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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 02, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 22
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Systems/Enterprise:
INDIA CAN USE GRID EDGE IN MANAGING IT INFRASTRUCTURE
While India has built up significant expertise in the areas of IT application
building and maintenance and most recently in the BPO sector, a sizeable
opportunity also exists in the area of IT infrastructure management, according
to GK Prasanna, vice president, Wipro Technologies.
At the ETIG Knowledge Forum on 'Managing Technology Infrastructure - Facing
The Challenge,' in Bangalore, Mr Prasanna said India offered a compelling cost
arbitrage to companies, who were today under increasing pressure to manage
their operations with restricted budgets and at the same time reduce total
cost of ownership. He said IT infrastructure was today managed from high cost
locations such as New York and London, but Indian companies offer firms a more
viable location to monitor their infrastructure. He also said several Wipro
clients had managed to move from a 12 x 5 model of availability to a 24 x 7
one, by leveraging both India's cost advantage as well as the inherent
difference in time zones.
Going forward, Mr Prasanna said, companies no longer wanted to view their
technology infrastructure as a fixed cost, but as one that was concurrent with
business demands.
Mr Patinier Gonzaque, consulting director, Computer Associates, South Asia
said IT was soon going to follow a utility model, where users paid for the
amount of technology they used. He also indicated that companies would be able
to provision their networks to cater to varying demand.
The internal IT department in organisations would soon take up the role of a
service provider and a customer-vendor relationship would be established, he
claimed. Mr H Krishnamurthy, principal research scientist at the
supercomputing facility at Indian Institute of Science said a key part of
technology infrastructure management lay in designing it correctly and
providing a scaleable and robust standards-based model.
He said companies today looked to a wide range of technology-related issues
such as performance and scalability, availability and fault tolerance and so
on. They were also concerned about operating in different environments
(centralised and distributed) and working with multiple vendors.
Mr V D Gulati, director, Institute for Development of Banking Technology,
noted that around 20 public sector banks had already transitioned to a core
banking model and another ten or so were considering the move. He said the
question today was more about building infrastructure across banks rather than
just within them. Security was slowly becoming a major concern too, with the
amount spent on this aspect likely to rise from 2% of the overall budget, to
over 10% soon. A major challenge would face the banking industry soon, when
the industry moved its V-sat transactions to Insat 3-E.
While huge spends have been made on technology, human error often negated the
benefits of it, Mr Murlikrishna, general manager, IT at Canara Bank said. He
also said that other factors such as availability of spares for hardware and
dependence on vendors' inputs affected the impact of technology. He argued
that increased user awareness was essential to realise the full potential of
IT infrastructure in enterprises. The event was sponsored by Computer
Associates, a provider of software and services that enable organisations
manage their IT environments.
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