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India picking up pace in tech products, solutions
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 27 March 2008, 02:15 IST
Bangalore: India, hitherto known as the back-office and development center of the world, is now slowly turning a market for technology products and solutions. Not just in consumer electronics or desktop software, there is traction even for B2B IT firms dealing in enterprise applications and high-end offshoring solutions. The shift is reflected in their expansion plans, which don't talk about just expansion at R&D centers, but how field strength is being beefed up, reported The Economic Times.
Application delivery infrastructure firm Citrix Systems, for instance, plans an expansion of its channel strength in tier-II and tier-III cities. The company looks at having around 75 to 80 partners by the end of this year. Right now, Citrix has around 47 channel partners spread across Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata.
"With our growing end-to-end application delivery infrastructure portfolio, we are creating more revenue opportunities for our existing channel partners and will be expanding our channel network to meet this growing demand," says Souma Das, Area Vice-President for Citrix India. Citrix India grew 47 percent year-on-year in 2007 and bagged 600 new customers, says Das.
Progress Software, another infrastructure software products company, derives 55 percent of its revenues from the international market outside the U.S. Over the next three years, Asia's share of 7 to 8 percent in this market is likely to grow to 15 percent with bulk of it coming from India and China.
"India definitely ranks among the top 3 markets that we have. Latin America (especially Brazil), China, India and Eastern Europe are at the top," says Rainer Gawlick, vice-president, worldwide marketing, SolidWorks, whose software helps firms design products.
Gawlick says India is unique in that Solid-Works has a value-added reseller (VAR) model here as against in Russia where the company follows a distributor model.
The IT market potential of India is validated by a recent Gartner report which says that based on the findings of the Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of CIOs, Indian firms report stronger than average IT budget increases of around 13 percent versus the world average of 3.3 percent for 2008.