Over the last three years, NTT Data Business Solutions Malaysia has been a global reference for SAP-based automotive wholesale business management solutions, its Managing Director, Harindran Narayanan said.
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| Harindran Narayanan |
This is is a feather in the cap for Malaysia, since Harindran founded the company as Business Formula in Subang Jaya in August 2000 as an SAP consultancy and reseller to provide software solutions to the automotive, engineering, energy, services, manufacturing, retail, conglomerate and consumer-oriented industries.
Its core services include full range SAP consulting, design and implementation services; Business Objects system consulting, design and implementation; support and maintenance of SAP and Business Objects systems and it’s a certified SAP value-added reseller support centre.
In 2010, NTT Data, the IT solutions and integration arm of the Tokyo-based NTT Holdings acquired Business Formula, which not only benefited from NTT’s corporate governance practices which enabled it to run its business better but more importantly provided it with global reach through the NTT group.
While widely known as a telecommunications company, NTT Holdings altogether has six subsidiaries – namely telecommunications network operators NTT East, NTT West and NTT DoCoMo in Japan; NTT Communications which provides long distance and international communications services and ICT solutions; Dimension Data which provides IT communications solutions, network and data centre services for enterprises; and NTT Data which provides IT solutions and systems integration.
The group currently has six entities in Malaysia – namely, NTT Data Malaysia, NTT Data Business Solutions (NDBS), NDBS CSA, Itelligence and NTT MSC which is wholly-owned by NTT Communications. NTT Data Malaysia, Itelligence and NTT MSC are all co-located in the Cyberjaya data centre.
It also acquired Cornerstone, a Singapore-based business intelligence (BI) company, Australia-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SAP solutions company Extend and Germany-based Itelligence, a global SAP partner. Itelligence hosts SAP systems in NTT MSC’s data centre in Cyberjaya for clients worldwide.
NTT Holdings and its subsidiaries altogether have 195,000 staff worldwide in 536 subsidiaries, with total sales worth US$ 120 billion. Overall, the group is involved in fixed and mobile voice and data communications, network services, operates data centres, applications development, outsourcing, systems integration and managed services.
Leveraging on its sister companies, NTT Data Business Solutions Malaysia provides hosting services for customers which don’t have a strong IT department, including virtual-private network (VPN) connectivity with 99.9% assured service-level.
Since most of them are still small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), their usage volume is still relatively low, so they must buy software licenses outright from SAP to use the hosted solutions. With sufficient volume, NTT Data Business Solutions could consider buying the licenses in bulk from SAP and bearing the cost but that option isn’t available right now.
Not mature yet
Despite all the talk about cloud computing, it’s still not mature enough in Malaysia and elsewhere. “Perhaps cloud will have to wait till Generation Y moves into decision-making positions,” said Harindran.
However, NTT Data Business Solutions can combine its core ERP systems with mobility so that field workers can access management reports, dashboards, human capital management and business intelligence on iPad, iPhone and Android devices, with ERP and human resource management systems running at the back end. Business intelligence is catching on and corporations like to see the information presented in graphical reports and dashboards.
No HANA
However, there are no installations of SAP’s HANA in-memory computing systems in Malaysia just yet, though Harindran expects this to be huge for enterprises in the next phase.
“While HANA can produce results from processed data in seconds, it’s still a premium product specific to companies in the retail, manufacturing, insurance and healthcare industries which need reports instantly,” said Harindran.
Today, NTT Data Business Solutions has over 100 customers in Malaysia and 75 staff members as of March 2013. It’s recognised as one of the top SAP service providers in Malaysia.
