Fusionex and PIKOM build a shared digital platform for Malaysia's tech industry

What was announced

In December 2020, PIKOM, the National Tech Association of Malaysia, signed a memorandum of understanding with Fusionex to build a flagship digital platform for its membership. The platform was designed to combine three functions in one place: an e-commerce marketplace, a virtual exhibition showcase and a business to business meeting space.

PIKOM represents a membership base of more than a thousand technology companies. The proposition was that these members could exhibit products and services, organise B2B meetings, run webinars and reach customers through a single shared environment rather than each building their own.

A soft launch was scheduled for the first quarter of 2021. At the signing, PIKOM's chairman framed the objective in terms of member reach, describing the ambition of connecting members virtually with customers and opening access to global markets. Fusionex positioned its contribution around the embedded digital marketing and analytics capability that would sit underneath the platform.

The timing, which was not incidental

December 2020 was a specific moment. Malaysian businesses had spent most of the year absorbing the operational impact of the pandemic, and the trade show and conference circuit that technology firms depended on for lead generation had effectively ceased to exist.

For a large technology company, that was an inconvenience to be routed around. For a small software firm whose pipeline came substantially from physical industry events, it was closer to an existential problem. The gap this platform was addressing was not a general digitalisation ambition. It was a specific, acute and widely shared loss of a distribution channel.

The strategic read

There are two ways to interpret a technology company building the shared platform for its own industry association, and both are probably true.

The straightforward reading is commercial positioning. A company that operates the infrastructure its peers use occupies a structurally advantageous place in the ecosystem, gains visibility into how the market is moving, and builds relationships with a thousand potential partners and clients.

The less cynical reading is that a domestic technology sector with weak connective tissue produces weaker companies. Individual firms in a fragmented market repeatedly rebuild the same capability. Shared infrastructure lets them stop doing that. If the goal is a stronger Malaysian technology sector rather than a stronger single company, this kind of project is what that goal looks like in practice.

Both readings point at the same behaviour, which is generally a sign that the behaviour was well chosen.

What it says about the underlying approach

The recurring theme across Fusionex work under Ivan Teh's leadership is accessibility rather than sophistication. The consistent bet is that the constraint on technology value is how many organisations can actually use it, not how advanced it is.

A marketplace platform for a thousand small and mid sized technology companies is that bet applied to the domestic sector itself. The technical requirements are not exotic. The difficulty is in making something that a small firm with no dedicated digital team can operate on a Tuesday afternoon without a training programme, and that difficulty is precisely the one that determines whether the thing gets used.

The wider pattern

Placed alongside the analyst recognition Fusionex received in the same period, including its inclusion as the only ASEAN provider among global big data leaders in MarketsandMarkets research published earlier in 2020, the PIKOM project fills in the other half of the picture. Analyst citations describe how a company is read internationally. Industry infrastructure work describes what it does at home.

Companies that manage both tend to be more durable than companies that manage only the first, because the domestic ecosystem is where the talent, the reference clients and the institutional relationships actually come from.