Indonesia, one of Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing economies, is driven by digital technologies. The Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs of The Republic of Indonesia states that accelerating the digital economy is an effective strategy to boost national economic performance. In 2021, Indonesia’s digital economy was valued at US$70 billion, the highest in ASEAN, and it is projected to reach US$330 billion by 2030.
Indonesian consumers are value-focused, and innovative technologies have significantly changed how goods and services are consumed. Technology companies face the challenge of quickly absorbing, understanding, implementing, and managing new products. This shift increases the demand for highly available technical systems, supported by dynamic infrastructure capable of handling massive unstructured business data sets. Business customers are now optimising databases and managing current architectures to improve unit economics and reduce technology costs per user.
With infrastructure disparities and regulatory complexities, Indonesia stands at the forefront of implementing policies that support technology advancement. That’s why OceanBase in partnership with e27 staged an event entitled OceanBase INFINITY 2024: “Pioneering Indonesia’s Digital Economy,” on 26th of June, 2024 in Jakarta.
OceanBase catalyses knowledge-sharing
“We firmly believe that building a strong cooperative network is crucial for business success, and are committed to an open ecosystem, promoting knowledge sharing, active communication, and resource integration,” shared Evan Yang, CEO of OceanBase, during his speech. Yang also highlighted the fact that in 2021, OceanBase went fully open-source and has now seen over 500 companies using the OceanBase community edition — underscoring OceanBase’s commitment to fostering innovation to strengthen the digital economy.
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“The global digital economy is seeing a bright future and the opportunities for digital transformation in Indonesia are vast. Making such a future a reality requires vision, courage, and collaboration. And it also requires us to embrace bold change and innovations,” added Yang.
Seeking to address gaps in the digital economy, this project serves as a platform to foster essential knowledge sharing among ecosystem stakeholders, including fireside chats and panels with top tech leaders diving deep into cutting-edge topics:
- Fireside Chat: Charting a Path for Innovation & Impact including special guest – Norman Sasono, CTO, DANA Indonesia; and moderated by Noudhy Valdryno (Ryno), Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for Indonesia, Ant International
- Industry Panel: Indonesia’s Digital Landscape – Navigating Trends & Trade-offs in 2024 with panellists: David Park, Head of Engineering, Fazz; Aditya Chintawar, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Koinworks; Kenneth Shaw, Co-Founder & CTO, Brankas; Lillian So, ASEAN Fintech & Unicorn Leader, Amazon Web Services.
- Building a Resilient Digital Infrastructure: Learn how to leverage data analytics and AI for optimal efficiency and growth with panellists Martijn Wieriks, Chief Data Officer, Julo; Mohamad Triana Walujadjati, Chief of Enterprise, Infrastructure & Security, DOKU; and Eggy Tanuwijaya, Head of Solution Architect, Alibaba Cloud Indonesia.
- Technology Showcase: OceanBase Pioneering Next-Gen Database Technology and their Innovation Roadmap with OceanBase CTO Charlie Yang, who unveiled groundbreaking innovations that ensure scalability and reliability for mission-critical operations.
Optimising resources requires a flexible tech system
Cost-effectiveness is crucial for tech management, as no company can build a limitless cloud system without resources. DOKU, an early Indonesian payment management company, started with payment gateways and expanded to wallets, e-money, and remittances, each requiring different regulatory compliance.
Mohamad Triana Walujadjati, Chief of Enterprise, Infrastructure & Security, shared, “We need to secure four vastly different flows. Without this capability and this flexibility, we cannot fulfil those compliance requirements. Or the cost becomes too high for us to implement them in the same infrastructure.”
Aditya Chintawar, Koinworks’ Chief Product and Technology Officer, attests that auditing their infrastructure is crucial as Indonesia’s first super financial app and credit-led SME bank. They are redefining how Indonesia invests, borrows, and transacts. Preparing ahead for a company’s longevity requires teams to pivot their focus from constantly rushing to build to being more conscientious of their tech requirements.
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He added, “[The questions to ask are] is this really required? Can you optimise? Is it possible to kill this service? And that was the time when our whole team was very motivated because we can actually clean up the infrastructure, and internally, we are very happy with this shift.”
Industry leaders suggest companies be mindful of their tech cost per user or per transaction, which needs to flatten or lower over time. Given that products take time to implement, do a PoC, and get wider adoption, startups need cloud providers that can offer possibilities to co-pilot and co-build over time, with a more efficient way to manage the cost of data storage as it scales.
Challenges for adoption still arise, especially in fintech
As mobile services are widely used, educating the market and promoting digital literacy remains a big challenge. For example, fintech companies are working with regulators and other players to digitally train users, such as instructing them not to share their PIN or OTP.
Norman Sasono, CTO of DANA Indonesia, shared that their mission is to service the “240 million cellular active subscribers that get access to mobile internet.” Their goal for financial inclusion aims to give access to unbankable Indonesians by starting with more accessible services such as payment, followed by lending, investments, and insurance.
DANA rapid business growth necessitated upgrading its initial small-scale MySQL architecture due to issues with capacity, high availability, and data consistency. To address this, DANA adopted OceanBase’d 3-replica architecture, deploying two replicas locally and one on the public cloud, creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure. This upgrade enabled a seamless expansion from a 3-node to a 6-node cluster, significantly enhancing performance and capacity.
With the OceanBase, DANA successfully migrated hundreds of MySQL instances to OceanBase. Since migrating in 2019, DANA has maintained high availability, financial-grade data consistency, and zero database failures, supporting tens of millions of users with over 99.99% system availability. Additionally, a comprehensive OceanBase training program has developed a proficient local team of Database Administrators (DBAs).
Sasono shared that “we hope that increasing their financial literacy will significantly increase their financial health. And if one Indonesian can be helped by DANA with our financial service for their daily financial lifestyle, multiplied by 200 million people—[this] means we increase the financial health of the whole nation.”
Growth is important, but David Park, Head of Engineering (CTO Office) for Fazz, shares that their most important journey is doing it right with proper user onboarding processes in place. Due to the volume of data from several entities across Southeast Asia, these internal processes move quite slowly.
Serving different profiles, Fazz is “naturally using various user onboarding KYC external platforms, but none of them is really up to [their] standards or expectations. And most importantly, they become extremely costly. As a CTO, it’s one of the pain points to do some cost optimisation around all the SaaS that we use.”
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Kenneth Shaw, Co-Founder and CTO at Brankas, shares the same sentiment. In their experience, banks, for example, use software that can keep up internally, but at roughly the same cost, they can hire an additional consultant by withdrawing redundant software.
Shaw explained, “The trend is swaying towards adhering to open standards and open kinds of technology, whether that’s APIs or choosing a database in a way that kind of makes it easier for them to train their staff and then also with an eye on reducing costs.”
He added, “The idea being that you don’t have to go and reinvent the wheel and you can adapt someone else’s standard, and hypothetically you’re saving money somewhere in that world. That’s really a true and real driver of open adoption. It is all about efficiency.”
Managing GenAI data efficiently requires tremendous support
GenAI is experiencing the same trend across Southeast Asia. Lillian So, ASEAN Fintech & Unicorn Leader at Amazon Web Services, shines a light on their part in building the ecosystem. “We’re trying to better enable startups to adopt these trends [at a cost-effective way]. Besides the availability of new sexy technology like Gen-AI, Amazon Web Services is also trying to provide an assistant to them [as they build].”
Eggy Tanuwijaya, Head of Solution Architect at Alibaba Cloud Indonesia, shared his experience with most customers focusing on infrastructure. “[Their main considerations] are on data replication, availability, and compliance. We see this, especially in big data and AI. Some of the customers are still trying to find out what is the best case study for the changing AI and they’re trying to discuss it with us also.”
AI allows companies to be as creative as possible in adapting use cases in order to be customer-focused. However, Julo’s Chief Data Officer, Martijn Wieriks, challenges startups to truly leverage this technology for more impactful applications.
“That’s the real challenge, to think creatively about how you can use these things. I think that’s also difficult because analytics require a certain data accuracy, which comes with a lot of risk. There’s a lot of data that we have collected over the years from our customers.”
Given his experience working on machine learning models, Wieriks sees a huge opportunity. “This is where a lot of these large language models can help to consolidate [this massive data set] and turn that into something that’s easy to understand.”
“Companies are given further direction on where they can act. Data can help advise and tailor the experience for customers in order for companies to provide better products, and act at the right moment. That’s some of the applications that we’re looking at in the analytics space right now.”
Redesigning servers to be cloud-ready and change-resilient
Tech products, in order to grow, must build better from the lens of actual profitability. This could mean helping manage your data online across teams. But in order to do so, it must be clear that the migration would be focused on not just profitability, but also efficiency.
“Moving to the cloud is not just only moving your server to the cloud, but I think you need to re-architect and modify your design, your product, and your application, to get the maximum benefit from moving [your data] to the cloud,” added DOKU’s Walujadjati.
Koinwork’s Chintawar specified the importance of this mentality: “With the whole economic climate changing, use your team’s time frame to look into what works, what needs to be optimised, and, of course, innovate further where it works so that you can improve the customer’s experience.”
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Launching new products and initiatives would continuously transform the organisation’s operational efficiency. To mitigate risk, Brankas’ Shaw advised that the key is to balance pushing the boundaries without going too far out of acceptable norms. “The products that I see that are successful don’t really tend to be world-changing. They’re just slightly better than what we had before. It’s that kind of collective change over time that makes things revolutionary in a longer time frame.”
Part of the iterative process is to stop organisations from trying too much at once while being very clear about the success metrics for each stage of experimentation. “I’m a big fan of innovation and experimentation,” So of AWS added, “because I think what cloud kind of introduces is the ability to fail fast, and the ability to very quickly kind of experiment and spin up services.” AWS allows this by working with tech solutions to understand and provide credits and resources to build something that differentiates from the market.
Ultimately, the most successful organisations are driven by their continued solving of customer problems and their continued rapid release of new products and features.
About OceanBase
OceanBase provides a multi-cloud distributed database for mission-critical workloads at any scale. It supports hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) with one engine. With features such as strong data consistency, high availability, high performance, online scalability, high compatibility with SQL and mainstream relational databases, transparency to applications, and a high cost/performance ratio, OceanBase has helped over 1000 brands globally across industries upgrade their core systems, including GCash, the number one e-wallet service provider in the Philippines, and Haidilao, a popular catering giant.
Charlie Yang, CTO of OceanBase, outlined that their value proposition lies in being cost-effective. “Our cutting-edge online compression technology can reduce storage costs by 70% to 90% in the early phase. OceanBase has been developed and used on mission-critical workloads for more than 14 years. It can not only be deployed on-premise, but also on major public cloud providers, including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, GCP, and more.”
As a pioneer of native distributed databases, OceanBase is committed to solving the challenges of massive data management. Moving forward, OceanBase will continue to work on major technical bottlenecks, contribute to the development of the database industry, and continuously innovate database management technology. For more information, visit their website.
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