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Karl Ng …The Government has
given MDeC the mandate to lead the
Digital Transformation Programme.
Mugilan … Founder of Golden
Gorillas – an online advertising
solutions startup based in Malaysia.
Ivan Teh … CEO of Fusionex, a multi-award
winning IT company with a global presence.
Its GIANT big data software was featured in a
White Paper published by IDC in June.
marketing expenditure with regional weather
and social media feedback. The client lever-
ages on BDA to build a strong competitive
advantage by making marketing decisions
tied to the findings of the system that it
deployed.
The client also utilises its predictive
analytics system to forecast potential sales
and revenue, which is a very powerful
mechanism.
Another example where a client derived
significant value was where FusionEx used
its BDA system for a business that offers
automated systems designed to optimise
building management.
Ivan explains further: “By analysing data
captured from various types of machinery
(machine-to-machine data), the client was
able to help its customers reduce waste and
cost andwas able to cut energy consumption
by more than 20%.
“Another interesting case studywaswhere
a financial institution client of ours was able
to monitor and make sense of social senti-
ments and relate this to customer satisfaction
as well as key areas of improvements. They
used our system to understand trends and
patterns so that they could better market their
products, increase sales with focus groups
and targeted marketing. In the process of
doing so they were able to attract and better
retain their customers. They used our system
to execute this in an automated manner,
resulting in superior customer insights and
analytics.”
STARTUPS JOIN THE RACE
The time is also ripe for many startup com-
panies to join in this BDA revolution. One
good example of such a startup is Golden
Gorillas – an online advertising solutions
provider based in Malaysia.
The startup aspires to improve advertising
performance and is developing advertising
solutions (for Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads
and other social media ad platforms) that
can help advertisers to double up their leads,
conversions and sales – which essentially
improve their Return on Investment (ROI)
from online advertising.
Its founder and CEOMugilan Chitambram
says: “Social media platforms involve mil-
lions of data being produced and consumed
on a daily basis, and having BDA will help
businesses to understand and evaluate the
available data to improve their commercial
decision making – especially for marketing
budgets and efforts needed to attain better
performance.”
A recent product developed by his
company is Facebook Intelligent Audience
Targeting (FIAT) that provides a platform
for advertisers to run analyses in Facebook
to find their target market based on their
daily activities.
FIAT is being providedmainly as platform-
as-a-service cloud solution for Facebook
advertisers. Mugilan says: “Understanding
the volume of data in Facebook is essential
for businesses mainly relying on Facebook
marketing for their advertising campaigns.
For example, randomly targeting teenagers
fromMalaysia to sell smart phones can be an
extremely huge time and money consuming
task if it were to be done without having solid
research, but what if BDA can help us to
analyse and provide a pattern of a Facebook
user who has been consistently talking about
getting a smartphone over the past few days?
“That’s where FIAT comes in to do the
BDA and help advertisers target better audi-
ences for their ads inside Facebook.”
He adds that FIAT was born out of a real
business need. “We realised that more and
more companies were moving away from
Facebook ads due to a lack of ROI. It was
a personal experience for me as well when
advert optimisation still fails to maximise
the ROI.”
“Therefore, we decided to find the root
cause and started to use BDA to help us in
our mission. We built our own advertising
pattern and algorithm that helped to under-
stand that the ads are not reaching the right
audience through traditional mechanisms.
With the analysis, the whole audience size
was refined based on their recent activities
and it started to deliver proven results with
some of them achieved as much as 300%ad
improvement.”
Capturing and storing data alone will
not help a business to move ahead in the
industry. The big data needs to become smart
data, which not only will empower us to find
out what is happening, but also to find the
cause for the occurrence.
PUTTING MALAYSIA ON THE MAP
These clear potentials have compelledMDeC
to set its sights on this growing segment and
put Malaysia on the forefront in this region,
says Karl Ng.
“The Government has given MDeC the
mandate to lead the Digital Transformation
Programme, which is called Digital Malaysia.
We aspire to have ICT contribute 17% to our
GDP by 2020.
“As mentioned earlier, we have seen the
tremendous benefits BDA has offered to
countries with a head start in it. With the
right enablers such as policy, talent, funding
and technology in place, we are confident
that BDA will contribute significantly to the
national digital economy.”
A successful national BDA initiative will
affect each and every Malaysian, he adds.
“The economic benefits are crystal clear
– it paves the way for more competitive
organisations, increased profits, cost reduc-
tion and job creation. We will surely need
data scientists, data stewards, information
managers, visualisation designers – in many
sectors, namely healthcare, manufacturing,
telcos, banking & finance and retail.
Socially too, it will have a very big impact
as, for example, it may be able to reduce the
spread of diseases by being able to predict
future hotspots. The same applies for crime
prevention – as authorities will be able to
‘know’ where crime will most likely happen
in the future and deploy resources there
accordingly.
“It helpswith pricewatch too – by keeping
inflation in check by predicting future price of
essential items and taking proactive action,
such as like stockpiling.”
Clearly, BDA is a journey, and organisa-
tions who do this well will be able make a
great difference and achieve a huge competi-
tive edge.