Customer support systems are becoming critical elements of business success. For multi-outlet businesses like banks, chain stores, e-businesses, etc, a centralized support center is fast becoming a must. A call center is a place where customer telephone calls are routed to, and answered. The advantages of having a centralized system instead of taking the call at individual shops are many. To start with, you can install sophisticated customer support systems and information databases far more easily at these locations, as opposed to having them at multiple smaller locations. Call centers are rarely set up at the business premises itself. Telephone calls can easily be switched across the globe. So, you can choose a location that is the cheapest.

Today, many third-party call centers are coming up, supporting multiple businesses off the same location. So, you need not go through the trouble of setting up your own. Like with medical transcription and offshore software development, India is emerging as a potential site for offshore call centers.

Data center

A data center is something like an ASP, without application rental being the primary focus. You use the services of a data center to host your data off site. Data centers in their simplest form are huge server farms with very fat pipes connecting them to the Internet. The most common use of a data center is for Web hosting. So far, Indian companies were hosting their Websites at data centers abroad. This was not because servers were not available in the country, but because the required bandwidth was not available. As bandwidth availability improved, we graduated to co-locating our Web servers. That is, we put the Web server at the ISP’s backbone itself. A further refinement kept the server at our own premises, with a fat leased-line connection running to the ISP’s backbone.

Data centers are the next stage in this evolution. And they have just started making their appearance. Today’s data centers are not just Web hosting centers. In fact, they offer a multitude of services to their clientele. For starters, many data centers do offer or plan to offer ASP services. Then, they can manage all your data on their servers, instead of your having to bother about backup schedules and anti-virus updates among other things. In short, data centers can well be the next stage in the evolution of the annual maintenance contract. What started off as hardware maintenance contracts now include on site management of your network, and can tomorrow evolve into the complete off siteing of your data. What advantages will this have? The argument is that you do what you are good at—your business—and leave those who are experts at managing data to them, as you are doing with your systems today.

VPN

Setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a way of connecting networks at different geographic locations into one, over the Internet. Consider a company that has offices in multiple locations. Before VPNs happened, the only way of connecting up these networks was to go in for leased lines. VSAT connections were few and far in between. Leased lines are a costly option and the farther the locations are, the costlier they become. VPNs provided a way out. Here, all your offices connect to the Internet and the data is sent over the Net.

This way, the length of the leased line is limited to, from the office to the nearest Internet access point. You do not need crisscrossing connects going all the way across. This could have been done even a few years back. But the question of data security came in the way of that happening. Then came the VPN. The development of tunneling protocols ensured that your data could be secure even while traveling over public networks. And finally there was a way for smaller (and even larger) organizations to connect up their offices into one large network without paying for it through their nose. Expect more action on the VPN front in the years ahead.

Broadband

Broadband is a hot topic, both for the home and the office. Strictly speaking, broadband is discussed in the context of the home. Offices are supposed to use leased lines. But that is not exactly the case in India. Broadband options—DSL, cable modem, etc are being considered for offices too. Why is it that broadband is not the primary option for the office? Broadband technologies are mostly one-way technologies. That is, downstream speeds are many times the upstream speeds with these options. In a home or individual setup, more data is expected to flow from the Web down to the PC you are using, while you will send back only a limited amount of data—e-mail, requests for pages, etc. Unlike this, an office needs to send large amounts of data both ways. This is partly because offices have many users connected and they need to send a lot of data both ways over their Net connects. For example, if you have a VPN running, or if employees need to frequently update portions of your Website, etc, the ideal option for you will be a connect that offers the same data transfer speeds both ways—something like a leased line.

For purely Web browsing needs, enterprises can opt for a broadband solution, but pretty soon you will be looking for other options.

ERP

This is actually old news. Most large enterprises have already been there and done that. Smaller organizations have also done that. What makes ERP interesting again is that vendors are trying to move ERP to the Net as an ASP offering. That is, you do not need to go through the rigors of implementing an ERP solution and then maintaining it. All that gets taken care of by the ASP. Theoretically, you can be up and going right from day one. This model is supposed to be advantageous for both the small organization and the large enterprise.

ERP applications are a hot prospect for ASPs. And all the factors that are holding back generic ASPs are holding back this one too.

Data mining

Like ERP, data mining is also old stuff. But not too many corporates in this country are known to be doing this seriously. A significant part of the reason is the non-availability of details, like detailed buyer profiles, etc. What is data mining? It’s simply taking available data and searching in it for patterns that you can use for business advantage. For example, consider the simple case of bills being raised and payment being collected. Assume that you have collected a year’s data. If you analyze this data carefully, you can make out patterns like, in which areas are your bills paid faster, or clients in which age group and educational background are more likely to default on payment.

Does the example sound familiar? Like something that you may actually be doing? Data mining can be considered to be a highly evolved form of good old MIS reports in action, where you work with much larger volumes of data and more intelligent tools. Also, you are looking for patterns as opposed to numbers. Obviously, the more the data (quantity and spread) you have, the better the patterns will be.

Krishna Kumar