IT spending in India is projected to total USD 79.8 billion in
2012, a 9.1 percent increase from 2011 spending of USD 73.1
billion, according to Gartner, Inc. Despite global economic
challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT.
India is the ninth-largest economy in the world, and the pace of
economic growth in India — with a mild (by global standards)
dip during the worldwide recession in late 2008 and 2009 —
has brought the role of IT into sharp focus within many
enterprises.
India like other emerging markets continues exercising strong
momentum despite inflationary pressures and appreciation of local
currencies, which are expected in rising economies. Gartner's
forecast shows that worldwide IT spending will reach nearly USD 3.7
trillion in 2011. From this amount, emerging economies will account
for USD 1.013 trillion.
Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head
of Research, provided the latest outlook for the IT industry today
to an audience of more than 700 CIOs and IT leaders at Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through November
23.
“Businesses are increasingly looking to IT to help support
the challenges of enhancing customer support, supply chain
management, optimizing business processes or helping drive
innovation in the business,” Sondergaard said. “These
demands are being placed on IT in an environment in which the
infrastructure (hardware and software) foundation of IT within many
enterprises may not be entirely in place. IT is also in transition
from being viewed as a back-office support function to a frontline
business-focused function.”
The telecommunications market is the largest IT segment in India
with IT spending forecast to reach USD 54.7 billion in 2012,
followed by the IT services market with spending of USD 11.1
billion. The computing hardware market in India is projected to
reach USD 10.7 billion in 2012, and software spending will total
USD 3.2 billion.
“The days when IT was the passive observer of the world are
over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by
IT,” Sondergaard said. “IT is a primary driver of
business growth. For example, this year 350 companies will each
invest more than USD 1 billion in IT. They are doing this because
IT impacts their business performance.”
Sondergaard said two-thirds of CEOs believe IT will make a
greater contribution to their industry in the next 10 years than
any prior decades.
“For the IT leader to thrive in this environment, IT
leaders must lead from the front and re-imagine IT,” said
Partha Iyengar, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner
and head of research in India. “IT leaders must embrace the
post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships,
fueled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and
mobility.”
This new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces. They
include: the cloud, social, mobility, and an explosion in
information.
“These forces are innovative and disruptive just taken on
their own, but brought together, they are revolutionizing business
and society,” Sondergaard said. “This nexus defines the
next age of computing. To understand this change, you must
appreciate each of the forces.”
The Cloud. The cloud combines the
industrialization of IT capabilities and the disruptive impact of
new IT-led business models. However, the shift away from
traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still
in the very early stages. For example, Gartner estimates that while
USD 74 billion was spent on public cloud services in 2010 that only
represented 3 percent of enterprise spending. But, public cloud
services will grow five times faster than overall IT enterprise
spending (19 percent annually through 2015).
“What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what
cloud computing is doing to in-house data centers. It is allowing
people to optimize around where they have differentiated
capabilities,” Sondergaard said.
Social. The next stage of social computing is
about mass-customer, mass-citizen, and mass-employee involvement
with enterprise systems.
“With 1.2 billion people on social networks, 20 percent of
the world’s population, social computing is in its next
phase,” Sondergaard said. “IT leaders must immediately
incorporate social software capabilities throughout their
enterprise systems.”
Information. The concept of one enterprise data
warehouse containing all information needed for decisions is dead.
Multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses,
data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data
services and metadata, will become the “logical”
enterprise data warehouse.
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics
is the combustion engine,” Sondergaard said. “Pursuing
this strategically will create an unprecedented amount of
information of enormous variety and complexity. This is leading to
a change in data management strategies known as big data. This
creates what we call a Pattern-Based Strategy architecture. An
architecture that seeks signals, models them for their impact, and
then adapt to the business process of the organization.
Mobile. The shift to mobile is almost overtaking
many IT organizations who can’t move fast enough to catch up.
Mobile is not a coming trend. It has already happened. In 2010, the
installed base of mobile PCs and smartphones exceeded that of
desktop PCs.
Less than 20 million media tablets, such as the iPad, were sold
in 2010, but by 2016, 900 million media tablets will be purchased
– one for every eight people on earth. By 2014, the installed
base of devices based on lightweight mobile operating systems, such
as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s
Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based
systems.
“That’s incredible change, not only for individuals.
It requires IT to re-imagine the way it provides
applications,” Sondergaard said. “By 2014, private app
stores will be deployed by 60 percent of IT organizations. The
applications themselves will be redesigned – they will become
context-enabled, understanding the user’s intent
automatically. Mobile computing is not just the desktop on a
handheld device. The future of mobile computing is context-aware
computing.”
Cloud, social, information and mobile, combined the new nexus.
Where data centers will give way to data clouds, mobile devices
become windows into personal clouds. Personal computing will become
massive collaborative computing, and information technologies will
be overshadowed by information ecologies.
“The impact of these forces will make architectures of the
last 20 years obsolete,” Sondergaard said. “Together,
they force the issue – they drive us to create the
post-modern business, drive simplicity and force creative
destruction.”
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