SLA Mobile in Malaysia

by Philip Stanfield
Published on: March 31, 2010
Categories: Uncategorized
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By Nic Stirk, CEO

Next month sees the third anniversary of SLA Mobile’s business in the fast growing Asia Pacific market. With an office that overlooks the Petronas Towers, and with the leadership of our APAC Director Craig Richards, our Malaysian business is fast approaching fifty world class engineers – and growing month on month.

 

The engineering team consists of Consultants, Software Developers, Quality Assurance & Test specialists, System Integrators as well as 24×7 Operations teams, all focussed on the growing Mobile Data, Internet and VAS spaces. Our teams are delivering projects in New Zealand, Australia, Qatar, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as for our SLA Mobile business in EMEA.

Back in 2006, when looking at where to centre our APAC operations, Malaysia offered a number of compelling reasons;

1. It has an excellent education system, which has turned out a talented resource pool,
2. The resource costs are significantly lower than the UK and other European economies, and
3. For some resource profiles the costs are lower than India!

However one of the most compelling reasons was its Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiative.

MSC is the Malaysian government’s FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) initiative which encourages overseas technology and ICT companies to base their Asia Pacific operations in the country. Over 2,000 ICT companies have applied and been granted MSC status, including global leaders such as Sun, and Cisco.

Being awarded MSC status brings with it a number of advantages, including; access to world-class physical and communications infrastructure, and 0% Corporation Tax for the first 5 years of operation, with the opportunity to extend that for a further 5 years.

SLA Mobile applied for MSC status http://www.mscmalaysia.my/ in 2006 and after being awarded we formed Stirk Lamont (MSC) Sdn Bhd in 2007.

 

The projects our team are delivering from Kuala Lumpur are bringing real value to all our customers. They vary in scale and geography and have included one-off engagements or large scale work packages for global Mobile Network Operators requiring all elements of our business, through to managed service contracts for media companies who want to access markets that they do not currently service.

An early win included a significant System Integration project in ’06 and ’07 for a major New Zealand mobile operator. This 12 month engagement touched all elements of our business and involved the upgrade of our customers Service Delivery Platform – a project that was completed on-brief, on-budget and on-time.

In 2008 we were awarded a major Software Development project that utilised consultants from both our EMEA and APAC businesses in a single coherent team, a model that allowed us to compete, and win, against much larger competitors not just on quality but on price. The SLA Mobile ‘hybrid’ model used agile methodologies and completed the 10 month development project with fantastic reviews from all customer stakeholders.

The success and growth of our business in APAC over the past three years has validated our decision to invest in Malaysia. As well as the skills and technology knowledge, our team continues to demonstrate tremendously the values and attitude which provide us with a fantastic foundation to continue bringing real benefit for all our customers both within the APAC and EMEA markets. Here’s to the next three years…

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