Hybrid Enterprises: The New Normal in a Post-Covid World

The pandemic has forced corporations into a new normal. Businesses are rethinking strategies and enabling innovation for seamless operations. This wave therefore requires a hybrid enterprise to function in full gear. Ease of accessibility, high performance of applications and uninterrupted connectivity is the need of the hour. And it needs to be handled with precision and efficiency to free up IT resources to explore new digital offerings and revenue models for businesses.

In an interaction with ETCIO, Vivek Raina, CEO of Excitel discusses IT as an enabler for seamless operation in a pandemic, how hybrid enterprises help scale better and industry partnerships to help enhance customer experience.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

How did Covid19 transform your business?

For Excitel it is a transformatory period. As a consequence of the containment measure the nation went into a lockdown. At that time, being in a wireline broadband business, we were the only window to the work--be it education, remote work or entertainment.

In the last couple of years, the business faced stiff competition from 4G and the ensuing tariff wars. But it all changed with the lockdown. People have had to rely on sturdy broadbands, since wireless cannot handle a multifold load as the former does. Therefore, the demand increased drastically.

Now our issue was to cater to the surge in demand. After a few initial hiccups and being declared as an essential service we were able to service our customers and cater to the needs of others.

How does hybrid infrastructure then help in the transformation journey of an enterprise?

Exemplary transformations in the face of increased demand have been undertaken by adopting hybrid enterprise. Microsoft too made a difference by their cloud first model and people took note of such tools, which led to demand skyrocketing. Had it not been following the hybrid methodology, it couldn’t have catered to the drastically increased demand.

From the example above it is clear that concentrating on one aspect and not through the cloud will not help scale up. Here you see the value of such hybrid topologies. In the new normal there would be more adoption of hybrid and you will witness people relying on such topologies.

How will hybrid benefit enterprises in the post covid world?

The whole post Covid scenario would give a boost to the new realm of hybrid. Remote working and remote hosting of data, applications would increase dependence on hybrid infra.

For instance, most of our servers are on data centers as of now. With datacenter facilities in multiple states, we used STT GDC India’s existing facilities for hosting our servers and connections for seamless operations. We started with one rack and now we are upto 30 and the journey has been fruitful. STT GDC India has enabled our expansion into multiple locations as we availed their partnership for network center operations.

For wireline operations, for broadband you need pipes coming in from service, content and uplink providers. But at the same time we have started taking some part of our OSS, BSS and other functionalities to the cloud.

How has the move benefited Excitel?

Not all costs in business are monetary. The need to hire people to create infrastructure divides the focus, right from the management to the last man on the field. The cost therefore is on the business and its bearing is on other things we undertake. Therefore, we win on our strategy to not focus on things that aren’t our core strength and rely on experts like STT GDC India, thereby resulting in monetary and efficiency benefits.

While STT GDC India provides its expertise to the infrastructure operations, the team at Excitel can focus on enhancing customer experience with improved packages, services and meeting the demand without a glitch.

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