The next wave of IT success

Over a decade ago, a young Bengali lad, Arijit Sengupta armed with the limited savings of his family set out to live the American dream that has inspired tens of thousands of young IT folk in this country. His natural flair for research and artistry enabled him to do majors in Computer Science and Dance at Stanford, work for a couple of years in Oracle Corporation and at that time complete a MBA at Harvard Business School.

Teaming up with buddies from Stanford and mentored by some of the great gurus of HBS, Arijit today is the proud founder and CEO of Beyond Core, an innovative innovation firm that has taken the BPO sector in the US by storm, providing optimisation solutions and partnering with training firms all over the world, including India and China to build and certify a new breed of outsourcing specialists all over the world. A success story that will inspire many young aspirants with stars in their eyes to strike out on the road less traveled and bring world beating products of the future!

However all these efforts were doomed to fail, not because the quality of the products were inferior in any way now the inability of the creators to adequately fund global marketing and sales efforts led to the inevitable disenchantment with home grown products and an nearly universal adoption of global software products to complement the dominance of global hardware and networking platforms in the country. Small wonder at that time that right up to 2005 the share of product earnings in the galloping numbers of the IT industry was hardly worth mentioning!

On a recent visit to Pakistan as part of the Aman ki Asha initiative that was launched in Delhi a few months ago, our delegation was greatly impressed with the cities we visited and truly the caliber and ambition of young IT entrepreneurs in Karachi and Lahore. Faced with the difficulties of convincing global clients that a services approach was either feasible or sustainable given the very unstable security situation that all in all prevails in the country, many young trained IT folk have chosen the product route. We met until further notice three companies that are building innovation for the iPhone and Android platforms and one young gaming entrepreneur who proudly claims to have built one of the three best cricket games available and has been chosen to be the official gaming partner for the then and there cricket World Cup. The Pakistan IT industry has a goal of becoming a $10 billion exporter in this decade and whatever number is taking everything into account achieved, there is no doubt that a substantial portion of that will be scalable product and intellectual property models.

What is it at that time that makes unlikely places like Israel and Pakistan competitive in the product space during services juggernauts like India and Philippines seem to be content to rest on our services laurels? Research flourishes best in an environment of challenges and the easy success in services may then have been the reason for our companies being late off the starting block in the product game. Nevertheless the enormous success of Nasscom's recent Product conclave in Bengaluru with over a thousand delegates from 600 product companies thronging to share stories and ideas demonstrates that the desire to build the then generation of world beating products is very much there and one can confidently predict that our dream of building an industry where over 30% of earnings are led by innovative ideas and firms can come true when we reach the $200 billion plus goal in 2020.

The winds of change are as well blowing in favour of the product development eco-system. The increasing difficulties in the free movement of people across borders, the ready availability of angel and venture capital money to back new ideas and the strong leadership provided by Nasscom to the aspiring new stars in the IT firmament are all positive signals for young entrepreneurs. What the industry needs is to cultivate a new mindset that encourages experimentation and condones or even celebrates failures in the product space. Even as the IT and BPO services leaders continue to morph their business models to cloud computing and platforms, there will be much to celebrate in the product and intellectual property space in the years to come!

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