[via Prof. DB Phatak and Sameer Kochar] ICT3 Quarterly (Skoch Consulting) has an interesting roundtable on affordable computing in India. What is very interesting is the wheel of penetration for increasin IT usage in India.
Prof. Phatak makes an interesting point: “Here is a ‘teacher’s dream’ – that the next 500 million users hopefully in next five years are to come from these countries. The Indian population figure suggests that we should have a share of at least 100 million users, which means that penetration should be 20 million desktops per year over the next five years. Last two years published figures by various agencies including Skoch, suggests that we are in the ballpark of 2 million desktops per year being sold. So clearly, we need a big drive…In my opinion drivers could be of two types, one is a price driver, so if somehow industry can come together, solution developers, system integrators and make the total cost of ownership of any acceptable solution to one-fourth of what it is today, then I get 4 x advantages. Simultaneously, if the end-user – government, industry, banks, financial sector, educations institutions – quadruples their investment in IT, remember, in developed world the level of IT investment is 3.5% of their overall budgets is on IT. In India the percentage is very small. So four times is an essential investment, if you do that you get a 16x advantage, what we desire is a 10x advantage.”
