APPLICATIONS service provider Corpmart Sdn Bhd plans to help more local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to gain access to the Internet in order to engage in business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce) activities.
According to Corpmart.com Ltd’s chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) Wallace Ng, the prospects look good as currently less than 10 percent of local SMEs have gone the Internet way, although Malaysia boasts of the largest market size for small and medium industries in the region.
He added that Corpmart will be using its corporate portal (www.corpmart.com.my) as a gateway for the SMEs to create their own portals to get onto the World Wide Web.
Ng said initially, the company aims to sign up 200,000 of the 400,000 SMEs within the next six months.
“Based on the success that we had in Hong Kong within the first month of launch of our portal, we are bullish about our prospects here,” he added.
As a corporate portal, Corpmart.com.my is a B2B Java-based platform designed to provide SMEs an integrated intranet application in the form of a Web-based office management and communication tool and a gateway to the Internet.
Among the services offered by Corpmart are domain name hosting and mapping, corporate Web site hosting with 10 megabytes (MB) storage capacity per corporation, unlimited Web-based electronic mail (e-mail) accounts, corporate intranet which will contain electronic notice board, staff list, contact list and corporate calendar, and personal virtual desktop.
The portal is currently available in English and Chinese, with a Bahasa Melayu version being planned next month while local templates for each country in the South Asia region will follow suit.
According to Ng, revenue will initially be generated from banner advertising but in the long run, the plan is to offer value-added services such as wireless application protocol (WAP) for a fee.
To date, Corpmart has invested RM1 million, pumped in by venture capital outfit Netrove Asia Sdn Bhd, for the setting up of a data centre, the hardware and software infrastructure.
The corporate portal is running on Sun Microsystems servers developing Oracle 8i database and developer tools.
According to Netrove’s CEO Teh Kim Seng, after an initial period of three to six months, the company will look into adding between RM3 million and RM5 million worth of funds into the Malaysian venture as well as to fund Corpmart’s expansion into the region, namely Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.
On a related development, Ng said will be rolling out its corporate portals services in one country throughout the region every two months, starting with Singapore within the next one month.
“We are also in the midst of setting up offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guanzhou and Taiwan which will be operational early next month while their services will be made available in the third quarter.”
A signing ceremony to formalise the partnership between Corpmart and Oracle System (M) Sdn Bhd was held in Bukit Jalil on Tuesday.
Signing on behalf of Corpmart was its chief operating officer Kevin Loh Eng Chye while Oracle was represented by its managing director William Houng-Lee.
