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June 17, 1998: Karavali Restaurant

In April 1998, after a decade with Wipro, I moved to Lucent Technologies. Lucent wanted to set up their Bell Labs Development Center at Bangalore. While at Lucent, I had the opportunity to work on a strategic study of the future of the Indian Software industry.

During the course of this study, my eyes were opened to several things. It was clear to me that the 21^st century will be to the service industries what the 20^th century has been to the manufacturing industries. I also realized that every thing that we see around us would be either software enabled or software constrained. Given that, I felt that there would be insatiable demand for software services all over the world. Yet, companies who try to fill that need with just software skills will not be leaders. In fact, people who will lead in the emergent space will need to deliver not software, but what I call "knowledge enabled software". Many of today's software services companies will not be able to be leaders in the emerging future. Because knowledge enabled software requires six things. These are: -