If overseas shoppers can choose from a variety of hypermarket retail chains or discount stores such as Wal-Mart, Target and Carrefour for a great bargain, India isn’t too far away from a similar experience.

The hypermarket retail business, which began in the country with the opening of the RPG group’s Giant retail chain and Pantaloon’s Big Bazaar, looks set to take off. The CL Raheja group and the Dubai-based Landmark group, two leading players in the organised retail business, have finalised plans to enter the hypermarket business.

The Landmark group, which runs the Lifestyle retail chain, has set the ball rolling by identifying places to start hypermarkets. The group has started acquiring property spaces in Bangalore and Hyderabad for discount stores. Industry sources said that Landmark is expected to bring in the technical and management expertise of MNCs for their new venture.

While Trent, which runs Westside, has announced its intention to start food retail stores, the plan has yet to take shape.

According to industry sources, 42% of retail consumption is in the food and grocery business. Domestic retailers could soon start experimenting with multi-retail formats, taking a cue from global trends, with a particular chain getting into different formats including departmental stores and hypermarkets.

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Indian software services companies are looking at entering the open source software market. These companies plan to offer support, implementation and maintenance services to corporates who use or plan to use open source.

While open source software is identified with Linux, there are several other enterprise applications more widely used than these two popular representatives of the open source software industry.

ERP applications, application servers, and messaging software products are some of the popular applications in the open source software world around which Indian companies are looking at offering services.

While Linux has attracted a lot of the attention, the reality is that application like Apache with a 90% market share in the internet server market are far more successful. In fact open source applications like Apache, Compiere and Jboss have already reached high levels of acceptance in the global corporate world.

These applications are emerging as a new business opportunity for Indian software service companies. India's strength in software is in services and local companies are looking at leveraging open source application for services. Smaller software services companies are more active in developing offshore services models based on the open source software industry and are developing capabilities to integrate services around open source products into their mainstream services.

The biggest difference between open source and proprietary software, beside the obvious one of ownership of the software, is sales, support and maintenance. While open source software's biggest advantage is that it is maintained and improved by a community of committed software developers, it does not have much muscle by way of sales efforts. Companies like Mastek, Patni Computers are already executing projects on open source software.

Patni is said to be looking at providing consulting services to our customers for adopting open source and are looking at solutions and services even in the embedded Linux area. It is already helping its clients with architecture design and migration to open source operating systems like Linux.

In short, Indian companies are now evolving and building models to sustain this part of the software industry.