Invest, Explore, and Some More

The red carpet is being rolled out and beating in gaiety are the drums, all

for welcoming the new year. As we write this, Santa is empting his goodie bag,

and, after a tiring trip around the world, is heading back to the North Pole,

only to come back again next year. Now, it is our turn to set the momentum for a

brand new year, with new resolutions, higher expectations, and a refreshed

spirit to don different hats and set new goals for ourselves. So, while the oft

asked question about our New Year resolutions compels us to have a ready reply,

even if we do not intend to stick to it, there are a few who are going beyond

just resolving to do a thing or two. And they are the Chiefs of Technology.

The ball for technological innovation and integration in an organization is

in the court of mascots of information technologyChief Information Officers.

Over the years, having evolved from mastering only the technical know-how within

an organization to laying stake in functional business process as technology

experts, some of Indias leading CIOs are setting new benchmarks in terms of

technology adoption, bracing for fierce competition, and promising to take their

organization to a new level with IT as the anchor. Gearing up to brighter

prospects and bigger challenges in the field of information technology, in 2008

are twenty-one upbeat CIOs. They will make fresh investments, explore new

technology frontiers and revisit strategic priorities.

Being the focal point of business transformation, these twenty-one CIOs,

across the health, insurance, hospitality, banking, retail and other verticals,

told Dataquest their priority areas for the year 2008. We asked these CIOs five

simple questions: on what technologies would you like to invest in 2008; what

areas would you like to explore; what strategic priority areas would you like to

focus on; five enterprises that have successfully integrated IT with their

business; and your biggest challenge for 2008. Here is giving you an exclusive

look into their agenda for the new year, unplugged!

Investment with Aplomb



Undoubtedly, in 2008, security tops the minds of the CIOs and hence proved

to be their favorite investment area. A majority seventeen out of our twenty-one

respondent CIOs opted for security as one of their crucial areas of investment

in 2008. Among the growing array of security treats, it has become necessary for

CIOs to beaf up their present security systems and to invest in new ones. The

year saw Microsoft providing comprehensive security solutions and officially

entering the security market with the launch of Forefront Client Security. The

launch reflects on the growing pains of security, spreading its wings intently

in the cyber world as well.

Close on the heels of security, storage and data center management were other

favorite areas CIOs invested their moolah in. Ten CIOs would like to invest in

these two areas and it isnt a surprise why. With companies storage requirement

for data amounting to multi-terabytes, storing the data and managing it becomes

an obvious yet crucial task. Adding another dimension to storage in 2008 would

be storage virtualization, which, though in its formative stage, has become a

buzzword. Sun Microsystems and Hitachi Data Systems, already known for their

high-end storage portfolio, have expanded their storage virtualization portfolio

this year.

They want to invest in Security
Khushru D Siganpuria, director, IT, Taj Group of Hotels	Meheriar Patel, GM & head, IT, Globus Stores	Sudipto Majumdar, CTO, Zapak.com

Another focus area that seemed to have emerged a priority for CIO business

strategies in 2008 is energy efficiency. Aligning to this is another goal that

storage virtualization may be seen as fulfillingmaking IT more environment

friendly. In a report by PC Quest magazine, ensuring high availability is the

biggest challenge for CIOs and more than 50% have outsourced monitoring and

management to a third party. Outsourcing, setting up their own data center or

for future readiness, investment in storage is priority for CIOs.

Its natural to expect companies investing in a data center or in managing

it, to choose rack and enclosures and blade servers as an area of investment.

However, companies like Elbee, India Today, SLR Ranbaxy, Arvind Mills, Bank of

India would put their money, literally, in blade servers, barring data center

management or storage. The total number of companies opting for blade servers

and racks and enclosures is seven.

Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) and Customer Relationship Management

(CRM) are the chose areas of investment only for seven of the respondents. It

reinforces that most Indian enterprises are now mature enough and, therefore,

have progressed beyond standard enterprise applications. But, with the huge SMB

market trying to automate their internal processes, ERP might be the right

answer. If 2007 was the time for CIOs to access whether an enterprise needs ERP

or CRM, 2008 will see them going ahead with it, especially among SMBs.

In our annual DQ Top 20 Vol II issue, this year, convergence of communication

technologies presents a lucrative market of close to $40 bn worldwide, but

raised a question. While Unified Communicationsis certainly hot, is it burning?

And CIOs seem to be echoing the sentiment. The market adoption of unified

communications is currently low, but since UC signals the beginning of the

convergence of communication technologies like audio-video conferencing, on to a

single platform, in turn leading to seamless communications, CIOs, world over,

are gradually moving toward this space; Precisely the reason why eight

enterprises, including Arvind Mills, Henkel CAC, and Oriental Insurance, have

shown interest in investing in UC.

They want to explore Virtualization
Manikkam VS, head, IT, Henkel CAC	Shirish Gariba, CIO, Elbee	Ketan Parekh, CIO, ShareKhan	Anwer Bagdadi, senior VP & CTO, CFC India

Another market projecting huge growth is Business Intelligence. According to

IDC, the market for BI software is already worth more than $7 bn. Another survey

conducted by Merrill Lynch said that BI software topped the list of tech

spenders in 2006, while a Forrester Research projected 44% companies worldwide

adopted to have BI software in 2007. This years encouraging growth is reason

enough to explain why Pricol Software Services and IFFCO would be investing in

BI in 2008. Some key technology trends in BI that CIOs might see emerging will

be SOA-enabled BI and open source BI. In our survey, though only two companies

have expressed interest in BI, 2008 might just be the year of change.

Windows Vista is also catching the eyes of CIOs as Globus, ShareKhan, Eagle

Seals, IIFCO, Thomson Press, SLR Ranbaxy, and FCB Ulka are companies opting for

it in 2008.

They want to focus on Compliance Confirmation as a strategic area
Radhakrishna Pillai, CIO, SLR Ranbaxy	Ritu Madbhavi, VP, IT, FCB Ulka	SC Mittal, executive director, Management Services & IT, IFFCO

Exploration 2008



Chiefs of technology are not shying away from exploring new frontiers.

Linux, virtualization, SaaS, SOA, and social networking were the new areas

explored though virtualization proved to be the popular choice. Shoppers Stop,

Kuoni Travels, Pricol, Zapak.com, Fortis among others did not express interest

in venturing into this territory, though it is hot property. Linux was next in

line with six companies choosing to explore this leading, or so far,

un-contested leader, of open source. Ten companies would be exploring SOA and

SaaS, while nine would like to explore social networking, especially, as words

on social networking through different social media for enterprises is spreading

fast, with the likes of IBM and Microsoft entering the picture.

Business Strategies



Green IT has captured substantial white space this year but CIOs are not

considering it top priority is 2008, and that is why only Henkel CAC and

Zapak.com showed inclination toward focusing on this strategic area. However,

compliance confirmation was the top preference with 11 of the companies CIOs

possibly focusing on it in 2008. Outsourcing got its share of the pie with SLR

Ranbaxy, India Today, Arvind Mills, Fortis, CFC, and five other concentrating on

it next year. Zapaks CIO, Sudipto Majumdar, has rated recruitment 9 out of 10,

and so have six others, showing that recruitment would remain a focus. Apart

from that, managing vendor relationship had eight of the CIOs, including, Eagle

Services, Sharekhan, Thomson Press, Oriental Insurance, and CFC and others

responding in an affirmative.

Whos the Best



We also asked CIOs for names of enterprises that they think have integrated

IT successfully and the response was a mix of names from banking, telecom, FMCG

and many other sectors, both private and government. NSE, ICICI Bank, Vodafone,

Airtel, HDFC, and ITC with its e-Choupal, and Reliance Infocom were common

choices. For a few, enterprises like M&M, HCC, IFFCO, HDFC, Allergan, Ranbaxy,

Asian Paints and Maruti fit the bill. In the aviation vertical, Kingfisher, Jet

Airways were considered a success story in IT integration by the CIOs. But,

there were a few CIOs who also thought that the news and views doing the rounds

is not enough to arrive at a conclusion, and, thus, preferred not to reply.

Bharti Airtel, ICICI Bank, HDFC were, however, the most popular in the lot, and

even without in-depth research, we can see why.

Even with a small sample size, there seems to be a trend reflecting on how

the chiefs of technology are planning ahead and planning wise. It is clear that

virtualization is playing strong on the minds of CIOs and security is a major

concern, hence the reason for a good number betting big on it. Maybe, the next

time we do this survey, in 2009, green IT and mobile application of business,

that fell behind slightly, would be more of a priority.

Shikha Das



With inputs from Stuti Das



shikhad@cybermedia.co.in