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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

December - 2008 - issue > Slowdown Impact

2-3 Difficult Quarters, Then New Opportunities Abound

Dr. Anand Deshpande
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Dr. Anand Deshpande
As is evident, in the current economic downturn the outlook for most companies is not great, and everybody is waiting for the economic situation to reverse. Companies across the board are slowing down on spending, and outsourced product development (OPD) firms like us have also been asked to reduce our spending as well.

Incidentally, the goings-on in the present crisis are similar to what had happened during the 2000-01 crisis. Even then, companies were cutting costs, and were looking at paying us less for the same job. This continued for couple of quarters and when the markets came back, we saw some very good opportunities coming by. And I have reasons to believe that this time too, once the crisis subsides after two or three quarters, we will see a lot many opportunities opening up.

For one, on the technology side, there a lot of new things that are in the pipeline. This includes new chip launches, coming of the multi-core and increasing penetration of smart phones. Also, Software as a Service (SaaS) is no longer a discussion topic, but is starting to come into practice. Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture are seeing increasing customer adoptions even in the current conditions. Companies need to think about new and innovative ways of leveraging consumer and web 2.0 technologies.

Turbulent times are best opportunities to explore new ideas and to implement disruptive changes. There are several new technology ideas that are getting ripe for deployment. and with the amount of these innovative ideas in the pipeline, I think in the long run, new business opportunities abound.

There is a rather interesting, and now quite popular presentation from Sequoia Capital to its portfolio companies which paints a very bleak picture of the market, and has asked start-ups to reduce their burn-rate. But even this, in the long run, will help the Indian IT companies. And how!


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