India’s developing tech certifications presenting business opportunities: Dell

New technology certifications and standards that are being developed in India are opening up fresh business opportunities for Dell Inc., Peter Marrs, the American hardware and services company’s president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, and John Roese, its global chief technology officer, said at a media roundtable on technology trend projections for the next year.

The rising adoption of zero trust in cybersecurity, practical implementations of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the emergence of multi-cloud edge platforms, and the development of quantum computing combined with generative AI will shape global enterprise technology adoption in the coming year, they added.

“India, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia are all building out certifications and cyber standards. We are excited at this opportunity and with our technology, we will help those customers,” added Marrs.

India’s developing technology certifications, regulations and standards include cybersecurity laws, besides social media intermediary guidelines announced last year, and the Digital Personal Data Privacy Act notified in August.

In November, union information technology (IT) minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said new regulations on AI deepfakes are also being drafted. The Digital India Act, which is also expected to add to technology legislations, is also being worked on, but work on drafting the law will be resumed by the “next government,” said union minister of state for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar, since it requires more consultations.

The spate of regulations may lead to more enterprise technology use cases, as more firms seek compliance support through technology service providers such as Dell. Another key theme, Roese said, will not only be restricted to generative AI business use cases, but across the entire spectrum of AI.

“AI is the centre of the universe and edges are the way to put it into production. Zero trust is the way to end up securing it, and ultimately quantum will be the thing to power it over the long term for the performance and efficiency needed to scale it into a global system. Actively think of AI, but do not do it independent of other architectures—this is how you’ll make sure your visions and actions align for long-term success,” he added.

The alignment of this vision will also translate into real-world business use cases for generative AI, with actual returns on investment for tech clients, Roese said. “While generative AI has sparked incredibly creative ideas of how it will transform business and the world, there are very few real-world, scaled generative AI activities. As we move into 2024, we will see the first wave of generative AI enterprise projects reach maturity levels that will expose important dimensions of the technology that are not yet understood in the early phases.”

India’s $245 billion IT services industry is currently making a significant wager on the development of genuine generative AI business cases.

All of India’s top five IT service providers—Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), Infosys Ltd, HCL Technologies Ltd, Wipro Ltd and Tech Mahindra Ltd—have made generative AI announcements, and disclosed ongoing pilot partnerships.

TCS, the largest of the five, said during its September quarter earnings call that it had over 250 pilot partnerships and had trained over 100,000 employees in new generative AI skills. Infosys, too, hinted at increasing generative AI use cases.

However, industry analysts argued that while pilot partnerships are steadily increasing, both service providers and tech clients are still experimenting with practical business use cases. As a result, despite increasing pilots, generative AI is not likely to help the IT services sector ramp up its revenue growth in what has so far been a weak financial year.

Roese’s prediction, however, points at increasing maturity of generative AI through the next calendar year—something that technology service providers around the world will hope to be true.