The Indian economy is going through a challenging phase with high inflation and slow growth. This coupled with the upcoming national elections has created a temporary slowdown of the broader economy.
Despite these challenges in the government segment, the broader market in India has shown resilience and has stabilized when compared to tumultuous phases in 2012 and 1H 2013. Companies have been spending (albeit with caution) on upgrading their IT and communications (ICT) infrastructure in order to deliver stronger value to the business. Many organizations are using the tight budgets to review and rethink the areas of investment and the modes of engagement with their technology vendors and partners.
Jaideep Mehta, Vice President & Country General Manager, IDC India said, “2014 will finally see the India IT eco-system begin a serious transition to the 3rd platform technologies of cloud and mobility, and to a lesser extent big data, and social. IDC predicts the influx of cloud and enterprise mobility technologies along with the associated changes in architecture and IT management processes”. He added, “From a vendor perspective, it will continue to be a challenging environment as the general elections put a stop to government procurement, and the enterprise sectors remain cautious in their spending.”
Based on these broad trends and the ongoing interaction with the market, IDC has identified the top 10 predictions for Indian ICT marketplace.
1. Integrated solutions– Solutions (from applications to silicon) will start becoming an integral part of discussions and strategy of all major hardware vendors, initial implementations and case studies will define the value proposition.
2. Automation – The automation of hardware management will continue to drive differentiation between hardware vendors. This will enable true ROI discussions.
3. Mobility – Increasing business process enabling and vertical aligned applications will drive the mobility wave.
4. Cloud – Adoption of cloud services will see a new life and greater momentum in the context of application/feature upgrade and application modernization. The influence of the business managers can be expected both in the selection of the solution and to ensure future alignment to business.
5. Security – With wider collaboration outside the enterprise, secure sharing of information and being prepared for vulnerabilities will gain more attention.
6. Smarter channel partners – OEMs and channel partners will get “Smart” to supplement shrinking IT hardware revenue.
7. Blurring Lines – Lines between SI’s, VAR’s & ISV’s partner types will get increasingly blurred as these companies try to broaden their value proposition.
8. Modernization – As increasing focus on business managers falls on applications (to drive efficiency, and industry specific compliance) there will be strong but selective investments in application modernization.
9. Repeatable Solutions:– Many of the large services vendors that have traditionally focused the very large (1000+ employee) segment will start building repeatable solutions for mid-size companies.
10. Sourcing – Smaller services partners and/or smaller services engagement will drive the mindset of organizational sourcing strategies as many services contract come-up for renewals.
Despite the fact that 2014 will be a challenging year; there will be pockets of investments across multiple industry segments. These segments/pockets can be primarily defined by the maturity of the organization and willingness to strategically embed IT in the business processes. Time invested to identify these segments and the dynamics associated with each of the segments will ensure success for technology vendors and service providers.
