Manage Your Applications And Rule Your Enterprise

With growth and productivity being on the agenda of every enterprise, we are now seeing innovative technology solutions coming up and changing the enterprise landscape.

With the varying enterprise landscape, in order to meet various challenges, we see frequent deployments in the space of business applications. As enterprises rely heavily on business applications, they often lack the internal resources to effectively design, implement and manage them globally.

Let us see how large enterprises manage these disparate applications that often fail to see eye-to-eye. In order to do this, Biztech2.com caught up with three CIOs who are known to be dealing with a large number of applications- Shuresh Shan, Head - Business Information Technology Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services (MMFS), based out of Mumbai; Sudip Banerjee, Vice President and Head-IT, Reliance General Insurance; and PKX Thomas, Chief Operating Officer (Previously CIO), Cleartrip.com.

_Now before getting to the challenges, it is important to know what kind of systems these enterprises have running.
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MMFS has many implementations spanning mobility, through to applications on the cloud, which service other business units. Apart from having the usual Business Intelligence, and integrated communications systems, the enterprise has also re-organised its infrastructure to support expansion based on demand. The company recently revamped its Unified Communications architecture using virtualisation so as to be able to scale indefinitely.

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Green Bits is a sustainability initiative through which, MMFS is able to administer effective utilisation of resources. “We also have great connectivity in place, to prepare ourselves for infrastructure issues with innovative products and services through latest methods and models,” shares Shuresh Shan, Head - Business Information Technology Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services.
While talking to Sudip Banerjee, Vice President and Head-IT, Reliance General Insurance, Banerjee said that they are currently using the Policy administration system, Claim management, CRM, BIM, data warehousing and Portal application to communicate with customers. Bringing these applications together requires accurate mapping of various processes, which is definitely not as easy as it sounds.

About what’s happening at cleartrip.com, PKX Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, Cleartrip, shares, “Currently all the applications are running on an independent system, which are interfaced using a batch update to synchronise the data system. We are now planning to move to an ERP system in the near future.”

Challenges faced while managing these applications

Managing business applications is not an easy task; scalability is an issue as it fails to scale to meet the growth of the company. Trying to support any two applications interfacing across the system is a major problem and trying to rectify the problem is difficult, because vendor management is complicated, believes Thomas.

Virtual computing has established the motivation for MMFS to enter rural India, but it has its own issues to keep the stable focus. To prepare the company to meet the increasing demands, the company thinks that its needs to build a public cloud.

Strategy used in managing these applications

It is very important to keep IT agile and flexible, in order to have a robust production environment and to avoid delay in management.

“We were very clear in choosing the applications and have a mixed package of product applications, as well as in-house applications to meet the requirements of stability and scalability. We have integrated applications and have a robust middleware to keep instep with customer demands,” said Banerjee.

MMFS has deployed an intelligent mobile solution, which transforms the high productivity of task force, which in turn improves the availability of information to the market, which has resulted in fifty percent growth. MMFS has ensured that demand V/s availability should be within the affordable cost efforts and time.

Shan mentions that both long term goals and short term shocks should be tested and prepared for better management of enterprise applications to create effective decision-making. Such initiatives prioritise the areas of development and enhancements for better automation.

How is the space of Business Application going to evolve?

Technologies like virtualisation, unified communications etc have to set a unique platform to be unique through either home grown or intelligent partner solutions to insight a difference to the customers and to educate and spread the reach and availability of information with governance towards efficiency and effectiveness for a better tomorrow. Quality focus through deliverables tracks and improves the increase of market presence to yield optimum results defending networks in the cloud to automate business process which leads to increase agility and timely knowledge sharing always boosts the revenue and accelerate business to depend on technology. The most innovative project which improves productivity reduces the unmanaged expenditure and gives timely benefits and experience to the organisation to improvise the customer services always.

Virtual office solutions, work from home, time efforts and availability through seamless design process and procedures to capitalise on untapped information to ensure no more technology lock in for any organisation to be freed to suit and select the adoption with estimated impact of worrying times through better economy projection to manage the fresh sourcing options work with partners to reduce cost and improvise productivity by deploying better procedures and process.

Should we ask for the change, or we will make the change, or be the change, UID and financial inclusion initiatives create detail agenda for financial institutions to become a vital medium to reach out to the rural grass route level, said Shan.

All said and done, with the application scenario getting more and more complicated, not to mention the entry of ‘n’ VMs into enterprise architecture can also create a management issue. In light of all this, it makes the CIOs role interesting in the view of integrating these disparate components to form a unified enterprise view.