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Research firm, Forrester, announced India forecasts in Delhi recently. Forrester’s predictions, which provide more insights than big buzzwords, are often relied upon to draw actual strategy by vendors and users, rather than being used to create marketing communication. In short, they are more realistic and hence, often balanced.
For the year 2017, Forrester identified four underlying trends encompassing the entire technology landscape. They are:
- The shift from customer aware to customer led
- The shift from data rich to insights driven
- The shift from perfect to fast
- The shift from siloed to connected
The research firm clubbed its 13 forecasts under these four themes.
Here are the predictions:
From Customer aware to Customer led
1. 80% of “digital transformations” will seriously miss the mark
2. Many of the firms using Customer Journey Maps will fail to achieve desired results
3. Robo-advisors will go mainstream, reaching a million users, forcing incumbents to launch robo advisors of their own
4. Overeager rollouts will earn chatbots a bad reputation
From Data rich to Insights driven
5. Artificial intelligence will begin to make inroads into India – 20% of firms in select sectors will experiment with the technology in 2017
6. A few Indian firms will break through into the “Excellent CX” club; but many will continue to provide mediocre CX
7. The frontier of digital experience will shift to personal finance management
From Perfect to Fast
8. Indian domestic cloud providers will retreat, refocus & offer managed services for hyper-scale IaaS providers
9. Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) will dominate the private cloud market
From Siloed to Connected
11. We will see start of “Deep-integration” in mobile apps in India
12. One Indian firm will face a Sony-like security compromise
13. Most innovation labs will fail
Forrester analysts, in particular, focussed a lot on the financial services segment to explain and demonstrate their points.
The statement that the research firm makes about Indian cloud providers is significant. India has 5-6 major domestic cloud providers with significant datacenter capability. While the Forrester forecast sounds quite radical and disruptive, the message that many of these Indian service providers are sending to their clients in recent months actually validate Forrester's forecast. Instead talking about their datacenters and end-to-end cloud services, many of them try to sell the hybrid story and managed services capability.
Whether the big shift will happen this year, as predicted by Forrester, remains to be seen, though.
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