Top-five provider: Tencent’s cloud business has been the fastest growing among the top five players globally providing cloud services. — Reuters
GREEN PACKET BHD has secured Tencent as the tech partner for the roll-out of their cloud services in Malaysia, according to sources.
“The deal is an exclusive deal for Malaysia for a number of years, with Green Packet to build up the business and Tencent to bring in their technology and intellectual property, ” says a source.
The joint venture is meant to be led by Green Packet, which is expected to popularise the cloud offerings to large financial, telecommunications and other institutions, as well as government usage, the source adds.
It is unclear yet what the initial capital expenditure will amount to but it is understood that Green Packet will fund this.
To recap, Green Packet is in the process of making a 10% placement of its shares.
It is likely that a portion of that will go towards this venture. At its share price of 70 sen as of Thursday’s close, a 10% placement would raise some RM67.6mil.
Meanwhile, a number of shareholders have been converting their Green Packet warrants.
As a result, Green Packet has received some RM26mil from conversions done since May 28.
Tencent’s cloud business has been the fastest growing among the top five players globally providing cloud services.
The other four are Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
According to global IT research and advisory firm Gartner, Tencent Cloud is ranked fifth in the world for 2019 and is growing the fastest among the top five cloud players, at an annual growth rate of 111%.
In the Asia-Pacific market, Tencent Cloud was ranked fourth, growing at 107.3% each year.
To date, Tencent Cloud has cloud and content delivery network (CDN) presence in five continents and 45 regions covering all key markets globally.
Tencent Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Tencent Holdings Ltd, which is a leading provider of Internet value-added services in China.
It is listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and commands a massive market capitalisation of more than HK$4.1 trillion or US$530bil, not far from that of Facebook (US$598bil).
Cloud computing is a fast-growing area of technology as companies are fast beginning to realise the value of such services.
The adoption of cloud computing has also further picked up during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the nation leveraged more on digital product offerings in the “new normal”.
The local cloud computing market is expected to be worth US$3.7bil (RM15.8bil) in 2024, growing at a compounded annual rate of 13% from 2020.
Apart from greater efficiencies that cloud computing provides, cloud-based applications have proven to be cost saving in the long run.
Users only have to pay as they need, for features and data storage capacity that are required.
In addition, the maintenance and management costs of IT systems will be greatly reduced.
The three components of cloud services entail Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
IaaS, which is the most basic product, allows the building of applications and controlling of fundamental building blocks of computing.
It also provides physical and virtual servers for storage and processing power.
On the other hand, PaaS provides a space for users to build applications and software with the tools and software that are already included.
Meanwhile, SaaS allows users or companies to rent applications or software over the Internet, paying only for what they use.
According to Analysis Mason Pte Ltd, the market value of SaaS is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2020 and 2024 while the market values for IaaS and PaaS are expected to grow at a CAGR rate of 9% and 25% respectively as more companies migrate to cloud services.
Notably, Green Packet has inked an agreement to tie up with Tencent Cloud to provide KipleID e-KYC (electronic know your customer) as a service to businesses in Malaysia, particularly for banking and financial institutions.
Green Packet will build KipleID e-KYC by leveraging on Tencent Cloud’s facial recognition and machine learning capabilities.
The Tencent-patented “single-flash” liveness detection solution integrates reflection-based and motion-based detection technologies.
This ensures a better user experience and more outstanding security performance with motion interaction feature, increased randomness of the algorithm and upgraded backend.
Green Packet has been making inroads into the technology space in Malaysia through fintech and proptech – applications that fit nicely into the cloud computing space.
Some of Green Packet’s products are SaaS products on the cloud, such as KipleID e-KYC, KiplePay e-wallet and KipleLive.
Green Packet founder and group managing director C.C. Puan had previously highlighted that the adoption of cloud computing will experience rapid growth in the coming one to two years, across various industries especially with the convergence of next generation technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and Internet-of-Things.
https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2020/06/13/tencent-to-partner-green-packet-for-cloud-services
