Monday, July 15, 2002 |
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Feature |
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Wooing Indian
programmers
Narayanan Madhavan
CHEAP
hardware, free trips to the USA, all popcorn you can eat - life's a
junket if you're a computer programmer in India.
In their tussle to
dominate the emerging industry for Internet-based services, industry
giants Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems are doling out incentives as
they woo programmers worldwide to back their rival software.
The courting is
particularly competitive in India, where by some estimates more than 10
per cent of the world's programmers work for some of the industry's
lowest wages.
"They keep
contacting us and say spend time with us," Shanti Sivakumar, a
co-founder of iTech Workshop, which writes software for the healthcare
and communications industries, said.
At stake is the nascent
market for Web services that will allow companies to do business over
the Internet.
Microsoft and Sun are
pushing rival standards - called .NET and SunONE, respectively, - for
programming Web services.
Persuading programmers
and developers to back one standard is a key battle in the fight to
dominate the industry.
S. Sadagopan, director
of the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Information Technology, said
nearly 70 per cent of India's software programmers are developers -
those who design the specifications for software that is then coded by
other programmers.
The creativity of
developers helps popularise standards and demand for code-generating
tools rises as more developers adopt a standard.
Fun and challenges
Wooing programmers and
their employers in Bangalore, India's southern software centre involves
blending serious mental challenges with fun. Microsoft and Sun line up
daylong seminars and months-long competitions, laced with entertainment.
In the past few weeks,
Microsoft, Sun and chipmaker Intel have all held seminars for Indian
developers. Sun's "Tech Days" saw 1,000 paid attendees, the
Intel Developers Forum 700 and Microsoft's VisualStudio tool show drew
7,500.
Techie seminars are
turning increasingly glitzy, with huge screens, music and lights fit for
rock shows.
"It's 99 per cent
serious, but we also have popcorn and candy and bands playing," Sun
spokeswoman Aparna Devi Pratap said about the company's annual developer
show.
Exports of software and
allied services from India ignored a slowdown last year, growing 29 per
cent to $7.5 billion in the 12 months to March. The current year is
expected to see a 30 per cent rise despite a sagging recovery in the
USA.
Underlining the
importance of the industry, Microsoft senior marketing manager Daniel
Ingitaraj says the number of programmers in India is expected this year
to equal the 5,00,000 to 5,50,000 in the USA.
But people are hard to
count in the world's second most populous country and other estimates of
the number vary wildly from 3,50,000 to 7,00,000.
The huge number of
programmers is one reason for the low wages.
"There is an
abundance of skills in Microsoft technologies. Because of this, the
price at which you can hire the skills is lower," Gopal Kulkarni,
chief executive of Kendra Technologies, which makes software to help
human resource managers, sift job applications said.
Inexpensive
In
Bangalore, home to more than 1,000 software companies, you can hire a
young programmer of Sun's Java language for around $ 200 a month - less
than a tenth of what a US counterpart would cost.
At least the incentives
from the software companies are good: Sun's include up to 60 per cent
discounts on hardware for developers while Microsoft offers software at
a fraction of market cost. Academic winners got a free trip to
Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, while professionals won digital
cameras.
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