Recession was not GOOD enough?

It seems the global recession is getting over. It surely seems to have
bottomed out in Asia and America, though Europe still looks a little uncertain.
India, where it was at best a slowdown, also seems to be getting over it.

That is good news. Or is it?

There is one strong reason why I feel it is not. Every recession brings with
it some positive, permanent changes that makes the businesses and economy more
efficient and productive. This recessionwhich was unique in the sense that it
affected the wealthy and affluent more than it did the common man, at least in
emerging economies like Indiadid not last long enough to decisively tell us
whether some of the new experiments that businesses had resorted to counter
slowdown were successful or not. With the pressure easing off, people are
leaving many of those experiments half way.

Let me talk about our communitythe IT community in India. There are four
definite trends that the slowdown had brought in. I called them GOOD acronym
for Green IT; Open Source; Outsourcing; and a Domestic focus by the large,
global IT services firms in India. While the slowdown did not introduce them, it
certainly brought them to focus.

And I guess, some of them are being left halfway, as the pressure eases.

Shyamanuja Das

Take Green. Six months back, every CIO talked of energy efficiency in every
available forum. Vendors packaged everything with a green tag. Today, as I talk
to CIOs they do not elicit answers, not to talk of enthusiastic participation.
Yes, every one is doing something or the other. But with the exception of a few
industries like telecom, that is too little to have any significant impact on
the business.

A clarification: globally, the large technology companies are still seriously
into it because they believe that energy efficiency will become more and more
important in future, from a business standpoint, as well as their concern for
the environment. But neither of these concerns are derived directly from the
present economic condition.

I guess open source is having a similar fate. In short, it is no more
imperative, not to say that all efforts have stopped. But the enterprise-wide
open source dream that many were seeing is certainly out of fashion.

I am a little more optimistic about outsourcing. While the easing of pressure
would certainly slow down the momentum to variablize everything (that we saw
some time back), it has come to stay. And here is why: unlike the above
twoGreen and Open Sourceoutsourcing had a critical mass before the slowdown
started and the supplier community was readyboth to grab the spurt in actual
demand and to answer the questions asked by the newly interested.

That brings me to the D in GOODthe interest in Indian domestic market by the
India-based export firms. Well, if I am optimistic about outsourcing, I am
certain about this one to stay. Only thing that I would like to say is that
while the popular belief is that the recession forced the companies to look at
India market, and that is why I included it in my acronym, I do not essentially
believe it. If we see user companies (and all the other three trends I talked
about), they were driven by a need to better bottomline by minimizing cost. IT
services firmswhether Indian or non-Indiandid not look at Indian market for
that. They looked at India for growth. And no one typically looks at a new
market for growth in the midst of a slowdown. The thrust was there earlier. The
recession in the West just brought that to limelight a little more.

So, here is my bottomline. The recession this time did not do too much GOOD
to us. So should we be happy that it is over or should we shed tears it did not
last long enough to have a lasting impression. Or should we just focus on our
work?

The author is Editor of Dataquest.
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in