As a result of popular online activities, including mobile messaging and social media, the growth of the data centre market in the country is rapidly multiplying.
Abigail Opiah caught up with Darren Hawkins (pictured), Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SpaceDC, as the company unveils JAK2, its Uptime Institute Tier III, carrier-neutral data centre with diverse fibre routes from multiple ISPs.
Hawkins says that Asia and Southeast Asia are fast-growing digital economies. He is right. The GSMA reported that the Indonesian economy is set to expand by $10.5 billion over the next decade, adding 1% to the country’s GDP by the end of 2030.
“When you look at the size of the market, they only have around 50% penetration of mobile phone users, compared to Europe where it is close to around 90%. There is a lot for growth to come in terms of data centre demand throughout the region,” he says.
“When you look at the key drivers for data centre growth, which is e-commerce spend and cloud adoption, migration to the cloud is affected by the quality of the digital infrastructure people have been working from in Indonesia is a low base. Lack of quality data center infrastructure was one of the key things we identified preventing growth in cloud.”
“When customers are looking to move their business in Indonesia, they are typically not coming off a high-end system, more often it is a simple system. The migration efforts is quite low, thus we are seeing fast adoption.”
Jakarta Focus
In regards to capacity in Indonesia, Hawkins says that there is not a lot – there is under 100MW generally in the city of Jakarta, which presented itself as a great opportunity for SpaceDC to expand in the market.
“Jakarta is the first data centre for us to come out of the gates. The region has one of the highest populations of internet users and it has a lot of internet penetration potential and we see a lot of growth still coming,” he states.
“Jakarta has a vibrant start-up culture, which coupled with the likes of Amazon, Alibaba and Google coming into the market, really does credentialize the city as the next growth zone, and it has the potential to be the next digital powerhouse for Asia.”
“Typically in a lot of Asian countries, the telcos dominate the data centre space, as they used to in countries like America and Australia 10 to 20 years ago, but now in those other countries you have data centre providers that do just that and the telcos focus on additional mobile related services and their networks.”
“As we move forwards with 5G, there is going to be pressure on the network providers to build better networks and services and shift their focus away from building data centers,” he continues.
“That will enable more data centre providers to come in and pick up the pieces. You will soon see a shift from telcos providing these services to specialist providers.”
Sustainable way forward
SpaceDC is one of the first Indonesian data centre provider employing the Selective Catalytic Reduction system to reduce the carbon footprint of its diesel generators. This is one of the many green design features of the ID01 campus.
“We are working out how we can provide infrastructure for international companies to expand into Indonesia. We are also looking into alternative sources of energy, and we are currently exploring some options to provide green energy for the data centres so that we can bypass the carbon based approach altogether,” Hawkins concludes.
“We are headquartered in Singapore, which has a very stable and reliable government system and many international companies can contract with us here with the assurance of common law, good trade and safe travel.
“We effectively branch out from Singapore and run and operate data centres forcustomers here, which gives a lot of reliability from a supply-chain perspective.
“Instead of a customer renting from one data centre supplier in Vietnam and a different one in Korea, they can come to us. Our vision is to provide a one-stop-shop for people across that region.”
The JAK2 facility is one of two data centres that SpaceDC plans to build in the Indonesian capital city. A larger data centre, JAK1, with 24MW of capacity is currently under construction and expected to launch in 2021.
