Notes from the Business Technology Conclave

Every day you learn something new at ISB. And yesterday was a particularly fruitful day for me as I attended the Technology Conclave. It was truly an enriching experience.

The Business Technology Club (BTC) of ISB hosted the annual Business Technology Conclave on 23^rd October, ’09.  The theme of the conclave was ‘Riding the Asian elephant – Emerging opportunities in the Asian Technology Landscape’. The conclave featured two panel discussions focusing on the Telecom and IT sectors.

Mr. V K Menon, Director of Career Advancement Services at ISB delivered the welcome address.  He pointed out an interesting fact that there is an impending huge manpower shortagel in developed countries in the next several years and that several asian countries (particularly India) are well-positioned to fulfill this shortage.

Telecom Panel:

The panel discussion on the Telecom Industry was titled “Improving the bottom-line:  Next generation business models”.  The discussion was moderated by an ISB alumnus from the batch of 2002 – Venkata Ramanan, Telecom Business Head from 3i Infotech.

The Indian mobile market is different from others in that the subscriber base is predominantly pre-paid (more than 90%).  Mangesh Kulkarni from Nokia Siemens Network felt that mobile internet is the way forward and methods have to be devised for monetization of the online presence of subscribers.

Kapil Bansal from Alcatel-Lucent spoke on the emerging challenges in the Telecom industry with the falling ARPU and increasing subscriber base. “Active and passive sharing, revenue sharing, hosted services and managed services should all be viable business options for Telecom players in this atmosphere”, he said.

NV Subbarao from Tata Docomo talked about the coming era of Data. He said that the trend is definitely towards convergence, and data traffic is going towards a Yottabyte and how Technology Management, Customer Adoption and simplified pricing are all going to be very important to manage this massive growth.

Dr. Manoj Kanagalu from Nortel foresees future business models being based on managed services, rental model and revenue sharing.  Mohan Moghe from Verizon gave a view of US markets and the various challenges therein. “The US mobile market is saturated and the focus is more on innovations and applications for the end user”, he said.  Vinay Goel from Google spoke on the importance of a full browser in a mobile along with a flat data plan to enhance the user experience.

Anshoo Gaur from Amdocs spoke about his company’s vision of ‘Tera Play’ and the continuous movement towards that vision wherein smart devices offer a connected digital lifestyle.  “The new business models will focus on managing and charging for personalized and contextual experiences across multiple devices”, he said.

IT Panel:

Post-lunch, Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Zensar Technologies, started the second panel discussion on “Asian Markets: New hotspots for IT companies” by saying that India continues to be the great IT centre. He said that there has been a positive shift in the focus of the IT industry – it is beginning to think of how IT can be leveraged in India in the key areas of Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, SME and Telecom.

Abhay Gupte from Logica said that there are three things that will play a significant role in taking our IT industry to the next level – innovation, product automation & deployment and location/geographic challenges.

NV Tyagarajan from Genpact said that the wireless industry in India, from being technologically behind, has leapfrogged to be one of the best-in-the-world. “IT in India needs to deliver value that goes beyond labor arbitrage. We feel that the exciting journey of innovation is coming into India over the next 10 years”, he said.

Haragopal M, who heads Finacle at Infosys said that products are a clear opportunity in this part of the world. “Products are an excellent transition to take IT to the next level. We now have global attention and global respect. We need to continue to launch new offerings, new products”, he said.

Amit Sircar, head of Microsoft Global Services India, spoke about how Microsoft India went through a strategic shift in order to think of India not just in terms of a consumer market or a resource but as an export-centric market.

Suresh Hosakoppal from Yahoo! warned about the risks that the offshore R&D industry in India is facing and how that could affect the growth in the years to come. We need to address these risks to get India back on track; Innovation and Productivity are big tickets items to address these risks.

Finally, Srini Komanduri from Deloitte talked about where the IT demand is going to come from in the future other than the usual outsourcing route. Two big areas he pointed to are the Indian industries (which are continuing to invest in IT) and the government (Healthcare, Transport and e-governance)

Ganesh Natarajan, who moderated the discussion concluded by remarking that Asia is definitely the hub for the future of the IT industry both from the market perspective and from the providing collaborative solutions perspective.

-Sankar G Vyakaranam

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