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R Dhamodaran
Senior Vice President
Channel Operations & Commercial Strategy, Cisco India & Saarc
According to global research firm IDC, India and China will contribute to half the total IT spend in 2009.
I couldn’t agree more. If we focus on growing and energizing the market, we can fuel India’s rise in the global economy. However, one must take into consideration the current economic scenario while mapping a go-to-market strategy. At this point, the best solution is to concentrate on long-term goals despite the slowdown.
Before we look at the year ahead, it’s imperative that we take into account the trends that drove the IT industry in 2008. Some of the key issues that emerged were the increased adoption of the unified communications (UC) platform across sectors, and the emergence of virtualization and eco-sustainability initiatives.
UC, through its collaborative tools, brought to life the age-old dream of an office-without-borders. The integration of data, voice and video, with mobility over the network, led to the development of technologies such as TelePresence and digital media that enhanced the collaborative experience. In addition, UC and its component technologies sped-up businesses on their road to going green as carbon-heavy overheads were reduced.
Around the same time, we saw ourselves entering the second phase of the Internet, Web 2.0, which was characterized by its ability to enable people to organize and categorize content, improve collaboration, open communication channels, and transform web sites into computing platforms running full-fledged applications. As a result, the network became more intelligent, and evolved to become a platform, not just for data traffic but also for all forms of media. Virtualization capabilities created cloud computing as an emerging trend for enterprises, interested in accessing and outsourcing data center compute resources. And as IT organizations morphed into services management frameworks, virtualization started playing a bigger role.
Going green was another important issue. Companies realized that, with the association of green technology, came improved business productivity and a reduction in energy costs. Concepts such as alternate and renewable sources of energy, re-cycling, e-waste management, green architecture, green computing, green data centers and reduction of the corporate carbon footprint gained importance on the corporate agenda.
Abundant opportunities
Going forward, the prevailing economic conditions will influence the adoption of IT in India. As the global economy slows, and the macro economic situation continues to be challenging, companies will look for ways to trim spending and improve their bottom-lines. For now, India is still looking at steady economic growth, and the government is working with industry to ensure that the impact of the slowdown is reduced. Nonetheless, there are trying times ahead, so organizations will have to take a long-term view and embrace technology which will help them bring down costs while increasing productivity. 2009 will also see the growth of the router and switching market in India; BFSI and telecom service providers will be the key adopters. The government is also likely to emerge as a big spender due to various e-governance and SWAN initiatives.
Additionally, the value of IT is moving from the edge of the network to the core. This means that the industry is seeing a corresponding transition from transactional communication like phone calls and e-mail to continuous collaborative experiences similar to today’s social networking. Hence, not only will corporates expect to be able to connect to everyone from everywhere through every device, they will also expect it to be seamless, secure and simple.
As collaboration within and between firms worldwide accelerates, global cross-functional teams will create a virtual boundary-free workspace, collaborating across time zones to capture new opportunities. Although collaborative technologies and Web 2.0 have been around for many years, employing them through entire organizations will be made possible only by an intelligent network. For this reason, more investments will be made in building these networks.
Data center consolidation will also be high on every corporate agenda as it ensures optimal utilization of existing resources. Wireless for last-mile connectivity in rural India and unwiring our cities will be another major focus.
Our initiatives
The future is exciting for our partners and us. In 2009, Cisco India will focus on driving innovation with partners and customers. With this objective in mind, a change in organizational structure reflects our recent evolution to a product-solutions provider. This enables us to direct resources toward disruptive solutions for the Indian market.
An important effort by us to expand and capture growth opportunities in the small business space has been the [bringing of the] Linksys connected office business organization into Cisco. This move has brought the Cisco and Linksys small business solutions together under a single distribution and partner strategy, and given us greater marketshare.
But now the global economic crisis must be taken into account, the situation is very real, and we are preparing to handle the slowdown. Staying closer to existing customers will be a priority because fewer market opportunities will lead to fierce competition. To this end, investing in building the right skill-sets to take on the upturn will provide us with competitive advantage.
At Cisco we believe in catching market transitions early, and, along with our partners, we also invest early to create technologies and solutions to get customer franchise through marquee customers.
Our strategy and execution plans will be in that direction. Today, as we focus on moving up the value chain by offering vertically relevant solutions instead of boxes and systems, enabling our partners to transform into highly valued solutions providers is crucial.
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