The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of digital readiness which helped companies and people’s lives to continue during as usual during this time. Building the necessary infrastructure to support the digitized world and stay current in the latest technology is necessary for any business to remain competitive in a post-COVID-19 world.
To see how organizations are ready to accept these changes, The Telegraph Online and We-Bridge solutions in association with NTT Netmagic hosted a CIO virtual session. Over 20 CIOs from different organizations took part in this session where various topics like digital transformation post-pandemic, adopting a digital first mindset, delivering exceptional user experience and enterprise applications on Google Cloud Platform were discussed.
Hear what our CIOs have to say:
Anil Valluri
Senior Director, Google Cloud
Anil is the Senior Director at Google Cloud and is responsible for driving business across various focus initiatives such as solution sets, digital natives and tech OEM partnerships. Anil Valluri is an industry veteran with over 30 years of experience in sales, marketing and technology leadership roles in the hi-tech Industry. Anil is an alumnus of Stanford University and believes in amalgamating lessons from leadership and entrepreneurship in what he does. Anil is a passionate audiophile with interest in analog audio and is an avid amateur golfer.
“Google touches multiple points in every person’s life. Google cloud is a 12 billion company, growingmalmost 100% every year. The job is not only to provide infrastructure but also satisfy customers as per their need and give value to them including speech API, vision API, AI, analytics, etc.
I had joined Google during COVID-19. I have not seen the Google office, did not meet any of my colleagues and not even my managers as I am operating from my home. It is completely a different and new experience for me. I don’t have any badge and not even any visiting cards. That’s the new way of doing things now and it becomes the new normal.
Anil Valluri
With every business and service embracing digitalization, customer experience has become center of the focus. It’s about convenience, time and place of choosing, device independence and above all a great user experience. Added to this use of advanced speech assist, Analytics, AI models and vernacular tech is making this rich UX and reach far and wide. Companies are benefiting from knowing who is using their service and in what way. They are able to profile their customers better and offer more relevant services and products. This pandemic has preponed adoption of digital transformation for many businesses and entities.
Today the keyword is agility and that comes from digital transformation. Ability to offer new services, fail fast, low cost of experimentation through DevOps models. Cloud is enabling us to save capex costs and pay for what we use with virtually unlimited scale in times of need. All of these ensure that we are ready to adapt fast and keep pace with changes. The entire promise of open source - which is flexibility, affordability, no lock in and security is being realized as most of the
technologies used in a cloud world are open source based.”
Malabika Saha
Ex-CIO, Graphide India
“The challenges faced by industry due to the pandemic are myriad. Economic slowdown needs to be given a strong boost in the form of various incentives from the government. From the viewpoint of enterprises, they should relook their business models and think how they can continue conducting their business from any part of the world with emphasis on work from home which might be the new normal. While there is no ideal roadmap, they should be in a position of wrap up the day being prepared to continue work from wherever they are the next morning. This translates to boosting the IT infrastructure. In India, the telecom industry needs to gear up and get their act together and be more customers sensitive.
Enterprises like NTT and Google Cloud need to educate the industry with new technology by organizing more workshops and discussions. Virtual meetings have shown that these are more effective than hiring hotels and hosting seminars.”
Manik Paul
CIO, Century Plyboards Ltd
“At Century Ply we are transforming the challenges into opportunities. The use of digital technology is leading the transformation journey. The company has used digital tools like SFA App, Dealers/Distributor App, Retailer database, e-gallery portal application, Sales Performance reviews to focus on both primary and secondary sales. A new culture of ‘Sharing and working together’ is evolved through various Google suites application – Meet, Google Drive and Google sheets.
At Century Ply, we have decided to gradually move all our applications to cloud. The users are encouraged to keep their own business critical data in their personal Google Drive. The company has also taken common cloud space at Google to store and share business data. The company is also exploring SDWAN solution to connect all factories, branch offices and sales offices.
The unprecedented challenges of pandemic and the super cyclone Amphan had convinced us to move our applications from On-premise to cloud. While the SAP was already moved to Netmagic Private Cloud, the mailing solutions and many of the home grown non-SAP applications were running from our Kolkata data center. All these applications were down for almost 15-20 days during cyclone Amphan. The DR was never designed and it majorly affected our business.
During the lockdown period, we have successfully migrated from On-premise ZIMBRA to Google suite of products and many of the applications were also moved to Public Cloud.
The company is very keen to move ahead with the digitization journey. We are exploring the RPA tools to automate some of the business process. The company also wants to use the IoT and ML to implement predictive maintenance and automatic quality checking. A new position is created – Head New Initiative to bring in more traction in this area. The company will soon begin the SAP S4 HANA journey.”
Partha Bhattacharyya
AVP-IT, Graphide India ltd
“Technology helped a lot in connectivity, virtual meeting, soft-based discussion and overall planning to run our business. Work from home concept is accepted by almost every company to run the business and support. We are already in SAP HANA landscape and we are planning to develop Fiori based application for analysis.”
Rajat Sikdar
Manager - IT and Customer Care Associate, Primarc Projects Pvt Ltd
“In mid-March, we have raised alarm by an advisory to the management that we should move our On-premises server to cloud as soon as possible. We migrated the whole system to Cloud within March 31.
The challenge was to provide the environment to the users. So we had categorized the users and provided the VPN login to users who were using Tally. The next requirement was all the meetings to be organized between the departments so that work from home can function in reality. We have organized a group of departmental champions and made them understand the process of Zoom meeting. Now the champions are organizing and moderating the meetings for their department
independently.
Our ERP ‘In4Velocity’ is a web based ERP which is integrated with Tally. Due to Tally's involvement in checking the data, we have to take the remote client software which is less secure. We are trying to get the total accounting package independently on the ERP.
We think we are blessed, as we have got a partner who is so obedient and keeps transparency in their work that every work with them is hassle free. We wish that as the companies like NTT - Netmagic and Google Cloud are now getting huge numbers of customers on cloud, they should reduce the rates as much as possible.”
Rajesh Dutta
GM-IT & CIO, Usha Martin Group
“Since I have joined Usha Martin Group recently, hence my major initiatives for last year were with Emami. It was a journey of 3 years where the key initiatives were in three major areas: Total revamp of the network infrastructure at plants and offices using SDWAN technology; Cloud Adoption for hosting business critical applications like E-way Bill ,Sales Force automation (SFA)and SAP Landscape migration; Developed a security framework for Emami Agrotech with selection of the best of breed products at end points to peripheral devices and email gateway solutions and MDM solution for device management; Active directory and Office 365 implementation with teams been used widely post COVID-19 situation and application level prioritization to enhance user experience; Ware house automation at plant using robotics automation to increase the throughput to supply chain.
At Usha Martin Ltd, there is e-Invoicing solution implementation, automated purchase order implementation, email gateway security solution and SAP analytics cloud solution and we are also planning to set up disaster recovery setup for SAP landscape.
As I was working in FMCG earlier and now at manufacturing, the major challenge we faced was the adoption rate until been forced to. The adaptability of MS Teams was the classic example for increase in adoption rate due to COVID-19. Hence the key to adopt digital initiatives is the adoption rate of the initiatives.
To deliver exceptional user experience cloud adoption would be the key along with secured and robust network infrastructure so that the users have seamless access and better experience from anywhere across the globe.”
