Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins
In modern times, India has accomplished miracles through the power of collaboration. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has the potential to accomplish yet another set of miracles in automating government and industry, and producing affordable education for all.
Three earlier revolutions using collaboration have dramatically improved the basic infrastructure within the country. The first revolution was called the Green Revolution, which started in the 1970s and took India from being a grain deficit to a grain surplus country. The second revolution, in the 1980s, was the White Revolution, which used the power of dairy cooperatives to enable large-scale milk production. Not only could India's own population be satisfied, India also became an exporter of dairy products. The third revolution, in the 1990s, was the Gray Revolution, which used India's plethora of English-speaking engineers and scientists to capture a significant share of the world's outsourcing business in software and pharmaceuticals.
Open Source Software (OSS) is poised to become the next revolution—perhaps named the Gold Revolution. OSS promises to build India's local infrastructure and create new wealth based on information services.
OSS is a boon for the Indian export market. However, automation of any sort is only beginning in the domestic market. Hence the local market languishes in the adoption of all automation tools, whether proprietary or open.
The localization and adaptation of computer-based solutions to move the local economy in India from pre-automation to automation continues to be a very slow march. Business processes remain predominantly manual. For example, it is reported that most doctors in India are practicing the same way they did 75 years ago—with pencils and pieces of paper. Ideally, OSS can promote the cost-effective adoption of automation, especially when legacy constraints are minimal. However, ground realities often discourage adoption of OSS.
Developing economies such as India's tend to foster low wages for services and support while permitting low prices for proprietary products because of piracy. This has led to a proliferation of proprietary technologies with affordable support structures and, at the same time, a resistance to OSS.
The resistance to OSS is driven by three main factors:
The parity of "purchase price" when equalized by piracy
The perception of a lack of maturity of OSS solutions
A higher cost of support due to relative scarcity of Linux-trained labor
However, a recent trend is the emergence of local businesses that provide support for point solutions important to small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in India. For example, companies have sprouted up in metropolitan areas to support the migration of email from large-scale proprietary server environments to the equivalent OSS solutions. This is partly because companies which have significant server-based infrastructure have been recent targets of licensing enforcement campaigns by proprietary vendors and government enforcement agencies. The perception of increased risk in using unlicensed software has provided the impetus for OSS adoption.
In contrast, automation for the export economy in India, with its highly skilled, English-speaking workforce, is beginning to exploit some of the new business opportunities offered by open source, especially in providing services for migrations from Unix to Linux and from Microsoft platforms to Linux.
Meeting the needs of the outsourcing market, low wages in India have fueled a substantial generic services economy with a global reach. Now, the outsourcing industry is beginning to take a serious look at using OSS for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solution development and implementation, for migration services, and for complex systems integration. As early as 1998, Dr. Ajay Shah, a consultant to the Indian Ministry of Finance, realized the importance of exploiting the inherent characteristics of OSS to build a services industry which could amplify the traditional Indian outsourcing services business. Today Indian companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have translated Dr. Shah's realization into sophisticated methods of services provision—for example, employing the state-of-the-art "ongoing cost reduction formulas" for client companies using the year-over-year economic advantages of OSS. The emerging market for OSS-based development and services has created high-value jobs in India for developers and, in addition, for business process analysts and service providers.
A principal portion of OSS outsourcing requirements centers around migration from older software platforms to Linux. For example, interest is rapidly increasing in retooling software from earlier, proprietary Unix platforms to Linux. Much of the conversion of traditional Unix applications and tools, like the earlier bonanza of Y2K work, is being done in India.
A second set of OSS outsourcing requirements involves building custom business applications using the new open source environments.
Companies taking advantage of these new outsourcing opportunities include HP India, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, Mindtree, IBM India, and many others.
Infosys, a top Indian IT company, is building a Linux migration practice as part of its multidimensional systems services and integration business strategy. Recent projects at Infosys illustrate both migration services and custom application development. For example, to meet the needs of a large petroleum industry client, Infosys ported applications for visualizing oil exploration data to Red Hat Linux from Solaris and IRIX. For another client, Infosys migrated a multinode high-availability application cluster from Solaris to Linux. In a project to help a leading peripheral manufacturer in Japan develop a new cost-effective product line, Infosys built Linux-based POS terminals using Java POS international standards.
Well-publicized projects at Wipro in the financial services and messaging services markets also illustrate the harnessing of OSS to drive cost-effective outsourcing services.