Mumbai: India's oldest and most distinguished IT firms are doing what would have been almost sacrilegious a few years ago - holding coding marathons to develop innovative fixes and deploying "commando" units to resolve clients' IT woes within hours.
Infosys, Wipro and other Indian IT giants, which rose to prominence during the outsourcing boom in the 1990s and 2000s, have struggled to keep pace with mushrooming start-ups. The rate of revenue growth has more than halved since 2011-12, partly due to the emerging competition.
Those young set-ups say they go beyond cookie-cutter solutions and argue that they do the job more quickly and for less. They also attract the creme de la creme of India's engineering graduates with their culture of bubble chairs, breakfast bars and table tennis at work, in a way that the corporate, straight-laced atmosphere of the country's IT trail blazers struggles to.
Client demands are similarly changing in India's $147 billion or Rs 9.36 lakh crore IT outsourcing industry. Major telecoms, retail and banking firms want more than an outsourced help desk, and now demand everything from help solving a server crash overnight to help building an app, industry veterans say.
"When people around you change, moving from a very process-defined model to a much more agile model, it is definitely making a dent in everyone's thinking," said Sanjiv Kovil, Wipro's chief technology officer.
To deal with this, Wipro, for example, has set up small "commando force" units that help get swift solutions by copying a startup environment where small teams move fast. India's third-largest IT services provider has also introduced gaming-like training sessions and so-called hackathons to solve both fake and real client problems.
Earlier this month Infosys - long known for its inflexible rules of employee decorum - did away with a formal dress code. The company had already relaxed rules that stopped workers from accessing social networking web sites at work.
There are some early signs the more flexible approach is yielding dividends.
Tech Mahindra said it won a contract last month to build an electric vehicle charging system for the city of Ontario, Canada, because its flatter structure had allowed the manager responsible to decide alone and move fast with his bid.
To be sure, it is hard for large IT companies, with an army of thousands of employees, to change overnight.
For now, even small changes should at least help retain the sector's traditionally fickle talent.
"(Young graduates) have access to overseas travel, they are spending time with customer organisations abroad and they are looking at that culture. So they are questioning their organisations," said Asheesh Mehra a senior Infosys employee who quit earlier this month to start his own company, Antworks.
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