The Real Thing…Virtually

The proof of the pudding lies in the eating. But how do you get customers to
bite, if they aren’t ready to buy the pudding? Compaq Computer India seems to
have this one figured out by building competency centers for specific customer
segments. One such initiative is the Finance Industry Expertise Center (FIEC) at
Mumbai. Located strategically in the heart of the financial hub of the country,
the center is meant to give end-users an opportunity to test vendor solutions on
Compaq’s latest hardware platforms. The FIEC is actually part of Compaq’s
Asian strategy to exponentially grow market share in the country and was rolled
out two years ago, explains NM Sundaram, country manager enterprise business.
While a budget of $5 million was sanctioned in the beginning, $2 million has
been spent on the center so far.

BULLISH: NM Sundaram, country manager for enterprise business (left), and Sanjay Agrawal, technical support manager

However FIEC differs from other standard demo-centers by being able to
simulate meaningful real-life situations. There are two ways in which the center
directly benefits end-user purchase decisions. The first is by helping end users
assess the business functionality of select financial and banking applications.
The second is by helping end users assess the technology required to make those
solutions effective. In both these cases the added value provided by the center
is the ability for end-users to specify operating conditions. For example,
customers can assess how a business application performs under certain
conditions of hardware sizing, number of concurrent-users and transaction loads.

Selecting a particular application is actually not the end of an IT purchase
decision. Beyond that users have to identify the right technology in terms of
scalability, availability and performance depending on their operating
environment." And if these requirements are not in place even the
best-of-class applications fail," explains Sanjay Agrawal, technical
support manager. The whole idea is to de-risk the adoption of new technologies
that have a definite business advantage. "More often than not, the
technologies are unproven and untested and therefore real-life simulations go a
long way towards reducing the duration of the purchase cycle," continues
Agrawal.

While most of the ongoing assignments are for the financial community, the
center also provides expertise for other applications and market segments. It
recently helped MTNL with the assessment of a datawarehousing solution;
simulated SAP ERP staging and fail-over for Indian Oil and helped a server
consolidation initiative at Tata Consultancy Services, among others. In the
absence of FIEC in the country, these exercises would probably have cost end
users a couple of $100,000 in Singapore, the closest alternative.

So how does FIEC get paid for its considerable repertoire of services? In
cases where the purchase decision of the hardware platform rules in favor of
Compaq, the costs of the intermediate technical services are absorbed in the
final purchase. But the axiom–if it works on one Unix it will work on any Unix–sometimes
also works against FIEC. And can lead to end users opting out of the Compaq
systems family. "In these cases the business application vendor is usually
expected to support costs of the pre-sales technical services," explains
Sundaram.

The stable of services from FIEC includes, stress testing of applications and
benchmarking of systems, among others. Stress testing involves assessing the
ability of the business application to support substantial increase in the
number of users with limited expansion of back-end server systems. The
application is assessed for its ability to continue exhibiting fail-over
functions and minimum response levels as the number of users increase. The other
side of the coin called benchmarking, is to determine the systems’
configuration and sizing for a defined application response. In either case, the
end result for customers is that performance related queries can now be answered
specifically rather than dispensed off by vague, gut-feel-type answers–a part
of routine vendor servicing.

Arun Shankar contributes to DQ