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S-based software company Red Hat Inc. will open an office in Jakarta as the open-source software provider sees a big market potential for its products.

Damien Wong, a senior director with Red Hat who is responsible for the Southeast Asian market, said that Red Hat was confident in setting up its business in Indonesia because the company saw huge opportunities for business development.

'€œIndonesia is a very significant economy in the global stage, based on the size of its population and economic projection. We also can see that there is an active open source community in Indonesia,'€ he said during the opening of PT Red Hat Indonesia on Tuesday.

According to him, the January report from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Indonesia had also led to their decision.

The IDC Indonesia'€™s report said that in 2013, IDC began witnessing a paradigm shift in the opinions of chief executive officers (CEOs) in Indonesia, as they started to acknowledge the critical role information technology had in achieving efficiency and productivity amid rising competition and costs in the coming years.

The government'€™s specific policies on open source was a key factor that supported Red Hat'€™s decision to invest in Indonesia. '€œWe were encouraged by policies that requested organizations to adopt open source,'€ Damien said.

The government had long introduced a campaign named '€œIndonesia, Go Open Source'€ (IGOS) in 2004, which promoted the use of open source software in an effort to battle the use of illegal software. While the 2002 Law on Intellectual Property Rights obliges the use of legal software, pirated software is still openly available.

One of the challenges in Indonesia, however, is the understanding of open source, he says.

Damien said that to address the challenge, the company would bring its best practices from its global and local enterprises and nurture partnerships with local companies.

Red Hat Indonesia country manager Jibenk Wijayanti said that to make it simple, she often compared Red Hat'€™s open source services to bottled water from a trusted company.

'€œEveryone knows that water is free, we can take it as much as we want. Open sources is like that. Red Hat open source services, however, is like buying water from a trusted company, meaning that the quality is guaranteed and there is also customer services to help if there is any trouble,'€ she said.

On its press statement, Red Hat says that it expects to produce, maintain and support local talent by offering training programs and plans to engage with local user groups and open stack and open source developer communities in Indonesia.

Jibenk says that Red Hat Indonesia is focusing on financial service industries and government organizations this year. (ask)