IT services firms productise services to expand offerings

Re-skilling staff to think beyond project execution

Amid changing market dynamics, Indian information technology (IT) service companies are increasingly looking at productising their service offerings in order to provide a better value proposition to clients.  

Large Indian companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies are seen re-skilling their workforce to tune themselves to the changing needs and position themselves as end-to-end partner with their clients. While some companies are organically building this capability by re-skilling their workforce, some of the Indian IT companies are also taking inorganic route to acquire platforms which they sell it to the clients after packaging with services.

“IT companies are realising that the next drive is value innovation, for which they will have to take their current talent pool and re-skill their employees to start thinking beyond project execution and more into productising process. Even though they are not building completely new products today, they are considering if their current offerings can be taken to clients globally and help them form deeper relationships,” said Pinkesh Shah, co-founder and director of programmes at Institute of Product Leadership (IPL).

IPL, which trains manpower in the software product space, was set up by Shah along with Sanjeev Kumar and Sharad Sharma about three years ago. Kumar is the managing director of data integration firm Informatica India, while Sharma is the former CEO and senior VP at Yahoo! India R&D.

Earlier this month, IPL is entered a 6-month engagement with TCS to transform and handhold the company's team at its healthcare business unit (BU) at Hyderabad to transform it into a product BU.

The idea for setting up the institute came when six-and-a-half-years ago, shah, who was then the global VP for products at security software firm McAfee in California was faced with the task of appointing a candidate for the product manager role.

“For a company like McAfee, money was not a constraint, and we had reached to the most premium management colleges of India. But after looking at over 600 resumes, I could not find a single product manager,” recalls Shah.

In the last 18 months, IPL has trained over 480 professionals on productising processes across most large and mid-sized IT services companies such as TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Mindtree. Based on the interest they have seen from the industry, Shah believes that over the next four years IPL will train at least 9,500 more professionals.

Based on his talks with companies and industry experts, Shah believes that most IT companies, especially those in the services space, are going to fast move towards productisation. During the days of IPL's inception, Shah and his colleagues met CEOs of 11 leading IT companies, who unanimously showed support towards this idea. “Many of those 11 are now on our board,” Shah said.