Malaysia – 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.

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.

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.