Renaming reinforces AIMS service and business longevity as Malaysia’s premier data centre
KUALA LUMPUR, 22 September 2014 – AIMS Group, Southeast Asia’s leading carrier-neutral data services provider, cements its physical presence in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur by signing a long-term anchor tenancy at the 18-storey building that has housed its headquarters for the past 14 years.
AIMS Group Chief Executive Officer Chiew Kok Hin says that this comes after the company’s 20 years of service in the Klang Valley, and demonstrates long term commitment to its clientele. He says, “Our message is simple – AIMS will be in this business for a very long time. We are part of the fabric of this vibrant, world-class city, and AIMS is in the heart of KL. We’re not going anywhere.”
As a carrier-neutral data centre, AIMS is home to all domestic telecommunication providers, as well as more than 80% of international service providers, making Menara AIMS the most connected site in the CBD of Kuala Lumpur and one of the most connected sites in the country. At the same time, AIMS is also the reference site for the Malaysian Internet Exchange (MyIX) at Menara AIMS.
Menara AIMS (formerly known as Menara Aik Hua), with 37,500 square feet of fully commissioned data centre space and another 10,000 square feet work in progress, is minutes away from the iconic Petronas Twin Towers. An additional 13,000 square feet is available in Cyberjaya plus points of presence in Penang, Johor and Kota Kinabalu.
Leading carrier-neutral data provider center is IBMs first managed security services alliance in Malaysia; to provide high data security with holistic management insights at competitive market cost
KUALA LUMPUR, 7 July 2014 – The AIMS Group (AIMS) today announced the first strategic alliance with IBM to roll out IBM’s Managed Security Services (MSS) in Malaysia.
AIMS which is Southeast Asia’s leading carrier-neutral data services provider, will offer its existing and new customers an enhanced range of high quality, managed security services from IBM, which is the world’s leading computing giant, in this area of enterprise-level IT and security.
This initiative addresses the need to help small and medium companies in Malaysia access enterprise grade security infrastructure services delivered by security experts.
“Cyber security is a serious business regardless of the company’s size”, said Chiew Kok Hin, CEO, AIMS Group. “According to a Ponemon Institute study in 2013, a business could lose as much as USD136 per lost record of data in the event of a cyber security breach. However, enterprise level security can be too costly or hard to manage for an SME (Subject Matter Expert), which is why AIMS has teamed up with IBM to address this need.”
He explains further, “With this new partnership, AIMS’s clients will be able to select a managed security service that suits their business IT requirements. Our customers can now benefit from high quality services and not have to invest in personnel or security infrastructure, opting for a one-stop service provider to manage their security infrastructure and security policies. With MSS, customers will not only have world class enterprise level security but can expect to save up to 50 percent on the operation costs that an in-house security deployment and management will cost.”
Leveraging the IBM Security Framework, AIMS will offer the new Managed Security Services delivered via a cloud-based Virtual Security Operations Center (VSOC). This platform provides customers full transparency and insight into their environment as well as a view on normal usage patterns. Some of the benefits available include:
- Reduced costs and minimized complexities
- Better Managed overall risk with an integrated view and holistic dashboard for greater visibility and security intelligence
- High Quality managed and monitoring services delivered through proven processes, integrated technology
- 24-7 technical expertise from AIMS
“AIMS customers receive through IBM virtual support, the ability to integrate the necessary information to give a holistic view of the security surrounding their data assets. We will provide 24-7 technical expertise from our virtual team of technical experts that will be aided by IBM’s intelligence reports, which are constantly updated to reflect the ever expanding cyber security threats that happen every minute,” adds Chiew.
Kris Lovejoy, the General Manager of IBM Worldwide Security Services says, “We chose AIMS as a provider of IBM Security Services because they are a market leader in Malaysia. AIMS has successfully built an integrated ecosystem of various communities together with their diverse client portfolio ranging from large corporations, to SMEs across industries as diverse as aviation, hotel, telecommunication, financial services, online businesses, oil and gas, retail and content providers.”
“There’s half a billion reasons why businesses need to prioritise data security. Our research indicates that more than half a billion personal data such as name, credit card numbers and passwords were leaked in 2013 alone due to online security breaches. By introducing a cost competitive MSS, we hope to minimise the loss of data amongst businesses in Malaysia,” ends Lovejoy.
The security offerings available span across multiple security domains including vulnerability management, application scanning, network-based firewall, IDS/IPS, UTM, secure email/web gateway, hosted security event and log management, web / DDoS protection, and Managed SIEM.
Data center professionals to be involved in learning programmes, projects and industry-sharing projects at INTI; Internship and job opportunities to be created with leading data centre player for graduates
KUALA LUMPUR, 9 June, 2014 – The AIMS Group (AIMS) and INTI Universal Holdings (INTI) announced a joint partnership under ‘The INTI Corporate Partner (ICP)’ initiative to drive industry centric education amongst generation Y.
CEO of AIMS Group, Chiew Kok Hin, shares that while 4.4 million IT jobs will be created globally by 2015 to support the growth of big data, unfortunately only one-third of the jobs will be filled.
He says, “Gartners research finding strongly indicates a current global problem that is the lack of relevant talent as students are not equipped with the right set of industry-specific skills. And this is precisely why AIMS has embarked on this partnership with INTI in order to more effectively contribute our industry expertise in designing academic programmes that are industry-relevant and which are in tandem with changes that affect the industry.”
AIMS’ one of the leading carrier-neutral data centres in Malaysia and South East Asia, will be working with INTI an education establishment that has been at the forefront of higher education for over two decades in the country- to share their industry expertise and knowledge, in order to ensure INTI provides the latest industry relevant curriculum. AIMS will provide host guest speakers from senior management lever, sponsor specific employer projects and offer INTI students internship opportunities at AIMS that can potentially lead to job offers.
“At the same time, this partnership with INTI, provides a platform for AIMS employees to ‘give back to the society’ by taking part in the education process by becoming guest speakers. INTI students will definitely benefit from this as they will get first-hand knowledge from corporate professionals who are actively involved in the operations of the data centre and outsourcing industry,” he adds.
Jeffrey Goh, Chief Executive of INTI International College Kuala Lumpur (IICKL) says, “We are incredibly pleased with our partnership with AIMS, as this in line with one of the pillars of our mission, which is to provide the most innovative education. By providing academic programmes which are vetted by industry players, we are putting them in touch with current industry trends and issues, which are in valuable learnings that will give them the edge over their peers.”
“Our hope is to be able to mould a generation of highly-skilled employees from INTI. At the same time, provide an effective placement system for graduates that meet the exact requirements of the local outsourcing and data centre industry by way of internship opportunities at AIMS, leading on to full-fledged careers in this specialised ICT field,” explains Chiew.
This AIMS-INTI partnership will also benefit AIMS employees who will have the opportunity to mould the minds of future leaders by being guest speakers and sharing real-world challenges so students can start thinking about how to apply their academic knowledge to solve these issues.
“On the other hand, INTI will also offer scholarships as well as fee rebates for AIMS employees who want to further their studies at INTI. This will encourage a culture of continuous learning amongst AIMS employees to keep up with specialised knowledge,” adds Chiew.
“We hope more corporate partners, such as AIMS will come forward to collaborate with us to provide our students with the right skillsets and competencie that are critical to the growth and future of our nation.” Goh ends.
Following a general move by Asian FSI Industries, Malaysia’s national bank- Bank Negara (BN) is encouraging more online transactions by reducing the fee per online transfer transaction from RM2.00 (USD0.61) to RM0.10 (USD0.03) while increasing the transaction fee for cheques.
This will add to the increase of data and add to the challenge for banking CIOs of how to handle this data, said carrier neutral data centre operator AIMS Groups Vice President, Enterprise Sales- Mulia Binti Mohamed Onn, during an interview.
This means banks need to ensure their data is secured. BN guidelines include the responsibility for financial services (FSI) organizations to have a secondary Disaster Recovery (DR) site, said Mulia.
What are the top challenges you believe in the financial services industry is facing this year?
With more users opting to bank online, some of the main challenges FSIs will face in the short term is the need to accommodate massive data expansion (both infra and systems), tighter/ stricter policies transaction control i.e. implement two factor validation, longer bank account numbers as such.
The initiative by BN is commendable but banks need to ensure their online transaction system is ready to securely protect customers data and the increase in user numbers. Otherwise we will have a case of customers being unhappy at a constantly down site or inaccessible services or worse missing money. Where is your data stored at, is there a secondary site, are both sites managed reliably will probably be the questions banks will frequently have to answer in the near future as customers become more aware about data online transactions.
You mentioned that Bank Negara guidelines require FSIs to have a secondary Disaster Recovery site. What does this mean to customers and why is this important to consumers and FSIs?
Bank Negara guidelines for financial service providers requires them to have good business continuity management and disaster recovery plans. Basically it means FSIs need to be able to implement a backup plan and have the right infrastructure in place to avert any possible problems that may arise from natural disasters such as flood, tsunami, nationwide electrical outages to system failure that will affect their business continuity.
If a bank only had one data centre to host all their information, all their customers information from transaction history to sensitive information could be lost and banks may not be able to recover the information in time. Imagine opening your online account and to find an alarming 0 balance in your savings/ current account due to the main site being down or affected by a disaster. When a bank has a secondary DR site, it provides customers the assurance that in the event of a failure at the main site, their data can still be safely accessed through a secondary site. Best of all customers are likely not to even notice the downtime and will continue using the services as normal.
Companies need to realise that downtime means a mark on their business reputation. The failure to access an account, or worse missing financial records, will create uncertainty amongst customers who are more than likely to take their money to another bank where they feel more safe to do transactions.
Customers would not want to leave their money in a bank that is unprepared to handle eventual disasters. So banks must place a priority in ensuring they have a business continuity plan in place which is supported by a well managed secondary DR site.
What sort of other steps do financial organizations need to go through to ensure they achieve compliance and ensure full business continuity?
Customers need to house their data in a well equipped and monitored data centre. Look at how the centre is being managed and how often health checks are done on their infrastructure. In order to ensure their data is safe and sound, financial organisations should conduct regular health checks on their network infrastructure, system and applications.
There also need to get properly certified with ITSM, ISMS and PCI DDS.
The governing principle behind an ISMS (Information Security Management System) is that an organization should design, implement and maintain a coherent set of policies, processes and systems to manage risks to its information assets, thus ensuring acceptable levels of information security risk
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a process-based practice intended to align the delivery of information technology (IT) services with needs of the enterprise, emphasizing benefits to customers compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) means that our systems are secure, and customers can trust us with their sensitive payment card information.
On annual basis they need to bring in independent auditors to perform pen test on their network and systems.
When managing large volumes of data, what are the best ways to get beneficial balance between privacy and security concerns?
Policy makers need to constantly review the security and privacy standards based on market trends, consumer appetites and geological condition. The world is moving at a fast pace and data is growing at break neck speed, we need to constantly evolve with the times to ensure we remain up-to-date to the business requirements of enterprises.
Could you give more details of how your carrier neutral approach better serves your customers?
Technology regularly breaks down, whether it’s well maintained or not but the good thing about a well maintained tech infrastructure is, you have a higher chance of predicting when it will malfunction. Similarly your services can face downtime if your carrier is down. Which is why data intensive organisations like banks, must ensure that they have more than one choice of carrier provider to fall back on in the event of a downtime. A datacentre that limits you to one carrier is a risky choice as you lack the flexibility of choosing the right one to match your business needs.
Carrier neutral datacentres offer an added plus point to a business as organisations can choose to have more than one carrier as their back up in the event of a network failure or fibre cut. Flexibility is the key here as, by being carrier neutral, you have the choice to pick the package that best suits your business needs.
Every time an organisation wants to change their telco/ service provider package, all they have to do is switch over without having to physically move any of their infrastructure to another data centre. Carrier-neutrality gives customers the flexibily to take advantage of competitive telco rates and choose the telco or ISP connectivity network provider that fits their business module.
By being carrier-neutral, AIMS is connected to all domestic service providers, as well as more than 80% of international service providers, making their data centres among the most interconnected in the country. At the same time, AIMS also hosts one of the three nodes of the Malaysian Internet Exchange (MyIX) at MENARA AIMS.
AIMS offers a high level of uptime availability, stability, 24-7 technical support and realibility that is supported by a large choice of connectivity vendors and data security at competitive rates.
We always advise customers that they must know what they want. For those who nees more information, we provide technical expertise right from the point of pre-sales to set up and 24 x 7 technical monitoring support. We advise them on what they need to look into before deciding on a data centre, the infrastructure and system that is needed to support their business and walk them through a customized plan that fits their business module. With more than 200 number of customers, we are able to share with them our best practice guidelines to ensure set up and implementation runs smoothly.
Customers also need to look at the power resource capabilities of a data centre as data centres operate 24 hours a day and needs to be constantly powered. Find out if there is a backup energy source and how their power is being managed as data centres consume high amount of energy and through proper best practices, they should be able to minimize heat with proper cooling systems in place to ensure power consumption is maintained.
AIMS is designed to take into account a customer’s scalability and is ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified and spans 50,500 square feet with data centres located in central Kuala Lumpur, Cyberjaya, Johor Bahru and Penang.
How do you serve your customers in territories outside of Malaysia?
AIMS is currently only based in Malaysia. However we are part of the regional Asia Data Centre Alliance (ADCA) and are able to offer our customers multicity connectivity through our partner datacentres in different countries in Asia.
AIMS continues to collaborate with partners that can bring value to our customers. We work with regional partners through ADCA to ensure our customers can easily set up a presence in countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and more. For example, we have collaborated with China Telecom to roll out IPVPN services to enterprises in Malaysia who want to establish business in China. Besides that we are constantly on the lookout for ways to provide our customers with value added managed services that fits different business sector needs. AIMS diverse client portfolio ranges from large local corporations and multinational companies to SME businesses, across industries as diverse as aviation, hotel, telecommunication, financial services, online businesses, oil and gas, retail and content providers.
Asia is a growing market but Malaysia is taking centre stage in the outsourcing sphere as it provides investors geographical stability, ease of doing business, infrastructure readiness, a lower cost of doing business that is relatively cheaper than in Singapore and Indonesia.
In 2013, AIMS achieved double digit revenue growth, ahead of the industry average and we are confident that 2014 will be another great year for AIMS.
~ Interview by AvantiKumar. Published in CIO Asia. March 18, 2014 ~
Operators of energy-hungry data centre providers want government help to reduce their electricity bills that have eaten into profits since the tariff was revised in January.
The operators of these server farms say electricity bills contribute nearly half of their business costs and a 16% jump in their power bills is threatening their competitiveness against regional rivals.
“Industry electricity costs have gone up by 16%, and given that power constitutes more than 40% of our overall costs, this has a negative impact on margins,” said AIMS Data Centre Sdn Bhd CEO Chiew Kok Hin.
“The money would have otherwise been used to develop innovative products and services and capacity. This increase has indirectly affected our growth.”
AIMS is a subsidiary of Time dot- Com Bhd and part of the Malaysian Data Centre Alliance (MDCA). The MDCA has sent a request to national utility company Tenaga Nasional Bhd for special rates when the new tariffs were announced.
MDCA is an alliance of 17 data centre providers nationwide that was formed in October last year. The companies include AIMS, HeiTech Managed Services Sdn Bhd and NTT MSC Sdn Bhd.
The half-year revenue for the industry is RM292 million and it is set to achieve the target revenue of RM562 million for 2013, which marks a 20% growth from 2012.
A spokesman for Heitech Managed said the large increment in electricity price has cut profits on existing contracts significantly.
He said the company also needed to charge new customers a lot more than previously, making them less competitive than data centres in neighbouring countries.
“Overall the cost of doing business has increased and margins are reduced,” he said.
“We will continue our request for a lower tariff with the relevant agency. We think data centre providers need support to stay viable in Malaysia in line with the governments Economic Transformat ion Programme to position Malaysia as a world class data centre hub,” the spokesman said.
AIMS Chiew said the MDCA is asking for a redesignation on its electricity tariff category rather than a lower rate. He said in Singapore data centres are given preferential rates to promote the industry and to provide competitive costing.
TNB said it was open to suggestions and would consider any request from the MDCA.
“Briefings/ discussions were conducted before and after the tariff review as part of our regular communication with industry players.
TNB will communicate with the respective companies on this matter,” said a TNB official recently.
In the meantime, Chiew said data centres are already passing on the cost to customers in stages, which has made their services more expensive.
This, he said, will also have a trickle down impact whereby their customers will also have to pass down the added cost to their own customers.
“Eventually our customers from industries such as tourism, SMEs, publications, FSIs and every company that requires data storage will pass this down to their customers which are the consumers,” he said.
The extra cost could also see these data centres losing out in terms of competitiveness to their regional peers in Singapore, where data centres have special designated lower rates.
“In Singapore, businesses which can commit to a certain amount of usage, will enjoy a special rate. This is something we don’t see here in Malaysia.
So this brings down our competitive rate as compared to Singapore as cost is unfortunately still a deciding factor for investors.
“Singapore recognises the importance of the data centres as a vital ingredient for growth within the telecommunication and IT sectors but across other economic sectors as well. As such, they do accord and implement relatively better policies and frameworks that facilitate foreign investment and also allow local domestic data centre operators to thrive,” Chiew said.
Chiew said as data centres become less competitive due to the higher electricity cost, he foresees smaller businesses looking elsewhere to store their data and potential investors may not look towards Malaysia as a data centre hub anymore.
“Companies that are in the business of outsourcing have a great dependency on cost optimised data centres. So the price increase in power has hindered the growth and trend we see towards outsourcing of services and infrastructure.
“We believe at some point the growth will return but at least for the next 12-24 months the growth momentum has been slowed,” said Chiew.
~ Interview by Farah Adila. Published in The Malaysian Reserved. May 5, 2014.~
Kuala Lumpur, 16 April 2014 – The AIMS Group (“AIMS”), Malaysia and South East Asia leading carrier-neutral data centre and managed services provider, today announces that they have been awarded the prestigious 2014 Frost & Sullivan “Data Centre Services Provider of the Year”.
This win was received by the data centre at the annual Frost & Sullivan Malaysia Excellence Awards that was held on 15th April 2014 at the Traders Hotel, Puteri Harbour, Nusajaya, Johor.
Each year, the Frost & Sullivan Malaysian Excellence Awards is held to provide recognition to organisations which have surpassed market expectations by exhibiting outstanding performance in their respective industries in the country.
Currently in its 10th year, the Frost & Sullivan award continues to place emphasis on various select areas that drive corporate excellence such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development.
Chiew Kok Hin, the CEO of the AIMS Group says, “It’s an honour for AIMS to once again receive the Data Centre Provider of the Year Award for 2014 from Frost and Sullivan. It’s been a remarkable year for AIMS as we once again achieved double digit growth with a 16 percent increase in revenue in 2013. This award is a feather in the cap to our efforts to be the top data centre in the country.”
Mayank Kapoor, the Industry Manager for Information & Communication Technologies at Frost & Sullivan says, “AIMS has exhibited its capability to provide a full spectrum of data centre services, and creates synergistic value for each engagement with their strategic partners to offering flexible pricing options to its data centre customers.”
“AIMS commitment to sustainability that has made it the first Malaysian data centre services provider to implement the environmental-friendly Dynamic Rotary Uninterruptible Power Supply (DRUPS). The company’s well rounded services offerings, state of the art data centre and innovative solutions were the lynchpins for its success in 2013.”
“Our proactive expansion both in Kuala Lumpur and the launch of our new data centre in Cyber Jaya (at the end of 2012), was a key factor in boosting the company’s achievement in 2013,” shares Chiew.
Today, the AIMS Group remains one of the most connected data centre in Malaysia, with direct sites located in central Kuala Lumpur, Cyberjaya, Johor and Sabah totalling over 50,000 square feet of data center space. All of these sites are solidly connected to all major regionals via the most diverse (being carrier-neutral) connectivity networks, in order to serve over 300 corporate clients from various industries.
Kapoor adds, “By bringing on board multiple carriers, carrier neutral data centres like AIMS, establish a unique value proposition in the market by offering customers the ability to work with any carrier of their choice instead of being tied down to a particular telecommunications service provider.”
“Carrier-neutral data centres are also more adept at providing higher network redundancy due to their non-reliance on any single telco provider thus attracting a wider array of customers from industry verticals such as media, multi-nationals, tourism, content, gaming and more.”
Chiew says, “We have always emphasized carrier-neutrality as a crucial network infrastructure to support our range of managed services for our customers. Our efforts to remain carrier neutral have paid off as today we have been recognised by Frost & Sullivan for our ability to provide customers with choice and flexibility.”
“AIMS truly believes that this sets us apart from our competitors as customers are always looking for the best options to access and transfer all the data traffic to and from their hosted sites. We would also like to thank our customers for continuing to place their trust on AIMS. We will continue to work hand in hand with our customers to provide them with customisations that can help set their business ahead of the game,” ends Chiew.
Local carrier neutral data center AIMS collaborates with world’s largest fixed line and broadband telecom operator
KUALA LUMPUR, 11 November, 2013 – AIMS Group (“AIMS”), Malaysia and South East Asia’s leading operator of premium carrier-neutral data centre and managed service provider, today announces its partnership with China Telecom (M) Sdn Bhd (“CT”), the world’s largest wireline telecommunications and broadband services provider as well as the world’s largest CDMA mobile operator.
According to CEO of AIMS Chiew Kok Hin, the partnership will see AIMS collaboration with CT in two areas AIMS will be a reseller of CT’s premium IP routes as well as Chinese data center capacity to local corporations seeking for extension into the various Chinese cities.
“In hand with this arrangement, AIMS will be working with CT to roll out IPVPN (Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network) services as more Chinese Internet Content is expected to be in demand by the Malaysian market.”
He adds that the move is also aligned with the Malaysian government EPP 3 vision to positioning Malaysia as a World-class Data Centre Hub.
“AIMS select partnership with CT as Asia’s premier telecommunications and Internet Service Provider (ISP) is part of our on going effort in providing more value added services and competitive variation to our customers who require a niche from their data center provider.”
President of China Telecom (M) Sdn Bhd, Li Jun adds, “CT partnership with AIMS is also with the objective of attracting ISPs and Internet Data Center (IDCs) providers in Malaysia to do business with CT.
Indeed, this partnership marks an important milestone in CT’s supporting role to complement Malaysia in establishing itself as ASEAN regional hub for telecommunications.”
Li adds that CT has a vast experience in the operations of data centers with more than 300 IDCs in mainland China including major cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu; and currently has also built five (5) IDCs overseas.
Chiew ends, “With the CT-AIMS partnership collaboration, Malaysian companies and AIMS customers seeking to venture into the Chinese market can now leverage on the established premier IP China routes for more synergistic business and content sharing opportunities between China and ASEAN ISPs.”
According to market research company, Radicati Group, there were already some 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide in 2012. Those same users sent over 144.8 billion emails daily. And, the numbers are expected to rise exponentially.
The growth of the Internet points towards a definite increase in the number of websites.
“Today, websites (or domains) are the direct representation of a business brand as the virtual world becomes more active. With commerce being transacted within the Internet, a company’s website sets the impression and credibility of its business brand.: said Web and E-commerce hosting company Exabytes Network Sdn. Bhd. Chief Executive Officer- Chan Kee Siak.
As of June this year, Domainworldwide.com reported that there are over 46 million registered websites, worldwide.
At the same time, Chan highlights that while Asia accounts for 44% (roughly 1.1 billion users) of the world’s Internet population, Internet penetration in the Asian region has only reached 27.5%.
“I believe this number will only increase in the next few years with the current aggressive introduction of web-enabled smartphones. More Internet users automatically means an increase in data. Exabytes already hosts over 200,000 websites, and we always need to be prepared to scale up our system to cater for a size-able increase in websites while ensuring reliable and uptime website-hosting for all the existing domains that we host,” he said.
The Exabytes Group of Companies has been in the hosting business since 2001, providing a diverse range of hosting related services such as web and email hosting, cloud hosting, e-commerce hosting, IT hosting and management services. The company business is unusual because it is completely online.
With the bulk of its customers comprising Malaysian SMEs, it also recently ventured into e-commerce hosting with its Easy.my portal service.
“To achieve a high level of website uptime availability, Exabytes relies heavily on a very stable data centre that not only hosts all our websites on their servers, but gives consistently good support and connectivity services, data security and affordable pricing for any major scale up.” said Chan.
That’s when Exabytes decided to team up with AIMS, the leading carrier neutral data centre operator and managed services provider in Malaysia and South East Asia.
“So far, AIMS has been excellent in meeting all of Exabytes requirements to successfully run a very large scale website-hosting business. The uptime is excellent and has exceeded the guaranteed service-level agreement,” said Chan.
“The AIMS Data Centre workers are highly professional. It is headed by its CEO Chiew Kok Hin, who is a good listener and always open to suggestions and feedback to better support Exabytes as an important data centre customer. This gives our business the needed flexibility to expand our growth,” said Chan.
“AIMS carrier neutrality is also a great thing because everytime Exabytes thinks of changing our telco/ service provider package, we do not have to physically move any of our business applications to another data centre. AIMS gives us the flexibility and choice to select any telco or ISP connectivity network provider that Exabytes wants, thus allowing us to take maximum advantage of the competitive telco rates,” explained Chan.
To remain as a leader in the web-hosting and e-commerce business, Exabytes intends to continue differentiating themselves in terms of service quality to their SME customers. And with the strong support of its data centre partner AIMS for over five years, Chan said, “Exabytes serves over 67,000 clients, 200,000 websites and 1 million email accounts. We are also the top hosting provider in Malaysia with 26% of the market share- we couldn’t have done this without AIMS as our data centre that provides us with what our business needs to scale up with a peace of mind in terms of consistent quality and top technologies.”
Company targets emerging Asean markets where demand for data storage is on the rise
Information retrieval specialist AIMS Data Centre Sdn Bhd is ready to make a push into the regional markets in Asean, planning to venture into Vietnam and Myanmar within a year.
CEO Chiew Kok Hin said the company data storage in Malaysia is now 90% utilized and AIMS is looking to add remote data storage in emerging Asean markers where demand for such services is also rising.
“To certain extend, Malaysia is a small market compared to the rest of the Asean’s population. There is still so much we can do if we go regional. We are not here to be only a local player but also regional. We see the opportunity of growing in Asean where the trends indicate that there is a need for the kind of service we are offering,” he told The Malaysian Reserve in a recent interview.
Chiew said since the launch of both of its data centre in Kuala Lumpur and Cyberjaya, the take-up rate has been encouraging with its storage nearing capacity.
AIMS, which is a unit of Time dotCom Bhd, owns 37,500 sq ft of space in Menara Aik Hua and 13,000 sq ft of data centre space in Cyberjaya.
On May 21, Time dotCom Bhd announced that the group was allocating some RM250 million in capital expenditure (capex) for the financial year ending Dec 31, 2013 (FY 13), of which RM100 million is to be spent on its submarine cable investment in Asia Pacific Gateway (APG).
Time dotCom Bhd CEO Afzal Abdul Rahim was quoted recently as saying that the group is on the lookout for further acquisitions, especially fixed line telecommunication companies, metropolitan fibre players and data centre companies outside Malaysia, such as Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore.
Chiew said after TIME acquired AIMS last year, the subsidiary has been given certain advantages such as additional access to certain segments of customers.
“The acquisition has positioned us to provide value proposition to our customers. Being part of a bigger group, it has given us added advantage of being a one stop solution of our services,” he said.
~ Article by Farah Adilla. Published in The Malaysian Reserve. 3 June 2013
New senior management appointment as part of data centre organisation-wide effort to boost customer satisfaction and operational efficiency
KUALA LUMPUR, March, 2013 – AIMS Group (“AIMS”) the country premier carrier-neutral data centre, today announced its recent appointment of Mohammad Azman Abdul Rahman as the Group new Chief Operating Officer.
The former Head of procurement at Time dotCom Berhad Azman has over 15 years experience of working in the Telco industry in various operation roles in Ericsson, DIGI, NSW Cable Systems, Siemens and Celcom.
AIMS Group CEO, Chiew Kok Hin said, “Azman’s vast experience in the operations and procurement sectors of the Telco industry is expected to contribute significantly to elevating the hosting and service standards of the local data centre industry via AIMS leadership in this market.”
“AIMS is at a crucial junction where we need to differentiate from the competitors beyond the capabilities of a basic data centre. We are in the business of ensuring our customers remain constantly connected, hence we have to constantly evolve with the right technology and managed services that add a differentiation value to their business,” he shared.
With the new appointment, Azman will be in charge of the operations and procurement of services and infrastructure in the company while Chiew puts greater focus on the commercial and revenue growth of the company.
Azman said, “The Data centre industry is a highly sustainable industry with a huge growth potential. My immediate and main focus will be in optimising AIMS operations and systems to meet the needs and expectations of our customers.”
“Cost efficiencies are a crucial part of business sustainability. The secret is to achieve this while maintaining the ability to scale according to business growth,” he ended.
Azman has a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia and began his career in the telecommunication sector with Celcom Timur Sarawak. Throughout his 15 years career in the telecommunication sector, Azman has played a key role in clinching and negotiating multimillion deals in his former positions.