Infosys Technologies has floated a new division in the US, the first by an Indian software company, to tap huge IT spends worth billions of dollars, by various governments in the US and Europe.

For example, European governments spends around $54 billion every year on information technology.

The UK alone is expected to spend $7.3 billion on e-governance projects while the US Government Electronics and Information Technology Association expects the federal government to spend about $42 billion on software and computers in 2002.

With global recession affecting software companies in India, Infosys' strategy to focus on government projects is expected to pay of in the long run.

The new division recently won an assignment for the UK-based National Health Services. "The potential is huge. We expect better revenues and solid growth out of such projects for the governments, Viswanathan said.

The UK Government may involve Infosys in its other technology initiatives, based on the success of their current contract.

It took Infosys a year to establish the public sector practice with people being drawn from various sectors but those who had public skillsets and domain competence. "It did not happen overnight. We were fine tuning our plans for a year now," Viswanathan said.

Viswanathan said the public sector practice of Infosys will focus on information and service aggregation which leads to reduction in transaction costs and brings the people and the government closer.

"The public sector practice will create a digital model for the public to easily access information, participate in decision-making and conveniently transact with the government," Viswanathan said.

He said Infosys identified the government sector because in times of depression, it is the governments which starts investing in various sectors to stabilise the economy.

"For example, in Europe, there is a significant presence of the government in various sectors. Within that one-sixth of the budget is spent on IT," Viswanathan said.

Viswanathan said various government are in talks with Infosys for their e-governance projects. "As we started hiring local talents in various European and American countries, we started getting noticed by their respective governments and they initiated talks with us," he said.

Viswanathan said the public sector practice adopts a three-pronged approach --- policy formulation, e-relationship frameworks and infrastructure enabling. "Infosys will be able to create a model that is ubiquitous in access across time, location, device and trustworthy in information security and technology," he said.

He said governments are similar to huge corporations and face the same challenges with their various services and multitude of stakeholders.