In country like India, software architects form a very small percentage of the IT workforce. It seems we have only 1-2 % of the IT professionals as architects in India compared to global average of about 10%. This could possibly due to lack of product based companies and also delayed adoption of IT as a strategic tool among the end user companies. But, all these seem to be history. The time is changing in India and so as the IT roadmap.

The industry is witnessing architecture-driven industry growth. Firstly, IT services companies are gearing up to add "architecture services" as new offerings in their palette. Interestingly, end-user clients are driving such needs. For example, a leading Indian services company needs as many as 600 senior and junior architects out of the 7500 software professionals that they are hiring in the next 3 years. Also, leading Telcos, Banks and Manufacturing companies are setting up enterprise architecture team. The major focus of architecture groups is reducing complexity, both by decreasing the number of applications and moving away from legacy systems in a cost-effective manner. For many organizations, adopting enterprise architecture is becoming means of rationalizing spiraling IT budgets and putting in place a form of governance with an enterprise-wide perspective. Some of the organizations have at least 3 or more legacy systems that they want to sunset, and some of them have 50 or more applications in their portfolio, which needs to be review.

This opens up new as well alternative career opportunity for the senior managers with domain knowledge and with minimum experience of 9-10 years. This also provides good opportunity for senior designers and senior engineers to opt for becoming junior architects. In fact, several companies are providing an alternate architecture career path along with project management. Together, managers and architects will make highly effective leadership teams.

Are you at the cross road of your career? Did you feel that you need more inputs to understand the architecture career graph? If you still have unanswered queries about the architecture role and career roadmap? Let's join the esteem panel of experts. The panelists will describe the work environment, the honour of being an architect at their firm, competitive pay, and the kinds of interesting projects & technologies the company will offer to the architects, for building their careers. The panelists will explain why their company is the best opportunity for an architect to start and pursue their careers!!

• How do you rate the acceptance of "software architecture" as a independent discipline compared to project management?

• What are the current prevailing practices, discussion within organization on software architecture? What are the key training, research activities within organization on software architecture?

• How are these leaders responding to the growing demand from clients for the software architecture and software architects?

• Do architects need to work with project managers in effort estimation, technology selection and selection of suppliers?

• What about career roadmap for Architects? What kind of interesting projects & technologies the company will offer to the architects, for building their careers?

• What are the challenges faced in developing the architecture team? How to measure the success of architects and what kind of incentives ?

• Model Driven Architecture approach enhances productivity, so as off shoring. What about Model Driven off shoring? Is it beginning of new trend?

• Does architecture services provides new opportunities for the IT companies?

• What are the key pockets of resistance in adoption of software architecture?