“Organisations need to be data-driven in order to compete effectively,” Jimmy Ting, Managing Director of DataMicron first told Vulcan Post.
But he saw that organisations faced an issue here: they had vast amounts of data, and lacked solutions to help them analyse it all. This was in particular for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), HR, and financial systems.
So DataMicron took it upon itself to solve these problems in both private and public sectors. Jimmy gave several examples of the work they do: in the private sector, their solutions revolve around efficiency, productivity sales, and marketing, using predictive modelling and machine learning.
On the other hand, problems solved in the public sector are related to data integrations, data cleansing, and the implementation of executive dashboards and predictive analysis, for example.
To simplify DataMicron’s objectives, it acts as both a software principal company, while also offering consulting and implementation services. “Hence, our products are usually built to address the ‘pain points’ of implementation and user-friendliness for businesses, etc.,” Jimmy said.
He believes that these defining points are also what set their in-house solutions and technology used apart from those of their competitors’.
A Slew Of New Tech Products For Big Data Solutions
Recently, the team just launched their new platform called SPOTLIGHT, which comprises the following products for the market, briefly explained:
- Eagle Eye: An AI engine with Natural Language Processing that can “read” documents, social media content and extract entities (names, locations, organisations), and find the relationship between these entities.
- Foresight: It’s like a data science studio or a workbench for data scientists, able to simplify weeks’ worth of work into days.
- Insta BI: A “self-service” business intelligence product, allowing users to integrate multiple data sources and design their own business intelligence systems.
- Neura Chat: A private messenger app for enterprises, (think WhatsApp but with better security), and can be used in command centres.
- Mini-Apps: This product allows users to create small applications for data collection, workflow, and reporting. It is integrated into Neura Chat.
They’re clearly focused more on enterprise customers and government ministries at the moment, but Jimmy added, “We intend to provide a scaled-down version of our software to address the SME market as well.”
While they’ve acquired their desired target market thus far, he said that doing so was the biggest struggle in their initial years.
“It wasn’t easy to convince large corporations to use local products as some do not believe we have the capability to develop high-end technologies such as in-memory database for fast aggregation.”
“Most of the time, we overcame this by doing proof of concepts (POC). The results of our POC proves that we are on par, or even better, than overseas giants in our space of big data analytics,” Jimmy stated.
Global Expansion While Self-Funded
Despite all those struggles though, Jimmy has great pride in the fact that they’ve been self-funded thus far, and could expand to 8 countries.
For him, MaGIC was instrumental in guiding companies like theirs to go global, and the two programmes that DataMicron benefitted from were the e@Standford and HIPP2 programmes.
There, they learnt how successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley strived to achieve their dreams. At the same time, Jimmy came to a realisation.
“The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are very fortunate to have VC ecosystems that can fund them to grow very big. However, in Asia, technology companies, other than e-commerce companies, do not have the luxury of VCs who believe in their technologies.”
“Even until now, the paradigm for VCs is such that western technologies are more superior than eastern technologies. Maybe, one day this perception may change as China starts to advance in technologies,” he added hopefully.
It’s Now Time To Scale Aggressively
DataMicron was able to get patents in both China and the US, which is another point of pride for the team since doing so isn’t easy, particularly for the US patent.
“We believe that there are only a handful of software companies in Malaysia that have been awarded a US patent on their innovations,” he added.
“Now that we have our new and solid platform SPOTLIGHT, we want to start to scale aggressively. We believe we have quite a large spectrum of products in the big data analytics and AI market.”
To get there, he acknowledges that external funding could accelerate their growth in the very near future.
If it’s not external funding that they get, then it’d be an IPO, which he wants to start planning for in the next 2 years, so that they can be listed within 5 years.
Featured Image Credit: Jimmy Ting, Managing Director of DataMicron by Pointwest
