Microsoft Brings Malaysian Businesses “Cloud On Your Terms” with the Power of 2

Microsoft System Center 2012 delivers robust, comprehensive and cost-effective management for complex IT environments spanning various Cloud models; Microsoft SQL Server 2012 provides a cloud-ready information platform to unlock breakthrough insights for success and innovation

KUALA LUMPUR, 26 April, 2012 – Microsoft has taken another step toward helping Malaysian companies of all sizes transform the way they do business by making it easier, more flexible and reliable to adopt Cloud Computing with the release of Microsoft System Center 2012 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012, at today’s “Power of 2” conference held at the Sime Darby Convention Centre.

Cloud Computing is typically deployed by organizations in four models: traditional, private, public or a hybrid combination of the two – something that has become more important to understand for Malaysian organizations, which are starting to flock to the Cloud for its advantages to scale on demand and achieve greater productivity. Research done by Forrester Consulting has found that 64 percent of Malaysian companies are either currently using or actively planning cloud initiatives. In these organizations, services such as software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) and infrastructure-as-a-service (“IaaS”) can run across a mix of public cloud, private cloud and on-premise infrastructures all at once. All of this has created a staggeringly complex environment for IT departments to cope with. Managing these hybrid environments with existing tools is leading to increased IT costs and higher staffing requirements.

“In the face of this, Microsoft has committed to provide best-in-class solutions for Malaysian businesses to harness Cloud Computing with unprecedented flexibility and scalability. By offering ‘Cloud On Your Terms’, we are enabling businesses to seamlessly harness the Cloud across private, public and hybrid models, with single-pane IT management using System Center 2012 and fluid movement of data across all platforms using SQL Server 2012,” explained Danny Ong, Chief Marketing & Operations Officer, Microsoft Malaysia.

He continued, “Through Microsoft System Center 2012 we are delivering a robust, comprehensive and cost-effective management tool that lets businesses more easily and effectively manage their entire IT environment from on-premise and to the cloud. Meanwhile, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 provides a cloud-ready information platform that helps companies in Malaysia unlock breakthrough insights across the company as well quickly build solutions and extend data from server to private or public cloud, driving business success and innovation.”

“Launching these two solutions today is a continuation of our commitment to Malaysian businesses to improve their efficiencies and returns on IT investment. In fact, only Microsoft has the experience, depth and breadth to assist Asian companies—from SMBs to large enterprises – in their journey to the cloud,” said Ong.

System Center 2012
With Microsoft System Center 2012, Malaysian businesses have access to the only unified infrastructure management platform that undergirds public, private or hybrid cloud models for end-to-end visibility of their entire IT infrastructure; from hardware component of bare-metal servers right through to its software components like applications, and all the layers in between. System Center 2012 delivers improvements in terms of application performance management via its deep application monitoring capabilities, seamless workflow automation via its Orchestrator solution, state-of-the-art self-serve capabilities, and significantly enhanced virtualization management and automation.

“The seamless management of complex IT infrastructures has become an important business issue largely due to the Consumerization of IT trend – how does a company maintain security and stability of a business IT environment as senior management starts bringing in their own smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks or other popular consumer devices for use in the office, as an example? System Centre 2012 is built from the ground up to enable the necessary process automation, configuration and management across platforms and environments; supporting Windows Server Hyper-V, VMWare vSphere, and Citrix XenServer and working with Windows Server, Sun Solaris, various Linux and Unix distributions, as well as most popular smartphone and tablet operating systems. This enables the IT team to secure and control non-traditional IT devices while still allowing employees to use the devices that they want,” explains Ong.

Combining a common management experience across hybrid environments as well as a self-service model that allows users to customize and request the services they need and greater levels of automation, System Center 2012 gives businesses of all sizes the means to automate and manage their IT environment as a whole, to develop cost-effective cloud infrastructures and to deploy predictable applications.

Furthermore, System Center 2012 delivers its comprehensive suite of cloud administration capabilities at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. Compared to competing solutions savings with System Center 2012 only gets larger as businesses adopt more extensive cloud solutions because its licensing covers unlimited virtual machines so companies can continually increase its VM density without additional licensing costs for virtualizing infrastructure and applications. Compared to other competing solutions, this can generate up to sixteen times the cost savings over three years compared to comparable competing solutions.

SQL Server 2012
In addition to adopting cloud computing for flexibility and economies, Malaysian businesses are also looking at the cloud to help them manage the huge explosion of data that is happening across every level of their organizations. Gartner reports that the volume of information worldwide will grow by 59 percent in 2012 with most of that data being unstructured.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a cloud-ready information platform that will allow Malaysian businesses to harness their data with built-in Business Intelligence capabilities through self-service analytics tools, interactive data exploration and visualizations backed by credible, consistent data and highly scalable data warehousing solutions. Organizations will be able to quickly unlock breakthrough insights within billions of rows of data with familiar tools like PowerPivot built on Excel and Power View for easily understood interactive data visualizations that allow them to quickly make well informed business decisions. Research by Forrester Consulting has found that SQL Server 2012 delivers an ROI of up to 189% with a 1 year payback period.

“Growing numbers of Malaysian companies are choosing SQL Server to manage their information. In the first 3 quarters of FY2012, we have already seen a double-digit percent year-on-year growth in End Customer purchase of SQL Server. Globally, SQL Server is the fastest growing database today and represents 45 percent of market share in units and 200 percent of Microsoft's BI revenue growth,” said Ong.

SQL Server 2012 meets industry requirements for high availability with the new SQL Server AlwaysOn for mission critical availability. Meanwhile common tools, like Management Studio and SQL Server Data Tools, give organizations built-in support for complex data types, greater interoperability with varied platforms and allow them to quickly create and scale innovative hybrid cloud solutions across public cloud, private cloud and on-premise infrastructures while connection points from SQL Server 2012 make it easy to take advantage of Windows Azure Platform benefits.

Notably, in Malaysia it has been deployed by e-business company IFCA-MSC Berhad, whose CEO Leong Nyu Kuan was on hand to advocate SQL Server 2012, saying it “has tremendous new functionalities–such as features for high availability and disaster recovery, increased performance and improved business intelligence capabilities–which IFCA-MSC Berhad is taking advantage of without having to change its enterprise applications; and all these benefits coupled with the added confidence of greater security.”

To find out more about Microsoft System Center 2012, visit www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/
To learn more about Microsoft SQL Server 2012, visit www.microsoft.com/sql/