With the Olympic Games finally taking place after a year of delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we thought of doing this month’s blog slightly differently and go behind stage, here at HGC, to get to know our colleagues who make our gaming portfolio come to life, ensuring hundreds of millions of cloud players have the best experience possible.
I had the change to catch up with our colleague Ali Mumtaz, who is the senior solution specialist for international business where he engages with both technical and non-technical teams in telecom services and manages infrastructure planning for corporate, wholesale and OTT sectors.
He has acquired a decade of experience working in both operational management and presales consulting roles.
As a telecom professional who is passionate about technological innovation, Ali likes to adopt change and “embrace new challenges as opportunities”.
He joined HGC four years on the back of exiting the fast-paced world of public cloud and data centre, seeing HGC’s strong presence in Asia and its vision as a driving force in technological transformation.
“I started my career a decade ago in Hong Kong, after completing post graduate (MSc) studies in Telecommunications,” he tells me as we sit in our meeting room, something many still cannot do due to the pandenmic.
“I consider myself as a generalist who has been exposed to different sectors in IT and telecoms industry and I firmly believe that the experiences I gained from distinguished roles across different industries throughout my career, gave me the insights our clients need.” He adds: “As a telecom and technology professional, ensuring customer satisfaction by offering excellent experiences is essential. Working for HGC and utilising technology to enhance customer experience is a fun job.”
Ali developed interest in business strategy and planning while working as a consultant. To equip himself with the necessary business insights, he pursued his MBA degree from HKU Business School which he completed last year during the peak of the pandemic.
The combination of his MBA and engineering background enables him to connect better with clients and understand their technological requirements as well as making sure the solution built serves and addressed a strong business case. It also allows him to go beyond his comfort zone, to look for the best solution in the transforming landscape of business innovation.
“I have developed a passion for consulting and advisory due to its dynamic nature as it allows me to explore different perspectives of network deployments,” Ali tells me. “Cloud gaming in particular, needs a network that is highly optimised, and the success of cloud gaming depends heavily on the underlying network.
“As a network provider, designing solutions for a gaming customer means we need to ensure a seamless experience for the end customer, the eyeballs as we call them, making sure the network is capable to fight back any latency issues, as data is being processed in real time by servers that are often located some distance away from the user.”
He shared that another reason why he enjoys working with gaming customers is no one else than his experience and interest in public cloud.
In recent years gaming has evolved into cloud gaming, turning any compute device into a powerful gaming platform, powered by hardware, such as a console, where games are streamed from the cloud via a data centre or edge node that will provide the processing power. This allows Ali to look beyond the connectivity but also visualize the architecture within a public cloud environment.
Ali adds: “The most fascinating point about consulting at HGC is to have a “thinking digital” mindset, deeply embedded in our solutions. We are not only providers of our own digital products and services, but also enablers for other business sectors specially the OTTs by providing the essential connectivity infrastructure for functioning and growing in the digital economy.”
HGC Global Communications is a Hong Kong-based titan of industry operating as a full-fledged telecom, broadband, data centre, and ICT solutions services provider.
We are experts when it comes to servicing the cloud and 5G gaming markets. By combining our know-how and regional expertise with our advanced technologies and resources, HGC's one-stop OTT edge solutions can provide custom components and solutions on a large scale and in a cost-effective manner, fully supporting OTTs to deliver a huge amount of content with minimal latency and increased agility.
If you wish to learn more about how HGC can support your gaming business, feel free to contact us at ibmarketing@hgc-intl.com and we can chat through it all. Alternatively, we will be attending ITW 2021 both in person and virtually, and we would be more than happy to welcome you to our booth.
