On June 6th, GoTo announced that its financial arm, GoTo Financial, has migrated the infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will support GoPay, Indonesia's national payment platform, serving over 20 million local users. This cloud migration, initiated in October 2024, will make GoTo one of Alibaba Cloud's most significant clients in Indonesia upon full completion.

Notably, GoTo Group is one of Southeast Asia's largest internet technology companies, with businesses spanning local services (including ride-hailing and food delivery) and finance (payments and financial services). GoTo was listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange on April 11, 2022.

Why is GoTo undertaking such a complex full cloud migration? How have Chinese cloud providers managed to break through?

Recently, National Business Daily (NBD) exclusively interviewed GoTo Group CEO Patrick Walujo and CTO William Xiong to understand the practical considerations behind this migration and the key factors enabling Chinese cloud providers to succeed overseas.

NBD：The migration prject is so challenging that many companies will not take the challenge. What is your company's motivation for that?

Patrick Walujo：So the systems in our company were built a long time ago. And we thought that we needed to upgrade the system to get more robust and then also costs, of course, is a big factor for us.

We need to be more efficient. And then on the execution side, what made me personally comfortable is when I asked William to join us from Alibaba cloud to GoTo R&D, the migration project, I think for me the leader who leads the project is very important. I want to make sure that we have somebody who has done it before.

NBD: What technical or operational challenges did you encounter during the cloud migration? How did GoTo and Alibaba Cloud teams overcome them?

William Xiong: From a migration perspective, this was an exceptionally complex undertaking—even by global standards. The migration involved relocating services from data centers across four regions back to Indonesia, while covering all core businesses of GoTo Group serving tens of millions of active users.

Our foremost challenge was executing this with minimal service disruption to customers while supporting business growth. To achieve this, Alibaba Cloud proved to be a critical partner. We collaborated extensively on big data optimization, functional compatibility, and leveraging advanced cloud migration tools and platforms.

NBD: We notice that this year GoTo has unveiled your GoTo AI strategy and also launched the first AI assistant Dira in Indonesia. So we would like to understand more about your overall AI strategy of the GoTo group. This is first question. The second one is also in Indonesia. So what's your thought of the digitalization, maturity and landscape in Indonesia now？And what is the attitudes of the Indonesian market to AI?

Patrick Walujo: So we launched our Large Language Model, Chat-Bot called Sahabat-AI for public, this is 72 billion parameters model.

In November last year, we launched a 8 billion and a 9 billion parameter model. So, this is a bigger model that we introduce is an open source model. To introduce it to to the public, we work with universities, we work with different media companies. This is a collaborative effort to build an native Indonesian large language model.

When it comes to AI adoption in Indonesia, based on our conversations with some American large language model players or the leading players, Indonesia is the third largest market. So the adoption is very fast. What we hope by introducing Sahabat-AI it accelerates with the excitement and the demand by local companies and local developers to advance their presence in AI.

NBD: Actually, we are observing that as opposed to open AI this closed source large language models so DeepSeek and Tongyi series those open source large language models actually are unveiled to the market and are making a breakthrough. At the same time, we are also noticing that the the large language models are accelerating these applications in vertical industries.So this is definitely leading to increasing requirements for the public cloud. So I would like to know in this context, so what has those emerging trends？ What are the changes those emerging trends bring to the GoTo existing systems and existing open structures？

Patrick Walujo：I think the availability of powerful open source models have been extremely beneficial for GoTo.

So we are playing with all the open source models, like Llama and DeepSeek, we have a lot of respects for all of the models. I think for us, we are more than happy to work with everybody who can help us solve our problems and go to which is to provide the best customer experience for our users, right？

And our experience is that when it comes to costs versus performance, the Chinese players have a lot of advantage that is the constructor is more suitable for players in developing markets like ourselves.

I think today we discuss with Alibaba deeper collaborations to see in what particular areas or use cases. We can work closer with the with Ali Alibaba to deploy quite.

NBD: This year， GoTo group announced a 5 year strategic cooperation with Alibaba cloud. What are the key elements and reasons driving GoTo to choose Alibaba cloud as its trusted core partner？

Willam Xiong：This agreement was reached for several reasons.

First, Alibaba Cloud is a leading global provider with extensive computing power and cloud deployment capabilities worldwide.

Second, from GoTo's perspective, this is a highly complex process. We chose Alibaba Cloud both for its capabilities and to foster deeper technological collaboration.

This migration has benefited both parties—enhancing cloud service capabilities and advancing GoTo’s multi-cloud migration and strategy.

Moving forward, we look forward to a strong partnership at the cloud service level.