Mobile World Congress 2021 (MWC 2021) is upon us. The conference is set to happen in Barcelona next month and it is where some of the world’s electronics giants meet to introduce new products or new concepts for 2021. It is a place where we might get to see new smartphones being launched as well.
Last year’s MWC was cancelled for obvious reasons. While MWC has kicked-off as a physical event for 2021, a lot of people still think it is a bad idea to attend the conference in-person. One of those people who recently decided that it was not a good idea is Samsung. Lenovo joined that boat soon after.
Samsung cited health and safety reasons for not attending MWC 2021 in-person. This does not mean that they are not participating in the conference though. Samsung will still be present at MWC remotely. In other words, MWC 2021 will still happen for Samsung, but taken completely online.
Samsung and Lenovo join several high-profiled giants in their physical absence in Barcelona for MWC 2021. Among the big names that announced their physical absence at Barcelona includes Sony, Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle, and even Google. All of them cited health and safety concerns for their staffs for not attending MWC 2021.
All of this is not particularly unexpected though. The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 is still a major global concern with new strains discovered every other month or so. The current infection numbers are not particularly encouraging as well, leading governments to close their borders and restrict movements and employing tighter regulations to curb the pandemic. The decision to bring events online is also inline of Apple, Google, and E3’s decision to bring their conferences and events completely online and completely free to attend for people around the world.
While the numbers are dwindling, there are still some key attendees yet to announce their physical absence for MWC 2021 though. Among some of those names are LG and Xiaomi. LG though has announced that they are pulling out from the smartphone business recently.
GSMA claims that they have anticipated the move from manufacturers to back out of being physically present in MWC 2021. In light of the pandemic and their cancellation in 2020, GSMA has also developed their own virtual platform to ensure that participating brands can still have their MWC presence. The online platform also ensures that attendees still get to experience MWC 2021, albeit in a more personal and private manner.
This article is written based on an email interview with Mr Chris Teo, CEO of Mednefits.
Automation seems to be all the rage nowadays; seeing implementations in a wide spectrum of industries. However, you’d never have thunk that automation could be the answer to one of the most pervasive issues that beleaguer companies – employee medical benefits. The current norm in administering medical benefits is through costly insurance plans which not only cover hospitalisation but also outpatient treatment. These plans can cause some undue financial strain on the company.
That said, automating the process through bridging companies and outpatient providers such as neighbourhood clinics could be the rosetta stone to solving the conundrum. With platforms like Mednefits, neighbourhood clinics and other smaller outpatient health providers can be linked directly to companies for the administration of these benefits. Platforms of the same creed allow companies to link directly with outpatient providers to better administer and optimise their spending for employee health benefits.
It may seem like we’ve gone a little too far into administering health benefits, but these platforms aren’t just about automating the administration thereof. They also allow clinics and outpatient providers to automate their own in-house administration processes. They will also empower these providers to adopt more current technologies in their day to day processes. Processes such as patient records and administration can be automated and digitized allowing them to focus on what matters – patient care. The hours spent on patient administration is also minimised with the implementation of automated registration. In addition, even when it comes to patient care, doctors can focus on treating the patient with automated voice notes.
In a system that has been ravaged by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the implementation of automation technologies can actually be a boon for the medical arena – even in neighbourhood clinics. Using things like artificial intelligence (A.I.) to help with analysing, recording and even consolidating patient data into actionable insights. According to Chris Teo, CEO of Mednefits, “Prioritising digitalisation for tasks that can be automated gives more time for healthcare workers to put patients first.” It may seem like a wide sweeping statement, but when the majority of menial tasks have been automated, doctors running neighbourhood clinics can spend less time administrating their business and focus on delivering effective care to their patients.
How then do companies benefit? With platforms like Mednefits, human resource departments need not engage insurance companies. Instead, they deal with a pay per use system which allows them to pay according to employee usage. These platforms provide a more seamless experience when it comes to employee benefits. The need for long lists of panel clinics is eliminated through the use of the Mednefits app which automatically highlights nearby panel clinics when employees need to get an MC or doctor’s note. A simple click of an icon for all the information at their fingertips. Co-pay arrangements can also be eliminated.
That said, when it comes to implementing such automation systems, the issue of data privacy naturally comes up. In a world where it seems like we’re facing a data breach on a weekly basis, access to personal data – in this case, patient data – is a valid concern. However, according to Mr Teo, the digitization data of patient data can be isolated from platforms like Mednefits. In fact, he stresses that while the platform does bridge the gap between outpatient healthcare providers, it doesn’t give companies access to sensitive patient data. Companies will only be able to track items such as claims made at these outpatient facilities. That said, this doesn’t discount the need on both company and provider’s ends to properly ascertain that their data is protected.
Essentially, platforms like Mednefits aim to not only give companies better control of their spending when it comes to healthcare benefits for their employees. They aim to help streamline the process for both companies and outpatient healthcare providers to allow them to focus on building their respective businesses. That said, eliminating a costly middleman when it comes to healthcare also makes it more accessible to the masses. As such, automating and optimising is a seemingly win-win-win situation. As Mr Teo puts it, “By streamlining and automating the administration work in the provision, costs can be reduced while improving the patient experience as well as the reducing the employer’s workload.”
Shopee is making it easier for users to get more value with their eWallet offering. The eCommerce platform has introduced a new feature which emphasizes their online-to-offline (O2O) approach. The new offering allows merchants to acquire footfall from Shopee users by listing offers and deals on the Shopee app.
With COVID-19 impacting consumer behaviour, many customers are going online first when it comes to purchasing daily essentials including ordering food. The new “Deals near me” feature aims to help retailers take advantage of the change to not only drive footfall to their outlets. Merchants are able to entice customers with attractive offers such as cashbacks and coupons on the Shopee app. Shopee boasts that the feature has already driven footfall of over 100,000 to 130 merchants who have adopted the feature since April 1.
“Deals Near Me helps merchants improve their online visibility and direct would-be customers to their outlets when we feature their cashback deals to consumers that are already in the vicinity. Showing the relevant deals to consumers can also lead to higher conversion and tangible sales for merchants. This is important for business recovery after an extended lockdown period that adversely impacted offline retailers, especially those in the service sector. We also believe that this new feature creates a win-win situation for both our users and participating merchants as we enable a convenient, seamless and rewarding shopping experience.”
Alain Yee, Head of ShopeePay Malaysia
The feature comes just in time for Shopee’s annual Hari Raya sales. This year’s Raya Bersama Shopee will see offers not only on Shopee’s eCommerce platform but also in the new “Deals near me” feature. Users can take advantage of Sahur Specials at 5AM, Jom Berbuka dengan ShopeePay at 12PM and Moreh Specials at 10PM. Vouchers can be bought for as little as 5 sen for cashback of up to MYR8. Participating merchants include Nasi Kandar Pelita, Nando’s, TGI Friday’s, Boat Noodle, Johnny’s, OLDTOWN White Coffee, J.Co Donut and Hokkaido Baked Cheese Tart.
In addition, Shopee will be having their Jualan Hebat Raya on 23 April 2021 and Pesta Jualan Raya on 5 May 2021. These days will come with numerous deals that Shopee users will be able to take advantage of. As usual, the deals will encompass everything from home appliances to outfits and decorations with discounts of 80%.
FunnelEvo Sdn Bhd is trying to incentivize automation for small businesses by creating a new challenge for them to pursue automation. The company is encouraging small and medium businesses to implement SaleSkip, a business management platform which allows entrepreneurs to automate processes which can lead to increased revenue.
SaleSkip allows entrepreneurs to create professional websites in a matter of minutes complete with their own eCommerce backend. The platform also allows users to drive revenue by automating processes like up-selling, tracking conversions and even allowing businesses to retrieve user behaviour and data to optimise sales funnels. Interaction with customers via apps like WhatsApp can be done through the automation offered by SalesSkip.
To spur the adoption of automation, FunnelEvo is offering an MYR100,000 reward in their RM100K Challenge: Online Business Automation (Raya Edition). The challenge which kicks off starting April 14 2021, will provide the first 2,000 registrants with guidance and know-how in creating an online store on the SaleSkip system. Participants of the two-month challenge will also be attending a 5-day marketing class worth MYR4,999. Participants with the highest sales will be given grants of up to MYR100,000.
The challenge will be the first of a series that will be held throughout the year. Those who are unable to register for this edition can take part in future editions of the challenge as they are announced.
NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 just happened last night. If you remembered 2020, you would remember that GTC 2020 was also the time where NVIDIA introduced their new A100 GPU chips for super computers. 2020 was also the yea NVIDIA launched their highly anticipated, and highly capable RTX 3000 series consumer grade GPUs.
GTC’s keynote is always a highly anticipated event. Not because the conference always brings a new GPU. Recent years of GTC has always been exciting because somehow GPU is able to push the limits of what is possible with computing and cloud. NVIDIA has made itself relevant not just in the graphics world, but also in the super computing world, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and even cybersecurity. NVIDIA’s own AI even composed its own song, and it is a good song mind you.
With GTC 2021, NVIDIA shows that they are not done innovating just yet. Now, they also want to give the likes of Intel a new sort of headache. NVIDIA has introduced Project Grace.
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang mentions that the name Grace refers to a particular pioneer in the computer science field, Grace Hopper. The project is NVIDIA’s first dip into the datacentre CPU industry. Fitting to the Grace Hopper namesake, project Grace is supposed to be 10x more powerful than the current NVIDIA GDX x86 supercomputer platform.
Why is this a problem for Intel? The world’s fastest supercomputer today is all powered by Intel’s x86 CPU platform. The x86 platform has also existed for about a decade now and the platform has approached its technological limits in 2021. Of course, NVIDIA took matters into their own hands and the Grace CPU is an ARM based chip for the fastest ever datacentre and servers in the world.
Just saying that the CPU will be the fastest ever server-based CPU though means nothing. What you want to know is numbers, and these are big numbers. The new Grace architecture allows the CPU and GPU to communicate at up to 900GB/s speed thanks to NVLink technology. According to NVIDIA, that is 30x faster than most servers today. Of course, paired to LPDDR5x memory modules, you get up to 10x the speed of today’s machines.
Before anyone can say that NVIDIA’s Grace dreams is just that; dreams, NVIDIA also announced that they will be installing their Grace based datacentre in the United States Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Labrotory and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The two clients will feature their very own NVIDIA powered supercomputer soon.
Source: NVIDIA
In those two places though, the servers and supercomputers are not built just to push cloud storage to corporations. They are purpose built for AI training and implementations. They are built for neural and language programming and training. They are built to progress humanity and probably cure cancer one day.
Of course, because Grace is a giant processor made for datacentres and supercomputers, we will not be expecting to see NVIDIA dive into consumer level ARM-based processors for PCs anytime soon. NVIDIA is working with MediaTek to bring their GPU technology into the mobile space and even ARM based PCs though. In that case, us regular consumers can expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon notebook PC with NVIDIA GeForce graphics power soon, probably. Catch NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 keynote on their website.
Last year, plenty of conferences and keynotes did not happen. One of the most anticipated conferences that did not happen last year was Google’s I/O conference. We expected Google to launch a new line-up of Pixel smartphones as well in the 2020 edition of Google I/O. Of course, that did not happen.
This year is a year where all these big conferences are making a comeback though. Apple and E3 have made a commitment for an all-virtual WWDC 2021 and E3 2021 this year. They are also making the event available to attend completely for free. Google has just done the same.
Source: Google
As with any other year, Google is a little cryptic with their Google I/O conference and its event date. This year you have to solve some puzzles over in Google’s event page. They call it the punch card, and it is exactly that. With some guidance from 9To5Google, you should be able to breeze through the Punch Card puzzle and reveal the Google I/O dates.
Google’s I/O event for 2021 is also confirmed by Google’s own CEO, Sundar Pichai to be happening from the 18th May 2021 to the 20th May 2021. As with any other virtual conferences happening in 2021, Google I/O 2021 can be attended online completely free. You should be able to sign up right after you complete the puzzle for Google I/O.
We are still expecting a Google Pixel announcement out of Google I/O 2021’s keynote. Other than that, the three-day conference is filled with workshops and learning experiences. The best part of all of that, of course, is that they are all completely free. All-virtual also means that you can take your learning all from the comfort of your homes.
There are also some rumours of Google working on their own new-generation TWS earphones in the Google Pixel Buds A. Not much is known yet about the new TWS earphones from Google though. Of course, the TWS earphones will be compatible with Google Assistant and probably come with more functions than your average TWS earbuds.
As mentioned, Google I/O 2021 is happening May 18th, 2021 to May 20th, 2021 onward. The event will be held completely online, and attendance is free. The only catch is completing their puzzle.
South Korea has become one of the biggest electronic giants the world has ever seen. With the likes of Samsung and LG, it is no wonder the South Koreans are highly regarded in the modern era of technology. The two electronic giants have conquered everything from televisions to even washing machines in 2021. They make some of the best-selling televisions, fridges, even down to a water purifier.
They have also been a leader in the smallest things we carry with us every day. Samsung and LG have been at the forefront of smartphone technologies for the past few years now. But there has been some interesting development for the past few weeks or so. One of them is the fact that LG has made an announcement that they are no longer interested in the smartphone business.
The announcement from LG’s very own newsroom describes that LG Electronics Inc. will close its mobile business unit as per approved by their board earlier in the day. What that means is that LG will give up its smartphone business unit and not dabble in the smartphone market in the future.
To be fair, the company has been considering the exit for a while now. LG’s Mobile Business Unit, or its smartphone division has been posting losses for the past five years at least, and they show no sign of recovering. The company has been focusing on selling some mid-range smartphones while developing interesting concepts that produces smartphones like the LG Wing. They also showed some concept of a rollable smartphone, something we do not expect to see LG producing ever with the announcement.
As per the announcement as well LG will continue to make their current inventory available for sale. LG will also continue to provide support and software updates for their current customers and their existing products until an unspecified time. Although there is no indication to when they will end their product life support. They only indicated that it will be varied by regions.
This also means that the company will have to repurpose its workforces from its mobile business units. They mentioned that this will be determined at a local level as well. Still, they have some time to repurpose everyone within the business unit.
LG is expecting the close to complete by the 31st July 2021. While LG will no longer be officially selling their devices by the end of July, they expect some existing stocks to still be available after specified date and those will still be on sale. LG will still be involved in the development of mobile technologies, however. They will continue to work on 6G network related developments even after the Mobile Business Unit concludes its closure.
2020’s gone and it won’t be missed. For all of the chaos, confusion and change the previous year brought, it helped illuminate a critical facet of Red Hat, our associates, our partners, our customers and our communities. It showed that we are resilient. Not only did we weather it as a company, we helped those around us stand firm through the storm. That’s something to be proud of, and I know that as CEO of Red Hat, I’m thankful at how we as a business, as a pillar of the open source community and as a global organization kept a steady hand throughout.
Red Hat was born out of community. It’s at the center of everything we do. When faced with uncertainty and when we see others in need, that’s when we pull together and show our mettle. Throughout the past year, Red Hatters showed a tremendous capacity for fortitude and humanity. When I first took over the role of CEO, I made the comment that I wanted every Red Hatter who was here at that point to still be here in a year. And I think we’ve held true to that.
At the time, that conversation centered on finding work-life balance when the lines became blurred. Without taking care of our personal lives and mental health, we’re not able to meet the needs of our customers. As associates became school teachers and caretakers, dealt with drastically reduced social interactions and grieved the loss of normalcy, they still served customers and helped them be successful. We didn’t just hunker down and wait for the storm to pass; we still moved forward and made ourselves available to help others.
No time to slow down
While the COVID-19 pandemic stalled many industries, the software industry raced forward. Technologies like cloud computing and automation became more important than ever. They are now firmly in the category of must-have, instead of nice-to-have. As a company, we turned our attention to products and services that our customers need to support remote work, expand digital services, scale to meet demand, become more resilient and keep innovating. I attribute our ability to continue to show strong growth throughout the year to this strategy and I’m so proud of the team for keeping the momentum going.
With our biggest announcements last year, you’ll no doubt sense a theme – making sure that our customers can develop and deploy any app, anywhere. They want the choice and flexibility to use the innovations and technologies on a platform that makes sense for the job at hand, and we’re making sure they can do just that. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform and highlights a future where containers and virtualization, managed consistently across the open hybrid cloud, are helping customers maintain operations while still bringing new products and services to market faster.
We introduced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, a new management solution designed to help organizations exert more consistent control over their Kubernetes clusters across the hybrid cloud — from bare-metal to major public cloud providers and everything in between.
Once they can deploy anywhere, they need to be able to bring those mixed workloads together and that’s where OpenShift Virtualizationcomes in. An integrated component of Red Hat OpenShift, we’re giving customers the ability to manage traditional workloads alongside cloud-native services, letting them prepare for the future while retaining existing investments. This helps to break down technology silos that can slow innovation and impact the customer experience.
For those wanting an increased level of support from us, OpenShift Dedicated is a fully managed service of Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. We continue to enhance and refine the capabilities of this managed offering, providing an option for organizations looking to reduce the operational complexity of infrastructure management, but still get all the benefits of enterprise Kubernetes. This enables their IT teams to focus on building and scaling the next-generation of applications, rather than keeping infrastructure lit up.
One of the benefits of open source is our close connection to the innovation born in open source communities, where new ideas and concepts emerge and incubate. This is a direct link to IT’s future, enabling us to more readily see trends as they evolve. It’s this connection that enabled us to push the envelope in open hybrid cloud computing, and it’s now providing our launchpad for the next wave: edge computing. Edge brings its own challenges for administrators and developers alike, so we’ve delivered new capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShiftto help bring edge computing into hybrid cloud deployments.
Coming together
The channel is what made Red Hat. Without our partner ecosystem, Red Hat would be a very different company. We have been successful because of our independence and our work across a broad spectrum of cloud and service providers, including Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft. As the saying goes: “actions speak louder than words.” Our neutrality is something that can’t change and you can see it in some of the moves we made this year.
Red Hat and Microsoft have been working to co-develop hybrid cloud solutions for years, which ultimately led to Azure Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s first jointly-engineered, managed and supported OpenShift service on a leading public cloud. This year we continued our drive as a leading enterprise Kubernetes service on the public cloud with Azure Red Hat OpenShift on OpenShift 4, bringing the power of Kubernetes Operators to Azure along with the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS.
As I’ve said, open source is about choice and about meeting customers where they are, on whichever cloud platform they prefer. With that in mind, we continued our work across the public cloud withRed Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, a jointly-managed and jointly-supported enterprise Kubernetes service on AWS. Red Hat OpenShift is now the common Kubernetes denominator on two of the world’s largest clouds but, most importantly, it’s now easier for our customers to consume OpenShift where it makes most sense for them without sacrificing operational flexibility or service levels.
We’re also seeing the promise of our acquisition by IBM come to fruition, as we scale and work together for powerful world-spanning solutions. Schlumbergerrepresents one of these moments. By collaborating with IBM, this initiative will support its business and provide Schlumberger’s associates global access to its leading exploration and production cloud-based environment and cognitive applications by using IBM’s hybrid cloud technology, built on Red Hat OpenShift.
On the horizon
Just a month in and we’ve already set the tone for the year. All roads, whether it’s through edge computing, serverless or Kubernetes, lead to open hybrid cloud. That’s what we’ve worked to build and where our focus continues to be. We’ve been talking about it for nearly a decade because it’s not just another trend; it’s an enterprise imperative. It’s through the hybrid cloud that we help our customers solve dynamic challenges and keep Red Hat in innovation’s vanguard.
We announced our intent to acquire StackRox, a leader and innovator in Kubernetes-native security. Once the transaction closes, this move will allow us to enhance security for cloud-native workloads by expanding and refining the Kubernetes’ native controls already present in OpenShift while shifting security into the container build and CI/CD phase.
Having a seamless integration between our sales and services strategy and our technology vision is critical to our success, and it calls for the right leader. For nearly a decade, Arun Oberoi has led the team and transformed our go-to-market approach matching our expanding open hybrid cloud portfolio, through strategic acquisitions and new alliances. He will retire later this year and Larry Stack will step into the role of executive vice president of Global Sales and Services. What I appreciate most about him is that he embraces the Red Hat culture and the customer is always the focus. There is a huge opportunity in front of us, as we keep scaling, Larry’s strong experience and the strategic thinking that he brings are going to help us capitalize on it.
Just because we made it out of 2020, doesn’t mean we’re back to business as usual. The pandemic is still impacting the world and organizations are still feeling the effects. The challenges aren’t going away, but we’ve shown resilience and that needs to be a trait that we keep as we move through the year. While 2021 holds many unknowns, one thing that is not unknown is our path forward.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a part of Malaysia’s digital transformation journey since 2015 when we established our presence in the country with a local marketing entity, AWS Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. The announcement by the Malaysian Government outlining the Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint via MyDigital marks a milestone in the nation’s journey to transform to a digital economy, built on cloud computing. As part of this journey, AWS is delighted to be named as a Cloud Service Provider for the Government of Malaysia by the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU).
With the right technology, governments, nonprofits, economic development organisations, and other entities can improve their internal operations, become more productive and, ultimately, focus more acutely on serving citizens. This can support business growth and help citizens enjoy improved quality of life. As organisations increasingly embrace cloud-based solutions, long-lasting effects can be realised in the form of community-wide collaboration, partnerships with local businesses, and increased innovation. These organisations can in turn wield greater influence on economic development and growth. The cloud also provides affordable IT services for entrepreneurs, helping them start and scale companies quicker and more reliably. These efforts pave the way toward building new businesses and a more productive workforce, which boosts local economic development.
AWS works closely with state governments, education institutions, and not-for-profit organisations in Malaysia to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and drive cost savings through the cloud. Our Malaysian customers range from public sector entities such as Smart Selangor Delivery Unit (SSDU), Asia Pacific University, and other government agencies, to enterprises including Petronas, Maxis, Astro, and Boost (Axiata), to startups like StoreHub, FashionValet, and 123RF.
SSDU leverages cloud computing to transform government services
SSDU started working with AWS in 2018 when they first built a Citizens Electronic Payments Platform for Malaysians to access paid government services through a highly scalable and reliable central mobile and web portal on AWS. Using the centralised platform, SSDU was able to conduct data analysis in identifying trends with near real-time data generated across the entire Selangor state to forecast and optimise services, accelerating the development of new solutions without large upfront investments. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, SSDU rolled out an operation dashboard on AWS that provided critical data for making real-time decisions to enforce containment measures. Simultaneously, SSDU facilitated the shift of over 1,000 local traders to sell products from physical to online stores to enable business continuity.
Using AWS, SSDU gained the control and confidence they needed to securely run their platform with the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. As an AWS customer, SSDU benefits from AWS data centres and a network architected to protect all customer information, identities, applications, and devices. With AWS, SSDU has improved its ability to meet core security and compliance requirements, such as data locality, protection, and confidentiality using AWS’s comprehensive services and features. We look forward to partnering with more government agencies, empowering them to transform their digital service offerings for citizens.
Optimising the educational experience with cloud
Education institutions, like Asia Pacific University in Malaysia, have gone all-in on AWS, moving their entire technology infrastructure to AWS in order to transform the teaching and learning experience. They are running a mobile application for a cashless campus, deploying IoT services for their student attendance and queue systems, and using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for part of its learning environment. Asia Pacific University is delivering education resources to students 116 times faster than when they were using on-premises infrastructure, vastly improving students’ user experience.
Upskilling the next generation of cloud talent
Additionally, AWS Educate programme provides students and educators with resources and content that focus on building cloud skills in education institutions in Malaysia such as Universiti Malaya (UM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), and Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation. In August-September 2020, AWS held the ASEAN DeepRacer Women’s League to encourage young women in higher education institutions to acquire skills in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and discover how technology can be used to create innovations to solve real-world problems. Two Malaysian students attained the first and second runner-up in the ASEAN League.
AWS has also been nurturing the local startups in Malaysia, and providing cloud skilling to develop the future workforce. Through AWS startup programmes, we have helped reduce cost of experimentation and accelerate innovation with AWS promotional credits. For example, the AWS Trusted Advisor online tool helps startup customers reduce costs, increase performance, and improve security by checking their use of AWS services, and making suggestions to help optimise performance. We further offer a variety of free online education and livestreamed or on-demand training events for startups across Asia at every growth stage, including AWSome Days and the AWS Builders Online Series for early-stage founders new to the cloud. To date, AWS has supported and helped grow hundreds of startups that are headquartered in Malaysia.
AWS is deeply committed to providing Malaysia with the best-in-class cloud technology. We look forward to building upon our worldwide experience in working with over 7,500 government agencies, more than 14,000 academic institutions and over 35,000 nonprofit organisations, alongside millions of active customers across other vertical industries around the world, to support the Government of Malaysia on its digital transformation journey.
Hot off the heels of AMD’s announcement of their new EPYC processors, Dell Technologies has revealed a series of new offerings that put the AMD EPYC front and centre. The new Dell EMC servers come optimised for multiple workloads to help businesses better cater to their needs. They up the ante with up to 64 cores with EPYC’s new Zen 3 architecture.
The new additions add to Dell Technologies’ already robust portfolio of Dell EMC PowerEdge offerings. They bring updated technologies with improved compute capabilities. The expanded portfolio allows for better handling of critical workloads and applications augmented by fast data performance thanks to the integration of PCIe Gen 4 technology. In addition, the new offerings in the Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio come with up to six accelerators to help with large, challenging, data-intensive workloads. They continue to put data security and redundancy at the core with a well-established Root of Trust and what Dell Technologies refers to as a Cyber resilient architecture.
Of course, running on the Zen 3 augmented EPYC processors, the new PowerEdge servers are more power-efficient than before. Dell Technologies claims that the new racks offer up to 60% power efficiency compared to the previous generation. Adding to its power efficiency, Dell has equipped the new generation PowerEdge with multi-vector cooling. This technology helps direct airflow to the hottest portions of the server; helping maintain lower temperatures and better performance.
The new line up consists of six offerings catered for different workloads and computing environments. From powerful, performance-oriented racks to AI optimised racks to deceivingly powerful, slim racks, Dell’s new offerings have you covered. Their Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 marries the performance of AMD’s new EPYC cores with NVIDIA’s A100 GPUs for powerful, AI and machine learning optimised workloads. The PowerEdge R6515 packs a configurable, dual-socket setup in a 1U rack server for compact performance while the R7515 brings a scalable single-socket 2U rack with performance and affordability in mind. They’ve got the C6525 for high performance, dense computing environments while the R7525 and R6525 bring extended flexibility.
