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TOP
STORIES |
Thursday, January 03, 2002
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Indian
cos fail to mint Euros on conversion
Anand
Krishnamoorthy in Chennai
Twelve European countries and 300 million people dumped their
local currencies and joined the Euro bandwagon amidst great
fanfare watched the world over. What went unnoticed was a supposedly
huge opportunity for Indian software firms to cash in on Euro
conversion, a la Y2K.
A cross-section of the software companies contacted by The
Financial Express said that the impact of Euro conversion
projects had been minimal. “We created a solution in 1999. We
also put up a separate website for it. It was touted as another
Y2K, but has not lived up to its promise,” said the spokesperson
for Hyderabad-headquartered Satyam Computers Ltd.
Industry pundits had billed the opportunity as the next big
conversion project after Y2K. Million of lines of codes would
have to be scanned and local currency fields have to be replaced
by Euro. Banks, financial institutions, insurance, retail would
account for the bulk of the conversion work, they said.
Companies like Polaris and DSQ software also said very little
work came their way. “We did some conversion for Citibank but
no other major projects came our way,” the Polaris spokesperson
said.
However, the TCS spokesperson, when contacted, said that they
had a lot of Euro conversion projects but it was nowhere close
to the Y2K opportunity. He declined to give any indication of
revenues from these projects.
Industry sources said leading Indian firms like Infosys and
Wipro also had not done much work in this niche. “Revenues from
conversion projects have been marginal or insignificant for
these companies,” said an analyst with a domestic brokerage.
IT companies in mid-1999 had hoped to retrain Y2K professionals
to undertake Euro conversion projects. Although solutions were
put out before December 2000, there were no conversions.
According to an industry consultant, the conversion was not
as complicated or as significant as it was initially thought.
Also, industry professionals realised after Y2K, that those
who were ill-prepared for the switch-over got along just as
well as those who had pumped in million of dollars to rewrite
code.
“There was a lot of skepticism in the industry regarding conversion
projects,” he added. Also, the conversion is not as complicated
as Y2K, since not much programming has to be done manually.
“The Euro conversion projects can be likened to a mirage in
the desert. As one got closer, it vanished,” said the consultant. |
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