CEBU’S EARNINGS FROM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Cebu is expected to generate $US255 million or 20 per cent of the $US1.275 billion in revenues in software development by 2010, as it continues to be a premier outsourcing destination in the country.
Bonifacio Belen, executive director of Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cebu-it), said this opened up job opportunities to 15,000 software developers in Cebu.
Cebu earned $US60 million and employed 3,500 software developers in 2006, he said.
The figures are based on studies conducted by the Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) and Business Process Association of the Philippines (BPAP).
According to BPAP’s five-year forecast, the country will get at least 10 per cent or $US1.2 billion of the total global business process outsourcing (BPO) earnings of $US110 billion to $US130 billion.
The BPO areas expected to fuel economic growth in BPO and information technology enabled services (ITES) in 2010 are customer care ($US5.296 million); back office services such as human resources ($US2.392 million); medical transcription ($US1.708 million); and animation ($US759 million), among others.
In his presentation during the launch of Cebu Business Month (CBM) 2008, Belen said this target put forward an enormous growth opportunity for Cebu.
The challenge for Cebu was to serve a substantial share or 20 per cent of the national target of $US1.2 billion in 2010, he said.
CBM 2008 featured the First Cebu Open Source Summit, which was one way of addressing challenges faced by the ICT sector.
For the very first time, the major stakeholders of Open Source Technology across the world would converge in Cebu to discuss how the Open Source movement was changing the rules of the game for ICT, he said.
The summit would have speakers from Cebu and other countries, who would discuss issues such as open source applications, infrastructure and technical success factor, challenges and risks of open source, and best practices for open source governance.
Filipino entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, who is chairman and co-founder of BPO company, Exist Global and software company, Morph Labs will be one of the speakers.
Belen said the summit would help Cebu to reach its revenue target in the BPO and ITES sectors in 2010.
He said the ICT sector in Cebu had been active in coming up with programs and establishing networks with different companies to ensure growth in the sector.
In 2006, the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CICC) also organized the 2nd Cebu ICT Strategy Summit in 2006, which launched a program that seeks to make Cebu and ICT hub by emulating the Silicon Valley (SV) model.
In the 2006 summit, the ICT sector in Cebu decided to address at least two ingredients that make the SV successfulinnovation ecosystem and technology entrepreneurship.
Innovation ecosystem promotes and enables research and development to find a way in the marketplace, while technology entrepreneurship creates an atmosphere where entrepreneurs are mentored and encouraged by business experts and venture capitalists.