Springboard Research says that India is set to be the fastest growing SOA market in Asia with an expected CAGR of 49% from 2006-9. IBM is seen as the leader with Oracle, BEA and TIBCO following behind. This is in line with my thinking. I believe that India will play the role of an “edge” market for SOA and will see considerable action in terms of growth, innovation and value creation.
Archive for November, 2006
Indian Drug Discovery Partnerships: Fad or a Long-term Trend
Published by November 30th, 2006 in investing and biotech/pharma industry. 0 CommentsTo me it appears that more evidence is in that the pharma/biotech value chain is modularizing, specialist firms are emerging and the industry footprint is going global. There have been 6 new R&D collaboration deals involving Indian firms in the last 3 months alone. How does this square with Prof. Gary Pisano’s view that the biotech sector lends itself better to vertical integration than to a Silicon Valley type ecosystem of independent specialists?
Growth Anatomy: Another Reason to Not Ignore Emerging Markets
Published by November 29th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsThe enterprise software industry cost structure is deconstructing in front of our eyes. The traditional infrastructure side is under attack by open-source and data-center virtualization; the application space is dealing with SaaS; and the traditional services model has already crumbled under the onslaught of Infosys and Wipro’s global delivery model. Yet, and I hate to say that, there is complacency in the air.
Anatomy of New Growth in India
Published by November 28th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, organizational design and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 1 CommentIn a new article, Anatomy of New Growth in India, posted at SandHill.com, I argue three things. First, take emerging markets like India seriously because they punch above their weight-class. Second, go after the bottom-of-pyramid opportunities. Third, think beyond talent/cost arbitrage and build in-market capability to incubate new products and business models. This is the first article in a series called India DNA Talk where I will discuss the burgeoning growth in India and its implications for the software industry at large.
The Quiet Leadership Revolution
Published by November 27th, 2006 in organizational design and leadership. 2 CommentsInnovation drives commoditization. It forces companies to reinvent themselves, to go through periodic orbit change. But times are changing. Now one needs a different leadership model to bring about radical organizational change… Old school thinking about confronting legacy mindsets won’t do anymore.
The current issue of The Economist has a generous profile of Mena Trott of Six Apart… In case you haven’t read it, a must-read set of articles on the whole phenomena of blogging is The Economist’s Survey of New Media. In fact this survey goes beyond blogging. It also talks about how journalism is changing, describes podcasting, forecasts radial change in media companies, romanticizes metaverses (like Second Life) and, yes, suggests that we are going through the early phases of a media revolution on the scale of that started by Gutenberg in 1448.
Stepping Outside of Comfort Zone at Work
Published by November 26th, 2006 in uncategorized. 2 CommentsMy parents constantly encouraged me to step outside my comfort zone. I have consciously applied that philosophy to my professional life. Ravi Aranke’s excellent comment a few days back has helped me construct a more cogent argument for following this strategy.
Entrepreneurship and Institution Building Mindset
Published by November 25th, 2006 in entrepreneurship and book review. 3 CommentsIn India the Tatas, Wipro and Infosys are torch bears of a tradition of institution building. Subroto Bagchi’s book, The High -Performance Entrepreneur, shows that this tradition is alive and well… this is a useful book for all aspiring entrepreneurs. It gives a ringside view of MindTree’s journey so far and uses that storyline to drive home some basic truths about entrepreneurship, the most important of which is that choosing the institutional building mindset is the best decision that an entrepreneur can make!
Indian Infrastructure Needs Orbit Change
Published by November 24th, 2006 in civic issues. 5 CommentsAndy Mukherjee is a Singapore based Bloomberg Columnist that I read in the International Herald Tribune. He is fast becoming one of my favorite journalists. His commentaries on Indian economy are crisp, incisive and often iconoclastic. Today he has an optimistic piece on the infrastructure build-out in India titled ‘The rich plug the gaps in India’.
Move Over Data Center
Published by November 23rd, 2006 in innovation, software industry and adaptable infrastucture. 1 CommentAbout a month back, Sun announced their Project Blackbox initiative. It’s a mobile data center product that’s essentially a shipping container full of water cooled low-power servers… But the real story is not about data center in a box, it’s about data center from a wall socket… Amazon’s S3 has created a huge marketplace for storage, backup tools, online backup vendors and other niche products. It’s quite likely that Amazon EC2 is going to do the same for the hosting market… New application categories will emerge and new markets will be created.
David Kushner writes a delightful cover story, The Firefox Kid, in the Nov issue of IEEE Spectrum. I enjoyed it at three levels. First, it’s a nice story about how Firefox came about. Second, it describes Parakey – a cool tool…
Bursting of the India R&D Offshoring Bubble
Published by November 21st, 2006 in offshoring. 5 CommentsI believe that India shoring of R&D is going through a “trough of disillusionment”. There are unmet expectations on both the US and the India sides. Many feel that the model isn’t working. Some companies are slowing down, others are scaling back and many more are re-evaluating their plans. But this phase is good for the future. It will recalibrate expectations and will lead to a more thoughtful and sustainable growth in India shoring going forward.
Mobile Operators are Impediments to Innovation
Published by November 19th, 2006 in innovation, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 0 CommentsI think mobile operators have become an impediment to innovation. They are reactive, risk averse, and unable to develop markets for new services. If things continue down the current path, mobile operators will be seen in the same unsympathetic light as the big music labels… need to shift gears from mass marketing to niche marketing; from servicing demand to creating demand; and, from doing it all yourself to building value chains with other services providers, content providers, handset vendors and the like. This is an orbit change.
When I arrived at VERITAS Software in 2004, two of my peer VP positions were setup as a two-in-a-box. Before the year was out both those positions had unwound. What went wrong? Was it the people, the concept or the company culture?
This is a contentious question… It often splits a group of people right in the middle. Before I share my answer with you, let me say that innovation is part individual, part organizational and part contextual… On reflection, perhaps a better question to ask is: can innovation intensity be increased? The answer to that is a qualified yes…
Questioning Orbit Change in the Pharma/Biotech Industry
Published by November 15th, 2006 in investing and biotech/pharma industry. 0 CommentsI am of the opinion that the global drug value-chain is morphing. Part of the change taking place is that specialist firms are stepping in place of in-house teams and as a result the value chain is going global… Prof Gary Pisano… calls for a rollback of the value chain modularization and a return to vertical integration… This is an important industry debate that one needs to watch.
Today is my 7th day of blogging and its time to take stock. Frankly I have been enjoying the experience. I like making judgments, indulging in some critical thinking and sharing my perspectives…. All this indicates that the blog will be about entrepreneurship, innovation, industry discontinuities, market disruptions and organizational change.
Limits of the MNC Hub-and-Spoke Model
Published by November 13th, 2006 in offshoring and organizational design. 3 CommentsA friend who joined IBM Global Services (IGS) in Bangalore five days back shared his joining experience with me. His desk wasn’t ready… His case could be an exception but I doubt this is the case… I am surprised that so many MNCs have failed to get their India leadership structures right…
Encouraging Student Entrepreneurship in India
Published by November 12th, 2006 in entrepreneurship. 1 CommentToday I was part of a panel discussion along with Kanwal Rekhi and Dr Sridhar Mitta … to get the students to look at entrepreneurship in a favorable light… So far, the India IT industry has been built by executive-turned-entrepreneurs. But now the local market is ripe… and Indian consumers are viable targets…
Are Things Looking Up for Product Innovation in India?
Published by November 11th, 2006 in innovation, software industry and entrepreneurship. 1 CommentLast year I was part of the team that selected 8 companies for NASSCOM 2005 Innovation Awards… The cycle for the 2006 Awards is now getting underway. I am again on the panel and this will give me chance to assess how much progress we are making in India on product innovation… I am cautiously optimistic…
Nick Carr Labels it the Era of Frugal Computing
Published by November 10th, 2006 in software industry, adaptable infrastucture and SaaS. 0 CommentsNick Carr has a delightful commentary on … the shift that is talking place in the industry… and characterizes this as the “era of frugal computing”. While I think frugal computing is an evocative name… it doesn’t do justice to the industry transformation that is taking place…
The War of Innovation Ideologies
Published by November 9th, 2006 in innovation and offshoring. 1 CommentThis new battleground where established companies and startups are fighting over next generation products is where the interesting action is taking place. One can see this as a war between two different innovation ideologies; a war that is fueled by the shrinking capital needs of new products due to the emergence of modular value chains and R&D globalization. And this war is playing out in a range of industries, right from telecom, enterprise software, pharma/biotech to the entertainment industry. The outcomes of many of the individual battles are critical for they will shape the new industry structures.
This notion that the VC business model is broken in the Web 2.0 world is doing the rounds lately… So the way I see it, the VC business model is not broken, it only needs an adjustment as to where it is applied…
