The "Surface" tablet was unveiled recently by Microsoft to meet the demands in computing by customers. It may be an answer to Apple’s iPad or Samsung's Android based tablets but Microsoft's jump in the fray is a sure sign that tablets, mobile centric devices and interfaces will dominate enterprise thinking while searching for solutions to enhance customer experience. Add to this other emerging technologies around social media, cloud and analytics and we can see significant disruptive trends which could radically change how we do business.

How will Enterprises deal with these trends? In a depressed economy with shrinking budgets organizations will leverage investments in traditional IT systems to deliver seamless service on new devices.

Not just cost savings, providers to offer business benefits

In the last three years since the global economic slowdown, we have seen a fundamental shift in the way service providers do business with their global customers. The new mantra from customers is not only to improve efficiency and do more for less but facilitate business innovation. Even as customers face cost pressures and expect IT services companies to offer cost benefits, they expect help in building their business.

This is a significant shift for the Indian services-oriented technology industry that has traditionally focused on building applications and maintaining IT infrastructure. The value proposition so far has essentially been cost arbitrage. More than a decade of serving customers from the days of addressing the Y2K bug has brought enormous learning in Indian companies to service customers by adopting world-class processes and tools at the back end. Now the focus is on the front end where these companies are inducting industry experts, solution architects, and investing in IP to create robust platforms to offer business benefits.