A: The challenges for CIOs across the globe in the present economic scenario are similar. While the IT budgets of most companies have been kept flat or pruned, the onus of delivering more capabilities at lower costs still rests with their technology team.

At Cisco, IT has been looked more as a strategy for business growth. Therefore, the contribution of  IT is more relevant for the business and has benefiting impact across the organisation.

We have embarked on four major transformations that include globalisation of business, virtualisation, collaboration and mobility to deliver value for our customers as well as ourselves.

As  the workforce diversifies and becomes global in nature, IT has to diversify as well. To meet the needs of our diversified workforce, we have built centres of expertise which are cost-effective and efficient.

Our assets lie in our hardware, software and people who work with us. We globally wanted to optimise these assets and that is where virtualisation came into play. Our entire game plan in the datacentre space is hinged on virtualising the entire technology stack at the server level, besides delivering a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for all our applications.

Collaboration has also been one of  our key strengths and we use our teleservices solutions or WebEx capabilities to serve this purpose. We have deployed a wide range of communication and collaboration solutions that include telepresence (it creates a live, face-to-face meeting over the network empowering employees to interact with their colleagues, across the globe), network enhanced work space (equipped with Wi-Fi and LAN connections, video conferencing etc.) and virtual office space, which allow employees to work from home.

Mobility, on the other hand, addresses the needs of  the workforce, by supporting them on every communication device and providing then all platforms across the globe.

A: Our virtualisation story is dependent upon several factors. We have a global datacentre program  (GDCP)meant to ensure efficiently run our datacentres, and it operates on three critical levels.

The  first  level addresses  the capacity  shortage within our datacentres.We realised that given the momentum of  our business, our datacentres would get utilised to its maximum capacity. To address this demand, we needed capabilities to increase this capacity without betting on hardware solutions. The first phase of  our datacentre plan was to deliver this incremental capacity to the business.

The second part of  our plan deals with resilience. This means that we had to create datacentres that are flexible so that they are available to us and our clients. If  one has to virtualise the entire stack, it is important that flexibility is built in the infrastructure.

The third aspect is to transform the business processes which reside in the datacentre environment, be it a configuration management service or an order management service. It is necessary to have flexible processes so that applications are faster and ready for web services such as SOA.

Today, we have virtualised around 30 to 40 percent of  our hardware, and we would migrate all of  our applications in a virtualised environment within next 18-24 months.

A: As mentioned earlier, we are in the process of virtualisation at multiple levels, and this is a difficult task for any organisation. I do not think that any organisation has virtualised its entire technology stack.

Another challenge is to know people who occupy our network, their role and identity, the assets they would need and the services they would leverage. So, ensuring security and compliance is high on our agenda.

Finally, as the IT industry moves towards services management concepts, the challenge would be to calculate the total cost of a service, especially when some services are delivered from within the company while others from third party providers.

A: The expectation from IT is to do more with less. CIOs will clearly have to  identify their most critical business projects; flag them off and defer the rest.

At Cisco, we have selected some IT strategic imperatives which are closely tied to our business. A significant amount of  our investments go towards the implementation of  these strategic imperatives. This does not mean that we would not focus on other IT activities. What it means is that a majority of  our hardware, software and people resources will be aligned with these key initiatives.

For example, portfolio optimisation and management has proved to be a key differentiator for us in our migration towards driving costs down and delivering value and growth.