Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung addresses the first Vietnam Open Summit on November 18

The summit brought together more than 200 delegates, including senior officials in charge of information technology (IT) application at ministries, governmental departments, and agencies, as well as IT experts and representatives from major high-tech corporations.

In his remarks, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said digital technology influences every aspect of life. It has become like oxygen, so must be as affordable as oxygen, and one way to ensure that is to use open technology, which is not only open source but also open architecture and open standards.

Open technology goes along with an open culture, he continued, where everyone contributes to developing technology and shares the use of technology, and the price becomes cheaper.

Hung highlighted the importance of data during Industry 4.0, saying that most value in the future will be created by data. The more data and types of data are built, the more opportunities there are for new value to be created.

As the people who have data and those who create new value from such data are not the same in most cases, the provision of open data is decisive in offering new value to people and the country, he said, adding the ministry has launched a national data portal, at data.gov.vn.

Vietnam has built 5G based on Open RAN and become one of the only five countries around the world able to produce 5G equipment.

Using open-source software will help companies reduce the time needed to develop software, improve product and service quality, and cut production costs, he said. Vietnam must develop human resources and create a market to allow it to reap the benefits from the application of open-source software./.VNA