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The Canadian Federal Government has embarked on a broadband network connectivity project that will cover the whole of Canadian cities and inhabitations by the year 2005.

HYDERABAD, March 7

THE Canadian ICT (information, communication and technology) services industry offers huge business opportunities for application development, business process outsourcing (BPO), backoffice and disaster recovery services, according to Mr Keith Parsonage, Director-General, Information Technology, Government of Canada.

While addressing the IT industry here under the aegis of Indo-Canadian Business Chamber, Mr Parsonage said that though the software services industry, which has revenues of about $123 billion, had flat growth rate over the last two years, there were several pockets within the services sector that had immense outsourcing potential.

For instance after the 9/11 incident, security-related business in the software services sector had witnessed remarkable growth. As against a growth rate of about seven per cent in the ICT industry in the Canadian market, this segment was set to witness a growth rate of over 24 per cent. About 250 companies were addressing this niche business space, Mr Parsonage said.

Interacting with the representatives of the IT industry in the presence of Director of Software Technology Parks of India, Col M. Vijay Kumar, Mr Parsonage said that the Canadian Government had embarked on a broadband network connectivity project to cover the whole of the country by 2005. This project had opened up a whole gamut of business application development for overseas and domestic companies in the areas of e-learning, telemedicine, e-governance, e-net and e-content. The Government had made a budgetary allocation of $105 million for this initiative.

To start with, all education institutions had been networked, making it amongst the pioneering initiatives anywhere in the world, he explained.

With some of the biggest Indian IT services companies including TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Satyam, Patni, already locating their development-cum-support centres in Canada to service their clients both as local centres and also provide near-shore services, "we expect many more software services companies finding their way to Canada to leverage the potential opportunity here where the tax system is amongst the lowest,'' Mr Parsonage said.

Yet another bright spot for overseas software services provider is the healthcare sector. The Federal Government had made a budgetary allocation of about $600 million for healthcare informatics aimed at simplifying procedures in the entire healthcare administration.

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