Summary Bullets:
• AWS’ new Malaysia region and diverse industrial capabilities will strengthen its market position.
• Industry collaborations will be the key to capturing growing business-led cloud opportunities.
AWS held Malaysia Cloud Day earlier this month and shared its latest plans in the country including a plan to invest $6 billion in the country by 2037. The investment will include a new local region to address the increasing adoption of cloud services in the country as well as various programs to upskill workforce in the country (for more, please see AWS Malaysia Region Will Address Malaysian Cloud Demand but Could Lose Early Market Opportunities to Competitors, March 6, 2023). At the event, AWS also shared various success stories with a number of enterprises across different industries including key players such as Petronas, Pos Malaysia, Bank Islam, Carsome, Axiata, and Astro. This is crucial to showcase AWS’ capabilities not only to offer basic cloud services, but also to work closely with enterprises on their cloud-led digital transformation and help them address business challenges through a wide range of solutions.
For example, Bank Islam, one of the four digital banking license recipients in Malaysia, shared how AWS cloud has enabled them to develop and launch its new digital banking brand (“Be U”) in a fully remote working environment during the pandemic, but also accelerate its product innovation to penetrate new customer segments and enhance customer engagement. Pos Malaysia, the national logistic company, uses AWS cloud solutions to achieve service agility in addressing the surge in e-commerce demand during the pandemic. Pos Malaysia also leverages AI/ML to enhance its services by analyzing wider sets of operational data to predict package arrival time, enhance its observability and troubleshooting time. In the telecom and media vertical, with AWS cloud, Axiata saw a reduction of its time-to-market of new solutions by 50% and growth in productivity, use cases and revenue, while Astro shared how AWS has enabled the incumbent media provider to accelerate the launch of Sooka (a streaming OTT application) with pay-per-view features to capture the growing streaming demand and challenge major global competitors such as Netflix and Disney. In oil and gas, Petronas, which has migrated over 90% of its applications to cloud environments, shared the importance of not only the technical capabilities of cloud services, but also the alignment with business objectives as well as change management in order to drive successful transformation. Meanwhile, digital-native companies such as Fave (e-commerce) and Setel (fuel digital wallet) also use AWS cloud services to drive agility and innovations.
While Malaysian enterprises are migrating more workloads to cloud and considering advanced use cases, these customer references are crucial for AWS to demonstrate its capabilities not only to provide cloud services, but also to work closely with enterprises and help them address their business challenges. For example, AWS’ wide range of edge solutions (e.g., AWS Outposts, Wavelength, and Snow Family) and its ‘cloud continuum’ strategy can be positioned to address the growing low-latency industrial applications demand. Moreover, its breadth of services, partner ecosystem and vertical capabilities will enable AWS to address diverse market needs across different industries and segments. Besides, working with major brands (e.g., examples above) can enable AWS to gain more trust from the market. The expanded local strategy combined with the new region will also attract other global players to invest in the country and hence drive the demand for local data center. AWS’ domestic presence, its partner programs and upskilling initiatives will drive the local digital ecosystem by attracting service partners, enterprises and developers to co-develop and offer cloud-based solutions. This will further strengthen AWS’ position in the competitive ASEAN market (for more, please see Hyperscalers Making a Move in ASEAN, September 27, 2022).