Tim Synan, the head of Google Cloud Southeast Asia, said in Jakarta on Thursday that turning Indonesia into one of the company’s hubs in the cloud business was necessary to meet the growing demand from local companies.

“We want Indonesia to become a digital powerhouse in Southeast Asia,” Synan said during the second annual Google Cloud Summit.

He said Google provided cloud services to a number of Indonesian companies, such as taxi company Blue Bird Group, diversified conglomerate CT Corp., fashion startup Sale Stock, ride-hailing app provider Go-Jek, media giant Emtek, online retailer Tokopedia and online travel agent Traveloka.

The seven companies currently use the cloud platform based in Singapore, one of Google’s 13 cloud platforms in the world.

Research by Google and Singapore-based investment company Temasek show that Indonesia is the fastest-growing internet market in the world, with an estimated 19 percent internet user growth to 215 million in 2020 from 92 million in 2015.

Indonesia is among the largest e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia. E-commerce transactions in the country are projected to increase from US$1.7 billion in 2015 to $46 billion by 2025 to account for 52 percent of the total e-commerce transactions in the region.

Cloud technology has become one way for local businesses to cut IT costs, especially for data storage. The technology essentially allows users to store data and programs on remote servers, thereby reducing costs related to, for instance, hardware maintenance, cybersecurity and server assembly.

Tim admitted that the lack of digital talent in Indonesia was a limiting factor for implementing cloud computing services, echoing the sentiment of many other companies working in the country.

To address that issue, Google said in March it would train 100,000 developers in Indonesia by 2020. This included the Google Developers Kejar program, formerly known as the Indonesia Android Kejar program, which has trained 60,000 developers from 10 cities as of March, and the Udacity program, which trained 13,000 developers in 2017.

Garindra Prahandono, the chief technology officer of Sale Stock, a local online fashion retailer, said his company had begun using Google Cloud in 2017. “It’s simple, it’s robust and it’s really easy to build stuff on it,” he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

He added that Google Cloud had allowed the company to cut hardware costs by 50 percent and made hiring easier by absorbing much computer-related work that would have otherwise required more digitally talented employees.

Bluebird director Sigit Djokosoetono said his company had switched to Google Cloud in 2017 after having tested other platforms, because they found it the most compatible with their needs.

He explained that BlueBird was experimenting with Google Cloud’s machine learning and artificial intelligence functions to spot trends in consumer behavior and thereby predict consumer demand, so they could deploy their fleet more effectively.

“The patterns are starting to become visible, but not enough to rely on,” he said.

As reported previously, rival US tech giant Amazon plans a Rp 14 trillion ($923 million) foray into Indonesia, which Amazon vice president Werner Vogels conveyed to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo during a visit to Jakarta last month.

Through this planned investment, Amazon is set to introduce its cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services, to the Indonesian market. (nor)

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