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Use IT to navigate industry’s ‘Perfect Storm’

BANGALORE: “Information technology is your compass. Use IT to navigate the ‘Perfect Storm’ that is looming ahead for the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector of Indian industry,” suggests Samir Inamdar, Co-founder and Chief Executive of private equity fund managers, Forum Synergies. He was delivering the keynote at a national conference on ‘Emerging technologies for SMEs,’ organised by the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), that opened here on Tuesday.

Today it was not just foreign institutional investors and large players who were coming to India: a number of global SME players were also investing in India — creating competition for local players, Mr Inamdar warned. The only way to stay ahead was to invest, upfront, in information technology. Trying to play ‘catch up’ later would prove too costly, he added.

Early deployment of productivity tools like enterprise resource planning would allow small and mid-sized companies to “drive by looking at the wind screen, rather than the rear view mirror,” Mr. Inamdar suggested. In his remarks providing an industry perspective, Ashok Pamidi, Director for Commercial Accounts, SMBs, and Enterprise Partners at Hewlett Packard, said an entire eco-system was coming up to support Indian SMEs. But while 99 per cent thought technology was central to their success less than half this number actually turned thought into action. In his introductory remarks, MAIT Executive Director Vinnie Mehta suggested that a mix-and-match technique, marrying domain knowledge to IT skills was the need of the day.

The conference saw presentations from Wipro, HP, Microsoft, BSNL, IBM, Bharti, Intel, Lenovo and others, sharing their experience and their own tools for the SME sector.

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