India is reaching an inflection point in technology adoption

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Just under one-quarter of the world’s total population used smartphones in 2014 with consumers in the Asia Pacific accounting for than half of this number. With its smartphone user rate growing rapidly, India will pass the US in 2016 to become the second-largest smartphone market worldwide, according to eMarketer.

India is reaching an inflection point in technology adoption with social, mobile, cloud and analytics driving digital disruption in the country.
According to Cisco, India will add, on average, 5 million Internet users and 8.3 million networked devices every month. At 70 million, India already has the largest number of WhatsApp users in the world. The world has truly gone mobile, forever altering customer expectations and experiences.

In India we are moving rapidly toward the next phase of the Web—the Internet of Everything (IoE) which is the intelligent connection of people, processes, data, and things. The Digital India programme unveiled by the government in 2014 is focused on the digital empowerment of citizens, where infrastructure would be offered as a utility to every citizen, governance and services would be on demand and citizens would be digitally empowered. The IoE has the potential to create $511 billion in value in India over the next decade.

Cisco estimates that if a typical bank becomes as digitised as its customers, the upside for the bank could be a 5.6% increase in bottom-line.
That’s a $392 million annual profit increase for a bank with $10 billion in annual revenue. As the country digitises there will be a tremendous opportunity for citizens, entrepreneurs, industries, communities, cities and the government. Below are our top 8 technology trends to watch out for in 2015.

Change is the only constant in IT: In the next ten years, industry boundaries will be expanding with IT companies partnering, investing and acquiring non-IT companies. Innovation in ICT is leaking over to distant domains.

If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work: Without apps as part of their Internet of Everything strategies, businesses will suffocate from the missed opportunity mobile offers.

It’s the network and it’s that simple: With more than 20 billion connected devices by 2018 worldwide, autonomic networking is fundamental to enable the network to support IoE. IT and OT (operational technology) will need to scale for the copious amounts of data and the push in simplifying the network will be SDN (Software Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation).

Is IoT secure?: In the next two to five years, IT security will extend to operational technology. There will be brand new use cases, such as connected vehicles. It’s real time: Big Data is nothing without Big Judgment. For analytics to be useful, IT must be delivered to the people who need it in real-time. Predictive context goes mainstream: The predictive context industry will become a major application category in the next four years.
Without trust nothing else matters: As companies learn to clearly communicate with their customers to build trust, the amount of encrypted data traffic will skyrocket.

Future of work: There will be a huge transformation in Operational Technology – from the typical control engineer to data scientist to new content and work tools. We’re excited about the possibilities of what technology can enable in India in 2015.

By Dinesh Malkani
President, Cisco India & SAARC

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