China: The Juggernaut Rolls On

Chatting with the vice-mayor of Shenzhen city at the celebration of Zensar's

first major project executed for an American client at our China Offshore

Development center, I was amazed by how well-informed he and his entire team

were about the various Indian companies in the software sector and how curious

they were about the intricacies of our operations and strategy. Coming from a

country where passive support and the provision of infrastructure is all one

really hopes for from the government, it was all the more remarkable to see how

much the city of Shenzhen and the province of Guangdong are willing to do to

attract investment and create software opportunities for their people.

The Gartner report on outsourcing published in 2002 had predicted that China

would move out of its embedded systems and hardware niche and begin to compete

for IT and BPO projects to reach respectable global revenue by 2006. This seems

to be happening already, and the arrival of many Indian companies, notably TCS,

Infosys, Mphasis, Satyam and Zensar to set up JVs, and dedicated outsourcing

facilities in Shanghai and Shenzhen could well accelerate the emergence of this

nation along with Ireland, Philippines, Russia and Singapore as aspirants for

the global software outsourcing business. Ireland has long been a worthy

contender limited only by its talent pool and Philippines seems to have lost its

early advantage because of lack of significant government investment in

developing infrastructure or people. Singapore with its aggressive government

and outstanding infrastructure and its recent return to double digit GDP growth

can never be underestimated. Russian programmers are beginning to proliferate in

larger numbers on global software projects, as are programmers from smaller

countries like Poland and Vietnam.

Ganesh Natarajan The war for global supremacy ten years from now will indisputably be fought between India and China

But the war for global supremacy ten years from now will indisputably be

fought between India and China. A country which can turn a city like Guangzhou

into the world's electronics manufacturing capital in under two decades, and

which has the will and ability to invest in building over fifty centres of

education, research and technology can be underestimated only at our own peril.

Compare this with India, where many cities with the potential to be global

players are out in the cold because they lack the basic infrastructure with

which to attract capital.

The tragedy is that even in the few centres where we have achieved global

recognition, the callous indifference of a few politicians is sending the wrong

signals both in India and abroad. When will our politicians realise that the

easiest way to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of employment and

prosperity is to deny it the basic infrastructure it needs to succeed. The

Bangalore-Hosur road, which is now becoming a kind of poster child for the

infrastructure issues in the country, is just one symptom of this malady.

But then one road does not break an industry, much like one successful

experiment in Shenzhen or Shanghai may not guarantee success for China in the

near term. The good news is that the competition between cities has taken off

well in India and it is the Kolkatas and Thiruvananthapurams and Punes with

their supportive government machinery which will lead the charge towards the

Indian software exports industry's still intact 100-billion-dollar dream.

Finally, the question that the Shenzhen vice-mayor asked me during our press

conference in the city truly intrigued me: "If we are willing to put a few

thousand young software engineers through a rigorous training program in China

and India, will your companies find job opportunities for them?" With this

kind of aggression and willingness to invest not just in technologies and

infrastructure but also in people, success cannot be denied to the Chinese

programming community for long. The day is not far off when Chinese and Indian

software engineers will work shoulder to shoulder on projects in both countries

and abroad and give new meaning to the age old "Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai"

slogan!

The author is deputy chairman & managing director of Zensar

Technologies and chairman of Nasscom's SME Forum for Western India Ganesh

Natarajan