The Best of 2011: A Collectors Edition

Technology for Growth and Governance

D NS FIE ATIO I UN IC N MU M CO

January | 07 | 2012 | 50 Volume 07 | Issue 10

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editorial yashvendra singh | yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

The year gone by, the year ahead Take stock of what you had anticipated in 2011 and what actually happened, and then plan for 2012

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s we move forward into 2012, you would be in the process of setting the IT agenda for your enterprise in the new year. Depending on the business model, CIOs’ mandate could be to run, grow or transform their organisations by leveraging technology. However, this would also be a good time to look back into 2011 and take stock of what some of you had anticipated, what actually happened and why.

The year 2011 started with the

editor’s pick 10

belief that it would be the year of the tablet.

By mid-year consumers and CIOs alike were besieged by the problem of plenty. While consumers were spoilt for choice, CIOs grappled with managing mobile devices and the related enterprise security challenges.

The year saw enterprises moving a step closer to cloud computing. Some pioneering CIOs embraced the emerging model.

Umesh Jain, President and CIO, Yes Bank, for instance,

The Best of 2011 In a compilation worth treasuring, CTO Forum brings to you the best features, opinions and analysis of 2011

moved all his bank’s applications on to the private cloud.

The ‘Go Green’ theme was unavoidable too. We conducted a survey on this issue with CIOs across the country. It revealed some interesting and encouraging results. Of a sample size close to a 100, 86 percent vouched for absolute support from their top management on deploying green IT. For a large percentage (72 percent), going green was a corporate mandate. CIOs were taking initiatives such as virtualisation, hardware refresh, reduced printing and the use of web 2.0 to cut down on their carbon footprint.

The year also witnessed some innovative IT deployments.

Encapsulating the best of analyses, features opinions and case studies, we bring to you CTO Forum’s Collector’s Edition.

Through this elegantly designed issue, we reminisce and celebrate your thinking and your accomplishments.

We, at the same time, encourage you to continue to lead with the innovative use of technology in 2012. This issue intends to serve as a good reference point as you track your organisations’ progress.

Personally, as we enter a new year, we promise to try and attain higher benchmarks for ourselves. We would like to request your support in keeping us honest and keeping us on our toes.

Have a wonderful and prosperous new year!

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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Cov e r D e s i g n by a n i l vk

In a compilation worth treasuring, CTO Forum brings to you the best IT implementations, features, opinions and analysis of 2011

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Cloud

14 | a Disruption That is Coming of Age 16 | DTH Self-Care on the Cloud 20 | Cloud Adoption: Tough Love 24 | Demystifying Cloud Computing 25 | TOP 10 cloud computing caveats

Security

31 | The Cyber Defence Team

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34 | Evolving Role of Security

Storage

37 | What’s Hot in Storage 39 | Enhancing Operational Efficiency

Virtualisation

43 | PRIVATE CLOUD OPTIMISES DATA CENTRE

Mobility

47 | CIO & Mobility 50 | Increasingly Mobile

Unified Communications 53 | From UC to Social Collaboration 55 | UC as a Service

Green Technology 59 | INTO A GREEN hospital 61 | GREEN POWER

CIO Speak

62-74 | cio opinions from 2011

what’s brewing at the

CTO Forum?

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www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Consulting Editor: Sanjay Gupta Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal Assistant Editor: Ankush Sohoni DEsign Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Director: PC Anoop Visualisers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Shokeen Saifi Sr Designers: Sristi Maurya, NV Baiju & Chander Dange Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N, Charu Dwivedi Raj Verma, Prince Antony, Binu MP & Peterson Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

76 a question of answers

76 |Cloud is a Journey Sushil Kumar, Vice President, Product Strategy and Business Development, Oracle Corporation talks on how cloud can transform an organisation 82

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82 | best of breed: Hero Worship and the Switch to Agile Learning quality

88 | View point: Understanding China Taking a look at the Great FireWall. By Steve DUplessie

lessons from Toyota.

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Digilink – Schneider IFC Trend Micro 5 SAS Institute 13 Tata Communications 7 Nullcon 13 BlueCoat 11 Fujitsu 18,19 Novell 14,15,37 Riverbed IBC IBM BC Toshibha 8-A Dell 16-A This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

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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 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 Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh.

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FEATURE Inside

Enterprise

Exploitation of Tech and the Information it Processes Pg 08

illustration bY prince antony

Round-up

Security Trends to Watch Out For

Ransomware, polymorphism, figure in the Fortinet's watch-list for the new year Fortinet has revealed FortiGuard Labs’ 2012 threat predictions, highlighting eight security trends to watch out for next year.

Ransomware to Take Mobile Devices Hostage “Ransomware,” an infection that holds a device

“hostage” until a “ransom” payment is delivered, has been around on PCs for years. FortiGuard predicts we’ll see the first instances of ransomware on a mobile device in the coming year.

Worming into Android Worms, malware that is able to quickly propagate from one device to another, have by and large remained absent from the Android

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operating system, but FortiGuard Labs believes that will change in 2012.

Polymorphism Want a Cracker? Fortinet has previously encountered polymorphism on Windows Mobile phones and believes it’s only a matter of time before the malware appears on Android devices.

Clampdown on Network-Based Money Laundering Using anonymous fund transferring ser-

vices and payment processor safe havens, cybercriminal syndicates have pretty much operated with impunity for years. However, FortiGuard Labs believes more people will be tracked and captured in 2012.

Data Briefing

$42.8 billion

Latest valuation of TCS

E nte rpri se Round -up

They J.T. Wang Said it

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According to JT Wang, CEO, Acer, we'll be seeing Windows 8 Ultrabooks in the second half of this year and Acer will be among the first to produce them. He said this at electronics show CES at Las Vegas.

HP Enhances Enterprise Cloud Services Solution to enhance the performance of mission-critical apps

“We estimate this year that 25-35 per cent of Acer will be Ultrabook. In the next two years we will make Ultrabook a mainstream product and we will cover all customers and all segments.” ­­­­­­­­­­­­­ J.T. Wang, — CEO, Acer

HP Enterprise Services recently announced a new release of its Enterprise Cloud Services that enhance the performance of mission-critical applications while meeting the changing demands and workloads of enterprise clients.

Clients implementing an infrastructure-as-a-service model require high performance of key business applications and confidence that important data is protected. New enhancements to HP Enterprise Cloud Services—Compute enable clients to increase enterprise agility and advance security by: Automating provisioning and management of additional virtual local area networks (LANs) within an isolated cloud environment for comprehensive information security; and improving on- and off-site encrypted backup and restore options for servers, virtual machines and databases, resulting in greater protection of critical data. The new HP Proof of Concept program enables clients to experience Enterprise Cloud Services—Compute capabilities via a short-term trial run.

During the trial period, clients can run applications through HP’s cloud computing infrastructure to experience these services as they would be used in their production systems.

Quick Byte on Financial

There is an increase in malware infections within WordPress sites, an open-source application frequently used by bloggers and self-publishers, due to a vulnerability in a popular image plugin and loose credential management, say Researchers at the AVAST Virus Labs in Prague.

— Source: AVAST Virus Labs

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E nte rpri se Round -up

Exploitation of Tech and the Information it Processes Social

graph will help companies understand factors impacting productivity

The Information Age is an 80 year wave of economic and societal change that is in its second half, where business value comes from exploitation of technology rather than from installation, according to Gartner.

"In the first half of the Information Age, the primary focus was the technology itself; this is where great fortunes were made by companies like IBM and Microsoft," said Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "In this period, the majority of companies that gained competitive advantage did so by differential access to the technology from these providers — for example, by

having more capital to invest in it or better skills at installing it in their businesses.

"In the second half of the age, as technology becomes ubiquitous, consumerised, cheaper and more equally available to all, the focus for differentiation moves to exploitation of the technology and to the information it processes," Raskino said. "It is already noticeable that the great fortunes of the second half of the age are being made by companies like Google and Facebook, which are not traditional makers of technology. In this period, the majority of companies that enjoy competitive advantage will gain it from a dif-

Global Tracker

Malware infection on Facebook

Over 45,000 Facebook users were

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Source: Gartner

infected by a financial malware called 'Ramnit'

ferential ability to see and exploit the opportunities of new kinds of information."

In a special report, "Strategic Information Management for Competitive Advantage," Gartner has identified four particular types of generally useful information likely to dominate competition this decade, in the way that process information and customer information did in the past 15 years: Location information, which is now maturing in availability, will offer opportunities to better optimise the utilisation of almost any movable physical asset (human or inanimate) in almost any business.

Sustainability information will be vital in advancing business models in industries that are adapting to the realities of a finite Earth meeting the demands of massive, consumerising emerging markets.

DNA information and the rapidly falling cost of obtaining it will obviously be critical to innovation and productivity leaps in agriculture, medical care and pharmaceuticals, but it will also impact insurance and other sectors.

Social graph information will help companies "X-ray" and understand organisation, team design, culture and other factors impacting knowledge worker productivity, yielding valuable insights to advance the intellectual service economy the way time and motion study did for manufacturing in the 20th century.

Beyond these, context, gesture, the live state of everyday objects (Internet of Things), inherent identity (untagged, imagerecognition-based), human emotional state and even brain response to stimuli are all new types of information that are at the radar's edge or are starting to be brought into play within businesses.

Gartner defines "competitive advantage" as a difference between a company and its competitors that matters to customers. It is one of the two key components of corporate profitability.

"The Gartner view of competitive advantage is about leadership — that is, how does an organisation gain a leadership position from the tools, capabilities and competencies at its disposal? The focus is not on doing something merely to be competitive, but rather on taking action to be the leader," said Jorge Lopez, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

E nte rpri se Round -up

image bY photos.com

EMC to Collaborate with Universities in India Begins with IISc and Amrita University

EMC recently announced it has extended its global corporate research program – the EMC Innovation Network – to India, and as part of the program, EMC’s India Center of Excellence (COE) will fund concentrated research efforts in India through University Collaboration to discover and explore technologies shaping the information infrastructure of the future. India now forms a fifth node of EMC’s worldwide Innovation Network, which has existing initiatives in the United States, China, Ireland, Russia, Israel, Egypt, and Brazil.

EMC has begun its University Collaboration program with the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) and Amrita University, Coimbatore. EMC will work with IISc specifically on the analysis of unstructured data, concerned with the discovery of patterns and trends in large data sets; and with Amrita University on information security. These are the first two universities in India to be part of EMC’s university collaboration research efforts and the EMC Innovation Network. They join global esteemed institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Peking University, and other universities at EMC’s world-wide locations.

IISc and Amrita University were identified on the basis of their commitment to research, quality of technical talent at faculty and student levels, and their expertise in key areas identified by EMC in information infrastructure technologies. EMC’s India COE will establish deep collaboration efforts with both institutes with the sole purpose of innovating new solutions for emerging challenges.

Founded in 2007, the EMC Innovation Network is the company's global research and innovation collaboration, connecting advanced technology researchers with university and industry partners, including startup companies, from around the world. Following its mission statement to, "Expand knowledge locally, Transfer it globally and Leverage it strategically," the network builds fruitful collaborations between EMC's R&D operations and the technology communities in each region. By bringing together talent from inside and outside the company, EMC is expanding its knowledge in strategic areas of technology through a continual exchange of information.

Fact ticker

Ways for Providers to Go to Market in DC Strategic approach to tech procurement

Gartner has identified ways that technology and service providers can go to market in the data center.

Compete as a Specialist: If a provider is competing as a specialist, it specializes in one technology area, and it doesn't try to be all things to all people. It doesn't go to market with converged systems or as a one-stop shot. Specialists want to be perceived

as best-in-class in their technology area and covet a reputation as the provider with the most innovative or advanced technology. The primary advantage of this go-to-market option for strategic marketing, product marketing, product management, marketing communications and brand managers is that the approach is familiar.

Partner to Achieve a Portfolio Offering: Partnering is an alternative way to get all the necessary data center infrastructure components into the provider's portfolio if it doesn't have offerings in every category inhouse. This approach also enables providers to focus their resources on the things they do best and rely on partners for the rest. However, partnerships can be fickle. Those taking the portfolio-by-partnership route should not underestimate the resources required to effectively manage and nurture these partnership relationships.

Classpad

R

ohit Pande, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, has come back to his alma mater to launch his latest innovation, Classpad.

Touted as a revolution in the education sector, the tablet is claimed to make education accessible to each student according to their own merit and intellect.

Classpad facilitates personalised and interactive learning in the classroom and makes education accessible to every student according to his/ her individual intelligence level and talent. Using the Classpad, teachers can effortlessly transfer class work to the students’ tablet, share their own content instantly and conduct tests/ assessments hassle free. Students can also give undivided attention to class lessons, attempt assessments and get immediate results to further enhance their learning.

Classpad has a touch screen with a 7 hour battery life, 1.3 Ghz processing speed and a built-in memory of 4GB expandable upto 8GB. Available for students in standard 3 to 12, Classpad can serve as an interactive e-reading device, with the capability of storing dozens of books. Equipped with software that can integrate with existing school platforms. It is available in 2 models: Trolley model for multiple student usage and One Tablet per Child (OTPC) model.

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In a compilation worth treasuring, CTO Forum brings to you the best IT implementations, features, opinions and analysis of 2011

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THE Best of 2011

Collector’s edition

Cloud | Pg.12 to 27 Security | Pg.30 to 35 Storage | Pg.36 to 40 Virtualisation | Pg.42 to 44 Mobility | Pg.46 to 51 Unified Communications | Pg.52 to 56 Green Technology | Pg.58 to 61 CIO Speak | Pg.62 to 74

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THE Best of 2011

CLOUD

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Cloud

here are as many arguments in favour of cloud computing as there are against it. Despite the chorus of different voices, cloud has come to be one of the most talked-about computing models today. While there are issues associated with it that need to be resolved, strong benefits for businesses adopting cloud computing are tough to ignore. From making businesses more agile to enabling them to concentrate on their core capabilities, cloud promises all of it, and more. Those enterprises that have deployed cloud are already reaping its benefits. The next year and a half could see more enterprises following suit.

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20% 44% 15%

cios say that they do not have the resources to develop a cloud strategy

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cios will move more than half their server transactions to cloud by 2015

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organisations already have hybrid applications or public cloud in production

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THE Best of 2011

imaginG BY Binesh Sreedharan

CLOUD

A Disruption That is Coming of Age A strong case is building in favour of cloud.

Enterprises could soon move beyond putting collaboration and mail to more critical applications on the cloud.

By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal

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he year 2011 will go down in India’s history as the world cup year, and for a long time to come there will be every mention of this glorious victory in all spheres of life. India had waited for 28 long years to lift the cup again, and the victory was a disruptive event in the nation’s cricketing years. Numerous similar examples exist in IT. It takes time for any technology before its actual benefits are accrued. Cloud is one such disruptive business-technology model that is changing the way businesses and individuals function.

If one gives in to the hype on cloud computing it would probably make one believe that everything is possible on the cloud. Reality, as most

THE Best of 2011

CLOUD

CIOs would agree, is that mature enterprise adoption is some time away.

In the next 12-16 months the industry might see true adoption of the cloud model, beyond collaboration, sales-force automation and mail, to touch more critical applications as well. That is also probably when Indian enterprises will really see increased cloud adoption, currently lagging their counterparts in the developed world a bit.

In the next few pages we will share some trends that have evolved over a period of time: How Indian enterprises are structuring their cloud strategy, the frameworks, the applications on cloud, the deterrents, the myths, the hybrid’s popularity and the concerns around security.

Not a Recession Excuse In the recent past, the global economic recession was the most commonly cited reason for or against various IT implementations. Those that got the go ahead had to achieve cost savings, safeguard investments, improve efficiency, and aid in recovering from a bad market experience. Cloud computing, however, isn’t a recession excuse.

Though cost efficiency is still the deciding factor for deploying a cloud environment, it is not the only factor. There are other benefits for organisations. They would be able to concentrate on their core competencies while leaving the task of running ‘commoditised’ IT infrastructure to the cloud service providers. Also, through the adoption of the cloud model, organisations are expected to become more nimble, enable quick provisioning of the resources for business opportunities and be able to build virtual and ‘open’ business processes, enabling various stakeholders including customers, partners, and suppliers to connect and do business more seamlessly.

Having said this, the level of deployment in organisations is still in the early stages.

Natural Progression Cloud computing probably came out of the need for cost effective and efficient management of computing resources. With the popularity of virtualisation and utility computing, cloud computing is a natural progression that allows enterprises to scale

their requirements quickly and in a simplified manner.

The genesis of cloud computing was in the ‘virtualisation’ of computing capacity, which -- at least in theory -- meant that several physical machines (servers) could be virtually clubbed together and excess capacity in each could be made available for users who otherwise had no access to it.

This, together with the concept of ‘anything as a service’ (users could consume a particular type of IT service and be charged exactly for actual consumption), led to the cloud computing paradigm.

“The benefit expected from cloud vendors is to provide cost advantage,” says Pratap Gharge, VP & CIO Bajaj Electricals.

This advantage would come from “sharing of infrastructure, sharing of management, administration resources, flexibility in scaling infrastructure as per the requirements and also charge for only used infrastructure and benefits due to economies of the scale,” Gharge says.

As the model is in an early adoption stage, Gharge says, “We are yet to see those benefits in the business critical applications.” Some of these benefits are definitely visible in applications such as mail, he says.

According to Raj Bala, Chief Technology Officer, Cognizant, “The main driver of cloud adoption is still cost efficiency.” With enterprises showing greater preference for the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, Bala says customers may adopt cloud model in one of the following four categories: 1. Backup and storage, disaster recovery functions, and development and testing environments on the cloud.

2. Commodity products available in SaaS model in CRM, HCM areas.

3. Hosting of non-mission-critical applications such as internal websites and portals, expense reporting systems, etc.

4. Moving back-office functions such as groupware applications, email, web conferencing, etc. to the cloud if they are not violating any privacy protocols.

To sum up, the factors that are fuelling the growth of cloud computing are improving bandwidth availability and reliability, maturity of virtualised environments and applications, innovations in the commodity server market, and the attraction of cost savings, scalability and efficiency.

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the pecan tree

johnnie walkers’ black label

the braastad cognac

what’s common?

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CLOUD

Case Study | tata sky

DTH Self-Care on the Cloud

O

Cloud has proved a cost effective solution for Tata Sky's Chief Business Operations Officer, Kadab L Mukesh and provided the framework for moving other apps on to it. By Harichandan Arakali

ne of the features of the direct-to-home satellite television business is that there tends to be huge fluctuations of volumes of user/customer transactions, driven by the events that viewers don’t want to miss.

A classic example is the cricket matches.

Suddenly there will be a surge of customers looking to change their packages, buy new ones and so on.

For people like Kadab L Mukesh and Anil Eipe, this poses an interesting challenge.

For Mukesh, Chief Business Operations Officer at Tata Sky Ltd., one of the biggest DTH service providers in the country, the question is ‘what is the most cost-effective way of consistently meeting this fluctuation?’ For Eipe, who as a Project Director at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. helps run Tata Sky’s IT, the question is what kind of technology model offers the best answer to Mukesh’s question.

“Keeping Idle capacity indefinitely is expensive,” says Mukesh. In some areas, it’s cost effective to raise capacity in-house while in others it isn’t. For example, raising

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capacity in call centres is hugely expensive.

Traditionally, even in IT, raising capacity for self-service is expensive, he says.

“What we figured is that even if we can’t solve all the problems, at least in one segment, we will raise capacity and drop capacity easily to meet the fluctuations in volumes in a cost effective manner,” Mukesh says.

“That was the starting premise for us to launch some applications on Amazon’s cloud, making it relatively easy for us to scale up some capacity and scale down as required.” The segment they zeroed in on was the customer Web ‘Self-Care’ portal.

Objective: Meet Peak Loads Effectively “Meeting the peak load in the self-care (portal) is the objective,” Eipe says. This is the service, accessed via the DTH provider’s website, which allows subscribers to make payments, change their preferences and keep track of their packages. “They use it a lot,” he says.

“When I have around 200-300 concurrent users or sessions on a normal day, at the time of something like the cricket World Cup season, this would shoot up to 1,6001,700 concurrent sessions.” This means at

any given point in a day, as many as 1,700 subscribers would hit the portal at the same time. That such surges in usage are driven by broadcast events or programmes, the ability to dynamically allocate capacity would make a big difference.

“What happened was that it came to a point where we needed agility in increasing the resources for a short duration,” Eipe says.

“To buy that hardware and keep as an idle investment, we weren’t keen on. We were looking for a model that could give us this benefit both commercially and technologically.” They found that model in the Elastic Compute Cloud service offered by Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company. The challenge was to ensure seamless integration with the back-end that was still residing in the DTH provider’s own data center.

Challenge: Standalone Doesn’t Help The challenge that Tata Sky’s IT enterprise encountered was typical of large organisations. “One doesn’t have standalone applications or at least meaningful standalone applications,” Mukesh says.

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CLOUD

all attain their defining maturity in

"You have to take baby steps and wait for maturity. You can't do a big bang so as a company we aren't ready to do that."

Even with just the selfcare portal, in the end, the retail customer will want to know what was his bill, what were the charges, what —Kadab L Mukesh was the last transaction, what Chief Business Operations Officer, were the packages and what new Tata Sky packages and services are on offer.

“This will inevitably touch the CRM system, the billing and other systems at the back-end,” he says.

Moving the entire stack on to the cloud therefore doesn’t make sense, and Needed: Seamless Integration that means one has to build interfaces The challenge was to ensure that the selfbetween the cloud and the on-premises care portal on the cloud would work seaminfrastructure, which is the company’s lessly with the in-house data center. This own data center. meant a lot of back-end integration. “What There is a second part that is equally we saw in the cloud at Amazon, they have important: On the back-end, one needs peomostly standalone systems that don't talk to ple who monitor the network, utilisation of any back-end systems,” Eipe says. memory, CPU, storage; people who ensure “Our journey too started that way, we security and the overall smooth running of moved a few standalone systems first, and the IT operations, “irrespective of whether then moved the self-care application. The these systems are on the cloud or in our way the application works in a co-located own data centers,” he says. data center is very different from the way it Therefore when an application is put out would work off the cloud,” he points out. there on the cloud, “how do we ensure that There are two or three aspects of this: the people who manage the back-end get a How does one maintain the transaction seamless interface. How does one ensure responsiveness, how does one maintain the that there are processes that help us manage data security, and how does one flow the the operations in a consistent manner.” data. “We overcame all of them and ensured The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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12 years.

And, with maturity comes wisdom...

Wisdom counts...

THE Best of 2011

CLOUD

the right redundancy and security. Our cloud is spread across Singapore and the U.S.” Eipe says that Amazon’s strength in terms of storing and protection of data and availability of systems is formidable. “We totally exploited that when we put our application on to the cloud,” he says.

From a business perspective, “in an ideal world, one can keep a standalone application. It doesn't affect the rest of humanity and that's fine. It's very safe, but it doesn't have any value,” Mukesh says.

Typically anything that has serious business value has a lot of interaction involved. In this particular case, self care has a lot of interaction but it does mean that from an operational point of view it has to be seamless.

An Interface Layer: Connector To move the application to the cloud from the co-located area, “we had to design a new architecture that would helps us to talk to the cloud” and vice versa, Eipe says. This architecture was validated by Amazon and they too came back with the feedback that this was the right approach", he says.

Over the last close to three quarters, they deployed this integrated system and at that time, this was among the first integrated applications that were deployed on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, Eipe says. “It's running very well and we found that the performance parameters are being met and we were able to increase the capacity as and when we wanted based on the events.”

They have also introduced a lot of monitoring mechanisms. Given the geographically distributed system and that too one that is owned by someone else, there was a lot of apprehension about this that needed to be overcome.

Basically, they created an intermediate layer, which is a kind of a connector: A program that takes any transaction coming in and pass it back to the back-end system. It is a kind of a gateway where it takes all the transactions coming in.

In the cloud model, when the self-care application was talking to the back-end enterprise bus, for reasons of security, Eipe didn't want to expose the bus to the Internet, which would in turn have exposed all the other back-end systems as well.

"What we did was to create a separate application layer that receives all the requests from the cloud."

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Cloud Drivers Low upfront capex and elasticity of resources are driving cloud adoption Pay-as-you-go model: The Cloud reduces the significant upfront capital expenditure which is needed to purchase and maintain IT infrastructure like hardware and software systems. Pricing in the Cloud is done on a usage based or subscription-based model which converts fixed into variable costs. The advantage of being cost-efficient makes the Cloud an attractive option, especially for SMEs. While the cost savings per employee through usage of the Cloud was nearly ten times for a company with 10,000 employees, it was as much as 109 times for a company with 10 employees.

Multi-tenancy: The Cloud resources run in multi-tenancy mode which means multiple users can access the infrastructure simultaneously from different organisations. Multitenancy also allows service providers of the Cloud to take significant cost advantages and better profitability, allowing them to make more R&D investments. The benefits are passed-on to the Cloud users making the Cloud solution a cost-effective option.

Elasticity of resources: Services of the Cloud are available On-Demand which allows customers to upscale/downscale capacity without incurring any capital expenditures.

Service providers of the Cloud are able to juggle between servers and data centers to shift resource utilisation as per the demand. This provides agility to the users.

Ease of implementation: Using Cloud-based applications is much easier than building new applications and data centers. Moreover, the entire management of the resources provided rests with the Cloud service providers themselves. The user interfaces of Cloud solutions are also very user friendly than the interfaces of traditional software.

On-Demand self-service: The most important feature of the Cloud is that users can use computing capabilities as and when they require the same without requiring any human intervention from the service provider of the Cloud. The user would not have to worry about commissioning / decommissioning computing infrastructure as per utilisation / requirements. —Source: KPMG

The application is very light weight as well, and it doesn't talk to the database.

It's sole purpose is to take the data and route it.

When Eipe and his colleagues built the connector, they also ensured that it could be re-used. Whenever they want to put a new application with back-end integration on the cloud, the connector acts as a common plugin catering to any kind of interface with the cloud in which the IT team could look at customer data from various transactions.

The reusability helps because they already have a plan for the future: “We have a roadmap in terms of other applications as well which are predominantly integrated with the back end systems. One is in the pipeline” already, Eipe says.

Decision: Possible Versus Viable How did Tata Sky’s IT enterprise really zero in on the best first candidate to move on to the cloud? “What we really did was, look at what is feasible to move out on to the cloud, the obvious first question. For example, it isn’t practical to move the entire Siebel CRM stack on to the cloud as the costs would be prohibitive.” So first, what is technically feasible.

Second, does it make business sense? Where does one need the agility and flexibility that the cloud might offer. For instance, moving a reporting system to the cloud may not necessarily bring any benefits given that it is fairly flat in usage while adding a transaction cost.

Next, what are the factors that need to be considered? First, what does it take to

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move out there. For instance, Tata Sky had Sun-based infrastructure while Amazon’s is built on the Windows-Intel platform, which would entail some conversions and so on.

Second, when everything sits in the same data center it’s fine. The moment some applications go out, there is a WAN-kind of transaction, so how does one take care of it?

Therefore what they identified was “what is technically feasible but doesn’t make economic sense and what is technically feasible and also makes economic sense,” Mukesh says.

Another factor is that the cloud needs to be ready for the applications that one wants to move, Eipe says. For instance, there are a lot of Oracle or SAP products -- the cloud equivalents of these need to be available and certified, he says. Even then, the question that will decide if the move should actually happen is again if it makes business sense -- this is the overarching consideration.

“Unless there is huge financial trade off from moving to the cloud,” mere availability of an application as a service that one can tap off the cloud isn't enough, Mukesh says.

“The big gorilla in the room is still the

"In an ideal world, one can keep a standalone application. It doesn't affect the rest of humanity and that's fine. It's very safe, but it doesn't have any value."

—Kadab L Mukesh Chief Business Operations Officer, Tata Sky

ERP and database which is still in-house,” he points out. That said, what the self-care move to the cloud established is that “right now the base platform is there and now moving anything else on to the cloud is simply a question of economic sense.”

Security On the security front, given that Amazon's entire business model is around the Internet, there is no way that a user-company, such as Tata Sky, will be able to match Amazon’s level of security.

In any case, "I'm going to put my entire customer data on the cloud. I'm not ready to do that," Mukesh says.

“Eventually, can we get to a point when we can do it, maybe yes," he says, "but not yet."

That again reflects the clever way in which CIOs are tapping the cloud: They are doing only just what is absolutely viable first, and then asking the question, 'ok what next?'

"If I log in, the system will only have enough information to allow me to do that and carry out my transactions," Eipe, says.

"But that's it. It will not store any details about the payment transactions, the packages chosen" and so on. "Nothing is being kept there on the cloud," he says.

The concern here is on two fronts. To start with just the system aspect, when it comes to a customer's transaction history, the volumes are huge and constantly changing, necessitating the administration tools at a level of complexity that can't be achieved easily on the cloud.

"You have to take baby steps and wait for maturity. You can't do a big bang, so as a company we aren't ready to do that," Mukesh says.

At the moment, "we already have the hardware (in the data center), it's working, and we haven't reached transition point.”

Flexibility, and Then Costs Then, with such a cautious approach, what’s the big excitement about?

“At the get-go, the biggest excitement factor is the flexibility,” Mukesh says. Over a period of time, it will be flexibility and cost.

If, depending on the sector and company, the IT budget ranges between three to four percent of total revenues for a telecom company and say about eight percent for a bank, chances are, what can be moved to the cloud The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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19

roger miller said:

“Some people walk in the rain... others merely get wet...”

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will be less than one percent. In the case of the self-care portal, the move to the cloud brought the capex down to almost zero for this particular set of applications. Capex is considered in terms of 'instances' which are units of CPU and memory purchased as and when they are needed.

On the operational front, the monthly expense of maintaining the self-care portal has come down by 60 percent, Mukesh says.

To put things in perspective, in absolute terms, these savings are a very small part of the overall IT budget at Tata Sky. The bigger benefit came on the bandwidth front, as all the traffic from customers using the self-care portal now lands in the cloud, and not on Tata Sky's data center, paring the costs on network bandwidth, as the network inherently is cheaper out there.

“When I use someone else's hardware on a monthly rental basis, say, I look at the usage fees, the first piece is basically around elasticity -- that is the first parameter, the elasticity of their resources,” Eipe says.

“Since we were already thinking along these lines, the move towards tapping Amazon's cloud wasn't difficult.”

They are now able to pick up the customer transactions at up to 1,800 concurrent users when there is an event that pushes up the usage. For a normal day, this limit is lowered to about 500-600 users but it can be boosted to three or four times. This is the technological advantage that also comes with a lot of commercial advantage as well.

In the medium term, let's say they have an application around a bunch of servers.

Sooner or later that hardware will reach end of life. The idea then is that instead of the fresh capex needed to refresh that hardware, the cloud gives Tata Sky the option of “picking and choosing what we want to move” and what they prefer to refresh in-house.

Next Stop: BPO-as-a-Service Tata Sky's self-care portal started out leveraging the infrastructure-as-a-service and to some extent the platform-as-a-service aspects of the cloud, when the application was hosted on hardware from Amazon.

What is being planned however, is a combination of the infrastructure and a "fair amount of business processes" about which Mukesh declined to share any more details as of now. When that happens, however, in

the near future, Tata Sky would be in the vanguard of exploiting the public cloud for BPO-as-a-Service.

"Are there any services for which I have certain capabilities in house that might be difficult to extend beyond a particular point?" The reasons include availability of skills and inconsistent demand for those skills. Further, there is the matter of maintaining all the infrastructure needed to provide that service in-house.

The ability to scale up and down, financial pay off, and security are vital determinants.

Each of these pressure points is different for different companies in different sectors.

What makes the self-care portal's transition to the cloud significant is that it has helped validate the idea that where a cloud service is available, moving there will eventually be considered purely on business terms and not on how elegant the technology is. Having taken the first step, by building the framework that allowed them to move the self-care portal onto cloud infrastructure, the IT enterprise at Tata Sky has given itself both the confidence and the operational knowhow for attempting more complex transitions on to the cloud.

Cloud Adoption: Tough Love In cloud computing, CIOs are adopting what is viable today, and are happy for the maturity to catch up with them rather than rushing into it.

By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal

T

he larger the organisation size, the more aggressive it is adopting the cloud, according to a report by Springboard, paid for by virtualisation software vendor VMware. That said, there are market trends in the way applications are being cloudenabled or equivalents offered on the cloud.

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“Trends around cloud computing are still towards the Windows/Linux platform-based implementation,” says Pratap Gharge, VP & CIO Bajaj Electricals.

“There is still very little investment from vendors in Unix versions based cloud infrastructure.” This means that cost advantage is still not visible and hence the

adoption rate is very low, he says. Where applications are being adopted they are still in areas such as sales-force automation and e-mail type.

This has been echoed by most enterprise users as the movement towards the tier 1 applications is still either absent or in a handful of cases in the pilot stage. Be

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it’s all about cutting

“Our belief is that Indian firms are, in many cases, perfectly positioned to leverage cloudenabled services.”

it telecom, BFSI, manufacturing or media, the advantage has been in moving the non-critical applications to the cloud.

Another trend seen is that those customers that got in early and started testing and trialing cloud 12 months ago are now reaping the early adopter benefits as they are now confident enough to be moving more production applications and specialist services such as DR across to the cloud.

“We are migrating internal applications on public cloud,” says Satish Joshi, Executive Vice-President and Global Head – Technology & Innovation, Patni Computer Systems Ltd. There is significant traction in cloud-enablement of common high-volume services like testing and standardised development jobs, he says. High performance computing which needs ‘burst mode’ compute capacity at certain times but not at others, is another good candidate for cloud model deployment.

More Critical Apps More business-critical applications also are available in cloud-like models in some areas, says Anand Narayan, Senior VP and Head of IT at Tata Capital. For instance,

through the clutter and displaying the

right attitude...

—Raj Bala

CTO, Cognizant Technology Solutions

C-Edge, a joint venture between Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India’s largest computer services company, and State Bank of India, the country’s largest bank, offers core banking services, on an outsourced Application Service Provider (ASP) model.

C-Edge combines IT services, networking and core banking application infrastructure in a bundle. This has been around for some time and is a way of cloud offering.

If one looks at the shared-services model, enterprises are ready and have been adopting ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS). At the same time, there is still a level of confidence missing in moving core and other business critical data to the same environment. This is mostly for the public cloud deployment. For start-ups and small and mid-size companies, where agility and cost are the driving factors, there is active evaluation of the cloud option.

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Attitude counts...

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Perfectly Positioned “Our belief is that Indian firms are, in many cases, perfectly positioned to leverage cloud-enabled services,” says Raj Bala, Chief Technology Officer, Cognizant Technology Solutions. “Our companies and government institutions are driving for efficiency and productivity improvement, but fixed costs are still relatively low, and this is a great opportunity to leverage cloud solutions.” Because of this, it’s likely that many next-generation solutions will be more widely adopted here in India before getting to the rest of the world as these companies leapfrog traditional service delivery models, Bala says.

Currently the simplest example of everyday cloud usage is e-mail. The benefits of cost and 24-hour accessibility across platforms, make this a sensible value proposition. For more specific uses, enterprises have started using the cloud to host their content management systems, project management software and other tools which require continuous collaboration and access.

Not Cloud Ready Though there are various advantages, there is lot of debate over the maturity level of the offerings and when, what and how will the enterprises truly adopt the cloud environment.

Virtualisation, charge per user, and metering are among the important factors that will influence cloud decisions, says Mani Mulki, CIO Pidilite Industries Ltd. Mostly when people talk about cloud they mean virtualisation, Mulki says. Cloud as a technology model is not understood or used as it is meant to be, he says. Virtualisation is just a step towards cloud and though the level of awareness has gone up there is not much clarity or maturity in the industry, he says.

Also, organisations run on various platforms, there is a complex, highly customized environment at most large organisations. In such a scenario the level of vendor interoperability, seamless migration is still not available. The biggest concern then again is security as even if the issues of interoperability and layer migration are tided over the confidence is missing on the security front, he says.

Most of the work on the cloud is still on the windows and open platforms. Whereas, most

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To Each His Own Different cross sections of companies are adopting the cloud in different ways.

I

n a survey sponsored by VMware, the virtualisation software vendor, market research firm Springboard Research found different cross sections of companies are adopting the cloud in different ways. Here are a few of the findings: Organisations with 10,000+ employees lead in current cloud adoption at 39 percent of the respondents versus organisations with 100-999 employees at 20 percent. The exception is very small organisations (<100 employees), where 24 percent have already adopted cloud.

MNCs lead the current cloud adoptions at 31 percent, when compared with the 16 percent adoption rate in the public sector.

Telecommunication (30 percent) and Technology (29 percent) lead current cloud adoption among verticals while Retail (11 percent) and Insurance (15 percent) lag. Telecommunication (41 percent) and Technology (38 percent) also lead in terms of future cloud adoption plans while Government (27 percent) and Healthcare (30 percent) lag.

Web conferencing, IM, collaboration and e-mail together dominate public cloud workloads at 93 percent. Regional average variance (public over private) is 42 percent for this combined category and Desktop productivity is now viewed as a public cloud workload.

critical applications in an enterprise run on RISC, UNIX and the likes which are not witnessing much cloud activity.

While efficiency and the latest technology makes the cloud highly attractive to IT decision makers, IT implementers are more eager to keep their skill sets current.

Overall, IT professionals see a technical

environment where better technology will lead to greater skills, efficiency and save money. However, there’s caution, too: the scepticism that often accompanies change and new technology also applies to cloud investments. Executives are concerned about security and service. IT staff fear losing control, being blamed for glitches and mistakes or being laid off.

Three Deterrents Extant research indicates that there are three primary deterrents to the widespread acceptance of the cloud: 1.Data Privacy: Large organizations still prefer to keep their data within their own networks.

2.Unstable Infrastructure: Enterprises in certain locations are still grappling with poor Internet connectivity, higher costs of dedicated bandwidth and frequent ISP downtimes.

3.Traditional Mindset: Enterprises have grown up building their processes in a certain fashion. The advent of the cloud is disruptive and provides immense benefits but at the cost of moving away from tried and tested ways of computing. The leap from the desktop to the cloud is thus evolving at a gradual pace.

There are many aspects like the granularity of the services, the price model, and delivery of SLAs which need to be sorted, says Tata Capital’s Narayan.

“In the financial sector like ours, legal compliance, regulatory issues, and governing clauses are stringent in nature,” Narayan says. “The delivery levels of the service providers are still unclear.”

Clarity on how, for instance, sensitive customer data will be handled, will go some way in getting the financial services providers to adopt the cloud, he says.

“There is business value for large organisations to go for a private cloud for these services but public cloud is still distant.”

Mulki voices his concerns: “When I leave the vendor and discontinue the service there is no guarantee or assurance that there is going to be no trace of my data left behind. The exit clauses are still not in place. This leaves me with a gap in my security concerns.”

Though security levels are addressed from the technology perspective, the basic concern is business sensitive data being in

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someone else’s control. There are backups being made, and the services are shared, it is still not a fool-proof environment.

Security and control remain major deterrents for enterprises to embrace the cloud.

Trust Thy Vendor?

“Number one challenge would be trusting the vendor,” says Bajaj Electricals’ Gharge.

“Due to the nature of the offering, there would be doubts about delivering promised SLAs, security related process compliance and taking care of the customer data.”

Other challenges today are the customer’s openness to share the infrastructure, and hence vendor’s inability to offer the shared platforms for business critical applications. No vendor is interested in investing in providing a solution before knowing its business potential, and customers are not sure about the effects of vendor locking, he says.

The absence of the reliable, proven vendors with guaranteed SLAs is the main challenge in moving to the cloud. Also

persed to all the groups,” says Mulki. “The architecture is robust and the advantage cost is visible.” It also helps in offering thin computing which can be metered.

The main advantage of cloud is when you can distribute the computing power on need basis and meter it for cost, he says.

“Private clouds are more complex simply because they are an adaptation of the cloud model to the customer’s existing IT portfolio and therefore has to handle the complexity thereof,” says Patni’s Joshi.

CIOs tend to see private cloud deployments as within their realm of control and hence perceive them to be the ‘safer option’.

Further, large government agencies or enterprises which are highly regulated may not have the option to use a public cloud. In such situations, private clouds present an option that is efficient, costefficient and highly scalable.

The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes, accord-

CIOs tend to see private cloud deployments as within their control and hence perceive them to be the ‘safer option.‘ Integration requirements with several internal systems and security related concerns are two other deterrents. As economies of scale still don’t exist, the cost advantage is not obvious.

Mostly when people talk about the cloud they talk about the technical, business and migration issues. What is being expressed is that the cloud will be more attractive to users who are going for new implementations, startups and organisations who have multi location, multi cities or countries and large user base.

Private Clouds?

“For very large organisations it makes sense to go on a private cloud as the infrastructure can be shared and services dis-

ing to the VMware-sponsored Springboard Research report on cloud computing. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies and methodologies in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise, according to the report.

Even as organisations debate costs and value for money, security, readiness, availability, they are going to look into what they can put into the cloud and start leveraging the benefits. Whether it is web content, web portals or their transactions, purchasing, shopping carts or whether its test, development environments or whether its applications, over a period of time, the adoption of the cloud is only going to increase.

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one man brought the British to their knees!

&

one batsman changed the fortunes of Indian cricket!

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Demystifying Cloud Computing Differentiating between true cloud computing and the smoke created by hype is tough. Here’s how to clear the air. By Kevin Smilie

A

s CIOs consider new corporate computing options, they often find themselves awash in cloud metaphors thanks to the overwhelming desire to achieve the promise of cloud computing.

The potential for cloud computing is compelling. For business, it promises faster access to technology and better alignment to demand. That offers agility, which can deliver significant competitive advantage. For example, a retailer can use the vast capacity of the cloud to quickly analyze consumer behavior and respond with pricing changes, different inventory levels or new advertising—even when its own server capacity is fully taxed. That can make the difference in a quarter’s financial results.

Cloud computing has the potential to make that extra computing capacity available in minutes or hours and provide the flexibility to turn it off as soon as it’s no longer needed without the residual capital asset and operating costs. The problem is that it’s hard to tell the difference between clouds and smoke. There is a lot of hype in the market. CIOs have heard many of the promises before with utility computing.

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But things are different this time. We’ve already adopted cloud services into our personal lives with technologies such as the iPhone, and that’s taken place as CIOs redefine the functions that really need to be done within the walls of the enterprise.

Bottom line: We’ve seen how cloud computing has benefited consumers, and many CIOs are ready to try it within the enterprise. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are already adopting cloud computing, since they lack the “advantage” of complex legacy environments that constrain their larger competitors.

Services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps are well-established within the SMB market and are rapidly expanding.

CIOs of large companies are beginning to adopt certain proven services (again, Salesforce.com and Google Apps come to mind) while piloting cloud computing services for broader uses such as development and test platforms as they seek to understand the new service delivery option available to them.

So, what do CIOs need to know to tell the difference between a real cloud and the smoke of marketing hype? Consider three things: • Decide how to best harness the cloud for

your business needs. Develop a plan that fits cloud computing into your IT service delivery model. That means understanding when technology services must remain within the organization and when they can be shifted outside. Consider the complexity and integration of your application portfolio. And understand both your local regulatory environment and your company’s willingness to move services and data outside your firewall.

• Recognise the limits of cloud computing. Understand the market and what it can deliver today. Compare your current costs to the price of available services. Compare available service levels to your needs.

• Set expectations for what the cloud will do for your company and when. Partner with your customers to progressively introduce new services and gain their support.

Cloud computing offers real advantage to companies that can see through the smoke and get a clear view of the new business technology landscape.

—Kevin Smilie is a partner in the CIO Services division of TPI, a Houston-based consulting firm.

—This opinion was first published in CIO Insight. For more such stories, please visit www.cioinsight.com.

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TOP 10 Cloud Computing Caveats

The "Move to the Cloud Now" call is growing louder. Here are ten cloud caveats to consider before embarking upon the journey.

they

By Drew Robb

1

Define your terms

Recent IBM prime time ads poke fun at cloud definitions.

Several nerds define it in the most esoteric terms imaginable like some of the ridiculously complex explanations served up for IT terms on Wikipedia. That is followed in the ad by users stating much more simply what they want their cloud to do. The first step with regard to the cloud then is to do as Voltaire demanded and understand your terms.

"Currently, the biggest challenge in cloud computing seems to be one of definition," said Rich Morrow, a cloud architect at Quicloud. "Upwards of 40% of decision makers in IT are confused about the term, the technologies, and the usefulness."

same thing is happening with the cloud.

Everything, these days, is being labeled as virtualized and cloud. "Companies rushing to cloud wash their offerings are not helping the issue," said Morrow.

3

Examine basic needs

inspired others to achieve the impossible.

Because of the hype surrounding cloud computing, Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group, suggested that organizations first ask themselves if they really need a cloud and why they need it. Like the rush to "get on net" of the '90s, a business case is often sorely lacking in the panic not to get left behind. Such a mindset can end up costing a lot of money for little result.

2 4 Watch out for cloud washing

At the start of the millennium, EMC launched the concept of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) to embrace the idea of caring for data management from cradle to grave across multiple media and tiers.

Within weeks, a rush of vendors issued press releases about their latest ILM offerings.

In many cases, these were the exact same products as before but with a rebranding to capitalize on the fad of the moment. The

Should I choose cumulus or nimbus?

With the first few points above examined thoroughly, the door is opened to greater understanding that can form a basis for the next point of discussion: public, private or hybrid cloud.

A private cloud is wholly internally hosted, maintained and run. A public cloud is overseen externally. A hybrid is a combo of the two. Security and compliance issues may limit the choices.

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Inspiration counts...

Wisdom counts...

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5 8 Nail down projected costs

Schulz recommended costs be worked out for delivery as a private cloud, public cloud and for a traditional IT set up. That way, a blanket security "no" to a public cloud can be given an actual price tag.

"Gain an understanding of your costs to deliver a given IT service to a particular service level objective to know if you will in fact be paying more for public cloud versus private cloud or your traditional environment," said Schulz.

Attitude counts...

Know before you go

Morrow emphasizes that CIOs must learn about the cloud before implementing anything. "If you don't have a 30-second elevator definition of the cloud or can't explain to a six year old how it would improve your business, then you need to bone up," he said. "If your team has knowledge, have them brain dump to you."

If no one knows, perhaps it is a good time to call in a knowledgeable cloud consultant to help with initial education and then resulting implementation.

6 9 Policy is as important as technology

Cloud adoption can be done as an IT initiative and the organisation then has to play catch up. Policy holes can result that can cause security, financial and other challenges.

"Information governance policies are typically absent in organisations when they first adopt a public or hybrid cloud environment," said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer, EMC's Information Intelligence Group.

"These types of policies govern how information is accessed, secured, and handled throughout the organisation, regardless of where the information resides."

7

Cloud piracy abounds

Like wireless in the enterprise ten years ago, beware of cloud computing pirates. "Smaller groups within organisations are more likely to adopt incompatible platforms and services given the ease and convenience of the public and hybrid cloud infrastructure," said Tidmarsh. "This is inefficient from a cost standpoint and it increases the number of systems and services that internal IT needs to integrate and support." This in turn can lead to the erection of cloudspecific silos of information as these information repositories aren't readily accessible to the organisation's other IT systems.

Inspiration counts...

Start small

Morrow advises CIOs to start small. A smart way forward, he said, is to peel off a couple of the best staff to set up a private cloud, or else deploy the next non-mission critical product in a public cloud to get the idea on how it works.

"An absolute no-brainer for a private cloud would be a test farm of OS/browser combos that your QA team can script Web products against," he said.

10

Find the right tools

Morrow believes monitoring is key, with Monitis, BrowserMob and Nagios being some of the options available to constantly evaluate live assets. There are other tools that will help in any cloud initiative.

"Getting familiar with configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet or Fabric will let your team build out a grand vision in the cloud," said Morrow.

Despite all these caveats, Morrow recommends that CIOs look for any and every opportunity to leverage the cloud and virtualisation.

"Any learning curve you need to conquer will be rewarded tenfold once you start using the cloud to do more with less."

Schulz, too, is upbeat. "Don't be scared, but look before you leap." â&#x20AC;&#x201D; This article appears courtsey www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles regarding IT management, please visit CIOUpdate.com The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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with

greater wisdom, superior attitude and sustained inspiration...

I

SECURITY

t was for the first time in 2011 that threats such as Distributed Denial of Services attack, considered a highly sophisticated attack vector, were executed using open source tools. The threat of cyber war loomed large, giving governments sleepless nights.

Iran built its first cyber command to fend off cyber attacks.

Israel similarly built a Cybernetics taskforce, while the US announced its strategy to retaliate hostile acts in cyberspace with military might. With their acceptance increasing in enterprises, and the concept of Bring Your Own Device to work catching on, mobile devices were on the receiving end of security breaches. The first couple of months of 2011 saw the largest number of malware in its history of mobile platform. Amidst this changing security scenario, CIOs need to work out strategies that enterprises could adopt to mitigate them.

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74% 53% 87% of all spam in 2010 was related to pharmaceutical products

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of adults in India have been victims of mobile phone loss or theft

enterprises said they had experienced a data breach in the past two years

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The Cyber Defence Team

There is a new

CIO

Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst, IT-Harvest and author of 'Surviving Cyberwar' shares insights into some of the new threats faced by enterprises and suggests new measures to counter them

N

ew threats and new measures to counter them call for a reorganisation of IT security teams so that they can focus on defending the organisation from targeted attacks.

It is only ten years since most enterprises established separate security teams to address vulnerabilities and deploy and maintain patches and virus signature updates as well as configure and maintain firewalls. To ensure that policies were created and enforced most organisations also created the position of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) who enacted those policies and became responsible for ensuring that the organisation was in compliance with standards and regulations. The rise of targeted attacks must be met by similar organisational enhancements. The

terminology and titles are not important but the roles and responsibilities described here are required to mount an effective cyber defence.

It is interesting to note that the Cheong Wa Dae (Korean President’s “Blue House”) has instituted a special Cyber Defence Team in reaction to concerted attacks on the computers of the G20 Summit Committee in Seoul.

“Since June, the government has been running a special cyber defence team to prevent attacks against major private and public computer networks." -The Chosunilbo Countering targeted attacks calls for new measures. One of those measures is creation of specialised teams that are not bogged down in the day to day tasks of blocking viruses and cleaning up machines. Here is my proposal for such an organisation.

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in town!

coming soon...

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SECURITY

Team Lead: Cyber Defence Commander The title may evoke a too martial image.

Perhaps cyber defence team lead, or director of cyber defence, will be a better fit. But the idea of one-throat-to-choke in establishing a leadership role is an effective way to motivate a team and its leadership with the seriousness of its task.

They must be instilled with the idea that they are targeted, under attack daily, and engaged in a battle to protect the organisation from a malicious adversary. The cyber defence team replaces the traditional computer emergency response team (CERT) and will probably incorporate most of the same people.

The cyber defence commander is responsible for establishing the cyber defence team, assigning and directing roles, making sure the correct tools and defences are deployed, putting in place controls and audit processes, and reporting to upper management on the results of those processes, and audits. The cyber defence commander would also be the primary point of contact for communicating to law enforcement and intelligence agencies when the inevitable situation arises that requires outside help or communication.

A large organisation with divisions spread around the globe or separate large business units may well have cyber defence teams deployed in each division with their own leaders who report up to the cyber defence commander. (Call them lieutenants if you must but I am not going to take the military command structure that far.)

The cyber defence team should have three primary roles: an outward looking role, an operational role, and an inward looking role. Each of those roles is described next: Cyber defence analysts are the intelligence gatherers. They study the threatscape with an eye towards emerging threats to the organisation. Most organisations assume that because they have so many people in IT security that someone is looking out for the latest attack methodologies or tools, and

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even keeping tabs on the various groups that engage in cyber attacks. Unfortunately the operational aspects of IT security are too consuming to allow this type of outward looking focus. IT security practitioners are very inquisitive and attempt to keep up with the huge volume of information available to them at conferences, from vendors, and in the news. But their activities are ad-hoc and mostly voluntary. Would TJX have succumbed to an attack that entered through

promised in 2008. They would have had contacts within the community who would have given them a heads up. They would then have seen the 2009 attacks against BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals Group, the major natural resources companies in Australia and analysed those attacks for similarities. They would have raised a red flag that their own organisation could be targeted as well and increased the vigilance of the internal teams.

Cyber defence analysts assume the role played by counter intelligence agents inside most governments. They gain an understanding of the attackers and their tradecraft and advise those responsible for defending against them. As members of a cyber defence team these analysts will be responsible for: 1. Understanding the state of the art in attack methodologies. They should research and understand the successful and attempted attacks against similar organisations. They do this through monitoring news reports, security research reports from the vendors including McAfee Labs, Versign’s iDefense team, Verizon’s Threat Report, F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen, Symantec’s threat report, Sourcefire’s VRT, Fortinet Research, Infowar Monitor, IBM X-Force, as well as independent researchers such as Dancho Danchev, Brian Krebs, Nart —Richard Stiennon Villineuve, and doza WiFi access Research Analyst, IT-Harvest and ens of others. point in a store author of Surviving 2. Getting to know in Minneapolis if Cyberwar potential attackers and they had had somemonitoring their activity. Is one staying abreast of the organisation a target for industrithe news who would have al espionage from competitors or state sponseen the exact same methodologies sored spies? Could a particular fanatic group, used against a Lowe’s store in Southfield, be it PETA, Greenpeace, Islamic Jihad, or a Michigan four years before? A team of religious faction, be targeting the enterprise? cyber analysts working at a mining or oil 3. Monitoring known attack sources and and gas exploration company would have distributing the IP addresses of those been alert to the news that the three largest sources internally for purposes of blocksuch firms in the US (Marathon Oil, Exxing and alerting. onMobil, and ConocoPhillips) were com-

“The cyber defence team should have an outward looking role, an operational role, and an inward looking role”

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4. Communicating the threat level to the rest of the cyber defence team.

5. Assisting in evaluating technology for internal deployment.

A valuable methodology for the research is being developed by the Infowar Monitor team working at the University of Toronto. They dub their methodology â&#x20AC;&#x153;fusion researchâ&#x20AC;?, a combination of technical analysis, contextual understanding, and field investigations. Translating this into the activities within an organisation would mean working with their peers to discover methodologies being used successfully against them, and the tools and defences they deploy. It would also mean having an understanding of the industry they are in and the value of their information assets to various potential adversaries. Banks, long the target of cyber crime, and casinos, with vast experience fighting insider threats, have had this type of interaction with their peers for years. It is time for manufacturers, non-profits, universities, state and local governments to do the same.

The second role within the cyber defence team is the operational role. Members of the cyber defence operations team must: 1. Select and deploy network and host based tools to monitor activity, alert on unusual activity, block attacks, and assist in removing infections that have made it through all of the cyber defences.

2. Interact with the rest of IT operations to ensure that infections are quickly snuffed out and cleaned up.

3. Engage in forensics activities to perform post mortems on successful attacks, gather evidence, and improve future operations.

The members of the internal cyber defence team supplement the rest of IT operations. They are not responsible for the daily updating of servers and desktops or the distribution of AV signatures or maintaining firewalls.

Their job is to discover and mitigate attacks as they occur. This is a 24x7x365 job. A primary responder must be identified for each evening, weekend, and holiday shift. They must be able to receive alerts, quickly gain access to the monitoring

The cyber defence Red Team makes use of many open source tools to act as surrogate attackers. Nessus can be used for scanning for vulnerabilities. it is open source and the basis of several commercial products system, and take defensive action when an attack occurs.

The third component of the cyber defence group is the Red Team. They look inward. They scan the network for holes in the defences and new vulnerabilities.

They engage in attack and penetration exercises to test defences. They evaluate new IT projects to ensure that authentication, authorisation, and defences are included in the initial design all the way through to deployment.

Each of these three roles has special tools that they should use to accomplish their duties.

The cyber analysts make use of knowledge management tools to categorise and create linkages between disparate data sources. An internal wiki can serve as the basis of communication with the other members of the team. A sophisticated tool from Palantir Technologies can help them track sources of attacks, record data, remember IP addresses and malicious domains, and even keep track of the identities, affiliations, and methods associated with particular groups or individuals.

The cyber defence operations team will use advanced packet capture, network behavior monitoring, application monitoring, and endpoint protection tools. Netwitness provides the best tool for capturing network traffic and applying filters that contain knowledge of attack sources, and other cross correlation capabilities. By deploying a network flow monitoring solution from Arbor Networks they can see changes in traffic patterns

400%

growth in targeted attacks from January 2011to November 2011

that are indicative of an attack. Guidance Software, known for its forensics tool kits has a cyber defence product that leverages the end point protection of HBGary to identify and remediate infections. FireEye is a network gateway defence against zero hour malware and blocks attempts to communicate with command and control servers operated by attackers.

The cyber defence Red Team makes use of many open source tools to act as surrogate attackers. Nessus can be used for scanning for vulnerabilities. It is open source and the basis of several commercial products most notably Tenable.

Vulnerability scanning is also a function of the regular IT operations so it is important that the Red Team use a different set of tools than those used by operations.

Core Impact is the most advanced commercial attack and penetration tool.

The organisation and duties of the Cyber Defence Team arise from the new threat of targeted attacks. There is a fundamental difference between defending against random attack from viruses, worms, and botnets and targeted attacks.

When the viruses and worms are written to specifically infect an enterpriseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s system and gain control of internal processes, communications, and data, traditional tools are ineffective and traditional organisations are at a loss. By assigning responsibility to a core team of cyber defence specialists the enterprise can begin to address their vulnerability to targeted attacks.

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Evolving Role of Security The security function is constantly evolving on similar lines as the IT function did 10 years back. As security issues become real for enterprises, the role of a CISO is becoming strategic By Varun Aggarwal

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he growing awareness around information security can be sensed by watching Sachin Tendulkar talking about the importance of security in an advertisement. There are some banks who have also started advertising about the effects of phishing and how users need to be aware of them. Even the end user today talks about data security without being a geek. What’s driven all this is a spate in large number of high-profile attacks in just the last 6-9 months.

While industrial espionage or national espionage with the use of IT was thought of something furturistic, recent events have come to prove that these threats have manifested into real risks for organisations. Even from a national security perspective, the attacks on private enterprises can wreck havoc considering 80 percent of national infrastructure is in the hands of private entities.

The evolution in the awareness about information security has also brought to the forefront the role of the security function in

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the organisation or the role of a Chief Information Security Officer. How is his role going to be defined going forward and what should he do in order to become strategic for the organisation?

According to Felix Mohan, Group CISO for Bharti Airtel, every leader needs the qualities of collaboration, communication and convincing and a CISO should work on certain principles to make their role strategic.

“CISO’s role is to maintain and manage an information risk program such that information assets are reasonably protected. However, information assets are not the only assets that a company has. There are tangible and intangible assets. Brand and reputation also need to be protected.

Financial assets need to be protected by preventing fraud. The CISO's role need to evolve into the role of a CSO. The more you enlarge your role, the more you —Felix Mohan make your presence felt in Group CISO for Bharti Airtel the organisation,” he suggests.

“The more you enlarge your role, the more you make your presence felt in the organisation”

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The second vector is agility and business intelligence. What role does a CISO play in order to make the company more agile and to have more business intelligence! “CISO needs to embark on intelligence based security. Intelligence based security would help the CISO fend against Advanced Persistent Threats. To embark on this journey, CISO needs to become a planner. Like Peter Drucker said, the work of a manager is 80 percent planning, 10 percent replanning and rest of the 10 percent in coordinate to make sure those plans are implemented. Less than 25 percent of a CISO’s time is spent on even looking at a plan. That should substantially increase. And in order to plan better, he needs to get threat intelligence, intelligence on business to understand new lines of business etc. CISOs also need to know the reference of intelligence,” Mohan says.

Gartner predicted 10 years ago that consumerisation of IT would be a big issue, yet not many CISOs are geared up to enable it in a secure manner.

CISO to CRO Next step is to move from security to risk management. The work of board of directors is to manage risks. Theoretically, the more risks you take, the more money you make. And as organisations are under tremendous pressure to make more money, they are taking more risks. “It is important for CISO to articulate in a business understandable language, the impact of these residual risks associated with information risks. When you communicate this to the management in an effective manner, they start looking up to you with a lot of respect,” Mohan explains.

Take for example if an employee’s mobile phone gets lost. That is a physical risk but it may contain corporate data, making it an IT risk. That data loss may result in a loss of reputation for the organisation, making it a reputational risk and finally, based on that loss in reputation, company’s stocks may plunge, making it a credit risk.

CISOs need to assimilate all these risks and evolve into a role of enterprise risk manager. In order to become strategic, CISOs need to become Chief Risk Officer by gaining knowledge about finance and business.

need to co-create with vendors.

You need to look at how you can create security solutions together with the vendors. Similarly, you need to co-create with the customers. You need to ask the customers what challenges they are facing.

Conclusion For a lot of businesses like online, security is highly strategic. The security issue is real and threats are now getting manifested into actual risks. CISOs need “More than 50 to start working on percent of our their hygiene and interactions should assume that they be with business. are under attack.

As more and more Though it should things are getting be a given that the online, security is investment that —Pankaj Agrawal becoming an imporgoes into protection CISO, Aircel tant thing. CISOs can is less than the value suggest extremely consumof the asset that we are er centric strategies to business protecting. Also, the security and become more strategic,” says KS measures would not be the same for Narayanan, Head - Information Risk Manevery organisation and may vary dramatiagement, ING Vysya Bank Ltd. cally between industry verticals.

“People at various levels can be strategic.

CIO, for eg., can take a strategic decision CISO as a Compliance officer on whether to build a CRM application Next is CISO’s role in compliance. Previinhouse or outsource it. Similarly a CISO ously, compliance was all policy based. Then can take a strategic decision on whether to came government based regulations leading hire a partner for the core security team or to regulatory compliance. There is a third build an internal security team and build kind of compliance that we’ll be evolving competence for them. He can take a decito and that is customer centric compliance. sion on whether he should manual handle Customer centricity is the prime need compliance or invest into an automated for the CISO. The entire business is now GRC solution,” opines Pankaj Agrawal, becoming customer centric but CISOs can CISO, Aircel. play an important role in becoming cus“There is a strategic component to the tomer centric. The more you start looking CISO’s role. It is up to the CISO how much at the pain points of end customer in terms he wants to contribute to that strategic comof trust and security, the higher are the ponent,” adds Murli Menon, CISO, Atos. chances of retaining that customer. CISO The good news is that the CISO commucan help in building that trust. nity in India is working together, keeping Finally, CISO needs to bring in innovacompetition aside, so that there is no need tion. While CISOs can look at bringing to reinvent the wheel. innovation in terms of cost and productivity, but the real innovation is in working with vendors. Vendors are not just for hiring. We —varun.aggarwal@9dot9.in

“People can be strategic at various levels in an organisation. A CISO can take strategic decisions as a CIO does”

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storage

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t was not too long back when a couple of terabytes were considered big data. Not anymore. Today, information in enterprises runs into tens and hundreds of terabytes. Managing this ever increasing data flow is a tough challenge, more so because of the critical nature of the information. The CIO of an enterprise, thus, has his job cut out. In 2012, the CIO has to formulate a storage strategy that aligns with his company's growth plans, is flexible and possesses scalability. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll also have to select what kind storage to use for what kind of workload, based on the performance requirements of each application.

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59% 54% 93%

annual growth in information volume worldwide

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expected CAGR of solid state disc drive shipments through 2013

enterprises encrypt the data stored over cloud

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storage

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hot in Storage CIOs are turning to stateof-the-art technologies and storage best practices to manage the ever increasing flow of information and data.

By Yashvendra Singh

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here has been a phenomenal growth in enterprise data in the last few years. The increase in information is increasingly putting pressure on not just an enterprisesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; storage infrastructure but also on the human capital required to manage it.

According to a recent study by IDC, digital data is clocking a fast year-on-year growth of 60 percent. It is expected to touch 1800 exabytes in 2011, which is a 10-fold increase over the last five years. To keep up with the growing data, there has been a steady growth in external controller based storage. This segment grew by 17.8 percent in 2010, according to industry experts.

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The growing data, coupled with the fact that it is considered a strategic asset by an enterprise, is posing a serious challenge for a CIO as he is required to put in place a storage strategy that is flexible, scalable and secure. Above all, he has to implement all this and cut costs too.

CIOs are, therefore, deploying technologies and implementing best practices to manage their data and information in the best possible manner. Virtualisation and Deduplication are some of the technologies that enterprises are increasingly turning towards for simplifying their storage infrastructure.

Storage Virtualisation Virtualiation of the storage infrastructure is a clear trend that is being carried forward from last year. According to experts, in 2010, enterprises went in for virtualisation but not in a structured way. This year will see them adopting virtualisation in a more structured way.

Manipal Hospitals, for instance, is one such organisation that has storage virtualisation high up on its priority list in 2011.

The company is witnessing its data growing at 18-22 percent year-on-year. Currently, Manipal Hospitals handles about 30 terabytes of data, which is expected to increase significantly as it is in the process of implementing HIS (Hospital Information System) in 13 other group hospitals.

Storage Best Practices Policy in Place: A CIO needs to make sure he has a policy in place on how to manage the unstructured data. According to an estimate, unstructured data takes up 80 percent of the entire enterprise storage, which is completely uncalled for. He should use technologies such as deduplication and thin provisioning to minimise the unstructured clutter.

Ease of Access: A CIO should be able to categorise the information in such a manner that the most important information is easily and quickly accessible.

Capacity and Regulation: The total capacity requirement within an enterprise should be in sync with the regulatory requirement of the particular sector. A CIO has to deploy a storage solution within that parameter for optimum utilisation.

Go With the Need: A CIO should not buy storage based on the lifecycle of the product. Instead, he should buy according to his need. An ideal situation is to procure for the next six months instead of the next two-three years. Considering the cost of storage declines every quarter, it would not make business sense to buy storage to meet two-three years demand.

Likewise, IFFCO is implementing Oracle ERP across its five manufacturing plants, and expects its data volumes to grow several folds.

“Our primary storage is about 9 terabytes, which is being used by Oracle and Dominos database, while our vital storage is about 4 terabytes. Once we move from the present legacy operations to Oracle ERP, there will be an increase in data. The way out would be to go in for virtualisation,” says S C Mittal, Group CTO, IFFCO. Muti-national companies with smaller set ups in India also have virtualisation on their storage roadmap.

As Preet Singh Khanna, CIO of commodity trading multinational, Glencore India, says, “We deployed IBM 3400 stor-

“The initial higher cost will be offset by the reduction in the footprint of the storage box and its power consumption.”

—Nandkishor Dhomne CIO, Manipal Hospitals

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age about five months back, and are using it for our storage and archival needs.”

Glencore India has a storage requirement of 3 terabyte at present, while the solution is capable of handling 15 terabyte.

“However, the pace at which we are growing, it won’t be long before we would need to look at other options. Storage virtualisation helps in optimising resources to the fullest, and we would go for it two years from now,” he says.

Automated Tiering and Deduplication Automated tiering is set to make big waves in many SANs in enterprises. It is becoming tedious to store data in a flat storage environment. Through automated tiering, enterprises are able to put information on the tier of discs that it needs – more accessed information on the top tier and less frequently accessed information on the lower tier.

Those organisations that have already implemented automated tiering are reaping its benefits.

“For IFFCO, implementing tiered storage has helped. We have moved vital data to fiber disc, while the archival data has been migrated to the cheaper SATA devices,” says Mittal. “We are now able to pull out impor-

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tant information fast, and data that is not needed has been pushed behind.”

According to analysts, dedpulication is gaining traction, and it is expected to become big in the next two years.

Ajay Shah, Senior Vice President, IT Applications & Security at Enam is in the process of implementing dedpuplication.

“We are going in for deduplication, and should be able to complete it over the next three months,” he says.

Data deduplication could be in the form of archive storage, virtual tape libraries, disk storage systems, backup systems, and applications like email systems. Deduplication

enables more volume of data to be stored on disc or fast access devices. For an enterprise it makes sense as it improves return on investment on systems.

Solid State Disc There is also a slow but steady movement towards solid state discs. While they may be expensive at the moment, their benefits offset the costs.

Large companies looking at high performance and lower chances of data disruption could deploy solid state devices for their storage in 2011. As solid state devices don’t have mechanisms such as spindle

and magnet, their seek times are extremely low thereby making data available fast.

Says Nandkishor Dhomne, CIO, Manipal Hospitals, “We are certainly looking at solid state discs. I may have 10 percent of the data that I access frequently put on solid state discs. The initial higher cost will be offset by the reduction in the footprint of the storage box and its power consumption.”

As per an IDC Outlook report brought out last year, solid state disc drive shipments are expected to increase 14 percent a year with a CAGR of 54 percent through 2013.

—yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

Case Study | HDFC Bank

Enhancing Operational Efficiency Experiencing an exponential growth in data, HDFC Bank decided to further ramp up its already virtualised storage infrastructure.

The result was an increase in overall operational efficiency.

By Yashvendra Singh

I

ncorporated in August 1994, HDFC Bank currently has a nationwide network of 1,780 branches and 5,231 ATM's in 833 Indian towns and cities.

As the bank expanded and decided to increase its retail customer base, the storage infrastructure came in under a lot of pressure. In response, HDFC implemented a multi-tiered storage solution

for its business intelligent applications and data warehouse.

However, the bank kept up its pace of growth, which resulted in further expansion in the volume and complexity of the bank’s storage needs.

The growth in data was stretching the management software and hardware that were initially deployed. The day-to-day operations of the bank were slowing down.

There were increased demands on the storage system too with the need to improve time management processes, extend the life of its existing storage assets, and shorten timelines.

By 2005 it became clear that HDFC needed a more powerful model to handle the multiple terabytes of data being analysed and moved. It decided to go in for Hitachi’s Universal Storage Platform 1100.

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The Goals Improve Operational Efficiencies. HDFC Bank’s growth meant that its storage systems had to grow and scale in terms of physical capacity.

Simplify Management of Storage Infrastructure. From 2004 to 2007, HDFC’s storage grew from 10TB to over 400TB to support the exponential growth in the retail banking sector. This massive proliferation of data required a new system of management.

Lower Costs Efficiently. Allocating storage helps increase utilisation and cut storage administration costs.

Reduce Migration Time and Complexity.

Based on previous approaches, the bank’s IT department expected to spend up to 33 days performing a data migration when migrating data from a legacy storage system to the new platform.

“The important aspect needed to improve operational efficiencies was to shift the architecture from islands of stranded storage assets to a virtualised tiered storage infrastructure,” says Harish Shetty, Senior Vice President of IT, HDFC Bank.

Under a tiered infrastructure, the most

important information or data is available for systems that demanded the highest availability, which includes the disaster recovery infrastructure. The least critical data such as nearline data analysis and data for backups, on the other hand, is stored on less expensive storage.

By adopting this multi-tiered approach, HDFC was able to leverage its investment that it had earlier made by deploying the Universal Storage Platform 600. It made the new Universal Storage Platform 1100 the primary Tier 1 platform, with virtualised legacy storage behind it.

The bank also added lower cost Tier 3 storage, which is virtualised behind the Universal Storage Platform. In addition, the multitiered system simplifies data management.

Having a tiered storage strategy lets HDFC move large databases quickly to top tier storage for analysis, and then back to lower tier storage when done. These efficiencies also allow the bank to analyse data more quickly despite its growth, providing more actionable insight to the bank’s management that can help improve revenues, not just cut costs.

“The aim was to basically optimise the requirement for production, testing, and archival of the database, and integrated it into a common storage. This data could then be flexibly used as and when we needed based on the application,” says Shetty.

The virtualised infrastructure also allowed HDFC to align application data to the appropriate class of storage, reducing the cost of data storage and extending the life of storage assets.

“The advantage accrued was the visibility of the entire storage, and we were able to move

“The aim was to optimise the requirement for production, testing and archival of the database” —Harish Shetty

Senior Vice-President of IT, HDFC Bank.

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The Results Operational Efficiencies in Change Management Change management can be done online without bringing the application down.

There is no need for the extensive planning and coordination between the multiple groups.

New volumes can be created with required configurations.

The application and data can be migrated online.

Simplified Storage Management Streamlined Migration Process HDFC Bank avoided both the complexity and time needed for migration by using virtualization technology and tiered storage manager software. The software did the storage mapping and then moved the data nondisruptively to the new storage.

Extended Life of Storage Assets The multitier system has ensured that the life of storage assets is enhanced.

Reduced Capital Expenditure The bank is now able to have low cost storage tiers.

Reduced IT Risks The implementation has ushered in flexibility, scalability and improved uptime, easing the stresses that rapid growth has visited upon the bank’s data centers.

from one storage to another based on the need,” says Shetty “Based on previous approaches, the bank’s IT department expected to spend 33 days to migrate the volumes on the storage systems. With the new technology, the application was brought down for less than an hour,” avers Shetty.

The bank now uses tiered storage manager software’s nondisruptive data mobility capability with regular monthly processes that require data migrations. This has eliminated hours of service disruptions.

HDFC is now planning to implement virtualisation and tiered storage at its retail banking arm.

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VIRTUALISATION

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here has already been a lot of investment in virtualisation on the server front. As we move further into 2012, there will be more traction happening on the storage, network and desktop front.

The new year could see a strong push from enterprises towards virtualisation. From 25-30 percent server virtualisation now, the rate will go up to 45-50 percent in the next two-three years. Also, increased virtualisation will set the stage for rapid adoption of cloud. Virtualisation will be the stepping stone for cloud computing.

15% 92% 13%

net-new applications will be specifically designed for cloud in 2012

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desktop virtualisation deployments are driven by improved security needs

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SMBs back up their data in virtualised environments

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PRIVATE CLOUD OPTIMISES DATA CENTRE KPIT Cummins Infosystems Limited significantly reduced its carbon footprints while optimising the company’s data centre environment with the help of private cloud.

By Varun Aggarwal

I

T companies are not just followers but often leaders in global technologies. With all the excitement surrounding the latest buzzword – cloud computing – and despite the wary wait and watch policy of most peer companies, Pune based KPIT Cummins Infosystems Limited decided to lead the latest technology from the front.

KPIT Cummins is a global IT consulting and product engineering partner focused on co-innovating domain intensive technology solutions for manufacturing companies.

In order to set up a highly optimised data centre, KPIT decided to opt for private cloud deployment. After going through a rigorous proof of The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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concepts (PoC), the company decided to go for the VBlock technology from VCE. VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that aim to reduce the cost of IT. VCE, through the Vblock platform, delivers an integrated IT offering with endto-end vendor accountability.

“The PoC went on for three months with multiple vendors and we finally decided to go for VBlock, which includes servers from Cisco, storage from EMC and virtualisation from VMWare. The solution seemed as though it was preconfigured for our needs,” says Shrikant Kulkarni, Sr VP & CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems.

photo by jiten gandhi

A Phased Approach KPIT Cummins wanted to take a phased approach and decided to first test the water with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for its support functions. “We were deploying VDI for the first time and wanted to find out how VBlock can support it. Since this was the first time that we were trying out the solution, we didn’t want our core functions to be the testing ground. We, therefore, started out with HR and Finance, and gradually expanded to include other departments,” Kulkarni added.

“Apart from these, we have also started migrating our corporate applications to the private cloud including Service Desk from CA Technologies for infrastructure management and console management tool — SVN, Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory. We’re also migrating other corporate applications like SAP to private cloud, in a phased manner, so that the business is not impacted and the process is completed as planned,” Kulkarni informed.

Multifaceted benefits According to Kulkarni there haven’t been

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"With VDI, we also have much better security, as it is a highly controlled and protected environment. The most important gain from VDI is the energy saving. Previously a desktop used to consume about 150 W of power, including the energy consumed by the monitor and the desktop. Now with VDI, it is down to 60 W since there is no CPU in the VDI," he added.

“We have started migrating our corporate applications to the private cloud including SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory.”

Lessons learnt

Kulkarni feels CIOs need to ensure that they undertake a comprehensive PoC for private cloud.

Also, he says, CIOs need to —Shrikant Kulkarni be sure of what Sr VP & CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems they what to move any major challenges with the to the private cloud private cloud so far. “While, enterand whether it is possible prises are concerned about security on to move those applications to it at all; the cloud; private cloud ensures that there otherwise it may lead to disappointment. are no such challenges like those faced with “You also need to carefully size the storage public cloud. The problem that we may face and compute for the private cloud so that in the future could be with regard to finding you do not face any performance issues. experts to work on private cloud. There are Once all the applications are migrated to not many professionals available currently common servers and storage, there would who have the required expertise. However, be immense pressure on the network and this is a challenge with any new technology therefore, it is also important to size the and can be taken care of through trainings,” network requirements. And in case you’re Kulkarni says. not already using a network management The advantage of virtualisation is manifold. tool, you would be required to do so once Firstly, with our virtual desktops, employees you deploy a private cloud. But beyond that, can work from anywhere in the office and we you don’t require anything additional for the don’t need to assign workstations to each perprivate cloud,” Kulkarni advises. son. Moreover, you don’t need a one to one There is often a difference between what ratio of employees and desktops, with the the customer wants and what the vendor same desktops available for use to employees delivers – maybe because of the expectation working in different shifts. There are also no gap or a communication gap or because of worries about sharing data or desktop setthe over-expectations set by the sales team. tings. Even if an employee is travelling to a For a successful private cloud deploydifferent location, he can access his desktop ment, Kulkarni feels it is important to from wherever he is. ensure that the consulting partner, the "Earlier we used to go for the best possible equipment vendor, and all other stakeholddesktop hardware, whether required or not. ers are in sync with the customer’s requireNow we can optimise the memory and comment. “It is very important that the consulpute capacity and also curtail the storage tant and the implementation partner have space assigned to each employee. Moreover, a clear understanding of what is required, it used to take at least one to two days to else it could lead to various problems,” cauprepare a desktop for a new employee. Now tions Kulkarni. it is done in just a few hours," Kulkarni said.

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MOBILITY

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artner estimates that by the end of 2010,1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. According to Gartner, this has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.

54% 472% 50%

second hand phones contain personal data, which the original owner is not aware of

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increase in Android malware samples since July 2011

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email users will rely primarily on a browser or mobile instead of a desktop by 2016

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MOBILITY

With mobile employees increasing in corporates, CIOs are now virtually on the job 24X7.

They have to ensure employees are helped and provided for in such a 24X7 work scenario

By Yashvendra Singh

CIO & Mobility

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Imaging by Shigil N

T

he enterprise mobility market in India, which comprises network, data, hardware, applications and associated services, has shown exponential growth during the last three years. The fast growth has been on the back of factors such as declining costs, increased maturity of industry verticals towards adoption, increased start-up activity, and ecosystem play in market development. â&#x20AC;&#x153;India already has 840 million mobile phone subscriber base with 15 per cent smartphone penetration, and the tablet PC market in India sells about one lakh tablets per annum. All these point to good devices penetration, that is further fuelling the growth of enterprise mobility,â&#x20AC;? says a study by management consulting company, Zinnov.

Add to this, a combination of demand side trends, and there seems to be no

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looking back, states the study. Industries leading the way in mobility services include banking, manufacturing, retail, hospitality and healthcare, while upcoming adopters like automotive, logistics and consumer goods companies are increasingly using mobile supply chain systems to streamline inventory management, replenish stock, track demand, and manage shelf space and storage in an optimal manner. As more and more employees are getting exposed to next generation technologies and devices, the enterprises too are beginning to follow suit.

As part of the study, Zinnov also interviewed 150 key IT decisionmakers in India to understand the softer issues driving enterprise mobility. According to them, the key reasons for mobility were push from management; collaboration among employees; getting more work time out of employees; pull from end users (customers or employees); and reducing communication costs. And, the business drivers for enterprise mobility were better customer service; productivity advantage; employee satisfaction; and competitive advantage in that order.

The Zinnov study also found that increased adoption of majority of the mobile platforms is a key motivation factor for start-ups. As platform adoptability improves along with network penetration and connectivity, more business functions like ERP, CRM, SCM, sales force automation, unified communication and billing, too, are coming under the enterprise mobility ambit. This is coupled with maturing organisations that are trying to mobilise departments like HR, retail, customer service, finance and field service.

Managing Mobility While mobility permeates enterprises, it also has implications for a CIO. With users able to access applications from anywhere on a plethora of mobile

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devices, it becomes a challenge for a CIO to ensure that sensitive data is kept secured.

As Mukesh Kumar, CIO, TPG Wholesale says, “CIOs can’t ignore enterprise mobility. From a business perspective, it is beneficial, but from a security perspective, it is definitely a challenge. It’s a tough decision to make — which device to allow and which to restrict. Carrying a mobile device is a personal behaviour and is hard to stop.

A CIO can’t even have a restrictive policy, as it will signal a wrong organisational culture for the younger generation.”

Parminder Singh, CIO, BPTP, considers enterprise mobility an opportunity, which, if leveraged in the right way, can yield dividends.

“From a CIO’s perspective, enterprise mobility is emerging as a challenging opportunity that needs to be managed. By leveraging it, we can improve efficiency and deliver more,” he says.

“In BTPT, for instance, when customers pay remittance, there can be an instant SMS acknowledging receipt. Besides, a customer can enquire the next due date of payment through an enterprise mobile platform. In fact, I can carry all my customer-facing processes on the enterprise mobility platform thereby improving my customer satisfaction level,” he says.

However, he too agrees with Kumar on the issue of security. “The biggest issue of enterprise mobility is security as the applications have to be exposed.

In case a device is lost, the

financial information can fall into wrong hands. So, any CIO looking to embrace enterprise mobility would have to have a robust and secure middleware. While the backend is secure, the middleware needs to be insulated from threats,” says Singh.

A Framework in Place Kumar feels while the security policies around enterprise mobility are still evolving, it is important for a CIO to at least have a framework in his organisation.

“A CIO should decide which platforms to allow and which to restrict, and then build security and applications around them.

There is still uncertainty with respect to which platform will lead the market, making it tough for a CIO to decide where to invest,” he says.

“Technology has a curve, and mobility is at the peak of this curve. Security, on the other hand, follows the technology curve.

So we will have to wait for some time to see which technology gains eminence,” says Kumar, who was SVP, IT at the Oberoi Group before joining TPG. Recalling his strategy while at Oberoi Group, he says, “We decided to allow BlackBerry, Symbian, and iPad, while restricting Android, as it was still in the nascent stage. A CIO has to selectively provide access to platforms.”

Singh feels a strict level of monitoring would be needed, and a CIO would have to put such a system in place.

“I remember when we rolled out laptops in our organisation, they were given on the basis of hierarchy and role. So, all the sales personnel were given laptops, while those at the back office were given desktops.

Mobility will start like that. But a CIO will have to put a superior level of monitoring in place,” he says. “When going for a mobile management strategy, a CIO would have to look at three aspects – what can I enable; what platforms can I tab; and the security aspect,” says Singh.

“CIOs can't ignore enterprise mobility.

From a business perspective it is beneficial, but definitely a security challenge” —Mukesh Kumar

Chief Information Officer TPG, Wholesale

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Increasingly Mobile M

ore US internet users will access the internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other wireline devices by 2015, according to a report from IT analytics firm International Data Corporation (IDC). The company's Worldwide New Media Market Model (NMMM) forecast that as smartphones begin to outsell simpler feature phones, and as media tablet sales explode, the number of mobile internet users would grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6 per cent between 2010 and 2015. The report noted that the impact of smartphone and, especially, media tablet adoption will be so great that the number of users accessing the internet through PCs will first stagnate and then slowly decline.

Western Europe and Japan will not be far behind the US in following this trend, the report noted. Worldwide, the total number of internet user will grow from two billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, when 40 per cent of the world's population will have access to its resources, while global

business to consumer (B2C) ecommerce spending will grow from $708 bn in 2010 to $1,285 bn in 2015 at a CAGR of 12.7 per cent, IDC researchers noted.

Americans are using mobile devices and notebooks to access the mobile web more than ever before, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Centre. Cell phone and wireless laptop Internet use have each grown more prevalent over the last year, the report found, with nearly half of all adults (47 per cent) going online with a laptop using a WiFi connection or mobile broadband card.

The report, based on a daily tracking survey on Americans use of the internet, also found use of non-voice data applications on cell phones grew dramatically over the last year.

Is Standardisation passé?

system, which acts as a double bonanza for the industry.

“Companies today are optimising their mobility investments with innovative approaches such as pay per use models which will bring down operating costs.

Majority of the IT decision-makers we spoke to see this happening over the next two years itself, which speaks well for the industry,” adds Praveen Bhadada.

Today, an individual carries at least three devices – a laptop, a tablet and a phone.

There are several apps being developed for mobile devices. The fact is that mobile is emerging as a viable platform in enterprises. Going forward, CIOs will have to imbibe information security within their overall IT framework.

It is beyond doubt that mobility is blurring the physical boundary between office and home. It is giving way to 24x7 work-

But what about standardisation? When all the CIOs are talking about standardising their IT infrastructure, the divergent mobile platforms – Android, iOS, BlackBerry – are making life tough.

“If today someone asks me can I bring in standardisation in my IT infrastructure, my reply would be ‘No’, given the fact that there are multiple platforms,” avers Kumar.

Agrees Singh when he says, “When it comes to standardisation, no matter how much we say, it is impossible to achieve.

There are so many platforms that it is simply impossible to bring in standardisation.

However, I do profess that at an industry level such platforms are secure.”

While mobility has a significant cost advantage from a business perspective, another noteworthy fact is the cost optimisation within the enterprise mobility eco-

“There are so many platforms that it is simply impossible to bring in standardisation.”

—Parminder Singh

Chief Information Officer BPTP

ers. It also has serious implications for a CIO, who too is now virtually on the job 24x7. He has to ensure that employees are helped and provided for in such a 24x7 work scenario.

Kumar, however, thinks otherwise. He says, “For the sales team out there on the ground, it is definitely advantageous as it allows them to access information and applications on the go. But if one was to analyse the actual cost benefit ratio, it is yet to emerge as a strong case. I feel enterprise mobility is being driven more out of the fear of losing out to competition rather than anything else. Allowing people in the hospitality industry to make reservations from their mobile devices, is more out of the need to stay abreast with competition.

It is a marketing investment.”

“While I would say the CIO was always on 24x7 duty (earlier there was maintenance work and backup during the weekends), it has now gone beyond 24x7. A user can call my IT help desk at any time. Our help desks, which used to work from 10 am - 7 pm, have already started working much earlier and end later,” adds Singh.

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Efficiency Through Mobility Lowe Lintas mobility roadmap envisages moving most applications to mobile platform to make the organisation more efficient By Varun Aggarwal

P

redictions about PC applications moving onto the mobile or the smartphone have been doing rounds for quite some time. However, the fact remains that when it comes to enterprises, smartphone usage is limited to corporate email access. Very few organisations take the leap and deploy enterprise applications for mobile. Similar was the case with media and communications major, Lowe Lintas. Though 22 per cent of the company’s employees were using Blackberry smartphones, the primary usage of the device, apart from making calls, etc., was to access corporate emails. No other enterprise application was accessible on the device.

This was when Pravin Sawant, CTO, Lowe Lintas, decided to better utilise the mobile. “Twenty two per cent was a significant number for the organisation, as it covers the entire top and middle management. However, we noticed that they were primarily used only for accessing emails.

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We wanted to explore other opportunities where we could also utilise them for enterprise application,” Savant said. Savant created a complete mobility roadmap with the BlackBerry team and presented it to the board.

“With the help of the RIM team, we were able to articulate a long term roadmap.

There are so many reasons that a potential IT initiative doesn’t achieve its set goals, and so we’ve taken our management along with us while preparing a long-term mobility roadmap so that we don’t hit bottlenecks at a later stage.”

Employees being the most important asset for a media and advertising organisation like Lowe Lintas, anything that improves employee efficiency, would have a lot of positive impact on the entire operations. The company, therefore, decided to first look at capturing some of the transactions, and at a later stage in the roadmap, look at how mobility can facilitate decisionmaking and improve collaboration within the organisation.

The Pilot Phase “In our industry, we have high human contribution, therefore time sheets application becomes very important to keep track of how the human assets are being utilised.

Plus, from a compliance perspective, we need to keep a log of how different clients are billed, based on the various time slots allotted to them,” explained Savant.

In Phase 1, as a pilot, the company focussed on the time sheet application.

Even though updating a time sheet is very important, for various reasons it used to get delayed, as some employees preferred to fill it once at the end of the week, while some would struggle to find time to fill it. “We thought if the application is available over BlackBerry, then it takes away the need for an employee to be on the office premises and connected to their laptop and internet,” Savant said. Now with the application on their BlackBerry, employees can update it whenever convenient.

“There have been two major benefits.

Firstly, we’ve been able to save a lot of

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time. Secondly, with more time, employees can pay a lot more attention to the quality of data entered,” Savant elucidated.

Work in progress Many more applications are in the mobile route. Take for example the employee requisition application. This is a complex workflow process for Lowe Lintas wherein there are different stages of approval: head of HR; head of a business unit and finally the CEO. With multiple approvals, there ought to be delay.

“Now, we’ll be enabling these approvals on the BlackBerry. Considering 22 per cent of our employees already have a BlackBerry, this means that all the approvers would already have a one and they can clear an application using their BlackBerry, thereby reducing the lead time to the entire approval process,” Savant said. For the larger workforce, the company is creating an online leave application module. So, all the leave applications and approvals would also be enabled on BlackBerry.

Transaction to collaboration Savant opined, “These applications take care of our transaction and approval related applications. Now, what we’re also considering is to take our collaboration portal (intranet portal), which is based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and build an interface so that all the updates on the portal can also be accessed through a BlackBerry.”

“Then we’ll also be leveraging the MS SharePoint Server platform to enable these capabilities by building dashboards. We do not want to just port all the online data to the mobile, because you need to take into consideration the usability aspect. So, we’ll pick up only the data that is essential to a particular user and port it onto his BlackBerry,” he added. Lowe Lintas is also looking at

technology called BlackBerry Balance. It enables BlackBerry smartphones to be used for business and personal purposes without compromise. When connected to an organisation's BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express, specific IT policies along with features built into the device software help keep personal information separate and business information highly secure. Users cannot copy data from business partition to the personal partition. Also, when a user leaves the company and takes the device along, the Blackberry Balance can wipe out the Business data from the device remotely, leaving the user’s personal data intact.

For users using a non-BlackBerry device, RIM would soon be launching a technology called Ubitexx in India that is a multiple device platform management tool. The multi-platform management integrates iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Google Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian smartphones according to mobile compliance in corporate networks.

Administrators can launch and manage an unlimited number of smartphone models over-the-air using a webbased console with software —Pravin Sawant distribution and Chief Information Officer group-based policy Lowe Lintas management.

building certain Business Intelligence applications through which senior managers can track the progress of a certain project or a campaign using their BlackBerry.

“In our industry, we need a lot of content from third party websites and collaboration tools to pool in ideas and best practices from various sources. We will be building team sites specific to a team or a group of people working on a certain project,” Savant said.

The integration of SharePoint Server with the BlackBerry gives a user a single interface where he can actually collaborate with a group of users and the content is shared only among the specific group.

“We chose RIM as BlackBerry penetration is highest in our organisation with 22% owning one” Overcoming challenges

Consumerisation of IT is one of the biggest challenges for the IT team at Lowe Lintas. The company chose to start their mobility journey with BlackBerry owing to its highly secure platform. “We chose RIM as a strategic decision since BlackBerry device penetration was highest in our organisation. Tomorrow, if users come to me and ask for applications on other platforms such as Android or iOS, I’ll at least have the groundwork ready,” Savant explained.

There are multiple technologies from RIM that Lowe Lintas intends to leverage in order to overcome the challenges related to consumerisation of IT. For example, RIM has introduced a

Return on Investment For the time sheet application, the payback period for the company has been just four months. Moreover, now that the company has built the basic blocks for mobility, it wouldn’t have to go through the learning curve again for other applications that it is now working on and therefore the ROI would be much shorter on these applications.

“Even if we do not consider the hard benefits, the soft benefits like the time saved in completing a process is a good enough business case for us,” concluded Savant.

—varun.aggarwal@9dot9.in

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Unified Communications

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he Unified Communications (UC) portfolios have begun to mature with the emergence of integrated UC suites, believes research firm Gartner. This differs from prior years when most vendors had broad portfolios that were not seamlessly integrated. According to Gartner, the best approach for enterprise deployment of UC is to develop a multi-year strategy from which a logical, affordable, and high-payback roadmap of phased projects can be defined and executed.

Status of Current Collaboration Infrastructure 7% 28%

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Usage of Telepresence 1%

18%

21%

Videoconferencing – using phone lines and television monitors Voice, video and data via telepresence

9%

Appraisals

25%

Recruitments

17%

Web-based tools including IP telephony

22%

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25%

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10%

Training Products rollouts Executive management meetings

Voice – using wire lines Video – via the Internet

Internal collaboration

17%

Others

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Unified Communications

From UC to Social Collaboration

By Minu Sirsalewala Agarwal

A

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.

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IMAGING BY PC ANOOP

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.

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Unified Communications

The Take Offs

Additionally, the availability Most companies’ commuof 3G definitely opens up nications framework is synnew roads for technologies onymous with UC and it is Smart ‘enterprise collaboration’ vendors will provide and applications owing to the important that a successful following capabilities off their platforms: greater bandwidth available, conversion is made possible. as well as faster data transfer.

As given in any implementaAbility to extend and consume functionality across tion, understanding of the different media, publishing and user interfaces requirement, doing right More Smart Devices sizing, and proper project If you see the evolution of Ability to seamlessly integrate with enterprise planning and migration plan the whole piece then the infrastructure to enable organisations manage to ensure a zero downtime is disruption first happened enterprise security, applications and administration the way to go. because of the Internet. The UC is a journey and cannext high-end disruption that Reporting and Analytics capabilities, which not be deployed 100 percent markets are seeing is the prowill enhance the value of the social actions, on day one, it is a stepwise liferation of smart devices in conversations, transactions, content and process. Every IT organisathe enterprise network. There networks that gets generated out of the usage tion faces the need for more is a significant traction in the of the collaboration platform hi-tech deployments each usage of mid and low-range year. Ideally, the first step devices in the enterprise In the true sense of collaboration, many enterprise business would be to cut down the cost space. Indian enterprises software vendors are likely to partner with, and acquire by unifying all the offices, being price sensitive will see other relevant technology to leverage the complementing bringing everyone onto the faster adoption at the midcollaboration features and provide richer solution and same platform, centralised level range and the penetrabusiness value to the businesses and end-users. management, centralised tion of the high-end smart conferencing, and centralised devices will be limited to a video conferencing. select circle of employees.

The new generation of employees is Enterprise decision makers should be traditional enterprise work-flows getting already fast adopting these tools and wary of a UC plan that does not provide integrated with enterprise communication devices. With the end users opting for dospecific and actionable strategies for endsystems to simplify the progress of such not-call options, the other channel that is user adoption. Enterprises and UC vendors work-flows. attractive is social networking. need to treat the end user like a consumer The increased use of mobile phones in the rather than attempting to control their More Video enterprise can be attributed to the affordcollaboration tools and devices.

With the emergence of the Internet and ability and availability of smartphones, reaFor some enterprises, the idea of userthe evolution of network-centric business sonable tariffs, convenience and ease of use, owned devices may seem impractical and practices, many companies had turned to ubiquitous data coverage and the personal even daunting. That doesn’t mean end multimedia conferencing; others embraced flavour added to communication. users and their preferences can be ignored. applications that allowed groups to share Mobile UC focuses on tighter integration The way would be to start with small traindocuments and collaborate on projects in of mobile phones with Enterprise applicaing and follow-up sessions coupled with real time. Now, some companies, including tions such as email, address books and marketing the new tools through internal a growing number of small and mediumcalendar as well as bringing in additional communications and evangelising within sized businesses (SMBs), are combining messaging channels such as SMS/MMS the organisation. these capabilities to create virtual meetings. to improve employee productivity. Many IT groups of most enterprises today About 50 percent of the traffic on the Enterprises have deployed Mobile UC to have implemented UC to some extent in Internet comprises videos, reflecting the some extent. the form of integration of PBX systems importance of video to UC. The next slew of As a result of the proliferation of smart(especially voice mail) with email and enterprise gadgets will use videos as a form phones people are more active on social calendar. Enterprises in advanced stages of communication as it allows the transfer networking sites. Increasingly the comof UC have integrated other channels of of information in real time and in a way it panies are integrating social networking communication such as instant messaging, is cost effective. Reaching out to a subject into their CRM network, so that the system combined with support for audio and video matter expert or even a panel of experts filters all the relevant tweets, for instance, and desktop-sharing for collaboration to based across the country will become easier and comments on the social networking enhance the UC experience. Though still in with the use of video-enabled endpoints and site into their CRM network. Research nascent stages, Communications-Enabled will allow teams and companies separated shows that on 5-7 percent of the tweets Business Process (CEBP) is getting by geographical borders to communicate are relevant to the company; this helps the introduced into enterprises. It involves with the push of a single button.

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Unified Communications companies to even take immediate action on the tweets from the customers. This helps the company create a ‘wow’ factor, because they can take instant action on complaints and give information to their customers immediately. This also helps in reaching out proactively to the customers who have otherwise not approached the company directly.

Today with these social networking sites the challenge is that one negative tweet about the product/service of the company results in millions of other tweets which result in forming an opinion about the company.

start new alerts bringing in all the right stakeholders and the people responsible to take the decision on to a conference call across 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.

Social Animals, After All Faster Decisions Take the example of supply chain: most of the companies follow just-in-time approach so as to reduce their inventory cost. However, if there is non-availability of a critical raw material, production could stop.

Today most of the companies have ERP and SCM but the action on a particular situation is taken by people. All the delays that generally happen are because of the human latency. If an alert is not addressed on time, the entire cycle gets delayed.

There are now solutions that trigger a communication exigency. Once the trigger comes in from the backend ERP, it can

Collaboration technologies (UC, videoconferencing, Web 2.0 applications) and mobility solutions (solutions that enable users to access the network irrespective of his/her location, solutions for mobile workforces) will be the areas of focus.

In addition, UC and its component technologies are speeding-up businesses on their path to going green while reducing carbon-heavy overheads.

Enterprise Social Software is another area generating great interest amongst corporate IT planners/decision makers. According to Cisco’s Collaboration Nations 2010 report, 60 percent of the

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

users surveyed, admitted to ignoring the companies’ social media policies at least once a day while close to 20 percent claimed that they ignore these policies multiple times a day.

ESS is not a replacement for publicly available Social Networking tools. It attempts to use the concept of social media to improve productivity at work. Some reasons why this software is in demand is because the need for socially-driven collaboration has increased.

Virtual teams and communities can quickly share ideas through blogs and wikis, schedule meetings and enable IM, voice, and video communication.

Collaboration has evolved from its 1.0 ways of being a point of one-way conversation and communication to 2.0 which is a more comprehensive, integrated and multi-way approach to community collaboration to providing real business benefits for organisations and communities.

The difficulty with 1.0 is that it has limited visibility or empowerment for general users, is hardly discoverable, and provides no means to extend the functionality. On the other hand, 2.0 tools and techniques have emerged as platforms of the people, for the people, by the people.

—minu.sirsalewala-agarwal@9dot9.in

A

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 management, soft phones, single number reach, unified messaging, conferThe Chief Technology Officer Forum

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Unified Communications encing, 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 cloud-based, standardised, and predictable model of cost and delivery.

UC for SMBs Not just large global enterprises, organisations of every size are turning to UCâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; 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 communicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;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.

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.

Green Technology 58

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ccording to a study, data centers globally consume 0.8 percent of the total electricity generated in the world at a cost of $7.2 billion. This was in 2005. Data centers have been growing rapidly, and their numbers would have increased significantly in the last six years. While electricity consumption in Indian data centres is yet to be quantified, given the IT sectorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strong footprint in the economy, one can assume that energy consumption would be more compared to the global average. In 2012, the initiatives that CIOs need to adopt to cut down on their carbon footprint need to include virtualisation, hardware refresh, reduced printing and the use of web 2.0.

50% 53% 86%

of data centre operating costs are associated with power and cooling

cto forum 07 JANUARY 2012

of energy consumed

by Facebook is sourced from coal and rest is clean energy

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CIos vouch for absolute support from their top management on deploying green IT

THE Best of 2011

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Green Technology

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s medical tourism in the country is booming, the healthcare industry in India has started leveraging IT like never before to offer services at par with their global counterparts. Healthcare industry in India is still amongst the lowest spenders of IT globally.

However, there are some early adopters like the Calcutta Medical Research Institute (CMRI), which is a 400-plus bed multi specialty care provider open round the clock. Set up in 1969, CMRI is an ISO 9001: 2000 certified institution.

The company is in the expansion mode and is in the process of starting two more hospitals including one in Jaipur. Once these facilities are established, three more hospitals would be opened in different locations. The challenge before this growing company, which is a part

INTO A GREEN hospital

Calcutta Medical Research Institute has decided to make its IT completely green with consolidation and server and desktop virtualisation.

By Varun Aggarwal The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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THE Best of 2011

photo by nitish sharma

Green Technology of the CK Birla Group, was to ensure that cost was kept under control while they offered better services to their customers. Also, aware of its environmental responsibilities, going green turned out to be the only option for them to achieve this.

As Vishnu Gupta, CIO, CMRI says, “We realised early that virtualisation could not only help us reduce costs, but would also help streamline processes and enable us to go green.” As a first step towards going green, the company looked at deploying desktop virtualisation. Gupta decided to do a pilot with NComputing’s desktop virtualisation solution at the hospital’s library. The pilot turned out to be highly successful. From five PCs, the requirement came down to only 1 PC with 5 monitors. The company has already started saving money on power – usage has reduced from 130 watts to around 12 watts.

Desktop virtualisation contributed towards increasing the operational efficiency by reducing the downtime of hardware and sharing the resources of high-end terminals. These terminals would use the resources of a single high-end PC, while giving the same operational output.

“We have multiple departments which use specific software solutions for their day-to -day operations,” Gupta says. “The licensing cost for each terminal within that department increases.” Moreover with many such software solutions requiring specific hardware, replacing such terminals with thin

Turn it on

The world market for wind turbines saw robust growth in the first half of the year 2010, with approximately 16 Gigawatt of new capacity added worldwide. China represents the

largest market and added 7800 Megawatt within only six months, reaching total installations of almost 34 Gigawatt. The USA, still number one in total capacity with 36 Gigawatt, saw a major decrease in new installations and added only 1200 Megawatt, followed by India.

—Source: World Wind Energy Association

clients became a smart option.

“Since thin clients have the capacity to replicate any machine's resources over multiple terminals, we have been able to reduce hardware-specific machines,” says Gupta, who has received complete backing from his management in his initiatives. This meant a corresponding reduction in the related “housekeeping and maintenance” activities. The power consumed by the thin clients was “negligible compared to conventional CPUs,” he avers.

The company leverages Web applications extensively due to which most of the work at the hospital doesn’t require the executives to store any data on the system. Thus, the system whose resources are shared with four other PCs, can do with a standard desktop hard drive. The extensive use of web apps also reduces the cost of software licenses and maintenance.

The company is now testing NComputing’s enterprise offering wherein one high- end desktop with about 16-32GB RAM would be able to support upto 38 PCs. The deployment would further reduce the cost of desktops,

“The cost savings were so appealing that the managemen did'nt think twice before approving the budgets for it.”

—Vishnu Gupta

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Chief Information Officer CMRI

and also greatly reduce the UPS costs that the company had to bear earlier.

Usually it is a challenge to buy within the budgets for a new IT deployment. But Gupta didn’t face any such challenge. “The cost savings were so appealing that the management didn’t think twice before approving the budgets for it,” he says.

Consolidating the infrastructure As the next phase of greening the organisation, the company is looking at consolidation.

With CMRI's operations increasing as a result of several new facilities in the pipeline, the company has decided to consolidate its entire IT infrastructure in one place. Instead of servers being setup at various locations, CMRI would now have a common data centre serving all the hospitals. Virtualisation would be a key element to fulfil this need.

“We have been using Microsoft’s HyperV technology for a while and would continue to use it for non-critical workflows. HyperV has also helped us acquaint to virtualisation.

Now, that we understand virtualisation technology well, we’re doing a PoC to run our critical applications in a virtualised environment using VMWare virtualisation server,” Gupta opined.

“Once we are able to consolidate our hospital infrastructure in one place, the next step would be to consolidate IT infrastructure in other CK Birla Group companies,” he says. The consolidation would be guided

by Gupta and would enable an internal cloud for the entire CK Birla group, which would help the company reduce its carbon footprint significantly.

THE Best of 2011

Green Technology

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ne of the biggest challenges confronting a CIO, aiming to transform his legacy IT infrastructure into a green and efficient one, is the justification of the capital expenditure to the company’s CFO. But what if the CEO himself takes a lead in this area? This was exactly what happened at CESC, the private power utility of the RPG Group stable.

As part of the company’s corporate social responsibility, CESC’s CEO, Sumantra Banerjee, convened a meeting of all senior officials of the company, including the CIO, a couple of months back. The brief for the

By Yashvendra Singh department heads was to bring in energy efficiency in their respective departments. the stationary cost will half,” he says jusSays Debashis Roy, Vice President, IT, tifying the move. The IT department at CESC, “Cutting down the carbon footprint CESC is also working towards reducwas very important for a power utility like ing the electrical wattage of the us. We have four coal-based thermal power equipment by deploying products plants that generate 1225MW. With coal with energy efficiency ratings. being the major culprit in carbon emisRoy intends to consolidate the sion, we took the decision of lowering IT infrastructure by bringing our carbon footprint.” the various systems running With a strong backing from his at scattered locations under a management, Roy set about the task central location. “Towards this of making CESC’s IT green. To keep goal, we are setting up a new everyone on the same page, data centre where we would all members in the IT be virtualising and consolidatdepartment were ing several critical applications, communicated which include payroll, billing the need and and CRM. We have categorically importance to instructed the builder to optimise the go green. data center’s design, and to look into the “The first green aspect at every step,” he says. thing we have Roy is also undertaking desktop and decided is to server virtualisation. CESC has about 2500 streamline our —Debashis Roy desktops across all departments. all mails from our captive printing infraVP, IT, CESC mailing system will carry the structure, and logo of a green tree and a slobring down paper Managing e-waste gan,” he says. usage in the company.

Yet another initiative that Roy is adopting A recent European Union guide on We have got an analysis done, towards reducing the carbon footprint of his ‘green purchasing’ claims that adopting and would be phasing out all large format company is adhering to the best practices duplex printing can help in cutting costs by printers that are more than three years old. related to e-waste disposal. as much as 38 percent over the entire life of a These would be replaced by duplex printers "We are prolonging the life of the equipprinter. In a study, Citigroup had once calcuto enable printing on both sides of paper,” ment by maintaining it well. We are trying lated that $700,000 could be saved annually says Roy. to use a desktop for at least 5 years. CESC and 76 tons of solid waste could be eliminated CESC has 35 departments in all, and their is also trying to engage with recyclers that if each of its employees saved just one paper a printing needs run into lakhs of pages per are adept at disposing off e-waste. In the week by adopting duplex printing. annum. While Roy finds it tough to quantify west, there are proper e-waste recyclers Roy believes while there is an initial capihow many pages would be saved, he expects that salvage and re-use products, and we tal cost for the new infrastructure, it will be “paper consumption to come down to half.” are trying to associate with such recyclers recovered in about a years’ time. “Besides, “Also, to discourage unnecessary printing, in India,” Roy says.

GREEN POWER

As part of going green, private power utility CESC is streamlining its printing infrastructure

“We would be phasing out all large format printers that are more than three years old. These would be replaced by duplex printers.”

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CIO Speak 62

What were the pressing concerns in 2011 that kept our technology leaders awake at night? What were the successful implementations that allowed them to sleep soundly? Here are some interesting revelations of the pains and pleasures of CIOs in the year gone by.

Inside

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K B Venkataramanan

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Samrat Das

J S Puri

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Suresh A Shanmugam

Yogesh Zope

Jay Kerley

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Milind Sawant

Julen C Mohanty

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Ajay Satyarthi

CR Naraynan

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Baiju Gujarathi

Ashok Sethi

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Muralidharan Ramachandran

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Neel Ratan

Srikar Balakrishna

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Aniruddha Paul

D Ramakrishnan

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Jijy Oommen

Paul Martine

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Aiyappan Pillai

Kadab L Mukesh

Ratnakar Nemani

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Randy Spratt

G N Nagaraj

THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | K B Venkataramanan

Private Data, Public Domain, Opportunity

PHOTO BY Jiten Gandhi

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here is a fundamental shift happening in the way organisations are looking at data. It is driven by people putting private information in public forums, at all times of the day. The next wave of services oriented organisations will look at mining this data before they start any strategies.

Organisations therefore would rather look at effective and differentiated strategy drivers. There will be a significant shift in business strategies from building brick and mortar based organisations to organisations that are small and extremely agile even in the way they structure themselves to deliver value to the marketplace.

We are a financial services back-office organisation that does post-trade processing for clients around the world. When we started about four-and-a-half years back, there was a need for understanding the domain and accumulating a lot of knowledge.

We literally had 250-300 K B Venkataramanan CIO, Viteos Capital Markets people. Back then scalability Services Ltd. was all about adding headcount.

The author brings more than 17 years of experience in large scale We then asked 'what can we do to autosystems design and operation, mate what someone else is doing without product development and infrastructure management. adding value either to himself or the process/organisation ?'

The answer to that question has helped us increase business, and maintain additional capacity, even as the number of people dropped to hardly about a 100 today. Our story for scalability revolves around creating that knowledge repository.

This is the crux of it: One, this is about creating a knowledge management repository. Two, how it will work depends on how you are able to collect data from the public domain.

Today, it's all about creating the value perception that drives the business. People in an organisation necessarily need to see value in what is being presented. The creation of the value will come from how well you're able to mine data and strategise.

The author brings more than 13 years of experience in operational management and IT services consultancy gained across multiple industries.

CIO speak | Samrat Das

External Linkages Will Change the Game

Building the architecture to integrate internal capabilities with external linkages will deliver an allin-one basket to the customer.

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n financial services, it is only a matter of time before selling in silos gets diluted, to be replaced by a holistic view of what the customer wants and can digest. Translating this into a technology roadmap, with the right external linkages is something that I'm very fascinated with and passionate about.

Realising the architecture to bring the end customer this one single aggregated piece isn't about simply ensuring availability or even tapping the cloud. It's about how much forward looking am I in putting this external integration in place. How do I integrate with my banks, with my registrars, with my demat accounts, with my mutual funds and then go and give the customer that single piece. There are two pieces in the life cycle of any financial asset or set of products. One is about understanding the need, which is essentially the selling process and figuring out the right fitment. Second, once the fitment is there, continuously evaluating whether the product or the combination is aligned to the needs that the customer has, as the needs keep changing with life style, age and other factors.

The first level then is the basic integration which is internal to the organisation. What I'd like to see is the integration with the external links: The core competency of a bank can't be replaced by an insurance firm, as these are individual strengths, so how does one do this? Today the buzz word is all about SOA, but is that the best way to go forward? I don't know.

Any application or framework that we build, we must ensure that it is open to assimilate and disseminate information. People who were novices only yesterday have moved up the value curve rapidly today. This means that the demand for such integrated wrappers will only increase, be it in a year or in five years.

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PHOTO BY Jiten Gandhi

Mining public-domain data to create the value perception that drives business will increasingly occupy the minds of CIOs

Samrat Das CIO, Tata-AIG Life Insurance Company Ltd.

THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | Yogesh Zope

Shared Services Have Potential Beyond IT Shared Services, while a simple enough idea, can make IT considerably more efficient in large enterprises.

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sk me about my dream as a CIO and I'll say, make the service approach effective not just for the internal customer, but I would want to be able to take it to the outside world with the same effectiveness.

The philosophy behind Shared Services is really simple, of course, but what I believe is that it can go way beyond IT. This is something that I'm trying to do at Bharat Forge as well, for instance, with the consolidation of safety processes and infrastructure.

Getting technology people on board isn't going to be difficult at all, and I would like to at least help build the processes that can take shared services beyond IT. At Kalyani, the context of the recession gave us the right opportunity to initiate shared services across the group. A lot of effort had to be put into reducing costs and at the same time increasing the efficiency of IT and standardisation.

We thought we'll involve most of the Kalyani Group companies and initially, we merely started with centralisation, which isn't really shared services.

This was however soon followed with a govYogesh Zope VP ernance framework IT Services, Bharat Forge The author brings over two to try and measure decades of industry experience how well the serand is currently leading a groupwide shared services initiative at vices were being Kalyani Group. provided. The aim was full-fledged customer orientation.

Typically shared services are applicable to only large companies – to get real benefit, the company has to be at least a $200 million group or larger, so one can exploit the potential of sharing services. Even the vendor community is really gearing up for this – what is cloud? Basically it is a shared services model. If you have a combination of private and public clouds, that is the way the industry is evolving.

The primary reason is that it increases your overall efficiency and flexibility. Besides, corporates don't really have a choice and we are a case in point. Every time the group floats a new company, we have to provision the necessary IT and do it in an agile manner, otherwise the costs involved will be very high. End user would be happy as they will get a homogeneous service across the group.

CIO speak | Suresh A Shanmugam

First, Be Self Aware

Know who you are, it will show you the way ahead

PHOTO BY Jiten Gandhi

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f you try to link the rise in technology and business with the idea of 'Who am I?' you will get some real insights in where you are today, where you need to go as a CIO with certain responsibilities that come with job. If you achieve this alignment of the self with the needs of those that depend on you and leverage all the tools available to you, such as the best emerging technologies, you'll get unprecedented growth.

First, address the issue of 'Who am I.' It will make you more self aware, tell you about your strengths and weaknesses and show you the way forward. Then, you'll be in a position to leverage all the technology that is out there and ensure that not only is your business growing but that in the process it benefits people way beyond the immediate organisation.

The idea of being more self aware extends from an individual to the entire organisa-

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tion, and questions you ask of yourself are also the same or similar: 'what are my capabilities, what is my Suresh A Shanmugam model, are there lacunae that Head-Business IT Solutions, M&M Fin Services need to be overcome, which tools The author is an IT professional, are the best in my context to with experience in operational management and IT services reach out to the most people, and consultancy gained across even, if necessary, is there somemultiple industries. thing fundamental about myself An example is what we did that I need to take a hard look at?' in trying to reach out to people in At the individual level this boils down the villages. We combined our knowledge to accepting that as a CIO one has certain of who we were, with the financial needs responsibilities that go much beyond simply of the people we were trying to serve – for ensuring the IT enterprise up and running example, a lower-middle-class father of two – there is a responsibility to the larger comdaughters and husband to a housewife – munity that we call society. and enabled the service by coming up with First, be self aware: Ask yourself, if it is the specs for the correct technology interreally justified to say, 'as CIO, I know IT face. This nearly doubled the number of better than the users.' If you get the answer people we could do business with. to this question right, you'll become what I term a 'successful IT human being.'

THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | Aiyappan Pillai

‘Win-Win’ Is Not a Cliche

PHOTO BY Jiten Gandhi

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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 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 win-win, 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 cusAiyappan Pillai tomer-supplier relationship Vice President, Tata Communications where, as customers, we demand The author brings over two decades technology solutions at the best prices. of industry experience to his job, which includes leading global IT The second involves the relationship development teams. 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 end-user 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.

The author has over 15 years of rich overseas and domestic experience managing technology infrastructure for large corporate organisations.

CIO speak | Milind Sawant

Trust More Important Than Technology

Active listening helped the IT department at Reliance Life Insurance to regain the trust from its users.

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he one principle that I believe very strongly in, and always try to live by, is that one must always be open to listening to people and trusting them to have the best intentions. When we learn to intelligently, not blindly, live by this principle, it gives us a chance to positively affect many people's lives by creating a sort of a chain reaction. The principle is applicable equally in our personal and professional lives. Since we are in the services industry, we should always be in the listening mode to deliver the desired output. My strong belief is that when you listen carefully you can deliver effectively and efficiently. By virtue of our experience we transform/address these dynamic needs using different technology solutions.

Here’s one example: We used to have lots of complaints from our branches about the unavailability of communication infrastructure, and people had lost faith in IT services. When we analysed the incident database through a series of interviews with the branch ops people, we found a pattern, and the solution was quite simple, really.

An alert mechanism that pro-actively informed branches about the outages would go a long way in winning our users’ trust again, we realised. We also added regular status updates that gave people a clear idea, in the case of an outage, of when they could expect the services back and what was being done about it.

Using people and technology we have started our NOC operations, which send alerts to affected branches either pro-actively or on an immediate basis. We follow up on it till the closure of the incident. Currently our NOC ops has handled more than 1,000 links successfully, with many ‘customer delight’ features including billing, commissioning and capacity planning. The point I’m making is, people are the real assets, and technology is merely a tool to enable them to do their best. Winning their trust goes a long way in getting them to perform well.

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photo BY jiten gandhi

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?

Milind Sawant Head - IT Infra, Reliance Life Insurance Company Ltd.

THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | Jijy Oommen

Deliver the Vision, Inspire Confidence There is a debate raging on the CIO's role. Should a CIO be a good business leader or a technologist?

photo BY Subhojit Paul

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y thoughts are slightly different. While a business-savvy CIO is valued, technology has a great role to play in every organisation, though the priorities may vary from industry to industry.

A CIO needs to definitely understand business well to be able to deliver useful solutions to the business needs and help create and deliver the bigger vision for the organisation, leveraging its technology strengths. At the same time, he needs to be a tough technocrat to the able to deliver on his commitments, for it is the CIO and his team that the organisation relies on for its technology needs.

Therefore, it's great if the CIO understands business, but he can’t shy away from the need to have great depth of knowledge and experience with a range of technologies and their usefulness in supporting business sustenance and growth.

The CIO needs to build a strong IT organisation to achieve his objectives and it can only be done with the support of a competent and committed team and the vendors.

At the same time, the Jijy Oommen CIO needs to be a EVP, Head IT at Bajaj great spokesperson Capital Group. to the external world THE author brings 15 years of experience to her job. She and practice the folbelieves being business-savvy lowing: and a strong technologist isn't an either-or question.

Build confidence in every individual to whom you matter the most in your sphere of influence, including peers and top management Be a catalyst for change and allow the final expression of interest in a certain technology solution from the other business leaders to ensure higher levels of adoption and ownership Maintain your status as a strong technology professional both within the organisation and in the industry unless you are actively aiming for a role change that doesn’t require serious technology strengths. That is what a CIO is paid for.

Read, read read: ensure that you remain on top of all the happenings in both the IT industry and the industry in which your organisation is operating. This will be vital to your success.

CIO speak | Ajay Satyarthi

View IT as a Profit Centre CIOs of today have to come up with new revenue streams from the data their company already possesses.

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T is no longer just an enabler of business, but has come to be a profit centre in its own right. The role of CIOs, and the organisations they lead, is to become a bridge between a company’s business strategy and the enabling technology architecture. Today’s CIO is expected to make innovations real and raise the return on investment of IT to expand business impact.

Just planning an innovation is not enough.

It needs a foundation that can sustain the dynamically changing business requirements. The CIO is expected to be a visionary, perceptive to promoting a broad technology agenda. On the other hand, the CIO has to take a pragmatic approach to deal with the realities of business. This approach facilitates the productivity of current IT solutions to eke out more time and budget for innovation.

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Ajay Satyarthi Accompanied by an ongoing Senior GM - IT at Videocon focus on lower costs and higher Telecommunications Ltd. The author brings deep efficiency, IT has to produce domain expertise in the field of greater business value. A ‘Savvy telecommunications to his job.

He has come up with innovative Value Creator’ finds new ways to ways to maximise VAS revenues help customers and the organisafor the telco. architecture that enables effection profit from how data is used. tive, cost-efficient management of The ‘Relentless Cost Cutter, its counterpart, risk and compliance. To solve multitudinous is focused on managing budgets and proproblems for internal as well as external cuscesses to eliminate or reduce costs. tomers, CIOs need to be multi-disciplinary To contribute the most to an organisation, and business oriented. Perhaps the CIO’s proven expertise in both business and techtrue role should be that of a business innovanical matters is vital. CIOs have to engage tor and strategy leader. In other words, CIOs with enterprises as collaborative business are no longer expected to sit at the boardleaders and drive new business initiatives. room table and suggest ways to move other The Inspiring IT Manager role occupies C-seat dreams into reality, but to stand and centre stage to motivate the IT organisation present new revenue streams from the data and deliver superior IT performance. the company already possesses.

More than ever, CIOs need to provide an IT

THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | Aniruddha Paul

Dare To Be Disruptive

BAIJU GUJARATHI VP, IT Governance, Repro India Ltd.

As a leader, a CIO should be challenging his peers and team to achieve more.

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question that I always ask myself and my team is, 'Do you think you can be considered a success just by being a part of a successful organization or would you rather be remembered by joining a team in trouble and helping them achieve success?’

The latter is significantly tougher but infinitely more satisfying.

The key to being a turnaround artist is being disruptive, and this is a lesson that I learnt early on in my career, when I was with a premier organisation in the IT solutions space. I was a solutions expert, based in Pune, as part of a team servicing the enterprises in the industrial belt in the region. An important reason I was there was that the company was trying to turn around the business in the region.

One day, around the time we were working on presenting the next year's plan, including revenue targets and so on, a senior executive walked in and wanted to know what we would achieve the following year. When this executive, whose role included the responsibility for the company’s performance in the region, heard we were expecting to grow a certain rate, he challenged us: “How can you say this, when the least I expect is that you grow at a rate that will put you on par with the kind of market share the company enjoys elsewhere?”

Aniruddha Paul IT-Head, ING Vysya Bank Ltd. There was a lot of conster-

Photo by Radhakrishna

The author brings 19 years of

nation in the team, with people experience to his job, as Head, IT Change Delivery, at ING Vysya Bank grumbling “how can he ask this of us, Ltd. Paul is currently in charge of when he knows of all the constraints IT enabled business transformation at the bank. faced by us in this region?” and so on.

What the executive wanted was for us to grow not the 10-odd percent we thought was realistic, but the 400 percent needed to bring the company’s share in this weak region on par with the zones where it enjoyed as much as 30 percent market share.

The moral of the story is that in this case, the supervisor was convinced it was do-able and wouldn’t take no for an answer: sure enough, while it took us the next two to three years, we did bring the company’s market share in the region up to the level he’d envisaged.

If, when required, a leader is not disruptive enough in challenging his peers and his team, the organisation he works for will suffer.

The author brings over 26 years of domain expertise in enterprise IT systems and governance, focusing on maximising the value of IT to business.

CIO speak | BAIJU GUJARATHI

IT Needs a ‘Value Paradigm’

A CIO has to overcome challenges on three fronts -- human values, managing change and performance measurement.

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ith IT acquiring an increasingly central and strategic role in enabling, sustaining and improving business, the CIO finds himself tasked with integrating IT governance into corporate and enterprise governance.

I believe there are challenges on three fronts to be overcome to succeed in this task: 1. Human Values: Technology brings impersonal(ness) in people dealing with each other. It is a great asset, enabler but should not cost a total loss of the 'personal touch.' In most companies, we see people 'drop a mail’ to pass on work or fend off a potential 'accountability' problem.

With tens of cc, bcc inside a mail there is then over-communication, miscommunication and ultimately, confusion. Unless emphasis on human qualities and values such as honesty and integrity are emphasised, one will not ultimately make good of IT. Across levels from government, regulator to enterprise we will have to revisit the Indian 'Vivek' (enlightenment) as the value paradigm to keep IT sane and avoid being counter productive. This is most fundamental as it deals with the very users of IT -- humans.

2. Change Management: The new face of IT is simply experienced in our personal exposure to it, be it at work or home. Mobile devices, email and the Internet. It has all pervaded our lives profusely. Very rarely does one write a letter to someone 'personally,' except formal record communications. So it does pervade an enterprise for IT initiatives at institutional level. One has to bring in some mindset change and for this, IT will have to be people-friendly.

3. Concept of Performance: Performance measurement in IT at governance level cannot be just a number game. It is alright to see numbers for network bandwidth or incident occurrences, but ultimately, performance should be seen from people and institution perspective. Unless initiatives do good to people, they will not do larger good for the institution.

Ask yourself: Does it make the life of an individual member of the institution better, enriched?

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THE Best of 2011

CIO Speak

CIO speak | Neel Ratan

M-Governance is Not About Smartphones The last mile remains one of the biggest challenges to deliver services in rural India.

photo by Subhojit Paul

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he last two years have seen an increase in the penetration of mobile phone services in India. Some government-to-citizen services already exist on different electronic platforms such as the Internet, computers and kiosks. Government should look at a plan of moving these to the “m” platform. This would really bring to life the effort put into switching these from manual to 'e' services which perhaps has made the switch to 'm' that much easier, by eliminating some of the problems originally faced.

That said, if we tried to deliver e-governance and government-tocitizen services on smartphones, it would have no relevance to the hundreds of millions of Indians living in villages. The challenge is not with their "IQ level," which is quite fine but with such impediments as lack of applications in local languages, and reading and writing.

Any solution then, would have to be speech and visual-based.

Any services that one wants to provide via a direct interface between the government and rural India, or for that matter between businesses and rural India, can't be in Hindi alone Neel Ratan or in English.

Executive Director with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

To fully exploit The author has over 21 years the potential of of experience in the design and implementation of e-governance the mobile phone and IT projects. penetration in the country, m-governance solutions have to work on the cheapest of handsets, must be very amenable to quick rollouts that build on existing infrastructure, and must catalyse an increased level of public-private engagement.

That catalysis will happen with the government establishing clear norms on which value-added-services providers can develop and offer applications on the m-governance platform that is both beneficial to the citizen users and fair to the vendors.

By Collaborating with, Mobile Service Providers, Mobile Handset Manufacturers, Technology Companies and Telecom / VAS operators, for starters, services that are already available as 'e' services can also be made available as 'm' services that predominantly use either the interactive voice response system or the sms (short messaging system).

CIO speak | Ratnakar Nemani

Do What It Takes to Build Credibility

Everything else will fall into place once stakeholders find that the CIO and his team know what they are talking about.

photo by Suresh vangapally

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’m a finance professional by choice of training and an IT professional by chance, with the zeal to excel further through learning from my more technologically learned colleagues. What I bring to the table is my ability to bring business insight to a technology project. There are some mantras that I follow here, as well as in my personal development that I urge my team to consider: Work for a cause and not for applause; Live life to express, not to impress; Strive not to make your presence noticed; and Just make your absence felt.

In an organisation, as with people, these tenets help us acquire the single most important attribute needed to achieve anything worthwhile, and that is credibility, for without credibility, no stakeholder will trust

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Ratnakar Nemani CIO-Himatsingka Seide us to deliver. For instance, recentLtd, Bangalore. ly, the president, operations at The author brings close to two decades of experience in our company was unconvinced finance, marketing, HR and IT that we could replicate everything to his job as CIO of Himatsingka Seide, a niche, high-end textile ing day itself, well ahead of he was looking for on the ERP company. close of business. applications that we were deploying Personal credibility is about and that he should therefore jettison the showing people that we respect their time home-grown program for that particular and value their trust: I’ve almost never been set of processes. It took us three months to late to office. In the very few instances that I win him over, but win him over we did, by was late even by 10 minutes, I’ve worked for continuing to keep his in-house programme the day and still sent a leave application to my running to his satisfaction, while we built boss. Finally, credibility also requires a certain the same processes on the ERP platform. amount of fearlessness: Most people try to In another instance, when a production impress their bosses. Instead, speak your system stopped working in another town, we mind and your heart. Initially this might cregot the engineer to drive through the night to ate a rift but eventually a good boss will come bring it to us, so we could fix the machine and to value your forthrightness and ideas. send it back. It was up and running the follow-

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CIO Speak

CIO speak | J S Puri

Striking the Right Balance

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he CFO is the choice person of the management. He has close proximity to the CEO, promoter and the board of directors. The reason for this is that a CFO handles the finances of the company. His role of controlling finance monitoring and ensuring profitability, which is the end goal of any corporate, attaches high importance. The CIO of today, meanwhile, has been relegated to the role of a service provider within his organisation.

To begin with the CFO does not have the specialist understanding of technology- the way a CIO has and therefore a CFO is unlikely to understand the rules, limitations and relevance of engaging developing technologies and enterprise solutions. But he has the greater power to influence a decision / direction - for the end result of which the CIO would be held responsible !

This happens more often than not because unlike a CIO, a CFO does not weigh parameters such as cost-benefit analysis and the return on Investment (RoI) before freezing a solution for implementation.

That the influence of a CFO is rising in a corporate J S Puri at the expense of that of a CIO Vice President, is substantiated by a recent survey Corporate Affairs & IT at Fortis Healthcare

by Gartner/FEI. It is in the interest

photo by Subhojit Paul

The author has over thirty years of

of an organisation to strike a fine balexperience in the IT domain, having worked with SRL Ranbaxy, Sharda ance between the roles of the CIO and Motors and Bhushan Steel. the CFO. Meanwhile, for a CIO to hold his own, there is a need for him to take up additional responsibilities. He should not limit himself to the IT department and should instead handle additional roles. This would not only increase his stature within the organisation but also add value to his own profile.

A CIO should also grab whatever opportunity he gets to make his present felt within his organisation. This opportunity could be in a meeting with the top management.

The CFO should realise the fact that he can’t work without the support of the CIO. The two should collaborate if they have to take their company to the next level of growth.

The author brings over two decades of experience in technology, having worked with some of the top companies in India.

CIO speak | Kadab L Mukesh

Public and Private Clouds: Not an ‘Either Or’ Option

Private cloud may not exist a decade from now, but till then, one will need both private and public clouds.

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e started with a public cloud because we needed to deploy something very rapidly which also had the ability to scale very rapidly. This is much easier in a public cloud, whether it is adding capacity or the administrative task of giving purchase orders.

There is also a strong case for private cloud in our own DC as we have several servers. Ten years from now, if there are no private data centres at all, that will be a separate ball game, but in the intermediary stage, one will have both.

Even with clouds, there will be enough people to ask questions such as ‘hey, should I really move my CRM data to the cloud’ or there will be people who will have concerns around security and wouldn’t want to move some of their applications and some of their data. In that case they will probably put together the private cloud infrastructure as well.

Let’s take security, and look at Amazon’s business: It is a business that is completely dependent on the Internet, which to my mind means that it is highly unlikely that I will ever be able to put in the kind of security infrastructure in my business that can be comparable to Amazon’s. Therefore I’m fairly comfortable putting applications on the cloud.

Here’s one example, specific to our business, where we have to manage thousands of satellite TV subscribers. Managing the peaks in demand for certain programmes would make it un-viable to add capacity of processors or storage as and when needed in our own data centre. This is simply the nature of the business.

On the other hand, consider a health care provider where one may not witness 70-80 percent kind of fluctuation in the volume of customers, the IT needs would be more steady and going to a public cloud may not necessarily be warranted just for that.

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photo by S Radhakrishna

In the light of the CFO encroaching upon the CIO’s turf, there is a need to strike a fine balance between their roles.

Kadab L Mukesh Chief Business Operations Officer-TataSky

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CIO Speak

CIO speak | Jay Kerley

Collaboration is User Driven Users will find tools and techniques to collaborate even if you don’t provide them any.

C

ollaboration is the need of the hour. You need to have a strong vision and roadmap around collaboration otherwise your users would get there anyway. They’ll use external tools and capabilities like social networking and personal mail to drive collaboration and efficiency. As a CIO, you need to be a part of this collaboration otherwise you’ll have information management and security challenges which could be hard to overcome.

The ability to collaborate electronically has been complex. Sending, forwarding and storing data in order to collaborate is extremely cumbersome and users need to collaborate in real time. You need to build natural and easy interfaces for collaboration so that they come naturally to users. The collaboration environment needs to be always-on with simple streamlined interface that is not over engineered and doesn’t put burden on the users.

As a first step into our collaboration strategy, we recently went for virtual desktop infrastructure with the deployment of CAD software over thin clients.

Not only does this environment increase the performance by over 60 percent, it also allows us to extend it to other countries and allow near real time collaboration. Previously, in order to Jay Kerley do 3D design Corporate Vice President and collaboration, CIO, Applied Materials Inc. we had to send The author has led Fortune 500 companies through massive change file as large initiatives including worldwide as 4-5GB and consolidation of technology and support services. the other person would then have to spend time, downloading it, then work on it, and then send it back. This process would typically take several hours and even days.

Now, multiple engineers across locations can work on the same file without having to download it and collaborate in real time. This has increased productivity by over 10 percent as now, we can work 24X7.

Engineers can also work from home, giving them flexibility.

While the project cost was high, we were able to benefit from it since we were able to cut cost by maintaining a single instance of data, reducing the need to store multiple copies of the these huge files in multiple locations, which also led to data integrity management costs. Also, with this project we consolidated our five global data centres into two that also led to significant cost savings.

CIO speak | Paul Martine

The Future of Office Environments

They will be dominated by Open Collaborative Spaces.

I

n the coming months and years, you're going to see more and more companies and their employees opting to work in open collaborative spaces. The open and collaborative environment is the way office spaces will transform. I really don't think you're going to see any more traditional, cubicle type of spaces.

These spaces also bring with them the option of open, 'work anywhere' concept.

I know of some big companies that have gone this way: Cisco has done it, parts of IBM have gone this way, we are certainly moving in this direction. It's not a dedicated spot for every employee anymore. Just pull up a chair, with the people you need to be working with at that given time, use your computing device and when you're done,

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Paul Martine CIO & Corporate VP, Operations, Citrix Systems Inc.

you move on to the next task.

It's efficient and cost effective The author has about 27 years from even the real estate point of industry experience and is a of view, and it certainly encourpassionate advocate of open collaboration. ages collaboration, where perhaps in traditional set ups, people didn't collaborate all that much. In today's work tive office spaces and a lot of it was done environment, we all need to work with a lot just to be cost effective, but they end being of other people in different teams. Just look a bit more collaborative with everyone sitat the projects that you need to do and all of ting together. the different people you need to work with.

In our own company, the vice president of Calling all the people together in to a meetapplication delivery, who owns applications ing in a stale, static environment... well you'll delivery, project management and enterget something, but call them together in a cofprise architecture... his building is built fee shop type of environment, and then you completely around the work anywhere conget a whole different kind of interaction going. cept. He is the vice president and he doesn't I've seen a lot of entrepreneurial and have an office. start up firms using such open collabora-

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CIO Speak

CIO speak | Julen C Mohanty

Lead More, Boss Less

photo by Neha Bajaj

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n most organisations, if you look at them, they treat employees as resources. Most of the time, it doesn’t help you.

If you look at people from a project management perspective, for instance, they might be ‘resources’ but at the end of the day, they aren’t inanimate resources or material resources.They have hearts and brains that work for you.

So when you have a plan, to achieve some objective, take a moment to step out of the plan: step out of your cabin and see that these are people and employees and not mere ‘resources.’

Most often, when one fails to do this, it adds to the current phenomenon in corporate life of people acting as bosses and not as leaders. A person who isn’t in a position of a supervisor might still be a leader, which has nothing to do with being a boss, but anyone who is heading any team, big or small, simply can’t afford to be just a boss, without some critical leadership traits.

The third thing I believe in strongly is empathy.

What happens usually, is we Julen C Mohanty again, look into time and cost Technology CoE, Citicorp Services India Ltd. and not into the people.

The author has around 10 years The cost depends on the market and of experience in various fields of IT Products, Services, Solutions and the time depends on the clients -- and Consulting. the people, as resources, are the most important strength of the company.

I draw inspiration from my own father, who as a chief manager in a public sector bank displayed the ability to see the people in the resources, understood the need to lead more and boss less and therefore brought empathy into play in all his interactions with others.

No matter how critical or serious a discussion or decision he might have participated in behind closed doors, when he stepped out of the cabin, he would always step out with a smiling face.

The idea behind it is, even if the matter that was discussed was grave, it serves no one to put on a sour face. On the other hand, a calm demeanor that suggests empathy will always draw people to you when you need them.

The author brings more than 15 years of industry experience to his role

CIO speak | D Ramakrishnan

Boost Business, Wow Customers: Automate

Automation helps make customer the king, as it turns interactions upfront and personal, efficient and pleasant.

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rom a customer perspective, automation matters a lot.

One must necessarily make customer interaction with the organisation convenient, efficient and a pleasant experience, be it via a mobile phone, a Web-based interface, a kiosk, personal interaction, or any other channel.

Automation is a critical component in improving business in most organisations. This is for three reasons: First, customer centricity, where we look to provide that 'wow' factor and the customer gets something useful and convenient. Second, automation frees up skilled full-time employees from routine work so that they can focus on innovation. Finally, automation enables efficient processes.

Next, in any automation strategy, an organisation must determine its own appetite for both automating itself and any risk that might arise out of automating certain processes. The reverse is also an attraction of automation, in that one can eliminate the risk attached to manually handling certain business processes by automating those processes, from a technology point of view.

An organisation's maturity in terms of technology adoption is an influencing factor in how far it might be willing to go to automate anything. The current practice in most corporations is to increase automation — not to reduce FTEs but for the three reasons I mentioned earlier.

For example, as part of an initiative called 'Customer First,' we automated a few customer-facing processes to a very encouraging response. One of them is chequebook re-ordering. When a threshold number of cheque leaves are spent (processed in the system) by a customer, it triggers an automated re-order of the chequebook. Thus, automation helps us differentiate and distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the eyes of our customers.

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Photo by S Radhakrishna

See people in your resources, empathise.

D Ramakrishnan Head, Core Banking, ING Vysya Bank Ltd.

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CIO Speak

CIO speak | CR Naraynan

Stick to the C and O of CTO

Recession has brought with it some valuable lessons. It is time to take stock for the CTOs â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not of IT but self worth

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echnology plays a big part in developing our country.

But how are we faring, you, me and the senior technocrats? It is only in the last few months that I have started questioning myself, my abilities and my deliveries. This global recession, or whatever the world at large calls it, has been, according to me, one of the most sensible and timely boons for everyone.

I have taken pride in my ability to synchronise with and assist my organisation in achieving its vision and targets. But I questioned myself on these parameters.

All of us, senior technocrats need to do self-evaluation now. The recession has given us this once in a lifetime opportunity to reassess who we are and what we can potentially do for our organisation.

I believe we need to stop living within the realms of our IT world, go beyond 'how we will reduce costs in IT' and engage in friendly (and at times not so friendly) banter with our CFO and CEO colleagues on larger issues. I am not suggesting that we stop asking

things like: How well is our technology working for us? What upgrades do we need and when? Can we stretch equipment life cycles?

Perhaps we need to now think about: What do we need to do to CR Naraynan CIO, Tulip Telecom beat this recession? I The author is a senior technocrat believe these fundaand a specialist in managing large-scale IT infrastructure mentals are beyond technology challenges.

My humble pledge is not to wait for answers from others. We perhaps will be well served to forget what our designations state and stick to the C and O in the title. A chief officer is someone who will be part of the fundamentals, a key member of the thinktank; someone who is not just an implementer of visions, but an integral part of strategy formulation. The T (or the I) of our title will always remain second nature to us.

I believe we can engage and play a pivotal role in shaping our organisationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s destiny and this global recession has set the centre stage for us.

At the risk of sounding delirious, let me conclude by saying â&#x20AC;&#x201D; go and enjoy the recession friends. It is the best free education for us, something that can infuse freshness in our abilities and help us leave an indelible mark on our organisations.

CIO speak | Srikar Balakrishna

Accept Consumerisation as a Cost of Business

For the CIO, the 'choice' involves a trade-off between the costs and benefits

photo by s Radhakrishna

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oday, people expect the same choice in their work environment, as they have at their homes, be it with respect to browsers, applications, or end devices. A CIO's approach to this phenomenon of IT consumerism involves a trade-off, I believe.

In an organisation, when you allow that choice, it has a cost associated with it. For example, let's say employees have the choice of using either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

This would mean that the security patches, version updates and other administration activities have to be deployed and managed for two browsers.

All the organisation's internal applications have to be compatible with both the browsers, and so on. This results in additional costs.

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Srikar Balakrishna There is no getting away from Head, IT Investment & Planning, RBEI this though. People expect such The author brings 20 years of choices of tools and devices, industry experience to his role which they feel makes them more productive.

Therefore, the CIO's trade-off is between how much it will cost and what benefits it balancing the availability of IT resources will bring for the organisation.The good between rigid norms on the one end and the news is that in the backend, it's probably 'use-anything-that-you-want' policy at the easier to make a more business-oriented other. They must make careful judgements decision on the choice or the hardware such on where standardisation is necessary and as servers, and software such as databases. where multiple options are fine. Our own In the front-end, certainly, one has to deal approach has been to put together a robust with a lot of 'soft' issues and an appropriate list of approved devices and applications investment for choice will have to be justiwithin which people can choose what they fied as the cost of doing business. want to use.

This is a tightrope walk for the CIOs,

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CIO speak | Ashok Sethi

Look at Productivity, Not Cost of Services For IT to complement business, the C level should look at value and productivity rather than cost

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question that a CIO is often asked is: Are you able to convince your CEO about the budget that you want? I believe, the need to convince the top management over the budgetary requirements arises when the top management lacks the knowledge and interest in what is happening in the outside world. It boils down to how aware the top management is of the goings-on in the enterprise firmament and whether it too wants to be on the same journey or not.

IT is a journey without an end. Today, I am on Mac platform, tomorrow it could be any other, and you should be ready to support it. Cost is always a factor. But I would like to call it an investment rather than a cost. If the C level starts viewing IT as an investment and looks at the RoI and the value and productivitygain taking place, I don’t think they will challenge the investment.

We, therefore, don’t look at cutting capex. I think investments are required irrespective of where you are. There could be various models of operations. Capex can be converted to opex if you opt for different services.

For instance, if you opt for cloud, it becomes an opex, while you have to buy the Ashok Sethi CIO, Sapient India hardware. The objective is service The author leads Sapient’s

and we need to loook at the cost of that IT Strategy and Enterprise Applications & Infrastructure service, and if we are to buy that service groups. He has over 20 years of from outside, what will be the cost of consulting experience procuring it. So, as a CIO, I am always benchmarking to find out the cost of that service internally. Can I get it at the same cost from outside with matching SLAs? If the answer is no, it means that service is not core to my business.

On the applications side, we are evaluating which SaaS models will work best for us. We are looking at our ERP system once again — platform upgrades are coming in. On the technology side, I would say our primary focus is on security, which would go up to the mobile devices. As the whole concept of BYOD is catching up, mobile device management is becoming critical for us. Collaboration was a big theme for us last year, and we would be expanding it in the next year.

People may say this is a cost, but I call it an investment.

Muralidharan Ramachandran CIO of Syntel Inc. The author brings two decades of industry experience to his role.

CIO speak | Muralidharan Ramachandran

Supporting Business Through ‘Syntelovation’ Syntel has instituted a programme that rewards innovative solutions.

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e are a young company by culture and the DNA of our organisation is about 'how do we keep innovating?'

So ideas are always welcome. We also have formal programmes, including one called ‘Syntelovation,’ an award programme that recognises teams that provide the best innovative solutions to our customers. That is something that isn't evaluated by merely people within the organisation. We invite our clients to be part of the jury and the awards are given on the basis of the innovation contributing directly to the customer's revenues and profit.

We enable our clients' IT team to support THEIR business.

'Syntelovation' is very clearly part of this initiative. Internally, within Syntel, we keep looking at new ideas. In a services company this is often in the form of a process innovation that can add to our top line or bottom line.

This is an area where we actually run portals, such as our 'Idea Transform' to capture ideas from any employee who has one. That is then scrutinised from the perspective of whether that can substantially improve our processes and so on.

For example, in managing infrastructure, we look at what we've been doing, the experience we've accumulated and see if we can use that to help our customers in better managing their infrastructure. Second on the application side, we run a lot of programmes, and with our centres of excellence, we work very closely with our customers to test or pilot something within Syntel something that will eventually be used by the customers. This every once in a while leads to frameworks, processes and even tools that can be authentically taken to the market and customised for the clients.

Globally the way the markets are today, with the economic turmoil, there is this constant demand for more with less.

Here, there are many areas where CIOs can contribute with innovation, helping their own business units help their clients get more for less. This is where the pressure is much higher even on CIOs to focus on projects that can help organisations tap business opportunities.

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CIO Speak

CIO speak | Randy Spratt

IT Nirvana for Growth

For achieving IT nirvana, CIOs need to manage the two sources of value

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here are two sources of value that a CIO must bear in mind, one is growth oriented, and the other is leverage oriented. These can be at odds. It is important for a CIO to successfully manage this paradox.

On the one hand, you need to innovate and be agile to serve the strategies of the business. On the other hand, you have a lot of activities that are commodity driven, and if you are not competitive with other entities that can provide those services, then you will be at a competitive disadvantage as a company.

In my mind, business Nirvana is top-line growth. This suggests business-driven IT activity, and a high degree of IT agility. The businesses will want and expect new devices, new capabilities, new applications, new tools to reach and delight their customers. They are looking for social networking, iPad apps, smartphone apps, and linking into cloud-based services to reach their markets and deliver innovative products and services. IT nirvana is making everything efficient, secure, leveraging economies of scale. In this scenario, IT

controls things to a greater extent.

In many organisations, there is a pendulum that swings between these two scenarios, between Business Nirvana and IT Nirvana, never Randy Spratt quite reaching either CIO and CTO, McKesson side before the Corporation momentum shifts The author is esponsible for the global applications that serve the in the other direcentire corporation and for the overall tion every three to IT strategy and information security for the company five years.

An innovative CIO focuses almost exclusively on enabling the business vision, and, for a time, achieves tremendous things for the organisation. In the process, he creates a shadow infrastructure and buys products at sub-optimal purchasing power. Projects fall behind, costs accelerate, and the desired agility is not attained.

A cost conscious CIO spends a lot of time cleaning up the infrastructure, and cutting staff. He de-emphasises innovative, top-line growth opportunities in favor of more efficient operations, greater buying power and more reliable operations through solid IT processes. __ This opinion was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories, please visit www.cioinsight.com.

CIO speak | G N Nagaraj

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Fight, Embrace Mobility

For CIOs, mobility can be interesting if they embrace it and a nightmare if they fight it

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The author Has close to 20

nterprise customer data is now available all across the cloud for all and sundry to access at will. As a liquor store owner, for instance, I would like to look at the data and make calls to people who live in the same neighbourhood with bundled offers perhaps. This example clearly showcases the dire need for enterprise control policies on mobile devices. It may even call for enterprises building custom apps and app stores local to their customers. Soon these application vendors will be talking on deals directly with business function heads by-passing IT, exactly the same way SaaS vendors did some time ago. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fight it, embrace it. To achieve this is, a CIO needs to create an app store within the enterprise with relevant apps.

He needs to categorise the app store into

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years of IT experience in various different sections -- B2C (Apps positions. He has worked in aimed at enterpriseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customers), corporates such as Reliance Capital, Religare Enterprises and B2B (Apps aimed at business partICICI Bank. ners), B2E (Apps aimed at employthis eco-system for corporates. This ees, and Marketplace (Place for crowd will deliver two positive outcomes: sourcing apps from the eco-system).

This will drive standardisation which will The CIO will have to support the mobile benefit app manufacturers and give them an apps with cloud storage capabilities. Distribenvironment of repeatability of sales without ute cloud storage through the app store to need for customisations. Devices will now employees and partners to deliver collaborabe bundled with an white label app store and tion on documents and data. This gives the app store framework that reduces corporates CIO control. Mobile apps can be leveraged effort to only branding the app store. to drive collaboration in social network space Its time CIOs start defining the new northrough a controlled window. mal in the app landscape. Life will get interThe app store infrastructure needs to drive esting if you facilitate proliferation on your governance and ensure manageability. It turf , on your terms; a nightmare to deal with makes sense for CIOs to group together and if you fight it! approach device manufacturers for creating

A Question of answers

PERSON' S NAME

True Cloud: Flexible and agile IT, which has something that can be consumed by the business user and which empowers business.

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S u s h i l K u mar

A Question of answers

Sushil Kumar | Oracle

Cloud is a Journey Sushil Kumar, Vice President, Product Strategy and Business Development, Oracle Corporation talks to Varun Aggarwal on how cloud can transform an organisation How mature is the western market when it comes to cloud computing?

The discussion has certainly moved to the next phase in the west. What I see is that the discussion is very real these days but there are not many customers that have built private cloud.

Some people have started by putting together some basic infrastructure service, but we see a very strong sense and interest from customers about truly trying to transform their IT into a much more agile entity that is much more business focused and that empowers their business users.

To them, a holistic solution is what actually cloud is. It is not something which is a side project, which would take a bunch of hosts that deploy virtualisation and then spin VMs on demand.

In the western market, customers have gone beyond the education and

awareness phase, the discussions that are happening now are about formulating a strategy, picking up the right tools and solutions. Whereas, in APC and particularly in India, we are still in the education stage, people have not really understood where public and private cloud fit. So, I think some people are still viewing cloud as something which is running on their Internet. I have been in talks with customers explaining to them what cloud means, removing the hype and how they can make it real for their businesses.

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you think that the huge investments that are often required to adopt a private cloud often offset the benefits that can be achieved from it?

That again depends on whether you think of cloud as a Greenfield project where you will dismantle everything

and start all over again or you see it as a logical, next step in terms of automating your data center management and creating more efficiency.

At Oracle, we have always thought of a private cloud as the logical next step in the evolution of enterprise IT to become more flexible, agile and more automated. We certainly do not subscribe to the view that you have to dismantle everything and start all over again. Enterprises are going to use a mix of physical and virtual system. That is just the reality.

A practical solution for enterprise cloud must cover both the systemsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the physical system, the virtual system. We have taken lot more expansive and broader view of the cloud and cloud is not necessarily start all over again. We provide our customers very logical path. They can choose to start in a big way or small way or take a logical step. But one thing that

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A Question of answers

S u s h i l K u mar

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Our solutions do not require customers to just throw away any of the investment that they have already madeâ&#x20AC;?

separates our strategy from everybody else is that our solutions do not require customers to just throw away any of the investment that they have already made.

Are you talking about putting the entire organisation on the cloud?

Lot of enterprises, both in India and as well as in US, started cloud as an experimental thing where for the non mission critical needs, where speed was much more important than the quality of service. Very soon they came to realise that this is a very small part of their overall spends. There are also pains and challenges there and business benefits are not significant as they would like to see.

While some of the customers are fine with this but there are some customers who have implemented virtualisation, and say, that I can spin a VM on demand but what is more important for me is that I have these applications, which need dedicated hardware and their resources are not optimally utilised.

A lot of our customers operate a shared service environment in their different subsidiaries.

They say, they have funded all the dedicated machines and still have a problem where a one set of machine is lying idle and another is starving for resources.

How can I basically put utilise that resource? And, what we have heard from the customers thatthey want a solution but what they have struggled with so far is to see a viable solution which can help them extend the reach of cloud beyond peripheral system. And that is where our expertise comes in. We are the largest provider of enterprise application.

Our focus has been on the applications from day one. Infrastructure is the stepping stone towards application. If you look at some of our solutions that we have created, we are the only vendor to offer a

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solution wherein you can take any multi-tier enterprise application and have their interdependencies defined. You have constrains that can be defined on each component.

So for example, if you wanted to say my database results fair on firewall, my HTTP layer designed in DMC and all that.

At the push of a button, you can deploy an entire application and have it operational. Those are the challenges that most of the people do not really see a solution for. And that is why we have spent lot of time on the drawing board trying to solve that problem. Similarly for databases, lot of customers do not want to split individual VMs because databases are the containers for your sensitive data.

How practical is it to build a database cloud?

The reason why people find that approach completely impractical

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

things I Believe in A viable cloud solution should extend its reach beyond the peripheral system atabase D virtualisation does not work because for every VM, you need a copy of the database loud is about C an IT paradigm which enables a self service access

because for every VM, you need a copy of the database. That means these incremental containers would each one of them going to have the same data. You have to track all the data and how it is going to be used.

The need is to back up more databases you put out there, and that creates more management overhead. Rather than giving you efficiency, it makes your life even more complicated.

So, clearly that approach to cloud where you give people virtualised database is not practical.

What we have done is that we have created a solution where a customer can create a database service.

For those customers, who are still not comfortable running database on a virtualised environment because of the performance issues, we have created a solution where we allow customers to run database service either on virtualised environment or on physical environ-

S u s h i l K u mar

ments so that they can basically go and pull together physical resources and allow customers to provision database.

An even more preferred approach is where you take a database and create different slices of that for different classes of users. This is what is called ‘Schema-as-aservice” wherein you basically take a unified database and take a slice of that database and hand it out to the users.

So going back to the basics, how does Oracle define cloud?

According to the National School of Standard and Technology, cloud computing is all about certain characteristics. Cloud is about an IT paradigm which enables a self service access. So that means an IT which is flexible, which is agile, there is something that can be consumed by the business user. This empowers business.

The definition of cloud does not talk about which technologies you use, it does not talk about the deployment model, for us cloud computing is all about having a agile, efficient, optimised and transparent IT environment that can be deployed either in a public cloud environment or in a private cloud environment. People are talking about building a hybrid cloud or a community cloud. So we believe that cloud computing is a logical evolution in terms of getting more optimised and service in an IT environment.

The one approach where we differ from everybody else is that for us cloud computing is not about pressing the reset button, it is about taking the existing infrastructure and evolving it in a more cloud-like entity which is more agile and more self service. So that’s why we believe that an enterprise cloud computing solutions should do the following things. First of all it should cover the breadth and the depth of the enterprise. It must cover virtual and physical systems. It should not be tied down to a given processor architecture because a lot of vendors will say automate infrastructure and then go for SaaS and IaaS. So in our vision, a cloud must empower every employee in the organisation to help them plan, deliver, monitor and provision the spark and other kinds of technology as well. And the second thing is that

the cloud must cover the depth of the enterprise services. So it must automate infrastructure which is where you are strengthening and empowering the system administrators but you must also be able to offer any of the layers of your stack as a service. So, infrastructure as a service, database as a service, platform as a service, even software as a service. Enterprise cloud computing solutions must be able to cater to all those kind of things. Third thing is that it must empower all the personals in the organisation.

IT must empower the business user by providing such service access, it must empower the cloud administrator themselves by providing the tools that helps them manage the complete life cycle that

“We spend a lot of time doing all the integration upfront and minimising the amount of hand weaving that the customers have to do in order to get the cloud” is help them plan, setup, deliver, manage, monitor and optimise cloud.

The third thing is that it must empower the business user by giving them more transparency and visibility of how effectively their IT is serving their businesses, to assess the cost of running IT and seek optimisation. So if you look at our solutions in a unified manner, it caters to every person in the enterprise.

We spend a lot of time doing all the integration upfront and minimising the amount of hand weaving that the customers have to do in order to get the cloud.

We believe that a combination of our Enterprise Manager 12 C, self service provisioning, the policy based work load management, metering and charge back, having a unified cloud stack manage-

A Question of answers

ment - that is from a single console you can manage the entire stack, you can corelate the problems of the application to the underlying layer and have a capability of not only running an application but also look within the application to see how well it is serving your customers. It gives the customers the ability to track transactions, the ability to define SLAs and monitor them.

We have provided our customers the most expeditious way to create either a private cloud or an enterprise cloud. If they are a service provider then create a cloud that is optimised for enterprises.

And then I look around, if you look at Amazon, the inter-private option is pretty sketchy. You can see many enterprises using Amazon but primarily for media rendering or testing. But the main stream option to run mission critical applications is very low.

Do you think Indian organisations are ready for on-demand computing or charge-back mechanism?

We see that all over the world people are not always ready to start sending invoice to internal customers. If you ask a CIO, which users are consuming the maximum resources, it is very difficult for them to assess. They can probably talk about where the budgets went. So for lot of customers more than charge back, measuring usage is very important in order to have visibility both for them as administrator as well as for user themselves to actually go and look at the common pain of class to see how much resources each user is using and how does it correlate to other users sharing that platform.

We see a lot of interest in this area and in some cases there is a new notion that has come up to show back. In this, you don’t really send departments an invoice, but just show them how much they have used and probably convert it into a dollar or rupee figure which enable to assess the cost in delivering services.

People are actively interested in real chargeback in community cloud environments and for most people it is about having transparency on how the IT is being used and to assess the cost of delivering services and seek ways of optimisating resources.

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PRINCIPAL PARTNERS

TECHNOLOGY AWARD PARTNERS

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SUPPORTING PARTNERS

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2011 AWARD WINNERS

Rajeev Agarwal, HAL | Manuhaar Agrawalla, The Oberoi Group | Sharat Airani, Forbes Marshall Group | Ajit Awasare, Larsen & Toubro | Joy Bagish, Apeejay Surrendra Corporate Services | Manoj Bhat, 3DPLM Software Solutions | Pradeep Chaudhary, Shree Cement | Johnson Cherian, Varun Beverages | Vijay Choudhary, HRH Group of Hotels | G.P. Singh Chugh, Vodafone Essar | Kaustav Das, Highbar Technologies | Goutam Datta, ICICI Lombard GIC | Harin Dave, Cognizant Technology Solutions | Keyur Desai, ESSAR Information Technology | Sanjay Deshmukh, Mercedes-Benz India | Yogesh Dhandharia, Rashi Peripherals | Suresh E, Paterson Securities | Sreekanth Elkuri, Mindtree | Shiju George, Shoppersstop | Somasekhara Rao Gonuguntla, TESCO Hindustan Service Center | Deepak Gupta, JK Tyre & Industries | Dinesh Gupta, Godrej Consumer Products | Gyanendra Kumar Gupta, IFFCO | Kapil Gupta, MTS | Sandeep Gupta, TCS - Global Consulting Practice | Tarun Gupta, Lanco Solar | Ravindra H.S., Sasken Communication Technologies | Archie Jackson, Steria India Pvt | Sandeep Jha, Africare | Asad Joheb, Taj Group of Hotels | Makarand Joshi, Deepak Fertilisers & Petrochemicals Corp | Hitender Kanwar, Tulip Telecom | Dipthi Karnad, HyperCITY Retail India | Aniket Kate, Mahindra & Mahindra | Suresh Khadakbhavi, Bangalore International Airport | Farhan Khan, Radico Khaitan | Feroz Ahmad Khan, Godrej Consumer Products | Ashish Khanna, The Oberoi Group | Pradeep Khanna, Infosys | Shishir Khare, TCS | Manoj Kumar, Jai Suspension Systems | Prajwal Kumar, ACG Worldwide | Prakash Kumar, Delta Power Solution (India) | Santosh Kurhade, IDFC Securities | Sushanta Kumar Lenka, Mitsubishi Electric Automotive India | Satish Mahajan, Consultant | Suchit Malhotra, Sapient | Umesh Malhotra, Hero MotoCorp | Kamal Matta, Sonic Biochem Ext | Kapil Mehrotra, iYOGI Technical Services | Ajit Mishra, Sistema Shyam Teleservices | Amit Mishra, Mothers Pride Education Persona | Samad Mohammed, iSpace Global Services (India) | Ramkumar Mohan, Orbis Financial Corporation | Ranganathan N, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services | Satyen Naik, Surat District Co-operative Milk Producerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Union | Rajkumar Nair, Kanakia Spaces | Alagar Raj Nallasamy, Perfsystems India | SDPL Narayana, Neuland Laboratories | Subhasis Nayak, Bata India | Beena Nayar, Forbes Marshall Group | Manish Pal, Mahindra & Mahindra | C.O. Parmar, IFFCO-Kandla | Nitin Parmar, Welspun | Naresh Pathak, Promed Group | Shyamanta Phukon, SIRO Group of Companies | Dinesh Pote, Mahindra & Mahindra | Puneet Prakash, Mahindra & Mahindra | Prasad Pudipeddi, Hamilton Housewares | Adarsh R, Kerala Financial Corporation | Gracekumar Rajendra, Cognizant Technology Solutions | Dharmaraj Ramakrishnan, ING Vysya Bank | Ajay Rana, Amity University | Manvendra Singh Rana, IBM India | Subha K. Rudra, Usha Martin | Anil Saini, Ricoh India | S. Saravanan, IBM Global Process Services | Makarand Sawant, Deepak Fertilisers & Petrochemicals Corporation | Rupendra Sharma, RJ Corp | Vivek Sharma, Reliance Power | Udupi Arunkumar Sheth, Gati Corporation | Shobha Shetty, Godrej Properties | Berjes Shroff, Tata Services | Avtar Singh, Bajaj Capital | Dinesh Singh, SJM Technologies | Jagdish Singh, Ramtech Software | Prashant Singh, Sistema Shyam Teleservices | Sanjay Pratap Singh, Medical Information Technologies | Sanjay Kumar Srivastava, Andritz Hydro | Anuroop Sundd, Siemens Industry Software (India) | Kanaka Durga Bhavani Prasad Suravarapu, Fifth Avenue Sourcing | Dinesh Tandel, Capgemini India | Balaranjith Thangakunam, Atul | Rajesh K. Thanua, Carzonrent India | Sanjay Tiwari, Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance | Mangal Verma, Eon Infotech | Sandeep Walia, HT Media | Rajnish K. Wangoo, Nokia Siemens Networks | Kishor Yadav, Adani Power | R.A. Yadav, Hero MotoCorp

Zoeb Adenwala, CIO (Global), Essel Propack | Srinivas Kishan Anapu, CEO, Cloud Ready Solutions | S.P. Arya, Sr VP (Corporate IT), Amtek | Vandana Avantsa, CIO, Motherson Sumi Systems | Niranjan Bhalivade, CIO, CEAT | David Briskman, VP & CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories | Manish Choksi, Chief - Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints | Satish Das, CSO & AVP - ERM, Cognizant Technologies | Vikram Dhanda, Sr VP, AEGIS | T.G. Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motor Company | Ajay K. Dhir, Executive Director & Group CIO, Lanco Infratech | Nandkishor Dhomne, CIO, Manipal Health Systems | U. C. Dubey, Executive Director (IT), Iffco-Tokio General Insurance Co | Vikas Gadre, VP - New Business Initiatives, Tata Chemicals | Rajesh Garg, VP & Head (ISS) & (NPP), Nucleaus Software Exports | Vishnu Gupta, GM Operations, Aditya Birla Health Services | Kinshuk Hora, Head of IT- India Subcontinent, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare | Sachin Jain, Head - IT, Evalueserve | Shailesh Joshi, Head - IT, Godrej Industries | Asmita Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas | Sudhansu Karmokar, GM - IT, Meru Cab Company | Sumant Kelkar, Advisor, Essar Information Technology | Sanjeev Kumar, Group CIO & Group President - Business Excellence, Adhunik Group of Industries | Vinay Mehta, CIO, Escorts Construction Equipment | Suhas Mhaskar, Sr GM and Head - Business Consulting & Special Projects, Mahindra & Mahindra | S.C. Mittal, Group CTO, IFFCO | C. Mohan, Head of IT Shared Services, Reliance Capital Group | Rajesh Munjal, Head - IT & AVP - Operations, Carzonrent India | B. Muthukumaran, Head - Operations & IT Security (India), SecureIQ | John Nadar, Head - IT, Tata Chemicals | C.R. Narayanan, CIO, Tulip Telecom | Venkatesh Natarajan, Special Director IT, Ashok Leyland | Ratnakar Nemani, CIO, Himatsingka Seide | Neena Pahuja, CIO, MaxHealthCare Institute | Prakash K. Paranjape, CIO, Idea Cellular | V.S. Parthasarathy, Group CIO, EVP - Finance & M&A, Member of G E B Mahindra & Mahindra | Daya Prakash, Head - IT, LG Electronics India | Girish Rao, Head - IT, Marico | Subhasish Saha, CTO, Apeejay Surrendra Group | Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travel Group | Rajeev Seoni, CIO, Ernst & Young | Vijay Sethi, VP & CIO, Hero MotoCorp | Shiva Shankar, VP & Head - IT Infrastructure, Security - Ops & Engineering, Reliance Tech Services | Jagat Pal Singh, CTO, Cybage Software | Shantanu Singh, Director - New Intiatives, ValueFirst Messaging | Dheeraj Sinha, Head - Corporate Management Services, Apollo Tyres | Swaranjit S. Soni, Former Executive Director (IS), Indian Oil Corporation | Shivaram Tadepalli, Advisor - IT, GMR Group

JURY

Best of

Missed Deadlines & Failed Strategies Pg 84

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Breed

Feature Inside

Hero Worship and the % Switch to Agile

Data Briefing

3.7

expected worldwide IT Spending in 2012: Gartner

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Why did it take GM 30 years to implement quality lessons it learnt from Toyota?

O

ver the last five years, Asynchrony has been successfully utilising Agile and Lean methodologies within software development processes for both internal work and on client projects. While the processes themselves are fairly straightforward, we found that there are significant cultural and organisational challenges that must be addressed when transitioning large corporations and The Chief Technology Officer Forum

government agencies from Waterfall or Spiral methodologies to Agile and Lean. The reason is not hard to see: a move from a command-and-control philosophy to a culture of trust, empowerment, and team accountability requires a major shift in thinking and culture and this is hard to do.

Why is it so hard for the organisations to change?

The issue has never been illustrated better than in the March 26, 2010 episode of NPR's "This

m a n ag e m e n t

B E S T OF B R E E D

Commitments to empowered teams, quality, and constant improvement are more than just a checklist of to-dos. These commitments require early buy-in from top to bottom, and a zeal in doing processes the right way to time (fewer mistakes with more projects), but we had made a American Life" radio program. In this case study, we heard about complete paradigm shift across our company in very little time. the creation of New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), Since then, our customers have seen how we create high quality an amazing joint venture in the mid-1980s between two industry software for clients. Better yet, it’s created with a predictable process giants: General Motors and Toyota. that puts surprises where they belong: as early as possible.

Toyota agreed to show GM the way they were making quality cars Many of our philosophies are right in line with Toyota’s: that Americans were buying like crazy. In return, Toyota would learn how to deal with American workers (and specifically American Empower the team members. unions). It actually worked. The plant began creating cars that were Give them ownership over quality. significantly higher in quality than what was coming out of other Do not tolerate defects.

GM plants, and doing it with unionised American workers. Sounds Constantly look for ways to eliminate waste. great so far, but the real story is that even though GM had learned Now, our customers, who generally have their own in-house these successful quality lessons from Toyota (and in fact witnessed developers, often want us to teach them our project management them first hand in their plants), it still took them almost 30 years techniques. It would seem that we could just have one or two of our (yes, 3-0… thirty) to implement these ideas across the corporation. developers go to their teams, show them how we develop software, The struggles GM has faced, the obstacles it has encountered, and give them a push, and see great software come rolling in, but of the mistakes made along the way are a cautionary tale for large organicourse it doesn’t work that way. sations that want to enact real change. I always share this story with Unfortunately, just as in the case of Toyota and GM, U.S. compaanyone I encounter who is a change agent or wants to see change hapnies aren’t often built for change. pen in a corporate or government environment. It helps frame plans Commitments to empowered teams, quality, and constant improvefor how to truly see change happen and how quickly to expect it. ment are more than just a checklist of to-dos. These commitments We never claimed to be geniuses. In fact, before we found Agile, require early buy-in from top to bottom, and a near religious zeal in we were just as guilty as anyone of “hero-based” project success. doing processes the right way -- regardless of the perceived cost. Note Having a software development background myself, I was put in the that I say “perceived.” As is true in many aspects of life, long-term position -- even as the project manager -- of making those last few gain is achieved by today’s discipline, not by taking shortcuts. fixes late at night or implementing that final screen so that the softThe following are the two issues I’ve most commonly seen workware could get out the door on time. ing against having a true quality culture in a large organisation: The last straw came when we had a team of developers working The appearance of speed is valued over accuracy - Team members on a project for a client, and even though they had great technical who are supposed to be producing results in a typical large organisaspecs that told them exactly what to do, the developers still created tion are measured primarily over how fast they can go. This is why an integration nightmare that took the project four weeks past the the “stop-the-line” concept was heresy at GM; the very idea that any deadline to get working. That was our impetus to change to Agile, as employee could stop the factory floor “productivity” over a defect we needed more discipline and a better process to keep was laughable even though the result was often a huge the last minute surprises from hitting us so hard. pile of broken cars at the other end.

As a small company, change came easy for us. All it Managers and executives love to get reports that took was a decision by upper management, buy-in by show how many tasks have been done, and how many our small development team, and a customer who was milestones have been accomplished. This concept of growth in willing to try something new. We made lots of mistakes “quantity over quality” is so embedded that the norm

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and stumbled a bit, but there were so many obvious benefits from the outset that it was worth the pain.

Once we got better, we were able to expand what we had learned from one team to another throughout the company; bringing an even more improved process to every project we took on. We still messed up from time

Master Data Management Software Revenue in 2012

for software projects is to have two to three months of testing and bug fixes when development is over!

However, Toyota had discovered that taking more time to “get it right the first time” and creating a culture that did not tolerate defective products made the process more predictable and created a higher quality

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car. In software development, as in automotive production, you’re a lot better off having a working piece in a complex machine be left alone than to replace it after the fact because it’s broken. The replacement never works as well in software it’s because so much context has been lost and assumptions are made that can cause even more problems later.

Heroism is highly rewarded - Every large IT department has them: the “gurus,” the “masterminds,” the “heroes.” They are the above average developers who come in and save the day when a project is failing by cranking away in a room by themselves somewhere for hours on end. These are the employees who receive the accolades and the recognition from management and end users, because they do such great work. Unfortunately, this “great work” creates a culture that can never be taught to others or used to help the company improve, and soon efforts are always dependent on the heroes getting it done to save the project.

Conversely, there are no heroes in the Toyota manufacturing line.

There are only trusted employees who are empowered to find the best way to do their job that will create the least waste. Having one line worker who is much faster and more productive doesn’t help

the whole; it just creates bottlenecks. The right way to produce quality products is for that person to teach everyone else how they are doing their job, which means making every process highly visible. A hero culture motivates employees not to share and to take sole credit for every success. That’s a sure road to nowhere for an organisation.

So what does it take to change? First of all, unless you’re starting from scratch (which presents its own issues) it takes time. Don’t give up after the first project, and don’t expect everything to be fixed right away. It took GM 30 years. It’s probably going to take your organisation a little time too.

Secondly, it takes commitment to quality. Don’t be tempted by the short-term gain, unless your company’s future is on the line. Recognise that even though it may seem painfully slow, doing it right is almost always the best way in the end. Not many large organisations can do it, but it can be done. And for the companies who can’t do it, it’s usually because they’re stuck thinking like the old GM rather than the new GM. — This article has been reprinted with prior permission from CIO Update.

For see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.

Missed Deadlines & Failed Strategies am on a bit of a rampage lately about organisations not addressing missed deadlines. I see this a lot. The reason why so many organisations have so much trouble doing what they intend to do on time is because when they fail to meet a deadline ... nothing happens.

The dates come and go and no one talks about it.

People who were on the hook either assume that they have been granted more time, or it wasn’t that important to begin with. Then there is no new deadline established because no one is talking about it at all. So the strategic task takes an even lower priority over the more urgent tactical demands of the moment.

This simple failure to address missed deadlines, letting the date come and go and leaving the failure totally unacknowledged and unexamined, is one of the biggest factors that keeps organisations from making strategic progress; it sends all the wrong messages and sets a very low standard of execution.

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By Patty Azzarello

illustration bY shigil n

I

Failure to address missed deadlines keeps organisations from making strategic progress

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What you are communicating by not communicating is: It wasn’t that important to begin with; It doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done; There are no consequences for missing a deadline; We’re not serious about meeting our commitments and late is okay.

Why no follow up?

I have observed four main reasons why executives fail to follow up on missed deadlines: 1. Too busy to keep track; 2. Not personally good at keeping track; 3. Don’t like the conflict of keeping track; 4. Don’t know what consequences to impose when something is off track.

The first two are really easy to fix. Get someone who’s naturally good at this to help you. In an IT organisation, you should have plenty of people with project management skills. Get one of them to structure a project tracking process around your strategic initiatives, and help you do the follow up.

Number 3 and 4 you can’t delegate. As an IT leader, if these things make you uncomfortable you need to do them anyway.

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In order to deal with any conintend to recover?” The act of flict that may arise: having this conversation sends 1. Be really clear up front about the message that it is NOT okay dates, owners, and measures, to miss a deadline. Sure it’s an of all known and communicate the status uncomfortable conversation, at the beginning of the project mobile malware but it should be! when everything is “green."

It’s not about coming down were discovered 2. Start communicating reguhard on someone or being disrein q3, 2011 larly about what is getting done spectful or nasty. It’s about movbefore anything goes wrong. ing the business forward. Also, I 3. If everyone can see their name find that strong performers take on a chart with the due dates and a lot of ownership in these conmeasures it is up to them to keep on track. versations and put more pain on themselves 4. Then when something goes from green then they get from you. to yellow or red, it is not as much of a conMany leaders struggle with the motivation flict to bring it up. At least it is not a surfactor. They feel like if they give someone a prise. Everyone saw it coming. The person hard time the person may get de-motivated, be who failed to deliver had the chance to avoid less committed or leave. In reality, the impact it, and knew before hand that it would be of not having the conversation is that you are addressed, so the conflict is not personal. letting the person know that what they were working on wasn’t very important, which I think is always even more de-motivating.

What consequences to impose You don’t need to fire someone every time — Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. a deadline is missed. But there are many — This article has been reprinted with prior options between termination and nothing. permission from CIO Update. For see more articles You don’t need to be a tyrant but you do regarding IT management best practices, please need to have a conversation. visit www.cioupdate.com.

Ask, “What happened? How to do you

E V E N T R E P ORT

websense

Event

Evolving Role of a CISO

CISOs discussed their evolving role in the enterprise in a roudtable discussion in Mumbai Consumerisation of IT turned out to be one of the biggest challenges for today's CISO

Sameer Ratolika, CISO, Bank of India, sharing his views on the difference between the responsibilities of a CISO today and five years back

Sunil Dhaka, CISO, ICICI Bank, explaining how a proactive security approach should be adopted by organisations

T

he last five years have seen the CSO’s role undergoing a transformation. While continuous breaches have ensured that security formed the vanguard of business continuity, regulatory compliance for data risk management has lent his office more authority. The position has moved from that of an IT security administrator to that of a business enabler.

The next five years could see another transformation. Businesses are pushing CSOs to assess risks faster and better. Going ahead, a CSO would have to protect sensi-

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The Chief Technology Officer Forum

tive data both from a business as well as legal perspective. He would have to understand and apply terms such as cost-benefit analysis and project management into his daily routine.

So, going ahead, what should be a CSO’s programme portfolio when it

comes to data risk mitigation? How can he convince his top management to deploy a specific solution? And above all, can he ever be on the board?

9.9 Media in association with Websense held a round table discussion in Mumbai to talk about CSO’s Programme Portfolio

websense

for Data Risk Mitigation. Ken McDonald, Senior Vice President of Sales Engineering, Websense, Inc tried to answer some of the above questions in a session moderated by Anuradha Das Mathur, Founder & Director, 9.9 Media.

To set the context, Mathur asked the panel of leading CISOs in the country on how their role as a CISO has evolved in the last five years.

Sameer Ratolikar, Chief Information Security Officer, Bank of India, said, “In the last couple of years, the focus is shifting from IT to information, and technology is just one part of it. In the past when an IT project was rolled out, only the IT department was involved in it, now CISO is a part of the entire product life cycle, ensuring security at every level."

For this, he said, "the CISO today needs to engage with every department of the organisation to understand their needs and the flow of information.”

Satish Warrier, Chief Information Security Officer, Godrej Industries added, “With the proliferation of devices, in the past five years, employees’ sensitisation towards security has been diluted. In the past, employees understood clearly that a personal laptop is not allowed in the organisation.

More and more employees have access to cheap computing devices (like smartphones and tablets) and all of them want to connect to corporate network. This is becoming a huge challenge for the CISO.” The business heads are also pushing CISOs to allow access on multiple devices, echoed the entire panel. Business is forcing CISOs to put in processes to allow multiple devices in the corporate network rather than banning these devices.

McDonald opined, “Globally, businesses are moving forward and it is no more acceptable for CISO to say no to a business decision. The CISO needs to become a business enabler rather than being a business inhibitor. If he stands and tries to block the progress, then we’d be run off. Therefore, he needs to go to the busi-

E V E N T R E P ORT

Ken McDonald, Senior Vice President of Sales Engineering, Websense responding to the queries of the panel

CISOs engaging in a casual discussion over dinner

Anuradha Das Mathur, Director, 9.9 Media setting the context for the discussion

ness and say, ‘yes we can’ and ‘here’s how we’ll enable it’.

Giving a different perspective, Faraz Ahmed, CISO & Head – Regional IT for Reliance Life Insurance, said, “There is an increasing pressure on the enterprises to reduce cost and therefore, allow corporate network access to cheap computing devices such as mobile phones and tablets."

Therefore, he said, "CISOs need to shift their focus from securing end points to securing the data and look at building processes to secure the data so that an employee can access the data with whatever device he chooses.”

CISOs of certain organisations expressed that their organisations have

specified that they want to give access to personal devices only when an employee is within the enterprise premise and CISOs are supposed to revoke this access as soon as the employee moves out of the enterprise perimeter.”

This basically boils down to how a CISO builds an information classification policy for the organisation.

The panel agreed that CISOs need to identify structured and unstructured data within their enterprise and build processes around how this data is managed in different stages—while in transit, while at rest or while being processed.

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VIEWPOINT Steve DUplessie | steve.duplessie@esg-global.com

Illustration by anoop pc

Understanding China Taking a look at the Great FireWall

China remains a fascinating land, full of smog, and gross people. God I do love it.

Brilliant: there have to be more PhDs per square foot here than anywhere else in the world.

Bizarre: The Chinese have absolutely no issue answering their phone, and engaging in loud, animated dialog, no matter where they are – say, as in the middle of a presentation in a small conference room. With me. after many years studying the Chinese market, have no real idea how it operates. The good news is the Chinese are the world’s bank, as they have the money. The bad news is they don’t seem willing to spend it as “normal” buyers. I can’t figure out how anyone makes money selling to this market.

When Europe inevitably collapses due to debt – or the US does – those entities will stop spending (by force, not by design, because god knows we don’t want to stop spending money we don’t have – we can print more!

My ex-sister in law once said “I can’t be out of money, I still have checks.”

She must now be a prime minister

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somewhere.) Since our collective governments are the largest buyers of IT stuff, and that will terminate, expect major IT vendors to double down on active markets such as China. Their power – already tremendous, will only increase. Those with the dough control the flow.

Surprisingly the entrepreneurial nature of the Chinese continues to blossom. It’s not your grandfather’s ministry anymore, son.

This is probably the only country on earth that continues to control information flow. No Twitter. No Facebook. No porn (I’m told). They continue to be able to alter reality to fit the “social best interest.” It’s stunning really. Countries have toppled in the last 18 months because of the social mechanisms available to the masses – but not here. Not that anyone would want to topple China, they are all doing just fine, thank you.

Apparently these folks will eat just about anything. I have photos of scorpions on the menu, duck tongues, and maybe the grossest thing I’ve ever seen – the sea cucumber. Oh, did i mention the bullfrog?

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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

Damn. I get that you have a billion plus people, but yikes.

The people in general are very pleasant. They smoke in elevators next to newborns and cancer patients, but they do so with a smile.

They are stunningly well spoken.

I know two words of Mandarin. The average farmer seems to know more English than I do. There is a reason they own the world.

It is fascinating to read the English version of the “news” in China. It’s Pravda circa 1972.

They literally control the weather. I couldn’t see 8 feet out my window this morning. No unrest if you can’t see.

Perhaps the greatest thing ever in China is the fact that while the country is approximately 9,000 miles wide, they have ONE time zone. Screw you. One! In India I think they change time zones every 15 miles. But China has one. Too confusing otherwise.

There are gas masks in every hotel room. No lie. Gas masks.

It’s too bad it’s a billion miles away from me, because it truly is one of the most awesome places on earth.