Where is the software outsourcing industry in Vietnam?

The outsourcing industry has maintained a growth rate of over 50% per year over the past three years. However, it was an increase on a small scale with a total value achieved in 2005 of US $ 70 million. Therefore, in addition to the efforts of each business, there should be macro policies to promote this industry to accelerate.

According to the IT Industry Department, the Ministry of Posts and Telematics, some giant software markets are opening up opportunities for the whole world. The more developed countries are, the greater the demand for software and services, exceeding their own supply and human resources. According to Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, Director of the Department of IT Industry, in the 1980s, industrial countries accounted for the majority of software revenue such as the US and Japan ., but since the 1990s there has been a shift. public to developing countries such as India, China, Eastern Europe and recently ASEAN countries.

The first time Vietnam was named on the world software map when in 2004, Kearrney international consultancy group ranked Vietnam in the ranking of 20/25 countries with the ability to attract the best service outsourcing. This is also a reference criterion for foreign companies to choose processing locations based on the ranking criteria for business, human and financial environments.

Enterprise "segmentation"

In 2005, Vietnam had about 650 enterprises engaged in software outsourcing with about 20,000 employees, the productivity of Vietnamese software engineers was approximately $ 10,000 / person / year. In general, this scale is too small while the processing industry requires growth in both quantity and quality of resources to be able to implement increasingly large projects in both scale and complexity.

Revenue of this industry is mainly from foreign enterprises or foreign-invested enterprises such as TMA, PSV, GlobalCyberSoft, SilkRoad, GlassEgg, PSD, Tan Thien Nien, GHP . Floating enterprises turned on as FPT, but these businesses are still very rare. Besides, the "leading" enterprises to develop products for the domestic market such as Lac Viet, HPT, VietSoftware, AZ Solutions, CMS, Hai Hoa . in recent years have also made efforts to exploit resources. public export.

Some businesses have paid attention to investing in quality management process to build prestige and reach out to the world such as PSV, FPT with CMMi5 and GlobalCyberSoft certification process with CMMi4, SilkRoad with CMM3 . with about 50 enterprises have built ISO 9001 quality management process. Many businesses are also seeking to exploit Japanese market.

America is still a big processing market of Vietnam. However, for the past few years there has been a great interest of Japanese companies with direct investors or seeking Vietnamese partners. A series of Japanese enterprises appeared such as Unico Vietnam, Ichi Corporarion, Individual Systems, Aplis Vietnam, Fusione . Their efforts to invest in Vietnam promise to contribute to the prosperity of the outsourcing industry in next period.

However, in this field, Vietnam has not attracted large corporations and no company has reached 1,000 engineers. Meanwhile, strong enterprises that are willing to resources will easily create a national brand. "Vietnam, therefore, is in need of strong businesses to boost the software industry to speed up," Tuan said.

Wave up, boat up!

According to Mr. Phi Anh Tuan, Vice President of AZ Solution, the number of domestic outsourcing enterprises increased rapidly, showing more favorable conditions such as programmers' capacity being improved thanks to the opportunity to participate in the projects where complexity is growing; the process of software development quality control in enterprises gradually meets international standards; National brands in international software outsourcing have also improved significantly. These are the factors that help businesses have the opportunity to receive outsourcing orders, contributing to bringing "new breeze" to the software industry.

Mr. Nguyen Huu Le, President of TMA Solutions, said that the software outsourcing industry in 2006 is facing a strong development opportunity when the voices of investors such as IDG, Intel, Microsoft . are helping people promoting Vietnam's IT industry to the world.Luong also said that the world trend is to outsource more complicated and high-value jobs. Therefore, training to promote the capacity of Vietnamese engineers must be further increased in order to create resources to keep up with the world level.

Opportunities are many, but experts say that in order to search for "territory", Vietnam needs a balanced policy for the whole software outsourcing industry, in which the resources for each target market are challenging. big wake up.

According to Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, the outsourcing industry must be invested by national brands, and cannot just let enterprises "mobilize themselves" but must have national marketing campaigns and international conferences on software, support businesses to market promotion and encourage the development of quality assurance processes. If building a foundation, the breakthrough will be fast because the market is expanding for all businesses interested in outsourcing.