The Winds of Change

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.

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.