To encourage the local software industry, what is the agenda for local software development?

Since software will help increase the country's competitive advantage, we think we should first strengthen the industry, especially improve the quality of local software, the software development process, and training.  Most software houses are small companies with insufficient capital and that affects the quality of software.

This is the main obstacle that we are trying to remove.

To address the problem, Sipa has joined with partners such as Software Park Thailand and the Thai Embedded System Association (Tesa) to raise the standard of the local software industry.

We have set up the Thailand Software Process Improvement Network (Spin) project to encourage local software developers to adopt software process improvement as a key principle in software development, while encouraging them to be certified to the international CMMi (Capability Maturity Model Integration) standard.

At this stage only one local software company has been certified to CMMi Level 2 with another certified to CMMi Level 5.

In the next 12 months, we hope to have more companies CMMi certified. The agency is also pushing ISO/VSE, a standard for very small software companies, as part of ISO. We have initiated programmes to encourage software houses to learn the new Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology.

What else do you think is important to help the local software industry?

The next concern is staff training, in terms of quality and quantity. We have undertaken training projects to the standard of globally recognised software engineers and we hope that the figure will reach 10,000 to 15,000 staff by 2010.

 Another area is embedded systems. Sipa has worked with Tesa to train people in this area as we realise that embedded systems will play a more important role in future.

This is a field that involves many technologies, including computers, electronics and software, so the engineers must have knowledge of the different application domains.

Sipa and Tesa plan to work with universities and vocational colleges nationwide to train embedded-system developers. In the case of universities, it aims to train engineering students in computer science, electronics and other areas, while it is planning to train lecturers for vocational schools.

 The plan is to produce about 100 developers this year and increase this by 350 developers every successive year.

Apart from building key infrastructure that is fundamental for the local software industry, how do you see other developments in terms of business and market expansion?

When we strengthen the quality and quantity of software companies, we have to help create markets - both local and international - for local software developers.

For local markets, we plan to encourage government organisations to buy software products and services from local software companies, and encourage small and medium enterprises in the country to use local software.

We plan to collaborate with government organisations such as the Board of Investment (BoI) and Revenue Department to give incentives to those who use local software and this can stimulate local software businesses.

We will act as a matchmaker to bring software houses to meet the source of funds or venture capitalists as we think this is a key channel to build more local software businesses.

Finally, we will participate in road shows, global exhibitions, trade fairs and technology events to promote the Thai software industry in the global market.

If we follow these plans, we are confident that the Thai software industry will grow dramatically and move forward to achieve the goal of Thailand being recognised as a software development country in the near future.