KUALA LUMPUR: Multimedia Development Corporation (MDec) is targeting to make Malaysia the Asean hub for Big Data Analytics (BDA) within the next five years to 2020.
That being said, there are still much to be done in progressing Malaysia's area of BDA and data-driven innovation, according to MDeC's director of innovation capital, Dr Karl Ng.
"One of our main goals is to increase awareness on BDA and encourage adoption among businesses in the country this year," he told reporters at a media briefing here, yesterday.
"We already have the leading ecosystem when it comes to technological infrastructure in Asean, and the focus this year is adoption."
Ng said that the push for the adoption will be conducted through a three-pronged key initiative plans namely in talent creation, the Big Data Week Asia 2016 (BDWA16) and the launch of the Asean Data Analytics Exchange (ADAX) in the third quater of this year.
"We have and will continue teaming up with universities in creating talent for this sector and we aim to create 16,000 data professionals by 2020, from the existing 4,000," he said.
The BDWA16 is in particular important in the push towards Malaysia becoming the BDA hub of Asean, said Ng.
"We are expecting 3,000 participation for this year, an increase from last year's 2,500 and the 700 we saw in 2014. All our participants are from within Asean so that they can network and come up with more innovative regional solutions."
The launch of ADAX later this year will only cement this drive towards becoming the regional hub.
"The ADAX is a regional platform to connect community, enterprises, startups, academia and working professionals in a central location to inspire and enable organizations to embrace data-driven innovation," said Ng.
"It is initially launched by MDec but given time, we expect it to be driven by the private sector as more and more small and medium enterprises look into BDA for the betterment of their businesses."