India now becomes a tech hub, small cos bring smarter technology for local use


India now becomes a tech hub, small cos bring smarter technology for local use

BANGALORE: It is unlikely that Gramener, Anaxee and Stelling are companies that most people would have even heard about, but these and others like them could represent the new frontiers of India's software industry.

Over more than two decades, India earned a reputation as the global leader in software outsourcing, but product companies - perceived as the mark of a true technology powerhouse - have been few and far between. With Gramener and technology product companies of its ilk coming up in large numbers across India, that anomaly is on its way to being set right.

While India is still a long way from showcasing a Microsoft or a Google, unobtrusively, technology companies have sprung up across the country to create products and solutions that meet the demands of local businesses. Quite unlike an InfosysBSE -0.52 % or a WiproBSE 0.19 %, which are the creatures of global demand, product companies are coming up with innovations made in India, by Indians and for Indians.

From helping capture fingerprint and iris data for the Aadhaar card to crunching numbers so that chicken live healthier and longer, these companies are using cutting-edge technology to provide tailor-made solutions for Indian needs.

"We have reached an inflection point," said Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies ( Nasscom). The ecosystem is just about right for product innovation in the country and India is about to emerge as a leader in software products, she predicted.

Selling innovative solutions for specific problems
he company that helps enhance longevity for chickens is Gramener, founded by former executives for IBM, Deloitte and Accenture, and based in Hyderabad. It does so by analysing data provided by Suguna Foods, its client and one of the biggest in the poultry business. Gramener finds disease patterns to let Suguna know what precautions to take and even makes recommendations about how much sunlight the birds must be exposed to, the type of feed, and even the structure of the shed in which they are housed.

Suguna, whose sales top 4,200 crore, has deployed an enterprise information technology system from one of the world's largest software makers but it turned to the two-year-old Gramener to find answers to specific problems.

"Gramener's business intelligence helps us take the right decisions at right time and we also get value for money," said GB Sundararajan, the managing director of Coimbatore-based Suguna.

Zinnov, a management consultancy which closely tracks the technology sector, has estimated that since 1990, fewer than 3,400 product companies were seeded in India. But between now and 2015, up to 600 will be created every year, its director Praveen Bhadada said.

"Startups are able to crack this market by selling niche innovations to solve specific problems. The global products brought in by big firms may not be relevant to the unique needs of the domestic market," he said. Solving these specific problems is what Indore-based Anaxee Technologies is doing for the Nandan Nilekani-led unique identification project.

Anaxee was founded after getting an incubation opportunity and seed funding of 20 lakh from NirmaLabs, a technology incubator promoted by detergent maker NirmaBSE 0.06 %. It recently won a contract to sell biometric systems to the Jabalpur Municipal Corporation in Madhya Pradesh for monitoring attendance of sanitation workers, a solution that has led to the discovery of many ghost employees.

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