The CDOTrends Reader’s Choice Awards

Fred Giron

In his role as research director, Fred Giron leads Forrester's China and Southeast Asia research teams. Their research on digital business examines customers' digital behaviors in Asia and the fundamental business changes needed in the age of the customer to win, serve, and retain these empowered customers. His research team advises CMOs, heads of digital, and CIOs and their teams on best practices for digital transformation, customer experience, and business innovation. Fred's personal areas of expertise and thought leadership span the domains of financial services (retail banking, insurance); digital operating models; as well as business technologies, such as cloud, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. He is also a domain expert in tech services and outsourcing trends as well as the underlying market dynamics.

Previous Work Experience:

Frederic came to Forrester through its acquisition of Springboard Research, where he managed Springboard's Indian research operations. Prior to Springboard, he was a research director at Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), managing its research activities in southern Europe and its coverage of the IT software and services markets. Frederic also launched PAC's activities in the US, where he covered the software and IT services markets. Prior to PAC, Frederic worked as an SAP consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Education

Frederic has a master's degree in electronics and project management from ENSEEIHT Toulouse, France.

Winston Thomas

Winston brings over 20 years of journalistic experience to CDOTrends.com. As the previous editor at Computerworld Hong Kong, CIO Asia and PCWeek Asia, he followed, edited and wrote how the Internet and the rise of the digital economy impacted businesses across various industries. Most recently, Winston served as N. Asia editor of CMOInnovation. As the Editor-in-Chief of CDOTrends.com, he is bringing together intriguing articles, insights from leading thinkers, in-depth lessons from practitioners, and various thought leadership materials to develop a new resource for CDOs and other digital practitioners. Fascinated by new technology trends, he is constantly looking at how digital is reshaping our future lives.

Besides his communication skills, he is well-versed in building conference and marketing programmes externally and internally. Recently, he produced Total Security Conference 2016, Big Data and Business Analytics Forum 2016 and Future Workplace Forum 2016. Previously, he also launched CIO Asia Awards and helped to create the Computerworld Hong Kong Readers’ Choice Awards (today Computerworld Hong Kong Awards under Questex Asia).

As a copywriter, Winston has contributed to South China Morning Post (for finance and IT sections), Asia Week and IT Malaysia. He has also contributed technology-based articles for inflight magazines, including Cathay Pacific’s The Club and Gulf Air magazine, and recently to Benchmark Magazine.

Previous to his career in the media industry, he was a commodities broker and an abattoir manager in Singapore. He currently holds a B Sc. (Biology) with Merit, loves playing the piano and running marathon events.

Vicky Abhishek

Vicky Abhishek is currently Vice President Technology Services Asia Pacific for Johnson & Johnson based out of Singapore.

Vicky is responsible for leading the Asia Pacific Technology Services organization, delivering infrastructure, application support, application development and technology services to Consumer Health, Pharmaceuticals & Medical Devices business units covering over 25K employees in 400+ locations, enabling $15+ BN growth region.

Key areas of focus include application services in Digital & Connected Commerce, Customer Engagement, Data & Analytics, Supply Chain as well as Infrastructure services in Hybrid Cloud, Network and End user compute with a goal to build next generation Digital Health experience for all J&J consumers and patients.

Vicky joined from Coca-Cola, where he held Group Chief Technology role for both Asia Pacific group as well as Botting Investment Group for past 8 years, since 2013. He lead the overall technology strategy to support $10BN region for the Coca-Cola company, including 56 bottling plants, 32K employees across 180 sites. He lead the digital transformation efforts to modernize biz processes, adapt tech platforms for innovation, drive Cloud adoption across Consumer Marketing, Supply Chain, Product distribution and Sales functions.

Prior to Coca-Cola, he has worked in General Electric Co. (GE) for 12 years and took up diverse challenging assignments - living in India, the US, China, and Singapore. At GE, he deployed and managed multiple IT Infrastructure shared services programmes, including datacenter, compute, cloud services, network, voice, end-user experience, and information security domains. He also had significant experiences across core business processes (NPI, ITO, and OTR) and collaborated with cross-functional business leadership to fuel growth in the Asia region. Prior to joining GE, Vicky worked in the Manufacturing and IT Software sectors.

With a relentlessly curious mind, Vicky tasks himself to learn something new every year. Alongside numerous industry and technology certifications gathered over the years, including Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified IT Forensics Expert, Azure Cloud Architect, Design Thinking from MIT etc. Vicky holds a Mechanical Engineering Degree and MBA in IT & Finance. This year he plans on being actively involved in learning more about Med Tech, Pharma industry with a focus on Data & Analytics platforms.

Living in Singapore for the past 14 years, Vicky is happily married to Nikita for 21 years and father to a teenage son. In his free time, he loves to read real, tangible books, he plays cricket and travels to new destinations to experience local culture and food. In past 3 years, he has evolved a health routine and has met his daily health goals, with a 987 days streak.

Darren Yong

Darren is the Asia Pacific Head of Technology, Media & Telecommunications located in Singapore. He is also the Asia Pacific Head of Client & Market Development and is part of the Asia Pacific Leadership team.  A highly accomplished executive with over 20 years’ experience in Telecom and Information Technology, Darren is passionate about bringing emerging technology solutions to clients, to enable their digital transformation journey. Darren has led key technology engagements in KPMG which cover Strategy, Data Migration, Cloud, Blockchain and use case builds. Working with C-suite clients across Telecom, Technology, Banking, Insurance, Life Sciences, Energy and Resource, Consumer, he advises businesses on Strategy, Transformation, Cyber Security, Data and Analytics and Cloud.

Prior to joining KPMG, Darren worked in the industry where he held key positions in companies such as Orange Business Services, Verizon Business, Sprint International, Lucent Worldwide Services, Siemens, and Nortel.