My book on the offshore services industry, co-authored with Gaurav Rastogi, is now out in both print and Kindle versions.

In India a print version of the book, published by Penguin, is available in major bookstores and online at Flipkart. In India the book is called Offshore: How India got back on the Global Business Map.

Outside India the Kindle version of the same book, but with a different sub-title, is available from the Kindle website. Offshore: India’s Services Juggernaut

The Facebook page for the book can be found here.

That is, according to Mark Suster who has a superb post on TechCrunch

They [a services startup] have created two internal technology “products” and wanted to figure out how they could turn their services business into a product business that could be financed. This team is talented. They wanted advice. And probably some money.

I gave them advice I don’t think they were expecting from a VC,

“Don’t raise venture capital for this business. Ever. And stop effing around trying to create a product company.”

The post covers a lot of ground, much of which will be of interest to services startups. But some of it applies to big services companies as well

I saw this first hand. My first career was at Andersen Consulting (one of the largest services businesses in the world). We built a hugely successful global services business yet we never got over our product envy from watching our tech clients. So we created internal software projects and all of the internal consultants on those projects became blowhards who thought they knew how to create software product businesses.

We stunk at every product we ever created. We had no sense for gathering real customer requirements. We over-spec’d products. We built for our over-intellectual selves. I can’t think of any great software tools ever created internally by Andersen Consulting. We were a great services business. Period.

Most of the bigger offshore services companies have some kind of active strategy to acquire a stream of non-linear services. Some people expect this to comprise of product-like revenues. In our forthcoming book we argue that tech products are a very different business from services. And given their lack of skills and management experience of the products business, services companies are going to find the going tough.

Fortunately, services companies don’t need to be “rescued” by products. They have ample opportunity to differentiate themselves within the ambit of services itself. The role of retained or developed technology IP doesn’t have to be wrapped up into a product to create value. The beauty of a services business is that there are so many ways in which you can extract value from a client, as long as you have something that they can’t get from the next company.

And yes, some of it, might actually be license or subscription fees. But hopefully, you’re not banking your company’s future on it.

Headstrong revenues for 2010 were $217 million. Genpact’s were $1.26 B. So unlike iGate’s acquisition of Patni, this isn’t remarkable in the minnow-swallowing-whale fashion.

Nevertheless, the acquisition is a sensible one. It is largely complementary in that Headstrong is mostly about IT Services to Capital Markets. Very little overlap with Genpact. Again, unlike iGate-Patni, this was about complementarity, not about achieving scale.

Genpact had to bulk up its IT Services business. IT Services offers both higher margin and higher growth. Both of which Genpact has not been able to deliver, at least to the satisfaction of investors whose expectations are benchmarked to the early days of the IT Services industry.

Genpact’s sophistication in BPO means that most of their growth comes from solutions where IT applications must be implemented or reengineered. Headstrong will bring them a lot more credibility, especially with custom applications.

And finally, even if the IT and BPO work are not joined at the hip in the same solution, having both offers cross-sell opportunities.

A few months back I had written about Cognizant’s rumored interest in Genpact. Eventually, nothing came of it. But I thought that that would have been a very good combination. Sort of a dream team – the fastest growing services company and the best BPO company.

Obviously, I don’t know whether the rumors were true or not, or what transpired if indeed there were serious discussions. But if I were to go out on a limb, I would say that they did have discussions. Maybe they didn’t agree on the price, maybe there were disagreements about the future of the combined company. Whatever the reason, the deal did not go down.

Which left Genpact in the position of being the leader in BPO, an industry that was very promising in the future, but an underachiever in the present. They had to do something to fix that. And so they acquired Headstrong.

This is a good time for bankers in the Offshore services industry. More transactions are to be expected. Watch this space.

I pulled some data together for the past five quarters. The results were pretty interesting.

First, I wanted to see what was happening to growth. I built an indexed chart which just shows growth for each company over its revenue in QE Dec-09.

Revenues for the previous quarter are in the same ballpark – between HCL’s $800 M and TCS’s $2 B a quarter. In that range, the size of the base should not impact growth much. Also, there were no major acquisitions during this period.

Cognizant is clearly pulling ahead of the pack. Wipro is falling behind a bit. HCL has upped its game and is keeping pace with Infosys and TCS.

What can we expect in the future? It’s hard to say. I think Cognizant will continue to lead the growth tables in the near term. The rest is anyone’s guess.

The long-term is a different matter. IT Services companies have a lot of inertia. These companies are like rolling, massive boulders. Changing speed or direction takes a lot of effort. And time. The companies that want to take the lead two years from now, better start making changes now. Managing results quarter to quarter, isn’t going to hack it.

The other interesting thing is the spread in margins in the industry.

The margins range from 10% for HCL to 25% for Infosys. (Wipro does not report net margins for its IT Business separately.) It is uncommon in an industry to have four similar sized companies in the lead with such a wide range of margins. Especially, in an industry where there are no entry barriers of technology.

My take is that this range of margins will narrow in the long term. Since Cognizant is now the growth leader, it can afford to stay put. But Infosys, TCS and Wipro will find it difficult to stay where they are.

If they execute well, these companies will be able to gradually up their spend on the things that matter and protect pricing. If they don’t, their pricing power will erode.

Protecting price levels is all about reducing competition. Superb account management and client service can do that. Investing in solutions that create measurable value for clients can do that. And new services and IP can do that.

Yes, a strong brand will also help, but the leverage from better marketing today, with five major players in the market, is not what it used to be. Good marketing is now table stakes.

On a related note, fellow EI, Ray Wang, who is just back from a NASSCOM conference, has a great post on how Indian services companies can start leading.

iGate with Apax Partners, will acquire 63% of the company for the final price of Rs. 503.50 effectively valuing Patni, the company at $1.5 Billion. By Indian law, iGate will have to make an open offer to acquire an additional 21% of the company.

With that, a company with revenues of about $200 million in 2009 acquires control of a company with revenues of about $650 million. Even by market cap, iGate is a third smaller than Patni. You won’t see this python-swallows-an-elephant acquisition happen too often in any industry.

What made it possible was the difference in the growth in earnings. Which in turn is because of the difference in how well the two companies are managed (see last year’s stock performance below). Based upon yesterday’s price, Patni’s P/E is around 10 and iGate’s is around 22. The difference is big enough for any private equity firm to drive a truck through.

About a year back I had wondered why the offshore services industry wasn’t consolidating. I had argued the case for scalar acquisitions

But a scalar acquisition strategy – basically bulking up – can make a lot of financial sense. If you are a well managed company with a P/E that is higher than the industry, an active acquisition strategy can make sense.

First, if you can negotiate a price for the target that is somewhere at or below your P/E, you are already looking good.

Second, acquiring a company with a similar business, has fewer integration risks.

Third, this industry, even though it has low entry barriers, is a business of scale. Visibility, brand, lower sales costs and overheads – all come from scale.

When I wrote that piece, I didn’t quite have this python-swallowing-elephant kind of an acquisition in mind. But this is, in fact, a scalar acquisition. Although the integration on this one won’t be easy.

Indian law makes it difficult to outright acquire a company. Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra are still separate companies. Until Patni is fully acquired, integrating management is difficult. Eliminating costs is difficult. Benefitting from having a common brand and go-to-market is not going to be possible. But I’m sure iGate and Apax would have carefully thought through these issues. It’ll be interesting to see how the integration takes shape in the coming months.

Nonetheless, this is a big deal with lots of potential to create value. If there is someone who can pull this off it is Phaneesh Murthy. He’s done superb job with iGate. Congratulations, Phaneesh! And good luck.

Congratulations also to Shashank Singh at Apax Partners for a very significant deal.

There are good reasons why the Cloud is a big trend. Enterprise IT loves the pay per use, “utility” model of provisioning computing power and storage. The infrastructure and the headache of managing it, both belong to someone else. Someone who can drive down costs tremendously through scale and automation in a way that the company on its own, never can.

But there are issues too. Since data will be outside the company firewall, information security is a big issue. Also, there are billions of dollars invested in data center infrastructure. Its all very well to say convert your investments into variable costs, but whose going to take those investments off the company’s hands? Not the cloud services vendor. In the meanwhile, virtualization technology like VMWare’s is helping companies achieve some of those savings in house.

The migration to cloud infrastructure is going to be gradual. Startups who don’t have anything invested will go straight to Amazon Web Services or a similar provider. But big business, which is where IT Services companies get the lion’s share of their revenues from, will take its time in migrating to the cloud.

Change is always an opportunity for a services company. Whether a company wants to try out the Cloud or implement a “Private Cloud” in house, they need advice and migration services.

Traditional IMS may also see a boost in the short term. A Fortune 1000 company may not shift much of its infrastructure to the Cloud, but between that and implementing a Private Cloud, the change will be significant – the pain of which they may decide is not worth bearing themselves. Often, this will lead to outsourcing decisions.

In the long-term how will the Cloud impact the IMS opportunity? There are some reasons to be concerned, but on balance, the impact will be positive.

The Cloud, by definition, reduces the workload on infrastructure management. But Private clouds retain a lot of the infrastructure management workload of legacy data centers. And as we have noted earlier, it will take many years before large companies will completely jettison their data centers, which will also need to be managed. Thus, the addressable space for IMS will shrink, but gradually.

While the pie might shrink somewhat, the slice of the pie that IMS gets could increase rapidly. Infrastructure management has been one of the laggards in the offshore services world. Some of it was because it required significant investments in NOCs (Network Operations Centers) by service providers, which slowed down progress. But it was also because clients have been less eager to offshore. The risk-benefit tradeoff for IMS is not as good as it is for Application Services. New technologies like virtualization will reduce the risk of outsourcing critical infrastructure management. The Cloud might just be the catalyst that gets more companies to outsource more aggressively.

But while there is opportunity ahead in IMS, service providers will have to change directions to take advantage of it. An advisory service to help clients understand the costs and benefits of migrating to the Cloud and/or a Private Cloud, should help position the service provider early in the decision cycle. A Private Cloud implementation and ongoing management service could be a money spinner, if not immediately, perhaps in a year or two (for which one would have to be offering it right now). In the future, there could be opportunities to resell third-party white-label Public Cloud services with a layer of IT management tools, although margins here are likely to be slim.

Photo Credit Kevin Dooley

The bill was weird and wicked in multiple ways. It increased fees for companies conducting legitimate business for purposes completely unconnected with their business. And it was constructed cleverly so that American businesses would not be affected. Which meant that not only would Microsoft and Intel not pay the higher fees, IBM and Accenture, who are in the same business of offshore services that Infosys and Cognizant are in, would also not pay them. Indian companies had been surgically targeted.

As if that wasn’t enough, in the 9/11 Health Care Bill (scrolls to fees) the same fees, which were imposed for 4 years in PL 111-230 have been extended another year. It was easy. Like taking candy from a child.

When I wrote about the Borders Bill, I made light of it. Financially, it is not a big burden for companies. An extra $2,000 paid a couple of times over a six year work permit is less than a 1% uptick in costs. It is not going to even affect margins, leave alone changing the value prop. But the precedent this sets is wrong and dangerous to both India and the US. It needs to be called out.

While the bill doesn’t talk about Indian offshore services companies explicitly, there is no doubt that they were the target. American lawmakers regularly beat up American businesses that “outsource American jobs to India and China”. In these hard times, they are tapping into the angst that high unemployment creates. But they should know better.

Offshore outsourcing is trade. When Ricardo talked about the law of Comparative Advantage, he did not exclude outsourcing from it. Trade brings benefits to the both countries. It may be harder to picture the benefits that the US gets from outsourcing but it does nonetheless. It lowers the costs of goods and services to consumers. It makes American businesses more efficient and more competitive in the global market. As outsourcing creates prosperity in India and China, they consume more American goods. And so on.

Which is why when the US has constantly preached to developing countries like India to open their markets, it has received the support of economists everywhere. Trade is good for the world. All of it, including outsourcing.

But if it is too much to ask lawmakers to guide their actions based upon sound economic principles, then I’d ask them to do it in their own interest. There are very few US companies who would support legislators that targeted Indian companies. Not just because they like how Indian services companies make them more efficient. But because India is one of the few large growth markets in the world today. No company wants their own government to hobble their attempts to get the best access to this market.

So far, both bills put together don’t amount to much. But as in many of these things, its the optics that matter. Right now the optics are all bad – anti-outsourcing and by extension anti-India. One hopes that it stops right here.

Meanwhile, what of Indian companies? Every major company I have talked to recently has aggressive plans to increase hiring in the markets. It won’t happen overnight, but the direction is right.

I met an executive at a leading offshore company recently who explained why this was so. In the past few years, clients have become paranoid about information security. Well publicized leaks of customer data and a growing share of BPO is driving some of this. Cross company collaboration requires easier access to tools for sharing. Services companies are going the other way on information security. Employees’ internet access is heavily curtailed. Computers don’t have USB ports. And so on.

Not all clients are equally paranoid. But the service provider’s internal policy and infrastructure must support the most paranoid customer. Therein lies the problem.

The biggest change, for both workers and companies, is a move toward what we call “the human cloud.” In the same way that high-speed Internet access disrupted the corporate IT market, creating a “cloud” of web-enabled infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work. Companies rely on dispersed teams to get the best talent available regardless of location (or price) and many are using crowdsourcing and other innovative means to achieve their goals.

If you look at the speaker list for Network 2010 there is not a single speaker from the IT Services industry. Isn’t that disappointing. Offshore is the dominant template for the IT Services industry today. And Offshore is the Human Cloud. Distributed teams around the world plugging in to collaborate to build or troubleshoot systems or carry out business activities. The industry should be defining the future of work. But it is not even at the table.

How are offshore projects run today from a collaboration standpoint? Fifteen years ago the tools for collaboration were email, phone calls and weekly status reports in MS Word. Aside from desktop sharing is it much different than that today? The quality of the phone lines are much better now and occasionally you’ll have a video conference for a sales meeting. But that’s it, isn’t it? Companies try to get clients to log in to their extranet collaboration apps and then when they don’t they quietly bury them. Design is still done by flying people over. And application support is all based on email. Please tell me if it’s any different.

I know a lot of this inertia is because of the resistance to change of corporate clients. But IT Services companies must take the lead. This is your business. Better collaboration leads to better outcomes for both you and your client. Its gotta be worth a better effort than what we’ve seen so far.

This chart plots the trend line for Trade in Services as a percent of GDP. Trade in Services includes both imports and exports. The data is from the World Bank’s excellent databank.

Till the mid 90s India’s Trade in Services was growing at about the same pace as the rest of the world. Then suddenly it took off. We know why that happened.

That is a structural shift in the composition of Indian trade, BoP and GDP itself. And the Offshore services sector is still growing.