Sipa will aggressively promote the local software industry through three main strategies - producing a skilled workforce, creating software-related jobs and opportunities, and developing potential markets.

After putting in a strong effort during the three years of the agency's existence, Avudh Ploysongsang, Sipa's president, said the agency had set aside Bt400 million from next year's budget to encourage the local software industry through the promotion of these four areas.

For enterprise software, the agency plans to encourage local software companies to achieve certified software standards including the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMi) and ISO/VSE, standards for very small software companies, as part of the ISO that initiated programmes to encourage software houses to learn the new Software Oriented Architecture technology.

The promotion will be conducted through collaboration with other government organisations, for instance, a project called Thailand Software Process Improvement Network which encourages local software developers to adopt improved processes as a key principle in their work, while encouraging them to be certified to the CMMi international standards.

Sipa's aim is that by 2010, at least 150 software companies should have achieved CMMi and 500 should have ISO. In this way Thailand will be internationally recognised as country strong in software. The agency will also encourage more certified professionals including Java certified and .NET certified. It expects to have 15,000 certified professionals by 2010.

For animation and multimedia software, the agency will continue to create many more pre-professional and professional animators, along providing facilities, courses, and tools for easier software development at lower cost.

"We have already successfully set up one animation studio in Chiang Mai, the Northern Animation Studio. Apart from having proving facilities, we also create markets through international road shows and business-matching programmes," said Avudh.

The third area is game and mobile-application software and the agency plans to encourage the industry with courses for software developers.

The last area is embedded-system software. Sipa will work with the Thailand Embedded System Association (Tesa) to train many more people in this area.

"We have cooperated with Tesa to increase the numbers of people who are skilled in embedded-system technology. Sipa and Tesa will collaborate with universities and vocational colleges nationwide to train the required personnel. In the case of universities, we aim to train engineering students in computer science, electronics and other areas, while we are planning to train lecturers for vocational schools," said Avudh.

Sipa itself will provide facilities support and coordinate with overseas partners such as Japan's IPA to set up local training courses for embedded systems. This is a collaboration between the Thai government and the Japanese government. The plan is to produce about 100 developers in the initial phase this year, and to increase this by up to 350 developers in each subsequent year.

Apart from promoting the four areas of software development, the agency will also continue its existing schemes including One Stop Service, ICT City, Open Source, Tourism Collaborative Commerce and cooperation with the Board of Investment (BoI).

"Collaboration with the BoI has promoted 201 companies in the software businesses with the value of investments being around Bt2.6 billion.

 "This is expected to create employment for 5,000 people," said Avudh.

Asian Pornwasin

The Nation