Second Phase of Startup Funding Happening Around Enterprise Business Segment

  

The recent glut in Indian Startup segment focused towards D2C or C2C or B2C and failed in big way other than few exceptions. Post burning their fingers, many investors pulled down the ongoing investment or went very cautious while approving funding. Most of new investment in Startup' happening in Analytics to B2B segment. During the first phase of Startup, most of the startup kept end user as prime customer without any business model. They kept burning cash to acquire user and keep losing them. The phase two of startup segment is focusing business to business channel as end customer.

Now Enterprise Mobility reappeared after few years of lull. We all consider Enterprise Mobility as Email access through BYOD. Earlier most of the businesses were reluctant to open their contextual based server access due to security concern.

In current environment, many startups are working or offering business to business trading platform connected with Commerce whereas connected the businesses through secure communications. The mechanism of pull request initiated push response helped startup to create virtual network without compromising the engaged partner.

In my point of view, most of the Enterprise now wants to reach out to their potential customer to partners through single communication channel and offering them seamless button based solution. The next one year will be critical to get evolved and may bring newlease of life in Startup segment of India.

Oracle and Microsoft Partnered to Fend off Competition & Increase Market Share

In its continued effort to increase Cloud based subscription service, Oracle announced strategic partnership with Microsoft to integrate its database and web tools on Microsoft Window Azure cloud platform. Microsoft will offer Oracle product line to its corporate customer and intron creating opportunity for Oracle to move faster on its vision of subscription based product offerings. Oracle partnership is going to help Microsoft compete effectively offering compatible product line. The offering will help customers to use Microsoft Cloud Azure Platform for their software development and use Oracle database. Extensive partnership in SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS domain will help Microsoft to compete aggressively with the likes of Amazon, VMware, and Google in one or another area. Both the titan is looking to increase their $1 Bn revenue into multibillion $ revenue machine as they hold or serve mostly all companies in one or another way. It’s good news for investor and customer base

Indian Telecom PSU’s BSNL & MTNL are Focusing on Enterprise Business to Grow

Encouraged with greater acceptance of Enterprise solutions by Customer and clocking 4000 Cr revenue, BSNL is eyeing double digit revenue growth in FY13. BSNL entered into ten year contract with Dimension Data to invest 200Cr to develop BSNL cloud service based on Dimension Data Managed Cloud. The BSNL cloud service to customers will be served through its Internet datacentre which is located in major cities in and around Metro cities. In order to fill connectivity gap to customers to tap new customer base, BSNL is using MTNL connectivity offering to offer managed cloud solution. BSNL is optimistic as client base, capacity utilization is going up. I will be eagerly observing the growth transformation of Government Owned BSNL and its cascading positive impact on MTNL

Cloud based Enterprise mobility may be a game changer for innovative companies

In recent years, the talks of all technology forums revolve around Application, Cloud and Enterprise mobility. The growing adoption of smartphone and better data connectivity is fuelling data traffic. Based on the reports major chunk of generated data traffic originates from social networking and messaging site. The higher adoption of Androids, iOS, BBY and Window operating system based smartphone brings in the level of uniformity which might help in higher adoption of Enterprise centric horizontal and vertical application to populate and retrieve information from backend server side. According to Zinnov Management Consultancy, Indian Enterprise mobility market reached close to $250 Million and expected to reach $1 Bn by 2015. The projection seems too steep to achieve that even in very optimistic economic environment whereas India is struggling to achieve even 5% GDP growth. The Enterprise mobility market is also very small compared to US which crossed $22 Bn (Researchandmarket).The biggest challenge faced by Indian Enterprise is more towards the interoperability, porting, security etc. The tough economic situation also offer and integrated benefit to think out of box to enhance productivity and reduce the cost to reach out to potential customer base. The BFSI, Transportation, Manufacturing and partly healthcare sectors are deploying Enterprise mobility basic features to sharpen their effective and efficient mechanism to approach any opportunities or concerns aggressively. Enterprise mobility adoption in India by in-large limited to Corporations with PAN India as well as International presence. The cost of Enterprise mobility per user runs high due to the complete system acquisition. It is one of the decisive factors by SMB and SME to park Enterprise mobility adoption. Given the potential of new business opportunity around SMB and SME segment, the solution provider may reap earlier mover benefit by offer server level features with dynamic service and business logic processes. It would enable potential clients to only pay for the process needed as per their business requirement. The lower cost of smartphone should be exploited by solution provider through their platform integrated MDM, BPM, RMS etc. The SMB and SME in the proposed scenario would need to redirect their connectivity traffic to get connected with solution provider cloud hosted middleware. The solution provider platform should also support drag-drop-develop applications interoperable on all leading mobile operating system. The solution providers are offered huge business opportunity in India by unleashing their state of art platform. In my point of view, the combination Cloud PaaS and AaaS designed for broader Enterprise mobility would bring in new business revenue coming out of shell of instead of limited HRM,CRM, ERP and Email.

Slow Cloud Computing Adoption by SMB & SME in India

With the Technological landscape shift post Internet bubble, major technology company started trying to figure out the innovative approach to reduce the IT TCA & TCO for their client. By 2004 the adoption trend started showing shift and increase business for data centre hosted managed service product portfolio. The virtualization technology brought dynamic shift in network design and deployment which in turned impacted the adoption positively. The growth propelled the datacenter competitor to think out of box to come out with even more exciting proposition. The downturn in 2007-2008 pushed many data centres into a state of closure as the clients reduced their capex and opex model to survive the worst financial crisis. The Private hosting or ownership model got changed into resource utilization based on computing power to remove the ownership cost and increase the return on investment. The concept of cloud computing quickly gained traction across sector and geographies. Many technology service providers started converting their product line to be compatible for cloud computing environment. US and W-Europe again led adoption cycle. The BaaS, IaaS, PaaS, AaaS, SaaS; the form of cloud services got many takers and changed the fortune of many technology companies. The proprietary dominated product line based companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle also approached cloud in big way and remodelled their product offerings accordingly to make it more affordable for broader client base. India also observed shift towards cloud services but with very lower pace. Many companies such as Tatacommunications, Tulip, Sify, Reliance globalcom, Bharti, and many more collaborated with Technology big-wigs to tap the huge revenue opportunity. A country with home of more than 8 Mn SMB & SME approached the concept cautiously as compared to peers in western world. It raises queries regarding the slow adoption. I read many article and most of them raised data protection, security as their top concern. In India, the SMB and SME define; refine their IT roadmap and stresses on localized development to keep the cost under check. Any updates and patches are done based on the organization service area and IT capex/opex allocation. Interestingly, the Indian PSU’s are still struggling to convert their paper based information into digitized form and in turn adopt innovative cloud service offer. In my point of view, the stumbling point in decision making process is the concern regarding data portability. In the absence of proper data portability, SMB & SME won’t be able to reap the benefits of cloud. The second major concern is the accessibility. Major chunk of SMB and SME are located in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and connectivity issues as well as cost are the concern for them. India is still witnessing heavy investment to enhance the communication connectivity segment. The data protection, data hosting, data transition route, security, interoperability, SLA and regulatory are some of the major decision making tags due to the recent government. According to NASSCOM report, the total market size of cloud computing in India is $400 Mn and their projection is to reach 16 Bn by 2020. The slow adoption of Cloud in India may impact Indian organization competitiveness in long run and productivity. Technology companies and communication service providers are forging collaboration to push cloud with little success.

Enterprise mobility may act as saviour to regain growth story in telecom sector

Enterprise mobility is making news for the last half decade. Most of the Telco and Technology companies developed their strategy to define, develop, deploy as per their requirements to reap the benefits of the same. The Technology companies such as Sybase, Kony, Antenna, Microsoft, IBM, HP, NEC and many more came out very strongly with standardized specification to tap the untapped market place. They got successful in developed geographies such as US, West Europe, Japan whereas still struggling to be successful in mass market such as India, China, Brazil and many more. Many analysts concluded that the applications, data protection, security and low end device are the core reasons of slow adoption. The slowdown in Telecom Industry and its cascading impact acted as contributing factor of India on-going recession. An unpredictable slow adoption of 3G, few launches on BWA domain and heavy investment around the same raised the economics around the investment. With growing concern of communication service providers regarding regulatory compliance impact on their mobile value added services, low voice & data ARPU brought them to a stage of financial bleeding. I believe that, even now its not late that CSP refocus on Enterprise mobility potential portfolio. Even the basic Enterprise mobility product or service or attached application would bring much needed revenue $ without or with little research $. As per the published report, India is home of more than 450 Mn self and salaried professional and they can be the target customer. The Enterprise mobility would increase the D-ARPU and additional recurring revenue from application level license fee. I strongly believe that during the most probable worst phase of telecom industry, Enterprise mobility may act as revenue saviour.