By Tom S. Noda
Published in the CWP February 2010 issue

With IT now becoming relevant to the business and its products, CIO and IT administrators today are increasingly under pressure to run the IT department as a profit center. But to turn the IT center into a money-making machine, CIOs will need technology itself to help them make a 180-degree turnaround in the way their IT organizations function.

During the 2009 yearend Computerworld Philippines CIO Forum held in December, vendors Avaya, Emerson and EMC, share strategies and tactics on how IT managers can achieve an IT department that not only saves on cost but can also contribute to business earnings.

For Jojo Abudancia, regional solutions manager of Avaya Philippines, an IT department can serve as a profit center by attracting and retaining customers using new business communications technologies. And some of the results, he notes, would be to reduce infrastructure costs, delivery of business agility and the securing of loyal customers.

“You must use communications instead of communications using you,” Abudancia says, adding Avaya has now come up with solutions designed for open, flexible reference architecture for cost-effective and agile communications that allow business users to serve customers better.

Abudancia introduced the new Avaya Aura, a suite of applications having an open SIP (session initiation protocol) at its core. And this SIP called Session Manager is not limited to Avaya’s infrastructure alone.

“Since this SIP is an open standard, we can use other brands, like Cisco or Nortel. In some cases, we can actually integrate even lower technologies like old versions of Avaya,” he explains. “The advantage is we now have a chance to integrate all of them and have a seamless enterprise experience. We can connect these technologies into the SIP cloud based on the Session Manager and make them have a single dial plan.”

Abudancia adds users can also have shared application on top of the SIP cloud such as voice mail or conferencing, IVR systems, and that customized applications can be made available throughout the enterprise.

“If you’re using different technologies like Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, chances are they have different voice mails. If you will integrate that into one and having that voicemail server on top of the cloud, then you reduce the number of systems that you manage and make it available for the whole enterprise. And once you have that consolidated network then customer experience is going to be much better because you are using the same application throughout the network,” Abudancia explains.

Meanwhile, Russel Perry, director for marketing of Emerson Network Power in Asia- Pacific, talked about preparing one’s IT infrastructure for virtualization or understanding from start and finish the criteria role of the data center.

Perry says the ability to virtualize is limited by one’s technology environment and Emerson can help by making an IT group understand clearly the infrastructure objectives and get involved with a high density computing environment.

“Virtualization alone really requires a framework. So what we will do is to provide you with a framework within which virtualization can fit. The benefit is you can then enable efficiency and lower operation cost in terms of CAPEX. The framework we’re talking about is to look at the total operational cost,” Perry says.

Perry says that among the issues to consider in order to determine if one’s department is ready for virtualization are: capacity and availability planning; power issues such as usage of a centralized UPS system or multiple small UPS; cooling systems; monitoring management; and after sales support.

Perry announces Emerson will have a suite of new product releases by early this year which will involve cooling, optimization, energy cooling for high density, and power distribution.

Meanwhile, Ronald De Guzman, senior technology consultant of RSA – the security division of EMC, discusses securing information in order to secure profit.

De Guzman stresses that CIOs should have a systematic approach to security and must make it information-centric, which is focused on managing information risk.

“In implementing a security initiative, it doesn’t always have to be a big bang or shotgun approach. It should be focused on the risk,” De Guzman relates.

He shares four steps to take when it comes to information risk management: define the policy (classification and control policy); discover/detect; implement and enforce; and monitor and report.

De Guzman says that the number one assignment is to find out where the sensitive information is and to classify it. The creation of security policy then follows wherein one can now implement the controls.

“It’s not like you come in and implement the security policy blindly. You cannot secure what you do not know and you can’t secure if you don’t know where they are,” De Guzman says. “So it involves these processes, policy creation, discovery and classification. Afterwards, the implementation for control follows and you should be able to allow yourself to monitor and audit what you have done.”

And in securing information infrastructure, De Guzman says that an IT department should ensure that the right people have access to the right information over a trusted infrastructure.

“The strategy is actually a repeatable process. Overtime you will acquire new things like applications and that would change the landscape again. So you should try to, in a much smaller scale, do the whole process again. Security is a journey, and it’s a continuous process,” De Guzman emphasizes.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Cloud: Waiting to Descend or Forever Up in The Air?
• Moving Through the Supply Chain
• Data Recovery– Riding Through The Chaos
• Mitigating the Risks
• Greening the Workplace

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