The Impact of Disruptive Forces

Undeniably, the buzz in IT is about the nexus of disruptive forces-social, cloud, analytics, mobility. They are not merely new markets alone; they are forces that are reordering and redefining the technology industries. The impact can be seen even in a developing market like India.
Based on the performance of various industry segments in the past financial year, it is very clear that most of the segments are the bearing the impact of the nexus of disruptive forces.

The PC market is facing tough times and the disruptive force here is the tablet. The new access devices are tablets and smartphones that define the trend of mobility and mobility has in turn changed many a rule in enterprise computing.

In FY2012-13, the server market in India declined for the third consecutive year. The forces behind this were clearly the new infrastructure trends like virtualization, consolidation, cloud, and converged infrastructure.

Similarly, the storage market in India declined marginally in the face of new trends facing the enterprise. It is being drastically reshaped by technology forces like cloud, big data, and converged infrastructure. Deduplication, integrated back-up, storage virtualization, and SDN are gaining traction.

On the other hand, entirely new market segments are redefining how people work. Unified communications is a growth segment in India and the trend is driven by increased need for collaboration and communication, spurred on by mobile, social, and visual communications.

The software market is no doubt being redefined by cloud. Software available in the SaaS model has clearly disrupted the way in which enterprises buy and use software. For the software vendors, it is a clear game-changer from the erstwhile model of software licensing and maintenance revenues. Not only that, key technologies related to database and information management are seeing fundamental changes. In-memory databases, analytics-based computing, application stores are the new defining paradigms.

The security market is being altered by the new rules of computing. While security threats and concerns have heightened, the market for security products is for new set of products that handle threats arising out of the new forces. Mobility, cloud, consumerization, and other disruptive technologies are changing the security products landscape and organizations are still adjusting to the new paradigm. Growth areas include UTM (unified threat management) and content filtering.

The services business is seeing new trends in terms of service delivery models and new market opportunity. Business process services processes being delivered using the platform-as-a-service model, IT applications being modernized for the social-mobile-cloud-analytics world, analytics services are just some of the examples.

These forces are unstoppable and irreversible. It is truly creating the next generation of computing.