India hottest Asian market for Open Source

NEW DELHI: India is set to become the hottest Asian market for Open Source. This was revealed today at the inaugural session of LinuxAsia 2006 held here.

According to Co-founder of Technetra, Robert Adkins, Indian business enterprises are expected to spend $ 25.12 billion on information technology in 2006. “The spending would be more than 23.7 percent over the past year. Of this the Open Source market can look for at least 40-50 percent share as the opportunity,” he said.

The main drivers spearheading adoption of OS are industry, enterprise and large verticals and educational institutes who are enamored by the tremendous cost saving and hassle free environment in the Open Source Platforms. Open Source has made a breakthrough in India, where less than 5 percent population are comfortable with English, by demonstrating the scope of power of local language computing as enabler for percolation of benefits of IT to the grassroots.

Technology researcher firm Gartner forecast that Open Source computing holds great promise in India. “India's technology adoption is gaining super momentum and expects a growth of 20.8 percent for the next four years in business spending on computer hardware, software and communication products,” Gartner report says.

Vice-President, Red Hat, Ellen Carberry said that among the more visible Open Source planks, desktops are emerging as a core area of adoption. Organizations are expected to make large scale switch over to adopt Linux on desktops to drastically reduce their costs without compromising on user productivity. Carberry said that Linux is now being used in 80 percent of the fortune 500 companies worldwide.

“For verticals, Open Source or Linux provides strategic advantages for adoption across the segment. Government, IT, education, banking and Finance appear to be more active in Linux adoption in the coming years,” Carberry said.