Proactive IT in time of downturn

We take you through all this in a chat with Vikas Arora, director, Enterprise Services, Microsoft India, on how good is proactive IT health-check and support as the new mantra for CIOs looking to optimize in the current economic downturn.

Vikas, first, give us an overview of Proactive IT support, as you see it.

The dynamics of technology maintenance are changing in the economic downturn. Even while hardware cost/performance has quadrupled in the last few years, what’s interesting is that the percentage of IT budget allocated to mere maintenance remains at more than a whopping 75 per cent. All enterprises today want to improve their IT infrastructure and make optimum usage of it from the perspectives of cost, risk, security and operational agility.

The pressure on CIOs to keep their IT systems available, reliable and performing constantly is evidently intense. Until sometime back, 80 per cent of CIOs relied on reactive IT support to help rescue their infrastructure from any breakdowns, today there is a shift towards proactive IT support.

Is that happening in India?

Yes, 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. In fact, studies have shown that investment in proactive IT services can drastically reduce downtime, improve mean-time-to-repair, reduce cost and rework and improve business reputation, speed to market, customer service and profitability.

Most functionalities are present in the products but not used. We are going out with our services arm and helping businesses optimize on investments and minimize breakdowns. This is a service flavour that customers are getting extremely keen on. The growth is quite substantial and double-digit kinds.

So when the firemen get proactive, what do they exactly do?

We start with problem identification on an IT infrastructure and spot any symptoms around areas like RAM consumption, resource usage. These may not be necessarily impacting the production environment but they might trigger trouble later. Then we check if there is good documentation around IT and how customer looks at the health of the environment. Then come the steps for mitigation and remediation as well as improvement of various IT steps. There are also best practices that are introduced and implementation is adapted over time.

And does it work on the typical AMC (annual maintenance charges) and license model or how?

There are two components to the model. First, it can be need-based for any high-end problem resolution that is scaled up to us. Second is a routine one. In fact, if it’s not routine, it’s not proactive. It can be a yearly support which most customers renew. The AMC format is still very much there. This model overlays and implements over that across platforms.

It is essentially overlaid with high-end support for MS and assures critical and proactive requirements being taken care of with a healthy environment from MS (Microsoft). But MS proactive IT offering can also be a separate choice that is not tied to licence model. These services essentially overlay on the customer’s MS layer and come into picture for mission-critical problems with high-response needs urgently calling for correct resolution.

How does it work for CIOs that have in-house IT support?

That’s where it kind of makes it extremely clear on the difference. Lot of CIOs depend on internal IT team for Level 1 or 2 support. It’s at the next levels that they like to call in MS.

Where does Proactive IT picture in Microsoft’s basket? And is it or can it be a services offering for non-Microsoft products also?

Microsoft Services is the consulting, technical services and support arm of Microsoft and in India, it works with over 250 large enterprises across telecom, BFSI, ITES and manufacturing. Under its technical support part it provides customers, who have significant investments in Microsoft technology, with customized and pre-packaged support and proactive services to improve IT health, reactive services when issues arise as well as various levels of support account management. No, it is limited to only Microsoft territory. But we should expect many other vendors warming up to the idea.

Is there any third-party evaluation corroborating your confidence on benefits of proactive IT?

According to research conducted by Forrester Consulting, it has been found that proactive IT services and support help organizations drastically reduce downtime, save costs on re-work and improve mean-time-to-repair. There are some key customer benefits of IT health checks.

‘Problem Identification’ helps identify symptoms or potential problems of server before they impact production. ‘Review Process’ reviews critical processes to achieve minimum downtime during disaster recovery. ‘Data Analysis and Reporting’ diagnoses and analyzes the data collected in order to make recommendations based on the best practices.

There is, in addition, ‘Trouble Shooting’ that understands server functionality and troubleshoots failures. ‘Warning Identification’ identifies warnings that might be adversely affecting users. It also covers ‘Common Problem Comprehension’ and ‘Supportability Comprehension’ wherein we can understand common problems and mistakes made by administrators and understand supportability best practices respectively.

Also, we have seen several customers turning to proactive IT services and health checks. Some examples in India are those of Sapient, Marico and Evalueserve. Sapient tried it with planning a proper 'IT optimization' cycle for Sapient’s worldwide Knowledge Management project, where Sapient leveraged proactive IT services to execute this mammoth task without facing any major glitches or loss of functionality.

Evalueserve has opted for proactive IT support services across aspects like health check, risk assessment program and knowledge transfer. Marico has used proactive IT while working on a new technology project on Business Intelligence capabilities to Marico’s sales and marketing team.