Indian IT firms still lag behind MNC counterparts
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 14 February 2009, 00:29 IST   |    1 Comments
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Mumbai: The Indian IT firms are yet to set their moves right to surpass their multinational counterparts or MNCs. "Multinational companies have presence in multiple geographies, economies of scale, in-depth understanding of client's business and a global view for many industries and this is what Indian service providers lack. These factors may work against Indian service providers when bidding for a project in the current scenario," said Mark Toon, CEO, Equaterra, on the sideline of India Leadership Forum organized by Nasscom in Mumbai. While Indian companies focus more on their on-site capability to serve clients better, MNCs such as IBM and Accenture have built their offshore capability to reduce costs, reported The Economic Times. While offering a project, a client basically focuses on factors like domain expertise, size and skill sets in application development, the areas Indian firms may lag behind. These companies' tendency to opt for maintenance or secondary application development mars their domain knowledge and product development capability. "Indian companies lack experience in green-field application development, which needs very deep domain knowledge," said Dana Stiffler of AMR Research. Moreover, the social and corporate turbulences like the Mumbai attack and the Satyam fiasco is another hurdle for the Indian firms to attract clients. "The fact that 115 independent directors have resigned in the past one month from corporate India are also matters of concern for these clients," said Dennis McGuire, Chairman and Founder of TPI. It is to outbid the negative factors that the Indian IT firms are relentlessly investing on foreign professionals to bridge the cross-cultural difference, a move they have always shunned in the initial stages.

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