Indian IT services companies are gradually, but surely gaining expertise in various industries they are providing services. Not only are they strengthening their manpower, but also the skills required to understand the finer nuances of business.

Consulting services can be classified according to industry practices (like automotive, pharma, media, retail etc.) or by functional practices (like operations, strategy, corporate finance). The Indian IT companies provide software services across all these industries and functions. The implementation and maintenance of the software requires a business perspective. This knowhow has enriched the skills of IT services companies. The globalization wave has also resulted in free exchange of ideas and people across countries. So how does all this make sense?

India is carving out a niche on the world map. "The clients to whom, we were providing software services, are asking us for consulting services" says Mr V. Srinivas, Chief Financial Officer of Satyam, Computer Services Ltd. Companies in today's world want their IT strategy aligned with business strategy. So before deciding on the software platform, they want to know, which platform suits them best? Which platform will provide flexibility to scale up? Which platform best fits the requirements of the business? Which platform can be seamlessly integrated with the existing IT systems? Is the existing data compatible with the new platform, If not what is the cost of converting it?

To answer all these questions, is difficult for the client. Even if they have an in-house corporate IT department, the awareness of the market is lacking. Also, many companies want to differentiate themselves using technology. In this dynamic era, where technology changes rapidly, you want the best cutting edge technology for your company.

So, time has come for Indian companies to latch on to this opportunity, of offering consulting services to clients to choose the best platform. This opportunity can open the flood gates of offering the traditional software services too. Just as the BPO¹ business was able to leverage on the expertise of IT services, so can the consulting services leverage on the relationship developed by BPO and IT services.

Only time will tell. But one thing is for sure, this is an opportunity that India IT inc. wouldn't like to miss!

¹Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the contracting of a specific business task, such as payroll, to a third-party service provider.

Comments (1)

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written by Surya Rao, 04 February, 2008

Hi Swapnil,

My question: Has value migrated from consulting to IT and collaborative networks?

The bottomline is that consulting cos like Accenture and Deloitte have moved into IT & collaboration platforms. There are not pure play Indian consulting cos of size to test empirically the impact on revenue growth due to this migration. In case of Accenture and Deloitte , they have clearly become much bigger compared to MCkinsey and BCG.


You could have covered KPO (Moving up the value chain from BPO) and Open source .

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