2011 to kick in a defining ICT moment for telcos, says IDC. How is India placed?

Transformation is now essential in a fiercely competitive market and 2011 will be a year that will “test the nerve” of telcos across the region as they accelerate to change and leverage on the opportunities while tapping on their natural strengths, says IDC in a recent press release.

“The much celebrated era of mobility, social media and cloud revolution will finally be delivered and this will shape not only the entire ICT industry in the decade ahead but the way we live and work,” Adrian Dominic Ho, Principal, Telecom and Managed Services, Networking Research at IDC Asia/Pacific noted.

He adds, “Telcos will also finally make themselves heard in the field of IT as they can no longer ignore the realities of a rapidly converging ICT theatre. Some telcos in the past have had bad experiences with IT but we believe their renewed approach would be rationale, measured and potentially devastating for the present IT leaders.”

According to IDC, the Asia/Pacific, excluding Japan (APeJ) telecom services market is expected to reach US$283 billion in 2011, representing a growth rate of 7.5%. Mobile and fixed data services will lead growth in the telecom services industry. Spending in enterprise networks is forecast to grow by over 13.1% in 2011 reaching US$15.1 billion. Growth will be driven by continued spending in data center networks, continued migration to an all IP platform and branch office network investments.

However, not all telcos will have the intellectual coherence and strength to make significant adjustments and conform to some unique practices and intricacies in the region to benefit from the opportunity, Ho cautions.

The release talks about the APeJ region as a whole and does not have a specific mention for India as a country. However, given that telcos in India have been busy building IT / data centre capabilities in the past, it would be logical for them to take bigger strides forward. However, their preoccupation with the ongoing and impending 3G rollouts could keep them distracted for a while and they could lag the ICT developments in the more matured APeJ countries by a few quarters.