What will 2005 be like?

2005 will be a year that will see new products, services and applications driving growth Shyam Malhotra

Broadband in India will start to happen. It is the mantra of the day and for

the first time we have a target-of 20 mn users by 2010. Not very ambitious,

but nevertheless a target. So will we have hordes of users running high

bandwidth searing applications in 2005? Probably not. 2005 will see more of the

infrastructure build up. The 256 kbps 'always on' connection that the Indian

policy defines as broadband needs infrastructure strengthening. A start has been

made by the government PSUs BSNL and MTNL. I hope competitive pressuces will

force others to follow.

Open source software, Linux, is going to catch on. Well, it has been catching

on for some time now! But now the numbers are beginning to look good. It has

been a rather torturous journey for Linux, but now software license revenues are

set to grow 78.6% to $11.6 mn in 2005 in Asia (IDC). India and China present the

largest opportunities for Linux adoption and migration in the server market.

What will drive this? Lower licensing cost, saving money on databases,

application servers, integration platforms and operating systems; development of

custom applications-application in regional languages etc. The SMB sector can

emerge as a major user. One study forecasts that the SMB IT-related spending,

which was more than $500 bn in 2004, will top $800 bn by 2008 (www.ami-partners.com).

The main areas of IT investment for this sector will be security, application

hosting, network storage and web hosting/development. These areas depend heavily

on back end infrastructure and Linux is a good option for that. The growth of

Linux should cease to be a prediction next year-having already happened.

Will e-governance gather momentum? This one involves sticking the neck out.

Like Linux this also gets top billing on many prediction lists. With better

connectivity and Internet penetration in the country, e-governance can stride

forward. Many pilot projects and trail implementations have happened across many

states. There are more in the pipeline. The conditions are right but growth will

need a strong desire. That will not be the case-at least not uniformly-across

the country.

There is nothing patchy about the growth of wireless services. According to

IDC, the wireless services market will overtake fixed line services in Asia

Pacific. The total telecom market is expected to touch $163 bn (up 11% over

2004). And more than half the revenue of this is predicted to be from the

wireless services. In October 2004, the mobile phone user base was 44.51 mn,

compared to 43.96 mn fixed-line users. Mobile telephony should also see more

applications. Internet access, SMS based services, locational services and many

more, will start making an appearance. Growth will therefore happen not only

because of more users but also more use.

The wireless gaming market in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, is expected to

grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%, from $237.4 mn last year

to $1.3 bn in 2008. In India also, mobile gaming is emerging as one of the

growing and popular applications in the digital consumer economy. Gaming is

quickly expanding beyond PCs and handhelds. The Indian mobile gaming market is

expected to generate $26 mn in revenue in 2004, and will increase to $336 mn in

annual revenue by 2009. (http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P2109). The

industry is presently in its infancy but has potential to grow in this year.

The one key trend that emerges is that 2005 will not be a year in which

growth happens by having more of the same. It will be a year that will see new

products, services and applications driving growth.

The author is Editor-in-Chief of CyberMedia, the publishers of Dataquest

(with inputs from Saswati Sinha) Shyam

Malhotra