We all thought Digital was dead, right? Well not in India. Digital India, which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and is 51 per cent owned by Compaq, told The Register today that it has opened offices in London and Vienna and in June will also open a Munich office. Som Mittel, president and CEO of Digital India (DI), said that since last July, his firm had made the decision to focus on software for the enterprise. He said: "Europe will have a major resource crunch and this can make or break a company. India is well established as a place for high quality resources." DI employees 500 staff worldwide, but 425 of those are software engineers, with the vast majority located in different locations around Bangalore. He said 70 people were involved in Web technology, with 30 more coming on board shortly. Because Compaq is a major investor in the company, that alllowed DI to work with its customers and partners on Internet infrastructure, call centres and system management, as well as Web enabling applications. The teams specialise in support and development for Unix, VMS, NT, Oracle, SQL, Java, and XML, amongst other software technologies, said Mittel. Large corporations were struggling to integrate their existing heterogeneous systems but the reasons for moving to Intranets were too compelling for them to ignore, he said. Setting up business to business applications was a major reason and significantly clipped costs, he said. The breakdown of how many PCs there are worldwide is most interesting. India, for example, is now buying something over 1.2 million PCs a year, but, according to sources, while worldwide penetration of PCs is something like 60 per 1000 of the population, in the US it is 300/1000, while in India it is 1.5/1000. The odd thing here is that India has a high proportion of literate English speakers and so should, by rights, be a major player in the industry. We're certain that one day it's time will come. It was nice to see that old maroon Digital logo again, notwithstanding... ®