Worldwide IT spending to reach $3.8trn in 2013

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.8 trn in 2013, a 4.1 percent increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trn, according to a recent survey. Currency effects are less pronounced this quarter with growth in constant dollars forecast at 4 percent for 2013.

Worldwide devices spending (which includes PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers) is forecast to reach $718 billion in 2013, up 7.9 percent from 2012. Despite flat spending on PCs and a modest decline in spending on printers, a short-term boost to spending on premium mobile phones has driven an upward revision in the devices sector growth for 2013 from the previous forecast of 6.3 percent

The outlook for 2013 for data center systems spending is forecast to grow 3.7 percent in 2013, down 0.7 percent from the previous forecast. This reduction is largely due to cuts to the near-term forecast for spending on external storage and the enterprise in the economically troubled EMEA region.

Worldwide enterprise software spending is forecast to total $297 billion in 2013, a 6.4 percent increase from 2012. Although the growth for this segment remains unchanged from the previous forecast, this belies significant changes at a market level, as stronger growth expectations for database management systems (DBMS), data integration tools and supply chain management compensate for lower growth expectations for IT operations management and operating systems software.

While the outlook for IT services remains relatively unchanged since last quarter, continued hesitation among buyers is fostering hypercompetition and cost pressure in mature IT outsourcing (ITO) segments and reallocation of budget away from new projects in consulting and implementation.

The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market and will remain roughly flat over the new several years, with declining spending on voice services counterbalanced by strong growth in spending on mobile data services.

Kapil Sibal release National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap Version – II

The ‘National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap Version – II, a document containing policy guidelines for IPv6 transition prepared by NT Cell, Department of Telecom (DoT), was released by Union Minister for Communications & IT,  Kapil Sibal here today.

 

Sibal said that Internet is an important tool to connect not only people but people and devices. The explosive growth of mobile subscribers and exponential growth of data has made it imperative to transit to IPv6 to move to smart knowledge society.

 

He emphasized that IPv6 is a limitless highway and the challenge is to bridge the gap between IPv4 and IPv6. He further added that Internet of Things (IoT) offers an immense opportunity for India whereby products & services based on IPv6 can be manufactured here and exported globally.

 

He said that IPv6 based innovative applications in areas like rural emergency healthcare tele-education, smart metering, smart grid, smart building, smart city etc. have tremendous potential to boost the socio-economic development of the country.

 

R. Chandrashekhar, Secretary (T), DoT underlined the need for a planned and gradual transition. The Roadmap will pave the way for bridging the digital divide as it is vital for achieving the broadband growth. R.K. Bhatnagar, Member (Technology) presented an overview of IPv6 scenario in the country.

 

He further briefed about proposed India IPv6 Centre of Innovation to be set up by DoT for facilitating IPv6 transition in the country as per the Roadmap. Latif Ladid, President, IPv6 Forum, in his congratulatory message received through e-mail said that IPv6 would make the Indian digital space smart and fertile leading to a better like for everyone.

Outsourcing of global software testing to grow $50bn by 2020: NASSCOM

The worldwide software testing outsourcing market is expected to grow from $30 Billion in 2010 to $50 Billion in 2020 and India is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of this growth according to a NASSCOM report. The ‘skills gap’ is a problem that pervades the IT industry (don’t hyperlink since report had US data only).

The heavy investment in critical business applications that keep large corporations moving is at risk because engineering qualifications today bear little resemblance to the needs of the market. With India becoming a hub for Testing-as-a-Service, Testing skills shortage likelihood as demand increases exponentially; is bound to improve employability of trained Testers. Additionally, COBOL which is one of the oldest programming languages, continues to play a pivotal role in running many of the world’s businesses and public services. But sadly, COBOL seems to be missing from curriculums in Engineering and MCA institutes these days. In response, Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing, and management solutions, today announced the launch of its Academic Program to support academic institutes, business organizations and students in building the next generation of skilled software testing professionals and COBOL developers. The company has also launched the Borland Scholar Program, aimed to create India as a hub for World-Class Software Testing Professionals. Micro Focus is reaching out to over 200 colleges to promote the integration of the subject in their university curriculum. With 91 of Global Fortune 100 Companies using Micro Focus Solutions, the program provide students a Competitive Edge in the IT Industry by enabling them to be pre-qualified on widely used Software Testing Tools from Borland. The program is designed keeping in mind the Engineering Student populace in the country. The focus is to train the students on the latest technologies and business models. The company aims to roll out 10000 industry standard professionals to support the growing testing market in India. Considering the present growth and potential in the software testing industry, the opportunities for software testers are enormous. The program will enable the education, enablement and development of the COBOL language and software testing professionals within universities in India and across the globe. The Micro Focus Academic program and the Borland Scholar Program, offer universities free software licenses from Micro Focus for non-commercial use in their labs, for teaching or research purposes.

The programs will support new and existing university IT programs to meet the demands of today’s business organizations, facilitate greater collaboration between businesses and academic communities and provide an interface through which existing students can connect with prospective employers seeking these skills.

In addition to using this interface to build an employment focused academic community, it will also be used to host competitions, encouraging students to test their coding skills and rewarding successful students with prizes and the possibility of an internship.

This program is an effort to Partner with Academia to complement their efforts of enriching Technical Education in India. Micro Focus aims to bridge the skill-gap in the industry by empowering Engineering students through hands-on training, to be pre-qualified on industry-relevant skills, before they step out of Campus.

 

 

National Cyber Security Policy in the offing: IT Secretary

In a bid to secure the digital environment, the Government is working on creating an overarching architectural framework and will soon come out with the National Cyber Security Policy, J Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India, announced here today.

 

Speaking at a workshop on ‘Role of Corporates in Securing the Digital Environment’, organized by FICCI in association with the Ministry of Communications & IT,  Satyanarayana said in both the initiatives, the corporate sector would have a significant role to play through the PPP mode.

 

While acknowledging that it was not known how secure the digital environment was, he said, “There is always an element of vulnerability. The situation is dynamic and we are continuously assessing the threats.”

 

Satyanarayana said that for digital certification both security and trust were needed. “E-Praman, one of the initiatives of DeitY, will help establish the identity of the people, and help in building trust and securing the user’s identity in cyber space,” he added.

 

T A Khan, Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA), DeitY, Government of India, stated, “When it comes to digital signature, we need to not only authenticate the identity of the user of the signature but also the transaction and must ensure the integrity of both.”

 

Some of the initiatives under taken by the Department for digital signature were online filing of income tax returns, e-procurement and e-tendering. DeitY has initiated Research and Development activities in the area of e-commerce on mobile platform.

Time stamping services and synchronization will soon be activated which will help in protecting against threats which could result in an undetected change to the clock that takes it outside its calibration, said  Khan.

Ms. Debjani Ghosh, Chairman, Information Technology Committee, FICCI, pointed out that by 2015, India needs to secure 40% internet penetration which means 500 million people must be connected to internet.

Sivarama Krishnan, Executive Director , PwC, said that digital signatures reduce nearly 50% of time spent by organizations in closing wet signature requirements. Business to Consumers (B2C) transactions are expected to witness a fillip in online transactions due to electronic signatures.

 

 

Mobility is reshaping consumer gadget spending and behavior

Household adoption and spending on consumer technology products is shifting faster than expected in favor of gadgets and services that are portable or mobile and those that that deliver networking capabilities and entertainment, according to a recent survey. The major change is that mobility is now reshaping mainstream consumer behavior in fundamental ways, the way people organize their lives and the spaces they live in.

The average household spending by users of media tablets, e-readers, laptops and digital cameras has fallen even as household penetration of these devices has increased. Falling prices and increased technology performance are primary drivers of increasing adoption and multiple purchases.

According to the survey, legacy products such as TVs and desktop computers have the highest mean years between upgrades, at four-and-a-half years and four years, respectively, while newer product classes such as tablets and e-readers have yet to be replaced by the majority of respondents. Replacement and upgrades of fixed devices such as desktop PCs and game consoles will be deferred or abandoned as consumers find they can do most of what they want on more recently purchased portable devices anywhere they want when they want. The things they can’t do will either get postponed to a later time or be forgotten about altogether as consumers reorganize tasks and activities to the devices and services they prefer to use.

PC and game console vendors can address attrition of desktop PC replacements by focusing product road maps and consumer branding initiatives on upgrade paths to portable devices or, alternatively, on home media hubs that provide storage and remote retrieval to the personal cloud.

The shift to wireless access and portable devices represents both a threat and an opportunity to technology vendors. Some static device ownership paradigms such as desktop computers and television sets remain stable while others, such as TV-related boxes and home networking equipment, increase. Consumers’ shift to more mobile devices and applications provides opportunities for equipment to deliver Internet access and content as well as to accelerate the development of mobile solutions and portable extensions to traditionally fixed products and services.

Most IT leaders have invested in big data

After a few years of experimentation and early adopter successes, 2013 will be the year of larger scale adoption of big data technologies. According to a worldwide survey of IT leaders, 42% of respondents stated they had invested in big data technology, or were planning to do so within a year.

Organizations are undertaking their big data initiatives in a rapidly shifting technological landscape with disruptive forces that produce and demand new data types and new kinds of information processing. They turn to big data technology for two reasons: necessity and conviction. Organizations are becoming aware that big data initiatives are critical because they have identified obvious or potential business opportunities that cannot be met with traditional data sources, technologies or practices. In addition, media hype is often backed with rousing use cases.

Despite challenges, it is expected that by 2015, 20 percent of Global 1000 organizations will have established a strategic focus on “information infrastructure” equal to that of application management.

In anticipation of big data opportunities, organizations across industries are provisionally collecting and storing a burgeoning amount of operational, public, commercial and social data. Yet in most industries — especially government, manufacturing and education — combining these sources with existing underutilized “dark data” such as emails, multimedia and other enterprise content often represents the most immediate opportunity to transform businesses.

By integrating and analyzing a variety of data sources, not just individually, organizations can achieve the most extraordinary business insights, process optimization and, of course, decision making. Although most of the big data hype is about handling the sheer size and speed of data available, our research shows that the ultimate wins will be from those making sense of the broadening range of data sources.

Rogue clouds prevalent in nearly 90% of Indian Businesses

Indian organizations are widely migrating to the cloud to gain competitive advantages around speed, agility and flexibility, according to Symantec Corp’s. recent Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey. In fact, nearly all the surveyed large and small businesses in the country are at least discussing cloud. However, increasing complexity and the proliferation of “rogue clouds” – prevalent in about 90 percent of Indian businesses, according to the survey – is resulting in escalating costs related to cloud. Rogue clouds are defined as business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure. Other key survey findings showed enterprises and SMBs are experiencing escalating costs tied to complex backup and recovery, and inefficient cloud storage.

According to the survey, rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls. It is a surprisingly common problem, found in 89 percent of Indian enterprises and 92 per cent of Indian SMBs within the last year.

Among Indian enterprises who reported rogue cloud issues, 57 percent experienced the exposure of confidential information, and more than a third faced account takeover issues, defacement of Web properties, or stolen goods or services. The survey found that top rogue cloud issues for Indian SMBs include security, data protection and loss of confidential information. The challenge is escalating, with nearly half (48 percent) of Indian SMBs indicating that rogue cloud deployments are becoming more frequent.

The most commonly cited reasons by Indian businesses for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save time and money.

Cloud Backup and Recovery Issues

Cloud is complicating backup and recovery. First, most Indian organizations use three or more solutions to back-up their physical, virtual and cloud data—leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk and training costs. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds organizations have lost cloud data (60 percent of enterprises and 70 percent of SMBs), and most (80 percent) have experienced recovery failures.

Finally, most see cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process; 85 percent estimate it would take three or more days to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud.

Inefficient Cloud Storage

Theoretically, cloud storage has the advantages of being quick to deploy, paying for only what is used and offering easy adjustment of capacity, all of which provide for high storage utilization rates. In practice, however, global cloud storage utilization is actually extremely low at just 17 percent. It’s even worse for SMBs, at just seven per cent. This is resulting in organizations paying for six times as much storage as they need. The problem is exacerbated because almost half of enterprises in India (48 percent) admit that little to none of their data is deduplicated, and 34 percent of SMBs indicate that half or more of their data is duplicate, all of which is leading organizations to pay for storage they don’t require.

Compliance and eDiscovery Concerns

With growing regulatory and internal compliance frameworks, the survey revealed that two-thirds of Indian enterprises are concerned about not only meeting compliance requirements, but also proving it. However, nearly half (47 percent) have been fined for privacy violations in the cloud within the past 12 months. Organizations are performing equally poorly on the eDiscovery front: three-quarters of those who have received requests (76 percent) missed deadlines for delivering the requested information, potentially leading to fines or compromised legal positions. What’s worse, 34 percent never found the requested information.

Data in Transit Issues

Organizations have all sorts of assets in the cloud – such as web properties, online businesses or web applications – that require SSL certificates to protect the data in transit whether it is personal or financial information, business transactions and other online interactions. The survey showed companies found managing many SSL certificates to be highly complex: Just 48 percent rate cloud SSL certificate management as easy and only 40 percent are certain their cloud-partner’s certificates are in compliance with corporate standards.

Hidden Costs Are Easily Avoided

The survey shows ignoring these hidden costs will have a serious impact on business. However, these issues are easily mitigated with careful planning, implementation and management:

• Focus policies on information and people, not technologies or platforms
• Educate, monitor and enforce policies
• Embrace tools that are platform agnostic
• Deduplicate data in the cloud

Symantec’s Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey

Symantec’s 2013 Cloud Survey is a result of research conducted by ReRez in September-October 2012. The full study represents 3,236 organizations from 29 countries. Responses came from companies with a range of five to more than 5,000 employees. Of those responses, 1,358 came from SMBs and 1,878 came from enterprises

Kapil Sibal launches National Internet Registry

Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology launched the portal of National Internet Registry (NIR) here . Speaking on the occasion  Sibal pointed out that unless this platform is inclusive, we will not be able to empower the people. He underlined that the internet is an exceptionally powerful tool and nothing in this country should be done to emasculate the medium.

National internet Registry (NIR) is an entity which coordinates the allocation of Internet Protocol addresses with other Internet resource management function at a national level in the country.

NIXI was recognized by APNIC in March 2012 to become the NIR for the country after successful demo of the indigenous software and systems developed for the allocation and management of Internet resources.

NIR functions under the overall umbrella of Regional Internet Registry(RIR) which is Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) based in Brisbane, Australia. The NIR has been named as Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN). Collective efforts of NIXI and ISPAI have led to the formation of IRINN in the country.

It is a major milestone towards setting up of Critical Internet Resource management function in the country. Setting up of NIR under NIXI will not only reduce cost in procuring IP address but will also facilitate faster access to information for cyber crime investigators and Government authorities.

Creation of NIR will help encourage/promote activities related to research, education and training covering the areas of Internet Resources and its proliferation. NIXI is a not for profit organization set up under section 25 of the companies Act 1956 for peering of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to the NIXI node for the purpose of routing the domestic traffic within the country.

NIXI also operates the .IN Registry for managing the .IN Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs). Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is a regional Internet registry which coordinates the Internet Protocol address allocations and other Internet resource management is the Asia-Pacific region.

 

 

IT stocks scale 52 week high

Infosys, Wipro, TCS & Hcl Tech hit 52 week high today. Bolstered by solid latest economic data from US, investors have shown buying interest in IT stocks. Reports that came out on Wednesday suggested economic activity picking up after it stagnated in the last 3 months of 2012 in US.  Private employers added 198,000 jobs in February which was higher than expected, according to latest data. Construction activity picked up where payroll rose.

S&P BSE IT was trading up 1.5% compared to marginal fall of 0.08% in Sensex at 1240hrs. Advance decline ratio in the IT sector was in favour of the bulls, 8 stocks advanced as compared to a fall in 2 while.
Infosys Ltd. stock is currently trading at Rs. 3000 up by Rs.34. The stock touched a high of Rs.3007.05 and a low of Rs.2976 on BSE. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 0.65lakh

HCL Technologies Ltd. stock is currently trading at Rs. 722 up by Rs.16.25. The stock touched a high of Rs.773 and a low of Rs.756 on BSE. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 0.57 lakh.

Wipro Ltd. stock is currently trading at Rs.452 up by Rs.8.15. The stock touched a high of Rs.453.55 and a low of Rs.442.10 on BSE. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 2.63 lakh.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. stock is up 2.1% currently trading at Rs.1590.50 up by Rs.32.70. The stock touched a high of Rs.1595.35 and a low of Rs.1553 on BSE. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 2.37 lakh.

Kapil Sibal launches Electronics Project Proposal System

Union Minister for Communications and IT, Kapil Sibal held a round table discussion with Academia, Industry and R&D organizations, here yesterday. The round table was held in order to have broad consensus and opinion on the proposed ICT&E R&D and Innovation Framework prepared by DeitY.

During this event, the Minister also launched the `Electronics Project Proposal System (e-PPS), developed by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). The e-PPS system will initially operate on a pilot basis.

The Electronic Project Proposal System (e-PPS) is a web-based system that encompasses the complete life-cycle of funding of R&D projects, beginning with online submission of project proposals for funds, to monitoring and management of funded projects. It supports the processes for

• Online submission of project proposals

• Evaluation of proposals by experts

• Project recommendations

• Project Monitoring

e-PPS replaces the existing manual system of project funding wherein the Project Investigators (PI) submit hard copies of R&D proposals, which are presented to a Working Group and based on the recommendations of the Working Group the proposals are further processed in DeitY.

It is a One-Go Dash-Board to see the projects from initiation to completion. It reduces the total processing time of proposals and aids easy dissemination of project information.

Global public cloud services market to attain $131 bn worth stature in 2013

The public cloud services market is likely to grow 18.5 per cent in 2013 to USD 131 billion globally. The figures showed a noteworthy jump from the earlier USD 111 billion in 2012.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud computing, storage and print services, is anticipated as the fastest-growing segment of the market. The market has taken a jump to grow 47.3 per cent in 2013 to USD 9 billion from earlier USD 6.1 billion in 2012.

Cloud services market has grasped a strong hold in the several regions of the world; including North America as the largest region in the cloud services market, followed by Western Europe as the second largest market.

Not only this, cloud services market is also gradually getting strong hold in Asia/Pacific (led by Indonesia and India), Greater China and Latin America (led by Argentina, Mexico and Brazil) markets.

Indian PC market showed growth of 3.5% in CY 2012

The overall India PC shipments for CY 2012 stood at 11.0 million units resulting into an year-on-year growth of 3.5% over CY 2011. Despite a drag on overall IT spending, the growth in the India PC market was driven by special projects like ELCOT and spurt in consumer demand for Notebooks. The consumer PC market recorded an impressive growth driven by growing shift in end-user demand towards Portable PCs, which grew at a striking 20.2% in CY 2012 over CY 2011. This is reflected in the improved retail footfalls, particularly among large format retailers (LFRs), which continue to act as a catalyst in driving consumer demand. On the other hand, the commercial PC business outside special projects like ELCOT, witnessed continued instability as the commercial desktops crumbled to a 3 year low in the second half of 2012.

In terms of vendor share, Lenovo claimed the top spot with a 15.9% market share in CY 2012 supported by fulfilments for the ELCOT project in the state of Tamil Nadu. HP gained the second spot with a shipment share of 15.2% followed by Acer at 13.2% for CY 2012. There is a continued visible shift in end-user demand from Desktops to Portable computing devices and this trend is expected to be seen in the coming quarters too. Driven by demand from Portable PCs, the Indian PC market is expected to register a double digit growth in CY 2013 despite downward pressures driven by longer refresh cycles seen in the recent periods. This trend of longer refresh cycle could be due to lower levels of usage of laptops as some of the activities are accomplished using tablets as seen in IDCs recent end-user research. With forthcoming elections in 10 states, there is a possibility of such special projects being repeated in few of the larger states, which may drive the PC market upwards

 

Indian PC Market shows resilience

The overall India PC shipments for CY 2012 stood at 11.0 million units resulting into an year-on-year growth of 3.5% over CY 2011. Despite a drag on overall IT spending, the growth in the India PC market was driven by special projects like ELCOT and spurt in consumer demand for Notebooks.

The consumer PC market recorded an impressive growth driven by growing shift in end-user demand towards Portable PCs, which grew at a striking 20.2% in CY 2012 over CY 2011.  This is reflected in the improved retail footfalls, particularly among large format retailers (LFRs), which continue to act as a catalyst in driving consumer demand.

On the other hand, the commercial PC business outside special projects like ELCOT, witnessed continued instability as the commercial desktops crumbled to a 3 year low in the second half of 2012.

In terms of vendor share, Lenovo claimed the top spot with a 15.9% market share in CY 2012 supported by fulfilments for the ELCOT project in the state of Tamil Nadu. HP gained the second spot with a shipment share of 15.2% followed by Acer at 13.2% for CY 2012.

There is a continued visible shift in end-user demand from Desktops to Portable computing devices and this trend is expected to be seen in the coming quarters too. Driven by demand from Portable PCs, the Indian PC market is expected to register a double digit growth in CY 2013 despite downward pressures driven by longer refresh cycles seen in the recent periods. This trend of longer refresh cycle could be due to lower levels of usage of laptops as some of the activities are accomplished using tablets as seen in IDCs recent end-user research. With forthcoming elections in 10 states, there is a possibility of such special projects being repeated in few of the larger states, which may drive the PC market upwards.

25% of distributed denial of services attacks in 2013 likely to be application-based

Twenty-five percent of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that occur in 2013 will be application-based, according to research. During such incidents, attackers send out targeted commands to applications to tax the central processing unit (CPU) and memory and make the application unavailable.

Some of the top 2013 criminal trends and potential safeguards and solutions for firms at risk of attack.

 

High-bandwidth DDoS attacks are becoming the new norm and will continue wreaking havoc on unprepared enterprises in 2013

A new class of damaging DDoS attacks was launched against U.S. banks in the second half of 2012, sometimes adding up to 70 Gbps of noisy network traffic blasting at the banks through their Internet pipes. Until this recent spate of attacks, most network-level DDoS attacks consumed only five Gbps of bandwidth, but more recent levels made it impossible for bank customers and others using the same pipes to get to their websites.

 

Hackers use DDoS attacks to distract security staff so that they can steal sensitive information or money from accounts

Enterprises subject to DDoS attacks should take steps to mitigate potential damage from these attacks. There should be greater cooperation with industry associations to share intelligence that can be acted on collectively and quickly, as well as enterprise investments in fraud prevention technology and the strengthening of organizational processes.

 

People continue to be the weakest link in the security chain, as criminal social engineering ploys reach new levels of deviousness in 2013

In 2012, several different fraud scams that took social engineering tactics to new heights of deviousness have been reported, including criminals approaching people in person as law enforcement or bank officers to help them through account migration that then comprised their bank accounts.

Deploying layered fraud prevention and identity-proofing techniques would help stop the social engineering attacks from succeeding. In particular, fraud prevention systems that provide user or account behavioral profiling and entity link analysis are useful in these cases. Call center call analytics and fraud prevention software can be deployed to help catch fraudsters committing crimes via social engineering or by using stolen identities. Customers should also be educated on best security practices to help them avoid phishing attacks and social engineering ploys.

PC market in W.Europe declined 11.7%

PC shipments in Western Europe totaled 15.3mn units in the fourth quarter of 2012, a decline of 11.7% compared with the same period in 2011. In 2012, PC shipments reached 58mn units, a decrease of 8.4% from 2011.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, all PC segments in Western Europe declined. Mobile and desktop PC shipments declined 12.1% and 10.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012, respectively. The decrease in the professional PC market was less severe due to replacement purchases and fell 4.9%, while the consumer PC market declined 17.6% year-on-year.

HP lost share in the mobile and home PC segments in Western Europe, but remained the market leader in the desktop and professional PC markets with nearly 10% market share ahead of its nearest rival. HP’s new leadership has undertaken a number of initiatives to reignite its business. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Acer, Lenovo and Asus reached 11% market share.

Acer, which held the No. 2 spot in the overall PC sales market in Western Europe, dropped to third place behind Asus in the home PC segment, with shipments declining 25% from the fourth quarter of 2011. Lenovo’s strong focus to increase market share helped it become the No. 2 PC vendor in the professional PC market with a 4% increase in the fourth quarter of 2012. Lenovo also grew 65% in the consumer PC market in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Asus saw its Western Europe PC shipments decline in the fourth quarter of 2012, indicating that its pricing had moved upwards to higher price points because of the midrange-to-high-end Windows 8 system. Dell dropped to fifth place, with shipments in the consumer PC market nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2011. Dell also felt the pressure from HP and Lenovo in the professional PC segment, where both vendors focused on gaining share over increasing their profit protection.

PC shipments in the U.K. totaled 3.1mn units in the fourth quarter of 2012, a slight decrease of 0.7% compared with the same period in 2011. In 2012, the PC market declined 3% totaling 11.7mn units, after a fall of 13% in 2011.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, HP extended its lead and remained in the No. 1 position, with strong growth in both consumer and professional PC markets. Dell’s consumer PC market continued to shrink, but in common with most of the top five vendors, saw an upturn in the professional PC market, where Lenovo took the lead with a 45% increase in the fourth quarter of 2012. Lenovo’s strong performance in the professional PC market helped to close the gap with Dell during the same quarter.

PC shipments in France totaled 2.5mn units in the fourth quarter of 2012, a decrease of 13.6% compared with the same period in 2011. In 2012, PC shipments reached 10mn units, a 6.4% decline from 2011. This is the second consecutive year that the PC market in France has declined.

The launch of Windows 8 had no impact on PC demand, and the holiday season saw retailers clear out their Windows 7 notebook inventories and drive their volumes of low-end notebooks. Both consumer and professional PC markets continued to decline, with the consumer PC market experiencing the sharpest fall of 19.5% in the fourth quarter of 2012. Ultrabook sales remained low. The Ultraportable segment accounted for 11% of all mobile PCs shipped in France during the quarter.

Shipments of mobile PCs in France decreased 12.5% in the fourth quarter of 2012, while desktop PCs declined 15.5% year-on-year.

Asus maintained the No. 2 position, gaining 3.1%age points in market share in the fourth quarter of 2012 and clearly positioned itself as a strong consumer PC vendor in the French PC market. HP remained the No. 1 PC vendor in France, thanks to its good performance in the professional PC segment, but it faces challenges in the consumer PC market.

Acer lost the No. 3 position to Dell, exhibiting the steepest year-on-year decline, mainly due to slow netbook sales and inventory build-up from the previous quarter. The vendor is also going through a period of readjusting its strategy. Lenovo showed continued growth, thanks to its expansion in the consumer PC market.

PC shipments in Germany totaled 3.4mn units in the fourth quarter of 2012, a decrease of 11.9% compared with the same period in 2011 . In 2012, 1mn fewer PCs were shipped than in 2011, which resulted in the PC market in Germany declining 8% from 2011.

Mobile PC shipments declined 15% in the fourth quarter of 2012, while desktop PC volumes decreased 6% year on year. Consumer and professional PC demand declined 13% and 11%.

This ongoing trend will have a profound impact on the current and potential installed base for PCs.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, Lenovo moved to the No. 1 position in the German PC market with above market performance in all segments, and it experienced 36% growth in the home PC market. HP rose to the second spot, while Acer moved to third place. HP performed above the market average in both the home and professional PC markets, but the gap with Lenovo is widening rapidly.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, both Acer and Asus lost market share, and both vendors saw PC shipment declines of around 30% in the consumer PC market. Fujitsu returned to the top five PC vendor rankings in Germany, narrowly beating Dell. Fujitsu saw strong growth in the desktop market, where it returned to second place, behind HP.

 

 

IT stocks lead after Nasscom predicts robust growth

IT sector gained in the intra-day trade in the market after the industry body Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) forecasted strong growth for the sector in 2013-14. Nasscom predicted that Indian IT industry is set to grow 12-14% to $87bn in the period. TCS, Infosys and Satyam all added more than 1% in today’s trade.
BSE IT was up 1.2% at 2:55pm on BSE Wednesday. Advance-Decline ratio was in favour of the bulls as 7 stocks advanced while 3 declines as 0 remained unchanged. On S&P CNX IT was bullish too as 12 stocks advanced against a decline seen in 7 stocks and 1 remained unchanged.

HCL Technologies Ltd is up 4.3%, and currently trading at Rs. 707.15 up by Rs.28.75. It touched a high of Rs.712.80 and a low of Rs.680 in the intraday trade at BSE on Thursday. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 1.02 lakh.

Infosys Ltd. is currently trading at Rs.2786.85 up by Rs.32.20 or 1.17%. It touched a high of Rs.71.40 and a low of Rs.67 in the intraday trade at BSE on Thursday. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at4.68 lakh.
Satyam Computer Services Ltd. is currently trading at Rs.117.25 up by Rs.1.10 or 1%. It touched a high of Rs.118.55 and a low of Rs.116 in the intraday trade at BSE on Thursday. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at 1.23lakh.
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.(TCS) came almost touched 52 week high today. The stock is currently trading at Rs.1434.35 up by Rs.26.10 or 1.85%. It touched a high of Rs.71.40 and a low of Rs.67 in the intraday trade at BSE on Thursday. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at4.68 lakh.
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.(TCS) came almost touched 52 week high today. The stock is currently trading at Rs.1434.35 up by Rs.26.10 or 1.85%. It touched a high of Rs.71.40 and a low of Rs.67 in the intraday trade at BSE on Thursday. Total traded quantity at the counter stood at4.68 lakh.

FY14 to be positive year from industry perspective: NASSCOM

NASSCOM has reportedly said that FY14  to be positive year from industry perspective.

NASSCOM is expecting IT industry’s FY14 revenue at $12-15bn, according to reports.

IT sector exports grew 10.2%, says NASSCOM

Top Priorities for IT Investments for CIOs in FY 2013-14

According to recent market research, CIOs in India are expected to increase their IT investments at anaverage of 20% in FY2013-14 as compared to FY2012-13. Manufacturing, Telecom, Retail, Healthcare and Pharmaceutical will be the keyverticals in terms of IT investments in FY2013-14.  Manufacturing sector is expected to witness a rise of 29% in absolute IT budget for 2013- 14,followed by Telecom and Retail with an approximate increase of 26% and 18%respectively

IT outsourcing by Indian CIOs’ is on the rise as 59% of IT staff is outsourced to third party service providers currently. This phenomena is increasing the demand penetration of third partysystem integrators.

On the other hand, Modern IT is slowly getting embraced by the Indian enterprises as enterprises show preference towards investing in some form of modern ITsolutions including cloud, big data and mobility. Business Analytical tools (including Big Data), Virtualization & Cloud, Mobility, Application Software & solutions and Consolidation of legacy investments & process excellence,would take on priority in FY2013-14.  Business Intelligence & Big Datais of highest priority for over 60% CIOs while Virtualization and Cloud Computing excites over 50% of the Indian CIOs

Business Analytics: CIOs continue to invest in business analytics with high uptake of Big Data within Manufacturing, Energy & Utility, Media & Marketing verticals

Virtualization & Cloud: CIOs show increased preference towards virtualization and cloud (both private & public) based on criticality of use case

Enterprise Mobility: 50% CIOs consider mobilityindispensable and find it very relevant for customer facing roles and consumer applications

Application Software: Expanding ERP capabilities is high onthe CIO agenda. CRM and SCM to maintain demand in FY2013-14

Consolidation of Solutions: CIOs are also planning on integrationof existing enterprise application software, ERP solutions, and BI tools to derive business benefits from legacy IT investments

Indian Manufacturing & Natural Resources industry may spend Rs408bn on IT in 2013

Indian manufacturers and natural resources companies may spend 408bn rupees on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of 9.1% over 2012 revenue of 374bn rupees. The forecast includes spending by manufacturers and natural resource companies on internal IT (including personnel), hardware, software, external IT services and telecommunications.

The telecommunications category remains the biggest spending category overall in the manufacturing and natural resources industry, and it is forecast to reach 132bn rupees in 2013. Meanwhile, software is achieving the highest growth rate amongst the top level IT spending categories – forecast to exceed 15 percent in 2013, with especially strong growth forecast for enterprise resource planning (ERP)/supply chain management (SCM)/customer relationship management (CRM), desktop software, and manufacturing-specific applications. A very high demand is anticipated for consulting services as manufacturers plan for these implementations, forecasting growth of over 22 percent in 2013 alone

Federated Single Sign-On May Be A Predominant SSO Technology

A well-executed single sign-on (SSO) strategy reduces password-related support incidents and provides users with improved convenience and more-efficient authentication processes. A sound SSO strategy will give users fewer reasons to write down passwords. However, one password providing access to all in-scope systems can lead to compromised access to those systems.

Mobile devices can pose further challenges for SSO. The following step should be used to appropriately scope the target solution set.

• Assess the Current Environment and Pain Points: The first step is to scope the problem space by identifying the user population and use cases that require a solution, and to inventory the target systems, their architectures and the anticipated lifetimes.
• User population: Identify whether a solution set should cover employees, contractors, external business partners or consumers/constituents.
• Use cases and applications: Identify the logical location of users and the target systems that must be accessed — for example, internal users accessing internally managed applications and software as a service (SaaS) applications, or external consumers and business partners accessing internally managed applications. Identify the applications and use cases that are currently used the most and generating the most calls to the help desk for authentication-related issues.
• Applications and their architectures: Determine the application architecture for each application deemed to be in scope for an SSO initiative.
• Evaluate Anticipated Changes to In-Scope Applications: It’s important to determine whether the applications used today will still be in scope over the next few years. If an application will be retired or replaced or have its user base significantly reduced within one to two years, then it can possibly be removed from consideration and, therefore, reduce the problem space. Approaching commercial application vendors to ask whether there are any plans to provide authentication options that can leverage the enterprise standards is also a good idea. A matrix with the inventory results should be drawn up to help identify common architecture and use case patterns.
• Leverage Currently Owned Services or Solutions to Reduce the In-Scope Applications: Identifying existing tools that could help reduce the problem is essential. Their use may be isolated to one business unit or application set when they could be more broadly deployed. Sometimes reduced sign-on (RSO), enabled by an established password synchronization tool or authentication to a common LDAP-accessible directory, will provide good-enough reduction in the problem space. When multiple directories are used for authentication, directory synchronization or virtual directories may be brought to bear to join disparate identity sources and to expose one standardized view of identity to multiple applications or authentication services, such as a WAM tool. This can provide RSO or SSO, depending on the configuration.
• Select Solutions to Resolve the Remaining Requirements: Application designs are moving toward Web architectures. As soon as currently owned directories, Kerberos and password synchronization tools have been leveraged, it is likely that tool or service selection will be based on the need to support SSO to Web-architected applications. Furthermore, SaaS adoption has been driving the need for federated Web SSO. Therefore, the solutions that support these needs should be presented first, with less prevalently needed solutions following.

Enterprises need to be more customer centric: netCore

NetCore solutions, emphasised enterprises to be more customer centric and deeper in their engagement, in their southern workshop hosted in Bangalore on Thursday, January 24, 2012 at The Pride Hotel, Bangalore.The overwhelming engagement during the workshop stands as evidence of the fact that organizations are now willing to focus on nurturing customer relationships and reap benefits of the customer-marketer bond forever.

The hands-on workshop deep-dived into the intricacies involved in the entire customer life cycle; basically covering customer acquisition, data analysis, seeking and implementing feedback and eventually, customer retention.  The session educated keen new-age Marketers and Analysts on what they should do and shouldn’t do. It emphasized on offering a value proposition by means of behavioral targeting, thus explaining the limitless possibilities that arise out of a critical examination of consumer behavior.

Additionally, the workshop also focused on the ill-effects of employing unethical means to increase one’s subscriber database by means of purchasing data or using data that has been referred by a third party. And since expanding the consumer base is the most significant need for any marketer, information on how this could be done ethically was discussed as well. The session advocated innovative means of gathering and analyzing subscriber data to arrive at valuable insights.

With the number of Internet  and mobile internet users hitting the 100 million and 80 million mark respectively, today’s organizations are focusing on their Digital Marketing efforts more than ever in order to keep pace with the ever changing consumer dynamics. A recent Hubspot research has revealed that as many as 78% of internet users conduct product research online. This makes it critical for organizations to stay on top of the consumer’s mind by investing time in building and nurturing strong relationships with them.

NetCore COO Kalpit Jain firmly believes that organizations should strive towards gathering consumer preferences through various online mediums and use this information to make customized offers to their consumers.

The several economic downturns during the past decade have made businesses realize that the only factor that enables sustainability during such dire times is the trust that a brand has been able to instill amongst its consumers through its actions. And one can blindly say that there is no better way than Email Marketing to connect with consumers and still maintain control over the conversations.

IT Sector outlook stable despite subdued revenue growth

The Outlook on Indian IT services companies for 2013 remain stable on the likelihood that their credit profile will remain stable during the year. Strong liquidity underlines the credit stability of the sector in 2013 when revenue growth is likely to be muted and margin stressed.

Revenue growth in 2013 is likely to be at levels witnessed in 2012 due to lower ticket deals rather than mega deals. Multiple sourcing and increased competitiveness can lead to increased volatility in revenue growth for a few IT companies.

Overall, India Ratings expects EBITDA margins to decline moderately during 2013. Wage inflation is likely to be the most important pressure point for Indian IT services companies with a large offshore workforce in India in 2013.

The trend towards shorter contract lengths will also lead to higher customer attrition rates apart from impacting margins due to higher client acquisition costs in the year. Nevertheless, an increase in resource utilisation levels and gains in higher value-added consulting segments are likely to contribute positively to the margins.

However, the possible negative impact of subdued revenue growth and stressed margins will be offset by the continued strong liquidity position of IT companies, which is supported by their high cash balances, nil-to-low debt levels and positive cash flow from operations.

The ratings of individual issuers in the sector could be negatively impacted by key event risks such as debt-funded acquisitions, large dividend pay-outs or share buy-backs which either deplete liquidity or increase financial leverage. Any materially adverse regulatory developments that try to limit the ability of the US- or Europe-based companies to offshore/outsource contracts could also impact the sector’s outlook negatively.

 

 

NASSCOM announces flagship India Leadership Forum 2013

National Association of Software and Services Company (NASSCOM) today, announced the dates for its annual three-day flagship event – NASSCOM India Leadership Forum [NILF] from February 13-15, 2013, to be held at the Grand Hyatt, Mumbai. The core theme for NILF this year is ‘Imagineering the Future: Disruptive Innovation for Sensible Growth’ where the ‘Imagineers’ will delve on opportunities to adapt, change and steer the organization and leaders across the globe towards sensible growth. The platform promises to bring yet another exciting, thought provoking and insightful panel of speakers from across the globe, to share their perspective on various industry related issues.

 

Elaborating on what NILF 2013 holds for the industry,Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM, said, “In its 21 years, NILF has recognized and rewarded the evolution and growth of the IT-BPM industry in India. This year’s theme of Imagineering the Future reflects the industry sentiment, and will focus on how future leaders will have to activate emotional and intuitive intelligence to access and transform the future. With technology stalwarts from across the world participating at NILF, the forum will provide strategic thrust and direction to local and global companies, enabling them to drive the industry’s growth and development. While we have crossed the UDS 100 billion mark in the last 2 decades, the next wave of growth has to come from a smart combination of soft skills and unconventional business ideas.”

 

This year’s NILF is also going to serve as a platform to a new campaign – the Indian Grandmaster Series. The objective of this Series is to project the Indian thought leaders, including the country’s home-grown management and industry thinkers. Including special ‘break-away’ sessions, such as the Leader2Leader, the Master Class and the power roundtables, the Grandmaster Series aims to discuss and explain the nuances of business, technology, management, leadership and more.

 

Additionally, NASSCOM will release its Strategic Review for 2013, which will include key findings of the Indian IT-BPO sector performance for FY2012-13. The year 2012-13 characterizes a landmark year as aggregate revenue for the Indian IT-BPO sector crossed USD 100 billion. The Indian IT-BPO sector continues to be one of the largest employers in the country directly employing ~2.8 million professionals, with over 230,000 jobs being added in FY2012. Despite challenges in the global market conditions, India sustained its growth trajectory. Some of the pivotal factors that have been contributing to this growth include new business models, organizational efficiencies, services around disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility, analytics, and social media, flexible product portfolios, as well as verticalized solutions.

 

The 2013 Leadership Forum is expected to host 45+ sessions, with more than 150 speakers, and close to 30 country representations at the conference.

NASSCOM announces February as women safety month

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today highlighted various measures undertaken by the IT-BPM industry to enhance awareness on the safety of its women workforce. NASSCOM along with leading BPM players highlighted the various best-practices and support systems that are in place to ensure this.

Announcing the measures, Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM said, “The contribution of women to the growth of our industry has been immense and it is our constant endeavor to provide a safe and secure working environment for all our employees. I must compliment the courage and commitment of our women employees that despite the heightened security concerns, we did not see any decline in attendance, productivity and applicants to jobs in this industry”. He further added, “The industry follows robust practices and has further enhanced its awareness programs for employees to make them aware of these practices. The NASSCOM Best Practices compendium on women security being released today showcases the comprehensive practices adopted by the industry that can be adopted by other industry sectors.”

Vikram Talwar, Chairman, NASSCOM BPM Forum said, “It is important to reiterate that it is the fundamental right of every woman to work and it is the responsibility of the entire ecosystem to ensure that there is a conducive environment created for the same. It is time for all the stakeholders – Industry, Organizations, Governments and law enforcement agencies to work towards this. The industry will continue to enhance and strengthen its own initiatives; however it cannot take over the role of the government and enforcement officials”.

Further, to enhance the level of awareness on safety and security, NASSCOM announced February as the Women Safety Month in the NCR region, wherein industry and NASSCOM will organize a series of events and activities to educate engage and empower its workforce. Over 50 different activities will be organized across companies in the region.

NASSCOM also announced the AppFame contest, wherein corporate, developers and students will be encouraged to build technology applications for women safety. The shortlisted applications will be showcased for adoption to NASSCOM members and other stakeholders.

The Indian IT-BPM sector is one of the largest employers in India and with over 800,000 women employed across levels and has been driving the agenda of gender diversity across large and small companies.

Business Intelligence and analytics need to scale up to support robust growth in data sources

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics need to scale up to support the robust growth in data sources. Business intelligence leaders must embrace a broadening range of information assets to help their organizations.

The three key predictions for BI teams to consider when planning for the future:

65 percent of packaged analytic applications with advanced analytics will come embedded with Hadoop.Organizations realize the strength that Hadoop-powered analysis brings to big data programs, particularly for analyzing poorly structured data, text, behavior analysis and time-based queries. While IT organizations conduct trials over the next few years, especially with Hadoop-enabled database management system (DBMS) products and appliances, application providers will go one step further and embed purpose-built, Hadoop-based analysis functions within packaged applications. The trend is most noticeable so far with cloud-based packaged application offerings, and this will continue.

70 percent of leading BI vendors will have incorporated natural-language and spoken-word capabilities. BI/analytics vendors continue to be slow in providing language- and voice-enabled applications. In their rush to port their applications to mobile and tablet devices, BI vendors have tended to focus only on adapting their traditional BI point-and-click and drag-and-drop user interfaces to touch-based interfaces. Over the next few years, BI vendors are expected to start playing a quick game of catch-up with the virtual personal assistant market. Initially, BI vendors will enable basic voice commands for their standard interfaces, followed by natural language processing of spoken or text input into SQL queries. Ultimately, “personal analytic assistants” will emerge that understand user context, offer two-way dialogue, and (ideally) maintain a conversational thread.

More than 30 percent of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data. Business analytics have largely been focused on tools, technologies and approaches for accessing, managing, storing, modeling and optimizing for analysis of structured data. This is changing as organizations strive to gain insights from new and diverse data sources. The potential business value of harnessing and acting upon insights from these new and previously untapped sources of data, coupled with the significant market hype around big data, has fueled new product development to deal with a data variety across existing information management stack vendors and has spurred the entry of a flood of new approaches for relating, correlating, managing, storing and finding insights in varied data.

Indian Insurance Cos. to spend Rs101 bn on IT In 2013

Indian insurance companies will spend Rs101 bn on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of more than 9% over 2012 revenue of Rs92.5 bn. This forecast includes spending by insurers on internal IT (including personnel), hardware, software, external IT services and telecommunications.

IT services has overtaken telecommunications to become the biggest spending segment, and is forecast to reach Rs30.6 bn in 2013, up from 27 bn in 2012. IT services is achieving the highest growth rate amongst the top level IT spending segments – forecast to exceed 13 percent in 2013, with growth of 23.4 percent forecast for business process outsourcing services. Consulting is also a high growth segment at over 18.2 percent in 2013.

NASSCOM welcomes clarifications from CBDT

NASSCOM welcomes the clarifications from the CBDT to make available the eligible deductions for the Software Industry and hope the assessments and past denials are suitably resolved taking in to cognizance the clarifications issued. While this is a positive step, it is important that the implementation is carried on efficiently. We urge that benefits denied in the past be reviewed in light of this move, and there be swift closure of cases for the Industry to benefit from this.

NASSCOM announces corporate awards for excellence in Diversity and Inclusion

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) organized the NASSCOM Diversity & Inclusion Summit 2013 at the Leela Palace, Bengaluru. With ‘From Case studies to Pervasive Inclusions- Making Diversity Work’ as the core theme, the summit witnessed thought leaders, CEOs, policy makers, and HR heads and professionals sharing insights into the global Inclusivity best practices used world over.

NASSCOM also announced the winners of the NASSCOM Corporate Awards for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion to recognize and honor companies that have adopted and implemented policies and practices to promote inclusion as well as enabled employees to contribute towards the success of their enterprise across all levels.

Worldwide mobile advertising revenue is forecast to reach $11.4 bn in 2013

Worldwide mobile advertising revenue is forecast to reach $11.4 bn in 2013, up from $9.6 billion in 2013. Worldwide revenue will reach $24.5 billion in 2016 with mobile advertising revenue creating new opportunities for app developers, ad networks, mobile platform providers, specialty agencies and even communications service providers in certain regions.

Geographical regions will also evolve at a different pace and in different directions. Historically, the atypically large adoption of handsets for digital content consumption in Japan and South Korea has given the Asia/Pacific region an early lead in mobile advertising worldwide. Looking forward, the high-growth economies of China and India are expected to contribute increasingly to mobile advertising growth, as their expanding middle classes present attractive markets for global and local brands.

However, North America and Western Europe will close the gap on Asia/Pacific as the mobile channel gets more and more integrated with 360-degree advertising campaigns, eating up budgets historically allocated to print and radio. Consumer multitasking will drive preference for multiplatform approaches, which will blur the lines between channels and make it difficult to eliminate category overlap. In the rest of the world — Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa — mobile advertising growth will be aligned with technology adoption and the stabilization of emerging economies, but will mostly be driven by large markets such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

Different types of mobile advertising are evolving at a different pace and in different directions. Mobile search — including paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented reality, all of which can be informed by location — will contribute to drive mobile ad spending across the forecast period, although it will diminish in strength as the period progresses.  Mobile display ad spending are expected to grow and take over from mobile search. It will initially remain divided between in-app and mobile Web (in-browser) placements — reflecting consumer usage — although after several years of in-app dominance, Web display spending will take over in-app display from 2015.

The rapidly growing share of time that consumers spend on mobile devices is generating ad inventory at a pace considerably faster than most advertisers can shift their spending to the medium. This creates a surplus condition that is driving down unit ad prices which in turn has led to a situation in which a significant portion of mobile ad inventory is taken up by app developers paying for ads to promote their apps and get them more downloads, a category known as “paid discovery.”

While the revenue basis of paid-for app store downloads provides some economic justification for this category, for many developers the outlay for ads is close to their maximum ad income or even exceeds it.
This creates a circumstance, reminiscent of the early days of Web advertising, in which cyclical advertising arrangements among websites produced an inflated picture of revenue that may ultimately prove to be a bubble.

Enterprises realize on average only 43% of technology’s business potential

Enterprises realize on average only 43% of technology’s business potential, according to a recent global survey. That number has to grow for IT to remain relevant in an increasingly digital world.

Over the last 18 months, digital technologies — including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud — have reached a tipping point with business executives. There is no choice but to increase technology’s potential in the enterprise, and this means evolving IT’s strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as their 2013 CIO IT budgets are expected to be essentially flat for fifth straight year.

The survey showed that CIO IT budgets have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bust of 2002. For 2013, CIO IT budgets are projected to be slightly down, with a weighted global average decline of 0.5 percent.

Digital technologies dominate CIO technology priorities for 2013. The top 10 global technology priorities revealed by the survey reflect a greater emphasis on externally oriented digital technologies, as opposed to traditional IT/operationally oriented systems.

CIOs see these technologies as disrupting business fundamentally over the next 10 years. When asked which digital technologies would be most disruptive, 70 percent of CIOs cited mobile technologies, followed by big data/analytics at 55 percent, social media at 54 percent and public cloud at 51 percent. The disruptiveness of each of these technologies is real, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination, rather than in isolation.

As needs and opportunities evolve, more CIOs will find themselves leading in areas outside of traditional IT. In addition to their tending role, they are starting to assume responsibility for hunting for digital opportunities and harvesting value. Sixty-seven percent of CIOs surveyed have significant leadership responsibilities outside of IT, with only 33 percent having no other such responsibilities. This situation contrasts sharply with 2008, when almost half of CIOs had no responsibilities outside of IT. Almost a fifth of CIOs now act as their enterprise’s chief digital officer (CDO), leading digital commerce and channels. Although this nascent role varies in scope and style, it normally includes championing the digital vision for the business — that is, ensuring that the business is evolving optimally in the new digital context.

Women lag behind men in internet use

Women dominate as computer professionals, though there exists a huge gap in the women’s access of the internet to internet in the developing world and Africa, said chipmaker Intel with inputs from the United Nations and US State Department.

Report suggested that there is lot more that needs to be done to boost women’s and girl’s lagging online access.

The reports said that women are 25 per cent less likely to have an online access in the developing countries than in the developed world and called on policymakers and technology companies to take steps to boost digital literacy to minimize the gap.

Even in the developed world, there is a gap between men and women in their internet usage habits. According to Intel’s report, increased access would not only improve women’s lives but also boost the global economy.

Information Technology: Result Expectations

IT is expected to have a softer than usual Q3 from a revenue growth perspective, due to holiday season in various end client verticals (esp. Manufacturing, Hi-tech), business impact of hurricane sandy in the US and continued weak spending from BFSI and telecom verticals. The Tier-1 IT players are expected to register growth in the range of 1% to 3% and Tier-2 IT players registering growth of -1.5% to 2% on an organic basis in dollar terms. Cross currencies are expected to support the above mentioned dollar revenues by 30-50bps and pricing is expected to be largely flat. Rupee appreciation of 1.7% qoq would impact in the form of lower reported rupee revenues.

Wipro IT services business is expected to deliver performance in-line with its guidance of 1.3%-3.2% posting 2%qoq growth in Q3 FY13. Due to incremental integration of HGS acquisition as well as that of Comviva, Tech M revenues are expected to grow 8.6% qoq in dollar terms.

OPM performance is also expected to be weak (declining 10-140bps qoq) broadly due to lower volumes (holidays) and rupee appreciation. Companies like Wipro, HCLT and Mindtree are expected to be further impacted by scheduled wage hikes/promotions during the quarter. Integration of lower margin acquired companies into Tech M is additionally expected to impact its OPM performance during Q3 FY13.

Wipro is anticipated to guide for 1.5-3% qoq dollar revenue growth in Q4 FY13 for its IT services business.

Commentary/guidance by Indian IT players as well as few global IT MNCs with respect to decision making, project start/ramp-ups, competitive pressures and overall demand environment has become increasingly cautious. This is more pronounced in industries like BFSI, telecom – verticals that form a substantial chunk of Indian IT services revenues.

Worldwide IT spending to reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2013, a 4.2% increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trillion, research says. The 2013 outlook for IT spending growth in U.S. dollars has been revised upward from 3.8% in the 3Q12 forecast.

Much of this spending increase is the result from projected gains in the value of foreign currencies versus the dollar. When measured in constant dollars, 2013 spending growth is forecast to be 3.9%.

Worldwide devices spending which includes PCs, tablets, mobile phones and printers, is forecast to reach $666 billion in 2013, up 6.3% from 2012.

The long-term forecast for worldwide spending on devices has been reduced as well, with growth from 2012 through 2016 now expected to average 4.5% annually in current U.S. dollars (down from 6.4%) and 5.1% annually in constant dollars (down from 7.4%).

These reductions reflect a sharp reduction in the forecast growth in spending on PCs and tablets that is only partially offset by marginal increases in forecast growth in spending on mobile phones and printers.

Worldwide enterprise software spending is forecast to total $296 billion in 2013, a 6.4% increase from 2012. This segment will be driven by key markets such as security, storage management and customer relationship management; however, beginning in 2014, markets aligned to big data and other information management initiatives, such as enterprise content management, data integration tools, and data quality tools will begin to see increased levels of investment.

The global telecom services market continues to be the largest IT spending market. It is expected that growth will be predominately flat over the next several years as revenue from mobile data services compensates for the declines in total spending for both the fixed and mobile voice services markets. By 2016, mobile data will represent 33% of the total telecom services market, up from 22% in 2012.

The Technology Sector In 2013

As the year 2012 draws to a close, the Indian IT industry has made significant progress during the last decades. According to The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOMM) India has captured a sizeable share of 58% in 2011 which was up from 51% in 2009 in global technology sourcing and business services market.

The year 2012 was marked by slowdown in global economy resulting in weak growth prospects of several world economies including India. The recovery process of Indian economy which began after the financial crisis of 2008 as reflected in the performance of FY11 again took a pause in FY12. Yet the IT-ITeS sector not only showed resilience amidst the slowdown but also marked a new milestone of crossing US$ 100 bn revenues in FY12.

Infosys Co-Chairman Kris Gopalakrishnan reported that it expects 2013 will be a much better year for the IT sector.

While Hexaware also reported that it is expecting the coming year to be “more muted”, report says. Mindtree is expecting to grow slower than the industry average of 11-14%.

Key industry predictions for IT firms in coming years

Social networking, mobile communications, the cloud and information are pressuring enterprises worldwide to make fundamental changes in business processes and that industry decision-makers should understand and respond to this Nexus of Forces that are changing their world and develop strategies to address the requirements of a fast-changing business environment. The top industry predictions for coming years include:

• Automakers will have announced concrete plans for upcoming automobile launches that will offer autonomous vehicle technology.
• Nontraditional money creation and exchange will enable 125 million more people to participate in the mainstream global economy.
• Patients will be harmed or placed at risk by a medical device security breach.
• National governments will require institutions to surrender student records for a redesigned, cost-cutting curriculum based on big data analysis.
• Natural-language processing (NLP) use among large healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) in English-speaking countries will quintuple, fueled by documentation, coding, quality reporting and research.
• To avoid becoming simply transaction factories, successful payer organizations will turn to information integration as their competitive differentiator.
• Pay-as-you-drive insurance will rise significantly to account for 10 percent of overall annual auto insurance premiums.
• More than 50 percent of the media sold to advertisers by agencies will be priced based on performance.
• Less than 2 percent of consumers globally will adopt Near Field Communication (NFC)-based mobile payments.
• More than 50% of government shared-service organizations that provide cloud services by 2015 will discontinue or downscale them.
• 50% of Tier 1 consumer goods manufacturers will invest in technology startups to maintain access to emerging business-to-consumer (B2C) technology.
• At least 25% of discrete manufacturers will adopt 3D printing to produce parts for products they sell or service.
• Enterprise software spend will increase by 25 percent from current figures as a consequence of the proliferation of smart operational technology (OT).

 

 

 

 

Worldwide ECB disk storage market up 3.6% in Q3FY12

Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue totaled US$5.3bn in the third quarter of 2012, a 3.6 percent increase from revenue of US$5.1bn in the third quarter of 2011. The third quarter of 2012 was the 12th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth.

While not as robust as in the past, the network-attached storage (NAS) segment grew 10.9%. The block-access segment composed of storage area network (SAN) and direct-attached storage (DAS) increased only 1.6 percent in third quarter 2012. The block-access SAN/DAS market segment represented 76.2% of the total ECB disk storage market in the third quarter of 2012. The NAS segment gained 1.5 points of share to represent 23.1% of the total ECB disk storage market in the third quarter of 2012.

Four vendors — Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems, Fujitsu, EMC and NetApp — outgrew the market in the third quarter of 2012. Hitachi/Hitachi Data Systems’ high-end VSP offering exhibited particular strength, while its midrange platforms achieved positive year-over-year growth for the first time in 2012. Fujitsu continued to emphasize its high-end and midrange Eternus brand storage platforms, gaining share in Europe, as well as in Japan. Even in a down market, EMC’s broad ECB disk storage portfolio enabled it to realize the greatest year-over-year market share gain. Recovering from a poor performance in the second quarter of 2012, NetApp showed signs of regaining its footing as market traction for its Cluster-Mode Data ONTAP and FlexPod offerings increased

Dell, HP, IBM and Oracle face difficulties beyond global macroeconomic issues. Lack of significant presence in the high-growth NAS market segment, in conjunction with the abrupt Compellent Storage Center and EqualLogic PS Series revenue shortfall, the latter apparently due to changing go-to-market strategies resulting from executive leadership changes, contributed to Dell’s third quarter 2012 annual revenue drop-off.

Beyond the turmoil surrounding HP’s board of directors and associated corporate activities, HP faces additional headwinds. Over 43 percent of its ECB disk storage revenue comes from the weakest region: EMEA. In spite of the impressive 72 percent year-over-year increase in 3PAR StoreServ revenue, it alone is unable to offset the drag of legacy P9000 XP, P6000 EVA, P4000 SAN and P2000 MSA products, which collectively deteriorated 24.5% in the third quarter of 2012 compared with the third quarter of 2011.

Considering the breadth and competiveness of its ECB disk storage portfolio, IBM’s third quarter 2012 annual revenue decline is attributed in part to faulty field operation strategy and execution, as well as to the fall off in DS8000 series which is closely aligned with System z and Power System server sales, and midrange DS5000/3000 and N series revenue.

Despite continued R&D investment by Oracle in its discrete ZFS Storage Appliance and Pillar Axiom storage platforms, users remain skeptical of Oracle’s long-range commitment its ECB disk storage business.

Rebounding from the March 2011 tsunami disaster, vendor revenue in Japan increased 11.2%, followed by North America, Asia/Pacific and Latin America with only 5.7, 4.8, and 1% year-over-year growth in the third quarter 2012. Displaying broad economic uncertainty, EMEA declined 2.2 percent.

 

Worldwide Semiconductor sales up 4.5%; to reach US$311bn in 2013

Worldwide semiconductor revenue is projected to total US$311bn in 2013, a 4.5% increase from 2012 revenue. Due to economic headwinds and an inventory correction, the fourth quarter projections have been revised down from the previous quarter’s forecast of US$330bn.

Growth predictions for 2012 have been reduced with semiconductor revenue expected to total US$298bn, down 3% from 2011. Third quarter forecast had put revenue at US$309bn for 2012, which would have meant an increase of 0.6% from 2011.

The semiconductor market was further depressed when DRAM prices failed to rebound in 2012. It is expected that the DRAM market will not recover until the second half of 2013, when lower supply growth is expected to pull the market into a period of undersupply. This should prove a turning point for the semiconductor industry; memory is expected to lead the recovery with 15.3% growth and total semiconductor revenue is projected to reach US$342bn in 2014, an increase of 9.9% from 2013.

The “Apple effect” is expected to remain pronounced in 2013, helping drive strong NAND and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) revenue growth of 17.2% and 9.4%, respectively. ASICs will also benefit from the new generation of video game consoles being introduced in late 2012 and 2013.

PC production will decline 2.5% in 2012. In 2013, total PC production is expected to remain weak; however, ultramobile PCs will grow strongly off a small base. The challenging economic environment has contributed to PC life cycle extension, in addition to users extending the life of their PCs as they adopt tablets.

Mobile phone production growth in 2012 and 2013 is predicted to soften overall as the tough economy reduces short-term demand for phones. However, the forecast for utility/basic smartphones has been increased, largely at the expense of traditional phones. In particular, adoption of Android-based entry-level smartphones in emerging regions continues to accelerate and will be a key growth driver. Worldwide smartphone unit production growth in 2013 is forecast to be 33%.

Media tablet production is also forecast to grow in 2013, rising 38.5% to 207.1 million units, up from the third quarter forecast of 169.8 million units. The success of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Google Nexus 7 and Apple iPad Mini illustrate the large opportunity for smaller tablets at the right price, while the white-box tablet market is stronger than anticipated, boosting the overall forecast.

Best practices for moving to a culture of extreme collaboration

CIOs and business managers will fail in their efforts to improve business performance outcomes through business process management (BPM) if they cannot overcome major barriers to cross-functional communication and collaboration. Business leaders can avoid this failure by embracing extreme collaboration (XC), a new operating model and an extreme style of collaboration.

XC is enabled by combing four nexus forces into a pattern that can dramatically innovate the way people behave, communicate, work together and maintain relationships — often across wide organizational and geographic boundaries — to collectively deliver breakthrough process performance.

Impact of Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) in Organisations

oSeventy percent of respondents in a recent survey said that they have or are planning to have “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies within the next 12 months to allow employees to use personal mobile devices to connect to enterprise applications. Thirty-three percent of all organizations surveyed currently have BYOD policies in place for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

The right of users to leverage the capabilities of their personal devices conflicts with enterprise mobile security policies and increases the risk of data leakage and the exploiting of vulnerabilities.
Outside the enterprise’s premises, employees may define their own usage policy for personal devices. Users can, therefore, install apps and visit URLs of their choice, whereas enterprises can limit applications and Web access on enterprise-owned devices. Users can also decide the level of protection for their personally owned devices. When enterprise data is allowed on these devices, the risk of leakage increases for the enterprise, not just because of the rise of mobile malware, but also because legitimate but unsupported apps may inadvertently create security risks for the organization and, most importantly, because of device loss.

Using mobile device management (MDM) software is one way to enforce policy on mobile devices. Users should obtain access to enterprise information only after having accepted an MDM agent on their personal devices, and possibly a URL filtering tool, such as a cloud-based secure Web gateway (SWG) service, to safeguard and enforce enterprise policy on Internet traffic. Enterprises should consider using application whitelisting, blacklisting and containerization, as well as setting up an enterprise app store, or app catalog, for apps that are supported.

User freedom of choice of device and the proliferation of devices with inadequate security make it difficult to properly secure certain devices, as well as keep track of vulnerabilities and updates.
Allowing users, rather than the IT department, to select operating systems (OS) and versions of mobile devices opens the door to devices that are inadequate from a security standpoint. An essential security baseline should require enhanced password controls, lock timeout period enforcement, lock device after password retry limit, data encryption, remote lock and/or wipe. The enterprise mobility baseline must also express minimum requirements on hardware — OS versions will not be sufficient.

In alignment with the mobile security policy, network access control policies should be used — for example, to deny access to enterprise resources such as email and apps from devices that cannot support the security baseline. Preventive action should be taken to ban noncompliant devices or create an alert for them by using tools such as MDM software.

Nevertheless, excessively limiting the types of allowed devices eliminates the benefits of BYOD for users. There should be no compromise of security for the sake of device variety, but where it is possible to manage and secure a new device model, it should be done. The policies that are enforced will depend on the risk appetite of the organization and the sensitivity of data allowed to reside on the device.

The user’s ownership of device and data raises privacy concerns and stands in the way of taking corrective action for compromised devices.
Most people consider data on their personal devices as their property, and would strongly object to having it manipulated by the organization without their explicit consent. When shifting from enterprise to user-owned devices, “remote wipe,” which is a fundamental security feature in a mobile security policy, becomes complicated from a legal and cultural point of view. Thus, sufficient attention should be paid to this issue to avoid repercussions. In practice, “selective wipe” is proving to be difficult in ensuring that all business data, and only business data, has been deleted from the device.

In this situation, it is recommended to liaise with the legal department to obtain advice, because there may be legal implications related to device wiping. Problems may arise if the user refuses a remote wipe. Time is of the essence when performing this task, and asking the user for permission after the compromise, when a remote wipe is considered necessary, will be impacted by message exchange delays that can be critical.  It is therefore advisable to obtain the explicit, written consent of users to delete their data in case of compromises, or the loss or theft of devices, at thetime of the user’s initiation to the BYOD program.

India PC market declined 5.9% in Q3FY12

The combined desk-based and mobile PC market in India totalled nearly 2.9 million units in the third quarter of 2012, a 5.9 per cent decrease over the third quarter of 2011.

White boxes (including parallel import), which accounted for 47% of the overall desktop market, declined 35% in the third quarter of 2012 compared to the same period last year. Mobile PCs, with a 23% year on year increase, helped drive overall market growth.

SaaS and Cloud Adoption – Recent Trends

Adoption of software as a service (SaaS) has grown dramatically among users of enterprise software solutions, but it varies widely within markets. A recent survey showed 71% of organizations have been using SaaS for less than three years.

In June and July of 2012, a survey of 556 organizations across 10 countries and within four regions (North and South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific) was conducted to understand the trend in the movement to SaaS from traditional software license models and to gain insight into how and where software budgets were being spent.

The results indicate that interest in the SaaS deployment model remains strong and continues to expand with late adopters. Brazil had the largest number of new users, with 27% of respondents using SaaS for less than one year.

Implementing net new solutions or replacing existing solutions is now the primary driver for using SaaS, according to the survey. Worldwide, there is a shift in SaaS adoption from primarily extensions to existing applications to net new deployments or replacements of existing on-premises applications.

According to recent surveys, investments in SaaS are expected to increase across all regions. 77% of respondents expected to increase spending on SaaS, while 17% plan to keep spending the same. More than 80% of respondents in Brazil and Asia/Pacific indicated more spending on SaaS applications over the next two years. The U.S. and European countries were not far behind with 73% of U.S. respondents and 71% of European respondents intending to increase spending on SaaS.

Respondents picked customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise content management (ECM) as the applications most often being newly deployed. Supply chain management (SCM), Web conferencing, teaming platforms and social were the applications picked most as replacements for on-premises solutions.

 

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Worldwide server shipments grew 3.6% in Q3 2012

In the third quarter of 2012 worldwide server shipments grew 3.6 percent year-on-year, while revenue decreased 2.8 from the third quarter of 2011.

From the regional standpoint, North America grew the most in shipments with a 7.4 percent increase. The region also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 1.1 percent for the period.

Four of the top five global vendors had revenue decreases for the third quarter of 2012. Dell was the only vendor among the top five to have its revenue increase in the third quarter. IBM had the lead for the quarter in the worldwide server market based on revenue –the company posted $3.5 bn in server vendor revenue for a total share of 27.6 percent. IBM’s revenue was down 9.5 percent year-on-year. Most of IBM’s revenue contribution came from its Power Systems brand with some contribution by System x as well.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2012 in spite of an 8.4 percent decrease in shipments for the quarter. This decline was driven primarily by declining revenue in HP’s ProLiant and Integrity brands. HP’s worldwide server shipment share was 25.8 percent.

Of the top 5 vendors in server shipments worldwide, Dell and Cisco were the only vendors to experience an increase in shipments.

In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers declined 7.1 percent in shipments but increased 2.3 percent in revenue for the quarter. The x86 rack-optimized form factor declined 0.2 percent in shipments and decreased 0.3 percent in revenue for the third quarter of 2012.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), server shipments totaled almost 590,000 units in the third quarter of 2012, down 2.8 percent from the same period of 2011. Server revenue totaled $3 bn, a decline of 9 percent year on year.

Each of the technology segments declined, with x86 server revenue dropping by 4.5 percent, RISC/Itanium Unix revenue by 18.5 percent, and the Other CPU segment by 29.3 percent.

Four of the top five vendors suffered revenue declines. The exception was Dell, which achieved 9.7 percent growth. The continued improvement of Dell’s enterprise capabilities and the expansion of its channel coverage have enabled it to buck current trends, but it remained in third place for overall EMEA server revenue. HP, despite suffering a 16.7 percent fall, kept the revenue lead in EMEA. It was followed by IBM, which saw a 7.7 percent decline.

Slowdown hits Indian PC Market

Sales of PCs in India slumped last quarter as retail consumers cut back on spending amid elevated inflation, a deepening economic slowdown and an uncertain global economic outlook.

The Indian desk-based and mobile PC market fell by 5.9 per cent to nearly 2.9 million units in Q3, 2012 from the same quarter of last year.

The share of consumer purchases in the total PC sales in Q3 2012 fell to 47 per cent from 55 per cent in the same period last year.

Indian consumers are cutting back on spending on big-ticket items as high inflation hit pockets while growth in salaries and wages eases.

The desktop market slumped by 35 per cent in Q3 2012, year on year while the market for mobile PCs witnessed a 23 per cent increase.

Lenovo remained the leader in the Indian PC market with a market share of 17 per cent last quarter

Cabinet nod for IT modernisation of Department of Posts

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs today approved the proposal of Rs.49.09bn towards IT modernisation project of the Department of Posts, covering 1.55 lakhs post offices.

The total expenditure for the project involving Rs.49.09bn includes both implementation phase and operation and maintenance phase for the IT infrastructure of Post Offices. The IT project of the Department is a part of the Mission Mode Project (MMP) included in the National e-Governance Plan (NEGP).

The Department of Posts has a network of 1.55 Lakhs post offices spread across all the States and Union Territories of the country. The key objective of the India Post IT Modernisation project is modernization and computerization of all Post offices in the country including branch post offices in rural areas to create a urban-rural network spanning across the length and breadth of the country.

The IT modernisation project is expected to give following benefits to the citizens of the country:

• Improve customer satisfaction due to faster and more reliable delivery of services
• Enhance visibility and transparency
• Provide access by multiple channels to the customers e.g. post office counters, kiosks, internet, mobiles ATMs etc;
• Ensure delivery of “citizen centric services”

The IT modernisation project will provide a national asset and infrastructure for all users apart from the post offices including various government departments, business houses and the citizens to use the services effectively for their communication, banking, insurance and service delivery needs. The project will improve the delivery of mails, banking and insurance services rendered by the Post offices across the length and breadth of the country.

For the purpose of implementation, the IT modernisation project has been structured into 8 segments catering to IT infrastructure such as datacentre, network, computers and peripherals, software applications which will cover all the product and services of the Department of Posts, and change management which will help in effective transformation into IT mode. The project will be implemented in all the 1.55 lakh post offices in a phased manner over a time period of 2 years, to be followed by the O&M phase over the period of contract.

The project will be rolled out to all the post offices covering all States and Union Territories in the country a phased manner.

Asia Pacific IT spending to reach US$743 bn in 2013

IT spending in Asia Pacific is forecast to reach US$743 bn in 2013, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2012. In 2012, IT spending in Asia Pacific is on pace to grow 7.6 percent.

In Australia, IT spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent in 2013 to reach A$75.5 billion (US$75.4 billion). IT spending in New Zealand is forecast to grow 2.0 percent in 2013 to reach NZ$11.1 billion (US$8.6 billion). These growth rates are slightly lower than the forecast worldwide growth of 3.8 percent.

In the Asia Pacific region, all five major segments of IT spending are expected to grow in 2013. The devices segment (including PCs, tablets, mobile phones & printers) in Asia Pacific is projected to total $229.7 billion, a 12.3 percent increase from 2012 spending. Data center systems spending is forecast to reach $28.6 billion in 2013, a 9.5 percent increase from 2012; software spending will total $33.9 billion, up 11.9 percent; IT services spending will reach $91.5 billion, up 7.5 percent, and telecom services is projected to total $359.4 billion, a 4.8 percent increase from 2012.

NASSCOM LaunchPAD puts the spotlight on 9 quality Indian tech products

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today announced the nine companies selected as part of its NASSCOM Product Conclave LaunchPAD initiative for 2012. The announcement was made during the second day of the NASSCOM Product Conclave (NPC) 2012 that was held at the Vivanta by Taj, Yeshwanthpur, Bangalore on the 7th and 8th of November.

Since 1990, the Indian has seen 3,402 product companies emerge. All of these companies are rapidly navigating the nascent product landscape in the country, with more and more product companies coming up from tier II cities like Belgaum, Vijayawada, Trivandrum and Mohali. The LaunchPAD initiative formally recognizes the potential of a few companies in the Indian technology product space.

This year, the judges received 54 entries and shortlisted nine companies after much deliberation. The nine LaunchPAD companies selected for 2012 are Qualitia Software Pvt. Ltd., InSync Tech-Fin Solutions Limited, Magnasoft Consulting India Pvt. Ltd., Ciafo, Silver Stripe Software Pvt. Ltd., Greytip Software Pvt. Ltd., Pipal Tech Ventures and SignEasy. Reflecting the current trends in the industry, many of these companies showcased products and concepts revolving around the cloud, localization and location services, mobility, web applications, social media and script-less test automation. The nine companies used the LaunchPAD platform to interact exclusively with the media, blogger and analyst communities, where they presented their products and received feedback from a focused group of professionals.

Vendor programs critical to channel organizations

New research from Brocade Alliance Partner Network indicates that many channel organizations are being impeded in their efforts to move toward cloud-based professional services due to a lack of flexibility and capability by their vendors. Studies revealed that in addition to direct competition, channel organization’s professional services ambitions are being restricted by a lack of innovative vendor solutions, overly complex programs and proprietary vendor technologies.

Findings revealed that almost half of respondents expect professional services to become their main revenue generator by 2020. Yet, for the majority of respondents, professional services accounts for 25% or less of revenues today.

The research also revealed the growing customer demand for professional services, with complexity and constraints on CapEx reported as the biggest customer challenges. Only 11% of respondents currently look to their vendors for innovative finance solutions and 19% for marketing funding key when trying to build a brand and reputation rather than sell on price.

To compete in the professional services sector, channel organizations now need to consider these critical questions:

• Do my vendors’ strategies, vision, and approaches to technology design support or impede our ability to maximize any professional services and support revenue opportunities?
• Do my vendors compete with me for professional services opportunities?
• Do my vendors provide value through genuine technology differentiation?
• Do my vendors provide finance solutions that address customers CapEX investment restrictions?
• Do my vendors provide marketing enablement, access to expertise and tools that help me build my brand?

The Brocade Alliance Partner Network (APN) Program is designed to deliver “success through simplicity” by taking a modular approach to partner enablement and offering a broad range of tools, assets and solutions that are easily accessible, usable, and targeted at accelerating partner revenue growth from the moment they join the program.

Designed to help partners build business models that realize revenue opportunities from professional services and cloud hosted services among current customers, while growing net new business opportunities, the Program enables partners to extend their reach through almost effortless marketing and technology enablement solutions.

Brocade APN Partners can also secure significant levels of differentiation by offering Brocade Network Subscription, first and only “pay by port” subscription solution. Brocade Network Subscription offers customers cost management and fast flexibility to scale up and down to meet business demand, while only paying for the ports in use. Brocade partners can close a deal that may have otherwise been lost due to CapEx constraints, while offering their customers a clear and manageable path towards their ultimate goals, and securing incremental revenue on an on-going basis.

Brocade Alliance Partner Network has three levels of membership (Select, Premier and Elite), plus a distribution category, and offers partners qualified leads, sales support and technical education in addition to a range of self-service marketing tools, enablement portals, and training and education programs to help partners develop and tailor their business models to their needs.

NASSCOM, CRISIL launches report on the Big Data

To help the industry script the next chapter of the great Indian BPO story,  National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) kick-started the two-day NASSCOM BPO Strategy Summit 2012 at the Leela Kempinski, Gurgaon. The Summit provided a platform for the Indian BPO industry to come together, discuss and strategize the ever-changing BPO landscape and the remodeling journey that it has embarked upon.

The Indian BPO industry is moving from efficiency to effectiveness while focusing on re-engineering themselves in order to deliver transformational impact to customers. The industry is developing future-ready solutions by following a verticalized approach by developing in-depth capabilities across verticals and creating customer impact through service delivery excellence. Despite the rise of several alternative sourcing locations, the Indian BPO industry continues to maintain its edge accounting for over 37 per cent of total global sourcing BPO revenues.

A trend that is fast being touted as the ‘next big thing’ that will help the BPO industry move forward is Big Data. Keeping this in mind, NASSCOM, in association with CRISIL GRA, also launched a report on the Big Data (findings & details below in annexure) which details the gaining traction of Big Data in India with IT services/analytics providers offering business centric solutions, and its impact on the industry and customers. The report also highlights the ability of Big Data to help in “evidence-based” decision-making, which in turn has a high impact on business operations. As the platform to review the industry performance of last year, NASSCOM also announced the top 15 BPO exporters in India for the year 2011-12 at the summit. The list is topped by GENPACT India Pvt. Ltd followed by Tata Consultancy Services BPO and Aegis Ltd at the second and third position respectively.

Data revolution to empower Common Man, says Kapil Sibal

The Minister for Communications & Information Technology Kapil Sibal says that India is at the threshold of another revolution – data revolution, and in a knowledge- based society, non- discriminatory, cost effective and timely information is the key to empower the common man.  Sibal was delivering the key note address at the Curtain Raiser Ceremony of India Telecom 2012 in New Delhi.

The Minister said knowledge is empowering and ensures good governance and inclusive and sustainable growth.  Sibal said with lowest tariff in the world, the India Telecom sector in the last five years has registered a four fold increase in teledensity. He said today mobile phone has become more than a communication device, and services are becoming increasing linked through mobile, internet and other digital modes of delivery.

The Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology  Milind Deora said the Government has provided impetus, clarity and stability to the sector. He said misinformation and half truths in a wireless society is a challenge to be met.

The Minister of State for Communications and Information technology  Sachin Pilot said India is heading for a wireless and hand-held society. He said we should be able to get latest technology at the most affordable prices.  Pilot said cyber security issues must be handled delicately.

Insights Galore at India’s 1st Digital CMO Conference

WATBlog successfully organized India’s 1st Digital CMO Conference to give marketing professionals key insights into digital media. The conference witnessed insights from marketing heads of some of India’s top brands, who have witnessed ground breaking success in digital marketing. CMOs from brands like Dell (P.Krishna Kumar), IBM (Virginia Sharma), HDFC (Kavita Joshi), Shopper’s Stop (Vinay Bhatia) & Suzlon Group (Dharini Mishra) Arun Nair (Club Mahindra) shared the story of the digital evolution of their brands.

A panel discussion that followed concluded that agencies play a critical role in formulating and executing digital campaigns. Veterans from the field of Social Media like Vivek Bhargava (CEO – Communicate 2), Nishad Ramchandran (Vice President, Hansa Cequity), Vikas Tandon (Managing Director – Indigo Consulting) , Carlton D’Silva (Chief Creative Officer – Hungama) discussed the role of agencies in leading digital growth.

The conference covered various aspects of digital marketing from strategy to social CRM to e-commerce among many others.