IT Industry in India - 2
IT Industry in India - 2
by Andrew Bailey, Darren Lee, Utsav Sharma, Claire Lewis, Karl Jenner, Dona Davis, Sudipa Kadam
Today we enjoyed a packed day of interactions with different players in India’s enormous IT industry.
To set the scene, Professor Rajesh S. Upadhyayula from the Indian Institute of Management (IIMK) – India’s top business school – shared some of the history of the Indian IT industry and its position today.
Revenues in the 2014 financial year were well over USD$100b (USD$86b export and USD$32b from the domestic market), a staggering increase since 1998 when the entire industry had revenues of USD$3b. IT is hugely important to India’s economy: it has the highest relative share of national GDP (9.3%) and is the largest private sector employer.
Over 55% of the world’s outsourcing of IT is to India. For a perspective from a huge IT services firm, we headed to the Cochin Inforpark headquarters of Cognizant, a US-based company which employs 150,000 of its 200,000 strong global workforce in India.
Cognizant provides business & technology consulting, systems integration, application development & maintenance and testing solutions – amongst other things. We were fortunate enough to have the head of the Cochin centre talk to us.
It was interesting to hear about how they think about their business over three time horizons (H1 – application development and maintenance; H2 – consulting, business process outsourcing etc.; H3 – social, mobile, analytics and cloud).
They believe in a few years that their current horizon one work may no longer be as profitable – hence their efforts to focus research and innovation on the future time horizons. Recently their CEO stepped completely aside from running the business day-to-day in order to focus on horizon three.
The company is continuing to grow and is in the midst of building a 12,000 person facility in Cochin – which includes a running track, amphitheatre and a man-made stream from the overflow of a local river to create what they believe will be an appealing environment for their staff.
In the afternoon we enjoyed a visit to several companies at the other end of the spectrum at the Startup Village.The Startup Village is jointly supported by the Kerala government and private organisations to mentor, develop and provide networks for new startups, and is beginning to spread India-wide.
It was inspiring to see and hear from young people working on animation projects, robots, large touch screen tables and all manner of other technology startups.
One of the founders showed us a short video about innovation and entrepreneurship in Dharavi – the largest slum in Mumbai.
He told us that while it can be easy to complain about the struggle to get funding or venture capital, it is easy to forget that for some startups it’s a struggle to get food, so it’s important that obstacles aren’t allowed to halt your ideas: often hugely innovative products and services are produced in environments where there are many constraints (such as in Dharavi).