In the short space of just two decades, India, has established itself as a leader of the global IT industry. Today, we account for 65 percent of the global offshore IT industry and 46 percent of the offshore BPO industry.

Already more than a million people are directly employed by this industry and if this growth is sustained at an annual rate of 25 percent or more, the industry can provide employment, directly and indirectly, to over nine million people by 2010, and generate export revenues of about $60 billion. And what will deliver such strong sustained growth? The answer: Through sustained innovation.

Transformation through Innovation and Growth through innovation, are constant themes in the IT industry. There are tremendous parallels in the journey called life that we all undertake and the journey that a company like TCS has had. Soon after its birth in 1968, when TCS was an infant, we were governed by the regulatory environment, where prohibitive customs duties meant we couldn’t import our tools of the trade: computers.

But just like a child can fashion a piece of wood into great cricket bat, so did we. When resources are limited you learn to use them wisely. We learnt to extract the most from the computers. We made sure our processes were more efficient. These small innovations led to the birth of quality movement, which has became a part of our DNA today. Today TCS is the only company in the world with an enterprise wide CMM and PCMM level 5 certifications – to use a schooling analogy, we were just given A+ for our quality processes.
There was a second Innovation as the result of the economic atmosphere at this time. Since the computers could not come to our country, we took our people and our skills to where computers were – to the U.S. Thus began our tryst with overseas markets. Just as genes shape a person these two factors shaped the nature and scope of the Indian IT Industry.

Adolescence: