Software Usage

The software industry in India has a unique distinction - the revenue from domestic projects, as of now account for less than 50% of the total turnover of the software industry. Though in this day when there is a heavy emphasis on exports, this may sound good, it actually is also a potential source of concern.

The reason is that the software industry is essentially a support industry. The
fundamental role of software is to improve the functioning of some organization in some form, or solve some problem which will be hard to solve manually.

The improvement may be in form of improved service, problem solving capability, information management, efficiency, or something else. In other words, the real success of the software industry should not be measured in terms of how much revenue they have generated, but how much enhancement they are able to induce in other industry segments. In this light, the high ratio of exports to domestic consumption of software is a disturbing trend - in exports the multiplying effect of the software goes to some other country.

A main reason for the domestic consumption not being high is lack of understanding of software, its processes, and its costs by the consumer organizations. For a long time consumers of IT goods thought that software is ``free'', and the main thing in IT is the hardware. Little was it realized that hardware, without proper software is almost literally a piece of metal and silicon junk. This mentality, unfortunately, was also reinforced by some hardware vendors, who at the time of selling their machines, either promised to ``give software for free'' or convinced the buyer that software is
something that the buyer can easily do himself. And this is as far from truth as it can be!

BROADLY speaking, software can be broken into three categories - system software, software packages, and application software. System software comprises of operating systems compilers, editors, etc., which typically come with the machine. Software packages like DBASE, LOTUS, ORACLE etc. are general utility programs that can be used to develop applications in some domain more easily. Application softwares are those that that are used to provide a computer based solution to some problem of an organization.

Some examples of such softwares are, software for payroll processing, banking, railway/airline reservations, inventory management, decision support system, etc. It is the application software that makes the IT investment useful to an organization.

Generally, a typical application software depends on the needs, characteristics, and methods of the organization, and has to be developed specially for the organization and cannot be bought as an off-the-shelf product. And as things stand today, getting software developed is not cheap.