Gartner, one of the worlds’ leading research and advisory company had recently stated that digital transformation is on a fast track as IT spending has increased due to Covid-19. We bring you the thoughts from Industry Veterans on this forecast by Gartner showcasing their opinion, expectations, and what this forecast means for their industry.
S Sriram, Chief Strategy Officer at iValue InfoSolutions
“Even before the pandemic, most businesses realized the importance of digital and online models and had made decent progress to keep business agile and address larger markets. Pandemic reinforced the importance of technology investments to extend flexibility in different lockdown scenarios including WFA. Most IT firms focused on empowering secured digital business did well despite India’s GDP posting negative growth after several decades including iValue, with its double-digit growth for Fy21.
Forward-looking companies did a lot of saving around business travel and office expenses during pandemic most of which was invested around securely extending business apps to all stakeholders, strengthening authentication and endpoint security, ensuring optimal app performance for WFA scenario, and securing endpoint data. Business continuity was another key focus area with investment in the hybrid cloud model for bursting in and out of multi-clouds from private and seamlessly managing it remotely. 3 way DR was in focus too along with continuous audit and assessment with heightened attacks in a vulnerable WFA working model.
With rapid recovery during the 2nd half of Fy21 and India poised for the fastest GDP growth for Fy22, we are excited about the growth opportunities for the IT fraternity focused around services and solutions to empower business to power safe, secure and scalable digitalization of business. We expect relevant IT to grow at 2X of GDP which wud be around 26% for Fy22.”
Prashanth GJ, CEO at Technobind
“The Gartner report on the WW IT spending forecast is pretty much in line with what we hear when talking to the CIOs in Indian Industry. Coming out of a difficult year when a lot of IT spend was made on extenuating circumstances where the focus was on ensuring business continuity by providing access for remote working environment. This year will see spends on two fronts – one consolidation of the strategy and execution for a more continued WFH culture and the second re-starting of the paused transformation projects. At Technobind we have quite a few technologies in our portfolio for enabling WFH culture, Employee Experience, and Collaboration – where we engaged with the industry through our partners and this is something we will continue to focus on this year as well. The Gartner commentary on the industry, which highlights the role of IT becoming more about business value delivery, is very exciting for us as it endorses our core philosophy where we continuously try and focus our selling story towards solving specific business pain points of customers. We will continue to invest more in enabling our partners to walk this talk and we strongly believe that we should be able to see FY 21-22 also being a good growth year.”
Gurpreet Singh, Managing Director at Arrow PC (Dell Technologies – Titanium Partner)
“Gartner has predicted that the total worldwide IT spending is going to increase in 2021 from $3.2 M to $3.9M. Enterprise Software is predicted to grow 8.8%.To ensure growth consistency and the right focus on expenditure in the enterprise industry this data is useful. Partners like us (Arrow PC) will certainly help enterprises or any organization to fast track towards digital transformation which is driven by the current necessity. But it is not just the growth that organizations need to focus on, an employee-centric approach in terms of technology to ensure that employees are up to date on technology and the IT infrastructure they are using. Change in IT policies, tools and with the right budget, the predicted increase in spending will certainly give the needed edge to all the organizations connected directly or indirectly to digital transformation. Due to the after-effects of the pandemic, there is a necessity for companies to carefully plan their expenditure. As remote working has become the new norm, tech companies need to watch their budget and improve the remote working environment. Supporting DCs is also a need of the hour as off-premises data management and analytics is what is supporting the industry to plan their next step. A prediction like Gartner’s can certainly help industries tread in the right path.”
Satish Kumar V, CEO at EverestIMS
“The “Gartner Worldwide IT spending forecast” indicates a deeper role for IT being an enabler of “business value delivery”. IT now will assume a “spearhead” function to achieve enterprise goals rather than being just a support player. The pandemic actually was a telling case in point that showed how IT came to the rescue of businesses but through emergency and kneejerk reactions. Whether it was “work from home” or managing the internet backbones that kept communication or remote management of Infra, IT was a key player in keeping the show running. We anticipate a larger role for IT to play in the coming years and the Gartner forecast only confirms the same. Such spending will be directed towards achieving revenue goals, creating platforms for employee engagement and collaboration, along with ensuring IT Infra is kept pristine and in high-performance mode. IT will no longer be seen as an expense center, rather it may soon become a key element in the arsenal of businesses looking to excel.”