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V. Rishi Kumar

Today's chief information officer has to bring the arms of different technologies and services together on one platform for coordinated action.

IMAGINE you are the chief information officer (CIO) of a large company. It is your responsibility to analyse your company's IT needs, what technology to go in for, how to put it all together, and at what cost. How do you go about your job?

For one thing, today's CIO must gather different technologies for different IT services onto one platform.

Consider this: Earlier, companies and their CIOs viewed their IT infrastructure as proprietary — wherein they bought or leased their hardware, wrote or licensed their applications. Today, companies have to go in for several complex and different technologies. So it's all the more necessary that the different arms of action are integrated into one structure.

Steve Faris, Vice-President, Asia-Pacific, BEA Systems, who was in India recently, spoke to eWorld about the shift in the way companies are approaching their technology requirements. If you analyse the responsibility of the current-day CIO of a large corporation, his task is nothing but like the spaghetti nightmare, which he has to unbundle, he says.

This means he has to move his company towards a simplified, scalable, common infrastructure. Instead of custom-built applications, the company must develop, piece by piece, a standardised approach on a single platform. Companies that are into telecom, banking and financial services are gradually moving towards this approach, as they are predominantly transaction-oriented. This approach, called Services-oriented Architecture (SoA), helps companies to bring together disparate systems and build functionalities on them. In this approach, different services are built into the IT infrastructure as its components.

It could develop into a plug-and-play model whereby the company taps its needs intelligently, and as it requires, thus taking care of the CIO's worries about application development, integration and the cost factor. According to Faris, India is at the heart of a global services revolution and there is a tremendous opportunity for growth based on the services-oriented architecture.

India has a clear lead in services but it has to watch out for competition from countries such as China, Vietnam and the Philippines, he says. As to how this approach will work, Faris says, for instance, as logistics and transportation companies in the region build more applications, particularly to streamline their supply chain networks, this architecture will help them leverage the existing infrastructure while building new approaches.

They do not have to discard the systems they have created painstakingly over the years, he explains.

Enterprise systems need to be more service-oriented, always running, constantly changing and easy to manage. This means, there has to be enterprise compatibility that eliminates application boundaries and delivers agile solutions, Faris says.

According to a Gartner study, says Faris, by 2007 more than 75 per cent of all applications software infrastructure licences would be sold by application platform suite vendors.

They will provide solutions to specific problems with the `hybrid software and service' business model.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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