India-centric IT firms could form 20% share of cloud leaders: Gartner

India-centric IT services companies could represent 20 per cent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market through cloud service offerings, according to findings by Gartner Inc, an information technology research and advisory company.

The report finds that India-centric IT services companies are leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labour-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors, according to Gartner, represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options.

In the report, Gartner has highlighted its predictions for IT organisations and users in 2010 and beyond. One of them being that by 2012, 20 per cent of businesses will own no IT assets. This has come about as several interrelated trends are driving the movement towards decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualisation, cloud-enabled services and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

“The need for computing hardware, either in a data centre or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.

For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points,” noted the report.

By 2012, Facebook, according to Gartner, will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialisation. Through Facebook Connect and other similar mechanisms, Facebook will support and take a leading role in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web. As Facebook continues to grow and outnumber other social networks, this interoperability will become critical to the success and survival of other social networks, communication channels and media sites, it said.

Gartner research has predicted that by 2014, there will be a 90 per cent mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion mobile connections. Penetration will not be uniform, as continents like Asia (excluding Japan) will see a 68 per cent penetration and Africa will see a 56 per cent mobile penetration.

“Although not every individual with a mobile phone or Internet access will transact electronically, each will have the ability to do so. Cash transactions will remain dominant in emerging markets by 2014, but the foundation for electronic transactions will be well under way for much of the adult world,” said the report.

It is predicted that by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.

Also, most IT business cases could include carbon remediation costs by 2014. “Today, server vitalisation and desktop power management demonstrate substantial savings in energy costs, and those savings can help justify projects. Incorporating carbon costs into business cases provides a further measure of savings, and prepares the organisation for increased scrutiny of its carbon impact,” added Gartner.