Tronox

Lalit Panda

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

For manufacturing companies IT is an enabler of efficiency but not integral to the product offering as with financial or other verticals. Therefore it is imperative that IT delivers business efficiency at the lowest cost possible. Technology providers need to think of new ways to leverage flexible app based functionality which can be delivered and maintained much more cost effectively rather than huge multi-million-dollar software that needs to be upgraded periodically at additional cost. Complexity reduction is a key challenge for IT departments. In bringing together mobile, service oriented platforms and infrastructure and mobile apps, providers can look at creative ways of solving business problems and providing accurate information quickly and in an easily digestible manner.

My expectation would be for service providers to provide an easy way to scale on a global service delivery model with functionality that can be flexibly adapted to the individual needs of the business. I saw a mobile app recently which pulls data in an agnostic way from various backend systems on the fly and presents them in an intuitive front end. That is the sort of application software that I think will be effective in the future.

On the infrastructure side we would like to see the ability of providers to manage private clouds and help morph that into the public cloud seamlessly. This is an area where good opportunity is available and helping combine services and infrastructure in a cost effective way to facilitate the inevitable is a good way to assist organizations make the transition.

Technologies that give competitive edge

Technologies that quickly and cost effectively allow business unit managers to see and react to changes in their environment they need to manage. This has always been the key value of IT systems and to do that with systems instead of people continues to remain an opportunity. Searching technology within an organization’s systems can be impactful as well to hone in on the information, like a Google in the enterprise.

Overcoming challenges to make job easier

If all was fine IT would be run by the business. One of the issues I worry over is that with consumers becoming increasingly clued onto technology, business systems need to be as flexible, user friendly and customizable as consumer products are. Business systems continue to force people into rigid interfaces and the risk is that employees start working around the system with devices and products that are more comfortable to work with. I also worry about security of IP and how we can prevent data leakage.