Startups and big data analytics were among the top topics in this year’s SOFTCON.PH: BREAKING THE CODE, organized by the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA), held last November 4-5. 2015 at the Marriott Grand Ballroom in Pasay City.
The rise of startups in the Philippines is reflected by the number of angel investors pouring money into local companies. Globe Telecom and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) established Kickstart Ventures and IdeaSpace, respectively, with the goal of introducing venture capital investing in the country. This has already produced a number of startups, most of which are related to the technology industry.
Arup Maity, PSIA Board Director, says startups are becoming a new industry where software developers are needed. He notes that the Philippines has considerable number of experts in a number of programming languages, including those for the mobile platform.
Startups as million-dollar industry
Maity, who served as moderator for the Startup Ecosystem and Investment panel discussion at SOFTCON.PH, adds that millions of dollars are being poured into innovative application development and that the Philippines should tap into its community of developers and technology infrastructure to either service startup communities around the world or even become startups themselves.
“It’s an exciting time to be a developer but it’s also a challenging one because you have to be familiar with changing software requirements especially on mobile,” Maity says. “Thankfully, programmers in the Philippines are adept. We also need to get investors interested in coming on board.”
Among the panelists on startup investments were Paco Sandejas of Narra Venture Capital, John Orrock of Future Now Ventures, Earl Valencia of IdeaSpace, Christian Besler of Kickstart Ventures, and Monchito Ibrahim of the Department of Science and Technology – Information and Communications Technology Office (DOST-ICTO).
Big Data is big growth prospect
Amid the growth of cloud computing is big data analytics, a process of evaluating data to find patterns, correlations, and other useful information for better decision making. Many companies are now looking towards big data analytics as a means to secure the sustainability of their long-term plans.
While there are applications that enable companies to pursue big data analytics, one essential aspect of successfully traversing it is having data scientists.
Big data analytics and building data scientists were among the key topics at SOFTCON.PH 2015. The discussion focused on addressing how companies can achieve return-in-investments and develop skills to implement predictive analytic capabilities. It also looked into the opportunities posed by demand for big data analytics in terms of building a pool of highly-qualified data scientists.
Presenting in this topic was Drew Perez of Adatos Pte. Ltd; Mary Rose Dela Cruz of Stratpoivt Technologies served as moderator. Among the participants in the discussion were Alvin Gendrano of Smart, Allan De Jesus of HP, and John Gonzales of PLDT.
Two-day software extravaganza
Other talks during the first day of SOFTCON.PH were: Developing on a mobile platform; Internet-of-Things; new training programs to produce better software programmers and engineers; and software-driven business strategies.
The second day featured dedicated talks for programmers. Among the tracks were: Feedback and continuous delivery in software development; security protocols; Agile engineering, refactoring and domain-driven design; performance tuning of mobile applications; building financial systems with microservices; risk-based exploratory testing; automation; quality management; and user experience interface management.
SOFTCON.PH: BREAKING THE CODE was organized by the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) in partnership with PLDT-Smart SME Nation and PLDT Alpha Enterprise, Accenture, Pointwest Technologies, IP-Converge, and Secure Metric Technology.