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C-Change 2014: Unleashing the potential of SMAC

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Abhigna
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JAIPUR, INDIA: As we are aware that SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) is the subject of most CIO conversations today, with endless debates on the value it can bring to the organization.

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The second day of the C-Change saw participation of industry experts and the analyst community. Manish Bahl from Forrester Research, Apalak Ghosh from CMR, Ajay Bakshi, Senior VP- Business Transformation, Aegis Ltd., and Rajnish Verma, Director-Sales, MongoDB in a panel discussion tried to demystify this new acronym and how CIOs can help their organizations leverage its full potential.

Anil Chopra, group editor of CIOL.com and PCQuest, moderated the panel.

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Apalak Ghosh said that SMAC has a wow element. SMAC makes a lot of sense for enterprises.

Manish Bahl, Forrester Research said that customers are the biggest users of SMAC and SMAC plays a very importantly role in reaching out to customers and driving growth.

The upper hand is with the consumers, agreed Rajnish.

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Bakshi mentioned that classic model in SMAC drives the business through " Mobility being given now days and is bound to grow at very-very rapid pace because that is what consumer wishes for, Mobility drives Social media, and hence it generates lots and lots of structured and unstructured content, which needs to be analyzed using Big data tools. Now, to handle so much of work content CIO's have a choice to look towards Cloud to deploy business support systems with relative ease"

When Anil Chopra asked whether it is redefining IT? Bakshi agreed that it certainly is! It is defining the service sector industry. New-age managers need to be ready for all of this.

Manish Bahl said a lot will depend on the driver of business -- whether IT or business. Mobile is an enabler within SMAC and IT needs to move beyond. The kind of engagement is also driving business growth. It is bridging the gap; hence CIOs need to have core ownership regarding SMAC.

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Apalak Ghosh added that SMAC works on the chassis of the underlying infrastructure.

Analytics has changed the business case scenarios, he said and further added that SMAC has to have a tangible business reality.

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Manish Bahl noted that SMAC needs a holistic approach and opined we will figure it out and see what it means for IT.

When Chopra asked the panelist on how SMAC being used, Ajay Bakshi said, for example, through social media today many organizations which are in retail B2C segments have developed a strong fan base and are easily able to test waters for new products or do promotional studies at relatively faster pace with better reliability.

This way, companies are cutting lot of cost, and are getting good feedback from customers. If you miss, for example, a separate hotel may get more bookings on a specific day, rather than a competitor.

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Further, answering to Chopra's question, Manish Bahl said we are very connected with customers. Printing cost reduction has gone down by 50 percent, while sales has gone up to 30 percent for a real estate company. Outcome-based pricing can help you test the waters.

Apalak Ghosh said that how you procure IT also has to change. There should be some champions from some verticals to analyse how the different businesses can grow.

Is Big Data a hype or reality?

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Every company is analyzing the huge data it has to develop the next best action. Rajnish said that Big Data could be defined as volume and velocity of data.

You need to analyze that data to take the right action, he pointed out.

 

Manish Bahl said 40 per cent of Indian organizations are investing in Big Data in 2014, but less than 10 percent have actually projected RoI from Big Data.

Apalak Ghosh said the SMAC makes a great acronym, but it depends on what kind of help it provides. You need to start with a departmental focus and then move on to the enterprise focus.

Organizations need to re-look at their infrastructure at the backend. Ajay Bakshi noted that within SMAC, C as Cloud is one section where CIO have full control to take initiatives as how you host is more of IT challenge rather than business.

You may see many things that others are not able to see, concluded Manish Bahl.