Google Technology Making Business Simpler

By Pedro Sttau, Former CIO, Icar Asia and Executive Director, Dbs Bank (Sgx: Mu7)

Pedro Sttau, Former CIO, Icar Asia and Executive Director, Dbs Bank (Sgx: Mu7)

Coming from a literature background did not stop Pedro Sttau's love for computer science. Though he studied literature in University of Lisbon, his love for coding made him utilize his free time to follow his passion. Throughout his career, Sttau managed to grow in various managerial career positions while working for major companies like Enterweb, Easylogics, Yunit, LateRooms.com, iCarAsia Limited and Supahands. Currently, Pedro Sttau is the Executive Director of DBS Bank, where he is Head of Architecture and is responsible for ensuring that everything is aligned to the bank's vision and to deliver business value with minimal cost, without impacting the scalability of the product that is being delivered.

Kindly shed some light on some of the promising trends or catalysts of Google Technology that has helped businesses evolve over the last decade?
As Google is driving innovation, platforms and technology evolve at mind-blowing speed. Google has woven into our daily life such that it has now become a verb. By harnessing the creativity and capabilities of Google Technology, we realized instantly that we can boost our organizational effectiveness and potentially improve our strategic direction setting. Formerly, we were hosting on the clouds and were not cloud-native. We embarked on working with Google more closely when we switched our applications, services, and infrastructure providers to Google. We were essentially looking into an infrastructure that was utterly disparate from our current infrastructure. We wanted a provider that had a new solution, was less expensive, and also provided migration support. Furthermore, Google architectural team made us feel that our business was in the right hands.

By engaging more with Google Technology, we began to have a different outlook towards our applications and services. We commenced contemplating about the benefits of going cloud-native and reevaluated the way we engineered our products. Google helped us to reanalyze the way our architecture was structured. Since going on Google Cloud Platform and ensuring that our architecture was progressively cloud-native, we started undertaking deployments of containers and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. I believe iCar Asia was probably one of the first companies to use Kubernetes as the orchestration tool and this is how we started evolving and working closely with Google Technology.

What are some of the difficulties that industry leaders face in this particular landscape, and how do Google technologies help them overcome the challenges pertaining to clouds or even orchestration of some of the Google services?
As a CIO, one of the main challenges we come across is to understand the purpose of the changes about to undertake with the emergence of new technologies.

By engaging more with Google technology, we begin to have a different outlook towards our applications and services. We commenced contemplating about the benefits of going cloud-native and reevaluated the way we engineered our products

Every CIO wants to deploy every new technology but we often get engrossed in the new technology that we forget to analyze the problem faced by the company first and as a result, we mostly end up with a solution that's not really what we're after.

We need to start from the other way round, analyze what the problems are first, and then find the right technology to solve it. It's necessary to emphasize the importance of becoming less technology-focused, be more operational and capable of solving problems with or without the latest technology. As a CIO, it's necessary to make sure that the architectural team is not just thinking like technical people but like business people also and business people are also thinking like an enterprise or solution architects.

Could you please enlighten us about your job role at iCar Asia and how has your expertise helped the company overcome some of the industrial obstacles?
As a CIO, I look after the IT operations, IT people and technology. Most of our assets, IP are all basically related to the software that we create that is also helping our businesses and private customers overcome some of the industrial obstacles. I take care of ops, people in tech and also help customers find the right car for themselves. My job role essentially entitles to connect buyers and sellers of cars throughout ASEAN and hence, we build products intentionally to enable this connection. Our products are mainly consumer-based and B2B-based products, with a sole purpose to facilitate the transaction of cars seamlessly.

With quite a lot of innovations and technological advancements seeping in, how do you see iCar Asia evolve with respect to both the technology and automotive industry?
We are have used technologies like TensorFlow to create models to segment our customers and their behaviors to help us find the perfect match between the car they are searching for and vehicles that are currently available in the market. Over the last two or three years, we've also been exploring technologies like Chatbot that acts as a concierge to help customers suggest certain cars based on their needs. These needs could be based on things like where they are in their life, their earnings, size of the family, or whether they need a car for leisure or business purpose. Whilst, on the other side, it helps us in knowing what type of car people would be likely interested in.

In terms of the automotive industry, the adoption of autonomous vehicles has shown a strong surge over the last decade. Majority of today's automotive companies like Tesla, Dyson, and many other companies are actively investing in developing autonomous vehicles. With more self-driving cars on the streets, the potential of human error is removed, thereby reducing the frequency and severity of accidents. Driverless cars could improve our lives – whether it's by being more environmentally friendly, improving our cities, space savers, or being much safer for drivers and pedestrians alike. But of course, this is going to take another 20 to 30 years for the whole industry to completely shift and adopt this technology.

Do you have any suggestions or advice for entrepreneurs looking to embark on a similar professional journey in this Google's Technology landscape?
Often, I find myself trying to reinvent certain types of technologies or solutions that are already existing or not solving the current problem. So my advice to the budding entrepreneur or technologists is not to be enumerated by technological innovations as it might lead you to the path of creating solutions that already exist. It's necessary to look beyond these innovations, find companies like Google who have already invested millions of dollars on such technologies. They provide us with a framework that let us focus on just solving those problems that are worth solving for our customers and not worry about the whole dev ops. Most CIO's dwell on purposeless matters; they are more worried about email or storage, whereas their business is to meet the needs of their customers. I would request them to focus more on their business and provide the best customer experience and not worry about creating technology or solution that already exists.