Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Views from the Top

Ravi Venkatesan chairman, Microsoft India

Impact: One significant development that we have experienced from our recent engagements with customers is their increased focus on cost control. We see this translating into companies investing in solutions and processes that enable them to deliver immediate productivity and drive cost efficiencies. Going forward, the following trends are likely to prevail in the market for the cost optimization that they deliver.

Reduced travel and communication costs: Cutting back on plane trips and hotel stays is one of the most obvious ways for companies to save money, but that must be balanced against the value of person-to-person interaction. Today, videoconferencing and new collaboration tools are making virtual meetings much more like face-to-face interaction and companies are finding that in many cases, information sharing and collaboration can be accomplished more efficiently and for much less cost when done virtually. A prime example of this would be Raymond which has reduced costs by 30% using Microsoft UC solutions.

Going virtual: Virtualization makes it possible to run more than one operating system on a single machine, which can help companies reduce costs by enabling them to use more of the computing power that they already own. Virtualization also presents opportunities to consolidate the number of servers companies own and use.

Reduced PC energy consumption: There are incredible power management tools in software today that help companies more effectively manage energy consumption. Companies should make sure they are taking advantage of all power management tools in todays software.

Using business intelligence: Business intelligence delivers on a simple promise to improve business performance by driving better decision-making throughout your organization. BI helps you make better and quicker fact based decisions, enables all types of decision making in the organizationoperational, tactical or strategic, lowers TCO, gets deployed fast and scales with your requirement and enables decision making at all levels of the organizationpersonal, team or organization wide.

Leveraging cloud computing: Many companies are beginning to consider the benefits of a Software-as-a-Service model for their IT environments as a potential cost saving strategy, which provides the flexibility and options for customers to help them make educated decisions. To save costs - customers will now start exploring options to see how they can manage and access softwarewhether its online, on-premises or both.

CRM solutions: CRM offers a robust suite of sales, marketing, and service capabilities; it offers businesses of all sizes a fast, flexible, and affordable solution for finding, winning, and growing profitable customer relationships. Lilliput Retail, a retail company specializing in kidwear has in fact seen a 60% increase in efficiencies of warehouses.

Another trend, which is witnessing an upward inflexion point, is the evolving role of the CIO into CIO plus. With a growing portfolio of responsibilitiesthe presence of CIOs at the Corporate High Table or the CEO Partners Table and management/executive committee is growing. In some sectors such as BFSI, telecom, IT & ITeS and retailing, they are already beginning to establish their presence on the Board. As expected, these are sectors where technology penetration defined as ICT spends as a percentage of total turnovers is high and the strategic or compliance related role is critical. Clearly companies are beginning to acknowledge the contribution of CIOs to their larger business planscertainly a welcome change!

The simple thing is that we take a long-term approach to our global business growth and continue to execute against our business plan. We will, globally, focus on outperforming our competitors and addressing our cost structure.

Challenges: Like any other business, our focus is re-aligning cost structures and remaining competitive and continuing to offer innovative products and solutions to our customers. We believe this is the time to walk the extra mile for our customers and partners through significant engagement and offering them more choice.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: We are currently engaging in a deeper conversation with customersabout how IT can help them increase efficiency and decrease costand we hope this will enhance our existing relationships. Other than that, we continue executing on a long term business plan; as well as investing in developing innovative products and business models for the middle and bottom of the pyramid.

Anand Sankaran chief executive, Wipro Infotech

Impact: The various factors of the macro-environment have created implications for Wipro such as lower IT spends by enterprises, especially in discretionary expenses. The second implication is that clients are asking for more value for the same spend. Thirdly, increased competition from more players entering the fray has resulted in pricing pressures. Lastly, we are seeing delays in new investments and projects in certain industry segments due to lower capital spend.

Challenges: Several predictions and economic analyses are indicating that the recovery may take some time. While situations like this offer their own set of challenges, we see this as an opportunity for the companies to organize themselves in a much more efficient manner and focus on productivity to eventually become stronger. Companies with sound fundamentals, robust strategy and strong management talent will weather these challenging times and come out with more verve at the end of it.

From an IT industry perspective, we believe that outsourcing is here to stay and we are confident on the resilience of our business model. Wipro is a cash generating company with healthy margins and a strong balance sheet. Our focus during the slowdown is to retain close proximity with customers and partners in their business priorities and investment in strategic initiatives. We need to move from a business as usual approach to more of a transformational approach that will help our customers realize better cost and service optimizations in their times of need. We believe our initiatives will be the game changers in the current environment.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: From a customer engagement perspective, this time is very critical and IT service providers need to stay in close proximity with customers. They should partner with the customers to help them drive their business priorities.

Krish Gopalakrishnan CEO, Infosys

Impact: The slowdown has affected the velocity of business since midSeptember. We are seeing longer decision making, and increased due diligence by clients to ensure investments in projects that give maximum returns.

Challenges: In this environment it is key to make sure that we retain clients, keep business intact and operate efficiently, keeping costs to the minimum, continuing to invest in a few strategic things which will be important when the recovery starts.

Changes in market dynamics after recovery: We expect to see more demand in new services such as infrastructure management, business process outsourcing and package implementation.

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5