Fusionex: Unleashing the power of companies big and small with data analytics and Google Cloud

About Fusionex

Fusionex is a Malaysian tech firm creating groundbreaking solutions in AI, machine learning, IoT, and big data analytics. It has a roster of global clients including Samsung, IKEA, and United Airlines. Founded in 2006 by entrepreneur Ivan Teh, it’s listed on Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.”

Industries: Technology
Location: Malaysia

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Fusionex gained a fourfold boost in platform updates, reduced data processing time from weeks to minutes, predicted 90% of equipment failures for chipmakers, and empowered SMEs with Google Cloud.

Google Cloud results

  • Frees up team to focus on creating groundbreaking big data solutions
  • Enables huge performance improvements for global brand-name clients
  • Allows major retailer to achieve 50% efficiency gains
  • Opens new possibilities for Southeast Asian digital transformation
  • Inspires staff to build next-generation AI solutions on Google ecosystem

Delivered 10X time savings for global chipmaker

As venture capital investment in the region grows, it looks like Southeast Asia’s moment as a global tech player has arrived. And Malaysia’s Fusionex is proving that with vision, drive, and strong partnerships, a company packed with regional talent can compete with the biggest names in the fields of AI and machine learning.

Fusionex provides innovative data analytics solutions to global clients such as Samsung, Toyota, IKEA, and L’Oreal. Its unique value lies in offering targeted services for multiple sectors, including manufacturing, retail, aviation, and financial services. As it helps global giants, Fusionex is also committed to enabling the aspirational journey of Southeast Asia’s SMEs.

“We help our clients drive better business performance, demonstrating measured increases in revenue, or reduced costs,” says Jacob Isaac, Fusionex MD for New Technologies. “We do this by embedding world-class analytical models into our clients’ mission-critical systems and automating actions based on the output of those models."

The company was built from scratch in 2006 by founder Ivan Teh and his small team, with no angel investors, fueled only by a revenue stream from satisfied clients. For a while, 18-hour days led to steady growth. But soon, the company’s dreams and ambitions outgrew the capacity of its IT infrastructure to process the massive amounts of data needed to achieve them.

To enable its mission of developing cutting-edge AI platforms for enterprises big and small, Fusionex turned to Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud came to the rescue by managing all of our infrastructure issues,” says Gan Chun Yee, Head of Big Data and Analytics at Fusionex. “We don't have to deal with performance issues or hardware maintenance anymore, they are being handled on Google Cloud infrastructure. That means we can focus on serving our customers better and more efficiently.”

“When we run our platform on Google Cloud, we deliver an optimum scalable performance platform, and that’s how we give value to clients.”

Gan Chun Yee, Head of Big Data & Analytics, Fusionex

Enabling a world-class Southeast Asian data analytics platform

Fusionex’s team spent its early years with on-premises solutions that required vast amounts of time for maintaining servers and addressing resource demand issues. As it invented data analytics services for a growing client base, the company needed to run multiple models in parallel that could scale up massively in an instant.

The hardware challenges prevented Fusionex’s engineers from focusing on their core task of creating innovative solutions: “It's always a problem when you need to involve lots of people in the infrastructure to manually deploy, manually scale, and manually shut down the servers,” says Gan.

By migrating to Google Cloud, Fusionex has achieved the freedom it needed to build world-class machine learning tools that could compete with the best in the business. The Google partnership has ultimately enabled the redevelopment of Fusionex’s flagship GIANT platform, which allows clients to make data queries in natural language and receive powerful insights into their business needs. The platform helps to inform decision-making across a range of departments, including technology, sales, marketing, and operations.

“We’re not coming in from ground zero, but with ready models and templates to bootstrap client businesses with a tried and tested, proven working model,” says Jacob Isaac, Fusionex MD for New Technologies. “Google Cloud enables our products and solutions to work more efficiently and effectively. It also empowers our models to process and output results over terabytes and petabytes of datasets, in a fraction of the time.”

Fusionex builds ML solutions on the full suite of Google Cloud data analytics services, primarily BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, and Cloud Dataproc. As for app development, says Gan, “we're running everything on Kubernetes.”

Google Kubernetes Engine allows us to operate much more efficiently and effectively, from an application development perspective,” he says.

Google Cloud adoption has transformed Fusionex’s ability to continuously evolve its platform with solutions that preserve global competitive edge. Before the migration, the company was issuing 10 to 20 updates per month for patches and fixes. Now it’s releasing 50 to 80 per month and foresees an increasing rollout capacity of 200 to 300.

BigQuery has triggered a massive improvement in the speed and power of Fusionex’s data crunching: “In the past, we needed weeks to process a data request, because our Hadoop clusters had huge resource demand problems,” says Gan. “Using BigQuery, we can deliver answers to customer data queries within minutes.”

“We're running everything on Kubernetes. Google Kubernetes Engine allows us to operate much more efficiently and effectively, from an application development perspective.”

Gan Chun Yee, Head of Big Data & Analytics, Fusionex

Tailoring solutions to meet the needs of global clients

Fusionex’s innovative data analytics platforms, powered by Google Cloud, have delivered impressive results for its clients. That’s why global household names keep returning to the Malaysian company for targeted cloud data solutions.

In retail, for example, the Fusionex GIANT platform enables a major hypermarket chain to make sense of the mountains of data its outlets produce each day, 85% of which was previously unstructured. Some of the most valuable data insights were hidden away in reams of unrelated files.

Powered by BigQuery, GIANT delivers real-time sales tracking and inventory monitoring, sending daily push notifications to managers on business performance from each of the chain’s stores across the country.

Fusionex’s platform enables precision stock replacement, inventory movement, and other logistics imperatives, yielding cost savings of more than 33%. And it reduces data processing on the client’s servers, boosting efficiency by nearly 50%.

For a major chipmaker, Fusionex crafted a tailor-made IoT predictive maintenance solution that allows the client to replace parts before they break down, processing data from 10,000 sensors. The predictive analysis permits the customer to anticipate 90% of potential equipment failures and yields massive time savings by identifying defective units nearly 10 times faster than manual inspections.

“For IoT data, we have manufacturing clients who need very fast predictions,” says Gan. “When we run our platform on Google Cloud, we deliver an optimum scalable performance platform, and that’s how we give value to clients.”

Partnering with Google to lift Southeast Asian SMEs

As Fusionex grows, it’s also promoting the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Asia-Pacific. The company recently launched a partnership with Google to build a “GIANT BDA” (big data analytics) solutions suite on Google Cloud to enable the digital transformation journeys of SMEs specifically. As a Google Cloud partner, Fusionex complements its GIANT BDA offering with additional training and consulting services customized around Google Cloud to drive business evolution for end customers.

“With Google and the Fusionex platform, we can provide immense value to SMEs,” says Gan. “We have the economics of scale for that. Thanks to our synergies with Google Cloud, we can really help SME clients grow.”

“In the past, we needed weeks to process a data request, because our Hadoop clusters had huge resource demand problems. Using BigQuery, we can deliver answers to customer data queries within minutes.”

Gan Chun Yee, Head of Big Data & Analytics, Fusionex

A future of endless possibilities with Google Cloud solutions

In the next phase of Fusionex’s own evolution, it’s exploring new Google technologies such as AI Platform and AI Hub. It’s also seeking to integrate more Google technologies outside of Google Cloud. The goal is to capitalize on the way the entire Google ecosystem of services, from Google Workspace to Google home devices, opens up new creative possibilities.

“Now that our infrastructure matters are all taken care of, we’re ready to focus more on generating models and driving even better business outcomes for our clients. With so much potential for development,” Gan says with a smile, “we’d like to work with Google for the next hundred years.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

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About Fusionex

Fusionex is a Malaysian tech firm creating groundbreaking solutions in AI, machine learning, IoT, and big data analytics. It has a roster of global clients including Samsung, IKEA, and United Airlines. Founded in 2006 by entrepreneur Ivan Teh, it’s listed on Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.”

Industries: Technology
Location: Malaysia