Dissecting the Potential of Indonesia's Digital Ecosystem in the Future

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just published a report entitled: Unlocking APAC's Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches, which discusses the potential for non-metropolitan digital growth in Indonesia. On the same occasion, we collaborated with AWS to hold activities #StartupForNegeri second series of webinar with the theme: Develop your startup outside of metropolitan Indonesia, which will take place on Tuesday, April 6, 2021, at 7 pm via the Go To Webinar application. In this activity, we will discuss directly the great potential of Indonesian startups that will develop rapidly in the future. 

This article is the result of our interview together Gunawan Susanto, Country General Manager of AWS (Amazon Web Services), which examines more deeply the results of the report on the condition of the digital economy in the next few years 

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Q: In a recent report published by AWS it was found that only 19% of workers have digital skills. While the economy needs more than 110 million digital workers by 2025 and at such a percentage, the average Indonesian worker will need to develop seven digital skills in the next 5 years to keep pace with technological advances and demand. 

• How do you see that statement?

• What is AWS' role in accelerating training efforts to build a future workforce that will help advance vision 4.0 in Indonesia?

In a published report, it was found that 59% of digital individual workers in Indonesia will meet the full requirements by 2025. Some of the rapidly developing digital skills such as, cloud architecture design, cybersecurity, large-scale data modeling, web/software/game development, and software operation support. 

Efforts can be made to bridge the skills gap. AWS itself has carried out various activities to improve the digital skills of people in Indonesia. Including collaborating with educational institutions, industry organizations, as well as the government, providing various free training opportunities, virtual and face-to-face classroom training with basic, intermediate, and advanced levels for one to collaborating with @Dicoding Indonesia on the Cloud and the Back-End Developer Scholarship Program , with the aim of equipping the Indonesian people with the skills and knowledge to fill and advance the back-end developer profession in this country. This program is open to students, teachers and the general public. For more information, please visit this page: https://aws.dicoding.com/

Q: Technology must be accessible to everyone. Recently, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, in his "Now go build" series talked about Indonesian farmers. What is the role of technology in addressing some of Indonesia's most pressing problems?

At AWS, we work every day with some of the nation's most innovative founders to support them in building and growing technology-driven businesses designed to solve problems that matter to communities across the country, and address the challenging structural gaps in everyday life. They do this by applying technology to create new access and new business models, and not being constrained by traditional practices. At Amazon, we call it Day 1 thinking - where we see possibilities, rather than being limited to things that have been done before.

We can take the example of the shipping and logistics sector which is growing rapidly in Indonesia. In today's challenging environment, start-ups such as food delivery services, HappyFresh, build and innovate on the AWS Cloud to help ensure convenient delivery of groceries and essentials. In addition, we also see how local telehealth startups such as HaloDoc leverage the AWS Cloud to provide greater access to medical care during a pandemic, all in all online so users can talk to doctors from home. At AWS, we are committed to supporting this progress, helping Indonesian builders to create successful startups that positively benefit our communities.

Q: We have experienced corporate professionals who are willing to take the plunge and try a startup. With a very large smartphone user base,cheap data quota prices, With a growing economy, how is Indonesia ready to face digital disruption? Will the next few years see the proliferation of digital-first businesses and they will infiltrate every sector of the economy?

There is no doubt that we are heading into a period of digital transformation that is unprecedented across the Indonesian business landscape, and we will certainly continue to see this momentum in our domestic startup ecosystem. Computing cloud has become a tool for founders in Indonesia to realize their ideas more quickly and easily. The cloud's cost-effective nature means startups can experiment with higher speeds, fail quickly with low financial impact, and recover easily.

Silicon Valley VC Marc Andreessen said that the AWS Cloud has helped reduce the cost of running applications to $1.500 per month - a 100x difference, which means it's easier than ever to launch business technologies. The cloud reduces growth process risk and ensures startups don't have to invest heavily in anticipating future demand.

From the very beginning, AWS's goal was to enable anyone, anywhere, to access the same scale and cost structure as the world's largest companies. We believe that providing reliable cloud services for everyone can democratize innovation and enable the best idea or business model to win - not necessarily the one with the most resources behind it.

We have a long history of helping nurture startups as they grow. We regularly work with venture investors (such as Alpha JWC), incubators, coworking spaces, and within the university sector to uncover emerging startups and provide them with the support they need to thrive.

AWS invests heavily in skills development to ensure startups have access to a talented pool of people from diverse backgrounds, and we even offer free online training courses for our novice customers on popular topics like Cloud Practitioner Skills, Machine Learning, and IoT. For all of these reasons, we strongly agree that Indonesia is entering an era of tremendous digital advancement, and AWS is committed to supporting the growth of our country's innovative business ideas across all industries.

Q: What are the key points of discussion in this Alpha JWC report?

One of the key points in the Alpha JWC report is this: Despite increasing economic strength, we observe that these cities (T2 and T3) are ~3-5 years behind their Tier 1 in digital adoption.

Indonesia's GDP is $4,1k - double that of markets like India. Half of the population is under 30 years old. It has nearly 200 million internet users. Since most online spending has been driven by Tier 1 consumers, how do you all see the ecosystem going well? Tier 2 and Tier 3 consumer needs are different - local language content, work - all this is done with an approach thin approach wallet. 

Q: What is the role of technology with this opportunity to digitally transform all cities? Example, cloud computing This opens up opportunities for founders, including those still in their earliest stages, to access advanced tools and services that may not have been affordable for years, such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT). How much awareness do you see among the founders of leveraging such access?

Cloud computing makes it even easier for you to bring great ideas to life, even for non-technical founders at the earliest stages of growing a successful business. At AWS, we offer a variety of programs and initiatives to support startups at every stage of their lifecycle, from inception to maturity.

At the earliest stage, the program AWS Activate we provide a number of benefits to eligible startups, including AWS credits, technical support, and training. AWS Activate has provided hundreds of thousands of startups worldwide with a number of benefits since 2013, including AWS credits, technical support, and training. Amazon provided more than US$1 billion in AWS credits globally during 2020 to help early-stage startups launch their businesses and accelerate their growth. With this help, startups use scalable, reliable and secure cloud services such as computing, storage, databases, analytics, Internet of Things, machine learning, and many others from AWS to scale their business.

With more than 200 products and services, we have the broadest and deepest range of capabilities of any cloud provider, from basic computing and storage to advanced database and architecture options, to pre-built solutions. In addition, our team is dedicated to working with our novice customers to help them determine which service is best for them.

Our services include a full suite of AI/ML tools, from creation and training tools to advanced frameworks and packaged AI-based solutions. We are working with Indonesian startups who are seeing huge benefits from adopting Machine Learning. A good example is HappyFresh, an online grocery shopping service operating in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Launched in 2015, the company partners with 278 supermarkets and stores that use the HappyFresh delivery platform and service to offer customers online grocery shopping. The company ships more than 100.000 products through its app which have been downloaded more than 1,5 million times. HappyFresh uses AWS Lambda for fraud detection, AWS Glue for extracting and processing data, and Amazon SageMaker for machine learning to anticipate customer demands

 Q: What are your predictions for 2021 and beyond, regarding the expansion of opportunities to T2 and T3 cities in Indonesia?

2021 will be a year of unprecedented digital transformation, powered by accelerated adoption of cloud computing. This will truly be a "new order of life" for the Indonesian business landscape.

AWS will open an infrastructure region in Indonesia by the end of 2021/early 2022. The opening of an AWS Region in Indonesia will support Indonesia's fast-growing startup ecosystem, large Indonesian companies, and government agencies by helping to drive more tech jobs and businesses, boosting the local economy , and enabling organizations across all verticals to lower costs, increase agility, and increase flexibility. We are delighted that AWS has been a meaningful part of this journey.

The addition of the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region will enable organizations to deliver lower latency to end users in Indonesia, and across Asia Pacific. In addition, Indonesian organizations from startups to enterprises and the public sector will have the infrastructure in their country to leverage advanced technologies from the world's leading cloud with the widest and deepest suite of cloud services including analytics, Artificial Intelligence, databases, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning. , mobile, serverless services and more to drive innovation.

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Follow #StartupForNegeri second series of webinar with the theme: Develop your startup outside of metropolitan Indonesia, which will take place on Tuesday, April 6, 2021, at 7 p.m. via the app Go To Webinars!