A leading Indian design, engineering, consultancy and contracting company, Toyo Engineering India Ltd executes medium and large size projects for chemical process industry, mostly in the oil and gas, refinery, fertilizer and chemical and petrochemical sectors. Work areas include engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), engineering, procurement services and construction management (EPCM) and project management consultancy (PMC). It is a subsidiary of Toyo Engineering, Japan, and was established in 1976. Milind N Kotibhaskar, Deputy Division Head, Infotech Centre, Toyo Engineering India Ltd, has spent 27 years with the company, of which he has been the IT head for the past three years. “I know the company business well and am now finding ways to have the company’s strategies work with the IT for our business to become more competent,” he says. In an interview, Kotibhaskar also pointed out how cloud computing could work for an engineering company like Toyo, and the loopholes it sees in the technology. Excerpts:
Tell us more about Toyo Engineering’s technological infrastructure.
We have an internal data centre and servers, and are now implementing virtual servers. We are now undergoing quality control for virtual desktop servers. As I mentioned, virtualisation is a latest technology and leans towards green IT. We are also into what is called Good Printing Solutions, where we have Xerox as our partner. This too is related to green IT.
In your opinion, how do you think IT professionals in India have reacted to cloud computing?
Our company isn’t using it as of now. I feel the internal stakeholders of the company are wary of the technology. For us, the risk increases once the data is not inside our premises. There is an anxiety in terms of security and availability. Although there are no immediate plans to implement it, the final decision rests with our parent company.
In my opinion, cloud can be an excellent collaboration platform. I may not allow others partners into my LAN but it I put something on the cloud, it will help in sharing data with them. It is very much a collaboration tool and can also be used for electronic document management system.
For a company like ours, we prefer to have our data within our infrastructure and take good care of our security and are International Management System Compliant. If there is any in LAN, we can take care of it ourselves.
You mentioned apprehensions about cloud computing. How can the service providers resolve the same?
They have to give us that level of confidence about data availability and how their SLA is, in terms of how far they will be able to address our concerns. The other weak link here is the unreliability of a good internet connection, which is an issue in India. If it becomes slow, users may not be able to access data when they want to.
For SMEs such as Toyo that have invested in IT infrastructure already, it is a wait and watch policy. But I feel that in the next three years or so, people will become more confident about the technology and embrace it.
