Telesoft sales director Andy Evripides has come to Bangalore from the U.K. not on your typical outsourcing-partner quest but rather to sell his company’s telecommunications products in India. So has Alan Hardy from Wayfarer, a market leader in ticketing systems. And so has Lesley Freed, chief executive of Saco.

Ten companies in all—mostly medium-sized U.K. players—are on a visit to Bangalore and other cities in India as part of a U.K. delegation to India with the notion to first sell their products and later think about setting up development center work on a “part outsourcing” model.

There’s good reason. With more than 80 companies from Bangalore having operations in the U.K. and almost the same number of British companies holding India offices, the quest for serious “business marriages” has begun in earnest, says Richard Stagg, the U.K. high commissioner to India

“India has become a hypergrowth market for us now,” Mr. Evripides said. “The EU has become over-saturated for mid-sized firms like us. Our priority is to find a good partner here in India with whom we can work together and market our products directly in India, and later set up a manufacturing base here.”

That’s partly because the infrastructure, while challenged, is coming into place. Take the airlines. In 2004 there were about 19 flights from the U.K. to India, a number that has shot up to 110 flights per year, according to Mr. Stagg.

Britain, for one, could benefit from such a boost. The region has become a software development powerhouse, and its bustling companies are itching for expansion. It now ranks as Europe’s leading investment market of software and IT services and has accounted for 20 percent of all domestic investment there from 2006-2007. The region boasts more than 100,000 specialist software makers. The number of software startups in the U.K. is also more than anywhere else in the EU.

Internationally, as digital content turns business models upside down across industries, the U.K.’s strength as an IT innovator has become more prominent and businesses there are collaborating successfully in the global arena to forge partnerships. India falls neatly in their expansion plans.

“We are here to look for a partner to market our products in a market which is booming,” said Allan Hardy, an account manager for Wayfarer, a unit of Parkeon, which dominates the U.K. ticketing systems business. “We see the infrastructure growth is huge, the need for billing and ticketing systems is tremendous.”

Red Herring's Sufia Tippu reported from Bangalore.