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In the byroads of Basavanagudi
Ten years ago, when software methodology maharishi
Ed Yourdon visited India, he wrote about India’s software industry
having matured into what he called “Stage-2”—wherein
the Indian pitch had changed from one of bodyshopping of cheap programmers
for onsite software coding and maintenance, to one touting high-quality
offshore software development “on time, on budget and with
a high degree of predictability.” He bemoaned the fact that
India was however far from his definition of “Stage-3”,
in which software products are produced and marketed extensively
by the local software industry.
A decade on, we don’t seem to have moved far ahead on the Stage-3 track,
and I don’t think we will ever see a proprietary, packaged desktop software
bestseller (such as a Word or a PhotoShop) emerging from a company in this part
of the world. But no longer does that seem the nagging worry it used to be not
so long ago. Even Yourdon, who has since been inducted into the Computer Hall
of Fame (and the Board of iGATE), has altered his views significantly. He was
recently quoted in a Cutter Consortium release as saying: “The next razzle-dazzle
technology may be created in Bangalore… Bangalore also has some very hungry,
very ambitious entrepreneurs… the next generation of Indian IT professionals
firmly believes that the US no longer has a monopoly on innovation.”
Indeed, we’ve come a long way since the $350 million mid-nineties. Several
billion dollars later, services still contribute a large chunk to revenues.
But in the interim, we’ve got offshoring pretty much down pat and the industry
is moving up to speed on its global delivery model; services are being offered
at various levels of the famed value-chain, with business process outsourcing
thrown in for good measure too. ‘Back Office of the World’ is nothing
to be ashamed of, seeing as it’s bringing in billions of bucks and keeping
a cool million of our folk gainfully occupied.
Actually, even if you are determined to find fault and remain ashamed regardless
of the magnitude of India’s software services success, you can now take
heart in other things—hardly a week goes by without another announcement
of another global software company setting up R&D shop or moving part of
its product development work out here. We have software product development
by proxy, if you will. And homegrown companies are merrily joining the fray,
making Bangalore and other cities a hotbed of research in chip design, embedded
systems and similar esoteric stuff. The trickle is yet to build up into a flood,
but the juggernaut is unstoppable now.
That’s why there’s a growing feeling that America doesn’t have
a monopoly on the Next Big Thing in digital tech any longer. No one knows what
it’s going to be, but it’s somewhere down the road, and that road
could well be in India.
Anyway Indians have contributed in the past, directly and indirectly, to several
Big Things of the digital revolution. But apart from a handful like Sabeer Bhatia,
Vinod Khosla, Kanwal Rekhi and others who’ve made big bucks, they’ve
remained largely unsung heroes. Until now. Shivanand Kanavi’s book, Sand
to Silicon—The Amazing Story of Digital Technology, sets right that wrong
quite adequately indeed.
Kanavi traces the evolution of Information Technology from the early days of
valves, transistors, and semiconductors, through to the invention and development
of the integrated circuit, personal computers, the Internet, fibre optics and
the complete digital convergence of computing and communications technologies.
Such historical accounts are widely available on the Net, but Kanavi has a unique
twist to the tale—he repaints digital history from the perspective of the
contribution of myriad brilliant Indian scientists, researchers, academicians
and entrepreneurs, all of whom played a critical role in technological breakthroughs
that have made IT what it is today.
Have you heard of Narinder Singh Kapany? I hadn’t. Turns out he carried
out pioneering experiments with optical fibres and actually coined the term
‘fibre optics’ in the 50s. It was only in 1999 that he was recognised,
by Fortune magazine, as one of seven unsung heroes who have greatly influenced
life in the twentieth century. Innumerable Indian scientists have been key members
of research teams at Stanford, Xerox PARC, IBM, Texas Instruments, Bell Labs,
Intel, etc, and the contributions of many of them are mentioned in the book.
While Kanavi has concentrated on explaining the technologies in detail, one
would have also liked to see more graphic biographical sketches of all the great
Indians covered—especially since the author spent about six months meeting
and interviewing them. Perhaps he’s reserving all that for the sequel.
The book mentions the award-winning exploits of a few individuals like Raj Reddy
(Turing Award), Praveen Chaudhari (US National Technology Medal), C K N Patel
(US National Medal of Science) and Bala Manian (technical Oscar), but Kanavi
clarifies that technology creation and evolution has largely been a collective
effort rather than “the romantic mythology of a few oracles spouting pearls
of wisdom, or flamboyant whizkids making quick billions.”
Which brings us to IT in India. A few names stand out from the very recent past:
R Narasimhan, H Kesavan, V Rajaraman, N Yegnanarayana, Sam Pitroda. And a few
more are contemporary: Mohan Tambe, Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Manindra Agrawal,
to name just three. But the next chapter in the amazing story of digital technology
could well be unfolding right now somewhere in the byroads of Basavanagudi in
Bangalore. Or, as Ed Yourdon recently stated: Maybe in Pune or Hyderabad or
Chennai, for all you know…
Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com
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