There are people we meet through work — the work ends, and so does the acquaintance. And there are people we meet through work, yet they stay on in our lives like an elder brother. For me, Mr. Đậu Trọng Hiển belongs to the second kind.
We met because of rest stops. When CD Restop needed investors who understood energy and technology to help build a network of rest stations, Mr. Hiển came — not with the bearing of someone writing a check, but with the bearing of a man of the craft. He asked about the charging units, the solar panels, the operating software — about every detail that only someone who has wrestled with real systems would know to ask. I remember standing beside the charging station that day — the two of us talking until we lost all track of time. Some handshakes are mere formality. But that handshake, I knew, was a beginning.
The more we worked together, the more I came to cherish him. Mr. Hiển is a man of technology in the fullest sense of the phrase — more than twenty years walking alongside artificial intelligence, smart cities, and digital transformation, since the days when those concepts were still foreign to most of us. In him is something I have always looked for in a companion: the endurance of a man who believes in something longer than others do. It is easy to be excited about technology for the length of one funding season. Mr. Hiển has walked with it for more than two decades — quietly, patiently, like a man planting a tree who knows full well he will not be sitting in its shade tomorrow.
Then one day, he told me about SmartSys.
SmartSys — Smart Systems Company Limited — is the brainchild he has nurtured and built since 2014, more than ten years now. A company doing AI, AIoT, and digital transformation for industry, cities, and government; the technology member of the DTH Holdings ecosystem, with a presence reaching Japan and the United Kingdom. More than ten years for a technology company in Vietnam — anyone who has worked in this field will understand how much weight that number carries. It is ten-odd years of rebuilt versions, of hard projects, of a faith that had to be fed by hand through every hot and cold season of the market.
The more I learned about SmartSys, the more I understood why Mr. Hiển has been able to go so far. The company's entire product line is built on six shared technology cores — built once, reused across every project, the way a master craftsman sharpens his full set of tools before taking on a job: S-Vision — AI vision and smart security, image analytics, recognition and alerts; S-IoT — device connectivity, real-time data standardization and Digital Twin construction; S-Command — the operations center for digital government and smart cities, where cross-sector alerts and data converge onto a single map; S-Service — the digitization of services, records, appointments and operating workflows; N-Industry — energy, asset, production and industrial warehouse management; and C-ESG — ESG governance, greenhouse-gas management and sustainable-development roadmaps. Upon those six cores stand eighteen products — from smart energy management, asset management and smart security to IoT platforms, Digital Twin and smart-city platforms.
This is not technology on paper. SmartSys systems have run in real life — analyzing customer behavior at major shopping centers like GigaMall, counting visitor traffic for the buildings of international developers in Hà Nội, and a project portfolio spanning factories, hospitals, cities and airports over nearly a decade. What I cherish most in that architecture: there is an entire core devoted to ESG and carbon — meaning that for Mr. Hiển, sustainable development is not the closing chapter of a pitch deck, but a foundation brick. Here, the two of us meet absolutely: I still believe technology is only worth doing when it makes the lives of ordinary people better — and does so in a way that can be measured.
And what I treasure most is that he trusted me enough to invite me into that dream — to walk with him in developing SmartSys along the road of digitization and digital transformation. People can offer one another capital, labor, effort. But the most precious thing one person can give another, I think, is trust placed squarely upon the thing he holds dearest. Mr. Hiển gave me that. I received it not as one receives an opportunity — but as one receives something entrusted.
We see the same picture: the rest stops of CD Restop need a digital brain to run on; the factories and cities of this country need intelligent systems mastered by Vietnamese hands. SmartSys has the technology and ten years of experience. I have faith in the ecosystem and in how its story should be told. The road is still long, the work still plenty — but I still believe what I have always believed: no one goes far alone. And walking beside an elder brother who knows the craft and loves the work, the long road suddenly feels half as long.
Half a working life on, I have come to see that the greatest opportunity in a person's life rarely sits inside any plan. It arrives in the shape of a person — an elder brother who appears at the right moment and places his trust in the right place. Our only task is to treat that trust with decency, and to see the work through to the end.
Thank you, Mr. Hiển — for that handshake beside the charging station that day, and for letting me lend a hand to your ten-year dream.
Ho Chi Minh City, August 2026 — Nguyễn Ngọc Hải