NIIT ties up with Singapore's DSTA to market biz solution in India

New Delhi, Oct 4 (UNI) NIIT Technologies, leading global IT solutions provider, today announced a strategic tie-up with Singapore's Defence, Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), to develop and market GeBiz, the electronic business portal of the Singapore government, in India and other countries.

The GeBiz solution developed by DSTA, is primarily targeted at central and state governments PSUs, and corporate buyers.

''Under this complex multi-million dollar marketing tie-up involving multiple things, we are looking at the sale of one solution in the next 1 year, completely at the department and ministerial level, as government organisations have a unique requirement of electronic government procurement,'' NIIT CEO Arvind Thakur told reporters here.

While revealing that in the next two days NIIT will begin negotiations with ''prospective clients'' in the ministries, Mr Thakur refused to divulge further deails on the size of the deal and the clients they were talking to.

Underthe tie-up, DSTA will outsource the development and maintenance support of GeBiz to NIIT Tech, which will then customise the application and market the solution to other governments in South Asia, West Asia and Central Europe.

While the Intellectual Property Rights of the GeBiz solution will remain with the Singapore government, NIIT will customise the solution to be called NIIT GeBiz, in accordance with the country's requirements, enabling change of implemenation.

Mr Thakur added that e-governance is a vast subject and there is a lot of activity in the area of goverment procurement, which contributes around 20 per cent to the country's GDP.

''It is this activity that this tie-up aims to leverage and support,'' Mr Thakur added.

The GeBIZ portal (www.gebiz.gov.sg), which is a one-stop e-business site facilitating trading between government organisations and its local and overseas suppliers, on an anytime, anywhere basis, was successfully implemented for Singapore's government agencies in 2000. DSTA is open to taking it to other countries as well through NIIT.

The multi-language solution will enable information to be electronically available on one portal thereby doing away with mechanical paper work and will ensure transparency and efficiency.

It is a centrally managed system that supports end-to-end transactions with trading partners for various modes of purchasing for all goods and services. However, procurement activities can be decentralised to the individual government agencies.

In FY05, more than 60,000 business opportunities from 120 government agencies worth 10 billion dollars were published on GeBiz.

At present, around 150 government agencies, representing around 15,000 users, upload their quotation requests and tenders on GeBIZ, while 20,000 suppliers use GeBIZ to submit their bids online and undertake transactions with various Government entities.

The fully electronic process has resulted in significant time and cost savings for its users.

The Indian Government initiated a National eGovernance Action Plan in 2004, involving an allocation of Rs 23,000 crore for eGovernance projects. IT spending by the Government increased 30 per cent, to reach Rs 6934 crore in 2005-06.

NIIT has a Software Development Centre in Singapore, which is emerging as a Resourcing and Technology hub for the Asia Pacific region.

NIIT Technologies has customers in North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and Australia, and offers services in Application Development and Maintenance, Enterprise Solutions including managed services (eg service desks or operations management) and Business Process Management to organisations in the Financial Services, Transportation, Government, Retail, Manufacturing and Government sectors.

UNI RA CS RN1706