Made in India

Bill Gates was asked on a talk show on NDTV24*7 during his visit to India, if he sees big software products coming from Indian companies his reply was for next 3-6 years No!,but next 10 to 15 years – YES!!! Given the fact that in 2002 India had meager 0.2% of the US$ 180 billion global software product market share and MADE IN INDIA brand has low acceptability and reach when it comes to software products we have a way to go.

There are software products coming out from Indian Companies trying hard to get the market share, take for instance Pramati Technologies(winner of NASSCOM Distinguished Technology Product Company Award) which had to form partnership with E-biz consultants like Yasu Technologies to get its WEB SERVER sold to customers. With biggies like IBM and BEA in the web server market it is targeting only 4-5 percent of the web application server market in US.

Cranes Software winner of Distinguished Application Product Company Award at NASSCOM Product Summit 2005, played a beautiful innings by buying up products for Systat Inc.(its US subsidiary) in three stages where each acquisition, from the US-based SPSS Science, was bigger than the size of Cranes at that time. The story how it did it is as interesting as the growth of the company which had revenues of around Rs. 1,633.8 million in FY 2005 of which 80% came from selling propriety products.

Ramco's fight with SAP and Oracle to take on global ERP market took around 10 years for it to get into profit mode, its first product was incidentally launched by Bill Gates as it was first ERP system to run on a Windows Server while SAP the ERP market leader had its own platform. The Adaptive Enterprise Solutions built on Ramco VirtualWorks has helped Ramco achieve a turnover of over USD 50 Million.

And not to forget Yasu which ranked 178th in The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2004 and is recognized as one of the top 50 technology companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast50 India 2005 program.

Product development is on the higher side of innovation and has higher risk proportion than usual service based projects carried out by bulk of Indian companies, but more than that the lack of understanding of what a big “Made In India” brand can do to India is what is stopping other Indian companies to enter global product market.