What are the atypical IT guys thinking?

MUMBAI, INDIA: From firewalls, email controls, voice recognition system in a land of bulls and bears to an in-house software in a perfume maker's den.

From being open, to cautious to tight-fisted, there are all kinds of IT spenders around. Brokerage for instance, is one area that got way more sophisticated than the almost always in-shambles, human-shriek controlled images of days of yore.

Proper firewalls, automated controls on email and other communication modes and voice recognition system for checking any leaks or security issues or guards against insider trading are some examples that Kiran Pawar, AVP-IT at Prabhudas Lilladher, a broking, corporate advisory and wealth management firm, points out.

He and other executives were speaking with CyberMedia News at the sidelines of an F&S Enterprise Security summit here on Wednesday.

Ask another peer, Suresh Patil, VP, IT, Systematix Shares & Stocks Ltd, about what he thinks of security and other IT investment areas and he tells that with openness to being more IT savvy comes the need of having solutions that attack the most relevant industry problems.

At Perfine Chemical Industries that manufactures perfumery and fine chemicals, the one-man army for both business and technical issues, Ashok L Bhatia, shares that he is still not sure how he can open out various parameters and data about his operations to a vendor.

The nature of function of his company, lack of multiple locations and the small scale, is what he thinks, render any big IT investments irrelevant for him. "We need automation primarily for two areas - heat management/temperature control and sample withdrawal.

For these needs we normally use an in-house software that comes with the process control solutions that we install," he says.