NIC partners with IBM to power national portal

New Delhi, Sept 18: National Informatics Center (NIC) today announced partnership with IBM to power the national portal of India (india.gov.in) enabling anytime, anywhere delivery of government services to the citizens.

The enhanced portal, based on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) from IBM, will provide a 'single point entry' to government information and services resulting in greater transparency and responsiveness.

''The national portal is driven by the objective of bringing transparency and trust to aspects of good governance. The portal will provide the global community a 'single sign-on' facility for Indian government services and information on India, while at the same time offering a single window access to over 5,000 websites. It will also provide a base infrastructure that can also be utilised by other e-governance projects,'' NIC Director General Dr Vijayaditya said.

IBM will provide its global experience and robust software to make the portal more user friendly, secure and scalable. The portal aims to add more features such as search, personalisation and localisation of content to suit the diverse requirements of the citizens of India.

NIC and IBM will also work towards ensuring universal accessibility of the portal for the physically challenged and those using handheld devices.

IBM India Software Group and Developer Relations Vice President and Country Executive R Dhamodaran said, ''The flexibility and scalability is possible through IBM's software and implementation of SOA, which will allow NIC and its stakeholders to collaborate and innovate in line with the dynamic needs of its customers.'' The IBM solution uses products like IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Workplace Content Manager for web publishing and personalisation, IBM DB2 Universal Database for providing robust data storage, IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind for intelligent search and navigation, and IBM Rational Application Developer for application development.

National Informatics Center (NIC) of the Department of Information Technology is providing network backbone and e-Governance support to Central Government, State Governments, UT Administrations, Districts and other Government bodies.

It offers a wide range of ICT services including Nationwide Communication Network for decentralised planning, improvement in government services and wider transparency of national and local overnments.

UNI