A CLUSTER for information and communications technologies (ICT) in Bulgaria was officially launched on March 28.
The cluster was established in December 2004 by 13 non-government organisations in the sector, said Tanya Veleva, executive director of the ICT Cluster. Among them are the Telecommunications Association, the Bulgarian Association of Software Companies, the Bulgarian Association of Information Technologies, the Bulgarian International Business Association, MSI Bulgaria foundation and Business Park Sofia.
The cluster will aim to create an environment for rapid development of the IT industry in Bulgaria, because the sector is a catalyst of economic growth, the organisers say.
The first official project is the preparation of a manual for building e-centres and business parks with modern telecommunications infrastructure as public-private partnerships in different regions in the country.
The Bulgarian ICT Cluster is a foundation, not an association, said Sasha Bezuhanova, chairperson of the ICT cluster and director of Hewlett-Packard Bulgaria. She said that Bulgaria has the potential to set up between eight and 10 business parks which, together with call centres, could create between 80 000 and 90 000 jobs.
Bulgaria's software industry is flourishing and this country will gain from this upsurge, companies in the sector say. Currently more than 80 per cent of the industry in Bulgaria is export orientated. The expectation is that exports will increase by 30 per cent each year in the next few years.
Bulgaria is very good at developing overall business solutions - customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning, financing systems, and "intelligent" websites. There are companies in this country offering products for modelling of engineering systems and organisation of the business processes in companies and therefore the Bulgarian software industry has its place on the global market.