The objective is to pull industry players and academic institutions together to train up a steady stream of people with necessary skills in the areas of big data and analytics to fulfil the current skilled data professionals gap in Malaysia.
MDEC endorsement
It looks like the components for the success of BASE is falling into place nicely since the Malaysian government is also all for this initiative to take place. In her keynote address at the launch, Dato’ Yasmin Mahmood, CEO of Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) said, “Digital Malaysia is a national agenda that aims to turn Malaysia into a developed digital economy that connects and empowers the government, businesses and citizens.
Transformational technologies such as Big Data Analytics (BDA) plays a pivotal role in ensuring the success of this initiative by creating new business value solutions and prompting significant innovation and advancements across multiple industries. Malaysia is well on our way to become a BDA hub in the ASEAN region and we are glad to partner with Cloudera on its BASE Initiative which takes us a step forward in this direction.”
Why Malaysia?
Daniel Ng, Senior Director of Cloudera (Asia-Pacific), opines that Malaysia is at the cusp of mindset change and talent flourishing. Due to Malaysia’s history of diversity, he is confident that Malaysia is a nation that is well-placed to adopt the sharing mindset. “By sharing technology, you now have the whole world working for you.”
Other business partners echo the sentiment that technology sharing and open innovation have already achieved critical mass and if Malaysia is not proactive, we will be left behind. Cutting elaborated that while technology is the easy part, a collaborated, coordinated effort from the industry players to securing the government’s support, is the hard part. It is not readily seen in other parts of the world.
Cloudera’s confidence and commitment to the Malaysian BDA landscape is further encapsulated in its appointment of its first managing partner in ASEAN, in Malaysia.
Recall that Malaysia had, in August 2014, launched the Public Sector BDA Blueprint. Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) and MDeC were to jointly implement four government BDA pilot projects, using BDA to analyse, predict and make effective decisions on issues close to the Rakyat’s heart, namely price watch, sentiment analysis, crime prevention and infectious disease forecasting.
While the jury is still out there on the progress of those pilot project outcomes, Cloudera’s launch of BASE and its participation by so many esteemed partners in Malaysia is a sure barometer that the country’s BDA ecosystem is well in the making.
