Monday November 24, 2008
MDeC grooming 15 open-source champions
PUTRAJAYA: The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) hopes to turn 15 open-source companies into international players within the next two years.
Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, MDeC chief executive officer, said: “MDeC will be mentoring these companies with a view of creating national champions.
“We will giving these companies international market access via our partnership with network systems giant Sun Microsystems.”
He was speaking at the announcement of MDeC’s collaboration with Sun Microsystems, which seeks to give the independent software vendor (ISV) community access to the resources to build open-source solutions on Sun technologies.
“We need to enhance the capabilities of these companies. They were chosen based on their commitment to developing open-source programs,” Badlisham said.
These 15 companies were picked from a total of 1,900 within the MSC Malaysia, of which 46 are open-source players. MDeC is caretaker of the MSC Malaysia initiative.
Badlisham declined to name the companies or detail their specific businesses but said that he hoped each would be able to generate an annual revenue of at least RM150mil by the end of the two-year period.
According to MDeC, MSC Malaysia recorded a revenue of RM13bil in early 2007.
“A good 2.42% of that (amounting to RM134mil) is in the open-source segment and this is growing. “We definitely can do better in this area,” Badlisham said.
“In this present global downturn, open-source software can offer the best value for money for its users.
“And with more mature products available, enterprises will be free to innovate, despite having smaller budgets (for software).”
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