By Ravinder Singh, Director and Head of Enterprise & Government, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks
Market demands have changed dramatically as a result of fast technological innovation, making it important for organizations to adopt new technologies to provide the best consumer experience. According to IDC, the Indian domestic IT & business services market was valued at USD 7.15 billion in 1H2022 and recorded a 7.4% year-over-year growth. This growth has been fueled by increased IT investments from Indian enterprises that are embracing new technologies such as cloud platforms, AI-based services, cyber security and application modernization.
However, to fully realize the promise of these technologies, organizations need to guarantee that it has a network infrastructure capable of supporting their digital transformation process. Digital transformation is an ongoing process in which robust, next-generation networking infrastructure plays an important role in successfully supporting and facilitating processes and activities. If a company wants to get the most benefits from digital transformation, it needs to invest in contemporary network technology and security.
These technological advancements are also influencing how telecommunications businesses operate and do business. They are rapidly ramping up by effectively implementing reforms, using system thinking, and building a resilient future.
Organizations of all sizes have witnessed and experienced a wave of new age technology changes, and this trend is expected to continue. Here is a look at some of the biggest technology trends to watch out for in the coming year:
Mobile internet connectivity will take center stage:
In many ways, the 2G to 4G spectrum revolution witnessed in Indian telecom has altered the way we live, work, and play. Today, India ranks second in the world in both the number of telephone users and the number of broadband internet users. We are a country of ‘Roti, kapda, makaan, and telecom.’ And rightfully so: the telecom sector contributes 6% of India’s GDP, providing up to three million direct jobs to the employment economy.
As internet connectivity continues to become an economic necessity, providing high-speed, reliable mobile internet access will become a greater priority for both businesses and the government. This increased need will drive a continued convergence of public cellular, private cellular, and private Wi-Fi over the next year. Following a similar trajectory to what we saw with Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum regulations, we are seeing spectrum regulators around the world increasingly making spectrum optimized for cellular available to private enterprises. Expect to see the growth of private networks over the next year as enterprises leverage this new spectrum to offer customers and employees better networking experiences.
Convergence at the Edge:
With approximately 5 million highly trained workers in the digital sector, improved connectivity, and vibrant startup ecosystem that values developing technologies, India is quickly becoming the next deep tech hotspot. The convergence of edge computing, AI, and 5G will completely transform the game. While high-speed, large-volume data transport is what 5G promises, a parallel technological architecture component centered around Edge is also starting to emerge. To ensure that software workloads that require feeding large volume/heavy/quick turnaround data sets are placed closer to the source than the cloud data center, software components like Edge Application Management systems, Edge Devices, and Network are combined with Cloud, Edge, and Network.
By 2023, we anticipate that network edge connectivity and security convergence will be crucial. Providing excellent connection experiences will be crucial as firms move away from current covid work practices and, in many cases, embrace an age of hybrid workforces where workers have greater flexibility over when and where they work.
Conversational interface and virtual assistants for networking teams:
Tech giants like Microsoft have been exhibiting their ongoing dedication to improving speech and voice-based services for personal and professional usage in India, for which they added Hindi and English (India) to Microsoft India’s list of supported languages for its Neural Text to Speech (Neural TTS) service.
Next year will witness a continued push for improvements in speech services so everyone can conveniently access information no matter where they are. We expect to see more vendors adopt this technology to simplify network operations while boosting the networking experience for end users. We also expect to see these capabilities similarly span the full-stack to provide insight and automated operations from client-to-cloud.
AI-driven Support will become essential across IT Operations teams in 2023:
Networks will continue to expand and increase in complexity pushing network support teams to their limits. In 2023 many IT operations teams will realize they need the assistance of AI-driven support tools and issue resolution mechanisms to stay ahead of the network failure game. AIOps will become a trusted member of the IT team. An explosion of data and a dearth of network engineers will accelerate that trend in 2023.
We will see increasing use of AI in networking and network event management systems evolve into more intelligent AI recommendation managers that are used to help fill gaps and simplify operations. We expect to see more AI-driven support adoption to proactively address network issues and decrease time to resolution for network failures to reduce operational costs and mitigate the staffing shortages IT operations teams are facing today.
Automation and Open standards architecture
As the scale and complexity of the operations are increasing, customers are looking at automation solution for their data centers and campus architectures. The network for the next decade will be automated and based on open architectures to operate in the heterogenous environment.