Trends that impact IT-ITES in 2018 and after

Many of the Indian organizations have undertook a mass number of IoT pilot projects to gain business benefits. However, experts and top CIOs in country believe that this year the focus will be in putting on appropriate infrastructure required to help them take those pilot projects across the organizations.

As a result, we are likely see a mild dip in the number of pilot projects, but the focus on core technology infrastructure transformation in Indian organizations will continue to be driven by IoT.

Many organizations will also likely fail to see the business benefits because of wrong choice of use cases that they originally started with.

Here are few trends to look forward:

Analytics and use of AI/ chat bots to enhance user experience. 

According to Gartner, “By 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development. Individual apps are out. Bots are in. In the “post-app era,” chatbots will become the face of AI and bots will transform the way apps are built. Traditional apps, which are downloaded from a store to a mobile device, will become just one of many options for customers.”

According Darshan Appayana, CIO, Happiest Mind, “Chatbots backed with cognitive engines will play a major role in enhancing employee interactions and experience, like during onboarding, understanding company policies, etc. AI assisted analytics platforms will become mainstream for financial analysis, sales prediction, project success predictions etc. Similarly there will be an increased usage of blockchain technologies internally in contract management, internal approvals, etc.

Gartner reports suggest that in 2020, AI will become a positive net job motivator, creating 2.3M jobs while only eliminating 1.8M jobs. AI will have a positive effect on jobs with AI-related jobs seeing steady growth starting in 2020. Up through 2020, all industries will see varying levels of time and effort savings with most industries experiencing no job loss. More than replacing humans entirely, AI will augment existing jobs and improve productivity.

Self-disruption

Darshan says, “If you don’t disrupt your way of thinking or the way of working, you will “self-destruct”. The disruption cycle has become much shorter, it is now every 3-4 years. So it is a constant disruption that will keep a company relevant.”

According to research agency Gartner, “By 2020, 5 of top 7 digital giants will wilfully self-disrupt to create their next leadership opportunity. Digital giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google disrupted industries by looking to previously unexplored options such as chatbots, conversational UX, and visual and voice search.”

However, these giants have grown so big, it is difficult to find new external areas to disrupt, so these enterprises will turn to self-disruption. Like Apple disrupted the MP3 industry, where it had a leading product in the iPod, with the iPhone, while this reduced revenue for Apple iPods. They potentially disrupted their own revenue base to create new and better opportunities.

Use of particular apps in an enterprise

User experience and omni presence will be the norm even for an enterprise as the workflow becomes more mobile and flexible. Shorter project timelines will drive the need to make services available anytime anywhere.

So containerized apps for access corporate information and services will become more prevalent. According to a report by Gartner, “By 2020, IoT technology will be in 95% of electronics for new product designs. With the technology evolution surrounding the IoT, it will become increasingly possible to add IoT features to a product at minimal cost. While security challenges need to be sorted, suppliers should begin to think about how to implement this technology, toward which consumers will soon gravitate, into every electronics-enabled product.”

Bots will play an important role, individual apps likely to get out of market. In the “post-app era,” chatbots will become the face of AI and bots, which will transform the way apps are built.

Traditional apps, which are downloaded from a store to a mobile device, will become just one of many options for customers.

Cloud/ opex

2018 will see buying products and services under the OpEx model will tend to be cheaper.  CIOs will get an advantage of spending several hundred thousand dollars all at once, rather than spending every month. OpEx will simplify budgeting year to year as costs and terms will become more predictable every month. With CapEx, sometimes it is difficult for IT managers to explain exactly how the company benefitted directly and indirectly from a purchase, but with OpEx, this will be transparent. For instance if you use x amount of storage this month, you will end up only paying x amount for it.

There are many conversations around the topic cloud, and moving to various types of cloud services. However, most Indian CIOs who participated in IDG’s CIO Year Ahead 2018, were not concerned about the implementation of hybrid cloud, but they wanted a proper infrastructure and licensing for it and they discussed on how to leverage the power of hybrid. But, it’s important to note just how much cloud services – and hybrid, in particular, have been growing and where they are impacting your business.

According an article published in WSJ, “Demand for the so-called hybrid cloud is growing at a compound rate of 27%, far outstripping the overall IT market.

CIO of Happiest Mind, Darshan Appayana says, “I thinks this is a done and dusted topic. Enterprises will look at the most cost effective way to deliver service and it could be a private, public or hybrid cloud. It will depend on the usage pattern, predictability of loads, etc.”