The Best Time to Graduate - Now !

I have travelled the length and breadth of the country in the last couple of months, primarily to some of the top institutes and campuses, as part of the recruiting process.  Through the interactions with the brightest and sharpest young minds, I found an eerie similarity between today, and when I graduated more than 20 years ago.  

From my conversations with the students who were graduating in the coming months, I came to realize that this is a great time to be graduating and entering the corporate arena.  All the students I spoke to understood that of all the trends currently shaping the technology industry – three stand out viz. the social, mobile and cloud revolution. Sure, some of our conversations did bring up the potential of Big Data as another big trend, but it is these 3 that are well entrenched and without doubt already changing and shaping every industry. And these 3 are indeed revolutions that will shape the future destiny of employees and enterprises.  In fact, since all 3 of them seem to be occuring in the same timeframe, their impact and interdependency on each other will leave long lasting effects that we will experience for decades. 

When I graduated about 20 years ago, in the early ‘90’s, there was a similar phenomenon taking place.   At that time there were 3 parallel and similar trends emerging in the world – the impact of which have lasted two decades, changing the way we interact, work, and operate.  The first of these was the introduction of Windows 3.0 which started the PC era and resulted in the desktop making its way to the desk of almost every individual employee.  In India, this trend continues to change our daily lives even today, though a lot of the world is already living in the Post-PC era.  The second revolution was that of the internet and it moving out of computer labs in universities into the corporate world.  I still remember feeling the awe of going to different websites and getting the information I needed with the Mosaic browser.  Since then, the impact of the internet on our daily lives has only increased – whether at work or home.  And thirdly, from a technology and architecture perspective came the client – server technology, which led to massive innovations and creation of various enterprise systems and applications like ERP, CRM, SCM etc.  It is interesting to note that all 3 of these major shifts happened around the same time and in my opinion, the combination and timing of their occurrence caused a revolution that has lasted us 20 years! 

From an Indian perspective, obviously, these 3 combined have resulted in the mushrooming of the IT services industry which has led to the creation of a $50B industry today and created jobs for hundreds of thousands of students graduating from its engineering schools over these last 20 years.   

Since then, there have been many innovations and changes.  However, once again, I see 3 revolutions taking place in the same timeframe, similar to what I experienced when I was graduating. Firstly, there is no doubt that the PC is going mobile.  The impact that smartphones and tablets are having on our daily lives is incredible.  These smartphones are indeed as powerful or even more than the PC’s were when they were first introduced.  It’s only a matter of time before they experience tremendous growth in terms of computing and processing power, allowing one to do everything that can be done on a PC on a mobile device.

The second phenomenon shaping the industry is the social revolution, which started out in the consumer space, but is slowly starting to make its way into the enterprise.  While, we haven’t seen its full impact in the corporate space yet, there’s no arguing that this probably is the best way and means for an enterprise to communicate with its customer base, analysts, and stakeholders.  The  internet is definitely going social.

And thirdly, again from an architecture perspective, we are all moving to the cloud.  Many a time we may be using the cloud even without realising it. There’s no doubt that the SaaS revolution, that salesforce.com led with, is starting to be felt across the entire spectrum in terms of industries, systems and geographies.  The question is when will something move to the cloud, not if.  Therefore, I say the client/server has moved to the cloud.

As outlined above, the 3 tectonic shifts happening in technology today are –

The PC going mobile

The Internet going social

Client/Server moving to the cloud

And given that these 3 are all occurring around the same time, I come to the conclusion that the impact of these changes will last us for decades to come – much longer that what the PC, Internet, and client / server lasted.  Especially from the Indian view point, if harnessed appropriately, with the right mix of entrepreneurial spirit and social bent, these events could help revolutionize the Indian software industry and provide the much needed shift away from a pure-play services focus to an innovation driven economy. And thus, I feel it is the most exciting time to be graduating, and would encourage all young graduates to take full advantage of the timing and help shape the future of generations to come with these 3 massive “parivartan’s” (transformations).