The Hindu Business Line : `Small IT product cos need sops'

While India is a popular destination for IT services, why is it not so popular on the product front? What is it that the country is lacking in — is it lack of funding, or lack of knowledge about the markets, and why are companies not looking at the combination of services and products?

These questions were posed to the city's IT intellectuals who attended the Nasscom Product Forum "Prospering in the new product ecosystem — Strategies to become a successful product company" on Tuesday. Mr Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies); Mr Deepak Ghaisas, Chief Executive Officer, - India Operations and Chief Financial Officer, iflex Solutions; and Dr Deepak Phatak, Chair Professor, School of IT, IIT - Mumbai, chaired the session.

According to a the report submitted by a IIM - Bangalore faculty — `Indian Software Product Sector: Challenges and A Roadmap,' by a faculty of IIM - Bangalore, software products as a business in India have a potential to generate of generating revenues about to the tune of $7 billion and create creating one million jobs by 2010. Mr Karnik said that there were about 175 companies in the product development space, of which Bangalore has 38, the National Capital Region - 35, Pune - 25, Mumbai - 25, Hyderabad - 19, and Chennai - 12.

He said this was only the tip of an iceberg as there were many companies who have not listed themselves with Nasscom"We have already initiated talks with the Ministry of Commerce and the CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) to provide incentives". Legal patenting corpus

Mr Karnik said that Nasscom has already started looking at setting aside a corpus of Rs 5-10 lakh (for each patent) for legal patenting.

"The companies who develop products are more concerned about getting their product on to the market and earning revenue rather than sitting and signing legal forms for their products." This situation should would have to change and the best resort is to have a corpus fund for the legal patenting and a consulting group to which would help the companies.