Padmaja Krishnan, director (Marketing, Planning & Research) of CSC India and other experts address your concerns that often contend your thoughts.

Are organizations increasingly getting convinced about adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

SOA is a way of modeling business using contemporary IT architectures, and is a better way of aligning IT to business. On the business side this may call for Business Process Reengineering (BPR). On the technology side, if existing implementations don't reflect the business model accurately, this may have to be re-aligned first. This requires upfront investment in terms of BPR and consequential restructuring of systems and their touch points with business.

SOA is a way of managing the enterprise. It can help break the silos that exist otherwise in the organization, calling for more transparency of services offered. This is sometimes seen as a power shift by various stakeholders and often meets with obstacles if there is no executive commitment and endorsement at the corporate level.

Current tools and technologies prevalent around SOA solve technology issues, but a gap remains when it comes to mapping user and business processes to technology. This is predominantly an exercise requiring deep business and domain knowledge along with thought leadership.

There is a top-down and bottom-up approach to SOA and one may have to blend the two in the right proportions for optimal benefits. Often this is overlooked leading to inadequately managed expectations, resulting in unproductive efforts and iterations.

Can organizations leverage Web 2.0 for business purpose? Can you list some advantages of Web 2.0 ?

Web 2.0 technologies facilitate end user collaboration and contribution. This leads to increased customer awareness and satisfaction levels. Some of the advantages are:

It's an effective means of providing and managing utility based computing that leads to innovative and cost effective business models for the service offerings.

Web 2.0 technologies entail availability of enriched graphical and multi-media user interfaces (beyond textual and form-based interfaces) resulting in breaking traditional social, language, and geographic barriers that existed otherwise in capturing user experiences and needs.

Has the role of an IT head become more significant with organizations gradually taking the outsourcing route?

The role of CIOs and IT heads in India is as significant, critical, and important as it's in any developed economy. With growth and globalization becoming the key agenda across the industry sectors for Indian and global players alike, outsourcing is an important topic that gets evaluated as an acceptable option for every significant IT road-map in the country.

Vivek Bhatnagar, country director (Global Alliances) of Ingres Corporation

Is open-source a cost-effective technology for SMBs? To what extent is this recommendable for emerging enterprises?

With the maturation of open-source technologies and their adoption over last few years by enterprises globally, open-source today is an approach that can be effectively leveraged not only by large enterprises, but also by emerging enterprises. It helps in building a cost effective, robust, scaleable, and open-standards based technology infrastructure.

This trend is well captured by studies from leading industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester. The supported open-source business model can provide tremendous cost benefits as well as flexibility to enterprises -- since it typically involves zero upfront license fees and only reasonable annual subscription payments to the vendors for 24x7 technical support, access to regular product releases, updates, and bug fixes.

There are now good open-source options available across the entire technology stack, including operating system (Redhat Linux, Novell Linux), databases (Ingres, MySQL), IDE (Eclipse), app servers/web servers/portals (JBoss, Tomcat), data integration (Kettle, Talend), reporting & business intelligence (Jaspersoft, Pentaho), and content/document management (Alfresco).

This widespread availability now empowers the small enterprises with limited resources to rapidly and cost-effectively develop and deploy solutions in areas -- such as custom application development, portals, e-business applications, and business intelligence.