In light of the global economic slowdown and shrinking corporate budgets, the years 2008-09 marked a challenging period throughout the world of business. Major consulting companies, including leading firms in management consulting and HR consulting, along with other advisories such as accounting firms, found themselves with substantial drops in business during 2009. Meanwhile, largest outsourced business and technology consulting firms in India were complaining that clients were delaying or cancelling projects as 2009 began. However, in recent years, corporate profits in general grew dramatically, which encourage the executives to authorize new consulting projects as long as they see the potential for a good return on the cost. On the shadows of this global growth, the county’s leading consultancies have also enjoyed substantial growth in employee count and revenues. With a steady growth over the years, Indian consulting market has grown to become a 19,000 crore industry now. Various reports says that, there would be over 2.2 lakh people working in this industry over that next few years in the 8500-9000 consultancy firms across the country.

IT Consulting – A Major Contributor

One of the fastest-growing segments of consulting has been information technology (IT). This segment includes consultants focused on e-commerce, telecommunications, intranet and Internet strategies and functionality, hardware systems design and implementation, software design, acquisition and implementation, and web site design and operation. A major development in IT consulting has been the extremely rapid growth of large companies that are based in India but compete globally, such as Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). These companies quickly grew multi-billion dollar revenue bases as major contenders in the global IT sector.

On the other side, services incorporating Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are reshaping the traditional way the IT-BPM industry has been providing till now. Even though, each of these four components have been evolving individually, companies have begun to treat them as an integrated whole. Dismantling of traditional business design with the convergence of above mentioned technologies provide an opportunity for Indian IT players to move into a higher margin business as compared to the typical IT contracts.    

Strength of Indian Consulting

While looking back to the past, one can see a hand in hand expansion of consulting business in India with maturing of Indian industry, not only in terms of size, but also in terms of service offering. The major strength of Indian consulting organizations include personal competence, low cost structure, diverse capabilities, high acceptability and quick learning capabilities of Indian consultants. Apart from that, being familiar with the local conditions, which is clubbed with well-dispersed and wide-ranging areas of specializations to service diverse range of client’s need, will give Indian Consulting firms an extra edge over the other players. However, the consulting sector still has some weak spots, which has been hindering the export growth such as low quality assurance, low local presence in overseas, low quality base, lack of market intelligence and low level of R&D. Despite these weaknesses, the consulting industry in India is trying its best to accommodate the demands. While big consulting firms are inhaling new employees, gulping up small firms and merging with peers, this industry can witness a faster growth in the near future.