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IBM’s Venture Capital Group, is now eyeing India as a potential geography. The group is in the process of identifying four VC firms in the country for the programme.

The IBM Venture Capital Group is setting up an India presence and will have a small team in place in one or two months. This team will work with the Vc firms and local IBM resources from across divisions.

Claudia Fan Munce, MD, IBM Venture Capital Group told that the innovation in India was growing at a rapid pace, in fact faster than how it was in China when they wanted there a couple of years ago. She said that they were looking to tie up with a few VC firms including a couple of local VC players to help them identify innovative companies and technology. According to her, the hot sectors in India for the group include KPO, healthcare, Web 2.0, collaborative & content space.

She added that the area of adoption of openstandards and open source software was also of interest. IBM Venture Capital Group started the group about seven years ago to partner with VC firms to create a stragetic advantage with portfolio companies and key technologies in new markets. This includes providing hardware and software resources, people, disribution power, enablement of assets, generation of sales leads and access to Fortune 500 customers.

Globally though, the number of partners through VCs has gone up from the initial 21 companies in 2000 to about 1,300 currently. The group’s MD said that 150 plus companies out of this were generating significant revenues for IBM. The IBM Venture Capital Group, which draws its resources from all of IBM’s divisions, has partners to US, China, Brazil, Europe, Germany, Ireland, Japan and Israel.

With the massive increase in organised retail in India there is going to be an analogous increase in volumes. Handling such great volumes is going to be a tough task, and this is where Information Technology will become the backbone of the sector. As far as choices are concerned, there are various ‘retail solutions’ provided by different IT companies. The most popular are Retail Enterprise Resource MAnagement and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Retail Enterprise Management is a form of ERP and primarily provides an integrated solution for the planning, forecasting, mjerchandising, inventury and distribution requirements of retailers, while Customer Relationship Management takes care of relationships with customers, including the recording, storage and analysis of customer information. Newer solutions include wireless handheld devices for inventory management, paying through mobile phones, retail web portals and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which is an automatic identification method that replaces the barcode system presently used by the retailers.

Recently, many retail solutions have been developed by international companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, HCL and even Indian companies like Dynamic Vertical Solutions (DVS), Wipro, Tata Infotech. Software packages like LS Retail by DVS, SAP’s reail solutions, Navision, and Essents are to name a few present. These can be effectively tackled through the implementation of technology in a structured and suitable manner.

The only problem is that Indian retail is still far behind in Information Technology terms. Atanu Ghosh, CTO, DVS explains that the The problem with Indian retailers was that they still look upon Information Technology as a cost rather than an investment.

However, customised software has many limitations which get exposed over time as the tasks become complex and scale of operations increase.