Vinita Gupta talked to CIOs and solicited their opinions regarding the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 as identified by Gartner.

Gartner had identified the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 at the beginning of the year. These technologies included Green IT, Unified Communications (UC), Business Process Management (BPM) and Virtualization 2.0, etc. Half-way through the year we decided to find out what CIOs were doing in these areas, their take on these technologies and the challenges faced by them in implementing the same.

Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction was of the view that these technologies would be adopted in different industries to differing extents. Some of them would also be adopted at different levels in different continents.He said, “While the awareness and pressure for Green IT is greater in the West than it is in India and China, I think that it will gain as much importance in India during 2008.”

Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO, Shopper’s Stop revealed that in the Indian context, of the 10 technologies mentioned by Gartner, not many had gained recognition as yet.They continued to remain trends which were yet to create an impact. Organizations had taken up the ‘green’ cause in the last few quarters, though with limited intervention within IT. The rest had been selectively explored, primarily virtualization and BPM. He was not including organizations that were pure play Internet companies that would have been influenced to a greater extent by the Web and social computing.

Green IT

While IT was helping organizations become more efficient and effective, it did have a certain negative impact on the environment.

Vijay Sethi, VP-Information Systems and CIO, Hero Honda Motors said, “Green IT has both a business advantage as it reduces the overall cost of ownership of equipment and also helps us fulfill our corporate social responsibilities.We, at Hero Honda, are governed by the philosophy of our Chairman Brijmohan Lall who said that we must do something for the community from whose land we generate our wealth. Starting from our IT policy where we specifically give focus to Green IT, we are taking significant measures to reduce the impact of IT on the environment.”

In a small way SCL-TVS Group had started adopting Green IT. It had taken the following initiatives:

-  Measurement of power spent on the data center
-  Conversion of all desktop monitors to TFT displays
-  Consideration of power consumption and heat dissipation as criteria while selecting servers
-  Consolidation of servers

T G Dhandapani Corporate CIO, SCL-TVS Group said, “Although power consumption in the data center is not significant enough to prioritize in a manufacturing company, as ideal IT professional we would like to monitor power consumption and reduce it wherever feasible.”