India ranks high on igetit’s agenda

Believe it or not, India ranks second after the US in terms of engineers logging on to myigetit.com, the web-based learning programme of Tata Technologies iKS. “India became the number two country almost immediately. The top five cities are Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Pune and Mumbai in terms of traffic,” president, Tata Technologies iKS, Kevin Noe told Autocar Professional.

The Denver-based iKS launched the new version of igetit in India early this year, almost at the same time when it was being released in North America and Europe. The new version is a global project and roped in 20 partners. This also involved partners in India, which include INCAT and Tata Interactive Services (TIS). INCAT provided some of the course material and knowledge information while TIS helped out in software solutions.

The web traffic at igetit comes from 203 countries, of which engineers in 45 have purchased an igetit account. “It took us about five years to get to 45,000 engineers worldwide, and we went to 65,000 in five months,” Noe said. iKS has targeted traffic of at least 100,000 by yearend. Nearly 70 percent of this would be through purchase accounts, while the rest would be free account users. It is targeting 500,000 users by March 2010.

India would have to contribute to at least 100,000 engineers to achieve the 2010 target. As of now, engineers from Tata Motors, INCAT, Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra and Ashok Leyland have signed up for an igetit account. iKS will soon bag a corporate account from an auto OEM not present in India, whose 5,000 users will use igetit to capture best practices and methodologies as well as a common education platform for its engineers.

Not many Indian engineers have purchased an igetit account though they spend about 12-15 minutes on each visit to the site. The company has attributed the unavailability of internet connectivity in many parts of India; difficulty in making online transactions; and lack of a local support centre for this. In fact, Noe is visiting India to meet colleagues at Tata Technologies in Pune and discuss the modalities of setting up a local support centre for Indian engineers.

Colleagues in Pune had apparently indicated that installing a debit card facility could help in adoption of igetit in India. Noe planned to talk to a couple of business partners, one of which has 3,000 outlets across the country. Presently, igetit's 100,000 hours of PLM learning content is generic across all countries, but iKS has realised there might be a need to adapt and tailor it for specific markets like India.

As part of this effort, its development team is working on creating market-specific content and web pages. In the not-too-distant future, an Indian engineer might just be able to go to an India-specific page, which will include a tailor-made content as well as details of a local support centre. Noe has projected India investments in the multi-million dollar mark over the next 2.5 years.

AMMAR MASTER