Moving up the value chain
Moving up the consulting value chain
The last couple of years have seen a slowdown in the breakneck growth rates of software exports. There has been tremendous pressure on billing rates in this period and India’s software services giants have begun to take their first steps on the value chain ladder by offering consulting services, observes Prashant L Rao

Facing Competition
Facing competition: Industry captains speak out
For India Software Inc success has come by facing tough competition and facing it well. Today however, a new set of challenges face the industry. The India brand is quite well established, yet, there’s lot of ground to be covered in this space. Other countries (most notably China) are emerging as powerful threats that are snapping at India’s heels. And we’re not that high up the value chain to ignore them either. Even on the BPO front, the need is to move quickly up the value chain, and deal with fears in other economies about the dangers of offshoring to India, vis-à-vis nearshoring. We spoke to a cross section of industry heads to find out what solutions they had to offer to these problems. Here’s what they told us

Telecom Software
India Software Inc taps telecom carrier market
With the global telecom bubble bursting, growth has been sluggish, with a significant cutback in spending by telecom majors like Lucent and Nortel. Service providers who had a high cost of operational expenditure because of heavy investments made in networks during the heydays, are now looking at Indian software companies to provide offshore solutions to manage their network operations, support systems, billing software, OS integration and business process re-engineering. Akhtar Pasha says the outlook for Indian software companies catering to the telecom markets looks bright—largely due to business from carriers

New geographies, new verticals
A glimpse into the future
Where does the industry go from here? Who are its future competitors? What are the opportunities waiting to be seized? How do we redress our shortcomings? Punita Jasrotia & Shipra Arora look at the big picture

BPO
BPO’s new mantra - provide higher value to clients
For BPO companies, growth will come through market expansion, expansion to other verticals and efficiencies of scale. The challenge will be to combine technology and insights with an innovative delivery model to offer a higher value to clients, say Gaurav Patra & Shipra Arora