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August - 2008 - issue > Editor's Desk
Are You a Niche?
Pradeep Shankar
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Just a year ago, the demand for IT manpower was very high and there was a promising future for the freshers from colleges; but today, the industry is beleaguered by manpower cuts, retrenching, and downsizing, to use some of the terms commonly heard now. It is admitted by all that the rosy times of the IT outsourcing business are gone, and the situation here in India is reminiscent of the dotcom bust of 2001.

The Indian IT industry is clearly facing highly adverse market conditions—the recessionary trend in the U.S. economy due to the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, the subprime crisis, uncertainty over the IT budgets of the U.S. clients, global credit crisis, and the weakening of the dollar. The impact is severe, given the fact that the U.S. accounts for close to 60 percent share of the Indian software majors’ exports.

The good news is that the niche players stand to gain in this downward trend of the economy. In this issue we feature a niche player—Corbus, which specializes in optimizing client’s supply chain management (SCM). By a combination of mature outsourcing methodology and ability to use offshore capability, Corbus applies its procurement competency to bring transformative value to its clients across diversified industry segments. It is noteworthy that Corbus pioneered the outsourcing of SCM long before it became a trend in the industry.

Yet another niche segment that hasn’t been hit by the slowdown is the Outsourced Product Development (OPD). In fact, it is one of the fastest growing segments in the offshore services market. Since the customers are unlikely to reduce or stop their spending on new products, the OPD segment has an excellent scope for expanding dramatically.

One has to understand that IT outsourcing is all about bringing in cost efficiency. However, product development is a revenue creation activity. In this issue, we feature Sonata Software, which is seeing increased momentum in its OPD business and is hoping that the growth will continue.


Do let us know what you think.

Pradeep Shankar
Managing Editor
editor@siliconindia.com


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