sustainability in data center design and operations through improved energy efficiency, to differentiate in the highly competitive market. The leading data center and cloud services provider in Thailand offers end-to-end digital infrastructure. True IDC stands out in the industry based on its formidable channel partnership program, industry-leading certifications, software-defined network that promotes an exceptional service-level agreement standard (99.999%), and customer portal that extends top-tier cloud billing and advisory services. As part of its partnership program, True IDC works with best-in-class partners, including Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Avaya, Cisco, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Tencent and VMware.

True IDC achieved strategic customer wins based on its continued expansion to address demand, in addition to its value proposition for integrated offerings and focus on operational excellence and innovation. The company’s impressive growth momentum and trajectory testify to its leadership, providing clients with greater value and enabling the company to capture market share.

True IDC’s infrastructure expansion investment enabled it to achieve above-industry revenue growth in 2021, and its four data centers are strategically located in North Muangthong, midtown Pattanakan, midtown Ratchada, and East Bangna, strengthening its domestic reach. The company’s fifth facility in Yangon, Myanmar, provides services beyond the borders of Thailand. The company leverages a one-stop-shop approach to continue expanding and enhancing its data center and cloud services offering. Bangna is an alternative site to Bangkok because of its economic cost of land, infrastructure, and network connectivity that supports high-scale data operations. As a result, True IDC is developing an East Bangna data center hub of four buildings as a data center campus. The first phase on eight acres of land started in 2018, while the second uptime-certified building is set to start working in 2022.

According to Nishchal Khorana, Vice President and Global Program Leader, ICT at Frost & Sullivan, “True IDC has plans to expand its Myanmar data center in Yangon and targets Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia for future expansion. It has already contracted teams to acquire land for its development plans in Vietnam and Cambodia.”

Furthermore, True IDC offers customer value as a strategic imperative to complement its extensive expertise and best-in-class capabilities. The company’s premium colocation offerings meet the growing business demand of medium-to-large enterprises and government agencies. True IDC brings the control, operation, and surveillance features of its five data centers under a single roof through its Regional Command Center. The software-defined fabric network eliminates boundaries between data centers to enable seamless resource sharing and to reduce latency, leading to guaranteed service continuity and optimal availability. The company works closely with customers to assess their needs and customize their solutions for seamless execution. True IDC’s purpose-built service allows customers to devise their equipment arrangement and energy consumption, while internationally recognized certifications enable customers to run their businesses with ease. As a result, True IDC continues to establish ongoing trust with customers for long-lasting relationships that extend throughout service lifecycles. The company enhances customer experience value through the following:

• Green, sustainable data centers and an eco-friendly operation system
• Transparent and reliable relationships with global customers (hyperscalers and enterprises) to address risks and safeguard customer data
• Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools within the system to add predictive capabilities; improve the efficiency in power utilization; and foster proactive, preventive maintenance
• A portal that enables customers to place and track requests for changes or extra services for a seamless experience
• Technology backbone at its interactive data and cloud data centers

“True IDC excels with its strong leadership focus that incorporates customer-centric strategies and exemplifies best practices implementation. The company remains a trusted partner, earning a reputation for offering the overall best in the data center services industry,” said Khorana.

The company achieved strategic customer wins based on its continued expansion to address demand, in addition to its value proposition for integrated offerings and focus on operational excellence and innovation. True IDC’s impressive growth momentum and trajectory testify to its leadership, providing clients with greater value and enabling the company to capture market share. With its strong overall performance, True IDC earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2022 Thailand Company of the Year Award in the data center services industry.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents a Company of the Year award to the organization that demonstrates excellence in terms of growth strategy and implementation in its field. The award recognizes a high degree of innovation with products and technologies and the resulting leadership in terms of customer value and market penetration.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in various regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analyses, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Frost & Sullivan

For six decades, Frost & Sullivan has been world-renowned for its role in helping investors, corporate leaders, and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies, Mega Trends, new business models, and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth opportunities to drive future success. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Kala Mani. S.
P: +603.2023.2037
E: kala.manis@frost.com

About True IDC

True IDC is the leading carrier neutral data center and cloud service provider in Bangkok, Thailand and throughout major territories in ASEAN. It offers superior colocation services, connectivity services, cloud services and professional services with the most numbers of internationally-recognized certifications and consecutive global awards. True IDC partners with best-in-class technology providers including Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Avaya, Cisco, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Tencent and VMware to deliver the end-to-end digital infrastructure experience to its customers in all business verticals. Contact us at: www.trueidc.com

Contact:

Waraporn Nintiem
M: +66 80 441 4211
E: Waraporn.nin@ascendcorp.com

SHANGHAI, July 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Choicefom, China’s leading CEM management platform provider introduced a brand-new CEM concept to its Total Experience Management platform TX that helps to improve customer experience and clients’ business performance. According to forecasts from IDC, QY Research and Touch PointChina’s customer experience management (CEM) market is on track to grow to US$1.8 billion in 2022, accounting for 15 per cent of the global market. China is now stepping into a fast track of enterprise growth with the focus on enhancing the customer experience.

With the new concept, Choiceform helps to create business growth for its clients through its absolute advantages in three steps.

1.Launching its strategic concept of the Total Experience Management  

In China, many industries are about to enter the stage of slow growth and saturation. For companies, the demand for consumer insights and for experience data is growing rapidly, opening the way to significant development potential for CEM. It may soon become something no company can do without. Consequently, it becomes very important to accurately define CEM. The TX Total Experience concept proposed by Choiceform is a customer-oriented strategic management system that includes brand experience (BX), product experience (PX) and service experience (SX), supplemented by employee experience (EX). The perfect combination of the four metrics demonstrates a complete holistic consumer insights which drives enhanced experience management. Not to be overlooked is that employees will also directly affect how a customer feels about the company and the brand. CX and EX will form a positive cycle of complementary and sustainable development. Choiceform TX was born from the concept that CEM must be comprehensive.

2. Improving customer satisfaction with scalable one-to-one interactions across the customer’s whole life cycle

The customer journey is an important vehicle to creating the best customer experience. Choiceform emphasizes the use of Moment of Truth to define the experience strategies, and to merge the scattered operational data with quality experience data scientifically. Across the full life cycle, in addition to solving the problem of  data silos and achieving data convergence, it is more important to uncover the painpoints and unmet needs so as to transform and reshape the experience. When optimizing the interactions with customers, Choiceform TX will automatically initiate sustainable and scalable one-to-one interaction campaigns. The automatic advance warning + multi point trigger mechanism creates a one-stop professional and standardized closed-loop management system, to ensure a sustained interaction across the whole life cycle in real time. Based on the development plan for modular applications, Choiceform will expand from a SaaS platform provider to PaaS platform provider starting this year, making it easier for companies to connect with different SaaS applications.

3. TX is not just a tool, but the brain of enterprises developing the date-driven scientific strategic growth decision

Discovery and predictions are the core of insights, while effective decisions based on the conclusions is the ultimate goal. In the future, companies that can minimize the process from data collection to decision making will be better positioned to seize market opportunities. The Choiceform TX platform truly makes data work, discovers and identifies the most valuable information for companies, and empowers them to find the best marketing paths through intelligent and digital technological innovation, transforming every decision into one that is science-based and informed. The value of Choiceform does not only lie in helping companies collect data, but about helping them improve customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI conversion rates. This is the unmistakable difference between CEM and other big data solutions. CEM is no longer a tool to execute processes, but a key factor in driving strategic business decisions.

Data and technologies are the basic elements, but data security in its most comprehensive form is the fundamental protection.

Choiceform’s “data security control center” provides security protection for different data levels and covers the whole data life cycle from generation to deletion. Firstly, infrastructures with comprehensive defense capabilities are built to cover the security baseline in the machine room as well as across the network, system and application data, so as to improve the capacity to deal with advanced security threats. Secondly, a resource management infrastructure is built to prevent unauthorized data access and maintain data confidentiality, integrity and availability through data encryption, key management and data shielding, among other techniques. Thirdly, normalized security operation infrastructures are built for compulsory implementation of secure development lifecycles (SDLs), effectively removing security vulnerabilities, as well as for dealing with every kind of security issues in a comprehensive, networked, systematic way through continuous implementation of vulnerability scans, penetration tests, code audits, security scheme design and implementation, security training and establishment of emergency response teams. Choiceform is committed to implementing data security standards in compliance with the strictest regulatory guidance.

Integrating its advanced abilities in providing customer insights with technologies to empower industry development

Choiceform’s business has from day one been CEM, with its prowess in technology integration and in providing customer insights setting it apart from the competition. Founded in 2015, Choiceform currently has teams in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan, serving customers in the automobile, real estate and property, finance, fast moving consumer goods (FCMG), computers, communications, consumer electronics and gaming sectors, among others. Core R&D teams account for 65% of the firm’s headcount. Choiceform has also assembled an insight team led by senior industry experts, all with more than 20 years’ experience, to drive the global data insights practice.

Choiceform Founder and Chief Executive Officer Wester Xi said, “This year is the seventh year since our inception. Choiceform has it in its roadmap to build a world-class product with Chinese characteristics and to continue driving the development and growth of the Chinese CEM market.”

About Choiceform

Choiceform is China’s leading Total Experience Management platform. It is the new growth engine for customer-centric enterprises. The company is dedicated to integrating multi-source data, discovering and predicting the real needs and preferences of every customer through cloud technologies, while delivering solutions that drive science-based decision-making across organizations.

For more information, please contact:

liz.zhao@choiceform.com 

BEIJING, June 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — On Jun. 15, 2022, iQIYI Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ), an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China, released a virtual reality (VR) painting video in honor of World Ocean Day, further cementing its commitment to building a premium VR ecosystem. iQIYI strongly believes in the potential of VR and augmented reality (AR) technologies and has, over the years, made substantial investments in building a VR ecosystem. Showcasing virtual painting, the latest VR video demonstrated that by making cutting-edge VR technologies more accessible to the general public, iQIYI’s helps create new career options for young artists. 

VR Painting Spawns A “New Profession” in the Metaverse

VR painting is one of the latest ways users create fully immerse experiences using the VR hardware and software iQIYI makes assessable. Many art hobbyists who have picked up their “brushes” in the VR world are excited by the challenge of painting virtually. Artists remarked that in comparison to traditional, two-dimensional painting, VR painting requires even stronger spatial thinking as the “canvas” is now three-dimensional. However, the process creates artworks that immersive and realistic.

Featuring artists virtually rebuilding the once-damaged ocean ecosystem, the video released on the World Ocean Day exemplifies a compelling story told through VR painting. The video inspires viewers to join force in marine protection as it shows the rebirth of coral reefs and seaweeds in an absorbing fashion.

Painting using VR also offers a new level of creative freedom for long-time artists. Newer artists revel in the challenge of painting virtually, noting that the interactive nature of VR painting makes it an exciting creative and social experience. Early this year, QIYU VR launched a VR painting game “Elephant World”, which inspired many users to share their creations in the QIYU VR community. In March 2022, iQIYI Smart also hosted a Metaverse Artist Competition for children, and the event was well received among young artists.

For many, the potential unlocked by VR painting may even lead to new future career directions. While most VR artists now paint for fun, VR painting can potentially be adopted to do clothing and architectural design. For young people, VR painting stands as a promising career possibility. 

Growing a Robust VR Ecosystem with Hardware and Content

iQIYI entered the VR market in 2016, with its investment over the years spanning content production, platform building, and hardware development. In 2017, iQIYI launched iQIYI QIYU (Adventure) VR, the first all-in-one VR product on the market in China equipped with a 4K screen. In 2021, the company introduced two flagship VR products in the span of three months. With 30 built-in free games, QIYU 3 entered the market in September and made an instant splash with its many revolutionary features, including a specially designed dual-screen solution and the iQUT future cinema. In December 2021, the company launched QIYU Dream, which, despite its cutting-edge features, was at a more affordable price point compared to market alternatives. The first batch of QIYU Dream sold out two days after the device’s official release on e-commerce channels.

Among the first long-form video companies in China to invest in the VR software and hardware ecology, iQIYI is now an established VR manufacturer in China. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), a premier global provider of market intelligence, in Q4 2021, QIYU’s omnichannel sales in China increased by 475.9% year-on-year, consolidating a 22.5% overall market share. In 2021, iQIYI QIYU accounted for 27.4% of the overall VR products sold via digital channels in China. 

A Future of Possibilities

Statista, an online statistics database, estimated that the size of the global VR / AR market may exceed $12.1 billion in 2024, with the compound growth rate from 2021 to 2024 potentially going beyond 36%. Looking ahead, iQIYI is committed to further cementing its leadership position in the market through making VR hardware even more accessible, while growing an innovative VR content ecology featuring arts, dramas, films, variety shows, and games.