It’s not hard for people like CPG and others to see whats coming. But it’s hard for them to make the course correction. Its actually impossible for most of them.
If I have to bet my money on any Indian services company to do that in time it will be Infosys. The simple reason: Only Infosys founders were engineers and have ability to go back to some technical roots for rethinking. Many will wonder why a CTO is hired as a CEO. What they won’t think is that only NRN and Infosys can do it. Rests of them are pure businessmen. They used to sell oil when it was profitable. They start selling IT when it became "more" profitable. They move around and find new businesses. They neither have the ability nor inclination to change the field. No wonder Shiv Nadar is already diversifying in sunrise sectors of India like education (growing young population) and healthcare (people living longer). They can never think of hiring a CTO from a fortune 500 tech company. Even if they can think they can never convince a CTO from such a company to join them as a CEO. It would be interesting to watch CPG conversing with Sikka as a potential CEO hire and explaining what he wants from him.
May be Infosys can lead the way and show, and others can copy. Thats the closest hope I have.
Cloud computing tech will hit hard the IT services model. Large scale automation and pre-built platforms that need declarative programming for configuring enterprise apps will make the need for large scale human operators to configure, deploy and maintain such apps disappear. Tech ability will shift to building such platforms and providing new feature regularly over customizing the platform for need. With little need for "real customization" and replacement of customization with configuration one won’t need an army of developers and system engineers to maintain an app and its platform. A few people with right knowledge will be able to Configure, deploy and run a large enterprise app. A cloud app can scale up without issues from 10 users to 1000s of users. If you are startup you just start with the same app when you have 100 users and you keep using the same app when you have 10000 users and partners. Will they feel the need to switch to SAP or Oracle somewhere in this growth journey? I don’t think so.
But before that happens Indian IT services business will keep growing. It will infact reach a peak as western MNCs and other re-tool themselves and get into new technologies leaving the crumbs to be swallowed happily by Indian IT services. Point: See the rise in growth of IT Infrastructure outsourcing in India.
While young Indians are increasingly getting exposed to new technologies and niche Indian companies are setting themselves up in to deliver in these technologies it’s difficult to hope that large companies will be able to change course. Corporate history is replete with large organizations dying not because they failed to predict or read the future but because they failed to implement the course correction in time if one at all.
India?s Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as ?Cloud? Moves In
India?s Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as ?Cloud? Moves In
CPG - C P Gurnani (CEO Tech M). He is mentioned in the article.