Imagine your organization purchases a system that makes the company’s CFO and the CIO, both happy. Is that possible? Rarely, we see a CFO and a CIO on the same page for an IT purchase. Now, the game can change forever with the introduction of IBM PureSystems.

As mentioned in a recent Forbes Article, which interviewed Ken Muckenhaupt, IBM’s systems and technology group CTO for financial services, who explained the drivers for IBM’s investment in PureSystems. “One is legacy, and not just old systems, but the legacies of mergers and acquisitions which have often left banks with two, three or four of every sort of system from HR to CRM, ALM to AML.”

Ken Muckenhaupt also says “we see a trend toward consolidation — some of it is replacement of applications or upgrading them, some replacement is being driven by past M&A activity. Some clients are looking to control costs through consolidation.” He goes on to add that “Pure is built with integrated provisioning and virtualization, and the IBM starter kit for cloud and it is a very scalable track system.”

Ken concluded in reference to the drivers for choosing PureSystems: “The business drive is strong enough that the IT staff can’t fight it.”

The primary objective of PureSystems is to reduce costs of banks running legacy systems, thereby making innovation a possibility. Lower hardware costs, less to pay in software licensing, plus savings in the real estate, power and cooling are possible by replacing 100 to 200 Sun servers or x86 servers with two or three PureSystems. The CFO will appreciate the reduction in costs and the CIO will appreciate the leeway PureSystems can give them to be proactive and innovative!

You can avail more information about PureSystems here.

The tax gap in the United States has always been a matter of concern. Therefore, in order to bridge that tax gap, the US has come out with a law known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The tax gap is the difference between theoretically due taxes and the actual collection of taxes. FACTA is aimed at foreign financial institutions to prevent tax evasion by US citizens-And will have a significant impact on US based or foreign companies with US clients or assets.

The new law will significantly affect the whole value of banking, and not just the areas of tax withholding or reporting.

How can Decision Management help you here?

Therefore, this brings us to the point that decision management is critical in enabling technology to manage FATCA. In fact, decision management is the only way to efficiently screen the hundreds of thousands of attributes related to clients, accounts and transactions and generate automatic reports. And because more changes can be expected to FATCA in the coming days, decision management will allow for changes to be made quickly to ensure compliance.

This legislation directly affects investments of NRIs, who are also taxpayers in the US. It goes onto affect Indian financial institutions, as they would handle investments of NRIs. Under the provisions of FATCA, the taxpayer or the financial institutions holding foreign investment has to give all the details to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) which is the tax law enforcement agency in the US. The disclosure needs to be made irrespective of the size of assets.

Therefore, the leaders of Indian financial institutions need to consider implementing Decision Management solutions in the near future. Decision Management can take care of a lot of anxiety that comes out of compliance and regulations. For more information on how to become a decision-centric organization, please visit here.

You can find more details about FATCA by visiting this link.

(Photo Credit: http://www.seniorliving.org/)

We have been writing blog posts covering enterprise mobility to emerging technologies right here, on this blog. The following blog posts have been the most performing posts for the month of August 2012. Let us revisit them:

Technology in Banking

The Cost of Enterprise Mobility

The future of Mobile Apps

Blueworks live: Simplifying Business Processes

You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group. Moreover, you can like us on facebook.

The mobile device that you carry has evolved to an extent that it has been transformed into being the most important device exposed to humans. This has been possible because in the 21^st century, communication protocols and enabled devices have advanced greatly. The surge in mobile device adoption has prompted enterprises to go-mobile, primarily because the customers are going mobile. This is highlighted in the fact that mobile device shipment grew by 11.1% in 2011 as compared to 2010, globally.

The transition to a mobile environment demands greater agility from an organization. The potential customer reach has made the growth of mobile nothing less than revolutionary. The organizations have responded well to the new channel and there are continuously evolving marketing campaigns that focus on the mobile consumer. Organizations have embraced mobility internally.

Clearly, enterprises have been proactive in their adoption to Enterprise Mobility. In fact, 2012 has been a year of mobile adoption which has been driven by consumer apps and enterprise apps. This revolution clearly indicates that the future of technology services industry will grow beyond services. It’s approaching a combination of services solutions and platforms in the world of mobile.

The growth in the consumer space is driven by the variety of platforms available in today’s market. This has significantly contributed to the growth of mobile and the usage of smart phones.

We welcome your thoughts and opinions on the “Evolution of the Mobile Enterprise.” You can can also join teh conversation on LinkedIn. 

In the 21^st century, the world has become more complex with the advent of disruptive technologies. With the ushering of the new era of technologies and business processes, the question is how we can achieve our business goals in times of increasing complexity? The answer lies in Business Agility.

Business agility solutions help any organizations innovate, transform and grow. The increasing IT workloads lead to the adoption of business agility as an approach. The critical point that works for business agility is that it increases the development speed and the delivery of innovative applications. It also enables an organization to quickly adapt to change with optimized processes and decisions. Therefore, the optimization of business operations can lead to increased visibility, governance and collaboration.

Innovative applications should have the ability to deliver a user experience that is reliable, secure and consistent across multiple platforms. The business benefits of agile solutions can be broken down in the form of “Extend, Transact, and Optimize.”

• Extend applications, processes, decisions and services to engage innovators to reach new channels, customers and markets.
• Transact with process integrity, scale and speed. This does not depend on locations, protocols or devices.
• Optimize business operations and lifecycle in a fast changing world.

The game is always changing. The approach needs to change to realize the ideal business outcome in this new era.

More Information about Business Agility Solutions IBM WebSphere can be found here.

We look forward to your thoughts and viewpoints. You can also join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Contribution by: Supriya Suriyanarayanan

As we all begin to realize the potential of smart-phones at work, companies are evaluating the adoption of a ‘bring your own device’ strategy to manage employee engagement. But, are employees really asking for a BYOD culture? Are you still stuck in a single device across organization rut – while enviously looking at your peers picking a mobile device they are most comfortable with?

As an employee, you should really be leading the call for a BYOD culture in your organization. Granted, it has its cons, primarily with security, but with every ‘emerging technology’ there is a phase of risk and growth that organizations will evolve and adapt to. And there are as many benefits, if not more, for an employee with the BYOD trend than it is for our organizations.

So, why should you encourage your company to adopt the enterprise mobility culture?

Social business – nobody works in isolation. We all have networks that we reach out to interact, delegate, support, learn, teach and make decisions that affect our daily job. How we interact is also not limited to official e-mails alone. Social media interactions have brought cloud computing to the end user. A well-thought, end-to-end enterprise mobility strategy helps companies build a thriving network by extending social collaboration wherever they work

Access to real-time data, anytime, anywhere – Companies are using different types of software to track and analyze business; access to data then becomes a key imperative. With mobile technology, you don’t need to be in an office to find data and use it. You could be in a meeting with your agency and want to update them on the latest sales figure by product categories – Sure, why not? And the familiarity with a mobile device allows you to use the various features on your phone to add, edit and present the data in the most effective manner.

Field force connectivity – For many years, field teams were required to trek back to their respective offices, file reports and claims and then, head back to work. Of course, the arrival of laptops eased this to an extent, but not the way ‘enterprise mobility’ can. A seller on the field can update a deal status in real-time with relevant information, while waiting for his next meeting or check the stock status before committing an order to a customer, right there and then.

Work-life balance – While many argue that enterprise mobility actually shifts the work-life balance in favor of work, I disagree. Mobility is a choice and the extent to which you rely on mobility is a choice that is entirely yours to make.

Ultimately, all of the above has the potential to contribute to our productivity – with devices we are comfortable with, information at our fingertips, making better connections at work and allowing us the power of choice. Whether we make the most of it – it’s a choice we have to make!

Blogger Info: Supriya Suriyanarayanan joined the India-South Asia Marketing team as the WebSphere Marketing Manager in January 2012. Prior to that, she worked in IBM in a GMU role managing the marketing for BPM and Decision Management for the growth markets. She has about 8 years of work experience and about 3 years experience in the IT industry.  You can follow her on twitter.

Technology growth is not new to India. The growth of mobile is the testimony to the fact. India is the world’s 2^nd largest market for mobile devices. Whether it’s the growth of PCs when it first came out or the adoption of portable devices like laptops/tablets, we have seen an incredible rate of user adoption in India. Therefore, when the reputed research firm, Gartner predicts that the Indian app development software market will reach more than USD 227 million in 2012 – translating into an increase of 22.6 percent over 2011, it doesn’t surprise at all.

The usage rate of mobile apps has shot up over the roof in recent times, with the growing penetration of the smart phone into the pockets of the Indian consumer. The growth will be driven primarily by evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source platforms.

The main reason for increase in application development spending is because of the need for application modernization and drive for making businesses more agile. The other factors that are responsible for growth in the Indian Application Market are because of emerging technologies like cloud, mobility and social computing.

The IBM Worklight mobile app development platform also provides an open, comprehensive and advanced mobile application platform for smart phones and tablets, helping organizations of all sizes to efficiently develop, connect, run and manage HTML5, hybrid and native applications.

We look forward to your viewpoints on the topic. You can also join the conversation on LinkedIn. 

Sources: Information Week: Cloud, Mobility and Open Source will drive Indian application development market.

When we associate any activity with the cost involved, there is a sense of ambiguity that prevails around the world, whether it’s buying a projector or implementing enterprise mobility solutions in an organization.  Recently, the Enterprise Mobility Exchange surveyed a global network of mobility experts who citied Cost to as the most important barrier to implementing Enterprise Mobility Solutions.

The survey threw up a set of interesting results which are as follows: ⁽¹⁾

• 76% of enterprise mobility practitioners highlight cost as most significant barrier to investment in new solutions
• 86% value product demos above all when selecting a new solution provider
• Improving workforce productivity is main driver behind mobility initiatives for 38% mobility practitioners

We shall focus on the cost of enterprise mobility and deep-dive into the reasons that cause the cost to shoot up significantly. Well, the three major components where cost might show an upward trend are Infrastructure and software. Any technology change accompanies a huge burden on existing infrastructure which is the primary driver for costs. In the case of enterprise mobility solutions, networks need to be put in place along with a variety of servers which support the network. Similarly, a separate set of software needs to be installed across the enterprise which supports mobility solutions which will be implemented.

All of this elaborate alignment in software and infrastructure naturally shoots up the cost while implementing an enterprise mobility solution. But we still believe that the cost involved         is only a tiny hole in the big picture of advantages that accompany enterprise mobility which improves collaboration and productivity with anytime, anyplace access.

For more information on IBM’s solutions for the mobile enterprise, please visit here.

We look forward to your thoughts and opinions. You can also join the conversation on LinkedIn.

⁽¹⁾  Survey results taken from the Enterprise Mobility Exchange Survey press release which can be found here.

Agility is defined as the power to move quickly and easily. The need for being agile is more imminent now than ever before simply because too many things are happing at one time. The single-most benefit that one can get from the adoption of the concept of agility is transformation. You transform as a person one you become agile and the business transforms once it adopts Business Agility into the core of its business processes.

Technologies over time have evolved so the business processes and systems have to keep up with the evolution. The only way keep innovating and transforming is to keep the business processes and systems up to date with the changes happening in the technology space. The competition keeps every business on its toes and whether it’s the adoption of cloud computing or starting up a new social media presence, optimizing processes and find ways to manage these processes have become the competitive requirement. Therefore, business agility solutions have the capabilities to drive the business toward a changing path.

Customers have become more demanding than ever before and it’s absolutely necessary to find new ways to reach out to them and retain them. Whether its personalized services or mobile availability, they have to be delivered quickly and securely. Organizations need to embrace agility by increasing the rate of communication and collaboration, and improve decision-making processes. The end result of embracing business agility for an organization is business transformation which will be realized over a period of time.

To know about how business agility solutions will help you manage change, click here.

We would love to hear your thoughts/opinions/queries on business agility. To join the conversation, you can also head over to the Agile Business group on  LinkedIn. 

If you remember the good old days of the very first mobile handsets in the market and how it ushered in a whole new paradigm in the telecom space, globally. It completely changed the possibilities of telecom. That was circa 2002-03. Mobile devices have been revolutionized ever since. But the first two years of the mobile handset saw an unprecedented growth because people realized the potential of the device. Circa 2012: The mobile device can do practically much more than ever before, thanks to the advent of mobile apps which are the genesis of a Smartphone (the advanced version of a mobile handset).

In the past two years, there have been a humongous number of applications in the market. Currently the count of mobile across different platforms is way over 1 million, easily. Apple clearly got a head start in the mobile apps market with exclusive apps for the iPod and the iPhone, there after came the Android platform, which really upped the ante, as far as the volume of mobile apps are concerned. More and more mobile apps have invaded the market and its bonanza time for consumers. The other platforms or app stores in this space is BlackBerry-App store and Nokia-Ovi store.

Well, everybody across the world might be wondering, if so much can be achieved in two years, then the future should be really exciting as of now. We know that devices are becoming more powerful with path breaking technologies like NFC (Near Field Communications) that are being integrated. A variety of content is being delivered through apps: Be it business, productivity, games, download apps, or news in general.

The number of apps in each category is staggering and continues to grow every day. There are a number of content aggregating apps as well. Whether you might have realized or not, these apps have reduced our ability to think, to a large extent. Nobody knows how the future looks, but in the short-term, expect better quality apps as app development platforms have improved. Moreover, you may see more augmented reality built into these apps in the future.

We would love to hear from you: What’s your opinion on the future of mobile apps?  You can also join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Photo Courtesy: Doug Belshaw