Tags: Software Solutions, Technology Industry
By Alexander Villafania
QUEZON CITY, METRO MANILA – Software development is one of the key industrial segments of the country’s information and communications technology (ICT) sector and is one of its fastest growth areas.
In fact, the software industry, which includes development, maintenance and outsourcing, earned at least US$400 million in 2007. This figure could grow to US$1 billion by the end of 2010. This kind of growth also entails hiring more people. As such, it is estimated that about 75,000 people could be hired by the end of 2010.
Filipino software developers are also sought-after by both local and foreign firms, largely because of growing expertise in developing end-user applications on open source and commercial software platforms. In fact, there had been several projects implemented through combined efforts by the government, private sector and academic institutions to continue the development of software developers in the Philippines.
Business organizations such as European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP) know of the possible economic and social contributions of creating a pool of professional software developers, which prompted them to start a project called Philippine Open Source Initiative (POSITIVE).
The University of the Philippines and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) also institutionalize a training facility called UP Information Technology Training Center (UPITTC) at the UP Diliman campus to develop ICT experts specifically on software development.
Development on open source software platforms and also in Java are also very much in demand. Jerry Rapes, G2iX Vice President for Asia Pacific Sales said that the Philippines has good pool of open source developers and they could be good contributors to software development on a global scale.
He cited the development of NPanday, an application that allows software developers to access and integrate software builds from the Apache Maven network onto use Microsoft Visual Studio. Essentially, NPanday makes it easier for developers to make an entire application using smaller tools from different development platforms.
The NPanday, developed by a group of Filipino software developers from MaestroDev, was borne out of a project started under the Interoperability Lab built by Microsoft Philippines and the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT).
“NPanday is just an example of one software project that highlights the capabilities of Filipino software engineers, which is why we should continue to develop them because there is a lot of economic growth on the software industry in general,” Rapes said.
CICT Commissioner on e-Government Tim Diaz De Rivera also said that demand for software development continues to grow and that there should be more initiatives to ensure the constant availability of skills software developers. He also stressed that more government agencies will be integrating more applications for internal or external purposes, which means there could be demand for more developers.
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