Mumbai, Nov 22: The Indian software and solutions providers have failed to develop new products and therefore the IT firms should stop trying to develop these, a senior official of research firm Gartner said on Monday.
“Whatever products have come out of India so far has been very bleak. Except one or two banking products like the one from iFlex, we have seen very bleak product development by Indian companies. So products are not the way to go for the Indian companies,” Partha Iyengar, Vice-President & regional director at Gartner India told PTI on the sidelines of a Gartner symposium & IT Expo here.
However, he noted there is a lot of process innovation by the domestic IT firms but not much product innovation.
“I think Indian software companies should stop trying to develop products and focus on services and other solutions.”
Instead of trying to develop software products, the Indian software and solutions providers should focus on becoming more business-centric and provide solutions to local businesses, Iyengar maintained.
The domestic companies were late to realise the potential of providing solutions to local firms, he said.
“Domestic IT companies have actually lost domestic businesses to IBM and other foreign players. They lost out on business which Bharti Airtel had to offer. They need to concentrate on opportunities from local companies. At the moment, they are servicing US clients out of locations there. But they need to have a global delivery model so that they can service clients anywhere from anywhere in the world.”
Iyengar said the domestic software and solutions providers must have the guts to drop large deals which have now got commodified, so as to move up the value chain.
“The challenge is to walk away from even big ticket deals if they are a commodity business. The only domestic company that has done that so far is HCL, which actually chose not to renew a particular deal and even helped their client migrate to another company, so that they can do better quality work, which would help them move up the value chain.
“Another company that did it is Cognizant. I think domestic companies should quit providing commodified services and try to move up the value chain,” Iyengar said.
Gartner Senior Vice-President & Global Research Head Peter Sondergaard said very soon 3D (three dimensional) printing technology would revolutionise manufacturing to such an extent that China might become irrelevant as a manufacturing base.
“If businesses simply print out parts from a 3D printer, like it is already happening, China would cease to have its present clout in manufacturing,” he said.
Sondergaard said cloud computing, social networking as well as mobility of data and applications are new disruptive forces affecting businesses.
“These forces are innovative and disruptive just taken on their own, but brought together, they are revolutionising business and society.”
“What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what cloud computing is doing to in-house data centres. It is allowing people to optimise around where they have differentiated capabilities. The impact of these forces will make architectures of the last 20 years obsolete,” Sondergaard said.
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