The Indian SMB sector has become as one of the fastest growing
industries in the country over the past couple of decades. Fast
adoption of Cloud technology has come with the promise of serious
transformation in the past few years. According to a
report by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium enterprises, the
Indian SME sector employs more than 80 million people across 36 million
units, and contributes over 45 per cent to manufacturing and over 40 per
cent to the Indian export sector. This contributes a good chunk of 8
percent to India GDP.
I cannot deny that the
Small and medium businesses have played a key role in providing new job
opportunities, helping in the progress of rural areas while competing
with global players entering India looking at the growth of cloud
adoption. This band has a serious and direct economic impact
guaranteeing better and fairer distribution of wealth and income in the
country.
That being said, there are challenges
that are in the way of the SMB champions. And this is where IT
distributers and channel partners come in.
Challenges within the sector
The
important thing to keep in mind is that it has taken some good
partnership efforts both from the people of India and the government to
help in the growth of the sector. The biggest problems so far is the
need of immediate correction and care, which again, through
collaborative efforts and strategic deployment of the right tech we
should be able to tackle.
Unlike urban Tier 1
cities, where it is easy to facilitate finance and credit instruments,
enterprises based out rural cities find it significantly more difficult
to get these instruments. The recent rise in online shopping and a
complete digital IT market emerging is a clear indicator of the next
biggest challenge that needs immediate attention - Lack of
infrastructure, with a big focus on providing digital tools, solutions
and competent protection still needs a lot of work.
More opportunities for partners
According
to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to
grow 18% in 2017 to $246.8 billion. Nearly 70 percent of the companies
we spoke to have either adopted or have adoption of enterprise cloud in
their roadmap. This can be seen as a huge opportunity for partners to
transform their own businesses and help their customers in the adoption
of cloud services. However, there is also the lack of understanding
about new technologies in the industry and this is restricting
organisations to go for cloud adoption. IT decision makers find it
difficult to build a business case around such technologies.
This
is in fact a great opportunity for the cloud-savvy partners. If they
can reset their way of doing business, Cloud adoption & migration
offer great prospect to the channel for their inherent strength is their
customer reach. According to a the research firm Zinnov, spending on
cloud services, that is expected to cross $10 billion by 2020 in the
country is driven by factors like investments to set up local data
centres and a rapidly growing developer ecosystem in the country. Goes
without saying that India continues to be a growing market for cloud
technology adoption with focus on public cloud due to easy access and
cost effectiveness.
Market Drivers: Collaboration is key
The
major change makers through cloud adoption are healthcare, banking
& financial services besides manufacturing, telecom and insurance
adoption. Investments in local data centres, cloud spending in both in
public and private, with focus on SaaS followed by
Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service accounting for
almost $1 Billion by 2020.
India has seen an
increase in interest among large IT major to cater to the specific needs
of the SMB segment. The main idea has been to tap the revenue
opportunity from this segment which can have significant top line
impact. While the enterprise ecosystem is showing significant demand due
to its maturity, the SMB space combined with the vibrant start-up
landscape and active participation by the government is indeed bound to
increase public cloud consumption moving forward.
Thus
the call for the moment is to invite companies for continues
collaboration to make investments in innovative go to market
partnerships to solve real world problems and strategize with data
driven insights to tap this opportunity. Getting the right technology to
the right people will be a very important step in that direction.