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InterSoft, a.s., was established in 2001 as a company operating in information technologies.

The basic idea in establishing the company was the association of partners of the international R&D project Esprit 29065 “Web in Support of Knowledge Management in Company (KnowWeb)” supported by EU in the 4th Framework Program. The company was founded with the intention to build on international experiences of software development for domestic or foreign customers, to exploit the status and international business contacts of partners and to capitalize the competitive advantage resulting of this association.

In 2004 the company changed the scope of its business activities with more accent on modern information and communication technologies, and with a view to provide new types of services in this field. The change was related to Slovakia’s entry into the European Union and to the resulting global context for the company.

Current activities of the company include outsourcing of analytic and development works in the area of web technologies, knowledge management, and sophisticated internet-based information systems.

The FP was at the origin of the company and the FP participation and experience have had a significant impact on the subsequent company’s mission and business plan. InterSoft cooperates with several public administration organisations, business field and civic sector, mainly in the area of e-Government and e-Democracy. Its essential activities are:

• Application of knowledge management and knowledge modelling.
• Information systems for e-Government and e-Democracy.
• Information systems for foundations.
• Complex analytic and development works in any field of software solutions.
• Guidance, consultation and advisory activities within the preparation and realisation of EU funded projects.

This standard portfolio for an ICT company has been enriched with services directly linked with the experience in the FP. The company’s working team consists of reputable specialists working at universities and in the business area. These specialists have created a strong, flexible, resourceful and respectable group interested in guidance, consultation, project and business plan preparation of activities with the support of EU funds.

Own products and solutions are based on results from previous projects ; in InterSoft’s case they can import results also from international cooperation and knowledge transfer and benefit from support of prestigious project partners.
Last but not least
Good FP background, knowledge of procedures and overall experience opened InterSoft doors to other challenges.

The latest EC funded 36-month project with the acronym Access-eGov (www.accessegov.org) started on 1 January 2006. It is a STREP type of the project with an EC contribution of nearly EUR 2 mil. The project consortium has a Slovak coordinator (the Technical University of Kosice) and it brings together, in addition to the coordinator and InterSoft, nine more members from Egypt, Germany, Greece, Poland and Slovakia.

The project has organisational as well as scientific, technological, and methodological objectives. It means that on the one side the project aims to improve accessibility and connectivity of governmental services for citizens and businesses and to simplify the use of government services for users by means of creating integrated „hybrid“ scenarios and providing guidance to users while following this scenario; but on the other side it simultaneously designs, develops, implements and validates appropriate technology, methodology, tools, rules, etc. To summarize, by employing semantic technologies the Access-eGov project will support semantic interoperability among e-government services across organisational, regional and linguistic borders.

Conclusion

This briefly reflects the history and presentation of the company InterSoft. As has been said in the Introduction – like tens of other ICT firms. But InterSoft has helped to show one important fact: the FP can be a real source of financing a SME’s R&D activities and, in addition, a SME can further benefit from the FP participation by implementing results, experience and contacts into its business plan.

Sometimes it is worth to go through all the bureaucratic constraints of the Framework Programmes.