Astro Accelerates its Digital and Business Transformation with Amazon Web Services

Astro aims to digitalise at least 75% of its current technology infrastructure, applications and processes by year end to better serve its customers and to ensure go-to-market agility and customer-centricity in the introduction of new content, products and services.

Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad and its group of companies (Astro) have signed an agreement with Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates (AWS), to use AWS cloud computing services and leverage AWS Professional Services for its group-wide digital and business transformation. The company is incorporating a cloud and mobile-first, analytics driven approach to accelerate innovation in pursuit of new personalised experiences for customers across all ages.

Dato� Rohana Rozhan, Group CEO, Astro said, �Today Astro is in 71% of Malaysian households and growing. That equates to 21mn family members across 5.1mn homes with an Astro service. Our combined engagement with households and individuals across TV, radio, digital and ground events is second to none; our TV viewers spend 4 hours watching Astro daily, radio weekly listenership is at 15.6mn, our live events attracted approximately 500k people and our digital properties, which are resonating among millennials, register close to 5.8mn visitors every month.

Additionally, our brand continues to uphold a strong position as one of Malaysia�s most loved and trusted consumer brands.

As we venture into 2017, we do so recognising our market strengths that we need to reinforce and build on, as well as the gaps that we need to aggressively address in order to be a deserving customer media brand of choice.

Accelerating our ambition to better serve the increasingly digital lifestyle of today�s consumers is a key pillar for Astro. Our collaboration with AWS comes at a critical time, as we prepare ourselves to serve the next generation of consumers through products and services that best suit their needs. We will accelerate our ability to innovate, speed up time-to-market for new and improved services, and adopt game-changing technologies where appropriate. Importantly, we will also improve the way we work collaboratively across the organisation and with partners, as well as empower teams to share knowledge and best practices, and encourage every employee to experiment and learn. Our commitment to a cloud-first infrastructure has enabled us to deliver scalable customer-centric service and care, as well as innovative and personalised digital-first products at a much faster pace.�

Astro now uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to host more than 23,000 on-demand current and library titles for their connected set top boxes and OTT video streaming products. They also use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with more than a thousand compute instances running on a daily basis, and deliver close to 2 petabytes of content every month from the content delivery network using Amazon CloudFront.

With a �Cloud First� approach, new services in video OTT such as Astro GO in Malaysia, and Tribe in Indonesia and Philippines, as well as e-commerce services like Go Shop in Malaysia and Singapore operate on AWS infrastructure, while legacy backend applications are also being aggressively migrated to the AWS Cloud.

�The transformation journey involves all of our 5,000 employees, by inculcating a digital mindset and creating a culture of innovation,� said Rohana. �Working with the Amazon Web Services team and learning about their spirit of invention has been inspiring for our teams. Our employees are now experimenting with new ideas using AWS cloud computing services for new product development and proof of concepts, while proactively simplifying processes across IT and business operations. These are the essential steps towards driving internal efficiency so that we can be more agile as an organisation in building our reach and relevance in Malaysia as well as serve our customers� increasingly digital lifestyles, both locally and in the region.�

�Astro�s commitment to digital transformation with AWS reflects their focus in providing the best experience for their customers. Their long term strategic approach in building a solid foundation with AWS gives them a business edge in the fast changing dynamic world of media,� said Nick Walton, Head of ASEAN, Amazon Web Services. �We are thrilled to be working with the Astro team in their transformation journey to create innovative new services. This will enable them to capitalise on the emerging opportunities quickly and improve speed-to-market for new products.�

Astro is currently building on its analytics capabilities and customer intelligence to better serve its connected and mobile customers, for example, through personalised recommendations, intuitive interfaces, automated interactions, as well as targeted and relevant contextual marketing. To accelerate its transformation journey, Astro is hiring more software engineers and data scientists across various disciplines, and is engaging AWS training services for skill enablement. With this transformative philosophy, Astro is recommitting towards becoming a technology driven digital customer and content company.