'Shrinking Budgets Make Collaboration Of Technologies Difficult'

In a one-on-one with Biztech2.0, Shantanu Ghosh, VP–India Product Operations, Symantec, talks about open collaborative architecture.

Could you please give us an overview of open collaborative architecture?

Open collaborative architecture is a philosophy and a set of tools to solve customer issues. Managing enterprise functions has become complex owing to the number of trends that are on display and available in the market. Large enterprises have business assets that were earlier managed within a boundary but they are now distributed, which is a direct result of the increase in workforce mobility. Therefore, more stringent measures have to be put into place owing to the laws and regulations laid down, which leads to better information security and data compliance.

To sum it up, Open Collaborative Architecture is an open, standards-based set of guidelines and technologies for interoperability with Symantec products, which allows customers to easily manage their infrastructure with greater efficiency and control across more platforms.

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What are the major challenges that CIOs face with regard to collaboration of technologies?

Looking at it from an end-point level and keeping in mind security measures like anti-virus and backup, the question that arises before CIOs is whether they can get all agents to collaborate and work centrally at the following levels – management at the application level; management at the workflow level; and management from any console. What we are trying to do is ease complexity and management.

CIOs, especially those who are a part of large enterprises, have to deal with the challenge of shrinking budgets and complex environments. Many a times, enterprises take the assistance of system integrators to make meaningful interaction happen between different applications and this involves different technologies and there are multiple ways of doing this.

What would be a suitable environment for use of this kind of architecture?

This kind of architecture can be effectively used while upgrading software versions on desktops and during patch management. With open collaborative architecture, these tasks can be conducted automatically without having too many mechanisms in place.

Open Collaborative Architecture prescribes an evolutionary approach to interoperability and solution building by using standard Web services, Web-based security, workflow management and configuration management technologies to provide customers with greater flexibility to build complex, multi-disciplinary solutions that can be tailored to specific business needs. Open Collaborative Architecture provides partners and customers with the ability to integrate their applications with the Symantec Management Platform. The Web services-based architecture provides data sharing and IT automation to streamline process execution and reduce the cost and risk of IT ownership.