CIOs get the real spotlight again

MUMBAI, INDIA: Following the great success and support from the CIO community in Bangalore, it was the turn of Mumbai to host the Enterprise Optimization Series, the flagship event of CIOL on Wednesday. The event discussed challenges faced by CIOs on IT investments and business optimization for enterprises as much as it covered tech vendors' business propositions.

Forrester Research's senior analyst, Sudin Apte kicked off the brainstorming event with his session on 'Justifying Tech Investments in Tough Economic Situation'. During his speech, Apte discussed how enterprises are justifying technology investments and its business benefits.

"IT's role is to align the business needs to meet the goals, but in the downturn, questions are being raised against the technology and its business benefits in terms of the investment or cost of technology. Poor track records of enterprises in using technology optimally has also contributed to skepticism of technology investments,” Apte said.

According to Apte, enterprises are quantifying technology investments today, but they need to change the business model.

“However, for CIOs, while buying technology for their enterprises, they are enhancing their organization's future value. So the with low IT budgets, the scale of technology acquisition is also changing,” he pointed out.

Further, Apte added that enterprises should look at a newer business models for technology investments such as cloud computing, SaaS, On demand or Pay-as-you-use as means to meet business needs with the use of technology.

Meanwhile, Saleforce.com's vice president, Andrew Knott, addressed the CIOs on innovation.

“Today, applications, platform and services are moving on the cloud. Cloud computing model is built on multi-tenancy platform which offers great benefits for enterprises such as no capex, modest opex and scalability as per businesses,” said Knott.

Knott explained that enterprises are cautious to use third-party IT infrastructure for cloud computing as security, business processes and integration, reliability and scalability remains major concerns for CIOs. However, the adoption of cloud computing will grow since it lowers cost, offers ease to use, scalability and flexibility, he added.

With the growing trend of cost cutting and sustaining businesses, Riverbed's marketing evangelist for APAC & Japan, Robert Healey shared his insight on operational cost reduction and delivery of critical IT business initiatives.

According to Healey, a CIO's responsibility is to keep the business process seamless, but now his challenge is to deliver the business continuity using IT with limited budgets or at low cost.

“Challenges for CIOs are growing, but there's no increase in budgets and IT infrastructure. In such situation, technology optimization is the key requirement to meet the business goals with available or existing technology in the enterprise,” said Healey.

“Typically enterprise applications use LAN, WAN and Web services, but any breakdown or slow access to networks, applications, storage, servers and even low bandwidth can impact the business continuity. Hence, enterprises need technology optimization, which in simple terms means doing more with less,” commented Healey.

Interestingly, S Ramakrishnan, C-DAC's former director general talked about the CIO's evolutions and ROI challenges for enterprises. He said that the CIOs will need to be bold enough to adopt new technology and business models in the current economic situation.

“CIOs need to look at new technology and strategies such as Open Source Software, SOA, SaaS, Web Services, Virtualization, Cloud computing, social networking and other bold innovative business models. A systematic approach with IT department, adoption of innovative technologies to align with business and marketing would be the mantra for dynamic CIOs,” said Ramakrishnan.

Apart from these eminent speakers, Samer Garde, Dell India's country manager, Parimal Pandya, Akamai Technologies' director for Emerging Customer Group and many top IT heads and managers across industry verticals attended the summit.

Now, the next leg of Enterprise Optimization moves to Delhi and hope to see more CIOs from the North India.