"You are not just measuring uptime, you are measuring process availability"

In second session Anwer Bagdadi, CTO, CFC international,
India Service said, this industry has been growing and the footprint is
getting wider. People are no more geography bound. They are diversifying into
multiple geography. Issues of skill sets, issues of managing people, technology
across borders are becoming key areas, he said. "We are no more doing only
simple processes, we are doing multiple complex processes just like in my own
organization," he said. What has also become important is that you require
high bandwidths, you requires turnaround applications so you are not only
interested in end-to-end connection, you are interested in ensuring that your
application is delivering what is expect of it. You are not just measuring
uptime you are measuring process availability you are measuring whether it has
been able to take care of what has been the SLAs deliverable which has been your
whether it is a software development or whether it is BPO process output.

Panelists at the session on Technology

Sudhanshu Tiwari, VP system, Tricom India said, some
of the challenges we are facing are that wages are: increasing appreciably,
second the dollar is appreciating over the Indian rupee thus reducing the
profitability of the industry and reducing its capacity to attract more funds,
and thirdly the cost of implementing information security solutions is going up.
All these factors together throw a challenge of building low-cost and
high-quality infrastructures which could sustain this industry over a long
period of time.

R Murlidharan, chief security officer, Transworks
said, in the last five to six years, we have really seen tremendous growth in
terms of the stability and reliability of technology. "I think what we see
from technology, typically from the perspective of eventually getting business
value of that technology, I think the most significant development has been,
apart from the technology boxes getting upgraded is the availability of
skillsets," he said.

Ajay Soni, senior manager IT, Patni Computer Systems
said, technology is becoming a utility versus technology remaining a strategic
tool. Instead of making it only higher end ability and running around TCO,
looking at the cost factor can we make it so strategic for business so it is
like CFO put the spread sheet in front of CEO. Can technology managers and
engineers use IT as a very strategic tool? Today, we are using IT as probably to
solve businesses problems or to remove competitive disadvantages.

Rajiv Garela, CIO, Wipro BPO said, one key issue in IT
is having people who can respond, if there is a problem, if there is a security
violation, response become the biggest challenge. Good communication skills have
also become a challenge for IT managers, he said. "You can get best of the
engineers, best of certified system people but can he talk in front of 10
different customers...can he express the problem clearly, becomes the bigger
challenge," he said.

Vaijayanti Mauskar, director, technology, E-Funds said
the key challenges I think which all technology had faced today is how do you
align yourself with business. "We are lucky if we can talk about strategy,
if we are in situations where we talk about the return on our investments, but I
think at the ground level is like how do you communicate with the business with
whom you partner, particularly in the BPO space to deliver, value to your end
customer," Mauskar said.