IT infrastructure in emerging markets: arguing for an end-to-end perspective

To help sustain large-scale pervasive computing in emerging markets, researchers must address unique challenges in the delivery fabric and enterprise backbone. Such challenges present opportunities for high impact innovation. Although most research organizations have focused on developing consumer-facing solutions, we posit that future research must take an end-to-end perspective. That is, researchers must not only consider the front end (such as consumer devices) but also the medium to reach the consumer (for example, the delivery fabric) and the back end (for example, the enterprise backbone) to create an economically sustainable, scalable solution. Although our end-to-end perspective generalizes to all emerging markets, in this article, we mainly discuss the Indian market from which we based our observations.