Huge demand for IT product developers

India faces huge shortage of software product developers who can think "out-of-the-box" ideas and concepts but the educational institutes are churning out engineers suited mainly for the IT services market, industry officials say.

A Nasscom-Mckinsey projection reveals the product and technology services will attain revenues of $8 -11 billion by 2008, making this segment a high growth area in coming years.

"If we assume an average billing rate of $4000 per person per month in 2008, we get the requirement of 2-2.75 lakh product-focused professionals," said Gowri Shankar Subramanian, CEO of Chennai-based Aspire Systems, an outsourced-product development company.

Current numbers in India would be in the range of 80,000 to one lakh professionals, going by the Nasscom's recent report of $3 billion revenues from product and technology services in 2004-05.

But some say the existing number would be much lower at 25,000-odd people or 10-15 per cent of the total IT population in India, making the anticipated demand much tougher to achieve.

"The institutes are churning out numbers more suited for the IT services sector rather than the product development market," says Anuj Kumar, vice-president, Induslogic, an OPD firm headquartered in Delhi.

Product-focused professionals were limited in number in India at about 25,000, he said and added that the global scenario was also more or less the same.

"The global scenario will not be too dramatically different - the IBMs, EDSs and CSCs of the world with huge employee base are primarily into IT services."