The Rise of an Idea Economy

S Mohini Ratna
Editor
VARINDIA

Collaboration and strategic partnerships are fundamental to improving business outcomes. There is no disagreement on the fact that we are living in an economy that is built on ideas. By 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. The technology of today has to be very action-oriented, proactive and agile to support the changing business needs.

In today's fast-paced environment, a "do-it-alone" approach is not the best strategy for growth. Companies that initially grew organically need to look for new ways to drive collaborative innovation that delivers on what their customers need today – and in the future.

The beauty of an idea economy is that almost anyone and everyone, whose idea has the worth, has the potential to bring change. If we look at the new companies - the digital ninjas – the way they are harnessing the power of technology, specifically applications, digital tools and cloud, they have certainly caused a huge disruption. To enable this kind of disruption, we need to introduce change - a change that is able to create new outcomes, a change that helps businesses proactively manage all forms of risks, a change that helps systems to be contextually aware and predictive and finally, a change that helps in creating a hyper connected workplace and ecosystem that further enhances productivity. These changes can only be seen if we shed the old skin and move on to embrace the new style of IT.

India has defeated every such symptom and has become the world's fastest major growing economy for the third consecutive year. India will grow at 7.5% this year and will become a US$ 2.2 trillion economy. With the initial vision of bringing 10,000 start-ups, now we are moving towards 20,000 start-ups and are recognized as the 7th largest economy in the world.

The need of the hour is to adopt the new style of IT to support the organization, which has to be efficient, open, flexible, scalable, collaborative, cost effective and most importantly secured. One is protection time and the other one is exposure time. Protection time can be defined as the collective ability of your security policies, controls, people and processes to identify and protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your sensitive information and IT services for a certain amount of time against specific threats. Whereas exposure time acknowledges the fact that we live in a world full of hackers who get better at their craft every day. It is composed of the time it takes to detect, respond and recover from a cyber-attack that is attempting to penetrate the protections described above. Ideally, the exposure time is less than the protection time, in order to avoid the loss of confidentiality, integrity or availability. In summary, companies should look for new ways to drive collaborative and secured innovation at every best possible level, which could deliver on what their customers need today – and in the future.

I have seen the greatest success when opportunity drives collaboration. This year the Channel Leadership Survey 2018 (CLS) speaks about how collaboration brings various technology products and solutions together for making the tech eco-system agile, and this is in tandem with the feedback received from VARs and Vendors.

Once again my sincere thanks to all of you for your continued support in sharing your valuable inputs and voting in our website. Thank you again for helping us in bringing the 19th Anniversary issue with a great success.