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Thursday, June 23, 2005
Ng: Big names, numbers at ICT meet
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
TOP GUNS. By the time you read this, it will be the second day of the 1st International Conference and Exhibition on Business and ICT 2005 (Cebu ICT) at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino. It took several months to plan, so it is great to see it succeed. And this observation did not come from local people, but from the top guns from Manila.
The Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry is already planning, informally, to make this a yearly event. Kudos to the chairman of the Cebu Business Month, Francis Monera, and the chairman of the Cebu ICT, Bonifacio Belen.
All the big brands in information and communications technology (ICT) were here, as well as the names behind the brands.
Participating in the convention were President Gloria Arroyo, Sen. Mar Roxas, DTI Secretary Juan Santos, all commissioners of the Commission on ICT headed by Virgilio Peña, and the chief executives of almost all major IT companies.
Seen were IBM’s Jajo Quintos, HP’s Nilo Cruz, Cisco’s Luichi Robles, Sun’s Cynthia Mammon, Avaya’s Ed Doctolero, Oracle’s Yashi Kant, PeopleSupport’s Bong Borja, SPI’s Ernest Cu, Innove’s Gil Genio and the Philippine Software Industry Association’s Fermin Taruc, among others. All major chief information officers of major government agencies were also here. City Mayor Tommy Osmeña and Gov. Gwen Garcia are speakers at the event.
Although the convention was a paid event, there were over 500 delegates, including well over 100 from Manila. The exhibit is open to the public, so if you haven’t done so, drop by the computer exhibits.
I would like to summarize some of the statistics that DTI Secretary Juan Santos enumerated. Currently, the Philippines has over 45,000 people employed in call centers, 3,000 doing medical transcription, as well as over 10,000 employed in software development export services.
These IT and IT-enabled services are said to be generating almost a billion dollars in exports. India is said to be approaching $15 billion in software and services exports.
But what I would like to put some time on is the excellent speech of Sen. Mar Roxas, which he delivered extemporaneously. Mr. Roxas has been championing the positioning of the Philippines in the IT-enabled services sector. Aside from Mr. Palengke, he has been called the father of the e-services sector.
The senator said that while we concentrate on ICT as a business, we should also focus on ICT as a business enabler for those not in the IT business. He said that of the at least 870,000 businesses registered in the country, 99 percent are micro-enterprises. Thus, you are looking at over 850,000 businesses that are focused on the local market. Most of them are still not using IT.
One of the fastest ways for the economy to grow is to have a conscious program to increase the competitiveness of these businesses. They cannot grow their market or participate in the global market unless they can increase their competitiveness and effectiveness by using the proper technology, or they are able to have access to finance, operational processes or markets that are available through the use of technology.
(www.bizdrivenlife.net)
(June 23, 2005 issue)
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