e-business will soon take a rebound
e-business will soon take a rebound
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In cooperation with the Asian GLOBE-The Jakarta CEO Club and
MarkPlus & Co. management consulting firm, this new column is
designed to look at the visions and strategic views of CEOs of
Indonesian and multinational companies operating in Indonesia. It
will appear every Thursday with the support of marketing guru
Hermawan Kertajaya. Following is the first piece on the CEO of PT
SAP Asia in Indonesia, a subsidiary of the Germany-based e-
business software solutions provider. It's compiled by The
Jakarta Post reporter K. Basrie.
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Over the past few years, the world witnessed the ugly ruin of
the online businesses. Many firmly insist that the online world
has just been something of a bust. So what went wrong?
Many blame the failure on the costs which were higher than
expected and the benefits more elusive than anticipated.
Liquidity, rather than the build-out capabilities, quickly became
the number one priority for many dot-companies as they struggled
to survive.
Most of the dotcoms were geared on how to gain capital from
the market rather than how to give value to customers.
Will the future still have a gloomy look after the well-
publicized sad story of the Internet world? Early efforts have
stumbled, to be sure. But many now doubt it. They say there'll be
a change very soon.
Take a brief look at world-class companies around the globe.
From procurement to product design to supply chain management,
the Internet and e-business have changed the way organizations
operate and enterprises serve customers and win the rigid
competition.
The community, still small but growing , has the belief that
the e-business is a permanent feature on the business landscape
today and tomorrow.
Krisnendu Datta, managing director of PT SAP Indonesia,
believed that the real players of e-commerce are beginning to
evolve and return in different forms.
"As that evolves, we'll see people's confidence coming back
and doing more of e-commerce based solutions into their
business," he said in a recent interview.
SAP, Datta went on, survived from the bubble burst because "we
did not jump into the dotcom bandwagon and try to play the IPO
game and try to run and acquire few companies with high market
capitalization, rather we focused on how we could enrich our
solutions using e-business technology using the e-commerce tools
and then go back to the same and other customers with added
value."
According to him, it's hightime for any companies in Indonesia
to go for e-business.
A rich bachelor will never be ready to marry, Datta said.
"So, I don't' think there's one particular time to go for e-
business. The time is now. The time is always there."
One, he added, can choose areas where he can go by looking on
at his own business models by looking on what he can achieve in
the end and e-business should not be driven by technology or me-
too business.
And globalization also offers opportunities and challenges,
instead of risks alone.
"As a global player, our main challenges in SAP is not the
hardest of the (Indonesian) government. Our main challenges are
how ready the market is, in term of people's ability and what the
IT does for them."
Datta, who has been in the IT industry for 14 years, reminded
that growth is not the sole goal in the business world since
growth is sometimes uncontrolled and non-profitable.
"That's why growth alone is not the only thing that we should
challenge in business."
Based on his experience, there are two fundamentals ways to
grow.
"First grow in your solution set by offering more products and
solution within the same customer base or within the same
geography or you enhance your geography with the same solution
set.
Do either one or you can do the combination. In case of SAP,
we're doing both," Datta said.
In today's world of e-business, the traditionally sequential
and stable links between internal departments in a company and
external business partners cede the to complex, multilevel supply
chain networks. SAP offers products that will allow companies to
manage a wide range of highly diverse systems from a multitude of
vendors -- systems that run in different technological
environments.
Indonesia, Datta said, is home to roughly 4,000 firms with an
annual earnings of between US$30 million and $40 million, which
has become the main targets of SAP Indonesia.
"About 60 percent of the market is still untapped," he said.
He, thus, invited IT players to grab the big opportunities.
"The question is the timeframe. This market still needs
certain amount of awareness, infrastructure, knowledge based for
IT to grow and that takes time," he said, adding that the perfect
time to get in would be over the next five years.
But he suggested that knowledge is a crucial element for any
company to grow and develop in such a competitive era.
Unfortunately, knowledge does not appear in the balance sheet.
Today, he said, knowledge management is not about acquiring
knowledge alone but sharing knowledge to others, including to the
employees.
Having tens of knowledge workers is much better and more
powerful than having one knowledge manager, he said.
Well, while there's uncertainty about the speed of change,
there's no question about the direction of change. And let the
rich bachelor make his own judgment.
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For the information box:
PT SAP Indonesia is a 100-percent subsidiary of SAP AG, the
world's leading provider of e-business software solutions
operating in 67 countries. Already in Indonesia since 1997, the
company has 40 employees, 200 partner consultants with 75 clients
and some 110 installations.
Datta has been in the IT industry for 14 years including in
his motherland in India and several countries in the region. A
top graduate from Calcutta University in India majoring in
physics, he get his MBA certificate from the European Management
School on Surrey, U.K.