"We are ready to work for the hardware industry"–Jerry Rao, NASSCOM Chairman

For a man who left a high profile corporate job to jump into it’s own
startup Mphasis in 1998, Jerry Rao has indeed come a long way. As the chairman
of the company he was con-ferred the ‘E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award’
in 2001 and became NASSCOM’s Vice Chairman in 2003. In an exclusive interview
with Rahul Gupta of CyberMedia News, Rao who was recently elected as the
chairman of NASSCOM shared his views on what needs to be done to establish India
as a high quality, secure, reliable software powerhouse and center of best
practices in the BPO. Excerpts from an Interview:

What would be your priorities and focus areas as the chairman of the
NASSCOM?

The basic thing about NASS-COM is its brand image and the great legacy. It
instills a con-fidence within the industry that we are there to help create an
eco-system that will change the face of IT and BPO sector in India. My job will
be to build on that heritage and founda-tion. While the world at large
recognizes that Indian IT and BPO companies are truly world class-both in terms
of cost and quality-I think we need to work reliability and security factors.
Our global customers as well as most of the Indian companies we are very much
concerned about that but we have to convince the world. We have to make sure
that this should be complemented by good cost possession and high quality and
that should be the image. So I think the focus should more be on reliability and
security.

NASSCOM has been trying to underplay the whole backlash
problem by terming it as America’s internal debate issue. How do you justify
this?

I don’t think we have been trying to underplay. The fact of the matter is
that outsourcing is good for American economy, it makes them more competi-tive
and it’s good for US compa-nies. What we mean with inter-nal debate issue is
really not something where we can influe-nce anything. Also, being the election
year, such political issues are bound to crop up as it would in any other demo-cracy
and one has to deal with it. In this case, the onus is not on us but on them to
deal with it. As far as NASSCOM is concer-ned, I think we have been succe-ssful
in getting the message across.

By and large today most in-fluential think tanks agree that
outsourcing is win-win situa-tion for both America and India. Certainly
individuals have been affected during the economic downturn phase. However,
recent statistics show that only last month US added more than three lakh jobs.

While NASSCOM was created as the association for software
companies, it is today consid-ered as the representative of the overall India IT
industry. Don’t you think time is ripe for NASSCOM to leverage this brand and
work for the overall growth of Indian IT including even the hardware sector?

Certainly we need to do this. I think these issues are all inter related.
What is the ultimate tribute to free trade? Software industry has zero percent
duty and that is largely because of NASSCOM and that has resul-ted into the high
growth in this sector. I think if we have zero duty, we have high growth. I
think through free trade, we can have high growth. We should move to an environ-ment,
wherein we have hard-ware also to have zero duty and I am glad that government
is committed to do it in phased manner, but sooner we move, it is better. We are
ready to provide any kind of support required, and ready to work for hardware
industry also because I think it will eventually help the whole industry.
Commitment to free trade creates world-class companies, world-class
infras-tructure and world-class delive-ries and it’s important as you are now
competing with the best in the world. Yes, I think the focus of NASSCOM should
be IT in its broader sense–IT enabled services–both dom-estic and export and
in export too, both big and small comp-anies, both service providers and product
providers. We should have the large clients. We cannot make this rigid
classification anymore. I think IT industry in its totality should move and
grow.