Jayakumar Balasubramanian

For the past month or so the Indian rupee is getting stronger against the American dollar, which has come down to 39 INR compared to 45 INR. This is already bleeding Indian services companies and their Q3 numbers speaks for that. When the rupee was getting weaker these service companies used to make 4-5% of their margins just by keeping their money in dollars and converting them back during the results announcement. Nowadays Indian service companies are mulling multiple options to resolve this problem -- six day working week, reduced hike for employees, productivity improvement, moving to lower cost geographies (like China and eastern europe) etc. With STPI tax sops are getting withdrawn by 2009 , Indian IT companies are having challenging times ahead. Let me take the example of product R & D happening in Indian companies as an example. Of course value creation can be done at multiple levels apart from R & D as well. Majority of MNCs which are having their engineering centers i...

Here is some of my favorite magazines! These mags are targeted to a specific audience, providing vital information. I started liking these type of stuff as they are catering to my interests. They also give altogether a 'positive' outlook of India . 1. Dare ( http://www.dare.co.in ): This is published by cyber- media completely focused on Entrepreneurship. They started the print edition from Oct '07 and the website is yet to be populated. Got a chance to read their Nov '07 and found it very interesting. It covered various aspects of Entrepreneurship -- new business ideas, VC/private funding, value creation and guest columns by successful Entrepreneurs. I also learned that their advisory committee consists of stalwarts like C.K.Prahlad, N.R.Narayana Murthy, Kanwal Reiki etc. Welcome effort from cybermedia! 2. Smart techie ( http://www.thesmarttechie.com ): This is a technical career magazine launched from Bangalore , which is a sister concern of Silicon India . I foun...

No doubt! The 1991 economic reforms brought magnanimous changes to Indian economy. Indian companies are going ‘global’ by acquiring foreign firms, getting into joint ventures, reporting consistent profits and become much more professional. What about public sector organizations? By virtue they have long legacy by creating a good brand image among average middle class Indians. On the other side they are facing stiff competitions from their private counterparts and ‘somehow’ learning to think about customer satisfaction. Recently I came across a couple of interesting observations. The first one was with getting landline and internet connectivity,when I moved to a new house. I chose BSNL without doing much research and initially got a good impression by looking into their website – well designed contents; downloadable application forms, electronic billing and payment facility, rate plan details etc. Added to that, I got the landline in a week’s time without any issues. But the real ...

In order to attend a training program, I visited another facility of my company, which happens to be a building with seven floors. Also it is one of the well planned and truly upto the global standard, somewhat similar to Singapore technology parks. During the break time I opened up the curtains and observing the surrounding areas. This is basically a very well constructed technology park (called as Bagmane Tech Park in C.V.Raman Nagar, Bangalore) and houses about 7000-10000 technology professionals.It was looking really great from the seventh floor -- well designed parking lots with about 1000 cars , clean and green surroundings, regulated traffic etc.(See the picture below). When I turned another 30 degrees to my right, I got a big shock. Just next to the technology park there is a slum followed by a dumping yard (See pictures below). The experience was really an eye opener for me as it clearly depicted two Indias . If I can call the first case as the ‘developed India ’...

Author: SS Kshatriy Price: 180 INR ISBN: 81-259-1459-5 When I visited Silicon Valley in the year 2002, I was amused to see so many Indians out there. Not only Indians are one of the major immigrant communities in the San Francisco bay area (which consist of counties like San Jose , Santa Clara , Fremont, Sunnyvale etc.) they are also one of the most successful group when it comes to Entrepreneurship. I remember reading one of the WSJ articles where as much as 30% successful Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are from Indian origin. Thanks to Nehru’s socialistic democracy, bulk of highly educated (mainly from IITs) engineers migrated to the US and made fortunes there. Right from 1970s these folks built tons of high-tech organizations and generated abundance of wealth, which built a very strong brand for India . Two decades later when Indian opened up the economy in 1991, it was ‘homecoming’ experience for these wealthy entrepreneurs as they acted as a bridge between Ind...

In his bestselling book ‘The world is flat’ , author Tom Friedman illustrates his ‘flat world’ concept. For people who have not read the book, let me give a quick background. The three billion people from India and China are much more empowered and connected today. It started when India opened up the economy and China signed the WTO agreement for open trade. Fuelled by these open trade policies, the ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘Off-shoring’ are the latest buzzwords for western world organizations for leveraging the eastern world. According to Friedman, this new worldwide phenomenon has leveled the competing field and the whole world has become flat. I really enjoyed reading the book mainly because the author extensively traveled to various geographical regions, met people, experienced the changes personally and came up with his conclusions. Now, let me look from the reverse angle and ask some questions to myself: Is the world really flat from India’s perspective? Can I do the same things from Ba...

My 55 year old mother watches 3 mega-serials every day in TV and feels very uncomfortable if she misses a single episode of any of those three. Apart from watching, frequent discussions on these mega serials happen with neighborhood aunties. I am sure people who are reading this blog would also feel either their mom or wife or aunties are also addicted to this ‘Megaserialobia’. According to me this Megaserialobia is cultivating huge amount of ‘Negative’ and ‘Depressive’ thoughts among people. The pattern and the objective of these mega-serials are very simple: Tap people’s emotions and make a huge business out of it. The mega-serial work starts with hiring 35+ year old cine actresses who lost almost all her opportunities acting in cinemas and make a ‘Heroine’ centric story around her. Then this 35+ year old ‘So-Called-Heroine’ gets married and moves into her in-law’s place. There she faces all sorts of problems ranging from humiliation to criminal case thanks to her ‘In-laws-and-co’ a...

The World Bank has declared India as the 12th richest country in the world during the year 2005 based on its GDP numbers. According to the Times of India article India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has touched 785.47 Billion dollars in the year 2005 and India is the only south Asian country in the list. This is really good news indeed. We are harnessing the results for the golden economic reforms that we have made in the year 1991. Today India is one among the hot-spot destinations as far as Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) are concerned and I am able to witness the raise of educated Indian middle class in front of my eyes. Having said that the economic growth alone cannot be called as ‘real’ growth because we are still fighting against fundamental problems like poverty, illiteracy, health-care and infrastructure in almost all parts of the country. The vibrant economy is helping me to buy a Honda City car but my poor governance is making me drive in the worst roads. So the nee...

A month back I wrote a blog about Small-And-Medium Businesses (SMB ) in India and the importance of technology in enabling these businesses to scale and perform better. After writing the blog I got to know that KPN travels ( https://www.kpntravels.in/ ) have launched their website and bus tickets can be booked online. For people who don’t know KPN travels, it is one of the biggest privately operated bus services covering almost all parts of southern India. I have been traveling in their buses for the past give years and I can bet that their business will grow in multiples because of their online system as most of the people travel in their buses are ‘Bangalore-techies’ for visiting their native places over the weekend. This is a perfect example for the ‘SMB + Technology’ combination which I am sure is a ‘Killer combination’ in Indian context. Also compared to other businesses, travel business in India seems to be the leader as far as adapting technology is concerned. According to ‘Digi...

There are numerous definitions for the word ‘Leadership’. One of the definitions says ‘The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people’s enduring needs’ and my mind cannot think of a better person than Sam Pitroda who is the best example I can ever think of practical leadership. The man who demonstrated for the first time to Indians what technology means and how it can change the whole society. His leadership brought ‘Technology-Business-Society’ together and being a tech-industry professional I have only one word for this person: ‘Hats-off’ For people don’t know who Sam Pitroda is, look into the nearby STD booth in any small ‘Ghalli’ in India. He is the man behind ‘conceptualizing’ the STD booth based business model and made it possible in India’s ‘Ever-challenging’ environment using technology. He founded Center for Development of Telematics (C-DAC) in 1984. He along with his colleagues ‘invented’ the telephone time measurement ...

Long time back I forwarded this picture to group of my friends group and it tickled an interesting discussion among us. If you see the picture there are lot of 'managers' are surrounding an engineer or a worker managers are simply watching and the engineer (people like me) are doing the hard work. This throws up an interesting question 'What do these managers really manage?' According to my experience there are two types of manager roles that are existing in the hi-tech industry as of now: 1. Delivery managers: These managers are basically a techie and moved to management ladder because of experience in software engineering and responsible for software engineering deliverables guy mainly operates within the 'software life cycle' starting from requirements gathering,design,coding,testing,release. 2. Business managers: Basically come from MBA background and manages any one of the non-engineering areas like HR,Finance/Biz development,Strategy of the company. As far...

Aeron a 33 year old, north-western American left me in a total shock when he asked me 'Hey Jay! I saw in the TV that Indian stock market is crashing. Is it so ?'.Of course this is the last question you expect from Aeron a car driver who drops and picks me from my work place. He hardly has a college degree and he knows about Indian stock market crash.Whats happening around me? Inside my mind a sudden statement came up 'The sunrise in the east'. My mind was wandering on some of the events that has happened in the past one and a half months. The receptionist in my office enters my country name as 'India' without even asking me, The April edition of Newsweek a famous US magazine has got the cover story 'The new India’. Every day in Wall-Street-Journal, the financial newspaper of the US has at least one column about China. Yes! I am experiencing it personally! The eastern part of the world is indeed raising. I also did some more reading and pondering with myself ...

Its really amazing the kind amazing to see various work cultures existing in India and more interesting thing is they all exist in the same period of time.To give a clear idea image the following three scenes: Scene 1: Government office, Erode, Tamilnadu The government officer gets out of the car, a peon goes and opens his door. He is wearing a white color dress and says 'Vanakkam Aiya' (Ji Huzur) and bows his head towards his superior.He carries his suit case and leaves his superior at his room and stands behind him as a salve.Here the work culture is of '17th century' (British style) Scene 2: Manufacturing firm, Chennnai All employees come on time and made to work very hard. They hardly sit and work.They call their superious 'Sir' but no bowing head.Here the work culture is of '18th century' (Industrial revolution style) Scene 3: Sofware firm, Bangalore Engineer walks in jean and T-shirt and watches his manager is walking in the floor.This 25 year old ...