Bangladesh emerging as a new IT hub in South Asia
IT companies in Bangladesh started exporting software around two decades ago, joining the business process outsourcing (BPO) bandwagon in the 1990s. Since then, many of them have diversified into exporting computer programs, according to Syed Almas Kabir, the president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS).
Kabir’s organization, BASIS, started with 17 companies in 1997. Now, the association has over 1,170 members and several have begun exporting their services globally.
Data Soft, for example, began its journey in 1998. Its Managing Director Mahboob Zaman told DW, “It was 1996 and the world was anxious about Y2K, which could cause a problem for computer systems in 2000. At the time, Indian tech companies announced that they had found the solutions for the problem. We thought if India could do such a lot of things, why couldn’t we?”