Karuna is a full-service Web design and digital agency based here in Kuching with branches found in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, as well as in Perth, Australia.
Karuna is a group of skilled website developers, UI (user interface) and UX designers, software programmers, project managers, and digital marketing experts
They have assisted governments, private companies and individuals embarking into the new age of technology trends and have delivered measurable results that empower their clients through their customised result-driven solutions.
They have worked with hundreds of clients since 2009 and have established themselves as one of the most trusted website design Malaysia companies for Malaysian businesses.
New Sarawak Tribune has spoken to the founder and chief executive officer of Karuna Sarawak, Melvin Ong, on the services that Karuna offers, their clientele, the successes or projects that Karuna Sarawak has undertaken over the years, and the future of Karuna Sarawak.
NST: Can you tell us about Karuna and what are its missions and goals?
Karuna is derived from the Sanskrit word compassion. Karuna’s initial vision was to try to touch and improve as many lives as possible with technology.
That vision has evolved into delivering the best for our clients and their customers through the transmitted use of design, technology, and innovation, and we emphasised Karuna’s touch.
The Karuna touch is essentially our 12 years of experience in design technology and innovation, combined with an experienced team that embraces an excellence culture and long-term customer partnerships.
One of the key principles at Karuna is to develop internal expertise in both Sarawak and Kuala Lumpur, and to have as many of our products developed in-house or acquired via knowledge transfers to our local staff.
We have international partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to empower our existing staff and add to our current product line.
We specialises in Web design and development focusing on user interface (UI), search engine optimisation and copywriting, digital marketing, branding, Turnkey Systems Development, IoT Systems development (Smart City), Augmented and Virtual Reality Systems, Enterprise and Agility Solutions.
Currently, we have approximately 42 to 44 employees here in Kuching. When interns arrive, we get a lot more people, sometimes up to 45 to 46 people, but we are adding more headcount as we go along, especially in the sales and marketing departments.
We are also attempting to expand the tech department, particularly in mobile applications and smart cities. We will be hiring a lot more engineers to strengthen the team.
NST: Can you share on Karuna Sarawak’s clientele?
Karuna operates in three business division. We have retail sales that primarily serve for the small and medium enterprises (SME) as well as non-governmental organisations (NGO) and other corporate bodies.
We also offer our services to government bodies such as the Sarawak Government, multinational corporations, government-linked corporations (GLC), and Bursa Malaysia-listed companies.
Within our business development division, we handle large tender projects such as proposals for projects that have yet to be considered in Malaysia.
We currently have over a thousand two hundred clients from Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, China, Europe, and the United States. Approximately 30 per cent of our clients come from different continents.
This year, we will be focusing on smart city initiatives as well as promoting our products in Southeast Asia, specifically Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, which will be an emerging market.
NST: Can you share some of the successes or projects that Karuna Sarawak has undertaken over the years?
Karuna began as an enterprise in 2009, prior to our conversion to Sendirian Berhad. The conversion to Sendirian Berhad took place in 2011. Back in 2009, we mostly built e-commerce websites for internal and external use.
We created a website called Karuna Borneo, and that brand sold 100,000 units in a month. That brought in a lot of revenue, which became the next phase of Karuna, which was web development, and then the other lines of products that we carry.
In 2017, we became the first company to that pioneered e-commerce for Astro Go-Shop which was a collaboration between Astro and Go-Shop Korea.
Also in the same year, in 2017 and 2019, we were the first in Sarawak to win the Malaysia Website Award (MWA) in both Commercial Site of the Year (2017) and Personal Site of the Year (2019).
We also became Sarawak’s first digital marketing agency to provide digital marketing services in 2017.
Aside from that, we also launched the first marathon registration marketplace and have over 150 runs, charities and corporate runs with KPJ, Tropicana Golf and Country Club, Digi, RedTune, and others.
In 2018, we were the first to introduce integrated property management, and it is the first property management system that can integrate with door access control smart door systems.
In 2020, we have the first iTicketing system for events and festivals, which is widely used in Malaysia for International Conferences and the Rainforest World Music Festival, as well as the introduction of Smart City product development in Sarawak, which will include the Smart Transportation and Smart Garbage Truck IoT systems, as well as a mobile app, under the Kuching Urban Transit System and councils.
In 2021, we setup an incubator for technology startups in Penang under 25 Startups and have assisted leading startups in Malaysia in venture funding and market access with the likes of Easybook, Pingspace, and other high technology and blockchain startups.
We were also the only incubator in Malaysia to be given a courtesy visit by the First Lady of Germany and have been recently featured as the cover story of EDGE Digital.
NST: Karuna’s role as Sarawak is moving towards adopting new technologies into the digital transformation era?
Even before Sarawak embarks into the digital transformation era, Karuna has been at the forefront of digitalisation and website application designs.
In fact, we have always been at the forefront of assisting the state government in digitising their websites as well as the internal system and other digital initiatives.
I think that we will be able to work closely with them as well as local private companies or individuals that wants to take the digitisation initiatives further.
As a cooperation, we are committed to push forward with our resources as well to generate more human capital to support the digitisation initiative.
NST: Karuna’s goals and believes are aligned with Sarawak’s desire to take advantage of the use of digital technologies and applications?
Our goals and believes are very focused in the sense that we want to pioneer the digital transformation so we can easily use Sarawak as a case study which we have through the Smart City initiatives.
We are expanding the initiative forward to other states. We have gotten a lot of inquiries as well from other states and other countries.
I think being given the opportunity to do more in the Smart City initiative and would actually allowed us to grow this initiative abroad as well.
That gives Sarawakian companies and our local human capital a chance to actually be a part of it. So when Karuna grows, the whole of Sarawak grows.
NST: How can new tech trends help Sarawak boost its economy as a whole?
In my opinion, I think that the adoption of new technologies in Malaysia, not just Sarawak, is still at an infancy stage. People have been talking about IR4.0 and the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) for a while.
The adoption of IoT is not being mass adopted yet, so I think before we step into the realm of even blockchain and even greater initiative like Smart City, we will need to promote IoT adoption.
That is something that we are actively working on to promote IR4.0 techs such as IoT, improvement of network like 5G, so those are the things that we are promoting first.
Blockchain definitely will be one of the future techs, very influential in finance and also traceable, so that is also here to stay. The next initiative would probably be more of a neuro-AI network, generating from AI, that also here to stay.
Still, I think Malaysia will probably only be able to adopt these techs within two to three years from now. So we need to embark on the digitisation initiative first and most companies are still using computers and laptops from like 10 years ago, so upgrade is needed.
Cybersecurity plays a huge component as we have more access to the internet, more things we can control by the internet, so I think the security component must not be overlooked, so we are heavily invested in that.
Now, cloud services are available, such as using Microsoft 365 where all your files are moving into the cloud, so security becomes a major component of it. And being able to utilise the cloud, so how fully utilize that and connect to different software and systems to that it can be integrated.
A lot of people said that they want to embark toward digitisation, so they will start bits and pieces of it but in the end, they don’t know how to put things together and each and every initiatives becomes wasted.
So that’s why companies comes to Karuna or similar companies like ours to lay out the digitalisation roadmap. For that, it becomes a very structured process of embarking into new digital technologies.
NST: Karuna’s hope and future
We have expanded outside of the country but we want to be able to strengthen our internal team as well as to promote a good internal culture so we want to develop team members as well as to grow our expertise with ongoing training and promoting a lifelong learning culture, so that is very important in Karuna.
We are also investing in partnership, technologies and start-up who are at the forefront of technology so not just doing internally, we are also doing externally.
So we welcome partners who are willing to do a technology transfer and also startups, founders, inventors who have noble ideas but do not have the capital/ manpower to do, so we are here, do utilise our expertise and we can talk about how to move further.
NST: How would you visualise Karuna in the future?
We envision Karuna as part of the industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) digitalisation movement in Sarawak and Malaysia. We successfully implemented the first smart city application for smart transportation.
We want to bring in smart city initiatives, particularly smart lighting such as smart traffic light systems because as we move forward into the future, we may be dealing with more machinery and AI, which we are utilising.
