'Web 2.0 strategy a powerful tool to reach connected customers'

Q&A: Dev Worah

Virtusa Corporation, the global technology major with expertise in Web 2.0, has been using its enhanced global delivery model, innovative platforming approach and industry expertise, to provide high-value technology services to clients through advanced technology centres (ATCs) located in India at Chennai and Hyderabad and in Sri Lanka. Dev Worah, director – technology, Virtusa Corporation, in an interview with Sanjeev Ramachandran talks about Web 2.0 as a ‘trend’ and the company’s quest to grow its current relationships with new solutions and services that would help clients achieve their business goals.

How do you see the growing importance of Web 2.0 tools in a changing technology environment?
Enterprises globally are facing serious economic and business challenges. CIOs at our global clients are being asked to optimise costs, bring products to market faster, maximise current IT investments, improve customer satisfaction, and, above all, utilise IT as a key enabler for innovation and differentiation in this stressed environment.

Web 2.0 tools and solutions are being utilised in diverse ways to build next-generation applications to improve customer satisfaction, drive business agility and deliver business value.

Companies the world over are seeking refuge in a variety of avenues, such as web logs and podcasts. How far can such measures help them?
Sales and marketing strategies are increasingly adopting a Web 2.0 strategy that includes podcasts, blogs, and RSS media to reach a new generation of 'connected' customers. This is turning into a powerful medium for information dissemination, collaboration, and building of social networks.

Financial advisers at one of our portfolio management clients use blogs and RSS feeds on their internal portals to stay informed of sales strategies and important events within their globally distributed organisation. Their websites, on the other hand, are keeping customers updated on news events and press releases through the use of blogs and RSS feeds. 

What makes an enterprise eligible or ready to deploy Web 2.0 tools? How much would it cost?
Forrester Research has estimated the global spend on Enterprise Web 2.0 to be $4.6 billion by the year 2013. Given the current economic conditions, enterprises have several low cost and open source solutions that they can utilise to deploy Web 2.0 tools, so this does not require a significant investment.

The simplest example of a knowledge management solution would be a 'Wiki' based solution. With the growing competition in the Web 2.0 tools space, we can expect serious cost pressure and competition that will lower the cost-barrier for accelerating the adoption of these tools in the enterprise.

What has been Virtusa’s experience in this?
In the last two years, we have seen a significant growth in adoption of web 2.0 solutions. Our customers are seeing significant improvements in ROI and customer satisfaction by utilising these solutions.

The social computing aspect of Web 2.0 offers a few challenges in terms of adoption; for example, the use of blogs versus email as a medium of sharing information within a community requires a change in mindset. Organisations often need to put an organisational change management plan in place to evangelise and rollout Web 2.0 within their organisations.