Innovations in IT/ITES industry

If you are looking for innovation, then the IT/ITES segment can't be ignored.

In our last year's Best IT implementation survey, we saw IT/ITES segment going a

cut above the rest as far as technology usage was concerned. Many IT/ITES

companies for instance, had moved to Web 3.0 while other industries were still

struggling to even figure out Web 2.0. This year again, we noticed quite a few

interesting trends in the IT/ITES segment. These go beyond project deployments.

Product Trends



One trend we noticed was that there were a lot of companies who nominated

interesting IT products that they had developed. While these could not be

qualified for the Best IT awards, as they were 'products' and not 'projects',

they were interesting nonetheless, clearly indicating the fast pace at which

technology is being developed by this segment. Many of the products were in fact

from small Indian companies. One of them was Prakhar Devanagari Font Parivartak,

which is a software that converts ASCII/ISCII devanagari text into unicode text

with 100% accuracy. The advantage of doing that, according to the creator of

this software is that unicode fonts can be searchable on the Internet. Many

govt. sites are using ASCII/ISCII fonts, which are not searchable. This software

can therefore do wonders for them.

Another very interesting product was My Mobile TV, which is basically a

Mobile TV application wherein a user can watch live TV on the go. The

application works on both 3G and 2G networks, and has been created by a company

named Apalya.

A third interesting product that was nominated included an interactive kiosk

with audio/video/data connectivity, serving as a self-care and sales channel.

The kiosk has broadband Internet and video telephony, which enables connectivity

with a live executive and a transaction ready card reader with a printer. This

serves as personalized, live-agent services at key customer presence points

without actually having a physical outlet there.

Hopefully, next year, these companies would have some real live case studies

to share of how they deployed their products across various organizations and

nominate those projects for the awards.

Implementation Trends



As far as IT implementations go, there's a whole range of different types of

projects being deployed by the IT/ITES segment. Of these, the highest number of

deployments we received were for security and risk compliance related

implementations. This obviously makes sense because most IT/ITES companies are

working on sensitive data of multiple customers, most of whom are foreign

clients. Therefore, such mandates for ensuring data privacy and security are

usually governed by the customers. The Indian IT/ITES companies must comply with

such requirements in order to compete in the market.

Security and risk compliance



There were several interesting security related projects, ranging from

access management to license management and control, to content security. On the

risk compliance side, the projects were largely related to automation of

security procedures to mitigate risks associated with any of the processes.

Managing risk is a challenging task for any organization, especially if the

organization has a complex technological infrastructure and is located across

multiple locations. For such companies, improper handling of risks is also

'risky', as it can lead to legal issues and liabilities. The problem becomes

even more challenging when you have multiple processes running, which are being

managed by multiple teams. So we found solutions, such as those by IBM Daksh,

being deployed that allow teams to do self-assessment for privacy and security.

The solution has an inhouse web-based self assessment tool comprising of

questionnaires related to commonly expected controls from clients who've

outsourced their process handling of sensitive personal information like credit

card numbers, health information, and other financial data. The various business

and functional heads answer self-assessment questionnaires and based on their

responses, the tool automatically calculates the risk rating. After collating

all information, higher risk functions are reviewed in greater detail.

Another risk compliance solution was deployed by the same company was a data

leakage prevention tool, which prevented data theft from insiders. The solution

monitors all inbound and outbound traffic from the network and prevents or sends

off alerts as per the pre-configured policies. The solution has an out of the

box policy template for HIPAA, PCI, GLBA, SOX, and other applicable US/European

laws.

Web-based solutions



Here again, the IT/ITES segment is using some very complex solutions. One of

them, the proactive performance risk analysis and remediation project by Infosys,

is also a winner of one of the Best IT Implementation awards. The project

essentially monitors 150+ web applications for their performance. These

applications are being used by internal Infosys employees. In case any

application's performance is likely to deteriorate, the system automatically

detects it and raises alarms so that the problem can be rectified in time. There

are also a lot of smaller IT/ITES companies, who're in the process of setting up

simple solutions, such as an online yellow pages, or a travel portal.

Other interesting implementation trends



Besides security, risk compliance, and web-based solutions, we also observed

many other interesting types of projects. One IT/ITES company deployed an ERP

solution to completely automate their financial and many other processes,

resulting in increased & authentic statuary conformance, elimination of

reconciliation efforts, etc.

A few companies also took green IT initiatives to become more eco-friendly by

reducing carbon footprint, as well as saving costs. For instance, iGate, the

well known IT company deployed a simple printing governance solution to save

paper. Essentially they used a reduce/recover-reuse-Recycle (3R) methodology to

make the environment a better place to live & work in. This initiative would not

only help in saving trees & environment, but also a lot of cost to the

organization. They implemented it on a pilot basis and based on the print

statistics collected across the printers they observed that the high utilization

was due to lack of awareness about paper conservation among employees. So

various options were implemented that helped in reducing non-business related

printing including educating employees, encouraging digitization & designing a

continuous control, etc. So after a thorough analysis across various business

groups, an allocation limit was put in place for each business unit & its

members. Not only this, they choose a comprehensive printer accounting and

management suite which provided quota management for printouts and security for

prints sent by the users.

Another green IT project was deployed by Infosys to address the business

needs, by leveraging existing investments. A virtualization solution was

deployed across their storage & server stacks. More physical servers were

consolidated into high end blade servers. The benefits of this are quite

obvious-savings in power & cooling, lesser real-estate, faster provisioning,

better utilization, and reduction in the overall TCO.

Future Outlook



After a detailed analysis we found out that Cloud Computing seems to be a

key technology/focus in the IT/ITES sector and many enterprises are keen to use

it as a platform. Implementing Cloud computing as a platform will help

enterprises save capital cost as it would direct them towards operational costs.

There might also be some challenges faced by the enterprises as when they plan

to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud, and then some control over their

information infrastructure and processes gets relinquished.

An approach known as secure the cloud, which is a risk-based evaluation of

the cloud environment can help in identifying gaps in security measures. This

approach encompasses, security, privacy, compliance, scalability, data leakage,

etc. Talking about security, its assessment includes data encryption, risk

management, user access, data storage location, incident response, etc. Also

it's very important for an organization to know that the cloud supplier can

adhere to all its risk-management practices.

Moving to scalability and speed, a lot of time can be easily cut down by

enterprises in buying and setting up of hardware, software, etc which are

necessary to support a new application. Moreover as per their requirements they

can do faster deployments, scale up and scale down their usage of services

during peak hours of activities.

Another interesting trend we found was that many organizations are keen to

adopt mobile and GPS based solutions. As 3G is making news all over the country,

so the trend is more towards the mobile based solutions that can easily run on

GPRS/ 3G enabled mobile phones.

From the above facts & information we can say that cloud computing is gaining

momentum & the cloud will become a mainstream solution in the coming years.