Aditya Ghosh, President, Indigo Airlines

We are in a business that’s been here for around 100 years. Even in India, we are often called the sunrise industry. I am the youngest CEO of the youngest airline which is only 6 years old.  Clearly the opportunity is actually staring at us. India has gone from being an oppressed colony to the next superpower. India is seen as the next engine of growth for the world. Irrespective of which area you are in and what are the economic troubles in that area, these troubles open certain opportunities. During the 2^nd world war many companies got devastated and businesses were shut down and then some people built tanks, weapons, ships & jeeps and they made a lot of money from that. In every era including this we have to deal with the problems by seeking out an opportunity in each of those problems.

India is a country with population of over billion people but there are less than 500 commercial planes. There’s something wrong in this equation.  USA is a country which is 1/3^rd in size to India in terms of population but it has around 13000 commercial planes. India is therefore one of the under- penetrated aircraft market in the world. Less than 1% of rail traffic in India flies by Air, that means if we can convert 1% of rail traffic into air, we will need double the size of airlines in business that exists in India today. That is the opportunity we are chasing at Indigo. But like we all know that life is not perfect and it is never meant to be easy. There are few challenges that we face. We are aware of the economy slowdown and also concerned about the crazy fuel prices. Continue reading →

Mr. Sudhir Vasudeva, CMD, ONGC

Change being the important component of the ecosphere, clearly the challenges in front of us multiply. I have spent 36 years of my life as an oil man. A variety of factors contribute to the pricing of gasoline in the Unites States. These factors include world-wide supply, demand & competition in crude oil industry, taxes, regional differences in access to gasoline supplies and environmental regulations. The other factors are: speculations in oil futures, geopolitical risks, technology premium, pressure from competing fuel and other soft issues like human rights, ethical labor practices, responsible investments and anti-corruption practices.

How to deal with the uncertainty & the change in the economy? One way is to look at the past trends and get ready for the future. Another way is to use a lot of algorithms and work on a model for the problem with variety of inputs that produce probability based outcomes. This needs a lot of number crunching and supercomputers can be used for that. Another concept uses fuzzy logic. Continue reading →

Mr. Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt Ltd

Uncertainty is the new norm and I want to share with you the four strategies which Microsoft has adopted and helped us in uncertain times. The volatility that we are seeing today is not just a passing phenomenon, it is going to be a fact of life and all of us should start getting used to it. No industry, country or company is immune from it. If you look at the technology industry, India has moved from fixed line phones to pagers to mobile phones. We have moved from rise of emails to decline of emails to the growth of social networks. We have seen adoption of internet widely. We have seen the financial crisis in 2008. In India we have had our own self-inflicted injuries which have caused us grievous concerns in many ways. All this has happened in last 15 years. We have to start managing this kind of changing environment. I have been quite happy to work in these uncertain times as it is in uncertain times that the good gets better and the average decline. If you want to increase your market share, make use of these uncertain times.

How has Microsoft prospered in uncertain times? We are 38 years old and we continued to grow through this. We started with a vision of a PC in everyone’s home. Today we talk about our vision being how we can help individual, business & countries to realise their true potential through the magic of software and we are just about to modify that all over again as we believe time has changed. We have moved from the era of personal computers to the era of what we call personal computing. It is personal and you have the ability to access enormous amount of power with the computer now. The next phenomenon would be where all software becomes a service. We are moving to the era of connected devices. This requires a completely new type of computing & it changes the balance of power from the enterprise to the consumer and it is a huge change which requires a different type of coding, mentality & thinking. It also has huge challenges in many other areas like taxation, privacy & security; therefore it is something which as a nation we have to resolve. Continue reading →

Pramod Bhasin is the Non-Executive Vice Chairman and former President and CEO of Genpact.

Reshaping the IT and knowledge based professional services organizations of tomorrow is critical for us because that’s where we belong. Let me try and address it in a number of different ways as to where I think we can take this if we really take it to our full potential, both as a country and as an industry.

Firstly in my view, this industry has barely got off the blocks. I hope others on the panel will agree. But do you know that 15-20 years is very young for any industry; we have years to go ahead of us, we have miles, miles to go before we sleep and the range of opportunities and the range of potential types of businesses that we could is enormous. It is ours to take! Given our demographics, given our population, given where our country is sitting in terms of costs and as a developing country, still the opportunity to get beyond what we do in our industry today, is immense.

It may often seem choppy, it may often seem difficult because as the developed world, Europe and America and all those other places, goes through their ups and downs, we will always feel the heat. But the fact is that our industry grew and NASSCOM predictions talk about a 13 to 15% growth. These are astonishing growth rates for an industry that is large; a hundred billion dollars. A hundred billion dollar industry growing at about twenty per cent for the last ten years is an astonishing number by any standards.
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