Skip to main content

Fujitsu

Malaysia

Archived content

NOTE: this is an archived page and the content is likely to be out of date.

Great Eastern Life Malaysia Advertorial

Article reproduced courtesy of ComputerWorld Malaysia.


The insurance business is a highly competitive one, in addition to being heavily regulated by Bank Negara. But despite its restricted nature, an insurance company operates just like any other business entity- to sell services and products that its customers want.

Lee Pooi Hor should know. As the head of IT at Great Eastern Life Assurance (Malaysia) Bhd (Great Eastern), he is responsible for Great Eastern’s IT infrastructure, service delivery and headcount, while at the same time ensuring that IT strategies are aligned to corporate business strategies. “ Insurance is a very competitive industry,” says Lee, “and it gets tougher by the year. As such, it’s important to ensure that IT is there to support the business. IT and business alignment aims to improve our service deliveries, whether they are to our 17,000 insurance agents, to our business partners or our own staff. We make sure they are happy, and they get the support they need.”

To better provide customer service and to prepare for its next phase of expansion, Great Eastern decided to consolidate existing SAN and NAS solution to a new enterprise class SAN storage, an undertaking that would boost its total storage size to 59 terabytes, with the deployment of Fujitsu ETERNUS enterprise storage system.

Lee Pooi Hor and Simon Low

The main aim of the project was to migrate away from vendor dependent NAS and SAN storage to platform independent storage solution and to provide a secured environment to safekeeping of critical information. In addition, the new SAN storage will also meet its future growth and expansion, while the single consolidated storage brings ease of operation and maintenance, apart from providing further value-added services like high-speed document storage and retrieval for its business partners and agents.

Getting the IT infrastructure up to speed is one of Lee’s key focuses. Storage consolidation, he says, is part of the company’s IT jigsaw puzzle to help enable the organization to gain a competitive edge in the market. “ Technology improves by leaps and bounds, and over the years, we have undertaken quite a few missions such as mainframe migration and server consolidation,” says Lee. “It has come to a point when we need to replace our existing NAS and SAN system with a consolidated enterprise class SAN storage, in order to achieve our next level of productivity.”

But being able to deal with Great Eastern’s various demands proved to be Fujitsu’s winning factor. Apart from having in-depth knowledge of its intricate IT setup and requirements, Fujitsu has also been partners before in implementing various IT projects for Great Eastern.

Lee says: “We did some evaluation on a few shortlisted vendors. The cost of technology was one of the criteria- not necessarily selecting the cheapest- but we also placed a lot of emphasis on partnership. Fujitsu understands how we work, and also understands our infrastructure. That adds tremendous advantage.”

In the long run, working with partners one can trust and who can deliver will be the most cost-effective. In short, he feels there is only one point of contact instead of having to deal with multiple partners when things are not moving along smoothly.

On the part of Fujitsu, fielding experienced engineers who worked side-by-side with Great Eastern’s team has similarly proven to be a winning combination, says Simon Low, Assistant Sales Director (Financial Services Industry) of Fujitsu Malaysia. That tight working relationship has enabled both sides to work together as a joint team, not unlike that of a partnership, says Low. The net result: right expectations from both sides, quick resolution of problems, close collaboration, and above all, little or no guesswork to mess things up.

Lee is particularly happy with the good working relationship that has built up over the years. “Fujitsu has been a good partner, as we had been through various projects before. The accumulated knowledge we have gained has enabled us to move ahead with this project very quickly, and because of right expectations, we are able to accomplish what we set out to achieve.”

Lee should be happy, as the entire storage consolidation- worth a couple of million ringgit- went smoothly and impressed the Management.

Next, Great Eastern will be looking at further strengthening its IT capabilities to support the organization plans, in particular, into China, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Says Low from Fujitsu Malaysia: “Apart from having intimate knowledge of Great Eastern’s requirements, we also got the right guys to do the right job.”

That probably sums up well the winning formula of Fujitsu Malaysia- having the necessary hardware and the soft skills to support customers such as Great Eastern to embark on their next growth and beyond.