KATHMANDU, NEPAL: According to Girish Trivedi, deputy director, Information Communication & Technology Practice, South Asia and Middle East, Frost & Sullivan, the current global economic situation is bleak. Some of the key trends visible today include slow resumption of lending, slowing down of IPO activity with investors more cautious, cut back and discretionary spending, and slow capex spending. He was speaking at the opening session on 'Enterprise Forecast' at the ongoing C-Change 2009.

"In India, we are still on the safer side amidst global recession. Even the government is borrowing from financial institutions. But then, it cannot be negated that the economic slowdown left its dent on almost all the sectors. On one hand, when some of the sectors such as BFSI, airlines, commodities, etc. were adversely affected, on the other hand, a few of them such as healthcare, education, etc. remained unimpacted. Moreover, in this evolving business ICT demographics, a few sectors such as cloud computing, outsourcing, optimisation, etc. will make profit." 

Five key areas in IT opportunity assessment:
* Opex/service business models: The enterprise market is likely to see a higher propensity to shift from capex based to opex based business models.
* Outsourcing upside: The outsourcing business model is likely to pick up across the enterprises. Newer business models are expected to emerge.
* Cloud  Computing: There has been a lot of talk on this particular technology segment. There will be a transformation of software into a portfolio of services, as well as an intelligent interactivity between clients and computing warehouse. On the other hand, business economies will also transform. There will be adaptability and collaboration specialised with hallmarks. Incidentally, virtualisation is among top three CIO discussion points.
* Unified communications: Trend toward unified communications delivery on a pay-per-use basis and communication enabled business processes (CEBP).
* Data centric model: The data centre market offers opportunities for a variety of players to compete with own strengths.

Is cloud computing a hype or reality?
According to Trivedi, there are five down-to-earth reasons to get excited about it. These are: Scale and scalability; utility pricing; control; environmental leadership; and business transforming application.

Responding to new environment
* Businesses should continue to steer IT as a critical tool in controlling overall costs and increasing productivity.
* The enterprises should start experimenting with hosted solutions.
* Limit on IT spending can be redirected, but should not be stopped as customers are becoming proactive.
* Use IT as a competitive advantage.
* Turn every service offering into a product
* Become a world class retailer as it is a buyer market.
* Transformation.