'IT On Fastrack' For SMEs

Biztech2.com, in its continued efforts to empower the CIO, held a day-long event – 'IT on Fastrack' – in Delhi for the SME segment. The event threw light on optimising IT resources and getting the most out of the infrastructure already in place.

Introducing the event agenda, Ivor Soans, managing editor of Biztech2.com invited Anurag Krishna from Cisco, one of the partners of the event, to deliver his keynote. The audiences were in for a pleasant surprise when the keynote actually began with a short film on a small time retail company, which faced various operational challenges and how Cisco’s UC solution (designed for SMEs) helped this retail firm overcome the challenges.

"When dealing with SMEs, I am often quizzed about the veracity of IT in an SME set-up and more importantly, about the RoI that the investment would bring forth. A simple solution like Unified Communications has tremendous applicability for SMEs, something which the short film showed you how. One area where UC could help you is expansion. Real estate is not really very cheap in Delhi. You might want to increase your revenue and further spread the wings of the business, but you wouldn’t really want to invest in increasing the office space as it comes at a premium. UC can convert homes into offices and employees can be connected through voice, mail, video conferencing, IM etc, all through a secure network. This is especially relevant if you’re still growing or maybe are a start-up," said Krishna.

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He also stressed upon the fact that once an SME has grown to a certain level, the priorities change. When you’re starting up, the focus is on getting a solid foundation and getting a foothold in the market. Once you have stabilised yourself, the company looks to grow aggressively. Once the goal of growth has been achieved substantially, the focus now shifts to differentiate your company and products from the competition. IT can help you achieve that.

Security from malicious software and all sorts of threats, which lurk on the Internet too, is a serious issue for SMEs. Trend Micro’s Deepak Talwar was there to educate the audience about the threats and the remedies which Trend Micro offers for the same.

"According to a recent study, every 2.5 seconds new malware is released onto the Web. Considering the amount of time we all spend online, none of us are protected from the bad guys and all of us are equally vulnerable. Many of us also use anti-virus software to protect ourselves from it. One thing, which all of us would agree on, is that it makes the system incredibly slow and hence, results in severe downtime. To overcome this, we decided that we would host the information protection solution on the cloud, which would scan everything from your mail to an IM popup, which may have a rogue code. Cloud hosting not only enables us to protect our customers, but as we learn from one customer’s experience, we would be able to protect our other users as well, who may stumble upon the same website or worm. Plus, it results in virtually no downtime as the solution is hosted somewhere else," said Talwar.

The above discussion was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Soans. The panel discussed various issues ranging from the challenges that SME CIOs face about convincing the management to invest in IT to solutions that could fuel growth.

The 'IT on Fastrack' event is scheduled to cover all the major business centres across the country. The next destination would be Ahmedabad.