MUMBAI, INDIA: Social media is today, the biggest element, according to Rajesh Janey, EMC India. "We are transforming - IT, business and yourself." He was delivering the keynote at the recently held EMC Forum at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai.
Manish Choksi, president, Home Imrprovement, Asian Paints, added: "I was not an IT practitioner when I began. IT was embedded in Asian Paints, we needed to take it to greater heights. It would be putting it together where it would be relevant to the business. IT is no longer a support function but a transformation function. We have now transformed the layer.
"IT organizations have gone through a transformation as well. Business is volatile, you need to be agile. What has always worked for us is that we have understood the business challenges ahead of time."
Speaking on the trends in India, Janey said that in 2013, the total IT spends are $2,372 billion against $1,967 billion in 2012, worldwide. In India, total IT spends are also growing - $60.5 billion as against $35.1 billion in 2012.
EMC also conducted a survey from India. First, 68 percent believe that Big Data has capability to create winners. Next, 91 percent believe decisions would be improved. Also, 57 percent believe senior management relies on Big Data to make decisions. Further, 69 percent believe insights created via analysis of structured and unstructured data.
About 62 percent agree that the Big Data tools will prevent/identify cyber attacks, and 73 percent believe information lost can be fully recovered.
Big Data inhibitors are said to be culture (35 percent), and no clear business case or RoI (28 percent). Popular Big Data technologies include predictive analysis (34 percent), high performance computing/sw cache (30 percent), enterprise content management (29 percent), Hadoop/MapReduce and/or distributed architecture (22 percent).
Business priorities driving IT transformation
According to the survey, 61 percent attributed this to business process/operational efficiencies, while 46 percent said there was improved governance and compliance. However, 45 percent believe it is in enhancing customer experience/engagement/communications.
As for the IT transformation journey, 49 percent feel it is virtualizing mission-critical applications, 33 percent created a private cloud/using virtual private cloud, and 51 percent are buildiing a software defined data center. Data center automation will be crucial over the next three years.
CIOs as business leaders
For CIOs, 45 percent have greater focus on cost/biz process outsourcing. The role has transformed from data center to the boardroom. CIOs are seen as business leaders, and business KPIs are in place.
EMC has customer support across 190+ cities. It has over 3800 enterprise and mid-market customers. EMC has also played a key role in India's e-governance programs. One is the National eGovernance Program. There is the Passport Seva project, as well as the National Remote Sensing Center.