Gartner Predicts Positive Modi Effect On e-India

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Prime minister narendra Modi’s much-hailed ‘Digital India’ initiative, which earned a vote of confidence from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who met the PM in early October) is expected to boost the government’s IT spending by 5 percent to $7.2 billion in 2015, estimates technology research firm Gartner.

A chunk of these expenses is expected to be incurred in the revving up of external IT services and telecommunications, the development of broadband and cloud-based initiatives, and the creation of digitally-governed smart cities across the country.

Anurag Gupta, research director, Gartner, said in a statement, “The delivery of a citizen-centric and transparent government is only possible through the extensive use of technology and by leveraging digital government.”

Gartner also identified the top strategic technology trends for 2015 in its report. It defines “strategic trends” as those that are likely to have a significant impact on an organisation for the next three years and have “a high potential for disruption of the business [for both end users and IT] and the need for a major investment”.

Gartner analyst David Cearley noted that “the merging of the real and virtual worlds, the advent of intelligence everywhere, and the technology impact of the digital business shift” will define tech in the coming year.

Some of the trends to watch out for are:

• Computing everywhere with the rise of handheld devices
• Rise of 3D printing
• Advanced analytics with every app becoming an ‘analytic app’
• Convergence of cloud and mobile computing
• Growth of ‘smart machines’ in which advanced algorithms will allow systems to understand their environment, learn for themselves, and act autonomously
• Advent of ‘web-scale IT’, a pattern of computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting
• Risk-based security and self-protection