Software park sets development agenda

Viet Nam’s first software park has successfully attracted large investments from leading firms in the industry and become a model that should be emulated elsewhere in the country, senior officials said on Wednesday.

Marking the Quang Trung Software Park on its 10th anniversary, Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said it was a role model that offered good services and maintained high management standards.

“The park has become Viet Nam’s biggest software training centre where there are 19,000 students, qualified staff and managers, which is a treasure to be valued and developed,” said Nhan, who is credited with initiating the project.

Experience gained from developing the park should be collected and used as a base to train and transfer skills and technology to other localities, he said.

Other speakers also extolled the centre’s success in luring foreign investment into the information technology industry.

The park has so far attracted 102 software companies involved in software, IT services and human resource training with a total registered capital of US$78.83 million. These include global IT giants like IBM and HP.

It has also created jobs for nearly 24,000 workers and over $70 million in revenue, half of which stems from export.

Le Doan Hop, Minister of Information and Communications, said that the park led the country in recruiting the largest number of employees and technical workers, and recording the highest revenue and export ratios.

Chu Tien Dung, chairman of Quang Trung Software City Development Corporation that manages the park, said over the past 10 years, the park had invested VND1.8 trillion ($90 billion) mobilised from different sources to develop technical infrastructure, including the inner-park traffic system and clean water supply.

The park has built an optic cable network on the 145Mbps multidimensional international wave-length, a database meeting TIER 3 standard, and an information security management system meeting the ISO 27001:2005 norm, Dung said.

Chairman of the HCM City People’s Committee Le Hoang Quan said that the Quang Trung Software Park had spurred economic restructuring in the city towards increasing the role of the knowledge-based economy with high quality and added-value products and services.

The city People’s Committee marked the anniversary by granting an investment certificate to the Hewlett Packard group, a global IT cartel that registered revenues of more than $124 billion last year, to establish a centre for development research and software services.

On the occasion, the park also was awarded the Labour Order, second class by the State. — VNS

Tags: Quang Trung Software park