Salesforce is serious about Indonesia, and partners

The launch of a new Indonesian entity has placed Salesforce at the centre of the largest digital economy in ASEAN, armed with an engaged customer base and expanded partner ecosystem.

Motivated by magnified enterprise interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and data – triggered by accelerated cloud adoption – the arrival of the customer relationship management (CRM) vendor not only represents a statement of local intent, but an endorsement of the market potential ahead.

This is a tier-1 player galvanised and gunning for growth.

“We look forward to working with businesses in Indonesia to capture new opportunities through the use of AI, data and CRM,” said Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager of ASEAN at Salesforce.

“AI can be a game-changer for businesses in Indonesia, if used in a trusted manner. With recent AI developments pushing the digital economy into a new era, Indonesian businesses have an opportunity to accelerate their digitalisation.”

Supporting the launch is the availability of Hyperforce in Indonesia, labelled as a “re-imagination” of the vendor’s platform architecture for the public cloud, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This is in addition to a skills partnership with The Ministry of Communication and Informatics (KOMINFO) to provide CRM curriculum and training under the Digital Talent Scholarship Program.

“Indonesian businesses now have access to Hyperforce which gives them the ability to host data locally with the benefits and scalability of public cloud,” Abraham added. “All these bundled with our local skilling initiatives, underscore Salesforce’s ever-growing commitment to the Indonesian market.”

Customer momentum builds, powered by partners

During the past two years, Abraham highlighted “growing interest” from Indonesian businesses specific to the deployment of Customer 360, a portfolio of cloud-based products and services.

Key customers include GoTo, Lion Parcel, Xendit and United Tractors, all of which are embracing cloud-based CRM solutions to improve productivity, shorten service resolution times and increase customer satisfaction levels.

“The number of customers we are serving in the market has grown significantly,” Abraham shared.

For example, logistics company Lion Parcel operates a vast network covering up to 98% of areas across Indonesia and 51 international countries.

Seeking to deliver enhanced customer experience at affordable prices, the Jakarta-based business rolled out Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to build a 360 degree view of their customer.

“This has enabled Lion Parcel to deliver personalised services, accelerate deals and drive greater empowerment within their workforce,” Abraham outlined.

Through utilising Salesforce, Lion Parcel has since achieved a 70% boost in sales, 20% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) and 30% improvement in cost efficiency.

“Cloud adoption is an important foundation for digital transformation across a business,” Abraham advised. “It allows businesses to bring new products and services to market quickly, innovate easily and scale as required – all of which drive growth of the digital economy.”

With new technology adoption expected to add up to $2.8 trillion to the Indonesian economy by 2040, Abraham said there is “no better time” for organisations to embrace cloud and digital solutions.

According to PwC findings, more than 80% of companies in Indonesia are currently using some form of cloud computing.

“Indonesia is making good progress on its cloud adoption journey,” Abraham noted. “This is a reflection of the readiness of the market to leverage CRM solutions to improve productivity and efficiency, and enhance customer experiences.”

The new Salesforce entity will bring people and decision-making closer to customers and partners in the market, alongside accessing a growing pool of homegrown talent.

Prior to this, local customers were serviced from the Salesforce office in Singapore with support from a specialised partner ecosystem in Indonesia.

“Partners form an important and essential part of our ecosystem that delivers success for customers,” Abraham outlined. “As businesses embrace digital transformation, they need context-based guidance and expertise from partners to drive innovation, and scale efficiencies and productivity.”

In Indonesia, Salesforce currently works with partners such as Deloitte, PwC, TMS Consulting, Metrodata and Trees Solutions. Plans are also underway to grow the software vendor’s reseller business having doubled the number of Indonesian cloud resellers within the space of 12 months.

“We are committed to helping our customers get the most out of Salesforce, by empowering them with access to a comprehensive ecosystem of partner applications, and experts from consulting firms that bring guidance, deep technical skills and Salesforce expertise across every industry, product and region,” Abraham said.

Following the launch of the Global Salesforce One Partner program last year, partners now have access to all portfolio products, as well as credentialing and other resources to build skills and gain expertise across the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

Local availability, homegrown skills

From a product perspective, the general availability of Hyperforce in Indonesia will also serve to meet heightened end-user demand.

Hyperforce is designed to help customers leverage the “scale, reliability and security” of AWS to quickly deploy Salesforce solutions including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

With increased emphasis on data security and storage, local data residency is now viewed as “imperative” for regional and global organisations in regulated industries such as the government or financial services.

“Organisations in Indonesia can now scale on AWS and access more than 240 services including AI, while improving their ability to meet their data compliance standards,” said Kirsten Gilbertson, ASEAN Partner Sales Lead at AWS.

According to Gilbertson, the local alliance reinforces the cloud vendor’s own $5 billion (IDR$71 trillion) investment in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region while supporting growing demand for “agile and secure” cloud solutions.

“We look forward to continuing to support customers and partners like Salesforce to digitally transform and grow,” Gilbertson added.

Specific to skills, the partnership with KOMINFO will provide participants with access to develop Salesforce Administrator, Developer and App Builder capabilities.

Training will be conducted on Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform and through expert-led workshops.

Nokentech will support the delivery of training to participants. The program is run by the Fresh Graduate Academy DTS and opened for enrolment in August before training commenced in mid-September.

In March, the vendor announced its partnership with Nokentech to train up to 100,000 students in Indonesia with CRM skills over the next three years. The partnership supports “equitable access” to digital skills with women to make up 50% of students trained.

In order to accelerate the development of the digital economy, Indonesia’s government is also committed to implementing “progressive policies” and strengthening private sector collaboration to support the development of emerging technologies, such as AI and cloud.

“We believe that these technologies could help create safe, reliable and sustainable innovative solutions for the society, as well as the national economy in general,” said Dr. Ir. Mohammad Rudy Salahuddin, MEM, Deputy Minister for Digital Economy, Manpower and SMEs; Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia.