Insight of My Company and its IT Strategies The Shipping Corporation of India Ltd. (SCI), a Government of India undertaking, Navratna company today has a significant presence on the global maritime map with an annual turnover of about Indian Rupees 36.5 billion (approximately US$ 820 million). It is the country’s premier shipping line owning a fleet of 77 vessels of 3.15 million GT (5.57 million DWT).
IT Strategy: We have implemented all modules of ERP-SAP and specialised shipping packages across nine locations in India. Our worldwide agents and ships are accessing these software. We have our own data centre in Mumbai which is virtualised and have state of art IT infrastructure. We have implemented MPLS for connecting our branch offices.
Views on new technologies Cloud computing is gaining importance particularly the private cloud. Many organisations would be having hybrid cloud. Email, web filtering, web applications would be shifted to public cloud. SME would use cloud for competitive advantages. Virtualisation has become essential in todays data centre.
Resources
to Keep Updated with Latest Technologies I am updating myself in latest technologies by meeting IT vendors, attending seminars/conferences, and reading IT publications on web and magazines.
Team Size We have team of about 44 persons out which 10 persons are managing IT infrastructure and rest are managing SAP and other packages.
Biggest Pain Point Biggest pain point is managing the SLAs with multiple vendors so that business users are getting continuous IT service.
Technology to Address Pain Points To some extent technology can help in monitoring but commitment of vendors is very important.
Slowdown Impact on IT Innovation IT innovation is important all the time. IT helps in improving the productivity and reduce operational costs.
Challenges Faced The major challenges in security are integration of various tools and educating users about the importance of IT security.
Adoption of Cloud Policy We have implemented private cloud to some extents and planning the private cloud at disaster recovery site.
Role of Cloud Private cloud has helped in reducing footprint of servers and we intend to implement more virtualisations in our data centre.
Expenses on IT Systems Our annual IT budget is Rs.70 crores which includes IT infrastructure and AMC for hardware and software.
IT Leader – Manager First or Technologist First IT leader should be the manager first and should also have the technical and business knowledge.
Latest Technology We are exploring cloud, Big data, mobile computing, BYOD.
Advice/ Suggestion Sometimes new IT technology may not be successful but it could be tried on small scale. It is better to try rather than wait for its success.
