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CTO FORUM
Technology for Growth and Governance
November | 07 | 2010 | 50 Volume 06 | Issue 06
ANIMAL INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY | 4 CAREER ENDING MISTAKES | ALL THE GOOD THINGS
Just like an artery clog can cause a heart attack, an organisation without free flowing information can collapse. Ways to retain and make knowledge flow uninterrupted in the organisation | PAGE 30 Volume 06 | Issue 06
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
A 9.9 Media Publication
NEXT HORIZONS
Beware of the
Reining the
PAGE 16
PAGE 38
Private Cloud Social Horses
I BELIEVE
DELIVERING PROMISE PAGE 04
EDITORIAL RAHUL NEEL MANI | rahul.mani@9dot9.in
We ‘Can’ Do
What Americans can’t!
F
areed Zakaria, the noted author and Editor at Large of Time Magazine, wrote in a recent column: “When I travel from America to India these days, it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, economy is on the move. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the mood is sour. Americans are glum, dispirited
EDITOR'S PICK 16
and angry. The middle class, in particular, feels under assault. Perhaps most troubling, Americans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects... The can-do country is convinced that it can't.” What Americans can’t we can! I am glad an Indian, who has spent a large part of his life in the U.S., mentions it without mincing his words. The core reason behind India’s success is its vast pool of knowledge and the creators of
Beware of the Private Cloud
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services.
that knowledge. That is pretty much the ‘secret sauce’ (if you want to call it that) of our success. Somehow Indians have been firm believers in sharing knowledge unlike the westerners who mostly believing in hording and protecting their knowledge assets. This Indian tradition is ancient and is now part of our DNA. To keep the momentum going, you, as CIOs, have the great responsibility of harnessing the potential of knowledge sharing for generating wealth for your companies, which ultimately contributes to the success of the nation. For this, it is essential to have corporate knowledge (don’t read information) on a sharable network so that it can be accessed conveniently by the employees using any device. You should be able to create an infrastructure
that not only helps employees in accessing that knowledge, but also helps them properly use it. That’s how knowledge evolves, stays relevant, and becomes more valuable. The question is how do you create such a network? “Unlocking Knowledge’ – this issue’s cover feature will give you the right answers. The feature will not only help you in creating an IT-enabled network for knowledge sharing but will also reveal how important the role of CIO is to execute it. We hope you had a happy and prosperous Diwali – CTO Forum, your trusted knowledge partner.
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
CTO FORUM 07 NOVEMBER 2010
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NOVEMBER 10 THECTOFORUM.COM
COV E R D E S I G E N BY B I N E S H S R E E D H AR A N
CONTE NTS
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30 | Unlocking Knowledge
COLUMNS
04 | I BELIEVE: DELIVERING PROMISE Suneel Aradhye CIO - Steel and Minerals, Essar Steel Ltd. on aligning the IT enterprise with business.
Not only your systems, but your employees are also filled with knowledge. With social media platforms on the rise it is important that you channelise this knowledge properly in the enterprise.
52 | HIDDEN TANGENT: ANIMAL INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY Ways in which nature affects devices in our lives. BY GEETAJ CHANNANA
Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling
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COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D- 107, MIDC, TTC Industrial Area, Nerul, Navi Mumbai- 400706
CTO FORUM 07 NOVEMBER 2010
FEATURES
42 | TECH FOR GOVERNANCE: FOUR CAREER ENDING MISTAKES while planning to move your data centre. BY IRWIN TEODORO
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur EDITORIAL Editor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani Executive Editor: Geetaj Channana Resident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra Senior Editor: Harichandan Arakali Principal Correspondent: Vinita Gupta Correspondent: Nipun Sahrawat DESIGN Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK Sr. Visualisers: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR, Anil T Suresh Kumar, Joffy Jose & Anoop Verma Designer: Sristi Maurya Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
16 A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
16 | Beware of the Private Cloud
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services.
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REGULARS
01 | EDITORIAL 08 | ENTERPRISE ROUND-UP advertisers’ index
38 | NEXT HORIZONS: REINING THE SOCIAL HORSES
49 | HIDE TIME: JS PURI, CIO, FORTIS HEALTHCARE is a
Keeping track of employees' social media usage
man of many passions, be it his personal life or his profession.
EMC APC SAS SUN POLYCOM SYBASE CHECKPOINT ACE DATA IBM CANON
IFC 5, 11 7 13 14-15 19 21 51 IBC BC
ADVISORY PANEL Ajay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limited Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej Industries Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Vijay Mehra, Former Global CIO, Essar Group SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) Product Manager: Rachit Kinger (9818860797) GM South: Vinodh K (09740714817) Senior Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar Singh GM North: Lalit Arun (09582262959) GM West: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755) Kolkata: Jayanta Bhattacharya (09331829284) PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh. Published at Bunglow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane, Nerul Navi Mumbai - 400706. Printed at Silver Point Press Pvt Ltd, D-107, TTC Industrial Area, Nerul, Navi Mumbai 400706. Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in
This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.
BY SUSAN NUNZIATA
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
CTO FORUM 07 SEPTEMBER 2010
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THE AUTHOR HAS has over 25 years diverse experience in finance domain and IT management in various industries. He is also a Member of Steel Business Management Committee.
PHOTO BY JITEN GANDHI
I BELIEVE
BY SUNEEL ARADHYE CIO - Steel and Minerals, Essar Steel Ltd.
Delivering Promise
Aligning the IT enterprise with business CIOs should leverage their understanding of organisational capabilities and culture to transform the IT enterprise for better alignment with business. Clearly define organisational roles and responsibilities to meet the strategic objectives of the business, and articulate what this means to the role of every individual in the IT enterprise. Markets today are extensively integrated and interdependent, and businesses in the emerging markets have sensed this cross-border opportunity. They have also started tapping talent across industry sectors. Simul-
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CTO FORUM 07 NOVEMBER 2010
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
CURRENT CHALLENGE BUSINESSES ARE TRANSFORMING THEMSELVES, THIS CREATES CHALLENGES THAT INCLUDE DRASTIC CHANGES IN ROLES/EXPECTATIONS AND A PERCEIVED LOSS OF IDENTITY.
taneously, the rapidly evolving user communities — comprising young, mobile and globally connected people — are more savvy putting more demands on IT organisation while appreciating the security concerns. Already businesses with lean staffing are willing to invest more in technology rather than people. Sporadic cases of CIOs playing strategic roles in shaping future business are more often than not exceptional cases of individual brilliance than moves that happened by design. For the information technology function to become truly strategic within businesses, the whole IT organisation needs to transform itself by building the right organisational structure, a business-like culture, and a strong, capable leadership pipeline. IT must demonstrate business values by putting innovation at its core. At ESSAR Steel, when we were transforming the IT enterprise, challenges included drastic changes in roles/expectations and a perceived loss of identity. It was easy to keep the team together by using our organisational capabilities and ‘culture essentials’ to explain why the change was important and how it would help them add value to business. Businesses today clearly expects CIOs to see things their way: Move to SLA-based Shared Services models Obtain the right enterprise architecture with the right mix of technologies/solutions Get the best business value out of the IT spend In summary, focusing on building the right organisational capabilities and ‘living culture essentials’ is very important. At ESSAR, we focus on Project Management, Operational Excellence, Nurturing, Negotiation, Entrepreneurial Orientation and Customer Focus to ‘Deliver the Promise’ to the business.
LETTERS Business Intelligence SPECIAL
Business Intelligence SPECIAL
PRODUCTIVE TOOL
One can easily lose focus at this stage. A lot of due diligence is required to get past this stage of BI journey. As an organisation, one may be used to a plethora of applications from multiple vendors. The lure of a steal may entice a CIO to go with one of his or % her existing vendors for the BI stack as well – an approach that might prove Faustian. % “Relying on the vendors to conduct their interpretation of due diligence and discov% ery could add a level of uncertainty and disconnect that may result in a reporting tool that does not meet expectations,” says Alec Smith, Vice President Projects, at U.S.based SWK Technologies Inc. On the one hand, if it is important to ascerSingle view of the customer across all tain what BI tools to use, it is equally important business lines to know what purpose those tools will serve. Consolidated financial and risk view of data One of the biggest issues that a CIO might across all product lines face is the lack an internal vision. Don’t fall for Both of the above short-term gains. Communication between all important departments such as sales, marketing, production and supply chain to create a 'demand document' is crucial to ensuring that the tools deployed will remain effective. It might seem contradictory, but it isn't: WHY BI? relying on 'human' wisdom, and on the Most businesses, by design, are destined to knowledge and wisdom of many, holds the move forward, not backwards. MIS reports, key. The key here is information. Technolwhich mostly provide information about Technolo ogy is merely a means to an end. Mahesh the past and churn out based on past gydata for Gro Manchi, CIO at Mahindra Resorts and incidents, cannot drive a forward looking wth and Holidays suggest that a CIO can just be organisation. Instead, it can lead to massive Governa nce the catalyst of a BI implementation. “A errors through incorrect assumptions. lot depends on the business folks on how BI as a tool is meant to not only elimimuch they're able to see what the CIO sees. nate the human imperfection from intel% % In many organisations the business execuligent decision making but also assist busiOctobto SIoperational tives nesses to look in to the future. It empowers NESS levels) are reluctant BU(at er | 21 | 2010 Volum INimplementations | 50 back these kinds of which e 06 | businesses to take decisions based on % T EL Issue 05 IMPwhole INTELLIGENCE LIG finally defeats the he says. evidences and not inept assumptions. This LEM purpose,” ESS SIN FRA E EN with Some CIOs also aren’t well very characteristic of the BI tool helps in BU ME Nversed T CE BI is E | 26 business, they understand cleansing the entire enterprise decision PAG Wtechnology. AG SINGissue justPlike O TorIOCRM. aU business making process. It leaves no room for perE an RK N | 3 ERP TM 8 and LIGEN a lot of ERP, CRM BI projects sonal biases, enthusiasm and inputs and N A| 30 ELreason TThe A C N E I % E are not led with business fail is because they helps in driving you into activities that ultiAS PAG ELLIGENCE S INT focus. If the goals of a BI project are well mately support your business productivity Bnor I VE ES PA N N I D G S defined, the implementation is boundA fail, OR and profitability goals. E | 32 Risk &UCompliance Customer B RECto R BUreduces E intelligence says Israel Ptashnik, a business technology BI, unlike plain vanilla reporting, SIN PAGE K AD Financial and | ES (including cross strategy consultant and coach at BusinessON the decision risk and empowers you to you S I profitability reporting sell, up sell 18 PA N GE Technology Strategy, RMAIsrael. streamline the manufacturing, sales, operaFO TIO |4 Operational Reporting recommendations) ANS tional, marketing and many other many TR THROUGH BUSIN N LI GE ESS activities. In all, it is meant to help produce WHICH IS LBEST? PA INTE LIGENCE NCSOURCE: the most valuable insights from the leastG BI can become very confusing at times. GenE CTOF BI SURVEY 2010 PAGE | 24 amount of resources. erally, when an organisation realizes that NIC H it
Business Intelligence
Which would be the primary area in which you feel a BI solution would give the maximum return on investment? 5
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Join close to 500 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn group for latest news and hot enterprise technology discussions. Share your thoughts, participate in discussions and win prizes for the most valuable contribution. You can join The CTOForum group at:
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helping a few vendors maintain healthy market shares and consistent growth. Today consumers have got variety, and they are also certainly more aware of their privileges. Businesses need more than MIS reports to analyse markets. To enable intelligent decision making and bringing actionable insights out from the existing data warehouses or ERP data, businesses require tools that could help in looking into the future.
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All Real
Business Intelligence has come out of the hype cycle. It is now a realistic technology – tested, tried and ready for mass deployment. Are you still thinking? By Rahul Neel Mani Unlike ERP, which swamped the enterprises in last one decade, BI is still the choice of a select few – mostly those who either have massive customer data or those who are in a fiercely competitive environment. But the scenario is changing slowly. A decade (or so) ago, simple MIS (management information system) reports were enough to do business and inventory forecasts. Perhaps customers didn’t have many options to choose from either,
The biggest benefits of consolidating data from systems:
CTO
No Hype f you follow the Hype Cycle of technology analyst firm Gartner, you will find a big change this year. Business Intelligence, which was on the top of the charts for last few years, lost its position. This could only indicate one thing: While its adoption rate of 20-25 percent by itself doesn't reflect this, the technology seems to have found many homes. In other words, there is yet to be a massive tilt towards deploying BI tools, but there certainly is an increasing number of takers.
WHAT TOOLS FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
Supported by a software stack that provides insight into business and its operating environment, Business Intelligence (henceforth BI) is one of the most productive tools for progressive, modern enterprises. Most of us, for a long time, weren’t able to differentiate between standard reporting tools and BI. Standard reporting is a good tool to know the historical data that shows what has happened in the past. It won’t tell you why something happened, or whether it can be prevented or improved upon in the future. CIOs and other specialists who have either implemented or are preparing a BI roadmap need to ask and answer the following five questions: Why does my organisation need BI? What tools does my organisation need and what S P Ipurpose will they solve? N E How do I select the most appropriate BI tools? How do I implement BI in my organisation? How do I ensure BI TCO?
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BI has come out of the hype cycle. It is now a realistic
technology – tested, tried and ready for mass deployment. ARE YOU STILL THINKING? |
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ATTRIBUTES OF A GOOD CTO
CTO acts as a bridge between business needs and how technology can be used best to apply right levers to either increase business avenues for example on product innovation side or increase productivity internally to service our customers better. He should have good understanding of management vision and should be be able to think boundry less in terms of application of technology trends. CTO or a CIO ( both have distinct job sphere in today's context ) is instrumental in making a strategy operational.
http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450
Some of the hot discussions on the group are: What are / shuld be the attributes of a good CTO ? What are the prerequisites for a CTO role ? CTO should have the ability to translate business goals into technology solutions and manage the day to day running of IT technology. CTO should be a very good communicator and should be able to explain technology to non-technical users.
—Boman Nakra CIO, Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank Positioning the CIO as a Powerful Business Partner The IT environment of today is simply too complex to rely on outmoded ways to keep the organization functioning and thriving flawlessly. A CIO must be a true business partner, someone who can not only drive out costs from day-to-day operations, but strategically manage IT to enhance revenue and profits.
—Ashfaque Ahmed GM, IT, R & R Group
CTO FORUM 07 NOVEMBER 2010
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
http://www. thectoforum.com/ content/niche-bivs-open-source
LEADING CHANGE CIOs can catalyse positive change.
“The CIO must actually take the lead in redefining the business. This requires first and foremost, that the CIO deeply understand the business, far beyond the day-to-day operations as currently conducted.” To read the full story go to:
WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.
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Open Source BI approach has been led mostly by Jaspersoft. Brian Gentile, CEO, Jaspersoft in a telephonic interview from San Francisco discusses where it's all headed.
OPINION
ABHISHEK DWIVEDI, AGM at Conjoin Group
Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@thectoforum.com
CTOF Connect
MEENAKSHI AGRAWAL VP-IT, Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Ltd.
www.thectoforum.com/content/leadingchange
INTERVIEW INISDE
Enterprise
PCoIP is Not an Incomplete Protocol. Pg 10
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTOS.COM
ROUND-UP
Mobility a Trillion Dollar Business by 2014. As analysts explore the changing face of the business.
WORLDWIDE mobile voice and data revenue will exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2014, according to Gartner. Mobile will generate revenue from a wide range of additional services such as context, advertising, application and service sales, and so on. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year. “We see three major eras of mobility,” said Nick Jones, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The device era was characterised by iconic devices like Motorola RAZR and was dominated by device manufacturers. This was followed by the application era
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THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
which arrived with the iPhone, popularising application and media stores. Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterised by cloud services and streaming media.” Gartner believes that context will be a defining principle of mobile business for the next decade. It will play a key role in many areas of mobile business, especially advertising and marketing. Thus, enterprises must develop a high-level mobile strategy based on technology-independent management goals and styles, rather than detailed device, platform or application policies.
9% DATA BRIEFING
PREDICTED SEMICONDUCTOR APPLICATION YEAROVER-YEAR GROWTH FOR 2011. SOURCE: IDC
E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP
THEY LARRY SAID IT ELLISON
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTOS.COM
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has followed up after blasting the new HP CEO Leo Apothekar over him masterminding a scheme while CEO of SAP AG to steal Oracle's technology. Now if HP decides to keep their new CEO away from HP Headquarters until the trial is over, Oracle can't subpoena him to testify at that trial.
Broadridge Offers More to Institutional Players. New solutions to support brokerage firms. BROADRIDGE Financial Solutions will offer its new market connectivity solutions operating in the India markets, either domestically or on a cross-border basis. The India market extensions include direct connectivity to India's two leading exchanges, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE), and the required custodian settlement capabilities including contract note generation and reconciliation of obligations, according to the statement. These solutions can be provided as integrated components of Broadridge’s Gloss solution on either an ASP service bureau basis or for on-site implementation, or alternatively they can be integrated with a brokerage firm's own technology solutions. Gloss is a real-time, multi-currency, transaction processing engine which automates the trade processing lifecycle from trade capture through to confirmation, clearing agency reporting and settlement, according to the company’s Web site. "Increasingly, firms are looking to grow their businesses and offer greater client choice on a global basis," said Tom Carey, President, Securities Processing Solutions, International, Broadridge. "We are firmly committed to helping them to accelerate the growth of their capital markets operations and expand into new global markets and asset classes faster and on a cost-effective, low risk basis."
“A few weeks ago I accused HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, of overseeing an industrial espionage scheme... my guess is that HP will keep its new CEO far, far away from the Court Courthouse until this trial is over.” —Larry Ellison , CEO, Oracle
PHOTO: PHOTOS.COM
QUICK BYTE ON GLOBAL MOBILE SECURITY
An 81% majority of respondents to a survey by Juniper admitted using their devices to access corporate networks without their employer's knowledge. More than half of those who access corporate networks without permission, do so every day. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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functionality in the firmware leveraging Teradici chips for the most demanding CAD/ CAM user. These ‘Zero Clients’ have no local operating system so they offer both the highest performance with native PCoIP firmware and the least cost of ongoing management.
PCoIP is Not an Incomplete Protocol. Seema Ambastha, DirectorSystems Engineering & Technology at VMware talks to Vinita Gupta.
GLOBAL TRACKER
the survey delved into the causes of network intrusion. CTO FORUM 07 NOVEMBER 2010
Q: Will this solution support both software and hardware based endpoints? A: Software endpoints will use the PCoIP functionality in the VMware View Client for Windows and Linux, whether on a full PC or a traditional thin client. For hardware-based endpoints, ‘Zero Clients’ will provide PCoIP
Network Intrusion
67% of large companies with 5,000 or more employees reported one successful intrusion or more this year, compared with 41% in 2009. For the first time,
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from task-based users to designers with demanding 3D requirements.
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
Companies reported at least one successful attempt in 2010.
67% 41% Had at least one intrusion attempt in 2009.
SOURCE: THE SIXTH ANNUAL ENTERPRISE IT SECURITY SURVEY SPONSORED BY VANDYKE SOFTWARE AND UNDERTAKEN BY AMPLITUDE RESEARCH
DISCUSS about VMware’s View 4 solution The software version of the PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol with VMware View 4 provides end users with a dramatic improvement in user experience across a wide variety of tasks and end point locations. VMware View customers will be able to take advantage of the PCoIP protocol to deliver virtual desktops across the LAN and WAN, for usage scenarios that span
Q: How PCoIP is different from traditional display protocols? A: For desktops hosted in the datacenter, the screen, keyboard, and mouse must be ‘displayed’ to a remote endpoint. The display protocol performs this function. IT organisations have historically faced challenges when using traditional display protocols to try to deliver a full fidelity experience to end-users. These challenges have therefore reduced the reach and limited the possible use cases for desktop virtualisation. The introduction of VMware View with PCoIP delivers a rich user experience over any IP network—thus addressing more use cases and accelerating the adoption of desktop virtualisation solutions. Q: PCoIP consumes more bandwidth than HDX and as CPU and bandwidth consumption rely on server that means the companies using PCoIP have to invest more on servers? A: This is a myth. If you benchmark HDX on a unconstrained 100 Mbps for a single user and use that as baseline it may look unimpressive. On the other hand PCoIP protocol dynamically adjusts image quality and frame rate based on available bandwidth. Maximum bandwidth can be capped to limit bandwidth utilisation. PCoIP protocol fairly shares the bandwidth when multiple user sessions are active. Q: According to your competitor Citrix, PCoIP is an incomplete protocol. A: It is not an incomplete protocol. Teradici is a leading provider of graphics, they have tested and partnered with VMware View which is been adopted by companies. It is a zero data loss protocol. Q: Mention some of the companies using the VMware View solution? A: The A.P. Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank Limited is India's premier Urban Cooperative Banking Institution. They have implemented VMware View which has reduced total cost of ownership by 50%.
E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP
PHOTO: PHOTOS.COM
Mobile Options for Payments. Is M-Payment the way forward ?
VOCALINK, a UK-based technology provider for electronic payment services, reports a survey it conducted among some British bank account holders found the respondents eager for ‘immediate’ mobile payment options. Vocalink’s 'Voice of the Customer' research shows the ability to make inter-bank payments immediately via a mobile phone holds a strong appeal for the modern consumer due to its speed and convenience, according to the statement. The survey, of 2,000 British adults who had bank
accounts, found 42 per cent of the respondents and half of those who already make online payments would find making a payment immediately via a mobile phone extremely valuable. "Our research shows that as mobile phone usage continues to grow, Immediate Payments has the potential to become ubiquitous,” said Kris Kubiena, Director of Consulting Services at VocaLink . “In today's modern world, both consumers and small businesses need to be able to move money instantly and easily. The Faster Payments Service in the UK has facilitated this requirement and now we have the ability, through Immediate Mobile Payments, to offer this service to international audiences,” Kubiena said. More than three quarters of all consumers surveyed use coupons when shopping, with 29% of UK and 15% of US consumers having already used a mobile coupon. Furthermore, the survey results revealed 71% of UK and 42% of US mobile users said they would be interested in receiving mobile coupons while they are shopping in a store to alert them. Convenience and portability are likely to be the drivers of uptake in this area, alongside providing an integrated system to organise consumers’ financial lives. The advantages of m-commerce for brand owners encompassed creating new revenue streams, such as via SMS and the mobile web. Moreover, the measurability of this medium, similar to the internet, could yield valuable intelligence into consumer behaviour. As many emerging market shoppers do not have access to official bank accounts, micropayments through this route should strengthen the position of advertisers in developing economies.
FACT TICKER
Apple Leads the Pack. The
worldwide mobile phone market grew 14.6% in the third quarter of 2010. THE GROWING popularity of converged mobile devices, or smartphones, with consumers and businesspersons is evidenced by the appearance of a second smartphoneonly vendor in the top 5 ranking. Apple moved into the number 4 position worldwide in 3Q10, joining Research In Motion (RIM) as one of
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the world's largest mobile phone suppliers. RIM has spent three quarters on IDC's leaderboard. "The entrance of Apple to the top 5 vendor ranking underscores the increased importance of smartphones to the overall market. Moreover, the mobile phone makers that are delivering popular smartphone models are
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
among the fastest growing firms," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC. Apple, RIM, and the vendors producing Android-based smartphones have put noticeable pressure on Nokia, the overall market leader. "Nokia still leads all vendors by a significant margin for converged mobile devices and mobile phones as a whole," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team. "However, Nokia's grip on the traditional mobile phone market has been somewhat loosened."
AIRLINE TECH
Q
antas has introduced an innovative Baggage Reconciliation System (BRS) that uses radio waves. Australia's first self-service baggage check-in facility, part of the airline's ‘Next Generation Check-in’ initiative is designed to streamline and speed up a passenger's journey through the domestic airport, according to the statement. RFID will track and verify bags with Unisys providing systems integration; implementation and rollout services; application hosting and support for BRS. In the first stage of the solution's roll-out, passengers at Next Generation Check-in airports are able print their bag tags, which have an identifying barcode, at a check-in kiosk before taking bags to the bag drop area. On the bag drop belt, barcodes are scanned to link bags to the passenger's flight information. Passengers can purchase additional baggage allowances on the spot or beforehand via the web. An intelligent chip-enabled bag tag, called a Q Bag Tag, will be given to Platinum, Gold and Silver Qantas Frequent Flyer members to use as part of a premium service, eliminating the need for these passengers to print a new bag tag each time they fly. The Q Bag Tag will use RFID technology to allow a bag to be quickly identified and tracked, according to the statement.
BESPOKE WORKS
POLYCOM
NEERAJ GILL Managing Director —India and SAARC, Polycom Inc Neeraj Gill was ‘hand-picked’ to aggressively exploit opportunities in fast-growing unified communications industry; extend video communications market leadership. A 20-year ICT industry veteran, Gill is responsible for business strategy, and for extending important market share – particularly in the fastgrowing video conferencing market.
UC is Relevant to All What, in your view, is the philosophy behind Unified Communications? A: As companies address today's market trends—such as the global economy, recession, pressure on budgets—they need ways to improve the productivity of their employees, lower costs and improve their competitive advantage. A key means to accomplish this is Unified Communications (UC), which brings together telephony, e-mail, presence, conferencing, mobility, instant messaging, content sharing, and other communications solutions into a single continuum or network—all of which have been siloed in the past. Not just for large global enterprises, organisations of every size are turning to unified communications both inside and outside the organisation. Should UC be on the radar of the top executive in an organisation? Why? A: Yes. The business landscape is changing and organisations are increasingly looking to leverage real-time group collaboration
to not only improve productivity, but reduce travel costs, align geographically dispersed teams and to maximise the use of specialists. Unified Communications (UC) addresses the growing demand for such services by bringing together data, voice, applications and videos into a single continuum or network for more effective communication and collaboration, while also enabling companies to accelerate decision making and maintain competitive advantage. A great range of social, technological, environmental and financial trends are influencing the market for unified communications. Contemporary business realities such as globalisation, worldwide competition, and the need for business continuity has paved the way for life-like experience for communication and remote meetings from anywhere around the world. Telepresence and video conferencing solutions help enterprises to work faster, smarter, and more effectively and efficiently. Polycom is a leading provider of integrated,
end-to-end unified collaboration solutions that help organisations meet both productivity and cost containment challenges. By leveraging Polycom’s leadership in all aspects of a face-to-face meeting that include hearing each other (audio), seeing each other (immersive telepresence and video) and sharing content, Polycom makes meeting over distance just as productive as being there. Polycom enables rapid and collaborative decisionmaking, by shortening chains of communication over distance, and continuously enabling innovative products and services. Polycom solutions have become critical to companies and organisations trying to win in today's increasingly competitive world. What are businesses doing globally in the way they communicate both within the organisation and with the outside world that makes UC highly relevant? A: Today’s global businesses have to deal with dispersed workforces, multiple vendors, partners etc. In order to deliver better
collaboration over distance and maintain business growth, effective communication between these entities is the most vital pillar of success. With unified communications, organisations can maintain business continuity, and accelerate growth, overcoming barriers of time and distance. True-to-life communications improves productivity and resourcefulness. A unified communications approach is indispensable for today’s competitive enterprise landscape, as it provides: Global and remote workforce: Increases scalability, flexibility and promotes an openstandards approach to collaboration; Cost Cutting: Reduces communication costs, facilities cost and travel cost; Availability of HD video conferencing at an affordable price: Ability for organisations to connect the most people, in the highest quality at the lowest cost; Focus on reduction of carbon footprints by reducing the need to travel, leading to greener IT; Increasing competitiveness in the global business environment: More effective communication and collaboration. How is Polycom championing the best of UC by itself and through its partnerships with companies such as Microsoft? A: Polycom is working with the leading unified communications platform providers to deliver applications that cut across different environments. Currently our strategic Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners include Avaya, BroadSoft, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and Siemens. We also have a larger network of ARENA partners who enhance the range and variety of unified communications Polycom is able to offer our customers. Polycom is also a founding member of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) – a non-profit alliance of worldwide technology leaders joining together to deliver open UC solutions to customers and address the challenge of integrating new and existing systems to support more productive and efficient workflows. Polycom and its partners are able to provide an open and interoperable collaboration solution that gives customers greater flexibility and investment protection for their UC environment, across the large enterprise as well as the SMB segment.
Polycom has also recently signed a multi-year, strategic global agreement with Microsoft Corp. to deliver integrated end-to-end unified communications and to improve customers’ business productivity. This agreement is a major step towards streamlining communications across messaging, video and voice with connected applications and devices. Under the agreement, Polycom plans to develop and market standards-based UC solutions – encompassing software, hardware, networking and services – that span the enterprise, small-to-medium business, and government markets; and will enable customers to improve business productivity and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs. Polycom and Microsoft share a vision for business productivity solutions built on
Intelligent Core as their foundation, organisations benefit from “location liberation,” so that people can have more engaging conversations in new ways that defy the boundaries of distance, cost, time and business disruptions. Through highly visual and immersive communication experiences, people can connect, speed decision making and raise productivity in highly effective ways that benefit companies and individuals anywhere. Some of the key features that an organisation must look for in a UC solution are: Open standards collaboration Easy-to-use and deploy UC solutions ( e.g. touch screen) Scalable conferencing bridges HD video and audio endpoints that deliver life-like experience
“OUR TIE UP WITH MICROSOFT IS A MAJOR STEP TOWARDS STREAMLINING COMMUNICATIONS ACROSS MESSAGING, VIDEO AND VOICE.” standards-based platforms that work with the tools and applications people know and use today. What desirable features should an organisation look for in selecting a UC solution? A: The key to a successful UC deployment starts at the core of the network, which must be intelligent, scalable, resilient and open in order to meet the needs of the business now and in the future. The Polycom UC Intelligent Core gives organisations the flexibility and freedom to communicate over HD voice and video, anywhere, anytime, and supports the deepest native integration and interoperability with leading UC network platforms, for a truly open UC environment. With the Polycom UC
Immersive telepresence systems Management applications and global support infrastructure Integration with their existing multivendor communication An infrastructure that is scalable, flexible and supports the needs of the business, delivering the highest return on investment with the lowest total cost of ownership
Three Cloud Benefits: Lowering costs, making IT agile and removing undifferentiated heavy lifting from data centres.
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A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
Beware of the DR. WERNER VOGELS | AMAZON.COM
Private
Cloud
PHOTO: JITEN GANDHI
Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer, Amazon.com in an interview with Ashwani Mishra shares his views on the architecture behind Amazon Web Services, the adoption of cloud computing and key issues and trends around it. How did Amazon Web Services come into being and what is the nature of the IT architecture used to offer services to enterprise users? The emergence of Amazon Web Services came out of our own need at Amazon.com to build a scalable and reliable platform that helped our engineers to be more innovative and effective. For many years Amazon Web Ser-
vices has been working on various scalable and reliable IT solutions and techniques. We supported Amazon. com’s business in several countries and built an e-commerce enterprise services platform. On this platform we have customers such as Marks and Spencer, Target.com and Timex running their e-commerce applications. The technologies needed for such companies were on a much
larger scale than even Amazon.com. We organised our IT structure internally by using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The model was built on an agile development methodology. So if we wanted to add innovation within our environment we created a small team that was given the task of developing a new service. We have around 300 to 400 such services right now.
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A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
So was this platform the precursor to becoming a new business model for the company to offer services in the cloud? Yes. It was not only the architecture but the manner in which it was organised internally. Each of these services had a dedicated team associated with it. The developers were themselves responsible for the operations and innovation. These teams had an assignment to improve the services continuously. During this time, we realised that we could do better. We did a deep dive and felt that all of these teams were working on similar issues, especially on the infrastructure front. Seventy percent of their time was being spent on managing infrastructure including storage, allocating and managing resources, managing databases, carrying out data replication, built fault-tolerance for multiple data centres, and managing networks. We realised that we were allowing duplication of work to happen purely because of speed of execution. We decided to place this in a shared services platform so that the teams could become more effective. By dropping the infrastructure pieces into the shared services model, our engineers became more effective. With shared services our people focused 70 percent of their time on innovation. This was a turnaround for us. This was the time when we decided to open this as a service for enterprises who wanted to innovate and focus on business, rather than worry on capex and opex costs. How do you envision enterprises making a transition to the cloud? There is some skepticism as of today but as more education happens around the cloud computing model, enterprises will become comfortable with it. However, we do see many enterprises across the globe being aggressive in deployment.
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If I look at a very-large-enterprise CIO, who is responsible for more than a thousand applications; it is obvious that he will not move all his applications overnight onto the cloud. According to me such CIOs would have an immediate strategy and a long term strategy for cloud transition. The immediate strategy would focus on anything that has to do with scale and where they need to control the costs. This would involve moving applications such as marketing, and campaigning to the cloud. These will be the obvious choices. In parallel, they will be starting proof-of-concepts to learn more about the cloud. They might then move their test and development environment and this will be a precursor to moving their production environment. Disaster Recovery (DR) in a cloud
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
THINGS I BELIEVE IN CIOs will have an immediate strategy and long-term strategy for cloud adoption. Standards will not become an obstacle in cloud acceptance. There will be a change in cloud licensing model.
model is another area that is becoming quite popular for many enterprises. The cloud is getting these enterprises to change the way they conduct their DR in terms of rigour and continuity and ensuring that business goes on as usual. In the long term, CIOs will look at their internal IT systems to be cloud ready and build features such as automation. They will also have to look at the IT dependencies of various applications and what would be the cost of bringing such applications onto the cloud. For example, if the CRM license of a company expires next year, they can either renew the license or place it on the cloud or go for SaaS. So there is a range of options available to CIOs today. Many technology service providers have hyped up the private cloud. You term it a "false
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
D R . W E R N E R VO G E L S
cloud." What are the issues surrounding the private cloud? Enterprises are not asking for private clouds, it is the service providers who are telling them what they should do. Take the analogy between the electricity grid and cloud model. In the beginning of the last century many enterprises ran their businesses using generators. When public electricity was introduced, these businesses couldn’t just dump their generators and
same burden that he carried before -- managing reliability, maintenance and so on. I think that private cloud doesn’t have the right to be called a cloud model. Would you agree that interoperability and well-defined standards hold the key to broad adoption of cloud computing? The way things are going, I do not think standards are an obstacle for the cloud adop-
“The cloud is getting these enterprises to change the way they conduct their DR in terms of rigour and continuity and ensuring that business goes on as usual.” —Dr. Werner Vogels , CTO, Amazon.com go on the public network. They took their time to realise that it was secure, reliable and their business could run on it and that’s when they started the transition. In this story there was one set of people who were unhappy and they were the generator manufacturers. They wanted their generators to be sold. So they kept telling enterprises that they should not only keep the generators they owned but also buy more and become independent public utility companies. Coming back to the cloud model, I think the cloud is defined by benefits, and the three important benefits are lowering costs, making IT agile and removing undifferentiated heavy lifting by off-loading data centre operations. In the case of a private cloud, it has none of these benefits. It doesn’t lower costs as one still needs to pay for resources; it will scale over again as demands need to be met, which means that there is no reduction in operational costs. It doesn’t improve your agility as the resources are not infinite and there are constraints. So a CIO will end up having the
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tion. Previously software applications were complex as many customers found themselves locked-in with a particular service provider. The only way they could achieve freedom from such complexities was through the presence of standards. We believe that one should not lock customers into any particular technology. Enterprises should have the choice of using any services that they want to use. So if an enterprise is using our compute services, they are not obliged to use our storage service. They have the freedom to use it from another service provider. Also having simple application interfaces, it becomes easy for enterprises to move from one provider to another. Will there be standards in the future? Maybe. What is Amazon Web Services doing to address the big worries around management and security in cloud computing? Automation is an important concept in the cloud for management of services. Here services are not just big software packets but come equipped with APIs that give the
power of control. We have various partners such as CA, BMC Software and more that work with us for our cloud offerings. Security has been one of the concerns and on a global level it is hard just to say ‘trust me.’ At Amazon Web Services, we sit down with CIOs and the CISOs of companies and look at their current practices. We then look at the security properties that the cloud can offer and whether we can match them. The cloud has isolation models, access control mechanisms similar to what many enterprises have on-premise. To be honest, I have yet to witness a situation where after such a conversation, the CIO or the CISO said that the security was insufficient in the cloud. The Federal government in the U.S. decided to move to the cloud as they wanted to deliver better services for the citizens. They launched one of their sites called recovery.org that tracks stimulus spending on the Amazon cloud. The government put out a release stating that our security in the cloud model was better than what they could achieve themselves. How do you see the adoption of the cloud model in the next one year? It is hard to predict where it will go in the next one year. Each year has been a surprise for us in the cloud space. There will be a change in enterprise licensing models. IT service providers are starting to realise that if they do not start listening to their customers, they will lose out. Licenses come for five to ten years if users want a discount. The whole discount business is murky. Everybody knows the huge price tags that come with the ERP systems and they also know that nobody is paying that amount. So does one want to commit for ten years to get the best deal? In the cloud, you pay for what you use. It is clear and transparent. I see the cloud model becoming consumer driven. Just like we have no brand loyalty in the consumer world of technology gadgets and applications, the same will be true for the cloud as well. CIOs want control of their IT infrastructure and meet business expectations. So we will see a move towards richer applications, integration with more consumer style IT applications; and all of these will be driven by cloud services.
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Ken Oestreich is VP of Product Marketking with Egenera.
ILLUSTRATION BY BINESH SREEDHARAN
BREED
ABOUT AUTHOR
Converged 54% Infrastructure DATA BRIEFING
COMPANIES SURVEYED SAID THAT CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE IS NOT ATTRACTIVE TO THEM
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Get your head around the concepts and problems of unified computing.
BY KEN OESTREICH
S
ince joining Egenera, I've been championing what's now being termed Converged Infrastructure (aka unified computing). It's an exciting and important part of IT management, demonstrated by the fact that all major vendors are offering some form of the technology. But it sometimes takes a while for folks (my analyst friends included) to get their heads around understanding it.
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
PART 1: What is Converged Infrastructure, and how it will change data centre management Converged Infrastructure and Unified Computing are both terms referring to technology where the complete server profile, including I/O (NICs, HBAs, KVM), networking (VLANs, IP load balancing), and storage connectivity (LUN mapping, switch control)
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are all abstracted and defined/configured Converged Infrastructure and Software Virtualisation in software. The result is a pooling of physServer Virtualisation Converged Infrastructure ical servers, network resources and storage Logically Abstracts Software Infrastructure HW resources that can be assigned on-demand. Portablility for Software Infrastructure This approach lets IT operators rapidly re-purpose servers or entire environments Agility of Software I/O, network & storage without having to physically reconfigure Logical Provisioning of Servers Infrastructure I/O components by hand, and without the Consolidates Virtual Servers I/O & networking requirement of hypervisors. It massively Eliminates Over-provisioned servers NICs and HBAs reduces the quantity and expense of the physical I/O and networking components components that can be swapped in and solutions. In doing so, a single Converged as well as the time required to configure out as scaling requires, ultimately the entire Infrastructure system can replace numerthem. A converged infrastructure approach system is integrated at either the hardware ous point-products for physical/virtual offers an elegant, simple-to-manage layer or the software layer. server management, network management, approach to data centre infrastructure A Converged Infrastructure is different I/O management, configuration manageadministration. from, but analogous to, hypervisor-based ment, HA and DR. From an architectural perspective, this approach may also be referred to as a comserver virtualisation. Think of hypervisors pute fabric or Processing Area Network. as operating ‘above’ the CPU, abstracting CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE Because the physical CPU state is comsoftware (applications and O/S) from the - Simplifying Management for ‘The pletely abstracted away, the CPUs become CPU; think of a Converged Infrastructure other half’ of the Data centre stateless and therefore can be reassigned as operating ‘below’ the CPU, abstracting In the manner that server virtualisation has extremely easily creating a “fabric” of comnetwork and storage connections. However, grown to become the dominant data centre ponents, analogous to how SANs assign note that converged Infrastructure doesn't management approach for software, conlogical storage LUNs. Through I/O virtuoperate via a software layer the way that a verged infrastructure is poised to become alisation, both data and storage transports hypervisor does. Converged Infrastructure the dominant management approach for can also be converged, further simplifying is possible whether or not server virtualisa‘the other 50 percent’ of the data centre – its the physical network infrastructure down tion is present. infrastructure. to a single wire. Converged Infrastructure and server virtualHowever adoption will take place gradually, The result is a ‘wire-once’ set of pooled isation can complement each other producfor a few reasons: bare-metal CPUs and network resources ing significant cost and operational benefits. IT can only absorb so much at once. Most that can be assigned on demand, defining For example, consider a physical host failure often, converged infrastructure is consumed their logical configurations and network where the entire machine, network and after IT has come up the maturity curve connections instantly. storage configuration needs to be replicated after having cut their teeth on OS virtualisaThere is another nice resource: A whiteon a new physical server. Using Converged tion. Once that initiative is under way, IT paper commissioned by HP, executed by Infrastructure, IT Ops can quickly replace then begins looking for other sources of cost Michelle Bailey at IDC. In it she defines a the physical server using a spare ‘bare-mettake-out... and the data centre infrastructure converged system: al’ server. A new host can be created on the is the logical next step. The term converged system refers to a fly, all the way down to the same NIC, HBA Converged infrastructure is still relatively new set of enterprise products and networking configurations new. While the market considers OS virtuthat package server, storage, of the original server. alisation to be relatively mature, converging and networking architectures A Converged Infrastructure can infrastructure is less-well understood. together as a single unit and re-create a physical server (or virBut there is one universal approach that utilise built-in service-oriented tual host) as well as its networkcan overcome these hesitations -- money. FIND CONVERGED ing and storage configuration management tools for the purSo, in my next installment, I'll do a deeper
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pose of driving efficiencies in INFRASTRUCTURE on any ‘cold’ bare-metal server. time to deployment and simIn addition, it can re-create an ATTRACTIVE plifying ongoing operations. entire environment of servers DUE TO LOW Within a converged system, each using bare-metal infrastructure of the compute, storage, and net- EQUIPMENT COSTS at a different location as well. work devices are aware of each Thus it is particularly well-suited other and are tuned for higher to provide both high-availability performance than if constructed in a purely (HA) as well as Disaster Recovery (DR) modular architecture. While a converged in mixed physical/virtual environments, system may be constructed of modular eliminating the need for complex clustering
dive into the really fantastic economics and cost take-out opportunities of converging infrastructure...
PART 2. Converged Infrastructure’s Cost Advantages Let me go a bit deeper and explain the source of capital and operational improvements converged Infrastructure offers – and why it’s such a compelling opportunity to pursue. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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T E C H N O LO G Y
First, the most important distinction to make between converged infrastructure and ‘the old way of doing business’ is that management – as well as the technology – is also converged. Consider how many pointproducts you currently use for infrastructure management. This diagram below has resonated with customers and analysts alike. It highlights, albeit in a stylised fashion, just how many point-products an average-sized IT department is using. This results in clear impact in Operational complexity – coordinating tool use, procedures, interdependencies and fault-tracking Operational cost – the raw expense it costs to acquire and then annually maintain them Capital cost – if you count all of the separate hardware components they’re trying to manage That last bullet, the thing about hardware components, is also something to drill down into. Because every physical infrastructure component in the ‘old’ way of doing things has a cost. I mean I/O components like NICs and HBAs, not to mention switches, load balancers and cables. What might be possible if you could virtualise all of the physical infrastructure components, and then have a single tool to manipulate them logically? Well, then you’d be able to throw-out roughly 80 percent of the physical components (and the associated costs) and reduce the operational complexity roughly the same amount.
Physical simplicity breeds operational efficiency. That means much less sustained cost and effort. And an easier time at your job. In the same way that the software domain has been virtualised by the hypervisor, the infrastructure world can be virtualised with I/O virtualisation and converged networking. Once the I/O and network are now virtualised, they can be composed/recomposed on demand. This eliminates a large number of components needed for infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and even failover/clustering (more on this later). If you can now logically re-define server and infrastructure profiles, you can also create simplified disaster recovery tools too. In all, we can go from roughly a dozen point-products down to just 2-3 (see diagram below). Now: What’s the impact on costs? On the capital cost side, since I/O is consolidated, it literally means fewer NICs and elimination of most HBAs since they can be virtualised too. Consolidating I/O
Point-products being used by an average-sized IT department App VM Server Management
Hypervisor/OS
Physical Server Management
CPU Network I/O Network Switching
Storage I/O Storage Switching
Software Provisioning
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Virtual HA
DR/ COOP Systems
I/O Management IP Load Balancing Network Management Storage Connection Management
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Physical HA and Clustering
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
Infrastructure Provisioning Device Failover
Configuration Management
also implies converged transport, meaning fewer cables (typically only 1 per server, 2 if teamed/redundant). A converged transport also allows for fewer switches needed on the network. Also remember that with few moving (physical) parts, you also have to purchase few software tools and licenses. See diagram on facing page. On the operational cost side, there are the benefits of simpler management, less on-the-floor maintenance, and even less power consumption. With fewer physical components and a more virtual infrastructure, entire server configurations can be created more simply, often with only a single management tool. That means creating and assigning NICs, HBAs, ports, addresses and world-wide names. It means creating segregated VLAN networks, creating and assigning data and storage switches. And it means automatically creating and assigning boot LUNs. The server configuration is just what you’re used to – except it’s defined in software, and all from a single unified management console. The result: Buying, integrating and maintaining less software. Ever wonder why converged infrastructure is developing such a following? It’s because physical simplicity breeds operational efficiency. And that means much less sustained cost and effort. And an easier time at your job.
PART 3: Converged Infrastructure: What it Is, and What it Isn't In my two earlier posts, I first took a stab at an overview of converged infrastructure and how it will change IT management, and in the second installment, I looked a bit closer at converged infrastructure's cost advantages. But one thing that I sense I neglected was to define what's meant by converged infrastructure (BTW, Cisco terms it Unified Computing). Even more important, I also feel the need to highlight what converged infrastructure is not. Plus, there are vendor instances where The Emperor Has No Clothing -e.g. where some marketers have claimed that they suddenly have converged infrastructure where the fact remains that they are vending the same old products. Why splitting hairs in defining terms? Because true converged infrastructure /
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unified computing has architectural, operational, and capital cost advantages over traditional IT approaches. (AKA Don't buy the used car just because the paint is nice) Defining terms - in the public domain Obviously, it can't hurt to see how the vendors self-describe the offerings... here goes: Cisco's Definition (via webopedia) "... simplifies traditional architectures and dramatically reduce the number of devices that must be purchased, cabled, configured, powered, cooled, and secured in the data centre. The Cisco Unified Computing System is a next-generation data centre platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation into a cohesive system..." Egenera's Definition "A technology where CPU allocation, data I/O, storage I/O, network configurations, and storage connections are all logically defined and configured in software. This approach allows IT operators to rapidly re-purpose CPUs without having to physically reconfigure each of the I/O components and associated network by hand—and without needing a hypervisor." HP's Definition "HP Converged Infrastructure is built on a next-generation IT architecture – based on standards – that combines virtualised compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single sharedservices environment optimised for any workload." Defining terms - by using attributes Empirically, converged infrastructure needs to have two main attributes (to live up to its name): It should reduce the quantity and complexity of physical IT infrastructure, and it should reduce the quantity and complexity of IT operations management tools. So let's be specific: Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of physical infrastructure: virtualise I/O, reducing physical I/O components (e.g. eliminate NICs and HBAs) leverage converged networking, reducing physical cabling and eliminating recabling reduce overall quantity of servers, (e.g. ability to use free pools of servers to repurpose for scaling, failure, disaster recovery, etc.)
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Converged transport reduces the number of switches App Hypervisor/OS CPU Network I/O Network Switching
VM Server Management Physical Server Management
Storage I/O Storage Switching
Physical HA & Clustering
Software Provisioning
Virtual HA
I/O Management IP Load Balancing Network Management Storage Connection Management
Infrastructure Provisioning
Device Failover
Beware.... when the Emperor Has No Clothes... In closing, I'll also share my pet peeve: When vendors whitewash their products to fit the latest trend. I'll not name names, but beware of the following stuff labeled ‘converged infrastructure’: If the vendor says ‘Heterogeneous Automation’ - that's different. For example, it
Configuration Systems
Simple, logical re-definition
Single, Logical Control
Ability to reduce quantity and complexity of operations/management tools: be agnostic with respect to the software payload (e.g. O/S independent) fewer point-products, less paging between tool windows (BTW, this is possible because so much of the infrastructure become virtual and therefore more easily logically manipulated) reduce/eliminate the silos of visualising & managing physical vs virtual servers, physical networks vs virtual networks simplified higher-level services, such as providing fail-over, scaling-out, replication, disaster recovery, etc. To sum-up so far, if you're shopping for this stuff, you need to a) Look for the ability to virtualise infrastructure as well as software b) Look for fewer point products and less windowing c) Look for more services (e.g. HA, DR) baked-into the product.
DR/ COOP Systems
could easily be scripted run-book automation. This doesn't reduce physical complexity in the least. If the vendor says ‘Product Bundle, single SKU’ - Same as above. ‘Shrink wrapped’ does not equal ‘converged’ If the vendor says ‘Pre-Integrated’ - This may simplify installation, but does not guarantee physical simplicity nor operational simplicity. Thanks for reading the series so far. I'm pondering a fourth-and-final installment on where this whole virtualisation and converged infrastructure thing is taking us - a look at possible future directions.
— Ken Oestreich is a marketing and product management veteran in the enterprise IT and data centre space, with a career spanning start-ups to established vendors.Ken currently works as Vice President - Product Marketing at Egenera. This article is published with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com.
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CASE STUDY | ING VYSYA BANK
Pay-ByWire TurboCharged CHALLENGE:
Through INNOVATION and some SERIOUS CODING, ING Vysya Bank has made DOMESTIC PAYMENTS via the RTGS-NEFT route speedier and more accurate. In a TIGHTER REGULATORY REGIME, such IT-led business innovations are boosting the bank's ability to make money from information. 26
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n the not-so-distant future, no one will use cheques. Reserve Bank of India's efforts, to make the RTGS and NEFT processes as common as cheques are today, are paying off, and increasingly, banks are offering their customers innovative payment services that are faster, cheaper and safer for all concerned. There are still many processes that require manual intervention that can be eliminated to make payments even more faster, cheaper and safer, as a project at ING Vysya Bank demonstrates. Everyday, as customers initiate payments via the Real-Time Gross Settlement and/or the National Electronic Fund Transfer routes, an army of bank employees is needed across the nation to manually match all the requisite information against their banks' databases to ensure that the money changes the right hands. At ING Vysya, an important step in this process is now automated.
C A S E S T U DY
COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY: ING Vysya Bank HEADQUARTER: Bangalore MD AND CEO: Shailendra Bhandari OPERATIONS: ING Vysya Bank Ltd., is an entity formed with the coming together of erstwhile, Vysya Bank Ltd, a premier bank in the Indian Private Sector and a global financial powerhouse, ING of Dutch origin, during Oct 2002.
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mation and operational excellence." In 2008 the bank took stock of its payment platforms even as it saw that the RBI’s persistent efforts to move from cheque-based payments to RTGS/NEFT would soon start getting traction in the market. While this would benefit individuals with small and large transactions alike, the true impact of what Ramakrishnan and his colleagues eventually developed would be seen in the corporate sector, making the bank 'Easy To Deal With' as ING's motto goes. On the one hand, the bank felt the need to re-architect its domestic electronics payment infrastructure and on the other "we also sensed an opportunity to put together a world-class solution that would offer the best of services to our customers," Ramakrishnan said. What the IT team also did was to de-link volume growth from paymentoperations-related FTE growth. The objective was to build the fastest domestic wire transfer facility in the Indian banking industry. As banking products and services get commoditized, speed and excellence of service channels become key differentiators, Ramakrishnan said in a background note on the project. India is rapidly modernizing and banking payment services are switching from physical cheques to wire transfer. "By building the fastest domestic wire transfer facility in India, ING Vysya now has the ability to differentiate itself to both retail and corporate customers and be their preferred payment processor," he said.
Money From Information
ANIRUDDHA PAUL, Head, IT Change Delivery and Dharmaraj Ramakrishnan, Head - Core Banking at ING Vysya.
PHOTO BY S RADHAKRISHNA
An Opportunity "Our research leads us to believe that we are now the fastest domestic electronics payments processor in the country," said Dharmaraj Ramakrishnan, Head - Core Banking at ING Vysya. "As India rapidly modernises and cheque-based transactions yield to NEFT and RTGS, our transformational initiative will position us well," he said. What became an IT-led business transformation actually started off in a small way as an infrastructure capacity augmentation exercise at the planning stage, Ramakrishnan said. "We took it to the next level of business transfor-
The big picture is part of the evolving landscape in the payment scenario, and what is it that various banks and financial institutions can do to innovate with the rapid changes happening in the indusry today. "This is characterised by the decline of float-based income," said Aniruddha Paul, Head, IT Change Delivery, Ramakrishnan's boss and an enthusiastic champion of various 'changethe-bank' initiatives that would put ING Vysya on par with larger competitors for lucrative corporate customers. "The chances of making money out of money are declining and the only way you can make money is by leveraging information," Paul likes to say. The decline of cheques and other such instruments and the inexorable shift towards electronic payments both in retail banking and with corporate customers is setting the agenda. "Against this background what we find is a sharply increasing numbers electronic transactions in the domestic market with tightening regimes from RBI on the kind of fees that we can charge to the customer," Paul said. For instance three years back there was a much looser regime on the fees that a bank could charge a customer. Now the RBI has clearly laid down the maximum that a bank can charge and there's not much flexibility there, he said. What ING Vysya is doing then is "building a whole range of payment products and surrounding informaTHE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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tion systems which can extract, glean, tweak, massage information related to the customer and provide value add to our corporate customers primarily, who are the beneficiaries of these kind of insights and also to various customers," he said.
Payments Programme The automation of the payee-name validation must be seen in this context. “This was a part of a bigger programme that aimed improving operational efficiencies,” said Dheepak Rajoo, a project manager with the bank’s Programme Management division who helped manage the two phases of the clutch of projects that eventually led to the successful implementation of the automation. “We had a payments flavour to it, with the NEFT RTGS, it had an ECS component, an offline clearing process related to cheque processing, a cheque truncation process -- all of this, we pulled together as a payments programme.” The NEFT RTGS had two phases -- first replicating the NEFT RTGS payment platform within the core banking operation. This was “primary because there were pain points around processing a finite number of transactions alone, which meant that the business capability itself could be hampered to some extent.” Then they thought “why don't we scrap the payment infrastructure, which wasn't scalable and migrate it into our core banking.” This meant creating the functionalities of an external processing engine withing the core banking, which “enhanced our capabilities to process transactions and to scale up,” Rajoo said. That was the first phase of the project. This also meant that the capabilities had to be extended to about 480 odd branches pan India. The core banking front end was an extension of the same platform, called Profile for Windows. “The challenge was to be able to migrate the functionality by building it from scratch into the platform.”
Automated Validation “Phase 2 was the more innovative” part of the project, Ramakrishnan said, building the ability for payee-name
validation. On inward processes, it was about building processes that would match the name, check the accounts, look for restrictions, match off amounts and execute real-time credit. The result could be that validated customers would get near ‘instant liquidity.’ Typically these projects are what the bank’s IT folks call 'Ops and IT Transformation’ projects. This also meant the project was done across geographies, with people working from Portugal and Poland, and therefore people speaking different languages. This meant that for instance, “we had to use a lot of visual and pictorial aids to get our ideas across with a brilliant programmer from Poland” who had some difficulty with English, Rajoo said. One of the things they did, was to migrate a payment processing engine that was natively built, called P-Connect. “We mirrored the same functionalities into our core banking system.” To be able to build all the native capability of a legacy software back into the core banking was the objective. “Now we've retired that platform,” he said. “The external engine had performance issues around scalability, and transaction processing times were extremely high,” Rajoo said. “At one point we had daily monitoring at the CIO level, what was the time for breakfix, what was the downtime, how much time was lost because of the performance issues and so on.” At the time we were thinking about the concept of a payments programme that had multiple projects -- we had a programme level project governance. That helped to always have a dip-stick every month, with the CIO, the COO and everyone else and validated the idea that 'the replacement was the right way to go' and the decision to move this in to the core banking made sense. Today, most banks use a manual process to validate payee names. Whenever there is an incoming NEFTRTGS, there will be a backend operations team that will monitor what time the message came in, what is the account number and perform a series of validations. Large banks can process hundreds of thousands of these transactions. Further RBI has stringent regulations on these transactions.
“The chances of making money out of money are declining and the ONLY WAY YOU CAN MAKE MONEY IS BY LEVERAGING INFORMATION” —ANIRUDDHA PAUL
HEAD, IT Change Delivery, ING Vysya Bank.
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The Benefits SPEED: Customer gets instant credit for the wire transfer as and when it is received by ING. This will enable the customer to have ready access to the funds. SAFETY: Customers accounts are credited only after payee names are validated and anti-money laundering (AML) checks done on-the-fly in a Straight-Through Processing (STP) mode. SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE: No more anxious waiting hours and queries to the Bank on the status of the funds transferred. COST BENEFITS: There has been a 40 per cent reduction in actual FTE (full-time employee) cost and a 75 per cent reduction from projected FTE costs if this initiative hadn’t been planned and executed.
REVENUE IMPACT: ING Vysya is positioning itself as a significant player in the payments processing space. This initiative goes a long way in underpinning our credentials. METRICS: Handles 2,00,000 transactions/month and an 84-100 per cent year-on-year growth rate Outward remittance processing time cut down by 50 per cent (10 minutes to 5 minutes) Inward remittance processing time cut down by 80 100 per cent (from 1 hour to nearly instantaneous for 70 per cent cases that go through STP) At 100 per cent growth rates in business volumes, the operations staff would have increased from 9 FTE to 20; it has now been resized to just 5 FTE Straight-Through Processing ensures customers get instant credit of the wire transfer as and when it
is received by ING Vysya. Error-free processing due to STP and implementation of maker-checker concept for high value transactions. Improved availability of systems across the branch network and online channels. PARTICULAR ATTENTION WAS PAID TO: System re-architecture and automation. This was a mammoth analysis, programming and testing effort. Payment processors are the most sensitive areas of operations and ING Vysya had to design fail-safe systems that would work flawlessly from day one. In particular, the fuzzy logic algorithms had to be suitable for Indian conditions and Indian names. Since payee-name validation was at the heart of STP, they had to get this absolutely right.
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the invoice details” that the vendor network is NEFT meant the transaction has to be real-time. using to pay to the bank’s corporate customer. That meant that the bank has to keep rampFor example, take a corporate with say 5,000 ing up its backend as the transaction volume dealers across the country. The dealer would increased, to be able to settle customer transacBRANCHES ARE make a payment and ask for delivery. Under nortions the same day. For instance, even if a transSERVICED BY THE fer is initiated at 4 p.m. when the cut off is 5 p.m. SYSTEM ACROSS mal circumstances, the dealer would have made a payment, taken the details about the payment, the transfer still has to be made the same day. THE COUNTRY. called up the corporate about the payment. The more the volume the more the number of For anyone with a corporate network and a venpeople required at the backend. dor network, “we are offering to the vendor as well as to “We automated it,” Ramakrishnan said. “We built an the corporate customer, make the payment, include some algorithm, which matches off the spelling as well as the information, passing the information and processing it way the name sounds.” The algorithm matches off the and informing the corporate ERP in a straight-through spelling and gives it a percentage value and also matches process is something that we can eminently do.” off the sound and gives it a value. The operations team Otherwise the vendor would have waited for confirmation can configure the rules that determine the degree of of the payment, sent it to the corporate, who would have doumatching for which a straight-through process can be ble checked, waited for the invoice details, and then would allowed, he said. have processed the delivery. Clearly there would have been many days gap between the vendor making the payment and Bedrock of Future Innovation the corporate processing the delivery to the vendor. “This particular innovation that we have done, which is “With our systems, not only do you make the core paybuilding from a domestic electronic payments system ment faster but the surrounding systems kick in to get the would be the bedrock of further innovation that we have information about the payment and automatically post it to do,” Paul said. In the payments and cash management to the corporate ERP systems in an straight-through prospace on the corporate banking side, the bank has a numcess,” Paul said. ber of innovative products that it has soft-launched, sold Such innovations, along with others such as offering out or is on the verge of completing installations. greater security for a payment, are helping ING Vysya For instance, this could be about telling a corporate cusBank go after lucrative large corporate customers who tomer who relies on inward NEFT based RTGSs from the were hitherto more the domain of large multinational vendor eco-system that “not only will we be able to probanks, he said. cess his payments the fastest in the country, but we also have mechanisms and systems that allow us to include —Harichandan Arakali THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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Unlocking Knowledge & Wisdom in the Enterprise
Information is not everything, it is of use to the organisation only if it is actionable. By Daniel Burrus
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29.5 CRORE
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very company has both information and knowledge. What’s the difference? Knowledge is something that’s actionable and that generates value for the receiver; it’s dynamic and causes action. Information, on the other hand, is static and is not actionable. It’s simply compiled data. For example, if you received a list of all the sandwich shops in your state, you’re now informed, but you don’t have any real knowledge of how to make a sandwich. However, if someone showed you how to create a great sandwich that tastes better than any other sandwich you’ve ever had, you now have something actionable. The person shared with you some knowledge based on his or her experience. You can go home and recreate that sandwich again. That’s knowledge. The good news is that knowledge increases in value when it’s shared. Think about it … have you ever learned from a co-worker? A customer? A stranger in the coffee shop? Of course you have. But you didn’t learn by giving the other person basic information. More than likely, you were in a dialog. You shared your knowledge and they shared theirs. In the process, you both learned something new and valuable. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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Unfortunately, human Knowing that knowledge For centuries, knowledge sharing has nature is to horde and prosharing is valuable, it makes been done on a small scale without technoltect knowledge because we sense to capture and leverogy, such as when people hang out around think we only have a certain age knowledge in your the water cooler, have casual lunches togethamount of knowledge in our organisation. But how do er, or go to a meeting. It’s during these head. If this were true, then you do that? Putting knowltimes that people share lessons learned and we’d certainly want to covet edge in a file cabinet or on a best practices. NUMBER OF it dearly. In reality, each perhard drive isn’t enough. You Unfortunately, such meetings are sporadic IMAGES FLICKR son is a fountain of knowlneed to have your compaor only last a short time. Additionally, only a APPROXIMATELY edge and new ideas based ny’s knowledge on your netlimited number of people receive the knowlNOW HOSTS on personal experiences, work so it can be accessed edge. And since it’s not captured, there’s meaning the knowledge anytime, anywhere, and via no way for people to continually access the well is deep and won’t run dry. Additionally, any device. People need to be able to not knowledge that was shared. But the CIO when you share your knowledge, you don’t only view the knowledge, but also add to it can put the company’s knowledge into a lose it. and utilise it. That’s how knowledge evolves, dynamic state by using simple networking Think of it like this: Suppose you’re in a stays relevant, and gets more valuable. technology. Capturing and leveraging intellarge, dark room with hundreds of other Additionally, realise that organisations lectual assets is an area where the CIO can people. Everyone in the room is holding an today are facing a major be highly strategic and unlit candle, except for you -- you have the knowledge drain crisis. can add value to the only lit candle. Your lone candle provides Approximately 78 milorganisation in ways no the only glimmer of light. What happens lion Baby Boomers in the other executive can. when you walk over to someone holding United States are headed Knowing how vital one of the unlit candles and light it with for retirement. When they your role as the CIO is your flame? The room is brighter, yet you leave, they’re going to take to creating a knowledge RATE OF INCREASE don’t lose your initial flame. What happens all the knowledge and wisbase, it’s time to start OF PHOTO UPLOADS getting people involved when you use your flame to light another dom that’s in their head TO FACEBOOK. candle, and then another, and then another, with them. Unfortunately, with the process. and so on? Do you still have your original no one can change the Again, your role is to flame? Yes. Only now the room is more fact that so many people will be retiring. But drive the initiative and spearhead the probrightly lit because you shared your flame. you can decide whether the retirees in your cess and technology. Others in your organiThe same thing happens when you share company are going to take their knowledge sation can set up a means to pull knowledge knowledge. You still have your ideas, but with them or if you’re going to capture it. out of people. by sharing them with someone else, you Knowing all this, it makes sense to develhave the potential to improve those ideas op knowledge sharing networks within your HERE’S HOW: well beyond what you previously thought organisation. The question is, how do you Knowledge Pull - There was a movement in possible. You make the ideas glow a little create one? the 1990s to capture knowledge that resided brighter. That’s why knowledge sharing is inside organisations, but few had luck with so powerful. it. Most of the knowledge they were sharing IT ALL STARTS WITH THE CIO was really just information, and many comHarnessing the knowledge within your panies made the sharing process too time organisation can’t happen without the CIO’s consuming and complex. To make knowlinvolvement. Why? Because one of the key edge-sharing work, you need to engage in a tasks for the CIO and the IT department process I call “knowledge pull", where you is to create new added value and competipull the knowledge out of people. tive advantages for the organisation. That’s First, realise that all knowledge needs precisely what a knowledge-sharing network both context and content. For example, delivers. The only way knowledge sharing a good storyteller can’t just give you the can work organisationally is by putting it on punch line. They have to set it up first by a network. giving you context -- the punch line that folIn order to create a knowledge base conlows is the content. The same is true with taining the collective knowledge within the your knowledge pull approach. You have to organisation, you need networks that allow get people talking or writing about the confor instant access to the knowledge that’s text before the content has any meaning. gathered. A working, dynamic, real-time So let’s suppose you have a sales team and knowledge base is more powerful than any you want to pull knowledge from them. To database or information base.
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“Managing knowledge in our business requires innovative approaches that include management, HR and IT solutions working together. It is as much a change management challenge as it is an IT challenge.”
begin, you’d set up an internal secure sales force knowledge base that all the salespeople have access to. This is called creating a community of practice, meaning that all the people who have a common profession come here to share knowledge. You can also create a community of practice for your HR team, your accountants, your engineers, etc. Communities of practice can be for virtually any group of people you have in your organisation. Then, you ask the community of practice for two short paragraphs each month. Why —JS Puri CIO, Fortis Hospitals only two paragraphs? You don’t want to take a lot of their time. Additionally, the parabiggest mistake and what they learned from graphs you’ll get will be so powerful that it, you now have 100 bits of knowledge and you’ll have a lot of knowledge to learn from powerful lessons that you can categorise. and act on. If you have 100 people on your Then, the next month, you ask two more sales team, you’re getting 100 knowledge questions: entries a month that’s a lot of knowledge! Question One: “What was the most The process is very easy. Each paragraph important personal strategy you implementis answering a question. The first is a coned last year?” (Context) text question, the second is a content quesQuestion Two: “What did it do for you and tion. Here’s an example of how the quesyour customers?” (Content) tions would work in terms of setting up the Keep doing this two-question approach context and content: every month and your company will quickly Question One: “What was the biggest have a wealth of actionmistake you made last able knowledge that year with a customer?” can be used to rapidly This sets up the context. solve problems and Let people know that spread innovation. you only want one short Does anyone lose any paragraph for a reply. of their knowledge by Question Two: “What sharing it? No. Does did you learn from your NUMBER OF USER the entire organisamistake?” This is the content; where the real ACCOUNTS ON TWITTER tion gain exponentially through the knowledge knowledge lies. Again, CURRENTLY exchange? Yes! And request just one short if people leave, due to paragraph. retirement or other reaTo encourage particisons, at least you’ve captured some of their pation, give examples from the company’s best knowledge instead of letting it all walk executive team, showing the CEO’s, CFO’s, out the door. When someone new comes on and other C-suite executive’s biggest misboard, you simply have him or her access takes and what they learned from them. the appropriate community of practice After all, if the company leaders won’t knowledge base network and start reading share, why should anyone else? But if the … and contributing. top executives are sharing, then everyone Even better, you can pull knowledge exterelse will feel compelled to share as well. The nally as well as internally. For example, you executives’ participation makes the process as the CIO can be in a community of pracboth “safe” and powerful. tice with other CIOs in companies similar If each of the 100 salespeople posts their
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to yours. The same concept would work for your CEO, CFO, etc. Even though everyone in the external community of practice would be working for competing companies, the reality is that the power of knowledge sharing is more powerful than competition. In fact, when competitors start sharing knowledge, they stimulate each other and get better ideas that each can go back and apply. Remember, you can create new knowledge by sharing existing knowledge. And just gaining the knowledge isn’t enough; you then have to apply it. How you apply knowledge versus how your competitors apply knowledge will likely be very different and that’s a good thing. That’s how an industry evolves and how innovation occurs. You want to make sure you’re on the leading edge of that evolution and innovation. Sharing knowledge is the best way to do that. Wisdom Pull - Once you get your knowledge network growing, you can take it a step further by tapping into your company’s wisdom and creating a wisdom base. What is wisdom versus knowledge? Wisdom is a guiding principle that can usually be expressed in one sentence and that tends to be timeless and cultureless. For example, the saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, has been around for a long time. It’s one powerful sentence that many people use as a guiding principle. If you’ve ever read a quote that resonated with you, it was likely a one-sentence message that helped guide your thinking. You can tap into the wisdom your team holds by creating a wisdom base where THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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Knowledge in Automotive Companies
everyone shares their personal quotes. The process is simple: Tell the different communities of practice that you want to start uring a conversasifications. They include Classification of Knowlcollecting and sharing their guiding printion, Hilal Khan, CIO, checks like printing, foredge, communication and ciples. Make it easy. Ask for only one prinHonda Siel Cars India talkwarding, archiving – this documents ciple stated in only one sentence a month. If ed about classification of creates a framework for Enablement – Using someone can’t articulate their wisdom yet, information and initiatives in controlling the knowledge various solutions related to that’s okay. Allow them to post a quote that knowledge management at flow in the organisation. process, discipline, security contains a guiding principle from someone his company. Across Honda we have and IT enablement else for now. We classify all the informadivided knowledge initiaRegular Audit – To The fact is that each person has a wealth tion being generated in tives into four parts: ensure that we are taking of wisdom inside. However, most people the organisation. There Education – sensitivity of care of information and don’t keep track of it, much less write it can be various parameters the knowledge, communiknowledge put together the down. Here’s a great way to start tracking attached to these clascation and documents. way we actually wanted. some of the wisdom you share every day: When you’re speaking with someone, every now and then you will say a guiding prinYes, you are a busy CIO. And all the ciple. When it happens you know it, and get everyone’s involvement: Tie the complepeople who report to you are busy, as is the you probably wish you could stop and write tion of the activity to the person’s paycheck. CEO and everyone else down the line. But it down. But if you’re like most people, you In other words, if they don’t take the time to answer this: During the five years before don’t want to interrupt the conversation, so answer the two questions each month, they Lehman Brothers disappeared (which suryou keep talking, thinking you’ll remember don’t get paid. Do you think that would get prised many people), were all the executives, that great quote you said later. However, the people motivated to answer two small questhe CIO, and employees very busy? Yes. But powerful sentence goes into a part of your tions each month? You bet it would. And by it didn’t help them much, did it? During the brain that’s short-term memory, and unless doing something that extreme, you’re showfive years before General Motors went bankyou write it down immediately, you’ll forget ing everyone that you think that knowledge rupt, were all the executives, the CIO, and it. and wisdom sharing is that important. employees very busy? Yes. But it didn’t help Next time when you’re talking and you By sharing knowledge and wisdom, everythem much either, did it? say one of your powerful guiding principles, one in your organisation can get smarter Being busy is not going to help you at all. stop and repeat it. By doing so, you’re shiftfaster. As a result, those in your company What is going to help you ing the words into a difwill generate more and better ideas, develop is taking the time to leverferent part of your brain more meaningful relationships with each age technology so you can that gives you more time other and with customers, and ignite the create business and comto write it down later. By spark for true innovation and long-term petitive advantage. And saying it a second time, profits. that’s exactly what creating you’ve given yourself five a knowledge- and wisdomto seven hours to write it —Dan Burrus is one of the world’s leading sharing network does. This down before it’s gone. As technology forecasters and business strateBILLION OBJECTS is about taking your most a side benefit, the listener gists, and is the author of six books, including CONTAINED IN valuable resource -- the gets to hear the wisdom the highly acclaimed Technotrends, which has THE AMAZON S3 knowledge, talent, and wisagain, which helps make been translated into over a dozen languages. He CLOUD. ANALYSIS dom of the people in your it stick in his or her mind is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a INDICATES A organisation -- and leveragtoo. research and consulting firm that monitors globGROWTH OF ing those capabilities in Again, everyone is al advancements in technology driven trends to order to bring the organisaloaded with wisdom. You help clients better understand how technologi4 BILLION S3 tion to higher profitability simply have to pull it from OBJECTS PER cal, social, and business forces are converging and accelerated growth. people so everyone can to create enormous, untapped opportunities. MONTH. Additionally, the time learn and benefit from people in your organisation spend answereach other’s experiences. To see more articles on this or any topic affecting the two questions per month will save Time Well Spent - At this point you may ing IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.com, a them even more time, making it time well be thinking, “This all sounds great, but I’m premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT spent. In fact, it’s so crucial that I even busy. And everyone in our organisation, executives from around the world. suggest you reward the behavior to ensure from the CEO to the entry level employees, everyone takes the time to answer the quesis so busy that I don’t see how we’ll have tions. Here’s an extreme example of how to time for this.”
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Human Centricity,
Social Media and the Knowledge Enterprise It is high time that you acknowledged the effect of social media and worked on policies to benefit the enterprise. By Raj Datta
A
s a young discipline, KM has many definitions and interpretations. Most efforts to date have misinterpreted knowledge management and equated it with content or information management. The term "management" brings about an illusion of exercising control and creating defined processes which automatically extracts the knowledge from people and puts it into searchable repositories within a defined taxonomy. It is believed there is a right way to classify information so that it can be centrally controlled. Most efforts that strategised in this manner did not succeed. The belief was once the intranet repository was built, content management processes and workflow deployed, people would naturally come and use it because it all made sense. The submitters of content and seekers of content were considered independently and publishing of content happened in discrete steps due to the nature of process-enabled
taxonomy and navigation in the repository content management. But this approach could seem unnatural for many seekers of didn't succeed so easily, in most cases resultthat information—different seekers have ing in failure or lukewarm success and the different ways of classifying and navigating CXO's running the show lost clout in the through information. The basic problem process. Their knowledge strategy was not with this model was that the human was designed for success. treated as a mechanical device, and knowlOne basic element that was missed was edge management was largely a processa focus on the human being. Why would driven and prescriptive approach. someone be willing to take the time and effort to pen their thoughts? Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge is fond of saying "‌ WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL MEDIA knowledge can only be volunteered, it canEnter Web 2.0 and social media. While not be conscripted." Snowden also points the basic technology underlying Web 2.0 out that we know more than we can tell, and has been around for quite some time, its we can tell more than we rise in popularity in recent can write down. years has brought it to the Inherently then, people attention of business leadare more comfortable ers. Social networking and having conversations and collaboration tools on the dialog as a way of exchangWeb are increasingly used ing knowledge. And even to tap into an explosion of if we did get the reposiCOMPANIES USE voluntary knowledge shartories populated using a ing. This feeds the comfort LINKEDIN FOR well defined prescriptive zone that people have with RECRUITMENT process, the centralised conversations and discus-
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Social Media in the Enterprise
sions through online activity. The unstructured manner in which knowlocial media has been a real revelation in that fact that it has its aegis at the very core edge is exchanged has quickly built into with professional individuals using these tools for their own personal activity. mammoth repositories such as Wikipedia. Now these media are being deployed increasingly in the enterprise - to build professional What's made the difference is the human organisation-centric networks and create and share professional content with others both is at the epicenter of these systems. In addi– in inter and intra organisation terms. Here we look at some of the contemporary social tion to conversing, humans have a need to media tools making waves that could be used in your enterprise. express themselves, to make friends and build relationships, and learn from others. People express themselves through social networks, mould their own identity, build a sense of belonging, and emote in this virtual space. Social media feels like a liberating tool as opposed to a prescriptive tool. Beyond such enabling technology, culTWITTER LINKEDIN YAMMER tural shifts in attitude have also fueled this Organisations are waking With any enterprise It is twitter for the enterphenomenon towards socialisation. Gen up to some fundamental media platform, security prise. With offerings of Y'ers are different from Gen X'er's and they positives of Twitter such is always the mandate. a (core) private, secure are both quite different from Boomers. The as, real-time short comTo this end, LinkedIn is micro-updating system ease with which Gen Y'ers are flocking to munication, instant wide different and hence more to create an in-company social media reflects a shift in social attioutreach - of almost appealing to the enternetwork with the abiltudes. The work style of both Gen X and Y is of broadcast ability, IM prise as users can be fility to create dedicated much more fluid and collaborative, and they integration, and outsidetered and pre-authorised in-house groups as well don't mind multi-tasking and generating the-firewall communicabased on their e-mail Yammer communities. outcomes through self managed teams. tion. All of the above are address. Therefore, enterAdditionally it seamlessly Their ability to multi-task coupled with handy tools for providing prises can have the capamerges with most other openness to collaboration means that they an edge when it comes bility of building control enterprise offerings like are comfortable with things being done to enterprise commuaround discussion boards Sharepoint and email, as piece meal, a bit at a time, through a collecnication and interacting and link-sharing areas by well as public social tools tive effort. This is true both in their personal directly with customers. e-mail domain. like Google Reader. and professional lives. Gen Y'ers certainly don't rely as much on the boss for detailed direction and task allocation as previous generations did. Many times the boss has to and feelings, as well. However, others not THE ‘PROSUMER’ get out of the way and let the team get the directly involved in the decision making In this brave new world the separate roles job done. process often only get communication of of producers and consumers of knowledge Gen Y'ers are also much more at ease with the outcome of the decision and don't have are merging and the age of the “prosumer” diversity, across economic, ethnic, gender, an understanding of what went into the is at hand where people collectively generate and cognitive-style strata. They are hence decision making process. There is no eviand consume knowledge and everyone eats easily connecting with other people in other dence available to them of what transpired their own dog food. Collaborative technoloparts of the planet and anyone with a comand why. And in today's empowered world, gies are allowing people to not only discuss mon interest or goal becomes a friend in the people spring into action only when they issues and fuel the decision making process online world. They also like exploring and truly understand the reasoning underlythrough collective gathering of views and learning new things with an open mind, ing decisions more thoroughly. By creating opinions, but also create an explicit form of and are even cultivatan explicit form of social memory online, social memory. ing their value systems people can understand the “why” of certain For example, people through online interacdecisions, and even get more involved in the who are socially tion. From a content decision making process itself. This applies involved in the delibperspective, such a shift to not only tactical issues at a project team erations for making a in behaviour is creatlevel, but strategic issues at an organisadecision often have the ing more comfort with tional level as well. deep insight into the unstructured or loosely This significantly improves the quality of reasons for making that NUMBER OF ACTIVE structured content geninformation available to people, and claridecision. They have MOBILE FACEBOOK eration, and a receptivefies the context within which people are an understanding of USERS. ness to collaboration. expected to act, which enhances buy-in, and each others' viewpoints
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100 MILLION
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creates a common alignment in purpose and direction. Social media then not only allows for conversations, but creates more inclusion overall. This is part of the reason that the open source movement has become so widespread and powerful. Innovation also is fueled by social networking. There is a growing opinion that innovation is fueled by an open and collaborative process which taps into the collective know-how of a community to not only come up with ideas, but to collectively transform those ideas into inventions and innovations. The success of the open source movement is a good example of this. Different people pitch in at different times in the process of creating open source software, balancing diverse collective thinking with collective action. And studies have shown that by creating a community of lead users and allowing them to interact, new demand itself is generated tapping into potential blue oceans. Customer communities are allowing companies to simply listen and observe and sense trends ahead of time. Innovation, is a largely a social phenomena, and the flattening of the world is accelerating the pace through an increased capacity for connecting people.
“We do not have any policies for social media as yet but we are planning to implement ways that groom an employee personally and professionally, without sacrificing independence.” — Hilal Khan CIO, Honda Siel Cars India
would still get generated based on defined templates, but what would feed it is an increased understanding and availability of thoughts assembled by people in the organisation, which is done through a continuous organic movement. Centrally created taxonomies will be driven by facets and roles of people, and classification through individually generated tags will supplement the organisational view. Providing alternative means for navigation will be necessary. Personalisation and customisation will become strategically important in this human-centric approach, and any assessment of technology deployment HARNESSING KNOWLEDGE will necessarily require give higher weight So what does this all mean to the enterto these features. Teamprise whose ability to ing and collaborative harness knowledge and software will have to be build capability is a core deployed allowing people strategic issue? They to connect with respect must reconsider and to their project, their job, redraft their knowledge and their passion. strategy for this "2.0" Beyond this, to get world. From a nuts and THIRD PARTY APPS maximum impact from bolts perspective, the ARE AVAILABLE FOR knowledge managetraditional deployment of TWITTER. ment, the leadership of centralised content mana knowledge enterprise agement systems will will need to shift its mental model and start have to be merged with this newer phenomthinking from a sociological and anthropoena of community-driven content generalogical viewpoint. They will need to observe tion. The process-driven approach has to be and perhaps even conduct ethnographic merged with a people-driven approach and studies to understand the emergent ways of strategically backed by technology to make it working that humans in self-organised teams a widespread reality. have realised. This is especially needed if A defined path for content management there are generation gaps between the leaderis still needed, but the raw material feedship and the rest of the workforce. ing it becomes assembled using collective To enable higher levels of innovation, approaches a bit at a time. White papers
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organisational-level knowledge processes will need to be deployed to pickup ideas and opportunity identification arising out of community activity. The knowledge harvesting process will go beyond lessons learned and get focused on sensing trends to become a forward-looking enterprise. Over time, as communities mature, decision-making also will increasingly be delegated to them, and pertinent issues will get funneled to them spontaneously for handling. This will result in more agility in sense-making, decisionmaking and responsive action. The enterprise will need to be thought of as a set of social networks both formal and informal, both intentional and emergent, which interact with each other to create organisational capability. These networks will also interact with the outside world over time and create innovation capacity. This is a powerful picture of the future and all that is needed to get started is to think of the human being. —Raj Datta is VP and chief knowledge officer at MindTree with global responsibilities for all aspects of innovation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and reuse. To see more articles on this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.com, a premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT executives from around the world.
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NEXT
HORIZONS
AUTHOR SAYS:
“Be prepared to take action if the rules are not followed.”
PHOTO: PHOTOS.COM
T
Reining the Social Horses How to keep track of employees' social media usage
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BY PAM BAKER
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
o say that confusion reigns over who is responsible for something said in social media is the understatement of the year. In a sad but comedic squabble over individual vs. corporate responsibility, a flurry of finger-pointing ensues only to end in a rash command to the rank and file to just "zip it already". But “people are going to use social tools for business whether the tools are provided by IT or not,” warned Wendy Steinle, marketing director for Novell Pulse. Yes, for business and for pleasure, the Twitter tweets and Facebook posts still fly from phones and computers all the day long, no matter what an employer has to say about the matter. Sure, a company can give an offending tweeter the boot but that’s a bit like locking the house after the burglar leaves with all your stuff. Sadder still if the offending post breaks compliance and the lawman locks you up for the burglary. On the other hand, there are those companies that, when faced with a runaway staff of tweeters, let the reins fly and trust the team to arrive safely at the destination. These are typically the companies that hail social media for its marketing value. That approach, however, leads to even more confusion. A recent global study conducted by the
SOCIAL MEDIA
Ponemon Institute and Check Point found that while the majority of IT and IT security practitioners believe employees should be responsible for their social repertoire, the majority of employees “rarely or never” consider security in their everyday business communications ... bit of a huge, gaping disconnect there, to say the least. Further aggravating the situation is the lack of consensus over who in the corporate pyramid should be the Pharaoh of Prelection. In the aforementioned survey, more than half of respondents in the U.S., UK and Australia say the employee should be the most responsible party for his or her gaffes but the CISO, corporate IT CIO might have a teeny bit of responsibility too. In contrast, respondents in France believe HR, followed by information security, are most responsible for controlling employees’ social media forays. In Japan, legal followed by corporate IT are viewed as the most responsible parties. In any case, nobody is in charge most of the time — fine fleck of leadership that is.
NEXT HORIZONS
Data loss prevention tools such as Symantec Vontu or RSA DLP can give you much more fine-grained control over what information users post to Facebook et al.
TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite are tools that track conversations, keywords and hashtags on Twitter (some go beyond Twitter, too). CoTweet, built specifically for larger organisations, allows multiple people to respond to tweets at the same time. Trackur and BrandWatch are tools that help companies find anything said by anybody about the company or its products. These tools are generally used for searching for specific message content rather than for specific users. Companies such as Novell Pulse, Symantec, RSA, Check Point, Zecurion, Identitylogix, Smarsh, and SpectorSoft produce solutions that do everything from enabling compaReining it in nies to review social media postings before But there are a few companies that have employees post to tracking employee usage of successfully harnessed their runaway social media inside company walls. teams into a quasi-tamed pace. Typically “Data loss prevention tools such as Symanthey begin with a strong policy that spells tec Vontu or RSA DLP can give you much out what can and can’t be discussed in pubmore fine-grained control over what informalic and the repercussions if any virtual lips tion users post to Facebook et al,” explained slip. “Just make sure you have usage poliRakkhi Samarasekera, CEO of rakkhis.com, cies, security guidelines and access rules a security startup. “If employees upload comput in place before you send your employpany confidential documents or information, ees off to socialise with the company's you can either block or investigate and take data,” advises Steinle. remedial action.” But be prepared to take action if the rules Trendrr takes a slightly different approach are not followed. by tracking location-based services “If the policy is not clear and such as Foursquare and Gowalla easily enforced, then the complus it aggregates Facebook “likes” pany's efforts to address the risks and reputation scores via Klout. associated with social networking (Trendrr also has a built-in sentiwill be in vain,” said Sam KolENTERPRISES ment analysis feature for tracking bert-Hyle, vice president of BusiHAVE TWO OR customer attitudes about brands ness Development and Strategic Initiatives at Smarsh, a company MORE YEARS OF and products.) There is also a new freebie that provides hosted supervision EXPERIENCE WITH tool to track employee usage of and archiving solutions for elecSOCIAL MEDIA enterprise and Internet social tronic communications. media on the market. NodeXL is Enforcement is easier if you are a free, open network discovery aware that the offense has taken and exploration add-in for Excel 2007 and place. To do that, your company needs an 2010. It extends the familiar and favorite arsenal of new tools. They come with a variety spreadsheet to collect, analyse and graph of purposes. Monitter, Twitterfall, TweetGrid,
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activity on social networks including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, www hyperlinks, and your local company email. NodeXL is a project from the Social Media Research Foundation and is supported by the Microsoft Research External Projects Group. The contributors are a list of notables from Microsoft Research, University of Porto, University of Maryland, Stanford University, Cornell, Oxford University, Australian National University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, among others. But there are ways to do some employee tracking yourself such as “via the proxy server which keeps a lot of usage [data] and, with a bit of light scripting, the connecting IP addresses can be mapped back via Active Directory to the individual user,” said Rakkhi. From this you can collect stats, he says, such as usage, time spent on average, subsites visited (e.g. Facebook apps and games), and when used (e.g. during lunch and after-hours or during the work day). “You can then combine with any productivity or other HR issues if you need evidence to put on a performance improvement plan or to terminate, said Rakkhi. “Also name and shame walls of Top 10 Facebook users are effective deterrents.” Be careful not to go too Big Brother with your efforts, however, as such is counterproductive. “The most successful enterprise social media deployments are those that strike the right balance between user control and free-flowing collaboration around data,” says Steinle. “Just because you want some level of management over social tools, doesn't mean you have to box yourself into a corner.” —To see more articles on this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit www.cioupdate. com, a premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT executives from around the world.
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LITTLE GIANTS
T H E C A L C U T TA M E D I C A L R E S E A R C H I N S T I T U T E
COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY: The Calcutta Medical Research Institute. ESTABLISHED: 1969 REVENUE: 250 Crore Rupees
PHOTO BY NITISH SHARMA
HEADQUARTERS: Kolkata, India NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: More than 2,500 CUSTOMERS: Eastern India and neighbouring countries
IN THE GREEN OF HEALTH A few well-thought-out initiatives at CMRI’s IT enterprise improved its operations and reduced its carbon footprint as well. BY VINITA GUPTA
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ALCUTTA MEDICAL Research Institute is a 400-plus bed multi speciality care provider open round the clock. the company’s focus was to lower the cost involved in providing the best industry-standard services to its customers. “Most of our terminals throughout our enterprise work 24/7,” said CIO Vishnu Gupta. “They consume a substantial amount of power.” That these computers were often only required for limited operations meant that there was scope for looking at ways to achieve savings without disrupting operations, Gupta said. The solution that was arrived at had the following phases of implementation: Identification of terminals that had to be replaced with low-powerconsumption PCs. Identification of terminals with limited scope for productivity and operations. Development of a portal to facilitate information and data management across the organisation The first phase started in February last year and the next two phases ran simultaneously in August the same year. Today, the project deployment is in Beta phase, and the company has already started saving money on power – usage has reduced from 130 watts to around 12 watts per PC. EMBRACE GREEN The project is part of an 'Embrace Green' initiative that Gupta and the organisation have set in motion. “As our organisation relies on electronic business, we are trying to reduce carbon footprints, trim operational expenses and generate savings through IT,” Gupta said. “Embrace Green is an amalgamation of three initiatives to improve operational efficiency while contributing towards the green movement in our daily operations,” he said. Gupta and his team found practical ways of making this difference without compromising the hospital's operations. Here are some measures they took: Atom-Based PCs: A simple switch to Intel Atom-based PCs alone saved the institute reduce power consumption at those terminals by as much as 40 percent. This also meant that Gupta saved money on the cap-ex that went into purchasing the 50 PCs he deployed as the Atom-based PCs were cheaper. Desktop virtualisation: Desktop virtualisation contributed to increasing the operational efficiency by reducing the downtime of hardware and sharing the resources of high-end terminals. These terminals would use the resources of a single high end PC while giving the same operational output.
LITTLE GIANTS
THREE INITIATIVES Paperless MIS, virtualisation of desktop and low power consumption PCs. Day to day MIS and communication to go on organisational portal online for any-time access and a delivery mechanism over smart phones. Thin clients to replicate and utilise the server resources and deployment of very low power consuming CPUs with limited functionalities. HOW MUCH? Cost of replacing old terminals with Atom-based PCs: INR 5,00,000 Cost of desktop virtualisation: INR 50,000 Cost of building the online portal: INR 54,000
“We have multiple departments which use specific software solutions for their day to day operations,” Gupta said. “The licensing cost for each terminal within that department increases.” Moreover with many such software solutions requiring specific hardware, replacing such terminals with thin clients became a smart option. “Since thin clients have the capacity to replicate any machine's resources over multiple terminals, we have been able to reduce hardware-specific machines,” Gupta said. This meant a corresponding reduction in the related “housekeeping and maintenance” activities. Finally, the power consumed by the thin clients was “negligible compared to conventional CPUs,” he said. One Stop Portal: The healthcare industry is very dynamic and a hospital's management needs to monitor operations very closely. This usually means a lot of paper-based reports, notifications, and communications are generated every day. Gupta's team used Microsoft's SharePoint to build a one-stop portal that considerably increased the efficiency of keeping track of all reports. “Since SharePoint has become a one-stop dashboard for all on role-defined access to information, we have routed their entire information channel towards the portal,” Gupta said. “This has helped us to bring down the cost required for this function considerably.” He is also working towards making the online portal support the hospital's Information and Data Management policy, he said. The next step for Gupta is to implement a more formal server virtualisation solution. The hospital's IT enterprise presently uses virtualisation solutions from Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Sun Microsystems, he said.
AS OUR ORGANISATION RELIES ON ELECTRONIC BUSINESS, WE ARE TRYING TO REDUCE THE CARBON FOOTPRINT AND GENERATE SAVINGS THROUGH IT.
—editor@thectoforum.com
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4
POINTS
IGNORANCE: Ignoring the data COMBINATION: Combining the move with other projects
IMAGING: ANIL T
PLANNING: Failing to plan appropriately
4
INVENTORIES: Not creating an inventory of equipment, applications and processes.
CAREERENDING MISTAKES
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You must not commit the following blunders while planning to move your data centre. BY IRWIN TEODORO
D ATA C E N T R E S
T E CH F O R G OVE R NAN CE
or failure-to-vacate penalties may wipe out any projected savings from the combined projects. Incomplete planning: Some IT professionals don’t take the time or effort to prepare a comprehensive plan or complete documentation of their existing data centre environments. They either go from memory about which applications run on which servers, or make incorrect assumptions on equipment that may or may not be in use. Relying on memory practically guarantees that a key server or application won’t get moved correctly. Smart project managers take a comprehensive approach to planning; not only working a baseline “best case” plan to accomplish the project goals, but putting significant upfront time into risk manageidentify information that may be affected ment planning. Most failures are due to and reach agreement on such items as data a lack of foresight — nobody thought the access, compatibility with new systems, disaster that just hit your data centre move application migration and others. Cleansing could happen; therefore, you didn’t plan data prior to the move may be worthwhile, for it. but definitely not during the move. Spend the time and meet with business Killing two birds with one stone: With all owners across the organisation and your the planning that goes into moving a data IT team. Identify some of the worst-case centre, many IT professionals attempt to scenarios that could occur in your data combine other projects, often guided by the centre move. When you think you’ve identiCFO’s visions of cost savings. fied them all, brainstorm some This is probably the biggest more. Assess the likelihood of mistake a firm can make. each scenario and the potential One of our clients recently business impact and make conattempted to combine multiple tingency plans. Disasters may projects into a garden-variety not happen, but if you prepare THINK THAT DATA data centre move and wound up for them, you’ll be in a far better GROWTH IS ONE making the project so complex place if they do. OF THE THREE TOP that the timeline slipped out Forgetting to create a compast all available slack in the plete inventory: It goes without CHALLENGES IN plan. The firm was subject to saying that any IT professionals DATA CENTRES significant financial penalties worth their credentials will have by failing to vacate the old facildeveloped strong project plans, ity on time. with plenty of slack time. However, don’t Moving a data centre is a major project forget to develop a comprehensive inventory in and of itself, but it is not the time to take of every server, application, networking conon virtualisation of the computing environnection, storage array and everything else in ment, or incorporation of a new tiered-storyour data centre before you start to move. age philosophy. Move your data centre first. Work with business leaders across the If your operations or finance teams insist on enterprise to make sure you include everytrying to combine projects, work with your thing, and be certain to have a well-docuvendor or reseller on a quote for sequential mented list of everything in the current data projects; the fees should not be significantly centre before planning a new one. more. Finally, calculate potential costs assoBeing lax or unprepared in moving data ciated with the increased complexity of comcan have devastating results. While combined projects. Paying an extra month’s rent pany expectations are high for improved
Moving a data centre is a major
undertaking for most organisations. And a successful move is a nice resume builder for any IT professional. A successful move will showcase skills in large-scale project planning, project management, technology integration and interpersonal communications. The process provides a chance for exposure across the company, as virtually every department is touched by the IT organisation (and affected by a data centre move) in some way.
However, data centre moves can be fraught with career-ending failures. No IT professional wants to be on the receiving end of memos and discussions describing lost orders, missed deadlines or customer dissatisfaction that occurred because some mission-critical business process was disrupted by a data centre move that didn’t run smoothly. In most relocation projects, there are four critical mistakes to avoid: Ignoring the data Combining the move with other projects Failing to plan appropriately; and Not creating an inventory of equipment, applications and processes. Taking time up front to think through each of these will significantly improve your chances for success and the personal recognition that follows. Ignoring the data: While IT professions give plenty of thought to the infrastructure involved in a data centre relocation, moving the data itself can be just as taxing. Sometimes even more so. It is easy to lose sight of the data as many firms have adopted the model that business group leaders own their data, Marketing owns the prospect data base, Operations owns inventory data, and so on. Yet the reality is that the data and its underlying infrastructure must be considered as part of an interconnected holistic system — not elements that can be taken apart and easily reassembled at will. The smart IT professional will reach out to business owners before the move to
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performance from a new infrastructure environment, data quality may suffer if it is quickly moved as an afterthought. At best, critical data may be temporarily unavailable. At worst, records could be permanently lost. For companies that increasingly rely on data, the ramifications range from abandoned e-commerce shopping carts and immediate loss of sales to long-term damage to customer relationships and company reputations.
Develop plans to relocate data with as much care as you put into hardware and building projects, and make sure you work with data owners across the enterprise. By following these recommendations, you’ll wish you could move more often.
tion firm. He is responsible for assessment services, integration of multi-vendor solutions, and coordination of professional service projects. Teodoro can be reached at iteodoro@ laurustech.com. To see more articles on this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.
—Irwin Teodoro is director of Systems Inte-
com, a premier destination site for CIOs,
gration for Laurus Technologies, a leading
CTOs, and IT executives from around the
Midwest IT consulting and systems integra-
world.
Strategically Managing Technology Investments If not managed properly they can chew through millions of dollars on the way to a write-off.
IMAGING: SURESH KUMAR
BY FAISAL HOQUE
C
orporate leaders commit enormous sums to technology investment — often, despite reams of ‘business cases’ — on a hope and a prayer that this money will actually buy solutions to their problems. Investments in information technology are particularly mysterious, because it is so new and constantly changing. Nevertheless, it now accounts for half of all capital spending. Spent wisely, business technology investment can make
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the competitive difference, but if mismanaged it can chew through a few hundred million dollars on the way to a write-off. If technology investments are to be strategic and effective, it is critically important to recognise that an organisation will need not just hardware and software but new business technology management capabilities as well. Although new technologies can and have transformed the business landscape, they alone are not sufficient for success. The organisation must make complementary investments in its business processes and structures. Technology alone is not an answer to anything; managing that technology together with the business is. A critical tool in making wise technology investments is the use of a portfolio. While most of you are aware of the portfolio concept, most companies have not successfully used it to significantly improve the return on their investment in technology. In several cases, setting priorities on projects is politically driven based on who thinks what is most critical. Although not surprising, I would argue that by applying a portfolio and program management (PPM) capability, organisations can replace political contests with fact-based decision-making.
I NVE STME NTS
T E CH F O R G OVE R NAN CE
The general principle that drives many companies towards a PPM approach is a simple one: An automotive company wouldn't manufacture a car without first undergoing a comprehensive analysis and design process to determine if the car would sell; how much it would cost to manufacture; what price it should sell at; what features and functionality it should have; how long it would take to produce; and so on. A corporation shouldn’t decide to invest in a particular technology without following the same general rule. Various terms with various definitions have been used to describe this concept. We use portfolio and program management to convey making it possible to select among them and create an optimal its holistic nature. I define PPM as the enterprise-wide focus on investment portfolio. Through a centralised view of all business defining, gathering, categorising, analysing and monitoring infortechnology projects, a good portfolio will make it easy to ensure that mation on corporate assets and activity to achieve business objecinvestments are well balanced in terms of size, risk and projected tives. payoff. Used wisely, it will actually increase business technology’s PPM can unite an organisation’s efforts at every level. It is a value by exposing projects that are redundant or risky, while revealcompletely different way of seeing, assessing and planning the busiing how to shift funds from low-value investments to high-value, ness. Portfolios can be developed far beyond the project level. They strategic ones. can include business models, markets, and partner companies’ PPM moves an organisation toward the convergence of business knowledge. They should include people as well as physical assets and technology management in several ways: It creates a “single and answer such questions as: Do we have the right people with the view of the truth” about a firm’s operations, and it generates a comright skills in the right place to quickly adjust our business to take mon vocabulary and set of metrics. It permits a comprehensive advantage of a new opportunity? set of decisions to be made before action is taken, identifying and This use of portfolios is analogous, to a degree, to financial portforesolving conflicts. It allows strategic direction flowing down to lio management. For example, in finance, where the concept of portmeet suggested courses of action flowing up in a formal managefolio management originated, an investor identifies and categorises ment process. PPM is, in fact, continuous: strategic planning all assets and collects them in a portfolio. This allows the investor to informs portfolio managers, who reassess programmes; and projsee various aggregated views of individual investments. The investor ects based on that information and information on the status of IT might see, for instance, that the portfolio is weighted too assets, risks and financial performance likewise influheavily in one industry, has redundant exposure to one ence subsequent strategic planning. type of security, carries a certain level of risk and promPPM provides information that links business needs ises a certain level of return. The investor can then set with business technology activities enabling a converged up a strategy and construct a portfolio likely to achieve viewpoint that is simply focused on business outcomes, an appropriate balance of risk-return. rather than advancing the interests of one group versus OF BUSINESSES In much the same way, technology asset portfolios another. PPM allows an organisation to get beyond the WILL HAVE NO reveal what a company owns and business technology incomplete approach of computing the ROI of indiOWNERSHIP OF IT project portfolios can reveal what its various arms are vidual projects. With a portfolio viewpoint, the payback trying to accomplish. It can thus decide which pieces of of a project can be evaluated within the context of many ASSETS BY 2012 all this activity are more likely to support the enterprise projects contributing to a business goal. The merits of business strategy. individual projects are not seen in isolation but in conThe bottom line is that effective PPM can help a comsideration of their contribution to business capabilities pany better align business technology spending with current and that enable a strategy. future business needs. PPM creates information and insight to help In forward thinking companies, business technology portfolios executives and managers make such decisions as: become inseparable from other portfolios — R&D, new products, and the like — and become just another component of a business Defining business improvement options and scenarios initiative. Analysing implications/impacts of potential initiatives Setting target allocations for investment categories Evaluating and making decisions on project requests —Faisal Hoque is an internationally known entrepreneur and author, and the founder and CEO of BTM Corp. His previous books include Evaluating the health of technology assets Sustained Innovation and Winning The 3-Legged Race. BTM innovates Determining appropriate sequencing of major programmes business models and enhances financial performance by converging Managing risk mitigation across the enterprise; and business and technology with its products and intellectual property. Identifying and resolving critical project-related issues. To see more articles on this or any topic affecting IT today, please visit PPM provides a centralised and balanced view of the payoffs of www.cioupdate.com, a premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT various projects that lays out the benefits and risks of each one,
“In forward thinking companies, business technology portfolios become inseparable from other portfolios”
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executives from around the world.
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SECURITY
THE NEW
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Michael Sentonas, Vice President and CTO Asia Pacific at McAfee Inc, has been with the company since 1999. He is a regular speaker on security issues at industry events and executive roundtables across the Asia Pacific region, and is a passionate advocate of the business value of IT security management. In an interaction with R Giridhar at the recent McAfee Focus 10 event, Sentonas discusses the evolving security landscape and the new approaches to security.
M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S
What technology trends will have the greatest impact on security? Consumerisation of IT and expanding definition of what is an end-point will have a huge influence on security. Today, there are many kinds of devices that can be connected to the enterprise network—from PCs and laptops to mobile phones and tablet PCs as well as fixed-function devices such as point-of-sale (POS) terminals, ATM machines, printers, storage and other devices. All of these IP-enabled devices have the potential for vulnerability and exploitation. A growing problem for IT administrators is the increasing trend of users bringing in their own mobile hardware and devices to the workplace, and then detaching from the corporate LAN taking these devices home. How do you secure such devices and enforce policies in a consistent fashion? Another technology trend that has been happening for nearly a decade is virtualisation. Keeping virtual servers as well as virtual desktops protected, while ensuring performance optimisation is another big challenge. Going forward, we will need to think about security for the cloud, in the cloud and from the cloud. How will these influence the way we think about security? The traditional security philosophy was “defence in depth”. Consequently, IT departments employed a wide range of tools and technologies from various vendors in an effort to ensure adequate security. While this approach has some benefits, the disadvantages far outweigh them, for example, multiple management consoles that don’t inter-operate, multiple update servers, multiple agents on an endpoint, and overlapping functionalities. The security landscape continually changes and today, IT teams need to deal with a larger variety and volume of threats, and a dizzying array of computing platforms. The result is a prolifera-
tion security solutions and options. Take for instance a typical corporate organisation. It would have deployed solutions including host intrusion protection systems (HIPS), firewalls, desktop and server antivirus, and encryption to ensure security. Often, these will be ‘bestof-breed’ options. The big problem for the IT department is that these security solutions don’t inter-operate or integrate with each other. So, it becomes very hard to manage them, keep them updated and patched. What is the overhead associated with multiple solutions versus providing the same functionality from one solution? Organisations need to start looking at newer approaches to security: an example is next-generation whitelisting, an approach that gives you control over application behaviour, not blacklisting, to reduce the management overhead. Basically, you need to re-think the way you do end-point security, network security, content security, security management with the goal to move to a more optimised security architecture. What is your company’s vision for next generation security? The traditional model of putting in new security solutions for each new
“We would like security to support business innovation, to allow the use of new technology and services.”
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threat vector and scenario is simply not viable. Today, businesses require an integrated intelligent security solution that provides a global view of threats, vulnerabilities, and the counter measures to address them. We think that McAfee is best positioned to provide a full suite of correlated and comprehensive intelligence that can significantly reduce risk, enhance security preparedness, help meet compliance regulations, and enhance operational efficiencies. We would like security to support business innovation, to allow the use of new technology and services and do it securely and safely rather than security being a business inhibitor. What are the elements of your next generation security strategy? We are proposing a multi-component and multi-tiered approach to security that can be rapidly deployed, and is easy to manage. Some components of our initiative include: McAfee Security Connected is an open framework for integrating potentially disparate security technologies. The framework enables technologies to work together through collective intelligence, it also enhances each solution’s individual security capabilities, efficiencies, and effectiveness. Delivering integrated security solutions for PCs, smart phones, storage devices, embedded systems, network perimeter, data center, web gateways, mail security, content, through a choice of on-premise, SaaS and hybrid delivery models. Developing predictive security solutions that can proactively find and protect against vulnerabilities, target and predict threats based on policies and events Today’s networks face continuous threats and unauthorised access to resources. Combining real-time threat awareness, award-winning firewall and intrusion prevention technologies with network access control, and an optimised manage-
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DOSSIER COMPANY: McAfee Inc SERVICES: Enterprise and personal Security products
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ment platform, our goal is to deliver the world’s most comprehensive network defense. Performing ongoing research and analysis to predict threats, perform ‘reputational’ scoring, and rapidly deliver the results to many kinds of connected devices through the cloud. What specific solutions have you developed that tie into this strategy? While antivirus technologies are still an important part of our product portfolio, we also have network security, data protection, security-as-a-service (SaaS), and risk and compliance business units. We work on a number of areas of security, including hypervisor-based protection, application white-listing, cloud-based security, as well as management and inter-operation of
across virtual and physical environments. Our customers say that McAfee Endpoint Security optimises security performance and reduces the total cost of ownership. The other new solution is McAfee Security Management 5. This is a centralised management platform that delivers proactive risk management, integration with business operations, and coordinated security defences. It can give an IT manager a full risk profile across multiple security layers, vendors, products and solutions—enabling a good understanding of the threat landscape and business risk. When used in conjunction with the Enterprise Mobility Management 9.0 (EMM) platform, it enables enterprises to extend the data centre to smart phones with the same control, visibility and security they get with laptops.
“IT heads should begin by adopting a platform for security that conforms to their industryspecific needs.” security solutions. We have been providing SaaS solutions for over ten years with offerings that span endpoint protection, vulnerability assessment services, e-mail and Web security as well as cloud-based global threat intelligence technologies. We will continue to advance and improve these services. Our latest releases are Endpoint Security 9 and Security Management 5. The first provides protection for desktops, servers, virtual machines, mobile devices and embedded systems. The Management Optimised for Virtualised Environments Platform (MOVE) technology improves virtual machine density and performance by offloading security functions like AV scanning. It also facilitates seamless security and management control
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What is your advice to IT managers who need to manage enterprise security? Security professionals have a growing challenge to prevent unauthorised intrusions, they have an obligation to protect the company from data loss and an even bigger challenge just trying keep up with a deluge of threats on the Internet. Trying to do this when many businesses are keeping IT spend relatively flat in the current economic climate is one challenge. Another is helping the business understand the challenges, calculating things like annualised loss expectancy (or risk to business) in monetary terms and explaining it to senior management can be very tough. At the same time they also have to plan, implement and run
the security systems to protect the enterprise from these risks. I would suggest that IT managers begin by adopting a platform or framework for security that conforms to their industry-specific needs, and, take a proactive approach to towards both security optimisation and deployment. This means that you should: Create and implement a security policy for your organisation. Make sure that the policy is frequently reviewed and that it takes into account the evolving threat landscape. Make sure that the people responsible for security are closely aligned with business requirements — otherwise the security policy will not succeed. Security should not inhibit business or impose unwarranted costs and inflexibility. Get good understanding of all your corporate assets and their vulnerabilities. Learn about the counter measures. Anything that can connect to or transact on your network should be understood, only then can you figure out how it can be compromised and of course protected. Audit your network and connected devices regularly and assign a business value to the device. Based on the value you place on a device or service and understand what vulnerabilities and exposures exist, you can determine the amount of protection technology to deploy. Build protection strategies for the entire organisation (including firewalls, intrusion protection systems, and anti-malware programs). Based on your appetite for risk you can choose the solution, vendor and service. Take steps to streamline and unify disparate security strategies. Implement a phased measurement and compliance process to ensure that your security policy is functioning, the protections are adequate, and your organisation meets compliance needs. You should have consistent information that gives you a complete view of the risk landscape. Leverage a unified platform to deploy, manage and report on security. Keep yourself updated on the evolving security landscape and threats, and adapt your security policy and protection measures. Educate users about security. People are often the weakest link in the security environment. —r.giridhar@9dot9.in
HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE
All the Good Things JS PURI
to rank CIOs on the basis of the professional accomplishments and on the scale of their passion towards life, JS Puri would be at the top of the pyramid. He loves everything – from his car to the latest enterprise system implementation he is undertaking for Fortis Healthcare, one of the fastest growing hospital chains in India and South East Asia. JS Puri started his career with DCM data systems in the late 70s and then moved on to HCL after a few years. Here he was involved in a division called International Integration, which involved in importing and selling copiers, Dictaphones etc. from Toshiba in the 80s. After this, he moved to Ranbaxy for the first time and then moved to an American company called Far East Technologies, based out of Boston. It was a system implementation company with operations in the United States, Middle East and APAC. He was heading their operations for APAC. This was the time, comparatively early in his career, that he was responsible for 16 multi-site ERP implementations, mostly in the automotive industry. He came back to India for a short stint at Bhushan Steels, after which he IF WE WERE
MUSIC: Puri's home theatre includes a high end studio five way Onkyo front end speakers, with a 12” woofer. The system uses Mordaunt Short active subwoofer for bass and dipolars from the same brand for the side surround speakers. The rear speakers are bipolar Wharf Dale. CAMERAS: Puri has a host of cameras that fuel his passion for photography. A
host of Nikons, Canons and a Hasselblack medium format camera complete the collection. THE RIDE: Puri’s passion for all things good is reflected in his car too. Like his audio equipment he has a unique car too – the Lexus LX 470. The massive luxury SUV runs on a 4.5 litre petrol engine, delivering more than 250 horses.
joined Sharda Motors not only for a business venture, but to satisfy his other big passion – music. A very discerning audiophile, Puri loves to relax at home and watch DVDs of rock concerts from around the world on his very elaborate home theatre. THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM
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PHOTOS BY SUBHOJIT PAUL
CIO, Fortis Healthcare
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Snap Shot With Sharda Motors, he was able to bring to a life an old desire of bringing Nakamichi, Marantz and Boston Acoustics to India. He then joined Ranbaxy as the Director of Corporate Affairs and was heading SRL Ranbaxy, one of the largest chains of pathological labs, as its CEO. According to him technology is never a challenge for him but people are. “Wherever I have been, technology, healthcare or audio, people play a very critical role. I have taken it as a challenge to be able to satisfy my customers and the people working with me as soon as possible. I think I have done pretty well to achieve that,” he says. But work is not the only place where is heart is, as he says, “photography is my second passion”. He has been an ardent photographer who has even done professional assignments. He has a great collection of cameras too, that range from Nikon, Canon and as he says, “For some strange reasons, a Hasselblad”. He has worked with Hardev Singh, a specialist large format photographer with an expertise in architectural photography. His first passion is his music. And, it is nowhere close to be called a passing hobby. Music runs in this man’s veins. An audiophile to the core, he has played in a band called Genuine Spares in the Shimla Beat Contest. He has hundreds of DVDs and Blue Ray discs of all the bands that you can think of. He likes all kinds of music, starting from Grand Funk Rail Road, Traffic, Eric Claption, Santana to Garry Moore. He loves to have music jams where he and his friends come together to listen to the music that they like. JS Puri lives in Faridabad with his wife Mini and his dog, Buddy. —By Geetaj Channana
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The Collections – Uncut Stones: If Puri’s car delivers raw power, the raw uncut stones in his home make it look something else altogether. He and his wife have a beautiful collection of uncut precious stones that include rubies, emeralds, sapphires, a 90 kg mother cross quartz clear crystal (with several terminators) and a 7 kg yellow citiren amongst many others. If this is not surprising enough, the collection also includes a molask fossil from the bottom of the sea, which is millions of years old. The Collections - DVD and Blue ray: A music enthusiast like him must have a whole lot of music – right. He has a collection of at least 500 DVDs. A big part of this collection is DVDs of live rock concerts. The story behind how he made such a huge collection is also very interesting. “There was a time when I used to pass by Amsterdam airport only because they had the best collection of music that you could get anywhere else.” Says Puri. He likes all kinds of movies with the favourite being Ice Age, Matrix and The Devil Wears Prada.
HIDDENTANGENT GEETAJ CHANNANA geetaj.channana@9dot9.in
THE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum
Technology Inspired by Animals
There is more than one way in which nature affects technology. HAVE you seen a cat jump off a high wall and land safely on its feet? Try doing that yourself and you would know how difficult it is. One of the many things that enables the cat to pull-off this stunt is hidden in its feet and the way it uses them. The cat first lands on its toes and then uses the heel to cushion its fall. Have you heard of the Jesus Christ Lizard? This too has marvelous feet. This particular lizard can actually run on water without getting drowned. Yes, a lot of insects can do the same, but their body mass is not enough to break the density of water – but the basilisk lizard is pretty big. It is able to run on water by bicycling it legs on top of the water at such an angle that its body rises out of the water on its own. Without making it sound like useless rants, I would give you one more example. This time it is about the Owl. You can hear the owl hoot but have you ever tried listening to it fly. Probably not. Since, it feeds
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mostly in the night on prey that have extremely sensitive senses – it has to fly extremely swiftly, without making a sound. But, why am I talking about animals in a technology publication? This is because two of the above mentioned three feats have already converted into technologies that we use on a daily basis. The third one, is still being experimented upon. Lenovo’s Thinkpad team has learnt from the cat and the owl to make their notebooks more reliable and silent. Lenovo uses something called the cat’s paw design in their rubber pads that you see in your laptop computers. The seemingly simple part has been inspired by the cat’s feet and helps in reducing shocks the laptop computer. The dual impact system cushions the laptop from crashing when you throw it on the table in rage after a fight with your boss. But how can the owl be used to make your job easier? Arimasa Naitoh, affectionately called “Father of
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"The basilisk lizard is able to run on water by bicycling it legs on the surface of water"
the Thinkpad”, explained it to us last week. The owl’s feather is structured in a way that it cuts air without making a lot of noise. The tips are curved and cut in a way, by evolution, that they do not make a sound while moving through air. The fans that cool the Thinkpads are designed by taking inspiration from the owl’s feathers. This includes the shape and the speed at which they rotate. The third example that I took above, of the Jesus Christ lizard, has not been converted into a commercial technology yet. There are experiments underway by Metin Sitti of Carnegie Mellon University. He is trying to imitate the basilisk lizard’s movements in robots that can be used to run on water and help in research and rescue operations. The next time you are watching National Geographic and see an animal do something extraordinary, look around your home – you may already have something that has been inspired by the way nature works.