M. Chary

“Change is the only constant” is a truth in this universe of ours, and this fact is a matter of daily experience as far as the IT industry is concerned. If we study the evolution of IT, one can observe the progression from machines bigger in size with less flexible software to the smaller and more powerful machines with increasing flexibility.

At one end of the spectrum, we have robust mainframes running the core businesses of the multi billion dollar companies. At the other end of the spectrum, we have sleek machines and software, enticing the users with amazing GUI capabilities and power that one never imagined could be provided on the desktop. The internet with its ever increasing need for the bandwidth, promises to provide the applications to anybody, anywhere no matter what machines they run on.

As far as the business application products are concerned, over the past 30 years the industry has seen the emergence of gigantic robust products that are suited to almost all the industries. These products have huge learning curve and require larger implementation time.

Many smaller products also emerged, catering to a particular industry segment or to an organization. Most of these products are not scalable, and provide minimum or no extendibility with respect to technology and functionality. These products are easy to implement, meeting the immediate functionality requirements of the organizations. Companies would usually outgrow these products pretty fast, with the growth in the business.

There are a few medium sized products that are configurable and extendible and yet simple to learn, implement and manage. These products offer "best of both worlds". These products are the right choice for the small to medium companies. These products have the capabilities to scale to the needs of the large corporations as well. The industry will witness the emergence of such products in near future.

Buying services to custom build the software can be alternative to products. To reap the advantages of automation faster, it is prudent for the organizations to do a due diligence on the available products before deciding to develop applications.

HTC Global Services, Inc a 12 year old company, with global operations and state of the art development centre in Chennai specializes in products and services. Over the past five years, it is engaged in the development of eBusiness applications trade marked eBAP. This suite of products address business functions such as lead generation, opportunity management, contact management, campaign management, sales force automation, order management, inventory management, purchasing, human resources, project management, process management, payroll, financial accounting. These functions are developed using component architecture and can be used as separate products, or, in conjunction with other modules of eBAP. In addition eBAP supports integration to third party products or applications developed with open architecture.

Majority of the industries in advanced countries are automated as far as their core business functions such as financials, order management, manufacturing are concerned. A few of them use some sort of sales force automation product and a few other components of eCRM. In next 2 to 3 years most of these companies are expected to implement CRM in order to understand and serve the customer better. In the developing countries such as ours, the automation has been a little slow, though recent years have shown considerable progress in this area. Fortunately, we do not have to take the same route as that of our western counter parts such as automating the core business first and then proceeding on to implement CRM. The definition of core IT applications will undergo a change. CRM becomes the core IT application, for, customer is at the core of every business.

With these automations on the horizon, organizations would amass large amounts of data about the customers, about their buying habits, about the employees, about their productivity and so on and so forth. For organizations to make decisions based on data, this data needs to be warehoused and mined. Nineties have seen the emergence of data warehousing, though such applications were built in eighties in a smaller scale. Data warehousing and data mining are gaining prominence and within five years most of the industries are going to warehouse and mine data in some form or other.

Moving in this direction, HTC built data warehousing excellence centre with expertise on designing warehouse and data marts; various OLAP and data mining tools. HTC provides warehousing features for all its products.

It is a well established fact that every organization that plans to survive the ambiguity and uncertainty in the industry must anticipate the change rather than just manage the change. This requires decisions to be made based on trends and data, to which automation is a precursor. It is the duty of the IT organizations to provide the necessary education and create awareness in the industry on the need for automation. Those IT organizations, which spend time to understand customers business and provide relevant products and solutions to meet their current and future needs and wants, are the ones to survive. Earlier, necessity was the mother of invention; henceforth, invention is the mother of survival.

The author is Director, India Operations & VP, Technology Management with HTC Inc. Email:chary@htcinc.com