Tuesday, March 04, 2008 ICT stakeholders aim to make Cebu an 'innovation' destination
INFORMATION and Communications Technology (ICT) stakeholders in Cebu are aiming to position the province as an “Innovation Island,” an integral component of the Philippine cyberservices corridor aimed at leading the growth of the industry nationwide within the next two years.
“The Philippines, in general, and Cebu, in particular, are proactively implementing an ICT roadmap and strategy as the next level goal of our shared vision to transform our province into the Cebu Innovation Island,” said Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology.
Becoming an Innovation Island will mean serving 20 percent of the country’s revenue and employment targets for the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry by 2010, Belen explained.
“Cebu has an enormous growth opportunity in ICT, which globally is expected to expand to $110 to $130 billion by 2010. The challenge for Cebu is to serve a substantial 20 percent share of the $12 billion national target for 2010,” he said, adding that the province is now the emerging destination in Asia for outsourcing and offshore operations.
Target
Belen said Cebu, through the software development sector, aims to corner $255 million of the $12.199 billion national revenue target of the BPO industry.
Cebu’s software development sector is generating around $60 million annually.
Apart from software development, other BPO services that are also gaining popularity in the province are customer care, back-office, medical transcription, legal transcription and animation.
In terms of employment, Cebu aims to increase to 15,000 the province’s current manpower pool of 3,500 software developers. Belen said software developers in Cebu have been growing at 50 percent in the last four years.
Challenges
He cited that from a population of 1,000 software developers in 2003, it has jumped to 3,276 in 2007.
To address the challenges leading to the breakthrough growth, the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry--in line with the annual ICT Summit of the Cebu Business Month (CBM)—is helping the ICT realize its 2006-2011 blueprint by focusing on the potentials of the open source platform.
The first Cebu Open Source Summit 2008, which will be on June 18 to 19 at the Cebu International Convention Center, is one of the major thrusts of the CBM in collaboration with the Commission on Information and Communications Technology and in conjunction with the Department of Trade and Industry.
Topics to be discussed include advantages and disadvantages of open source, spectrum of OS technology, vendors and products, OS applications, infrastructure and technical success factors, challenges and risks and licensing and legal implications.
“The open source summit will advance the development of an innovation system and the promotion of technology entrepreneurship, two of the pillars of Cebu’s blueprint,” Belen said. (MMM)
