Mr. Sandeep Nagpal, Microsoft

13 th July, 2007: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) may constitute as much as 95% of the industrial units in India today, but there are still several major challenges facing their development. A session on the IT challenges in the field was held at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi on Friday and Microsoft Business Development and Relationship Marketing manager Sandeeep Nagpal was the speaker at the event.

The event was held by the corporate relations committee of the institute. The session was largely interactive, and he encouraged students with prior work experience in the IT sector to present their viewpoints on the issue.

“There are very few IT applications in the SME sector. About 1.2 million of them have Internet connections, but only 0.25 million of them have websites. The hurdles in IT adoption include the lack of knowledge, limited reserves and lack of ecosystem linkages,” said Mr. Nagpal.

Amongst the suggestions that emerged from the discussion was the need to come up with a business model of software as a service. “The system could be usage-based or we could come up with other innovative models,” he said.

Special Thanks to : Ms Vividha Kaul