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Tech giants woo India's IT pros

Narayanan Madhavan in Bangalore

Cheap hardware, free trips to the United States, all the popcorn you can eat - life's a junket if you're a computer programmer in India.

In their tussle to dominate the emerging industry for Internet-based services, industry giants Microsoft Corp and Sun Microsystems are doling out incentives as they woo programmers worldwide to back their rival software.

The courting is particularly competitive in India, where by some estimates more than 10 percent of the world's programmers work for some of the industry's lowest wages.

"They keep contacting us and say 'spend time with us'," said Shanti Sivakumar, a co-founder of iTech Workshop, which writes software for the healthcare and communications industries.

At stake is the nascent market for Web services, which will allow companies to do business over the Internet.

Microsoft and Sun are pushing rival standards - called .NET and SunONE respectively - for programming Web services.

Persuading programmers and developers to back one standard is a key battle in the fight to dominate the industry.

S.Sadagopan, director of the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Information Technology, said about 70 percent of India's software programmers are developers -- those who design the specifications for software that is then coded by other programmers.

The creativity of developers helps popularise standards, and demand for code-generating tools rises as more developers adopt a standard.

Fun and challenges

Wooing programmers and their employers in Bangalore, India's southern software centre, involves blending serious mental challenges with fun. Microsoft and Sun line up day-long seminars and months-long competitions, laced with entertainment.

In the past few weeks, Microsoft, Sun and chipmaker Intel have all held seminars for Indian developers.

Sun's 'Tech Days' saw 1,000 paid attendees, the Intel Developers Forum 700 and Microsoft's VisualStudio tool show drew 7,500.

Techie seminars are turning increasingly glitzy, with huge screens, music and lights fit for rock shows.

"It's 99 percent serious, but we also have popcorn and candy and bands playing," Sun spokeswoman Aparna Devi Pratap said of the company's annual developer show.

Exports of software and allied services from India ignored a slowdown last year, growing 29 percent to $7.5 billion in the 12 months to March. The current year is expected to see a 30 percent rise despite a sagging recovery in the United States.

Underlining the importance of the industry, Microsoft Senior Marketing Manager Daniel Ingitaraj says the number of programmers in India is expected this year to equal the 500,000 to 550,000 in the United States.

But people are hard to count in the world's second most populous country, and other estimates of the number vary wildly from 350,000 to 700,000.

The huge number of programmers is one reason for the low wages.

"There is an abundance of skills in Microsoft technologies. Because of this, the price at which you can hire the skills is lower," said Gopal Kulkarni, chief executive of Kendra Technologies, which makes software to help human resource managers sift job applications.

Ten for the price of one

In Bangalore, home to more than 1,000 software companies, you can hire a young programmer of Sun's Java language for around $200 a month -- less than a tenth of what a US counterpart would cost.

At least the incentives from the software companies are good: Sun's include up to 60 percent discounts on hardware for developers, while Microsoft offers software at a fraction of market cost.

"They have a developer programme where you pay $2,000 to $3,000 and you get an entire suite...which is not heard from other vendors," said Kulkarni.

Ingitaraj said Microsoft also wooed Indian developers this year with a competition to make faster, more reliable software.

Academic winners got a free trip to Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, while professionals won digital cameras.

For all these efforts, the software giants may run the risk of a poor return for some of their marketing bucks.

For one thing, many firms are waking up fast to Linux, the free operating system trying to rival Microsoft's Windows, said Kulkarni.

And Sivakumar of iTech Workshop said developers from her company attend technical seminars only to catch up with the latest trends.

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