Industrial software boosts economic development

Regarded as China's No. 1 software exhibition, Int'l Soft China 2009 was held in Beijing on 11th June. In this exhibition, industrial software became the leading role, and their application cases and solutions in the industrial fields have been displayed as a focus. Mr Li Yizhong, Minister of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said they will make efforts to develop and promote the application of industrial Software and solutions in different industrial fields so as to support the enterprise in terms of the technical reforms and progress.

By carefully observing the scene of Int'l Soft China 2009, you may find something totally different from before. In each exhibitor's booth, the exhibitors spent less time delivering paper bags containing the materials, but more time answering the questions of the visitors.

This change indicated that visitors' knowledge in this aspect had been greatly improved from joining in the fun before to observing it in a very professional way currently. That just met the theme of this exhibition: Integration of industrialization and Informatization to promote the economy, software and service enhance the core competitiveness.

Get the Industrialization a Pair of New Running Shoes

Screw is a supporting role getting least attention in the industry, but one story told by Mr. Zhang Zhenqing, Vice President of Digital China Management Systems Limited was still kept in the listeners' mind. He said one big company has never found one of their screws had sufficient stocks for 70 years until they put their stock management software on use.

One small screw is enough to show the function of industrial software. If we say such common software as office software can push forward the industry in terms of efficiency improvement and cost reduction, thus the industrial software can really help the enterprises enhance the value-added of their products. Chen Chong, Chairman of China Software Industry Association described it vividly as get the industrialization a pair of new running shoes.

Industrial software, as its name implies, is the software designed for the industrial sector. It can generally be divided into two types: one is the embedded software; the other are a variety of Software specially used by the industrial sector including CAD, CAM , CAPP, CAP, product data management etc.

Mr. Zhou Hongren, Executive Deputy Director of National Informatization Consultative Committee said industrial software is a fusion agent to help the integration of informatization and industrialization. Without industrial software, it's impossible to create the advantages of informatization based on the advantages of the industrialization, and then no integration of industrialization and informatization at all.

"Pull and push" for the development

"Integration of industrialization and informatization actually means industrialization pulls and informatization drives. The vigorous demands of industrialization are the premise of healthy and consistent development of industrial Software." Wu Chengru, an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering said. The inner demand of Chinese industrial restructuring and upgrading, and technological reform is becoming the "pull" for the development of domestic industrial Software.

Besides, in the Planning on Adjusting and Revitalizing the Electronic Information Industry released not long before, there are a number of provisions relating to the industrial Software with special emphasis on that "application is used for establishing and pushing forward the industry", namely, the application of electronic information technology is used to promote the industrial development and upgrading.

In the competition with the foreign industrial software enterprises, Chinese enterprises have the advantage of "manpower cost-effective". Ni Guang, an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering calculated and said, "after comparing the R&D cost and working time of Huawei and Siemens R&D people, 'manpower cost-effective' of Huawei R&D people is 12 times of European counterpart. Pushed by the national policy, the domestic software is promising absolutely." Abundant labor resource is pushing forward the enhancement of software industry overall level and the rapid development of this industry. Until 2008, the people amount working in this industry have reached 1.8 million and each year the graduates of this major are more than 600 thousand.

Different skill shows in the exploration

In the Seminar for Revitalizing and Developing the Chinese Software Service Industry held recently, Gao Sumei, deputy director general of Operating, Monitoring and Coordinating Bureau under Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the top 100 enterprises which got the most income from the software business in 2009 have continuous improvement in their R&D level. The industrial software income has increased by 56.1 percent over the same period of last year, among which industrial automatic control software increased by 210 percent, CAD and CAM increased by 16.5 percent and enterprise management software increased 2.3 percent.

Due to the close connection between the industrial Software and applications, domestic industrial Software enterprises are becoming the main part of self-innovation. Take iron and steel industry as example, Shanghai Baosight Software and other domestic software enterprises have developed the industrial Software with independent intellectual property rights for different industrial fields. With the manufacturing and executive management system of the iron and steel enterprises as the core, the software broaden the measuring and testing functions in the horizontal orientation and perfect the applications of the domestic industrial Software.

As for the breakthrough direction of domestic industrial Software at the next step, firstly, the embedded software closely related to the industrial production has a huge market potential. According to the statistics, currently the market scale for the domestic embedded Software have exceeded RMB 100 billion yuan, possible to be RMB 465 billion yuan in 2011. Besides, during the product design process, domestic CAD software providers are catching up. An academician Ni Guangnan believed that CAD2009 of Guangzhou ZWCAD Software Co., Ltd and CAXA CAD2009 of Beijing CAXA Technology Co., Ltd are even better than the foreign software in some aspects.

In the fields of industrial control equipments and system Software representing the level of the manufacturing industry, the domestic automation system has served the enterprises in the flow industries such as iron and steel, metallurgy, chemical engineering, and the core technology of the relative Software are developing to help the industrial enterprises improve the technology and efficiency continuously.