Author Archive
Discovering new horizons!
It’s been a year of discontent and yet a year of great satisfaction – for the country, the industry and for me personally. Taking over the reins as Chairman of NASSCOM at a time when there were just a few clouds on the otherwise blue skills of the Indian IT and Business Services industry, it has been interesting to see the constant word “growth” being quickly replaced by recession, slowdown, protectionism and layoffs as the repetitive lexicon of the times.
Trusted Sourcing – in search of perfect solutions.
It’s been one of the most subdued New Year celebrations in recent time – the clouds of economic uncertainty would have been bad enough to quench the spirits of the merry makers but in many places in Western India the dark shadows of the terrorism attacks in Mumbai continued to cause concern in organisations, communities and homes! Not a very good start to what promises to be a tough industry and certainly an early warning that security in all its formats should be the priority for all of us in the IT and BPO industry in the coming months.
Building talent for the new growth phase in services
In a global recessionary environment, India grows at six percent and there is still concern. In the first half of the current fiscal, the IT and Offshore Business Services grows at a stupendous twenty-four percent and the nay sayers still say the IT growth story is over ! No wonder then that in spite of over a lakh new job offers already made on campus, there is still a mood of despondency when young people discuss job prospects in this sector. In a country where every piece of bad news gets magnified by the cynics, it is not surprising that the wave of new hiring which the good companies have initiated are being overshadowed by the stray cases of layoffs and performance separations that are a natural consequence of any downturn.
The Satyam crisis and beyond
It all broke one morning when I was chairing a meeting of my management team. A call from CNBC said, “We are putting you on air in thirty seconds” and within minutes I, along with the entire leadership of this industry were on a treadmill of successive disclosures and revelations that were to shock associates, customers and every person associated with Satyam, the Industry and indeed corporate India. A week down the line when I landed in IIM Bangalore to chair a NASSCOM-IIM panel on Information Security, there were no surprises to find that the cameras and recorders of the Press were only interested in one six letter word! And recently in every television studio where I had gone to speak about Zensar’s outstanding quarterly results, I had to literally warn every newscaster that the first three questions could not be about Satyam else I would refuse to answer!
The Satyam Crisis and its aftermath
The Satyam saga has been a black spot in the hitherto untarnished reputation of the Indian IT industry with the unprecedented scale and seriousness of the fraud perpetrated on all the stakeholders by the promoters. While the quick actions taken by the Government have restored the confidence of shareowners, customers and employees to a certain extent, the next few days will determine the direction the new Board will set to resolve the liquidity crisis in the firm, to address business and employee continuity issues and to set a process in place to ensure that the root causes are eliminated and financial veracity is restored.
The opportunity for Punjab
Puneet Vatsayan, the force behind the TiE event in Chandigarh and himself a serial entrepreneur who, with his techie wife Anu have built an excellent product engineering business in the city of Chandigarh could well be a role model for what successful SMEs must do to thrive in the downturn. The duo has used their significant technical prowess and American savvy to dominate a small niche and with the rug being pulled out on the financing options for many product firms in the US, here is one business that will scale and grow even as many services businesses are beginning to feel the pressure of crumbling global economies.
Celebrating diversity in the knowledge industry
The moment of the year 2007 for me was the evocative scene in Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par where the young protagonist defies all the odds and walks up shyly to receive the art prize, thereby demonstrating that every social and intellectual shortcoming can be overcome through genuine appreciation of potential.
Collaborative Outsourcing
The key theme of the Gartner conference in London earlier this year was ‘Strategic Multisourcing‘ or the ability to work with multiple vendors for undertaking all the contextual work that that is better left to third party providers while the company focuses on what is truly core to its own operations.
Building resources for a resurgent India
Two outstanding interactions in the space of twenty-four hours gave me a new hope in the future of education in India. For a long time we have worried about the appalling quality of some of our educational institutions , at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and have despaired about finding resources in the right quantity and quality to fuel the ever growing needs of the IT and BPO industry. The galloping economy in the last few years and the sudden surge in the fortunes of many manufacturing, retail, healthcare, hospitality and financial services firms have accentuated the concerns with no other a luminary than KV Kamath of ICICI Bank forecasting that the services industries in India would need ten million skilled people to enter the job market every year for India to sustain its economic momentum. And a situation where less than twenty percent of the three million more graduates are deemed as employable is certainly not a source of great comfort or optimism.
NASSCOM and the art of global leadership
It is an interesting challenge to be appointed Chairman of NASSCOM at a time when the industry is at a crossroads. After a decade and more of spectacular growth, with the Software exports sector making the transition from wage arbitrage to process quality to innovation, BPO coming of age with multiple complex processes being migrated to India and knowledge processes becoming the new outsourcing priority, new opportunity areas like Engineering Services, Embedded Systems and Media and Gaming becoming the focus of attention of many entrepreneurial start-ups as well as the established players, it seems to some, in the industry, the analyst community and indeed the Government that this is an industry which has matured and will now chug along at a respectable if less spectacular pace to keep its place in the global sun. NASSCOM itself, having successfully steered the industry over the last twenty years, through the early period of establishing Brand India and then the successive challenges of Year 2000, the Dotcom boom and bust and now the era of product and process innovation, would be justified in adopting an agenda of stabilisation and consolidation of all the gains made in the past.
