eCloudValley continues to drive AI transformation with AWS in Asia Pacific

eCloudValley was named the winner of MSP Partner of the Year by AWS in 2024.

Established in 2013, eCloudvalley (eCV) has grown to become a global leader in the cloud market in Asia Pacific. The Taiwanese company is an AWS Premier Partner, serving over 2,400 businesses in the region and continues to grow its presence and services to support businesses of all sizes.

Contributing to the success of eCV is the strength of its local teams in all the markets it operates in the region. Not only does eCV work heavily with AWS to meet customers digital transformation needs, it also ensures its localized teams on the ground are capable of offering unmatched technical specialization in cloud solutions, ensuring a comprehensive approach to digital transformation.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Ellery Wee, CTO at eCV Malaysia, shared how businesses in Malaysia, both large enterprises and SMEs have leveraged eCV’s capabilities.

According to Wee (pictured below), eCV is very focused in its partnership with AWS in Malaysia especially with the amount of growth opportunities in the country. Wee mentioned that since AWS launched its cloud region in Malaysia, it actually solved a lot of data sovereign issues that businesses were concerned about.

“A lot of the data needs to be within the country. So, when AWS announced that its enabling in-region capability, we ourselves at ECB received a huge uptake in terms of business, especially in terms of inquiries coming in to actually move the tech within the Malaysian region. eCV has even received inquiries on repatriation of data from Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong back to a specific set of customers in Malaysia,” said Wee.

Apart from that, Wee mentioned that a lot of existing customers that have infrastructures on-premises have also reached out to them to help them in their migration or transformation journey to move up the value chain.

“If you look at what happened seven or eight years ago, many were concerned about the public cloud, especially on the security of their data. However, this has kind of gone away. In my conversations with C-levels from enterprises and SMEs, they’re pretty open to the cloud. Whether it's public cloud or private cloud, they're very open to it. And it's different from several years ago where business owners are very hesitant or had a lot of pushback,” explained Wee.

From cloud to managed services

As cloud adoption picks up in Malaysia, the next challenge for businesses in the country is on how they can manage them. Given the continued shortage of skills in the country, both enterprises and SMEs are now moving towards managed service providers to manage not just manage their data and cloud but also security as well.

With 97% of businesses in Malaysia highly vulnerable to this risk due to insufficient investments in cybersecurity infrastructure and expertise, ensuring the cloud is well secured is imperative for organizations in the country.

“At eCV, we provide consultancy services whereby we offer to manage cybersecurity for organizations that are challenged in doing so. At the same time, to ensure employees are well trained in handling cybersecurity situations, we provide a consultant service for social engineering practice where our experts would actually draft a very unique email or a unique message, very specific that is targeted to the individual and run it as a test on them,” said Wee.

When it comes to managing data, Wee pointed out that it’s a strength at eCV as they’re capable of not just managing and migrating data but also get more value from the data with the various tools, processes, technologies available.

In fact, eCV was named the winner of MSP Partner of the Year by AWS last year. The award recognizes eCV’s success in providing end-to-end AWS solutions to customers at any stage of the cloud journey. This includes consultation on initial solution design, building applications, through ongoing optimization and support.

Investing in technology

“Since I joined eCV, I am now looking to bring in top subject matter experts in finance, manufacturing and retail, to try and see how I can extract that domain expertise to couple with our infrastructure expertise to provide a better value out to the market. If you think about it, business owners understand cloud. They understand AWS and they understand security. But technically, at the back of their mind, it's like, how can they increase their revenue and profitability? It all boils down to that,” Wee explained.

However, Wee also believes that businesses that invest in a technology and tie it to an ROI, they’re having the wrong strategy as they need to understand that innovation may not necessarily provide an outcome.

“The question is, are you willing to take the hit in terms of investment? Can you do 10 investments and probably only have the 10th investment provide a return while the other nine provide zero returns? So, innovation is not about ROI. Innovation is about having that process discovery, understanding is there an aha moment that you can realize and that can be absorbed into your organization. It’s the aha moment to propel you and even defeat your competitors out in the market. Hence, I think the mindset needs to shift. It needs to be a paradigm shift,” added Wee.

While GenAI can help with data management, cybersecurity and such, for Wee, the challenge today is that when businesses implement a lot of GenAI capabilities, does it really add anything? If it’s just employee productivity to improve how HR works, how will that actually translate into revenue?

“This conversation needs to be very skilled and very business savvy. And I think that what's missing in the past is in eCV. So, I am in the process of crafting that go-to-market strategy, so that our sales team and our delivery team can support that engagement,” added Wee.

At the end of the day, when it comes to investing in AI or any technology, Wee feels businesses need to understand the entire process.

“The problem is, when it comes to the acceleration of AI, everyone tends to forget the basics of it. When you move to AI, the infrastructure, the data, all need to be replaced. And that's where our business with AWS or the public cloud is very key because we provide the building blocks to enable AI,” concluded Wee.