Indian enterprises are ready to lock and load

At the recently concluded Technology Senate 8, I had the opportunity to listen in as IT heads shared their experiences with cloud computing and disaster recovery and kibitzed about Excel vs. dedicated BI tools. I also got to interact with some of the folks who are going to transform Indian telecom and got an inkling of what's on the cards for you and me when 3G finally becomes available from the GSM operators in the first quarter of fiscal 2011.

Rewinding for a moment to the discussion on cloud computing and DR, what came out was the fact that e-mail is perhaps the first business critical app to make its way to the cloud in India. This is perhaps because, although mail is vital, it's not quite as vital as ERP. So it makes for an excellent test case for an organization that's broadly convinced about the merits of the cloud but isn't quite ready to bet the house on it. Some CIOs continue to be skeptical about the public cloud while others are willing to put at least their messaging on it (UB's putting its e-mail on Microsoft BPOS). However, security is no longer cited as a bugbear. What is mentioned, however, is the threat of cross-country legislation if the service provider offering cloud services is located in another country or continent. A possible solution is to simply engage with a local provider. Airtel, Reliance Communications and Tata Communications are all offering cloud services.

When it came to DR, the talk was around how, although the common perception is that recovery is instantaneous or near enough, in the real world it can take anything from 30 minutes to six hours to recover some semblance of normality. The assembled IT heads talked about the difficulty of persuading their bosses to accept the need for DR before a disaster strikes, at which point the board is yelling for putting a DR in place yesterday.

Talking about telecom, some interesting insights were shared. We could well be looking at 3G going mass-market if everything plays out as planned. Every adult Indian's got one or more phones today. Imagine, if this phone could deliver everything from utilities to entertainment without the user having to sign up with ten different providers using a low-cost yet extremely capable handset. That's the vision that is propelling Indian telecom's innovators and when 3G finally makes its debut in April 2011 or so, expect fireworks.

There's a lot more in our coverage of the event. Read on to find out who said what, what Indian IT's satraps feel about the state of technology—it's all there from power sessions over breakfast to the final panel discussion with dozens of sessions in between. There are insights to be gleaned and much to be learned.

In an unrelated tidbit, I’d mentioned some time back that the Samsung Wave had problems with the accelerometer being over sensitive in changing screen orientation when you moved it a teensy bit. Well, the latest bada firmware update, JH1, fixes that problem for good. If you have trouble applying it, just backup your phone data, reset the device (type “*2767*3855# using the phone keypad) and you’re good to go.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com