Long term future of IT in India


When I went to college in India, all I wanted to do was take the first job that will send me to US. And a dozen years later, I am starting to think of where I will retire, where I will work the latter parts of my career and so on. This makes me ponder on the long term future of IT in India. I might as well think aloud here, with the hope that I get some insights from the readers. As always, these are just my personal opinions – not that of my employer.

India’s IT scene is dominated by about 20 to 50 companies or so, and the rest is fragmented by smaller shops. Amongst the big ones – and I mean big in terms of head count – the biggest ones are in services. A large number of people make their living doing production support and BPO type work. There is also some design and development type projects in the mix. Outside the services work, there is some product development too. Most big product companies in the world have some presence in India, and they pay better than the services companies to attract top talent. So in short, there is plenty of companies where an IT job can be found.

One thing I do like about the workforce in India is that it is fairly inclusive. Although I don’t have stats officially – I have seen several more women in offices of IT companies in India, including in leadership roles compared to other countries I have visited. 12 years ago, only certain states had fair representation in IT jobs, but by now – people from all parts of India are getting better opportunities.

I think IT pays better on an average than most other jobs in India, and as a result a lot of people have better quality of life. Most youngsters are now able to buy houses and cars early in their life, which is also pretty good. There is a lot of good restaurants and bars and gyms and movie theaters and all that, so life outside work is enjoyable too.

That is the bright side, but I have my worries on the flip side.

How about the supply side of the picture? No issues here either at first sight with plenty of college grads coming out of the education system every year. From the time I joined the workforce – and possibly a few years earlier, IT jobs attracted away a lot of talent from the top colleges, especially engineering colleges. IT companies at that time ignored non-engineering students. They were not exactly looking for comp science grads – any engineering degree was fine. I am a mechanical engineering major, and it never mattered to my first IT employer . I never could put a finger on why engineers were considered at the expense of every one else. I would just as well gladly hire a math major or a physics major or a liberal arts major with the right attitude – since I have to train the engineering grad also to work in IT. Being an engineering grad myself – I am not convinced that education gave me something extra as a programmer, that I would not have gained if I took say Chemistry as my major. I hope this has changed, or is changing.

After a dozen years since I left India, I still have not seen the engineering colleges tune their education to the needs of the IT market. Text books are still the same as what I learned and what my dad learned before me, with very little updates. And people still join mechanical engineering degrees with the sole purpose of getting a job in IT – with no interest in becoming a mechanical engineer.

There are also plenty of IT educational institutions that train people in programming. I try to check out their course work and teaching methods when I can, and honestly have not been very impressed. They teach many different languages in one course – like C, C++,Java, ORACLE PL/SQL, MS SQL, HTML, javascript etc, but with hardly any focus on good basic software engineering. I am even more dismayed when I see a lot of the teachers have never worked in real projects. It gives me the same awkward reaction I had to the guy who taught me power plant engineering who himself had never set foot in a power plant. As a result, employers give a very thorough training after people are hired , and before they can be put in a project. In my specialization – SAP – in which India has a lot of talent, I doubt how many colleges teach SAP. I know plenty of people who have been cheated by expensive “mom and pop” SAP coaching centers.
Someone recently told me that there are classes at these places for HANA too.

The good thing despite the above is that thanks to internet, working in global teams, and the ability to go abroad for projects – Indian IT workforce has access to almost everything that others have, and hence could keep up well with the global pack.

There are some societal side effects – since the best and brightest grads do not seem to want to go to the government services, military,banking and so on which were the coveted jobs for the previous generations. I often wonder if this will have an impact on society over the next several years.

Infrastructure has been a long term problem. A visit to Bangalore will prove the point. It is near impossible to drive in Bangalore at peak hours unless you have lived there for a while. Pollution is also pretty high. Yet, I know several companies who send work to India insist that it be done out of Bangalore. There are physical limitations to expanding the towns where IT is concentrated now – not just Bangalore. Thanks to political structure of the country, the private sector is fairly limited in what it can do to make the situation better. Thankfully trade unions have not yet taken over IT in India and destroyed it, like they have for manufacturing sector etc.

A big advantage India has held over other emerging IT power nations has been the proficiency in English. Companies in the west readily pay a premium for it. But this is not a long term advantage – I have many friends in Vietnam, China and South America who speak very good English, and it is just a matter of one more generation when this becomes less of a differentiation.

Cheap skilled labor was a big reason why western countries outsourced work to India. Well, it is not exactly cheap any more. Salaries have increased manifold. My first job paid me INR 150,000 a year or so. And that is after I did my engineering and MBA. Today I know my nieces and nephews make more than 3X or 4Xthat in similar jobs when they enter the work force. The rates charged by Indian companies to their clients abroad have not increased 3X or 4X – if anything, competition has forced them to keep it down. They still thrive because of volume and exchange rates and so on. This does not mean other countries will readily over take India in near future – that is like saying 25 years from now, Daddy and I will be the same age. India has tremendous experience and skills now and will carry that edge for foreseeable future.

I am also worried seriously about the credit card debt that many of the younger folks carry that I know India. Just based on personal observation – peer pressure has driven many a young IT employee to spend beyond their means and incur bigger loans than they reasonably should take. I have seen this movie before in US from the front seat, and I would hate to see a replay in India. On second thoughts, I am not very sure if this is an IT only issue or whether others are affected too. I guess every one needs to make their own mistakes and learn, and that learning from someone else s mistake is harder.

Bangalore – and other IT hubs – have one thing missing that stops them from being the next silicon valley. And that is a good VC system. It might be a chicken and egg problem since a large part of the IT business is still on services side, and not on product side. I am yet to have made a trip to India where I have not had a conversation with a bright eyed young guy (or gal) who would tell me that he/she has this amazing idea, but can’t move forward without capital. The De-facto capital raising mechanism is to run to a local bank and convince them to give a line of credit. It is an ineffective process to put it charitably. Off late, I know some VC friends in Silicon Valley who lend a hand to budding entrepreneurs in India, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to how things move in the US. It is certainly not a lack of liquidity in India that investors are not supporting these companies – I think it is one of a cultural difference. Since a lot of people from India who worked in US have now moved back to India, I do see some change in this behavior. I am looking forward to see VCs and Angel investors doing more in India.

One last thought before I go back and plant the last few plants in my front yard ( this is what was accomplished before I started typing this post https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3381192563120.151791.1068608267&type=1&l=48b8a0feb8 ). If cloud is truly the future – and if most companies move heavily to SaaS etc, what will happen to the majority of IT people in India, who make a living doing services projects?

Let me know your thoughts

Online Social Media – how much does it actually influence buying decisions ?


As a consumer, I am influenced by online social media. But the bigger the purchase, the less I am influenced by “online” social media, and more by “offline” social media.

I won’t try a new restaurant without checking yelp reviews.I won’t buy a book without reading what others say in Amazon. I won’t buy a widescreen TV without checking 15 sites and then talking to store clerks, friends etc. When I bought a house (the biggest purchase for me), I did comparisons online – but eventually I had to walk in and out of 50 or so houses before my wife and I agreed on a place. The bigger the purchase – the less I trusted social media, and the more I trusted “real” people and my own “physical experience.

When I say social media – I am typically thinking only of “online” media – twitter, facebook and sites like that. I am excluding other “offline” social things like hanging out with my buddies at the water cooler, chatting with other parents at my daughter’s swimming lessons, talking to others on phone and stuff like that which we don’t associate with “online”, despite being totally “social”.

It never fails to impress (ok, and scare) me when I log on to a site, and find context specific advertisements. I have seen a lot of SAP ads,Pet product ads, Cricket (the game, not the mobile phone thing, and not the creature ) and Tennis ads and so on when I use my yahoo email, google searches and facebook. Fantastic – yet in all these years, I have not clicked on even one link that these sites showed me. If anything, I get some pleasure in not clicking on them – since in my mind, I think of them intruding my private space.

And although not prolific by any stretch – I am fairly active in online social media, and spend some time every day on it. At best, it must be having an indirect effect on my buying decisions, since my gut feelings over time are surely influenced by what I read, and I read a lot of stuff online.

I started to think that maybe direct advertising is what is not working in social media – and that vendors can influence indirectly using social media by sharing information via blogs etc. But Forbes advoice single handedly ended that theory for me. I honestly cannot stand most of what gets published there by vendors and now it has gone to an extent that I don’t take any time to even glance at it when someone says “Forbes says” and point to an advoice link. No thank you.

TV advertisements influence me more than social media ads. I am not sure exactly why this happens. My hypothesis is that people have more experience making them and tuning them over years that it makes more impact. But even then – when it comes to big purchases, I still prefer the offline social media . It could also be that I grew up watching TV and not online social media, and hence am more influenced by TV. Others who are younger might not look at it the way I do. Yet another theory I have is that while video is more impressionable for me, since I consume most of the online content on my mobile device, low bandwidth decreases the user experience of video ads online, there by making me tune out quickly.

Enough about me as a consumer, what about me as a professional consultant and a seller of consulting services ?

All my clients know that I blog and tweet, and that I share some (hopefully useful) content with them – and some of their CXOs tease me on what I write. So, on the bright side – they do read what I write. I also have on occasion benefited from name recognition from my blogs, where I walk into a room and someone googles me and checks out the content that I have authored in past, and (so far) giving me some credit. But I cannot imagine (yet) any one who has given me business primarily because of what I have done in online social media. Not by a long shot.

Buying decisions for consulting services are still mostly influenced by past performance on delivery, trust,price, word of mouth publicity (even fierce competitors talk to each other when it comes to quality of consulting services or product maturity).
I am yet to see a multi-million dollar deal signed with a CXO saying – “it is your online ads that finally persuaded me”.

Even the big cloud players who sell the idea of “online sales” will readily go in person to meet the clients and sell them on their cloud wares. Sales people can be very superstitious. I have a friend who insists she needs to wear her “closing heels” to get ink on the contract, and another friend who insists on wearing his “deal making tie” for the same purpose. I keep wondering what will be the equivalents when it becomes virtual.

“Digital eminence” as my employer refers to it, is a big deal these days. Clients do google about consultants – and check out linkedin profiles and all that. And I have been rewarded to some extent in my career for my online social media activities. But when I think about it – I think what gave me some credibility in online social media is the experience I gained (and continue to gain) in the offline world. That outweighs the reverse situation of online credibility helping me in the offline world. It will be interesting to watch if this balance will ever shift in future. I am not holding my breath on it.

What about big companies who tried innovative online social media advertising? Couple of years back – Pepsi had such an initiative that I read about. I believe it was called “Refresh”. I am typing this on my flight to Portland, so I cannot google it to confirm. They took their foot off the gas pedal for TV and print ads, and focused heavily on online social media – primarily facebook I think. I do not follow superbowl, but I did hear they even pulled out of advertising there for that year. How did it work out for them ? They got tremendous coverage from analysts and marketing experts for being innovative and all that. But it did not exactly help them increase the sales of the pepsi softdrink. Not only did classic coca-cola remain the number one drink, pepsi lost the second spot it long held, and that spot was taken by diet coke. Pepsi went right back to heavy advertisements on TV etc quickly after that. The irony is not lost on me – since I followed this story using online social media 🙂

I am not saying that this experience will stay the same for other companies. It probably will improve over time. If I am a representative consumer – then companies will do well to pair TV and online social media to work together. I say this because I forgot the last time I watched TV without multi-tasking on an online device at the same time. In fact, I usually check out things I see on TV at real time on internet, and make buying decisions depending on size of purchase.

Now there is one last thing – I have no idea if my view is shared by any one else on the planet 🙂

Big data – because it “can” deliver you huge value doesn’t mean it “will”


Big data is the talk of the town in social media, and has picked up some interest amongst customers too.I had a series of big data conversations this week with customers, colleagues and friends and thought I will share some here. As always – these are just my personal ramblings, not my employer’s views.

In social media – “big” usually means close to petabytes or at least several tens of  TB rushing at you from all over the place. At customer sites, the expectation seems to be much more modest – 50 to 100 TB is considered excessively big data even for some very large customers I know.

Cost of big data is bigger on all fronts compared to status quo volumes (and velocity and all other factors) of data in most shops. Storage is cheaper than few years ago, but it is not free – and when you talk about petabytes and all, it needs a LOT of storage. And then there is the multiples needed for HA/DR/Archiving etc. And this needs more data center space, cooling , power and so on.

What about the quality of data? As we know – poor quality is a big problem in all kinds of data related stuff. Quality becomes a bigger problem when volume and speed increases. Existing tools may be stretched to deal with that kind of data. But assuming tools can somehow do this – there is a question of the human effort to fix data. A lot of data projects fail to deliver value because no one owns data from business side. Big data will most probably make this problem worse, unless software improves by leaps and bounds in short order to make data quality a non issue. How many of us will hold our breath on that?

What about security? even with just 2 TB of structured data – there are companies who struggle to make sure everything is secure, and everyone is kept honest, and all the legal compliance is ensured. I have seen the amount of trouble they go through when status quo is changed (like an M&A , or even a small CRM system is introduced).   Most of them are not equipped to deal with more data unless they beef up on more sophisticated governance, and probably more staff.

Some companies love BYOD and others do not. The ones who do not, frequently worry about support cost and security. Imagine the effort they have to go through if BYOD will happen in their companies, and they have to protect much larger data than they are used to?

We are right now in the middle of a small POC for a customer – and the data in the datawarehouse is miniscule compared to what “Big Data” can be. We are talking about something only like 150 to 200 million lines per cube. The data comes back at lightning speed from database to appserver. But the user did not see this speed from his iPad connected from a starbucks wifi via VPN. He did see some improvement, but not enough for a big WOW.  And every drill down needs a roundtrip that also chokes up the network yet again.  Essentially, the bottleneck moved from the DB/App server side to the network/client side. These networks will need serious upgrades in capacity to cope with big data. And the mobile software should be smart enough to use the processing power and memory of the device to minimize the use of bandwidth when it is not required. Carriers will probably need big upgrades too, and if big data catches on – we should start seeing different types of data plans from them, dissimilar to the rates that we see now when we buy tablets and smart phones.

Then there is the cost of licensing – and the models of licensing evolving. But if licenses are tied to the quantity of data that is processed/stored – then that adds up quickly.  And even with sophisticated software – you need smart data analysts who can make use of it to generate value. These analysts – or architects, scientists, artists, artisans or whatever it is they are called this week – don’t come in big numbers, and they won’t be cheap either. And long term – I am not sure if this is given enough importance in universities.

The other side of the equation – the more important side, is the value that big data delivers. There is definitely value in big data – significant value – for sure. But it is not value that gets delivered overnight, and it is value that takes significant investment before reaping benefits. And this value will not be spread evenly across industries, or even companies across industries.  So it is a decision that needs to be taken carefully.  Given the cost, the insights from big data has to be not just “big” but  “BIIIIGGGG” – for the investment to be worthwhile.  And because it “can” deliver value does not mean it “will” – it is not a secret that several companies could not even make good use of much smaller quantities of structured data available to them readily all these years.

Several CXOs I have spoken to are willing to dip their toes despite the cost.  And they are all trying to find out where it is that they can gain competitive advantage by jumping in. Several are interested in a cloud offering for big data – mostly from a cost point of view. This is an area where SIs and SW vendors and analysts et al need to do a better job in my opinion. There seems – in my limited visibility – a serious shortage of  specific use cases to help companies make a business decision. There are a few – like in healthcare for example – where compelling arguments were made, and customers and vendors are partnering effectively.  Given the investment needed for big data – evolutionary change might not make it look appealing to the buyers.  It needs to be revolutionary . And as my ex-manager used to tell me –  almost every project that pays for itself will get funded irrespective of the economy.

PS: If big data catches on big time, then we can seriously expect a boom for the tech stocks across the board since several companies will benefit from the vendor side. The economy – at least in history books – will probably thank big data for the good that it did 🙂