Telin CTO Nanang Hendarno talks technology evolution, market challenges, and the keys to success in his role

PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin) is on a mission to become a hub for international communications utilising its existing network of submarine cables, while transforming itself into a digital telco and a key player in the data centre market in Asia Pacific and beyond, explains CTO Nanang Hendarno.

 

Telin, a subsidiary of state-owned telecoms and network service provider PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia, focuses on international telecommunication services and expanding the parent company’s overseas business.

 

Hendarno explained that Telin – like most communications service providers (CSPs) – is in the process of adapting to a rapidly changing market place, both in terms of growing international data traffic and the fast paced evolution of technology.

 

The CTO explained that his role is key in a market where ever shorter technology lifecycles make it harder to develop new business cases and models based on those new technologies. “It requires good decisions from myself on the business and technology strategy,” he said. 

 

Investment in new technologies is another area that must be carefully navigated by a CTO, Hendarno said. Telin is seeing the amount of traffic on its networks double every year, as part of a broader – rapid – rise in Indonesia’s internet data traffic. Matching such soaring demand for data requires Telin and other CSPs to deploy new technologies, which requires ever greater annual investment in new technologies. 

 

However, while investing to grow, Telin has “to reduce our costs because of competition,” Hendarno noted.

 

The CTO identified over-the-top (OTT) players as a key competitive threat. Such companies “use our infrastructure for their services or solution, and they don’t invest anything in the infrastructure, they’re just on top of our infrastructure,” he said.

 

Hendarno explained that such competition from OTT companies is what is fuelling Telin’s vision to become a digital telco. The evolution will see Telin continue to “maintain our telco business, but also add digital services” to its mix.

 

That is not to say that Telin is not a fierce competitor in the CSP market. Hendarno explained that it is a strong player in the provision of voice and IP transit services, which combined account for around 60% of its revenues today. “We are also active in IP Exchange [IPX] and can deliver any kind of service” utilising that technology, he said.

 

The company also continues to deploy submarine cable connections, and will open its first data centre in Singapore in a matter of weeks. “I believe we can be one of the biggest data centre providers in Asia,” Hendarno said.

 

Telin’s push into the data centre sector forms part of a broader expansion of its services in recent years. Hendarno said the company has already begun offering CDN services that will position Telin as a content hub, and that the company is also offering A2P SMS services among others. 

 

“We call it new business,” Hendarno said, explaining that the operator has embarked on the expansion in a bid to offset predicted declines in its voice and IP transit revenues over the next five years.

 

While the new business areas today generate around 6% of Telin’s overall revenues, Hendarno noted that the contribution those sectors made to the company’s revenues grew by 186% year-on-year.

 

“We believe that we are on the right track to get a better business in the future by doing new businesses like this,” he said.

 

Hendarno explained that in addition to IPX, other technologies including software defined networking (SDN), and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are in Telin’s roadmap in the next five years.

 

IPX will enable the company to “deliver any kind of services in the same platform,” while SDN and NFV will “be deployed in the future to reduce costs and make the business process more lean and simple,” he explained.

 

While Hendarno noted that many equipment vendors are pitching SDN and IP as “the key element to reduce the telcos ownership” and therefore costs, he noted that Telin’s implementation and development of SDN and IP “is still very limited.”

 

Instead the company remains focussed on its existing technologies including data centres, wide area networks and core networks. “We also still deploy other submarine cables.”

 

Hendarno explained that deployments are being held back by uncertainty over the new technologies, such as “when is the right time to implement or to deploy SDN and IP in the network?”

 

One reason for the uncertainty over the best time to deploy the technologies is that there are currently few “operators that really implement SDN and IP in one,” Hendarno said. Another factor delaying deployment is the level of interoperability in the equipment provided by vendors. “They said that they comply with open standards, but it is not really open like the equipment that we have today.”

 

The short term pain should pay off in the long term, though. Hendarno said he expects voice revenues to continue to decline in the future, but that Telin is confident it will offset those declines with increased revenue from services including IPX and SMS.

 

Hendarno is well placed to guide Telin through the technological and business transitions of the coming years.

 

The CTO completed a bachelors degree in 1991 in which he majored in electrical engineering, and in 1997 added a masters degree from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, majoring in space engineering.

 

He also has an in-depth knowledge of Telin gained through stints with several departments of the company in a career spanning close to 25 years. “I started working for telkom in 1992, I worked at the operation department for several years, and then I moved to the corporate – strategic planning – department, and then moved to network planning and development, and back to the operations division.

 

“My last role before becoming CTO of Telin was executive general manager for the service operation division from 2014 to 2015. In parallel I was a commissioner of Telin,” before taking up the CTO position in February 2016.

 

Hendarno manages a team of technology experts based primarily at Telin’s headquarters, but also at offices worldwide. “We have 35 points of presence, but we have 10 subsidiaries,” in Singapore, Hong Kong, Timor-Leste, Australia, Malaysia, Macau, Taiwan, the U.S., Myanmar, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

 

The CTO played down the challenge of managing such a geographically diverse team, explaining that he holds “regular informal meetings with our network and IT team to share my views, my thoughts, my problems and get feedback from them about those issues that I wish to discuss.

 

“I also have regular activities with them to come closer and form informal relations with all the team. I prefer informal communication rather than formal. With that I can get better views from them.”

 

An added benefit of Hendarno’s informal approach to managing his team is the ability to motivate staff members. At its simplest level, the CTO’s enthusiasm for his job is more easily translated to the IT and networks teams.

 

Hendarno said that one of his proudest achievements with Telin to date is pushing the company to invest more heavily in the field of optical submarine cables when he became a Commissioner at the company. “At the time I started telling Telin to be part of the concession of the submarine cable from Asia to Europe,” which connects South East Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe (SEA-ME-WE-5).

 

The most recent development of the strategy came in October 2016, when the company broke ground on a cable landing station in the Indonesian district of Kauditan that forms part of the a submarine cable system named SEA-US that will connect South East Asia to the U.S.A.

 

Telin expects to complete the laying of the cable by March 2017 and plans to open the submarine link to commercial traffic in July 2017. The cable will connect Los Angeles to the Indonesian city of Manado via the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, and Telin predicts it will result in a large increase in internet connection speeds.

 

The company is also in the process of constructing the Indonesia Global Gateway (IGG), a submarine cable that will connect the islands of Sumatra, Batam, Jawa, Bali, Kalimantan and Sulawesi with Singapore.

 

Hendarno explained that the IGG cable “will connect the European cable to the U.S. cable, which makes me proud of the achievement. By doing that, I believe, Telin could be the hub of international traffic in data, voice and in rich telecommunication because we can connect from West to East and vice-versa.”

 

The routes taken by Telin’s subsea cables could provide it with a unique selling point because the company’s connections do not run through waters prone to earthquakes including the South China Sea, Luzon Channel and Japan. The cables are also a key element in parent company Telkom Group’s international business development strategy.

 

Hendarno explained that, in his view, there are four key elements to being a successful CTO. He outlined what he calls the RBTN approach. 

 

“R stands for regulation. The CTO should understand the regulations of each country, in the context of telco services, business and infrastructure. B is business – a CTO should have business sense. T is for technology – that’s one element that a CTO should also understand [particularly] global technologies, and N is for networking – relationships with customers, partners, vendors and stockholders.

 

“Also a CTO has the vision to support company strategy and business.”

 

That reference to establishing close relationships with customers perhaps debunks the perception that telecoms CTOs focus purely on the technology side of the business. “In my role as CTO I also take care of operations,” Hendarno said, explaining that the latter element involves handling service delivery assurance. “I have to keep closer to the customer. If there is a problem with the services I can easily talk to them to make them understand what the problem is and how long it will take to resolve.”

 

Maintaining close relationships with customers is important “because you have to deliver and maintain the service in a quick way.”

 

A key means of achieving that goal is by holding regular meetings with customers. Hendarno said such meetings are also important in terms of deciding on a technology roadmap and gaining much-needed feedback on how Telin is performing.

 

“We have regular meetings with the customers. Every three months we have customer meetings to get information about the quality of our service, what they really need and their impressions about our services. With good relations and regular meetings with our customers, we can get what they really need” with regard to services.

 

In terms of equipment vendors, Hendarno said networking is a key means of getting “updated technology from them” and details of “the newest technology that will be coming from them in the near future.”

 

Telin’s own R&D department is another key source of information for the CTO, he added.