10/12/2012 07:37:00 PM
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MUMBAI, INDIA: Muralidharan Ramachandran, Syntel Inc’s CIO talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about the company's overall IT landscape, how Syntel has adopted BYOD, Cloud and its challenges, new IT implementations and key areas of innovation and R&D activities
Excerpts…
CIOL: Syntel is a large sized BPO and IT services company with many offices and delivery centers across locations. Can you brief us about the company's overall IT infrastructure landscape?
Ramachandran: Syntel has development centers across Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon and Chennai in India and three offsite development centers in the US, besides sales offices around the globe. Syntel has consolidated its data centers in its campuses in Pune, Mumbai and Chennai in India.
All the delivery centers and sales offices are interconnected using high speed TDM and MPLS links. Syntel has implemented data center virtualization and currently over 60 per cent of its workload is virtualized. The entire infrastructure is optimally configured with redundancies to ensure that availability of the infrastructure is consistently over 99.8 per cent.
Syntel has its multi-tenant Global NOC based out of Pune and the entire critical infrastructure across all the global locations including connectivity with its clients are monitored from here. Syntel leverages ITIL V3 compliant processes to deliver business services to its business users.
CIOL: BYOD (Build Your Own Device) and cloud have been the popular trends among IT companies and organizations over the world. So how open is Syntel towards BYOD and Cloud? Is there any specific corporate IT policy in place with regard to employees, BYOD and cloud technology?
Ramachandran: Syntel has already adopted BYOD and has extended it today to key customer facing users for access to email infrastructure.
The vendor independent approach has provided the flexibility to business users to use device of their choice. Today the environment already supports BlackBerry OS, iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows mobile environments.
Syntel has plans to upgrade and strengthen its infrastructure and roll it out to a larger set of employees. Syntel believes that cloud technology will revolutionize the way IT services will be delivered. Syntel is already in the final stages for deployment of its internal private cloud.
CIOL: Though the BYOD trend is highly popular largely in context to overall cost to organizations, what kind of challenges does it throw for CIOs?
Ramachandran: The key challenge that BYOD throws to CIOs continues to be security. This is more relevant to IT and BPO services companies where besides the challenge of protecting intellectual property of its enterprise, the challenge is with protecting the IP of its customers and convincing them of the effectiveness of controls during due diligences and audits conducted by them.
Challenge is also posed in the form of the requirement of convincing its GenY workforce of differentiated sets of policies arising out the need to adhere to customer contracts and security policies for certain type of work, which involves access to confidential customer data.
CIOL: Can you brief us on the latest IT or tech implementation carried out at Syntel recently that has helped the company in terms of cost-saving and other benefits?
Ramachandran: Syntel uses Microsoft Lync as a platform for promoting internal collaboration. Apart from the out of the box integration that Lync provides with Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, Syntel has integrated the Lync platform with its Polycom MCU infrastructure, thus providing seamless integration between its room based and desktop based video collaboration solutions.
Syntel has also integrated Lync with its Avaya telephony infrastructure. This has ensured that Syntel has seamlessly integrated its once disparate presence and chat, telephony and video infrastructure for enhancing collaboration amongst users.
The Lync platform is leveraged both internally and also externally for collaborating with third parties. With all these enhancements and implementations, Syntel has started seeing cost benefits and expects significant reduction over the period of time.
CIOL: As a CIO, which are the new technologies that you are evaluating for future deployment in Syntel?
Ramachandran: Syntel continuously evaluates works on upgrading and implementing technologies which will help reduce cost and also develop new capabilities.
All initiatives are evaluated against its impacts on cost, increasing revenue and / or enhancing customer and employee satisfaction.
Key technologies being evaluated and/or in implementation state include expanding implementation of desktop virtualization, private cloud, BYOD, analytics and mobility.
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