WITH offices in 17 locations in Malaysia and presence in 14 international projects, iPerintis is well on the road to becoming a globally recognised and premier ICT Solutions provider.
iPERINTIS, A LOCAL SYSTEM integrator that has been responsible for Petronas' core ICT services and management since 20004, is actively pursuing a number of initiatives with the objective of further internationalising its operations.
According to its Chief Executive Officer John Miller, the company is looking to leverage off its existing clients by extending the current services to wherever they operate.
`We expect 2011 to be another `interesting' year and one not without its' challenges. We will be watching carefully the number of new clients we acquire and the geographies we operate in,' he explains, adding that iPerintis is working with partners to establish opportunities in the Middle East and Vietnam.
`Additionally, we have a number of formal partnerships with a number of major international blue-chip companies such as EMC, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, SAP and VMWare.'
Miller, however, admits that entering new markets and working with new clients is always challenging for any business.
`We have traditionally been very Malaysian focused and that is reflected in our processes, work habits and even our culture. We need to adapt and each day we come to work we need look at our jobs differently. To counter some of these challenges or support our opportunities we have brought in some new people with regional experience and put together a business plan that has international growth as an objective as well as developed a number of strategies to achieve our objectives,' he explains.
iPerintis was founded in 2000 primarily in response to the dot.com boom then and was set up to look at several B2B initiatives such as eProcurement.
`And since 2004, we have learned a lot from our relationship with Petronas and today we have the knowledge, skill and experience that are commercially valuable to all businesses but in particular the Oil & Gas sector.'
CLOUD COMPUTING
Going forward, one area that iPerintis is going to focus from now on would be the cloud computing.
`There is certainly considerable `hype' with many cloud offerings being introduced in the market space, however not many Malaysian companies or for that matter regional players can actually back it up with the successful large scale execution of cloud services.'
Miller reveals that iPerintis has been quiet but very successful in developing two separate `cloud computing' initiatives.
`We have a well-established private cloud operating today that serves the Petronas group of companies. This represents several million dollars of investment by iPerintis and we expect to invest considerably more in the next one year,' he adds.
With the private cloud in place, Petronas, for the large part, does not buy servers/ram/disk any more as they now `rent or subscribe' it from iPerintis and only pay for what they use.
According to Miller, there were several motivations or business drivers for doing so as Petronas was aiming to reduce the high ICT cost , improve ICT asset utilisation, manage technology obsolescence more efficiently and to do away with complex and lengthy procurement processes.
`We see cloud computing as a way to help solve some of these issues. In short it allowed us to reduce cost and react in a more agile way to the demands of the business.'
It is understood that in less than 18 months of the cloud implementation within Petronas, iPerintis managed to reduce the cost of computing (server & storage) by more than 35% and reduced lengthy acquisition and deployment requests for new services from several months to days and in some cases hours.
`Where we are today represents in my view nothing less than a transformation. This `private cloud' environment will continue to develop and we will enhance our offering as the supporting technologies develop, for example we are already looking at self- provisioning and extending the availability of SaaS type solutions.'
In addition to its private cloud, iPerintis has also invested and established a public cloud where it decided to work with what is known as the VCE coalition (consisting of VMWare, Cisco and EMC).
The coalition has a solution named VBlock - basically this consists of all the cloud building blocks fully interconnected and very scalable capable of supporting many thousands of VM's with large volumes of storage.
`This is a considerable investment on our part and something that we are keen to develop and as we look to take iPerintis to a wider client base both domestically and regionally we see this as a significant platform for opportunity,' says Miller.
The development in cloud services are certainly in line with iPerintis' vision to establish the company as a regional leader in the provisioning of cloud based services for the O&G industry.
`But we are not limiting our focus at O&G businesses only as cloud computing is far wider reaching and what is good for O&G will also be good for other business verticals,' Miller stresses.
He realises that cloud is rather new still and many business are unsure on how to realise the benefits and there are concerns relating to security and data sovereignty that need to be addressed.
`What I am keen to do is establish a critical mass of business on our infrastructure and demonstrate the value of the cloud.'
`We understand both the opportunities and the challenges and I believe that working together with our partners we have an opportunity to position Malaysia as a regional leader in this space,' he says.
PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS
In 2008, soon after he joined the company, Miller put together a plan to achieve several goals, namely to record better revenue and profit, to become the number one partner of choice for the customers; to achieve world class product and service delivery excellence; and develop local people and become an employer of choice.
`Our focus was very much `Build a Better iPerintis'. We have made considerable progress in all these areas. Though we will never take our eyes off these fundamentals, the focus is changing - today we are gearing towards `Growing iPerintis',' says Miller.
`We now have a stronger foundation in that we have great industry experienced people who enjoy working for iPerintis, and with that comes the commitment and motivation to help us be successful.'
As iPerintis focuses on growing new businesses, new priorities emerge such as:
STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS - Miller says the company recognises the importance of good partners.
`Just about every supplier / vendor who comes through the door wanting to be a `partner' usually results in a discussion on what a `true partner' is - for me it is not about using iPerintis as a channel to our clients. Partnership is about working together so that we all gain by providing something of real value that will benefit both our client base.'
VALUE OF INNOVATION - The company realises the value of innovation and today has a well-established Technology Planning & Architecture group. Miller says they need to be innovative in order to provide their clients with solutions that will both drive business improvement and reduce cost. The private cloud computing model is a great example of this.
DOMAIN SPECIALIST - The company is also working hard to establish itself as a domain specialist as far as the O&G and Petrochemical business is concerned.
`For example; we are addressing some very specific challenges related to Petro-Chem plants and we are doing some very interesting work in the Upstream Data Management area. Basically, we are working on projects and operations from Upstream all the way through to Downstream. So we understand our strengths and we are looking to leverage off this. The point is that we are not just another System Integrator (SI) in a very crowded market,' he elaborates.
MARKET REACH - iPerintis is also diligently extending its market reach and over the last couple of years, it has executed projects in over 15 countries. This is something that the company is keen to build on further.
AUTHOR : Mior Azhar
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