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August 2008, DATAQUEST
 
The winner mindset - can product firms get there ?
 
One defining moment from the first week of the Beijing Olympics has been the last microsecond stroke of miracle swimmer Phelps to get his seventh gold medal, literally snatching victory away from a competitor who had decided to use length rather than a stroke the win the race, reminiscent all too painfully of our own PT Usha’s failure to lunge for the tape in an Olympics many years ago and missing the bronze. It is this commitment to win that has made some of the great competitors through the ages what they are.
Speaking at a Gartner event in Cape Town South Africa, it struck me that what we have not been able to achieve in sports is something we have managed in IT services. Surviving multiple roadblocks – the initial reluctance to offshore, the dot com crisis and the current global economic slowdown have become part of a day in the office for CEOs in this industry and it’s good to see that the BPO firms are also following suit. With the concept and practice of KPO – in sectors ranging from retail to financial services to platform BPO solutions having gathered momentum, there is no looking back for the champions in these categories
The straggler in the IT Olympics so far has been the product industry. After the early efforts of companies like Softek and Wipro in building software products, the chase for creating Indian IP seemed to have been given up for over two decades as the industry chiefs focused on services. Apart from a lone ranger like i-Flex and the intellectual property creation by service firms through long years of work in chosen domains like Financial Services and Retail, the product sector has remained a topic of discussion rather than a segment to celebrate. But as the recent NASSCOM Product summit showed, this sector too seems to be at an inflection point. 1.4 billion dollars in this segment may not sound great but it is still comparable to China’s entire Software exports, to make one small comparison and the potential to reach 12 billion dollars by 2015 should make many entrepreneurs and more venture capitalists flock to this segment.
There are some heartening signs already – over a hundred product firms have been set up in just the last year and the funding of start-ups in this space has crossed half a billion dollars and is climbing. The growing domestic market and the focus of attention on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) will also open up new opportunities for the product entrepreneurs obviating the need to open expensive marketing offices worldwide to get their name into the consideration set of buyers.
However there is a need for all players in the eco-system to realise that there will be further challenges before the holy grail of multiple Indian product successes is realised. Entrepreneurs themselves will need to resist the low hanging fruit offered by services opportunities that will distract them from the main purpose. Larger firms in the software industry and CIOs would do well to offer partnership opportunities to young software and related industry start-ups to give them the initial boost so essential for business success. Academic institutions should provide a news focus on product architecture and design to create a new breed of IT folk who can fuel the resource needs of the product industry and of course the Government should understand that product successes the world over have been created by small groups of people working from their garage and not in expensive and remote Special Economic Zones – one more case in favour of continuing the visionary STPI scheme to preserve the virtual nature of the knowledge industry. Maybe the time has come for the baton to pass from services to products in preparation for a new lunge to the finishing line of success.
Finally back to the Olympics and two more defining moments created by our own Indian competitors – the first a sad meandering of our two tennis ladies into the opening ceremony wearing track suits that stood out shabbily in a milieu of others in national costume – surely some discipline should prevail even with our superstars ! And of course the wonderful sight of young Abhinav Bhindra demonstrating amazing composure as the national anthem proudly played in the medal ceremony! If a competitor who was seventeenth in the reckoning could come up triumphant, there must be more to the Indian killer instinct than we have been given credit for. Let us hope that the new generation will take inspiration from the Bhindras of the world and choose truly high peaks to conquer!
 
   
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