The Indian bio-informatics market is expected to exceed $2 billion by 2008 while the market for the country's biotech R&D products and services is likely to rise to around $3 billion by 2010, according to a study by the National Association of Software and Service Companies and KPMG.
The R&D work being outsourced to India in these segments relates to areas like molecular biology, DNA sequencing, molecular biology software packages and molecular modelling, among others, the study said.
The embedded systems segment is expected to witness a spurt in R&D outsourcing as well and will account for revenues of $1.5 billion in 2004-05. Already, the Indian BPO services companies are getting into the development of embedded system tools like micro-controllers and design of hardware and software, the report said.
Another sunrise sector within R&D outsourcing domain is the VLSI and chip design market which is estimated to grow into a $808 million opportunity in India by 2005.
Research in basic electronics, digital electronics, VLSI design, circuit layout, design, verification and logic design will be key over the next few years.
Information security solutions will also fuel R&D outsourcing services to India. At a global level, the IS market is expected to grow to $23.6 billion by 2006.
The Indian market is also growing at a healthy compounded annual growth rate of 27-30 per cent with companies focussing on areas like cryptography, software security and reliability, network security, secure operating systems, applications security, disaster recovery, biometrics and security auditing market.
Some of the future R&D markets that Indian service providers can plan for include high performance computing which is to be worth $1.6 billion in India by 2005, wireless and mobile applications, likely to touch $37.4 billion by 2006 and nanotechnology that has the potential to grow to $1 trillion over the next decade globally, the Nasscom report said.
In the same space, the digital signal processing is expected to expand to $19 billion globally.