Afzaal Mirza, an integral part of the HP Consulting Team in support business for Pakistan and other Asian Emerging countries, talks about his organization’s significant presence in the country.
In an exclusive interview with IDG Pakistan, he acknowledges, “In terms of services within the region, we do more than a billion dollars services in the Asia Pacific region. It’s serious business for HP in the region in services, consulting and there are certain focus areas for us e.g. big data, cloud, mobility and security.”
Automation and cloud have been around in the market for a long time now, but what’s different today?
I look after Asian emerging countries and Pakistan is one of the focused countries in the region. We are a country of two hundred million people where we have a large number of banks telecom companies and a large number of public sector organizations. These organizations have large IT infrastructure setups where they are offering different kinds of services, whether it is for their own employees or for their customers.
I feel it is time that they start thinking about moving it to the next level where they could offer more meaningful services and solutions to their customers and they should also think about reducing their capex and going towards some more cost effective IT infrastructure, where they can move on two an Opex model, where they charge their services as per the usage and the requirements of the customer. So I think it’s an ever growing market and I think it should be a highly focused market because there is huge footprint of IT infrastructure available in these countries.
The Age of Collaboration
I think it is the age of collaboration. Technology is changing the way we interact with people and I think the model and the mediums available are changing. So there should be two to three priorities when we talk about collaboration. It has to be readily available, it should be cost effective and it should be an open platform. We must not restrict our customers and our uses into one platform.
I believe it should be easy to use cost effective solutions where people can interact with other people in order to improve their productivity, to reach them and find solutions tailored to their needs. So I think collaboration is the backbone of every business. If you have a good collaboration solution available within your IT infrastructure, it will automatically increase your productivity to the next level.
IT as a Service
I believe 2015 would be the year for IT services. If you look at the international market every company may it be hardware or software company, is transforming into a services company. You talk about Microsoft, you talk about IBM, you talk about HP or for that matter any other company, which had a very focused approach towards hardware and software are now transforming into a services company. Because I believe services is the future for the IT industry and many reports and surveys conducted throughout the world have supported this. It is believed that the services industry would surpass any other industry within the IT domain maybe by 2025. So I see a lot of potential for services in consulting in Pakistan and I see lot of potential for HP solutions and services in Pakistan and I’m very much positive about that our customers would see lot of value in are solutions and services.
Furthermore, I think going forward we will take our relationship, particularly with telecom operators, to the next level where we will come up with focused and requirement-oriented sessions where people can discuss and inquire about solutions to their specific business needs.
I think its time that we all should realize the power and importance of information technology in our daily lives. You start from school going kid, to a housewife, to an IT professional. I think everybody is impacted by the use of IT and IT solutions. It is time that we streamline all the solutions and we tailor them for the targeted audience and for the specific business need and I think anybody who understands the market requirement and addresses it accordingly will be a winner.
