BANGALORE: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) Wednesday conferred, for the first time, its Lifetime Achievement award on Tally Solutions managing director Bharat Goenka for the accounting software product company's contribution to the Indian IT industry.
"Goenka is often referred to as the 'father of the Indian software product industry' as he was amongst the first to develop products for the Indian market using just a personal computer three decades ago," Nasscom product forum chairman Sharad Sharma said here at the association's product conclave here.
With over two million customers across the country, Tally is a shining beacon for thousands of product entrepreneurs.
The IT representative body also selected 10 emerging companies after evaluating software products of about 50 firms in the category on a range of parameters, including financial, growth, market differentiator, customers, market visibility and distribution.
The companies are -- AliveNow Inc, Capillary Technologies, Forus Health Ltd, iDuple, Innoz Technologies Ltd, MobMe Wireless Solutions Ltd, TeliBrahma Convergent Communications Ltd, Wingify, Wifinity Tech and Zenga Media Ltd.
Of the 50 upcoming companies, 15 are located in Bangalore, 13 in the National Capital Region (NCR) and six in Hyderabad.
"With active support for software products, India's prowess to build intellectual property can be leveraged into tremendous value in a global context. With about 200,000 research and development (R&D) software engineers and one of the largest R&D footprints in the world, we have one of the strongest value-creation engines in software," Sharma asserted on the occasion.
The Indian software product eco-system is at an inflection point of acceleration, manifesting interesting trends. The companies registered a cumulative average growth rate (CAGR) of 81 percent during the past three years, which is higher than that of the global IT industry in the software product space.
Similarly, companies operating in the niche services such as internet, mobile and cloud domain had a whopping CAGR of 108 percent in the like period (three years).
"The average revenue per employee in the innovation category was Rs.1.3 million, while the average R&D spend in the same category was Rs.2.5 crore during the past three years," Sharma recalled.
As filing patents in the US is expensive, multinationals operating in the country account for about 90 percent of the patents filed in India. "Subsidy support is needed to grow the patent portfolio of the India product start-ups. China has used a scheme like this to grow its patent portfolio," Sharma added.