August013 thrifty love low res

LEADERSHIP

VOL/08 | ISSUE/10

BUSINESS

TECHNOLOGY

SANJEEV KUMAR, Group CIO, Adhunik Group, opted for a cloudbased HRMS instead of investing Rs 2.5 crore on ERP licenses.

TThrifty hri rift ftyy ft

Loving it Challenged by the slowdown, three ingenious CIOs won great business benefits with frugal IT budgets. Page 38

AUGUST 15, 2013 | `100.00 W WW.CIO.IN

VIEW FROM THE TOP Swarup Choudhury on Thomson Reuters’ digitization strategy.

HOSTING SUCCESS HDFC Life builds one of India’s largest HSD projects.

Page 52

Page 44

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> Executive summary

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Visit www.SEreply.com Key Code 50455y ©2013 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric and StruxureWare 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 • 998-1169566_IN

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello E D I TO R I A L

Trending Trouble Why are so many CIOs being driven by what is an agenda dictated and driven by business?

I’ve seen Indian CIOs and organizations reacting to changing economic realities in myriad ways—with some IT departments turning into profit-centers to others actually getting involved with new product development to even CIOs taking on roles beyond IT. I also believe though that this thrust toward the strategic and the bid to be an indistinguishable part of an organization’s DNA is limited to pockets of excellence and not a widespread phenomenon.

I guess that’s why a group of CIOs the other day were more than intrigued when I told them that CIO Research suggested that the IT leader role in many organizations had actually become less strategic over the past year. Interestingly, this trend is running concurrent to the role of IT and what it can achieve, being taken more seriously by managements.

Why is it that CIOs, at large, seem to be being driven by what is an agenda dictated and driven by business, where the IT department is required to hop to it and execute?

Is it that IT leaders have been listening to so many voices off late telling them to be more aligned to business needs and realities that they have forgotten that they are business executives as well and are responsible for taking a business goal and driving an enterprise IT strategy around it?

In the rush to roll out more and more projects in shorter and shorter time cycles is IT’s role seen as being more of a valued service provider and less as a key differentiator?

That last question worries me no end. Five years ago, joint research by CIO Magazine and IIM-Bangalore had indicated three possible paths to the evolution of the CIO role: • The role would continue to grow in stature till it assumed the role of an internal consultant; or, • If the role truly became strategic the organization would see it fit to pull in someone with a business background to head IT; or, • Lines of business would become so tech-savvy, that IT would lapse into executing tasks.

I wonder if that third nightmare vision is indeed coming true. What do you think?

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS FEATURES EDITOR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS

Vijay Ramachandran T.M. Arun Kumar Gunjan Trivedi Sunil Shah,Yogesh Gupta Shardha Subramanian Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Anup Varier, Debarati Roy, Sneha Jha, Varsha Chidambaram SENIOR CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao SENIOR COPY EDITORS Shreehari Paliath, Vinay Kumaar LEAD DESIGNERS Jinan K.V., Pradeep Gulur, Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor SENIOR DESIGNERS Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V. SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT SALES VICE PRESIDENT SPECIAL PROJECTS GM MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER SALES MANAGER-KEYACCOUNTS MANAGER MARKETING MANAGER-SALES SUPPORT SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES

MARKETING ASSOCIATE

LEAD DESIGNER SENIOR DESIGNER

Sudhir Kamath Sudhir Argula Parul Singh Siddharth Singh Jaideep M. Runjhun Kulshrestha, Sakshee Bagri Ajay Chakravarthy Nadira Hyder Anuradha H. Iyer, Archana Ganapathy, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil Arjun Punchappady, Cleanne Serrao, Lavneetha Kunjappa, Margarate D’costa, Nikita Oliver, Shwetha M. Jithesh C.C. Laaljith C.K.

O P E R AT I O N S VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS FINANCIAL CONTROLLER CIO SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION SR. MANAGER IT MANAGER OPERATIONS MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL SR. ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE

Rupesh Sreedharan Sivaramakrishnan T.P. Pavan Mehra Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Sasi Kumar V. T.K. Karunakaran Satish Apagundi Dinesh P., Tharuna Paul Prachi Gupta Poornima

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in 2

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027.

Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

VOL/8 | ISSUE/09

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contents AUGUST 15, 2013 | VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

Case Files 44 | HDFC Life HSD When HDFC Life realized its sales force could bring in more success with a productivity enhancer, it turned to HSD. Presenting the behind-thescenes story of one of the largest HSD implementations in the country.

By Eric Ernest

72 | Sterlite Technologies SECURITY CERTIFICATION Sterlite Technologies’ ISO 9001 certification gave its customers quality assurance, but the company needed a stamp of security. Enter ISO 27001.

By Debarati Roy

74 | Samvardhana Motherson Reflectec

3 8

VIRTUALIZATION When managing SMR’s datacenter resources was becoming cumbersome, and in turn, affecting uptime, the company’s CIO found a savior in virtualization.

By Eric Ernest

more »

COVER DESIGN BY VIKAS KAPOO R & UNNIKRISHN AN AV

38 | Thrifty and Loving It

5 2

COVER STORY | INNOVATION How three CIOs found three ingenious ways to achieve great business benefits with frugal IT budgets.

By Anup Varier and Shantheri Mallaya

56 | 12 Ways to Mess up an IT Project FEATURE | PROJECT MANAGEMENT Project management experts discuss sure-fire ways to delay or derail a project and— more importantly—how you can avoid these common project management pitfalls.

By Jennifer Lonoff

64 | The Great Talent Hunt FEATURE | STAFF MANAGEMENT Finding IT pros with business skills has always been a bear. So, leading CIOs are taking radical steps to train, recruit or grow the hybrid staff they covet.

By Kim S. Nash

4

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

VIEW FROM THE TOP: “Digitized news is what differentiates us.

We give our audience something to deliver value and be more productive,” says Swarup Choudhury, MD, Thomson Reuters.

VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

21 – 24 October Goa, India gartner.com/in/symposium

The World’s Most Important Gathering of CIOs and Senior IT Executives Early Bird: Register now using promotion code SYMAD2 to save INR 10,000*

Leading in a Digital World Gartner Symposium/ITxpo at a glance: • Four days • 800+ attendees with 200+ CIOs • Over 100 analyst-led sessions • Exclusive CIO Program • Five role-based tracks • 30+ Gartner analysts on-site • 40+ solution providers

* Early Bird Discount ends 23 August

JUST ANNOUNCED! Luminary Guest Keynote: Jamie Anderson

‘Management Guru’, Professor of Strategic Management at Antwerp Management School and the Lorange Institute of Business Zurich, and Visiting Professor at London Business School

JUST ANNOUNCED! Exclusive CIO Program Keynote: Harish Bijoor

Harish Bijoor is a Brand domain specialist. He has recently published a book titled, “Marketing Trends – Smart Insights into the world of Indian Business”. He has been teaching at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad for the past 8 years

DEPARTMENTS 2 | From the Editor-in-Chief Trending Trouble

By Vijay Ramachandran

9 | Trendlines Optics | Be Farsighted, Literally Technology | It’s a Very Touchy Topic Programming | English as a Programming Language Biology | Medical Miracle Online Shopping | An Infantile Purchase Space | Love Thy ET Neighbor Automobile | Driving under Absence Robotics | Cat-bot to the Rescue!

Alternative Energy | Google Gets Wind Power Research | Artificial, ok. Intelligent?

6 0

22 | Alert Security Culture | Security’s Seven Samurai Threats | Beware: Mobile Malware

75 | Essential Technology SDN | SDN Means Business Basics | 10 SDN Commandments

60 | Innovating Tyrelessly CXO AGENDA | SUPPLY CHAIN Dheeraj Sinha, Group Head-Corporate Management Services, Apollo Tyres, says IT has infused innovation into the company’s products and has helped it become one of the most advanced organizations in the tyre industry.

By Yogesh Gupta

Columns

52

27 | Evolve or Perish FRANKLY SPEAKING The proliferation of broadband technology has forced cable and DTH operators to face a Darwinian threat. Defeat is certain if they don’t up the ante before it’s too late.

88 | Endlines Genetics | DNA to Go

By Lauren Brousell

3 1

By T.M. Arun Kumar

29 | The Crux of UX LEADING EDGE User experience matters the most when it comes to the successful adoption of enterprise IT. It’s high time that it showed up on CIOs’ radars.

By Gunjan Trivedi

31 | The Mob Rules SOCIAL MEDIA So many of today's hottest products do crowdsourcing and get their value from the collective actions of users. Here’s why your company should, too.

By Mike Elgan

6

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

CIO Online

.in CIO ADVERTISER INDEX

Canon India

[ Edi tor's PICKS ]

14 & 15

Cyberoam Technologies

The Chosen Ones

EMC IT Solutions India

To read the most interesting, exciting, and fascinating stories of the day, check out our Editor's Picks. Read the latest features, surveys, and interviews on emerging technologies, challenges, and opportunities.

Gartner India Research &

[ CI O TV ]

3 33 to 37

Emerson Network Power India

19

Advisory Services

5+flap

HID Global Corporation

1

IBM India

10 & 11

Lenovo India

IBC

NetAppp India Marketing & Services 20 & 21 SAS Institute (India)

43

Schneider Electric India

IFC, 7 & 59

Trend Micro India

23

Vodafone South Ltd NLD - IN89

BC

Websense Software Services India

Video Library From case studies to peer-to-peer advice, and from new technology developments to international events, our videos cover everything that affects you.

To keep yourself abreast of the happenings in the IT world around you, watch our online videos. cio.in/videos

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17 & 25

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By the Numbers Our surveys are a treasure trove of technology, staffing, security trends and beyond.

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A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

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

VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

E D I T E D B Y V I N AY K U M A A R

NEW

*

HOT

*

UNEXPECTED

Be Farsighted, Literally Researchers at EFPL and the University of California, San Diego have developed a pair of zoom-switching contact lenses that will not only let you see as you normally do, but also let you magnify what you see by 2.8 times.

The trick behind these contacts is a two-part lens. The center is simply a clear element that allows light to pass through as it normally would. The outer edges of the lenses, however, are coated with patterned aluminum mirrors.

These mirrors reflect light that passes through the lens, bouncing it around the lens four times before it hits your retina.

Meanwhile, switching between normal and telescopic vision is done through a pair of Samsung liquid crystal switching 3D glasses. The center non-zooming part of the contact comes equipped with a polarizing filter, so switching between distance-viewing and regular vision is as simple as changing polarizing states on the glasses.

But the biggest breakthrough with these contacts is that they’re only 1.17 millimeters thick, so you can easily slip them onto your eyes. Previously, telescopic vision was only possible through telescopic glasses or by surgically implanting larger telescopic implants into your eye.

OPTICS

TRENDLINES

Technically, scientists developed these contacts to help restore sight to people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

AMD destroys the high-resolution central macula region of the eye’s cornea, which robs people of the ability to make out fine details like words on a smartphone.

If they work as designed, these telescopic lenses will redirect and magnify the light to the outer regions of your eyes, allowing you to see these details again. That said, the research could also be used to develop contacts that help people with healthy vision to see super far.

—By Kevin Lee

It’s a Very Touchy Topic

VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

has also been awarded a grant by Singapore’s National Research Council for the purpose of developing a viable prototype. “Our innovative system is able to transform surfaces such as wooden tables, aluminium, steel, glass and even plastics into low-cost touch screens,”

Khong says. For now, the system, made up of a series of sensors whose input is run through a computer chip to determine the location of the tap, can sense the location of a single tap. By adding cameras, the researchers believe they can add multi-touch capabilities.

Since the STATINA system uses the speed at which sound propagates through a given material to locate the tap, it’s unclear whether or not each sensor would need to be “tuned” for a given material, or whether it would work with multi-material objects, such as a canvas picture with a wooden frame.

IMAGES BY MAST ERF IL E.COM

T E C H N O L O G Y Researchers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore say they’ve found a way to turn ordinary objects into touchscreens, through vibration.

The STATINA (Speech Touch and Acoustic Tangible Interfaces for Nextgeneration Applications) technology is relatively simple: By implanting a number of vibration sensors onto walls or the surface of a flat-panel television, the system can “triangulate” the user’s touch or tap, essentially retrofitting a wall, TV, or other device into a touchscreen.

The team, led by NTU assistant professor Andy Khong, published its research in an IEEE journal. The team

—By Mark Hachman REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

9

English as a Programming Language

TRENDLINES

P R O G R A M M I N G Programmers often spend years in school learning how to program. Now, researchers say that they have come up with a way that may allow even the most inexperienced person to develop code.

Writing computer programs has always generally required using special-purpose languages like C++, FORTRAN, or Assembly language. In a pair of research papers, computer scientists at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) investigated if it’s possible to write programs using natural language—that is, the sort of language we speak or write with on a daily basis. As it turns out, it might be—for some things, anyway.

In order to demonstrate this, the researchers created a system to train a computer how to convert naturallanguage descriptions into regular expressions—a pattern or sequence that is assigned to a string of data (letters, variables, etc. written in a certain manner) so that the program can interpret exactly what it is trying to say. This makes it so the system doesn’t get confused when you say “Let’s eat Grandpa,” but really meant, “Let’s eat, Grandpa”. Regular expressions can make file searches more flexible than a normal search function in desktop software.

The researchers gave the system text specifications for different file formats. The text specifications were written in natural language and the system automatically learned how to interpret the text and convert it into programming jargon so that the computer could properly read the data in the different file formats. For instance, when given the naturallanguage text description ”three letter word starting with ‘X’,” the system returns the regular expression “\ bX[A-Za-z]{2}\b.” As demonstrated in both papers, this system is able to interpret much longer and more complicated text specifications and convert them into regular expressions.

While the above example may not look like much of anything to the casual observer, this system creates what computer scientists call input parsing programs, which help the software understand the exact meaning of a sentence or expression. The above example, “\bX[A-Za-z] {2}\b,” is the exact definition in the computing world of a “three letter word starting with ‘X’ and when that is put into a search it will return only exactly that. Natural-language programming may not yet help the non-programmer to suddenly become an expert coder, and though currently limited in what it can do, it is definitely a start. In time, as the field of computing linguistics grows, it may be possible to write entire software using your mother tongue.

— By James Mulroy

12

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

Medical Miracle

B I O L O G Y The thoughts of re-growing limbs or even healing instantly is just crazy talk, unless you’re either Wolverine or that cheerleader girl from Heroes. Now, a new study led by NYU’s stem cell biologist Dr. Mayumi Ito has discovered the key to re-growing tissue and bone could have been underneath our fingernails all this time.

The study looked into the curious case of Deepa Kulkarni, who lost part of her finger in an unfortunate door-slamming incident but was able to re-grow the tip of her finger, thanks to a seemingly magic powder made of ground-up pig bladders—MatriStem.

Scientists long theorized that the MatriStem acted as cellular scaffolding that attracted stem cells from the bone marrow or the small bit of the nail that Kulkarni retained on her partially severed finger.

Dr. Ito’s study confirmed the fingernail theory when she discovered a new group of stem cells in our fingernails called Wnts (pronounced “wints”). If you’ve ever wondered why your nails never stop growing, it’s because there’s a network of self-renewing stem cells in the nail matrix called the Wnt signaling network. These Wnts don’t just promote the growth of fingernails, but also flesh and even bone.

The NYU Langone Medical Center scientists confirmed her findings by replicating the same finger-clipping scenario with mice. Amazingly, the scientists also rerouted the Wnt pathways to other areas of the body to stimulate the regeneration of bone and tissue beyond the fingertip.

“Amputations of this magnitude ordinarily do not grow back,” said Dr. Mayumi in a release.

The implications of this research could be huge.

Potentially this discovery could help the millions of amputees across the world.

The team’s next step is to explore the molecular mechanisms that control how the Wnt signaling pathway interacts with the nail stem cells to influence bone and nail growth.

—By Kevin Lee

VO L/8 | ISSUE/10

An Infantile Purchase Paul Stoute’s 14-month-old daughter accidentally purchased a car when she was playing with her dad’s iPhone.

Stoute says that his iPhone was logged into the eBay app when his daughter Sorella started playing with it, and managed to buy a classic 1962 Austin Healy Sprite for $202 (about Rs 11,920). Thankfully, the old car is in desperate need for some TLC, hence the small price tag.

Stoute says that he first discovered that he had purchased the car, dubbed ‘Frankensprite’ thanks to its hodge-podge of parts, when he received an email from eBay confirming his order.

Stoute eventually decided to keep the car, which he plans to fix up for his daughter’s 16th birthday.

This latest incident is one of many over the past year that have seen parents faced with huge bills after their children got their hands on their iOS devices.

In March, a five-year-old racked up a £1,700 (about Rs 1.55 lakh) bill by downloading in-app purchases on a free-to-play iPad game; a father accused his teenage son of fraud for a £3,700 (about Rs 3.37 lakh) iPad bill; and an eight-year-old spent £1,000 (about Rs 91,000) while playing a Simpsons game.

In an effort to prevent such incidences from occurring in the future, Apple has highlighted the Parents’ Guide to iTunes in the App Store.

ONLINE SHOPPING

C O N S U M E R I Z A T I O N Whether you like it or not, BYOD is here to stay. Here are the top reasons employees bring personal devices to work.

Clients contact me via my personal phone 41% It has more functions 39% I get more done

37%

My work is mobile in nature

35%

I am more used to the software

28%

I feel more engaged

26%

I feel less stressed

23%

Source: VMware

VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

IMAGE COURT ESY: ESO.O RG

Being BYOD

S P A C E Scientists have discovered a solar system with three super-Earths that could possibly hold liquid water, meaning they have the ability to support life.

The three potentially habitable planets are part of a system of at least six planets that orbit a star known as Gliese 667C, which is 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius or The Scorpion. Gliese 667C, which is just over one-third of the mass of the sun, is part of a triple-star system known as Gliese 667 or GJ 667.

A group of astronomers working with the European Southern Observatory examined data from the 3.6-meter HARPS telescope in Chile. This system is the first they have found that has a “fully packed” habitable zone.

“The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star,” said Rory Barnes, a scientist in astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle, who took part in the research. “Instead of looking at 10 stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them.”

The three potentially habitable planets orbiting Gliese 667C are confirmed to be super-Earths—planets that are more massive than Earth, but less massive than the planets Uranus or Neptune. All three are within their star’s habitable zone, a relatively small area around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system.

Scientists from around the world, including those at NASA, have scanned the heavens for other habitable planets to try to answer the question: Are we alone in the universe?

In April, NASA reported that its Kepler Space Telescope found two planets that are perfectly sized and positioned to potentially hold life. NASA scientists did not say they had discovered life on the newfound planets, which are about 1,200 light years away. However, they said they’re one step closer to finding a world similar to Earth that orbits a star like our sun.

The Kepler telescope last fall wrapped up its prime mission of searching the galaxy for Earth-like planets, meaning small, rocky planets orbiting sun-like stars. NASA decided to extend the telescope’s search for Earth-like planets for another four years.

—By Sharon Gaudin

TRENDLINES

—By Ashleigh Allsopp

Love Thy ET Neighbor

13

CANON MDS: SAFE, SECURE

SUPERIOR Subroto Panda, CIO, Anand & Anand, says the agility, flexibility, and service support provided by Canon’s MDS solution helped the law firm safeguard the privacy and confidentiality of its clients’ legal documents.

What are some of the challenges faced by legal firms in India and your company in particular?

Some of the challenges that we face are: Matter management, information life cycle management, time and billing (timesheet), records management, enterprise content management, knowledge management, communication technologies, and desktop and application services.

The biggest challenge is to spread awareness about the benefi ts of a technology and the need to innovate and engage through the usage of cutting edge technology.

The business needs to realize that its processes need to be re-engineered for efficiency. Introducing new cutting-edge technology without the buy-in of users would result in a total failure—no matter how good the tech-

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP CANON

nology may be. While it is important to bring in new technology to the business, the change management and user acceptance angle should not be overlooked.

rency, even though there are incidents of forgery and counterfeiting.

Therefore, we will have to wait till we have a viable and sustainable alternative in place.

Given that security, privacy and confidentiality are key concerns for your organization, how did Canon help address this most important aspect through MDS? The conventional practice of law consists of negotiation, mediation, and resolution. But in modern times, and mostly in the common law countries, the nature of justice dispensing machinery is adversarial that is the one who alleges must prove his claim. Therefore, there is a pressing need to have greater control over physical documents because leakage of crucial evidence can be devastating for a case strategy and the client’s interest.

This results in vigorous guarding of documents and records by the parties. Any compromise with the sanctity and secrecy may affect the outcome of a case. In order to combat this threat, authentication, validation, and notarization of physical documents and red-tapism became the norm in many common law countries. Also, as creating a fool-proof record management system, fighting forgery and cheating, and having multiple entries at multiple points for recording data became standard practices, this, in turn, led to an excessively paper-driven court system.

For people involved in providing legal services, there is no escape from the absolute liability for breach of confi dentiality and client interest. Hence, there are systems, checks and safeguards in place to avoid any compromise with established standards of good practice.

The Bar Council of India puts an onus and considers it the lawyer’s duty to safeguard the client’s confi dentiality and always to act in the best interest of the client which means providing optimum security to key client document and privacy.

Moreover, the world’s economy is still dominated by paper cur-

Were there other options you considered? Why did you choose Canon’s MDS solution?

We considered and shortlisted some leading industry solution providers. However, as per our inhouse benchmarking criteria Canon MDS stood apart. Some features that make up the USP of Canon MDS are its ease of use, minimal dependence on manpower, and a self-adjusting and dynamic autooptimization. Among other features that we really liked about Canon MDS were its agility, printing capability, support services, technology up-gradation, standby options, and that it is hardware-agnostic.

“Ease of use, agility, printing capability, support services, and the fact that it is hardware-agnostic are the USPs of Canon MDS.

Canon allows us to meet our growing printing needs in a costeffective way.”

Did you have any apprehensions before deploying Canon’s solution and how were these overcome?

Initially there were some concerns about the fi xed cost and predicting the ROI post-implementation.

But now users continue to be impressed with the performance, reliability and ease of use of Canon’s MFDs. Our IT team views Canon as a true partner, which is willing to work with us to address our printing needs and ensure that printing services are available 24 hours a day. Most importantly Canon allows us to meet the growing printing needs in a cost effective and sustainable way.

How efficiently was Canon’s MDS implementation carried out?

Implementation was prompt with a centralized control at Canon and we had a fair idea about the progress being made on a daily basis.

Due to our familiarity and an extended usage history with Canon solutions, our IT team had very few glitches and the learning curve wasn’t very steep for the members of our firm.

Subroto Panda CIO, Anand & Anand

Driving under Absence The UK government plans to unleash driverless cars on UK roads by the end of 2013.

A team of researchers from Oxford University and Nissan UK will test a driverless Nissan Leaf on public roads, after successfully completing trials around Oxford Science Park.

The move is part of the Department of Transport’s new £28 billion (about Rs 2.55 lakh crore) road investment and strategy scheme announced recently.

The report claims autonomous vehicles are capable of driving on their own “using knowledge of the environment in which they are driving”.

The report also states: “Systems are now starting to emerge linking technologies such as lane keep assist, advanced intelligent cruise control and advanced emergency braking. These technologies allow a vehicle to travel along major roads, maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle in front at a set speed and without deviating from their lane - all without the driver’s input.”

The vehicles are guided by a system of sensors and cameras and hold the potential to be safer and more efficient than regular vehicles. As a precaution, a back-up driver will be in the driverless vehicle at all times and ready to intervene in case of an accident.

TRENDLINES

AU TO M O B I L E

Until now, it has only been possible to test autonomous cars in the UK on private land.

Google is involved in a similar project in the US where it has equipped a fleet of Toyota Prius cars with autonomous technology.

“I think the self-driving car can really dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin when the California driverless car bill was signed. He added that he thought the vehicles would be commercially available before 2020.

However, at present, each Google vehicle is thought to cost approximately £100,000 (about Rs 91 lakh), with half of that money being spent on a high-quality laser range finder.

Meanwhile, the Oxford team claims that its prototype navigation system costs less than £5,000 (about Rs 4.55 lakh).

“We use the mathematics of probability and estimation to allow computers in robots to interpret data from sensors like cameras, radars and lasers, aerial photos and on-the-fly internet queries,” reads the academic group’s website.

— By Samuel Shead

Cat-bot to the Rescue!

R O B O T I C S Swiss scientists have created a cat-like robot with the stability and agility to one day be used in search-andrescue missions.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne created what they have dubbed the “cheetah-cub robot,” a light-weight quadruped prototype about the size of a house cat. The robot is able to run nearly seven times its body length in one second.

As agile as a live cat? Well, not yet.

However, scientists say the robot still has solid autostabilization characteristics when running at full speed or over a course that included small steps.

The robot’s strengths all lie in its cat-like legs.

Researchers built the robot’s legs to mimic cats’ legs—with three similarly proportioned segments on each leg. Springs were used to replicate the cat’s tendons, while small motors replicate the feline muscles.

“This morphology gives the robot the mechanical properties from which cats benefit, that’s to say a marked running

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ability and elasticity in the right spots, to ensure stability,” says Alexander Sprowitz, a scientist on the team. “The robot is thus naturally more autonomous.”

By making the cheetah-cub robot more stable and agile than traditional robots, it would be more able to climb over rubble and debris left by earthquakes or tornadoes.

Search-and-rescue teams could use the robots to get inside collapsed buildings or devastated areas to look for survivors.

It’s fairly common for scientists to base robotic designs on living creatures.

For instance, last summer, Harvard University researchers, inspired by starfish and squid, developed squishy robots that can change color. Working with DARPA, the scientists also are working on making the soft robot able to change its temperature, enabling it to evade heat vision.

In June 2012, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced that they were striving to make robots more agile and maneuverable by studying the way cockroaches seemingly disappear.

—By Sharon Gaudin

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP WEBSENSE

CASE STUDY

SHIELDING YOUR ENTERPRISE:

THE MAGIC OF TRITON Faced with the potential leak of sensitive data and increased malware from the Web, Hexaware realized it needed a unified security solution.

That’s when it turned to Websense.

I

N an economy as tough as today’s, Hexaware Technologies, reported an increase in net profit of 23 percent.

For a company doing this well, the ability to secure itself given the current threat landscape is paramount.

This requirement in Hexaware’s case is all the more pronounced because the company processes sensitive client information.

“Security Incidents, if any, will directly hit our reputation and our relationship with clients. As a proactive measure to enhance the security posture of the organization, we have implemented a Data Leak Prevention (DLP) solution using Websense, says N. Nataraj, CIO, Hexaware.

Out in the Open Nataraj cites business need as the driver behind the move to implementing an automated security solution.

In the absence of preventive controls there is always a possibility of sending sensitive information to the outside world. In response to such potential threats, Hexaware turned to a DLP solution to save the day.

DLP rules based on business needs were configured through Websense.

“The solution helped us monitor the granular level control lapses. For example, we have configured the product with a detailed control list which helps us permit or block the traffic to Web-mail,” he says.

Also, Hexaware has been using the Websense Web Security Gateway for over four years. It has helped the company achieve a flexible Internet access policy for users while ensur-

ing the highest level of security from Web-based threats.

With the onset of hybrid traditional threats and APTs and they being data-centric, Hexaware had to protect its information asset from data leaks over Web, e-mail, and end point channels. Hexaware believed in a unified security architecture and implemented the same with the help of Websense’s Triton Enterprise.

“Websense’s solution has prevented data leaks, ensured customer satisfaction, and increased new business opportunities.”

Benefits Galore “Preventing data leakage and security incidents, process improvement, ensuring customer satisfaction, and increasing new business opportunities are some of the benefits that were enabled through Websense’s DLP solution,” says Nataraj.

Earlier, uploading documents onto the Internet was blocked—although it was possible to send attachments through a user’s official e-mail ID. But with the new system in place, a white-list of e-mail domain accounts was created to allow legitimate data transfer to certain domains and the blocking of all others.

Nataraj states that along with the DLP integration, Hexaware was able to block even unintentional data leaks that are usually unknown to the user.

In fact, Nataraj says, a lot of security awareness has been created among the employees as this solution directly or indirectly impacts them.

By implementing DLP, Hexaware has started monitoring the data transmitted through HTTP, SMTP, FTP and alerting the exceptions. The solution has given confidence to the customers, which has

N. NATARAJ, CIO, Hexaware enabled business growth. Also, this expertise of implementation has enhanced the capability of the security consulting team of Hexaware.

Nataraj says as CIO of the company, he has to be always alert and that it’s his responsibility to enhance the security posture continuously to avert potential and new threats. The security implementation is a journey and DLP solution is one aspect of it.

This feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

COMPILED BY ARITRA SARKHEL

Best Practices

Insecure about Security

TRENDLINES

The threat ecosystem is rapidly evolving and organizations need to re-assess their current security capabilities and enhance their next-gen security portfolio.

T

The current set of security capabilities that organizations in India have implemented to guard themselves against potential security threats isn’t ready for the next wave of the threats, according to a joint study by Cisco and Data Security Council of India (DSCI).

A full 56 percent of respondents to the study—titled Reinventing the Network in the Context of Security—say that current security solutions are inefficient in managing threats related to mobile security, BYOD and virtualization.

Another 43 percent point out that existing security solutions meant to detect vulnerabilities and block attacks are insufficient. And 53 percent pointed to the feeble strength of existing security solutions to withstand sophisticated, targeted and persistent threats.

At the same time, respondents believe that threats have become more sophisticated and organized with 79 percent of respondents saying they are worried about targeted attacks. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said that targeted attacks are arising from multiple channels and 71 percent said attack payloads are becoming more advanced.

From a mobility perspective, the top concerns of IT leaders are malware and threat protection (86 percent); security scanning and quarantine of non-standard devices (83 percent); and enforcing network policy on mobile devices (83 percent).

1

RE-ASSESS your current security capabilities, the first step is figuring out if you have a problem.

2

TAKE a holistic stance to your enterprise’s security challenges.

3

INVEST in next-gen solutions to counter ever-evolving threats.

4

CREATE a consistent approach to respond to threats, whether they are physical or virtual.

Ensure that managing security policies is easy.

5

ENCRYPT data before it is transmitted to other sources.

Concerns with Existing Capabilities Current Set of Security Solutions Ineffective for managing security of mobile, BYOD, and virtualization 56% Cannot withstand sophisticated, targeted and persistent threats

53 %

Cannot integrate external and internal intelligence

53%

Cannot enforce policies at application layers

43%

77% Of organizations face attacks from multiple channels.

SOURCE: DSCI-CISCO SURVEY

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INDIA INNOVATING

NetApp-Netmagic:

Partnering to Boost Business Nitin Mishra, Senior Vice PresidentProduct Management, Netmagic Solutions, says NetApp’s expertise in storage and its product portfolio is helping Netmagic serve its cloud customers better and provide them with a holistic experience.

How are solutions from NetApp helping you better your offerings?

The good part is NetApp has its own standardized framework for cloud services architecture, which helps us to confidently roll out our services and go to market through that. When we know that NetApp is part of a standard architecture that is tested with other vendor components, it makes it easier for us to set benchmarks for committing uptime and performance SLAs to customers.

Second, NetApp allows flexibility in pricing. For example, NetApp is always open to ideas and understands when we don’t want to invest upfront and that we can pay them as our data grows. Also, when we jointly pitch services to endcustomers with NetApp, it creates value for the customers.

In addition, we cross-leverage each other’s strengths. For example, Netmagic has always been strong in the Internetenabled business space, and NetApp has traditionally been good in the large enterprise segment. So, that gives us plenty of opportunities for cross-leverage.

We cross-leverage each other’s strengths.

Netmagic is strong in the Internet-enabled business space, and NetApp is good in the

large enterprise segment. So, that gives us plenty of opportunities for cross-leverage.”

How does NetApp’s single OS for the entire clustered storage improve the agility of your datacenters?

From a NetApp-Netmagic perspective, it does help to have a single OS for storage platforms as it helps us manage and standardize our service provider offerings. Besides, we can also leverage our skills, and have more in-depth focus on a single platform from a development and support perspective.

How would you describe your relationship with NetApp? We have been working closely with partners like NetApp from a technology perspective, and share our product roadmap in advance with them. For instance, a company like NetApp is an integral part of our public cloud service portfolio. We do the solution architecting and ensure

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP NETAPP

Data Management for Dynamic Enterprises Though SDS has been around for a while, data explosion and the need for consistent user experience have now brought it to the forefront. Here’s how it can aid businesses by making data management efficient.

In spite of being a fairly familiar concept, why is software-defined storage (SDS) now emerging as one of the critical components?

The two IT components that businesses mainly focus on are the data stored and the business logic that transforms the data into actionable information. As data is increasingly the lifeblood of all enterprise operations, data management and services are in sharp focus.

Simultaneously, the explosion in the quantity of unstructured data and the need for consistent customer experience across devices call for increasing intelligence in the data management and services layer.

Besides, heterogeneity in the datacenter and the rapid virtualization of compute infrastructure demand a shift in the way data is managed. SDS, with its promise of policy-driven, automated, and virtualized management of all data, is therefore on CIOs’ radar.

In your opinion, what value does SDS bring to enterprises?

IT operations, and in fact, enterprises in general, are being overwhelmed by the deluge of data being created and consumed. It is a challenge just to store data, back it up, replicate it, and serve it reliably and with acceptable performance to applications

we are in sync with our partners and their respective technology roadmaps.

NetApp is also proactively engaged with us in creating new services and also helping us benchmark these services against some of the international service providers.

Public cloud growth in India is quite steady. How does this impact storage?

Most of the IT infrastructure resources are available on the cloud today. We are in fact now close to the launch of a solution that can commit IOPS on storage in the cloud.

With this, we can with greater conviction tell customers that public cloud infrastructure can deliver the same level of performance that a dedicated physical environment can.

Enterprises will then definitely buy into the business sense in opting for a predictable

and users. The problems are largely to do with siloed approaches to data storage, multiple administrative requirements for different silos, inability to scale flexibly across them or to apply architecture-wide metrics around quality of service. SDS allows us to abstract storage from different sources into a single entity comprising pools of different characteristics which can then be allocated dynamically to applications. The resulting simplicity, flexibility and responsiveness liberate IT and data architects from mundane tasks, allowing them to think and act strategically.

Santhosh D’Souza Director-Technology NetApp India opex investment model in public cloud infrastructure for their IT. The good part is that a lot of education is happening through various OEMs and SIs, who are already positioning the cloud well.

Analysts believe that IT services are driven by the rising adoption of SMAC. What’s your strategy?

That’s great. Delivery and management of SMAC applications and solutions will be out of datacenters. The only challenge that we foresee will possibly be the cannibalization of revenue from our traditional businesses, which we believe would get balanced out in the mid and long-term. In a market like India, enterprises are still warming up to the whole concept of outsourcing their IT infrastructure and its benefi ts. Interestingly, recent studies clearly show that

Are Indian enterprises receptive to the idea of software-defined datacenter (SDDC)? What do the discussions with CIOs indicate?

Indian enterprises have been quite enthusiastic about the outcomes that SDDC and SDS promise. Several enterprises have embarked on virtualizing their compute and desktop infrastructure. Quite a few of them have also launched private cloud initiatives—either enterprise-wide or for specific projects. Finally, some have also ventured to use public cloud services. As these actions begin to pay off, CIOs would be interested in abstraction layers, multi-tenancy, and automation across storage, networking, security, and other hardware elements.

investments in building captive datacenters will slow down, triggering the capacity to move to third-party service providers. A sizeable piece of this movement from captive to third-party datacenters will also be driven by the adoption of cloud computing.

Overall, these are positive developments since the average revenue per square feet from our datacenters will increase while we also broaden the portfolio of our services.

Specifically, on the cloud, this is the third year that we are seeing over 100 percent growth in public cloud service revenues.

With 3G being rolled out completely and the launch of 4G, mobility-enabled applications and their usage will proliferate and there will be an increasing need for quality datacenters to service this demand.

alert

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

Security’s Seven Samurai W freedom, larger budgets, and support from other departments. Anyone responsible for running a security awareness program should first at least attempt to obtain strong support, before focusing on anything else.

Yes, getting this level of support can be difficult, but our research also found best practices on how to obtain this support.

Successful efforts frequently highlighted that security awareness was required for compliance and that awareness efforts provided a return on investment that will inevitably save the company money. They also created special materials such as newsletters specifically for uppermanagement, and short articles that highlighted relevant news and tips for executives.

IMAGES BY PHOTOS.COM

hen we were asked to keynote a recent CSO event, it was a pleasant surprise that the top concern of the CSOs was “security culture”.

From performing many security assessments and penetration tests, it is sadly obvious that even the best technical security efforts will fail if the company has a weak security culture. It is heartwarming that CSOs are now moving past straight technological solutions and moving towards instilling a strong security culture as well.

While there are many more lessons to be learned, the following are the seven most notable habits, which we believe will lead to successful security awareness programs.

1. C-Level Support Awareness programs that obtain C-level support are more successful.

This support inevitably leads to more

FINDINGS

In Your Arsenal

2. Partnering with Key Departments

Successful awareness programs found a way to involve other departments such as legal, compliance, HR, marketing, privacy, and physical security.

While it is easier to get this support if you have the C-level support, these departments frequently have mutual interests and might be amenable to providing additional resources such as funding or distribution.

Frequently, these departments can make security awareness efforts mandatory. For example, the legal and compliance departments carry a great deal of influence throughout the organization and can make security awareness a required component of other processes.

Advanced threats require advanced security measures and tools.

Here are the different tools global organizations have deployed to protect their IT infrastructure.

IT Safeguards Currently in Place

71%

Malicious code detection tools Intrusion detection tools Discovery of unauthorized devices Vulnerability scanning tools Vulnerability alerting services

53% 47% 46% 41%

12%

The percentage decline in the number of organizations using malicious code detection tools for spyware and adware SOURCE: PwC

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alert

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

3. Creativity Creativity is a must. While a large budget does help, companies with a small security awareness budget have been able to establish successful programs as well.

Creativity and enthusiasm can make up for a small budget. An example of creativity includes the use of a security cube during a company event. The security awareness department set up a mock cubicle with 10 common security violations in the main hallway. Employees who could identify all 10 violations were entered in a prize drawing. Another effort was giving out boxes of chocolates, which also included the security policy document, on Valentine’s Day. Employees reported that they felt compelled to read the document, because they liked the chocolate. These are just examples, but clearly there are unlimited options.

related incidents, such as attempted visits to banned websites. When you can show measurable improvements in any aspect of security, you can justify your program, and obtain additional funding and support. Just about every department in a company has to prove its value, and security should not expect to be an exception.

5. Department of ‘How’

4. Metrics

Awareness efforts that focus on how to accomplish actions are more successful than those that focus on telling people that they should not be doing things.

Clearly, there are actions that should not be allowed, but those should be the exceptions and not the rule. For example, it is not realistic that you can tell employees that they should not be on social networks, but it would be useful to them if you tell them how they can be on social networks safely.

One of the key factors in having a successful effort is being able to prove that your effort is successful. The only way to do this is to collect metrics prior to initiating new awareness efforts.

The metrics can include surveys on attitudes. They could also include the use of phishing simulation tools to include pre- and post-awareness training. You can also examine the number of security-

Most security awareness programs follow a one-year plan. Those plans also attempt to cover one topic a month. This is ineffective, as it does not reinforce knowledge, and does not allow for feedback or to account for ongoing events.

Programs that rely on 90-day plans, and include re-evaluation of goals every

6. 90-day Plans

90 days are the most effective. The most successful program focuses on three topics that are reinforced regularly throughout the 90 days. Every 90 days, the program is re-evaluated to determine what topics need to be addressed moving forward.

7. Multi-modal Awareness Materials The most successful programs are not only creative; they rely on many forms of awareness materials. While there is a potential place for learning management system training modules, too many programs rely on them completely as an awareness program. Successful programs incorporate a variety of awareness tools.

This includes newsletters, posters, games, newsfeeds, blogs, and phishing simulation etcetera. The most participative efforts appear to have the most success.

Another issue to consider is that materials should attempt to connect with different generations. For example, some videos seem to connect best to young males. You then need to use other videos or materials that connect with older employees and females. There is definitely no such thing as “One Size” security awareness. CIO Ira Winkler and Samantha Manke are contributing writers. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

[ON SECURITY VULNERABILITIES OF ATMS IN AN INTERVIEW VIEW TO CNN]]

“This is the first time anyone had actually looked at the underlying software in ATMs. And once I sort of dug in, ripped the software apart, I was really surprised at the amount of flaws that are hiding underneath there. I am not naive enough to think I am the only one who can do it.”

—BARNABY JACK, NOTED WHITE HAT HACKER WHO HO DIED ON JULY 27

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP WEBSENSE

CASE STUDY

MULTIPLE THREATS, ONE UNIFIED

SECURITY SOLUTION

Facing sensitive data leakage, Web security threats, and severe Internet usage violations, iGATE needed a comprehensive security solution.

Websense’s hybrid security solution came to its rescue.

S

ecur it y is p ar amount to any organization—more so when the organization in question has around 28,000 employees working across the world, who can knowingly or unknowingly open up avenues for security threats to creep into the IT infrastructure. That’s exactly the situation iGATE found itself in.

The Pandora’s Box of Threats An increasing number of users accessing corporate assets while on the move, instances of systems being infected by viruses, and inappropriate browsing habits of employees posed serious hazards to iGATE’s security landscape. That’s when M. Chella Namasivayam, CIO, iGATE, realized it was high time the company had a powerful security solution.

“We had multiple incidents where employees posted critical data to third-party

With Websense’s unified security solution, the number of data leaks and Web threats have come down by almost 90 percent.”

websites,” says Namasivayam. The solution he had in mind had to be one that could block security risks, thus reducing exposure of security breaches as well as helping create a centralized policy management to reduce instances of non-compliance.

Panacea for Protection That powerful solution which Namasivayam was looking for came in the form of Websense’s hybrid security solution—a combination of the Websense Secure Web Gateway, Websense Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and Websense Web Endpoint solutions.

“The hybrid solution from Websense provides content filtering for the Web. It also enforces our Internet usage policy in the cloud and shields corporate and roaming users from malware, spoof, viruses, spyware, and other modern threats. It also allows us to enforce our organization’s Internet usage policy from any device,” says Vijay Gurumurthy, associate director-IT, iGATE. The solution also enables centralized policy management. Additionally, a report reporting server was configured to consolidate all Internet access logs for reporting and forensic reasons. “The centralized manager is installed in Mumbai, and DLP analyzers have been installed in all locations that have a proxy. The Websense DLP plugin redirects all Web traffic to the DLP analyzer for detec detection of data leaks,” says Gurumurthy.

Fairy Tale Ending

M. CHELLA NAMASIVAYAM, CIO, iGATE

Websense’s hybrid security solution has ensured iGATE is protected against modern threats from various fronts. With Web Websense’s Secure Web Gateway solution, iGATE has been able to comprehensively en enforce Internet usage policies. “The real-time scanning and categorization capabilities of

Benefits of Websense’s Hybrid Security Solution Centralized policy management Real-time scanning of Web content End-point security Bandwidth optimization Data loss prevention the solution also enable us to give our employees access to social networking and other Web 2.0 content without compromising on security or legal liability risks,” says Namasivayam.

On the other hand, the Websense Web Endpoint for roaming users has helped iGATE enforce usage policies on devices provided by the company, even when the user accesses the Internet outside the enterprise network. In addition, the DLP solution allows iGATE to monitor and prevent sensitive information from getting leaked over the Web. Thanks to Websense’s central policy management, iGATE has successfully optimized bandwidth by reducing content downloads not related to business. With Internet usage strictly in line with the organizational policy, and all corporate and roaming users strongly protected from security threats, Websense’s hybrid solution is, as Namasivayam puts it, “The best fit for iGATE’s business needs.”

This feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

alert

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

Beware: Mobile Malware

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to $28 (about Rs 1,650) since each one can tell a consumer’s device to send or receive up to seven messages from a premium rate SMS number.

Seventy-three percent of all known malware involves Fake Installers, according to the report.

“These threats trick people into sending SMS messages to premiumrate numbers set up by attackers,” the report states. “Based on research by the MTC, each successful attack instance can yield approximately $10 (about Rs 590) in immediate profit. The MTC also found that more sophisticated attackers are developing intricate botnets and targeted attacks capable of disrupting and accessing high-value data on corporate networks.”

This Too Shall Pass

T

he number of mobile malware apps has jumped 614 percent in the last year, according to studies conducted by McAfee and Juniper Networks.

The Juniper study—its third annual Mobile Threats Report—showed that the majority of attacks are directed at Android devices, as the Android market continues to grow. Malware aimed specifically at Android devices has increased at a staggering rate since 2010, growing from 24 percent of all mobile malware that year to 92 percent

by March 2013.

According to data from Juniper’s Mobile Threat Center (MTC) research facility, the number of malicious mobile apps jumped 614 percent in the last year to 276,259, which demonstrates “an exponentially higher cyber criminal interest in exploiting mobile devices.”

“Malware writers are increasingly behaving like profit-motivated businesses when designing new attacks and malware distribution strategies,” Juniper says. “Attackers are maximizing their return on investment by focusing 92 percent of all MTC detected threats at Android, which has a commanding share of the global smartphone market.”

In addition to malicious apps, Juniper Networks found several legitimate free applications that could allow corporate data to leak out. The study found that free mobile apps sampled by the MTC are three times more likely to track location and 2.5 times more likely to access user address books than their paid counterparts. Free applications requesting/gaining access to account information nearly doubled from 5.9 percent in October 2012 to 10.5 percent in May 2013.

McAfee’s study found that a type of SMS malware known as a Fake Installer can be used to charge a typical premium rate of $4 (about Rs 250) per message once installed on a mobile device. A “free” Fake Installer app can cost up

Juniper’s report identified more than 500 third-party Android application stores worldwide, most with very low levels of accountability or oversight, that are known to host mobile malware—preying on unsuspecting mobile users as well as those with jail-broken iOS mobile devices. Of the malicious third-party stores identified by the MTC, 60 percent originate from either China or Russia.

According to market research firm ComScore, Android now has a 52.4 percent market share worldwide, up 0.7 percent from February. As Samsung has been taking market share from Apple, Android use is expected to continue to grow, according to ComScore. CIO Lucas Mearian writes for ComputerWorld. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

Passwords are a thing of the past and they need to go, according to a group of Silicon Valley-based tech companies who will launch a public advocacy campaign called “Petition Against Passwords” next week.

Passwords are the keys that enable access. At the same time, they’re also the weak link that smashes the security chain, according to many experts, who for years have warned that passwords simply don’t work as they used to, and that password protection alone isn’t enough.

The problem with passwords is two-fold, according to the advocacy group, which aims to influence large digital service providers to move towards “passwordless” authentication and identity protection. On one hand, users either create easily remembered passwords that are entirely too weak or they are forced to pick passwords that are hard to remember, but quickly cracked by machines. The other side to that is a lack of password policy enforcement, and the gaps in basic data protection that can lead to breaches that expose millions of passwords.

When breaches expose passwords, they often make their way online and wind up in wordlists that are used by password cracking software.

Identity companies LaunchKey, Nok Nok Labs, Clef, and leading consumer advocacy group TechFreedom have signed on to support the petition.

— By Steve Ragan

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TM Arun Kumar

FRANKLY SPEAKING

Evolve or Perish Proliferation of broadband technology has forced cable and DTH operators to face a Darwinian threat. Defeat is certain if they don’t up the ante before it’s too late.

D

o you really need a cable or a DTH connection to watch television? Intuitively, one would tend to answer yes. But, think again, and one is more likely to say, perhaps not. Why? The answer is simple: Streaming video over the Internet.

Video streaming, live or otherwise, has been around for sometime now. But, it has mainly been restricted to tech-savvy people having access to a computer and high-speed broadband Internet connection. Broadcast television, on the other hand, has been ubiquitous, at least for the last decade or so even in the developing world, and doesn’t require any high-tech knowledge.

Just switch the idiot box on and use the remote. Simple.

That is, up until now. But, as Bob Dylan wrote a long, long time ago, “the times they are a changing.” And, how relevant it is even now!

So, what’s changing? The idiot box is becoming smarter and broadband Internet connections are becoming popular.

Though broadband penetration in India may currently not be as high as in the developed countries, it, however, is poised for a huge growth. There are estimates that the number of broadband connections in India will reach about 600 million by 2020, up from about 20 million at present.

That’s a staggering growth over the next seven years, which many may dismiss as impossible. But, when you think of how the mobile phone penetration grew in India over the past decade, who will bet against this projected growth? Imagine the options for broadband to be delivered—from fibre to the home to USB dongles to 3G and 4G services over mobile networks.

On the other hand, the idiot box is becoming smarter. You can connect your TV—or should we simply call it a display—to

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the home router over Wi-Fi or through an Ethernet cable and on to the Internet. With mobile apps to control the TV, the smartphone or tablet doubles up as a remote and streaming becomes even easier. And in a few years, when gesture-based remote comes, imagine the possibilities.

Now, combine the two—smarter TV and ubiquitous broadband—and you start wondering would television content in the future be delivered over broadband Internet rather than through the traditional cable or DTH. And if that were to happen, how are cable and DTH operators going to survive in the long run? Is their current business model of delivering television content to people’s homes going to go kaput sooner rather than later? So, in essence, will they end up selling calculators in an era of computers? Or to put it in a TV parlance, will they be selling 14-inch CRT-based black and white TV sets in an age of 51-inch flat screen LCD or plasma HDTVs? And what can accelerate this change is the conflict between the television broadcasters and the cable and DTH operators.

As it is, there is enough amount of friction between the two over issues such as carriage charges, which essentially are fees paid by the broadcasters to the cable operators to carry their channel in the cable networks. Now, these carriage charges account for anywhere between 2 to 10 percent of a broadcaster’s cost, but are a major source of revenue for the cable operators.

It’s an uneasy relationship at best and is tested repeatedly.

Earlier in the year, cable operators Hathway and Gujarat Telelink stopped carrying a bunch of channels over their networks due to a dispute in the carriage fees. About a year ago, BBC pulled out two of its channels from India citing high carriage costs. And these skirmishes continue.

Now, India is an exception where the broadcasters pay the carriage fees. Worldover, it’s the other way round—cable operators pay the broadcasters the carriage fees for the right to carry their content. Currently, the situation in India is that both need each other to survive. While one has access to the customer, the other has the content, which makes them in a way mutually dependent.

But, what broadband is doing is that it’s breaking this mutual dependence by giving a new avenue for broadcasters to deliver their content to the customer. So, if the broadcasters start taking the new route via the Internet, where does it leave the Hathways, Siti Cables, Tata Skys, Dish TVs and their ilk?

The bottomline is simple: A 10x force is hitting cable and DTH operators’ business. If they don’t quickly morph into ISPs who also offer cable TV services, their business may go the same way that pagers did. So, evolve or perish. CIO

Arun has covered the IT industry in India since the time 80386 was cutting edge, MS DOS was the predominant desktop OS, and Internet was still a few years away. Follow him on twitter @aruntm

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Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

The Crux of UX User experience matters the most when it comes to the successful adoption of enterprise IT. It’s high time that it showed up on CIOs’ radars.

E

IMAGE BY MASTERF ILE

dward Tufte, information design guru, author and professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University, once noted remarkably, “The most common user action on a website is to flee!”

That reaction holds true for corporate users with enterprise technology platforms that they have to deal with. Their reactions usually range from sharp discontentment—on milder side—to complete abandonment.

In an article on this subject in the Wall Street Journal, Jaco Van Eeden, a principal in the Digital ERP practice within Deloitte Consulting, referred to an example that he had once come across where in the procurement function of one major ERP system, a user had to complete about 36 steps just to go from creating a purchase requisition to issuing a purchase order!

Aren’t CIOs aware that densely-packed interfaces, endless screens to navigate, and non-intuitive workflows result in really bad user experience and sheer frustration?

Sure they are. But in the tug-of-war between software form and function, most CIOs have a natural inclination to the latter. User acceptance, hence, is largely dealt with using a mix of change management strategies that include an infinite number of training programs, a CEO’s diktat and result in an overworked helpdesk. All, ultimately, at the cost of organizational efficacy.

And, this is THE problem.

It is widely-known that the vast majority of CIOs are amazingly prepared to deliver efficient systems to address business needs.

The complication is that they generally have little knowledge of what actually matters the most: User experience.

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Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

The ISO 9241-210 standard defines User Experience (UX)—a term that was popularized by user experience architect Donald Norman in the mid 90s—as a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use of a product, system or service. According to the ISO definition, UX includes all the users' emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. In fact, the ISO standard lists three factors that influence UX: Systems, users and the context of use.

Wikipedia quotes Jim Miller, principal of Miramontes Computing, stating that UX encompasses much more than the traditional 'user interface' issues, such as screen design and command structure. Rather, it's a broad collection of usercentric issues that cut through the full extent of a project.

Improving user engagement with enterprise apps requires understanding users’ behavior and roles—how professionals in various job functions use different systems on a daily basis. It also requires providing them with a completely new, customized interface that integrates different systems they use and helps them work more effectively, according to Van Eeden in the WSJ article.

Van Eeden goes on to say that the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise is making CIOs more aware of the value of simple, intuitive user interfaces. However, the drawback

with using mobile devices as a model for user interface design is that it leads some CIOs to think that they can improve user engagement with enterprise software simply by making those transactions available to users on their smartphones and tablets.

This approach is flawed, he says, because it takes a ‘system up’ rather than ‘user down’ method that focuses on transactions rather than the user’s experience. ERP systems’ emphasis on transactions is what has created so many of the usability problems plaguing employees today, Van Eeden points out.

An American computer scientist renowned for his pioneering work in virtual memory and the Chairman of Computer Science at George Mason University, Peter Denning says, “The old days when we could just go into the backroom and develop technology for the DOD are gone. Now we’re developing technology for my mother, and that requires a whole new set of skills.”

In my opinion, it’s just not new skills, but a new approach and the power of visualization that’s called for. Because that is exactly what a user wants to experience. CIO

Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an awardwinning writer with over a decade of experience in Indian IT. Before becoming a journalist, he had been a hands-on IT specialist, with expertise in setting up WANs. Reach him at gunjan_trivedi@idgindia.com

Mike Elgan

SOCIAL MEDIA

The Mob Rules So many of today's hottest products do crowdsourcing and get their value from the collective actions of users. Here’s why your company should, too.

A

ILLUSTRATION BY MASTERFILE

Kickstarter project called Tile set out to raise $20,000 (about Rs 12 lakh) to create small, flat, battery-powered stickers that you attach to your stuff, enabling you to find anything with your smartphone.

They've raised more than $1.6 million (about Rs 9.6 crore) so far.

But why?

Tracker gadgets have been around for years. They're useful for finding your lost remote control, keys, and other objects. But Tile does something incredible that no other tracking product can. Here's how it works.

You attach a tile to your tablet, remote control, dog's collar or you drop it into your purse, backpack or briefcase. Use the smartphone app to register each Tile device—basically tell the Tile cloud service what object each Tile is associated with.

To find an item, you use the app to make it "ring," then follow the noise. Or you can walk around looking at a proximity display showing you when you're getting closer or farther away. It basically turns your phone into a divining rod.

But here's the awesome feature that drove Kickstarter contributions through the roof: If you lose something—say, your bike is stolen or you leave your phone in a taxi, you log into your online Tile account and report the item as lost.

At that point, every Tile gadget in the world keeps a lookout for your lost item. If your dog or phone or car or bike gets within 50 to 150 feet of any other Tile owned by any user, you'll get a notification showing you where on a map your Tile was detected.

How cool is that?

Crowdsourcing makes Tile different from any other tracking device. Tile leverages "network effect" like cell phones do, meaning that the value of Tile as a product gets higher as more

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Mike Elgan

SOCIAL MEDIA

As we enter the era of Big Data, we'll increasingly benefit from data harvested from the inputs of big crowds. These benefits will range from finding cures for diseases to lost TV remotes. people become users. Come to think of it, so many of today's hottest products do something similar—they get their value from the collective actions of users.

The most important Web-based services on the Internet— specifically social networks and search engines—are spectacularly valuable and enjoyable sites precisely because they represent sorting algorithms applied to crowdsourced data.

Look what Silicon Valley giants are spending the truly big bucks on these days: Apps and services that do smart things with the data generated by massive numbers of users.

Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a service that's fun to join because it's full of awesome photos provided not by Instagram, but by other users.

Google paid a billion dollars for a tiny Israeli startup called Waze, which is all about crowdsourcing. Waze is a navigation service that you can use to get directions similar to Google Maps.

But Waze is also an engine of crowdsourcing. For example, the location of every opted-in user is uploaded anonymously to the servers. Waze then determines how fast each phone—and by extension, each car—is moving. That gives you real-time information about the speed of traffic. Waze also lets users report things like gas prices, observations about why traffic is jammed and the location of police cars.

You'll notice that both these billion-dollar startups are social networks acquired by bigger social networks. That's because social networks get all their juice from crowdsourcing.

Social network crowdsourcing is valuable to users because not only can individuals use social networks to do crowdsourcing of their own—for example, I crowdsourced ideas for this very column—but social action surfaces the best content on the social networks, either through Google+'s "What's Hot" list, Facebook's EdgeRank or Twitter's Discover page.

The Two Kinds of Crowdsourcing There are two basic kinds of crowdsourcing—the kind where people consciously participate, and the kind where they don't.

Waze, for example, uses both kinds. The reporting of observations is conscious, the uploading of speed and location data is not. Some of the coolest innovations in crowdsourcing tend to be invisible to the user. For example, Google owns a service called reCAPTCHA, which it acquired four years ago. You probably use reCAPTCHA all the time. Its primary purpose is to prove you're human. reCAPTCHA shows you two words with distorted lettering that make it hard for computers to recognize but relatively easy for humans to do so.

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is a word scanned by Google from a library book or from the archives of The New York Times. Questionable scanned words are inserted into the reCAPTCHA rotation, and large numbers of users are shown the same word. When enough users type in the same word, that word is accepted as the correct one for the digital copy that will be stored and indexed for all time.

Google is using the amazing pattern recognition capabilities of millions of distributed human brains to perfect its optical character recognition software.

Other astonishing applications of the crowdsourcing idea can be found in CrowdMed, Deliv, Nike+ Places, Metwit, RideShip, Root Metrics, Quora and Weathermob.

The Trouble with Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing has been getting some bad press lately, and for bad reasons. For example, Google built a site called Google Flu Trends, which ideally can track and even predict the spread of flu across the world. But during the most recent flu season, Flu Trends overestimated the outbreak. Flu Trends crowdsources search queries for information about flu and thereby is supposed to indicate actual flu.

The problem with this assumption is that it doesn't measure actual flu at all—it measures public anxiety about flu, which is subject to media manipulation. People go rushing to the search engines to find out about flu symptoms.

In general, crowdsourcing that tracks actual behavior is more useful and accurate than crowdsourcing that tracks opinions and attitudes.

Crowdsourcing is great for surfacing options to choose from (as I did with my crowdsourcing for this article). It's great for brainstorming and getting ideas. And it's great for gathering large numbers of data points and applying algorithms to that data.

Crowdsourcing isn't so great when you assume a weak correlation between measured attitudes and something else. It's important to remember that all you're really crowdsourcing is the attitudes, which can be manipulated, either by the media or by the crowd itself.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with crowdsourcing as an idea. As we enter the era of Big Data, we'll increasingly benefit from data harvested from the actions or input from big crowds. These benefits will range from finding cures for diseases to finding your lost TV remote. Let's hope the crowdsourcing space gets even more crowded. CIO Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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EMC Forum is a global platform featuring EMC’s newest breakthrough products and solutions – Now in its 4th year in India!

Join EMC and their partners along with other IT and Business Leaders, and learn how EMC can transform organizations of all sizes by leading IT as service, software defined storage and accelerate the ability of an organization to capitalize on cloud and big data.

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EMC BREATHES LIFE INTO MASTEK’S IT As capacity requirements touched a whopping 300 percent in five years, Mastek’s storage solutions were beginning to choke. That’s when EMC stepped in.

Company Mastek

Industry IT/ITes

Headquarters Mumbai

Like the musket-toting soldiers in Alexander Dumas’ classic novel The Three Musketeers, the four founders of Mastek, one of India’s oldest IT companies call themselves the four ‘Mastekeers’. It was because of their vision that today Mastek has developed deep domain expertise across financial services, government, insurance and health sectors. It has built very large and complex business critical applications and delivered them successfully.

But in the last five years, Mastek’s capacity requirements have grown at an alarming rate of 300 percent. That’s enough to jolt any CIO. And Waseem Khan, VP-Technology Infrastructure Service and Information Security, Mastek, was no different.

With growing business, Khan was also anticipating data hike of 20 percent in the forthcoming years and he knew that Mastek’s existing storage setup wasn’t equipped to handle data explosion of this scale. Khan realized that he would have to build a robust and scalable storage platform to sustain this growth.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

With its innovative and state-of-the-art technology, EMC’s the right partner as it can build scalable and high performance storage infrastructure at a reasonable cost.”

WASEEM KHAN,

VP-Technology Infrastructure Service & Information Security, Mastek

THE STORAGE CONUNDRUM Since the last six years, Mastek had been using EMC’s Celerra NS500 storage solution in its central as well as redundant datacenters and disaster recovery (DR) site—all located in the western parts of India. Although the storage solution had served its purpose and provided adequate performance, in the last couple of years, it was not able to match the requisite performance needs. “The existing storage capacity of EMC Celerra systems in all the three DCDR sites combined was only about 11 TB while the requirement was over 20 TB,” says Khan.

Apart from the low data handling capacity of the existing storage platform, the firm was facing several challenges in maintaining system performance. “EMC Celerra systems were primarily

used for storing user data as well as project-related data and hence performance was a key parameter,” says Khan.

If the storage challenges weren’t enough, the firm was facing issues in managing the data replication and back-up processes. The business criticality of the data required Mastek engineers to carry out incremental data backups and complete the replication process over the same weekend.

Meeting this requirement was becoming exceedingly difficult with data growth and high bandwidth utilization.

To match the growing performance and data needs, the company was planning to replace its existing EMC Celerra solution, which is a NAS-based solution, and use a Fiber Channel (FC) based SAN storage solution

at its central DC and DR site. While Khan had a plan, time was not on his side.

And that’s because the existing EMC Celerra solution was reaching end-of-support stage. “We planned to execute a technology refresh exercise to build a storage platform which is scalable to handle data growth for the next three to five years, is reliable, promises high performance while managing growing capacity requirements, and can provide excellent ROI,” says Khan.

THE PERFECT FIT With scalability, cost, and performance criteria in mind, Khan set to work. “We evaluated two options.

It was to either replace the existing EMC storage boxes by latest EMC storage offerings or to assess products from other technology vendors,” says Khan.

After carefully evaluating storage technologies from EMC and other vendors, Mastek chose EMC as its infrastructure technology partner and decided to use EMC VNX5300 and Celerra NX4 systems as its storage platform of choice.

“We evaluated these solutions on multiple parameters such as ease of migration from previous storage, technical compatibility with the previous technology, our internal expertise and support services offered by the vendor apart from the overall cost-effectiveness of the solution,” says Khan. EMC’s solution was superior as compared to the other competing solutions on these technocommercial parameters. The firm also realized that

With innovative features in EMC’s storage solution such as thin provisioning and data deduplication, Mastek was able to realize 35 percent to 40 percent of space savings.

That made EMC’s solution superior.

EMC’s storage solution has the latest technological features that it desired and its a consolidated unified storage offering. “Our strong long-term relationship with the firm also played a key role in zeroing down on the EMC’s storage solution,” says Khan.

In the new infrastructural set-up, Celerra NS500 solution at the central DC and DR sites was replaced by VNX5300, while at the redundant DC site EMC’s Celerra NX4 was deployed. The overall implementation including the installation, and configuration of EMC’s storage boxes and migration of data from the existing EMC boxes went without a hitch.

Currently, the total usable capacity combining these three sites is about 22 TB which can be scaled up further as per requirement. “The migration procedure designed by EMC was easy to administer and we could seamlessly migrate to the new platform,” says Muzaffar Ansari, manager-Technology Infrastructure Service,Mastek. EMC’s storage solution has been running for about a year now with approximate data size of 22 TB.

PERFORMANCE UNCHAINED With storage in place, Mastek can now handle dynamic data growth and performance requirements for the next five years. The company was also able to improve its system performance by about 40 percent as it moved to a centralized and unified storage environment. “Both platforms, EMC VNX5300 and EMC Celerra NX4 are scalable which has greatly improved our data handling capacity,” says Khan.

Additionally, the solution has increased Mastek’s management efficiency and significantly reduced the time required for backups. “The bandwidth utilization of the system has also improved by 25 percent,” says Ashish Junnarkar, deputy manager, Mastek.

The solution has also helped Mastek in implementing real-time replication across the three DC-DR sites between EMC VNX5300 and NX4 storage boxes. “We have implemented real-time as well as periodic replication wherein multiple units from the central and redundant DC sites replicate to the DR site enhancing the overall reliability of the solution,” says Zaheer Ansari, deputy manager, Mastek.

With innovative features in EMC’s storage solution such as thin provisioning and data de-duplication, Mastek was able to realize 35 percent to 40 percent of space savings.

As Mastek’s ROI from EMC’s storage solution has been substantial. “There have been significant improvements in cost savings per TB due to enhanced space utilization,” says Khan. The implementation

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

of EMC VNX5300 and Celerra NX4 was also critical for Mastek in order to ensure compliance to its corporate governance policy.

EMC VNX series storage solution offers features such as 8Gbps FC connectivity, thin provisioning, automatic volume management, compression, and de-duplication among others. Certain specific features of EMC VNX 5300 and Celerra NX4 were particularly beneficial for Mastek.

“The thin provisioning feature enabled us to optimize storage space on demand based on the user requirement. While with data de-duplication feature we could save substantially on capacity requirements,” says Khan.

Going forward, Mastek plans to make periodic expansion of the existing storage solution to meet the growing data and performance requirements by adding EMC VNX series storage boxes. “Post

the tech refresh exercise, we have added two more VNX5100 boxes with a total capacity which is close to 30 TB,” says Khan.

The credit for the success of the implementation, says Khan, should go to the core team of Zaheer, Ashish, Alka, and Muzaffar at Mastek and EMC. “The support from EMC in the entire migration exercise— and also post-implementation—has been excellent.

EMC has ensured that there is no downtime during business hours,” says Khan.

EMC’s solution enabled Mastek to not only leverage IT in a strategic manner but it also made its business more agile in order to handle dynamic data growth while maintaining optimal system performance.

“With its innovative and state-of-the-art technology, EMC’s the right partner who can build scalable and high performance storage infrastructure at a reasonable cost,” says Khan.

Keeping Up with Storage Dynamics Anantharaman Balakrishnan, VP Sales-BFSI, West and East Regions, EMC India, says the company’s robust

storage and backup solutions are helping CIOs stay abreast of the changing demands in the storage landscape.

How has the storage landscape changed in the last five years?

The first remarkable shift is in storage media: Tape has been largely replaced by disk, and disk is being replaced by flash storage. Second major change is the use of industry standard components running advanced software, shifting the value proposition from hardware to modern storage software stacks. The third is architectural.

In the big data world, there’s a demand for scale-out storage. The fourth is convergence: Storage, network and servers,

are all growing together. The fifth shift is management and orchestration. Storage resources are increasingly presented as a dynamic and variable service to other layers of the IT stack. Finally, the IT model is shifting to an “as-a-service-model”.

How is EMC fulfilling the need for scalable storage?

At EMC, we understand that customers need scalable storage. With scale-out storage, multiple modules are clustered into progressively larger configurations

EMC’s Trusted IT solutions deliver customers the visibility and control they need to build trust in present and future IT infrastructures.”

ANANTHARAMAN BALAKRISHNAN,

VP Sales-BFSI, West and East Regions, EMC India

that behave as a single unit from a performance, capacity, and management perspective. Can we always make bigger, traditional scale-up storage arrays? Of course. Will they be enough to keep up with even bigger data growth and performance requirements? Not always. This design theme can be seen in EMC products such as VMAX (scale-out block storage), Isilon(scale-out NAS storage) and Atmos (scale-out object storage).

And what about the need to securely store and backup client data?

Virtualization, cloud, and big data bring better cost, and agility to the business.

Security teams must ensure availability of assets. EMC’s Trusted IT solutions deliver the visibility and control to build trust in present and future IT infrastructures, due to: Continuous data availability with fast, reliable backup and restore, advanced, intelligence-driven security to prevent, detect, respond to advanced threats, and data protection.

Cover Story

Buy-in

Cover Story

Innovation

Thrifty

Loving it How three CIOs found three ingenious ways to achieve great business benefits with frugal IT budgets.

…And the rupee came tumbling after…

That’s perhaps the only refrain echoing the gloomy bylanes of Dalal Street. So much so that the story of the rupee’s fall from grace is becoming the new normal in an economy that’s only going south.

It’s a fall that’s sending a ripple down the spines of organizations already struggling to stay afloat in the muddy waters of an uncertain economy. Money is dearer and businesses are in no mood to loosen their purse strings.

And for CIOs, that means shoe-string IT budgets and an increasing pressure to innovate.

That’s a tough ask for any CIO. But it is in times of crisis that the Reader ROI: most innovative and inexpensive Four inexpensive ways to implement IT projects ideas get wings. That’s exactly what four CIOs have done. Despite The importance of in-house expertise tight budgets, these CIOs have How startups save costs found ingenious ways to get great

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B y A n u p Va r i e r & Shantheri Mallaya

business benefits with frugal IT budgets.

So can you. Here’s how.

Get on the Cloud What happens when a gargantuan project meets the need to do more with less? Ask Sanjeev Kumar, group CIO, Adhunik Group of Industries, and he’d probably say: You either innovate or perish.

Heading the IT function for the over Rs 3,500 crore group, Kumar found that each business unit within the group had its own way of dealing with HR. Each had its own job requirements, designations, and people processes even while dealing with employees of a similar profile.

This disparity led to instances where the companies engaged in mining, steel, power, REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

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Innovation

and value-added steel products were unable to cross-leverage skills and resources not only among themselves but even among the multiple plants of a single unit. Without a centralized knowledge portal the LOB heads had little visibility into the organizational structure of their sister concerns and were losing out the opportunity to learn from each other. “For example, a highly skilled technician at our Rourkela plant can help solve some issue at the Jamshedpur facility only if we have the visibility into such resources,” says Kumar.

Initially at Adhunik, every aspect of people management—right from recruitment to retirement—was decentralized. Employees

were losing close to 10-15 percent of their time chasing the HR department for things like claims settlement, leave records, and pay slips. This was time that top management wanted its employees to spend on productive work rather than on mundane follow-ups.

“This also affected the appraisal process for employees within the group as there was no uniformity in the process

Sanjeev Kumar Group CIO, Adhunik Group turned to the cloud for Rs 30 lakh per annum, instead of deploying an ERP module—that would have cost Rs 2.5 crore in licenses—for the company’s HRMS.

of evaluating their performance,” says Kumar. He sought to put an end to these incongruities without burning a hole in the company’s pocket and considered the implementation of a human resource management system (HRMS). “But the system needed to be agile and flexible enough to incorporate the necessary changes demanded by either the business or regulatory authorities,” he says.

Kumar considered using the modules of SAP that would help him consolidate employee information of the group companies. But that didn’t come cheap.

“We would have had to spend close to Rs 2.5 crore on licenses and there was an additional 22 percent cost on the licenses for annual support,” he says.

While he knew that such a deployment would just about serve the immediate purpose, he knew that this expensive proposition wouldn’t be flexible enough to readily incorporate newer features that might be required in the future even at an additional expense. Moreover, user acceptance was the key in a system that hoped to encourage selfservice by employees.

Kumar reasoned that a cheaper and more agile alternative would be to engage a cloud service provider who’d take care of upgrades, functionalities, and compliance.

And the fact that a cloud service provider who was willing to cater to the needs of 3,500 odd employees within the group at a total cost of Rs 30 lakh per annum—a mere two-thirds of the annual support costs he would have otherwise incurred—made the deal all the more sweeter.

With this new system on the cloud, the group has been able to streamline its HR processes and sort the disparities with respect to the nomenclature and pay grades.

“This has helped foster collective wisdom within the group,” says Kumar. Moreover, the employees of the group are happy taking care of their HR queries through an automated anywhere-anytime solution and it has helped the company regain the 10-15 percent loss in time spent on such activities.

“We also saved on servers and storage that would have been needed if we had opted for SAP,” says Kumar. With his centralized

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HRMS on the cloud, Kumar has successfully managed to bring the CEOs and department heads of the various business units and plants onto the same page. At 10 percent of the cost of its alternative, the cloud has been a win-win overall.

Go Open Source Not many CIOs enjoy the luxury that Rajat Sharma does. As president-IT of the Rs 2,000 crore Atul, Sharma has the fortune of dedicating 15 percent of his IT budget to new projects.

Despite that, when it was time to implement an internal data warehousing solution he turned to open source. “We decided to circumvent the challenges of costs, AMC, and customization with our own ideas. We also had a previous success story to fall back on.”

That success story—in 2011—came in the form of deploying an in-house built, open source-based vendor portal on top of the company’s core ERP Oracle platform.

At that time, Sharma didn’t know he was starting a legacy of testing the unknown at remarkably frugal costs.

Piggybacking on that success, this time around, the 2,700-strong company decided to have a data warehousing solution completely built on open source with a dash of BI. The company split the business data into two clearly distinct segments of live transactional data and business reporting data. “The project aimed to reduce the TCO of IT infrastructure as well as application costs while giving business users a positive computing experience.”

But at what cost? “We invested only in the procurement of BI licensing,” he says.

Sharma pulled off a complete BI system replete with dashboards for management reporting across domains.

What the system set out to do was to generate and trigger pre-defined alerts, notifications, and reports in accordance with the parameter definitions provided by the business domain users. Most of the routine transactional reports (like sales report, payment receipt register, production variance reports, bank statements etcetera) are now being generated at the pre-defined timings through auto-run scheduled requests and

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Rajat Sharma President-IT, Atul, took the open source route for his data warehousing solution and saved TCO of Rs 16.2 crore over three years.

published for usage and consumption by the authorized business users, as approved in the workflow. Most of these reports are communicated through e-mail, thereby saving the time of business users for fetching their reports and information from the ERP, data warehouse or BI solutions.

The benefits of this project have been many. For starters, there has been a threeyear TCO savings of around Rs 16.2 crore.

The deployment time was a phenomenal 68 percent more efficient against the Oracle benchmark of a roll-out period of 11 months as suggested by Oracle and Forrester.

The company’s raw material procurement price index has reduced by 1.6 percent on a year-to-month comparison after the procurement process started getting monitored.

Besides, a reduction in engineering inventory by 21.5 percent, all thanks to the consolidated monitoring of common on-hand inventory and procurement on a daily basis.

The company also noted that off-specification batches on the production floor reduced by 66 percent on a year-to-month basis due to transparent monitoring of production floor performance through dashboards.It doesn’t end here. The collection efficiency has also improved phenomenally due to sales and collections overdue dashboards and the e-mail alerts which directly impacted working capital requirements.

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Innovation

6.8 days (43.2 percent reduction),” says Sharma. And all that at a negligible cost.

Do IT In-House When the going gets tough, the tough innovate. That’s the mantra of Pankaj Verma, VP-IT at Indore-based National Steel and Agro Industries (NSAIL).

Battling growing costs and a bad economy, Verma wanted to implement an efficient production process that would cut losses. But it also had to be easy on the purse. “We have a lot of forex exposure on various accounts. The fluctuation in dollar rates created havoc in controlling prices. We also wanted to reduce wastage.”

NSAIL had to achieve two objectives: Optimize material and production planning, and provide business users with an overview of what was happening in the company. These had to be tightly integrated into the core ERP. NSAIL was evaluating ERP sub-modules but that wasn’t an attractive option. “Some of the related modules of our ERP did not function

Pankaj Verma VP-IT, National Steel and Agro Industries, created a planning module in-house—instead of going for an off-the-shelf product—and saved Rs 1 crore for the

the way we wanted, or they had too many permutations and combinations. Other options were too expensive.”

Verma estimated that implementing a new module would cost the company around Rs 1.5 crore. That threw this option out of the window. But at the same time, it also opened another door for him: Doing it in-house.

“We have a good team. We have had ERP experience for the last seven years in our team. So, the mood was upbeat. We thought of giving it a try,” says Verma.

NSAIL’s process has four stages of production: Input line (pre-processing), first stage (2 lines), second stage (3 lines) and final stage (1 line). Verma simply tweaked the main ERP and added layers and views to throw up product-wise, stage-wise, and line-wise material and product movement.

Armed with three people from planning and three from IT, including Verma himself, in a matter of about six months, NSAIL has completed about two of its four stages of production. The experiment has currently worked so well, that work on the third stage and the final line is making steady headway.

The success of the planning modules has helped the company achieve efficiencies in raw material planning. NSAIL was also working on a BI module along with the planning module. The solution, once again, a layer added to the core ERP, is a dashboard which throws up the position of raw materials in the plant and the finished stock in the warehouses. “It also helps serve as a ready reckoner for cash flow management. Another target was to make ERP a single point of information for key users.”

Verma admits that the company has only now been assiduously able to keep track of the various analysis and benefits that have accrued with these implementations. He estimates that once completed, the planning module has the capability of saving roughly around Rs 1 crore.

Though the company is aware of the need to opt for third-party upgradations, Verma says it was critical to make a beginning and show management that there are easier possibilities to explore in difficult times. CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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PHOTO BY FOTOCORP

Cover Story

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Case File | Hindustan Times Media

HOSTING SUCCESS CESS Field level employees are the lifeline of the insurance industry. When HDFC Life realized its already efficient sales force could bring in more success with a productivity enhancer, it turned towards hosted shared desktops (HSD).

Presenting the behind-the-scenes story of one of the largest HSD implementations in the country.

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BY ERIC ERNEST

Reader ROI:

How to ensure higher levels of productivity The importance of managing IT resources centrally How to evaluate and choose the right solution

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If it weren’t for its industrious sales force, posting a 66.5 percent growth in net profit in a single financial year would have been just a distant dream for HDFC Life. And getting there in a down economy is not a mean feat. That’s what makes the insurer one of the big guns in the fiercely competitive Indian insurance industry.

However, sustaining those high profit figures is as important as achieving them. HDFC Life’s SVP-Business Systems and Technology, Thomson Thomas realized this and decided to come up with a way to sustain the company’s profitable streak, through IT. He saw the potential to reduce the insurer’s IT costs, and at the same time, improve the sales team’s productivity by opting for one of the largest hosted shared desktop (HSD) implementations in the country.

Initiating IT Insurance Back in May 2012, when the desktops used by the insurance giant’s sales force were due for a hardware refresh, Thomas had to decide what route to follow to accomplish it. Traditional refresh would have required upgrading desktop PCs on the hardware and software fronts, an endeavor that would be quite expensive There were two main factors that required addressing during this refresh: The need for reducing the costs and complexity associated with managing user desktops, and the need to maximize productivity through end-user systems.

“From a technology angle, we looked at options such as HSD, VDI, and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as part of the refresh,” says Thomas.

“From a business challenge point of view, we were facing a couple of issues related to information security and app performance.”

There were some serious cases of nonadherence to security policies. For instance,

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Thomas had different options such as VDI, DaaS and HSD on his list for the hardware refresh. HSD easily trumped the other two, thanks to its capability to connect several desktops to one processing system.

one of their security policies required USB ports to be disabled at all times. This was not followed strictly at branch locations. And since two to three sales members were sharing a desktop, the threat of data leakage was high and had to be addressed on priority.

On the app performance front, there was a lot of antivirus activity happening, mainly due to constant updates.

This, coupled with the other apps running on those desktops, resulted in inadequacy of processing memory for users to process their activities at optimum levels.

Choosing the Right Scheme “The right solution for us would have to ensure that if xGB of RAM was assigned to a user, he should be able to use all of that memory for running his apps/work,” says Thomas.

One crucial capability HDFC Life expected in the solution was a simpler and more effective vendor management policy. The priority thus was to get an endto-end solution—end-user device, servers, storage, and implementation—from a single vendor.

Thomas points out why some of the other options— DaaS, VDI and the likes—did not fit the bill. “When you take a service, there needs to be clear SLAs to ensure accountability, and in our evaluation, especially when the branches are spread out, the SLA on performance has a strong linkage with the network. Therefore, for the ideal DaaS setup, the service provider would need end-to-end ownership. But the DaaS service providers REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

45

Case File | HDFC Life

were not necessarily the best network service providers. This ruled out DaaS as it did not offer us any advantage in service levels or cost.”

So, the decision to go with HSD was based on the company’s analysis of user profiles.

The user segment that needed the HSD implementation—in this case the sales team— consisted of users who only used applications via the browser. Thomas elaborates, saying, “As such, there was no requirement for say local applications with heavy CPU utilization, capability to modify OS system variables, admin access, ability to install own application, etcetera.” This, as a result, eliminated the need for a VDI solution.

ke

All these factors, along with a satisfactory POC that showed an improvement over the earlier system and met current expectations, led to strengthening Thomas’ conviction that HSD was the way to go.

Installation in Instalments HDFC Life Insurance implemented the HSD system over two phases, each phase seeing the introduction of 1,000 new units.

The project was successfully implemented

by December 2012, something which, as Thomas puts it, was made possible with the valuable help provided by Amit Bhide, senior manager; Ajay Vernekar, VP-Enterprise Services; and Thomas’ other team members.

With a sales force numbering around 11,000 members, the HSD implementation was focused on those members who did their work through desktops—a group called the ‘frontline sales group’, consisting of around 6,000 members.

However, there were a few important areas Thomas had to check in order to ensure the system’s effectiveness. As he himself puts it, the network plays a vital role in meeting the maximum potential of HSD. When conducting the POC, Thomas tested the HSD setup not only on the LAN, but also on the WAN in order to get a clear picture of how the network performed under different circumstances. Based on the network loads, various optimizations were carried out to allow for the HSD system to run as intended.

Nevertheless, Thomas reiterates that they really didn’t have to alter any part of their existing infrastructure to accommodate the new HSD system.

Benefits in the Long Term One of the most significant benefits of the HSD implementation has been that unplanned downtime has been minimized and accelerated recovery is possible in case of OS failures. “The user’s personalized stateless virtual desktop is accessible from a wide variety of devices and can be accessed securely over the Internet,” says Thomas.

The system has also helped in reducing downtime caused by unforeseen system errors. In the earlier scheme of things, fixing an error on individual desktops would take

ux

work

We have seen hardware call reductions of almost 22 percent with HSD. We expect to see 46 percent cost reductions in support costs for desktops.

-Thomson Thomas, SVP-Business Systems and Technology, HDFC Life

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Case File | Hindustan Times Media IMPLEMENTATION PREMIUM HDFC Life was able to save around Rs 51 lakh within the first six months of the HSD implementation. anywhere between four to 15 days depending on the availability of the required desktop component, thereby drastically affecting employee productivity. Under the new HSD system, it takes around four hours to get a new system to replace the faulty thin client—a substantial productivity improvement.

Moreover, desktop provisioning, which used to take around four hours earlier, can now be done in an eighth of the time.

“Earlier, we used to have local level IT servicing the desktops. The problem with this setup was that for each desktop, we needed a local engineer who would be able to service that particular brand,” says Thomas.

“Now I have zero mean-time to repair. If a unit goes off, I log in a call and four hours later, the new thin client is in place. In the worst case, I will have the new device in a day.”

The storage structure found in the HSD implementation also ensures greater data security. As Thomas explains, “In the HSD setup, there is a specific storage space assigned to users, so the data of one user is not visible to another.”

With the ability to centrally manage all the new systems, the IT team has been able to better allocate its resources to meet business needs, rather than having its bandwidth tied up in addressing issues on end-user systems.

Now Thomas is able to comfortably assign resources to perform other support duties for other business segments—such as having his IT team member support tablets provided to senior management, without the need to have an explicit contract to support these devices.

“We have seen hardware call reductions of almost 22 percent. We expect to see 46 percent cost reductions in support costs for desktops,” says Thomas, when talking about the observed cost benefits that amount to a total annual savings of around Rs 51 lakh.

“The target price we had for the solution was the price for desktop refresh, and we managed to keep the high-end solution at the same levels. So, there was no additional cost incurred. In fact, if we look at the savings mentioned above, the organization had an overall cost reduction as compared to a normal desktop refresh,” Thomas says. Shedding light on how this HSD

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Achieved

Reducing Downtime

Minimizing unplanned downtime was one of the biggest benefits the insurance firm reaped. It achieved an 87 percent reduction in desktop provisioning time, while the mean time to repair a system has gone down from 15 days to a single day.

87% reduction

in desktop provisioning time

Slashing Costs

HDFC Life used the funds initially envisaged for the desktop refresh for the HSD move instead, and it didn’t have to spend any extra money on this project. The company also expects to be able to reduce the cost of supporting individual systems by 46 percent.

Application Performance

HDFC Life also reported an improvement in application response hovering in the 60-75 percent range. Moreover, the sales team now has the ability to access the required apps securely over the Internet, thus achieving anywhere-anytime work style.

Repositioning IT

The insurance giant has observed a 22 percent hardware call reduction. So, with the IT team’s not having to respond to as many desktop calls as before, and being able to manage the new system centrally, its resources are better allocated to address other business needs.

Reducing Footprint

HDFC Life has also observed a 55 percent reduction in the individual internal desktop consumables such as memory and hard disk.

implementation has impacted end-users, Thomas says, “We are now seeing a higher usage of the systems.”

Moreover, since the application is published over the Internet, the sales personnel can access the application securely online, thereby ensuring continuous availability of service to end-users in the event they are unable to get to the office.

He cites a recent Point of Sales (POS) system they launched as a case in point—an end-to-end system that lets sales members fill out online proposal forms to perform underwriting actions. Thomas mentions that the number of forms filled online, once the HSD implementation was in place, has increased over earlier times when the members used desktop PCs. As Thomas says, “If the HSD system we implemented wasn’t user-friendly or effective enough, this POS system would have collapsed as people would have been complaining about how their systems were slow.”

“In fact, in March, 60 percent of new business login was happening through this online channel,” says Thomas. “I have zonal reviews that happen with my leadership

Reduced costs by

46%

Application response hovering in the

60-75% range

22%

Hardware call reduction

55%

reduction in desktop consumables

team located across the country. The most prominent issue in the past one and a half years has been that of systems being slow.

Now, we don’t have to hear any complaints on those lines,” he adds.

Thomas also reports 60-75 percent improvement in application response.

A rather soft benefit is that the storage space allocated to users, as it is now centrally managed, is not being ‘abused’, with the users’ saving their own personal files onto the system.

Thomas plans for another refresh this year—2,000 more HSD systems will be setup as well for the remaining desktopusing sales members. Thomas further plans to set up the HSD implementation in other sections of the life insurance giant. The firm is also currently involved in setting up a BYOD initiative for the sales force to help access work applications.

With the new HSD system in place, HDFC’s sales force is well-positioned to be able to deliver yet again. And Thomas can look back and say, “Sar utha ke jiyo.” CIO Send feedback to eric_ernest@idgindia.com

REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

47

JW MARRIOTT, PUNE | 5-6 SEPTEMBER, 2013

CELEBRATING

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& THOUGHT

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SYMPOSIUM PARTNERS

SPECIAL AWARDS’ PARTNERS

ANDREW GRANT

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AUSTRALIA

UNITED KINGDOM

SINGAPORE

Join Andrew Grant, CEO, Tirian as he expounds on upcoming leadership concepts at the CIO100 symposium.

Andrew has worked on leadership and team development for top executive clients in MNCs throughout the world for more than 15 years.

Hear Andrew Bryant, Leadership Consultant, come up with new and interesting theories on leadership at the CIO100 symposium 2013.

Let Michael Podolinsky, Asia’s Productivity Guru & CSP, take you through innovative means of achieving your goals at this year’s CIO100 Symposium.

Being a recognized leader, Andrew has shared the stage with top international speakers such as Stephen Covey, Jonas Ridderstrale and Bob Nelson.

Andrew has also co-authored several books (including his latest on creativity ‘Who Killed Creativity’ [Wiley 2012]) plus over 30 corporate educational resources, simulations & programs that are licensed worldwide. He was featured on BBC, ABC TV, Singapore radio and in several international newspapers and magazines, including the Wall St Journal and Financial Review. In 2011 he was ranked as one of the top 30 leadership gurus in the world.

INDIA’S LEADING CIOS

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INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT LEADERS

2 NIGHTS O

OF CELEBRATIONS

TERENCE LEWIS COMPANY This year’s CIO100 Awards’ Ceremony takes on a whole new flavor with award-winning choreographer and Bollywood entertainer Terence Lewis taking up the challenge of making every CIO dance.

See him hold the audience enthralled as he makes one and all dance to his tunes at this year’s CIO100 Awards’ Ceremony!

Come experience the dance phenomenon at CIO100!

BREATHTAKING ENTERTAINMENT

BY INVITATION ONLY

VIEW

from the TOP

Swarup Choudhury, MD, Thomson Reuters, says the company is more of an IT organization than a news agency and that digitized news keeps it ahead of its competitors.

News

Breaker

BY VARSHA CHIDAMBARAM

Thomson Reuters is known as the company that owns the world’s most trusted news source, Reuters. But the company is more interesting than that. Not only is it generating and distributing news from all corners, it is also deriving intelligence embedded in content, and delivering it across the value chain.

The man at the helm, Swarup Choudhury, MD, Thomson Reuters, is a strong believer in IT’s ability to help the company stay ahead of competition. Sharp, suave, and straight shooting, Choudhury was a blue-eyed IBM boy who joined Thomson Reuters in 2012. He is spearheading a cross-section of businesses in India ranging from pharma and life sciences to big-bang financial risk, tax, and legal, all on the nimble shoulders of technology. In this interview, he talks about why he thinks IT is a competitive differentiator and how it helps the company retain customers.

CIO: Thomson Reuters is known as a news company.

Can you elaborate what you bring to the table outside of news?

What do CEOs and other C-level executives expect from you? Read all about it in VIEW FROM THE TOP. Visit www.cio.in/ceointerviews

52

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

Swarup Choudhury: You’re right. Thomson Reuters is known for its news, but we are actually a trusted intelligent information company. Most traditional companies have a three-tier architecture. The first-

tier is the infrastructure, the second is the application layer, and third is the business layer. We, as a company, are split into five layers. Our first layer is data, which is now called the big data; on top of the data we do curation of the data, on top of curation of data we do analytics, on top of that we do workflow, and then the fifth and final layer is transaction. That is one way of looking at us as a company.

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SWARUP CHOUDHURY EXPECTS I.T. TO Help retain customers Provide competitive edge Set new digitization benchmarks

PHOTOS BY SRIVATSA SH AN DILYA

You claim to be an IT company driven by news.

How does content and IT form the core of your other businesses?

For us, news is content in a digital form. It could be text, voice, or video. But there is other content apart from news that is primarily based on IT. Take our services in the financial space for example. One of the things we provide is a terminal called EIKON that helps all classes of traders— financial analysts, financial traders,

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operators, and people who operate in the financial divisions of companies.

We provide data feeds on all asset classes, right from equities, to bonds, to derivatives, to fixed income, across different platforms. News is content. Digitized news is the core that differentiates us from the rest. We give our audience something important to deliver value and be more productive.

Can you give us some examples of how IT

has helped you extend new services?

There are many examples. One that comes to mind is in the financial sector. We’re pioneers with the best database for KYC. We have an offering called World Check that is used by people globally and my mission is to increase its awareness in India. It tracks all transactions including aberrant transactions and transactions you don’t want to support. For governance, we have a solution that helps external

REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

53

View from the Top

board members communicate. Today, external board members receive important communications on their personal IDs, thus increasing the risk of leakage of privileged and confidential information.

With our solution, we extend a boardlink which is a highly secure 122-bit architecture platform through which all board members can connect and talk to each other in a secured environment. This is prevalent abroad, but we are trying to get that consciousness here.

Content is getting rapidly digitized. Is that a challenge or an opportunity?

It’s a great opportunity. Think of the good old days, when you’d go to a lawyer’s office, see the big books in the library and get impressed. They had to keep everything in print. But today, we don’t need the books; today we have everything on a tablet or a device. A lawyer can easily pull out information and prepare for a case. We’re enabling these solutions for them through our offering Westlaw.

And how can technology help improve the judicial system?

We are trying to help the government in its initiative to help improve the delivery of justice in the country by digitizing the courts. We have a project called the modern court and the e-court project. In the US, the top 14 affiliate courts are digitized by us. However, in India, because the courts are not connected, justice is not speedy enough. The court has to be connected to the hospital. The hospital has to be connected to the police and CBI, so on and so forth.

Essentially, they all have to be interconnected to make information move fast.

Today, if you file an FIR it may take up to six months for it to be even brought into queue, and, you may get a hearing few years hence.

I am told that there are over 30 million cases 54

A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

The introduction of GST will result in a lot of tax complications. How are you planning to deal with this?

“Digitized news is the core that differentiates us. We give our audience something to deliver value and be more productive.”

— Swarup Choudhury pending on crimes against women, which is a very sad state of affairs. It is happening not because of the lack of intent; it is because the government doesn’t have the ability to collapse the work flow.

Since we are into providing workflow solutions, we understand digitization. Owing to our existing capabilities, we are volunteering to try and improve the delivery of justice.

But the critical question is can we collapse a workflow that spans three years into one year and get people justice immediately? Today, when some of the critical witnesses can’t or don’t come, many of these cases get postponed, adjourned, or delayed. To counter this, we are trying to digitize by getting video conferencing for witnesses even in remote locations.

We also try and involve junior lawyers in the remote district courts where many of them don’t have the wherewithal to reference material. By digitizing, we can provide multiple channels of access to information.

Through our solutions, local customers are able to determine and ensure compliance with prevalent tax laws. According to estimates, if GST is implemented, it will add 200 basis points to our growth rate. Having implemented GST worldwide with the help of IT solutions, we have the best practices, and we’d like to help the government accomplish that here.

Land reform is also big on our agenda.

Our Manatron solution has helped digitizing land provisioning in 40 countries with a tax perspective and we intend to bring that to India as well.

Our tax and accounting solutions appeal to professionals in accounting firms, corporations, law firms, and government.

So essentially, think of us as an ERP for tax solutions. Most of the companies have implemented ERP but all have struggled with it. Our solution plugs and integrates all ERPs. Our solutions also ensure tax compliance with complex Indian regulations including TDS. Last year, we acquired a company called Fast Facts, which focuses on TDS, e-filing of returns and tax audits etcetera.

You’re really bullish about the power of technology.

How can India benefit from investing in technology?

India can develop with greater investment in R&D. In fact, R&D spends of corporate India, as a percentage of the GDP, is low at about 0.5 percent, whereas in the US, it is much higher.

A lot of global firms are relocating their R&D facilities in India and are trying to tap into the scientists/researchers/innovators pool to support the creation of intellectual property and patents.

Our Intellectual Property and Science business provides comprehensive intellectual property and scientific

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View from the Top

information, decision support tools and services that enable scientists, R&D professionals and IP practitioners to discover, develop and deliver innovations.

and design, you could end up spending months and months analyzing data. Now you can do it using technology.

How are you leveraging IT for your own business?

What were some of the learnings that you brought to Thomson Reuters?

We use analytics in a big way. Analytics help us in market segmentation; it helps us know which markets are growing, what are the patterns in customer behavior, who are traders that are doing better than the others, etcetera.

Analytics tells us that the real growth in India will happen in tier II cities. We’ve accounted for that in our five-year plans.

In segments like retail and FMCG, we use it to study customer behavior and insights. Our customers use analytics to keep track of customer- loyalty and also for market expansion.

Analytics helps you define unique propositions to create value. In the past, because you didn’t have the architecture

IBM is the old daddy of tech. It virtually defined the infrastructure layer from its mainframe DB2 and essentially established the technology infrastructure standards.

At Thomson Reuters, the attraction is in creating value.

Once you finish putting a layer of technology around your customers, the next question is ‘how do unleash value?’.

That can only come from information extraction, ROI, and innovation. As I mentioned earlier, Thomson Reuters has a five-tier layer which sits on top of a three-tier layer. So, having done the threetier at IBM, I want to move to the five-tier mode, and extract and deliver more value to the customers.

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What’s your growth strategy in India?

My strategy in India is to get people to understand what we do. The communities by and large know us, but I want to penetrate more and tell them about our new initiatives because technology is driving user-friendliness. People are driving more adoption of technology from more conventional to digital. Our strategy is to increase our footprint in this market.

We are going after the tier II market— mid-size. A lot of the companies that are growing today are in the mid-size market.

My objective is to help our Indian customers go global, expand their businesses, and have global standards so that they can be differentiated in the market. CIO

Varsha Chidambaram is principal correspondent.

Send feedback on this interview to varsha_ chidambaram@idgindia.com

REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

45

Project Management

WAYS TO MESS UP AN IT PROJECT

Project management experts discuss surefire ways to delay or derail a project and— more importantly—how you can avoid these common project management pitfalls.

BY JENNIFER LONOFF

Paul Simon famously sang that there must be 50 ways to leave one’s lover. Similar could be said regarding projects: There must be 50 ways to screw up IT projects. For the sake of brevity, however, we are starting with the top 12 ways to derail a project—and how to avoid these project management pitfalls.

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Reader ROI: How to manage projects successfully Common project management pitfalls The importance of saying no

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Project Management

1

Having a poor or no statement of work. “I’ve seen many projects encounter troubles due to the lack of a well-defined project scope,” says Bryan Fangman, senior project manager at Borland, a Micro Focus Company.

“Despite the best planning efforts, change is inevitable, so having a clear statement of work up front is essential in getting agreement with the customer on what will actually be accomplished,” Fangman says. “A poorly constructed statement of work (or absence of one) will lead to ambiguities that are hard to resolve and you will never truly know when the project is finished,” he adds.

2

Not setting expectations up front.

One of the key ways to screw up a project is to not create a roadmap and failing to define project requirements and expectations for all stakeholders at the beginning of the project.

That’s why “before we start any projects, I make sure that everyone on both the customer team and project team have a clear, documented understanding of two primary things: What we are going to do, and how we know when we are done,” says Tim Garcia, CEO, Apptricity. “Without documented agreement on the answers to these two questions, the project is in danger from the start.”

3

Not securing management buy-in. “Executing a project without securing sponsor support is not only counter-productive but also a recipe for disaster,” says Brad Clark, COO at Daptiv, a provider of on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions. “It’s imperative to be on the same page with the sponsor for a project to move in the desired direction and get organizational buy-in.”

4

Using the same methodology for all size projects. “Most project management methodologies have a standard set of key tasks and deliverables for enterprise IT projects,” says Robert Longley, a consultant at Intuaction, a coaching and consulting company.

“Most methodologies are designed around projects of a certain size,” Longley says. “If you have a project that is worth more, or less, and you try to use the standard approach, you may find that it costs more to do the deliverables than it does to do the actual project.”

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Your team members are not machines. If one member is overloaded, the end-product will suffer.

5

Overloading team members. “Your team members are not machines,” says Dan Schoenbaum, the CEO of Teambox, a cloud-based collaboration and project management company. “Pay attention to how much work each individual member is assigned,” he says. “If one member is overloaded, the end-product will suffer.

Utilize the strengths of your team and spread out the workload as much as possible. This will avoid overwhelming your team.”

6

Waiting or not wanting to share information.

“Waterfall approaches to project delivery—where results are not presented to users and stakeholders until late in the project— introduce risk and often lead to disappointing results,” says Garcia.

That’s because “users often don’t know what they want until they can actually see, touch and work with it,” Garcia says. That’s why he recommends using an agile, iterative approach to project management.

“Iterative projects delivers results in short, quick phases, with the most critical and complex components delivered first.”

7

Not having a clearly defined decision-making process. “While user involvement and feedback are critical, successful projects also need a clear and defined decision-making process,” says Garcia. “Project teams should embrace change, but change decisions need authoritative approval, agreement and documentation. Understanding the process and chain of command keeps everyone reading from the same playbook.”

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57

Project Management

8

Not using a project management software system. “Excel spreadsheets relegate project managers to manual intervention and worst of all, ‘walk the floor’ status updating,” says Brian Ahearn, CEO, evolphin Software, the developer of digital asset management software.

“Project managers need a solution that automatically updates project status each time a task is completed, alerts you when a task is past its due date, and will provide a complete and up-todate project status report,” he says. “The best tools free the project manager from the tyranny of manual reporting and allow them more time to drive critical tasks.”

9

Allowing scope creep (or excessive scope creep).

“Loosely defined and unclear project scope, halfway surprises, and frequent change requests can lead to increased timelines, increased cost, escalations, a demotivated team and, most importantly, an unsatisfied customer,” says Sandeep Anand, vice president of Project Governance at Nagarro, a high-end software development firm.

To combat scope creep, “ensure project objectives are understood, deliverables are defined and the project is monitored daily,” Anand says. That said, change requests are a fact of life in projects. So it is a good idea to “budget for scope creep and have a defined process for accommodating change requests.”

Knowing how to say no and offering a constructive alternative solution can prevent a project from becoming derailed or delayed.

10

Being afraid to say “no.”

Part of being a good project manager is being “an educated advisor,” says Markus Remark, vice president, Customer Operations, TOA Technologies, a provider of field service management software and solutions.

“This means knowing when to say ‘no’ to a request, whether because it’s not in the best interest of the company, the project, the end-users or the customers,” Remark says. “Knowing how to say no and offering a constructive alternative solution” can prevent a project from becoming derailed or delayed.

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Not being a team player. “Every project has a team that is expected to work together to successfully complete the work,” says Hilary Atkinson, director of Project Management at Force 3, a business solutions provider.

“The project manager is the hub of the team, the process and the solution. Yet many young or new project managers make decisions without consulting with the team and without gaining approval,” Atkinson says. “Without that communication and approvals, the project is headed for disaster. The project manager cannot manage a project schedule, budget or scope without the team.”

A related danger is that “the project becomes ‘our project’ rather than a ‘company project,’ “warns Gordon Veniard, a veteran management consultant and the owner of thevenworks.com. And “instead of focusing on achieving the goal or getting it right, [team members or whole teams] then spend time looking for others to blame, defending their own position or refusing to co-operate with other teams,” he says.

“It’s like a non-performing sports team where the defense blames the offense; the offense then blames the defense; and the coach berates the referee. They’ve temporarily forgotten about winning,” Veniard says.

12 Not caring about quality—the “good enough” syndrome. “Due to different factors, such as schedule or budget

YES

pressure, it might be tempting to reduce the effort on quality assurance (QA),” says Sergio Loewenberg, senior manager, Business Consulting, Neoris, a global business and IT consulting company. However, a “lack of proper QA will result in a weak end-product,” he says.

“If the quality standards drop, the project will experience negative consequences such as re-work, liability and reduced margins,” Loewenberg says. So the project management team needs to understand “that the cost of preventing errors is lower than the cost of fixing them.” CIO Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to CIO magazine. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

PROUD TO BE GREEN The winners—from large organizations—of the Green IT Awards 2013 share what this recognition means to them.

"The award has been a great source of motivation for us. We’ve initiated several projects to conserve DC power.”

"The award not only adds recognition to our DC initiatives but also encourages our executives to go green."

ANIL K. KAUSHIK

T.G. DHANDAPANI

GM-Infrastructure & Services, BPCL

"We are proud of the fact that the passion with which we practice green IT has been recognized and rewarded.”

M. K. MADHAVAN

CTO, IndusInd Bank

CIO, TVS Motor Company

"Winning this award means a lot. We follow a holistic approach in being environmentally conscious—from our IT to power infrastructure."

SANJEEV PRASAD CIO & SVP, Genpact

"It’s nice to have your efforts appreciated. From optimizing power usage to virtualization, our green approach covers all aspects of IT."

"Winning the award is a privilege. We achieved this by minimizing non-volatile organic component emissions from our datacenter.”

JAYANTHA PRABHU

S. RAMASAMY

"Winning the award was inspirational. We deployed many green projects that increased our DC inventory by 25 percent."

"Providing uninterrupted service to customers while migrating our datacenter has made us worthy of this award.”

KULIN THAKER

SUNDAR VIJAPURAPU

"Our methodical approach to energy efficiency won us the award. We'll now strive for greater excellence.”

"It’s a great recognition for the IT projects that have contributed to energy-saving initiatives and enhanced our ROI.”

ALOK KUMAR

DEEPAK SINHA

CTO , Essar Group

EVP & Group IT Infrastructure Head, Kotak Mahindra Bank

VP & Global Head-Internal IT & Shared Services, TCS

Executive Director (IS), Indian Oil Corporation

"Today, CIOs understand the power of infusing green IT into their datacenters.

Green IT isn’t just a cause to save the environment it is also about using IT efficiently to reduce energy consumption. These CIOs have proved that by turning to smart strategies one can achieve sustainable IT that benefits the environment and adds business value. Our focus has always been on making energy safe, reliable, productive, efficient and green. And with the Green IT Awards, we want to recognize and reward the green initiatives of these CIOs.”

Head-Technology Infrastructure Group, ICICI Bank

Deputy General Manager-IT, National Insurance Company

NIKHIL PATHAK

VP- IT Business, India & SAARC, Schneider Electric

Brought to you by

CXO Agenda | Supply Chain

INNOVATING Dheeraj Sinha, Group Head-Corporate Management Services, Apollo Tyres, says IT has infused innovation into the company’s products and has helped it become one of the most advanced organizations in the tyre industry.

T

PHOTO BY SUMEET SAWHNEY

BY YOGESH GUPTA

Sinha to rise through the ranks. Which is why, over a period of time, new product development, capex around investments, product management, and other components were added to his role.

In this interview, Sinha talks about the synergies between supply chain and IT to steer ahead in the tyre industry, which is increasingly aping the FMCG sector in terms of demand.

The world’s 16th largest tyre maker, soon to be the seventh

CIO: Recently, Apollo Tyres announced the

largest, Apollo Tyres hardly needs an introduction. Suffice to say, the company is India’s second-largest tyre manufacturer, and a force to reckon with. With the acquisition of Copper Tire & Rubber Company of the US—in a deal that’s being touted as the largest in the auto sector—Apollo Tyres will set a new benchmark.

But close on the heels of this deal comes one enormous challenge: Integrating the supply chains, the lifeline of the company. With Dheeraj Sinha, group head-Corporate Management Services, holding the reins of the supply chain, the company is in safe hands.

acquisition of a company twice its size: Cooper Tire & Rubber Company. How do you plan to integrate the supply chains of both companies?

Sinha has over a decade of experience behind him—he was head of IT of the company till 2006—and today has grown to take charge of the supply chain for the entire group. Aligning IT with business, managing teams with focus on outcomes, and creating organization’s value drivers, has propelled

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DHEERAJ SINHA: It’s too early to comment on this acquisition as it’s under regulatory approval as of now.

However, the challenges of integrating the supply chains of both entities are vast and very significant.

As of now, we have six manufacturing plants but this number will now extend to a network of 14 plants across the globe with the acquisition of Cooper Tires. The ability to manage demand across continents and design the supply network would be the main objective. There would be added impetus on prioritising the production VOL/8 | ISSUE/10

CXO Agenda | Supply Chain

TYRELESSLY Dheeraj’s Agenda: To develop synergies between supply chain and IT to stay ahead of competition.

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cycles like which category of tyre needs to be manufactured at which plant to ensure profit optimization at all times.

How is IT helping you achieve this synergy?

Today, nothing moves without IT. As a manufacturing organization, we tend to ship goods, but primarily it is about the information that needs to flow across.

The crux of supply chains is: Make right information available to right people to take the right decisions. From an endcustomer perspective, it is more about the stock availability at dealership level—regional or national where it can be demanded and called for—and all this is enabled by IT at the backend.

A year-long project is under way to transform the supply chain capabilities internally and cope with longer planning schedules. We have integrated the APO

The critical supply chain component where IT can help is

fitting RFID tags onto our tyres. It can also be used as an after-sales service tool.

(Advanced Planning and Optimization) tool of our ERP across our plants. We are exploring tools around strategic capacity planning and decision support systems.

How has the SCM landscape changed in the past five years?

What impact has IT had?

There is a significant change and IT is helping us cope with it.

When we acquired two manufacturing set ups in South Africa a few years back, the ability to integrate demand and then segregate and source tyres from various plants irrespective of the location formed the prime focus. The automatic cross PO generation across entities, transfer pricing schema, and the entire export process is all enabled through the supply chain.

Looking from a fundamentally different prism, we have enabled mobility to a great extent for our sales team. The 62

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structure of any ERP is based on business areas and processes, and not around people. So, the end-customer’s data often gets lost in the magnitude of data present. With mobility, we have turned the tables. The salesperson can, now, click on the dealer’s photograph and the updated information appears on the mobile device. This is across the various internal processes of Apollo. The customer’s accounts receivables, offtake, commitments, participations level across schemes, complaints, feedback etcetera are all available at one place.

The sales team can place orders online.

A sales person’s plans, schedules, and marketing campaign are all available on the tablet. Today, sales people don’t have to come to office; they can do all their work sitting anywhere, thanks to mobility. In the next phase, we will map their attendance and conveyance bills.

Now, sales people have an additional three hours in a day. This has increased their productivity by 30 percent. Also, the mobility solution rolled out a year back has brought the customer and Apollo Tyres closer. While the process is sales and fulfilment, it is very much a supply chain process.

The product lifecycles are shorter, and the speed-to-market is what makes a company successful in today’s environment. Apollo is working on both these levers to ensure that we come out with the right product much before competition does.

Have you capitalized on new technology platforms like the cloud and social media to keep operations across your supply chain seamless and cost-effective?

Yes, we have. Our fleet account settlement process was completely paper-based. It was manually intensive and very cumbersome. As part of SCM optimization, we are in the process of deploying OTM (Oracle Transport Management) solution which is on the cloud. The entire transactions of fleet movement will be captured in the system. Billing will be auto-generated and all proofs will be inherent in the system. This leads to higher level of partner satisfaction and reduction of internal efforts to do the job.

Our social media strategy was quite disparate as each company— within Apollo—was driving its own initiatives. Now we have a single social media initiative as we are planning to roll out a uniform strategy across our BUs within the next two months. Social media

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CXO Agenda | Supply Chain can be utilized for multiple things like R&D and HR but we are using it to focus on the customer to build brand awareness and improve customer services. It is the only channel that gives feedback both ways and in real time.

In terms of process mapping, the social media platform allows us to respond to negative sentiments and convert them into problem tickets. You call it brand building, I call it customer service.

In your opinion, what is your biggest supply chain challenge? How is IT helping you fix it?

Social media allows us to respond

convert them into problem tickets. You call it brand building, I call it customer service.”

The challenges in India range from the absence of large 3PL players (third-party logistics) to the need for structured warehouses. More infrastructures need to be built around supply chain for it to be reliable in India. We struggle to locate trucks because GPS is not used in the supply chain by service providers.

The critical supply chain component where IT can help is fitting RFID tags onto our tyres. It will not only track the tyres within the supply chain but will also be helpful as an after-sales tool. People are no longer buying tyres but leasing them. With some fleets we have introduced the concept of cost per-kilometre. People can now use mobility-as-a-service in terms of usage of the tyre and other specs than a pure capex buy of a tyre.

Moreover, evolving business models compel you to deploy technology and solutions to cope with business challenges. For example, the maintenance of tyres under our fleet management is a significant challenge. RFID will indicate things like service time, and enable temperature pressure monitoring which ensures tyre longevity.

This acquisition would make Apollo the world’s seventh largest tyre maker by 2016. How vital is SCM to your growth story?

In a manufacturing environment where you sell goods and services to a customer, supply chain is the fundamental fulcrum on which everything moves.

At Apollo Tyres, SCM encompasses the entire business per se—from demand management at the end customer to the provisioning of finished goods back to the point irrespective of the location.

An efficient supply chain would obviously lead to less costs and better integration with our customers as well as with our partners and raw material suppliers. It is important for our supply chain to have a tighter integration with IT so that we could cater to the changing needs of vehicle manufacturers like Maruti, Tata Motors, and Ashok Leyland. We need to continuously monitor their plants, their new vehicle models, and then accordingly tweak the tyre production quickly and effectively. The ability to see the vehicle manufacturer’s plants and accordingly change the production of tyres is the name of the game.

We are moving from a demand forecast-based model to a replenishment model now, like the FMCG sector. The faster the

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to negative sentiments and

product moves from the shelf, the faster it gets produced and shipped back to the point of location. Sophisticated tools capture the demand which may be as simple as a dealer portal, structured demand across geographies, and the ability to spread across the SCM network. The ability to cater to global demand, execute supply network planning, and optimize with profitability continue to be critical factors for our supply chain.

What are the business challenges that will drive Apollo Tyres towards being more efficient in SCM and IT?

In the future, product lifecycles will be much smaller.

Customers would become more demanding and more intelligent.

A tyre is always a grudge buy and never a happy buy. It is quite a difficult product from a brand loyalty perspective. When it comes to commercial vehicles (trucks, fleet, and light commercial), performance, and efficiency play a huge role. For passenger cars, on the other hand, it is more of brand recall at least in the Indian market.

In the last two years, Apollo Tyres has moved towards a very high degree of customer centricity. Many processes will continue to ensure bringing customers into the process map, understanding their buying patterns, and getting customers closer to the organization. The efficiency of our supply chain— including manufacturing and distribution—lies in its ability to influence the customer. If you have a strong hold around these two then you are on the right path.

Also, once the acquisition of Cooper Tire & Rubber Company fructifies, the US market will bring its own challenges to keep us busy for the next two to three years with a different set of challenges and solutions. CIO

Send feedback on this interview to yogesh_gupta@idgindia.com

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Staff Management

Great Talent The

BY STEPHANIE OVERBY

Hunt

Finding IT pros with business skills has always been a bear. So leading CIOs are taking radical steps to train, recruit or grow the hybrid staff they covet.

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Over a two-year period,

Bill Weeks saw 70 percent of his development team at SquareTwo Financial walk out the door. More than half of them left on their own. Weeks fired the rest.

It might sound like a leadership disaster, but it was the best thing that had happened to the $250 million (about Rs 1,475 crore) asset-recovery company’s IT organization in years.

When Weeks took over as CIO in 2010, the company was in growth mode, but IT was falling behind. He wanted to build a results-focused technology team, but many on staff refused to engage with business.

“The previous CIO had told the IT staff, ‘Business people are busy doing business things, and if I catch you talking to them, I’ll fire you,’” says Weeks. “That’s the exact opposite of what I believe.”

Many IT executives face situations like Weeks’, where they’re challenged to build IT departments that are more strategic, service-oriented and engaged with the business—but they’re dealing with employees who lack the skills to make the transformation.

According to a recent IDG Enterprise (IDGE) Reader ROI: How CIOs can recruit IT survey of 696 senior IT and business executives, workers who understand more than half of the respondents said IT must business requirements be business-savvy (61 percent), collaborative (53 What they need to do to percent), and innovative (50 percent). The only make techies think the way business does problem is that finding “hybrid” staff—those with that combination of tech skills and business savvy Ways to achieve business-IT alignment that CIOs covet—remains a problem.

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CIO Role

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Staff Management Many IT employees still take a traditional view of their role, as order-takers rather than business partners; indeed, 58 percent of respondents to the IDGE survey rated their IT staff as reactive. And among their top IT-management challenges were cultivating strategic thinking (51 percent), developing business understanding (42 percent), and converting technologists to strategists (37 percent).

This talent issue is hardly new. IT leaders have preached the importance of the blended IT professional for years. But after a decade, it’s clear that help is not on the way. Schools won’t suddenly churn out enough perfect, well-rounded IT employees. Tech-knowledgeable business people aren’t going to apply for IT assignments in droves. Developers and data

warehouse professionals won’t suddenly arrive at work as business strategists.

Leading CIOs are taking matters into their own hands.

Some are firing folks who can’t make the transition, or changing the way they hire. Others are encouraging existing staff to be more business-oriented or populating their IT ranks with recruits from the business. Some are mentoring. Others are stretching.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But CIOs are making progress. And, given what the business expects of IT, they don’t have a choice.

Kent Kushar, CIO, E&J Gallo Winery, recruits about half of his strategic thinkers as readymade hires from the outside world and develops the rest internally.

What’s Wrong With IT Given the chance, 27 percent of IT and business leaders would remake their company’s IT departments from scratch, according to the IDGE survey. It’s a telling statistic, a sign of frustration at a time when CIOs are under pressure to boost business results and develop customer-facing applications, but may lack the kind of staff who can do that.

According to a CIO Executive Council survey of 200 IT leaders this year, IT organizations are least proficient in the “ability to develop, market and present compelling visions of ITenabled business opportunities” followed by the “ability to appreciate and incorporate external customer needs and experience.” If corporate IT were composed of employees with equal parts business and technology knowledge, those might be dominant skills. So why don’t CIOs just hire more well-rounded workers? Because they don’t tend to exist in the wild.

“Business savvy comes from years of experience working on the business side, generally at a level high enough to have a broad cross-functional perspective,” says Dave Smoley, CIO, AstraZeneca. “Because technical competence comes from years of experience working and training in math, science and technology, it is rare to find both in one individual.” Smoley, until recently the CIO of Flextronics International, joined pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca as CIO on April 15.

Bringing business professionals into IT can work, but their technology knowledge can be shallow. Imbuing techies with a business point of view is difficult.

“It’s hard for tech people—even middle managers on up to senior managers—to think the way that the business thinks,” says Teri Takai, CIO for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). “They tend to explain things from their own perspective.”

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Staff Management

Raja Musunuru, CIO at The Steritech Group, was once a case in point. “I am an engineer by study, and to me, everything seemed to be a problem that needed to be solved—and solved in a particular way,” Musunuru says.

“While that works well in certain scenarios, it’s not a foolproof recipe for value contribution to the business.”

When Weeks arrived at SquareTwo Financial, only a couple of people at the very top of the IT organization worked with the business at all. “The rest were spoon-fed what to do. It was a huge bottleneck that stifled creativity and collaboration,” says Weeks. “It was crazy.”

Rebuilding—and Rebranding—IT

Leading CIOs are taking matters into their own hands. Some are firing folks who can’t make the transition, or changing the way they hire.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is blow up the IT department up and start over.

Weeks explained his expectations to the technology team: “We’re moving to this more collaborative and engaged environment. You’re going to have to understand what our business needs to be successful. You may not want to do that, and I don’t want any hostages.”

Some people got it, particularly the company’s underused business analysts. Others fled, like many on the development team. It wasn’t just the business focus that drove them out, it was the added accountability.

“There were people who had been hiding under a rock,” Weeks says.

Weeding out those who couldn’t adopt the business point of view was half a solution. To replace them, Weeks had to hunt down that rare breed—the business-savvy, collaborative programmer. “We needed a combination of tech skills and collaboration skills,” says Weeks. “And we’re primarily a Java shop, so that made it even more difficult.”

Weeks started by building a new employment branding campaign that emphasized the financial success of the company and its desire for A-level programmers. He implemented agile methodology that required development teams to work closely with the business. And he appointed business analysts as the product owners of those development teams.

At E&J Gallo Winery, the world’s largest wine producer, long-time CIO Kent Kushar also knew it was time to turn his reactive, back-office IT function into a proactive, customer-facing business partner. What he didn’t know

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was whether he had the right people to do it. “We knew we had some who could make the change,” says Kushar.

“They latched right on.” But many did not, despite “lots of chances to make it.”

For a new role—the customerfacing IT representative—he wanted more than a business bent. He wanted a graduate business degree. Finding the best and brightest MBAs was one thing; finding those who wanted to work at Gallo headquarters was another. “You don’t recruit a Harvard grad to come to Modesto,” Kushar says. He zeroed in on schools like the University of Arizona, the University of Texas, California State University Stanislaus, and the University of Arkansas.

“My CFO and I did it ourselves.

We didn’t outsource it. We got on airplanes. We talked to deans. We studied the curricula. We joined advisory boards,” Kushar says. “And we were able to attract the right talent.”

Reaching Across the Aisle

When Smoley was populating his global customer solutions group at Flextronics, he too wanted top business-minded tech leaders. “We often get them from manufacturing sites, which are essentially really small companies,” Smoley explains.

“This is a good source of talent because if an individual has been an IT leader at a manufacturing site, they have absolutely dealt with customers and business management directly. They have experienced the pressure for reduced cost and increased speed. So these folks are business-savvy and technically strong.”

They don’t all want the job; some are happy where they are. But for those that do, Smoley has a career path for them. “We also make it a practice to offer our IT talent the option to work on the business side as a career path, and we actively recruit from non-IT functions in the company,” says Smoley. “Our mission was to be the career destination of choice for all employees at Flextronics.”

One problem Smoley often encounters, however, is overestimating the technical capabilities of business people. “While one doesn’t really need to be a technologist in these roles, there is a need to understand how to break a project down into work tasks and dependencies and assess technical risk,” he says. “Without that capability, a project can go into the ditch quickly.” He needs staffers who have REAL CIO WORLD | A U G U S T 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

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Staff Management enough technical knowledge to stay out of danger and who are willing to seek assistance when things get hairy. Smoley encourages his business-minded folks to spend plenty of time with technologists inside and outside the company— suppliers, partners, and peers.

Talking to Aunt Linda At the DoD, Takai’s lieutenants excel at highly technical projects, but she reminds them that their technical solutions are only as good as their ability to communicate them to senior defense leaders. “I tell them you have to use Aunt Linda language,” she says. “How would you explain this to your mother, assuming she’s no expert? Or your neighbor?”

She’s always peppering her direct reports with questions about their projects—not the technical details of the programs, but their intended results. It’s to help her prepare for meetings with department secretaries and undersecretaries. But it drives home the point that it’s business outcomes that matter.

“I try to take them to meetings whenever I can so they can see the dynamics themselves,” Takai says. Sometimes that’s enough. In other cases, Takai will identify expert explainers to emulate.

At SquareTwo Financial, it took time for IT employees to get comfortable with business discussions. “It’s difficult for a developer to stand up say, ‘I’m going to show you what my product does and do it in a way that a business person can understand it.’ Not, ‘Hey, I wrote this code this way and here are my SQL statements,’ but, ‘Here’s the business value of why I designed this the way I did,’” Weeks says.

When Musunuru was interim CIO at Gaylord Entertainment, he says he found it valuable to be paired with subject matter experts, which gave him not only more domain expertise, but also a deeper understanding of how technology solutions could affect the organization—for better or for worse. “They trained me in assessing whether specific initiatives and IT processes are a net value addition or subtraction to the broader organization,” he says. The engineer who once solved problems in a vacuum evolved into a collaborator.

Bringing business professionals into IT can work, but their technology knowledge can be shallow.

Imbuing techies with a business point of view is difficult.

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Shortly after joining Gaylord, Musunuru partnered with business executives to understand their growth imperatives and the operational challenges causing customer satisfaction issues.

He formed a cross-functional team to map the customer journey and develop solutions to improve customer experience, including the implementation of a Web-based booking engine to optimize the reservations process, a cloud-based call-center-optimization solution that improved conversion rates while reducing operating costs, and a campaign-management system that transformed marketing operations.

It Takes Two Sometimes, however, a techie is just a techie.

And that’s not a bad thing. “It’s hard to be a technical person today,” says Kushar. “If you can find people who keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs, that’s valuable.” Gallo’s IT infrastructure staff, for example, is very focused on the technical aspects of the environment to ensure it is relevant, usable, world-class, and ready for business growth, says Kushar.

“I don’t want all business savvy,” agrees Takai of the DoD. “If you only have that with a light dusting of the technical, you would never adequately address the challenges we have here.”

Takai is careful not to chase away the experts. “The thing that hasn’t worked is my trying to make technical people less technical,” she says. “You might move them a little bit, but they’re never going to step back and take a management perspective. It’s just not who they are. It’s frustrating for them.”

Instead, Takai finds someone with complementary business skills to work with them.

“I may have an area where I need a lot of technical expertise and also the ability to interface with our business people—like cybersecurity. If I have someone who understands the technology but is not as good at dealing with the front office, I bring in a second person who’s better at marketing skills and dealing with senior leaders and pair them up,” says Takai. “You don’t have to get all your expertise from one person.”

“Success in IT comes from building an organization that has a mix of strong technical individuals as well as business-minded individuals who are leading in a way that helps the techies understand how they fit into the business and why what they do is important,” says Smoley. “Simultaneously, you have to help the businessminded folks understand the technical strategies and roadmaps so they can leverage them and represent them to the business. It is a continuous challenge.”

The Making of a Strategist Are IT strategists made or born? At Gallo, Kushar recruits about half of his strategic thinkers as readymade hires from

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the outside world and develops the rest internally.

“In part, it’s about allowing some people inside the organization to think differently,” he says.

For Suzanne Best-Foster, vice president of enterprise infrastructure services at Jacobs Engineering, the key is “investing in more listening than talking and suspending the techie drive in me to provide solutions based on what I know and not what could be.”

Her transformation to strategic thinker has been fueled by listening to others challenge her thinking or encourage her to broaden her vision. “I have grown immeasurably through the opportunities they have made for me to gain insight,” she says.

Smoley says strategic thinking must be a core tenet of talent development. “I look for openmindedness, a questioning mind-set, candor, critical thinking, and the ability to network confidently, internally and externally,” Smoley explains. When he finds junior employees who have those traits, he matches them up with a senior mentor. “It helps to accelerate learning through more frequent conversations around what works and what doesn’t—and why.

“Success as a strategist comes from a broad awareness of strategic options and what has and hasn’t worked in the past and currently,” Smoley says. “The technical world changes so fast that individuals have to be continuously assessing their assumptions and re-evaluating them.”

Progress, Not Perfection One thing Takai has learned is that you can’t take an entire IT organization and make it all strategic.

“They’re used to doing things a certain way and it’s hard to get people to go at it differently,” she says. “It’s better to pick two or three people at a time,” she says.

And she’s realistic about the changes she can— or can’t—make when some of her employees have 30 years of tenure; they were there before she was appointed and will be there after she leaves. “They know people like me come and go, and my ability to get them to think differently is limited.”

Sometimes, the dual demands of the hybrid role are too much for one IT professional to handle. Or pairs of seemingly complementary workers don’t mesh. “The toughest part is to try to find compatible people,” says Kushar. “Either you try to put someone who’s too technical in a role and don’t have the customer skills, or those who are too customer-skilled and don’t have the technical awareness. Those people fall flat.”

Weeks has spent three years already on the path to creating an IT organization that boasts both business and

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Teri Takai, CIO, the United States DOD, always reminds her lieutenants that technical solutions are only as good as their ability to communicate them.

technology expertise. His direct reports finally all get it. But “when you get down to their directs, some get it more than others,” he says. “Each rung down the ladder, it’s harder for them to see the big picture. It’s not perfect. It never will be.”

Yet these top-notch CIOs keep at it.

“You don’t hire people who get it and all of a sudden everything’s cured,” Weeks says. “You have to give them time to understand the business. And then they have to hire people who get it, and give them time to understand the business. It takes time.” CIO

Stephanie Overby is a freelance journalist. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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EMBRACING

CONSUMERIZATION

Consumers today have more choice, more options, and more flexibility in the technology that they use every day. For IT, it’s about striking a balance between user expectations and enterprise requirements, says Microsoft’s Amrish Goyal.

“It isn’t simply a question of whether users can bring their own devices into the workplace – it is the governance one needs to put in place to enable productivity while also protecting business information.”

- Amrish Goyal, Director - Windows Business Group, Microsoft.

How can CIOs embrace consumerization while creating a strategy to delivering measurable business value?

People want to use the same technology at work as they do at home. As this technology spills over into their professional lives, the line between the personal and professional is blurring.

And although consumer technology offers some great potential benefits for the business, it also represents added risk in terms of security, privacy, and compliance. For IT, it’s about striking a balance between user expectations and enterprise requirements.

With a diverse range of devices based on the Windows platform, CIOs can meet enterprise requirements while delivering an experience that employees will love.

Further, CIOs can control and manage the proliferation of devices in an enterprise, Windows and non-Windows based alike, with a single pane of glass using onpremise management tools, alongside cloud services.

With best productivity experience on Windows-based devices, CIOs can enable what employees want while delivering the security and privacy that is required in the enterprise.

To adapt to consumerization of IT, CIOs need to move from a device-centric approach to user-centric approach. What does this mean for IT?

Microsoft delivers a range of Windowsbased devices—from smartphones to tablets to PCs—that people love to use and that are ready for the enterprise.

Having more devices means increased complexity, so the focus is on minimizing that complexity.

For IT, an end-to-end security and management platform can simplify how CIOs respond to the consumerization of IT, regardless of the devices that their users bring to work. For users— whether they are working on a PC, a tablet or phone, or through a browser— having familiar tools can help them stay productive. And for developers, it’s all about putting user-centric experiences at the heart of application development and enabling faster development across devices.

What are the biggest hurdles of embracing consumerization of IT and how can CIOs overcome these challenges?

Some of the challenges of embracing consumerization of IT for CIOs are: Maintaining strict security parameters while managing user identities, so that employees can access enterprise information and resources from a diverse range of devices Enabling users to capitalize on the social capabilities and ease of collaboration that electronic devices and applications

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provide, thereby integrating their work and personal lives The extra IT cost that an organization must bear in setting up new security measures and infrastructure is another big hurdle in embracing consumerization of IT. To overcome these challenges, CIOs need to ask continually what their users want and need, particularly with respect to providing rich, usable applications for those devices. They need to have their security measures, policies and infrastructure in place in order to provide a seamless experience to employees. And they should look at the extra IT cost from a long-term perspective, and as a cost that will ultimately lead to productivity enhancement and a reduced device cost in the company.

The flood gates of consumerization have opened and CIOs are asked not to stand in its way. Great advice, but what does that mean to the CIOs that need to maintain information security and compliance?

It isn’t simply a question of whether users can bring their own devices into the workplace – it is the governance one needs to put in place to enable productivity while also protecting business information.

When looking at the IT challenges introduced by consumerization, it may help to use the application as a focal point.

After all, it is the ability to run applications on these new consumer devices that drive the additional productivity promised by consumerization. Independent of what device the user has, a CIO needs to: Provide secure access to applications.

Deliver those applications in a way that respects device form factor and purpose.

Secure devices running applications and data being shared via those applications.

Ensure that both devices and users are compliant with corporate policies.

The crux of problem is ensuring that these capabilities can be implemented across a diverse set of employee-owned devices, alongside corporate-owned systems.

Devices, identity, social technology, and applications and services are the critical focus areas for CIOs who are on the consumerization

roadmap. How can Microsoft help CIOs re-imagine their Enterprise, especially on these fronts?

Proliferation of devices in the workplace: With so many devices available, and employees wanting to use them to access the corporate network and its sensitive intellectual property, Microsoft enables CIOs to promote the right level of flexibility and agility for users to access the correct resources, but also manage devices to promote data security.

marketed and distributed.

Can you tell us about some of the innovations that Microsoft has been at the forefront > to provide a flexible work style using intelligent infrastructure?

Devices powered by Microsoft Windows 8 bridge the divide between what users want from a gadget and what organizations require from those who use gadgets for personal and business purposes.

Identities: Microsoft enables CIOs support a multitude of non-Windows platforms and supports a multitude of identities and user scenarios to meet the access needs of its customers.

Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager has changed the device-management landscape by offering a single pane of glass through which to manage devices and the Microsoft intellectual property that they may contain. It enables Microsoft IT to manage diverse environments.

Outlook Mobile and Office Mobile built in: Users can easily get up-and-running with a Windows device that has all the familiar office tools such as Outlook Mobile and Office Mobile built-in and ready to go.

Social Technologies: Social Technology is the major force for driving action, collaboration, and integrating applications into workspace.

Microsoft offers social technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Yammer.

SharePoint simplifies the process of storing, synchronizing, and sharing important data, and includes workmanagement capabilities that help users organize and prioritize tasks from across SharePoint, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Outlook. Yammer offers similar functionality, and future development will include an option for extranet accessibility.

Mobilizes business apps: With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is enabling organizations to take charge of their own business apps. Customized business apps in organizations are the in-thing today enabling business users to be more productive. Windows Phone 8 supports development of private app.

Microsoft offers great managing capabilities for IT of an enterprise who can manage all the Windows devices and various applications on the devices using System Center 2012 and Windows Intune at the backend.

Supporting Development of Applications and Services: Application development in the era of the Consumerization of IT requires a user-centric model. Users require lineof-business (LOB) applications that span device types. Microsoft Windows Intune and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager at the backend enable CIOs to ensure control and monitor apps once

Integrates with business infrastructure: Windows Phone/device remains the leading smartphone that is easy to deploy in a Microsoft IT infrastructure, whether it’s on-premises (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync) or in the cloud (Office 365).

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* REAL PROBLEMS * REAL SOLUTIONS

SECURITY

RELOADED Sterlite Technologies’ ISO 9001 certification gave its customers quality assurance, but the company needed a stamp of security. Enter ISO 27001.

BY DEBARATI ROY The Organization: Sterlite Technologies is India’s only fully-integrated producer of optical fiber, telecommunication cables, and power transmission conductors. Sterlite Technologies operates in 10 countries, and more than 25 percent of national power grids in India run on Sterlite conductors. The company’s customer list features six of the top 10 telecom giants, and its products connect over 75 countries. Sterlite’s net worth stood at Rs 1,148 crore in FY 2012.

The Business Case: Sterlite’s plant in Aurangabad already had an ISO 9001 certification, and that ensured its customers high standards in production processes and high quality. But with 45 patents in its kitty and some of the largest telecom and power operators banking on its products, Sterlite realized it had to strengthen its information security standards as well.

“Since we operate in global markets and service a lot of global clients, it was important for us to standardize and strengthen our information security practices,” says Prasanth Puliakottu, CIO, Sterlite Technologies.

Puliakottu wanted to create a comprehensive framework which included all aspects of production and processes, including information security. That was because commitment to information security was a prerequisite for many of Sterlite’s clients.

Right from the time of receiving an order till the time of delivering the final product, Sterlite performs numerous quality checks to fufill client requirements regarding information security and ensure standardized procedures. The process was tedious, time-consuming and there was always the fear of missing a step that could cost the company a lot—sometimes, to the extent of losing a client.

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The Solution: Puliakottu realized that an ISO 27001 certification would cement the fact that Sterlite took information security seriously. He roped in Sunil Pawar, Sterlite’s CISO, and the heads of different LOBs to create an ISO 27001 framework.

Puliakottu and his team spent around 18 months creating an information security and process standardization framework. This framework included even the most basic yet often neglected pieces of data security protocols like how paper used during work hours should never be left unattended.

The Challenges: Both Pawar and Puliakottu spent the first three months for the initial preparations and creating a standard ISO 27001 framework. This included external audits, risk assessment, profiling, and closing gaps in processes. But the time of implementation came along with the need to make some strategic calls.

With four plant locations and offices scattered across India, Puliakottu had to figure out a way to conduct security training and implement policies at all locations. The real challenge was completing the entire process in as little time as possible.

“It took us totally 15 months to go live at all locations. Individually, each plant would have taken about eight months instead of 12, but the collective time frame would have been larger as well,” says Puliakottu.

Another challenge was to get employees enthused and serious about security. “We realized that information security in itself is a boring topic and people might not be enthusiastic to attend training sessions,” says Pawar.

However, the duo had other plans.

Puliakottu roped in the HR team and initiated a fresh round of training in various enterprise applications for employees. The security guidelines were plugged into these training sessions as part of the larger scheme of things. Just the kind of sugar-coated pill the employees needed.

The Benefits: The impact of the newly acquired certification on Sterlite’s image

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Prasanth Puliakottu, CIO, Sterlite Technologies, quelled clients’ concerns regarding information security by fetching an ISO 27001 certification for the company.

wasn’t hard to see. Notably, the company finalized a deal with a UAE-based customer within just a few days of acquiring the certification.

“Earlier, the client would come with a checklist and conduct an audit before signing a deal with us. Now, almost 90 percent of the general questions on most checklists are automatically answered because we adhere to ISO 27001,” says Puliakottu.

He expects that as a result of this, Sterlite will be able to generate about Rs 100 crore more than what it would have earlier made over a stipulated period of time.

Having assured quality and security for its customers, Sterlite Technologies can now expect to connect more countries. CIO Debarati Roy is principal correspondent. Send feedback to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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casefiles

SAMVARDHANA MOTHERSON REFLECTEC

When managing SMR’s datacenter resources was becoming cumbersome, and in turn, affected uptime, the company’s CIO found a savior in virtualization.

The Organization: An enviable global presence and revenue of around Rs 6,954 crore set Samvardhana Motherson Reflectec (SMR) apart from other players in the rear view mirrors manufacturing industry.

Part of the Samvardhana Motherson Group (SMG), SMR develops, produces, and distributes a whole range of automotive components.

Its clientele includes the granddaddies of the auto industry: BMW, Toyota, Cadillac, and Tata.

The Business Case: Establishing SMR after

Gaurav Gulati, AVP and CIO, Global IT, SMR, improved uptime and saved significant costs for the company by taking the virtualization route.

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*

BY ERIC ERNES T

acquiring Visiocorp in 2009, SMG showed a focussed effort to improve IT systems as IT was key to the efficiency of the company’s supply chain. “Given its financial condition, SMR was not investing much in things such as IT maintenance and timely upgradation, factors that affected user productivity,” says Gaurav Gulati, AVP and CIO, Global IT, SMR. Also, SMR’s main global datacenter at Stuttgart, Germany, housed around 80 physical servers that ran over 50 businesscritical apps. One such app is SMR’s EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), which receives real-time customer schedules, shipping schedules, and routing carrier instructions. If this app were to face downtime, business operations would be adversely affected, because delayed electronic notifications have a negative impact on its supply chain.

The Solution: Gulati realized that the solution to SMR’s problems lay in server consolidation, which can be achieved through virtualization.

A POC was conducted across SMR’s datacenters in France and Spain.

SMR was able to witness remarkable improvement in manageability and user-experience just by virtualizing less critical apps. Gulati was now confident that virtualization

was indeed the solution to his problems. The plan was to virtualize 50 servers, 35 of which were over five years old and hence had to be replaced as per the company’s refresh cycle. If not for virtualization, the company would have had to spend a substantial amount of money on new physical servers. The total number of servers was brought down to three, with most of the critical apps being virtualized.

Benefits: With virtualization, SMR has been able to get an ROI of 524 percent, which is calculated based on the investments it is making on the infrastructure and the much larger savings expected in coming years.

Gulati believes the project will reduce TCO by 70 percent over five years, by comparing current costs with what it would have spent in operating according to the earlier model.

However, uptime improvement has to be the most significant gain the company has made.

Application uptime has improved by 0.23 percent, year on year from the last quarter.

Having accrued the benefits and saved significant costs in the process, Gulati can proudly look back at a project well implemented. CIO

Send feed back to eric_ernest@ idgindia.com

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ESSENTIAL

technology IMAGE BY MASTERFILE.COM

A CLOSER LOOK AT SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKS

SDN has the potential to bring the same efficiencies to datacenter networks that CPU virtualization brings to datacenter servers. Here’s why you should take it seriously.

SDN Means Business

BY ROY CHUA AND MATTHEW PALMER

SDN | Software-defined networking (SDN). You’ve heard about it. You’ve talked about it in hallways, in meetings, at conferences. Chances are you want to try it in the not-too-distant future. But for all the interest in SDN, many people don’t truly understand what it is or what it means for their enterprise.

Social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing have pushed traditional IT approaches to their limits, spurring incredible innovation in virtualization and automation.

But although compute and storage have been able to scale by becoming flexible, agile, and virtualized, networks are the one place IT hasn’t virtualized.

Enter SDN. In today’s cloud environments, administrators can spin up new compute and storage instances in minutes, only to be stymied for weeks by rigid and oftentimes manual datacenter operations on the network. SDN has the potential to revolutionize legacy datacenters by closing the provisioning and management gap between networks and their compute and storage counterparts.

Defining SDN At its most basic, SDN is an approach to networking that centralizes management of the network by separating the control logic to offdevice compute resources. SDN also exposes

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programmable control APIs to allow applications to orchestrate and automate network services.

SDN increases efficiency by optimizing existing applications, services, and infrastructure. Removing the need for manual configuration of switches and routers reduces errors while allowing applications and services to scale with a speed impossible in legacy datacenters.

Datacenter operators are looking to SDN approaches to fulfil one or more of three basic network needs: Simplification and efficiency Automation and scale Assurance and compliance

SDN in the Datacenter and Beyond SDN offers incredible potential for flexibility, agility, and scalability in nextgeneration datacenters. Certainly, service providers see huge potential for SDN in areas such as service chaining, traffic engineering, bandwidth-on-demand, and dynamic WAN interconnects, but

for establishing multi-tenancy, or creating multiple, isolated virtual networks on the same physical network. SDN enables you to programmatically create flexible network configurations so you can either connect different servers, firewalls, and load balancers into the existing infrastructure or replicate existing multi-tier network topologies without having to deal with cables or complex command-line operations.

SDN also allows administrators to stretch the network across racks within the datacenter or even across multiple datacenters or clouds. For automation and orchestration, SDN enables coordination and service insertion (firewall, IPS, load balancing etcetera) across all resources, including networks, compute, and storage.

SDN and network virtualization also enable cloud infrastructure providers to essentially have their own virtual platform to run applications. They can serve multiple departments or customers, providing each with their own isolated compute, storage, and network playground. SDN enables cloud orchestration platforms such as

Although it’s too soon to tell which SDN approaches will rule the datacenter or how they will impact traditional networking, it’s clear that the technology is here to stay. its greatest benefits will be realized through the implementation of network virtualization in the datacenter.

Debates abound over the relationship between SDN and network virtualization.

Depending on how you define SDN, some people contend it’s possible to achieve network virtualization without it. But the fact remains that network virtualization— abstracting logical networks from the underlying physical implementation— is the most prevalent use case for SDN technology today. When it comes to slicing the network, SDN solutions will be key 76

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OpenStack and CloudStack to provide on-demand, multi-tenant networks as part of their private or public cloud spin-ups.

Enterprises will also see business value from SDN solutions in visibility and troubleshooting—namely, tap aggregation.

Instead of having to physically place taps on relevant switch ports, an SDN solution can selectively inspect flows within the network.

SDN solutions programmatically record to an analysis device to figure out what’s going on, potentially cutting troubleshooting time from weeks down to minutes. There are certainly other SDN use cases outside

35%

SDN’s expected share of Ethernet switching by 2016,up from almost negligible in 2012.

SOURCE: IDC

the datacenter, in campus and access networks, including follow-me services, advanced network access control, and even dynamic compartmentalized networks for compliance. But the most immediate gains will be reaped in large datacenters, where SDN promises to substantially reduce operational costs. The jury is still out on whether SDN will result in significant reduction on the capex side. The commodity datacenter switch, touted by many as the new reality with SDN’s ascent, has yet to hit mainstream.

SDN Vendor Approaches The stakes in the swiftly evolving SDN space are high, and vendors are rushing in to establish a footing. Traditional networking providers and upstarts alike are creating their own SDN frameworks and controllers, even as major stakeholders try to define the very underpinnings of the technology.

These days, just about every networking vendor claims to offer some sort of “SDN” product. Layer 2-3 vendors are either embracing OpenFlow or spinning their own form of a flow-control and programmatic API. Layer 4-7 players are moving toward virtualizing their offerings and trying to fit into a software-centric SDN architecture so they can provide on-demand, elastic Layer 4-7 services. A new battleground is brewing around virtual switches, which mirror what their physical counterparts do, only inside virtual machine hosts.

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Related to the concept of virtual switches is that of the overlay network. Favored by virtualization platform vendors VMware and Microsoft, overlays “float” virtual network domains on top of a physical networking and virtualization infrastructure. Overlay approaches based on protocols such as VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN), NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation), and STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) support the creation of millions of virtual networks that can exist on top of legacy physical infrastructures, moving the network intelligence to the “edge” of the network where virtual switches live.

On the control front, both established networking vendors and startups are building their own SDN controllers, which translate application calls into OpenFlow or similar protocols, and in some cases, function as a network operating system.

Other vendors are making current and new switches SDN-compatible by supporting OpenFlow and other programmatic APIs. In fact, most vendors are working to find ways for existing products to work with SDN capabilities, particularly when it comes to orchestration, management and analytics, and automation.

Meanwhile, competing vendor-led consortiums are racing to establish SDN standards for the industry. Time will tell whether the consortiums will provide the more transparent approach to SDN standardization they promise, or whether—as cynics fear—the industry-led initiatives will essentially trade one form of vendor lock-in for another.

Few innovations have burst upon the networking and datacenter scene as dramatically or as rapidly as SDN. But for all the promise it offers, the technology is in the early stages of the typical enterprise software market evolution. Although it’s too soon to tell which SDN approaches will rule the datacenter or how they will impact traditional networking, it’s clear that SDN is are here to stay. CIO

10 SDN Commandments BEST PRACTICES | These 10 recommendations provide enterprise IT managers a framework to evaluate SDN products from the multitude of SDN suppliers.

1) Have a clear vision about how SDN technology will benefit your shop.

2) Pilot and evaluate the SDN carefully before committing to a specific architecture.

3) Evaluate the impact of SDN on your IT organization. Does SDN offer opportunities to create cross-functional teams that address datacenter or cloud networking requirements?

4) Think about SDN implementation challenges. Who will help you with the SDN installation? Do you have the existing SDN skill set in your IT organization or is additional training needed?

5) Identify a specific initial use case for SDN. For example, reducing the time to provision network security to new VMs, or facilitating quality of service guarantees across your private WAN. 6) Think about the potential impact of SDN on your operational costs.

7) Support for legacy networks. How well does the SDN offering support your installed base of legacy Ethernet switches and routers? What is the migration plan going forward for SDN? 8) Think about SDN in business value terms. How does a specific SDN product reduce your costs or benefit IT operations?

9) Security. Improved network security is a critical potential benefit of SDN. Does the SDN offering under consideration improve security or does it create additional security challenges?

10) Standards support. Does the SDN support a wide range of industry standards, for both networking and IT? — By Lee Doyle

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SDN BASICS

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IF YOUR CEO HAS FALLEN

HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE WITH HIS

NEW TABLET

JULY 17 & 19, 2013 Report Presented By IDG Events

IF YOUR MARKETING HAS SIGNED UP WITH EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA SITE KNOW TO MAN

IF YOUR HEAD OF OPERATIONS CHOSE TO RUN SUPPLY CHAIN ON

CLOUD

YOUR IT HAS BEEN

CONSUMERIZED CIOs need to rethink IT architecture to focus on controlling -- or loosening controls on – information, and understand how IT can adjust to the new reality of the Consumerization of IT.

By Gopal Kishore

T

he millennial generation, born between 1980 and 2000 now entering employment in vast numbers, will shape the world of work for years to come. At the first edition of CITE World in India, Padmaja Alaganandan, Executive Director - Consulting at PwC Consulting spoke about how attracting the best of the millennial workers is critical to the future of business. She highlighted that their career aspirations, attitudes about work, and knowledge of new technologies will define the culture of the 21st century workplace. “It’s clear that millennials will be a powerful generation of workers and that those with the right skills will be in high demand. They may be able to command not only creative reward packages by today’s standards, but also influence the way they work and how they operate in the workplace. They may also be one of the biggest challenges that many organisations will face,” she said.

From a recent study conducted by PWC, Alaganandan highlighted that the companies that have already been most

successful in attracting talented millennials – Google and Apple among them – are naturally innovative employers who are never restrained by ‘how things used to be done’. These companies are not specifically targeting millennials, but their culture, management style and approach to recruitment and retention naturally appeal to the millennial generation. “And because of that, they are able to take their pick of the best young talent around,” she said.

Adding to the conversation at the Indian edition of the conference that has been running successfully at the USA, Vijay Ramachandran, Editor – In – Chief, IDG Media, said that CIOs will need to gain better insight into peculiar behavioural skills of the mobile generation. “The millennials possess very unique habits and their expectations at the workplace are greater than what exists today in our technology realm. But what’s worse than not having the technology to cater to their needs is assuming their demands and developing a redundant strategy,” he said. “For example, the Gen Y prefers to engage over social media, and

While it’s important for organizations to build structure, some of the technologies that the millennials will need at work has to be more collaborative.

Vijay Ramachandran Editor – In – Chief, IDG Media

hence a robust social business strategy is necessary. They are more success-driven and collaborative,” he said.

Reimagining the Enterprise Businesses are moving towards a more individualistic yet collaborative workplace and much of this change is driven by new tools and technology. Geetu Bhatnagar, DirectorEnterprise Marketing, Microsoft India, spoke about how today’s technology is sparking imagination at the enterprise.

She highlighted that customers today have more information and new ways to connect and that competition is being driven by global uncertainty, while tried and tested aspects of managing cost and risk are still essential to the bottom line.

Adding to this, new workstyles are changing the workplace innovation in product and services.

“The imagination of our customers is boundless. Technology and new expectations are powering enterprise growth,” she pointed out. Bhatnagar provided examples of technology changing the game in areas as diverse as entertainment, enabling a seamless banking experience, making utilities smarter, offering superior personal experiences, fulfilling the surge in energy demand and creating engaging retail experiences, among others. “People want to use the same technology at work as they use at home. And although consumer technology offers some great potential benefits for the business, it also represents added risk in terms of security, privacy, and compliance. For CIOs, it’s about striking a balance between user expectations and enterprise requirements,” she added.

“As a leader in business and consumer technologies, Microsoft is in a unique position to understand and provide guidance on how best to embrace consumerization responsibly within enterprises,” she said. Outlining Microsoft’s approach to provide a holistic solution to embrace the consumerization of IT, Bhatnagar described Windowsbased that have been popular among consumers for enabling security and management to support flexible work styles, creating the best productivity experience along with modern

application development. “People and data are key to reimagining your business. With an intelligent infrastructure built on Microsoft technologies, organizations can provide easy access to applications and data, so users can remain productive,” concluded Bhatnagar.

Change Agent – Mindtree’s PeopleHub Consumerization in the enterprise can and will benefit organizations by redefining how they interact amongst themselves. Sudhir Reddy, CIO, Mindtree spoke on how his team built an intuitive, ubiquitous portal that seamlessly brought intranet transactions and knowledge management content to the employee.

Speaking to the delegates at CITE World India, Reddy said that the writing on the wall was clear. “The current state of the market calls for device independence, consumerization, social intelligence and collaboration among others. Thirty months ago, we took stock of where we were, and realized that we needed to scale effectively, and ensure that employee productivity is enhanced,” said Reddy. The team also had animated discussions around topics such as how will consumerization affect them, what services should they offer and what they should not, and even if they needed a LAN anymore.

Reddy had discovered that there were too many individually branded applications running at Mindtree, without any integration except for the hyper link at the portal level.

Apps were being developed in technologies of choice at departmental level, and after the initial excitement of creating an app, the buzz died down, he said. “Users had to be educated on where to go for what. There was no integrated search facility, or common UI. The lack of centricity and data duplication made it difficult for new users to get the information that they required. What we lacked was a robust portal platform,” he added.

The focus of the IT Team then shifted to improve employee skills and expertise by delivering relevant, accessible and secure information using simple, integrated and personalized

Millennials routinely make use of their own technology at work and three-quarters believe that access to technology makes them more effective at work.

Padmaja Alaganandan Executive Director - Consulting at PwC

JULY 17 & 19, 2013

Cloud and social computing, data explosion, ubiquitous connectivity and other innovative technologies are sparking imagination and this is transforming Microsoft.

Geetu Bhatnagar Director- Enterprise Marketing, Microsoft India

tools. “We wanted to create a corporate portal which would be unified, personalized, simplified, fast, intelligent and work flow enabled, all under a single brand,” said Reddy. However, the team had difficulty getting everyone to give up their brand and fall into the corporate theme, migrating from legacy to the chosen platform, optimizing technology stacks, and license optimization among others.

The Consumerization of IT Revolution - And What It Means for Business The phenomenon of consumers, and consumer technology, driving innovation in the corporate sector is gaining ground rapidly. Vishal Arora, General Manager and Regional Business Head at Wipro spoke on how employees are taking their personal experience and insight drawn from their consumer use of hardware and mobile applications to their professional lives. Consumerization of IT is having a positive and profound impact on standard of living, employee work life and collaboration, and corporate behaviour, he said.

Drawing on conversations from in-depth surveys of senior executives across five markets (USA, UK, France, India and Australia), Arora showcased business and consumer benefits of consumerization in the enterprise. According to the survey, over 42 percent of senior business leaders polled cited ‘better innovation’ as the most tangible commercial benefit of consumerization, and that it is driving higher levels of productivity, increased business and employee efficiency, and customer engagement and satisfaction. About 46 percent of C-suite executives in the survey hailed ‘mobile devices’ as the greatest driver of consumerization of IT in their company, while ‘wireless internet’ came in closely at second, which points out clearly that the future is mobile. “For business this means greater access to stakeholders and employees, stronger consumer relationships, and increased efficiency, productivity and innovation,” he said.

As far as the business benefits are concerned, Arora said that consumerization of IT results in lower cost, increased

innovation owing to new technologies and new ways of working. It also leads to stronger customer relationships thanks to availability and reachability of consumers using a variety of platforms and feedback loops. Consumer benefits include enhanced collaboration with social technologies, and flexible mobile working opportunities. For customers, getting information and access to services through mobile devices, and being able to transact ‘on the go’ in their own pace were the biggest benefits. He also cautioned that technology, ownership and security were the biggest concerns for IT and CXOs.

Making it APPen The pace of change in the enterprise has become extremely rapid and opportunities created by mobile are unstoppable. Atul Gupta, Partner, Management Consulting, KPMG and Sundar Ramaswamy, Director – IT Advisory, KPMG spoke about how mobile devices have changed the way people access digital content. Smart phones and tablets have brought rich, digital content to the fingertips of consumers, while mobile banking has emerged as one of the most innovative products in the financial services industry. Even shoppers are increasingly using their mobile devices for everything from browsing to comparing to buying products and governments are also reaching out to their citizens, using mobile devices as an efficient channel.

Highlighting this rapid pace to the delegates in Delhi, Gupta said that we are living in exponential times, where the doubling time of newly added information is going from years to weeks within a decade. “Everyday a number of things are happening at the same time. More than 300 iPhone apps, 3000 eBooks, 100,000 videos, 900,000 blog posts, 50,000 new photos are being created everyday and all of this information is available at our fingertips,” he said.

Referring to recent studies, Ramaswamy, in Mumbai, underscored that 13 percent of web traffic comes via mobile, which is twice than that of last year, 37 percent

The most important lesson learnt is that we need to implement ideas quickly. If we seek user feedback constantly, then projects will never get off the drawing board.

Sudhir Reddy CIO, Mindtree

Business Transformation by Embracing Consumerisation and Enabling Mobile Work Styles There is a sense among business leaders that the CIO’s role will and must change to adapt and leverage new technologies.

Vishal Arora General Manager and Regional Business Head at Wipro

growth in the number of global 3G subscribers in the past year, and 1.5 billion smart phones and tablets would be installed globally by mid 2013, overtaking laptops and PCs. “By 2015, the total number of mobile Internet users in India will grow to 237 million while 3G users in India will reach 272 million by 2017 from 35 million in 2012. Interestingly, 56 percent of the smart phone users in India access internet on their phones multiple times in a day,” he added. “We are witnessing affordable smart phones, affordable data plans, generation Y (and even GenZ), real time data and a need for faster decisions, and this is all happening at the same time,” remarked Ramaswamy. According to them, the era of Enterprise mobility and Mobile Apps is truly here and mobility is spreading across sectors. “However over the long term, barriers aside, sound economics always wins,” they said.

They also highlighted the top five mistakes and how CIOs can avoid them to enhance user experience while creating apps. This included not matching user expectations, information overload, overdoing it, breaking conventions, basic graphic design flaws and limited user testing. Finally, they stressed that simple applications are better received, and outlined other success strategies for a successful mobility deployment.

Various speakers from different industries provided their viewpoints on what consumerization of IT is. These were eye-opening and refreshing views.

Thomson Thomas

VP- Business Systems & Technology HDFC Life Insurance

For enterprise IT to actually lead and embrace the consumerization and mobility revolution, it needs to adapt IT processes and user support to this new norm. Sanjay K Deshmukh, Chief Evangelist Officer at Citrix India spoke about how the new era of consumerization and mobility is changing the relationship between users and the IT department.

Deshmukh said that consumerization tops the list among the business trends that are impacting IT . “Consumerization is being driven by the fact that consumer capabilities are surpassing that of enterprise IT. The first source of this trend is the new generation of people entering the workforce. They bring their personal workspaces, habits, and identity with them. More sophisticated and very popular consumer devices are compounding the trend. These devices have capabilities that far outreach enterprise IT computing capabilities from even a few years ago – and they are easily available at low cost from a variety of retailers,” he said.

According to Deshmukh, the primary reason for using consumer applications at work is because users are familiar with them from their non-work life. “In their personal lives, users don’t build workflows around applications; they download applications to suit their workflows. If IT

Everyday more than 300 iPhone apps, 3000 eBooks, 100,000 videos, 900,000 blog posts, 50,000 new photos are being created every day.

Atul Gupta Partner, Management Consulting, KPMG

It is very important to understand how consumerization is going to affect us. The conference helped me look at the big picture. There’s quite a lot I’m looking forward to implement in my company.

Amol Vidwans President – IT , Dighi Port

JULY 17 & 19, 2013

We are witnessing affordable smart phones, data plans, real time data and a need for faster decisions, and this is all happening at the same time.

Sundar Ramaswamy Director – IT Advisory, KPMG

insists on specific applications with strictly associated workflows, users simply won’t use the applications. CIOs and IT managers need to transition to user-driven IT, but the challenge is in balancing the application and mobility demands of end users with the governance and operational needs of the organization.” he said.

Consumerization of Business Intelligence Increasingly, IT is shifting from being the providers of BI to serving as the enablers of BI. Nilesh Kulkarni – Consulting Lead, QlikTech India spoke about how the role of IT in business intelligence is not about creating all the dashboards and reports users might possibly need. Instead, IT’s role is about ensuring security, compliance and provisioning users with high-quality data, excellent performance, and self-service.

“IT’s role in the past was that of a gatekeeper. In this role, IT was tasked with making sure that enterprise systems were secure, scalable, reliable, cost-effective, efficient, resilient in times of trouble, and compliant with industry and government regulations. IT’s role in the future is that of a storekeeper. In the role of storekeeper, IT becomes the “yes” department.

IT becomes the proprietor of an IT store. Inside the store, IT manages mission-critical systems and master data. And, importantly, instead of trying to manufacture or manage all

The millenials demand apps they heard about the previous night to be made available at the workplace immediately. Conferences like CITE help CIOs justify a policy driven approach to such challenges.

Sunil Mehta

SVP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT

use of technology throughout the organization, IT monitors activity taking place outside the store, staying on the lookout for new trends and business user-adopted technologies that could add value to the business in a broader way. By supporting communities of business users and moving away from the old gatekeeper role, the IT department becomes an enabler of productivity and a more direct partner in the business,” he said.

According to Kulkarni, consumer technology such as search, social networking, and apps is fundamentally transforming the way we live and work. We expect to be able to do all of this anywhere, any time the mood strikes us. “Traditional BI solutions give users access to lot of data. But how does the user explore all that data, to discover meaningful relationships and associations, and pursue their own path to insight?” he asked. In contrast, with business discovery platforms, users can search and explore all the relevant data at their disposal.

End User Computing - IT Control, Security and User Freedom Consumer and cloud technologies have enhanced our lives with new kinds of efficiency and freedom. To achieve the same agility at work, employees are flooding the environment with a dizzying array of mobile platforms and devices—many of

To mobilize the business, IT needs to look at devices, apps and data and try to provide the users applications that they are familiar with.

Sanjay K Deshmukh Chief Evangelist Officer, Citrix India

IT departments need to change their mindsets and policies, because consumerization of IT is here to stay. This is a great conference and I am meeting a lot of people and friends here Vijay Sethi, Vice President and CIO, Hero MotoCorp

A Framework for Transformation Consumer technology such as search, social networking, and apps are fundamentally transforming the way we live and work.

Nilesh Kulkarni Consulting Lead, QlikTech India

which are not integrated, secured, or managed at all. Clearly, It is critical for CIOs to deliver new ways to work by bringing together applications and data via a simple workspace accessible by end-users from any device – as dictated by their business policies. Aneesh Dhawan, Regional Sales Head North and East, VMware and Atil Upponi, Product Specialist EUC, VMware spoke about how IT needs to rationalize new technology diversity that is making its way into the organization from the cloud or from the employee’s personal life.

“This causes quite a conundrum. Applications live in your datacenter, on the desktop, in the cloud or on mobile devices. What was once a Windows dominated world is now a multi platform world and each employee may have three devices each with a different platform but the need to get access to the same apps across all of them,” he said. Upponi highlighted that in looking to solve the issues associated with technology diversity, IT has three common responses to the problem. “They either Ignore It – resulting in poor IT control and security and compliance risk, Lock It Down – leading to unhappy workforce, IT is viewed the “bad guy” or Buy a Point Solution - which does not scale, increases cost, and creates a management hassle. Common responses only mask problem,” he pointed out.

Technology updates like consumerization of IT have caused consistent changes in role-plays within the enterprise too. Sudipta Ghosh, Technology Partner at PwC shared some perspectives on the framework of transformation in enterprise technology. Ghosh focused on key principles of consumerization of IT, its impact and the key trends that will tend lend themselves to transform all levels in an organization. “The consumer’s expectations have changed due to his persistent digital lifestyle. Not just that, even business processes have changed significantly owing to the demands of staff majorly consisting of the millenials,” said Ghosh. “The current system supports co-creation and transparency more than anything,” he added.

Only the right technology will facilitate Indian enterprises to champion through the impending transformation. “The four key technology trends that CIOs must watch out for are social media, mobility, analytics and cloud. We now know that there’s a near-zero cost of communication that exists around us called the internet. The internet has created global networks that has reached our mobile phones. Not just that, even our customers expect managed outcomes other than just sales pitches,” he said. “Whereas, cloud will help enterprises to monetize the differentiated experiences their users expect.”

IT is tasked with embracing and supporting this new technology landscape while bringing it under the umbrella of corporate governance, security, and control Aneesh Dhawan Regional Sales Head - North and East, VMware

The sessions give you an insight to what everyone is doing and what are the small steps that we can take right now, to make sure that we get there finally.

Such forums will bring a lot of clarity to the aspect of consumerization of IT in the CIO community.

Gopal Rangaraj

Umesh Mehta

CIO, Reliance Life Sciences

CIO, Jubliant life sciences

JULY 17 & 19, 2013

The CIO is playing the role of an ‘orchestrator’ while the CMO is the market builder. There’s an incredible opportunity for those who get this right.

Sudipta Ghosh Technology Partner at PwC

The key message here is to develop your products and services, sell them and then fine-train your people to help them grow, Ghosh said. “CIOs must focus on developing their value proposition to make them sellable. Effective selling strategies bring all involved departments like marketing, sales, and operations together and facilitate co-creation.

While, fine-training your people will help balance the level of input from all functional areas,” he said.

Jain. According to him, security and performance issues are the greatest barriers to enterprises really embracing consumerization of IT in their enterprise. “While consumerization of IT can lead to several business and financial advantages, it is important to strike a balance between what the young workforce wants and what IT has to manage. CIOs need to weigh up the risk of security breaches against gain in productivity” he said.

Describing the journey that Evalueser ve has been on, Jain said that they have a global policy to allow personal handheld devices, BYOD for the sales team, segregation between enterprise and guest network and desktop virtualization among others. He also outlined how the organization was working before embracing consumerization of IT, and how productivity has increased many folds after this. “For instance, the communication cascade tools has resulted in saving hundreds of manhours,” he said. The next wave in Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise will be when employees begin to bring their own application and CIOs need to be geared for that, he warned. “Consumerization is going to spoil enterprises.

If you don’t take a shot at it, someone else will,” he said.

Preparing for Consumerization of IT in the Indian Enterprise and Beyond While laptops used to be the de facto device not long back, the advent of smart phones and tablets have completely changed the way users work, and the expectation from the IT to enable these devices have skyrocketed. Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve spoke about how important it is for the Indian CIO to embrace consumerization of IT and the roadmap that his organization has laid to ensure that they are ahead of the curve in this game.

IT support in the age of consumerization is still a grey area. “Striking a balance between what the young workforce wants and what IT has to manage is becoming increasingly difficult. Why does it have to be a fight?” he asked. However, IT support is not the biggest concern for

Consumerization of IT is not seen as a mobility issue now. It is providing a platform for innovative products, applications and services.

Sachin Jain CIO, Evalueserve

The sessions were really informative. This will help us raise our issue with the board to implement the learnings from the conference.

This is an excellent event with a lot of takeaways. There are others who attempt to organize such events, but nobody gets even close.

N Rajendran

Rajesh mohan

CTO, NCPI

Joint President - IT & Systems, Binani Cements

HEARD

“What Next? Why, Bring Your Own App...”

“Often the IT Team is resistant to accepting good technology ideas that end-users come up with.”

“The younger workforce is easier to deal with, but there’s a fair bit of pushback coming in from mid-managers.”

HEARD

“Is Windows getting into the MDM territory?”

“Even the Sumerian civilization tablet dating 4500 years cribbed about the next generation.”

“In every generation, we always believed that the earlier generation never got it and the next generation doesn’t deserve it.”

endlines GENETICS

* BY LAUREN BROUSELL

A person’s skin type, ancestry and susceptibility to diseases can be revealed by their DNA. But personal genomic data isn’t widely accessible, in part because of security risks. “If your DNA were to leak and get into the wrong hands, it could be abused,” says Gene Tsudik, professor of computer science at University of California. Insurance companies might raise prices or deny coverage based on your conditions, he says. So Tsudik and a research team created an app called GenoDroid to prove that genome data can be kept private, even if it is stored and tested on a smartphone. The app encrypts the data so when it’s used in testing, the only thing revealed is the result. Tsudik doesn’t intend to release GenoDroid publicly but hopes that eventually, when genomes are digitized and carried around on mobile devices, the app will have opened the door to secure genetic testing. He imagines a big market for such tools, ranging from at-home paternity tests to data helping pharmaceutical companies design custom drugs.

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PHOTO BY MASTERFILE

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