From Bangalore last week, I sent my three sons a note that included the warning: "You’d better plan a career path that puts you in a position to write the specifications, because you don’t want to be competing against these guys for the job of writing the code."

I was there to lead two sessions at the opening two-day meeting of the Business Technology Summit, plus another session at the half-day companion event in Mumbai two days later. While traveling to the Bangalore conference, I got a double-barreled reality check on the vigor of the technology marketplace where I was going to speak.

• First, I saw a story about the intensely entrepreneurial spirit of software development in India;
• Second, I saw a story about the launch of Intel’s latest 6-core Xeon, primarily (and for the first time) a design product of that company’s Bangalore center.

At all of my three presentation sessions, the audience lived up to the image those news stories suggested. I was asked to discuss potential business plans for new startups, and to share my research on cloud computing security and integration opportunities. The energy and intensity of those conversations were matched only by the enthusiasm I encountered for the competitive possibilities and the economic incentives of Platform as a Service.

India’s projected to be a booming market for PaaS, with growth rates far exceeding those of the U.S. and Europe — perhaps even edging out the rest of the fast-growing Asia-Pacific technology arena. That’s great news for India, but definitely also a challenge to developers in the rest of the world.