State govt should invest in ICT — Sabah Net
KOTA KINABALU: The State Government should be more daring in investing in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry.
Sabah Net Sdn Bhd chairman Fred Gabriel opined that investment in the ICT industry could benefit the State Government as such move may attract more foreign investors to come to Sabah.
"Sabah Net always tries to assist the current State Government in achieving its direction in terms of development, process management and anything that is related to ICT.
"Today, in Sabah, we have found that our system is a little bit behind compared to other countries. Thus, we wish that the government would dare to spend more money to venture into the technology industry.
"This could be a good reason for the foreign investors to come and for them to carry out their businesses in Sabah," Fred told reporters when met at the Sabah Digital Transformation Forum 2019, held at a hotel here on Tuesday.
"If we have the infrastructure but we don't have the solutions, the technology may not move accordingly," he added.
In view of this, Fred reckoned that there is nothing wrong with investing more on technology; furthermore, such initiative would enable the state to cope with the direction envisioned by Chief Minister Datuk Seri Panglima Shafie Apdal.
FPS-ENP Sdn Bhd general manager Chin Tzeng Kwan had also echoed Fred's call.
"As what the chairman has said, the role of Sabah Net is pretty clear. As a Sabahan myself, we (FPS) are passionate in leapfrogging Sabah.
"The first thing that I am ambitious about is the fact that we know where we stand in Sabah. Although we might be behind, but we are not ashamed of that," he said.
Chin added that it is hard to determine whether the existing data centers in Sabah are efficient or not.
He noted that the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) are here in Sabah and therefore it is important to maintain these two by ensuring the efficiency of the data centers.
He said that FPS encourages the subsidiaries, stakeholders and State Government to work as a team to improve data centers in Sabah
The forum was jointly organised by Sabah Net Sdn Bhd and FPS (KK) Sdn Bhd.
Also present at the forum were State Computer Services Department's (JPKN) Head of IT Security Daniel Ng and FPS (KK) Sdn Bhd director Melvin Chong.
"We (JPKN) are very happy to [see] such private and public partnership. We can also see a kind of synergy going on, in line with the government's transformation programme
"We are not looking at the short term, we are looking at the long term.
"As far as IT is concerned, which is spearheaded by Sabah Net, we can see that the things are already there. We just need a little bit of alignment, direction and a mission," said Daniel.
FPS (KK) Sdn Bhd is a data centre solution distributor that has been operating in Sabah for the last five years.