Identify opportunities in the rebound: IDC India chief

BANGALORE: Identifying the right opportunities during the rebound in the economy is the key for success and sustenance. This was stated by IDC India Managing Director Pradeep Gupta while delivering the keynote address for the annual IDC-event, Directions 2003, here on Thursday.

"The rebound is starting. We have made passage to the next wave. New leadership requirements will create market share changes. Prosperity will last a decade or more," asserted Gupta.

It was during one of his speeches at the Bangalore IT.COM, last year, Gupta had mentioned that recovery would happen either in the second half of 2002 or true recovery in 2003. Today, giving his presentation to the participants of Directions, Gupta asserted that signs of recovery was in sight.

The dot-com crash, IT industry on the ropes, the telecom winter and September 11 led to the worldwide IT spending collapse in 2001. However, the perspective of 40 years of IT spending, with the crashes and rebounds cycle, indicated a similar rebound is on the cards from 2002. "In the IT business cycle pattern, reality strikes every five years, triggering a temporary slowdown. In the past, slowdowns had lasted anywhere between seven to 18 months. In the advent of a new technology the market raises to a speculative bubble. Incidentally, the IT industry saw an unprecedented growth in the 1990s which led to the slowdown. However, the analysis reveals that the worldwide IT spending in the past 40 years has been $6 trillion and is poised to be $15 trillion during the next nine years."

Erasing the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that the slowdown has left in the minds of the people, are business integration, mobile and wireless, new computing architectures and security posing as opportunities in the rebound. Other opportunities include emerging geographies, interactivity and bandwidth demand, according to Gupta. In the worldwide business integration opportunity, the enterprise integration software is estimated to be $17.5 billion by 2005, enterprise application services by 2005 is poised to grow to a size of about $300 billion and Web services to touch over $ 75 billion also during the same time frame.

On the mobile and wireless opportunity, the mobile eBusiness services is expected to be round $ 40 billion by 2005, while the mobile eBanking customers in the US is expected to jump to 4 million from approximately 100,000 users now. According to IDC, the rack and the blade servers is poised to grow along with the appliance servers during the next three years. Despite the slowdown the security has been the area of growth in the past year, thanks to the September 11 incident. While the security software is to touch $15 billion, worldwide by 2006, security services is poised to touch $ 20 billion by 2005.

In a survey taken through 28 countries, IDC estimates 25 million IT jobs to be filled by 2004. Gupta concluded his presentation stressing to the industry as the time being ripe to identify the opportunity and take advantage for not only sustaining but also propelling the growth.