Last week at the Gartner ITExpo in Goa, I had the opportunity to discuss recent trends in business technology, here in India and around the world, as well Google’s commitment to its enterprise customers.
The theme of this year’s event was ‘Leading in a Digital World’. As someone who regularly meets with business leaders and CEOs in India to discuss how they can use digital technology to move their organizations into the future, one of the key trends I’ve noticed is that it’s the CEOs who bring their CIOs to these meetings that are at the helm of leading companies. These businesses recognize that technology has a major impact on not only the productivity, security and efficiency of their organizations, but also their future growth and culture.
In just a few years, we’ve seen some major changes in the attitude and approach to workplace IT — ‘Technology’ has risen from #6 to #2 in the list of factors that businesses expect to have the biggest impact. Not so long ago, many businesses were skeptical around moving businesses to the cloud. Fast forward to today and many businesses now realise that they can no longer expect their employees to use legacy technology at work. They need tools that facilitate collaboration.
The proliferation of cloud, mobile and social technologies in our personal lives has meant that people now expect more from their workplace IT and want to work the way they live — across multiple devices at any time, with the flexibility they’re used to having at home. Cloud based tools have collaboration built in. Unlike the last generation of software — which was designed to make you, as an individual, more productive — pure cloud products like Google Apps are designed for teams, making it easy to connect, communicate and collaborate in real-time.
Companies like Google are playing a major role in this “consumerization of IT.” More than 425 million people around the world rely on Gmail in their personal lives, and now more than 5 million businesses are using Gmail as part of Google Apps at work. It’s no longer startups and small businesses making the move to this more collaborative style of work either.
In India,companies like Voltas Limited, India Infoline, Jindal Steel, Indiamart and Hiranandani have made the switch to Google Apps. Cloud based mapping tools are also helping Indian businesses be more efficient and competitive too. Madras Cements use Google Maps to track their deliveries and see where their sales staff and competitors are across their network — they’re also able to share and access all this information from any device wherever they are. This birdseye view of their network and business has helped them improve their overall competitiveness and seen them increase their earnings by 7%.
Today, moving to the cloud is not a question — it’s inevitable. This is good news for IT staff, who don’t need to spend time maintaining servers and installing upgrades, and also for employees, since the cloud makes it easy to collaborate and get more stuff done quickly.
Posted by Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director, Google India
