With an expected turnaround in global business sentiment, the
Indian IT sector is again eyeing double digit growth. Some of the
top technology companies have again started their hiring
initiatives, while some have started looking at
acquisitions—clearly signaling growth opportunities. While
Nasscom expects the IT sector to grow anywhere between 4 to 7
percent in 2009, it expects the industry to deliver 10 percent
growth in 2010.
The cautious optimism of the IT sector is evident from the
Infrastructure Agenda 2010 survey results, where close to 44
percent of the respondents said they would spend slightly more
(between 20 to 40 percent in 2009, as compared to 2010).
That said, the bulk of the investments will be in areas where
organizations can clearly reduce operational costs using IT. The
survey results mirror this trend. An overwhelming percentage of
respondents (70 percent) said they will increase spending on
virtualization and server consolidation initiatives.
| Figure 1: Top technology initiatives that organizations
will consider for reducing operational costs using IT in
2010 |
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Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner believes
that the focus on virtualization from firms in this sector will
only get more aggressive in 2010. Chakraborti says that firms in
the IT/ITeS segment will also look at client side virtualization by
adopting desktop virtualization. He also believes that these
companies will let employees buy their own laptops and smart
phones. Company applications will be delivered to these employees
remotely through cloud services on these devices.
Indian manufacturers face great competition from countries such
as China, and are naturally keen to improve their competitiveness
using IT. Most manufacturers have an extensive and complex network
of suppliers and customers. Hence, BI tools that provide these
companies with the required information to make timely and accurate
business decisions, is critical today. Information could be related
to customer buying patterns, monitoring inventory levels and
benchmarking distributors or regions.
The survey findings highlight that 98 percent of the CIO
respondent base expect to increase their budgets for BI in 2010.
Investment in virtualization technologies is second in the list
with 92 percent affirming their intention to invest in this
technology. The interest in Document Management Systems (DMS) is
also high, with 69 percent of respondents stating they will
increase investments in this technology. Web 2.0 tools, though
popular, have not made it to the ‘must do’ list, with
only 36 percent of respondents saying they
will increase investments in Web 2.0 tools in 2010.
| Figure 2: Top challenges faced by CIOs in this
sector |
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The usage of open source tools is also gradually picking up in this
sector, with over 41 percent of the respondents using open source
operating systems, 40 percent using open source office productivity
suites, and 11 percent using open source database and messaging
systems.
Speaking on challenges CIOs in this sector face, 59 percent of CIOs
cited integrating disparate applications and systems as their
topmost challenge.
To reduce overdependence on a single country such as China, many
countries are today actively looking at India as an alternative
manufacturing hub. To India’s benefit, it also has an
extremely successful software services industry that can lend the
right support to boost the competitiveness of Indian enterprises.
Many SMEs are looking at implementing ERP solutions. Large
enterprises too are looking at increasing their IT spends in
technologies such as BI to accurately identify customer trends. The
potential of Indian manufacturers to transform their global
competitiveness is indeed bright.
Rapid Adoption Of UC Tools
With multiple teams spread across the globe, IT / ITeS firms are
natural adopters of Unified Communications(UC) tools. The survey
highlights that 60 percent of the respondents expect to increase
their IT spend on UC and video conferencing tools. Going forward,
one can expect further acceleration in the adoption of UC tools.
This is since organizations in the software services industry find
that besides reducing costs, using such tools has helped improve
employee productivity.
Figure 3: Areas in which organizations in this
sector
use SaaS |
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For example, Wipro uses UC tools for collaborating on projects,
interacting with customers and partners, and for virtual training
sessions and leadership meetings. Using UC tools, the company has
saved close to 100 trips per year for piloted projects, with
approximate savings of USD 2.5 million. Similarly, in Infosys, UC
tools are being used in design and architecture reviews, in large
deal pursuits and co-creating Intellectual Property using its large
distributed workforce. Due to UC tools, many large organizations
such as Wipro and Infosys now have the concept of virtual teams
that are scattered across the globe.
Among the top challenges that CIOs in this vertical face,
respondents said that integrating disparate systems and
applications remain the greatest concerns. Other challenges include
tackling the shortage of IT skills and the lack of budget.
Another interesting insight from the survey is the usage of
SaaS. Close to 50 percent of the respondents in this sector consume
enterprise applications using a SaaS model (see Figure 3). As the
pressure on margins gets bigger, one can expect companies in this
sector to move away from CAPEX models and shift towards OPEX models
such as SaaS. Interestingly, a significant 70 percent of
respondents have indicated that they would consider open source as
a strategy in 2010 to reduce their operational costs using IT.
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Muralikrishna
K
VP and Group Head, Computers &
Communication Division, Infosys
Before positive signs of recovery emerged from the global
economic downturn, we leveraged technology and process expertise to
drive agility and operations excellence while simultaneously
enhancing collaboration. This has helped us improve our project
delivery excellence and IT asset lifecycle management.
Our priorities in the coming year include improving our agility to
meet new business model requirements and making the required
changes to existing models, if necessary. We will also focus on
driving the adoption of emerging technologies and concepts to
improve client experience, project delivery experience and
operational excellence.
Key 2010 initiatives include:
- Private cloud adoption at a
larger scale as a project development platform
- Leveraging emerging
technologies and concepts to support non-linear business models
globally
- Data center
consolidation
- Unified
communications—taking further initiatives to improve our
collaboration and communication platforms
- Driving asset lifecycle
management, monitoring effectiveness in the areas of hardware and
software
- Initiating information
lifecycle management.
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Satish Joshi
Executive VP and Global Technology
Head, Patni
In 2010, we will continue to leverage IT to improve automation
and efficiency of operations. This includes optimizing the cost of
managing and running IT infrastructure, making IT infrastructure
much more flexible to changing business requirements, and enabling
the creation of new services and delivery models for established
services by using IT.
As our infrastructure is already substantially virtualized, our key
initiatives will center on maximizing the potential of
virtualization to:
- Create an on-demand model of delivering IT and application
services to business
- Improve cost efficiencies of operations
- Start leveraging public cloud computing services in addition to
the private cloud that has been built—and integrate this
seamlessly
We will also focus on IT-enabled remote service delivery
mechanisms and create increased collaboration via technology
between our local teams and our teams working onsite with
customers.
In 2010, we will also focus on a greater degree of
automation—through software engineering tools—in all
phases of the software development lifecycle.
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N Natraj
CIO, Hexaware
Technologies
In our business, getting a 360 degree view of the data and
business is a top priority. Some of our top initiatives in 2010
include areas such as UC (Phase 2), ERP Upgrade, BI tool
implementation, virtualization, application consolidation and
Knowledge Management (Phase 2).
We are also exploring SaaS, shared services models, and cloud
computing technologies. Enabling application access from portable
devices such as BlackBerry is also on the anvil. Finally, we are
looking at implementing Global NOC and SOC.
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Sunil
Gujral
EVP & CTO, Quatrro BPO
Solutions
As a corporate IT function, we support over seven business
verticals ranging from Finance and Accounting, Risk Management
& Analytics and Interactive Game Localization and Testing
services.
Aligning the varying needs of each business remains our key
challenge—given our objective to leverage common underlying
infrastructure across all business verticals and deliver the
benefits of economies of scale, optimal utilization of resources
and access to a common pool of skilled resources.
Businesses demand more transparency and openness for their own
service delivery teams. Further, the active participation in
service delivery for end customers often puts constraints on
security policies, regulatory requirements and the supporting
infrastructure.
In addition, the increasing dynamism in the business environment
requires certain elasticity in capacity provisioning. This allows
the business to ramp up as quickly as possible and ramp down, if
required, with minimal wastage owing to idle resources.
Recent recessionary trends have added further fuel to the age-long
business demand of “Do more for less —and if not, at
least more for the same or same for less.” Finally the demand
to go green by reducing carbon footprint has started showing its
face in the form of questions being posed by some existing
customers and most of the new RFI/RFPs. It is obvious that some
steps in this direction will have to be undertaken in 2010.
In 2010, we will work with our technology partners to improve
delivery timelines and evaluate possible business models that can
bring in the desired elasticity in capacity. We will also evaluate
cloud sourcing as a possible means to bring in the required
elasticity as well as lower delivery costs.
Additionally, we will take efforts to identify low-risk
applications with no client interfacing—as a starting point
in the process of adopting cloud computing.
Simultaneously, we will identify virtualization opportunities
across the IT landscape—including servers, desktops and
storage—to maximize the optimal utilization of existing
resources, as well as identify slack resources which can be
deployed for new processes.
We will also deploy tools that measure and benchmark the
utilization of resources as well as adherence to customer and
partner SLAs, and dashboards that can effectively report any
variances. This will assist us in taking proactive measures to
ensure consistent SLA adherence as well as optimal resource
utilization.
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