India slower at adopting BTO
Japan, Korea and China are the fastest in the region to adopt business technology optimization (BTO) software.
Ben Horowitz, Opsware co-founder, which was acquired by HP last year, spoke to ZDNet Asia in his new capacity as vice president and general manager, BTO products, HP software. He said Japan and Korea already have mature BTO adoption landscapes, but China in particular is hot on their heels.
"There is a huge push in China, which is adopting technology unbelievably fast. It's faster than everywhere else. The level of ambition is also very impressive," said Horowitz.
India, on the other hand, has been considerably slower in its adoption of automation software tools--a possible result of a culture historically reliant on cheap labor, Horowitz noted, raising the example of Indian farmers who were typically paid such low wages that it made no economic benefit to get a tractor.
"Automation sells better when labor rates are higher," he added.
And even though labor rates in India are now higher, a possible cultural resistance to using automation tools over human labor may have hampered the adoption of software automation, too.
India still remains a very large market for hardware and other BTO tools such as testing software, Horowitz added.
On Asia's "hunger" for BTO, Horowitz said there are vast opportunities driven by aggressive corporations looking to leapfrog counterparts in the West, particularly in the manufacturing and banking sectors.
"Manufacturing went up the value chain very quickly in China by driving a huge amount of automation. Now, people are looking to automate IT in the same way.
"Time-to-market is the biggest request I hear from Asian companies," said Horowitz.
IT has become increasingly complex, as a result of better applications to manage the hardware infrastructure, he added: "15 years ago, 50 servers was a big setup...now, big is 50,000 servers."
Because of that complexity, it becomes less cost effective as headcount is added to manage a resource, compared to the returns on using an automation tool .
"And when the business goes south, people blame IT first and ask where all the money went. "That's a common reason why CIOs get fired," said Horowitz.