In an exclusive interview with Usha Prasad of CIOL, Shekar Dasgupta, President and COO, Solix Technologies throws more light on how information can be transformed into valuable business assets.

Excerpts from an interview

CIOL: How can enterprises transform information into valuable business assets?

Shekar Dasgupta: There has to be a will to recognize that an organization has an extremely valuable business asset in terms of its data and it must use it. Just deploying a technology is not good enough. It is akin to a hospital importing sophisticated equipment and keeping it packed in a storehouse; it soon becomes a liability. This recognition has to come from the top. Only when leaders in an organization start to make use of data for their business operations and decision making, the issues of best practices of data management emerge. The deployment of appropriate data management technologies follows from this and applies to both large and medium enterprises as well.

CIOL: Does information security drive business improvements for an emerging enterprise?

SD: In recent times, accounting and industry-specific regulations have driven best practices in data management. So also has scandals emerging from breaches in data security. In fact some regulations do mandate certain standards in data privacy and security. Even without these regulations, all organizations have to protect their sensitive data from falling into hands of their competitors. Since taking measures for data security can rarely be done in isolation, it has sometimes become a driving force towards adoption of best practices. We see this, for example, in emerging pharmaceutical or bio-tech companies.

CIOL: How do you help emerging enterprises in transforming isolated security operations to strategic assets and minimize business disruptions?

SD: We would like to encourage organizations taking a long term and holistic view of their IT needs rather than take up sporadic and isolated initiatives that ultimately defeat the purpose. We support our customers through a comprehensive range of data management services surrounding our product offering of the Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite.

CIOL: With the re-architecting of IT and newer versions of applications coming in, are businesses scaling the heights of success?

SD: We cannot predict what technology will emerge ten years from now. No one talked about SOA ten years back. Most organizations then were just grappling to emerge out of client-server architectures to adopt the first generation of browser-based 3-tier applications. There are organizations which can adapt very quickly to these changing technologies and there are others who struggle.
The laggards typically adopt the ostrich posture that the new technologies are irrelevant to their needs. But fairly soon, this catches up on them as their businesses are left behind by newer competitors who have become more nimble through adoption of new technologies.
A look at the newer private banking or telecom players in India is a shining example of this. And this is not because the earlier players in India were government-owned. The same thing happened in other parts of the world where the traditional players were globally recognized names and had been figuring for decades as poster children of best management practices. Many failed to adapt - the term then coined: they were being "Amazoned". It is fundamental that an organization adopts an adaptive infrastructure.

CIOL: How does adaptive infrastructure enable growth of an emerging enterprise?

SD: The late nineties were tumultuous years but it did see some traditional companies emerging stronger. While many suffered serious setbacks, the largest book retailer in the world still retains that position. It became a case study both for traditional and emerging companies worldwide. It showed the importance of formulating an IT architecture that is flexible to adapt to changing business needs and adopting newer technologies and at the same time is robust and scalable to accommodate business growth, without disrupting current business operations.
Both brick and mortar as well as on-line retailers had to ensure minimum inventory while keeping minimum lead times for deliveries. Clearly, they needed to collaborate on-line with their suppliers and all other stores or warehouses in the vicinity. Ten years later we can see that those who succeeded adopted architectures that today can support SOA without a major overhaul. There are others for whom it is going to be very expensive.

CIL: Organizations across the globe are looking at performance management in a major way to grow their business, comment?

SD: There are a number of tools like Balanced Scorecard that help in Corporate Performance Management (CPM). We help in long term data retention through our archiving software. As the archived data is still online and as easily retrievable as data in production systems, CPM software tools pull in both current and archived data to generate the scorecards.

CIOL Bureau