GEC NEWS WIREWith increased adoption of cloud storage, cloud infrastructure is being more popular. This popularity may be due to the cost and management problems faced with traditional enterprise infrastructure. There is an opportunity to move Enterprise Architecture to cloud and reduce cost significantly which many companies grab onto.
Cloud computing which offers efficiency, performance, reliability, security, scalability, and speed to its customers is gaining popularity at a booming pace. This in turn has reduced the investment to traditional IT infrastructure and data center. This led to the rise of vast ‘hyperscale’ cloud data center, a large-scale public cloud data center. It is expected that there will be 628 hyperscale data centers globally by 2021, compared to 338 in 2016.
An interview with Jai Mulani, the CEO of IBT took us through the difference in the market of traditional infrastructure implementation. “6 to7 years back if the infrastructure for a new office costed AED 0.5 Million, today the same size of office will need to spend only AED 30,000 on Cloud Subscription. This is because the technology has grown. Earlier an office would need 10 servers, but virtualization reduced it to 3. Today, with the advent of cloud, servers are being eliminated. With the evolution of technology, the investment cost has gone down drastically.” said Mr Mulani.
IBT, which started in 2009 with main focus on infrastructure implementation, has now moved on to Business Process Outsourcing with the reduced investment in infrastructure. Mr Mulani said, “In UAE, infrastructure market is saturated and stagnated. In 2014, we started a new company for outsourcing. The major activity we do under that is call center outsourcing, process outsourcing and IT outsourcing.” He further added that the company is seeing immense growth in this market because it is a people-oriented business.
“The call center and IT outsourcing business which is 5 years old, is competing with our IT business which is 9-year-old. The new division is neck to neck with IT.” he said. There are a lot of misconceptions about the BPO business. With new emerging technologies like robotic process automation, the industry is breathing in a new dawn. “Business is moving towards people centric sector. Everyone is moving to cloud, everyone is talking about AI. We also have migrated from that sector, from Infrastructure company to a BPO company.” added Mr Mulani.
New technologies are influencing BPO business. Technologies like cloud computing, analytics software, social media platforms etc. are now being used in it. A chatbot is one such technology which is a computer programmed or an AI which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.
A question that arises with these technologies is whether it will replace humans in the workplace. “At the first level, yes, it has already started replacing. At level one chatbots have already replaced people.” But Mulani sternly says that it will never replace humans as a whole. “If a client is asking common questions than it can be easily taken care by automated chatbots. As soon the person in charge sees that the chatbot has not responded or the question is out of the SLA of chatbot, then the human intervention starts.” Human intervention is always needed for any of these technologies.
