Thursday, December 21, 2006 Ng: Cebu’s IT tipping point By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
WE are nearing the end of the year, and I believe that this is the year when Cebu has hit the tipping point for technology.
What I mean is that Cebu has hit the point where it is now considered a serious market and cannot be left out. Consider this: all the major players in information technology (IT) are now here.
Last month, IBM inaugurated its new office at the Asiatown IT Park. On Dec. 26, Microsoft is going to inaugurate its own office at the Skyrise building within Asiatown IT Park, and no less than President Arroyo herself has been invited to cut the ribbon.
Not only these two IT behemoths, but all players are here. HP has always had a service center here, and Lexmark and Epson both have huge presence. Canon has been here for awhile.
Cisco and Imation already have full-time personnel in their respective offices here, and most recently, Oracle.
Jobstreet and JobsDb, two major IT-based recruitment companies, have also been active here. APC also has an active service center here. Most major IT distributors also maintain offices in Cebu.
I believe that Cebu’s importance as the center of IT will only increase as more companies realize the need to tap the resources and markets in southern Philippines.
An interesting development has been the speculation that has been circulating in the Internet about Apple’s planned foray into cell phones. Earlier, Apple cooperated with Motorola to come up with an Apple designed cell phone, but it was only a matter of time that Apple would actively go into the business itself, considering that the biggest competitor of computers and mp3 players is the cell phone itself, as the many types now function as camera and music player.
One of the things that won’t happen, though, is that if Apple does go into cell phone manufacturing, the product won’t be called iPhone. As you may have noticed, the i-prefix has been dominant in most of Apple’s product lines —like the ilife, ipod, istore, and ibook, among others.
For a while, Steve Jobs, when he first assumed the executive position at Apple, was known as the iCEO. But it seems that they don’t have rights to the name of iPhone, which belongs to Cisco.
Cisco got it when it purchased a company called InfoGear Inc.
Earlier, various blogs speculated that Apple tried to negotiate with Cisco to buy the name, but apparently no agreement was reached.
I also met up with some top officers of Cisco, and they confirmed that Cisco is now setting its sights on the consumer market, which could be one of the main reasons they decided to capitalize on the iPhone name.
The iPhone, by the way, is a VOIP phone that will be released under the Linksys brand. It allows users to easily make calls over the Internet.
Many people probably haven’t heard of Cisco as often as the other information and communication companies. Cisco makes routers and switches that routes more than two-thirds of the traffic on the Internet. But for most of the time, it is focused on serving major Internet providers and corporations.
In the past few years, it bought companies like LinkSys and Scientific Atlanta. And with the most recent change of their logo and their slogan, the “Human Network,” it is believed that you will be hearing much more about Cisco products in the near future.
There is also another statistic that is quite interesting, according to US Nielsen Media research. As of the third quarter of this year, there are now more DVD players in US households than VHS recorders.
According to the survey, 81.2 percent of US homes now have a DVD machine compared to 79.2 percent with VCRs.
DVD players were released in 1997, and as of 1999, only about six percent of households have it in contrast to 88 percent that had VCRs. However, it has grown rapidly, and it overtook VCR sales in 2003.
It has become so dominant now that most motion pictures companies have stop releasing their films in VHS format.
Of course, here in the Philippines, we follow a slightly different trend. The Philippines was one of the few places where Betamax format won over the VHS, and therefore when Sony decided to withdraw the Betamax in the early 90s, there was a void which was then temporarily filled by VCD players (VCD players did not catch up in the US market).
So for a while, the most dominant video player for us was the VCD, but I believe in the next years, as DVD prices go down, the VCD players will also disappear.
The Web may not have grown as fast as the dot com players have touted it to be, but it continues to grow fast. As of third quarter of 2003, Nielsen noted that almost three quarters of households had computers, and a big percentage of that went regularly online.
