Science & Tech Quote by Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar is drawing a line between two eras of Indian tech: the comfortable, services-heavy past and a riskier, higher-upside future built on products. The phrasing is telling. "So far" politely frames the prevailing model as a stage of development rather than a failure, but it still carries a quiet indictment: Indian firms have been content to build what clients ask for, not what markets might buy at scale. "Customer application" is business-speak for bespoke work, the kind that keeps revenue predictable and margins constrained. It also keeps power with the buyer.

"Needs to shift" is a soft command, aimed as much at boardrooms and investors as at engineers. Packaged software is not just a different deliverable; it's a different mindset: standardized offerings, repeatable sales, ongoing upgrades, and owning the roadmap. It demands product management discipline, domain expertise, and the willingness to disappoint individual clients in order to serve a broader market. That's culturally difficult for companies trained to say yes.

The choice of banking and financial services is strategic. BFSI is both lucrative and punishing: complex regulations, legacy systems, high switching costs, and extreme intolerance for downtime. If Indian companies can ship credible, secure, compliant packages here, they gain a stamp of seriousness that travels across borders. The subtext is national competitiveness: India has long been the world's back office; Kumar is arguing it should become a factory for software that exports not just labor, but intellectual property and leverage.