Dear Ashu, what an interesting time to ask this question when the double digit margins of Indian IT giants are under threat in the wake of global consolidation on big deals and stronger Indian Rupee. That’s precisely the reason major Tier-1 software development vendors/providers are graduating upto the value chain and have no option but to upgrade their skills & offerings to their customers.

This means that they need to farm their accounts deeper and find out high value/high-margin work on top of their routine offshore coding, maintenance and testing work. They don't have the bandwidth, precedence and wherewithal to match their global peers like IBM, Accenture, EDS and CSC but have a very efficient Global Delivery Model and access to a select pool of talent (though also fought for, by big 4s) locally that can be deployed on-site on Indian salaries on deputation basis.

That’s why they are looking for experienced consulting and business process re-engineering professionals from traditional consulting organizations to fill the gap. However, as they also have heavy presence in the BPO/KPO space, I think a lot of innovation will come from these areas as well. IT companies are trying to prefect the BTO (Business Transformation Outsourcing) game that is a fine mix of traditional IT offshoring and maturing BPO offerings.

As far as the career in this space is concerned, plenty of opportunities as these companies are still in the “Start-up” mode as far as consulting domain is concerned. Out of the 5 Indian biggies TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and Satyam, only Infosys seems to have built a respectable presence with 150-200 odd consultants so far. Their recent effort to acquire a majority stake in Cap Gemini’s European consulting biz is a testimony that they want to aggressively build global refrencaability & scale in this domain.

So, being in the consulting practice of these companies is definitely an exciting place to be both from a learner and practitioner point of view. The learners will get paid handsomely to make mistakes and grow in the process and the practitioner will be able to build a profitable and world-class biz and reap fantastic dividends over next decade. Prior experience in Six Sigma, BPR, Market Research, IT consultancy and Management Consultancy in an international environment will be a big plus.

The next decade belongs to Indian software industry with a proven global delivery model, strong foot into multi-million $ deals competing with big 4s, grounded in a world class cost base with a lot of hunger for global M&A. However, the war with global giants is still to be fought in open and only the time will tell who won. But it’s an excellent time to join the war.

Regards
Deep

posted September 4, 2007

These companies will offer Consulting to move up the value chain but will end up as glorified system designers.

It took decades for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) to grow out of the IT consulting services to high end management consulting inspite of their pedigree.

Even today Accenture is not taken seriously enough in Business Strategy consulting and perhaps makes more revenue out of their low end BPO diversification.

Infosys, Wipro, TCS and to a lesser extent Cap Gemini would be looked upon as pretenders in the rarified environments of Management consulting and would willy nilly have to fall back upon consulting services built around technology solutions.

Come to think of it, what is the value that these companies bring to the table. They have started life as body shippers playing on the arbitrage of rupee costs and dollar revenues and in the process grown big with fancy campuses.

Narayanmurthy glorified the process of offshoring the development process (again to save costs) by calling it a Global Delivery Model. So they would do the design in the US...rather take dictation from wizened clients... and write the code in India.

The Management consulting genes are totally missing from their DNA and I suspect they are too much grown up for a meaningful gene transplant.

sanjay9negi@hotmail.com

posted September 4, 2007

Dear Ashu, Yes, majorly all IT companies have management consulting arms and they are doing consulting more on IT functional side. Among Indian IT companies i feel no one is doing great in this area. As far as job prospects are concerned, they take people who are graduate in management and/or have spent some time in similar kind of roles. Every IT company has consulting arm where they chalk out IT strategies , IT roadmap etc or similar kind of work for packaged applications.

posted September 5, 2007

Ashu,

To answer your question in a word, it is "both". Indeed these companies have their primary strength in IT domain and would like to leverage this and their existing client base for consulting assignments. However, their consulting practice needs to have (and I believe has) the requisite business and domain understanding to be able to come up with solutions that will fly with senior management of Fortune 500 companies.

I do not see anything wrong with this. Come to think of it, technology has become the singlemost important disrupter of the prevailing "rules of the game". Possibly IT companies, with their knowledge, are best placed to leverage this.

Cheers

posted September 5, 2007