Microsoft committed to supporting Open Source solutions to its customers
KUALA LUMPUR, 25 September 2014 — Microsoft Malaysia reaffirmed its commitment to transforming businesses and working with the Open Source community in Malaysia by participating and sponsoring the Malaysia Open Source Conference 2014 (“MOSCMY 2014”).
Held over two days at Menara Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, MOSCMY 2014 saw more than 300 participants taking part in various workshops, discussions and keynotes. The MOSCMY is an annual event aimed at unravelling current and future trends of Open Source Software (OSS) and Hardware, and is also a platform for businesses to leverage OSS latest innovations, best practices, and success stories. MOSCMY 2014 focused on the utilization of Open Source in Open Hardware and the Open Source Community, as well as how businesses can leverage Open Source solutions to enhance their values and operational efficiencies.
“MOSCMY 2014 marks six successful years of engaging with the Open Source Community and Malaysian businesses on the promotion and utilization of OSS and Hardware. Over the years, we’ve seen growing interest in OSS implementation and success stories, and we couldn’t have done this alone. This year, we are proud to partner with the likes of Microsoft to bring MOSCMY 2014 to the masses, but our work here is far from over. We will continue to work and partner with open source communities at all levels to bring the latest in OSS developments, solutions and trends in the coming years,” said Harisfazillah Jamel, Co-Founder of the Open Source Developer Community and Chairman of MOSCMY 2014.
Speaking at the event, Dinesh Nair, Director, Developer Experience & Evangelism, Microsoft Malaysia said, “Microsoft is committed to advancing the company’s investment in interoperability, open standards and open source. Today, thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux and Hadoop, run on our platform. We will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including working with MOSC and many standards organizations.
Dinesh went on to elaborate that Open Source standards are an integral part of the Cloud ecosystem, which provides developers and CIOs with the freedom and flexibility they need to operate their business, “At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and Cloud-first world. In the Cloud, we support key standards that provide the building blocks for open, interoperable Cloud services, and we support developer choice of programming languages. Additionally, we support data portability and believe customers own and control their data, no matter where it resides. By supporting these standards, we are contributing to and partnering with open source communities to promote interoperability, which makes it easier and less costly for customers to develop and manage mixed IT environments.”
A recent survey conducted by IDC supports Dinesh’s claim on Cloud adoptability citing that in 2015, the share of IT spending directed to Cloud will increase – and noticeably, the number of respondents which indicated that they would not be allocating any budget to Cloud dropped from 22% in 2013 to just 1% in 2015. “With the number of hosted private Cloud solutions now available from providers that have strong IT service management processes, demand for these offerings is set to grow at rates faster than other Cloud segments,” explained Chris Morris, IDC’s Associate Vice President for Cloud Services in APEJ (Asia/Pacific excluding Japan).
Home Grown Business – Astiostech, Champions Open Source Solutions Powered by Azure
Malaysian owned Astiostech, was also present at the MOSCMY 2014. The company, which provides Open Source IP-PBX telephony and Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) to enterprises and SMEs, had the opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of Open Source IP-PBX telephony systems, “We develop enterprise-level office PABX that cater for every telephony needs. Secure, stable, flexibility and license free, our Open Source telephony solutions provide every PABX functions that you will typically find in advanced and expensive commercial systems, with just a fraction of the cost. Moreover, with Microsoft Azure as the backbone for these systems, you can expect seamless and uninterrupted performance with negligible latency, which as we all know, is a deal-breaker when it comes to real-time traffic management,” said Sanjay Willie Stephan, Chief Technology Officer of Astiostech.
Incorporated in 2013, Astiostech has quickly made a name for itself within the IT industry. With a combined 20 years of strong IP telephony, networking, open source application and programming skills, the company is agile and quick to understand IT trends and are able to leverage them through highly customized solutions. “We’ve been noticing a certain trend and have been able to capitalize on it through our niche solutions. We noticed that our customers almost always require a reliable and secure Cloud ecosystem when considering our Open Source solutions. When coupling our solutions with Microsoft Azure and demonstrating its flexibility and dependability to our customers, the choice becomes clear, making it a no-brainer for our customers. It’s a win-win situation really, our customers are satisfied with the service we’re providing, and at the same time, we’re able to build on our reputation within the industry,” said Sanjay.
Astiostech’s reputation speaks for itself through endorsements from its satisfied customers, including Ikhasas Sdn Bhd, a multidiscipline company in Malaysia specializing in property development, construction, engineering, infrastructural works and turn-key designs. With a growing workforce of more than 700 employees, Ikhasas needed scalability and uninterrupted operation to cope with its demand and expansion. With rising IT infrastructure and maintenance costs, Ikhasas turned to Astiostech for a viable yet affordable solution, “With our rapid expansion, we needed a cost-effective solution for efficient and reliable communication between our offices. To implement a PBX at every local office would skyrocket our initial setup costs, and we’ve not even taken into account operational costs yet – each call back to our HQ from our branches is a cost factor too. With Astiostech’s Voice as a Service (VaaS) solution, we got the best of both worlds, reliable service at an affordable price,” said Ken Tee, Management Information Systems Manager, Ikhasas Sdn Bhd.
Having completed the trial period for the VaaS solution at one of their offices, Ikhasas proceeded to implement VaaS at multiple offices throughout Malaysia and have been satisfied with the outcome thus far, “To be honest, when Astiostech recommended the VaaS solution to us, we were a little skeptical as we needed a stable Cloud ecosystem for quality communication channels between our offices. However, Astiostech reassured us that their solutions ran on Microsoft Azure and after trying it out, we decided it was a rock-solid stable solution. To date, we’ve had almost no technical issues with Microsoft Azure and the entire system as a whole, especially when it comes to call quality or latency issues,” explained Tee.
Dinesh concluded by saying that the ongoing relationship between Astiostech and Ikhasas was exactly what Microsoft envisions for businesses in Malaysia, “For a company like Ikhasas that grows fast and aggressively, OSS cloud solutions are the way to go. Microsoft will continue to engage and facilitate interaction between our proprietary development processes and the company’s open innovation efforts to foster relationships with its partners and open standards communities. As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choices and opportunities to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments.”