twitter   facebook   linkedin    
 
download
 
 
 
Data Quest Article, 01/2010, Ganesh Natarajan
 
 
The Confederation of Indian Industry’s annual regional meeting in Goa is always a time for assessment and planning – for the Indian economy, for key industry sectors and for many of us who participate in the deliberations. In the last two years, the mood in the meeting has swung from great euphoria in 2008 when the Indian stock markets and the economy itself was on a roll to deep pessimism in 2009 when the bottom seemed to have dropped out on the global economy as well India to a revival of hubris this year with the stock markets again booming and the expectation of seven percent growth in the current fiscal progressing to near double digits in the coming year being the talk of economic pundits.
A growth in all sectors of the economy bodes well for the fortunes of the IT industry. Global IT spending is likely to be flat or moderately higher than the horrible year that 2009 predictably turned out to be but the predictions of an increased interest in global sourcing has revived the interest of the stock market in large IT companies and has seen a rapid acceleration of order booking in large and medium scale companies in the industry. In the domestic sector too , while Government spending on e-Government and other long pending projects as well as new ones like Nandan’s Unique Identity mission will be watched with interest, new IT projects will also receive their share of budget allocation though the opportunity spectrum may change substantially in the coming year.
With most significant companies having implemented an Enterprise Resource Planning package in their organisations, the Business Intelligence related projects that had been put on the back burner in the midst of the slowdown that characterised most of the last year, will now need maximum focus. Mature firms have passed the stage of simple performance dashboards and will need to create Indian firms across sectors will be no different from their global counterparts in the revival year of 2010 and CEOs leading their companies through the upturn will a full fledged Enterprise Performance Management system that drives and supports the change that will be the mandate for most management teams.
The focus on energy conservation and green IT has already accelerated the process of server virtualization in major IT departments and the continuing need to drive cost out of the system through reduction of space and cooling requirements in data centres and the use of virtual machines to run significant chunks of business applications will rapidly gain acceptance in medium and large organisations. Another potential technology that meets the simplicity and cost reduction objective- the use of Service Oriented Architecture in building business software applications, can be expected to move out of the familiarisation mode into robust implementation as vendors of solutions move from seminar mode to more active hand holding of projects in client organisations.
With the emergence of cloud computing becoming a surety for this decade, the opportunities to embrace innovative IT models like Software as a Service will be significant for all corporations seeking to embrace suppliers and vendors and other smaller partners within the fold of their IT applications. With the futility of owning all aspects of computing infrastructure becoming evident to all members of corporate management, the initial negative perceptions about security and privacy, leading to reluctance to move storage and applications to remote hosting will recede. Applications hosted on a public or private cloud will become the norm and the company eco-system of vendors and dealers accessing applications on a pay per use basis will encourage better adoption of world class IT applications even among the SME community. Microsoft has taken the lead with its solutions offerings in SME clusters like Tirupur, showing their commitment to the cause and all other enterprise software vendors run the risk of missing the bus if they are unable to offer solutions to this vital segment of the market.
Finally, it does not take a soothsayer to predict that like the rise in 2008 did not scale the heights that were promised and the fall in 2009 did not quite plunge any industry sector into an abyss, the revival of 2010 is not going to justify the irrational exuberance that pervaded the country at the beginning of January. While the results of the IT sector and some of the leading business groups may have given cause for cheer, the weak results of L&T and ICICI Bank both bell weathers for the economic fundamentals of the country, have shown that the revival will be slow though it will definitely bring cause for cheer to most companies. If IT plays its role in enabling change to happen in corporate India, all of us in the industry can expect to do an Aamir Khan and say “all is well” !
   
Back