Hello friends,
I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for extending support to VARIndia IT Forum 2009. VARIndia feels honoured to host many such groundbreaking conferences, wherein the best of brains from the industry and the government deliberate on forward-looking solutions to the current issues from the IT market standpoint.
One very good thing that has come out from the deliberations is that eGovernance can give way to mobile governance. This might be an indication of the government devising some innovative way to reach out to the people, but the industry is really ready for it.
If one looks at today’s PC market, netbooks are making a very good noise in the market. Today, almost all of the PC vendors have this product. Samsung, which had quit the PC business long back, has bounced back with a number of products in the notebook segment and in their scheme of things, netbooks feature very strongly. Similarly, Acer, HCL, HP, Lenovo, etc. are pretty aggressive in this segment.
The component vendors like MSI and Asus have launched netbooks based on Intel atom processor. nVidia has also joined the bandwagon, which is known for graphics cards. They have launched a netbook named as smartbook.
The industry predicts penetration of 8.5-9 million PCs in a year’s time in the country, but that is not exactly what one expects to happen in India. It should be many times more in proportion with the number of population and potential users. There has to be a price performance value proposition defined to the customers. The customers who are using mobile phones worth Rs.10,000 – Rs.30,000 without thinking about its utility, cannot they go for these netbooks? Yes, absolutely.
The industry pundits are also talking about the penetration of broadband. It can only be possible if the device is cheap and the value proposition is clear to them. Today, most of the students have access to the social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, etc. And, they are the users from all over the country – urban and semi-urban areas as well as rural areas. They are the people who can really drive sales of netbooks. Besides, there are captive users in enterprises.
Like the mobile revolution in the country, India has the potential to make it happen, and this will make a turnaround of the IT market.
Sanjay Mahapatra
Editor
