Moving forward on its digitalization journey, the Gokongwei Group teamed up with Infosys and Microsoft Corp. on using artificial intelligence to scale up the company’s monitoring and operations control for increased productivity.
With the Gokongwei Group’s drive to innovate, the company is a step closer to its goal of becoming the first truly digital conglomerate in the Philippines.
“The Gokongwei Group and their industry-defining transformation have elevated them into an enterprise of tomorrow, which is crucial as the digital and traditional economy continue to be on a growth trajectory,” said Microsoft vice president of sales, marketing, and operations for Asia Pacific Sandy Gupta.
“Together, Gokongwei Group and Microsoft are empowering every person and every organization in the Philippines, through innovation and digital transformation to build an inclusive, economic society. Our customers can trust that we will never compete against them. We’re not a search company; we’re not a retailer. We are an enterprise technology company,” said Gupta.
The Gokongwei Group is one of the largest and more diversified Filipino conglomerates with operations across Southeast Asia. With subsidiaries JG Summit Holdings, Robinsons Retail Holdings, and Summit Media, the organization remains a crucial contributor to the Philippine economy with diversified businesses that include airlines, consumer and consumer-packaged goods, financial services, manufacturing, petrochemicals, real estate, retail, and media.
The group recognized the incredible value and impact cloud computing would have on their businesses—improving agility, increasing the efficiency of business processes, building trust, reliability and empowering them to innovate for the future.
“The Gokongwei Group has been a part of the Philippines’ history since our founding in 1957. We’ve served our community for many years, and we endeavor to continue doing so well into the future,” said JG Summit Holdings Inc. chief information officer Carlo Santos.
The group’s transformation journey started in 2018, with a holistic data center modernization project that saw JG Summit migrating its main datacenter in the Philippines to the cloud. In 2019, it announced a strategic partnership with Infosys and Microsoft as part of their digital transformation journey.
“Our vison and purpose have steadfastly remained—an unrelenting commitment to provide our customers with better choices, creating shared success with our stakeholders. We knew that achieving that requires an entrepreneurial mindset, and our ambition needed to be on a foundation of integrity. Which is why when it came to digitalizing the organization, across all companies, we knew it needed to be Microsoft, the industry’s most trusted and comprehensive cloud offering,” Santos said.
When the pandemic hit, the Gokongwei Group was ahead of the curve. Through easy and secure collaboration powered by Microsoft 365, their hybrid workforce was able to ensure business continuity where needed, stay focused on their customer needs, and provided improved service while staying safe.
According to research by The Economist, 72 percent of business decision makers across private and public sectors reported an acceleration of their industry’s pace of transformation during the pandemic.
Digital transformation, once an imperative to gain a competition edge, became a key to business resilience and transformation. By migrating to Azure, The Gokongwei Group was able to pivot to become a digital company, future-proofing their business groups.
Microsoft Azure is the foundation of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud and intelligent edge strategy, providing startups to enterprises the cloud services, developer tools, scale, and security needed—no matter where they are at in their cloud journey. More than 95 percent of the Fortune 500 choose Azure.
To accomplish their vision, the Gokongwei Group sought technology partners ePLDT, Infosys and Microsoft to help them achieve their greater digital transformation ambition. They completed their migration at the end of 2021.
ePLDT, the ICT arm of PLDT Enterprise provided the colocation services at its VITRO Data Center, which enables the Gokongwei Group to host their critical IT infrastructure in a world-class data center facility.
“We are thrilled to be a strategic partner in the Gokongwei Group’s drive of constantly innovating its operations to answer the growing and changing demands of the market. On behalf of PLDT Enterprise, we thank the Gokongwei Group for trusting us to be part of their end-to-end digital transformation journey through our VITRO Data Center colocation services. We express our utmost commitment to continuously invest in world-class infrastructure and industry-leading expertise to serve their evolving needs,” said PLDT first vice president and Smart Enterprise head Jojo Gendrano.
Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, was crucial in both formulating and executing the Gokongwei Group’s transformation strategy. This involved migrating various data centers across multiple business units into a single unified Microsoft Azure-based platform and upgrading the group’s SAP ERP system to SAP S/4 HANA.
“We are delighted to collaborate with the Gokongwei Group in their digital transformation journey. Our expertise in digital technologies backed by decades of experience in navigating the business landscape will definitely bring in a lot of synergy that will help them realize their vision of long-term digital transformation. We are proud to help the Gokongwei Group enhance their business journey as they seek to positively impact more consumers across the Asia-Pacific region in the future,” said company executive vice president and global head for consumer, retail and logiatics Karmesh Vaswani.
The Gokongwei Group is one of only a few organizations in the market to pivot to a fully-digitalized and advanced technology system, the biggest migration of its kind to the cloud of any Philippine-based company.