India's IT Market is set to grow at around 15.5% in 2010, with the market expected to return to a “new normal” after last year’s turbulent economic environment. Recovery will be supported by financial stability, investor confidence, government initiatives and a shift towards a competitive and customer-oriented market structure.
Enterprises have also noticeably shifted their IT spending focus from investments to streamlining costs and improving internal efficiencies. With the CIOs primarily focused on allocating around 75% of their budgets to “keep the lights on,” there is great interest in cost-cutting measures.
Data center transformations, IT manageability advancements, SaaS and virtualization investments are also helping companies drive “economies of scale” by reducing operational expenditures, both from the business and IT perspective, while increasing productivity.
Below are the top 10 trends most likely to shape the Indian IT market this year.
- Business enhancement with existing vendors - and geographic expansion - will drive a strong focus from India’s IT community.
- Analytics and the advent of ‘intelligent solutions’ will create new business value.
- IT solutions will make steady headway in rural India, as a result of strong public and private sector investments.
- Business leaders will drive the proliferation of SaaS applications.
- A wave of innovative new payment technologies will emerge.
- Desktop Virtualization will gain more acceptance in the enterprise.
- Government projects will fuel smart card technologies.
- Mobile social networking will hit the mainstream.
- The convergence of computing platforms will accelerate.
- Online developer platforms and communities will become the new ecosystem battleground, as well as the epicenter of application innovation.
Manish Bahl is a Research Manager at Springboard Research