‘Caution! Are You Spending Much Too Much on BCP?’

Manoj Kunkalienkar is president and executive director (India operations) at
ICICI Infotech. He heads the company’s technology solutions group, including
software and infrastructure solutions, banking products group as well as
consulting and transaction processing businesses. Apart from these, he is
responsible for quality initiatives as well. ICICI Infotech recently announced
plans for the disaster recovery market, in coordination with Veritas and
Hitachi. Kunkalienkar spoke to Dataquest about business continuity planning,
disaster recovery and ICICI Infotech’s corporate strategy.

l In
the past, you have spoken extensively about a holistic strategy for business
continuity planning (BCP) and even highlighted the inclusion of doctors and
psychologists in BCP. But how many companies really follow these practices?

It is true that not only most Indian companies, even global firms do not
adapt a holistic approach towards BCP. It is like life insurance. No one really
believes in the possibility of an untimely death. However, BCP is high on the
agenda for most companies and they do have processes in place. Processes like
who takes charge of what functions when someone is away are very strong in
public sector units. However, the top management needs to focus on and allocate
funds for training employees in BCP.

l Conversely, companies could
panic and over-spend on BCP. How can enterprises define optimum spending on BCP?

While planning for a disaster is crucial, companies cannot afford to
out-price themselves by spending too much on it. The key lies in prioritizing
data and even clients in terms of criticality. For instance, banks need to
decide that in case of a disaster, the top five customers would enjoy continuous
service, the following 10 in the next few hours and the rest would just have to
wait a little longer.

l ICICI Infotech has come a
long way since its ICICI Investor days, encompassing a wide range of products
and services in the BFSI segment. Yet, like most Indian software companies, why
does a bulk of your revenue still come from services?

Given that banking software products are high-end and cannot be completely
shrink-wrapped, they will always require a high degree of effort and time for
implementation. As a result, the line between what constitutes products’
revenue and software services remains blurred. Currently, 25% of our revenues
come from products and I expect this to grow to 40% in the next few years.

l The chunk of business that
you have been getting from ICICI has dropped from 99% to 35%. Will this
de-risking strategy eventually lead to a complete spin-off and an IPO?

The current holding pattern has ICICI Ventures with 62% stake, ICICI Bank
(29%) and Emirates (8%). We will continue to reduce our dependence on ICICI hope
to go public eventually. However, there are no plans for an IPO in the near
future.

MANJIRI KALGHATGI