I'd question the assertion that India has the largest number of GIS educated
people in the world, could be. My experience with GIS companies and
individual professionals from India [either in India or in North America],
and this is confirm by several prominent GIS executives from India, is that
Indian GIS companies really excel at "productizing services". The GIS
industry was one of the first IT domains that moved labor-intensive
production to India, and that model has garnered significant momentum across
the entire business spectrum. Recent headlines continue to confirm this
trend.
I asked several Indian GIS Executives several years ago, why, if India had
such potential, such domestic expertise, combined with such a compelling
cost structure, why had none of these companies made a product to compete
with the major GIS ISVs. This still puzzles me, especially now that the
current marketing efforts focus on SEI-CMM certification [ISO 9000
certification being a 1990's fad]. The answers I received, unanimously,
were that Indians were much better at "productizing services" rather than
creating new products and marketing those new products. Before anyone takes
offense at the above comments, remember, these were Indian GIS Executives
telling me this.
In contract, in China, there are no less than 15 different fully-functional
and highly effective GIS applications that are designed, built and deployed
domestically, and with incredible success. The cost structure in China is
highly competitive to India, and there is a compelling argument for Chinese
clients to use home-grown GIS applications. This continues to prove a major
obstacle for the major ISVs to penetrate that market. As a consequence, the
adoption rate and up-take of GIS technology [the full spectrum] is outpacing
any other market in the world. It is truly amazing. This would not be the
case if the only options were ArcView, ArcInfo, GeoMedia, MapInfo, etc: the
cost of deployment and support is simply prohibitive for the Chinese user
community. This is not to say that ESRI, Intergraph, MapInfo, Autodesk have
not had reasonable success, but it is in the single digit percentile as a
whole.
Because India [as a whole] continues to rely on a) back-office services and
b) licensing COTS applications from ESRI, Intergraph, MapInfo & Autodesk
from very parochial and anti-competitive local distributors, the up-take and
adoption of GIS technology across the full user community spectrum is still
very low. 80-90% of the application of GIS technology is in the field of
natural resources/environmental management, and while key for India, is
nominal when compared to the entire potential market.
The cost of data and access to data is certainly a continuing problem for
the Indian community. Two years ago, in conjunction with the MapIndia 2002
conference, the NSDI addressed this issue. While they continue to talk, my
friends in India tell me that not much has changed. Inertia is difficult to
overcome, wherever it exists. As an example, one attendee pointed out that
he could acquire IKONOS 1m panchromatic imagery of Delhi if he acquired it
outside of India, but if they wanted to buy it inside India, they would have
to go through the sole provider (NRSA) and it was their discretion on
whether to sell the imagery or not, and what I have been told, that process
is quite laborious and intrusive. Similarly, at least at that point [it may
have been changed by statute by now] it was illegal to a) publish internet
maps with a scale greater than 1:1M, and it was also illegal to digitize the
Survey of India 25K scale map series (or any other series), but, this is
such common practice that the legality of it almost never surfaces.
I, as well as many others in India, have made the same arguments that
Dimitri points out below: that being that if Governments open their policies
to allow ubiquitous and universally *free* GIS data that the economy would
grow exponentially. Where would MapQuest [AOL], YahooMaps, GDT, Navtech,
TeleAtlas and others be, and all their clients, and all their client's
clients be without access to national level GIS data that they have added
value to over time ? This is a huge economic multiplier, one that gets
quietly overlooked too often [with the unfortunate consequence of a
perceived value that is much less than reality]. If you look at
RoadsofIndia.com, they attempt to provide turn-by-turn driving directions
for many different cities, but it is still quite cumbersome. This is more
to do with the lack of standardization of data at street level than with
Satyam's application, and even this level of detail has come at a great
internal cost to Satyam to develop it, let alone take it to the next level
to be on par with MapQuest, etc.
I've wondered for several years now, when is the Indian GIS community and
India as a whole going to truly realize it's full potent
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