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Indian ITES sector shot into global prominence in the first decade of the 21st century with world-class service delivery models focused on operating efficiency across a wide range of business processes. While there is widespread acceptance that India is a prominent and important locus for carrying out business processes, there is also the perception that India is not quite ready for moving into the next phase of growth. The current economic conditions have forced IT vendors to innovate and survive the turbulent times. During the first act, there was minimal differentiation amongst the top-tier Indian ITES providers. To make matters interesting, many multinational IT vendors have also set up operations in India to neutralize the cost leadership advantage while claiming to be more innovative.
As I watched the quarterly results from the ITES sector, it shows that they have continued to show double digit growth in revenues and margins. What steps have they taken to do that? In the first 90s, they specialized in moving work overseas. This was followed by making IT programming services a commodity and delivering it using a global delivery model. This approach has also been applied to entire business processes that created the BPO industry. Their unique approaches to building the IT infrastructure, sourcing talent, and utilizing knowledge management systems were of great help. The capabilities required for the next act are quite different. One approach taken is to move up the IT stack and deliver consulting services. They have also done some innovations in the business models by linking their payments to customer success factors. The birth of the knowledge process outsourcing industry has created a new industry around decision support. I am sure that there are many other innovations currently happening. A colleague of my Venkatraman (from Boston University) and I are studying this industry to understand the new moves that are being invented by the ITES industry. It is our hope that other businesses can learn from this sector.
What are some of the interesting projects that are taking place within the ITES sector? What new competitive moves are being created at this time? We hope to shed some light on these questions this summer. Watch this space for updates.
I just completed a report on cloud computing for the Advanced Practices Council of SIM. Here is the executive summary:
Current conversations about cloud computing are dominated by vendors who focus more on technology and less on business value. While it is still unclear as to what components constitute cloud computing technology, some examples of its potential uses are emerging. We represent them in a stylized fashion using seven attributes that C-level executives could use to formulate cloud based strategies. Firms can manipulate these attributes to derive unique benefits and create a competitive advantage. As a whole, we predict that cloud strategy will lead to more intense network-based competition, resulting in a major overhaul of the current competitive landscape. It is imperative that companies prepare for such a future by reformulating their business strategy to include the attributes enabled by cloud technology. The time to begin that transformation is now.
I was following the recent debate in The Economist website on cloud computing. The motion on the floor was that the cloud can't be entirely trusted. We have Stephen Elop from MSFT pushing the software + services model and Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com pushing for an all out cloud future. I wrote the following on the comments section of the debate.
I found the debate on cloud computing to be very fascinating. The focus, however, has been on cloud computing technology and cloud vendors. Based on examples presented here and in what I have seen in companies, the real learning for me has been the potential for companies to adopt a cloud strategy. This means that they have the ability to reduce the "drag coefficient" of their current IT systems and focus more on the business and innovation. The current conversation is too vendor focused. The debate needs to move on to what customers can accomplish by following cloud strategies.
Cloud strategies rest on certain key assumptions about your IT capability. Core principles like data interoperability, transparency, user involvement, low switching costs, ability to mix and match applications, tap into services anywhere and anytime, ubiquitous access to information are all axiomatic to this. The CEO can now think of unique value propositions that can trust the IT systems to deliver on the underlying principles.
This week I had a chance to present my research on cloud computing to the Advanced Practices Council of SIM. I showed the overall ecosystem and the core player ecosytem during my presentation. Here is the list of players and the visual. These core players include both well-known companies and new entrants. Salesforce.com Facebook, Rightscale, Elastra, Kaavo, GigaSpaces, CohesiveFT, Hyperic, Cassatt, Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, Boomi, MuleSource, OpSource, Cast Iron Systems, Appirio, eVapt, Ping Identity, OpenID StrikeIron, Citrix, IBM, MySQL, Oracle, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Vmware, Google, Amazon Web Services, Hewlitt-Packard.
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This network includes infrastructure providers (triangles), platforms (diamonds), service companies (rectangles), applications (ellipses), collabartion (circles). The starting point for this ecosystem was the taxonomy provided by Peter Larid. Additional companies are included based on the industry stack. Information about links were gathered from company webistes. Strategic links are shown in tan, technical ones are shown in yellow and green links denote  system integrators.
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The previous network diagram captured all the annouced partnerships within the ecosystem. In this network, using data from programmableweb.com, we render the network based on mashups that exist between cloud providers. 
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Here is an ecosystem of companies that operte in the cloud computing space. I got the initial list of companies from a taxonomy created by Peter Larid. I added a few companies to that list and then created a database of all their alliances using information provided on their websites. Infrastructure companies are shown as triangles, platform providers are diamonds and service companies are shown as circles. Link colors denote type of alliances -- strategic (tan), technical (yellow), systems integrator (green).
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For a research project on cloud computing, I created this tag cloud using various definitions of cloud computing (Thanks Sandeep). As you can see, hardware and software figure prominently. Also, the notion of utility and on-demand services.
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This semester in my clouds, platforms and networks class, I had students collect data on ecosystems and render them using Pajek. Here are examples of what they came up with for the class.
The ecosystem for Amazon Kinlde and Sony eReader
EMC NetApp Ecosystem
Netflix and Hulu Ecosystem
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 It has been a while since I posted a visualization on mashups. Here is a new one. I have highlighted some of the platform providers as diamonds in the picture. Since my last visualization in 2007, Twitter is one new player that has emerged as central to the ecosystem. A whole slew of applications have been created to run on the Twitter platform. Amazon and Facebook applications have also entered into the picture. As I think about mashups, I think they are the early examples of applications that run on clouds. One can think of the diamonds as cloud platforms and the circles as applications that run on these clouds. I am sure thta there are other plaforms that I'm missing in my highlights. I have started a new project on this topic and will post more visuals on this as my understanding of the domain improves.
The data for this visualization was provided by programmableweb.com
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