Face to Face in India

I have been following this week reports on two events in India which demonstrate quite a few important features of the market there.

The National Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) annual conference in Mumbai is closely followed in India and around the world as it provides a number of important clues to the direction of development for the all-important IT and outsourcing industries. Business Week's Steve Hamm has been covering it all week on his Bangalore Tigers blog. The titles of his posts give a good flavour of what has been going on:

• Political showdown coming for India's techies
• New worries for the Indian tech industry
• The Changing Rules of Global Competition

Meanwhile, down in Goa, Cybermedia's annual C-Change Forum has been underway. As with a number of other things this company does, it is very much in line with global IT media trends. Rather than the all singing, all dancing giant show which has now fallen out of favour, it offers vendors an audience with India's top 100 CIOs and those CIOs, in resort-style surroundings, an opportunity to exchange notes away from the day-to-day pressures of the office.