India has the potential to lead the world in the
nexus of social, mobile, cloud information but may waste the
opportunity, says Gartner
BANGALORE, INDIA: India has the potential to lead the
world in the adoption of nexus of forces, which is the convergence and
mutual reinforcement of social interaction, mobility, cloud and
information. However, for this to happen a number of technological and
socioeconomic shifts must happen, according to Gartner.
The manner in which IT is used, developed and managed will change
significantly, because of the nexus of forces, and the technologies that
sit behind them. These pivotal technologies include the explosive use
of media tablets, mobile applications, context-aware computing, the
Internet of things, next-generation analytics and in-memory computing
(IMC).
"However, for this to occur, new infrastructure will have to replace
the old; new types of servers, networks and even data centers will have
to be rolled out," said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at
Gartner. "A cash rich consumer base is required that is able to demand
and take advantage of social, mobile and context-aware applications.
Furthermore, established ways of behaving in education, shopping,
banking, etc., will have to morph to take advantage of new
technologies."
Transformation of this nature is expensive and time-consuming. The
economic, demographic and social outlook for western economies suggests
that, for the next few years, such changes will be difficult to achieve.
At first glance, India seems to be well-placed to embrace these changes
- it has virtually no legacy systems, billions of dollars are being
spent on developing new infrastructure, a wealthy, a well-educated
middle class hungry for change, and the country is pivotal in the
digital supply chain.
Therefore, Gartner analysts said the question of whether India will
be the first place to see the emergence of this new computing scenario
is important.
"Based on current forecasts, India will become one of the world's
biggest consumer economies during the next five years. India will have
more than 1 billion mobile subscribers by 2014. India will see a
significant roll-out of new IT infrastructure during the next five years
in both the public and private sectors," said Kumar.
Given the economic and demographic statistics, the improving levels
of literacy and the large consumer base, India should be ideally
positioned to take advantage of the Nexus of Forces. Entrepreneurs in
region, such as Bangalore and Mumbai, should be able to create products
that link these technologies together.
"While there are significant opportunities in India to lead in the
Nexus of Forces, contrary forces are also at play. The uptake of social
media remains quite low. There is a degree of ambivalence toward the use
of social media for marketing by Indian retailers," said Kumar.
"Although
it's easy to see how social media could grow rapidly during the next
few years, privacy concerns and the cultural fabric of the country may
suggest otherwise. Indians are, by nature, private people, focusing more
family than on other, large social groups. If the use of social media
does not reach a substantial proportion of that young, affluent consumer
base, then the benefits of the Nexus of Forces may not fully
materialize."
A second factor is the skepticism toward the cloud. Indian IT users
feel that the public cloud remains immature for enterprise use. The
major concerns reflect the ones that Gartner sees worldwide, namely,
security, data retention and the maturity of the offerings. One specific
issue is the belief that the underlying financial constructs of public
cloud services do not add up.
"Many people feel that it would be difficult for public cloud
operators to provide enterprise services that are lower than their
internal costs. This view reflects the fact that most people still view
the public cloud as a software as a service (SaaS) model, rather than
infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or the platform as a service (PaaS)
model.
This carries complex financial and technical permutations in areas
such as patch compatibility, testing of new applications and contract
management," Mr. Kumar said.
