A churning is taking place in the Indian software industry. Successive slowdowns and upturns through the last decade have separated the men from the boys. The leaders that have thereby emerged have put a big distance between them and the medium-sized firms with not much of a future for the latter. One of the latest manifestations of this is Patni, a large middle-rung firm, getting taken over by iGate which has decided to try and buy itself into the big league under the leadership of Phaneesh Murthy. Whether money can buy a slot in the premier league is not yet clear but what money plus capabilities can deliver is clear from the way Tech Mahindra is headed for the top league by appearing to make a success of the acquisition of Satyam. Most recently, the challenge posed by Cognizant, the silent 400-metre runner who combines stamina with speed, to the entrenched leaders has produced one of the biggest management shakeups in the industry with Azim Premji asking the two joint CEOs at Wipro to make way for T K Kurien. Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani knew and ran well the business as it was and still is. But tomorrow’s needs are different. As the industry gets out of a recessionary market, the leading players must not only feel the need for a new paradigm but also must know what it is. The memo for the leaders of the next phase of the business is to identify what it will take to remain in the top league — not just to redeem a vision but to spell it out in the first place. Wipro’s need for a turnaround strategy falls into place with the next generation, Rishad Premji, taking over as chief strategy officer.
For several years now, the industry leaders have been grappling with the challenge of transforming themselves from executioners to innovators. That this will have to happen along with competence in the next generation of technology, cloud computing, goes without saying. But do what with cloud computing? What business model will enable software as a utility to generate superior growth and margins? That is one of the challenges of tomorrow. The other is of the global incumbents, not just on the global arena but on the Indian home turf too. While IBM and Accenture are challenging the Indian challengers in India, between the two IBM is challenging Accenture too. Witness the induction of an outsider, Avinash Vashistha, as the head of Accenture in India. In this scenario, the two Indian leaders who are currently smiling are TCS and Infosys. The former’s smile is broader as it is putting a distance between itself and the rest. Its ability to keep winning new clients and expanding the business with existing clients, the depth of its different capabilities and the core leadership team that S Ramadorai left behind constitute its winning formula. Infosys’ smile, on the other hand, is a little wan as it is losing some of its premium pricing powers. Kris Gopalakrishnan and his successor will not be able to remain satisfied by executing with excellence in carefully chosen fields. They also have to define for their firm a strategy to meet the challenges of the decade ahead.