Emerging IT Opportunities in India in the New Year 2022

Some IT Leaders have given predictions about emerging opportunities in the IT industry in India in 2022. Following are some of these are listed blow -

“In the years ahead IT will avoid one-size-fits-all ransomware protection. File data and their backups are new targets for ransomware. File data—which may be user documents, video, or research notes, may not be protected as vigilantly as mission-critical operational data such as customer databases or invoice systems. Yet this data still has long-term value and contains sensitive info such as PII or IP that can’t be compromised. The flipside is, that as organizations bolster their ransomware defenses by taking on a more thorough approach to detection, recovery and restoration, they may end up spending exorbitant OPEX on a ransomware program. Rightsizing ransomware protection will be a smart tactic. "

--Prateek Kansal, Head of engineering & India operations, for Komprise

"At the backend, AI solutions will use call/chat transcripts, CRM integrations and knowledge databases to help agents pull out information faster. The ability of AI-based speech analytics too has improved and can offer businesses important tools to monitor their call centre conversations, improve first call resolutions, as well as extract customer data for marketing and product development”

- Chaitanya Chokkareddy, Chief Innovation Officer, Ozonetel

"This growing data demand will require constant innovation to ensure that the right kind of storage is available to fully exploit the data it contains. Organizations are increasingly relying on multiple clouds and other emerging technologies to remain competitive. Cloud as a service models are being adopted to provision and scale quickly and on-demand more cost effectively."

--Srinivas Rao, Senior Director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies

"Ever-maturing self-service analytics capabilities will mean basic-to-intermediate analytics is no longer

offloaded to the IT team or data specialists. This will create a new set of citizen data scientists within an

organisation, helping to accelerate the pace of decision-making as employees will no longer have to wait

for someone to run their analysis.

In 2022, organisations will treasure a robust forecasting engine that enables them to predict future

trends with a higher level of accuracy so they can anticipate and manage business problems before they

cause harm."

--Rakesh Jayaprakash, Product Manager, ManageEngine

"cloud-based deployment segment will grow more. Cross-platform and cross-application connections and security will see a rise. MSME segment is expected to show the highest CAGR in the years ahead. Large scale adoption of cybersecurity solutions in SMEs will grow considerably."

--Harshit Agarwal, Co-Founder & CEO, Appknox

"The year 2022 will see acceleration of Indian SaaS companies going global. But there is a danger of Indian SaaS going the way of IT services companies. Over 90% of revenues of IT majors such as Infosys, TCS and other is export income – mainly from US, EU and UK markets. But this will mean that India as a market may be served less and most of the innovation will be to solve problems of developed economies.

Another challenge will be acute talent shortage. There is huge demand for new-age skills such as AI/ML, GRC, Data integration etc. – but supply is short driving up cost of manpower. Indian developers now get US dollar salaries- working from home. SaaS companies also need to focus on building organization and thus requiring professional management, sales and marketing teams, global support etc."

--Apurva Mankad, CEO & Founder, WebXpress

"Data storage, security & privacy will be a key challenge for vendors as businesses become increasingly watchful of who they trust with their data. Tech companies that have built their business model around ad-revenue and collect user information from their customer organisations without explicit permission (a practice we refer to as adjunct surveillance) will begin to lose their customers' trust.

A lot of MSMEs will be taking their first steps towards going digital, and for many of them, mobile would be the platform of choice. That creates opportunities for SaaS players to think mobile-first and enable customers to manage their business easily without the hassle of long-term contracts, large scale implementation, and expensive software.

There will be a surge in the usage of low-code platforms as more and more teams embrace cloud technologies for various complex business processes, while seeking simpler ways to implement automation and streamline processes."

--Praval Singh, VP, Marketing & Customer Experience, Zoho Corp

"While opportunities exist across multiple fronts, I would like to highlight specific opportunities.  SMBs are focusing on reducing man-hours spent on operations, across their business process lifecycle. SaaS products that help in achieving this goal, in any part of this process lifecycle, will find customers. Statutory compliances are becoming detailed, robust and complex. This will open up opportunities for SaaS businesses to create products that will make it easier for businesses to be compliant. The shift in customer behavior to digital is going to create more opportunities as customers get more comfortable in the digital world. There are some tough but not insurmountable challenges. Finding the right talent to enable and manage scale is a clear challenge. Understanding the customer, educating them on how the product can support and help them, what are the customers struggling with, getting their feedback - these are not easy tasks. It is important to have a strong understanding of the customer's pain points to build a successful SaaS product. If a SaaS product and startup have customer success at its core, then this challenge can be overcome. "

--Logesh Velusamy, CEO & Founder,Effitrac Solutions

"Business and IT leaders look to shift on-prem infrastructure to hybrid environments and transition apps to the cloud. They want to remove complexity and increase flexibility and security controls, all while empowering a workforce that’s more distributed than ever."

--Parag Arora, VP & MD, Southeast Asia, Korea & Indian subcontinent, Citrix

"A product platform which facilitates such an interconnected business ecosystem leading to faster flow of information is an exciting problem to solve. Furthermore, GST and demonetisation have given impetus to a cashless economy which is inherently about faster flow of money in the business ecosystem. While there has been a revolution in the consumer payments space, there is still a lot that can be done to integrate systems that businesses use to maintain their data with banking systems such that payments and reconciliation can happen on a more real time basis. Such systems can be a boon for SMEs who constantly face cash flow challenges.”

--Abhishek Dalmiya, Director of Product Management, Tally Solutions

"The core challenge for ML remains the availability of quality annotated data. Many companies, especially startups who envision AI as core component of their product, struggle to collect enough data to train a model which can make accurate predictions. As AI pioneer Andrew Ng says, ML Development needs to move from being model/algorithm-centric to data-centric. We hope that the hype around ML/AI is met with the basic understanding that nothing useful in ML can be built if you don’t sizable and heterogeneous and well annotated training data."

The security concerns around AI are more from the perspective of the bias it can create in the decision making.

Another concern is around privacy especially when Personally Identifiable Information is present. To address this, Differentially Private algorithms and methods are used which create a trade off b/w privacy and accuracy. So basically some (systemic) noise is added to the data so that the data can’t be traced to the person who it belongs to so the privacy is ensured. But the model accuracy takes a hit because of introduction of noise. But this hit is tolerable and all the big tech companies like Apple, Google are already using these algorithms in their devices."

--Satish Pala, Chief Technology officer, Indium Software

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