Sharad’s view is more of a market problem. Opportunities are arising faster than the industry’s ability to scale up with infrastructure, leadership, or manpower. This leaves out many startups in the fray. There should be industry-academia-government support to nourish the startup ecosystem. The industry needs to understand that enabling the startups would actually foster the growth of the biggies too. Forums, which enable interaction between startups and industry stakeholders comprising of customers, venture capitalists, and talented workforce on the lookout for opportunities towards growth are urgently needed. Startups should understand the economics of scaling too. It would perhaps be counterproductive if they take a risk and go onto the path towards high volume growth. Sensible growth in a phased manner is the key to sustained success. Also there is a great need for a mindset change as success begets envy. Subverting startups, for instance, by copying their ideas and getting revenue is not a great idea. The culture of co-operation and co-existence is needed for the startup ecosystem to thrive. To get a winning breakthrough, I don’t think lack of funding is the problem area for startups. The key is to give a value proposition to those possessing funds and attract them with the merit of the idea.

Vivek:

Look at the top 25 companies 25 years back, and compare them with today’s top 25 companies. Many successful companies of the past do not figure in the present list. Why? The simple answer is: market evolution, wherein those who did not evolve with the market just took the slide downwards.

Next big thing to happen to the Indian Tech Firmament

Sharad:

Co-creation will be the new buzzword, wherein when developers create the product, there is active involvement of customers and beneficiaries through online forums during the making of the product. Thus both of them co-create the result and there is bound to be lesser product failures. Earlier there were many product failures from India. Now, there is no reason that the next ‘YouTube’ cannot come out of India. Today a company, say, in Koramangala, Bangalore, can host consumer videos of the volume of a YouTube without the need for possessing even a piece of data center equipment, courtesy new technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing brings supercomputing through the Web by networking large groups of servers that often use low-cost consumer PC technology.

Apart from this, I think, in the future, the retail and entertainment business is going to bring in major business for IT.