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Changes in market dynamics after recovery: Only the stronger players will survive. I strongly believe the survivors will emerge as stronger, more efficient and better companies.

Arun Jain CEO, Polaris Software

Impact: We are seeing two major changes: A shift from demand servicing to demand creation. So far IT companies were just servicing demand that landed on to their desks. Now, with the RFPs drying up, the focus is on demand creation. Here, one has to understand the customers pain and create solutions to address and thereby create value. This is what I refer by demand creation. Polaris has acquired skills in demand creation as our strategy is based on creating solutions based on customer pain points.

We are engaging with top banks through workshops like self funded Progressive Modernization along with their business and technology teams.

Challenges: Discretionary spending is certainly going down. We are seeing a delay in cycle time. New projects planned during the upswing are being re-looked. However, many of our customers are using this as an opportunity to realign and re-calibrate their current investments in IT, and are looking at discarding some of their incumbency issues. Since we work on core applications of our clients IT environment, we are seeing our combination of solutions, services and product components help us bring a business outcome based approach to our clients.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: History teaches us that all big institutions are a result of major changes. Change brings opportunity, the opportunity of changing leadership at the marketplace. We may not witness the post-2000 kind of growth in outsourcing. The non-differentiating companies in the IT space may not survive.

We see a growth in product based services and IP led companies will have an edge. The growth of Indian software companies can still happen and not entirely linked to the growth of industry per se. Given the same market size, Indian IT companies can grow by replacing their foreign competitors.

PR Chandrasekar CEO and vice chairman, Hexaware Technologies

Impact: As a result of the slowdown, we are observing different changes in the marketplace, though not all are negative. The impacts largely seen are:

The uncertainty in the marketplace impacting budget and project decisions on the customers end.

Longer sales cycles and greater focus on must do and revenue generating type of projects with customers.

On positive side, creating more opportunities for offshore and mid size companies as customers re-examine their supplier options and look for deals/best of breed solutions.

Challenges: While the slowdown is creating opportunities for off-shoring, it has brought many challenges as well. The top challenges include:

Managing costs and overheads.

Planning in an uncertain market.

Driving revenue growth.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery
Like we have observed in the past, we will see a significant increase in off-shoring post the slowdown. While the market may take time to recover, we expect the IT industry to recover earlier than the other industries. Also, we at Hexaware are better geared for growth with a stronger management team in place and a new vertical organization.

Sudip Nandy CEO, Aricent

Impact: The top impacts of the slowdown have been:

Greater scrutiny of orders at the customers leading to deferment of decisions

Customers are very watchful and waiting for signs of behavior change in their customers, and holding major investments till they are very sure.

Challenges: The top three challenges are:

Streamline and create greater flexibility in our business

Attain greater customer loyalty

Prepare to take market share during the recovery

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: I foresee a greater consolidation in mature markets.

Ganesh Ayyar CEO, MphasiS

Impact: The impact has been mixed.

Many discretionary projects are getting postponed or shelved. This is leading to longer sales cycle and lower return on sales pipeline.

Our customers with long and trusted relationship are jointly planning the cost optimization. This strategy of helping customers is further strengthening business relationship.

Customers are considering all options to lower costs and as a result are more open to best shoring.

Challenges: For us some of the key challenges will be:

Optimizing operational cost: This will enable us to further help the customers and will improve our readiness to tackle the economic meltdown challenge. Further intensifying our customer

focus: This will help us to retain our customers by adding value even in such trying conditions.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: What we see is that IT spending will recover slower than the market. While the pent up replacement demand will kick-in, the discretionary spend will grow a lot slower than the market. Smaller IT services players will struggle to strive. Companies with a deep rooted customer and partner relationship will have a higher chance of success.

Aparup Sengupta CEO, Aegis

Impact: Being in the customer lifecycle management, we have seen no change in business as this entails activities in the non discretionary spend cycle. With added motivation to save, customers are outsourcing more to reduce their TCO and converting fixed costs to variable costs. Customers are seeing tangible economic outcome in the form of better efficiencies/productivity and are willing to give additional volumes of work.

Challenges: Manage growth without affecting quality, SLAs.

Start quantifying process KPIs with business KPIs and provide better service levels.

Try to partner with CXOs to understand their outsourcing agenda and not limit relationship with operating sponsors at client end.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: We flank both ends of the economic spectrum. In growth cycle companies want us to do more. This is driven by topline movements. In downturn companies want to save more and thereby are open to outsource more work.

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