The micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) should adopt information and communication technology, especially cloud applications, to cut costs and function more effectivley in the ever-increasing competitive scenario, according to experts in the ICT field.

They were speaking at a one-day conference organised here last week by the Visakhapatnam zone of the Confederation of Indian Industry on empowering SMEs through ICT intervention.

G. Sambasiva Rao, Chairman of the local zone of CII, said cost-effective technologies were now available in the field of ICT for MSMEs to cut costs and improve their efficiency. Therefore, it was wrong to think that ICT was meant only for major industries. The CII would help MSMEs in making use of ICT as a tool for greater efficiency, he said.

Rajavel Sekaran, Director of IBM India (Vizag development centre), said no upfront investment was needed by the MSMEs to make use of ICT and cloud applications were now available at fairly cheap prices for them to adopt easily. “Cloud is here to stay; make the best use of it,” he said.

Pullela Sastry, Director of Xinthe Technologies, said the MSMEs would not be able to incur heavy expenses on adoption of ICT and, therefore, cost-effective cloud solutions should be offered to them by service providers. Such solutions were now available, he added.

B. Murali Manohara Rao of Sankhya Technologies said each MSME should at least have a website to publicise its products and services and “it is necessary for MSMEs to make use of ICT to graduate to being major units.

They should expand their business and enter the big league.”

Social media

G. Shiv Kumar, CEO of Maples Software, stressed the importance of making use of the social media for marketing purposes and said the MSMEs should allocate at least 5-7 per cent of their turnover for ICT and it would pay rich dividends.

Vijay Anand S Bhaktha, Director of IMRB, defined cloud as “a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data. You need not install any infrastructure. It is enough if you have a PC, or tablet, or smart phone. The service provider will give the MSMEs the required service at a reasonable cost. Adoption of ICT has become much easier now.”

Data security

When several of the participants raised queries about data security, Ulaganath Muthu, partner channel development manager of Microsoft, said “the data is not owned by Microsoft, the service provider, but the MSME itself. The data is not at risk. There are various levels of security guarding the data. In fact, the data on the cloud is as secure as in your company's systems, in fact even more secure. Your systems may be hacked.”

sarma.rs@thehindu.co.in

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