IS 2004 provides rare insights for CIOs

CIRCUIT EC / Mumbai

THE latest annual edition of information management and strategy for Indian CIOs, Infrastructure Strategies 2004 (IS 2004), gave chief information officers in-depth insight into the IT spending patterns and strategies that India Inc intends to pursue in the coming year.

The event was held at Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai on July 13, 14, and 16 respectively. The findings of a nationwide survey were compiled from the insights of approximately 250 CIOs. This provided the CIOs present with a number of insights into aspects such as the size of enterprise IT budgets, preferred areas of technology investment, and management areas of companies in different verticals.

Highlighting the key findings of the survey, Val Souza, Editor, Express Computer, Indian Express Group, spoke about the trends and patterns in IT spending, and discussed the findings of the IS 2004 survey. In his presentation he said, “In earlier years only the tech-savvy organisations such as banks aligned business with IT. This year it’s happening across verticals. In the area of storage the CIO is not only looking at the technicalities of the solution, but also the business value.”

Dissecting the survey further, Souza spoke about storage trends and highlighted the fact that a lot of companies are moving from DAS (Direct Attached Storage) to other forms of storage like SAN (Storage Area Network) or NAS (Network Attached Storage). On the enterprise-wide application front, he shed some light on data mining, BI and ERP, and their increased adoption by BFSI, telecom and automobile companies.

The primary concern for CIOs these days is with regard to return on investment in IT. A quicker return—besides getting the IT gear up and running at the earliest—is the need of the hour. An interesting revelation was with regards to average IT spends, which the findings said was Rs 5.28 crore. Storage, enterprise applications and security were revealed to be the most preferred areas of IT spending.

On the security front, the findings revealed that the adoption of anti-virus solutions and firewall products are increasing by the day. Advanced forms of security—advanced at least in the Indian context—such as IPS are still miles away from adoption. So far, Indian companies have resorted to half-baked measures across different sectors. Souza touched upon one startling aspect of a security audit: two-thirds of the companies surveyed do not undertake it, but companies are gradually realising the need.

Sanjit Sinha, head, hardware research group, IDC India, spoke about trends in storage management. He said that 15 percent of the information stored in archives in the future will be of reference data. “A new market for storage services will emerge. We expect a 21.2 percent CAGR for the storage market. By 2007, the storage market will have grown by 37.5 percent.” He outlined the strategy companies can adopt with regard to managing storage. He said there are two types of organisations—one that adapts to change with a “let’s watch others changing first” attitude. The other approach is to react too fast to change without taking into view the needs of the organisation. The art lies in balancing the two and adopting a storage management strategy accordingly. Sinha also said that although telecom and banking companies are early adopters of storage, there is considerable potential in the manufacturing sector.

Hicham Abdessamad, senior director, Storage Area Management, Hitachi Data Systems, made a presentation titled ‘Storage Area Management—the next step in storage management. He said, “CIOs are concerned about reducing costs, improving service levels and managing risk. To do this, they need to drive automation and operational efficiency.” He walked the audience through the phases of storage automation.

At the conference in Bangalore, Jitendra Sangharajka, Lead System Administrator, Infosys, made a presentation on ‘Best practices in storage management.’ At the Delhi conference, S Balasubramanian, vice president, Information Systems, Hero Honda, spoke to the audience about the same topic. At Mumbai, P K Vohra, head, Retail Technology Group, ICICI Bank, stressed on the challenges in storage management at a time when storage was growing exponentially in India. “As storage grows, the problems associated with storage management also grow. You need to be able to identify what is transaction-centric and what is not. You can shut down some applications for maintenance if they aren’t critical or transaction-centric,” he added. Vohra also spoke about some of the IT challenges faced by banks. He listed exploding storage requirements, inter-operability issues, and skilled manpower as the most important ones.

Vohra also discussed new technologies emerging in storage management such as storage virtualisation and ILM. Most enterprises have to be cautious before adopting these technologies if they are not linked to business processes. He suggested a heterogeneous strategy that reduces the dependency on a particular vendor and gives flexibility to the chief information officer.

Jitendra Sangharajka of Infosys made a presentation on Best Practices in Storage Management	Hicham Abdessamad said that CIOs are concerned about reducing costs, improving service levels and managing risk. To do this, they need to drive automation and operational efficiency
According to SANJIT SINHA, there are two types of organisations—one that adapts to change with a “let’s watch others changing first” attitude, and the other that reacts very fast to change without taking into view the needs of the organisation. The art lies in balancing the two	P K VOHRA pointed out that as storage grows, the problems associated with storage management also grow. Companies need to be able to identify what is transaction-centric and what is not. They can shut down some applications for maintenance if they aren’t critical or transaction-centric