The media and entertainment industry in India is today at the crossroads. The increasing demand to deliver content in all possible forms in every sort of imaginable device on a 24x7 basis, calls for putting in place a robust communication infrastructure. Ishwar Jha, VP, business technology of Zee Telefilms, one of the largest media conglomerates in the country, talks spoke to VOICE&DATA about the technologies deployed in Zee as well as how regulations and vendor influx are affecting the CIO's choice of a new technology. Excerpts:

CIOs are always under pressure from their bosses to get the best from the partners and also reduce IT and telecom costs. So how do you keep a balance between the two?
Being in the media and entertainment industry, buying technology is just one side of the mirror. Before a decision is taken to invest in any technology initiative, lot of research goes into the technology and the business requirement, and evaluation of all the benefits the technology will bring to the table. This helps us get better decisions on TCO and RoI much in advance.

Based on the above core principle, we start evaluating technology solution partners who can predict and sync the future roadmap, product feature enhancements, and the additional benefits that the technology product or solution will bring on table in future. Since we are able to identify and articulate our needs in the most cost effective way, there is a better realization of the benefits the technology will provide. Both tangible and intangible benefits are more or less measurable by the top management.

How imperative is the communication/network infrastructure to your business? How easy or difficult is it to manage them? What are some of the key issues you witness in your communication & network infrastructure?
Communication/network plays very vital role in our industry and is a very core component for business. Our business is highly dependent on the network. Our operations will get stalled if we do not have a proper network and communication facility. To explain, we have a studio in Mumbai from where live recording takes place and the content is directly transmitted to the broadcast center. This needs a robust, reliable and always on communication infrastructure.

Managing communication infrastructure of this scale requires 24X7 monitoring, redundancy and high availability. We give necessary care to each and every aspect of deployment to minimize the risk and get optimum availability.

What is the technology roadmap that you have for your company?
With the ongoing trends in the entertainment industry, there is a demand to provide content anywhere, anytime on any device. Currently, we are chalking out the strategy to be leaders for the next wave in entertainment technology. We want to provide our viewers preference based entertainment content anytime anywhere on viewer's preferred device. This entails a lot of research and pilots especially in the area of communication, content and customization as per user choice and needs. This is the next wave and the market is going to be inundated with such innovative applications and technologies.

What are the problems you face as a CIO and how do you address these problems?
Generally, vendors introduce technology and lack industry specific domain knowledge. Today, every industry vertical has its specific requirements and need customized solutions to fit in their industry type. Though there are a few vendors who cater to industry specific requirements but by and large there is lack of industry specific knowledge.

Most of the time, vendors upgrade and come out with new versions just to keep their balance sheet look more profitable and keep their investors happy. If they are constantly inundating the market with new products and phasing out the old systems and support, the users have to incur not only fresh costs for updated products but also face the problem of low RoI on the earlier investments.

Most of the vendors do not have well laid support call escalation process. In fact, now days whenever you log a support call, you receive an e-mail after 2-3 days stating 'Call status closed due to you not providing sufficient information or not available when our representative tried to reach you.' Whereas the real situation is that the vendor representative do not even follow up.

Another problem experienced by most CIOs is that the management understands only the business language and thinks about profit more than just technology. There is a constant challenge at hand to communicate in the language of business and explain how the specific technology will enhance the bottom line and provide more profit in the long run. To talk in millions and billions is a daunting task then communicating in bits and bytes.

What are the key trends in enterprise communication? What top 5 technologies are going to make a mark in future?
Wi-Fi, though still not completely present in India, is one technology that is here to stay. Wireless broadband over DTH platform is also an important technology. Extended enterprise with Web services and mobility enabled applications and infrastructure will also be important. Storage will be cheaper and will mine more data.

IP is gaining ground. What is the promise that IP has for your company and do you plan to deploy IP based technologies like IP Phones, MPLS based VPN etc.?
Yes. IP is certainly the single most evolution that has come and made its ground firm. Most of telecom and networking infrastructure will be on this platform. Today high number of networks have either migrated or are migrating to IP networks.

Are there still regulatory issues that hamper deployment of new communication technologies in India?
Though the Indian government has been very active in recent times there is still a lot more to be done by the government in technology and telecommunication front.

Government must think and be serious to make people wirefree. They have seen recently how mobility (without wire) has spread and reached to every nook and corner of the country. They must work around the broadband policy and promote the DTH based communication feature under broadband.

Information technology policy needs a definite re-writing as lots of dynamics that has taken place in past, clearly has significant influence on how future of technology is going to be impacted by these developments.

Minu Sirsalewale