It is often said that recession is where the opportunity is. The economic downturn of last year may have been a big blow to the majority of businesses, but the bright side is that it has paved the way for CXOs and entrepreneurs alike to scout for new avenues both in business and technology. But the biggest challenge lies ahead of the CIOs to strike a balance between the business growth and maximum utilization of available resources. Sanjay Lall, VP and CIO, SimplexGrinnell is excited at what lies ahead. SimplexGrinnell is provider of access control, security, CCTV, fire alarm, audiovisual, and PBX telephony with worldwide installation and service facilities.

“The last two years have been extremely challenging for every CIO in the industry. While there was the need to have a constraint over one’s resources, the business had to keep on growing. It was important to maintain the interests of the stockholders and have consistent numbers on Wall Street Journal quarterly,” explains Lall.

Today, with a reasonably stable market and with many new developments in the area of cloud computing and virtualization that offer a myriad of services at low cost, it is the ideal scenario for him to set processes for the company. With the data security now possible on ‘cloud’, he believes that IT is moving in the right direction - commoditizing the technology partners. As information technology shifts from being a standalone product to shared services, it’s time CIOs focused on using IT to improve customer service.

“With the social media gathering traction, there is a boom in the amount of information available over the Internet. It is time, we focused on analyzing all the data and utilizing intelligent solutions like cloud computing and virtualization to make the customer experience superior,” says Lall.
This can be easily achieved by capturing all the knowledge that is out there and productively converging social networking and making the employees better informed. But at the same time one ought to keep in regard the security at data and network level. In all, IT will become the broker in every endeavor a business wants to partake.

Today, Lall is busy building a team that is focused on the needs of the business. He is looking at IT as the key enabler for putting SimplexGrinnell at the pinnacle of market growth by cutting costs and leveraging the company’s business. His goal for the next five years is making SimplexGrinnell the undisputed leader in its market segment so that it is renowned globally. For this his first step is to develop operational products that converge IP with standalone devices; so that he can drive technology to optimize infrastructure and aid in business improvement while lowering the costs.