The celebration of hundred years of IBM is an important milestone for the organisation and the over four hundred thousand IBM-ers who can take justifiable pride in having been a part of one of the longest success stories in the corporate sector. However what the milestone should also mean for industry planners and chief executives in our sector and beyond is what it takes to build sustainable organizations in an ever-changing business environment. Every industry, from transportation to energy to entertainment witnesses shifts every now and then that makes incumbents obsolete and provides opportunity for new idea to become successful business models. The rapid shifts in platforms, from mainframes to distributed mini-computers to personal computing and now to cloud and mobile devices has made it imperative for sustainable players to focus on the business solution that customers expect rather than their own technologies and solutions. IBM could be accused of being a little tardy in making the transition from mainframes in the post Watson era, which raised serious questions about the company’s relevance in the mid-nineties, but the alacrity with which Gerstner and Palmisano recognized and embraced the shift to services, both through data centre proliferation and data aggregation, mining and analytics to enable cloud computing is truly worthy of appreciation.. The industry globally is in the throes of transition with power seemingly have passed from traditional behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to Eric Schmidt’s “gang of four”, which is how the Executive Chairman of Google has characterised his own company Google and Apple , Amazon and Facebook which are all redefining customer interfaces and collaboration within and outside the industry. This transformation of expectations is already throwing up opportunities and challenges for all of us building services and solutions for the global market. In a company like Zensar, we already see our investments in cloud, Web2.0 and Mobile extensions to our solutions to be as important as strengthening vertical domains and horizontal services to predict and serve new needs of our customers. Innovation in capabilities will have to be supplemented by exploring new definitions of “core “ and “context” for all firms, as the recent move towards a “Source and train” partnership models for human resource acquisition and deployment has shown. A strong focus on customer needs will necessitate new partnerships for skills identification and building across the eco-system, which will continue to raise questions about the relevance of business models and provide opportunities for transformation. What we can all learn from IBM is the need to develop a DNA of strong industry focused research capability, globally integrated knowledge sharing communities and a clear roadmap for all stakeholders that makes them comfortable with their destiny and that of the corporation. Our industry needs half a dozen players to build this confidence if the two hundred billion dollar exports goal has to be achieved by the year 2020.