The National ICT Association of Malaysia (PIKOM) revealed three main objectives to drive  Malaysia’s ICT industry to greater heights.

Its newly-appointed chairman Ganesh Kumar Bangah shared the objectives include to drive value to members through targeted activities driven via PIKOM’s five Chapters. 

“The five chapters are PIKOM CIO Chapter, Outsourcing Malaysia, E-Commerce Malaysia Chapter, PIKOM Cybersecurity Chapter and Venture Investment Chapter.

“PIKOM Venture Investment Chapter is our latest addition and was actually rebranded from our Angels Chapter. 

““The setting up of the PIKOM Venture Capital Chapter is timely for 2018, as we need to put in concerted efforts to draw in more foreign investment know-how into Malaysia’s ICT industry to accelerate our young ICT companies towards achieving high growth,” he said during a luncheon with members of media.

The other two objectives for PIKOM is to  further strengthen PIKOM’s position as the Voice of the ICT industry by becoming the nation's private-sector ‘compass’ for digital initiatives and to achieve self-sustainability with a sharp focus on high impact activities.

Towards this objective, PIKOM is collaborating with strategic partner Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to kick off Sea Dragon, an annual sustainable Venture Pitch Platform for Southeast Asian start-ups and scale-ups for investments, growth and global market expansion.

“In this pitching event scheduled in May, Southeast Asian start-ups and scale-ups will be matched with potential regional and global investors with as much as US$25 million funding to be raised.”

“We are looking to attract investors to this platform from North Asia market including China,” he said.

Sea Dragon is one of the high impact activities PIKOM has planned via its five PIKOM Chapters – each of which have been identified to cover priority areas in developing the nation’s ICT sector, he added.

“PIKOM seriously upholds its role in creating a highly conducive ecosystem for local ICT brands, companies and organisations to thrive in Malaysia. 

“Each of these Chapters address specific areas of ICT where developments can provide the most value to the market,” he said.

The other area that PIKOM expects to garner huge interest is in the area of e-Commerce, which it will run activities under the E-Commerce Malaysia Chapter.

“PIKOM’s E-Commerce Malaysia Chapter singularly drives towards the same objectives of the Government’s National E-Commerce Strategic Roadmap – that is to boost e-Commerce adoption among Malaysia’s SMEs by doubling the current number of e-Commerce-enabled SMEs to 350,000 by 2020.” said Ganesh, who doubles up as the E-Commerce Malaysia Chapter chairman.

He  also announced that PIKOM will be hosting an E-commerce Fair every month starting from March. 

The fair, he added, will be an in-house networking platform to link up local SMEs with over 100 of PIKOM’s technology enabler members, so that the SMEs can successfully onboard to e-Commerce quicker.

As Malaysia sets to host the 24th World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) in Malaysia in the year 2020 together, PIKOM will also be hastening the groundwork for this global event that will put the country as its focal point.

“Year 2018 is also the time that we will be ramping up the efforts for WCIT 2020. Over the next months, we will be announcing the collaborative partners for WCIT, as well as the appointment of the new CEO.

“Our main objective this year for WCIT 2020 is to finalise the theme and the teams for the event, we are going to look for suitable speakers,” he said while noting that WCIT 2020 will be jointly hosted by PIKOM together with MDEC. 

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