Posted by Dagens Industri, March 28, 2008

“In the outsourcing country above others, India, IT has become its largest export. But the Indian engineers not only work for companies in the west but also start their own companies. Photon Infotech has in a short while grown from 17 people to 1500. There Marcus Wilhelm is the newly appointed chief in charge of global operations in the fast growing company.

The Swede that is part of the Indian IT boom.

Marcus Wilhelm has just landed in Delhi after a 22 hour flight from Boston where he has been meeting customer. It is time to go back to work in Chennai. Five months ago Marcus Wilhelm resigned from his position as CIO from EF after 13 years to start working at Photon InfoTech.

“It is fascinating to work for an Indian company and to be part of the revolution that is going on. Everything has become standardized in IT and you can work basically from anywhere. It is fun to be part of the growth wave of niche IT Company” he says.

10 years of working abroad.

Photon Infotech was started in 1999 by two Indian entrepreneurs with each a top notch education from USA. The company survived the IT bubble and has grown from 17 to 1500 people in the last five years. This spring they are being introduced onto the Indian stock exchange.

Marcus Wilhelm being a westerner has experience living 10 years abroad and got his eyes on India during his period in China.

“I moved to Shanghai and tried to hire a lot of programmers in 2002, but it was really hard to find good people” he remembers.

The biggest problem was that the Chinese lacked in English knowledge, and Marcus Wilhelm also felt that their technical knowledge was poor. At the end he gave up and outsourced most of EF’s online school Englishtown to India.

Service oriented Architecture

It is hot in Chennai thought the summer is almost a month away. Large billboards are all over the large IT corridor where Photon Infotech has its office. The four stories high building in glass and concrete is only an year old but a new one is already built to accommodate their growth which is about 50 new people a month.

Here the traditional cubicle that exists in the Indian offices is replaced by the staff sitting along long tables, some have ponytails and some have shaved heads. It has hanging posters with encouraging notes where the sales team sits. “Congratulations Prasana to your first contract-worth 9000 dollar-excellent job”.

Photon Infotech is concentrating on Web 2.0 technologies, for example applications for social networking sites such as Facebook and service oriented architecture. They thereby see themselves as more niche than the larger outsourcing giants such as Wipro and Infosys who have been around longer and work on larger systems and older non web based technologies like SAP. Photon Infotech’s management is all in their thirties and say that they have a flatter organization compared to the larger IT companies.

Be Creative and take responsibility

Aasima Samreen is 25 years old, wearing a veil and has worked nine months in the company. Right now she is building a tourist site and says she likes to work at Photon. “The working culture is very good here and we have possibilities to collaborate with the clients”. When I probe further she says that she doesn’t know for whom she is building the site.

To get the staff to ask questions, be creative and take responsibilities is the biggest challenge for Marcus Wilhelm.

“I want to get away from ‘I only do what I am told’ mentality and so the first thing I did was to give sales goals to the operations team.”

He thinks in general that the Indian developers are really smart but that they often live in protected family environments and don’t move away before they get married. When Marcus Wilhelm is trying to recruit the best, not timid and outgoing people he has interestingly noticed that they all have a common denominator: they have all lived abroad.

Scare of Conflict

“Even those who have studied outside their home city are more open as people” he says.Scare of conflict is one of the biggest problem with the staff he feels. “I didn’t know that there is a term called ‘absconding’ before I moved here but it means that people just don’t show up at work. They are scared to resign so they just leave. They don’t even pick up their phone and there you stand” he says.

Photon Infotech is loosing about 8 percent of its employees every year but that is significantly lower than the 20 percent the IT industry has in India.

“It has become such a war on talent that people have absolutely no loyalty. The companies are trying to lock people in by contract but it has become a vicious circle” Marcus Wilhelm says.

But he is also pointing out that people can be extremely obnoxious.“They can ask for a higher salary a week before they are supposed to go on a one year contract to the US. It is just pure blackmailing.” Marcus Wilhelm thinks.

He is trying to establish personal relationship with the staff which is uncommon in India.“In the US the bosses go out and have a beer with their staff after work but it doesn’t exist here” he says.

Thinking of buying Swedish

The positives with the Indian outsourcing industry according to Marcus Wilhelm is that it comes from the “back end” which means that at one time they started by creating administrative systems for companies. It is totally against what for example Framfab or Icon did during the dot com boom where they started at the front end and worked their way back towards the back office functions. It is smarter to build a site from the back says Marcus Wilhelm.

Photon Infotech is aggressive and wants to venture into the northern European market for small and midsized businesses. They hope that the Indian IPO will give them financial muscles to acquire companies and Marcus Wilhelm is not against buying a Swedish company.

Better and more ambitious.

“We can buy a Swedish IT company, keep the Swedish customer facing people and move everything else to here” he is thinking aloud. He is finding it hard to understand why it is still considered controversial to outsource in Sweden. “A person who has gone to the Indian elite school IIT gets a fifth of what a Swedish engineer gets in salary and is in general better and more ambitious” he feels.

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