Preet Singh Khanna
Glencore is a leading integrated commodities producer and marketer. The company produces, sources, processes, refines, transports, stores, finances and supplies commodities needed by industries around the world. Glencore combines the strength of its unique marketing capability with the insight and supply of its own diversified portfolio of production and logistics assets.
Glencore’s relationships with producers and consumers of commodities are supported by its global network of 50 offices in 40 countries throughout Europe, North, Central and South America, the CIS, Asia,Australia, Africa and theMiddle East. Close to 3,000 people work in Glencore’s marketing operations.
IT is a strong focus area for GlencoreIndia. Preet Singh Khanna talks about Glencore’s IT focus areas.
What are the major technological challenges and technology adoption in your industry?
We are in the business of commodity trading (metals, coal, oil, grain). They are natural resources available in different geographical locations. Hence to be in this business, we need to be present globally and connectivity to all such remote locations is vital to us. Since we are present through a global network of 50 offices in 40 countries throughout Europe, North, Central and South America, the CIS, Asia,Australia, Africa and theMiddle East, connectivity is a big challenge for us. In order to overcome this hurdle, we have to look for a telecom partner who has a globally wide spread network for both voice and data so that we can tie up with such partner to make our locations up and running 24×7 / 365. Connectivity is important to make our business a success.
What is your opinion about the need for 4G among Indian enterprises?
Let us first explore 3G services and then probably we can look at 4G usage
Who are your Wi-Fi providers and how do you rate their services?
I have dedicated broadband connection from Airtel and locally we have installed access points to provide Wi-Fi connectivity to our users and visitors.
What are your organizations’ devices and social media access policies? How it is impacting growth of the company?
Mobileas well as Blackberry devices are provided by Glencore. Regarding social media, we allow only LinkedIn.
What are the new technologies that you are planning to implement?
We are planning to implement VOIP in all branches ofIndiathis year.
What is your security strategy? What are the ICT risks that bother you the most and how do you handle it?
Keeping in view of our global presence, the management has decided to have a global security team which looks after security aspects, designing security policies and selecting devices for all offices globally.
Data leakage / theft bother me the most and we have employed various methodologies available to handle such threats.
What is your ICT budget? What is the growth in ICT budget? What are the new components?
Rs 1.5 crore is our IT budget. We are experiencing growth of about 10 percent. We will be adding VOIP components in our network this year.
What are your opinion about cloud and importance of cloud?
Cloud is fast gaining pace in the market and service providers are developing cloud based apps very fast. Let us not take any hasty decisions and try and evaluate the cloud first for our needs and then go for the best suited version of cloud as per your need.
What would you expect from the communications industry?
Better uptime and connectivity in the remote areas as far as possible so that expansion plans can be executed.
