Vendor Accent

Industry-Academia Partnership

It’s the only way to build a resource pool of skilled IT-professionals says Krishna Kant.

India has emerged as the fastest growing IT hub in the world. With a CAGR of 28 percent during the last five years, the IT-ITES industry’s contribution to India’s GDP has risen from 1.2 per cent during 1999-2000 to 4.8 per cent in 2005-06. However, there are many challenges facing the industry today to sustain its growth, the most critical challenge being the lack of skilled IT manpower.

According to NASSCOM, every year over three million people (graduates and post graduates) are added to the workforce in India. Of these, only 25 percent of technical graduates and 10 to 15 percent of other graduates are considered employable by the growing IT and ITES sectors. Even after employing these graduates, most companies have to spend a considerable amount of time and resources on their training so as to develop the skills required by the industry.

With the talent shortage resulting in increasing salaries and high attrition rates, experts have cautioned that India could lose its competitive advantage in the IT sector. This could lead to a situation where the growth of IT industry in India could slow down if India was unable to meet the growth demands due to the shortage of quality manpower

According to a NASSCOM -McKinsey report, there will be a requirement of 10 million skilled professionals by 2010 in the IT-ITES sector. Industry players agree that a shortage is inevitable. Already, there is high demand for skilled IT professionals and the IT Industry is witnessing a shortage of domain expertise in areas like security, storage, networking, telecom and content management. The students coming out of technical institutes are not industry-ready, especially in domain expertise areas such as storage. As per industry estimates 20 percent of IT jobs require information management and storage skills.

There is a dramatic increase in the average storage capacity in every organization and a slight increase in the number of storage related IT professionals. The role of storage professional is also becoming far more complex including the need to understand a wide array of technologies, vendor solutions and compliance techniques.

IDC has recently done a study titled “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010” which reveals the amount of information the world is creating and copying in a given year. In 2006, 161 exabytes of digital information was created and copied, continuing an unprecedented period of information growth. This digital universe equals approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written – or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun. According to IDC, the amount of information created and copied in 2010 will surge more than six-fold to 988 exabytes, a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent and APAC excluding Japan will grow 30 to 40 percent faster than the mature economies.

As per the report, while nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, most of this content will be touched by an organization along the way – on a network, in a data center, at a hosting site, at a telephone or Internet switch, or in a backup system. Organizations – including businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, and associations – will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of the information.

We are reaching a point today, where the infrastructure we have built to house the exploding information is no longer adequate. Just as one example, 100 million records have been stolen since April 2005. Today’s IT infrastructures are strained by the avalanche of information, most of it coming from completely new sources (consumers) and in completely new forms—image and video. This new digital information, which tends to replicate itself uncontrollably, is not subject to the traditional best-practices of the data center, and at the same time it is enlarging rapidly the scope of IT managers’ responsibilities. Today’s IT infrastructures were not designed to deal with a host of new challenges, from security and privacy to digital rights management and compliance with new regulations.

India is among the top three fastest growing markets for storage solutions in the Asia-Pacific region. Within IT, information management and storage is the fastest growing segment growing at over 15 percent CAGR. Multiple drivers like digital information explosion; regulatory compliance pressures; natural calamities and man-made disasters and growth of data-centric networks and multiple applications such as ERP, SCM and BI have fuelled the need for organizations to adopt information infrastructure solutions.

Considering the above complexities in the managing the information in today’s information economy, going forward, it will become imperative for businesses in India to adopt information infrastructure solutions to extract the maximum business value for their information assets, improve service levels, position their organizations for growth and change, comply with regulations and protect key information assets. As businesses prepare themselves to compete in the global economy, to derive maximum ROI from their existing technology investments they will have to focus on building intelligent information infrastructures.

The above scenario presents a huge opportunity for IT professionals specializing in storage as well as the industry. However, in the current circumstances there is a huge gap between the supply in terms of storage-skilled professionals and demand of these professionals. The shortfall of skilled information storage and management professionals could hamper the growth of the fast growing storage industry in India and in turn affect the businesses productivity and competitiveness of businesses in the long run.

Considering the above, the industry needs to start investing in building a resource pool of skilled storage professionals in partnership with Academia. The responsibility is not on the education system alone. It is paramount that industry extends its expertise to the students in partnership with academia. Industry-academia partnership can raise the standards of technical education and create a resource pool of industry-ready professionals. There are few technical institutes in the country that have information management and storage in their curriculum. There is also a need to educate these institutions on the demand of information management and storage professionals in the industry and therefore the necessity to build storage in their curriculum. The discipline of information management and storage presents a huge career opportunity for students as government and enterprises across India are looking at deploying information infrastructure solutions and they require the skilled-manpower to build and manage their information infrastructure. Apart from enterprises and governments, there are also storage vendors, channel partners, VARs and SIs which are also looking at hiring talent with the requisite skills in storage.

This is a true proportional scenario where industry and academia have a symbiotic relationship, thus addressing the demand and avoiding damage to the growth of the fast growing IT industry. As Indian IT moves up the value chain, domain expertise in areas such as storage and security will become crucial and it will necessitate initiative both from industry and academia.

The author is the Education Manager, EMC India Kant_krishna@emc.com