Recently VMWare organized an Open Forum on Business Innovation at Nagpur. I am glad that I was invited to share the discussion panel with other IT Managers from leading industries of Vidarbha some of them being Mr. Sanket Joshi, Head IT, Vicco Laboratories & Mr. Pramod Pampatwar, Director Technical, Jhulelal Institute of Technology. The forum was moderated by Mr. Vikas Gupta, Head IT (Spend Management) at Essar Group.
The open forum began with a discussion around how SME/SMB entities have leveraged their IT expertise to develop unique and simple solutions for their own industry domains. The next part of the discussion was about the current challenges that are being faced by industries when it comes to growth and CAPEX/OPEX. Multitudes of IT solutions for each challenge are being made available especially with huge growth in Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing. It puts tremendous pressure on IT managers in terms of technically and commercially evaluating, selecting, procuring and implementing IT solutions under stringent timelines.
The forum closed with VMWare personnel throwing light on the solutions their company could provide. One interesting point to note was that for large scale IT Setups 100 percent Cloud or 100 percent In-House server and storage solutions may not be a possibility and a fine balance will be needed depending upon the criticality of data, the size of data, the internet bandwidth available, and operational costs of Cloud-vs-Inhouse infrastructures.