Invest in technologies, where payback is closer to the horizon

Idhries Ahmad

NEW DELHI, INDIA: In the first part of our speaker series for CIOL C Change 2009, Idhries Ahmad of CIOL catches up with Prasanto Kumar Roy, President & Chief Editor, ICT Publications, CyberMedia.

Roy, a veteran in enterprise technology trends, and with more than twenty years experience in writing for CIO community, feels the current uncertain times will be putting enormous pressure on CIO across the board to deliver faster with whatever resources they have been already allocated.

“If certain level of service was acceptable in better times, the tolerance to service level violations now will be extremely low ,”says Roy

Roy also points that, going forward this year, CIO will be expected to make significant contributions in helping companies achieve higher growth and market share and also reduce cost in certain areas,

However he adds, without necessarily, looking at strategic investments where the ROI is more than three years.

“CIOs need not to ask for more funds than allocated and if he invests in any of new technologies, make sure that payback is near to horizon”, adds Roy.

Roy also discuses some of the top enterprise technology trends for 2009 and also explains why the need to go Green for enterprises is more pressing than ever.

Excerpts:

On your toes: Deliver much much faster than you used to do

Clearly CIO are facing challenges from budgets. However, they will be facing challenges to deliver lot more stringently with respect to what they were delivering and that too with whatever resources they have at present.

The expectation from CIOs and IT establishments will be very high and they need to deliver much faster than they used to do earlier.

Let me put that this way. If certain level of service was acceptable in better times, the tolerance to service level violations will be down even more. If the IT infrastructure of a company goes down for a few minutes, it may have been tolerated in past, but this if it affects key processes, then the tolerance levels will be very very low.

It is also an opportunity for CIO to help companies realizes achieve their objectives in a downturn which is enhancing growth and market share and perhaps reduce cost in certain areas

Be short sighted: Invest in technologies where short term ROI is guaranteed

In these times, investment will be evaluated on very short term basis.

So instance, when you talk about investing in new technologies like Virtualisation . Virtualisation may be great in cost saving, but the cost savings clearly wont quantifiable over the immediate horizon of few months. If a CIO goes to a CFO and tell him that he needs to invest half a million in a technology that gives him one million investment in three years, it clearly will not work in current environment.

There will be lot of pressure on a CIO, where he will be required to create a better role for company without necessarily looking at strategic investments where the ROI is more than three years.

However, if a CIO says that he has got an application that can significantly reduce operating costs or improve the process in a such a way that it can improve the market share in next few months, it will be acceptable.

Go for new processes, which are are revenue neutral, which essentially means CIO need not to ask for more funds than allocated and if he invests, make sure payback is near to horizon.

Going Green is not longer only a CSR activity

Green will become even more important in a year, where we will have serious challenges of expenditure . We saw in the past that going green in the cause of concern, not because of environmental concerns, but because of economic reasons especially, the capital expenditure incurred because of tremendous shortage of power.

For certain sectors , power energy and efficiency has become critical. Telecom is one of the them and they have to cut power consumption. BFSI in the past has also worried about power consumption, but not terribly worried, but with dwindling cash reserves , the scenario may be changing. A lot of power is wasted by ATM networks and those sectors will be seriously looking at these issues.

We will be seeing CIO making serious efforts to go green going this year

And Security will be every CIOs headache this this year

Security is and will be number one area of interest today even beyond green. Security both in the terms of information security and physical security and the integration of the two.

The role IT can play in physical security, be it applications like video surveillance, access control, monitoring, recording and of course IT information security will be keenly studied by CIO and many of those application will be implemented.

Probably security will be highest growth area of interest going around.

Going mobile will be in vogue in 2009

Mobility will be strong trend in this year We are entering this year at 300 million mobile connections and exit the year with 400 million connections . Therefore the need to have mobile application support .

This has been an interesting need in the past, but going forward it will be a critical need. Now all the enterprise B2B or B2C applications must look at mobile as a key platform

Also in terms of PC usage, twenty five percent of PCs sold last year were laptops and the number will be more this year. Therefore the need to support mobility both in terms of supporting handhelds will be huge.

Again, previously mobile devices formed small part of total base and didn’t matter, but today everyone is it is carrying critical data on their handhelds and for CIO, security will become critical area to address.

CIOL CChange is best platform for top notch Indian CIOs

C Change is a pretty unique concept as it gets together top level CIOs at a place which is little out of the way. . It provides huge networking opportunity for top notch CIO in India to get in touch with each other and get exposed to diverse range of topics which help them to gain insights into latest enterprise technology trends and challenges.

Last year CChange was brilliant

CIOL Change 2008 was even more interesting considering some interesting touches it was given. The idea of setting up groups which debated for months for their vision for ‘Agile Enterprise’ was extremely novel.

There was lot lot of excitement among the participants and lot of new ideas were tossed up.

Pertinent to mention , last year, CIOs were extremely excited about new investment coming into the markets as industry was witnessing continuous growth. However, I feel the mood will be little subdued and, I feel this year getting investment will be a huge challenge.