2007, The Year That Was....

With the New Year losing a bit of its lustre we’re now in a much better condition to analyse the old one. With every single enterprise trying to boast of a success story, we at Biztech2.0 (launched in March last year), have endeavoured to give you enterprise technology news as it happens. Naturally, we want to be even bigger and better in the year to come – after all, technology never stagnates. We feel 2008 could well be either the Year of Google or the Year of Telecom in India. But let’s leave predictions for another day; instead let’s now attempt to sum up the best that happened to the Indian Enterprise technology space in the year that went by.

January — 2007 saw true broadband coming into the Internet space, in the wake of a government directive to all state-owned and private ISPs to provide 2Mbps bandwidth as broadband to residential subscribers for the price of the existing 256 Kbps offering. A Forrester report stated that Indian CIOs needed to get ‘practically inclined’ in business functionality and not forget key aspects of business such as BI and DR. The year started on a high note with Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran (MJP), the water and sewer utility serving India’s western state of Maharashtra, winning the Bentley Award of Excellence for its use of Bentley software to help develop a disaster mitigation plan – the first such award ever won by any civil administrative unit in India. And Microsoft Windows Vista, which was launched after a long wait, proved to be somewhat a success, despite a slew of early negative reviews.

February and March — Sify, a consumer Internet and Enterprise Services provider in India, launched its WiMAX solution with mobility features. This was the first formal introduction of the fourth generation of the telecom revolution. Another path-breaking study revealed that Indian SMBs would spend as much as $8 billion to strengthen their IT infrastructure, the highest in the APAC region. The month also saw Syndicate Bank and I-Flex gaining a key recognition – the Asian Banker IT Implementation Award, which triggered the core banking practice that’s since been seen as a benchmark for the BFSI industry.

April and May — Apple computers launched a Mac Pro with two Intel quad-core processors working in tandem as a single processor; the first entrant in the computing space that saw eight cores running simultaneously and clocked at 3GHz. The period also saw Mumbai airport launching enterprise-class Wi-Fi service in association with Bharti Airtel. With security concerns growing after the advent of Web 2.0, Google Adwords was found vulnerable by cyber criminals, who managed to infect unsuspecting users with malware. Around this time Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Microsoft jointly delivered Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BIPM) solutions – the first ever alliance with an Indian IT company in this space.

June and July — Pune-based IT Company Zensar began outsourcing services from the Baltic port city of Gdansk in Poland. IBM India, on the other hand, launched Project Big Green as part of the global Intelligent Energy campaign, aimed at helping economies cope with existing and impending energy crises, setting the trend to mobilise a green IT initiative in India. In keeping with the green initiative, Wipro InfoTech rolled out an eco-friendly range of desktops and laptops aimed at reducing ‘e-waste’ in the environment. Days later, HP introduced its green storage technology that claimed to cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by up to 50 percent.
August and September
— MTNL unveiled a ‘four-in-one’ facility on a single MTNL landline connection, allowing customers simultaneous access to normal telephone, Internet, VoIP phone and IPTV. Websense unveiled new technology that detects security attacks launched within Web 2.0 applications. Security as a key concern came under the limelight even as reports of a phishing attack targeting customers of AXIS Bank made headlines. Though people came to be increasingly on their guard, Bank of India’s website was hacked and used to distribute an enormous amount of malware to visitors. Swedish hacker Dan Egerstad posted a list of a hundred critical email accounts – complete with working passwords – to embassies and governments around the world.

October and November — Airtel offered 8Mbps broadband internet access to customers in India, the first to do so in the Indian Telecom space. Kingfisher Airlines, in partnership with Paymate, announced the launch of FLYBUYSMS, an SMS-based ticketing service. Apple released its overhyped ‘Leopard’ OS 10.5 for Mac users. A Gartner study claimed India to be the fastest growing Business Intelligence (BI) platforms market in Asia (including Japan), posting a growth of 35.6% in 2005-06. Reliance Communications and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership to deliver a highly connected, personalised TV experience to consumers in India through Reliance’s IPTV service. Perhaps the biggest news of the year involved Google, T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola and others collaborating on the development of Android through the Open Handset Alliance. In November, HP and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd, built the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world and the most powerful in Asia Pacific. Swedish hacker Dan Egerstad was eventually arrested on charges of a “computer break-in”.

December — IBM acquired Cognos to support IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, a cross-company initiative that combined IBM’s strength in information integration, content and data management, and business consulting services. Gartner analysed 30 countries and assessed their suitability for offshore locations. The analysis showed that India remained the undisputed leader, but countries such as China, Russia and Brazil are increasingly providing credible alternatives. Kerala became the first state in India to introduce Free Software for IT education in high schools, and will soon see full-fledged implementation in colleges and for e-governance.

As we have just recounted, the past year saw loads of action in the Enterprise Technology space. The highlights listed above are the really important ones – it would be practically impossible to compile an exhaustive list. It goes without saying that 2008 will see plenty of innovative technologies and a lot of competition, so watch this space!