Obama's team confident about made-in-India software

Hyderabad: Despite the protectionist policies, when it comes to the government websites, Obama and his team rely on made-in-India software like FusionCharts, for data visualization. Like FusionCharts, a number of startups such as, Zoho, salaree.com, tringme, deskaway and kayako are making waves in the U.S., reports Padmini Copparapu from The Economic Times.

without moving out of their cubicles in India, these startups are making waves in the world market. Some of these are not even based out of traditional tech hubs like Bangalore and Pune, but are catering to global biggies from their small-town centres in Jalandar and Noida.

Nasscom has hailed these startups as the third wave of India's IT revolution. According to Nasscom estimates, there are over 650 such start-ups in India involved in product development, of which nearly 100 have come to the scene in just the past three years. Nasscom Chief Som Mittal has pegged the young tech product development industry in India at $12 billion by 2015.

Unlike the Silicon Valley "me-toos" of the past, this new breed of tech companies are building products that are lean, indigenous and world-class, say experts. "A lot of our talent is wasted in the services sector. Product development, especially on the internet is the future; it is location agnostic and will bring us recognition, credibility and unlimited non-linear growth," says Pallav Nadhani, who co-founded FusionCharts in 2002 as a 17-year-old.

According to Sharad Sharma, Chair of Nasscom's product forum, after IT implementation services and BPOs, Software as a Service (SaaS) is the next big thing to help the Indian IT industry. Under SaaS, like in cloud computing, the software is deployed over the internet, hosted, owned and managed by a remote service provider, thereby effectively saving the end consumer costs of running the software and also making it easily accessible.

"It has opened a whole new world for us. Geography, platform, infrastructure are irrelevant as long as you make a lean and world class product, which these startups are doing. In fact, we are setting some first-time examples in the world," added Sharma.

Another example is Chennai start-up Zoho Corp, whose applications are rated on a par with that of Google and Microsoft and is poised to upend market leader salesforce.com in CRM solutions. Even though Zoho has offices across the world, it operates with a 1500-strong team out of Chennai.