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Published on March 12, 2008

The Association of Thai Software Industry (ATSI) is planning to set up a new software fund to provide soft loans to businesses for investment in software. The association is also building the Kingdom's first software factory to showcase the software development process.

These two initiatives highlight the association's efforts to develop and boost the local software industry.

ATSI's president Somkiat Ungaree said that to push software to be a business process improvement tool, the association will form a software fund to encourage Thai businesses to invest in local software.

The association plans to work with the government sector to set up the ATSI Software Fund with a Bt100-million budget to provide soft loans to small- to large-sized enterprises as well as government agencies. Operated by the ATSI, the fund is expected to accelerate the utilisation of Thai software. Loans will be given out for a three-year period.

As a fund manager, Somkiat said the association will match local software companies' capabilities with businesses' requirements and start software development projects.

The fund would provide loans-under-obligation to make investment in Thai software.

"This will encourage the use of Thai software while helping local businesses adopt IT for business process improvement," he said.

Somkiat said the fund is expected to be operational within the next few months and the association expects to aid 50 projects in the fund's first year.

"We also plan to use these 50 projects as a showcase to draw out software development best practices - for the development process as well client management," he said.

The best practices will be used as guidelines for both demand and supply aspects and clients will also be made aware of them when they invest in software development

projects.

To ensure the success of each project, the association is setting up a steering committee which will monitor the work of local software companies. The committee will also assess users' readiness to adopt software for which they are requesting loans.

Meanwhile, to develop a showcase of the software development process, the association has initiated work with the Department of Industrial Promotion, the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), Microsoft, Rangsit University and 20 other local software companies to set up the country's first software factory.

The project, costing Bt20 million, will train and certify existing programmers and create a collaborative environment in the factory.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation