About Fusionex Dato Seri Ivan Teh

The problem he started from

Every account of a technology founder is tempted to begin with the vision. It is usually more honest to begin with the irritation.

Before founding Fusionex in the mid 2000s, Ivan Teh led technology teams at HP and at Accenture. Both are organisations that put you in front of a great many enterprise systems in a great many industries, and both give you a fairly unsentimental view of what happens after a project goes live. The pattern that emerges from that vantage point is consistent and slightly deflating: the technology usually works. The adoption usually does not.

Large organisations were accumulating operational data faster than they could form a view about it. The instrumentation was improving. The interpretation was not. Somewhere between the data warehouse and the person who actually had to decide whether to reorder stock, extend credit or reroute a shipment, the signal was getting lost, and the loss was happening in the translation rather than in the technology.

Fusionex was built around that gap. Not as a research laboratory, and not as a consultancy that would hand over a slide deck, but as a company that would build the platform and then stay long enough to see whether anyone used it.

What the company actually built

The technical scope is broad but coherent. Data ingestion systems that can pull from the heterogeneous mess of a real enterprise estate. Processing engines that can handle the volume. Analytics and machine learning models on top. And a visualisation and interaction layer designed for the assumption that the person using it is a category manager rather than a data scientist.

That last assumption is the one that shaped everything else. If your user is a specialist, you can afford complexity and expose the parameters. If your user is a general manager with a decision to make before end of day, complexity is a defect. Fusionex consistently designed for the second case, and that design choice is the most defensible thing about the company's positioning.

The engineering question and the adoption question are not sequential. They are the same question, asked at different points in the build.

The third party record

Claims made by a company about itself are worth very little. Claims made about a company by people with no commercial interest in flattering it are worth considerably more, which is why the analyst record is the part of this profile that carries weight.

• Fusionex has been cited in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms as a Vendor of Interest.
• It was named a Major Player in the IDC MarketScape assessment of big data and analytics platforms, and was the only ASEAN company in that assessment.
• Research published by MarketsandMarkets in 2020 listed it among the key global providers of big data solutions and services, again as the only ASEAN name on a list otherwise dominated by American and European vendors.
• It was nominated by Frost & Sullivan for Global Big Data Analytics Company of the Year.
• The company and its founder have been profiled by Forbes.

None of these are trophies in any meaningful sense. What they indicate is something narrower and more useful: that analysts covering a global category found it necessary to account for a Malaysian company when describing that category. For a firm operating outside the usual centres of enterprise software gravity, that is the harder thing to achieve.

Public speaking and industry work

He is a frequent speaker at industry forums, conferences and academic events, typically on enterprise data strategy, the practical realities of AI adoption and the position of Southeast Asia in the global technology economy. The substance of those appearances tends to be consistent, and consistency over a decade of public remarks is itself a form of evidence.

The recurring argument is that technology should be shaped around human requirements rather than the other way round, and that the measure of an analytics deployment is not the sophistication of the model but whether the organisation's decisions changed. It is not a fashionable position. It has aged better than most of the positions that were fashionable at the time.

Cross border work

In January 2019 Fusionex hosted the China Entrepreneur Club at its office, the only Malaysian technology company to do so. The delegation was led by CEC president and former China Merchants Bank president Ma Weihua, and the discussion covered how Malaysian and Chinese enterprises might increase bilateral investment across technology, trade, tourism and cultural exchange.

The following year, during the early phase of the pandemic, the company backed a social enterprise in repurposing its production line to make protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers at Malaysian hospitals. It is a small story relative to the analytics work. It is included here because corporate character tends to be more legible in the small stories than in the large ones.

For the continuing record, see the news and analysis archive, or the longer discussion of management approach in leadership and enterprise data culture.