Indonesia’s NeutraDC outlines global ambitions

NeutraDC, the datacentre arm of Indonesian telecoms giant Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), has set its sights on being a global player in datacentre and connectivity services, going beyond its backyard in Southeast Asia.

The company was formed from the consolidation of Telkom’s datacentre and connectivity assets over a few years in a bid to improve operational efficiency, according to Michael Hu, chief commercial officer of NeutraDC.

Speaking at Cloud Expo Asia 2022 in Singapore this week, Hu said Telkom had spent years building up its infrastructure assets, from undersea cables and edge points-of-presence (POPs) to datacentres, but the assets were deployed and managed by various groups with different go-to-market strategies and expansion plans.

Noting that such a business structure was inefficient, Hu said Telkom has mostly consolidated its infrastructure assets in Indonesia under NeutraDC. Its international assets, including regional facilities in Hong Kong and the city-state of Singapore, where its Telin subsidiary operates three datacentres, are expected to be consolidated early next year.

“We believe that consolidating our infrastructure assets can help us optimise our business under one single entity, and this is going to elevate our equity value and provide us with large and reliable capacity to help our customers grow rapidly and support a variety of requirements,” Hu said.

Specifically, Hu said the consolidation will enable the company to standardise the design and construction of its datacentres, improve service delivery and cost effectiveness, and have a clearer view of its total capacity so it can better allocate resources and plan for expansion.

“With about 30 datacentres, we’re not only a domestic player, but a regional player. In the future, we will definitely be a global player and we’re happy to collaborate with partners to help us expand our business moving forward,” Hu said.

Hu said content delivery networks are already tapping NeutraDC’s infrastructure in Indonesia to serve content closer to users, noting that the company has met their capacity and redundancy requirements by deploying content assets across its datacentre footprint.

Telkom’s large enterprise customer base has also drawn a well-known global hyperscaler that faced the challenge of penetrating the Indonesian market, Hu said.

“We created a joint business plan by leveraging Telkom’s resources, capacity and customer base. We helped them to get access to the local market and they decided to put their cloud infrastructure on top of our environment.

“But without consolidating our physical infrastructure and leveraging our entire ecosystem, we would not have been able to make this deal happen. We see more hyperscalers and global enterprise players looking for this kind of cooperation in Southeast Asia,” he added.

According to Structure Research, Jakarta’s datacentre colocation market is expected to grow to $938m by 2027, with hyperscalers accounting for 72% of that growth. The booming market is also driving global and regional players to expand their footprint in Indonesia.

Equinix, for example, is expected to open a new facility in Jakarta’s central business district by the second half of 2024 while Singapore-based Digital Edge is planning a 23MW colocation datacentre in the capital by the fourth quarter of 2023.