Amitabh Singh, VP & CIO, Industrial Group, Alghanim Industries.

With cloud, virtualization, tablets, and smartphones, the CIOs phone does not stop ringing. Today, every CIO is in demand to create and judiciously manage the humongous volumes of data and information to cater to the demands from these platforms. The CIOs role has gained a different dimension from what it was beforeof implementing the best available technology and bringing down the overall costs to understanding the business needs and the processes and trying to integrate technology to end processes to stay ahead of the competition. The simplification of the IT platform has to be accompanied by the the integration of technology to avoid unnecessary duplication of data, believes Amitabh Singh, vice president & CIO, industrial group, Alghanim Industries.

Singh feels that virtualization although is in nascent stages, his own group of companies have witnessed a sea change with its deployment as the number of physical hours and servers have reduced drastically. It has resulted in 20-25% reduction in the overall cost of operation. And as far as the cloud platform is concerned, CIOs are steadily moving towards it by partnering with hardware providers who can take away or to whom they can sell off their remaining/redundant IT infrastructure.

In fact, Alghanim Industries will have 100% virtual environment by 2012-13 and will also move to hybrid cloud for their confidential data. Cost savings is achieved after deploying virtualization or cloud platform because of the reduction in real estate cost for the storage of servers, electricity, and other maintenance heads.

Today, there are many applications available for various platforms, therefore the CIO should only selectively use those applications that can enhance the end-user experience and also keep a check on the rising IT costs. Understandably, says Singh, over a period of one-and-a-half years, Alghanim industries has decreased the number of apps from 400 to 65.

Speaking about the tablets and smartphones, Singh said that his organization will soon be providing tablets to senior management, while smartphones with suitable apps will be given to the sales and marketing workforce to ensure visibility and transparency of data without restricting their mobility.

Singh rates simplification of business process and adherence to the process through technology deployment and usage of hand-held devices as a big challenge. In addition, social media platform also poses risk to the intellectual property and business as even though an explicit external policy is in place in most organizations, but internal policy is still missing. The CIOs have to go that extra mile in order to reap the benefits of social media with the help of appropriate apps and policy, but he would also have to create awareness about the use of social media.