 On the threshold of the 21st century, India experienced an information revolution. This was the big bang of the cyber universe. It transformed the very perceptions of a developing economy. The processes of management underwent significant changes. The advances in information technology created an explosion that unleashed tremendous potential. As information superhighways began transporting the bits and bytes of future technology, India reached out to the world and established a brand equity for the country. The momentum achieved was reflected in the entrepreneurial gestures of thousands of individual Indians. Hundreds of high-tech companies took shape and fed the huge global demand for digital solutions. After two decades of development, there are companies which epitomise the success and strength of the Indian IT revolution. They grew because of the foresight of their promoters who, through their vision and competence, helped in building an IT-enabled India. They were among those who proved that information technology could play a critical role in the overall development of India, not only in terms of economic growth but also in terms of social advancement. On the 19th of October 1999, there was a banner that adorned the front of the prestigious New York Stock Exchange building. The banner displayed the rainbow colours of an Indian company, Wipro. At a time when the world's stock markets had turned rocky, putting aside conventional wisdom of waiting out the market freefall, Wipro pressed ahead with its ADS issue. Despite what the skeptics had said about bad timing, the company's first-ever public offering since 1947 sailed through, raising US$114 million. This issue vindicated Azin Hashmi Premji's belief that Wipro could get the valuations of a high-growth, high-tech company. Today, Wipro not only provides work-maintenance services to many a global firm, but also provides high-end R&D services to companies like Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Nokia. But it was barely 20 years ago that in 1980, Wipro had diversified into computers. The company today employs more than 12,000 people and has over 20 overseas offices. Premji's early bet on infotech has placed Wipro at the vanguard of India's IT revolution. IBM had left the country. The quality of existing companies in India had not invested enough in technology or invested enough in after sales customer service. So we were able to buy the company of technology from a small startup company and we were able to develop a leading-edge computer product, which was leading edge from a global point of view. And we launched the product in early 1980 and it was a resounding success and we built upon that success. We kept putting back money into the business. We kept investing in customer service. We kept investing in R&D and we grew the business very significantly. And in the late 80s, from addressing the domestic market, we started addressing the global market. For India, the growth in information technology was an opportunity to overcome the negative trade imbalances of a developing nation. Here was an industry that required innovation and intelligence as its main ingredients. The IT revolution became the new mantra of a rejuvenated economy. What propelled it was the passionate infection spread by the success of India's export-oriented software industry. The potential of its high capacity to generate wealth, foreign exchange and employment caught the imagination of a whole nation. The task of this nation in the next 10 years is to create at least 4 to 5 million jobs every year, jobs that provide good disposable income. And I don't think that's going to happen in the government and I don't think that's going to happen in the public sector at this point in time. So it has to happen in the private sector. And I'm not very sure if we can do it in the domestic sector simply because the domestic sector is not in a position to create the kind of jobs that we are talking about, 50, 60 million jobs. I think we have to concentrate on the export sector. Today the contribution of GDP to India's, the contribution of exports to India's GDP is somewhere around 9%. And we have to take it to somewhere around 20%. If we did that, our exports hopefully by 2008 should be around perhaps 180 to 200 billion dollars. And at that point in time we would have created a considerable number of jobs. Since that day in 1981 when 7 young men, 34 year old Narayan Murthy among them decided to form Infosys, the company has grown to be a world leader in providing IT consulting and implementation services. We were very short on money but we were very long on hope, energy, enthusiasm, commitment, etc. And right from day one we realized that we had to look at the export market and that's how 6 of my colleagues went abroad and we started working with a software company in New York City. And I remain in India and my job was to get a computer imported into the country and then start developing software from India. Infosys today specializes in a wide range of technology driven business transformation initiatives including e-business strategy, system integration and application development and management services. Some of the major clients of Infosys include Microsoft, Nortel, Samsung, Reebok, Toshiba and Cisco. Across India organizations in the IT sector are being increasingly driven to rapidly integrate and synchronize their systems and structures to leverage the potential of emerging technologies. In the past decade and a half changes have taken place at so fast a clip that the transformation has been akin to that of a revolution. The PC eclipsed the mainframe within a decade and in so doing put technology on the table top. Managing people and this technology assumed a critical role in the success stories that were to unfold. By the year 2000 more than 185 of the Fortune 500 companies outsourced their software requirements to Indian houses and by the end of that year there were 5 PCs for every 1000 Indians. The convergence of technology started in the latter half of the 90s primarily in information and communication. To be able to think and then to communicate this thought lay at the core of cyber entrepreneurship. More and more of the people are involved in not doing thinking and interacting with each other and therefore the services which deal with information as the raw material, information as the finished good both the bits. As we would call it as against the atoms, that is the preoccupation. I think the knowledge here what we are saying is a much larger percentage of humanity is engaged in taking information in some form working on it and giving it back. And so it's not just about low level information processing, it is then ideas and concepts, abstractions and creating tremendous economic value out of new abstractions and new ideas. In 1981 31 year old Rajendra Pavar and two of his friends realised that very soon there was going to be a demand supply gap as far as trained computer professionals were concerned. Together they set up NIIT, an institute of computer education. Today NIIT is not just a school for learning computers, it has moved beyond its training niche. With its software development business expanding overseas it has become a global force to reckon with. NIIT provides software services to the likes of IBM, Sears, American Express, British Airways, Deutsche Bank, Hitachi, Honda and Sony. It was since the late 1970s that information technology education in India gained attention. The three year MCA program was conceived. Engineering colleges were encouraged to run BTEC programs in computer sciences and engineering. By the late 80s and early 90s as the focus shifted to software exports the approach to manpower development in the IT area took on epic proportions. All universities either started or expanded degree level programs in IT. But it was the Indian Institute of Technology which was to play a stellar role in advancing the cause of computer education. When I was a student at IIT Kanpur I got exposed to an IBM 1650 which is a very old machine and then to an IBM 7044 and that's where I got tremendously interested in computers. And those were the initial days of computing in India and it was always great excitement, great fun to use computers. Each year the various IITs produce engineering graduates who not only feed the growing demand for highly skilled manpower in the domestic sector but also supply the needs of IT power houses in the likes of Silicon Valley USA. Soon IT education became an industry in itself with enough space for public and private initiatives to coexist. Affiliations were being given to specialized privately run institutes and a major expansion of certificate and diploma courses run on commercial lines started taking form. In India today there are 500 engineering colleges conducting BTEC programs in IT related fields. 300 universities are running the MCA course. Along with other courses like BE and BCA the universities of India are capable of producing 75,000 graduates every year. In the normal formal sector more than 5,000 institutions are imparting training to an additional 500,000 students. This sector generates a revenue of 400 million US dollars and is growing at a rate of 20% every year. Any industry which is fast growing where a lot of opportunities are getting created will always have demand for people. We face the same demand for people. We lose some people but mostly they are to jobs overseas or to startup companies. But that is part of our planning. We expect to lose some few people and we have enough depth in the organization, enough quality of people to quickly succeed where there is any attrition. It was with economic liberalization that the Indian IT industry completed its voting process. Restrictions on import were removed. Thus Indian companies could easily buy the top-end products that facilitated production and creativity. The Elizabeth Bank of India introduced a current upon convertibility which meant that it became easy to travel outside India. It became easy to establish sales offices outside. It became easy to get consultants in quality, brand equity, etc. from outside India. But what probably benefited the industry most was the opening up of the economy to 100% foreign investment in high-tech areas. So the best companies from all over the globe came and opened shop in India. Others looked around for collaborations. This was a period of intense competition as Indian companies had to now deal with not only each other but also with transnational established brands. The country opened itself to 100% foreign investment in high-tech areas. So we had the best companies from all over the world come and operate in India and in Bangalore in particular, which meant that we had tremendous competition for human resources. So then we started thinking in terms of how can we make ourselves the most attractive employers? And that was a big help. Competition for employees was the biggest thing that really helped emphasis. World majors began opening their R&D sales in India and the entire industry received a fresh impetus. For those who had had the foresight, this was a period of vindication. Information technology was now receiving the attention it deserved. The 80s were a period when we spent most of our time trying to interact with the government on those issues of what should the duty structures be and so on and so forth. And I think as India entered the 90s and got ready for liberalization, the mindset became very different. So our interaction was more to make it far more open. And we were, at that time itself, we were saying that we'd like to be more aggressive than what the IT agreement is about, that we can bring forward zero duty even before the rest of the world demands from us. It was a result of the policies adopted by the government coupled with private sector initiative that saw a quantum leap forward in the total production capabilities of the industry. In the period 1994-95 till 1999-2000, the domestic software segment grew from 350 million US dollars to 1,700 million US dollars. Software exports grew from 485 million US dollars to 4 billion US dollars. At the same time, the domestic hardware segment grew from 590 million US dollars to 1,450 US dollars. But exports fell from 177 million US dollars to 86 million US dollars. Hardware is not a focus area for us for exports. Hardware is a focus area for us for the domestic market. And we are prioritizing in terms of where India has a unique competitive advantage and where we as a company have a unique competitive advantage. And we think the opportunities are much more in the area of professional services for the global markets than they are in the area of hardware. The phenomenal growth in information technology over the past two decades has witnessed the mushrooming of specialized centers that cater to the needs of the new age entrepreneurs. Software technology parks have been set up in many parts of the country and special facilities have been accorded to entrepreneurs operating from these locations. The city of Bangalore and its surroundings have come to be known as the Silicon Valley of India. It boasts of more global names in IT than the rest of India put together. It is home to 75,000 IT professionals. But there are other cities which realizing the potential of this industry are fast catching up. We need 20-30 cities like Bangalore. If we want to create somewhere around 3-5 million jobs just in the software and IT sector, then we want all these 20 cities to become much bigger in terms of the opportunities for IT. So I want Hyderabad to come up. I want Bangalore to grow. I want Pune to come up. I want Bombay to come up. I want Delhi to come up. Why not? I mean after all this is India. Why should these opportunities be limited to one city? It doesn't make sense. I think we have bright, young children in every part of the country. So every state has to provide opportunity for good quality jobs. And so I think we need 20-30 cities like Bangalore. The euphoria created by information technology and the immense amount of growth that the industry witnessed also got reflected in the bosses of the country. Like in the West, it was the technology stocks that witnessed unprecedented growth. Infosys, which has a very progressive stock option scheme for its employees at the end of the year 2000, had 213 millionaires in US dollar terms. Out of the 7,853 employees of Infosys, 1,773 were millionaires in Indian rupee terms. Wipro had the largest market capitalization amongst Indian companies and Azim Prenji with his 84% stake in the company became the richest Indian. NIIT stock prices grew more than a hundredfold compared to 1993 figures. But the year 2001 saw technology stocks across the globe take a beating and it was no different with their Indian counterparts. Ten years of terrific growth in the US created an overhang. It created a kind of a day trader phenomenon in everybody's mind that you can make money easily and started creating a bubble around the internet, idea. And I think the world really lost its balance, should we say. We all lost our balance. And we started pushing that idea beyond its logical foundations. And that started getting corrected. But clearly we have to see it in a bigger context and say it's a matter of a certain period of time. Is it 6 months? Is it 12 months? Is it thereabouts? I mean that's the debate really speaking. So during this time we will see a contraction and a compression. And we will see that really speaking people will have to create exceptional value for their customers and become better and better. And it's a kind of a cleaning process should we say, which happens in a position of overcapacity. But when that is behind us we will still see the same kind of growth in the remaining part of the statement. While the stock markets have taken a beating, it has not diminished India's importance as a hub for quality software solutions and products. This year itself the industry is all set to reach an export level of 6.24 billion US dollars. And by the next year it is estimated to go up to 9 billion US dollars. In 1999-2000, India exported software to 95 countries, 62% of all exports going to North America. While the USA continues to be India's largest export market, export to Europe increased to 23.5% of the total. The pundits in the industry have set what they believe to be a very achievable figure of 50 billion US dollars by 2008. While India centric companies are expected to earn 12 billion US dollars by the same year. To achieve this velocity of business, both industry and the government are taking some bold and purposeful steps. All of which is aimed at enhancing the global brand equity. There's been an enormous uplift in the brand image of India over the past 18 months. So India as a country today has a very strong reputation in global markets whether it be the United States, Europe or Japan. As a major source for very high quality technical talent. As a major source in partnership for very high quality processes and quality deliveries. And which offers a strong value for money equations. Because the cost of living in India is significantly lower than the cost of living in Europe, Japan or the United States. As the internet began to weave its worldwide web in 1993, it coincided with the phase of economic reforms taking place in India. The newly liberalized economy got ample opportunity to benefit from the evolving world of IT based economic transactions. As internet services became available at cheaper and cheaper rates, it virtually opened up a new world of economics and business. Not only did the net become a means to conduct business, but in itself it became big business. Along with the more visible material change, there are intangible changes that have also started to take shape. We need to understand that the internet is a social phenomena. There's a technology implementation. But what it is doing is not to connect computers. That's a means. It is basically connecting minds. And the mind to me is very much more than intellect. I think we have to understand that perspective. So how to get insights which come even with limited data in the human system. And you can of course draw algorithms with huge computers to draw insights and we still are nowhere near the capability to build lateral thinking or insights. So and there is a whole dimension of emotion there. We know that if you are highly motivated, your idea is better. We don't know how to do that into computers. We don't understand many issues yet. So yes, time is becoming an issue because with connectivity we no more have sunset and sunrise. We are becoming a bit of a slave to that system of 24 by 7. And I think we have to respond through initiatives in managing people on how do we deal with the downsides of this pressure? How do we reorganize our thinking or ways of working, our organizations to cope with the pressure that come with the increasing speed of the device and the increasing connectivity? So the old ways of working will not do because it's a new capability we have created. And how to deal with this new capability in a way that actually gives more comfort rather than stretches more makes us slaves. I think those things we need to deal with. The positive role that information technology has played and continues to play in the development of modern society no longer is a debatable issue. The seed of success has already been sown as is evident by the exceptional performance of the software export sector in particular. The potential of IT and its high capacity to generate wealth, foreign exchange and employment has caught the imagination of an entire nation. It is obvious, India with its many advantages is all set to play a larger and stronger role in a cyber world.