At the time of the 'Big-Bang' launch of India's largest Broadband Internet services, I had written in these columns about the ways in which one can leverage the availability of broadband Internet services. More than six months after the beginning of a long awaited revolution, I am still on VSNL dial-up, waiting for the word-of-mouth publicity to reach me about how great the new broadband services really are!

All over the world people are using broadband modems and routers with their broadband connections with ease. But here, I have seen a broadband service provider struggling for one week to set up a broadband connection at a customer's premises using a wellknown brand. After using the new broadband connection for a month, the customer's experience is 'slightly better than dial-up!'

While Indian companies are becoming IT superpowers abroad and getting acclaim for good customer support, why are they treating their own countrymen as C-class customers? A customer for a leading ERP vendor has been working hard with a solution provider for the past two years to implement ERP at his end. But there were many glitches in the initial deployment itself. He is now thinking of giving up and going with another vendor to fix the problems in the ERP deployment.

Valuing Indian customers
Recently, a prospective client called me to discuss an ERP solution. I was looking forward to an assignment involving evaluation of a suitable ERP package for the client. What the requirement turned out to be, however, was very much unexpected.

The company had already implemented an ERP solution at a very high cost covering almost 20 locations across the country. The solution is a well-known global brand and the implementation partner is also a well-known company that has executed successful projects abroad.

The customer was facing a lot of post-implementation problems and they wanted me to study the situation at a few important locations and come out with a report on what was going wrong.

So, what is the problem here? Is the customer so dumb to let almost over Rs 2 crore go down the drain or is it the solution provider who is not taking the customer seriously because he is an Indian customer? As I didn't get involved in the investigative project and haven't had a chance to study the situation first hand, I have no answer to this question.

But I think it's a very relevant question and we need to look into such cases with an unbiased mind. It's not that we treat only our customers indifferently; we even tend to treat ourselves in the same way.

How otherwise can you explain a developer of software solutions having their mail server out of service in the midst of a PR campaign for three consecutive days? The logic seems to be – if the snail-mail can wait for three days, why can't e-mail wait for three days?

I wonder how many replies to their mail campaign must have bounced during those three days of blackout. More surprisingly, the link in their e-mail, which pointed to their website was also down for three days.

Assuming that this happened only once in a year, it roughly works out to less than 1% downtime. What an unfortunate timing for that 1% downtime to take place.

There are web-hosting companies that offer a much better uptime guarantee, but they cost a lot and we are always ready to take such risks to save a few hundred dollars at the cost of our reputation.

Risking it with IMs
Talking of reputation, I will not be surprised if some day I hear about a security solutions provider's website being hacked or an anti-virus solutions developer's LAN getting infected by viruses. While there is some awareness building up about protecting the corporate networks, there are still many companies with vulnerable networks and virus infected mails keep going out from their mail servers. People are using public services like Yahoo! messenger and MSN messenger for their inter-branch communications and file sharing without looking at the vulnerabilities in both these services.

If we carry out a quick web search on the vulnerabilities of these messenger services, we can see a good deal of information about patches being released and holes being plugged. Some companies who have installed firewalls on their corporate LANs cannot block Yahoo! and MSN because these have become a part of their corporate communications tools. The end-users then remain free to use their personal e-mail IDs from the office network and the anti-virus scanning on the corporate mail server becomes ineffective.

Because of the almost immediate two-way nature of communication, many users feel that the use of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace leads to more effective and efficient workplace communications and, therefore, to higher productivity. As a result, IM is increasing in popularity in both professional and personal applications.

However, the increasing use of instant messaging means an associated increase in the number of security risks. Instant  messengers can also provide an access point for worms and backdoor trojan horses. Hackers can use instant messaging to gain backdoor access to computers, bypassing desk-top and perimeter firewall implementations.

Why IMs are so popular
It's not that there are no other means of secure messaging available to the corporate users. But for reasons better known only to them, many companies don't bother much about such issues. I remember having seen detailed instructions about how to install Yahoo! and MSN messengers on the FAQ page in the support and training section of a website belonging to a banking solutions provider. I do not know if end-users of the banking solutions use these public messenger services for inter-branch communications and file sharing.

Enterprise class professional IM solutions provide a secure, rapidly deployable communications platform that integrates instant messaging and file sharing applications. They can provide logging, archiving, advanced security, sophisticated administrative features, hierarchical structures and interoperability with other instant IM networks if required. Using such solutions, managers can maintain the user base, search log files, create new user domains and change the services available to each user, preventing unauthorized exchange of information via instant messaging. I think it is time to get more professional on such issues
and build up better security and confidence for the customers. 

The author is an independent consultant, and can be reached at dongre@usa.net

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