OpenRice is recognised as “Omni-Experience Innovator” in the IDC Digital Transformation Awards 2020, achieving a new digital experience in the dining biz journey with ICT leader CITIC Telecom CPC

HONG KONG, 29 October 2020 – CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited (“CITIC Telecom CPC”), a wholly owned subsidiary of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (SEHK:1883) together with the most popular and award-winning dinning guide OpenRice today celebrate their business collaboration. Using innovative technology to build a reliable dining experience and one-stop merchant platform, in reaching new heights for Asia FoodTech Ecosystems, OpenRice has won three category awards at the “IDC Digital Transformation Awards” -Omni-experience Innovator – Hong Kong, and DX CEO – Hong Kong and Regional.

CITIC Telecom CPC Supports OpenRice’s Digital Transformation Journey

OpenRice has been going through a digital transformation journey in recent years, where they have gone from an online dining guide to a FoodTech Ecosystem. With its success in digital transformation, OpenRice has won three IDC Digital Transformation Awards – for Omni-experience Innovator – Hong Kong, and DX CEO – Hong Kong and Regional. 

The IDC Digital Transformation Awards recognise the achievements of organisations that distinguished themselves with notable and measurable success in the execution of their organisation’s digital transformation (DX) initiatives across the seven DX masteries and who make significant efforts to transform or disrupt the market.

During the digital shift, OpenRice redeveloped its Table Booking System into a native app and website, connecting consumers, restaurants and partners in the F&B and non-F&B sectors. The new initiative included the transformation of a table booking system into one-stop merchant platform “OpenRice Biz” to support restaurants’ dining business journey, improve the availability of market insight solutions for merchants, as well as provide agile and digital business operations. Enabling technologies, including big data analytics and AI, were adopted to empower the initiative.

“With a majority of food and beverage merchants lacking the technology know-how and budget, OpenRice as a platform has taken the leading position to innovate and enhance services for restaurants. Thus, we introduced the OpenRice Biz Platform, where restaurant merchants can choose from a suite of dining solutions or have customised plans tailored specifically to better fit their needs. This was how our journey of digital transformation began,” said Joe Yau, CEO at OpenRice. “We see digitalization as a part of the company’s daily routine; growing with it and evolving with it has become second nature amidst the growing digital economy.”

Delivering the Most Important Package in the Dining Journey: TRUST

As OpenRice continued to expand its platform business with increasing traffic, transactions and data volume, a more reliable security solution was needed. This is where CITIC Telecom CPC came in to assist OpenRice with their security and network system.

“With increasing cyber-attacks and phishing emails, as well as a rising amount of data usage due to the expansion of our service offerings, we needed to enhance our security level and data transmission,” said Yau. “With CITIC Telecom CPC’s TrustCSI™ UTM and Email Protection services, plus its TrueCONNECT™ MPLS connectivity service in place, OpenRice now enjoys reliable data flow and better data protection to help safeguard our business.” 

“CITIC Telecom CPC always strives to serve our customers with strong support for their business digital transformation, and we are glad that our TrustCSI™ information security services and TrueCONNECT™ private network solutions have helped to support OpenRice’s secure dining platform,” said Mr. Taylor Lam, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Management at CITIC Telecom CPC. “The OpenRice FoodTech ecosystem redefines users’ total dining experience and services merchants’ business operations, as well as sales and marketing strategies. Appreciating its success, CITIC Telecom CPC nominated OpenRice for the IDC Digital Transformation Awards and we feel honoured that it has won awards in three categories.”    

CITIC Telecom CPC’s Security Solutions Revamped to Support its DX Strategy

Given that DX is no longer an option but a must-have process for any type of business, CITIC Telecom CPC’s innovative solutions and experienced experts have put it in a leading position to help enterprises on their DX journey. CITIC Telecom CPC’s new DX strategy will ensure that it is a strong ICT-enabler to support the digital transformation of various industries. In fact, with 5G+ bringing DX into a new era, CITIC Telecom CPC’s solutions will help enabling enterprises to better leverage technologies. For example, 5G+ will allow Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT, and even autonomous driving to reach new heights, while CITIC Telecom CPC’s solutions suite assures enterprises by helping them to leverage these technologies in a secure and effective manner to achieve their DX goals.

“Innovation Never Stops. Our Digitalization strategy is simple, it not only about machines and technologies, but also about talent and customer experience. We are putting people at the centre of the DX Journey, and truly believe it is people’s skills and their ability to learn, adapt, change and innovate that makes any technology implementation successful,” said Daniel Kwong, Chief Information and Innovation Officer from CITIC Telecom CPC.

“Furthermore, the way we work is primarily about keeping customers at the centre and we plan everything around them to ensure we are aligned to both their strategy and their business goals. Recognising that digital transformation is no longer a choice but rather an inescapable and exponentially growing process, enterprises are quickly adopting and leveraging new technologies to embrace the digital era. CITIC Telecom CPC is committed to helping clients navigate their digital transformation journeys, through the provision of a wide range of innovative solutions created from powerful new disruptive technologies,” added Kwong.

Since the next generation of digital business will be run by underlying data, there is a crucial security element that now needs to be considered – cybersecurity and a company’s networks and systems will need to be combined. Thus, security will no longer just be another system requirement, it will be one of the key enablers of digital transformation.

“As one of the key components of our DX strategy, we are revamping our TrustCSI™ portfolio to fulfill customer demand during their digital transformation journey,” said Lam. “With new additional services and technology enhancements, our security service portfolio now consists of four key service scopes – Device Management Service, Threat Detection and Response Service, Behaviour Analysis Service, and Professional Service. Customers can now enjoy comprehensive security solution offerings, and select the most suitable services to help them digitally transform their operations.”

Embedded with the latest powerful analytics-driven SIEM and superior Dashboards capability, TrustCSI™ 2.0 can empower customers and teams with data insights in real-time, making it fast and easy for everyone to visualise and deliver numerous capabilities at-scale, as well as to address modern threats demand analytics-driven security and continuous monitoring.  

The key enhancements of this revamp include the launch of the Incident Response (IR) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) functions under the Threat Detection and Response Service scope, and a consultation service for China Cybersecurity Law MLPS 2.0 compliance under the Professional Services scope.

Threat Detection and Response Service

With the new generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology, CITIC Telecom CPC brings a whole new experience to its customers. The enhanced SIEM platform can support modern cloud applications and type of workload and provide a flexible deployment model including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid models. An advanced monthly report and customised monitoring dashboard will be available for customers, giving them a clear picture on their security aspects. 

What’s more, the IR and SOAR services are added to help customers identify potential threats from different devices without human intervention. Remediation actions and suggested measures will be provided to resolve an issue automatically in the future.

The new IR feature is able to:

• • Shorten investigation cycles – prioritise, confirm, and act on higher priority threats
• • Use an Investigation Workbench to investigate notable events that may represent a threat
• • Leverage integration with existing capabilities – by collaborating and tracking an investigation
• • Quickly launch a response to critical incidents

The new SOAR service can:

• • Automate repetitive tasks so that customers can allocate their resources to higher value tasks
• • Automate security alerts allowing customers to keep everything under control, instead of dealing with overwhelming alerts
• • Orchestrate workflows and responses across all products so that each device can actively participate in the defence strategy
• • Save time and resources by resolving issues and making current tools work better

Professional Services

People are the key to any enterprises DX journey, and CITIC Telecom CPC can help by providing the resources to help client personnel learn and understand fast changing policy and compliance changes. This service includes being able to help companies enter the Chinese market with China Cybersecurity Law MLPS 2.0 compliance. For enterprises expanding or already operating inside China, it is imperative their digital transformation be in compliance with the law. This service includes classification, filing, implementation, evaluation, and auditing, and is easy, reliable, and professionally administered to ensure an enterprise operates a robust, fully compliant MLPS 2.0 infrastructure. Other Professional Services offered by CITIC Telecom CPC include vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and security device migration.

Together with the existing yet powerful Device Management Service, which provides round-the-clock comprehensive and reliable infrastructure management services to handle the crucial burden of regular diligent device and software management, and the TrustCSI™ Behavior Analysis Service which brings a new approach to enterprise cyber defense, CITIC Telecom CPC’s solutions provide a secure journey for companies that are going through the digital transformation process.

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About OpenRice

Established in 1999, OpenRice is currently the most popular food dining guide in Hong Kong. The database contains the most complete and updated restaurant information, with credible restaurant reviews written by real locals. As the most comprehensive F&B platform in Hong Kong, OpenRice is devoted to the research and development of FoodTech to create a sustainable one-stop shop of solutions in the eco-system; including Restaurant Management System (RMS), Recruitment, POS & integrated payment, Table booking & dine-in solutions, Scan to Order, Vouchers, TakeAway , Analytics, and beyond!

Based in Hong Kong, OpenRice has also actively expanded to other Asian regions in recent years, including Macau, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and China.