TCS announces major investments in big data, cloud and mobility

TCS CEO and Managing Director N Chandrasekaran said that firms globally are realising the benefits of these technologies and discretionary spending in this space is rising.

"This business is picking up momentum and we have made serious investments. We are talking with clients in realising this core transformation and companies are all beginning to invest money in this space, whether it is cloud, whether it is big data, whether it is mobility," Chandrasekaran told PTI in an interview.

He, however, did not provide the range of investments the Mumbai-headquartered firm is making in this domain.

"I think it is a significant pick-up that we are having.

It will scale every quarter because this is the time discretionary spending is going in this direction," he added.

TCS is not the only firm eyeing the growing digital technology space. Infosys, country's second largest software services exporter, said in July-September quarter it witnessed increased sales momentum of its big data and cloud offerings.

Similarly, NASSCOM, the apex body of the USD 108 billion IT-ITeS industry in India, aims to achieve a USD 300 billion revenue by 2020 with focus on Internet and mobile technology, big data and cloud computing for a speedy growth.

On the size of deals in this domain, Chandrasekaran in an investor conference last week said: "We have been winning a number of engagements and the deal sizes range from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars -? those are the typical deal sizes."

Research firm Gartner says: "Digital Industrial Economy will be built on foundations of the Nexus of Forces (which includes a confluence and integration of cloud, social collaboration, mobile and information) and the Internet of Everything by combining the physical world and the virtual."

In 2009, there were 2.5 billion connected devices with unique IP addresses to the Internet with a majority of devices being cell phones and mobile PCs. In 2020, there will be up to 30 billion devices connected with unique IP addresses and most of them will be products.

Gartner predicts the total economic value add for the Internet of Things will be USD 1.9 trillion dollars in 2020, benefiting a wide range of industries like healthcare, retail and transportation.

According to research firm IDC global IT spending in 2013 will exceed USD 2.1 trillion, up 5.7 per cent from 2012, driven by double-digit growth in the third Platform foundations of mobile, cloud, Big Data, social technologies and emerging markets' growth.

It added the most important trends and events in 2013 will cluster around mobility, cloud services, big data and social technologies, which will play a leading role in growth for the next eight years.