In his meetings in California with the executives of Oracle, Cisco, and HP – the Silicon Valley leading international corporations – the Prime Minister discussed their future growth in Lithuania, new investments, and application of IT innovations in the public and private sectors. Prime Minister Kubilius presented prospects of Lithuania as an IT competence and services hub in the market of the entire region.

The Prime Minister pointed out that Lithuania “has emerged from the crisis and the time has come for investments into the long-term strategy for the state, which is impossible without state-of-the-art technologies”.

The Lithuanian Prime Minister, while talking about Lithuania’s readiness to become an IT innovations hub, pointed out that Lithuania had one of the highest GSM penetrations in the world, the densest network of public internet access points in Europe, the world’s fastest upload internet, and ranked fourth in the world by broadband quality. Furthermore, as much as 40% of the population have higher education, which is twice as high as the EU-15 average. The country’s openness to innovations is also demonstrated by the fact that 92% of the population use e-banking, and 88% declare their income to the tax office online.

President of Oracle Corporation Safra A. Catz agreed with the Prime Minister that the crisis is the best time to resolve for change and substantial reforms. The Oracle executives expressed their wish to share experience in the e-government project development as well as their interest to invest in the fields of education and tax collection.

The Cisco executives suggested formation of joint working groups with the Lithuanian Government to examine opportunities to create projects related with the e-government development, contemporary management systems, as well as the potential to establish data centres in Lithuania and develop cloud computing. Cisco expressed their determination to invest into the Lithuanian IT start-up ventures and promised to closely examine the list of companies provided by the Lithuanian Government.

The HP executives were interested in practical opportunities to establish an IT competence and human resources bank in Lithuania as well as to invest into the IT education.

The Prime Minister underlined the Government’s programme commitment to support high-tech development as well as the Government’s ambitious plans to make the share of IT, laser technologies, biotechnologies, and nanotechnologies equal to 25% of GDP and 80% of national export by 2015. The Prime Minister also noted the aim to transfer approximately 50% of public services online and to raise the percentage of e-literacy among the population to 80% by 2012.

Companies the Prime Minister and his delegation met with have extensive experience in public sector and e-government systems development. The advanced information technology companies have entered into the Lithuanian market and are well-known to the Lithuanian IT experts.