SoftEdge Systems, a small Dublin software firm, will sign a deal next week with one of India's largest IT and services companies, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
Annu Sahni, SoftEdge's chief technical officer, said in Delhi yesterday that the deal would be "substantial", opening up a potential market of thousands of new clients.
"Tata are talking about [ selling to] a hundred schools at a time," added the chief executive of the 12-person company, Vikas Sahni. "Even if they pay just 20 per cent of our list price that will be substantial for a start-up like ours."
TCS will sell the Dublin firm's multimedia software, called DocsAlive, to the public sector in India and to corporate customers worldwide.
As with their recent bid to commercialise unused Microsoft source code in their product, Softedge's India deal has taken just over a month to conclude.
Vikas Sahni proposed the licensing deal during the Irish trade mission to India in January. The Indian conglomerate, which is a large accounts reseller for Microsoft, saw an opportunity to extend its services.
"This relationship will go a long way towards business growth with our existing Microsoft customers, as well as opening up new opportunities for SoftEdge and TCS," said Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice president of TCS, which had revenues close to €2 billion last year.
The Indian software and services sector is expected to grow by almost 30 per cent in 2006, accounting for more than € 30 billion according to Nasscom, the national software and services trade association in India.
Exports will represent almost €20 billion of that growth, making licensing deals and partnerships with Indian firms increasingly lucrative.
Another Dublin-based software firm, Steeltrace, is about to close a deal worth € 210,000 over the next two years with Siemens Information Systems (SISL) in Bangalore to integrate its requirements engineering software with the Indian firm's process improvement services.
