Professor Ravi Aron, operations specialist at the Wharton School, part of the University of Pennsylvania points to two trends that are taking place in the American marketplace. "I think the cultural barriers are enormous for Indian companies to get into the so-called "high-end category" consulting. I think that some of the Indian companies have underestimated the barriers."

Richard J Schroth, CEO, Executive Insights, takes up the point, "At the high-end strategy consulting level, for the Indians to move into the US marketplace in particular -- or to compete against established, world-class players like McKinsey, BCG and Bain -- there are very few that have been able to differentiate themselves strongly enough to sustain any kind of presence or significant long-term growth.

"There are also some significant cultural issues coming into the US market. The presence is dramatic, and it's very different to have senior level presence in the boardroom, at the chairman level, or at the chief executive level than it is to have strong relationships at the operations level. This gap is a formidable cultural and socialisation issue that needs a lot of study," according to Schroth.

Roopa Unnikrishnan, engagement manager, Katsenbach Partners, takes it further, "When you have parts of organisations doing such drastically different businesses with drastically different economics, it builds disharmonies within the organisation that require a great deal of astute management and organisational design to resolve. It builds into business such different economics that a lot of Indian companies are going to have to start thinking differently about their management capability and leadership mix in the coming few years."

Professor Aron believes there is a threat to Indian companies in America because their weakness is in business development and relationship management. He says, "They're really poor - I don't mean in skills, but the ability to wear a suit and talk to the CEO's office. So it's double-jeopardy now. One point is that they don't do the relationship management and talking the strategy talk very gracefully. And there is likelihood that so-called mid-wife firms like Everest could take ownership of the customer relationship."

Nathaniel J Mass, managing director, NJ Mass Associates, sees enormous growth potential in America for Indian firms. "The Indian companies, Wipro for example, have a strong potential to grow profitability. And given their current margins, which are in the 20-per cent to 30-per cent range, they should be able to reinvest in growing in a smart way. They still have to execute, and they have some real challenges like going upscale in terms of consulting capabilities - which they may or may not exploit well, but hopefully they will have the opportunity."

But Roopa Unnikrishnan sees the challenge for Indian business differently. "Part of the challenge for the Indian companies is to try and understand what their value-added is, as other companies start to see the value of moving their costs down," she says. They need to be thinking differently about their own business models and their own business capability.

"At that point they might have to move to a higher-end kind of value proposition. At this point they have to reassess where they're spending their capital."

Professor Aron describes the technology services industry in three layers. The bottom-most layer is a very hardware-driven business (producing computers, etc) in which there has been convergence onto a few standards. The middle level consists of a bunch of services, like applications development, applications testing, and documentation. The top level is what falls into the grab-bag of consulting, but these are really customised services.

He points out, "If you look at the margins where Indian companies are really strong, it's in the middle level. They are almost absent from the hardware level, since for a variety of reasons manufacturing is still not competitive in India. It's in the middle - the application development design, testing code maintenance - where Indian companies are really strong," she says and adds, "They are now trying to upgrade, to some extent, to get into consulting services."

Schroth agrees, "I think there will be a forward, upward movement into some of the consultative services like ERP (enterprise resource planning). Some of the ERP operations still require good financial structures and good financial consulting to go with the implementations, but it's not the strategy-level elements. So I think there will be a cap level that many of the Indian companies will not want to integrate into their business model. And I believe there will be a shedding of the US companies' high-end consultants that are housed inside the outsourcing companies."

"But who will companies like Wipro and Infosys work with to help them change their culture, which somewhat mirrors the US outsourcing culture?

"Until now they haven't been aggressive, but now that they're playing in the world scene, I think they'll have to spend some of this money on getting their own strategy pulled together," he warns.

"If you sat in a room with the main people from Google, and from Infosys, you'd get a definite different feeling about progressiveness, growth, and the thinking and the dress that that they'd wear to talk to you.

"I'm suggesting that's going to be the tough barrier (for Indian companies) because in a sense the market is defining those two companies as some of the highest growth potential firms in the marketplace. Yet Google is performing quite admirably, whereas I don't see Infosys having anything like that shaking in the market. They probably have a limited window in which to rethink themselves, but also to rethink the culture."

Unnikrishnan extends the point, "Infosys has a very corporate environment, while Google is off the wall and different. And Wipro's ownership structure doesn't make for a culture where people are trying to push for entrepreneurial thinking."