The Indian domestic IT services market, particularly the public sector, opens up tremendous opportunities for software product vendors. However, as would be expected of a market of this nature, realizing the opportunities will be far from easy.
The e-governance projects are managed by the IT services majors. The diversity of projects open up plenty of opportunities to IT solution providers to address public sector requirements through partnerships with these systems integrators. However because of some fairly unique challenges, realizing these opportunities will be far from easy.
Procurement in the public sector is often less transparent than what the vendors are familiar with, and decision and implementation cycles in the public sector are too long for many vendors. Government project stipulations are often unrealistic. For example,. The state-owned NIC accounts for over 50% all government IT contracts. We have been told that there is
considerable cultural bias in the government in favor of NIC. This might not be easy to change. Ovum recommends a ‘wait and watch’ approach, given that its still early stages for Public-Private-Partnerships for the Indian public sector.
Exploring opportunities, Somak adds, “Most of the ‘still on the table’ opportunities are in the niche areas across solution categories. Some of the possible niche categories are Enterprise Architecture, Transactional Content Management Business Rules Management Systems, Data Quality Management, Master Data Management and low cost end-user computing solutions.”
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