Establishing Malaysia's Cloud Readiness
I recently attended the 2nd
MSC Cloud Conference and had the pleasure of listening to individuals driving
both local and international efforts for Cloud awareness and acceptance. For
its second year running, each guest speaker took the same route and direction in
their delivery of the content, which covered areas such as what is cloud, how
can it improve your business, creating cloud ready apps and examples of major
corporations and their experience with Cloud.
Cloud computing is not old
news. It's not a newly introduced concept, yet, after many years of awareness,
we are still in the ‘need convincing’ phase.
According to the Asia Cloud
Computing Association’s (ACCA) 2014 cloud readiness index, Malaysia is ranked 8
out of 14 selected countries, which included Japan, Singapore, Australia
and New Zealand. We ranked 7th
in 2011, and 8th in 2012.
There were three points
brought up by audience members in the conference, among many, that I would like
to address:
·
Does Malaysia
have the talent?
·
Does Malaysia
have the infrastructure to support Cloud?
·
One speaker
expressed ‘bewilderment’ that there are certain Cloud providers that charge
2USD per license on a monthly basis. That roughly equates to RM6.
I spent two decades in
Australia (ranked 3rd in the 2014 readiness index), and having spent
a year now in Malaysia, I can say that the difference between both nations is
experience. Education bears knowledge and inexperience breed’s experience. The
question is, are Malaysian employers willing to be patient and encourage
progression within their own workforce?
I believe Malaysia has the
infrastructure to support Cloud. In fact, the Malaysian banking system and
Internet infrastructure is progressively faster than Australia’s, yet their
processes are not. In simplest terms, the tools are available, but they’re not
being made use of.
Yet, with Malaysia
supposedly having a shortage of personnel in the areas of Big Data Analytics & Software Development, while working within an inadequately structured infrastructure, with limited support
from local Malaysian businesses due to costing factors, there is
still one company that believes that these setbacks are challenges that can be
overcome.
Challenges drive Innovations |
Yet again, despite these
challenges, and odds of success, we released TimeTec Cloud, our cloud based
time attendance, meticulously crafted by an experienced team of professionals
with an awareness of our country’s infrastructural limitations.
A common concern for
companies with established middle partners (distributors) is the question of
how do we involve our partners when we are able to deal directly with
end-users?
Within the past 2 – 3
months, we have released and introduced two reward schemes, the Revenue Sharing
Scheme for our partners, and the Loyalty Rewards Program for our subscribers.
Loyalty Program Rewards* |
In short, we’re continually
spending money on improving our service, we are sharing our profits with our
resellers and we give away free biometric terminals to subscribers*.
And while Cloud is still in
its infancies in Malaysia, we will always be involved in its maturation in the
coming months and years. Start exploring Cloud now and by 2020 we will be an
ICT established nation.
As a guest speaker at the
MSC conference asked, “Whose here to make money?” Our answer is You.
Recommended Article: http://www.asiacloudcomputing.org/research/cri2014
By Justin Goh, Analyst, TimeTec Computing
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