Intel exhorts India to make Internet a national priority

He was delivering his keynote speech to an audience of over 800 people from all sections of the industry at Intel’s e-business forum held in Mumbai. Mr. Miner said e-business will transform India’s economy by providing access to new business opportunities worldwide. He pointed out that to be competitive in the growing global economy, India needed to make the Internet as well as e-business, a national priority. He said, "The decisions you make today on your Internet-based business model, will have consequences for decades. An open architecture creates unlimited possibilities to build the most flexible, scalable, cost-effective and innovative e-business solutions."

Mr. Miner also urged business leaders to increase their e-business implementation pace. Outlining imperatives for accelerating Internet growth, and therefore e-business momentum in India, he said India needed to further invest in telecommunications and information technology infrastructure, adopt a modular Internet architecture and continue the reform process in power and telecommunications sectors. "A modular internet architecture creates unlimited possibilities. Intel and global industry players will work together to provide you with such solutions. A foundation of horizontal, open and standards based solutions will enable companies to deploy e-business solutions more rapidly and easily by providing unparalleled performance, innovation, flexibility and economies of scale", he said.

Mr. Miner also pointed out India’s IT spend at 1.1 per cent of the GDP was comparable to that of China but was way behind Vietnam and Malaysia, which spent about 2 per cent of their GDP. Miner expressed happiness over the fact that some state governments in India had taken the lead in deploying IT for e-governance, paving the way for a healthy growth in e-commerce.

"India has the potential to leap frog and achieve higher hyper-growth in e-commerce than its neighboring countries", he said. He added India needed to adopt and gain a lead in "voice enabling the internet", which will make the internet much more accessible, since anyone owning a wireless phone will have the ability to access the internet via voice portals. This, he said, will lead to a significant growth in the number of people that would have an access to the Internet.

Mr. Nandan Nilekani, president and chief operating operator, Infosys Technologies Ltd, said that Indian companies need to globalize their operations, work in a deregulated environment and consolidate themselves through mergers and acquisitions to enable themselves to stand to world competition. He said they needed to adopt scalable models and look at least ten years or beyond before committing themselves to any kind of technology because "You cannot predict growth". Indian companies needed to have a look at 10-year business cycles and not just 1 or 2 year cycles.

Global research company, Gartner Group, has forecast that B2B e-commerce activity worldwide is expected to grow to $7 trillion in the next four years. For the Indian scenario, another well-known research firm, International Data Corporation, has forecast that e-commerce transactions in the country will top $1.7 billion by 2003, up from $ 3.5 million in 1998.

As per Nasscom, the financial sector will see maximum activity through e-commerce, with transaction increasing from Rs 2,600 crore to Rs 13,000 crore in 2010. This will be followed by the travel and hospitality sector where e-commerce transactions in which are expected to grow from Rs 2,100 crore to Rs 11,300 crore in the same period. Transactions in computer and electronics are expected to rise from Rs 1,600 crore to Rs 11,000 crore and finally in chemicals and petroleum products, from Rs 2,500 crore to Rs 6,700 crore.