Prof. Oscar J D’Souza, SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Prakash Pawar, CTO & Head - HRD & Operations, Intrex India and Peter Alexander, VP - Worldwide Business Marketing, CISCO discussed the challenges that small and medium enterprises face, in an exclusive discussion with CNBC-TV18.

According to Prof. D'Souza, SMEs can aim to become large companies, through better intergration of their processes using IT. Pawar feels that the greatest challenge that SMEs face, is their limited financial budget. Alexander feels that customer responsiveness is a major key to create a loyal customer base.

Excerpts from CNBC-TV18’s exclusive interview with Oscar D’Souza and Prakash Pawar:

Q: What are some of the key business challenges do you think that mid-market enterprises face? How do some of these business enterprises translate into IT challenges?

Prof. Oscar D’Souza: I think the good news is that all the big companies started small or medium, including CISCO. But how does one ramp-up from a midsized company to a large organisation. Remember large organisations typically differentiate themselves on the quality of their brand or on their brand itself. They also differentiate themselves sometimes with being low cost leaders.

So, how does a low-cost company ramp-up the level of a large organisation and that is a big challenge for organisations today. IT can definitely help in that respect because IT brings to the table tremendous amount of integration, tremendous simplification of business processes, scalability and standardization.

Q: From your perspective as a CIO, what are some of the key business challenges that you face and how they translate into IT challenges?

Pawar: The problem can be related to our day to day lives. When you grow up from childhood to adulthood, there is one stage where you are neither an adult nor a child. So, mid-sized organisations basically are in that conflicting situation. They are neither small nor big; they have advantages and disadvantages on both sides. There is constraint on budget. When you are a small enterprise, there are a lot of things you do at a different scale.

Q: How can CIOs of mid market enterprises do more with less? Now I know that is a large understatement but if you could just give us a perspective?

Alexander: One of the areas to your point is in the area of standardization. I think to the point you made earlier around how to a degree do you customize. The more of a mixed environment you have, the more it is best of breed of everything and the less integrated it is the more expensive it is to operate. That is just the way it works. So, I think the way to do more with less is to integrate more, standardize across the organisation and leverage IT in as generic a sense as possible, and customizing as little as possible but to optimize the business.

Q: Customer loyalty is something again that is very critical for mid-market enterprises, ensuring that. How can CIOs of mid-market enterprises use technology to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty?

Pawar: Being a young organisation, you have to start things in the right perspective. You have to have proper KYC (know your customer), create an awareness in the organisation that the customer should be treated like a king, have good loyalty programmes as well. So, these are some of the initiatives that you have to inculcate in the organisation at a very early stage and as the organisation matures, because all these things require a lot of budget and money, but you can start as a small seed and work upon it.

Q: Would you like to add to that?

Alexander: Of course, from a technology point of view there are things that you can really improve customer responsiveness. At a software level, CRM. One of the keys is instead of making it, all flashing lights and everything you can do; instead make it as ubiquitous within the organisation as possible. The more people who interact with customers in a familiar way, the way to do it scalably is using technologies like CRM, unified communications.

Q: From an academic and from a consulting perspective, can you tell us what are some of the technologies that will move from narrow niches to a more widespread adoption in the coming year?

Prof. D’Souza: I think one should look at SAS (Serial Attached Technology)and SOA (Service-oriented Architecture )as two up and coming - I wouldn’t say technologies - but frameworks in order to ramp-up especially from mid-market to larger enterprises.

Alexander: Yes, I agree. Software as a service and Service Oriented Architecture is a key. I think that from a networking perspective, you’ll see a lot of changes in the data centre. You’ll see increasing ubiquity at the Ethernet; have very high speeds in the data centre as companies build their own data centres.

Unified Communications, I think the notion of information and communications being separate infrastructures, and separate media, those days are numbered.

Q: How can a mid-market enterprise leverage some of these technologies like Unified Communications, mobility and wireless, Web 2.0 and including things like social networking?

Alexander: Well again, I think it begins with a strategy and a roadmap for adoption because you cannot consume all of that at one time. Building an intelligent network with the kinds of services that allow you to layer things on top easily, starting with that foundation of the Ethernet out of varying speeds, effectively routed with things like quality service and of course a high degree of security, gives you that intelligent foundation to be able to have a wireless add-on. So, start with the right foundation, build it ubiquitously within the organisation.

Q: One of the major problems is usually security in all of these. That concerns a lot of enterprises and especially so at mid-market enterprises perhaps with lower budgets. What are some of the security challenges in your experience do mid-market enterprises face?

Pawar: One has to have a proper security policy, implement it as well, practice it, have security audits, and also have budgets because security budget is the last thing in mid-market enterprise. Nominate somebody as a Chief Security Officer, maybe at a middle level and he should have direct access to the top management besides CIOs and last but not the least, have a fallback plan in case things go wrong. Also, there are some shields available in terms of insurance coverage for these kinds of problems.

Q: Anything you’d like to add to that?

Alexander: I think investment in security is key. If you think security is expensive, try buying cheap security. You will find it is very expensive. So, being proactive particularly in that area is important, because when it starts going wrong, it would start going very wrong.

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