'We should watch out for China'

"Enhancing

competitiveness and creating brand equity will get increasingly tricky and tough

for business in these days of the Internet and e-economy. Delivering quality is

only a bare essential now," says Navyug Mohnot, executive director, QAI. He

also stresses on the need to recognize excellence in software in India through

industry meets, for its own growth and development. In an interview with

DATAQUEST, he warns of an insidious threat for Indian software companies from

countries like China, Vietnam and Hungary. Some excerpts:

What have you set out as priority objectives?

Simply, the objective is to get the software community together on a common

platform, to share, network, read each other’s best practices and to get gurus

from around the world to share on that platform their software development

practices and then to implement the same according to Indian requirements. Also,

we need to have these experts to absorb the best of our practices and tell the

world about it. In the third SEPG Conference held in India a month-and-a-half

ago, we tried to achieve just this.

What will the impact of such conferences be on the Indian software

industry?

As countries like China, Ireland and Vietnam start walking on the same path

as us, we are being forced into a segment where low costs are not the key but

high-quality services and products are. The home truth delivered by conferences

is very important–that we have emerged as high-quality deliverers and

producers of software.

You mentioned a threat from other countries. How do you read China’s

stature?

I would say China is moving strongly in a direction to emerge as a very

strong player. We’ve had several interactions with the Chinese, worked with

their companies and some have visited India. I feel China is getting its act

together in software. And when that act gets together, other people will have to

watch out. I’m glad Indian companies, at least the larger ones, are seized of

this issue. It’s the only way to move up or down the value chain.

IT-enabled services, call centers and medical transcription are down the

value chain–but what the heck, we are a billion people–let’s leverage the

numbers, make money and provide services. The other option is to move up the

value chain by leveraging the Indian intellect. India has these two real

advantages–numbers and smart people. We should leverage both.

A lot of companies are into IT-enabled services, but a whole lot more must

move up the value chain, from being mere vanilla service companies. While the

first is happening, the second, of moving up the value chain, has to happen

really real fast. Otherwise, the Chinas, Vietnams and Hungarys of the world will

seize the opportunities and we’ll lose the first-mover advantage. And India

gets complacent very fast, that’s our biggest danger as a country, as a

culture. As somebody said, we have found the enemy and it is us.

What about the role of the government?

The government really needs to play a non-interfering role and restrict

itself to the strategic issues if India is to develop as an IT superpower,

software developer. Like a good coach it should really get out of the way.

Intellect is high in India…the average Indian is street smart. We can compete

with and beat the best in the world.

Suprabuddha Sanyal in New Delhi