SINGAPORE: Big data analytics (BDA) and integration is critical to the success of the Digital Malaysia initiative, according to US-based Talend, a software vendor that specialises in big data integration.
“By integrating and then harnessing the data generated from Malaysian citizens’ digital footprint, organisations create new opportunities, improve services and facilitate innovation for the nation’s public and private sectors,” its chief executive officer Mike Tuchen told Bernama in an email interview.
He was responding to a a question on how big data analytics can help Malaysia advance in the development of the Digital Malaysia programme.
According to him, Malaysian organisations face the challenge of integrating the sheer variety and volume of data now available within and beyond the organisation in order to gain a unified and actionable view of the business.
“These include customer data, collected through mobile applications customer interactions and social media analytics,” he said when asked what are some challenges Malaysian companies face in getting value from big data.
As the data collected is not standardised and often not clean, organisations face the operational challenge of integrating data to generate valuable insights, he added.
On whether Malaysian companies are aggressively investing in big data and deploying big data solutions, Tuchen said: “We are seeing early stages of interest and adoption of big data in Malaysia.
“This is similar to the trends we have experienced in Europe and the US, where some early adopter sectors including finance, telecommunications and retail are leading the adoption curve.
“As more companies explore and implement proof of concepts and engineering teams experiment and test open source solutions, we foresee more Malaysian companies investing in big data solutions in the near future,” he said.
Tuchen said a signifcant number of organisations in Malaysia are already embarking on Big Data initatives focused specifically around Hadoop and real-time data integration to ensure a sustained competitive advantage in their respective industry.
These initaitves cover both new projects and modernisation of their existing investments, he said.
To help develop Malaysia as a data science hub, Tuchen said Talend has joined the BASE (Big Analytics Skills Enablement) initiative with industry partners like Cloudera and Malaysia Digital Economy (MDEC) to train data professionals in Malaysia.
“This includes working with academic institutions to equip the Malaysian workforce with big data, analytics and integration skills, to effectively match trained data professionals to sectors where their skills are required and maximised,” he said.
Tuchen said Malaysia’s financial services and telecommunications sectors have evolved to become more data driven and focused, and are using data to improve customer insights and services and reduce churn.
In addition, he said, the ability to do this in real time integrating data from disparate sources has increased the value of Big Data.
“One sector in Malaysia with significant potential to become more data driven would be e-commerce,” he said.
The Malaysian e-commerce industry is fuelled by domestic demand and is well supported by a sound infrastructure and broadband connectivity.
Based on consumer patterns and behaviours, the data obtained by e-retailers can be used to predict a customer’s next purchase or offer a sales coupon or free shipping service to the customer, in order to provide a specially tailored retail experience, he said. — Bernama