'India reshaping global IT, but remains small player'

Six decades after its birth, the global IT industry has grown into a trillion-dollar behemoth. But while India has played a stellar role in shaping the sector, its share in the pie is a minuscule three percent, say the authors of a new book.

"India showed that the characteristic of on-time and within-budget delivery is something that can be expected as the norm," said Priya Kurien, who has co-authored "Blind Men and The Elephant: Demystifying the Global IT Services Industry" with Was Rahman.

"More importantly, it has also been bringing in a much better success rate for the quality of project work delivered," said the Bangalore-based Kurien.

Yet at $18 billion (Rs.711 billion), the total revenue of India's IT services exports is still less than three percent of the total IT services pie.

"Therefore, while in India there is considerable hype and excitement about the role of the Indian IT industry, just from a contribution to the global pie, there is plenty more to be done," Kurien told IANS in an interview.

Tracing the six decades of global IT services, their Sage-India published book looks at the state of three giant global IT service organisations - IBM, EDS and Accenture - and the Indian challengers TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

Unable to find "books that gave us enough insights into the past of the IT services industry," the authors got the idea to write a book covering past, present and future of the sector.

"We certainly don't offer any predictions on where the industry will go, only possible scenarios that can play out and other factors that will have a major impact on the industry," they added.

India needs to learn some lessons in a hurry, they suggested. "Given India's fascination with the IT industry, we do think this will have more readers in India," said London-based Rahman.

Rahman is CEO and co-founder of Dolphin Advisory. He has spent a career advising business and technology executives on how to leverage the potential of IT. He has been involved with many corporate big names and a charter member of TiE UK.

Kurien is managing director of Dolphin Advisory. While at Insosys Technologies for a decade, she co-developed the firm's European Strategy and its Solutions Programme.

The authors say in terms of executive customer relationships, the largest IT services companies globally have expanded because they have very strong relationships at senior executive levels of their customers.

"Acquiring and managing such relationships is quite effort intensive and challenging. The top Indian players are doing this but the rest of the industry probably has things to learn on this aspect," Kurien pointed out.

Likewise, most Indian IT services firms have been riding on "Brand India" that seems to denote low-cost and high quality IT services to Western customers.

"The need for differentiation and uniqueness for each Indian player is something that will become the need of the hour as Indian firms begin to compete much more against each other than 'in-house' IT teams or Western competitors, as was the case in the past," said Rahman.

Large global players also know the value of a consortium to win the really big deals, for instance, with the US government or the UK National Health Service.

"Indian IT service providers have been growing so rapidly and since the market seems to be growing, collaboration and partnerships have not really been important thus far but will become increasingly so to win the larger deals," suggest the writers.

They argue that Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) numbers peg the Indian IT and ITeS industry to be employing over a million people. Even as a percentage of the total employment by the IT industry globally, this is a fairly high percentage.

"This number continues to rise year on year right now. As many people are part of this industry and aspire to be part of it, and are investing in building careers in it, we think it is useful and relevant for them to understand the past, present and the scenarios for the future of the industry," said Kurien.

According to Nasscom, last year the domestic spending in India was $8.2 billion. As a fraction of the global IT spending, this is still very small.

But it is beginning to grow with both large and SME businesses beginning to utilise IT. Not having constraints of legacy infrastructure, both types of businesses are leapfrogging generations of technology to begin with the latest available today, the authors say.


Indo-Asian News Service