Firoze M Zahidur Rahman, Guest Writer
DHAKA: When I started the business, most common refusal was – do you have a reference? How many people/organizations use your software? Who are your customers?
I just started the business, how can I have references? Competitions were too large compared to us. The only way we could penetrate the customers were – pick up the newer sectors, innovation grounds, pilot/concept tests where they were willing to explore opportunities at a lower cost but with an agile team.
We got couple of breakthrough and the situation became unbearable as soon as we started to expand. We don’t have enough capable resources to meet the demanding customers. Struggle started to build right away from understanding the requirement to delivery and support.
At every point we were struggling to scale up. We had few star performers who were highly overloaded. Remaining all others were more of a burden to the team. We understood – this is not the sector where we can win in the long run.
Our competitors have more than hundred thousands of human resources in their team across the globe. It is not possible for us to compete – the quicker we grow the quicker we go out of business. As a whole we have huge shortage of ICT human resources – be it programmer, designer, manager, architect – as a whole everything.
If we look at the local market we have a huge captive demand of solution for our many day to day problem. Technology – specially software can play a vital role in solving them. Side by side we also have a good prospect in international market both for our products/services and providing labor/BPO services.
Bangladesh has 130million mobile connections with 50 million internet connected devices. Our local captive market for software solutions is also very big. If we look at our local ICT infrastructure – communication infrastructure through mobile operators is present nationwide.
Government and other bodies have started to build their own infrastructure to become more efficient and people oriented. In this context – we are in a situation where we don’t have many ICT experts/resources, we have very strong demand in the local market which is already close to beyond the capacity of the local resources and we have a demand to supply cheap ICT labor in the international market. What do we do?
If we start serving the international market with a value proposition of cheap labor, we engage our limited resources in an ever declining market. This will also open up the local market to external players for local ICT solution demand and we will lose our local market opportunities to international vendors.
We will happily start purchasing international solutions and start spending the hard earned foreign currency in return of very low volume foreign currency income from ICT BPO. In fact we will probably build the solution as a labor for the international solution providers who eventually will sell those solutions at a higher price to our local market only.
Where are we heading to? Are we putting all our best resources as the slaves of the international players at USD 8/hour to USD 25/hour with a risk of losing the contract any time with a notice of 3 month.
The bigger we grow the bigger the risk of bankruptcy becomes. The situation becomes even worse, when we open up our local market to outsiders. Local problems have to be addressed locally.
If something runs excellent in USA, essentially it will not be running well in Bangladesh. We have our own set of challenges that needs special attention. It’s going to be a fresh learning for all. It is worth giving chance to local people.
We add value in every way – we spend less foreign currency – the value remains within the country. Our resources become our true assets. They are better utilized. Now it is our choice which direction are we going to walk. Yes, its never going to be a hundred meter sprint, it will be a walk that will have to take us far - to a direction that we set now.
Shall we be going for local value addition through the local resources or become cheap labor nation to serve external interest? Our neighbor India had to decide this during last economic recession as well and eventually policy makers decided to increase the local value additions through local companies.
While we realize this situation, the international players (beneficiary of the business) realize and know that too. None is doubting about anyone’s personal aspiration or professional caliber to serve towards building the nation. But we have to decide whether we let Google, Facebook or Microsoft to decide our fortune or we drive it on our own through a healthy ecosystem which definitely include them as well but up to the extent that helps mutual growth.
After 12 years doing software business in Bangladesh and serving the local market primarily with a team of 300 member - I can only say - if we rely on what we have and learn from the globe, apply it to local context we will be successful.
During my graduation in BUET one of my teachers said in his Mechatronics lecture - in many discipline we can be 30/40 years behind, but in Mechatronics we are quite up to date. Taking a short pause he said - the discipline is fairly new, we cannot be that behind. So if we work hard we can be leading the sector.
Next year after we passed out we saw one of the team from BUET became one of the top 3 teams in RoboCon International Contest. We just need the vision and right support - success will come - can be slowly but surely.
BDST: 1547 HRS, JUN 19, 2016
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