what next?

As the solution providers continue to upgrade their business rapidly, it
seems that the organizations also are increasingly looking for ways to reduce
the total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructures.

The most interesting fact is that these solution providers are delving into
such avenues that demand more market maturity and technical expertise, woven
seamlessly with an integrated service structure to deliver efficient business
solutions for their clients. Increasingly they have started addressing a larger
clientele rather than restricting themselves to the SMBs. Afterall, the basic
thrust of a solution provider is to provide total IT solution rather than
supplying hardware products.

Starting off with the box pushing strategy and gradually maturing to deliver
integrated solutions to the customers, the solution providers has now become an
integral part of the Indian domestic service market.

Key Trends

With time, the scalability and nature of projects delivered by the vendors
has changed drastically. They have started taking up and delivering large scale
and more complex projects to the SPs.

As per the current trend, the solution providers are opting for solutions
like security and surveillance, green data centers, networking storage, cloud
computing, virtualization and ERP.

Talking more about the emerging solutions in the market, Ranjan Chopra, CEO,
Team Computers said, "Cloud computing is definitely on and lots of people are
buying it. It transforms the way in which information and services are consumed
and provided and also helps in lowering costs by using energy and resources more
efficiently. It also simplifies operations and management by enhancing agility,
growth and profitability. Consumerization of software seems to be the buzzword
in the market with every one going online. For instance, Salesforce has launched
chatter box, which makes networking easy and helps develop further businesses.
Facebook is also emerging as the latest interaction site for the SPs and the
vendors.

Social networking has been around for a while. As Internet started evolving,
consumers became more Web and market savvy, and e-mail marketing campaigns and
bland websites became less effective. Hence, it it important for businesses to
embrace and leverage new technologies in order to continue reaching their target
audiences. This is relatively a new way to create, publish, and distribute
content, photos, audio files, and other relevant information online. This
collaborative platform enables users to communicate openly and collaborate on
Internet."

Cloud computing transforms the way in which information and services are consumed and provided and also helps in lowering costs by using energy and resources more efficiently Ranjan Chopra CEO, Team Computers	many organizations today have adopted 'virtualize first' policies to help reduce capex and opex as well as improve underlying business processes Nitin Shah, CMD, Allied Digital

The Internet can deliver workforce management solutions directly to the
corporate desktop via Web browser. Thus the solution providers 'host' the
solution at a remote data facility, and users login to the system via Web
browser.

IDC has estimated that the market for the delivery of high-end applications
through the outsourced model will reach approximately $2 billion within the next
four years, up from about $150 million in 1999. While this approach may not be
right for every organization, it deserves serious investigation when
organiza-tions contemplate a workforce management solution.

Nitin Shah, CMD, Allied Digital said, "I have observed that people nowadays
like to buy solutions-as-services and it is the new trend infrastructure. The
entire industry is moving from capex to opex. Virtualization is equally trying
to move steadily amongst others solutions like the server virtualization,
storage virtualization and desktop virtualization. This is the sole reason
nowadays organizations are enthusias-tically deploying server virtualization
because of the immediate benefit it provides. As a result, deployment of server
virtualization has never been higher-in spite of the economy. In fact, many
organizations today have adopted 'virtualize first' policies to help reduce
capital (eg hardware, software, etc) and operational (eg management) costs as
well as improve underlying business processes."

Adding more to it, Shah said that while most organizations understand the
value of a virtualized server infrastructure for moving their businesses
forward, many make the critical mistake of either downplaying or overlooking
completely the important role which storage plays in these environments.

"Wireless networking is also making its mark into the market. The user today
wants to access their database anytime from anywhere, as it is more convenient
for them. Also many of today's IT managers who are responsible for information
security management and data privacy agree to my point of view. Because they
understand the realities of conducting business today in an environment, where
information technology components are often not integrated. With increasing
sophisticated and proliferation of attacks and ever shifting focus of the
threats to the next weakest link, that is people and applications, the rise of
financially rewarding attacks will continue. Security and privacy data concerns
will be raised by the proliferation of the new and extended enterprise
applications and technical environ-ments will continue to become more complex.
But these challenges are predominantly organizational and cultural and thus
resulted in most of the enterprises investing in and developing new security
programs," opined Shah.

Consequently such initiatives have not kept pace with the growing business
requirements over a period of time. There might be many reasons for the same
such as-disconnect between enterprise and business unit goals, low
prioritization of security as compared to business initiatives, lack of
appreciation for the importance of security, IT-based security projects, etc.
Pradeep Jhawar, Director, Bard Roy said, "Security is definitely growing but not
within the IT dealers and as all the dealers are new to the security market it
will take time for them to buck up".

Talking about storage devices, Jhawar added that managed storage devices is
the talk of the town.

HP is focusing on managed storage devices. Also, significant contributors to
storage in an organization include e-mails and the various databases that link
to key business applications like ERP, CRM and SCM. Backup and recovery of such
data is high on the priority list for any IT department. ERPO is still strong
and continue to rule the SMB segment. The storage solutions used by
organizations to store their data are broadly classified as network storage
solutions.

The most common amongst these are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN
(Storage Area Network) along with connectivity options (Fiber channel etc). By
outsourcing storage services, one can efficiently provide and manage all data
storage related activities and services, as most vendors who offer managed
storage services are experts in this domain This also helps new branches to
quickly get functional.

Managed storage services can be implemented via remote management, wherein
the managed service provider remotely manages storage activities and devices.
Some benefits of using managed storage services include a customized and
flexible solution with best-of-breed facilities like continuous performance
monitoring, end-to-end problem management, change management, real time response
to additional storage needs and comprehensive reporting.

As companies continue to extend connectivity outside their office walls,
businesses must focus on new ways to protect its data and communication. Cisco
offers a network security infrastructure and delivery of cloud security
services, thereby enabling businesses to collaborate with greater confidence
even as their workforce and partners become increasingly mobile and interactive.

Tom Gillis, VP and GM-Security Technology Business Unit, Cisco said, "In
today's changing world, businesses require a security strategy that accounts for
the physical, virtual, mobile and global aspects of their business. Our vision
for security is based on a balance of protection and enablement, which
integrates security from the network to the endpoint and the users. Security
needs to capture the latest threat intelligence to mitigate shifting threats.
This combination enables businesses to collaborate with greater confidence when
engaging employees, partners and customers."

"Adoption of SaaS and cloud services represent a growing share of finite and
expensive WAN bandwidth," said Abner Germanow, Director-Enterprise
Communications Infrastructure Research at IDC.

"Until recently, SaaS and cloud services were delivered on a best effort basis
that were not good enough to meet the business criticality, performance, and
video service demands facing future waves of SaaS and cloud service maturity,"
added Vikram Sharma, VP-SP, Cisco India and SAARC.

Minakshi shetty

minakshis@cybermedia.co.in