Clinical Laboratory & Diagnostics in India & MENA

I have decided to spend three days attending the Microsoft TechMela being held at Mumbai from the 14^th – 16^th June. This is a great event and has high energy with about 2,000 mostly young developers participating enthusiastically in the technical sessions and trying out moves on the six Xbox 360 gaming consoles installed in the foyer.

What impressed me about Microsoft is that the company having just had a major launch of Vista and Office 2007 is already planning and preparing for the launch of its new products – more about these later. Truly, this is a company that not only has the ability to anticipate future trends, but also the clout make them happen.

From Day 1, the major takeaways from the sessions were:

·         The next major inflection point in software development is here – from products and applications for individual PCs to the client – server environment to Internet and now on to service oriented applications.

·         The Internet has now evolved to the next version – Web 2.0 – with a huge number of applications and services available on the Internet. User created content is on the rise.

·         There seems to be a conscious move by industry leaders to work towards convergence – the PC, the Mobile Phone and the TV will soon be working in a truly interconnected way – a change that could happen sooner than you think – A Unified Communications strategy is very much on the cards from Microsoft.

·         Hardware performance will continue to improve – no end in sight yet. This is being driven by even higher amounts of digital information being created every second – from data to images to audio and video.

·         I was impressed by the focus on a technology called ‘virtualization’ in which a single piece of hardware such as a PC or a Server can run multiple operating systems and environments. This is being made possible by advances on both the hardware and the software front.

·         More and more analog devices will shift to the digital format – it was music and photographs at first – now it seems to be the turn of the telephone. The speakers were of the opinion that since digitization supports software advances, the pace of change of the technology could be very rapid indeed and the world’s telecom network may be in for a major overhaul soon.

·         Broadband connectivity is improving in all countries of the world and so is mobile phone usage – this is potentially very disruptive to many companies and business models.

Like most other industries such as telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing, healthcare is not immune to these changes that are on the anvil. Surely better communication, lower total cost of ownership and better interoperability between disparate systems can only benefit our industry.