Question: Has HP Indonesia seen any changes in market trends during the COVID-19 period in Indonesia and the Southeast Asian region?

Answer: What we found is that customers are demanding more features: improved camera, audio, video and security, all of which are required to support hybrid work. Functionality is even more important to customers now compared to before the pandemic.

As for commodities, we have observed prices stabilizing over the last six months or so; they [are much better] than during the pandemic, when a huge shortage of supply and capacity was driving costs up.

Can you share with us HP’s initiatives for customers to enjoy a secure working environment in times of increased cybersecurity threats?

Security has always been a major concern for HP, and we have built a lot of features into our products to help our customers manage security – from the BIOS all the way to the screen. For our notebook screens, for instance, we have developed an automated privacy filter to prevent visual hacking. We’ve also developed a new feature called privacy alert, which will automatically alert and activate user’s privacy protection once it detects a potential somebody who is looking at your screen behind you.

Strategies to enhance security still depend on the user’s awareness, for example, to not click on a suspicious link. To address this challenge, HP developed HP Wolf Security, which isolates everything that [users] open up on the internet, including a suspicious link or a legit link, in its own virtual machine to prevent it from affecting the rest of [the user’s] system. So that’s one way we remove the human from the equation, because the human will always make mistakes.

What’s your take on cybersecurity issues in Indonesia? Have you found a peculiar challenge in Indonesia when you’re trying to formulate a new technology to address customers' concerns here?

I think the industry is working very hard to plug many of the so-called loopholes. We are part of the industry. What we are doing is we want to remove human error from the equation through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automated tools to remove the human from the equation. That’s what we’re focused on.

Let’s classify the issue into maybe a few parts. If you look at the government and large enterprises, the awareness and the ability to tackle cybersecurity are very high. Everywhere across the world, also in Asia, large corporations, governments and the public sector are all very aware and they have taken steps [to deal with cyberattacks]. That is one area that [everyone] is actively working on.

The second area is small and medium businesses [SMBs], and the third area is with the individual consumer. Now, with SMBs and individuals, the challenge is awareness and the ability or willingness to invest in protection.

HP is helping our customers by providing the security features I mentioned before for free. That, at least, protects their endpoint, which is very often neglected, because people usually only think about antivirus and virtual private networks [VPNs] to protect themselves. They don’t think about protecting their device beyond, for example, password log-on. So the awareness and the ability and willingness to invest in SMBs and in individuals are critical here.

What impact of the global slowdown do you anticipate in Indonesia’s technology landscape?

We all read the headlines. It may or may not be as dire as we all may think. What we’ll do or what we’ve been telling our partners in the entire ecosystem to look at are opportunities. Look beyond the headlines.

The headlines might be dire, but there will still be opportunities. Indonesia holds a range of investment opportunities. The country is carrying out ambitious infrastructure projects, including the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway, electric vehicles manufacturing facilities and the new capital city project in East Kalimantan. We want to be able to support all companies in Indonesia to [reach] their goals […] and use our technology.

The headlines say we’re heading toward a recession. Is the business sentiment mixed, at best? Yes, but beyond that, we still see plenty of opportunities in [Indonesia’s technology landscape], especially considering that the country also has a very big and vibrant start-up community. That’s why we’re here, because there are more opportunities to discover compared to the bad news – and we must tap into those opportunities.

How have you as an executive guided your team during this uncertain time?

We want to focus on the opportunities. If we do that well, we [believe] we will be able to grow regardless of what happens to the broader environment. We want to be more aggressive in the market, we want to look more closely into our partners in Indonesia and serve the broadest range of customers.

We are monitoring all the usual economic indicators, such as currency, interest rates and GDP growth, but these indicators do not provide a complete picture. [I am optimistic] Indonesia’s economy will still be better than that of other countries.

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