Microsoft India(NASDAQ:MSFT) organized the first-ever MNC IT Summit in Bangalore. The Summit brought together over 70 leaders of India-based IT organizations of multinational corporations (MNCs), in an endeavour to shape their collective vision for the industry and identify areas for collaboration. The attendees represent Fortune Global and Forbes 1000 companies with combined annual revenues in excess of $2 trillion, employing six million people globally, including more than one million in India. The Global In-house Centers (GICs) of these multinational corporations provide a range of services to their parent multinational corporations – IT services, Business Process Management and Engineering Research & Development. India’s GIC exports are expected to reach $17 billion in 2014.
The theme of the Summit was "What will it take for the MNC IT Community to increase its impact ten-fold in five years?"
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The Summit included keynotes, panel discussions and focussed workgroup sessions by prominent speakers from academia, business, government and media, including Adil Zainulbhai (Senior Advisor, McKinsey), Prof. Anil Gupta (IIM, Ahmedabad), Dr Pramath Raj Sinha (Founding Dean of ISB, Founder Managing Director 9dot9 Networks), Dr Raghunath Mashelkar (Former Chairman, CSIR), Rajesh Dalal (Senior Consultant, Healthcare & Former MD, Johnson & Johnson), Prof. S. Sadagopan (Director, IIIT, Bangalore) and Som Mittal (ex-Chairman, NASSCOM).
The Microsoft MNC IT Summit 2014 was kicked off by Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik who said, "The IT-GICs have been playing an important role in the adoption of cutting-edge technology by their organizations. At Microsoft, we are committed to strengthen the ecosystem with future-ready productivity and platform tools for the mobile-first, cloud-first world."
Microsoft IT India Managing Director, Raj Biyani, said, "By collaborating closely, the leaders of the MNC IT units can boost India's IT ecosystem exponentially in the next five years." He touched upon key insights from the three-year journey that fundamentally transformed Microsoft’s own IT-GIC into a talent hub. This transformation has been documented in recent case-studies by Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Dr Sadagopan pointed out that IT centers in India are playing a leading role in establishing centers in other countries, including Vietnam and Argentina. Adil Zainulbhai, of McKinsey & Company, and editor of “Reimagining India: Unlocking India’s Potential” emphasized the vast untapped potential of India’s youthful economy. In a panel discussion titled “Innovating and Winning from India”, Pramath Sinha, Dr R. A. Mashelkar, Rajesh Dalal and Prof. Anil Gupta shared inspiring examples of successful innovations in India, what Dr. Mashelkar labelled as “affordable excellence”.
Som Mittal highlighted the contribution of the overall IT industry to India’s economy creating 3.2 million jobs and generating over $100 billion in exports. IT-GICs make a substantial contribution in this impact. He appreciated the spirit of collaboration among Indian IT organizations stating “there is no place elsewhere in the world where competitors collaborate so fiercely”.
