My colleague and friend, Saday Tiwari presented at the Customer Engineering Conference along with Olaf Schnapauff on the technology and success factors in India versus other more established geographies in the mobile telephony space.

They discussed how the mobile phone transforms the lives of millions of Indians. An example they cited was that of a fisherman returning from the high seas with his catch. Traditionally, the fisherman was locked in to the port he set out from, almost always selling at a price well short of what he could potentially obtain. With mobile phones becoming affordable and ubiquitous and Service Providers offering widespread coverage, the fisherman can now, even as he returns from his fishing trip, discover where he can command the best price in the vicinity. The Network is making the difference to humanity Sun Microsystems and other organizations are hoping to achieve.

Mobile Telephony Subscription Growth	Organized Retail Growth

Infrastructure in India is growing at a pace that seems at once astounding and inadequate. The mobile services market is a great example. In March 2002, 45 million Indians owned a phone (wireline or wireless), approximately 6.5 million of whom were wireless subscribers. Five years later, wireline subscription is stagnant but wireless subscription reached 168. Nearly a quadrupling in 5 years. Over March 2006 - March 2007, monthly growth was at the rate of 6.5 million subscribers. If anything, the growth has been accelerating (to 8 million additions a month now) and we reached 200 million wireless subscribers in August. The one statistic that we cavil at is that of teledensity - with a population of over 1.1 Billion in the country, we still have a long way to go.

Such growth figures are evident in other sectors too. For example, the organized retail sector amounted to 4 Billion USD in 2005 and is projected to grow to 64 Billion USD market in 2015 (projections vary, but this number is at the lower end of the band).

The technology challenges that service providers in various sectors face are similar : they are worried primarily about the ability of their IT infrastructure to scale to unprecedented levels. They need technology to handle unpredictable load characteristics. Deployments have to be highly efficient in their resource utilization. Technology should lend itself to reduce the time it takes for a business idea to be rolled out into a product - the first mover advantage in general is enormous. These are precisely what we believe characterize Redshifted application workloads. Workloads (and infrastructure supporting them) that in our estimate will dictate the demand for computing in the future.

This is why I characterize India as a redshifting nation - the entire infrastructure (telecom, financial services, retail, hospitality, travel ...) is growing at an astonishing clip. Moore's Law implies that the performance that can be extracted out of the real estate on a chip can double every two years or so. Saturated application areas can therefore be well served by computers, as the rate of growth of their workloads will not be as fast. Indian IT infrastructure however is under-served by Moore's Law, thus fueling demand for more and more system capacity.

Sun's research and development strategy recognizes this trend (see Greg Papadopolous' presentation at our Analyst Summit earlier this year), and our technologies are being shaped by the need for massive scale systems tailored to deliver agility, efficiency and a competitive edge to our customers.

[Note : Added some hyper-links and explanations to the original post]

Tags : suncec2007 India