Event

NASSCOM 07: India Leadership Forum

Under the ambit of the India leadership forum, NASSCOM 2007 hosted many informative sessions for the IT world. By Kushal Shah

Union Cabinet Minister Thiru Dayanidhi Maran inaugurating NASSCOM '07

Another edition of NASSCOM took off in Mumbai last month playing host to delegates from across the globe. This year’s event was attended by over 1,600 delegates from 20 countries. The three days were marked by sessions that threw light on various aspects of Indian and global IT covering a wide gamut of topics starting from the Indo-EU relationship to Changing rules in the Tech market to Innovations for emerging companies to IT in various verticals to the concluding remarks by the head of the country on this fastest growing segment of the Indian economy.

NASSCOM 07 kicked off with the rather serious topic of why India is not as successful in business with the EU as it is with North America and how to go about overcoming this problem. Industry giants from across the world were present for this opening session including Bernard Bourigeaud, Chairman of the management board and CEO, Atos Origin. He said, “The EU is a large set of different countries, each country is different from the other in terms of language, culture and in the way of doing business. In order to tackle with this, Indian businessmen will have to build relationships with their clients in Europe and I see huge potential for this business between India and Europeon countries.” Another serious issue for this area of business is that of margin. It is difficult for Indians to get the same margin that they get in North America.

This year’s event was inaugurated by Union cabinet minister of Communication and IT, Thiru Dayanidhi Maran. B Ramalinga Raju, Chaiman, NASSCOM pointed out that the Indian IT industry directly employs 1.63 million people and helps about two and half times more in an indirect manner. He says that venturing into IT is easy but one problem coming in the way of this segment is the lack of physical infrastructure.

Maran in his speech drew attention to the government’s plan to improve IT in India. “Making bandwidth available to every Indian remains at the top of our priority list”, says Maran. Replying to the complaint of poor infrastructure availability, he said that infrastructure cannot be built overnight and that the government needed time for the same but that it would ensure that the situation would improve.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen talked about the role of maths which is the traditional Indian talent in the field of IT. In one of the session which talked about the changing rules of the global IT, Steve Hamm, Sr. Writer BusinessWeek said, “The 300 percent growth of Indian IT in five years is the result of broadening its vision from software programming to implementations, BPO and data centre management.” According to him Indian IT has succeeded on the back of low cost labour and efficient operations, dedication to quality and constant improvement, true commitment to customer satisfaction, adoption of global best management practises, as well as the skilful hiring, training and deployment of employees. According to Pramod Bhasin, President and CEO, Genpact, “We have barely scratched the tip of demand from the top companies across the globe.” Some of the other sessions on the inaugural day were about the opportunities for the next generation emerging companies and the benefits of going global through the way of partnerships.

In one of the sessions which dealt with the changing role of emerging markets in a globalised scenario, Bhasin felt that the economy is being fuelled by young people and their expenditure on luxuries such as cell phones, cars etc. Nandan Nilekani, CEO & MD Infosys felt that the way business is done needs to be changed. It is about getting the necessary things at lowest price. According to him Rs 10 recharge and $10 mobile phone will sell more compared to the traditional prices. When we talk about globalising and de centralising all the IT from places like Mumbai, Bangalore and Gurgaon; it is very difficult to convince senior management to move from a high level city to mediocre one. Bhasin says, “Moving from Gurgaon to Jaipur is far more difficult than moving from New York to Mumbai.”

Prime Minister at NASSCOM 2007 India Leadership Forum

One of the attractive sessions which showed the true use of IT was that of Innovation. It explained the true meaning of difference between innovations and invention; “invention is to come up first with something new. Many R&D exercises lead to inventions but very few can create a business innovation which is actually of any help to customers,” said Navi Radjou, Vice President, Forrester Research. Innovation is not only about new products and services but also about new business models. Innovation is not about asking for ideas but about asking for problems so that the solution can be innovative and useful. Jeremy Burton, Group resident, Enterprise Security and Data Management, Symantec pens down three rules of innovations. Firstly, as a leader of any organisation, innovation is your job. Secondly, failure is an option but fear of failure is not and last but not the least, innovation requires discipline. Over the time, innovations in big companies will increase and leadership will be a bigger factor than management.

Many companies displayed their innovations at the Indian innovation forum. Some of the participating companies were HP Labs India, Ittiam Systems Monsoon Multimedia, Kale consultants etc. HP Labs displayed an input device for phonetic scripts which can be used by people knowing languages other than English. This project attached a lot of significance to the Indian cultural scenario. Some other sessions which attracted the delegates were about negotiating to win from an almost lost situation; new organisational structures and learning; and about offshore product development.

The growing trend among the IT business is that of remote infrastructure services. This business is low on profit initially but takes off over time. In last three to four years with technology advancing in the area of remote infrastructure management this field has sped up. Large organisations with about 50,000 servers, 10,000 databases, and about half a million desktops are finding it difficult to take care of their infrastructure and are looking for a vendor to take of all these operations.

Security is one subject which holds a fair bit of significance in outsourcing. Talking about the issues of security and privacy in outsourcing, Rahul Singh, CEO & Managing Director, Citigroup Global Services said, “When we have to do 600 million transactions a year, security is a major concern. To achieve that, we need the right culture within the organisation.” Raman Roy, Founder, Quatrro BPO Solutions, urges all the outsourcing companies to join hands to fight the evil of security breaches by the employees. This can be done by sharing the employee details and keeping track of various changes taking place in their records.

Some of the events were based on the social responsibilities of IT and engineering services etc. This India leadership forum came to an end by the closing remarks by Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh. He helped visualising the mammoth growth which lies ahead for this industry and congratulated all on the current success of it. He expects the IT industry to grow to $60 billion by 2008 and $80 billion by 2010.

NASSCOM 2007 looked into all the possible areas of Indian and global IT and a wide range of ideas about the problems faced by various segments of the industry were discussed.