It's no surprise that Siemens, the German industry giant, has been around a long time, but did you know it has been doing business in Indonesia since 1855?
I learned about this during a recent visit to the head office of Nokia Siemens Networks Indonesia in Menara Mulia, Jakarta.
Back in the 19th century, among other things, Siemens brought the first key telegraph equipment to the island of Java, installed electricity generators in Batavia and installed the lighting in the Sultan's palace in Yogyakarta.
As you know, in mid 2006, Nokia bought the carrier services arm of Siemens AG. The resulting 50-50 company was called Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). The new company has nothing to do with the mobile devices business, which is under Nokia Mobile. Rather, NSN is focused on providing products and services for fixed and wireless networks. In fact, according to NSN's release, Frost & Sullivan, a global business research and consulting firm, recognized NSN as the Telecom Equipment Vendor of the Year in Indonesia for 2008.
What enabled this company to lead the delivery of telecom products and services in Indonesia in just one and a half years after the merger? First, according to Arjun Trivedi, head of subregion Indonesia, NSN had offices in all 33 provinces plus 20 other cities across the country. The closeness to the customers facilitates the contact between the engineers and the customers and expedites their services. Currently, NSN employs 1,100 permanent employees and 2,400 contract workers. Half of the total 3,500 employees work in Jakarta. "A very substantial number of these people are Indonesians," Arjun told me in our conversation.
Another reason for the achievement is of course the wide range of technologies that NSN brings to Indonesia, which Arjun claimed to be the largest in the country. It includes access technologies such as ADSL, HSDPA, HSPA, HSPA Evo, LTE and even WiMAX.
The broad portfolio allows the company to provide services such as applications development, network optimization and, of course, procurement to local telecom operators such as Telkom, Telkomsel, Indosat, Excelcomindo, 3 and Axis. Interestingly, I learned that Internet service providers such as CBN and Biznet are also among NSN's customers.
I was also surprised to find out that Jakarta serves 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The R&D center in this city focuses on supporting Intelligent Networks (IN).
An Intelligent Network, in essence, includes the servers and systems for prepaid applications. "We are developing prepaid applications here in Jakarta," said Arjun. These are very complex applications, since, as the term "prepaid" indicates, the operators have to be able to track the usage of the "pulses" by each customer in real time to make sure that every second of call is paid for.
In this connection, the most interesting facility that NSN has built in Indonesia is the newly inaugurated test bed. The core of this test bed was actually inherited from Siemens, but it was still very small when it was transferred to NSN. Located on the ground floor of Menara Mulia, it contains a fully working GSM/UMTS network complete with the BTS and switch. This test bed is interconnected to three other facilities in the world - Helsinki, Munich and Singapore. "Any GSM operator in Indonesia can bring their equipment here for testing purposes," Arjun explained. By testing the equipment or software in the test bed instead of the real network, operators can avoid the risk of wreaking havoc with their networks, which are bound to make their customers very unhappy.
Another feature of the test bed is that it can also be used as a training center by university students wishing to learn about the latest in network technology.
In fact, one of such training sessions happened to be going on when I toured the facility. Local developers can also come and test the applications they are working on to verify that these applications will work in a live network and will not bring it to its knees.
Like other global telecom vendors in Indonesia, NSN also works with leading local universities - ITB (Bandung), ITS (Surabaya) and UI (Jakarta). What distinguishes NSN is perhaps the attention given to women in technology.
In addition to conferring Woman in Technology Award, the company has also sent several female university graduates to Finland to learn about research and development in the telecom industry.
NSN may not be a familiar name in Indonesia - perhaps because it is still a fairly young company. Yet our young engineers must take advantage of the test bed, the R&D center, the various scholarships and all the training or internship programs that global telecom companies such as NSN offer. It is the only way we can build our local competence and talent pool in this industry.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment