January 1. 2009; BANGALORE:

First the bad news:  IT's back to the future for the Indian domestic Information Technology and IT enabled Services (IT/ITeS) sector. 2009 will apparently see the slowest growth -- 13.4 percent -- since 2003, according to IDC India. 

However, some sectors will grow slightly faster -- collaborative apps., storage software,  system and networking software.

Now the good news:  India will remain the  fastest growing  market in the Asia Pacific region -- followed by China, Vietnam, Thailand and Philippines -- with a 11.4%  growth in domestic IT spend.  Telecom will grow faster than this -- at around 19.2 % IDC assures.

In 2008, the domestic market crossed 1000 billion rupees: Rs. 1010.31 billion or Rs.101031 crores, breaking up as Rs 941.85 billion (Rs. 94185 crores) for IT and Rs. 68.46 billion for ITeS ( Rs 6846 crores). Cheers to that.