The public sector and small and medium sized enterprises are the largest and most robust markets

US based ICT company, Hewlett-Packard (HP) is targeting customers from small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), together with the public sector in Indonesia, as these market segments are said to be the nation’s most robust.

Jim Merritt, the senior vice president of HP and general manager of Enterprise Group for Asia-Pacific and Japan explained the company regards developing markets such as Indonesia as an engine of growth.

It was claimed Indonesian SMEs were the largest private sector market for HP products, following commercial retail accounts and global companies. By size alone, the SMEs are rapidly growing.

According to Indonesia’s Cooperatives and SMEs Ministry data, the SMEs compose almost 90% of all Indonesian businesses. 97.2% of domestic employment is also provided, generating 57.9% to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Global markets were very competitive as many of HP’s competitors, such as Dell and IBM, also targeted them. Rather than having 100 global enterprise customers, HP find an advantage in having 25,000 customers from SMEs.

According to Merritt, it is very difficult for most companies to accommodate 25,000 customers. However, HP has the capability to accommodate a large number of customers owing to a strong partnership ecosystem, allowing it to scale all the way down to the SMEs.

Many of the SMEs were engaging with HP to aid in modernising infrastructure and transitions to cloud computing.

Merritt went onto explain that Indonesia was now also strengthening efforts to develop and improve infrastructure within many sectors such as education, healthcare and transportation. The public services development is a major opportunity for HP to grow and establish their brand in Indonesia.

Both local ministries and administrations are now shifting to the ICT based system for providing public services. For example, the Jakarta city administration has begun to use online tax collection and electronic-budgeting.

It is believed that once a new president is officially announced, the public sector will accelerate again to become robust.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) Indonesia forecasts ICT spending in the country will reach US$16.8billion by the end of this year, mirroring a 12.5% rise from 2013. Hardware is expected to continue to be the top purchase, accounting for up to 86.9% of estimated spending total.

IT services and software are the next two major purchases, which the IDC also forecasts will constitute 8.6% and 4.4% of spending, respectively.