We help our clients plan

Where does infrastructure management services fit into the
overall IBM set up?

Within the IBM services group we have two organizationsglobal business
services which provides integration services to customers, and the global
technology services which is much about infrastructure services. Within this, we
have infrastructure management services which include storage, security,
privacy, business continuity and resiliency, and also facilities which includes
data center design and construction.

What change have you seen in IBMs strategy on services?

IBM is putting together all the pieces. If you look five years back, people
wanted services from a company which was agnostic from hardware. Today we see a
focus on risk mitigation and is a trend we see in our clients. Our clients have
business issues that are keeping them awake at night. We have put in investment
together to provide a complete solution.

How do you view business risk?

We think of risk in two pieces. The negative risk that we have always
worried aboutnatural disasters, earthquakes, and running out of capacity in
the data center. There is also a positive side to the risk. Companies are
growing fast and they face problems in scaling up, and need a much more robust
network. We help our clients to help them plan. They want their business to be
safe in every respect and more importantly, businesses need to plan in advance
to mitigate risk. We work to assess all elements of their business to know the
pieces where there are greater risks, which will have greater impact to their
business. The degree of risk varies from organization to organization. We did a
CIO survey in India recently and almost every customer put security as the top
issue. Across the world we see a big shift in security. It is a boardroom issue
now.

What are some of the other critical areas of risk mitigation?

An emerging is the work area recovery. For a long time, we have been doing
recovery of hardware and software. There are a lot of people who are online and
if something happens to the building they are working in, you want the people to
go elsewhere and work. But, you would also want the screen and the whole
environment to be the same so that you dont loose productivity. So, we are
coming up with a solution which will allow not only data recovery but also
protect the environment they are working in.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in