Marico tries the new oil for IT Engine

PUNE, INDIA: If one goes by the new crystal ball of proactive IT's early bird breedlike Microsoft, the world has started to change.

Until sometime back, 80 per cent of CIOs relied on reactive IT support to help rescue their infrastructure from any breakdowns, today greater emphasis and value is being derived from proactive IT support, as the company believes.

Keeping in mind the pressure of delivering cost-effective IT infrastructure, CIOs in India are fast turning to pro-active IT health check support to ensure consistent and productive delivery as well as minimal IT breakdown costs, as it goes on to add.

"Vendors like Microsoft are helping their customers optimize IT resources and minimize breakdowns by working with the partner ecosystem provide periodic and proactive IT health check," tells Vikas Arora, director, Enterprise services, Microsoft.

Among the initial adopter bandwagon are names like Marico, Evalueserve and Sapient. Evalueserve has opted for proactive IT support services across aspects like health check, risk assessment program and knowledge transfer to ensure quick response, stability and high availability of Evalueserve’s IT setup.

Another example is of Marico.When working on a new technology project aimed at offering Business Intelligence capabilities to Marico’s sales and marketing team Marico leveraged the benefits of proactive IT support, as Microsoft cites.

With this, Marico was able to ensure a strong backend support spanning across strategic planning, designing and development, to the final deployment. "All product related issues were addressed as they rose through the implementation stage, as a result of which Marico was able to minimize errors."

According to Forrester research, in the past six years alone, IT budgets have risen from an average of 2.3 per cent of revenue in 2001 to an average of 4.1 per cent currently. And the percentage of IT budget allocated to mere maintenance is about 75 per cent.

As a result, any average company spends less than 25 per centof its IT budget on new development. The interpretation for vendors like Microsoft couldn't be more bullish in such a scenario.

“All enterprises today constantly thrive to improve their IT infrastructure and make optimum usage of it from the perspectives of cost, risk, security and operational agility. Specifically, given the current worldwide economic downturn - optimizing IT infrastructure to deliver cost effective solutions that enable their businesses, has become a top priority for all companies. In such a scenario, the pressure on CIOs to keep their IT systems available, reliable and performing constantly is evidently intense." Arora shares. There's another illustration in form of Sapient that shows the openness to proactive IT.

The over 6,000 workforce at Sapient, operating across North America, Europe and India, often required information on basic policy and processes. However, the only source, the Sapient corporate Intranet, was outdated and did not reflect the true user needs. Given this challenge, Sapient decided to replace its existing portal with an online Portal, explains Microsoft as a customer example and experience-sharing.

"The Microsoft Premier Support team was instrumental in providing sample codes, logic changes and following up until all issues were resolved and we at Sapient are confident that the consultancy and guidance provided by Premier Support is a great proposition for delivering crucial IT projects (like ours) with minimal glitches and better turnaround time.” Dan Barnicle, Content Management & Collaboration Practice Lead, Sapient adds.