Malaysia’s Web-hosting and cloud hosting provider, Exabytes Network has joined MDeC (Multimedia Development Corporation) to offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) acceleration program for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
CEO and founder, Chan Kee Siak said, ” Exabytes is excited to partner with MDeC and will play a crucial role in supporting the program. It is part of Exabytes’ corporate objective to develop the Malaysian ICT sector in line with the maturing local market of more savvy providers and consumers.” He added, “What better way to go global than to link with government initiatives such as this project that is specially developed for companies within the MSC Malaysia ecosystem.”
The program is part of MSC Malaysia’s larger plan to produce 60 online solutions providers or independent software vendors (ISV) on the cloud by end of 2012, 6000 new SMEs conducting business online (digital enterprises) by end-2015 as well as 1,500 new jobs for engineered positions and 1-percent global share of the global cloud computing market, by the same deadline.
It is also the second in a three-step ‘process’ to grow the cloud ecosystem in Malaysia. Dinesh Nair, Director for MDeC’s Information Technology Industry Division said, “First we had the onboarding program which basically takes Web software that isn’t cloud-ready and offer technology help and training (to their ISVs) to migrate it to the cloud. After that comes the acceleration program where we basically subsidise their hosting for up to six months.”
Exabytes as a partner in the acceleration program would be subsidising over RM16,000 worth of go-to-market activities, hosting services and even an e-commerce workshop for each ISV approved by MSC Malaysia. A further RM15,000 worth of hosting services is subsidised by MSC Malaysia.
These two programs take care of the supply side of cloud applications, after which the more difficult and challenging part comes – adoption from the SMEs. The SME adoption program is slated to launch in July and just like for the previous two programs, there is some form of subsidising from partners like Exabytes, Microsoft, Jaring, Maxis and also MDeC themselves. “There is a trial period for these guys, they usually can’t afford (to adopt cloud apps) because they still have fixed costs. So, we subsidise them for up to 6 months.” It still remains to be seen if SMEs would like it and start paying after 6 months is up.
Multi location presence Exabytes has also launched Malaysia’s first Multi Location Cloud Hosting service, whereby customers can choose where to host their cloud and allocate resources to it from the same cloud control panel even though hosting may be in any of four supported locations – Kuala Lumpur, Cyberjaya, Singapore and USA.
Exabyte’s total cloud capacities have increased now – 400 CPU cores, 4TB of RAM, 80 TB of SAN and 4Gbps of bandwidth, are at the disposal of customers who choose to host their cloud at any of these 4 locations. Chan said that local businesses should be enabled to expand their businesses beyond Malaysia. “They can host different versions of their software in different countries. There will be better experience to customers because they are nearer to the server too.”
There is also a good case for redundancy of traffic routes, given the natural disasters that have disrupted global Internet traffic before and caused untold financial losses for Web-based businesses.
There are no comments
Add yours