Software still beats hardware

The salaries of hardware engineers in the Indian information technology industry have nearly doubled over the last two years and yet the exodus to software continues, according to an Elixir Web Solutions survey.

The increase in the hardware industry salary indicates growth of 28 per cent in the industry and increasing demand from organisations. Abraham Cherian, manager IT practice, Elixir Web Solutions, said, "Any company with five IT systems needs engineers to monitor them. Besides a lot of IT hardware component of companies are being outsourced."

Consider this. At the managerial level (with 3-4 years experience) in the hardware industry, salaries have risen from Rs 75,000-1,00,000 three years back to Rs 1.5-2 lakh currently. But these salary increase cannot match those of the software industry.

Even the salary of a junior level engineer in the software industry can match that of a manager in the hardware industry while an employee with four and above years of experience in the software sector earns anywhere between Rs 6-7 lakh per year.

For these reasons hardware engineers prefer to move to software industry. "Of every 100 hardware engineer at least five want to move over to the software industry. But other than salary, we have seen that people are shifting due to the environment and the people that they are working with," said Cherian.

The other reason is the glamour and the brand that software industry is associated with that attracts the best talent from the hardware engineering sector.

Elixir survey reflects that e-commerce and supply chain management professionals will be in big demand in the coming few years. However, apart from the basic degree in computer science/engineering one must have knowledge of software used in the front end such as Java, Dynamic Hyper Text Mark-up Language (DHTML), Visual basic etc., along with basic understanding of databases such as Oracle and SQL server as well as networking and web server maintenance used in backend.

Cherian noted that last year the company had placed 20-25 people in the e-commerce industry but in the last six months the demand has grown by 50-60 per cent. The other segment that is looking fast growing is the supply chain management (SCM) professionals.

"However, the team leader overlooking a SCM deployment needs to have business understanding than IT knowledge. In the last three months we have provided 4-5 managers for supply chain deployment," adds Cherian.

However, to manage this growth and get continuous quality talent the report suggests that the HR department needs to be an important sub system in the IT industry. In future competitive edge among organisations will come only through their human resources.