PUTRAJAYA: Prestariang Bhd will be collaborating with Alibaba Cloud — the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group — and Singapore-based technology firm Conversant Solutions Pte Ltd to develop EduCloud, the first integrated education platform in the Asean region.

The three parties yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding for the development of the platform, which will see an official launch next month on Feb 14.

Prestariang chief executive officer  Dr Abu Hasan Ismail said the company will be making a series of investments for the platform, but did not disclose the total amount of investments to be made.

“In terms of investment, Prestariang will be the owner of the platform. We will be making a series of investments for this, as it’s a long term plan. We will be making the announcement to Bursa Malaysia on the total amount we will be investing.

“It is a substantial amount of investment considering the target market we are after. The platform is for the whole of Malaysia and we are looking at the entire Asean region as well after that,”he said.

Abu Hasan explained that EduCloud will be a single platform providing services related to education, including campus management, teaching and learning, entertainment, digital payment and many other services and online applications.

He also said that Prestariang is already in talks with a number of interested parties for the subscription of the platform.

“It will be a recurring income base for us going forward. We have engaged with the government and the next phase for Prestariang is to aim for consumers and eventually move into Big Data, a new space for us. It’s a very exciting time for us,”said Abu Hasan.

Alibaba Group vice president Ethan Yu said the group is new to the region, adding that Prestariang is its first partner in the Asean region for education cloud-based services.

“The global education systems are moving to the cloud, which is a very obvious trend in the world currently. For example, in China, most education means are being digitalised.

“We are very happy to have Prestariang partnering with us. We are very new to this market as we have been here for a very short time,”said Yu.

In view of Prestariang’s collaboration with Alibaba, Abu Hasan said he is hoping for 2017 to be a good year for the company.

“After all the planning, it will be about the execution. We hope for 2017 to be the best year ever for Prestariang,”he said.

He added that the government will be making a significant announcement when Alibaba Group founder and executive chairman Jack Ma officially comes in as Malaysia’s digital economic adviser in March.