Country with an agenda for software excellence is engaging with Cisco at every level

July 17, 2003

By Jason Deign, Cisco Systems

With an area of 329,565 square kilometres and a population of 82 million, Vietnam is hardly a giant by Asian standards. But that has not stopped the country from aspiring to be the regional leader in technology development, aided in large part by Cisco Systems.

Vietnam, like Indonesia, the Philippines and others, is currently one of Asia's emerging technology players, lagging behind both "growth countries" such as Malaysia or India and developed markets such as Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.

But it has already introduced a forward-thinking agenda for change, capitalising on the high growth rate of its population. Nearly half - 40 million - of the country's people are under 25 and both they and the government realise that education will be key to future prosperity.

As a result, says Bill Chang, Cisco regional managing director for South Asia, "people are hungry for knowledge - everybody is keen to upgrade themselves."

As a response, the Vietnamese government is seeking to emulate the success of its regional neighbour, India, in the field of software development and for the last year and a half, technology parks have been growing alongside the country's many manufacturing centres.

The government's aim of a software park in every city might seem a bit ambitious in a country with almost no residential telecommunications network and where a phone call can cost $2 a minute. Until, that is, you consider that the going rate for a network engineer is just $200 a month - and there is no shortage of young people eager and able to learn.

Cisco has for some time been playing a key role in Vietnam's plans to become an Asian software force. The company set up an office in Ha Nti, the capital and administrative centre, in 1999 and now has a second base in Ht Chi Minh, the country's more entrepreneurial second city.

In this time, Cisco has seen its business grow tremendously. It has helped promote technology development both in government and the enterprises, acting as a major supplier to the state-owned Vietnam Posts & Telecommunications Corporation (VNPT) and its subsidiaries.

It has also played an important part in the establishment of technology-related intellectual capital in Vietnam.

Cisco operates Networking Academies - training courses that teach students to design, build and maintain computer networks - at both of its Vietnam offices and in February widened its knowledge transfer activities with the establishment of a Systems Engineer (SE) Club.

The SE Club, targeted at technical employees of Cisco-certified systems integrators, distributors, resellers and retailers, posted a spectacular success in May by producing three Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIEs).

The CCIE is one of the highest certifications in the networking industry - attained by only 9,500 specialists in the world after a two-hour written test and an eight-hour hands-on lab exam. One of the three engineers even managed the rare feat of passing on his first attempt.

The expert skills of Vietnam's CCIEs - and 1,000-plus students to have emerged so far from the country's Cisco Networking Academy Programme - are being put to good use as the deployment of the country's telecommunications infrastructure ramps up.

Here, the Ministry of Post & Telematics is leading by example with an ambitious plan to introduce e-government services along similar lines to those available in Singapore.

Part of this pursuit of technology excellence has been the staging of high-profile knowledge transfer events such as the Vietnam Information Technology and Communication Forum 2003. Cisco is a Gold Sponsor of this show.

Apart from government-backed moves to promote network deployment, Vietnamese businesses - and foreign companies located in the country - are major consumers of new infrastructure.

Vietnam is, for example, the fastest-growing wireless local area network market in South East Asia, with hotels and businesses increasingly keen to provide Internet access hotspots to customers and employees.

Other big growth areas include optical networks, network security and IP core, edge, virtual private network and multi-protocol label switching technologies.

"Going forward, there is tremendous excitement," says Chang. "Vietnamese companies do not have legacy infrastructures, so they can leapfrog straight to the latest technologies. They are not using copper, but going straight to fibre or optical networks."

Jason Deign is a freelance writer based in Barcelona, Spain

Source: http://www.cisco.com