India's top technology and outsourcing body said it is confident it can ride out the challenge of a stronger rupee and a global economic slowdown as it wrapped up its annual meeting. India's flagship outsourcing industry is grappling with a rupee that rose 12 per cent last year lowering the local equivalent of every dollar earned and a potential recession in its main market, the United States.

"The demand we still feel is strong," NASSCOM president Som Mittal said on Friday in the nation's financial capital Mumbai, where the three-day meeting drew IT players from India and around the world. The sector expects to meet or even exceed its software export target of $ 60 billion and overall software and services revenue goal of $ 73-75 billion by 2010, Mittal said in an interview.

India's IT sector with its skilled, low-cost work force that has planted the country on the global business map, is keeping its fingers crossed that the international slowdown will turn out to be a blessing. It is hoping the financial turmoil in the US and elsewhere could drive businesses to farm out more work to cheaper Indian firms even as they pare overall technology budgets. The industry has been seeking to diversify its markets to offset its reliance on the US, which remains the largest outlet for India's software, sector taking 61 per cent of its exports. Europe-bound exports, however, have climbed 55 percent since 2004. Britain now accounts for 18 per cent of India's software services market and continental Europe takes 12 per cent.

The IT sector is also looking at India's burgeoning domestic market fuelled by economic growth of around nine per cent. Revenues from the domestic IT market, including hardware, are estimated to reach $ 23.2 billion in the year ending March 31, 2008, up 43 per cent from the previous year.

Indian IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) revenues are seen growing by over 33 percent to reach $ 64 billion in the current financial year. The sector is also eyeing remote infrastructure management services "as the next big opportunity" after the success of BPO, Mittal said. By managing infrastructure from a remote location, companies can cut costs by 40 to 60 percent, said a new report by Nasscom and McKinsey, which estimated potential annual revenues from such activities at $ 524 billion. So far, companies in low-cost locations like India have captured just six to $7 billion of this market, the report said. India is "well positioned to capture a disproportionate share of this growth by 2013 that is about $ 13 to $ 15 billion, " said McKinsey partner Vivek Pandit.

INDIASOFT is an outsourcing mega event, a global networking opportunity and a business-to-business (B2B) partnering forum, to leverage Indian IT capabilities to global strategic alliances

The Indian software industry has brought a paradigm change in the global information technology (IT) landscape in recent years. Among the IT segments, software and services have emerged as the fastest growing sector of India 's exports. India has been instrumental in sharply shifting the fundamentals of the digital economy away from commodities to technology and value added services. Software exports from India have of late drawn significant attention around the world. Many countries are realising that they could considerably reduce their overall project costs by sourcing software from India , which is capable of providing total solutions in a host of sectors of the economy.

With a view to leverage Indian software capabilities to global strategic alliances, and to give a visible momentum to inhancing IT exports from the country, ESC created a unique brand for Indian software and services companies in 2001 - INDIASOFT comprising of International IT Exhibition & Conferences. By organizing INDIASOFT events , ESC is adding value to the expanding horizons of its activities in view of the immense business opportunities that exist for Indian software companies. It was only with the intention of enhancing India 's software brand equity that ESC has initiated the annual event INDIASOFT, comprising of International Exhibition and Conferences .

Sun Microsystems has announced details for Sun Tech Days in India. The event will be held for the second consecutive year in Hyderabad, at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) from February 27 to February 29, 2008 with supporting sessions in Bangalore and Chennai.

Based on the theme of 'Open Opportunities', this year's event will cover technologies such as JavaFX, JRuby and other open source technologies in addition to Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), GlassFish project, NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), OpenJDK, Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), OpenSolaris, SOA using OpenESB and Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS).

Speaking at the press conference, KP Unnikrishnan, director - Marketing, Alliances and Teleweb Sales, Sun Microsystems India said, "Our theme for this year's event - Open Opportunities, as the name suggests, is focused on open source projects and communities. The open source model offers liberties to every user and developer, which encourages collaborative innovation and this is what we wish to drive home with this year's event." The event will be supported by Oracle, AMD, Intel, Ericcson, Nokia, CollabNet, Sybase, Accenture, Webex, Parasoft amongst others.

The Hyderabad IT Summit 2008 - with focus on 'Empowering IT with World Class Infrastructure' - will be held in the city, as a three-day meet during March 20-22, at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre.

The summit is being organised by the State's Information Technology and Communications Department, in association with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

It will bring together national and international experts from top institutions, technology companies and major investors, along with the existing and upcoming infrastructure developers and policy makers.

The summit will focus on emerging trends in global IT industry and infrastructure demands in the current phase of developments. It will also widely-address the IT infrastructure needs of large businesses and small- to mid-sized enterprises.

Hyderabad has 40 IT SEZs and hopes to reach $7 billion mark with a prospective growth of 50 per cent during the current financial year, according to a press release.

The world-renowned Georgia Institute of Science and Technology (Georgia Tech) has sought 250 acres of land in order to set up a special economic zone (SEZ) focusing on research and industrial collaboration apart from the offshore campus that the institute is planning on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

The institute was in talks with the state government for starting a 100-acre campus,(Georgia Tech also operates a campus in Metz, in northeastern France, known as Georgia Tech Lorraine. Opened in October 1990, See Comment below) "Now, however, they have expressed the intention of starting a SEZ as well apart from the campus and the government is inclined to clear the proposal," an official told TOI.

State government officials say Georgia Tech being among the top ten US public universities, its presence in Hyderabad in the form of the SEZ and an overseas campus will greatly boost the academic credentials of Andhra Pradesh. "Not only is it among the top ten public universities in the US, but it is also a leading research university, and its forays into nanotechnology and semi-conductors will be a boon for students here. The SEZ will be a great added incentive," the official said.

Georgia Tech chose Hyderabad as its location for the only campus outside of its 400-acre campus in Atlanta, Georgia, because more than 40 per cent of the students who go to study at the Atlanta campus are from this city. Apart from this, proximity to an international airport, salubrious climate and a cosmopolitan culture with lots of American eateries and other outlets also made them decide on Hyderabad, said sources.

Georgia Tech offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, engineering, sciences, computing, management, and liberal arts.In 2005, for the seventh consecutive year and the eighth time in the past decade, US News and World Report ranked the varsity ninth among the top public varsities in the US for undergraduates and 37th among all American universities.

Indian IT majors are eyeing life sciences as the new growth opportunity and looking at both organic and inorganic routes to tap this market.

"The pharma industry is a $700-billion market globally. The way IT industry looked at it earlier was to look at the IT spends of this industry, which would be about 3-4% of revenue and include hardware, software and infrastructure. However, as the market changes, customers are looking for more than that. With a dwindling pipeline, there is not only a need for faster go-to-market strategies but also driving efficiencies across the value chain. The evolved need for IT in the area of lifesciences is shaped by the ongoing changes in the global pharma industry. Pharma companies are faced with a pressure on their top lines and reducing their sales force to cut costs. That presents an opportunity to IT companies that are providing solutions which reduce time to reach market by speeding up clinical trials, manage research information better and ensure regulatory compliance while speeding up the value chain process.