Rajul Garg Posted online: Saturday, October 30, 2004 at 1147 hours IST
Engineering a software success story
A few months ago, BBC reported that Indian software companies were the only ones on the world map to depict a continuous increase in market capitalisation. The product segment has crossed the hurdle race and domestic revenues of a lot of companies have seen a sharp increase this fiscal. With the support of the infotech and business process outsourcing (BPO) revolution, India today boasts of an excellent talent pool for IT services and products fuelled by a friendly eco-system and lowered development costs.
Companies are now more willing to talk about products and consider them as a viable revenue stream for the future. There has been a recognisable increase in domestic and international demand for high quality and low-cost products and this is expected to grow steadily in the next 18-24 months as global economies witness further mobilisation.
The Indian Software Products Engineering Industry has experienced a phenomenal increase in revenues. In fiscal 2002-03, Dataquest estimated total revenues of product companies from India at close to Rs 10 billion. In 2003-04 that total indicates Rs 14 billion, a growth of 40%. The Top 5 and Top 10, respectively, account for 80% and 94% of total sector revenues. Several software products engineering companies are dedicated to bringing to the market the best technology solutions possible. Owing to this dedication towards proven methodology, unparallelled quality and a commitment to complete customer satisfaction, the US and Europe have opened up to outsourcing their R&D, services and operations functions to India.
The market is favourable for Indian software products engineering companies as opportunities abound in higher Returns On Investments, better scalability, access to a vast global opportunity and value-based pricing. There are several unique, innovative products which are based on expert domain knowledge, close proximity to the client and consumer compatibility.
There are products that integrate standard data storage, design and end-user access tools into a powerful information management solution. A whole range of products can be found spanning various domain areas including industrial, healthcare, insurance, telecom and banking.
Amidst the sea of products, it matters how well differentiated a product is. Commercial grade enterprise is one of the prime differentiators in the software products engineering market as it is different from one-off applications development and this is true for licensed or hosted software. Producte engineering is different from one-off application development because of the commercial grade nature of it. The uniqueness of the product lies in the fact the software is portable, scaleable and useable. A software product needs to be portable, scalable and highly useable.
Besides being highly available, the architecture has to be configurable and extensible making it easy to interface with a wide range of external systems. The quality of the software product system needs to be better documented, supportable, easily installable and hostable. This feature is particularly useful since multiple companies want to share the same database product. Commercial grade enterprise software supports multiple languages and is highly reliable. Commercial grade applications often need keys for activation to ensure that only authorised users within appropriate limits use them.
An ideal commercial grade solution product is built in such a way that it runs on multiple platforms, multiple permutations and combinations of browsers, web servers, application servers, databases and operating systems. A high level of precision and front-end polish makes it intuitive and easy to use. A commercial grade software product minimises training, has excellent online help and is cost-effective. In the current software engineering products business, there is a need to reduce time and expense required to develop and maintain. Therefore, the features and qualities of commercial grade enterprise software make it a near perfect player vis-a-vis current industry trends. In the near future, it may emerge as a necessary requirement and not an option.
(The author is chief operating officer and vice-president, engineering, Induslogic)
