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 Pallab Talukdar, CEO, Fujitsu India, opines that customers will increasingly demand Opex options to IT Capex
The year gone by was challenging in more ways than one. The Indian IT and ITES sector, with a large exposure to the financial sector in US and Europe, was the first to feel the brunt of the slowdown.
While the Indian economy coped relatively well, with only a 3 percent dip in GDP growth, Indian businesses were far more cautious, and this resulted in a sharp drop in IT investments. Categories such as servers and storage posted negative growth of 15-20 percent in 2009. Having witnessed high double-digit growth over the past several years, the IT industry most certainly felt the severity of the downturn.
Fortunately, economic sentiments picked up in Q3 2009, and hopefully, IT investments will follow suit. IDC has projected 15 percent growth for the domestic IT market in 2010.
India looks poised for a 9 percent GDP growth this year, and the government’s Chief Economic Advisor, Kaushik Basu, recently stated that FY2011 will see a big rebound. But he also observed that a return to double-digit growth will require snipping of red tape and systemic inefficiencies, indicating room for more reforms ahead.
This augurs well for our industry on two counts. First, more reforms will give an impetus to the industry. Second, IT is a proven tool to remove systemic inefficiencies, hence the government’s investments in building IT infrastructure would be significant. A case in example is the Unique Identity (UID) project, which will see enormous spin offs across multiple segments.
Trends to watch
The biggest trend of the last couple of years has been the consolidation of IT infrastructure. It will continue to be a crucial theme even in 2010 as enterprises aim for higher efficiencies from existing IT infrastructure resources to reduce business overheads and IT Capex. This year virtualization will gather steam and grow along with key infrastructure technology products and solutions such as servers. Acceptance of the cloud will grow as the post-economic slowdown scenario will drive more organizations toward it to harness its power in accelerating business recovery and growth.
Green will be in vogue in every aspect, including technology driven by energy deficiency, government policies and growing corporate social responsibility. IT as a service will gain because it promises to modularize Opex.
Channel opportunities
Customers are increasingly looking for infrastructure-as-a-service. They are talking of SLA-driven platforms, so the opportunity for channel partners is in offering optimized infrastructure.
Channels will have to develop the flexibility to simultaneously manage physical and virtual resources and solutions that have in-built scalability and availability to provide optimum business continuity. Increasingly, vendors will have to integrate financial services in their go-to-market in order to give customers the option of converting from Capex to Opex.
In summary, 2010 holds a lot of promise for the IT industry, but the rules of the business have changed, and partners will have to focus on providing energy-efficient products and solutions that are simple, modular and cost-effective. |