The idea that the role of the CIO has now gone beyond technology and innovation related issues, and has now reached the domains of strategy and planning. Days are gone where IT was considered to be the cost center and treated as an isolated entity. The CIO’s role has become more challenging with the emergence of new technologies, which have a critical influence on the growth of any business organisation. CIOs are no longer technocrats, they are being looked at as business enablers. They are expected to take risks, and they need to have extensive knowledge of planning and strategy.”

In the early days of his career, my role was confined to looking after Zapak business, which was a high growth segment. Over a period of time, other groups got formed into the organisation to manage different lines of business. Later on the company realised that there are many entities in the group that are using similar technology to reach out to their customers, and then I was given the charge of developing the IT strategy for the entire group.

My new responsibility was to incorporate technology for bringing agility to the business, so that there is improvement in the time-cycle in which we place our products into the market and the cost of doing business is also manageable. I have consolidated the entire stack of online businesses from the traditional DC to an one cloud platform. We have successfully performed technology migration to private cloud. By successfully completing this project, we are able to reduce 80% of the server footprint, and have eliminated 70% of the operating costs, with permanent elimination of Capex requirements.