L-R: Zainal Amanshah (InvestK); Cherian Varghese (Oracle); Darell Leiking (Minister of international trade and industry); Michael K C Yam (InvestKL) and Mohamed Fitri Abdullah (Oracle)
The Oracle Cloud Solution Hub has officially launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the aim of helping regional organisations adopt emerging technologies such as blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and autonomous databases.
The technology giant has been actively recruiting to fill close to 150 new positions since late 2018 for this new facility.
Furthermore, the hub will facilitate a new regional technical cloud centre that will provide solutions for Industry 4.0 and provide the technical backbone for the ongoing digital transformation of the industry.
“The heart of Industry 4.0 is a set of rapidly evolving and converging technologies that can help transform the way we live and ultimately how businesses work to improve their overall competitiveness,” said YB Datuk Ignatius Darell Leiking, Minister of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
“By welcoming establishments and investments by leading multinational technology giants like Oracle into the local market, MITI aims to create an innovation ecosystem to enable a seamless digital transformation journey for Malaysian businesses, especially the SMEs.
“The digitalisation of SMEs remains a key focus for our economy because nine out of 10 businesses in Malaysia are SMEs which represents over two-thirds of our nation’s economy."
The strong growth of Oracle Cloud across Asia Pacific has also led to the continued expansion of Oracle Malaysia, with this new facility adding an additional 150 jobs to local operations. This current expansion comes after Oracle Malaysia established a digital hub in 2017.
The investment by the vendor is also aligned with Malaysia’s own transformation roadmap, which includes strengthening the digital connectivity, enhancing workforce capability and developing new talents and skills, improving data integrity and standards, intensifying research, innovativeness and technological development programmes and activities.
As a result, Oracle is working closely with the investment arm of MITI, InvestKL, to encourage Malaysian businesses to innovate and improve their overall competitiveness.
Through embracing new technologies and digitally transforming their business operations, local SMEs will be better equipped to compete more effectively in the global world.
“Oracle has been present in Malaysia for over 30 years,” said Fitri Abdullah, managing director of Oracle Malaysia. “We are excited with the new investment in the Oracle Cloud Solution Hub.
“Already the Hub has enabled us to work with local government agencies and enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation strategies through Oracle’s latest technologies.
"We look forward to deepening our collaboration with Malaysian government and businesses as we continue to support our customers across the region through this Hub.”
Cloud skills
Oracle has also been investing in raising the cloud and computing capability of the local workforce through the Oracle Academy as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative.
The Oracle Academy philanthropic program provides educators with computing education resources using the latest technologies to make students "college- and career-ready".
The academy has signed up over 60 higher education institutions, reaching more than 45,000 students across Malaysia.
“We congratulate Oracle on its cloud solution hub and look forward to the growth of additional high value jobs and services activities,” said Datuk Zainal Amanshah, CEO of InvestKL. “Oracle’s continuous investments demonstrates its confidence in Malaysia as a hub to move up the value chain in terms of cloud and data technology; and enabling it to ride on the region’s robust growth opportunities from Kuala Lumpur.
“We will continue our strong support and collaboration on their regional journey that will greatly benefit Malaysia’s digital economy in widening the high skilled talent pool, increasing employment opportunities, and strengthening economic growth."
Oracle has also seen an uptake in its autonomous database solution across the region, and is in the process of launching new Gen2 data centres and retrofitting existing ones to cope with the additional processing power, with new ones planned for August 2019 in India, Australia and China.
Once these data centres are operational, the vendor plans a major ramp up of its autonomous database solution across Asia, with SMEs set to benefit the most from this lightweight solution due to it freeing up database administrators to focus on more complex tasks as well as its potential for cost savings, and boosting productivity.
