40 years at the Top

We are back with the annual Dataquest Top 20 rankings. While the list continues to be dominated by the IT services industry, 2022 has been a really good year after the virtual collapse of the Indian economy in 2020 and the recovery of 2021. Overall, the list offers great hope for the future and India’s role in the global digital economy

It’s been a long 40-year journey for both Dataquest and Indian IT. During this period, we have seen the National Computer Policy of 1984, the first software policy of 1986 and the Liberalization of 1991. The initial policies were not a grand success and had to be tweaked from time to time. Liberalization itself was brought on by India’s biggest financial crisis till then.

The 1990s were momentous and had their share of policies and multiple tweaks. The National Telecom Policies of 1994 & 1999. The coming of the commercial Internet that led to all the powerful work devices that followed. The Y2K crisis led to a new era of IT services giants.

The 2000s saw one revolution coming after another: Laptops really spread, the Wi-Fi became essential, smartphones could do everything, India became the broadband mobile capital of the world, followed by the era of startups and apps… Both large enterprises and SMBs started digitally transforming themselves with greater and greater pace with each passing year.

One way to chronicle all this is by the annual DQ Top 20 ranking. The focus was not on just the Top 20. DQ in fact covered hundreds of IT companies every year. We have chronicled the rise and fall of all the players of note. The Top 20 is a fascinating annual list. Some companies have survived while some have perished. Some have revived themselves while new ones have come and left the oldies way behind.

Problems and crises have been a constant

In 1977 the actions of the then Janata Party government led to the flight of players like IBM. 1980s was a time for new policies but also great struggle for the new IT players with the License Raj and export import problems. The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s affected the US more than India. But the 2008 financial crisis affected everyone equally.

The industry is usually no stranger to sudden crises. The IT sector scrambles, gets into war mode and comes out with solutions for both itself, its clients and the non-IT industry at large. The Covid pandemic would prove to be no different. You can use the terms Old and New Normal around every crisis. The Normal keeps changing. We have had umpteen New Normals till date.

All round Digital Transformation

A lot of jargon which floated around for the common person ended up becoming policy post-pandemic. It was all implemented at the individual, company, industry and government level.

Digitization: We have been hearing talk of a paperless office for decades now, but it finally seems to be happening. Online money got a boost. Even though blockchain and crypto has been controversial, there is a lot of forward movement.

Online identification processes, the rise of the mobile workforce, the government jumping on to the bandwagon, changes in education along with a reliable cloud has led to the rise of digitization.

Ecommerce: Probably the biggest pandemic story was how this ecosystem expanded to all the corners of India. It expanded to every product category. You name it: Groceries. Clothes. Make-up. Medicines. Swiggy. Zomato. Dunzo.

The no touch era has truly begun as the government also came out with a national drone policy. The consumer network is ready to face future tragedies and businesses are primed for business continuity.

Collaboration: Before the pandemic it was in name only and now it is actual showing results and there are certain industries, sectors and job profiles where online collaboration can be implemented 24X7. There has been a succession of investments in both solutions and infrastructure

Remote Work: For another section, the Hybrid work environment is the way forward. They are looking at the best of both worlds. Pick and choose. This could be also for a single job profile or an industry at large.

Others still want to totally return to the old world. How else will you service the client and track real-time progress? How else will you justify your real estate investments and ensure that disparate teams collaborate with each other?

Moonlighting: All this has led to the problem of moonlighting, a pressing issue for Indian IT services giants. They were wracked by both high and unprecedented attrition and moonlighting.

On the face of it working for two or more companies simultaneously appears to be very wrong and that was the initial reaction of the Indian IT industry, with Wipro leading the way. But with each passing day it is gaining acceptance and now many companies are coming out with a moonlighting policy.

Remote work. Hybrid work. Moonlighting. Right now, the employee seems spoilt for choice and a corporate paradigm shift has occurred. How long this will last and how it will shape the 2020s remains to be seen.

Bandwidth: All this would not have been possible without bandwidth. The overall consumption, speed and reliability of bandwidth went up significantly: Both fixed line and mobile. This was a boon for the home consumer. Mobile workforce, large enterprisesand SMBs.

Cloud adoption: Another factor stitching it all together is the cloud. We are already living in a cloud world. Each and every day, millions of data centres cater to billions of devices sending trillions of GBs of data all across the world.

And it’s not just data, but cloud services. The entire offline infrastructure is being transferred to the cloud. If the Internet meant that we all lived in an online world, now businesses live in a virtual world.

Automation: This has led to automation and overall increased IT adoption has resulted in changes at the smallest level of SMBs right up to a global behemoth like, say Amazon. Remote operations, robots and bots could pave the way forward.

Hybrid Education: The business of education transformed. While online education may have been a flop in our actual schools, K12 online coaching still flourishes. The potential is the greatest in colleges and professionals looking to upgrade themselves.

We are entering a world where the right skill with the right application will matter and not the right degree from the right university. Here online education can cut costs, cater to remote regions, and keep updating the syllabi at a much faster rate than the offline system can cope.

The role of the Government

Digital India has come of age, and this is the first time that the government got its act together. During the pandemic it came out with the Aarogya Setu in record time with CoWIN being its biggest success. Now the latter is being expanded beyond Covid.

There are the multiple PLI schemes for the electronics and telecom sector along with Startup India. The Open Network for Digital Commerce will be a solution in helping small ecommerce players and expanding the entire industry.

The biggest success is UPI, which has emerged as a global leader in both volume and innovation. Both rural and urban India along with small and large enterprises have embraced it with the world looking to adopt it.

HealthTech & AgriTech: Two much neglected areas entered the spotlight. The private healthcare industry in India upgraded itself and now is getting ready to be integrated with the government system which is going digital.

We are still predominantly an agricultural nation and startups are working on coming out with a myriad of solutions which will benefit the smallest farmer. This single industry has the greatest growth potential and maybe isn’t even 1% of what it can or should be.

Disruptive business models & BCP

Digital Literacy received a huge backing and therein lies an opportunity for business of all kinds to change and give digital Customer Experience of the best kind at all levels: B2B, B2C and B2G.

According to the Gartner definition, “Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.”

Digitization. Digitalization. Digital Transformation. It’s all happening. All this was born out of a need for BCP. We have been primed and are ready to ensure business continuity in the face of whatever calamity that may come.

The decades to come…

2020 was Annus Horribilis of India when all the good work of the past decade seems to have been undone. But we recovered in 2021 and from 2022 onward we look to be the fastest growing large economy in the world maybe for decades to follow. While we overtook France and UK some time back, the timetable for surpassing first Germany and then Japan has been pushed forward by many economists.

With the basic digital transformation needs being taken care of, we can move to more advanced emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality and blockchain. 5G has finally come to India and we can leverage that. Industry 4.0 is a reality in a country where certain areas were struggling even with Industry 1.0.

If you look at the current Top 20 list, then you will see quite a high double-digit growth in the post-Covid era. There is no reason why we cannot continue with this kind of growth for another decade, thanks to the above-mentioned factors.

With the way things have gone, it is safe to say that one cannot even attempt to predict the DQ Top 20 of 2030 or even which industries and sectors will dominate that list!

By Sunil Rajguru

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in