Saturday, February 21, 2009

The BFSI Impact on Indian IT

Hi All,

Well just like Nouriel Roubini I have been posting since 2007 about the impending disaster that the IT Industry in general and specifically in India s headed for. Just see my blogs on 2007 which talk about how NASSCOM is projecting 10 Million Jobs in 2010 whereas the Industry and Technology are going in a direction so as to reduce the total number of IT Jobs.



Here are a few facts:



1) BFSI Contributes to 1/3rd of typical IT Revenue of Top Indian IT Companies. These companies are by far the largest spenders on Technology as the requirements from Reporting, Customer Service, Compliance and Security is highest in this segment. This industry has complex and multiple products to offer to customers. Apart from these technology, research etc.are other industries which spend huge amounts on IT.



2) BFSI segment has seen bankruptcies and mergers some of the big names have just disappeared. This has led to consolidation in IT Infrastructure and Applications.



3) Technology Innovations have led to requirement of fewer resources to deliver.



4) The rise of open source has led to small application development just vanishing, today you have out of the box portals and templates like joomla, phpnuke, drupal so on and so forth.



5) The Onsite Rates of consultants in US has crashed to approx. 50 USD an hour in some cases. India's blended rates (Onshore /offshore mix) has become costlier.



What can we do to counter this effect as an Individual:



1) Never Stop Learning, Cross Skill yourself and be ready to move to better, newer and niche technologies.



2) Hard work always pays, so now the time for those parties and dancing classes is over, you want to have a job, slog on weekends to learn and retrain.



3) As organizations Indian IT companies need to look beyond people supply they need to create PRODUCTS and INNOVATIONS and move away form hourly billing to Fixed Price.



4) Exhorbitant Salaries: Its time to say goodbye to those white elephants with fancy degrees an designations


The Times are Changing and they are changing now.