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The Real Thing…Virtually

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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

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