Open Source

“Open Source Has More Headroom In India Than Anywhere Else”

NIIT Technologies works on open source projects, contributes to the community and hires open source professionals for its projects. If given a choice, the company chooses open source technologies over proprietary solutions because it gets adequate talent and is ready to train engineers in relevant technologies, if required.    Rate this news:  (1 Votes) Saturday, March 09, 2013:  When companies like NIIT Technologies Ltd adopt open source technologies, they take the technology to the next level with their innovation and development, creating a trend of sorts in this domain. NIIT Technologies works on open source projects, contributes to the community and hires open source professionals for its projects. If given a choice, the company chooses open source technologies over proprietary solutions because it gets adequate talent and is ready to train engineers in relevant technologies, if required. Diksha P Gupta from EFYTimes spoke to Arvind Mehrotra, president, APAC, India & Middle East, NIIT Technologies, about the scope for open source professionals at NIIT Tech and what the company looks for. Excerpts: Do you feel India is rich enough in open source talent and do you get the kind of trained manpower you want for NIIT Tech? There is cutting-edge work constantly happening in open source. So, today if I were to look at it, yes, there is sufficient talent available. As to whether there is an enthusiastic workforce for open source in particular, is an open question. I think it’s a 50:50 kind of ratio. People take IT as a career option, whereas open source requires one to play the role of a continuous evangelist on the technology front. People opting for IT as a career are selecting the industry, are focusing on certain business processes and certain types of applications to further their roles and careers. So, if you talk about the availability of a workforce, yes, it is available but has to be groomed correctly. A lot of those qualified have the aptitude and the attitude to be evangelists for open source. But open source is a culture where people will make mistakes. It requires openness to download applications, work on them and contribute back; whereas, in a formal organisation, we are worried about the legal implications of copying a piece of code and embedding it into work that we are contracted to deliver to our customer. So we have formal barriers there. We cannot allow that because we will carry those risks. We do not want someone else later claiming ownership of the code our engineers say that they have created. There are legal and contractual implications that prevent businesses from inducting open source applications easily. You said people can become open source evangelists if you train them right. Do you train people when they come on board at NIIT Tech? Yes we do. NIIT Tech has made an open source commitment. Before the cloud was launched, we used to make ‘Build My Application’ (BMA). It was a framework for rapid application development. We did market it. When we realised that people were finding it difficult to retain the code and maintain it because it was being generated by a RAD equivalent tool, we allowed it to go to the open source community so that others could continue to use it and build their own applications with that. So that has been our contribution, and that momentum and spirit continues to fuel the organisation to make more such contributions. As far as training the professionals is concerned, we have a schedule calendar and a huge library of training material available for our employees. The training programs are available in both electronic media and as premise-based training. Our technology innovation centre constantly generates ideas of projects and programmes that the community works on. The centre runs an annual session, during which people who have worked on open source or proprietary technologies come and showcase their capabilities. For us, open source is also a business issue as there is immense demand in this sector. There is a centre of competence that drives it. But it trains only those who will work within the organisation. So, if the demand for a particular skill set is not very large, we do not train a huge workforce just for the sake of giving them exposure to open source. Ultimately, employees are becoming more discerning. They want to know why they are getting trained and whether the training will benefit their career further or fulfil any personal objectives. Only then will they agree to get trained on a subject. So there are employees who are eager to get trained on open source technologies these days? Yes, very much. And that depends a lot on the broad area that a professional has chosen to build a career in -- whether it’s the infrastructure, applications or the database side. Most of the database guys these days want to understand technologies like MySQL, DB2, etc. Employees also choose what they believe their specialisation should be. Do you think there is enough training being provided across the country on open source technologies? In my view, there is a lot of noise about this. There are a lot of forums where such discussions take place. But sometimes, one believes that open source has become not the mainstay but the ‘cheap option’. Whereas it should be the other way round. Open source should not be the cheap option but the technology option. So today if people are getting driven to open source for the commercial objective of avoiding licensing costs, they tend to acquire applications that may not suit them -- making the wrong choices on open source. Businesses today, unfortunately, have poor communication with IT professionals, and the latter often do not make the right assessment of what is required. If you select an open source technology, you have to know: (a) who is backing that open source software; (b) if there are support issues, who will solve that problem, etc. So in short, one has to not only look at the availability, but also the maintainability and scalability of the applications developed on open source, rather than just the cost factor. If such decisions are taken, I am sure open source has more headroom in India than anywhere else. If businesses are ready to adopt open source technology, does that mean that the demand for open source professionals has been increasing in India of late? I do not have hard statistics to say that, but if I were to look at the government projects that we are working on, there is very strong demand. The NIC, Government of India and DeitY are formally identifying applications that should go to open source. But they are also requesting options from open source and proprietary applications simultaneously in many of their tenders. So, the final choice remains with the vendors and they have to decide what to select. If the penalties are linked to the availability of the application, warranties, support, and given the fact that open source technologies do not allow longevity, OEMs and systems integrators prefer to go for proprietary technologies because they can back these with something. But yes, one cannot deny that the government is creating demand. We as a company do submit Requests For Proposals (RFPs) to the government. I think India has a fairly good demand for open source professionals and it will continue to grow because companies would want to see IT offerings for a lower cost. What are the challenges involved with open source technologies vs proprietary technologies? There are two challenges involved if you talk of open source technologies vs proprietary technologies. The proprietary technology providers have established huge brands and open source has a brand issue. So there is a recollection issue with open source technology. If an open source project does not have the backing of an OEM but has a forum, a technology guy will be comfortable in that kind of an environment while a business guy may not be as comfortable because he does not get any assurance. So the open source forums in India will have to give a certain set of assurances or identify a list of applications or application stacks that can be rated. Assessments of the applications are required for the business people to understand what choices they are making. What are the skill sets that you look for in engineers when you hire them for open source projects? The centre of competence at NIIT Tech has defined the toolsets that we work on. But what we look for while selecting an engineer depends on the needs of the projects. If we are using open source testing frameworks for a project, we would want to take on professionals who have some experience in those tools. But if we are hiring testers in general, their engineering calibre is the biggest criteria for selecting them. Freshers are hired based on their basic engineering skills and their understanding of technology. Does NIIT Tech contribute to open source projects as well? NIIT Tech is definitely involved in making contributions to several open source projects. Our centre of competence and our technology innovation centre interact with the open source community in a formal way. Apart from that, our developers are involved with various community initiatives, which makes us even closer to the community.