BI, Big Data Highest IT Spend Priorities For 60% CIOs

Zinnov, the Market Expansion and Globalisation Advisory firm, has released a report titled “IT priorities of Indian CIOs for FY2013-14” highlighting key insights from over 50 key IT decision makers from across industries like Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Travel & logistics and others.

Key Findings: Top 5 priorities for IT Investments for CIOs in FY2013-14

Business Analytics: CIOs continue to invest in business analytics with high uptake of Big Data within Manufacturing, Energy & Utility, Media & Marketing verticals

Virtualisation and Cloud: CIOs show increased preference towards virtualisation and cloud (both private & public) based on criticality of use case

Enterprise Mobility: 50 percent CIOs consider mobility indispensable and find it very relevant for customer facing roles and consumer applications

Application Software: Expanding ERP capabilities is high on the CIO agenda. CRM and SCM to maintain demand in FY2013-14

Consolidation of Solutions: CIOs are also planning on integration of existing enterprise application software, ERP solutions, and BI tools to derive business benefits from legacy IT investments

The Zinnov study analysed preferences of CIOs and their priorities for IT investments on various parameters such as verticals of investment, size of enterprises, and the budgets on outsourcing for the year 2013-2014 and found some interesting insights. According to the study, CIOs in India are expected to increase their IT investments at an average of 20 percent in FY2013-14 as compared to FY2012-13. Verticals such as Manufacturing, Telecom, Retail, Healthcare and Pharmaceutical will be the key verticals in terms of IT investments in FY2013-14. Manufacturing sector is expected to witness a rise of 29 percent in absolute IT budget for 2013- 14, followed by Telecom and Retail with an approximate increase of 26 percent and 18 percent respectively.

Talking about some key findings, Praveen Bhadada, Director-Market Expansion, Zinnov, said, “With $30 billion already in IT investments in India, this is a very positive sentiment coming out from Indian IT decision makers. The last 2 years have been specifically tough for the domestic IT market and IT vendors would now be eagerly looking for a promising FY2013-14. India is now starting to gain strategic importance as a market for IT solutions globally and we believe that IT vendors would be able to do better business in the country with the macro-economic environment slowly improving as well.

The study also reflects that IT outsourcing by Indian CIOs’ is on the rise as 59 percent of IT staff is outsourced to third party service providers currently. This phenomena is increasing the demand penetration of third party system integrators

On the other hand, it read that Modern IT is slowly getting embraced by the Indian enterprises. 2/3rd of the surveyed enterprises showed preference towards investing in some form of modern IT solutions including cloud, big data and mobility.

The study highlighted that Business Analytical tools (including Big Data), Virtualisation & Cloud, Mobility, Application Software & solutions and Consolidation of legacy investments & process excellence, would take on priority in FY2013-14. Business Intelligence & Big Data is of highest priority for over 60 percent CIOs while Virtualisation and Cloud Computing excites over 50 percent of the Indian CIOs