China Unleashed

For the last decade I have made it a point to spend a few days
in China every eighteen to twenty-four months, and each one of those six visits
has been a revelation of how much a nation can achieve when it has the
imagination and drive to make things happen. At Zensar, our early attempt to
crack the Chinese software opportunity through a venture in the newly developing
city of Zhuhai failed to fulfil its potential, possibly due to a wrong choice of
partner, but our success in the last few years with Zensar China in setting up
centers of excellence in cities like Shenzhen and Nanjing has shown that China
remains one of the most interesting markets for any firm to conquer if it has
truly global aspirations.

The fundamental difference between the Indian IT story and Chinas
current aspirations is the extent of involvement of the government in every area
of industryfrom industry strategy to infrastructure to education. For many of
us who have lived the joke that Indias first IT minister, the late Pramod
Mahajan, used to crack that beauty and IT in India achieved global recognition
thanks to the absence of government involvement, it is a revelation. At a
meeting with the vice mayor of Nanjing and the party secretary, it was amazing
to be asked Nasscoms view on the relative importance of IT and BPO since the
secretary in two successive visits to Bangalore had been struck with the shift
in focus that he saw in the industry from one to the other!

And while there are no dearth of differences in approach and
scale, the similarity is in the endearing innocence of students of computer
science and software engineering between the two countries. On the sidelines of
an agreement to collaborate for a centre of excellence in one of the prestigious
colleges in Nanjing, the one-hour interaction that followed with faculty and
students showed the extent of insight students are gaining from both IT and
business process outsourcing. Even if their command over English is still
deficient in most cases, the willingness to plunge into a question in English
and listen intelligently to the answer showed that this advantage we so proudly
boast of is at best limited in time. We need to collaborate with some of these
sources of young talent if our dream of employing 10% global talent in our
workforce is to be achieved. Zensars own efforts in using professionals from
fourteen nationalities in our project teams has shown that this is feasible and
even desirable.

In a global environment which is demanding co-sourcing and
collaboration in IT solutions, it would be well worth the effort for Indian
firms to reach out to Chinese students and entrepreneurs. Apart from the fact
that effective partnering can open the door to the large Chinese market and the
adjoining opportunities in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the innovation of Indian
talent combined with the documentation and process discipline of our Chinese
brethren can prove to be a winning combination for project execution, even in
the Western world. A disaggregated approach to the system development life cycle
could well see this happening in successful projects in future.

Finally, one more aspect of Chinese lifestyle that is different
and yet wonderful to observe is the total lack of class consciousness in their
society. When we were invited to a ceremonial lunch with the president of the
university, it was good to see that the driver and photographer who accompanied
our delegation on the two days we were in Nanjing sat at the same table with us
and enjoyed the rice wine, fresh shark soup, frog meat in coconut milk and
watermelon with the same gusto as everybody else on the table! One aspect of a
culture that is destined to succeed in the short and medium term!

The author is deputy chairman
& MD of Zensar Technologies and an Executive Council member of NASSCOM for
2007-09.

He can be reached at ganesh@cybermedia.co.in