CIO Summit 2014: Leverage Cloud and Mobility

Craving for some hot pizza on a train? No problem. TravelKhana.com, a Web portal can now get it delivered to your seat. Working with partner restaurants in select towns and cities, the portal allows people to order food via a Web interface or a mobile application.  “It’s not a radical technology. Bringing together the concept of a website, mobile apps, and home delivery is not what’s exciting. What’s exciting is the thought process and how new-age companies are leveraging technology to woo their customers,” says Venu Reddy, research director, IDC India.  That’s a noticeable shift in terms of business concepts and a clear indication of the fact that the world is constantly moving from an industrial to a digital one. And to be able to survive in this new scheme of things, IT needs to transform, not just on the surface, but to the core infrastructure level. Changing business models, the need to lower costs, shrinking time-to-market, governance and more agile processes, are going to have a tremendous impact on your IT infrastructure.  This means that CIOs now need to look at something as core as a datacenter in new light. An efficient datacenter is the one that is agile, efficient, and cost-effective and can support dynamic business needs. Reddy stressed on the role that cloud computing and mobility can play in this journey. The need for standardization will push companies to look at more integration, modernization, consolidation and standardization of applications and IT processes, says Reddy.  “Technologies such as virtualization, cloud, and mobility have the ability to renovate the infrastructure of organizations in a highly systematic and phased manner,” he says. Rightsizing supply and demand is one of the highlights of this flexible infrastructure. This means that CIOs can scale up or down depending on business demand, says Reddy. It is this agility that is going to become the next big business differentiator for most organizations.  But Reddy also cautions that cloud and mobility are merely tools which happen to be available at the right time to solve a larger problem. It’s not the technology that is going to deliver value. What matters is how CIOs will use these tools to solve critical business issues or come up with innovative business ideas to win in today’s world.