Software exports emerged as the King—the dominant segment of the Indian IT industry. Over the past few years, software exporters had dominated mind-share with big branding, huge market caps and reams of newsprint. Now, they have begun to dominate where it ultimately matters—share of the revenue. India emerged as the preferred software-outsourcing destination of the world, with the DQ Top 20 still accounting for 55% of all exports. The Top 20 software exporters accounted for 62% of the total software export revenues of Rs 24,813 crore.

Customized software development and software maintenance remained the breadwinner with close to Rs 15,547 crore coming from here. Notwithstanding analysts’ predictions of this being the slowest growing segment worldwide, Indian exports of customized software and maintenance services actually grew at a very respectable rate of 51%.

The US continued to be the hot destination, with 63% revenues coming from here. But for the first time, the rest of the world brought in over a tenth of the revenues. In the applications segment, Web-based and e-commerce applications continued to draw in the big bucks. This can be attributed to the fact that the b2b sector has emerged almost unscathed through the dot-com bust. However, because of the dot-com debacle, the contribution of e-commerce applications to total revenues remained near-stagnant at 19%. All companies (Indian exporters included) will now be looking at increasing their revenues from Europe and the APAC market. By the end of the year, many companies, including Wipro and Infosys, had set up offices in the continent—mostly in France, Germany and the UK.

Storage

The storage market has never seen better days. DAS is out. SAN and NAS are being embraced by many organizations teetering on the edge of a data explosion. And forget the slowdown. The year 2000-01 saw storage fast becoming a vital part of IT infrastructure, and emerge as one of the forerunning segments bucking the downturn, with most vendors recording their highest growth figures. The increasing deployment of Web-based architecture across various industry segments meant an exponential increase in data. The resulting inefficiency of the direct attached storage (DAS) came into sharp focus, causing firms to look at new storage options. Storage area networks (SAN) and network area storage (NAS) were suddenly taken far more seriously. Data storage requirements in large Indian firms also crossed the 1-terabyte (TB) mark for the first time.

The future, clearly, lies with NAS and SAN, even though India is still way behind the developed world, where DAS is now down to near-60% levels (80% of Indian storage is still on DAS). An interesting trend in the year under review was that hardware giants positioned themselves in the storage space—HP, IBM, EMC, Sun and Compaq competed in the SAN segment, while Net Appliance was the market leader in NAS. All server vendors were active in the DAS segment as well.

The year was a great one for most vendors, with Compaq posting 400% growth and Seagate tagging an upswing of 125%.