Last week at the NASSCOM Leadership Summit I met my old friend Rene Seifert a 6 feet 5 in tall German who has been living in Bangalore for 5 years. He is almost say half Indian and Half German by now.

During our interactions we talked a lot of many things but one subject which stuck out was the overall gloom across the conference. Most people in their dark black suits looked almost depressed and ready the burst into tears the very next moment. However Rene made notice of my bright orange T-Shirt and the loud bouts of laughter I was getting into while interacting with him and a few other friends like Vijay Anand of proto.in and Kiruba Shankar the famous blogger.

Post the conference Rene flew to the Swiss Alps to celebrate his birthday in style and somewhere in that Sub-Zero temperature his brain froze and due to the friction between him on a ski and his frozen brain many sparks of wisdoms were translated into a fantastic blog post he talks about many things there and has also invented a new term which he calls ‘Gondalization’. Reading the blog post closely talks about what I have been saying for ages... the Software Industry has to grow up and adapt to a innovative product business model. The days of outsourcing in its current form are over.

CK Pralhad the famous professor made an interesting speech where he talked about new business models and how Bridgestone Tyres have re-invented their business by providing Tyres to its consumers on a per Kilo Meter charge basis and not an out rite sale. He further described that how this system was developed for Bridgestone by an Indian software company.

So far so good.... bingo finally understood the main reason of the gloom.... while Bridgestone is doing great and even started selling the system to others like a product. I assume that the software company which had made it for them probably on a per man hour cost basis has by now lost most of its good technical people who were poached for double the salary... the people who were left they had to fire because of the bad economy and as the company had little and no-ip rights over the technology they are now scrambling across the world to see if some oil company is interested in selling its Oil based on mileage achieved and not by the gallon....

The mood at this years NASSCOM show was essentially nothing but a wakeup call and the future is ORANGE...

NASSCOM is certainly the bet IT conference organized in India. But you know what Shit happens...the economy is bad, Satyam just hit us on the face, terrorism is everywhere...we are at the rock bottom and from here can only go on and next year I hope to see a lot of people in colourful shirts, a pony tail and a big smile on their face.418810