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The Winds of Change

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Anand Deshpande, the founder of Persistent and arguably one of the most

cerebral CEOs in our industry has three simple vectors which he uses to measure

whether any candidate is good enough to join his teamis the person technically

excellent; does she have an ability to generate new business, as she capable of

managing large teams? There is no room in this industry for somebody who is a B

grader in all three. The tough times that we are passing through will need every

incumbent and aspirant to be an A rater in at least one of the three areas.

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Having spent a couple days in China flying the India flag at the Gartner

Chairmens summit which brought together association chiefs from the BRIC

countries as well as Mexico and the Philippines, it is easy to understand why

India has taken such a massive lead in the IT and Business Services outsourcing

industry. The core intellect of the young engineers in our country which

demonstrated Indian capabilities at the dawn of the industry in the eighties and

then led to the chapters of process quality in offshore applications development

and maintenance and now innovation has got us firmly entrenched in the value

chain of our global customers and even as competition starts taking pot shots at

us with every possible incentive and investment, the industry stands firm in a

leadership position.

We cannot rest on our laurels however, and in these difficult times when the

light at the end of the economic recession tunnel might well turn out to be a

new express train of industry decline that might ruin a few more countries in

early 2009, the industry needs to avoid unnecessary distractions and panic

buttons and should seriously address the task of building forts around our

existing business streams and looking at new opportunities for entrenching

ourselves even more firmly with existing and potential clients. In the healthy

growth experienced in the past many years in our core competency areas of

applications management, testing infrastructure and contact centre work, the

need to address innovation in all its facetscreation of new intellectual

property to challenge incumbent vendors, development of new processes and

business models for keeping our technology factories lean and state of the art

and many othersmay have been a little slow in large organisations. Today the

time and the opportunity is ripe for all industry players, big and small,

product or service focused and domestic or global in outlook to unleash the

forces of creativity and build a new future.

Ganesh natarajan

Nasscom has unearthed gold mines of possibility in Remote Infrastructure

Management, Engineering Services, Product and Embedded Systems Development and

Domain BPO solutions and the new investigation into Green IT and Education

technologies will reveal new paths to success in this industry. There are many

nascent opportunities that can be addressedSoftware-as-a-Service, SOA, new

business intelligence solutions, grid computing, mobile content and technology

and vast opportunity of media animation and gaming which holds out so much

promise for becoming multi-billion dollar opportunities in each space. And the

methods of addressing these opportunities could be different from the

traditional approach as well. A recent experiment we have initiated through the

Emerge community of Nasscom tries to replicate the success of the Linux

development and Eclipse model where a bunch of young professionals across firms

are collaborating to create a new testing framework that will be freely

available to the entire developer and tester community to adopt and build

commercial value added services on top. If this experiment succeeds, a community

of developers dreaming big dreams and creating new products and services could

well see the traditional firm boundaries of the industry being brought down like

the Berlin wall, as a true spirit of collaboration pervades the industry.

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