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Big data’s big potential
1. Cautious note on Goods and Services
BY M. HAFIDZ MAHPAR
Tax

2. Overwhelming response to Mah Sing’s

Lakeville Residence in KL

3. Globaltec sees 85.56m shares crossed

at half of market price

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accounts

6. Let's talk money, honey

7. Indonesia’s plantation sector move may

affect M’sian companies

8. Plantations under pressure as KLCI slips

9. Tiong Nam Q1 earnings at RM13.19m,

seeks new business opportunities

10. Tamarind Energy armed with US$800mil

eyes Malaysia as home base

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MARKETERS can gain a strong competitive advantage through the ability to harness Related Stories
large, complex sets of data − the so-called “big data”. Big data’s big potential
Creating the meaningful brand
The growing demand to process and analyse big data for marketing insights has
Big plans for Friends Advertising’s media arm
spurred Pulse Group PLC, a leading digital research agency in Asia, to make a
major investment plan in that area. A hard habit to break Marketers should focus
more on unconscious mind, says consultant
Among others, it aims to set up a specialised big data centre in Cyberjaya − said to M&C Saatchi to pitch for more multinational
be only the second such processing and analytics centre in the world − and turn the businesses
country into “Asia’s premier big data hub.” New MD to take Mindshare to another level

So far, the seven-year-old company has mainly done research around the 4P’s of
marketing (price, product, promotion, and place). That covers brand research, new
product development research, segmentation research and pricing studies, among
Latest News
others. Star Publications Q2 earnings up 38% to
RM39.08m
To the public, Pulse is probably known best for its role in the annual Putra Brand
Tiong Nam Q1 earnings at RM13.19m, seeks
Awards. Under the initiative, it polls 6,000 consumers − an unusually large sample
new business opportunities
size − to determine the nation’s top brands.
Plantations under pressure as KLCI slips
This year Pulse is branching off from structured, one-dimensional data into big data
Kanger allocates 50 mil yuan for capex
in a big way (no pun intended).
Globaltec sees 85.56m shares crossed at half
Pulse chief executive officer Bob Chua acknowledges that the new big-data arm, of market price
Pulsate, might overtake its current main business in terms of revenue eventually.
Show More
He says the worldwide market research revenue took about 100 years to grow to the
current level of US$32bil. According to Wikibon, the big data market is forecast to
grow to over US$50bil in just the next five years. Nation Business World

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Big data’s big potential - Business News | The Star Online 19/08/2014

“So the growth of big data is much bigger and faster,” he tells StarBizWeek.
Sport

Pulse started big data work about a year ago because clients required it. Chua says 300-tonne concrete span at MRT construction
at present, 10% to 15% of Pulse’s revenue is already coming from big data. site falls, three workers feared dead

Perdana University refutes non-payment claim,

“We anticipate the need for it to be very high in the near future,” he says. says RM6.3mil paid in May

Like the 4P’s of marketing, big data has its 3V’s: volume, variety, and velocity (speed MH17: Najib gives kudos to returning Malaysian
DVI team
of data processing). More V’s have since been introduced over the last decade.
MH370: Fugitive Pakistani in bank fraud case
“Pulsate is responsible for finding the gold nuggets in the treasure trove of data, ie. still in country, say cops
patterns, correlations, etc. It is about making sense of data volume, speed and
Surendran arrested for sedition, released on
everything else,” he says.
bail

Chua says large companies have data stored “all over the place” but may not have a
More Latest Stories
way of mining the data for insights. Pulsate, which will focus on predictive analysis,
can help.

“A lot of companies have data currently, but how to extract value from that is Topics
important. If data sit in different pockets, they are not ‘talking’ to each other.”
Selangor MB crisis Malaysia Cup
For a car company, he says, Pulsate can predict what models it will sell more of, who MH17 crash Packaged Food 101
it will sell them to, and what kind of sales volume it will achieve. Missing MH370

“That’s where we will help brands. We will be the first in Asia to do this,” Chua says.

High-level jobs Videos

Trending Now:
Pulse’s latest project is expected to require an investment of RM20mil to RM60mil Interest rates to
over the next three years. It consists of three components: people, platform and go up?
hardware.

On people, Chua says Pulsate must hire data analysts and data scientists (analysts
Second digital
who find insights by studying multiple sources).
autopsy facility in
Bradford
Data scientists are much sought-after, making them among the highest paid
professionals in the world. Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden is quoted by CNBC.com
as saying: “The talent pool is, at best, probably 20% of the demand.” (Hortonworks is
a commercial vendor for big-data analytics platform Apache Hadoop.)

Regarding the second component (platform), Chua says it is the ability to take the
different sets of data and parallel process them.

As for hardware, he describes it as “basically storage.” “There is so much data that

you’re talking in terms of terabytes and petabytes rather than gigabytes and
megabytes,” he says.

The specialised big data centre in Cyberjaya to process that high data volume is
expected to be set up by the fourth quarter.

“We will create 200 very high-level jobs such as data scientists (within three years),”
he says, adding that it is in line with the Prime Minister’s vision of boosting the ADVERTISEMENT

nation’s gross national income per capita and the Digital Malaysia national
programme.

The Pulse group also plans to start a training academy for data scientists, one of the
first in the world. It will start operating together with the data centre.

“We will train fresh university graduates specialising in fields such as statistics and
financial modelling and churn out data scientists and data analysts,” he says.

Chua says the outsourcing space in Malaysia involves mainly call centre work with
low value and low margin. “We (Pulse) fit in the knowledge process outsourcing
space. It may not involve a high number of jobs, but the output is high level,” he says.

Global tech icon

Pulse also hopes to work together with TalentCorp to tap on Malaysian talents abroad
such as in the Silicon Valley. “We can attract them to come back or utilise them

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Big data’s big potential - Business News | The Star Online 19/08/2014
such as in the Silicon Valley. “We can attract them to come back or utilise them
overseas,” he says.

While other countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore are also trying to be Asia’s
premier big data hub, Chua feels Malaysia has the right ingredients to do it and Pulse
has a good track record.

At present, Singapore is ahead, having opened a big data analytics centre earlier this
year.

Chua says Pulsate will have two regional offices − in Singapore and Hong Kong.
“The immediate target clients are large multinationals which have a lot of transactional
data as well as governments.”

He adds that the company may open offices in Tokyo and Sydney as well.

Pulse Group was de-listed from London’s PLUS Stock Exchange in October last
year. Chua, a 38-year-old Malaysian, is Pulse Group’s largest shareholder with a
41% stake, followed by Japan Asia Investment Co Ltd.

“We’ve made full use of being a public company and now we want more flexibility to
do some of these other things. Bringing it private made sense for us,” Chua says,
adding that it may be re-listed down the road.

Asked whether Pulse will try to get the Government, through agencies like Khazanah
Nasional Bhd, to come in as investor, he says: “Perhaps. I think they might be
interested.”

Chua says Malaysia has struggled to build a global technology icon and he hopes
this can be achieved via Pulsate.

“There’s a big data wave and a lot of money is being invested in it. Moreover, Pulse
has a track record. There’s no reason that we can’t do it.”

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