Veneeth Purushotaman, head-Technology, HyperCITY Retail India.

Even though recession has become a thing of the past, it has taught most enterprises the significance of mobility. Mobility is increasingly becoming an integral part of an enterprise as tablets are flexing its muscles to make their presence felt with the usage of tablets expected to be higher on the shop floor. Tablets will support another reason for the cloud computing services (back-end) market to thrive, which is the best way to extend the apps to a mobile.

Cloud, currently on a hype cycle had been used earlier though under different labels. Cloud solutions fit the bill for solutions that need a lot of storage; DR on the cloud, backup on the cloud, etc; the benefits are immense for these on the cloud as the storage space required is increasingly linear and exponential, says Veneeth Purushotaman, head, technology, HyperCITY Retail India.

He further adds, Before deciding which applications could be transferred to the cloud, a CIO could re-look at the entire infrastructure and security architecture and explore whether the existing policies and infrastructure allow anyone from the user community to access an application on the cloud? Or are changes required in policies and/or network infrastructure? All CIOs will be keen to move non-critical apps on to the cloud but then the word critical is a very relative term.

Social media is more a social subject than a technology subject; it has become one of the most important and effective channels for connecting with consumers. However enterprises have not been able to fully leverage on this medium and in future it is expected that they will change their usage much to their benefit. There is still a story waiting to unfold in India on social networking and enterprises using the medium.

Mobility has infused simplification, thus enabling seamless functioning to improve efficiency not just restricted to boundaries for users in offices, shop floors, and homes. A CIOs role is much beyond the role as an IT enabler; a CIO has a greater visibility of the end-to-end processes over his business counterparts and therefore has a big role to play in influencing and tweaking business processes, shares Purushotaman.

In the tablet space, Purushotaman is working on 2 projects in order to build applications to bring in mobility and efficiency to the workforce. However his organization still hasnt utilized the services of cloud computing for any of its services, but wouldnt hesitate if the right opportunity and need comes its way.