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: about Rs 67.6 lakh.

However, one area in which most manufacturers appear to be investing in is enterprise applications. About 68% of the respondents in the manufacturing sector already have ERP deployments—something that is now considered a de-facto standard in this industry vertical to ensure better operational efficiency. It also has

the highest rate of adoption of ERP across verticals; only BFSI comes close with 64%.

Bihar Sponge Iron Ltd has over 200 employees yet there are only 15 desktops in the organisation. The company spent about Rs 10 lakh on its IT infrastructure in 2007, and there are no plans for any big deployment this year. Susheel Kumar Bachheti, assistant manager, EDP, Bihar Sponge says, “Our work does not require much of IT and therefore, we have only 15 workstations. As regards connectivity, we have in place a gigabit Ethernet LAN. We are also using a DSL connection, offering a speed of 512 Kbps. Our basic requirement from the internet is communication through email with our branches.”

Apart from the basic infrastructure like desktops, notebooks and printers, the major technology areas upon which manufacturers spent most of the money were servers, connectivity, software and internet applications. For 2008-09, the top priorities listed by the respondents in manufacturing sector are laptops, notebooks, laser printers, accounting software and LAN.

The scenario is not very different in a medium-sized wholesale/retail organisation from its smaller counterpart. Technology is not yet a priority in this much-hyped industry vertical, which is the second lowest in terms of IT spend with companies in this vertical spending an average of Rs 56.4 lakh or 0.32% of their turnover on IT.

The survey respondents in this sector had an average of nine offices in different locations. While this sector scores lowest on leased line adoption (58%), it scores the second highest in terms of DSL deployment (71%), behind IT/ITeS (74%).

Jaipur Rugs is a 250-strong company that sells carpets and rugs globally. According to Yogesh Chaudhry, director Jaipur Rugs, “We spent over Rs 2 crore in 2007 on our IT infrastructure. We try to ensure that we use the best of technology and leverage it as far as possible. We already have basic IT infrastructure in place—with multiple servers running Windows and Linux, Wi-Fi connectivity and a Gigabit LAN. Now we are planning to invest in bar-coding and a virtual private network from Reliance to connect all of our branch offices.”