Customer Preferences Have Created A New Set Of Challenges

 What is your appraisal of the performance of the Indian ICT industry, given the social-political changes in the US and Europe and the digital disruption?

Over the last year, the Indian technology industry has seen strong growth as organizations across industries are pushing for digital transformation to meet their customers changing needs. The Indian ICT industry is expected to cross the $200 billion mark in the next two years. Given the current challenges and opportunities presented by the market in India, achieving that growth is very plausible.

Speaking on the social-political changes, the recent developments on the data protection front has led to ministries across the world regulating and implementing policies to handle/protect data. Governing bodies such as the Justice BN SriKrishna committee in India, GDPR in the EU, and the new cybersecurity legislations in Vietnam, have been instilled to build on digital trust and cybersecurity. To further strengthen the Government’s efforts, Enterprise and IT firms have seized this window of opportunity to build on products/solutions addressing digital risk.

In an era where technology is rapidly disrupting every passing minute, it has become imperative for organizations to embrace newer technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Blockchain etc. for digital transformation. From the army to agriculture, these new age disruptive tools of technology are being adapted to change the economics of all organizations across multiple verticals. From here on, one can only expect to further progress in terms of a secured digital disruption, and let technology further strengthen all our lives. In India, rapidly increasing urbanization, digitization and changing customer preferences have created a new set of challenges that need to be addressed. Organizations that are closely watching this space have realized that there is a huge domestic market that can be tapped by bringing about the right balance between a digital economy and absolute privacy protection. Of course, the approach to tap this market needs to be carefully crafted, but the size of the opportunity remains huge nevertheless.

In summary, organizations that can get on the digital transformation bandwagon and embraced disruptive technology with an unrelenting focus on addressing the associated risks, have shown better performance, and also laid a solid foundation for their next phase of growth.

How emerging tech is changing the entire industry, and do you see traditional verticals upping the ante by adopting newer tech? 

The last decade has seen some major technology innovation. A special mention to the past five years that has brought about a monumental change in terms of innovation to enterprise technologies. Emerging enterprise technologies are now capable of changing the status quo. For instance, AI capabilities are now embedded within network – namely automation and machine learning help in increasing speed and improve all aspects of any application lifecycle, right from automatic provisioning and deployment to security and connectivity. Adding onto enterprise technology, let us take a moment to appreciate the 5G ecosystem. This seems to be the next essential generation of mobile communications, with Gartner predicting that by 2020 there will be over 21 billion devices globally connected to the internet.

 Can you talk about the need for a proactive Security infrastructure in this era of connected devices?

In this sense, with 5G coming into the picture, there is going to be massive jump in data volume due to the reduction in transit time along with an increase in the number of IoT devices. However, this may lead to a substantial trust gap when it comes to data consumption, bringing attention on the security aspect of consumption. This is where we see that the tech is changing the entire industry. Now, companies are adopting a more practical and systematic strategy to deploy a robust security infrastructure. For instance, we at Subex expect the next phase of growth to come from developing technologies for building IoT security solutions to establish digital trust. We have closely tracked the IoT threat intelligence landscape and built a solution. This solution will not only cater to our legacy customer base, but be further extended to smart cities, oil and gas, and manufacturing sectors. We are able to drive such creations through our global honeypot (a decoy computer security mechanism), that consists of updated, real-time threat database to protect organizations from potential risks. Through such innovations from us at Subex, we are headed towards contributing substantially to IoT security, which is expected to become one of the largest spending areas within IoT by 2025.

Drawing from our example above, this is how emerging technology is changing the nature of doing business, and traditional verticals are upping the ante by reinforcing their core functions by innovating with these technologies. In the Indian context, there are many such small pockets of innovations that are seeing the light of the day, and it is essential that these innovations get the right opportunities to scale up substantially. It is these home-grown innovations that will truly make a difference, because most of the challenges that we are trying to overcome in India demand a unique outlook and mindset. Generic approaches that have worked elsewhere seldom succeed in solving issues in this part of the world, and it calls for a localized approach driven by custom algorithms and specific data to create an impact.

Further, it is commendable how organizations are further foraying into verticals that are not a part of their core competence and exceling at it with no room for their legacy to be diluted. I think it is safe for us to say that organizations adapting emerging tech are truly bringing about a change in the technology landscape.