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Wednesday, January 10, 2007
It's New Year, and the greetings ring across 180 million phones. India is expected to cross 250 million by end-2007. It's a proud member of the 100-million-mobiles club (along with China, USA, Japan and Russia). In 10 years, its teledensity jumped 10-fold - to 10 phones per 100 people.
Powering this were dramatic drops in pricing: over a tenfold drop in ten years in cellular tariffs, long distance call charges. And hardware costs.
Motorola now has the F3, its first ultra-low-cost handset, made in India. Under Rs 1,600, it's sleek and black, thin and light, and its new-age display saves power. Cheap handsets will drive the next explosion in usage 'at the bottom of the pyramid', fuelled further by operator subsidies and free-handset bundles.
Most of the 2006 story was that of a consumer mobile boom. In 2007, that boom will impact everything, not just popular opinion and the judiciary: but governance, enterprise IT, software and services, manufacturing.
South India is home to a new wave of manufacturing: mobiles and their supply chain, supplying to a boom market. Over 100 companies in India have sprung up in chip design, largely involved in mobile technologies.
India's services story was founded on financial services, which still accounts for over half the pie. But telecom is 'the new BFSI'. It's the fastest growing vertical for services, and the subject of a range of startups and new ventures by existing firms.
Playing catch up in 2007 with the consumer mobile boom will be the enterprise.
In DQ's annual four-city CIO Mobility event in December, most CIOs had at least a mobile application in the works: mobile email, and, often, an SMS gateway to an enterprise app. Other mobility tech drew serious interest: RFID apps, location-based services and GPS, GIS and mapping, field and shop floor data capture devices that are full-fledged, connected handheld computers. And CIOs were hunting for mobile solutions to problems as diverse as CRM and field support and meter-reading.
At the heart of all this is the mobile device, most often a phone that's getting smarter. And the PDA is converging with the smartphone. The BlackBerry is now more phone-like, so are the new Palms; Nokia's email devices (such as the E50) are looking more like simple phones, as cameras and media players are becoming standard in the phone form factor. And enterprises have seen that the mobile phone is the most readily available "terminal" among employees, partners, and customers. CIOs will inevitably turn to the phone as a key access device to enterprise apps. Even as we enter a fourth straight year of 100% growth in laptop sales.
Welcome to the Year of Enterprise Mobility.
Prasanto Kumar Roy
Source: Dataquest
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