Chennai: "Indian entrepreneurs should create intellectual properties around their core strength to succeed in the emerging competitive world. The country should put people and processes together in a unique way to gain a space for itself in the business process outsourcing (BPO) market," said Raj Mashruwala, COO of the US-based Tibco Software. "It is time to build intellectual property rights (IPRs)."

Delivering his keynote address at Connect 2002, the second international conference on IT, communication technologies and bioinformatics, organised by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) in Chennai, he said: "Integration of various systems and applications is still ranking at the top, ahead of other areas like e-commerce, Windows upgrade, customer relationship management (CRM), XML applications and others."

According to a study, 44 per cent of the chief information officers (CIO) surveyed in the US ranked integration as their top priority, compared to 37 per cent who wanted ERP upgrades and 20 per cent wanting CRM upgrades.

According to Mashruwala agile corporates, which could differentiate services and products and are flexible, are better placed in the emerging market. "The ability to tailor your business processes to suit the resources, structure and competencies of your organisation is the main factor."

In this context, BPO becomes important, he said. "Indians should not merely offer similar solutions at a cheaper cost, but provide a different outlook and solution that would be end to end and unique.

"India has competencies in software and it should move forward from the current trend of just setting up software centres to own IPRs and get an edge. Start-ups particularly should focus on this. Industry and university interaction can be speeded up now with companies having more disposable incomes, which can be risked towards research."

Within the Indian context, relevant projects should be selected that could be made commercial, he said. "For example, IIT-Bombay is looking at a project that would make money transfer from mofussil towns to faraway metros speedier. Currently it takes 10 days, a long time for money to get deadlocked."

On creating value propositions in the IT services sector, R Visvanathan, CEO, enterprise solutions division, Wipro Infotech, said: "IT services companies should continuously innovate, develop a long-lasting relationship with customers and also change in line with their customers."

Tracing the evolution of IT services from IBM mainframe era, he added: "The evolution is from product- to customer-centric. From vertically integrated firms to specialised product firms, the IT services sector has evolved into technology integrating and managing firms."

Tamil Nadu IT secretary Vivek Harinarain, who spoke on the strengths of his state becoming a major sourcing base for IT services, said: "The government will develop the area between Tidel Park 1 (software park) and Siruseri near Chennai as an IT corridor. Further, the government is all set to sign a memorandum of understanding for development of Tidel II soon."