Innovation, Intelligence, Internet... Next Era of Economy

S. Mohini Ratna,
Editor-VARINDIA

After making rapid strides in mobile telephony like 2G and 3G, we are now blessed with LTE service which has debuted in the country after the recent launch by Bharti Airtel. With this, 4G is now a reality in India. 3G service has found about 10 million takers around the country which has a mobile subscriber base of 900 million. With the launch of 4G services, the data transfer speed will be ten times faster than 3G (data transfer speeds of up to 2 Mbps). However, there is no 4G-enabled handsets available in India at present. The 4G network can be accessed only via wireless internet dongles on laptops.

This year, the IT automation is expected to be used more to cater to the local growth and demand.  The companies will spend more on IT in the form of equipping their sales people with tablets and integrating these devices with their sales force automation software.  It is observed that some of the priority areas for investment are customer relationship management, e-mail and calendaring, web and business intelligence tools. The automation not only brings increased accuracy and efficiency in the entire ecosystem but also leads to reduced consumption of paper in the industry.

India is seeing one of the fastest rates of internet adoption across the globe and also one of the fastest-growing IT services markets. Email is still bigger than social media. A recent study indicated that 85% of online-connected global citizens in 24 countries use internet for emails, while six in ten (62%) use it for social networking. This clearly shows that the Indian Internet economy contributed Rs.3.2 trillion to the overall economy in 2010, representing 4.1 per cent of GDP, and is projected to rise to Rs.10.8 trillion by 2016. It is up to all of us - users, businesses and the government - to leverage the potential of the internet to deliver value and wealth. We see emerging opportunities for innovation in areas like mobile, e-commerce and cloud and are committed to growing the market by offering more locally relevant services.

Let us live in the cloud world to connect globally.