The Indian IT industry has left its mark on the world IT map. It caters to the software outsourcing needs of the major clients from USA, Europe and Australia. The two decades of rich software development experience has empowered the Indian IT industry to become number one software outsourcing destination in the world.
However in near future Indian IT industry will have to look beyond the Western nations to other countries like Japan and China. China is growing at tremendous rate while Japan is the second largest IT market after US. Both, China and Japan, offer tremendous business opportunities to Indian IT outsourcing companies.
The Japanese industry adopts traditional approach and is resistant to change to change. Therefore Indian IT outsourcing industry will have to devise a sound Japanese-centric policy to penetrate the Japanese market successfully. The Japanese Industry opens its doors from long tern investors and Indian software outsourcing companies should aim for long term investment if they want to bite deeper into the Japanese IT outsourcing pie. The other major challenge is getting past the language barrier because Japanese businesses prefer to conduct their working in Japanese language, rather than English. The Indian software professionals lack Japanese language skills, hence Indian software outsourcing companies should allocate more its resources to train its workers on Japanese language and culture. This will certainly bridge the gap which exists between Indian and Japanese IT industry.
The Indian software outsourcing industry should also give equal preference to China, because it today offers lucrative market for Indian software development companies. Japan today outsources majority of IT development to China software industry. China and Japan are geographically and culturally closer to each other. Besides this there are no language issues as many Chinese software professionals know Japanese language. The Chinese Government is now more focused on developing IT industry and has declared 21 regions in China as tax-free up to 2014 to boost its offshore IT industry.
The best way forward for the Indian software outsourcing industry would be to tap both these markets by setting up offshore development centers in China. Wipro already operates a global IT delivery center in China. The other Indian companies should also follow the suit and train their workers in Japanese and Chinese languages. The setting up Indian ODCs in China will be like killing two birds with one stone. The Indian IT companies through their Chinese ODC can penetrate the local market easily and at same time tap the Japanese market.
The Indian software outsourcing industry should show greater flexibility to successfully tap both Chinese and Japanese market, which it has been finding difficult to crack, so far. It simply cannot ignore these two economies because they offer bright opportunities in the coming years. The software development companies should act quickly before it becomes too late. The emerging economies like Vietnam and Thailand in near future will certainly bite deeper into the software outsourcing pie and hence it right time now for the Indian software outsourcing industry to make inroads into China and Japan. This is the right time when the Indian IT outsourcing industry starts implementing a more friendly IT policy to generate more business revenues.
