International Data Corporation (IDC) is the global provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events for the IT, telecom and consumer technology markets and its India office was set up in 1986.

2015, the year that many hope to be the year of revival for business growth and prosperity in India is also the year when technology is expected to get embedded deeper in our lives (directly or indirectly) to make it better as well as complex like never before. Whether it's the artificial intelligence, real time analytics or 3-D printing, 2015 is the year when such innovations are expected to mature and in turn transform some of the traditional way of doing things, paving way for new possibilities. The level of innovation this year is expected to outpace the technological era of the last few decades.

For instance, advancements in healthcare technology combined with innovations in the area of smart textile and wearable health devices are sure to boost the biomedical upkeep of mankind. The enormous amount of data thrown at us from devices (linked to hospitals and doctors) will also see analytics getting utilized far closer to our lives than ever before. This by definition means that all pervasive 3rd platform adoption is expected to grow beyond data centres and enterprises in 2015. Also, edge computing and new age analytics (distributed across the cloud) will present a new way of planning, designing and analyzing the workloads of future.

2015 is also expected to be the year of refresh and upgrades where the infrastructure of yesterday will finally see the transition towards efficiency and business alignment rather than project silos. This in turn is expected to see advancements and use cases for some of the underlying technologies and concepts like SDN, SDS and NFV. These will eventually provide the much needed flexibility and elasticity to the infrastructure that is required to generate meaningful patterns and insights from the new age platforms and services. The concept of anything as a service can come alive only if the underlying infrastructure is designed, built and operated to be agile and such approach would start finding its way in the Indian data centres in 2015.

While the data centres witness such transformation, both the consumer and enterprises will continue to have growth in smart devices and equipment paving new use cases for "IoT" (albeit that this will be limited to more traditional devices like smart phones and M2H solutions). Whether it's the smart car or the manufacturing production/assembling lines or a connected toothbrush to smart homes, 2015 will see IoT implementations going beyond labs and starting to find their commercial use in everyday life. Smart cities and Digital India are also expected to have their first pilot implementations (or at-least designs) taking shape this year.