With increasing numbers of people, devices, machines and sensors coming online, India is on the cusp of a digital revolution. Networking major Cisco is looking to capitalise on the huge opportunity that the Digital India programme initiated by the Modi government offers to private and public sector enterprises.
“The Internet of Everything (IoE) value at stake in India over 10 years (2013–2022) is $511 billion. Of this, private sector value at stake is $394.4 billion and public sector value at stake is $116.2 billion. As Digital India becomes a reality, we are looking to tap into this opportunity,” Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC, told BusinessLine .
IoE is the intelligent connection of people, processes, data and things, which is enabled by intelligent networks. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, India will have 526 million Internet users and 1.5 billion networked devices by 2018.
Stating that India is ready to be digitised, Malkani said: “Our strategy over the next 3-5 years is on capturing this digitisation opportunity.
“To do this, we have created a new business segment called ‘Growth vertical’ two quarters ago to tap into new, emerging opportunities in the areas of education & healthcare, government service provider accounts, smart cities, IoT, public safety & security, Defence modernisation, contact centres and country transformation projects around national broadband.”
Cisco’s other three business segments are, the enterprise vertical that includes top 250 customers who are big buyers of IT in the country supported by dedicated account managers; the commercial vertical, a partner-led, high velocity business that addresses mid-market/SMB customers and is expanding beyond Tier-1 cities; the service provider vertical, which includes telecom service providers in the country who are currently looking to go global. Supporting all of the four verticals is Cisco’s Services business. “There is a need for our technical resources to educate and deploy solutions to end customers along with our partners. Our huge deployment across the country is expanding our Services business,” said Malkani.
Earlier this month, Cisco announced a partnership with ILFS Technologies, a technology solutions company of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (ILFS), to utilise the IoE to develop digital solutions for India’s infrastructure and smart cities.
The company has invested in training 8,696 partners by conducting 488 partner-enablement workshops and recently released three ‘Made in India’ next generation communication products, spanning the areas of mobility, cloud and computing technologies.