BANGALORE, INDIA: India today is arguably the land of the highest number of developer population in the world, said a recent study on the subject, "Open web-platforms for the developer community" by Zinnov Management Consulting, a leading Management Consulting firm.

Over the next 3 to 5 years more than 50 percent of the developer population, across technologies and platforms in the world, will be based out of India.

Revealing numbers on how this segment of the industry is poised to grow, it read that India today is home to more than 500,000 members of Oracle's online developer community, has approximately 6,50,000 highly skilled JAVA developers and close to 70,000 Cisco Certified Professionals. Infact in 2004 alone, there were around 150,000 "Microsoft Certified Professionals" in India.

"With the advent of open-web platforms, a couple of years back, there has been a paradigm shift in software development.  Proprietary software makers are now opening up platforms to commoditize their products/solutions to customers and increase reach and scale", said Chandramouli, director, Advisory Services, Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

With cloud computing gaining traction, not just consumer products but even enterprise product companies are embracing this route, for e.g., Salesforce, NetSuite etc., the report highlighted.

Currently, out of the total number of 900 product companies in India, there are about 15 to 20  Indian companies that have created applications on open platforms like Orkut and Facebook (consumer focused).