Over the next few years, Asia is poised to see tremendous growth in the area of managed services, according to Value Advantage.

Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the implementation, support and maintenance of IT systems to an external provider, which allows organisations to focus on their core business activities. According to Frost & Sullivan, organisations in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend over US$10.25 billion on managed services by 2010, up from $6.47 billion in 2007.

Value Advantage is Asia’s first host of Canada-based Level Platforms Inc’s Managed Workplace, the industry-leading Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform designed exclusively for use by managed service providers (MSPs).

It's RMM products include management of IT systems' architecture, monitoring, managed cloud services, alerting, alerts Viewer, remote Control, out-of-band management, patch Management, scripting, bandwidth monitoring, asset management, asset tags. policy modules, reporting, customised user interface, trouble tickets, 3rd party integration, collaboration, on-premise or hosted solutions.

However, many managed service providers (MSPs), especially in Asia, work on an inefficient model of reacting to problems only after they start to affect the customer's day-to-day operations or what is called “firefighting.”

Furthermore, many small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) don't take advantage of the full value of their IT systems; rather, they have simply purchased the equipment for the sake of adopting technology in typical kiasu fashion as they say in Asia.

So how should MSP’s aim to counteract both these problems? How can remote monitoring and management (RMM) enable MSP’s to better serve their clients as well as increase productivity and efficiency for themselves?

Well, Value Advantage is confident that its RMM products will help MSPs to better serve SMEs in Asia.

However, based on the past experiences of other service providers, they found Asian SMEs to be resistant to embrace remote services.

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.

Cloud computing is the latest buzzword these days and make no mistake, it’s not about angels sitting on clouds performing customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, business intelligence, accounts receivable, accounts payable and other such functions on their notebook PCs.

In fact it’s been around over 10 years and was previously know by rather clinical terms such as the application service provider (ASP) model, IBM called its offering a service oriented architecture (SOA) and it was previously called software as a service (SoaS).

Simply put, cloud computing and its earlier names refer to various types of software applications hosted on a remote centralized server, instead of on each individual PC or a local server, and accessed using a thin client environment, which usually is a Java, XML or a Web 2.0 app running within a web browser on a PC, PDA, smartphone or other platforms.

If you live in the Klang Valley and you use RapidKL buses to travel, you won't miss seeing the video ads from Asia Media TV. The current economic situation is forcing companies to find alternatives ways to advertise their product. With advertisers reducing their spending, companies like Asia Media seems to be benefiting from the current recession.

Comm & Tech Asia finds out more about this company and the people behind it in our interview with the CEO of Asia Media TV, Dato' Ricky Wong (second pict. below). 

Sun Microsystems Malaysia appointed Loo Chong Peng (CP Loo) as its managing director in early July. Loo replaces Gan Boon San who was promoted president of Sun Asia South, replacing Lionel Lim, who was promoted senior vice-president, Asia Pacific region. Its former country sales director, Loo will now oversee Sun’s operations in Malaysia, drive Sun Malaysia’s business opportunities, increase its revenue and grow its market share.

Gan became managing director of Sun Malaysia in August 2006 and while there, he was also in charge of Sun in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brunei and Bangladesh, while also being chief of operations of Asia South. Gan’s is now in charge of strategy and must ensure a consistent, integrated and responsive customer experience to deliver growth and profitability across Asia South. As Sun was in a quite period, Gan could not divulge its overall worldwide revenue, except to say that it had “announced a slew of software and hardware” and that “everybody is smiling.”