Solutions To Improve Your Business

STME has been the first IT Company in the Middle East to be awarded the ISO 9001:2000 When trying to successfully run a business, decision-makers are often in a quandary regarding the necessity, and the opportunities of growing their data storage capacity and using it to eventually grow their business or make it run more efficiently.

One such opportunity concerns the size of a business and whether its size makes it feasible for a large business to move to cloud data storage can be opted for by SMEs alone or could prove to be a viable option for large scale businesses also which have a lot more at stake. Quite often, these concerns revolve around the security of sensitive data also. CIO Pakistan addressed these issues during their Breakfast Series. Senior professionals from STME and NetApp were also onboard at the event, and engaged in a spirited discussion with the Editors at CIO Pakistan and the guests attending the event.

certification for the company’s world-class portfolio of professional services. STME aims to address business needs, increase ROI and facilitate the achievement of strategic objectives related to IT infrastructure solutions and operational efficiency. Speaking at the event, Muhammad Arshi Wassique, Country Sales Manager at STME said that the organization delivers state-of-the-art in technology solutions that empower both customers and employees. STME doesn’t just offer its customers technology solutions, but by informing them what technology is all about helps them to gain even further benefits through the use of technology.

Technology is continually changing so it needs to be continually transformed and upgraded also. It is in fact the tool, while the business itself is the core thing that helps an organization to grow so STME tries to serve its customers by assessing their business with reference to IT. Later, STME does “a little consulting, architectural design and planning with reference to the assessments and then deploys, implements and integrates, support for the existing infrastructure or whatever else that their clients’ may have had planned and finally manage the due transformation,” explained Arshi Wasique as he talked of how the STME works.

For some time past, experts have been of the opinion that a growing competency in virtualized data storage helps a business to effectively compete ‘across industry verticals with a shift of focus from physical infrastructure that gobbles the scarcest of resources, that is space, time and a sizeable amount of underutilized Human Resource.’ Therefore, as Arshi Wassique pointed out, “Data is the core thing, and its availability and accessibility are the core things for an organization.” Its Data Storage capabilities along with their 24/7-365 days support services, set to meet specific customer requirements form the STME team’s core strengths.

Following this was a presentation by the NetApp team. The team from NetApp consisted of Samiuddin Hamid Managing In charge from NetApp and Osama Qazi Professional Services Consultant at NetApp. Talking about his organization, Osama Qazi talked about his organization and the way it operates. Network Appliances or NetApp provides state of art storage solution.  It is the only vendor in the industry that offers both Unified SAN/ NAS solutions in a single box. NetApp provides both consultancy and implementation services as per your storage requirement.

NetApp has enjoyed excellent success on the Internet. They already have a “huge chunk of the Saudi Airlines storage stream, out-stream and Internet IT and they cover most of Saudi Airlines’ enterprise IT and general purpose storage, emails etc., while also looking out for their upstream and business-related stuff where they also carry on exploration etc.” The organization has a footprint everywhere and has been working in Africa for the last ten years.

The presentation also drew the participants’ focus on using technology and ways through which they could lower their expenditure and increase their return on investments. “There’s always an offset between the data you have and the storage capacity that you have,” said Osama Qazi due to which there has been a trend amongst many organizations to buy “data centers since they now require more and more space to store their data.” Furthermore, organizations that had always practiced desktop storage are now practicing data virtualization.

For Osama Qazi, this spells the fact that most organizations, not only in Pakistan, but across the world in both developed and developing countries are ready to go virtual with their data storage. However, at the same time, “businesses wish to spend less amounts of money and other resources on IT but at the same time getting better and better ROI, especially as concerns their data storage capacities.” He felt that this trend had also led to a “shift in the role of the CIO, so that they are being asked to deliver more and more services while their funds and budgets are not increasing at the same pace as the requirements of their organizations.”

With data growing at explosive rates even in a recessionary business environment, CIOs today are constantly under pressure to do more with less. The CIO Breakfast Series Roundtable plugged in the gap by promoting an intellectually conducive business environment that served as a platform for CIOs from the local industry to interact with senior professionals and experts from the NetApp and STME Regional Teams in three events that were held in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore to enable more and more local businesses to learn about and move onto virtual data storage and ensure progress and growth for their organization.