Zinnov, a global market expansion and globalisation advisory firm, has identified top 10 trends dominating the Indian Domestic IT Market in 2014. According to the advisory firm, the growth in mobile internet users has been accelerated by the increasing penetration of smartphones, which is expected to reach about 150 million by 2015.
Further, enterprise mobility market is expected to grow from US$ 244 million in 2011 to US$ 1 billion by 2015. To capitalise on this growth, Indian enterprises are expected to derive operational and business advantages by making significant investments in telecom and IT.
Following are the Top 10 trends identified by Zinnov –
Achieving manufacturing excellence through technology adoption will be the primary force behind economic recovery: While the Indian services sector is increasingly focusing on hiring high-end skills (by and large), and the agriculture sector is relying on unskilled labour (at large), the growth of manufacturing sector and job creation of semi-skilled workforce will emerge as the primary force behind economic growth in the country in 2014.
Community networks will present massive unparalleled opportunity for technology companies: Large number of small and medium enterprises which exist as local-social physical communities will emerge as ?new category of target small and medium businesses (SMBs)? by large enterprises. Also, as the internet and mobile ecosystem evolves in the country, a number of technology centric opportunities are expected to emerge around web enablement, issue resolution, customer resource management and web advertisements etc in 2014.
UID will drive large scale technology adoption at the grass root levels: Registrations of Unique Identification Number (UID) are expected to reach 600 million by end of 2014. While large banks and telecom companies may only leverage it as another know your customer model, nimble players will leverage the ecosystem to deliver innovations such as card-less transactions, automating employee verification/tracking and e-health (remote diagnosis and disease management). This will drive large scale technology adoption at the grassroots level as well.
e-health and e-education will emerge as the two big categories after e-commerce: Internet user base in India has reached over 200 million in 2013. This growth has also given a fillip to delivery of services such as education, health, banking, etc. over internet. Online delivery of education can help deliver more value owing to lower set-up and operational costs. Initiatives such as low cost tablets, National Knowledge Network (program to connect over 30,000 colleges) and platforms such as Edcomp?s virtual studios, Tutorvista, etc are expected to increasingly digitise education delivery. Similarly in the healthcare space, lack of hospitals and medical staff is creating market for e-medicine in India.
Discovery and hyper local visibility related technology solutions will be the primary focus of Indian SMBs: As only 500,000-700,000 out of the 10 million technologically addressable SMBs have websites, digital discovery solutions particularly in the exponentially growing mobility realm would become a priority for SMBs. With Google changing its smartphone search algorithm in order to promote mobile-friendly websites, there would be potentially a huge market of making existing websites mobile-ready. Early signals of hyper local discovery engines are already emerging and present huge potential in 2014.
Enterprise Mobility will take a large share of transformational IT focus of Indian enterprises: Enterprises are looking at using telecom and IT tools to bring in better operational and process efficiencies, open up new business opportunities and for providing better customer service through a connected and agile workforce in 2014.
Konntected Network of Things (KNoT) as an evolving concept of traditional Internet of Things (IOT): KNoT has a wider scope, including the machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction over a local network, going beyond the dependence on internet. KNoT technologies are getting popular and it is estimated that over the next decade, these technologies are expected to generate revenue over US$ 10 trillion with more than 30 billion connected devices.
India to become the second largest technology start-up ecosystem in the world: Over the last two years, 20 plus privately run accelerators and funding groups have been launched with most of them supporting 5-10 start-ups annually on an average. With a large numbers of stakeholders coming forward in support of the start-ups, India is well-positioned to experience a new age for technology entrepreneurs.
Localised marketing will play an important role in driving technology adoption in India: The evolution of the US$ 32 billion domestic IT market in India is contributing to the emergence of newer marketing themes. The marketing organisations of large technology companies are increasingly being challenged to innovate on marketing messages and themes which are relevant to the market evolution in India.
Social media will drive significant monetisation opportunities in 2014: Social media in India accounts for 25 per cent of total online minutes and 83 per cent of India?s online population uses Facebook. A large number of organisations have already started measuring the impact of social media led marketing efforts through leads, sentiment, and brand visibility etc consequently attributing significant revenue uplift to social media efforts. In 2014, businesses will leverage social media to acquire customers directly, spread awareness through existing customer recommendations and direct referral traffic to existing web properties even with potentially limited marketing budgets.
