KUALA LUMPUR, Sunday 27 June: Yasar FC, a joint venture between Malaysian company Dondurma AP Sdn Bhd and Yasar Dondurma of Turkey will introduce the Turkish company's desert cafe chain to Malaysia and the Asia Pacific region.

The agreement was signed at the Bosporus Restaurant, Pavilion shopping mall this afternoon, by MADO group chairman, Mehmet Kanbur and Shaifubahrim Mohd. Salleh and Ameta Kaur on behalf of Dondurma AP, before Her Excellency Serap Ataay, Ambassador of Turkey to Malaysia.

Yasar Dondurma owns the MADO branded cafe chain, Turkey's largest, as well as the MADO ice cream brand made from goats milk and saleb, an orchid extract found in the Marash region of Turkey, which give the ice cream its viscosity and provides an aroma which counters the smell of the goats milk. The ice cream is unique in that due to its viscosity, it's eaten from a plate with a knife and fork.

MADO has been making ice cream for five generations and it positions itself as being family-oriented, with family-oriented service, along with modern facilities such as WiFi, and it combines high European standards with the assurance of halal food.

Yasar FC will use Malaysia as a base for distribution of the MADO brand of ice creams, Turkish coffees, speciality cakes, its range of baklava (a rich, sweet pastry), breads, Turkish pastry's and small pizzas in Malaysia and across the region, and the company expects this to bring in US$100 million in various investments over five years. Dondurma AP owns 51% in Yasar FC, while Yasar Dondurma owns the rest.

Over the next few years, Asia is poised to see tremendous growth in the area of managed services, according to Value Advantage.

Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the implementation, support and maintenance of IT systems to an external provider, which allows organisations to focus on their core business activities. According to Frost & Sullivan, organisations in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend over US$10.25 billion on managed services by 2010, up from $6.47 billion in 2007.

Value Advantage is Asia’s first host of Canada-based Level Platforms Inc’s Managed Workplace, the industry-leading Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform designed exclusively for use by managed service providers (MSPs).

It's RMM products include management of IT systems' architecture, monitoring, managed cloud services, alerting, alerts Viewer, remote Control, out-of-band management, patch Management, scripting, bandwidth monitoring, asset management, asset tags. policy modules, reporting, customised user interface, trouble tickets, 3rd party integration, collaboration, on-premise or hosted solutions.

However, many managed service providers (MSPs), especially in Asia, work on an inefficient model of reacting to problems only after they start to affect the customer's day-to-day operations or what is called “firefighting.”

Furthermore, many small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) don't take advantage of the full value of their IT systems; rather, they have simply purchased the equipment for the sake of adopting technology in typical kiasu fashion as they say in Asia.

So how should MSP’s aim to counteract both these problems? How can remote monitoring and management (RMM) enable MSP’s to better serve their clients as well as increase productivity and efficiency for themselves?

Well, Value Advantage is confident that its RMM products will help MSPs to better serve SMEs in Asia.

However, based on the past experiences of other service providers, they found Asian SMEs to be resistant to embrace remote services.

KUALA LUMPUR, MARCH 30 - Even with the rise of Internet, certain aspects of society find it difficult to integrate technology into their lives. Education, is one such field, finding itself limited to factors such as equipment costs, electrical capacity and manpower.

In light of this issue, technology manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has come up with a solution: It intends to introduce school students to using thin clients, instead of the more expensive desktop workstations.

KUALA LUMPUR, March 25 - Juniper Networks, an IT and networking products manufacturer, was recently in the capital to talk about the advantages of using cloud computing, and more specifically, its own addition to the technology known as a 'cloud-ready data center.'

At the ‘Data Centre Green Tech’ conference, CK Lam, Enterprise Solutions Marketing Manager for Juniper Networks APAC (picture below), explained that existing networks throughout the world faced the problem of complexity as more users plugged into the Internet.

Kuala Lumpur, 26 January: HeiTech Managed Services, a wholly owned managed services subsidiary of HeiTech Padu, today launched Padu M.O.B.S (Managed Online Backup Services), the first such hosted backup service in Malaysia, designed especially for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

The company will initially target the services at its current 40 customers which store their tape backup off-site with it. Most of them are small-to-medium sized manufacturers (SMIs), SMBs and insurance companies.

Based on Avamar technology from EMC Computer Systems (Malaysia), Padu M.O.B.S. remotely stores data backed up from an organisation's servers, desktop & notebook PCs, as well as mobile smart phones onto servers at HeiTech Padu's Tier IV secure data centre in Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam.

ORACLE recently added new capabilities to its Oracle Accelerate programme aimed at mid-sized companies and a new portal, http://midsize.oracle.com for its mid-sized customers and partners.

In the around three years since Oracle Accelerate was launched, Oracle has added over 7,000 mid-sized applications and 25,000 customers worldwide.

The new Oracle Accelerate portal includes a Partner Marketplace for customers to easily find the right combination of Oracle Applications and Oracle Accelerate Solutions.

“Unlike enterprise customers, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) cannot afford full-blown Oracle solutions especially tailored to their needs, so Oracle Accelerate provides them with a choice of several industry-specific solutions for their specific industry,” said Jasbir Singh, Oracle Malaysia senior director of Applications Sales.

For example, besides basic enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger; applications specific to a high-technology companies include original equipment manufacturer (OEM) complex equipment, OEM consumer electronics, outsourcing services and others.

Industries in Malaysia currently supported include the chemical, consumer goods, high technology and life sciences.

Oracle Accelerate combines Oracle Applications and  Business Accelerators with geography-specific deployment expertise to solve business problems in highly targeted and rapidly deployable packages.

Generally available since 1 September, 2009, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (DB 11g Rel 2) helps organisations reduce their IT costs, according to Mark Townsend, Oracle Server Technology Division vice-president of Product Management.

Its new features include Real Application testing and Active Data Guard which are a boon to database administrators.

“DB 11g Rel 2 reduces hardware capital costs by a factor of five times, storage costs by 10 times, upgrade costs by four times, on the other hand it improves performance by 10 times, database administrator productivity by at least twice, eliminates downtime and unused redundancy, and considerably simplifies customers' software portfolio,” said Townsend in Kuala Lumpur on 3 November.

Firstly, it reduces hardware costs by consolidating all the disparate e-mail, applications, data warehousing and other servers and storage within an enterprise's data centre into a grid comprising an in-memory database cache, a bank of real application clusters and an automatically managed storage farm, all managed from a single location by an enterprise manager.

KUALA LUMPUR, DECEMBER 4 - In a strange bid to make itself more appealing to young Malaysians as well as local stamp collectors, Kaspersky has decided to market itself by bundling its products with their own 1Malaysia stamps.

Encased in a green booklet with Jackie Chan in a white helmet on the cover, the stamps depict blankly-smiling oval-shaped cartoon characters with the 1Malaysia logo. The stamps are valued at 30 cents each, and are represented as a joint effort between Kaspersky and POS Malaysia.

BUKIT JALIL, DECEMBER 3 - Astro has confirmed its intention in making High-Definition Television (HDTV) available to its viewers. Although it has not given a time-frame as to when it will release the service, Astro has confirmed that its intention in providing HD-quality television in Malaysia, which will be known as Astro 2.0. The current implementation that Astro is currently operating on is known as Astro 1.0.