India's oldest and most distinguished IT firms are doing what would have been almost sacrilegious a few years ago – holding coding marathons to develop innovative fixes and deploying "commando" units to resolve clients' IT woes within hours.
Infosys, Wipro and other Indian IT giants, which rose to prominence during the outsourcing boom in the 1990s and 2000s, have struggled to keep pace with mushrooming start-ups. The rate of revenue growth has more than halved since 2011-12, partly due to the emerging competition.
Those young set-ups say they go beyond cookie-cutter solutions and argue that they do the job more quickly and for less. They also attract the crème de la crème of India's engineering graduates with their culture of bubble chairs, breakfast bars and table tennis at work, in a way that the corporate, straight-laced atmosphere of the country's IT trail blazers struggles to.
Client demands are similarly changing in India's $147 billion IT outsourcing industry. Major telecoms, retail and banking firms want more than an outsourced help desk, and now demand everything from help solving a server crash overnight to help building an app, industry veterans say.
