Progressive Times-Jan 2011

Times I/2011

CEO Speak

Events

Hello everyone, welcome to the insightful edition of Progressive times.

• Professional Services Outing Professional services organization had structured an all day event of Cricket Match at Stellar Gymkhana club, Greater Noida. There were around 23 participants from PSO who played cricket as a part of team building & grooming activity initiated by

As we have entered into the New Year, we look forward to the new horizons to be explored. But surely last year would be along us as a collection of experiences and learning.

Last year, has been a mixed bag and transformative year for all of us in many ways. The year which passed by, left some remarkable foot prints. At Progressive we saw 2010 as a year of opportunity to drive transformation in all areas of our business. Thanks to your support and understanding we have made good progress in some areas, but still work is needed in many more areas. In the year 2010 in my opinion we achieved the so many things like: Repositioning ourselves as a horizontal solutions and services company in the market place with focus on - Converged Infrastructure, Network & Security, Collaboration and Communication, Information Management & Cloud Integration. Also, completed consolidation and also cost alignment was achieved. We have consolidated our business in three geographies - North & East , West and South. We have relentlessly pursued cost efficiency without compromising on customer experience. This is absolutely imperative given our stated objective to be a low cost producer of service with a national footprint. Some significant achievements in our technology services after we got gold partnership with Oracle, cloud partnership of Google and Microsoft positioning ourselves as a cloud integrator.

We had shown solid growth in Managed Services Business with addition of some large clients like Gas Authority India Limited, Air India, SEBI, etc.

Last year portrayed what we as an organization delivered.

But in the New Year we should work out all the more to improve as a proficient player of the industry. Improving, developing and stretching ourselves to achieve the vision of the company. The technological advancement and Organizational up gradation we long for could only be achieved through continuous efforts and desire to more ahead. We as a family should and will continue to grow and prosper. I wish you all a very happy new year!!

Prateek Garg MD & CEO

Progressive. After the cricket match Progressivian had lunch at Stellar and followed by some indoor games like Table Tennis, Air hockey etc.

• New Year Celebration Great Place To Work has organized a new year bash event in Progressive, Noida. The daylong event kicked off with Bay Decoration competition in which people from all different departments put in their effort to make their sitting area look best.

This competition was accompanied by “Every hour question” – where GPTW shot in question on hourly basis and quickest response got the reward. This was followed by Tambola competition where everyone participated enthusiastically. In the evening Progressivian said 'Good Bye' to 2010 with cake & snacks.

Times January 2011

Customer Services Be calculative If you're a service provider, customer expectations can pose a major challenge. That's because expectations are wondrous creatures: They grow, they shrink, they change shape, and they change direction. They shift constantly, and they shift easily. And how satisfied (or dissatisfied) your customers are is determined by these expectations and your performance in meeting them.

If expressed as a calculation, customer satisfaction might look something like this: Customer Satisfaction =

Your Performance Customer Expectations

Of course, customer satisfaction is influenced by a complex interplay of factors; it's hardly as simple as plugging numbers into a formula and calculating the result.

Nevertheless, this calculation serves as a reminder that your customers' level of satisfaction can be affected by changes in either their expectations or your performance. That means you have to pay attention to both.

And that's where things can get tricky, because how you perceive your performance may differ from how your customers perceive it. In fact, discrepancies between your perceptions and theirs would not be at all unusual; I routinely encounter such discrepancies when I interview a company's service staff as well as its customers. So, even if you're working yourself to the proverbial bone, if customers view you as unresponsive, then you are unresponsive — in their eyes.

The reverse is also true: If you really are unresponsive, but customers perceive that you deliver superior service, then you do (in their eyes), and you gain little by trying to convince them otherwise. I'm not advocating bumbleheaded service, of course, but merely emphasizing that customer satisfaction is driven by their perceptions, not yours. Their perceptions are their reality, and any overlap between their view of the world and your own may be simply one of those delightful coincidences.

Watch for changes If your customers' satisfaction level is changing, find out if something has happened, either at their end or yours, to affect their expectations or perceptions. Whether that change in satisfaction level is skyward or in the direction of

the bottomless pit, analyze what's happening. If satisfaction is rising, find out what you're doing right, so you can keep doing it; if satisfaction is slithering downward, figure out how to reverse the situation before it falls off the chart.

Make sure you don't get so wrapped up in delivering services that you lose sight of your customers' expectations and how well they think you're meeting them. Be conscientious in observing what's going on in your customers' environment and your own that could affect their satisfaction level.

Good to Read A chance to Start over It was a cold December night in West Orange, New Jersey. Thomas Edison's factory was humming with activity.

Work was proceeding on a variety of fronts as the great inventor was trying to turn more of his dreams into practical realities. Edison's plant, made of concrete and steel, was deemed "fireproof".

As you may have already guessed, it wasn't!

On that frigid night in 1914, the sky was lit up by a sensational blaze that had burst through the plant roof.

Edison's 24-year-old son, Charles, made a frenzied search for his famous inventor-father. When he finally found him, he was watching the fire. His white hair was blowing in the wind. His face was illuminated by the leaping flames. “My heart ached for him,” said Charles. “Here he was, 67 years old, and everything he had worked for was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, 'Charles! Where's your mother?' When I told him I didn't know, he said, 'Find her! Bring her here! She'll never see anything like this as long as she lives.”

Next morning, Mr. Edison looked at the ruins of his factory and said this of his loss: “There's value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew.”

What a wonderful perspective on things that seem at first to be so disastrous. A business failure, divorce, personal dream gone sour . . . whether these things destroy an individual depends largely on the attitude he or she takes toward them. Sort out why it happened, and learn something from the blunders. Think of different approaches that can be taken.

Times January 2011

Top 10 game changers in year 2011 • Internet tablets will flourish in the New Year Apple's iPad paved the way for a new genre of tablets, and it looks like you'll see more of these coming in 2011.

• The web moves to 4.0 from its current 3.0 phase And you thought we were still in the web 2.0 era, but with newer technologies like HTML5 and cloud services, it would be interesting to see how the web shapes up in the year 2011.

• New search technologies f o r business Internet search becomes ever more powerful with more realtime results, location based search that organizations can use for focused advertising.

• Key server and storage technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, solid state disks, 10GE, hold promise forefficient storage and protection of data in future New storage specs, storage in the cloud, and data de-duplication take center stage in 2011.

• Data center penetration will increase across midto-large enterprises With the economic slowdown

your

• Groupware will become t h e m o s t popular application for the Cloud The mystery behind this and many other things like new CMS platforms, open source software, and even content optimization for the iPad. • With 3G in next 5 years, always connected enterprise is not a distant dream where global integration and local optimization will be the survival mantra of new age enterprise. 3G apps for mobile devices will take business to the next level.

3G

• Enterprises will develop entirely new skill sets for delivering social media solutions Social media needs no introduction, but most businesses are still struggling to understand how to leverage its full potential.

• Rise of App stores in India We saw telecom giants like Vodafone and Airtel introducing their own app stores in the 2010. But due to scarce bandwidth on GPRS, their usage was limited. With 3G coming in, we're likely to see a lot of action in this domain.

out of the way, organizations are considering to invest in newer technologies. Virtualization and cloud computing are two key technologies being considered in the data center.

• State of Security in 2011 Web continued to be the prime source of threats. The emergence of new technologies like cloud is making cloud security a key security focus. Increasing end points in the form of enterprise smartphones apart from traditional end points are also increasing the magnitude of threat perception.

Times January 2011

Desktop Virtualization, Cloud, iPad to rule 2011 Virtualization continues to be in steady demand as organizations move from defining to deploying cloud computing. Thus virtualization and cloud are going to be the major trends in 2011.

Cloud comes down to earth As organizations better understand the advantages of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service as a solution to meet their specific business needs, cloud computing is becoming more commonly accepted as part of the enterprise toolkit.

As more in-depth discussions take place, dialogue is gradually moving from 'what is the cloud' to grounded discussions about avoiding lock in, ensuring IT productivity, regulatory compliance issues, SLAs and privacy concerns.

Desktop virtualization goes mainstream: One of the practical implications of cloud computing is to free the desktop.

Old thinking is that the only way to provide a full user experience is to have the desktop environment installed on the end user device.

This slows down enterprise agility, and is no longer necessary. The traditional desktop environment remains an important part of enterprise IT, but there is no reason for it to remain just on the laptop. Citrix sees the desktop becoming rapidly more cloud enabled, centrally maintained, and accessible from any device.

The iPad factor With the multitude the number of smartphones and tablet PCs entering the market and increasingly being introduced in the workplace, this presents various challenges for IT departments.

The proliferation of consumer devices and the increasing enterprise adoption of tablets such as the iPad are causing seismic shifts in the way IT manages endpoints. Frost & Sullivan forecasts that by 2015, 54 percent of all mobile broadband devices sold in APAC will be smartphones, while

a Citrix survey this month found that almost half of all 4,951 respondents are already using the iPad daily at work (remarkable since the iPad has only been in the market for seven months).

As access to applications and data from all devices becomes a business imperative, desktop virtualization deployments will move to fill the void. Since IT can manage data centrally from the data centre, with complete control over tailored access, delivery and security of business applications, organizations will be able to introduce 'pickand-mix' IT policies – allowing users secure access to corporate apps and desktops, whatever device they bring into the office.

Times January 2011

Fun Zone • There are 1,792 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

• Just days before the World Cup of 1966 in England, the trophy was stolen and then later retrieved by a dog.

• Dalmatians are born without spots.

• Men's shirts have the buttons on the right while women's shirts have the buttons on the left.

• Footprints of astronauts who landed on the moon should last at least 10 million years since the moon has no atmosphere.

• If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

• TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

• 'Go', is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

• More than 2500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products.

• The percentage of people dreaming in black and white started decreasing after the spread of color TV.