India’s software development skillbase is huge but its success has come in producing software for others – either through its multi-billion IT services industry or as an offshore location for multinationals like SAP, Oracle, IBM and many, many more. Its software products industry is by comparison, small and little known.

Not content with this, to promote the growth of domestic software industry, approximately thirty Indian software companies have formed a new association named the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT). This will be led by Bharat Goenka, co-founder of Tally Solutions, supported by the founders of InMobi, Nucleus Software, Brand Sigma, and other leaders from the domestic software industry. The group had their first meeting in Bangalore last Monday, 4th February, to discuss action plans.

This new association has been formed with a vision to develop a powerful Indian software industry able to develop mainstream software solutions and deliver these to both domestic and global markets. iSPIRT aims to help domestic software companies to think big and to encourage them to develop new solutions by creating an appropriate development environment: addressing policy issues together, sharing playbooks for success, and devising joint programs of action.

iSPIRT will work separately from NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the number one trade association of the Indian IT industry, which has more than 1,400 members, including over 300 software companies – but whose agenda is dominated, naturally enough, by the Indian IT services giants. iSPIRT’s founding members are NASSCOM members, but these two associations will (rightly) follow different behaviors to meet their different goals. iSPIRT will have a flat structure and a volunteer model, unlike NASSCOM which is headed by a paid official running the association.

There is no doubting India’s software creation capabilities, but achieving success on the global stage requires much, much more. But as the saying goes, every journey starts with a single step. Whatever the future holds, it will be for the betterment of domestic software market and overall Indian IT industry if the vision creates an ecosystem which can act as a performance enabler for its software companies.

PAC Research Director Philip Carnelley also contributed to this blog post. Post by Biswajit Banerjee