India Shining . . . . . but Outsourcing too !

Certainly the “India shining” slogan is a passé now. But something which has been overlooked in the backdrop of MNCs’ outsourcing to India is perhaps the very own domestic market. The Indian companies are also quick learners and are looking forward to outsourcing their IT infrastructure or services; as a means to cut-cost and concentrate on their core business operations. Indian IT majors heard the alarm bells when the mega giants like IBM, Accenture & EDS forayed into the Indian services market. But little did they do to shift their focus from the lucrative overseas market to the maturing domestic market.

History was made when Accenture struck major deal with Dabur, Hewlett-Packard with Bank of India and Ashok Leyland and IBM & Nokia with Bharti Televentures. The deals would be for a period of say 5-10 years and involves 100s and 1000s of million dollars. This proves that the Indian market has matured and domestic outsourcing provides a huge opportunity for vendors and service providers. But, the Indian IT Majors risk ceding this local opportunity to the global players.

Global research organizations and NASSCOM may be depicting rosy pictures about domestic outsourcing in the Indian context; but the billion dollar question is: how much prepared is the Indian counterpart to capitalize on the “home ground advantage”. Can they really get “On” to challenge IBMs’ “On Demand” model? A modest beginning has been made from the top Indian IT companies but still one fails to understand why they haven’t been able to clinch any such deals ahead of their foreign counterparts.