The Nasscom Leadership Forum, an annual fixture in Mumbai is on this week. It exudes a bullish tone after a subdued one the last couple of years. But while there is plenty of talk of innovation at the event, the reality is an “old faithful” benefactor through the two decades the event has been held, the financial services industry is back spending again.
Barry Wiegler, who used to run the Sourcing Interest Group and is now Managing Director of Outsourcing Angels recently interviewed me about outsourcing innovation and a couple of comments I made to him are particularly relevant as Nasscom looks ahead to the next two decades
“The big challenge for a number of outsourcers (and their investors) is they keep wanting to sell services that were innovative a decade ago. Many are centered around ERP vendors, Cold-war era data centers and waterfall implementation methodologies in a world increasingly moving to social CRM, cloud computing and agile methods.”
“…newer players like Salesforce.com and Amazon. They are not “traditional outsourcers” but they are giving customers alternatives as they look at application management and IT infrastructure services. They emphasize automation more than labor in their services, and represent a major threat to the current outsourcing model which is pretty labor intensive.”
““If you look at the last couple of decades, most outsourcing has focused on infotech – software, data centers etc. There are similar new opportunities opening up as companies implement cleantech, nanotech etc.”
