Buffalo or Bank, Apps are Where You Find Them

"I WILL MAKE software when I grow up," said the kid in shorts,
"because India will be a software superpower. But where can I see some
Indian software? I don’t have any."

This was a small school in Meerut, UP, but it’s an old question I face.
Where’s all the software India makes?

But I still don’t have any newer answers except that many small
productcompanies are still valiantly at it, and Nasscom’s trying to help them,
and funding may trickle in again…

…so I will instead take up another part of the picture, the other big gap
in the Software Inc story.

Services around products. Application integration. Especially for the bulk of
smaller and businesses, it almost doesn’t exist.

After our cover story on enterprise application integration, I received
several mails from readers, including CIOs, saying that if EAI was happening,
why such poor service levels from Indian business houses, where one hand doesn’t
know what the other’s doing? One CIO quoted an editorial where I’d referred
to ICICI as a pioneering tech user…but whose apps were so disconnected that
you could get bonuses and thanks, threatening letters, and solicitations from
the same address on the same day.

And most smaller businesses are a long way off from EAI. Our publications
group itself is a case in point: a host of business apps that don’t talk to
each other: circulation, editorial, HR. We have RFID-based access, but not
linked to payroll.

Or take Dominoes pizza. Till today, this pioneer of 30-minute delivery has
not discovered caller ID in India, while my driver knows and uses caller ID.
Good old CTI (computer-telephony integration) lets Dominoes USA do simple but
amazing things such as pick up a regular customer’s call within one ring,
greeting her with a "Hello Ms White, would you like the same as
always?" cutting down average call durations from 3 minutes down to 35
seconds. Believe it or not, even Airtel figured out caller ID in its own call
center just last year, while its services (such as directory, 904 in Delhi)
still ask you for your number.

Which is why any example of integration and innovation we come across,
whether of RFID tags for an attendance system for buffaloes (with a clear
measure: increased production) or of deploying wireless to solve a distribution
problem, it excites us enough to put the stories on our cover. Which we hope
will help highlight to the many resellers and others looking for services ideas,
that there’s lots of business waiting to be got, for those who can solve real
problems with innovation, integration and a bit of technology.

Prasanto K Roy