Skill me up

South Africa has always been a software development outsource destination. From the developers currently hard at work for Amazon.com in Cape Town, to the now defunct Software Futures, which had offices in London at one point it was so busy, the local market has always participated globally to some extent.

It's been suggested that SA should compete for global software development work in the same way government wants to become a BPO&O destination. Should we, and, perhaps more importantly, could we?

Certainly it's a lucrative market. According to the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering: “Estimates put the size of the global software market at about $210 billion, with a growth rate of over 5%. The South African software industry has an insignificant share of this lucrative and strategic market. The Department of Trade and Industry estimates that software exports are about R500 million per annum.”

The JCSE, in conjunction with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), and an initiative called Savant*, which most industry commentators thought long dead, aims to promote SA as a software development destination, taking SMEs to Cebit and putting a strategy for the country's presence at Cebit in place.

None of the local players ITWeb spoke to had heard of the initiative, which speaks at the very least of the usual disconnect between government, academia and the sector itself.

Skills and the fact that SA's capability is a well-guarded secret are the two factors counting against it in the global market. And skills tends to be the first problem most people put forward when considering SA's future as a software development hub.

Says Microsoft SA developer platform evangelist David Ives: “We talk about the three Is of technology in SA: innovation, incubation and investment. What the industry needs to do is innovate, and build interesting applications. It needs enough capital and support in terms of facilities, software tools and the right kind of environment. Then, industry and government need to allow software companies and developers the space to go and do their thing.

“To do this, we need more job-ready graduates,” he asserts. “We need to attract more people to the IT industry, and we need more skilled educators to give them the foundation they need. Mostly, though, to build a thriving software ecosystem, we need far more professional developers, who need to start thinking totally differently about how they build in this environment. The industry needs to start building enough skills to deal with this new world of technology.”

Andrew Holden, MD of Bytes Outsource Services, concurs: “Competing countries in this market, such as India, have the resource pool and have tertiary education, particularly in the sciences, while in SA, we still need to prioritise these fields of learning in order to produce software engineers that can compete at the same levels.”

Not everyone believes we have a skills problem, however.

“South Africa has the requisite level of technical skills - both retained and returned because of the global economic crisis,” states Steve Lauter, new business development head at The IQ Business Group's software and technology business unit. “In countries where the skills base is far larger than ours, the skills tend to be extremely specialised. We have generalists, highly skilled individuals who can turn their hand to almost anything. This is one of the reasons why South African developers have been in such high demand overseas. Having generalists on a development team brings down the total cost of that team because you need fewer people to achieve the same result.”

Software exports are about R500 million per annum.

JCSE

Rob Katz, executive chairman of software development house Global Vision, agrees. “I believe we've built some incredible skills, even though we've lost a lot to the US, UK and Australia. I believe we still have very good skills, certainly out of the Cape and Gauteng, that align themselves possibly better than an India [to global clients] because South Africans tend to have a better cultural fit to Europe and the US, and our leadership style is closer to that of the US too.”

These are many of the same reasons SA is cited as a good BPO&O destination, along with the exchange rate, time zone and language commonalities. In common with the BPO&O initiatives, SA's moves into the market appear to be fragmented and not driven by a united industry sector. Maybe that's what needs to be fixed first.

* Savant, which you will be forgiven for having forgotten, is the DTI's South African Vanguard of Technology programme. It was a PPP, but is now an activity within one of the DTI units. It mainly consists of an industry portal and Web directory.