To Become Next Silicon Valley: Cebu lacks basic infrastructure

Efforts made in grooming Cebu as the “innovation capital” of the Philippines might just turn out futile if proper infrastructure to support such aim will not be established.

Cebu Software Development Industry Association, Inc., (CebuSoft) president Richard Tiong said that basic support should be created first, before Cebu could take off as an “innovation capital” in the country.

At present, Cebu lacks four basic requirements of becoming a “melting pot” of software developers and good software products. These are good schools to provide both software scientists, and software engineers; vibrant venture capital market; good pool of technology-entrepreneurs (techno-preneurs), and availability of lifestyle destinations that provides conducive environment for the geeks.

Aside from a handful of lifestyle destinations that have so far provided a fitting ambiance for technology artists and scientists, Cebu lacks three basic infrastructures that would transform the province into another “Silicon Valley” destination in the Philippines.

However, the availability of few destinations for the tech-savvy community such as those that provides WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) access is already a step forward for Cebu to reach its goal of becoming the next Silicon Valley.

But these are not enough, the need to put up the basic support requirements must be given utmost attention through collaborative efforts from the government and the private sector.

For his opinion, Cebu is “oversold” in terms of marketing it as an IT destination, or software development hub in the Philippines as the availability of good software engineers and software scientists are very limited. Most of them are also hired by multinational companies with operations in Cebu while others are offered jobs abroad.

Software engineers are those geeks who design a software product, while software scientists are those who make research for new innovations of software.

An IT software industry source also told The Freeman that Cebu schools are not producing software engineers, but they have focused their course offering in producing software scientists, through Computer Science courses.

These two courses must be widely available in order to provide good pool of software engineers and software scientists.

Because of the lack of enough talents in this field, there are no venture capitalists (VCs) that entered Cebu yet.

Venture capitalists (VCs) are those businessmen who will take advantage of a good concept or IT development product and offer to fund the idea, as well as market the product.

Because of human resource problem, Cebu is not attracting hardcore techno-preneurs as of this moment, although the potential is huge, Tiong added.