Engg services spend to touch $1 trillion

Talent pool needed to tap offshore opportunities.

There is a need for the industry and institutes to come together to build the talent pool as offshore engineering services offer huge opportunities for India, Subu D Subramanian, director, Satyam Computer Services, said.

Addressing a press conference in connection with the SAE India and Satyam Computer Cart Baja Engineering Design Challenge contest, Subramanian said that engineering services would be the next big driver of growth for the offshore outsourcing industry.

Quoting Nasscom and Booz Allen Hamilton report, he said that global spend on engineering services was expected to grow from $746 billion in 2004 to $1.1 trillion by 2020. Of the $1 trillion spend, around $150 billion to $225 billion is expected to be on offshore engineering services and India's share is expected to be $34-$42 billion.

In 2004, India had only 12 per cent share of the $10bn-$15bn offshore engineering services market.

Subramanian said that talent pool scaling up would be the key challenge for India as the engineering required unique, sector specific skill sets. High quality engineering talent needed from top to bottom of pyramid "" research and development, systems design and services.

India can provide the advantage of its IT strength in engineering, provide integrated engineering and manufacturing services and provide end-to-end solution.

By providing end-to-end solution, India could offer total cost advantage from design to engineering to manufacturing, the Satyam director added.

While the industry and academia should come together to address the talent gap, there is also need to create awareness among the student community, said M S Kumar, senior vice president, SAE India and chairman and chief executive officer of Precimax Tech Pvt Ltd.

As part of the efforts to create awareness, southern section SAE India and Satyam would be organising an inter-collegiate engineering design contest called 'Cart Baja Design Challenge' on September 17 and 18 in Chennai for undergraduate and post graduate engineering students. The contest covers conceptualisation, detail design and prototyping.

Cart Baja (pronounced as Baa-Hah) is part of a series of engineering design competitions titled 'Mini Baja', being held all over the world including US, Brazil, Korea, South Africa and Mexico under the aegis of SAE International, a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing mobility technology.