Harvesting Mobility

S P I N E

CTO FORUM

Technology for Growth and Governance

July | 07 | 2010 | Rs.50 Volume 05 | Issue 22

From Left: AVINASH ARORA, Director - IS, New Holland Fiat (India); S C MITTAL, Senior ED, Group CTO, IFFCO; SURESH A SHANMUGAM, Head, BITS, M&M Financial Services; GIRISH RAO, Head IT, Marico

Harvesting

ANDROID GROWS UP | MAKING VIRTUAL DESKTOP A REALITY | A LITTLE REGULATION

MOBILITY Enterprise CIOs have sniffed big business opportunity in using mobile technology to connect with customers | PAGE 26

BEST OF BREED

Shared Services

Manifesto PAGE 18

LITTLE GIANTS

Automating

Patient Care PAGE 44

I BELIEVE

Outsourcing Saga PAGE 06

Volume 05 | Issue 22

A 9.9 Media Publication

EDITORIAL RAHUL NEEL MANI | rahul.mani@9dot9.in

From Dreams to Reality: Innovation is the link CIOs need to focus on

D

uring my visit to United States late last month, I got the opportunity to hear one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Jeffrey Katzenberg is the CEO of DreamWorks Animation. With this opportunity came the privilege of seeing extended previews of a couple of megareleases from the animation giant, including Kung Fu Panda 2 and Megamind.

Without any exaggeration, Kung

Fu Panda blew my socks off! It was an incredible piece of animation, full of action and emotion, painted in vibrant colours, texture and depth. There was a remarkable change from the earlier version of the film. Not that I am an ardent follower, but it was perhaps the most impressive piece of animation I had seen in my life.

Along with the preview, came Katzenberg's keynote. And

EDITOR’S PICK 44

Automating Patient Care RGCI's drive to integrate applications, streamlined administrative processes and made treatment procedures hassle-free for patients.

from that hour-long speech, one statement stuck on. “Every single thing you see on-screen comes out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist already.

Nature didn't deliver it to us.

Everything had to be dreamt.

And to make these dreams a reality, one needed to be very innovative.”

Did he say something new, or radically different—perhaps not. Why then, do I remember it so clearly?

Because there is a message for all of us in what Katzenberg said. Five years ago, operational excellence was probably the key driver in a CIO’s life. Today, that is not all that you need to focus on. Innovation is now an inseparable part of the job. It is the winning formula. And being the CIO you should be driving

innovation. The ongoing thrust to innovate may have come from the need to reduce costs, but in the long term, you—as the CIO—are expected to create competitive advantage. There's no shortage of creative ideas for making business more competitive. All you need to do is to conjure creative ideas that can be realised through innovation.

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JULY 10 THECTOFORUM.COM

C O V E R D E S I G N B Y: P C A N O O P | P H O T O S B Y: J I T E N G A N D H I & S H A M I K

CONTE NTS

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26 COVER STORY

26 | Harvesting Mobility

COLUMNS

06 | I BELIEVE: THE OUTSOURCING SAGA Rajeev Batra, CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices on taking calculated risks

Enterprise CIOs have sniffed a big business opportunity in the rural parts.

They have clearly understood the role mobile technology can play to help them serve customers in far-flung locations.

56 | VIEW POINT: HP VS CISCO The odds seem to be in HP's favour.

BY STEVE DUPLESSIE

FEATURES

Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling

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COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited.

Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o K.P.T House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. TTC Ind. Area, Plot No. A-403, MIDC Mahape, Navi Mumbai 400709

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36 | NEXT HORIZONS: THE NEW MATRIX A special report on how to use technology to reshape your company.

BY HONORIO PADRON AND ERIK DORR

VOLUME 05 | ISSUE 22 | 07 JULY 2010

www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur EDITORIAL Editor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani Executive Editor: Geetaj Channana Resident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra Associate Editor: Dominic K Assistant Editor: Aditya Kelekar Principal Correspondent: Vinita Gupta Correspondent: Sana Khan DESIGN Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK Manager Design: Chander Shekhar Sr. Visualisers: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Suresh Kumar Designer: Sristi Maurya Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

20 A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

20 | Blink Twice Every Second. Michael

Sentonas, CTO, APAC, McAfee on putting research in the cloud and embracing whitelisting.

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REGULARS

03 | EDITORIAL 08 | ENTERPRISE ROUND-UP 49 | HIDDEN TANGENT advertisers’ index

14 | BEST OF BREED: ANDROID GROWS UP The underdog is ready to fight the big daddies of enterprise mobile tech market.

53 | HIDE TIME: AJAY KUMAR MEHER, VP– IT & NEW MEDIA, SONY ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK, MULTI SCREEN MEDIA

VERIZON IBM HP SAS EMC LIFE SIZE CANON

IFC & 1 7, 9 & 11 13 15 25 IBC BC

This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

ADVISORY PANEL Ajay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limited Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej Industries Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Vijay Mehra, Former Global CIO, Essar Group SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) Product Manager: Rachit Kinger Asst. Brand Manager: Arpita Ganguli 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 Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd C/o K.P.T House,Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd C/o K.P.T House, Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur C/o K.P.T House, Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D 107,TTC Industrial Area, Nerul.Navi Mumbai 400 706

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I BELIEVE

BY RAJEEV BATRA CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices THE AUTHOR HAS over 15 years of experience in decision-making positions in the IT departments of telcos.

The Outsourcing Saga Calculated risk taking succeeds

OUTSOURCING in IT has been prevalent in the mature economies since 1990’s, primarily to bridge the skill and resource availability gaps.

Turn of the century saw the advent of outsourcing in offshore model, where third world countries like India, Philippines, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and few others destinations started fulfilling the requirements of developed world, be it for software, applications, voice processing, data processing, manufacturing or logistics.

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CURRENT CHALLENGE LATE ENTRANTS IN THE OUTSOURCING DOMAIN FACED QUALITY ISSUES DUE TO STRETCHED RESOURCES OR LIMITED SKILLS

In early 2000’s with the increase in automation, there was a lot of innovation in the area of outsourcing.

Resources and task fulfillment were no longer the prime drivers for outsourcing but business outcome and unlocking value became the mantra.

In India, the rapid growth in several sectors likes telecommunications, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, hospitality, logistics, power and transport, required rapid IT automation with infusion of resources, processes and practices to sustain the scale and operations thereof.

Organisations at various stages of growth chose different models to suit their objective e.g. business transformation, scale with speed, operational excellence, unlocking value etc.

The point of inflexion for IT outsourcing in India came in early 2004, when a few path-breaking historical deals were done in the area of telecommunications and FMCG. One of these deals was a classic match of the vision of two big organisations; both were able to leverage each other’s strengths to have a win-win situation. ‘One relied on scale with speed, while the other's vision centred around a utility computing, leading to both companies reaping huge benefits: be it reaching the top market position or increasing shareholders value or gaining many other such deals. Needless to say, at the time of agreement both organisations took and shared a calculated but huge risk, but at the end there was a big success story to tell.

Many other outsourcing deals followed. However, the advantage and USP gained by the early movers was not realised to its full extent by the late adopters of this model. Some of the late entrants even faced quality issues due to stretched resources or limited bandwidth of particular skills, leading to delays in delivery and overall business dissatisfaction.

CTOForum LinkedIn Group Join close to 400 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn group for latest news and hot enterprise technology discussions.

Share your thoughts, participate in discussions and win prizes for the most valuable contribution. You can join The CTOForum group at: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2580450

One of the hot discussions on the group are: How do you treat your vendors – like a partner, a service provider, or a mere salesman?

In IT, it is all about partnerships. We will not be able to satisfy our end customers unless all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together perfectly. A closer comparison is with an orchestra or a stage play. The end result is totally dependent on each participant performing its role as per the plan. If all partners work towards joint objectives, we will never have to open the contract papers for missing deliverables or SLAs.

—Asmita Junnarkar Chief Information Officer at Voltas Limited.

In today's business world the use of words like service provider, system integrator etc. are no longer valid. The complexity and specialisations required in any industry are challenges that need "collaboration" with specialists for continued success. I have followed one simple golden rule - there is no "I” and “You" with those who work with you - even though they may be from different organisations. Only genuine collaboration and partnership bring success. I consciously avoid using the word "vendor" in all my interactions.

—KR Sreenivasan CIO and CQH, Tata Capital Limited.

CTOF Connect

In a one-of-its-kind feature, the CIO of Hero Honda Motors India, Vijay Sethi, interviews Ravi Sud, the company's CFO, on what role IT should play in an organisation and how he uses IT to solve other problems.

To read the full story go to:

thectoforum. com/content/ my-trump-card

OPINION

WISE BY FAILURES

Learn from your failures.

Don't just preach, practice it!

“By appraising failed projects, we learn what not to do the next time around. But by appraising successful projects, we learn what to do, and what to do better next time.”

To read the full story go to: SHARAT MATHUR GM-IT, Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS)

http://www.thectoforum.com/ content/wise-failures

STORY INISDE

Enterprise

Flock announces that its new browser is built on Chromium Pg 12

ILLUSTRATION BY SANTOSH KUSHWAHA

ROUND-UP

Jet Airways deploys SAP business intelligence tools. Helps enable faster decision-making.

SAP'S analytic tools have helped Jet Airways quicken the data availability process and speed up its decisionmaking process. The company has implemented the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning and Consolidation.

The main reason for the implementation was the growth in business and need for quicker data analysis.

Kavita Chopra, DGM- Budgeting and MIS, Jet Airways says, “I cannot put a value to the savings that we at have got due to this tool but with the help of the BO tool we have done the route profitability and cost allocation at the most granular level. We can find out a flight’s most

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profitable route, landing navigation rate, oil consumption etc. It’s important to look at the Profit and Loss (P&L) of every aircraft. All this information is now available in real time. We carry out the P&L on flights every week and depending on the future booking loads we can take the decision of combining two flights instead of flying two separate flights.”

Before deploying this solution, the airline used to have reports on a transaction system. The BO tool has helped the airline in getting the reports on time and increased their decision ma king process.

—Vinita Gupta

57% DATA BRIEFING

of businesses are likely or highly likely to acquire companies in the next 12 months SOURCE: RECENT ERNST & YOUNG STUDY

ILLUSTRATION BY PC ANOOP

JAMCRACKER, the unified cloud services delivery and management company has announced the Jamcracker Platform Enterprise Edition. It addresses the growing problems associated with ad hoc cloud services adoption within corporate networks.

The platform is a services delivery and lifecycle management solution that aggregates all cloud services – public and/or private – within an enterprise and provides a central point of control.

The platform empowers IT departments to become a cloud service broker and offer any combination of cloud-based services to their organisation including private and public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS solutions. To enable enterprises to unify command and control for disparate cloud services, the Jamcracker Platform allows IT organisations to offer a catalogue of aggregated services with unified provisioning, access control, administration, auditing, monitoring, support, and departmental charge backs.

TheJamcracker Platform aggregates and delivers all cloud services from one integrated infrastructure, providing IT with unprecedented visibility and control at the enterprise as well as at the department or line of business level. From a single management interface IT departments can centrally and consistently manage multiple cloud offerings.

“Many larger enterprises are struggling with the unauthorized and decentralized adoption of cloud services and are looking for a solution to control and manage these in the same way they manage traditional IT assets,” said Steve Crawford, VP of Marketing and Business Development for Jamcracker. “The Jamcracker Platform enables IT departments to consolidate the delivery and management of private and public cloud services in order to incur the benefits of cloud computing, but not the risks.”

The Jamcracker Platform Enterprise Edition is available immediately from Jamcracker and its business partners worldwide.

O&M 176 IBM QITF1

%

Jamcracker's solution: Extends enterprise IT command and control to public and private cloud services

E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP

Next wave in global delivery models to focus on location portfolio. Findings from a new Everest

ILLUSTRATION BY PHOTOS.COM

study called Global Sourcing 2.0

THE MATURING global sourcing scenario has presented suppliers with a dynamic marketplace based on changing buyers need and demands. These buyer demands lay extreme emphasis on the need for next generation characteristics in global services models, marked by globally diversified delivery footprint, industrialised delivery approach, and a global talent pool for growth, according to Everest, a global consulting and research firm.

As the outsourcing industry evolves into a more sophisticated space, service providers are looking for means of catering to the

highly progressed buyer needs, which go beyond labor cost arbitrage. These buyer preferences include an increased geographic and services scope, sophisticated delivery requirements, and a more thoughtful approach towards a global sourcing portfolio centered around value maximization and risk management, according to a new Everest study, Global Sourcing 2.0 – Evolving Global Delivery Imperatives for Outsourcing Service Providers. Accordingly, service providers are re-evaluating their global delivery model designs to meet nextgeneration global sourcing challenges and

GLOBAL TRACKER

According to IDC, the

social platforms market showed a YoY growth of 55.9%. The top 3

vendors in 2009 were IBM, Communispace, and Telligent.

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Growth in worldwide revenue for the social platforms market Year 2008

$237 million

Year 2009

$369.7 billion

SOURCE: IDC

opportunities. Locations portfolio, operating model and talent management emerge as key dimensions on which service providers are redesigning their delivery models. The Everest report analyses key global delivery trends, next generation imperatives, and discusses their implications for buyers and service providers.

“The evolution of the supplier delivery models is evident; more so with the industry dynamics to remain high on growth requirements, even when faced with an extreme competitive environment. As the buyers’ sourcing strategies and engagements mature, service providers are rethinking their global delivery models to meet evolving buyer requirements related to location risk diversification, locationagnostic & consistent delivery experience, faster and lower cost transitions and deep domain expertise,” said Amneet Singh, Vice President, Research, Everest Group “We believe that a diversified and well-balanced location portfolio, industrialisation-driven operating model comprising global delivery suites and enabling infrastructure, and a rich and capable worldwide talent pool will be critical for suppliers to compete and be relevant in this next phase of global sourcing evolution,” added Singh.

“Understanding these global delivery trends holds importance for service providers and buyers alike,” said Gaurav Gupta, Principal & Country Head, India, Everest Group. “While it is critical for service providers to be aware of these imperatives and prepare to compete with the changing market paradigm, buyers need to incorporate and leverage these next-generation global delivery characteristics in their decision making to drive improved value from their sourcing programs,” added Gaurav.

The Everest Report, Global Sourcing 2.0 – Evolving Global Delivery Imperatives for Outsourcing Service Providers, is based on the analysis of global delivery trends of leading global and Indian service providers, supplemented with discussions with buyers and service providers, and leverages Everest’s extensive experience in serving the global sourcing industry. The report presents the global delivery trends with pertinent examples, data analysis and observations, and draws important implications for service providers as well as buyers.

E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP

Cloud is real and here: Verizon Business. Opens second data centre in Hong Kong

VERIZON BUSINESS a unit of Verizon Communications, is banking heavily on the adoption of cloud computing model for its future business growth.

The company has strengthened its extensive Asia-Pacific network infrastructure by opening a second data centre in Hong Kong. The new facility will enhance Verizon’s ability to deliver new cloud and data centre services in the region — and provide direct access to Verizon’s global network — to meet the growing demand of the company’s

enterprise customers.

Verizon already has many small companies as its cloud service customers.

“Cloud is no longer a buzzword for us and we believe that the market is moving towards everything as a service. We are making significant investments in our cloud offerings,” said Joe Crawford, Executive Director, IT Solutions, Verizon Business.

The investment is a part of the $16.8 billion to $17.2 billion that Verizon Communications plans to

spend this year building, operating and integrating its advanced, reliable and high-performance networking and computing platforms.

“We continue to serve our presence globally to better serve our multinational customers and to accelerate the delivery of nextgeneration cloud services,” said Yali Liu, Director of Asia-Pacific Network Planning, Verizon Business.

She added that the company will bring in new technologies to make cloud more cost effective, reliable and secure. Verizon also provides customers the flexibility to choose the geography where they would like to host their cloud services.

To address the issue of security and authentication, Verizon partnered with Novell in April this year. The solution called as Secure Access Services is an on-demand identity and access management service that aimed at enterprise clients to outsource their infrastructure and expertise required to extend and manage user access to cloud-based resources while maintaining control over policies and governance.

Verizon has also tied up with IBM and McAfee among others.

—By Ashwani Mishra. The correspondent visited Singapore on an invitation from Verizon for attending the press conference.

FACT TICKER

Worldwide IT Spending Growth

Gartner revises earlier prediction of 5.3% growth to 3.9% for 2010 WORLDWIDE IT spending is forecast to total $3.350 trillion in 2010, an increase of 3.9 percent from 2009 spending of $3.225 trillion, according to the latest outlook by Gartner, Inc. Gartner has lowered its outlook for the IT industry from the first quarter of this

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year when it forecast worldwide IT spending to grow 5.3 percent, primarily due to the devaluation of the euro versus the U.S. dollar since the beginning of the year.

"The European sovereign debt crisis is having an impact on the outlook for

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IT spending," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. "The U.S. dollar has strengthened against the euro during the second quarter of 2010, and this trend will likely continue in the second half of 2010, which will put downward pressure on U.S.-dollardenominated IT spending growth."

"Longer-term, public-sector spending will be curtailed in Europe as governments

struggle to bring budget deficits under control during the next five years and to reduce debt during the next 10 years," Mr. Gordon said. "Private-sector economic activity will also likely be hindered because of the direct impact of austerity measures on key government suppliers and the indirect impact caused by the 'ripple effect.' An effective policy response will be critical to stimulate investment in general and in IT in particular."

CHROMIUM TILT

The open source platform Chromium just got a new shine. Flock, the self-proclaimed Social Web Browser, has announced that it will use Chromium and discontinue the use of Firefox's Gecko engine in the development of its browser.

Flock has been proud of its new browser's speed. “As the first major browser other than Google Chrome to be built on the Chromium platform, the new Flock is blazingly fast!” CEO Shawn Hardin said in a blog post.

“With Social becoming a new way for everyone to engage, discover, work and play online, we decided last year that it was time to build a completely new and different version of Flock. Our goal was to redesign Flock to meet the needs of all active social media users, and anyone who seeks to better manage the volume of information, media and relationships they interact with online each day,” Hardin said.

Hardin has touted the a new feature in the browser that searches one's personal networks.

“The Web is fast-becoming the Social Web. More and more users around the world are discovering the powerful benefits of being connected. At Flock, we believe passionately that this global phenomenon is literally bringing the Internet to life. It’s the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Internet,” Hardin said.

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FEATURE INSIDE

5 Steps to Making Virtual Desktop a Reality Pg 16

ILLUSTRATION BY ANIL T

L

Android Grows Up

The underdog is ready to fight the big daddies of enterprise mobile tech market.

ROB MCGARVEY

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et's face it, BlackBerry owns the enterprise mobile tech market. There's no disputing that, but increasing numbers of analysts are raising the cry that RIM's stranglehold is giving way to Google's relentless Android charge. The headline news is that, by some counts, Android already outsells iPhone in all markets – Motorola happily reports it cannot keep up with demand for its Android phones. The "hot" mobile tech phones of summer (iPhone 4G handsets aside) are shaping up to be Sprint's Evo and Samsung's Galaxy S, both running on Google's mobile OS. "Android is the platform to watch," said Vinayak Naik, vice president, Content at AppDiscover, a mobile tech apps development company. "While BlackBerry might have the upper hand in enterprise markets and Apple might be showing great strides in the consumer market, we feel these two players will be ceding their pre-eminent position to Android in the next 12 to 18 months."

Apps are in, BlackBerry doesn't have enough, iPhone has the apps but it hasn't persuaded big business it is a serious mobility device. CIOs need to brace themselves for a stampede of employees seeking authorisation to use app-loving Android phones on company business.

What should you say?

You should say "Yes", according to the experts.

There's a mounting acceptance of the need to look beyond BlackBerry in the enterprise. To wit, here are 10 reasons Android deserves consideration for employees who have outgrown BlackBerry and want a genuine mobile Internet experience: The new OS (Android 2.2) makes it easy for enterprise to use Android phones, said Kevin Kitagwa, director of Strategic Marketing at MIPS, a

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M O B I L E T E C H N O LO G Y M A R K E T

developer of processor architectures. "With better support for Microsoft Exchange (mail, calendar and global address books) and more enterprise security features such as remote wipe and password policies, Android 2.2 will make it easier for corporate IT departments to support it." Older versions of Android were undeniably bulky with enterprise email but Android 2.2 changes all that.

Great availability across networks also goes in favour of Android, says enterprise mobility expert Azita Arvani of The Arvani Group. Of course, BlackBerry can lay similar claims but iPhone cannot (it comes with AT&T lock in).

You want Verizon? T-Mobile? Sprint? Android delivers choice. It's even on AT&T. Ditto for device choices, as Google enlists an army of manufacturers, from HTC to Motorola, to create Android phones.

This makes it easier for a particular user to find the phone that matches their needs. It's also produced a range of price points to suit most budgets.

"Great integration with Google Maps and other location based services," says Rushang Shah, director of marketing at CompanionLink Software, “can be a huge advantage in routing a mobile workforce to the right places at minimal cost.”

Tight integration with Google Voice means the mobile phone can easily be made a component of a unified business communications strategy. It also means the enterprise can make easy use of lower cost calling options.

2 3 4

5

6

9%

Mobile who pointed out that A blizzard of apps: 50,000+ the very openness of Android in the official Android apps has bred fragmentation and store alone, and independent increased incompatibility issues apps stores now are sprouting causing "headaches for IT," he up. Many apps are enterprise/ IS THE MARKET said. Apps that run on Android productivity oriented. Yes, there SHARE OF 2.1 don't necessarily run on 1.6 are more apps for the iPhone, ANDROID, WHICH and, even more problematic, but there are more apps than every phone manufacturer is anybody could possibly need IS STILL 1/3RD OF available on Android.

IPHONE'S FIGURES free to add some of their own code on top of the OS. This At least some Android means a Motorola Android may phones – for instance, behave very differently from an Sprint's EVO – can double as HTC or a Samsung.

WiFi hotspots and, says analyst Mike Demler, "This is the one disadvantage I see with an independent industry analyst based in switching to Android," said Rosenthal who San Jose, California, USA, that can help cut otherwise said he hears from ever mounting travel expenses (no need to pay exorbitant innumbers of enterprise customers that they room WiFi access fees). want more information on doing just that.

The open Android platform is a key There is no counting BlackBerry out in advantage because it means that developenterprise, but there definitely also is a new ment of the OS will continue at a fast pace. kid on the block that is fast winning credibilThat same open platform also means ity. It's too early to predict Android will topple enterprise can introduce its own custom BlackBerry, but it is isn't too early to pull up a changes, to better suit the particular busiseat to get a close-up view of what is shaping ness, said Eugene Goland, president of Dataup as a brutal brawl for enterprise dollars.

Art, an application development company.

"Rapid OS update cycle leads to quicker fixes and resolution of issues," said As a busy freelance writer for more than 30 Shah. Fiddling with the OS can produce bad years, Rob McGarvey has written for many leadcode but, in the Android universe, fixes tend ing publications including NY Times and Harvard to come very fast.

Business Review. McGarvey covers CEOs, business, high tech, human resources, real estate, Does all this add up to a sweep for and the energy sector. This article is published Android? Maybe, but consider this final point with prior permission from www.cioupdate.com. from Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise

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5 Steps to Making Virtual Desktop a Reality An application audit will help you assess whether VDI makes sense for your organisation.

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BY DAVE STROM

hile the idea of making virtual desktop a reality may not be on many IT radar screens yet, a few shops are beginning to implement these tools as a way of keeping their desktops inside the data centre where they can be more

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readily managed, updated, and secured. The idea has some merit, particularly for those of us that began our computing careers in the mainframe era with 3270 terminals. But the road to total desktop virtualisation isn't easy, and can be overwhelming.

Before you consider VDI, do an applications audit and see how

GREEN IT

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many of the following situations you have in your enterprise. The more you have, the more problems you will find with deploying VDI to these users: Bi-directional audio applications across your network Synchronizing PDAs and smartphones from your desktops Applications that depend on low-latency network connections Heavy graphics users such as CAD and desktop publishing Other oddball peripherals attached to your desktops such as scanners and specialty printers Here are five steps to consider what it would take to fully deploy VDI and how you could evolve towards this goal: STEP 1 Pick your storage area network (SAN) and virtual machine (VM) hypervisor suppliers. You'll need to beef up both eventually, but if you don't have much experience with either, now is the time to get started. Just about any SAN vendor will work with VDI, but the key things to look for are scalability. Once you start saving all those desktop VMs to your SAN you can take up a lot more space.

There are four major VM hypervisor suppliers: VMware, Citrix Xen, Microsoft and Sun (listed in order of their suitability for VDI from best to least). All three sell VM servers such as VMware's ESX that are good solutions for VDI, but once you start down the path of one vendor's products, it isn't easy to switch or mix and match. So, make sure you are comfortable with these basic virtualisation technology providers before proceeding.

Part of this step is looking at server hardware to house all of your VMs. Cisco's UCS is one worth looking at, because of the memory and VM density that you can support with this device. In one demonstration from VirtualStorm.com earlier this fall at VMworld, there were more than 400 VMs running Windows XP on each of six blades on a single device. Each XP instance had more than 90 GB of applications contained in its VDI image, which was very impressive.

STEP 2 Look at application streaming tools as a way to begin to deliver applications to your desktops. There are three major streaming providers here: VMware's ThinApp, Symantec's Endpoint Virtualisation Suite, and Microsoft's App-V. Microsoft and VMware both work best with their own hypervisors, while Symantec's can run on any platform. (To get an idea of how complex these streaming tools are, take a look at a screencast video that I prepared for Symantec.)

STEP 3 Gain experience with VM image management tools. Each of the major vendors offers a series of tools to make changes to the original VM instance that you want to duplicate and deploy across your enterprise. For example, VMware offers vSphere and View Composer. There are a number of third-party tools that are worth exploring here, because they offer more features and can scale across larger deployments. Two worth checking out are LiquidWareLabs.com and VDIworks.com.

Before you consider VDI, do an applications audit and see how many of the mentioned situations you have in your enterprise. The more you have, the more problems you will find with deploying VDI. Virtual Access Suite. Part of your explorations here is to figure out which remote control protocols you will need to use, such as Windows Remote Desktop Connection.

STEP 5 Purchase thin clients or ordinary PCs for your endpoints.

There are specialised thin client computers from HP, ChipPC, Wyse, Sun Ray, and Praim.com that offer cost and energy savings over ordinary PCs for your endpoints, but they also offer challenges in that they are usually under-powered devices that may not deliver all the applications or performance you require. Some thin clients only work with particular hypervisors and protocols too, so that is why we've saved this step until last. Some, such as the Wyse S-10VDI, come bundled with the Leostream Broker clients to make things a bit easier.

One other factor to consider is smart card support, to enable users to login to their desktops easily and automatically.

As you can see, there is a lot of technology to evaluate, test, and deploy before you can be free from the traditional unmanaged desktop that a user is free to use and abuse at will.

Dave Strom is a freelance writer living in St. Louis and the former editor-

STEP 4 Look at connection brokers to manage how you will deploy

in-chief of Network Computing magazine, DigitialLanding.com, and Tom's

your desktops. These products determine which protocol and remote desktop host is assigned to a particular user. They include such vendors as Citrix Desktop Broker for Presentation Server, LeoStream Virtual Desktop Connection Broker, and Quest Software's

Hardware.com. He has written two books and numerous articles on networking, the Internet, and IT security topics. He can be reached at david@ strom.com and his blog can be found at strominator.com. This article is published with prior permission from www.cioupdate.com.

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CASE STUDY | ESSAR

The Shared Services Manifesto Challages

Essar needed a new ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK that would allow the IT and business teams to closely ALIGN THEIR REQUIREMENTS. BY VINITA GUPTA

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ssar has built a shared services environment for selected applications across the group to improve time to market and reduce cost by leveraging a flexible IT model where resources can be provisioned on the fly as per business demand.

Aligning IT with business At Essar group, aligning IT with business strategy was a priority. As part of the IT plan, the company needed a new architectural framework that would allow the IT and business teams to closely align business and IT requirements for the group.

Over the period of last three years, Essar has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model, in the process taking many initiatives such as creation of a consolidated datacentre at Hazira, consolidation of IT infrastructure services for the entire group and deployment of blade servers and enterprise storage.

Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group says that the group has done away with the concept of infrastructure ownership by individual companies of the group wherein the applications were installed on individual servers and there was not much importance given to the proper utilisation of the infrastructure.

C A S E S T U DY

COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY NAME Essar Group BUSINESSES Steel, Oil & Gas, Power, Communications, Shipping Ports & Logistics, Construction and Minerals REVENUE US$ 15 Billion HEAD IT Jayantha Prabhu INDIA HEAD Shashi Ruia, Chairman, Essar Group

JAYANTHA PRABHU, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model.

“Our infrastructure was ready for the next step of optimisation – building a shared service model based on virtualisation. After looking at the various technologies in the market that could help us in achieving our objective, we zeroed in on the BladeSystem Matrix Solution offered by HP.”

Shared service model The implementation was done in April 2010 at Essar’s Mumbai office. When Essar started the project they discussed about the key elements to enable a shared services model and finally decided that the infrastructure had to be: Service-oriented: Operating IT as a collection of services rather than one overseeing a collection of equipment and a pile of code. This is a radical departure from historical IT-as-a-cost-center approach.

Shared: Often IT is created in silos; many of these are aligned with individual group within departments within companies; each LOB had its own little IT department.

One silo does things this way; another does basically the same thing, but in a different way, or with a different

BEST OF BREED

product. A shared services approach consolidates operations, eliminating and minimising silos, and making them actively cooperate. This consolidation is a prerequisite to globally sharing resources and capabilities.

Standardised and simplified: The sharing or consolidation theme allows for standardisation. However, systems and interfaces have to be regularised and increasingly automated, further simplifying the environment.

Agile and effective: The goal of IT’s operating at the speed of business should be able to wrangle resources, to design, build, and run the services as per business needs.

“Later we decided which resources we wanted to pool together using virtualisation. We did not stop at just server virtualisation but looked at virtualisation of all the elements across the enterprise, this included server, storage and networking.”

Specific application templates had been developed to automatically provision resources for every new business user. A catalog of published service templates was published. Using a software tool, Essar then built a self-service portal for businesses users to request for IT services on the fly.

Today the typical process for ordering a new service is described below.

Benefits of the project Essar today addresses many different segments, each of which have been growing strongly in the last few years.

The company has diversified into new areas and new business and has brought agility in their business. IT has been a key enabler to support this growth and agility in the market place.

With the shared services model, the company is now able to reduce the time taken to deploy new application infrastructure from months to minutes. This enables the group of companies to rapidly address new business opportunities and emerge stronger against competition globally.

“We are enabling continuous consolidation and virtualisation. In comparison with traditional models where capacity planning is done in advance, the solution allows us to iteratively repurpose virtualisation based on resource utilisation.

This brings greater flexibility for us,” said Prabhu.

Future plans Today Essar has selected non-critical applications on this platform. Going forward the company plans to move all their critical applications on this platform.

Also, the existing setup has been deployed in production and will be used to consolidate the physical server environment to the blade matrix platform. The company plans to replicate the success of the implementation so that all new infrastructure deployments will be planned on shared services infrastructure.

— Vinita.gupta@9dot9.in

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A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S

SENSOR APPROACH: McAfee is using telemetry sensors to keep a tab on malicious activity, says the company's CTO, APAC, Michael Sentonas.

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With two new vulnerabilities discovered every second, traditional protection techniques are falling flat, says Michael Sentonas, CTO, APAC, McAfee, in an interaction with Geetaj Channana.

He thinks that the industry has to look towards two solutions to overcome the new challenge: put the research in the cloud and embrace whitelisting.

M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

MICHAEL SENTONAS | MCAFEE

BLINK! Twice Every Second Lets start with talking about a technology that Indian CTOs are looking at adopting – virtualisation. What are the kind of security challenges that a CTO can face in virtualised environments?

How are they different from regular environments?

As far as security is concerned, virtualisation extends some of the traditional security issues and brings up new ones. It adds its own complexity and uniqueness. The same threats that you experience in a physical endpoint or server also exist in a virtualised server or endpoint. Vulnerability in a Windows or Adobe platform is the same regardless of whether the server is physical or virtualised.

People always talk about the ultimate exploit in the virtual environment... the exploitation of the hypervisor. People like VMware, Citrix and IBM do a great job of securing their

hypervisors. Looking from the perspective of VMware there hasn’t been a critical vulnerability in the hypervisor till date.

When businesses buy expensive hardware and then a hypervisor, they want to install many virtual guests on top of that hypervisor, but they do not want the complexity of installing security on every single guest that runs on top of that hypervisor. They just want to protect it in a hassle-free way and yet be effectively covered.

We as a company also share this vision. We ask: what is that we can do so that businesses can just plug into the hypervisor and be security at once for everything.

We are also working on a product to be released by the end of this year, which will arguably change the way security is looked at in the virtualised environment because of the fact that we are looking at reducing the

amount of weight of the endpoint that runs inside the virtual instance.

This will ensure more efficient scanning, will use less resources and need less memory too.

There are talks that host based security is not working as well now. Is there another option that they can use – like whitelisting?

If you consider the traditional approach to research in security, I agree with you that we are coming to a point very quickly where it will become very expensive to do the research and put it into the endpoints. We detect around 47,000 new pieces of malware every day, and that's a lot. This is almost one every two seconds. How many end users you know would update their technology once every two seconds; they can’t [and they won’t]. It is too inten-

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sive for them to do that. Typically it is done once every day.

Back in the early 2000s, we had a lot of time to work on. When a vulnerability was discovered and it entered the Ethernet; some of the biggest attacks of the times like the slammer or the love letter took six months to attack the end user.

Around 2006-7, a term called zeroday vulnerability came up. This was because the vulnerability was discovered and it attacked the same day and the time to respond was significantly compressed.

In the early 2000s the focus was on blacklists. But as the time was compressed the industry responded by creating more predictive features in the technology. Now we are at that inflection point where we are saying that there are so many new vulnerabilities, it becomes very hard to research and it is very difficult to use predictive signatures because possibility of getting it wrong is always there. So, I think the whole industry has to look at two things: putting the research in the cloud and whitelisting.

As a security vendor we have more than 350 people working 24x7 and coming out with fixes, blacklists, predictive signatures, techniques and behavioural technologies that we put in the cloud and we want our customers to leverage that. One of the strategies that we’ve had for the last eighteen months is that every solution that McAfee provides is effectively a telemetry sensor. What this means is we are trying to gather information of our desktops, servers, laptops and email systems and help feed a private McAfee security cloud with information about every IP address and application that we interact with. The reason for that is that we are grooming, what we believe to be, the largest reputation cloud in the industry to help people start to make reputation based decisions about using an application or interacting with an IP address.

Eighteen months ago we enabled our endpoint technologies to lever-

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“There are no standards in the cloud environment today that could help people look at security in a unified manner globally”

age that security cloud. Now we have our firewalls, email security solutions and IP technologies communicating with that cloud.

Can you illustrate how this is done?

You probably recall the July 4th weekend last year there was a very targeted attack at the US government organisation; that attack did not happen on July 4th. The attack started on May 29th, just that the main pay load happened on July 4th. The attackers were planning the attack from a long time ago.

We were monitoring the malicious activity and were setting the reputation scores of the IP addresses linked to the activity. By the denialof-service attack happened on July 4th, the firewalls connected to our security cloud had sensed that the reputation of these IP addresses is not good and they must not accept traffic originating from these addresses.

THINGS I BELIEVE IN There hasn’t been a critical vulnerability in the hypervisor till date.

It is very difficult to use predictive signatures because possibility of getting it wrong is always there.

We are quickly coming to a point where it will become very expensive to put research into the endpoints.

The next thing that we talked about is whitelisting. That is exactly the way the industry needs to head in the next couple of years. We have just acquired a company called Solidcore that has a dynamic whitelisting technology.

I think the proof of this technology came into the limelight at the time of the rover attack in January on Google and other companies. At that time we knew that at least 30 companies were impacted – now we know that the number was at least 500. The traditional technologies that were out there could not respond to that kind of an attack. This was because no one understood the kind of attack, even the reputation services were not helpful as the IPs involved did not have a reputation rating. Our whitelisting technology, however, was able to stop that attack, immediately, without prior knowledge. We have held many hacking seminars where we have demonstrated the attack and how it could have been stopped. I am sure this is where the industry needs to go.

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S

Let me go to another pain point that is there. We’ve seen a move towards virtualisation and the cloud. But, there is certainly a problem of security when people are migrating from their current systems. What according to you are the biggest challenges?

Migration is certainly a big challenge.

Obviously when you are migrating you must have a contingency plan, a risk mitigation plan and a disaster recovery plan to deal with such scenarios. People have the misconception that they can turn one off and turn the other one on – which obviously is not going to happen. Most cloud operators are sensitive to this and they have good migration processes to ensure least amount of outage.

People have a lot of concerns about security when they are moving to a public cloud environment.

What according to you are the biggest challenges and solutions?

There are no standards today that help

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people look at security in a unified manner globally. Different standards are used in different countries. People use regular audits – quarterly, half yearly or yearly – to manage this situation. But, the problem is that the security landscape changes every minute. We at McAfee are working towards helping create these standards. What we are trying to do is create a cloud security program whereby an organisation not only goes through a periodic process but they also go through a daily assessment of their technology to make sure that the technology is free from malwares and security holes.

How different is it from having regular security patches?

Regular security patches do not tell you if you are vulnerable. What we are talking about is a process by which they can continually access their technology and gauge what are the holes in the process. Once they know this, they would know how to protect their environment. This is even before a patch has been released. They could take

countermeasures before patching the vulnerability to protect their environment.

Another important thing is the introduction of mobile devices on the network. What is the kind of security risk associated with these?

There has always been a big hype around security concerns with mobile devices. But, the reality is that there has not been any major attacks that have emerged from these devices.

With a lot of intellectual property and sensitive information sitting on these devices, the risk is now more severe. Since these devices are small and cheap they can be easily lost and replaced, but the data on these devices cannot be retrieved. It is important to be able to manage a device after it is lost. On top of that, in the last 18 months or so, there has been an influx of applications on these devices. There are hundreds of thousands of such applications that are floating on the internet – a lot which are not installed from authorised sources – they are not approved.

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harvesting

mobi l 26

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FROM LEFT: Suresh A Shanmugam, S C Mittal, Girish Rao and Avinash Arora

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i lity

Enterprise CIOs have sniffed a big business opportunity in the rural parts of the country. They have understood clearly the role mobile technology innovation can play to help their business serve customers in far-flung locations.

The increasing

adoption of mobile usage in the rural areas has been another factor that has made a robust business case for delivering local, usable content over the mobile.

Anything and everything from weather updates, to farming tips, mandi prices to real-time business information can be delivered with ease and huge benefits. By providing reliable and comprehensive information on these subjects, companies have unwittingly helped improve productivity and increase earnings of the rural masses.

We share with you how some of the CIOs utilised mobile solutions and discovered that their efforts resulted in a rich source of inspiration, innovation and even profit for their mainstream business lines.

IMAGING BY BINESH SREEDHARAN

By Ashwani Mishra

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raising hopes,

addressing rural concerns

“With increasing mobile penetration and lower costs over the last few years, we wanted people to reap maximum benefits using mobile phones” S C Mittal

Senior ED, Group CTO, IFFCO and Director, IKSL

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited used mobile services to empower farmers in the remote areas of the country

P

eriya Jakkhammal, a small time farmer of Theni district located in the southern part of Tamil Nadu was invited to address the Conference of Education Ministers of Common Wealth Countries in July 2009 held in Malaysia. As an active member of IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited (IKSL), Jakkhammal spoke on how the use of mobile communication services helped improve income levels of women in her district in the field of goat and cow rearing.

In this case, IKSL partnered with Thenibased NGO Vidiyal and Common Wealth of Learning, an intergovernmental body of Commonwealth countries focusing on strengthening learning. The objective of IKSL was to provide voice messages and helpline on sheep/goat and cow rearing, women's rights and other areas of interest.

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“The primary focus of IKSL has been to leverage communications and provide relevant and location specific content to empower people in rural India,” says S C Mittal, Senior ED (Management Services & IT), Group CTO, IFFCO and Director, IKSL. IKSL was established as a telecommunications subsidiary of The Indian Farmers Fertilizer Co-operative Ltd. (IFFCO) in 2007 in partnership with Bharti Airtel for empowering the famers.

Prior to this, IFFCO was using kiosks to communicate with the rural population.

The focus of the mobile initiative was to provide information directly to the farmers, deliver location specific, time sensitive information and important alert and ensure that the services does not add economic strain on the farmers.

“People had to come to the kiosk and this

was a challenge. With increasing mobile penetration and lower costs over the last few years, we wanted people to reap maximum benefits using mobile phones,” says Mittal.

Empowering farmers IKSL in partnership with Airtel launched Value Added Services (VAS) through a Green SIM card. Using this card, farmers got access to a unique VAS platform that broadcasts 5 free voice messages in specific zones in the country and on various topics related to mandi (market) prices, farming techniques, weather forecasts, dairy farming, animal husbandry, rural health initiatives, plant protection, employment opportunities, government schemes, etc.

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SNAP SHOT

PHOTO BY SHAMIK

Organisation IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited

on a daily basis. Each voice message is of one minute duration. Other activities like mobile-based quiz, Phone In Programmes, etc. are also taken up.

In addition, the farmer can call on a dedicated helpline, manned by experts from various fields, to get answers to their specific queries. “ If an agent fails to resolve a particular query, it is escalated to a second tier of experts who address the required issues of the caller,” says Mittal.

There are around 60 experts spread in the country and the user base of IKSL has crossed 15 lakh across 18 states in the country. On an average, there are around 400 to 600 calls received by the helpline each day.

However, during harvesting seasons, there is a significant increase in daily calls received.

IKSL is also working towards reducing the cost of calls made by the farmers to the helpline.“We are in talks with Airtel, and hope to reduce the costs by at least 30 to 40 percent,” says Mittal.

Similar to having a focused approach on sheep rearing for women in Theni, IKSL has also supported other communities like increasing the yield and improve the quality of basmati rice production in Haryana.

Challenge Empowerment of people living in rural India Improve decision making ability of farmers by delivering location and time specific information and alerts Solution Launched mobile Value Added Services (VAS) through a Green SIM card in partnership with Bharti Airtel A dedicated Helpline for resolution of agricluture and other village related issues by a team of experts Benefits The solution has seen rural upliftment of farmers in many states Over 15 lakh users

This was a project implemented in Karnal, Kaithal and Kurukshetra in partnership with The Haryana State Cooperative Supply & Marketing Federation Ltd.(HAFED). Through the use of mobile services for the farmers in these parts, the output of basmati production increased by 25 percent as compared to last year.

“We plan to expand these services to a larger user base in the country,” says Mittal.

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“With CFMS, we have clear visibility of farmer level data. It has improved reaction time, reduced damages for crops and improved productivity�

Girish Rao

Head IT Solutions, Marico

clearing the fog

Poor visibility on seed prices meant that Marico often paid more than what was required. An in-house developed mobile application empowered its field staff with the information they needed.

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PHOTO BY JITEN GANDHI

M

arico, one of India’s fastest tioning System (GPS) to track their pergrowing consumer products and sonnel who validated the standing crops, services companies, has been checked whether what was contracted by the following the process of contract farming farmer was farmed or not, looked for insect for several years. The process of contract infestation, and whether they would get the farming involves cultivating and harvesting required harvest during the end of the cycle. for and on behalf of business It also captures requisite data establishments or governwhen the farmer sells the ment agencies and forwardproduce in the market.

SNAP SHOT ing the produce at a preThe data captured on the Organisation determined price. In return, mobile device is relayed to Marico Limited the contracted farmers are a central system every thirty Challenge offered a good price against minutes. Even if there is Ensure stability of their farm produce. no signal, the device keeps supplies The contracted farmers storing the data and sends it Keep a check on grow kardi (safflower oil) when the signal is available contract farmers for Marico, a key ingredient or when the personnel visit Market price visibility in Marico’s Saffola brand. the nearest branch office after Solution The primary reason for the a day’s work.

Provided mobilecompany to go for contract “With CFMS, we have a based applications for farming of seeds in India very good visibility of farmer its personnel was in order to ensure level data. It has improved Used GPS for tracking stability of supplies. our reaction time to farmer Created a portal for Due to instability of the queries, reduced damages for price information and market in the last couple of crops and improved producbusiness analysis years, kardi as a crop had tivity,” says Rao. to compete with other cash The company witnessed Benefits Improved reaction crops like gram. increase in productivity by 30 time to farmer queries “Despite being on contract, percent and reduction in crop Increase in farmers would start growdamage by 50 percent as comproductivity by 30 ing other crops. This meant pared to the previous year. percent that there was no assurance Reduction in crop damage by 50 percent of supplies and we ended No fooling us Addition of Rs 1-2 importing oil. This impacted Using a J2ME application, crore to their bottomour top and bottom line in the company created a portal line terms of availability of raw that now allows the comReduction in material,” says Girish Rao, pany's buying agents to send turnaround time from 8 days to 1-2 days Head IT Solutions, Marico. kardi-related information to the portal in real-time from various mandis (markets) Getting farm using their mobile phones. facts right As a result the company now has better To address this concern, Marico went live visibility into the prices and this is used to with a Contract Farming Management take immediate decisions like buying from a System (CFMS) late last year. For this, field market with good quality and low price. The personnel (agriculture representatives) were data is also posted in the Business Intelliprovided with mobile phones that hosted an gence (BI) system for conducting long-term in-house developed application using J2ME strategic analysis. “Previously, there was technology to capture farm data. delay in providing information to the buyThe company made use of Global Posi-

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RFIDs Ease Collection Problems GODREJ AGROVET, a subsidiary of Godrej Industries, is a diversified agribusiness company with interests in animal feed, oil palm plantations, agrochemicals and poultry. The company has been using mobile applications for its palm oil business.

The company has issued RFID cards to farmers. So when a farmer brings his produce to a collection agent (CA), a handheld device scans the RFID card of the farmer to read details like name, bank in which he has an account, address, etc. The CA then prints the receipt of the produce.

When a CA prints receipt slips, a SMS goes to the staff at the oil factory; and they know what produce is coming in. The farmer then takes the same slip to the taluka office to get benefits from the government. Slips are a pre-printednumber controlled, legal document.

—At the time of talking, Suresh Bhise was IT Head at Godrej Agrovet Limited

ers who needed to take a decision on what quantity to buy and at what price,” says Rao. Marico has been able to get an additional average discount of Rs 1-2 per kg from the market price after deploying this system.

This has added around Rs. 1-2 crore to their bottom-line.

Also, the turnaround time for getting market information has been reduced to a day or two from 8-10 days earlier.

“This process has real time data capturing. It is like an in-house stock exchange which provides market information in terms of arrivals and posts rates at the various mandis (markets) across the nation,” says Rao. The local buying agents can now concentrate on keeping a tab on the material and price movements rather than spending time in relaying the market information verbally to the central team.

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the right mix New Holland Fiat India integrated its ERP, web services and mobile technology to smoothen processes of Sales Order Management (SOM), invoicing and shipment of consignments

N

ew Holland Fiat India, a wholly owned subsidiary of CNH Global – a leading agricultural equipment company – is a majority owned subsidiary of the Fiat Group.

Previously, tractor requirements within the company were booked in an offline batch mode at the head office. Also, order booking process was not integrated with the monthly forecast submitted by Commercial Business Units (CBUs). The CBU members consist of people from sales, service and parts business.

The tracking was manual and feedback was not instantaneous. Moreover there was a huge amount of paper work that was involved in order to approve any sales order for which the credit limit differed from the usually accepted limit.

When the company decided to expand and sell tractors directly in the rural areas of the country, it realised that lack of infrastructure in these parts would hamper business growth.

For fixing these challenges and so as to bring more transparency in the overall process, the IT team developed a new online web ordering system that would smoothen operations of Sales Order Management (SOM), invoicing and shipment of consignments to customers.

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“We integrated our ERP, “We have captured the data web services and mobile in transit money (accounts SNAP SHOT Organisation technology in such a way receivables) using SMS inteNew Holland Fiat that any shipment that gration with ERP. The data is (India) Pvt. Ltd takes place from the plant available for on-line financial is communicated directly parameters validation all the Challenge to our dealers and CBUs,” time and is updated every Manual tacking of orders; feedback was says Avinash Arora, Director time the transaction takes not instantaneous - IS (India & S E Asia), New place,” says Arora.

Lack of infrastructure Holland Fiat (India).

Order booking can now be in rural areas So the moment a dealer or out of the pre-defined MOP CBU places an order and it is only or under exceptional Solution Integrated ERP, web confirmed and accepted, the cases in which a dealer can services and mobile dealer/CBU gets a message demand on the spot order technology on his mobile. “The system booking and shipment is now much more agile, the request or could book an Benefits processes transparent and the advance order.

Automation of process results accurate,” Arora says.

Order approval is autoIncreased visibility During the time of booking mated through a workflow and transparency the order, a CBU user associbased on defined business ated with the dealer or the rules; the process is webdealer himself is equipped based and integrated with with the latest information on the stocks. the mobile system. Approval triggers can be Such information includes advances to end automatically sent, obviating the need for customers and the status of all other finananyone to be physically present in the plant cial parameters that are mandatory to be or warehouse. validated by the commercial processes viz.

An auto mail is generated the moment bank guarantee and security deposit status an order is submitted by the CBU or the of the dealer, MOP (monthly operating dealer. The approving authority gets a clear plans) figures, outstanding, payment plan picture of the status of the order particulars for the month, status of transit money, etc. and financial parameters with green /red

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“The system is now much more agile, the processes transparent and the results accurate” Avinash Arora

Director - IS (India & S E Asia), New Holland Fiat (India)

PHOTO BY SHAMIK

Reducing the Heat in Sales Processes VOLTAS is India's leading air conditioning, refrigeration and engineering services company.

Voltas aimed for its sales team to be more flexible in responding to market dynamics and more accountable by requiring it to document all sales commitments.

So for its consumer business i.e. windows air conditioning, the company deployed SAP application on smart phones for its employees. The module deployed in this case is the sales and distribution module. This service will enable field sales personnel to capture sales orders/

book order, register a cheque receipt etc. on the mobile.

“The project is currently in the pilot phase and should be over within a period of two months,” says Asmita Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas Limited.

Additionally it will help managers to release the sales and credit blocks. The maximum number of users for this mobile application would be around 150. The mobile technology is provided by Sybase for tight integration with SAP. Voltas has also rolled out mobile solutions in its engineering equipments business where the sales team captures leads

coming from various sources like government agencies etc.

Here the sales personnel of the company have been given access to a pre-sales application on their smart phones.

A module called business journey plan is also installed on the mobile devices. When sales personnel visit a customer, they can capture the details of the customer visit with excerpts of the discussion on their mobile application. All the customer visits are captured in this module and a visit plan is also available in the form of a calendar in the mobile.

coloured buttons. A click on the relevant button triggers the processes to move forward either for order processing and subsequent shipment or cancellation.

The order is registered using an auto function system (AFS) that allows writing of an intelligent program in the ERP. In this case, it was written using a BaaN tool. This program keeps running in the background and integrates the ERP and mobile solution.

If a particular dealer is able to satisfactorily meet all the financial parameters, an invoice is generated and gets published on the web. This also reaches the dealers' mobile phone and provides details regarding the order placed, shipment made and the invoice number and the amount, if any, that needs to be paid.

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“The mobile service enables our executives to know the exact amount to be collected and provide a receipt anywhere, anytime.�

Suresh A Shanmugam

Head, BITS, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited

handhelds march

into the villages To expand its reach and quicken the delivery of its services across remote areas in the country, Mahindra Finance equipped its field task force with a mobile solution

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HARVESTING MOBILIT Y

PHOTO BY JITEN GANDHI

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Beyond the Urban Consumer

ahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd. (MMFSL), part of the Mahindra Group, is one THE INDIAN TELECOM that addresses this growing rural Most studies on the VAS of India’s leading non-banking finance INDUSTRY is one of the fastest market and build a successful market infer that, in addition, the companies focused on the rural and semi growing in the world and India is revenue model. services that cater to the nonurban sector. It provides finance for utility projected to become the second The not-for-profit sector is also urban areas will have to be crevehicles, tractors and cars and has a network largest telecom market globally making use of data services to ated in a number of languages to of 459 offices. by 2010. help rural populations manage provide locally relevant content MMFSL was expanding rapidly across the This VAS industry in India is their lives more effectively. such as agricultural commodity Indian sub-continent, particularly to remote now growing by around 60% Thomson Reuters, has been prices, weather information and locations, rural villages and semi-urban year on year. It is quite clear that updating over one lakh farmers access to government services towns. To facilitate this reach, the company mobile phones will be critical to in the country with the latest and information. needed to have new branches fully operadeliver services in remote and market trends, weather forecast, According to a whitepaper tional in quick time. rural areas in India. and crop information via its titled Mobile Value Added Lack of basic infrastructure at the new Approximately 70 percent SMS-based service. Telco compaServices in India by Accenture, branches was posing as a significant roadof the Indian population lives nies too have take the cue. Tata a major potential – and to date block. Vehicle dealers also needed financing in rural areas, accounting for a indicom, has started a project in largely untapped – market for information on time to compete effectively subscriber base of close to 100 a district in Gujarat that allows VAS is in the provision of services with other players. The company required a million mobile users. With the farmers to operate their irrigation for enterprises. From simple scalable IT infrastructure to support the growrural population expected to pumps from remote locations applications such as using SMS ing number of branches and employees. reach more than 830 million in without the having to travel to the for scheduling appointments “Deploying mobile solutions was 2010, it is estimated that 100 farm. Nokia has also joined the to streaming product videos to our biggest bet to address all the above million new rural subscribers will fray, offering Life Tools Services, a salesperson’s mobile phone, issues,” says Suresh A Shanmugam, be added by then. by means of which they offer the applications could offer conHead, Business Information Technology Out-of-the-box thinking and agricultural information and edusiderable first-mover advantage Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra new strategies will be critical for cational information to people in for service providers who can Financial Services Limited. delivering services and content both rural and urban areas. address this market quickly.

In the earlier legacy environment, dependency on local systems was low; all recorded data was captured in the database at the now check status of collections at any given million customers were collected when they head office, written on compact discs (CDs) point of time thereby enhancing their effiwere due. Shanmugam and his team set out and sent to other locations as ciency levels. to do just that. To empower per branch requirements.

Around 80 percent of the company’s colrural remote services and do SNAP SHOT Since the customer base of lection was done through cash which had so in an effective manner, Organisation the company consisted mainits own problems. “By deploying this mobile Shanmugam deployed Mahindra & Mahindra ly of farmers and transportservice our executives now know the exact e-Point of Sale (ePos) devices.

Financial Services Ltd. ers, with little or no exposure amount to be collected from the client and These devices ran on open Challenge to technology, the mobile they can also provide a receipt anywhere source software and provided Needed to open new was the preferred medium and at anytime,” says Shanmugam. Other access at the last mile, acting branches in quick time to cater to their demands at features of the mobile device system include like a mini mobile branch.

By Making information their doorstep. biometric thumb impression, combined using such mobile services available to all stakeholders For meeting the business touch screen display for input and output, and by deploying automated requirements, the new customer voice recording, RFID solution to SMS solutions, business Solution mobility infrastructure had trace the exact location of the executive, cusqueries could be resolved Open Source to enable deployment of tomer signature capturing etc. much faster. architecture, no applications quickly and With the mobile solution in place, loans The business team's licensing cost Common device for without any disruption to can now be disbursed quickly, often in demand were clear: it wanted multiple verticals existing services. less than two hours. Data duplicity at the to process queries on a loan The field task force back-end is eliminated. It has also resulted application and sanction Benefits needed to be connected to in best practices and compliance for the the same within two days.

Instant Loan the company's system to company to instill not only best process and This is now possible from all disbursement within two hours gain access to the business procedures but also to comply with regulaMMFSL-connected locations.

Customer service at support solutions and tor/ trade bodies related to commerce trade The field force now extracts door step ensure that the monthly and finance. and captures information in No duplicity of data instalments from the 1.3 real time. Internal users can —Ashwani.mishra@9dot9.in CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

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AUTHOR SAYS

Let’s face it – social media, smartpads and a host of other cloud options are here to stay.

ILLUSTRATION BY SANTOSH KUSHWAHA

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The New Matrix A special report on how to use technology to reshape your company.

BY DANIEL BURRUS

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oday we’re in the midst of several technology paradigm shifts. These changes greatly impact organisations and CIOs worldwide.

First, there’s the computing hardware shift. Previously, you could only use a computer by accessing a mainframe using a terminal. Then came desktops. Mainframes did not go away. We simply changed our primary interface device. Next came laptops.

Mainframes and desktops still didn’t go away, but the laptop became the interface device of choice.

Now, the power of a laptop is being put in the palm of our hand with smartphones and smartpads. And because this device is a phone, a multimedia computer, a video conferencing platform, a still and video camera, a locator and navigator, and a game and entertainment centre that is with us 24/7, the devices are transforming all areas of our life.

The second shift is in software and software distribution. We went from enterprise level software for mainframes to personal and business packages for our desktops and laptops. Now we have the "app" software revolution. Again, the old doesn’t go away, but the primary tool of choice is changing.

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And because apps allow us to personalise our devices to suit our unique needs, this revolution will grow rapidly.

With apps becoming more popular, it’s now time to explore the third shift which is the emergence of a new level of apps... what I’ll call enterprise level apps (ELA). These are apps customised for such wide-scale applications as purchasing, logistics, supply chain management, sales, and military security, just to name a few. These apps are designed not only to make people more productive in their work, but also to do some of the work for them.

For example, in the medical field, they’ll be ELAs for disease management, for patient records, and for remote diagnostics.

The app will be more like an essential tool to perform a specific function rather than an ancillary item. Combine this with the real-time data revolution that’s also taking place, and you can see how groundbreaking enterprise apps are.

Never before have people been able to get information and data in their hand even as the data is just being generated. So when something occurs, is produced, or a need arises, that information is immediately visible to anyone authorised to see it in the exact way they want and need it to be. To have that visibility and have it with you 24/7 is both powerful and amazing. Instead of just having real-time data, companies are redefining themselves and transitioning into real-time enterprises, which means they are using real-time data to make better decisions faster.

Of course, all these shifts present some real-time challenges to CIOs. As the CIO or IT expert in your company, you need to understand the depth of this revolution.

Recognise the change Historically, CIOs are used to having control over the company’s technology, and they like everything to be behind the bulletproof enterprise IT veil. Many CIOs and IT professionals are not happy with the increased focus on cloud computing, yet that’s precisely what their company’s staff is using when they use their personal computers to search Google or access other applications in the cloud.

This dislike for cloud computing is understandable. It is, after all, outside of

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300K

the control of the IT network You can’t have people thinkthat the CIO and his or her staff ing that the IT department is have worked so hard to develop holding the company back. and secure. But let’s face it – Instead, you need to be helping APPS AVAILABLE them move forward. Granted, apps, SaaS, social media, smart phones, smart pads and a host it’s human nature to protect and ON THE APPLE of other cloud options that your defend the status quo, and there APP STORE FOR employees use – both at home are some security concerns with THE IPHONE AND the emerging technologies. But and increasingly at work – are here to stay. at the same time, you have to OTHER DEVICES Consider this: In early 2010, remember the old adage, “It’s easier to ride a horse in the directhere were 150,000 apps in tion that it’s going.” In this case, the horses the Apple store alone. Now we’re close to of technology are going in a new direction 300,000 apps with billions of downloads. at a pace and speed we’ve never seen before.

So it’s growing fast, with no indication of It’s time for CIOs to pay attention to this slowing down. and do more than just go along for a ride.

Working as a strategic consultant to large Case in point: In January 1993, IBM knew organisations, provides me the opportuthe future of its company and it was the nity to observe how CIOs work from close most admired company on the planet. But quarters – I’m amazed at how many CIOs the horses of technology changed direction. are not embracing this paradigm shift. As By the end of 1993, IBM was getting close a CIO, you have to ask yourself, “Will there to going out of business. It missed the shift. be more apps in the cloud option, including But IBM is not the only case. Many other audio, video, storage, and apps, next year companies have missed the shift. Think than there is this year?" The answer will about it: When was the last time you bought be a resounding: “Yes!” You can’t ignore something from Polaroid? it. Many of your own people and your own Now we have another gigantic technoexecutives are using cloud-based services logical shift taking place, and the last people right now. And if they are more productive who should miss it are the CIOs and the IT at home by using these apps than they are at department. The shift is here, it’s easy to see, the workplace, and are doing things that are and it’s as plain as day. Therefore, it’s time to more advanced on their smart phones and start directing the horse on the journey. smart pads (at least in their minds), then the CIO has a problem.

Opportunities abound

Companies are redefining themselves and transitioning into real-time enterprises, which means they are using realtime data to make better decisions faster.

Since ELAs are just now emerging, it’s the perfect opportunity for CIOs to be on the forefront of the revolution. ELAs are often internal company apps, and the IT department should be the one involved and in charge of developing them.

Here’s an example of how an enterprise level purchasing app could work: Suppose you work at a manufacturing plant and want to purchase an item. The moment you discover the need, you can pull up the company’s purchasing app on your smart phone. You can place your order, see all the pre-approved items that fit your need, and select what you want. When you click on the item, you can get an instant approval or denial. If there’s a denial because your request doesn’t meet pre-defined purchase parameters established by the company’s head of purchasing, you can get a justifica-

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tion and take steps to move forward to make that purchase happen. At the same time, everyone involved in the purchase can have instant access to that request and its status.

Here’s another example: With a security app for a military base or other lock-down area, if an incident, such as a fire, occurs on the premises, everyone on location can know exactly what happened and where the incident is all from their phone and from the minute it occurs. Depending on your rank or position, you can know where to go and what to do. You can see the location of the fire extinguishers and other emergency tools. If there is an explosion and you need to go to a secure place, you can see where to go and how to get there. You can locate different emergency exits quickly from the palm of your hand.

These are just two small examples. Other kinds of enterprise level apps can include internal and secure versions of popular social media platforms such as Twitter to quickly solve problems, Facebook to con-

Today’s CIOs must also look at how the company as a whole can use technology to redefine itself in the marketplace.

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24/7

nect disconnected engineers, and visual real estate and broader YouTube to create how-to videos. bandwidth connection. Many Companies that have already new TVs are also 3D equipped, embraced such initiatives are meaning that your apps could creating stunning results because be 3D, too. As you can see, this VISIBILITY they’re using technology to is a game changer. Smart CIOs IS HELPING enhance collaboration and comneed to stay ahead of this evoORGANISATIONS lution and help redefine their munication among employees without exposing the company to company accordingly.

TAKE DECISIONS threats from outside the network.

FASTER In addition to creating enterUsing the paradigms prise level apps, the CIO should All these revolutions, and be looking at creating apps they can offer especially the app revolution, are enabling to their customers/clients and the public in companies to redefine who they are, what general. Such apps may even open a new they offer, and how they offer it … and revenue stream for the company. they’re enabling the CIO to have a big role in the redefining process. In this case, the current technology shifts are actually tools The next level of creation. As a result, you can help your Aside from directing the creation of the varicompany create new products, new services, ous apps, the CIO also needs to be looking and entire new markets something most at where the app will be used. Currently, CIOs have played a role in, but now have an people think of apps as being primarily opportunity to lead. for smart phones. But what about the new Here are some ways to do that: smartpad revolution Apple launched with First, look at your products, services, or its iPad? Some smartphone apps are comindustry and see how today’s new technolopatible with smartpads. But even the comgies can help you redefine things. panies who make these apps aren’t thinking When it comes to your company and your big enough … both literally and figuratively. industry, ask yourself some key questions, Since the smartpads have bigger screens such as: and more processing power, why should What is growing and what is shrinking? they do the same thing as the phone app?

What is the direction of change based on the Why not take advantage of that extra space impact of new technology? (For example: and power and come up with a new class getting more energy efficient is not a trend, of apps that can do things the phone apps it’s long-term; similarly, getting more virtual can’t? These are key questions CIOs must is long-term.) and based on where things think about and address if they want their are going, is there a way to use technology company to be a serious player in the future to create new opportunities? app market.

Next, look at how technology is affecting But that’s just the beginning....The next your customers in your industry right now. evolution is apps for the smart television Examine the overall customer experience think iTV. Today’s newer televisions are as well as who is buying your offerings. For Internet enabled. (And, by the way, all our example, when ultra-light aviation came devices will be Internet enabled one day.) about, the first ultra-light aircraft were basiThat means the processor and the televically hang-gliders with engines. The FAA sion browser are built into the TV set so decided not to get involved with it, which you don’t have to plug a computer into your meant people didn’t need a pilot’s license to television. The TV is the computer. fly an ultra-light. As a result, the first manuThis will drive the IPTV revolution even facturers targeted that demographic people faster. Because it’s essentially TV over the who wanted to fly but who didn’t have the Internet versus on cable and satellite, many time or money to get a pilot’s license. One Millennials use IPTV to solve all of their company thought they could get a better wired television viewing needs. Knowing customer, so they asked, “Why not redefine this, it’s only logical that your company the market?” will also want to produce television level Rather than target those who didn’t have apps. However, now you have even more

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a license (and who had less disposable income), this company decided to target commercial jet pilots and flight instructors.

After all, these people loved to fly and they had money; however, because of their jobs, flying had become more automated and less fun. Then the company went one step further and redefined the ultra-light itself by adding a stick and rudder and instrument controls. They made the ultra light more like an airplane rather than a hang-glider, which better appealed to their new target market. The company went on to being highly successful, all because they redefined who their customer was and then made product changes accordingly.

So when it comes to your customers, ask yourself some key questions, such as: Is there a better customer? (For example, maybe you’re selling to a customer who is focused on the lowest price.)

Who is your ideal customer?

Is there a customer you don’t have but should have?

Could you use technology to redefine your product and attract that customer?

Is there a way to use technology to enhance your product or service in some way that opens up a market or creates a new market for you?

Finally, look at the specific ways in which you compete in the marketplace as well as what makes your company unique. Then decide how technology can redefine the way you compete. For example, at one time, Polaroid was the king of instant photography. But then technology and digital photography changed their industry, and the way they competed (instant photography) changed but Polaroid didn’t change with it.

Instead, they made the mistake many businesses do: they used technology to get more efficient and lower their costs but failed to create new products and markets.

Similarly, Kodak was failing for over a decade. Finally, they looked at how they competed in the past as well as what it would take to compete in the future. That’s when they embraced digital photography. And while they still have some traditional film labs across the country, it’s their digital products division that’s most profitable today.

The moral: The longer you wait to redefine how you compete, the harder it is to survive.

However, when you pinpoint a way to use

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Change Now, It is the Only Constant THE CLASSIC example is Amazon.com. When they first started the business, they used technology to redefine how people sell books. But they didn’t stop there. They then expanded to other products and redefined how nearly everything was sold. Then they redefined again. Because they have a large IT, logistics, and warehouse system that is not 100%

in use at any one time, they now rent out their enterprise IT platform and warehousing space to other companies. So they are not only redefining an industry, they’re also redefining themselves.

Another now classic example is Apple. Back in early 2000, before they launched the iPod and iPhone, most people thought Apple was quickly

technology to compete better, you create new revenue streams. So when it comes to competing in a technology-driven age, ask yourself some key questions, such as: Is there a way you can use technology to redefine how you compete?

Is there a way you can use technology to change your product or how you service people?

Is there a way you can use technology to redefine your customer’s experience?

Yes, the technology revolutions we’re currently experiencing are redefining how companies make money, how professionals work and how consumers buy. They’re also redefining the strategic role CIOs play in the company, enabling CIOs to have a bigger hand in external product/service creation, industry standards and the company’s longterm vision. No longer can CIOs keep their focus on data protection and company networks (although those will always be key job functions). Today’s CIOs must also look at how the company as a whole can use technology to redefine itself in the marketplace.

From mobile finance and banking to geosocial networking tools, every vertical from real estate to manufacturing is going to be redefined in a short period of time. No CIO can afford to move slowly, otherwise, he or she may miss the opportunity entirely.

going out of business. That’s when the company redefined themselves around music.

Later they redefined again with the iPhone, which lead a telecommunications revolution. Now they’re doing it again with the iPad by creating a new class of personal computer.

Like Amazon.com, Apple has redefined themselves as well as their industry.

dow. You simply need to rethink security.

With the cost of hardware continuing to decrease and with bandwidth and processing power continuing to increase, it’s easy to predict that cloud computing, apps, smart phones, and smart pads will gain even more popularity. As a CIO, that can mean one of two things for you: 1) it can be a major headache, or 2) it can be a major opportunity. The difference is in how you look at the shifts and how you embrace the future.

Ultimately, staying ahead and breaking new grounds during a technology-driven transformation is indeed possible. It’s all about looking at where the market is going rather than where it is today. It’s about looking at where your customer is evolving, not where they used to be. When you change your mindset, ask some key questions, and then take action on what the answers reveal. When you do that you can use today’s technology paradigm shifts to redefine your company, improve operations, create new revenue streams, and experience higher profits than ever before.

— Daniel Burrus is one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists, and is the author of six books, including Technotrends (1993, Reed Business Information, Inc.), which has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm

Embrace the future

that monitors global advancements in technology

You also have to realise that using technology such as apps, smart phones, and smart pads to redefine your company does not mean that you throw security out the win-

driven trends to help clients better understand how technological, social, and business forces are converging.This article has been published with prior permission from www.cioupdate.com.

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4

POINTS

FOUR IMPORTANT AREAS OF GOVERNANCE PEOPLE: Success of any organisation is directly linked to the engagement of its members TECHNOLOGY: Is at the foundation of the information governance framework

PHOTO BY PHOTOS.COM

POLICY: Instead of focusing on limits, focus on outcomes RISK MANAGEMENT: Means identifying the magnitude and impact of non compliance

A LITTLE REGULATION CAN BE A GOOD THING! Want your organisation to be proactive rather than reactive? Try information governance.

BY KIMBERLY SAMUELSON

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As a speaker at many technology events,

I get to see the reaction the phrase "information governance" elicits — I’ve seen everything from eye rolls to head nods.

“Easy for you to say. Try and implement it!” said one particularly feisty individual. “Yeah, we are still trying to figure it out,” grumbles another. I am employed by a developer of an enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor and clients constantly express that they are overwhelmed by the wealth of their own information: “What should we keep? What should we purge? How do we manage information so that it becomes an asset rather than a liability?

How can we use our information to operate more successfully? What controls do we need to put into place?”

While many approach information management from a technology nutsand-bolts standpoint, what is often not addressed is the top-down, strategic management of information. I like to explain it this way: You’ve seen the trees, now let’s view the forest.

Step back for a second and consider the adaption of information management within an enterprise. When your organisation first implemented information management, I bet it was all about "finding and filing". You had paper files, electronic documents, etc. and you had to put them somewhere so that you could easily find them.

Essentially, you were setting up a central point of information control.

Then you started to consider how much valuable information could be found in your business critical applications such as ERP, CRM and GIS and you thought about your users and the fact they had to toggle around three or four applications to get the information they needed to do their job. You then made the bold move of using your content management system as a sort of integrative middleware, so the information delivery to your users became much more dynamic.

You’ve approached information management from an enterprise technology perspective and you are rightfully proud of

the way you provide services to your users.

Then it happens (insert ominous music here!) that an e-discovery request is made, a new compliance initiative rears its ugly head, or you get notification of an audit ...

So now what?

It’s time for top-down. It’s time to plan an information governance strategy.

Governance roadmaps and frameworks Every organisation or enterprise has an overarching goal. To reach this goal it is necessary to coordinate activities and make a plan. In today’s economic climate, that goal may be simply to survive. In order to increase its chances for survival, an organisation must be agile. In order to be agile, an organisation needs its “information lifeblood” to be available, consistent and reliable.

“The information governance framework has four parts: people, policies, technology and risk management.”

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This information is an asset to the organisation because it allows better decision making. But at the same time, the information needs to have some controls around it. Simply put, in order to be more agile, organisations must better manage their information by putting a governance strategy into place.

Governance implementation is often thought of as a journey. Just as you won’t reach your organisation’s goals in a few days, you won’t solidify your governance plan in a couple of meetings. I’ve read a lot of material that suggests that one should create a road map for governance. While this is useful, I like to think of governance as a framework. A framework is an incomplete, though concrete, solution to a recurring problem. A framework has physical components upon which the user may build elements. Frameworks allow policies to be created, conflicts to be resolved and are flexible enough to foster the provision of services to business units. Simply put, information frameworks allow us to create a structure for aligning control with agility.

The information governance framework has four parts: people, policies, technology and risk management. People and policies are the organisational enablers, supported by the discipline of risk management, which is shored up by technology. This allows resources and risk to be managed while fostering the creation of information value.

In the same way as blood pumping through the body provides the body parts with energy and strength, this information gives the business units power and agility. Ultimately, the goal of the governance framework is two-fold: compliance to regulations and value creation. A controlled yet flexible governance framework fosters agility in business processes and service delivery.

The Fab Four The four areas of governance are important enough to discuss in more detail. Every successful information management endeavour that we’ve seen has been organised in this manner. Implementing a governance structure allows your organisation to be proactive rather than reactive.

People - It’s so important to start with the human element. The success of any organisational endeavour is directly linked

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“Every organisation or enterprise has an overarching goal. To reach this goal it is necessary to coordinate activities and make a plan. In today’s economic climate, that goal may be simply to survive. In order to increase its chances for survival, an organisation must be agile.” to the engagement of the members of the organisation. If the needs of management and staff aren’t considered, you might as well shut off the lights and go home. Information management is truly a collaborative process. Make sure you have executive sponsorship, but don’t forget to engage your consumer in the strategy.

Be reflective of the needs of your clients rather than definitive. Use IT as the enabler, but it’s not always necessary that they take the lead. The most successful strategic implementations form a stakeholder committee that includes department heads, consumers, legal, technologists and records managers. But, before you put together a large group, let me caution you: Although all organisations want governance decisions to represent the interests of all stakeholders, the best committees assign clear responsibilities for each decision to individuals who can accept accountability for outcomes.

A good governance structure allows staff to work in the most efficient and effective way possible by giving them access to information assets. And don’t forget about usability. If implementations of information management controls are cumbersome, they will fail. It’s amazing how easily staff will get around your controls or refuse to use your system if it isn’t useful. The reason most information governance efforts falter is that they don’t keep the business units' methods of working in mind.

Policy - There’s no one-size-fits-all suggestion I can make in terms of governance policies, but I have a few suggestions. Instead of focusing on limits, focus on outcomes. When you approach policy-making in this manner, your business units are much more likely to cooperate as they will see value.

Rather than have staff members wait in line

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at a records counter for information, consider implementing a controlled system that allows instant, individualised information access. This way it’s less about lock-down and more about empowerment.

Approach your information like an asset, from a portfolio perspective. You don’t look at your bank account in terms of individual one dollar bills; don’t view your information that way.

Finally, consider standardisation. Metadata or data about data is your information DNA. Consistency here will pay dividends and make compliance and auditing less painful. Standardisation is an enabler of agility. By standardising foundational components, you become more agile.

Technology - Technology is at the foundation of the information governance framework. When planning your enterprise, be agile in your systems approach.

Consider implementing an enterprise content management application. A lot of organisations use applications such as a geographic information system (GIS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) as points of control or platforms to deploy shared services. Implementing this type of technology will introduce automation to your information management and automation ensures consistency.

There are three common avenues you can take in terms of ECM implementations: The first is ECM as the single point of control for complete information lifecycle management. A rules-based structure is key, but don’t forget about the quality of the information you capture. Remember a content repository is only as good as the content it manages. As a wise person once said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

The second approach involves looking

at your information architecture from the user perspective. Here’s your opportunity to be agile in your technology implementation. This method is known as “dynamic personalisation.” Dynamic personalisation allows the user to access information in the manner and environment in which the user is most comfortable. The user can access the ECM application directly or through any other application through which the user works. In this case, think of ECM as a sort of integrative middleware. Middleware, by design, makes the sharing of information resources transparent to users. It provides consistency, automation and security.

The third approach is the implementation of ECM as a shared service platform. This is most often implemented by governancemature organisations. Enterprise information management is literally that — information shared across business units or functions. This is particularly attractive to technology departments as it allows them to develop business processes that can be repeated across the enterprise allowing optimal resource efficiency, cost and service performance.

Risk Management - From an information management perspective, risk management means identifying the magnitude and impact of non compliance; most often as it relates to record-keeping. As regulators and agencies now undertake closer scrutiny of organisations, it is more crucial than ever to be sure that information is consistent, reliable and available. A well-vetted records management policy is crucial here.

Remember that records management needs to be deployed from an enterprise perspective across the entire portfolio of information assets. Technology is really effective as it ensures consistency. Ide-

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Technology is again helpful as it ally, the records management allows you to cast a wide net and structure can be implemented narrow down as needed. The transparently. This allows busiframework you proactively build ness units to work in the most on the front-end will make this efficient way possible, but the TRILLION WAS LOST process less painful. organisation’s record-keeping IN PRODUCTIVITY Disparate governance efforts, integrity is still intact. Technolno matter how well they are ogy also allows you to establish AS A RESULT OF implemented, cannot alone monitoring and auditing proINFORMATION promise information govercesses to ensure proof of comOVERLOAD nance. Mature organisations pliance and transparency. Look rely on organisational structures at the risk mitigation effort in a such as frameworks that are positive light. As crazy as it may simple, coherent and transparent and that sound, regulatory oversight can be a unifyengage both staff and management. If we ing concept for business. define successful organisations as those One of the most intrusive risk managebest able to thrive in their current environment situations is the e-discovery process. ment, and we consider information the At its most elementary level, e-discovery is lifeblood of organisations, then an informaenterprise search, production and auditing tion governance strategy is crucial for all of information. This is an arduous process organisations to implement. Agile, adaptthat can be somewhat alleviated by an estabable organisations leverage their informalished information governance framework tion as an asset. These organisations have and stringent records management policies.

$ 1.5

T E CH F O R G OVE R NAN CE

mitigated risk, established standards and, most importantly, leveraged their information into quality decisions.

About the author: A 17-year software industry veteran and a frequent presenter at industry events, Kimberly Samuelson is director of government strategy at Laserfiche. She joined Laserfiche in 2001 as a regional manager and has served the company in several roles, including creative director and director of government marketing. Samuelson specialises in developing and delivering compelling content about ECM for the government market. Her background combines extensive marketing and business development experience. Kimberly can be contacted at ksamuelson@laserfiche.com. This article has been published with prior permission from www. cioupdate.com.

LITTLE GIANTS

IT IN MEDICINE

COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY: Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute & Research Centre.

REVENUE: Rs 106 crore NUMBER OF PATIENTS HANDLED: Approx 16,000 per year NUMBER OF BEDS: 241 NUMBER OF SERVERS: 17 servers NUMBER OF TERMINALS: 250 PHOTOS BY SUBHOJIT PAUL

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Vishal Kakkar, Head - IT Operations at Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute & Research Centre (RGCI), PV Jaishankar, Advisor IT, member of Governing Council, RGCI and S.Sundaresan, GM – Finance & Head IT, RGCI

AUTOMATING PATIENT CARE

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 750 APPLICATIONS RUNNING: 6

The Research Centre's drive to integrate applications will streamline administrative processes and make treatment procedures hassle-free for patients.

BY SANA KHAN

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IT IN MEDICINE

P

ATIENTS UNDERGOING cancer treatment

put up a brave face. After seeing them go through the trauma and costs typical of the treatment, hospital administrators know that the least they can do is make the admission procedures and the process of conducting tests painless.

The management of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute (RGCI) and Research Centre knew the reality, and wanted to change things.

They had seen how things are: the chaos in hospitals and the long and cumbersome processes take a toll on the patients and their families. A patient who is registered in the hospital typically has to go through many steps: from meeting different doctors to getting multiple tests done to being administered life saving medicine or treatment. Moreover, at each of these steps, the patient is typically required to make payments, and so, considerable time is lost before the patient can start treatment.

An equally time-consuming aspect of hospital treatment involves non-medical or administrative procedures, which need to be carried out parallel to medical procedures. Besides collection of patients' bills and fees, their treatment records have to be maintained and reports have to be generated – all forming an integral part of the patient’s hospital experience, and, if not handled efficiently, adding to their woes.

Recognising the special needs of patients coming to them, the management of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre felt the need to make this experience less harrowing to the patients and their kin. The potential of harnessing IT to transform patient care was recognised to make the procedures less cumbersome and eliminate the scope of errors in the medical process.

THE INSTITUTION'S JOURNEY

LITTLE GIANTS

patient data were causing a strain on the hospital staff. The management decided that it was time to have an integrated patient record system: one that would record patient information from the time they registered to the time they are discharged. The in between steps of consultation, administering of medication, surgeries, therapies, testing, scanning, payments, prescriptions – all had to fall within the purview of the new IT system. This was going to be a first of its kind implementation in the country.

To achieve this goal, the administration came up with the idea of computerising all their records, both medical and non-medical, thereby reducing human intervention and making the process more efficient and patient-friendly.

It was decided to computerise all records and procedures of the hospital – clinical, non-clinical and imaging. The challenge in this change lay in the integration of different solutions addressing various aspects.

THE INTEGRATION DRIVE The management and doctors of the hospital envisioned a solution which would be able to address the end-to-end needs of not only patients and the medical process but also those of the hospital’s administration. The IT team of RGCI, headed by Vishal Kakkar, spent almost two years to find an “off the shelf” application which would address their needs; however, no such solution existed. Most big IT players had not delved too deep into the problems of hospitals and healthcare so far, as this was in the government domain till about a decade and a half back. The applications available could provide only piece-meal solutions.

The managing committee, the administration and some pioneers amongst the medical fraternity of RGCI jointly took a decision to create a new application which was patient friendly and could also help in effective administration. At this point, Kakkar, realising the expertise that would be required to bring in this sea change in the hospital’s use of IT, decided to engage with E-Gestalt, a consultant in integrated IT solutions. E-Gestalt was given the mandate to provide an effective interface between different clinical, non-clinical and imaging solutions.

After testing a number of softwares, E-Gestalt zeroed in to a few applications: Vista clinical software for medical processes, PARAS

“TO OVERCOME CULTURAL AND HABITUAL RESISTANCE, A ‘CHAMPION’ WHO COULD ENDORSE AND LEAD THE CHANGE, WAS GIVEN THE CHARGE OF ‘CONVERTING’ THE REST OF THE TEAM.”

In 1996, a group of philanthropists came together to draw the plans for a specialised hospital for cancer in Delhi. The leading name at that time was the Tata Memorial of Mumbai but the extreme pressure on the very limited resources and the growing number of cancer patients led to the birth of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre. From the beginning, the philosophy behind this institution has been to provide for the complete care of cancer patients and to improve the quality of their life.

Around four years ago, in 2006, problems related to availability of

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IT IN MEDICINE

“ IT IS SIMPLE TO ADDRESS THE “HOW” PART OF PATIENT CARE, WE ARE TRYING TO ADDRESS THE “WHY” PART THROUGH THIS PROGRAM.” DR. DEWAN

Clinical-IT Champion, Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute

“THE FOCUS HAS BEEN VERY CLEAR FOR THE TEAM THROUGHOUT AND IT IS TO REDUCE THE PAIN OF THE PATIENTS.” SUNDARESAN

GM Finance and Head IT, RGCI

for non-clinical processes and PACS (Picture Archiving Communication System by Fujifilms) to manage the imaging the institute.

E-Gestalt was involved right from the stage of shaping contracts and looking into policies of implementation to the project finally going live in September 2010.

Once online, the entire process of treatment will follow a set pattern. A patient would register with the hospital and will be issued a card with a unique bar code. The patient name and information will be directly sent to the doctor’s schedule and he would be intimated that there is a patient in waiting along with the billing information.

The doctor would examine the patient and recommend a few tests, say a scan. His recommendation would be directed to the two scanning machines in the hospital and the patient would automatically be put in waiting on both. After making the payment, the patient would walk up to a machine and his scan would be executed. The report and the image would be sent back to the doctor who would feed his prescription into the system. The prescription would be read by the pharmacy inventory and the medicines would be made available. In certain drugs like the one used for chemotherapy, where fixing of dosages is a highly sensitive matter, this too is taken up by the machine and made ready for the patient.

There has been a lot of collaboration between the different players who have come together to turn this dream into a reality. The principal consultant from E-Gestalt, Inderdeep, has been stationed in the hospital for over a year now. His familiarity with the hospital functions and relationship with doctors’ and management is indicative of the collaboration between the technical and operational players in this implementation. Sundaresan, GM Finance and Head IT, RGCI, says the focus has been very clear for the team throughout and it is to reduce the pain of the patients.

REAPING THE GAINS There are other benefits for the hospital. The turnaround time has decreased as the movement of the patients is faster. The real time updation of all records including those of the accounts has led to

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greater efficiency and made micro level costing analysis possible. In Sundaresan’s view, the six crore investment in purchasing the applications and hiring the expert for this integration implementation will yield returns within a short duration because of these benefits.

At the same time, the minimising of human intervention in these processes has reduced the scope of error. The system is designed such that at no level does the information transfer takes place without the user appending a digital signature to it. Hence, all doctors and medical staff need to verify the information being fed-in before sending it off to another department for use.

The transformation from the age old hand-written prescriptions to all details being captured on a machine has not been easy. Following the example of the Midland Hospital in the USA, RGCI began the practice of identifying ‘champions’ from amongst the different teams. Hence a pioneer who could endorse and lead the change was given the charge of “converting” the rest of the team. The ‘champion’ was trained and equipped to handle queries and smoothen out the process of inter departmental communication. This approach was a huge success in overcoming cultural and habitual resistance.

This implementation will also give a major boost to the cancer research that RGCI undertakes. The statistics and data of the large number of patients coming to the institute for treatment, is a goldmine for cancer researchers and doctors, world over. Moreover, merging of non-clinical information like regional distribution, occupation etc is bound to throw new light on the causes and early detection of the disease.

However, there are operational situations which the hospital needs to be geared for: power cuts and unavailability of internet being the most basic ones. Even though backup plans for such situations are clearly defined, the feasibility of these will only be tested once the entire system goes live in September this year. Some departments have already made the switch and others are still in transition mode.

Meanwhile the old patient records are being scanned and made available online.

—sana.khan@9dot9.in

THINKINGBEYOND CHRIS CURRAN | chris.curran@diamondconsultants.com

CHRIS CURRAN is Diamond Management & Technology Consultants’ chief technology officer and managing partner of the firm’s technology practice. He writes the CIO Dashboard blog at www.ciodashboard.com

16 Enterprise Architecture Strategies A close study of big enterprises throws interesting results WE’VE been spending time thinking through the differences in implementing new or improving existing EA (enterprise architecture) capabilities for smaller, say a few billion in revenue, and larger firms in the Fortune 100 or thereabouts. Because the larger firms tend to have many complex, often unrelated business units, the role of centralised IT functions can also be quite complex, even unclear. Furthermore, centralised enterprise functions have many challenges in driving standards throughout diverse, geographically scattered units.

Here is our hard-earned list of strategies, observations, insights and lessons learned over a collective 55+ years of EA and IT strategy work with over 100 companies. See what you think and what you would add (or disagree with).

1.An exhaustive enterprise level blueprint is virtually impossible to build – it’s too big and no one will buy-in 2.The best strategy blends a direction-setting enterprise blueprint and business unit and domain blueprints 3.Centralised accountability for the EA function is a predictor of success

4.A centralised team of architects is critical in driving EA standards and approaches 5.Architects must be assigned to projects as core team members (60%+ of total EA FTEs) rather than “advisors” 6.EA should be measured in two ways: business capabilities delivered and costs of core services 7.Measure EA as an asset – what does it cost to provide the service and what return does the business get from the business capabilities delivered?

8.Architecture leadership requires strong management, business operations and technology skills, most likely in three different types of people; don’t expect your chief architect to run the EA function 9.Methods and governance must be integrated into existing work processes (eg. project approvals, systems development life cycle (SDLC) ) rather than a new overlay 10. Enterprise Architecture is not always the best name for communicating; maybe Strategy & Planning or Enterprise Transformation is better 10.The best large companies have

Centralised enterprise functions have many challenges in driving standards throughout diverse, geographically scattered units

“business architecture” teams reporting to the business (or dual reporting to business and IT) 11.Leading companies have reference architectures in place for 90% of the technical domains 12.Your senior enterprise architects must have the right cultural skills and awareness to integrate well with upstream business partners and downstream technical users 13.High performance groups maintain consistent, formalised EA involvement in the SDLC to translate blueprints into sufficiently detailed starting architectures for each project as well as accurate cost and resource estimates 14.Mature organisations target 40% EA resource time for strategic planning and 60% on SDLC tasks, and typically err on spending more time on SDLC tasks 15.Strong credibility and trust amongst business and IT partners is a predictor of EA success. Credibility has typically been gained via joint strategic planning efforts.

Co-authored by David Baker, Partner and Chief Architect at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants

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T H I N K I N G B E YO N D

OPEN SOURCE

The Alternate Way

Open Source Alternatives for Industry Applications RECENT conversations with insurance, biotech and hospitality companies highlight growing interest in open source models for industry vertical apps. These firms are considering opening up and sharing parts of their core business applications, not just infrastructure or common enterprise systems like HR or financials. While none of these examples are straight-forward open source where all of the code is freely accessible and the code development is crowdsourced, they liberally borrow from the ideas of libre and gratis.

In the insurance case, a deal is far from done, but it’s a big deal to even have this kind of conversation in a very conservative industry. Here’s a little more context around one of the open source alternatives.

Insurance carriers consider open source development Insurance carriers use three primary systems

– one that evaluates and prices risk (underwriting), one to keep track of customers and policies (policy administration) and one to process claims (uh…claims!). There are also a few other important systems used to research and set pricing, to create and configure new products, but those are the basic three.

As is the case in many other industries, there are only a few large software players (CSC, IBM, etc.) who have more established offerings but tend to be slower to include new ideas and architectures. There are also a handful of upstarts who tend to bring more innovative capabilities but who are largely unproven. When it is time for a carrier to upgrade one or more of the three core systems or to add one to support a new business line or geography, they are faced with the age old question: larger/slower/known vendor or smaller/faster/unknown vendor?

We have three insurance clients who are currently asking this exact question – each

of them are adding new products and/or markets and think that going outside to a smaller/faster/unknown vendor will give them speed advantages. Interestingly, they are all looking at the same vendor, which got me and my partner Mark Purowitz thinking: Could there be a way to share more across these companies who are competitive in at least some markets?

We have started to discuss the idea of an open model in which, with unanimous approval, extensions to the core vendor software would be developed once and shared across the three (and maybe more) firms.

Some call this model “open periphery” since the core is proprietary but the extensions on the periphery could be made open.

It’s great to see this kind of co-opetition (a word first coined in 1913) around a complex problem like complex industry application development. Hopefully, they can get past the lawyers and make it happen.

HIDDENTANGENT GEETAJ CHANNANA geetaj.channana@9dot9.in

THE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum

The technology drivers. The enterprise was

always the driver but consumer technology is close at heels.

WHO drives technology?

Let me just put this question in context and divide the usage of technology in two broad buckets of enterprise and personal technology. When we think of enterprise technology, it's data centres, server farms et al that come to one's mind; personal technology on the other hand includes handheld devices, televisions, etc.

Now, let me answer the above question. Enterprise has always been a driver of technology in this world. Be it personal computers or handhelds – enterprises have dictated what will become mainstream. This has mainly been because of the numbers that it provides in terms of technology usage and sales for vendors.

Companies like Apple had a tough time convincing people that they would need a computer at home with the Macintosh. Devices like the Commodore 64 were great consumer devices. They sold more than 30 million units making it the most sold single model personal computer of all times.

That party, though, didn't last forever; the IBM PC clones took over and killed the Commodore. Also, the

parent company made some mistakes along the line to make it easier.

The IBM PC, on the other hand originated for the enterprise and got to its critical mass using office productivity as the killer application.

When people were comfortable using computers in the office, they wanted to have them at home too and use it for things that they even thought possible until sometime ago. The internet (again an invention for the enterprise) just sealed the place of the PC at home and made it a necessity instead of a luxury.

Thus, the enterprise has always ruled the way we use our computers.

But that is something that is changing rapidly. And, ironically, one company that is one of the biggest drivers of this change is the one that lost out to the PC – Apple. We all know about the iPod, iPhone and the iPad, so I would not waste your time and my ink in describing them here. Another aspect that has changed the user experience and brought more and more people to use the internet is Facebook, Twitter and other social apps.

What these applications are doing to the industry is something that is worth

“Though the Commodore had great devices, they simply could not sustain; the IBM PC clones took over.”

noting. They are making consumers the driving force in how enterprise software and processes are designed.

While I was speaking to James Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, he made a very interesting comment. He said that the users in office are now looking for Facebook- and Google-like functionality in business applications and they want it free of cost.

The users are now more aware of the computer than ever and are more comfortable in using them than they were ever before. But, the flip side is that they want absolutely slick software to work with that is bug free.

The other part of the whole changing world order is the devices that have taken over the world by millions. Be it the Blackberry, iPhone, Android or other smart phones, they have changed the way people interact with each other and the device itself.

The time is not too far when we would have enterprise software running on iPads and the so-called app-phones. One of the first enterprise apps to be available on the iPad was WebEx online meeting platform by Cisco. The others are not far behind.

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CONVERGED

INFRASTRUCTURE MEANS ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES In an exclusive interview Dave Donatelli, EVP and GM, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP spoke to Rahul Neel Mani in Las Vegas during HP Tech Forum on Converged Infrastructure.

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D AV E D O N AT E L L I

DOSSIER NAME: Dave Donatelli DESIGNATION: Executive VP and General Manager ORGANISATION: Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP PREVIOUS JOB ROLE: President, EMC Storage Division

Issues like infrastructure consolidation are causing fresh pain. What’s a leading IT innovator like HP doing to address such a problem?

Indeed, one of the biggest problems that enterprises face today is infrastructure sprawl. This sprawl hurts the ability of enterprises to innovate.

Surveys suggest that 70 percent of the IT dollars are spent on maintaining legacy infrastructure. Only about 30 percent of funds remain to be spent on something that makes IT a real hero for businesses, which is bringing about new innovations such as new applications that help gain access into new areas. At HP, the whole R&D is focused towards solving these problems.

Are there more challenges than just infrastructure sprawl and maintaining legacy IT? Indeed there are! The pace of technological change is enormous.

The changes that we see today are mostly generational changes which don’t come too often. What do we really mean by these changes? Let me explain to you. For over two decades, the industry was busy in developing products that were based on individual silos. As a result the user got a server silo, a networking silo, a storage silo and to manage all of this, a management silo. All put together, these are major pain areas for a CIO from a management perspective. There is a lot of challenge in keeping these silos in sync with change. There was a need for breaking down these silos and create a unified infrastructure, which stitches everything together.

HP is well positioned to take advantage of these remarkable changes in the world of computing.

As a result of our customer-centric

innovation, we came out with a concept called HP Converged Infrastructure. There is a very strong reason for everyone to believe that HP is, in reality, the only company which has its own servers, storage, networking and management portfolios. We have both the ability and product portfolio to design an integrated, converged infrastructure from the ground-up.

And the most important thing is that enterprise users don’t have to wait for it for years. This is available now.

What does Converged Infrastructure mean to the users?

In precise terms, Converged Infrastructure is a blueprint for the futuristic data centres that replace the inflexible IT silos. This is achieved by converging server, storage and networks with facilities – all managed through a common management platform. As a result, you get an infrastructure that delivers a new level of simplicity, integration and automation that can accelerate the desired business outcomes.

The solution supports core virtualisation across all layers in the stack including the network, storage and server. HP is uniquely positioned at and committed to supporting various flavours of virtualisations like HyperV, VMWare and others...But at the same time, if the users want

“The changes that we see today are mostly generational changes which don’t come too often.”

NO HOLDS BARRE D

to run their infrastructure in a nonvirtualised environment, the HP Converged Infrastructure supports that equally strongly. This infrastructure offers a great amount of resiliency – from a single machine-high availability to a global high missioncritical availability. You can have data running across different continents replicated to ensure that you have a resilient infrastructure. The Converged Infrastructure supports modern IT users by not only meeting their dynamically changing business needs but also by effecting savings in maintaining legacy IT. Which new HP products are part of this solution?

Converged Infrastructure is our bold answer to the demands from customers asking to get rid of complex solutions that have sprawled across their environment. This is the most significant advancement in the past four years in the HP BladeSystem solutions which include new servers as well as innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix. Apart from that, HP has also announced power management technologies that optimise energy usage and provide control over IT systems. HP has also leapfrogged in storage software space introducing new levels of simplicity and automation through a single, unified architecture for data deduplication.

First breakthrough innovation is HP ProLiant G7 blades and servers. The G7 promises to deliver cost savings in as little as 30 days. HP realised that to perform optimally, servers must have a balanced architecture across CPU, input/output (I/O) and memory. The new HP ProLiant scale-up servers deliver innovations in automation that allow clients to speed application delivery and more effectively utilise IT.

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NO HOLDS BARRE D

D AV E D O N AT E L L I

Second important announcement is HP Virtual Connect. It combines data and storage networks to eliminate sprawl. Virtual Connect will deliver automated, wire-once connectivity to any network, eliminating up to 95 percent of sprawl at the network edge. Virtual Connect FlexFabric module is a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network eliminating the need for multiple interconnects.

The third one is HP BladeSystem Matrix software which simplifies IT environments with one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. It also enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in less time. It helps users in reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures.

The fourth one is HP Intelligent Power Discovery. It is yet another industry-first from HP for green data centres that creates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools and data centre power grids. By accurately provisioning energy, data centre managers can extend the life of their data centres and save millions.

Finally, HP StoreOnce is HP’s answer to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture.

It not only eliminates the complexity of multiple deduplication processes and products, but also improves productivity and data management efficiency.

Don’t you think it will lead to a lot of proprietary lock-in as far as the customers are concerned?

Many business users ask me this question.

My answer to this is very simple. Those who have worked with HP — customers and partners alike — know that we are totally committed to working on standards that help in keeping the infrastructure open. The foundation of Converged Infrastructure is based on open standards. Users can buy as little or as much as they want to buy. They can also replace us with anything they want.

The infrastructure is orchestrated which means that the software and machines do the work which was earlier done manually and this ensures that errors don’t occur.

Finally, the converged infrastructure is modular. A user can start with smaller pieces

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“HP is committed to working on standards which help users in keeping their infrastructure open.” as per his/her needs and grow as large as possible as the business grows. I can assure you that unlike others, we convert our vision into reality in a promised timeframe. A lot of these products that you see today from HP were part of our vision few years ago and today it is all part of reality.

It took ten years to refresh the basic architecture of some of the most promising technologies from HP. What went in those ten years of research?

What is the result?

Customers want technology architectures to have a significant life span. It is quite a substantial investment. Obviously we do bring out new generations of products from that architecture but the latter doesn’t change too often. There is always a trade-off between changing too fast and letting them exist for too long.

Our forecasts about IT infrastructure convergence have proved to be true. Having predicted convergence, we designed the bladed infrastructure. In fact, it is the only one out there in the market for the classic product. Earlier these products were developed on 100 percent custom hardware.

Redesigning these products so that they are built on acceptable industry standards required a lot of technical research and work. That’s what we have been working on for all these years. We all love the end result, which, today, takes the form of a simplified solution for customers. If you look at the holistic approach of HP Converged Infrastructure with open standards, it is something really unheard in the industry.

How is the HP Consultancy Services division shaping up?

The HP Consultancy Service helps customers create an architecture which helps them adopt convergence. It can also help customers in implementing the appropriate technologies in their data centres or even run their converged infrastructure through HP services group. Finally, HP facilitates its partners who can then work with the customers to set up the converged infrastructure. It is all about customer choices. But we want to offer the largest array of choices a customer can think about.

—Rahul.Mani@9dot9.in

HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE

Teach Thyself.

It Works AJAY KUMAR MEHER

SOMETIMES the most important lessons are the ones we learn in our childhood. And so has it been with Ajay Kumar Meher, Vice President – IT & New Media, Sony Entertainment Network, Multi Screen Media. “Do your job with your 100% effort and the result will fall in-line,” Meher remembers his mother's advice from the time he was a tinytot. “Those are the words I hold close to my heart even today,” Meher said.

IT’s every activity should be on the basis of business outcome, Meher believes. “Think like the CEO or the business head of the organisation and IT strategy will form an integral part of your thought process.” At Multi Screen Media, Meher says, there is close scrutiny before any IT activity is sanctioned. “Is the activity helping in top-line growth ? Is it helping in reducing operational cost? is it improving efficiencies?...we ask ourselves all these questions.”

Meher joined Multi Screen Media (MSM) in 2007; prior to that he worked in capacities that tested him on his network administration capacities as

A LEARNER ALL HIS LIFE... Meher swears by the need for constant learning.

With his one-hour-a-day learning rule for his team, he wishes to infect them too.

There's simply no time for any learning, he says. “Those who have personal interest, progress rapidly, but for those who don't, the compuslory gives them the push they need!” he says.

TIME TO SHARE... The learning habit has helped the team members contribute to plans that are backed by strong research, Meher asserts. So as to reap maximum gains, Meher asks individual team members to share with the group about their learning during meetings held once a month. There's an extra bonus – the activity has helped some members develop their presentation skills!

well as his applicaion development prowess. In his last stint with Philips, where he worked for ten years, he was the Senior Manager and responsible for WAN, Notes Mails and applications, Internet setup and applications.

“The role of the CIO is to understand business and IT

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PHOTOS BY JITEN GHANDHI

Vice President – IT & New Media, Sony Entertainment Network, Multi Screen Media

HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE

Snap Shot both and my core IT assignments have helped me understand the language of IT,” he said. Meher says that his cumulative knowledge of applications and infrastructure as well as the business knowledge that he has gained over the course of time has helped him to lead IT. At MSM, Meher needs to make sure he has a talented team. To ensure this, he has adopted a practice of nurturing talent in-house. “We have built a study hour per day kind of culture, where every employee is encouraged to leave his work for one hour and study whatever he/she wants,” he says. That has helped foster sharing of knowledge among colleagues by creating a formal platform to enable it, he says. “This has helped me build a knowledge base in the team itself which has helped us cope with the changing and demanding requirements of the broadcast industry.”

As a business enabler, IT and New Media has provided a technological edge to the organisation, Meher asserts. In recent years, Meher's team had undertaken SAP implementation, digital content transfer to the broadcast center and implementation of a rights and broadcast management system. “These deployments have helped business to improve its efficiencies and also lower the operational costs,” he said.

Meher loves to cook and listen to music in his free time. Going on vacations with family and friends is another of his favourite activities. “As a family we play many in-door games or go on long drives together,” Meher shares. These activities help Meher destress and get back to work with renewed vigour. “Can there be greater joy than a smiling family welcoming you after a long day at work?” Meher asks.

—By Aditya Kelekar

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Favourite book. “The Goal” written by Goldratt.

The book talks about theory of constrain (TOC). I like the book as this helped me in providing a different aspect to look into constrain and how to eliminate it. As for the quote...Walt Disney's If you can dream it, you can do it.

Favourite album. Meher loves to listen to old Hindi music. Mohd. Rafi is his favorite. “A glass of wine/beer with Rafi is my style of meditation,” he quips!

Favourite movie. A big fan of movies, Meher's favourites are comedies. “My latest favourite is 3 Idiots, he says. I watch movies to get relaxed and any movie doing that helps me do that is good for me,” he says.

Memories to cherish. Every new trip overrides my memory of last trip, Meher says. This summer the Meher family – Ajay along with wife, Jolly, and school-going daughters Priya and Riya – went to the queen of hills “Nainital” and the forest of Corbett.

VIEWPOINT STEVE DUPLESSIE | steve.duplessie@esg-global.com

HP vs Cisco

ILLUSTRATION BY SURESH KUMAR

The odds seem to be in HP's favour CISCO walked into HP’s bread and butter by hopping into the server space. I’m not sure they really thought this through all the way. HP countered by buying 3Com–wanting to become #2 (for now anyway) in the enterprise networking space.

HP is going to win this battle.

Here’s why: It’s all about the margin structure.

Cisco has enjoyed roughly 70% margins in core networking forever, because they have had no real competition for the last 15 years. They have not pushed the commodity envelope and passed on savings to the market – because they didn’t have to. Now, they are addicted to that contribution margin – it funds everything else they do.

IF (note the big IF) Cisco become successful in servers, they will only do so by changing their margin profile. They will not ultimately be able to sustain margins in excess of HP or IBM or Dell because they simply can’t buy at anywhere near the levels of the big server guys. Nifty packag-

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ing is just that–packaging. It’s not a sustainable value proposition that justifies a huge margin profile. Cisco has sold about 1,000 UCS systems over the last year, I think. HP ships 8,500 servers a DAY. To get to scale, Cisco is going to have to buy someone. Dell? That would be awesome and give them scale–but awfully expensively. Who else? They can’t buy IBM or HP, or Intel, so who else is there? That means they have to do it organically– which will cost a fortune and drag down earnings in my estimation–let alone the distraction it will cause.

Now for HP and networking, the opposite is true. Networking margins for HP will be GREAT! They will be closer to 50%–twice that of servers– even if they price at 50% of Cisco.

HP already has 5,000 people trained on the products and is aggressively hiring salespeople. HP will find no real trouble convincing shops to let them start as a legitimate number two. Once they are in, who knows?

No matter what, Cisco will be forced

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

to either lower their pricing and eat margin or cede market share. I suspect they will be forced to cede share, as once they drop pricing their whole model breaks. Final thoughts here: 1. HP only has to show minor, consistent share gains to win.

2. HP has a much deeper overall portfolio versus Cisco. Cisco has networking and telepresence. HP has everything and the kitchen sink.

3. Cisco can be outsold. Their dominance has allowed them to move from hunters to farmers over the years.

4. If Cisco is committed to the server space, they almost are forced to pick up the last big piece–storage.

5. HP has always pushed the commodity envelope. It will be bad enough that HP gets a foothold in core networking and forces a one time price correction–but they won’t stop there. They will keep on forcing it year over year. At least that is what history tells me.

(In my next column I will forecast the course that IBM and Oracle will take.)