As part of the celebration, Microsoft:
- Hosted the largest #DevCon in Asia Pacific with more than 2,500 developers participating
- Announced the graduation of first batch of 2,500 developers on Azure scholarships from the Azure Academy, run by Dicoding, where the virtual classes were conducted in Bahasa Indonesia.
Jakarta, Indonesia – February 27, 2020 – Microsoft is celebrating 25 years of operations in Indonesia and will continue to invest in enabling the country to realize its vision of becoming South East Asia’s leading digital economy. As part of the celebrations, Microsoft hosted its largest developer conference in Asia Pacific, which was attended by more than 2,500 people and many more who joined online to participate in a day of learning.
Held in partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Information (KOMINFO), the //DevCon/ Digital Economy Summit, introduced Microsoft for Startups to the audience to the developers, start-ups, community organisations and business leaders in Indonesia.
Underscoring Microsoft’s Commitment to Indonesia, the summit set the stage to enable developer velocity, independent of language, framework or cloud. Key highlights of the Summit included:
- Keynote addresses by Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
- Showcase of industry leading speakers and start-ups including Beehive Drones, Jejak.in, Opsigo, KoinWorks and Botika.
- Five Developer Community and Learning Hubs, where attendees had access to Dicoding, the developer community, GitHub, LinkedIn for job opportunities, She Loves Tech, a community platform providing mentoring, guidance and support for female developers and women entrepreneurs, and solution experiences from Telkomsel & ViBiCloud.
“Microsoft has a long history in Indonesia, having operated in the country for 25 years with 150+ employees and 7,000 partners across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands. We are aligned to the government’s priorities of creating a future-ready community, focused on digital skills and digital infrastructure for a digital economy,” said Microsoft Indonesia President Director Haris Izmee.
“Our mission in Indonesia is to empower every person and every organization to achieve more, and that includes enabling the workforce with the skills and support needed to transform Indonesia. There’s been a dramatic shift in global labor markets, and we have learnt that more than half of the employees in any organization today will need to be re-skilled,” continued Haris.
Providing Future Ready Skills
“The jobs of today will not be the jobs of tomorrow, and we have already seen demand for software engineering roles expand rapidly beyond just the tech sector. Business leaders in Indonesia feel that Quantitative, analytical and statistical skills, entrepreneurship and initiative-taking, and IT skills and programming will be what sets us up for success as a country. Highly skilled professionals will have an enormous leverage as computing becomes embedded in every industry, and it has created acute labor shortages in digital skills,” continued Haris.
At the summit, Microsoft announced the graduation of the first batch of 2,500 developers on Azure scholarships from the Azure Academy, run by Dicoding, where the virtual classes were conducted in Bahasa Indonesia.
According to a 2019 Microsoft IDC study, 65% of business leaders in Indonesia feel that technologies like artificial intelligence with help employees do their existing jobs better and 21% of business leaders believe that AI will create new jobs. While 81% of Indonesia’s businesses prioritize skilling and reskilling of workers in the future, 48% of them have yet to implement plans to train their workers and 13% have no immediate plans.
Over the past 25 years Microsoft has trained 18 million teachers and students in Indonesia on digital skills including Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Data Science through the Digital Literacy Curriculum, and Partnerships with 4 universities and the Ministry of Communications and Information.
“We are committed to advocating the importance of digital talent to increase Indonesia’s competitiveness in the region over the next 25 years,” said Haris.
Indonesia has an ecosystem that allows for industry disruptors and unicorns to be realized, reinforcing the ideas, talents and solution-driven mindset that is available here.
“We’re nurturing an environment to encourage the dreamers and the risk takers and those who refuse to take no for an answer. We’re also encouraging people to try new things, to lift one another up and to break down barriers. You are the builders of tomorrow. We are inspired by you. And we can’t wait to see how you take Indonesia to the next level and realize the vision of becoming South East Asia’s leading digital economy,” concluded Haris.