Leaders Discuss Role Of IT In Powering Future Growth

Microsoft India today organized the first ever MNC IT Summit in Bangalore. The Summit brought together over 70 leaders of India-based IT organizations of multinational corporations (MNCs), in an endeavor to shape their collective vision for the industry and identify areas for collaboration. The attendees represent Fortune Global and Forbes 1000 companies with combined annual revenues in excess of $2 trillion, employing six million people globally including more than one million in India.

The Global In-house Centers (GICs) of these multinational corporations provide a range of services to their parent multinational corporations – IT services, Business Process Management and Engineering Research & Development. India’s GIC exports are expected to reach $17 Billion in 2014.

The theme of the summit was “What will it take for the MNC IT Community to increase its impact ten-fold in five years?” The MNC IT leaders articulated their vision, approach and path forward for their community. They committed to work together in enhancing India’s IT brand to attract more MNCs to set up IT centers in India, and called for sharing of best practices to help expand existing centers and enable them move up the IT value chain by doing mission-critical work from India. 

The Summit included keynotes, panel discussions and focused workgroup sessions by prominent speakers from academia, business, government and media including Adil Zainulbhai (Senior Advisor, McKinsey) Prof. Anil Gupta (IIM Ahmedabad), Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha (Founding Dean of ISB, Founder Managing Director 9dot9 Networks), Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar (Former Chairman, CSIR), Rajesh Dalal (Senior Consultant – Healthcare & Former MD – Johnson & Johnson), Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director, IIIT Bangalore) and Som Mittal (ex-Chairman, NASSCOM).

The Microsoft MNC IT Summit 2014 was kicked off by Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik who said, “The IT-GICs have been playing an important role in adoption of cutting edge technology by their organizations. At Microsoft we are committed to strengthen the ecosystem with future-ready productivity and platform tools for the mobile-first, cloud-first world.”

Microsoft CIO Jim DuBois said, “It has been amazing to watch the IT industry grow and evolve in India. Cloud is the next big trend that is driving the next wave of IT growth and transformation, not just for large enterprises but also for SMBs, governments and citizens.”

Microsoft IT India Managing Director, Raj Biyani said, “By collaborating closely, the leaders of the MNC IT units can boost India’s IT ecosystem exponentially in the next five years.” He touched upon key insights from the three-year journey that fundamentally transformed Microsoft’s own IT-GIC into a talent hub. This transformation has been documented in recent case studies by Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.

A documentary “Inventing the Zero, Reaching for Infinity: The Story of India and its IT Industry”, directed by Emmy Award winner Rafeeq Ellias, was unveiled at the summit which puts the spotlight on the role of MNC IT ecosystem’s symbiotic relationship with India and features perspectives of its leaders from the IT industry.

Dr. Sadagopan pointed out that IT centers in India are playing a leading role in establishing centers in other countries, including Vietnam and Argentina. Adil Zainulbhai, of McKinsey & Company, and editor of “Reimagining India: Unlocking India’s Potential” emphasized the vast untapped potential of India’s youthful economy.  In a panel discussion titled “Innovating and Winning from India”, Pramath Sinha, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, Rajesh Dalal and Prof. Anil Gupta shared inspiring examples of successful innovations in India, what Dr. Mashelkar labeled as “affordable excellence.”

Som Mittal highlighted the contribution of the overall IT industry to India’s economy creating 3.2 million jobs and generating over $100 billion in exports. IT-GICs make a substantial contribution in this impact. He appreciated the spirit of collaboration among Indian IT organizations stating “there is no place elsewhere in the world where competitors collaborate so fiercely."