S P I N E
CTO FORUM
Technology for Growth and Governance
March | 07 | 2011 | 50 Volume 06 | Issue 14
CROSS-DOMAIN CLOUD MANAGEMENT | JUST WHAT IS THE CIO'S ROLE? | CASE FOR INFORMATION GOVERNANCE
Enterprise
Sans Borders By adopting superior UC technologies, enterprises are increasingly becoming borderless. | Page 30
TECH FOR GOVERNANCE
IT and the Adolescent Organisation PAGE 50
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
Volume 06 | Issue 14
Transforming the Data Centre PAGE 16
A 9.9 Media Publication
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
ANDREW MILLER
CEO, Polycom, talks about the metamorphosis underway in the UC market. PAGE 43
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EDITORIAL RAHUL NEEL MANI | rahul.mani@9dot9.in
Game Changing Formula: Small Innovations Help You Thrive
S
even hundred million and counting … I am not talking about the population of any country. Nor am I talking about the revenue of any enterprise. What is it then? This is the total number of telecom subscribers in India - growing at a whopping 20-25 percent year-on-year. These numbers don't include passive subscribers. Wondering what it is that I am trying to prove? The whole world knows about India’s telecom story. That is the reason why every big international tele-
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com operator wants a pie of this business. But it is not easy. The incumbents have deep pockets to rattle any new player. There are a few pertinent questions these new telecom players have to answer before they enter this overcrowded space. What should they do for survival? What could be the winning formula for them? How can they create a differentiation in the market where the main source of revenue, voice, is almost free? I also posed some of these questions to Avinash Mittal who
Making ERP Fashionable The House of Pearl Fashions deployed ERP to get better control over its processes and used it as a fashion statement to ensure employees started using it.
decided to quit an established incumbent to join Uninor as VP, IT, Networks and ValueAdded Services. Uninor is a fairly new operator, and according to some media reports, the parent company even faced pressure from investors to pull out of India to cut losses. Surprisingly my questions didn’t deter Avinash from giving me good answers. First, he said that Uninor offers only pre-paid connections, which eliminates a lot of operational hazards and expenditure from the system. Apart from that, the company deals with the demand and supply in a unique way. Despite having a conventional route to the market, Uninor connects with its retailers directly, and unlike other service providers, this operator does it in realtime. This helps in two ways: One, the demand-supply gap is always under control. Two, the
operator is able to incentivise its retailer appropriately to create greater loyalty. IT has made all this possible. These rather small innovations have resulted in decent gains for Uninor. In a short span of time, they have been able to gain good traction in this already crowded space. “We can’t win customers otherwise. Innovation is the only way to thrive,” says Mittal and accurately so. If there is one game-changing formula, it is innovation. If you can master it, business will follow. If you have any winning formula, we will be glad to discuss. As always, I welcome your feedback.
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MARCH 11 COV E R D E S I G E N BY P C A N O O P
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30 COVER STORY
30 | Enterprise Sans Borders
COLUMNS
04 | I BELIEVE: ‘WIN-WIN’ IS NOT A CLICHE The power of 'win-win' isn’t often as obvious as it should be. Just consider: who would like to lose? Got it?
By adopting superior UC technologies for responding swiftly to changing business needs, enterprises are increasingly becoming borderless.
BY AIYAPPAN PILLAI
60 | VIEW POINT: WHY IS EVERYONE SO FIRED UP ABOUT BIG DATA? BY STEVE DUPLESSIE FEATURES
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COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D- 107, MIDC, TTC Industrial Area, Nerul, Navi Mumbai- 400706
CTO FORUM 07 MARCH 2011
50 | TECH FOR GOVERNANCE: IT AND THE ADOLESCENT ORGANISATION As a start-up evolves, it offers IT an opportunity to prove its worth. BY DAVE RAMSDEN
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur EDITORIAL Editor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Senior Editor: Harichandan Arakali Resident Editor (West): Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal DESIGN Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK Sr. Visualiser: PC Anoop Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR, Anil T, Joffy Jose Anoop Verma, NV Baiju, Vinod Shinde & Chander Dange Designers: Sristi Maurya, Suneesh K, Shigil N & Charu Dwivedi Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
16 A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
16 | Transforming the Data Center
"CIOs today are faced with the challenge of transforming their data centres," says Hubert Yoshida, Vice President & CTO, Hitachi Data Systems. 46
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REGULARS
01 | EDITORIAL NTERPRISE 10 | E ROUND-UP
advertisers’ index
46 | NEXT HORIZONS: CASE FOR INFORMATION GOVERNANCE Information cannot be manage without a plan. BY BARCLAY BLAIR
56 | NO HOLDS BARRED: HARVINDER S RAJWANT, VP, BORDERLESS NETWORKS, CISCO, talks about the increasing threats fired up by 3G.
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ADVISORY PANEL Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, CIO, Pidilite Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Vijay Mehra, CIO, Cairns Energy SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) Product Manager: Rachit Kinger (9818860797) GM South: Vinodh K (09740714817) Senior Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar Singh GM North: Lalit Arun (09582262959) GM West: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755) Kolkata: Jayanta Bhattacharya (09331829284) PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh. Published at Bunglow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane, Nerul Navi Mumbai - 400706. Printed at Silver Point Press Pvt Ltd., A-403, TTC Ind. Area, Near Anthony Motors, Mahape, Navi Mumbai-400701, District Thane. Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in
This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.
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THE AUTHOR BRINGS over two decades of industry experience to his job, which includes leading global IT development teams.
PHOTO BY JITEN GANDHI
I BELIEVE
BY AIYAPPAN PILLAI Vice President, Tata Communications
‘Win-Win’ Is Not a Cliche If you think, ‘win-win’ is a
cliche, think again. Its power isn’t often as obvious as it should be. Just consider: who would like to lose? Got it? I STRONGLY believe that ‘playing Win-Win’ is the key to success in one’s personal and professional lives. What this means is not necessarily making compromises, but keeping an open mind and recognising the
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CURRENT CHALLENGE MANAGING THE IT DEPARTMENT'S RELATIONSHIP WITH CUSTOMERS AND USERS WITHIN THE COMPANY
other person has a right to his idea of how things should be in this world. Personal experience is the best teacher and hence the firm belief. It is a no-brainer that everyone likes to win. No deal would get through if it does not result in a net win for either party/parties. When you play winwin, all parties involved are willing to understand the other perspectives and work out the best solution. This is applicable to customer-supplier, peer-to-peer as well as personal relationships. I can think of two key areas related to the delivery of an IT solution, where if one always plays ‘win-win’ things will rarely go wrong. The first is the customer-supplier relationship where, as customers, we demand technology solutions at the best prices. The second involves the relationship between technology or engineering teams as internal suppliers to the internal customers who are the end-users of the solution, within an organisation. In the former instance, if the negotiation is not right, subsequent support falters, impacting project delivery schedules and budgets. The latter is a less apparent and understood aspect, as it is critical that the end-user sees value in the outcome of the project and hence owns the solution. Projects that have end-user ownership seldom fail. While IT teams would demand a lot of enduser involvement, potentially causing conflicts with their regular work, it is important that the end-user sees value in the time being spent and effort being made. Working this out would remove one major stumbling block in IT projects.
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BFSI is one of the use cases for the private cloud. There are companies that are only looking to the public cloud but they're not paying attention to the private cloud possibilities. In summary, the private cloud allows new IT technologies to add value to the enterprise business as never before. —ENRIQUE CORRO SE Manager MEX/NOLA at VMware
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FEATURE INSIDE
Enterprise
Data Warehousing Reaching Its Most Significant Inflection Point Pg 12
ROUND-UP
CRM Spending to Grow 30% Expected to see
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largest increase of all application software markets
SPENDING on customer relationship management (CRM) software is expected to see the largest increase of all the application software markets worldwide in 2011, according to a survey by Gartner. Overall, 31 percent of respondents expect an increase in application software spending in 2011. In comparing their 2011 fiscal budgets with 2010, 42 percent of survey respondents indicated that they expect to increase spending on CRM in 2011, compared to 39 percent on office suites and 36 percent on enterprise resource planning (ERP), which ranked second and third, respectively. Gartner conducted an expansive primary research survey of more than 1,500 IT leaders of organisations
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in 40 countries, which concluded in July 2010. The goal was to determine software spending allocations for IT budgets in 2010 and predictions for 2011. “We’re expecting the CRM market to recover gradually as buyer confidence returns and as businesses begin refocusing on growing revenue as opposed to just reducing costs,” said Hai Hong Swinehart, research analyst at Gartner. “Areas of investment are expected to include the online channel, SaaS based deployments and technologies enabling customer loyalty management, and more-targeted levels of customer service. Along the way we can expect market shifts as acquisition activity escalates, adoption of SaaS grows, and service providers become a more visible force in the market.”
DATA BRIEFING
$18
Million: the size of Ondemand CRM market in India —Source: Zinnov Research
E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP
THEY MUKESH SAID IT AMBANI Addressing the annual general meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Mukesh Ambani shared his mantra with members of India Inc on how to bring about the convergence of India and Bharat.
Juniper Networks Introduces Qfabric New data centre fabric Provides better scale, speed, savings and simplicity to power the cloud computing era
“We should aim to create universities as academic centres of excellence, which will feature in the top 100 in the world and achieving this will be one of the cornerstones of a New India that we will need to build.” —Mukesh Ambani , Chairman, Reliance Industries.com
JUNIPER networks has unveiled QFabric, an outcome of “Project Stratus,” Juniper’s multiyear data center network research and development initiative. QFabric delivers quantum leap improvements in data centre performance, operating cost and business agility, from the enterprise to the large scale cloud provider. Engineered as a simplified, highly scalable data centre network solution, QFabric enables a superior approach to building and securing virtualised data centres that eliminates the tradeoff between quality of experience and economics that plagues today’s legacy networks. QFabric enables improvements in data center speed, scale and efficiency, by removing legacy barriers and improving business agility. QFabric’s flat architecture also enables integrated security solution that provides visibility, enforcement and scale across the entire physical and virtual data centre fabric. Juniper has invested three years and more than $100 million in research and development to address these constraints, creating the new architecture.
QUICK BYTE ON SECURITY
Symantec has exposed a rogue Android app that has been tweaked by hackers to hijack a smartphone and run up big texting bills before the owner knows it. The reworked app is placed on unsanctioned third-party "app stores" where careless Android smartphones download and install it. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP
Data Warehousing Reaching Its
Most Significant Inflection Point YEAR 2011 will be the year when data warehousing reaches what could well be its most-significant inflection point since its inception, according to Gartner. The biggest, and possibly most-elaborate data management system in the IT house is changing. The new data warehouse will introduce new scope for flexibility in adding new information types and change detection. "In 2011, we are seeing data warehouse platforms evolve from an information store supporting traditional business intelligence (BI) platforms to a broader analytics infrastructure supporting operational analytics, corporate performance management and other new applications and uses, such as operational BI and performance manage-
ment," said Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Organisations are adding workloads with online transaction processing (OLTP) access, and data loading has moved to intraday — approaching continuous — loading in many cases." In 2010, cost control and performance optimisation became critical evaluation criteria and, consequently, the market has begun to accept a higher first cost in exchange for lower administrative and management costs over the life of the data warehouse. "We are seeing revenue increases for software licensing in the data warehouse DBMS market as vendors have expanded
GLOBAL TRACKER
More Than 50 percent of data centres would have High-Density Zones by 2015. Less than 10 Percent of data centres had high-density zones in 2010. 12
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50%
SOURCE: GARTNER INC.
Data Centre High-Density Zone
their offerings and marketed their products as 'easier to implement and manage'," Feinberg said. "While cost is driving alternative architectures, performance optimisation is driving multitiered data architectures, including a strong interest in in-memory data mart deployments. At the high end, data warehousing is now mission-critical." Gartner firmly believes that the data warehouse "ideal" is changing and will give way to new kind of warehouse that addresses more extreme types of information assets. As a result, data warehouse DBMS vendors must begin to address numerous, new information asset formats, or be relegated to supporting roles in the future. Analysts maintain that there is a real opportunity for data integration tools vendors to challenge the database management system (DBMS) vendors as the primary data management architecture, and the DBMS vendors should not underestimate this potential competition. The market is shifting from storage and access to delivery and comprehension, and that means context as depicted in metadata will become paramount. Another contender for the crown of information provider is business process platforms, which deliver business process management. Although late to the game and less mature than either DBMS or data integration, these solutions assist in managing the business context of information management. "By 2013, we predict that data warehouse DBMS vendors will combine their offerings to become something more like an information management platform. The DBMS will become, above all else, an execution platform. It will support and perform data management and integration tasks as well as for query and analysis execution," said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner. "Many traditional data warehouse DBMS vendors already offer both the DBMS and execution platforms — but the independents may surprise the mega vendors. By all indications, acquisitions as well as research and development will set the stage and the deciding factors for the big winners and losers when the 'title fight' begins."
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E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP
Polycom to Interoperate with Competing Offerings Interoperability to include support for non-standard TIP from Cisco
POLYCOM has recently announced that the Polycom UC Intelligent Core solution is transforming the UC experience by enabling interoperability with other vendors’ solutions, including the closed Cisco telepresence systems based on the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP). Significant innovations in the Polycom UC Intelligent Core platform will soon enable customers to deploy multi-vendor UC solutions and protect their investments in legacy third-party systems. The innovations continue Polycom’s com-
mitment to UCEverywhereSM by Polycom, a strategy for seamlessly connecting communications across the continuum of consumer, mobility, SMB (small to medium businesses) and the enterprise, regardless of platform or network. These same innovations enable Service Providers to deploy open cloud-based UC telepresence services, giving customers the capability to communicate outside their organisations and across their supply chain to suppliers, partners and customers. “Cisco customers have told us for years that they’ve been imprisoned by a closed telepresence platform that builds a wall around their UC environment and keeps out non-Cisco users. Today, all that changes,” said Andrew Miller, CEO, Polycom. “With its support of open standards, the Polycom UC Intelligent Core solution gives customers more options for collaborating and expanding their UC environments than ever before, without having to sacrifice their existing systems. Breakthroughs like this are fundamental to our vision of UCEverywhere.” The ability to deploy Polycom solutions alongside competitors’ systems can deliver dramatic total-costof-ownership (TCO) savings. Polycom estimates that a mid-sized enterprise will spend up to $2.1 million less in the first year on a typical Polycom telepresence deployment – including equipment, bandwidth, services and maintenance costs – versus a comparable Cisco telepresence deployment. Standards and open interoperability are also the foundation of Polycom’s portfolio of strategic alliances. This set of alliances is known as the Polycom Open Collaboration Network, and includes Microsoft, IBM, HP, Avaya, Juniper, BroadSoft, McAfee and Siemens. These joint Polycom partnerships are critical to providing customers with the flexibility, best-of-breed solutions and investment protection.
FACT TICKER
Bug erases 150,000 Gmail accounts Google promises complete restoration
LESS THAN a percent of Gmail users woke up to a fright this morning, when they experienced a blank inbox and a ‘Welcome to Gmail’ message awaiting them when they logged on. After the first of these users aired their plight on the Gmail Help Forum, Google estimated that approximately 500,000 Gmail accounts
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were reset, with about as many users losing their entire cache of mails, chats, and attachments. Google obviously began working hard to restore the accounts of “0.29% of the Google Mail userbase” immediately, and promises that all the missing data will be restored as soon as possible. Google later revised its estimate
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
of the number of accounts affected to 150,000, or approximately 0.08% of all Gmail users, so if your account was one of those hit by the bug, you can count yourself as truly unlucky. For the rest of us, this only serves as an unpleasant reminder to stop trusting cloud storage, and to regularly take backups! "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change," a release from Google said.
TALLY.ERP
T
ally Solutions has released Tally.ERP 9 Series ‘A’ Release 3.0, which features enhanced functionalities including the new Rupee symbol. The improved version of the software intends to improve Tally's reach in the Middle East with the introduction of its bidirectional language feature, simplifies the business processes via job work, and payroll via income tax for payroll, informed the company. "Most often Simple is confused with Basic, Tally.ERP 9 is very simple to use, yet comprehensive. The focus has been to absorb the complexity of providing a simple yet functionally rich and flexible product. With the inclusion of the Rupee symbol, job work for outsourced manufacturing and Arabic etc., the capability of Tally.ERP 9 has gone a couple of notches up,” remarked Shoaib Ahmed, president, Tally Solutions. The software incorporates ‘intercurrency’ conversion, and enables user to select a base currency (say INR in this case) and convert the consolidated reports of all international branches of the business into the same. Hence, if a business unit has branches in the US as well as UK, the reports will be churned out not with the corresponding ‘$’ or ‘£’ values but in ‘rupee symbol’. This facility however requires the user to feed the current currency values into the system to enable this function.
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A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
H U B E R T YO S H I D A
Embracing change: Today the acceptance to technology is at a pace that we have never seen before.
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H U B E R T YO S H I D A
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
HUBERT YOSHIDA | CTO, HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS
Transforming the
Data Centre
CIOs today are faced with the challenge of transforming their data centres to stay in sync with changing business needs. In conversation with Rahul Neel Mani, Hubert Yoshida, Vice President & CTO, Hitachi Data Systems, provides insights into how Hitachi is aiding this transformation. The data centre and IT services have become instrumental in almost every business in this age, yet many are still being powered by legacy infrastructure. The goal is to create a virtual, flexible and mobile infrastructure which is able to deliver services ‘On Demand’. How is it possible? IT is challenged today to reenergise the data centre to readily accommodate changing business requirements and demands for always-accessible information. The challenge lies in making information both available and secure. The transformation of the data centre infra-
structure initiates the creation of agile virtual flexible infrastructure which enables ‘On-demand’ services. It is more than just automation and virtualisation. Rather, it is a combination of dynamic provisioning, virtualisation and cloud computing, which is successful in arresting escalating storage operational costs and transforming the data centre to be agile, sustainable, and business-oriented. We will continue to help customers transform their data centre into an information centre that is virtualised, automated, cloud-ready, and sustainable. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
H U B E R T YO S H I D A
What are the pressing challenges regarding this transformation in the data centre? How should a CIO be responding to these challenges? The complete transformation of the data centre can only be achieved when the infrastructure fosters cooperation among server, network and storage assets, and relies on a single platform for all data and delivers application transparency so that it can be synchronised with business objectives. A CIO’s approach towards data centre transformation is to optimise many types of virtualisation methods to consolidate resources, technologies and applications, thereby reducing the complexity of years of ‘bolting on’ and building-in future flexibility. A key enabler for agility and transformation is virtualisation which provides an abstraction of IT resources, so that it can be viewed as a common pool of resources which can dynamically create or change IT services to meet changing business requirements. Storage virtualisation separates the application and server view of data from the physical storage infrastructure so that we can change and transform the physical storage infrastructure without disruption to the application. What are the most important steps organisations should take when transitioning to the new data centre model? The first thing is to understand that storage virtualisation separates the application and server view of data from the physical storage infrastructure so that we can change and transform the physical storage infrastructure without disruption to the application. The first step to do is to transform your legacy storage infrastructure without the need to rip and replace. Most virtualised storage systems will see an increase in performance just
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“Organisations should focus on application and server-centric strategy instead of focusing on a conventional storage-centric view.” by sitting behind the large global cache of the USP V/VM. However, if one needs more performance, one can wide stripe his volumes or move them onto tier-one storage in the USP V/VM and do both. If you are converting servers or applications as part of this transformation, you can create non-disruptive clones of the data for conversion, extract/translate/load, development test on lower cost tiers of storage, or dynamically spin up new allocations of virtual storage to support virtual servers. Not only can storage virtualisation protect your applications and servers from changes in the physical storage infrastructure, but it can enable your applications and servers to change and grow dynamically.
THINGS I BELIEVE IN There is a need to reenergise the data center to accommodate changing business requirements and demands for always accessible information The VSP and HCS management suite provides one platform for all data to automate, simplify and protect heterogeneous storage resources
In this approach two things are visible prominently. These are virtualisation and cloud computing. What should organisations think before they plan for virtualisation and cloud? In the current transforming IT scenario, CIOs need a truly end-toend data centre. Considering the next wave of virtualisation and cloud storage, organisations should focus on application and server-centric strategy instead of focusing on a conventional storage-centric view. What are the focus areas of storage efficiency improvements that can have a positive impact on the data centre? As infrastructure becomes more disruptive and resource intensive,
H U B E R T YO S H I D A
aging IT systems and infrastructure create a burden on maintenance. We believe the transformation of the data centre starts by designing flexibility and efficiency into the architecture with a priority on data and its storage. To achieve this, we are bringing together innovations in storage virtualisation, dynamic provisioning and archiving. We also offer proven methodologies and human resources to help customers implement IT in a new way that offers predictability and adaptability for the future. The result is a data centre that is highly responsive to changing business and economic conditions, enables the ability to access and make sense of data in a moment’s notice and accommodates unpredictable bursts of transactions. In many regions, affordable power is becoming scare and companies are forced to relocate to continue operations. Substantial power savings can be achieved through replacement of power hungry legacy systems and more efficient utilisation of current systems. It’s important to have awareness about the tools that are available to transform legacy systems. These could be virtualisation and system management tools that link business objectives with infrastructure performance and provide a return on your total assets. Some companies are doing this today by using virtualisation to seamlessly migrate off peta bytes of legacy storage systems and recovering 40 percent or more of existing storage capacity through dynamic provisioning. While we talk about other things, Hitachi Data Systems last year also announced the new high-end platform the Virtual Storage Platform. Yes, recognising the importance of a transformed data centre, Hitachi Data Systems launched the industry’s first threedimensional scaling platform. It enables organisations to scale up, out and deep for unprecedented levels of agility and cost savings in their virtualised data centres. The Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) introduces a platform that can scale up to meet the increasing demands of virtual servers and high performance data bases. The VSP is the only storage virtualisation platform that can support VMware VAAI across
internal and external, virtualised storage, providing improved VMware scalability and performance while preserving investment in existing storage assets. In conjunction with the new VSP storage platform, Hitachi Data Systems has also introduced new management software, the Hitachi Command Suite (HCS), which provides closer integration with applications and virtual servers and provides a common management tool set to manage block, file, and content data across heterogeneous storage systems. The VSP and HCS management suite provides one platform for all data to automate, simplify, and protect heterogeneous storage resources.
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
customers to build the infrastructure on cloud. And this particular platform provides the perfect environment for organisations to build their infrastructure on cloud to provide information services and infrastructure service. Because of the unique capability of this platform to service block file and content data, we will help customers in integrating the content on cloud in the infrastructure cloud as well. And over a period of time, customers can bring in a whole lot of intelligence in transition through the information cloud. This platform provides an ideal environment and with this announcement we will help increase operational efficiencies.
“Substantial power savings can be achieved through replacement of power hungry legacy systems and more efficient utilisation of current systems.” The VSP is the first enterprise storage system that has converted to Serial Attached SCSI for faster, point-to-point, performance and availability over conventional FC Arbitrated Loop disk connections and introduced small form factor 2.5 inch disks which consume less than half the power of conventional 3.5 inch disks. This, combined with a new design in packaging and front to back rack mount cooling, reduces data centre footprint to less than half that of competitive storage frames. These power and space saving features are particularly important for Asia Pacific data centres where power consumption is growing faster than in Europe or the Americas. The core message behind VSP is the notion of 3-D scaling and management. How will this gel with virtualisation and cloud? A couple of years back, Hitachi Data Systems had decided that that it will help the
What are your other plans with regards to virtualised storage and cloud? Hitachi Data Systems is continuing to grow using virtualisation as a core competency. It will continue to invest in innovation to enable its clients to attain competitive business advantage. We would love to see huge Hitachi storage implementations across verticals and turn our customers’ data centre to an information centre and translate that into business growth. Hitachi Data Systems India plans to expand on solution selling and focus on Government and Healthcare Verticals. This aligns to the company’s global vision that data centre transformation is to have a single, virtualised platform for all data with the ability to manage multivendor environments.
—rahul.mani@9dot9.in
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Cross-Domain Cloud Management Pg 24 Just What is the CIO's role? Pg 26
Constant Connectivity: % The Way We Work Today
DATA BRIEFING
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EXPECTED GROWTH IN PC SHIPMENTS IN 2011 TO REACH 387.8 MILLION UNITS: GARTNER
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While the Internet and its access devices have removed all boundaries from work, they have made life tough for a CIO. BY MARK SETTLE
W
hat is work in 2011? The Internet and the devices we have created to access it have removed all physical, temporal, and spatial boundaries from work. In fact, work can pretty much happen in any setting, anytime, anywhere a work-related thought crosses
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
your mind. An inconvenient consequence of this simple truth is that the employees of most American corporations expect their IT groups to supply them with the data and applications they require to act upon their work-related thoughts in any setting, anytime and anywhere. It's a commonly known fact that over the past 40
MOBILITY
years, the number of farm and manufacturing jobs in America has declined while the number of service jobs and knowledge workers has grown. It's equally obvious that information technology has played a key role in enabling and leading the transformation of everyday work. For example, traditional farm and manufacturing jobs use IT to provide workers with up-to-date information about weather conditions, irrigation needs, stock inventory, etc. The cabs of many tractors and harvesters have been later in the month), and adjust the duration transformed into instrumented cockpits, of my last meeting of the day to ensure that with GPS locators, onboard navigation, PC I'm complying with my wife's instructions. displays, and intercom capabilities to ensure Following dinner at home, I might go that their operators are constantly connected online to review my late-day e-mail traffic to job-critical information. from work, check stock prices, see if I've At the end of the day (and at the beginbeen upgraded on the flight to New York, ning), workers at home employ another briefly run through the slides I intend to assemblage of technology to stay connected use at my 9 a.m. meeting the next day, and to a world that is increasingly of their own make a dinner reservation for the weekend. making. Wi-Fi provides Internet access Any reader of this article could easily subthroughout the household and can be used stitute his or her own sequence of activities, for stock trading, vacation planning, gambut the point is this: When did work start bling, retail purchases, video gaming, or and when did work stop during this hypoSkyping with friends. Tweets, texts, e-mails, thetical workday? The simple truth is that and RSS feeds provide a steady stream of the Internet and the devices we have created information -- some for entertainment, to access it have removed all physical, temsome for education, some for work, and poral, and spatial boundaries from work. In some for pure serendipity. (Let's face it, fact, work can pretty much happen in any sometimes it's just plain cool to look up an setting, anytime, anywhere a work-related arcane baseball statistic, find out what was thought crosses your mind. An inconvenient served at last night's White House state dinconsequence of this simple truth is that the ner, or see a real-time video display of Times employees of most American corporations Square during a snowstorm.) expect their IT groups to supply them with In any given 30 minutes at work, I might the data and applications they require to act read e-mails from my desktop support upon their work-related thoughts in any setteam in Frankfurt a distressed sales rep in ting, anytime and anywhere. England, the leader of one of my applicaIn his book The Innocents Abroad, pubtion support teams in Bangalore, and a note lished in 1869, Mark Twain made this obserfrom my wife reminding me I need to leave vation: "In America, we hurry--which is well; work early. I might schedule a four-person but when the day's work is done, we go on teleconference for later in the week, select a thinking of losses and gains, hotel for a business trip to New we plan for the morrow, we York, review my son's resume even carry our business cares and provide some tips, update a to bed with us." In his worst PowerPoint presentation, issue nightmares, Twain never could written instructions about the OF SMBS FEEL have imagined how we have format of an upcoming opera-
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Most IT shops have an approach to end user computing that is akin to McDonald's, trying to furnish a limited selection of products reliably and consistently.
77%
tions review, review stock analysts' reports on a technology company whose products are of potential interest to us, check on snow conditions in Park City (in preparation for a ski weekend
THEY 'D LOSE 50 PERCENT OF THEIR DATA IN THE EVENT OF A DISASTER
transformed our obsession with work into a 24x7 addiction through the use of modern information technology. Here's a story that supports Twain's observation: In my
recent travels, a fellow CIO told me that his network team had discovered a sharp secondary peak in daily VPN traffic, extending roughly from 8 p.m. to midnight on most weeknights. Thousands of this company's employees were logging back onto the company network every week at night to check e-mail, access SharePoint files, surf the Internet, etc. The CIO ran a simple Zoomerang survey to determine why this traffic was occurring. There were two predominant reasons. The first was that people wanted to "get caught up" from the previous workday or "get a head start" on the next day. This would appear to be a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation. The other dominant response was, "I log on because it's a more appealing use of my time than any other activity that is available to me." I personally find that response to be a little disturbing, but truth be told, I'm probably guilty of it myself. As Americans have become more IT aware, and IT adept, it has become increasingly difficult for IT shops to keep up with their ever-changing tastes and predilections. Most IT shops have an approach to enduser computing that is akin to McDonald's, trying to furnish a limited selection of products reliably and consistently. The only problem is that our users (and their friends and families) have been dining at some higher-end establishments, and they are looking for a whole lot more variety in their personal technology capabilities. In his autobiography My Life and Work, Henry Ford writes that one morning, in 1909, he announced to his sales team that in the future, the company was only going to build one model automobile, the Model T, and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars. Ford writes: "…and THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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I remarked: 'Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.' " Such uniformity may be good for assembly line productivity. Motivated by similar productivity drivers, IT shops put similar limitations on the tools they are willing to procure and support for their end users. This is rapidly becoming a losing strategy. It's difficult to maintain device standards when half of the members of your executive team bought themselves iPads for Christmas.
ordained. The application guerrilla war we are about to be drawn into is far more significant than the device support and security issues that occupy much of today's debate regarding the role of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise. In the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), author George Orwell wrote of a future dystopia in which an all-seeing force tracks the movements of all citizens in a mythical country called Oceania. Surely, no reader of this article believes that Orwell's vision of "Big Brother" has not become, at least, technologically possible in America today. The technology is certainly in place to track the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, or even minute-to-minute activities of most knowledge workers. Our electronic fingerprints are everywhere, from E-ZPass toll booths, to credit card readers, to bank ATMs, to AOL/Gmail/ Hotmail messaging, to cell towers, to Facebook and other social networking sites, to … you fill in the blank. Anyone who believes that he or she can disguise or camouflage whether we like it or not. their electronic existence is seriously deluDuring any given year, most IT shops typically deliver new business capabilities sional. Anyone who believes he or she can to their internal clients through a couple maintain multiple electronic personas -- a of hundred releases that introduce new work persona, a play persona, a parental applications or, more commonly, enhance persona, a political persona, etc. -- needs to old ones. By contrast, Android developers read Internet Protocols for Dummies. are releasing more than 10,000 applications Most IT shops instinctively turn discusevery month. Admittedly, many of these sions about information security into mobile applications have very little business debates about network engineering, spawnsignificance, but some are clear productivity ing endless conversations regarding future boosters. Little by little, our end users will technology investments that will help secure gradually adopt specific mobile applications the transport layer, the network layer, the and build their own unique productivity data link layer, etc.. IT groups instinctively "cocoons," customised for their needs. I avoid a discussion of the social engineering fully expect that in three years or less, many and social discipline required to truly proof our employees will be routinely accesstect a company's information assets. ing mobile applications at their work desks, Let's take a simple analogy that everyone because they will have become an integrated can relate to. I personally have no desire and essential part of the way to share my annual W2 forms with my college-aged chilwork is performed. dren. They are already getting Just look at the numbers: enough of my money. The last Even if 90 percent of Android thing I want them to realize applications have zero busiY-O-Y GROWTH is the remaining amount that ness relevance, that still they aren't getting. The techequates to 1,000 applications of IN WORLDWIDE nology solution to this problem potential interest per month, SERVER SHIPMENT would be to reserve a room in relative to the 200 that a proIN Q4, 2010 my house for my confidential ductive IT shop might deliver W2 files, secure it with retinal in a year. It's a numbers game eye scan technology, install whose outcome is largely preteam seems totally overwhelming. I contend that the threat to "business as usual" is much more profound and insidious. The real problem is that most IT shops are geared to fight a classic European set piece battle, forming up in structured ranks to frontally assault a business problem or challenge. We like to build large, complex applications with scripted workflows, automated approval processes, hard integrations with other systems, etc. Unfortunately, we are about to be drawn into a guerrilla war
Even if 90 percent of Android applications have zero business relevance, that still equates to 1,000 applications of potential interest per month. Smartphones and tablets are creating an interesting problem for IT organisations. Our users are not moving to new Internet access devices at the expense of old ones -- they are adopting new devices in addition to the old ones. Our employees are building their own, personalised technology workbenches in the same way that a blacksmith or furniture maker of yesterday would have configured his or her personalised workbench. A smartphone, tablet, laptop, and home PC and printer are basic components of every knowledge worker's tool belt. To add insult to injury, our employees are starting to subscribe to mobile applications that allow them to access information they can't get through company-furnished applications and databases. They also have a much keener appreciation of the obstacles that limit their productivity, so they subscribe to applications that will forecast traffic conditions, find Starbucks locations, update airline departure times, etc., to overcome their personal obstacles. Most IT shops bemoan the difficulty of supporting and securing smartphones and tablets. Mobile applications may be constructed on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and HP/Palm operating systems and accessed on a dizzying array of physical devices. The challenge to the standard end user support
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Managing information security is a little like eliminating access to inappropriate content in the workplace. laser intruder alarms in the room to thwart unwanted visitors, and finally require finger print scans to open the file itself. The simpler solution is that I just put the W2 forms in a place where they can't get them. Embargo all access -- it's worked so far. The same thing is true in private industry. Go talk to a hedge fund company or an investment firm that caters to "high wealth" individuals. Undoubtedly, these companies will have sophisticated technology to secure their IT assets, but more importantly, all employees will realize that their livelihood and personal job security is critically dependent upon avoiding the leakage of sensitive information. When USB ports are disabled on their PCs, they don't complain. When they are told that they can't have remote access to company systems, they don't complain. They "get it": An inadvertent security lapse could put them completely out of business and out of their jobs. Many high-tech companies also "get it." When their executives travel overseas, they leave their personal PCs and BlackBerrys behind and employ loaner devices that carry only the information required to conduct the activities scheduled for that particular trip. Their intellectual property is too valuable to be transported casually outside the confines of their company's labs and headquarters. Managing information security is a little like eliminating access to inappropriate con-
tent in the workplace. It's hard to get people to "clean up their act" until the threat of losing a job comes into play. If you are experiencing a loss of productivity due to the existence of suggestive information in the workplace, set a mandate with termination as a consequence. You will be amazed at the drop in access to offensive sites and content. The same is true for information security: Establish clear policies with clear penalties and just start performing some scans and searches. It's a lot more intrusive but a lot less expensive than buying more network security tools. The subtitle of Stanley Kubrick's iconic 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Maybe CIOs in 2011 need to adopt a similar mantra: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Smartphones and Tablets." Most of our employees already have their electronic tool belts, fully equipped with smartphone, tablet, laptop, and home PC and printer. IT shops that are in denial, hoping the complexity of this landscape will somehow disappear over time, are sadly mistaken. It's time to switch from being a reactionary force trying to hold onto the status quo to demonstrating true technology leadership by proactively supporting the use of new access devices throughout the enterprise. We need to develop a new "support contract" with the employees using these
various devices. Here are three steps we can take today:
Step 1: Continue to support a very limited number of standard "tool belts" (maybe one?) for the IT-challenged employees who still remain in every large company, but promote and evangelize the use of other devices with the "buyer beware" caveat that support issues will largely be resolved through self service. Properly managed, this should become an exercise in expectation setting: If you use a standard, supported device, we (IT) can help you solve your problems. If you elect to use something different, we can only go so far (defining what so means) in helping you when something goes wrong. That approach won't work in all circumstances but will provide an 80%+ solution for the majority of problems encountered by users of unsupported devices. Step 2: Embrace the reality of mobile applications. It will take a while to redeploy existing headcount from the support of legacy applications and give them new skills for mobile application development. In the meantime, IT should become a clearinghouse for "cool apps" that are already commercially available. Eventually, IT should be churning out its own monthly collection of "cool" mobile applications, but until that dream can become a reality, just start proTHE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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on their desktops everyday. They need only slivers of the large, complex applications we've constructed in the past. Ideally, they would like to GROWTH IN assemble much smaller comStep 3: Start Web-enabling SERVER REVENUES ponents of these applications everything. Become an interIN Q4, 2010: into portals that are customnal software-as-a-service ized for their unique needs. (SaaS) provider to your own GARTNER And they are coming to expect employees, and provide your "zero latency" in the databases users with browser-based that are feeding these appliaccess to the applications they cation components. Buildneed to perform their jobs. ing highly componentized applications, Look at the capabilities you are offering, with real-time data interfaces that can be and think about your users' desires to accessed on a subscription basis, is a radiaccess those capabilities in any setting, at cally new development paradigm for most anytime, anywhere. IT shops, but one that we will all eventually The three steps outlined above are tactical be forced to adopt. responses to the situation we find ourselves As a profession, we need to stop hiding in. Two other, more fundamental, changes are behind network engineering as the ultimate desperately needed in the way we do business: cure for all security ills. We are going to We need a new mental model for applihave to participate in a much more difficult cation development. We need to stop behavsocial conversation within our companies ing like 19th century British generals and and start restricting data access instead more like 21st century guerilla freedom of application access. Data is the ultimate fighters. We need a whole new paradigm source of competitive advantage. Every comfor application development based upon pany needs to determine what data is critical user "pull" rather than IT "push." Users to its health and survival, and restrict the want to subscribe to the portions of applicadissemination of that data on a true need-totions they need to do useful work; that's know basis. That will be a far more difficult why they minimize so many applications
moting other people's products and learn how to be an "early adopter" of mobile tools that are already out there.
conversation to have in most companies than debating the most appropriate tool for securing the transport layer. But ultimately, it will be a far more effective way to manage security-related risks and liabilities. Pundits like to use Facebook and Twitter as the ultimate examples of how constantly connected we all have become. I don't need to observe the behavior of my college kids to convince myself that we live in a constantly connected world. I can find clearer examples much closer to home. When my wife gets up in the morning, she turns on the computer before she turns on the coffee maker (and before she talks to me). That's the world I live in today.
—Mark Settle, chief information officer for BMC Software, joined the company in 2008. He has served as the CIO of four Fortune 300 companies: Corporate Express, Arrow Electronics, Visa International, and Occidental Petroleum. Settle has worked in a variety of industries including consumer products, high-tech distribution, financial services, and oil and gas. He received his bachelor and master's degrees from MIT and a PhD from Brown University. He is also a former Air Force officer and NASA Program Scientist. —This opinion was first published in CIO Insight. For more such stories please visit www.cioinsight.com
Cross-Domain Cloud Management
I
If your cloud initiatives are stalling, it's time to have a cross-domain services management team.
BY DENNIS DROGSETH
n this column, I'm going to pretend that you're already dealing with some cloud initiatives -- whether you had anything to do with them or not -- and trying to take some control over chaos. I have been proposing appointing a "Cloud Tsar" to document and evaluate who was doing what inside and outside of IT -- whether software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
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But, in this column, I'm going to draw on some December data from a global research initiative EMA did called Operationalising Cloud to give you some pointers about what to do next. Just for the record, we surveyed 155 respondents globally across verticals for companies of 500 and above employees. Of the respondents, 26 percent were C-level and 57 percent were director level and above. We were seeking the "top-down" view on cloud deployments.
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Starting over Perhaps what is most striking is 70 percent of respondents had to "redo" or "rethink" their initial cloud initiatives! The dominant change they wanted to make was process re-definitions so that different individuals and groups could work together more effectively to support the dynamic, cross-domain requirements cloud engenders. Changes in management technology adoption for provisioning services and monitoring and assuring services for performance were near the top of the list, as well, along with changes in application development and design. It might be also worth noting that more than 25 percent of respondents also had to re-assign ownership for organisational leadership. And, as IT executives, you may well want to know just what those organisational changes are likely to be. To answer this, I'll combine a little data with a little observed insight from working with IT organisations and hope the combination shapes up for you.
As a single organisation, Cloud or Virtualisation Support edged out Data Centre/Server Ops as the primary owner for cloud. This represents a radical jump upward (doubling in percentage) over a year ago. This is a selfstyled, specifically focused team that may or may not have strong cross-domain capabilities, depending on the maturity of the organisation and of the effective maturity of the cloud deployments -- the two go hand in hand. Perhaps more significantly, the third entrant here, architecture/infrastructure services, when combined with cross-domain service management, became the single, most pervasive organisational force in assimilating cloud and also the most successful one. When we did the analysis, we saw that this group led in accelerating cloud deployments, and was also more advanced in deploying critical service management technologies that in turn brought strong benefits based on our data. We tracked twelve technologies, but a few examples are CMDB/CMS, application dependency mapping, service catalogs, integrated service desks, and IT process automation, or runbook. We also asked respondents if they had a "cross-domain services management group" as a general statement of maturity. Now, I know that this could mean many things and go by many different names but the data that came back was nevertheless astonishingly consistent: If you have a cross-domain services management group not only are you categorically ahead of IT organisations that do not, you are significantly more likely to see your IT budget increase!
ILLUSTRATION BY ANIL T
Cloud teams
As a single organisation, Cloud or Virtualisation Support edged out Data Centre/Server Ops as the primary owner for cloud. In terms of cloud, you are advantaged in both the extent to which cloud services can be assimilated, and the effectiveness with which they can bring value. The value we tracked included opex and capex savings, provisioning new and existing services, improved service performance, and even enhancing business models and supporting revenue creation, among others. This group, by the way, is more often than not led by‌ you! Better than 50 percent of the respondents indicated C-level oversight, and 70 percent were VP level and above. If your cloud initiatives are sputtering and you don't have a crossdomain services management team (call it what you will including "architecture and infrastructure services") maybe it's time to create one. After all, the demands of cloud computing aren't limited to systems management. One could argue that virtual machines are fundamentally a networked phenomenon with disruptive impacts on the whole infrastructure, including storage, let alone applications that are themselves modular, dynamic and often unpredictable (e.g., Web 2.0) in terms of components. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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Reorg for the cloud? well planned, managed and integrated with broader IT So should cloud computing make you rethink your service directions; and · organisational structure? Maybe so. Once again, it's the 3 Cloud is a fundamentally cross-domain vs. "systemstail wagging the dog, I know. But cloud computing has only" or even "systems-centric" phenomenon once apparently gotten quite a lot of heft behind its tail. understood -- and this has profound implications on OF RESPONDENTS And it's still worth doing. 57 percent of our responprocess and organisational structures, as well as manHAD TO REDO dents were "somewhat satisfied" and 34 percent were agement technologies for assuring, optimising and OR RETHINK THEIR "completely satisfied" with their cloud deployments. provisioning IT services. That's up only a tad from last year. So what's next for you with cloud? I'd love to hear CLOUD INITIATIVES To distill an awful a lot of words (five columns worth) from you on that score. into three key points I'd say: —Dennis Drogseth is VP of Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise 1 Cloud is a confusing admixture of technologies- it's Management Associates, an industry research firm focused on IT management. Dennis can be reached at ddrogseth@ important to prioritise where and how you want to enterprisemanagement.com adopt them; · —This article appears courtesy www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles 2 Cloud is not an end in itself, but provides a means to deliver serregarding IT management best practices, please visit CIOUpdate.com. vices more flexibly, resiliently, cost-effectively and responsively if
Just What is the CIO's Role?
A CIO should know everything about information and the technology to deliver it. BY MIKE SCHEUERMAN
ILLUSTRATION BY BINESH SREEDHARAN
T
here has been a lot of discussion in many forums about the role of the modern CIO. To me it's fairly simple and it's in the title: Information. The CIO's role is about information. Information to make strategic business decisions; Information to make tactical business decisions; Information about the state of the business; Information about the customer needs; Information about everything that is crucial to the operation and direction of the business. Generating information and the systems that acquire, house and disseminate that information is the essence of the CIO's role. The person with the CIO title must be able to understand everything there is to know about the information needs of the business and everything about how technology can be used to deliver that information
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M A N AG E M E N T
in a timely, cost-effective way. So here's a breakdown of what the CIO needs to do to fulfill the role chief information officer: Strategy - The CIO participates in the development and management of the business strategy. Without this foundation the CIO can't know what information is needed for crucial business decisions and which is just nice to have. The business strategy drives the technology strategy. Developing a technology strategy with an architectural framework supporting the information needs of the various decision makers is the first step toward delivering that information. Interpretation - The CIO has to have the business savvy as well as the technical savvy to interpret the business needs in a technology context; answering this key question: What kind of technology can best deliver the information that is required? Acting as the intermediary between those with those who establish the business goals and strategies and those who know how to implement the technology is one of the key roles of the CIO.
Communication - Developing a communication plan to let all the stakeholders know what progress is being made on getting the information that they need is the next big area of focus for the CIO. You may be able to deliver a wonderful system, but if no one knows that there is forward movement, then you might as well not even do it because somebody is going to get impatient and unhappy because they don't know what's going on. Communication at all levels is vital. The information about progress is almost as important as getting the information for business decisions itself. Delivery - Delivery of information is next big area for the CIO. Putting together plans for projects that meet deadlines and budgets goes a long way to determining the success or failure of a CIO. There are multiple components to delivery: project management; infrastructure; vendor due diligence/management; security; regulatory compliance; stakeholder input, etc. The list is almost endless. Each of these components has a role to play in delivering that one piece of information that can
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make or break a business strategy. Delivering information at the right time to the right person is what the CIO does every day. If that information is faulty or late -even if it's not be the CIO's fault -- they will still get blamed because the tools of modern business are technology based. Being a CIO is one of the toughest jobs in any company because you have to know everything about the business, everything about technology and be able to clearly explain it to people who haven't a clue or don't care about one or the other . —Mike Scheuerman is an independent consultant with more than 26 years experience in strategic business planning and implementation. His experience from the computer room to the boardroom provides a broad-spectrum view of how technology can be integrated with and contributes significantly to business strategy. Mike can be reached at mike@scheuerman.orgmike@ scheuerman.org. —This article appears courtesy www.cioupdate. com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit CIOUpdate.com.
CASE STUDY | HOUSE OF PEARL FASHIONS LTD
Making ERP
Fashionable CHALLENGE:
House of Pearl Fashions DEPLOYED ERP to gain better control over its PROCESSES and USED IT as a fashion statement to ENSURE employees started using it.
BY VARUN AGGARWAL
T
he textile industry is one of the largest employment generators in India, and yet remains a low-margin business. The only way to thrive in this highly competitive industry, filled with process inefficiencies, is to do things differently. This is exactly what House of Pearl Fashions demonstrated with its ERP implementation. House of Pearl Fashions is a Rs 1,850 crore apparel manufacturing conglomerate that helps bring many of the world’s leading clothing brands to market. The company has operations across six continents and plays a dominant role in the supply chain for brands including GAP, J.C Penney, Next, Liz Claiborne, and Esprit. Since 2005, House of Pearl has expanded rapidly after a series of acquisitions that bought it manufacturing, sourcing, and distribution facilities around the world. Its growth enables the company to produce more than 4,000 styles every year and warehouse and distribute 5 million pieces of apparel annually in the UK and the U.S.
Good IT or God Riding on the back of acquisitions, the company was growing at 30 percent, while the industry was growing at 4-5 percent. “With growing business, you need lots of controls in place,” says House of Pearl Fashions, Group CIO, M Srivenkatesa. “If you have a business that goes beyond line of sight, then you need either God or good IT systems to manage it.” Srivenkatesa, who gave up the top job as CEO at another company to become House of Pearl Fashions’ CIO, had been looking for “some
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tool to get that control” from 2006 itself. The company had huge operations in geographies including India, the U.S., UK, Germany and Hong Kong. “As we got more business, new channels came into being and we came to a situation where nobody knew what’s happening about annual reporting and so on," the CIO recalls. Then there was the headache of dealing with disparate platforms. The company had a UNIX platform for shipping and commercial business, Oracle for production, and some homemade tools for merchandising, sales and procurement. “None of these talked to each other. We had a situation where the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing,” Srivenkatesa says. From being a CEO of a 300 crore rupee company, Srivenkatesa was getting into the CIO’s shoes to drive the ERP implementation for House of Pearl. Having worked on SAP earlier, he knew exactly what the solution could do for the apparel maker. With little IT experience, but formidable business domain expertise, Srivenkatesa embarked on a journey that required not just process re-engineering but also a massive change management initiative.
Selling SAP Not that change management was an easy thing to do with the deployment of this scale, the task at hand for Srivenkatesa was also to make people shift from paper registers to computers. However,
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better career opportunities and their market value would improve. That worked fairly well for us,” Srivenkatesa says.
Optimising Order Fulfillment Processes
COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY: HOUSE OF Pearl Fashions Limited
House of Pearl has been able to improve overall planning and forecasting to achieve greater cost and process efficiency. Centralised data collection has resulted in greater data integrity and accessibility to support strategic decisions and speedy monthly financial closings. Perhaps the greatest gains have been through improved global supply chain management and collaboration. Before, with orders taken in the UK or the U.S. and the
REVENUES: RS 1850 crore HEADQUARTERS: GURGAON, INDIA EMPLOYEES: 10,000
Operations' Highlights 30 percent growth year-on-year brought its own challenges ERP implementation reduced monthly book-closure cycle time from 20–25 days to 10 days Reduced order management lead time Reduced inventory levels Achieved greater supply chain efficiency and optimised sourcing Centralised operations data for enterprise wide consistency Enhanced system performance to gain fast response times
Financial and Strategic Benefits
M SRIVENKATESA, GROUP CIO, House of Pearl Fashions Ltd has been able to bring about transparency and efficiency in the entire supply chain process with SAP.
the biggest challenge for them was to ensure that business managers started using SAP. For starters, the company went with an open stream approach wherein there were no checks (audit check, accounting check, compliance check etc) put into the system to see how the users responded to the system. “We got a lukewarm response initially but we felt it was still better than what we would’ve had if we forced the system on people,” avers Srivenkatesa. The company decided to go slow and took about two years to have the entire organisation use the solution. “We ran an internal marketing campaign for SAP, creating positive vibes about SAP in the organisation. We also sent messages saying that people who started using it would have
Integrated enterprise-wide operations to improve planning and forecasting and achieve greater cost and process efficiencies Increased internal control to ensure proper recording, authorisation, and reporting of business transactions Improved accuracy and access to operational data to support strategic decisions Gained real-time inventory visibility to optimise levels and ensure delivery precision Improved collaboration across supply chain to realise optimal profit margins
corresponding goods purchased where they were most cost competitive, the processes were prone to gaps in communication or execution. “Our distribution and logistics entities were entirely dependent on worksheets and manual follow-up at every stage,” Srivenkatesa says. “But orders can now be tracked in real time for better visibility and control. Plus, we’re electronically integrated with many of our U.S. customers to reduce our order management lead times.” With SAP software, House of Pearl has gained a higher degree of adaptability so it can react more quickly to changes in demand and opportunities for growth. —varun.aggarwal@9dot9.in
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ENTERPRI S
SANS BOR D The coming together of superior UC technology and the need for businesses to be quick to grasp opportunities is set to transform the UC market in 2011. Early adopters are increasingly becoming borderless. By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal
HE WORLD IS INCREASINGLY becoming flat, resulting in an agile workforce catering to a global market place. Today, for a company, located anywhere in the world, to reach out to any customer irrespective of his location is an imperative. While this is a huge challenge for enterprises, it is an even bigger opportunity. Unified Communication (UC) has been playing a significant role in making this a reality. Today, UC has transitioned from being a pure communications platform to tools and applications to improve business processes and employee productivity. We have seen UC undergo some major changes to include new technologies that have helped bridge the
INSIDE 33 | 2011: The defining year for Unified Communications 35 | From UC to Social Collaboration 38 | Case Study: Improving Efficiency 41 | UC as a Service 43 | Leading the Change
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IMAGING BY PC ANOOP
R DERS
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communication gap further. From PBX systems to telepresence at your desktop, UC has slowly but surely assumed a quicker and more efficient avatar. As UC applications became more prevalent, organisations, of all sizes, were able to see, first-hand, the benefits that they could potentially derive from UC tools, prompting them to invest. Gartner recently published its annual Magic Quadrant on UC for 2010. In the market overview, the research firm notes, “The adoption of UC by enterprises continues to increase; however, actual penetration as a percentage of market, and, in some cases, usage rates across an enterprise, remain low.” Getting the workforce to actually use UC tools is essential if companies are to reap
Moreover, this transformation can help them to create new business models, accelerate decisions, increase productivity and innovation, and strengthen customer relations. Over the long term, opportunities even exist to design entirely new businesses and approaches using mobility, which could include virtual manufacturing, virtual meetings, virtual logistics or new modes of operations, such as office-less businesses. Employees are also realising the advantages of being able to connect and share information – regardless of time, location and device – based on their personal experiences with Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Wikis. Frost & Sullivan also says that India has good potential for growth of UC applica-
rganisations are looking at connecting the external world into the enterprise network securely. This is a challenge which is faced by the CIOs of the country today. the ‘soft’ benefits of increased collaboration and productivity and realise ‘hard’ metrics such as cost savings.
India Ahead In 2009, when it came to adopting UC and collaboration among companies, India saw the highest earnings in terms of 'return on collaboration' investment. According to a 2010 Frost & Sullivan study, currently, India leads the SAARC region's UC market in terms of total spending and better overall awareness of UC. Indian companies are realising that transformation into a collaborative, borderless enterprise will allow them to harness the efforts and collective wisdom of individuals across and outside the organisation. This is the single biggest reason driving UC demand.
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tions as demonstrated by the projected CAGR of 7.9 percent in the period from 2008 to 2015. It is clear that there is a huge market waiting out there to be tapped and companies are focused on addressing it. To effectively tap this segment, it is important that vendors develop customised solutions, which offer a cost-effective and easy to deploy alternative. Organisations are looking at connecting the external world into the enterprise network securely. This is a challenge which is faced by the CIOs of the country today. So with these changes, UC has to be implemented across all technologies and across all devices. It cannot be limited to the desktop or mobile, it has to be on every interface that a user touches.
Enabling Strategic Communication Every technology provider defines UC slightly differently. There are some providers who include everything under telephony, including contact centres. Others define UC as a technology that is limited to desktops. On the one hand, business users today at any point touch multiple disruptive devices such as Blackberry, the i-Phone, i-Pad, and other smartphones. On the other hand, with multiple users on Skype and various social networking sites, there is a very thin line between personal/ social life and professional life. This thin line too is fading rapidly as more and more interactions happen through Twitter and Facebook. There are some organisations that have integrated these applications into their systems. In today's dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit will come from having a communications system that can change and grow at a moment's notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective business communications, employee mobility, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability. Larger enterprises that had deployed UC technology prior to the downturn have already seen its usefulness as it helped cut costs immensely. In turn, this feedback has had a huge impact on smaller organisations, influencing their decisions to implement it. Key decision makers fundamentally want technology solutions that are not only cost effective but time effective as well. They are looking for technology that will make communication easy, fast and efficient. Reaching out to a subject matter expert or even a panel of experts based across the country should be a simple task and collaboration between teams and companies separated by geographical borders must be a constant and seamless activity. That said, multimedia conferencing and collaborative tools such as WebEx and TelePresence have experienced terrific demand from CIOs. There has been a change in demand. IP phones are being complemented by conferencing solutions and enterprise social software. CIOs are veering to the idea that enhancing inter and intra company communication can be brought about by deploying an entire UC framework rather a few select solutions.
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2011: THE DEFINING YEAR
FOR UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
In 2011, UC will be entering into a critical phase where there would be a greater need for overall awareness and understanding on it. ocial Communications and Collaboration and Video are among the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011, according to research and analyst firm Gartner. On the other hand, International Data Corporation (IDC) also views Unified Communications (UC) moving into a critical phase in 2011 where there needs to be more overall awareness and understanding — and customer handholding if necessary — around real-world UC applications, deployments, and success stories — proof points for validating UC's effectiveness. It's prime time for UC expertise to develop and propel to a level that matches the considerable amount of technology that is available. As a matter of fact, the usage of unified communication and collaboration tools has been significantly growing in India. With justified Return on Investment (ROI) and direct saving on costs, there is a strong belief that companies will increase their budgets toward video conferencing, instant messaging and other collaboration tools in the future. With this as a background, CTO Forum conducted a survey to understand the adoption of unified communications and collaboration in India. We surveyed the CIOs from mid-sized and large enterprises on their current preparedness, usage and future plans. Nearly 110 CIOs from across
Status of Current Collaboration Infrastructure voice, video and data via telepresence videoconferencing – using phone lines and television monitors
7%
Web-based tools including IP telephony
28%
18%
video – via the Internet
22%
voice – using wire lines
25%
Usage of Telepresence Executive management meetings
Others 1%
25% Internal collaboration
Products rollouts
21%
10% Appraisals 9%
Training 17%
Recruitments 17%
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Reasons for adopting UC Improves decision-making
12%
Better response
9%
Improves work/life balance
10%
Earth-friendly practice
9%
Quicker access to information
Other 1%
11%
Cuts Travel
16% Improves productivity
16%
Improves collaboration
16%
Biggest Obstacles to UC deployment Security
10%
Finding the money for it
24% Getting management buy-in
28%
Lack of technical knowledge about the best UC solutions/vendors
22%
Getting end-user buy-in
16%
Vision for UC 2011 No specific plans
18%
Upgrade room(s)
8%
Add rooms
6%
Migrate to hi-definition
18% Implement unified communication
36% Move to desktop
14%
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the industry spectrum filled in the full survey. The survey was targeted at measuring the corporate awareness, level of current usage and assessment of the future intentions within organisations who intend to use the UCC tools. According to the CTO Forum survey on the Opportunities and Challenges in Unified Communications, 35 percent of the respondents said they were already using video conferencing with the help of phone lines, television monitors or through telepresence. Another 22 percent respondents were using video over the Internet. The remaining 43 percent respondents leverage either Web-based tools including IP telephony or plain wire-line voice telephony for their communication needs. Telepresence, which is slowly gaining momentum in India, was found to be used for various purposes in Indian organisations. 25 percent of the corporates using telepresence do so for executive meetings, while 21 percent also use it for internal communications. The other usages of telepresence were found to be for appraisals, recruitment, training and even product rollouts. When asked what were the key drivers for adopting Unified Communications, we got a variety of responses. While 16 percent of the respondents were found to be using UC to reduce travel costs, another 16 percent used it for enhancing productivity. Yet another 16 percent respondents have adopted UC to improve collaboration with both internal and external customers. Twelve percent of the respondents also believe that UC helps in improving decision-making in the organisation. There are however, many obstacles that lay ahead in the widespread UC adoption in the country. The biggest challenges still remains the management buy-in, with 28 percent respondents facing this problem. Lack of knowledge about the best UC solutions and vendors also came out as a big hinderance as 36 percent of respondents are still looking forward to deploying UC this year. Among those who have already deployed UC, 18 percent are planning to migrate to high-definition and 14 percent want to deploy UC on the desktop. —A CTO Forum-Polycom Initiative
FROM UC TO SOCIAL COLLABORATION We’re social animals, after all. The future success of businesses may depend on the degree to which they recognise, accept, and enable this, so people can be, well people. That’s the way UC is headed and there seems to be no stopping it. By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal
S ORGANISATIONS BECOME more diverse in business applications, acquisitions and mergers become more common and multi-national workforces become the norm, decision makers are looking for ways to make communication as easy as possible for everyone. An important focus area for many organisations is how to mobilise their employees in a way that allows them to work efficiently wherever they are. UC has become the most important ‘must have’ in any organisation and users expect to get one solution that collaborates everything on the same platform, email, slide presentations, file sharing and so on, along with the video conferencing facilities. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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Most companies’ communications framework is synonymous with UC and it is important that a successful conversion is made possible. As given in any implementation, understanding of the requirement, doing right sizing, and proper project planning and migration plan to ensure a zero downtime is the way to go. UC is a journey and cannot be deployed 100 percent on day one, it is a stepwise process. Every IT organisation faces the need for more hi-tech deployments each year. Ideally, the first step would be to cut down the cost by unifying all the offices, bringing everyone onto the same platform, centralised management, centralised conferencing, and centralised video conferencing. Enterprise decision makers should be wary of a UC plan that does not provide specific and actionable strategies for end-user adoption. Enterprises and UC vendors need to treat the end user like a consumer rather than attempting to control their collaboration tools and devices. For some enterprises, the idea of user-owned devices may seem impractical and even daunting. That doesn’t mean end users and their preferences can be ignored. The way would be to start with small training and follow-up sessions coupled with marketing the new tools through internal communications and evangelising within the organisation. IT groups of most enterprises today have implemented UC to some extent in the form of integration of PBX systems (especially voice mail) with email and calendar. Enterprises in advanced stages of UC have integrated other channels of communication such as instant messaging, combined with support for audio and video and desktop-sharing for collaboration to enhance the UC experience. Though still in nascent stages, CommunicationsEnabled Business Process (CEBP) is getting introduced into enterprises. It involves traditional enterprise work-flows getting integrated with enterprise communication systems to simplify the progress of such work-flows.
More Video With the emergence of the Internet and the evolution of networkcentric business practices, many companies had turned to multimedia conferencing; others embraced applications that allowed
groups to share documents and collaborate on projects in real time. Now, some companies, including a growing number of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), are combining these capabilities to create virtual meetings. About 50 percent of the traffic on the Internet comprises videos, reflecting the importance of video to UC. The next slew of enterprise gadgets will use videos as a form of communication as it allows the transfer of information in real time and in a way it is cost effective. Reaching out to a subject matter expert or even a panel of experts based across the country will become easier with the use of video-enabled endpoints and will allow teams and companies separated by geographical borders to communicate with the push of a single button. Additionally, the availability of 3G definitely opens up new roads for technologies and applications owing to the greater bandwidth available, as well as faster data transfer.
More Smart Devices If you see the evolution of the whole piece then the disruption first happened because of the Internet. The next high-end disruption that markets are seeing is the proliferation of smart devices in the enterprise network. There is a significant traction in the usage of mid and low-range devices in the enterprise space. Indian enterprises being price sensitive will see faster adoption at the mid-level range and the penetration of the high-end smart devices will be limited to a select circle of employees. The new generation of employees is already fast adopting these tools and devices. With the end users opting for do-not-call options, the other channel that is attractive is social networking. The increased use of mobile phones in the enterprise can be attributed to the affordability and availability of smartphones, reasonable tariffs, convenience and ease of use, ubiquitous data coverage and the personal flavour added to communication. Mobile UC focuses on tighter integration of mobile phones with Enterprise applications such as email, address books and calendar as well as bringing in additional messaging channels such as SMS/MMS to improve employee productivity. Many Enterprises have deployed Mobile UC to some extent.
obile UC focuses on tighter integration of mobile phones with Enterprise applications such as email, address books and calendar as well as bringing in additional messaging channels such as SMS/MMS to improve employee productivity. 36
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As a result of the proSocial Animals, After liferation of smartphones All people are more active on Collaboration technologies social networking sites. (UC, videoconferencing, Smart ‘enterprise collaboration’ vendors will provide Increasingly the compaWeb 2.0 applications) and following capabilities off their platforms: nies are integrating social mobility solutions (solunetworking into their CRM tions that enable users Ability to extend and consume functionality across network, so that the systo access the network different media, publishing and user interfaces tem filters all the relevant irrespective of his/her locatweets, for instance, and tion, solutions for mobile Ability to seamlessly integrate with enterprise comments on the social workforces) will be the infrastructure to enable organisations manage networking site into their areas of focus. enterprise security, applications and administration CRM network. Research In addition, UC and its shows that on 5-7 percent component technologies Reporting and Analytics capabilities, which of the tweets are relevant are speeding-up businesswill enhance the value of the social actions, to the company; this helps es on their path to going conversations, transactions, content and the companies to even take green while reducing networks that gets generated out of the usage immediate action on the carbon-heavy overheads. of the collaboration platform tweets from the customers. Enterprise Social SoftThis helps the company creware is another area In the true sense of collaboration, many enterprise business ate a ‘wow’ factor, because generating great interest software vendors are likely to partner with, and acquire they can take instant action amongst corporate IT other relevant technology to leverage the complementing on complaints and give planners/decision makers. collaboration features and provide richer solution and information to their cusAccording to Cisco’s Colbusiness value to the businesses and end-users. tomers immediately. This laboration Nations 2010 also helps in reaching out report, 60 percent of the proactively to the customusers surveyed, admitted ers who have otherwise not to ignoring the companies’ social media policies at approached the company directly. least once a day while close to 20 percent claimed that they ignore Today with these social networking sites the challenge is that one these policies multiple times a day. negative tweet about the product/service of the company results in ESS is not a replacement for publicly available Social Networkmillions of other tweets which result in forming an opinion about ing tools. It attempts to use the concept of social media to improve the company. productivity at work. Some reasons why this software is in demand is because the need for socially-driven collaboration has increased. Faster Decisions Virtual teams and communities can quickly share ideas through Take the example of supply chain: most of the companies follow blogs and wikis, schedule meetings and enable IM, voice, and just-in-time approach so as to reduce their inventory cost. Howevvideo communication. er, if there is non-availability of a critical raw material, production Collaboration has evolved from its 1.0 ways of being a point of could stop. one-way conversation and communication to 2.0 which is a more Today most of the companies have ERP and SCM but the action comprehensive, integrated and multi-way approach to community on a particular situation is taken by people. All the delays that gencollaboration to providing real business benefits for organisations erally happen are because of the human latency. If an alert is not and communities. addressed on time, the entire cycle gets delayed. The difficulty with 1.0 is that it has limited visibility or empowThere are now solutions that trigger a communication exigency. erment for general users, is hardly discoverable, and provides no Once the trigger comes in from the backend ERP, it can start means to extend the functionality. On the other hand, 2.0 tools new alerts bringing in all the right stakeholders and the people and techniques have emerged as platforms of the people, for the responsible to take the decision on to a conference call across people, by the people. devices. This will enable them to discuss the situation and take immediate action. People can even follow up and reply to the case by either pressing 'yes' or 'no' on their devices. This reduces hours of decision making process to minutes. Every company has an emergency group thattakes action at the time of crisis. It is important to get this group activated at the time of exigency and take necessary steps. —minu.sirsalewala-agarwal@9dot9.in
The Take Offs 1
2
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CASE STUDY | ESSAR GROUP
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY N Jayanta Prabhu, Essar Group’s Head of IT Infrastructure and Technology, decided to deploy a centralised communication platform in Essar. He brought in standardisation, optimised costs, and ensured users got seamless communication, be they iPhone lovers or Blackberry addicts. By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal
COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY: ESSAR GROUP REVENUES: $24 BILLION HEAD QUARTERS: MUMBAI, INDIA EMPLOYEES: 70,000 SECTORS: OIL, POWER, Communications, Minerals, Shipping & Logistics
SSAR GROUP, the $24 billion telecommunications -to-oil conglomerate, has aggressive expansion plans, with one group company Aegis alone making an average of five acquisitions every 12 months in the last three financial years. Consolidation of IT infrastructure, then, was a given. N. Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT Infrastructure and Technology at the group is overseeing the consolidation of the company’s IT infrastructure, a process that started close to four years back, and includes putting in place a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure. “From $5 billion five years back, we’ve grown almost five fold to $24 billion,” Prabhu points out. “I do not want to maintain multiple set ups.” What Prabhu and his team were looking for was a communications solution that would allow them to exploit all the tools of modern unified communication.
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At the same time the platform had to be amenable to integration of disparate legacy systems so that they could be managed from one centralised location.
Needed: A Cost-Efficient Solution It all began with Essar incurring high costs for communications between employees located across different facilities globally. That Essar had multiple IT locations managing different systems was another factor influencing the decision to consolidate as Essar expanded. Employee travel was on the rise and considering the economically challenging global environment, Essar was keen to cut expenditure. The need was a cost-effective and efficient solution that would reduce travel. The acquisitions naturally brought in disparate systems and the attendant growth-
related challenges: multiple locations in multiple countries with little standardisation. Communication was becoming difficult, and cost was becoming a problem — not just operational cost, but also that of management and technology maintenance. On the communications front, Prabhu and his team were looking at centralising their operations with common facilities such as audio and video conferencing, voice mail, and VOIP.
Integrated Solution Using technology from Avaya, the chosen communications platform provider, “We deployed applications for conferencing, centralised management and mobility,” Prabhu said. Prabhu’s team, was already familiar with an earlier Avaya platform — CM 3. They
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then had the option of upgrading it to a newer version, CM5, and extend the functionality to all the users. Instead of upgrading existing set ups, what Prabhu decided was to procure a telephonic exchange from the vendor and integrate both CM3 and CM5. “This has been done in India for the first time,” he said. Essar is following a phased approach to implement and deploy the hardware and the applications across its various sites. As of now, a Session Manager and other components are being deployed. The deployment allows Essar to exploit the advantages of open standards: The platform is “reliable, scalable and secure, and enabled Essar Group to further save on communications costs,” Prabhu says. It has allowed Essar to put in place a single, integrated dial-plan across the organisation; THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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the session manager facilitates centralised routing with smarter on-net calling. Communication infrastructure management costs are coming down, as the deployment rolls out across the group, with enterprise-wide architecture and centralised management. Essar has been able to retain existing communication features, while consolidating and centralising applications such as messaging and conferencing.
Huge Benefit The benefits for the group are both qualitative and quantitative. On the qualitative side – there is easy access to all, anybody can contact any location through VOIP. Essar has configured conference bridges for both audio and video meetings. A mobility application allows anybody in Essar Group to login within their network and have a conference call. Essar was earlier paying to a private service provider to access this service, so the rates they were paying were much higher. The in-house conferencing solution has significantly pared this cost. The integrated, centrally managed communication platform has simplified Essar’s complex communications networks, reduced infrastructure costs and facilitated quick delivery of new voice, video, messaging, presence, and web applications to employees everywhere. Services such as Netcalling, and applications such as Voice Mail, Conferencing, and any third-party applications can be rolled out across sites using sequencing from one data centre. There is now Centralised Management, Centralised Voice Mail, and Centralised Audio Conferencing. The Session Manager allows for sites to be added at a later stage as and when required. The Session Manager significantly reduces inter-office communication costs by utilising SIP and enabling CUG calling. Additional features such as audio conferencing facility for the entire group within the CUG network through the Centralized Meeting Exchange also delivers further savings. “It is a huge benefit for me,” Prabhu says. “Also the usage of any device; for example I can use an iPad and all the collaboration tools and at the same time can
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MORE BANG FOR THE BUCK INVESTMENT
Rs 5-10 crores in recent locations in Mumbai. Planning another RS 10-15 CRORES WITHIN NEXT ONE TO TWO YEARS.
ROI At Hazira plant, COMMUNICATION BILL WAS AROUND RS 10 LAKH PER MONTH. Now it has come down to 2 lakh after implementing VOIP.
RESULTS REDUCED COSTS. The Avaya solution has cut costs on employee travel by providing a more robust communications platform. In addition, the IP-based voice solution allowed “free of cost” STD and ISD calls leading to savings of up to Rs. 12 Lakhs per month. IMPROVED PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY. The Avaya solution has enabled enhanced collaboration when resolving issues between IT teams across various locations. The solution also provided enhanced mobility to employees at a manageable cost. As a result, there is an increase in productivity, and significant reduction in employee downtime. In addition, clients are able to reach employees easily thereby avoiding business disruptions. MORE PERSONAL INTERACTION. Through the Avaya solution, Essar achieved more personal interaction with employees at all locations for problem resolution without increased communication costs. LOWER OWNERSHIP COSTS. Avaya IP phones support both SIP and H.323 communication protocols to enable standardization on a single client for the entire workforce. REDUCED NEED FOR TRAINING. Avaya products deliver a consistent, easy-to-use interface across multiple platforms so employees can stay updated without expensive training sessions. EXPAND AND EXTEND ESSAR’S VOICE NETWORK. This was done using the existing communications infrastructure with minimal incremental investment. SOURCE: ESSAR
extend it to BlackBerry or any other device seamlessly.” This open architecture with the corresponding flexibility is benefitting the entire group, he says.
Roadmap “We have prepared a roadmap and based on that roadmap we are operating existing set ups and at some places we are replacing existing telecom exchange with Avaya,” Prabhu says. Essar is using Flare POC now. “They have given us a few POC equipments on Flare, the smartphone. We have already successfully tested a POC in
our environment. Now we have ordered 25 Flare equipments.” The plan is to integrate Essar’s SAP CRM with the Avaya platform. “The integration is already going on. They want to bring all the SAP, internet and all the backend access through that on Flare,” Prabhu explains. The roadmap also includes the creation of a DR strategy for the existing communications platform.
—minu.sirsalewala-agarwal@9dot9.in
UC AS A SERVICE As companies put the impact of the recent financial crises behind them, UC adoption is expected to increase significantly. More companies may consider the purchase of UC as a service or as a hosted solution as a future option. By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal DOPTION OF UC IS DEPENDENT on companies training their users on the use of this technology and for decision-makers to quantify its benefits. While market growth is improving, newer cloud service offerings may be a significant factor in its longer term success. UCaaS has also radically altered some equations—as a hosted, managed, and utility or usage-based offering, UCaaS can remove the barrier of up front expenses and greatly improve the bias for action within the CIO’s office. Offered on a per-seat basis, UCaaS can include a standard suite of UC feature sets as part of the monthly seat cost. Typically, these capabilities can include presence THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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UC IN 2012
Buyers are very interested in UC; new solutions that solve business problems are being delivered; and interoperability in its many varieties is on every vendor’s agenda. This, together with new business and delivery models that rapidly deliver UC capabilities and benefits, positions the market for rapid acceleration by 2012. The first movers will be in industries that value the speed of informationbased business processes; for example, business services and healthcare. IT professionals charged with UC initiatives today generally believe that UC will be part of their standard operating environ-
ment over a five-year deployment cycle. These same professionals are looking for the internal workgroups and roles (for example, sales forces and R&D teams will be early adopters) that will realise the highest value from faster, more collaborative business processes that can prove the case for UC once and for all within their companies. Vendors will be able to use buyer interest in cloud (particularly private cloud) deployment models to increase consideration of UCaaS — but will have to deliver communications and collaboration capabilities that can interoperate with on-premises solutions like direc-
management, soft phones, single number reach, unified messaging, conferencing, and the necessary communications and messaging hardware to support the offer. Since these capabilities are provided in the cloud, consistent service experience and business continuity are intrinsic. In short, UCaaS provides UC capability via a cloudbased, standardised, and predictable model of cost and delivery.
UC for SMBs Not just large global enterprises, organisations of every size are turning to UC—inside and outside their companies. Currently, adoption in the mid-market segment is seen to have increased and is growing rapidly. The SMB-potential for UC is tremendous as UC offerings span across budgets and requirements. The bouquet of UC offerings, currently available in the market, is so versatile that any organisation, large, medium or small, can find technology that best suits both its needs and budget. "Not just for large global enterprises, organizations of every size are turning to unified communications—inside and outside their companies." articulates Neeraj Gill, MD , India & SAARC, Polycom. According to a NASSCOM report, approximately 50-60 per cent of IT expenditure in the country is expected to come from the flourishing SMB segment. There is also a huge potential in small towns for UC as it is currently an untapped market. As companies get more globalised UC will be more in demand. More and more SMBs are now adopting UC because of the many benefits that it can offer.
Not Quite There Yet One of the major limitations in the Indian market is the government regulation on PSTN and VoIP interconnection, which limits the full potential of an IP telephony system.
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tory or security. Buyers want to deal with fewer vendors and service providers in all areas; therefore, vendors will recruit and/or develop channels (either sole providers or those that can lead a consortium of systems integrators (SIs), value-added resellers (VARs) and service providers (SPs) that can deliver the full gamut of ICT capabilities. Those ecosystems of vendors and channels that cannot fulfill a broader set of requirements in a tightly coupled hybrid deployment will risk losing a competitive edge to those who do. SOURCE: FORRESTER
Interoperability is yet another issue that needs to be resolved. Not all phones, soft phones, gateways, call managers are interoperable as they support some proprietary variant of a standard protocol. This limits enterprises from a free mix and match of components. The usage of open standards can tackle this issue. Many suppliers have developed products that support open standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP not only allows for VoIP communication but also supports video, fax, presence and instant messaging. Open standards are important because they provide a foundation that can be built upon. One common problem faced in the deployment of enterprise UC applications is often the kind of bandwidth available for use within the office space. While we have definitely seen the digital divide reduce, we still have a long way to go. A 2 mbps connection, for a year, continues to be quite expensive, prompting many organisations to opt for connectivity of poor quality. This, sometimes, affects the performance of enterprise technologies and tools and does not leverage the true capabilities of the application in question. Often when an organisation considers change that impacts every employee, such as an enterprise-wide IP telephony implementation, the process tends to focus on hardware, software, and getting the technology up to speed as quickly as possible. However, a company's infrastructure is also composed of people. Resistance to change is normal and should always be anticipated.
LEADING THE CHANGE
In the 10 months since ANDREW MILLER took over as the CEO of Polycom, he has been leading the company from the front. In conversation with Yashvendra Singh and Rahul Neel Mani, Miller talks about the metamorphosis undergoing in the unified communications market, and how Polycom is addressing it. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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How is the overall enterprise communication and collaboration space changing? There are lots of exciting changes and strong growth drivers that are propelling the market for unified communications (UC). First, we see an expanding market for UC both within and beyond the enterprise to SMB, mobile and consumer applications. This growth is driven by three factors: adoption of open standards and integration into best-of-breed UC solutions like Microsoft Lync; accessibility of telepresence solutions ranging from consumers and the mobile market to SMBs, enterprises and service providers; and the widespread availability of cost-effective bandwidth. Second, the underlying business drivers for UC are increasing as more businesses of all sizes are operating globally and looking for ways to improve communication and collaboration across locations and time zones to accelerate decision making and time to market, and to lower operation costs and better leverage existing resources. The market for Unified communications has immense potential. According to a Frost & Sullivan research study in 2009, the APAC market size of video conferenceinfrastructure is around 330-350 million dollars, of which, India’s contribution is around 9%. But, by 2015 this industry is expected to reach around 850- 900 million dollars and the growth in India is expected to be 15%. You have been leading Polycom's Open Collaboration Network initiative. How has the progress been so far? The Polycom Open Collaboration Network (POCN) is a key strategy for Polycom that provides significant value for our customers. By working with leading unified communications platform providers, Polycom is able to deliver its productivity-enhancing and cost-saving telepresence, video and voice collaboration products as an integrated part of core unified communication environments, making the technologies easily accessible as part of the everyday workflow within a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy and manage. Our strategic Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners include Microsoft, Avaya, BroadSoft, HP, McAfee, IBM, Juniper Networks
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and Siemens. Through this initiative, our customers can stay assured their solutions continue to interoperate in a best-in-class environment, rather than being tied to one particular vendor. 2010 was the year when you believed in "sell-through philosophy" where the service provider sells and fulfills services to customers. Will this strategy continue in 2011 too? It will definitely continue. In fact, we think 2011 and moving into 2012 will be when the service provider market for UC really gains momentum. One of Polycom’s key strategies is to enable the next generation of cloud-based services in conjunction with our service provider partners. We will do this by powering service provider networks through the Polycom UC Intelligent Core infrastructure platform, and by bringing together partners around standards and open interoperability to drive a network effect for customers. How is Polycom enabling the service provider channel to host and manage services for end users? In India, Polycom has a 2-tier distribution structure. There are 3 distributors and 50+ channel partners. By first quarter of 2011, Polycom will be launching ‘Polycom
Choice Programme’ for defining its channel partners, their certification and growing their reach. To enable service providers to deliver UC services reliably, cost-effectively and with a differentiated experience, Polycom is building the most scalable and robust platform to deliver these services through the Polycom UC Intelligent Core. How do you see consolidation in the industry affecting technology advancement? Consolidation is happening, but Polycom is winning in the market, because we remain focused on delivering greater customer value, flexibility and investment protection. Polycom believes it is critical to continue to innovate in a standards-based way and to provide seamless UC integration through our POCN partners, while also solving the interoperability challenges for our customers by connecting the islands of communications that exist between enterprise, mobile and consumer applications. This is also proven through Polycom’s commitment to UCEverywhere, a strategy for seamlessly connecting communications across the continuum of consumer, mobility, SMB (small to medium businesses) and the enterprise, regardless of platform or network. These same innovations enable ser-
U N I F I E D C O M M U N I C AT I O N
“There is no doubt in my mind that real-time communications in the cloud is coming and will drive broader adoption” vice providers to deploy open cloud-based UC telepresence services, giving customers the capability to communicate outside their organisations and across their supply chain to suppliers, partners and customers.
assurance that Microsoft and Polycom technologies will be deployed and managed in solutions that not only consider the server and software platform, but also at the full network impact and utilization.
While yourn ‘UC Everywhere’ strategy includes a cloud computing solution, there are issues such as end-point equipment installation, training, lighting and sound, and operating procedures in migrating video conferencing to the cloud. What is your take on it? There is no doubt in my mind that real-time communications in the cloud is coming and will drive broader adoption, because it solves many of the issues limiting adoption today that we have discussed previously. However, you question is a good one. Regarding equipment installation, the barriers for businesses today is not actually plugging in the cameras and codecs, it is making sure they systems can easily connect across the network and between firewalls. The cloud will solve these issues. Areas like training, specialised lighting and sound, etc. provide a great opportunity for value-added services through service providers and channel partners. One example is BT, which has created reference architectures to give customers the
Telepresence adoption in India seems to be quite far. What is your strategy to push its growth? Yes. Polycom believes there will be several major factors driving growth of telepresence. Polycom is helping to enable the cloud-based services that will simplify how customers purchase and use visual communications technologies like telepresence and make it easier to extend video use across business, mobile and consumer applications. Regionally, there are two key areas that need to align so that you see growth, namely broadband infrastructure deployments and then industries see the bottom benefits of adopting the telepresence solutions. Firstly the India government is very committed to the deployment of highspeed networks both wireless and fixed broadband across the breadth of India, this then becomes the foundation to build from and we are working closely with them on this initiative. Next, we have aligned with a number of key channel partners in India which include
COVE R S TO RY
leading telecommunications player. Together with these channel partners and our PCON partners, we are developing innovative solutions for many end user customers especially in the verticals of Government, Healthcare and Education. But why is the market still reaching out for closed technologies as opposed to open, standards-based ones? The market is undergoing a sort of metamorphosis. We are seeing tremendous traction for open and interoperable technologies. Enterprises are realising multiple benefits by choosing open platforms based technologies. There is also confusion in the market, some of it propagated by other vendors, about the current state of interoperability. For example, we hear from Cisco Telepresence customers all the time that were promised interoperability, but find themselves locked behind proprietary walls. It is this customer demand that led us to support Cisco TIP on our infrastructure platform. We are breaking these customers out of the proprietary walls and providing a way to leverage their existing systems, but scale their network with standards-based solutions moving forward. UC’s full IP-based approach can introduce reliability, security and regulatory issues that are frightening to certain industries such as healthcare, for instance. What is the way ahead? On the Healthcare front, organisations face challenges mainly in three areas; delivering quality patient care, streamlining care delivery processes, and improving business processes. These challenges are compounded by an environment with many time-dependent critical processes, multiple modes of communication, and many mobile caregivers and other workers with widely varying availability throughout the day. Polycom offers a portfolio of end-toend, scalable, secure, Unified Collaborative solutions, which increases productivity of healthcare professionals, are used extensively for training of hospital staff, can extend patient care and expertise to remote areas, and also improve patient care with mobility solutions.
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NEXT
HORIZONS
BARCLAY BLAIR SAYS
“It is not uncommon to find that 30 percent or more of the data we collect from clients is duplicate information.”
S
uccess in IG requires fundamental changes to the way that companies think about information and how they should manage it. This means that IG, more than anything, is a change management exercise. And change management requires powerful simple messages to drive it. That's what I hope to provide here and in my next few columns.
Reason 1: We can't keep everything forever
Case for Information Governance There is just too much information now to manage without a plan.
BY BARCLAY BLAIR
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"Information workers, who comprise about 63 percent of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more." — "Don't You Dare Email This Story," Wall Street Journal. IG makes sense because it enables organisations to get rid of unnecessary information in a defensible manner. Organisations need a sensible way to dispose of information in order to reduce the cost and complexity of IT environment. Having unnecessary information around only makes it more difficult and expensive to harness information that has value.
I N F O R M AT I O N G O V E R N A N C E
Most statistics on the volume of digital information organisations create contain numbers so large that they are hard to comprehend (for example, "the digital universe" is estimated by IDC at 281 exabytes in size or 1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 1 million terabytes = 1 billion gigabytes). Organisations experience 30, 50, or even 100 percent annual growth in the volume of information they store. And the trend doesn't seem to be slowing down. Although the cost of storage hardware continues to drop, storage hardware costs are just the beginning. According to IDC, the total cost of storage ownership "far outweighs the initial purchase price" of the hardware, and includes factors such as migration, outage, performance, information governance, environmental, data protection, maintenance, and staff costs. Organisations often claim that they are just keeping a piece of information "for now." Without a firm plan in place, this really means "keeping it forever." After all, unless you plan on keeping a piece of information forever, you will need to make a destruction decision about it at some point. Will that destruction decision be easier or more difficult in the future? After all, in three, five, or ten years will: IG, with its legal and compliance foundations, provides a defensible approach to disposing off unnecessary information. The combination of good policies around retention of information during normal business operations and preservation of information during legal holds and litigation or regulatory investigation protects your organisation. It's important to note that the law doesn't require us to keep everything forever, but only IG provides a defensible framework to help us get rid of the information we don't want and aren't required to keep.
Reason 2: We can't throw everything away "Ensuring the right information is available to users when needed is regarded as the highest business priority for large companies. And the vast majority of decisionmakers believe that an effective information strategy has a very significant impact on this top business goal." — "Managing Information: Research Study on Customer Priorities and Challenges," RONIN Corporation.
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IG makes sense because Section 802 of Sarbanes Oxley: organisations can't keep every "Whoever knowingly thing forever, nor can they throw destroy[s] any record, document, everything away. We need the or tangible object with the intent GROWTH right information, in the right to impede, obstruct, or influplace, at the right time. Only IG ence the investigation or proper OF DIGITAL provides the framework to make administration of any matter good decisions about what infor- UNIVERSE IN 2010, shall be fined under this title, ACCORDING TO imprisoned not more than 20 mation to keep. If we could throw away every years, or both. IDC piece of information created We can't throw everything and received in our institutions away. We need some way to whenever we wanted to, there would be determine which information has value little need for IG. The reality, of course, is either because of business goals or legal much different. Information is how we do requirements. IG helps us with this. business and, to a greater degree each year, business success is influenced by how well Reason 3: E-Discovery we manage that information. Although "It costs about 20 cents to buy 1GB of most information is created by individuals, storage, however, it costs around $3500 to enterprises are responsible for the security, review 1 GB of storage."- AIIM Internationprivacy, reliability, and compliance of most al Email Management ROI Calculator of the information these individuals create. IG makes sense because it reduces the cost and pain of legal discovery, now This is the role of IG. referred to as ediscovery since most inforSome information we keep because of its mation is stored electronically. Proactively business value. Some we keep because of managing information reduces the volume legal requirements. By some calculations, of information subject to ediscovery and there are thousands of laws and regula-
Information Governance, with its legal and compliance foundations, provides a defensible approach to disposing off unnecessary information. tions in the U.S. alone that speak to the way organisations must manage their information. The role of IG is to parse those laws and regulations into practical policies and retention schedules that guide the organisation on its proper management. Without an IG program, organisations are at risk of breaking the law. Certain external events, such as litigation or a regulatory investigations, also create special legal requirements for the management of information. In these situations, even information that could normally be thrown away has to be preserved and properly managed. Failure to do so opens an organisation and its employees up to serious criminal and civil penalties, such as those spelled out in
simplifies the task of finding and producing responsive information. In the past five years, ediscovery has evolved from a specialised legal issue into a disruptive force in the business, IT, legal, and information management realms. This transformation was kicked off in the U.S. by the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and fueled by years of inattention to information management at many organisations, which had allowed vast stockpiles of unnecessary email, documents, and databases to accumulate. Today, organisations can expect to spend millions of dollars finding, processing, and producing responsive digital information in the course of a major lawsuit. According THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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30%
have been satisfied. IG enables to Fullbright and Jaworski LLP, us to get rid of unnecessary one in five large organisations information in a defensible spends more than $10 million manner. As such, it can reduce the each year on litigation (excludamount of information that needs ing settlements and judgments). OF THE DATA to be reviewed in the course of a By 2011, it is expected that WE COLLECT organisations will spend nearly legal matter. FROM CLIENTS $5 billion annually on ediscovWhen working with clients, it is not uncommon to find that 75 ery tools, according to Forrester. IS DUPLICATE to 95 percent of the information The expense of ediscovery INFORMATION created by the organisation in comes from many sources, the email system, for example, but one of the most significant has no long-term business value or legal is the cost of finding, processing, and retention requirement and can be disposed reviewing information that has been of in the ordinary course of business. These unnecessarily retained. The law on this percentages vary by system and industry, point is quite simple: if you possess but the amount of "record" content is usuinformation at the time you know or suspect ally much lower than "non-record." Further, it will be responsive to a legal matter, you a good IG program reduces the amount of must preserve it -- even if you could have duplicate information stored by an enternormally disposed of it in accordance with prise. Duplication is expensive and wasteful. your records management program. In our ediscovery practice, it is not uncomThe proactive nature of IG means that mon to find that 30 percent or more of the unnecessary information is disposed of as data we collect from clients is duplicate soon as it is no longer needed and all legal requirements for its retention or preservation information.
The value of IG then, is that it can help organisations defensibly reduce the amount of information stored by orders of magnitude — a benefit that is felt not only in reduced management costs, but also reduced e-discovery costs and risks.
—Barclay T. Blair is a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, software and hardware vendors, and government institutions, author, speaker, and internationally recognised authority on a broad range information governance issues. He is the founder and principal of ViaLumina Group, Ltd. His blog, Essays in Information Governance , is highly regarded in the information governance community. Barclay is the award-winning author of several books, including Information Nation, and is currently writing Information Governance for Dummies. Barclay is a faculty member of CGOC (www.cgoc.com). —This article appears courtesy www.cioupdate. com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit CIOUpdate.com.
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5
POINTS
DOLESCENCE AND A EXECUTIVE function RECOGNISING THE onset of corporate adolescense CHALLENGES OF business adolescense PHOTO BY PHOTOS.COM
UNITING THOUGHT AND action through IT FROM COST centre to difference maker
IT AND THE
ADOLESCENT ORGANISATION
As a start-up evolves into a mature company, it offers IT an opportunity to prove its worth. BY DAVE RAMSDEN
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Businesses go through several stages
of evolutionary development and in each one they demand different things in order to survive and to prosper. In an organisation’s early entrepreneurial beginnings, the focus lies in getting customers and generating enough revenue to stay alive. Centralised systems for managing workflow, delegated leadership, and formal business planning lay far off in the future.
skills needed to deal with these opportuniBut as the business grows, these needs ties (and hurdles) change, as well. begin to become pressing -- often challenging the leadership of the organisation to recognise that there are new requirements Adolescence and the for both their leadership and the business’s executive function functions. From an IT perspective, this In middle schools, many students are chalentrance into the maturing phases of busilenged because the focus of learning shifts ness growth can be an excellent opportunity from primarily technical functions (such as to support and accelerate company perforreading or mathematics) to a new requiremance. Moreover, if IT truly embraces its ment for assuming more executive funcpotential, this can be a transitional moment tions. These executive functions are skills that allows it to develop a vital strategic role like prioritisation, delegation, organisation, in the organisation. collaboration, and work planning. We may There are many models which analyse all recall that age when long term assignthe phases of business growth. Although ments and projects suddenly became a lot there are many other outstanding sources more complex. on this topic, many of my observations refBusinesses at this adolescent stage feel erence the work of Neil Churchill and Virpressure from the same challenges. The ginia Lewis, who recordedThe Five Stages strengths of the organisation need to transof Small Business Growth in a 1983 edition form. The executive functions in any wellof the Harvard Business Review. Whichever organised business become more essential business expansion model is examined, every day. The company cannot rely solely however, you will undoubtedly recognise on the success of its traditional product to the period of growth in which a business solve all its problems. This is not to say that struggles to progress from the company loses its identity, its initial success as a small but it does go through an awkbusiness to a more mature ward period of change and organisation which maintains adjustment to the new priorisustainable growth. ties at hand. If we compare this phase of For example, the owner of a EXPECTED CAGR the company’s growth to our design firm may be a creative
17.4%
own human development, it parallels adolescence. New opportunities are accompanied by awkward growth and frequent confusion. More significantly, though, the specific
FOR CRM MARKET IN INDIA FROM 2010 TILL 2014
genius, but may also need help managing cash flow or setting up a quality assurance process. A brilliant engineering entrepreneur may have difficulty delegating work and
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is most likely unfamiliar with HR best practices. Some executives cannot navigate this change. Some may be emotionally tied to the earlier corporate culture or to their role as the singular heroic leader. As a result, their companies may either fail or eventually migrate to new ownership. Other leaders may fair better, but never be able to push the company into the growth mode, which is necessary to attain business maturity in later years.
Recognising the onset of corporate adolescence So how does IT rise to the call and assist in helping the company through these changing times? By recognising the signs of these phases, understanding the larger business changes at work, and engaging strategically with executive leadership to augment the skills they need most. By truly understanding the business requirements of their company during their adolescence and recognising the unique factors at work, IT can take advantage of this period to demonstrate powerful strategic value, and ultimately drive the performance of the organisation to new heights. To begin, it is important to understand the hallmarks of a business entering adolescence. Here are some characteristics to help define this stage: n An organisation at this stage has already passed through the times when the owner did everything and constantly worried about adding clients, delivering product, and generating enough cash to break even. The owner is now withdrawing from day to day responsibilities. n The organisation has lived to see the addition of functional managers, and responsibility for budgets and major decisions are beginning to be pushed out to them. n Financially, there is a growing sense of stability, both in terms of client base and cash flow. The company is recognising regular profits and reinvesting them into growth. n Systems are often unevenly deployed and departmentally isolated with little or no cross functional capabilities. This is the point when the leaders of the organisation typically need to make a decision regarding future growth. To plunge into expansion mode, they must actively reinvest their profits into THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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funding growth to drive the company into this new age. In doing so, they also introduce functional managers, who are more forward-looking, and work towards a vision of the future rather than managing the status quo. These managers may be given responsibilities such as developing their own respective budgets and collaborating to develop strategic plans to march forward as a united group. The growing focus on the future, from developing shared vision to budgeting for
to them, IT leadership can have a remarkable effect on the success of the company. Consolidating applications into systems that provide forward-looking intelligence will be crucial to effective strategic planning. And the ability to measure progress and tweak tactics accordingly will enable the CEO and functional leaders to be nimble even as the company reaches its growth goals. IT’s ability to unite thought and action from the executive level throughout the company is a lasting strength. Mature
From process automation to collaboration, unified communications and decision support intelligence, IT must deploy the solutions that the new organisation is going to need to truly thrive at this stage of its life. organisations entering any new market or growth challenge need this advantage like never before. Global organisations coming out of the Great Recession are seeing major business growth in emerging markets. These businesses need to approach that growth in new ways; ways that mesh with the cultures and economies of the communities they are selling into. New challenges Transforming from cost center to like these tax the flexibility of large organisadifference maker tions. Strategic use of technology can not The CEO needs help more than ever at this only help meet those challenges, but transmoment (this can be said of mature organiform them into opportunities. sations as well today). As we have said, most In all of these cases, from growing entreentrepreneurs have outstanding skills in preneurial companies to global corporaat least one key area, and that is how they tions, the IT function transforms into the were able to create and develop the success architecture of the executive function itself. which all of their staff share in. But not all The infrastructure must be entrepreneurs have developed reliable and fast. The systems the skill of collaborating with must be integrated and easily a dispersed leadership team, accessible onsite or remotely. nor that of accurately gauging More importantly, the applicatheir performance and managOF INDIAN CIOS tions must enable those same ing toward strategic goals. abilities we struggled to grasp By anticipating these needs HAVE PLANS TO in middle school. They must and recommending business INCREASE THEIR IT provide executive leadership solutions (i.e., software packSPENDING with information that helps ages and the appropriate delivthem collaborate, assess, prioriery models -- cloud, on premtise, and organise while providise, SaaS, etc.) that are catered growth and strategic planning, are all signs that an organisation is going through a significant change. What follows are guidelines how IT can use this knowledge to transform from a functional cost center to a key strategic player with a seat at the executive table.
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ing the CEO with the ability to better coach and delegate. In this way, vision, strategy, and tactics are easily translated from the top down through all levels of the organisation. The CEO can no longer be everywhere at once, though they may deeply wish they could. Their vanishing sense of control can cause real grief. Having reliable systems that keep interdependent functions running smoothly can be an enormous gift at this moment. Moreover, the ability to easily access performance metrics from these systems greatly aids in both tactical and strategic decision making. From process automation to collaboration, unified communications and decision support intelligence, IT must deploy the solutions that the new organisation is going to need to truly thrive at this stage of its life. The best IT leaders will recognise these signs and effectively introduce solutions that empower the organisation to succeed. They will consult with leadership from the top down, creating business solutions which are instantly recognised as such, instead of technical solutions which may be less accessible to the C-level audience. And by focusing these solutions on the adolescent organisation’s new need for analysis, planning, communication, and control, they will reveal their own strategic value in the vision of the future.
—Dave Ramsden is chief intelligence officer at Atrion Networking Corporation, where he is responsible for the Information Services team. His focus is on applying technology, process improvement and business intelligence to drive strategic execution across the organization. He has over 16 years of leadership experience working for companies such as Eastern Telecom, Data Comm Systems and Dimension Data. Dave can be contacted at dramsden@atrion.net. —This article appears courtesy www.cioupdate. com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit CIOUpdate.com.
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C LO U D
Cloud Attributes Apply Across the Stack The functional and operational attributes of storage must embrace the core attributes of cloud. BY KEN OESTREICH
M
y “aha” moment here at EMC came during my first week when I was asked to describe the generic attributes of cloud infrastructure. Here I was, in an organisation that’s made billions on storage, and I was about to talk about cloud attributes solely from a compute perspective.Was I missing something? I then realised that I’d always related to storage as a “big, fat, dumb disk in the sky”, and assumed that it was merely subservient to the compute stack. Well, not exactly. My re-think was that attributes of compute, storage, and yes, network, all had to be reconsidered in the context of a holistic cloud-based infrastructure.
Cloud Attributes: Most will agree that the following attributes describe the operational profile of a generic cloud: (HT to IDC) n Shared, standard service. Built for a market (public), not a single customer n Solution packaged. A “turnkey” offering, integrates required resources n Self-service. Admin, provisioning; may require some “onboarding” support n Elastic scaling. Dynamic and fine grained I’ll add a few functional attributes as well: n Consolidation: ability to make optimal use of lower-level resources n Automation: ability to self-configure to provide the required service n Multi-tenancy, Multi-tiered-SLA: ability of resources to securely house individual services & service-levels across shared infrastructure n Global availability: ability to provide a shared service across multiple availability zones
Attributes in a Storage Context The first assumption most make is these traits apply exclusively to the compute layer (physical servers, VMs etc). But pause and consider the storage (and network) facilities too need to embody most. But consider this: In virtualised world, servers are files, and files are just data. So, when we talk about cloud-related scaling, service migration, server
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fail-over etc., we must also implicitly speak of managing data dynamics, replication and mobility. When we talk about automation, self-service provisioning and service elasticity, we’re implicitly talking about dynamic data/storage provisioning and expansion. From a broader perspective , begin to consider implications of global availability and hyper-scale. The terabytes of data that embody virtual servers and their data might need to be migrated to (or duplicated in) multiple hemispheres. We can know (or hope) that the physical servers will be there but it’s the bits that still have to travel. The next idea these observations triggered was the need to keep compute, network and storage stacks in lock-step when rolling-out cloud services. The answer (not surprisingly) is converged infrastructure. But I'm now encouraging everyone to view storage of bits in a completely different light – one where the functional and operational attributes of storage must be architected to embrace the core attributes of cloud computing. For without the bits, there can be no servers, no data, and no services. —Ken Oestreich is a marketing and product management veteran in the enterprise IT and data center space, with a career spanning start-ups to established vendors. This article was first published on http://fountnhead. blogspot.com/ and appears here with prior permission from the author.
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NO HOLDS BARRE D
H A R V I N D E R S R A J WA N T
DOSSIER COMPANY: Cisco Systems ESTABLISHED: 1984 REVENUES: $40 Billion HEADQUARTERS: San Jose, California, U.S. PRODUCTS: Networking Device, Network Management, Interface and Module, Optical networking, SAN, Wireless, Telepresence, VOIP, Security Datacenter
3G Devices Will Attract More Cyber-Scamsters
Harvinder S Rajwant, Vice President, Borderless Networks – Security, Cisco Systems talks to Varun Aggarwal about the increasing threats on the mobile platform, fired up by 3G. 56
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What trends do you see in the way various cyber-threats are emerging? While it’s only beginning to percolate, a trend is clearly emerging—Cyber criminals are looking for new opportunities outside of the PC environment. They are investing more resources toward developing exploits that specifically target users of mobile devices. Taking advantage of the rapidly multiplying number of mobile users worldwide makes business sense. Less developed nations are particularly ripe for opportunity: Due to vulnerability exploits in various Windows PC operating systems, Microsoft has improved security in Windows 7 and taken a more aggressive approach to patching vulnerabilities. This makes it tougher for scammers to infiltrate Windows 7 effectively; having reached the Windows vulnerability ‘tipping point,’ they have moved on to other operating systems, applications, software services, and devices such as smartphones, iPads, and iPods. Apple and its products, including iPhones, iPads, and the iTunes media service, have all experienced an increase in exploits. Just as important in driving this trend is the embrace of mobile devices and applications by consumers and enterprises. The worldwide adoption of mobile devices presents even more opportunities for intrusions and theft. While security researchers have identified many focused scams that target mobile devices, a widespread incident is almost certainly on its way. To date, scams have targeted select groups of mobile users, such as customers of a specific bank. The massive and relatively new market for mobile applications also offers new markets for criminals. Researchers have detected exploits in which wallpaper apps for Android Market, the app store for the Android mobile operating system, have been collecting mobile subscriber information and sending it to a website owned by a scamster. According to market research firm IDC, the number of mobile devices, from smartphones to tablet PCs, accessing the Internet will surpass 1 billion by 2013, creating more opportunities for cybercrime. In the Indian market, with the advent of 3G, as mobile data traffic increases it will lead to increased threats in the mobile space. According to the Cisco Visual Net-
working Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2010 to 2015, in India, mobile data traffic will grow 114-fold from 2010 to 2015. What impact do you see with the increased focus on Java as an attack vector by various malware writers? Cybercriminals aim their campaigns at software programs, devices, and operating systems where they can reach the widest net of potential victims. This is demonstrated by the noticeable increase in exploits involving the Java programming language, and the ongoing use of PDF documents to launch exploits. At this point, Java appears to be the greater threat. The flaws in Java have made it a promising target for criminals.
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appears the mobile malware, which users download after falling prey to a social engineering ploy, is designed to defeat the SMS-based two-factor authentication most banks use to confirm online funds transfers by customers. Cisco security experts anticipate that the real focus of cybercriminal investment for 2011, however, will be on improving the success and expanding the number of cashout services (‘money-muling’ operations). These operations are a vital component of the cybercrime lifecycle and are becoming more elaborate and international in scope. ‘Money Mules’ are individuals who help launder money by accepting and transferring funds earned in online scams. Money mules are sometimes criminals; more often, however, they are people in need of money who are tempted into this activity by ‘work-
“High-end cell phones are getting infected with deadly viruses such as the Cabir virus, causing untold damage by deleting all stored information. This is the first cell phone virus, which originated in Philippines.” When it comes to PDFs, organisations rely heavily on these documents to conduct business, so the idea of limiting their use within corporate networks is seen as impossible. Yet Adobe Reader and Acrobat continue to be strong threat vectors online. It’s the rare business or personal computer that doesn’t have the Adobe Reader software for viewing PDFs, and computer users continue to place an undue amount of trust in these documents. With people increasingly accessing official documents on smartphones, it poses a huge threat in the mobile space. New on the horizon are exploits delivered via social networking that can infiltrate multiple platforms. The massively successful banking Trojan, Zeus — which, according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has played a key role in the theft of more than $70 million from 400 U.S. organisations over the past several years — is already being adapted for the mobile platform. It
at-home’ spam. Regardless of whether they are willing participants or unsuspecting victims, money mules are integral to enabling criminals to profit from their campaigns. Users can limit these operations by not becoming unwitting accomplices. Since people are the weak point in forming a defense against socially engineered scams, user education must be ongoing and effective. However, in spite of many organisations’ best efforts to teach workers to exercise caution when responding to emails or social network messages, social engineering continues to be a highly successful method for cybercriminals. How would 3G change the mobile threat landscape? Third-generation (3G) mobile networks are opening the way for access to an everexpanding array of high-bandwidth applications and data services to mobile subscribers. The ability to use applications such as Skype, which within a year have been
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downloaded more than 17 million times, on a mobile network may change all provisioning assumption used in its design. “Always-on” connections, as made possible by mobile data access networks such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), wireless LAN (WLAN), and 3G, expose subscribers to a growing number of malicious threats such as the upcoming mobile viruses or even traditional broadband viruses and worms, degrading the overall user experience. High-end cell phones are getting infected with the deadly viruses such as the Cabir virus, causing untold damage, deleting all stored information. This is the first cell phone virus, which originated in Philippines and has already infected many highend cell phones. Another virus, Cardtrap-A, targets Series 60 Symbian devices and spreads via Bluetooth or if it is downloaded and executed on the phone from the web. After infecting the phone, Cardtrap-A copies two Windows worms (Padobot-Z and Rays) to the memory card of the phone in an attempt to get onto other devices.
to the network, but also the network itself, which should be intelligent enough to adopt itself to the changing demands and should cover the underlined network services and selectively give access to the resources such as application servers and back-end database servers.
What should organisations do to mitigate these new threats? Since social networking is one of the main causes for security breaches, it is important for organisations to adopt strict policies around this. It is important to have tighter controls on how workers use social networks such as Facebook. Security solutions that allow businesses to fine-tune how individuals navigate around a social networking site, and what information they can post and share, already are in the market. For corporations today, products are driven by the ‘User Experience’ which is driven by the latest tools and applications that are part of their social networking. Corporate IT is now forced to not only give access to these sites but also ensure security without compromising the ‘User Experience.’ So corporate IT policy has to keep track of all the ‘SMART’ devices getting connected to the corporate network, identify their context and profile and dynamically enforce policies based on the service requirement identified by each business demand. This policy not only should cover the end devices or for that matter any SMART entity getting connected
“It is important to have tighter controls on how workers use social networks such as Facebook.”
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What role can service providers play in securing the mobile device? How viable is it to do this in India at the moment? The opportunity provided by data services has prompted mobile operators around the world to launch new architectures, marketing campaigns, and service strategies to gain market share and revenue. With the adoption of IP-based service models, and with the introduction of ‘true’ high-speed mobile access, operators are facing an increasing number of new challenges that threaten the success of their initiatives by turning their data networks into generic access pipelines with little service differ-
entiation. Moreover, as service offerings mature and are supported by higher access bandwidth, subscriber quality expectations increase tremendously. As operators capitalise on IP networks, they need to create higher-margin, higherrevenue premium services such as video streaming, push-to-talk, or interactive gaming. Mobile operators are looking for profitable ways to deliver such value-added, bundled, or personalised IP services to greater numbers of subscribers. Critical to the current strategy is the ability to understand at a granular level how subscribers are using the network, identify what applications or services are being consumed, and then intelligently apply network resources to applications and subscribers that promise the highest return on investment. Operators need to manage and control subscriber traffic. This can be accomplished by implementing service control technology, which enhances the transport network with application and subscriber awareness. Service control allows the network to identify, classify, and guarantee performance for services based on unique application content and subscriber criteria. Service control reinforces the new paradigm in which mobile service providers can define and enforce the policies for application traffic management on their network. In this way, operators can optimise network performance, overcome QoS constraints, ensure that infrastructure is used for maximum return on investment and secure their network from malicious traffic. Mobile service providers will play a major role in securing the Mobile device connectivity as they are in the best position to reach and service this vast population with disparate end devices which converge at their network layer. In fact we have partnered with most of the large service providers today who are offering securing email services and secure
web browsing services and secure corporate connectivity services for their broadband and enterprise users who have availed their bandwidth connectivity services and it is a matured market with stable technology.
— varun.aggarwal@9dot9.in
Author: Matt Barney
“The book codifies Infosys' unique values and leadership practices.”
HIDE TIME | BOOK REVIEW
New Paradigm in Leadership
Infosys gives insights into developing effective leaders for the 21st century INFOSYS Technologies Ltd has been heralded as one of corporate India’s leading lights. It typifies every aspiring entrepreneur’s dream, as the success story of seven driven men from India’s middle class, with only a dream to bind their aspirations. Leadership @ Infosys is perhaps the first book to systematically analyse the key factors that have helped the company grow rapidly, from a seed capital of just $ 200, in 1981, to crossing the four billion-dollar mark in 2008. The book is an interesting anthology of articles from senior leaders of Infosys and edited by Matt Barney, PhD, Vice President and Director of the Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI), in Mysore, near Bengaluru, Karnataka. The institute serves as the company’s corporate training facility. The foreword, written jointly by N.R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor and Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO, sets the tone for the rest of the book with its refreshing candour. The writers acknowledge the transformation that Infosys has undergone and with characteristic modesty, admit to “not being perfect”.
The vision is grand, as they express their desire to see Infosys thrive for the next 200 years; a grand ambition, no doubt. They identify Infosys’ values as the key driver to sustainability. And they point to how Infosys always strove for ‘respect’ – their vision exhorted them to become a ‘globally respected corporation.’ They also believe that the leadership should set a positive example for the rest of the organisation, as that would provide the “moral authority to lead.” Inspiring words, indeed. And Infosys has certainly lived up to its lofty ideals over the last three decades. Matt Barney’s introductory chapter takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the inner sanctum of the Infosys edifice. Here, he sets out the core Infosys values as C-LIFE— Customer delight, Leadership by example, Integrity and transparency, Fairness and the pursuit of Excellence. Then he explains how Infosys selects, trains and nurtures its leaders. The ILI assigns counsellors to the cadre of leaders who have been identified for senior positions. These counsellors serve as coaches who, according to Barney, “help the leader
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Mahesh Ravi is the Managing Editor of India Now magazine. He can be contacted at mahesh. ravi@9dot9.in
interpret strengths and opportunities, and focus specific actions that will likely pay off the next year when we assess them.” In addition, Barney outlines nine dimensions of “Infosys Leadership”. He combines the interrelated Strategic, Change, Adversity and Transition dimensions into one chapter. Other dimensions are Operational, Talent, Relationship and Networking, Content and Entrepreneurial. Each chapter in the book focuses on one of these dimensions and select Infosys leaders share their insights and experiences within that particular dimension. The epilogue from T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director and Member of the Board, is no less inspirational. Pai says “leadership is about getting ordinary people to achieve extraordinary goals,” something which he acknowledges is an “exceptionally difficult task.” But he concludes that it is only a “team of excellent, passionate, visionary leaders with a wide range of viewpoints” that can provide longterm sustainable leadership. —mahesh.ravi@9dot9.in
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VIEWPOINT STEVE DUPLESSIE | steve.dupless@esg-global.net
Why is Everyone so fired up about big data?
ADVANCED analytical capabilities? Enhanced business intelligence? Superior decision support abilities? The ability to turn data into money? Nope. While all those are good things and very worthwhile pursuits, they are not the reasons our industry is so enamored with the construct of big data. The reason we love big data is far less complex. There are really two reasons: first, because Oracle decided to get into the game and second, because once we figured out why they wanted to get into the game, we realized there was a ton of money to be made–or lost. The IT industry has been built on the back of transactional systems. Those are the most expensive, most important systems in our worlds and as such have the best people on them. Transactions occur once. We make sure our systems scale to meet transactional demands–once. We pay a lot to over-provision in every aspect because transactional scale is not a nice to have, it’s mandatory. Big data is created by copying transactional data and sticking it on another system. Over time, those
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systems become supersets of our transactional systems. We make lots of copies and put them in lots of big data systems. Since we used big iron/big databases/big money stuff on our transactional systems, we had the tendency to duplicate those investments on our big data systems even though those systems behave completely differently from each other. So we found ourselves with giant systems and giant expenses all over the enterprise, built for transaction processing, that don’t ever do transaction processing. They sit idle 90% of the time, waiting for an “analyst” to come up with some query to run against the data set. Oracle sells TONS of RDB licenses for big data infrastructure, even though it seems stupid that that type of data sits inside an RDB. People are creatures of habit. Industry counts on it. So, along comes the benevolent Mr. Ellison. He sees that the masses are paying $3M+ in infrastructure costs for each of their big data piles. He doesn’t think he is getting enough of that pie. So he brilliantly decides that he can radically reduce the spend on
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most influential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www. thebiggertruth.com
hardware by packaging up commodity stuff purpose-built to handle the big data issues. He then bundles all of his magic software–which now consumes 80 percent of the spend–and puts a bow on it for customers. Then he gets downright evil (and even more brilliant): he runs into all the big sites, performs a quick software audit, and finds out those sites are all out of licensing compliance. Suddenly, customer A gets handed a bill for $4M–but not to fret, because the good people at Oracle have a simple solution: instead of just paying up, why not just buy a new Exadata system–which will greatly simplify your life–and we’ll make that little compliance issue disappear? Genius, really. I figure there is at least $6B in big iron at risk in this area alone. Now, not to be overtly pessimistic, there is a silver lining. Once all the plays have been made for their ulterior motives, then everyone will get down to the real value at hand, which is making those random piles of data start generating customer value. That will happen.