The future enterprise and more

Other Sessions

Ananth P, Head - Country Sales & Marketing, Datacraft India Limited

Ananth spoke about the 'Future Enterprise' and divided his presentation into five broad categories. They were architecture & standards, application network solution, IP convergence, network management, and integrated security.

"Standards are driven by the evolution of new architectures, and architectures are driven by the availability of new standards," he explained.

The application network solutions according to him should include staff, customers, and partners, and is best created on a layered architecture that comprises logic, services, and the platform. He also talked about the four basic types of integration approaches—business process integration, application integration, data integration, and infrastructure integration.

He went on to explain the benefits of IP convergence and showed us the current status of IP convergence on the 'Gartner Hype Cycle'. He also talked about the changing drivers of IP convergence.

Ananth displayed a security framework, which would allow an enterprise to plan and control, realize value, manage and operate, and design and deploy technologies in a planned manner.

As a conclusion he said that the future enterprise simplifies the way technology works for you.

Roger Blacker, Marketing Manager, Office Systems & Solutions Division, Canon Singapore Pte Ltd

Blacker spoke about the global trends, issues, and the future of printing devices

"I read the results of a surveys conducted across 500 companies in USA about the number one issue that they faced. Most of them stated that they wanted to reduce costs. But as the participants in an earlier panel discussion stated, that the use of electronic distribution has actually not reduced paper costs," he said.

In other words what he wanted to say was that, the increased use of digital technology has resulted in more paper consumption. There always has been a huge demand for printing on paper, and this has led to the need for document management.

He said that canon believes that there has to be a strong integration between the digital and printed information. "Obviously if you have paper documents and electronic documents the key issue will be, how to integrate this together," said Blacker.

"We are moving to a future where the printing device can be customized according to the business needs and introduced into the workflow wherever required. And the key to it is that it should not rely too heavily on programming. It has to be something you can snap into place in your workflow."

His talk was followed by a presentation by M Lakshmi (Lux) Narayan Rao, Assistant Director-Marketing, OSS Value, Canon India.

He said that enterprise environments were becoming more complex. And in such a situation an enterprise would prefer to use a device that could simplify operations by directly converting a document from an image format to a highly compressed pdf format, by even an unskilled a junior executive.

"The true efficacy of an application will not depend on how easily tech-savvy personnel can use it, but on how a non-tech-savvy personnel can use it. This is when real cost-savings can be seen," he said.

David Blumanis, Data Centre Consultant, APC

"Technology changes have been happening in many areas, but the way we have built data centers has remained the same," he said.

There are lot of business and financial benefits that a company can gain when a data center is built. So enterprise should look at new approaches of building a data center that keeps in mind scalability and reliability. There is need to create agility in the data center. This will allow the data center to change along with your business, and also get the required TCO.

"Ten years ago, CIOs did not believe that there would be more than 30 1u form factor servers in a single rack that would consume a lot power. And no CIO thought that there would be 2.5 tons of storage equipment occupying a lot of floor space." So it's essential to build a data center architecture that will keep up with the pace of change in all areas like growth, power, and availability.

Expectations from data centers have also become high. Ten years ago if the data center was down for a few minutes it may have gone unnoticed. But today, companies can't afford a minute's downtime because the entire business rests on it.

Many organization's use a wrong approach when designing a data center. They may have a few business applications like ERP or financials for high availability. So they build the entire data center with emphasis on high availability. In reality all applications may not need such high availability, but the organization has already spent a lot of money to build such an infrastructure.

He also said that the UPS room architecture was as important as the server room architecture. And it was equally critical to ensure that the power conditioning equipment could support growth and scalability required to match that of the servers.

Arvind Chandrasekar, Business Development Manager, AMD India

Chandrashekhar spoke about the future trends of 64-bit computing.

"The reality of the day is that its not hardware or software that determines whether you need to move to 64-bit computing. What maters is whether you feel the need. If you believe that you're ready for 64-bit computing, you are," said Chandrashekhar to open his speech.

64-bit computing is pervasive, and will go down to a point that within the next two to four years, as you decide, it will be adopted in all enterprises. The only reason why it hasn't been adopted is perhaps the cost.

When there is a consolidation in the IT infrastructure, the cost of staffing and management goes down, and scalabilty and capacity utilization goes up. In other words there is better ROI.

"If you map a similar scenario to a 64-bit environment, the costs for application boost, memory gain, and OS go down. The I/O and plant utililization go up. On the overall it totals to higher ROI," explained Chandrashekhar. "In effect you need to look at what works for you at the end of the day."