By Charles F Moreira, Editor
Fusionex Corp Sdn Bhd and Alibaba Cloud partnered to jointly promote cloud-based applications to customers across the ASEAN region in a ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel in Kuala Lumpur on 26 September 2017.
Both companies will also jointly drive innovation, in big data analytics (BDA), machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure and solutions will enable Fusionex’s innovation centre to develop technology and platforms which will drive the digital transformation of the region.
“Alibaba Cloud and Fusionex will together deliver solutions to customers across the ASEAN and Asia-Pacific regions”, said Raymond Ma, Alibaba Cloud general manger of ASEAN and Australia-New Zealand. “Alibaba Cloud and Fusionex will jointly sell our solutions and services across ASEAN and Asia”, said Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh, Fusionex managing director.
Fusionex brings to the partnership its expertise and core competencies in cloud-based applications and solutions for industry sectors such as financial services. trade facilitation, e-commerce, retail, aviation, travel and hospitality as well as manufacturing. Fusionex also is a leading data technology provider specialised in BDA, IoT and AI.
“Our largest customer base by industry are in trade-facilitation, e-commerce and retail, financial services including banking, insurance, stocks and shares, travel and hospitality industries such as theme parks and resorts”, Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh told Enterprise TV. “Right now, manufacturing comprises a smaller industry segment for us. However, today our customers base is about 50% enterprise and 50% small-to-medium enterprise (SME) compared to 70% enterprise and 20% to 30% SME two years ago”, Teh added.
Fusionex’s footprint covers the United States and Europe, with its largest presence in Europe being in the United Kingdom, France and Netherlands. However its largest market is the Asia-Pacific region – i.e. in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia. South Korea and recently China.
On the other hand, Alibaba Cloud, established in 2009, is China’s largest provider of public cloud services and fourth globally in the Internet as a Service (IaaS) market by revenue in 2016, according to IDC. Its core competencies are in cloud-based elastic computing, storage & networking, database services, security solutions and services. These services are scalable to suit customers of various sizes and to scale up as customers’ size and needs grow.
Alibaba Cloud’s AI solutions – i.e. ET Brain, City Brain, Medical Brain, Industrial Brain and Environmental Brain help transform industries and cities. ET Brain integrates machine learning, heterogeneous data analysis and visual & speech recognition to help respective industry verticals to solve real-world challenges and unleash their development potential.
City Brain provides urban planners and city officials with the tools to help them upgrade their city governance with facilities such as traffic management and prediction in real-time, as well as city services and smarter drainage systems.
Medical Brain processes a wealth of medical knowledge to help relieve the workload of medical personnel and to serve as patients’ virtual assistants and support in areas such as medical imaging, drug development, hospital management and wearable healthcare devices.
Industrial Brain helps companies to centralise data management from manufacturing processes with Alibaba Cloud’s expertise in computing and data services.
Environmental Brain launched in June 2017, can cross analyse environmental data such as temperature, wind speed, pressure, humidity, rainfall and solar radiation revealed by satellite images to help predict likely smog patterns and help both governments and non-governmental organisations to make decisions related to the environment and monitor pollution.
Alibaba Cloud currently has data nodes at 15 locations worldwide, including Malaysia. The other nodes are in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Middle east, Europe and on the western and eastern coasts of the United States.
Its presence in Malaysia began in early 2016 when Alibaba Cloud created a team dedicated to empowering Malaysian Enterprises. Then in January 2017, it signed an agreement with Conversant Solutions and Prestariang Berhad to jointly work on building an integrated education platform called EduCloud to provide a range of cloud-based education and related services, including campus management, teaching and learning, entertainment, digital payment and many other online applications and services.
In March 2017, the Alibaba Group established its first overseas e-hub under eWTP with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDeC). Besides plans for a data centre in Malaysia, the company has been granted MSC Malaysia status and has jointly conducted training for industry players together with MDeC.
In July 2017, Alibaba Cloud announced the establishment of a new digital hub in Malaysia together with MDeC and as technology partner, Alibaba Cloud will provide a series of programmes and services including the Alibaba Cloud Certified Professional (ACP) certification programme, one-on-one go-to-cloud consulting services and customised technology solutions designed by Alibaba Cloud architects.
