U

nless the government improves the telecommunications network and other related infrastructure, Indonesia will not become a favorite location for companies looking for places to house their data centers, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

'€œBased on our assessment, right now Indonesia is not a country considered to be a data center location,'€ IDC Indonesia head of operations Sudev Bangah said in a limited press briefing on Tuesday.

According to a recent IDC data center index ranking, Indonesia is in the bottom three for data center building, surpassing only the Philippines and China.

Hong Kong and Singapore, meanwhile, ranked first and second among all 13 countries throughout Asia Pacific, excluding Japan.

Bangah said a lack of adequate infrastructure and uneven electricity distribution had become the main challenges for enterprises looking to build data centers in the country.

'€œIndonesia'€™s infrastructure spending is still very low, below 2 percent of its gross domestic product [GDP]. Hopefully, the new president will do a better job,'€ he said, adding that most countries in the Asia Pacific spent between 3 and 4 percent of their GDP on infrastructure.

The country'€™s lack of infrastructure is apparently the reason why BlackBerry has not built a data center here despite a government regulation requiring enterprises with a huge Indonesian consumer-base, such as the Canadian phone maker, to build their data centers in the country.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen said previously his company had no intention to build a data center in the country given considerations of cost efficiency and security.

Despite the country'€™s low favorability as a location for a global data center, in its study of over 300 enterprises operating in Indonesia, IDC Indonesia found that more than half of enterprises
included data center expansion as their basic information and communications technology (ICT) in 2015.

Bangah said the figure represented a surge from between 20 and 30 percent last year.

In addition, the study found that this year was the first when enterprises operating in Indonesia saw '€œoperational efficiency'€ become a future priority, a pattern which was similar to counterparts throughout the Asia Pacific.

Bangah said most companies operating in Indonesia had previously placed '€œcost saving'€ as their main priority.

The study also found that many enterprises in Indonesia looked more into so-called third platform technology, consisting of mobile devices and applications, cloud services, big data analytics and social technologies.

The surveyed enterprises stated that they would increase their spending on mobile devices, cloud services, big data analytics and social technologies by 49 percent, 42 percent, 62 percent and 48 percent, respectively.

The study, however, also found that almost 20 percent of the enterprises admitted that a lack of understanding of technology would become an obstacle to really adopt the transformative technology.

IDC Indonesia predicted that the country'€™s total ICT spending would hit US$16.6 billion this year, with almost half coming from consumers, 24 percent from the media and communications sector, 7.2 percent from the banking sector, 6.3 percent from manufacturing and the remainder from the government and retail sector.