No longer an enigma to the industry, experts predict that over 70 per cent of the world's business applications will move into the ERP format over the next decade. Chairman of the Computer Society of India Deepak Shikarpur sees Pune playing a very important role in India. ``Even if the mushrooming of new software companies has been limited to a few cities, lately, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Gurgaon have emerged as fast growing software cities,'' he observed, after the conclusion of the ERP convention jointly organised by The Indian Express and the CSI.

Both the organisations have now come out with a monthly ERP journal. The idea is to satisfy the intellectual curiosity and the information needs of software experts. During the ERP convention, Shikarpur revealed that companies selling packages such as SAP, Baan and MFG/PRO were emerging as top vendors since they have developed Indian versions of their ERP packages.

However, even as the bigger industries in Pune had opted for ERP solutions, it is yet to percolate to the smaller and medium sized industries because of the costs involved. On an average, an ERP installation costs around two per cent of the company turnover.

Significantly, Pune still ranks way below the rest of the cities in the attraction of investments in the software sector. An analysis of the 430 software companies reveal that Mumbai takes the lead with 115 companies with Bangalore a close second at 87 companies, Pune has managed to attract only 23 industries. The CSI has major plans of playing a catalytic role to take initiatives taking Pune to the top. This includes organising visits of global software companies to push for benefits for being in Pune, focus on IT for manufacturing as a focus area, plan a national IT university in Pune, set up an exclusive software technology park , build computer literacy in all schools in Pune.

and appeal to all industrialists in Pune to appeal to their foreign collaborators to start software development centres in Pune.