The move from ‘precise’ to ‘adaptable’

Sudhir Nayar, Managing Director – Commercial Sales Cisco India & SAARC and Pankaj Agrawal, Director – Collaboration Business, Cisco India & SAARC talk to PCQuest Editor Sunil Rajguru about the concept of a hybrid workplace as a means of survival and disruption in the new normal that has resulted due to the Covid-19 crisis.

Here are a few snippets from the interview:

Sudhir on the need for adaptability during the current pandemic:

“We have changed from being precise to being adaptable. We have understood that adaptability in our business, in our technology, and in our mindset, is one of the biggest changes we need to make. This applies to me personally and for all the businesses that I speak to.”

Pankaj Agrawal on the ideology of a hybrid workplace:

“Organizations have now realized that the future of work is hybrid: A certain percentage of people will continue working from home, maybe forever. There are clear advantages for both organizations as well as employees. For organizations the biggest advantage is the expansion of the talent pool. From an employees’ perspective they become more productive when they are given the freedom to choose where they want to work from.”

Sudhir on the multi-faceted role of IT in a hybrid workplace:

“I’ve always believed that IT is enabler but today, I’m saying that IT is a differentiator in most areas. I don’t know a single customer of mine whose business was disrupted because of IT. IT has been able to stand ground firmly. I hear a few priority areas from a few hundred CXOs I have spoken to. Firstly, they are using IT to get their data strategy right. Then we got an explosion of application usage. Third, the focus was on giving a good digital experience to your customer. That need has now morphed into digital decision making. Two more areas that are loud and clear are collaboration and security. All of this will fail if we don’t have the right security solutions.”

Sudhir on the uncompromised need for security:

“We have developed a fatigue of alerts. How do I know this alert is serious enough? We launched a very good platform called SecureX to mitigate this challenge. On an average, any CSO uses around 8-10 different technologies in his/her organization. How do you implement a common dashboard? What SecureX does is not only integrate any device and any security tool that you are using from Cisco. It also opens up to 165 other products. It is based on Open API.”

To access the complete panel discussion, head over to the PCQuest YouTube Channel: