The Future of Last Year’s  5 Disruptive Technologies

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho

Cloud Computing & SaaS

The cloud market is flush with funds and flourishing as of now. Going forward, we will see consolidation of the cloud technologies. Companies that do not have a good business model will go out of business. It’s already happening, and it’s natural given that there is a lot of competition and limited exits. This trend will continue in 2016 and for the years to come. When it comes to India, however, we will see many companies entering the cloud, particularly in SaaS sector. More VC funds will reach India, and there will be an accelerated growth, even though the global market will be slow. India is a great place to start a company because of the talent that is available here.

Raju Vegesna

Chief Evangelist, Zoho

“There is an explosion in the number of smart devices that have emerged but there is definitely a need for consolidation. Google and Apple play an important role in this segment, but we are still at an early stage.”

Information Security

The coming year does not look peaceful as it will be a lot more chaotic in 2016. We will see many more attacks and ransom demands from hackers. For the vendors, security will be a high priority. We can also expect stricter regulations from the governments, and a push for hosting data in the same country. Tangentially related to the issue of security is privacy. Going forward, it’s going to be a very important theme. More and more consumers are becoming aware about privacy issues, and are pushing to protect it. This would be a challenge for companies with ads-based revenue model. The movement for protecting privacy has already started, but this is a trend that will go beyond 2016. This is just the beginning.

Storage

The storage market is moving in the right direction. Commoditization of the market has led to drop in prices of per GB storage, and this trend will continue. Google has slashed its rates, Apple and Amazon have entered the market bringing down the rates further. These sectors have become commoditized, and now it’s the turn of software infrastructure. Even when it comes to enterprise on-premise storage, vendors are struggling to survive. They have two trends working against them: one, storage has become cheaper, which means in order to survive, they have to cut down their margins; second, more and more companies are moving to the cloud, which makes it harder for them to find customers.

Enterprise mobility

Since everyone is moving to the cloud, enterprise mobility has moved up a notch, and players like Google and Apple have opened doors to partnering with several companies to provide business solutions to enterprises. Most organizations have realized the benefits of the cloud and BYOD (bring your own device), despite security and privacy governance issues. There are only a handful of vendors in mobile device management (MDM) sector right now, and we will see more vendors enter this market in the coming year.

IoT

IoT is going to be the next big thing in the year 2016 as it is going to see products integrated with technology. It will enable good products to become better products. There is an explosion in the number of smart devices that have emerged but there is definitely a need for consolidation. Google and Apple play an important role in this segment, but we are still at an early stage. Such companies are dependent on the ecosystem to develop and mature, and that is yet to take place.