Government organisations in Thailand will soon be able to attend parliament meeting without needing to travel to the Parliament after the deployment of telepresence technology offered by Electronic Government Agency (EGA).

Dr Sak Segkoonthod, president and CEO of the EGA revealed early this week that his agency will deploy telepresence services at the Parliament and ten other government agencies within this year following the national implementation of cloud computing this month.

“Telepresence might be launched at the Parliament first for government organizations to defend their annual budgets without needing to come to the Parliament,” he said.

The EGA will work with CAT Telecom, a state-owned company to invest in telepresence services and mobile telepresence unit. CAT will invest in setting up these facilities, while the EGA will attract customers for the services.

This year, the EGA aims to have ten customers including Government House, the Parliament, the Government Centre, the Public Health Ministry and the Commerce Ministry.

“Currently, we offer Web-conference services for government offices in thirty three districts in thres provinces in the South of Thailand. The service is aimed at making it unnecessary for officials to travel to attend regular meetings,” Segkhoonthod added.

Starting from this month, the EGA will invest THB 50 million (US$ 1.64 million) to set up infrastructure to provide cloud services including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Segkoonthod told FutureGov that the EGA aims to encourage around twenty to thirty government organizations to use the agency’s cloud services by the end of this year. The EGA’s cloud is capable to support up to two hundred agencies nationwide and will be upscaled next year.

To provide cloud services effectively, the EGA has set up the government information network (GIN) that already linked 160 government organizations throughout the country, and the new GIN 2.0 aimed to connect 1,150 government agencies by the end of this year.

Apart from improving the capacity of GIN and providing cloud services, the EGA plans to provide app store for the governments. It will pilot this year before launching the service next year.

“SaaS is one of our cloud services. We will set up the app store to provide software and applications for the government. Now, we have e-mail and internal electronic software and applications for the government that are ready to be offered in the trial period. To provide the full service, we have to work with local software companies to provide the applications,” said Segkoonthod.

A detailed interview with Dr Sak Segkoonthod on how Thailand will implement cloud and further integrate e-government is featured in the March-April 2012 edition of FutureGov Magazine.