Pune, Sept 3, 1998

Mr. Ravi Sangal, President, International Data Corporation, part of the International Data Group, USA, said the market for IT products was growing at a phenomenal rate in Asia.

Pointing out that there were 300 PCs for every 1000 in Australia, four PCs for every 1000 in China and two PCs for every 1000 in India, he said the PC penetration indicated the economic growth rate in the respective countries.

Mr. Sangal explained how Internet was changing the lifestyle of individuals and corporate houses in their daily life. "A few years ago PC was the basic tool to carry on day to day business while today Internet has become an indispensable sophisticated tool" he remarked.

Mr. Sangal said the world was heading towards an information society with large numbers using Internet services and related IT packages for quick exchange of information in every field.

Stressing the localization strategies for popularizing the IT software packages, Mr. T. Ravidaran, executive director, Transmatic System, said the mission of carrying out business partnership with C-DAC had paid rich dividends.

"Today C-DAC has 80 per cent market share in IT software packages in Kerala and the most literate state in the country was using IT extensively", he said.

Indian IT was increasingly being applied to astrology in Kerala and it was becoming even popular elsewhere, Mr. Ravidaran pointed out.

Mr. R. K. Verma, Director, Aarkay Research Foundation, New Delhi, said if a sizable demand for software systems was created, the rest will follow.

"Today there is more technology development at the cost of market development", he said, adding that measures should be initiated to produce market driven product.

Explaining the working of IBM PCDOS Hindi version, Verma said it was paramount to go local and develop new programs and packages for bilingual environment.

"About 90 percent of our schools are run in vernacular languages and only 10 percent are in English medium and yet the vernacular schools were not much exposed to computer environment", he said.

Explaining that the GIST technology in 1984 was introduced for data processing applications, Mr. C. B. Raje, Group Coordinator, C-DAC, said after ISCII standard was introduced for data interchanges, these facilities enabled the usage of Indian languages in various application areas.

He said once Windows in the early 90s dominated the market, the speed of local language application accelerated with most developers offering font based solutions with various font standards.

Pointing out that localization was not matching the pace at which computerization was becoming popular, Mr. Raje said that in the last 10 years less than 5 percent of computer softwares got sold every year.

"This was mainly due to multiple languages in the country, complex scripts and lack of awareness among users", he said.

However, C-DAC with a mission to reach out to the masses was extending support to IT developers for application development with Indian languages.

Currently, a range of multimedia and multilingual products developed by C-DAC had revolutionized the IT industry and SAARC scripts were also available in the C-DAC products range, Raje added.