IBM Malaysia’s Managing Director Catherine Lian has urged businesses to be both agile and resilient in responding to the changes taking place.
“Since the start of the pandemic, at IBM, we see organizations globally have accelerated their digital transformations initiatives, and they do this by adopting AI and cloud-based remote collaboration tools and seeking data-driven insights to fast-tracking innovation and transforming operations from inside and outside. We see this in HR, procurement, finance and supply chain, as well as in customer engagement marketing and sales,” she said, speaking at the recently held IBM Malaysia Media Roundtable.
With further implementation of remote working, Lian pointed out that this has resulted in an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid cloud and AI allowing organisations to navigate uncertainty and adapt to the changing conditions.
“Working with clients, we have seen that a ‘one-cloud-fits-all’ approach doesn’t work. Companies want flexibility to run their critical workloads across any platform without having to rewrite everything as they go. They’re choosing multiple cloud providers and platforms to best meet these broad range of needs – from building banking solutions, to running airline reservation systems, to responding to seasonal capacity demands.”
IBM’s hybrid cloud is said to allow organisations the flexibility to balance the need to keep some workloads on-premise or in a private cloud while also taking advantage of the speed and flexibility of the public cloud.
According recent survey respondents from Malaysia, 19 percent of their IT spend is allocated to cloud and they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid cloud from present 36 percent to 46 percent by 2023. The majority of their cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 53 percent share today to 44 percent by 2023.
Further, the study reveals that the return on investment (ROI) of a platform approach as respondents said that the value derived from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor approach. In fact, the platform approach is cited as accelerating value with scale.
IBM Malaysia is working with governments, corporations from multiple sectors to infuse cloud and AI into key areas including customer engagement, healthcare, telecommunications, banking, as well as operations and business processes.
“We also continue our public-private collaboration with The City Council of Penang Island (MBPP) in accelerating Penang smart city initiatives and enhancing State Government service delivery to the public to the business sectors,” Lian said.
