Speak to most technology integrators on opportunities for server business, and nine out of 10 will list customer segments like BFSI, IT/ITES, manufacturing, telcos and government as the HOT verticals to tap. Interestingly enough, with IT dependence of any business rapidly increasing, servers today find themselves in demand in many 'non-glamorous' segments. Restaurants and grocery stores for instance!

As a leading brand in vegetarian ready-to-eat, instant food and restaurant business, Bangalore-based MTR Foods' physical value chain was performing satisfactorily in the areas of R&D, production, quality assurance and packaging. However, there were concerns in the areas of procurement, marketing, sales, distribution and finance. The information value chain was very much lagging behind, and was soon going to be a handicap. It was imperative that MTR's information systems moved to the fore and be a strategic tool, rather than merely be a support tool.

MTR's MD P Sadananda Maiya realized the need to address his problem areas. The company decided to implement an ERP solution from SAP and for this needed to have a comprehensive hardware infrastructure in place. The project, which ensued because of this decision to set information systems in place, resulted in an integration deal of nearly Rs 2.5 crore. Of this nearly 40% share was taken by the servers supplied by Sun Microsystems. The implementation was carried out by L&T Infotech, while HCL taking care of networking and FMS.

The servers included one for application, one for database and one for test and development of ERP. And the IT consultant (Southstar Data Consultant) and integrator for MTR did well to convince the client that they require a high-performance OS and a reliable and scalable hardware platform to run the ERP. The bigger point here however, is not about the technology vendor or integrator or also the kind of server, but its about unseen, unexplored opportunities. In this case for instance, apart from server sale, storage and management softwares too got sold along with.

Food World is another unique example of a retail grocery store adopting technology to improve its business efficiency. "They needed to track inventory, constantly have an update of their central warehousing facility to the extent of profiling customer buying patterns across stores. They couldn't have done it without IT and servers again played a major component of their technology deployment," informs Krithiwas Neelakantan, National Business Development Manager, Sun Microsystems.

According to him, while away from publicity, a huge business prospect lies in areas like these, retail, healthcare and so on. Time for partners to sit up and listen?

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