How CIOs plan to spend their IT budgets in 2013

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2013, a 4.2% increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trillion, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Taking a cue from this market research estimate, Dataquest set on a trail to speak to a few CIOs to know their plans for technology adoption during 2013. Continue to read along as we pen down these plans...

"We have already adopted cloud for some initiatives and started BYOD in a pilot mode and the plan is to magnify these initiatives next year. The reason is simple, we cannot afford to ignore such initiatives. The gap between personal and professional space is diminishing circadian, and such initiatives will act as a catalyst to improve employee's efficiency and loyalty to organization."
-Raj Khemani, Head, IT, Clariant

"First, design policy which will control the organization and personal privacy when using BYOD. Second, use cloud apps which will ensure data security and freedom to use any device anywhere. Third, use Secure Wi-Fi in an organization and home instead of traditional lan cable and switch. The adoption of these three methods is expected to reduce the cost spending on technology and operation costs such as manpower, amc, energy saving (ups power, ac demand and office space requirements etc)."
-Dr Selvam K, Group Chief Information Officer, Siva Industries & Holding

"We will continue to focus on mobility and develop more customer-centric applications on smart and mobile devices. Rollout more products and services in the mobile devices. We have already started on our path to virtualization. We will continue more aggressively the visualization program. More content and efficient content management system will be implemented. HTML 5 based applications will be rolled out."
-A Balakrishnan, CTO,Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services

"Our focus is going to be on Cloud, Social, Mobile & Big data. We are internally adopting cloud first policy for all infrastructure requirements. We are closely evaluating Windows 8. We plan to have enterprise wide windows 8 adoption for end user computing. For our mobile staff (sales, account management, project management) we will roll out finely tuned mobile apps which, unlike the legacy 'one-size-fits-all' approach, will narrowly meet individual needs while integrating them with our back office team.
Our security practice will add enhanced Security Event Identification and Correlation Capabilities. We will also offer enhanced Security vulnerability assessment testing and remediation processes to our clients."
-Sanjay Vidyadharan, Chief Information Officer, Marlabs Software

"With the constant development in the field of science and technology, the New Year will see newer technologies like:

Business Intelligence tools for providing better insights to management and operations -

BI has become crucial to move from being reactive to proactive information. As enterprises are generating more and more data, it is increasing becoming crucial to use the data in most logical way. This is required not only for operational efficiency, but to retain most profitable customers, prevent fraud, manage risk and compliance efforts

 

Virtualization
Virtualization will continue to play a key role as we get more and more of our hardware virtualized to increase efficiency and reduce operational cost & upfront capital expenditure
Enterprise social collaboration technology
Enterprise social collaboration technology for enabling real-time information exchange and performance management has become crucial for today's organization. Social communication tools like blogs, social networks, and office networks have already proved to improve business productivity by improving collaboration among co-workers and promoting better communication with clients.
Knowledge management technologies
Knowledge management technologies to preserve our vital information and to create, share and disseminate information within the organization through online discussions, forums and knowledge management portals
-Suresh Iyer, Executive Vice President - IT, Blue Star Infotech

 

"Our exponential growth of the business needs to be coupled with a fast-evolving IT landscape. Enterprise IT (one of the major levers enabling the business) needs to support the growth of key business operations and functional processes.
The four major IT initiatives we are examining currently at Lodha are private cloud services, Wireless and radio technologies, open source stacks and virtual desktops.

Private Cloud
The existing server landscape is 4 years old and needs a tech refresh as it is constrained to handle the ever growing scalability needs of applications. The time-tested option is to replace these with upgraded and enhanced latest model servers. However that would not solve the persistent problem of high power consumption, scalability on demand, redundancy and single point of failures. These implicit needs have led us to look at cloud based services as hosting virtualization in-house does not look cost effective. A virtual private cloud is an integrated approach to traditional enterprise IT using cloud computing. Unlike public cloud implementations, the hosted services in a private cloud are behind a corporate firewall. The advantages are higher level of security and compliance than most public cloud implementations. The data centre operations management would be easier as the virtual servers won't need to share data buses or processor time with servers of other organizations, as with the public cloud. This means we could get higher levels of performance on a private cloud and avoid "vendor locked" because it is quite easy to migrate. The other major advantage we expect is lesser capex, though higher opex.

Wi-Fi, wireless, and radio technologies
With the business growing at a rapid pace, establishing fast & reliable connectivity to every site has become an imperative. Poor or non-existent network coverage and laying and managing fibre and network cabling is a time consuming effort for every new project site. We have initiated program "Lodha Unwired" to explore Wi-Fi, digital leased lines and Wi-Max to get seamless connectivity to sites. Outdoor radio seems to offer a robust, quick-to-deploy solution that we are actively examining. Maintaining fibre and network cabling at project sites is a challenge due to frequent cuts, rains and water seepage, rat-infestation and digging incidents. Projects offices start small and need constantly upgrading as new associates are added. We are testing wireless cards on desktops and printers to allow re-configure and changed seating structures without any IT intervention.

Open source stacks
Being a highly documentation-driven process, the company is exploring to implement enterprise content management (ECM). Looking at an open source stack promise to reduce ECM costs by up to 80% compared to proprietary systems offerings from major vendors. Open source solutions have become established as a large, silent and highly viable and cost-effective alternative over the past decade. The open source model allows vendors to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost meeting small time-frames that are of deep interest to us.

Virtual desktops
We are in the process of exploring the virtual desktops alternative. Since our design, project and procurement associates are on the move, with new projects evolving and maturing during different execution phases, a large effort is required to de-provision, backup, move and re-provision their IT equipments. The major advantages that we envision is quicker asset management (provisioning and de-provisioning), lower support costs, ease of maintenance, data security and lower TCO over a period of time."
-Sudhendu Bali, EVP-IT, Lodha Developers Group