WITH the expected explosion in the global demand for new software developments, the Cebu Foundation for Information and Technology (CEDF-IT) plans to strengthen links between the academe and the industry to ensure that the local talent pool will be ready when the demand for software developers starts to pour in.
Dr. Greg Gabison, CEDF-IT president representing the University of San Jose Recoletos, said CEDF-IT with its new members of the board would look into projects that would help boost the software development side of the outsourcing industry.
“While most of our jobs in the outsourcing right now are still the call center jobs, we feel that there is something we can do about this area and we have partners in the telecom industries as well who are helping us out like Globe with our Globe Labs project,” Gabison said.
“We will also push forward with more projects that will encourage students with potential for developing technologies and ensure that Cebu will not only be known for voice services but also in the high-end skills side,” he said.
Gabison said he believed that Cebu talents were capable of developing software products that could be used for business and even support software for the already popular device operating systems such as Android, which can be further strengthened with more collaboration between the academe and the industry.
With firms now willing to pay for the technology, Gabison believes that the Cebu talent pool are very technology savvy and should be able to satisfy demands for software developments from major companies here and abroad.
“We have actually used software developed by local talents in many projects already. One is the Sugar CRM2 Management Tool which we developed with Android technology in USJ-R,” Gabison said./Reporter Aileen Garcia-Yap