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Software/IT Services/Business Process Outsourcing
India is a significant early battleground in this competition, particularly in the mobile phone segment.
Adobe is an investor in Mumbai-based Indiagames Ltd., which had three of the top 10
games in India in 2007—two cricket games and a Hollywood action game based on Bruce Lee.
Indiagames already uses Flash in many of its games because it works across all phone brands and
screen sizes. Indiagames has overseas offices in Los Angeles, London and Beijing and has developed
games for Fox, Universal, and Miramax, as well as for Bollywood studios in India.
The mobile gaming market is expected to grow almost ten-fold in India over 2007–2010, from
$29 million to $250 million. Currently, 100,000 games are downloaded daily on mobile phones in
India, according to a study presented by Indiagames founder and CEO Vishal Gondal at the
Mobile World Congress in February 2008 in Barcelona. Game revenues have surpassed music
download revenues for some Indian mobile carriers, and games are seen as key to raising per
subscriber revenues overall.
Flash, Flex, and AIR have made Adobe a cutting-edge company in the Indian market, particularly
at the nexus of mobile phones and the Internet. Gupta estimates that perhaps 50,000 developers
in India use Flash in their applications, with growing upside demand. He says workforce
attrition at Adobe captive centers tends to be “in the single digits” and in some years has been
zero; the average age of the engineering and programming staff is 27.
Through 2003, managers were recruited from Indian staff that had spent time in the U.S. on
assignment. “In the last two or three years,” Gupta says, “we’ve seen resumes from people who
have worked many, many years in the U.S., in senior positions with companies like Cisco or
IBM, who want to come back to India. A lot of them are coming back not to be close to family,
although that is a consideration, but because they believe the best growth opportunities are in
India.” While all of Adobe’s global centers—in China, India, Japan, Romania, Germany and the
U.S.—are growing in terms of staffing and ownership of particular products and innovation,
Gupta believes that India is likely to grow faster over time, due to domestic market growth and
the potential for development of emerging market innovation that can be applied globally. While
work can still be done in India at one-third the cost of the U.S., the company sees is presence in
India as a global business and a growing source of intellectual property: its per capita filing of
patents from India is equivalent to that in the U.S.
Salesforce.com: Build it Yourself
Software firms strike a delicate balance in emerging markets,
between nurturing a vibrant developer community and clamping
down on developers engaging in illegal use of their software. One
fast-growing San Francisco firm, Salesforce.com is building a new
model in India with its software-as-a-service and platform-as-aservice
offerings. With no downloadable software and no software
on CDs, Salesforce.com doesn’t face the usual headaches of
software piracy as it expands its reach into India.
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