Eighty per cent of the fresh opportunities for India's IT and ITeS sector in the current decade (2011-2020) is going to come from new geographies, verticals and customer segments, an industry veteran said today.

President of the industry lobby group NASSCOM (National Association of Software & Services Companies) Som Mittal said growth has come back to India's IT and ITeS industry and "the growth is going to be very different from the growth that we had in the past".

"...as per our analysis, in the coming decade (2011-2020), 80 per cent of the new opportunities are going to be from new areas such as new geographies, new verticals, new customer segments", he said.

"So I think we need different focused approaches for the next decade. I think we have a sound foundation that is there", he said at the inauguration of an international conference on software engineering, organised by the Computer Society of India, and in an interaction with reporters later.

"Opportunity is huge ahead of us", Mittal said.

He said U.S.A would continue to be a large market for India's IT companies, noting that revenues from here grew faster than the industry average last year. "There is still a lot more to be tapped within the same country, within the same customers".

Mittal said NASSCOM is working with automotive and textile clusters to encourage adoption of IT by small and medium enterprises. "With cloud (computing services) coming in, it's possible to offer IT at a very reasonablec cost".

With improvement in connectivity and the advent of cloud computing services, the domestic IT market is going to see a "very large fillip", he said. Cloud computing services would throw up a new breed of entrepreneurs and drive complancency out of the big players.

On scams dominating the political and media landscape, Mittal said it would have no impact on the IT industry, saying customers are actually happy that these scandals are not being brushed away and indeed are being addressed.

He said NASSCOM has opened 220 knowledge centres in villag in different parts of the country in association with Non Government Organisations to enable people get data they need.

NASSCOM is consolidating the initiative and looking to scale it up by incorporating inputs from other models and making it platform-based.

The knowlege centre initiative has thrown up "amazing stories", he said. For example, people in a village have started cultivating mushrooms which they have never seen in their lives, by getting information from the internet.