Imagine if 70 per cent of all the Nobel Prizes ever won belonged to India. Impossible? Damn right. But what do you say to this: Of the 78 companies assessed worldwide at SEI CMM Level 5-considered the ultimate test of quality for it services companies-54 of them are either Indian companies or Indian operations of it multinationals. Some prominent assessees include TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, i-flex and Polaris Software. In contrast, only 19 US companies have the same level of certification.

For a country known as a traditional laggard in quality this is a rare achievement. What does this certification mean? Does it provide a competitive advantage to companies that have these certifications? Says Navyug Mohnot, Managing Director, QAI India, which handholds Indian companies during the CMM assessment: "It is taken for granted that companies bidding for large software services projects will have this certification. That is why Indian companies have a distinct advantage in the international marketplace."

But what is SEI CMM? SEI refers to Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, which started work on a "capability maturity model" (CMM) beginning the mid-80s on request from the US defence to review its software problems. Since then, different levels of CMM have been developed, ranging from-in increasing order of complexity-1 to 5.

Motorola India Electronics was the first company in India to get a SEI CMM certification in 1994. Since then, a number of Indian companies, starting with Infosys, Wipro, and more recently Kshema Technologies, have put themselves through the assessment.

How does a cmm5 company differ from a CMM4 or no CMM company? The difference will essentially be in the two companies' ability to manage complex processes, change with new technology, and prevent defects. Says Anand Mutalik, Chief Technology Officer of Kshema Technologies: "Indian companies that were struggling with enhanced complexity found SEI CMM to be a robust model, which would help them in continued process quality improvement."

Not all think CMM is a good measure of a company's process capabilities. But that population is a minority. After all, software is procedural knowledge. Therefore, all knowledge-enabled or knowledge-intensive firms have to inevitably "induct" software systems to meet changing business requirements without losing customers. Says K. Subrahmaniam, CEO, Covansys India: "CMM is for everybody-for doing business better if they depend extensively on software."

At the Nasscom-Gartner summit in Mumbai in September last year, when the topic of cmm5 assessment came up, one of the tech CEOs explained how it helps. "When you tell customers that you are a Level 5 company," he said, "they shut up and listen." Now, you know why Indian techies don't get asked a lot of questions.