IT Next - November issue-2012

Page 41

Future OF IT

www.itnext.in/futureofit

more on web

White Paper Value for Business, Value for Customers

It is important to be agile, which means understanding the business and its pain, and being able to alleviate the pain, promptly and efficiently. http://www.itnext.in/ futureofit/index.php/ the-agile-enterprise

Opinion

Re-thinking Authentication By Rakesh Thatha

Creating Agile Enterprise

I llustratio n: rAJ v erma

In a market that is perennially changing, being agile is the only way forward. CIOs today are preparing to meet change head on by focusing on making their businesses more responsive and future-proof Without change, there can be no growth. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the global IT sector. New technologies are coming up all the time, while existing ones become obsolete in the blink of an eye. Today, mobile technologies, social media and cloud computing are all the rage, and every enterprise is grappling with the need to incorporate them into its offerings. Companies are facing new demands every day. Data

“Open Sesame!” is a classic example of using an authentication mechanism in the famous tale, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.http://www. itnext.in/futureofit/ index.php/rethinkingauthentication

Expert View

Games Can transform Business By Daniel Burrus Anyone who has children or who has been around them for a while knows that kids, as well as young adults, are attracted to video games like flies to light. http://www.itnext.in/ futureofit/index.php/ games-can-transformbusiness

volumes are on the rise. Collaboration is gaining in significance. There are new security threats emerging every second. How do you build and sustain a business in an environment which is always in flux? With the changing technology landscape and rapidly evolving customer preferences, a new breed of companies is on the rise: agile enterprises. These companies value responsiveness over red tape, flexibility over rigidity, and are focussed on the big picture rather than the details. They realise that the cost of missed opportunities due to IT not being able to keep up with the business’s needs is far higher than any investment in IT towards making it more agile.

Need for Being Agile With companies’ e-commerce presence now extending across several countries, incorporating one key change for the end user can often mean months of development work and testing. Companies often end up with disparate apps, platforms and systems which become a drain on their resources. Not only is this true in the case of companies undergoing mergers, but also in growing companies, where IT deployments take place in a disparate way, with each branch or department setting up its own set of processes and technologies in isolation. Pretty soon, the company which is operating in silos, and data duplication and errors have crept into the system, transparency is an issue. Maintaining a huge, sprawling setup like this can be a challenge, and can raise expenses needlessly. But an agile business is able to continually re-examine itself to look for better and faster ways of doing things. Take Tulip Telecom, for instance. The company came across such a challenge in the recent past. According to CR Narayanan, CIO, Tulip Telecom, “Our network grew in an inorganic way, and we needed to optimise our costs. We connect to our customers from our Points of Presence (PoPs). We have more than one lakh connects across the country today. When a customer shifts location, the load on the PoP in that location reduces. If this happens, in some cases, it may not be economical to continue that PoP, because the cost of running and the cost of providing the bandwidth may outweigh the revenue.” So how did they deal with this? “To prevent revenue leaks, we are monitoring every PoP. http://www. itnext.in/futureofit/index.php/the-agile-enterprise

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