The Road Ahead: In Search of a New Value Proposition
- The Business Technology Club Panel Home


The Business Technology Club panel had Georg Kniese, MD, SAP Labs India; Ramesh Emani, President - Product Engineering Solutions, Wipro; G K Sukumar, Director Industrial Sector & Centre Head – IBM Hyderabad, Murali Natarajan, MD, Intergraph Consulting Pvt. Ltd and Professor Rajiv Banker as the moderator.

The speakers delved into topics like competitive strategies to counter global competition in the technology sphere, skill crunch in India’s knowledge economy, necessity of the IT sector’s cohabitation with government, the perspectives and experiences of Indian firms entering global markets, and about entrepreneurial prospects in this area.

Rajiv Banker said that this was an exciting time for India, and that IT has been a major catalyst in bringing about change in business models and value propositions. Georg Kniese defined “value drivers” offered by India such as the high quality human resources and favourable government policies, which helped companies like SAP focus on delivery excellence. The key insight was that cost advantage alone did not ensure a sustained edge. Continuous improvement in skills, creativity and innovation is significant for any location to move up the value chain.

Ramesh Emani focused on the challenges faced by India and the steps that India Inc. can take to maintain the advantage. According to him, the five key steps that need to be taken are improving talent quality, driving operational excellence, transforming people, bringing leadership traits and sustaining innovation.

G K Sukumar spoke about the roadmap taken by IBM in India, and the challenges faced by the Indian IT industry in the years to come. The two main challenges faced by the company, according to him, were competing with Indian counterparts and other IBM subsidiaries, and scarcity of people having managerial and leadership skills.

Murali Natarajan, provided insights on how value proposition related to IT can be created by achieving innovation in our products and services with domestic force. This could lead to developing leaders to make our people and products the best, and also encourage partnership with competitors.

The following is an interview with G K Sukumar, Director Industrial Sector & Centre Head, IBM Hyderabad



What do you think is the role of the ISB in creating/honing future business leaders?

ISB students bring with them a broad based perspective to technology and business, which separates them from the other B Schools. Our past experience with ISB alumni has been encouraging, and so we look forward to further recruitments here. I must mention that an ISB alumnus was instrumental in re-aligning the practices followed in the aerospace domain at IBM through his innovative thinking and in depth knowledge of the domain. I also look forward to conducting perspective sharing workshops at the ISB for relationship building.


How has the ILS experience been for you?

The arrangements and the interests shown by the student community towards the panel discussion, is laudable. However, more time should have been earmarked for the Q&A session, since some very interesting questions were being raised by the student community which had to be cut short due to the paucity of time.


According to projections, the value of software exports will supposedly reach $60 billion by 2010. Is this a realistic goal?

It can be achieved, subject to a few constraints, specifically referring to the resource crunch in the middle management level in India. Indian software companies have abundant technical resources, but need effective managers to lead them to future success, and it is for this purpose that companies are looking to B-schools like the ISB, to provide the required leaders for the industry.