BaliCamp gears up to become Indonesia's Silicon Valley

BaliCamp gears up to become Indonesia's Silicon Valley

By Zatni Arbi

BATURITI, Bali (JP): I just spent two very interesting days in
Bali. The second day would perhaps be interesting only to me: I
spent the whole day in the Bedugul area, which I had visited more
than 20 years ago and had been intensely dreaming of revisiting.

Of course, as you can understand, it was quite a
disappointment for me to see so many hotels and resorts sprouting
wildly in that area. It was also a disappointment to find how
noisy this place had become -- with all the motorcycles on the
road and the jet skis on the water. Well, what can I say? These
are the changes that we, unfortunately, have come to label as
"progress".

However, what brought me in the first place to Baturiti, some
20 minutes before Bedugul, was what I would consider real
progress. I was invited to witness the official opening of
BaliCamp, a software development center owned by PT Sigma Karya
Sempurna, a Sigma Cipta Caraka company. It is a high-tech campus
where programmers work on various different projects while
enjoying the natural beauty of Pacung Valley.

Even before it was officially launched, BaliCamp was already
serving 10 companies in North America and Europe.

"So far, we have received US$2 million in revenue from these
projects," said Otto Toto Sugiri, the visionary engine that has
been driving the progress of Sigma Cipta Caraka and all the
companies in the group.

Software

Indeed, Toto is known among the Indonesian IT community for
his ideas, most of which are ahead of their time. Selling
software and services to the global market from the beautiful
island of Bali is one of them.

"When the crisis hit us, we thought that there was still
something that we could do, and that was to export software," he
said. He mulled over the idea, talked it over with prospective
partners and then set out to find the best location for the
campus. He ended up in Baturiti, Pacung, right in the center of
the island.

When the colorful fireworks went off in the sky with a lot of
bangs that Saturday evening, less than half of the total project
was completed. Yet there had already been about 95 programmers
pounding on the keyboards in the cozy rooms -- which each of them
probably look like a family living room to you -- in the well-
equipped complex.

"Creativity is the essence of software development," Toto
reasoned, "Our developers need a work environment that can
stimulate their creativity."

That is, undoubtedly, why Sigma's own workplace in Menara Dea,
Mega Kuningan, Jakarta, is also designed in a very similar way.
You'll not find any cubicle in the coffee shop-like workplace.

What is perhaps another extraordinary thing about this center
is that Sigma has been building the campus without any bank
financing.

"Our shareholders don't believe in taking out loans," Toto
told me when I first met him a couple of months ago. This is
where the Sigma Group seems to be really conservative -- for a
commendable reason given the fact that almost all other startups
would think first of applying for bank loans. The US$3 million
investment that has been made in BaliCamp so far has come from
the group's own equity.

In the "work modules" at the camp, programmers, developers and
others provide various services to their clients, including
integration, localization, testing and quality assurance,
migration, software and application development and project
management. A direct satellite uplink to Hawaii provides a large
conduit to the Internet for all the bits and bytes they produce.

Partners

Those who were present at the opening ceremony, which was
preceded by a Balinese performance, would find it hard to believe
that they saw top-level executives from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle
sitting next to each other. These three are real competitors --
always trying to grab each other's customers. The fact that
BaliCamp was able to build partnerships with the three of them is
perhaps an indication of how much confidence these major software
vendors have in this company.

What about human resources? As if to provide yet further
testimony in support of my conviction that Indonesians are just
as capable as other nationals when it comes to software
development, Sutjahyo Budiman, BaliCamp marketing director, told
me that they had had no problem recruiting good talent.

"Every Thursday, we invite those who are interested in joining
us to come to BaliCamp and take our job test. On average, we have
10 people coming each week, although our hiring rate is still
around 10 to 15 people a month. We also visit the computer
schools at Indonesia's leading universities regularly to find
more talent," added Sutjahyo.

By the end of 2001, BaliCamp expects to have between 400 and
500 people working at the center -- one third of them
programmers.

"In addition to a comfortable work environment in a naturally
beautiful surrounding, another attraction is the way remuneration
is determined. BaliCamp is a result-oriented environment, so how
much one earns depends on what he delivers," explained Sutjahyo,
who was the second person to join BaliCamp.

Local opportunities

Needless to say, BaliCamp also creates new opportunities to
the local Balinese people living around the complex. The driver
of the minibus that took me to Bedugul the next morning, for
example, told me that four BaliCamp programmers were boarding at
his home.

But that is not all. "We have also been introducing the
computer to the local community," said Sutjahyo. "About 10 to 20
village children as well as adults come to BaliCamp each evening,
and we teach them how to use a computer and the Internet."

What are their most significant products so far? One of them
will be a product very important to us who use Microsoft Office
to prepare documents in Indonesian. "Microsoft has asked us to
develop an Indonesian spell-checker for MS Office," Sutjahyo told
me in a one-on-one interview after the ceremony.

Two Bahasa Indonesia professors from University of Indonesia's
Faculty of Letters have been working closely with the company on
this application. "The beta version is already completed, and we
are hoping to release Version 1.0 soon."

BaliCamp may not have been the first software development
center that has capitalized on what Bali has to offer. A couple
of years earlier I also had the privilege of visiting PT Mitrais,
a software development center in Kuta owned by PT Mincom
Indonesia. Bali is the most preferred place for these companies
because of the easy access through its international airport, a
relatively stable and safe environment and a local community
accustomed to having foreigners among them.

However, who was the first to set up a software development
center in Bali is not an issue, since what we all would like to
see is more and more similar initiatives like BaliCamp and
Mitrais emerging in this country. We have a local pool of talent,
and IT is a dynamic and constantly changing industry with
abundant opportunities.

Needless to say, all of these initiatives will need government
support in the forms of advanced, reliable and cost-efficient IT
infrastructure, a totally overhauled education system and a far
more conducive environment.

Until then, let us all wish the best to those who brought
BaliCamp into being. Their work has just begun.
(zatni@cbn.net.id)