The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is partnering with a multinational software company in order to create applications for the government using open source technology.
As reported, the partnership with Red Hat, Inc., which started this year, aims to create an ecosystem to support developers and the Department’s goal to help them benefit from open source technology.
Open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. As such, open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.
The goal is to develop a community of independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers within the Philippines that can leverage on open source innovations.
The company will be creating new innovations that are readily available for the Philippine government.
One such platform, which the company will be providing the government for free is a management tool used for virtual and private cloud infrastructure.
This allows the developers to easily build, develop and run application in private or public infrastructure regardless of the application architecture.
This will benefit the government as this will help developers create applications that can be tested by different agencies across the government, making integration of innovation into the system much easier.
It is a win-win situation since the community will have a place where they can access world-class leading technologies.
They will also have the ability to create applications that are meaningful for government agencies that are good for the Philippine constituents.
The Officer-in-Charge at the Department’s Government Digital Transformation Bureau described this initiative as a big help in developing applications for public service.
There is a need for the people in the government and even those from the private sector, who are providing their assistance to the government agencies, to be able to develop applications easily in a cloud environment.
This initiative of having an open source environment is very much welcomed since it allows developers to develop applications for government agencies easily.
Moreover, the platform will be made available freely to registered software houses for those who are interested in developing applications for government agencies.
These applications may be for the administrative or internal rules of government, particularly those applications which would help them deliver their services to the public.
The company is a provider of open source solutions and provides services like operating systems, virtualisation, middleware, storage and cloud computing.
It has been serving its Philippine customers for more than a decade and with the launch of its Philippine office, it will be able to provide a more stable service to the local market.