From corporate drone to entrepreneur
KINIBIZ Every entrepreneur has a story to tell. But not every entrepreneur can claim to have survived the baptism of fire the way that Wei Chuan Beng of REDtone International Bhd certainly can.
Wei does not have a sad story to tell of growing up in poverty or obtaining a rich investor in the early days of the business. Nevertheless, he has been through many challenging times as an entrepreneur.
In fact, Wei will be the first to tell you that being an entrepreneur is all about hard work and perseverance. In a recent interview with KINIBIZ, he spoke about his beginnings as an entrepreneur and how REDtone survived the dotcom crash of 2000.
Asked how he got started in the telecommunications business, Wei replied that after graduating from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, he started working with Hewlett Packard, first with the systems support side and later in the sales division.
“In sales, I was an account manager, and that means I provided solutions to our big corporate customers and multinational companies. We supported customers globally for HP, Motorola, Intel and Alcatel, where we provided global solutions such as network consultancy, computer servers and software,” he recalled.
Wei said that at that point in time, he observed the budding “convergence trend”. IT convergence is the technology of merging separate telecommunications services into a single platform, such as allowing a mobile phone to both make calls and access the Internet.
“We may talk about convergence right now, but convergence as a phenomenon actually started in the mid-90s. It was just at the beginning of the Internet era, but in terms of IT and telecommunications, that was the beginning of convergence.
“The simplest example of convergence is the voicemail system, where you can call a person who is not around and the call is then diverted into a server for a voicemail to be recorded,” he explained.
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