After Budapest, Berlin, Singapore, and Milan Aliz has opened its fifth office in Jakarta, Indonesia. We interviewed Balázs Molnár, APAC, CEO, about the new engineering hub.
Aliz has been present in the Asia Pacific market for a long time and has achieved some impressive results. What sort of presence does it have in the APAC region and what has it achieved so far?
We established our first office in Asia, in Singapore, back in 2016. With six years of experience with Google Cloud technologies and a specialization in data and analytics, we were able to quickly grow our footprint in the region. We became one of Google's most accomplished partners and won the Partner of the Year award for Asia Pacific in 2019. This award is given by Google to the fastest-growing partner in the area. It was a huge recognition of our work not just by Google but also by our customers who nominated us.
To better serve our clients, we decided to expand our team in Indonesia and open a full-size development center. This will serve a dual purpose: to better and more cost-effectively serve our growing client base in Southeast Asia, and to be able to manage global demand.
Why, though, did you choose Indonesia?
Indonesia has always been one of our most important markets, and especially during the past two years, we have experienced very strong momentum. The country is on an accelerated path to digitalization, and in many cases, tech adoption is leapfrogging other regions like the EU or North America. A lot of this adoption is coming down to the use of data, machine learning, and cloud technologies, which are right down our alley.
We are particularly excited about how this change will bring positive social impact, from helping remote areas access a wider range of products through e-commerce to providing education for underprivileged children. This is something we are proud to be a part of, and we want to double down on it moving forward.
Another reason we are expanding in Indonesia is that we are able to find highly skilled and qualified engineers who are eager to learn and experiment with the latest technologies. People are our greatest assets, and we value them highly. We also expect them to be bullish on what we are looking to achieve. People in Indonesia are talented and, thanks to the rapid digital development, highly skilled and qualified as well. It felt like the right place to build an engineering hub that not only serves our clients across Southeast Asia but can also deliver high-quality work to the other side of the globe.
What kind of team are you building in Indonesia? Who are you looking for? How many people?
We are building a full-size engineering hub in Indonesia that can implement any Google Cloud project without having to outsource any part of the work to our other engineering teams. This means we need data engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, infrastructure engineers, as well as management, sales, and other back-office functions. Over the next 24 months, we are looking to hire 50-100 people, of which 80% will be from high-value-added engineering fields. This holistic approach enables us to deliver comprehensive solutions and provide seamless support to our clients.
Regarding skill sets, we are looking for smart people who can learn. Experience matters, but what we really seek is the ability to quickly adapt and learn new things. The environment is changing extremely fast around us, as are the technologies that we use on a daily basis. Our success depends on our ability to adopt these new technologies. This is what our clients value, and this is where we can drive the most value for them.
Can you name some clients you have worked for in the region and are proud of the collaboration and the results you have achieved?
One of our earliest successes in Indonesia was the modernization and migration of Tiket.com's tech platform. The company was experiencing exponential growth at the time, and their legacy system couldn't handle it. We designed and helped implement a brand-new cloud-native tech stack that could handle a much larger load and automatically scale for sudden spikes in website traffic.
We are also very proud of the training we provided to the data teams of Gojek, Tokopedia, and Traveloka, Indonesia's three largest digital enterprises. In addition to helping them with some of the technology implementation, we empowered them to independently execute similar projects at scale.
Currently, we are also engaged in major projects within the traditional enterprise space, such as our collaboration with Prudential. In this partnership, we are reinventing their digital infrastructure and exploring innovative approaches to enhance their client services across the region. These endeavors highlight our commitment to driving digital innovation and delivering transformative solutions for our clients.
If someone would like to be part of such exciting projects and apply to Aliz, how can they do it?
They can find our open positions and apply directly on our Career page.
