“Digital Transformation brings more efficiency, creates new revenue streams, and improves customer experiences”
Som Satsangi, Managing Director, HPE and Vijay Sethi, Chief Information Officer, Hero MotoCorp Ltd, explain why businesses need to ride the digital wave
Gone are the days when buying a two-wheeler meant going to the dealership to find out about the options available in the market. Today, by the time you reach the showroom, chances are that you have already done the homework on the brand and the model you want to purchase. Twowheeler sales have increased manifold, and the automotive industry has to transform its backend to keep up with changing customer trends. As new models go from drawing boards to production in months, rather than decades, going digital has become the need of the hour. “Technology is changing the world. Companies that don’t go digital will not survive in the long run. Products are different, customers expect a very different kind of response, and ecosystems within the organisations have changed; digital, to my mind, is not about whether companies should do or not do. It’s a question of when I can do it. It has gone from being optional to mandatory,” says Vijay Sethi, Chief Information Officer, Head Human Resources and Corporate Social Responsibility, Hero MotoCorp. As the demand for value-added vehicles soar, auto companies are under pressure to keep up with changing needs and also ensure profitability. “Any intervention that you do in any organisation has to be also driven by financials. It is not about charity or experimentation. It is about delivering value to the business. The newer pay-as-you-use technologies have made it simpler for us to digitize as you don’t have to put in too much CapEx,” Sethi adds. Financials apart, there are two other key factors in the digitization process – the choice of technology to be adopted and the enhancement of the competency of the people who are going to use it. Companies such as Hero are fast digitalizing their processes. From a time when most data use to be stored on-prem, to storing some on prem and some on cloud - the future seems to lie in technologies such as Hybrid IT. “We started out with dumb terminals attached to huge data centres where all the computing was done. From there, we moved to the PC era, where a lot of processing was done at the PC end. But a major part still happened at the data servers. Now, with the advent of technologies like IoT and analytics, edge computing has taken on in a big way. The end customers want a speedy response, and you can’t really wait to send data back to a server,” Sethi further says. Solutions providers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) predict that all data processing is going to shift to edge. “By 2020, it is estimated that 80% of data will be generated in edge and this will never go to a data centre or cloud. It will be analyzed and processed at edge itself. This makes edge computing very critical,” said Som Satsangi, Managing Director, HPE. “HPE is working very closely with all our large enterprises to help them on the core data centre side, the intelligent edge, and to bring a seamless experience and deliver everything as services anywhere in the globe,” he adds. “We believe that all enterprises are going to have a hybrid infrastructure. They will all have something on-prem, which is their own cloud, and also something off-prem, which is on a cloud provided by a service provider such as Microsoft. How to divide how much data goes where is very important, and this is something organizations end up missing. been This helping is an all area large where enterprises,” HPE has Satsangi further says. Recently, the company has made two core acquisitions - CTP and Red Pixie – to aid this. Industrial revolution 4.0 has also been a boon for the auto sector. “Technologies like Industry 4.0 have been very transformative for the auto industry in India. We need to look into two things - enhancing productivity at reduced costs and ensuring that quality goes up. And, Industry 4.0 is actually impacting both,” Sethi says. But making the switch is not always so simple. It may take several attempts before companies get the right technology that fits their needs. “According to a McKinsey report, only 20% of companies are able to switch to digital technologies successfully. You can have the best technologies, but if they are not aligned with your organization, they can’t be successful. That’s where HPE Pointnext comes in. It helps CIOs create a footprint of their organization’s digital journey and manage the entire process—starting from conceptualization to operationalization to delivery,” adds Satsangi.