The expectations of a CIO today is embryonic

How do you think Indian CIOs focus is shifting?

CIOs in India are focusing on cost efficiency aspects, while simultaneously supporting business growth and innovation. To put it in other words the expectations of a CIO today is embryonic, wherein there is a shift of focus from utilizing IT to improve business operations to ‘business’ IT which is innovation and transformation for business value. Further we have seen digital transformation in the organization as one of the most important requirements of the CIO. This requires enablement of macro technology forces of cloud, social, analytics, mobility, and the Internet of Things. We know that not every business fundamental will need to change to the same degree, nor will every technology driver have a role to play in every business scenario.

If that is so, how do you see CIOs expectations from their service providers changing?

We believe CIOs will turn towards service providers (SPs) who can support them through their digital business journey and can support their cost expectations. They would be looking to build digital leadership and bimodal capability of renovating the core and yet be agile enough to exploit the new and innovate.

Thus CIOs are expecting their service provides to understand exactly what they want from an engagement, especially how it should be linked with existing business processes of the organization. The SP should be partners who can determine and demonstrate how their offerings can underpin, support, enable, and accelerate the digital transformation to remain relevant to their business. The SP should be able to articulate value in business terms such as key process outcomes and impact to key performance indicators (KPIs). CIOs expect their SP to not only help with the new technology and solution implementation, but also present relevant industrial experience and impart any lessons learned from previous implementations.

So the CIO would expect better integration, optimum management of IT infrastructure and applications, security and also compliance.

According to you what should be the key parameters that CIOs must keep in mind while selecting their service partners?

There are four very important factors CIOs must consider. First, the CIO needs to pick a SP (Service Providers) with broad portfolio of managed services. We know that using multiple managed services vendors can become quite costly and complex for organizations. Traditionally sourcing by process seemed to be optimal as it allowed organizations to hire ‘the best-of-breed’ for a particular activity but at the same time it can hinder agility and make change more difficult. To ensure flexibility, organizations must ensure that their prospective providers offer a comprehensive suite of managed services, from infrastructure management to managed security, resilience, mobility, and other IT services to managed hosting and cloud. Also they need to look for SPs who are flexible and can offer different approaches allowing the enterprise to scale demand up or down to match business requirements.

Second, the CIO should evaluate SP’s skills and experience. I believe that with changing IT landscape CIOs must assess SP’s skills that go beyond basic operating system maintenance and availability management. They need to look at SP’s with high skill levels related to managing change, virtualization, high availability, middleware, multiple network technologies, cross-platform integration, mobility, security and cloud technologies.

Thirdly, the CIOs must also check if SPs deliver services that align with industry best practices and ITIL standards. A services provider should employ industry best practices in managing an organization’s IT resources. ITIL best practices encompass problem, incident, event, change, configuration, inventory, capacity and performance management as well as reporting. Best practices for transitioning from in-house to the provider’s management system are also a critical area to explore.

And finally, the SP must have experience in multivendor environments via strong partnerships. Today’s IT infrastructure is typically a heterogeneous environment comprised of hardware, software and network products from a variety of vendors. Thus I believe CIOs need to choose a SP who has extensive experience of working with multivendor environments and has partnerships with leading vendors to ensure availability and visibility into emerging technologies. To meet the modern day needs of a CIO, a vendor-agnostic services provider should play the role of trusted technology advisor, helping the customer select the technologies that provide the best fit for his business.

Which are the specific verticals that HCL Services focuses on?

As a managed service provider we believe that adding service capabilities specific to key vertical markets delivers exponentially more value than generic one-size-fits-all offerings. In our opinion, the ability for a solution provider to bring together sales, technical expertise and services skills, and apply them to solve specific industry pain points, is the ultimate expression of partner/vendor success. We are thus committed towards solving two specific technology challenges: Helping companies better manage, scale and secure their IT infrastructure to enable effective customer experiences, and delivering customized industry solutions to improve business outcomes through better use of transformational technology and automation. Over the last 30 years we have served many industries including BFSI, manufacturing, government, healthcare and have developed strong industry capabilities. Further, we have strong Infrastructure consulting practice with excellent domain expertise in BFSI, manufacturing, government, and healthcare to identify specific problem areas in clients’ existing systems and offer specialized solutions to generate higher RoI from their technology investments.

Can you give some idea of the reach you have in these segments?

To give a glimpse of our capability and experience in BFSI space—we have 50+ BFSI customers, manage 26,000+ network devices spread across BFSI customers and have 2500+ datacenter assets across x86, rack and blade servers under management for BFSI Industry. Similarly, for a heathcare giant in India. Similarly, we have very strong experience, skillset and relationships in government sector. We have created and are now managing world’s largest data center for a complex government program, have rolled out 250+ G2C services in three states and won numerous awards for our government projects.

In healthcare we have worked with lot of leading hospital chains of India. To give an example we helped a multi specialty hospital chain in creating an agile and scalable Healthcare Information System (HIS) by deploying an enterprise cloud solution across 22 hospitals With the deployment of these HCL solutions, the hospital could easily manage patient records and critical data with the help of the HIS application. It has become the first hospital in India to have the entire HIS application on the cloud. The hospital now has a centralized database management, which helps in easier patient record management and accurate billing processes.

How is the HCL’s services arm gearing up to meet CIO expectations?

We are aware that CIOs today are co-creating innovation with the business and looking at IT in new light to help them drive digitization agenda and at the same time streamline operations, increase organizational effectiveness and strengthen the lines of communication within the enterprise, as well as with business partners and external customers. We have thus aligned & transformed our services portfolio to help organizations improve business value while maintaining the focus on low costs and high efficiency.

We have next generation IT infrastructure services portfolio comprising of infrastructure consulting, managed services and multivendor support services. Further, our IoT ready monitoring tools (Tefilla), cloud services, contact centers, R&D facilities are giving us the right impetus to deliver quality solution in our key operating markets. Operationally, we have tied up with industry best technology partners and have co–developed innovative practices to align ourselves with the rapid changes of industry standards and requirements.

Talking about our existing skills and experience, we have tied-up with 20+ OEM’s including IBM, HP, Cisco, Oracle, Vmware, NetApp, etc, ensures top of line infra consulting. Our 720+ support touch points and 20 regional logistics center ensures the economies of scale & cost optimization for a CIO. Our experience in managing 15,000+ datacenter assets across x86, rack and blade servers, 70+ mission critical datacenters across India, 20,000 TB of data storage management and 10 PB of data replication & backup cumulatively is unmatched by any third party provider or in-house IT team.

Also our delivery is supported by a strong IT network operations center based in Pondicherry and we are continuously building our capacity in this datacenter. We focus on an ITIL v3 compliant delivery model with certifications like ISO 27001, PMP, Six Sigma, etc, and have a 24 x 7 x 365 support model. Our delivery is supported by a high amount of automation and strong service management tools.

Further with our ongoing business transformation initiative ‘Gold Standards’. We have benchmarked ourselves from a mark-to-market perspective and are committed to delivering ‘Continuous Excellence—every time’ to all our clients. Our ‘Gold Standards’ initiative has further ingrained 7 mantras in our DNA—people, partner, customer, processes, tools, technology, and product & services innovation.

HCL claims that repair is one of its strengths. What is the RoI that you promise to convince users to go in for repair in this era of use and throw?

We have seen a large demand for multi-vendor support among Indian businesses and consumers to support long hardware refresh cycle, increase the life of devices and manage out of warranty assets. Further, the exponential rise in electronic gadgets makes it imperative for consumers to have a trusted after-sales service partner.

We are a nationwide organized player offering post sales services for IT products, consumer durables, and home appliances for a large range of brands. We have a strong business model created by tying up with OEMs, LFRs, and e-commerce players to offer end-to-end after market support services including In and out of warranty devices, supply chain management, spare parts logistics, International call centers, walk in centers and e-waste services across India with the support of strong back end of 300+ centers.

HCL Care has tied up with Samsung as a strategic partner for providing premium customer support & repair services through a network of large format service centers. We have more than 300 multi-brand service centers across India, managing 14 lakh+ calls per month, handling 7.8 lakh repair on annual basis, and are the preferred partner of choice for marquee brands like Philips, Lenovo, BlackBerry, Emerson, Dell, Xiaomi, Obi, etc. We have maintained a very long relationship with Nokia for their repair services in India and continue to perform their back-end repair services on a large scale.