In what could give a push to digital signatures in commercial applications in India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - the largest software company of the country - has received the license to become Certifying Authority (CA) for digital signatures
The company has already devised a business plan to explore Indian as well as overseas market with its digital signature solutions and will soon be building a sales and marketing team to pursue business opportunities in the market.
Digital signature is an electronic form of authenticating a document on computer. The Certifying Authorities issue a digital signature certificate to individuals or organizations to enable them to authenticate a document on computer.
When contacted by eFE, the controller of certifying authorities K N Gupta confirmed that the license was granted to TCS on Wednesday. “We are hopeful that TCS will help in proliferation of digital signature technologies in commercial applications in India,” said Mr Gupta.
Industry sources indicate TCS already has a few orders to implement e-signature solutions in hand and the company was waiting for the license to roll out these projects.
The TCS executive vice president for advanced technologies Dr M Vidyasagar, when contacted, said, “We are in touch with a few Indian companies and have been informally marketing our solutions so far. Now that we have been granted a CA license, we will be able to close some deals in near future.”
He said, “We have already developed our own software for implementing digital signature technologies and the CA license will help us in capitalizing our efforts in the market".
Given such a complex structure where security-related issues are involved, "we are far away from marketing digital security solutions as an FMCG product," says Dr Vidyasagar.
He said that the company would also use digital signature software as part of its security solution offerings in the market
TCS has so far invested around 12 person years in developing an indigenous public key infrastructure (PKI) software, Mr Vidyasagar said, adding that the company has already supplied the software to Institute of Development and Research of Banking Technology (IDRBT), a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) arm which has already received a CA license. PKI is the technology that is used to enable digital signature transactions on the computer network
TCS is the fourth organization and the second private firm that has been granted a CA license for digital signatures in India. The first license was given to a Satyam group company, SafeScrypt in February this year. Experts feel that the entry of TCS might warm up the PKI market in India as TCS is also one of the largest software players in domestic market
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