Technologies Trending Today

Change is constant. This is most true when it comes to technology. However, some technologies just don't go out of style. 

You can separate human life from technology. You may be thinking the unthinkable. They are as intertwined as Siamese twins. Ergo, constant technology upgradation is the natural course of action. 

Technolgy upgradation is something of an absolute must for finding out how to reduce the overall IT delivery cost.  Against the backdrop of economic uncertainties, 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. 

Today various measures are being taken by those at the helm of affairs in the IT departments of organisations. Stress on building private clouds is being given. With the acquisition of thin clients, you can expect reduction in electricity, cooling, support and reduction in PC acquisition costs. This will result in reduction of overall hard disk space and memory investment cost. The enterprises are centralising and optimizing usage across all users from servers and centralised storage. This has lead to the reduction of refresh cost for hardware thereby enhancing the life of the asset. 

As security becomes foolproof, we will witness an spurt in the announcements of bring -your-own-device (BYOD) policy by the organisations. 

On the 13th Anniversary of VARIndia we take this opportunity to look at the technologies and trends that have already been the topic of much discussion and debate in bygone months of 2012. We will also consider the trends that will have potential impact in coming months of the current year and beyond.

It is no surprise, cloud computing is already marking a larger footprint in 2012 and will continue to do so in future. Cloud computing provides cost-cutting services that are immensely appealing to SMBs. Other technologies in the list are virtualisation, data security, storage, VoIP. According to estimates, the total cloud market in India is expected to reach USD 4.5 billion( Rs.21,600 crore) by 2015,of which private cloud adoption will dominate for USD 3.5 billion in revenue, growing at over 60 percent.

Dharanibalan Executive, Offerings Management & Development, Global Technology Services, IBM, India/South Asia	Faisal Paul Head, Marketing and Solution Alliances, Enterprise Group, HP India	Vineet Fogat Country Manager Epicor India	K P Unnikrishnan APAC Marketing Director Brocade Communications

Cloud Computing

It can be said without a shadow of doubt that transition of cloud computing from being the latest industry buzz word to an accepted operational expenditure is nearing completion. Cloud has emerged as an IT service that businesses, both enterprises and SMBs, have already adopted or are in the process of evaluating its adoption. 

Umang Bedi, Managing Director - South Asia, Adobe Systems, says,"Everyone is talking about the cloud technology. Everybody expects access to data anytime, anywhere and this will be enabled via the cloud."

Pratik Chube, Country General Manager, Products and Marketing, Emerson Network Power in India, sees greater opportunity in cloud. He says, "Cloud Computing would be the key driver to optimise datacenter spending and more customers would opt for the Cloud as a faster and cheaper option to migrate to an 'IT enabled' enabled ecosystem." 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.

Pradeep Doshi (Director Sales, Topnotch Infotronix)Top Notch Infotronix India Pvt.	Vishal Dhupar Managing Director Asia - South, NVIDIA	Pratik Chube Country General Manager, Products and Marketing Emerson Network Power in India	Rajeev Karwal Founder & CEO, Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions,

Managed Services 

Enterprises are putting stock in managed services as a cost-effective means of dealing with their IT concerns. Notwithstanding the divergence of opinions on the managed services market in India, one thing is quite certain. The future of managed services looks bright. It is being well received in India. Indian market presents a huge opportunity for managed services.

For Managed service there is a huge market potential and will continue to increase as more and more companies are looking forward to streamlining their operations and are starting to hire and refocus their energy on making this a profitable year. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance organizations remain the largest contributors to the managed IT service m arket with a share of 28.2%, followed by the manufacturing and government verticals," says Dharanibalan, Executive, Offerings Management & Development, Global Technology Services, IBM, India/South Asia. 

ERP

Once considered an expensive proposition ERP is witnessing adoption among the SMEs. The ERP market in India is very lucrative and is growing everyday by leaps and bounds. According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, the ERP market in India is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 19.2% to reach somewhere near $ 184.7 million by 2013. Organisations of all sizes - Big, Small and Medium are investing in ERP software in order to turn around their mission critical business processes and prepare themselves for the next level of growth. 

Vineet Fogat, Country Manager - Epicor India, is of the opinion that cloud computing, an improved social and user friendly experience, and application mobility, will be some of the main drivers behind ERP over the next year or so.

"New ways of delivery and better technology has enabled us to offer simple, powerful, easy and less expensive solutions that can handle complex business situations for large & small businesses. Most SMEs are increasingly adopting SaaS for ERP deployment, " says Manikandan E, Regional Manager, Ramco Systems Limited. 

"The right ERP has a big part to play in confronting the complexity challenge with solutions that facilitate better, faster decision making, support an increasingly mobile workforce and equip manufacturers with business agility rather than rigidity, and this is driving demand for ERP," says Souma Das, Sales VP and Managing Director for India, Infor.  

Umang Bedi Managing Director South Asia, Adobe Systems	Govind Rammurthy MD & CEO eScan	Vishak Raman Senior Regional Director Fortinet India & SAARC, Fortinet	Manikandan E Regional Manager Ramco Systems Limited

Big Data 

Big data refers to huge amounts of data, hundreds of terabytes, even petabytes-1,000 TB equal 1 PB-of information. The Big Data market is exploding, not only in terms of marketing hype but also in real revenue.  While its definition and overall market size may be in the realm of debate, this is for certain - Big Data is the new definitive source of competitive advantage across all industries.   

Even for an industry prone to hype, the buzz surrounding Big Data is, indeed, sky-high. The vendors are reinventing their technology strategies with Big Data offerings. 

Kapil Sood, Vice President, Systems Business, Oracle India, says, "Big Data implementations have just begun rolling out globally with Indian firms in the consideration phase. In a globalized economy, Big Data possess strong growth potential worldwide including the Indian market which will match steps with other countries in adopting Big Data for driving business". He adds, "Oracle plays an important role in the Big Data market with its end-to-end solutions to address the full spectrum of enterprise Big Data requirements. In fact recently, in continuation with our strategy to deliver pre-integrated, pre-tested engineered systems for data management requirements, we have introduced a new engineered system - Oracle Big Data Appliance." 

Business Intelligence

Today, the term "Business Intelligence" and its acronym "BI" are ubiquitous. To put simply, Business Intelligence provides the right information to the right person in the right format at the right time. Also, the popularity of self-service business intelligence tools will continue to increase in 2012. Mobile BI and SaaS-based BI are also expected to grow steadily.

Subashini Ramakrishnan Chief Technology ManagerDax Networks	Amitava Lahiri SVP IT Services Prithvi Information Solutions Ltd	S. Rajendran Chief Marketing Officer Acer India	Manu Bansal VP, Advanced Technology, Channels, Cisco India

Virtualisation

Anyone giving you a list of top technologies and trends for the next 12 month, Virtualisation has to be in the list. Virtualization is no more just market buzz. It is a reality now. 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. 

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. 

According to Faisal Paul, Head, Marketing and Solution Alliances, Enterprise Group, HP India, "Virtualization was once seen as an efficiency tool and a way to save on hardware expenses. Virtualization today, however, plays a key role in a Converged Infrastructure environment. With virtualization, organizations can begin to transform their Data Center by focusing resources when and where they are needed most. It is estimated that virtualization can dramatically increase hardware utilization rates from 10 or 15% to 70 or 80 %."

Storage

The storage market opportunity, particularly in the SMB and SOHO space, is strong. Every business, big-or small, is continually expanding that calls for huge data backup and storage.

We never had enough storage, and that trend will continue. Look for the 2TB SATA drive to rule the market and cloud to rearrange, but not reduce, many current storage plans 

The importance of storage is growing. Stakes for SMBs are high in storage. With the exponential growth of data, there's still a need to secure data but there's also a demand for data to be shared so that remote workers, partners, customers and even mobile applications have several access points, anytime, anywhere.  

Ashwani Tikoo CIO CSC India	Syed Asim COO - India South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Dion Global Solutions	Rajesh Goenka VP - Sales and Marketing, Rashi Peripherals Pvt. Ltd.,	Kartik Shahani Country Manager RSA India & SAARC

Security 

Security is usually viewed as an overhead function. Hence, it's always about how to do more with less and still protect the data. Since enforcement of regulators is increasing, the SMEs have to start paying attention. The need for security is growing faster than the number of people being educated.

The bad guys won't stop, and neither will those trying to protect us. Large companies will focus on refresh only, but smaller companies face increasing regulations and will be forced to upgrade. While the battle rages on, security tools and experts are becoming more affordable.

Instant connectivity, IT consumerization, user mobility and cloud computing are all trends driving continuous evolution of the enterprise environment. Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, Fortinet India & SAARC, Fortinet, is right when he says,  "To support that new environment while protecting it, organizations must address a new security landscape in which threat penetration points proliferate, traffic gets undistinguishable, bandwidth demand increases and management issues multiply."

He adds, "In parallel, organizations must also keep up with ever-evolving threats. Increased targeted attacks such as advanced persistent threats (APTs), the rise of insider threats, leveraging social engineering and social networking, the emergence of mobile botnets, and an easier access to crimeware tools and providers, all pose new security challenges."

Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, RSA India & SAARC, says "The attacks are complex, sophisticated and focused on a specific information. The information gathered from multiple sources would be used for the attack." He adds, "Behaviour-based technology, real-time monitoring of activities, forensics will gain more prominence in the coming year given the threat landscape.  

"Surveillance & Security today is a fundamental requirement for every establishment. Security systems must not only help detect and facilitate swift action, but also help design and plan a proactive strategy against future threats," says Subashini Ramakrishnan, Chief Technology Manager, Dax Networks. 

Channel partner community

Relationship between vendors and channel partners is likely to reach another level. Vendors are raising the bar in terms of their expectations for partners. Same is true of the channel partners. 

Having more certifications and training as well as higher levels of commitment are being expected of partners. Partners, on the other hand, expect greater commitment in the form of more market development funds, training, and joint marketing and sales efforts. 

Jim Simon Quantum's Director of Marketing for APAC	Kapil Sood VP, Systems Business Oracle India	Kunwer Sachdev Managing Director Su-Kam Power Systems	Vinay Rane VP Manufacturing, Smartlink Network Systems Ltd

Tablet PCs

Until a couple of years ago, tablets were on the agenda of very few. They were finding their use mainly in a handful of business applications like package delivery, warehouses and hospitals. But in a span of two years then scene has undergone a sea change. With the advent of iPad, the landscape has changed drastically and tablets like the iPad are now much sought-after commodity. 

According to Rajeev Karwal, Founder & CEO, Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions, by 2015 60 percent of the Tablets will have Android.  Given Apple's domination of the market, vendors will have to sweat it out to gain significant market share. A fair share of tablet sales will continue to be direct from supplier to service provider and then to the end user.

Unified Communications

A great deal of the popular phone systems were designed before the advent of Internet and Voice over IP (VoIP) matured. As the older system needs to be replaced, the first choice of the resellers and their clients is VoIP. Internet-enabled phone system may finally make Unified Communications a reality we have been promised for years.

Today's business environment makes Unified communications technology an essential proposition because it works as a lifeline between business and its customers, vendors and partners.

SMEs have their own share of resource-related challenges, especially when it comes to money and talent. It is also a known fact that SMEs place high priority on simplicity. And this simplicity is more than visible when it comes to the realm of communications. 

With the expansion of Unified Communications from the enterprise space into mid-level and smaller organizations, a growing number of SMEs are gradually exploring how Unified Communications has the potential of increasing efficiency, productivity and sales.

Manufacturing

If we take the last two decades into account, we must come to the conclusion that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Today it is the cynosure of several companies and business firms. Already a software superpower, the country is steadily on its way to become a hardware manufacturing hub in due course of time. 

Smartlink Network Systems Ltd, is working proactively to increase the manufacturing activity. "We have three state of the art high speed SMT lines and wave soldering machines. Product Quality is assured through inspection equipment's such as X-ray machine, solder paste height measurement, electronic magnifier, incircuit testers, etc."says Vinay Rane, VP Manufacturing, Smartlink Network Systems Ltd. The company manufactures Networking products like Switches, Routers, Wireless Modem, VOIP products and various Motherboards. “Our manufacturing lines are set up with full fledged shop floor control systems for efficient processes, linking inbound & outbound supply chains to the Operations,” says Vinay. 

Kunwer Sachdev, Managing Director- Su-Kam Power Systems , says, "We understand the need of the customer whereby he looks forward to getting timely supplies which needs to be cost effective and of reliable quality, meeting his ever changing needs. We focus on innovativeness to churn out products having high-end technology at affordable prices and constantly evolving features."

Sachdev says, "In the manufacturing sector, where we produce a whole gamut of products like Inverters, transformers, batteries, OLU's and Solar products etc. the basic things we focus on are :

1.    Inclusive growth of all. For eg: Human resource to be treated as an asset, progression planning, training and holding-holding to become good leaders.

2.    Working on improving productivity, quality and reducing wastages in all spheres and areas.

3.    Creating a vibrant & dynamic work environment.

Networking

Most businesses in India are making huge investments in developing an efficient & secure networking infrastructure. As a matter of fact, the growth of wireless networking market in India is happening on two fronts– the Consumer/Home User and the Enterprise user. The factors that have contributed to the increased demand of wireless products in Enterprise segment are increased security, reliability & flexibility feature offered by wireless networking products. 

Video Conferencing 

Simplicity, the cloud, affordability and interoperability are leading to the increasing use of video conferencing systems by SMEs.

Adoption of videoconferencing systems by SMEs has increased. The reason is not far to seek. The advent of cloud computing is to a great extent responsible for this. According to analyst firm AMI-Partners, SMB web/videoconferencing is one of the fastest expanding components in the cloud, with a 20 percent compound annual growth rate.

And that's not surprising. Cloud-based services enable any videoconferencing unit, to connect with any other, without the need for investment in infrastructure. Instead, payment is handled with a per-call fee or monthly subscription. But the cloud is only part of the growth picture.

Server

As recession leads many organisations to do more with less, server virtualization is making forceful presence. Benefits that accrue to the Businesses thanks to the adoption of server virtaulisation are reduced space, increased utilization of resources, power and cooling, reducing the TCO and increasing the ROI of servers, improving IT agility and reducing provisioning time. 

Key drivers for server growth in India are the state run major Infrastructure projects (like APDRP, SDCs, etc) and technologies like server consolidation and virtualization. The industry verticals which offer huge opportunity are Telecom/BFSI, Government and SMEs.

Data Deduplication

Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan, sums up the data security ladndscape when he says, "In today's information technology landscape, data plays an important role. Hence, maintaining data integrity is always a major focus of all sizes of networks."  

When Data Deduplication came into picture, it was hailed as a new, promising technology. Today it has morphed into one that is proven and well-accepted.  Organizations are verring round to the view that Data Deduplication delivers on its promise and are now concentrating their attention on the overall results such as backup and restore performance (i.e. TB/hour), replication, and of course the cost of the total solution. With the growing adoption of data deduplication by the enterprise, SMBs have also started to implement it.  

"Now that data deduplication is well-accepted it has begun to be implemented in SMB solutions like Quantum's DXi4500 backup appliance," says Jim Simon, Quantum's Director of Marketing for APAC. 

BYOD' (Bring Your Own Device) 

The company PC is becoming a thing of the past, as businesses increasingly allow, and even encourage, employees to bring their domestic, consumer devices into the workplace and access corporate applications.  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, it will create many problems for IT departments as they attempt to mitigate risk, and signals a tough future for PC and laptop manufacturers." He 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."

MOBILITY

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.

Amitava Lahiri, SVP IT Services, Prithvi Information Solutions Ltd, says,"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. I will not be surprised if we see the desktops are gradually replaced by high-end tablets and mobile devices."

Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia - South, NVIDIA, says "With mobility bringing a paradigm shift in the IT realm, we're really excited about Tegra 3. Ushering in the era of quad-core processing in mobility with Tegra 3, NVIDIA brings PC-class performance levels, better battery life and improved mobile experiences to tablets and phones."

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, syas, "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." Asim adds, "We, at Dion, are working closely with our customers in the financial industry to bring one such power to mobile users - the power to trade from anywhere anytime. Through this application, end users can trade real time in multiple exchange segments and asset classes." 

Souma Das Sales VP and Managing Director for India, Infor	Kalaivani Chittaranjan ED & CEO ,eMudhra Consumer Services Ltd.

Overall IT Market

With the announcement if 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.

We are already seeing positive signs and the market is certainly on a growth mode. Considering the low PC penetration in our country, we expect that it will only grow, fuelled by the SMB, Education, Govt and BFSI buying. Moreover, with the onset of the festive season that will continue for another two months, we are confident that the retail market will witness a significant spurt in sales. There is also a huge buying potential in the smaller towns & cities during this season.  

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 Evangelist, 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.

Rajesh Goenka, Vice-President - Sales and Marketing, Rashi Peripherals Pvt. Ltd., sums up the whole landscape succinctly, "Tablet PC, Solid State Devices, All in One Desktop and Cloud computing are the key technologies/product category which will drive business throughout the year. Focus will be on improving work efficiency, power saving and ease of us will be the key."