Sailing Smoothly Through the Slowdown

Hardware outsourcing, re-looking at current infrastructure, going green – some of the many answers to control costs and increase productivity during the slowdown

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

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IThe PCQuest Infrastructure SummIT 2009 was an event that provided CIOs and IT decision makers with strategic advice on how to get more out of their existing IT infrastructure as well as go a step further in understanding current technologies and trends with the aim of sailing through the slowdown

The event was divided into two segments – a morning track targeted at network administrators and IT managers, where hands-on demos on some of the hottest technologies were exhibited, which the fraternity could use to realize immediate results. The evening track saw the gathering interact with industry experts towards understanding various aspects of IT implementation, maintenance and management that would help enterprises – small, medium or large – survive and constructively optimize their resources during current economic uncertainties.

Technologies and trends discussed in the event were relevant for the slowdown – Open Source software, Application Management, Data Center Outsourcing, Green IT and more. The event rounded off with a panel discussion on how to get RoI from IT during tough times, which unanimously is the single biggest apprehension over the last month or so.

The Bangalore edition of the summit, like the ones in Mumbai and Delhi, kicked off with a PCQuest overview of relevant technologies that can be handpicked by enterprises with immediate effect. Ranging from strategies like containing current business as against growing aimlessly, to cutting marketing budgets as against increasing visibility, the session also delved deep into complex infrastructure, manual processes, and increased travel being 'budget sappers' and how using Green IT, embracing Open Source, and adopting SaaS models can significantly reduce costs and increase profitability.

Netmagic revealed startling facts like most servers being loaded to only 10% of their capacity and how consolidating groups of servers can go a long way in seeing better RoIs. It was quite a revelation for IT managers that hardware, networks and operations support are the biggest aspects of IT infrastructure where recurring costs occur. During times of economic uncertainties the 'build v/s buy' percentages for IT hardware becomes more pronounced and using third party servers and hardware usage in a pay-as-you-use model was agreed upon as the way to go.

Another interesting industry view from D-Link was that of converged data, voice, and video with anywhere, anytime availability, and its ability to democratize the technology landscape, right from the grass-root levels to more state-of-the-art solutions that have superior speeds ranging from giga to tera bytes. Also, a road map to meet SLAs with fewer resources, handle mergers and technology consolidations, enrich maximum out of existing infrastructure and 'out of the box' options to bundle these strategies under one umbrella was put forward by Quest Software.

Going green to reduce costs was touched upon by LG, that sparked off a CRT v/s LCD debate, and how the latter saves space, energy consumption and in the long run, has an impressive savings in the company's facilities department. Overall technology transformation was another interesting topic of discussion where Wipro discussed how the traditional CEO v/s CIO disparity can be solved by linking the IT with business goals, with investments, assess reuse, configuration optimization, deployment planning and effective consolidation of plan-to-deployment cycles.

The final brainstorming session where attendees actively indulged in debates with the panel of speakers was the highlight of the event where it was unanimously agreed upon that a detailed and conscious road map needs to be formulated with the aim of linking the business goals with the existing IT backbone, and outsourcing of hardware should be seriously considered, along with taking a serious re-look at the existing framework and make technology decisions that are qualitatively aimed at business consolidation and faster RoIs.

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