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PCQuest SMB Forum — June 2010

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PANKAJ
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PCQuest SMB Forum is a series of IT events, held each

quarter since the last five years. It provides a unique opportunity to IT

decision makers of small and mid-sized companies to interact with each other,

share IT-related problems and experiences in deployment of IT solutions. During

June, 2010, the Forum was held across five cities: Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai,

Ludhiana and Jaipur. It was organized as a single-day event in the evenings, as

a series of speaker sessions on technologies and trends, a live demo on using

virtualization in data centers, rounded-off with a panel discussion amongst key

IT heads from the local industry.

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The theme for the event series this time was something

that's on every single organization's business agenda today-how to do more with

less. Although we're gradually coming out of the economic slowdown,

organizations are still taking cautious steps forward. They are trying to

understand where to put in new investments and how to leverage existing ones

better. The SMB Forum focused on new technologies that could help Indian SMBs

get more out of their investments, and leverage their existing assets more

effectively.

Doing business on the Web

The PCQuest team dwelled on the various

technologies that let you do business over the Web and demonstrated

virtualization techniques that let you improve IT infrastructure

utilization.

Adeesh Sharma, Operations Editor Adeesh Sharma, Operations Editor Rahul Sah, Sr Technology Analyst, CyberMedia Labs

Speakers from PCQuest dwelled on Cloud Computing and SaaS

technologies and the business domains where SMBs can benefit from such

technologies. The APC team, partners for this event, showcased their latest data

center solutions that not only make data centers more efficient but also ease

the process of scaling them up in future. The speaker from Wipro discussed how

an organization can reduce cost of ownership by 30% for infrastructure and 25%

on applications by leveraging Wipro's cloud-based services.

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Sandeep Koul, Technology Analyst, CyberMedia Labs Deepak Singh Thakur, Regional Sales Mgr, Telecom &

Services-North & East
Hitender Grover, National Program Manager-SMB

Umashankar Kesavan, Regional Sales Mgr-South Manish Gokhale, Country Sales Mgr-Services & Telecom

Vertical
Shailendra Shukla, Head-System Integration Business
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Dheeraj Malhotra, Practice Manager-Cloud Computing Services,

Wipro talked about their latest Cloud-based solutions.
Sathya Gautam, Head-IT, Dorma India, Chennai spoke on ERP,

Web-based and security solutions deployed by her organization.

The event was concluded with heady tech discussions amongst

the audience over cocktails and dinner.

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As awareness increases, so do expectations



For people who've participated regularly in the Forum, journey over the

years has been both enriching and intriguing. In the initial days of tech

adoption, companies would typically be allured into getting solutions deployed

based on recommendations by peers, aggressive marketing by vendors, and the fear

of losing out clients to the technically more advanced rivals. A globally

expanding economy has added fuel to tech desires. A case in point is ERP. A

standard ERP deployment is meant to automate end-to-end processes in a

manufacturing company. Over the years, after investing susbstantial amounts on a

complete solution, quite a few companies realize it's not just about deploying

but utilizing technology  to the max. There's cost associated with maintaining

such a complex deployment and quite a few companies realize they could've done

with a few simple applications, especially as returns are not in consonance with

the investment. Also, nobody is sure about the recurring costs in maintaining an

IT  application, howsoever small it might be. For instance, quite a few smaller

companies feel shortchanged by their website developers, who they feel are not

doing enough to ensure a steady stream of visitors. Worse, they keep charging

them for any modification or innovation carried on a website. One key reason

behind such acrimonies is the lack of SLAs amongst small-ticket service

providers and end users. The whole business of providing IT services to SMBs is

quite disorganized, with companies getting trapped by small-time providers, who

have little experience in end-to-end application development and support.

Improving operational efficiency
The panel discussion in all cities centered around the

various hardware, applications and hosted services that improve the

operational efficiency of an organization. Representatives from local

industries spoke about IT deployments in their companies and how they're

raking in business benefits through them.

Now, as the economy recovers, organizations have become

more skeptical about each penny they spend on innovation. And as the focus on

efficiency increases, so does the demand to know the RoI on any prospective IT

deployment. The awareness surrounding the potential ups and downs associated

with a deployment and expectations on the benefits to a company have also

increased. Smaller companies are still very loyal to the big IT vendors and show

more faith in commercial software as compared to Open Source, which apart from a

few popular applications, seems to have fallen out due to poor support. But they

want these vendors to do more to convince them about the real business benefit

in adopting newer technologies.

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Panelists in Chennai: L to R: Adeesh Sharma, Operations

Editor, PCQuest; Umashankar Keshavan, Regional Sales Manager-South, APC; N.

Varadarajan, Sr. Gen. Mgr-IT, Madras Cements; M. Vishwanathan, Head-IT, EBM

Nadi International; Sathya Gautam, Head-IT, Dorma India; S. Balaganapathy,

Head-Network Operations, Irevna; Saravanan Vishwanathan, Head-Internal

Systems, Hexaware Technologies; and Visweswaran M, CTO, Ma Foi Randstad.

L to R: Rahul Sah, Sr Tech Analyst, PCQuest; Manish Jhawar,

GM-Technical, Data Infosys; Susheel Sharma, AGM, MIS Wires and Fabriks;

Manish Gokhale, Country Sales Mgr-Services & Telecom Vertical, APC; and

Dheeraj Malhotra, Practice Mgr-Cloud Computing Services, Wipro.
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L to R: Dheeraj Malhotra, Practice Mgr-Cloud Computing

Services, Wipro; Dinesh Lakra, Member, Medium Industries Development Board;

Hitender Grover, National Program Mgr-SMB, APC; Abhay Pratap Singh, Mgr-IT,

Eastman Industries; and Anil Bedi, CEO, Bedico Automotives. The discussion

was moderated by Sandeep Koul and Rahul Sah, Sr Tech Analysts, PCQuest.

There was keen interest shown by the audience in Cloud

Computing technologies, their potential benefits and associated costs; this

however was hyphenated with concerns on potential security risks associated with

all hosted deployments. A manufacturing company in Chennai has gone for a

private cloud deployment for sensitive applications and left mundane tasks such

as email archival for the public cloud. Lack of reliable last-mile connectivity

and sufficient bandwidth are amongst the key reasons why they are more happy

having an in-house setup. The most popular hosted application for organizations

is CRM, which they feel can be better managed in such a setup.

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Panelists in Delhi: L to R: Deepak Singh Thakur, Regional

Sales Mgr, APC; Anil Chopra, Editor, PCQuest; Vijay Sethi, VP-IS & CIO, Hero

Honda; S.S. Sharma, CGM-IT, JK Tyres & Industries; and Kunwar Naresh, AGM-IT,

Liliput Kidswear.

 L to R: Adeesh Sharma, Operations Editor, PCQuest;

Geeta Ramachandran, VP-IT, Bharat Oman Refineries; Ravish Jhala, Systems

Mgr, Trident Hotels; and Ashish Dandekar, CIO, Power Exchange India.

Managing server rooms/data centers



Traditionally, smaller companies have paid little attention to their server

rooms. Most still have IT equipment strewn all over the place, and the addition

of equipment over time, adds to the tangled up mess. As few have the knowledge

of techniques or budgets to effect a makeover within a reasonable period of

time, scalability and maintenance are biggest casualties. APC showcased several

cost-effective techniques and equipment to streamline the server rooms and data

centers. Built on a modular-design, their racks provide a neat stack-up of

equipment which removes clutter while providing easy interoperability with

legacy equipment. Their products are designed to provide for even distribution

of cooling, optimally arranged cabling, power efficiency and real-estate

savings. The UPS have been designed to weather extreme fluctuations in power and

can be easily scaled up to provide additional backup, with minimal effort. The

company has a wide range of datacenter equipment to effectively match

requirements of smaller organizations.

Virtualization demo



The event was rounded-up with a demo of virtualization techniques. The

PCQuest team showed two such techniques to the audience: desktop and server

virtualization. Desktop virtualization was demoed by running VirtualBox

hypervisor on a laptop. On top of VirtualBox one can run different operating

systems. As part of server virtualization the team showed how one can use ESXi

hypervisor (that is freely available) on top of a server. One can create virtual

machines with just a few clicks and run different OSes on these virtual

machines. This is done using the remote client called vSphere.

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