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Gearing up for the Next Wave of IT

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Signs of economic revival are now visible and we are slowly coming out of the

gloom of downturn. Where some industries like automobile benefited from this

recessionary phase, some like real estate and insurance sector were worst hit.

This low-phase has forced almost all industries alike to re-assess their

businesses from a different angle, which has brought out many invaluable

revelations related to their businesses. As we stand at the threshold of a new

beginning, Its important to reasses our business prioritries and understand how

the emerging technologies in IT can help leverage business growth. The PCQuest

Infrastructure SummIT 2009 has a panel discussion in most cities, wherein key

CIOs were invited to share their learnings and discuss the way forward. The

topic of this panel discussion was 'Gearing up IT for the next wave of growth.'

The panel in Delhi comprised of J.S.Sodhi, AVO-IT at Amity University, Upal

Chakraborty, CIO, DLF, Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda, Anil Kumar, DGM-IT,

Oriental Insurance with Anil Chopra, Editor, PCQuest as the moderator of the

discussion.

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What recession taught us?



The panel started with discussing major leanings that recessionary period
brought forth. An interesting point that emerged was that the IT infrastructure

of an organization has to be flexible enough and scalable both upwards and

downwards. The panel highlighted the disadvantage of the lock-in Opex model of

IT infrastructure management wherein an organization has to pay a fixed amount

for a fixed period of time to the service provider, whether or not the

infrastructure is being used.

 Upal Chakraborty, CIO, DLF said, “We had entered into an Opex model for

our IT infrastructure management, where we were locked in with a service

provider for 4 years. When the downturn hit, the transactions decreased and

people left, leaving a lot of IT infrastructure like PC's idle. But we still had

to pay for that which we were not using. When we enter the growth phase again we

would take care not to go for such a model where we can't easily downscale.” The

panel said that it has to be ensured during the contract-drafting with the

service provider, that provisions enabling sudden downscaling or up scaling are

in place. Also it was emphasized that a capacity-on-demand Opex model is more

favorable, wherein you pay only for what you use.

“We believe in

bringing benefits of technology to the end User (Student) level. We are

already providing recordings and live transmission of class-room lectures to

multiple locations over our own MPLS and now are working towards taking

these live and recorded sessions to mobiles.”

J.S. Sodhi,

AVO-IT at Amity University

“IT can play a

major role in reducing the energy consumption and carbon footprint of an

organization by working on redesigning processes and using technologies like

workflows, video conferencing, bringing paperless culture, building

management system and facilitating working from home.”

Vijay Sethi,

CIO, Hero Honda

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The ability of the IT infrastructure to support customer relationships

efficiently was also highlighted, as during the downturn, retaining and

attracting customers remains the biggest challenge. Anil Kumar, DGM-IT at

Oriental Insurance added that, during this period they focused on improving

their customer service by enhancing their company portal which enabled its

customers to obtain policies, lodge and track their grievances, implement claims

and track its status all through the portal, thus making the processes

hassle-free for customers.

The panel emphasized on the importance of employing green IT during downturn

not only for reducing carbon footprint but also to reduce the cost base

drastically. On this, Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda said, “Energy savings of the

IT equipment whether at datacenter or at user level can be achieved by doing

things like virtualization, consolidation, changing CRTs, etc. Also the carbon

footprint of organizations' products can be reduced during in-use phase by

making products even much more energy / fuel efficient.”

The panel agreed that the recessionary phase enabled organizations to go back

to the roots and re-audit their IT infrastructure and consolidate whatever

already existed. This also gave them an understanding of users' exact needs and

enabled them to innovate solutions / products according to user' needs. J.S.

Sodhi, AVP-IT, Amity University said, “During this period, an innovation that we

implemented was live classroom lecture transmissions over MPLS to multiple

locations, without using expensive video conferencing equipment. We also

implemented virtualization in our data centre, employed blade servers and

re-audited our security compliance during this period.”

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“Virtualization,

mobile access and extending the boundaries of the enterprise are

technologies we should be looking at. In the real estate industry, project

management and monitoring is vital. Business process management aided by

tools is something all CIOs should look at”

Upal Chakraborty,



CIO, DLF

“We wish to enhance

our portal and employ Internet technology to enter the remote areas to

deliver insurance policies where people are still not able to make use of

insurance policies in true sense.”



Anil Kumar
, DGM-IT, Oriental Insurance

The way forward



On gearing up the IT infrastructure for future, the panel felt that there is a
need to enhance the productivity within an organization by deploying work-flow

enhancement solutions and disruptive technologies to make workforce more mobile

and efficient. Deploying Business Process Management solutions to improve

productivity was also stressed upon by the panel as a future focus area.

The importance of project management for growing industries for monitoring

time and cost attached to the projects came out in the discussion.

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Deploying efficient customer and dealer relationship management solutions was

also highlighted as focus area for businesses. The necessity to focus on

compliance of not only applications but also infrastructure was also emphasized.

Concentrating on generating awareness about Green IT within the organizations

was stressed at and the importance of making the IT infrastructure less energy

consuming and consequently less cost consuming was brought out in the

discussion. The panel also highlighted the importance of encouraging the use of

video conferencing and following paperless culture.

Amrita Premrajan

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