It is a well-known fact that the speed at which business processes take place has increased at an unimaginable rate, thanks to the progressive nature of technology. The number of complexities associated also increases along with the progress made. The advent of handheld devices has worsened the situation, bringing about a dramatic change in the way applications have to be tweaked such that they provide the best performance. In order to help CIOs pour in their concerns and find solutions for them, CIO Magazine, along with Riverbed Technology and HP, organized two CIO roundtable discussions at Mumbai and Bangalore respectively. Anil Batra, MD, Riverbed Technology (India), Josh Tseng, Technical Director, Riverbed Technology and Uday Birje, Country Manager Network Consulting & Services, HP led the discussion on what technological strategies can be implemented to make applications perform optimally.
The recent recession had serious repercussions on several organizations that some of them still have not got up to their feet. Opening the forum for discussion, CIO Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, Vijay Ramachandran asked the gathering, “A recent discussion with CIOs of the automobile industry revealed that organizations in that sector have seen unprecedented growth post-recession. But this growth has come up with its own share of challenges. What kind of growth and expansion are taking place in your organizations?”
The way the recession impacted business varied with the organization and the services it provided. C N Ram, Group President – CIO, Essar Group, said that his organization has been experiencing tremendous growth after the recession. But he also stated that the growth would not manifest in the near future and would take quite a long time to materialize. Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President & CTO, Reliance Capital Ltd, provided a contrasting view. He said that growth in the retail industry has been slow-paced. However, he asserted that technology, especially cloud computing has great potential to improve business conditions.
Two significant changes that many organizations made post-recession were centralization and consolidation of business operations. The same have made a positive impact on STAR India Private Limited. Highlighting the difference these major moves have made, Venkat Iyer, the organization’s Sr VP – Digital & IT, said that the organization has made many acquisitions and has implemented several technological advancements for its operations. He also mentioned that connectivity is the greatest concern for most organizations at present. Byju Joseph, AVP – IT, Future General India Life Insurance Co Ltd, supported this point saying that connectivity was very poor in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. He added that the organization developed in-house applications to enable communication in such areas.
Most of the CIOs said that bandwidth and latency were the two major challenges that plagued organizations’ IT infrastructure. Addressing this concern, Tseng said that WAN optimization solves both these issues. He added, “The architecture of Riverbed devices is much different from that of its competitors. Hence the failure of a competitor’s product does not mean that Riverbed’s products would also fail to accelerate applications.” He said that an evidence for Riverbed’s success is the US Marine Corps’ decision to utilize Riverbed’s products to solve the bandwidth and latency issue. 
Uday highlighted how HP can help in accelerating applications saying that HP’s latest offering – Instant-On Enterprise streamlines everything that is required to deliver a service by using technology to integrate and automate the value chain. He also said, “Organizations must do a POC and then conclude whether WAN optimization is the best solution for issues related to connectivity or not.”
A recent trend among employees that has become a cause of concern for CIOs is the increasing usage of PDAs and tablet computers. Most applications do not deliver the same kind of performance on tablets that they deliver on PCs. Talking about this sudden migration from wired networks and devices to an entirely wireless setup, Veneeth P, CIO of Hypercity, said that the same applications do not run effectively on tablets and that new applications have to be created, besides restructuring the network to facilitate efficient performance on handheld devices too.
The CIOs were united in the view that creating Internet-friendly applications and making effective usage of cloud technology can ease the stress on the network. They added that WAN optimization is a technology they have already included or are planning to include for their operations.
