As Founder and CEO of Gloscon, I feel so proud to be associated with extremely bright young Indian developers who have fire in their belly to excel and become tomorrow's leaders. Today, the environment in India is lot different then what it used to be when I started out my career in IT field back in 1995. When I joined Bachelors of Computer Engineering course in 1991, not many people wanted to go in Computer Engineering Stream. Very few companies were there in Software Servers when I passed out in 1995 and Internet was not a commodity as it is today. You had no choice but to work in large enterprise to get best of the facilities and gain knowledge.
Today after 13 years, Technology has changed so much. The biggest shift I see in these 13 years is exponential growth of Open Source Software which has shaken up the entire software services sector globally. Software Services Sector today is not just controlled by large companies like TCS, IBM, Wipro and likes of that. Actually most large corporations revenues from Services Services sector are either staying flat or declining. On the contrary, early stage startups are springing up from different parts of the country and growing at an exponential rate. You will see hundreds of start-ups making a living from rentacoder, odesk, elance or getafreelancer sites.
It not just Open Source Software that is hitting the pockets of IT services sector, there is also a shift towards using Pay per Use Software (i.e SaaS - Software As A Service). SaaS seems to have matured now and companies now no longer have do hire hundreds of developers and spend millions of dollars to build complex solutions - at least not those that involve Internet.
I do a lot of speaking engagements in Indian Colleges and Universities especially in Gujarat in areas of Entrepreneurship, Web 2.0 and Open Source Software. Indian Student Mentality is a herd mentality. They just follow what their friends follow. I do get calls every now and then - "I want to work in .NET". When I ask "Why?", I do not get a convincing answer. I have to tell them that look at the postings on Gujjuchaps and other job boards, the job market in Open Source is growing much more rapidly then it is in proprietary software.