World Hosting Day – 2013 is organized to dedicate and recognize the contribution of innovative and fast moving Indian hosting market. India is slowly playing a very important role in today’s fast growing IT and hosting world. Not only on the Asian continent, but also all over the world through strong alliances with American and European companies. And the market is still growing, offering nearly unlimited potential for the Indian and foreign hosting industry alike.
Therefore, WHD.india is eagerly awaited, as it gives the exhibitors the opportunity to address all the important decision makers and masterminds, to present their solutions and discuss new business ideas.
The event saw some of the eminent speakers sharing their views around different topics like “Innovating with the Domain Name System”, “Industry Trends & Opportunities”, “Go beyond email” etc. Worldhostingdays.com
Key excerpts from the sessions by Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr. Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Verisign and Pari Natrajan, Co-Founder and CEO, Zinnov Management Consulting
As per a study by Zinnov, India has one of the largest SMB base in the world and ranks no 2 with 47mn SMB base. SMBs contribute significantly towards the economy, however, currently only 20% are addressable from an IT stand point.
Some other quick and interesting facts shared by Pari Natrajan, Co-Founder and CEO, Zinnov Management Consulting are:
There is tremendous opportunity for domains and websites in the SMB segment and there is huge opportunity for them to go online. An online presence can help them go global, increase business and customer base, be competitive and enhance their credibility in the market.
Today:
· 90% addressable SMB market is still untapped
· 4.5 Mn SMBs with PC Access
· 2.6 Mn SMBs with PC internet access
· 1.4 Mn SMBs with e-mail Access
· 1.3 Mn SMBs online through aggregators
· Conversion rate from domains to websites < 50
Today, Tech savvy, innovative companies and social internet consumers are driving the SMBs online by organizing SMB road shows introducing innovative apps to help them get website.
However, there are still lot of challenges that SMBs are facing to go online like:
• Most of the SMBs are satisfied with aggregator websites
• Satisfied with other sales channels such as tele calling,SMS/Email marketing and word of mouth
• A large number of SMBs do not budget for web presence; for those who do, the budget is usually less than INR 5,000
• Most of the SMBs are struggling with lack of internal skills to manage and run website and managing website content
• SMBs are not aware about the key benefits by having their own website due to lack of knowledge and being less tech savvy
Bright future ahead
Indian domain and hosting market is fragmented and provides tremendous opportunity going forward:
Current market share:
· 3.5 Mn Domains and 3 Domains per 100 internet users
o >1,000 active hosting companies
o >100 K active resellers
o Top 5 Registrars focussed on the Reseller Model
· Huge Growth Opportunity: USA and UK have 27 domains/ 100 internet users currently
Market Opportunity By 2016
· 16 Mn Domains and 7 Domains per 100 internet users
· 6.4 Mn Hosting Packages
· USD 500 Mn annual Sales
Trends emerging in the Indian hosting and domains market
· Increasing Focus Of Global Competitors
· Decreasing Price Points/Changing Business Models
· .com The Preferred Indian Choice
· Increasing Evangelizing Activities
· Website hosting pricing plans have declined by >60% in the last 4 years
· Hosting plans start from $16 per annum compared to $40 earlier
Hosters have an advantage to tap the SMB opportunity if they:
· Give customers more choice
· Display and explain offerings in detail
· Offer Product/Service localization
· Increase value
· Partner with innovative firms
· Partner with established players
· Gain customer stickiness
With .com SMEs can
· Open their business to the world through .com brand
· Operate at 100% uninterrupted availability
· Protect online presence from malicious attacks
Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr. Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Verisign
India’s projected growth of Internet users, through increased mobile penetration, will form the second-largest Internet population in the world by 2015.
McKinsey report on the Internet’s Impact on India (Dec 2012):
-India’s user base of 120 million is currently the third-largest in the world
-Projected to have the second-largest user base by 2015, with 330-370 million
-India has the potential to double its economic contribution from the Internet over this 3 year period
-McKinsey calls this the “Internet Gross Domestic Product” or “iGDP,” for India this would mean a growth from 1.6% to 2.8-3.3%
Innovating with the Domain Name System: New Opportunities Enabled by Trusted Key Distribution
The traditional role of the Domain Name System has been to provide a global directory of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses associated with Internet-accessible resources, such as a web server or a mail server. DNS-based Authentication of Name Entities (DANE) enables a new role: as a directory of public keys and digital certificates. Building on the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), DANE simplifies and strengthens the distribution of validated credentials from issuer to relying party, just as basic DNSSEC does for IP addresses.
In this talk, Burt reviews DANE and its main use cases, present the latest information on its deployment, and outline the next steps for achieving its full benefit in enabling Internet-hosted applications and services. Like DNS itself, those benefits will be best realized when the DANE and DNSSEC’s top-down key distribution model is combined with grass-roots innovation from application developers, hosting providers, and certificate issuers around the world.
As the registry operator for .com, Verisign has provided the essential underlying service layers that direct Internet users to where they want to go online. We have observed and responded to the explosive growth of the Internet, the majority of which has occurred within the domains we operate, by consistently over-delivering on the requirements of the day to support the uninterrupted operation of the Internet.
With a current average of 77 billion DNS lookups performed daily—and peaks far in excess of this—it is vital that Verisign’s Internet services be operational around the clock.
To make this possible, we have designed a sophisticated service from the ground up to address diverse hardware, operating systems, middleware and custom applications, power provider and network provider diversity, and a number of other protections.
Such massive scale helps ensure global performance and data integrity at all times and supports real-time updates.
As new domain names are added at 75 authoritative name server sites around the world as well as the operation of the A and J roots, two of the 13 root servers supporting DNS operations for all domains on the Internet.
How this innovation helps
This combination of a reliable, secure platform and significant capability provides a foundation for a wave of new applications and services that are poised for growth in the near future with advancements in cloud computing, Big Data and the ‘Internet of Things.’
Adoption of these new applications and services will once again raise the bar on infrastructure requirements to deliver available and secure services that engender the trust of Internet users, such as the impending shift to Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) to allow for greater expansion of the Internet addressing space, and mass adoption of DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to provide a chain of custody for DNS lookups and help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
Role of Verisign
Verisign has pioneered solutions for addressing new generations of threats to the security and stability of critical Internet infrastructure. As the strength of the DNS has engendered public trust, and businesses, governments and individuals have moved critical operations and information online, this has also created a massive opportunity for cyber criminals to engage in competitive sabotage, extortion, theft, and general disruption of services. Some of the most talked about and common methods of disruption seen today are distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), advanced persistent threats (APTs) and exploitation of user errors through techniques such as typosquatting and phishing.
Our DDoS Protection service, developed with expertise from protecting the infrastructure for .com and .net, is helping defend enterprises from attacks by blocking harmful traffic in the cloud before it reaches their network or application. And we have implemented DNSSEC in the .com and .net zones to help assure users that the data they receive from their Internet request originated from the stated source and that it was not modified in transit by malicious actors.
We have been instrumental in advancing DNS protocols for security and efficiency. For example, we have worked to enhance the DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) protocol, which builds on the DNSSEC infrastructure to enable cryptographically secure communications. This technique can be used to exchange cryptographic credentials, such as for more generally enabling signed and encrypted email between Internet users.
The work of our teams underscores the point that to continue to enable secure and reliable connectivity, we need to look differently at DNS: not because the services we’ve been providing are any less important, but because the services our stakeholders and customers are likely to want in the future continue to evolve. They need a back-end service to support infrastructure, but they also need more intelligence in the front end and the middle. They need simple answers to simple questions, but sometimes they also need different answers. And they need a place to look up more information than just the IP addresses of servers. In effect, they need a way to enable access to more things with confidence and reliability, anytime, anywhere.
Our commitment is to ensuring that an infrastructure powered by Verisign is always operating at the highest level to enable the innovation required to address the needs of the future, while also addressing the needs of today.
