Summary Bullets:

• There were mixed developments in the telco enterprise ICT space.

• Despite positive progress, telcos should further expand their ecosystem partners for advanced technologies and wider collaborations.

There were mixed developments by Malaysian carriers in Q2 2022, from Maxis’ new 5G alliance, TM’s new solution arm (Credence), TIME’s partnership with Fortinet and its plan to sell its data center business and MCMC’s approval of the Celcom-Digi merger.

1. TM Launched Credence: After acquiring VADS and streamlining its enterprise business under a single brand, TM ONE, TM launched a new entity, Credence, as its cloud and digital service arm. As a new entity, Credence could innovate faster and capture the high-growth ICT market opportunity in the country. However, there could also be brand and back-end integration challenges. For more, please see TM Launched Credence, a New Enterprise Digital Business Arm to Redefine Its Position in the ICT Market, July 8, 2022.
Continue reading “Malaysia Enterprise Telecom Update Q2 2022 – Mixed Developments but Positive Overall Progress” →

Summary Bullets:

• Natural language processing (NLP) market heats up under robotic process automation (RPA) integrations

• UiPath steps up its NLP play via acquisition

RPA vendors are adopting NLP technology at a rapid pace in response to enterprises’ stepped-up transformation efforts.

This week RPA vendor UiPath acquired AI pureplay Re:infer to help bolster UiPath’s native NLP capabilities. The start-up’s strengths are in transforming unstructured information from documents and communications into structured data, to be analyzed and integrated into broader automated workflows. Continue reading “Now Robotics is Getting Interesting via Siri-like NLP Capabilities” →

Summary Bullets:

• Much of the focus and hype regarding the digital world has been limited to providing immersive consumer entertainment.

• While the world awaits the metaverse, companies such as Siemens and Nvidia are building the software and hardware that helps businesses take advantage of digital technology.

The naming game that accompanies the introduction of new technologies can confuse end-users and perhaps impede adoption. The words virtual reality, augmented reality, and metaverse all describe a concept first introduced by Yale Computer Science Professor David Gelernter. In his 1992 book, Mirror Worlds, Gelernter describes a virtual, immersive world where many aspects of public life exist online as an extension and mirror or twin to the physical world. Although Professor Gelernter defined the notion of digital twinning, the roots of twinning go back to the Apollo space program as NASA built a physical twin for each spacecraft headed to the moon for troubleshooting purposes. The existence of this physical twin proved invaluable in returning the damaged Apollo 13 safely to earth. Continue reading “[MS Word] Twins: Siemens and Nvidia Partner to Expand Industrial Twinning” →

Summary Bullets:

• There were growing collaborations between carriers and IT providers that mutually benefit both parties.

• These partnerships will accelerate enterprise 5G developments in the region, but could also lead to challenges such as go-to-market and customer ownership.

Compared to the previous quarter (for more, please see ASEAN 5G Q1 2022 Roundup: Beginning of 5G Network Slicing and the Platform Play, April 8, 2022), there were a lot more initiatives on enterprise 5G driven by telcos and other industry players in Q2 2022. Telcos continued to enhance their 5G and service capabilities through partnerships with IT providers, including AIS with NCS, Maxis with HPE, M1 with Accenture, Celcom with HeiTech, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchinson (IOH) with Tech Mahindra.

Continue reading “ASEAN 5G Q2 2022 Roundup: Wider Partnerships Between Carriers and IT Providers” →

Summary Bullets:

• Amazon caught both the tech and healthcare industries off guard when it announced it had reached an agreement with One Medical to acquire the tech-centric healthcare provider for $3.9 billion.

• The deal raised some regulatory red flags as critics questioned the data privacy implications of having a large retailer with a massive cloud platform having access to patient records.

Amazon’s planned One Medical acquisition stunned both the healthcare and technology industries. While the deal is not the retailer’s first foray into healthcare, the value of the deal and the pairing with Amazon’s other interests in both brick-and-mortar retail (Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh) and pharmaceuticals (PillPack) show just how serious the company is about pursuing an outsized role in the medical industry. One Medical, which operates just under 200 clinics, offers patients a subscription-based telehealth service, which dovetails with Amazon’s own Prime model. Continue reading “Amazon Goes All-in on Healthcare with $3.9 Billion One Medical Acquisition” →