The Techtonic Shift in Indian IT

he life of 30-year-old Wael Ghonim has a strange parallel to those of N. Chandrasekaran, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Francisco D’Souza. There was a time when each one of them was a bystander to a revolution.

Infographic: Vidyanand Kamat 

Ghonim, a Google executive, had come back to his native Egypt in early January but disappeared on January 27 and spent the next 11 days in secret police detention. Upon his release on February 7, he was interviewed on TV in which he denied he was the real hero. He walked off the camera, but not before declaring that he would never leave Egypt and that he was ready to die for its cause.

Political revolutions are poetic and technology revolutions prosaic but both are about creative destruction. Both change the way we live. And often it is the bystanders whose commitment decides the success of such revolutions.

Nearly a decade and a half ago, N. Chandrasekaran, then in his early thirties, must have felt the same; or for that matter, the 40-something ‘Kris’ Gopalakrishnan must have too. Though TCS that Chandrasekaran heads, or Infosys that Gopalakrishnan runs today were central to the revolution in global technology even that time, all that they got for their labours was the tag “Code Coolies”. The revolution belonged to IBM, Sapient, Cisco, and Netscape. Chandrasekaran and Gopalakrishnan were not much more than bystanders.

But at the beginning of 2011, their companies are much, much stronger and on the verge of driving a brand-new IT revolution that will yet again change the way we live and work.

To understand this, you would have to make the trip to the faraway American Midwest. There lies Jane or Jenny — names are not that important here — ailing and at home. With American healthcare in shambles, getting nursing help at home is tough. The number of available nurses is no match to the number of patients needing them. Many patients flock to the hospitals, naturally. It is then that the law of unintended consequences kicks in and those who actually need the hospital beds find it hard to get in. Hospitals face a moral dilemma. How can they nurse the ailing as far as possible in their own homes so that hospital beds are free to take in the more critically ill patients? Obviously, they can’t hire a large nursing field force. The costs are prohibitive and the task of managing them is quite another matter altogether.

That’s when the bystanders of the last revolution decided to step into the square. The company, possibly Cognizant, perhaps Wipro, decided to speak up and offer to save those lives.  As per the plan, the best nurses go out into the field armed with hand-held devices, nifty software and high-speed connectivity. The field nurses provide the human touch, the panacea of the ailing. All the vital signs and medical data they gather are divided into two batches. The batch of data which needs immediate action — for instance, a suspicious change in the ECG pattern — is analysed at a local command centre. Everything else is sent to a centre in India where it is put into a database and analysed for long-term action.

The Indian outsourcing company owns and operates everything, nurses in the field, US operations centres, India operations centres and all the IT and infrastructure. It builds the business by acquiring, integrating and transforming the various assets required. It adds more sophisticated local-market call centre services for practicing nurses in the field and buys out companies with field nursing staff. Now, a complete home nursing solution can be offered to health-care providers or health plans, all from workstations in India.

A decade ago, the Indian company would have been merely fixing bugs in the hospital software.

Today the world wants Indian IT companies to go beyond offshoring. Global customers appreciate that Indian companies understand technology and know how to cut costs. And that they could help cut costs down to the bone. Gone are the days when companies could just fill in the technology piece and smugly make money. Now, the overseas customers want Indian outsourcing firms to help them evolve business solutions.

“Fundamentally if they don’t understand our business, they wouldn’t be on board at all,” says the CIO of one of the world’s largest companies. So, the changing reality for Indian companies is to take the next logical step and align their services more in tune with the business objectives of their customers. This is especially true of large companies like Tata Consultancy and Infosys who have the capacity to undertake enterprise-wide projects and urgently need ways to get their massive revenue bases to grow.

This in itself would be a tough enough challenge. What makes the job tougher for Indian companies is that there is a new clutch of technologies they need to master — social media and cloud computing. If they are smart about it then this is the moment when Indian firms can wrest the technology thought leadership from companies such as Accenture, IBM Global Services and HP.

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