Economic crisis no threat to software industry - ATSI

The Association of Thai Software Industry (ATSI) has rolled out its 2009 strategic plan, which aims to drive the fortunes of the Thai software industry through what are expected to be tough times ahead.

ATSI president Somkiat Ungaree said the association was working on five strategies. First, the association will work with the government to create domestic demand for software. It will boost the strength of local software companies among Thailand's key industries, including manufacturing, tourism, food and automobiles.

However, the government itself will be a main focus as a potentially huge market for local software. With the government's budget, its policy to promote local software businesses across industries, and its desire to enhance the performance of government departments and agencies, the association believes there will be huge government demand for software.

"We will work in parallel by selecting local software companies with the most potential and negotiating with the government to prepare budgets to purchase local software. The association will work as a matchmaker for them," Somkiat said.

Secondly, it plans to develop a database of software people and companies in Thailand - a so-called "Bible of IT Resources" - to help to guide the industry and the government in effectively developing and deploying IT-related policies. The database will also involve the collection of competency profiles covering all areas of expertise.

Somkiat said the association would also arrange retraining programmes for graduate students and people in early retirement to teach them software technologies. Then, it will work with the real sector to create jobs for them. This programme aims to retrain more than 50,000 people in 2009.

The third plan is to help local software companies to take their expertise abroad. Because of the economic downturn - the so-called Hamburger Crisis - the strategic market is not America or Europe, but rather the Asian market, and particularly China, Vietnam and Indonesia.

"We don't think of the Hamburger Crisis as a threat, but rather as an opportunity leading us abroad, especially to the Asian market. Countries in Asia will buy more software from Asian vendors than from vendors in the West," he said.

Fourth, the association plans to upgrade its "Buy Thai First" scheme by introducing "Buy Thai First Version 2", and encouraging more 100 Thai software companies to get a Software YES certification, to update the 100 YES certificates issued last year.

New candidates for Software YES certification will be required to show innovation in software products and services, intellectual property, and at least three customer sites as references.

 "We will continue business matching between software companies and target users. We were quite successful in this activity last year, and a lot of our matches resulted in business deals. These were worth between Bt300,000 and Bt1 million," Somkiat said. 

Finally, the association will focus on security, which promises to be this year's main technology trend. It will urge software companies to become more familiar with Syslog, which is a standard for forwarding log messages in an IP network, but is also typically used for computer system management and security auditing.

"Our focus is to create awareness about IT security over open-source platforms. We plan to guide software companies on to the security track because security will be a key area for the software industry this year," he said.