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Mr. Sikka, you are right.

Mr. Sikka, you are right

For any of you who may have missed Vishal Sikka communication to Infosys employees on the new year, read here.

The problem that Vishal Sikka is alluding to is largely connected to the identity of our IT Industry today. We’re the ‘outsourcing’ destination for the world – and companies like Infosys actually helped create the concept of ‘outsourcing’. This is precisely what is getting disrupted by automation and AI. The term “outsourcing” itself is facing obsolescence.

Clearly, the Indian IT story can no longer be about cost arbitrage. Let’s not forget that India is also a huge, untapped market with enormous potential for disruptive ideas. Amazon and Uber will probably paint a very different picture of India than Infosys or Wipro.

Also the next wave of technological thinking is emerging. API-driven ecosystems, Low- code app development, design-led growth, and the impending data explosion with IoT are shaping the future for us. These mega trends are giving rise to a new breed of smaller and nimbler companies that are uniquely positioned to create products and services for a new breed of enterprises around the world that are ‘born digital’. At Pramati, we’re looking at these markets. And the future looks fantastic for us.

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Start-ups and think tanks are game-changers

It is time for us to embrace new-age start-ups and local think tanks for India to prosper.

Human development indicators improve rapidly when countries learn to provide health, education and financial inclusion more effectively. Incremental increases in expenditure on welfare schemes and subsidies do not bring about this change. Plugging the leakages in government distribution helps, but it is not a panacea. What we need are game-changing innovations that can tackle India-scale challenges.

In the past 30 years, it has become clear that game-changing solutions do not follow a prescribed path to discovery. Instead, they are born out of hundreds of experiments. These experiments can’t be limited to the labs of a few resource-rich incumbents.

We need to widen the funnel to include the new-age entrepreneurs and innovators. To do this, the government needs to adopt and evangelize pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, create level playing fields and encourage innovating around national issues.

There is some good news on this front. In the past few years, a collaborative effort between several government agencies and the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), a non-profit think tank, have helped create key enablers for hundreds of experiments.

A digital infrastructure for cashless, paperless and presence-less (on smartphone) service delivery is now in place. It is colloquially called the India Stack. It offers all the building blocks that are needed as public goods. And the rapid adoption of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers (JAM) has created a ready pool of citizens to try out these services.

This enables new-age start-ups to do more complex things than they could do before, making them transformation agents for real India.

These new-age start-ups will deliver 10x gains that we need in health, education and financial inclusion to make India successful.

But we must think beyond start-ups. The Indian state must evolve too. It must learn faster, change faster and implement faster.

A 2013 paper by Luke Jordan of the World Bank and Sebastien Turban and Laurence Wilse-Samson of Columbia University shows that the Indian state performs poorly on these dimensions compared to the Chinese state. They identify many factors for this.

For instance, China has undertaken reform once every five years since 1978, while India has only attempted it twice in 65 years. Therefore, China has been continuously tuning up its capacity to learn and deliver.

In India, substantial administrative reforms are overdue. (The reforms recommended by the Second Administrative Reforms Commission still remain unimplemented.)

It turns out that think tanks have an important role to play too. A dense network of think tanks is necessary to conduct and spread research.

Indian think tanks are mostly central or foreign, with only a few having strong links into the policy system. China has think tanks observing and explaining change. This is a structural gap.

Because of this, the Indian state is conspicuously lacking in its capacity to generate new knowledge, transmit it across the system and act on that.

It is time for us to embrace the two new players—new-age start-ups and local think tanks—for India to prosper. Only then will we able to break free from our current trajectory to meet the aspirations of our young citizens.

Jay Pullur is founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies. He is also a co-founder and governing council member of iSPIRT.

Shashank N.D. is founder and CEO of Practo Technologies. He is part of iSPIRT’s Founder Circle.

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India Stack takes the Digital India campaign to a whole new level

India is the third largest smartphone and mobile internet user market in the world with over 200 million internet users in 2013. The figures are expected to touch a staggering 500 million users by 2017, including 314 million mobile internet users according to a report by IAMAI and KPMG. Clearly, mobile phones are the ‘computing device of choice’ for the country. To keep up the momentum, the Government of India is keen on developing the digital infrastructure of the country under the Digital India program.

Digital India is a revolutionary program that will empower the masses and leapfrog India into the next generation of government services. Fortunately, the lower level of investment in earlier generation technology means India has skipped the legacy era and waited for the right technology to arrive at its doorstep. To kick-start and empower the Digital India program in a very democratized form and involve the great innovation talent of the nation, the Government of India has launched an open API policy. An open API, often referred to as a public API, is a publicly available Application Programming Interface (API) that provides programmers with programmatic access to a propriety software application. This set of open API is known as the India Stack and these would enable the ease in integration of mobile applications with the data securely stored and provided by the government to authenticated Apps.

India Stack is a complete set of API for developers and includes the Aadhaar for Authentication (Aadhaar already covers over 940 million people and will quickly cover the population of the entire nation), e-KYC documents (safe deposit locker for issue, storage and use of documents), e-Sign (digital signature acceptable under the laws), unified payment interface (for financial transactions) and privacy-protected data sharing within the stack of API. Together, the India Stack enables Apps that could open up many opportunities in financial services, healthcare and education sectors of the Indian economy. What this essentially means is that developers and tech startups can now build software and create businesses around the readily available infrastructure offered through India Stack, thus opening a huge potential to tap into the booming smartphone market in the country. Since the consumer market in India is very large, such startups could also hope for institutional funding and gain from the early mover advantage.

Through the digitized elements like e-KYC, e-Sign, digitized Aadhaar information and digital locker, the entire ecosystem has now become a presence less, paperless and cashless based system. A Digital Locker enables users to have all their legal documents in a digitized format that is stored online and can be accessed from any part of the country. The e-Sign makes it simple for people to sign deals, contracts and legal documents through their phones and the Unified Payment Interface lets people make payments with ease through their smartphones from anywhere.

India Stack makes a user base of over a billion people readily available through its API. This means that startups and tech companies can build over this to be able to integrate various functions for their businesses or for larger enterprises. Every bank or telecom operator scans through tons of paperwork every day to be able to verify customers and generate KYC documents. Now imagine the impact if this entire process could be digitized by building an application which would integrate India Stack and the user base of over a billion Indians!

With the technology, documentation and sample code available, entrepreneurs and startups can get started with innovating, prototyping as well as building India Stack enabled applications. The commercial applications are endless with multiple opportunities, as the large user base opened up by India Stack is nascent, solution-hungry and largely untouched by technology. Now even a local vegetable trader can take an intra-day loan almost instantly through his mobile phone and pay it back the very same or next day without even physically visiting the bank or wasting any time (time is money when earnings are proportional to time spent)! With their e-KYC documents and digital signatures, a loan can be processed almost instantly and the money transferred through the Unified Payment Interface. Long queues at banks, telecom offices and all other government and non-governmental processes should be the thing of the past, through proper integration of India Stack.

The nation is looking for “a transition from technology-poor to innovation-rich society” and entrepreneurs have a good role to play. The problems (read opportunities) in financial services, healthcare and education are all so large that only the right technology can cost-effectively solve them. Solving these scale problems would mean great business sense too.

iSPIRT, the non-profit software product industry think tank powered by industry veterans, has been actively involved in the development of India Stack and is helping entrepreneurs make the best use of business opportunities provided by India Stack, while building their startups. iSPIRT believes that India Stack creates a whole new generation of business opportunities around the mobile phone and early movers would have tremendous market advantages.

On a recent visit to India, Bill Gates commented on India Stack saying, “India is on the cusp of leapfrogging!” And it truly is; considering it is the only country in the world offering such an open and secure API, India is certainly looking at taking the Digital India campaign to a whole new level.

The future is here and now is the time to act.

 

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Analysis of Market Opportunities for Indian Software Products

As a think tank, iSPIRT has been constantly thinking, exploring and encouraging numerous models of software product business, all in parallel. This process leads us to gather three distinct categories of inputs that can then be crystalized and shared with the larger ecosystem – practitioner experiences, market trends and industry strengths. Since all the three factors evolve, the class of opportunities becomes different over a period of time and the analysis needs to be repeated. The current document reflects the best of our understanding as of today.

iSPIRT is very appreciative of the efforts of entrepreneurs who pursue individual market opportunities and their will to succeed. Unlike a market analysis report by an Analyst firm, this document does not aid entrepreneurs to pick a particular opportunity or support an investment thesis, as it deals with mainly the macro-level factors. We believe that an articulation of the market reality (a blend of practitioner experiences, market trends and industry strengths) would provide insight to industry observers and policy makers as to how the Software Products Industry is working and why.

Here is a small outline that helps in understanding this document.

First section starts by clarifying segmentation of the market on internationally accepted lines. Two major impact areas are then analyzed – SaaS business model (pay as you go, for software) and Services industry (large population familiar with issues and delivery of services to enterprise customers, particularly, larger ones). Finally a picture of market opportunities across segments is derived from the above trends and other tailwind factors from an India perspective.

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Action Plan for increasing M&A opportunities for Indian product startups

Indian product companies punch below their weight. Despite huge innovation and rising entrepreneurship, most Indian product companies are invisible on the global map. The reasons are many, but a big one is the lack of meaningful exits for companies that actually create value in their product markets. This paper focuses on a plan to address this gap.

The iSPIRT position paper of March 2013 identified several issues that need to be addressed to improve M&A activity in the US-India corridor. While discussions with the Product Nation community members strengthened the propositions made, we needed to get a buyer’s perspective before formulating an action plan. This led to an Executive Brainstorming Session with several prolific technology leaders and acquirers from Silicon Valley.

The brainstorming session at Palo Alto, CA on May 21, 2013 had broad participation from across the tech industry and was attended by M&A professionals and senior executives from Autodesk, Cadence, IBM, Intel, NTT Docomo, Facebook, Paypal/Ebay, VMware, and Walmart Labs. The iSPIRT team also had a private meeting with the head of M&A at Oracle. Representatives from Cisco and BMC could not be present due to last-minute issues.

On May 22, the iSPIRT team met with the CEOs of about 20 Indian startups, most with some presence in Silicon Valley to gain better access to their markets and customers. This meeting further stressed the need for improving M&A exits for startups, particularly for those that lack strong US VC backing. There was unanimous agreement within this CEO group that improving company readiness, visibility and access to potential acquirers would go a long way in planning successful exits. Inputs from this meeting have been included below.

iSPIRT M&A Connect Action Plan 2013 Version 2