Microsoft Brings Malaysian Businesses “Cloud On Your Terms” with the Power of 2

Microsoft System Center 2012 delivers robust, comprehensive and cost-effective management for complex IT environments spanning various Cloud models; Microsoft SQL Server 2012 provides a cloud-ready information platform to unlock breakthrough insights for success and innovation

KUALA LUMPUR, 26 April, 2012 – Microsoft has taken another step toward helping Malaysian companies of all sizes transform the way they do business by making it easier, more flexible and reliable to adopt Cloud Computing with the release of Microsoft System Center 2012 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012, at today’s “Power of 2” conference held at the Sime Darby Convention Centre.

Cloud Computing is typically deployed by organizations in four models: traditional, private, public or a hybrid combination of the two – something that has become more important to understand for Malaysian organizations, which are starting to flock to the Cloud for its advantages to scale on demand and achieve greater productivity. Research done by Forrester Consulting has found that 64 percent of Malaysian companies are either currently using or actively planning cloud initiatives. In these organizations, services such as software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) and infrastructure-as-a-service (“IaaS”) can run across a mix of public cloud, private cloud and on-premise infrastructures all at once. All of this has created a staggeringly complex environment for IT departments to cope with. Managing these hybrid environments with existing tools is leading to increased IT costs and higher staffing requirements.

“In the face of this, Microsoft has committed to provide best-in-class solutions for Malaysian businesses to harness Cloud Computing with unprecedented flexibility and scalability. By offering ‘Cloud On Your Terms’, we are enabling businesses to seamlessly harness the Cloud across private, public and hybrid models, with single-pane IT management using System Center 2012 and fluid movement of data across all platforms using SQL Server 2012,” explained Danny Ong, Chief Marketing & Operations Officer, Microsoft Malaysia.

He continued, “Through Microsoft System Center 2012 we are delivering a robust, comprehensive and cost-effective management tool that lets businesses more easily and effectively manage their entire IT environment from on-premise and to the cloud. Meanwhile, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 provides a cloud-ready information platform that helps companies in Malaysia unlock breakthrough insights across the company as well quickly build solutions and extend data from server to private or public cloud, driving business success and innovation.”

“Launching these two solutions today is a continuation of our commitment to Malaysian businesses to improve their efficiencies and returns on IT investment. In fact, only Microsoft has the experience, depth and breadth to assist Asian companies—from SMBs to large enterprises – in their journey to the cloud,” said Ong.

System Center 2012

With Microsoft System Center 2012, Malaysian businesses have access to the only unified infrastructure management platform that undergirds public, private or hybrid cloud models for end-to-end visibility of their entire IT infrastructure; from hardware component of bare-metal servers right through to its software components like applications, and all the layers in between. System Center 2012 delivers improvements in terms of application performance management via its deep application monitoring capabilities, seamless workflow automation via its Orchestrator solution, state-of-the-art self-serve capabilities, and significantly enhanced virtualization management and automation.

“The seamless management of complex IT infrastructures has become an important business issue largely due to the Consumerization of IT trend – how does a company maintain security and stability of a business IT environment as senior management starts bringing in their own smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks or other popular consumer devices for use in the office, as an example? System Centre 2012 is built from the ground up to enable the necessary process automation, configuration and management across platforms and environments; supporting Windows Server Hyper-V, VMWare vSphere, and Citrix XenServer and working with Windows Server, Sun Solaris, various Linux and Unix distributions, as well as most popular smartphone and tablet operating systems. This enables the IT team to secure and control non-traditional IT devices while still allowing employees to use the devices that they want,” explains Ong.

Combining a common management experience across hybrid environments as well as a self-service model that allows users to customize and request the services they need and greater levels of automation, System Center 2012 gives businesses of all sizes the means to automate and manage their IT environment as a whole, to develop cost-effective cloud infrastructures and to deploy predictable applications.

Furthermore, System Center 2012 delivers its comprehensive suite of cloud administration capabilities at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. Compared to competing solutions savings with System Center 2012 only gets larger as businesses adopt more extensive cloud solutions because its licensing covers unlimited virtual machines so companies can continually increase its VM density without additional licensing costs for virtualizing infrastructure and applications. Compared to other competing solutions, this can generate up to sixteen times the cost savings over three years compared to comparable competing solutions.

SQL Server 2012

In addition to adopting cloud computing for flexibility and economies, Malaysian businesses are also looking at the cloud to help them manage the huge explosion of data that is happening across every level of their organizations. Gartner reports that the volume of information worldwide will grow by 59 percent in 2012 with most of that data being unstructured.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a cloud-ready information platform that will allow Malaysian businesses to harness their data with built-in Business Intelligence capabilities through self-service analytics tools, interactive data exploration and visualizations backed by credible, consistent data and highly scalable data warehousing solutions. Organizations will be able to quickly unlock breakthrough insights within billions of rows of data with familiar tools like PowerPivot built on Excel and Power View for easily understood interactive data visualizations that allow them to quickly make well informed business decisions. Research by Forrester Consulting has found that SQL Server 2012 delivers an ROI of up to 189% with a 1 year payback period.

“Growing numbers of Malaysian companies are choosing SQL Server to manage their information. In the first 3 quarters of FY2012, we have already seen a double-digit percent year-on-year growth in End Customer purchase of SQL Server. Globally, SQL Server is the fastest growing database today and represents 45 percent of market share in units and 200 percent of Microsoft’s BI revenue growth,” said Ong.

SQL Server 2012 meets industry requirements for high availability with the new SQL Server AlwaysOn for mission critical availability. Meanwhile common tools, like Management Studio and SQL Server Data Tools, give organizations built-in support for complex data types, greater interoperability with varied platforms and allow them to quickly create and scale innovative hybrid cloud solutions across public cloud, private cloud and on-premise infrastructures while connection points from SQL Server 2012 make it easy to take advantage of Windows Azure Platform benefits.

Notably, in Malaysia it has been deployed by e-business company IFCA-MSC Berhad, whose CEO Leong Nyu Kuan was on hand to advocate SQL Server 2012, saying it “has tremendous new functionalities–such as features for high availability and disaster recovery, increased performance and improved business intelligence capabilities–which IFCA-MSC Berhad is taking advantage of without having to change its enterprise applications; and all these benefits coupled with the added confidence of greater security.”

To find out more about Microsoft System Center 2012, visit www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/

To learn more about Microsoft SQL Server 2012, visit www.microsoft.com/sql/

Malaysian Mobile Technology Enabler Delivers Faster, More Reliable Data Access With Move to SQL Server

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — April 24, 2012 — MACROKIOSK, a mobile technology enabler for enterprises, today announced its deployment of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The Malaysia-based company made the upgrade to improve performance of its relational database system and to position itself for continued business growth through enabling mobile technologies for enterprises.

Since opening its doors in 2000, MACROKIOSK has established relationships with global mobile operators and grown its etracker (Global Mobile Messaging Network) connectivity coverage to more than 2 billion mobile subscribers worldwide. With the move to SQL Server 2008 R2, MACROKIOSK will benefit from more effective tools for managing large amounts of data and providing customers with the most optimal services.

MACROKIOSK currently serves more than 2,000 clients in more than 37 countries and in 18 industries, including aviation, automotive, medical, hospitality, entertainment, banking and finance, telecommunications, and transportation and logistics. Through etracker, MACROKIOSK offers premium and bidirectional bulk messaging services that serve as the platform for end-user experiences, such as mobile banking transaction alerts, mobile airline flight booking and many other comprehensive mobile services.

“MACROKIOSK is a multicountry mobile technology enabler, and we constantly look for new opportunities for growth — whether through greater internal efficiency or expanded services for our customers,” said Joanna Hew, chief technology officer at MACROKIOSK. “We’ve been very pleased to see the breadth of features and tools in SQL Server 2008 R2, which have enabled our customers to get more done and positioned us to be more responsive to changes in the market.”

Employees and Customers Reap the Benefits

MACROKIOSK worked with Microsoft Premier Support to devise a migration plan and identify any known issues. Consequently, MACROKIOSK was able to complete the migration from SQL Server 2005 in just four hours. Since that time, MACROKIOSK has seen an increase in productivity and operational efficiency:

• Improved performance and availability. The Table Partitioning feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 has enabled MACROKIOSK to split each database table across multiple physical devices, increasing query execution speeds by up to 100 percent. And with a combination of Data Mirroring and a failover configuration, MACROKIOSK improved the availability of its databases.
• Reduced hardware requirements. SQL Server 2008 R2 performed fast backups, while producing compressed backup files that were smaller. MACROKIOSK currently manages about 3.8 terabytes of data and has up to 200 users querying this data simultaneously. The size of uncompressed in-production data remains the same, but the company has seen a 50 percent reduction in the size of compressed backup database files.
• Easier administration. The combination of an improved user interface, enhanced management tools and simpler maintenance procedures help database administrators increase productivity and efficiency. For example, IntelliSense is an auto-suggest/auto-complete feature that assists administrators when entering commands. And Data Collector identifies tables that are sluggish and offers configuration recommendations to improve their performance.

The enhanced database management features in SQL Server 2008 R2 have also improved the user experience for MACROKIOSK customers, many of whom must download data from the company’s servers to create a report. Features such as Table Partitioning have led to a noticeable reduction in how long it takes for customers to generate these reports.

More information about MACROKIOSK’s use of SQL Server 2008 R2 is available in the case study and the Microsoft Customer News Center.