The Hindu Business Line : `BTO for optimising business outcomes'

"While business continues to look at information technology as complex and complicated, information technology needs to emphasise its new role as an enabler of outstanding business outcomes," Mr Graham Sowden, President, Mercury Asia Pacific, said while delivering the keynote address at `Mercury World Australia,' the company's annual event held in Melbourne last week. The theme for this year is `Optimise Outcomes.'

Pointing out that information technology is evolving from its traditional role, that of an application builder and infrastructure manager, to delivering efficient business services, he said that businesses could achieve their desired outcomes by implementing Business Technology Optimisation (BTO).

Organisations deploy applications across networks. On the one hand, the applications are constantly evolving from the IT side, giving out more efficient ways of doing business. On the other hand, business needs are making their own demands on IT, necessitating further changes in the way their applications run. Any change in the the existing way things are run has a potential risk involved, at times giving out unpredictable results. Recent suspension of morning trading on Tokyo stock exchange is an example. So, with all the complexities involved in living with it, are businesses becoming wary of IT? Replying to a specific question whether there existed a `disconnect' between business and IT at the moment, Mr Sowden said that an IT risk might translate into a business risk these days, resulting in a negative business outcome, and that businesses could overcome this by optimising their IT processes. Mr Jonathan Rende, Vice President of Product Marketing, pointed out that this is where Business Technology Optimisation comes into picture. "Today want their IT infrastructure and any further investment in it to be totally aligned with their business goals. They want to do more with less (in IT). BTO will enable them to do it."

The two-day conference in Australia brought together a mix of users, experts and industry leaders. Held in four tracks, the sessions had senior Mercury executives and the company's key partners talking about how the company's latest suite of products ensure an end-to-end deployment of BTO and enable businesses get the from their applications and IT infrastructure.

This event will be followed up by a seven-city road show in India, Mercury Technology Meet, this week. "This is to help bridge the lack of understanding of `quality' in IT that exists in business today," Mr T. Srinivasan, country head of Mercury India, said.