Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services or BASIS will organise the country’s biggest software and information technology exposition on February 1-4, after a lull of four years.
One of the objectives of this year’s BASIS SoftExpo is to boost the use of local software, especially in government procurement, the organiser said.There is no official estimate on the market size of software in Bangladesh, but industry people believe the figure will not be less than Tk 16,000 crore a year.
Through the exposition the local software developers want to grab a portion of the amount, BASIS said.
Seminars on IT and IT-enabled services will be held on the sidelines of the show at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in Dhaka.
“This year the exhibition will be bigger and better than ever,” said Mustafa Jabbar, president of BASIS. “We are targeting the local market though a good number of foreign buyers will participate in the exposition,” he said.
In the last few years the local software developers did a tremendous job and almost grabbed the market for banking software, Jabbar said, adding that their target is the public sector now.BASIS said the fair is expected to see more than 180 exhibitors and five lakh visitors, including high officials from different ministries, delegates from foreign organisations and representatives of the ICT sector.
The exhibition area will be divided into four zones for business software, ITES and business process outsourcing, mobile innovation, and e-commerce.Matchmaking sessions will be arranged for local and foreign businesses to explore opportunities for business expansion.
This year’s one will be the 11th version of the show. BASIS could not organise the fair for the last four years as developers participated in Digital World, a government-sponsored mega exposition for presenting digitisation successes.
This year the software makers will participate in both the shows.
“Our target is very limited and we only expect the buyers and interested people,” Jabbar said. “That’s why we separated it from the Digital World.”
