A peek into Gartner's crystal ball

In a recent session that Gartner held to predict the IT trends in the Asia Pacific for the new year, it declared that the region would continue to see rapid growth in the IT Services and Software segment.

Narrowing the research down to India, Gartner observed that the fastest growth is occurring in the IT and Telecom segments. "The probability that voice-based solutions will gain traction in India is higher than in other countries of the APAC region, such as Australia, because of the country’s lower literacy rates," says Jitendra Jethanandani, Analyst-Software Infrastructure, Asia Pacific, Gartner.

However, Sujay Chohan, VP and Research Director, Gartner notes that India has made a distinct shift from being a development site, to being an emerging market as its economy grows. That is a trend, India will continue to see as PC penetration increases and the big telecom players deploy services such as streaming video.

The SME segment will see substantial ERP adoption in the near future, but Pranav Kumar, Research Director, Enterprise Application Software suggests that the Indian market is still immature when it comes to SRM and SCM adoption. Jethanandani echoed Kumar's prediction that apart from some early enthusiasts, Business Intelligence will not feature in its true form any time soon.

On the PC vendor front, Gartner predicts that three out of the top ten global players will exit the market by 2007, and will probably be replaced by Chinese IT companies. The changes that this will bring about include pricing challengers. These challengers will give the established vendors a run for their money.

- Deepali Gupta