Raju Ramesh, Imtac

Maturing markets bring big opportunities for IMTAC.

ACN: What's your big focus going to be for this autumn in the region?

RR: Our customers are mostly in the banking industry, and the real push is actually because the pipeline is full of data warehousing and business intelligence deals - the effort is going to be wrapping up whatever loose ends are out there. There's enough business out there, it's just a question of wrapping it up neatly.

Also, we want to announce the projects that we've won in the last three or four months, so there's also a lot of focus on closing the deliveries neatly, and keeping the customers happy.

ACN: What are the big issues you see in the regional enterprise IT sector?

RR: A lot of vendor maturity is now starting to happen - it's been delayed, but vendor maturity, in terms of process, in terms of ability to deliver, that's now coming. The key thing for me is that - in US or European terms - there are very few enterprises here. Enterprises in this region tend to be medium-sized operations.

So enterprises are starting to come - looking at the airline industry, or the banks, they're scaling, and merging and consolidating.

ACN: What are the hot technologies that are shaping enterprise IT trends?

RR: Datacentres are getting a lot of attention from CIOs - businesses are not willing to compromise on the availability of systems for work any more. My guess is, in the next two years there's going to be a lot of ground up investment in datacentres, disaster recovery, business continuity. That's the focus I'm seeing on the hardware side.

On the software side, I think customers are beginning to explore managed services, IT outsourcing - these are more western trends, but we have started to see some of the large enterprises look in this direction.

ACN: How can enterprises maximise their IT RoI?

RR: Enterprises have not looked at a vendor strategy - they've acted on where they feel comfortable, and those kinds of things have dictated how they've chosen vendors. But I believe enterprises are going to start looking at what the vendor is going to bring to the table in terms of a partnership - this will dictate a lot of decision-making.

ACN: Why should CEOs care about IT?

RR: Because the business is going to stop otherwise. If you don't have systems to handle your customers, it's a problem. Most enterprises have customers who work with the business 24/7 - if you look at airlines, banks, their customers don't stop.