Over the past 30 years, Taiwan has accumulated nearly a thousand commercial software companies (ISVs). Despite their years of product experience and customer base, Taiwanese ISVs must focus on specific industries or niche markets to maintain their competitiveness due to the relatively small size of the Taiwanese market.
Another challenge is that Taiwanese ISVs often compete with global companies in terms of scale and resources. Taiwanese ISVs are typically smaller and have limited resources, making it difficult for them to compete with global companies in research and development, and to grow into large commercial software teams.
With the rise of a new wave of global digital development, generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology will accelerate the creation speed and service architecture of software across various industries. Software vendors can not only leverage their accumulated software development capabilities to add intelligent innovation to existing industry applications, but also use AI to address opportunities for innovative upgrades to outdated software architectures or rapid code rewriting. Furthermore, they can integrate AI technology and value-added applications into their existing software services to create more competitive software service products, enhance the international competitiveness of the IT industry in the face of global digital development, and even have the opportunity to become unicorns in the commercial software sector.
In addition to continuous innovation and value-added services, the software industry's rich experience in industrial applications can be combined with the government's digital development strategy. With its reliable cloud platform computing, data storage, and AI technology research and development capabilities, it can provide highly internationalized digital application services, such as enterprise ESG, healthcare, and general GAI. Through the co-creation mechanism of industry, government, academia, and research, the risks and pressures of internationalization for software companies can be reduced, and the cooperation of the software industry ecosystem can be promoted, thereby accelerating the internationalization of Taiwan's commercial software industry.
With the widespread adoption of cloud services and the economic development of Southeast Asia, Taiwanese ISVs are poised for significant market opportunities. Southeast Asian countries are experiencing rapid growth, leading to a demand for commercial software from local businesses. Taiwan, with its world-renowned IT capabilities, naturally becomes a viable alternative to products from the US and China. Furthermore, the implementation and service costs of commercial software have historically been high. Transforming commercial software into SaaS cloud services can simultaneously meet customer expectations and resolve service cost issues.
The Software Association has been established for 40 years, and its members are mostly commercial software companies of the above types. This year, it established the Cloud Service Promotion Association, hoping to integrate Taiwan's commercial software product resources and global sales channels for IT products. In turn, it will use generative AI technology to accelerate the transformation of ISVs into SaaS. With the encouragement of government policies, it will work together to realize the ideal of software going to the cloud and going global, and create a digital black wave of software!
Source: Financial News Issue 695