Express Computer (Vol.27, No.4) April, 2016

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THE RELEVANCE OF DESIGN THINKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE ong before Design Thinking became a buzzword, Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, remarked that one has to start with the customer experience and work backwards towards the technology and not the other way around. Every Apple product has been built using this approach, and this perhaps explains the company’s huge success in almost every product category. Apple was one of the earliest proponents of design thinking principles.

Put simply, this means that enterprises must step into the shoes of their customers and think about what customers would love to have. It also means unlearning traditional ways to solve a problem, and think of coming up with something that creates immense value for the customer.

Design Thinking is more relevant in the digital age, as the pace of innovation has accelerated and the next Uber or Airbnb can disrupt any industry. Take for instance, a firm like Infosys, which is trying to reinvent itself by incultating the principles of design thinking.

Under Vishal Sikka, the firm is trying to completely change the traditional model by incorporating design thinking in some of its major processes. For example, software engineers have to mandatorily come up with a better and efficient way to complete a project, and look at innovations within their own projects with the ultimate goal of exceeding expectations for the client. Thanks to design thinking, the company has more than doubled its share of large deal wins.

Another case in point is Yes Bank, one of India's fastest growing private banks. The bank has applied design thinking principles in identifying the gaps in targeting the urban poor, by observing and talking to the concerned people. The bank found out that migrants were losing a lot of time and money as they were forced to stand in long queues at the banks to send money to their native places. These migrants did not need a savings account. They just needed a faster way to quickly remit money to their family members. Yes Bank addressed this problem by creating Yes Money terminals, which were given to the small merchants or paanwallas, who were authorized subbusiness correspondents with the bank. Migrant labourers could use the terminal at the nearest location to send money. While the most obvious way would have been to open bank accounts for the poor, Yes Bank followed a different strategy using design thinking principles.

Besides Infosys and Yes Bank, the Tata and the Mahindra Group of companies, have started using design thinking principles to improve their competitiveness. While the number of Indian firms applying design thinking principles is relatively small today, expect this trend to accelerate in the digital era as new entrants try to change traditional markets completely through a totally different approach. The choice for incumbents is clear – disrupt or be disrupted.

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FIRMS LIKE INFOSYS, YES BANK, THE TATA GROUP AND THE MAHINDRA GROUP OF COMPANIES, ARE USING DESIGN THINKING PRINCIPLES TO IMPROVE THEIR COMPETITIVENESS

srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

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APRIL, 2016

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contents

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case study

opinion

HOW BYOD HELPED AIR WORKS TO ACCELERATE ITS PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY

DESIGN THINKING FOR NURTURING INNOVATION

HOW CIOs CAN USE DESIGN THINKING

A severely under-emphasised among the driving forces of design thinking is the enculturation and inculcation of ‘Design Attitude’in organisations

The CIO can use design thinking to delve deep into the problem space by empathising with users and arriving at more meaningful and empowering solutions

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HOW CLOUD COMPUTING 24 IS HELPING FRESHDESK SCALE ITS EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE AND REDUCE COSTS

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Express Technology Sabha 2016

interviews SATYENDRA

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20 PAKHALE

Principal Designer and Founder, Satyendra Pakhalé Associates

Design as a discipline is hardly understood DAY 1

DAY 3

Leveraging technology to make India smart

Panel Discussion: Smart Electronic Service Delivery:

Inauguration and Welcome Address

Best Practices

Power solutions for WAN connectivity

eNlight 360

Moving beyond e-Gov to connected Governance

Security made simple with Sophos

Optimisation of IT landscape with least risk

Smart storage for government

Digital Architecture for smarter Governance

A strategic approach against an increasingly

20 years of digital innovation in India

sophisticated threat

Panel Discussion: Co-creating Digital India –

Digital India… Digital Future...

Leveraging Technology to make India smart

Panel Discussion: Availability of Skilled Resources for fulfilling the dream of Digital India

SUNIL

28 TANDON Head - Non Voice Services, Tata Teleservices

Wi-Fi adoption is still in an early stage in India JAGANNATH

56 NARENDRAN

DAY 2

Embracing mGovernance

Keynote: Key imperatives for accelerating

Health Informatics: Issues and challenges in

transition to smart cities

implementing e-governance solutions

Software Defined Infrastructure

Power Discussions @ Technology Sabha

JOE GAGNON

Availability for the Always - On Enterprise

Power Panel : Dell

Smart Connectivity & Security

Power Panel: BSA | The Software Alliance

Safeguarding, Data and Networks against

Power Panel : Micro Focus

Sr. VP & GM, Cloud Solns, Aspect Software

Insider and Outside Attacks

Power Panel: Schneider Electric

Cyber Security for Digital India

Power Panel: Veeam Software

Information security in the era of disruptions

Power Panel: ESDS

Sr. VP, APAC & ME, Aspect Software

SANJAY GUPTA

and more...

MD, South Asia and ME, Aspect

news analysis

Business transformation driving the need for CX

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LIFESIZE EXCITED ABOUT POST-SPLITFUTURE In the wake of the announcement of Lifesize’s split from Logitech, Lifesize’s CEO, Craig Malloy shares his perspective on the way forward for his company

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SAYED

58 PEERZADE Group CIO, Reliance Big Entertainment & Reliance Entertainment - Digital

The CIO has to lead the business transformation in the digital era APRIL, 2016

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Vol 27. No. 4. April, 2016 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Chief of Product Dr. Raghu Pillai Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Ankush Kumar, Rashi Varshney Mumbai Jasmine Desai, Abhishek Raval DESIGN National Art Director Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rushikesh Konka Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West and East Prabhas Jha - North Dr. Raghu Pillai - South Marketing Team Shankar Adaviyar Ranabir Das Ajanta Sengupta Amit Tiwari Mathen Mathew Navneet Negi Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Ashish Anchan PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia

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COVER STORY

“You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around Steve Jobs

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his quote by the iconic Steve Jobs describes in one single line, what the power of design thinking can do to the fortunes of a company. Apple has always kept one thing in mind while designing all its products (from the iMac to the iPhone to the Apple Watch) - a relentless focus on customer experience by creating products

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and features that customers love to have. This approach is now being adopted in a variety of different ways by Indian organisations. Rather than just doing the tasks allocated to them, companies like Infosys are asking their employees, “Is there a better way to solve this issue?” The approach now is to think like creative solution providers rather than just providing the client with a basket of services for solving a particular problem.

From the initial experiments that Indian companies have done with Design Thinking, the impact has been

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significant. Take for instance, the Zero Distance initiative of Infosys. This initiative is projected to save its clients more than $1 bn a year, as per a news report published in Livemint. The report also mentions that the initiative has doubled the share of large deal wins for Infosys —from less than $400 million in a quarter to $900 million in a quarter.

Under this process, software engineers have completed projects more efficiently or have delivered by going out of their professional scope with innovative solutions in over 90% of the 8,500 master projects currently

underway. The Design Thinking approach, as a part of the Zero Distance initiative at Infosys, lies at the heart of it.

Infosys is not the only Indian company walking this path. One of the largest corporate houses in India, the Tata Group has promoted the concept of Design Thinking. The group CTO is driving the process of applying ‘Design Thinking’ rigorously across the group.

Tata InnoVista, Tata Tech Talks and Tata Group Design Forum workshops are initiatives being run within the group, where designers from different companies come together to discuss

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Tata Elxsi applies Design Thinking in the areas of Information Design, where the focus is to share information and make tools available to the employees Anil Sondur Executive VP,Tata Elxsi

Some of our executives have been directlytrained byStanford d.

School on the design thinking approach and process Theodore Forbath VP,Digital Transformation,Cognizant 10

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problems. M&M, SAP, GE and many other MNCs have also been using this innovation tool.

With the flux that the technology world is going through and with all the brick and mortar firms also starting to get a digital address, the design thinking process can be leveraged by the CIO in taking up the flood of challenges, which is a direct import from the breakneck developments in the consumer technology space. Recently, the industry has seen a surge in interest from firms to follow this innovation style. “Over the past six months there has been a massive increase in the level of interest in design thinking from CIOs and other CXOs globally. CIOs are opening up to this idea,” says Frederic Giron, VP, Research Director serving CIOs, Forrester.

"We have had a few conversations with CIOs regarding Design Thinking," says Jaideep Mehta, MD, India and South Asia, IDC

What is Design Thinking?

Before delving into how CIOs can apply Design Thinking, it is necessary to get the concept and the definition right. Out of all the industry players that Express Computer spoke to, the most prevalent was ‘keeping the end user at the centre of the initiative for which design thinking is used’. Agrees Gopichand Katragadda, Group CTO, Tata Sons, says,“A critical aspect of design thinking process is to have a user experience center with mechanisms to observe and obtain live feedback from future users of the products & services. Customer Centricity, hence, is the key driving force.” For a CIO, some examples include, observing internal customers via cameras, mouse clicks, and keyboard usage when asked to use a potential new application.

Design thinking further emphasizes end-user observation in a controlled environment with frequent touch points.

“CIOs can consider building a basic user experience center with simple technology elements and small space.

They will also have to hire the right kind of talent to translate the observations into products and services,” he says.

Parthasarathy V S, Group CFO and CIO, M&M says, “Design Thinking is a

process of co-creating along with the customer. It is a unique problem solving experience that you bring to your customers, both external and internal, and in turn create value for them. It starts with identifying customer needs and entails providing a creative resolution of concerns and creating solutions, with the intent of giving an enhanced experience.”

Parthasarathy believes that Design Thinking will bring about a change in the mindset of the CIO. “The empathetic approach of design thinking will help them evolve from their traditional roles of problem solvers to creative solution providers. They need to think critically and find creative solutions to problems while having a strategic mindset. This changed approach will shift them from accidently discovering value to systematically creating value. For example, we have moved from business process re-engineering to new business models. Now it’s the business moment that every business has to think about and how a consortium of businesses will come together to create a life time experience for the customer and participate in every ‘business moment’ and grow the business exponentially.”

Design thinking is a discipline, which actually originated in the field of architecture. "The same principles were used by the Stanford university and they converted it into business process oriented thinking to apply the principles in creative thinking and the use of techniques like brainstorming, freewheeling thinking and whiteboarding to quickly come up with solutions," says Jaideep Mehta of IDC. A few definitions also combine the customer centricity aspect with agile development methodologies. “The idea of design thinking is to keep the user at the centre of the entire project. That’s where we see companies trying to merge design thinking with agile development. In order to combine these different concepts, these companies have an iterative development process where they come back very often to their user and test the prototypes of the product they are developing in order to ensure the product is in the direction of where the user would APRIL, 2016

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Over the past six months there has been a massive increase in the level of interest in design thinking from CIOs and other CXOs globally

The empathetic approach of design thinking will help CIOs evolve from their traditional roles of problem solvers to creative solution providers.They need to think critically and find creative solutions to problems while having a strategic mindset like the product to be. The final product has to be relevant to the desires of the users,” explains Giron.

CIOs leverage agile development in their organisations. “Agile development already includes elements of design thinking like frequent end-user feedback.

Design thinking further emphasizes enduser observation in a controlled environment with frequent touch points,” states Katragadda.

Taking an iterative approach is important. The solution has to be perfected, iteratively with observations and inputs gathered from end-users.

“Many CIOs have implemented agile methodologies that cover the iterative aspect,” finds Theodore Forbath, VP, Digital Transformation, Cognizant.

But then the customer focus has always been prevalent. What new things does Design Thinking bring to the table?

As Tim Brown from IDEO, a California based consulting firm, says in his recent EXPRESS COMPUTER

Frederic Giron VP,Research Director,Forrester

blog, “Empathy is not only about sympathy for someone else’s circumstances, but the deep intuition for what it feels like to live their lives. If you manage a store, for example, try ringing up customers at the checkout. If you run a logistics center, try working on the warehouse floor. If you manage project teams, sign up to be a regular project team member for a day. Whatever it might be, go experience the day of someone you lead.”

Importance of the human element and collaboration This is where the IT function has missed the point. The human element. There is a lack of focus in understanding the true desires and requirements of the users (both consumers and employees).

The business process, IT systems are designed to fulfill the business requirement but the users of the system are not taken into consideration to the

Agile development alreadyincludes elements of design thinking like frequent end-user feedback Gopichand Katragadda Group CTO,Tata Sons APRIL, 2016

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Design Thinking helps us arrest problems before theyoccur Parag Arora Area VP & Country Head,India Subcontinent,Citrix

Design Thinking is a process of cocreating along with the customer.It's a unique problem solving experience that you bring to your customers ParthasarathyV S Group CFO,CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra 12

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extent to which they should be. Also quite often, the systems are bought without any collaborative effort with the end users of the platform. Giron says that design thinking can correct basic flaws and make them correct. Says he, “CIOs should focus more on the users and understand how do they do their jobs, rather than on the hardware to be bought. When you look into the design methods, one of the key characteristics is combination of viability, feasibility and desirability. Viability is the business model -- it’s the economics of the project.

Feasibility is the technology part, and the desirability is from a user perspective on how he will use a particular innovation or a solution.” The magic happens at the intersection of the three.

On the customer support side, there is a lot of work going on currently in giving a consistent experience to the customer queries -- be it online, on the phone or any other communication channel.

Infosys has infused Design Thinking with great depth inside the organisation.

Sanjay Rajagopalan – Senior VP, Head – Design & Research, Infosys says, “Design thinking puts the focus on empathetic, human-centered, problem finding. The solutions are further arrived upon by the techniques of rapid, iterative prototyping, testing and solution finding,” By training over 70,000 employees in this methodology, the company has undertaken what is possibly the world’s largest such employee enablement effort.

As a result, Design Thinking is used effectively as an innovation framework internally (e.g. In HR, IT, Marketing, Procurement, Client Communication etc), in the company’s ongoing client projects (i.e. The Zero Distance Initiative), and in jump-starting new projects for clients (i.e.

The AiKiDo Initiative).

Design thinking can be used very effectively in the PoC stage. PoCs, otherwise are carried out like a compliance process, and the mindset is to wrap it up after checking a few features.

Parag Arora, Area VP & Country Head, India Sub -continent, Citrix Systems says, “At Citrix, by applying the design thinking, we along with the CIO team, take a comprehensive approach and also engage the users in a big way. They are

profiled in terms of their different requirements and the PoCs are planned keeping in mind how those requirements will be fulfilled in a full fledged roll out.

This helps us to arrest the problems much before they occur. To not involve the final consumers of the product would be flawed thinking.”

Anil Sondur – Executive Vice President, Tata Elxsi, feels that it’s the ‘dissemination of information’, where most of the CIOs fail. “IT tools are most of the times underestimated, especially inhouse. Not everybody is aware about the tools available for use inside the organisation.”

Design Thinking in action Tata Elxsi applies Design Thinking in the areas of Information Design, where the focus is to share information, make tools available to the employees, so they can use them.

Mahindra &Mahindra also follows a similar approach. The company has attempted to scale Design Thinking across the workforce to help them collaborate better, focus on discovery and exploration to uncover customer needs that have not been articulated with relevance to emerging technologies, business models and emerging human behavior.

Cognizant has been organising design thinking sessions for its employees four about four years now. “Some of our executives have been directly trained by Stanford d.School (Institute of Design at Stanford) on the design thinking approach and process. Over the years, we have learnt a lot about applying design thinking in our context,” informs Forbath from Cognizant.

The company has dozens of innovation trainers who conduct design thinking sessions. A good number of engineers and developers from across functions have been trained on innovation, which encompasses many aspects of design thinking. Several hundred of these resources have received specialized training to bring deeper understanding about the subject.

Design thinking is also strongly entrenched at Citrix, so much so that they follow a top down approach for APRIL, 2016

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fixing the communication guideline on how the the internal and external stakeholders will engage with customers -- be it the company’s internal consulting, sales, pre-sales staff or external stakeholders. “Every year, Citrix’s CEO, Mark Templeton gives a guideline on customer engagement. Employees are trained in this communication approach, wherein the messaging should not be inconsistent when the potential customers interact with the employees of Citrix irrespective of which function they belong to,” says Parag Arora. “On the customer support side, there is a lot of work going on currently in giving a consistent experience to the customer queries, be it online, on the phone or any other communication channel.”

It’s said, Happy Employees = Happy Customers. Design thinking is also being used to establish and evolve systems on which employees can perform jobs with speed, ease and accuracy. Take a function like sales, where the design thinking approach can be used to deliver phenomenal results. “There is also a lot of work that CIOs are doing in the CRM systems to enhance the performance of the sales personnel. The reports in the system are being studied to understand EXPRESS COMPUTER

the behaviour of the sales staff and design it to exactly fit their requirements,” says Giron from Forrester.

A large consumer packaged goods (CPG) company using design thinking studied the failure on it’s massive investment in procurement systems going to drain due to low usage by its employees. They are now in a process of re-doing the platform. “A portal is being set-up on top of the procurement system that will make it easier for the requesters to do their jobs,” Says Giron.

From an IT agenda perspective, it helps the CIOs understand how employees are doing their jobs and how could the solution be designed in such a way that it’s easily usable. This requires the CIO to think about an easy to use UI that provides a good user experience.

Indian companies are still beginning to evolve with the idea of design thinking.

For it to be established and ingrained in the organisation culture will be crucial because innovation is a constant exercise and when it doesn’t click, chances are that it is dumped. In the age of digitisation, it will be all the more crucial to adopt this way of thinking. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

Design thinking is a discipline,which actuallyoriginated in the field of architecture.The same principles were used bythe Stanford University and theyconverted it into business process oriented thinking Jaideep Mehta MD - India and South Asia,IDC

Indian companies are still beginning to evolve with the idea of design thinking.For it to be established and ingrained in the organisation culture will be crucial as innovation is a constant exercise and when it doesn’t click,chances are that it is dumped.

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COVER STORY

DESIGN THINKING AT YES BANK At Yes Bank, Design Thinking has been applied in four areas viz., Organizational Structure & design; Decision Making; Core Business Initiatives and Innovation Initiatives

A

t Yes Bank, the evangelist for Design Thinking is the MD & CEO, Rana Kapoor, himself. He anchored and gave his team full freedom to try out ideas.

Rana Kapoor says, “India has entered the Design, Innovation and creativity driven Entrepreneurial (DICE) economy. Banking has traditionally been a ‘left brained’occupation.

The future however is going to be ‘right brained’ and design thinking is the way ahead.”

Design Thinking application started at a time when the bank was also at an inflexion point – growing from a small sized bank to a medium sized bank, after getting the green field license. Thus far, it was operating as a start-up bank, on gut feeling entrepreneurship. The lean teams made manoeuvring easy and the clients appreciated it. However as the organisation grew in size, the bank was faced with the usual dilemma about how to implement strong process controls & systems which were

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characteristic of a large organization, without compromising on the professional entrepreneurship and innovation mindset.

Multiple hierarchies coupled with tedious processes, multiple reviews can stifle innovation and also result in longer turnaround times. The need and demand for change was in the air. The signals of change were acknowledged and well received by the top management. Recalling this, Amit Shah, Sr. President, Corporate Strategy, Marketing & Communications says,“We actually didn’t know that what we were doing is essentially design thinking. For us, it was an application of commonsense, with the “customer centricity” taking precedence and therefore supported by a one bank approach. It is only off-late after some of us trained formally in design thinking, did we back-reference our strategies to it”.

Design thinking was applied in four areas viz., Organizational Structure & design; Decision Making; Core Business Initiatives

Rana Kapoor MD & CEO,Yes Bank

and Innovation Initiatives.

The bank’s overarching objective was to use design thinking to keep the Organisation as nimble, and innovative as it was before, inspite of the growth the bank had clocked.

While design thinking has many angles, one of it is to decide on a goal and then work backwards.The bank overhauled the way they looked at the talent pool and segregated them in order to continue the innovation culture, which was in a state of decline.

Hence a simple formula was arrived at called the “6:3:1 structure”in 2010, when the bank launched its Version 2.0 Vision & Strategy.

Henceforth, 60% of the human capital was deployed for business generation, 30% on evolving businesses and 10% on real random ideas.

To maintain innovation, 60% of focus was on the high frequency businesses – the cash cows, 30% on new businesses and focus areas like MNC & Government banking. and 10% on new radical moonshot ideas.

In order to materialise a swift decision making structure, it was decided that not more than 10% of the decisions need to go to the top management; 30% of the decisions will be taken by the hierarchy one level down to the top line and 60% of all the decisions will be closed at the organisational level.

The real test was applying design thinking in the core business initiatives. One APRIL, 2016

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The bank’s overarching objective was to use design thinking to keep the organisation as nimble,and innovative as it was before,inspite of the growth the bank had clocked

way to look at design thinking was to keep an open mind, look at the ecosystem and identify core customer need gaps in the industry, which can be filled.This is different from the conventional thinking of a herd mentality where businesses in the hurry of acquiring business end up following what other companies have been doing so far and becoming a ‘me-too’. Yes bank applied design thinking in identifying the gaps in targeting the urban poor (financially excluded, migrant workforce). While the obvious way for the bank would have been to open bank accounts for the urban poor, the bank decided to reach out to them and do ethnographic surveys and look at the world from the eyes of the urban poor. “We found out that the urban poor, most of the them - migrant labourers were facing a challenge of standing in long queues at the banks to send money orders to their native places. Time is precious for them because they rely on a daily wage earning model and not monthly wages.

Standing in queues was a time consuming affair. It deprived them from the money they would have earned if not standing in queues,” Thus they don’t really require a savings account, nor a loan. But their primary need is a mechanism to quickly remit money to their family members and still save enough time to go and earn the daily wage,” says Amit Shah, Sr. President & Country Head Corporate Strategy, Marketing & EXPRESS COMPUTER

Ritesh Pai

Amit Shah

Senior President and Country Head Digital Banking,Yes Bank

Sr.President, Corporate Strategy,Yes Bank

Communications, Yes Bank. Technology in the form of Yes Money terminals was leveraged here.The bank decided to provide Yes Money terminals to the small paanwallas, merchants etc, who are the authorised subbusiness correspondents of the Bank. The migrant labourers can send the money by going to the nearest business correspondent.

The Yes Money using the Immediate Mobile Payment System (IMPS) bridge transferred the money to his place of origin. The money can be withdrawn from the nearest commercial bank branch. This was all done working simultaneously with the bank’s compliance and legal teams.

The bank later found that most of the transactions happened early morning or late in the evening. This initiative of the bank has clocked 2.68 crore transactions with a total remittance of 11,073 crore from 43 lakh unique customers since it was launched.

The bank has also used design thinking by empowering the feature phone owners to do financial transactions. “Usually, the enterprises are targeting the smartphone users however the majority of the market still uses feature phones. It’s a latent opportunity still untapped for financial transactions.This is a classic example of design thinking, where technology is used to tap a market opportunity which exists and is quite evident to all players in the market but not converted into a business opportunity. We are tapping

into it by adopting a low cost SIM-Sleeve technology that is tagged with the SIM card. It powers the feature phones to do financial transactions and should be launched shortly post pilots are done,” says Ritesh Pai, Senior President and Country Head, Digital Banking, Yes Bank.

In another example of design thinking, Yes Bank has tried to solve the problem of last mile delivery for fulfillment for ecommerce players, which has a cascading positive effect on the related stakeholders in the industry - players like the courier, suppliers to get faster payments. Majority of the online shoppers continue to choose the Cash On Delivery (COD) model however the challenge is either they are not at home when the courier arrives, resulting in further coordination etc. Yes Bank has partnered with Smartbox e-commerce solutions. The bank has deployed automated parcel delivery terminals from Smartbox.The customer can select a terminal and receive the order after entering an OTP on his mobile phone.

The payment can be made at the terminal itself using a card. Smartbox terminal is powered by the payment systems from Yes bank.In this way, Yes Bank has used Design thinking by showing empathy for the e-commerce players and other stakeholders including the customers and solved the problem and creating a win-win for all.

APRIL, 2016

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OPINION

»

DESIGN THINKING

DESIGN ATTITUDE: A CRITICAL FACTOR IN INTEGRATING DESIGN THINKING FOR NURTURING INNOVATION Although, contemporary management literature has proposed design thinking to play a strategic role in transforming products and more recently in transforming business, a severely under-emphasised among the driving forces of design thinking is the enculturation and inculcation of ‘Design Attitude’ in organisations

BY DR ASHIS JALOTE PARMAR

T

he world of management is moving to an era of complex, fuzzy and interdependent challenges that are often raised by rapid technological advancements and dynamic customer aspirations. Customers are demanding more meaningful and integrated connect to products and services with organisations. As the business context continues to evolve, these challenges require organisations to be innovative and agile in decision making to adapt to contextual changes.

Although, contemporary management literature has proposed design thinking to play a strategic role in transforming products and more recently in transforming business, a severely underemphasised among the driving forces of design thinking is the enculturation and inculcation of ‘Design Attitude’ in organisations. Design attitude is a critical 16

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factor required both at the individual and organisation level to leverage design thinking for innovation.

Design as a term, especially in the Indian context has been trapped in a cliché of aesthetics or as an extension of art, and lately the term ‘Design Thinking’ is becoming a corporate fad. A short study revealed that 595/600 senior Indian executives associate the term design only with aesthetics. Ambiguity still looms around the actual meaning of the term design and design thinking and its role in innovation and strategic thinking. Hence, it is critical to define it. The origins of the word design can be found in the Latin word designare, which is made up of the prefix de- ‘out’ and signare ‘to mark’.

Designare means to devise, to choose, to designate, to strategise or to appoint. In other words, the very nature of ‘design’ lies in integrating strategy as a part of its core

problem-solving process that changes the existing conditions into preferred ones.

Design literature defines it as ‘The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired foreseeable end constitutes the design process. It is a basic of all human activity – all humans are designers’. I define Design Thinking as a problem solving process -‘a creative and systemic problem solving process that can holistically envision or shape products, processes, businesses and even societies by driving user- and context-sensitive solutions.’

Not a new phenomenon Design thinking is not a new phenomenon, but a term propounded to adopt problemsolving process of design in managerial decision making to accelerate innovation or infuse creativity. Following the success of Apple, a big debate took place on the APRIL, 2016

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framing and application of the term design thinking among large business houses.

Past year has witnessed, few Indian corporates rather hastily adopt the term ‘Design thinking’, wanting it to act as a silver bullet to promote innovation. In my opinion, training employees in the overtly commercialised and popularised four staged design thinking cycle- Empathy (User), Ideate, Prototype and Iterate will not lead to Innovation. This is a fragmented approach to incorporating design thinking, specially, when organisation has no prior culture of design with a general organisational understanding of design=aesthetics. It’s almost like jumping from level 0 (no design or styling) to level 4(design thinking in strategic decision making).

Core fundamentals of design attitude On a first glance the four staged design thinking cycle- one realises that it is no different than any scientific problem solving process. What is different is the “design attitude” which can be defined as the cognitive parameters that drive the design thinking problem solving process/ design thinking cycle. Leaders, managers, engineers and other professional experts need to first imbibe design attitude to be able to drive innovation through this process.

The core fundamentals of design attitude are: (a) Challenging Assumptions: This means initiate problem solving by reframing the problem statement from ground zero (b) Systemic view: Develop a holisticsystem level or 360 degree view of problem and map interrelations between people, context and technologies (c) Envisioning / making propositions: to formulate strategies with ambiguous and often unpredictable data sets, also known as Abductive thinking, as opposed to inductive and deductive thinking that the managers and engineers are trained with. (d) Sense and respond: being adaptable to larger environmental changes within the organisation, with competitors and in the larger context of global changes, thus providing not pre build products (make and sell) but sensing and responding EXPRESS COMPUTER

To gain consistent and long term benefits from design thinking process requires a road map by the senior management to create an ecosystem to induce design attitude at a strategic level and in the structure of the organisation –people must be trained to develop this skills (e) Zoom in and Zoom out: looking at the problems inside out and outside in similar to looking at a problem with a telescope, microscope and wide lens (f) Breaking Silos/multidisciplinary team: Work on problems by breaking the barriers of disciplinary boundaries in the organisations (g) Empathy: It is not only about asking user his needs but immerse in problems in the field to develop a holistic, people driven and context to envision new propositions.

This also includes co design with the communities, early involvement of stakeholders and experts where

applicable.

To gain consistent and long term benefits from design thinking process requires a road map by the senior management to create an ecosystem to induce design attitude at a strategic level and in the structure of the organization.

Without this ecosystem, as a standalone, this 4 stage cycle will not lead to innovation. Design attitude needs to be imbibed not only in the individuals but also in the organisational culture to build an ecosystem of processes which facilitate the design thinking individuals to drive innovation and create design driven organisations. These individuals don’t necessarily have to be designers but design thinkers or as R. Verganti says ‘interpreters’. Apple, Bang & Olufsen are classic examples of organisations which have been successful when they have incorporated design attitude as their DNA right from, the organisational structure.

Fostering innovation The very nature of design thinking allows challenging the existing order of doing things to improve them and even reconstitute them. To foster innovation which goes beyond just the mechanical usage of the 4 stage cycle, transforming organisations and societies at a national level requires leaders in organizations and government, to develop design thinking attitude as an inherent capability in its organisation construct. This process requires more than a single process adoption but transformation in the mindset of the organisation. It means changing the way people in the organisation think, and the way organisation is structured so that the internal processes are agile and adaptive. This will allow the flexibility to create operational agility, adaptability, and innovation as one of the means to create people centred, entrepreneurial and meaningful organizations. It can create an ecosystem of co-creation that allows multiple stakeholders, such as employee, management, end users, to be a part of cohesive decision making, hence making the organizations more meaningful and entrepreneurial.

The author is Professor of Design Thinking, IIM-A APRIL, 2016

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OPINION

DESIGN THINKING

»

HOW CIOs CAN USE DESIGN THINKING The new age CIO can use the design thinking framework to delve deep into the problem space by empathising with users and arrive at more meaningful and empowering solutions

BY RIPUL KUMAR

C

IOs have always been dreamers.

They have been not just dreamers, they have been doers, relentlessly putting together enterprise class systems that help people in organizations move, find a customer’s birthday, send invoices, apply for leaves, get employees shiny new laptops, or help their customers troubleshoot the washing machine they sold.

The enterprise class products are definitely functional, have been used by millions of users, and are more secure than an online bank. The storyline changes in the hands of the users of these products. Companies spend millions of dollars to publicise the launch of these

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enterprise-class products internally and give out cash prizes for the initial users to complete a task. That said, they can barely find one who can reasonably do it.

The user and IT nightmare starts from this point. The IT department keeps on sending emails about software training initiatives and shoves PowerPoint presentations in emails about how to use it – which no one is interested in. Then, when employees want to apply for refunds for the money they spend on an overseas assignment, they spend a whole day figuring and fighting the system, another day fighting the finance department. Ultimately, they forgo the amount, disgruntled!

‘Design’ has always been considered as an important characteristic in enterprise products to make products visually appealing, to get the color just about right, to find that right typeface for the website, or to align the pixels for the customer advisory board meeting presentation. Fortunately, many CXOs now understand that the role of design is a lot more than aesthetics. Leading CXOs now acknowledge that design is all about problem solving that delights users. And, to delight users, they need a problem solving approach, which is centered around the user – human-centered design!

The mobile product manager of a APRIL, 2016

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large e-commerce company was visibly worried. While the mobile users were increasing, their share of revenues was much lower than the desktop sales. On probing the key business issues with the site, it was evident that analytics showed people loved to go to the ‘deals section’ on the home page. However, they are not buying it from there. And, also there were way too many people dropping off after seeing product details. They tried several solutions over three years before reaching out to a design research agency.

The research team brought motivated buyers to a lab and watched them buy things off the online retailer. What they learnt was reassuring and fascinating.

This was reassuring as people’s instinct was to go to the deal section of the website. But fascinating, because, to understand that it was all a mistake due to a poorly placed label. All that visitors wanted to was to explore categories of products. This deep understanding of people and business problems helped the ecommerce company to find a targeted solution with a very large business impact – a far cry from the several shots in the dark earlier!

Since the onset of industrialization, ‘what customers wanted’ and ‘the way they wanted it to be solved’ have always been the writing on the wall for businesses. Most times, with the gut feeling of what customers may want, business leaders quickly come with solutions. In fact, several times the solution precedes the problem! However, the new age CIO perceives problems and approaches solutions radically different.

When building new systems or updating the old, the new age CIO delves deep into the problem space by actively emphasizing with users (people who use the products) of their products and services to deeply understand the problems that users have (that effects their working lives), then ask questions about how to solve these problems. They then move towards the solution space by freely ideating about the possible solutions and then rapidly prototype some promising solutions. And, these prototypes are tested with real users and the solutions iterated – the ‘design thinking’ framework that is centered EXPRESS COMPUTER

Leading CXOs now understand that design is all about problem solving,that delights users.And,to delight users, they need a problem solving approach,which is centered around the user around the human!

A new age CIO uses the design thinking framework to get deep into the problem space by empathising with users, iterate a vast landscape of solutions to learn, and then arrive at more meaningful and empowering solutions. These solutions match users’ latent needs, in contrast to solutions that were either just gut feelings or solutions that no one uses.

One of the largest banks in the world with more than 40 years experience running customer care call centers had a problem in hand. The business leaders were unable to reduce the average handling time (AHT) of the calls further and that had started hurting the bottomline. With all the latest and fast

systems, all the business wanted was a simple 5 seconds reduction in AHT, which would have reduced customer service costs by several million dollars.

To understand people and the problems, a team of anthropologists and designers patiently listened to thousands of calls while sitting side-by-side and silently observed the daily activities of customer service agents across the globe.

After a couple of months living in call centers, the team had deep insights into the agents’ universe. They reported to the client about the over-jealous and error prone documentation of calls, difficult to remember and time consuming navigation in addition to scattered information. After testing and iterating several solutions to these problems, a solution emerged. This solution saved 2 minutes of AHT (not just 5 seconds), which in turn, saved millions of dollars of recurring training costs of agents. This naturally created happier customers.

Many times, CIOs do not have a choice to build products. They are forced to find the right fit. Today, while selecting new products for the enterprise, the CIO has no dearth of enterprise solutions.

However, with the advent of iPhones, people have ideal consumer-grade products. The users now expect enterprise applications to be like consumer-grade – no painful and worthless setup routines, no upfront learning needed to use the first time, intuitive enough so that it requires no ongoing training, and makes day-to-day work seamless & effortless.

The age of barely functional design in enterprise application is breathing its last.

Now, the design thinking framework helps the CIO select intuitive user experiences that empower users, and makes them more productive, intrinsically. And, unlike yesterday, CIOs today bring users on the same table as customers.

According to Forrester Research, design thinking means "encouraging a more open, collaborative approach to innovation" across the organization.

Design thinking is about how CIOs solve problems, the human-centered way.

The author is Director of User Experience Research,[24]7

APRIL, 2016

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INTERVIEW SATYENDRA PAKHALE PRINCIPAL DESIGNER AND FOUNDER, SATYENDRA PAKHALÉ ASSOCIATES

DESIGN AS A DISCIPLINE IS HARDLY UNDERSTOOD There are many misunderstandings about design thinking in general and design profession in particular.

Design in popular culture is a surface, a veneer, a colour— just aesthetics, and appearance. Not to say that appearance is not important, but it is not just that; it is the result of many things done right.

‘Design Thinking’ and above all ‘Design Doing’ is often a result of collaboration among various parties – designers, manufacturers, investors, marketing and communication – this all needs an understanding of each other in a holistic manner. For such collaborations to succeed it needs openness, trust and mutual respect. Abhishek Raval speaks to Satyendra Pakhale, Principal Designer and Founder, Satyendra Pakhalé Associates.

Is design thinking about doing process changes?

‘Design thinking’ has no meaning unless it is put to practice that is ‘design doing’.

That is the real challenge, it is often a result of collaboration among various parties – designers, manufacturers, investors, marketing and communication – this all needs an understanding of each other in a holistic manner. For such collaborations to succeed it needs openness, trust and mutual respect.

What are some of the misunderstandings about ‘Design Thinking’?

There are many misunderstandings about design thinking in general and design profession in particular. Design as a discipline is hardly understood. As a structural tool bringing positive change to global living conditions—that is really 20

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the basic way we would see design as a discipline.

Often it is not seen that way. Design in popular culture is a surface, a veneer, a colour—just aesthetics, just appearance.

Not to say that appearance is not important, but it is not just that; it is the result of many things done right.

How do you define 'design thinking'.

‘Design Thinking’ is a primal mind-set, an attitude of an organization, industry or institution to innovate and create meaningful impact in its context.

‘Design Thinking’ and above all ‘Design Doing’ is a strategic creative attitude – essential not only for CIOs and CEOs of any organization but for the very existence of the company in the global context, if it has any aspiration to contribute to wider contemporary culture, make an impact and connect with people – ‘design doing’ is vital.

What kind of inputs do you take from a company you are meeting on how Design Thinking can be applied in the organisation?

When meeting any company we acquire a thorough understanding of their mindset, business activities and past – present – future aspirations. We need to understand their willingness to accept and to implement new open-minded collaborative strategies. All these inputs and the human connections within an organisation provide us insights into how ‘Design Thinking’ could be applied.

To apply ‘Design Thinking’ it ought to be at the highest leadership and strategic level.

We engage with an organisation at the core. Unless there is total commitment ‘Design Thinking’ remains a lip service.

As a matter of fact ‘continuous curiosity’ is the core of our design practice. The studio practice embodies 'design thinking' resolving complex conditions through experimentation and prototyping providing the very best solution for each venture redefining systems and typologies. That means research is an ongoing process and feeds into all activities.

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‘Design Thinking’and above all ‘Design Doing’is a strategic creative attitude – essential not only for CIOs and CEOs of any organisation but for the very existence of the company in the global context.If a company has any aspiration to contribute to a wider contemporary culture,make an impact and connect with people – ‘Design Doing’is vital How many rounds of meetings do you have to do before you are finally able to figure out on how design thinking can be applied in a particular company?

Preferably none. It is never a question of how many meetings. What is really essential and primal is the mindset of a company or organization. If there is no willingness to change, then we are not interested to begin with. If there is any aspiration to get somewhere and an openminded attitude towards collaboration we then certainly open heartedly engage.

The classic saying, ‘it takes two hands to clap’ is very appropriate in this context.

We bring worldwide experience from diverse set of industrial sectors from our two decade long design practice and collaborations with the top most industries from Europe, America and Asia. That is a huge asset for our collaborators and contributes intuitive insights to any creative problem solving

in the range of industries and product typologies.

Those who value our contribution and unique design solutions that not only fulfill utility but above all create cultural content get hugely benefited. One such transformative example is the ‘add-On’ Radiator we designed for then not so known radiator manufacturing company TUBES Radiatori, Italy a decade ago, today they are the market leader in design radiators and completely transformed as ‘add-On’ radiator became a flagship product, long seller and still remains most innovative product in the market after all these years.

Through our design practice we help create transformation – through innovative, value creating and culturally engaging design. We always meet the top leadership team of CEO, CXOs and Founder who are in the position to understand and implement the design vision. This needs open minded and collaborative people who welcome positive change and innovation on all levels and invest into design for wider benefits beyond just bottom line. Over two decades we have been engaging with top leadership in various industries worldwide that supports true innovation and design that contributes to wider contemporary culture.

What are some of the low hanging fruits that CIOs can use to apply and test the principles of design thinking?

For a long-term success and true lasting impact in any sector of industry, focusing on low hanging fruits or easy way out is not going to take industry anywhere.

What we are keen to engage with and contribute to is long lasting culturally significant impacts through design. We simply have never been interested in methods, shortcuts and list of requirements. What we know from our design practice is that it is utmost essential in any collaboration to focus on the real needs and problems those need to be addressed applying ‘design thinking’ and ‘design doing’. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

APRIL, 2016

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CASE STUDY

VMWARE AIRWATCH

»

HOW BYOD HELPED AIR WORKS

TO ACCELERATE ITS PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY Trying to cut unnecessary processes and bring coherence into complex activities, Air Works decided to bring BYOD on-board with VMware AirWatch

BY JASMINE DESAI

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I

f you take a risk and invest in the technology, it always pays you back,” says Ravinder Pal SinghGlobal Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works speaking about the BYOD deployment at the organisation. Founded in 1951, Air Works provides engineering, asset management and safety and technology solutions to the commercial and business aviation communities.

Early on, Singh realised that if the organisation had to build state-of-art technology, it had to be done through devices. The first step in the longwinding process was doing a scan of what sort of digitisation had already been done in the company. The kind of data which was coming from aircraft inventory to users and consumed through processes was just not enough and would have led to a huge bottleneck eventually. “This is where BYOD fits in.

It was a risky decision because I had to go to various regulatory agencies across India to take their approval,” says Singh.

He also decided that the organisation would have a portfolio of applications which would work on any device.

He also wanted to cut-off the culture of the company giving mobile devices to their employees. His major aim was to let employees take advantage of very humongous and complex architecture beneath the application portfolio.

The choice of VMware AirWatch for BYOD was not a difficult decision to make. “When Air Works looked for a solution there was no other vendor who had such a mature technology as VMware AirWatch. The interoperability was great, considering that we are just not an Android shop or Blackberry shop etc. Thus, its neutral nature helped us to make our decision faster,” says Singh. Although the usage is very simple, the underlying technology is very complex, which is required to percolate through different layers. BYOD adoption has resulted in immediate visible impact.

“We did not have to struggle with our EXPRESS COMPUTER

The inventory accuracy has increased from 16% to 97.4%.Track and trace process which used to take 3-5 months now takes 350 milliseconds.

user-base at all. Our user-base in aviation is very passionate than bankers or IT services guys, and it is a very complex industry. The culture in aviation is very different, wherein they are not so much into devices etc. In aviation, if a bug comes in tuning of the engine, then people can die. It is not a software where if a bug comes, one can re-release the software. In this context,

I wanted zero-learning curve for the users”, informs Singh.

“BYOD has become an integral part of our working,” he says. For example, if an engineer clicks a photograph in the aircraft, then that photograph goes to an Air Works patented diagnostic software, to find out where the fault is.

Then it goes to another module, which has the history of the aircraft and looks if the fault has occurred before. If it has happened before, then it checks who has corrected it and what was the reason for it. As most of these staff carry iPads, if the work schedule needs to be changed, it can be done immediately without any lengthy processes in the middle. It immediately hits the invoicing part and the ensuing discussion with the customer is saved on a database in the cloud. All these activities do not take more than 30-40 minutes in terms of real-time exchange conversation and replanning.

“BYOD is the start-point from an end user perspective and the application portfolio. It has reduced the cycle time for most of the operations. The inventory accuracy has increased from 16% to 97.4%. Track and trace process which used to take 3-5 months which is a continuous airworthy process now takes 350 milliseconds,” says Singh.

One of the challenges that the organisation always faced was in terms of hiring skilled people. The probability of finding the right aircraft engineer with the right license and right equipments, and right paths for the right aircraft has improved from 1 % possibility to a high 7.6 % possibility.

Around 300-400 people use the software, including employees in the hanger. “Out of our 1,100 people, around 800-900 people would be using BYOD solutions across the globe,” says singh.

Air Works has also customised software for internal usage. For example, it has created collaboration tools for its pilots with HoneyWell.

Further, the instructions which happen between the hangar and the pilot can be done through the iPad. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

APRIL, 2016

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CASE STUDY

HOW

FRESHDESK

CLOUD

»

COMPUTING

IS

HELPING

FRESHDESK SCALE

ITS EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE AND REDUCE COSTS To serve its rapidly growing global customer base and to scale its existing infrastructure, Freshdesk has used the cloud computing services of Amazon Web Services

BY ANKUSH KUMAR

F

reshdesk is a global provider of cloud-based customer support software that integrates conventional support channels (such as phone, email, web) with modern channels such as social media (Facebook, Twitter), along with community management, self-service portals supported by a rich knowledge base. Its key services include email ticketing, social media integrations, SLA (service level agreement) management, automation and integrated game mechanics.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Freshdesk has witnessed exponential growth last year as its

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customer base more than doubled, and crossed 55,000 customers in over 120 countries. With this phenomenal growth, the number of requests per week has zoomed from 2 million two years ago to 260 million currently. To serve its rapidly growing global customer base, one of the biggest challenges for the firm was to scale the existing infrastructure. After evaluating several vendors, the company turned to AWS to host and deploy its cloud-based platform.

Explaining the power of scalability and flexibility, Krishnenjit Roy, Director of IT Operations, Freshdesk says, “While you need to wait for months to get an SSD installed in an aging legacy system, it can

be done within a couple of clicks with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Using AWS, we were able to scale a highly available distributed database cluster and architected a “Just-In-Time Scalability” infrastructure, without any downtime or investing a large amount of up-front cost.”

The cloud as the building block Freshdesk is an early adopter of AWS. Prior to moving to AWS, the company was running its infrastructure on Engine Yard which also used to run its infrastructure from AWS. Engine Yard is an AWS Technology Partner.

There were three major challenges

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with Engine Yard - technology adoption, limited control and support cost. This prompted Freshdesk to explore AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

“Our main criteria for choosing AWS as a strategic platform for our cloud infrastructure was their years of experience, reliability and its speed of innovation. Additionally, we wanted to invest most of our time in product innovation and offload the infrastructure onto a cloud environment so that we can get rid of administrative overheads to maintain it on a day-to-day basis,” says Roy.

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The entire process took only a couple of weeks with zero downtime. Developers who were early employees in the company transformed into great DevOps professionals. The entire migration was done by the internal team with due support from the AWS technical team. As an “all-in” software provider, Freshdesk chose AWS as the core infrastructure platform that supports its SaaS solutions.

The company's entire customer-facing app servers (that host Web and Rails Application Server) and a combination of backend resources such as cache, queue, database and storage are running on AWS cloud infrastructure. While some of these resources are sourced from AWS,

others are hosted as Freshdesk managed resources on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) servers.

Cloud as a strategic platform AWS works as Freshdesk's extended operation team and has enhanced the ability to reserve resources for demanding workloads, scaling the available I/Os per Second (IOPS) as needed, and running the most stringent workloads with consistent performance.

Today, all customer support portals that handle more than 59 million endusers across the world and serve close to 260 million requests per week, run on AWS. As far as the company's core

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CASE STUDY

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FRESHDESK

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business is concerned, all its core product offerings as well as its staging and other QA environments are on AWS, making it a strategic platform in the organisation.

Among the various AWS cloud services, Freshdesk uses the Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ElastiCache and AWS OpsWorks.

Additionally, Freshdesk creates 32,719,502 objects per month with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) which is used to store 8 TB of data such as images, attachments and user avatar images. For persistent storage, it uses Amazon DynamoDB to stream Twitter feeds by bringing in powerful capabilities for social media tracking, engagement and response management. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)’s Point-In-Time recovery functionality helps Freshdesk to get rid of backup and security issues, giving it more time to focus on architecting its core application without reinventing the wheel.

In addition, Freshdesk has built FreshInsights, its reporting bundle, on Amazon Redshift –a cloud-based data warehouse for analytics and data mining.

It helps generate reports on ticket metrics and get the data out to their users when they need it. The company was able to measure granular metrics such as agent performance, timesheet, customer satisfaction score and even identify the happiest and dissatisfied customers.

Currently, it has close to 20 million rows per day on Amazon Redshift.

Freshdesk is also releasing an integration of Freshservice, its IT service desk and ITSM solution, with AWS. This integration enables DevOps teams to manage their AWS assets from within the service desk, giving them visibility into the relationship between various AWS instances and applications. In addition, Freshservice is enabling the DevOps teams to manage their alerts better with a new Amazon CloudWatch integration.

Together, these capabilities will allow Freshservice users to serve their endcustomers more effectively.

CLOUD POWER The cloud has given Freshdesk the ability to:

1 2

Lower its end user response time by 20 percent

Measure granular metrics such as agent performance, timesheet,customer satisfaction score and even identify the happiest and dissatisfied customers

3

Effortlessly spin up additional capacity whenever the threshold of high load is crossed

While you need to wait for months to get an SSD installed in an aging legacy system,it can be done within a couple of clicks with the help of Amazon Web Services

Ability to scale seamlessly

Krishnenjit Roy

Talking about the numerous additional

Director of ITOperations,Freshdesk

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benefits that Freshdesk has experienced by shifting to the AWS cloud, Roy explains, “In addition to the 100 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances we have in place today, when we reach high load, we can effortlessly spin up additional capacity and it can be ready in time to handle the current workload. This makes it easier to handle enterprise customers with more than 1500 support agents. This kind of iteration is one of the greatest features of AWS, and is only possible because they can provision (and de-provision) Amazon EC2 instances instantly.”

AWS has also further addressed the firm’s concerns pertaining to data security. AWS’s certifications and architecture have almost eliminated the security gaps against all possible breaches, which dramatically reduces complexity. This in turn, helps the firm shift focus to innovation without worrying about security threats.

While the company was evaluating other cloud providers during the initial decision phase, it found AWS to be the least expensive - its closest competitor was priced 50 percent higher. “Once we realized that our commitment with AWS would be long-term, we invested in the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. With Reserved Instances, our costs have been reduced by 75 percent.”

Freshdesk was able to lower its end user response time by 20 percent with Amazon CloudFront. It could deliver faster and efficiently with provisioned IOPS (around 30k I/Os per Second), SSD backed stores and APIs provided by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) without compromising on the budgets.

Encouraged by the overall experience so far, Freshdesk is planning to work with AWS on the elastic search capabilities. The company is also building an event processing engine using Snowplow. This will use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Kinesis. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

APRIL, 2016

INTERVIEW SUNIL TANDON TATA TELESERVICES

WI-FI ADOPTION IS STILL IN AN EARLY STAGE IN INDIA In the last one and half year time period, there has been significant interest and focus of the government and enterprises in Wi-Fi. With the government’s ambitious plans for Digital India, Wi-Fi can prove to be a great complementary technology, believes Sunil Tandon, Head - Non Voice Services, Tata Teleservices in a conversation with Mohd Ujaley How has the Wi-Fi space evolved in the last couple of years?

Recently, there has been significant interest and focus of the government and enterprises in the Wi-Fi space. Now, we have come to a stage where we have started to analyse how best we can use Wi-Fi as a complementary technology to the networks that are already in place.

This includes mobility or cellular networks for mobile customers, fixed network for fixed customers and wireless network for nomadic customers.

Mobile customers are those who are traveling in the car and if there is a need to talk to somebody, they are best served by the cellular networks. 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G is the technology truly suited for the mobile users. A fixed user is somebody who is in the desk or in office, and can be served by the fixed-line network both for voice and data. Nomadic users are those who are at a particular place for a long period of time – more than 20 minutes, such as the airport, cafe, shopping mall etc. These set of users, in our assessment, can be well served by the Wi-Fi network.

The interest in Wi-Fi has also increased because of positive global announcements. A big device 28

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manufacturer and a few other companies made some big announcements around Wi-Fi that led to an improved ecosytem and user experience. In India, government efforts on Digital India and Smart Cities are visible and both have generated lot of interest and now people are beginning to discuss what is possible and what is not possible.

the Internet can do to simplify their life and get them socially connected with friends and relatives, adoption is surely going to increase. As the next 100-200 million people go out and discover the Internet, the demand will increase. While there are challenges, strong demand in our assessment over a period of time will ensure that we ride over these challenges.

You mentioned that there is growing interest and focus in Wi-Fi as a complementary technology. In your opinion, what are the key areas that need to be addressed to encourage Wi-Fi usage?

Other than investment in this sector, we need last mile connectivity. In our country, the last mile fibre is still limited.

It is a huge challenge because if you want to provide fast Internet access to people, you need fibre as backhaul. Secondly, the availability and quality of electricity is different at different locations and it also varies in different seasons and the time of the day, which in turn, impacts access.

Having said that, there is a lot of optimism. A large percentage of the population in India still does not have access to the Internet and as more and more people discover that and see what

When it comes to last mile connectivity, we seem to be banking too much on NOFN. How feasible is this optimism?

We should look at all the alternative options, all the time. Typically, if you look at a country like USA, there are five access mediums available to them. They have broadband, cellular, DTH, satellite and cable. You can choose any one or you can build redundancy by using one as the main and the second as secondary option.

But in our country, we have only one or two options. We still have that journey to travel. And, at this stage of the journey, we are absolutely open – open to investment, open to work with various partners and open to different technologies.

There is a flurry of announcements from state governments for providing free Wi-Fi APRIL, 2016

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There has been significant interest and focus of the government and enterprises in the Wi-Fi space.Now,we have come to a stage where we have started to analyse how best we can use Wi-Fi as a complementary technology to the networks that are already in place

access. But how do you monetise it and make it self-sustainable?

We absolutely believe that anything that we start, we must ensure that it is selfsustainable. It means that it must provide opportunities for revenue generation. For example, some state government and municipalities are open to paying a fixed fee per user per month. In addition to this, there is a possibility of analysing the usage information at an aggregate level, not at an individual level, and use that to serve appropriate value to the customers.

There are corporate houses out there who are willing to pay for this kind of information. The third option is the subscription model. Typically, there is a certain amount of free minute and thereafter there is an option to buy time.

Once people start seeing the value offered

by Wi-Fi, usage can pick up.

Very soon, companies like Reliance Jio are likely to roll-out telephony and data services at a massive level.Will that impact this sector?

In a nation of 125 crore people, only 25 crore people can access the Internet today.

Wi-Fi adoption is still in an early stage in EXPRESS COMPUTER

India. Countries like China have got more than a million hotspots. We are far away from China, and hence, there are a lot of opportunities for all the companies here.

We as a company have always believed in competition. More choices in front of the customer will help the market to grow, create awareness and obviously it will make us more leaner, fitter and smarter.

We are actually looking forward to new launches, as a lot of people would have affordable access to hi-speed Internet.

I think that is clearly a game changer.

Today, we cannot visualise the possibilities, but people will themselves discover the immense value. mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com

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CO-CREATING A DIGITAL INDIA:

LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGYTO MAKE INDIASMART EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2016 Leveraging technology to make India smart Inauguration and Welcome Address Power solutions for WAN connectivity Moving beyond e-Gov to connected Governance Optimisation of ITlandscape with least risk Digital Architecture for smarter Governance 20 years of digital innovation in India Panel Discussion: Co-creating Digital India – Leveraging Technology to make India smart 32

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he 19th edition of India’s premier eGovernance forum, the Express Technology Sabha, was held on 18th February at the Crown Plaza in Kochi – the capital city of God's own country, Kerala.

Express Technology Sabha has long been India’s premier eGovernance Forum; and has been known for setting the pace for eGovernance seminars with leadership dialogues, actionable case studies & best practices, networking opportunities and technology showcases. The forum gathered under one roof some of the key Government ICT practitioners and

decision makers. The 3-day residential conference explored new trends and innovations that are crucial in delivering e-governance initiatives successfully. Technology Sabha had the support of departments such as DeiTY, NeGP and Digital India in executing this event.

The event saw the participation of more than hundred senior government bureaucrats, who discussed and debated topics crucial for delivering efficient e-governance initiatives. Some prominent industry and thought leaders who participated in the event included: APRIL, 2016

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PROMINENT SPEAKERS @

Honorable Governor of Kerala, Justice P Sathasivam

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Ranjan Dwivedi Director General of Police, Home Guards, Govt of Uttar Pradesh

Elias George Additional Chief Secretary, Govt of Kerala & Managing Director – Kochi Metro Rail

Dr Shalini Rajneesh Principal Secretary, Backward Classes Welfare, Department, Govt of Karnataka

Tom Jose Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Labour and Skills, Govt of Kerala

Ganga Kumar Special Secretary and Managing Director – BSBCCL, Govt of Bihar

Amit Sharma MD, SIDCO, Govt of Jammu & Kashmir

Vidya Bhushan Additional Commissioner, Commercial Taxes, Noida

Sanjay Sahay ADG, Grievances & Human Rights, Govt of Karnataka

Nilesh B Fal Dessai Managing Director, Info Tech Corporation of Goa Limited

Golok Kumar Simli Principal Consultant & Head Technology, Ministry of External Affairs,Passport Seva Project

Dr BK Murthy Executive Director, C-DAC

Saadut Hussain CEO, Jammu and Kashmir e-Governance Agency, Govt of Jammu & Kashmir

Tarun Kumar Pithode District Collector, Rajgarh

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INAUGURATION AND WELCOME ADDRESS T

Chief Guest, Honorable Governor of Kerala, Justice P Sathasivam, in conversation with Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director and Head-New Media, The Express Group.

Elias George, Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Kerala and Managing Director – Kochi Metro Rail 34

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he mega event was inaugurated by the Chief Guest, Honorable Governor of Kerala, Justice P Sathasivam, who was welcomed by Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director and Head-New Media, The Express Group.

In his inaugural speech, the Honorable Governor spoke of the importance of events such as the Express Technology Sabha and said, “The theme, ‘Co-creating Digital India – Leveraging Technology to make India smart’ is appropriate at this juncture.” The Governor spoke about his experience with technology, and remarked about the transformation that the banking sector has undergone, thanks to technology.

The first keynote for the event was delivered by Elias George, Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Kerala and Managing Director – Kochi Metro Rail. Elias George, spoke on the topic, ‘Leveraging Technology to make India Smart: A Kochi perspective.’

Speaking about the importance of smart cities, George remarked that a smart city must be able to raise the living standards of people. “In a smart city, the public transport must be so customer friendly, that even the higher government authorities must feel comfortable to travel in them,” said George. Talking about how technology can make e-governance services more accessible to common people, George gave an example of the ‘Kochi App’, which not only provides people the option to pay utility bills, but also gives them real-time information on bus routes.

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Power solutions for WAN connectivity Anubhav Sabharwal, GM - Government Business, Schneider Electric IT Business

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n his presentation, Anubhav Sabharwal, General Manager Government Business, Schneider Electric IT Business, started by sharing details on the key achievements of Schneider Electric in the last one year. His

company was awarded the highest exporter award for the 9th consecutive year by the Government of India for IT Hardware. “Our products are being made in India for the Indian market. This is a true example of Prime Minister Narendra

Modi’s initiative of the Make in India project.” He also informed that all the plants of the Schneider Electric were Six Sigma certified, which assures an enterprise on the quality of services and products.

Sabharwal also presented a brief case study on how Schneider Electric Service Bureau in Bangalore was helping the government of Madhya Pradesh in ensuring that its State Wide Area Network (MPSWAN) runs smoothly without any hiccups. He stated that close to 358 locations were being monitored by a DCIM Software in a NOC in Bhopal.

According to Sabharwal, all the parameters of government and enterprise IT infrastructure could be efficiently monitored with the help of its service bureau in Bangalore. Sabharwal also highlighted that both battery and CPU were going through a transformation phase. Enterprises were also moving from non-modular distribution and legacy systems to modular systems.

Moving beyond e-Gov to connected Governance Saurabh Bhattacharya, Director Government & Public Sector Consulting, PwC India

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aurabh Bhattacharya’s presentation focused on cocreation of an economic strategy to bring various stakeholders together to create value to beneficiaries in the Digital India project.

Emphasizing the role of private organizations in bringing in more value to e-governance projects, Bhattarcharya said that a robust technology infrastructure for powering e-governance services effectively could be achieved by collectively bringing in government departments, businesses and citizens to create value for all beneficiaries.

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Optimisation of IT landscape with least risk Dr Naveen Gurusiddaiah, Head, Technical Services, Micro Focus India

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haring his views on how enterprises could optimize their IT landscape with the least possible risk, Dr Naveen Gurusiddaiah, presented a small overview of the challenges that enterprises face today. Dr Gurusiddaiah also spoke about COBOL – a language considered dead by many people. “Many people have the wrong perception that COBOL is dead. We have brought a lot of innovation in COBOL.” Micro Focus has also tried to bring in host connectivity from mainframes to a modern platform, which gives users a lot of flexibility. Dr Naveen Gurusiddaiah also spoke about the importance of identity, access and security for the government

Digital Architecture for smarter Governance Ravinder Pal Singh, Director – Solutions Strategy & Business Development Smart Cities, IoT & Digitisation, Dell Inc

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n his presentation, Ravinder Pal Singh, Director – Solutions Strategy & Business Development Smart Cities, IoT & Digitisation, Dell Inc, spoke about the massive disruption caused by technology and the impact it had made on common people. “20 years back people used to fear that the pace of technology adoption will replace human workforce and increase unemployment.

But in the last 15 years, the adoption of digital technologies has created innovative ways in how customer services were rendered,” said Singh.

Singh pointed out that digitization was transforming the way enterprises did business. “Digitization is changing the way we learn, play and do business.

One of the best examples of how digitization is changing the country can be seen from the Passport Seva project and land record project,” Singh added.

As huge amount of data was available at each department, it was possible to properly analyse and cull out valuable information.

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20 years of digital innovation in India Ankur Goel, Head - Government & Commercial Business (India & SAARC), Polycom

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huge player in the collaboration space, Polycom is witnessing an explosion in video adoption in the country. Through his presentation, Ankur Goel, explained how video collaboration technologies were being used in five key sectors namely, egovernance, e – education (through virtual class room and video library), tele-health (through home care and primary care), Social Justice (for

prosecution and trials) and National security.

Goel also spoke about the company's Acoustic Bubble technology that enables workers to enjoy the advantages of video conferencing any time, any place, anywhere – without the worry of background noise. It effectively banishes background noise and makes mobile video conferencing very effective.

Panel Discussion: Co-creating Digital India – Leveraging Technologyto make India smart

(From L-R) Moderated by Biju Kadapurath, Director - Government & Public Sector Consulting , PwC India, this panel discussion included Ganga Kumar, Special Secretary and Managing Director – BSBCCL, Government of Bihar; Anubhav Sabharwal, General Manager, Government Business, Schneider Electric IT Business and Dr Rajeev Papneja, EVP/COO, ESDS, as the panelists.

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hile the overall objective of Digital India was impressive, the road to execution is challenging. A

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collective view of the panelists was to leverage the collective learning and experiences of technology implementation, and share it for the

benefit of other organizations. Said Ganga Kumar, Special Secretary and Managing Director – BSBCCL, “In the Government, the challenges across all the sectors are the same. We are doing a lot of work but it is fragmented.” He urged government organizations to share their knowledge so that the learning curve was lesser for other organizations.

Taking the conversation ahead, Dr Rajeev Papneja said, “Digital India cannot be successful without the participation of the private sector.”

Papneja pointed out to the success of cloud experienced by many government organizations, and urged participants to adopt cloud for making their organizations more agile.

Panelists also spoke about the need to build better infrastructure – especially in rural India. Said Anubhav Sabharwal, General Manager, Government Business, Schneider Electric IT Business, “There is regular power failure in rural India.

For the vision of Digital India to succeed completely, this issue must be addressed.”

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KEYNOTE: KEYIMPERATIVES FOR ACCELERATING TRANSITION TO SMARTCITIES EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2016

Biju Kadapurath, Director - Government & Public Sector Consulting, PwC India

Keynote: Key imperatives for accelerating transition to smart cities Software Defined Infrastructure Availability for the Always - On Enterprise Smart Connectivity & Security Safeguarding,Data and Networks against Insider and Outside Attacks Cyber Security for Digital India Information security in the era of disruptions Moving beyond eGov: Embracing mobile (mGov) Partnering for Success: How Government and Industry can work together to grow the Indian ITEco System Panel Discussion: Ensuring last mile connectivity securely 38

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n his keynote, Biju Kadapurath spoke about the various smart city components such as Smart & Green Energy, Smart Water and Sewage Management, City Solid Waste Management, Multi Model Mobility, Safe City and Surveillance, Health and welfare, Smart Governance, Smart Spaces, Environment Sustainability, City Communication, Citizen Participation, Disaster and Emergency Management.

He shared that the population in India was growing rapidly and every year the country was adding a

population equal to Brazil. He stressed on the concept of dense area development which could lead to improved service delivery efficiency and revenues. He emphasized on establishing partnerships with the private sector and international bodies to ensure delivery of high quality smart services. Sharing his future outlook, Biju Kadapurath spoke about the concept of 'Smart communities'. This means that governments have to utilize the digitization phenomenon and technologies to create a better living experience.

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Software Defined Infrastructure Mani Kiran Kumar, Manager, Data Centre Solution & Services, Schneider Electric IT Business

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n his presentation, Mani Kiran Kumar, talked about the importance of software driven infrastructure and the key initiatives that Schneider was taking in this critical infrastructure market.

Sharing the company's vision for the data center business, Mani said that Schneider Electric was focusing on dramatically simplifying the process of designing, deploying and operating the world’s most predictable, dense and efficient data centers. “Our approach is to focus on the improvement and integration of the system – not the component,” said Kumar. The company develops connected technologies and solutions to manage energy and process in ways that are reliable, efficient and sustainable. Mani said that the group invested in R&D to sustain innovation and differentiation, with a strong commitment to sustainable development.

Availability for the Always - On Enterprise Sunil Kumar, Territory Manager, India South, Veeam Software

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mphasizing on the importance of redundancy for smart cities, Sunil Kumar shared his perspective on how technologies such as virtualization or cloud were extremely important. He then shared his perspective on the importance of taking backups for legacy infrastructure, as very few people tested their virtual backup infrastructure.

Quoting a study, he said that a significant number of CIOs say there is a gap between the level of availability of legacy backup solutions provide and what end users demand, felt that there was a problem in their backup system. Sunil Kumar shared how his organization ensured that every backup was restorable, as its software did a backup within a period of every 15 minutes.

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Smart Connectivity & Security Rajesh Kumar, Tech Lead, Juniper Networks

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ighlighting the importance of Smart Cities, Rajesh Kumar said that it will lead to good infrastructure such as water, sanitation, reliable utility services and healthcare facilities. Highlighting the importance of connectivity, Rajesh said that it was extremely important for different entities in the ecosystem to exchange information with each other.

Citing an analogy, Rajesh gave the example of interactions between different departments of a hospital and traffic police to keep the traffic smooth so that the ambulance carrying the patient reaches the intensive care on time. “Network and data centers are the main foundation of the smart infrastructure. If the network is not stable then the connectivity between the devices will start dropping,” said Rajesh .

He also shared details on the latest trends in automation for networks, which can significantly raise efficiencies.

Safeguarding Data and Networks against Insider and Outside Attacks Ajay Dubey, National Manager, Partners & Alliances, Forcepoint

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jay Dubey began his presentation by giving an overview about how the vector of cyber vulnerabilities has spread over the years. With the proliferation of smartphones and higher adoption of technologies, the space for cyber crime has also increased. He also shared some of the best practices to mitigate the challenge and how Forcepoint was enabling government and private enterprises to secure and safeguard their data.

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Cyber Security for Digital India Sanjay Sahay, ADG, Grievances & Human Rights, Government of Karnataka

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anjay Sahay, while addressing on the topic of cyber security for Digital India, praised the government initiative of connecting the last mile and taking services to citizens via the Internet.

However, he cautioned government departments to take cognizance of the fact that many large enterprises that had robust systems in place were hacked. He advocated government organizations to have a broader view of security. “Cyber security should be an integral part of security, as there is no difference now between physical security and cyber security,” said Sanjay.

Information security in the era of disruptions Gaurav Mahendru, Solutions Architect, Trend Micro

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mphasizing the critical role of information and required security, Gaurav Mahendru, pointed out that modern business trends and the rise of digitally enabled businesses have fuelled massive changes in the enterprise IT landscape.

“The use of cloud, mobile, IoT and constant connectivity are powering today's world, which in turn are driving changes in the modern data center. But, as quickly as enterprises are evolving, hackers are finding new and innovative ways of getting into the organisation. And regardless of how they get in, they are ultimately after one thing – sensitive, critical information that is housed in the data center.” Mahendru highlighted his firm’s commitment to keep information safe for all organisations, and said that his firm wanted to make the world safe for exchanging digital information.

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Moving beyond eGov: Embracing mGovernance Vasudeo Purushottam Behere, Head - Government Vertical, NetCORE Solutions Private Limited

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asudeo Purushottam Behere began his presentation by highlighting the role of mobile in today's world. Behere highlighted how mGovernance initiatives can make e-Governance programmes more effective. To demonstrate how mobile communications were being used to proliferate messages of great national importance, he shared some of the interesting findings from Prime Minister

Narendra Modi's programme called Man Ki Baat. “People are using IVR systems to get information and share their thoughts about a government project in large numbers,” pointed out Behere.

Highlighting the importance of mobile phones in delivering e-governance services, Behere said that mGovernance initiatives could be used to collect effective feedback from citizens and improve services provided by the government.

Partnering for Success: How Government and Industry can work together to grow the Indian IT Eco System Dr Jared William Ragland, Director, Policy, APAC, BSA | The Software Alliance

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r Jared William Ragland presented an overview of the various activities of BSA | The Software Alliance across the globe. He informed the audience that BSA has been working for educating people on the legal use of software and its intended benefit. He spoke about how the BSA was working with the government to increase awareness about licensed software, and sensitize businesses on protection of intellectual property. Ragland also highlighted how data was becoming an asset and opportunities for the companies and hence, proper compliance was key to success.

Ragland was excited about the opportunities that an initiative such as the Digital India project presented, as he believed that these projects were creating immense opportunities for many stakeholders in the country.

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Panel Discussion: Ensuring last mile connectivity and security

(From L to R) Moderated by Arun Moral J, Director - Government & Public Sector Consulting, PwC India, this panel discussion saw the participation of eminent thought leaders such as Tom Jose, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Labour and Skills, Kerala; Ranjan Dwivedi, Director General of Police, Home Guards, Govt of Uttar Pradesh; Sanjay Sahay, ADG, Grievances & Human Rights,Government of Karnataka; Vidya Bhushan,Additional Commissioner, Commercial taxes, Noida and and Puneet Ahuja, Sr. Technical Consultant, Juniper Networks.

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he moderator began the discussion by asking the panelists about their views on last mile connectivity issues and solutions. Most panelists were of the view that for the dream of Digital India to succeed, ensuring last mile connectivity was key. This was especially important in

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rural areas, where network connectivity was relatively poor. As more and more government departments start delivering e-Governance services, the importance of last mile connectivity will only grow. Panelists also spoke about the importance of ensuring cyber security and increasing awareness. Ranjan

Dwivedi, pointed out that while a lot has been done with respect to training related to cyber security for police departments, there is still a big need for further improvement to enable the police personnel to make more efficient use of technology in their day to day job role.

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Panel Discussion: Smart Electronic Service Delivery: Best Practices

Panel Discussion: Smart Electronic Service Delivery: Best Practices eNlight 360 Security made simple with Sophos Smart storage for government Astrategic approach against an increasingly sophisticated threat Digital India‌Digital Future...

Panel Discussion: Availability of Skilled Resources for fulfilling the dream of Digital India Embracing mGovernance Health Informatics: Issues and challenges in implementing e-gov solutions Power Discussions @ Technology Sabha Power Panel : Dell Power Panel: BSA| The Software Alliance Power Panel : Micro Focus Power Panel: Schneider Electric Power Panel: Veeam Software Power Panel: ESDS 44

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(L to R) Moderated by Srikanth RP, Editor, Express Computer, this panel discussion had panelists share best practices and examples of effective and successful e-governance services. Panelists included Tarun Kumar Pithode, District Collector, Rajgarh; Dr Shalini Rajneesh, Principal Secretary, Backward Classes Welfare Department,Govt of Karnataka; Amit Sharma, MD, SIDCO, Govt of Jammu & Kashmir and Nilesh B Fal Dessai, Managing Director, Info Tech Corporation of Goa Limited

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ven as the government has an ambitious digital agenda, there are a number of steps that need to be taken for ensuring that citizens have easy access to electronic services provided by the government.

This may be given using kiosks, common service centers or by providing free WiFi facilities as some districts have done.

For example, Rajgarh district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, is experimenting with a free Wi-Fi model. " Besides the access, the emphasis must be on providing effective services.

"The focus of the government departments must be to provide timely and efficient services," stated Tarun Kumar Pithode, District Collector, Rajgarh. To ensure that the services are delivered without any hiccups, Pithode said that it was important for the government departments to invest time and efforts in capacity planning, and regularly take feedback from every stakeholder.

Similarly, Dr Shalini Rajneesh, Principal Secretary, Backward Classes Welfare Department, Govt of Karnataka, spoke about 'Sakala', an extremely successful initiative that

ensures that government services are delivered to citizens within a stipulated timeframe. "In a e-governance service, responsible officials have to be extremely responsive. If this is not done, the service delivery model will not be able to succeed in the long run," said Dr Shalini. Today, Sakala has not only ushered in transparency but has also reduced corruption in a significant way.

Nilesh Dessai of Info Tech Corporation of Goa Ltd, shared details on how his department was looking at building a robust infrastructure so that citizens could access government related services easily. "We have connected all panchayats to Goa broadband," said Nilesh.

Amit Sharma, MD, SIDCO, Govt of Jammu & Kashmir, shared his perspective on the importance of mGovernance. "Using mobile phones, we can deliver services to people closer to their homes. In the future, we must move towards a world where we do not need multiple certifications. One single authentication must be able to establish your identity and give an individual access to all government services," said Amit Sharma.

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eNlight 360 Dr Rajeev Papneja, EVP and COO, ESDS Software Solutions

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haring details about ESDS’ flagship product, eNlight, Dr Rajeev Papneja, said that this product offering was a 'Made in India' offering, which was comparable to

the best in the world. As per a recent Gartner report, the present average global compute consumption by any organization is extremely low at 8% while it is just 5% among Indian organizations. Unlike the

present pay-per-use cloud model, ESDS’ eNlight Cloud delivers in-built intelligence to constantly monitor consumption of virtual machines and accordingly assign computing resource in real-time. Dr Rajeev said that the pay-per-use model will encourage even smaller government departments to make IT investments based on their actual requirements.

Government enterprises with seasonal traffic who experience unpredictable compute load and do not want to make heavy IT investments can use the pay-per-use model of eNlight cloud. Unlike traditional cloud service providers, eNlight is focused on real time auto-adjustment of compute resources of a virtual machine, while all the other common features like high availability, scalability and horizontal scaling are already built in the cloud platform.

Security made simple with Sophos Rajeev Gupta, AVP Sales, India & SAARC, Sophos Technologies Pvt Ltd

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n his address, Rajeev Gupta highlighted the increasing level of digitization in the country. “India is going digital because of more number of people getting connected to the Internet. Over 350 million people are connected via Internet.” Rajeev also spoke in detail about the growing trend of IT infrastructure being built on the foundation of cloud, mobile, social, and big data technologies. While this trend accelerated productivity, it has also exposed enterprises to more risks, as there were no defined borders. In this scenario, securing data and applications without impacting user experience is critical, said Rajeev. In his presentation, he also highlighted how his firm had a holistic security portfolio for guarding government enterprises against malware, intrusions, data leakage and unauthorized application usage.

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Smart storage for government Avinash Kulkarni, Regional Sales - Govt Business Vertical, Hitachi Data Systems

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vinash Kulkarni spoke about how government departments could raise the productivity and efficiency of their data

centers. Kulkarni said that his company had experience and expertise in government projects, and informed the delegates that a majority of state data

centers were running on Hitachi Storage. He also spoke on the importance of virtualizing, unifying and managing data for government departments.

Speaking on the issues of disaster recovery for e-Governance initiatives he shared details on how government departments could consolidate and manage heterogeneous storage arrays using the firm's virtualization and management solutions.

He also shared more details on the acquisition of Pentaho, a leading data integration, visualization and analytics company with an aim to enhance the company’s existing big data analytics and processing technologies and extend the capabilities of its broader information management product and services portfolio.

A strategic approach against an increasingly sophisticated threat Michael Joseph, Director, System Engineering, India & SAARC, Fortinet

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oseph highlighted the critical importance of ensuring security, especially since more and more government services were delivered the electronic way.

Sharing details on how some of the leading firms like Sony, Apple, eBay were hacked, Michael Joseph highlighted the fact that government departments cannot afford to lower their guard even momentarily.

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organizations, he shared the example of the Carbanak cybergang. "Hackers sent an email containing a malware program called Carbanak to hundreds of bank employees, hoping to infect a bank's administrative computer." He also spoke about Ukraine's Power Plant Hack where two power distribution companies reported the hack and more than 80,000 users were without power for more than three hours. Joseph shared some best practices for government officials to better protect themselves, while highlighting his firm's value proposition.

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Digital India… Digital Future...

Hirak Mukherjee, Managing Consultant - Technology Transformation, Sify Technologies Limited

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irak Mukherjee's session primarily focused on converged infrastructure. He explained how a converged infrastructure could help government departments implement a scalable platform that significantly reduced the time and cost of deploying new IT services. Hirak highlighted Sify's strengths in offering ICT services which included the domains of telecom, data centre, cloud,

application integration and technology integration. Sify has a number of notable firsts - be it being India’s first private Internet Service provider, India’s first IPv6 provider and India’s first ICT company to own a cable landing station.

Hirak also shared details on Sify's capabilities in context aware computing, event driven analytics and pervasive computing, which could be useful for government departments.

Panel Discussion: Availability of Skilled Resources for fulfilling the dream of Digital India

(L to R) Aniket Patange, Director APJ, Data Center Lifecycle Services, IT Business, Schneider Electric; Amit Sharma, MD, SIDCO, Govt of Jammu & Kashmir; Dr BK Murthy, Executive Director, C-DAC, Golok Kumar Simli,Principal Consultant & Head Technology, Passport Seva Project, Ministry of External Affairs and Saadut Hussain, CEO, Jammu and Kashmir e-Governance Agency

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he Power Panel discussion on Availability of Skilled Resources for fulfilling the dream of Digital India primarily focused on shortage of technical skilled resources.

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Dr B.K Murthy, Executive Director, C-DAC who moderated the discussion presented an overview of the status of skills shortage in the country and encouraged the panelists to share some

solutions for addressing this issue.

Managing Director, J&K SIDCO, Amit Sharma shared his views on the importance of upgradation of skills for ensuring the success of the Make in India mission. Aniket Patange, Director APJ, Data Center Lifecycle Services, IT Business, Schneider Electric, said that his organization was working closely with the government in understanding the skills gap. As part of its CSR activities, Schneider Electric is helping in providing training for upgrading skills and enhancing employment.

Golok Kumar Simli,Principal Consultant & Head Technology, Passport Seva Project, Ministry of External Affairs, pointed out that the need of the hour was enhancing digital skills, especially as India was on the verge of a digital transformation. Most panelists were of the view that common standards need to be setup to ensure that every certification's relevance in the current market was measured and certified.

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Embracing mGovernance Ganga Kumar, Special Secretary & MD, BSBCCL, Govt of Bihar

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anga Kumar spoke passionately about the critical importance of m-Governance initiatives, and said that mGovernance has helped the organization take its efficiency and productivity to a different level. The firm has used mobile platforms for ensuring transparency and accountability in the execution of the projects and its operations. BSBCCL has implemented a location tracker solution from Vodafone, which helps the firm in

tracking the field force and their movements. Today, more than one thousand assistant engineers are using this technology to monitor the progress of projects.

The firm is the first in the state to use mobile application using GPS technology for mobile governance.

Ganga Kumar said that this initiative has helped the firm monitor its diverse field force and execute projects at a faster pace.

Health Informatics: Issues and challenges in implementing e-gov solutions Dr BK Murthy, Executive Director, C-DAC

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r B K Murthy highlighted the key challenges of implementing eGovernance services. His presentation explained in detail the three main types of challenges i.e technical challenges, administrative challenges and user level challenges, and the ways to address these challenges.

Dr Murthy also gave an overview of several innovative products that were launched by C-DAC like eAusadhi, Blood Bank, Megh-sushrut, eSushrut, Ayu-sushrut, GMEI,HFMS, eMMS and eChavi. He also shared his perspective on the power of mobile applications and its usage by the healthcare industry. He also spoke about the benefits of mobile based HMIS, wherein doctors were able to address the queries of patients on a real-time basis using a mobile platform.

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POWER DISCUSSIONS @ TECHNOLOGYSABHA Power Panel : Dell

S

tressing on the importance of security and its relevance in today's world, Ravinderpal Pal Singh, Director – Solution Strategy & Business Development Smart Cities, IoT & Digitization, Dell,

said, “Security is the most important aspect when it comes to moving ahead in various emerging areas specially cloud computing. The real problem that most of the organisations face is how to analyse what kind of data that needs to

be secured.”

Classification of data is important when it comes to security, said Singh.

“Security audit is extremely important when we deploy any application. We don’t have data retiring policy in India. In most of the cases, we don’t even know how data can be useful to us.”

Singh then stressed on storage and its significance in CCTV projects, “CCTV is still at a stage where it is not regulated properly. In CCTV data, storage is really important as we may have to dig years of old data. The size of the storage is coming down and even formats are also coming down but the policy has to be there whether we really need to store everything. Technology can secure anything but it depends on the person who is handling the security.”

Power Panel: BSA | The Software Alliance

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epresenting BSA, Dr Jared William Ragland, Director, Policy, APAC, BSA | The Software Alliance, spoke about the immense opportunities that India presented. "India is a very large country and therefore the opportunities, challenges and even the stakes for businesses are very

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high. Software services are moving on the internet and on the cloud. If you need to be a company managing a sizable businesses then you need to know how to manage the systems,” said Jared.

Jared said that BSA was excited about the Digital India initiative that the government had initiated, and said that

these projects were creating 360 degree opportunities for everyone.

Highlighting the procurement process in the Indian context, Jared said that BSA was working closely with the Government.

"We are building relationships with the states. We have been talking about the challenges that our members are facing in the procurement process. We want to make sure that the system is much more efficient and transparent,” said Jared.

Some of the delegates during the Power Panel raised the issues of organizations incurring huge losses due to wrongly drafted RFPs. Lack of involvement of experts during the procurement process was a huge drawback in the process. Some of the delegates suggested that the government departments must involve experts from specific fields for a better outcome.

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Power Panel : Micro Focus

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uring the discussion, representatives from Micro Focus presented a broad overview of various activities taken by the company in the area of

enabling organizations to exploit trends such as the cloud, mobility and virtualization, whilst also leveraging their prior investments and established IT assets.

The firm informed the delegates that most of the firm's products are now developed in India. In fact, the company is also localizing most of its offerings to the extent of incorporating Indian languages such as Hindi.

Micro Focus has a huge focus on the government, and said that it has been focusing on the government vertical in a big way. Sharing some examples from public sector units in which Micro Focus solutions were being deployed, the representative from Micro Focus said that there was huge potential in the government sector as with the announcement of Digital India programme, the opportunities were immense for their firm.

Power Panel: Schneider Electric

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n this power discussion, Schneider Electric shared the firm's perspective on the topic of “Data Center Life Cycle Services”. Aniket Patange, Director Datacenter Lifecycle Services and Anubhav Sabharwal, General Manager Government Business, Schneider Electric IT Business along with their team gave a detailed presentation highlighting various stages of the data 50

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center life cycle. Patange informed that at every stage of the data center life cycle, Schneider Electric was in a position to enter and help organizations make their data centers more energy efficient.

Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant and Head –Technology, PMU, Passport Seva Project, Government of India pointed out that today, the concept of a 8-10 year life cycle has gone as the

data center life cycle has to be endless in today's time. Patange informed that in the last five years, there has been a data centre explosion across the globe including in India and Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon is further likely to increase the demand. Hence, it was important to modernize the physical infrastructure too. He said, “IT refreshment is happening but physical infrastructure has been the same in last 10 to 15 years and that puts a lot of pressure on delivering efficient services."

The government officials were of the view that going for a private cloud was tough for them but they were always on the lookout for innovative technologies which could help them in increasing their efficiency. Anubhav Sabharwal of Schneider Electric highlighted that the company had established a dedicated team in Bangalore which can help government organizations across the country in monitoring their data centers for energy efficiencies and other critical needs.

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Power Panel: Veeam Software

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n his presentation, Sunil Kumar, Territory Manager, India South, Veeam Software, spoke about the challenges that government organizations faced due to legacy backup solutions. In many cases, government departments failed to recover their data from backups. Kumar said that his firm's products and solutions were designed to

deliver an RTPO of less than 5 minutes for all applications and data by leveraging virtualization, modern storage and the cloud.

Using the firm's products, government departments can guarantee recovery of every file, application or virtual server.

Additionally, utilizing backup data can be used to create an exact replica of the

production environment. Government departments can test a low-risk deployment with Virtual Lab, allowing them to test changes in a production-like environment before actually deploying them.

Kumar spoke in detail about the Veeam Availability Suite, which provides monitoring and alerting tools so that government departments can discover, and be alerted of, issues in the IT environment before they have a significant impact, with complete visibility of the backup. With features like 2-in-1: backup and replication, builtin WAN acceleration, backup from storage snapshots for EMC, HPE and NetApp and HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration, Kumar said that government departments could avoid data loss and achieve RPOs of less than 15 minutes.

Power Panel: ESDS

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r Rajeev Papneja, EVP and COO, ESDS Software Solutions, shared details about ESDS' data centers. He also spoke in detail about its flagship product, eNlight, which was a 'Made in India' offering, and

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comparable to the best in the world.

Dr Papneja highlighted that ESDS held a US patent for the auto-scalable feature of eNlight, which has succeeded in eliminating the downtime suffrages, which occur as a result of volatile

Internet traffic. This auto-scaling feature makes eNlight suitable for Disaster Recovery hosting and cuts down Disaster Recovery hosting costs by 70%. Pointing out to the ability to choose only the exact features that enterprises want, Dr Papneja said that the cloud hosting solution had a built-in ability to automatically scale CPU and RAM ondemand. Government enterprises also have the choice of opting for minute-tominute usage and billing of CPU, RAM, bandwidth and hard disk space of each virtual machine.

Government enterprises with seasonal traffic who experience unpredictable compute load and do not want to make heavy IT investments can use the pay-peruse model of eNlight cloud.

Information on eMagic, an enterprise data center management solution from ESDS and MTvScan (a malware and trojan vulnerability scanner) were also shared with the attendees.

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EVENT EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA 2016

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RECOGNISING OUTSTANDING eGOVERNANCE IMPLEMENTATIONS A

s part of the event, innovative e-governance initiatives were honored. The awards were sponsored by Dell. Ranjan Dwivedi, Director General of Police, Home Guards, Govt of Uttar Pradesh, was the Guest of

Ranjan Dwivedi, Director General of Police, Home Guards, Govt of Uttar Pradesh

Honor. He was joined on stage by Ranjit Metrani, Director and GM-South, Dell India, to give away the awards.

Ranjan Dwivedi in his address, acknowledged the important work done by government and private agencies for

improving the overall governance framework in the country. Dwivedi highlighted the importance of effective private public partnerships, and said that it was crucial for the success of government projects.

Ranjit Metrani, Director and GM-South, Dell India came on stage to give away the awards with Ranjan Dwivedi

CATEGORY: OUTSTANDING MGOVERNANCE IMPLEMENTATION Project: Mobile Monitoring Project, Bihar State Building Construction Corporation, Govt. of Bihar Recipient: Ganga Kumar, Special Secretary & MD, BSBCCL

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CATEGORY: OUTSTANDING FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTATION Project: CFMS of the Govt of Andhra Pradesh Recipient: Representative of Govt of AP receiving the award on behalf of Dr. P. V. Ramesh, Principal Secretary, Finance, Govt of AP

INNOVATIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNOLOGY Project: Body worn camera, Hyderabad Police, Govt. of Telangana Project: e-Vahan Bima, Govt of Telangana RECIPIENTS: A.V.Ranganath, IPS Dy.Commissioner of Police, Traffic , Hyderabad and Sandeep Kumar Sultania, Transport Commissioner, Govt of Telangana Technical Secretary to IT Minister, Telangana

OUTSTANDING IMPLEMENTATION OF FREE WI-FI Project: Free Wif-Fi Project, Rajgarh District, Madhya Pradesh Recipient: Tarun Kumar Pithode, District Collector, Rajgarh

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OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IN CITIZEN SERVICE DELIVERY Project: Passport Seva Project, Ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India Recipient: Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant & Head Technology, Passport Seva Project, Ministry of External Affairs

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BUSINESS AVENUES

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INTERVIEW ASPECT SOFTWARE

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION DRIVING THE NEED FOR CX Customer service is no longer a cost centre. After a new product launch, no longer do we find any lag in similar products being offered by competitors. Given the pace of business transformation brought about by new age companies, customer experience (CX) can go a long way in not only new customer acquisition but customer retention too. To understand how Customer Experience has evolved to play a strategic role in improving the competitiveness of enterprises, Abhishek Raval spoke to Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect Software; Sanjay Gupta- Managing Director, South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software and Jagannath Narendran, Sr. VP, APAC & Middle East, Aspect Software

Customer Experience (CX) has been a topic of discussion in the past,however it has been progressively gaining mindspace.

What has changed?

Jagannath Narendran, Sr. VP, APAC & Middle East, Aspect Software:

There is a game-changing technology transformation underway, which will continue to evolve. Uber, Airbnb and Facebook, today being the world's largest transportation, hospitality and media company respectively is a sign of the changing times. So, there is a paradigm shift happening in how people choose to transport, stay and consume media and in the midst of this transformation, the only differentiator an enterprise will have is creating customer satisfaction.

Customer service is seen as a cost centre. However the company that continues to see customer service as a cost will not last long. Customer experience (CX) is clearly the key differentiator for either market share growth or revenue share growth because customers have choice today. Flipkart and Snapdeal is giving a tough run for giants like Amazon.

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Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect Software

Customer experience is the single biggest component to stand out as a differentiator in the market The organised retail which used to so big in India has completely changed today. The kind of experience from these e-commerce firms is appealing. They can completely decimate the competition.

Even a single instance of bad customer experience can prove to be a fatal for any company. One of the airline companies, they had a passenger whose baggage got lost and thus it was delivered late. He shared the experience on social media. He had a large follower count on Social platforms. Then it became a PR nightmare for the airline. They also noticed a drop in ticket sales.

The expectations of the customers and the capabilities to meet them have never been as nearer as now. We are ahead of what we wanted. A lot of the constraints in starting companies no longer exists. So, capital, customer access and manufacturing is easily available. So, once the constraints are removed, the velocity of change happens at a different pace.

Airbnb is a result of these changes.

They seized the spare capacity in housing.

Uber tapped the vacant space in passenger cars. But why now? Given the product similarities, customer experience is the single biggest component to stand out as differentiator in the market. After a new product launch, no longer do we find any lag in similar products being offered by competitors. Given the pace of competition, customer experience can go a long way in not only new customer acquisition but customer retention too.

We are working with a large automobile manufacturer in USA. They have been using our technology for their contact center. But in a traditional way and thus APRIL, 2016

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Jagannath Narendran

Joe Gagnon

Sanjay Gupta

Sr.VP,APAC & Middle East, Aspect Software

Sr.Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions,Aspect Software

Managing Director,South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software

wanted to re-imagine their customer service as a tool to be used for marketing.

We have been working with them on the idea of building a convenient car manual.

The plan is to make it SMS based. One of our customers is a third party insurance company, who uses our contact center platform. They are undertaking a workforce management overhaul exercise together with contact center with the self service element included - to create an integrated consumer experience platform.

This helps them to solve queries asked by the customers in the best possible manner.

We want them to start off by having a question into the text tool. It can be twitter, SMS or otherwise and to be able to then query against the insurance database.

Simple queries get answered instantly but in case they cannot be answered quickly, the system alerts the agent and he takes over.

How do you justify buying a customer experience solution in terms of RoI? Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect Software:

With respect to one of our customers, the EXPRESS COMPUTER

Given the pace of competition,customer experience can go a long way in not only new customer acquisition but customer retention too

number of consumer interactions, at first used to be only in the form of phone calls.

Approximately a million phone calls a year.

The number doubled to two million interactions a year, which decreased the customer service costs by twenty percent because we were able to deal with the questions differently, on various communication channels and more effectively as the company grew, so we

were able to track all of the metrics, utilisation, number of interactions. This is RoI driven.

We are in the early stages of a pilot with a utility measuring the RoI of using our customer experience platform for scheduling a customer service visit in their maintenance and repair business.

With the proliferation of the tools available for customer interaction,how do you make sure the customer query is resolved?

Sanjay Gupta- Managing Director, South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software

We are doing a contextual transfer on the transaction the customer is doing on our system. he started interacting on a different channel and the query got resolved on a different channel altogether.

If a conversation started on an SMS, or a mobile app or a disposable app followed by a call from the customer, the conversation can resume without the need for the customer to repeat whatever he shared on the other channels. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

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INTERVIEW SAYED PEERZADE GROUP CIO, RELIANCE BIG ENTERTAINMENT

THE CIO HAS TO LEAD THE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA CIOs are no longer technocrats, they are business enablers and a crucial part of the organisation says, Sayed Peerzade, Group CIO, Reliance Big Entertainment & Reliance Entertainment - Digital.

In an interview with Ankush Kumar, he talks about his journey with Reliance Entertainment and how he consolidated the entire stack of the online business (Games, e-Commerce, VoD, GoD, Mobile, Publishing) from a traditional data center environment to a consolidated cloud platform.

In this era of disruption,how important is the role of CIO in your organisation?

The CIO role in my organisation is as important as any key business role. Being into a dynamic business, and in a time of disruption, the CIO has to lead the business transformation to the digital era -- that’s the target we have set for the organisation.

Our group consists of many entities which are online businesses, and most of them are global businesses. Transformation to the so called 3rd layer (SMAC stack) is very much required to get more users, increase the experience of end users and retain them. This will lead to revenue growth and SMAC plays an extremely important role in this. As a CIO, I have taken all steps to adapt new technologies to provide the required agility to business and have succeeded in this aspect. Be in Cloud, Mobility, Social or Analytics, we have adapted all technologies and got our business in the right direction for growth.

As a CIO/ IThead what have been some of your key achievements with respect to IT innovation in your organisation? Please share some examples?

I joined the Entertainment group since its inception. When we started it was not a group. It was one entity known as Zapak.

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By moving from a traditional data center setup to one cloud platform,Reliance Big Entertainment has been able to reduce 80 percent server footprint,and eliminate 70 percent of operating costs, with permanent elimination of capex requirements many verticals of the entertainment business, the group got formed. However in the initial days, I was confined to look after the Zapak business which was growing fast, and at the same time other entities were formed and managed by different teams as per LOB (Line of Business) requirements. Over a period of time, we realised that there were many entities in the group which were into a similar kind of B2C business as far as technology usage

was concerned. To achieve greater synergies, I was given the mandate of the entire group to consolidate and get the required agility to the business with improved time to market the products and manageable cost to business.

Today, I have managed to consolidate the entire stack of the online business (Game, e-Commerce, VoD, GoD, Mobile, Publishing) from the traditional data center to one cloud platform and have also performed technology migration to a private cloud. Hence, we are able to provide the required flexibility and instant time to market the business. By successfully completing this project, we were able to reduce 80 percent server footprint, and eliminate 70 percent of operating costs, with permanent elimination of capex requirements. At later stages when Reliance Games gets formed, we have designed a perfect Hybrid cloud integrating the current private cloud and the newly adapted public cloud. We have distributed the data between both the clouds keeping in mind sensitivity, volume, dynamics and end user experience.

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of instances moving between any of these cloud structures without disturbing the user experience and business impact. This has been widely appreciated and recognised by various organisations as well as industry experts. I was also involved in designing and setting up the Big Data analytics setup/platform from scratch based on new technologies like Hadoop on an independent private cloud. I have also built the first and unique complete business analytics tool for the gaming industry. These initiatives have helped the organisation gain tremendous business benefits due to improved real time decision making, which in turn has contributed to improved revenue figures.

How has been the adoption of cloud technology and what has been its impact on your overall business?

Migrating the entire setup from a traditional data center setup to cloud has been the key turnaround for us. This has resulted in 80 percent server reduction and hence we have seen similar savings related to power, energy and cooling. This initiative has consolidated the group into one setup and platform. Various digital groups which were being operated separately in the traditional setup have been consolidated and brought to one cloud EXPRESS COMPUTER

setup. Non-critical servers have been moved to the public cloud. This is a perfect blend and usage of cloud technology.

Traditional physical servers interacting with each other was a complex system as we did not have a single platform or tool to manage our entire server farm. Today, all entities can be managed from one console, which has given us more flexibility.

Tell us about your gaming business and the relevance of Big Data analytics in this industry?

We have implemented a full life cycle Big Data project for our global entity, Reliance Games. Under the global brand 'Reliance Games', we produce, develop and publish world-class games. We have some of the world’s top 10 games in terms of gameplay and revenue. We have more than 600 developers working on these games from our Pune, Korea and UK studios. The way these games work is as follows. A user downloads the games either through Apple store, Google Play or Amazon store. He can play the game individually or he can play with anyone in the globe using multiple players and social network integration. We are the only Indian company to develop and publish these premium games and we are standing at par with global players like Zynga. With many world class games in

production pipeline along with existing live games, we wanted a deep 'real-time' analytical system to analyse these premium products to understand the DAU, number of downloads, user behavior, game performance, drop-outs, reasoning for drop-outs and game progress. This analysis could be useful for our current as well as future products.

We tried to find a vendor in the market who could provide us an end-to-end solution for real time Big Data analytics.

Although there are many vendors available on Big Data, we could not find a vendor who could understand the dynamics of our business and products to provide us 'endto-end' real time Big Data analytics solutions -- technically as well as analytically. There was a need to build a robust analytical system or business and we hence decided to build the system from scratch ourselves. Today, our end-to-end analytical setup has helped us make our product more competitive in addition to increasing our revenues.

What has been your contribution as a CIO/ IT head in the overall growth of the organisation?

Gone are the days where IT was considered to be the cost centre and an isolated entity. The role of the CIO has become more challenging with the emergence of new technologies and need for more growth. CIOs are no longer technocrats. They are business enablers and a crucial part of organisation. CIOs should be ready to take risks, and must do extensive planning and strategy for the business they are working for to be the part of the business. In this digital era, IT is a backbone and enables the entire business.

This is true for my case also as I have initiated so many things for enabling my business and its growth, which has been supported by my reporting managers to the full core. This has helped us tremendously in growing the business, maximising the user experience and in bringing down the costs to an extent where the business is EBIDTA (interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) positive. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

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NEWS ANALYSIS

Lifesize

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LIFESIZE

EXCITED ABOUT POST-SPLIT FUTURE In the wake of the announcement of Lifesize’s split from Logitech, Lifesize’s CEO, Craig Malloy shares his perspective on the way forward for his company JASMINE DESAI

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n the wake of the announcement of Lifesize’s split from Logitech, Lifesize’s CEO, Craig Malloy spoke with Express Computer about the journey forward for the company. “This is an exciting step for Lifesize and is the result of the tremendous work we have done to create a unique offering in the video conferencing and collaboration space,” said Craig Malloy, CEO and founder of Lifesize. “Standing as an independent company will allow us to invest more meaningfully in our product roadmap and be more responsive to the market and our customers.” Logitech will still retain a meaningful interest in Lifesize moving forward.

Backed by $17.5 million in funding

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from three prominent Silicon Valley venture firms – Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners – the company is focused on winning new customers as a high-growth cloud-based video collaboration and meeting platform company, and taking the $7 billion global conferencing market head-on.

Over the past 18 months, Lifesize has transformed itself to address the evolving video collaboration and meeting platform market. The company pivoted its business through the combined launch of ‘Lifesize Cloud’, its cloud-based video collaboration service. Since the launch of ‘Lifesize Cloud’, the company has added more than 2,000 paid customers –

including Twilio, Survey Monkey, Omnicom Group and Evolution Gaming.

Reminiscing further on the reason for the split, Malloy says, “The reason we split from Logitech was to get a better focus on Lifesize. Over the last few years, strategies of both companies started to diverge. Lifesize was becoming an enterprise software company, delivering cloud-based solutions. Because of the spin-off, we are more independent, focused and a much smaller company that is free to maneuver in the market the way we want to. It allows us to be more nimble and faster.” In India, Lifesize sells its solutions through a distributor network. It has three distributors namely, Ingram, Reddington and GreenSource APRIL, 2016

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Because of the spin-off we are more independent, focused and smaller company that is free to maneuver in the market the way we want to Craig Malloy CEO,Lifesize

and 75-80 partners.

Scalability was always a huge ongoing issue with on-premise videoconferencing models. It is a whole new world in video communications with SaaS delivery models. The demand for video communications is at an all timehigh. There has been a spike in video calling applications. “When employees walk through the office door, they want to have the same kind of experience which they get on apps like Facetime. As the demand has exploded, the method of deployment needed to change as well,” states Malloy. The deployment earlier was the expensive on-premise one which had also scalability issues in large environments. It stalled the widespread EXPRESS COMPUTER

use of the technology.

However, in the past few years, it is possible to make a high-definition video call over mobile and tablet devices. The combination of new devices, network and enterprise software moving to the cloud has enabled Lifesize to change its deployment for video communications.

“Our deployment model used to be expensive conference-room infrastructure. With cloud-based models we can talk about enabling every person with a conference-room with great video collaboration tool. Our solution is delivered as a downloadable app or webbased application.Our value proposition is to enable all our customers and every person in every conference room with

The combination of newdevices,network and enterprise software moving to the cloud has enabled Lifesize to change its deployment model for video communications APRIL, 2016

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beautiful quality video web-conferencing, audio-conferencing, streaming and recording in a one simple scalable application,” mentions Malloy confidently. He also informs that in the current growing environment of BYOD, Lifesize cloud is perfectly positioned. Any device that can make a video call, can participate in the Lifesize cloud infrastructure.

There is always a speculation about the death of conference-rooms as organisations are gearing up for anywhere everywhere SaaS collaboration tools. Malloy waives off these doubts and says that conferenceroom devices will only die out if conference rooms die out. 40% of all Lifesize video calls have one conference room. 75% of their overall 2500 customers have at least one conference room system paired to the cloud service.

The cloud delivery model has also changed Lifesize’s focus in APAC. “Earlier, Lifesize’s biggest customers used to be in China, which is not really an open market for cloud service. Presently, India and ANZ are our key APAC 62

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markets due to its progressive IT policies, vibrant economy, size of the market,’ explains Malloy. Lifesize cloud is hosted on IBM SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. It is run in 13 data centres around the world including the IBM data centre in Chennai. Lifesize also has data centres in Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Toronto, Mexico City, DC, Dallas etc. They also give a fail-safe redundant capacity. Thus, in case of a disaster, the worst that could happen is that the call will drop and get re-registered in one of the other data centres.

Emphasizing on the company vision which also comes out of his own passion as an entrepreneur Malloy says, “One of the core values of our company is to drive relentless innovation. In our business one should never be missing technology cycles. You cannot be stuck in the past.

As market is moving to cloud service, it is imperative to move that way. Our competitors who have not been able to do that are already seeing declining financial results. For a smaller organisation like Lifesize, it is absolutely

critical to drive relentless innovation.”

Presently, the major innovations which he is driving at Lifesize is working on effortless scale within the organization and consolidation of various webstreaming, audio conferencing and video conferencing technologies on one platform.

His own leadership philosophy revolves around establishing a vision to people of what Lifesize is going to be and to have the right set of people. As a leader, Malloy is always trying to be a facilitator and lets individuals in the team be what they want to be by breaking down barriers, helping the team move to the other level and quench their creativity by letting them have a fulfilling time at work.

Being an entrepreneur at heart does not necessarily seem risky to Malloy.

“Whenever I start a company I do not feel like it is a risk. I feel like I am going on an exciting adventure. The bigger risk is staying in a big company and not able to contribute or move out,” he mentions. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

APRIL, 2016

REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/49926/90