Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 16)

By guest author Tony Scott

Looking to the Future

Tony: If you think about five years from now and say: “My vision of the work we will be doing and of my company five years from now is going to look like this,” what do you think you are going to look like?

Anand: We think that the product development market could be very cloud based. People will build products in a snap, without necessarily hiring teams. Individuals or small teams will define nimble, agile products to do all kinds of things that are currently being done by traditional software. We want to be the factory to build those.

Tony: It’s very exciting, because I think this is a interesting transition point for the industry, and by this I don’t mean just the outsourcing industry, I am talking about the technology industry overall. I think we are seeing the technology industry mature and therefore transition into greater degrees of specialization on certain aspects, and also greater degrees of consolidation on other aspects. It’s almost like the auto industry. If you look at the history of the auto industry starting a hundred years ago, or even 70 or 80 years ago, there were hundreds of auto manufacturers. They all tried to do everything themselves. The industry consolidated into a smaller group, and they moved into working with Tier 1 suppliers such as Bosch, which started to create entire systems for the auto manufacturers.

Anand: That’s a more mature ecosystem.

Tony: And that’s a model for almost any industry. So that of course creates opportunities for companies like yours.

Anand: You are absolutely right. We are excited that there are these opportunities. This is going to happen at scale, so for us these kinds of things become tricky because the market is changing, expectations are changing, and even for the same customer what you might be selling is different. You also have to look at new sets of customers.

Tony: But you are selling into the new customer base at a level that is very different from the old customer base. Isn’t that going to very difficult?

Anand: It isn’t going to be easy. While we believe that we have the engineering capabilities to execute on the kind of decisions that I shared with you, how effectively we can make it work for our clients, and how can we scale the business and make sure we are a contender, those are all execution challenges that I see as the CEO and founder.

[This concludes the Persistent Systems interview. Stay tuned for the next company in the series.]

This segment is part 16 in the series : Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview
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