One of Asia’s leading telecommunications groups, Axiata, forges what is described as a strategic joint venture with Google Cloud in order to sell Google business applications and lots more other valuable products across the Asian region. The business-to-business unit of the telco group called Axiata Enterprise states that the partnership will aim to cater to the “evolving needs of millions of companies across rapidly digitalising economies in Asia.”

The Chief Executive Officer of Axiata Enterprise, Dr Gopi Kurup narrates, “Axiata and Google Cloud have a shared vision of helping businesses digitise and grow as they build greater resilience for the long haul.” He says further, “With nations increasingly stepping up on digitalisation for economic recovery and growth, we stand at a critical juncture to support businesses, especially small and medium players in their efforts to adjust and adapt to new digital norms for survival.”

Axiata’s operators will be introducing Google Workspace to their markets as part of their combined ICT portfolio and solutions bundles. These business packages are offered for sale to small and medium enterprises. Such a move will signal the official start of the newly-formed partnership.

It has been revealed that the very first company to bring Google tools was Axiata’s Dialog in Sri Lanka. This happened in the second quarter of the current year. Incidentally, Dialog Axiata is the flagship telecommunications service provider of Sri Lanka that operates Dialog Mobile, the largest mobile network of that country. Interestingly, by the second half of this year, next to follow suit are other big telcos in Asia such as Celcom in Malaysia, XL in Indonesia, Robi in Bangladesh, Ncell in Nepal and Smart in Cambodia. One other significant segment in this strategic alliance with Google Cloud is that the operations of Axiata is going to boost its own internal modernisation efforts

As Axiata bares, XL Axiata based in Indonesia is already implementing Google’s Anthos for its hybrid and multi-cloud computing programme. This Indonesian unit is aiming to transfer 70% of its workloads to the cloud in the succeeding three years.

In a similar manner, Malaysia-based Celcom is taking advantage of Google Cloud’s infrastructure and solutions to operate its payment gateway. Likewise, the same company is planning to utilise the artificial intelligence tools of Google Cloud in order to put together “personalisation and recommendation models” which is seen as a way to step up customer experience.

Dr Gopi Kurup further adds, “The power of Google Cloud’s advanced technologies combined with Axiata’s market intelligence enables companies to access advanced tools to boost their collaboration and productivity and generate data-based insights to strengthen their evolving customer engagement strategies.”

Previously known as TM International Berhad, Axiata Group Berhad, is a multinational telecommunications conglomerate with headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One of the largest carriers in the said country, Axiata also operates extensively across the Asian region.