Tuesday, December 13 2005 14:23 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: California-based Agitar Software Inc., the leader in enterprise developer testing, may set up a product development next year in India, which the firm believes can overtake Japan to become its biggest market in Asia Pacific in the next 3-5 years. "That (establishing a centre in India) definitely would be an opportunity with us when we plan other product things next year. We are actively working on some prototype and other products. It's something we would definitely look into", the company's Vice-President (Asia Pacific Region) Jeff Pope told sources here.

Founded in June 2002, the company's flagship product is Agitator, which helps software developers find and fix bugs when writing new programmes. Its other product is Agitar Management Dashboard. Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates are the lead investors behind the company.

"Agitator enables developers to codify knowledge about an application's context when creating unit tests", he said.

Asia Pacific contributes close to 25 per cent to the privately-held company's overall revenues, with Japan alone accounting for arond 15 per cent of it.

Pope said given the vast uptapped software test automation technology market in India, the company believes the market in this country might dislodge Japan from being its biggest revenue generator in the region in 3-5 years.

"Indian market is pretty important for us as we are in the Java space and Java language is fairly heavily used here (India) as opposed to say China where the Java market is still smaller", he said. "I think we can do a very good business here".

Pope said language is still an issue in the Chinese market, which isn't as advanced as India. "Indian market is much more advanced and matured. China is where India was some ten years ago".

Agitar is planning to take new initiatives to raise awareness, give a push for accelerated adoption of its enterprise testing solution, and additional deployments in the Indian marketplace, according to him.

"Agitator and Agitar Management Dashboard automate the creation of unit-tests and provide unprecedented objective visibility into the state of quality of software projects, for demanding enterprises", he said.