Scope for Open Source Products in India

India is pioneer in IT services and the number of products that are made and marketed in India is very little. Today, when we take IT for a commoner who wants to automate his business he often goes for a proprietary software. Multinational product companies like Microsoft typically use India as they marketplace and I feel that there are lot of market to be tapped in India as we are at early stage of computerization. When there is a rapid computerization, we need many product companies in India to serve our markets. There is a big problem with existing products - the big price tag. Neither the companies will be able to spend thousands of dollars for infrastructure nor it is sensible to buy even if they are willing to do so. Even if you have open source products, again most of them are developed elsewhere in the earth and still there will be moderate price for their services. The next shift in Indian market will be commercialization of open source with an intention of serving Indian markets. We need much better service for a smaller price tag.

There are open source products available for almost everything however that needs to be customized for specific needs. This gives an opportunity to use existing open source product (for free or for a minimal through away prices) as base and pay only for services (like support or customization). Moving forward, the concept of products is going to erode and move towards services/solutions model. Within next few years, we will witness a drift towards open source products in India and there will many open source companies. The companies which understand this will be a big hit in India and potentially go global with the help of open source.

What do you think?