Trumps administration has put in a restrictions on H1B visa and planning to come out with a bill to curb outsourcing of services outside USA. To me, its a blessings in disguise for Indian $150 bn IT & ITES industries impacting around 3 mn Indians.
Indian IT industries had a stupendous organic growth from cheap labor, as body shopping partners in early 90’s to an outsourcing service partner today. The mainstay of Indian business were IMS, Application Build and Managed Serves, BPO/KPO operations and technical manpower to large IT Tigers like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, CISCO etc. All these engagements involved large deployment of manpower onsite and offshore. The game was 70 percent cost and wage arbitrage and 30 percent on values. While small countries like Israel earned similar revenues with only 15 – 20k resources. I remember Mr. Azim Premji quoting in mid nineties ( I was working with Wipro then) , that this indian model of service business is largely dependent on government policies and its a “Business at Risk” , but unfortunately all Indian knowledge sector forgot this pearls of wisdom including Wipro themselves barring few like Infosys and Iflex (Oracle Banking) .
With changing technologies ,India has lot of value to offer. If Indians can be the power behind Google, Microsoft, Oracle , CA, BMS, CISCO, IBM , why not build a similar Make in India.This is a great opportunity for India to be build value in newer technologies like Big data solutions, Artificial Intelligence in IMS, Opensource databases, Medical computing and other emerging areas and build tangible products and solutions. All top Indian IT companies have the necessary incubator and technical management to build these systems.
Also this is an opportunity for Indian companies to become a true multinational service companies employing and harness local talents. If we see a true Multinational, the manpower is distributed across cultures e.g Siemens/BMW/Merc has less German , Oracle and Google has less American citizens, and the story is same with all true multinationals in the globe today.
Lets not cry and lobby uselessly with USA but change our mindset and operating model creating true Indian value added cross cultural Multinational Giants. Its to be done now or Perish.
