First a report on my sight-of-the-day. As we were touring on the OMCs (Offshore Management Centers) not one, but two of the cubicles had a picture of the three main characters of the Harry Potter movies taped to the wall. The pictures looked like they were from the time of the first movie since the actors were so young. Bonus points to anyone who can name the three characters.
Over the past three days we've met with two large and one medium sized outsourcing firm, HCL on day one, Wipro on day two and Microland today. In addition to remote infrastructure management all of these firms also offer professional services to the IT community and Wipro and HCL also build and brand their own PC and server hardware for sale mostly in the Indian market as well as offer application development services either as an outsourced solution or via staff augmentation.
Today I visited Microland also in Electronics City. Yesterday it took an hour and a half to drive the 15 miles from Bangalore to Electronics City and today it took 45 minutes because there was a holiday that closed the schools and partially cleared the roads. At 1340 employees, Microland is much smaller than either HCL or Wipro. They still manage large contracts for Fortune 100 companies supporting thousands of users across multiple time zones. Thirteen months ago Microland was also awarded a contract to manage another Fortune 100's core network backbone. They must be doing something right.
The attention to detail, technical and management skills and professionalism demonstrated by all of these organizations as well as off-the-cuff descriptions of 30% savings had a magical calming effect on the UBM IT professionals listening to their pitches. There are still questions to be answered through reference checking and pilot programs but, based on the conversations we've had over the past couple of days, I'm convinced that India's outsourcers have a good chance of winning another customer.
Tomorrow I'll be attending Microsoft Research in India's second annual TechVista symposium in Bangalore. More about that later.