Our global clients are increasingly inquiring about the capabilities of their preferred service providers in ASEAN and Indonesia in particular. I recently spent some time in Indonesia and met leading local and global service providers there. The key takeaways from these meetings? Not surprisingly, the strengths and weaknesses of IT service providers in Indonesia differ by industry, domain, and service line. As a result, clients need to be careful and orient their vendor selection process toward the right set of service providers. Depending on the requirements, the right provider might be based in Indonesia — and it might not. More specifically, sourcing professionals should realize that:

  • MNCs looking for traditional infrastructure services can rely on a good availability of skills. Most MNCs setting up shop in Indonesia are looking to replicate the enterprise architecture defined at their headquarters in the US, Europe, or Japan. The presence of local and foreign SIs in Indonesia with solid infrastructure skill sets across major technologies means that they won't face too many challenges finding the right partner at the right price point.
  • Packaged application skills are harder to come by. It's relatively easy to find people skilled with SAP and Microsoft applications in Indonesia, although their level of experience won't be on par with what you'll find in more mature markets, particularly when it concerns newer products like Ariba and Hana. SAP and its local partners are investing in developing those skills; the availability of training partners like Monsoon will help in the medium term. Oracle application skills are much less present in the country; this will force organizations to look elsewhere or leverage their preferred global partners' delivery centers in AP. The same is true for specific horizontal applications like supply chain management and vertical applications like core insurance and core banking.
  • Organizations looking for transformation capabilities have even fewer local options. Business and IT transformation skills are scarce in Indonesia; there are few enterprise architects with in-depth domain expertise. Cloud experts are still in the making and program managers capable of complex programs involving multiple stakeholders are few and far between. Clients will need to rely on providers that can fly personnel in from Singapore, Australia, or India for these projects. As a result, your provider shortlist should mainly focus on MNCs like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG, and Wipro for business and application transformation or IBM, Dimension Data, and HP for infrastructure transformation.

You will find the complete report with profiles of 20 local and global IT service providers active in Indonesia here. As usual, I am interested in your experience sourcing technology services in Indonesia and the rest of Asia.