2005/2006
2003/2004

2005/2006
2003/2004

2005/2006
2003/2004

ICT development jump started
By Yong Chee Tuan in Brunei, January 2005.

More than have a dozen e-government projects in Brunei have been awarded to successful bidders by January 2005.

The main portal project for the Ministry of Communications was awarded to a subsidiary of a local ISP in partnership with a Singapore company, Ecquaria. The solution will adopt a J2EE middleware platform with applications developed from SOAP objects.

Four other e-government projects were rolled out by several IT-savvy officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. These projects comprise the Data Centre, Portal, Kiosk Systems, and e-Zakat (fund collection system).

The Ministry of Education will import more than 1,700 units of Acer desktop PCs to be placed in all the schools.

The University of Brunei Darussalam was awarded two projects: e-Library and the Campus Resource Planning (CRP). The CRP project comes in two parts: the portal that will be developed using BEA Weblogic, and the web applications information systems.

The e-government initiatives were designed to jumpstart ICT development in Brunei. An increasing number of ICT vendors and consultant-services firms are now considering setting up offices in the country. The e-Government Road Show, organised in January 2005 by a local firm, brought together a consortium of Korean ICT vendors to showcase their solutions and capabilities.

At the same time the number of PC exhibitions and expos aimed at consumers has increased manifold. There were more than six major PC exhibitions held at various shopping malls and centres in 2004. Some of the PC retailers noted that sales of laptops have exceeded those of desktops. A preferred feature of laptops sold is the Intel Centrino chip set with built-in wireless (WiFi) connectivity running Microsoft Windows XP.

Mobile computing is on the rise as the number of ?hotspots? with WiFi access continue to increase. Many shopping areas are offering free WiFi access to patrons. The country is also expected to introduce a 3G telecommunications system offered by TelBru (a government ISP awaiting privatisation) in partnership with QAF (one of the largest private sector organisations in the country). The current sole mobile phone service provider, DST, is currently upgrading its GSM system to 2.5G. However, it may soon prove to be very difficult for both ISPs to provide competitive packages to users due to the small size of the country?s population and the limited scale of the market for such services.

The current upbeat pace of the ICT sector was not always the case. There was a long list of many e-government projects waiting to be tendered and processed since the Prime Minister Office?s e-government project (PMOnet) was awarded in December 2003. The bottleneck was an unusually long bidding process (sometimes exceeding a year: from submission of tender document to the announcement of the winner) that brought a lot of discomfort to ICT vendors. Some of the prospective bidders were close to packing up and leaving the country or going dormant. This has now all changed with the launching of these new projects.

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