IBM Sametime could rise again as HCL makes shortlist for India's home-grown Zoom clone

HCL and Zoho are among the companies shortlisted in the Indian government's competition to develop a locally-made video conferencing platform for its own use. The competition, which kicked off in April, seeks a local developer to reduce India's dependence on foreign collaboration platforms, and was announced not long after …

[Charlie Clark]

Well, there's already Jitsi… and whatever Nextcloud is using.

[eionmac]

A jitsi server in India would suffice.

A local server(s) in India using Jitsi would suffice. They could improve (whiteboard?) to it and pass back to Jitsi.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A jitsi server in India would suffice.

Why do techies love jitsi*? Every now and then I get invited to a jitsi vidcon - it's like being back in the good old days of video conferencing - 45 minutes of 'i can't connect' - 'can you hear me' - 'maybe it would work better without video?' and the ever popular 'why don't you dial in on your phone and just use the video on your pc?'. Zoom may not be perfect but at least it works. I guess it's the same mindset that insits we use 'ComplexFileSharingAppNooneHasEverHeardOfAndHasAReallyClunkyInterface' instead of Google Drive or Dropbox.

(Disclaimer: I know - Open Source - Security - Incompetent User...yadadyadayada)

[Anonymous Coward]

Homegrown?

I was going to make a snarky comment about how Sametime hardly counts as "home-grown", but in fairness IBM had been moving development work to India for a long time before it finally shed Lotus Notes.

[fnusnu]

Thereby proving the Indian government is as stupid as all the others: The government also prefers making local products because they meet the industry development goal of enhancing local expertise, developing, and productising software.

[James Anderson]

Well not as dumb as the UK gov. which pays over the top for mostly American software, and, lets thier shrinking software development industry wither and die.

Incidentally one of the many harmful side affects of selling local companies to foreign conglomerates is that any locally sourced software is ditched for the corporate standard usually Microsoft and Oracle/SAP.

[pradeepvasudev]

Slightly misleading

The real challenge for the Indian government has been this: The mobile market is overrun by Chinese phones and a significantly large number of apps are Chinese too (tiktok, helo and so on.) The collab market is either Zoom (Chinese, insecure, probably sending data to the Chinese govt) or the American kinds like Webex (slow, expensive, and probably sending data to the Americans). Why should the government trust either party when it needs have its own conferences?

India really is in a difficult geo - on one side is Pakistan (avowed safehouse of Islamic terrorists from everywhere), which can't be touched because the 'mericans are still trying to work things out on the Afghan side and on the other is China, with lots of border disputes.

For Europeans and Americans, Islamic terror is an on-again, off-again thing, and China is an abstract threat. For Indians, both are real, every day, existential challenges.

And the West is only occasionally supportive and even then flaky in its support. When China tried to embarrass India by bringing up Kashmir in the UN SC, it was supported by only one other country - the United Kingdom (though it changed tack later).

No wonder the average Indian still thinks of Russia as their only true all-weather ally. And France a close second.