IT budgets could end up “flat to marginally high” for next year, said Mr Avinash Vashistha, Chairman and Managing Director – India, Accenture. This is despite the weak macro indicators, he added.

Speaking to Business Line , Mr Vashistha said that “uncertainty” and the macro economic situation in the West have not yet translated into client conservatism or unnerved technology service providers.

Global clients, he said, will have to continue to spend on IT maintenance work. They may even move some IT maintenance to low-cost countries, and then plough the amounts freed up into small transformation projects to take advantage of mobility, cloud, digital and data analytics.

“Transformation is not just about big transformation. People have to be smart and see what new technologies are coming in, which is transforming their industry. So people have to incrementally make that move. For service providers, these are the areas of focus even in the times of uncertainty,” Mr Vashistha said on the sidelines of GIREM Leadership Summit held in Goa.

At the same time, since IT is now key to global business operations, the “lights on” type of work (read application management work) will continue.

“Going forward, businesses (clients) will look to somehow manage the costs…If they have discretionary projects, they can delay those. If they have already embarked on leveraging low cost countries, they will accelerate it. But companies that have not tried offshoring before, will not take on very large outsourcing projects at this juncture. They will do it in smaller doses,” said the top honcho at Accenture.

And yet clients will look at incremental investments into transforming business, say, by leveraging mobility or migrating to the cloud – all these signal big opportunities for service providers, he added. Another area to watch out for is data analytics and data mining.

“How do you use analytics to give insights to clients so they can navigate though their data, more effectively. Some of these are very big opportunities,” he said.

The Fourth edition of GIREM's Urban Planning and Real Estate Leadership Summit saw strategists, urban planners, and industry experts converge to discuss issues that confront urban planning. The three-day event included brainstorming sessions on land use policies, land management, issues around SEZs, waste management and integrated townships.

>moumita@thehindu.co.in

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