Some excerpts from Imrics link ....

The world's second largest software company that is also known as the Big Blue is offering to build "enablement centres" for India to shift from being a mere software services powerhouse to a full-fledged software industry hub.

"We are willing to invest heavily in the enablement centres based on what decision the government takes. It should standardise on open source and we will create centres for the software industry to flourish," Amuj Goyal, vice president, solutions and strategy, IBM software group, told IANS.

"Innovation on the Microsoft platform has moved out. VCs (venture capitalists) are not investing any more on the MSN platform. Gates' visit was only to carry the message of proprietary software that will not benefit the customers," he said.

Goyal, the highest ranking Indian in IBM worldwide, has helped drive the growth of the hardware leader's foray into the software business and made it a $13 billion group in just seven years, displacing Oracle from the position of the world's number two software company.

"IBM was on proprietary technology in the early 1990s. We could not see outside that. We were trying to look after ourselves, not the customers, until we started the software business in 1995. Today Microsoft is on the wrong side," said Goyal, an alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur.

"We will put up enablement centres (like e-governance or e-business centres) for software centres. Our strategy is different. Customers need to have control and that can come only through open standards. Microsoft's strategy is to get in their proprietary technology. That's a big trap," he added.