Jerry Rapes :: Fuller representation and expansion for PSIA-Visayas and Mindanao
I just wanted to share this one page profile + platform that I made for Jerry, who is running for a seat at PSIA’s BoD.
Jerry Rapes, president and CEO of Exist, is one the key drivers in the advancement of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Cebu, revitalizing and propagating Cebu as an invaluable provider of world-class ICT services through initiatives such as the annual Cebu ICT Conference, Philippine Open Source Summit, Developers Connect (DevCon), academic and private sector linkages, technology meet-ups, and industry association campaigns.
As executive at Exist, DevCon Foundation 1, Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (CEDF-IT) 2, and Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI) 3, Jerry shares business, marketing, and human resources advice with key stake holders to build the next-generation Cebu ICT business landscape.
Working at Exist, the Philippines’ pioneering open source software engineering firm with over 150 developers based in Manila and Cebu with key clients in Asia and North America, Jerry has been instrumental in founding Exist Cebu in 2006 and in expanding Exist’s vertical markets and geographies locally and abroad.
An influential contributor on the implementation of the road map for ICT and business process outsourcing (BPO) industries in Cebu, Jerry connects major stake holders in the country to participate and create ideas that spur business growth in the region.
Jerry knows the capabilities, language, people, and culture of Cebu and nearby regions and that - among many other things - is a major contribution to PSIA.
Jerry’s Plans for PSIA
Fuller representation and expansion for PSIA-Visayas and Mindanao
With his strong connections in the Visayas and Mindanao regions and roles in CEDF-IT and CCCI, Jerry aims to expand the participation of more companies in the mentioned regions at PSIA. Jerry plans to create programs that can leverage on the uniquely resourceful and ingenious Filipino talents from the Visayas and Mindanao regions.
Tapping Visayas and Mindanao will spur in more jobs and more revenue, effectively promoting the growth and global competitiveness of the Philippine software industry.
Strong academe and private sector relationship
Jerry is an enthusiastic proponent of higher education in the Philippines, working with various academe and grassroots communities, and through industry linkages with PSIA, CCCI, CEDF-IT and other industry associations.
Jerry plays a key role in building the community of IT professionals in the country, as President of DevCon Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to showcase the “IT Pinoy Talent” through unconferences, geekups, and bootcamps. A pioneering project of PSIA and with the goal of building a community that would inspire IT professionals, DevCon has grown to having over 4,000 participants since June 2009. It is now highly sought after by educational institutions through its mini-DevCon programs that aim to augment the academic learnings of students with up-to-date trends in the IT industry.
He also has helped develop ICT skills through Exist Code Camp, a software development training program for IT graduates that has been running successfully for the past four years under his supervision, and he discusses capability issues and development plans with both the academe and private sector for this purpose.
Through these, Jerry brings a wealth of experience in liaising with the academe to PSIA.
References
1 DevCon Foundation, President (2010-present)
2 CEDF-IT, Vice President (2010-present)
3 CCCI, Chairman of ICT Committee (2010-present)
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technologies 2011
Yesterday, market research and analyst firm Gartner announced (at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo) the Top 10 technologies and trends that will become strategic for most organizations in 2011.
I’m happy to note that I’ve been working closely with these technologies for the past 3 years and excited to witness the continued growth of these technologies and trends.
Here are the technologies and trends that are in my circle of work:
Cloud Computing. Been hearing about cloud computing since 2007. Been reading stuff about it since then. It’s true that Software as a Service (SaaS) model is the most pronounced and used, even in the Philippines, but there’s also data that suggests for growth of Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service models (in the Philippines) in the months to come.
I’ve also been witness to the transformation of products/services rolled out by Morphlabs. Back in 2007, Morphlabs offered what people called “cloud hosting” subscriptions in the product called Morph AppSpace. The service allowed small businesses to deliver their apps to the cloud easily, with just a couple of clicks of the mouse. Morphlabs also had (sometime 2008 I think), a service called Morph AppCloud, which was a more robust version of the service, that catered to bigger businesses. Morphlabs had also released a number SaaS apps, such as an on-demand CRM and an on-demand ECM. However, due to the demands of security and privacy in cloud computing, it was compelled to re-think about its offerings and starting 2009, it pursued its efforts of re-building its cloud platform.
Now, Morphlabs is on track and competitively positioned vs its counterparts 3Tera, Surgient, Nimbula et al in the provisioning of a comprehensive cloud platform. Be sure to visit their website to find out news about its recent announcement related to Enterprise Cloud Architecture at Interop NYC.
Gartner mentions that the next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between the open public and closed private cloud types. In addition, the firm says that: Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor’s public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer’s enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation.
Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Gartner adds that the quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.
In my line of work, I’ve been hearing about mobile app development almost every day — mostly iPhone app development or iPad app development. My thoughts? More training for students in terms of programming/engineering for these devices. Filipinos are naturally creative and given the right training, the Philippines can surely make a name for itself on mobile application development outsourcing.
Social Communications and Collaboration. Well, it’s Social Media Month over at Exist Global, the software engineering firm where I work. So far, we’ve seen great interest and there are some encouraging results (as Junnie notes). I’d say — it’s still a long way to go.
Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. It’s my big challenge to bring together our social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.
For the complete list from Gartner, click here.
How are you using these technologies to your advantage?
Two .. maybe 10 things to Remember once you’ve your Exist Blog Account
I want to share two things which I had done for my account to help you manage yours.
1) Analytics - If you want to track web traffic to you blog, you can do so with this so-called plug-in Ultimate Google Analytics, which is available under Plugins. Just ACTIVATE it and input this number: UA-7460784-2. For basic configuration, just enable the “Check for updates” and “Enable tracker”. Make sure to save your settings.
Below is a sample of what Analytics provides:
I normally log in to Google Analytics to view data. Email me with your GMAIL addy so that you can have access to yours.
2) Feeds - Set up Feedburner. Feedburner is a fun tool for monitoring who has subscribed to your account. Again, this plug-in is available under Plugins. Just activate it. To set up your feed, go to Options and follow the given instructions. From what I understand, I won’t have to make changes to the existing feed settings nor ask our IT folks to help me with the changes because this will redirect the existing feed to my Feedburner. Let’s see if that works
…
OK, I’m leaving the next numbers up to you… maybe you have done something creative too? Kindly share because we’d like to maximize this engine as much as possible. Let’s be pro-active in our efforts
5 Ways to Supercharge your Blogging
I attended Blog Mo, Karerin Mo last week and had a fantastic time listening to the speakers. I thought it’d be useful to share some info to those who are already blogging, to help them give a little bit of a boost to it.
1) Create themes per month or per time period. Just like an editorial calendar. This helps you focus.
2) Say it with pictures. Yep, a picture is worth a thousand words. However for those who like it pithy (like me), re-read your lengthy post twice before you publish. The re-checking will help you trim down the fat.
3) Allow for guest-posting. Ask (relevant) people to give you their views and opinions on your topic. Have them cite stories or examples.
4) Search engine optimize. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to determine the right keywords and link these to pages that you’d like to optimize for search engines. One of the speakers talked in great length about SEO and mentions that you can optimize for different sets of keywords for different pages.
5) Share. Share your post to your friends, colleagues. Tweet about your posts. Re-distribute your post in other available blog engines.
Pretty simple, right? Still finding it difficult to blog? Let’s chat!
Non-voice industry groups promote sector through media guesting
Re-printing …
Representatives of different industry associations under the IT-BPO sector gathered in front of the camera for an hour of “People, Politics, Power”. But that is just the name of the news-oriented talk show hosted by veteran anchor Freddie Abando of government channel NBN4 who had as guests represenatives of the non-voice sector last September 27 live from the media center in Visayas Avenue, Quezon City.
NBN 4 invited the heads of the Animation Council of the Philippines (ACPI), Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP), Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines (HIMOAP), and Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA), together with the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (B/PAP) to discuss current trends, job opportunities, and future demands in the non-voice segment of the IT-BPO industry.
The representatives from each of these groups were Weng Bagadion (ACPI), Ranulf Goss (GDAP), JL Botor (HIMOAP), Calen Legaspi (PSIA), and Martin Crisostomo (B/PAP).
The media guesting was an active effort to promote and highlight the non-voice sector, which claims the need for more supply of this higher-valued workforce that includes software engineers, game developers, animators, analysts, as well as Sales and Marketing officers to fill the available jobs here and abroad. High-value workforce means expertise in niche areas, hence the relatively higher income amongst individuals working for this sector.
The less familiar but nonetheless lucrative non-voice sector of the Philippine offshoring and outsourcing makes about 30% of the entire industry, the rest being the contact center sector. The non-voice includes the fields of medical and legal transcription, software development, game development, animation, research, and other industry specific services.
The entire Philippine IT-BPO industry has been a powerful job-generating segment for the Philippine economy in the last decade gathering about US$ 7.225 billion in export revenues and expecting to reach US$ 12 Billion by 2011. The Philippine IT outsourcing segment alone projects a contribution of US$1 Billion.
October Events at Exist
Several events happening this October:
Philippine ICT Seminar at the Kyoto Open Innovation Symposium, Oct 12-13
Willex Perez, Business Development for APAC at Exist, will be presenting about Open Innovation together with Morphlabs KK President Konno-san at the Philippine ICT Seminar to be held at Kyoto, during the Kyoto Open Innovation Symposium.
What drives innovation within an organization? We think that Open Source plays a big role in the enablement of innovation, more than the given benefits of rapid time to market and cost savings. At the talk, Willex will share how Exist Global, pioneer and industry leader in Open Source from the Philippines, has delivered innovation for its global customers using Open Source.
One other innovation enabler to be discussed, this time by Konno-san, is the subject of cloud computing. Many of us have heard about cloud computing. In fact (speaking locally), 71% of the survey respondents from ComputerWorld Philippines’ CIO Forum on Cloud Computing last July noted a plan to implement a cloud computing solution within 12 months. Defined by Gartner as “a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to external customers using Internet technologies” — cloud computing promises savings, and delivers speed. Beyond the hype, early adopters are realizing not just cost optimization, but capacity and capability gains with cloud-based services.
Watch out for the presentation materials in the Exist Global Slideshare.
PROCON and Asian Global Sourcing Conference at Sheraton Park Hotel, Anaheim, Oct. 14
Organized by the Asian Business Association of Orange County, the Asian Global Sourcing Conference and Procurement Opportunities Conferences features business matching opportunities, seminars, and an exhibit with theme on Growth Strategies in the local and global economy.
The conference is designed to assist all small business owners who want to get contracts with large corporations and government agencies.
Exist is participating also in this event. Thanks to PSIA for the point to this event.
Aboitiz Tech Forum, Davao, Oct 21-22
The Tech Forum is an annual event specifically targeted to the IT community of the Aboitiz group of companies and is being sponsored by the group IT Committee headed by Hoton Elicano.
The Tech Forum aims to be a venue for sharing of best practices, learning from each other in a confidential environment and setting of directions and normally covers current IT issues, evolving global trends and evolving global issues.
Exist was invited to present on the topic of Open Source; Mike Lim, VP of Engineering, will fly to Davao with Donna Alix, Business Development for Oceania, for this event.
Watch out for the presentations in our Slideshare account and a press announcement.
Interop NYC, Oct 18-22
Exist, together with the Morphlabs and MaestroDev teams, joins Interop at NYC this year. As system integrator for Morphlabs, we’ve been successful in the pushing of its adoption locally. I definitely look forward to seeing these projects in production.
MaestroDev, our software automation partner, will be showcasing its latest product at the said event. Find out more info at their site. Morphlabs also has a lot in store for cloud platform adopters. Check out the Morphlabs site for more info.
There are just the enterprise events … there are a number of community-driven events too. I’ll have my colleagues post info about these events soon.
Factors Affecting Growth of IT Outsourcing in the Philippines
Yesterday, we had visitors from Impact Press, the authorized representative of the New York Times for the production of specialized international and country branding reports. I met Matthew Harris and Anna Dabrowska — who were on a mission to discover what and how private companies in the Philippines are doing/are helping in the development of ICT industry.
We had a very insightful discussion on IT outsourcing in the Philippines. For this post, I specifically wanted to touch on factors affecting the growth of IT outsourcing, mentioned by Exist CEO Jerry Rapes. He cited 3 elements:
1) Capital Investment - The Philippines ICT sector doesn’t receive adequate capital investment. This may be a result of the misconception that the Philippines is purely a BPO player.
In a post by BusinessWorld Online Editor Maricel Estavillo, she tells that: In the early 90s, venture capitalists (VCs) from the US and Asia were aplenty in this country, all scrambling for a chance in Philippine start-ups. Later that decade, however, most left one after another for India and China whose potentials had begun to pique investors’ interest.
The Philippines, said Martin T. Lichauco, managing partner of venture capital firm G2VC, is seeing significant progress lately in the area of technology development. He notes that G2VC, a venture capital firm that seeks to identify and invest in disruptive technology start-ups, has recently seen a lot of business plans from companies that have less than 10 people only or the so-called garage IT shops.
G2VC agrees that a coordinated effort between the public and private sector is important to get ICT development going. “With local venture capital community leveraging on its experience both here and abroad, we stand to accelerate the development of these commercially viable technologies,” says Martin. “By co-developing a platform that would employ best practices in taking these companies to the global arena, then the chances of the Philippine tech start-ups making it big would be much much higher.”
2) Higher Education - Jerry noted that there are more people with master degrees and PhDs in India than in the Philippines. He shared the story of Winston, Exist Founder and former employee at Intel Capital turned technopreneur, who in a patriotic move, went back to the Philippines to not just establish his own start-up, but help Filipinos make their way into the global technology centerstage.
Getting good education is understandably difficult for many Filipinos due to cost constraints. However, efforts such as the Developers Connect (DevCon) and barcamps have (to a certain extent) helped enable knowledge sharing (knowledge transfer) to the masses.
With Winston’s leadership, we actually opened two Innovation Centers in the Philippines: Manila and Cebu to provide a venue for Filipino ingenuity to flow freely through interactive meet-ups. Both facilities have been used almost weekly by local IT groups for countless tech-driven events.
Exist helps to build up the Philippines as a vital hub for innovation through various academe and grassroots engagements, and through industry linkages with the PSIA, Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Cebu Education Development Foundation for Information Technology and other industry associations.
3) Scale - Philippines software companies aren’t that big, except for a couple like Accenture. We just can’t scale up similar to how India does it. If we are able to scale, then we’d get bigger enterprises to work with us. Bigger customers = higher revenues = a better Philippines.
Maybe the main reason we can’t scale is because there aren’t enough incentives for the younger folks — we’re doing a lousy job marketing what IT (IT enablement) can do for them and for the country. The reason we can’t scale is that we’d always give up at once “the road less taken” for the easier, initially higher paying jobs.
What do you have to say?
Octoberfest! Offshore Application Development back with a Vengeance
Start of Q3, we talked about a 100% growth in revenue — this past quarter proved that offshore application development is back with a vengeance. We’re excited to hit our targets!
Yes, that’s right. In the Philippines, there’s been a big clamor for technology consulting and engineering services in the Finance sector. I think this clamor is related to the need to serve customers better — the need to innovate and create new products / services to better serve customers because of accelerating hyperdigitization and consumerization.
Gartner, in its recent report, “The Future of IT Services” mentions: Consumer behaviors will have the power to reshape how enterprise IT works; they bring new and varied expectations for IT, which, at an enterprise IT level, must be recognized and developed. Further, growing consumer buying power and use of IT (and information access to the buyer) will force vertical sectors to adopt new technologies and create new products that better match
consumer needs.Interesting also that we’re beginning to realize deals from the US again. The leads aren’t what I would call in abundance; I’ve got a feeling that the other Phil software development companies don’t have THAT many either. The Indian competition in IT outsourcing is still tough to compete with — add to that the illusion that the Philippines is just a BPO provider.
But … the playing field seems to be changing. Philippine software industry is getting better at marketing, selling, and delivering on projects. PSIA is making great efforts in building connections, bridging the gap between the private industry and the academe, creating a brand for the Philippines in the field of software engineering. Personally, I feel that there should be more sharing / open forum on business processes (marketing!) just so we can help each other commit less mistakes.
There’s still a lot of WORK to be done. I’d say we’ve just started to kick off things. We can’t relax, but we’re definitely open to celebrating Octoberfest!
Blog Mo, Karerin Mo
Wanted to share this event for those interested in making money out of blogging. One of our young leaders in Exist — Joanna Taguinod, who heads the Infrastructure team, belongs to the organizing team. And yes, Exist is sponsoring the said event.
For those interested to join, find more info here: http://karerinmo.blogspot.com.
Future of Application Development Outsourcing and the Exist + G2iX Story
One of the key stories of 2009 was service provider consolidation – especially in the form of large technology-based companies seeking to buy market share of wider services-based business (e.g.,Dell buying Perot Systems and Xerox buying ACS). - Global Sourcing Trends In 2010, Morrison & Foerster LLP.
This is the same story for us. In 2009, G2iX or Global Gateway Innovation Exchange was created in a defensive move to ensure that Exist, Morphlabs, and MaestroDev survive the recession. We didn’t know how long the global financial crisis would last so we had to consolidate and conserve resources.
It’s noted in the same report from Morrison & Foerster that service providers believed that the model of having an integrated technology and services company will give an advantage in the outsourcing marketplace because the outsourcing arm could take advantage of the vast relationships that the technology company has created.
On our end, Exist — G2iX’s software engineering services arm — had the stronger history vs that of the emerging so-called sister companies Morphlabs, a cloud computing platform provider, and MaestroDev, a software automation technology and services provider. Integrated under G2iX, our business development team was able to go to market with a bigger cache.
Exist had to its advantage value-added capabilities in cloud enablement. We also saw (and still see) a lot of customized sourcing opportunities when dealing with large enterprises that’re interested at first with the cloud. Morphlabs as a technology partner of Exist was able to achieve rapid time to market, given Exist’s capability in delivering rapidly on projects. Morphlabs and MaestroDev shared Exist’s strong track record — at the end making all three companies weather the crisis.
We were able to achieve our goals. However, not really all of it.
With the consolidation, we lost brand focus. We also had a complex structure that didn’t appeal as attractive to investors. And so as we operate post-recession, we had to make another move — a sort of counter attack to what had been in place for the last 12 or so months. This move puts the emphasis and focus now on the individual portfolio brands, instead of G2iX.
Now, the value-creation efforts are now more focused.
What will happen now to G2iX? It will simply remain as the incubation platform for new companies.
I hope that puts into perspective what had happened to us and I hope it clears the air of confusion. We had the same discussion internally in our recent business update meeting and we’d like for our customers, partners, potential customers and others to understand how the crisis had affected us, how we overcame it, and how we are moving from now on.
Since I work at Exist — naturally, I’ll talk more about what’s going to be happening and where we’re headed. And you know, I think this is where the prediction on the market for smaller outsourcing contracts will have made its mark.
It’s said that: for some time now, the average size of outsourcing projects has been falling as multi‑billion dollar mega-deals fell out of favor; companies broke up deals into components and selected providers based on niche skills. This trend is continuing and presents an opportunity for smaller providers who are able to compete effectively for contracts that fall below the level at which larger providers are able to compete effectively.
Definitely, we’re not as big as Accenture, and definitely there are smaller players compared to us. However, I’m relating a lot to this prediction as we move forward with our existing deals in:
Enterprise Application Development. We are still working on enterprise deals and we’ve actually seen a resurrection of financial sourcing requirements with one of our long-standing clients National Payment Network. I also read in the same report that there’ll be increased activity in 2010 in the hospitality and healthcare — this is very notable in our ongoing partnership with one of the prominent healthcare providers in the Philippines. So, those 2 verticals Finance and Healthcare are 2 interesting niche markets for us and something we’ve had already established our success with.
Interactive Solutions. We’ve expanded our market to cater to web and mobile app development, which includes the flavors of social networking applications, iPhone and iPad app development. We know that consumerization is on the rise and global brands are taking advantage of these social tools to get their brands closer to their consumers.
Technology Solutions. We continue to work with strategic partners such as Morphlabs and other technology start-ups in building disruptive solutions. In the past, we’ve worked also with established product vendors but as I read, cost optimization efforts will drive these companies to carry out development in-house rather than outsource.
Cloud Computing. Cloud computing has a disruptive potential to create powerful new value propositions. Many of us have heard about it and we believe that beyond the hype, that there is real value in it. That’s why we serve today as a system integrator for Morphlabs in the APAC + Australiasia regions. And as their partner, we offer cloud enablement on top of our technology consulting and custom engineering services.
In a related news, KPMG and the Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry have forecast that Asia will account for 26.3% of the total consumption of IT and BPO services in the next 10 years.
I’m positive that the Philippines will get a significant chunk of this pie, even if Morrison & Foerster believes that the Philippines is just purely a BPO player.
The complete report by Morrison & Foerster may be downloaded here.
