India is in a perfect sweet spot to leverage IoT market opportunity: Purushottam Kaushik, Cisco

Cisco is seeing a great impact of IoT in the Indian Government’s vision of smart cities. Purushottam Kaushik, Managing Director, Sales, Growth Verticals, Cisco India & SAARC, believes that by virtue of a strong ecosystem of IT organizations, huge growth in mobile internet usage, renewed focus on manufacturing and tremendous potential of opportunities in education, healthcare and agriculture, India can benefit hugely from IoT.

1. What are some of the biggest growth drivers for IoT in India?

The Internet, today, is the conduit for sharing information, providing quality healthcare and education; besides being critical for enterprises to run their businesses efficiently. From being a ‘good to have’ to becoming a ‘must have’, the Internet brings things, people and data together. The growth of the Internet has been unprecedented and driven by advances in mobile technology, increase in processing power, storage, and bandwidth at ever-lower costs; growth of cloud, social media, etc.,

The power of this network is growing exponentially and is driven by billions of connected devices. These things are not general purpose devices such as smartphones and PCs, but dedicated objects, such as vending machines, jet engines, connected soap dispensers and a whole host of other examples that touch our day-to-day lives.

We are seeing a great impact of IoT in the Indian Government’s vision of smart cities, which will be built on the backbone of all devices in the IoT space. The entire ecosystem of smart cities –healthcare, education, infrastructure, agriculture and other industries would get a fillip. State governments are also working on blueprints and competing with each other to stay ahead of the curve. Beside smart cities, some of the other transformation domains which will are reflecting the leverage of IOT is Manufacturing, Utilities, Oil and Gas and Transport.

2. How do you see the market opportunity for IoT with respect to your clients in India?

Cisco defines IoE as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable and turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences and economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries. It is estimated that, in 2019, there will be 545 million Internet users, 654.1 million smartphone users and 1.6 billion networked devices in India.

At Cisco, we can visualize that India is in perfect sweet spot to leverage the market opportunity emerging through IOE/IOT. By virtue of strong eco system of IT organizations, huge growth in mobile internet usage, renewed focus on manufacturing and tremendous potential of opportunities in education, healthcare and agriculture, India can time investment into this opportunity very well.

Governments both state and central through all the proposed digital initiatives are likely to see the biggest transitions which will not only just help reduce costs, improve revenue by plugging all the leakages but also help improve the experience of service delivery tremendously. E-governance and Digital India are some of the key initiatives which will ride on IOE led platforms.

We are also working with lots of clients in manufacturing world across Auto, pharma, paints etc. where we don’t just see a significant mind share but also execution plans to include IOE platforms. We are also engaged with multiple transport industry and E commerce clients who are seeing some immediate implementation growth opportunities on IoE initiatives.

The smart city initiative by the government requires seamless digital and physical infrastructure to be shared efficiently across devices and applications to enhance end services and optimize costs. These are complex and require multi functional expertise;with our experience on similar brownfield projects in Barcelona and Hamburg, we are committed to the digital India vision of the government.

Data originating from things creates a vast pool of information, making us take stock of the way we have traditionally managed information. However, the processing and analysis of this data will generate much value for enterprises across many business functions, creating new, hitherto un-imagined, opportunities for digital marketers.

3. Can you give us some examples of your clients in India who are using your IoT solutions?

We are currently working with multiple organizations both in Private and Government domain in leveraging IOE/IOT led solutions for their growth initiatives. Multiple cities are exploring smart city solutions like Navi Mumbai, Lucknow, Jaipur who have executed platforms for convergence of City services and many others are in various phases of implementations.

Many power utilities organizations and mining organizations have moved ahead in leveraging IOE solutions as they found huge benefits through same. Some transport organizations and manufacturing clients have also finalized on execution plans for implementing similar technology solutions. However some of the biggest transitions are likely to change the trajectory of growth specially in agriculture, utilities, energy companies and they may be slow starters however will be bring the biggest momentum.

In addition, we have partnered with Electronics City Industries Association (ELCIA) in Bangalore to set up Asia’s first ‘Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Hub’. This project will lay the foundation for a new ecosystem to help Electronic System Design & Manufacturing (ESDM) companies to develop solutions for City Infrastructure Management (CIM) including Smart Parking, Smart CCTV Surveillance, Smart Street Lighting, Smart Water Management/Leak Detection and Community Messaging.

4. Your perspective on the future outlook for IoT in India

According to Cisco, the IoE has reached a point where future growth will occur at an explosive rate, as the digitization of business and society merge. If the rapid increase in the number of Internet connections and global network traffic is anindication of this, IoE has the potential to grow global corporate profits by 21% in 2022. The company estimates that IoE will be a $19 trillion opportunity by 2020 and could generate $4.6 trillion in value for public sector organizations over the next decade. In the future, it will become important for organizations to have a chief data or digitization officer who can help create the end-to-end analytics needed to transform data into actionable intelligence for businesses.