WiredScribe: The Business of IT

The networking products market in India has come a long way and looks set for rapid growth thanks to a slew of newer, scalable and more efficient technologies. ‘The network is the computer’, said Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems. The import of this now famous statement has never been truer than in the context of our own time. Whether large or small, computers are almost never standalone devices; networking is an essential constituent. Studies have shown that 30 percent of a company’s cost is on networking. Though the global economic meltdown saw a slight slowdown in the networking space with more and more organisations setting up LAN and WAN infrastructure, we have also seen the demand for network hardware rebound. These devices no longer remain the exclusive domain of a few large corporates but have become an essential part of our everyday life. High-speed access to the Web is now coveted by all including the small and medium enterprises and the small-office-home-office...

As mobile devices proliferate and electronic gadgets get richer features, somebody has to design the IP that manufacturers can cobble together to get to the market in a jiffy. We profile some of India’s development hot shops in the area of embedded systems that cater to this market. Ittiam systems A phone that automatically transfers calls to the phone closest to you, alerts your cellphone to inform you that the sale you have been waiting for has come through or an embedded chip in your forearm. Some of these gadgets are still on the drawing board but a lot of this technology is already available. Gartner predicts that by 2004, a billion mobile devices will be in use worldwide.  With the vast potential market out there it isn’t surprising that many Indian technology start-ups are focusing on mobile computing and wireless devices. The market for digital signal processor (DSP) equipment may be dominated by giants such as TI, but the same can’t be said about the DSP software...

If you wish to have a solution or technology to integrate your disparate storage devices and manage them as one logical unit, it may be storage virtualisation technology that you are looking for. Gopal Jain is the CIO of a large organisation that has just completed two acquisitions in quest for growth that defies the rate at which the industry is growing. But while everyone—right from the top management to the stock analysts are impressed with the inorganic growth route, Jain is still worried and perplexed. Perplexed, because as the CIO of the company, he has to not only integrate two diverse IT systems but make sure that there are no hitches in exchanging data between the diverse systems that are not interoperable. Jain’s case is not unique and many Indian companies today face the same problem while integrating diverse storage systems from different vendors. Each player offers his own proprietary products and solutions. And more often than not, these products are not interoper...

This is one debate that has raged on for years—is the mainframe dead, and is client/server king? Events like 9/11, which demonstrated the need for fault-tolerant computing, have re-ignited the relevance of this debate. For instance, other than traditional mainframe users like the banking-financial services sector and manufacturing behemoths, even unlikely candidates like universities and the travel industry have been choosing mainframes over newer technologies. Says V L Mehta, director of IT at Mukand Engineers , “More than 70 percent of the world’s data still resides on mainframes. The market is growing in terms of revamping the older mainframes and adding new features and software to the oldies. Also, the new mainframes are smaller, cheaper, more powerful and e-business ready, so the market is growing steadily.” The advent of minicomputers in the seventies and desktop PCs in the eighties was expected to ring the death knell for mainframes, which were considered to be large, infl...