Beyond 2020 resolutions: Ushering the year of tech Adaptation

By Eric Quah, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia

This year has proven to be a challenging one that forced many of us to reevaluate our business priorities and strategies. It was also a year of adaptation, with organizations pivoting to a remote workforce, ensuring sufficient safety precautions for essential workers, and digitizing business processes in order to continue working collaboratively.

More than two-thirds of Malaysian companies having experienced some form of disruption[1] during the various Movement Control Orders. In July, a joint Harvard Business Review and Red Hat survey found that 95% of APAC executives said digital transformation has become more important over the past 18 months. In addition, results from Red Hat’s 2021 Global Tech Outlook showed 65% of surveyed executives said that they are well into the “transforming” phase of their digital transformation plans.

Digital transformation is clearly no longer just an aspiration, it’s become business-critical.

Earlier in the year, many organizations in Malaysia turned to Red Hat as their strategic technology partner to further transform, modernize, optimize, and quickly adapt to changing digital demands. Two examples I can share of digitization accelerating through COVID-19 are AmBank and Social Security Organization (PERKESO), two of Red Hat’s APAC Innovation Award winners this year.

AmBank engaged with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and Red Hat OpenShift to build new agile application projects and deliver better mobile banking services. Red Hat worked with AmBank to automate compliance processes such as credit, risk and company checks while reducing the complexity of onboarding. In doing so, AmBank is able to deliver a better customer experience by digitizing the onboarding process to lower customer churn and increase customer retention. 

Meanwhile SOSCO, otherwise known as PERKESO, collaborated with Red Hat to transform its services as a provider for crucial social security provisions and administration for workers in Malaysia. By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its servers and developing new modular applications integrated with Red Hat Fuse, PERKESO reduced their operational costs while extending the availability of its social security provisions to over 450,000 active employers and 6.86 million active workers in the nation.

It is also encouraging to see the government offer greater resources for digital transformation through initiatives such as the Industrial Digitalisation Transformation Scheme[2], which will help support Malaysia’s goal of becoming a high-income nation. With other initiatives like the SME Digitalisation Grant Scheme, businesses across different industries are better placed to invest in automation and infrastructure modernization. We look forward to seeing how these efforts will support workforce resiliency as we move into 2021. Overall, despite 2020’s challenges, I am optimistic about the opportunities 2021 presents for Malaysia’s continued digital transformation journey. Open source is based in collaboration and open possibilities. We look forward to helping organizations realize the potential of enterprise open source technologies to


[1] https://www.ey.com/en_my/take-5-business-alert/covid-19-impact-on-malaysian-businesses  

[2] https://ringgitplus.com/en/blog/budget-2021/smes-and-businesses-key-highlights-in-budget-2021.html

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