Strengthening Partners and Local Talent Becomes Alibaba Cloud Indonesia's Main Strategy

Alibaba Cloud currently has 21 data centers (data center) scattered in various countries in the world. Two of them are in Indonesia, inaugurated in 2018 and 2019. Alibaba Cloud Indonesia Country Manager Leon Chen even said that the company is currently in the process of building its third data center in Indonesia, targeted for completion in early 2021.

"We see great potential here; and Indonesia itself is a strategic market for Alibaba Cloud. This is also the reason why Alibaba Cloud is a provider of cloud the first global to present data center in Indonesia," he said.

Partnership strategy

Not only Alibaba Cloud, DailySocial notes several other large companies have invested in the development of local data centers. There is Microsoft which will disburse funds of up to US $ 1 billion, Amazon with US $ 2,5 billion, and Google with an unspecified nominal (they recently released cloud regions).

Meanwhile, local providers also have a big role in working on market share – let's say names like Biznet Gio, Telkom Sigma, and others. In addition to technological solutions, two brand those mentioned are affiliated with other companies engaged in telecommunications and digital.

Talking about his business strategy, Leon said, for market penetration, his party has a synergy approach. They work with local partners to bring expertise and technology to strengthen local companies. In addition, various training and certification programs to be a strategy 'talent pool', in order to increase the availability of local experts.

"Currently, Alibaba Cloud has around 100 local partners in our ecosystem [...] Earlier this year, we also announced training programs that we initiated with universities, incubators, and training institutions in Indonesia."

Entrusting local talent

In the interview, Max Meiden Dasuki as Lead Solutions Architect was also present Alibaba Cloud. The man who graduated from the Surabaya Technical High School acts as a consultant for customers from startups and corporations.

"We educate customers on how to adopt cloud. We work with local partners to provide customized solutions to increase the efficiency of their business operations and address their challenges more cost-effectively," said Max.

In more detail he gave an example of his duties. For example one of the customers has a need for a relational database management system solution, they find many challenges using traditional databases. After in-depth discussion and analysis, Max and the team usually provide technical advice, in that case he may suggest implementation cloud-native database like PolarDB.

"We helped them to migrate from traditional to PolarDB. So they can manage without having to worry about performance because they can measure computing resources quickly and efficiently," explained Max.

In addition, Max also said that 80% of the Alibaba Cloud team in Indonesia are local staff. While 20% are female staff.

Goals for this year

Alibaba Cloud Indonesia has committed to holding 200 trainings This year. Targeting 20 thousand participants, it is expected that 50% of them can proceed to the certification stage. In addition, the company plans to recruit 5 thousand new employees globally by the end of the year, including for its business units in Indonesia.

"We have achieved triple-digit business growth for three consecutive years [...] supporting customers from various sectors, especially E-commerce, finance, media, education; for example Adira Finance, MNC, JNE, Kopi Kenangan, Investree, Akulaku, and so on," said Leon.

Along with the construction of its third data center, Alibaba Cloud is also about setting up 'data scrubbing center' first in Indonesia. The need for data intelligence services was taken into consideration by the company in the release of the system – in addition to being able to comply with regulations that require the management of strategic data in local data centers.