Rajneesh De
MUMBAI: In the 1970s when General Motors and Volkswagen were ruling the automotive sector, Honda was a small Japanese company in the distant horizon. Honda is now a highly regarded global brand name.
The same realignment could take place in the IT industry too - it is plausible that Indian IT-services companies, dwarfed today by a few global majors, could lead the world in market capitalization within two decades.
This was the essence of a NASSCOM panel discussion that attempted to predict how the IT industry would realign in the face of tomorrow's challenges.
However, it might not be exactly accurate to refer to them as Indian IT-services companies - in a 'world becoming flat' as Friedman expresses. Competitive companies are assuming not only a global footprint, but even imbibing a global character.
No wonder, therefore, that all panelists were keen to refer to themselves as representing global companies: Kevin Campbell, Member-Executive Leadership, Accenture; Craig Mundie, SVP & CTO, Microsoft; Dennis McGuire, Founder & Chairman, Veritage (formerly TPI & Equaterra) and moderator Arun Maira, Chairman, BCG; however, that even Ramalinga Raju, Founder & Chairman, Satyam Computer Services; Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Genpact; and Vineet Nayar, President, HCL Technologies.
However, the transformation into global companies will not happen automatically - again drawing parallels from the Japanese auto industry, it would be the potent combo of a low-cost base and efficiency on the shop floor that would do the trick. The early signs are already evident; Indian companies do have a low-cost base and they score highly on the manpower quality front. And as reflected in the theme of this year's NASSCOM forum, leadership and innovation are the two planks on which these companies would face their acid tests.
In addition, panelists proposed their vision and prescription on how the IT industry should respond to tomorrow's challenges. “Regulatory environment and attempts at controlling information dissemination could be the future teasers,” guessed Mundie.
Reduction of costs would not remain the only raison d'être for back-office operations, remarked McGuire; while Campbell predicted a more real time allocation of jobs across both back and front offices. Nayar was pretty vocal that there would be an increasing orientation toward software productization and technologies would see consolidation.
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