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Published on September 18, 2007

Now Software Park Thailand has a new mission to increase the use of software to bring competitive advantages to the Thai economy.

For a decade, the park has encouraged local software development while nurturing software entrepreneurs in the hope of making them stronger. While this task is still going on, the park has a new ambition -  to push the use of information technology, especially software, to improve industries' competitiveness.

"During the past ten years we have put a focus on software development on the supply side by encouraging local software development and developing new software entrepreneurs for the country. In the next era we will pay more attention to the demand side, to apply software to improve business productivity and strengthen the economy," said the park's director Suwipa Wanasathop.

The park recently developed a three-year plan to push the use of IT to benefit real sectors and it has set agriculture, medical and healthcare, software and microelectronics, auto and logistics, energy and environment, textiles and tourism as target industries

Suwipa said the park would create links with industries, business associations as well as related organisations to develop software technology that could address the industries' problems. Ten software development projects are set for the next three years.

"We will work with industry clusters and look at their requirements to improve their businesses and identify technology that should be developed to fit their needs," she said. To develop each project, the park will invite local software companies and related organisations to participate in developing technology to answer the industries' problems.

Instead of developing technology to serve each part of a business process individually, Suwipa said this time the project would focus on the bigger picture by using IT to improve the whole business process of each industry.

"We hope that all 10 projects will eventually come out with a bulk of enterprise software that can serve the whole business process. Apart from being used locally, the business-process software could also be sold internationally," she said.

To serve the new mission, the park recently received a Bt333-million budget for the next three years to support the new development projects.

Suwipa said the 10 projects were expected to be a starting point to make proof of concept to bring IT to address industries' problems. In the meantime, it would be a path to develop more skills for local software developers to shift from being software programmers to become software architects.

"As the project involves the development of enterprise software for the entire business process, local software people will have to develop more skills to design the whole system rather than just program coding," she said.

The park plans next year to start the first three projects with target industries being energy, logistics and the food industry.

Apart from the 10 projects, the park will also focus on strengthening local software companies and creating more professional software developers.

During 2002 to 2006, the park incubated around 150 software entrepreneurs, of which 93 companies have continued in business on their own. Around 169 software applications were developed and they generated revenue of more than Bt200 million during the incubation period.

Suwipa said in addition to nurturing local software entrepreneurs through the incubation programme, the next plan was to accelerate software company spin-offs.

During the past several years, the trend has been for the IT departments in large companies to be spun off as new software companies. To allow these companies to stay in business, Suwipa said the park would provide assistance to make them stronger in the business arena.

"As this group of companies have their own investment and software products, they require different assistance to those which are new start-ups. Instead of giving them facilities support, we will assist them in terms of knowledge and technology transfer, marketing support and helping them to reach software standard certification," she said.

 Pongpen Sutharoj

 The Nation