It’s no more about work-life balance, it’s more
about work-life integration, said Anand Sankaran, Senior Vice
President and Business Head, Wipro Infotech while delivering his
keynote session at INTEROP Mumbai, 2011.
Consumer technology and enterprise technology have traditionally
followed different paths of evolution. While consumer technology
was built on open standards and was developed for a larger audience
and enabling usage of multiple apps, enterprise technology has
traditionally been proprietary, accessible within the firewalls of
the organization for usage by a defined set of employees and for
satiating a defined set of needs. But in the last few years there
has been a trend of migration of consumer technology into
enterprise computing environment, as consumer technology started
becoming more capable and cost effective like its enterprise
equivalents. Anand Sankaran, Senior Vice President and Business
Head, Wipro Infotech shared his views on the prevailing trend at
the ongoing INTEROP Mumbai, 2011.
Sankaran said that the key trends leading to consumerization of
IT are social media pervasiveness, smart and mobile devices,
changing work force devices and emerging business models. “It
is predicted that 120 million more smartphones and tabs will be
sold than PCs in 2012 and 1.3 million apps will be downloaded to
smartphones and tablets, compared to 75,000 on PCs. We will clearly
see a shift from apps traditionally being developed for usage in
clients like Windows and Linux towards developing apps on
smartphones. In the next 5-10 years you will see the proliferation
of integration of consumer technology with enterprise technologies.
I am confident that just a year later, there will be more noise on
consumerization of IT than now,” said Sankaran.
Bring Your Own Device Policy
Talking about the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) policies being
implemented by Wipro, Sankaran said that they started off with
rolling out Bring Your Own Apple products policies. This was the
first step towards integrating enterprise applications with
consumer devices. Wipro then started rolling BYOD policies for
other devices ranging from Android to Windows. At Wipro there are
certain sections of employees who have been given the flexibility
of bringing their own devices rather than what had been
traditionally defined by the CIOs, he said.
One of the reasons he cited on why a company should develop a
BYOD policy was - to attract and retain fresh talent. He said that
prospective employees have today started asking the companies
whether they have a policy that enables employees to bring their
own devices to the office. If a company has BYOD in place, it gives
the company brownie points and attracts the tech-savvy talent of
today.
Sankaran mentioned some key points that CIOs must keep in mind
while planning the integration of consumer technologies and
enterprise technologies. He cited scalability, security,
sustainability, developing a plan that is manageable within the
organization, and inclusiveness that should involve supporting
multiple technologies and devices, as the important points CIOs
should take into account.
About Author
Amrita Premrajan is an IT journalist based in New Delhi with over two years experience in reporting on enterprise technology and interacting with CIOs and technology professionals. Currently, she is Senior Correspondent at InformationWeek India. She has a Masters Degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.
More articles by Amrita Premrajan