• 48 percent of the companies have already made investments in the area of Enterprise Packaged Software. And this is the second highest area of spending for an enterprise in any technology vertical.
• 36 percent of the entire IT budget had been dedicated to the purchase of packaged software products in the last one year.
• 80 percent of the companies use RDBMSs, making it the most-used Enterprise Packaged Software.
• 78 percent of the companies use NOSs and 77 percent use Web/Proxy/Mail servers.
• 88 percent of the large enterprises currently use RDBMS.
• Infrastructure/network management tools are used by 44 percent of the companies. Testing and troubleshooting tools are used by 26 percent, and Knowledge Management tools by 19 percent.
• In the next year, 43 percent companies plan to invest in RDBMSs, 34 percent plan to invest in NOSs and a similar number in Web/Proxy/Mail servers.

• Companies, especially large enterprises should keep up the investments in NOS, RDBMS, Web/Proxy/Mail servers since they are the basis for business critical apps.
• It is necessary to evolve as soon as possible from an information-enabled organization into a knowledge-enabled organization using knowledge management tools.
• Organizations with high growth levels need to invest in infrastructure management tools to reduce complexity.
• Organizations that need to train their staff within short deadlines need to invest in knowledge management tools.
• Organizations like service providers and infrastructure management companies need to use testing tools.

HDFC Bank manages its huge, complex, dispersed computing network across the country with Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG.

S.R. Balasubramanian, Vice President, Information Technology, HDFC Bank says, "To enable the offering of our wide range of products and services efficiently, in both the wholesale and retail segments, the IT infrastructure had to be streamlined and tightly managed."

Managed network
For banks running online applications, system downtime can severely affect business. For HDFC Bank, it was not technically and economically feasible to manage assets, solve problems, and distribute and update applications on the network across the country. The network needed to be streamlined and managed from a common window.
It required a tool that could analyze the network, upgrade the links and servers, and add more disk capacity when required. "CA's Unicenter Web Management solution provided the services the bank's IT team was looking for," said Bala.

The modular Unicenter was implemented for better planning of capacity, to manage the IT infrastructure, and to secure and maintain assets centrally.

Single-window view
Now, using the single-window management console, the bank can monitor and manage the entire network without the need to visit remote locations. Explains Bala, "Earlier if an engineer from a remote branch faced a problem, he or she would typically contact the regional office where the engineers would try to solve the problem."

Instead of manually installing, managing, and upgrading software applications, software upgrades and maintenance are performed from a central location—without having to visit the individual users desktop.

Intelligroup Asia, an ISO 9001 and SEI CMM Level-5 ERP systems integrator with a workforce of over 1,200 is using Microsoft Exchange 2000 as its messaging system.

Why Exchange?
Intelligroup was facing numerous glitches in its earlier messaging system. There was no integration between the OS and the mailing system, and the administrator had to create multiple login and e-mail IDs for every user.

Pavan Reddy B, Manager-MIS says, "Keeping with our business philosophy and vision, and the changing demands of the market place, distance and technology, we realized that our messaging solution was not serving our communication purpose. We needed a solution that had more collaborative applications and one that was more user-friendly." He also added that the company needed a solution that would integrate with the OS (Windows) and user database, thereby reducing administrative overheads.

"All these requirements could be addressed if we migrated to Microsoft Exchange 2000," said Reddy.

Message received
The company now has a multi-server environment, where the servers in an administrative group are managed as a single entity. The administrator need not open a separate window for creating the mail ID. The integration of Exchange 2000 with Windows 2000 Active Directory also benefits end users by providing single sign-on capability. The OWA (Outlook Web Access) combined with the FE/BE (frontend/backend) architecture supported by Exchange 2000 makes it easier for users to access their mail-boxes over the Internet using a simple URL.

KM plans
To exploit Microsoft Exchange 2000 to its full potential, Intelligroup is integrating a Knowledge Management (KM) solution (which is still under development) with Exchange as a backend. It will use the Exchange Web storage system for document management and build workflows around it. The solution also includes ORMS (Operating Resource Management System).