KUALA LUMPUR, MARCH 30 - Even with the rise of Internet, certain aspects of society find it difficult to integrate technology into their lives. Education, is one such field, finding itself limited to factors such as equipment costs, electrical capacity and manpower.

In light of this issue, technology manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has come up with a solution: It intends to introduce school students to using thin clients, instead of the more expensive desktop workstations.

KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 - Juniper Networks, an IT and networking products manufacturer, was recently in the capital to talk about the advantages of using cloud computing, and more specifically, its own addition to the technology known as a 'cloud-ready data center.'

At the ‘Data Centre Green Tech’ conference, CK Lam, Enterprise Solutions Marketing Manager for Juniper Networks APAC (picture below), explained that existing networks throughout the world faced the problem of complexity as more users plugged into the Internet.

Kuala Lumpur, 26 January: HeiTech Managed Services, a wholly owned managed services subsidiary of HeiTech Padu, today launched Padu M.O.B.S (Managed Online Backup Services), the first such hosted backup service in Malaysia, designed especially for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

The company will initially target the services at its current 40 customers which store their tape backup off-site with it. Most of them are small-to-medium sized manufacturers (SMIs), SMBs and insurance companies.

Based on Avamar technology from EMC Computer Systems (Malaysia), Padu M.O.B.S. remotely stores data backed up from an organisation's servers, desktop & notebook PCs, as well as mobile smart phones onto servers at HeiTech Padu's Tier IV secure data centre in Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam.

ORACLE recently added new capabilities to its Oracle Accelerate programme aimed at mid-sized companies and a new portal, http://midsize.oracle.com for its mid-sized customers and partners.

In the around three years since Oracle Accelerate was launched, Oracle has added over 7,000 mid-sized applications and 25,000 customers worldwide.

The new Oracle Accelerate portal includes a Partner Marketplace for customers to easily find the right combination of Oracle Applications and Oracle Accelerate Solutions.

“Unlike enterprise customers, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) cannot afford full-blown Oracle solutions especially tailored to their needs, so Oracle Accelerate provides them with a choice of several industry-specific solutions for their specific industry,” said Jasbir Singh, Oracle Malaysia senior director of Applications Sales.

For example, besides basic enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger; applications specific to a high-technology companies include original equipment manufacturer (OEM) complex equipment, OEM consumer electronics, outsourcing services and others.

Industries in Malaysia currently supported include the chemical, consumer goods, high technology and life sciences.

Oracle Accelerate combines Oracle Applications and  Business Accelerators with geography-specific deployment expertise to solve business problems in highly targeted and rapidly deployable packages.

Generally available since 1 September, 2009, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (DB 11g Rel 2) helps organisations reduce their IT costs, according to Mark Townsend, Oracle Server Technology Division vice-president of Product Management.

Its new features include Real Application testing and Active Data Guard which are a boon to database administrators.

“DB 11g Rel 2 reduces hardware capital costs by a factor of five times, storage costs by 10 times, upgrade costs by four times, on the other hand it improves performance by 10 times, database administrator productivity by at least twice, eliminates downtime and unused redundancy, and considerably simplifies customers' software portfolio,” said Townsend in Kuala Lumpur on 3 November.

Firstly, it reduces hardware costs by consolidating all the disparate e-mail, applications, data warehousing and other servers and storage within an enterprise's data centre into a grid comprising an in-memory database cache, a bank of real application clusters and an automatically managed storage farm, all managed from a single location by an enterprise manager.

KUALA LUMPUR, DECEMBER 4 - In a strange bid to make itself more appealing to young Malaysians as well as local stamp collectors, Kaspersky has decided to market itself by bundling its products with their own 1Malaysia stamps.

Encased in a green booklet with Jackie Chan in a white helmet on the cover, the stamps depict blankly-smiling oval-shaped cartoon characters with the 1Malaysia logo. The stamps are valued at 30 cents each, and are represented as a joint effort between Kaspersky and POS Malaysia.

BUKIT JALIL, DECEMBER 3 - Astro has confirmed its intention in making High-Definition Television (HDTV) available to its viewers. Although it has not given a time-frame as to when it will release the service, Astro has confirmed that its intention in providing HD-quality television in Malaysia, which will be known as Astro 2.0. The current implementation that Astro is currently operating on is known as Astro 1.0.

Residents of Kuala Lumpur and its southern outskirts will have a new one-stop centre dedicated to all home-related products and services, entertainment, lifestyle, great accessibility and ample parking when Viva Home mall opens its doors for business in October 2010.

Located along Jalan Loke Yew at the old location of the Uncang Emas 3 (UE3) mall, Viva Home will be accessible via overhead bridges and a walkway linking it to the Taman Miharja light rail transit station.

“We sought out an excellent location. Somewhere visible. Somewhere accessible. Somewhere close to homes,” Yee Ia Howe, chief executive officer of Viva Mall Sdn Bhd said at the Viva Home Retailers’ Launch on 1st December 2009 at the Maya Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

“Jalan Loke Yew is an ideal location in the city, with access to major arteries and the catchment area of Cheras. Better than that, we are creating more access roads in and out of Viva Home so as to make it easier for everyone to get to us. All these pull factors appeal to the end consumer and that benefits you. It is our job to bring the traffic to you and we are confident we will do so," Yee added.

By Lalit Gupta

Over the last 5-10 years, governments around the world have implemented ‘e-Government’ in some form or fashion, with mixed results. Generally, such efforts have helped them provide enhanced access to information for government agencies, govt employees and citizens.

However, significant issues remain. Most government agencies today, still operate in silos, based on previously built ‘legacy systems’. Essentially, separate computing entities and environments were created to meet diverse needs, with different applications for different organizations. So, while access to services are good, the issues of legacy and IP creation based on business rules have tended to hamper growth and offering of more innovative and effective services for the citizenry. These systems are also generally inflexible and expensive to maintain.

But since they incorporate years of government policy and thousands of man hours of effort, it is understandably difficult to do away with them or move to a new, lower-cost and more agile computing environment.

This infrastructure situation is juxtaposed with an increasingly sophisticated and demanding citizenry. Citizens, both individuals and businesses, are looking for a high level of flexibility and agility by the public agencies to help them do things better and more efficiently. They are very used to particular levels of quality and convenience, drawing these expectations from the private sector. They are consequently growing more demanding in similar levels of convenience and service from their Government agencies. 

These are the two essential challenges that require a next level of evolution for the electronically-enabled government of the future. The call is for government agencies to be creative, do things differently, and quickly, across multiple agencies. Oracle defines this next step as ‘iGovernment’ – the next level of evolution for governments to address contemporary and future challenges.

iGovernment is not just about addressing inefficiencies in cost and flexibility. It is also about liberating a whole lot of energy that can be utilized to create more efficient and innovative citizen services. iGovernment will enable government services to essentially:

• be Innovative – with the flexibility and agility to do things differently and to do things better in being able to define, develop and launch innovative citizen services;
• be Integrated – to break down infrastructures and process silos to enable effective collaboration across agencies; and
• be Intelligent – to embed rich analytics capability and business intelligence into ones’ operations so that an organization is able to monitor the performance of agencies and public programs/ policies in a way not possible before.