India Public Cloud End-User Spending to Rise 31.4 Percent in 2021

According to the latest Gartner forecast, end-user spending on public cloud services in India will total $4.4 billion in 2021; this will be 31.4% higher as compared to 2020.
Indian CIOs saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.
Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and cloud management and security services will all show double-digit growth in India for the first time. As people continue to work remotely in 2021, this will lead to an increase in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spends. These segments are forecast to grow 47.7% and 52.2%, respectively.

Within SaaS, customer experience and relationship management and content services will be the highest growing segments in 2021, forecast to grow 24.9% and 26.1%, respectively. In 2020, spending on e-mail and authoring declined 0.2%, however, this trend will reverse in 2021.

E-mail and authoring is expected to grow 25.1% this year. With the increase in remote workers by organizations due to the pandemic, more business is being conducted using email and collaboration tools, which will drive the growth of these services.

Apple to Cut Production of AirPods as Customers Buy Cheaper Wireless Earphones

Apple has reportedly asked its manufacturing lines to reduce the production of AirPods wireless earphones by 25-30 percent. Apple is facing huge competition in the wireless earphones market with availability of many cheaper wireless earphones, which is allegedly leading to huge unsold inventory.  

According to Nikkei Asia, Apple is now expecting to manufacture AirPods between 75 million and 85 million units for 2021. Apple’s plan to downscale the production of AirPods indicates that the demand for the premium wireless earphones is weakening, despite the double-digit growth in terms of percentage ever since AirPods were launched in 2016.

Apple has stiff competition in the market. Not just in the US but in several other countries also, including India, where brands such as boAt, Realme, Noise, and Redmi have been selling truly wireless earphones for as low as Rs 2,000. The cheapest AirPods model here costs around Rs 10,000, on the other hand. According to Counterpoint Research, Apple’s market share shrunk from 60 per cent in 2018 to 47 per cent in 2019 to just 31 per cent in 2020.