IT And ITeS Industry's Perspective on 2021's Top Highlights

Here are some of the highlights from IT/ITeS Industry for the year 2021:

Rajiv Bhalla, MD, Barco India:

The year 2021 will always stand out as the year organisations and people adapted to the hybrid lifestyle. The beginning of a disruptive new decade marked by innovative solutions, technological advancements, and resilient organisations driven by visionary leaders, 2021 taught us many lessons. The tech industry has outdone itself, designing new solutions to take on even the most insidious of pandemic challenges and we should hold these lessons close as we move into the new year. The pandemic has highlighted one thing, for sure, an organisation is only as effective as its employees, and leaders must adopt a people-first approach in all their policies. As we embark on another revolution around the sun, let us put our heads together and work towards solutions which are sustainable and responsible. 2021 is the year we learned to adapt, let 2022 be the year we flourish as we focus unwaveringly on business resilience and optimal leadership.

Rajesh Dhuddu, VP & Practice Leader Blockchain & Cybersecurity Tech Mahindra:

The accelerated integration of technology in business operations and workflows, along with increased adoption of Work from Home (WFH) model, have resulted in a surge in cyberthreats and attacks.  Malicious threats from outside and within organizations, coupled with increasingly stringent data regulations, have made cybersecurity a C-suite level issue. Acknowledging this, organizations are focusing on re-evaluating their IT strategy ensuring an end-to-end, robust, and strategic infrastructure design based on Zero trust architecture to improve overall infrastructure security posture of business and network security lifecycles alike. Using low-code automation to harness collective knowledge and form a secure, centralized system of data records, to simplify operational systems and enable a cohesive view of things, is rapidly becoming the functional norm.”

Rohit Khetan, Head Marketing & Strategy, Ginesys:

The retail landscape will continue to evolve at a rapid pace in 2022. Post pandemic challenges and opportunities will be technology-driven with a deeper and real-time understanding of consumer trends and demand. Digitization has led to an increase in demand for integration of offline retail stores or pre-integration and online web stores and channels for a better omnichannel experience. Another trend we foresee is the gradual democratization of retail intelligence to benefit mid-size companies and SMEs. Increasingly people are using AI to drive customer behaviour at scale leveraging digital footprints. This includes using interest and social media footprints to subtly push customers to try certain products/ webstores. Industry data suggests that marketers will see an average increase of 10-20% in sales when using personalized experiences. Digital payments across retail formats like UPI are now at around 10% of retail transactions and only growing. Combined with credit cards, this is set to eclipse cash as the payment system of choice. Last but not the least, self-checkout is going to be a much-implemented feature across mid to large stores as costs to deploy this technology gradually reduce.

 Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India:

As we welcome 2022, a wave of concern due to the new strain of COVID-19 yet again reiterates - the importance of being “geo-aware” to contextualize environmental, social, and economic systems for a safer and healthier society, and emphasizes the significance of “Preparing Strategically, Responding Rapidly and Recovering Methodically”.  In spite of numerous challenges, 2021 has been a landmark year for the geospatial industry. While on one side the “geo-awareness” and “spatial thinking” surged to all time high, we also witnessed major strides by the government through new policies like Geospatial Data Guidelines, Drone Policy, Draft National Geospatial Policy 2021, among others. These make 2022 look very promising and as the geospatial technologies get subsumed into the enterprise IT architectures, GIS takes centre stage in new converged environments to help organizations unearth better economic, social, and environmental value and higher return on their investments.

Technological advances have pushed geospatial applications to newer heights, especially in the year 2021. While the technology supercharged normal business intelligence with a geographic component that allowed a holistic situational awareness, providing real-time insights into operations and systems, it also enabled us to fight COVID-19, from an interdisciplinary perspective, with proactive planning, international solidarity and a global perspective. Now, as the geospatial technologies are getting subsumed into the enterprise IT architectures, GISl is taking centre stage in new converged environments to help organizations unearth better economic, social, and environmental value and higher returns on their investments. The rapid rate of GIS adoption in the past year has indeed laid a strong foundation for the dawn of a new “Geo-Enabled Era” that will foster inclusivity, sustainability, and resilience in the future.