Software industry body Nasscom sees revenues from the Indian product companies to hit $10 billion by 2020.
With an eye to boost the creation of software products out of India that can export as well as cater to the Indian market, similar to the likes of Oracle or SAP, Nasscom has launched a product council that will handhold product-focussed start-ups.
This handholding will be in areas such as funding, market access and technology. This is the next step to the vision outlined by the Narayan Murthy Committee (which has targeted $300 billion revenues by 2020), will be a part of the recent 10K start-up programme initiated a couple of months ago, Nasscom officials said.
Members of council
This council will be spearheaded by Ravi Gururaj, Chairman of Frictionless Ventures and will include members like Sanjay Parthasarathy, former Microsoft employee who is heading Indix, a start-up based in Chennai. Others include the likes of Manav Garg of Eka Software, Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk, Rohit Bhat from Robosoft, Hanuman Tripathi, Infrasoft and Kishore Mandyam of Impel.
Revenues from Indian product companies in FY 13 were estimated at $2.2 billion and there are around 2,400 such companies. “Since the launch of the 10K start-up initiative, we have got 4,500 registrations,” said Krishnakumar Natarajan, Chairman, Nasscom.
Despite this bullishness, some industry watchers are still not convinced. “If you were to dissect the numbers, this target does not reflect Nasscom’s optimism,” said a head of a start-up company which is not a Nasscom member. There are other concerns too.
Industry watchers say that concerns from starting a business, handholding and most importantly helping start-ups overcome obstacles in the form of electricity, taxes and other factors may have come a little too late. These concerns have been echoed by a World Bank survey that has ranked India 132 in the world regarding ease of doing business. “We are addressing these bottlenecks but it will take some time,” said Gururaj.