Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

As for Pai pointing at Infosys PAT .. they're in that moment where wile e 
coyote is perfectly safe, only he's stepped off a cliff, standing over thin air 
and just about to raise a sign that reads "help"

I'm sure Deepak Shenoy can poke a few more holes than I can but .. Here are the 
rest of the numbers that blowhard / great financial genius missed out on

http://www.indiainfoline.com/article/equity-earnings-result-commentary/infosys-q1fy17-consolidated-net-profit-declines-4-qoq-to-rs-3436-crore-in-line-with-estimates-116071500326_1.html

--srs

> On 22-Oct-2016, at 12:35 AM, Sriram Karra  wrote:
> 
> So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
> this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
> order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
> the comments in this thread:
> 
>   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
>   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
>   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
>   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
>   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
>   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
>   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
>   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
>   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
>   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
>   its heyday.
> 
>   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
>   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
>   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
>   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
>   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
>   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
>   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
>   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
>   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
>   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
>   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
>   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
>   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
>   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.
> 
>   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
>   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
>   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
>   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
>   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
>   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
>   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;
> 
>   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
>   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
>   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
>   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
>   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
>   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
>   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
>   shakeup.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
> 
>> Comments?
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
>> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>> 
>> 
>> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
>> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
>> battle with newer digital technologies
>> 
>> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
>> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
>> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>> 
>> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
>> the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
>> story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
>> sported.
>> The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
>> packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
>> Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
>> industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
>> the stroke of midnight of the new 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

The situation changes when you move up the value chain as you so clearly 
demonstrate.

But when a company builds its business model on hiring huge numbers of warm 
bodies to throw at drudgery that is rapidly being automated now even in the 
enterprise .. nobody at all in enterprise IT dreamed even five or six years 
back that a group of say ten people could single handedly provision a data 
center worth of servers, os and software installs, networks etc using puppet, 
chef, software driven networking and all that.

And several of them kept hiring manual testers long long after other companies 
switched wholesale to test automation.

And entry level tech support kids where a lot of that went over to more 
intelligent context sensitive help, chatbots and such.

Try to lay the lot off and they even face litigation and demands for trade 
unions - something that pampered industry least expected though entry level 
employees earn about as much as a driver does.

--srs

> On 22-Oct-2016, at 12:35 AM, Sriram Karra  wrote:
> 
> So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
> this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
> order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
> the comments in this thread:
> 
>   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
>   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
>   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
>   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
>   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
>   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
>   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
>   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
>   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
>   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
>   its heyday.
> 
>   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
>   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
>   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
>   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
>   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
>   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
>   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
>   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
>   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
>   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
>   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
>   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
>   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
>   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.
> 
>   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
>   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
>   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
>   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
>   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
>   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
>   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;
> 
>   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
>   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
>   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
>   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
>   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
>   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
>   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
>   shakeup.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
> 
>> Comments?
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
>> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>> 
>> 
>> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
>> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
>> battle with newer digital technologies
>> 
>> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
>> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
>> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>> 
>> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
>> the technology departments of global 

Re: [silk] Bump in the road, or end of the road?

[Sriram Karra]

So many thoughts on this topic... having spent 8 years in various roles in
this industry Just a few quick observations here (in no particular
order) on the specific challenges facing the Indian IT industry and some of
the comments in this thread:

   - IT Services is not all about server maintenance or routine sysadmin
   work. Application Development & Maintenance (of bespoke systems), Product
   Engineering, Customisation and deployment of complex packages (like ERP
   systems), and so on cannot be automated with the current state of the art,
   nor are they dull or monotonous drudge work. I have myself worked as a
   contractor for Cisco, maintained critical parts of their embedded OS (the
   original IOS), developed thousands of lines of code, and new features, that
   have powered (in some ways quite literally) the Catalyst 6500, a cash cow
   for Cisco for nearly 15 years. It was a great experience to see engineers
   from humble backgrounds perform high quality engineering for Cisco even in
   its heyday.

   - Innovation comes in all sizes and shapes. We romanticise the Google /
   Apple style of innovation at the expense of other forms. When my former
   boss, at age 34, convinced John Chambers and Cisco at its peak (mid 90s) to
   offshore product engineering work to Chennai, that was business innovation
   too. The situation now is the Indian model is so well understood that there
   are few levers left in negotiation, and the downward margin spiral that
   Sikka keeps lamenting about are defining the mood about the industry (more
   on the margins later). But this is not new either. Even way back in 2007/8
   it was clear to insiders that more innovation is required with the business
   models. We started talking the language of 'Fewer Better People' to change
   the customer mindset from hourly billing to more outcome based pricing
   models. Many companies have seen success in these endeavours. But no clear
   industry-level breakthrough has emerged, and that is a worry. Maybe it
   won't, but that does not mean the death of the industry.

   - What is certainly lamentable is these companies have gotten left
   behind in the latest technology trends and by not paying enough attention
   to building scalable businesses. But the threat of automation and "AI" is
   somewhat exaggerated: the domestic IT demand is just warming up and you can
   be sure that journey is going to start at the bottom of the pricing
   hierarchy; in technology the next wave is always round the corner and they
   only need to survive till the next wave comes around;

   - Mohandas Pai's response has some valid points. Infosys PAT was 21.9%
   in FY 2015-16, which is very respectable. For comparison: Google's PAT for
   FY 2015 was 21.8%. Accenture's was 12.5%. There is scope for players to
   change their cost structure, remove dead wood, and change the reward system
   to make them more competitive viz a viz the MNC biggies. But it is an open
   question on whether they can pull off the execution. Maybe most won't, but
   I do hope at least a few will, and we will all be better off for this
   shakeup.


On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
wrote:

> Comments?
>
>
> http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/737W8zcjPA6lGWIajRCd6K/Indian-
> software-dies-at-17-from-failure-to-grasp-future.html
>
>
> Indian software dies at 17 from failure to grasp future
> The Indian software services industry died on Friday after a short
> battle with newer digital technologies
> 
> A slowdown alone wouldn’t have stopped the Indian industry if it had
> been able to embrace ‘smac,’ or social, mobile, analytics and
> cloud-based technologies. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
>
> Singapore: Seventeen years ago an Indian man from New Delhi mesmerized
> the technology departments of global corporations with a doomsday
> story many times more puffed up than the luxuriant crop of hair he
> sported.
> The latter was a wig, and the former was just bad science fiction
> packaged by consultants as a $600 billion hair-raiser. But Dewang
> Mehta, the chief lobbyist for India’s fledgling software services
> industry, carried off both with aplomb, convincing businesses that at
> the stroke of midnight of the new millennium, their computer systems
> would crash because old programs measured years in two digits instead
> of four. The solution, he persuaded them, was to let a horde of
> techies from Bangalore and Hyderabad go through each line of code and
> fix the Y2K bug.
>
> That was the birth of India’s massively successful software services
> industry, which died on Friday after a short battle with newer digital
> technologies. At the time of its demise, the business was worth $110
> billion in annual export revenue.
> The first hint that the end was near came on Thursday when Tata
> Consultancy Services, the biggest Indian software vendor by market
> value, announced a virtual stalling of its business in the September
>