The seemingly light-hearted nickname for the company's office, "Office of Superheroes", seems half futuristic, half a teenage boy's bedroom fantasy as you walk in, a place where Marvel and DC Comics memorabilia live. There is also a large karaoke room with a professional sound system, which Dato' Teh admits he is not microphone-shy about using. (For the record, he does a good version of You Raise Me Up and might even give Ed Sheeran a run for his money.) But for all the creature comforts in the office, the Fusionex team, which now includes more than 550 employees, works as hard as it plays.
"It's a meeting of different ideas and technologies, where villains aren't animals or monsters, they're problems," according to him. "My parents gave me the ability to solve puzzles and comprehend the actual issues that people face. So, where you see poverty, hardship in different situations, disasters or explosions, how do you use technology and innovation to overcome all these problems? How do superhero traits manifest in real life? That's what we all do."
To illustrate the nature of Fusionex's business, he positions the company not only as a discovery tool but as a sequence of information, an intelligent foundation that cuts across all the complex and incomprehensible elements in an organisation. "There are a lot of problems in every organisation that need to be highlighted. In the manufacturing process, it is essential to keep defects and downtime to a minimum because these can have significant financial repercussions when there are problems with quality or when entire batches of material need to be returned. It can happen as a dangerous explosion that could lead to death. What we do for clients is discuss their concerns together, because we don't know everything, so we have to act in a consultative manner."
"But we work very hard with them and are very focused. Fusionex uses our team's experience and its technology to leverage data technology to solve client issues. We believe that data is the new crude oil. This is something significant, but it will continue to be raw data unless we collect, store, process and analyse that data to make it meaningful and insightful for our customers, so that it informs us what to do based on what happened in the past, and better planning for the future can be done. That's what we do for our customers of all shapes and sizes."
Founder of Fusionex Dato' Teh no longer needs to convince prospective clients to check out Fusionex; however, this may be partially because of Thor's massive hammer, Mjolnir, which he keeps in his office ("I don't have to say much when I've got it in my hands," he says with a smile). Important domestic and international clients from a variety of industries, including Starwood, Ritz Carlton, Marriott, CIMB Group, American Airlines, Dell, Intel, FedEx, AEON, and Malaysia Airlines, have been on the company's client list. They all look to Fusionex to give them the insights they need.
For the founder's own account of how the company began, read Dato' Seri Ivan Teh, a digital giant with a difference.
