Indian firms gain foothold in product development

By agencies   |   Monday, 14 February 2005, 20:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: The principal booster that is setting the pace for outsourced product development is cost. The software industry is undergoing a major transition. Buyers and clients continue to drive down license prices while expecting higher levels of support and quality. To cope with the pressure on cost, product development companies now have two choices: outsourcing the work to a firm in a country like India or setting up internal R&D units at cheaper locations (including India) across the globe, reports IBEF from New Delhi. The latter is feasible only for giants such as Microsoft and Cisco, which has several development centres dotting continents. Those who can’t afford new centers, have begun looking for partners with low-cost, high quality labor pools that would help them develop products at low cost without compromising quality. But cost isn’t the only factor. For software companies, the software they sell is their bread and butter. The faster they can develop a product, the faster they can add more features to it. If they can do it at a lower cost, they are better off in the market. So, global IT companies are coming to Indian firms to do product development faster and to crash the time-to market cycle. “We come in the picture because of the speed at which we work. There are also cycles in the software industry. So, they save a lot of money working with product developers or off shoring product development,’’ points out Gowri Shankar Subramanian, CEO of Aspire Systems. This Chennai-based firm has deputed a 10-member team to a Houston-based company for developing a data driver that will enable PC users to easily access data on mainframes.