Terror, Terror and Terror

I guess that’s what is there on everyone’s mind today – feeling very livid and very helpless as we can’t do much other than sparing a moment about  the whole tragedy, the innocent victims who laid their lives and may be lighting a candle. Feels very upset over the sad state of affairs.

I was in Bangalore working with my laptop when I first heard the news and that too on “Financial Times” website of UK and since then never got away from the TV and the web, and was feeling sick in the stomach to do anything and could not concentrate on anything – felt really sick L

In the same space I wrote way back in June about the possibility of the same under the title “A Safer India is a MUST : IT power of India and Protecting ourselves”; I was very convinced that then that for a vibrant growing economy like India only ways to break the progress and even reverse it was through terror and I was very sure then that this will be what used against us. I wish I predicted wrong but unfortunately all became true.

I read in an article that the loss was more than Rs4500 crores in those few days and obviously much more in the business that would not come our way because of this, and wish someone in the higher ups would have thought about this. Even if they had spent some part of that money towards securing our nation, this day would have never happened.

US was also hit similarly and yes it bounced back but there were almost none terror attacks. When we compare ourselves to US, the numbers just doesn’t add up:

India supposed to have only 3,500 intelligence agents for 1.1 billion people. Compare that with the U.S., where the FBI employs 12,000 agents for 300 million population. Add this to the new home guard security agency and the elaborative measures they have taken to prevent another 9/11. Same goes with UK too.

I feel today terrorism is the biggest obstacle for the Indian business and its economic juggernaut. India is being tested as never before. In the coming months the world, and in particular the global business community will be watching us for the answer to a crucial question: whether India can overcome its greatest obstacle to advancement, whether India can bring about concrete action items and execute it, can India respond the way US did post 9/11 etc. This is I feel the most important phase in our history and we need to stand tall and reply with very concrete actions. No I am not talking about a war, no blame game either but pure fool proof security system in place so that next time when they try again we can defend ourselves.

On a positive note, I feel that people are asking for a serious no-nonsense concrete action plan from the government and I feel people are more united today. Will this day be remembered in history as the day which marked the real unification of all Indians across the length and breadth of the nation without worrying from which state he hails from or which language he speaks or what caste/creed he comes from? Hope so; tragedy has happened but let’s take the positives of it and move forward with vigor,  resoluteness, oneness, dedication and with lots of hard work to build a India the world will envy.

Jai Hind

Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software

 

 

 

 

Entrepreneurship and the Marathon

Entrepreneurship and the Marathon

I know many people in their talks, essays and articles keep comparing entrepreneurship to running long distances or what we say marathons. Many a times I used to wonder why, I myself is a avid long distance runner – used to run 20kms and not I have sort of scaled down to 10, nevertheless long distance and I had an opportunity to do the same today too and this thought occurred to me again and I started drawing similarities.

I do three different kinds of runs depending on where I do or when I do. I do sometimes treadmill running, sometimes in a big ground where I run few rounds or sometimes I just run across the town. Even though all three are tough in their own ways I think there is a huge difference between them. Running long distances like any rigorous work, is as much physical as mental. One needs to be very strong physically as well as mentally. I have seen that in treadmill running there is always an option to stop when either your body or the mind says enough for now, excuses can be many and you are exactly where you started and hence generally exit option as I call, is right there and you stop many a times at the slightest of the fatigue or a hint to quit. Where as in circle running these tendencies are there but at an average of ½ the circle is what you need to run to get back to where you started whenever you feel like stopping. Again exit option is there to take whenever you want. Whereas across the town running does not throw this option and when you are doing this you don’t even get distracted nor you even look into the watch or anything, only thing you know is that you need to reach the destination and you don’t have an exit option waiting like in the other two options and still better, you don’t even have that exit option in your mind, all you think and know is the destination, period. I guess this is what I call the high performance entrepreneurship, you are so deep into it, you don’t have and don’t even consider any exit options and you just see the destination and run for it. While doing ofcourse you hit many occasions of downs and fatigues where you would have taken the exit option if you were tread milling but not in across the town run, that’s the beauty of it. You have just have to jump deep, deep enough so that you don’t have exit options other than reaching the destination and that way you don’t keep any exit options but the desired goal in the mind. A story comes to my mind wherein the attackers used to burn their boats after they cross the river and the only option is to win the war and return – killing all exit options other than the desired one. I guess this attribute is what makes an entrepreneur, the real high performance entrepreneur. It is very tough but that’s how the game is played. This recession will be a litmus test for the entrepreneurs especially of the emerging community I believe.

Andy Grover’s “Only the paranoid will survive” talks mainly about how deeply you are involved and is the final and the only measure of success or better word he uses is the survival. Even Bagchi in his book “The High performance Entrepreneur” talks about not to even think about the exit options. If you have a backup plan or an exit option, your mind tunes to it and it always takes the easy option.

Talking about Entrepreneurship remind me about the lecture I gave recently on “Entrepreneurship” in my Alma Mater, UVCE (University Visvesvariah College of engineering) which is part of Bangalore University, where I did my BE in Computer Science, way back in 1991 (Aug 1987 to Aug 1991). I was amazed by seeing that hunger, the energy and the enthusiasm in their eyes. The kind of exposure they have is unlimited. Our days entrepreneurs are well known for the IT services industry and I am sure the next gen entrepreneurs will answer the question of “Will there ever be an Apple or a Microsoft or a Google from India?” This question keeps popping to me always. I was recently giving a speech in California mainly about India and the opportunities we have over here and one of the questions that came up from the audience was that will we remain the IT Services guys or will there ever be an Apple or a Microsoft or a Google from India? Not sure whether I gave a convincing reply but that kept on lingering in my mind and I am sure the day is not too far and you never know, the recession might be a blessing in disguise in a way for us to huddle together and start working on revolutionary ideas, but after seeing those students I am sure the days are not too far.

 Digressing again, I feel there are lot of opportunities in India itself in a way which is making the west look in our direction. We at S7 Software, were considering on how to capitalize the growing Indian market and I picked up a book about Indian amrket in a US airport (always good to see the market in someone else’s perspective and then you add your own and the result should be something very close to what it is). The book title is “Riding the Indian Tiger” – seems a  reasonable good book and I am sure that those in the west you are planning to foray into India will find this book very resourceful and some of the facts he has put about India is really amazing and let me share the same with you all here:

 

·         30 to 40% of all India’s produce is lost in the supply chain (great opportunity here)

·         India has a total arable land area of 162 million hectares – 25% more than China

·         India is the second largest producer of Sugar case in the world and from sugarcane you get Ethanol – a vital element of the struggle against global warming

·         India is the largest producer of motorcycles in the world

·         India is the largest producer of milk in the world

·         Only five nations has population higher than UP

·         India is the fourth largest producer of soybeans in the world

·         High tech manufacturing, distribution and logistics, pharmaceutical and medical devices, financial services, education, renewable energy, agribusiness, fashion apparel, media and entertainment, hospitality and leisure, private health care etc are supposed to be the *hot areas* as far as verticals where there are lot of opportunities.

·         BTW, talking about hospitality and leisure industry, NYC is supposed to have more hotel rooms than currently exist in the entire country of India

 

Anyone getting any entrepreneur ideas to jump into these opportunities? J

 

Anyway, coming back to my across the town running, I did a 10km and clocked it within 50 minutes and for me that was very good rate and I thoroughly enjoyed it. You are exhausted but you feel so good at the end as if you scaled Mount Everest. Hopefully I will climb the Everest in my entrepreneurship climbing – irrespective of how tiring it is, I am sure the journey will be worthwhile and will be lot of fun and satisfying.

Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software

 

Time is money so they say, Time is Respect, Time is Everything

I was in London couple of weeks back. This was my first London visit and fortunately had done enough home work (on the internet) and hence trying to figure out Tube (the Subway train) and the busses wasn’t a problem right from the moment I arrived there. I took a Saturday off and went to sightseeing in London in a guided tour; London is beautiful and I am very impressed with the public transport and how traveller friendly it is. What I was more impressed was the time sense the guide showed - let me share the experience. We were 23 in total, people all from various countries and various walks of life, and guide would explain the whole history behind a building, event etc and used to let loose us (for photo ops, refreshments etc) but used to say you have to come back at a given time, say quarter past 11 and he *meant* quarter past 11 and few people of course would not appear and he instead of either waiting or complaining about them, would clap for all those who came on time and would wait just for couple of minutes and used to say “I am sure they would have found something which is worthwhile than this and we moved on. Remember every loss of a tourist would cut into his tips at the end but still time is time for him and because of his attitude we saw everything in London what we had planned for the day, but we were 5 less when we finally reached the hotel back. This is how *time* works here and so in most developed countries.

 

Now let me fast compare this to few foreign delegations and group seminars I have attended in the past. There were times when we were told to meet at a given time in the lobby or at a given place and many a times there were guys from the local place/country, heads of local organizations over there etc also to be present at a given time and I always found that we were always late to a given time. At one instance in one of the delegations, we were all told to meet at sharp 8.30 in the morning and about 15 delegates were to be present from our side and another 3 from the hosting nation side. 8.30am came and went, those three were all there on time and guess how many we were on time from our side – just two of us :–( Sad indeed. Worse, most of the delegates were having breakfast over a long chat with no worry about being on time and still worse others who were done were just accompanying them, and worse than all, we two had to hear the murmur of about Indians time sense, in IST how “S” stands for stretchable etc etc from the local delegates and what a shame? And we are supposed to be the tomorrow’s Premji and Narayan Murthy’s!!!  No chance with this time management, I am sorry to be harsh but true in my opinion.

 

If we in the corporate world don’t fix this stretchable issue, everyone else will stretch our country and we  can never be a developed country: it was a shame on our part and worse we don’t even condemn this either - the attitude of “chalta hai” - people don’t seem to understand to respect and to value the time of those who came on time; remember time is not just money, but respect too and everything else and this stretchable is  a contagious disease and your employees will do the same and your whole organization will start following the same - meetings delayed, commitments delayed, promises delayed etc etc and the list goes on; think about it, fix it before it is too late otherwise we will all be too late as this is a very competitive global flat business world and one day it would have spread everywhere like cancer and before you know, our clients wont stretch but will skip us.

Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software

EmergeOut Conclave: It is a Crime…………

(This  is about the EmergeOut conclave we had in the last week of September 2008, in Delhi)

(The whole blogging on emerge out is pretty stale now I guess as stale as talking about India’s win in Mohali – too stale nevertheless let me give my point of view!!)

The EmergeOut conclave was a great opportunity for us, the emerging companies, to come out understand what we need to learn from those who have been there and done that and also was a great networking opportunity too. I almost missed it but thanks to Avinash from NASCOM who literally forced me to come there and ofcourse my marketing manager Subodh told me how in the world I can miss it and thanks to both I was there and valued every moment I spent there.

Before people start thinking why the hell the topic reads like it, let me get to the point. The whole session started out with the key note address by Subbroto Bagchi talking about “breaking all rules” and as usual he gave a very impressive session but unfortunately it was a very short one – probably less than an hour I guess (or atleast it appeared so :–) ).

I really think it is a Crime to call Subbroto Bagchi for a Key Note address and give him just a slot of an hour or less L As I mentioned earlier his topic was about breaking the rules and I was hoping that he will break this law of time limit but to everyone’s disappointment he did not break that law. His oratory skills are so impressive, and his knowledge his so vast and his speech’s are worth every second and he has the capability to hold the entire audience’s attention. In this speech, I really liked his comparison (of entrepreneurship) to nature and to Salomon breeding habits  and his words of “learn from the nature” and “don’t try to increase the probability (of survival), just be the survivor”. I was first subjected to his session/speech by *force* when I joined WIPRO in 1997 after I returned for good from the US and from then on I always make it  a point to attend any function/seminar in Bangalore where Bagchi is speaking.

Those who have never sat through his speech, I recommend strongly to try once and don’t blame me for getting addicted after that J Those who have not read his book on entrepreneurship (The High performance Entrepreneur) you are missing something and my advice is start NOW ASAP. Especially if you an Indian Entrepreneur specially in the services industry – don’t ever miss it (buy it today on the way home).

Coming back to EmergeOut, I won’t be summarizing the whole event as there was live blogging going on while the event happened and also many other blogs have come on the same (NASSCOM Emerge website) site and they should give a pretty much detailed summary of the whole event. Personally as good as I felt, did feel that few things were missing. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting again Mali (C Mahalingam, VP HR at Symphony Services), Sanjay (Sanjay Anandaram, CEO JumpStart), KK (K Krishnakumar, CEO MindTree) who were all my mentors when we (S7 Software) got mentored a year back.

Anyway in my opinion I felt that EmergeOut should have covered on “Sales and Marketing” especially for emerging companies, and also about “Innovation”,  again with the emerging companies and specially services companies in with probably live examples of other Indian companies who have crossed the bridge. I would love to hear Avinash’s opinions on these two items.

Overall it was a great experience and I felt good of being there and I hope it will be an annual affair. Looking forward for the next one!!!

Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software

My Experiences with NASSCOM delegation to UK and Ireland

My Experiences with NASSCOM delegation to UK and Ireland

 

Sorry for a long gap between my Blogs as I have been travelling a lot, a week in Delhi for the NASSCOM emerge out conclave (it was just one day but it coincided with my kids vacation and hence took the week off to see Delhi and Agra) and another 10 days in UK as part of the NASSCOM delegation.

Let me try to summarize how the trip went, what I expected out of it and what were the takeaways. We were 17 of us from various SMEs across the length and breadth of India and all had different experiences and expectations w.r.t this UK delegation. As far as I am concerned, this was my first time to UK and even though we had few clients we were never into UK per say and our offerings (Legacy migrations and modernizations) fit the UK market very well but I knew with no knowledge of the local culture, the ways of doing business and more importantly never being there even once, we were definitely not in the perfect position to do business in UK in a way and I am one of those who believes that ‘you do business with people’ and knowing people from the place where you do business, is very critical and paramount for me. This was in a way my main objective to see, look around and understand how business actually runs in that country and any amount of reading, knowing via other medium, internet study in no way equivalent of being present there physically.

I was in London two days ahead of schedule, met couple of my clients, spent time understanding the local people, culture, business and more importantly the commute part – the bus, the tube and the trains. One day I spent on London sightseeing and my honest opinion is I was very very impressed with the local transport of London and something what we can emulate here in traffic choked metros of India. Roads are narrow to in London but most travel by the underground subways what they call TUBE and ofcourse complemented by the Bus and the trains running from suburbs of London to downtown London and the whole system is so traveller friendly imagine me becoming an expert in just an hour and two rides in the Tube. You don’t have to ask a person a thing, all is written and you just have to look around (and ofcourse you need to know English) (please note for those who are travelling to Heathrow and then to London, there is a TUBE which runs from Heathrow to central London and no need to go for those expensive Cabs – yes I hear you – you have luggage, they knew too and they have made space for the same in all TUBEs which run that route – smart planning huh).

Sunday I flew to Dublin (in republic of Ireland) to join the delegation and had planned enough to figure out the buses and the bus route to the hotel. Sorry I can’t say the same thing what I told of TUBE to transport here. Anyways, we had daylong meetings in Ireland with NASSCOM equivalent of Ireland, with few clients, with few expatriates from here who have established over there, lawyers involved either in corporation setup or immigration etc and overall was very informative to an extent to make a smart choice based on those facts whether you like to do business over in Ireland or not and whether you like to setup your European office (whenever you make that decision) in Ireland or not. Overall I was very happy with the outcome as I personally did not have many expectations out of the Ireland visit and for an entrepreneur any information feed is always beneficial as they all play in the mind some day or other while taking a decision or a stand.

 

Monday night we flew to Glasgow (in Scotland, part of UK) and we were supposed to be having a long day on Tuesday meeting various clients and other associates. I had read on Friday in the telegraph on how England pays a huge amount of tax payers money to Scotland so that it is what is today (This is based on what I read in the paper and disclaimer is I don’t have firsthand knowledge to prove this or disprove this and hence might not be true at all; I will welcome your comments) and with few banks going almost bankrupt, I was wondering what can be the reception as I suspected or feared, the day was a disaster as no one turned up other than few office bearers from the NASSCOM equivalent of Scotland and had a bit of introductions and promises to forward our profiles to the potential companies over there and did a bit of sightseeing but I caught an early flight to London to meet a potential client of mine which worked out for me. Then again such things are bound to happen and generally getting the ideal situations is almost zero and who understands this better then the entrepreneurs. This reminds me of what Bagchi talks about how Watson had a unexpected customer out of his wife’s club meeting and what IBM is today because of that and hence we should expect and derive opportunities and insights from everything that happens around us irrespective of whether we planned that or happened accidentally.

Anyways, on Tuesday night we were all in London to embark rather a very demanding schedule from Wednesday onwards. Wednesday morning started with a meeting of NASSCOM equivalent of UK or London what is called Intellect and has some great members, there were few companies from London area, lawyers, immigration experts, auditors, etc and had a great time. We even had speed dating, a concept of NASSCOM delegates (us) and UK based companies talking to each other one after the other trying to explore where both have opportunities to work together which went very well. Overall at the end of the end we had great sessions and lot of first hand information about how to do business in London, where to start and how to start and what all we should be careful of (regulations and taxes) and what all we need to take care etc and we came out very satisfied and happy and it made up for all we lost in Scotland in a way. We also went to London Stock Exchange and we had got this special permission to go inside and we had one of the presidents talking to us and how one can get listed there even if we are SME etc and they set pur aspirations much higher. The greatest moment of all was Som Mittal (president of NASSCOM) was with us whole day and we all have even dinner together in an Italian restaurant. Getting to know Som so closely and so well was my real highlight of the day. He is very impressive the way he delivers his speech and the way he works with his counterparts. I was very impressed with him.

Wednesday we went to IBM office in Hershley, an hour drive from Central London.  They explained that as the home of IBM CICS and also the birth place of IBM Websphere MQ and to Java some extent. They shared some of the best practices of IBM worldwide and how they work with IBM Beijing and IBM Bangalore on a very close relationship. They also talked about their new ventures w.r.t Facebook and mobile technologies all written in J2ME. They explained how a almost dead product was given to them when they started and how they converted that into a mainstream product and is now responsible for a very good part of the global revenues of IBM. Then we drove to Microsoft which is another hour drive from there and is located in Thames Valley, a beautiful place and an hour or less drive from London and is in a place called Reading (pronounced as Redding). We met a senior manager over there and he talked about the complete set of software offerings Microsoft has and dealt more on the software + services offerings which is new from the MS stables and he even mentioned to check the MS website by the end of the month as they have a new offerings and a new announcement to make. He explained how software just as a application or just as a SaaS model won’t be viable in the coming days and it is the combination of these two is crucial and MS offerings of S+S is going to be the future. We also met one from the vendor connection program and he talked about how Indian companies can leverage MS UK and he explained his experience with working with other IT biggies from India. Then we actually went to Reading and we met a corporate lawyer associates who gave a complete run down of how to set up a office in Thames Valley and we also met the Indo-UK business council and I had collected enough information and contacts and felt like I could have started the business from that day in the UK and could have even got few clients J

 

Friday was relatively less of a rush; we met to a end to end service provider of the whole services of corporation setup, auditor, tax, immigration and related matters. Information was very helpful and I get the information I collected throughout this trip is very invaluable and I don’t think I would have got this info this easily even if I had spent weeks if not months researching. Post lunch we had a short meet and we dispersed and I spent some time shopping a bit or more walking up & down the Oxford street which is a major shopping street (akin to say Brigade road in Bangalore just 10 times bigger I guess) and then off to India on Saturday.

 

Unexpected outcome of the whole event has been the networking among we the delegates itself and the friendship we built among ourselves and the information sharing we did among ourselves some of the best practices etc. I guess I learnt a lot of stuff which I would have not got otherwise and something which I can apply in the day today running the organization. The chemistry worked very well and was the most unexpected sweet outcome of the delegation. Also I like to thank Akansha and Amit who represented NASSCOM and were very helpful and had worked very hard to make this a success. Thank you each of the delegates for making my trip very memorable and to be frank I learnt a lot in these nine days which otherwise would have taken lot more time and few more costly mistakes for sure.

 

Ofcourse you spend all your time praising the whole thing and if you don’t mention few shortcomings, the whole summary will be like food without salt – wont it be? J J

 

I felt we can do little fine tuning here and there and teh time spent would have been much more worthwhile. Some of the things I thought were,

 

-          Little more time conscious from all of us

-          If NASSCOM had informed its equivalent in other countries to inform about us (the delegate companies) and then in turn those companies to read the profile and actually come and meet us whenever there is a good match

-          Somehow overcoming the Scotland Fiasco

-          May be sessions from those Indian companies who have been successfully established their business in UK and sharing their experiences and the good, bad and the ugly things

-          May be few sessions from people who can explain how to do business especially from a vendor point of view

 

Overall was a very good trip and yes I did achieve my objectives and like to take this opportunity to thank NASSCOM for arranging one and my fellow delegates who enriched my experience over there.

 

Manjunath M Gowda

S7 Software

Will the SOA services be like this one day?

Please do refer to my latest article which got published on enterprise.in and here is the link and this should serve as an introduction to what I am going to discuss in the ensuing paragraph.

http://www.enterpriser.in/India/Opinion/SOA_Redefining_Software_Deployment/551-91286-444.html

If all applications either legacy getting migrated to the SOA model or the new ones getting designed in the SOA fashion, we are surely building black boxes which can talk to each other  to get the work done via web services. The fun part of the whole story is that the different modules work in such a fashion that even if you remove and replace with other, chances are other modules getting affected is almost zero which truly is the best case of modularization and the real black box at work.

One of the advantages of the is that any given organization can concentrate all its energy into its core focus area and rest all it can outsource very easily as long their core focus area and the outsourced modules all talk to each other in a SOA fashion.

There are few advantages in outsourcing services in SOA way

-          You can create SLAs very specific to the service required

-          You dependence level will be not critical on a given service provider

-          Switching cost between vendors is very minimal and none in most cases

-          M&A activity becomes easier, also using same modules across departments and across geographies becomes that much easier and integration across becomes better and faster

-          All these together will increase productivity exponentially and also make execution such a smooth motion

-          Many more such advantages

There are many applications across enterprises yet to take advantage of SOA but in future I am expecting more and more enterprise applications will get migrated to SOA to take plethora of advantages of SOA.

Manjunath M Gowda, CEO S7 Software

Execution is Everything

As people say a step walked is better than miles planned. In this Blog I will discuss about the book I just finished:
“EXECUTION – The Discipline of getting things done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

I am very impressed with the book and this book bit of a text bookish but takes you on the journey of how to actually draw strategies and operations and then a operations plan with deadlines and responsibilities and explain how to draw a budget and even revenue forecast based on this rather than the other way round.

Infact that’s what we do to at S7 Software – we first write down the objectives, then get the strategies on how to achieve these objectives and then action items for each strategy and a resource name against each action item and then a timeline for each action item. Once set we use this to derive the expected revenues for the next year and also budgets. Of course while we do this we even bring in the resource strength and the skill set and then basically modify, few trade-offs happen and we finalize the whole plan before March (end of the current financial year) for the next financial year and meet every quarter to do a “progress-check” and realign the strategy if required based on the realities and market condition and proceed for the next quarter. (Thanks to our mentor Anal Jain who introduced this to us).
If you guys are doing this anyways, I say read the book as a reference to make sure you are on the track and may be fine tune here and there. If this is *not* how you plan your year, I strongly recommend to get a copy pronto and read and understand every point the author makes and try to follow it up and you will be surprised to see the results you see in your organization.
Anyway below are my highlights of the book and in no way these highlights will replace reading the book but I am hoping that these highlights might actually make people pick up a copy and read the whole book. Ok here are the highlights:
A step walked is better than miles talked so is what this book talks about – unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they are pointless.
• Execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy
• Execution is the major job of the business leader
• Execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture.
The heart of the execution lies in the three core processes: the people process, the strategy process, and the operations process. An organization can execute only if the leader’s heart and soul are immersed in the company. Those who these processes in depth fare dramatically better than those who just think they do. Execution has to be part of the organization’s culture. Organizations don’t execute unless the right people, individually and collectively, focus on the right details at the right time. As per authors here are the leader’s seven essential behaviours:
• Know your people and business
• Insist on realism
• Set clear goals and priorities
• Follow through
• Reward the doers
• Expand people’s capabilities
• Know yourself
Coaching is the single most important part of expanding others capabilities. “Give man a fish and you would have fed him for a day; teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for lifetime”. Learning comes best from working on real business problems.
A solid, long term leader has an ethical frame of reference that gives her the power and energy to carry out even the most difficult assignment. This characteristic is beyond honesty or beyond integrity, beyond treating people with dignity. It’s a business leadership ethic. Putting the right people in the right jobs require emotional fortitude. Failing to have this is considered as emotional weakness which eventually will destroy both the leader and the organization.
The foundation of changing behaviour is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent. As Larry’s puts it, “differentiation is the mother’s milk of building performance culture”. You cannot have an execution culture with robust dialogue – one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candour and informality. A good motto to observe is “truth over harmony”. Formality suppresses dialogue; informality encourages it. A good leader is one with vision, strategy, and the ability to inspire others. They are the ones who energize people, are decisive on tough issues, get things done through others, and follow through as second nature.
People process:
If you don’t get the people process right, you will never fulfil the potential of your business. Analyzing succession depth and retention risk are the essence of talent planning and building a leadership pipeline of high potential people. Identifying high potential and promotable people avoids two dangers – one is organizational inertia – keeping people in the same jobs for too long and the other is moving people up too quickly. Preserving the dignity of the people who leave jobs is an important part of reinforcing the positive nature of the performance culture.

Strategy process:
If the strategy does not address the how’s, it is a candidate for failure. The strategy should not be disconnected from both external and internal realities. It should also have alternative plans on what if a given strategy goes wrong. A strong strategic plan must address the following questions:
• What is the assessment of external environment?
• How well do you understand the existing customers and markets?
• What is the best way to grow the business profitably, and what are the obstacles to growth?
• Who is the competition? • Can the business execute strategy?
• Are the short term and long term balanced?
• What are the important milestones for executing the plan?
• What are the critical issues facing the business?
• How will the business make money on a sustainable basis?
A good strategic plan is adaptable. A strategy review has to be done on a regular basis and one needs to raise some of the important questions such as below and change the strategy and the course of action accordingly;
• How well versed is each business unit team about the competition?
• How strong is the organizational capability to execute the strategy?
• Is the plan scattered or sharply focussed?
• Are we choosing the right ideas?
• Are the linkages with people and operations clear?
Every strategy has to be examined and reviewed to make sure that it will not dilute our focus on our original market segment, to the extent that we could lose the golden goose that is to fund the new segments.

Operations Process:
An operating plan has to be created based on the strategies listed. It looks forward to the hows – the action part. The leader is primarily responsible for overseeing the seamless transition from strategy to operations. Generally the operating plan will have quarter-by-quarter action steps. Operating plan ties a thread through people, strategy and operations. Budgeting should not be independent and operating plan made to fit into the budget – it should be the other way round. The budget should be the financial expression of the operating plan.
Synchronization is essential for excellence in execution and for energizing the corporation. It means that all moving parts of the organization have common assumptions about the external environment over the operating year and a common understanding. You cannot set realistic goals until you’ve debated the assumptions behind them. They need to be tested either by going to customers or some other source which is valid. With this kind of information, the group can make intelligent trade-offs based on reality which is crucial in an operating review. We not only need to look at our customers but also at their customers and many a times at their customers’ customer too. They are ultimately who define or determine the demand for their products. Once the assumptions are pinned down, the next step in the operations process is to build the operating plan itself. It is a three part process that begins with setting the targets and then you develop the action plans, including making necessary trade-offs between short-term objectives and long term goals.
Once all is done, actions are assigned to people with timelines and follow-through measures are established to make sure people are meeting their commitments. The operating plan should cover all major programs for the coming year for which it is planned, such as marketing and sales, production, functional operations, capital spending and so on. One outcome of the operations process is identifying targets that clearly and specifically reflect not only what a business wants to achieve but what it is likely to achieve. Operations process builds confidence as the team after going through the whole planning, knows that they can meet the targets.
as usual, would love to hear your feedback.
Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software

More on Mentorship

Probably the most read blog of mine was on mentorship. I got lot of replies and comments direct to my inbox (in total 40) – thank you all so much for the feedback. One thing stood out in all the comments was for me to name the mentor and in fact I did not name him for two reasons, first the objective of the blog was to create awareness on the mentorship and their advantages rather than the “mentor’ itself and again I hadn’t taken permission per say from my mentors (Why I am using the plural word here, I will come back to it soon ) to name them but now that almost everyone asked me to reveal their names and I did go back to my mentors for their approval and have got it, let me introduce them here.

The person who I referred in my other Blog is Anal Jain. Mr Jain has more than 30 years of experience in top management positions in major international IT firms’ right from leading WIPRO’s InfoTech’s marketing to building and leading IBM’s business in India after their re-entry into the country. Starting his career in early 1970s with IBM India, Anal has been a part of the India IT success story, steering companies through unchartered waters and with fabulous success. Anal was a topper throughout in his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur and holds Master degree from Brooklyn Poly, New York, USA. Today he is very actively involved with the mentorship via NASSCOM and TiE.

We spend together almost a complete day once every month in the office reviewing the past progress, analyzing the current market and strategizing based on any changed conditions in the market. When we do this micro level analysis his feedback and his ideas are amazing and helps us thoroughly – basically they have been there, done that and achieved success and their guidance, planning and help in the crucial junctures are compared to none. Let me take this opportunity to thank anal for agreeing to me our mentor and spending lot of hours with us inspite of his busy schedule, - Thanks Anal for all your help, we all appreciate it.

Let me step back, digress a bit and go back to the questions and feedback I got, and there were lot of questions on how to select a mentor to can anyone be a good mentor and should the mentor be local. To answer the first one, like how all project managers are not the best so as in mentorship too – you need to be careful on who works the best for you and with whom the chemistry is right (of the mentor and the management). A lot of home work has to be done to find out which spot is your Achilles heel and then find a mentor who is strong in that area. At S7 Software when we started we knew that our sweet spot is technology and when have great engineers but our weak spot was Sales and Marketing and in general the whole experience of Entrepreneurship as such. So those are the areas which we concentrated on to find mentors.
The other question was whether the mentor has to be local or we can still derive a lot of advantages even if the mentor is not local. To answer that question let me talk about a bit about our experience. When we started I went to another successful entrepreneur (and a serial entrepreneur) called Aki (I haven’t taken his permission yet and hence won’t reveal everything of him yet :-) ) who was responsible for setting up many firms in the US (in Bay Area) and all of them were sold successfully to bigger firms and then now he is back again to what he knows best – starting a new venture. He is a very busy man but encouraged and gave me lot of tips on how to start and how to tackle initial issues as they crop up while we grow. Today we are mentored by another great strategist who resides in the Bay Area (California), United States. His name is Dr. Shyam Johari, worked as Vice President for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – America, worked for Compaq (Tandem) as Director of Product Performance, System Integration, and India Software Development for NonStop Division and with Burroughs (Unisys) in various management roles. Dr. Johari holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Chicago.

We call him once every month and spend atleast couple of hours going over the metrics, results achieved and what needs to be done for the next quarter, next half year and next year so that we are on track. He is very good in analyzing the US market and he pretty much our eyes and ears in the US and gives us lot of feedback and ideas and of course brings in lot of contacts too. We also get to meet him every time one of the top management goes to US (which is almost 6 times a year). We report our earnings every Quarter to Shyam like say Infosys or Wipro does for the stock market. Because we do this we are very disciplined in this and we know even though we are a privately held firm we cannot behave like that and we use Shyam as the per say “Stock market” and every quarter we have to be prepared with answers for the tough question he (substitute with Market) asks us after we announce the results. We have been practising this of announcing our quarterly results to Shyam (and to all our employees) and sort of getting prepared to announce to the market one day when we go IPO – too big a dream right? Why not? Just because we are a small firm let’s not act like one is our mantra and only time will tell us how we succeed. I hope with Shyam’s example I have given how actually having a non-local mentor you can actually convert the fact to your advantage. Again let me take this opportunity to thank Shyam too – Shyam, thank you so much and your help (as you are aware of it) has been exemplary.

To end the note, I don’t think I have done a complete justice in mentioning all the help and advice our mentors have provided with especially in critical junctures. I have recorded as much as I could recollect but if I have to mention all another five sheets won’t be enough to be frank. My main intention behind this blog was not to either glorify my mentors or my company but to throw light on the “Mentorship” as such which is very common in the western world and in India still is in its infancy I feel and from my experience (whatever small it is) lot of entrepreneurs feel that somehow they know all and are hesitant to involve mentors and also they have lot of apprehension in a way that how can someone from outside can come and help. This is a myth and in reality everyone should try mentorship and at any stage every company is always looking to get that quantum jump to the next stage and a mentorship at that level will be very helpful and handy (irrespective of what level your firm is). Hope this blog has been educative as well as eye opener. As again please send me your feedback irrespective of whether you agree with me or not – it is always great to see another perspective.

Developing Tier2 and Tier3 cities for IT, way to go or no way Jose?

I keep hearing time and again that time is now ripe to go to Tier2 and Tier3 cities for IT and ITES companies. Being part of a big city or Tier1 city and being an SME, we keep wondering too whether should we go or not and if yes is the time ripe and if so, can SEMs go first or it is the business of the large corporations such as a Infosys, or a Wipro or a TCS to setup the operations and the ecosystem first and then the SMEs to follow? I don’t know the answer and I have been analyzing the pros and cons of the same for quite some time and let me analyze the same here and let me think loud (in this case let me pen down as I think along).

Recently I had been to Shimoga as part of IT delegation initiated from the state Govt of Karnataka for encouraging IT/ITES companies to set shop over there. Shimoga is a small town around 300 k.m north of Bangalore and I consider it as say Tier3 city (Mysore and Mangalore probably fits under Tier2 tag). I am sure there are many such towns and cities in different cities which are considered as potential Tier2 and tier3 destinations for IT/ITES. Infact Shimoga happens to be the home district of the current CM and there is lot of hope and aspirations of the local community for attracting many IT/ITES companies over there and infact there is already an ITES company operating for last couple of years.

There are lot of advantages – you are away from the hustle and bustle of big cities and being part of a quiet relatively unpolluted environment, lower living costs, no traffic jams for sure, better quality of family life etc but the biggest advantage will be the land/realty price and especially more attractive if government can provide (thru SEZ etc) very subsidized land. But then again lot of cons go with that – lack of availability of talent, even if local talent exists will be tougher to pull them from the lure of big cities, fewer schools to support the ecosystem, additional expenses (which is not an issue for BIG IT companies) of setting up of every infrastructure item that is required, the quality of life off-office hours, the schools, the shopping malls, the night life what most of the IT and the ITES crowd expect – all these will be missing, and more than finding talent, retaining the talent will be a bigger issue expect for those who are from that town and love to stay and work there which I feel is a very small % today. Then again the expenses of running a firm in big cities is becoming extremely tough and challenging with rising inflation, fuel costs, real estate costs, attrition rates, traffic chaos, ever reducing of the quality time spent with the family, and in general dissatisfaction towards the ever busy polluted city life. The issue has become a chicken-egg issue with waiting to see which one will happen first – the IT companies moving to Tier2/Tier3 or is it the ecosystem first and then IT companies more there. Still better big companies opening it up first on a big scale so that they can or have the potential to make others to create the needed ecosystem to start with them but the early advantage will be lost for SMEs and as the land/rental prices would have increased, stealing the lone big advantage one could have got.

I have read a lot of studies done on the movement of IT to Tier2/Tier3 but none are very encouraging for SMEs. Many companies are finding it very difficult to hire talent and still tougher to hold onto them. Today’s talent is in spite of all the deficiencies and cons, still sticking onto metro life style with shopping and entertainment in the weekend which is clearly lacking in the tier2/tier3 cities. A NASSCOM- Kearney assessment of 50 leading locations for IT-BPO sector has pointed out that a lack of recreational facilities was a handicap for the tier-II and III cities. But the study on `location road map for IT-BPO growth', had predicted that the share of sectoral employment in the top seven locations will decline to around 60-75 percent over the next decade and that will subsequently result in the rise of tier II and tier III cities'. "But that cannot be achieved by only installing physical infrastructure like power lines and mass-transport system in tier II and tier III cities. Efforts should also be made to create an ecosystem that comprises social infrastructure with the trappings of metropolitan life," said SM Doshi, partner A T Kearney India.

The industry experts believe that the first mover advantage does no way help IT companies attract skilled employees to these locations. When an ITES employee was asked by his company to get ready for a stint in a Tier3 location he decided to hunt for a new job. Poeple’s usual grouse – what will I do after office hours or during weekends? If I am in Tier1 or big cities there are lot of options from malls, to multiplexes to pubs to many more options. There are currently over two million employment provided by India's IT-BPO sector, and over 90 percent of which is captured by the seven leading cities of Bangalore, Mumbai, NCR, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Kolkata. Less that 10% is relegated to tier2 and tier3 cities and a very low ratio indeed.
So do SMEs make the bold move and couple it with Government incentives and move also to Tier2 and Tier3 cities and to get that early mover advantage or wait until the Big ones move or there is a critical mass built and then move. I am divided but I am more biased towards moving first coupling with government benefits and then more such SMEs move, hopefully teh ecosystem builds around it and yes will be a risk but then again business is always taking calculated risk. What do you readers’ advice?

“Get a mentor – not a choice but a sure MUST”

This is something I say with lot of conviction and from my own experience of seeing what is it like with and without a mentor. I just came out of a mentoring session which happens once a month in our office and my mentor is a senior pro in the IT industry with more than 40 years of experience and who has worked directly for the likes of Azim Premji. He spends 6 to 8 hours with us on a trot trying to understand our strategy, ground reality, issues/concerns etc and analyzing them in a way which you never thought of and giving a shape of your company’s future and path to tread in a way which you wonder hey how did he do which didn’t occur to you etc etc. All these comes only from experience and to learn everything from our experiences is surely a “too-time-consuming way” and yes I consider myself very lucky to have such a mentor in the first place and then darn lucky to have him spend time with us every month like that.
Then why is it not such a prevalent thing around in our industry? Many reasons I have heard or come to my mind. Some feel that they probably know everything and don’t see value, some have lot of Ego to play with or others are too busy deep in their business that they never realized the value of one or could afford to take time to search for a right mentor. There are many cases where they are not networked well to have one but that should not be an excuse, the student willing, the teacher appears. Our case itself is a classic example, please do read further.
When we started in late 2003, we (founders) were probably the worst networked among IT peers, just a bunch of engineers who knew no one. We started an ODC way back in 1998 and ran it till late 2003 until it spun off to us to create an independent services company; until then we never networked with any one and there was no need to, it was a cost centre and we did the development – no sales neither marketing from here and we never grew beyond 20 and its only when you become a profit centre the real fun started J When you become responsible for the P&L, you will know how long the word “entrepreneurship” is!!
But in spite of this we were very clear with few things - we will focus on a niche area (and in fact the expertise we had already built), and we knew our weak spots (and also our sweet spots) and we needed a mentor for sure. We searched everywhere for a mentor but could not make that breakthrough until we saw a NASSCOM email which called for mentorship (there is a saying – you see what you want to see) and that was god send for us. (Note: TiE also does this mentorship programmes and I recommend to try TiE first before looking other avenues especially when you are still small and haven’t become a NASSCOM member yet). We applied and we were honest in our weakness and in fact very brutally honest and I guess the panel liked us and thank god we were selected. The mentor panel had the likes of CEOs, VPs of HR-Sales and Marketing, Directors etc of some of the well know software companies in town. Despite their busy schedules, they took time off to help us out by genuinely showing interest to learn our company, strategy, strength, weakness and analyse and help us out on what we need to do and what we need to fix and confirming some of our strengths and exposing some of our so called strengths and laid out a clear path for growth and sustainability and in that six months of mentorship we learnt more than what we did in the last two years of operation. Of course your experience and what you learn on the field, is not replaceable and you have learnt for your life but a light showing us a clear path makes your journey that much easier, and why re-invent the wheel when there are pros who are willing to help you out. The mentorship program of NASSCOM not only opened doors for the mentor session but also opened up for lot of business networking and one lead to other and suddenly you know many of the pros and they know you and it becomes that much easier to find the right mentor.
The help so far has been tremendous and is something I propose to all companies to try out on a must basis rather than an optional basis. Finding the right mentor is another issue for another day and can be a topic of my next blog. This is a topic by itself as there are various kinds. Let me talk about it in one of my ensuing blogs.
Hope the read was very informative and hope you find it helpful. Please leave your comments on what more and/or what different I can write about the mentorship. As always your feedback and comments are welcome.

“Go Kiss the World”

This is the latest book by Subroto Bagchi (co-founder of MindTree) and the book I read non-stop last weekend. The book is very interesting and inspiring to say the least. This is one of those typical-weekend read or a travel read book which you can finish in few hours in a single read. Definitely good read especially for budding entrepreneurs and IT guys as well.

Subroto takes the reader through his life right from his birth to his school/college days to his career growth including his experiences with MindTree as a co-founder to his recent title “The Gardener”. He touches upon each of his experiences with a lesson learnt and how that experience in the hindsight made him a better person and an entrepreneur. There are lots of things to learn for us from his experiences that he narrates in the book.

He has divided the book into3 parts and from what I remember, part 1 deals with his birth and early days, part 2 deals with his earlier career and dilemmas and part 3 deals with the Wipro experience and his experience at MindTree. Part 1 is bit a drag, part 2 is ok but part 3 is very interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed that part where he talks in his experience with WIPRO and how they grew the company from a small firm to what we know of WIPRO today. Overall a good book to read but I would strongly suggest entrepreneurs to read his earlier book “The High performance Entrepreneur” which I consider a Bible (or a Blue book) for Indian software companies.

Whenever I read Bagchi’s books, always wonder why NRN (or other Infy co-founders) is not writing such a book – alas none has come out so far and I remember reading once that all the founders have made a promise that they would not pen a book about their Infy experiences – what a shame that we never get to read the real experience of a truly global Indian company’s birth, rise and rise.

The Business of Software

This is not only the topic of my new blog but also the book which I just finished reading. This is a 2004 book but very relevant even today in the business of software. The author is Michael A Cusumano, Co-author of another famous title – “Microsoft Secrets”. Let me take this blog-opportunity to review this book. This is one of the very few books which I have seen talking about software business in particular and more importantly very very few which talks about software services. This book mainly talks about the software business in general, business models, revenue models, products, services and hybrids, strategy, people, management, software development and finally case studies of many such software companies some of which were successful and many closed shops. I will be quoting few things in the ensuing paragraphs and all will be highlighting mostly what the author says rather than my personal opinion but I don’t think my opinions are far from his anyways. My main goal here is to provide a detailed summary so that who don’t have time to read the book will get a good enough summary and hopefully will create enough curiosity to pick a copy!!

The author talks about the strategy and the kinds of companies that exist and the difference between them. Summary goes like this: there are broadly three types of companies, viz... Product based, Service based and the Hybrid ones. Companies must constantly pay attention to the strategies and the business models at all times continuously evolving their technical skills and core technologies. In software development, it is just as important to decide what doesn’t go in as it is to decide on what goes in. Companies should have a strategy and specific organizational capabilities to support that strategy and carry them through both good times and bad times. Product companies has higher (exponential) growth in margin but very low success rate and on the other hand service based companies has moderate success rate but the margins are very low and is highly labor-intensive and less profitable. Ofcourse hybrid model provides the best of both worlds but requires high organizational skills to manage both but he concludes that this might represent a new business model by itself. For product companies it is the economy of scale but for service based it is the economy of scope that is the Holy Grail. Economies of scope can be achieved by structuring knowledge such as how to do requirements, manage projects, customize applications, conduct testing and more importantly how to reuse this in different projects without affecting the IP of the clients. It can also be achieved from clever account management. He also talks about some of the financial metrics that conveys the measure of health of software companies – they are revenues, sales productivity or revenues per employee, expense boundaries (say 25 to 30% of total revenues), R&D budget usually, general administration budget, profit target (20 to 30% of revenues as operating income) etc. His conclusion on one of the strategy points is that, when a software company targets enterprises, it has more ways of succeeding, even if it fails to develop a best-selling product. Another point to note in strategizing is to make a selection on whether you are targeting a “horizontal offering” (broad set of customers) or focus on specific industries or applications, what is called the vertical market segments. One of the observations he makes (from data) is that rapidly growing companies have much better chances of survival. He outlines three basic strategies of rapid growth: scaling, duplicating, and granulating. Scaling is simply doing more of what one is already doing but for more of similar clients; Duplicating is primarily extending same strategy to other geographical markets or to other similar markets (as opposed to exact). Granulating is diversifying offerings and the organization structure by creating new, small business units to target new opportunities. A word of caution is that, diversification into related areas and technologies are usually good ways to grow, compared to unrelated diversification. Recurring revenue will be very helpful if one can find a way to strategize the same. He goes ahead and states that the goal of every software company should be to establish large and growing revenues that are recurring. As the saying goes – “get their data, and their hearts and minds will follow J”. He divides the companies based on strategy as one of these – platform leader (e.g.: Microsoft) or follower or complementor. Basically strategy of a company should take care of all these and be precise and in summary the strategy of a company should determine what kind of an organization you want to be.

After strategy he talks about the business model, importance of strategy over there, and the revenue model. Also are the discussions about the product versus services debate and his conclusion is that “the key choice is not simply whether to be a services company or a products company, but how much emphasis to place on one type of business over the other”. He also stresses the point about how business models may need to change with the economic times as well. A word of advice for new companies that niche applications and new platforms are the best places to look for software product and service opportunities but with a caution that one should focus on solutions rather than the technology itself.

Then he talks about software entrepreneurship as a whole which I enjoyed thoroughly and he talks about some of the very critical issues one needs to follow or atleast should have considered and is the basis for creating a bigger organization and also to get funding. Accepting VC money when it is not needed and accepting more than you need can often become what he calls the “Kiss of Death” (he analyzes this completely which I will skip and leave it those who will read this book!!). He has devised an 8-point plan to evaluate effectiveness of companies especially startups which goes as:

1. A strong Management Team
2. An Attractive market
3. A compelling new product, service or hybrid solution
4. Strong Evidence of Customer Interest
5. A plan to overcome the “Credibility Gap”
6. A business model showing early growth and profit potential
7. Flexibility in Strategy and Product offerings
8. The Potential for a Large Payoff to Investors

Finally he does a through analysis of four software product start-ups, three software services start-ups and there hybrid solutions start-ups with an equal number of failures and success through his eight-point plan, and is very educative and an eye opener is many issues.

One of the points that made me think was that his conclusion on Software services and VC funding – he says “Venture Funding is often the kiss of death for an IT services firm. It is a form of artificial wealth and the overwhelming tendency is to spend it. This is essential to create a company but more often than not it encourages a firm to expand its headcount and overhead commitments or its marketing plans to levels it cannot sustain”. But this is what I agree totally “A talented software services company should always remain profitable by managing head count and expenses carefully”. A service based company creates relationships with customers, they may build technologies but they cater to the needs of the individual clients. To be efficient, they need to learn how to leverage technology and knowledge gained in one project to other projects without compromising customer confidentiality.

Overall he has done a very good job reviewing different types of software companies and how to strategize, create business and revenue models, what are the points to watch out for, and more importantly he has analyzed many such companies giving us an insight on what works and what don’t. Overall a great book for a budding software entrepreneur and I recommend highly.

BTW I hope I was able to give a detailed summary of the book, enough to enthuse a budding entrepreneur to read this book. I constantly read such business books and I am hoping I will provide a detailed review through my blogs. Please let me know some of the pluses and minuses of such reviews so that I can better it for my next reviews.

A Safer India is a MUST : IT power of India and Protecting ourselves

This has been bothering me for quite a while, particularly more so when I visited US last month and saw how few other countries were being pushed. This being a very touchy subject, I debated myself a few times on whether I should blog or not and my emotion had a better of me, and hence here is the blog. No I am not such a big guy to talk about such a big subject nor this is something related to SME space alone, but I feel it is a pan India issue which I like to bring it here.

Today India is pretty much equated with IT in the US (may be so in the whole of Western World). Indian economy is doing really well (inspite of the US slowdown, petrol prices going through the roof, financial markets being sluggish etc) and most of the success is attributed to the rise of IT and the brand/image that India has in the global market. Today IT continues to be one of the main contributors fuelling the growth of Indian economy. Overall, Indian business is doing great globally, which makes it our duty to safeguard this image or brand of India globally and ensure the market and the economy grows.

In this scenario, many countries are vying for a share in the global IT spending of which India always gets a lion’s share. Almost every country has a nice story advertising as to why outsourcing to their country/region is way better than doing it to India. Some countries are employing different ways and means to divert business to their country, not excluding such below the belt tactics as, “We are safer than India” line. Safer? This word really bothered me a bit and started this whole thought process of mine – why are they safer (are they really safer? and why are we not? Do you think that a bit of fear in the global market can turn the market elsewhere? Do you think some one might actually try doing this? After all, this is billions of dollars market and a few doubts here and a few scares there can probably change the mind set and turn the customers away (remember a small lead is all it took to make US citizens almost drive away the Chinese made toys). For all you know, someone who wants a bigger share of this pie, who wants to give a bad image to India in the global market, can probably do the most dreadful and shameful act, you never know. If these people can create a dent to our image, they would have achieved what they wanted and can send out bad signal to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter where the dent has happened; it is India which stands to lose.

It stands to logic that, the least suspected person does a criminal act and the most suspected gets the blame. This may be the case here too. We need to be very careful. One of the first things we do when we construct a house is to secure ourselves and I guess we need to do something similar here for our country too– don’t know how, but we have to do it on a war footing. This might even mean allocating a huge budget, taxing us more (say adding Security cess), drastic measures that may hurt the economy to some extent in the short term. It is still worth every penny spent, saving our industry, brand, economy and more importantly 1000s of innocent lives.

I sincerely hope that the government and the concerned security agencies are actually making sure that the right steps are being taken. Prevention is one million times better than the cure. Home Land security is a good example in the US, they have introduced many innovative steps and security procedures to prevent a repeat of 9/11 and I hope we do something similar before something of that nature happens. Safer India is a better India for everyone.

SMEs: Is this the end of the Plain Vanilla outsourcing?

“The ability to focus and differentiate is the main secret of success for SMEs” says John McCarthy, Vice president Forrester Research on how Indian SMEs can succeed in the highly competitive crowded outsourcing market (Source NASSCOM’s NEWSline April 2007 Issue no.66), in the report “The SME Survival Kit”.

Another very strong statement by the same Forrester research in the same report goes as “Going forward, only one to three Indian offshore service providers will emerge as true multi-line, multi-geography players. The remaining will have to focus to create sustainable growth and differentiation in the marketplace”.

Very strong statements and a very clear black & white message for SMEs – differentiate or die, Specialize or perish and there is no way out. I totally agree with this. SMEs have to concentrate becoming a domain or a niche expert rather than trying to do everything. Market won’t allow too many players once it matures and I am sensing that the market today is in that state, and the best strategy for SMEs is to find a niche which suits their skills and their liking and offer solutions and services that help them increase the expertise in the chosen niche area. Also I don’t think one should size up the market initially (if you have good info about it well and good but don’t sweat it out to find the info). The market is generally big enough for startups and SMEs to work/start in and once you are in the water and get wet, slowly you will figure out what the market is, where it is heading and you always modify/alter/suit your strategy/business based on the new learning anyways.

Once the focus is set, and a niche area is selected, every step forward should always make you closer or better in the chosen niche and it is very critical not to sidestep from your final goal, as the saying goes if you don’t know where you are going, any road taken is fine and SMEs should not be treading this road today (or any day as a matter of fact). If you follow this path, yes growth will be slow (compared to plan vanilla outsourcing growth) but it will be a sure way and you will be laying a very good foundation and one day you can build a multi-storied palace on that. Moreover outsourcing has matured so much that if you are not providing value to the client (other than the person and his skill set), it means basically there is no value proposition beyond the usual outsourcing proposition and you are replaceable. On the other hand if you give a clear and a unique value addition, a niche expertise or a domain expertise which is more than the person, there is every chance that you might win the deal even if you are put against one of the biggies. Remember, today multi-sourcing is the preferred path with a clear reason being reduction of risk (of depending upon one vendor) and horses for courses theory, select the expert for the work in question (ofcourse you can bring the puzzle sourcing here which I wrote about in an earlier blog).

I feel expertise in a given niche area/focus is clearly the best way to grow in the value chain of the outsourcing and I also feel that the difference between products and services is graying down and probably the right time for service based companies to invest in products too (may be to sell or to use internally as tools to achieve faster rate, lesser cost and pass on the benefits to the client) and can use that as a differentiation / unique proposition your firm offers and you can concentrate on all these if we (SMEs) are focused in a given niche area rather than plain vanilla outsourcing.

As a lasting comment, though SMEs are under constant threat with focus and differentiation as the key for success, even larger companies are under the threat of global competition and I am sure Indian biggies are under severe pressure to figure out a competitive strategy to compete with MNC biggies which are making inroads into their pie by M&A activities or otherwise (EDS acquired by HP, IBM growing very strategically, etc) – watch out something drastic by Infosys and WIPRO in the coming days for sure.

Puzzle Sourcing

(this is reproduction what I blog on NASSCOM blog)

This is my first blog entry on the emerging forum of NASSCOM; hope will be the beginning of many more to come. I represent S7 Software (s7software.com) as CEO and also happen to be one of the co-founders, a Bangalore based firm specializing in software migration, re-engineering, and legacy modernization services. I used to regularly blog on s7software.blogspot.com. My profile is attached to this site. My main intention of writing blogs is to share my thoughts and views especially oriented towards helping and encouraging new and emerging and wannabe entrepreneurs and share my experiences too. Also write about how I see the market, what strategies might make sense, what are the issues we are facing in this global business, how to tackle them and what is in the store of SMEs like us and hopefully lot more but I will restrict myself as much as I can to business with a special emphasis to software and Indian business even though no guarantee can be given on the same J I might now and then wander off to my other favorite topics – cricket and politics, just watch out. BTW, I hope readers find my blogs interesting and knowledgeable and informative and will help to rethink on their strategies and probably come out with strong comments either favoring or disagreeing what I talk about. I hope to write one every week unless I am traveling. I hope I keep up with what I have promised.

I want to start off with an interesting topic which I have been toying with ever since I heard something on similar lines from one of my clients (thanks to him for the initiation of the thought process for the same). Today we are not taking about should one outsource or not but what is the right way to outsource. One of the major issues of outsourcing is the security of the source code/Ideas/inventions/Strategies etc collectively what is called in the industry as the Intellectual Property or the IP. The biggest issue today is safe guarding the IP from leakages and contaminations.

The issue is of paramount importance when you outsource your IP creation or share your IP to a third party. It becomes all the more important on an outsourcing company to protect the IP of its client. There are various ideas and process in place right from the best firewall security to roving cameras to access controlled doors to bio-metric locks to very strict agreements and penalty clauses. Inspite of all there is always fear of IP loss or news of such things happening.

Keeping the IP issue aside for now, there is another facet of outsourcing which is becoming popular off lately, to reduce risk on dependency of one outsourcer and using the horses for courses theory, cutting the bigger shore to small modules and outsourcing the specific modules to the experts in that technology area or domain. This is what is called multi-sourcing in the industry and is of lately very popular especially considering the number of outsourcing vendors and technology or domain experts available in the market.

Combining the IP safeguard issue and multi-sourcing, I have been toying with a new way of outsourcing – something what I call – Puzzle Sourcing. This is nothing but a specific way of multi-sourcing but the chore is split more like puzzle pieces and outsourced to different vendors (can to be to experts of that module) and the whole software makes sense when combined, like a puzzle and separately don’t have much value. Is this can be achieved, and adding the usual things what we do today, the IP loss can be cut to negligible.

Ofcourse cutting the given software or the IP into strategic pieces such a way that the actual IP value of the software is got only by actually joining all of it still not easy or trivial task but I feel is worth a try. If this is the way to go, I am assuming even the programming way might change from say object oriented programming to say puzzle-oriented programming - very far fetched idea but why not J

(reproduction) My Blog on NASSCOM post US trip - part 2

As I promised, here is the blog regarding my experiences being part of the NASSCOM delegation to the Software 2008 and the INTEROP Trade fair and then followed up with the Bay Area visit.

We all arrived on the Monday (April 28th) at Vegas and got ourselves registered for the event. We (S7 Software) were one of the exhibitors in the NASSCOM booth but there were two more on April 29th and three others on the 30th. This time around Software 2008 had merged with INTEROP which had around 500 exhibitors and another 50 or so from the Software 2008. From my experience it was a huge trade fair with many IT or otherwise decision makers attending the same. The way it was setup this time I got a feeling that somewhere SW2008 lost the track and most attendees turned out for INTEROP and SW2008 looked like a poor cousin.

There were also many seminars, keynote sessions and conferences and some of them were very good and were focused towards IT services. There were many good ones but were running on a parallel track and somehow I felt that the merger of SW2008 and INTEROP happened in the later stages than early stages and hence so much of confusion and parallel track happened and I assume most of these issues will be sorted out in the next happening. Nevertheless, one session which stood out from all others was the opening keynote session by CK Prahalad about his book and his view about the “The new age of Innovation” and I thought it was excellent.

We also spent lot of time on the INTEROP floor for business networking and it wasn’t bad either and in the end we felt we spent less time in the conference and one more day would have been great. There were many biggies in the INTEROP including the likes of Microsoft, Foundry, Netgear, Cisco etc but feeling is again that INTEROP is more on the hardware level and I wonder why INTEROP cannot be software too (we provide Software INTEROP solutions and so does Microsoft). Software 2008 too had some great clients such as HCL, Ramco, TCS, Collabera

Overall I was very happy about the event and the kind of leads we were able to generate and kind of info (strategy, market, trends etc) we were able to gather. Infact we went ahead and booked a booth/stall for ourselves for the next year event which is also going to happen in Las Vegas. Also SW2009 is going to be well integrated with INTEROP than this year event for sure.

All of the delegates left to Bay Area on Wednesday for a two day hectic schedule on Thu and Fri. As planned we all met on Thu am in the Comfort inn at Mountain View and then the best thing is we all left in a bus to SD Forum. “Bus” was a great way of making us all mix well and this is when I thought if we had this Bus thing going even before the Vegas event. In SD forum office we had few sessions on what is going on in San Jose and also what are the factors we should look into if we are opening up an office in US specifically in the San Jose Area including the legal issues, banking, VC info, infrastructure rentals and incubator information etc. All these information will be critical when you want to enter the US market. I felt SDforum is a great place to start with and they will network with all related agencies and people as the need arises.

Then we attended NetApp, Google, SUN, & Microsoft offices over the two days. For NetApps, the engineering manager turned up and we were surprised by the amount of India specific knowledge he has (interestingly one of the conference rooms is named “Bangalore” and I saw directions for this Bangalore everywhere) and was a very good session overall. We were bit disappointed over the SUN’s visit as it looked like a museum visit but had an opportunity of seeing all the new hardware that Sun is investing in. Google visit was interesting one as we not only got an opportunity to visit the famous Googleplex but we had to sign an NDA before we set foot in. We had one of the Indian origins employee who happens to be engineering director discussing what makes Google tick and what are the plans and vision they have for the future. The whole Googleplex looked like a college campus and was a great visual treat. The Microsoft office in the bay area was little different but was fortunate enough to have the Corporate VP giving us a presentation which shared MS perspective as what it is currently focussed on and also talked about the trends, focus areas and the support that they can offer to companies. Some of us were thrilled to get attention from MS and getting our queries answered.

On Thursday evening we attended the SIPA (Silicon Valley Indian professionals Association) panel discussion about “The next generation IT services” and I was fortunate enough to be part of the panel members and more fortunate to have distinguished Persistent CEO Anand Deshpande (who was leading the delegation on the behalf of NASSCOM emerging companies forum) and I was amazed at knowledge and hold he processes about the market and software in specific. I was fortunate enough is an understated statement. There were 40 to 45 Indians from the Silicon Valley, lot of the participants were budding entrepreneurs. We also had a very good panel discussion. The session was moderated by Craig who is an ex-HP person and was responsible for lot of work at HP India. Anand also talked about NASSCOM and its activities. The session ended at around 9pm after which we all had dinner together. We had lot of very interesting questions coming from the audience including should we move back to India and what is the right time frame to do so and how is Indian economy doing etc. Overall it was a great panel discussion and surely a great experience to cherish.

We also had panel discussion about the topic “Critical Success factors in entering the US Market ” and workshop on “How to market and Network like a local in the Silicon Valley”. The panel had an investor, a speaker from Deloitte, Senior Director from Sun and a successful entrepreneur. Susan (of SD Forum) raised some good questions as to what all companies should look for before entering the US market, how does one go about getting his first customer and basically doing business in the valley, some best practices were shared by speakers and the opportunities that valley offered. Lot of emphasis was laid on the eco-system that the people in the valley provided for start-ups. Some questions were raised at the end of the session. Matt from Sun Microsystems shared some good insights. The panel discussion was very informative and all these will be very helpful for us going forward as we grow and scale. The workshop was very interesting one and 4 different trainers talked about the cultural aspects and what companies should lay emphasis on.

We ended the delegation trip on Friday night with an informal meeting with TiE members who came to meet the members of the delegation. The event was sponsored by a law firm Orric. This was a pure networking session. It was a a good unwinding session for the delegates and an opportunity to meet with TiE members and some investors. Later in the night all delegates met to collect feedback from the delegation members and later we bid good byes with a promise to meet often and keep in touch.

Overall it was a very successful delegation, very well planned and moreover very well executed I felt. A big part of the success goes to Avinash (from NASSCOM) for organizing and executing such an event. I also like to take this opportunity to thank Anand Deshpande, co-founder and CEO of Persistent, who was leading the NASSCOM delegation of emerging companies. His time, and his experience added lot of glitter to this delegation trip and I am very fortunate to be with him during the delegation days. I hope NASSCOM comes forward with more such delegation visits hopefully to Europe, and Australia too.

Post Contributed by Manjunath M Gowda, CEO - S7 Solutions