Volume 2 | Issue 6
Luminous - Digitization Journey on the Cloud Chander Khanduja CIO Luminous Power Technologies
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Luminous - Digitization Journey on the Cloud
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Clouds hit by El-Nino, future of Clouds in Enterprise Infrastructure
Luminous – Digitization Journey on the Cloud Founded in 1988, Luminous Power Technologies (P) Limited is a leading company with a differentiated portfolio of solutions for packaged power, diversified generation, electrical control, and safety & energy optimization. With over 5,000 employees across 8 manufacturing units and 28 sales offices, Luminous enjoys a dominant market in India as well as overseas. Chander Khanduja joined Luminous in 2013 as CIO to lay down the digitalization road map for the organization and to formulate an IT strategy that complemented the fast pace of innovation and growth. He is a dynamic IT leader with more than 20 years of experience in various industries and diverse technologies. Here, he discusses how Luminous leveraged the Cloud to drive innovation.
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Luminous – Digitization Journey on the Cloud
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Clouds hit by El-Nino, future of Clouds in Enterprise Infrastructure
“IT is a key strategic function in any progressive organization,” begins Khanduja, “and all applications are built to accelerate growth and efficiency.” Khanduja’s 35-member team has implemented almost 25 projects in the last two years including major SAP, CRM, SAP, GRC, Virtualization, SAP DR, Ariba, Mobility, SRM, Portals, and Cloud applications. Primarily divided into three parts – infrastructure, enterprise applications, and digital applications, the IT support and development is mostly in-house and performs two main functions – Operations and Projects. The Operations team takes care of day-to-day IT requirements and the Projects team works on ideating new technologies to increase the operational efficiency of Luminous. “During our digitization month, we developed one application every week. I am yet to hear of any company who has done that,” proclaims Khanduja, about his award-winning IT team. Chander Khanduja 03
Easy Choices
Temporary Troubles
“We were looking for a technology which was easily available, scalable, and broad parameters that we considered when contemplating the Cloud. “Office 365 perfectly fits these parameters. It was easily available, one could choose to either expand or contract our operations to scale in the future, and finally Microsoft’s long reputation and expertise in the area eased all doubts about Cloud being a sustainable solution.”
However, like any adoption program, Khanduja’s team had a few obstacles that needed to be addressed.
In terms of technical aspects, many other factors were considered too. IT Security is the key for any organization, along with a simple user interface, and the ability to work on a hybrid model (partially on-site, partially on the Cloud). Upon evaluation, we found Office 365 a sound solution and were very satisfied with its capabilities. “Apart from this, we also had existing licenses for many Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Office 365 offered us a familiar solution, making change in management all the more easy.”
Easy Implementation Like all other projects, Luminous followed their homegrown, 5-point protocol for the successful rollout of Office 365. This in-house process has served Luminous well, when any new project is implemented it follows: •
Prep and Scoping - Initial research on a solution
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Planning - How the said solution can be implemented
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Migration and Transition - Transfer of on-premise data to the Cloud
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Communication - Internal communication about the new system in place
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Adoption - Final rollout of application and change management
This only went to show how easily Office 365 can be integrated with the organization, justifying Luminous’ choice completely.
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Firstly, data migration was an issue. Transferring large inboxes was difficult
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Secondly, the existing Internet bandwidth wasn’t enough to operate on the Cloud
A planned adoption protocol saw the hiccups through. Data migration was done over the weekends so as to not hamper company operations and an improved Internet connection was brought in with extended bandwidth to accommodate Cloud operations. Post addressing these challenges, the entire Cloud operation has been smooth sailing. “We’re very satisfied,” says Khanduja, “the entire process was very fruitful for us as an organization. We are confident about the future.”
Little Lessons “Look at your journey and plan your milestones” says Khanduja. Although the entire adoption process was very smooth, Khanduja has a few suggestions for other organizations who might be considering the Cloud. •
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Firstly, he says, it is important to not just look at the technology – do not have a micro view. There are many external factors that one must consider. The Cloud is whole different way to look at things. Secondly, there is no need to try everything that the Cloud has on offer at the same time. Khanduja strategically adopted applications one by one, starting from mail, then OneDrive, followed by Azure and now finally Yammer.
Real Returns Khanduja stresses that at times there are no immediate tangible returns in moving to the Cloud. “Right now, it is a very essential tool to the organization,”
says Khanduja. “If I had to talk about ROI, I’d say that we are now able to work efficiently. Our operations are scalable we can even roll it back when needed. The flexibility that the Cloud offers us greatly contributes to our business dynamics.” The success of Office 365 lies in the fact that more solutions and features are being explored and implemented at Luminous every day.
Clouds hit by El-Nino, future of Clouds in Enterprise Infrastructure By Arun Gupta, Managing Partner & Director, Ingenium Advisory
Summing It Up “We are looking at Cloud in a very big way because it gives us a sense of comfort. It does not block your investment,” says Khanduja. A Capex kind of investment would not allow the same pleasures. One can’t tell if the investment will be valid in the future. “Opting for the Cloud meant my decision will hold good for the future and I can now focus on other opportunities that the Cloud has to offer,” he reiterates. Khanduja now works on innovating new capabilities with the Cloud. Apart from mobility, Khanduja is also evaluating a Disaster Recovery system on Azure. Developing an application on the Cloud makes it easier to roll it out to the business, thereby reducing Application Development time considerably. “As CIO, apart from looking at existing technology to sustain business, I now spend a lot of time to understand other growth drivers which can be initiated with technology,” he concludes.
In the not too distant future, Cloud computing will be celebrating its 10th birthday. Yes, it has been that long since the term was coined and people started talking about Clouds of all kinds. The subject of many barbs, humor, analysis, predictions, conferences, and angst, the Cloud has had its share of the good and the bad with accompanying confusion for those who decide, create, deploy, or manage it. Every vendor created their interpretation of what they wanted to offer to their customers and the ASPs (Application Service Provider) rebranded themselves, which added to the chaos. It was not just about public or private, someone decided that why not create a heterogeneous Cloud and called it Hybrid. Not to be left behind, fine tuning of the definition began with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Storage as a Service (SaaS) – confusing proponents of Software as a Service. These were followed by Community Cloud and Distributed Cloud, which created new business opportunities and models. The list of touted benefits from Cloud was long: agility, cost saving, multi-tenancy, reliability, scalability, elasticity, availability, manageability, and finally security. Models mushroomed based on assumptions that
did not hold water. CIOs and infra heads challenged them, and experimented and explored in bits and pieces. Anecdotal references of ‘swipe your card and solve problems with on-demand extension to enterprise compute/storage’ made many sit up and take notice. How did they pump TB of data on constrained corporate internet pipes? Pay-as-you-go the new mantra; pay for what you use – not peak capacity, differential rates, and variable metering (happy hours?). Orchestration layers across different Clouds and combinations made headlines invoking the CXO’s desire to challenge their IT setups. Every IT major, data center provider, telecom operator, and pure play company vied for attention with me-too offerings. Cheaper, faster, better innovators and startups challenged the bigger players, only to be acquired or die in the muscle match. The dust is only now beginning to settle. In the decade that went by – with acceptance of different variations and stretched definitions – the focus shifted to real life business use cases. SFA, communication and collaboration, on-demand infra for startups, and HR solutions have become mainstream. Purpose-task oriented apps are gaining ground, while every legacy solution aspires to offer itself on the Cloud. Mobility solutions leveraged the Cloud, offering new capability. Flexible models of deployment, scale up on demand (conditions apply for scale down). Today a greenfield enterprise IT roadmap can be created without ownership of software licenses or data
center hardware provisioning. Almost everything can be bought on the Cloud, from office automation, to ERP, CRM, SCM, WMS, BI, Helpdesk, SDIM – the list is comprehensive and deep. The challenge arises in two parts, integrating each of the Cloud solutions with the other seamlessly (as compared to monolithic solutions from vendors) and orchestrating all the pieces on the second part in managing multiple relationships and licensing terms. The question that keeps popping up is the transition of current enterprise IT to the Cloud; when will it happen and what prevents mass adoption? On the other hand the counter question is, is it desirable or adds value or removes complexity? And why does it have to be either or? I would propagate coexistence a fair strategy in comparison to extreme and absolute ends of the spectrum. Enterprise data centers will lose their relevance and disappear in the coming years pronounced some analysts – familiar to past doomsday predictions. Clouds are ubiquitous and all-pervasive today; innovative solutions and business models are emerging by virtue of mass penetration of mobile access devices. The future shall be strongly influenced by these disruptive trends of today. With an open mind and agility, enterprises and CIOs need to experiment and weave these into strategic business and IT initiatives lest they be caught napping. The future is coming sooner than we thought-be ready to face it, embrace it, challenge it, love it, hate it; but ignore it at your own risk!
This article originally appeared in Arun Gupta’s blog at CIO Inverted and is reproduced with permission from the author. 04
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Cloud Accelerator Program Industries all over the world have recognized cloud computing as the way forward and are turning to it for their communication and collaboration requirements. Microsoft is working on an innovative program to help you better reap the benefits of cloud computing and incorporate it seamlessly into your IT strategy. Microsoft has three main tracks to help you begin your cloud journey: Track 1
Strategy - This is the beginning of the process which focuses on senior decision makers of the organization. Microsoft will present a special brief to help them understand the benefits and aspects of working on the cloud. Track 2
Planning - Once the leadership is convinced of fully exploring cloud capabilities, the next step is to plan a migration process. Whether a quick cloud assessment of your company needs or a detailed adoption blueprint, Microsoft will help you chart your cloud implementation process. Track 3
Tapan Garg Founder and CEO CIO Association of India P1, Gem Wellington Old Airport Road Bangalore 560017 E: tapan@cioindia.org W: www.cioindia.org
Getting Started - Microsoft’s advanced migration service will ensure that your organization’s infrastructure and application move seamlessly to the cloud. Now your organization is ready to go! To know more, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/india/datacenter/cloudaccelerator-program.aspx
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