Having arrived safely in India in over the weekend after a long but comfortable flight, grabbed a few hours sleep and taken a very quick tour of some of the sights of Delhi I visited the first of 4 IT Service providers I will visit on this trip.
My first impressions are of a vast, highly capable IT industry. IT companies are concentrated in dedicated IT parks. Everywhere you go in these parks you see the big IT names from IBM to Wipro to Dell. Yesterday I spent in Delhi, one of the many locations that this service provider operates from in India. Today I spent in Bangalore in another facility of the same organisation. Both IT parks and facilities were of a very high standard, though much building is still underway and the road infrastructure is stretched beyond capacity (driving by the way is not for the faint of heart over here and indicators seem to be rarely if ever used in favour of car horns). One interesting thing I discovered this evening was that there are frequent, purposeful power cuts all over India in an attempt to match supply and demand. I noticed the lights dimming several times during meetings yesterday but had put this down to motion sensors doing their job. Today I found out that this was actually the UPS devices kicking in and out. It must have happened 4 or 5 times during the day. Every company has their own generators and the IT business parks can typically run for 7 days in the event of a power outage. Given their importance there are also backup UPS devices for each generator.
Beyond facilities I have been very impressed with the calibre of people I met at all levels. Additionally, many of the stories I had been told around behaviours in terms of blind deference to more senior managers and always saying 'yes' have certainly been dispelled in terms of those I have met to date.
Tomorrow I am staying in Bangalore to start a 3 day visit (again split across two cities in India) to another service provider. Tomorrow night I move to Chennai to visit their second facility.
I'll post again after that visit.
Blog by Simon Murphy on business technology
About Me
- Simon Murphy
- I am an experienced IT consultant working in Dublin, Ireland who specialises in Enterprise and IT Architect and helping clients solve their most pressing business problems. I have 16 years experience in the IT Industry and have worked in a variety of industry on very large scale IT projects. I am certified by the Open Group as a Master IT Architect and currently work for Deloitte Ireland where I lead our IT architecture group.