Making IT Infrastructure Last: Unlocking Potential with Services

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Responsible businesses are constantly challenged to find ways to cut costs, improve profitability and maximise returns for investors.

Responsible businesses are constantly challenged to find ways to cut costs, improve profitability and maximise returns for investors. Another significant social responsibility of companies is their environment-friendliness ensuring the smallest possible carbon footprint is kept under consideration. With business infrastructure purchase and maintenance high on a list of unavoidable costs for a business, it is absolutely critical that businesses ensure that their infrastructure is robust and remains relevant to their business for as long as possible.

This is even truer and even more difficult when it comes to the IT infrastructure of an organization. While there was a time when businesses could afford to buy the latest and best technology, today the focus is more on discerning the value that a device, application, or solution can bring. In the recent times, companies have even preferred to buy in to less capital-intensive offerings like services to unlock greater potent

ial from existing technology. As was expected in the last financial year, Indian companies expenses on fixed assets rose by only seven percent, a modest figure when compared to the previous years growth of 37 percent.

A school of thought believes that IT in itself does not offer a competitive advantage to a business, simply because every other person or entity has access to the same commercially-available technology solution. The true competitive differentiation for the business lies in the creative application of suitable solutions for business problems. When an OpEx investment in licensing or activating certain elements of technology architecture can unlock greater value than a whole new CapEx outlay, it provides the business with motivation to uncover the hitherto unexplored capabilities of their infrastructure.

Coming back to the point about IT being an enabler of a cost advantage, the above illustration holds true even in the case of new technology pu