Now we are into 2013, we cannot resist the temptation of keeping the crystal ball rolling. That the dictum ‘Change is constant’ fits aptly in the case of technology. But there are some technologies just don't go out of style.
Trying to separate human life from technology is tantamount to thinking the unthinkable. As a matter of fact, human life and technology are as intertwined as Siamese twins. Hence, constant technology upgradation is the natural corollary.
Technolgy upgradation is something of an absolute must for finding out how to reduce the overall IT delivery cost. Against the backdrop of not-so-good-times on the economic front, there is an urgent need to address the challenge of minimizing the overall maintenance costs while at the same time providing enhanced service levels with increased number of users remains the task.
To arrive at 2013's top technology trends, VARINDIA spoke to some of the analysts, and backed up their forecast by talking to value-added resellers. We also spoke with the vendors and other stakeholders serving the channel community.
Virtualization, security and storage are the trends at the infrastructure side while mobility and internet applications are user facing (though security is important at both ends).
The Changing Role of IT organization
Today, there is a fundamental structural shift happening in the way we work. Compared to the old PC era wherein companies locked down computers allowing employees to only use monolithic products through a wired network in an office environment, today’s workers are driving change because of the empowerment they’re getting from powerful consumer devices and self-service cloud applications. So in effect, the set of assumption for IT has now been turned on its head and IT must get into service delivery. The role of IT has now transformed to respond to and for the way people need to consume “it” – the services, apps, data and information. In order to solve this problem, the only thing that will work is a holistic solution with many piece parts working together well, seamlessly to solve the problem.
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| Sunil Dutt, Managing Director Research In Motion, India | Rothin Bhattacharya, EVP - Marketing, Strategy, Business Development, HCL Infosystems | Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India subcontinent, Citrix | Ashwani Tikoo, CIO CSC India |
Sanjay Deshmukh, Area Vice President, India subcontinent, Citrix, says, “You can’t just solve a single-sign-on problem or a mobile device problem as an island. These narrowly defined problems are now being stacked on top of each other and are much more interrelated and need to be solved inter-relatedly. The other way in which the role of an IT organization has changed is that they need to think of themselves as "internal service providers" - and having to "compete" against commercially-available apps/products. The "IT-as-a-Service" trend extends to service-providers, who are able to provide Windows and Desktops more efficiently than the IT organization itself – and IT shops are compelled to source desktops from outside their walls. IT's security/control/compliance models shift from the "locked-down" device, to the virtually-issued and controlled device.”
Cloud Computing
As the dust settles down on cloud computing, service integration and brokerage of processes that leverage cloud services will be a key trend to watch out for in the future.
“In the enterprise space Cloud Computing will evolve further as companies and even the government will turn to cloud computing for better data management and at optimum costs,” says Rothin Bhattacharya, EVP - Marketing, Strategy, Business Development, HCL Infosystems.
Cloud Computing has emerged as an IT service that businesses, both enterprises and SMBs, have already adopted or are in the process of evaluating its adoption.
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| Amitava Lahiri, Senior V.P - IT Services Prithvi Information Solutions Ltd. | Ambarish Deshpande, M.D-India Sales Blue Coat | Syed Asim, COO - India South Asia, MEA Dion Global Solutions | Vishak Raman, Sr. Regional Director India & SAARC, Fortinet |
Rothin Bhattacharya, EVP - Marketing, Strategy, Business Development, HCL Infosystems, shares the same sentiments when he says, "In the enterprise space Cloud Computing will evolve further as companies and even the government will turn to cloud computing for better data management and at optimum costs."
"We believe among the emerging technologies, Cloud computing is no longer in the 'testing the waters' stage. It has moved well and truly into production," says Ashwani Tikoo, CIO, CSC India.
MOBILITY
For those in the mobile industry, 2012 has been a year when there has been a lot to celebrate and an equal amount to be concerned about . Restrictions and regulations are growing. “As we all know, that can cut both ways: too much regulation and we might see constraints on growth. For us in the mobile device business, it is time to re-imagine everything, thanks to the spurt in smartphone adoption, the increasing use of tablets and the growing comfort levels with technologies such as cloud that are making it easy for consumers to access their data from anywhere at any time at seriously low costs,” says Sunil Dutt, Managing Director, Research In Motion India.
Year 2013 will witness colossal strides of innovation in the field of mobile devices where we will continue to witness powerful yet efficient processors clubbed with technologies such as NFC, 4G, and of course applications. In the coming years, the hardware of these mobile devices has to keep pace with the giant shift taken in the software segment and thus we can expect to see superior and more refined specifications in mobile devices in the future. In the recent past, the war in the OS market has been heating up and in 2013 the mobile industry is expected to climb onto the next phase of evolution, i.e, Mobile Computing. It is a revolutionary phenomenon which is going to redefine the mobile industry.
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| K P Unnikrishnan, Marketing Director, APAC Brocade Communications | Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO eScan | Manu Bansal, V.P , Advanced Technology, Channels, Cisco India | Pradeep Doshi, Director - Sales Top Notch Infotronix India Pvt. |
India, as a mobile market in 2013, is going to be in the midst of all the action. In fact, the lead indicators of what 2013 holds are before us: There are just 27 million smartphone urban users in India - which is barely 9 percent of total mobile phone users. This means there is a massive room for growth in smartphone adoption in India and we have barely seen the tip of the smartphone frenzy. This pent-up demand will drive amazing innovation in markets such as India and rest of the world will stand to benefit from it. Access to better networks is also fuelling the growth of mobile devices. Year-on-year 3G subscriber growth in India is 841 percent (China 115 percent, U.S. was 31 percent, the UK 25 percent and Japan 9 percent in comparison).
“Mobility continues to drive innovation and is becoming all pervasive when it comes to usage across industry verticals. All these three areas are some of the trends that we will be focusing on over the next 12-18 months,” says Bala Variyam, Vice President - Collabera Labs.
Mobile devices continue to outgrow PCs as preferred primary computing devices. According to Gartner, by 2016, at least 50% of enterprise email users will rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client, instead of a desktop client.
This new mobile environment means higher security risks, as inherently unsecured mobile devices carry increasingly more business-critical information. Applications are playing a key role, offering more capabilities. While the opportunities mobile presents are significant and mobile has become an enterprise requirement, there are a number of challenges clients face like compliance with corporate policy, development and deployment of mobile applications with secure connectivity to corporate infrastructure.
“Mobile instruments are improving their capabilities at a rapid speed and this will definitely accelerate the productivity of large enterprises, especially for people on the go, be it management, sales or operations. We can see the desktops being gradually replaced by high-end tablets and mobile devices,” Amitava Lahiri, SVP IT Services, Prithvi Information Solutions Ltd.
“At Blue Coat, our core mission has always been to enable customers to fully embrace the new technologies that evolve how businesses do business without compromising security or network performance,” says Ambarish Deshpande, Managing Director-India Sales, Blue Coat.
Mobile technology is a huge area that is still highly under-utilized in India. Mobile phones have reached nearly every household in India, which opens a huge new market for mobile applications.
Syed Asim, COO – India South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Dion Global Solutions, says, "With smart phones and androids being a huge success in the Indian market, we see a rapid increase in intelligent applications that will give consumers the real power of mobility."
The purview and definition of mobility will undergo a change as organizations will now need to consider how they will deliver all these apps to any user at any time regardless of the device,” says Sanjay of Citrix. Mobility will not be just about user mobility but app mobility and moving apps around from datacenter to datacenter to cloud. An application may be delivered from two different locations to a user that could be anywhere. In the context of these newer realities, mobility won’t really be about the device that enables it but being able to do what we want, where we want and when we want.
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| Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist Zoho | Bala Variyam, Vice President Collabera Labs |
BYOD
The move by IT to allow BYOD by employees hits mainstream; the corporate-issued laptop begins to become a bygone piece of equipment. IT realizes that it's able to control devices remotely through virtualization while simultaneously allowing individuals to use the devices that make them happiest and most productive.
As businesses are in the process of allowing employees to bring their personally owned computers, smartphones, and table ts into the workplace and access corporate applications, the popularity of BYOD is increasing fats. This will allow application availability at anytime, from anywhere, and will help business slash procurement costs. K P Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director of Brocade Communications says, "The smartphone/tablet phenomenon will fuel this trend, and will drive uptake of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), wireless networking and end-point security solutions in the corporate arena.
However, the increasing popularity of these devices will create several problems for IT departments as they attempt to mitigate risk, and this signals a tough future for PC and laptop manufacturers. When it comes to BYOD, one of the most overriding threats is the loss and theft of these devices.
Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, India & SAARC, Fortinet says, "BYOD provides a variety of advantages to organizations, ranging from improved productivity to increased ROI for IT departments. However, a BYOD environment also lacks many of the traditional security controls that organizations have relied on to secure their data, leaving gaps in their data and device protection strategy."
Unnikrishnan adds, "This year, I believe we will see at least one high profile security disaster as a result of this trend, and that will be act as a wake-up call for companies to get proper security processes in place before unlocking their networks to all and sundry."
In order to address the balance between usability and security, organizations are taking a variety of steps. While some draconian approaches (such as denying all personal devices on the corporate network) might be warranted for extremely secure organizations, most organizations want to adopt a BYOD policy that offers some flexibility for users while enforcing corporate policies and adopting best practices.
Apart from the vulnerability of the devices, the sensitive company data residing on these devices is also at risk. Here, encryption software and mobile device management (MDM) systems can play a part in mitigating risks. MDM has become synonymous with mobile security. However, MDM is not a complete solution to BYOD challenges as it does not provide a complete security solution. MDM does provide an expanded level of policy enforcement that is not enabled by default.
With BYOD comes Bring Your Own Applications where many employees are now downloading Apps within the organization. As a result IT Administrators are losing control of what tools and applications are used inside the Enterprise and business users (often lacking in an understanding of the potential security risks these applications can pose) are becoming their own system administrators. “There are many examples of Apps that transmit information with no security, Apps that leak sensitive information, through to Apps that are malicious and place the user and the information at risk,” opines Jagdish Mahapatra, Managing Director, McAfee India & SAARC.
Virtualisation
With the passage of time virtualization is all set to play a bigger role as IT organizations morph into more and more of a services management framework. Many companies are quickly realizing the value in moving to virtualisation.
Virtualization has been commoditizated. Fast becoming a natural way of doing business, today it is less about the process and more about the business enablement of what virtualization allows the clients to do that they couldn’t do before.
Virtualization facilitates consolidation of infrastructure and hardware by replacing physical servers with virtual machines, and by combining applications on virtual servers. Hence, it leads to reduced space and cost of IT infrastructure. Over the years, there have been many security concerns within a virtual environment. "Many incorrectly believe that just because the environment is virtual, it must be inherently secure. However, the fact is that virtual environment for the most part suffers from the same security concerns as does the physical environment," says Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan.
Social Media
Adaptation of social media platforms continuously introduces an additional set of vulnerabilities towards the consumer segment. Also, when many technology trends and technologies combine, they have a much greater impact. Hence, implementing the right security needs at such situations become a complicated task.
With smart phones and androids being a huge success in the Indian market, we see a rapid increase in intelligent applications that will give consumers the real power of mobility, Syed Asim, COO - India South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Dion Global Solutions
"Taking this into consideration, we, at eScan, are focusing on security solutions that are well integrated and provide a comprehensive layer of security from evolving cyber security threats to the IT users," says Rammurthy of eScan.
Overall IT Market
With the announcement of some big-ticket reforms by the Government, economy is all set to gain momentum which has slowed down in the past years due to the policy paralysis on the part of government. However, the Indian information technology sector continues to be one of the sunshine sectors of the Indian economy showing rapid growth and promise. The coming period is expected to be the year when business revenues and market share will return or exceed levels.
Some positive signs are emerging these months and the market is certainly stabilized to an extent. Considering the low PC penetration in our country, we expect that it will only grow, fuelled by the SMB, Education, Govt and BFSI buying.
Manu Bansal, Vice President, Advanced Technology, Channels, Cisco India, says, "India is a key growth market and factors like increasing mobile, PC and internet penetration, need for connectivity, social networking, rapid urbanization, entrepreneurship, etc are pushing sales for Cisco in India." Cisco strongly believes in India's growth story and "strengthening our market position in such high-growth markets is an integral part of global strategy to achieve the targeted growth. Going forward, I believe that Tier II and upcountry markets will offer a lot of opportunities and we are looking to increase our focus and presence."
IT is something which would never lose its importance. In fact, it is going to gain more and more significance in the near future as the dependency on IT will increase. As technology has become an integral part of our daily life and business, all the small and big firms are embracing technology for making their operations run better. One major reason that today all the companies are adopting IT is because it helps them in increasing efficiency in their organization, gain scalability and provide resilience to their operations.
"Things have not been very good in this year due to multiple reasons for peripherals industry. But on the bright side these tough times gives us chance to think differently and evolve in new directions," says Pradeep Doshi (Director Sales, Topnotch Infotronix), Top Notch Infotronix India Pvt.
According to Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelis t, Zoho, "Tough economic conditions also provide opportunity. Companies that survive during challenging times will prosper when economic conditions improve. We have seen this in the past."
Finally...
Internet and electronic communication have grown manifold before even we could understand the challenges that it could pose. Identity thefts, data security and integrity are some of the important challenges faced in the electronic world." Other than banking transactions, where to an extent there is an awareness to wrap the electronic records with security tools, there is really no awareness of the exposure that the electronic records are subjected to," says Kalaivani Chittaranjan, ED & CEO, eMudhra Consumer Services Ltd.
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