The successful IPO of Tech Mahindra underlines the fact that it is promising year ahead for the Indian IT Service firms. If one could gauge from the number of engineers that large IT services firms are hiring, there would be an impressive growth registered this year too.

At the same time, there are two interesting trends panning out. Software product companies are increasingly outsourcing product development to vendors to save on time-to-market and focus on marketing and branding their products. A new breed of offshore product development service providers like Symphony Services, Aztec Software, Aspire Systems, and Persistent Systems are cashing in on this opportunity.

In this issue, we feature Symphony Services. What we found in the company is a very strong product DNA. The management background, work culture, training programmes, and innovation initiatives speaks about their preparedness to attack the market.

The other significant trend is the semiconductor trend. The Indian semiconductor industry is in a very exciting phase today, poised to witness enormous growth. Several international semiconductor companies are establishing their offshore design centers in India. Domestic design services companies have shown tremendous growth. Global majors have shown confidence in Indian design companies by awarding them critical projects. All these speak of the growing maturity in the semiconductor ecosystem. The missing piece though is semiconductor manufacturing.

But to get closer to become the Silicon Valley-hotspot for product development-isn’t going to be an easy ride. We must understand that to build world-class products or chips in India we need armies of PhDs. Not many in the IT industry seem to be geared for higher education.