A Year of Digital Leap?

Tech & Business Trends 2015

By Ashish Pachory

Over the past decade, we have witnessed new technologies converging with the old to drive large scale evolution in the telecom space. The lines between Information technology and Network technology have blurred considerably and continue to do so. The advent of virtualized core networks NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and SDN (Software Defined Networking) has come as the fresh wave in this sea of convergence. On another level, IP-based communication applications and OTT (over-the-top) collaborations signal sharper convergence of IT and Telecom.

However, convergence alone is not going to be the only driver of growth in products and services. Technologies now need to merely intersect with each other to open up new domains. For example, while Big Data has immense potential on its own, but the moments we conceive its intersection with say, Internet of Things, new perspectives instantly emerge. Take any set of technologies, intersect them, and you will most likely get a similar answer. This intersection of technologies, not necessarily their convergence, is going to emerge as a value-multiplier in the coming years.

And the advancements are going to be a lot more rapid than in the past. The communications world is an adherent of the Half-Life theory according to which every new technology takes half the time to mainstream as its predecessor. For example, the adoption of smartphones in Tier II and III cities has happened very rapidly with the advent of high-speed networks. This trend is not likely to abate.

The world will continue to gravitate towards mobility, which requires that you make yourself independent of networks, platforms and devices. This spawns three distinct growth trends in 2015: increasing cloud adoption for access to content and applications, abundance of bandwidth and up scaling of the information security infrastructure.

On its own, Big Data will gain a firmer foothold in telcos as hyper-competition drives them to strengthen their data management and analytics capabilities to drill deep and wide for gaining better insights to enhance customer experience at every stage of interaction.

As much as technology, the regulatory environment will drive the development and growth of new trends. There are many advances that are ready for launch in 2015 from a technological perspective and that have the potential to revolutionize. Take IoT for example, it should gain pace, at least in vertical segments, in 2015 but this is subject to various other non-technological factors.

Smart Cities are another example, as is the mass adoption of Mobile Financial Services, Mobile-Health and a host of other Mobile Value Added Services. The year 2015 may well see the arrival of these and more if only the environment can catch up with technology!

Year 2015 can be an year of technological leaps that will introduce India to the new world of communications that the telecom and IT convergence is enabling.

(The author Ashish Pachory is Chief Information Officer, Tata Teleservices)