HYSEA's Technology Day

Today at the Hyderabad Software Exporter Association's Technology Day, there were a few interesting talks.

IT Services
Sudin Apte of Forrester opined about the rapidly polarising IT Service's industry. The Top 3 players are growing rapidly (40-50% CAGR) while the smaller companies are getting left behind. The rest of Top20 grew at half the Top3 rate and have profit margins in the 18-19% range compared to 24-25% of Top3. The rest outside the Top20 had margins in the 12-13% range. Three years ago the Top3 were 26% of the industry but now they are 41%. The ABN Amro deal made big news last year with TCS and Infosys winning huge chunks but it is a less known fact that six smaller Indian firms got kicked out ABN at the same time. The smaller companies look set to be vaporised by the bigger ones without even too many acquisitions owing to trends on the demand side and supply side!

The so called 'Billion Dollar babies' - companies which recently grossed $1B in annual revenues - HCL, Satyam, Cognizant will have an year ot two before they either graduate to bigger league or stagnate and lose industry position. A Tier-2 player just cannot aim to succeed by attempting to be a mini-TCS or a mini-Infosys, offering all kinds of services to a small set of clients. The IT services industry has just gotten tougher to enter and a startup cannot achieve unless it executes to a carefully nurtured niche.

Web 2.0
Ramesh Loganathan of Pramati gave an excellent post-lunch talk on Web 2.0 and later ended up giving a pitch on his companies new Web-Desktop integration offering Dekoh ('look' in Hindi). The product sounded cool but there was nether a live demo nor a canned demo. Later I checked Pramati's website and they actually have some cool Web 2.0 demos but no mention of Dekoh.