IT sector needs to develop niche market

CEBU, Philippines – After being hailed as the top emerging outsourcing destination, among 50 other cities in the world, Cebu is now faced with the challenge to develop its own niche market.

Cebu ICT 2009 Conference and Exhibition chairman Jerry Rapes said during the opening salvo of the Cebu Business Month that the industry needs to develop a niche that it can capitalize on, otherwise the efforts of the industry stakeholders will be futile.

At present, Rapes said the local industry is showing strong capabilities in areas such as game development, animation and open source software development.

 “We have to know the niche where we belong and where we can compete strongly. We have to leverage on these strengths rather than do everything and actually gain nothing,” he said.

As one of the highlights of the CBM 209, Cebu ICT stakeholders are now preparing to move further ahead in the global ICT arena through determining the factors that lead to this recent achievements in the upcoming Cebu ICT 2009 Conference and Exhibition.

Cebu ICT 2009 Conference and Exhibition is an annual event that is one of the major highlights of this month’s celebration of the Cebu Business Month (CBM).

Rapes said Cebu’s ICT sector has been doing considerably despite the current tough economic standing.

“We will need people to work together. The IT and ICT-enabled services, government, academe and the industry must work hand in hand and everyone has a role to play,” he said.

Rapes added that in order to drive the industry’s growth, talent development is very much crucial and with this aspect, the partnership between the academe and industry is deemed essential.

He said that they are propagating the concept of “technopreneurship” to pave the way to the creation of more innovations in the realm of ICT.

Rapes said that so far, our local industry has been able to come up with new innovations such as IT application platforms despite the various limitations particularly on financing.

“We need to have a global mindset and local execution. We need to invest in talent development because technology is already in place and is much cheaper. Talent building is not cheap but we need to do it in order for us to move forward,” said Rapes.

 He said that China and India have 100,000 PHDs in computer science, IT, physics and computer engineering courses while we only have a few professionals in these fields.

“We have to understand now how we can leverage in talents so that we can develop our baseline strategy. Our government’s training programs are competitive enough because reputable and certified companies are doing the trainings but not a lot are consuming and utilizing these,” said Rapes.

The upcoming Cebu ICT 2009 conference and exhibition will run from June 25 to June 27 at the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) and it will carry the theme: “Cebu: e-merging Island of Innovation.”