Strategies for IT deployment

Technologies could wax and wane in popularity-something could be as cold as

permafrost and then suddenly become hot because of an event somewhere that

changes the rules of the game. For instance, DR was something that people knew

about and did as part of their routine task till 9/11



happened and then the Asian Tsunami hit. Now, suddenly this is a very hot thing.

Scams rocked the business world one after another which brought in mandates

like Sarbanes-Oxley (USA) and EU-8 (Europe) and now the Clause 49 (India). This

added the dimensions of disclosure and with it came the need for information

security. So what is it that you should be doing?

Should you really follow the pack or forge your own road when it comes to IT

deployments in your organization or would you rather take an informed decision

on when it is right for you to move into something? That's one question we

will try to answer in this strategy guide.

Peer action



So what are other CIOs out there gearing up to deploy? DR seems to be the
universal answer with over 76% of our respondents saying they were planning to

deploy disaster recovery in the near future.

Information security (which is a related area) is also high on the list with

65% CIOs considering it. Otherwise hot areas like SOA and VoIP figure lower in

the order with 30—40% favor. The reason for this seems to be clear. Some of

the most common problems in the way of deployment still include the following

reasons.

• Getting top management buy in for the technology. This is important for
  
  any deployment project to succeed. With a plethora of technologies and
  
  alternatives available today, choosing between them is also a problem.
• Then there is the gap in getting what you want from the vendor. Vendors,
  
  it is alleged, often promise you things that they later do not deliver on.
  
  These may also include how the solution would improve productivity and
  
  performance.
• 83% of our respondents also feared new deployments would break something
  
  that was already there and this would cause a downtime. This is a
  
  significant percentage and indicates a need that new deployments
  
  (especially) need to be first tested and verified against internal
  
  conditions before they go live.
• A good 71% of them emphasized that ensuring alignment of solution to
  
  business needs was essential before they could consider it.

Now, let's move on to test how their plans stand vis-à-vis what's being

considered hot and happening elsewhere in the industry.

Compliance



All the brouhaha over SOX, EU-8 and Clause 49 seems to have left the IT decision
makers unfazed. The kinds of compliance they are talking about include the ISO

and BS. Upto 81% of our respondents felt that compliance in this direction

governs their IT purchase strategies. But, with yearly purchase-related audit

cycles and committees sitting to approve them, these decisions could take a

while, as they would require convincing from the technology champions before

they actually buy technology.

But you can be sure that Clause 49 is going to be big in the next couple of

months, given that the deadline for ensuring compliance is Dec 31st this year.

Already, solutions are appearing from several vendors to help with this.

Prominent vendors include: Skelta Software, PricewaterhouseCoopers, NewGen and

CRISIL. These tools let the top management ensure that a predefined hierarchy

audits and approves organizational financial processes, thereby essentially,

transforming financial activity into a workflow with an audit trail. Watch out

for action in this area, with more hectic activity in atleast the early part of

2007 to catch up with and disperse compliance procedures through all your

departments and business units.

SOA



Just 35% of respondents said they were considering SOA for the future. This has
two meanings. One, SOA has been now happening for some time and if you're on a

big-vendor platform then the chances are that you are already using SOA. That,

in turn, means that there is relatively little to do for the future. Future

needs here would be to extend existing business applications to other areas-like

Web, mobile or create inter-business portals to interact with vendors and

clients.

VoIP



Although only 41% of the CIOs we asked replied that they were planning VoIP
deployments in the next few months, we feel this is a very hot area and that

this number would have been lower last year and rise higher in the days to come.

We are starting to see a slew of products hitting the market aimed at VoIP (see

the PowerDsine Midspan reviewed in this issue, for instance). All that is sure

to make it easier for enterprises to deploy IP telephony. Of course, there is

one pull-back factor that has surfaced in the days before we went to press: the

two major Indian telephone



carriers announced that they were slashing long distance call rates in the
country and bring it on par with a local call. The high cost of such long

distance calls was the driving factor for VoIP taking off in the country. We

need to watch the action in the coming days before we can safely say how this is

affecting VoIP deployments in Indian enterprises.

Identity management



RFID is still the most popular means to do identity management. Web-based
spyware and worms that replicate via email are adding to the threat as data

theft can happen along these pathways without the user even being aware that he

has been victimized. Lots of vendors have ID management solutions out and these

should be checked out to save later embarrasment. With 41% of the CIOs in our

survey planning to deploy identity management in the near future, the question

is-are we complacent or confident?

Consolidation



The tower to racks to blades thing has long ceased to be a buzzword. Most
enterprises have already been there and done that. But advances like multi-core

computing, with servers on the x86 platform also going multi-core (see our

article on multi-core server processors elsewhere in this issue), consolidation

will hot up once again. The 47% of CIOs who answered Aye to this query in our

survey will reap this benefit in the coming days. Remember, every additional

processor core in a server lets you reap that much more benefit in performance

as well as thermal control (as one dual core will put out less heat and consume

less electrical power than one single core). And, there are 8 and 17 core CPUs

headed your way in the not too distant future.

Mobility



Compared to the US scenario, where working from all over the place, working from
home and in the car is a way of life, Indian enterprises still are not that

savvy a workplace. Clunky desktops still dot executive work spaces in every

office. And, how many enterprise applications that you have deployed actually

let you use it over the mobile (like a smartphone)-or, if they could do that,

how much of it is being enabled and used? While it is great that traveling

executives get a notebook to work from and employees can check and respond to

email using their Blackberries and smart phones, the enterprise itself still has

a long way to go before it becomes fully mobile. Some 24% of our surveyed CIOs

indicated they would like to improve that situation by implementing mobility in

future.

Business applications



If we consider the number of projects we saw during our Best IT Implementation
survey in June earlier this year, we notice that a significant number of them

were enterprise business application related. They may not have been called ERP,

CRM or SCM applications, quite a lot of them simply were. The ratio of in-house

software to labeled software here was healthy. So, even though 40% of our

respondents in this survey say they will do ERP and just 18% will do CRM, this

does not mean that the flow of EBA has died down.

Wish list



Consider this: when going in for new purchases, CIOs feel that their top
management is largely receptive to the new ideas (41%) if they are able to

justify an ROI for the project. But, this needs to coincide with business needs.

Therefore, the priority on their wish list is to get tailormade solutions that

would let them calculate and justify returns for.

With a per enterprise annual purchase budget that varies between 1 and 50

crores and rising yearly, this is a hungry market that's demanding to be

satisfied.The key here is that enterprises are keen on watching their

competition. A good 53% of these CIOs would immediately call their experts to

understand the technology. So, they would not go out to implement the same

necessarily. This is important because it points out the common misconception

that if a few people are doing something, its a hot and happening trend. Also,

this indicates that the industry is hungry for knowledge, also evidenced by the

59% responses we got clamoring that not enough information was available to

satisfy their questions. Perhaps they should have paid a visit to the PCQuest

Enterprise Solutions Showcase over the last couple of months.