Desicritics Author: Sadagopan S

The Phenomenon Called Indian Mobile Market Growth

Sadagopan S — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:04:06 EDT

The Indian mobile market is on a high growth trajectory. I was in two different Indian cities last week - part of my five-day five-different-city tour across Asia. While in India, I was told by my colleagues that the mobile telephone network connectivity had become so bad that connections were dropping often. I was in Kuala Lampur for a day and while talking to some friends, a Malaysian expert told me that the prospects of two major Malaysian telecom operators looked good owing to their investments in India.

I was in a lunch meeting with a senior executive of a major South east airline the week earlier in Singapore - the most talked about topic over lunch was the advent of Indian aviation players creating ripples in the market. I was floored by the experience flying Jet airways on the chennai - KL leg. My colleagues ask me to hold judgement till I get to fly Kingfisher. I'm not someone to be impressed so easily - my frequent flier statement shows several hundred thousand miles with none other than Singapore Airlines. It is very likely aviation shall do an impressive repeat of the success of the mobile industry.

Let's look at the telecom scene: South East Asian telecom operators have made significant investments in Indian mobile service players. These players took financial stake in established growing business. Maxis, Malaysia's largest telecom player has invested in Aircel and Singtel has invested in Bharti, the largest mobile player in India. As these players slug it out, Maxis reports that Aircel added 588,000 new subscribers during the second quarter alone, which is more than double Maxis' achievement in Malaysia. The other Malaysian player Telekom Malaysia is investing in the third Indian Indian player - Spice Communications. All the three are aggressively expanding their Indian opoerations.

Monthly subscriptions are inching towards six million additions per month- 5.9 million of them are new mobile subscriptions making India's net addition the highest in the world overtaking that of China - though the penetration levels may be lower. The New York Times article shows that China added 5.1 million subscribers, so the Indian run rate is 15% ahead of that of China. Look at the growth - around 125 million subscribers have signed for mobile services in less than 15 years since the services were launched in the country. India beleives that six /seven million monthy new subscriber additions are possible.

Clearly liberalization, foreign investments all are helping the country in a big way - after all the Indian mobile subscription rates are amongst the lowest in the world and handset makers like Nokia are helping the cause by coming with low cost models and in the process helping India create high tech manufacturing clusters in places like Sriperumpudur - India's likely answer to Shenzhen. Three types of operators are already investing here - the OEMs like Nokia, Motorola, the EMS's like Flextronics & Foxconn and the component manufacturers who work with the OEM & EMS players.

Dell is the recent addition planning to set up a manufacturing shop there. It's the most talked about thing in the tech sector today - some of the largest telecom related opportunties for system integrators/service players are available in India. Clearly opening up of the economy and the progress of the technology world is helping India advance faster and better - the only eyesore is the Indian infrastructure - I do not want to write about my experience in the Bangalore airport clearing baggage or the time that it took for me in clearing immigration on my return via Chennai.

HP's Patricia Dunn Should Go

Sadagopan S — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 16:36:58 EDT

The HP board spying scandal drama is getting more and more murky. HP's chairperson, Patricia Dunn now says that the use of pretexting (a scenario in which one person masquerades as another in order to obtain private information) for board members and reporters has been a "major embarrassment." Clearly the cognoscenti look disturbed at the developments thus far.

Patricia Dunn should go, writes David Kirkpatrick. HP's chairperson reportedly spied on the company’s directors by having their telephone conversations tapped. If these allegations are true, it is very clearly unethical and perhaps illegal as well. The Wall Street Journal quotes people in the know as saying that there were criminal acts involved in the methods used to search the collected records. After all, HP is a legendary company and the founders of the company were well known for their neat and clean approach towards conducting business. Too often, the board fails to stand up and lead by example -- this should not be tolerated any longer. The board and its conduct are always answerable to shareholders and the law. It's also definitely a good practice to have the CEO and Chairman of the Board positions kept separated.

It is high time that HP stands up and in the process sends a firm, loud and clear message that it is once and for all putting behind the shame and agony of the ugly happenings centered around its board members. For a technology company, being able to respect privacy rights and behaving in an ethical manner, given that it operates around the world, is an absolute must. There is no room for ambiguity in this case. Ms. Dunn need not wait for the board to declare loss of confidence in her. She should be fired immediately.

Too often the board fails to stand up and lead by example. This should not be tolerated any further. It is high time that the HP board shows that it can act decisively to put this controversy behind it and take a strong stand against any sort of unethical acquisition of personal information. One essential way to send that message is to get rid of Ms. Dunn. Otherwise this will remain a mess that impacts the good reputation of HP.

Offshore BPO At The Crossroads

Sadagopan S — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:03:13 EDT

"Capgemini buys majority stake in Unilever's India BPO" screams the headline. The Unilever India Shared Services (Indigo), is a captive BPO company set up by Unilever in India with around 600 employees in Chennai as its development centre. The captive centre carries out finance and accounting-related processing for Unilever companies in 45 countries. Paul Hermelin, CEO of Capgemini, says that he would look at acquiring the remaining stake at a later date. While the cost of the acquisition (sellout?) was not known, it is expected that since the deal includes the price of acquisition of the stake and a revenue contract for future business, the total cost may not be very high.

On Valuation: Indigo had revenues of Rs 22.3 crore for the year ending December '05 with the average per head revenue of Indigo at �20,000 (Rs 17.4 lakh). Since captive BPO units are primarily cost centres, revenues or earnings are not likely to be the relevant benchmarks in valuing the deal. Instead, the valuation is likely to be based more on land, building and other infrastructure. The news also said that Capgemini (CG) and the Unilever group have also entered into a seven-year agreement to deliver the full range of BPO F&A services to all the Unilever companies, which Indigo currently serves.

As I see it, many are looking at this as a strategy beneficial to CG for scaling up in India. I would also urge readers to look at it from a different angle - that of Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL). Unarguably India's corporate icon and Unilever's crown jewel would not have taken such a decision without working out its near and medium term benefits. It's likely the case that HLL must have thought that sustaining a captive BPO center may not be the best option available to it - seen from an expertise, economics and scaling up perspective. I like Lever's approach - unlock the value, renounce management control where the operational challenges can not be managed with its existing core competency.

There are lessons for several multinationals who are setting up /scaling up their captive centers in India. No MNC can understand India better than Unilever. HLL has been in the country for several decades and is perhaps the largest non government/oil/IT services corporation in India. While the captive option may look attractive for some software product vendors/others in a limited way and for short duration, in reality, we see that the captive option falls short on one most important dimension - arresting turnovers, repeatedly cited as a matter of concern. The ability to support a wide range of operations may also be doubtful with captive models. Dell may be a notable exception.

Those who look at offshoring as just a means to shave off some costs and hope to improve on savings with passing time would definitely fail to achieve their goal measured over a period of time, unless they can work on the ability to manage it in a concerted way. In my experience, I find that maximizing productivity and minimizing risk seems to be the most prudent option that enterprises choose to pursue while attempting offshoring, and the ability of the captives on that front to outperform outsourcing is still an open question. The process of offshore outsourcing may be more evolutionary and a determined pursuit to engage more wide and deep would be a sure way to reap consistent benefits.

I echoed similar views when Apple chose to close down its India based support operations that there is no merit in keeping support as captive unit where scale is not there - whichever part of the world it might be. Outsourcing support may be the long term option for Apple (and all other industry majors across verticals). Clearly those investing in captive centers may need to review the options available to them more carefully.

Book Review: Eimona: The New World

Sadagopan S — Fri, 1 Sep 2006 04:27:35 EDT

G.B.Prabhat, the author of Eimona, has impressive credentials. He is the pioneer in offshore consulting business and a well known name in the global IT/Business Consulting space. Eimona is his second novel and after an interesting opening rapidly paces to an amazingly engrossing read - very rich in words and full of events - suits itself for a non stop read.

The humor and the depth in characterization, the distinct messages/thoughts centered on each of the characters are indeed quite telling. The new flat world is forcing disparate cultures to come together in an enmeshed way - with prosperity, business accelerating the pace of life like never before resulting in practices and events that were unthinkable a couple of decades back. These happen quite routinely and have the potential effect of denting the fabric of societal and traditional family values. Eimona is certainly amongst the early attempts to capture and bring out in its own brilliant way that these advancements come out with a tradeoff. Invariably society and most individuals pay a price for pursuing things that are centered on things like live for the moment, or follow the group syndrome and the deleterious consequences of the mechanical life with plastic smile ensconced with artificial values generally follow.

Prabhat's work is woven brilliantly combining wit, humour, false values, aimless materialism, simplicity, virtuous life and raises serious questions. The novel is set in Madras in India and captures the nuances of Eimona, a place that does not physically exist in any of the continents but alas is perhaps existent everywhere in this flat world. Clearly the message is universal, while the setting may be contextual.

What is Eimona? It is the reverse of anomie - an affliction that causes the victim to have social interaction that's lower than the usual standards in the group, a sort of rootlessness. By seeing through the eyes of Subbu, the eighty four year old, simple man, the world as he sees it is changing so fast in all its facets that established norms turn upside down. The way the change in norms are captured and presented makes the reading quite absorbing - filled as they are with good humour and deeply thought out observations. Most of these are brought out as Subbu's mind goes back and forth and assesses events and happenings based on new norms and bring out the conflict between the New India of stock options and artificial values while the society does not fully want to get rid of the flavors of the Old India.

The cold blast that hits Subbu in the form of the nature of fortunes that get built in millions based on stock options, the changing landscapes of residences when nature in its closest form at distance has not changed a bit, the prenuptial agreements and the different business setup where the employed and the organization have a purely contractual relationship etc - all these make reading of the novel, a very meaningful exercise. For example when his great granddaughter is born - he worries that she should not be named with the new economy tongue twisters - Vrimnolika, Karnishta or Avnita - he is relieved when she is named Maya , a simple but traditional name. Subbu, who has seen so many of his family members gone for ever in his lifetime dotes all his attention on the eight-year old Maya, his great granddaughter.

The powerful characterization in the form of the ever uncertain - Bharat, a successful investment banker as his grandson and his personable but aggressive wife Indu, an executive in a software firm and the way the events move when she can't accept their young daughter's nonchalant attitude towards the eworlds modern tools - online chat, games and all other non-academic activities but is quite tuned towards nature loving activities and pursues simple interests, which transcend social class and technology barriers. A nature loving child becomes a problem child when she does not get attracted towards the net, expected of her in these times. Rule setting Indu wants to run the family with an iron grip - the same way she works in the office and that includes his old, suffering father, staying alone and who in the past had a great social and business life. Several of Indu's action, so well brought out typically represents the false sense of righteousness that pervades the society and her own response towards sad personal events and partying life all make readers wonder and worry about the chaotic degeneration that we all see in our present day lives.

Subbu also finds many modern day activities at odds with what he has seen in his prime time - every working day in any family, the apartment complex transforms into a bedlam of noise and confusion by seven thirty in the morning, only to become quiet and solemn in an hour. His concerns about the potential inequity that modern society is spreading and how the beneficiaries tend to over look it is a representative point about the type of issues that the novel seeks to bring out. Bharat's inability to make up his mind - in moments of crisis - the appearance of Buridan's ass and the tutorship he got that in the long run - the majority always wins - are all classic follies that we tend to see in modern life and the novel captures it at its essence quite well. What happens to the simple minded old man Subbu and his great grand daughter Maya closer to the end adds to the excitement in reading the book.

Yet, despite addressing such serious issue of life, the novel has a well felt undercurrent of humour and coming out so naturally; it amplifies the effect of the book many times over. Eimona brings out quite fascinatingly many destructive shortcoming of the so-called meritorious society where conformance to the new norms is non-negotiable, however bizarre and anachronistic they might appear to the balanced mind. It pops up several questions that deserve to be answered by every thinking person. Combination of sharp observation and told in an eloquent style, liberally embedded with gentle satire, Eimona clearly qualifies to be the most representative story of the modern life and the digitized generation. It leaves a sense that we need to pause, reflect and question the happenings in the fast paced modern life and perhaps realign and revise the nature of the journey seeking more and more prosperity leaving with a taste of lesser happiness all around. Eimona may soon become a well spoken word as well, around the world. This is a MUST READ book - one can perhaps keep reading year after year.

VC Money and Indian Entrepreneurial Growth

Sadagopan S — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 05:26:12 EDT

Sramana Mitra perspective about VC and entrepreneurial maturity in the Indian ecosystem is amazing. With tech giants committing large investments in India and many VC firms upping their interest, she thinks that in today's India, the commodity in short supply is good entrepreneurs. In VC parlance, fundable deals are few and far between.

She points out that this goes back to India's traditional role as the world's back-office and the "skill-set that has developed in India is that of engineering management and coding. The specifications are provided by teams elsewhere. Elsewhere, the market studies get done. Indian managers do not understand global technology markets. They have hardly had opportunity to learn this aspect of business. Entrepreneurs try to position products without knowledge of the product marketing discipline".

Mitra thinks that services being the forte, VC's may think that the entry barriers are low and the strong players may get stronger and the investment appeal may go down. VC's may like internet, mobile, travel, matrimonial type of sites and investors are looking at other areas like retail, real estate etc.. She concludes that due to a number of such reasons that the Valley would continue to be the hotbed of technology innovation, which Indian back-offices can then implement and scale. Charles has similar set of concerns and thinks that with all the VC money flowing into India, a new startup model for Indian companies is necessary.

My Take: Read my earlier note here wherein amongst other things I noted that more than 95% (again my estimates based on feel) of the web2.0 setups have primarily come from within the US. Kudos to the technology leadership that the US is showing here - forget Asia or Europe - initiative, speed and zest for trying out in the tech sector still remain a US vestige. Good for America and by extension good for the world.

As I see it, it's time for action in places like India right now.

Some like CK.Prahalad expect China and India to dramatically change things in the years ahead. A recent delegation of venture capitalists visiting india while noticing infrastructural problems, also noted the ethos of circumventing such difficulties to carry on.

While some investments are beginning to happen, the ground reality is that vast majority of venture money tends to go into existing and later-stage businesses. There is little or no real VC money available in India that startups can tap. Companies that are receiving money in India are either spin outs from existing large businesses, captive units or second tier outsourcing providers that may lack the size or scale to compete with IT service giants and want the private equity money to grow through rollup and acquisitions.

In the US, venture money goes into early stage, pre-product or pre-revenue companies, while in India, a majority of the private equity is going into late stage businesses. A friend asked me when to expect the likes of next Google to come out of India. I had no answer to provide. Truth is that in general most Indian enterprises are hardly innovation chasing entities, and the framework for VC entry and exits are poorly defined. Coupled with limited VC activity in the past and archaic regulations, these factors make it a tougher breeding ground for enterprises like that of what is seen in the valley.

I agree with Mitra that the Valley shall continue to be the springboard for innovation and technological advances for some more time to come and we may see some limited action in other parts of the world - we may see the activity in India to be the equivalent of say a Boston area or Texas area for springing up startups but the valley shall remain the central node for technological advances. Let's hope breakthrough big deals and innovative enterprises spring out of this momentum.

However, I am not in agreement with Mitra about few things: Entrepreneurism is not in short supply in India. I see an increase by multiple times in terms of aspiring entrepreneurs in India. While I agree that she is right that there is a lack of marketing mindset amongst Indian setups, it is changing fast. Mostly what I see is that lack of capital had been a major reason.

The scene is changing fast. I now see many India-based entrepreneurs going around brimming with ideas. The fact remains that VC's are not so forthcoming in funding ideas as we see in the US market, which is understandable as they are in a new terrain. We are not hearing of VC's closing deals in India all that fast as we see elsewhere. I also feel that even in traditional outsourcing there are lots of white spaces waiting to be invested in by the VC's.

I do feel that the investment levels in pursuing mobile related opportunities are far too less in the country and I think it is still not a settled issue if Indian firms can be there - there are few more steps before ruling out the possibility. We are not seeing ambitions to build a next Cisco like firm in the mobile application space. The fact is that we may not see a Socialtext, Google, SAP or Cisco coming out of India in the next five-year timeframe but things are improving and are definitely slated to improve further in the coming years.

India-Anchored Service Providers: Huge Growth Ahead

Sadagopan S — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:34:21 EDT

First it was Forrester'sStephanie Moore,giving an endorsement of the growth of Indian headquartered offshore players. Now, Dana Stiffler from AMR has come out with an excellent perspective on the state of affairs of India Inc.

I liked Dana's term of calling India Inc companies as Indian headquartered companies/India anchored companies. She points out that things are on fire - tremendous growth opportunities are being felt by these majors. The scalability shown by these players are a real record of sorts. Dana makes a studied observation here -while all players are seeing increase in their cost structure, seen from a customer perspective - the benefits still outweigh the costs. They have no intention of backpedaling on their outsourcing and offshoring strategy.

Another interesting thing to watch in Dana's chart is the revenue/employee comparison between the global and Indian players. As I wrote recently, sourcing relationships actually encompass a wide array of choices given the dynamic nature of business and the intersections of various levels of capabilities that lay within enterprises and service providers. The increasing expectations associated with outsourcing are becoming difficult to meet. With a wide range of functions getting outsourced, the ability of the outsourcer to bind and manage all these functions meets with a varying degree of disruption. On the other hand, the service providers are coming under huge pressure to improve operational efficiencies and to maintain and enhance margins.

So in essence, seen from a customer perspective, offshoring strategies need to be dynamically re-evaluated as the business needs, strategies, models and execution methods keep changing. Clearly for the foreseeable future, despite the higher salaries experienced in India and other offshore markets, customers can continue to work with their chosen offshore service provider out of the existing locations to maintain the cost advantage besides reaping a set of other known higher-order benefits in offshore outsourcing opportunities.It must be said that the focus now needs to shift to improving productivity & yield converting into better business value as can be seen by executing faster and providing better business solutions.

eLearning, Open Source & Litigation

Sadagopan S — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:15:35 EDT

I wrote about dim prospects of e-learning riding the open source wave. The post evoked some strong reaction - perhaps more than most other posts would normally invite.

Someone wrote to me whether I have ever been to any institution to write about them. Well elearning is evolving very fast indeed. I was in a major presentation on a global elearning initiative a few weeks back and I saw significant amount of interest shown in open source - that included discussions around Moodle and Sakai as well.

I have seen quite a few commercial elearning packages getting implemented. I read with interest this development : Blackboard, a leading package claimed patent rights on certain tools/aspects of learning management systems. Blackboard claims that the patents only cover narrow company-created innovations.

The open source community believes that Blackboard would leverage the patent to force competitors into expensive licensing agreements, thereby increasing costs and reducing innovation. The http://noedupatents.org/ wiki lists issues relating to the patents claimed by Blackboard.

Theoretically speaking, leading edge open source applications can be best developed in the academic community - but I very much doubt that we can get together so may thinking hats in a sustainable way to come with a steady pace of consistent applications.

The more I began to look at solutions like Moodle /Sakai, amongst the well known applications, the more I realized that one may need to do a lot more to make these global class live applications( just my views here). I do not necessarily subscribe to the notion that open source fosters innovation. Larry McVoy once wrote- "It is simply not possible for an innovative software company to sustain itself using an open source business model."

For the record, I do not look at patenting as the same as innovation. Mcvoy says bitkeeper believes if the product is open sourced, we would be out of business in six months .To build a financially sound company needs well-trained staff, who need to be paid well. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you? I can't agree more.

The New Rules For Web 2.0 Startups

Sadagopan S — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:48:12 EDT

There are some interesting new trends on the Web, and it's the nature of a phrase like Web 2.0 that adheres to them, says Paul Graham. He finds that a lot is different now from 1998. Web sites look different. Startups operate differently. People use the Web in different ways. The changes were gradual, but if you have a gradual change of sufficient magnitude, it starts to become a different world. Some CEO's of Web 2.O Companies respond to questions ranging from revenue models, marketing, competition and a whole host of issues. Interesting to read - given my call for a reality check there, but the enthusiasm, initiative and energy seen in the Web 2.0 ecosystem is indeed amazing. This is an interesting set of response :

Sample : Question : How does (or how will) your company make money? - Browster (Peter Milener): Paid search in its various forms - PPC, search traffic, comp shopping, search clouds, etc. - delivered in a valuable way to users. - JotSpot (Joe Kraus): We're a subscription business model. The hosted version of JotSpot is used primarily by small to midsize businesses. We've got over 2000 paying companies and 30,000 paying users. In addition, we've got a downloadable version of JotSpot for use by larger enterprises. This is also sold on a subscription basis. - Texasgigs (Mike Orren): Local advertising. We will sell on "traditional" web models like CPM. Not much CPC, because a click usually isn't the right metric for local. We have a model whereby users can register a credit card (or multiples) with us in order to get instant discounts on purchases at our local advertisers, as well as a rebate to the local charity of your choice. We can then take ad revenue on a pay-per-swipe basis. - Piczo (Sonya Prybutok): Today we are based on an advertising model with plans to diversify our revenue streams as we grow. - ProductWiki (Omar Ismail): In the short term 100% of revenue will come from price comparison advertisements on our product pages. And for some comic relief... - Rapleaf (Auren Hoffman): Selling pet supplies

No doubt - there are some smart people quoted herein - my views remain unaltered. I just finished reading this article. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

The Enterprise Software Consolidation Jigsaw Puzzle: Customers Beware

Sadagopan S — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 01:21:12 EDT

Post IBM's proposed buyout of Filenet, the buzz in the ECM market is getting more and more shrill. For players like IBM, its 16 billion software business now contributes even more profit to the bottom line than services, and it's just now emerging as the $91 billion company's most dependable growth engine.

Actually, this is insightful -- Annex Research estimates that for 2006, software will account for 20% of IBM's revenues but 37% of its profits. Meanwhile, services, which represent 53% of revenues, account for 35% of profits, and systems and technology (mostly hardware products), which represent 24% of revenues, account for just 12%. IBM's software unit enjoys gross margins of 84.2%, compared with 35.9% for hardware and 27.7% for services.

For players like HP, it’s a catch-up game. BI Vendors could be buying out ECM players says this article, predicting more twists in the content management space. Bizarre, to say the least. If such a thing would happen, this would throw the BI players/ECM players into an awkward situation -- they will lose their identity. Look at this -- BI operates on structured data and too often ECM players operate on unstructured/hybrid data. BI mostly operates on data built on transactions; it cant be said of ECM to the same degree.

Look at it from a buyer's perspective – what would he get out of such a combined play? NOTHING, TO SAY THE LEAST. Also it may be technically possible (though not so easy), to combine these together – this would be a heavy duty investment for any enterprise and would definitely not be more flexible or friendly to operate/extend and integrate with other applications. More consolidation of ECM space appears plausible – that would be bringing together platform/infrastructure players, portal players, ECM players together . while some acquisitions look sensible, clearly all may not make the cut.

The early results of acquisition of proximate space play have not delivered well. The future of enterprise software is in partnering meaningfully, consolidating where there is a clear rationale, but not to come together for the sake of coming together!

Indian-Headquartered Offshore Services Players and Their Edge

Sadagopan S — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 12:39:26 EDT

Forrester's Stephanie Moore writes that major global service providers continue to lose ground to large Indian firms, especially in the application services market. She finds that the tier one Indian providers have continued to thrive while most legacy service providers have posted minimal to negative growth and goes on to assert that Indian firms will continue to grow -- and not just because they are a lower-cost option but they have caused a fundamental and structural change in the service provider/client relationship.

More importantly, she nails the fact that offshore providers have taught clients to expect transparency, efficiency, and accountability in service delivery. Stephanie, well known in the analyst community/industry for her superior understanding of the Indian offshoring phenomenon earlier wrote how Accenture & Cap Gemini are scaling/distributing/perfecting their global delivery models.

Better delivery is ensuring that Indian-headquartered companies are growing better than the global majors with offshore presence says this article. Due to their focus and operational efficiencies, Indian headquartered vendors are winning more deals than traditional players. Gartner's Partha Iyengar is quoted therein in support of this observed trend.

A few months back, while acknowledging the impressive ramp up of offshore presence of global majors, I wrote that more and more opportunities are beginning to get won in large numbers and most of the Indian big players are anyway hiring Big Six veterans to help strategise better to go after bigger deals.

An acquisition of the big players may be the final assault on the dominance of Big Six - but this could mean that the Indian companies may need to have a different mindset to manage - (with limited margins and more longterm in their outlook).It may disrupt the traditional economics of the Indian players, but nonetheless would be a move much needed in time.

Infosys in their recent analysts meet again emphasized that acquisition for scale is not an approach aligned with the disruptive business model for the offshore players but niche/special expertise may be the drivers for acquisitions. Certainly, I expect that at least one/two acquisitions would be made by Indian players in the mega deal outsourcing players space in 2006/early 2007. This is possible, as adaptability and speed of operations have always characterized their growth in the last decade - the important thing is to not lose sight of humongous opportunities that lay in front and go after them as aggressively as they used to do while growing.

It's still not game even - the gap may seem to be narrowing but even then, Indian HQ players have a lot more advantages sitting on their side. This is not to underrate the significant strides that multinational players are making with their India-centric plans. The collective share of the offshore players business in the global outsourcing industry is still very small, but they are gaining marketshare rapidly. The services industry is by itself a very different type of industry governed by an entirely different set of drivers.