So far we have visited three companies: Keane, Evalueserve and HCL. Each one of them was very interesting and a learning experience. Here are some key takeaways. Keane presented their pyramid model for employee growth, retention and planning. The structure and incentives that they have put in place for this is something that they hope will give them an edge in the market place. Their approach encourages managers to find ways to mentor and champion each employee’s future. With the bottom of the pyramid being frequently replenished, this should keep them constantly in sync with market demands. The Evalueserve visit helped us understand the term KPO . In addition to inventing that term, they have developed some best practices around identifying, recruiting and managing a highly skilled workforce comprised of doctors, lawyers and engineers. Just like the IT industry created the CIO and CTO, the KPO industry will create a new role like a chief research officer. The HCL visit also followed the same pattern of putting people first. They have made investments in platforms like iGain and intrepreneurship allows them to get more out of their employees. These initiatives remind me of Google. Just as Google uses its 20% time and intranet for transparency, HCL uses iGain for improving project performance and create new IP through its intrepreneruship initiative. Their business model of linking project payment to performance (the case of Boeing’s Dreamliner) was very interesting.

Over the next two weeks, a team of MBA students and I will be visiting several IT vendors in India. Our objective is to understand the industry, visit key players and explore what the future holds in this sector. Vendors currently on our plans include Keane, Evalueserve, HCL Technologies, MarketRx, Genpact, EDS, IBM, Wipro, MeritTrac, Cognizant, and TCS.  We are also visiting TVS-E which represents the component manufacturing sector that is showing great promise for India. Over the next couple of weeks, I will report on what we see.

So HP is planning to buy EDS for $13.25 billion dollars. Facing competition from the likes of IBM and Accenture on one hand and Indian IT vendors like TCS, Wirpo, Infosys and Cognizant on the other hand, this seems like a logical move to provide scale. While customers may like it, the increasing commodotization of services may not be appealing to investors.

I just read on CNN that MSFT pulled out of the negotiations for Yahoo! Now Yahoo! is back on its own (at least for the near term) to navigate the competitive landscape. In considering MSFT's proposal was Yahoo! predisposed to dismissing it? Given that they can't merge with Google due to regulatory reasons, what other options are now open to Yahoo!? It was not too long ago, responding to poor performance, that they did some major reorganizations and brought Jerry Yang back into an operational role. Even with these changes, their Panama platform has not found much traction. They were recently talking about outsourcing some ad services to Google -- not a ringing endorsement for their own services! Given all this, it makes me wonder if they have a long term plan at Yahoo?