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ata storage company EMC says that with its fast-growing economy and large population, Indonesia has emerged as one of the most promising markets for cloud computing in Asia Pacific.

The company’s president for Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, David Webster, sees the prospect for cloud computing businesses in Indonesia as very positive, since organizations in the country deeply understand that in order to move forward, they have to invest more in the development of information and communications technologies (ICT).

“They also understand that they don’t need to do ICT alone. They can find other companies to do ICT for them,” he told The Jakarta Post at an exclusive interview session at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Jakarta on Thursday.

Talking about the awareness of business entities and other organizations in the country to utilize more advanced ICT technologies like cloud computing, he said that in many emerging economies, including Indonesia, there is recognition of the fact that currently businesses and ICT are interconnected and support each other.

“The main challenge to cloud computing businesses in the country is how to make people understand that this is not hard. It’s about how to persuade people to start using these technologies,” Webster explained.

Given current trends, he predicted that over the next five years, a high proportion of Indonesian companies and government institutions would start using cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server.

EMC’s country manager for Indonesia Adi Rusli, who also attended the interview session, revealed that the company’s business had shown a very encouraging performance during the past three years.

In 2009, the company’s revenues grew by 35 percent year-on-year, while last year, growth reached 60 percent. In the first half of this year, EMC also recorded convincing growth of 85 percent, compared with the same period in 2010.

“We’ve have been in Indonesia since 2006, but during the first three years, we had difficulties in taking off for several reasons. But, since 2009, everything has been on track,” he said.

Currently, the company has one distributor, three resellers and four value-added resellers in Indonesia. Adi reported that his company continually worked to improve the capacity and capability of its local partners in order to fulfill the needs of customers in their coverage areas.

EMC clients in the country are mostly located in Jakarta. In terms of the business sector, most of the company’s clients come from the telecommunications industry, finance and oil and gas sectors.

“Most of the big oil, gas and mining companies, like Chevron, Total and Freeport, are our clients,” said Adi.

Besides those large-scale companies, EMC also sees the potential to expand its client base to small- and medium-scale enterprises, particularly for data storage.

Adi said that it was easier for small- and medium-scale enterprises to decide to start using cloud computing technologies. Then, once they were satisfied, they would spread the word to their fellow business associates.

A new study from Springboard Research reveals that cloud computing is poised for very strong growth in Indonesia over the next 12 to 18 months.

As much as half of all Indonesia-based organizations are currently using, or actively planning, cloud computing initiatives, rising to 68 percent among large organizations.

—JP/Rangga D. Fadillah