India can be a global tech transformation leader

India can become the tech capital of the decade or even the century. R. Venkatesh, President, Enterprise Business Group at Redington Ltd, looks at India’s place on the global stage and other trends. Edited excerpts from a video interview.

How the pandemic changed the industry

The pandemic had an impact on all of our personal and professional lives to a large extent. Specific to enterprises, digital transformation became a top priority for organizations. While this was always talked about in the past, the acceleration that we have seen in digital adoption and transformation across sectors, across industries and across enterprises was possibly unmatched post-pandemic.

The second aspect is hybrid work became a standard practice. To a large extent the IT services sector is struggling to get back people into the office.

Today the role of IT is becoming more strategic. How can technology get more productivity and efficiency and not just cost effectiveness in operations? How can it drive more innovation? Enable strategic initiatives for driving growth etc. How can I protect my organization?

Thirdly, in the past infrastructure used to be more consolidated. From: How do I keep it centralized in my premise, it became more distributed. It became a hybrid environment. I have something on prem, I have co-located something and I have moved something into public cloud.

Cloud has almost become mainstream today. Cloud has been one of our fastest growing businesses in the last few years and especially post-pandemic it has continued that momentum.

Is cloud real? Is there a role for organizations like Redington to play? Will it even solve any of our challenges? These were all the questions in the customer’s mind a few years ago. Today if customers don’t adopt cloud even for some of the workloads, then it feels that there is something wrong with that organization.

Securing the enterprise became more and more complex and that required huge tech adoption. Last but not the least, its AI led automation. How do I automate a lot of my mundane and repetitive processes to make the people more effective, efficient and productive in terms of their decision making, in terms of their challenges that they face in terms of driving organizational growth. How do I use ML to drive data analytics to give better insights about business to drive strategic growth.

The tech evolution and adoption gap

The concept of “Technology Friction” has become very important and very pertinent today from Redington’s context. How are we positioning Redington in the current and future world? Technology is evolving at a certain pace and the adoption is relatively slow.

The gap between the evolution and adoption is what we call as friction. We feel as a technology solution provider, our role is to help, to reduce this friction and enable technology adoption for customers and enable partners to sell the relevant and right technologies to the customers to solve for their business challenges, problems and technology requirements.

Post-pandemic resurgence and the cloud

A few years ago, only hardcore digital native companies, tech startups and ecommerce companies were going in for cloud adoption. Over time, whether it is an enterprise or an SMB or across sectors, cloud adoption had become very critical. Earlier IT was only possibly looking at only supporting the inhouse IT requirements, infrastructure, end points and give support.

Today the role of IT is becoming more strategic. How can technology get more productivity and efficiency and not just cost effectiveness in operations? How can it drive more innovation? Enable strategic initiatives for driving growth etc. How can I protect my organization?

During pandemic it was possibly resilience. How do we bounce back? That was then the top priority. Post-pandemic it is resurgence. How do I put the organization back on track in terms of growth initiatives?

From that aspect cloud has become a very integral part of tech adoption. But it has still not solved for all the challenges. Regulated industries require sovereignty of data along with more private and secure environment. Security aspect of cloud is still a big opportunity in the market today.

This is where our S.M.A.R.T. (Simplifying Migration & Accelerating Robust Transformation) Cloud Adoption Framework really helps in assessing the customer requirement, understanding their business need, giving them the right architecture and framework to adopt cloud. Certain workloads are best suited for cloud. Certain are best remaining on prem. We give them a cloud roadmap for years. We are the only distributor to have partnerships with all the hyperscalers in the country.

India is positioned so well with our strong IT services foray to lead this transformation in the whole globe, and we have a huge opportunity. This is one of the reasons they are possibly saying India can become the tech capital of the decade or even the century.

Most of the hyperscalers have started opening up their second and third data center in India today. The government is releasing a separate data center policy and a data privacy policy. Globally there is an evolution. India is also pretty fast in terms of bringing up some of these regulatory requirements and practices. We see an increasing trend in terms of private cloud implemented by many of these enterprises or regulated industries.

The impending AI-led transformation

AI has become an integral part of our day to day lives from a consumer standpoint, whether it is Alexa or Google Home or Siri and even Google Maps. Even from enterprises standpoint, how do I automate some of those repetitive and mundane practices so that human beings can take more strategic decisions that will help organizations drive more productivity and efficiency. That’s the way things are evolving.

For example, in a sales function, “product availability and pricing” is a very important query that the customers and channel partners keep asking for. So, is there is an opportunity to automate these queries? The marketing function has an opportunity to automate many of their standard programmes, policies and frameworks.

Using chatbots, voice assistants and social media platforms have become possibly a very imperative investment from a tech automation perspective. It is said that AI-led automation is going to be the single biggest tech adoption in the industry globally and in India.

India on the road to 2047

India is positioned so well with our strong IT services foray to lead this transformation in the whole globe, and we have a huge opportunity. This is one of the reasons they are possibly saying India can become the tech capital of the decade or even the century.

We have already pioneered the digital transformation in the form of UPI. It is possibly the global standard right now. Many global mature economies are thinking of adopting it. The government is talking about ONDC, which is about integrating all the digital ecommerce platforms and enabling the consumers and sellers to come on one single platform.

What more needs to be done?

What will be important is the government’s investment in and around R&D plus innovation and how do the enterprises create a platform for that to make it convenient for new age entrepreneurs to leverage technology. There is a skill gap. We have a huge human resource capital available, but they need to be skilled on necessary areas and technologies. That will become a huge asset for the country. Today we find private-public partnerships more from an infrastructure level. How can we create this partnership in the technology world?

R. Venkatesh

President, Enterprise Business Group, Redington Ltd

(Check out the complete interview at the CyberMedia Series YouTube channel)

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in