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 Jayesh Kotak, Vice President, Product Marketing, D-Link India, believes that the downtime has compelled companies to focus on value creation
The year 2009 was certainly one of the most challenging years for the IT industry. In the first half, against the backdrop of economic slowdown, both IT vendors and channels were filled with anxiety.
But despite the rough time, we regard 2009 as the best year for the world economy. It compelled everyone to return to the most fundamental aspect of business—moving from valuations to value creation. Complex business models and futuristic projections based on highly-leveraged finance models gave way to simple profit and loss approach.
It reinforced the thinking that customers are not just looking for quality products and solutions, but also at higher returns on investments (ROI) and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
It taught all of us the importance of being customer-centric, nimble and adaptive to fast changing technology and business concepts.
Overall, the market performed better than expected in 2009. Things could have been a lot worse considering the gravity of the global financial crises. There is no doubt that the IT industry has emerged stronger.
Last year was abuzz with virtualization and cloud computing, and witnessed an increased adoption of Web 2.0 and open source technologies. In 2010, the global economy will require more economic and financial stimulus in order to stay on course of a healthy recovery. However, the Indian economy has revived to a large extent and will continue to grow at a robust pace. Domestic demand will be the key growth driver, led by increased government spending in infrastructure and education sectors. While the IT industry will post better growth rates than 2009, returning to earlier growth levels will be a challenge.
Technology trends
Awareness about Green IT is at an all-time high. Across the globe, people are demanding more environment-friendly products and solutions that can enable high-performance computing, while satisfying ecological concerns.
Security concerns will drive consumption of various solutions and services ranging from audit services to security products like UTM, to physical security and access security.
Web 2.0 and applications around it are transforming the usage of Internet into a more powerful business tool. Its adoption is facilitating increased knowledge sharing and more effective marketing. It was the buzz word in 2009 and will continue to gain more traction in 2010.
In 2010, mobile computing will become more ubiquitous with convergence of data and communications.
Channel view
We think the biggest challenge channel partners will have to counter is the move from an IT Capex to Opex business model. The Opex model will present itself as either a finance or a services model led by cloud computing and SaaS. In both cases, the channel business will change substantially. Partners will have to get proficient in both financial management and service level agreement (SLA) based services delivery and provisioning. |