Experiences are critical for both personal and professional growth of an individual in making him/her a specialist of the field he/she serves for years. For Mr. Vijay Balan, Managing Director at HP possessing extensive experience in IT and still serving it up diligently, the above statement only rings true.
While talking to Team CIO, he shed light on his professional background and the vast experience he has had being associated with the field of IT. He shared his long association with the IT field for more than two decades and serving it for 13 years. During this long time period, he performed multiple roles ranging from sales, to running a business. He also introduced different large scale projects across multiple geographies and also took part in putting solutions together. Before joining HP, he was working in Japan. On his current role and position, he stated that, “I look after the Asia emerging countries enterprise business for HP. I am the managing director for the region, which covers 11 countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Los Cambodia, Sri Lanka and all the few countries around Indian sub continent.”
With a close eye on local as well as international markets, one gets the fair idea of the market potential, trends and consumer behavior. Mr. Vijay sees businesses in Pakistan as having immense potential. He further stated that the local market is quite favorable with respect to big data, cloud, and mobility. Comparing Pakistan with other regions he said, “We get positive response from local market as we drive solutions and efficiency, but other regions have bigger scope for technology in terms of developments and innovations.”
Since buying trends and demand have a huge impact on the overall economy and growth of businesses, a slow buying trend, thus, negatively influences the technology graphs. While discussing these impacts, Mr. Vijay stated that it is becoming difficult for CIOs to manage budgets to purchase latest technologies. However, on the other hand, consumer market is inclined towards innovative technologies and some established and leading companies also try to invest in state-of-the-art technologies to achieve agility and efficiency.
With the proliferation of innovative, smart devices, competition between the companies has definitely increased. HP is also one of the famous brands in the world and thus competes with many top companies. Speaking about the existent competition, Mr. Vijay shares, “HP has the largest spectrum of solutions; we have from the smallest devices to the most powerful servers that you can find in the market. We do have competition with daily show suspects; however, HP is still the largest IT Company across the globe.”
Smartphones are undoubtedly the smartest evolution in technology. Based on the usefulness of these devices, technology companies roll out new devices frequently to take the lead in the market. Just like Google and Microsoft who have joined this rat race, HP was rumored to be working on a Smartphone too. However, it seems that HP doesn’t want to reveal anything beforehand. Partly accepting the speculation Mr. Vijay stated that HP does make sure that their customers get the best of products and services. He explained that the company mainly focuses on cloud services and aspires to become a market leader. Beside this, their main area of specialization is big data. “We understand the importance of mobility, and therefore, spend most of the money in this area,” Mr. Vijay told.
HP is a company that has products and services tailored at both small and big businesses. It tries to fulfill the needs of almost every sector whether it is telecom or financial sector. Owing to their extensive range of products and vast outreach, one could expect HP to continue to serve Pakistan as well as other regions in the similar fashion in the future as well. Pointing out to his latest ventures, he told Team CIO Pakistan that some projects are in line and HP looks forward to working with businesses and governments in the days to come.
As an ending note, Mr. Vijay appreciated the hospitality and talent of Pakistani people and expressed the desire of wanting to visit Pakistan again.
