IT Next - November issue-2012 by Manan Mushtaq

NOVEMBER 2012 / ` 100 VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 10

STRATEGY: IT to Play a Strategic role in Driving Growth

BOSS TALK: Banks in No Mood to Take Risks

INTERVIEW: Oracle’s Hughes on Fusion’s Future

32 BIG Q

Gambling with Apps Pg 51

ALL

PAIN, Jayantha Prabhu CTO, Essar Group

GAIN? While Bring Your Own Device increases employee delight, it can create new problems for IT Pg 16

Editorial

Rising Tide of BYOD— Make a Checklist Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), the latest buzz in the industry, isn’t

“IT managers need to gear up and make a checklist to address the BYOD trend, if not prevent it”

exactly music to IT managers’ ears. In fact, it must seem more like Bring your own Devil, giving IT teams of enterprises nightmares instead. While it is no longer a question of whether IT managers can cope or are ready to take up BYOD-associated challenges, it is a must-do; indeed, a rising tide which needs an intelligent navigation mechanism to prevent any adverse effects it may unleash on the security systems of an enterprise. Unlike most technological innovations, the BYOD trend is not a discovery by top technologists or an innovation, but is driven by users; rather, demanded by employees who have no relevance to any technology. The so-called menace for CISOs, which has arisen out of new fancy devices, has serious implications if not handled with the utmost concern and sincerity, whatever the pressure from business teams to encourage the trend. But what is the solution, The panacea lies not only in tightening the security ring around the device or IT framework, but also in bringing about a revolutionary change in the way security needs to be addressed. It may be about change management at the user level itself. Whatever the cause or outcome, IT managers need to gear up and make a checklist to address it, if not prevent the trend. The cover feature in the current edition of ITNext has brought out significant trends in BYOD which bother IT heads and has provided insights into some of the mechanisms used to handle this, as well as working out strategies to make it a business enabler rather than view it as a security menace.

Geetha Nandikotkur

Blogs To Watch! What BYOD means to the industry and how consumerisation of IT has driven this trend http://www.webopedia.com/ TERM/B/BYOD.html How can BYOD be a smart solution to the enterprises in enhancing their productivity? http://www.cisco.com/web/ solutions/trends/byod_smart_ solution/index.html BYOD trend and the software used which can help the users in availing its benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bring_your_own_device Various steps involved to make BYOD work for your organisation http://www.cognizant.com/ RecentHighlights/Making-BYODWork-for-Your-Organization.pdf

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Cover Story

boss talk

interview

19 C ase Studies-Managing Mobiles, a global perspective | Given that Mobile Device

Management is still nascent, a look into how the global counterparts are managing the proliferation of mobile devices

22 I nterview with Vishal Tripathi, Analyst at Gartner | While there should be no policy paralysis on BYOD, companies need to consider their options carefully including security and support trade-offs before plunging into BYOD

24 1 0 Best Practices to Get BYOD Right | Like any other technology, getting BYOD to work effectively for you is about adopting the best practices than the tools being used

cover Design: Shigil Narayanan photography: Jiten Gandhi & Subhojit Paul

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06 Banks in no mood for risk | David Furlonger, VP& Gartner Fellow on why banks donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t intend to take risk

32 On Cloud 9 with Fusion | Douglas Hughes, VP, Applications, Oracle, JAPAC, talks about Fusion initiatives around cloud

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MANAGEMENT Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Vikas Gupta

EDITORIAL Group Editor: R Giridhar Executive Editor: Geetha Nandikotkur Consulting Editor(Online): Sanjay Gupta

Page Customer Innovation through

cloud

DESIGN

Oracle’s initiative to re-write all its applications under the Fusion suite and make it cloud ready

opinion

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the big Q

08 Reap Big Benefits with Big Data | Hung Lehong, VP-

51 Gambling with Apps for gain | Experts say that cloud

Executive Leadership, Gartner, on how to curate, manage and govern big data

calls for gambling with apps for better benefits

15-Minute manager 41 Strategic IT play | Gartner’s

Guide to utilise the power of IT to drive growth in the current sluggish economy

cube chat

MARCOM

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56 Dare to Dream |

Balaranjith T, GM-IT, Atul Ltd., on the importance of IT in the current competitive landscape

STUDIO

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ITNEXT | O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2

I LLUSTRATI ON: P ETERS ON PJ

BY SHAI LEN DRA R AV I

THE JOURNEY TO BIG DATA Traditionally, enterprises used ‘structured data’ resulting from online transaction processing technologies to derive insights; they then evolved to Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technologyused extracts of the structured data to answer multidimensional analytical queries used for relational

OCTOBER 2012 / ` 75 VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 09

STRATEGY: Next100 Winners’ Achievements

VOLUME 03 | ISSUE 09

IT managers should take a holistic approach to exploit big data opportunities by managing the data, analysing it and creating intelligence to make it functional

There are five major “disruptive scale” changes happening simultaneously, which are increasing the complexity of IT tremendously and throwing up numerous challenges and opportunities. Delivery platforms are shifting (mobility, cloud, social); communication and collaboration channels are being reinvented (Web, mobile, social); consumer technology is driving innovation; data is opening up and exploding from proliferating apps, devices and sensors that organisations are deploying or connecting to. A few insights: IDC says organisations will need to manage 50x more information by 2020. Facebook’s 800 million users post 250 million photos each day. Twitter’s users send about a billion Tweets in a week. In 2011, smartphone sales exceeded PC sales by 30 per cent. These five current trends are critical for any organisation’s strategic road map as they update and modernise, as well as out-innovate their competitors. All of these result in the outburst of what we call big data.

BIG DATA | INSIGHT

BOSS TALK: Visualising Risks

INTERVIEW: Oracle’s Hansen on HCM’s importance

40 BIG Q

Intelligence aligned with Business Pg 55

UNLOCKING WOMAN POTENTIAL

With so much of a buzz around big data in the industry, it’s imperative for IT managers to understand the forces that drive the big data revolution, the key facts about identifying big data and using appropriate tools to leverage the inherent opportunities so as to create business advantage.

IT NEXT

INSIGHT | BIG DATA

CKING UNLO EN ’SL WOMN TIA E T O P women can help nities that l and ies and opportu their full potentia Best strateg Pg 14 rs to unlock IT manage the leadership ramp walk

october 2012

reporting and data mining. However, “Big Data” encompasses more than structured and transactionbased data. It also includes ‘unstructured data’ such as videos, RFID logs, social networking conversations, sensor networks, search indexes, environmental conditions, and medical scans etc. Forrester Research estimates that enterprises effectively utilise less than 5 per cent of their available data, because the rest is simply too expensive and too time-consuming to work with. Big data technologies and techniques make it efficient and affordable for organisations to tap into this remaining unused 95 per cent. Moreover, with the biggest drivers of big data such as increased consumerisation with blending of business and personal personas, expanse of content (especially unstructured data) and a cultural shift from the art to the science of making decisions, organisations will soon realise the depth of insights and begin formalising plans to harness them.What will then be needed is a fundamental shift in the thought process of organisations. Traditionally, businesses defined the problem and IT developed a solution for it. In the new approach, discovering new insights from the data is at the forefront. The user is free to manipulate data to gain insights; and organisations will be able to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and such up-to-real-time information.

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2 | ITNEXT

IT NEXT thanks its Readers for the warm response

IT NEXT values your feedback

We want to know what you think about the magazine, and how we can make it a better read. Your comments will go a long way in making IT NEXT the preferred publication for the community. Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@itnext.in.

IT Professionals facing IT Services challenges: The prevailing scenario does not seem to show any specific growth pattern for the Indian IT Industry. Growth of services (ITaaS, SaaS, etc.) is yet another challenge for IT professionals in the services segment. The management is also becoming wary of such kickbacks on all expenditures, which adds yet another dimension to a CIO’s woes. The ominous shadow of the Cloud technology with all its attendant pros and cons weigh heavily on the CIO’s shoulders. ITNext has been spearheading the cause of identifying such leaders in the CIOs/IT Managers community to an admirable extent. In the present context, I feel that IT managers of today have to be judged in their capacity in: a) Consolidation with adaptation of sound technologies b) Financial Jurisprudence (ROI vs.ROIloss caused because of lack of Implementation) c) Project management with Group dynamics d) In sourcing capacity with generation of revenue from in house intelligence.

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read this issue online http://www.itnext. in/resources/ magazine

Ratnakar Nemani, Senior Executive - Vin Win Solutions

Informative magazine I have been a reader of ITNext since the Next100 awards last year. I find it very informative and good. It covers areas related to software applications like news, features and interviews that I am associated with and are relevant to companies like SAP, Oracle etc. The magazine also gives insights into what customers are initiating around IT, their challenges and experiences and their approach to address the challenges, which is interesting. Having said that, I have noticed content

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around the emerging technologies like cloud, Business Intelligence (BI) and mobility which is where the future growth is. Over all, I find the magazine to be an interesting read for IT managers. Kaustav Das, Delivery Head SAP Highbar Technologies Ltd (HCC Group Company)

Open source momentum

gaining

Like other technology B2B magazines, IT Next has been covering all the core technologies that we deal with. These include ERP, Security, Virtualisation etc and also emerging technologies like cloud and mobility. I feel the magazine should also cover areas like ERP on open source as we are keen to know more. Especially when companies like IBM and Redhat are evangelising open source, any content around it would give us the the necessary confidence to go for it. Even if we run into rough weather, we know we have someone to support us. Open source ERP makes sense for us since BHEL is shifting to ‘One BHEL’ in over the next 6 months as all the 15 BHEL manufacturing units will come under a single ERP platform. We are currently using SAP ERP only for logistics, finance, and quality control while the rest of the modules have not been used so far. Even though virtualisation is no longer the buzz word as almost all firms are in some stage of implementing it or have already done so. We are also looking at virtualisation to reduce the carbon footprint. Security is also a major concern and it is an on-going process. So what we need is a Unified Threat Management for a complete endto-end security solution. B.S. Baliga, AGM-IT, BHEL (Note: Letters have been edited minimally, for brevity and clarity)

Boss talk | David Furlonger

B u s in es s M a n ag e m e nt

In No Mood to Take Risk

urprised? Gartner says that the Indian financial services such as banking and financial institutions are in no frame of mind to take risks to lead the technological innovation wave. The traditional large banking institutions are not in a position to take on the demands that are pouring in and are seriously held back by the legacy of systems and processes. The evolution of the internet continues to raise questions about the continued viability of brick and mortar establishments in retailing and financial services.

The Bottleneck The most challenging task facing banking and other financial services which cannot be ignored are in terms of deploying the right process delivery mechanism, given the increasing user base. Money transfer, evolving channel experience, core banking and the need for the smartphone delivery process, channel connectivity, besides enhancing customer satisfaction, etc., have been some arduous tasks for IT heads of the banking segment. For many existing financial services institutions, mapping the path to the future is proving to be extremely difficult and challenging. Traditional models no longer apply to many of their customers or markets. They have a series of questions to address-do they simply adapt to the new competition, do they try and exert influence over the broader market, do they look for help and partners, do they need to fundamentally restructure? Security remains paramount for all banking applications, and while for many of these new entrants security and privacy of customer data is important, it’s not at the level of priority that would be needed to support a banking proposition. Performance challenges will also be significant--failure of key banking systems can be catastrophic, and availability of all systems must normally exceed 99 per cent.

itnext | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2

“It is critical to re-think the way the demand chain is being formed and structure the operations accordingly” Suggestion BOX

This may test the technical and economic models of many of the new entrants. In consequence, regulatory compliance will also prove taxingwhile legal teams can help with applying the letter of the law, this is more about an entire organisation that must increasingly subvert itself to the rules of the supervisory body.

Best Needed Practices

“A small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives have turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball.” title: mON E YBA LL Author: michael lewis Publisher: WW NORTON AND COMPANY Inc PRICE: $15.95

The foremost agenda for banks and other financial institutions is to leverage technological innovations to address the growing business needs. To all intents and purposes, they should define agility, both from a technology and a business model point of view. They should be extremely adept at extending their value chain analysis beyond the core offering, with discernment in identifying new opportunities for the business and highlighting specific customer needs that they might address. They need to recognise the magnitude of what they are deciding. IT heads need to evolve strategies which are flexible to align with the business. The real value lies in creating a hierarchical organisational structure and focus on wealth management aspects. The author is David Furlonger , Vice President and Gartner Fellow

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Opinion

money wise Hung LeHong, VP-Executive Leadership & Innovation Research, Gartner

Improving Productivity through Big Data

Big Data Will Drive Big Benefits

t would not be an exaggeration to say that bringing in one per cent (1%) improvement in the use of Business Intelligence (BI), advanced analytics and big data solutions will determine better efficiency in the processes and growth assuring almost five per cent (5%) better efficiency. It is all about Big Data, the buzzword in the industry which results in better usage of information to drive better business growth.

What is Big Data? Big Data is about looking ahead, beyond what everybody else perceives. Not at what has already happened, or what is happening now, but what will happen next. The leading organisations of the future will be distinguished by the quality of their predictive algorithms. By tapping an incessant stream of information from internal and external sources, businesses today have an endless array of new opportunities for transforming decision-making, discovering new insights, optimising the business and revolutionising their industries.

Vital Big Data Requirements Big data is entirely about creating better opportunities to utilise information for superior growth and expansion. One should not ignore key aspects such as visualisation of information, information optimisation, in-memory and role of data scientists. Gartner expects 30 per cent (30%) of large enterprises over the next four years to hire Chief Data Officers responsible

itnext | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Gartner expects 30% of large enterprises over the next four years to hire chief data officers responsible for curating, managing and governingâ&#x20AC;? for curating, managing and governing information and finding professionals, such as data scientists and experts in non-relational database management system (DBMS) technologies. The best way to use the big data advantage will depend on how the data is analysed in effective ways which can ensure fraud prevention. Using appropriate tools to convert unstructured metrics to structured data will result in better productivity.

It is imperative for enterprises to consider BI and advanced analytics distinctly from one another, recognising the advantages and unique application circumstances of each. The businesses in the information sourcing models are critical to identifying the real data and claims made by the historical data claims. While BI serves a distinct purpose for sharing, summarising and manually exploring data and metrics, more advanced analytics can aid and even automate decision-making. Next generation analytics will go beyond measuring and describing the past to predicting what is likely to happen and optimising what should happen based on an increasingly varied set of data sources and types. The addition of mobile, social and collaborative technologies to advanced analytics tools will give a broader insight to the users for decision making including when and where they will need them. The other advances of using analytics in the big data set-up will help in speeding up the process of extracting and measuring data in terms of reading per second. One question which is frequently asked by IT heads is, what is the mechanism for using cost effective analytics solutions to get faster and deeper insights into the information databases? The solution could be around analysing potential costs involved in terms of acquiring new skills, new software, evolving new cloud strategies, adding necessary security tools besides adding new storage. A few vital facts around big data are: * Big data in conducive to high expenses is not big data *There is no big data devoid of business value * Take the initial step after evaluating the business value to accomplish return on investments * Using the right combination of BI, analytics and big data will procure the required one per cent (1%) improvement.

November 9, 2012 | Grand Hyatt, Mumbai EMC Forum 2012 is all set to be the biggest IT showcase of the year. It promises to be a storehouse of insightful sessions, cutting-edge technologies and viable inputs from global experts. You can expect to learn why cloud computing and virtualization are key to mastering the new IT realities, and how you can unlock the value in Big Data and transform your business, your IT and yourself.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER David Lim, Author and Mountaineer David Lim is best known for leading the 1st Everest expedition from Singapore in 1998. Partially disabled from a rare nerve disorder since 1998, his comeback story— of overcoming the odds, was featured in Reader’s Digest in 2001, and has since been translated into eight languages. As a mountaineer, The Sunday Times described him as ‘unstoppable’ after he summited his 7th virgin peak in September 2012.

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update

Update I n d u s t r y

Oracle Expands its Cloud Services Portfolio

The seven new Oracle Cloud preview services announced will augment its service portfolio

TECH NEWS | As a provider of public, private and hybrid cloud offerings, Oracle at the recently held Oracle Open World at San Francisco, announced seven new Oracle Cloud preview services which augment the comprehensive portfolio of Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all available on a subscription basis.Â Oracle Cloud delivers a broad suite of subscription-based, enterprise-grade Application Services, Platform Services and Social Services. Oracle also provides a comprehensive portfolio of cloud

What will be a breakthrough category in mobile in 2012?

MOBILE According to global market update 2012, Samsung and Apple now accounts for 50% of the smartphone unit share.

Total Global Subscriptions to exceed 7 billion in early 2013â&#x20AC;&#x201C;China exceeds 1 billion, India 950 million.

2012

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2011

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he Ot Source: Chetansharma.c om

trends deals products services people

products and managed cloud services for IT providers to build and manage clouds. Delivering on the cloud strategy, Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Product Development, announced that Oracle was expanding its Oracle Cloud services portfolio, and continued to demonstrate significant customer and partner momentum. At the event, Oracle announced preview availability of seven new Oracle Cloud Services including Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service; Oracle Financial Reporting Cloud Service; Data and Insight Cloud Service; Oracle Social Sites Cloud Service; Oracle Developer Cloud Service; Oracle Storage Cloud Service and Oracle Messaging Cloud Service. Oracle Cloud delivers instant value and productivity for business users and developers through functionally rich, integrated, secure enterprise cloud services. Customers now have more options than ever with the Oracle Cloud, the most secure, flexible, modern and reliable cloud available today, Kurian added. However, according to him, the key aspect of cloud is that it is standardised. Customers should understand that while customisation is not possible, it is important that they speak to business and get them to accept the cloud norms and sit down with them to simplify things in the areas that business demands.

Nikon 3200 DSLR

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Nikon’s D3200 has a 12 megapixel sensor that is very capable when it comes to capturing dynamic range and contrast. It’s compact, light weight and doesn’t compromise on features. Price: Rs 48,950

The psychedelic dancing speakers is just what you need when you want to listen to music. Pricey, but it’s not every day that you get to see a dancing robot speakers set! Price: Rs 14,999.

Sennheiser IE80 Earphones Tweak the base level for each ear, change the cable if it’s damaged. IE80 does build on the excellent bass of the IEB. The overall sound is quite wholesome, with good experience. Price: Rs 24,990.

SingTel Launches High Speed Global Network TECH EXPANSION | Singapore

Telecommunications Limited (SingTel) has announced the launch of a next generation information super highway for its ConnectPlus suite of global connectivity services, linking key business hubs in Asia, Europe and USA. Enterprises will now be able to enjoy reliable high speed services on a stateof-the-art optical network that is capable of data transfers of up to 10Gbps. This will enable enterprises to fully harness the benefits of information and computer technologies (ICT) across regions. Delivered over SingTel’s meshed network of extensive

Enjoy high speed services on optical network of data transfers of up to 10Gbps

submarine cable assets, the Automatically Switching Optical Network (ASON) and the MultiProtocol Label Switching – Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) use the latest technologies to achieve

Around The World

greater resilience and scalability for SingTel’s ConnectPlus International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) and Ethernet Line (E-Line) services. The intelligent network is able to detect faults swiftly and automatically switch data traffic to backup routes via a sophisticated control plane. Goh Boon Huat, SingTel’s Vice President of Business Products, said: “At SingTel, customers’ business priorities have always been our key focus. With the implementation of these latest technologies in our network, customers’ networks will be future-ready for the delivery of ICT services across multiple geographies. Customers can achieve greater business advantage by deploying data-intensive applications such as video conferencing, multimedia, data analysis etc.

quick byte

Amazon to hire 50,000 seasonal employees Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc will hire more than 50,000 seasonal employees at its fulfillment centres across the United States, as it gear up for the winter holiday season. Retailers typically add seasonal staff in the weeks leading up to the holiday shopping season to work in stores and help in other areas, such as in distribution and fulfilling online orders. Amazon did not say how many seasonal workers it hired for the 2011 holiday season, but said the plan is to hire more than that of last year.

CP Gurnani, CEO of Mahindra Satyam

“The entire experience of Mahindra Satyam turnaround taught us that crisis is relative--while it destroys morale, it also signifies opportunities for the better”

Source: Chetansharma.com

N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2 | itnext

update

TE sets up Manufacturing Facility in Bangalore

Illustration: peterson pj

TECH TIDINGS | TE Connectiv-

ity has announced nationwide expansion plans in India involving an investment of approximately Rs 300 crore to build a new manufacturing facility in Bangalore and expand existing facilities to support the growing local market and global exports. As part of the expansion plan, an integrated manufacturing plant will be constructed at the Aerospace Park, Yelahanka, Bangalore, and operational by 2014. In addition, TE’s manufacturing plants in Shirwal and Wagholi in Pune will be expanded over the next three years. The key focus of the company is to expand its operations in India by strengthening the talent pool and increasing the local product development. At the new plant in Bangalore, TE will design and manufacture next-generation connectivity solutions for multiple industry verticals, including automotive, aerospace, defense, marine, enterprise networks, telecom, data communications, industrial, energy, consumer devices,

News @ blog

TECH NEWS

Micromax Scores Over Apple, Samsung According to a research report, Micromax has emerged as the leading brand in the India’s tablet market, ahead of the international brands such as Apple and Samsung. The report, India Quarterly Media Tablet Market Review between April and June this year, says Micromax had 18.3 per cent share in tablet volume sales, while Samsung stood second with 13.3 per cent. Apple was in the third spot with a market share of 12.3 per cent during the review period.

The company will invest Rs 300 crore to build a new manufacturing facility to support the local market

appliances, circuit protection and relays. The new plant, which will measure 280,000 square feet, will create new jobs in the areas of assembly, packaging, molding, stamping, tooling machine components, copper wire, optical fiber, and cable processes. The company rebranded as TE Connectivity from Tyco Electronics in March 2011 to better reflect the products and solutions it offers customers.

Micromax’s CEO Deepak Mehrotra says the next quarter would be better, as the company had only one tablet in that review period. “We, at present, have a portfolio of five tablet PCs and the numbers next quarter should be better,” Mehrotra said. Micromax has so far launched its Funbook series tablets, which are priced between Rs. 6,000 and Rs. 10,000. Apart from Micromax, there are quite a few Indian manufacturers such as Zync, Zen Mobile, Kobian and Karbonn, selling lowcost tablets in the market. Apple and Samsung, on the other hand, are high priced. Apple’s latest iPad costs around Rs. 38,000 whereas Samsung tablets price range from Rs. 19,300 to Rs. 37,500.

Google News Turns 10

xxx new tablet comes with a keyboard xxx other features designed to stand out in the market

Google News was launched on September 22, 2002—a decade ago. It broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. In the last 10 years, Google News is up by 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. Source: Agencies

itnext | N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2

update

Oracle Unveils New SRM Suite

3 areas of servergrowth by 2015 TECH OPPORTUNITIES | Three key server segments — hyperscale data centers, hosted virtual desktop (HVD) workloads and extreme low-energy (ELE) servers will offer opportunities for growth through 2015, according to Gartner, Inc. Servers represent the control points of hardware infrastructure in data centres, where workloads and applications reside, and Gartner analysts estimate that end-user spending on servers accounts for about 60 per cent of overall data centre hardware. “The server market was worth Tablets in $52.8 billion worldwide in 2011, andwill 2012, a 98% increase offer considerable growth opportunifrom 2011. ties in the coming years,” said Kiyomi Source: Gartner Yamada, principal research analyst at Gartner. a) Increasing demand for hyperscale data centres creates an opportunity for providers to boost server shipments b Flexibility of HVDs will move workloads, increase demand for virtualised servers c) Efficiency and energy-saving factors will boost demand for ELE servers and have new opportunities.

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IT Next

7– 9 March 2013

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TECH TRENDS| During his keynote presentation, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) Suite. Oracle SRM Suite is an integrated enterprise service that enables companies to listen, engage, create, market, and analyse interactions across multiple social platforms in real-time providing a holistic view of the consumer. Oracle SRM Suite is integrated with various Oracle’s enterprise applications, including Fusion Marketing, Fusion Sales Catalog, ATG Web Commerce, and ERP, allowing organisations to use social platforms to transform their corporate business processes and systems. Thomas Kurian, executive VP, Oracle Product Development said, “With our SRM Suite, we are empowering our customers to embrace this change by integrating the tools required to listen, engage, create, market and analyse social interactions into existing applications and services.” Additionally, the suite is integrated with platform services, including Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service, enabling marketing teams to integrate social with their custom Web pages, landing pages and marketing tools.

ASK THE EXPERT Guidance for Calculation of PUE in Data Centres

A threepronged methodology with

standardised categorisation of DC subsystems such as IT load, physical infrastructure or power to measure the PUE in a data centre is critical Please elaborate on the importance of PUE in a data centre. Power Usage Effectiveness is the recognised energy efficiency metric for data centres. It is also defined as the ratio of two numbers, data centre input power over IT load power. It is calculated by dividing the total energy of the data centre by the IT energy consumption. Calculation of PUE becomes very crucial as it is determined by dividing the amount of power entering a data centre by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. For instance, the total power supply of a data centre comprises two categories; critical power such as electrical distribution, transformers, generator and UPS, and cooling and auxiliary power such as chiller and tower, CRAC/CRAH, pumps, lighting, security and so on. In the course of providing energy audits for data centres, establishing the PUE becomes very important.

What are the practical issues that DC operators face while establishing the PUE?

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dossier

aniket Patange DirectorDatacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric reiterates that defining certain standardised patterns to determine the PUE of the data centre is important

Schneider has identified a number of practical problems encountered in establishing the PUE of specific data centers. Some of the issues causing difficulty in classifying power-consuming subsystems as IT loads, physical infrastructure are: • Data centre devices that draw power and their efficiency calculations are unclear • Certain data centre subsystems such as outdoor lighting or NoC are not taken into account. Some subsystems support a mixed-use facility and are shared with other non-data centre functions (for example, cooling towers and chiller plants), so the fraction of power attributable to the data centre cannot be directly measured • Some subsystems are extremely impractical or costly to instrument for power consumption (for example, PDUs due to number of output connections, or switchgear) • Some aspects like loads that are unrelated to the data centre but cannot be separated during measurement .

ask the expert CUSTOM PUBLISHING

“To perform data centre efficiency calculations, it is critical to clearly define which power constitutes IT load, and which power is physical infrastructure, besides UPS and cooling equipment” Since most data centre operators who attempt to determine PUE will encounter one or more of the above problems, a standard way to deal with them should be defined. This also calls for a standard approach to collecting data from the data centres, while articulating how to use the data to calculate PUE, with a focus on handling the ambiguous data structure.

What are the various methods adopted to overcome PUE related challenges? There are three-pronged methodologies outlined which can help data centre managers overcome challenges. a) Establishing a standard to categorise data centre subsystems as either (i) IT load, (ii) physical infrastructure, or (iii) not included in the calculation To perform data centre efficiency calculations, it is critical to clearly define which power constitutes IT load, and which power is physical infrastructure, be it servers or storage which constitute IT loads, besides UPS and cooling, which are physical infrastructure. There are both theoretical and practical considerations in assigning loads to the above three categories during data centre efficiency calculation. Some key guidelines applied to construct the categorisation system include these: • If managing the energy use of the subsystem is a realistic and desirable outcome of DC energy management, then the system load should be part of the PUE metric • If it is typically not practical to separate the measurement of a specific load during a measurement process, then it should not be prescribed that the specific load be separated for computation of the metric • It is critical to come up with a comprehensive list of the types of devices found in a data centre to be used for efficiency calculation b) It is ideal to estimate the power usage of a subsystem using a standardised method for that subsystem type. To substantiate, some devices that consume power and are associated with a DC are shared with other uses. For example, a data centre may share a chiller plant with an adjacent office building, or the data centre UPS may also provide power to a call centre. A common approach taken when a device is shared is to simply omit the device from the PUE calculations. This can result in major errors, especially if the device is a major energy user such as a chiller. Such an approach invalidates the PUE calculation for benchmarking purposes. A better strategy is to estimate

10% or above – this is the amount of losses in PDUs in a partially loaded data centre, impacting PUE calculation significantly

(or indirectly measure) the fraction of the losses of the shared device that are associated with the DC and then use these losses in the PUE calculations. Here are alternative approaches to determining the energy use of a shared chiller plant: * Measure the thermal load on the chiller using known electrical losses of all other DC loads and measure its perofrmance. Measure the fractional split of the thermal load between the DC and other loads (using water temperature, pressure, pump settings, etc), along with the chiller input power, then allocate the fraction of the chiller power to the DC according to the fractional split * Shut off the non-data centre loads on the chiller, then measure the chiller to determine the chiller power associated with the data centre.

PUE Framework

What’s in, What’s out?

Personnel space Switchgear Network operations center (NOC) etc.

Data center

Source: Schneider

Physical Infrastructure

Electric Data Centre Science Centre

Watts IN

Power Cooling Lighting Physical security Fire protection

IT Load Servers Storage Networking

IT Watts

Useful computing

Not Included ?

PUE =

Power Usage Effectiveness

Watts IN IT Watts

c) Thirdly, to use standard methodology for subsystem type for measurment, measure/estimate the thermal load on the chiller using known electrical losses of all other data centre loads. Measure the chiller efficiency performance and then use this information to calculate the electrical power that the chiller is using for data centre loads. If a subsystem’s power cannot be directly measured because of technical barriers, estimate the power using a standardised methodology for the same. BROUGHT to YOU BY

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The The Bring Bring Your Your Own Own Device Device trend trend isis often often considered considered aa delight delight for for employees employees but but aa pain pain for for IT.IT. So, So, what what does does itit really really involve involve and and how how can can ITIT leaders leaders cope? cope? byby sasa n jay n jay g upta g upta

The form factors

and capabilities of computing devices have undergone tremendous changes in the past few years. Not only have devices become smaller and handier to carry, they pack much more punch in terms of software, applications and connectivity. Workers are no longer “tethered” to their desk, so to say. Until four or five years ago, the primary mobile device on which employees could get any significant office work done was the laptop. Then gradually a variety of other mobile devices—smartphones, netbooks and tablets—made their appearance in the market. Targeted at the go-getting youngsters as well as the upwardly mobile company executives, these are now being lapped up in large numbers all over the world. According to IDC figures, around 25 million tablets were sold globally in the second quarter of 2012, representing a growth of 66 per cent over Q2 2011. The number of smartphones sold worldwide in Q2 of 2012, as per Strategy Analytics, stood at 146.1 million—a quarteron-quarter growth of 32 per cent. These are significant, fast-growing numbers in the overall computing pie (each quarter, roughly 90 million PCs and 360 million mobiles, including smartphones, are sold). The Indian tablet and smartphone market segments are growing at even faster rates. As per estimates by CyberMedia Research, consumers in India bought over 5 lakh tablets during the AMJ 2012 quarter, up 673 per cent from the year-ago period. For the year 2011, a total of 11.2 million smartphones were sold--registering a growth of 87 per cent over 2010 figures.

INSIDE 19| Case studies Managing Mobiles: A global Perspective 23 | interview Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner 24 | 10 Best Practices to Get BYOD Right

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cover story | Enterprise Mobility Because a large proportion of the device-owning consumers are corporate employees, it was only a matter of time before they began bringing all those wonderful devices to the workplace—often to the envy of co-workers and the consternation of the IT department.

Enter the BYOD era That is how the BYOD phenomenon started: consumers-employees brought them into their workplaces, insisting that the IT department support them. According to Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, in most places around the world, the BYOD trend is enforced or demanded by employees rather than embraced proactively by the organisation. IT folks mostly think of BYOD as a menace rather than an opportunity. But they can hardly be blamed for such thinking: corporate data is becoming The number of ever more important to secure and the tablets sold in new fancy devices not controlled by IT India in Q2 2012, a only add to IT’s security headaches. QoQ growth of 673% Fortunately, many vendors recognised the BYOD trend early on and began offering solutions and services around it. In fact, a whole new segment concerning the multiplicity of devices and operating systems has emerged: Mobile Device Management or MDM. Now there are several specialised MDM vendors that offer help to reduce the BYOD pain, if not eliminate it. Another factor that has contributed to the rise of BYOD is that savvy CFOs and number crunchers saw BYOD as an opportunity to reduce the hardware budget and to deal with technological obsolescence. The logic went thus: if employees were going to get their own devices to work, they could bear all or part of the device cost and share some of the responsibility for its upkeep and replacement.

05 lakh

“Exact figures on cost-benefits may not be available, but on a high level, we have reduced around 20 percent on device costs by implementing BYOD” - Nilesh Goradia, Head of Presales (India Subcontinent), Citrix

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In addition, there was another necessity: if a company was to be an attractive and forwardthinking employer, it would need to go with the flow and make all the adjustments to keep the new crop of talent happy. Because, if it did not have a BYOD policy, then, well, young talent could always flee to “more accommodating” competitors. It’s like offering Internet connectivity to employees in the early days of the web. Today, BYOD is considered a similar employee-magnet. “In these times of war for talent amongst companies, employers need to have flexible working models, including BYOD,” says Gernot Fels, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Fujitsu Technology Solutions (which offers Managed Mobile service as part of its repertoire).

The Indian Experience In India, BYOD as a policy or proactive initiative is just beginning to happen. Among the handful of companies that have started a formal BYOD jour-

Enterprise Mobility | cover story ney are the conglomerate Essar Group and the real estate firm BPTP. “At Essar, we are enabling BYOD to provide user flexibility and enable access to Essar resources. It is now viewed as a business enabler,” says Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group. The group’s IT team has designed applications on the Sybase Unwired Platform that allows field employees to access the SAP system and process orders—right on their mobile devices. Also, a JDA mobile application is used for a few other businesses. According to Prabhu, at an organisational level, Essar has leveraged mobile platforms that are lighter and used devices that have bigger screen sizes, in addition to reducing dependence on the

BlackBerry platform. It has provisioned mobile apps like Polycom RealPresence and Microsoft Lync that facilitate anywhere video-conferencing, audio and chat. Essar uses a combination of solutions to meet its mobility and BYOD needs, including Sybase Afaria 6.6, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and the device-binding feature of Microsoft Exchange 2010. Afaria, which is an MDM solution, helps Essar to deliver consistent policies across all device platforms. It provides visibility on the device like hardware specification, installed applications, etc. “The MDM can enforce security polices, encrypt corporate data on the device and facilitate remote

CASE STUDIES

Managing Mobiles: A Global Perspective

iven that it is still early days for Mobile Device Management (MDM) in India, organisations here may want to look at what their counterparts are doing globally to manage the proliferation of mobile devices. Here are some case study excerpts:

London Olympic Games committee London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), which had the challenge of staging 26 Olympic sports and 20 Paralympics sports in just six weeks for over 10 million ticket-holders, deployed Good for Enterprise, a secure mobility suite which enabled the use of sponsorprovided and personal devices. The solution safeguarded against lost and stolen devices, coupled to an ease of implementation across the estate, giving users the access they needed to email, contacts and calendar appointments.

Hospital chain in USA RehabCare owns and operates 34 long-term acute care and

rehabilitation hospitals, and manages rehabilitation programs in partnership with over 1,260 hospitals and skilled nursing facilities in 42 states. It developed its own cloud-based applications for mobile devices so that all required information could be entered quickly and easily during patient care. After deciding on Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, for enterprise-wide use, the company evaluated MDM vendors and zeroed in on MobileIron for its Virtual Smartphone Platform. A key factor in the decision was that MobileIron provided the ability for automatic device enrolment with encrypted profiles. Among the benefits: Departments are now getting fewer helpdesk calls, and overhead is down because there have been far fewer replacement devices.

US Government bureau US-based Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) uses two MDM solutions—Good for Enterprise and AirWatch—to manage its 2,500 iPhones, over 300 iPads and more than 1,000 BlackBerrys. In a report on FierceGovernmentIT.com, Walter Bigalow the

bureau’s chief of IT services management said, “The use cases determine how we use the MDMs in our environment.” ATF is using Good’s MDM solution when it needs to ensure that ATF information stays within the sandbox, which requires a complex passcode to access. Agents can use a simpler passcode just to get on and make a phone call, said Bigalow. AirWatch, which requires a single, complex passcode, allows agents broader access into the iPhone to use third-party apps to take photos, GPS readings and send information back to the bureau through the enterprise case management system.

Travel solutions firm from Singapore Sabre Pacific, owned by Singapore-based travel solutions and services company Abacus International, connects travel buyers and sellers through the world’s largest travel marketplace, the Sabre Global Distribution System. Tasked with an objective to roll out corporate issued iPads to field personnel while also supporting BYOD, Sabre Pacific’s IT team began looking at mobile device management solutions. The

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cover story | Enterprise Mobility wipe in case the device is reported lost or stolen,” says Prabhu. The BES solution, deployed in a highly-available cluster configuration, is used to manage and enforce corporate policies on all BlackBerry devices. Applications such as HP ePrint, Lync and Cortado are integrated with BES. For Vilakshan Jakhu, CIO, BPTP, the organisation’s BYOD journey began when the sales team were given iPads (the first models) for better productivity but at that time, no MDM solutions existed in the market. This created a challenge, as IT was unable to synchronise/secure the iPads. So Jakhu and his team embarked on the search

challenge was to give users advanced mobility while keeping it simple for IT to manage. Like many organizations, Sabre Pacific had issued and supported corporate-issued BlackBerry devices for mobile users in the past. However, the IT team found that their users’ needs were changing, and many of them started bringing in their iPhones. So the team began the process of mapping out their requirements to ensure a smooth transition from a BlackBerry Enterprise Server environment to one that included an MDM solution and a mix of corporateissued and user-owned smartphones and tablets. After evaluating a few solutions, the team chose Zencloud, Zenprise’s cloud-based MDM solution. Zencloud runs on a highly-available, globally-redundant cloud infrastructure with a 100 per cent uptime SLA.

Danish pharma company Based in Denmark, Novo Nordisk makes and markets pharmaceutical products and services globally and is a leader in diabetes care. To support its worldwide sales organization, Novo Nordisk planned to deploy a centralized Siebel CRM solution to mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs of more than 2,000 sales representatives in over two dozen countries. This provided a particular set of challenges

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for an MDM vendor and zeroed in on MobileIron (the vendor is listed in the market leaders segment of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant). M. Tech Products Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based solution provider and MobileIron partner that has presence in India, implemented the solution at BPTP. Sharing his views on the challenges of making business applications available to different devices with different screen sizes and operating systems, Jakhu says that this is a classic problem faced during mobile app development. “Development should concentrate on HTML5 content wrapped around an APP interface. This usually solves 80 per cent of the compatibility issues,” he opines. Also, in his

given the variety of mobile data standards and policies as well as different types of cultures and user needs. So the company developed an extensive set of requirements and began its search for a technology that would support it at that point and provide flexibility and scalability in the future. With the help of Danish mobile technology specialist Mobility Architects, it finalised and deployed Afaria from Sybase (owned by SAP). It found that Afaria excelled in over-the-air deployment, easy installation, rapid implementation and central management. It was also the best tool to meet high performance requirements, and did not consume excessive battery power and bandwidth in the process.

tial information. After evaluating some vendors on Apple’s preferred list of MDM solution providers, the IS team decided to deploy MaaS360 from Fiberlink. The solution provides the visibility, agility and automated controls to manage all mobile devices for all user types from a single, web-based console. Among the benefits: Efficient mobile application management, resulting in 98 per cent time savings for IT; rapid deployment in the cloud, with devices enrolled in only three minutes; centralized control to ensure asset and information security; advanced features that provide real-time visibility of all devices and applications.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOME MDM VENDORS School District in USA MobileIron www.mobileiron.com The Pascagoula District Good Technology (PSD) in Mississippi, USA, www.good.com is a public school district SAP (Sybase Afaria) with about 6,900 students www.sybase.com and over 1,100 teachers, administrators, Zenprise instructional and other support personwww.zenprise.com nel. When many of the district’s principals Fiberlink Communications determined that laptops were no longer the www.maas360.com optimal device for their on-the-go schedAirWatch ules and that iPads were better suited www.air-watch.com for both the administrative and learning BoxTone environments, the Information Systems www.boxtone.com team began the process of purchasing and Tangoe securing iPads and iPod touch devices. www.tangoe.com PSD needed a way to protect the new Note: This is a random partial list and is not mobile assets and safeguard confidencomprehensive.

Enterprise Mobility | cover story experience, users tend to face bigger problems on Android “since there is no standardization of screen size” across the multitude of vendors who make these devices. “Android development is easy and there is virtually no compliance check on the developers on their APPs. This can make apps vulnerable to hacks and malware attacks,” he says. In Jakhu’s view, development is relatively easier on the iOS platform but compliance to Apple’s development programme is stringent. “This does benefit the end user because they are able to get a better app, which is consistent across all iOS platforms. The security and vulnerability to malware is very low,” he says. Basically, organisations must pick their supported platforms. “Picking just Android or iOS doesn’t fulfil the needs of all users within the organization so provisions for both should be made,” he says. One way to minimise the effort and time in modifying the application to work on different mobile

operating systems is to go for desktop virtualisation, which gives more ease to the IT department and freedom to the end user, according to Nilesh Goradia, Head of Presales (India Subcontinent), Citrix. “In desktop virtualization, what you require on the end point is the Citrix receiver, which is supported on more than two billion devices. So irrespective of the underlying OS and without doing any reengineering on the end point, you would be able to deliver the application on any device using any underlying OS,” he says. The BYOD programme is not applicable for just any smartphone or tablet, according to Prabhu of Essar. “Only enterprise-ready devices should be permitted within the enterprise,” he says. In his opinion, it is very important to make sure that the back-end infrastructure is ready to take on devices that are running on newer platforms. His advice to others planning for BYOD: “Through detailed study, selection of proper solution and architecture design,

“At Essar, we are enabling BYOD to provide user flexibility and enable access to Essar resources. It is now viewed as a business enabler” - Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group

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cover story | Enterprise Mobility issues relating to integration can be minimised to a great extent which, in turn, reduces project cost and time to implement.”

The bugbear of security One of the primary inhibitors to more organisations adopting BYOD is the management of security on multiple platforms and devices. According to Jakhu, “BYOD fails if it cannot be proactively used to expose corporate applications in a safe and secure manner.” An effective way to tackle this, he suggests, is to have a “managed BYOD” policy. Jagdish Mahapatra, MD, India & SAARC, McAfee, shares some The number of interesting statistics. Quoting the smartphones sold McAfee Mobile Security Survey worldwide in second 2011, he says, “As per the survey quarter of 2012 findings, 49 per cent of Indian employees keep work-related presentations, bids, contracts, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), plans, diagrams, etc, while 51 per cent of the surveyed respondents store or send work-related purchase information on their phones. However, despite storing such vital information on mobile devices, only 44 per cent of the respondents back up their mobile data and most devices have little or no security as a policy.” In such a scenario, more stringent security controls will need to be put in place if an organisation wants to embrace trends such as BYOD. “Every organisation will need to do a risk assessment to look at the technology that will be supported and its inherent risks, how users will access corporate resources and, ultimately, corporate data through to how they manage users who lose their device or leave the organisation,” says Mahapatra.

146 million

“Any tool would only help drive the organisation’s internal IT policy around BYOD. If the policies are not detailed and exhaustive, the tools would find it difficult to measure up to the requirements” - Jagdish Mahapatra, MD, India & SAARC, McAfee

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According to Mahapatra, there is “no single solution or silver bullet” which will address all security concerns in BYOD. Instead of addressing BYOD in isolation, he suggests, it should be considered along with all the resources so that there is one single console to monitor. “Any tool would only help drive the organisation’s internal IT policy around BYOD. If the policies are not detailed and exhaustive, the tools would find it difficult to measure up to the requirements,” he says. Virtualisation of desktops is one of the recommended options for securely delivering applications on mobile devices—a solution evident in the case of Essar, which has enabled Citrix desktop for all users. Says Prabhu, “Employees can access on their mobile devices Citrix desktop, which is a streamed version of their desktop. No data gets downloaded on the device. Additionally, if employees are using apps to access enterprise resources, with Afaria, we are ensuring that any data that is accessed through these apps is encrypted and completely isolated from other data through

Enterprise Mobility | cover story

Interview Vishal Tripathi Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

“There should be no policy paralysis on BYOD” Companies must consider their options carefully, including security and support trade-offs, rather than plunge into BYOD just because other firms are doing it, feels Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

(3) consider the trade-offs (such as security and compliance risks); and (4) consider additional factors such as application models and Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools. Are there any changes to the internal IT architecture because of BYOD? BYOD is one of the drivers of hosted architecture in enterprises. Organisations embracing BYOD need to have a more mature, thinner architecture so that they can support and secure business applications on multiple mobile devices.

ow is BYOD viewed in most Indian organisations today? Is it encouraged, tolerated or discouraged? The BYOD phenomenon is only beginning to find its feet in Indian enterprises. Mostly, it’s a hard-to-stop occurrence driven mainly by the employees. It’s not something companies are doing proactively. Which is not much different from what’s happening elsewhere, because there has always been forced implementation of BYOD. What should IT leaders consider when they evaluate or implement BYOD in their organisations? I think companies should not look at BYOD from the simplistic view of saving costs on devices. What happens is that costs get transferred to other things. IT leaders should also consider these questions: What happens to the security? What happens to compliance—is it compromised? What level of support

is needed for employee-owned devices? They will do well to consider all aspects of BYOD before plunging into it. BYOD is best done wisely and methodically rather than on an ad hoc basis: there should be no policy paralysis on BYOD. So, what are the key considerations for a BYOD plan? Before deciding to implement BYOD, IT leaders should consider four key things: (1) not all employees need it, so they should do a proper user profiling of employees and look at the various use cases; (2) choose the best use-case scenario

a sandboxed environment for each application.” What’s more, in case the device is reported lost or stolen, the IT team at Essar is in a position to initiate a remote wipe. So, while there are serious security concerns in implementing BYOD, it is possible to tackle them with a combination of technology tools and policy measures.

What are the top two or three challenges for IT leaders when it comes to BYOD? The topmost challenge according to me is security, followed by managing the constant influx of new devices, which are not standardised. Another big challenge is that even though users want to bring their own devices to work, they often do not take the responsibility for them. What should IT managers keep in mind in ensuring the security of enterprise data when employees access it from their own devices? They should carefully examine how the applications are being streamed from the servers to the devices and make sure that there is no data leakage. Secure app delivery is going to be very critical.

The cost-benefit equation Tripathi of Gartner warns that companies should not look at BYOD from the simplistic view of saving costs on devices, as costs get transferred to other things such as support and compliance (see Interview). Nevertheless, if done in a well thoughtthrough fashion with proper policies and controls,

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10 Best Practices

to Get BYOD Right Like many other things in technology today, getting BYOD to work effectively for you is more about adopting the best practices than the tools being used. Here are some key points to keep in mind before pressing the start button

Policy, policy, policy! Get your BYOD policy in place by thinking holistically and methodically about what would be the best fit for your organisation. Do not take a “keep up with the Joneses” approach to BYOD.

Security is paramount, so do a thorough risk analysis before giving in to the temptation of seeing your employees walk in with lots of good-looking iPads or Galaxies.

One often-recommended approach is to enable completely device-independent computing through desktop virtualisation, accessed through an SSL VPN to protect the enterprise network.

Think people and not necessarily devices. In many cases, IT can think about their BYOD initiatives in how to manage and provide secure access to data and applications in terms of people, not the devices they use. However, organisations should make clear who in the organisation is allowed to use personal devices, whether on an ad hoc basis to supplement a corporate endpoint, as a permanent replacement for a corporate device or anything in between.

Contractors are generally ideal candidates for BYOD. They are expected to bring their own de-

vices, as it aids independent contractor compliance.

Get buy-in from top management. One of the key criteria for the success of a BYOD initiative is the senior management’s commitment and support. This is especially helpful in enforcing the clauses laid out in the BYOD policy (there can often be some heartburn on privileges or plaintive voices like, “But that’s not fair!” If people see the top bosses’ involvement, things become smoother.)

Watch your back(end)! It is very important to make sure that the backend infrastructure is ready to take on devices that are running on newer platforms.

The more, the merrier. While some organisations may choose to standardise on just one or two mobile platforms, the wisest thing to do (especially in these transparent and high employee expectation times)

BYOD can help organisations save on device costs. “On a high level,” says Goradia of Citrix, “we have reduced around 20 per cent on device costs by implementing BYOD.” At Essar, while the overall IT costs have increased due to BYOD (including back-end infrastructure, training, and mobile app development costs), Prabhu says that the productivity of employees has “significantly increased” as a result of better work and collaboration tools available at their fingertips.

“Development should concentrate on HTML5 content wrapped around an APP interface. This usually solves 80 per cent of the compatibility issues” - Vilakshan Jakhu, CIO, BPTP

Enterprise Mobility | cover story

Control Rooms

would be to embrace as many platforms as possible. Check with the solution providers about current and future compatibility status.

need

Clean Air

Participants should be encouraged to buy their personal devices through normal consumer channels rather than the organisation’s purchasing department. This helps maintain clear lines of ownership as well as ensures that participants have a direct relationship with their hardware vendor. You may want to make employee discounts available to them, if covered under your corporate vendor relationships.

to prevent breakdowns due to corrosion

Get a handle on costs. Contrary to popular perception and in many cases, BYOD may increase an organisation’s costs by requiring the IT team to support a wider range of devices than they would under a corporate devices-only policy. In addition, software licensing costs may increase as more devices are used to access company systems. Try and build cost scenarios based on different combinations of devices and employees.

BYOD doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You should think about the specific services you want to make available on BYO devices based on work groups, user types, device types and network utilised.

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Says Prabhu, “We have not yet done any cost-benefit analysis. Our objective is to manage various mobile devices in the right way rather than accepting risk. Also, we want to extend enterprise applications to the mobile workforce.” In Jakhu’s opinion, if a SaaS solution is adopted for MDM/BYOD, then the costs would be maximum $50 per device per year (inclusive of bells and whistles). “This will overall be less than managing unsecured devices which are using corporate networks with or without IT’s knowledge,” he says. On the productivity front, Jakhu says, “Assuming BYOD is in place, employees greatly benefit from such a solution since they are assured that their personal data isn’t being taken away from them.” Both Essar and BPTP are putting the lessons of their BYOD experiments to work and seem set to become more nimble and employee-friendly organisations. Given the rapid and, apparently, unstoppable march of mobile devices into the enterprise, it is high time other Indian organisations considered BYOD with a methodical, proactive approach rather than deal with it as a reluctant reaction.

Customer

Innovation through Cloud 26

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Oracleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seven-year painstaking effort to rewrite all its applications under the Fusion suite is cloud ready

Oracle OpenWorld | insight

imag ing by s higi l n

he key agenda for Oracle’s top executives, Oracle President Mark Hurd and Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corp., at its recently concluded Oracle Open World in San Francisco, was to share its cloud social services strategy enveloping the most complete enterprise social platform in the cloud. Besides, the top brass emphasised the need for simplification and consolidation of databases to meet changing information needs and IT services that are delivered and managed. In his keynote address to a gathering of approximately 50,000 people at the Oracle Open World, Ellison shared the company’s strategy as part of Oracle Cloud Mission which brings in a series of application platforms to customers. Ellison and team intend to influence its 390,000 customers to migrate to cloud. While Ellison’s objective is not to compel its customers to migrate to cloud and move all its critical and noncritical applications to the Cloud, it is equally important for him to enable customers to have the right option. “Our idea is to provide choice and flexibility to customers to choose the right option, be it on-premise, cloud, hybrid model or any other,” says Ellison. Against this backdrop, for the past seven years, Oracle has been rewriting its applications for the cloud which it brought under the ‘Fusion Middleware’ umbrella. Besides, Oracle has enabled its entire database to be in the cloud along with its programming language Java that is cloud-enabled. A host of advanced technology hardware solutions are integrated with the

“Our idea is to provide choice and flexibility to customers to choose the right option, be it on-premise, cloud, hybrid model and any other” Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corp

software solutions which are cloudenabled, titled engineered systems.

entire suite of applications and made them cloud ready; these include HCM, accounting, finance, CRM and others.

Justifying the Cloud Journey Ellison and team strongly believe that the industry has come of age and customers are increasingly adopting a utility computing model where the Cloud is evolving as a corporate strategy within enterprises across geographies. Some of the application offerings which are cloud-enabled would be Platform Services which are built on SQL, Java, and HTML providing necessary user interfaces. Application services, a comprehensive range of solutions, are based on SoA architecture. According to him, a software platform is well integrated with social networks at the platform layer. Social relationship management solutions are another key area for Oracle which is integrated into the cloud phenomenon. As part of the cloud journey, Oracle has integrated its

Uptake on Fusion Having built a cloud strategy around Fusion, Ellison gives an account of its existing Fusion application strategy. From Oracle’s product standpoint, about 38 per cent of the customers have taken to CRM, about 23 per cent to ERP and 39 per cent to HCM. From a deployment strategy perspective, about 9 per cent of the customers are On Demand, 65 per cent are on SaaS and 26 per cent are on-premise. Going by the geographies and with regard to Fusion sourcing, APAC stands at a ratio of 10 per cent, EMEA at 23 per cent and America at 67 per cent. However, Ellison expects APAC to be larger next year with various innovations happening on the product lines making it more customer friendly.

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insight | Oracle OpenWorld

“We will take a call in future to see if we can migrate most of our applications to the suggested SaaS model after careful evaluation, going by Oracle’s strategy” C S Ramesh, GM-IT, Titan Industries

As part of the Open World, Ellison announced new launches and releases of certain product lines with new functionalities and innovations embedded, something that customers had been anticipating for quite some time. The major ones that have been rolled out include Exadata X3 Database In-memory machine, Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite, Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Cloud Services Portfolio, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c with new tools, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine Software Enables customers to View and Analyze Data at the Speed of Business and so on.

Mark Hurd’s 4-pronged strategy As part of the global media press briefing, Mark Hurd, President, Oracle Corp, reiterated that there is a lot of technology being introduced to customers which have critical relevance to their growth strategy. Some of the new products and solutions that Oracle announced is well entangled with its cloud strategy.

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Our 4-pronged strategy includes the most relevant solutions around the enterprise applications technology at every level of the stack. “So, you can see the stack where there is storage, servers, our virtual machine, operating systems, database, middleware and applications,” says Hurd. Historically, what Oracle has done is to sell to a federated environment, have a high level of enterprise fit in multi-vendor environments. Secondly, we want to vertically integrate these pieces into our line of engineered systems to provide superior TCO. According to him, Oracle’s strategy is to take those very same best-ofbreed parts of its stack and integrate them into engineered systems that manifests itself as Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, the engineered systems that are differentiated for customers. “In the first strategy when people buy parts, who does the integration? They do. So, the first thing we do with engineered systems is we integrate a server. We integrate it with storage. We integrate

it with the database. We do their work as part of our R&D as opposed to the customer’s IT budget. Second, they perform better. Our X-2 Exadata which runs Oracle database and from the current baseline when it runs will allow them to run 100 times faster. Third, it is easier to support. You get a higher level of support. Our Platinum services which really revolve around our Oracle end-to-end implementations, can provide instantaneous support. We talked about five minute service level responses to the customer queries. For most customers, it’s hard to give your name and address in five minutes, let alone get a response to a technical issue and we are committed to provide suitable responses in five minutes which is possible with our engineered systems,” Hurd reiterates. Thirdly, “We want to deliver next-generation cloud applications and finally to deliver this technology to any industry. That is, deliver on the next generation of cloud applications. These applications are very different. They are not, if

Oracle OpenWorld | insight

Oracle’s India Focus

you are taking the old generation of applications, they are not ripped Oracle believes that the Indian economy will have and replaced. Since these significant scale of opportunities for the company that can solutions are modularly built, result in a growth in sales force and development teams it is possible to rip out the old and put in the new ones. racle employs 30,000 professionals in India across its sales, support and develThe fourth strategy is opment organisation. That includes OFSS as well. BRIC countries are important to to strategically deliver us. China and India are our growth markets in Asia--both these economies have a signifithis through industries cant scale of opportunities for us. In both the countries, we have had a lot of growth in our to solve customers’ sales force and most importantly, we have development organisations in these countries. In problems at the highest India, we added thousands of jobs last year and it also houses one of our largest development order of business value. teams outside the US. Up to 80 per cent of the growth on the planet will be in those emerging Trying to solve our economies. So, this changing economic backdrop is changing the physical location of people. customers’ problems in People in traditional economies are travelling to all of those locations—physically going there to the banking space, our do business. There will be more than 1 billion mobile workers in the world by 2015; so connectivity, healthcare customers social networking, and mobility are all in high demand. clinical trials issue, retail merchandising Customer Spend problem and so on. So Customers will spend money if there is good return on investment. That’s indicative of what was we are working on our observed in our recent financial results. That said, there isn’t a customer we have who isn’t on an customers’ higher order austerity plan and an innovations agenda at the same time. Customers are trying to save money to issues in the context of free funds to be able to invest. On any given day, the CEO is telling the CIO that he needs to adeverything we are trying dress mobility, grow revenue and help the company market itself to customers. On the flip side, to do. That’s our strategy. the CFO is cutting budgets by 5 per cent challenging the IT. The only way around that is to We will be spending roughly build two agendas and attack them simultaneously. 5 billion this year in R&D. Last year, we spent about 4.5 billion Impact of Innovations and before that, about 4.2 billion.” Our four-pronged customer strategy is clearly tar-

geted at solving customer issues at the highest order of business value. We want to help customers become more efficient and save money as we help them innovate, even as big companies adapt to a world of mobile devices, cloud computing and huge amounts of data. Customers are growing their data storage by 40 per cent a year. This is a big deal for us.

“On any given day, the CEO is telling the CIO that he needs to solve the mobility challenge, grow revenue and help the company market itself to customers”

i maging by sunees h k

Mark Hurd, President, Oracle Corp.

Customers’ Take One of Oracle’s customers, C S Ramesh, GM-IT, Titan Industries, has migrated customer facing applications on the private cloud. Titan has been using Oracle’s e-business suite and Exadata for a while. “We will take a call in future to see if we can migrate most of our applications to the suggested SaaS model after careful evaluation, going by Oracle’s cloud strategy,” says Ramesh. N Ravishankar, CIO, IT&IS, Tata Sky Ltd., believes that the discussion with Oracle’s top executives at the Open World reaffirms a few strengths of the products and solutions which can enhance the performance. “The range of solutions and its capabilities was an eye-opener as most times, one would get carried away by the competition’s perspective and not realise the inherent potential,” says Ravishankar. According to him, the strategy around engineering systems reinforces the commitment towards using cloud enabled models.

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In such a situation, senior IT managers who are ambitious to move up the value chain to become future CIOs need to drive the necessary change by imbibing effective skills. These include: a) Business awareness and the ability to influence the team to use the right solutions for business needs b) Being a good collaborator who can influence business teams, focus on outcome for initiatives rather than on individual credit c) Being hands-on with evolving technological changes and having the ability to adapt to the most relevant technologies to deliver business benefits that can be measured and appreciated by stakeholders

i maging : pe te rs on PJ

A right mix of business acumen, leadership, technology savvy and effective collaboration strategies will take you to the CIO level

t is all about change. As businesses get agile in tune with changing market dynamics and increasing opportunities and risks, the role of a CIO witnesses a sea change. The expectations from a CIO are changing, the role is getting even more demanding. As is obvious, the CIO is expected to enable business growth, transform the business besides ensuring smooth operations. The technological evolution which is increasingly becoming user focused or user dependent only increases the challenges for a CIO--he is expected to be in sync with technological changes and business requirements, all the while acting as a catalyst.

Leadership | insight d) Leadership with the right balance between business, technology, people management, leading the team and being a mentor In such a dynamic environment, it is imperative for future CIOs to wear multiple hats. The key ingredient is to be mature, with the capability to make the right judgment with the organisation’s interest in mind. Most often, crisis management is a vital task that CIOs need to handle: to take control of the situation and ensure damage control. The role also demands one to take initiatives that can help in transforming the business, make it more agile, scalable and profitable, while devising short and long term strategies. However, new areas like social media, big data, mobility etc., call for new functionalities in the role. Besides managing budgets and delivering business benefits, both tangible and intangible, the CIO needs to manage stakeholders’ expectations effectively. With a 360 degree approach, IT managers need to develop the ability to handle other functions like marketing, HR, finance and business roles. In fact, in most organisations, CEOs consciously work out strategies

to have IT as part of the sales team and vice versa so as to expose IT to business roles. Besides, a CIO must handle change or transformation, yet manage resources like people, budgets, processes effectively.

CIO Functions: Experts Opinion Functional Expert drawing a crucial intersection between business and technology

Required Skills

Changing their status quo

Some vital skills imperative for IT managers are: Qualifications and capabilities: Developing technological expertise by acquiring IT certifications and management qualifications Getting business savvy: Having expertise in processes, customer focus, project management, risk and compliance, resources and budget management, good leadership with excellent communication and people management skills A Bachelor’s degree with a post graduation in management along with IT certifications Working jointly with HR Leadership: Being a good leader with the right balance between business, technology, process and people management Being a visionary to align business strategy along with IT

Driving better profitability

“Besides managing budgets and delivering business benefits, both tangible and intangible, the CIO needs to manage stakeholders’ expectations effectively” BLV Rao, CTO, Infotech Ltd.

CIO is not a technocrat, but the idol behind engineering the change using best practices Recommended a sabbatical of 1-2 years of working in functional areas like logistics, operations and finance Participation in day-to-day governance and contributing to corporate governance, security and policy matters

Change inevitable The most strategic amongst the various skills are those that bring in a change in culture. This is the most important both from an internal and external perspective. The future CIO needs to bring in transparency into the system, make efforts to improve trust between teams, comply with policies and organisational framework, risks and compliance, true collaboration etc. Ensuring KPIs and KRAs are worked out both tactically and strategically for the optimal use of resources and to drive lower TCO and better RoI is one of the functions expected from a budding CIO. Some organisations follow a balance score card with a set of KPIs and KRAs. Project management is another lucrative cap that the CIO wears – this gives sufficient exposure to senior IT executives to handle teams and delegation of work. Envisaging risks and periodic review of projects would enable them to simplify things, and convey the right value to stakeholders. Besides, project management would open up opportunities for mentoring team members. Most organisations now want their IT teams to get involved in buddy programmes.

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Douglas Hughes | interview

Make a Fusion with Cloud Douglas Hughes, VP, Applications Product Development, Oracle, JAPAC, is upbeat about Oracle’s cloud vision announced recently at Oracle Open World. In conversation with N Geetha, Hughes brings to light the initiatives taken around its Fusion middleware to make it cloud enabled Can you elaborate on Oracle’s application road map for the future? Oracle is invading its cloud mission enabling all its enterprise technologies and business applications through the internet. As a process, the company has announced various platform services, application services, social platform and mobility services. Besides, the product development team has ensured building these on smart platforms such as SQL, Java, HTML5, SoA, while creating user interfaces with strong web applications. We are also assuring our customers and partners that we have created a robust support system through self-service models and also created support communities to support them. Which cloud service model is gaining momentum from the application outsourcing perspective? It is interesting to note that SaaS

as a model is taking the right direction and most parts of the world are absorbing this service area. Now, I see customers being comfortable about putting CRM around the SaaS model. The reason for this is that it is logical, because one of the biggest problems in the business today has been surges in demand by the business and users. There have been massive demands in the HR segment where the customer behavioural pattern often changes, and it is easy to put such applications on cloud for its dynamic feature. With changing market dynamics, most customers find cloud to be a viable model to put customer facing applications on SaaS. HR applications on cloud are seeing a major boost. The next one we are starting to hear a lot of noise about is procurement and financials. Procurements had been there for a while, financials is the next wave.

How do you intend taking the Fusion suite forward as part of the cloud strategy? What we have done with fusion with our next generation applications is to make sure that every module within Fusion can be deployed on the cloud on the same code line. For example, if one of the manufacturing modules is able to go with the cloud, other modules too would have the same code line and to enable this functionality, we had to rewrite to build Fusion. The reason is that there are many options out there. Cloud is always there, but the moment you mean to do something more, you need to customise, and you need to change and you need a different code line and that’s a major downfall for a lot of companies and a lot of them don’t even understand that. How do you see Fusion and cloud from the Indian customer perspective?

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interview | Douglas Hughes We have built a capability that allows us to go on to the cloud or come off the cloud. From the Indian perspective, what I see is that there are many small and medium companies which have ambitious growth plans.It is interesting to see the sheer growth scale in India and China, which is phenomenal. I found customers asking the most pertinent questions; for instance, they would ask, “If I am going to scale to that, I want to make sure about putting infrastructure in correctly for my IT system, I would not like to start off with an off-the-shelf package that runs on a disk. I want what the top end of the town is using. I want to get enterprise software, now how can I do it?” Since these customers would not want a big infrastructure cost, SAAS suits that. While it is an easy way to get up and running fast in a cost effective manner without having all the overheads, later if need be, they may want to bring it on purpose and that becomes interesting, so that’s one of the key things. It could be a reverse trend in places like India and China.

Where do you see the challenges for cloud in large enterprises? Yeah, the interesting observation with regard to the large enterprises is that we are seeing pockets of areas with the same logic, so customers want to look at SaaS as a service because they see it as a cost saver. In reality, what happens is that if you think of it in terms of on-premise, there is a high upfront cost and then it gets lower afterwards. If I look at it as a service lower upfront cost, there is a long ongoing cost. However, we are positioning our services as a cost saving measure. I see bigger companies have got their own on-premise solution and they are allowing a surge capability on the

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on-demand solutions along with service solutions. For instance, a big telecom company in India might have 1,000 seats of CRM but it will take 200-300 or 400 seats as SaaS, so it still has its very solid core with which it can do its service chores and site chores and all its cross area chores and that tends to be tough as a service system to do. But when it is just pure marketing or any other functionality, it can do that but as a service, it is now allowed to blend its models. There is a hybrid model that will evolve. It already has an investment in it and it can’t throw that away. However, what is going to happen is that as time goes on, companies will get to an inflection point, when they say, ”I

“With changing market dynamics, most customers find cloud to be a viable model to put customer facing applications on SaaS” have got to update my hardware. So the question would be, do I want to update my hardware, do I buy a hardware to put a software on it, or do I want to own the hardware because I want to install the software, or could I just buy a software and just have it?” So those are the decisions that might be made. And I think it will be about using what the top end of the town uses. Again, when I say SaaS, I talked to a lot of C-levels around the world, and there is no logical checkbox to go with as a service.

Douglas Hughes | interview we want to turn around and we want to try something; say, we are in a big end of town and we might be in one of the big banks in India, you know, ICICI or any of those that are out there. Now in the past, what they had to do was a question of hardware. Get software, get everything up and running a proof of concept. I see a lot of C-Levels now saying, it would have been nice to just link that. I mean if it works, this is where we see the platform, I see the platform and infrastructure service setting up our IT department to deliver services to their customers to make them more not just cost effective but quick in the market. We know that the history has always been that the IT department has been slow, they haven’t delivered on budget, they haven’t delivered on time, and this allows levels of flexibility. The interesting thing that is happening right now, which is a great thing about software as a service is it is Opex not Capex, and the bad thing about software as a service it is Opex not Capex.

Do you have any Indiaspecific strategy for this? How will IT heads buy in the line of business? It is interesting to watch that many IT heads are putting across their core ideas to board members and saying it would make sense if a particular task was done this way. The key change is that the C-levels have the discussion nowadays and they can choose which way they want to go and some of them will be heard and some of them will go ahead. However, there are a couple of things that CIOs can think of. They can think of starting with PaaS, which is not necessarily India-specific. However, I do see PaaS as a smart direction for India. A lot of times,

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Where do you see the direction for Indian customers from Oracle’s cloud standpoint? I see customers demand more references and proven models around Fusion. They want to see more and more customers allowing the operations on the product. They want to ensure that this continued innovation goes on and it is more about mobility. So, we have done a lot of announcements about mobility this week; mobility is very hot, social, it is not there yet but it is starting to tick in the people’s minds, and I think they also want to see if the directions taken around architectural framework make sense. However, more and more people need to start to

understand those foundations that have built up this structure and how to put it together. Customers don’t need to do away with the existing model or platform, only a part of it, and that’s what we are doing. We know companies can’t do that. There will be points in time when logical decisions will come and they can go, I will get rid of everything, all the infrastructure that is there. But there are others thinking that I can’t throw it out. I want them to focus on the big things and that is to make money. I don’t want them to just throw it off, I want them to get to the solution of the software, be it the older software or the existing products, so they are on a platform to be ready for Fusion. That’s a big one and India is pretty good at that. But getting on the lightest version is important for the key functionalities and then getting ready to deploy new products to extend their functionality, extend their capabilities. I call it extension because that’s what we are doing. You are applying IT functionality into areas that are currently not applied and there is value there. Some questions that can be asked are: What’s my return on investments on upgrading my financials? I don’t know. What’s my return on investment on the talent management system? If I can save three people, I have already started to see a lot of money coming in. At this point, getting customers to Fusion is a slow process and we just have 100 customers. Rewriting Fusion was a big job. We didn’t think when we started that we would have to rewrite from scratch and how big this would be. This is the first rewrite of enterprise software in 25 years by anyone.

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the web f r o m

www.itnext.in Read IT Next stories published online. The links of these stories can also be accessed through your mobiles/smartphones using QR code.

WI-FI NEWS

70% of mobiles sold in 2015 will use Wi-Fi

TECH SPENDING NEWS

Every tech budget becoming an IT budget: Gartner Twelve years ago, technology spending outside of IT was 20 per cent of the total technology spending; it will become almost 90 per cent by the end of the decade, according to Gartner.Much of this change is being driven by the digitisation of companies’ revenue and their services. Leading this transformation is The Nexus of Forces, a convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and information patterns. http://www.itnext.in/ content/every-techbudget-becoming-itbudget-gartner.html

INDIA TABLET NEWS

40%: Growth of Indian tablet market MAIT, the apex body representing India’s IT hardware, training and R&D services sectors, says Tablets will grow at 40% CAGR in 5 years. http://www.itnext.in/ content/40-growthindian-tablet-marketover-next-5-years.html

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According to ABI Research, the IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi protocol will conquer the existing ones (802.11b, g, & n) in two to three years. WiFi protocols have changed significantly over the last two to three years and almost every smartphone shipped this year will offer some form of Wi-Fi capabilities. However, a new Wi-Fi protocol will begin to dominate mobile devices soon. New market intelligence from ABI Research projects the IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi protocol will begin to conquer the existing protocols (802.11b, g, and n) in the next two to three years. http://www.itnext.in/content/70-mobilessold-2015-will-use-wi-fi.html

Interview

Clas Neumann: Customers Inspire Innovation Neumann throws light on coinnovations with clients and the significance of technologies such as HANA and cloud, partially developed at the Indian development centre of SAP in Bangalore. http://www.itnext.in/content/clas-neumanncustomers-inspire-innovation.html

OPINION

Patently Troublesome Regardless of who wins finally in the Apple-Samsung tussle, patent fights are here to stay, says Sanjay Gupta, Consulting Editor (Online), IT Next. The trigger for this article is the recent jury decision awarding $1 billion in fine to Apple against Samsung for design patent infringements. By the time you read it, some more cans of worms would have been opened for sure. I’m no clairvoyant, but I can say almost certainly that the duel will go on much longer. For one thing, granting of patents, their exercise by companies and what they imply for consumers are very complex issues. For another, they involve huge sums of money. Even though patents have increasingly come to rule the roost, factors like growing awareness, lawsuits and the notions of justice associated with patenting (or not patenting) are splitting the society.

http://www.itnext.in/ content/patently-troublesome.html

from the web MOBILE HANDSETS NEWS

NEW SOLUTION NEWS

New PDF Solution Adobe’s next generation Acrobat XI features complete PDF editing and export to Microsoft PowerPoint. Adobe Systems Incorporated has unveiled Adobe Acrobat XI software, a powerful new solution that rises to today’s complex document challenges. The industry standard for PDF software will now feature complete PDF editing and export to Microsoft PowerPoint, along with new capabilities and functionality designed for tablets and mobile devices, such as touch-friendly capabilities on tablets and smartphones allowing users to add comments, fill in, save and sign forms. Acrobat XI supports IT departments with more seamless Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration, easy deployment, applications virtualisation and robust application security in lowering TCO, with better RoI. http://www.itnext.in/content/new-pdf-solution.html

Mobile sales in India to reach 251 million Samsung, Nokia top two vendors; smaller companies face the heat in a market crowded with over 150 players Mobile device sales in India are forecast to reach 251 million units in 2013, an increase of 13.5 percent over 2012 sales of

251

BI NEWS

Canon deploys QlikView BI to drive sales The solution from Team Computers simplifies decisionmaking by providing high-level details across products and geographies. Team Computers, an IT solution provider, has announced that Canon India has opted for Team Computers to deploy the latter’s QlikView business intelligence solution to drive its sales operations. Ranjan Chopra, CMD, Team Computers, said, “QlikView consolidates data sources and provides simple solutions. Team Computers aspires to give easy-to-use yet robust interface capable of handling multiple levels of data.

million

DIGITAL NEWS

Should banks fear Google, Facebook? Well, yes and no! Gartner believes that digital megafirms may not be the banks of the future, but they’ll sure influence financial services. Despite the hype about “digital mega-firms” such as Apple, Facebook and Google wiping out mainstream banks, traditional banks will have the edge over their Internet-oriented rivals, according to Gartner, Inc. http://www.itnext.in/content/ should-banks-fear-googlefacebook-well-yes-and-no.html

http://www.itnext.in/ content/canon-deploysqlikview-bi-drive-sales. html

221 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. The mobile handset market is expected to show steady growth through 2016 when end user sales will surpass 326 million units. “The Indian mobile phone market is very competitive with more than 150 device manufacturers selling devices to consumers. Most of these manufacturers remain focused on the low-cost feature phone market which still constitutes over 91 per cent of overall mobile phone sales, offering a huge market to compete in,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. http://www. itnext.in/content/ mobile-sales-indiareach-251-millionunits-2013.html

ANALYTICS NEWS

BPO analytics services for better business insights New HP analytics services touted to accelerate discovery of growth opportunities, efficiencies and cost savings HP Enterprise Services has announced new BPO analytics services designed to accelerate discovery of growth opportunities, efficiencies and cost savings while supporting improvements in compliance and mitigation of risk. http://www.itnext.in/content/bpo-analytics-services-better-business-insights.html

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event Report | Intelligent Networks

Need for Agile Networks IT managers have to make their networks agile to meet the needs of a dynamic world

T Next magazine, Comscope and SigmaByte Computers jointly organised an event on “‘Strategies for making Your Network Agile & Intelligent’ in Mumbai on October 17, 2012. The evening event was attended by more than 40 IT infrastructure and network managers. As a prelude to the discussions, Ashok Srinivasan, the National Technical Manager for CommScope Enterprise Solutions Division, delivered a talk on the need for “Agile Networks in a Dynamic World”. He highlighted the factors driving the demand for faster and more robust networks, and explained some of the new in-building technologies that can be used to create resilient and reliable networks. Senior IT executives are all cued into lea rning the techniques of building agile net works

Ketan Kothari, Managing Director, Sigmaby te on best practices

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panel in full steam on how to build a dynamic net work

Future OF IT

www.itnext.in/futureofit

more on web

White Paper Value for Business, Value for Customers

It is important to be agile, which means understanding the business and its pain, and being able to alleviate the pain, promptly and efficiently. http://www.itnext.in/ futureofit/index.php/ the-agile-enterprise

Opinion

Re-thinking Authentication By Rakesh Thatha

Creating Agile Enterprise

I llustratio n: rAJ v erma

In a market that is perennially changing, being agile is the only way forward. CIOs today are preparing to meet change head on by focusing on making their businesses more responsive and future-proof Without change, there can be no growth. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the global IT sector. New technologies are coming up all the time, while existing ones become obsolete in the blink of an eye. Today, mobile technologies, social media and cloud computing are all the rage, and every enterprise is grappling with the need to incorporate them into its offerings. Companies are facing new demands every day. Data

“Open Sesame!” is a classic example of using an authentication mechanism in the famous tale, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.http://www. itnext.in/futureofit/ index.php/rethinkingauthentication

Expert View

Games Can transform Business By Daniel Burrus Anyone who has children or who has been around them for a while knows that kids, as well as young adults, are attracted to video games like flies to light. http://www.itnext.in/ futureofit/index.php/ games-can-transformbusiness

volumes are on the rise. Collaboration is gaining in significance. There are new security threats emerging every second. How do you build and sustain a business in an environment which is always in flux? With the changing technology landscape and rapidly evolving customer preferences, a new breed of companies is on the rise: agile enterprises. These companies value responsiveness over red tape, flexibility over rigidity, and are focussed on the big picture rather than the details. They realise that the cost of missed opportunities due to IT not being able to keep up with the business’s needs is far higher than any investment in IT towards making it more agile.

Need for Being Agile With companies’ e-commerce presence now extending across several countries, incorporating one key change for the end user can often mean months of development work and testing. Companies often end up with disparate apps, platforms and systems which become a drain on their resources. Not only is this true in the case of companies undergoing mergers, but also in growing companies, where IT deployments take place in a disparate way, with each branch or department setting up its own set of processes and technologies in isolation. Pretty soon, the company which is operating in silos, and data duplication and errors have crept into the system, transparency is an issue. Maintaining a huge, sprawling setup like this can be a challenge, and can raise expenses needlessly. But an agile business is able to continually re-examine itself to look for better and faster ways of doing things. Take Tulip Telecom, for instance. The company came across such a challenge in the recent past. According to CR Narayanan, CIO, Tulip Telecom, “Our network grew in an inorganic way, and we needed to optimise our costs. We connect to our customers from our Points of Presence (PoPs). We have more than one lakh connects across the country today. When a customer shifts location, the load on the PoP in that location reduces. If this happens, in some cases, it may not be economical to continue that PoP, because the cost of running and the cost of providing the bandwidth may outweigh the revenue.” So how did they deal with this? “To prevent revenue leaks, we are monitoring every PoP. http://www. itnext.in/futureofit/index.php/the-agile-enterprise

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event Report |Intelligent Networks

panel Berjes Shroff, Head IT & IT Security, Tata Services Ltd

Meheriar Patel, CTO and Head Online Business, Globus Stores

V. Subramanian, DGM & CISO, IDBI Bank Ltd

Ashok Srinivasan, National Technical Manager for CommScope Enterprise Solutions Division

R Gi ridhar, Group editor, 9.9 Media sharing a few lighter moments with the panelists

Ketan Kothari, Managing Director, Sigmabyte

Mr. B. Venkatakrishnan,Â Head of IT - Projects & OperationsÂ Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd

Srinivasan gave examples of new software tools and networking hardware that make it easier to diagnose network faults, reduce power consumption and manage enterprise networks effectively. He also fielded queries from the audience on how to plan for future networks, and ways to ensure the performance of mobile devices within buildings. A veteran of the structured cabling industry, Ketan Kothari, MD, Sigmabyte delivered an engaging talk that dispelled the myths and misapprehensions surrounding cabling infrastructure installation, testing and certification. Peppering his speech with personal experiences and anecdotes, he illustrated how IT infrastructure managers could take measures to forestall network problems. The event culminated with a panel of senior IT executives discussing the evolution of networks in enterprises. Participants took up issues like planning network infrastructure for future needs, coping with new requirements like BYOD and video, and managing converged networks. All panelists reiterated the need for effective partnership with, and support from, network infrastructure partners to cope with the evolving needs of an enterprise. In an interactive session, the panelists fielded questions from the delegates. Some key points brought to light during the discussion by the participants and panelists revolved around how organisations can make the move towards a better managed network, one that

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Panel member sharing views with the senior IT executives on how the in-building technologies can be used in creating resilient and reliable net works, which are more agile and intelligent to meet the needs of the changing dynamic world

Decision-makers and senior professionals paying all attention to understand and grab the nuances of building effective net works and addressing the challenges

bends the cost curve to its advantage, both in the short and long term; as well as tackling the challenge of adopting new technology and applications that require delivery of more bandwidth to the desktop and backbone network, taking care of single points of failure and managing the physical infrastructure configuration to boost operational efficiency.

15minute manager

training Education workplace compensation workforce trends skills development personal development

Page 42

Strategy: Strategic IT Play this page Review: iPhone5 page 44 Trends: BI Means Business page 45 Training Calendar: IT&Telecom Events page 46

BY n Geetha

il lustratio n: Peterso n PJ

he role of a CIO faces immense challenges. And most research groups have reiterated the fact, what with various negative forces influencing the industry and diminishing the importance of IT. One of the major influencers in this challenging game is the sluggish economy; in fact, Gartner’s latest CEO survey revealed that 85 per cent of CEOs believe they will be negatively impacted by the global economic slowdown. This has a direct impact on the role of a CIO. So, Gartner advocates that IT heads must now think strategically, and along the lines of business, if they have to govern their space and make their presence felt. However, the silver lining for IT, as per Gartner’s observation, is that twothirds of CEOs believed IT would make a greater contribution to industrial growth and that about 40 per cent foresee an increase in IT investments.

Nexus Game The recently concluded Gartner Symposium, which revolved around the theme ‘Focus, Connect and Lead,’ laid emphasis on the nexus of focus that influenced CEOs and CIOs alike in driving the required growth.

Gartner’s direction

Strategic IT Play Strategic play by IT teams will drive the necessary growth during the current sluggish economy

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15-MINUTE MANAGER Says Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner, â&#x20AC;&#x153;We live and work in an age of incredible promise, an age unleashed by a nexus of forces: social, mobile, information and cloud.â&#x20AC;? As part of his keynote address to CIOs and senior IT executives at the recently held Gartner Symposium in Goa, Sondergaard reiterated the fact that while there is economic uncertainty, there is also enormous opportunity. According to him, IT is at the centre of every business. These forces are innovative and disruptive when taken only on their own, but together, they are revolutionising business and society. This nexus defines the next age of computing. To understand the change, you must appreciate each of the forces. It is all the more important for a country like India, which exercises a strong momentum despite inflationary pressures and appreciation of local currency.

Business & Technology Nexus As IT heads and their teams prepare to reshape their roles for the future, it is imperative for them to align with these forces that are expected to impact the industry at large. Forces such as social networks, mobility, information and cloud will create the big wave which will enable these professionals to swim through during the next stage of computing. The major change that the industry can witness will be increased digitisation of revenue; also, every business budget will be the IT budget. Social: With 1.5 billion people or 20 per cent of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population on social networks, and $34 billion from ads, gaming and subscription markets, social computing is in its next phase. Social computing is moving from being just on the outside into the core of business operations. It is changing the fundamentals of business management and redefining the operational model to engineer a set of behaviours that ultimately aids professionals in getting their job done. By 2015, 10 organisations will spend over $1billion each on social media.

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Health Tips

What are the benefits of jogging?

10 Benefits of jogging for fitness 1. Better sleep. One feels refreshed in the morning 2. Strengthens leg muscles. Strong leg muscles indicate good health 3. Reduces risks of blood pressure and cancer 4. Helps in controlling and even preventing diabetes 5. By strengthening cardio-vascular muscles, jogging reduces the risk of a heart attack. 6. By using excess energy,

jogging gives you stress relief 7. Your bones become stronger with jogging 8. People who jog regularly look younger than other people their age 9. It strengthens the respiratory system and improves blood circulation 10. Improves appetite The other physical benefits of jogging include: Improved fitness Weight loss Burns abdominal fat Improves appetite Strengthens muscles and bone density Fights insomnia Fights ageing Fights diseases Cardiovascular benefits

Psychological benefits of jogging include: * Confidence building

A great method for better appetite and digestion

* Stress relief * Mind training * Improves attitude Source:www.health.am

15-MINUTE MANAGER

“The age we live in is unleashed by a nexus of forces: social, mobile, information and cloud” Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner

“Think of new ideas and skills with a unified focus on IT and plan investments to drive customer experience” Partha Iyengar, Head of Research-India, at Gartner

Mobile: In 2016, more than 2.7 billion mobile devices will be purchased globally, two-thirds of the workforce will own a smartphone, and 40 per cent of the workforce will be mobile. With this new channel to customers and employees, organisations should design their business around the

mobile. This will have a positive impact on application delivery, employee productivity and process work flows. In less than two years, 20 per cent of sales organisations will use iPads as the primary mobile platform for their field sales force. By 2018, 70 per cent of mobile workers will use a

“20% of sales organisations will use iPads as the primary mobile platform for their field sales force in less than two years” Peter Sondergaard, Sr VP & Global head of research, Gartner

Big data advantages * 5 disruptive scale changes happening, increasing the complexity of IT tremendously and throwing up challenges and opportunities * IDC says organisations will need to manage 50x more information by 2020 * Facebook’s 800 million users post 250 million photos each day * Twitter’s users send about a billion Tweets in a week * In 2011, smartphone sales exceeded PC sales by 30 per cent * Opportunities with big data vary from sector to sector and organisations need to analyse this from a functional standpoint * Nimble new companies that understand the value of big data will not only challenge competitors, but may also re-define the way business is done * Big data allows organisations to create highly specific segmentations

tablet or a hybrid device that has tablet characteristics. Asset ownership is also changing: by 2016, employees will purchase half of all non-PC devices used in business; and by the end of the decade, half of all devices will be used by the business too. Mobile phones will continue to be the fastest growing space within the Indian IT market. During the same time period, this segment will also account for nearly 42 per cent of all telecommunications revenue in India. It will also account for nearly 26 per cent of the overall IT spending. Information: The concept of one enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions is dead. Multiple systems including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialised file systems tied together with data services and metadata, will become the “logical” enterprise data warehouse. Big Data is about looking ahead, beyond what everybody else sees. Not at what has already happened,

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15-MINUTE MANAGER REVIEW

iPhone 5: The Fastest Smartphone in the Land

With its Apple-designed A6 processor, the iPhone 5 is distinctively unique in the world of smartphones. Most high-end phones currently run on one of two architectures: ARM’s Cortex-A9, which is used by Nvidia, Texas Instruments and others, and Qualcomm’s Krait. But the A6, as some experts discovered, is something completely different—an ARM-compatible system-on-a-chip designed, top to bottom, by Apple. There’s also the new slender, slimmer body that no picture illustrations can do justice to. If all of Apple’s claims are true, then the iPhone 5 is an engineering masterpiece: double the performance in a more compact package with no sacrifices in terms of battery life. Five tests were conducted altogether. First, the browser benchmarks: Sunspider, Browsermark and Guimark 3 Bitmap, all test Web browser performance. Sunspider is about JavaScript, Guimark is about interactive HTML5 and Browsermark is an overall browser benchmark. The iPhone 5 takes things to the next level with a processor that can compete with the S4, including the fast browser. Its Browsermark score is 80 percent (80%) higher, and it shows much speedier Sunspider times. GUIMark, like most mobile on-screen graphics tests, maxes out at 60 frames per second because that’s as fast as your screen updates. A phone’s hardware performance cannot be the only feature taken into consideration, but it’s definitely a piece of the puzzle. Based on these benchmarks, the iPhone 5 lives up to the expectations of being twice as fast as the iPhone 4S. It’s also, for now, the fastest handheld computer sold in the US. People who thought that the iPhone 4S was a half-hearted effort are rightfully expecting the iPhone 5 to be the real upgradation of the iPhone 4. In the end though, there’s more to a smartphone’s real worth than speculation. Apple has, on multiple occasions, been able to produce devices that simply get better than the previous products and few will be surprised with the iPhone 5 pulling off a similar trick. Source:Thinkdigit

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or what is happening now, but what will happen next. The leading organisations of the future will be distinguished by the quality of their predictive algorithms. By tapping an incessant stream of information from internal and external sources, businesses today have an endless array of new opportunities for transforming decision-making, discovering new insights, optimising the business and innovating. Gartner expects that 30 per cent of large enterprises over the next four years will hire Chief Data Officers responsible for curating, managing and governing information and finding professionals such as data scientists and experts in non-relational DBMS technologies. Besides, by 2015, about 85 per cent of the big data analysis will be outsourced to the cloud, which will create new customer relationships and massive collaboration. Cloud: The cloud combines the industrialisation of IT capabilities and the disruptive impact of new IT-led business models. Cloud is not about cost cutting, and big data is the killer app for cloud. However, the shift away from traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still in the very early stages in India. Large enterprises in India are gravitating towards a private cloud model to better understand the constructs of cloud computing within their own premises before deciding to move some applications onto a public cloud model. By 2014, there would be greater market consolidation led by the cloud, which will create a highly competitive model for customers, promising savings of almost 80 per cent. Between 2011 and 2016, the market for Business Process Services in the cloud will double in size to nearly $145 billion. Partha Iyengar, Head of ResearchIndia, at Gartner, recommends that IT heads design strategies with open policies and procedures. “Think of new ideas and skills with a unified focus on IT and plan investments which can drive better customer experience,” says Iyengar.

15-MINUTE MANAGER

Business intelligence

BI Means business As an integral part of corporate success strategy, BI is innovatively meeting agile business demands By Suni l r ank a

il lustrati on: Shi gil Narayanan

ost discussions in the recent past amongst enterprises, research groups and senior analysts around the globe have been about Business Intelligence (BI). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Business Intelligence as a technology is coming into the spotlight of the top management in businesses as it is perceived to drive superior business growth and help organisations to tap information in real time. One could observe that customers have invested heavily in Business Intelligence

technologies based on business needs, but perceive mediocre results. The reason for this could be changing market dynamics and technological evolution along with the paradigm shift in consumer behaviour patterns. Consequently, if the application of BI is not understood correctly or tracked effectively, the investment could result in much lower return on investment (ROI) than expected.

Shortcomings on the State of Business Intelligence I would consider the current state of BI to be in a state similar to that which the

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems sailed through about 15 years ago, and which saw certain setbacks during the implementation process, though promising. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s discuss the transition and the evolution of BI in the industry by going back a few years. One would recall that every department needed a solution to operate and function efficiently. Back in the early 80s, people invested heavily in ERP silo systems; later, companies like Oracle and SAP built industry and vertical based solutions allowing users to deploy solutions for increasing operational efficiency. However, from mid till late 90s, after creating transactional data for 15 years, people wanted to see how the existing data could be used along with its trends, graphs and patterns. Users found the need of a few systems which could provide them with sufficient information insights. The necessity to make better use of information or the generation of right information at the time required resulted in the invention of BI, which also gave birth to the data warehousing concept. The initial focus of BI revolved around data and the

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15-MINUTE MANAGER

event calendar Major global events in IT and Telecom during November 2012

efforts revolved around bringing the data out of the transactional systems to provide meaningful insights. The thrust was on creating data structures so that data analysts could do some basic reporting for answers like, “What is my current open inventory?” or “What are my order backlogs?” and so on. Still, it required manual effort to tie the data together.

BI’s Progression

event

Venue

Dates

M2M & Connected Devices Asia Pacific Summit 2012

Singapore

Nov 05 - 08, 2012

TSF Time and Sync in Telecoms

Nice, France

Nov 06 - 08, 2012

IDC’s Asia Pacific Telecom Summit 2012

Singapore

Nov 08, 09, 2012

AfricaCom 2012

CTICC Cape Town, South Africa

Nov 13 - 15, 2012

4G Latin America 2012

Colombia

Nov 14 - 15, 2012

The 3rd ICCCT 2012

Allahabad, India

Nov 23-25, 2012

Mobile Network Security Strategies

New York City

Nov 28, 2012

TM Forum’s Customer Experience Management Summit 2012

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Nov 27 - 28, 2012

The Smarter Telco Conference

Mumbai & New Delhi

Nov 29, 2012

Capacity Asia 2012

Bangkok, Thailand

Nov 28 - 29, 2012

Source: Agencies

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The remarkable progress that BI saw, which was based on the demand of business groups for newer needs, indicated a shift from manual data reconciliation to a technological approach. Hence Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tools like Informatica, Decision Points and ODI were invented to extract, transform, process, organise and analyse raw data by transforming it into abstract data structure. Thus we saw the emergence of ETL tools, data warehouses, OLAP cubes, as well as many other specialised technologies. Until lately, the modernisation of BI was focused on how data was processed, manipulated and displayed. Data representation on dashboard was a deal-breaker and after the initial steps towards “User Experience BI,” followed the famous “Build It and They Will Come” philosophy. All of it can be categorised as the “Traditional Business Intelligence” approach. It gave the user much needed insight, but with the growing demand, people needed more.

Setbacks concerning Traditional BI Despite the technological innovations that the industry is witnessing, innovation around BI has not measured up to industry expectations. BI application deployment still needs to go through certain steps which include: Collecting requirements, transforming into specifications, and then designing, building, testing and finally implementing the cycle Data integration, cleansing, modelling, warehousing, metrics creation and management, reports,

15-MINUTE MANAGER dashboards, queries, and alerts e-mails. For example, using Waterfall methodologies and depending on the size of BI implementation, it could take anywhere between 3-6 months of iteration. In addition, constant change in the requirements and in the time reports built result in missing schedules, and most importantly, unhappy users. Users don’t recognise the connection between the implemented solution and their problem. Apart from methodologies, most scenario requirements are individual driven, cascading change requests and causing delays in delivery. Decision making across the enterprise is based on individual judgments. With so many individual niche solutions, complex BI solutions integration of various voluminous data sources is almost impossible.

Where are the Returns? Having said that, some of these challenges could be addressed with the help of packaged BI applications. Some of the advantages of packaged BI application are as follows: These

“BI wind is blowing towards bringing in innovations with the successful concepts of agility, mobility, cloud and bigdata” Sunil S Ranka, Member of the Board of Directors for BIWASIG

applications are typically designed for a specific domain (e.g. CRM, finance, or HR). They come with pre-built data extractors for relevant data sources, data models, sets of metrics, reports and dashboards. They satisfy 80 per cent (80%) of customer requirements and serve as a solution accelerator. They leverage vendor knowledge from prior customer experiences and implementation. It works best when your IT department lacks relevant functional/technical experience. Does it

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTION The subsequent few years will see a shift from traditional BI to next generation BI approaches The next wave of BI products will have new methodologies such as leveraging the existing investment and fixing the basics

data discovery. This will be the key through which companies will find data within their existing data ig data is no more a concept. It B has come a long way to become main stream and will need to be part of the overall corporate IT strategy

Establishing a Center of Excellence for BI, a common ground where business and IT could come together and make faster and better decisions with the common objective of successful BI

BI in cloud will be the next wave and data security and multitenance could be a roadblock but with low TCO, companies will need to make the first move

ompanies will need more of the C ‘Google” style “inmemory” analytical tools for faster business and

Mobile BI will be the next buzzword and agile BI will be the new norm

mean packaged applications can resolve all issues? Not necessarily. It may resolve up to 80 per cent (80%) of the requirements but the remaining 20 per cent (20%) could cause potential issues during upgrades and reinforcements. At times, out-of-the-box metrics definitions may not match existing corporate metrics definitions. Packaged applications have better user feedback, ease of configuring applications and bring in refined reports, which are tested before deployment. According to the TDWI group, customised BI applications are more tedious as they seek business requirements, define project scope, hire developers, build ETL tools, design schemes, build reports, generate feedback, train users and so on.

Which Way Does the BI Wind Blow? Even with various bottlenecks, BI has evolved to beome an integral part of the corporate success strategy and there is an effort to make necessary modifications. Clearly, the wind is blowing towards bringing in better innovations with the success of concepts such as agility, mobility, cloud, bigger data volume, etc., and people are willing to change with the need and companies are investing in innovating next generation products. (see box) Sunil S Ranka, Member of the Board of Directors for BIWASIG (BI Warehousing and Applications Special Interest Group).

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Top Travel Gadgets for 2012: Can’t bear to leave your gadgets behind while you travel? Mushroom GreenZero Wall Travel Charger

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Like something? Want to share your objects of desire? Send us your wish-list or feedback to editor@itnext.in

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Cloud

the big

Gamble with Apps for Gain EXPERT PANEL

N Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group

The Situation...

Cut it from here

Will Vijay Sahai be able to muster the confidence to move all his enterprise applications to cloud? I am sure most IT heads face a similar dilemma in making key decisions about moving critical applications to cloud. Vijay Sahai, Senior Manager-IT of a large automobile manufacturing firm finds his cost of infrastructure maintenance (both applications, hardware and software) soaring. The company, which has a large network with offices spread across various locations and that caters to multinational customers, runs umpteen applications. With multiple users of these applications, it is a Herculean task for Sahai to keep tabs and ensure security. Since the company owns a huge captive data centre, Sahaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s challenges know no bounds. After much debate, Sahai managed to convince his conservative top management to opt for cloud model as a corporate strategy. However, scepticism around cloud prevailed and with much hesitation, a Your responses count. Log on to www.itnext.in/bigQ to submit your replies. The best entry will be published in the next print edition.

Vinod Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Walmart India

Dheeraj Sinha, Hea d-Global IT and Supply Chain, Apollo T yres

private cloud was created. But Sahai is still not convinced and wants his entire enterprise applications to move to the real cloud model. The industry is abuzz with various cloud models and their testimonials. Large application vendors too make tall claims about their cloud offerings around various business critical applications. There are SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and hybrid models trying to invade the market. Sahai is completely bowled over by the cloud concept, cloud offerings and their advantages. On the one hand, he is tempted to move all his business critical applications to the cloud and relax; on the other, he is clueless about the intricate challenges and risks involved as there are no proven standards around cloud model. While cost saving is one aspect, security is a key parameter he cannot ignore. Senior colleagues in the industry have yet another perspective: large enterprises should not opt for public cloud as there are several risks and shortcomings with regard to handling data or information. And so, he seeks answers from experts on two big questions; these will help him make the right decision.

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the big q

the big questions...

Which cloud model do you think Vijay Sahai should consider at this point of time? Which of the applications should he consider moving to the cloud (which fits best) model?

What is the approach he should take with cloud strategy? For instance, should he go in for a cloud service provider? How does he address security issues and what kind of benefits should he expect for the cloud model?

Here are the answers... Evaluate dual sourcing Model FIRST ANSWER

N Jayantha Prabhu CTO, Essar Group About me: Principal owner of ESSAR Group Enterprise Architecture Board-IT Infrastructure & Technology; acting as Chairman, Technology Committee. Heads the IT Center of Excellence

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Cloud-based service delivery will empower enterprises to simplify their infrastructure and potentially reduce costs via standardised platforms, combined with new skills and management practices. The current challenge is to develop a cloud-services decision matrix to determine where to leverage the cloud. It is important to know which is the right solution for your organisation’s unique needs and circumstances. When choosing applications to migrate to a cloud model, you need to find the right balance between value and risk. You need to figure out where various applications and/or business functions fit in the Cloud Services Decision Grid—and where they don’t. We recommend that Sahai assess service portfolios, identifying those services that are core to the business versus those that are commodity, and matching that against the corresponding delivery mechanism of “Insourcing versus Outsourcing.” As a first step, it is advisable to plunge into public cloud model and take a cautious approach: initially choose a few least critical applications to host on public cloud as well as migrate server from physical to virtual to observe application portability, performance, security concerns, the next phase of applications to be included and cost analysis.

Second Answer There are many benefits offered by cloud-based services such as increased scalability, flexibility, availability and productivity. For maximum benefit from migration to the cloud, it is essential that organisations develop a cloud strategy which takes into consideration commercial and technical concerns. Based on our experience and knowledge, I recommend a 3-pronged cloud strategy: a) Establish strategic direction—this begins with low risk applications or pilots and draws lessons for the future. This requires assessment of suitable business needs, triggers and timing, considering financial impact and organisational capability, while managing change and reviewing governance b) Implement a cloud solution as a structured project—build a business model, assess the risks, capture functionality, standards, and performance, manageability, security and compliance requirements, while preparing an exit plan. c) Review the implementation by conducting a post-implementation review to: Undertake periodic risk assessments Confirm the benefits Capture lessons learned Prioritise any new business changes

the big q

Experiential Evidence is Key to Cloud FIRST ANSWER If Sahai intends to ahead with the journey to the “real cloud”, he should certainly look at a hybrid cloud model. His own personal conviction of the concept notwithstanding, there has to be solid financial and experiential evidence that the private cloud already implemented has resulted in specific maintenance cost savings, while maintaining the service levels that his multinational customers and offices experience. If there is no such evidence, at least directionally, he has no case. Unless he is in a position that requires drastic cuts, his purpose is best served by evaluating on a case by case, area by area basis as to what the level of comfort is with moving the data and applications out of his environment to the “real cloud”, and what the risks are versus the verifiable cost benefits of taking those systems out. Then, he will need to create a project plan that gradually moves out these applications and data, ensuring at each stage that the benefits are realised and that there are no significant operational or security issues before going on to the next area. When it comes to core applications and data that differentiates his company from others, he will have to tread very carefully. Despite the short or medium term financial advantages he may obtain from moving these to the “real cloud”, the risks from a strategic and business perspective will most certainly outweigh these financial benefits, forcing him to consider keeping these in-house now, and indeed, forever.

Second Answer

Vinod Sivaramakrishnan CIO, Walmart India About me: Experienced business information technology executive with over 16 years experience in all aspects of IT, with crossfunctional knowledge in finance and risk management

Depending on the service provider and the technology, cloud security has evolved to a point where it may not be substantially less secure--for the class of applications which are generally moved to the public cloud--than an internally hosted and managed environment. The key issues here are: Contractual--Questions of liability and exposure, especially given he has multinational offices and customers with differing legislative and privacy requirements, as well as different comfort levels with being placed on the cloud Strategic--Diminishing ability to work in multi-partner environments and being at the mercy of a large single-vendor environment where he may lose control over the future.

Enterprise Server Cloud : $6000 mn by 2014 Private VS Public Cloud Revenue $7,000

Private Public

$6,000 $5,000 $4,000 $3,000 $2,000

S ource: I DC

Enterprise Server Cloud Computing Revenue

Cloud

$1,000

IDC, 2010 (Doc#223118)

$0 2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

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the big q

100% cloud is not for large firms FIRST ANSWER

Dheeraj Sinha Head-Global IT & Supply Chain, Apollo Tyres About me: Aligning IT with business, improving organisational effectiveness, team management and result oriented

Since Vijay Sahai works in a manufacturing organisation with complex inter-dependent applications, granular security, along with extensive network and security roles and profiles, his challenge is how to reduce costs while taking some of the complexities away, and at the same time, enhance performance levels of the IT systems. Certain sets of applications which are completely inward facing and provide backend automation like ERP, SCM, PLM, etc., are much more integrated with business processes and are more difficult to move to the cloud for an established business (at least in the near future). For these complex applications, Vijay can look at IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). For a lot of applications, corporates have a separate Dev/QA and Production environment. If the data interface needed for these are not very exhaustive, he can create a strategy around PaaS and have all newer applications delivered through the PaaS model or SaaS model, provided the Saas model exists. For large enterprises, 100 per cent solutions on the cloud seem a distant dream. There’s still quite some time for corporates to move their “real” IT to the cloud. At least, not yet.

Second Answer It is essential to enlist all future initiatives, with data complexity and dependency on other applications (interface) along with apps criticality defined, as the task becomes a little simpler. He needs to pick up applications and initiatives that are low on data integration, a little less critical and possibly having users outside of the office domain.

Notes NOTEs

More Resources 54

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Virtual Storage Platform anniversary: http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2011/09/happy-birthday-vsp.html How to avoid information overload: http://marksblog.emc.com/2011/09/episode-108-.html

update

open Debate

book For you A platform to air your views on latest developments and issues that impact you

Is DaaS a viable proposition? How?

Swarnali Ghosh, ManagerApplications, Eveready Industries Daas is a viable proposition when there is no internal threat to the data in the organisation. The user does not need to buy a license for the database but just pay for the usage. It is platform independent and can be used in mobile devices. It serves the purpose of dealer management, vendor management and the external sales force data. We use E-fact hosted by TCG and just pay for the usage. Even maintenance cost works out cheaper. The constraint with regard to Daas is that it doesn’t support mission critical applications such as ERP.

Kaushal Shah, Head-IT, Privy Organics Daas is a viable proposition, as the business applications require efficient, secured and faster database to store, secure and for speedy access to data. To manage this, organisations require resources such as hardware infrastructure, software licenses, HR and others such as 24 X 7 power, dedicated location, etc. Database grows from two components, which includes new business applications, and existing business applications. Benefits from Daas include: access from anywhere for 24 X 7 Business Applications, fixed service cost, WAN cost and no other resources cost.

SDPL Narayana, Asst. General Manager - IT Neuland Laboratories Ltd The benefits No software / hardware needs to be installed, thus saving Capex and time. Users can access it from anywhere across the globe Organisations pay for what is used, like paying bills towards consumption of water, electricity, cooking gas etc. No issues of running out of disc space No issues related to renewal / procurement of licences DaaS is best to handle databases which are Less important Easier to standardise In huge volume

The Leader’s Checklist

Title: The Leader’s Checklist Author: Michael Useem Publisher: Wharton Digital Press Pages: 136 Price: ` 747 Reviewed by: Sanjay Gupta

Some of you might remember the 2010 Chilean mining accident in which 33 miners were trapped underground for over two months. Engineer-minister Laurence Golborne, who played a key role in the successful rescue operation, features as one of the exemplary leaders in Useem’s book, which focusses on 15 mission-critical principles for leaders. The book also draws leadership lessons from such heroes as Joseph Pfeifer, the fire chief at the time of the September 11 attacks in New York. Inspiring, insightful reading is at work in The Leader’s Checklist, which first made its appearance as an ebook and is now available in print in an expanded version. Based on the lessons from astonishing stories, solid research, and leadership expert Useem’s years of leadership development work with several organizations in the US and elsewhere, the book is intended to help readers develop the ability to make good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments. Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?

IT NEXT VERDICT

Your views and opinion matter to us. Send us your feedback on stories and the magazine to the Editor at editor@itnext.in

This book will inspire and help professionals that need to take critical decisions during stress. It will also help them become better leaders. Star Value:

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cube chat | Balaranjith Thangakunam

Dare to Dream “To survive in today’s competitive landscape, every new initiative will require IT, and a higher role will be a natural transition” says Balaranjith T, GM-IT, Atul Ltd By manu sha r m a

M My success

mantra

Failure is not the worst thing to happen

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ost of us dream big. In reality, though, dreams remain only dreams. But Balaranjith T not only dreams big, he also ensures he is on the right path to success. Bala (as he is known) dreams of becoming a Chief Strategic Officer (CSO), as IT drives most operations of a company today. Without IT, no new company initiatives can survive in today’s competitive landscape. Hence, the role of a CSO will be a natural transition for me,” he says, and adds, “My career path and achievements indicate that I am on the right path to becoming a CSO shortly.” Bala has over 12 years of experience in the IT field at top-notch companies: 6 years with Infosys, a year with Bearing Point (PWC Consulting), 3.5 with Yahoo! and 2 with Atul Ltd. Post schooling, Bala wanted to take up Automobile Engineering, but with his good

ranking, he got into Computer Science & Engineering. “But after my first year in engineering, I got so hooked on to programming and developing applications that I have never looked back. Today, I enjoy coding and debugging it.” After BE, Bala got into Infosys through campus placement. As a software engineer, he was part of the enterprise software team that grew from 30 employees to 9,000 in just 6 years. In 2006, Bala moved to Bearing Point (PWC consulting) where he was responsible for the development of enterprise software (ERP) for Big 5 companies. Later in 2007, he moved to Yahoo Labs in Bangalore and was responsible for shifting the entire development work from the US to India and also setting up a captive centre from the ground up. “The shifting of the entire development centre to Bangalore resulted

Balaranjith Thangakunam | cube chat

Fact File Nam e Bal aranj i th Thangakunam C urrent D es ignatio n General Manager – IT C urrent Role Head – IT Appli catio n s Expertis e ERP, Open Source, Databas es , BI, Mobil e Applications

“I got hooked on to programming and developing applications, that I have never looked back” in huge savings, of almost 1/10th of the operating expenditure, for the company.” Bala has been responsible for automating all manual processes into Oracle ERP since 2007 at Atul Ltd. “I have also been developing software in-house such as employees’ expenditure and quotation for purchasing,” he adds. Further, “My current CIO, Rajat Sharma, has given me enough freedom to think out of the box and come up with ideas for process automation.” In fact, fast changing technologies are always a challenge. But gaining domain knowledge and learning business processes is the only way out, he says. Bala feels cloud and mobile applications are two technologies that will drive the IT industry. “The world

is moving out of desktop computing to tablets and mobiles. The whole gamut of applications which were developed for desktop usage needs to be made compatible with mobiles/tablets,” he says. Bala admires Steve Jobs for his passion for work and his visionary abilities. “He has changed the way we work by bringing out products like Ipod, Iphone and Ipad. Another person I admire is my own brother, Balamurugesh. I admire him for his honesty, integrity and hard work. He has shown me that hard work is always rewarded in the long run.” When free, Bala makes it a point to hit the ground along with his IT team to play cricket or football, between 6-7pm. “This improves the bond between members in the IT team, and helps rejuvenate ourselves.”

Work Experi ence 12 years Favourite Quote “All hard work res ults i n profit, b ut m ere talk leads only to povert y.” Favourite Destination L aks hadw eep, Indi a Favourite Book The Bi ble Favourite Gadget My Android Phone

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update

off the shelf

A sneak preview of enterprise products, solutions and services

Fujifilm FinePix S4500 Hits Indian Market The company has made quite a name for itself with its X-series of cameras

Kobian introduces Mercury mTab7 tablet. Runs on Android 4.0 ICS Kobian has introduced a new Androidbased budget tablet in India, called Mercury mTab 7. Priced at Rs 6,499, the Mercury mTab7 runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and is powered by a 1.2 GHz Cortex A8 processor. The Mercury mTab7 also features a 7-inch capacitive display, 0.3MP front facing camera, 512MB DDRM, 4GB internal storage and a microSD card slot that supports storage up to 32GB. For connectivity, the device supports 3G via dongle, HDMI, USB, and Wi-Fi.

key SPECIFICATIONS CAMERA | The Fujifilm FinePix S4500 * 24-720mm focal length is a super-zoom camera with an * Decent image quality impressive 24-720mm focal length, * Runs on AA batteries but features a slow lens (f/3.1-5.9). * Has a CCD sensor The camera fits well, handles well, but somehow, ends up feeling a little plastic. The Fujifilm FinePix S4500 is built of plastic with a rubberised layer on the back. The rubber grip is nice, but the plastic nature of the camera is quite obvious. The buttons on the back are packed pretty tight, which, in our opinion, is nice, as you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to hunt on either side of the camera for buttons. The camera does feel a little plastic, but it does not feel flimsy. While the camera doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come with a lens cap, the Fujifil m$4500 is almost exact in specs with the S4200, save for the lens. The focal length of the lens on the S4500 is 24-720mm whereas the S4200 only does 24-576mm. It houses a 14 megapixel CCD sensor measuring a standard 1/2.3 inches in size. Now, with the advancement in imaging technology in the last decade, CCD sensors are pretty old. The Fujifilm FinePix S4500 is priced at Rs. 17,999, making it a part of medium-tier point-and-shoot cameras. For such a price point, the camera performance leaves a lot to be desired.

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The price-sensitive Indian market always looks for low cost, feature-rich tablets and here is one in the sub 7k range. mTAB7 brings the joy of tablet at a low cost . The ultra-thin and light-weight features allow one to carry mTAB7 easily anywhere and its sleek features allow it to sit comfortably in your pocket.

PRODUCT FEATURES * Android 4.0.4 ICS OS * 1.2 GHz Cortex A8 Processor * Dual camera * 4,000 mAh battery

update

Sony Drops 84-inch, 4K TV on Indian Consumers

Hitachi Develops Glass Storage Chip

PRODUCT FEATURES * X-Reality engine * Supports 3D * 2 tower speakers * S-Force Front Surround

LCD tV| The X9000 is the first 4K TV to hit the

Indian market and everything about it is impressive. Another national first from Sony is the Bravia KD-X9000 TV. If you wonder what’s so special about this new Bravia--well, for starters, it measures a whopping 84-inches diagonally and if that isn’t enough, it is also India’s first TV to support 4K resolution. The X9000 is the first 4K TV to hit the Indian market and everything about it is just as impressive. The TV has a resoluiton of 3,840x2,160 pixels, which is around 4 times the resolution of the best HDTVs available in themarket. The X9000 comes with Sony’s proprietary X-Reality engine for the best viewing experience and it can also upscale HD content for clear viewing. The device supports 3D and has the passive 3D view which means that users would have to wear thinner and lighter glasses. In fact, these glasses are also light on the pocket of users. A TV this impressive also requires good sound, and for that, Sony has incorporated two tower speakers that mount right next to the TV itself. Each tower features a total of 10 drivers, including tweeters, woofers and sub-woofers. The price on this gorgeous slab of a visual treat is a staggering Rs 16,99,900 and can be pre-ordered right now.

Zebronics launches

ZebMate PMP in India

PORTABLE MEDIA PLAYER | Zebronics has launched

a new PMP in India–the ZebMate Cinema 3.0+. The USP of this PMP is its ability to play 720p HD video, its 3-inch touchscreen, as well as TV-out functionality. Its TFT display actually has a resolution of 400x240 pixels. Zebronics has priced it at Rs. 2,900, with a one-year warranty. The ZebMate Cinema 3.0+ comes with 4GB of built-in storage, which can be expanded via microSD up to 16GB. Its lithium polymer battery is rated to deliver up to 9.5 hours of audio playback, and 2.5 hours of video playback. It comes with a 3.5 mm audio jack. The ZebMate Cinema 3.0+ is apparently also a diminutive offering, weighing in at 52 grams,

Hitachi has developed quartz glass sheets as a medium of storing information. According to Hitachi, these little glass squares are fire and water proof, can withstand chemical exposure, and are impervious to radio waves. Data storage, though easily accessible, thanks to cheap DVDs and hard drives, has always left some reason for stress by the user. But what’s there to worry about? Drive failure, of course. Or scratched disks. Storage media these days have a life of a few decades, but Hitachi claims that its quartz glass storage system could survive for a few hundred million years, at least.

produCT FEATURES * Fire and water proof * Stores inside the quartz sheet * Life of 100 million years

PRODUCT FEATURES * Supports Audio: MP3, WMA, OGG, * Video: MPEG-1/2, MPEG4 XVID, etc * 4GB of built-in storage * Resolution of 400x240 pixels

and measuring 11 mm in width. The most interesting fact is that ZebMate support formats support both audio and video systems. For instance, in audio the product supports MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, APE, AAC, AC3, ATRA, DTS. In video, it supports MPEG-1/2, MPEG4 XVID, DIVX, H263/264, WMV9/VC-1, RMVB and so on.

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my log

Sanjay Gupta Consulting Editor—IT Next (Online)

For a Wow Experience il

User Experience Design is a much used and abused term in today's changing world

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environment. In fact, while UED has much to do with user-centricity, a UED effort must often find the sweet spot. In the context of the Web, great user experience design does not mean a good-looking web page (though it certainly helps). According to some experts, there are three ways to look at these elements: rational, emotional and meaningful. The rational element pertains to a wellarchitected site that invites users to take specific actions, those that not only match their own needs but also correspond to what the site sets out to achieve in the first place. Emotional means the site appeals to the language, cultural and behavioural aspects of the target audience. And the meaningful element comes into play when a website helps the aspirations of a particular group of people: the youth, for instance, who would find a site more useful if it gives career guidance and choices rather than just listing courses or colleges. In short, UED makes the customer utter that single beautiful word marketers want to hear: Wow! With the world getting more and more connected and consumers becoming more aware than ever, enterprises will find it hard to ignore UED as a key element of their business strategy. And given technology’s growing role in delivering “experiences,” the importance of IT leaders in advancing the UED agenda can hardly be over-emphasised.

3 Essential

Reads

DouGlas HuGHes | INTERVIEW

MAKe A FUSiOn WitH CLOUD Douglas Hughes, VP, applications Product Development, oracle, jaPaC, is upbeat about oracle’s cloud vision announced recently at oracle open World. in conversation with n Geetha, Hughes brings to light the initiatives taken around its Fusion middleware to make it cloud enabled Can you elaborate on Oracle’s application road map for the future? Oracle is invading its cloud mission enabling all its enterprise technologies and business applications through the internet. As a process, the company has announced various platform services, application services, social platform and mobility services. Besides, the product development team has ensured building these on smart platforms such as SQL, Java, HTML5, SoA, while creating user interfaces with strong web applications. We are also assuring our customers and partners that we have created a robust support system through self-service models and also created support communities to support them. Which cloud service model is gaining momentum from the application outsourcing perspective? It is interesting to note that SaaS

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Douglas Hughes, VPApplications, Oracle on Fusion's future Pg 32 oraCle oPenWorlD | INSIGHT

T Customer

Innovation through Cloud 26

Oracle’s seven-year painstaking effort to rewrite all its applications under the Fusion suite is cloud ready

im aG i n G BY sH iG il n

On the face of it, the term User Experience Design (UED) sounds quite selfexplanatory. But there are key differences in how even those in the UX industry (UX is short for User eXperience) interpret or implement what UED involves. The term “user experience” is often attributed to the cognitive psychologist Donald Norman, who used the related “user-centred design” in his 1988 book The Psychology of Everyday Things. Ever since, the idea of designing an entire “experience” around the user or the consumer has evolved into a whole big discipline. Not that people didn't care about it before, but identifying it by name and according it the full status of a domain of study has helped companies in obtaining maximum benefit out of their UED efforts. Some people think that UED is the same as user interface design (UID). Others think UED to be a one-time activity that can be checked off like a line item in a process. And there are those who focus everything in a project on the user alone-forgetting the very organisation. In reality, “user experience” is a much broader term that encompasses how a product or service is designed, how it is delivered, how it is repaired and how the user relates to it in any other way over its entire life cycle. UED involves the whole organisation to make its output “experienced” by the target customer in an iterative, dynamic

“Our idea is to provide choice and flexibility to customers to choose the right option, be it on-premise, cloud, hybrid model and any other” Larry ellison, Ceo, oracle Corp

software solutions which are cloudenabled, titled engineered systems.

entire suite of applications and made them cloud ready; these include HCM, accounting, finance, CRM and others.

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CEO Larry Ellison, & Mark Hurd, President, Oracle Corp, talk about cloud innovations Pg 26 CUBE CHAT | BalaranjitH tHanGaKunam

BalaranjitH tHanGaKunam | CUBE CHAT

Dare to Dream

FACT FIL E na me Ba l a r a nj i t H t H a nGa K una m Cur r e nt D es i Gnat i on Ge ne r a l ma naGe r – i t Cur r e nt r ole H e a D – i t a PPli Cat i ons eX Pe rt i s e e r P, oPe n s our Ce , Data Bas es , B i , moB i le a PPli Cat i ons

“To survive in today’s competitive landscape, every new initiative will require IT, and a higher role will be a natural transition” says balaranjith T, Gm-IT, Atul Ltd

“I got hooked on to programming and developing applications, that I have never looked back”

BY MANU SHARMA

MY SUCCESS

MANTRA

Failure is not the worst thing to happen

itnext | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 2

in huge savings, of almost 1/10th of the operating expenditure, for the company.” Bala has been responsible for automating all manual processes into Oracle ERP since 2007 at Atul Ltd. “I have also been developing software in-house such as employees’ expenditure and quotation for purchasing,” he adds. Further, “My current CIO, Rajat Sharma, has given me enough freedom to think out of the box and come up with ideas for process automation.” In fact, fast changing technologies are always a challenge. But gaining domain knowledge and learning business processes is the only way out, he says. Bala feels cloud and mobile applications are two technologies that will drive the IT industry. “The world

Wor K eX Pe r i e nCe 12 Years FaVour i t e Quot e “a ll H a r D Wor K r es ults i n Pr oF i t, B ut me r e ta lK le a D s onlY to PoV e rt Y.” FaVourite Destination l a Ks H a DWe e P, i nD i a FaVour i t e B ooK t H e B i B le FaVour i t e Ga D Ge t mY a nD r oi D PH one

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Balaranjith T, GM-IT, Atul Ltd., believes that every business initiative needs IT Pg 56

Lenovo® recommends Windows 8.

20 YEARS OF DOING WHAT’S NEVER BEEN DONE 1992 WORLD’S FIRST LAPTOP WITH TFT DISPLAY 1993 THINKPAD TRAVELS TO OUTER SPACE ON A NASA MISSION 1994 WORLD’S FIRST LAPTOP WITH AN INTEGRATED CD-ROM 1995 BUTTERFLY KEYBOARD – SHOWCASED IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK 1998 THINKLIGHT™, THE KEYBOARD LIGHT INTRODUCED 2003 FIRST LAPTOP WITH AIRBAG PROTECTION FOR HARD DISK DRIVE 2006 FIRST LAPTOP WITH PROTECTIVE ROLL CAGE 2009 THINKPAD® W700ds, WORLD’S FIRST DUAL-SCREEN MOBILE WORKSTATION 2009 THINKPAD LAPTOPS ARE USED IN THE VORTEX 2 PROJECT TO STUDY TORNADOES 2011 WORLD’S FIRST BUSINESS-READY 10.1" TABLET 2012 THINKPAD X1 CARBON, WORLD’S LIGHTEST 14" ULTRABOOK™

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*Lenovo ThinkPad is ranked the no.1 laptop from IDC’s Asia/Pacific Quarterly PC Tracker, Q1 2012, for unit shipments from Q2 to Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 period to Large Enterprises, education and government sector combined. © Lenovo 2012. All rights reserved. Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, For Those Who Do, ThinkPad and ThinkLight are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo. Microso and Windows are registered trademarks of Microso ft Corporation. Ultrabook is the registered trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.