The Art of Winning an Unfair Game: Cybage & India’s IT Industry

Abstract

In this teaching case, we consider the challenges and opportunities faced by Cybage, one of the many players in the Indian software and information technology (IT) services sector, as it co-evolved with India’s knowledge economy. Despite its small size and a last-mover disadvantage, since its founding in 1994, Cybage had enjoyed growth rates higher than rest of the industry. Had Cybage developed a set of capabilities that differentiated the company from its peers and enabled it to expand from a handful of IT practitioners to a company with nearly 4,000 professionals and a global footprint? Or did Cybage’s growth merely reflect the general expansion of India’s knowledge economy? In this case , we overview the Indian IT industry’s evolution and highlight the concepts of entry timing, IT capabilities, service-dominant logic, and value co-creation by considering questions regarding Cybage’s key differentiators and capabilities, avenues of future growth, and the applicability of Cybage’s current capabilities to other domains of IT service provisioning.