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Ranjan Das president & CEO, Indian Subcontinent, SAP

Impact: It is definitely the worst crisis since the founding of the software industry. There is a strong correlation between GDP and global IT spending. And this crisis spans almost all global networks and is affecting every country, even if at varying speed. But, even during times of crisis companies invest in software to make them more competitive, though they are taking decisions more carefully than before.

Challenges: We have arrived in a new world in 2009.The economic crisis will be here to stay for some time. We expect 2009 to be a year of limited visibility, making it increasingly difficult to project business in this environment. The crisis is worsening and has a negative impact on the preparedness of our customers to invest in IT.

However, SAP believes that the challenges all companies are facing in this business environment will create new opportunities for SAP. Customers are spending selectively but expect a much faster and tangible return. Smart companies are continuing to invest in IT to become more efficient and agile, to cut unnecessary costs and gain better assessments on risk.

Industries that continue to invest into IT are public sector, consumer goods, utilities, life science and the pharmaceutical industry.

Ganesh Natarajan chairman, Nasscom and global CEO, Zensar

Impact: The current market scenario has given rise to more innovation in the industry and within the organization as well. This has given us an opportunity to revisit our intrinsic value propositions and launch new services for all our recession hit customers in the USA, Europe and Asia. The slowdown has led to increased cost cutting pressures on companies globally resulting in an increase in Indias share of the outsourcing work in the global outsourcing pie, creating more opportunities for Indian IT companies to explore.

Challenges: The challenges that would top the charts in the next few months are cost control; increased profitability; and development of technologies, process and business solutions that give an accelerated return on investment which are the need of the hour.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: Yes, there will be significant changes post the current recessionary market conditions. One of the biggest changes that will be seen is increased innovationthe current situation will help us in becoming an even more innovative organization as these crazy times will call for strong measures to sustain and grow. In addition to this, we will also see the organization emerge as a stronger entity which will create opportunities for us to be true transformation partners to our customers and capitalize on opportunities in our chosen domains.

Pramod Bhasin CEO, Genpact

Impact: The slowdown certainly has an impact on our business, both IT and BPO, as it has on almost all businesses. The immediate impact is cut on spending, and lower volumes because the transactions have gone down. On the IT side, the impact is more, as it is more discretionary spending. On the positive side, business has gone up on certain areas within BPOs, such as collections, inventory management and supply chain.

I believe the impact on BPO will be positive on the medium to long term as this will force companies to be more efficient. But before that they have to figure out what they need to do. That will take some time.

Challenges: The immediate challenge is managing pricing pressure, even as transaction volumes go down. But the challenge is also to use the opportunity that comes with it. For example, this is the right time to acquire talent in the US and UK. The challenge is also to invest on your brand, and the front-end, while remaining cautious on the immediate outlook.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: The biggest issue today is the lack of predictability. I am not sure if the US economy will see a recovery anytime soon. But I believe our market will recover by Q4 2009 as our clients figure out what they need to do. This industry is part of the solution to the crisis. This will grow faster than any other industry. While other industries are talking of 20-30% drop in revenues, we will still grow in double digits. While it is early to plan for a post-recovery strategyas we have not seen the worst yetcertain changes are imminent. One is the balancing of portfolio. We have to look at India and China more seriously. It should be India-to-India and China-to-China. We have to see how our products can play out independent of offshore labor arbitrage.

Naresh Wadhwa president and country manger, Cisco, India and SAARC

Impact: As the global economy slows down, and the macro economic situation continues to be challenging, our customers are looking for ways to trim spending and improve bottomline. Cisco, like all other large technology companies, is not immune to this fall in IT spends. IT investments, especially in enterprise and IT/ITeS sector, have been affected. However, as always, we view such market transitions as opportunities to invest aggressively and move into new market adjacencies.

Challenges: We believe our vision, strategy and execution model will enable us to move into market adjacencies with tremendous speed, scale and flexibility. There are both opportunities and challenges in the current market scenario. A key focus area will be the realignment of our resources into the highest-yielding growth opportunities. We will seek to tap the opportunities in the commercial marketplace and also tap into growth verticals such as education and healthcare among others, and work toward strengthening our existing customer relationships.

We believe that we are very well positioned in the industry from a vision, differentiated strategy, and execution perspective. We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies. We will do our best to provide the product architectures and the expertise to help our customers in the implementation of these collaborative capabilities from a technology and business perspective.

Changes in Market Dynamics after Recovery: Our approach to all of the economic slowdowns that have occurred over the last two decades has remained very similar. We view these market transitions as opportunities where we assess the environment and our strategy, take advantage of building stronger customer relationships and differentiation, and start preparing for the upturn.

Neeraj Bhargava CEO, WNS Global Services

Impact: We have renewed four contracts recently, three of them at higher prices. Having said that, there is a real slowdown and there is an impact of that. Customers are going back to 2001/2002 levels. The core transaction processing BPO has seen renewed interest. We have seen both: in some cases, the immediate need to cut costs is making sales cycles shorter, customers are coming to us. But in some cases, where because of the changes, the whole organizational structure has been affected, the decision cycle has become much slower. There is a clear negative impact on the KPO side of business, as discretionary spending is being cut.

The markets looked very weak in the immediate aftermath of Lehman. But they are looking much better now.

Challenges: The challenge is to offer the traditional BPO a lot better; to apply more and more technology to the processes and help the clients in immediate cost saving.

Col HS Bedi CMD, Tulip Telecom

Impact: The aftermaths of the slowdown have indeed been a grave one. However, various Indian companies like ours with lower exposure in the international markets have not been severely affected. The slowdown has offered us a great opportunity to expand our business and add an array of new product lines in order to complete our service offerings. This allows us to increase our addressable market size almost five-fold. We have therefore witnessed a huge surge in business opportunity; our addressable market size has grown almost five-fold. Besides this, Tulip has also seen a positive impact on some parts of the business because of the increased adoption of videoconferencing in our customer base in order to cut overall costs.

Challenges: For the next couple of months, we aim to focus on our processes in order to attain maximum operational efficiency. We believe that present day challenges have opened new avenues for the growth of our business. Some of the opportunities that we are working on include the deploying of a robust fiber network and strengthening our alliances with global service providers and application providers.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: We are hopeful to gain further traction in verticals viz BFSI, media & entertainment, government, which though continue to grow presently, are likely to grow with greater thrust. I also believe we will continue to see various new technologies evolving as the times change. And firmly believe that while enterprises will continue to remain prudent about the investments that they make, they will continue to invest in projects that allow them to achieve their business goals.

Vijay Thadani CEO, NIIT

Impact: Reduction in discretionary spending.

Slower decision making and therefore longer sales cycles.

Longer collection cycles.

Challenges: Improving productivitydoing more with less.

Maintaining employee morale. Managing liquidity.

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