‘Stratus’— A Credible NAME IN BFSI: Vikramjit Bhatti

Highlighting a range of products Stratus technologies offers to both the public and the private sectors, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Stratus Technologies, Vikramjit Bhatti in conversation with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN) talks about company’s capabilities of preventing malfunctions by tolerating hardware breakdown

What are the various organisational sectors that Stratus Technologies provide their solution to?
Stratus Technologies has been in India since 1993, supporting mission critical business applications for customers across verticals. When the need is non-stop computing, Stratus has the solution with 99.999 per cent uptime assurance. Stratus is proud to be associated with some of the leading organisations active in BFSI, Government and public sector, defense, aviation, power and petroleum and manufacturing among others.

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What is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in convincing prospective clients for using your products and solutions? What are the key facets of Stratus ‘Always on’ Solutions?
Stratus ‘Always On’ HW and SW products ensure continuous operation of key applications, normal running of systems and data security for our clients from various industries, including BFSI. Ensuring continuous operation of key applications and guaranteeing the security and integrity of crucial data are of great importance to our clients. Clients may experience application shutdown due to hardware malfunction, thus affecting the operation of the application and even the entire system. This could lead to major business and economic losses to our clients. Fortunately, Stratus products can prevent this from happening. Stratus’ choice of solution prevents clients from suffering from direct and indirect economic losses, a feature both our clients and we value the most. Dual-computer, hotstandby and cluster are among the traditional solutions to computer shutdown due to hardware malfunctions. However, the traditional method, as a disaster recovery solution can only contain the malfunction. With such method, we are only halfway towards continuous work. On the other hand, Stratus technologies can prevent disasters and malfunctions by tolerating hardware breakdown without affecting continuous operation of key applications, making it a disaster prevention solution.

Have the Public Sector and Private Sector (especially large enterprises) increased their affinity towards Stratus Technologies?
Stratus Technologies is more than just a vendor to customers, specially in the BFSI space with both public sector and private sector choosing Stratus as their ‘Partner of Choice’ when ‘Always On’ is the requirement. Stratus is a well-known and credible name in BFSI with our platforms running Payment processing, trading and settlement systems. Many of the leading financial institutions from credit unions to the world’s largest banks and processors rely on Stratus Technologies ftServers to deliver 24X7 availability of essential services and applications. American Express’ global authorisation network, City Bank’s corporate clients and every trade on the National Stock Exchange of India run the Stratus ftServer.

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In today’s financial services industry, faster payments demand platform availability well outside the traditional overnight settlement window. Microsecond trades, global online banking and mobile transactions must be enabled 24*7*365. Billions of dollars are exchanged during the settlement windows which are moving from overnight to intraday, and even more frequent, transactions. The platforms these systems run on are becoming increasingly important and need to be resilient. Stratus keeps your services up and running all the time whether transacting on the Cloud, on a smart phone, at a branch or via an ATM. We offer a range of flexible ‘Always on’ solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, and backed by a support structure with a 30-year track record of success.

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A proactive approach to prevent downtime is a key differentiator and many a times a business savior in current scenario

Ensuring that skilled IT resources are readily available in remote locations has been the detterent in deploying and enabling technology for government and defence organisations. Even where deployments are made, sending resources to fix issues take days if not weeks. Stratus Technologies Fault Tolerant Servers minimises the need to have skilled resources flying out every time. With self diagonises capabilities, advance part shipment, remote care and field replacement it is possible for basic operators to complete the fix without having to enter a single command.

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What are the roadblocks, if any during the integration of products and solutions of Stratus Technologies? How effective is your investment protection to customers?
Our solutions support common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Redhat Linux and VMWare. We don’t foresee any roadblocks during integrations as it’s well adopted by major industries and customers worldwide. Stratus Technologies does not announce End of Support (EOS) for our HW solutions. Our ‘Always On’ solution prevent HW breakdown, not recovering from it. With a disaster prevention solution in hand, a disaster recovery one is no longer necessary.

What are the three typical demands from modern CIOs of Indian organisations?
Information Technology has evolved from a Support/Cost Center to a Business Enabler and often a critical differentiator in competitive scenario. Similarly, today’s modern CIO needs to be a business leader alongside the technology enabler role already played. Most Modern CIOs we come across have clear expectations from technology investments they make, such as easy to manage, cost effective solution, minimal service interruptions from downtime, generic architecture which supports common operating environment Stratus Technologies satisfies these expectations and simplifies the modern CIO’s work life when availability and uptime is a concern.

Ensuring that skilled IT resources are readily available in remote locations has been the detterent in deploying and enabling technology for government and defence organisations

What are the typical dos and don’ts you would like to suggest CIOs and CISOs?
We would reiterate the golden rule of technology adoption like adopt generic architecture with common Operating Systems, don’t adopt proprietary HW architecture to prevent failure, adopt architecture which prevent architecture downtime, not recovering from it. A proactive approach to prevent downtime is a key differentiator and many a times a business savior in current scenario.

Digital India is a Rs 2.50-lakh crore e-governance initiative for 2015-2019. Kindly share your readiness and strategy on the initiative?
We believe the e-Governance and digitisation steps put forth by the government are truly the way forward. Initiatives such as Governance and Services on Demand, Infrastructure as a core utility Citizens and Digital Empowerment of Citizens are huge steps and will facilitate advancement of the masses. Having said that, it the initiatives such as these that require a solid reliable and always on platform to support them. Stratus has worked with several governments globally to support critical citizen services and is poised to be the perfect partner in the Indian context.

The firm is actively engaged with different government bodies and proud to be associated with some of the key Digital India initiatives.

We will continue to invest towards building formidable relationships and partnerships with other solution providers to support Digital India initiatives.

What is your overall marketing strategy for e-Governance market in State Governments, BFSI and Central PSUs?
Over the years, Stratus has a enabled a dependable and robust Channel and Alliance Ecosystem catering to different industry verticals. We continue to invest in building more of such meaningful relationships locally to reach and provide our solutions to various eGovernance initiatives by the Government.