#India - Disruption Led Growth

I’m fresh off the recently concluded India Mobile Congress 2019, which was, to put it simply – India’s biggest mobile tech event of 2019. It was a fantastic melting pot of ideas, innovation and intelligence – with 5G and AI taking centerstage. Over 300 exhibitors were present at the 3-day event that featured sessions with global speakers, thought leaders from various industry and key policymakers from the government. It was a fascinating peek into what the future holds for India, through and through. I also enjoyed freshly brewed coffee made on a smart, cloud connected coffee machine(not kidding??).

Had the privilege of sharing the dais with some of the sharpest minds in the technology sector, names like Gopal Vittal (Bharti Airtel), Jay Chen (Huawei), Rajan Wagadia (Qualcomm), Ajit Mohan (Facebook), Gilles Garcia (Xilinx) and P Balaji (Vodafone Idea) who was also the moderator. The theme for the session was ‘India's Future - Intelligent, Immersive or Inventive?’ and it was an enthralling session from the get-go. The idea was to share views on India’s readiness for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, with 5G and next-gen technology ready for penetration.

From my perspective, the equation of India’s readiness for next-gen connectivity and technology rests on three pillars – how is the growth happening in India; what are the opportunities for telecom players; and lastly, what would it take to accelerate the growth.

I strongly feel the growth in India would be disruption-led and we have enough examples in the recent past that prove it. The 4G disruption rocketed India from 155th to #1 market globally in mobile data consumption in ~18 months, its never happened in anywhere else in the world. How OTT players are changing the narrative on content consumption, how digital payments are reshaping financial transactions are some more examples to note. The reasons for disruption being the keyword in the India growth story are two-fold. First, our country presents very unique challenges especially in high-friction industries that technology can absolutely solve. Second, we have young, creative talent that has deep desire to solve those challenges. A perfect example of that is e-commerce. As a company that’s remains deeply committed to PC technology and its impact on creativity, we were only reaching consumers in Top ~50-70 cities for the last 2+ decades. The advent of e-commerce meant one can now reach consumers and businesses in 90%+ of the PIN codes. Such moves are truly transformational for India in bridging the digital divide through access to technology.

The entrepreneurial ability of our country, the knack for addressing needs in a very unique and disruptive way, also contributes to our readiness for the next big leap. To this end, everything that the government has done in setting up digital highways(Aadhar, UPI, IndiaStack, GST..) will all massively contribute towards progress. In my opinion, the pace of this disruption in our country will only accelerate , singularly due to it as these will be platforms that startups ride on to deliver innovative solutions for local needs.

India being one of the youngest countries with limited legacy infrastructure, we will be one of the fastest adopters of as-a-service business models across every vertical in my opinion. Telecom players are uniquely positioned to be a front runner in leading this business model disruption as they know their consumers or businesses better than most. Besides utility companies, telecom operators are the only enterprise that can provision or bill a service at any cadence which is a significant competitive advantage.

This brings us to the point of accelerating the growth. Cloud has already become the most accepted service delivery model for India. In my opinion, telecom operators will need to transform themselves to be cloud service providers by bringing an IT mentality to their business. Through “cloudification” of their network, they can provide the lowest cost as-a-service delivery to consumers businesses, thereby disrupting the entire ecosystem.

This network transformation will pave the way for 5G, which further fuels business innovation through a high performance, low latency edge by placing compute at the source of service delivery and data creation. I’m sure with the talent horsepower India possesses, we will continue to harness technology in unique ways to create inclusive growth for India that raises all boats!

#IMC2019 #IntelAtIMC