What's Up with Tech?

From Food Processing to Global Tech Powerhouse: The Remarkable Journey of FPT Software

• Evan Kirstel

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Curious about how a food processing technology company from Vietnam transformed into a global tech powerhouse? You'll be amazed as Hieu from FPT Software takes us through his fascinating journey and the incredible growth of FPT. From his student days in Vietnam and the US to a 17-year career that saw FPT grow from 2,000 to 30,000 employees, Hieu's story is one of relentless innovation and global impact. Discover how FPT has become a leader in software, IT services, and digital transformation, forming strategic partnerships with industry giants like Microsoft and SAP. Don't miss out on how FPT is revolutionizing the MedTech sector with cutting-edge AI and digital solutions.

Ever wondered how seamless data access could transform healthcare? We dive into the complexities and challenges of healthcare data management and unveil the groundbreaking progress being made towards instant, informed care decisions. Imagine a world where all relevant healthcare data is at your fingertips—it's closer than you think. Celebrate the successes and ongoing innovations with us, as we highlight the tireless efforts of our guests in advancing specialized healthcare solutions. This episode is packed with insights and inspiration for anyone invested in the future of MedTech and healthcare.

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Speaker 1:

I swear his name.

Speaker 2:

And I'm here at the MedTech event in Boston with my new colleagues, collaborators, friends from FPT Software. I had the pleasure of meeting you both in person yesterday, so it's been a fantastic, eye-opening insight into the world of MedTech software hardware go-to-market, etc. Of medtech software hardware go-to-market, etc. I'm here with Hieu from FPT, a company that many of you may not have heard of. So I'd love to start off with introductions. Hieu, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your background and the global tech and IT powerhouse that is FPT an IT powerhouse that is FPT.

Speaker 1:

Alright, thank you, ivan, nice, to meet you, finally. So I have an IT background. I studied IT in Vietnam and also did my master degree in computer science in the US for two years as well, and when I came back, I joined FPT. So I've been with FPT since then. It's now 17 years.

Speaker 2:

So it's a brand and a name that is not as well known in the US as it is globally, and certainly in Vietnam. You're a household name. Maybe tell us about the origins of the company and the original vision and mission behind FPT?

Speaker 1:

Right, thanks, oh, that's a very good question. So actually the FPT, the company, started about 36 years ago, in the time that the Vietnamese market is still very poor, not very open. So those are the teams of like a gang of PhD students, fresh from PhD in math. When they came back to Vietnam and they realized that they need to do something new to help with the friends, help the family and how to change things. So they started a new company.

Speaker 1:

And it's very strange, at that time they started a company to do something and they just set up the company and do different things. And they started with the FPT, meaning food processing technology. So that's just one, one of the ideas. But then they go on and try different things about the doing some business with the setup, maintain and selling the pc computers. Also they are the distributor for IBM pc in Vietnam at that time, which is very huge, very new. No one even dared to take that kind of business in Vietnam at that time, you know, during like 1988, 1989, something like that. And they just go on with the ideas of daring to do something new that no one has ever done before in Vietnam. So that's how they came up with being the top two or top three of the telco providers, isp in Vietnam being the software, the system integrator, one of the largest in Vietnam, and also established the FPT software, which will focus more on doing the IT service for the world, for the global customers.

Speaker 2:

And you're known not just throughout Southeast Asia sort of your home turf, as it were but also globally in so many different disciplines and industries. Do you really cover every industry now? I know you're active in healthcare and manufacturing and retail and so many others. How do you describe your role in these different industries?

Speaker 1:

Exactly so. We are quite strong in those areas that you just mentioned, but we are like the technology powerhouse. That's what we want to address ourselves. We do have our strength in some industry, but we want to be open to any other kind of industry where we can help them with solving the technology problem, helping to draw the roadmap for digital transformation, whether it is any kind of industry and any kind of technology.

Speaker 2:

So FPT software is the main pillar, it seems, within FPT in the various industries. Of course, the buzzword is digital transformation, but it looks like you do it all Software development, outsourcing, BPO, tech support, back-end, front-end. What don't you do? Or maybe more specifically, what are your strengths in software? It sounds like you cover all the different disciplines.

Speaker 1:

Oh, yes, we are trying to, and of course with the change in new technology we always have to catch up to cope with that. And we also try to partner with some big names like Microsoft and Salesforce, SAP, something like that order to bring the more service, more technology to those, to our customers.

Speaker 2:

That's fantastic and a lot of talk here at the MedTech event around AI transforming the way we design and develop, deliver support. You know the medical device industry, but AI is at the heart of that as well. Ai seems to be at the heart of a lot of your different initiatives and business offerings. How do you see AI impacting FPT internally, as a company, as an organization?

Speaker 1:

Yes, Actually not only now, because we have, for example, in MedTech, we have some long-term customers, for example, some big manufacturers in Japan where, even a few years ago, we already worked together with them and helped them to do some kind of R&D, poc to apply AI to their medical devices since many years ago, and so it's not it's not just now many things that they are seeing now on the market. We already work together with our customer, like few years ago, to try different things and and yes, I think it's a very good direction now that ai people are seeing ai, it's the right direction. Now it's being started to being applied to many areas, including medical device, and we continue to helping our customer to apply those AI into different things, like for the medical image processing device and, of course, for the advanced data analytics as well.

Speaker 2:

That's really exciting and you joined FVT, I believe, as about 2,000 employees. That's a pretty small company 17 years ago.

Speaker 1:

Yes, that was an amazing time, amazing roadmap from when I joined in 2008. I was like 2,000 something employees you know based on the employee ID and our company just grow like so fast. And now FPT software itself at 30,000 staff in many different countries. We also have different development centers in everywhere. We have nearly 1,000 engineers in US and Latin America, about 3,000 in Japan and a few hundreds in Europe, etc.

Speaker 2:

It's amazing to see FTP prospering and blooming, but also the Vietnamese tech and high-tech economy is prospering and growing. What's been the secret of the success? Not just for FTP, but the Vietnamese economy, people? It seems to be a renaissance period.

Speaker 1:

Really I don't know whether it's a secret or just some point that I can realize. And also some people already told me that Vietnam has been growing very fast the economic, so the technology is also one part of that. We've been very open, we've been welcome many new ideas, the economics, the technology. Many other company will go to Vietnam has been coming to, to, to to Vietnam and we learned a lot from them. And IT has been a hot trend in the world and, of course, in Vietnam.

Speaker 1:

I think one part is that Vietnamese people, we kind of we really focus on education, especially in math, so we try to push our kids to be good in math. So we try to push our kids to be good in math and which means that later, when they come to the university, they would highly pick some technology career path, like IT or, you know, something related to technology, which means that we can provide a huge amount of human resource for the technology sector and especially FPT. We operate our own university called the FPT University. So for now we have been counting we have already have about 2,000 hundreds students graduated from our university and most of them are in IT.

Speaker 2:

That's amazing. That's a model for many of us here to learn from in the US. Thanks so much for sharing some time and insights into the mission. And shifting gears here to one of your colleagues, collaborators, gopal, speaking of Renaissance, you're quite a Renaissance man. You're a practicing physician, innovator, investor, consultant, advisor. How do I describe your work these days? Maybe you can introduce yourself properly.

Speaker 3:

Well. Thank you, evan, I really appreciate it. I've been really intrigued by FPT's footprint in its capabilities in technology. Introducing them to the world of medtech has been pretty exciting. I see myself as really kind of an innovator accelerator. I can come in and realize an opportunity from a technology or a clinical outcome relevance perspective. But then there's also the navigation of that technology how it's built, how it's commercialized, what are the regulatory pathways and ultimately, I've had experience in both corporate roles investment banking roles and venture roles in how these companies get financed and when the right money comes in at the right time and it is aligned, a lot of good things can happen. Companies grow, but they usually grow because they're having an impact to their customer. They're creating something that is changing healthcare in a way that we may not have perceived quickly value. But we're envisioning how workflows get more efficient, how data becomes more relevant to decision making, and new business models keep cropping up. Everyone thinks like what's your business model? The world of today is what are you solving? The business model to follow?

Speaker 2:

That's such a great point and your story is extraordinary, if I do say so myself. Tell us about your personal and professional journey from India to Australia, to the US, uk and beyond. Fascinating story.

Speaker 3:

It's been fun. It's been quite the travel. Born in India, junior schooling there and then high school and University in Melbourne, australia, university of Melbourne grad, from where I did my fellow Royal Australasian College fellowship in surgery and specialized in neurosurgery and was really excited by a lot of technology entering the operating room, got to work with companies that eventually got acquired by the likes of Medtronic and J&J, became consultants to those companies and then taught anatomy at Stanford University where I was a junior faculty. That was a Pandora's box. There were so many interesting things going on, with engineers in the same room as physicians in the same room as business people trying to figure out what is minimally invasive surgery in the future. We saw endoscopy, we saw catheters, we saw robotics and I got so excited I realized this is what I wanted my career to be.

Speaker 3:

After doing some basic science research in Toronto, I got my MBA out of Duke at the Fuqua School and joined companies, both large and small, to commercialize technologies, not just in neuroscience. I mean it's interesting that many of these technologies are cross-platform. So I've done cardiac oncology, ophthalmology, imaging and in the last five years I've seen a lot that's gone on. Where we're talking about communication workloads started off as mobile health. It started off as decision support. Now we're calling it AI, but at the end of the day, we're looking at how information in healthcare can be consumed in an entirely different way.

Speaker 2:

Wow, fantastic journey. And so it's amazing we're here in Boston. We're talking about this global marketplace from Vietnam to the US and beyond. Given all the challenges we see globally. Is medtech, is health tech, a bright spot in the global landscape? You must be very optimistic about the opportunity that's ahead of us with AI and advanced devices and digital health, to serve these populations that went unserved in places like India and Africa and Southeast Asia for so many decades and millennia. You must be very intrigued by the opportunities, the possibilities. India and Africa and Southeast Asia for so many decades or millennia. You must be very intrigued by the opportunities, the possibilities.

Speaker 3:

I think there are an extraordinary number of exciting opportunities, and countries will deal with the regulatory process or their access point issues differently. Their economics are different as well. That said, treating disease and managing clinical care delivery is a universal issue and we've seen some accelerators. We've seen medical access and clinical care delivery quite burdensome and tricky and complicated in crises like the pandemic and complicated in crises like the pandemic. And as we look at the future, we've realized that we have very powerful infrastructures. Some of them were pharmaceutical companies, many of them were logistic companies, but then there were manufacturing companies. At the end of the day, you are talking about a medical device at some level in the delivery of care. To get a vaccine to you, we needed to have temperature control. You know freight delivery. Those are all medical device technologies. The carriers of many of these drugs that elude are also medical devices.

Speaker 3:

So the spectrum of what is health tech now is much broader and collaboratively integrated. It's not one thing. And so the life sciences I think in health tech is an acceleration of novel and new understanding of biology. Our biosciences have become smarter. You can go down the discussion of genomics or proteomics or you know kind of precision analytics and diagnostics, as has our IT, our ability to communicate shared data and now analyze it, and I think those two are colliding in such an interesting way and every CEO will get up and say we're implementing AI Under the covers. They're struggling and scrambling to figure out exactly how that works and I think they need guidance. They need capability and these are very highly specialized solutions. There's no one you know, solution fits all. But how exciting would it be if all data could become available in an instant to make a decision for you or your you know loved one, to make the care decision that's appropriate for them. And we're approaching that at full speed.

Speaker 2:

Wow, such an important mission. Congratulations both gentlemen on your success, and onwards and upwards. Thanks so much, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.