Thursday, October 11, 2007 Venture capitalist puts up tech bar for open source
TO show the province’s potential as an open source software market, a Filipino venture capitalist has set foot in Cebu to advocate open source software development.
“Cebu has a large under-utilized talent pool (of people with) the right set of skills—innovative, creative and willing to take risks,” said Morph Labs Inc. chief executive officer David Abramowski.
Morph Labs Inc., a company that hosts web applications developed by local software vendors, opened its “interactive tech bar” at the groundfloor of i1 building at the Asiatown IT Park last Friday.
Abramowski said Morph aims to develop the “tech-noprenuer” spirit among Filipinos, especially in Cebu, which is considered as one of the leading markets for open source technologies worldwide.
He told a press conference that Morph will hire software developers in Cebu to assist in the research and development aspect of the company. But he did not reveal how many software developers in Cebu will be hired by Morph.
At present, the company, which also holds operations in Manila, has 20 software engineers.
Morph is offering clients the option to rent rather than buy software.
“This is software as a service,” Abramowski said.
He explained that this involves hosting software on the web and charging users for its use as opposed to selling copies of the software to clients.
“Before, what a company does is to buy a software and hardware, and then hire a developer to run the program. With Morph, we handle the whole back-end process for them,” he said. “All they have to do is rent it from us. For example, they can rent a small piece of the Customer Relations Management system to run their business.”
The common concept of most small and medium enterprise players buying a software service and hiring a pool of information technology professionals to operate the database is “costly,” said Abramowski during the press interview.
Morph enables entrepreneurs to acquire the same business solutions technologies of multinational companies while driving the operating cost down and increasing service ability, he said.
“We want to change the way software is delivered to businesses,” Abramowski said, adding that the company has identified Asia as its main market.
To stimulate the local software industry, he said Morph will introduce products that combine technology and business solutions before the year ends. (MMM)
