Today, India is home to the fastest growing ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs. The region is experiencing a technology boom like none we've seen before. The numbers speak for themselves: from just over 3,000startups at the end of 2014 to a projection of more than 11,500 by 2020, and a developer community of nearly three million members, predicted to surpass the United States in the near future. Add to that a massive increase in venture capital and private equity, and the next decade will unleash a tremendous amount of innovation. It's clear that India is one of the most important technology markets in the world.

Most of the modern companies are software defined businesses. They will have an advantage over companies founded even just a decade ago because infrastructure resources and developer tools are easily accessible now more than ever. Companies such as GitHub, Stripe, New Relic, Docker, Twilio, etc. are fundamentally changing the way software is built and how developers interact with software.

In the past, the software development lifecycle was both time consuming and expensive. Most companies involved in the development of infrastructure offerings and tools neglected the software developer. Prices were too high, the offerings were too complicated to navigate and the user interface was unnecessarily complex. With the proliferation of open source software and easy to setup cloud infrastructure, it is now easier than ever to create a minimum viable product(MVP)or a working prototype of an idea. This enables developers and entrepreneurs to quickly build, test and deploy their innovative applications and products. The faster build test deploy lifecycles mean that they can more easily iterate their idea or concept before building a full-fledged product and eventually scale their business and build long term sustainable companies.

Also, in the last several years,the cost of cloud infrastructure has seen a decline, largely on account of the advancement in hardware and technology, and partly driven by increased competition among cloud players. This means that the barriers to entry are constantly being lowered for startups and developers and enables them to scale their business much faster.
 

With the proliferation of startups in India, the challenge for most of them is to identify good technical talent. Irrespective of the funding status of a startup, it always makes business sense to tackle problems through well defined systems and processes, rather than trying to solve them by adding more human resources. This essentially means that new age companies have fewer resources to drive their business and to make critical decisions. Interestingly, in most companies, the role of the software developer has evolved from being someone just responsible for coding to someone who also plays an active role in defining the user stories, contributes to design and user experience, and makes recommendations on the relevant technology stack and infrastructure to be used to build the product. The software developer will increasingly drive key decisions that impact the business over the longer horizon.

India has the unique opportunity to leapfrog over legacy enterprise technology and accelerate their growth with the modern tools that are now available at their disposal. It's already happening. Developers are building next generation businesses that will shape what the future looks like. Before,it was essentially unaffordable for an individual developer to purchase a dedicated server. Shared hosting services offered a viable option, but today with cloud technology, there is limitless flexibility and scalability.

We want to facilitate this trend in IT departments throughout India, where software developers are becoming key decision makers. Businesses throughout India that are agile and willing to embrace cloud infrastructure will have an advantage over ones that don't. And employers willing to accept the developer's newfound prominence will fare better than ones that are slow to adjust to this new reality.