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CIO Tech Vision 2007: Visualizing The Future

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CIOL Bureau
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 Gyana Ranjan Swain

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The new year comes with new promises, new thoughts and new opportunities. With growing consumer needs and to put their enterprises at the top, CIOs are under tremendous pressure. Though technology is evolving to a new height everyday, the trick to adopt this ever-evolving technology lies with the enterprises' vision for the coming years.

Competition is at its peak and CIOs cannot afford to go with the same pace as they did earlier. CIOs need to incorporate the new technologies without fail in their ICT frame plan for the overall performance of their enterprises and to get the best results.

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Connectivity Matters

Today the connectivity options to the enterprise customers are multifold offering their unique benefits. Enterprises have different strategies for their core network and distribution network. Core network is the backbone of any organization.

There is a serious shift from TDM and leased line systems to other technologies like MPLS. Cost is the biggest factor. Most enterprises are not comfortable moving out of a private to a public network. The responsibility of providing quality service in VPN rests primarily with service providers.

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With convergence and shift from TDM to IP, the concept of single network providing all services is gaining ground and so the concept of connectivity services is catching up.

Earlier, service providers used to offer services as per the license agreements, eg basic service providers used to offer basic telephony and ISDN services whereas NLD operators used to offer leased line services. But large operators now opt for all types of licenses.

Initially, all the operators were busy with infrastructure deployment but with majority of the deployments are complete in large cities, the concept of integrated service became the order of the day.

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Mobility Empowerment

As a result, companies have failed to adequately plan and manage the growth of mobility over the past few years, and more importantly, have failed to plan for the accelerated growth which will occur over the next few years.

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Mobile empowerment enables employees to take back office systems to the point of interaction with the customer, no matter where their customer might be. As a result, customers receive a higher level of service and exhibit a higher level of satisfaction and loyalty to their supplier.

Managing mobility is different and requires new tools and processes. While local area network (LAN) connected notebook computers and off-site workers are currently handled by a standardized IT process developed for an inside-the-company-facilities model, the massive growth of mobility over the next 3-5 years will leave IT organizations unable to cope with the new mobile reality unless they reconsider the existing strategy.

Areas to Focus on

Unified Communications:

Solutions that help enterprises consolidate and standardize their enterprise-messaging environment. They enable the integration of e-mail, voicemail, IM, data conferencing, and video conferencing into a single platform at anytime, anyplace and collaboration among employees, trading partners, and customers in a secure, reliable, and compliant infrastructure.

Collaboration & Content Management:
These solutions help enterprises effectively find, capture, use, share, manage, and protect information. With an ability to make more informed timely decisions, individuals are empowered to make a greater contribution to their business' bottom line.

Business Intelligence:
These solutions enable enterprise customers to more effectively leverage information assets across the organization to make faster, better-informed decisions. Also, enable people to more quickly access and analyze the right information from their legacy applications, standalone systems, databases, and other previously untapped information silos.

Business Process Integration:
Focused on business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and workflow solutions, it enables enterprises to better orchestrate and manage business processes.
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One of the greatest challenges to both business and IT groups within companies over the next five years will be effective deployment and management of mobility in the workforce, over a wide array of devices, connections and applications.

Failure to effectively tackle the mobility challenge will leave companies with inefficient operations and at a major competitive disadvantage through poor customer service, higher cost of operations, and lack of flexibility. Mobility, therefore, must be included in any enterprise strategy.

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Security is Money

Threats to networks are simply getting faster and perhaps a bit smarter, galvanizing vendors to produce solutions that are smart and fast. With the underworld looking at it as a serious new avenue, the network is unlikely ever to be completely safe.

The related trend that seems to be picking up is that security is becoming an application in itself. Not just the vendors, but even service providers are increasingly putting it up as a value added service.

Storage Needs

Therefore, network storage in organizations is passing through a transition phase and new technologies are evolving.

As data availability becomes a key differentiator for enterprises, an increasing amount of resources are being spent in ensuring continuous operations. Dedicated networks are being provisioned to guarantee performance as well as security for backup applications.

However, some concerns still exist with CIO's that include performance of the application, management of various data centers, complexity of design and deployment, cost of the solution, availability, and security.

Failure to effectively tackle the mobility challenge will leave companies with inefficient operations and at a major competitive disadvantage

Bottom Line

NGN is widely talked about as the next technology trend and wireless network is going to be the only way of communication. With so much happening in the industry, it is up to the enterprises and their CIOs to visualize their business future much ahead of the time.

And hope this new year provides them with the technology mantra which is a must for them, in order to attain their goals.

Happy New Year!

Source: Voicendata

 

The new year is going to see drastic changes in Indian communications industry. The nation is gearing up to roll out 3G and WiMax in 2007. The communication minister has already renamed the coming year as the year of broadband. In organizations today, storage needs have doubled or tripled annually for the past few years. Moreover, storage is directly attached to tens or hundreds of individual distributed servers, configuration, backup and other management tasks that have become more expensive, time consuming, and staff intensive. The other very clear trend is the management of security that will continue to become more complicated and costlier. Most enterprises perceive mobility as a relatively minor portion of their overall IT budgets , despite it is being consistently placed among the top five initiatives of the next three years in surveys of business executives. As enterprises grow and expand their operation, the need for a better and improved connectivity services with assurance of quality services is becoming the order of the day. The enterprises are becoming more demanding. Also, the kind of SLAs, which they are asking from service provider, has undergone a tremendous change over the years.