The Finger-friendly Apps

Technology for Growth and Governance

March | 07 | 2013 | 50 Volume 08 | Issue 14

viewpoint

The New Measuring Stick Page 48

the fingerfriendly apps A 9.9 Media Publication

Best of Breed

Caught in the Crossfire Page 20

no holds barred

Addressing Modern Security Issues Page 42

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editorial yashvendra singh | yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

From Complexity to Simplicity

Mobility and cloud are deconstructing enterprise applications

A

t Salesforce.com’s annual conference this year, its CEO, Marc Benioff, told reporters, “All software is going to look like Facebook.”

Benioff may not be an oracle but what he said doesn’t seem to be too far fetched either. As a matter of fact, the transition towards his forecast already appears to be underway.

Traditionally, an enterprise solution is meant to be a ‘show of force’ — a powerful system that has been optimised to work

editor’s pick 24

on a desktop. This arrangement worked perfectly till the advent of enterprise mobility and cloud computing. Then the rules of the game changed.

A look at the numbers and it is hard to ignore the fact that enterprises are going mobile. Consumerisation of IT is here to stay and proliferate. However, mobility is not synonymous with complexity.

It supports simple, lightweight applications. This shift towards minimalism is intensified when

The Finger-friendly Apps Apart from being platform-agnostic, today’s enterprise apps need to be as user-friendly as in a mobile app store

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cto forum 07 march 2013

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

cloud computing comes into the picture. By leveraging the cloud model, applications can now be accessed anywhere, anytime and on any device.

For the time-honoured and complex enterprise software, the going is bound to get tough in the mobile-centric world. But ringing in simplicity will come with a price. A CIO will have to walk the tight rope balancing mobility and simplicity on one side and security and compliance issues on the other side.

Nonetheless, a start has been made. In this issue’s cover story, we discuss this new trend threadbare, and focus the spotlight on top technology leaders and vendors adopting it.

Facebook is one such company that has been deconstructing. In its nine years of existence, the social networking service has been splitting its

web application into smaller and lighter apps (messenger and camera, for instance) that can run on mobile devices.

As for Benioff, he is putting his money where his mouth is. Moving towards simplicity, Salesforce Labs has come up with an app called Logger, which enables sales people to update records on the go. The app, sans Salesforce’s frills and fancies, claims to be the easiest and fastest way to log activity.

If you too have plans of doing away with the old and intricate systems in your enterprise to usher in simplicity, do share your plans with us. We look forward to your feedback.

Now, align your data centre with your business strategy.

StruxureWare for Data Centres insight enables a healthy, business-driven data centre.

Tap in to the health of your data centre.

As an IT or data centre manager, you know that doing your job well means saving your company both time and money. Today, there finally is a way for you to be completely tapped in to the overall health of your data centre. StruxureWare™ for Data Centres gives you visibility across your entire data centre infrastructure so you can make informed decisions — not arbitrary ones — about your infrastructure.

For example, you can plan proactively for needed capacity and streamline workflow management to improve your business agility and availability. In fact, now more than ever, infrastructure decisions are business decisions.

Now, make informed decisions about your infrastructure:

>

Plan proactively for needed capacity.

>

Blueprint data centre expansions and consolidations.

>

Streamline workflow management of your IT physical infrastructure to improve your business agility and availability.

>

Make changes knowing how they will affect your business.

>

Visualize change/capacity scenarios to improve your bottom line.

>

View your current and historic PUE/DCiE and energy costs of subsystems to make intelligent energy management decisions.

An always available, efficient data centre.

What’s more, StruxureWare for Data Centres communicates in real-time with the leading virtualization platforms: VMware® vSphere™ and Microsoft® System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. The software’s built-in automated response capabilities ensure that virtual loads always have healthy host environments. With your VMs on healthy hosts, you can focus on running your data centre more efficiently. The software also gives insight into PUE/DCiE trending over time, enabling you to make intelligent energy management decisions. With StruxureWare for Data Centres planning and reporting capabilities, who’s the company hero now? You are!

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Discover which physical infrastructure management tools you need to operate your data centre. Download White Paper #104 today and 10 lucky respondents can WIN a telescope!

Visit www.SEreply.com Key Code 48019y ©2013 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, StruxureWare, vSphere, and InfraStruxure are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. • www.schneider-electric.com • 998-4108_B_IN

march13 Conte nts

thectoforum.com

24

Cover Story

24 | The Finger-Friendly Apps Apart from being platform-

Columns

06 | I believe: siloed it: the biggest challenge

By Shailesh kumar davey

agnostic, today’s enterprise applications need to be as userfriendly as in a mobile app store

48 | viewpoint: the new Measuring stick By steve duplessie

S P I N E

CTO FORUM

Technology for Growth and Governance

cto forum 07 march 2013

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

Volume 08 | Issue 14

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IPHONES ARE COMING TO THE PLANT FLOOR| CYBERSPACE: IT’S A MEDIUM, NOT A PLACE

Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling

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

Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Plot Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301

March | 07 | 2013 | 50 Volume 08 | Issue 14

VIEWPOINT

The New Measuring Stick

PAGE 48

the fingerfriendly apps

BEST OF BREED

Caught in the Crossfire

PAGE 20

NO HOLDS BARRED

Addressing Modern Security Issues

A 9.9 Media Publication

Cover design by: Manav sachdev

PAGE 42

Features

20 | Best of breed: caught in the crossfire CIOs are stuck between different business leaders who have conflicting business priorities

www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Consulting Editor: Atanu Kumar Das Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal & Akhilesh Shukla DEsign Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Sr. Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Directors: Atul Deshmukh & Anil T Sr. Visualisers: Manav Sachdev & Shokeen Saifi Visualiser: NV Baiju Sr. Designers: Raj Kishore Verma, Shigil Narayanan & Haridas Balan Designers: Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ Midhun Mohan & Pradeep G Nair MARCOM Designer: Rahul Babu STUDIO Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

16 A Question of answers

16 | Ruchir Godura, VP, India and South Asia,Vidyo, talks about the enterprise video conferencing and telepresence markets

38

44

RegulArs

02 | Editorial 08 | letters 10 | Enterprise Round-up advertisers’ index

38 | tecH FOR governance: Cyberspace: it’s a medium, not a place

44 | next horizons: iphones are coming to the plant floor IT

Internet is a medium with which we fabricate a social contract to communicate

is changing constantly and we need to work from general principles

Datacard IFC IBM 1 Schneider 3 CTRLs 7 ESDS 9 Cisco 13, 33, 37 Zenith 15 Patel India 19 SAS Institute 23 Wipro Infotech 32-A Falcon (Expo 2020 Dubai) IBC Microsoft BC

advisory Panel Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IT, ICICI Bank 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, Sr Consultant, NMEICT (National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology) Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp Vishal Salvi, CISO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Sales & Marketing National Manager – Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (+91 98804 36623) National Sales Manager: Vinodh K (+91 97407 14817) Assistant General Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar Singh (+91 97407 61921) Senior Sales Manager (North): Aveek Bhose (+91 98998 86986) Product Manager - CSO Forum and Strategic Sales: Seema Menon (+91 97403 94000) Brand Manager: Jigyasa Kishore (+91 98107 70298) Production & Logistics Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh.

Published at Office No. B201-B202, Arjun Centre B Wing, Station Road, Govandi (East), Mumbai-400088. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd., A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in

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

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5

I Believe

By manarojan kumar, CIO - Kanoria Chemicals xxx author is the Vice President at ManageEngine and is responsible for new IT developments in the company.

Gaining the Trust of Management Manarojan

Kumar CIO, Kanoria Chemicals & Industries believes for a CIO to gain in my more than two decades of experience in IT , I have realised the importance of regular communication with the management. This not only helps in building a rapport with the management but also strengthen the role of a CIO in an organisation as a business leader

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cto forum 07 march 2013

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

current challenge eliminating siloed IT management environment

and business enabler. In the absence of such a role, the CIO remains just a custodian of IT infrastructure.

The management always has a high expectations from the IT team led by the CIO at the fore front. In case the expectations are not met, they are highly disappointed of the IT team and lose interest in any new IT project. They lose faith in the CIO and his ability to transform the enterprises with the help of IT. The management's attitude sooner or later reflects in the functioning of the CIO. Failing to deliver, the CIO is seen as a liability on the organisation. The management stops taking up new IT project unless they are absolutely imperative for business growth.

However, for the management to lose faith in the company's CIO, the latter is also responsible to a large extent. CIOs often present a rosy picture to the management to get their approval for fresh investment.

In fear of not getting approvals for the project they do not highlight the challenges, and completely ignore them while presenting a case for new project. Such challenges are bound to crop up during the implementation phase and lead to delays or over spending or both. These challenges, however small they may be, have the potential of putting a project in jeopardy. Once the project outcome is not as per the case presented by the CIO, the management becomes skeptical of future investments.

I believe that a CIO should be honest enough to the management while presenting the case for any new deployment. Along with the benefits of the new project, he should also highlight the challenges that may be encountered during the execution of the project. I am sure that it would help the management to understand the ground level chal-

LETTERS

Form IV

Statement of ownership and other particulars about the publication, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM as per Rule 8

Are CTOs more interested in satisfying the CFO & Board rather than the consumer?

I see CTO is aligned to the CFO and the Board in that order, the CTO will have to also be good at resume writing as he will not last too long. But then the question arises, is the CFO aligned to the Consumer? If he is not, then even he may be in hot water sooner or later.

Arun gupta, Group CIO,Cipla

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.

Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@thectoforum.com

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1. Place of publication

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2. Periodicity of its publication

Fortnightly

3. Printer’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address

Kanak Ghosh Indian Yes N.A. Plot No.725, Sector-1, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai-400706

4. Publisher’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address

Kanak Ghosh Indian Yes N.A. Plot No.725, Sector-1, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai-400706

5. Editor’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address

Anuradha Das Mathur Indian Yes N.A. Plot No.725, Sector-1, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai-400706

6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Plot No.725, GES, Shirvane, Nerul, Navi Mumbai-400706 Major Shareholder Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Pvt Ltd N-154 Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017.

I, Kanak Ghosh hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Dated: 1st March, 2013

Sd/Signature of Publisher

FEATURE Inside

Enterprise

Datacentre Networking is Still in its Teens Pg 12

illuSTRATION BY anil t

Round-up

India’s Digital Universe to Grow to 2.9 ZB Study reveals cloud as key concern area;

value through Big Data as the biggest opportunity EMC Corporation announced results of the EMCsponsored IDC Digital Universe study, “Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East — India”— which revealed that the digital universe in India will grow 23-fold between 2012 and 2020. The digital bits captured or created each year in India are expected to grow from 127 EB to 2.9 ZB between 2012 and 2020.

India’s digital information explosion is being driven by proliferation of devices such as PCs and smartphones worldwide, increased Internet access within emerging markets and the boost in data from

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cto forum 07 march 2013

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

machines such as surveillance cameras or smart meters. Other contributing factors include increasing machine-to-machine communication (M2M), falling cost of technology,and digitisation of TV, among others. Over time, the distribution of the bits within the digital universe by country of origin will more and more closely mirror the distribution of population.

Key findings of this India-specific study include: Less than half a percent of all digital information is analysed today while 36 percent would provide valuable insights making big data a significant opportunity for India.

Data Briefing

$14 billion

Will be the global BI revenue in 2013

E nte rpri se Round -up

They Som Said it Mittal

image BY PHOTOS.COM

The year 2012 was a landmark year for the IT-BPM industry in India as it crossed the landmark of $100 billion of revenues, says Mittal.

“The year 2012 also has its share of uncertainty with global economic volatility, slowdown in technology Five Ways to Spot and Score Bad IP Clients Fortinet highlights spending the importance of client reputation and the mantra of doing more with less”

Identifying improper behaviour among the devices connected to their network is a critical tool for any organisation concerned about Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). In light of the rapidly changing landscape of such targeted malware attacks, Fortinet lists the top five types of behaviour that might indicate that a device has been infected. a) Bad Connection Attempts: Typical malware behaviour often includes attempts to connect to hosts that don’t exist on the Internet. While some bad connections may be due to user error or bad links, a series of bad connections could be a sign of malware infection. b) Choice of Application: A host that installs a P2P file sharing application can be considered riskier than a host that installs a game. Some consider both actions problematic. The ability to add weights to each action allows each risk to be scored. c) Geographic Location: Visits to hosts in certain countries can be categorised as risky behaviour, especially if there is a significant amount of traffic involved. Identifying such behaviour can be combined with a white list approach that identifies legitimate sites in such countries to help identify infected clients.

image BY PHOTOS.COM

Quick Byte on DDoS

— Som Mittal, President, Nasscom

A quarter of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2013 will be application-based. Instead of inundating websites with requests, such DDoS attacks send targeted commands to applications to overwhelm them and make them unavailable The Chief Technology Officer Forum

cto forum 07 March 2013

11

illustraTION BY shigil narayanan

E nte rpri se Round -up

Datacentre Networking is Still in its Teens Forrester’s analysis of

current DC networking solutions says that they are still immature

Data centre networking solutions on offer today are still in their ‘teen years’ and it will take some time for them to reach ‘adulthood’ says Forrester’s analysis of leading data center networking solutions. After a comprehensive analysis of solutions from vendors including Alcatel-Lucent, Arista Networks, Avaya, Brocade Communication Systems, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Hewlett-Packard, and Juniper Networks and combing through customer stories, technical documents, and vendor responses, researchers at Forrester concluded that “even though the proposed solutions offer

tremendous value, today’s data center networking solutions are immature.”

In his latest blog, analyst Andre Kindness who serves infrastructure & operations professionals wrote that data center networking solutions have just hit their “teen years” and exhibit teenager characteristics. Kindness outlined five traits exhibited by today’s top solutions to substantiate his theory.

According to him, today data center networking solutions: Continuously re-identifying themselves.

At one time, data center networking characteristics were one-dimensional, focused

Global Tracker

IT Infrastructure

Africa IT infrastructure market is set to reach $3.9 billion in 2013, marking a four

percent increase from 2012 12

cto forum 07 march 2013

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

Source: gartner

According to research firm Gartner, the Middle East and

on flattening the network. Now the conversation has expanded to include the integration of virtualised and physical infrastructure while creating a fabric of horizontally interwoven networking components. However, customers will be hard-pressed to find a consistent definition from each vendor that hasn’t evolved over the past two years.

And guess what?

They’re likely to change it several more times in the next three years.

Require adult supervision. No matter how many software defined networking (SDN) slides are shown, network automation is limited to reacting to VM movement. The systems monitor one boundary condition when the system should be monitoring thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of instances (virtual and physical ports/links/ switches, applications, policies, etc.).

Networking teams should expect continuous babysitting. They’ll be manually configuring the devices and adjusting knobs to figure out the bandwidth allocation, QoS settings, buffering settings, etc.

Are moody. Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA), Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), and others are new technologies that have little mileage and can be unpredictable or fail to even work in certain environments.

Some customers said they rolled back some of their deployments because the technology was just too temperamental.

Feel Isolated. Many of the data center networking components from a single solution are tightly interwoven with each other; however, few venodors have provided interfaces that enable the network subsystem to share stateful information with another subsystem.

The cliques are alive and well within the data center.

Act self-absorbed. Networks will encompass both virtual and physical aspects. This means policies, control, and network services have to go past the last physical edge port. Virtual network functions belong to the network domain, except most solutions don’t offer visibility, control, or management of the virtual network.

This overly inward focus will likely thwart I&O from realising true benefits of a nextgen data centre.

E nte rpri se Round -up

illustrATION BY raj verma

Free Mobile App for Safeguarding Women The app allows users to send emergency SMSs

Software development firm, Telerik, has launched "SafeBridge", a free mobile application which can be used for safeguarding women.

Designed to help vulnerable groups such as women, children, professionals, working late at night, foreign tourists and city visitors, the application allows users to send emergency SMSs with GPS information to preset lists of trusted contacts. There is no need for any registration to use the app.

Developed in response to recent spike in crime incidents against women, the beta version of the application is currently available for both low-end and high-end Android phones and will soon be made available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices.

“Since opening our office in New Delhi in 2012, we at Telerik have made it our priority to be active citizens of this society. The urgency of the recent incidents required a prompt response and thanks to Telerik' products, we are able to quickly build the application for all types of phone users,” says Abhishek Kant, country manager of Telerik India.

Using the safety app is simple. At the start of the application, the user first must preset the contacts of friends and relatives who will be notified in the case of an imminent threat.

To decrease response time in emergency situations the app involves just the one-touch function of simply pressing a "HELP ME!" button to send out an SMS with GPS information.

In the cases when the threat is over, there is an "I'm Safe" button to immediately notify contacts that everything is alright. "SafeBridge" can function with limited internet or no internet availability on the phone.

Telerik's "SafeBridge" allows the user to personalize the "help" and "safe" messages. The application also provides a "Track Me" feature, which includes sending out the user's current location at pre-determined intervals. The application also includes a Directory of police stations in Delhi. In future, Telerik's team plans to add other Indian cities to this police directory as well as city-by-city contact information of hospitals and NGOs in the country. The app will also include the option to report crimes the user witnesses but may not be the victim of.

Fact ticker

Social Credentials to Define Retail Customer Identities Half of new retail identities to be social-based Let's face it, for a large number of users, Internet essentially means Facebook or Twitter. Such has been the impact of social media on our daily lives. It is no surprise then, that experts predict that by the end of 2015, as many as 50 per cent of all new retail customer identities will be based on social network identities.

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cto forum 07 march 2013

According to research firm Gartner, along with federation technologies and mobile computing, social identity adoption will have a major impact on the practice of identity and access management (IAM) in 2013 and beyond.

Says Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner, “For an increasing number of Internet users, social

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

networks are the Internet. Using ‘login with Facebook’—or other popular social networks—reduces friction and therefore improves users' experience of customer registration and subsequent login.

For registration, the required personal information can be imported from users' social profiles, reducing—if not eliminating—form filling. Moreover, using a social network identity means users don't have to remember rarely used passwords or endure convoluted password reset processes when they forget them.”

Mobile Apps

W

ith enterprises under extreme pressure from management and employees to develop and deploy mobile applications to accommodate mobile work styles and increase customer engagement, Gartner predicts that more than 50 per cent of mobile apps deployed by 2016 will be hybrid. “Mobility has always been a separate topic for IT professionals, but it is now influencing mainstream strategies and tactics in the wider areas of technology enablement and enterprise architectures," said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Increasingly, enterprises are finding that they need to support multiple platforms, especially as the BYOD trend gains momentum. To address the need for mobile applications, enterprises are looking to leverage applications across multiple platforms.

The advantages of the hybrid architecture, which combines the portability of HTML5 Web apps with a native container that facilitates access to native device features, will appeal to many enterprises.

The need for context awareness in mobile applications has increased with the capabilities of mobile devices, causing developers to consider both hybrid and native architectures. For applications to leverage location, ondevice hardware the applications need to be developed using either hybrid or native architectures.

A Question of answers

ruchir godura

Huge Potential: Video conferencing revenue is growing 14.4% Y-o-Y globally

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ruchir godura

A Question of answers

Ruchir Godura | VP, India & South Asia, vidyo

Govt Sector has Huge Potential

In a conversation with CTO Forum, Ruchir Godura, Vice President, India and South Asia, Vidyo, talks about the enterprise video conferencing and telepresence market and its potential in the country

Given the fact that most businesses today are reluctant to invest into an expensive telepresence solution and free applications such as Skype are getting better in terms of quality, what business opportunity do you see in the videoconferencing and telepresence market in India?

A recent IDC report shows that the worldwide hardware based enterprise video conferencing and telepresence market showed a noticeable deceleration in growth in the first quarter of 2012, with video conferencing revenue growing 14.4 percent year over year, well below the 23-25 percent year-over-year growth range witnessed in the last three consecutive quarters. On the other hand the

scalable, software based enterprise video conferencing and tele-presence market remains one of the brightest prospects globally and is gaining huge momentum. Enterprise technology leaders are starting to shy away from proprietary solutions.

The flexibility offered by web conferencing, and availability of video conferencing solutions such as those offered by Vidyo – agile, adaptive, and form factor agnostic – will drive the future in personal and enterprise video market.

One of the primary drivers for enterprise web conferencing tools has been explosion of free consumer services like Skype and Facetime.

Having been exposed to the benefits of video calling in their personal lives, employees are demanding a

similar facility in their enterprise tools. The clear demand from corporate users has been to be able to connect from anywhere, not just conference rooms, and in high quality, and to seamlessly and securely integrate with existing enterprise IT systems like UC tools, active directory, corporate firewalls and conference and board room systems. It provides a more affordable solution to organisations, without additional investment in equipment required. Other factors leading the growth of web conferencing include fewer firewall configuration issues, and lower internet bandwidth requirements for organisations looking for agile video solutions.

Vidyo is a cost effective for enterprises and can be the best choice for The Chief Technology Officer Forum

cto forum 07 March 2013

17

A Question of answers

ruchir godura

SMEs for video conferencing as it’s a fully featured, secure, high definition video conferencing solution that runs on the web as well as on private corporate networks and on platforms ranging from smartphones and tablets to full immersive telepresence rooms. Application like Skype etc face security concerns which doesn’t hold true for the solutions provided

by Vidyo.

What are your focus areas and how are you trying to gain entry into the enterprise space in the country?

Organisations across sectors, have shown interest in web conferencing solutions. In the private sector we see tremendous growth coming from the financial services, health, telecom, retail and education sectors.

In India, the government has also become a strong proponent of promoting e-governance, education and telemedicine via video conferencing tools. We also see the adoption increasing in bigger organisations as they upscale or downscale, based on the existing economic environment.

India is a priority market for Vidyo and going forward we will continue expanding base in the country by providing cost effective and secure solution for enterprises. Video conferencing in India, as a trend has picking up pace as compared to earlier. Couple of years back, the idea of video conferencing had not even penetrated the personal lives of individuals, let alone the enterprise space. Today, with barriers such as complexity of technology, high costs, poor quality and unreliability being overcome, more and more people have begun to use video conferencing in their day-to-day lives. India definitely has a huge opportunity especially in the Government space and Vidyo would be keen to join hands with governments across the country to create an enhanced and seamless communication mode across domains like Defence, Education, Healthcare etc.

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cto forum 07 march 2013

“Applications like Skype etc face security concerns which doesn’t hold true for our solutions”

What does an effective unified communication strategy offer to an enterprise?

The biggest advantage that a unified communication system offers is that it allows people to be productive for a lot longer — regardless of their time and location — by just helping them collaborate with their colleagues.

This ubiquity adds a whole lot of business value to enterprises. A good enterprise unified communication system today can largely reduce the need to physically travel for business meetings as well as reduce the need for a whole lot of prior resource reservation, thereby, saving on time and cost.

What are you doing in the area of video conferencing over mobile?

We have something called VidyoMobile software that brings highquality video conferencing to popular Android and iOS tablets and smart-

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

things I Believe in UC system allows people to be productive for a lot longer.

India is a priority market for Vidyo and going forward we will continue expanding base in the country.

India definitely has a huge opportunity especially in the government space.

phones. Now you can host or join a person-to-person or multi-party video conference from wherever you are, using a simple internet connection.

As an endpoint in your VidyoConferencing system, VidyoMobile delivers transcode-free video conferencing for natural communication at the pace of conversation, without the broken pictures associated with traditional solutions. Enjoy the freedom to connect and collaborate easily with others across a wide range of endpoints from smartphones to room-based telepresence systems.

The software offers full functionality on both WiFi and 4G networks, extending access to remote and mobile participants. It is designed from the ground up for multi-party collaboration. With this technology, you can leverage mobile devices that users already have over commodity wireless networks. The application also has the ability to conference with legacy endpoints via VidyoGateway.

Best of

Breed

ILLUSTRATION by raj verma

A

Caught in the Crossfire

CIOs are stuck between different business leaders who have conflicting business priorities

By Michael Vizard

20

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s is often the case, CFOs will rightly insist that ERP applications are the official systems of record. But from a practical perspective much of daily business is now being managed via CRM and social media applications. The CEO and the board of directors, of course, wants all these systems reconciled, which unfairly puts CIOs squarely in the crossfire between different business leaders that often have conflicting business priorities and objectives.

A“We see this issue all the time. It’s definitely a tough time to be a CIO,” says Paul Allen, worldwide service line leader for finance & analytics for Hewlett-Packard. “But it also creates a mandate for the CIO to solve the problem.”

Savvy CIOs see this conflict as an opportunity to leverage some creative tension to finally address a range of application integration and data management issues across the enterprise. In fact, new big data and inmemory computing technologies may finally give CIOs control over data in a way that has eluded them since the days when mainframes reigned supreme over all of IT. Unfortunately, it usually takes a major event of one type or another to get organisations to focus on the core problem. Over a decade ago when DirectTV wanted to launch NFL Sunday Ticket, a service that lets subscribers watch every NFL game being televised on any given Sunday, the company had multiple systems of record in place that made it difficult to share revenues with the various networks televising the games. To solve

CIOs are simply making the best of a bad business situation

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the problem, the senior management team simply declared one application would be the company’s official system of record. “The senior management team recognized the need to address this issue back when we had nine different systems,” says Mike Benson, CIO of DirectTV and a member of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit organization of IT executives.

Unfortunately for CIOs, with the growing usage of CRM systems there is now more tension than ever between sales and finance. “We’re seeing CRM systems increasingly becoming the system the business relies on more simply because that’s where they get the most visibility into what’s really happening in the company on a daily basis,” says Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, an IT services firm.

Brandon Brown, CIO of Trident Marketthose applications all but useless. In addiing, a direct response marketing firm, says tion, organisations often wind up having this issue is more pronounced in some verto deploy analytic applications against data tical industries than others. In manufacturwarehouses that add a lot more complexity ing industries where transactions still tend and expense. to take place on a quarterly basis, the ERP Simo Said, vice president of database and system still dominates. But in a lot of busitechnology for lines of business and indusness-to-consumer transactions, Brown says tries for SAP, says unifying all the raw data there tends to be a lot small, high-volume in one system is one of the major business transactions that are happening in real time. benefits of investing in a system such as the That kind of business environment tends to SAP High Performance Analytic Appliance shift the focus of the action within the com(HANA). In effect, HANA becomes the pany to the CRM system. system of record for processing all data in “It now really depends on the nature of real time, which can then be accessed by any the industry as whether the business is application that either runs directly on top of going to be driven by a CRM or ERP sysHANA or via an application programming tem,” says Brown. interface. Rather than having multiple copBrown also notes that with advances in ies of the same data running throughout the analytics platforms from vendors such enterprise, HANA provides an opportunity as IBM it’s becoming easier to unify dispato centralize all that data in-memory in a way rate business processes and applications. that makes distributing multiple copies of In fact, as advanced analytics continues to data around the enterprise unnecessary. evolve alongside the rise in-memory comSAP HANA is not the only puting, the data management database platform that IT organpendulum may finally be swingisations can opt to process data ing back in favor of the CIO. in memory in real time. ExaMany CIOs have been trying sol, for example, makes it to unify business processes via possible to run existing SQL application integration projapplications on top of an inects that make sure there is a will be the size memory database. Conversesingle truth manifesting itself of public cloud ly, Starcounter has developed across every business applicamarket by 2017 a NoSQL database that runs tion. Conflicting data from completely in-memory. different applications, however, Alternatively, some organcan easily wind up rendering

B E S T OF B R E E D

Many CIOs have been trying to unify business processes via application integration projects that make sure there is a single truth manifesting itself across every business application

$131bn

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isations may simply get by with Apache Hadoop implementation, which may not be as fast as an in-memory database, but at the very least allows IT organisations to more cost effectively build big data analytics applications.

Obviously, it will take some time for the transition to in-memory computing to fully play out across the enterprise. In the meantime, CIOs, in the absence of a corporate mandate that identifies one particular application as the system of record within the organisation, may want to bide their time.

The simple fact is that a lot of the division that exists in many organisations winds up being reflected in the IT systems that support business units that are either not quite as closely aligned as they might be, or are hostile to each other because the underlying business model is fundamentally flawed. Of course, that doesn’t stop anybody on the business side from accusing IT of not understanding the needs of their business unit, even though those needs are often in direct conflict with the needs of another part of the business. More often than not, CIOs are simply making the best of a bad business situation that is currently, but perhaps not permanently, beyond the means of their control.

—The article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioinsight.com.

ci sco CISCO

ctof custom series

Simplifying IT Management Through Cisco’s UCS In a series of interactive articles, Cisco will shed more light on its Unified Computing System (UCS), thereby enabling CIOs to better manage their IT infrastructure How can UCS help me in simplifying management of my IT resources?

Dinesh Kaushik, Head IT, Caparo India Answer: Management solutions for an integrated data center infrastructure must help monitor the network and storage resources required by the computing platform. Complexity in server management software can increase as more products are used to develop and maintain an integrated infrastructure. Additionally, each component vendor will bring its own management interface and communication protocols.

This simplification changes things for the better because it takes a lot of complication out of the equation.

The Cisco UCS Manager runs embedded in the fabric interconnect and helps manage all components of the Cisco UCS with Intel® Xeon® pro-

cessor through a single pane. Managing the server, networking, and storage resources with a unified approach greatly decreases complexity, providing the capability to deploy and alter applications quickly through the innovative use of policies, role-based access control (RBAC), service profiles and templates.

operating systems commercially available as well as third party storage devices.

Therefore, it can be easily integrated along with any existing infrastructure.

Cisco’s UCS is no doubt an innovative solution. However, would deploying this lead to vendor lock-in?

How compatible is it with other IT infrastructure/solutions?

Manoranjan Kumar, CIO, Kanoria Chemicals & Industries

To learn more, you may also visit us at cisco.in/servers

Answer: Deploying Cisco UCS with Intel® Xeon® processor will not result in a vendor lock-in. The difference lies in the architecture which provides a significant advantage based on how it is implemented. Standard Intel x86 processors are beneficial both from a connectivity and a management perspectives. Cisco UCS supports most

The following link gives the interoperability matrix with other vendors: http://cisco.in/ ucs/matrix

For any queries regarding Cisco UCS, please send them to yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

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Intel ®, the Intel ® logo, Xeon ®, and Xeon ® inside are trademarks of Intel ® Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries

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the fingerfriendly apps

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The introduction of social, mobile and cloud technologies has changed the way billions of people around the world communicate with each other. It has had an impact on enterprises too. The result has been that businesses today are transitioning from complex, desktop-optimised applications to light, user-friendly applications that work seamlessly on mobile devices. Vendors have taken the cue and are increasingly developing such apps.

CTO Forum take a closer look at some such enterprise applications and how CIOs are leveraging them.

By Atanu Kumar Das Design By Pradeep G Nair

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innovative apps,amazing experience vendors are developing enterprise applications that are user-friendly and light on the bandwidth

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one are those days when enterprise applications were complex solutions that were delivered through desktops. With the emergence of consumerisation of IT, employees now expect applications to be available on their mobile devices anywhere and anytime. They also want them to be simple to use. Vendors are increasingly aligning their product development strategies in line with this trend. The success or failure of any enterprise applications is directly related to its ease of use. Analysts believe that 80 percent of enterprise applications succeed in today's environment because of their ease of use.

According to Hirak Kayal, Vice President, Applications Product Management, Oracle India, “As an enterprise technology leader, Oracle offers a huge number of business applications across the stack and to companies in every domain. We believe that a user-friendly and simple interface is the primary user-need for every single business application. This is an area where Oracle has been carrying out significant amount of work across the applications product portfolio. User experience is not just the ease of navigation through the application. It’s much deeper.

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We have been enhancing the whole way a user works in the application to get his / her work done.”

“Having actionable insights telling the user what best to be done, when to be done and how to be done through a simple and intuitive user interface is what improves his / her productivity to a great extent. That’s what improves the overall user-experience of the system. It does not stop at desktop user experience alone. We are extending similar experience through hand-held mobile devices and tablets as well. A user can access the application through these devices and be able to not only execute transactions but also have access to embedded analytics to support his/her actions,” he says.

For example, the company claims that one of its solution suite, Oracle Fusion applications, leverage years of in-depth, customer-driven research and design to create a next-generation user experience. User-experience in Oracle Fusion applications is designed to leverage the power of Oracle Fusion middleware, business intelligence and embedded social collaboration. With Oracle Fusion applications, organisations will move beyond simply completing transactions to gaining real business insight. The

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Oracle Fusion applications user experience puts users at the center. The user discovers what he/she need to know and the result is a dramatic improvement in end-user productivity, according to Oracle.

We are in the midst of a computer revolution – customers, employees and partners are all empowered. The introduction of social, mobile and cloud technologies has changed the way billions of people around the world communicate with each other. More than 150 million social conversations are happening every day. More than 1.7 billion touch devices were shipped in 2012. Over half of CEOs surveyed in IBM’s 2012 study expect that social channels will be the primary way of engaging customers within the next five years. Companies now realise that they must connect with their customers, employees, partners and products to become customer companies.

One of the important aspects about the growing popularity of building social networks is to have userfriendly interfaces.

As Sidharth Malik, AVP India, Salesforce.com says, “The growing popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter has made feed-based user interfaces the new standard when it comes to consumer applications. When Salesforce.com started, we asked why couldn’t business applications be as easy to use as Amazon.com. Today, we are asking why business applications can't be as easy to use as Facebook. All of our enterprise applications, including the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, have award winning, intuitive and easy to use user interfaces. Each application also integrates with Salesforce Chatter, the number one enterprise social network.”

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With Chatter, enterprises have the power to leverage the social features popularised by Facebook and Twitter -- such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds in a secure enterprise environment. Chatter’s user-friendly, feed-based userinterface lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data, and companies can connect content and applications from any source, gaining valuable insight into what is happening across the entire business.

The results of providing employees with such a user-friendly interface are clearly visible. There is a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organisational barriers because the insights are pushed to users in real-time.

Today with more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the only company delivering a next generation customer platform that enables companies of all sizes to revolutionise the way they sell, service, market and innovate.

Delhi-based company CRMnext's CEO Nishant Singh also feels that it is very important for vendors to focus on ease of use of enterprise applications.

He says, “I strongly believe that it is becomming increasingly important for vendors to provide user-friendly interface.

When we started our company eight years, we realised that 50 percent of CRM applications failed. We were adamant to

“The growing popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter has made feed-based user interfaces the new standard when it comes to consumer applications” Sidharth Malik, AVP India, Salesforce.com

find the reason for the same. We did four years of R&D and concluded that one of the primary reasons for the failure was because the applications were very difficult to use. They lacked simplicity.”

“Another important factor is enterprise applications should have the ability to be accessed from remote locations. The legacy apps had to be accessed from inside the office. Our product was designed keeping in mind the usability factor and needs of the employees,” he says.

Satisfied customers One of the biggest customer for CRMnext is HDFC Bank.

Four years ago, the bank was looking for a CRM applica-

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2010-11. The quality of documentation improved from 60 percent to 97 percent in November 2011.

The effect of social media

tion that could manage its 55,000 users.

The prior CRM application which the bank was using was not able to integrate different applications into one. The result was that it had become tedious for the bank employees to work on.

“The mandate was to manage the customers of HDFC better. They were looking for a CRM product which could be positively evaluated on three key parameters. First, a product with architecture capable of managing over 55,000 users serving over 25 million customers. Secondly, they needed a CRM solution with integration capabilities that was reliable and capable of managing complex and diverse scenarios while retaining traceability. Lastly, the bank needed an implementation partner with banking domain knowledge and capability to execute the vision.

Above all, the solution had to be user-friendly,” says Singh.

CRMnext created multi-wave process workouts to ensure unification and consolidation of all unstructured processes (that ran on excel) and semi automated processes. It phased out six applications such as lead tracking system, customer contact management, etc. CRMnext integrated with seven core systems to provide end-to-end status visibility. Process T-A-T was guaranteed by alerts and multistage escalations across departments and channels by using mobile and two-way SMS capabilities to create leads, update status, request for customer offers, etc.

This resulted in a whopping jump in HDFC's customer base by 150 percent. Assets' business grew by 100 percent over 2008 levels. Number of leads captured per month from September 2010 to March 2012 increased by 275 percent. There was an increase of 32 percent in lead conversion from the financial year 2009-10 to financial year

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Today a brand gets mentioned in social media a lot more than we could have imagined. A single customer view about customer service or product benefit or organisation culture play a huge role in influencing prospective customers or potential hiring candidates.

“Taking into cognizance the change of tide towards social media and its benefits, Oracle has designed its cloud-based as well as on-premise applications with a social element incorporated. Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) solutions are a good example of this. They help organisations transform their corporate business processes and systems, with innovative social collaboration, marketing and insight services. It provides a complete platform to execute social media strategy for an enterprise,” adds Kayal.

Oracle SRM suite is an integrated enterprise service that enables companies to listen, engage, create, market, and analyse interactions across multiple social platforms in real-time, providing a holistic view of the consumer.

Oracle social network comes packaged with Oracle Fusion CRM for enterprise wide collaboration. Oracle

“I strongly believe that it is becomming increasingly important for vendors to provide userfriendly interface” Nishant Singh, CEO,CRM next

social network is a secure private network that provides a broad range of social tools desaigned to capture and preserve information flowing between people, enterprise applications, and business processes. By connecting users with most critical applications, Oracle social network provides contextual, real-time communication within and across enterprises. With Oracle social network, users have the tools they need to collaborate quickly and efficiently, while leveraging the organisation’s collective expertise to make informed decisions and drive business forward. It is therefore, critical to have a user-friendly interface that is known to users and is simpler to collaborate on.

“Oracle social network can be accessed anywhere and

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anytime from a variety of interaction points including a web browser, outlook application, or mobile and tablet devices. Each client provides a rich experience through form factors specific to the devices they run on. Outlook integration bridges the social experience between Oracle social network participants and their email. Oracle social marketing enables creation of social content and publishing. Oracle social engagement and monitoring helps an enterprise track social activities around their brand and analyse effective ROI on various social campaigns. Our recruitment solutions help enterprise leverage the power of social media to source candidates,” adds Kayal Social collaboration is absolutely integral for companies and Malik also feels the same. He says, “In the midst of today’s computer revolution, we cannot afford to live and work in silos. Social collaboration in the enterprise breaks down barriers across departments and regions, improving transparency, productivity and engagement. Sales teams can collaborate close more deals faster. The C-Suite can have unprecedented transparency across their organisation to drive innovation. ”

“Oracle social network can be accessed anywhere and anytime from a variety of interaction points including a web browser, outlook application, or mobile and tablet devices” Hirash Kayal, Oracle Design and technology Design and choice of technology is extremely important for an enterprise grade application. No application can be developed without planning out the design architecture of it. The design of user interface is the key to deliver a system of engagement.

“Design of Oracle Fusion applications user-interface relies on years of customer usage data, feedback and analytics.

Every step has to be considered in great detail to be able to build a successful and easy-to-use application. Choice of technology should also enable us to execute and deliver the designed application. For example our ADF mobile platform completely enable us build mobile applications once and render natively across multiple mobile operating systems.

It’s a combination of design and technology which plays a significant role in delivering a user friendly application. We

embarked on the design principle and technology choice for fusion applications quite a few years back and good part is that the strategy remains unchanged. That means we have been moving in the right direction,” said Kayal.

Security issues There have been concerns among enterprises that security features will get compromised if the vendor develops an application which is too simple and easy to use. Kayal feels that vendors are today working towards providing security and also offer a simple platform.

“It is definitely possible to develop secure enterprise applications while keeping them simple and easy to use. That’s why the choice of technology and design framework is so important. While the design and technology layer enables us to deliver the desired user-experience, security is ensured across multiple layers from hardware, operating system, database to application layer. Oracle owns the entire stack and hence we are most capable to offer security across the stack. Oracle has a number of security solutions and suites that can be integrated into applications to make them secure and robust.”

Oracle identity management is a complete and integrated, next-generation identity management platform that provides breakthrough scalability; enables organisations to achieve rapid compliance with regulatory mandates; secures sensitive applications and data regardless of whether they are hosted on-premise or in a cloud; and reduces operational costs. Security does not only come from software capabilities. Physical security is also extremely important as well for cloud applications.

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m3m ups sales by using oracle app M3M India used Oracle financials to process all transactions, including administrative expenses and general office purchases

M

3M India Limited, a property development and real estate firm based in Gurgaon, has evolved from a realty advisor to a designer of luxury residential and commercial properties. M3M India owns more than 500 acres of land in Gurgaon, Delhi and NCR. M3M India’s business has developed through three phases: acquiring and consolidating land and licenses; construction development and marketing; and maintenance. In 2010, the company began the development phase and decided its existing home-grown accounting system no longer met its requirements.

agement, and made it easier for staff to manage and complete property sales.

“Oracle E-Business suite and Oracle CRM on demand supported the expansion of our property portfolio across all locations. The best part of the application was its ease-of-use features, ” said Jain. “These applications provided us with the right financial, inventory, and sales data in real-time, ensuring our customers received a satisfactory level of service at all times.”

Challenges

M3M India used Oracle financials to process all transactions—including administrative expenses such as salaries and general office purchases—and project expenses, such as raw materials required for property construction and development, like cement, steel, and furnishings.

According to Jain, Oracle financials provided the company with security and data management capabilities that were not available with its previous accounting system.

“Oracle financials was capable of handling thousands of transactions, providing us with a system that will support future growth,” said Jain. The system also offered a high level of data security. We can assign a staff member to only perform a certain task at a particular time and it meant connectivity in remote locations.

“We needed a simple enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage financials, sales, and projects across all of our locations,” said Gaurav Jain, vice president – finance, M3M India Limited. “If we continued using our existing accounting system, we would have required additional applications to manage key business processes.”

In early 2010, M3M India engaged Oracle Partner Filix Consulting to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.2 modules: Oracle financials, purchasing, property manager, inventory management, and CRM on demand.

The integrated system streamlined financial and inventory management processes, improved sales lead man-

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Improved Reporting with More Secure Data

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“we were india’s first real estate

company to go live with oracle crm on demand and oracle e-business suite release 12, achieving this in only four months”

Gaurav Jain, VP, Finance, M3M India Limited

“For example, if we have one staff member responsible for invoicing processing, I can restrict his or her access to certain parts of the system that are used only to process payments.”

Oracle financials also enabled M3M India to generate expenditure reports and reports related to Indian tax regulations immediately, using clean and reliable financial data.

“We can now generate any financial report almost immediately,” said Jain. “Previously, we would spend two to three days gathering information from spreadsheets to generate any type of financial report.”

More Control over Purchasing M3M India uses the centralised Oracle purchasing application to order raw materials used to construct properties and purchase office products from various suppliers.

The system enabled cost control by monitoring product orders, determining if purchases have been received, and processing invoices easily.

“As this business grows, Oracle purchasing will become more and more beneficial,” said Jain. “We are hoping to get to the point where one less person is involved in processing each order.

“Oracle purchasing ultimately provided us with peace of mind that the correct information is available to everyone involved in purchasing. The system also reduced the chance of unauthorised purchases across our business because we have control over the movement of packages from the time an order is placed to when it is received.”

ensured they can find relevant information immediately when customers call.

“For example, if a customer inquires about the status of their payment for a property, we can access the relevant information for that customer immediately,” said Jain. “This ultimately improves the service we provide to our customers.”

Solutions Enabled accounts staff to generate financial reports almost immediately rather than spend two to three days gathering data from spreadsheets Provided data security features that restricted unauthorised staff from accessing certain financial information Prevented staff from making unauthorized purchases by providing complete control over the procurement of office items and raw materials Improved customer service levels by providing a cen tral data repository to store client data and more effec tively manage property sales Provided insight into inventory at construction sites, which ensured staff always had the right amount of stock and projects were completed on time Ensured staff followed sales leads, which helped increase property sales by 10 percent Saved 50 percent on software, hardware and mainte nance costs with the hosted Oracle CRM On Demand application.

Implementation Process Better Customer Service with Centralised System Oracle property manager provided a central data repository that enabled M3M India to record customer information and more easily and effectively manage property sales. The web-based system provided sales executives at several locations with the latest stock information. This

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During the first phase of the project, M3M engaged Filix Consulting to deploy Oracle financials, purchasing, property manager, and inventory management. Filix also deployed Oracle CRM on demand during the same phase. “We were India’s first real estate company to go live with Oracle CRM on demand and Oracle E-business suite Release 12, achieving this in only four months,” said Jain.

ext Gen uting

processing power required, relative to the other food groups I mentioned in my previous answer, is outstripped by the capabiliADVERTORIAL ask the expert ties of the mainstream processor family, which in today’s incarnation is Intel’s Xeon E5 2600 series.

In response to this phenomenon, Intel subdivided the Xeon lineup to include a new “EN” class of processors, the E5-2400 series, which ease back on the gas pedal of Moore’s law for designs that don’t require as much processing power in relation to local storage and memory. This creates a new class of cost & performance optimized systems for lighter workloads or for storage heavy systems (think big data) at the entry end of the portfolio. various permutations of server designs Three of our new UCS M3 series systems required to cover the myriad of workloads fall in this category: the B22, C22 and C24. most efficiently. Think of these as your four At the same time, Intel has brought four server subsystem food groups. Architecsocket server options, formerly the provture purists will remind us that everything ince of the mission critical, “EX” end of the outside the processors and their cache spectrum, down into the mainstream. An falls into the category of “I/O” but let’s not example of this is our new UCS B420 blade. get pedantic because thatiswill mess up my SoA:ifThere you are want four socket count and Q: Centre for Sight India’s second-largest many resilient andcore robust applications ophthalmology that are available a cloud model including ERP, food group analogy. chain with 44 centers across the performance butondon’t necessarily need the country. We expect a turnover of more than `125 crore DW/BI and Disaster Recovery (DR). Disaster Recovery In Cisco UCS,The I/Ocompany is effectively taken leveraged comprehensive features of an EX class this fiscal. has successfully organisations can RAS also look to deploying a public private cloud to achieve real-time multi-location, multi- cloud, because they will not have to invest in trained off thebusiness table asintegration. a designWeworry because you have a price/performance are now looking up to our IT system, manpower.

Asnow the DR datacenter can be owned by team to gets furtherits strengthen this initiative service providers to run these every server full USRDA of net-and make optimized solution for thatservices, need. there will be Centre for Sight a more resilient organisation. What no investment on the setting up of the DR datacenter. working through VIC: helping porsolutions can Ithe expect from my IT team when it comes For the rest of the applications, the existing environment For any queries regarding UCS, please send to business intelligence, asset management and new- needs to be examined. If the current running tions of bandwidth, rich with Fabric them to yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in age disaster management? applications have additional modules available, which are well tested and integrated for BI, CRM, SCM etc., Extender technology vitamins that yield they would enable easy integration. Many other hundreds of Ethernet and FC adaptstandard applications are also available that can help BROUGHT TO YOU BY get the datacenter upto speed on these aspects. ers through one physical device.

Gone are the days of hemming and hawing over how many mezz card slots your Ashish Wattal blade has or how many cards you’re going National Product Manager– UCS to need to feed that hungry stack of VM’s on Cisco India & SAARC your rack server.

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries This simplification changes things for the

ve articles, Cisco will shed ed Computing System ng CIOs to better manage e

-

t,

Dr Mahipal Sachdev Founder, Centre for Sight

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“making apps user-friendly�

Sunil Padmanabh, Research Director, Gartner India, talks to Atanu Kumar Das on the importance of developing apps with a simple interface What are your views on vendors developing applications/solutions that have a userfriendly interface? How important it is for enterprises?

Vendors are today concentrating on developing enterprise applications that have a user-friendly interface.

As per data available with Gartner, eight out of 10 enterprise applications succeed only because they have a user-friendly interface. And the primary reason for their failing enterprises is because they lack an interface that is attractive to the user. Be it SAP, Oracle, Microsoft or Salesforce, the core idea is to provide a platform that is as easy to use as is Facebook or LinkdIn. Enterprise users are increasingly demanding simplicity in their apps. So today the vendors are concentrating totally on improving the end-user experience. I remember once SAP had to revamp an entire application just because it was not user friendly.

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Why do you think there is demand among enterprises to use applications which have a user-friendly interface?

I think the demand is primarily because of the experience that users have by using social tools in their mobile. Today, there is a very thin line between office experience and personal usability.

Employees want the same look and feel when they come to work and they do not want to work on multiple platforms to complete a task. The vendors are working on developing enterprise applications that can give on-premise access as well as mobile access. The idea is to optimise the license usage. Earlier, enterprise used to buy licenses and they were left unused because of the cumbersome interface and this led to loss of productivity. But, now vendors are aware that usability is the key criteria for success.

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What are the challenges in developing an application/solution which has a userfriendly interface?

The most important challenge that I feel is to make the application simple to use. Vendors try and bundle all the functionalities in one enterprise application.

This makes the solution not just complex but also cumbersome for end users. Meanwhile, corporates want applications that have modules, which can be accessed by specific departments. Today, users also want gamification experience in their applications, which also poses a challenge for the vendor. I feel a user-friendly app is one that is intuitive, contentspecific, should designate appropriate business roles and should have dynamic analytical features. The need of the hour is to develop applications that can run on any and every platform, be it on the desktop or on a mobile device. Employees today want flexibility to work from anywhere on any device and that should be the primary concern for vendors developing enterprise applications.

“The problem is that enterprise vendors mostly concentrate of application security as well as data security. The trick is to concentrate on data security�

Sunil Padmanabh, Research Director, Gartner India

Can enterprise applications stay user- friendly if we implement strong security features?

One of the most integral part that enterprises look at is security but vendors should ensure that security features at the back-end should not be a deterrent in developing a user-friendly interface. The problem is that enterprise vendors mostly concentrate of application security as well as data security. The trick is to concentrate on the data security as that is the primary concern of the enterprises and keep the interface simple. Security is important but it should not be over engineered, there should be a balance between the functional needs. There have been many instances where enterprise applications have

failed primarily because vendors have tried to concentrate too much on security and less on developing simple usability of the application.

So there should be an equal mix of both security features and easy-of- use as both are integral for the applications success.

What are the key features that an enterprise

looks for while deploying an application?

Some of the key features that enterprises look for in an application is support for multiple mobile platforms. Be it Apple, Android, BlackBerry or Windows, the vendors should be developing applications that supports all these platforms. An enterprise application store should allow the applications to be downloaded on the device from the browser via a URL or through an enterprise market application which is similar to the Google Play Store or iTunes App store.

Another important feature is security and application with downloads happening on a secure VPN tunnel.

Where do you see enterprise applications heading in the future?

In the future, I foresee that vendors would concentrate on making enterprise applications more simpler to use. The idea would be to integrate with legacy as well as modern applications and provide a platform which is scalable and flexible.

The vendors will concentrate on improving the user experience as this is the key to building a successful enterprise application.

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'The Innovation Steeplechase' In his or her mind, each of us wants to be 'innova- tive'.

Innovation is the new mantra for success for corporations and individuals within them. It is the answer to problems of growth, profitability, produc- tivity, and organisational logjams. It is also the ready response expected from 'leaders' - functional or otherwise.

But like leadership, innovation remains elusive and daunting.

How does innovation come about and how can you bring it about - across the organisation or within your department? Most CXOs feel constrained due to 'too much to do in too little time'... and therefore none left over to innovate or fight deeply entrenched systems that come in the way of change. Equally inertia could result from the feeling that what you do is too mundane to innovate.

Misconceptions around innovation only make 'getting started' tougher!

Given how critical innovation is for raising the bar - every time, every day - the 9.9 Leadership Institute is launching a series of 'Innovation Workshops' to help with 'winning the innovation steeplechase' irrespective of where you are in the race - before the start line, in the uncertain middle, or closer to the finish line...

Depending on which of these questions dominates your thoughts around innovation, the 9.9 Innovation Team will design a workshop or programme for you and your team.

What the '9.9 Innovation Team' can do for you...

Companies and senior executives are grappling with answers to one or all of the questions below in the innovation context.

The Why

The What

Why should I innovate? Can I be innovative?

This question is answered through awareness around innovation, including: - Addressing myths and misconceptions - And why each one of us can be 'innovative' If you spend all your time making tiny process improvements and watching competitors steal your customers with innovative new products and services, then "The Why" applies to you.

What areas should you innovate for maximum benefit?

We outline areas where innovation can deliver serious benefits and identify the most popular application areas across organisations. The mos obvious approaches begin with a need for: - Topline growth - Bottomline improvement Your business is going fine, sales and profits are a bit flat perhaps but they will pick up... or will they? If thi is your concern, then "The What" applies to you.

The How

How do I execute and implement?

Here we offer our Creativity & Innovation Toolkit to help you kickstart the process to: - Deliver specific outcomes - Sustain the process - Embed programmes to influence the DNA of the organization If you are unaware of the one right problem to solve that creates "unfair" advantage for your organization in the marketplace, then "The How" applies to you We offer Initiation Workshops; Toolkits; Projects and Embedding Programmes with durations ranging from 2 hours to 2 days to 2 months and beyond.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Email: akanksha.pundir@9dot9.in Phone: +91-9999799614 Email: anuradha.mathur@9dot9.in

T E C H FOR G O V E R N A N C E

c y b e r s pa c e

5

POINTS

imaging BY anil.t

Much hay has been made over the use of the term ‘Cyberspace’ The internet was born with the idea of sharing data and to connect systems (nuclear weapons primarily) in gibson’s universe, people ‘jacked’ into the internet and left their bodies behind for a digital domain Cyberspace is in fact what is between our ears Cyberspace is only a space in the cognitive dissonance

Cyberspace: It’s a Medium,

Not a Place

Internet is a medium with which we fabricate a social contract to communicate with each other 38

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c y b e r s pa c e

Much hay has been made

over the use of the term “Cyberspace” since all this talk about cyberwar has been bandied about. I for one have also been one of the more vocal personages yelling online and off about the use of the term or more to the point its over-use and lack of real context. I consider it a bit of a pet peeve really but I started to think about it much more recently and think that it’s time to put down some ideas that have been in my head about cyberspace.

Lately I have been focusing more on the cognitive, social, and psychological issues surrounding the human animal and the technological interface that we have created for communicating with one another. The Internet was born with the idea of sharing data and to connect systems (nuclear weapons primarily) during a time of war after regular infrastructure may be destroyed.

It has morphed since then to encompass much more of our daily lives. Not only from the methods we use to pay our bills but also sociologically by the invention of social media. Along the way we humans also created a mystique around this new technology that was futuristic and cool. The name that was coined for this ideal was put forth before the Internet was born by William Gibson in his book “Neuromancer” It was this presaging of the idea that not only would we someday in the future be able to communicate with people on a network of computers, but also that we would actually live on the “net” In Gibson’s universe people “jacked” into the net and left their bodies behind for a digital domain with imagery that felt real and technologies that could kill your physical body while you were linked to cyberspace. It was really from this coining of the term and it's cool factor that it began to catch on as we developed the technologies of the Internet and the means to interface with it more graphically.

Hackers gravitated to the word as well as war fighters early on but it really did not

not the modern lexicon until more recent times with the advent of APT (Advanced Persistent Threats) and Stuxnet where malware and espionage met and small conflicts were waged. Suddenly the sexiness of Cyber which really also more commonly was used with the term “sex” after it became the word of the day and once tagged with war became the de facto term for a new kind of warfare. …. But, lets go back to this notion of “cyber” being a place. Is it in fact a place? Can one inhabit it? Or is it just a medium by which data is passed between systems and people to communicate? I would say that both of the latter are the reality and that clothing the medium in a sexy terminology leads to too many misapprehensions about the realities of what exactly is going on when one goes to war in it. As if anyone really can.

Sociology & Linguistics While the internet was originally conceived as a network to send data and communicate between systems it has become much more societally today to us all. It is the primary means of communication for people via phones, computers, and other types of interfaces. It is this fact, that moreover the social aspects of the internet and its important to society have become the primacy that we need to investigate it as a mirror to our natures. It is our nature that is effecting the direction of the technology.

In the realm of the information security world I have been moving more and more

T E C H FOR G O V E R N A N C E

away from the strict notions of defense and offense via technological means alone toward a more comprehensive understanding of the why and the how of the adversary's aegis instead of primarily looking at the vulnerabilities and the outcomes of their being used.

This shift for me has widened the scope quite a bit and it became clear to me that by looking at the problem between the keyboard and the computer is a key to a better 360 degree process that we could use to manage our vulnerabilities more effectively.

By studying these new sciences (CyberPsychology & Cyber-Sociology) I think that we can get a much better handle on creating a more secure environment to start as well as a more holistic means to information security on the whole.

Once again, the medium is just the means of communication though that does evolve the communication and lay the groundwork for social change. Mores, ideas, and language all effect the society broadly. In this case the medium of the internet or “cyberspace” as a modality is having real world consequences due to the hyper connected nature of it all today. Ponder the future connectivity as we move from Web 2.0 to 3.0 as well. How much more will the medium, which now can effect our daily lives in good as well as terrible ways directly enable us to further or destroy society up to the physical in the case of infrastructure (grid security etc.

Cognitive Dissonance The key point that I want to make in this first of perhaps a few blog posts on all of these ideas is that the human behind the keyboard is just as important if not more important than the keyboard and CPU they wield. It is also important to set forth that cyberspace is only a place in the cognitive dissonance that we are all deluding ourselves into believing. In reality cyberspace is in fact what is between our ears and the internet is a medium with which we fabricate a social contract to communicate with each other, and potentially wage war. By understanding the tool user and their motivations you can understand the tool.

—This article is printed with prior permission from infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

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T E C H FOR G O V E R N A N C E

R e g u l at i o n

Legal Weapons to Fight Info Theft

Companies should use trade secret and copyright law to maximise their ability to protect confidential information

By Mark V.B. Partridge

I

to maintain the work as a secret. Instead, it appeared that employt’s a common problem. A company learns that a former ees and others had copies of the list without specific restrictions on employee copied confidential computer files--proprietary source its distribution. The owner of a trade secret must take affirmative code, marketing plans, customer lists and pricing informationaction to protect a trade secret’s confidentiality. It is important that -before leaving and has used the information to start a competemployees who have access to a trade secret take steps to prevent ing business or has shared it with a competitor. its unauthorized disclosure, whether on the Internet, by word of The first instinct is to challenge the conduct as a misappropriamouth or otherwise. All proprietary materials should be marked as tion of trade secrets. After all, the company marked the files as such, denoting that they should be kept confidential and are conconfidential information and had a company policy requiring sidered proprietary. Access to the trade secret should be limited to employees to keep such information secret. Unfortunately, this those individuals with a need-to-know. Procedures for may not be enough to prevail on a trade secret claim. maintaining confidentiality should be implemented Effective action to combat this threat includes the and enforced. If disclosure to employees and third-paruse of a full array of legal weapons. Copyright proties is necessary, those who are granted access to trade tection, however, is often overlooked in the battle to secrets should sign nondisclosure and confidentiality defend corporate secrets. This oversight is a mistake, agreements. These issues relating to a trade secret are given the advantages under copyright law for challengfact intensive and can be difficult and expensive to ing information theft. was the surge in prove at trial. A copyright claim, in contrast, is much Proving the existence of a trade secret involves more sales of windows easier to establish as it is based on objective facts. than merely showing that work was designated as confidential. A party claiming a trade secret must show phones in q4 2012 To prevail on the copyright claim, a company would merely need to show that it owns a valid copyright, that that the claimed work has value because it is a secret there was access to the original and that the allegedly and that the claimant has taken reasonable efforts to infringing work is identical or substantially similar to maintain the work as a secret. Confidentiality designaprotectable elements in the original. In our experience, the test for tions alone are not necessarily sufficient. An example of the difficreating a work protected by copyright — original, tangible expresculty of proving trade secret rights is presented in the Illinois case sion — is easily met by confidential business records. Similarly, of Liebert v. Mazur, in which the plaintiff was unable to protect its the test for infringement is easily met when an employee directly customer list. The dispute involved a former salesman for a heatcopies files protected by copyright. If you are required to go to ing and cooling equipment distributor who copied customer files court to prove your claim, it will generally be much quicker and from the company’s computer system before leaving to work for a cheaper to prove a copyright case. competitor. The court concluded that the list was sufficiently secret and had economic value to satisfy part of the test for being a trade —This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please secret. But the plaintiff failed to show that it took reasonable steps visit www.cioinsight.com.

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Cadence

ctof custom series

Managing Density

Future-Proof Solutions for Datacentres TE Connectivity’s superior cabling solutions helped Cadence not only make their datacenter expansion meet design specification at the right cost but also reduced its carbon footprint

W

hen the semiconductor design firm Cadence Design Systems was looking to expand their operations to accommodate a new, larger development center, it needed to simplify its datacentre topology to cut costs and create a network infrastructure that was secure, easy to manage, always available, and capable of adjusting to unpredictable workloads and changing business needs. The construction and setup of state-ofthe-art 4000 sq ft datacenter at Noida has consolidated all servers that were earlier kept at 11 small computer rooms scattered over three buildings.

The expansion meant building a future-proof, high-speed network. An essential part of the requirement was infrastructure cabling that would support bandwidth-hungry, highly available, and scalable network devices.

Cadence's IT team, which provides support to the San Jose-based company's offices worldwide, selected TE Connectivity’s structured cabling solutions: Among other operational efficiencies, Cadence was looking for, speed and quality of installation, port density, easy MACs (move, add, changes), superior cable management with optimum floor space utilisation.

Together with TE Connectivity Regional Manager, Neerav Kumar, Cadence designed a LAN on Distributed Network Architecture (DNA) that facilitated easy management. Fiber backbone redundancy was maintained to each hub room from the datacenter and between the hub rooms using MPO fiber optic cabling solution. The datacenter, however, used the Centralised Network Architecture (CNA) topology with the zone cabling approach to address the increasing operational costs of network administration. This would also help ease future migrations to high-speed LANs.

Another challenge was density limitation that has a severe effect on the scalability and cost of the overall infrastructure design. This complex issue in design specification was addressed through TE Connectivity’s Hi-D cable management platform that increased port density by 50 percent and allowed all 720 ports to be correctly managed within a 42u cabinet, thereby reducing the real estate footprint of the telecom room and resulting in huge cost savings as well. This was further augmented with modular plug-and-go solutions on copper (MRJ-21 solution) and fiber (MPO solution) media, which was faster to deploy and easier to maintain and use. These factories pre-terminated and tested products brought in high density and speed, reliability and scalability to the Cadence datacentre.

Says Ashwin Rao, IT Group Director of Cadence, “With TE Connectivity’s state–ofthe-art modular plug-and-go solutions for copper and fiber connectivity and Hi-D connect system in the datacenter facility; Cadence is able to use space optimally with reduced cable load. We are also able to plan better cooling in our datacenter with reduced power consumption.”

“The, award-winning datacenter has PUE, or power-usage effectiveness, a measure of efficiency, of 1.23,” Rao says.

This means 81 percent of all the power fed to the datacenter is used by the servers.

The solutions used in the facility accrue multiple benefits for Cadence in the short and long run: the solution on preterminated plug-and-go MPO fiber system is ready to take on the constant growth of processor power inside the server farms as well as the demand for faster communication throughout the premises. The network is ready for future bandwidthhungry applications at today’s cost with flexibility, scalability and reliability that is warranted for the next 25 years.

BROUGHT to YOU BY

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N O H O L D S B A RR E D

Albert Kuo

DOSSIER Company: Blue Coat Systems Established: 1996 Headquarters: California, US Products: Proxy SG, MACH5, K9 Web Proxy, PacketShaper, CacheFlow employees: 1,250+

Addressing modern

security issues In a conversation with Atanu Kumar Das, Albert Kuo, GM and VP, Field Operations, Blue Coat, Asia Pacific, discusses the numerous security threats confronting enterprises in India and Asia Pacific

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Albert Kuo

What are the key security threats that Indian enterprises are facing today? How is Bluecoat helping them in tackling these threats?

Today, enterprise customers are at a risk when it comes to network security. Cyber criminals are always on the prowl. It is, therefore, imperative for oragnisations to ensure that they deploy security solutions to keep their infrastructure safe. Some of the key threats confronting enterprises are phishing, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and malware.

We, at Bluecoat, believe that enterprise security should be held upfront, and towards this end we have developed several innovative solutions. The most important thing for the enterprises is to realise the difference between normal and abnormal behaviour when they go to the web. It is also integral that they deploy filtering technology as the first layer to detect malware at an early stage.

How should Indian and Asian organisations gear up to tackle the modern security threats in a cloud environment?

Enterprises in India and Asia alike are staring at numerous threats. The first step in the fight against such threats is to be proactive and deploy the best of breed security solutions. This will help protect critical data and infrastructure.

The Blue Coat cloud service is a flexible security-as-a-service (SAAS) offering that leverages the same protection and policy infrastructure deployed by the largest companies around the world and extends the corporate security perimeter to all devices in any location.

The cloud service can be seamlessly deployed within an existing security infrastructure and can scale on-demand to support new user requirements.

As an enterprise-grade offering with a fully meshed global network, the cloud service delivers a 99.999 percent SLA guarantee. Customers can seamlessly direct all traffic to the cloud service through a variety of deployment and connection methods, including IPSec VPN, proxy chaining, explicit proxy and client agent, to ensure consistent protection and control for all devices, regardless of location.

How is Blue Coat helping CIOs in securing their enterprise network?

One of the most important thing is to begin early. This allows the organisation enough time to conclude whether or not it has deployed the right security solution. At Blue Coat, we leverage on our core strength, which lies in addressing vulnerabilities in the web platform.

We help enterprise technology decision makers CIOs by making them aware of the need to implement a fool-proof solution that can protect the various enterprise applications.

Today, consumerisation of IT is a big issue in enterprises, and CIOs are doing their best to address it. At Blue Coat, we regularly develop security solutions for better protection of enterprises. With Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) proliferating in

“We, at Bluecoat, believe that enterprise security should be held upfront, and towards this end we have developed several innovative solutions” enterprises, it has opened the gates to security breaches. On his part, therefore, a CIO needs to provide selective access to enterprise applications. This was not the case five years ago. The job of the CIO is therefore becoming more challenging. We have been in constant touch with CIOs and are offering customised solutions on the cloud so that the security issues can be addressed at different platforms.

What is Blue Coat's strategic vision for the Asia Pacific region in tandem with the new market shifts?

We understand that Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market for Blue Coat. While there has been a tremendous improvement in security of enterprise applications in

N O H O L D S B A RR E D

this region, unfortunately there has been a matched increase in the risk factors.

Our strategy is to develop innovative security products which CIOs are yearning for. We are working towards developing solutions that can take care of all the security needs for the enterprises.

Blue Coat CEO has publicly stated our unchanged strategy across two highly strong markets —web security and WAN optimisation. We will continue to focus on these two areas in the Asia Pacific market in the coming months.

Founded in 1996, Blue Coat provides products to more than 15,000 customers worldwide, including 88 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies.

There are CIOs who believe that offence is the best defence. What are your thoughts on the issue?

Should citizens attack criminals before the criminals get a chance to attack them?

Should we arm our citizens with guns and weapons so they can shoot the criminals?

It is probably not a good idea. The same is true in cyber security.

First, so many websites get spooked, there are so many botnets but there are very few companies that carry out a counterattack.

Second, doing so is illegal and it is always good to follow the law.

But you are not wrong in one sense – we need a better capability to anticipate an attack to better recognise it.

So we need to share information such that if ‘A’ gets attacked and is able to see the attack we can use his experience to save ‘B’.

The best defence is the thorough understanding of the attack methodologies and information sharing for getting the ability to see the attacks.

BYOD has brought about a lot of change in enterprise working experience. We all know that BYOD has increased productivity quite a bit but there are also numerous concern areas.

Some of the concerns identified by Blue Coat are BYOD device OS updates and upgrades; app downloads; photo and video uploads and downloads; BYOD backup to cloud storage or a company-issued laptop or desktop; watching recreational video on YouTube; Facetime and Skype video/audio conferencing; and guest wireless.

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NEXT

HORIZONS

B

illustration by manav sachdev

rowsing industry newsletters, I noticed that Automation World had two related stories on new technologies. Both articles indirectly point to an issue that industry needs to come to terms with quickly if we are ever going make our plant floors secure.

The BYOD Iceberg?

iPhones Are Coming to the Plant Floor

IT is changing constantly and we need to work from general principles

By Eric Byres

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Let’s start with the Tablets and Smart Phones story. It is about the issue of mobile devices, especially personal mobile devices, showing up on the plant floor. Never going to happen you say? I wouldn’t be so sure.

First, a definition. The topic of personal mobile devices is referred to in the corporate IT world as “Bring Your Own Device” or BYOD. If you haven’t heard of BYOD, Wikipedia defines it as: Bring your own device (BYOD) is a business policy of employees bringing personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and using those devices to access privileged company resources A common example is using your personal iPhone to access your company’s email system. And as I will explain later, the iPhone is only the tip of the iceberg. The

mobility

whole “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) phenomenon is a major concern throughout the corporate world.

Like icebergs, mobile technology has become an unstoppable force of nature.

They have invaded the corporate office – is the plant floor the next frontier?

The iceberg is a good metaphor for the onslaught of this technology. When dealing with an iceberg, pushing against it or ignoring it generally aren’t effective options. It is bigger than you are and will go where it wants. The best you can do is to try to manage it.

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One option for the mobile device question is to just ban them outright. There are cases when this might be appropriate, but generally outright bans rarely work the way people want them to What is a Mobile Device Anyway?

Bring Your Own Devices to the Plant Floor?

One option for the mobile device question is to just ban them outright. There are cases when this might be appropriate (explosive Most IT departments are beginning to environments for example), but generally accept the inevitability of BYOD. According outright bans rarely work the way people to arecent study, the majority of companies want them to. surveyed said they are now adapting their IT One of the reasons is that we have a teninfrastructure to accommodate employee’s dency to see technology only in terms of personal devices, rather than restricting what is available today or what is popular. employee use of personal devices.

This results in narrow definitions of a spe “Dear Mom, Today is my first day procific technology that lets other technologies gramming the filling line.” slip through. For example, an iPhone is What about the plant floor? Will tablets clearly a mobile device, but what about a soon be standard equipment in the personal USB keyboard or mouse that an refinery? Or will they be banned from employee brings in, perhaps for health reamoving outside the corporate office. The sons? (If you don’t think that a mouse can first sentence of the Tablets and Smart be a security issue then see: Hackers pierce Phones article says it all: Industrial IT teams network with jerry-rigged mouse). Someare likely to rail against the use of mobile times a “mobile device” isn’t even a device at devices, but many equipment makers feel all. Consider a CD that contains a Stuxnetthey are fighting against the tide to ignore infected S7 ladder logic file. them. Productivity will determine which Or an automated forklift that moves side will win. from site to site. At the extreme end, many people know we have been working with #1 on the Engineer’s Wish List?

Boeing for the past few years – they have Next read the Industrial Networking Desires large mobiledevices called 787s. What is Revealed article. You will notice that when important to remember is mobile devices engineers are asked to identify their unfulcan range from a CD with what appears to filled industrial networking desires, the numbe an innocent document file, to ber #1 item is: “Connecting to the the obvious iPhone, right up to factory with a smart phone”. entire mobile platforms.

I have discussed in past The only way to address this blogs that in any war between range of evolving “mobile” techsecurity and productivity, nology is to use the Zone and security will lose. The situawill be the Conduit concepts promoted in tion is no different here. Smart the ISA/IEC 62443 standards. phones are coming to the plant growth of IT Properly done, zone and conduit floor. The only question is “Will spending in security can result in operational we adapt to this new world in a middle east in 2013 requirements that define a securisecure way or will it be another ty process, rather than proscriptive source of insecurity”?

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requirements like “Mobile Devices should not be used on the plant floor”. Restricting devices seems simple and comforting, but since this is so narrow, restrictive and inflexible, it encourages inventive staff to find ways around the rules so they can do their job.

Recently I talked to a customer with a very innovative way to manage Wi-Ficapable mobile devices on his factory floor.

Instead of banning wireless technologies (something that is hard to enforce if you have a lot of contractors), he actually set installed Wi-Fi access points throughout the manufacturing areas.

Then he routed all the access points into a “Captive Portal” – one of those locked down web pages you run into in hotels and airports. This Captive Portal strategy had multiple benefits – first he immediately had a record of who was trying to use Wi-Fi in his factory. Second, by forcing all employees and contractors to log in, he could track exactly what they were doing and when.

Then, based on each user’s log-in credentials, he could restrict network access to specific systems in his factory. For example, a contractor working on the Finishing Line could be restricted to only seeing the Finishing Line PLCs.

Who Knows What Tomorrow’s Mobile Device Will Look Like?

Information technologies are changing constantly. Trying to manage them with proscriptive rules is a hopeless task, because we can never keep up. Instead we need to work from general principles.

—This article is printed with prior permission from infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

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m a n ag e m e n t

Technology 2013: The Script Unfolds

The market indicators highlight the need for solutions-oriented approach

By Narayana menon

M

ost technology has the shelf life of a banana.� Scott surveyed expect to invest in a private cloud owned and maintained McNealy. We have always been at a cross road by themselves on premises in 2013. On similar lines, 68 percent of in terms of technology. The advent of almost the respondents indicated that they would invest in private cloud anything as a service provides another dimenbut would have a service provider maintain it for them in-house. A modest 36 percent of the respondents indicated that they will invest sion in terms of choices in deploying IT. Amidst in public cloud computing within the next year. A spurt in cloud all these, as IT has matured as a critical business enabler, IT leaders deployments will follow as technology and standards evolve.Most in organisations shoulder responsibilities of positively contributing to the organisational growth through optimal CapEx/OpEx and Indian enterprises seem to have implemented the first phase of ROI, innovative resource deployment and utilization, tighter process their virtualisation strategy and are now looking to take it to the next controls and reporting mechanisms. IT heads act as headlights by level to facilitate business agility and efficiency along with cost savproviding actionable business intelligence and analytics. ing. It is also interesting to see a growing base of SMB In this context lies the need to cope with exponential customers deploying virtualisation in various forms data growth, particularly in the semi-structured and purely from a cost reduction perspective.The Indian IT unstructured realm. A planned data management stratservices market is forecast to reach $10.2 billion in 2013, egy includes effective Disaster Recovery (DR) Managewhich is a 12 percent increase over the previous year as ment (considering the criticality of business continuity per various industry analysts, indicating a clear growth of enterprises from a financial, regulatory and reputation perspective expected within the XaaS/hosted services purview. TCO, will have app at a time of increased outages owing to both man-made flexibility and SLA based pay-as-you-go pricing models as well as natural disasters). Strategic big data, mobility/ contribute to these technologies being looked at more stores by the BYOD solutions, cloud computing (personal and hybrid favourably – also indicative of the thinning gap between year 2017 clouds), XaaS (anything/everything as a service), mobile XaaS and the cloud models to form a more inclusive and smart device applications for the enterprise, effecmodel of service delivery. tively harnessing the power of social media and comprehensive, actionable BI & BA are now key and immediate tech prioriGrowing Indian Market ties, while integrated ecosystems, enterprise app stores, in-memory Gartner has recently raised its estimates for global information techcomputing and internet of things and appliance models would be nology spending this year to $3.7 trillion, representing a 4.2 percent viewed more strategically over the next five years. growth over 2012. They also estimate that IT spending in India is projected to total $71.5 billion in 2013, of which enterprise IT spending is estimated at $42.5 billion.

Emerging technologies It is also interesting to note that according to ABI Research, the A recent Gartner survey indicated that 48 percent of enterprises

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m a n ag e m e n t

N E X T H OR I Z O N S

global business continuity and data disaster recovery market will exceed $39 billion by 2015. Disaster Recovery has a high potential in India. Respondents to the Forrester Q2 2010 IT budget survey rated BC/DR as the number one priority for small and medium businesses and the second highest priority for enterprises.

Where are enterprises investing?

The industry predicts near double digit growth on spending around services, software and hardware (to include client devices). We see a clear indication of services led models being the flavour of the hour and this is where I feel most investments would be closely followed by the others. Products, processes and people form the corner stones on which successful organisations and consequently industries are built on. I would divide this in to twoviewpoints – the vendor perspective and the consumer perspective: From a vendor perspective, innovative products that offer flexibility and can easily integrate into complex existing environments would be the need of the hour. While providing superior standards and business edge, the technology needs also to have a clear road map in terms of adapting to the physical, virtual and cloud environments and catering to interoperability with incumbent technologies, at the same time allowing access via a variety of both old school and new age devices. Vendors will primarily invest in process clarity, in skilling human resource and in growing distribution networks to reach end customers.

From an end-customer perspective, choosing the right technologies to suit their business objectives and deploying best fit models of IT (cloud, XaaS, hosted etc) to facilitate the same along with data management and business continuity would be of prime importance. In terms of process – with multiple technologies coexisting in a typical IT environment, it is important to integrate and set an SLA driven model with clear metrics.

“Gartner has raised its estimates for IT spending to $3.7 trillion, representing a 4.2 percent growth over 2012”

SMBs: No longer behind

— Narayana Menon, Lead-Marketing, APAC & Middle East, Sanovi Technologies

According to advisory firm Zinnov, as against about 5,000 large enterprises there are over 10 million SMBs ready to consume IT. This represents a tremendous market potential. In my view, SMBs in India are uniquely placed as they have a wide choice with respect to the IT path they can embark on. They could choose to jump straight in to a XaaS model with minimal in-house investment, saving infrastructure, space, power and cooling requirements to name a few. Free of operational hassles in setting up and running their IT, SMBs are able to look at it with a more strategic approach to tie-in with their growth and business ambitions. As mentioned earlier, business continuity is emerging as a key focus area for SMBs and based on the business impact analysis they can opt for the most appropriate DR option. For instance, Sanovi Cloud DRM offering is the specific product offering that enables service providers to offer DR as a service. Sanovi’s cloud product enables service providers to scale and deploy DR offerings at the service level and values that are attractive to SMB customers for its subscription-based fee and associated SLA. Apart from business critical applications, data management, business continuity and appropriate analytics, SMBs would embrace XaaS in conjunction with or as a prelude to the Cloud, Mobility and BYOD solutions with fervour in the months to come.

Opportunity for the Channels Solutions Integrators and resellers are looking at Sanovi to provide the key differentiator for customers’ comprehensive DR strategy with DR management as the fulcrum. At Sanovi, partners are our growth engine, an integral part of our business strategy.

Today, 90 percent of our business is with and through our channel partners. True to our emphasis on partners, we have built an extensive channel network spanning across India, as well as parts of the Asia-Pac and Middle East regions. We at Sanovi, enable our partners to identify and fulfil new opportunities, creating a win-win situation for all involved.

The market indicators clearly highlight the need for solutions oriented approach with a services led option (XaaS) to choose from.

Partners should re-orient themselves to go to market as enablers of technology solutions rather than mere facilitators. Channels need to invest in developing service and solutioning capabilities around a combination of key pull and some strategic push technologies in the market as these in turn will work out to be profitable growth and revenue models for them.

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

cto forum 07 March 2013

47

VIEWPOINT Steve Duplessie | steve.duplessie@esg-global.com

image by xxxxxx

The New Measuring Stick Time To Legitimacy

twenty five years ago Netapp became the modern day bellwether of this metric — they acquired real paying customers at a clip heretofore unheard of. For the last 20+ years they maintained that bar.

Not anymore. Yesterday Nimble announced they reached 1000 customers in only 2.5 years. Not free software downloading customers paying SYSTEMS customers.

That is an astounding rate of success. There are others. Actifio has hundreds of customers in two years of GA. There are a bunch on the horizon that will break soon - Legible, Nutanix, Whiptail, Data Robotics (50,000+ units shipped or something crazy like that), etc., just to name a few. Five years ago it was unthinkable. A company simply couldn’t acquire a thousand real customers if it was in the systems business (where stuff costs a lot, and requires a real commitment from a customer to install, learn, and use a product) no matter what size VC investment it had.Why? Because the big guys controlled the market - and the information flow. God bless the internet

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cto forum 07 march 2013

and the social aspects of knowledge dissemination.

The barriers to “smart” are no longer controlled by big brother (except in China, of course) - so a little guy with a better mousetrap can bring their story to the masses - and IF that story resonates with a real life issue, customers will find you.

It’s awesome to watch. I think people take it for granted but they shouldn’t - it’s as big a sea change business/market wise as anything to hit the systems business in, well, forever. It forces the big guys to compete at a pace and level they have not had to deal with since they were the little guys. And they don’t like it much.

Why would they care about little Actifio stealing 250 customers when they have 250,000? Because an epidemic starts with 2. And their ability to contain and control as they could in the not too distant past is gone. So now not only is it near impossible to become a big giant company that becomes the market leader in a big giant market - it’s become just as hard to hold on to that position. For 50 years those who have been lucky/

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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

brilliant enough to claim a market have had the almost anointed right to maintain that status forever (even if their stuff sucks). No more.

This wave has just begun. Not only will the biggest have to contend with the other big guys to fight over share loss - they will soon have to pay very serious attention to “those on the cusp of global legitimacy” - who actually may end up a bigger threat to market supremacy than the traditional major players.

If getting to 1000 customers in just 2.5 years is the STARTING point, what happens in a few more years?

Remember when the US only worried about one big threat? The Russians!!! Protect against them and we’ll be safe! Throw that out the window. Now we have to protect against little packs of unrelated (seemingly) random threats/psychos. A whole different ball game.

This is kind of the business equivalent. Not that the little guys are terrorists, mind you - but they intend to steal the the money the market gives the big guys. Metaphorically it’s the same principle.

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