'We migrated email platform to public cloud'

MUMBAI, INDIA: Excerpt from interview with Ashmita Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas Limited

CIOL: Major technology investments at your enterprise?

Junnarkar: Last year, our major investments were in compliance initiatives. We implemented SAP GRC for authorization control and Altris for software deployment control. Next year we will focus on more stringent usage of these tools. We are also focusing on employee mobility, we migrated our email platform from on premise to public cloud environment. This has given employees anytime, anywhere, any device; access to their official emails. Next year, we will consider moving more systems to cloud platform.

CIOL: Any overhauls of significant scale or value at your enterprise?

Junnarkar: In the year 2009-10, we went through major overhaul for our SAP system. We moved to higher version of servers, moved from SAP R3 to ECC6 and made our SAP IFRS compliant at transaction level. In the same period, we moved all our Windows servers to a virtual server farm.

CIOL: Whats your strategy for the coming future?

Junnarkar: Coming year, we will focus on strengthening our various CRM systems. We use multiple CRM systems for multiple business lines. We will also continue our focus on employee mobility.

CIOL: Areas of interest from recent tech-breakthoughs?

Junnarkar: Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Social Networking Analytics.

CIOL: Advice to peers in terms of lessons, mistakes or challenges you experienced over past few years?

Junnarkar: No IT initiative can succeed without involvement of Business. Highlight the business benefits of each IT initiative and get total buy-in from business before starting the initiative. Stay focused on the expected benefits and keep reporting the status periodically to business owners. This will help you in getting approvals for newer initiatives every year.