"We are established in the commercial Linux community"

Grim Gjonnes, who heads the marketing division of Trolltech, was in India

recently to scout for partners who will help the company build a strong market

for its products. Focussed on Linux, the Santa Clara-based organization is

confident of making inroads into the education, oil and natural gas, elec tronic

design and automation verticals on this OS platform. Grim is excited by the

growing adoption of Linux by the corporate segment, and hopes to harness this

with Trolltech’s flagship product, Qt.

What technologies will Trolltech offer to the Indian market?



We are a software company providing software development tools and libraries

as well as consultancy services. Our flagship product, Qt, is a C++ toolkit that

can be used for writing applications for Windows 95/98/NT4/Me/2000, Mac OS X,

Linux, Solaris, HP-UX and many other versions of Unix with X11. Qt offers the

advantage of being able to incorporate the same or better performance in the

application with fewer lines of code. Qt applications can also be built visually

using the Qt Designer.

For the Indian market, we are looking at developing applications for the

education, oil and natural gas, electronic design and automation verticals on

the Linux platform. And we think that the animation and special effects market

in India also has a lot of potential.

What are your investment plans for the Indian market?



We will be in the short-term and medium-term not establish an independent

physical presence in India, but rather build on the position of our partners

already having a solid presence in the market.

We are however willing to invest in building a market for our products here

and allow our partners to participate in the development of this market. We will

also reward partners that can demonstrate an ability to really build and

maintain the market.

How do you see the Indian market from a Linux-adoption standpoint?



We are definitely seeing a greater level of corporate acceptance for Linux

in India now. More and more corporate organizations are standardizing on Linux.

With more and more accounts and office applications being developed on Linux, we

will see a greater number of large corporates and also the SME adopting Linux.

It is a reinforcing loop and once the ball starts to roll, it will roll faster

and faster.

The Indian market is beginning to show interest in Linux and this comes on

both the desktop and embedded applications front. A number of Indian software

development organizations are writing applications in this direction.

By what timeframe do you see Linux becoming mainstream, because not too

many mission critical applications are on Linux today?



We are actually seeing more and more mission critical applications being

developed and deployed on Linux. For instance, air control works on Qt. Yes,

this varies from country to country, like in Germany and China there are a large

number of such applications, while the same cannot be said for India as of

today.

But the shift can clearly be seen here in India too. While it is much slower,

it can be seen, and more so the IBM presence in this segment will only help

hasten this. It is another two years to go and Linux will be big.

How will the new UnitedLinux initiative impact the growth of Linux?



In principle, Trolltech supports initiatives that contribute to

standardization in the Linux market and reduce the fragmentation in this market.

Indeed, we believe that such initiatives in general are good for our customers

in the Linux market, and good for the attractiveness of the Linux market as a

whole.

However, our products are distribution-neutral, and such initiative would

therefore not have any immediate impact on our products or our business. It

should also be said that the success of such initiatives is highly dependent on

the ability to gather the support of major players.

Getting the support of major players not currently supporting the UnitedLinux

Initiative will therefore increase the importance of this initiative.

India has a big developer base, how are you looking at capitalizing on

that?



Like I said earlier, we are not looking at a direct presence here in India,

so the logical route is to go through the channel. Our tie-ups with the

independent software vendors (ISVs) will provide us with a much bigger customer

base. It will also give us the opportunity to develop critical applications with

our partners for our customers. We have established ourselves in the commercial

Linux community and are looking at the same positioning here in India too. We

prefer to work with partners and will continue to do so. We are looking at

developing strong links with Indian companies and are also exploring to align

ourselves with Indian organizations that have complementary products. We are

also exploring tie-ups with training organizations to train people on Qt.

What skill set will you look for before appointing partners?



While we will definitely want partners to have C++ and Visual Studio

expertise, we will also take them through an extensive training process. Also we

will look at partners who have the focus on one or more verticals that we talked

of.

The partner should have the bandwidth to service our global customers who are

either already present in India or are looking at opening shop here. We will

extend our total support to our partners here.

When you say support, is there anything in particular that you refer to?



We have been investing in market development and our channel partners. And

we are pretty happy with the progress achieved so far. So we will continue to do

so. Our investments will take the form of marketing activities (including an

attractive clause in our reseller agreement about co-marketing funds),

competence enhancing activities for our partners, and special business

arrangements for technology partners with complementary business ideas having a

global potential.

Our road shows in Bangalore, Pune and Delhi drew a considerable audience and

we will continue that activity. We are also planning to hold technical seminars

in the near future to cover major regions. For the seminars we will bring our

best people here.

MOHIT CHHABRA in New Delhi