International Data Corporation (IDC) India recently released a research report on recent trends in manufacturing, digitization initiatives and IT spend forecasts across industry segments and enterprise applications.The report provides insights from primary research from IT leadership within manufacturing on what the business priorities are, given the interest created by initiatives such as ‘Make in India’.
Automotive continues to be the innovator and biggest spender. Consumer product goods such as food & beverage, fashion and apparel will see maximum growth close to 9% due to regulatory, traceability, supply chain visibility and demand management requirements.
In terms of enterprise applications, the traditional enterprise management which includes ERP is the biggest spending area. Interestingly, “Security” will see maximum growth close to 15% due to the vulnerabilities thrown open in today’s emerging technology landscape opening up the enterprise to several partners and gateways outside the enterprise. Roles such as CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) are gaining significance in today’s organization structure.
If the technology sector is split into 3 broad areas viz hardware, software and services, hardware will see a negative growth in IT spending with XaaS (XaaS is a collective term that stands for a number of things including X as a service)type of deployments growing, application modernization and due to the significant investment organizations have already done for infrastructure. Software spend will grow the fastest, close to double digit values in the next few years.
IDC classifies manufacturing broadly into four buckets based on the value chain, with each one having its unique characteristics – asset, brand, engineering and technology oriented value chains. The report analyses key trends, areas of investment and recent updates in each of these value chains. Any report on digitization is incomplete without mentioning the 3rd Platform – cloud, mobility, social and Big Data/analytics. The report covers recent adoption rates, use cases and examples of application in the industry. Technologies such as IoT, that are part of what IDC calls “Innovation Accelerators” (others being robotics, 3D printing, natural interfaces, security technology) are no longer buzz words. IoT is a technology that has seen fastest adoption trends compared to other in 3rd platform.