Data center has become as complex as catering to the end consumers’ needs: Sanjay Motwani, Raritan International

How can CIOs properly align the IT operations with the organization’s overall business?

The function and role of IT has changed drastically in the past few years. Earlier, such professionals used to do back-end functions and batch processing jobs who are called as IT enabler of business. But the way we would view it today is that IT is the function that can provide competitive advantage to the business it is associated with. In regards to this, IT plays a very critical role today. IT acts as the front face of the organization with the consumer and the customer. So the experience that the customer gets is what IT is delivering and how IT is engaging with the customer.

What should be the priorities of CIOs as far as the IT infrastructure is concerned?

There are two aspects of IT infrastructure - one is front facing infrastructure which is engaging with the customer and the second is back-end infrastructure. IT needs to build its infrastructure to make its customer user experience brilliant and to do so, organization needs to build the infrastructure at the backend. While talking about infrastructure, it includes compute power, storage, air condition et al which are associated with it. It has to augment all these facilities at the backend. The challenge lies in to differentiate whether to keep augmenting only when the demand arises or to parallely try and improvise operating efficiency that are available currently with you. That’s where operations of managing IT infrastructure comes into play.

Why is a data center highly technical, complex, and relatively new component of the organizational structure?

Earlier data center has always been a back-end operation in any organization. Today IT’s role is catering real time infrastructure. But data center has now become a part of organizational structure because of the changing needs of business and demands. Thus, data center has become as complex as catering to the end consumers’ needs.

Can you please highlight the three priorities of Raritan for next one year?

The three priorities would be:

• Highlighting the end customers (CIOs and CTOs in an organization) and how to take control or better control of their IT infrastructure
• How to improve the operating efficiency within their data center and maximize their infrastructure to avoid wastage
• Educating the market in terms of what are the new technologies which are coming into play and how they can benefit from it