A majority of large Indian enterprises are planning to increase their IT spending this year, with an average IT budget of $12.2 million, according to a study.
“Indian companies' IT priorities in 2013 are cloud (particularly infrastructure as a service), virtualisation, data centre consolidation and IT modernisation,” said Arup Roy, research director at Gartner.
“About 10 per cent of IT spending in 2012 was allocated to external services, and 14 per cent of this was on cloud related initiatives. Similar ratios are expected in 2013. There is a greater inclination towards private cloud contracts, more than in any other market this year,” Roy added.
In line with the trend observed in other countries, the biggest IT spending in India was in the communications industry, followed by banks and securities.
As banks embark on their next phase of transformation into more competitive, customer-friendly institutions, key opportunities are likely to come up in the areas of core banking systems and upgrades or integration with other peripheral systems.
Near-term opportunities in the banking sector will be in the areas of collections, contact centre services, business intelligence, mobility and IT outsourcing.
Relatively poor spending in insurance, government and utilities sets India apart from other countries.
Nevertheless, these markets are likely to offer strong opportunities for service providers. Some of the largest IT deals are starting to come from central and state governments. Specifically, opportunities are emerging in state and central government bodies that relate mainly to efficiency, transparency and e-enabling projects for citizen-facing services, as well as workflow-related projects.
Between June and September 2012, Gartner surveyed 1,523 large enterprises (those with more than 1,000 employees) to determine their IT spending plans. Within the survey, 153 respondents were in India.