10 January 2015

On January 1, 2015, Presidential Ordinance No.4 entered into force, introducing amendments and additions to Ordinance No.12 of September 22, 2005 "Concerning the Hi-Tech Park." Changes in the rapidly developing IT field are long overdue. Valery Tsepkalo, HTP Administration Director, spoke on the changes and HTP development prospects in an interview to Sovetskaya Belorussia (’Soviet Belarus’), the largest national newspaper.

— Dr. Tsepkalo, one of the points of the Ordinance is to expand the list of the HTP resident-companies’ activities. What does it mean?

— It is true, the number of activities increased, but they are still within our key area – information and communication technology. For example, now we can design various devices and microchips, create hardware and software systems and market them as our own products. However, there will be no material production in the HTP, only knowledge-based. The changes were necessary since for the nine years of the HTP operation, the IT industry has changed both in our country and throughout the world. Some HTP resident-companies have grown into major international corporations and gained international credibility. As a result, many customers ask their advice on how to use information technology to improve business processes and performance of the enterprise. IT consulting was introduced as an additional activity of the HTP resident-companies. One more activity is testing and quality control of software developed by another company. In fact, HTP resident-companies provided business counseling and testing before but only as a part of the software development process. For example, Microsoft has developed software for the server platform and wants to check its reliability and resistance to various stresses and DoS-attacks. It is a large contract for millions of dollars. Our companies could not participate in such projects before, and now they have such an opportunity

— What are the HTP plans for 2015?

— We cannot say that tomorrow we will have another World of Tanks or Viber. We cannot foresee the emergence of such companies. But we can and should create a favorable ecosystem for that. Therefore, our short-term plans are to support young companies willing to develop their own products, including protection of the intellectual property rights, assistance in finding venture capital and infrastructure support. For this purpose, we are going to launch a business incubator in February. We are planning to hold a large international conference for IT startups in May-June. Soon enough, these companies will determine the image of the new economy of Belarus.