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Sailing Smoothly Through the Slowdown

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PCQ Bureau
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IThe PCQuest Infrastructure SummIT 2009 was an event that provided CIOs and

IT decision makers with strategic advice on how to get more out of their

existing IT infrastructure as well as go a step further in understanding current

technologies and trends with the aim of sailing through the slowdown

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The event was divided into two segments — a morning track targeted at network

administrators and IT managers, where hands-on demos on some of the hottest

technologies were exhibited, which the fraternity could use to realize immediate

results. The evening track saw the gathering interact with industry experts

towards understanding various aspects of IT implementation, maintenance and

management that would help enterprises — small, medium or large — survive and

constructively optimize their resources during current economic uncertainties.

Technologies and trends discussed in the event were relevant for the slowdown

— Open Source software, Application Management, Data Center Outsourcing, Green

IT and more. The event rounded off with a panel discussion on how to get RoI

from IT during tough times, which unanimously is the single biggest apprehension

over the last month or so.

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The Bangalore edition of the summit, like the ones in Mumbai and Delhi,

kicked off with a PCQuest overview of relevant technologies that can be

handpicked by enterprises with immediate effect. Ranging from strategies like

containing current business as against growing aimlessly, to cutting marketing

budgets as against increasing visibility, the session also delved deep into

complex infrastructure, manual processes, and increased travel being 'budget

sappers' and how using Green IT, embracing Open Source, and adopting SaaS models

can significantly reduce costs and increase profitability.

Netmagic revealed startling facts like most servers being loaded to only 10%

of their capacity and how consolidating groups of servers can go a long way in

seeing better RoIs. It was quite a revelation for IT managers that hardware,

networks and operations support are the biggest aspects of IT infrastructure

where recurring costs occur. During times of economic uncertainties the 'build

v/s buy' percentages for IT hardware becomes more pronounced and using third

party servers and hardware usage in a pay-as-you-use model was agreed upon as

the way to go.

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Another interesting industry view from D-Link was that of converged data,

voice, and video with anywhere, anytime availability, and its ability to

democratize the technology landscape, right from the grass-root levels to more

state-of-the-art solutions that have superior speeds ranging from giga to tera

bytes. Also, a road map to meet SLAs with fewer resources, handle mergers and

technology consolidations, enrich maximum out of existing infrastructure and

'out of the box' options to bundle these strategies under one umbrella was put

forward by Quest Software.

Going green to reduce costs was touched upon by LG, that sparked off a CRT

v/s LCD debate, and how the latter saves space, energy consumption and in the

long run, has an impressive savings in the company's facilities department.

Overall technology transformation was another interesting topic of discussion

where Wipro discussed how the traditional CEO v/s CIO disparity can be solved by

linking the IT with business goals, with investments, assess reuse,

configuration optimization, deployment planning and effective consolidation of

plan-to-deployment cycles.

The final brainstorming session where attendees actively indulged in debates

with the panel of speakers was the highlight of the event where it was

unanimously agreed upon that a detailed and conscious road map needs to be

formulated with the aim of linking the business goals with the existing IT

backbone, and outsourcing of hardware should be seriously considered, along with

taking a serious re-look at the existing framework and make technology decisions

that are qualitatively aimed at business consolidation and faster RoIs.

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