Domestic IT Market: Beginning Of Phase 2.0

The DQ Channels SP Summit gave partners enough to think with sessions on
Green IT, Manpower Management, IPOs and funding. The sessions apart, partners
assembled at the SP summit also privy to a presentation on 'Domestic IT Market:
Beginning of Phase 2.0' by Kapil Dev Singh, Country Manager, IDC India.

Singh noted that the Indian market was the fastest growing in Asia-Pacific
and would grow further in the coming years. He indicated that the SMB was a big
driver of this growth and new products and go-to-market strategies would be
specifically designed to enable this growth in the days to come.

He further said that the channels had evolved over the years and have today
emerged to provide more value-added solutions than mere volume products.
Additionally, he felt that services was a big opportunity that partners to bank
on for growth in the future.

“The years 2007 and beyond will see a new phase of growth that would revolve
around the domestic market in hardware, software as well as services. Mobility
and convergence will be key trends while infrastructure management will be a
challenge. The consumer segment will see rapid growth along in the verticals of
retail, healthcare and many more,” Singh said.

“Concepts such digital homes will continue to grow and 'Growth phase 2.0' would be built on new technologies that would result out of a growing consumer demand for the same” Kapil Dev Singh, Country Manager, IDC India

Where you should be

Making IT responsive to the growing demands of reducing costs will be a huge
challenge in the coming months and IT vendors will need to align their products
and services to meet these new needs. There will be a greater focus on B and
C-class cities and SMBs will play a key role in growth across various market
verticals.

Singh (extreme left) noted that the Indian market was the fastest growing in Asia-Pacific and would grow further in the coming years

Concepts such digital homes will continue to grow and 'Growth phase 2.0'
would be built on new technologies that would result out of a growing consumer
demand for the same. This was what the IDC report had to share.

Singh also said that IDC India would soon be providing channel partners with
news­letters and advisory on issues related to backends, frontends as well as
people management. The newsletter would be called 'Channelyze' and IDC
specialists would offer partners with the much needed advise and consultation on
their various concerns.

Earlier this year, IDC had predicted that this year virtualization will
become mainstream in 2008 as it gains wide-scale adoption. Enterprises across
segments like IT/ITeS in India have been early adopters of consolidation and
virtuali­zation. IDC India estimates the share of virtualized servers to double
from the present 22 to 45 percent by 2008-end.

In addition to benefits like ease of management and better resource
utilization, enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of additional benefits
like design densities, power and cooling. Riding on the success of server
virtualization, storage virtualiza­tion is also coming of age in India. The
success stories of virtualization that have gained momentum are expected to have
a positive impact on other segments like manufacturing, BFSI and aviation during
2008.

IDC had also revealed that uptime, availability and performance management of
infrastructure and applications will be at the core of innovation. This in turn
will fuel the underlying shifts in the managed services delivery model.

In today's competitive business environment, the enterprises need to operate
at peak efficiency even as the complexity of operations grows. As this occurs,
managements are realizing that technology fundamentally underpins most, if not
all, of its business processes, and uptime and management is a key concern as
they strive to get more out of less.

Delivery mechanisms will witness significant change with both tier-1 and 2
managed services providers setting up more Network Operation Centers (NOCs) and
Security Operation Centers (SOCs) to adhere to stringent Quality of Service (QoS)
and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with initial response times being as low as
five minutes in case of a mission critical environment.

Managed services providers will drive the next level of innovation by
providing services delivery based on IT Services Management (ITSM) and IT
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks. These frameworks, coupled with the
reduction of onsite staff will help to cut costs and lead to optimization of
uptime, availa­bility and performance of enterprise IT infrastructure and
applications.

DQC News Bureau