Vivek Paul on India's IT industry

Do read this interview of Vivek Paul in Tuesday's Economic Times. Though he decided to quit the job of Wipro's CEO a while ago to take up a position in a private equity firm, Paul has some rosy things to say about the future of India's IT industry.

The 2001 tech wreck showed the resilience of the Indian IT industry. The entire technology market was crashing and people were going from incredible growth prospects to nothing, and here was the Indian software industry saying “we have dropped the growth rate from 70 to 30%.” Wow. Most would give an arm and leg to get 30% in that kind of downturn. What it also did for the Indian software firms was that it gave them a pause to build sustainable institutions. If we had continued to grow at 70% we would have just kept on adding people without focusing on building an institution.

The inflection point after that was the backlash against outsourcing. It threw up a different kind of challenge. How do we navigate through deep shoals? I think that the Indian software industry did a fantastic job of getting through that without having any damage done to their business. After the backlash, I see a straight highway, clear roads, no clouds in the skies.

Over at the Coffee House, Ramnath recounts his impressions, after attending Paul's recent talk at IIT-Madras.