InStep aims to become full-fledged provider of its own tech in 10 years

InStep Group is focusing its business on cloud time-attendance (cloud TA) solutions, an automated car-park system and field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, as it strives to be a full-fledged developer and provider of its own technology within the next 10 years.
President Wiwat Wongwarawipat said one of the group’s cloud TA solutions had been designed as a time-attendance system for small and medium-sized enterprises. 
It now has around 100 corporate users with around 15,000 end users that benefit from the system for their access control. 
Under development at InStep, meanwhile, is a payroll system that will allow corporate users to pay salaries to their staff, or to end users, via another cloud TA solution. 
Siam Commercial Bank and Kasikornbank are the company’s financial-sector business partners in this particular project, as a result of which users of the cloud TA solution will be able to have their staff’s salaries paid via SCB or KBank, he said.
InStep’s cloud TA solutions are designed to support SMEs by enabling them to run their business via mobile office automation. 
Employees of SMEs will also be able to request leave via mobile devices.
Its current cloud TA offering supports the Japanese, English and Thai languages, but the firm is also developing Vietnamese-language support and expects to expand its business in Vietnam by the end of this year via local partners, Wiwat explained.
InStep is also testing the Myanmar market and expects to expand its customer base to the neighbouring country in the second quarter of next year.
Meanwhile, for the automated car-park system, the company is in negotiations with Japanese business partners to develop solutions that allow drivers to park their vehicles with the minimum of fuss by using a readable and reusable parking card. 
The company’s president, who hopes to put the integrated solution on the market next year, said it also involved automatic licence-plate recognition in order to check the status of vehicles entering a car park, with the recognition system connected to the nationwide database of vehicle licences. 
The beauty of the system is that it will make it easy to check a car’s location in a parking area, so that businesses such as shopping malls can provide targeted promotions for drivers and passengers heading to and from the store, as well as supporting the security system at department stores, he explained.
The automated system also comprises an e-stamp solution, allowing shopping centres to reduce the number of printed parking tickets and eventually go paperless. 
It also has an under-vehicle inspection system, which can check suspect vehicles via a scanning device, he added. 
“The automated car-park solutions will provide intelligent car parking, which is a business area with high potential in the near future,” Wiwat said.
Field programmable gate array, which is the third area of InStep’s technology drive, entails semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects. 
FPGAs can be reprogrammed to desired application or functionality requirements after manufacturing, he said, adding that this feature distinguished them from ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), which are custom-manufactured for specific design tasks. 
Although one-time programmable FPGAs are available, the dominant types are SRAM-based, which can be reprogrammed as the design evolves. 
He described FPGA development work as a knowledge business that utilised artificial-intelligence technology to reduce workload complexity and improve business efficiency.
InStep’s FPGA is designed to help data scientists solve the problems the face, as well as identify huge data and facilitate data analytics. 
The company expects its development of hardware for AI that can be applied to identify product items, goods and people to be available in the second half of next year, Wiwat said, adding, “I think the FVGA [we are developing] will be important in solving data analytics [problems].”
The president said InStep was determined to provide knowledge to the business sector, but at the same time develop its own tech as an information-technology company, or IT inventor, in the digital era. 
InStep, which currently operates as an IT product outsourcing base, aims to be a company fully focused on the provision of its own technology – for both the domestic and international markets – within 10 years, he said. 
The company expects to generate revenue of around Bt170 million this year, rising to more than Bt300 million in 2017. It currently has around 200 employees.