BANGALORE,INDIA: The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), a neutral, open forum in which customers and suppliers of IT application software can develop an industry-wide approach for measuring and improving IT application quality, has announced the launch of its India Chapter.

CISQ-India will hold its inaugural India meeting today at Taj West End, Bangalore.

CISQ is an IT industry leadership group comprising IT executives from the Global 2000, system integrators, outsourced service providers and software technology vendors, which are committed to making dramatic improvements in the quality of IT application software.

Sponsored by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Object Management Group (OMG), CISQ was founded by global experts in software quality standards including: Dr Bill Curtis, director of CISQ and author of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) framework; Dr Paul Nielsen, director and CEO of SEI; and Dr Richard Soley, CEO of OMG.

According to Forrester, the global IT market is expected to witness an exponential growth of 9.3% and touch $1,534 billion in 2010. India has about a 20-25 per cent of share in the global IT consulting market alone. As India’s IT industry continues to make a mark on the global IT landscape, meeting global quality standards is becoming imperative to maintain the momentum of growth in the IT sector. CISQ will now be present in India through its Executive Forum and help enable Indian IT companies raise their quality standards.

“India is steadily emerging as an IT powerhouse. With more and more Indian origin IT companies making it big on the global scene, it is imperative for them to attain the highest standards of software quality” said Curtis, who addressed the media in Bangalore today in advance of CISQ-India’s inaugural meeting. “In the 1990s, the Indian IT Services industry used the CMM framework to establish a global reputation for process excellence. With CISQ standards, I am confident that Indian IT companies will play a key role in taking the lead when it comes to cost effective delivery of highly dependable software solutions.”

In the context of CISQ, SEI will work with OMG to develop software-related standards and appraiser licensing programs. The standards process is co-managed by the two groups and brings together IT leaders worldwide from both organizations.

“SEI provides a neutral environment for IT executives to address quality challenges as an industry and works towards developing the requisite standards and infrastructure necessary to address them,” said Nielsen, also speaking in advance of the inaugural meeting. “OMG’s success in standards development and SEI’s experience in software architecture, quality attributes, process improvement and network security make this a robust partnership with a global reach.”

“For several years, IT executives have complained that there are no industry standards for measuring the quality of business application software,” said Soley. “CISQ will enable us to benchmark the effectiveness of internal development, evaluate the quality of applications acquired from external sources and predict the quality and cost of IT services to the business.”

Major global corporations including Tata Consultancy Services, AXA, IBM, General Motors, McKesson, Morgan Stanley and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are among the CISQ members driving the effort to create a global standard for measuring and reporting the quality of IT applications.