Infocomm Indonesia

Hitachi Data Systems successfully held their second annual conference on Tuesday, March 12. Prior to the conference, Hitachi organized a panel discussion on Compliance and Data Retention Strategies. It was my pleasure to be the moderator of that panel, which presented the prominent figure in storage industry, storage technology guru and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Hitachi Hu Yoshida. The two other panelist was head of IT at Directorate General of Taxation (DGT) Harry Gumelar, and Brocade consultant David Schmeichel.

The panel started with Harry described e-filing systems in DGT, their policy to retain data at least for 10 years, and DGT future plans that include storing phone records between officials and taxpayers as well as keeping digital version of original documents. DGT will be challenged with managing not only the explosion of data, but the growing of unstructured data. The tax authority had implemented Hitachi USP V as their platform but no archiving system yet.

Hu went next, explained the pitfalls in addressing data management challenges, touching on Hitachi Content Archive Platform, and the most important part: how compliance is not only for the sake of regulators but it is also good for business (Aside for banks and some companies listed in US stock market, Indonesia has a relatively weak regulation on data protection).  Last was David talked about security, encription an how Brocade has a unique position that made them most competent in that matter.

After each short presentation by panelist, it was time for panel discussion. DGT e-filing system was a good showcase on how Hitachi and Brocade solutions can fit their future plans. We touched on Hitachi’s approach to virtualization, how USP V enables virtualization even on externally attached, heterogenous tiered storage.  We also discussed about how to manage and protect data that was brought out from the core storage to user’s PCs –mostly from business users- because they need the data to do some analysis using spreadsheet application like Excel. Hu answered that Hitachi just recently launched a solution for that, called Hitachi Data Discovery Service.  

It was indeed my pleasure to moderate the morning panel.

Blogging

I met Hu once again later in the afternoon, this time in a more informal setting. We talked a lot about blog along with Sulistyawan who manages Indosat’s storage. Hu’s blog is dubbed as one of the 10 most influential blog in storage industry according to Network World while Sulistyawan’s blog on storage is one of the few blogs in Indonesia with a strong, focused content. Hu asked I and Sulistyawan how we find Wordpress that we both use and we both agree we chose the blog engine because the flexibility to create and manage topics.

I explained to Hu that according to a study by FeedBurner (now I remember) –which was quoted in BusinessWeek’s article "Children of the Web"- that Jakarta is one of the cities in the third tier of the global blog belt. The blogosphere in Indonesia is very alive. The Pesta Blogger (blogger party) was a successful event with more than 600 bloggers attended. I also mentioned about my colleague Budi Putra who left his journalist post in Koran Tempo to become a professional blogger and founded Asia Blogging Network (ABN).

Well, Hu wrote our conversation in his blog.

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