Enterprise IT spending to touch $40 bn in 3 yrs: Gartner

Against the backdrop of increased focus on India's infrastructure development , IT spending by enterprises is expected to grow at a substantial pace to touch USD 40 billion in three years, according to Gartner.

Global IT research firm Gartner has projected that enterprise spending on information technology in India, would see an average compound annual growth of 11 per cent.

Enterprise IT spending is expected to see good growth in the coming years. Going by estimates, the expenditure is likely to reach around USD 40 billion by 2013 says Gartner's Vice President Rakesh L Kumar.

Currently, the domestic market is estimated to be worth about USD 23 billion.

He noted that India's good economic growth coupled with government-led core infrastructure projects, would provide increased opportunities for information and communication technology (ICT) companies.

"Target financial services, government, communications and manufacturing as the fastest-growing sectors for enterprise IT investment," Kumar said.

He pointed out that enterprise IT spending across the Asia-Pacific region is anticipated to surpass USD 300 billion by 2013.

According to Gartner, infrastructure improvements would help raise annual enterprise IT spending growth in the coming months.

How does one measure the impact of social media on email marketing?

Social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are terrific complements to email marketing. Social media links included in an email are the equivalent of Forward to a Friend on steroids because of the viral nature of social media platforms. In fact, it is found that social sharing increases audience exposure by a factor three to five times over Forward to Friend.

Measuring how social media affects your email efforts isn’t that difficult because most email service providers (ESPs) today offer social sharing-tracking as part of their metrics-and-reporting function. The key is increasing social sharing, growing your audience and measuring how that growth leads to increased sales.

Here are some best practices:

• Reinforce the opportunity to sign up. It may seem odd to put a sign-up link in emails that go out to current subscribers, but you want to make it as easy as possible, when the email is shared, for your new audience to sign up for your mailings.
• Beef up your call to action. Because ESPs track only the first impression when an email is shared, give all recipients a reason to connect directly with you by including a specific call to action. The call might be to download a white paper, enter a contest, etc. Make sure to use unique URLs or special landing pages to help you track where your new recipients are coming.
• Offer incentives to share. One company offered a gift to subscribers who shared content and enticed 10 friends to sign up for their newsletter. With incentives like this, it has grown its list by nearly 15% in just a few months.
• Design your emails for multiple platforms. Heavy social media users are likely to read your email on a smartphone, so keep your call to action short and at the top of your email. We’ve found that emails with minimal content and only one call to action perform the best.
• Take care of your brand advocates. Tailor special emails targeted to your “power sharers.” Bring them in early to review new products and services.

Finally, once new members sign up, use measured marketing to monitor each lead source as it moves through the sales pipeline so you can determine what’s working and where to allocate future efforts.

Flexibility Drives Open Source Adoption

One of the myths about open source software is that IT organizations adopt it because it’s free. But it turns out that while cost is definitely a factor - especially in these tough economic times - the bigger issue is flexibility.

There’s a lot of administrative overhead associated with testing and deploying proprietary software in the enterprise. In contrast, open source software can generally be downloaded and tested by virtually any member of the IT staff without a whole lot of interaction with vendor salespeople and internal purchasing departments.

In fact, a new survey of over 500 IT professionals conducted by Zenoss, a provider of open source systems management software, found that 66.1 percent of the respondents said they use open source whenever possible. But what’s interesting about these results is that over 70 percent cited flexibility as a primary reason for using open source, which narrowly edged out lower costs.

At the same time, however, over 70 percent said that the current state of the economy played no role in influencing their interest in open source technologies.

According to Mark Hinkle, vice president of community for Zenoss, IT organizations are increasingly valuing the fact that they can adopt open source technologies on their own terms. Interestingly enough, the Zenoss survey also found that the IT people surveyed still value the support they get from vendors, the maturity of proprietary software and the features they get in those products.

Ultimately, while the Zenoss survey shows that mainstream adoption of open source software is already here, it doesn’t appear that the adoption of open source technologies necessarily means that proprietary technologies are going away altogether. But It does mean that proprietary software needs to be not only that much better, but a lot simpler to initially test and acquire as well.

RIM's PlayBook faces tough battle for loyalty

"The PlayBook’s big advantage over the iPad for enterprise customers is that many businesses already have BlackBerry smartphones deployed, and are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product to manage their connectivity. Enterprise IT managers understand the security and device management advantages that BlackBerry has over Apple, and RIM will maintain these advantages with the PlayBook, which is fully compatible with existing BlackBerry services. 

The BlackBerry PlayBook certainly looks like a strong contender against Apple’s iPad, at least amongst RIM’s core enterprise customers. Further, RIM’s dominance of the enterprise smartphone market has begun to come under pressure from Apple and a range of Android competitors, and since the iPad’s launch there has been a lot of discussion about the role of tablet devices in enterprise and the adoption of consumer devices by business users.

The PlayBook is aimed squarely at enterprise users, but RIM has very deliberately included high-end multimedia and gaming capabilities to attract consumers – and of course business users are also consumers.

The PlayBook’s big advantage over the iPad for enterprise customers is that many businesses already have BlackBerry smartphones deployed, and are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product to manage their connectivity. Enterprise IT managers understand the security and device management advantages that BlackBerry has over Apple, and RIM will maintain these advantages with the PlayBook, which is fully compatible with existing BlackBerry services.

The danger for RIM is that Apple already has a big head start in the tablet market, and the buzz around its apps and ‘cool factor’ is significant. Many business users will want to bring their own iPads into the work environment, so this is going to be a long and hard fought battle for RIM, but an important one as mobile devices become an increasingly important part of doing business.

Half of B2B firms boost search campaigns through social media

While many B2B firms leverage social media to connect with potential clients, more than 40 percent have found the platform is useful for boosting search campaigns as well.

Forty-four percent of respondents reported seeing noticeable boosts in search engine campaigns. Forty percent saw a lift in search engine referrals, 25 percent observed higher click-through rates on their paid search initiatives and 25 percent increased their conversion rates.

The majority of these companies leveraged social media to improve search engine optimization. Two-thirds (66 percent) are using the platform to create in-bound links, 64 percent are using extended profiles to reap more hits from search engines and 62 percent are tuning in to social media conversations to plan keyword strategies.

The benefits of social media campaigns inspired many B2B firms to hire more social media experts. More than half (56 percent) of companies are devoting more budget to the platform, while 15 percent are hiring staff.

With hundreds of millions of consumers using social media and online shoppers conducting more than 16 million searches per month, the combined power of social and search channels enable brands to reach a large audience.

Google Instant, SEO and your business - what does it all mean?

What is Google Instant?

Google Instant is the new, potentially game-changing addition to the world’s favourite search engine.

 

Google instant will change the way we search, experts predict.

Google Instant displays search results as a user types. Rather than typing your entire search query and hitting enter, you can simply start typing – and Google will predict what you are looking for. Results will appear, and change, below the search box as you type. Google says that the average web user reads much faster than they type, so displaying results in this way will save time.

That might well be the case. But the SEO community has been having kittens since Instant launched, with many proclaiming it to be the death of optimisation. While this is unnecessarily melodramatic, Google Instant does have significant implications for every business that relies on its online presence.

How does it change search patterns?

Users want to get to what they are searching for as quickly as possible, and Google Instant might help them do this.

Given that Google Instant’s predictions seem generally to be pretty accurate, it is a fairly safe bet that users will spend less time looking through search engine results pages. They will probably click through to one of the top results more quickly.

Many people have been suggesting that businesses and SEOs will now have to optimise not just for keywords, but for letter combinations. If you believe some of the blog entries posted this week, London hotels will have to optimise their site for every letter combination from ‘lon’ onwards if they want to keep any of their traffic.

But this isn’t the case. The search results users see are not based on letters – they are based on the keywords Google thinks they are searching for. In other words, if you start typing ‘London hotels’, Google doesn’t think you’re searching for things related to ‘lon’ – it is trying to guess what keyword you are going to type, and then it is displaying results relevant to that keyword.

What does it mean for long tail?

Other SEOs are worried about the impact of Google Instant on long tail searches and content. Many optimisation strategies are built with long tail searches in mind, and there is concern that Google Instant could scupper these strategies.

First of all, it is likely that some users making long tail searches will see the content they are looking for more quickly. You might see a relevant page even before you have finished typing your query – and if this is the case, why would you wait to see more results?

But it is worth remembering that users making long tail searches are likely to be doing so because they are looking for very specific information. They are looking for subsets, if you like; they are not interested in ‘London hotels’ – they are interested in ‘London hotels with a swimming pool near Battersea’, or whatever it might be.

These users are presumably less likely to be tempted by early Instant predictions, because a quick scan of the title and description will show that those first few pages don’t contain the information they are looking for.

What about PPC?

Google Instant is also likely to have an impact on PPC. The most obvious concern is how the new tool will affect impressions. If results are changing every time a user types a new letter, how will Google count your ad impressions?

According to Google themselves, ad impressions under Instant are counted in one of the following three situations :

* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result,  an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

This would suggest that the ads you see for a fraction of a second as you are typing will not be counted as an impression – and will therefore not affect your click-through rate (CTR).

There are a couple of things to note, however. First of all, unlike in optimisation, many marketers are likely to start bidding on letter combinations in an effort to ensure that their ads are displayed first, and highest. By second-guessing the user you might be able to boost your CTR.

Secondly, Instant is likely to produce a mindset in users that makes them even less willing to wait for their results, or scroll through even the first page. As a result, adverts in high positions will probably become even more important.

Google Instant is a major change for the search engine. But the panic in the SEO community is premature. Keep monitoring your results as you always have been – and let’s wait for some hard data before proclaiming the death of optimisation.

How do UK and US mobile consumers compare?

On either side of the pond, mobile phone consumers have taken different approaches to market purchases.

Variations in tariffs, contract length and even geography, brought about contrasts in the way mobile phones are purchased, but smartphones like the iPhone have challenged the norm for users on the prowl for a new mobile.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president of mobile devices at Gartner, said a greater range of subsidies from UK providers allows consumers to choose devices with desired features and then pick that device from the provider with the best deal, a contrast to in the US. In the US, it’s always been about the provider and the data and voice plan that best fitted your needs. Then, you would get whatever phone the provider would put on that package.

This is evident in the different ways mobile websites show their content. The UK site Know Your MobileKnow Your Cell, lists carriers and then shows products to consumers. displays handsets upfront whereas its sister US site,

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester, geographical scale was the one significant difference between the UK and US, impacting the level of coverage on which mobile phone users rely – a matter that is still a challenge to the US.

Contract lengths also vary between the two countries, with two thirds of UK consumers on prepay phones and the majority of US mobile consumers on long-term contracts.

Different technology

Market differences are also a result of varying technologies used by UK and US providers, according to Fogg.

UK mobile users have a much easier time switching SIM cards between phones than they would in the US because UK carriers use essentially the same technology on the same frequencies, he added.Any phone can work on any network, unless it has been locked to a network, but that lock can be undone very easily. That means if consumers want to switch networks, it’s relatively easy for them to do so.

However, US companies have a mix of technology, with AT&T and T-Mobile using SIM cards with CDMA technology – similar to UK carriers – and Sprint and Verizon use GSM.

iPhone in the market

This is why Apple’s iPhone is currently exclusive to AT&T in the US, because Apple would have to make a separate handset for companies like Verizon or Sprint, Fogg added.

As for the iPhone, Fogg said it is having a major impact on both UK and US carriers, causing them to look into how they price data, avoid congestion and manage their mobile networks.

“The iPhone is actually, if anything, more of a unifying force in terms of the experience of carriers on either side of the Atlantic,” he said.” The experience is more similar than it is different. “

Both the lead carriers for the iPhone the US, AT&T, and in the UK, O2, have both reported congestion in network quality problems.

Future of subsidising

As for the US, historically subsidy levels have been lower than in Europe, but with the shift to higher end devices, subsidy level has increased closer to the European model.

Milanesi said it would be interesting to see changes in subsidy levels in Europe, like what was seen with the iPad. In this case nonsubsidised hardware was sold at a fairly high cost but consumers still purchased it as there wasn’t a two year contract or high monthly plan tied to it.

She said when operators in other countries cut the level of subsidy, sales dropped in the short term, but then picked up again and sales went back to normal.

“That would allow carriers to lower their cost and may be a truer marker of who really the consumers are going after as far as brand, and who they like, rather than unnecessarily going with a brand that gets the highest subsidy from the carrier,” Milanesi added.

Mobile phone innovation

Rob Bamforth, principal communications analyst at Quocirca, said the market is headed not only toward devices, but also toward applications. After all, most people talk about having an Android device, not a Samsung Android device. That’s because that’s an app platform.

He said those involved in the market are trying to capture and understand the mobile application market and development stores.

This could ultimately weaken the carrier and device brand, he added.

“Despite the strength of the brands, I think people are typically looking to the devices,” Bamforth added. “The iPhone reinforces that and the counter-marketing that’s going on from the other manufacturers is also reinforcing that.”

Fogg said, specifically in the smartphone area and in the arrival of mobile internet, North American companies – RIM with the BlackBerry, Google with the Android and Apple with the iPhone – have been the most innovative.

“Those three firms have really driven the smartphone market for the past two or three years,” he said.

European handset makers like Nokia and the smartphone platform Symbian have been on the back end, fighting against the new wave of innovation coming from North America, he added.

As for the iPhone, Milanesi said the difference occurring in the UK, US and beyond is that it has generated an attention to user interfaces and intuitiveness.

“This is what Apple has done to the industry, moving away basically from focusing just on the hardware features and looking at the overall experience that a high end device should be able to deliver,” Milanesi concluded.