Tech in 2015: What Xerox, Freescale, NetApp and Ericsson have in store

The Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi’s vision is Make In India. This vision is being strongly approached in order to put India on the global map of innovation. The process will take a while to be implemented, but will definitely see the light of day as Mr Modi has plans of a major national program, designed to facilitate investment, foster innovation, enhance skill development and build a best-in-class manufacturing infrastructure.

The movement will involve various sectors into the program, which include media, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, space and a lot other areas. Technology is one major sector and it will play an important role into the success of the Prime Minister’s vision.

In order to make the Make In India plan a definite success, a lot of technology companies, in India and across the world, are joining hands to see a brighter future for India. Companies such as Xerox, Freescale, NetApp and Ericsson are already seeing changes and planned a roadmap for the future, keeping the move as the main focus.

Speaking on the Make In India program, here are what the four tech giants say about the year that went and what they have in store for the present year.

Vishal Awal, Executive Director, Services, Xerox South Asia

With the vast amount of data that will be generated through the positive change in Government ideology, the back-end vital work-flows and processes (such as managed print services, document management services, etc) will have to undergo a major revamp in 2015, with upgrades and implementation of new content management solutions that ensure data availability on a real time basis with no lapse.

As per the assessment that E&Y and Xerox did on Indian MPS market, the market size as of 2015 is expected to be ~250M$. MPS adoption levels as of 2011 were less than 10% (steadily growing though) and hence there is a vast untapped opportunity for market expansion. MPS segment has gained momentum in the last few years as enterprises have started to transition from CAPEX to OPEX business mode of printing. With the changing technology, MPS not only caters to “Print for Less” but also “Print less” via enhanced automation and digitization. There is increasing awareness about the MPS market in India as outsourcing as a service model matures, and early adopters realize significant business benefits. The momentum is currently evident in the large enterprises, but the vibrancy in the market with the entry of more players offering MPS is slowly but surely permeating to other segments including the medium and small enterprises. The success of Indian service verticals like BFSI, Telecom, education, publishing, hospitality and real estate are driving the adoption of MFDs. MPS is bound to witness impressive growth in the next 18 months as its compelling business benefits, along with enhanced service standards, attract enterprises of all sizes cutting across verticals.

With the Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the helm, the Indian Government is steadily carving a great success story, testimony to which is the recently announced Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). The dream of transforming into a more streamlined, simple and easy transaction methodology, PMJDY will enable people to move out of the clutches of usurious money lenders by providing access to basic banking needs.  With 1.5 crore bank accounts opened on a single day, in the first leg of deployment and the aim of achieving >7.5 crore bank accounts by January 26, 2015; the eventual success of the financial inclusion plan will depend on the core technologically efficient solutions. Tying-in with this, Researchers at Xerox invented a banking solution that reduces the cost of establishing branches – even in rural areas – and automates much needed personal banking services, like opening a bank account or applying for a loan, making it simple for consumers in India and other developing countries to manage their money. The solution helps with automatic validation of completeness and correctness of handwritten paper forms, language conversion of forms without the need for translation and secure technology to overcome slow, error-prone data transmission over satellite networks commonly used in rural areas.

There is scope to build an understanding of how intelligent and innovative solutions in virtualization, cloud, analytics, collaboration, social media, big data, converged infrastructure can help these industries derive significant business benefit. In the coming year, with the government’s push towards ‘Digital India’, it can be seen that special-purpose clouds and applications will emerge to focus specifically on connecting devices and machines. They will gather data quickly, likely streaming off devices with very little structure, as well as performing quick analysis of the data with the ability to instantly respond to the device. Adding to this, the rise of 3D printing is likely to lead to the re-invention of many old products, as well as the introduction of extraordinary new innovations. 3D printing is on track to move beyond a mere emerging technology into a truly transformative technology. The ability to locally print almost any designable object would have strong repercussions across our society. It is thus crucial that technologists and policy makers begin a significant dialogue in anticipation of these challenges to our current global economic status quo. While the future is certainly hard to predict, prescience and advanced planning are necessary in preparation for the disruptive technology of 3D printing.

Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations, Xerox India

The printing industry in India is growing at a rate of 12% per annum and comprises of over 2,50,000 big, small and medium printers. Supporting this is the package printing sector, which is growing at the annual rate of 17 percent, commercial printing at a rate of 10-12 percent and digital printing at robust 30 percent. The digital printing industry especially is seeing significant transformation with new technologies & innovative applications providing cost-effective and customized solutions. Bill printing will make further use of digital printers to bring in advt. in single page as that of bill to have customer recall and help in elimination of additional flyers, which normally customer don’t see except the bill page. In the near future, we believe that offset and digital will not only co-exist, but will also complement each other- with offset taking the medium-to-longer jobs and digital performing on short-to-medium run lengths; there is a renewed interest on short end printing because of merging of variable and fixed data. Due to the increasing demand by customers for personalization, UV digital printing and inkjet technology are on the rise in India with swelling focus on segments like photo-printing, book publishing and packaged printing. Digital printing on packaging material will take big momentum in coming years through high end digital products which can handle up to 500 GSM paper.

Another visible trend is the shift in the printing industry in India to a more solution-centric business model from a purely equipment dependent industry. This has prompted printing majors in the country to develop more applications and to further the use of various software and technologies to automate and simplify business processes. Moving into 2015, providing simplified solutions, ease of operations, cost optimization and savings to customers will only get stronger; largely due to the uptake in cloud printing, mobile printing and increase in remote connectivity and automation of processes.

By 2015, there will be more than 40 vendors with commercially available managed services offerings leveraging smart machines and industrialized services. With consumers' preference to use Internet and mobile services to drive business efficiencies and optimize time management, every industry is striving to improve the customer experience by simplifying, automating and making more intelligent end-to-end processes, minimizing manual interventions and allowing the consumer to self-serve.

Satinder Sohi, India Country Director, Freescale Semiconductor India Pvt. Ltd.

The semiconductor industry has moved manifolds in the last couple of years and we have noticed nationwide adoption of the semiconductor products and solutions. In 2014, we saw a lot has been talked about how government is initiating laws and policies to move the industry forward and how semiconductor industry has a lot to contribute to government’s initiative of a digital India and a smart planet. Steps are also being taken to boost domestic production of electronic items and reduce dependence on imports.

In 2015, what will be interesting to see is how trends like Internet of Things, big data and cloud will combine to enable a smart planet. We believe CIOs will refocus on the fundamentals in 2015, securely embedding innovation in their global network in order to make sense of big data and IoT outputs and fuel business growth. Data center networks are undergoing a huge change because of the amount of data available and the need to securely store it. As a result, trends like Software Defined Networks (SDN) are coming to the mainstream. It can manage the network more intelligently and in a much more cost efficient manner. According to IDC, ninety percent of data centre and enterprise systems management environments are expected to switch to new business models to handle IoT and BYOD devices by 2017. Forty percent of IoT data will be processed and stored at, or close to, the network edge by 2018. This tells us that IoT will certainly be the focus area for enterprises large or small and SMBs in 2015. Markets like smart grids and metering is also expected to boom in 2015 and spending in this sector will also see a significant rise, according to a report by IC Insights.

In 2015, adoption of technologies and services related to IoT will rise aggressively, particularly within the small and medium business markets, and larger organisations that were not early adopters. Due to the widespread adoption of semiconductor and IoT across industries, we will surely see growth in the auto, networking, healthcare industries and these will certainly provide the country with the next big innovation.

Overall, the semiconductor industry is very positive presently and we expect it will continue to grow in the years to come.

Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & SAARC & Jay Kidd, SVP and CTO, NetApp

If 2014 was a year of big change in technology and new visions for India by the government – the digital India, Make in India and the smart cities campaign, 2015 will solidify these changes and start a transformation. Technology will play an important role, with massive deployments in network, data, storage and analytics. Some top technology trends we envisage in India are –

# Mushrooming of Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics

The year ahead will see quantum increases in data generation, led by the IOT phenomenon. Data will become the new gold. A leading industry analyst firm’s Digital Universe analysis of the growth of data projects that intelligent connected devices will increase the amount of “useful data” that can be analyzed and used to make decisions from 22% in 2013 to 35% in 2020. This “useful data” needs to be in digital storage in order to enable the analysis and use of this data. This will compel enterprises and government alike to think harder about network efficiency, storage and analytics. If India is to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves in 2014, a calibrated approach is an imperative, born of long term technology roadmaps. Analytics deployments will be spurred in the increasingly complex marketing and consumer engagement environment that have been created in the digital era.

 # Enterprise platforms will move to multi-vendor hybrid cloud architectures

Organizations contemplating both green field and brown field cloud deployments will tend towards a multi-vendor hybrid cloud environment, that will provide the benefits of both the worlds – public and private cloud.  Avoidance of lock-in, leverage in negotiations, or simply a desire for choice will make customers reluctant to work with one cloud vendor, and multiple-vendor hybrid clouds will attain prominence. This growth will further be boosted as big data evolves and drives the need for sophisticated storage infrastructure.

 # Software Defined Storage will form the foundation for hybrid cloud

Software Defined Storage (SDS) is foundational platform which address range of use cases managing data placement according to cost, compliance, availability, and performance requirements. SDS has the ability to be deployed on different hardware platforms and will extend to cloud architectures as well. SDS will enable data accessibility across cloud platforms consistently, thus simplifying data management.

In addition, India will see fallout impact of the following global trends in 2015 (as predicted by Jay Kidd, SVP and CTO, NetApp)

# Flash arrays will take baby steps

Till date, enterprises have used disks to store their critical data. These SATA disks come with a lot of challenges including space usage, time taken to input and overhead costs to maintain the requisite environment. While this is definitely not going to change and at least 80% of enterprise data will continue to reside on disks, Flash will start taking baby steps as organizations become aware of its advantages and ease of use. However, the growth of this transformative technology will be hindered by costs - the least expensive SSDs will likely be 10 times more expensive than the least expensive SATA disks.

# Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is the New Compute Server

Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) products are becoming the new compute server with Direct-Attached Storage (DAS). Traditional data centre compute consists of blades or boxes in racks that have dedicated CPUs, memory, I/O and network connections, and run dozens of VMs. HCI such as VMware’s EVO allows local DAS to be shared across a few servers, making the unit of compute more resilient, while broadly shared data is accessed over the LAN or SAN. Starting in 2015, the emergence of solid state storage, broader adoption of remote direct memory access (RDMA) network protocols, and new interconnects will drive a compute model where the cores, memory, and IOPs storage will be integrated in a low-latency fabric that will make them behave as a single rack-scale system.

# Dockers replace hypervisors as the container of choice for scale-out applications

Companies are increasingly looking for scale-out applications. To accommodate this need, Dockers are more resource efficient and reduce the storage space required as compared to hypervisors. We will see the emergence of a robust ecosystem for data management through Dockers and other surrounding services in 2015.

With the IoT devices expected to grow to 4.9 billion in 2015, up 30 per cent from 2014 and reach 25 billion by 2020 as per a leading analyst firm, unstructured data is being created by every device thinkable – from smartphones, laptops, social to cloud applications. Organizations need to become technologically sharp to deal with the changing dynamics in the big data space. They should adopt improved storage solutions to address their needs and the above predictions hold good for them.

Chris Houghton, Ericsson

2014 has been a great year for the ICT industry overall. The cabinet’s approval on the ambitious, $17 billion, digital India programme was an important initiative that can help India transform into a connected, knowledge economy. We expect the Digital India vision to further take shape in 2015.

In a market like India, where mobile is the first access to internet for a lot of people, mobile broadband is the key platform on which this vision can be delivered. Given the spectrum constraints in India, the release of additional spectrum in the relevant bands will contribute to affordability of services and harmonization of spectrum will allow a lower-cost device ecosystem to evolve. This will play a key role in driving mobile broadband growth in India in the long run and will be an increasingly important driver of capacity, user experience and quality and, therefore, act as an enabler for the Digital India Vision.

We will also increasingly see the Networked Society becoming a reality in the coming years.