IT News: SOFTWARE PARK MISSION : Campaign to survive and improve in 2010

Support ranges from product development to export marketing

Software Park Thailand has initiated an "IT DNA" strategy and mission which aims to create differentiation between businesses in the software industry and to support IT innovation through the nationwide Software Park Alliance.


Software Park Thailand director Suvipa Wannasatop said the park would focus this year on enabling local software companies to develop a wider variety of different products and services and to market them, in order that they can survive.


The park believes that its IT DNA mission will stimulate IT innovation under a "BEST" concept, standing for various platforms labelled Business, Empowering People and Processing, Social and Knowledge and Technologies Enabling.


On the Business platform, the park has set up various projects such as business matching, entering international markets, open-house research and development and Software Park tenants and clusters.


On the Empowering People and Processing platform, the park has developed a structured software-development process called personal software process (PSP). It is claimed the process will help software engineers to improve their performance.


The Social and Knowledge platform will feature a know-how portal to share knowledge, information and consulting. A software-process statistics repository portal will also be developed for businesses and members.


Finally, on the Technologies Enabling platform, Software Park Thailand will provide cloud computing and develop WebsiteSpark to distribute knowledge and information to businesses. It also plans to launch a virtual IT classroom in April.


Moreover, the park is also encouraging the establishment of private-sector business alliances to set up software parks in various locations, such as in the Cyber World building on Ratchadaphisek Road in Bangkok and Korat Software City, in Nakhon Ratchasima province.


Suvipa said Software Park Thailand aimed to promote the use of locally-developed software and technology to increase productivity in the tourism, healthcare and foods industries. It will also urge businesses using locally-developed products to adopt digital marketing and Green IT, helping to create what it sees as a "win-win supply chain" and a "smart IT ecosystem".


To help local software firms to enter international markets, the park will cooperate with the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (OSMEP) to support a delegation from 16 local software companies on a visit to Korea to promote their digital content and mobile applications. It will also create networking activities between Thai software companies and Korea's National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA).


Suvipa said growth in Thailand's digital-content industry was crucial, especially in the areas of e-learning, animation, games, Web-based applications, computer graphics, interactive applications and visual effects.


The global digital-content industry was worth US$1,700 billion (Bt56.2 trillion) in 2009, and the United States, England, Japan and Korea are the major players in the global market, she said.