Enterprise Next: It's time to innovate IT

MUMBAI, INDIA: After the success at Chennai and Bangalore, CyberMedia India Online Limited's flagship event Enterprise Next received overwhelming support and response from the CIO community in Mumbai on Friday.

Setting the event's tone, Reliance Tech Services vice president and head of Business Consulting, Balaji Varadarajan initiated the interesting thought of “Pool IT - Rule IT” among the CIOs here. Balaji discussed that due to the current economic situation there's a trend of consolidation across industries, and IT industry should also look towards consolidation.

He explained how the Reliance ADA Group has consolidated IT and raised the point that such consolidation can happen between different enterprises in terms of sharing resources. Balaji meant that small organizations and enterprises, which have similar IT requirements and challenges, can form group to meet volumes for software vendors and thus create scale that is attractive to all parties.

However, Balaji pointed to the challenges of pooling IT that includes breaking the organizational and cultural barriers with the same group and cost optimization.

“By sharing knowledge, pooling IT resources across company barriers, CIOs can get benefited from it.”

While, shared IT resources and services are getting popular among enterprises, the concept has led to the creation of cloud computing. Salesforce.com's account manager – SME Business Segment, Navneet Narula talked about innovation in the cloud.

Interestingly, Narula asked the CIOs to become chief innovation officers and not just remain as chief information officers and bring innovation in IT to simplify things.

“If consumers' web applications are easy then why should the business applications remain complex? Business applications should be easy to use, seamless and shouldn't be upgraded frequently,” he said.

According to Narula, pooling IT is similar to 'cloud', which has the multi tenant architecture that leverage infrastructure and offer platforms to work for organizations and enterprises. However, he said that key concerns about cloud computing is security but the market is moving to cloud computing.

“Security of cloud is just a perception. Cloud offers more productive and collaborative ways for organizations to build own applications,” he said.

From IT pool to sharing resources to innovation in cloud, the session was flooded with ideas and thoughts that bothers the CIOs across organizations and enterprises.

Meanwhile, Zensar Technologies' executive vice president and chief executive – India Operations, Vivek Gupta discussed the aspects of collaboration, innovation and transformation in enterprises and making the way through the slow economic scenario.

“With the current scenario of credit, cash and demand crunch, for most businesses survival is at stake. Though there's pressure to reduce IT spend, CIOs must use that savings in innovations. There's dilemma of today's survival and innovate for tomorrow,” said Gupta.

Gupta stressed on the optimization for survival and urged to leverage shared services model by moving from onsite to offshore services to bring down cost of IT. He pointed to the impact of sourcing model, which is an impact study of organizations' business process needs using best practices and methodology.

“Many enterprises and businesses today have collaborative strategy for business using key tools and technologies such as blogs, mashups, microblogging, wikis, forums and others,” he added.

Overall, it was an brain-storming event for CIOs where the speakers discussed how CIOs can move towards new innovation and optimization in IT to achieve the goal of success for their business and enterprises amid the tough economic time.