ICT: Desperately seeking networking professionals

30 May 2006

The advent of globalisation, India''s prowess in Information Technology and a strong educational system are increasing the pace of the information-communications- technology (ICT) revolution. The signs are everywhere; the phenomenal rate of mobile adoption, increased ICT investments by enterprises for competing effectively, small and medium business investing in ICT to become suppliers to global MNCs and state governments looking to bridge the socio-economic disparity and providing effective citizen-centric services are some examples.

All of these are showing signs of an unprecedented impact on the economic development of the country. Interestingly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking ahead, Gartner predicts that Indian ICT spending will surpass $54.8 billion by 2008, and achieve a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 19 per cent. With this growth comes the challenge of a growing shortfall of networking professionals in the country. Networking forms the backbone of the ICT revolution.

A networking professional can be defined as a person capable of installing, configuring and troubleshooting network devices for the internet and server connectivity. This would include planning the basic wired infrastructure to support network traffic and monitoring network performance and isolating failures

While there has been a growth in the number of IT professionals in India there is an increasing shortfall of networking professionals. This is likely to have a detrimental effect on ICT adoption across all sectors in the future. The industry and the government need to work together to address this shortfall and sustain the ICT revolution that will take India into the next phase of economic growth and development.

Let''s take a look at some of the sectors that are driving the demand for networking professionals and reasons for it.

Government
Increased focus on e-governance under the ''national e-governance action plan (NEGAP), state-level wide area networks (SWANs) have been identified as part of the core infrastructure for supporting these e-governance initiatives and the Department of IT (DIT) has earmarked a significant outlay for supporting this activity, which will cover the entire cost of establishment, operation and maintenance of state-based WANs. The next few years will see a lot of state governments invest in building SWANs that will be the backbone for delivering e-governance.