A SINGAPOREAN software company, Genovate,
has expanded business to Thailand as an investment- support
project of the Board of Investment (Bol) and the software
Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), with the aim of encouraging
local software development to create more software professionals.
Under the project, the company will receive tax-free advantages
without any ceiling for eight years of operation. It is
the first foreign company to invest in the Thai software
industry under a government programme to stimulate the
industry.
Genovate was established in 1997 in Singapore. It has
offices in Malaysia, Korea, Australia, India, Saudi-Arabia,
Dubai, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
The company’s group CEO and cofounder, J Anton Ravindran,
said that the company aims to transfer its technology experience
and software-development knowledge, in web services, mobilecommerce,
bioinformatics, and SAP professional training, to the local
software industry. It has spend Bt13 million to establish
a company representative office in Bangkok and to employ
12 to 15 local professionals. It is expected to officially
open in the next three months.
The company will run two main businesses. The first is
application development and software localization and the
second is SAP professional training.
It will localize its applications developed and distributed
in Singapore to Thailand including four main applications – ezGEMS.
Ez-Hr, ez-Pay, and vLearn – to small-and –medium
enterprises in the Thai market.
exGEMS is enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
designed to help asset-intensive industries to better manage
their capital assets. Ez-Hr and ezPay are web-based applications
for staff management and payroll system, based on Java
and extensible mark
up language (XML), vLearn is an online learning package.
The company also plans to develop new software for emerging
markets such as application software for the automobile
industry.
“We will start to develop application for the auto
industry as our new market area by using Thailand as base
for development before export to other countries. We will
start the development in the next three months and expect
to complete it in six months,” said Anton.
The company also sells consultancy in software development
for Web services, mobile commerce, and bioinformatics technologies
such as Bio-Java, Bio-Perl and Bio-XML technology.
Anton said that as the company is an authorised SAP professional
training partner for Singapore, India, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Middle East and Thailand, it aims to create certified SAP
professionals, “around 100 to 120 people in the first year
of operation.”
The national Government Financial Management Information
System(GEMIS) project built around SAP R3 infrastructure
requires many SAP professionals, but these people are in
short supply.
Apart from the GFMIS project, there are many multinational
companies wanting to move businesses, services and production
here, but the lack of SAP skills is an obstacle to them.
We saw the opportunity and decided to set up a company
to provide professional SAP training with the hope to creating
more skilled people, “ said Anton.
The company aims to generate first-year revenue of around S$1.2 million
(Bt26.2 million) and around $3 million in the second year.
asina@nationgroup.com
