As you know I am at the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum in Mumbai. I chaired a panel discussion on Wed evening and that went kind of alright. Many times I walk from a session thinking that I did a good job. This wasn’t one of those moments.
As always there are interesting conversations that happen in the hallways. For instance, Neeraj Aggarwal of BCG and I had an intense but productive discussion about the future of Indian IT services players. This is major conversation thread here. Are the Big Indian 5 about to peak? What will SaaS do to them, etc. There are many opinions floating about. I’ll share mine here in the coming days.
This time, again, I was disappointed to see very few local women speakers. In fact, this year is worse than usual – there is only one local woman speaker (Padma Ravichander of Perot Systems) on any of the panels. This doesn’t reflect the makeup of the Indian IT industry. There are quite a few women in leadership positions. I think NASSCOM has to do a better job in giving them visibility.
The NASSCOM Innovation Awards will be given out today by the Prime Minister in a few hours. I was one of the jury members and so have been collared by many people upset at seeing big names like Bharti-IBM and HP on the list. Their view is that NASSCOM favors the big companies and doesn’t do enough for the smaller players. At least when it comes to the Awards, I feel this is unfair criticism. Yes, HP is one of the award winners but then they have won it for their Gesture keyboard. This keyboard makes computer use possible in Indian languages. This is a bottom-of-the-pyramid play that should have been recognized no matter who did it. I can go on. But instead I would ask you to read my views here.
John Hagel did a good talk on Web 2.0. As expected, it was a thoughtful perspective. His ideas intersect nicely with my take the next generation of SaaS. I feel that next generation SaaS will be about supporting, not individual enterprises, but networks of (micro) firms. I will comment on John’s talk later. Unfortunately not many people attended the session. The hall was probably only half-full. This is a shame. More people need to be exposed to John’s ideas.
At John’s session I ran into Yuvaraj Galada, VP Business Development, Novatium. Novatium has a compelling network PC offering. They have definitely moved forward in recent months. I had seen the product first at Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s office in IIT Madras probably a year back. They have now tied up with Sun for the enterprise market. Wyse is already active in that space. This channel partnership is a good move as it frees up the Novatium management to concentrate on the home market. Their target is the 30m urban India segment in the “middle of the pyramid” (which is different from XO-1’s focus on the bottom of the pyramid). Ultimately success will depend on pulling together a value chain. This is where Gramateller ATM failed. They have a small trial going in Chennai. They need to take it slow and debug all business model issues there. Newsweek has big story on them. I hope they don’t run too far ahead of heir headlights because of all this publicity. While they have the product sorted out, they still have work to do in sorting out the value chain.
Got to run now.
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