This year’s HCMC ICT Contest is themed ‘Journey to a Smart City’ and was launched in August 2019. Until October 31, 2019, it received 65 papers, which were carefully evaluated in November for the awards ceremony to be held in December 2019. Many of these papers are from state organizations and in the fields of digital transformation, Internet of Things, smart operation, and practical applications for citizens.
According to Deputy Director Le Quoc Cuong, among the 16 submitted papers of 12 enterprises in the first category of ‘Business with Outstanding Software Product’, the contest prioritizes domestic research results, those in the list of the key product program, and ideas to directly contribute to smart city establishment or solutions to the city’s current issues. Certain prominent candidates are the document administration system Doceye, the school management software, the integrated library management software Lac Viet Vebrary, and the integrated platform to handle data FPT.Fortuna.
He also commented that because of their excellency, the 6 submitted papers in the second group of ‘Business with Outstanding Hardware Product’ required the judge board to work extremely hard to deliver the final result after many on-site evaluations at applied organizations.
The year 2019 is remarkable in that the four pillars of the project ‘Transforming HCMC into a Smart City from 2017 – 2020, with a Vision to 2025’, namely a common database and an open database ecosystem, an operating center for a smart city, a simulation center to forecast local socio-economic strategies, and an information security center, have been officially launched to serve the operation and management tasks of the municipal authorities. Next year, these pillars will be closely connected to the city’s residents.
When expressing his opinion on the practical and wide use of winning products in real life, especially their positive effects on the above project, the Deputy Director said that these winners will no doubt actively contribute to finishing all goals of the project and cited the 7 papers in the fourth category of ‘Organization with Outstanding ICT Application’. All submitted solutions in this group showed a full implementation of IT in management and operation missions in order to save cost and improve performance, to better serve citizens and make precise decisions. Typical candidates are the HCMC Department of Transport, the HCMC Department of Health, and the People’s Committee of District 12.
Answering the question about whether the result of the third category – ‘Enterprise with Outstanding Value-added Services’ – will show significant breakthroughs or not since this aspect is the all-time strength of HCMC, Mr. Cuong shared that winners of this group must satisfy the demand of constructing a smart city, such as e-commerce, content provision service based on telecommunications platforms, IT infrastructure service based on cloud computing, digital signature service, data storage-exploitation-process service, IT system consultation and installation service, intelligence property and brand name protection service. He added that obviously all submitted papers of this category this year meet the requirements.
The 11th ICT Contest of HCMC in 2019 also honors organizations and individuals that have outstanding achievements to contribute to the ICT development of HCMC (the fifth category). In general, this year’s candidates have worked in the IT field for a long time, and thus having significant impacts on the growth of IT here, thanks to their own capable human resources, cutting edge technologies, and immense prestige within the IT community. As a result, many of their products and solutions have become the foundation for a series of applications to aid the smart city transformation process.
The last category of the ICT Contest is ‘ICT Student with Excellent Results in Studying and Researching’. This group received 17 papers of 6 educational institutes. Among the candidates are learners from vocational schools who already won respected international awards.
