Monday, December 29, 2008

PHP Circle in Chennai

While many believe that the real action in the IT business happens in the large companies, there are very few who realise that there is life outside as well. There is a vast potential for Indian small-scale IT companies and the thousands of job-aspirant programmers/engineers who work with them.

A group of professionals and companies has joined hands to form Chennai’s first PHP professional forum, a free forum, called the ‘PHP Circle’.

While TCSes, Infosyses and Wipros are busy catering to the large US business segment for software development, there is a large, untapped segment viz., the US and European small online business market. This is one of the high growth markets today, especially in the US, as businesses built around strong revenue models are now emerging from the rubbles of the dot com bust.

Web applications market for small online business has its own characteristics. The size of each work is small, with low budgets (yet very viable for the Indian SSI IT market), and project management issues are more complex than the conventional software market. Still, Indian IT SSIs would do well to focus on these segments, as there is relatively less competition in this market from the established IT companies.

While Microsoft platforms and other higher-end tools are the preferred by medium of large-scale companies, small businesses prefer PHP and mySQL to develop their web applications in view of their being low-cost and being from the open source stable.

Due to the strong inroads that Microsoft ASP and .NET have made in providing easy tools to create web applications, and also due to the fact that India is favourably tilted towards Microsoft technology, there are not many trained programmers and solution-providers available to pursue PHP-based development. So, concerted efforts are required to develop manpower in PHP and mySQL. Companies willing to join these efforts are welcome to become members of this forum.

The activities proposed, all free of cost, include weekend classroom training for programmers, free tutorials, monthly forum meets with popular guest speakers, career-related contact opportunities, PHP Help Desk through bulletin boards, weekly newsletter with job postings by companies, sub-forums in engineering colleges and more.
Anyone with the required professional qualifications/programming experience and desirous of becoming a PHP programmer can become a free member of this circle. Since PHP is a fast expanding open source development tool, India can and must become the world leader in this widely used domain. And future prospects abound.

‘PHP Circle’ is a Chennai based non-profit forum. For More Information Click Here

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