Pratap Garghe,  Vice-president & CIO, Bajaj Electricals

Our main focus would be on the applications front. Evaluating, selecting and implementing new technologies are high on our agenda. As of today, we are using a customized ERP application. We have been using this ERP for the last 10 years and we feel that it has lived its life.
The customized ERP was built in-house on the PowerBuilder/Oracle environment. Also, we were finding it difficult to get the required resources of PowerBuilder, and there were some functionality restrictions as well. The design and the requirements were based on our business 10 years back. Now the business has seen rapid growth, and we have to address issues of scalability, so we need to change the platform.
We are planning to shift from this customized ERP to a ready ERP solution. During this shift, we will also try to make some business improvements. For this we have recently engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers for laying the strategy for business processes.
We have also carried out major developments in customized applications with respect to areas like Web-based and HRM portals, as well as integration with our business partners that include dealers and suppliers.
With increasing applications and servers, we also plan to look at virtualization. This will help us to operate more applications from the same set of servers, or utilize servers more effectively.
We  implemented the shift of our data center to the Reliance IDC in October this year.
Back-office applications, IT services and a public network for voice/data services will be some of the areas that we intend to spend on in the next year.  

 -------------------------------------------------------------- As told to Ashwani Mishra