First outsourcing portal of the country launched

Launched on December 30th, the website's initiative is to utilise Bangladesh's reservoir of low-cost IT skilled manpower towards outsourcing efforts.

"These people are sincere, active, and hold in-depth knowledge on programming, multimedia, web-development and even hardware," said Sayeed Rahman, founder of BanglaIT.

Fifteen companies have already enlisted under the banner of OSBD within a day of the launching of the site.

Once properly outsourced, the skilled hands of Bangladesh are expected to pull in a significant amount of foreign currency boosting the national economy.

"We are already spending USD 400,000 in the state of California towards the growth of the export-dimensions of Bangladesh's IT sector. But the question is, how much of this money will come back to us?" poses Rahman.

The outlook of the OSBD portal is expected to catch the attention of a diversified IT community from all over the world. With quick links to several public-sector websites of the country, including Bangladesh Government, Export Promotion Bureau, Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation and Bangladesh Computer Council, founders of the site anticipate a large-scale response from international firms.

Personal promotional attempts from the founder and members of the advising panel of BanglaIT, most of who are working at prestigious companies in industrialised countries, will work to coordinate pulling in international companies looking for off-shoring opportunities from Bangladesh.

"We are also working on listing OSBD in popular search engines so that relevant keywords will pull it up in search results," said Bangladesh coordinator, Mohammad Atikur Rahman at the launch.

Local companies have been attempting to outsource IT work for quite some time. But the earnings figures are quite negligible compared to several other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

"These companies have little opportunity to promote their IT products, even if these products are of standard quality," said Rahman, who hopes that OSBD will work as a medium between coders and the buyers.

Rahman plans to conduct initial evaluations of local companies interested in outsourcing. According to Rahman, keeping the image of any outsourcing company intact is as important as offering top quality work. At present the Bangladesh government is pulling in changes in its ICT expansion policy to promote any growth in the sector, in view of creating an IT-driven nation by the end of the year 2010.

The Bangla ICT website launch ceremony was held at International Computer Connections at BSRS Bhavan. A list of advisors is available at the web-location www.banglait.com. At present, OSBD does not charge a fee for their services.