The move is to help local software companies to benefit in cost saving in their projects.

Panutat Tejasen, Sipa's Chiang Mai branch manager, said Sipa's software component development would be offered to local software developers free of charge to help them shorten time and save costs.

He said Sipa would be developing software components for two applications: enterprise resource planning (ERP) and tourism. ERP would be the main application for businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises. Sipa's role is to enable software vendors to increase their abilities in software development by providing facilities called "reuse assets".

"Software vendors can use these components, free of charge, to further develop applications," said Panutat.

He said that initially Sipa developed seven modules for ERP that included sales, products, and accounting, while it developed vacancy checking, booking, and location searching for tourism businesses.

ERP software components are designed to allow software vendors to further develop and create ERP applications to serve companies with annual revenue not over Bt100 million.

Sipa Chiang Mai's lab has received Bt6 million as the budget for developing the component software that aims to encourage 100 local software vendors to benefit with this reuse asset software development that took three years.

"Now three tourism software modules are ready and have been launched for software vendors. The seven ERP modules are expected to be ready and available by the second half of this year," said Panutut.

SMEs will benefit from this scheme because their businesses will have more choices when seeking local software and applications, and they will also be at a better price.

Manoo Ordeedolchest, Sipa's director, said that the scheme is part of Sipa's mission to encourage local software vendors to be more competitive with cost saving, and improving time-to-market with their software development.

The benefits of the plan include improving productivity, creating cost savings, eliminating redundant development, saving development time, minimising ongoing maintenance costs, and bringing software development to markets more speedily.

"The problem is that most local software vendors are small businesses with insufficient budgets to develop and improve their applications for time-to-market," said Manoo.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation