KUALA LUMPUR: Artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud technologies present opportunities for local enterprises to transform their businesses for global competitive advantages digitally.
According to IBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd, companies can achieve this goal through strategic collaborations with business and technology partners who bring global 'best practices' to Malaysian shores.
IBM Asia-Pacific general manager Paul Burton said that leading Malaysian companies have already taken bold steps to deploy AI in their operations successfully in recent years.
"AI has moved from ''hype to hope'' with a diverse range of companies now leveraging it to boost productivity, cut costs and accelerate digital transformation," Paul said in a statement today.
"However, some organisations may become ''stuck'' when it comes to accessing the right skills and talent due to global skills shortages," he further said, adding that a partner ecosystem can provide the necessary resources and expertise needed to help businesses and tech partners get to market faster while also creating shared value for clients.
Businesses worldwide are set to invest US$110 billion (RM461 billion) on AI-related solutions and services by 2024, about 200 per cent more than the US$37.5 billion they spent in 2019, according to IDC (International Data Corp) estimates.
That is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 per cent.
According to the science, technology and innovation ministry, the National Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) policy is set to improve the country's productivity by 30 per cent across all sectors by the end of 2030, with AI contributing a significant part.
Paul cited the case of TIME dotCom Bhd (TIME), which offers a suite of domestic and international connectivity and data centre solutions for the wholesale, enterprise and retail markets.
In 2019, TIME became the first Malaysian company to adopt automation technologies from IBM.
Together with its subsidiary AVM Cloud Sdn Bhd, the TIME group today provide organisations with the option of on-premises or virtualised network setups.
"We set out to achieve fully automated lifecycle management to bring the latest in agility and flexibility to our services," said TIME chief technology officer Ang Thing Jiun.
"With NFVI (network functions virtualisation infrastructure) and service orchestration, our customers have more flexibility in network planning, implementation, operations and even budget planning," he said.
IBM partnered with Persistent Systems Sdn Bhd as the core solutions partner to ensure smooth implementation as per TIME'sTIME's vision.
"Our team can now automatically provision services across physical and virtual networks and scale in, out, up, down, as required," Ang said.
"We continue to explore and assess new technologies to enhance our network and improve the services and experiences delivered to clients."
Paul said it was gratifying that TIME could see robust improvements in productivity.
"The TIME group can deploy services with about 80 per cent less effort while maintaining operations at scale with about 20 times less manual work than previously," he said, adding that improvements also strengthened customer experience.
The IBM partner ecosystem has two core tenets. The first is an open-source hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat OpenShift, which can help clients modernise and transform their business.
The second tenet is the IBM Cloud Paks, or AI-powered software that can help organisations build, modernise, and manage applications securely across any cloud.
It aims to establish a hybrid architecture and an AI footprint for clients.
"A hybrid cloud approach empowers companies to drastically reduce costs and integrate new solutions such as intelligent chatbots and virtual agents. As a result, enterprises can redeploy resources and generate new customer experiences and revenue streams," says Paul.
"Clients find that choosing a hybrid cloud approach is 2.5 times more valuable than relying on the public cloud alone with benefits spanning across business value acceleration, developer productivity, infrastructure cost efficiency and reduction in regulatory, compliance, and security costs," he added.
"As companies increasingly turn to application modernisation, process automation and infusing AI within business operations, choosing the right partner will be key to an organisation's future success.
"IT services partners are expected to become increasingly critical to business digital transformation efforts well beyond the disruptions of the pandemic," he said.