Cisco has the largest engineering footprint in India outside the US

Cisco now wants to focus on the whole application space, modernisation, infrastructure and cyber security in India, says, Daisy Chittilapilly, President, Cisco India & SAARC. Having led the digital transformation vertical of the company, Chittilapilly had closely witnessed the quick evolution and adoption of IT solutions in the country across various industries and sectors in the last two years.

In India, the company now wants to focus on the whole application space, modernisation, infrastructure, cyber security and hybrid experiences space.

Covid has essentially turned India into a living lab, probably one of the largest living labs all around the world, running huge pilots in how to do e-education, e-healthcare, how to take what was previously physical programs of the government now completely online, how to make us shop more than we always shopped online, how to take medical appointments, financial transactions online.

Whether us as a consumer, me as an employee in a business or me as a citizen, interacting with the government, there is so much that has been tested at scale in the last 24 months, since March 2020.

India is right now at 100 million digital transactions a day with ₹5-lakh crore value of transactions happening daily. As government takes more and more services online, public sector spending in ICT (information and communications technology) is expected to clock about $8 billion in the next year.

She further says, if you look at the National Digital Health Mission, they have already incorporated almost 3,000 hospitals and almost as many doctors and 14 crore digital health IDs have already been created and you can say we are sort of creating an Aadhaar equivalent on the health side.

That will then create an insurance ecosystem. Lots of numbers are also showing that this is a move, which is going to be permanent. It was a revolution for the last 21 months, but it is now becoming more of an evolution of the way we do things in the future.