Currently, capital expenditure and information technology (IT) spending are being reevaluated. While the road to full recovery is going to be long and arduous, various financial stimulus initiatives announced by the government can help the economy and businesses outlive this pandemic.

In spite of the current macroeconomic challenges, Making Indonesia 4.0, the much-lauded industry road map, still presents the greatest opportunity for Indonesia to land within the top 10 of the biggest global economies by 2030. To reach this, one needs to ensure that business processes are well-integrated to accelerate economic recovery, capability building and scalability across Indonesia’s key sectors.

As businesses across Indonesia focus on improving collaboration and communication across the value chain, business-to-business (B2B) integration has emerged to become a key business imperative. No longer merely regarded as a challenge for the chief information officer to tackle, B2B integration presents an opportunity for businesses in Indonesia under the current situation to ensure efficiencies at scale across their partner and supplier ecosystem, encompassing operational processes such as onboarding partners and invoicing suppliers.

With Gartner and IDC forecasting a precipitous drop in global IT spending this year, cloud services are seen to be bucking the trend. And this trend is only seen to continue on, with B2B integration getting a new lease on life in the cloud.

Following ASEAN’s most recent digital integration framework, where two out of five priorities are closely related to harnessing the power of integration to coordinate and facilitate B2B business interactions across regions, cloud-based B2B integration will allow companies in Indonesia to experience significant reductions in infrastructure, maintenance and personnel costs associated with older, on-premises solutions.

It comes as no surprise that an increasing number of organizations across Indonesia are looking at B2B integration as a means to offer more flexibility, more efficiency and a faster approach to partner operations. As partner ecosystems become even more woven into an organization’s fabric, moving B2B integration to the cloud allows businesses in Indonesia to fully capitalize on its potential, empowering them to successfully manage vast networks of partners while increasing business velocity and sparking innovation.

As Indonesian businesses work toward scaling up further, many organizations are quickly realizing the benefits provided by a fully hosted cloud platform that enables them to quickly ramp-up B2B transactions, trading partners and industry standards. In fact, Indonesia’s market for cloud services is estimated to reach US$1.2 billion in 2022, according to a report by market research firm Frost and Sullivan.

On this front, never has it been more pressing to drive the democratization of integration as disruptive innovation takes center stage in organizations across Indonesia today. This is why adopting a multifunction integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that supports B2B integration, application programming interfaces (APIs), hybrid integration and the Internet of Things has become key to driving enhanced connectivity across the partner value chain.

 Today, there is a strengthened need for readily available on-premises, cloud and mobile data, which can allow organizations in Indonesia to consistently populate business documents with information to accelerate the speed of doing business.

It is no wonder then that enterprises in Indonesia today have ranked hybrids as the ideal IT operating model — a trend seen to only increase in 2020 as organizations demand flexibility to ensure critical data and systems are protected while keeping costs at bay. Referring to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s statement that this is the right opportunity for businesses in all sectors to transform, as a practitioner, as well from the business standpoint, I highly agree that now is the moment of truth for us to revolutionize.

What we embrace nowadays will be passed on to the future as a legacy, so the choice is in our hands.

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The writer is country manager of Software AG. The views expressed are his own.

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