Data Driven Growth is Here!

Tech & Business Trends 2015

By Yathish Nagavalli

The ICT industry will go through transformation from product centric to customer centric that is primarily driven by data and will innovate to bring new ‘value’ to the customer.

Increased penetration of broadband, mobile internet and continued popularity of smartphones will further augment new investments and business opportunities.

Consumers, businesses and governments alike will depend more on the offerings from the ICT industry. The ICT industry will go through transformation from product centric to customer centric that is primarily driven by data and will innovate to bring new ‘value’ to the customer in terms of offering new products and services and this will be made possible with alliances and partnerships between telecom operators and OTT players.

In 2015, we can see telecom operators leverage their strengths, monetize on core assets like network infrastructure and customers and embrace new business models while learning from the OTT players.

Telecom operators will leverage the ICT infrastructure to enable services from other verticals like healthcare, energy and retail to name a few, thus bringing new revenue streams. Here are some of the trends and technologies that will be of importance to the ICT industry in 2015:

Smart Pipes: The ‘dumb’ pipes will start to get smarter and new instrumented value added services will be enabled like for example HD Voice and HD Video. Application of virtualization technologies on network elements with NFV and SDN will improve operational efficiency as well as bring in new capabilities.

Ubiquitous high speed internet connectivity: Ubiquitous high bandwidth internet connectivity will be a requirement for many new ICT services. New technologies will continue to push the boundaries of what ‘High Speed’ broadband means and we will see more and more deployment of ultra high speed broadband with ‘x’ Gigabits per second bandwidth capacity. We can expect to see increased deployment of 4G/ LTE in the mobile broadband space while research and experimental focus will remain on 5G.

Increased adoption of M2M and Internet of Everything: Connected devices and people will change many things in 2015 across multiple verticals like energy, healthcare, security among others. It is estimated that about 50 billion devices will be connected by 2050. The exponential growth of connected devices will have impact on network infrastructure and telecom operators will need to plan on upgrading the infrastructure and related technologies. ICT technologies combined with internet of everything will enable realization of smart cities.

Cloudification: Mobility and cloud computing go hand in hand. Cloud computing is continuing to gain momentum and Telecom operators will play an important role in enabling cloud adoption leveraging their infrastructure and expertise in managing large data centers.

Mobile first strategy: Anything that can go mobile will go mobile. Businesses will have to use the ‘Mobile First’ strategy to innovate faster and to retain and attract new Customers. Providing consistent multi channel engaging experience drives adaption and engagement.

Greater Personalization: Customers expect greater personalized product offerings with context based on location, time and device. Gamification will be used to engage not only the employees but also the customers to do what the enterprises would want them to do.

(The author Yathish Nagavalli is Chief Architect at Huawei India R&D Center)