Technology for Growth and Governance
July | 07 | 2011 | Rs.50 Volume 06 | Issue 22
The CIO’s Self Discovery
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
CIOs reveal their real aspirations, beyond their careers, of re-inventing themselves,and leaving a lasting legacy.|
The Future of
DR Looks Promising PAGE 18 BEST OF BREED
Taking Out the
Guess Work PAGE 22
PAGE 32
I BELIEVE
A QUESTION OF ANSWERS
A 9.9 Media Publication
NEXT HORIZONS
StrikingI BELIEVE the
Beware of the
Reining the
DELIVERING Right Balance
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Private Cloud Social Horses
PAGE 04 PROMISE
QFABRIC: RETHINKING THE ARCHITECTURE TRANSFORMS TCO. QFabric requires 34% fewer devices, it can be managed by a single administrator and as a result, it radically lowers the cost of management and operations in the data center.
IT’S TIME TO DElIvER A
INTRODUCING QFABRIC. The demands on the data center have gone exponential. And with that, the connected world now demands new levels of power, processing, savings and control to meet the needs of this inescapable and constant new reality. QFabric, our breakthrough new technology, changes the game in the data center by fundamentally solving the challenge of cost and complexity. Power and cooling is 79% lower than the industry standard, total rack space is up to 90% lower and overall, the system uses 1/5 the carbon emissions of current large scale solutions. Juniper has spent countless dollars and hours, dedicating the best minds in the networking industry for the past three years to solve what we feel is the most pressing issue in the network today. The result is QFabric and it changes everything.
juniper.net/qfabric/cio
Ăž Inbound Response Management
Priya Sharma, 1800 209 3062 022 - 67083830, Juniper@dnbindia.in
editorial Pramath Raj sinha | pramath.sinha@9dot9.in
Volition versus Motivation True leadership shines through when the journey undertaken is one of volition.
L
eadership for CIOs is a theme we have pioneered at the CTO Forum. This probably stems from the fact that creating leaders is an idea built into the DNA of our company, 9.9 Media. Therefore, it is with great pride and, of course, some sadness that we see Rahul Neel Mani, our editor, take the next stride in his leadership journey and turn entrepreneur with a small group of his 9.9 Media colleagues. As my co-founder and CTO Forum publisher and editor, Anuradha
editor’s pick 32
Das Mathur, wrote in her recent email to you, Rahul has been central to the ongoing transformation of the CTO Forum and while we will miss him, we are grateful for all that he has done to build a strong foundation for us here. We wish him and his colleagues well – the success of our alumni will be the ultimate test of the goals we set for ourselves in founding 9.9 Media over three years ago. The management guru, late Sumantra Ghoshal, used to say that true leadership shows
The CIO’s Self Discovery Cios have been there and done that. Professional milestones no longer make their hearts beat. For them, it's payback time and they want to bequeath a lasting legacy.
through when people are selfmotivated about what they do. He referred to this self-motivation as “volition”. Volition is about your personal wish, desire, choice, will, and preference to do what you really want. When your work or day job is what you do out of volition, it creates magic, leadership shines through, and performance peaks. Far too often volition is mistaken for motivation. Sometimes motivating someone can help people act with volition but usually the two are diametrically apart. If motivation is push, volition is pull. This was the crux of Sumantra’s argument. When Senior Editor Harichand Arakali talked to your colleagues about their personal aspirations, he got a set of highly inspirational responses. Not surprisingly, they all talked about the things that they
wanted to do out of their volition. What is most exciting is that several of them are already doing those things even in their current roles, which is a hallmark of great leadership. They are “being themselves”— bringing their deeply personal values and beliefs to their work — despite playing a very business-like and professional role in the C-suite. They are not shy to talk about childhood values that they imbibed from their parents or the notion of leaving a great legacy behind for future generations. We hope this will trigger some useful reflection and introspection for you as well. I look forward to seeing you in Kovalam!
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july 11 Cov e r D e s i g n by B i n e s h S r e e d h ar a n
Conte nts
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32 Cover Story
32 | The CIO's Self Discovery They have been there
Columns
04 | I believe: Striking the Right Balance In the light of the CFO encroaching upon the CIO’s turf, there is a need to strike a fine balance between their roles. By J S Puri
and done that. Professional milestones no longer make their hearts beat. For them, it's payback time and they want to bequeath a lasting legacy.
64 | View point: The End of the Disk Era Solid State comes to the fore. By Steve Duplessie
Features
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60 | Tech for Governance ERM Maps Enhance Complaince Programme An ERP Map assists the compliance practitioner by laying out best practices in a visual format. By Thomas Fox
www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Senior Editor: Harichandan Arakali Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal DEsign Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Directors: Binesh Sreedharan & Anil VK Associate Art Director: PC Anoop Visualiser: Prasanth TR, Anil T Sr Designers: Joffy Jose, Anoop Verma NV Baiju, Chander Dange & Sristi Maurya Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N & Charu Dwivedi Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
18 A question of answers
18 | Future of DR Looks Promising
Abhilesh Guleria, Country HeadMultimedia Product Group and IT Platform Business, NEC India, reveals how NEC is making its presence felt in India. 51
56
RegulArs
01 | Editorial 10 | Enterprise Round-up
advertisers’ index
51 | next horizons: Managing Sync'd Online Backup CIOs have three options – ban the usage, ignore it or offer a credible option. By Ian Gotts
56 | NO holds barred: Hugh Njemanze, Founder, ArcSight talks about how the company has been able to sustain a robust growth.
JUNIPER IFC SCHNEIDER 05 Juniper – advertorial 07 Fujitsu 08,09 SAS 13 Patel India 15 Tata Teleservices 16,17 Nokia IBC IBM BC
advisory Panel Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, CIO, Pidilite 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, CIO, Cairns Energy Sales & Marketing 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., A-403, TTC Ind. Area, Near Anthony Motors, Mahape, Navi Mumbai-400701, District Thane. Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in
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The author has over thirty years of experience in the IT domain, having worked with SRL Ranbaxy, Sharda Motors and Bhushan Steel.
photo by Subhojit Paul
I Believe
J S Puri Vice President, Corporate Affairs & IT at Fortis Healthcare
Striking the Right Balance In the light of the CFO
encroaching upon the CIO’s turf, there is a need to strike a fine balance between their roles. The CFO is the choice person of the management. He has close proximity to the CEO, promoter and the board of directors. The reason for this is that a CFO handles the finances of the company. His role of controlling finance monitoring and ensuring profitability, which is the end goal of
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current challenge correct selection and the use of proven / successful methods of implementation of technology / enterprise solutions.
any corporate, attaches high importance. The CIO of today, meanwhile, has been relegated to the role of a service provider within his organisation. To begin with the CFO does not have the specialist understanding of technology- the way a CIO has and therefore a CFO is unlikely to understand the rules, limitations and relevance of engaging developing technologies and enterprise solutions. But he has the greater power to influence a decision / direction - for the end result of which the CIO would be held responsible ! This happens more often than not because unlike a CIO, a CFO does not weigh parameters such as costbenefit analysis and the return on Investment (RoI) before freezing a solution for implementation. That the influence of a CFO is rising in a corporate at the expense of that of a CIO is substantiated by a recent survey by Gartner/FEI. According to the survey, 42 percent of IT organisations are now reporting to their respective CFOs. This trend is expected to increase, the survey noted. It is in the interest of an organisation to strike a fine balance between the roles of the CIO and the CFO. Meanwhile, for a CIO to hold his own, there is a need for him to take up additional responsibilities. He should not limit himself to the IT department and should instead handle additional roles. This would not only increase his stature within the organisation but also add value to his own profile. A CIO should also grab whatever opportunity he gets to make his present felt within his organisation. This opportunity could be in a meeting with the top management. The CFO should realise the fact that he can’t work without the support of the CIO. The two should collaborate if they have to take their company to the next level of growth.
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Data Centre Projects: Growth Model
> Executive summary
Contents 1 2 7 7 9 10
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©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, and InfraStruxure are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. email: esupport@apc.com • 132 Fairgrounds Road, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA • 998-3811_IN
LETTERS COVE R S TO RY
I T D e p loy m e n T
coVE r S to rY
I T D e p loy m e n T
Making it Easy Page 26
Making IT Easy CASE STuDY | RLICL
Pay-By-Wire Turbo Charged
intelligence on the Go
Page 28
Page 32
Digging out inefficiencies
CTOForum LinkedIn Group
RLICL needed a rapid, efficient and cost effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to sustain customer satisfaction levels and improve service quality.
Common ivr Boosts revenue
Page 34
Page 36
By AshwAni MishrA
CTO
R
FOR UM
Five enterprises have leveraged the power of innovative IT to boost revenues,enhance agility, and drive out inefficiency.
Techno logy for Growth
There are IT deploymenTs
SECURIT
and then there are those iT deployments that are innovative, weed out inefficiencies within the organisation making it more agile, and add to an enterprise’s bottom line. The CTo forum magazine has been, over the years, featuring case studies of such iT deployments. for this issue, however, we decided to select the best from the rest. After sifting through case studies that appeared during the last one year in the magazine, we short-listed five of them to be featured in this issue. Among those featured include a bank that has leveraged iT to come up with speedier and Pay-By-W more accurate domestic payments; a coal mining company that has cut down inefficiencies Turb o Cha ire rged plaguing it, thereby enhancing its decision-making process and turning agile; and a telco that PAGE 28 has implemented the first of its kind single iVr architecture to boost revenues and optimise its core network resources. happy reading. Y-STUPID
IS AS STUPID
The Chief TeChnology offiCer forum
cto forum 21 JUNE 2011
eliance Life Insurance Company Limited (RLICL), a unit of Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group, was looking for a rapid, efficient and cost effective Customer relationship management (Crm) solution to sustain customer satisfaction levels and improve service quality. The existing Crm solution was not up to the mark and had many limitations. firstly, the Crm application was managed by a service provider, and was not directly integrated with other applications within the company. Due to this segregation, service request resolutions often used to take more than a day to be addressed. and Go vernan Secondly, any addition and/or modification of service categories in ce the Crm application took a couple of weeks and were carried out by the service provider with an additional cost of rs 30,000 per category. finally, the service request resolution and the updates that were required to be filled back in the Crm application by the functional team took a couple of days which resulted in a longer resolution time. “This resulted in customer grievances and affected customer satisfaction levels,” says C mohan, Chief Technology officer, rliCl. mohan wanted a solution that could handle surge in volumes, Making provide flexibility and scalability without degrading service quality PAGE 26 it Easy benchmarks set by the organisation.
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Making it easy The iT team decided to replace the outsourced Crm systems with an enhanced in-house Crm system which had the capability to draw agility from Service oriented Architecture (SoA) framework and Business Process management (BPm) solution to integrate all the core insurance applications through an enterprise Service Bus. The team implemented a flexible, scalable, automated and secured Crm solution which was integrated with the core applications, leveraging SoA service. The new system was called easy Crm. With the deployment of this solution the company gradually improved its capability of managing customer complaints, request
COMPANY DASHBOARD
June Volum
| 21Life COMPANY Reliance Insurance Company | 2011 | 50 21
e 06 | 2001 | ASSOCiAtE Of Limited | EStABliSHED Issue Reliance Capital Ltd. | SERviCES Life Insurance Plans, Retirement Plans, Protection Plans etc.
The Chief TeChnology offiCer forum
25
DOES
Intelligen ce on
the PAGE 32 Go
| TECH FUELED TRANSF ORM
PAGE 34
ATION
| FIVE TIPS
Common Boosts IVR Revenue
PAGE 04
FOR NEW TIMES
Five en terpris enhanc power of ines have leve ra no e agili ty, and vative IT to ged the boost dr revenu out in ive es, efficie ncy. | PAGE 25
e 06 | Issue 21
Volum
Media
www.linkedin.com/ groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450
Digging out Inefficien cies
BEST OF
A 9.9
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Publicatio
n
BREED
Debu the Tonking SLA Mp 5 yths
PAGE 18
I BELIE VE
Do W Takes hat It Credibito Build lity
PAGE 04
A QUES TION OF
Expla Busin ining Benefiess ts of VC ANSW ERS
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What are the attributes of a good CTO? What are the prerequisites for a CTO role ?
We see the CTO's role as that of a technology leader bridging the gap between the commercial requirements of the enterprise and the technology support of those requirements. An effective CTO should be able to guide the efficient implementation of IT strategy of the business.
Some of the hot discussions on the group are: The Cloud is all air and no substance Do you think cloud is going to die a quick death of SOA or is it going to make big headway into the enterprise? Is it old wine in a new bottle? What does it lack in making a convincing case? Its real and all about today and tomorrow. However, you have to bring it back to a realistic service that gives tangible benefits. There are a great deal of 'cowboy' stories and not many who really understand it.
—Ronald Kunneman, Director at Digitra
Opinion
Public and Private Clouds
The economics of the business will play an important role in choosing the cloud option “We started with a public cloud because we needed to deploy something very rapidly and have the ability to scale very rapidly.” 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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Polycom intends to change the mindset of the corporates in the way they look at videoconferencing. In a freewheeling conversation with Rahul Neel Mani, Randy Maestre, Global Head and Senior Director, Industry Solutions at Polycom talks about how he plans to achieve it. http://
www.thectoforum.com/content/ explaining-truebusiness-reasons-using-vc
RIChard WArd, Head of Technical, WIN Plc
Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@thectoforum.com
CTOF Connect
http://www.thectoforum.com/content/publicand-private-clouds-not-%E2%80%98eitheror%E2%80%99-option Kadab L Mukesh Chief Business Operations Officer, Tata Sky Ltd.
FEATURE Inside
Enterprise
Cloud Interoperability a Greater Challenge to Adoption Than Security Pg 12
Round-up
Location Critical For Sustainable Future of Cloud Services Australia too carbon-
intensive, while New Zealand seen as green. Cloud computing services are touted as ‘greener’ than owning and running in-house technology infrastructure, but geographic location is the key to more sustainable outsourced data storage and services, according to a report from Gartner. Data centre operational costs are continuing to rise, with Gartner estimating that up to 50 percent of operating costs are associated with heating and cooling. As a result, energy consumption, efficiency, monitoring and management will be a dominant trend in data centre operations over the next five years. Recent Gartner research points to substantial (greater than 30 percent)
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potential savings in operating costs relating to electricity usage when efficiency design principles are incorporated, as well as lower upfront capital costs. “Truly sustainable computing needs to combine energy-efficient technologies and the use of reliably available low-emission electricity, which may prompt significant changes to the geolocation of data storage and other services in the long term,” said Marcus Blosch, research vice president at Gartner. “Just as labour arbitrage has driven some aspects of business process outsourcing activities, emissions arbitrage will play an increasingly significant role for outsourced IT storage and services.”
Data Briefing
$2.25 Billon Amount paid for Go Daddy buyout
E nte rpri se Round -up
They JULIAN Said it ASSANGE
illustration BY Shigil N
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken a jab at MasterCard by spoofing the credit card company's signature 'priceless' commercials. MasterCard is one of the major credit card companies that is blocking over $15million in donations to the web-based whistleblower group.
Microsoft Launches Office 365 Globally The new cloud service to compete with Google Apps. Microsoft Corp. has announced the availability of Microsoft Office 365, the company’s newest cloud service. Office 365 is now available in 40 markets, and it brings together Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription. The service was introduced in beta last year and, in a few months, more than 200,000 organizations signed up and began testing it. “Great collaboration is critical to business growth, and because it’s so important, we believe the best collaboration technology should be available to everyone,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “With a few clicks, Office 365 levels the playing field, giving small and midsize businesses powerful collaboration tools that have given big businesses an edge for years.” Office 365 is available in a variety of service plans for a predictable monthly price from $2 to $27 per user per month. With Office 365 for small businesses, customers can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in minutes, for $6 per user, per month.
Quick Byte on SECURITY
“Watching the world change as a result of your work: priceless. There are some people who don't like change. For everyone else, there's WikiLeaks.”
—Julian Assange, Founder, Wikileaks
As people are constantly looking to get an invite for Google+, spammers are sending out bogus Google+ invitations that in reality point to online pharmacies. The messages look similar to the real emails that users may receive from friends who are already members of Google+. The Chief Technology Officer Forum
cto forum 07 JUly 2011
11
illustration BY Shigil N
E nte rpri se Round -up
Cloud Interoperability a Greater Challenge to Adoption Than Security Many public cloud networks
are configured as closed systems. The greatest challenge facing longer-term adoption of cloud computing services is not security, but rather cloud interoperability and data portability, say cloud computing experts from IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association. At the same time, IEEE’s experts say cloud providers could reassure customers by improving the tools they offer enterprise customers to give them more control over their own data and applications while offering a security guarantee. Today, many public cloud networks are configured as closed systems and are not designed to interact with each other. The
lack of integration between these networks makes it difficult for organisations to consolidate their IT systems in the cloud and realise productivity gains and cost savings. To overcome this challenge, industry standards must be developed to help cloud service providers design interoperable platforms and enable data portability, topics that will be addressed at IEEE Cloud 2011, 4-9 July in Washington, D.C. “Security is certainly a very important consideration, but it’s not what will inhibit further adoption,” said Dr. Alexander Pasik, CIO at IEEE and an early advocate of cloud
Global Tracker
A super-botnet is thought to have infected as many as 4.5 million devices so far in 2011, with 1.5 million of the infected IPs in the U.S.
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Source: Kaspersky Labs
Botnet Infections
computing as an analyst at Gartner in the 1990s. “To achieve the economies of scale that will make cloud computing successful, common platforms are needed to ensure users can easily navigate between services and applications regardless of where they’re coming from, and enable organisations to more cost-effectively transition their IT systems to a services-oriented model.” According to industry research firm IDC, revenue from public cloud computing services is expected to reach $55.5 billion by 2014, up from $16 billion in 2009. Cloud computing plays an important role in people’s professional and personal lives by supporting a variety of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications used to store healthcare records, critical business documents, music and e-book purchases, social media content, and more. However, lack of interoperability still presents challenges for organisations interested in consolidating a host of enterprise IT systems on the cloud. According to IEEE Fellow Elisa Bertino, professor of Computer Science at Purdue University and research director at the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance, the interoperability issue is more pressing than perceived data security concerns. “Security in the cloud is no different than security issues that impact on-premises networks. Organisations are not exposing themselves to greater security risks by moving data to the cloud. In fact, an organisation’s data is likely to be more secure in the cloud because the vendor is a technology specialist whose business model is built on data protection.” However, Steve O’Donnell, IEEE Member and former global head of Data Centres at BT in the United Kingdom, suggested much of the concern is about control for IT managers. “There’s a lack of enterprise tools that enable management of security and availability in the cloud in the same way as in a data center,” he said. “Enterprises believe their own data centers are secure and available, and want to own the management of cloud security and availability rather than outsourcing it to a third party.” Dr. Pasik, an IEEE Senior Member, suggests one creative solution to reassure organisations their data is secure on the cloud is to develop an insurance-based approach, similar to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the U.S.
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E nte rpri se Round -up
Enterprise Software Market Grew 16.3 Percent in 2010 A return to solid footing.
The India enterprise software market showed broad growth and recovery in 2010 with total software revenue increasing 16.3 percent annually to total $2.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2009, India revenue grew just 4.2 percent to $2.1 billion. "In 2010, major software vendors expanded their product portfolios, acquired companies where appropriate to their plans, and reached deeper into emerging markets including India," said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner. "The year represented a return to solid
footing as the India market expanded in terms of revenue and maturity.” Four of the top five vendors experienced revenue gains above the industry average. Microsoft maintained the No. 1 position as it increased its enterprise software revenue market share in India to 28 percent in 2010. Microsoft’s results were enhanced in 2010 by the broader adoption of new releases of the Windows 7 operating system and Microsoft Office 2010 productivity software. Microsoft's total software revenue results were improved by new strategies aimed not only at individuals, but also at organizations and multiple delivery models. The company is placing more emphasis on enterprise application and infrastructure software programming platforms. IBM maintained its No. 2 ranking in 2010 as it had in 2009. It would be the No. 1 enterprise software vendor if Gartner did not count consumer sales of Microsoft's office and operating systems. IBM sells only to enterprises and partners. The company's software revenue grew more than 15.3 percent in 2010, mainly due to its WebSphere, Tivoli, Information Mgmt., Operating Systems and Rational brands. IBM expanded dramatically in 2010 into the applications segment with a focus on e-commerce, marketing and sales with more than 20 industry solution frameworks as its "smarter planet" go-to-market strategy evolves. Among the top 25 vendors in India, VMware led the group with more than 51 percent growth in 2010, followed by Cisco with more than 31 percent. The top 25 vendors accounted for nearly 94 percent share, or more than $2.3 billion, of the overall software market.
Fact ticker
Symantec Caution Towards Cloud Adoption Survey reveals
gaps between expectations and reality. Symantec has announced the India findings of its 2011 Virtualisation and Evolution to the Cloud Survey which examined how organisations plan to move business-critical initiatives to virtual and hybrid cloud computing environments. The results uncover disparities between expectations and reality as enterprises deploy these solutions. CEOs and CFOs are
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concerned with moving businesscritical applications into virtual or cloud environments due to challenges including reliability, security, availability and performance. “Indian enterprises are discussing virtualisation and private/hybrid clouds. While agility and affordability are the main drivers, having fewer legacy systems is helping this
The Chief Technology Officer Forum
transition,” said Vijay Mhaskar, vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. “The transition brings in a new set of challenges related to security, scalability, and disaster preparedness.” The gaps are a hallmark of early stage markets where expectations are out of step with reality. As the virtualisation and cloud markets continue to mature, we expect to see those gaps close. The awareness around virtualisation being an enabler for private and hybrid clouds is widespread, but the important thing to bear in mind is that it is critical to plan a seamless move.
BPM
I
DC has named Cordys a leader for Business Process Platforms in its latest IDC MarketScape report, titled: “IDC MarketScape: Business Process Platforms 2011 Vendor Analysis”. Out of the 17 vendors who participated in the report, Cordys received high scores for the capabilities of its Business Operations Platform (BOP). “Because of its technical functionality as a platform, modern development environment and business functionality in its process layer, we believe Cordys is an appropriate purchase for enterprises investing strategically in BPM automation technology," stated Maureen Fleming, Program Vice President at IDC and author of the report. Fleming pointed out that "customers have selected Cordys because of pricing, business-friendly interface, BPM+SOA orientation and its performance in proofs of concept." The MarketScape stated: "Cordys BOP is suitable for process projects ranging from simple to the most sophisticated." The report also noted that "Cordys was one of if not the earliest BPM pure play to recognize the importance of building BPM on a SOA-based platform. That benefits Cordys today as process applications become far more complex and need to pull data from enterprise applications as well as mediate functionality performed by a third party app on behalf of the business process.”
RELIABLE AND ACCESSIBLE SERVICES FOR ALL With the help of Tata Teleservices Limited, the Passport Seva Project made the passport application process faster, easier and more accessible for Indian citizens, through MPLS VPN
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he Passport Seva Project, a National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) project, was launched by the Ministry of External Affairs in May 2010. NeGP comprises 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMP), encompassing 10 Central, 10 State and seven Integrated MMPs, spanning multiple ministries and departments. The Passport Seva Project was initiated by the Ministry of External Affairs to provide passport and consular services to citizens. The project envisaged the setting up of 77 Passport Seva Kendras across the country, a multilingual call center, a data center, a disaster recovery center and a centralized nation-wide computerized system for the issuance of passports. Until early 2010, the application processing for the Passport Seva Project was carried out by 37 regional passport offices, 15 passport application collection centers, 495 District passport cells and 1154 speed post centers that collected applications. The Project is based on public private partnership (PPP) model and was envisioned to deliver passport services to citizens in a timely, transparent, more accessible and reliable manner.
Challenges Passport offices are widely concentrated around big cities, making it cumbersome for the rural population to visit them multiple times to successfully complete the passport application process. The process itself is highly complex and may take 30-45 days, and further delays may occur due to manual errors caused while processing the application. Hence, there was a pressing need to bring down the total time required for processing passport applications. The Passport Seva Project’s vision was to connect 192 links across 77 passport facilitation centers through the country and make the process easier and faster. There were a number of challenges that the Government faced. To implement the plan and overcome the challenges the Government had to:
z Create a centralized database to upload citizens’ information in digital format, so that the information could be accessed in real-time, aiding in decision-making with various Government projects z Increase accessibility of government-to-citizen services by increasing delivery channels of such services across the country, and bring down the overall application processing time z Use information and communication technology to increase delivery channels for passport services z Improve process efficiency
Solution After conducting in-depth research, Tata Teleservices Limited (TTL) deployed Managed Enterprise Network Services over the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) platform, as this was the best suited solution for the infrastructure requirements of the project. This was expected to bring down the cost, and increased reliability and scalability—features that are often missing in legacy networks. The project required highly agile and redundant networks, and MPLS VPN (Virtual Private Networks) emerged as a trusted WAN connectivity option. In addition, lower latency, minimum packet loss, easier provisioning, high security and bandwidth prioritization made MPLS VPN the perfect solution for this critical national project. With TTL’s solution, the Passport Seva Project could effectively achieve several benefits. It could connect 77 Passport Seva Kendras by adopting Managed Enterprise Network Services over the MPLS platform. It achieved the integration of around 192 points across India on successful completion of the project. The Managed Enterprise Network enabled the organization to focus on its core business activities. The Passport Seva Project also enabled real-time access to application status by providing a highly reliable network.
Business Challenge
BESPOKEWORKS
After conducting in-depth research, Tata Teleservices Limited (TTL) deployed Managed Enterprise Network Services over the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) platform, as this was the best suited solution for the infrastructure requirements of the project. With the help of TTL solutions, Passport Seva Project sought to develop its strategies around efficient operations and enhanced customer satisfaction through the following: z Security: Secured access to data to ensure the protection of citizens’ confidential information z Connectivity: Enabled connectivity to different points across a number of locations throughout the country z Manageability: The managed MPLS network with pan-India presence simplifies manageability and allows focus on core business z Reliability: High uptime and built-in system redundancy ensure higher degree of reliability z Scalability: Can cater to multi-fold increases in data volumes arising from increased passport applications
Benefits The project now benefits from Managed Enterprise Network Services for its network requirements. Increased reliability of the overall network, as well as critical links and support from the service team, have enabled the project staff to focus on core activities. Some of the benefits include:
Increased efficiency The data was digitized, which resulted in increased efficiency through reductions in instances of manual errors. Processing time was reduced from several weeks to around three days. End of multi-level contact points A single point of contact was made available for network-related issues.
High uptime The TTL network provided diverse and redundant network links, facilities, routes and termination points throughout the network, with maximum availability. Till date, the network has experienced 99.99% uptime.
Email us at enterprisesales@tatatel.co.in
Improved reliability MPLS has redundancy built into the system, which improves the reliability of the network infrastructure.
Continued connectivity Now there are multiple paths to ensure continued connectivity during network outages, thus reducing overall downtime.
Relationship management Excellent relationship management has instilled confidence in the client, paving the way for strategic relationships.
Consistent performance on SLAs Ease of deployment, improved telecom support and reduced administration costs have translated into consistent performance on Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Reduced network costs Passport Seva Project was able to cut down on network costs by 10%.
Customer satisfaction Business value was gained in terms of lower customer complaints, and increased customer satisfaction.
Lowered costs Data networks were consolidated by reducing the number of vendors, which resulted in lowering billing management costs. With TTL’s solution, the Passport Seva Project has been successful in meeting its objectives of delivering faster and more efficient services to citizens.
Call Toll-Free 1800 266 1800
SMS <EBS MPLS> to 58888
A Question of answers
PERSON' S NAME
Betting on DR: Guleria feels just as virtualisation has become a reality, DR would also see traction among corporates and SMB.
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A b h i l es h G u l er i a
A Question of answers
Abhilesh Guleria | NEC India
“Future of DR Looks
Promising”
NEC recently launched the latest version of its HA and DR solution in India. In a conversation with Yashvendra Singh, Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head- Multimedia Product Group and IT Platform Business, NEC India, reveals how NEC is making its presence felt in India.
photos by Subhojit Paul
Although NEC has had a long association with India, why is it still not a very popular brand? While NEC products have been in use in India for long, the business has been on the B2B side and there has been little interaction with B2C customers. This was also one of the reasons why NEC India was incorporated in 2006. We are now focusing on the Indian market by launching new products and establishing centres of excellence, one each in biometric and retail. So how has the growth been in the last five years in India? Despite being a fairly young entity, we have grown at double digits year-on-year. For instance, our multimedia products division is among the top providers of integrated display solutions, ranging from busi-
ness projectors to digital cinema projectors and digital signage. The division is very strong in the hospitality sector. It is evident from the fact that the Taj group, which rarely endorses any brand, has endorsed our brand. We have also gained a strong foothold in the manufacturing and BFSI verticals. NEC also has global identity solutions (biometric, fingerprinting) and is a part of two very large projects in India – ESIC and UID. Besides we are also working with law enforcement agencies such as the state police of Karnataka and Assam. From 2000 onwards, we have started providing short haul tower-to-tower communication to leading carriers. We are engaging with them for our 3G solutions also. We are also playing in the upcoming opportunities of femto cell and carrier cloud.
You have recently launched the latest version of your middleware, ExpressCluster, in India. How would it help businesses? We have launched the latest 3.0 version of ExpressCluster business continuity middleware, which has a legacy of 14 years, in India. It is an integrated High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. The focus on disaster recovery and high availability in India has received new interest and attention due to incidents related to security and natural disaster. This new software provides a wide range of solutions enabling fast recovery and continuous protection of critical applications and data. This provides unified management of all protected applications and data stores, with easy server workload migration requiring no client reconfiguration.
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A Question of answers
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“Our middleware, ExpressCluster, is hardware agnostic, which gives it complete interoperability.”
How does your product differentiate from competition? NEC has put both together both hardware and software to come up with an integrated solution that no one else has. Customers have to buy software from vendors such as CA, Symantec, and Veritas. Another differentiators is that our middleware is hardware agnostic, which gives it complete interoperability. ExpressCluster also offers the widest support in terms of platform so the middleware is certified for Windows, Solaris and Linux. But most SMEs in India have homegrown applications. Does ExpressCluster address this issue? Yes, it does. The solution is very flexible on the operations side of it. So, it can handle standard applications such as Mail, Exchange, SAP or Oracle database or it could also be a homegrown applications. In a country like India, there is a huge growth in the SME segment where there is no standard application. They may have a homegrown ERP or any other application. Our solution incorporates all these. Another important differentiator is that we have a specialised fault-tolerant server that comes for one-third the cost of a proprietary solution. By combining this with NEC’s middleware, we can give businesses a 99.999 percent uptime. The market where the ExpressCluster plays will be around $ 22-23 million by 2012. We are already number one in APAC, including Japan. Why should a CIO buy it? Our integrated offerings make more sense when you migrate to cloud because the moment you migrate to the cloud services, customers need that uptime. As 3G and WiMax coming in, and hand held devices proliferate, one can’t afford to have any downtime. That
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is why high availability makes more sense for customers. What should a CIO look at while formulating a DR strategy? A CIO has to first see which applications are critical. He is answerable to his CEO if any system malfunctions. A CIO, therefore, has to move his critical applications onto a high availability platform. While planning DR, he also has to see that the second location of the standby DR site should not be in the same geographical area. Ideally, it should be in a different seismic zone. The cost and the bandwidth should also be looked at. Another point that a CIO needs to look at is how easy is the solution to implement, and how flexible is the solution to meet his requirements. What trends do you see in DR space in India? Indian customers have become
things I Believe in Indian customers have become mature and they have realised the importance of HA and DR. EC offers N an integrated (software and hardware) solution for Indian customers. As the cost of bandwidth comes down, the requirement for DR will go up.
mature. Where there is mission criticality, enterprises know they have to go for DR. The SME segment too is growing and is investing in technology. CIOs are seriously evaluating DR. Just like server consolidation and virtualisation which was the hot topic sometime back and is the reality today, it is the same case with HA and DR. As the cost of bandwidth comes down and technologies such as 3G and WiMax come into play, the requirement will go up. The future looks promising. How are you expanding the market for youself? NEC values its partner ecosystem. We will leverage our partners’ understanding of the market and their relationship with customers. To increase our penetration, we are appointing regional partners. Over the next one year, our target would be to have 60-100 installations.
Features Inside
Best of
Breed
Data Briefing
$74
billion
Expected spending on Gaming in 2011
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Taking Out the Guess Work
Effective scenarios and modeling must be accompanied by impact analyses enabling decision-makers to implement the optimal solution.
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By Faisal Hoque
odeling is not a new concept. In fact, everyone does it without thinking. Do you recall the invention of the spreadsheet? Before the PC revolution, Wall Street analysts performed complex spreadsheet calculations by hand using only a simple calculator. This process
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was completely inflexible, prone to mistakes, and thoroughly mind-numbing. To make changes to a model (whether to vary inputs or correct mistakes), analysts had to rework the entire thing, a process that, needless to say, was inefficient at best. In 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan
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Bricklin recognised an opportunity to automate this tedious process using software and the rapidly maturing PC. He introduced the VisiCalc spreadsheet to the market, and almost overnight transformed how financial analysts worked. The obvious advantage to Bricklin’s innovation was efficiency. Complex models that once took hours to update could all of a sudden be modified with a few keystrokes. But the real revolution that the spreadsheet kicked off wasn’t just about efficiency and automation: By unburdening analysts from the heavy lifting of manual calculations, spreadsheets lowered the marginal costs of evaluating new scenarios from thousands of dollars to near zero. This in turn encouraged experimentation and creativity, and the same employee who once spent days perfecting a single model could suddenly produce several alternatives in a single afternoon. Spreadsheets kicked off an industry-wide movement towards experimentation (and PCs) that revolutionised how analysts and the financial services industry worked. By allowing workers to easily create and analyse the impact of multiple scenarios, spreadsheets and predictive modeling encouraged a culture of rapid prototyping and innovation, or impact analysis, that is as applicable today for converging business and technology as it is for the financial world. Effective scenarios and modeling must be accompanied by impact analyses, which enable decision-makers to alter factors, create multiple output scenarios, evaluate the end-to-end impact of each scenario, and eventually select and implement the optimal solution. This stands in direct opposition to conventional, linear problem solving techniques, where decision makers analyse subproblems at each logical step along the way, and then assume that the overall impact of their choices is the best one. As with modeling in general, impact analysis can be used to address a broad range of activities. For example, it is often used in supply chain planning for advanced data-driven calculations that optimise a particular function, such as inventory costs, against unique inputs and constraints such as market demand, logistical restrictions and manufacturing capabilities. Impact analysis can address much sim-
pler problems, as well. On Dell’s build-toorder website, potential buyers test multiple PC configurations until they find a good match between the features they want and the cost they can afford to pay. In both of these cases, individuals vary inputs; rules translate these inputs to outputs; and team members compare the impact of multiple scenarios to choose the solution that fits their needs. In order for
Effective scenarios and modeling must be accompanied by impact analyses, which enable decisionmakers to alter factors, create multiple output scenarios, and eventually select and implement the optimal solution. impact analysis to work, the scenario being modeled should conform to three guidelines: Easily identified inputs, rules and outputs - Impact analysis requires defined sets of inputs that are linked to outputs using predefined rules. These inputs and outputs are often quantitative (as in our supply chain optimisation problem), but they can also be qualitative (such as our PC configuration options). To produce good results, these criteria -- and the rules that link them -- must accurately reflect the real world problem. Multiple configuration options and decision factors - Problems that contain only a few inputs and outputs aren’t suited to
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impact analysis because the effect of altering inputs is often obvious. When the outputs are less intuitive, impact analysis helps decision-makers’ identify good solutions. Low-design, high-implementation cost Scenarios that are inexpensive to design but difficult to implement are ideally suited to impact analysis. It’s unrealistic to contract a builder to construct five houses so that you can choose the one you like the most. It’s entirely possible, however, to commission an architect to draft five blueprints. A person can compare plans, choose a favorite, and give it to the contractor. This is where the synergy between modeling and impact analysis really comes in to play: Predictive modeling is a powerful tool for lowering design costs, and so a crucial driver for impact analysis. Disconnects between business, process and technology are often introduced when individual decisions have unforeseen effects on the blueprint as a whole. Enterprises tend to decompose the problem several times and decide a course of action that probably was suggested in the initial round of analysis.
Impediments A few obstacles need resolution before any company can get started with modeling and impact analysis: The most obvious is the common perception that the time it takes to develop a model during the design stage is better spent on implementation. This is due, in part, to previous experiences with models that were frighteningly inaccessible to all but the most die-hard experts. Since non-specialists (a group that frequently includes managers and other authority figures) couldn’t experience their value first-hand, they assumed that the models were a waste of time. The shorthand solution to this is to make the modeling environment friendly enough for a broad range of people to pick it up and experiment according to their own level of comfort. A good example to point back to here is a financial model whose inner workings may be exceedingly complex but whose overall purpose is clearly communicated to a nontechnical audience. In extreme cases, modeling can be a waste of time. This happens when people get stuck The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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in an endless design loop; by continuously tweaking the model in the quest for a perfect solution, they never get around to actually implementing what they’re working on. The way to counter this impulse is by linking a system of real-time monitoring to metrics, goals and objectives that are established at the beginning of the project. This implies a link to both project and performance management that is crucial to any type of modeling. The other obstacle that stands in the way of modeling and impact analysis is the gaps that exist between multiple models and between models and the real world. These gaps are referred to as white space, and they’re familiar culprits in cases where modeling hasn’t been successful. Typically, the tools that are available to technology employees to model the business, processes, and technology are disjointed, and so they tend to exacerbate rather than overcome the white space problem.
to create the business scenario Most tools are geared either models that form the basis for to a particular task (process end-to-end impact analysis. modeling, object modeling, or Each scenario represents a knowledge management) or to "to-be" alternative for accombroad horizontal activities (word expected plishing the firm’s goals. The processing, drawing or spreadWorldwide structured and visual nature of sheets). A consequence of these models makes it easy for the disjointed offerings is that comSoftware as a team to compare these scenarpanies tend to use multiple tools Service Revenue ios and eventually combine the and environments to develop growth in 2011. best of each, and that equates their models. to what’s best for the organisaWhen changes are made in tion overall. one environment (say a process diagram) they aren’t automatically — Faisal Hoque is an internationally known reflected in other areas (a requirements entrepreneur and author, and the founder and CEO document or business strategy memo). of BTM Corp. His previous books include Sustained Without integrated tools, decision-makers Innovation and Winning The 3-Legged Race. must proactively anticipate ripple effects — This article has been reprinted with permission to keep their models aligned. from CIO Update. @ www.cioupdate.com. To see Once the current business model is more articles regarding IT management best pracunderstood, enterprise executives can begin tices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
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Converged IT Infra and the Business
A converged infrastructure is a new model for IT and it means you can use technology in new ways to improve the bottom line. By Brandon Harris
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deally, by the time you have a truly converged IT infrastructure running in your data center, many of the people you work with will have begun to see you in a different light: The CEO should begin to see you as the provider of IT as service and a source of efficiency, productivity, and innovation for the entire organisation. The CFO will stop thinking of you as a pitchman for capital expenses and will have begun posting your expenses in predictable amounts in the operational expense budget. The tone of your conversations should shift from adversarial to cooperative. And your storage team should finally stop suspecting that you really like the server team better than them and won’t ask you to choose sides all the time. You’ll spend more time talking with your team leaders together, instead of one at a time.
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Forward-looking IT It may not happen overnight but, if you have been modifying and developing new procedures to coincide with your new technology, your relations with the people around you should start to reflect the collaborative, flexible, forward-looking IT environment you have just fought tooth and nail to implement. There are some changes in there for you, too. Once you’ve made the transition to the new way of doing things, for example, you can’t revert back to old methodology. When the next new project comes up that requires additional capacity, instead of automatically thinking about buying and building it, you can think about exploiting the capacity you have in different ways: Do you have excess capacity that isn’t being used? Can you re-allocate the capacity that marketing needed for a special project once it is over to provide resources for a new project for accounting?
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your storage and networking teams collaborating is to get them participating directly in the process of defining what it will take to make their culture reflect the new image of the technology.
illustration BY Anil t
Users in the room
With converged infrastructure you can use technology in new ways to improve the bottom line. As your resource capacity becomes increasingly dynamic, you’ll need maintenance and change management procedures that are as just as agile. You allocated extra capacity to the sales department during the peak season, did that capacity ever get decommissioned or re-allocated? ... To adapt a phrase: the price of converged infrastructure liberty is eternal vigilance.
Self-serving corporate assets Once you have implemented self-service, resource provisioning, automation, monitoring and governance can help you prevent department heads from thinking self-service means instant gratification. Establishing chargeback or showback capabilities will help you demonstrate that they are spending money by self-serving corporate assets. Some department heads who haven’t been keeping up with the times might be shocked to learn that the IT resources their department uses are corporate assets and not their own private technology stash! This could be a good point for the CEO or CFO to make on your department’s behalf. Within your own staff you will probably have a recalcitrant few who want to maintain proprietary control over the technology in what used to be their silo. Those tendencies aren’t going to just go away. Policies, procedures and incentives need to be in place to encourage a more enlightened sense that IT really is a team effort. The best way to get
Now that your people inside the IT department are spending less time doing mundane tasks just to keep everything running, they will need to spend more time interacting with people outside the IT department. You’ll need policies to ensure that relations between your technicians and end users get off on the right foot. A converged infrastructure is a new model for IT and it means you can use technology in new ways to improve the bottom line. Showcasing initial successes that demonstrate how a converged infrastructure can get a product to market earlier, for example, can help promote advocates on the business side. And those legacy systems you worked around to get here; they haven’t gone away. The ideal goal, of course, is to get everything into the converged infrastructure where you have lowest costs per port, the lowest cost for SAN storage, for compute resources, … for everything. And you can take advantage of the dynamic movement, self provisioning, scaling and all the benefits of shared resources model. A successfully implemented converged infrastructure in your data center is not a destination. It is a process: more accurately, it is a set of processes, procedures, guidelines and configurations that allow your IT environment to respond more effectively to change. Change is not going to stop. Your technology will change. You’ll probably want to buy bigger servers, for example, to take advantage of economies of scale, and faster networks to boost bandwidth. The modular nature of a converged infrastructure will make changing technology easier. Cloud computing is on your horizon, if not already raining on your parade. That’s going to bring change. A converged infrastructure does not provide all the features of cloud computing but it does enable cloud computing and will make leveraging a range of cloud options an easier transition.
Business agility The hot buzzword in the business press today is agility; the ability of a business to respond rapidly and cost efficiently to changes in the business environment. A characteristic of business agility is that it makes change a routine part of organisational life. In many ways, business agility is the business counterpart to a converged infrastructure. Both have a little of the feel of controlled chaos about them. IT policies and procedures used to be geared to maintain the status quo. The policies and procedures you need to put in place for your converged infrastructure should be designed to ensure that purposeful, constant controlled change and not the status quo. —Brandon Harris is Vice President of HP Solutions at Logicalis, an international provider of integrated information and communications technology solutions and services. — This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. @ http:// www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
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Does IT Deserve a Seat at the Table? IT can build its case for a seat in the boardroom by strengthening its relationship with the business and senior management. By Augusto Perazzo, Larry Scinto and Chris Gallacher
Critical Enabler No. 1: IT must be seen as a value-add provider - IT needs to move away from being seen as an uncontrollable expense and demonstrate cost competitiveness and high ROI. Frequently IT conversations with the business focus on
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illustration BY PHOTOS.COM
G
iven the current global environment and the competitive advantages technology can provide, it is interesting to see that the role of CIO is typically not present in the boardroom of most medium to large organisations. Other corporate functions are usually present such as HR, legal and finance, with IT typically reporting into the COO or CFO rather than the CEO. Why is IT left outside? Does this mean these organisations don’t have a vested interest in IT or simply view IT as overhead rather than a strategic enabler of business change? How does the IT organisation make itself more relevant to boardroom discussions? In order to earn a place at the table, IT needs to demonstrate the ability to drive competitive advantage by demonstrating cost competitiveness and high ROI on technology investments; and understanding and working closely with the business to create and deliver innovative services and products for external customers. So how to change this? How does IT become more related to the business?
reactively answering the question on “Why does IT cost so much?” To address this concern, IT needs to take time to breakdown associated costs and clearly demonstrate the added value it brings in a proactive manner to eliminate any view that the costs are unjustified. This is an opportunity for IT to educate the business in explaining the additional value provided when compared to alternatives. Mature mechanisms exist for managing the cost of IT, one of which is to develop and implement a business-facing service catalog as described by ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). ITIL is strongly focused on deliver-
ing value to the business through its main principle of running IT as a service without the business worrying about specific costs and risks. The service catalog is a great way to lay out exactly what IT offers -- in business terms, mapped to business processes. This not only helps the business understand what IT provides but also helps to educate the business on what costs make up IT and how the business’s own behavior can help control costs through consumption. Developing service catalogs involves direct interaction with the business and can help develop relationships at a senior level as
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well as support competitive advantage by providing differentiated “fit for purpose” technology services to the business. As technology has advanced so has the language and hence the need for IT to refocus its raison d’etre and learn to adapt its message to their audience. IT should steer away from purely focusing on technology towers and talking in IT jargon but develop skills in describing IT services in terms of the business processes that it supports (e.g., number of transactions, invoices printed, etc). It is key for IT to operate in terms of business outcomes, not technology outcomes (e.g. new direct-to-consumer lending model implemented vs. just providing Web services and hosting). This is the opportunity for IT to prove the added value it brings by demonstrating competence and expertise in how to leverage technology for greater business benefit. The need to stay abreast of technological improvements is still critical but any adoption of a technology must show clear business benefit and not just be linked to a "Wow!" factor. Developing clear technology roadmaps is a catalyst to building the business case for adoption and maintaining alignment with the wider business strategy.
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IT should steer away from purely focusing on technology towers but develop skills in describing IT services in terms of the business processes that it supports.
the lines of communication remain open. Utilising this approach to gather feedback and use this information to develop service improvement initiatives will ensure high customer satisfaction and provide IT with much needed information on the strategic objectives of the business. Organisational structure is key and there are typically many to choose from bu t ultimately there are three dominant types: Customer/Service – Ensuring alignment of business application functions to each customer organisation while managing infrastructure and support discretely across the whole service. This model is typically used when there are multiple business units within the organisation with differing requirements. Lifecycle/Process - Providing plan, build, and Critical Enabler No. 2: Communirun teams that are focused on high volume cate and organise around the business of changes. This supports organisations Developing and maintaining relationships that are heavily change-focused and need to across the business is key to ensuring that adapt quickly. IT understands the business and how it Capability/Technology – This type of organioperates. The conversation with the busisation is centered around providing techness must mature beyond simply keeping nology as a service typically split between the lights on. infrastructure and software. Business While it is paramount to provide stable management and support are managed as and resilient operations, IT needs to ensure discrete functions. This typically supports adequate focus is made on strategic and smaller and more stable environments. technological advancements. IT must By focusing on the principles discussed, keep its ear to the ground to determine the IT can strengthen its relationpeople, process and technolship with the business and ogy enhancements necessary senior management and build to provide the business greater its case for a seat in the boardefficiency and competitiveness room. As the IT understanding while also striving to innovate annual growth of the business matures, IT can to reduce complexity and costs. then demonstrate to the busiEstablishing formal dialogue in information ness how technology led initiawith the business by implevolume tives can be used to implement menting an organisational worldwide. the overall business strategy and structure that shows clear mapmove from an internal service ping to business departments organisation focused on mainand segments will ensure
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taining the IT infrastructure to an strategic business asset focusing on creating and delivering innovative services and products This is not an easy journey and no silver bullet exists. However IT should organise itself to address both needs: to support business innovation and to provide a reliable and cost effective infrastructure. Any initiative to engage with the business at the more strategic level must start with IT -- proving that IT is already cost effective and that it can help with innovation. This will provide a strong foundation to gain business buy-in as the role of IT continue to be questioned and transformed. —Chris Gallacher is a consultant at PA Consulting Group. Chris works within PA's US IT consulting practice advising clients around IT service management principles and organisational. Chris holds a Masters in Information Technology and is an ITIL v3 Expert. —Augusto Perazzo is a principal consultant at PA Consulting Group. Augusto works closely with Business and IT executives to define strategies and operating models, optimise processes and empower people. Augusto has an MBA degree from USC Marshall Business School and holds ITIL and PMP certifications. —Larry Scinto is a managing consultant with PA Consulting and has led numerous IT business transformation programs for G500 companies in the healthcare, financial services, technology and utilities industries. He is a certified ITIL practitioner and holds an MBA in general management from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College. — This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. @ www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
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Case Study | Voltas Limited
Happy Employees =Happy Enterprise ChallEnge:
Voltas Limited eliminated large number of employee HR issues by integrating multiple HR systems into a single SAP instance across locations, bringing in transparency and improving employee satisfaction. By Varun Aggarwal
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mployee satisfaction is one of the biggest goals of any HR department. However, most of the HR departmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time is spent into data entry and data validation etc., leaving less room for employee engagement and strategic initiative planning. Similar was the situation at Voltas, where a central HR team had to manage payroll, appraisals, leaves
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and a lot more by fetching data from different databases and different locations for over eleven thousand employees. Moreover, overseas locations had their own payroll system for each country, making it very difficult for the management to get a central view of the entire organisation. Distributed systems led to inconsistent databases, wastage of time in managing everything and thus loss of pro-
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would contain every detail of the employee right from his joining to exit from the organisation.
Selecting the right platform
COMPANY DASHBOARD
Voltas has been an early adopter of SAP software. Its first SAP implementation took place in 2003 to 2004. Over the following years, other divisions also added SAP solutions, increasing the SAP software footprint. When the company wanted a new HR solution to help improve its employ-
Company: Voltas Ltd. Established: 1954 Headquarters: Mumbai, India Products: Heating, Ventilation and Air conditioning, Refrigeration
Financial and Strategic Benefits reater employee satisfaction with realtime access to HR G services and information via a self-service portal Greater transparency for decision making Better consistency achieved by centralizing and standardizing HR guidelines and deployment of HR policies Reduced process time in the areas of recruitment, hiring/ separation, performance management, and payroll Single source of data that helped eliminate duplicate information
Key Challenges eplace manual processes and multiple stand-alone applicaR tions Achieve an integrated IT platform Standardize processes in HR and reduce staffing cost Heighten transparency across the organization Improve employee satisfaction by leveraging self-service technology Adopt a common database for all MIS
photos by Jiten Gandhi
Asmita Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas integrated the entire HR operations across different locations and different platforms on SAP ERP Human Capital Management.
ductivity for the HR department. Moreover, the employees had to courier their reimbursement claims and follow up the HR department to ensure it was received. In case there is any error in the forms filled in by the employee, multiple iterations were required. In order to solve all such issues, Voltas decided to centralise the entire HR system into a single platform, which
ees’ quality of life at work and address the challenges of exponential growth, it looked again to SAP. The SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solution was finally selected to transform the corporate HR function. The goal was to streamline its IT landscape by moving to a single system that would provide endto-end automation of the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire. In addition, Voltas wanted to improve employee satisfaction by offering self-service in the HR area. “Before SAP ERP HCM, I used to personally spend at least one day per week resolving HCM data-related issues. Post SAP ERP HCM, I hardly spend any time on such issues,” opines Asmita Junnarkar, chief information officer, Voltas Limited. Using SAP ERP HCM, Voltas was able to streamline its IT landscape and phase out its multiple IT systems. By standardising all the processes of human resources – The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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“Earlier, any policy change meant changes in multiple systems and checking data consistency across these systems. This has become so much simpler and faster today." Asmita Junnarkar CIO, Voltas Ltd.
to deploy policies and carry out transactions, creating greater transparency and reducing the cycle time for processing information and transactions.” Junnarkar adds, “Earlier, any policy change meant changes in multiple systems and checking data consistency across these systems. This has become so Transforming the HR department much simpler and faster today.” Voltas chose to implement SAP ERP HCM HR self-services have been a hit among for the Indian operations, and then followed the employees. Today, self-service portals up with overseas implementation. The Indiprovide them with real-time access to HR an implementation went live in six months, data. Managers can now approve training after which the overseas project was completand leave requests through e-mails with the ed in UAE and Qatar in four months. Both click of a button. The platform also includes were on time and within budget. As Swapnil data validation so that the employee is Navalkar, General Manager – Corporate HR, reminded on any incorrect data entry; while points out, “SAP ERP HCM has brought all at the same time reduce the time that would the HR processes across India and overseas otherwise go into clarifications with the into one system. This makes it easier for us accounts and HR departments. This has lead to increased employee satisfaction at Voltas. Key Performance Impact The IT team at Voltas also Indicator built two custom applications over the SAP ERP HCM Monthly payroll processing time From 4 hr to 30 min platform for the benefit of the From 6.9 HR staff per employees: Increase in employees served per 1,000 employees 4.5 Transit Houses: Voltas owns HR team member HR staff per 1,000 multiple guest houses that can employees be availed by the employees Improvement in internal customer while in transit. However, one From 2.64 to 3.16 on satisfaction index for employee needed to call in and check for scale of 4 self-service the availability each time they had book the guest house. But Time required to process leaves From 2 hr to 1 min now, a new online booking system lets the employee know Time to generate HR-related Faster delivery with about the availability of the reports lower turnaround time transit house and book online. including time management, training, performance management, expense management, and recruitment – the company was able to improve productivity and reduce staffing costs.
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Critical Incident Diary: Often annual appraisals take into account the performance of an employee only in the past few months because of lack of documentation on key achievements and failures. “To bridge this gap, we built an online app within the SAP HCM wherein employees and supervisors can document their own and their subordinate’s key achievements and failures as and when they are observed. “The system automatically retrieves all such incidents during the time of appraisals making it easier for the management to take informed decisions and eliminate any room for conflict,” explains Junnarkar.
Way Forward Voltas is expanding its SAP software footprint by implementing SAP solutions to cover learning management and employee onboarding and e-separation. The company is also rolling out SAP ERP HCM to its subsidiaries and joint ventures, starting with Universal Comfort Products Limited and Rohini Industrial Electricals. Voltas also plans to use SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions to create role-based dashboards for senior management. As Swapnil explains, “Our vision for the future is to have reports available on the desktop in the form of dashboards.” Voltas is currently in the process of identifying the best parameters that should be included in each dashboard as they would vary from department to department and between different job roles. —varun.aggarwal@9dot9.in
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They have been there and done that. Professional milestones no longer make their hearts beat. For them, it's payback time and they want to bequeath a lasting legacy.
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hat more would a CIO want? The next logical peak professionally, you would think. Becoming
the CEO comes naturally to them, equipped as they are with all the leadership skills. But, is that it? Not
at all, if you go by the diverse responses that the CTO Forum received from the motley group of CIOs it met, representing industries as diverse as banking and satellite television. Their dreams are made of different hues, coloured by the events in their personal lives. But they all speak one language: that of personal social investment. They are ready to chart a new course: sharing experience; giving advise and building leaders of tomorrow. In short, they are preparing their wills â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a
IMAGING BY ANIL
legacy of torchbearers of tomorrow.
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The View from the Top Yes, it is different. Ask a group of super-achieving CIOs “What next?” on the purely personal front. The answer most definitely is not “CEO”. Not one of the CIOs that CTO Forum spoke to is chasing power or money – most already have a fair amount of both. Their’s instead is a story of seeking meaning in their lives and leaving behind an enduring legacy. By Harichandan Arakali
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hat next, CEO? A question that most CIOs would tell you they had to answer at least once on a purely professional front. But what when you pose the same querie, albeit differently worded, on a purely personal front? Is that really what (becoming the CEO) matters? What is their bottomline in life and where do the CIOs see themselves headed in the years to come? Is it a personal quest to find themselves all over again? Or do they even think on those lines at all? What do they really aspire for in their lives? CTO Forum did exactly that. It went beyond the boardrooms and the forbidding formal suits, to take a peep into the real men behind the CIO facade. It invited a small group of CIOs, CTOs and heads of IT to talk about their personal development goals; their journey of self-discovery; their experiences and the lessons on life that it taught them; and the dreams that they are still chasing. That they have all carved a niche for themselves in the corporate world, achieved a high degree of professional success and taken long strides as leaders in their field is indisputable. But what we wanted to know lay beyond their professional domains. It involved a look inwards; a self-analysis and an existential question: Who do they think they are and what do
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they want to do next? It involved a very personal point of view.
The Bottomline of Life If you take a group of super-achievers who spend every single day tweaking, and sometimes overhauling business processes using their deep understanding of technology, and ask them what’s the bottomline in their life, the answers can certainly surprise you. The following questions among others were posed to seven CIOs, including one visiting CTO from Xerox Corp to unravel the wo/men within: 1. What life's lessons do you feel you still need to learn? 2. What dream are you passionately nurturing in your heart and mind? 3. How are you planning to realise that dream? 4. Have you noticed how others benefit from the hard-earned wisdom that you can now share and that doing so only enriches your own soul? 5. Where are you on your journey of self-actualisation, discovery? These seven CIOs, a reasonably good representative sample of their peers, were separated by background, even age, sex, companies and verticals in which they work and yet, unerringly, they all zeroed in on similar basic life lessons that they had learnt the hard way and Kadab L Mukesh, Chief Business Operation’s Officer, Tata Sky that they wanted to share with others, or use it to help others. “I’d like to help others find the same balance in their lives that I’ve found in mine,” said Sudhir K Reddy, CIO, MindTree Ltd. Reddy draws his first inspiration from Give It Free his father, who he says, “would just not compromise Each one of the CIOs that the CTO Forum spoke to on his expectations from himself for his family. identified with this theme. “It’s payback time,” joked He would probably have been a millionaire if he Kadab L Mukesh, who after nearly two decades of wanted. But instead, my father chose to channelise running various units of Direct TV in the US, Japan his energies into his family and that made all the and Latin America, came back to India two years ago difference.” as TataSky’s Chief Business Operations Officer. Reddy says, “Today, I am carrying forward the same In his professional capacity, Mukesh drives his collessons and desire to see if I too can help young peoleagues to challenge themselves. He demands that ple find the same balance in their lives.” they show him the business value in whatever they He likes to attack everything in his life, be it work do, like moving the next set of applications on to or something personal, with the same energy and the Amazon Elastic Cloud, for instance. Personally zest. It doesn’t matter whether it is a 6 am conference though, his dreams are of a different hue. He has call with a tough client or a bowling session with colgiven himself four years to get involved full-time with leagues or a biking trip with his friend Murali KrishNGOs working in the field of education and in initianan of Infosys Technologies Ltd. tives to mentor young businesses and people with photo by S. radhakrishna
“We’ve got so much from society, the people around us; it’s time to give back... it’s as simple as that”
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CO V E R S TOR Y
ideas for cross-border commerce — his forte. “We’ve got so much from society, the people around us; it’s time to give back... it’s as simple as that,” he said. “I’d like to build a village that is completely selfsufficient with farms to factories,” said John Cherian, a doctor whose fascination with all things technological ultimately got him to the position of IT Head at the Philips Innovation Campus. “I might have been something else in another part of the world, but I’m here, and I’m happy to have reached here. So why not give back freely what I have learnt here?” Cherian sold books and endured rattling bus trips to Chennai for PC components to assemble desktop PCs to partly fund his college education. Today, toting his soft phone equipped iPad, Cherian says, “At Philips,
“In my post-tech-life, being a great homemaker is definitely high priority for me” Jijy Oomen , CIO, Bajaj Capital
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I discovered I enjoyed what I was doing immensely; but my dream is to one day build this village, which has everything.”
Adversity Gives Strength When Sophie Vandebroek, Chief Technology Officer of Xerox Innovation Group was 34, her husband died, leaving her with three children. Her husband, a talented director of engineering at a firm in the US, where the Belgium-born Vandebroek had emigrated with her spouse, “used to joke that we hold the world by the strings,” Vadebroek recalled in an interview last month in Bangalore. She was visiting her group’s India Center. “One day, the string was cut, and I discovered I didn’t even know my next-door neighbours,” she said. Vandebroek refused to buckle under, and today uses her position to act as a strong champion of people relationships across race, religion, gender and even sexual orientation. Hardship, was another theme that popped up in our discussions with the CIOs, who have either personally gone through a real wringer of a life but emerged winners or witnessed what things as poverty and/or the loss of a parent or a loved one can do. “My mother was married at 18, had her daughter at 19, her son at 20, lost her husband at 25, her daughter at 40, got cancer at 50 and died at 53,” said Ratnakar Nemani, who rose to become General Manager, IT after nine promotions in 18 years at VST Industries. He is today CIO at Himatsingka Siede, the Bangalorebased niche silk maker, overhauling the company’s IT systems. “What is my mother’s achievement?” he asks; and answers proudly: “It is Ratnakar.” That brutal upbringing has not made him bitter. Instead, he’s used the knowledge of what adversity can do, to instil confidence in his colleagues and team members in their times of need. “I was desperate to grow up and fast,” said Jijy Oommen, who in her mid thirties is one of the youngest CIOs around. No wonder, Jijy started working when she was just 20, spurred by the death of her father and wanting to take care of her
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mother. Today, as CIO of Bajaj Capital Ltd, she’s come a long way, but her memories are still fresh as she recalls how at less than 22 years, she was already an assistant manager, solutions, at a software company where she started her career. “Most of my colleagues were much older,” Jijy informs. Jijy is candid about how starting on a job early in her life meant that she “missed out on many things on the personal front.” For this CIO of a leading financial services company today, attending parents-teachers meetings and making her children’s favourite breakfast dishes, are the high points of her high-profile life. “In my post-tech-life, being a great homemaker is definitely high priority for me,” she said. Jijy also has some other dreams. “Having come this far, I would certainly like to help others improve their lives in some way,” she said. “I love technology and I love religion, and this has led me to study Scientology. ”
Meaning and Legacy Santhosh Babu, a leadership coach who runs OD Alternatives, an executive leadership training consultancy, looks at these CIOs or other CXOs as people who’ve already mastered, what he calls, the functional skills, in the early years of their careers, as also the transferable skills such as what would be required if they made the switch to the CEO’s role. They are now haunted by the idea of “meaning and legacy”, and the question they are seeking an answer to is: “Boss, I’ve definitely climbed up the ladder fast, but did I keep Ratnakar Nemani, CIO, Himatsingka Siede the ladder against the right wall?” The question that these CIOs have most effectively answered is what they have chosen to attempt in the coming years: Change Delivery at ING Vysya Bank, put it, “If you Build the next generation of leaders. In one way or can’t ensure peace and harmony at home” you won’t the other, either directly, in their own organisations, do well anywhere else in the long run. or indirectly, by sharing their knowledge and their These CIOs are leaders themselves, but what will network of contacts, these CIOs have resolved to define them in the coming years and distinguish bequeath a legacy of effective leadership. “That is them from others, is their deliberate choice to help their biggest legacy,” Santhosh said. “It doesn’t matter others become leaders, be it in their organisations or what anyone thinks or not thinks of their endeavours; outside it. Some have already taken tangible steps in building the next set of leaders is the most enduring that direction; others are actively considering it. As legacy” the CIOs can give. Santhosh puts it succinctly, they will re-invent themWhich brings one back to Christensen’s advice: selves, create new possibilities for themselves and for “Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your others and build tomorrow’s leaders. career.” If that sounds counter-intuitive; think about it, it really isn’t. As Aniruddha Paul, Head of IT
photo by Suresh vangapally
“What is my mother’s achievement?... It is Ratnakar”
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Sudhir Kumar Reddy
CO V E R S TOR Y
“A simple thing like 'bring your own device' can make a difference for someone to stay or leave” Sudhir Kumar Reddy
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CIO, MindTree Ltd.
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The Balance that is Life My Motivators One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life Happiness is a state of Mind…
One book that I keep going back to Webster’s Dictionary One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply Many over the years… Currently it is Subroto Bagchi One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Health is better than Wealth…. Obviously, it is best when you have both One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Valuing others time and keeping your word
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want to help people find the same work-life balance that my father demonstrated can be achieved. He could have done any number of things. He could have made a lot more money for instance, but he was determined to fulfill his commitment to the family. We learnt the value of family life from him. Children don't necessarily learn things that their elders tell them. They learn from what they see their elders do. It’s all there in the subconscious and every now and then it surfaces. When it comes to work, one of the things that puzzles me is, why does someone leave? In the knowledge services business, it’s all about people, projects and profitability. Projects happen, and profitability, people worry about, but why someone leaves is a very complex thing and it has something to do with balance. It can be about commute time or that the job is just boring, apart from inadequate compensation. Just about anything. With all other things being equal or comparable, what would make someone stay or leave? A simple thing like "bring your own device" can make a difference because a college hire today is already comfortable using a combination of apps s/he has found on the internet to figure out the most productive way for s/he to do the work. If a company then says "Look, you’ll only use this stodgy laptop with these set of
applications", that is obviously a big turn-off for a tech-savvy youngster. I use this as an illustration to show how a small change (in policy) can make a huge difference down the line, with thousands of new, eager recruits. What can I do today to help many people find that balance which is dear to me? So can I for instance, subsidise a new recruit’s purchase of the device of choice – Thinkpad or Macbook (for example), if that’s her preference—to the extent the company’s budget allows me, instead of forcing her to use what the company can afford? Can I get as much productivity with ‘work from anywhere’ and effectively deploy nonintrusive monitoring and controls. If you extend that philosophy, you’ll see what I’m getting at and what I want to achieve. Is it possible to let people be themselves and still get the best out of them? How do we create an environment that enables this work and life culture? Here is also where my biggest gripe is—this very Indian cultural concept of "please adjust". Why should I adjust? Where would Apple be if Steve Jobs decided to adjust? In two generations, young people will refuse to settle for anything less than the best, not just in products but also in terms of work ethics. And, I see it as my job to help build that momentum from today itself. The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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Bounce Back & Live My Motivators
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nitially, I was totally unprepared to share the story of these very personal events in my life. They challenged me to make myself what I am today and I have carried the lessons along with me for many years now. Today, I want to share it with you all and help people understand and imbibe it to improve their lives. ‘Bounce Back or Die,’ this is the lesson that life taught me and what I want you to learn. I was a bright student and scored good marks in class 12. I came to Delhi to take the medical entrance test in 1994. The harsh Delhi summer (it was a record breaking one) was too much for me to bear and I fell severely ill. I was bed-ridden for a month-and-a-half. By then, the entrance tests were over and my parents were asking me to come back to Kerala, my home state, and continue my studies there. I am the kind of a person who takes challenges to heart — I’ve always been that way. I decided to stay back in Delhi and started se eking admission in other courses. But then came the news that my father was diagnosed with cancer and it was at an advanced stage. I decided to put my dream of a formal education on hold and pursue a course that would get me a job fast. I enrolled in a two-year diploma course in computer applications while pursuing my graduation through distance learning. That year, in October, my father passed away. Since my siblings were also studying, I didn’t want
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to burden my mother, and hence, in the second year opted for the early morning and late evening batch. I also found a job near the institute. Things began to look up, with my course completion, only to send life into another tailspin. My elder sister, who’d recently found a job in Delhi, was killed in a terrible motor accident. That was in 1997. This tragedy was the real test of my strength. Do I give in to depression or bounce back and help my mother? I chose the latter. There were many obstacles on the way and I didn't let anything or anyone hold me back from pursuing my goals. Along the way, I picked up a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, a Masters in Banking & Insurance Management and an MBA in Information Systems. I have also done several certifications and till today, I continue to study. It is easy for me to chart my future professional course. But what I would really love to pass on are the hard-earned lessons from my interactions with many many people along the way. These are as much about retaining humility in what could be a learning experience, as about finding the courage to go for broke when you have the conviction that you are on the right track.
One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life I’m pretty restless in my quest for the next thing to know or learn
One book that I keep going back to Magic Of Thinking Big by David J Schwartz One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply Unfair to give just one name. Many have influenced me in different ways One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Personally, I am keen to learn how to relax Around me, I’d like to see every individual feel responsible for self and to society One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Be aware of how others will perceive you. No two people think alike
CO V E R S TOR Y
Jijy Oommen
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“There were many obstacles on the way and I didn't let anything hold me back from pursuing my goals” photo by Subhojit Paul
Jijy Oommen
Executive VP & Group Head Technologies Bajaj Capital Ltd.
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Aniruddha Paul
CO V E R S TOR Y
â&#x20AC;&#x153;I try to stay grounded by getting involved in business analysis, system design, field visits, and researchâ&#x20AC;? Aniruddha Paul
India - VP & Head of IT Change Delivery at ING Vysya Bank
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Life Skills for Practical Living My Motivators One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life That I have a low boredom quotient and it’s important that I factor that in, whatever I do
One book that I keep going back to Achalayatan by Rabindranath Tagore, whose world view on religion and education is timeless
PHOTO BY S. RADHAKRISHNA
One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply My first supervisor in my first company – he taught me the art of the sell One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Efficient time management. I’m quite bad at it One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Never chase money, if you are good enough it will find you eventually
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he best leaders are the ones who have the ability to easily move back and forth between their mandate of taking an abstract ‘big-picture’ view of life and the occasional need for the zero-feet level, roll-up-your-sleeves and do-it-your self work. I’ve seen this with every giant leader that I’ve had the chance to know and interact with in some form, such as Vineet Nayar (of HCL Technologies Ltd.), or Nandan Nilekani and Narayana Murthy (of Infosys Technologies Ltd), or Don Koch of ING—people who I’ve respected for being able to eloquently describe a world view and yet, in the next instant, do a deep dive into intricate details and ferret out nuggets of information that would otherwise stay concealed. As one grows in life and seniority, articulating the abstract view comes naturally, but a more dangerous by product is getting divorced from the nitty-gritty of reality. We tend to pick up lazy habits of not personally reading through documents and doing our own research, but relying on abstracts prepared by others. Or, in not staying current with new developments, but leveraging past competence and experience past it’s sell-by date. In my current role of leading IT driven enterprise transformation, there is a severe temptation to operate at very high level of abstraction. Indeed, the role calls for it in terms of preparing enterprise architecture blue prints and transformation agendas. I try to stay grounded and real by sometimes getting involved in business analysis, system design and field visits, and incessant research. This helps me a lot in challenging assumptions and in keeping everybody real and honest.
In an always-switched-on world, it’s difficult to have separate traits for personal and professional life. So, the above extends into personal life in terms of staying equipped with a few hard skills. For example, even if you become a senior executive and have a driver for your car, retaining the ability to deal with a flat tyre and fluid change in an emergency is a great idea. As a corollary, every year, I try to learn a new skill, however trivial. A few years back it was learning how to eat with chopsticks flawlessly, including picking up individual rice grains with them. In another year, I determined that I would cure myself of vertigo by doing bungee jumping and I did that (the bungee jumping, not the vertigo). For the last two years, it has been off-road driving in my 4WD, especially through mud, and I’m slowly getting better at it. At the back of all of this is the ability to figure out what drives you and makes you happy, the pursuit of which requires decision-making fearlessness that only economic self sufficiency can bring. Economic self sufficiency does not equal being rich – it merely means reaching a state of mental peace with one’s material needs and ability to fulfil them. It sounds simple, but the honesty that it brings to professional and personal life choices is tremendous. Therefore, in helping others find their way, I ask them the same questions that I ask of myself – how real and contemporary is your knowledge-base? Have you stopped learning and resting on past laurels? Are you doing what you are doing because it makes you happy? How honest is your decision making? Easy questions and hard answers, but once answered, will serve you well.
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Ratnakar Nemani
CO V E R S TOR Y
Ratnakar Nemani
Group CIO, Himatsingka Siede Ltd.
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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Successes small and big have also come because of a lifelong attitude of never giving in to adversityâ&#x20AC;?
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Courage Under Fire
My Motivators
One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life Discipline
One book that I keep going back to The Professional by Subroto Bagchi One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply My Mother One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Control over Negative Emotions One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Confidence
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n 1990, at the beginning of my career, I had to decide between two jobs â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a position with VST Industries, the makers of Charminar cigarettes, for Rs 2,500 a month in Guwahati and the other with Thomas Cook, the travel agency, for Rs 3,500 in what was then Calcutta. For various reasons the VST job was much more relevant to my longer term career prospects. I ended up staying with them for 18 years during which time I was promoted nine times until I reached the position of General Manager, IT. It was an area that I'd decided to pursue early on in the company, rightly anticipating this field to be the one that would make a lot of difference to business processes. Picking up qualifications along the way, such as the ICWA charter, also helped. Today I just want to ensure that my colleagues and team members have the same confidence in what they do that I have in my work. If I ask a subordinate to put in his papers, if my leadership has succeeded, then he'll do it without a murmur, for he will know that tomorrow he'll get another equally challenging and rewarding job on the strength of what he and I have achieved together. Back in VST, I was leading a team from a unit that was providing IT services and even looking to bid for external contracts to implement ERP systems and so on. We were invited to make a presentation to a well known business school that was looking at deploying some of these applications. That we were lesser
known than some big names we were competing with for the contract, meant that we waited for some 5-6 hours before we got a chance to make a presentation. We got the contract and a commendation from the finance officer of the customer company saying that we exceeded his expectations. That experience was an eye-opener for me and my colleagues â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we decided that we would never fear to pitch in for another big brand just because it had a big name. Successes small and big have also come because of a lifelong attitude of never giving in to adversity. I dropped out of school in class 10 because I couldn't make the cut-off grade in maths and science. The new cut-offs had been introduced by the school as part of a new system the previous year. At around the same time, my sister died, and for me it was a devastating blow. I felt as though I'd lost everything in life. Yet, there was also a life-affirming activity happening alongside. My mother was trying to clear her own class 10 exams so that she could get a better job and give us a better life. My mother was an exemplar of courage and determination. She was married at 18, by 25 was already a widow and lost her 16-year-old daughter at the age of 40. The death of my father and sister, brought my mother and me together as collaborators in the mission to make my life a success. She herself was to die of a cancer at 53, but her legacy of courage lives in me and will be passed on to the leaders I help create. The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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A Social Worldview
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moved back to India about two years ago. Prior to that, for about 16 years, I was working in some combination or the other of the US, Latin America and Japan. A large chunk of my experience in pay TV is in bankruptcy and turnaround, which I learnt on the job while working for one or the other unit of Direct TV, starting with the US. As a part of my job, I used to manage operations and IT, so, my background is more in business operations. I’ve lived in Japan, and the US and managed operations across Mexico and all of South America. What I’d like to do, I honestly don’t know if it is practical or feasible, and I don’t even know how to go about it. In my ideal world — and I’ve been living in India only recently, so it would take time — say in three to four years, I’d really like to do a couple of things. First, mentor people who are starting up businesses, or people whose businesses are in difficulty or people who want to do cross-border business — go international but who don’t have the background. A large chunk of my experience is international and a large part of that is in bankruptcy turnaround, distress situations and so on. Then there’s also a fair amount of startup and venture knowledge that I have. So, I feel this is something that I can do. There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in international business that people are not aware of. For instance, because Argentina has a tax treaty with the Netherlands but not with the US, it makes business sense to have a Dutch entity and export from the US to the Netherlands and then over to Argentina.
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I’d love to mentor people by using my knowledge in international business and help them get their businesses going at the global level. The second thing that I want to do is to work with NGOs, especially in the field of education. The desire to do something for the education of the poor is, at least partly, rooted in my own life history. Like many of the middle-class people, I come from a very humble background. So, I have seen the other side of the fence upclose and personal. I can recall being in one of the Mumbai ‘chawls’ — stacked up one on top of the other — where one had to carry an umbrella into the toilet for the fear that the roof might leak. Somewhere along the line, we got lucky, and life has been really kind to us all this time. And now, it’s clearly payback time. What concerns me in education is not raising funds — it isn’t necessarily a challenge — but the pedagogy and the method of teaching. In my view, it is something that is highly suspect. For example, teaching trigonometry to a student in a municipal school isn’t the same as teaching it to a kid from an upper-middle class family. I feel there is an opportunity to tweak the pedagogy and stop it from being a one-kind-fits-all model. I want to see if I can help create a teaching system that takes into account the socio-economic background of the student. This is something that I’m very passionate about. I’m not saying I have solutions for these problems, but it’s something that I would certainly like to get into and give a try to find out what I can do.
My Motivators One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life Love of harmony in all matters
One book that I keep going back to Poetry of Kobayashi Issa One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Spend more time learning One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Don’t take yourself too seriously
CO V E R S TOR Y
Kadab L Mukesh
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photo by S. radhakrishna
â&#x20AC;&#x153;I want to help create a teaching system that takes into account the socio-economic background of the studentâ&#x20AC;? Kadab L Mukesh
Chief Business Operations Officer, Tata Sky Ltd.
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John Cherian
CO V E R S TOR Y
“People are my weakness and technology is my passion, and the two come together in the dream I have” Dr. John Cherian
Head, IT Infrastructure Philips Innovation Campus
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Building A Self Contained Village My Motivators One thing I discovered about myself that has had a lasting impact on my life Competitive spirit and getting things done
One book that I keep going back to The Bible – the more you read, the more insights you get into life One person whose thinking and/or actions influenced me deeply Moses in The Bible Old Testament. A great leader who led a nation (Israel) to a new beginning One change I would like to effect in my life or in my surroundings Learn to slow myself down... One piece of advice I got that really stuck with me Shelf life of technology is always decreasing. Be an early adopter with calculated risk to reap the best
I
f you look at leaders, a very important ingredient in their success formula that gets them to that position, is their passion to excel. The fire to excel at whatever I did, was always there in my mind and I remember wanting to be the best even back then in my childhood. Though I studied medicine and became a doctor, I had a passion for technology. The urge to learn how things work has always been there in me. My background in medicine played its own important role as well: it helped me implement several things in my customer service aspect. Doctors are the best examples of great customer service — the ‘patient first’ motto that they imbibe as a medical practitoner, translates into the ideal of ‘customer first’. For me, this ideology helped me become a great business technologist. The passion to excel coupled with the work ethics that a dedicated doctor brings to his job, led me on a different kind of search. It taught me to seek opportunities for doing something different, something unique, throughout my career leading up to Philips. I have always wanted to achieve something that would make people say "this guy and his team have done something worthwhile". When I was a student in a government-run medical college, many of the ventilators often wouldn’t work, and I would tinker with them and sometimes succeed in getting them going. Because of this ability, I
was given access to ICUs (intensive care units) that no interns would be allowed into. The lesson I learnt here was: make yourself useful and it will literally open doors for you. On the technical front, wanting to boost my career in business technology, I left no course that came my way, untouched. I knew I was competing with qualified engineers, so I acquired a clutch of certifications. What made the difference for me was that the doctor in me was always rearing to take charge of any situation that confronted me and I veered towards becoming a manager. This also means that whatever I do in the coming years will have to involve being with people, understanding people and working with and motivating people. If you call me a ‘peoples person’ that would be me, I really enjoy that. People are my weakness and technology is my passion, and the two come together in the dream I have. One day, I will build my own autonomous unit, a village that will have everything from farm to factory to hospitals. This will be a venture that will not be for money, but purely to help people. It will a be self-propelling, self-sustaining unit and I’m waiting to work on it. In the interim, I manage to keep my medical knowledge up-to-date. I visit villages when I can, talk to people about good health practices — see, you don’t need to be a specialist but a general practitioner—and I still have that in me. I have this dream, but am I ready for it? I don’t know yet. The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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3 Steps to a Lasting Legacy
H
ow does a person look at the world, what is his mindset, which Babu calls the Human Operating System: Figure out what your operating system is and you would have understood who you are. This knowledge is essential to re-inventing oneself and almost always, there is a correlation between the ability to ask and answer this question and a person’s position in an organisation or maturity. Usually, it is only a person who is mature and interested in self development and is at the senior level in an organisation, who can really attempt this question, Babu said. At a junior level or when we are young, most people will be interested in creating security and focus on the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. The CXO needs to ask this question, ‘Who Am I and how am I making a difference?’ because in the answer could lie the ability to create the next leap for himself and many people around him at work and in life. “Who you are will influence what you’ll do,” and at the senior executive level, the next level of personal development lies in a person mastering himself. “This isn’t anything new from me, but this is how even traditions work,” Babu said.
The Next Leap The next leap for CXO-level people involves actively
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Is it possible to be prescriptive in getting CIOs or other Chief ‘X’ Officers to achieve their personal development goals? Santhosh Babu, founder of OD Alternatives, an executive leadership coaching consultancy, discusses his ideas in an interview with Harichandan Arakali jettisoning any urge to live on past glory. They are all going through a transition time, in which three things are vital: First, Self Renewal is a must. They have to re-invent themselves continuously for the second step which is to create new possibilities for themselves and others. The first two will dovetail into the third task, which is to build the next level of leaders. Many senior executives think about such things as the ‘next level I could take the organisation to,’ but what they don’t think is that their legacy will always be the next level of leaders they create, he said. Their ability to reinvent in the middle life will be at the heart of this: “If you don’t do that you go straight to being an old man.” The legacy of today’s leader rides on the number of leaders he creates and helps create for tomorrow. It is also an important way, according to Babu, to ensure what he calls ‘tacit knowledge’ is passed on. Senior executives are usually also at a stage in life where they are looking for meaning and legacy and often development at work and in personal life are intertwined, and following these three steps would help the CXO make the transition on both fronts.
NEXT
HORIZONS
Features Inside
Hurray! IPv6 Day is Here
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Managing Sync'd Online Backup CIOs have three options – ban the usage, ignore it or offer a credible option. By Ian Gotts
irst it was cloud-based apps that were causing CIOs sleepless nights. Business users are wooed by the ease of use, sexy look and feel and the speed of implementation. Sadly, business users are oblivious to the security hazards, the lack of integration into core systems, the scalability and longevity risks to the cloud vendor. This is something that in previous articles I have called the “Stealth Cloud.” The Stealth Cloud has allowed corporate data to leak into the cloud as users populate these applications with their information. But that trickle is turning into a stream, primarily due to cloud based apps. Specifically, a genre of apps called “file sync & online backup," is a rapidly growing area claiming the “cloud is the new USB”. In a world that is awash with data, good connectivity and affordable storage prices, this statement may be true. So what are these apps offering to make them so appealing? First, we need to recognise that, for a huge number of employees, their work and personal lives live on their lapThe Chief Technology Officer Forum
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top, which typically have a working life of two to three years. IT departments implore them to make sure they back up their fragile hard disks but don’t really offer an easy way to do it. By easy, I mean zero-effort -- set it up once and forget it. IT departments have provided file storage but it is up to the employee to remember to back up when connected to the corporate network. And to be honest there are far more interesting things to be doing than remembering to backup. With the “file sync” app, vendors have Outside of IT recognised that we are not ready for a 100% But the downside, just like the Stealth cloud solution. There are too many times we Cloud apps, is they are not part of corporate are not near a Wi-Fi or corporate network, IT strategy. Therefore, the benefits of scale so apps make it easy to synchronise a folder and common use are lost. Type “file sync or a set of folders on a device, duplicate & online backup” into a search engine and them in the cloud and then sync those cloud you will get over 300,000 hits. Type in just folders with any other device. “file sync online” and you get over 3 million! This translates into complete data porThere are over 50 vendors who claim to be tability. In fact, I am writing this article on the leading file company and they all look the Mac at home but saving it to the “sync the same; certainly to the untrained eye. folder” I use in the cloud. Every time I hit The CIO needs to get ahead of the busisave it is available to the other devices I have ness users and offer an equivalent or better connected. I can edit it on my PC or my solution that not only meets people's needs iPad. I can even make it available to other but also forms part of the corporate strategy. people as a shared file. It is all about minimising risks. This is all achieved with a simple regisThe first and greatest risk is that your tration and log-in to a website and a downbusiness’ hard won ISO-27001 security load of a small client side app; identify the accreditation will be flushed away in an folders that are to be sync’d; and the folders instant. These apps run roughshod over will stay permanently sync'd with no need security policies and accreditation. to back up. Some of you are reading this and thinking This may explain why this phenomenon that it is no different from the issues of USB has gone viral. The puppy dog sale is the sticks and external hard disks. That is true first 2GB is free. A couple of players are but, we as the IT community, have hardly got offering 3GB. Microsoft’s Skydrive is 25GB a real handle on that issue either. The benefit but there is no easy sync app so it falls at with physical devices is that they eventually the first fence. Two gigs may not sound like end up gathering dust in cupboards. The enough, but you can "earn" more space by challenges with “file sync” apps run deeper: completing the training or inviting friends. Data security: Where is this data going? If users go beyond the initial free space, Is it crossing country borders? Who is storthere is often a sliding fee. ing it? How and when is it being Since the fee is so low, individbacked up? Who has access to it? uals have no problem expensVendor lock-in: Will the vening the cost. As a result, true dors exist long term? If they are total corporate costs are never acquired, who will buy them? If of consumer seen and vendors are able to they collapse what happens to the stay in business. spend on digital servers with the data? This sounds great. Online Corporate network loading: If information sync. Back-up. File versionevery employee has their entire was for devices hard disk sync'd in the cloud ing. File sharing ... Sounds like another of the CIO's jobs done what will that do to the network in 2010. for them. and Internet connection?
The CIO needs to get ahead of the business users and offer a better solution that not only meets people's needs but also forms part of the corporate strategy.
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Costs: If users decide to upgrade to more data, where are the economies of scale? Is the company paying to backup and sync their music and videos? Interoperability: If every user used the same app, would installation, support and upgrades be simpler? Data management: When an employee leaves how do you get control of the data? How do you exploit the file sharing? So what are the options for a CIO? There are broadly three: 1 .Ban using these apps: Most CIOs are fairly unpopular with the business users so this will drive the wedge further. 2. Ignore the problem: Not an option and possibly a dereliction of duty. The "I" in CIO does stand for "Information," after all 3 .Offer a credible option: Review the market and decide on the best approach whether it's in-house, open source installed in-house or third party solution. Normal IT strategy and vendor evaluation stuff. And then set some policies on how it should be used. No matter what they do, CIOs need to get on with it. Every day that goes by the problem gets worse and it will be harder and harder to wean users off their favorite cloud if that's what you want to do. —Ian Gotts is the author of six books including, Common Approach, Uncommon Results; Why Killer Products Don’t Sell; and two Thinking of … books on cloud computing. He is a prolific blogger with a rare ability to make the complex seem simple, which makes him a sought-after and entertaining conference speaker. His book, Thinking of ... Offering a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions, articulates the opportunities and the challenges ISVs face in their transition to the cloud. — This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. @ www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
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Hurray! IPv6 Day is Here
Fortunately, the IPv6 transition is not a ticking time bomb with a hard deadline. By Pam Baker
Illustration by photos.com
T
he alarm sounded: IPv4 was running out of IP addresses. To fix the problem,IPv6, the next generation of routing, came to be with plenty of fanfare about its nearly unlimited number of addresses and additional security. There is even an official day for fanfare, “World IPv6 Day” tomorrow on June 8. A bunch of Internet giants including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, will celebrate the day by enabling IPv6 on their main services for the whole 24 hours. It’s a day to go gaga over the impending switch over or at least to feel more confident about it ... not that there’s any choice really. “The transition to IPv6 is not a potential issue, but a guaranteed reality,” said Peter Newton, director of Product Management, Business Products at Netgear. “The only issue is how fast that transition will take place and how painful will it be.” Fortunately, the IPv6 transition is not a ticking time bomb with a hard deadline. Companies and consumers “will be able to manage their transition from IPv4 to IPv6 with NAT translation and dual-stack capable equipment to create an orderly, productive shift,” said Newton. The transition should pick up speed after the hoopla on June 8 but, for the most part, few folks will notice much difference during the shift. However, at some point, equipment and software upgrades will become a necessity for pretty much everybody. “Consumers and small businesses need to open a dialogue with their Internet service provider (ISP) about providing IPv6 services,” advised John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the organization in charge of managing address space in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean. “Mail, web, and application servers must be reachable via IPv6 in addition to IPv4. “If they have not already, consumers and small businesses need to ensure equipment, software and operating systems are IPv6 compat-
ible and should impose IPv6 compatibility requirements on their vendors and service providers." The funny thing is that most consumers and small businesses are likely to be using IPv6 enabled equipment already. It’s smart to check for that before running out to buy more equipment. In the short term, service providers will feel the most pain as they need to procure more IPv4 addresses and convert their installed base of modems and networking gear to IPv6 capable gear, said Newton. “The real winners of this change will take advantage of the latest generation of networking gear to improve their efficiency and operational capabilities, giving them an advantage over their slower competitors.” Related Articles The bottom-line is that the faster companies and consumers make the switch the better off all will be.
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More secure? But will the switch to IPv6 really leave anyone any safer? “In some aspects, IPv6 is considered more secure than IPv4 due to some built-in security capabilities, mainly the inclusion of IP Security,” explained Sharon Besser, VP of Technology at Net Optics. “Yet, IPv6 security uses the same methods to forward and route packets across the network as IPv4. In addition, the upper-layer protocols and applications that transport the application data are mostly unaffected.” By contrast, IPv4 had no native security but security has been cobbled onto it over the years. Still, security issues linger. For example, network address translation (NAT) allowed businesses and households to share a single IP address for multiple devices. While such band-aids extended the life of IPv4, it also served to mask the bad guys; making detection, protection and prosecution all the more difficult. “The good news is that IPv6 solves this problem. It allows for a virtually limitless allocation of identity on the Internet,” said Joe Yeager, a product manager at Lancope. “Not only can everyone have a unique identity on the Internet, all of their devices from their phones to their tablet PC’s to their toasters can be identified; perfect for security.” “Currently, the two protocols have equivalent security,” said Curran. “As a basis of comparison, IPv6's best improvement is adding more bits for addressing (128 bits) over IPv4 (32 bits).” There is a fly in the transition lube that is worrying security experts, however: large scale NAT (LSN), also called carrier-grade NAT (CGN). “For the security market, the changes IPv6 brings
about are mostly good,” said Yeager. “The slow adoption rate, on the other hand, is not so good. Because the pressure from IPv4 address exhaustion is building faster than the cut-over can happen, technologies like LSN are being considered.” Basically instead of one company or one household being behind a single IP address, LSN allows for literally thousands of customers to be behind a single IP address. “Imagine you share the same identity on the Internet with thousands of random strangers,” said Yeager. Major websites such as Facebook and Google may have no other recourse after a malicious attack but to block that IP address, and thereby block you and the thousands of other people using it, he warned. —A prolific and versatile writer, Pam Baker's published credits include numerous articles in leading publications including, but not limited to: Institutional Investor magazine, NetworkWorld, ComputerWorld, IT World, Linux World, Internet News, E-Commerce Times, MedTech Journal, NY Times, and Knight-Ridder/McClatchy newspapers. She has also authored several analytical studies on technology and eight books. Baker also wrote and produced an award-winning documentary on paper-making. She is a member of the National Press Club (NPC), Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and the Internet Press Guild (IPG). — This article has been reprinted with permission from CIO Update. @ http://www.cioupdate.com. To see more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.
“Understanding the customer is the key to success”
ArcSight, which was acquired by HP last year, was started when the dotcom bubble had burst. CTO Forum talks to Hugh Njemanze, ArcSight Founder and VP & CTO, HP Security Solutions, about the company’s journey so far and how it has been able to sustain a robust growth.
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Hugh Njemanze
DOSSIER Company: ArcSight Established: 2000 Was purchased by: HP in 2010 Services: Enterprise software, security management Headquarters: Cupertino, CA
What inspired you to incubate ArcSight? How has the journey been so far? Before we started this company, we saw that there were organisations building tools in-house, and they were realising that they cannot be in the business of maintaining those tools. The reason being thta perhaps the person who originally built the tool moved on to another company and someone would need to reverseengineer it to understand it. So it was better to find a commercial solution. There was clearly a need for log consolidation and analysis tool in the market that could meet the enterprise needs for strategic monitoring. We started at a fairly difficult time when the dot-com bubble had just burst and not many customers had discretionary funds to start new projects. But we turned it into an advantage because while we were building our first product, we could focus on building a great product as we weren’t worried about selling it by using our funding. By January, 2002, there was a reviewer who did a round of all such tools in the market, and told us that ours was the most mature tool in the space. When we launched our first product and published the details on our website, the competitive website claimed the same features within weeks on their own websites. However, that worked in our favour because when we did PoCs for the customers, they told us that we were the only product that actually matches its website specs. In fact, I also met some of my competitors at trade shows and they said we had an unfair advantage because we wrote fresh code base and they used the same old code base that evolved over a period of time. Most of our competitors started out as security consultants and wrote these tools for themselves and became a software company almost by accident. Another advantage that we had was our conservative fiscal approach. During the dot-com days,
“We maintained a small team initially and as we got customers we expanded the team. This approach helped us survive the downturn and helped us become profitable at a very early stage.” there was almost a formula that if you were to be acquired you’d be paid a million dollar for every employee. So these companies kept hiring employees without thinking much about profitability and viability as they just wanted to be bought. On the other hand, we maintained a small team initially and as we got customers we expanded the team. This approach helped us survive the downturn and helped us become profitable at a very early stage. How much funding did you receive? We started with a venture capital of $16 million and then did a second round of funding a couple of years later. That was the last time we raised money until we went public. We started selling our product in 2002 and by 2004 we started generating profits and went public in 2008. You hired a sales person and met potential customers even before you had a product? How did you manage to achieve this?
N O H O L D S B A RR E D
We described the log management and analysis problem that we had been hearing from other customers and they agreed they had similar problems and needs and were therefore willing to talk to us even though we didn’t even have a proper name. We used to call ourselves Wahoo, which is the name of a fish. People thought that it was just a copy of the name Yahoo. With some of those cold calls that Pat (the sales guy) and I made, the customer said that if you could build a product that could solve the problems we described, they were ready to buy it. We saw a solid interest in the solution. We spend a lot of time with customers and translate their needs into something that makes sense for an engineer. Every year we have a user conference where every presentation is either given by engineers or the customers using it. Engineers love it because they get to interact with the customer and therefore they come back very inspired and motivated. Customers love it because they get the ground truth from peers and the guys writing the code. You started when the dot- com burst happened. Recently we experienced an economic recession. How did that impact you? Rather than change things, we survived the downturn in a different way. We continued to grow at a rapid pace. We have a lot of BFSI customers. Banks were hit very hard during recession. Some of the banks folded, some got acquired. The interesting thing for us is if a bank got acquired, at least one of them would be using ArcSight, so they’ll expand their licenses to cover both the banks. So, we found that the mergers were driving higher adoption of our products. It was an interesting set of events because we went public in December 2008 when the economy had started declining and the advice
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Hugh Njemanze
was against going public. But we went against all odds and went public and 18 months into it, we were the only company trading above the IPO price amongst those that went public during recession. We continued climbing till the time we got acquired by HP. How do you ensure that your solutions suit the requirements of diverse verticals and customers? One of the principles we have is to build products that meet customer needs without applying the features to just one customer. So every time a customer explains to us what they want to do, we try to understand how that can apply to other customers and build solutions in such a way that it can appeal to others. So, sometimes that means creating a feature in a more generic way and creating authoring tools so that customers can customise to their specific needs. For eg. One of our early customers wanted to be able to have a workflow inside a ticket-
ing system. We didn’t want to rebuild the entire ticketing system but at the same time, we didn’t wanted to build that was narrowly built to just one customer. We talked to a few customers and we built something that can be parameterised so that you can use all the terminologies that are there in your particular environment. So, we built a straightforward workflow which can be made to look and feel the way the customer wants. Log management tool has a potential hazard of being misused. How did you educate the customers to ensure it isn’t misused? Our customers actually educated us instead of vis-a-versa. Different customers have different tolerance levels. For eg. In Germany, privacy is a very important consideration in the workplace. They have legislations against workers being monitored etc. So as per the rules you can capture the logs but you have to purge them after 24 hours. That led us to build some flexibility in our products. Now, the cus-
tomers can say when they want what data to expire. This ensures no data is stored beyond the acceptable limits. We’ve always tried to make the software configurable so that it meets the needs for most customers. How is ArcSight changing post its acquisition by HP? This was our biggest concern before getting acquired. One of the reasons I felt comfortable with the acquisition by HP was because we can pursue the vision of the company as part of HP. So far that has been the case. We have our R&D team completely intact. We have our own sales force intact and even our own facilities intact. So far, HP is willing to understand how we’ve been successful and if it makes sense, HP will adopt some of ArcSight’s processes and if it makes sense, ArcSight would adopt some of HP’s processes. We’ve been going through the process for a while and it has been very constructive.
T E C H FOR G O V E R N A N C E
compliance
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POINTS
ERM Map assists the complaince practitioner in designing or reviewing a company's GRC erm mAP lays out best practices in a visual format It helps identify sub-processes within specific disciplines involved
photo BY photos.com
within the ERM Map, a CIO's role should begin with expertise on the integration of technological controls into business applications CIO should ensure data security is Board of Directorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; agenda topic
ERM Maps Enhance
CompliAnce Programme An ERP Map assists the compliance practitioner by laying out best practices in a visual format.
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By Thomas Fox
compliancE
For some time I have wanted to write
about an Enterprise Risk Management (EMR) Map that I came across. It is put out by a company called MetricStream. This ERM Map is designed to assist the compliance practitioner in either designing or reviewing a company’s Governance, Risk and Management (GRC) by providing a visual representation of the best practices in compliance business processes. It allows a company to either develop a gap analysis or classify gaps in its GRC program by better understanding overall system requirements. The ERM Map lays out these best practices in a visual format; identifying sub-processes within the specific disciplines involved in ERM; and finally separating such practices in Leadership, Organisation, Process and Technology. This post will focus on Leadership and Process and I will discuss these in only some of the areas which are identified by discipline on the ERM Map.
1. Chief Compliance Officer Leadership- the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) is responsible is the model for ethical behavior and should link ethics to business success. The CCO should be a part of the Executive Leadership Team and work to create a formal compliance program including a Code of Conduct, Compliance Policy and Compliance Procedures to detail how the program should be conducted throughout the company. Process- the CCO should develop processes for monitoring of compliance so that if there is a violation, it can be detected and then remedied. There should be some type of ethics certification and creation of an anonymous reporting or helpline. There should be a formal measurement of compliance and ethics risks and a follow-up analysis of compliance failures to determine lessons learned going forward.
2. Chief Risk Officer Leadership- this role should lead through visibility on the full spectrum of enterprise and operational risk. As risk management is a value generating business process; the
role should be a part of the Executive Management Team. Process-this role is responsible for creating the formal process for analysing and managing enterprise risk across the company. It assists to ensure that the Internal Audit process is risk driven and that financial processes are risk-based.
3. Chief Financial Officer Leadership- the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) should focus the department’s efforts on business risk when conducting internal audits. This is broader than simply general audit, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or Foreign Corrupt Practices (FCPA) audits; it should include all business risks. There should be accountability to the company’s Board of Directors. Process- initially it should be noted that ERM should drive audit priorities and the overall audit process should be repeatable and systematic. There should be consistent processes in place between operational and internal audit. In the area of findings, a summary of findings should be reported to the Board of Directors and there should a collaboration of findings with and recommendations to the persons or departments which are audited.
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reporting through centralised record keeping and document control. This role should enhance the collaboration between quality and regulatory affairs.
4. Chief Information Officer Leadership- with a nod towards my “This Week in the FCPA” partner Howard Sklarwho routinely lists data security as a key compliance concern, I will discuss the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) within the ERM Map. The role should begin with expertise on the integration of technological controls into business applications. The CIO should be charged with the centralised management of IT governance and should ensure that the IT environment is secure. This would include protection of information security. Finally as a leadership function, the CIO should ensure that data security is a Board of Directors agenda topic. Process-here the CIO should work to have an overall IT framework assist to drive business processes. There should be a centralised document management and approval system and there should be enduser identity management. —This publication contains general information only and is based on the experiences and research of the author. The author is not, by means of this publication, rendering business, legal advice, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such legal advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified legal advisor. The
4. Chief Operating Officer
author, his affiliates, and related entities shall
not be responsible for any loss sustained by any Leadership-the Chief Operating Officer person or entity that relies on this publication. (COO) should be responsible for operational The Author gives his permission to link, post, risk and should lead the effort to impart that distribute, or reference this article quality and safety are at the core for any lawful purpose, provided values of the company. This attribution is made to the author. office should be accountable to The author can be reached at tfox@ regulators, industry and legal tfoxlaw.com. standards. The COO should lead of security to achieve consistent compliance
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and minimise exceptions. Process- the CCO should lead in the collaboration between quality and regulatory affairs. If there is decentralised accountability, the CCO must consolidate the
incidents
—This article is printed with prior
occured due to network share access rights.
permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management please refer to Infosec Island.
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securit y
How to Manage Default Admin Passwords
Corporates' passwords need to be secure, confidential and available. By Bozidar Spirovski
E
Security and Confidentiality The passwords should be constructed in two parts (each part entered by different person). Having two people create a password increases the complexity significantly, and reduces the possibility of using social knowledge of a single person to attack the password.
Confidentiality and Availability The parts of the password should be written on separate pieces of paper marked first and second part and stored in separate envelopes. These two envelopes should then be stored in a tamper evident envelope. Placing the passwords in tamper evident envelope is a place where most attempts at secure storing fail. The basic reason is that tamper evident envelopes are not readily available, or even that they cannot be ordered through central procurement. This is rarely the case, since such envelopes are available in most office supplies stores. But even if such envelopes are not available, you can easily create a DYI tamper evident envelope like this: n Take an ordinary envelope n Ask your manager to sign his name at least 2 times on the edges of the envelope, from both sides n Cover the length of signed edges with a transparent adhesive tape -
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Illustration BY Shigil N
very corporation nowadays is very concerned with account security. And the first thing that an auditor or security officer asks for are the treatment and storage of the default admin accounts (root, administrator, sa, DBO...). We don't need to repeat the well known mantra of not using the default accounts for daily use. But these accounts still need to be well secured to achieve the following criteria: n Security- the passwords for the default admin accounts need to be strong and complex, and should withstand most attempts at brute force or social engineering attacks n Confidentiality- no single person should know the default admin account password, since he/she can abuse this account for gain or to cause damage. n Availability- In times of crisis, the organisation may still need to use these default admin accounts, so they cannot be lost. The following procedure can be applied by any organisation, and it meets all three criteria. make sure that you overlap the envelope with the adhesive tape n Put the password envelopes inside the tamper-evident envelope n Seal the envelope, and have the manager sign the edge where the envelope is sealed n Cover the length of the seal and the signatures with the adhesive tape - make sure that the tape touches both the flap and the envelope surface as well as the signatures Through this process you have created a crude tamper-evident envelope. If someone tries to open this envelope at any edge or through the sealed flap, he/she will damage the adhesive tape. If someone tries to remove the adhesive tape prior to opening the envelope, the removed adhesive tape will remove the signature that it covers. Once this step is out of the way, the securing of password can be finished by storing the envelope in the department safe, where employees can still get to it if needed (a crisis situation). Just make sure that you reset the passwords of the default admin accounts in all places where they are used. —Cross-posted from ShortInfosec —This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.
Author: Patrick French
Hide time | BOOK REVIEW
“Indians are responsible for one in six Silicon Valley startups...”
A Canvas Called India Through painstaking
research and extensive personal interviews, Patrick French sketches a portrait of India that's at once vivid and varied.
ONE in every six people on this planet is an Indian. One half of all people living in a democracy are also Indian, says Patrick French, author of the acclaimed book, India: A Portrait. What, then, is India? It is difficult to draw a portrait of India. It is as diverse as it is vivid. The canvas will be more like a collage really, than a single, representative portrait. But Patrick French has done a marvellous job of doing just that in his new book. He chronicles a changing India, from a fledgling nation struggling for the basics through the fifties and much of the seventies, to the tiger economy of today. It is a compelling narrative of the social and economic revolutions that are transforming India in fundamental ways. "In India, I have tried to write about the country both from the inside and from the outside--or from a distance," says French in the introduction to his book. "The information passes through three different prisms," he goes on. "The first is political, the second economic and the third social." French says
the individual stories, aspirations and triumphs of many people are at the heart of the narrative. The book walks you through the experience of being independent India from its birth until now. Beginning with an account of how the Union came into being, French examines India’s unique experimental blending of socialism with capitalism. Focussing on the most recent changes, he shows how the rapidly changing social mindset allows the deeply traditional and the startlingly unconventional to co-exist. French traces India's rise to global prominence. In it, he describes how India evolved into a prominent nation of promise and achievement in spite of its contradictions and conflicts post Independence. He has divided his book into three parts: Rashtra (the nation), Lakshmi (wealth), and Samaj (the society). It is a detailed, in-depth narrative for a serious-minded reader who really wants to get into the heart and soul of India. Each of the three sections, says
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Author of Prey By The Ganges (Wisdom Tree, 2011), Hemant Kumar is a veteran of wire service and television journalism.
French, "Seeks to answer, in an indirect way, the question: why is India like it is today?" French makes a strong point when he says: "Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there... For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry--For many Europeans, India is a religious place with a special, undefined mesage." In the chapter Only in India, under the section Samaj, French says: "In the past, singular stories from India - the Dabbawallahs, reverse-gear driving... had only entertainment value or local relevance. But Indian methods were now extending to other parts of the globe." The book is advertised as “an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people”. Through detailed interviews, French lets his subjects open up to him. He cleverly pads each such interview with details from books, reports, and personal observation. The Chief Technology Officer Forum
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VIEWPOINT
Steve Duplessie | steve.duplessie@sbcglobal.net
illustration BY Shigil N
The End of the Disk Era Solid State comes to the fore.
Mark Peters I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and figured I’d toss out some alarming concepts to stir up a discussion. We’re researching the topic and will publish a more complete paper on it shortly. The premise: it is only a matter of time before disk (as we know it currently) will stop being a significant part of the data center. Solid state/ flash type technologies will replace it. What time? I think within 5-8 years. Why? Because the servers are solid state. The networks are solid state. The only thing that ISN’T solid state is storage. The only REASON that continues is because of the cost. Previously we wrote a paper on the economics of change–where we (rightly, in my opinion) stated that it takes a step function in cost reduction to move a market to a new way of doing things. Few argue (although there are some, which I always am thankful for) that mechanical disks are BETTER than solid state technology. People did argue that vacuum tubes were better than solid state stuff too. How did that work out for you? People
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run mechanical disks even though they are slower, inherently less reliable (more on this argument in the paper), and generally a nightmare to manage (due to the sheer number of them) simply because the cost of the alternative is just too high. Thus, the contention is that IF the cost were on par or at least close, people would choose solid state devices to store their stuff on versus disk drives–at least for primary capacity. (Eventually EVERYTHING will be solid state, but just as tape maintains a role, disk will most likely maintain a role for a long time–perhaps for archive systems, etc.–although if cost truly becomes a non-issue, then one can draw the conclusion that all we need is solid state and tape.). Yes, there is a big IF–but since that IF is economic–I can assure you that issue will be solved. Then it just becomes about WHEN. So, if it is inevitable that the end game = solid state storage in the data center (everywhere), and that end point occurs at X, what are the likely disruptive opportunities that will avail themselves to our IT industry
About the author: Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most influential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www. thebiggertruth.com
along the way? Dick Egan of EMC fame told me and others, in 1986ish, that he felt that by 1990-1992 we would no longer use spinning disks. He was off by a few decades, but he was right. Moore’s law doesn’t apply to disk drives. It does continue to apply to solid state technologies (like processors, memory, etc.). Couple the natural market forces with new acceleration technologies such as dedupe/compression and one can see how in relatively short order, the economic argument will be flushed down the toilet. I’ll focus the next bit on what the likely progression will be in getting from point A to point Z shortly.
Irrelevant Side Note: n I smell another big recession coming on in Tech. I hope I’m wrong, but the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. China is slowing spending, Europe is a mess, and the U.S. government has to stop spending like drunken sailors while using credit cards to pay of its other credit cards. It all feels like we could be heading for a problem.
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