We will invest over $1 mn in new technologies this year

GE Capital provides funds for real estate, equipment and inventory
financing; fleet services; working capital; and funds for corporate
acquisitions, re-financing and re-structurings. For its 130 mn customers, GE
Capital offers credit cards; retail sales finance programs; home, car and
personal loans; and credit insurance. VOICE&DATA spoke to GE Capital India's
CIO, Raghavendra Vaidya, the man behind all the ICT needs of the company, on how
it's providing effective communication. Excerpts

How excited are you for technologies like 3G and
WiMax in helping your business needs?

I am excited about the potential these technologies offer for a business
like ours. GE Capital works with both businesses as well as retail customers.
The new technologies such as 3G and WiMax offer many new avenues for us
especially on the retail side. I foresee that these technologies will change the
way we interact with our retail customers. For example, we expect large scale
financial transactions through the mobile phone, and with time more people will
do it because of the access to 3G and WiMax. Of course, we have to continue to
create secure transaction pipes for such activities. Security levels and
parameters will need to evolve to meet the richness and capabilities of the 3G
and WiMax environments.

What are your green initiatives?

We are always looking for ways in which we can increase the organization's
computing capabilities without unnecessarily increasing our hardware and
software infrastructure. We have started our journey to adopt the latest
technologies in virtualization and cloud computing. We make sure that we use
energy efficient hardware architectures to make sure our data centers are green,
an initiative taken by GE Capital globally.

How do you cope with connectivity challenges in your
branches/centers in remote areas?

With MPLS getting cheaper and stable, we rely on dedicated connectivity to
branches. In absolute remote locations, we still have to rely on DSL
connectivity. We have embarked on the virtual desktop initiatives that will help
us further bridge the gap between remote locations. Virtual desktop initiative
will take away the information security and governance issues from remote
locations to a central data center. It makes the help desk more efficient and
users more productive. Currently, we are evaluating a number of different
technologies for implementing VDI.

What are your investment plans for the technological
upgradations?

At present, to address the complex ICT requirements of various businesses of
GE Capital, we have a mix of IBM and HP infrastructure. We work on high-end
computations on IBM, and newer technology migrations like virtualization on HP.
Our software platform is Oracle, and we use several niche software packages for
specific functions. On the telecom side, we use ASPECT for our contact center
infrastructure.

As our business evolves, we evaluate the need for new hardware and software
every year. Given the spread of GE Capital's business-from commercial finance
which includes corporate lending, leasing, equity, capital markets; and consumer
finance businesses that include mortgage and credit cards-we have IT
infrastructure requirements that need to help us perform very focused
transactions. We are moving to a fully virtual Intel environment with VMware.
The IBP Pseries environment caters to our high volume transactional and
analytical database environment.

We are committed to using cloud computing, and we are seriously assessing
some open source applications. We expect to make an investment of $1 mn over
this year in new technologies with the aim of furthering our commitment to
provide end-to-end financial solutions.

How is telecom making business more competitive?

We use telecom very effectively to service our retail customers. We have
several customer service and customer care initiatives that are IVR based. Our
telecom infrastructure plays a critical role in giving customers a choice of
payment options and a better resolution of their queries; and for us it is a
mode of understanding the evolving needs of our customer. We have moved to a
complete MPLS environment for our data networks from point to point, and this
provides business with a high speed and reliable connectivity across the
country.

What are the key trends in enterprises communications?
The top five technologies that you think are going to make a mark in the future?

VoIP, infrastructure commoditization, managed services and m-banking are going
to be very important for our kind of business. The end game is to make the cost
as variable as we can to manage the business cycles.

Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years. What
kind of issues and challenges has it thrown up, especially in terms of network
security and management?

At GE, we have defined standards to manage wireless and keep our company
safe.  We do have a robust security infrastructure to enable the users to
connect to wireless networks. The Wi-Fi has gone beyond PCs with most of the
mobile devices supporting Wi-Fi connectivity. This provides a lot of mobility to
the users, and at the same time poses more security and management challenges.
We always err on the side of caution when it comes to choosing between
flexibility and information security.

What are your demands regarding QoS provided by the
communications service providers?

Telecom has become much more stable and affordable in India with time. While
I am happy with the performance, we have seen some outages from time to time
owing to the physical infrastructure related issues. I am sure our telecom
providers are working on curbing the unplanned outages. The fiber network has
improved tremendously over the years, but we still face challenges regarding the
cost of bandwidth as compared to North America and Europe. We have also seen the
entry of global bandwidth aggregators of late, and that might change the game
for a company like GE which is spread across the globe and the network is very
connected.

What kind of network storage and security solutions do
you use? How satisfied are you with the services?

Depending on the business needs, a variety of N/W storage solutions are in
use from SAN to Enterprise Virtual Arrays. Security is our utmost priority,
hence best in class intrusion detections systems, firewalls and Splunk help us
manage our environment. Overall, storage is an area where I am looking for
consolidation with an added flexibility and security. I wish I could operate
storage as a commodity and manage it on the fly with no complexities of
obsolescence. I am satisfied with our security solutions.

How do you ensure that your company deploys not just
the latest, but something that adds value to the business?

A robust operating and spends review mechanism with participation from
different functions like IT, quality, finance and core business makes sure that
we deploy the 'most appropriate' technology which may not necessarily be the
latest. The important thing is that any investment should affect one of the
major business goals: top line growth, bottom line growth, productivity,
compliance, etc.

Akhilesh Shukla

akhileshs@cybermedia.co.in