Sify-Cisco CIO Meet in Delhi Highlights the Evolution of Datacenter

IT industry has matured over the years and is churning out the best in class from the digital technology. It has hitherto witnessed growth in regard to industry, business and economy. The digital transformation plays a vital role for IT business indeed. On the same note, in collaboration with Dataquest, Sify and Cisco Technologies organized a CIO Meet in New Delhi recently. The meet highlighted the need to embrace digital technology for cost reduction and to increase productivity.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Jai Menon, Director Technology, HT Media orchestrated the session addressing how datacenters and IT technology is evolving and its future prospects. He said that there is a framework created called “e to i”. The terminology helps practitioners to understand and embrace technology for competitive advantage. This event saw IT leaders across the industry citing their views on the importance of datacenters.

Dr. Menon said, "Organizations follow either enterprise style or internet style, but they cannot work independently for long. In a chronicle form, we as IT practitioners or even our providers like Cisco, we either think about ourselves as enterprise style or internet style players. But what is happening today is that they are coming together and are being embraced by us as practitioners."

Taking his cue from Dr. Menon, Harish Subramaniam- Lead Datacenter, Cisco also spoke about organizations that are adopting a mixture of both “e and i”. He also acknowledged how datacenters have changed over the years and how today most e-commerce applications are on clouds – majorly on public cloud.

CHALLENGES FOR IT

The companies need to decide whether to go for an in-house department, take software services or go for infra services. According to Harish Subramaniam, one has to embrace all of these as an IT team may not be equipped with applications at the edge or at the public cloud. The role of datacenter has to expand and only IT is not enough and that is why “e to i” came into picture with ASAP (Analyse, Simplify, Automate and Protect).

Observing the constant changes in the industry, the CIO Meet addressed that infrastructure has to be optimized so that server stays under control. The need of the hour is to plan infrastructure commencing from the network to storage for matching the requirements of the application. Traditional applications like Oracle Database and SAP may not be enough; hybrid cloud will be a reality soon.

Arvind Gautam, Business VP and Head TIS Business, Sify Technologies talked about Sify’s approach towards datacenters, how Sify has restructured in the last 5-7 years and play the role of new ICT player. The objectve of Sify is to create hybrid business models.

He also spoke about how the company created datacenter space and what all kind of assets they have created and how do they differentiate their spending on those assets.

According to Sandeep Majumdar, Chief of Operations-North, delivering the datacenter transformation presentation means different things to different people. So, the essence is driving into hybrid infrastructure. It could be on print at the client's premises at the company premises, datacenter or all done on a variety of roads.

The event was successfully concluded on the note that datacenters and transformation network is an imperative business call for IT companies. The meet was a part of Sify Technologies’ three-city CIO Meet series, the others being Hyderabad and Chennai.