the game is afoot....

India's Government represents a huge opportunity for both developers and systems integrators. The government is expected to spend by conservative estimates about $ 20 billion in buying IT products, infrastructure and services over next five years. This is huge money by any stretch of imagination.

 

Unfortunately the spadework for all this happened many years back. And as I talk to different government departments taking my own band of Open technology partners, consisting currently a motely group of small developers I find it very difficult to penetrate into the marketplace, where using open source based solutions would have served the best. Though we have had small victories in winning and setting up some small servers that will run-- yes Python based applications, I see that Microsoft has virtually locked government on its product portfolio.

 

Microsoft's approach has been simple.

 

1) Sell Consultancy free

2) Sell basic development services free or nearly free

3) Sell licenses and win repeated orders on licenses.

 

 

Indian government has surprising bitten the free apples offered and has to buy oranges across the country.

 

For example eight to ten years back, Microsoft approached India's Home ministry(which controls the police department among others) sold them free consultancy and almost free service.

 

This is a software database design-- fairly complex made on MS SQL Server 2000 for the police departments to manage the different case histories. But how complex and how expensive? It would have taken a three member team at the maximum of two months to come up with the design and another two months for building the software. And these are my conservative estimates. Smarter guys can definitely do it faster. If I were to put a cost on the same by Indian standards it will be at the maximum Rs 15 lacs( about 30,000 USD). 

 

Indian government got this virtually free. Microsoft meanwhile over the past ten years has sold or has set a potential to sell around 16,000 SQL Server Licenses. Luckily many state governments have figured it out and refused to buy in, implementing their own solutions. But many others have already purchased for a majority of their police stations. The cost, a whopping USD 15 million, the Windows 2K/2K+3, 2K +8.

 

Today I had suggested to someone senior in the department that we can build the entire solution for USD 300,000 or lesser on PostGresSql, may be Django, or use a Java based open source framework withe every single extra license coming free. They see the point, but they are just helpless.

 

In a bid to sell Python as a programming language which is best suited for the government, I am trying to make a document. If there is anyone who can help me, buzz me a mail on ramdaz At diqtech dot com.