14 July 2022

Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) has signed two collaboration agreements with Cisco to partner in projects for 5G innovation and the digital acceleration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The deal is part of Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) programme, which is a strategic partnership with governments worldwide to accelerate their national digitalisation agendas.

“The programme taps on the power of private and public partnerships across a variety of sectors, including national infrastructure, education, and smart businesses and communities, to bring digital solutions to national challenges,” Cisco said in a statement.

TM said the partnership with Cisco focuses on three key pillars: digital transformation in the public sector, digital transformation for service providers that focuses on 5G innovation and digital transformation for SMEs.

Under the terms of the deals, TM and Cisco will build a 5G-as-a-service centre of excellence to springboard 5G adoption and develop proof of concepts for enterprises and vertical industries. “Supported by Cisco’s full stack of private 5G core technologies complete with services and support, the innovation platform will demonstrate 5G enterprise use cases realised on the reference architecture to allow businesses to visualise and implement 5G frameworks and solutions that address unique business challenges,” the statement read.

In a bid to accelerate digital transformation for SMEs, TM and Cisco will also drive a joint digital solution seeding programme for selected SME customers.

“These solutions will range from the Internet of Things (IoT) to business analytics solutions for SMEs in the retail, education, and manufacturing sectors,” they said.