The winds of change

INDIA: Anand Deshpande, the founder of Persistent and arguably one of the most cerebral CEOs in our industry has three simple vectors which he uses to measure whether any candidate is good enough to join his teamis the person technically excellent; does she have an ability to generate new business, as she capable of managing large teams? There is no room in this industry for somebody who is a B grader in all three. The tough times that we are passing through will need every incumbent and aspirant to be an A rater in at least one of the three areas.

Having spent a couple days in China flying the India flag at the Gartner Chairmens Summit which brought together association chiefs from the BRIC countries as well as Mexico and the Philippines, it is easy to understand why India has taken such a massive lead in the IT and Business Services outsourcing industry.

The core intellect of the young engineers in our country which demonstrated Indian capabilities at the dawn of the industry in the eighties and then led to the chapters of process quality in offshore applications development and maintenance and now innovation has got us firmly entrenched in the value chain of our global customers and even as competition starts taking pot shots at us with every possible incentive and investment, the industry stands firm in a leadership position.

We cannot rest on our laurels however, and in these difficult times when the light at the end of the economic recession tunnel might well turn out to be a new express train of industry decline that might ruin a few more countries in early 2009, the industry needs to avoid unnecessary distractions and panic buttons and should seriously address the task of building forts around our existing business streams and looking at new opportunities for entrenching ourselves even more firmly with existing and potential clients.

In the healthy growth experienced in the past many years in our core competency areas of applications management, testing infrastructure and contact centre work, the need to address innovation in all its facetscreation of new intellectual property to challenge incumbent vendors, development of new processes and business models for keeping our technology factories lean and state of the art and many othersmay have been a little slow in large organisations. Today the time and the opportunity is ripe for all industry players, big and small, product or service focused and domestic or global in outlook to unleash the forces of creativity and build a new future.

Nasscom has unearthed gold mines of possibility in Remote Infrastructure Management, Engineering Services, Product and Embedded Systems Development and Domain BPO solutions and the new investigation into Green IT and Education technologies will reveal new paths to success in this industry. There are many nascent opportunities that can be addressed Software-as-a-Service, SOA, new business intelligence solutions, grid computing, mobile content and technology and vast opportunity of media animation and gaming which holds out so much promise for becoming multi-billion dollar opportunities in each space.

And the methods of addressing these opportunities could be different from the traditional approach as well. A recent experiment we have initiated through the Emerge community of Nasscom tries to replicate the success of the Linux development and Eclipse model where a bunch of young professionals across firms are collaborating to create a new testing framework that will be freely available to the entire developer and tester community to adopt and build commercial value added services on top.

If this experiment succeeds, a community of developers dreaming big dreams and creating new products and services could well see the traditional firm boundaries of the industry being brought down like the Berlin wall, as a true spirit of collaboration pervades the industry.  - By Ganesh Natarajan, Chairman, Nasscom