Fusionex CEO Dato Seri Ivan Teh receives the Technopreneur of Excellence title

Roughly a thousand people filled the hall: industry leaders, established names and the newer arrivals in Malaysia’s ICT sector. The Technopreneur of Excellence title is reserved for individuals who demonstrate ICT best practice, and the citation is explicit about what it is rewarding, namely diligence, commitment and sustained innovation rather than a single headline result.

For Fusionex, led by Ivan Teh, the award continued a run. It followed the company’s Company Excellence Award in 2016, which makes the pattern harder to dismiss as a one-off.

“It takes everyone working together”

His response on the night was notably unglamorous, and consistent with how he tends to talk about recognition.

I am happy and humbled to receive this award. Accepting this in front of so many ICT friends and colleagues reminds me that it takes everyone working together to advance the role of ICT in society. I want to congratulate and thank everyone from Team Fusionex who made this possible. We will continue to move upwards in our journey and mission to help shape this country and region positively with technology.

The framing there is worth noticing. Not a personal achievement, but a sector one, with the company named as the unit that did the work.

A keynote in Hong Kong

The award landed in the same period as a considerably larger stage. Ivan Teh represented Malaysia and ASEAN as a speaker at the 2017 Belt and Road Summit, held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. He was among the more prominent speakers gathered to share perspective with thousands of business leaders and senior government officials drawn from close to fifty countries.

Regional representation at that level is not incidental. It is one of the few mechanisms by which a technology sector outside the traditional hubs gets read as credible by people who allocate capital and partnerships. That theme is picked up in more detail in the piece on why regional visibility matters.

Partnerships and the pipeline

With Fusionex established as a data technology player, Ivan Teh led the company into a strategic alliance with Alibaba Cloud, then one of the fastest-growing cloud providers anywhere. Alliances of that kind do two things at once: they extend what a company can deliver technically, and they act as third-party validation that the technology holds up.

Closer to home, Fusionex technology has been incorporated into the syllabus at certain local universities, part of a deliberate effort to develop homegrown ICT talent. Ivan Teh has been consistent in advocating for young talent, regularly encouraging students to treat ICT and data technology as a serious career rather than a fallback. He has served as a judge for the Sunway University Dolphin Tank technology entrepreneur competition, run by the Young Outliers, and for MDEC’s Battle of the Digital Ninja event at KLCC.

The analyst record

Awards are one signal. Independent research is another, and it is the harder one to influence.

Gartner’s 2018 report on modern analytics and business intelligence shortlisted and commended Fusionex’s data technology platform. Separately, Fusionex was identified as a major player in IDC’s MarketScape report for big data and analytics. Fusionex was the only ASEAN-based company featured in both reports, which is the detail that gives the pair of citations their weight. Taken together they establish the company’s credentials in the regional data technology market on terms set by outside analysts rather than by its own marketing.

Reading the run

Grouped together, the award, the keynote, the cloud alliance, the curriculum work and the analyst citations describe something more coherent than a good year. They describe a strategy: build a defensible technical product, get it independently assessed, use the resulting credibility to represent the region abroad, and reinvest the standing into the talent pipeline at home.

Ivan Teh’s philanthropic work runs on a parallel track, most visibly in his Rotary Paul Harris Fellow recognition.