2001 was the year of the slowdown. The downturn, which started with the IT industry, slowly spread to other verticals, affecting the entire economy. Enterprises across verticals began to feel the pinch, with both toplines and bottomlines coming under pressure. A substantial number of companies cut back on IT budgets, while others adopted the wait-and-watch approach.

Enterprises have now started looking inwards at leveraging their IT infrastructure more effectively. Starting with this issue, DATAQUEST will talk about ways and means to use existing IT tools better—a simple guide to help your enterprise reduce costs while getting more out of its IT investments.

Instant messengers
Telecommunication bills account for a significant part of enterprise expenses. With large and medium enterprises spread across the country, monthly telecom bills run into lakhs if not crores of rupees. One way of curtailing the expenses would be to reduce the duration and frequency of calls, but this could possibly reduce the productivity of the employees of the organization. Faced with pressures due to a slowing economy, businesses are looking to cut down on operational expenses including travel related ones as well. While there are options such as video conferencing, there are even cheaper options that are available.

Using instant messengers (IMs) is an option that can be considered. There are numerous instant messengers that can be downloaded from the Internet. Anyone with a PC and an Internet connection could use them, as an alternative to phone calls (both national and international). Instant Messengers come with options such as private chat, conference chat and voice chat.

Large-scale enterprises have the option of customizing their IMs to their Intranet or groupware. Challenges in using freely available instant messengers would include ensuring that employees do not misuse the messenger for chatting for unofficial purposes. As S K Agrawal, VP, software development, Chambal Fertilizers says, "Instant messaging would definitely reduce telecom costs but one needs to watch out to prevent misuse."

Benefits: Huge reduction in phone bills

Local Mail Servers
Are you living with the hassle of worrying about the delay in downloading your email? Several Indian businesses have their mail servers hosted abroad, mainly in the US. This means that even local email travels across the globe before reaching its intended destination within the country. The result, wasted bandwidth and in some case loss of time. An option to this is setting up a local mail server, which accesses the Internet and downloads mail on a time-specified basis. The server can be set up easily by any kind of business right from small to large-scale enterprises.

Benefit: Massive savings on Internet bandwidth

Amit Sarkar in New Delhi

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