The Hindu Business Line : `SMEs should focus on intellectual properties'

THE Indian small and medium size (SME) IT firms should concentrate on creating intellectual properties (IPs), rather than competing and thinking about large firms such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.

``The SMEs should understand that it is impossible to compete with big firms,'' said Mr Raj Mashruwala, Chief Operating Officer, TIBCO Software Inc, US.

SME Indian IT firms have competencies in software and they should move forward from the current trend of just setting up software centres to own IPRs, he added.

Speaking at Connect 2002, Mr Mashruwala said that Indian companies should create IP around their core strength. Integration of various systems and applications is now the focus of many firms, as against implementation of individual packages like say an e-com or a CRM (customer relationship management) application. According to him, 44 per cent of the Chief Information Officers (CIO) surveyed in the US, ranked integration as their top priority compared to 37 per cent going for ERP upgrades and 20 per cent for CRM upgrades, he added.

Mr Mashruwala said that Indian firms should take up specific projects relevant to the country. For this, there should be far more interaction between the industry and the academia - both interdependent. In the US for instance, the Silicon Valley's existence is mainly due to Stanford University, and Road 128 in Boston, where most of the IT firms are located, is due to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he added. One such local project in India could be on eCash — money transfer through the Net. Currently it takes over 10 days to send money from a remote town in the North to a city in the South. During this transit, the money is blocked completely.

Using technology and Internet, Indian firms can do a project to transfer the money within seconds. ``Let the project take three years, but it is worth taking up,'' he added.

In his remarks on "Digitisation, an approach to business excellence", Mr S Mahalingam, Executive Vice-President, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said that the Chinese firms have proved their high level of productivity and efficiency in various sectors including manufacturing. It would not take time for them to prove it in IT sector too.

``We need to improve on productivity and provide cost effective solutions and products to meet the challenges from Chinese and other country firms,'' he added.

One way to be more productive and cost effective is make the organisations digitised. However, for this, the companies should first discipline their systems and processes. In most of the organisations, there are islands of systems and department. For instance, the HR or the finance department would not know what the manufacturing department does and vice versa, he said.

Without a proper workflow, assimilation and integration of information between departments digitisation would not help. Digitisation in GE was possible (done in six months) only because the company had a discipline, proper systems and processes in place before going in for digitisation, he said.

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