"Digital Aspiration" at CMC: How to turn Vietnam into the Digital Hub of the region?

Facing many difficulties during the Covid-19 period in Ho Chi Minh City. Last year, in Ho Chi Minh City, CMC successfully opened CMC Data Center Tan Thuan. First of all, how are you feeling right now?

Really happy. I feel fortunate and proud that we have accomplished our goal with so many unyielding efforts, especially after the difficult period of the epidemic and in the most difficult place of Vietnam during the epidemic – Ho Chi Minh City.

Fortunately, despite the inevitable difficulties of the pandemic in 2021, CMC still has great development, revenue increased by 22% to VND 6,900 billion and EBITDA profit increased by more than 33%, reaching more than VND 700 billion. Forecasting this fiscal year 2022, CMC can continue to have a high growth rate of over 25% to reach the revenue target of USD 1 billion by 2025.

I am also very grateful to the Party Committee and the government of Ho Chi Minh City for creating conditions and helping us so that even during the epidemic, CMC could still carry out the construction and installation work on schedule so that we have this opening ceremony today.

Data Center CMC Data Center Tan Thuan is our key project in the 2020-2025 operation strategy. The spirit of the project is to bring Vietnamese data to stores in Vietnam.

The completion and operation of this center will, first of all, help us improve our capacity to provide digital infrastructure and digital transformation services for the Government, state agencies and businesses. At the same time, it will help synchronize and complete the national digital infrastructure, aiming for Vietnam to become a regional and international data storage and processing center.

Why is it important to bring Vietnamese data to stor in Vietnam, sir?

Currently, Vietnamese people are using a lot of foreign digital platforms such as Microsoft, Google... When using those platforms, we are providing our own data to partners outside of Vietnam. That doesn't help the country's data enrichment. Our desire when building a data center is how to pull that data back to Vietnam.

Data is also a form of national resource, people often liken it to oil. With oil, we have to suck oil, bring it back, accumulate, and process it into "gasoline" and the word "gasoline" is higher value and other derivative products for us to supply back to society. Data Center will also be almost like a "processing factory" for data, turning it into useful products, serving the market.

How does the birth of CMC Data Center Tan Thuan, combined with two data centers already in the operation of CMC, directly affect the strategic vision and ambition of the Group?

The Center's activities have a close relationship with CMC's 4 business blocks, making an important contribution to our revenue target of USD 1 billion by 2025.

With Technology & Solutions, CMC aims to become the leading digital transformation service provider in Vietnam. With Digital Infrastructure, we aim to become the leading B2B convergence service provider in Vietnam. In terms of international business, the group hopes to become the leading offshore IT service provider in Asia and even beyond. As for the education and research sector, we aim to turn CMC University into a smart, innovative, and research-oriented university with a medium-sized scale of 20-30 thousand students.

What benefits does this center bring to CMC itself and its stakeholders?

If visualized in another way, in the standard Digital Infrastructure Block ecosystem, considering the smooth telecommunications infrastructure network as the lifeblood, the data center is the heart that carries the life force throughout the body. CMC Data Center Tan Thuan directly enhances not only the quantity and quality of "data highways", but also with certified international standards, it also helps to increase security and ensure the safety of receiving, transferring, connecting, storing and processing data with huge traffic.

Accordingly, our customers, partners, and investors will all benefit directly from the outstanding development of the group's and member companies' ability to provide digital infrastructure and digital transformation services. Here, we will launch a more complete C.OPE2N 2.0 ecosystem, with the goal of providing more comprehensive digital transformation solutions and services for domestic and foreign organizations and businesses.
 

Talking more about C.OPE2N, this is an open ecosystem for CMC's enterprise organization, launched in 2019. This is an open architecture system that integrates all the technological strengths of CMC such as Multi-Cloud platform, data platform, AI and application platform.

With C.OPE2N, businesses can choose the best infrastructure, deployment, application and integration services from providers, CMC will help manage, optimize and expand for business operations.

The foundation of digital experience and automation: "1 click", "5 minutes for digital transformation", "SLA"… are the criteria for providing services on C.OPE2N. All customer experiences are analyzed, optimally designed to ensure quality and meet the most demanding customer satisfaction! Our goal is to make C.OPE2N the leading digital transformation platform serving millions of small and medium enterprises in Vietnam within the next 5 years.

In your opening speech, you mentioned making Vietnam a Regional Data Center - Digital Hub of Asia Pacific. What does this goal mean?
 

Digital Hub - Digital hub, is the goal set out in the Draft Information and Communication infrastructure planning (TT&TT) period 2021 - 2030, with a vision to 2050 in the field of data centers built by the Ministry of Information and Communications.

The draft clearly states: will form and develop a technology ecosystem, turning Vietnam into a digital center, a place to transfer, connect, store and process data of the region and the world with the development requirement by 2025 to form at least one data center serving the central goal of the region and the world; By 2030, complete and develop the technology ecosystem of Digital Hub.

After assessing factors such as favorable geographical location, open and consistent policies, diverse connection infrastructure, large-scale neutral Data Center, attracting the participation and presence of leading information technology firms... international experts as well as CMC believe that Vietnam fully has all the conditions to become the next digital center of the region.

To become a Digital Hub, besides technical factors like Data Center, what other factors do we need?

To become a global data service provider, there are two important conditions: one is technical infrastructure and the other is human resources. Vietnam is very fortunate to be one of the countries in Southeast Asia that is a "power" in terms of population, only inferior to Indonesia, secondly, we have a young population, love math and that is the basis for us to develop a very good and competitive digital human resource.

In recent times, especially during the period of influence of the Covid-19 epidemic, Vietnam has increasingly emerged as a center for providing digital human resources for the region and the world. Typically, many multinational companies have brought such service centers to Vietnam such as Samsung R&D which has opened a very large center in Hanoi.

In the city. In Ho Chi Minh City, we are also providing high quality human resource services for R&D centers of multinational corporations. It can be said that, step by step, Vietnam is becoming the data service center of the region.

CMC's investment orientation in education is also part of that goal. Building competitiveness from digital citizens, from people who can provide digital services is extremely important. If we consider it a national competitive strength, then that strategy must be taken care of and built up.

Accordingly, on July 26, 2022 CMC University was born, with the philosophy of Liberalization, creativity and difference, with the goal of building high-quality human resources, leading in some fields of science and technology in the world by 2043 when CMC celebrates its 50th anniversary.

That is also one of the very important strategies to help us achieve our goal of 1 billion USD in revenue in 2022. Because we then needed from 10 to 15,000 IT engineers and the IT market itself also needed millions of new programmers. We think it's time to attach our responsibility and mission in human resource training for the country.

What do you think about the role of private enterprises like CMC in such an important aspect as creating digital infrastructure for the development of the country?

Now, the private economy has become an important force of the economy and its contributions can be seen in almost all different sectors. People may hear a lot about real estate and think that only real estate has a private role, but I think that in industry, in technology, especially if it comes to FDI, the non-state force contributing to our economy can be said to be very very large and in all fields.

With CMC being no exception, we want to be a creator in the field of digital infrastructure. The creator must first be the pioneer to come up with an idea, secondly, to be the pioneer to carry out that mission.

We are proud to be a pioneer in digital transformation, building a digital platform, building security solutions for not only Vietnam but also for global customers in the top 500 in the world with typical customer being SAMSUNG. Even during the epidemic, CMC still provided thousands of engineers for SAMSUNG's R&D center, contributing to turning Vietnam into a global SAMSUNG digital service center.

As for CMC Data Center Tan Thuan, the Data Center is not new in Vietnam, but if it is to turn Vietnam into a Hub, serving the region, the standards must be pushed to a much higher level. In order to open CMC Data Center Tan Thuan, with a scale of 1200 racks, meeting Uptime Tier III, TVRA, PCI DSS standards, we had to pass 115 tests with the strictest regulations, the highest technical standards of the international assessment organization Uptime Institute.

We confidently affirm that this is the leading modern and secure data center not only in Vietnam but also in Southeast Asia, marking a new development step to bring Vietnam closer to our goal of becoming the Digital Hub Regional Data Center of Asia Pacific that we have chosen.

I hope this pioneering can become an inspiration for other data service providers to see Vietnam as a qualified place to develop and invest.

On the other hand, regarding the creation of digital infrastructure, we also aim to be the leader in the field of cloud computing. The CMC Cloud Make in Vietnam platform, researched and developed by our own team of 300 experts and engineers, has provided services for nearly 10 years, full of features like the most advanced nationwide Cloud systems.

The CMC Cloud platform currently accounts for about 25% of the Cloud market share created by domestic service providers, meeting PCI DSS standards for financial institutions, banks, and especially the entire PC-Covid platform being run on the CMC Cloud platform, which has served millions of visitors and processed data during the peak of the epidemic in Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh City in particular and the whole country in general.

In 2022, CMC Cloud has invested research and development resources to build a 2nd generation CMC Cloud cloud computing ecosystem (CMC Cloud 2.0) with many powerful new features such as K8S, DBaaS, Autoscaling, Container Registry, Data & A.I integration, security features of brands such as Checkpoint, PaloAlto, Fortinet...

In a previous interview, he shared that when he had the opportunity to create Made in Vietnam computers, he did not have the advantage of the support policy at that time. So at the present time, how have the initiatives and recommendations of a private enterprise like CMC been heard and recognized?

It's actually very different. Thirty years ago, Vietnam just entered the socialist-oriented market economy, so at that time, the private economy was still very new. The strategic initiatives of that period were not easy to implement, not only in terms of institutions but also socially and economically, because they all required investment elements.

But now, for example, when we join the National Committee on Digital Transformation, I personally and other members often come up with initiatives, which have been listened to, considered by the Government, and even later became national programs.

From the practical requirements of life, the people and the suggestions of experts... The government listens, makes necessary changes and directs in a very timely manner to adapt to the development of society and especially the digital society.

In your opening speech, he mentioned the concept of Digital Aspiration. What is Digital Aspiration and how is Digital Aspiration expressed at CMC?

Digital aspiration is part of our aspiration to build a strong and prosperous Vietnam by 2045, when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of our nation's founding.

With CMC, the specific goal of Digital Aspiration is to turn Vietnam into the Digital Hub digital service center of the Asia-Pacific region. That is the absolute trust and expectation at the highest level in Vietnamese people, in Vietnamese wisdom, in Vietnamese technology. That digital aspiration is spread in all CMC activities and instilled by more than 5,000 CMC people.

As early as 2017, CMC launched a vision aspire to conquer the digital world - Aspire to spire the Digital World when positioning a new strategy. Three years ago in 2019, CMC completed the Proposal on an aspiration to build Vietnam into a world digital hub - Digital Hub.

Up to now, CMC has focused on 3 strategic breakthroughs: building digital transformation, world-class digital platform - World Class; creating a large digital service market not only in Vietnam but also globally; creating a space environment to be the convergence of the quintessence of global digital human resources in Vietnam to build the country. This is completely consistent with the strategic goals set out by the Ministry of Information and Communications, making Vietnam a strong country in digital technology.

We believe that if each of us with nearly 100 million Vietnamese people have great aspirations to contribute to the country's construction, such as CMC's Digital Aspiration, the goal of turning Vietnam into a powerful and prosperous country will not be far away, possibly before 2045.

Thanks for your sharing!

Post: Hoang An

Design: Huong Xuan

According to CAFEF