Malaysia’s IoT Outlook

Recently, we did a survey and asked 3 questions to some of the industry players. Check out their responses below from:

• Norfaisal Ismail, Business development, Celcom Axiata Berhad
• Amirul Aizat Md Noor, Manager, Business Development, Silver Ridge Holdings Berhad
• Mu Pathma, CPO, Cre8IOT
• Mohamad Ariffin Zulkifli, IoT Consultant and Trainer, Myinvent Technologies Sdn Bhd
• Mohd Adib Sarijari, Lecturer, UTM

Question (1) – What’s your comments about the overall IoT industry in Malaysia compared to the rest of the world?

Norfaisal – A bit slow if compared to countries with well-planned cities.

Mu Pathma – Some feel that its slow, but I think each country have its own game plan when coming to IOT implementation, of course, the macro level (gov.) not putting in a serious thought in this, when compared to countries like Singapore, here we focus more on race, religion, and political survivals. SME and MNC having small isolated projects, some are jumping in to grab the $$ associated or be relevant with “new girl in town”.

Mohamad Ariffin –  Good. It is moving but quite slow as there are more businesses or organization not yet really understand what is IoT.

Amirul Aizat – Slow movement

Mohd Adib –  There are industries in Malaysia already using IoT based technology in their operations, such as in Panasonic on how do they manage the supply chain, etc. However, in general industries in Malaysia needs help on iotizing their operation. Many still in IR 2.5 and in fact 1.0. However, in my opinion, awareness of IR 4.0 /industry 4.0 in Malaysia is good.

Question (2) – What’s your top 3 IoT applications?

Norfaisal

1. Smart fleet management
2. Smart home
3. Smart health

Mu Pathma

1. Trash Bin Solution
2. Parking
3. Healthcare

Amirul Aizat

1. Smart Home
2. Smart Energy
3. Smart City

Mohamad Ariffin

1. Rain Water Harvesting Monitoring and Analysiss
2. Production and Energy Monitoring (Factory)
3. Smart Office

Mohd Adib 

1. Security system
2. Facility management
3. Digital campus

Question (3) – List top 3 (or more) stumbling blocks of IoT deployment?

Norfaisal

1. Budget issue
2. Unable to figure out efficiency with cost reduction
3. Reliability concern
4. Need to educate people – lots of internal task to carry out to meet objectives
5. Digital migrants issues – baby boomers might be able to tolerate

Mu Pathma

1. End Customers mentality that initial cost should/must be cheap.
2. The stupidity of everyone thinking to capitalize on IOT by thinking IOT will work like a magic, it needs multiple domain expert comes together to develop something that works like magic.
3. False Representation, some technology providers are giving false or not fully “layman” understandable explanation when explaining about using IOT to do XXX. Like 10 years of battery life, where its possible, but with the limitation of one message per day, layman think every 1 min with downlink.
4. End customer refuses to pay for the solutions IOT provide, making it harder to compute the ROI, this is partly because they used to get for free, monetizing become harder in IOT where initial CapEx is higher

Amirul Aizat

1. The government would take cognizance that apart from making policies to adopt IoT
2. Depend on cheap labor or foreign workers
3. Due to fear of expenditure and refusal to change business styles

Mohamad Ariffin

1. The myth of IoT development is cheap.
2. The client is not an expert in his/her domain as we are not able to discuss properly on solving their problem.
3. That is all.

Mohd Adib

1. Investment
2. Manpower
3. Awareness

This project Equonix Tech Lab is working to propose the IoT based solution in the Smart City projects in India. This main aim of this activity is to develop a scalable infrastructure which can help identify the power consumption, automation street light monitoring from the centralized remote location.

By this IoT project, we are developing an electronic device that uses LDR sensor to sense the sunlight intensity and send the data to the STM32 based microcontroller based board for interpretation. The system has been programmed in a way that says whenever the sunlight intensity drops below a threshold value that we set, it will facilitate the switching ON/ OFF of the street light.

The hardware system uses GSM-based method to provide the location of the street lights and also updates the regular status of the light ON|OFF status to the FAVORIOT server. The data collected will be then sent to the cloud where it can be stored, analyzed and interpreted for a better understanding of the power consumed. This also facilitates smart energy management to save a lot of electricity. Also, the remote server has the ability to update the Firmware Over the Air (FOTA) from the FAVORIOT server.