Innovation As Door Opener

As I land in the Valley to attend Sandhill's Enterprise 2006 meet, so many people in so many forms were repeatedly asking about the growth prospects of the consulting and outsourcing industry. Many observers in different contexts try and compare traditional service players with offshore headquartered majors and come to various conclusions - I see a huge swing in judgement depending on whom I get to hear.Developments like this stroke such discussions. generally try anfI enjoyed reading this brief interview with Cap Gemini's Salil Parekh. It is quite interesting to hear him say that outsourcing in North America is currently larger then it needs to be in terms of the percentage of the pie. As he sees it, for his firm, outsourcing shall give more dollars in absolute value and he expects that consulting will clearly grow in terms of the percentage of the pie. There will also be growth in the technology services piece, but overall it would be lesser than what would be seen in consulting. The growth in consulting will be much larger in percentage terms and he is banking on CG's ability to execute around innovation and these growth platforms. Itis well known that CG had been focussing on building offshore tail to their operations and there bullishness about their griwth -notwithstanding the need to hive off an interesting practice in the recent past, points to more interesting times ahead. I agree with his logic that innovation would be the door opened and offshoring shall help CG in enabling transformation centric engagements. Good to see CG coming back quite well. This proves the often heard hypothesis that the growth shall be coming from different models for different firms.