Thursday, January 23, 2014

It is a rat race

The ongoing rebound in western economies is only re railing our IT sector that had lost on its turnover.This is no pointer to  days of bright sunshine in the longer term. Our IT industry remains largely  strait jacketed  into Application Development and Maintenance (ADM),  at 60% of our total revenues.  Increasing competition, lower billing rates and low-end ADM services should compel us  to  move up the software value chain, be it product development, R&D, social media, analytics, cloud computing and so on. Sadly the industry's Engineering and R&D services contribution has remained  negligible as has been  our software patents, Indian IT brand  is urgently due for an upgrade.Today's IT is not even about  tomorrow but the day after and beyond .Indian IT talent is avant-garde and what it needs is a petri dish to nurture it.While bread and butter earnings are a must and our IT majors are at it, the government and NASSCOM must generously seed breakthrough  start ups as also promote  top class Centers of design and innovation, in the IT sphere.Else we risk  technical obsolescence given the fast paced , ever changing and  futuristic nature of this esoteric technological interface. Facebook,Twitter et al, were nowhere even  in the cosmos a decade ago , today they rule perhaps to vanish the day after.If India does not leverage its distinct  IT edge to leap frog, we will be relegated to   providing  no more than clerical services to a demanding  global IT Office.

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