India's education sector to step up its IT spending

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India's education sector to step up its IT spending
Bangalore: India's education sector is forecasted to increase its IT spending from an estimated $356 million in 2008 to $704 million by 2012, reflecting in a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19 percent during 2007-2012, according to the research study by Springboard Research, an IT Market Research industry. Majority of educational institutes in India are expected to spend on networking and basic infrastructure upgrades in the next two years. According to Springboard's report "Inside the Campus: IT in India's Education Sector", Wireless LAN (WLAN), Storage Area Network (SAN) and ERP are the three most popular IT solutions adopted by educational institutes in India. "In particular, a large number of institutions are opting for networking solutions, storage and ERP implementations to support their business, upgrade operations and streamline budgets," said Nilotpal Chakravarti, Senior Research Analyst - Vertical Markets at Springboard Research. Findings of the report are based on Springboard interviews of IT solution providers, System Integrators and solution vendors in the education vertical, along with a survey of 250 IT decision-makers from primary, secondary and higher educational institutions in India. The report revealed that majority of institutes reported moderate to high IT spending on software (up to 50 percent of their total IT spending). In contrast, 18 percent of respondents reported spending more than 75 percent of their budgets on hardware. Spending on IT services remains low in the Indian education sector with nearly half of respondents spending up to 25 percent of their budgets on services. "License and subscription fee renewals take up a large piece of spending, while network infrastructure upgrades will enable students and teachers to have more access to quality curriculum-based digital content such as digital learning objects," Chakravarti said. When questioned on their future IT investment plans, survey respondents gave the highest importance to networking, PCs and servers and student administration systems. The report revealed high level of home PC penetration among students in major cities in India with 74 percent of school students and 86 percent of college and higher education students estimated to have access to personal computers at home. Also, a majority of respondents in the survey named Microsoft as a leader in providing educational software and solutions. Other key solution players in the market are IBM, NIIT and Oracle. According to the survey respondents, IBM led the market in servers and storage infrastructure, HP was ranked as top PC vendor in the education market and D-Link and Cisco are the top two networking vendors in the education sector in India. "Educational institutions in India are presently focused on the deployment of IT systems that will enable them to improve the educational process for their students, and to stay ahead of the competition," said Chakravarti.