Today, the success of a business is also driven by the IT solutions deployed within an enterprise. While large enterprises have been adding more to their IT Budget year on year, the smaller ones or the emerging enterprises are not lagging behind either. With CIOs and IT managers in place, the awareness on transforming information into valuable assets has gained importance even among the smaller enterprises within the perimeter of their growth plans.
Ramesh Loganathan, Vice President, Middleware, Pramathi Technologies tells us more about how enterprises, especially small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are doing their best to get the best out of IT.
"First of all, when we talk of information, information in this sense is a little nebulous or vague. It could be information available with the employee that could be converted into knowledge or it could just be a data. In modern technology, with Web 2.0 approaches, managing business assets definitely comes into play," says Ramesh.
Now, when we go beyond what is conventional information processing, we see the normal and traditional applications being deployed and integrated into smaller enterprises. If you look at the service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, it is considered as a high barrier, which again is a myth. But smaller enterprises can easily adopt SOA especially the ones which are not IT-enabled yet and are keen on growing bigger, he notes.
"With SOA coming into play and looking at it as a business asset, one more interesting thing that comes with it is the management information which is now integrated reliably into management and administration side of an enterprise. The CEO can interpret data as business data, which is otherwise an administrative data," says Ramesh.
Today, there are newer technology and new models coming in. For SMBs, it will be a disadvantage to deploy them if they are not fully automated. In a way, it's a blessing in disguise for start-up companies as they can leverage more on newer and emerging approaches, he adds.
"In the last one decade, IT has been re-architected and newer versions of applications are coming in. In the '90's, people expected everything to be one a utility model. Today, the appreciation for workforce Internet model is high. The hosted model is one option and that's where companies have opportunities to adopt a service. At least, a managed application model is a new opportunity for SMBs. These definitely have helped businesses scale newer heights," Ramesh says.
In fact, Pramati, an end-to-end Enterprise Java platform vendor, is offering similar services for few of its clients. If it's a small solution and a small team, you can't get six to seven different people on your payroll. Here there's opportunity for companies to offer them service. I'll have these 10 different people as a team, and at any point they can serve four to five clients and at an affordable cost. You can get these services for running, building, maintaining and hosting the applications," he explains.
So, this managed application is a new model, which makes a lot of sense for SMBs. It is an emerging space, and what we are doing is what people have been asking for. By understanding their scalability and reliability, we do performance engineering where you just maintain it, support it and host it, he adds.
"The comfort level with someone else managing your applications is higher now. Even if they are managing themselves, they run it on an external data center. Using data center is one comfort and utilizing a model like salesforce.com is another comfort, he notes.
While transforming information into a business asset, enterprises should be cautious enough to have a secure data in place. "Information security is another dimension to this issue. Even if you go into a loose infrastructure like Wiki for example, they say small enterprises and small employers can manage the collaboration with such an infrastructure," he says.
"Security is really no more an issue. Security, I think, is a given in this massively wired Internet era. One can have well-defined infrastructure with security support," he adds.