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Intel CEO Dr Craig R Barrett today said that India would have to lead the global computer industry from the forefront to make it the topmost information technology player in the next millennium.

Barrett, after holding detailed interactions with the CEOs of leading IT companies, told reporters that India's IT industry is vibrant and industrialists are taking keen interest in making it a global player.

He also had praises for the quality manpower in India.

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At a special session organised by the executive council of the National Association of Software and Service Companies to discuss strategies for the next millennium, Barrett said his company is promoting the Indian computer industry and stressed on the need to introduce more venture capital.

NASSCOM Executive Director Devang Mehta requested the Prime Minister's Task Force on Information Technology to consider zero import duty on components, value-added software development and reduce costs of networking.

Later, delivering the keynote address at India's premier entertainment industry technology conference, Broadcast India, Barrett highlighted new business opportunities available through new media spurred by the growth of the Internet and e-commerce and driven by a world of one billion connected PCs.

Barrett outlined two new market opportunities available to the content creation industry. The first is to look beyond the traditional film industry at innovative interactive digital content, he said. The second is to create new revenue streams in the consumer and entertainment fields through embracing e-commerce and other emerging digital content tools.

The next step for the content industry is to converge its digital content with the PC industry's emerging digital devices such as DVDs and set-top boxes. This would lead to new eyeballs watching and interacting with Indian content, not just in India but also in Indian communities world-wide, Barrett explained.

Similarly, by closely tracking technical developments of the new hardware platforms, digital content creators can accelerate their time to market, he pointed out.

When a new business dynamics, such as the delivery of PC economics on the workstations, collide with one billion connected PCs, the opportunities are endless for digital content creators, he said.

Over the past five years Intel has been driving initiatives across the technology and content industries to ensure that Intel architecture based platforms are the best platform for digital content creation, he claimed.

All major content creation applications are being ported to Intel's 32-bit and future 64-bit architecture based platforms.

Some of the most advance video editing, audio tuning and 3D animation and virtual environments are all now based on Intel's 32-bit Pentium II Xeon processor platform, he said.

The Pentium II Xeon processor delivers the world's best price-performance on floating point and 3D graphics together with large memory and input and output. These are important elements to ensure that the digital content creators have an optimised and balanced workstation platform, he said.

This results in content creators having high-performance single and multiple image displays, integrated video and 3D functionality and advanced realism.

This is Barrett's third visit to India and his first since becoming Intel's CEO in May this year.

Barrett's visit to India marks the first leg of a six-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The tour will also take him to Vietnam and the People's Republic of China.

UNI

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