ICRIER report calls for free and fair competition in Indian mainframe computer market

12 Mar 2010

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The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), along with Indicus Analytics, released a report on The Issues of Competition in Mainframe and Associated Services in India in New Delhi on Thursday.

Sponsored by OpenMainframe, a forum comprising industry and IT representatives, and other stakeholders promoting fair competition in the mainframe industry, the report is based on a survey conducted among infrastructure verticals, including financial services, process manufacturing, retail trade, services (telecommunications), transportation, utilities and wholesale trade.

At the release, economists, including Dr Rajiv Kumar, director and chief executive, ICRIER, Dr Laveesh Bhandari, director, Indicus Analytics Pvt Ltd, S L Rao, chairman, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Jeff Gould, editor, OpenMainframe.org and CEO, Peerstone Research, professor Bibek Debroy, senior economist, Dr Mahesh Uppal, director, Com First (India) Private Ltd, and ICRIER's professor Rajat Kathuria, deliberated on the need for a level-playing field in the mainframe and high-end computing market.

The report calls for lending serious thought to issues of free and fair competition, entry of new innovators, deterrence of bundling of IT goods and services, and ensuring universal inter-operability between different IT systems including high-end computers.

Given the need for inclusive growth in India – in the last few years, social sector programmes have seen a dramatic increase in scale and scope targeted towards the underprivileged – it is imperative that the public and private sector build a large-scale IT backend, especially high-end servers, including mainframes. For this, it is vital that there is free and fair competition in the mainframe sphere in the country.

India's high-end computer market is dominated by IBM (with 50 per cent market share), HP (33 per cent) and Sun (17 per cent). "During the MRTP days this would have been sufficient to launch investigations against IBM because of its size.

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