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November, DATAQUEST
 
 
Puneet Vatsayan, the force behind the TiE event in Chandigarh and himself a serial entrepreneur who, with his techie wife Anu have built an excellent product engineering business in the city of Chandigarh could well be a role model for what successful SMEs must do to thrive in the downturn. The duo has used their significant technical prowess and American savvy to dominate a small niche and with the rug being pulled out on the financing options for many product firms in the US< here is one business that will scale and grow even as many services businesses are beginning to feel the pressure of crumbling global economies.
But the problem that continues to plague Puneet and many other IT entrepreneurs is the talent pool. Programmers and testers there are in plenty but where does one go these days to find professionals for architecture, domain skills and even product life cycle? Are we as a nation destined to remain mired in application and infrastructure support even as the global restructuring throws up ample opportunities for Indian technology firms to take the lead? Or will we take the proverbial bull by the horns and get Private Public partnerships in place to address the skills issue while there is still time to redress the situation ?
A day in Punjab, my second visit to Chandigarh in three months showed that there are ample opportunities for Punjab to develop talent as their own distinctive sweet spot in the new IT order that will surely emerge by 2010. The Nasscom Fifty Location study has already placed Chandigarh as a challenger and Ludhiana as a worthy aspirant for their place in the IT sun and if a city like Pune with its weak infrastructure and poor power availability can rise like a Phoenix from the ashes in five years, there is no doubt that Chandigarh and Punjab with their superiority in these areas can reach the top of the IT and BPO totem pole in a much shorter time
The issue in Punjab and indeed in all of India is that of skills. The best Universities in the country and that includes Pune and Punjab, thanks to their visionary Vice Chancellors, fully realise that while their colleges do provide excellent education and access to world class technology, the onerous task of skill building, particularly in the services segments needs active participation from the private sector - training firms, technology providers, reputed certification agencies and of course potential employers will all have their role to play in this.
It is very likely that initiatives like those in Pune where the University has partnered with Global Talent Track and Cisco Systems to give best in class Transaction Processing BPO skills to tens of thousands of students from their constituent colleges will be scaled to other cities and Punjab could well be the next destination for a massive talent building program that enables both large and small companies to flock to the state with the confidence that their resource needs will be met. This will of course need careful selection of young aspirants to be given awareness, active collaboration of colleges to provide the infrastructure and support for employable skills building and participation by the city and state administration in developing centres of excellence in key cities where certification and employment oriented intensive training can be provided.
In the current slowdown where new job creation will be slower and skills will have to be fine tuned to meet the exacting requirements of the global marketplace, even existing industry professionals may have to do whatever it takes to keep their capabilities updated. Domain certification agencies in insurance, retail and logistics, advanced skills certification in areas like software engineering and software architecture which international bodies liken the IEEE can provide and manufacturer courses like these offered by Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and CISCO will all become mandatory rather than nice to do options and training companies will have to facilitate this to stay and thrive in their businesses.
A last word on Punjab and a few hours in Amritsar prior to my day in Chandigarh provided a kaleidoscope of emotions - the patriotic frenzy during the changing of the guards at the Wagah border, the sombre reflection on lives needlessly lost at the Jallianwala Bagh memorial and finally the spiritual lift in the midst of thousands of orderly devotees at the splendid Golden Temple - India with all its contradictions is still a great country and states like Punjab and indeed cities like Chandigarh and Amrtsar provide the confidence that we are just getting into second gear for a long journey to success !
 
   
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