Domestic IT market to maintain last year's growth: IDC

Bangalore, Jan 8 (UNI) The Indian domestic IT market, which notched up an impressive growth of 22.4 per cent in 2006, is likely to maintain the growth rate this year also, according to a study conducted by IDC India.

Releasing its IT market predictions for 2007 today, the IDC said the domestic IT market was expected to grow by an estimated 21.5 per cent, making it the fastest growing market in the Asia-Pacific region.

''The domestic IT market has posted impressive growth in the last three years and is expected to continue the momentum in 2007, which only means the domestic market has come of age,'' IDC (India) Country Manager Kapil Dev Singh said in the report.

From a global perspective, the current year would be a year of intense 'hyper disruption' in the IT industry, with major structural changes taking place along different industry vectors at once all interacting with each other and accelerating each other. Predicting an intense competition posed by small players over the big timers, the report said small businesses would become big, more software would become services and vice versa. These disruptions, and others, would force most market leaders out of their comfort zones and open up new opportunities to those that choose to surf these disruptions rather than stand against them, the report said.

India, South Asia's largest economy, would continue to lead the pack as the next IT market opportunity. Strong GDP growth and entry of many global giants have put immense pressure on domestic enterprises to stay competitive.

With the increased spending on IT by the country pegged at Rs 75,891 crore last year, investments have started to take place across banks, FSI, telecom, manufacturing, Government, resource, education and other industries. With businesses becoming more dependent on IT, enterprises in India had matured to the extent of consolidating their IT infrastructure acquired over the years.

The report said this year would witness changes in key technology components that help attain a state of virtualisation, SOA and application integration and introduction of new models like On-premise hosted applications, hardware on lease and Software as a Service (SaaS).

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