India's Next Step.

This article focuses on the computer software industry of India. The online brokerage firm Sharebuilder Corp. bought inexpensive customer-relationship-management software from Talisma Corp. in Bangalore, India, saving enough money on the deal to let it use the application to continue to run a call center in the United States. According to the National Association of Software and Service Cos., a trade group for India's IT industry, India's revenue from software sales and research and development increased 30% last year to $3 billion. Established software vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, already tap Indian talent not just to crank out code but to help design and develop commercial offerings. Increasingly, Indian software entrepreneurs want to put their own companies' names on product labels, at home and abroad, by capitalizing on their country's highly educated and low-cost workforce to build and sell software for everything from back-office programs to customer-facing applications. INSETS: THE UPSHOT;UP-AND-COMERS: Companies with bright futures.