Can�t really expect an elephant to prowl and hunt can we
Ok, the metaphor is a bit extreme but the point I am trying to convey is every person or for that matter entity or industry have certain base skills which is a result of the way the society works, the way people are educated and the natural maturing of a sector.
Just like for getting cheese, milk has to go through the fermentation stage in between, an industry cannot jump ships and transform into an entity 2 steps above on the maturity index.
We know that the Indian IT has been around for last 20 odd years but the reality is, the industry got an impetus around the Y2K years when huge numbers of Indian IT professionals were involved to fix legacy code and data entry stuff and so on, exceptions existed about product companies, an example being the company I work for, it came out with a product way back in 1990�s but which was largely for the Indian market and which did not take off coz the Indian market was not mature enough to invest in an IT product and the companies outside India were not ready to invest in an unknown entity .
So the work largely involved was nothing great to write about and also Indian companies were able to recruit huge numbers of graduates skilled in mathematics and programming skills vis-�-vis understanding the semantics of a language (something which we are on an average good at due to the way our education works). The initial wave was about the numbers getting noticed.
The next wave was the services part where the companies took advantage of the currency differential to take on work and turned huge profits. Again for certain companies the hiring is not about
rocket scientists.. Companies needed people skilled enough to work hard and the logical understanding of what is been asked for and to an extent just get that done in the time frame within costs. This is the model on which most of the service companies work on. Again solution and product companies exist even today, they are not in the news coz that sector is still nascent but these companies will be the harbinger of the next phase.
The service companies have ruled the roost for so many years but services are as the name suggest dependent on the service being provided, when the need for that service is done they go out of vogue unless they mature to providing solutions and technology innovations.
Again various threads on job discussion forum paint a very wrong picture about the part of the Indian IT industry which is just not about revenues and number added in a Financial Year. A basic search for product companies on the NASSCOM site would give enough information about the sectors and technologies on which the companies work in.
The industry is as usual on target for the next step, the maturing of the industry to take on work and also force itself to look at the world for work and not just US. This financial year has been a wake up call for companies which have hedged their bets just on US and grown complacent. There is more business out there and more markets, India itself is a huge market and the companies who have worked on hedging the bets have been less hit with the currency fluctuations. The strengthening of Indian rupee is the precursor for companies starting to bill in rupees rather than in dollars, but for that to happen the industry should offer something which no one else does and for that to happen as I noted before, the companies who have been investing in IP would come to the forth. These companies put a premium on talent and skills and people who hang about being armchair critics rather than pursuing upgradation of skills will be left behind.
A solution or a product company requires lesser number of people to generate the same amount of revenue than say a service company, the risks involved are much more, as there are a lot many product companies which go bust as compared to a service company and hence the
requirement of skill is of paramount importance for the former, so if you want to catch the train, people you better be on time at the station
