ISDS looking for foreign partners

BRUNEIAN IT company ISDS is currently in the process of shortlisting foreign partners to embark on new projects with in the future.

Indah Sejahtera Development and Services (ISDS) Sdn Bhd, after its participation in the recent CommunicAsia 2012, Singapore, where it launched the latest version of Joombah Jobs, an extension of Joomla, a job-board application, has made contact with "a lot of international companies" that are interested in working together.

Christopher Ng Kok Keong, marketing manager and business development executive of the company, told The Brunei Times that via CommunicAsia, ISDS met with a number of potential partners to do business with in the near future.

"Many have approached us and we are always looking for overseas partners in the event that there are any projects that we can work together on. So now we are in the process of analysing and shortlisting a few (companies)," he said.

Ng explained that ISDS is looking for partners from various countries such as the United States, India, China, Singapore and Malaysia.

"After choosing a partner, we will then start to liaise with them," he added.

Currently, ISDS is already in the process of working with other international partners on a number of projects which are in the Expression of Interest (EOI) stage.

"We are looking at data centres, e-government and so on with these on-going projects," he revealed.

Although none of the projects have been awarded yet, ISDS is already looking toward the future and planning other ways they can collaborate with international partners.

In the domestic scene, ISDS is also actively seeking opportunities and has submitted three different entries to this year's Brunei ICT Award (BICTA), two systems under ISDS and another from its sister company.

"In BICTA 2011, where2kerja was placed third, and we are submitting a new where2kerja applicant tracker called CATS, and a separate system called MySchool," Ng said.

ISDS' where2kerja is a system that simplifies the hiring process for professionals by allowing employers to browse through tens of thousands of resumes stored in the database in a structured manner. Ng said that the new feature for where2kerja is called the Computerised Applicant Tracking Systems (CATS), which has a "resume passing technology".

"This is to reduce the load of a company's human resource team. With CATS, the application process will be streamlined and hence, reduce the cost of administration," he said.

The manager gave an example, saying that if he were a job applicant, his resume, in a pdf or document format, will be uploaded into the system and the resume will be automatically be converted into a candidate for hire.

The other system, MySchool, is a complete student information system which is deployed in the cloud, so any schools can leverage on the service to retrieve a student's particulars.

System Analyst at ISDS, Muthu Krishnan, gave an example that if the service is used, the school can maintain a student's full records complete with the tracking of his or her SPN21 (21st Century National Education System) module.

"With this, there is no need to invest more in hard drives or servers, and if it is successfully implemented then after some time, there will be complete statistics of students' strength or staffs strength that can be monitored by authorities," said Krishnan. He believes that the authorities can come up with a ranking system, as they will be able to determine which schools are best in the country and why.The Brunei Times