Express Computer (Vol.26, No.3) March, 2015

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celebrating 2 5 years

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elcome to the special issue, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of Express Computer.

25 years ago, when the magazine began its journey, it quickly endeared itself with readers from enterprise technology community. Today enterprise technology is phenomenally advanced as compared to how it was 25 years ago. In fact, the past 25 years often feels like 250 years when seen from the perspective of the progress that enterprise technology has made.

It is startling to consider how far the content that goes into every issue of Express Computer has changed over the years. The past issues of the magazine are like a magic carpet, which transports you to an earlier era, when a computer with only 10 KB memory was regarded as advanced.

In its journey of 25 years, the Express Computer has covered many tectonic shifts in technology such as catching up of EXPRESS COMPUTER email in the mass BEGAN COVERING consumer market, the eGOVERNANCE rise of texting, social MORE THAN A media and much else.

DECADE AGO WHEN It has covered the rise THE CONCEPT of Google, the WAS BARELY transformation of UNDERSTOOD Apple Inc., the rise of the Android platform, etc. In the recent period, we have been looking at ideas like Big Data, SMAC, IoT, etc. Technology rarely pauses for breath, and a magazine like Express Computer has to be on toes all the time.

Express Computer began covering eGovernance more than a decade ago

EXPRESS COMPUTER

EXPRESS COMPUTER CELEBRATES ITS 25th ANNIVERSARY when the concept was barely understood and most government departments had serious misgiving about computerisation and automation. Nine years ago, Express Computer pioneered the Express Technology Sabha, a niche forum for senior government officials, thought leaders and representatives from private IT companies, to facilitate exchange knowledge on eGovernance.

By now 17 highly-successful editions of the Sabha have been organised in different cities.

In the realm of technology, longevity is rare. The best devices, solutions, hardware and software often see a swift rise, followed by an equally swift obsolesce— hence a 25th anniversary, like the one that Express

Computer is celebrating, is a remarkable example of longevity. To efficiently cover the fast-changing world of technology, we need insight and knowledge of the major technology issues; we need flexibility and perseverance; however, it is teamwork that’s of greatest importance. In the past 25 years, reporters, art directors, copy-editors, freelance contributors, editors and other professionals made valuable contributions to the magazine.

We have endeavoured to pack the anniversary issue with stories, interviews, case studies that are informative and interesting. We hope you will enjoy the issue. anoop.verma@expressindia.com

MARCH, 2015

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CONTENTS

CONTENTS A N N I V E R S A R Y

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37

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S P E C I A L

CLOUD COMPUTING CLOUD SOLUTIONS ARE RAINING ON INDIAN ENTERPRISES

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE JUSTSMAC IT

ENTERPRISE SECURITY SAILING THROUGH HOSTILE WATERS IN IT

STORAGE & SERVERS FASTER COMPUTE,GREATER STORAGE

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I S S U E

PRINTERS COLOUR YOUR PRINTS

DMS AND MPS GETPAPERS IN ORDER, CLICKTO DIGITISE

DATACENTER SOLUTIONS DATACENTER INDUSTRY: POISED FOR RAPID GROWTH

DISASTER RECOVERYSOLUTIONS DISASTER RECOVERY: MAINTAINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY

MARCH, 2015

CONTENTS

feature

column HOW TO PICK YOUR CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER? Dechacca Ponnappa

LEVERAGING BIG DATA FOR DIFFERENTIATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

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“We work pretty hard to develop solutions for ensuring that people can enjoy comfortable sleep.

Through our innovatively designed mattresses, we are essentially educating the society on sleep related matters so that people can sleep-well and feel healthy and fresh when they wake up,” says Pertisth Mankotia, Head – Information Technology, Sheela Group.

Ashish Pachory

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CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE HIGH GROWTH FORESEEN IN CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE INDUSTRY

ASSESSING CLOUD MATURITY Vishnu Bhat

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STRUCTURED CABLING STRUCTURED CABLING EXPECTS RAPID GROWTH

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS INTEGRATED & INTELLIGENT COLLABORATIONS

TECHNOLOGYFOR SLEEPING WELL

LEARN TO CODE PROGRAMME: RASPBERRY Pi DISTRIBUTION @ SCHOOLS

event

P H Kurian

UPS & BATTERIES EMPOWERING THE ENTERPRISE

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MAJORITYOFENTERPRISES ARE AFFECTED BYAPP ECONOMY At the APJ Summit, organised by CATechnologies, it came to light that about 57% of enterprises are of the view that the app economy is exercising a disruptive force on their businesses.

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celebrating 2 5 years Vol 26. No. 3. March, 2015 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Editor Anoop Verma* Chief of Product Dr. Raghu Pillai Delhi Heena Jhingan, Pupul Dutta, Mohd Ujaley Copy Desk Aditi Gautam Mumbai Jasmine Desai Bengaluru Pankaj Maru DESIGN National Art Director Bivash Barua Deputy Art Director Surajit Patro Chief Designer Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rushikesh Konka Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West Prabhas Jha - North Sanghamitra Kumar - East Dr. Raghu Pillai - South Marketing Team Shankar Adaviyar Navneet Negi Ajanta Sengupta Amit Tiwari Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Rohan Thakkar PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia

MUMBAI Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 2nd Floor, Express Tower, Nariman Point Mumbai- 400 021 Board line: 022- 67440000 Ext. 527 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com Branch Offices NEW DELHI Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division Express Building, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi- 110 002 Board line: 011-23702100 Ext. 668 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Fax: 011-23702141 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com CHENNAI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division New No. 37/C (Old No. 16/C) 2nd Floor, Whites Road, Royapettah, Chennai- 600 014 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com BANGALORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com HYDERABAD Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 6-3-885/7/B, Ground Floor, VV Mansion, Somaji Guda, Hyderabad – 500 082 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com KOLKATTA Ajanta Sengupta The Indian Express Ltd

Business Publication Division JL No. 29&30, NH-6, Mouza- Prasastha & Ankurhati, Vill & PO- Ankurhati P.S.- Domjur (Nr. Ankurhati Check Bus Stop) Dist. Howrah- 711 409 Mobile: +91 9831182580 Email id: ajanta.sengupta@expressindia.com KOCHI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Ground Floor, Sankoorikal Building, Kaloor – Kadavanthra Road Kaloor, Kochi – 682 017 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com COIMBATORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd No. 205-B, 2nd Floor, Vivekanand Road, Opp. Rajarathinam Hospital, Ram Nagar Coimbatore- 641 009 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com AHMEDABAD Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd 3rd Floor, Sambhav House, Near Judges Bunglows, Bodakdev, Ahmedabad - 380 015 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com BHOPAL Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd F-102, Inner Court Apartment, 1st Floor, GTB Complex, Behind 45 Bungalows, Bhopal - 462 003 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com JAIPUR Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd S2, J-40, Shyam GHP Enclave, Krishna Marg, C-Scheme, Jaipur - 302 001 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com

IMPORTANT Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express Limited cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

Express Computer Reg. No. REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, RNI Regn. No. MAHENG/49926/90 Printed for the proprietors,The Indian Express Limited by Ms. Vaidehi Thakar at Indigo Press, (India) Pvt. Ltd. Plot No. 1c/716, off Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 and Published from Express Towers, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021) Editor : Anoop Verma (*Responsible for selection of News under the PRB Act.) Copyright @ 2012 The Indian Express Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.

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FEATURE

TECHNOLOGY FOR SLEEPING WELL

BY ANOOP VERMA “We work pretty hard to develop solutions for ensuring that people can enjoy comfortable sleep. Through our innovatively designed mattresses, we are essentially educating the society on sleep related matters so that people can sleep-well and feel healthy and fresh when they wake up,” says Pertisth Mankotia, Head – Information Technology, Sheela Group

“I

nformation Technology provides numerous opportunities for exploring a wide range of solutions, by applying different thought processes, picking up different approaches. Essentially it enables you to work differently, in the way that you would like to,” says Pertisth Mankotia.

“IT can lead to lot of innovations and creativity; it not only connects systems and processes, but also people.”

He looks back with surprise at the era when people used to be suspicious of IT. 10

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There was the feeling that implementation of IT will lead to loss of jobs, as computers would replace people.

There was also the feeling that automation could lead to loss of importance of the workers. Thankfully, our society has now grown out of these luddite ideas,” he laughs. He is of the view that even the most advanced technology is of no match for the human brain.

“Only human beings who understand human psychology can do the work that humans do and take maximum advantage of the Information Technology systems that we have around us,” he asserts. In his IT career he has faced many challenges,

but he believes that every challenge can be overcome as long as one has the patience, humility and the luck to be blessed with a good team.

Currently employed as the head of Information Technology in the Sheela Group (India & Australia), Pertisth Mankotia is responsible for digitisation of various processes with the objective of brining speed and innovation to enterprise. “Today IT is the backbone of operations at Sheela Foam and its channel partners. With a user base of more than 4000, we have created an information culture for not only our employees, also the channel (120+ MARCH, 2015

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Distributors and 5000+ Dealers) across the country. We have created a platform for sharing knowledge and taking advantage of technology to enhance business,” he informs.

All the distributors of the Sheela Group are connected, so that they can work efficiently on a similar platform and share information while running their independent businesses. This has simplified their life and enabled them to take advantage of IT Infrastructure and synchronised environment.

Pertisth informs that the IT department at Sheela Group has adopted technologies like cloud, virtualization, EXPRESS COMPUTER

BYOD, Open Source, managed printing, etc. The group has set up its own data center with outsourced DR. The best thing is that the datacenter operations have been managed at the best possible cost, and are still able to contribute lot of valuable business insight through business intelligence.

“The infrastructure that we are using is quite simple and we look for commodity products rather than going with the proprietary products,” says Mankotia. He is also in favour of open source. He says that the open source solutions are better as they enable the organisation to expand and scale up at a

lower cost. “In addition to this, we keep updating our self, as we very well understand that technology has a life like banana,” he laughs.

Pertisth is proud of the work that the IT team at Sheela Group has done. A homegrown ERP platform called “great plus” has been created, on this the entire business of the company is running running efficiently. Moreover, the channel partners (Distributors & Dealers) also use the same platform for their business of creating seamless and synchronised working environment.

“The IT team has also created specific solutions for tracking secondary and tertiary sales, controlling sales to unauthorised dealers, access the channel stock, improving serviceability, improving operational efficiencies and reducing wastage,” he says with pride.

The system at Sheela Group enables seamless system of order placement and product delivery. Once an order has been placed by the dealer, it automatically gets transferred to the distributor and from distributor to Sheela Foam (if material is not with the distributor). The order status till it is sold to end customer can be tracked by the entire chain.

Pertisth has played an important role in deployment of the replenishment system based on TOC (Theory of Constraints) concept. In this they have developed a dynamic replenishment system which auto adjusts the stock level based on sales, seasonality and orders in hand. This system has been implemented at Sheela Foam and also at the Distributors locations and at both points order is placed based on stock levels. This has brought down the inventory levels and have enabled the channel to stock more variety in the same space and cost.

The company has a weekly Review system based on TOC. Pertisth says, “We follow the concept of “theory of constraints” where all the performances are reviewed on a weekly basis so that adjustments in plan can be done easily to improve performance. We SMS all critical KPI results every morning so that the day can be planned accordingly.”

Controlled MOP (Market Operating Price) by tracking of the secondary sales MARCH, 2015

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FEATURE

PERTISTH MANKOTIA Current Designation Current Role

: Head – Information Technology : Develop and Implement IT strategies in alignment with corporate objectives. Simplify business processes while delivering bottomline measurable benefit and track record of bringing profitable business growth.

Expertise : Bringing innovation and simplicity to the Enterprise with the use of technology.

Work Experience : 20 years Favourite quote : Whenever I do a good job, I open the window and see whom I can pass the credit to and whenever I go wrong, I go look into the mirror and see where I went wrong N. R. Narayana Murthy Favourite book : The Idea book – Fredrik Haren Favourite food : Lebanese Favourite destination : No specific choice.

Favourite gadget for work : My Notebook Favourite gadget for personal use : Note 3 What inspires you in your work? : Freedom to Work. I believe in “Do Everything You Love”

and Guarantee Validation System has enabled "Sleepwell" to become the pioneer in successfully controlling MOP in India to a very large extent. Authorised Dealers are able to retain margin on Sleepwell Mattress as the company is in a position of setting an MOP (Market Operating Price) in the market. With this initiative, the dealers are more motivated for promoting Sleepwell sales. They are able to win the confidence of the customers in their product, as just after the purchase of Sleepwell product the guarantee gets registered through SMS. This ensures that the customers are able to develop faith in the authorised dealers and this further enhances the importance and scope of our dealership.

The deployment of RFID technology has helped the businesses in controlling the unauthorised selling of the company’s mattresses. Each mattress has a RFID tag inside it. This helps the company in tracking the product movement from the factory to the distributor to the dealer.

The RFID tag enables the company to keep an eye on the entire supply chain.

Another valuable product that the IT department has created is the system of e-wallet. “We have more than 5000 12

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dealers and for each one of them we have created an e-wallet,” informs Mankotia. In the e-wallet, the stock value of the dealers is maintained during the “exchange offer,” which is an offer run by the company for the customers. The stock value is calculated on the basis of material purchased by the dealers during the exchange period. Every time a dealer sells a mattress, the value in their e-wallet decreases. Dealers can increase the amount in their e-wallets by purchasing more products from a distributor.

The IT department in Sheela Group has also developed various systems for measuring the standard KPI such as — wastage, OTIF, Throughput, Payables, Receivables, NPA’s , Transportation cost, etc. These KPI are shared with everyone in the morning through SMS. Mankotia is of the view that for any organisation, the protection of its internal data is of utmost importance. He says, “It is absolutely imperative for the organisation to have a DR. We should think of DR as a system for load balancing, as when the DR is being updated in real time, there is no need for conducting security related drills.”

He has positive view on cloud. He feels

that there is good scope for using cloud for general event based applications or for packaged solutions like mailing, surveys, communications systems, DMS, etc.

Pertisth is one of those people who enjoy their job. “I love my job. My work Inspires me,” he says emphatically. “As long as you’ve got passion, faith and are willing to work hard, you can do anything.

You can have anything you want in the world.” How does he see his work in Sheela Group? “We work pretty hard to develop solutions for ensuring that people can enjoy comfortable sleep.

Through our innovatively designed mattresses, we are essentially educating the society on sleep related matters so that people can sleep-well and feel healthy and fresh when they wake up.”

So is there any ambition that still remains unfulfilled? His answer is rather philosophical, “Ambitions changes with time, as the world is highly dynamic. In the morning you get up with a certain plan and by the time you do to sleep, there is a revised plan to accomplish the next day.

That is life.” He says that he would like to be creative in whatever he does in future. anoop.verma@expressindia.com

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A N N I V E R S A R Y

CLOUD COMPUTING

S P E C I A L

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CLOUD SOLUTIONS ARE RAINING ON INDIAN ENTERPRISES

BY JASMINE DESAI The rapidly evolving cloud market in India is poised to see an acceleration in growth rate. According to Gartner, the total cloud spend will reach $1.9 billion by 2018

“G

rowth of cloud services in India reflects the demand for new sourcing models,” says Ed Anderson, Research VP at Gartner. “We expect high growth rates across all cloud services market segments in India.” Such positive sentiments on cloud sector are now fairly common in India's enterprise IT segment. 65% of large enterprises are using cloud technology, services and solutions as part of their IT 14

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infrastructure, according to Verizon's State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 Report. At present, the Indian public cloud market alone, according to Gartner, is poised to treble to $1.9 billion (about Rs 12,000 crore) by 2018.

In India, cloud services revenue is projected to have a five-year projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2% from 2012 through 2017 across all segments of the cloud computing market.

Segments such as software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) have even higher projected CAGR growth rate of 34.4 % and 39.8 %. When it comes to immediate adoption of cloud

solutions, things are not that rosy. Jay Sappidi, Founder and CEO of Plumsoft Solutions Pvt. Ltd., says, “Though the future of cloud computing in India seems rosy, immediate adoption of cloud is slow.

Unless startups that are into developing cloud solutions attain global focus for their products, it will be hard for them to scale and grow to sustain investment costs.”

Cost Effective Solutions The current crop of cloud solutions are providing best of the breed solutions in silos, like CRM solution or HR solution, etc. However, what companies need are MARCH, 2015

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Regional Sales, Red Hat India, dwells on the issue of security. “It is important to manage your cloud usage properly and make sure employees have access to the resources that they need from the cloud provider. If they look outside the business and rogue clouds get into the mix organisations then they have essentially lost control over the data. This can lead to data loss and sensitive information being compromised as it is now outside the company firewall.”

Sudhir Narang, Managing Director, BT India, says “Maintaining security in cloud computing remains a major technology challenge for ICT service providers. There are concerns related to lack of control, data protection, network protection and regulations. The shortage of skills to deploy and manage new cloud computing projects is also a cause for concern.”

Security is not the only roadblock when it comes to cloud. According to Karan Kirpalani, Associate Vice President, Product Management, Netmagic, "Another important point that organisations need to consider before embarking on a cloud journey is whether their applications can scale in the cloud.

If their loads are static and their users access applications over a closed circuit rather than the internet, perhaps the cloud is not an ideal platform for them.

This means that organisations sometimes need to re-architect their applications for the cloud."

Various shades of cloud integrated solutions. This is because majority of customers for such simple and cost effective solutions are small and medium scale businesses. They don’t have the resources or the technical capability to integrate these disparate cloud solutions to get a single view of their business."

Santhosh D’Souza, Director- Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd, India, says, “Users, providers and government policy-makers are asking many questions about the current use and future evolutionary path of cloud computing. But the tension within IT on moving to the cloud will EXPRESS COMPUTER

resolve as organisations recognise what cloud model is needed to serve their application portfolio.”

Internet connectivity is another issue dominating this market. Mentions Sidharth Malik, Managing Director and Vice President, India, Akamai Technologies, “This situation is momentary as the Indian government is now focussed on creating smart cities.

Another issue that we come across is data security. With the increase in information availability on the web, customers are concerned about cyberattacks.”

Jagjit Singh Arora, Director –

The issues with cloud computing are real, but they are definitely not coming in the way of its rapid adoption. The increasing usage has led to a number of trends meeting varied demands of enterprises.

IT team is moving right to the heart of business, helping to develop solutions to real-life business challenges.

Mentions Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, India, "Many of our cloud customers are also customers of other cloud vendors. So then the big question is how do customers manage this? What if a customer needs to access an application residing on another cloud? Can they do it MARCH, 2015

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Unless startups that are into developing cloud solutions have a global focus,it will be hard for them to growto sustain investment costs Jay Sappidi, Founder and CEO of Plumsoft Solutions Pvt.Ltd.

DRaaS has gained traction because it can provide up to 75% savings when compared to traditional DR Karan Kirpalani, Associate Vice President,Product Management,Netmagic.

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celebrating 2 5 years with the same service level agreements, security, performance, and quality of service and still stay within their budget means? Hence the availability of a secure interconnection where a customer can connect to multiple clouds without the hassle of co-location."

He adds that enterprises are looking to put more business-centric applications in the cloud. This requires an approach that builds cloud-based solutions that specifically fit each workload, taking into account geography, security, networking, etc. Enterprises must create individual cloud spaces that correspond to the individual needs of their workload. This trend will gain pace in the coming year.

According to Arora of Red Hat India, "Currently the industry is transposing from client-server to cloud-mobile. The major shift that I believe will happen in the coming year is open source becoming the preferred choice for cloud. Indeed, it is the foundation for widespread cloud services and enterprise applications.

Also, by incorporating open cloud across the full gamut of features organisations can be confident that their technologies will deliver the full strategic value as promised by cloud computing."

He also mentions that cross cloud orchestration is another growing trend.

It is gaining in popularity because it offers compliance and control over the burgeoning issue of Shadow IT. As cloud services continue to expand in number and sophistication, enterprises would also be opting for multi-vendor hybrid cloud architectures. Consumers will utilise multiple cloud providers to avail the best possible configuration for their enterprise. As big data evolves, the need for advanced storage infrastructure will also increase, which will boost this growth in the coming year.

Companies are also looking out to invest more on business automation

software that will help them prepare for the imminent business opportunities. Jay Sappidi, Founder and CEO of Plumsoft Solutions Pvt. Ltd., says, “Just like accessibility, ease of use and cost has enabled penetration of mobile phones to every consumer income level, likewise, if the right solutions are provided at right price points, Indian companies of all sizes will adopt cloud solutions." He added speaking on trends that, smaller companies will be more open to cloud solutions than larger organisation.

Larger companies will be looking for hybrid solutions, which have the flexibility to be deployed as a cloud or onpremise solution. Also, with the proliferation and adoption of smartphones, companies are looking for cloud solutions that take mobile-first approach.

"Agility and the ability to respond faster to changing business, customer and worker demands will be some of the major trends to look forward to in the year 2015. ICT providers will enable CIOs to face a series of digital opportunities and threats, which have seen before to keep their market position,� says Narang of BT India. In one of the surveys conducted by BT, it was found that more than 2/3rd of organisations now expect the modern CIO to be an innovator and use technology creatively to take the business forward. Technology partners can also help the CIO to be more creative by sharing their ideas, involving customers in research and engaging in innovative thinking about new ways of working by using technologies such as mobility, cloud services and unified communications.

Organisations having a digital roadmap will also clearly have an impact on cloud computing adoption. According to Jiten Patil, Principal Expert, Cloud and EDT Solutions, Persistent Systems, "In the coming year, enterprises will start

AS CLOUD SERVICES CONTINUE TO EXPAND IN NUMBER AND SOPHISTICATION, ENTERPRISES WOULD ALSO BE OPTING FOR MULTI-VENDOR HYBRID CLOUD ARCHITECTURES. MARCH, 2015

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IN NUMBERS

65

%

of large enterprises are now using cloud technology, services and solutions as part of their IT infrastructure, according to Verizon's State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 report.

$1.9 Bn (about Rs 12,000 crore)

At present, the Indian public cloud market alone, according to Gartner, is poised to treble to $1.9 billion (about Rs.12,000 crore) by 2018.

Projected Growth Rate

34.4 %

software as a service (SaaS) 2014

39.8 %.

infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

In India, cloud services revenue is projected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2 % from 2012 through 2017 across all segments of the cloud computing market

BIG DATAAND COLLABORATION SERVICES FOR CONSUMERS AS WELLAS BUSINESSES WILL CONTINUE TO FUEL CLOUD USAGE IN THE NEXTYEAR AS WELL. INTERNET OFTHINGS (IOT) WILL BE ANOTHER SOLUTION THATWILL LEVERAGE EDT STYLE understanding the difference between EDT (Enterprise Digital Transformation) and traditional enterprise IT services when it comes to the future of the business. Understanding of digital business imperatives along with ‘design for cloud’ methodology will help drive enterprise transformation in a better way.

Cloud based EDT architecture patterns, tool-sets and platforms will emerge for enterprises to start rolling out their new business models to tap newer market segments."

He also says that cloud consumption will be driven by new age mobile technologies that will help stack up EDT architecture for enterprises. Big Data and collaboration services for consumers as well as businesses will continue to fuel cloud usage in the next year as well.

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Internet of Things (IoT) will be another solution that will leverage EDT style architecture and platform to deliver IoT services using scalable cloud model.

IoT seems like the top trend which will have cascading effect on cloud adoption within enterprises. Mentions Shree Parthasarathy, Senior Director, Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte, "IoT is making a mark with couple of initiatives wherein large number of startups and leading vendors are creating solutions with the ability of connecting devices to each other. Cloud will play a major role to elevate the solution coherently and will be essential for businesses of all kinds and their consumers.”

As BYOD is emerging as increasingly important of every CIO's list, the role of

Deployment of cloud can eliminate tedious administrative tasks Sidharth Malik, Managing Director and Vice President,India,Akamai Technologies

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Maintaining security of cloud computing is a major challenge for ICTservice providers Sudhir Narang, Managing Director,BTIndia

Government policymakers are asking many questions about the current use and future path of cloud computing Santhosh D’Souza, Director- Systems Engineering,NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt.Ltd India 18

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celebrating 2 5 years

cloud also becomes more important to make BYOD a seamless experience.

According to Malik of Akamai Technologies. "The cloud process is likely to eliminate tedious administrative tasks, which might delay more important objectives, and will also embrace multiplatform adaptability. In this increasingly hyperconnected world, every consumer will depend on cloud services to connect and access their data through multiple devices." He goes on to express the opinion that with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) models becoming conventional in the workplace, the enterprises are opting to assist their employees in conducting company business using their own personal devices with the help of a safe, secure and reliable cloud service.

Cloud computing has been gaining lot of attention in the wake of rising importance of disaster recovery. Mentions Kirpalani of Netmagic, "DRaaS (Disaster Recovery-asa-Service) has gained significant traction in the past few years because it harnesses the power of elastic, on-demand cloud and can provide up to 75% savings when compared to traditional DR." Sanjoy Sen, Doctoral Researcher, Aston Business School, UK, says, “Continuing on the theme of ‘everything, everyone, everywhere’, the major trend that I foresee would be a faster adoption of cloud technologies, as an enabler of organisational value and strategic agility, both globally as well as in India. Hybrid clouds will be the dominant trend, putting an end to the debate whether businesses should be looking at either public or private cloud infrastructures.

Hybrid cloud adoption will definitely continue to grow. Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & SAARC), says, "The hybrid cloud gives our customers the opportunity to speedup innovation in ways they never could before. We help them conquer the most difficult challenge of the hybrid cloud, which is data management. We know data is more valuable when it is in the right place. Our software allows customers to move data securely between cloud service providers and back to their own data centers as their needs undergo a transformation."

According to Chris Howard, Research VP at Gartner. “Services delivered through the cloud will foster an economy based on delivery and consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management. The public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud models now dot the landscape of IT based solutions.

Because of that the basic issues have moved from ‘what is cloud’ to ‘how will cloud projects evolve’.”

There is significant movement towards cloud platforms, and also in the direction of massively scalable processing. As Howard mentions, “Virtualisation, service orientation and the Internet have converged to sponsor a phenomenon that enables individuals and businesses to choose how they will acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licensing models." jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

MARCH, 2015

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rrespective of whether it is a large enterprise, a small business or an entrepreneur looking to build a startup, the challenge in choosing a cloud service provider is complex. There are many clouds, each developed and operated by its own service provider, who will establish the definition and operation standards in their own manner. With such an assortment of clouds to choose from and the ease of provisioning cloud offers, enterprises may try various clouds by placing few workloads with different service providers.

According to Frost & Sullivan the Indian third party cloud market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.3% over a period of FY2014-2020.

Here are some important questions to ask your prospective cloud service provider:

Service provider credibility ◗ Does the service provider have a proven track record that will meet the criteria of performance, scale and reach that an enterprise needs, not just for the business today, but as it grows and expands tomorrow? ◗ For how many years have the cloud services been offered, and in how many countries? ◗ How many new product releases have happened so far and how much is the investment on R&D? ◗ How many customers does the cloud service provider presently have in the country the enterprise is operating in? ◗ Which is the largest customer they have supported and how comparable is one’s workload to that of customer’s workload?

Security ◗ Can the service provider fulfill the organisation’s compliance policies and external regulatory requirements? ◗ Does the service provider have a track record/experience of fulfilling the data privacy requirements in a respective industry and geography? ◗ How can data leakage be prevented?

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DECHACCA PONNAPPA, SENIOR RESEARCH ANALYST, ICT PRACTICE, FROST & SULLIVAN

HOWTO PICK YOUR CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER? Dechacca Ponnappa provides an expert checklist of requirements that enterprises must consider while selecting their cloud service provider

◗ How can one get a view of the data that is not physically controlled by the enterprise? ◗ How will one’s data be separated from other clients, who will be sharing the same IT Infrastructure such as servers, network, and storage? ◗ Does the cloud service provider supply an audit report that details results and responses of periodic security assessments?

Cost ◗ Are provisioning, hosting, and management services included in the cost model or does it attract extra cost? ◗ Will an enterprise be able to scale and add additional users at the same cost? ◗ Would product upgrades require additional cost? ◗ Is there an extra cost for customer support or any bug fixing? ◗ Is there a cost to migrate historical data onto the cloud?

Reliability and Uptime ◗ What will be the cloud’s annual uptime metrics and how are they measured?

What is the average length of an outage? ◗ What has been the track record of annual reported uptime versus the service level agreement? ◗ Is the cloud solution certified by an authorised independent third party trustee?

Deployment and Integration ◗ What is the deployment time frame, integration practice, and project management methodology that will be followed? ◗ What is the role of the enterprise and the service provider in the implementation?

Will there be charges for guiding the enterprise to perform its role effectively? ◗ Are there any tools for integration or loading that may be required from the enterprise?

Features and Specification ◗ How is this solution unique to support the enterprise’s requirements as

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compared to other solutions? ◗ Will the enterprise be able to achieve the required performance from the workloads hosted on the cloud? ◗ How will the workloads on cloud seamlessly interact with the enterprise’s existing legacy infrastructure? ◗ Is it a scalable solution that can align to the enterprise’s growing business needs?

The cloud strategy of the enterprise should not just match today’s vision, but also become a foundation for the future.

Specifically, the enterprises should look for the following characteristics: ● Interoperability: Interoperability is sometimes described as “Hybrid Cloud”.

To extract maximum benefit from cloud, enterprises should choose a solution that allows workloads to operate from different environments.

●

Access to Technical Expertise Although cloud is mostly automated, quite a few enterprises will still rely on the cloud service provider for support since they do not have internal staff or administrators.

It is therefore important to validate that the provider offers the level of customer service the enterprise is accustomed to.

Additional levels of support such as advisory services and professional services to help develop a long term cloud strategy for optimal long term cloud

2. Periodicity of its publication 3. Printer's Name Whether citizen of India Address 4. Publisher's Name Whether citizen of India Address 5. Editor's name Whether citizen of India Address 6. Name and address of individuals who own the newspaper AND Shareholders holding more than One per cent of the total capital

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: Express Towers, 2nd Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 021 : MONTHLY : MS. VAIDEHI THAKAR : Yes : Express Towers, 2nd Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 021 : MS. VAIDEHI THAKAR : Yes : Express Towers, 2nd Floor Nariman Point, Mumbai-400 021 : Anoop Verma : Yes : Express Building, Ground Floor 9 & 10, B. Z. Marg, New Delhi-110 002. : The Indian Express Limited 2nd Floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021 : Indian Express Holdings & Entp Limited 2nd Floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021 : Mr. Viveck Goenka & Mr. Anant Goenka 2nd Floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021

●

Version Control The provider’s service will evolve over time. The features present today, may be withdrawn tomorrow and only some may persist indefinitely. When the initially accepted agreements of a contract are changed, then the enterprise should review the impact of the withdrawal or addition of services with the service provider. Hence, enterprises should put a mechanism in place to be informed of the changes and amend the contract to suit their future requirement.

The TCO analysis will be a major decision factor to migrate to cloud and enterprises often miss critical variables such as IT staff required to manage an unmanaged cloud, time to market, competitive advantage etc. The future of cloud will be hybrid cloud; allowing enterprises to derive more value and drive innovation.

FORM - IV (SEE RULE 8) 1. Place of Publication

● Cost Cloud is a cost effective model compared to an on-premise data center.

However, comparing price tags of differentiated service providers with undifferentiated mass market commodity providers is not a like comparison. There could be huge hidden costs for a business in the cloud architecture or advisory services, which may not be captured in the pricing catalogue that is published.

Last word

STATEMENT ABOUT OWNERSHIP AND OTHER PARTICULARS OF EXPRESS COMPUTER, MUMBAI, AS REQUIRED UNDER RULE 8 OF THE REGISTRATION OF NEWSPAPERS (CENTRAL) RULES, 1956

●

Service Level Agreement Given the dislocated relationship that can exist between the provider and the enterprise, an acceptable user policy where the enterprise should know what is covered in the SLA by looking for explicitly stated exceptions and understand why the provider has excluded the same, has to be established.

performance have to be part of the key evaluation criteria.

: Mr. Shekhar Gupta & Mrs. Neelam Jolly C-6/53, Safdarjung Development Area New Delhi 110 016 I, VAIDEHI THAKAR., hereby declare that the particulars given above are true and to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Date : 1/3/2015

sd/VAIDEHI THAKAR Publisher

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JUSTSMAC IT

BY HEENA JHINGAN The enterprise software vendors are reforming their strategies to align their business with various aspects of SMAC, which is now having an unprecedented impact on the industry

D

espite umpteen challenges, the enterprise software segment in India grew at a healthy rate in 2014. There is no sign of a slowdown. According to research firm Gartner, the enterprise software market in India is projected to reach $4.7 billion in 2015. By 2018, India’s share of the software market in Asia-Pacific is expected to reach $6.8 billion.

Shweta Baidya, Senior Market Analyst, IT Software, IDC, says that the overall enterprise software market in 24

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India witnessed a stable growth in the range of 10-11% during first half of 2014.

The growing need to understand customer preferences better and rollout personalised offers led to the healthy adoption of CRM and BI. Several enterprises were looking at analytics to predict market demand and align their supply chain. Investments picked up in sectors such as online retail, BFSI, manufacturing and other such sectors.

She points out that the growth factors tend to differ from one industry to another, depending on unique challenges that the business is facing, changing market dynamics and the level

of technology adoption. “We see that large manufacturing units are integrating their ERM solutions with the PLM and SCM modules for better resource utilisation. Some of them are also looking at cloud based solutions for easy scalability and flexibility options.”

Among consumer oriented sectors improving customer experience is a key growth driver. Banks are investing in solutions for end-to-end customer management, including multi-channel customer on-boarding to help customers avail services without having to physically visit the branches. “Retail industry spending is driven by retail MARCH, 2015

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analytics, virtual or mobile shopping, mobile POS, and the like,” adds Shweta Baidya.

Niraj Kaushik, Vice President, Applications Business, Oracle India, observes that with the rapidly increasing digitalisation and growing momentum in the government space, 2015 is expected to be a much more buoyant year.

Enterprise software market is being revitalised. Software buying is increasingly shaped by cloud services, digitalisation initiatives, information and data analytics, and mobility. These trends are changing how software EXPRESS COMPUTER

investments support organisational goals and outcomes, driving new business models, and reshaping how software is valued, purchased, and utilised.

The SMAC way A significant change has been witnessed over the last 5 years in the global enterprise applications and business software markets, notes Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India, Symantec. Emergence of technology trends like BYOD, mobility, cloud and analytics have led to an explosion of data—both structured and

unstructured. These disruptive technologies are pushing the product vendors to realign their product strategy. Hence we are witnessing a radical change in enterprise technology and there is impact on the suite of offerings, services as well as delivery ecosystem.

This has led to the creation of new markets, where there is increased scope of differentiation in the otherwise saturating enterprise segment. These offerings are undergoing a transformation to provide better value proposition and architectural design in order to adapt themselves as per the demand generation. “Cloud computing has gained significant maturity and SaaS offerings have witnessed traction across geographies and industry segments,” Kaura says.

Owing to the shift in the way enterprise applications are now architectured and deployed, social collaboration and mobility are emerging as design cornerstones for solution providers like Oracle.

“Customers are asking for systems that adopt such concepts. What is even more interesting, however, is that social is not the old standalone system, but a contextual collaboration design element that customers can use within any application. They do not need to switch to another screen or application to reap social benefits. Similarly for analytics.

Oracle’s analytics are pre-built reports, relevant to the task being performed and easy to use,” Kaushik of Oracle says.

He adds, Oracle has embraced mobility in a big way – every application is mobile-enabled. “We have a mobile application development toolkit that are being used by customers to create secure mobile apps.”

“Mobility,” says Jaydeep Deshpande, Regional Marketing Manager, Qlik, “will remain an important factor for responsive platforms.” According to him, by the end of 2015, developers and administrators who thought they had solved their problems by standardising on one platform will most likely be facing the same problems again. “They simply must give users a responsive MARCH, 2015

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Large manufacturing units are integrating their ERM solutions with the PLM and SCM modules for better resource utilisation Shweta Baidya, Senior Market Analyst,ITSoftware,IDC

Emergence of technologytrends like BYOD and mobility,have triggered an explosion of data,and pushed the product vendors to realign their product strategy Tarun Kaura, Director – TechnologySales,India,Symantec 26

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experience. It’s the same for BI and data discovery software,” he adds.

Most of the Zoho apps, including Zoho CRM are accessible on mobile. In 2014, Zoho introduced Facebook and Twitter tracking from inside Zoho CRM. “All of Zoho is on the cloud. All these technologies make sure our customers are leveraging the latest technologies, when it comes to supporting their customers,” asserts Gopal Sripada, Senior Product Marketing Manager Zoho CRM, Zoho.

Samik Roy, Director – Dynamics, Microsoft India, is in agreement. He believes that the rapid advances in cloud and mobility, along with rising customer aspirations of rapid implementation and user adoption, are fuelling the demand for business agility. Enterprises desire to be enabled to respond quickly to changes in their business environment.

Businesses feel they must tackle their enterprise IT investments in a consistent and timely manner while cutting the fat out of capital expenditure. It is important for the enterprises to capitalise on the cloud opportunity and save on capital expenses by adopting cloud-based enterprise software (e.g., ERP, CRM, SCM).

Businesses are also demanding intelligent solutions that can mine their reservoirs of raw data and make sense of it all, in turn, providing the customer with a more unified experience.

Analytics solutions that sit in well with incumbent products are preferred over those that don’t. Mobility, analytics and cloud will continue to shape enterprise software offerings. Growth in this segment will depend on how well the market participants inlay their offerings with more domain knowledge and industry-specific expertise.

Here is a look at the how some of the most commonly used application software performed:

ERP Regarded as the backbone of an enterprise, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has a come a long way.

Harsh Vardhan G, Executive Vice

President—Global Marketing & Channels, Ramco Systems Limited, is of the view that the era of buying an ERP for automating operations is a passé. He says that the organisations no longer evaluate systems for functionality alone.

The focus is on moving towards investing in an ERP which is intuitive and high on usability. While addition of new functionalities is part of every product roadmap, the thrust is on building capabilities that can help clients transform their business operations.

“We launched Ramco’s in-memory based planning and optimisation (IPO) application which resides on top of the ERP and helps process tasks/actions in memory, in parallel and at drastically high speeds. Whether the need is to run constraint-based Real Time Scheduling, Logistics Planning, Demand Forecasting, Production Management, or Capacity Planning, Ramco IPO helps achieve all this,” says Harsh.

With the latest ERP trends there is a continuous momentum and we have been witnessing greater uptake from the market. While in 2014 segments like professional services and retail thrived, 2015 will see e-commerce businesses taking off in a bigger way. A lot of traction in traditional sectors like manufacturing and logistics segment is also seen.

Vardhan says, “There will be a consistent increase in adoption of ‘Two Tier ERP Strategy’ when it comes to extending or adding solutions to the IT backbone. Enterprise mobile application market will witness exponential momentum in the coming year where there will be extensive usage of enterprise cloud services on mobiles and tablets. The enterprise application market will focus on providing customised, seamless experience to end users and automate business processes by increasing accessibility across platforms.”

Interestingly, several enterprises in India are in a transient phase from small to medium to large and hence they keep moving from one ERP/CRM/BI solution to another.

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“Enterprises transitioning to specialised ERP/CRM software from heavily customised general/legacy ERPs. Enterprises are looking for newer licensing models, self-service BI and analytical options,” says Aju Mathew, Director - Enterprise Solutions, Aspire Systems.

CRM As businesses today seek a higher return and increased effectiveness on marketing, sales and service programme investments, the customer relationship management (CRM) software market is seeing dramatic growth and enhanced offerings, including data analytics and social CRM applications, mobile functionality as well as gamification features.

Behavioural targeting, coupled with online website visitor tracking,

monitoring each customer’s journey through the entire life-cycle and datadriven marketing process, is helping businesses to thrive and become game-changers in their respective segments. Companies that are using legacy software need to upgrade their technologies and processes to meet the needs of the businesses.

Elucidating the changes seeping into the CRM fabric of enterprises, Gopal Sripada, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Zoho CRM, Zoho, says that with about 40% growth rate in 2014 they have performed better than the industry. Thanks to an increasing penetration of mobile Internet, especially in the Tier 2 cities, like Coimbatore, Vishakhapatnam, Indore, etc., they are are seeing a lot of growth opportunities in these areas for their

The more people have access to self-service data discoverytools, the more value organisations can get.

Jaydeep Deshpande, Regional Marketing Manager,Qlik

Delivering better Customer Experience through Intelligence Talisma’s new generation intelligent CRM presents a whole new way of understanding customers. It is a solution that delivers much needed predictability across customer interactions and transactions.

Analytics

Sales force effectiveness It can help your sales force conserve its energy in targeting the right opportunities, thanks to its data gathering and analytical abilities.

Business Intelligence

Social Media

Digital

Do more with your customer data

Transform and adapt

This CRM frees up your service teams to focus on delivering better customer experience while it responds to and analyses customer and prospect interaction. This data is analysed from a current and historic perspective to derive patterns of sales interest.

It gives your business the agility needed to adapt depending on changing competitive landscape and customer preferences.

Mobility

Optimize enterprise-wide decision making Cloud Solutions

Multi-channel

With availability of data of better quality, better decisions can be taken keeping short-term and long-term goals in mind.

Personalized customer experience Engage your customers through a personalized customer experience by gaining the ability to predict a customer’s unique service preference.

Talisma Intelligent CRM delivers intelligence-driven customer experience across ITeS, Retail, Financial Services and Manufacturing verticals.

For over a decade, Talisma has been defining customer experience across over 30 countries. Drop us a line at marketing@talisma.com, now to learn how you can unlock the true value of your customer through Customer Experience Management.

Follow @TalismaCustExp on Twitter to get the latest news and updates on customer experience management.

Talisma Corporation 214/6, Ramanamaharishi Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore-560 080, Karnataka, India. Tel: +91 -80-4039 4400 Email: salesapac@talisma.com

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INDIA’S SHARE OF MARKET SIZE IN ASIA PACIFIC

$4.7 Bn

2.5 TIMES $6.8 Bn (2018)

(2015)

10-11% IDC says the overall enterprise software market witnessed a stable growth in the range of 1011% during first half of 2014

There’ll be a consistent increase in adoption of ‘Two Tier ERPstrategy’when it comes to extending or adding solutions to the ITbackbone Harsh Vardhan G, Executive Vice President – Global Marketing & Channels, Ramco Systems Limited 28

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IDC predicts that visual data discovery tools will grow 2.5 times faster than rest of BI market

REVENUE GARTNER PROJECTION

$139mn $121.2mn

2013

2014

sales & marketing, productivity & collaboration and HR applications.

“Our flagship product Zoho CRM’s new CRM Plus Edition is a super success. Our customers are now showing lot of interest in this offering ($50/user/month), which encompasses several sales, marketing and support apps,” says Sripada.

“At Zoho,” he says, “we believe that there is a better way of handling the growing pains of small-business owners.

And wehave designed our CRM system especially for small to medium-sized businesses, keeping the ease of use and flexibility to scale in mind. Being a bootstrapped company, we understand the importance of customer acquisition during the initial stage of business growth.”

“That is why we were always committed to helping startups and small businesses with free CRM plan to stay focused on nurturing early adopters and converting them into paying customers.

Now, we are happy to expand our Free Edition further with 10 free users and more features,” he reasons.

More importantly, as the cost per

According to a research by IDC and EMC, the world’s overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020 but only 37% of it will be useful

customer acquisition is increasing exponentially, business owners are placing more time and resources on improving the customer journey experience throughout their life-cycle, thereby trying to retain them at every step. “Tighter integration between customer relationship management (CRM) software modules with ERP, SCM and BI tools play a vital role in generating more revenue per customer,” he suggests.

In 2014, the company witnessed enterprise customers adopt its CRM solution for usage across more than 10,000 users,says Samik Roy, DirectorDynamics, Microsoft India Of these, some included global deployments and competitive replacements as well.

“We won customers across all major segments including Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Government, IT/ITES and Manufacturing. Our CRM Online offering on the cloud gets further enriched due to the native integration with Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer, Power BI and Lync, which enhance the productivity of our customers,” he says, adding that this MARCH, 2015

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BI TRENDS Information activism is emerging: Inside each organisation,users want to be actively engaged with their data,but they lack the technology to do so.By providing users with BI solutions,which allow true self-service,they move from passively consuming the data to actively using it to glean important information.We live in a world of data (both at a personal and professional level) and people express themselves through the work that they do with it. ◗ The move from “what” to “why”: In the past BI tools were used to capture a description of what was occurring within an organisation.These static reports gave simple updates to inform users, but they did not encourage them to ask the next question. In 2015 we will see more organisations looking for “diagnostic”analytics to not only find what is happening, but to ask questions and find out why.The ability to learn from past triumphs (or failures) provides significantly more value than a report of outcomes. ◗ Data must come from external sources, not just internal: “Intelligent”organisations know that smart decisions come from the use of data, but where that information comes from matters.To truly gain context around trends and industry happenings, organisations must look to both internal and external data sources. Simply focusing on their own data, and shying away from the accelerating data boom, is a mistake.

Organisations who utilise comprehensive solutions to process the information from multiple sources and in multiple views, are able to stay ahead of the game. ◗ Data without Borders: In 2015, BI solutions that excel in reporting, but lack analysis via interaction, will be a thing of the past.The shift in BI platform requirements, moving from reporting-centric to analysis-centric, means companies will expect to be able to digest and gain insights at a glance.Visualisation is key as users need to be able to understand their data in a way that is natural to them, breaking down the barriers between people and their data. BI solutions must look as good as they operate, and must operate as good as they look. ◗ Data storytelling enables decisions: When analysis is done in silos it can be difficult to share findings with others to drive a consensus. BI is no longer about collecting reports, it’s about interactive decision making.Therefore, data storytelling is critical as it allows users to create a compelling narrative of their results to convince team members and executives to take action. However, static stories can lead to unanswered questions and the end of a successful meeting.The option to dive into the data to answer questions in real-time is key to one’s success. ◗ Bad data plagues the workforce: Organisations often take it for granted that their data is accurate, blindly trusting the figures and relying on them to make both strategic and operational decisions. However, most organisations will have some form of inaccurate data on their books, often simply due to human error.The problem is not that the data contains errors, but rather, that no one is aware of them. By the time the errors are flagged, the entire chains of decisions have already been made, sequences of events have played out and investments are lost. Fortunately, visualisation can help as it enables users to see the big picture and provides an overview of a data set, making it easier to identify patterns and determine how they differ. ◗

Social is not the old standalone system,but a contextual collaboration design element that customers can use within any application Niraj Kaushik, Vice President,Applications Business, Oracle India

Tighter integration between CRM modules with ERP, SCM and BI tools play a vital role in generating more revenue per customer Gopal Sripada, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Zoho CRM,Zoho EXPRESS COMPUTER

Source: Qlik

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also facilitates greater adoption as the users can do all daily activities from one single platform via a very user friendly and intuitive interface.

Business Intelligence

Enterprises are transitioning to specialised ERP/CRM software from heavilycustomised general/legacyERPs Aju Mathew, Director - Enterprise Solutions, Aspire Systems

Businesses feel they must tackle their enterprise IT investments in a consistent and timely manner while cutting the fat out of capital expenditure Samik Roy, Director – Dynamics,Microsoft India 30

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Gartner had projected Indian BI software revenue to reach $139 million in 2014, a 15% increase over 2013 revenue of $121.2 million. Indian organisations are making investments in BI software, especially data discovery solutions from guided analytics to self-service data visualisation, as they recognise the importance of empowering individuals in the organisation to access and analyse data, collaborate on their insights, and make decisions that will drive success for the business. Several enterprises such as Mahindra & Mahindra, HDFC Life, and Shoppers Stop have benefited by the use of BI tools.

In fact, 2014 proved to be an exciting year for vendors like Qlik that added many new customers to its portfolio, including Thangamayil, a leading jewellery retail chain with 30 stores across several districts of Tamil Nadu.

Qlik helps in effectively monitoring and analysing 40 million records of inventory in near real time. It reduces stock levels to improve profitability, and provides better customer satisfaction.

As a result, they are now enjoying 5% cost savings across all stores, and this in turn means reduced prices for their customers.

The industry is facing a data deluge.

According to a report form IDC and EMC, the world’s overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020, but only 37% of this data will be useful. At the same time, with fast changing market demands, organisations need to use information strategically to thrive, not just survive.

They are sitting on a goldmine of data, but many simply do not know how to derive value from it.

Deshpande of Qlik is of the opinion that it is the knowledge, experience, and intuition that people bring to the task that creates the sequence of questions that reveals the answers.

“The more people have access to

self-service data discovery tools, the more value organisations can get. That is what drives the market for our solutions. Several analyst firms have made the same prediction. IDC predicts that visual data discovery tools will grow 2.5 times faster than rest of BI market. By 2018, investing ‘end user self-service’ will become a requirement for all enterprises,” he adds.

The road ahead The industry watchers believe that 2015 will be dominated by mobility, application life cycle management and BYOD. There will be a strong adoption of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) as organisations will transform from being software enabled to software driven businesses. This will create a structural change in many industries, including the technology industry. IT decision makers in India expect next-generation technologies to give their organisations a competitive advantage.

Baidya of IDC predicts that the SMB segment will be one of the key contributors in the growth of the market going forward. This segment has been the most agile and nimble in terms of 3rd platform adoption owing to limited legacy infrastructure to worry about. As a result, there is increased collaboration between ERM (Enterprise Risk Management) vendors and their partners (SIs/ISVs/TSPs) to cater to this segment, which was not a priority till sometime back.

The market is slowly waking up to the benefits of big data and analytics and there are cases of deployments across sectors. The focus on a wide variety of marketing analytics for customer segmentation as well as to understand new areas such as sentiment analysis related to social media will drive CRM analytics adoption.

Government reforms are also widely expected to trigger significant investments in areas like banking, manufacturing, retail, etc. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com

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SAILING THROUGH HOSTILE WATERS IN IT

BY PUPUL DUTTA In 2014, several high profile breaches, including that of Sony, JPMorgan Chase and Apple iCloud accounts, made news around the world. It is clear that the magnitude of the security related challenges is on the rise and the enterprises can’t afford to ignore the new age cyber threats

I

f we extrapolate from the trends of 2014, we reach the conclusion that 2015 will see its share of high-profile cases of cyber crime. Hackers are expected to launch attacks on big and small organisations and they will probably succeed in breaking into the systems of few of their targets. The threats are growing extremely complex in nature.

At times the enterprise that seems to have been targeted are not actually the real target, rather they are the vehicle for launching further attacks. But even if the 32

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enterprise is not the final target, its reputation gets marred when the news of the breach gets out. Customers of the enterprise start feeling insecure about the security of the data that they have handed over to the enterprise and they begin to look for alternate solutions.

Even the simplest of errors can lead to severe financial loss, and the loss of reputation is even higher. CISOs are now recommending tighter security policies and better awareness for dealing with such complicated threats. The enterprise security market is being driven by two major thrust areas - protection and compliance. In the past few years, we

have seen both of these growing in number and complexity.

Businesses have to ensure that the controls and processes are in place so that they can comply with regulations.

These controls can be achieved through the use of security toolsets that address the complex IT landscape of enterprise customers.

According to Gartner, the security market in India grew from $882 million in 2013 to $953 million in 2014, and is expected to cross $1.06 billion in 2015.

With the emergence of new disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility, virtualization, Big Data and social media, MARCH, 2015

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endless and diverse, thereby providing limitless attack vectors that needs to be addressed (both for device level security and as an access point).

Also, virtual attacks spanning multiple geographies are becoming possible and real in today's world,” explains Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager-Enterprise, IDC India.

Evolving threat scenario

the enterprise security market in India has seen a considerable and consistent growth over the last few years.

Security market The Indian IT security market can be bifurcated into the Network Security Appliance Market and Software Security Market. According to IDC, the Network Security Appliance market is worth approximately $229 million (customer revenue) for 2014 and is expected to have a growth rate of 10% in 2015. The Software Security Market, on the other hand, is worth around $154 million in 2014 (vendor revenue) and is expected to have EXPRESS COMPUTER

a growth rate of close to 15% in 2015.

There are a lot of factors that is driving the security market, one of them being, rapid expansion and growth of enterprises resulting in exponential growth of IT infrastructure (that needs to be secured) as compared to the last two decades. Secondly, increasing local and international regulatory and compliance requirements. Also, increasing frequency, sophistication and type of attacks, in terms of both capability and scalability is steering the growth.

“While everything gets connected and Internet of Things become a reality, the number of endpoints are becoming

For many years, cyber-criminal gangs focused exclusively on stealing money from end users. An explosion of credit card theft, hijacking of electronic payment accounts or online banking connections led to consumer losses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Maybe this market is no longer so lucrative, or probably the cyber criminal market is overcrowded. It now seems like there is a struggle being waged for ‘survival’. And, as usual, that struggle is leading to evolution.

The massive rise in the usage of social media and the proliferation of enterprise mobility has made enterprises more vulnerable than ever. Today users can access any kind of data from anywhere.

The fast adoption of BYOD and cloud are accelerating this trend, and providing new directions of attack. The usage of smartphones, tablets, or next generation notebooks, by employees to connect to corporate networks, puts the corporate data, outside the company’s direct ‘sphere of influence’.

There was a time when attackers would use a backdoor entry to barge into a corporate network and siphon terabytes of information to FTP servers.

Today however, more sophisticated groups use SSL on a regular basis alongside custom communication protocols.

“Some of the more advanced groups rely on backdooring networking devices and intercepting traffic directly for commands. Other techniques we have seen include ex-filtration of data to cloud services, for instance via the WebDAV protocol (facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on web servers),” explains Altaf Halde, MARCH, 2015

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Use of techniques like filtering and web access control should be followed.

One can always minimise the attacks Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager-Enterprise, IDC India

Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab South Asia.

“It is due to such attacks that many corporations have banned public cloud services such as Dropbox from their networks. But one needs to understand that this also remains an effective method of bypassing intrusion detection systems and DNS blacklists,” adds Halde.

Lastly, targeting hotel networks is the new norm. It is not easy to crack a hotel's network, however, compromising a hotel reservation system is an easy way to conduct reconnaissance mission on a particular target. By launching this kind of an attack, the hackers can follow the victim and they also gain the ability of launching a physical attack, like the one launched in Mumbai in 2008.

The Darkhotel group, an APT actor, is known to have targeted specific visitors during their stay in hotels in certain countries. Basically, hotels are known to provide a good base for cyber terrorists to attack certain categories of people, such as company executives, etc.

Targeting hotels is also highly lucrative because it provides intelligence about the movements of high profile individuals around the world.

Tackling threat

Some of the more advanced groups rely on backdooring networking devices and intercepting traffic directly for commands Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab -South Asia 34

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For years, the IT industry talked about emerging technologies such as cloud computing, mobile computing and social networking. With this increased openness and storage of data far outside the four walls of the organisation, came exaggerated threats to information security.

An unified approach to security by installing security on virtual devices/solutions with a combination of traditional methods is a way of dealing with the ever rising threat. Also, regular data integrity or log checks and reviews keeps the CISOs informed about what kind of data is coming in and going out of the organisation.

Companies should also ensure that there is encryption at all levels, even at endpoints or personal devices, if used for official purposes. Secondly, following strict industry standards and best practices helps in avoiding known forms

of attack or data leakage, loss or theft.

Organisations need to educate their employees on all types of possible attacks and that, even the tiniest mistake could lead to a disaster.

“Recently, the e-commerce website, eBay was attacked. The employee credentials were obtained through a phishing attack and used to steal financial data of millions of customers. To avoid this kind of situation, use of techniques like filtering and web access control should be followed. While the threats can't be completely dealt with but one can always minimise the attacks,” says Sharma of IDC.

Spike in MitB attacks There has been a spike in MitB (Man-inthe-browser attacks) attacks. Embedded in seemingly innocuous pop-up ads, MitB Trojans are automatically launched when users click an infected pop-up.

Research reports indicate that nearly 94% of customer networks observed in 2014 have traffic to websites that host malware. Many malware families like Palevo, SpyEye, and Zeus have been found to incorporate man-in-the-browser (MitB) functionality. The most efficient countermeasure against MitB attacks is the out of band transaction verification containing transaction details along with OTP on the consumer side. On the enterprise side it includes the adoption of fraud detection based on user behaviour profiling.

Given that Internet access is pervasive in all organisations, cyber attackers usually exploit a person's online behaviour to deliver malware and carry out malicious activities. The worrying part is that seemingly innocuous and valid websites can display this kind of behaviour. This makes it very difficult for the end user to figure out if the use of the website is for legitimate business purpose. While user awareness will help here to some extent, the rate at which such attacks are happening and changing, is very fast. “The best way to tackle such a scenario is to opt for a secure web-gateway solution. Here too the cloud based option is the best bet as it will cover all grounds including roadMARCH, 2015

ENTERPRISE SECURITY

Protection must focus on the information,not the device or data center Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India,Symantec

THE SECURITY MARKET IN INDIA GREW FROM $882 MILLION IN 2013 TO $953 MILLION IN 2014,AND IS EXPECTED TO CROSS $1.06 BILLION IN 2015. warriors and provide a platform for consistent and uniform policy enforcement,” says Rishikesh Kamat, General Manager, Product Development & Marketing, Netmagic.

In addition to this, companies should ensure there is secure encryption, authentication and access control from unmanaged device to gateway. This will ensure that any DNS resolution to malware sites that hosts MiTB are contained. “It is imperative that the right technology is embedded into the security architecture that minimises the risk associated with MITM breaches, with minimal human involvement,” explains Prasenjit Saha, CEO, Infrastructure Management Services and Security Business, Happiest Minds Technologies.

Security & Convergence The world is changing rapidly and so is the way we communicate. People now EXPRESS COMPUTER

have access to unprecedented volumes of data 24x7. Internet penetration too is increasing, with a growth rate of about 26% year-on-year coupled with a boom in demand for smartphones. According to Canalys, a global technology research firm, the mobile device market is expected to reach 2.6 billion units by 2016.

With this, managing the influx of devices and traffic has become increasingly difficult and complex for IT departments. Additionally, the rapid adoption of business applications such as voice-over-Wi-Fi clients means more comprehensive orchestration is needed, requiring granular policy and performance management to ensure that key applications are secured and optimised.

“Big Data, cloud, mobility and security are all mega forces, which CIOs today are having to tackle. Companies are struggling to keep pace with the increasing volume and sophistication of

It is important that organisations provide controlled access to users who are using a myriad of different personal devices Sundar Ram, Vice President,Technology Sales Consulting Oracle Corporation,Asia Pacific MARCH, 2015

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cyber-attacks, particularly those aimed at web applications and high-value traffic in data centres. Customers’ needs are shifting from simple connectivity to very sophisticated, large-scale networks, cloud ecosystems and High-IQ networks.

In order to address the changing threat scenario, we must focus on delivering new and innovative solutions,” explains Sajan Paul, Director Systems Engineering India & SAARC Juniper Networks.

In addition to formulating a strong security framework, businesses and consumers can take few steps to better protect themselves, whether it be from a data breach, targeted attack or common spam. Firstly, companies should know the kind of data that is generated within the organisation as well as that which is accessed online. “Companies need to focus on protecting the information generated and accessed within instead of focusing on protecting the device or the data center. Basically, organisations need to understand where their sensitive data resides and where it is flowing to help identify the best policies and procedures to protect it,” says Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India, Symantec.

Besides, companies also need to authenticate access of core business applications as well as SaaS applications for external users such as partners, vendors, customers and so on. “It is important that organisations provide controlled access to users who are using different personal devices like tablets and smart phones to access and work with corporate data,” notes Sundar Ram, Vice President, Technology Sales Consulting Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific.

By being proactive and alert, organisations can help prevent data loss from sophisticated threats such as malware, and simple mishaps like losing a device.

Increasing security budget, a solution?

Often CISOs complain that due to lack of sufficient budget for security, the company had to compromise on the right set of tools for securing the infrastructure. However, it is not true 36

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celebrating 2 5 years Predictions for 2015 THE RISE IN THE USAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA, COUPLED WITH THE GROWTH OF ENTERPRISE MOBILITY, IS MAKING THE ENTERPRISES MORE VULNERABLE. always. While some CISOs feel it is important to devote a big chunk of the IT budget for security alone, others feel differently.

“The enterprises need to focus on procuring more enhanced tools to tackle advanced cyber threats. The overall spending will depend and differ from vertical to vertical like for example sectors like BFSI, government and telecom give high priority to budget allocation for cyber security measures,” says Sanjay Deshpande, CEO and CoFounder, Uniken.

“Traditionally, Information Security investments have always been considered a subset of technology budgets. However, there has a been a paradigm shift in this mindset and most CISOs have their own budgets and run their own cost centres.

Typically, Indian corporations (medium to large enterprises) are known to apportion between 30-40% of the overall technology spend towards information security,” says a senior official of Cox and Kings.

Information Security spending is largely based on effective forecasting and there is no right formula to correctly arrive at a budget that will address ‘all’ information security needs. This is also largely dependent on the industry verticals and the nature of business.

Hence, organisations should decide carefully and judiciously on the amount they would like to use solely for securing the infrastructure of the business.

According to a study from the RAND Corporation and Juniper Networks, hacker black markets have reached a significant level of maturity. In 2015, we are likely to see the continued expansion and maturity of hacker black markets.

Fuelled by the continued vulnerability of point of sale systems and an influx of cloud services, the market opportunity for economically motivated attackers will continue to grow. The hacker black market is similar to a thriving metropolitan city with diverse communities, industries and interactions.

It is expected that focus on prevention rather than containment due to increasing monetary consequences of an incident will happen. Real time data (and trend) analysis and intelligence will become key to secure infrastructure and in turn, the organisations as well.

According to IDC, it is foreseen that CIOs, in the longer run, will start reporting to the CEOs directly. Today they are mostly reporting to the CIOs. “Security too, would be tightly embedded in the applications/devices at all levels. Biometric identification and authentication will be closer to everyone than ever before,” says Sharma of IDC. Data integrity is expected to take the centre stage as well since data manipulation will affect organisations in the same way as data theft, if not more.

At the same time, there would be rise in malware, social (media) and access based attacks.

Lastly, identity and access management, along with offline encryption and multi-factor authentication will see wider adoption.

Basically, it is foreseen that the trends will be driven by the hyper-connected nature of new-age technology, as well as growing sophistication of security threats. Cloud, BYOD and IoT related technologies are likely to create new weak links in security infrastructure as most business-functions, including security, become IT dependent. Cyber security will become a hot topic in boardroom discussions. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com

MARCH, 2015

A N N I V E R S A R Y

STORAGE & SERVERS

S P E C I A L

I S S U E

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celebrating 2 5 years

FASTER COMPUTE, GREATER STORAGE

BY HEENA JHINGAN The much anticipated infrastructure refresh cycles and the new greenfield projects, which the government is planning to launch soon, will be the major drivers of growth for India’s storage and servers market

T

he server and storage vendors have their eyes set on the programmes such as ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’, both of which are expected to lead to the rise of a large number of greenfield projects. These projects will have extensive deployment of IT, and will to lead to a significantly higher demand for compute and capacity related solutions.

After being flat in 2014, the server market is at the cusp of rapid growth in 2015.

The right combination of server and storage is important to deliver the 38

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desired performance, especially in the current environment where the enterprises are increasingly investing in virtualization technologies. The adoption of technologies such as cloud, mobility, big data and software defined everything is defining the growth of the overall industry, including servers, storage and networking infrastructure, and the management of data centers.

According to a recent IT Decision Makers survey by Dell, 98% of Indian IT decision makers feel that the data center management is important for their companies. 66% percent feel that mobility is the most important

technology trend for their organisation.

This is followed by Big Data (65 %) and Cloud Computing (63%). The survey results clearly indicate that to catch up with these technologies, the Indian organisations must get the basics of server and storage right.

Here is look at how these two critical elements of enterprise IT infrastructure fared in 2014.

The server market In the third quarter of 2014, worldwide server shipments grew by 1% year-onyear, while the revenue moved upwards 1.7% from the third quarter of 2013, MARCH, 2015

STORAGE & SERVERS

An IDC report finds that x86 server market in India grew by 10% in terms of unit shipments in the third quarter (Q3) of 2014 as compared to Q3 of 2013. The report said the major contributors to this growth were professional services, communications & media, banking and retail verticals. It said that the non x86 server markets, however, saw a decline of 58% in terms of revenue in Q3 2014 as compared to Q3 2013 due to large refreshes in verticals like banking and telecom being on hold due to various factors.

Market Trends

according to Gartner.

However, the India server market witnessed a double-digit growth in shipments and revenue. The server shipments in India grew 18.8% during the third quarter of 2014, resulting in a revenue increase of 14%. Most of this growth is being fuelled by hardware refresh and consolidation efforts, which slowed down during the first half of 2014.

Though x86 servers fuelled the growth in third quarter with 18.9% year-on-year shipment growth, Unix-based hardware revenue also grew by 7.6% as compared to the last year.

According to Gartner, in terms of EXPRESS COMPUTER

vendor performance, HP occupied the first spot, followed by Dell and IBM. HP dominated the market with its strong leadership in x86 server market. IBM is currently going through a major transition as the divestment of its x86 business gets taken care of.

Going by Gartner’s estimates, the Indian server market is expected to generate revenues of $677 million. This represents a growth of 3.3% in 2015 as compared to 2014. Gartner expects that this growth will mainly come from data center and infrastructure modernisation investments, mobility solutions, consolidation and virtualization.

Mehul Doshi, Country Manager, Data centre Solutitions, Fujitsu India, says, “For Fujitsu India, 2014 has been a good year on the server side. We saw a growth of about 8-10% both from revenue and units perspective. Several ERP led projects ensured growth for the sever business, especially the x86 servers.”

Interestingly, he points outs that this year there was no new trend of virtualization from either Citrix or Microsoft, so it did not eat into the server business.

He is of the opinion that with surveillance projects being adopted across the vertical, there is bound to be an increase in demand for servers. This is because more servers will be deployed for delivering better IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) on the growing storage base.

Another exciting space that Doshi sees on the server side is from the High Performance Computing sector. He is of the view that the importance of high performance computing (HPC) is rapidly growing because scientific and technical problems are being studied on the basis of computer simulations. Such high performance computing requirements are emerging from areas like geospatial sciences, manufacturing, education and research.

Fujitsu is now setting up a High Performance Computing (HPC) Competency Centre in Bangalore to help scientists and engineers perform advanced computational work. In fact, he says, “With this Competency Centre, we believe that we can contribute to the MARCH, 2015

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celebrating 2 5 years

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Volume,velocity, longevity and value of data are putting storage at the heart of the data center David Chua, Director of Distribution Business, Asia Pacific South,HGST

government’s ‘Make in India’ project as the manufacturers can use this facility to develop prototypes of their products.”

Oracle’s Head of Systems Business, Amit Malhotra talks about another trend that seems to be getting prominent—this has to do with the pre-integrated hardware and software stacks called the Engineered Systems. “The adoption of these systems is fast catching up. Some IT tracking firms now look at these as a separate category,” he says.

“These engineered systems are complete solutions and pretested, so can easily be deployed, resulting in shorter time to market. In a conventional process, if one optimised hardware or software the result would be around 1030% better performance, but these systems are capable of enhancing performance up to 10 times, at the same time reducing power consumption, all these combined lead to much lower TCO. We, in fact, have noticed a double digit growth,” Malhotra says.

Doshi, however, has a different point of view. He says that though these systems have clicked globally, the Indian market is yet to see a considerable amount of penetration of these systems. For Doshi new technologies like virtualisation and cloud are in vogue. He foresees change in the way enterprises have been buying servers and storage traditionally.

Storage

Organisations are focusing on data consolidation to overcome complexities and improve operations Manish Gupta, Director,Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India 40

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According to IDC’s Asia-Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, the Q3 2014 India external storage market witnessed a double-digit quarteron-quarter growth (in vendor revenue) and stood at $1.97 million though year-onyear was a de-growth.

Q3 2014 witnessed a recovery mainly due to some large multi-million dollar deals that were absent from last few quarters. The market is expected to revive in the coming quarters due to business favouring policies from government and large pending technology refreshes, though increased acceptability of cloud and need of infrastructure optimisation across organisations are posing hiccups to the traditional storage market growth.

IN NUMBERS

$1.2Bn IDC estimates the all-flash array market will grow to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2015

51%

of data centers worldwide have deployed flash already as a way to improve I/O performance in 2014

49% plan to consider it

(According to IDC)

In a survey commissioned by HGST earlier this year, 86% of CIOs and IT decision makers surveyed believe that all data generated has value if the organisation is able to store, access and analyse it optimally

According to a Seagate Research, Rajesh Khurana - Country Manager for South Asia (India & SAARC, ASEAN) Seagate Technology, says by 2020 about 56% of storage will be on cloud. Till a couple of years back most of the storage was happening in the compute space, but is no more the case now, all thanks to the kind of apps that we use now.

“About 6.5 ZB of unstructured data is expected to be stored in the cloud by 2020,” he says, adding that the organisations will have to prepare their infrastructure to support that.

Hence, optimisation and productivity have become the key priorities across MARCH, 2015

STORAGE & SERVERS

FLASH STORAGE IS GAINING FOOTHOLD IN INDIAN ORGANISATIONS, ESPECIALLY IN VERTICALS LIKE COMMUNICATION & MEDIA, MANUFACTURING, IT/ITeS AND BANKING. SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGE IS ALSO SLOWLY GAINING TRACTION AS MAJORITY OF THE OEMs ARE TAKING SOLUTIONS-BASED APPROACH TO CATER TO THIS DEMAND organisations and this is resulting in increased adoption of technologies like virtualization, de-duplication, automatic tiering, compression and thin provisioning.

Flash storage is gaining foothold in Indian organisations, especially in verticals like communication & media, manufacturing, IT/ITeS and banking.

Software defined storage is also slowly gaining traction and majority of the OEMs are developing a solutions-basedapproach to cater to this demand.

David Chua, Director of Distribution Business, Asia Pacific South, HGST observes that this data deluge is not unique to India, but data is becoming more important than ever globally “Fuelled by the growing number of applications, devices and data types – not to mention the Internet of Things (IoT) – the amount of data being created and replicated is doubling every two years,” he says. A survey commissioned by HGST earlier this year, it has come to light that 86% of CIOs and IT decision EXPRESS COMPUTER

makers believe that all data generated has value only if the organisation is able to store, access and analyse it optimally.

“This volume, velocity, longevity and value of data is putting storage at the heart of the data center, creating new opportunities for the enterprise storage industry,” says Chua.

Some of the popular themes that are emerging in the storage area pertain to analytics and mobility. “The trends that will drive enterprises in 2015 will essentially be related to Consolidation, Convergence, Mobility, Analytics and Compliance,” says Vinod Ganesan, Director Platform, Solutions & Services, Hitachi Data Systems.

Software play is becoming more and more critical for data centres today. This has prompted the storage vendors to experiment with software defined storage solutions. For instance, HDS launched the next generation enterprise platform the VSP G1000 , which according to the company is a paradigm shift in Enterprise Storage. “VSP G1000

CIOs are discovering howenterprise flash radicallyimproves data center performance & efficiency VivekTyagi, Director-Business Development, Commercial Sales & support, SanDiskIndia

As flash becomes, optimised & affordable,new applications and new storage software stacks are emerging Abhijit Potnis, Director TechnologySolutions - India and SAARC,EMC MARCH, 2015

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These engineered systems are complete solutions and pretested,so can easilybe deployed,resulting in shorter time to market Amit Malhotra,

celebrating 2 5 years

THE ADOPTION OFTECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS CLOUD, MOBILITY, BIG DATAAND SOFTWARE DEFINED EVERYTHING IS DEFINING THE GROWTH OFTHE INDUSTRY,WHICH INCLUDES SERVERS, STORAGE AND NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTURE,AND THE MANAGEMENT OF DATA CENTERS

Head of Systems Business,Oracle

Manufacturers can use HPC to develop prototypes of their products Mehul Doshi, Country Manager,Data Center Solutions,Fujitsu India 42

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is built on ‘Software Defined’ framework and leverages HDS’ Storage Virtualization Operating System capabilities,” informs Ganesan.

Stressing on software gaining role in helping enterprises increase the flexibility and RoI of their existing arrays, Santhosh D’Souza, Director - Systems Engineering, NetApp India, says, “Our FlexArray software virtualizes an enterprise’s existing storage arrays to streamline operations.”

D’Souza says, “Our strategy is straight, one OS is used to manage the internal storage and work with heterogeneous infrastructure. A solution can truly be defined as software defined storage solution if, irrespective of data residence, it can help manage and move data.”

Convergence, automation, integration Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India, says, “Today’s data centers are evolving at a rapid pace and businesses are under extreme pressure to support existing application

requirements while using IT in new ways, all within a financial constraint. For most enterprises, their business depends upon a well-functioning data center and they would prefer to reduce the complexity that comes with fragmented facilities in a data center. Organisations are focusing on data consolidation which helps them overcome complexities and thus improve operations.

Though most organisations prefer the data centre consolidation route to improve their operational efficiencies, it hasn’t had a big impact in the overall market for storage and servers in India. “Today we see emergence of new businesses and enterprises across the nation. What we expect to change in the coming years is the higher adoption of converged infrastructure solutions for new data centres where the operational silos that currently exist for server, storage and networking functions will give way to unified architecture. A unified approach will help customers to better manage, scale and budget the infrastructure requirements to meet the business needs.

MARCH, 2015

STORAGE & SERVERS Gupta says, “We have widened our reach. We have deepened engagements with existing customers asking for richer IT configurations for critical, higher-end workloads. Our innovative 13th generation PowerEdge server portfolio and the recently launched FX2 servers, which are a modular offering to fit any customer workload with its converged infrastructure including compute, storage and networking, are contributing to the overall growth of the enterprise segment for Dell India.”

Flash way Another segment that is growing rapidly and thereby disrupting the storage ecosystem is Flash. IDC estimates that the all-flash array market will grow to $1.2 billion in revenue by 2015. It is being embraced by Indian companies across sectors.

“As flash becomes more pervasive, optimised, and affordable, new applications and new storage software stacks are emerging. These are built ground-up’ for solid-state. The flash storage has value in a number of implementations within and across the storage infrastructure—in storage systems, in servers, and in the network.

A percentage of flash is almost always there in the storage solution, so that it can be used in combination with some intelligent management software, which will lead to both performance and financial improvements. This trend will grow stronger in 2015,” Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions - India and SAARC, EMC According to IDC in 2014, 51% of data centres worldwide have deployed flash for improving I/O performance. In the next 12 months, the remaining 49% plan to consider it. In today’s fast-paced, “wait-less” business environment, not only must IT grapple with increased digital content, it needs to ensure realtime access to information that can potentially impact business competitiveness and bottom lines.

“Businesses today require faster and more robust storage than what most data centers can provide. To overcome the limitations of legacy storage and as inmemory solutions become a requirement EXPRESS COMPUTER

for modern applications, modern CIOs are discovering how enterprise flash radically improves data center performance and efficiency,” says Vivek Tyagi, Director, Business Development, Commercial Sales and Support, SanDisk India.

Fast Future Of late, the industry’s focus has been on bringing down the cost per TB. No doubt the disks are getting cheaper, but the sheer volume of data being churned and stored is so large that the management of these disks is getting expensive. Malhotra of Oracle says that to deal with issues like these we have to start bundling the management software. “The CIOs are not getting mindful of management bit as well, and are looking at TCO including the management cost,” he states.

Gupta of Dell says, “From our conversation with our customers, it is evident that with the advent of forces of Big Data, Mobility, Cloud and Software Defined Everything, the workloads are changing and shifting the ways in which IT infrastructure is being deployed.”

“The IT infrastructure requirement to meet these new age workloads are relevant to all the verticals such as BFSI, IT/ITeS, healthcare to name a few and we expect the growth in 2015 to be led by technology refreshes, which aided by higher adoption of these technologies in all the verticals,” he adds.

2015 will most likely see the emergence of the biggest flavour of the cloud—the hybrid. This opinion is being expressed by Potnis of EMC. He is of the view that by combining the best of the two worlds, the public and private clouds, the hybrid cloud space will see some kind of traction.

In 2015, HGST sees that helium HDDs will continue to play a more dominant role than air-filled drives in the Data Centres, as the former can provide the highest capacity per drive with more stable and reliable recording technologies. The lower power consumption of Helium-filled drives result in the highest enclosure and rack densities in the industry. Overall, these combined benefits deliver the lowest TCO per terabyte possible. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com

The trends that will drive enterprises in 2015 will essentially be related to Consolidation, Convergence, Mobility,Analytics and Compliance Vinod Ganesan, Director Platform,Solutions & Services,Hitachi Data Systems.

Atrue SDS solution should be able to manage and move data,irrespective of where it resides Santhosh D’Souza, Director - Systems,Engineering, NetApp India MARCH, 2015

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PRINTERS

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I S S U E

celebrating 2 5 years

PRINTERS

COLOUR YOUR PRINTS

BY PUPUL DUTTA Currently in a nascent stage, the colour printing industry is now gearing up for fast growth due to strong demand from sectors such as education. The slowdown that the overall IT space experienced during the last few years has not had any discernible impact on the growth rate of the colour printing sector

I

n the last year there was a recovery in the Indian peripherals and printer market, with the first quarter of 2014 witnessing a 1.5% growth in printer shipments. According to IDC, the market in 2014 was largely driven by the government sector and the medium and large enterprises.

Though the country is witnessing the wave of digitisation, some sectors like healthcare, BFSI and telecom continue to print sheets of paper. These sectors, even though they are early adopters of new technologies, remain dependent on 46

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printing solutions due to the nature of their businesses.

“The digital printing industry is seeing significant transformation with new technologies and innovative applications providing cost-effective and customised solutions,” says Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations, Xerox India.

Market watchers are of the view that in foreseeable future, offset and digital will not only co-exist, it will also complement each other, with offset taking the medium-to-longer jobs and digital performing the short-to-medium

run lengths. Interestingly, there is a renewed interest in short end printing because of the merging of variable and fixed data.

Overall Printer Market According to an IDC report, the market grew 1.5% sequentially in the first quarter of 2014 and there was shipment of 8,01,000 units. This was largely driven by the government’s buying in the laser segment, which recorded a significant sequential growth of 12.8%. But inkjet segment performed weakly due to low consumer demand across all price-band segments, resulting in a marginal growth of 1.5%.

MARCH, 2015

PRINTERS

are the two segments which clearly take the lead in so far as the printing business is concerned. Also, it is these two segments that are contributing almost one third of the business out of the total printing market

Laser MFP vs Inkjet printers

Gautam Paul, Assistant Director and Head Consumer Systems Group (CSP), Canon India, notes, “For A4 laser category, the total size is about close to 1.6 million units and in the inkjet category it is about 1.2 million units. If we split the categories for both inkjet and laser, the market size has remained nearly stagnant, it is estimated that for laser that market has remained between 1.5 million to 1.6 million units over the last 3-4 years.”

While the single function printer category has been seeing a steady decline, the multifunction printer category is growing. “Within the laser EXPRESS COMPUTER

multifunction printer category, we are witnessing growth in the Mid and High End (MAHE) segment. In Inkjet, we are witnessing significant growth from our ink efficient series,” adds Paul.

UV digital printing too has seen some market traction due to increasing demand for personalisation by customers. It is expected that digital printing on packaging material will drive big momentum in coming years through high end digital products, which can handle up to 500 GSM paper.

Nevertheless, the sector has witnessed high growth, especially in the publishing and education sector. These

The age of A4 printers is now gone. The loss of A4 printers is the gain of multifunction printers, which are also known as the MFPs. The MFPs require a little bit of extra room on the desk and they bring immense value by being versatile enough to print, copy, scan and do much more.

The MFPs produce better-quality documents, create less noise and work more quickly than their predecessors.

Their speed has doubled over the past two or three years. Operational costs are falling and manufacturers often provide standard cartridges or XL cartridges, which turn out to be more economical.

Despite the advantages, both segments have their own niche market.

Explains Manoj Kumar, Executive Vice President & CEO, Ricoh India, “A customer for laser printer may not necessarily go for MFP. This is because a MFP consumer has totally different requirements and expectations from the machine. In India about 80% of the market consists of the entry level products, which we like to refer as, the segment one products. These are the products that dominate the market and print about 1-20 PPM.” “The 21-30 PPM space has roughly 17% of the market share and 4% market share for 30 PPM crust. Laser printer is a mass product consisting of about 80% market of the segment which is for the entry level user,” adds Kumar.

According to Rajagopalan of Xerox, though there has been a major shift in demands of laser based MFPs over ink MFPs, it is expected that both the sectors will co-exist.

“Demand for MFPs is constantly on the rise. The other factors leading to MFD adoption are higher level of efficiency, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), high quality prints, ease of use MARCH, 2015

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PRINTERS

Digital printing is seeing a transformation with new technologies providing costeffective solutions Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director,Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations,Xerox India

celebrating 2 5 years and the value that the MFDs offer.

Multifunction colour laser printers possess true multitasking ability while also enabling the competitive advantage of colour. With a multifunction colour laser printer, one can create, communicate, collaborate and go green,” he adds.

As the laser MFPs continues to witness high growth, inkjet segment too is catching up. “In the inkjet segment the main growth will be in the ink efficient allin-one category. One needs to understand that the laser MFP growth is primarily because we expect the SME and the enterprise segment to consume more printers i.e on the commercial side.

However, the attraction in ink efficient series will happen because of higher consumption and demand from the home segment,” explains Paul of Canon.

Laser printers are the first choice of SOHO and education sector consumers, and they are responsible for much of the growth that we see in the market.

Customers prefer laser printers because their output is much better than that of conventional printers.

On the other hand, MFP customers are predominantly government and large enterprises. “Out of the total MFP market, about 45- 50% share is contributed by the government,” says Kumar.

The enterprise segment has emerged as an important player in this entire business. Besides, the print shops better known as jobbers typically contribute 1015 % of the printing business but in terms of volumes they churn out good numbers.

Offset versus digital printing

In India,about 80% of the market consists of the entry level products,which print 1-20 PPM Manoj Kumar, Executive Vice President & CEO, Ricoh India 48

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In India, offset printing unlike the rest of the world still continues to grow. “The digital printing business market share is growing much faster than the growth in offset printing. But the print volumes generated from digital are only 2-3% of the total offset printing market,” says Puneet Datta, Director, Marketing & Sales, Professional Printing Products Group (PPP), Canon India.

Offset and digital printing will continue to grow in near future. Digital printing is naturally growing faste. It is expected that digital printing will always

compliment offset printing and in the long run, offset is expected to remain a predominant technology to be used.

Rajagopalan of Xerox is of the view that the digital printing market is growing mainly because of the momentum that it has already generated. “With customers demanding better customisation, high quality prints and new features like photoprinting, bill printing, signages, etc., digital printing is experiencing high adoption. This by itself is an indication that the future is bright,” he says.

Xerox has more than 30% market share in this space, and the company expects to strengthen its presence further with the launch of Xerox's Versant 2100 and C60/ C70 machines.

“We believe that both the digital and offset will co-exist as they serve different purposes,” adds Rajagopalan.

Colouring the documents Though colourisation is popular these days, the uptake is not as high as it is in some advanced countries. In India this segment of the industry is still at a very nascent stage, even though high growth is predicted as it can offer high quality of printing.

“The colour printer market is very small and is less than one percent of the overall printer market. Since the market size is very small, even with high growth we don’t expect the segment to grow beyond one percent growth in the next one year,” says Paul of Canon.

However, it is expected that the colour printing consumption will increase in two segments —the commercial space in SOHO, SME and the enterprise segment.

Colour printing today is a necessity, but according to market experts, it is expected that there may be a conflict in the minds of the customers on whether to use an A3 or A4 multifunctional device.

Even while using an A4 device some of the colour printing requirement may still get attracted to the A3 MFPs. “In the second segment we see home category witnessing growth in colour printing and this will continue to grow because the home users primarily look at color printing consumption for photo, pictures and project work,” says Paul.

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PRINTERS

In the A4 laser category,the total shipment is close to 1.6 million units and in the inkjet category it is about 1.2 million units.If we split the categories for both inkjet and laser,the market size has remained nearly stagnant Gautam Paul, Assistant Director and Head Consumer Systems Group (CSP) Canon India

THE PRINTING INDUSTRY IN INDIA IS GROWING ATA RATE OF 12% PER ANNUM AND COMPRISES OF OVER 2,50,000 BIG, SMALLAND MEDIUM PRINTERS 50

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Popular printing apps Today a lot of printing apps are being developed to help customers print from anywhere at any time, thus catering to the mobile workforce of today.

Case in point is the application called ConnectKey, which is an operating system and software for Xerox multifunction printers (MFPs).

ConnectKey simplifies the work processes and caters to the needs of the mobile workforce. However, one must keep in mind the issue of security while giving the print command from anywhere. Most companies offer extra security features like McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) and Cisco’s TrustSec for normal printing environments as well as mobile printing and scanning solutions that integrate fully with cloud-based technologies and mobile devices.

McAfee ePO unifies security management through an open platform and makes risk and compliance management simpler and more successful.

Says Kumar of Ricoh, “Secured printing can be easily ensured by appropriate solutions. The solutions are installed on the devices and through them you can keep track of which user is

taking how many prints. You can also lock excess control rise using those solutions and monitoring usage.”

Most organisations now are moving towards an oriented architecture so that one has different applications which are easily integrated in ERPs. Same applies to applications for print which are integrated into ERP without occupying much of space in terms of data storage.

Digitisation and printing market With digitisation gaining ground in almost all spheres of workforce, most of the organisations today are trying to store information digitally and move to the cloud. The trend towards digitisation is surely a long-term threat to the fortunes of the colour printing industry, but the threat is not that significant, as there are sectors that simply can’t afford to stop printing.

Observes Rajagopalan, “We are devising technologies which help customers to move to a digital platform, but it is important for us to understand where printing is required – for public documentation, communication and in anything that you store digitally. There is the need to retrieve it at some point of time. So yes, printing may not be growing as content is for example, but as long as MARCH, 2015

PRINTERS

3D PRINTING 3D printing, a leap to the future of manufacturing!

Making of prosthetics or manufacturing equipments is now a click away with 3D printing.While these are one of the many benefits, the technology is constantly evolving gaining ground in many sectors...

2014 is the year when 3D printing market matured swiftly,as focus was shifted from companies that promote and manufacture the technology to its actual applicability.Alarge range of industries such as manufacturing, aviation,auto,AEC (architecture,engineering & construction) and others have found immense utility for the technology.

Autodesk is one of the companies that has foreseen its value and has taken several steps towards ensuring that the technology reaches its potential.We launched Spark,an open 3D printing platform and Ember,the 3D printer based on the platform,which sets a new benchmark for the 3D printing user experience.This made it easier for hardware manufacturers,software developers,materials scientists,product designers,and more to participate in and benefit from 3D printing technology.We also constituted a $100 million 3D printing fund,called Spark Investment Fund,to give money to startups and designers in the 3D printing space and encourage the development of a full-fledged ecosystem.

The future is undoubtedly bright for 3D printing technology. Our expectations on the future of 3D printing in coming years are:

businesses are growing and they need to communicate with other businesses, employees etc., they will print.”

Within the entire printing market which was earlier dominated by offset, everything is now moving to digital, giving people more ideas to be creative.

The education sector will continue to print due to the nature of our teaching process. The government sector too will continue to print for the time being as it will take them a lot of time to move from print to digital, given the massive amount of data that has to be taken care of.

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The popularity of 3D printing will go beyond enthusiasts and hobbyists and the technology will make its way to the average consumers’homes.This will form a gateway to a newer form of manufacturing process called distributed manufacturing where smaller,distributed digital factories located much closer to the point of demand will sprout up instead of centralised factories, massive ports and transportation networks. ◗ Advanced forms of the technology will be created namely, additive, or augmented manufacturing in which 3D printing complements existing digital processes.

Injection moulding, composites fabrication and casting are all being revolutionised right now and provide endless opportunities for the technology. ◗ Proliferation of 3D printing in medical science will result in newer and advanced methods of saving lives. Soon, hospitals will be able to create exact replica of bones, tissues and entire organs of patients resulting in limited dependence on organ transplants!

Moving on

becoming digital, there is less demand from printing solutions.

“The second challenge is the dip in printing on the commercial front; we no longer receive printed utility bills. All the utility bills are now e-mailed to the customer. Also, if we consider personal consumption of print copies those are also converted into the e-form. Thus, there is a tendency that there could be a reduction in the overall printing requirement,” notes Paul.

◗

The printing industry has evolved over the years; it has experienced all the vagaries of the marketplace. However, the market for print continues to grow and with advancement in technology . Hence the printing majors are constantly innovating.

With mobile printing, cloud, advanced security features etc., gaining in popularity, we will see more of such applications coming up in 2015. A major challenge that the industry faces is that there is an overall decline in the printing space. While the content consumption is

By Rajiv Bajaj,Head,Manufacturing,Autodesk,India and SAARC on 3D printing and its future for the manufacturing industry

pupul.dutta@expressindia.com

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celebrating 2 5 years

GETPAPERS IN ORDER, CLICK TO DIGITISE

BY PUPUL DUTTA In the competitive business environment, DMS and MPS are the most sought after technologies — they help businesses stay agile, reduce costs and boost productivity.

Yet, the adoption of these technologies is witnessing a staggered growth and companies selling such software have to navigate through a welter of challenges.

A

s organisations continue to grow, their volume of data grows with them.

Most establishments conduct their communications through digital means and they produce terabytes of data everyday. Organisations also prefer to convert physical paper to digital formats for safe keeping and easy archival and retrieval.

Document Management System (DMS) and Managed Print Services (MPS) are becoming important. Majority of the enterprises opt for both or one of 54

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these services because of the agility that it brings to the business. Since users are adopting these technologies on a global scale, several trends are emerging in the document management market, influencing decision-makers to select one vendor over another.

Another reason for rapid adoption of DMS is that paper documents are not only difficult to store, they are also perishable.

Management of paper documents entails extra man-hours and there is overall loss of efficiency. Hence companies have to go in for DMS to stay competitive.

Managed Print Services, on the other hand, help facilitate document

management, in a way that they are printed and shared in accordance with the business needs of the company. The concept of MPS is evolving everyday, as the realisation has started dawning on the companies that going digital helps the environment.

DMS market Document management system (DMS) is known to help organisations with managing their documents and assist in proper preservation and storage mechanisms. It also helps reduce document deterioration by digitising all the documents. DMS has become a key MARCH, 2015

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$

go through various documents using a single software solution. It brings an organisation closer to a paperless environment and enables a company to take a large step towards improving employee efficiency and reducing environmental impact.

Newgen estimates that the market growth will be around 10% CAGR and expects the trend to continue for the next few years. “The digital transformation wave is fast catching up with global enterprises, as they strive to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Initially, driven by compliance requirements, digitisation and process automation, DMS has now become essential for productivity and efficiency.

The nexus of forces - SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) is further fuelling this global phenomenon where almost all paper based information is getting converted into digital,” says Virender Jeet, Sr. VP Technology – Newgen Software.

Yet this technology is often neglected in many organisations. It is neglected despite the crucial role it plays in enabling operations and improving productivity and efficiency. “The reasons are evident – the ownership is split across functions, costs are not visible and impact on organisational efficiency and productivity are not measurable,” explains Vishal Awal, Executive Director, Services, Xerox South Asia .

“In order to ensure that the entire lifecycle of the documents is managed well, we advice organisations to take control of the end-to-end processes for each document, apply Six Sigma methodologies as well as processes and use only market-leading solutions in adherence to appropriate standards,” adds Awal.

Most enterprises do not realise that the cost of keeping a fragmented, decentralised document strategy are just too much. A business that is using obsolete technology may loose its competitive edge.

MPS market by end of 2014 (according to Infotrends)

Driving the momentum

Biggest adopters -government, education sector and healthcare

According to Gartner, 15% of all ECM (Enterprise Content Management) being undertaken is Document Management,

13.63% business priority for most organisations as they seek new ways of managing the barrage of information they create and share on a daily basis.

According to a Research & Markets report, the global market for DMS is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.63% over a period of 2013-2018, and verticals across businesses are likely to adopt this solution.

Some of the key verticals that are driving the DMS market include – BFSI, telecom, retail, manufacturing, FMCG, healthcare, life sciences and utilities.

Markets are always driven by the need of the businesses to become efficient and more productive. DMS helps employees to EXPRESS COMPUTER

of expected growth in DMS over a period of 2013-2018

Biggest adopters of DMS - BFSI, IT/ITeS, retail and healthcare

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There is a need to move from tools focused on our individual abilities to tools that empower social productivity Alok Lall, Director - Microsoft Office Division

With demand for faster decision making,organisations are aiming for cost reduction,and improved turnaround time Bhaskar Joshi, Senior Marketing Manager- Office Imaging Solutions Division,Canon 56

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celebrating 2 5 years with BFSI, IT/ITeS, retail and healthcare being the greatest adopters. The research and consultancy firm further adds that in future, the industry will witness more and more enterprises outsourcing their document management needs to leading global players like Microsoft, Canon, Xerox etc., for whom it is a core business.

Therefore, the major growth driver for the printing and document industry is the increasing need for effective document management and outsourcing services that will manage end-to-end document workflows in an organisation. “Many enterprises are moving well beyond the basic uses of DMS (such as secure file storage in organised libraries) to tackle deeper business requirements that need strong process efficiency as well. This has led organisations to regard DMS as an environment for solutions that fit their business needs,” says Awal of Xerox.

A key factor that is driving the adoption of DMS is that it is easy to use and supports effortless information sharing and retrieval. Going paperless has now become imperative for today's organisations as they look to create leaner and more efficient operations as well as cross functional resource optimisation. In light of this emerging trend the future augurs well for the DMS market.

“The demand for reliable and costeffective DMS platforms, which can provide organisations with stable growth capabilities will be on the rise in the coming years. Advanced document management systems with built-in social collaboration capabilities that allow businesses to manage and leverage critical information arising out of social space will be highly successful,” explains Fahmida Ozair, CEO, SoftAge. Capturing the information context and leveraging it to make informed business decisions will be another critical feature of successful document management systems. While there is a lot of momentum in the market for DMS solutions, there are also challenges in the growth of the same.

We can majorly base these challenges on pure apprehensions of CIOs to move to a digital way of storing their documents.

“Some organisations still have apprehensions in discontinuing their

traditional ways of work as they look at technology with an alien eye. Change management is a big issue in such organisations,” says Jeet.

Alok Lall, Director, Microsoft - Office Division, says, “There is a need to educate the market on DMS solutions. Many inmarket solutions provide limited amount of coverage for content, something potential buyers may not be fully aware of.”

Another hurdle for DMS solution is the ‘legacy systems’ that have been deployed in organisations for decades. End users of these legacy systems are highly skeptical about advanced DMS platforms as they are not willing to change their age-old style of working.

User demands When it comes to catering to user demands, most of them centre around solutions that can help organisations manage the lifecycle of their information, end to end. Further, in the mobile-first, cloud first world, businesses must not only manage their information arsenal, they must also make it available for users on the go. Remote workers must be able to access files from anywhere, anytime. “Along with being mobile-friendly, businesses want DMSs that do not add to their capital expense while integrating easily with incumbent systems and solutions. They should also help improve internal collaboration, must be easy to use, and be more mobile friendly,” notes Lall of Microsoft.

Besides these, some of the key deciding factors in regard to document management solutions are integration and interoperability, innovation in the solution, credibility of the vendor and the solution thus provided, affordability, etc.

“Integration and the ability to interoperate with existing IT infrastructures has emerged as a big deciding factor for most IT procurements.

Enterprises, as they scale up, need myriad applications to balance and run their business. Therefore, enterprise leaders and IT procurement decision makers are always keen on technology that has proven integration and interoperability capabilities,” explains Jeet of Newgen.

Organisations look for product companies that deliver innovative MARCH, 2015

DMS AND MPS

Driven bycompliance requirements, digitisation and process automation have become essential for efficiency Virender Jeet, Sr.VPTechnology – Newgen Software

THE GLOBAL MARKET FOR DMS IS EXPECTED TO GROWATA CAGR OF 13.63% OVER A PERIOD OF 2013-2018,AND VERTICALS ACROSS BUSINESSES ARE LIKELYTO ADOPTTHIS SOLUTION. solutions to clients at a rapid pace. They prefer vendors that can upgrade faster to new technologies. The importance of synchronised processes and the impact they have on services delivered to endcustomers cannot be overlooked. No matter what business or service an enterprise deals in, DMS platforms and solutions can create seamless processes and collaborative management of digital assets.

Go-to-market strategy Most companies that offer DMS solution are focusing on tools that empower social productivity. Says Microsoft's Lall, “We believe that there is a need to move from tools focused on our individual abilities to tools that empower social productivity. We will help our customers in this transformation by providing ubiquitous EXPRESS COMPUTER

collaboration, which is ubiquitous in terms of device, the pervasive nature of the cloud, and enterprise social networking.”

Xerox on the other hand brings to the plate solutions that streamline the entire value chain. “As part of the business transformation Xerox underwent recently, the company’s business groups were aligned into Services and Technology & Channels group (T&C). Xerox does not concentrate on price, its focus is on value addition,” says Awal. Other organisations like Newgen are focusing on new markets like America. They are also expanding their partner ecosystem for moving into new markets across the globe.

Predictions for 2015 Given the fact that everything is going mobile these days, the world of DMS can’t stay unaffected. With mobile devices being

Manyenterprises are moving well beyond the basic uses of DMS to tackle deeper business requirements Vishal Awal, Executive Director,Services, Xerox South Asia MARCH, 2015

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In comparison to other developed markets,AsiaPacific region's MPS market is growing at 17-20% and the global average growth rate is 10-12% Manoj Kumar, Executive Vice President & CEO, Ricoh India

used more for business communication, there has been a huge rush in the amount of documents stored, transferred and even edited through them. It is expected that this year some of the applications will move to the mobile.

The pervasiveness of social media has made it an indispensable component of business strategy. Smart IT frameworks will facilitate collaborative work environment by leveraging social media platform to engage with the customers and other external stakeholders.

Analytics is another area expected to become part of the DMS offering soon.

Expanding the scope of process analytics to encompass predictive analytics tools along with real-time Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) within the IT framework is resulting in enhanced operational intelligence, improved visibility and business responsiveness and this is expected to pick up soon in the DMS space.

Like it is the case in all other sectors, cloud has forced enterprises to rethink the way they work. Data is now overflowing out of the enterprises through emailed copies of files, copies of files saved to the cloud and so on. The companies are pushed to focus on data security and how best to save, share and collaborate on enterprise content. Hence we will see the trend of "outsourcing", and it is here that cloud is expected to play an increasingly important role.

Managed Print Service

THE MARKET SIZE FOR MANAGED PRINT SERVICES IN INDIAWILL EXCEED $275 MILLION BY 2014.

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With changing times, the managed print service (MPS) market too continues to evolve. MPS is no longer restricted to device consolidation, it now facilitates efficiency in business and paperdependent processes. While many organisations are still in the early stages of implementing MPS, according to some market reports about 20% of the organisations are planning to use MPS within the next year, reflecting the growing maturity of the market.

Further, as more and more businesses enter the second and third phases of their MPS engagements, expanded services and solutions that support broader process automation initiatives are proving to be key differentiators amongst the

leading MPS providers.

MPS market According to a study by Infotrends, the market size for managed print services in India will exceed $275 million by 2014.

Ricoh on the other hand projects a growth rate of 30% of the overall MPS market in India, making it one of the fastest growing MPS markets globally.

“In comparison to other developed markets, Asia-Pacific region's MPS market is growing at 17-20% and the global average growth rate is 10-12%,” says Manoj Kumar, Executive Vice President & CEO, Ricoh India.

The MPS segment has gained momentum in the last few years as enterprises have started transitioning from CapEx to OpEx business mode of printing. BFSI and telecom, being early adopters, are expected to continue to be the dominant spenders.

Drivers of market Both MPS and DMS are being adopted by government, education sector and healthcare, industries, as all of them require a smart office. They understand the need of reducing costs and optimising resources so that they can build higher competitiveness for the organisation.

“With an increasing demand for faster decision making, organisations are aiming for cost reduction, improved turnaround time and serviceability. They are looking for value driven solutions for continuous business process improvements within corporate and government and hence, there is a high demand for managed integration of office functions. Bridging this gap, is where office automation acts as an integral part to Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry and is playing a vital role in the government and corporate sector today,” says Bhaskar Joshi, Senior Marketing Manager- Office Imaging Solutions Division, Canon.

The acceptance of the cloud-based MPS model is increasing at a tremendous pace. There appears to be a decent market for managed cloud services for printing in SMEs in the near future and this is contributing in the growth of this market enormously.

MARCH, 2015

DMS AND MPS Go-to-market strategies According to Kumar of Ricoh, the key future strategies will revolve around development of solutions that help customers to have a uniform and secure print environment. It will enrich user experience while being easy to use and enabling mobile printing. Customers today are looking at one vendor who can manage their complete print infrastructure.

Joshi of Canon believes that vendors need to aggressively look at educating their customers and reach out to CIOs to spread awareness about the benefits of MPS. “We at Canon believe that CIOs today have larger role and need to be sensitised about the issues and the need to have effective MPS. Canon works towards building awareness amongst CIOs on the importance of adequately managed print fleet. Lack of the right printing facilities affects the company’s ability to adopt to change in addition to constant management and maintenance,” he adds.

Integrating DMS and MPS Many enterprises today prefer to have a partner who will provide both MPS and DMS services, although in today’s scenario these services are provided by different vendors. According to Gartner, organisations spend approximately 1-3% of their annual revenue on print activities and the document output costs are rising at around 30% per annum.

Companies have started realising that printing is one of the few remaining areas of IT spending where substantial savings can be realised with little risk.

Printing cannot be neglected as the printed information adds values to the business by supporting the brand and helping to create sales opportunities.

Though print management is ‘the last grey area of uncontrolled costs’, if handled efficiently and strategically by companies there are huge opportunities wherein they can save up to 30% of these costs with effectively managed document services.

Companies are realising the need of domain experts for managing processes and activities more effectively and that is EXPRESS COMPUTER

CASE STUDY: MINDTREE – MICROSOFTSHAREPOINT

Mindtree rides on Microsoft's SharePoint to better connect with its employees

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indTree created PeopleHub, a unified corporate intranet portal, using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.This intuitive portal seamlessly brings together intranet transactions and knowledge management content all at one place for the benefit of the knowledge worker. MindTree’s knowledge workers now have a single access point to all application content, transactions, and information sources.

The portal offers a personalised user experience and is integrated with SAP and knowledge management applications. It “crawls”about 8-10 TB of data and has an average of 1,500 hits per day. In addition, the integration with 'Fast Search' data search technology helps deliver faster, accurate, and more relevant information to employees. Response time has now reduced to 2-3 seconds and enhanced social networking capabilities create a sense of community and encourage cross-unit collaboration.

why outsourcing has gained importance in document management and other spaces. “Enterprises are looking at saving costs by shifting from capex to opex models and bringing in operational excellence and we feel one of the major areas where this can be implemented is print infrastructure,” says Joshi.

Joshi asserts that today the first thing on a CIO’s mind is paper management for going green. “CIOs are focussed on having paperless office and streamlining of workflow. They want optimisation of storage, readiness and accuracy of data and security. Digital colour printing is also on their radar,” he adds.

According to E&Y, MPS is being looked at as a means of cutting print cost and keeping the content secure. A report from Ernst & Young puts it quite well - “For this, the workflows will need

to be automated, and we will see document management solutions being integrated with MPS.” The linkages of documents and workflows, coupled with print suppression measures via increased digitisation, and advanced analytics, mobile and cloud printing, help the enterprises unleash an extra layer of productivity. Advanced MIS capabilities provide insights that help the clients gain visibility and control over their print infrastructure, thereby effectively managing the most vital asset for the enterprises – information.

In times to come, we are going to see continued movement towards more integrated work flow solutions that will blur the lines between MPS and basic business process outsourcing. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com

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COLUMN

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n today’s hyper-competitive telecom landscape, Information Technology has the power to act as a true differentiator for the business. But to make a positive difference, IT has to be an equal stakeholder in the creation of business value. In other words, it has to be integral to the system that leads to the customer’s overall experience with the telecom service provider. In other words, for driving competitiveness, the CIO has to be the enabler of superior customer experience.

Information Technology can be seen as the foundation on which the systems for delivering seamless customer experience stand. Only IT has the ability to reach out to the bottom of the pyramid and define systems to measure experience parameters at different stages of the customer’s life cycle, and then correlate them for delivering personalised support require big data analytics to be institutionalised. The CIO must create the right avenues for these trends to be impeccably ingrained into the IT ecosystem.

Today the focus is not on customer acquisition, but on customer retention.

Retaining a customer requires you to differentiate your offering from that of the rest. This in turn means providing a customised experience to each customer— the experience has to be tailored to his/her preferences. This is only possible through meaningful analysis of customer behaviour, which in turn is achievable only through advanced analytics.

With its ability to glean and respond to customer insights in real-time, big data is the real catalyst for effective customer engagement. Businesses, whether small or large, are churning huge amounts of data at an unprecedented rate from a multitude of resources - posts to social media sites, application downloads, digital pictures and video uploads, mobile GPS signals, etc. The capability of collating relevant data from these sources and converting the same into actionable business insights with the aim 60

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ASHISH PACHORY, CIO, TATA TELESERVICES

LEVERAGING BIG DATAFOR DIFFERENTIATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices, explains how the insights from big data analytics can help enterprises achieve competitive edge and discover new business opportunities

of improving efficiency and customer experience is at the heart of big data.

A recent academic research found that companies that have incorporated data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates 5% to 6% higher than those of their peers. The reason is simple: the more information a brand has on their consumer, the better it is able to predict their buying behaviour and customise its offerings, fostering customer trust and leading to an increased chance of sale.

The technology is particularly compelling for challengers operating in highly competitive markets. Today we are able to draw insights and preferences on all aspects of our customers’ behaviour against hundreds of different criteria ranging from handset type and data usage, to re-charge preferences and roaming activation. We can translate this into a personalised experience – not merely covering the subscription package itself – but all aspects of engagement from tailored offers to personalised customer support.

A recent study has claimed that 96% of the companies surveyed admitted that they could do more with big data and make better use of analytics in their organisation.

Indian companies are at different levels of data maturity — some companies are struggling to visualise their data, while others are using predictive models and realtime analytics to drive decisions. Agile analytics and campaign management tools used by new generation analytics companies have made the technology affordable for Indian companies, strengthening the promise of greater big data integration by businesses in the future.

Big data can be the lifeline for any business. It speaks of history, patterns and structures of organisations that are constantly generating information.

Transforming this data into actionable insights can help gain a new perspectives, fix what is wrong and discover new opportunities for enabling businesses to become bigger and more profitable.

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DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS

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DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS

celebrating 2 5 years

DATACENTER INDUSTRY: POISED FOR RAPID GROWTH

BY MOHD UJALEY The movement towards cloud computing, the rise of several content-heavy applications, and the exceptional demand for storage space, are some of the factors that are leading to the rapid growth of the data center segment

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oday the need to increase storage capacity has become a kind of ‘work in progress’ for every major enterprise, there is a continuous rise in the numbers of data hungry customers and applications, there is optimism around cloud and there is the explosion of big data—hence it should come as no surprise that the CIOs and CTOs are always looking for new places where massive amounts of data can be stored and utilised with efficiency and security.

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center market has every reason to be upbeat about the prospects for the industry.

In line with the global trends, the Indian data center market is buoyed by the positive sentiments in the economy and the strong resurgence of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government.

According to research firm Gartner, Indian data center infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, will see a 5.4 % increase to $2.03 billion in 2015.

Cloud, convergence, virtualization propelling demand As the Indian economy is expected to grow at a healthy pace this year, the data center companies are keen on setting up their infrastructure here. The companies are also encouraged by the programmes like Digital India and Make in India that have been announce by the government.

These programmes can lead to the generation of huge amounts of data, which will further propel the demand for data center solutions.

“The Indian data center market is poised for healthy growth due to demand coming from sectors such as BFSI, MARCH, 2015

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Telecom, IT and Social Media. Apart from these sectorial influences, various eGovernance initiatives of center and state governments are also fuelling the demand,” says Vinod Ganesan, Director – Platform Solutions & Services Hitachi Data Systems, India.

Echoing the positive sentiments prevailing around Indian economy, Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India, ME and SEA at Array Networks, says “Demand is going to be robust for data center solutions in the years to come.

Data centers offer enterprises and cloud service providers a new level of flexibility for deploying automated, softwareEXPRESS COMPUTER

driven and scalable networks.” He adds that the BFSI, telecom, service providers and eGovernance sector are driving the demand as they are constantly looking for quality, continuity and agility in their data centers.

While large financial institutions, telecom providers and e-commerce giants are building in-house data center for meeting their data storage needs, the pure-play data center hosting providers are catering to the demand from small and midsize businesses (SMB).

Ashish Pachory, Chief Information Officer (CIO), Tata Teleservices, is of the view that the SMB segment will propel

the growth for enterprise infrastructure solutions. He goes on to say that enterprise networking will serve as the biggest segment with revenue expected to reach $948 million in 2015. “Data center consolidation and virtualisation, along with cloud and mobility, will be the key trends influencing network purchases,” adds Pachory.

With mobile telephony witnessing unparalleled growth in number of users, auction of spectrum round the corner and National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) being rapidly rolled out, the demand for data center solutions and data center infrastructure will grow enormously. Companies such as IBM, HP, Teradata, Oracle, SAP, EMC, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, VMware, Cisco, Avayay are seeing good business potential in India. During his recent visit to India, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft Corp, Satya Nadella, announced that the company will set up a local data center in India. Microsoft has decided to spend Rs 1400 crore on setting up three data centers in Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai.

Other players have also shown keen interest in setting up data centers in India. IBM has already launched a 30000 sq. ft. cloud center in Airoli, Mumbai and plans to add more such centers. During his visit to India, the Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, indicated that Amazon may set up its data center in India.

Shrirang Deshpande, Country Head – Data Center Business, Emerson Network Power, India, says, “The market opportunity for data center industry in India continues to mature with the growing prevalence of 3G, broadband connectivity and emergence of disruptive technologies like cloud and virtualisation. It is obvious that the data center market in India is maturing and the industry expects better opportunities in 2015.”

Optimising the Data Center The technology has disruptively changed the overall scenario of data centers. Major application vendors are moving their solutions to public, private or hybrid cloud. The data centers are MARCH, 2015

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Various eGovernance initiatives of center and state governments are fueling demand for data center in India Vinod Ganesan, Director – Platform Solutions & Services Hitachi Data Systems,India

Data Centers offer enterprises and cloud service providers a new level of flexibilityfor deploying automated, software driven and scalable networks Shibu Paul, Regional Sales Director – India,ME and SEA, ArrayNetworks.

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celebrating 2 5 years also being used by enterprises to combine their cloud-based services such as analytics, collaboration, and communication to better understand and target their customers. Emerson Power Network, a major player in this segment, predicts that growing number of organisations will be managing hybrid environments in which on-premise IT resources are supplemented with strategic use of cloud and co-location services to enhance utilisation, resiliency and flexibility.

“As far as cloud is concerned, many of the service providers have started rolling it out. Some of them are offering cloud services to the general public, to gain more mind share with the endconsumers. Many enterprises have implemented the cloud architecture, though they have kept it as private.

Making it public will take some more time as many enterprises are concerned about issues of accessibility, availability and security,” says Alamuri Sitaramaiah – MD India & SAARC CommScope.

Enterprises are looking for architectures, which are simple, flexible, and easy to integrate with legacy systems. A report on Data Center Services by IBM articulates that the software defined environment (SDE) in which server, storage, network and facilities resources are automatically provisioned and configured by software programmed to understand and adapt decisions to the requirements of each workload in real time seems to be the way forward.

Other key forerunner in technology space has been virtualisation – especially in data center applications. This has helped in optimising the space, in terms of the hardware, storage, better power and cooling usage. “More and more customers are now a days moving towards virtualised environments, they are experimenting with the cloud method of consumption of IT” says Amod Ranade, General Manager, Schneider Electric IT Business, India.

CommScope’s Sitaramaiah points out that large migration to cloud based architectures is also leading to deployment of more fibre optic cabling

systems in the data center and the emphasis has been to optimise and save on power and to lower the PUE. He further says that more and more information is being sought for Data Center Infrastructure Management Solutions. “Increasingly Cat6a UTP and OM4 fibre optic cabling systems are being specified for supporting 10G to servers and 40G / 100G in backbones,” adds Sitaramaiah.

Challenges: Energy, Security and Sovereignty Energy, security and the issues related to sovereignty are the key challenges that the industry faces today. The lack of regular power supply is a major issue that the data center companies face in India. Data centers are mainly concentrated in Tier-1 cities and the power crunch is forcing the data centers to run on expensive diesel powered generators. In many cases, the data centers start operations before their buildings are fully completed for utilisation. The contract power demand is often based on existing operations and as they expand, the lack of power infrastructure for increased capacity doesn’t get met. This prevents the data center companies from expanding. So the data centers have to resort to technologies like virtualisation, which allow them to use their existing assets to a higher utilisation level to counter such issues.

“A primary concern for most data center operators in the country is to ensure business continuity with a focus on issues such as reducing energy consumption, manageability, scalability, efficiency and security in the datacenter,” says Shrirang Deshpande of Emerson Network Power, India.

Schneider Electric’s Amod Ranade is of the view that energy efficiency is an important concern for the industry. He points out that there has been focus on energy efficiency in India and lot of innovation is happening around higher efficiency of UPS system, air conditioning system and the innovative ideas for using external ambiance for cooling the data center.

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DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS

Data Center consolidation and virtualization,along with cloud and mobility,will be the keytrends influencing networkpurchases Ashish Pachory,

THE INDIAN DATA CENTER MARKET IS BUOYED BYTHE POSITIVE SENTIMENTS IN THE ECONOMYAND THE STRONG RESURGENCE OF GROWTH-RELATED PROJECTS ACROSS VERTICALS SUCH AS BANKING, INSURANCE,TELECOM AND THE GOVERNMENT. Another key concern for the industry is the security of the data and the data center. The second is comparatively easier to manage, but the security of the data is dependent on a lot of external factors and is not that easy to manage.

Array Networks’s Shibu Paul is of the views that enterprises should ensure proper data isolation and storage segregation to secure their sensitive data; else data center might put entire data at risk. “As core and business critical applications grow in numbers, application delivery and performance becomes very critical for data center solutions,” adds Paul.

We have been having lot of discussion regarding the ownership of the data.

There are no clear answers to the question — who governs the data? Is it EXPRESS COMPUTER

the law of the country in which data center is located? Or law of the country in which data center provider is based?

Many government departments are creating their own data centers in India to ensure that the critical government data does not go into the hands of any foreign country.

Impact of Make in India Government of India has been taking lot of initiatives to promote the country as a favourable investment destination.

Effort is being made to give impetus to manufacturing within India. The“Make in India” initiative has the potential to reinvigorate electronics manufacturing in India. Amod Ranade of Schneider Electric says that we have a huge R&D facility in India and we take pride in

Chief Information Officer (CIO),Tata Teleservices

Customer are moving towards virtualized environment an experimenting with cloud method of consumption of IT Amod Ranade, General Manager,Schneider Electric IT Business,India MARCH, 2015

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Migration to cloud based architecture is leading to deployment of fibre optic cabling systems in the data center Alamuri Sitaramaiah, MD India & SAARC,CommScope

WITH MOBILE TELEPHONYWITNESSING UNPARALLELED GROWTH IN NUMBER OF USERS,AUCTION OF SPECTRUM ROUND THE CORNER AND NATIONAL OPTICAL FIBRE NETWORK (NOFN) BEING RAPIDLY ROLLED OUT,THE DEMAND FOR DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS AND DATA CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE WILL GROW ENORMOUSLY.

Concern for most data center operators is to ensure business continuitywith a focus on reducing energy consumption, manageabilityand security Shrirang Deshpande, Country Head - Data Center Business, Emerson Network Power,India 66

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designing and developing solutions and products that keep in mind the unique and specific requirements of Indian customers as well as the local market.

Shibu Paul of Array Networks points out that any country that has moved out of their regular growth tangent has invested and executed an effective manufacturing policy. He goes on to says that the current government’s initiative is in similar outline. “Current contribution of manufacturing to overall GDP is below par when compared to other nations. Moreover in an economy, the labour and skilled workers are available in plenty to work on these initiatives that will have a farfetched effect on a country’s prosperity,” adds Paul.

Conducive regulatory framework and availability of optimal infrastructure are basic to doing business for domestic as well as multi-national companies.

Initiatives such as Make in India can fetch the real benefit, if India is able to address these concerns. Data center market across the globe is huge and India can aspire to be a data center hub in the future.

Future looks uprising With demand coming from various sectors and the big players globalising their operation, the future of the data center market in India seems to be on the rise. In the year 2014, India has seen some announcements by Microsoft and IBM. According to industry players, the MARCH, 2015

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market is likely to see more maturity in 2015. According to Ashish Pachory of Tata Teleservices, Indian enterprises will be focusing on building intelligent data centers that will be optimising existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities. “The current adoption will lead to increased attention to newer trends such as public cloud, and integrated systems,” adds Pachory.

Shibu Paul of Array Networks is of the views that MNC players are heading towards data center space and are largely focused on cloud storage and data center solutions in order to accomplish secure applications.

“Currently it is more influenced by local players, but 2015 will see many MNC’s starting their services. This will create a very competitive scenario,” says Paul.

According to Gartner, the data center and co-location business in India is expected to touch $ 1.3 billion which is being fuelled by increased outsourcing of data center requirements by banks and Government.

Sitaramaiah of SAARC CommScope, says, “From a cloud data center perspective, 2014 has seen a couple of investments and this segment of the DC market should grow in 2015.” He is of the view that the third party multi-tenanted data centers (MTDC) segment (e.g.

Netmagic) can lead the growth in 2015, while Carrier MTDCs are growing though at a very small pace. “All carriers seem to have big plans for both Telco and Enterprise Data Centers in 2015, with Telco DCs primarily coming from migration to 4G and LTE networks by the carriers,” adds Sitaramaiah.

“With increasing numbers of users coming online and the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative, we believe that offering data center operators the agility to respond to change with innovative solutions and cost, as well as energy efficient DC infrastructure will drive the growth engine for most players in this segment in 2015,” concludes Shrirang Deshpande of Emerson Network Power, India.

GROWING DATA CENTER INDUSTRY

$2.03Bn

Indian data center infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, will see a 5.4 percent increase to $2.03 billion in 2015. (Source: Garnter India) The Indian data center market is buoyed by the positive sentiments in the economy and the strong resurgence of growth-related projects across verticals such as banking, insurance, telecom and the government.

30000 sq. ft.

IBM has already launched a 30000 sq. ft. cloud center in Airoli, Mumbai and plans to add more such centers.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Microsoft Corp, SATYA NADELLA, announced that the company will set up a local data center in India. Microsoft has decided to spend Rs 1400 crore on setting up three data centers in Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai.

DRIVING FORCE BFSI, Telecom, service providers and eGovernance sector are driving the demand

$948mn ENTERPRISE NETWORKING WILL SERVE AS THE BIGGEST SEGMENT WITH REVENUE EXPECTED TO REACH $948 MILLION IN 2015 (GARTNER)

mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

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recently heard a management expert talk about a business fundamental that many of us are guilty of overlooking from time to time. Your company might have the best vision in the world. But without the proper execution, a vision is just a vision.

The advice – that there essentially is no vision when there is no execution – is ideally suited, I think, to enterprises trying to figure out how best to implement a Cloud programme.

According to a recent study which polled 300 executives of large global organisations. In this study, “Simplify and Innovate the Way You Consume the Cloud,” 77 % of respondents said that they are using or planning to use IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS for a wide range of business applications in the next two years. Their applications truly run the gamut; they include Web content and experience management, enterprise management software, BI software, business process management, enterprise content management, and industry-specific processes.

Therein lies a common issue: consolidating those applications into an easy-to-use interface. Those same executives surveyed face the challenge of how best to execute on an appropriate and truly effective Cloud programme. For example, 83 % of the respondents said they are struggling to bring together all their Cloud services to traditional IT. With so many options, it can become a challenge to settle on the right course of action – especially if you’re relatively “immature” when it comes to the rapidly evolving Cloud space.

How best to assess your organisational maturity when it comes to the Cloud?

Well, for starters, is your company in the following group of relative newcomers to the Cloud? That is, just 17 % of the executives surveyed think that all assets are available in one self-service environment. Only 27 % of them think that the level of self-service and transparency is sufficient. If you and your organisation 68

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VISHNU BHAT, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & GLOBAL HEAD, CLOUD & INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES, INFOSYS

ASSESSING CLOUD MATURITY No longer does a company need to hope that its in-house IT staff is keeping up with the rapid evolution of the Cloud environment.

A holistic hub enables the rapid creation, adoption, and governance of Cloud services across any ecosystem.

fall within either or both of these groups, then it’s time, I think, to choose the Cloud ecosystem that best improves the experience of your customers.

I recommend making customer service your company’s top priority and then building a comprehensive Cloud strategy around it. The advantage of this strategy is that you have an array of customers. First there are the external customers. But your internal business stakeholders are also your customers.

That’s why it’s vital to work with the right partner to define and build a robust Cloud ecosystem for those needs.

Okay, so suppose you get past that very important starting point. Your maturity level vis-à-vis the Cloud has skyrocketed.

But there’s still relatively a lot to learn.

For example, in a recent study, executives at 66 % of companies polled said they are either “concerned” or “very concerned” about the complexity involved in managing and governing a hybrid cloud environment. The reason is mainly that because up until recently, organisations adopted Cloud programmes in a very ad hoc fashion. Sometimes their in-house IT departments couldn’t keep up with those developments.

If an organisation is uncertain about how to make the Cloud a part of its customer-facing strategy, then it’s time for a Cloud ecosystem integrator that can orchestrate all of the functions and programs across the Cloud environments. A Cloud ecosystem hub, for example, is a solution that provides a single window that helps enterprises build, manage, and govern a unified hybrid Cloud environment. A holistic hub enables the rapid creation, adoption, and governance of Cloud services across any ecosystem.

It’s safe to say that when an enterprise is using the Cloud with confidence, then it has become a part of its strategic arsenal.

That’s why having a partner to help integrate all aspects of the Cloud is a vital part of your organisation’s technology journey.

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DISASTER RECOVERY SOLUTIONS

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DISASTER RECOVERY SOLUTIONS

DISASTER RECOVERY:

MAINTAINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY

BY MOHD UJALEY At the core of disaster recovery is the fact that a copy of the mission critical data owned by the enterprise is kept at a different location. A DR solution must not only enable the business to recover from any natural or manmade disaster quickly, it should also be cost effective

D

isaster recovery is a system of saving data in case an unexpected disaster strikes. There can be any number of negative events that can lead to disruption in the services that are being provided by any data center. But nowadays the consumers have come to expect flawless 24/7 service and failure of a data center, even for a few hours, is simply not an option.

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irreversible damage to the future prospects of the business. Hence disaster recovery (DR) technologies, which help enterprises in dealing with a broad range of disruption scenarios such as cyber attacks, fire, power-cut, riots, terrorist attack, cyclone, earthquake, etc., are of critical importance.

In an increasingly interconnected world that thrives by crunching massive amounts of data, it is obvious that the demand for disaster recovery solutions will have no limits. Industries such as banking, insurance, retail, telecom, eGovernance, and manufacturing are highly dependent on DR technologies.

The data center, converged infrastructure and storage segments are all set to grow at a healthy pace in the current year, and this will naturally lead to growth in the demand for disaster recovery solutions. According to Gartner, disaster recovery solutions are typically 4% of the data center budget and this share can go as high as 6-8% in a country like India where large numbers of disaster recovery projects are occurring. Hence, the DR solutions market size in India is expected to be on the high side for the year 2015 at 6-8% of the data center spend, totalling $125$160 million.

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lose the connect with IT. “Like their global counterparts, the Indian enterprise too are conducting 24x7 operation. Day or night, their data center has to keep working with the same seamless efficiency,” adds D’Souza.

As the dependence on the IT systems has continues to rise, it also leads to greater demand for DR solutions.

“Organisations are investing in modern technologies in order to strengthen their business across verticals and regions, which is one of the reasons for enhanced focus on DR solutions,” says Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, India, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. He also says that with government giving impetus to Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives, the need for DR solution will increase further in coming years.

Technology: Banking on DRaaS

Disaster Recovery Solution: Not an afterthought anymore The major sectors that are propelling demand for disaster recovery solutions are banking, government, telecom, IT/ITeS, and advent of affordable cloud services. “DR solutions have always been deployed by banking, government/PSU and large manufacturing organisations for the past few years. We also see a significant rise in the demand for DR in case of eGovernance projects,” says Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, CoFounder & CEO, Sanovi Technologies.

Also, DR solutions have become a key differentiator for business continuity and EXPRESS COMPUTER

agility. Santhosh D’Souza, Director – Systems Engineering, NetApp India, is of the view that DR solutions have become a standard practice across most industry verticals. For financial services, communication & media, retails, citizen services, IT/ITeS industries, business continuance is absolutely critical. These companies cannot afford to lose customer data under any circumstances.

D’Souza is of the view that the enterprises are highly dependent on IT for delivering their products and services to their consumers, and for conducting interactions within the organisational ecosystem. They simply can’t afford to

While there is no dearth of awareness about the necessity of having DR solutions, the actual implementation of such systems is often inadequate, primarily due to the paucity of funds.

Especially the small medium businesses (SMBs) face such financial issues and they fail to have an effective DR, leading to a situation where their business faces the constant thread of outage.

To address the challenge of affordable pricing, SMBs are banking on cloud service for disaster recovery. This is also known as DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service. A DRaaS offering provides an architect to implement the solution, monitors and manages the data, and connects customers to the necessary resources in emergency situations. This could be a great benefit for many enterprises that don’t have the experience or the capital to invest in the talent, which is necessary for developing a comprehensive in-house plan for DR. In the eventuality when there is a data center failure, the customers would have the disaster recovery experts available round the clock to get the systems running smoothly in quick time.

“A cloud-based DR solution can significantly reduce the complexity and also control the cost of maintaining a server, networking, and data center MARCH, 2015

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There is a significant rise in the demand for DR for eGovernance projects Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, Co-Founder & CEO,Sanovi Technologies.

THERE IS STRONGER MOVEMENTTOWARDS DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE INTO CLOUD (DRAAS). IN FACT,THIS IS THE GLOBAL TREND—DR FOR ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS ARE INCREASINGLY BEING PUT IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD,WHICH IS MANAGED BYAMAZON OR THE LOCAL CLOUD PROVIDER.

DR solutions have become a standard practice across most industry verticals.

Companies cannot afford to lose customer data under any circumstances Santhosh D’Souza, Director – Systems Engineering, NetApp India.

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infrastructure,” says Prashant Gupta of Verizon Enterprise Solutions. He points out that more businesses are examining cloud-based disaster recovery solutions as technology service providers are developing new offerings designed to fit the specifications and budgets of nearly any customer.

Prashant Gupta is also of the view that for IT BPO sector, it is a good opportunity to leverage the cloud based DR servers rather than invest in a DR infrastructure.

“Due to the cost related advantages that it offers, cloud is being looked at by organisations across the world. The Indian organisations are also opting for cloud. We are seeing lot of demand from the e-commerce companies in India,” adds Gupta. “DR becomes affordable when it is deployed in the cloud.”

Recovery as Service (RaaS) is the newest offering that managed service

providers and cloud service providers are offering, as an alternative to the expensive on-premise DR solutions. “With RaaS, the upfront cost of DR has become cheaper to a very large extent. Several SMB customers are now deploying cloud based DR solutions for their critical systems,” says Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti of Sanovi Technologies.

The global RaaS report by Markets and Markets predicts that RaaS will be a $5.8 billion market by the year 2018, growing at a CAGR of 54 percent. Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti points out that we are seeing initial trends in India too in this direction where several customers are evaluating and adopting RaaS solutions in the recent 6-9 months.

Outsourcing DR Solution “Unless a business is willing and able to devote significant money and time to build MARCH, 2015

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and operate a backup site, outsourcing a DR solution would be the only viable alternative,” says Prashant Gupta of Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

The cost of implementation is usually low since the investment in hardware is small or non-existent. Also, the ability to increase and decrease the computational and storage related resources allows the business to effectively scale-up as needed. This allows them to avoid unnecessary expenditures. Above all, businesses can completely eliminate the cost of leasing, owning, and maintaining real estate to house the data at an additional location with a cloud-based DR solution. “We are seeing increasing number of requests for application centric DR solutions so that data recovery is guaranteed and consistent.

This is generally not possible with traditional solutions that are storage or host driven,” says Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti of Sanovi Technology.

Pulamarasetti also points out that the enterprises are deploying mixture of standard and customer solutions, whereas in RaaS, there is a push to standardise and keep the DR solution simple. This will enable Service Providers to easily deliver across hundreds of customers in a short span of time. For private clouds being deployed by enterprises, there is again a need for standardised low-touch deployment based solutions for rapid selfprovisioning.

Disaster recovery solution market in India has been maturing with the advent of cloud services. Now we are seeing a stronger movement towards disaster recovery as a service into cloud (DRaaS).

In fact, this is the global trend—DR for enterprise systems are increasingly being put in the public cloud, which is managed by Amazon or the local Cloud Provider.

“A strong recovery within the telecommunication segment, coupled with growth within the manufacturing and the government segment will continue to drive market growth,” concludes Santhosh D’Souza of NetApp. mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com

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DISASTER RECOVERY solutions are typically 4 percent of the data center budget and this share can go as high as 6-8 percent in a country like India where more numbers of disaster recovery projects are occurring DRAAS OFFERING provides an architect to implement the solution, monitors and manages the data, and connects customers to the necessary resources in emergency situations

EXPECTED MARKET SIZE

125-160Mn

$

Disaster recovery solutions market size in India is expected to be on the high side for the year 2015 at 68 percent of the data center spend, totaling $125-$160 Million (Source: Gartner)

DISASTER RECOVERY technologies which help enterprises secure their business against any natural or man-made outages, such as fire, power-cut, riots, terrorist attack; cyclone, earthquake etc. have become an integral part of organisations operation as it ensures continuity in the business even after a major disaster

RaaS MARKET SIZE

5.8Bn

$

RaaS will be a $5.8B market by the year 2018, growing at a CAGR of 54 percent (Source: Market and Market)

INDUSTRIES SUCH as banking, insurance, retail, telecos, egovernance, and manufacturing are highly dependent on DR technologies to avoid revenue loss, avoid litigation, maintain shareholder confidence, and avoid reputation risk which may occur due to breakdown in the services

Organisations are investing in modern technologies in order to strengthen their business across verticals and regions,which is one of the reasons for enhanced focus on DR solutions Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions,India,Verizon Enterprise Solutions

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CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

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HIGH GROWTH FORESEEN IN CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE INDUSTRY

BY MOHD UJALEY With customers across myriad segments transitioning from the traditional ‘build-it yourself’ infrastructure to converged ‘ready-to-use’ infrastructure, the segment is looking forward to high growth in the year 2015

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onverged infrastructure industry, which provides solutions that are made by bonding of server, storage, networking, virtualisation and at times few other resources into an integrated system that is holistically managed, has gained lot of momentum during the past few years.

The enterprises today are moving towards solutions, which offer easy alignment with the legacy systems and offer greater agility, security, simplicity and scale.

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technical and business benefits over siloed servers, storage and networking resources.

There has been an exponential increase in the worldwide spending on converged infrastructure. According to IDC, the spending on such infrastructure is likely to touch $17.8 billion in 2016. The converged infrastructure market has gained significant traction in India over the past few years. The market situation here is in line with the global trends. According to the Gartner, India will be the second largest market and also the second fastest growing market for data center infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region.

Betting on High Growth In 2014, revenue from data center infrastructure market in India that comprises of server, storage and networking equipment was $1.92 billion. It is likely to see a 5.4 % increase to $2.03 billion in 2015, according to the research firm Gartner.

“The year 2014 has been a crucial year for the converged infrastructure. There has been greater acceptability of what IDC describes as the 3rd platform technologies – Cloud, Mobility and Internet of Things, which have led to the emergence of new demands in various IT segments,” says Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise MARCH, 2015

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Solutions Group, Dell India.

“The converged infrastructure market has gained significant traction in India over the past 12-18 months. Based on the IDC Datacenter Economies Index, commissioned by VMware, the positive economic impact that virtualization is likely to have in the Indian market by the year 2020 is about US$5.5 billion,” says Murad Wagh, Sr. Manager—Systems Engineering, VMware India.

Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solution India & SAARC, EMC points out that there has been significant growth in converged infrastructure market across the globe. This growth is quite visible in EXPRESS COMPUTER

VCE revenue in last 2-3 years of close to $2 billion. According to IDC, globally converged infrastructure will account for 12.8 % of total storage, server, networking and software spending by 2016, up from 3.9 % in 2012.

The Key Drivers The key drivers for the converged infrastructure industry are factors such as high adoption of cloud, more bandwidth utilisation in data center, high operating costs and high adoption of virtualization.

Dell India’s Manish Gupta points out that the key concerns for most customers include trends such as big data, mobility,

BYOD, cloud computing and softwaredefined everything. In the coming year, these things will have a seminal impact on the data center space. “Converged Infrastructure solutions are being deployed by SMBs and large enterprises as an alternative to building an expensive data center,” adds Gupta.

Abhijit Potnis of EMC is of the view that the two aspects that are driving the demand consist of factory integrated converged infrastructure and reference architecture based converged infrastructure. He also informs that the maximum amount of convergence is happening in greenfield projects such as virtual desktop.

“Some of the large enterprises are asking for factory integrated converged infrastructure but lot of demand is coming from reference architecture based converged infrastructure,” adds Potnis.

There is a demand for operations which deliver performance, saves time, optimise costs, save power and enable automation of the processes.

According to VMware’s Murad Wagh, Industry is witnessing the trend of customers across segments transitioning from the traditional ‘build-it-yourself’ infrastructure to converged ‘ready-to-use’ infrastructure that allows IT to deliver faster results and focus on innovation rather than just keeping the lights on.

More and more organisations are expecting support from a single source on all components of the data center including virtualization, compute, storage and networking, as it helps organisations drive down operational costs related to siloed management of infrastructure. In fact, this seems to the key driver of growth for the segment in the past, and this trend is likely to continue in 2015.

Technology Trends The currently market trends clearly indicate that the sector has recovered significantly from the low of 2008, when there was a global recession, and now we are in a period of high growth. But the sector also faces many challenges. There are the budgetary pressures. According to Forrester Research, most firms are allocating 50 % of their IT spending to the MARCH, 2015

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CONVERGENCE INFRASTRUCTURE MARKET

CIOs are looking for applications that enable them to turn data into actionable intelligence and strategic insights Som Satsangi, Vice President,Sales,Enterprise Group, HP India.

Worldwide spending on converged infrastructure

$

17.8bn

$

4.6bn

(2012)

(2016)

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTUREAND TOTAL STORAGE Converged infrastructure will account for 12.8 % of total storage, server, networking and software spending by 2016, up from only 3.9 % in 2012

Converged Infrastructure solutions are being deployed by SMBs and large enterprises as an alternative to building an expensive data center Manish Gupta, Director,Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India.

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SECOND FASTEST GROWING MARKET India will be the second largest market and also the second fastest growing market for data center infrastructure within the Asia-Pacific region.

(Gartner)

3.9% in 2012

12.8%

in 2016

5.5bn

$

The positive economic impact that virtualization is likely to have in the Indian market by the year 2020 is about US$5.5 billion.

(IDC)

82%

KEY DRIVERS The key drivers for the converged infrastructure industry are factors such as high adoption of cloud, more bandwidth utilisation in data center, high operating costs and high adoption of virtualization.

of server workloads will be running in virtual environments.

(Gartner)

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CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

cost of maintaining ongoing operations, systems, and equipment. Less fund is being deployed for executing new projects.

Som Satsangi, Vice President, Sales, Enterprise Group, HP India, says that when there is unparalleled growth happening in the industry in terms of data volume and velocity, the IT organisations have to find ways to overcome the budgetary challenges for implementing the right kinds of solutions.

The innovations in the areas of cloud, mobility and IoT are fuelling the demand and setting the trends in the IT sector.

Four broad types of convergence — general purpose integrated infrastructure, application specific building blocks, module building block and hyper rack-space — are evolving.

“Customers typically choose between purchasing rack or blade servers, networking and storage individually for building the foundation of their data center operations,” says Manish Gupta of Dell India.

“Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliances (HCIA) is the next wave that will simplify and hasten the delivery of application workloads even more.” says Murad Wagh of VMware India.

CIO’s and Convergence CIOs’ need real time analytics on live transactional data in a highly secured environment. According to Gartner, in 2016, 82% of server workloads will be running in virtual environments.

“Today, with the overwhelming amount of data and the need for immediate turnaround time, CIOs are looking for applications and systems that enable them to turn increasing amounts of data into actionable intelligence and strategic insights while keeping their costs to minimum,” says Som Satsangi of HP India.

According to Murad Wagh of VMware India, CIOs today have a choice from the perspective of infrastructure insourcing.

They can go for traditional infrastructure that is put together by a system integrator and may consist of converged/engineered systems and hyper-converged infrastructure.

“When it comes to rapid delivery of EXPRESS COMPUTER

services such as virtual desktops for a new projects, CIOs prefer converged and hyperconverged infrastructure. CIOs and infrastructure heads need freedom of choice when it comes to converged infrastructure to help avoid vendor lock-in and get the best price-performance ratio,” says Wagh.

CIO’s are looking at data centers as an investment, and hence, the data centers of the future must be step up to become a valuable contributor to the top-line income stream of a wide range of organisations.

Banking on converged solution in 2015 Converged infrastructure industry saw a significant surge in the demand in 2014 despite the fact that many segments of the enterprise infrastructure market have given lacklustre results. The market is bullish going forward in the year 2015 as increasing numbers of enterprises are featuring converged solution at the top of their IT procurement decisions.

“In 2015, HP expects that Indian enterprises will be focusing on building intelligent data centers that focus on optimising existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities.

This will lead to greater focus on newer trends such as public cloud, big data etc,” says HP’s India Som Satsangi.

Major players like EMC are bullish about the converged infrastructure market in India. In this sector they see the opportunity for rapid growth.

“I am very bullish about converged infrastructure because it provides ample opportunity for working with small base and grow thereafter. Markets like India will do better in the modular-basedconverged than the factory-basedconverged infrastructure,” explains Abhijit Potnis of EMC. “Software defined data centers represent the IT infrastructure of the future and will bring greater levels of flexibility to enterprises by allowing them to optimise their IT environments to meet specific workload needs,” says Manish Gupta of Dell India. mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com

Enterprises are asking for factoryintegrated converged infra,but demand is coming from reference architecture based converged infra Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solution India & SAARC,EMC.

Customers are transitioning from the traditional ‘build-ityourself’infrastructure to converged ‘ready-touse’infrastructure Murad Wagh, Sr.Manager – Systems Engineering, VMware India.

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STRUCTURED CABLING EXPECTS RAPID GROWTH

BY EXPRESS COMPUTER With factors favouring the structured cabling industry multiplying on a daily basis, the industry is expecting that 2015 will be the year of rapid growth

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onnectivity is the key element for enterprises across industry segments such as mobile, data networks and IT infrastructure, and role of structured cabling and networkings has become more critical than ever before. This is a global trend, which is visible in India also.

From Indian structured cabling industry perspective, the last few years have been a bit low on the demand side.

According to industry players, the segment saw a discreet or subdued 82

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demand pattern, which means that some components are installed in high proportion than the others.

Sluggish market “The structured cabling market in India saw a drop of more than 20% in 2013.

After a sluggish start in 2014, the market bounced back slightly in the second half of the year,” says Alamuri Sitaramaiah (Sita), Managing Director - India and SAARC, CommScope.

“LAN cabling accounted for around 70% of the cabling installed. The use of fibre in LAN environment was limited and primarily deployed as backbone for

campus applications,” says Assaf Skolnik, VP-Sales, RiT Technologies.

Even, Gaurav Ahluwalia - Managing Director, R&M India points, “The structured cabling has seen more and more implementations of Automated Infrastructure Management systems.”

These opinions seem to suggest that the structured cabling industry has experienced tough times in the Indian market. However, the industry continues to be optimistic and expects the demands to pick up in 2015.

According to IDC, the structured cabling market is likely to show a CAGR of 20.5%, which is high, relatively to MARCH, 2015

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are increasingly deploying IEEE 802.11ac wireless access points and this is calling for increased use of Cat 6A UTP cabling systems,” informs Sitaramaiah of CommScope.

Further, “Data centres are adopting Switch Fabric architectures, which is leading to deployment of more fibre in the sector,” adds Sitaramaiah.

Interestingly, the consumption patterns and preferences also seems to play over the deal-sizes in this segment.

“Customers are consolidating their offices to a single office and this is seeing increased deal sizes as well. On a whole, the structured cabling market is at an inflection point in India and should see adoption of more high-end cabling systems,” comments Sitaramaiah.

Technology trends

global growth trends and this will encompass both the copper and fibre solutions.

Growth drivers While the copper and fibre solutions are banked as key growth drivers, RiT Technologies' Skolnik points that Cat 6A holds top edge in the copper cabling category, while Shielded cables (S/FTP) are gaining popularity in LAN deployments since screened cabling improves performance through noise immunity, enhanced security and support for higher bandwidth (10 Gbps and above).

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“The fibre optic cabling market in India is witnessing a higher growth with strong demand from data centres and residential complexes. Case in point is FTTH,” says Skolnik.

Amid the industry optimism, the Indian structured cabling segment is also witnessing distinctive trends in terms of enterprise and customers' preferences like Cat 6A, Switch Fabric architecture as well as 10G copper cabling systems, respectively.

“Customers of structured cabling in India are migrating to 10G copper cabling systems to support 40G and 100G in their network backbone. They

The vendors are banking high on some of those emerging technology trends in the Indian market. For instance, Ahluwalia of R&M India refers to the growing adoption of structure cabling in the Automated Infrastructure Management systems. “It enables organisations to monitor their network and control it in case of any errors, hence reducing downtime drastically,” says Ahluwalia.

“Downtime is a critical factor for all businesses and to overcome that many companies are investing in Automated Infrastructure Management systems.

This enables a better understanding and usage of the network,” reasons Ahluwalia.

Among businesses and enterprises, though Cat 6A continues to remain highly popular, Ahluwalia notes that it could change in near future with development of a new Cat 7A or even Cat 8A technologies, which companies will adopt for better data transmissions and lowering networks strains.

While, data centres are highly fibre dominated, on the other side enterprises are looking for cabling security - a new trend in the industry today. “In fact, this is because structured cabling solutions support data, as well as a wide array of extra low voltage systems throughout an intelligent building, such as HVAC, MARCH, 2015

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Structured cabling has seen more implementations of Automated Infrastructure Management systems GauravAhluwalia, Managing Director,R&M India

With the maturity of communication standards, opportunities will open for mid-size enterprise applications Assaf Skolnik, VP-Sales,RiTTechnologies 84

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security, VoIP, lighting systems and more,” explains Sitaramaiah.

As enterprises continue to adopt convergence and cloud, Sitaramaiah reckons that it will definitely push the demand for high-speed copper and fibre cabling deployments.

They are also looking to invest in cabling management solutions like Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) solutions, as it offers a complete view and monitoring capabilities of the entire network and physical infrastructure.

“This in turn helps to detect hotspots and local failures, aiding in optimising network performance and reliability,” explains Skolnik of RiT Technologies.

Demand scenario The structured cabling industry is upbeat about growth prospects in 2015.

There is expected to be growth in both vertical and segment specific demands.

According Skolnik of RiT Technologies’ the data centres are key growth contributors, due mainly to the various data centre modernisation initiatives. The Indian enterprises are focussing on building new intelligent data centres while also optimising existing hardware assets.

“Other key contributors to this demand are government, SMEs across all verticals, education, and manufacturing,” adds Skolnik.

Ahluwalia of R&M India is of the view that the boom in infrastructure is actually going to push the demand of structured cabling in the country. “Structured cabling is a strong backbone to infrastructure and India is a country that is constantly developing,” says Ahluwalia.

From vertical stand point, Ahluwalia banks on IT/ITeS segments, as this is an extremely strong sector in India.

Manufacturing too is gaining some momentum.

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“The demand forecast for structured cabling in 2015 is one of cautious optimism, driven primarily by technology, banking & financial services industry (BFSI), hotels and hospitals,” adds Commscope's Sitaramaiah.

Outlook for 2015 With the improvement in demands in the second half of 2014, most vendors are optimistic on the overall performance of the structured cabling industry in the new year 2015. They are predicting an increase in the investments in various sectors, including IT. According to R&M India's Ahluwalia, India is a growing market with a solid economy, and the future of structure cabling is also very strong. While the industry grew bit slowly during the past two years, Ahluwalia banks high on the low cost of structured cabling solutions

INDIAN STRUCTURED CABLING INDUSTRYEXPECTS MORE DEMAND IN 2015

70%

LAN cabling accounted for around 70% of the cabling installed

Structured cabling segment growth of about 12 to 15% in 2015, driven primarily by office consolidation projects The structured cabling market in India saw a drop of more than 20% in 2013

in India. He considers it to be a key factor in pushing up the demand and growth in this segment.

“Copper has a long innings to play, fibre is showing a surge in OM3 as it is a good option in data centres based on current standards. With newer technology in fibre coming in, we will see more use of fibre for various projects,” says Ahluwalia.

“The Indian IT sector is gaining momentum and we expect the investment cycle to get back on track. Industry projections are at 20%. We anticipate structured cabling segment growth of about 12 to 15% in 2015, driven primarily by office consolidation projects,” opines Commscope's Sitaramaiah.

Interestingly, RiT Technologies' Skolnik is also positive like his fellow competitors and industry peers, he shares a good insight

SWISSN SS R&M, a Swiss Company, offers high performance copper cabling solutions for Cat.5e, Cat.6 and Cat.6 A systems. R&M offers a complete range of fiber-optic cables and components for singlemode (OS1, OS2) and multi-mode (OM3, OM4) fiber solutions.

With direct presence in over 36 countries around the world and with 50 years of experience, R&M has earned the reputation of a quality leader that always offers added value, comprehensive warranty and excellent support.

Tel: +91 80 4079 2600 | Fax: +91 80 4079 2604 | Email: ind@rdm.com

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Customers of structured cabling in India are migrating towards 10G copper cabling systems Alamuri Sitaramaiah, Managing Director - India and SAARC, CommScope

ACCORDING TO IDC, THE STRUCTURED CABLING MARKET IS LIKELYTO SHOW A CAGR OF 20.5%, WHICH IS HIGH, RELATIVELYTO GLOBAL GROWTH TRENDS 86

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celebrating 2 5 years into the growth prospects for structured cabling industry's outlook for 2015.

“Organisational growth, use of converged networks, new enterprise applications, demand for data centres and network virtualisation, will keep up with the demand in the coming days,” informs Skolnik of RiT Technologies.

“With the maturity of communication standards, more opportunities will open for mid-size enterprise applications,” adds Skolnik.

While the structured cabling industry is riding on high hopes and has positive expectations from the demand perspective, the recent move by Indian government to focus on electronics manufacturing in the country is likely to play a key role in future growth of various segments and industries including, structured cabling.

manufacturing units in India, the Swiss cabling solutions firm R&M has also joined the fray and is setting up an assembling plant here. Early in 2014, In fact R&M acquired Advanced Fiber Systems (AFS) in India to strengthen its local assembling and supplies to the domestic market.

“We have invested in an assembly manufacturer in Bengaluru. This enables us to be more competitive and target a larger audience. We import majority of the solutions, as our manufacturing processes are automated. This gives us an excellent mix to expand our business operations across all verticals in the country,” says Ahluwalia of R&M India. mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

Impact of 'Make in India' initiative Companies like Commscope, D-Link and others are already locally manufacturing many of their products and solutions.

These suppliers have set up large facilities in India many years ago, well before the Indian government launched its 'Make in India' initiative.

“CommScope is well placed in the industry. Our factory in Goa supplies half of the demand in India for CommScope solutions. We are now trying to ensure further growth in the productivity of our Goa factory. Few other vendors also have plants in India,” says Commscope's Sitaramaiah.

Skolnik of RiT Technologies says that the government’s latest 'Make in India' initiative will push the growth of manufacturing sector and pave way for local manufacturing.

“While manufacturing locally we also need to ensure that the quality of our products remain high,” asserts Skolnik While Commscope, D-Link and few other vendors already have their MARCH, 2015

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INTEGRATED & INTELLIGENT COLLABORATIONS

BY HEENA JHINGAN The enterprises in India see healthy RoI from Unified Communications and they are readily investing in integrated and intelligent collaboration tools

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ot so long ago, we would have found it difficult to believe that a retail jewellery chain would invest in videocollaboration tools. Last year, branded jewellery retailer PC Jeweller, connected its stores across 45 locations and design sites across the country using video collaboration solutions from Polycom.

They are now using high definition audio and video technology to speed up critical decision-making, serve customers better, and enhance team meeting experiences within the company. The suite of video 88

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collaboration solutions deployed at PC Jeweller includes Polycom RealPresence Group Series at all PC Jeweller outlets. The video system was seen by PC Jeweller as a good way of transforming teamwork on new projects, training on new software, internal meetings and employee reviews.

According to the industry pundits, the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) has had its share of slow paced growth due to Indian BPO industry losing significant amount of incremental voice and call centre business to competitors like Philippines and countries in Eastern Europe. Even though, the UCC segment hasn’t witnessed any seismic in terms of

technology, many organisations are challenged by different UCC technologies, even a decade after the first IP-based PBX. However, some recent developments have caused IT decision-makers to formulate often, for the first time -comprehensive UCC strategies, and to invest in them substantially.

In line with the global trend, the Unified Communications (UC) industry has been growing in India. The industry is witnessing an increase in adoption across the enterprise segment. Organisations are familiarising themselves with the power of UC applications, and are adopting them in myriad ways to deliver breakthrough MARCH, 2015

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adoption enables reduced costs and facilitates people to come together as a dynamic team, irrespective of their geographic location.

“With the advent of positive business sentiments and new opportunities globally, companies are now looking forward to leap beyond traditional space and grow their business. All of it is not possible without a state of the art, integrated and pocket friendly UC solutions that can scale and remain flexible at the same time, to provide a mobile and connected workforce of future," said Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager- Enterprise Computing, IDC.

The market in 2014

experiences, streamline business processes that boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness.

Alok Lall, Director, Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India, observes that the Indian enterprises are prioritising a widescale adoption of unified communication and collaboration in ways similar to their global counterparts.

According to market intelligence firm IDC, voice-based unified communication solutions have captured a major stream of revenue in the Indian market and this is expected to touch $1,506.2 million in 2018 at a CAGR of 12.4 %.

Lall points out that while Indian firms EXPRESS COMPUTER

are behind the global UCC adoption curve in some respects – penetration of IP telephony stands at 64% compared to a global average of 76%; penetration of instant messaging tools lags the global average by 11 points—the future of UCC investment in India certainly looks positive and the incremental uptake rates for UCC applications this year are expected to be in the range of 16% to 26% India as a market is eclectic in nature and UC adoption is driven by various customer segments. While some of these segments are advanced technology adopters, some have not yet realised its impact on workforce productivity. UC

2014 has been a year of growth for Unified Communications. The size of the UC market in Asia Pacific, according to research agency Frost & Sullivan, to rise from $4.6 billion in 2010 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% till 2017. 2014 saw an increase in adoption of UC by SMBs. Mobile unified conferencing solutions and mobile unified communication solutions saw a greater uptake from e-commerce and logistics companies. However, the UC spending in the government sector was low in 2014 due to the general elections.

Ongoing proliferation of 3G and broadband Internet services in India promises further growth of this segment.

However, the biggest shift in the market, as per IBM's Anmol Nautiyal, DirectorSocial Business & Smarter Workforce, is the interest shown by the enterprises to deploy UC to not to just cut travel cost, but to bring speed and agility for a competitive edge, even if the solution comes at a premium. “The enterprises now expect to get an integrated environment with social and analytics tools for overall experience.

The silos are now getting destructed,” he says. Real time, face to face kind of interaction has emerged as an effective means of collaboration.

The rise of video “It is not just about video conferences in office environments; it's about delivering the ability to meet face-to-face in any environment,” observes Minhaj Zia, Managing Director, Polycom India & SAARC. MARCH, 2015

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e-Commerce companies use our virtual number to connect with customers without knowing customer details Ambarish Gupta, Founder & CEO,Knowlarity

celebrating 2 5 years He believes that to a large extent this makeover is due to the integration of video collaboration into day-to-day mission-critical business operations, such as mobile inspection on the factory floor, crisis response centres in government or video-enabled kiosks in banking.

Companies globally and across the country are now seeing the value of video collaboration beyond simple travel savings, to include reducing time-tomarket, increasing customer service, improving crisis management, and streamlining decision making.

The traditional conference room has been complemented – or at times, replaced – with video services via desktop, mobile and tablet devices, and in the cloud, in response to an increasing remote workforce. Some organisations prefer flexible technology deployments and a pay-as-you-go model to scale up as needs evolve and change; for example adding video conferencing capacity to a site where it is most required by instantly expanding software licenses. “This eliminates time delays associated with customs implications and extra shipping costs,” he says.

“A wide gamut of video-capable UC clients, web-conferencing platforms, and consumer applications are now used in the workplace. Users are more familiar with video-conferencing software than ever before, and are demanding access to it,” says Lall of Microsoft.

Across an organisation people understand the value of face-to-face human collaboration in real time from anywhere and using any device.

Anywhere, on any device

IBM Verse can learn from a user's behaviour and draft responses based on similar previous interactions Anmol Nautiyal, Director-Social Business & Smarter Workforce,IBM 90

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Ambarish Gupta, Founder & CEO, Knowlarity, says that a major shift towards mobility is happening because most people are using solutions that facilitate work from home or they have various distributor sales sources, distributed support centre, etc. “Enterprises want global presence without having any physical interactions, so our focus is to provide mobility to every enterprise within and outside India. This is going to be the key driver for us in the enterprise segment.”

According Zinnov, India is a rapidly

growing enterprise mobility market. It encompasses hardware, network and data, applications and associated services. The market will be worth $ 1 billion by 2015.

As platform adoptability improves, along with network penetration and connectivity, more business functions like ERP, CRM, SCM, sales force automation, billing and unified communications too are coming under the enterprise mobility ambit.

Findings from a major global Dimension Data and Ovum study 'The Future of Unified Communications & Collaboration' show that 44% of Indian enterprises plan to invest in mobilising UCC. The solution providers are working on product updates to support mobility.

Gupta asserts that they have introduced mobility for existing smart IVR customers.

“Several e-commerce and logistics companies, which do not want their user mobile number and user details to be shared with the logistic and fleet management companies, use our virtual number to connect with the customer without knowing the customer details.”

Currently India is ranked 6th in smartphones penetration, and according to ITC the country will be at the 3rd position by 2017 with 155 million smartphone units. The Indian enterprises are witnessing an increase in the penetration of all kinds of mobile devices, including Tablets and Phablets.

The devices in most cases are employeeowned and the employees expect the same kind of collaboration experience across platforms and operating systems.

Thus there is a thrust on open standards such as WebRTC. “Such open standards help exploit the true potential of ubiquitous real-time collaboration within enterprises as well as with customers and partners, using voice, video calling, instant messaging and data, providing boundless opportunities for growth. Unified Communications can help organisations become more productive by offering frictionless access to the right information, in the right context and at the right time,” reasons Anthony Bartolo, Senior Vice President, Unified Communications & Collaboration, Tata Communications.

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THE SIZE OFTHE UC MARKET IN ASIA-PACIFIC,ACCORDING TO RESEARCH AGENCY FROST & SULLIVAN, IS EXPECTED TO RISE FROM $4.6 BILLION IN 2010 AND TO GROWATA CAGR OF 11% TILL 2017 Lall says that one of the challenges that the companies face is related to BYOD. Employers are unable to provide support for these devices. The Dimension Data and Ovum study says that the rate of Indian employees, who bring their own devices to work and use them for work, is significantly higher compared with other nationalities. 86% of Indian employees who own a smartphone or tablet use it for work.

However, only 38% of large India-based businesses provide support for corporate approved employee-owned smart devices; and worse still, only 21% support any employee-owned smart device.

All the same, the support rates of corporates for employee-owned devices fall only slightly below the global average.

Overall Indian employees are well ahead of the global trends in having BYOD programmes. At the moment, therefore, Indian businesses are unable to keep pace with their employees’ working practices.

This is sure to change once Indian companies start investing in BYOD policies EXPRESS COMPUTER

and support systems.

Lall says, “Microsoft's Lync is familiar and consistent across a variety of devices and in the first half of 2015, the next version of Lync will become Skype for Business with a new client experience, new server release, and updates to the service in Office 365. We believe that Skype for Business will transform the way people communicate by giving organisations reach to hundreds of millions of Skype users outside the walls of their business. We’re also making it easier to connect to people everywhere. Lync already offers instant messaging and audio calling with Skype users. Skype for Business adds video calling and the Skype user directory making it possible to call any Skype user on any device.”

On Cloud & Managed As companies look to shift IT costs to a predictable operational expense, and not a periodic and big capital investment, cloud services, hosted solutions and managed services are taking a fast flight. Cloud has

Unified Communications can help organisations become more productive Anthony Bartolo, Senior Vice President,Unified Communications & Collaboration, Tata Communications

Users are familiar with video-conferencing software than ever before,and are demanding access to it Alok Lall, Director,Microsoft OfficeDivision, Microsoft India MARCH, 2015

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The companies are looking to integrate social media into their traditional sales,service and support channels Minhaj Zia, Managing Director, Polycom India & SAARC

There is a shift towards outcomes-based requests from our customers Arun Shetty, Director-Collaboration Solutions India,Avaya 92

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captured the imagination of businesses of all sizes. Most of the small and midsize businesses (SMB) use cloud services today.

Web hosting and email top the list.

Cloud telephony in India has witnessed growth in adoption over the past few years.

This is because the cost and features being offered are more attractive over plain vanilla hosted electronic private branch exchange (EPBX) and PBX solutions.

In the past many companies had premise-based deployment of UC applications, but managed by a third party.

However, hosted solutions simplified both deployment and management of the applications. While cloud based UC solutions have clicked with the SMBs, big firms do not find cloud based conferencing attractive.

Avaya’s Director-Collaborations Solutions-India, Arun Shetty, says that moving applications to the cloud is a trend that will continue to be a strong technology driver. Whether its contact centers (CCaaS), unified communications (UCaaS) or video as a service (VaaS), customers are finding compelling reasons for adopting these technology models. “There is a shift towards outcomes-based requests from our customers. Sometimes, this is being referred to as “infrastructure as a service”, and it really summarises what our customers want: outcomes. They don’t care where their equipment sits, who manages it, what technology it uses, as long as they have the tools to help them run their business.”

According to Gartner reports, the global Unified-Communications-as-aService (UCaaS) market is projected to grow from $2.52 billion in 2013 to $7.62 billion by 2018, an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.8% “We’re seeing a change in customer mentality from the need to sweat outdated assets to a focus on competitive differentiation; or, from an organisational point of view, we’re seeing lines of business now asking CIOs to deliver a different set of outcomes,” he says

Fall of silos Moreover, the business of IT has converged significantly over the last decade, resulting in fewer staff managing a broader array of

solutions and capabilities and organisations looking for ways to simplify deployments and reduce IT administrative tasks.

Lynch 2013 provides a single, unified client for real-time communications, including voice and video calls, Lynch Meetings, presence, instant messaging, and persistent chat. Having a single UC client application instead of multiple applications simplifies deployment, adoption, and support. Lynch 2013 users can connect to anyone on Skype, enabling rich communication with hundreds of millions of people around the world. These capabilities help to reduce the IT cost of supporting home-office and mobile work.

New client deployment option using a streaming technology, which quickly installs Office, including Lynch, over the Internet or internal networks facilitates faster use and enables upgrade of newer applications.

Zia says that the companies are looking to successfully integrate social media into their traditional sales, service and support channels that can open up the conversation in new and exciting ways.

Gupta says, “We are seeing a mix of unified communications with social networking as a new trend in unified communications. You might have seen lot of apps coming in and providing video voice data conversions. Social and unified communications are the major development in this field.”

“Gone are the days when solution providers were focusing on segregated capabilities,” says Nautiyal. He is of the view that intelligent tools are now imperative. The industry has realised that there is so much of information hidden in the simple applications such as the email.

IBM Verse blends email, collaboration, social intelligence file sharing and analytics to learn a user's behaviour and predict interactions with co-workers. “With IBM Verse we have reinvented the email. It includes a built-in personal assistant that can learn from a user's behaviour and draft responses to e-mails based on similar previous interactions. So it is not just about integration, but intelligence as well.”

Along with growth drivers, there are also certain challenges that plague this segment. According to Gupta, a key MARCH, 2015

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UNIFIED COMMUNICATION: VITAL STATS Penetration of IP telephony

64% 76% The future of UCC investment in India certainly looks positive and the incremental uptake rates for UCC applications overall this year are expected to be in the range of 16 to 26%

The size of the UC market in Asia Pacific, according to research agency Frost & Sullivan, is expected to rise from $4.6 bn in 2010 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% till 2017.

44%

of Indian enterprises plan to invest in mobilising UCC.

Currently, the 6th largest country in smart phones, IDC estimates India will climb to 3rd largest by 2017, yielding

155 million

units a year by 2017

86%

of Indian employees who own a smartphone or tablet use it for work

Penetration of instant messaging tools in India lags the global average by 11 points

challenge is around customer education, most customers in the SMB space are not fully aware of the benefits of Unified Communications & Collaboration. He is of the view that the regulatory framework, in most emerging markets, is not very clear about PSTN and IP collaboration. Low Internet penetration is an obvious deterrent, but the Indian market is fast learning to cope up with the issues of the last mile connectivity.

Connected Future Industry experts are optimistic about the future of UC&C. In 2015, video collaboration is expected to continue to grow. And by 2016 video conferencing is expected to be the world’s most preferred method of collaboration. The progression of video technology and overall user experience today reflects that high definition audio and video, advanced content-sharing and recording capabilities, interoperability with existing ecosystems, and security protocols are some of the features that will define the standard of any video collaboration deployment.

Industry sees the infliction point in a transformation towards the need for greater mobility taking place this year. IDC predicts that by 2015, the world's mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion, representing 37.2% of the total workforce.

This indicates that 2015 will see continuity in the trend of the convergence of consumerisation and mobility. Forrester Consulting survey reveals that 50% of information workers are working away from the office, part of an ever growing trend to mobility.

Mobility in this view is when businesses integrate video-conferencing, not only as a team engagement solution, but also as one of the most critical solutions that enable businesses today to deliver an Omni channel based customer experience. The idea is to deliver customer experience on any channel, anytime, anywhere, without interruption. In fact, almost every CEO and CIO we spoke to in India, has mobility at the top of the mind. Just video conferencing is not enough. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com

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t is almost like playing lottery – except in this case everybody wins every time — this is what many of the companies, which were into making Unified Communications software told us five to ten years ago when the Unified Communications (UC) market was swamped with the first wave of fancy technology.

Unified Communications is basically the tool that brings together audio and video conferencing, messaging and presence into one single integrated application. Among other things, this comes in very handy when employees are working somewhere else than their office desk. With mobile phones, WiFi, cloud services, social networks, and connected devices they can work from anywhere.

When they are equipped with a UC solution, they can easily bridge that gap between devices.

A recent Cisco study shows a return on investment of 103% over a three-year period and a payback period of just one year. According to Aberdeen Research, 79% of all companies see a return on their UC investment within the first 12 months.

Jabra demonstrates valuable results.

For example, our clients with UCoptimised headsets are able to reduce their overall call handling time by 33%. If you have a call center with 1,000 employees making an average of $20 per hour, this represents a significant increase in efficiency.

Collaboration is key In this entire ecosystem, there is an important ‘C’ that stands for collaboration. While unified communications allows us to communicate seamlessly across multiple devices, it is still just a channel to get hold of colleagues or information about them.

But if you could use these wonderful tools to collaborate, create and invent new things together, you would multiply your investment.

Surprisingly, a lot of the technology solutions that companies invest in are 94

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celebrating 2 5 years

KAPIL MANCHANDA, MANAGING DIRECTOR-INDIA & SAARC, JABRA

HOWTO DOUBLE RoI WITH UC&C Enterprises can double the return on their investment on Unified Communication if they take full advantage of the technology. All they need to do is to start collaborating instead of just communicating, writes Kapil Manchanda

already capable of making employees work in collaborative and virtual teams.

But for some strange reason, many companies do not take full advantage of the solutions.

Microsoft Lync, which is a popular instant messaging system, enables you to see a team member’s presence, conduct audio calls, video conference calls and present information to all attendees. But these features are rarely used.

Its time to find and activate the missing ‘C’ in ‘UC&C.’ It is about making your investment work and setting collaboration free. You wouldn’t make people’s private Facebook accounts the primary company communication platform either – knowing that employees are banned from attending via their company owned devices!

Two times better In your new UC&C set up, information will be shared in groups, where ideas, news and information go viral, but this time it happens within your own company.

There are benefits for everyone. A report by Frost & Sullivan, a company that is using UC&C, it is noted how their engineers improved product development and lowered costs associated with innovation through the use of UC&C solutions. Sales and marketing professionals saw improvements across sales performance, customer retention etc. Big benefits are waiting for the companies, which can dare to go for a right combination of communication and collaboration.

According to Frost & Sullivan the organisations that go from “basic collaborators” to “advanced collaborators” are usually able to improve efficiency and double their RoI. All it takes is using the technology you already have to facilitate a group sharing culture, where all employees are part of a continuous, digital discussion. By adopting this strategy you don’t just win the lottery, you win it twice!

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UPS & BATTERIES

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EMPOWERING THE ENTERPRISE

BY MOHD UJALEY With the organisations working round the clock, power is of utmost importance. The enterprises are committed to using energy productively and efficiently

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here has been substantial growth in the industrial and commercial infrastructure in the country over the years. However, due to unavailability of uninterrupted source of power supply and rising energy cost, the need for reliable energy efficient power back-up systems have become an essential part of an organisation set-up. However, even the power sector cannot safeguard itself from the vagaries of the political situation and the state of the PC segment.

The UPS segment has de-grown in the 96

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past year due to election in India in 2014 and also due to the slowdown of growth in the home PC segment. But the market is full of optimism, as there is high growth in the demand from tier-II and tier-III cities.

This is leading to vast improvement in the opportunities for the UPS market in India. “The market has de-grown in the past year by about 2.5% to 3%,” says Gurudutt M – Head – Mid Market and Enterprise Channel Business, IT Business – Schneider Electric India.

According to research firm RNCOS, the Indian UPS market is expected to grow at 11% in 2014-2018. “We see a growing demand from tier 2 and tier 3

cities which has led to an increase in the opportunities for the UPS market in India,” says Syed Sajjadh Ali, Managing Director – India, Electrical Sector, Eaton.

He also points out that with the advancement in technologies, ecommerce, data centers, servers, electronic and medical equipment’s, there will be significant demand for high power range of UPS systems in India.

“The dynamics of the Indian market continues to change as India’s power sector develops. However, customers continue to face problems with the quality of power. Due to this, there has been a gradual rise in demand from the MARCH, 2015

UPS & BATTERIES

The market has de-grown in the past year by about 2.5% to 3% Gurudutt M, Head – Mid Market and Enterprise Channel Business,ITBusiness – Schneider Electric India

UPS and battery market in India,” says Ankesh Kumar, Director - Marketing, Emerson Network Power, India. He also points out that UPS solutions have functions that make them capable of handling more complex tasks than simply enabling uptime.“The rapid rise in consumer data consumption has been further driven by reliable and robust uninterrupted power supply solutions.

This enables more efficient and reliable data storage and other business processes that depend on UPS,” adds Ankesh Kumar.

Growth in the BFSI and government sector plays an important role in boosting EXPRESS COMPUTER

the UPS market. Both sectors contribute around 36% of the total revenue of the UPS industry in India. The industry is likely to see more demand from telecom, eGovernance, education and infrastructure sectors.

Technology gaining greater penetration The UPS market in India is dependent on UPS systems (up to 25 KVA), constituting of over half of the total UPS market. But things are changing with the penetration of several new technologies into the UPS sector in India. There is a shift towards cloud computing which is

We see a growing demand from tier 2 and tier 3 cities which has led to an increase in the opportunities for the UPS market in India Syed Sajjadh Ali, Managing Director – India,Electrical Sector,Eaton MARCH, 2015

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generating the need for data storage and safety. These data centers require uninterrupted service and power backup which is also leading to the growth of the data center UPS market.

“There is a gradual inclination towards solar-powered UPS systems and the growth is fuelled by an increase in demand from new markets primarily in Tier II and Tier III cities,” says Gurudutt M of Schneider Electric India. Syed Sajjadh Ali of Eaton is of the view that with the expansion in technologies, we will see major changes taking place in the UPS systems. “Newer technologies are being adopted by players in the UPS market – a notable one being the positive shift towards solar-powered UPS systems,” says Syed Sajjadh Ali of Eaton.

Another major change which is impacting the growth of UPS market is the demand from smaller areas.

Gurudutt M of Schneider Electric India is of the view that the improvement in the rural economy of the country is leading to growth in demand for power backup equipments have from rural areas. Syed Sajjadh Ali of Eaton says that UPS technologies should focus on two critical aspects. The first being reliability, particularly in the case of mission critical applications, where failure amounts to very high costs.

When we talk about reliability we are necessarily assuming that the higher battery life and the least or preferably no downtime. This also minimises the total cost of ownership over time. The second critical aspect is energy efficiency. This is imperative in a world that has limited energy resources and high energy costs.

By consuming less energy and delivering more productivity we can not only achieve cost-efficiencies but ensure that we are operating sustainably.

Echoing similar concern, Ankesh Kumar, Emerson Network Power, India, points out that factors like energy efficiency and reliability are vital for the smooth functioning of a Data Center UPS power Systems.

“If industry is eager to take better control of their equipment and improve reliability of their production plants 98

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“CIOs are looking for tools which can predict any failure in advance so that right action be taken on time” says Gurudutt M of Schneider Electric India.

The industry is increasingly moving towards Real Time Monitoring and Data Center Infrastructure Management Solutions . These solutions enable the CIOs to manage and monitor absolutely disparate sets of equipment both in IT and Physical Infrastructure on a real time basis.

Outlook for 2015

Industry must take proactive approach to power backup and conditioning equipment Ankesh Kumar, Director - Marketing,Emerson Network Power,India

while reducing costs, the industry must take a more proactive approach to power backup and conditioning equipment,” says Ankesh Kumar. He goes on to inform that while the prevalent technology is still SCR (Silicon Controlled Rectifier), it is the SMPS technology that leads to reliability and efficiency. It leads to reduction in the size and weight of the equipment. “The electrical performance on ripple and harmonic is much better than SCR,” he informs. “This allows more scalability, flexibility and reduces the overall cost of the SMPS technology.”

CIOs looking for Real Time Monitoring Data is nowadays becoming the nerve center of a business strategy. Hence uptime and energy efficiency is critical to business continuity and its success. In such dynamic and volatile business landscape, monitoring of critical assets remotely & ability to predict failures in advance is emerging as the key requirements and being desired by a CIO of today.

According to the research report by firm TechNavio the increasing demand for UPS Systems is expected to boost the battery Market in India, which is growing at a CAGR of 16.5%. Sudden power fluctuations and power cuts is leading to growing adoption of UPS systems in the IT, banking and telecom sectors. The report further states that demand for lead-acid batteries from the automobile OEM and replacement battery markets are also contributing to these strong market projections.

“The numerous functional benefits of lead-acid batteries are expected to drive the growth of the Battery Market in India,” says Gurudutt M of Schneider Electric India “The future growth of the UPS market in India is extremely positive. The increasing demand for power to meet the ever increasing needs in various industries will lead to investments in technologies that can manage power more efficiently and reliably. The industry is experiencing a shift towards energy efficient technologies . The shift towards green energy sources will lead to more innovations in the power back-up industry,” says Ali of Eaton.

“Growth initiatives, fuelled by the government’s ‘Digital India’ vision, are expected to drive growth for egovernance initiatives in telecom, banking, insurance and healthcare segments and that will increase the demand for data centre and UPS solutions,” says Ankesh Kumar, Emerson Network Power, India. mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

MARCH, 2015

BUSINESS AVENUES

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www.expresscomputeronline.com

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MAJORITYOF ENTERPRISES ARE AFFECTED BYAPP ECONOMY

BY PUPUL DUTTA At the APJ Summit, organised by CA Technologies, it came to light that about 57% of enterprises are of the view that the app economy is exercising a disruptive force on their businesses.

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A Technologies kicked off the APJ Summit at Singapore with Kenneth Arredondo, President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan, delivering the keynote address wherein he spoke about the constantly evolving ‘app economy’. “Apps are changing the business. With constant downloads, more and more data is being created perpetually,” he said.

Arredondo further explained that today everything is driven by connected mobile apps. “About 57% of APJ enterprises believe that it is disrupting their business,” he noted.

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During the course of the conference, various speakers highlighted how applications are defining business relationship with customers and fuelling the productivity of employees. The speakers explained how the ‘application economy’ is tearing down old notions and breaking apart past models.

During the course of the conference, CA introduced new DevOps solutions and enhancements that unify IT development and operation teams to drive faster and more effective development, deployment and management of high quality applications.

The CA DevOps portfolio includes solutions across all platforms from mobile to mainframe. According to the company,

by using CA DevOps solutions the customers have reported significant improvement in productivity (up to 60%), development speed (between 25%-50%) and deployment ( with up to 15 times reduction in manual effort).

Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions, Office of the CTO talked about how the virtual life of people is fast becoming their mobile life as well. “Data no longer resides on a mobile device, in the cloud, or in silos or structured databases. Data will simply be out there, generated by sources both within your control and outside your control,” he said.

Daphne Chung, Associate Director, Software Research IDC Asia/Pacific who was present at the summit spoke about MARCH, 2015

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According to the software major, businesses are rethinking their business models in the Application Economy, with close to 90% planning to implement an API program in the next five years. “CA is working with customers to securely marshal the hidden value of their APIs to create new applications, attract new users and developers, open new routes to market and grow their businesses,” said Vic Mankotia, Vice President, Solution Strategy Asia Pacific & Japan.

App economy spreads to India

L-R Andi Mann, VP, Office of the CTO, CA Technologies, Daphne Chung, Associate Director, Software Research, IDC – Asia Pacific, Kenneth Arredondo, President & GM, APJ, CA Technologies

the changing consumption model. She also elaborated on the journey to the cloud. Chung was of the view that by 2020, one-third of the top 20 market share leaders in most global industries will be significantly disrupted by new competitors using the third platform, which comprises of mobile, cloud, big data, social, etc. “However, about 80% of Asia/Pacific-based organisations are not equipped to harness third platform technologies to compete in the new marketplace,” she stated.

Talking about Internet of Things (IoT), Chung said that in 2015, it is expected that IoT will create a $752 billion market opportunity for APeJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan).

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Managing APIs CA Technologies announced their new and expanded API management solutions, which can accelerate mobile and web application delivery, improve customer engagements with frictionless access, and open new revenue channels and opportunities.

The CA API Developer Portal is currently available as a SaaS offering, and delivers faster time to value, lower support costs, and the ability to leverage enterprise APIs at the speed and scale of the cloud. Businesses can open data as APIs, create, deploy and manage applications more effectively and efficiently to power innovation and competitive advantage.

According to a study commissioned by CA Technologies, majority (78%) of the Indian IT leaders surveyed indicated that their enterprises are being moderately to extremely impacted by the application economy.

To meet the demands of this new application economy, about half of the Indian enterprises believe that investments within the bracket of 30%70% towards application development over the next five years will increase business efficiency.

Further, acquiring software companies to add development capabilities, about 66% have made or are in the process of making one in the next 12 months.

Also, increased competitive market conditions coupled with intense pressure to release applications quickly to meet customer demand have impacted 37% of IT leaders to expand their business operations into different verticals, the survey revealed.

At the event, CA Technologies drove home the point that while threats continue to rise, the company will come up with new innovation to deal with the challenges.

“At CA, we’re here to help. We are building the tools that enable tomorrow across every environment and ecosystem in the Application Economy. We’re eager to help you innovate so that everyone in this room can seize the opportunity today,” said Stephen Miles, Vice President, Enterprise Management, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com

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overnment of India through its “Make in India” programme wishes to transform India to a software/hardware super power. This programme can only succeed when there are skilled employees in the country. In the last three years alone 80 million new users got on to the internet in India. In the next five years, another 500 million new users will be on the internet and a lot of new products will be needed to serve their needs. To build these products, we need well trained professionals. The well trained professionals are the key to building startups, which, over a period of time, will transmogrify into billion dollar companies.

Government of Kerala has taken the lead and launched the initiative called “Learn to Code”. The initiative is being kick started through the Raspberry Pi distribution Programme. Under this programme government of Kerala has distributed 2500 Raspberry Pi Kits to selected school students. The Government is attempting to “Catch them Young” and instil a sense of innovation and experimentation in the school children. The programme is being implemented by Technopark Technology Business Incubator (T-TBI) in association with IT@School and Startup Village.

The best thing is that the students are also being given basic training and will be encouraged to experiment with the Pi. Focused coding sessions will start after the March examinations. Starting April, each student will be assigned a mentor.

The Learn to Code programme is being launched on the foundation built by the IT @ School project which was started in 2002 for capacity building in Information Technology at the school level. IT @ School is a globally acclaimed success model, which churns out IT savvy generations into the system. Four lakh students are being trained every year during the last 12 years.

The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, creditcard sized, computer that plugs into the 102

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P H KURIAN

LEARN TO CODE PROGRAMME: RASPBERRYPi DISTRIBUTION @ SCHOOLS “The small sized Raspberry Pi will help in promoting basic computer science in the schools across Kerela,” says P H Kurian, Principal Secretary, Department of Information Technology & Department of Industries, Government of Kerala

display unit (computer monitor or TV).

The computer can be controlled through the standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device, which enables people of all ages to explore computing, and learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python.

The Raspberry Pi has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been used in a wide array of digital maker projects. The computer unit has outlets, which can be connected to a normal screen and a keyboard, and it functions as a normal desktop PC. This whole set-up is used for learning computer programming, to surf the internet and send out e-mails, create games and animations, make graphic designs in the screen and to programme external devices like robots, thermostats for recording temperature, etc.

The Raspberry Distribution planned by the government of Kerala is first of its kind in India. This is being done for the first time as a state sponsored programme in the world. A similar distribution happened in UK in January 2013, but then it was sponsored by Google and 15,000 Raspberry kits were distributed to school students.

Technopark TBI has completed the procurement of the Raspberry Pi kit comprising of Raspberry Pi B+ board, Enclosure, 8 GB SD card, HDMI cable, HDMI to VGA cable, USB keyboard and USB Mouse. Out of the fund allocated for the initiative, Rs 1,08,09,950 has been incurred for the procurement of 2500 kits i.e Rs 4,324/ kit.

The government of Kerala plans to distribute 10000 kits annually to students primarily in the 8th standard and follow it up with focussed training/mentoring sessions. The government also plans to organise competitions that will trigger and bring out the innovation and experimentation urge in the students at the school level.

The Raspberry Pi is being distributed simultaneously across all the districts of the state.

MARCH, 2015

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