IT’s Changing Geography

The Economist captures the changes in the technology business:

Welcome to the new geography of the IT industry, one that is no longer centred on Silicon Valley. It is the result of two distinct shifts that are reshaping the business. For some time, its centre of gravity has been moving away from the Valley to places such as Redmond, Austin, Armonk and Walldorf (in Germany), where four industry leadersMicrosoft, Dell, IBM and SAP, respectivelyare based.

At the same time, large parts of the business are migrating offshore, mainly to India, but also to such places as China, Russia and Vietnam. This is already being likened to what happened to manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, when companies in the rich world moved many of their operations overseas. The IT industry is now developing something that it has not had before (except in hardware manufacturing): a fully operational, international supply chain.

[This] is the result of three separate trends that will increasingly become one, as the boundaries between software, IT services and business processes become blurred.

The article also discusses the prospects for Indian software firms in the changing scenario, and also what lies in store for Silicon Valley.

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Rajesh Jain

An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.