Happy New Year, At Last…

Phew! What a year 2001 has been–one that began with so much promise, with a

great IT-friendly budget being presented by the finance minister. This was

followed up by steady results for the JFM quarter by both software and training

companies. Next in line was the hope that government spend would go up and that

pent-up demand for new global applications, delayed by the Y2K bug, would propel

the software industry to another 50%-plus growth. Finally, there was a general

feel-good factor pervading the entire business community.

But that was not to be. To quote Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, "O what a

fall was there my countrymen, when you and I and all of us fell down, while

bloody treason flourished over us." While it may be stretching the point to

call to mind the dreaded ‘R’ word–recession–or even the September 11

events an act of treason, the trauma that has faced every major corporation .in

the first three quarters of the year has been unprecedented in the short and

glorious history of this IT-struck nation.

Surveying the IT landscape today is almost evocative of the scene that must

have hit the eyes of the mythical character Sanjay, through whose eyes the

Mahabharata epic was said to have been witnessed. The scene after the battle in

Kurukshetra could not have been very different from that witnessed in the IT

sector today. There are corpses of dot-coms littered all over the place, small

software and training firms wiped out, and even some of the larger training and

consulting firms showing sharp declines in revenues and profits. PC-makers have

not been spared either–with the much-promised government spend falling way

short of expectations, they have taken a mighty hit. But none are as scarred as

the venture capitalists, which have been forced to beat a retreat and lick their

wounds. They are paying for a capital crime–that of having funded too many

start-ups with too little customer traction. Today, the VC bears a new look, for

most have been forced to don the garb of investment banker or private equity

investor.

Light at the end of the tunnel



While the length of the slowdown tunnel is a subject of speculation for

everyone from Alan Greenspan to Yashwant Sinha to every IT CEO, there are a few

companies that have used the humbling experience to reshape their organizations

for when the markets turn, as surely they must. In the software sector,

companies that have weathered the storm well and emerged stronger (apart from

big guns like TCS, Wipro and Infosys) are Polaris, Cognizant Technology, Zensar

Technologies and i-Flex. Notably, all of these, through a combination of

strongly-focussed services and geographic diversification, have managed to

consolidate their competitive positions.

Nothing showcases this better than the work our own team at Zensar has done

since April to reposition us. From having been just one more provider of IBM,

Oracle and Microsoft programming services to now being positioned as a powerful

transformation partner to clients across the financial services, retail and

manufacturing verticals, we have come a long way, riding on a five-stage value

proposition:

• E-biz and KM strategy consulting;
• Business process reengineering, alignment management and info architecture
  
  planning;

• Software blueprinting and component-oriented software
  
  development;

• SEI CMM Level 5 offshore development, migration and
  
  maintenance center; and

• Business process enablement for clients.

If this is all it takes and a mid-sized firm like Zensar can

successfully accomplish this in a few months, one can brave flak and ask–Why

don’t hundreds of others follow suit and lay the foundation for a better

future in 2002 and beyond? There is no magic in the prescription, but it does

need clarity of vision, steely resolve to pursue that vision, and the ability to

put together a team of evangelists that will not only fashion the change but

manage the transition in the capabilities and mindsets of the entire

organization.

Let’s take a brief look at each of these areas and the

opportunities that can be tapped in the New Year. E-business Consulting is no

longer the ability to create a pretty website and wait for customer hits and

eyeball stickiness. It is a serious business of integrating front-ends and

back-ends to permit the customer a seamless view of the entire organization with

the ability to interface, interact and transact business at the click of a

mouse.

Knowledge management is no longer a cerebral set of

initiatives to keep in the cupboard and roll out at conferences and press meets.

It is the serious business of integrating all customer relationship management,

business intelligence, document management, e-learning and collaborative

computing initiatives to build true knowledge corporations with vibrant

communities of best practices and knowledge and learning sharing. And all this

happening seamlessly without extra effort across and beyond the employee and

stakeholder community.

With myriad initiatives, tools and technologies put in place

by successive CIOs and well-meaning consultants in every medium and large

organization, opportunities abound for reverse engineering.

Diverse applications into manageable data and process models,

and generating software blueprints that are more easily maintained by a new

generation of information architects–that’s a great new opening. This would

then call for yesterday’s SAP, Peoplesoft and legacy system implementers to

work with today’s Dot.Net, Websphere and See Beyond integrators to build

tomorrow’s component-oriented future-proof architectures.

Do you see the huge migration task in front of every

futuristic organization? And with every CEO and CFO looking for processes to

outsource to eliminate every possible dollar of cost from company profit and

loss accounts, there are rich business process outsourcing pickings available

for anybody who cares to look hard enough.

Taking an inside-out view



At a year-end seminar conducted by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Labs

in Mumbai, on India’s potential role in the future of the telecommunications

industry, the professor imparted a pearl of unconventional wisdom. "India’s

future in this segment lies not in conducting more auctions for telecom circles

or even in vendor beauty parades, but in a bottom-up approach to proliferation

of small network users in homes, housing colonies and village panchayats,

tapping the 802.11 unlicensed spectrum. The power of the community is greater

than the deterrent capability of the powers that be and this is one way by which

the entire country can be propelled into the 2.75 or 3 or even 4G world,"

he announced.

It is this breed of inside-out thinking that the country

expects from its IT CEOs in the coming year. This is what can take the Indian

capability beyond the reach of Chinese and Filipino programmers who can play the

cost game as well as we can and probably better, given the pyramid structure of

their polity and society. Indian companies will have to take on the developed

countries at their own game by being two steps ahead of demand, and with

breathtaking solutions that preempt problems in technology and applications and

unleash the juices of creativity across corporations, societies and nations. Do

any of us remember that there was a time when Japanese goods were scorned by the

Western world as nothing but low-quality, low-cost options? Today, the quality

image of the Japanese product is second to none. It is the quality

transformation wrought by the Sonys and Toyotas in the consumer products arena

that Indian companies have to achieve in the IT solutions area.

Notwithstanding all the Osama bin Ladens and Musharrafs of

the world, we will triumph and make our Prime Minister’s dream of "IT is

India’s Tomorrow" a reality. In 2002. Happy New Year!

Ganesh Natarajan The

author is deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies and the

global CEO of Zensar.