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KPMG

TECHNOLOGY

the cloud computing fad Words: Sandip Sen

Cloud as a business venture: Doing business through cloud is not easy and will not happen overnight.

Market leaders Amazon Web Services AWS and Microsoft Azure have invested billions of dollars in the past decade with hope of enticing net users to adopt their services in the three verticals of cloud technology by providing

Cloud computing as the next big trend sounds nebulous, but it’s not so fuzzy when you view the value proposition from the perspective of IT professionals. We analyse this new reality.

infrastructure, platform and software as a service. Google, IBM, Accenture, Apple, CISCO have been other major investors and Cloud service providers.

The market has however been quite difficult and slow moving with more hype than silver hitting the cash registers.

So when Amazon recently reduced the prices of its Elastic Block Services,

I asked Regina Tan a Senior Manager with AWS, on how and why they did it.

“We will continue to reduce prices over time” she said, stating that AWS was putting up more servers in Singapore and Japan due to increased traffic from the East. The load apparently was not only due to external customers but due to the rising in-house demand from Amazon book stores, Kindle Reader, Create Space Publishing Services and the Amazon MP3 Store with Cloud player and Cloud drive. So users of AWS Cloud would be actually paying less due to the greater volume of internal business of the giant retailer.

The real fight for Cloud leadership will be between Amazon and the 3 dominant mobile phone majors Google,

Microsoft and Apple. The volumes in the mobile place will decide the viability of cloud based services in the long run. Google Music has recently come out of the Beta phase to take on Apple iTunes with 20 million songs and Amazon Cloud with 17 million titles and the Microsoft Nokia combine is expected to follow soon. All four have been tying up with major music albums and entertainment studios and expect to stream online music as well as HD videos to their users.

The Indian market: Though AWS has a long list of Indian clients who use its cloud services like Hungama, the digital media entertainment major; redBus Travel Agency, a

Companies like Google and Apple are both dependant on its developer services for its cloud revenues mobile and web based ticketing portal for bus operators, Classle a cloud based social learning program, and several developer services, the major share of its cloud workload is expected to be from internal services. Google and Apple are both dependent on its developer services for its cloud revenues while Microsoft is dependent on its leadership in PaaS (Platform as a Service) powered by .Net The current Indian market is miniscule, but is expected to grow to$16 billion by 2016. Among the Indian IT majors, Wipro has been the early starter two years ago with web based data centres located in Mysore, Pune and Noida with the aim of creating a formidable SaaS (Software as a Support) platform. TCS started its cloud services as late as February 2011 with the aim of generating revenues of $1billion in the next five years from the small and medium sector. Soon after he took over

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KPMG

TECHNOLOGY

The question on everyone’s mind right now is whether creating us remote servers is a boon or a bane as Co-Chairman, S Gopalkrishnan told Reuters that Infosys would be scouting for acquisitions in Japan and US for its cloud based operations. Other major cloud service providers with large presence in India are global MNC’s IBM, Accenture, CISCO and Cognizant.

Boon or a bane?

One big question that comes to the mind is whether creation of such remote servers and data centres will increase or decrease the Indian share in the global IT pie. If cheaper and faster services are available in the Amazon or Google Cloud, why should our users continue to patronise Indian companies? Given the huge investment and long term returns it is highly unlikely that Indian companies would play a

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major role in Cloud services in the near future. So does it mean that Cloud computing will kill the local industry?

Expert opinion negates the fear of any Cloud take over. Primarily because of security concerns and reasons of confidentiality cloud based software will never rule the roost. Security, portability, functionality, and interoperability are major risks especially in today’s environment. Nobody who can afford a secure home environment will opt for cloud. While Cloud may hold the advantage of quick scalability and reduced costs for the small operators those who have become moderately big will want exclusive custom made software developed in secure environment under their control for their operation.

In April 2011, a massive outage crippled Amazon Web Services for several high profile users like Reddit and Quora in the US East coast. The diversion of traffic following debugging caused

failure of EBS virtual disks and a two day outage diminishing the invincibility of data on the cloud myth overnight.

Though several EBS users like Netflix and Twilio escaped the carnage, the widespread failure caused concerns among users across the globe.

Many users desire exclusivity and would not risk competitors to have access to similar applications for development on Cloud. Besides with high profile web hacking cases of Sony and Lockheed International, large companies are becoming increasingly cagey of developing software online. Instead they are creating complex security loops in applications by different sets of developers to make it difficult for cracking. Security fear has been a prime reason for the slow off take of the standardized web based services like cloud computing. That is not going to disappear easily.

Despite such risks, the benefits of Cloud are numerous. Though there is less likelihood of servers being located in India due to low speeds and poor connectivity the needs of the Cloud

industry are increasingly going to be addressed by the locals. This includes software developers, app developers, mass produced powerful low cost servers, networking and data development centres and many others.

As per NASSCOM Cloud will be a major resource pool for the 2.25 million IT professionals within India. So Cloud could eventually be a bigger opportunity than threat. Programmes like ‘Mechanical Turk’ or a ‘Human Intelligence Task’ force (HIT) where you could work from any remote location without a work permit and get paid for services to the cloud computing majors from across the world could grow.

Author Profile: Sandip Sen writes for Economic Times and several international business publications.

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KPMG

MONITOR

breakthrough in education Words: Sandip Sen

O

ne of the nine students who scored 100 percentile in the CAT exams for admission to the IIMs in 2011 was Dr Sashank Prabhu, an MBBS from Grant Medical College, Mumbai and a current student of the prestigious Faculty of Management Studies at Delhi. Speaking to India Today Prabhu admitted that though this was his third attempt to enter IIM, he may not ultimately join the same because his current education at FMS and summer internship is extremely satisfying.

He also went on to add that he had opted for a management career because he realised during his MBBS studies that he would not be too happy practicing medicine. “I would not be doing justice to my patients if I wasn’t dedicated to the profession, so af-

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It is better for doctors to study management and manage the profession than have professional bankers to manage the show.

Doctors are opting for a management degree and healthcare services are favouring them too, we analyse this new reality.

ter completing my studies I decided to move to management,” he said.

Healthcare management would be a better way to use one’s talents and the country needed professionals to manage the rapidly growing eco system.

Nobody can deny that India’s fast expanding healthcare system needs better and more professional managers. Not only the state of art private super specialty hospitals need good managers but so do government managed district hospitals, medical colleges and rural health centers. The entry of professional managers in the healthcare system has been slow primarily due to lack of supply not paucity of demand.

An experienced doctor with 20 years of medical practice can get a jump of 20% to 30% if she qualifies as an MBA, says administrators at a capital’s super specialty hospital. However, there is no

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KPMG

MONITOR such benefit for freshly qualified doctors without years of practice behind them.

Several hospitals are actively encouraging and sponsoring experienced doctors to qualify in MBA. The move from practice to administration is happening slowly with greater interaction from the top institutes. Most of these experienced doctors do their management courses from reputed institutes like the IIM-Ahmedabad (short-term course), AIIMS, FMC and Pune Hospital. They usually return to the parent institutions with a raise and continue practicing medicine as before or opt for an administration job that permits both practice and management of the hospital’s healthcare services.

Management courses for doctors need to be radically restructured to cater the needs of the industry It is a matter of positioning oneself for the right opportunity thereafter says a capital’s top headhunter as the real breakthrough arrives only when a challenging opportunity with total operational responsibility presents itself. A doctor-turned-CEO could earn almost double her pay but the work is back breaking as well, with no bouquets for the losers. Some experts feel that doctors managing health services could backfire as you lose a good specialist and get a reluctant manager. Doctors temperamentally are far removed from the corporate management environment of profit push and shareholder wealth multiplication and it is not wise to make them multi-skilled.

A post graduate MBA course usually teaches its students marketing, organisational behaviour, accounting, law, finance, operations, economics, ethics and strategy but the value system of a

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modern management course is considered to be different from the ethics and value system of the Hippocratic Oath, a vow historically taken by doctors since the 5th Century BC. The contradiction is not alone with the supposedly outdated Greek manuscript says one top specialist on condition of anonymity at one of the capital’s best hospitals. “Doctors are essentially creative beings who need time to read, think and research in order to deliver better services. The reading we do is usually enormous as medicine is a developing science. However, the continuous profit push of the administration does not permit that luxury.”

“Here we are reminded continuously by the administration team of the pending appointments, the optimum time to be given to each patient and the daily and quarterly targets.

We are given training in managing our time, using the hospital services more widely and efficiently, on using IT as a tool, but there is no training on how to become better doctors,” she lamented. Though she had herself signed the contract with the hospital fully aware and had been warned by her peer group, she often regretted the decision to join. “The money is so good that I can’t leave, now that I have grown used to it,” she admitted.

Several doctors, however, felt that there is no option to modernisation and the growing number of doctors with MBA qualification will only help build a holistic empathy driven approach to healthcare. It is better for doctors to study management and manage the profession than have professional bankers to manage the show.

Since private equity investments are very active in building scalable healthcare organisations today it is possible that the industry is taken over entirely by the money managers. To avoid that from happening it is necessary to retrain practitioners of the trade into

healthcare administration and management to better manage their profession.

However, management courses for doctors need to be radically restructured to cater to the needs of the industry. An ideal hospital administration course would have to do with patient management instead of customer management; procurement, maintenance and toxic waste management instead of supply chain management; civil law instead of industrial law; and have courses of marketing, accounts, finance, ethics and strategy completely redesigned to meet the needs of the healthcare industry.

Hospital services is a critical part

of the society and has a responsibility much greater than the corporate world towards the people. They must not be given functional training to just scale up operations and conduct business as usual in that segment. If that happens a vast portion of the population who cannot afford expensive health care will be left out of the system and the nation’s resources will be spent only in catering for the rich. Since the tax payer through government spending bears the burden of educating most of the doctors in state run medical colleges, they will be the biggest losers if only the upper class is to benefit from the expansion of India’s healthcare services.

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KPMG

COFFEE BREAK

Abhijit Bhaduri

Vikas Rathi

An XLRI alumni and author of two bestsellers

An IIM-Bangaluru graduate whose book explores the genre of Existentialism

corporate pen Words: Puja Raina

Ravi Subramanian This banker-turnedauthor fulfilled his dream of being the John Grisham of banking

O

Amish Tripathi An IIM-Calcutta product & author of three bestsellers

Sameer Kamat His book Beyond The MBA Hype serves as a guide for aspiring MBAs

Chetan Bhagat IIT-IIM alumnituned-author and now also a script writer

Prasoon Joshi This IMT-Ghaziabad alumni needs no introduction for his works have fetched him critical acclaim

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Clad in an executive suit. Facing hyper competition. Chasing dream lifestyles.

Flying business class. The business book guys have arrived and how. It’s official that every MBA has a story to narrate.

Rashmi Bansal This IIM-Ahmedabad passout tells the story of people who’ve made it in life without being an MBA

n my desk lies a pile of books, this fortnight’s must-reads for the corporates. These bibles promise to help me build efficient teams, open my mind to the science of thinking smarter, guide me to strategise growth plans and if they do none of these they leave me wondering about things that I was not taught in my B-School. I religiously read them up all; grasping some information, adapting some practices or simply quoting a few at board meetings. So when recently I noticed another pile on my desk I wasn’t surprised. After all, the publishers and authors want us to believe that reading is what enhances our corporate skill set. I was game to flip some more.

However, I was in for a surprise. For this pile was telling a tale of a different kind of the days spent chasing grades, falling in and out of love, mythological mysteries and more. What were they doing on my desk, I questioned. The answer was simple. Ex-classmates, present colleagues, aspiring managers, et al had penned them. Hence, they were the natural pick of the fortnight.

Perhaps, I am too late to express my

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KPMG

COFFEE BREAK surprise on the corporate pen being put to use other than signing on the dotted line, for the writer-officials have dramatically moved from the boardroom to bookstores (to even Bollywood) in a big way. Let’s revisit the library and shake hands with the authors of now.

To do justice to the interesting development one has to begin by talking of the man who made it glamourous and acceptable for MBAs to pen stories down. Yes, had it not been for the IIT-IIM alumni Chetan Bhagat we wouldn’t have known that our colleagues could write and sell! When his debut novel Five Point

These writer-officials have not just proved that the pen is mightier than the men but that MBA is a level above

But how does one make his work worth a read? After all the market is flooded with alumni fiction. Explore the unknown is the sensible choice. An apt example to quote here would be that of IIM, Bangaluru graduate Vikas Rathi’s.

His book Resident Dormitus explores the genre of Existentialism.

And if one were to learn from the experience of Amish Tripathi, an IIM Kolkata product and author of The Immortals Of Meluha and The Secret Of The Nagas, then one would want to keep the degree and it’s learning aside.

Sharing his experience Tripathi had once said, “I tried the standard MBA route. I made a strategic and timeline plan, formulated in Microsoft Excel, which would guide me in writing my book. The plan was complete with character sketches, plans for writing short summaries of each chapter,

definition of premise, conflict and resolution, etcetera. The attempt was heroic. The results were disastrous.”

And what helped him pen the bestsellers of the trilogy was a mental shift. “I stopped trying to control the story.” Producer Karan Johar would soon be making a film based on his novel.

Can we then safely assume that the managers need to give up the control to pen free flowing pieces of fiction and non-fiction? But then no matter how far they move from it, the MBA DNA refuses to leave them. Interestingly, a young author and IIM-Ahmedabad graduate Rashmi Bansal penned her latest, Connect The Dots, on people who have made it big without an MBA! And then there are the obvious genres like Sameer Kamat’s Beyond The MBA Hype, which serves as guides in the

MBA journey. Sticking to what you know the best is a success formula.

Ravi Subramanian’s novels If God Was A Banker, Devil In Pinstripes and The Incredible Banker and one non-fiction work, I Bought The Monk’s Ferrari, explains just that. Having spent 16 years in banking, Subramaniam had once shared his dream of being the John Grisham of banking.

And while these examples encourage one to pen a tale, the aspirations don’t just stop here. One can go beyond especially if one were to learn from the career graph of advertising’s big man, Prasoon Joshi.

The IMT-Ghaziabad passout is one of the most popular and renowned lyricists of today. Time to wield the pen, truly. For these men have not just proved that the pen is mightier than the men, the MBA is a level above.

Someone – What not to do at IIT! reached us in 2004, one and all took notice. Here was an investment banker writing in the language, which was questioned for its literature quotient and loved for its ease and honesty.

Little did one know that his actions would inspire many others to explore what Microsoft Word could do for them. Today, Bhagat is five books and two movies old. His story telling virtues are perhaps as strong as his marketing skills.

It’s not tough to guess that our next author the gentleman behind the books Mediocre But Arrogant and Married But Available from the acronym, MBA is a MBA. Here’s the CV for the uninitiated. Abhijit Bhadhuri did his PG in HR from XLRI and even holds a degree in Law from D.U. The author is the Chief Learning Officer for the Wipro Group and is based out of Bengaluru.

Both his novels revolve around the life and ways of a MBA, at school, in relationships, at work and more.

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KPMG

LEISURE

corporate fun days

It might sound like a paradox but some office days can be fun days; a mantra that leading corporate and MNCs are following now

Words: Shilpa Pulyani

T

he whole concept of mixing work with pleasure has been around for years. But the only time we do implement it ‘otherwise’ is when we are on a vacation, where willingly or unwillingly we end up working. John C Maxwell, a renowned leadership expert, speaker and author had once said, “When you’re truly having fun in your work, creativity flows freely.”

Yet, how many of us really have fun at our workplace? Successful people and organisations know that the secret to success at work lies partly in creating a fun work environment for themselves and others. Happier workplaces have better morale, more productivity and creativity.

In today’s time one of the most important aspects in any type of business is an employee’s morale. While this might sound like some kind of HR buzzword, it is undoubtedly a vital piece of the puzzle. And now that leading MNCs and other corporate houses have been successful at solving this puzzle, they have also devised an easy solution for the same. Employers now know that whether you’re selling vacuum cleaners or doing taxes, unless you are having fun, your work will suffer. This is why it is essential to have

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corporate fun days in any business.

But first things first, what really are corporate fun days? The simple answer to that is they are exactly what they sound like – a day where your corporation has fun. Sounds pretty easy, right?

Is there a certain formula that should be followed to have a corporate fun day? Not exactly. The truth is that any activity should do the trick of boosting employee morale.

While traditional corporate fun days have always been weaved around special festivals and company achievements, it is now becoming a steady practice to keep the employees motivated. Vatsal Verma, a professional in a leading MNC says, “In our organisation such parties usually coincide with the major holidays. A perfect example of this type of activity is the company Christmas party. We have this practice of exchanging gifts with each other but it’s anonymous. The important thing is that everyone has fun.” Adds Vatsal, “We also have a pre-busy season bash and a post busy season bash during which we get all of the different departments of the business together. It’s a great platform to get to know our colleagues as well.”

While these are regular parties, corporates are now focusing at out-of-

Companies, charities and organisations are realising the benefits of combining business with pleasure, establishing improved relationships with both employees and clients

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LEISURE

the-box ideas to bring in an element of fun at work. ‘Fun office days’ that are a rage internationally are quite popular as well. Tailored to suit each firm’s requirements, these fun or activity days are the easiest way to lighten the heaviest of air or a stressful situation.

Some of the most popular days that the corporates and MNCs enjoy celebrating are Bosses Day, International No Office Day, Gossip Day, Karaoke Day, et al.

Sharing her experience of the Bosses Day celebration at her office, charted accountant Steph McGinley says, “We just got a notification from the administration saying that we’ll be celebrating Bosses Day. We really had no idea of what should we do or how do we celebrate it… but our bosses were sporty enough to throw in suggestions like we should have indoor and outdoor

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games, have a Happy Hour that day during which we can all meet socially over drinks, etc. It was overall a very nice experience and I got to see a side of my boss that we really wouldn’t have come to know otherwise.” Such activities also involve learning aspects which are ideal for the development of critical skills as it combines the team cohesion with one or more learning messages.

Megha Mahtani too discovered that she could sing when her office hosted karaoke night. “I’m a very shy person.

And with such bizarre working hours these days one hardly gets any time to pursue what they love. At one of the karaoke nights hosted by my office, I learnt that I could sing and that I’m pretty good at it too. Along with that such occasions help you unwind and get your mind off work. Such break in our mundane schedule rejuvenates the mind and also helps me take a fresh approach towards work.”

In addition to that some organisations even take their employees for a much deserved paid holiday to exotic locations. This is also an effective teambuilding exercise as the employees get to know each other socially. Karan Karol, who works in another leading company, says, “Our organisation takes us to various national and international locales for a company off site every

year. I feel this is a great practice as after working so hard one looks forward to a vacation. Such business cum leisure trips works wonders for the employees as not only do we feel like we are valued but we also get a chance to bond with our co-workers.”

Shikha Mishra, who works in one of country’s biggest media houses, says, “If you work with the best, you get the best. We have crazy working hours and we work like a dog, but when we party we completely let our hair down.

Since we spend so much time with our colleagues the special ‘fun days’ or corporate picnics, as we like to call it, bring in the element of satisfaction.

After all the hardwork we deserve such treatment!”

Along with these special corporate fun days, some organisations also help people pursue their passions by organising filmmaking workshops for small groups, treasure trails and adventure sports for the ones who love the thrill, book clubs for the avid readers, etc.

While planning corporate fun days the most important thing is to be creative.

The idea is to take everyone’s mind off their jobs for a little while Each of these team initiatives ensures that even with a small group your colleagues and co-workers will still be able to build strong working relationships.

The key is creativity. Variety is important to corporate fun days. The more original the idea, the more fun everyone will have. The idea is to take everyone’s mind off of their jobs for a little while. The beauty of corporate fun days is that you get to see the actual person.

Corporate fun days are crucial to the morale of your employees. The happier the employee, the better they work.

Companies, charities and organisations are realising the benefits of combining business with pleasure, establishing improved relationships with both employees and clients.

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