It may come as no shocker to tech firms across the world that ‘Tech development’ as an industry has been slowing down. Large enterprises don’t seem to be buying as frequently and fervently as before. Smaller development projects seem to have dried up. Growth estimates (Gartner Q1 2017) to 2020 hint at a 3% CAGR over the next 3 years. At the same time, for the first time in history, 6 among the 10 most valuable firms in the world are technology companies! If the logic of stock price being indicative of future earnings, something seems to not add up. What is really happening and what should a tech company be doing?
Understanding it takes some retrospection.
What happened while I was working?
Over the 20-year period beginning in the mid-80s, there was a flurry of businesses which jumped on the convergence of affordable computing and leap in telecommunication and the opportunity it threw up for businesses across the world. Large enterprise technology development efforts with large organizations starting to implement technology as infrastructure to add efficiency in operations and bring data sets together became the new age conquerors of this portion of the information revolution. Some big names that emerged were the IBMs & Oracles of the world and closer to home, the Patni, Infosys and TCSs of the country.
Around 2005, a new buzzword emerged with the improvement in telecommunication ecosystems across the country – Cloud. Information could now be stored anywhere and accessed anywhere. One did not have to maintain physical infrastructure to be able to house information, which meant that a small business could now hire only the infrastructure they needed at the efficiency of a large data center. Smaller organizations now jumped in as infrastructure costs and setup costs was virtually nil and barriers to entry were virtually eliminated. A few years in, a tiny revolution was brewing with the name of SaaS. A new revenue model of charging for use and value rather than the committed models that existed. This picked up immediately as now the cost of subscribing to technology solution was close to nil. The ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ of early 2005 now made way for the ‘late majority’ in less than 5 years.
Business as usual was threatened for the first time.
Prequate 