Leadership Live With Aswin T Utomo, CIO of Tokopedia

Indonesia-based e-commerce giant Tokopedia has witnessed massive growth in users and transactions over the past few years. But managing such hypergrowth requires robust infrastructure.

Aswin explains how Tokopedia handles this using Genesys solutions. He also offers leadership advice for CIOs.

Leadership

Tokopedia is a leading shopping platform in Indonesia that provides a wide variety of products to millions of users. The company is on a mission to democratize business through technology and provide an opportunity for everyone in the country to grow their business.

To do this, they need to be able to handle huge amounts of data and traffic. The company must also ensure that the transactions of its customers are safe and reliable.

In addition, they must also be able to create a work culture that is diverse and inclusive for all employees. Aswin believes this is critical to Tokopedia’s success and its future growth.

Aswin explains that one of the best ways to develop leadership skills is to learn from other people. He shares that his personal experiences of stepping out of his comfort zone helped him develop into a better leader. These experiences taught him the importance of being empathetic and understanding of others.

Management

Aswin is a firm believer in the philosophy that life is a series of adventures and challenges. He always sees these as opportunities to test himself and improve. Hence, his decision to pursue Engineering even when it meant juggling a full course load and a 20 hour a week internship in San Diego.

As a result, he was able to graduate from college on time and became one of the top students in his batch. His experiences shaped him into the leader he is today.

Aswin was able to transform Tokopedia into a multi-cloud-native architecture with well-defined web, application and cache tiers and data layers. This allows for quick scaling as needed during big events like Semarak Ramadan Ekstra and Tokopedia Live TV shows. The IT infrastructure is based on three environments, namely Biznet Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud Singapore and AWS Singapore, connected by an international private leased line or IPsec VPN to minimize network latency.

Communication

Melissa’s passion for her work and her empathy with the people around her gave her a strong drive to succeed. She believes that people should be treated equally and with respect. She is also a strength champion and a true believer that diverse and inclusive workplaces make better teams.

As the largest online marketplace in Indonesia, Tokopedia has democratized business through technology to millions of users and merchants across the archipelago. With its huge user and vendor base, handling traffic is no easy task. The company turned to Genesys Cloud CX to scale its communications and ensure reliability and flexibility.

Last year, Tokopedia’s academy recorded a three-fold increase in participants who attended digital and technology education programs. It hosted 4 summits, 14 workshops and 55 educational webinars. In addition, its Tokopedia Play video platform saw increased monthly viewership and live shopping adoption rates. These results are a testament to the success of Tokopedia’s leadership approach.

Team work

Aswin loves to challenge himself to improve his skills. He says he learns the most when things don’t go well for him. He also believes that it is important to understand the needs of the people around you, and this helps him with his leadership style.

Working as a part-time teacher while studying Engineering in Los Angeles and Computer Science in San Diego taught him many lessons about building teamwork skills. He learned to be more considerate of his peers and was able to motivate his students to work hard.

Today, Tokopedia has millions of users and 11 million merchants across the Indonesian archipelago. Its IT infrastructure must be reliable and scalable to handle this hyper-growth. Tokopedia uses Genesys Cloud CX solutions to increase its communication scale and reliability and provides flexibility with multi-cloud support. It also leverages security services from Alibaba Cloud to provide a secure environment. This helped Tokopedia achieve its goal of democratizing business in Indonesia.