Successful business strategies are often designed in response to rapidly changing business conditions and therefore need to be dynamic. We’re going to look back today and study some success stories from past Indian design center strategies that may enable us to make some recommendations for the future. Of course, one could quote similar arguments for offshoring design to other parts of the world, but I am restricting my strategies to India for obvious reasons.

Imagine, then, that today we are back to the edge of that precipice, peering down at what we perceive as the next business slump. The feeling of uncertainty is all-pervasive, except that this time around the tech managers and the entrepreneurs have a few more options than what they had last time. The last downturn forced several players, both big and small, to seek low-cost resources across the globe, specifically in India. Since then, however, many have pulled back, citing operational issues or an easing of pressure from top management. The employee retention issues coupled with the exchange rate fluctuations has given business people much to consider with regard to offshoring. In my humble opinion, however, these developments do nothing to change one basic reality: companies that planned and executed an India strategy outsmarted and outlasted those that did not!

The truth is loud and clear that a carefully crafted India design strategy can still give the strategic edge for big companies or a fresh lease of life to the startups. The semi-conductor design manager, for example, would do well to carefully study the existing IP and design services capabilities of third-party vendors in India to gain an edge in this changed environment. Last time around, the Indian semi-conductor industry was in its infancy with only a few big names boasting of capabilities that were locked in for in-house use. Today, things have changed substantially.

Of course, one needs to keep in mind that strategies vary based on given situations, which means that what worked well in the past may fall flat now. I was at the front-end of the outsourcing wave while working with Tata Consultancy Services in the late 1980s and again at Cadence in the early 1990s. Both companies were pioneers in their domains, deriving substantial value from their foresight. It should be no surprise, then, that when I co-founded GDA Technologies; our first hardware development center was at Chennai in 1998, long before others thought of having an Indian design center. Then came the 2001 crash, and software and hardware offshoring became the norm rather than an exception. In today’s declining business environment, I am confident of an even bigger outsourcing wave but the strategies and their execution will be diametrically different.