2014-07-21 04:48:11

In Vietnam's IT landscape, Tinh Van Group is one of the few companies with over 20 years of development history, leaving a strong technological imprint and pioneering many technology trends and IT products such as search engines, portals, security, library solutions, and HR solutions.

Commenting on Tinh Van, Mr. Nguyen Thanh Nam, former CEO of FPT, said: "Tinh Van is one of the most distinctive IT companies in Vietnam. Despite changing times and competitors expanding into diverse industries, Tinh Van remains committed to its core fields of information technology and telecommunications, diligently creating countless useful products and services for society. Few companies retain such vitality and enthusiasm after the transformations of a long journey." This July, on the occasion of Tinh Van's 20th anniversary, we highlight the pioneering milestones of this company.

Search Engine: Ahead of the Giant

The first pioneering milestone of Tinh Van is in the search field with the Vinaseek tool. Before Google expanded in the Vietnamese search market, Vinaseek was considered the most powerful Vietnamese search engine, with a record number of users. At that time, Vietnamese character encodings were not unified—there were up to 20 different encodings—and search engines like AltaVista or Yahoo did not support Vietnamese. Vinaseek thoroughly addressed these weaknesses. After one year of operation, Vinaseek had built an index database of 6 million Vietnamese web pages, processing hundreds of thousands of search requests daily, and became the default search box for hundreds of reputable websites in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese search engine Xalo.vn was launched in 2008

Later, when Google began supporting Vietnamese search with Unicode encoding and all Vietnamese websites adopted a unified encoding, Tinh Van invested in and developed Vinaseek into the Xalo.vn portal with new strategies.

From Intranet to Portal

Before 1997, when Vietnam had not yet officially connected to the global Internet, tech enthusiasts had to use small-scale computer networks simulating the Internet, using TCP/IP, dial-up, and web servers, called Intranet networks. At that time, Tinh Van built and developed the first two Intranet networks in Vietnam: the ITNet network of the National IT Program Steering Committee and the Netlab network. Netlab was one of the first forums in Vietnam, albeit quite rudimentary. Many people experienced online "chat" for the first time on Netlab, with a very special feeling, while those around them were only vaguely familiar with email or traditional mail.

Not stopping there, Tinh Van always seemed to explore and reinvent itself. Just one year later, when website building technology was still very new to many Vietnamese, and programmers had to build websites from static HTML pages with a range of utilities they had to create themselves, Tinh Van developed the TVIS portal software solution. Mr. Hoang To, Chairman of the Board of Tinh Van, wrote the first lines of code for TVIS. After many developments by other Tinh Van experts, TVIS became the number one portal solution in Vietnam, holding the largest market share in this segment. To date, TVIS has been widely deployed for numerous ministries, government agencies, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Government Portal (chinhphu.vn), the National Assembly portal, portals of ministries, and many major provinces and cities (Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Thai Binh, etc.). It can be seen that TVIS accurately reflected market demand, and once again Tinh Van demonstrated its ability to anticipate user needs and future technology trends.

Pioneering Professional Software Solutions

While creating a professional solution "child" is quite difficult for many other Vietnamese IT enterprises, Tinh Van is a pioneer and owns many number-one professional software solutions in Vietnam. A typical example is the Digital Library solution – Libol.

Before 1998, the only popular library software in Vietnam was CDS/ISIS (a free product from UNESCO), with two versions running on DOS and Windows, mainly for librarians. Library readers still had to search for books using card catalogs, and most daily library operations were not computerized. At that time, Tinh Van's Libol introduced a completely new vision: building a comprehensive solution that manages all library operations, not just document management, and especially bringing the library online to serve readers as a digital library. This was something the Vietnamese library community had not yet imagined.

Libol's popularity in the library sector was so great that in the early 2000s, Ly Thuong Kiet Street in Hanoi was jokingly called "Libol Street" because six agencies on that street used Tinh Van's digital library solution. Currently, Libol still holds over 60% of the library software market share nationwide, generating tens of billions in revenue annually for Tinh Van.

Another potential solution area where Tinh Van also played a pioneering role is the HiStaff human resource management solution. Initially, HiStaff was developed on order for the large enterprise Unilever Vietnam. After a short time, HiStaff quickly became a preferred solution implemented at many leading Vietnamese enterprises such as Techcombank, Maritime Bank, Honda Vietnam, Vinamilk, Pepsico, Phu Thai, etc. And of course, HiStaff became a trailblazer for a new market—the HR management solution market—with the participation of other IT names. But as a pioneer, HiStaff still left its mark by leading the HR management software market share in Vietnam with annual revenue of millions of USD.

From 2002 to 2007, Tinh Van continuously launched various software solutions such as: Union University Management Solution, eFile Archive Management Solution, Qualita Asset Management Solution, Clever Online Training Solution, OmegaTest Question Bank and Exam Solution, Davit English-Vietnamese Automatic Translation Solution... These were all massive, highly complex software solutions, and were the first of their kind developed by a domestic company and brought to market.

The Mission of the Trailblazer

Speaking of Tinh Van, people often liken it to a typical example of scientists doing business, implying a certain idealism. And the "idealistic" flow is like an "instinct" of Tinh Van people in R&D activities, as recently Tinh Van once again pioneered in the field of electronic textbooks. It started from a very simple idea: to put all the heavy textbooks that children carry to school into a thin and light tablet. This is something that almost every parent in Vietnam with school-going children has wished and dreamed of for over a decade—a reform to reduce the burden of books. Commenting on the significance of the Classbook electronic textbook, Vietnamese educators all agree that electronic textbooks are certainly an inevitable future trend and a meaningful innovation milestone for education in Vietnam.

The Classbook electronic textbook was introduced at the 55th anniversary of the Vietnam Education Publishing House

Speaking about the company's development over the past 20 years and future development strategy, Mr. Hoang To, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Tinh Van, said: "For me, 20 years of Tinh Van is just the initial accumulation and affirmation of the creativity of a pioneering enterprise in the market. Tinh Van will always maintain the spirit of a startup with all its fine qualities: passion, independence, enthusiasm, ambition, aspiration, and always full of bold creative ideas. Since 2014, Tinh Van's leadership has established the 'Go Global' strategy, boldly stepping out of the bamboo hedge, determined to seek great opportunities in new horizons."

In the context of a difficult economy, where many large IT enterprises are mainly engaged in service business and outsourcing, lacking core products, a company like Tinh Van is truly a bright spot worthy of respect. With 20 years of development and the mission of a trailblazer in many fields, we believe that Tinh Van will soon lead in many important areas of Vietnam's technology market, and with the 'Go Global' strategy, Tinh Van will boldly step onto the global market.

(According to Dan Tri)