NetSuite Supports the 2016 International ICT Awards with LightCMS

Recently, a team of volunteers, including myself and a combination of product managers and software engineers at NetSuite Philippines, was able to lend our support to the recently concluded International Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Awards. Organized by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines (CCCP), a software donation grantee of NetSuite.org, and the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP), the annual industry event helps to promote the development and growth of the local ICT/IT-BPO industry—an industry which contributes up to $22 billion of revenue to the Philippines and is expected to create over 1.3 million new jobs in 2016.

Now in its 10th year, the organizing committee of the event decided to launch a new category called the “Participant’s Choice for the Best Team Leader Award,” to provide recognition for team leaders and frontline supervisors in the industry—and also motivate them to aspire for higher level positions in the future. Secondarily, it was a great way to introduce the use of interactive information and communications technologies and inject a bit of fun into the nomination and selection process.

The NetSuite.org organized volunteer group was tasked with helping the ICT Awards execute the nomination and voting process for the ‘Best Team Leader’ award category, and the team planned to manage the online voting process through an online microsite, specifically coded and completed for the event. NetSuite provided the underlying infrastructure and application for this stage, using a combination of a donation of LightCMS—a fast and easy to use online Content Management platform which was used to build the microsite; and a donation of the NetSuite SuiteCloud platform—NetSuite’s application customization and development platform delivered via the cloud. Our team of volunteers then designed, set up and deployed the solution in under five days—showing the power, flexibility and speed of deployment of NetSuite’s platform.

In a one-month time frame, the online voting process attracted over 10,000 unique visitors, and registered nearly 60,000 page views. More than 8,000 valid votes were counted to arrive at six finalists. At the gala awards night, the audience were then asked to select the final winner via SMS, after reading the profile of the candidates and viewing short videos produced to showcase their backgrounds. In the end, Alyssa Fae Camungol of Cognizant was chosen as the Winner of the inaugural “Most Popular Team Leader” during the awards.

We are certainly very happy and proud to have been able to support this worthwhile endeavor to promote the local IT-BPO industry and recognize the team leaders and frontline managers of this industry here in the Philippines. NetSuite has been in the country for nearly nine years, and today employs over 1,000 very talented and skilled Filipinos. It was our own small way of contributing back to the industry and the community which has been such an important part of our success.

Blog written by Alvin Pabellon, Principal Product Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan at NetSuite. Pabellon led the pro bono project with Canadian Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines.