Empowering partners and system integrators to make them the IT one stop shop

New Delhi: India has emerged as the fastest growing IT market in the world, driven on the increased IT adoption by the domestic market along with the increased exports. While the economic slump has had a impact on IT spends globally, India has been fortunate enough to stay away from the influence of the slow down according to a study conducted by Gartner that stated, Indian IT budgets are expected to increase by 5.5 percent in 2009, whereas globally the IT spends re anticipated to see a decline by 4 percent. Further more, the research estimates points to the fact that in the coming times, growth momentum in the domestic market will be led by the significant growth in the packaged software and service business and this in turn will exert tremendous pressure on Indian companies to adopt and implement better and faster IT applications.

The increased demand foreseen in the industry will create a perfect environment for Partners like Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) to work closely with the known IT players and act as a major provider of complementary applications to companies across industries. Sectors like financial institutions, p pharmaceutical, healthcare and textile have already been hugely benefitted by ERP, CRM implementations and system integration.

According to a research conducted by IDC, successful partners recognize that two of the primary business success factors, revenue growth and customer satisfaction, are interrelated, with the latter underpinning the former. To identify new ways to improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue, Microsoft has developed a partner engagement program that empowers both the ISV and SI partners with the latest technology to boost customer satisfaction and increase revenue.

A case in point is that of the two partners of Microsoft, namely Cognizant Technology Solutions (Cognizant) and Proteans Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Microsoft has been providing them with support and assistance with the latest technology. Cognizant is a leading provider of information technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services primarily for Global 2000 companies, while Proteans is a global outsourced software product development company that provides outsourcing services to ISVs, SaaS companies, Internet firms and technology companies. Both the companies facilitate their customers primarily with a wide range of services like project-based application services, business and technology consulting, complex system integration, application outsourcing, business process outsourcing, IT infrastructure outsourcing, testing solutions, analytics, ERP, CRM, business intelligence, data warehousing and supply chain management.

To enhance these services,...