Software
Industry in India uniquely identified Compare another Countries Software
Industry, if we are talking about revenue concern with another domestic project
then it hardly reach up to 50% of the total turnover of the software Industry,
Yet now a days, there is a heavy emphasis on exports, this may sound good, It
actually is also a potential source of concern.
Software
Industry in India uniquely identified Compare another Countries Software
Industry, if we are talking about revenue concern with another domestic project
then it hardly reach up to 50% of the total turnover of the software Industry,
Yet now a days, there is a heavy emphasis on exports, this may sound good, It
actually is also a potential source of concern.
Reason
behind it is that the Software Industry is vital a support industry. The
Important role of software industry is to, to improve the functionality of some
form,
or solve
some problem which will be hard to solve manually. The improvement may be in
form of improved form or service, problem solving capability, information
management, efficiency, or something else. In other words, the real success of
the software industry should not be measured in terms of how much revenue they
have generated, but how much enhancement they are able to induce in other
industry segments. In this light, the high ratio of exports to domestic
consumption of software is a disturbing trend - in exports the multiplying
effect of the software goes to some other country.
A main cause
for the domestic consumption not being high is lack of understanding of
software, its processes, and its costs by the consumer organizations. For a
long time consumers of IT goods thought that software is “free”, and
the main thing in IT is the hardware. Little was it realized that hardware,
without proper software is almost literally a piece of metal and silicon junk.
This mentality, unfortunately, was also reinforced by some hardware vendors,
who at the time of selling their machines, either promised to “give
software for free” or convinced the buyer that software is something that the
buyer can easily do himself. And this is as far from truth as it can be!
As we
know, software can be broken into three categories - system software, software
packages, and application software. System software comprises of operating
systems compilers, editors, etc., which typically come with the machine.
Software packages like DBASE, LOTUS, and ORACLE etc. are general utility
programs that can be used to develop applications in some domain more easily.
Application softwares are those that that are used to provide a computer based
solution to some problem of an organization. Some examples of such softwares
are, software for payroll processing, banking, railway/airline reservations,
inventory management, decision support system, etc.
Application software that makes the IT investment useful to an organization.
Generally, a typical application software depends on the needs,
characteristics, and methods of the organization, and has to be developed
specially for the organization and cannot be bought as an off-the-shelf
product. And as things stand today, getting software developed is not cheap.
Let us see the order of software costs from the view point of a client. One way
to estimate the size and complexity of an application is the function points
approach. By this method, a medium sized business application requiring 10-12
reports to be printed, having 8-10 different types of input, a few interface
files, and a dozen odd different types of queries, will have about 200 function
points. Typical productivity in the software industry is of the order of 10
function points per person-month. This means that this application will require
about 20 person-months to develop. That is, a team of 4 software engineers will
develop this system in about 5 months. As many good organizations charge
between Rs 6 - 10 lakhs per person-year, in terms of money such an application
will cost at least Rs 12 lakhs! And it can easily run on a workstation or a
system consisting of a server and a few PCs costing about 6 - 8 lakhs! So, in India
also, as the hardware costs have fallen over the years and the salaries of
software personnel have grown, the reversal of hardware-software cost ratio has
occurred. Only, many organizations still do not seem to realize it!
Being ready to pay the cost of software is not the complete story. Another
reason for organizations not getting proper returns from their automation plans
is that organizations do not understand software, the process of producing
software, and software quality.
It is now known that to produce quality software, the developing organization
has to follow well laid out software engineering methodologies. Unfortunately,
there are many software organizations who will not follow these methods and do
a poor job of developing the software, but bid low for a job. Due to lack of
appreciation of software quality and software development process, a consumer
cannot understand why a company will charge 20 lakhs, while the team of boys
out of school are willing to do it for one tenth the cost. They find out the
reason the hard way - when low quality software with poor user interface and
without proper documentation gets delivered, which keeps failing, loosing data
and records, and is not liked by the people who have to use it. The other
approach, which the more aware companies will take, is to give the contract to
some well known, reputed company. They will get a good software but will
probably be charged more due to their inability to distinguish good from bad
and effectively use competitive forces to reduce costs.
Getting quality based application software developed is actually not an easy
task. It requires sufficient knowledge about the software development process
to be able to distinguish between a “mature” software organization
that has reasonable software development processes in place, and an
“immature” organization, which produces software in an ad-hoc manner,
and is therefore more likely to produce a low quality software. Furthermore,
the customer organization also has to play an active role during the
development of software, if it wants the software to satisfy its objectives -
even the ISO: 9000 standards for software companies specify that the customer
organization play a key role during software development. Unless the customer
organization analyses the capability of the software developers and plays its
the proper role during software development , it is likely to end up wasting its
investment in computerization and IT.
Icreonglobal is a leading Offshore Software Outsourcing Company in India
and Offering Web
Development Services and Custom
Application Development Services
About the author
Ricky Morlie is a content writer cum articles analyst for
the offshoredotnetdevelopment organizations since last 2 years and having the
more than 5 years of experience in this fields.
Tags: capability, concern software, consumer organizations, domestic consumption, enhancement, functionality, hardware vendors, high ratio, india, industry segments, information management, long time, management efficiency, mentality, proper software, silicon, software industry, time consumers, turnover