Employing, deploying and developing cutting edge technology, the IT industry has put India on the global business map. India started off as a cost arbitrage advantage destination for the corporate world and is now slowly, but surely coming at par with the rest of the developed world. The IT-ITES/BPO segment is now talking of moving a level up - many, two three or even four levels up in Business Process services, pundits call it Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

Here are some trends that are finding/will find pervasive uses at the enterprise level. 

Web 2.0 technology -consumer technologies are trickling into the enterprise - such as instant messaging and search. Today, instant messaging is being used by enterprises for real time collaboration. There are many enterprise applications that have built in search algorithms to help you find the information you're looking for Youtube, Wikipedia are well known to many and can be very useful tools. Social networking technologies first latched onto Web 2.0 technologies. Blogs for example are a new way of disseminating news even before a newspaper does, enable Web Publishing, help direct traffic to a website.

The drivers for adoption of most of the Web 2.0 technologies is (a) ease of use  (b) easy to implement (c) Standardized (d) bring a big group of people together to share information. Sharing information on Web 2.0 is far easier than on a company's intranet which is generally Web 1.0 enabled. Web 2.0 enables doing things online without any real technical expertise.

Green is in. As per a Gartner study, the ICT industry accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions which is about what the aviation industry is currently responsible for.  Rack density has gone up considerably, up to 30,000 Watts per rack, leading to more heat generation, and higher electrical cost of cooling. It makes business sense to improve data center and building design, and procure more ‘power-friendly' equipment. Findings reveal that one can recover the cost of power saved by using a flat screen LCD over two years vis-a-vis a CRT monitor.

In the case of India with its power cuts and cost of electricity, it is even more imperative that power is saved.  Increasingly all the equipment that is coming in today is eco-friendly. The government is consciously driving the green revelation. The concept of green buildings is coming in. The amount of water being consumed is returned back to the earth. The building construction is designed in such a manner that a building requires minimal cooling throughout the year. Buildings are designed to allow sunlight throughout the day hence reducing the need for artificial lighting.

Virtualization: This is the technology to improve hardware utilization in the data center and defer purchase of more.  Virtualization is a key driver for Server Consolidation and leads to considerable savings in electricity bills. Virtualization is a cost effective way to improve application uptime, and enables better utilization of resources.

SOA: (services oriented architecture) An example would be Fedex allowing its partners access to a limited amount of its business applications, such as tracking a parcel, pricing, etc. Likewise the partners can allow others limited access to their applications and servers. This concept has created a lot of buzz, but has had limited success stories in India. SOA is a completely different delivery model for enterprise apps that calls for building additional apps around existing ones or integrating enterprise apps, requires following a standards based approach and also requires an eco-system, to be successful. 

Wireless and mobility. A lot of applications are being developed around the mobile phone.  Mobile phone production in India will exceed 100 million units in 2011. Cell phone put IT to a lot of creative use and can be used in places where computers and Internet can't reach. All types of industries can benefit from it, for example the financial sector can benefit by enabling banking even in the remotest of locations, even where it is not feasible and/or profitable for a bank to set up a branch.

Unified Communication. The idea behind unified communications is to reach the right person at the right time using the right communications channel, across diverse communication channels. Increasingly with the number of communication channels increasing, the headaches in reaching someone have also increased. Quite often, you are trying to reach somebody and he's not reachable on a landline, or e-mail, his mobile is switched off. Unified communications is supposed to help solve that problem. As is obvious, it helps improve communication for faster decision making. Both Commercial and Open Source Solutions are available. Unified Communications  requires the concept of ‘presence' to be effective.

Other noteworthy trends are High Performance Computing which is increasingly becoming more and more affordable. Multi-Core on x86 platform is happening too, which saves a lot of space as well as a lot of power. Another trend is that instead of having huge software on a desktop why not just have it on the web browser, browser based computing business analytics is gradually creeping in. Desktop  Virtualization to reduce average TCO of PCs is also picking up. Data Center Centralization and Consolidation - instead of having a fragmented architecture and infrastructure all over the place, it is better to have it at one place and have it remotely accessible. This also leads to Unified Threat Management for branch offices - Instead of having a separate anti-virus, firewalls and anti-spam solutions for each branch office. Information Security and powerful malware are on the rise. Biometrics will find lots of applications for example fingerprint and retina scans.

The picture looks rosy as far as technology goes, but there are lots of thorns to watch out for. There's an overdose of technology, leading to product commoditization. While consumer driven technologies are moving into the enterprise world, a judicious balance will have to be made to get the best ROI from deploying technology as, when and where required.

Sometime ago there were similar arguments during debates when adoption of internet by enterprises was being considered vis-à-vis intranet, since internet was not regulated. But intranet used the same technologies that internet used, except that it was more controlled under a corporate environment.

Another argument against adoption of Web 2.0 at the enterprise level is misuse by employees. Can one ban the telephone from the organization out of the fear that some employees will use it to make personal phone calls? Similarly, would one stop using instant messengers for the same reason? In the same way, one can't really afford to ignore Web 2.0. There are lots of technologies being used for social networking, and chances are that once you use them in your organization, some employees will continue to use them for the same purpose. However, one can gain a much bigger business benefit by using the technology.

Writers notes: The writer acknowledges Mr. Anil Chopra, Chief Editor, PC Quest magazine for his contribution to this article. This  article is based on the recently held PCQuest ESS2 Enterprise Solutions Showcase. 

Tarachand Wanvari, a consulting correspondent for Business Gyan and www.businessgyan.com looks after the South India bureau of www.indiantelevision.com. Feedback at tarachand@ businessgyan.com. 

Issue BG79 Oct07

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