Indian IT companies in China
Longtime readers may be familiar with my interest in China. Lately, it has been hard to keep up and I have mostly given up trying - except for in a few areas.
One of my interest areas is the evolving confluence of interest between Indian IT industry and China - thanks to the Chinese determination to catch up with the IT industry in India and the impact of the falling US dollar and rising wages for the Indian IT companies.
There were two interesting stories on this subject in FT and WSJ last month. The Financial Times story captured the start-up frustrations of the Indian IT companies that have set up development centers in China. There seems to be two main problems - 1. Inability to quickly find and hire a large number of English speaking developers in any Chinese city in order to quickly scale up for new projects 2. Lack of good project managers. It included an interesting interview with an Mphasis manager who said that for the time being they are looking to get experienced managers from from India to lead large projects. There was a story in Wall Street Journal in the same week that profiled a Chinese software company that has hired a few executives to (among other things) rewrite the e-mails from their developers to their US clients. These exectives are also trying to wise up the developers on the 'American way' (e.g. Dont be profusely sorry to an American when you do something slightly wrong. It doesnt go down as well in the English language and the client may think you are faking it). It interviewed some of the people inside this company and they talked about how determined they are to win big business from North America and how they are looking at this cost as an invesment worth making.
I think it will be a few years before we know how successful China's push towards IT services is going to be.
But earlier this month CNET published a short interview with Sudip Banerjee of Wipro. I thought it was very interesting and covered some of the same ground. Check it out.