16 | FORBES INDONESIA AUGUST 2017
IN APRIL, Jeffrey Immelt,
chief executive and chairman
of General Electric, one of the
largest companies in the world,
was in Jakarta. There, he signed
a partnership with Dattabot,
Indonesia’s leading big-data
analytics company, making Dat-
tabot the first startup in the
world to partner with General
Electric’s IT division GE Digital. As part of this partner-
ship, Dattabot will work with GE Digital to develop ana-
lytics solutions for the industrial Internet revolution. As
an Indonesian, I am proud to have a national technology
company operating at a global level.
Dattabot’s partnership with GE Digital is an illustration
of how big data can apply artificial intelligence to transform
the industrial sector in Indonesia. Using big data, Dattabot
helps Indonesian industrial companies to increase effective-
ness by collecting, reading and interpreting data from smart
sensors, thus creating the end-to-end machine-to-machine
connectivity, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT).
For example, IoT allows us to monitor and fine-tune
the operation of heavy equipment in a mining site to an-
ticipate wear and avoid downtime, thereby improving per-
formance. For a country such as Indonesia with abundantnatural resources, IoT is a key catalyst that can help our
natural resources sector to increase its productivity whilst
reducing costs. Agriculture is another sector in Indonesia
that can be transformed significantly by big data. Dattabot
is partnering with Planet, a San Francisco-based satel-
lite earth imaging and analytics company that acquired
Google’s satellite imaging division in early 2017, to help
agribusinesses in Indonesia boost productivity with effec-
tive and efficient crop input. Using online and offline data
collected from satellite imaging, soil sensors and mobile
phones, Dattabot provides farmers and agricultural com-
panies with information on farming field potential, opti-
mal cultivation methods, and potential pests and diseases.
As agriculture provides jobs to over 40% of the country’s
labor force and contributes about 14% to the GDP, big data
can have a tremendous impact in the country.
Given how fast the world is changing today, we need
to continuously think of how Indonesia can develop a
competitive advantage. The Internet revolution is no
longer about e-commerce or marketplaces. E-commerce
and marketplace companies such as Sale Stock and Ama-
zon have long utilized big data to better understand their
customers, and provide value-add solutions by using arti-
ficial intelligence-based recommendation engines and
chatbots to handle end-to-end sales. The new wave of
technology innovation is already here, and it is beginning
to unlock value in the real sector.
The two examples above from
the mining and agriculture sector
show that this change is happening
not just in Silicon Valley, but also in
Indonesia, and we need to embrace
this innovation. Indonesian com-
panies need to start collecting data
from their operations, and under-
standing and analyzing it to create
actionable insights. With the right
mindset, change can be an oppor-
tunity, and big data can be a key
driver to transform our national
companies. FCAN BIG DATA TRANSFORM
INDONESIA’S GROWTH?
WILL ONGKOWIDJAJA IS A CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING PARTNER AT ALPHA JWC VENTURES, AN INSTITUTIONAL AND INDEPENDENT VENTURE CAPITAL FIRM WITH AN INDONESIA
FOCUS. ALPHA JWC VENTURES MAY HOLD INVESTMENTS IN SOME FIRMS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE. PREVIOUSLY, HE ALSO WORKED AT UBS INVESTMENT BANK AND MCKINSEY &
COMPANY IN INDONESIA.GUEST COLUMN WILL ONGKOWIDJAJA
Big data
can be a key
driver to
transform
our national
companies.