In a recent media conference organised by Teledirect Telecommerce Sdn Bhd (Teledirect), Senior Vice President of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC), Dato’ Narayanan Kanan and CEO of Teledirect, Laurent Junique offered insights into the potential and challenges faced by Malaysia to be a global outsourcing hub.
According to Junique, companies are choosing to invest in outsourcing dollars because of the accessibility to a reliable infrastructure that ensures effective and efficient business operations at a lower cost, with greater flexibility. By outsourcing transactional and administrative functions, organisations are able to focus on their core business operations and reduce operating costs.
Ranked third in A.T Kearney’s 2004 “Offshore Location Attractiveness Index: Making Offshore Decisions”, behind strongholds such as India and China, Malaysia has proven to be an attractive destination for shared services and outsourcing. A recent benchmark study by Deloitte Consulting also placed Malaysia as a ‘clear favourite’ for outsourcing and offshoring activities in the region, ahead of China, India and Singapore.
In 2003 ,Teledirect “felt conditions were right to start offering regional and global contact centre support out of Malaysia” and made Kuala Lumpur its regional operations hub.
MDC expects Malaysia’s outsourcing sector to grow at a rate of more than 8% between 2003 and 2006.
Although attracting investors to operate in Malaysia’s outsourcing industry was cited as the country’s main challenge to become a leading global outsourcing hub, MDC acknowledges that Malaysia is gaining recognition as a young and fast growing outsourcing hub.
“It is always a win-win situation to both investors and Malaysia because investors can build up the skills of their workers and help boost the industry and economy. At the same time, they increase their profits,” said Narayanan.
Junique and Narayanan echoed that Malaysia’s strengths should be tapped and leveraged upon.
“Malaysia has the competitive edge as we hold a unique position not only in Asia but the world. Teledirect is able to provide linguistic support in up to 14 languages though their telephone sales representatives (TSRs) by operating out of Malaysia. Modern infrastructure, an attractive business environment through the MSC, strong government support and low cost of operations places the spotlight on Malaysia,” said Junique.
MDC’s Programme Director of Shared Services and Outsourcing, Rob Cayzer who was also present said branding is one of the key strategies in wooing investors. Corporations can help boost the country’s image by attracting influx of investment into the country.
In line with Teledirect’s business focus in ‘Sales Acceleration’ and recent achievement of its MSC status, the company believes that this will strengthen its position and potential to help companies achieve more sales faster. Teledirect acquires between 30 000 – 40 000 new customers in Malaysia and between 60 000 – 70 000 new customers in the region on behalf of their clients every month.
Businesses which have capitalised on Teledirect’s services include companies in the financial, information technology and telecommunications sector.
Today, the company has a network of 7 contact centres in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Philippines and India.
Teledirect operates more than 900 workstations, 370 of which are located in their fastest growing contact centre, Kuala Lumpur. The company plans to build another contact centre which will house 250 - 300 people in the next two years.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Computer World re Data Centre
Coverage of the Computerworld Malaysia Data Centre Forum, held on July 7, 2009.By Computerworld Malaysia staff writer
05 Aug 2009
05 Aug 2009
The Computerworld Data Centre Forum that was held on 7 July in Kuala Lumpur saw the participation of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals from various verticals, including financial, education, government and telecommunications.
In his welcome address, AvantiKumar, Computerworld Malaysia deputy editor & Fairfax Business Media correspondent said that one major challenge facing data centre managers today is the slowdown of budgets for IT expansion. But at the same time, he noted, there is also pressure from government, business and user organisations to instigate further sustainable IT and the drive towards trends like cloud computing and software-as-a-service.
The first keynote speaker, which was themed ‘Mission: Impossible,’ government agency Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) director, business & market development, industry development division, Rob Cayzer said that Malaysia continued to be an attraction for many companies in the ICT arena, noting that Malaysia has grown by leaps and bounds and many companies still set up shop in the country.
“There are many reasons for this but the key reasons for this is that Malaysia offers cost competiveness, a world-class room to grow and a holistic focus on ICT. As a testimony of this growth, as of last year, Malaysia had about 100,000 square feet of data centre space, which represents about one-third of that in South East Asia,” Cayzer said.
However, as the industry grows, Cayzer noted that Malaysia would need to brace itself for the next phase of growth by focusing on data centre excellence. He added that Malaysian companies could do this by incorporating value-added service on top of the infrastructure.
“From the government perspective, we see value added services to include critical knowledge capital, new products and services, a talented workforce, and trade capacity. In the new era of data centre excellence, the data centre is not just a piece of hardware with some services in it but it’s going to be the key enabler for the development of IT organisations and thus companies must pay attention to this area going forward,” he said.
Cayzer also noted that the data centres of the future would incorporate key components such as smart power technology, green data centre design and operation, utility and grid computing, knowledge-based services, utility application and bloom computing.
CommScope Enterprise Solutions vice president & managing director, Ispran Kandasamy was next and began his session by asking what is the most important asset a company possesses.
“If I were to direct this question 10 years ago to the automotive industry, it would have said cars. But today the most important asset companies have is no longer a product or a service but it’s the information they possess. This makes the data centre a critical element to the success of any organisation,” he said.
According to Kandasamy, datacentres host mission-critical applications within a tightly controlled environment. Enterprises, he added, tends to focus tends to be placed on ensuring that the applications can be deployed effectively on day one at the data centre design stage.
“However, equally important is a design imperative that the physical layer network architecture manages the numerous iterations of active equipment and applications that will be connecting to the network over its lifetime, which can only be achieved by taking a holistic design approach,” Kandasamy said.
Citing several factors that are driving the growth of the data centre, Kandasamy said, today, more people are connecting to the Internet and the innovation that capitalises on new technology is growing. A well designed data centre is therefore central to helping companies prepare for the future.
Going forward, Kandasamy identified several factors that will be important for enterprises to keep in mind. These include having reliable and standards compliant data centres, being green and energy aware, and reducing operational expense in terms of maintenance costs.
Cost and security concerns
Symantec regional technical director, systems engineering & customer advisory services, Raymond Goh said that in a recent survey conducted by Symantec, reducing costs was cited by executives as being the most important objective for enterprises in the coming year. He revealed the top three cost containment strategies currently employed by companies were to increase automation of routine tasks (47 per cent), reduce the number of servers by employing virtualisation (43 per cent), and reduce data centre complexity (40 per cent).
“Other method employed included the centralising of standard solution stack definition, the cross-training of IT staff, implementing storage virtualisation and storage resource management/tiering,” Goh said.
On top of this cost challenge, Goh noted that meeting the expectations of other parts of the organisation is going to be more difficult and expensive.
He also pointed out that enterprises today no longer look for ROI (return on investment), ROFY (return on fiscal year) or even ROQ (return on quarter), but are looking at a new concept called ROY (return on yesterday).
He then shared Symantec’s steps for deriving ROY. “Firstly, companies must stop buying storage...Secondly, companies should adopt thin provisioning...Next, companies need to implement data de-duplication...Lastly, companies need to implement archive for optimisation, which effectively deals with the rising trend of unstructured data storage such as e-mail.”
Check Point Software Technologies security engineer, Soong Chee Lum noted that virtualisation is the next big thing in enterprises as companies seek to consolidate their data centre hardware.
However, he added that with virtualisation, security also becomes a real major issue.
“Virtualisation cannot exist without security. Virtualisation does not protect or conceal your guest OS. With more mission critical applications utilising virtualisation, it becomes imperative to deploy a holistic security plan to protect virus/worm infections and block rogue virtual machines.”
Not only about tech
While addressing technology challenges in data centres is a critical step, companies should also look into operational challenges too, noted second guest keynote speaker, Quint Wellington Redwood managing director, Michiel de Boer.
“Our infrastructure and services are faced with different demands from the business such as multiple internal IT suppliers/external suppliers and it becomes difficult to align their IT with business strategies.”
One key issue, Boer said, that must be addressed is how to control the cost of complexity with the increasing variety of our products, services, customers, processes and roles.
“To do so, companies must start by managing the demands and supplies and sharing the execution of services. A shared service centre can significantly improve quality and reduce cost. Companies need to organise themselves centrally to manage demand and supply and not just focus on the execution. This requires some maturity from the business side of things as well from IT. Ultimately, it all starts with measurement, as if we cannot measure, we cannot control and we cannot improve our organisation,” Boer explained.
Addressing business continuity
Sybase South East managing director, Sivadas Ramadas began by saying that today’s market place is largely driven by a single, simple principle – “We want it, and we want it now.”
“Successful organisations realise that these basic but unrelenting expectations have morphed into business demands. When we launch an application, we expect full and immediate functionality. When we click the ‘buy’ button, we expect an expeditious access to the information we require,” he explained.
Central to meeting this demand is for companies to have a business continuity plan so that companies can continue to operate in the event of any mishaps or incidents, Ramadas said.
“But despite this demands made by the consumer, many organisations have a flawed perception of business continuity as a responsibility of the IT department only. In truth, users couldn’t care less about availability, disaster recovery, and associated processes and policies but care only about seamless, uninterrupted, and rapid access. When business continuity is effective, availability occurs under the covers of ultimately providing the best service levels to all stakeholders,” Ramadas said.
Ramadas said disaster recovery was once an autonomous and largely technical consideration but today the concept and implementation of data backup systems has emerged from a “nice to have” IT add-on to become a strategic investment in ensuring availability.
“As with any enterprise-wide deployment, organisational acceptance of the need, plan and approach is mandatory – from the boardroom to the mailroom. To avoid competing agendas, roles and responsibilities should be established as a first step. This will instill a sense of participation and encourage a more collaborative environment.”
Ramadas said the IT organisation retains the responsibility for technical planning, implementation, and operation details of the business continuity plan.
“In conjunction with this, lines of business (LOBs) are responsible for communicating mission-critical functionality, understanding and executing contingency plans. Lastly, corporate leadership must set and integrate policy regarding a business continuity plan through active participation and dedication of resources.”
Concluding the seminar, FalconStor Software regional director, South Asia Pacific, Simon Ng argued that today’s back up and recovery process is dated and is not effective for today’s demands.
“Disaster recovery is costly, limited, inefficient and risky. Disk space, power and cooling needs are consuming IT budgets as data consumers continue to increase their demands and drive storage usage,” said Ng. “Additionally, issues like remote site protection continue to be costly and inefficient.”
Ng said one of the best ways to address this problem is to utilise Continuous Data Protection (CDP) instead of using other back up technologies.
CDP is a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery markers from any point in the past.
Ng noted that with CDP, there is a continuous availability with 100 per cent data integrity and there are no lost data or lost transactions.
Other advantages, he added are that CDP replaces “restores” with instant recovery, which shortens back up time from hours to minutes and also eliminates backup window problems and reduces tape cycles, which minimises tapes cost.
“FalconStor Solution provides the platform and architecture for any enterprise’s data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery needs,” Ne said.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Job Lay Offs since Oct 2008
Published in CNET
May 13, 2009 4:45 PM PDT
Tech layoffs: The scorecard
With the overall economy slumping, the tech industry is taking its fair share of hits. We'll keep updating the chart below as news of company changes comes in. See our complete coverage of how the tech sector is faring here: Tracking the tech downturn.
Know of a layoff not listed here? Let us know on this form or e-mail us.
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