CIO Magazine September CIO 100 Special Issue

LEADERSHIP BUSINESS

TECHNOLOGY

| ISSUE/10 CIO 100 SPECIAL: A LOOK AT THIS YEAR’S WINNERS AND MUCHVOL/07 MORE

Over Achievers They beat expectations.

They drove business.

They are the CIO 100. Page 31

THE OTHER 100 Read the profiles of the projects of the CIO 100 finalists. Page 146

SEPTEMBER 15, 2012 | `100.00 WWW.C IO.IN

Congratulations to the CIO 100 Networking Solutions

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Ajay Meher

Ajit Manocha

Baljinder Singh

B.K.Bhatta

MULTI SCREEN MEDIA

Ashwani Tikoo

Ashish Pachory

TATA TELESERVICES

Kapil Pal

CSC INDIA

V.C.Kumanan

PEPSICO

IDFC

SYNGENE

EXL SERVICE

ITC

Manoj Arora

Mukesh Jain

BILCARE

ICICI BANK

Amit Phadke

Amit Sethi

Amrita Gangotra BHARTI AIRTEL

CENTRAL BANK OF INDIA

Bhupendra Pant

Chakrapani Perangur

Chandan Sinha

Damon Frost

ACCELYA KALE SOLUTIONS

L&T - EWAC ALLOYS

Murali Krishna INFOSYS

YES BANK

INDUS TOWERS

Muralidharan Ramachandran SYNTEL

N.Nataraj

HEXAWARE

A.K.Mohanty

GHCL

P&G, INDIA

V.V.Padmanabham

Parakh Dave

BRITANNIA INDUSTRIES

FUTURE GROUP

HP Congratulates The Rajeev Jorapur

Ramnath Iyer

S.K.Singh

S.T.Sathiavageeswaran

MERCEDES-BENZ INDIA

HAMDARD LABORATORIES

Sunil Sirohi NIIT

CRISIL

N.Rajendran

G.S.Ravi Kumar

Satish Das

Satyajit Sarker

NATIONAL PAYMENTS CORPORATION OF INDIA

HPCL

COGNIZANT

Suresh Shanmugam

Sunil Sevak

MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA FINANCIAL SERVICES

L&T

GATI

Rakesh Bhatt

BAJAJ FINANCE

Sebastian Joseph

DTDC

DDB MUDRA GROUP

Tarun Pandey

Sunil Mehta

ADITYA BIRLA FINANCIAL SERVICES GROUP JWT INDIA

Rajesh Mohan

Rajeswara Rao

BINANI INDUSTRIES VISAKHAPATNAM STEEL PLANT

V.Seetaramaiah

PARADEEP PHOSPHATES

Thomson Thomas

HDFC STANDARD LIFE INSURANCE

Shailesh Joshi

Ram Medury

EIH - THE OBEROI GROUP

S.K.Ravulapaty

Shalabh Raizada

V.S.Parthasarathy

Venkatesh Natarajan

GODREJ INDUSTRIES RELIANCE COMMERCIAL FINANCE

M.Thyagaraj ONGC

Rajesh Chopra

ICICI LOMBARD

MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA

SAFEXPRESS

ASHOK LEYLAND

No. 1 in the Indian x86 server market with 45.1% unit shipment share during Q2 CY 2012.

A.K.Kaushik

Anil Khatri

BPCL

SAP INDIA PVT

Devesh Mathur

Dhiren Savla

HSBC

VFS GLOBAL

Pankaj Agrawal

Parna Ghosh

AIRCEL

Anil Veer

Anthony Thomas VODAFONE INDIA

ITC - HOTELS DIVISION

Farhan Khan

Girish Rao

Jayantha Prabhu

ARICENT TECHNOLOGIES

RADICO KHAITAN

HONDA MOTORCYCLE AND SCOOTER

Pertisth Mankotia

MARICO

P.K.Nijhawan

SHEELA FOAM

Arijit Bhattacharjee

HINDUSTAN ZINC

Ashish Mathur

WNS GLOBAL SERVICES

Jijy Oommen

ESSAR GROUP

Pramod Pawar

L&T GENERAL INSURANCE

BAJAJ CAPITAL

C.V.G.Prasad

ING VYSYA BANK

Maj. Prashant Singh BHARTI INFRATEL

Johny Paramian GMR

Pushpinder Singh BANK OF INDIA

Joydeep Dutta

ICICI SECURITIES

Rajat Sharma ATUL LTD.

Winners Of CIO100 Awards C.S.Ramesh

TITAN INDUSTRIES

Sharat Airani

Rajeev Batra MTS INDIA

LAKSHMI VILAS BANK

EVALUESERVE.COM

Sachin Jain

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar RELIANCE CAPITAL

RELIANCE GLOBALCOM

Sanjay Saraswat

Sanjay Malhotra

Shekar Kamath

Sri Karumbati

V.Srinivas

S.Ramasamy

Srinivasa Narasimhaiah

Sudesh Puthran

Valerio Fernandes

Venu Madduri

B.Venkatakrishnan

Veneeth Purushotaman

FORBES MARSHALL ADITYA BIRLA CUSTOMER SERVICES

Vilakshan Jakhu BPTP

S.Ravishankar

SSS

CONTINENTAL AUTOMOTIVE COMPONENTS NSL GROUP

NAGARJUNA FERTILIZERS & CHEMICALS

MAHINDRA VEHICLE MANUFACTURERS

AMWAY INDIA

INDIAN OIL NOVO NORDISK SERVICE CENTRE INDIA PVT.

HYPERCITY

V.S.Krishnan

WALMART INDIA

CIBIL

Yatendra Kumar

GOKALDAS EXPORTS

Sanjeev Kumar

ADHUNIK GROUP OF INDUSTRIES

Subodh Dubey

Sanjeev Prasad GENPACT

Suneel Aradhye

USHA INTERNATIONAL

ESSAR STEEL INDIA

Yogesh Zope

R.C.Dhup

BHARAT FORGE

NTPC

No.1 in the Indian x86 Blade server market with 75.6% unit shipment share during Q2 CY 2012. *Source: IDC Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Server Tracker, Q2 2012, August 2012 release.

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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

No Small Change

Beyond the mere numbers of projects, it was their transformative nature that challenged the jury. … Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

—Robert Frost First, this year’s math. Four hundred and ninetyone unique organizations filled out the nomination form for the CIO100 Award as well as the seven special awards, totaling 672 projects. Last year, if you recall, 399 organizations had filed in nominations.

The competition was not merely fierce, it was brutal.

Picking the winners was indeed a difficult act.

A closer look at the submitted projects reveals some interesting trends, a good six percent of all projects were about improving collaboration; five percent were about the cloud; 11 percent were about taking mobility forward, and just a tad under 10 percent were about ERP (a fascinating contrast is that while 10 percent of those with a mobility project made the grade; only 4 percent of ERP projects came through).

To be a CIO100 award honoree this year, companies and their CIOs had to demonstrate technology initiatives that had significant business benefits, positively impacted business process, were technologically innovative, and demonstrated creativity in deployment.

That’s a tough ask any time. But beyond the mere numbers of projects, it was the transformative nature of so many of them that challenged the jury, the output of legion of men and women whose work is profoundly reshaping the Indian business landscape—IT leaders who do take the ‘road less travelled’ and without any regrets.

The CIO100 Awards are as much a reflection of the holistic nature of technology transformation as they are a reflection of role of the CIO in pushing corporate change.

That is what these awards truly represent—a recognition of the forces of change.

Change that doesn't come easy; Change that is continuum. Change that makes you the men and women you are. For it is in the nature of humans to resist transformation, nonconformity and variance. Thus, persistence in pushing these initiatives deserves to be honored, recognized and applauded.

That makes the finalists of the CIO100 Awards 2012 very special people indeed.

Salud!

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi DEPUTY EDITOR Sunil Shah ASSISTANT EDITOR ONLINE Varsha Chidambaram CHIEF COPY EDITOR Shardha Subramanian SENIOR COPY EDITOR Nanda Padmanabhan COPY EDITOR Vinay Kumaar PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Aditya Kelekar, Gopal Kishore SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Sneha Jha CORRESPONDENTS Debarati Roy, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi, Ankita Mitra, Kartik Sharma DESIGN LEAD DESIGNERS Jinan K.V., Vikas Kapoor, Jitesh C.C SENIOR DESIGNER Unnikrishnan A.V DESIGNERS Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh, Lalita Ramakrishna SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VP SALES GM MARKETING MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS

Sudhir Kamath Parul Singh Siddharth Singh Jaideep Marlur, Sakshee Bagri, Varun Dev MANAGER- SALES SUPPORT Nadira Hyder ASSISTANT MANAGER PRODUCTS Dinesh P MARKETING ASSOCIATES Anuradha Iyer, Benjamin Jeevanraj CUSTO M SO LU T I O N S & AU D I E N C E DEVELOPMENT SR. MANAGERS PROJECTS Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra, Ajay Chakravarthy MANAGER Tharuna Paul SENIOR EXECUTIVE Shwetha M PROJECT COORDINATORS Archana Ganapathy, Saurabh Pradeep Patil, Rima Biswas F I N A N C E & O P E R AT I O N S FINANCIAL CONTROLLER SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL SR. MANAGER PRODUCTS SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION SR. MANAGER IT

Sivaramakrishnan T. P Sasi Kumar V Poornima Prachi Gupta Sreekanth Sastry T.K.Karunakaran Satish Apagundi

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

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.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page

S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD

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contents SEPTEMBER 15, 2012 | VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

The

Over Achievers A closer look at the winners, the finalists and those in the super league club from the CIO 100 2012 awards.

SU P E R LEAGUE FINALIST

COVE R: COVER DESIGN BY VIKAS KAP OOR . COVER ART BY PH OTOS.CO M

WINNER

31 | The Over Achievers COVER STORY | LEADERSHIP This year’s crop of CIO 100 winners and finalists demonstrate how IT can excel despite the multitude of challenges that face it and the businesses it supports.

By Team CIO

33 | CIO 100 2012 THE WINNERS Read the project profiles of the 100 most hard-hitting IT leaders of 2012.

By Team CIO

209 | CIO 100 2012 THE SUPER LEAGUE These 20 IT leaders have the distinction of excelling year after year.

By Team CIO

238 | CIO 100 2012 EVENT: THE MANY FACETS OF EXCELLENCE Awards, discussions , conversations, expert views, entertainment and much more. Here are the highlights of the CIO 100 2012 event.

By Team CIO

146 | CIO 100 2012 THE FINALISTS They might not be CIO 100 winners, but they’re still streets ahead of the pack.

By Team CIO

4

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contents

(cont.)

DEPARTMENTS 2 | From the Editor-in-Chief No Small Change

By Vijay Ramachandran

11 | Trendlines

6 9 Columns

Batteries | A Battery You Can Spray Internet | Are Your Facebook Likes Free Speech?

Electronics | Burning Bright Legal | Now, Hands-free Texting in California Outer Space | Garden Space for a Space Garden Opinion Poll | Uninsured and Unprepared Alternative Energy | Knee Caps Energy Security | Cloud Covers Your Car Popular Science | Fund a Satellite and Make Your Space

292 | Finish Research | The Ant Story

By Cassandra Khaw

Wh@t's Hot Online

16 | The Unholy Trinity THINK TANK CIOs and other CXOs suffer from three fatal diseases that hamper their growth. Like they say, prevention is better than cure.

Column by George Tillman

5 Things a Private Cloud is Not Research firm Gartner says there's still a lot of cloud-washing, or market confusion on exactly what the technology is. Go to www.cio.in/article/ gartner-5-commonly-held-myths-aboutprivate-cloud-303992012 and find out what a

20 | The Perils of BYOD STRATEGIC CIO All technologies and trends have their own advantages and disadvantages. It’s important to know both sides of the story. Here is the other side of the BYOD coin.

private cloud really means.

52

Column by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

22

| E-Mail Extortion: A Sordid Tale

UNDERCOVER OFFICER One CSO’s account of the dark side of security that goes beyond hackers and thieves.

Column by Anonymous

1 1 6

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CIO Online

.in CIO ADVERTISER INDEX

Bharti Airtel

[ CI O HOMEPAGE ]

Boston Limited(India)

CIO.in Revamps!

Cartes

185 to 188 7

Canon India

26 & 27 51

Ctrl S Datacenters

To serve your needs better, we've redesigned cio.in. Now you'll be able to navigate content more easily, and quickly see the stories that demand your attention. We also have more surveys and more case studies!

Innovation

Dell India

175 & 176

Eaton Power Quality

13

EMC Data Storage

226 to 229

Fujitsu India

25

HID India

41

HP- PSG

47

HP Servers

IFC & 1

HP Software

93

HP strorage

109

IBM India

BC

Juniper Networks

[Cover Story]

The Over Achievers

[ BO O K C LUB ] Conversation Starter

The CIO 100 2012 Awards Ceremony held in Hyderabad witnessed 200 of the most outstanding IT projects Books have been known in India. The platform also brought to spark conversations together speakers from around the and on our website you globe, experts from India, and one can find the genesis of one. Learn what of the largest gatherings of Indian IT your peers think of a book and then visit leadership under one roof. the CIO Book Club section online and join Check out the 100 winners, the conversation with your peers. finalists,and super achievers. >> www.cio.in/bookclub The Winners Read how their IT initiatives changed the way their businesses operated.

The Super League Their consistent performance puts these 20 winners into a separate category.

The Finalists They might not be in the top 100 but their work still puts them ahead of over 400 other contenders.

Must Read @ cio.in 8

>> By the Numbers: Uninsured and Unprepared >> Column: The Unholy Trinity >> Feature: Now, Hands-free Texting in California

S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD

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82 & 83

Lenovo India

IBC

Microsoft Corporation (India) Cover on Cover NEC Corporation

59

Novell India

Bookmark

Panasonic India

17 & flap

Path Infortech

97

Polycom Technology R&D Centre 5, 182 & 183 Riverbed Technology India SAS Institute (India)

3 143

Schneider Electric India

21

Smartlink Network Systems

19 + peel on cover

Tata Communication Trend Micro India Tyco Electronics VMware Software India Wipro infotech

250 & 251 9, 10 & Tab 115 23 29 & 30(innovation)

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

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Ranked #1 in Server Security* yet again.

As businesses continue their journey to the cloud, analysts and security experts agree that risk management practices must change. Trend Micro leads the way in protecting businesses against today’s sophisticated cyber attacks by providing real-time, actionable threat intelligence and network-wide visibility and control. With our solutions you gain the ceratinty that your data is always secure across all environments-physical, virtual and cloud.

trendmicro.com/journey Scan to download IDC Analyst Connection: Server Security for Today’s Datacenters

For more information Call : 1800 103 6778 email : marketing_in@trendmicro.com Delhi : 91-11-42699000 Mumbai : 91-22-26573023 Bangalore : 91-80-40965068

*IDC, Worldwide Endpoint Security 2011-2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares ©2012 Trend Micro, Inc. All rights reserved. Trend Micro and the t-ball logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trend Micro, Inc.

www.trendmicro.co.in

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TREND MICRO

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

HELPING CIOS SHRUG OFF MOBILE AND CLOUD WORRIES For CIOs, there’s only one road where the cloud and mobility are concerned and it’s straight ahead. So what about your security concerns? There are solutions, as Amit Nath, country manager, India and SAARC, Trend Micro, points out.

AMIT NATH Country Manager, India and SAARC, Trend Micro Amit Nath has been spearheading the business growth of Trend Micro in India and the SAARC Region. He has been instrumental in Trend Micro’s emergence as an industry leader and success in a fiercely competitive market.

According to our global security survey, 66 percent of CIOs will increase their investments in mobile security nextyear. What’s driving so many of them to up their spends?

Corporate data is increasingly being stored and accessed by devices that are not fully under the control of IT administrators. Hence, the likelihood of incidents of data loss that are directly attributable to the use of improperlysecured personal devices will rise. In addition, virtual and cloud platforms are just as easy to attack, but more difficult to protect. As more companies adopt these technologies, it falls on the shoulders of IT administrators to secure their company’s critical data.

So, what can Trend Micro do for these CIOs in the area of mobile security?

We have recently launched an upgraded version of Trend Micro Mobile Security (TMMS) 8.0. It’s a winner of the 2012 NWA Best Endpoint and Mobile Device Security Award. It enhances the enforcement of password and encryption policies, and provides more granular remote wipe capabilities. It also introduces a mobile application management system that allows IT staffers to automatically push corporate

apps to iOS, Blackberry and Android devices.

TMMS 8.0 is available as a plug-in with the Trend Micro™ OfficeScan™ solution, and easily integrates into a company’s IT management infrastructure, greatly reducing the cost and complexity of deploying a mobile security and management solution. TMMS 8.0 provides advanced functionalities like selective wipes and encryption tools. It also covers device enrollment, provisioning, policy enforcement, and inventory detail. The features included in TMMS 8.0 are suitable for both personallyowned and company-owned devices, allowing protection to be tailored for different types of users.

Moving to the cloud front, our survey points out that 54 percent CIOs believe cloud security is their top challenge. What’s really bothering them?

Cloud computing may appear as the biggest challenge in terms of user authentication, data protection and data breach, damage and loss.

Since cloud computing is usually done beyond a client’s firewall, there’s always the fear of putting data “out there”. User authentication is still one of the key points of apprehension despite the fact that cloud providers ensure data encryption besides employing necessary safeguards to monitor access. Then there’s the perceived threat of data loss, breach or damage. This has been countered by cloud data back-ups and multiple-server storage. The fact is data in the cloud is less prone to breaches and physical damage like fires or floods.

How can Trend Micro help CIOs secure their clouds?

We combine a virtualization security platform with encryption and key management to

secure servers, applications, and data in the cloud. Our offering, Deep Security, protects systems and applications deployed on private, public, and hybrid clouds with anti-malware, Web reputation, integrity monitoring, intrusion detection and prevention, firewall, and log inspection modules. This is available in agent-less and agent-based options that can all be managed through a single console across physical, virtual, and cloud server deployments. It delivers comprehensive, adaptive, highly-efficient agent-less and agent-based protection.

Then there’s SecureCloud, which is designed to encrypt and protect data on public, private, and hybrid clouds while also securing data stored on physical and virtual servers. Easy-to-use, policy-based key management authenticates the identity and integrity of servers requesting encryption keys, and controls when and where your secure data can be accessed. It provides data protection for public and private clouds and VMware vSphere virtual environments. CIOs can deploy SecureCloud as a hosted service or as an on-premise software application.

Either way, they control the keys, thereby enjoying the freedom to encrypt data in virtual datacenters or in the cloud, and even to move data between cloud vendors.

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

EDITED BY SHARDHA SUBRAMANIAN

NEW

*

HOT

*

UNEXPECTED

A Battery You Can Spray battery that can be sprayed on to plastics, metal and ceramics.

In an experiment, Singh’s team airbrushed a battery on to nine ceramic bathroom tiles. Each tile represented one battery cell and they were charged with a small solar cell. Connected in parallel, the battery was able to power for six hours a set of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) that spelled out the word “RICE.” With patents filed on the process, the team is now looking to further refine the process.

—By Martyn Williams

electrodes at one end. Because they cannot easily be shaped, they sometimes restrict designers, particularly when it comes to small gadgets with curved surfaces. The Rice prototypes could change that. “Today, we only have a few form factors of batteries, but this battery can be fabricated to fill the space available,” said Singh.

The battery is sprayed on in five layers: Two current collectors sandwich a cathode, a polymer separator and an anode. It was difficult optimizing the components in the form of paint,” says Singh. Initial versions were sensitive to moisture, but the addition of a polymer and a heat-sealing step solved this problem.The result is a

TRENDLINES

Researchers at Rice University in Houston have developed a prototype spray-on battery that could allow engineers to rethink the way portable electronics are designed.

The rechargeable battery boasts similar electrical traits to the lithium ion batteries that power almost every mobile gadget, but it can be applied in layers to almost any surface with a conventional airbrush, says Neelam Singh, a Rice University student who led a team working on the technology for more than a year.

Current lithium ion batteries are almost all variations on the same basic form: An inflexible block with

POPULAR SCIENCE

Are Your Facebook Likes Free Speech?

Facebook has joined the ACLU in arguing that users’ likes on the social networking site should be a protected form of free speech. In separate filings with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the US, lawyers argued that a ruling that refused to provide protections to those who like something on Facebook was wrong.

The case stems from the firing of several employees in the Hampton, Va., sheriff’s office after local elections in 2009.

Two of those employees—Daniel Carter and Robert McCoy— were known to have liked the Facebook page of Sheriff B.J. Roberts’ opponent. Following Roberts’ win, they were allegedly fired for their actions.

Carter and McCoy took their case to US District Court in Virginia. However, Judge Raymond A. Jackson ruled in Roberts’ favor, saying Facebook ‘Likes’ aren’t enough speech to warrant constitutional protection.

Both see the ruling as limiting free speech, and worry that users’ Facebook likes can be used

INTERNET

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against them. “Liking a Facebook Page is speech: It generates verbal statements and communicative imagery ... as well as similar statements and imagery in the News Feeds of the User’s Friends,” Facebook argued in its filing.

The ACLU shared in Facebook’s definition of “liking.”

“Liking something on Facebook expresses a clear message —one recognized by millions of Facebook users and nonFacebook users—and is both pure speech and symbolic expression that warrants constitutional protection,” the organization wrote in a separate filing.

Their message is this: Judge Jackson’s ruling means our likes can be used against us, just because we aren’t physically saying it, when at the same time other content on Facebook is already protected as free speech thanks to previous rulings.

— By Ed Oswald REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2

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Burning Bright Fireflies are one of nature’s few creatures that can create their own light using an organic chemical reaction. But a group of scientists from Syracuse University may have unlocked the secret of the firefly’s bioluminescence to create a lighting system that does not require batteries or electricity.

This is not the first time scientists have tried to recreate natural bioluminescence. These scientists, however, have made a breakthrough by combining nano-sized superconductors with chemical reactions to make their lighting array 20 to 30 percent more efficient than previous attempts.

A firefly produces light though a chemical reaction between luciferin and enzyme luciferase. The scientists have isolated the same luciferase enzyme and attached it to nanorods made out of two superconductor metals: an outer shell of cadmium sulfide along with an inner

TRENDLINES

ELECTRONICS

core of cadmium seleneide.

The scientists simply need to add luciferin as a fuel to create a reaction that releases energy. The nanorods absorb the energy from the reaction, which is called Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer, and begin to glow.

“The trick to increasing the efficiency of the system is to decrease the distance between the enzyme and the surface of the rod and to optimize the rod’s architecture,” said Mathew Maye, an assistant professor of chemistry at SU, in a release. “We designed a way to chemically attach, genetically manipulated luciferase enzymes directly to the surface of the nanorods.”

The nanorods can also be manipulated in such a way that the scientists can change the color of the lights (turning it red, orange, or green, for instance). By arranging the nanorods in a rod-in-rod architecture, the nanorods produce a near-infrared light,

which could be used in night-vision goggles, telescopes, etcetera.

Currently, the team’s light-up nanorods have not made their way outside of the chemistry lab. The team is still working on improving the sustainability of the chemical reaction for longer periods of time and creating larger lighting arrays.

— By Kevin Lee

Now, Hands-free Texting in California L E G A L Texting-addicted California drivers will soon be free to write messages while zipping down the highway—provided they write those messages verbally, that is, using voice-operated, hands-free devices…phones not included.

The Freedom to Communicate bill modifies the California state vehicle code to allow for an exception to the formerly allencompassing anti-texting law. The exception is this: “A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while using an electronic wireless communications device to write, send, or read a text-based communication, unless the electronic wireless communications device is specifically designed and configured to allow voiceoperated and hands-free operation to dictate, send, or listen to a text-based communication, and it is used in that manner while driving.”

In other words, you can now text or e-mail in California, so long as you do it on a voice-operated, hands-free device that is specifically designed for the purpose of sending text messages and e-mails while driving.

So what does this mean for California texters? Not a whole lot. The change has already gone into effect, but the exception does not, it appears, extend to phones. In fact, the California

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Highway Patrol explicitly told the San Jose Mercury News that the new law will not let drivers use their phones—even phones with voice-operated, hands-free software, such as Apple’s Siri— if they must pick up their phones to activate the software.

“The phone can’t be in your hands,” CHP spokeswoman Jaime Coffee told the Mercury News. “Hands-free is key.”

A representative from the office of the bill’s author, California Assemblyman Jeff Miller, tells NBCNews.com that the bill was “not crafted to apply to phones,” but rather to apply to devices such as in-dash navigation and messaging systems.

This doesn’t change much. Though texting via voice-operated, hands-free devices may have been technically illegal in California, it’s not like there are very many cases--if any--of cops pulling people over for using completely hands-free devices. After all, using such devices for other purposes--such as changing the radio station or dictating navigation--is legal, and nobody can really tell what you’re actually doing.

But maybe this means that Google’s Project Glass glasses will be legal to use while driving? After all…those are hands-free.

—By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

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Garden Space for a

Space Garden

TRENDLINES

O U T E R S P A C E If astronauts ever go on a real long-term Mars mission, they are going to need more sustenance than rehydrated space burgers. A space garden can go a long way to keep astronauts fed and breathing fresh air.

To this end, NASA handpicked a team from the University of Colorado Boulder to develop a remotely operable, robotic garden to support future astronauts in deep space. The bioregenerative food system will be able to autonomously grow a garden, harvest fruit and vegetables, and compost refuse into nutrients for new plants.

The miniature biome will provide astronauts with fruits and vegetables and purify water if needed. It’ll also naturally revitalize the air supply. Of course, the system could also provide some much need activity besides looking at trajectory charts.

The team already has a working prototype based on the work done by the CU-Boulder’s computer science department two years ago. There are, however, more milestones the team needs to meet, including automated seeding, monitoring of plant growth, harvesting, and recycling the nutrients from plant waste back into the system.

The Boulder team’s bioregenerative food system is just one of the five projects chosen by NASA to participate in the 2013 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge. The team was awarded a grant of about $40,000 (about Rs 22 lakh) to deliver an operable design by the summer of 2013.

—By Kevin Lee

Uninsured and Unprepared S E C U R I T Y When asked if their organizations had an insurance policy against the theft or misuse of electronic data, customer records, etcetera, fewer Indian businesses and IT leaders said they did compared to their counterparts elsewhere.

CHINA

50%

RUSSIA US

40%

45%

INDIA

27%

Knee Caps Energy A L T E R N A T I V E E N E R G Y British researchers have found a way to power small gadgets such as GPS trackers by harvesting energy from users’ knees, potentially making batteries redundant.

Known as the pizzicato knee-joint energy harvester, the circular device fits onto the outside of the knee and consists of an outer ring fitted with 72 plectra and a central hub with four protruding arms. With every bend of the knee the outer ring rotates, causing the plectra to pluck the arms.

This results in the arms vibrating, much like a guitar string, and generating electrical energy, which can then be used to charge devices. The researchers from Cranfield University, the University of Liverpool and University of Salford said the device can currently harvest around two milliwatts of power but could exceed 30 milliwatts with a few realistic improvements.

This could enable a new generation of GPS tracking, more advanced signal processing and more frequent and longer wireless transmission, the researchers said. The device could be particularly useful for soldiers who currently have to carry up to 10kg of power equipment when on foot patrol, or to power body-monitoring devices such as heart rate monitors, pedometers and accelerometers.

The knee is thought to be a suitable mechanism for energy generation, as it has a large change in angle during walking and does so at significant speeds. A device attached to the joint could therefore generate large amounts of power, the researchers claim.

“There is an on-going project looking at manufacturing a more compact and truly wearable harvester,” said Dr Michele Pozzi, lead author of the study.

“At the moment we are using precise but cost-effective manufacturing techniques for the plectra and casing and anticipate that remaining parts will be moulded industrially, slashing the cost. I’d put a cost tag of less than £10 (Rs 870) for each harvester on a large scale production.”

The research has been presented in IOP Publishing’s journal Smart Materials and Structures.

—By Sophie Curtis

Source:Indian Information Security Survey 2012

14

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9/25/2012 1:10:27 PM

Cloud Covers Your Car

having his mobile phone on him before the car will operate, Miller says. But if this authentication process doesn’t happen correctly, criminals can obtain access.

The second issue is de-provisioning. This involves managing the process when an owner sells a car, and making sure that the previous owner can’t still remotely start the car. “If the user [identity] isn’t automatically de-provisioned from the old owner to the new owner, the old owner can still control the car’s operation,” Miller says.

The technology solution is “a single, independent system that sits in the middle, ensuring that the old owner is de-provisioned and the new owner is provisioned,” Miller says. “Link this independent entity to the public title records to ensure that the transfer

of ownership changes the status of the old and new digital owners.”

Another concern is a lack of two-factor authentication services. The password combinations used for owner access to the vehicle are insecure and hackable, Miller says.

“Passwords can easily be guessed,” he says. “Computers can be stolen and hacked into.”

This threat can be addressed via extensive two-factor and risk-based authentications, Miller says. “Twofactor requires a second piece of information, and risk-based requires that the person be physically at a location or pre-determined time before the authorization is given,” he says.

TRENDLINES

S E C U R I T Y As vehicles offer an evergrowing number of digital features, they could present several security threats—unless automakers manage these technologies effectively.

That’s the thinking of Dave Miller, CSO at cloud-based platform vendor Covisint. Miller says that in a world of smarter cars, there are five key vehicle identity and security issues to consider.

Now Miller believes that cloud services provide the answer to these threats, and given the obvious vested interest, it might be tempting to dismiss the whole concept. One challenge is identifying the right owner of the vehicle.

“Technology, through password combinations or other similar methods, will bind us to our future cars, enabling us to operate, drive and maintain these vehicles,” Miller says.

In some instances, this will require two-factor authentication, such as the car’s legitimate owner physically

ENTER PASSWORD

—By Bob Violino

Fund a Satellite and Make Your Space P O P U L A R S C I E N C E From the people that developed SkySafari, the highly popular astronomy app for iOS, Android and Mac OS X, comes the SkyCube. It’s a nano-satellite measuring only 10-by-10-by-10 centimeters that will be launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the first quarter of 2013. A contribution to the SkyCube Kickstarter campaign will reserve your chance to broadcast messages or take pictures from it during its mission.

The primary mission of the SkyCube is to bring space exploration to the masses, giving ordinary people the ability to fund and use their own satellite. It is equipped with a lowresolution camera (the specs on the camera have not been specified) which will take pictures of Earth, space and perhaps the similar ArduSat which completed its Kickstarter campaign with over $100,000 (about Rs 55 lakh).

The satellite is required to “ping” every 10 seconds to indicate the device is functioning and alive. The SkyCube team got the bright idea that they could send data, or “tweet”, instead, and use this as the way to fund the mission. Every $1 will sponsor approximately 10 seconds of the mission, thus giving you one personal 120-character message, or one “ping.” Starting at a

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$6 (about Rs 330) pledge, you get six 120-character messages and the ability to request one image from the satellite. The pledge option tops out at $10,000, which gives you complete access to the SkyCube for a whole day (that’s 10,000 messages and 2,000 image requests), two round-trip tickets to Cape Canaveral to see the liftoff, a radio receiver that can pick up the transmissions and some SpaceX Falcon 9 and SkyCube swag.

An iOS and Android app will be available to track the satellite, send messages to it and request images from space. If you’re not the participating type, inexpensive radio equipment or an internet-connected device is all you need to receive the SkyCube messages since they will be archived on a server, accessible at any time.

90 days after the launch, an 8-gram CO2 cartridge will inflate a 10-foot wide balloon that is coated with titanium dioxide power to increase reflection. The SkyCube team claims that it will be as visible as the Hubble Telescope or a first-magnitude star, easy to see with the naked eye. Within three weeks the satellite will be pulled out of orbit due to atmospheric drag and will end in a fiery spectacle, leaving no build up or space debris.

— By Alex Cocilova REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2

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9/25/2012 1:10:27 PM

George Tillmann

THINK TANK

The Unholy Trinity CIOs and other CXOs suffer from three fatal diseases that hamper their growth.

Like they say, prevention is better than cure.

W

ILLUSTRATION BY PHOTOS.CO M

hy do good companies go bad? Google, once the hoped-for slayer of the evil empire, has become a pretender to the dark crown. With its privacy issues, allegations of snooping and opposition to Net neutrality, Google seems to have turned its back on its "Don't be evil" motto. Facebook has spent so much time wrestling with privacy issues that it could take on Randy Orton in a WWE SmackDown. Microsoft, according to some critics, should spend more time listening to its customers and perfecting what it currently sells and less time trying to corner every market in Silicon Valley.

Apple is widely seen as arrogant and dictatorial. How did these one-time princes of light succumb to the dark side? What were the leaders of these companies thinking?

Three even more troubling questions are: Does a corner office change one's view of the world? Do "cornerites" suffer from diseases that the likes of you and me are not prone to? Can these same diseases affect IT? The answer to all three questions, unfortunately, is, "Sometimes."

Not bound by geography, or even limited by profession, there are three maladies that can infect the high and the mighty. Defensive subordinates, as well as corporate up-and-comers, need to watch for the afflicted and avoid them at all costs. Let's look at each in uncomfortable detail.

Evil 1: Hubris Hubris, or arrogance, is the most common C-level disease. Feeling that you are so good you cannot possibly be wrong has brought down executives, politicians, even entire corporations. Hubris can lead smart people to make some incredibly dumb decisions.

Arrogance was rampant in Enron, which went beyond thinking 16

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George Tillmann

THINK TANK

that whatever it did was right to the notion that any idea its leaders came up with should be lawful simply because Enron could make money with it. Unfortunately for Enron, it suffered from end-stage hubris, and expired. Not only does it no longer exist, but many of its former senior executives went to jail.

Some critics believe Microsoft suffers from this disease as well. They argue that Microsoft believes it is better at deciding what you need than you are, so paying attention to customers is a waste of time.

In an IT organization, hubris is often exhibited as a condescending attitude toward users. Symptoms include snide comments and jokes at the expense of those who earn the revenue that IT so willingly spends. More serious cases involve slow response to user requests, protracted studies of obvious improvements, and rigidity in scheduling, executing and approving changes.

Evil 2: Sycophantism The second C-level disease is sycophantism. This one manifests with executives surrounding themselves with yes-men and yeswomen, who tell them only what they want to hear. Sufferers of sycophantism equate disagreement with disloyalty. New or opposing ideas are not allowed, and those who voice them are banished.

Many recent books on the George W. Bush administration tell of how loyalty, not just to the president but also to the president's ideas, was required. Dissenters were eventually replaced. In the business world, some people charge that the halls of Oracle are a dangerous place for those with non-conforming opinions.

A symptom of the yes-man disease in IT is an innovationstarved organization where reward and promotion depend more on whom you know or whom you agree with than on what you accomplish. Skill, hard work and dedication garner not praise but suspicion, while politics and cronyism too often replace rational decision-making.

Evil 3: Deformation Professionnelle The third disease is deformation professionnelle (professional deformation, or professional distortion), which is characterized by seeing the world only from the perspective of one's profession or organization and the conviction that one's profession or organization is more important than any other.

The devastating effects of deformation professionnelle can be seen in the response of the ex-bankers who worked for the US government during the great recession of 2008. They gave not a thought to the people in manufacturing and Up the Ladder transportation, instead To learn about advancing in the focusing on banks and CIO role, read Three Keys to bankers. So convinced Move Forward on www.cio.in were these ex-bankers c o.in by the fevers of 18

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Feeling that one cannot possibly be wrong has brought down executives, politicians, even entire corporations.

Hubris can lead even smart people to make incredibly dumb decisions. professional distortion, they believed that the only sensible action was to bail out people like them—bankers with multimilliondollar salaries. Their minds were uncluttered by thoughts of what they could do to support middle-class factory workers.

Banking is not the only industry so blinkered. The auto industry is equally dedicated to the idea that it is the one indispensable industry and subscribes to the notion that "what's good for General Motors is good for America" (though this popular misquote of former General Motors CEO Charles Wilson's statement is an inversion of what he actually said).

When Facebook comes up with self-serving policies on privacy account deletion, its attitude seems to be, "What's good for Facebook is good for the user."

Professional deformation in IT is typified by a self-absorbed IT organization that fails to realize that its sole function is to serve others. Its staffers see themselves as providing things (computers, networks, applications) rather than services to the company.

Sufferers can confuse being necessary to the functioning of the enterprise with being the center of it.

Containing the Infection While these diseases can attack anyone, the severity depends on the level of the infected. Infection of a junior employee might be easily contained, but C-level outbreaks are highly virulent. Prolonged exposure has been known to cause culture change and in some cases even fatality—as in the outsourcing on an IT organization.

What can one do about these three diseases? Few successful people start out with these ailments. In almost every case, these diseases were acquired after the infected achieved a certain amount of success. In most cases, the roots of healthy management are still there, though perhaps buried and long hidden by the pathogens of perquisites. The challenge is to find a way to bring the lost antigens to the surface. When you discover how, let me know. I'm still looking. CIO

George Tillmann is a former CIO and management consultant, and the author of The

Business-Oriented CIO. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

9/24/2012 3:52:55 PM

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

BYOD

ThePerilsofBYOD

S

ome people love the movement Now, take this one step further. Say you don't All technologies and known as bring your own device have a job. Interviews at one potential employer trends have their (BYOD). Some even insist that it's go well and they say they want to hire you—but own advantages and their right to bring their iPhones, your job will require you to have a late-model disadvantages. It’s Chromebooks or iPads to work. But I've always smartphone with a minimum data plan of 1GB important to know both been wary of BYOD. Recent developments in per month. Don't have them? Well, be prepared sides of the story. Here how businesses see BYOD have moved me from to fork over the $500 (approximately Rs. being concerned to being downright worried.

27,500) to get the high-end gear and services, is the other side of the What I have distrusted about BYOD is its because if you don't, they'll find someone else.

BYOD coin. potential to become the attractive carrot for Sounds like nonsense? Not if you've been the stick of cost-cutting. The BYOD concept following the unemployment news. To quote was introduced with an emphasis on employee from a recent Brooking Institute report, "It has choice, but I never really bought that spin, and the recent always been harder to find a job the longer you are unemployed. developments confirm my fears. The whole point of BYOD, from But the situation facing American workers today goes well the point of view of the senior executives who have embraced it, beyond historical norms. For all unemployed workers, the is to save money. probability of finding new employment in today's economy is Take, for example, the state of California with its estimated considerably lower than it was prior to the Great Recession." $16 billion (approximately Rs. 88,000 crore) shortfall for In other words, the less likely you are to be able to afford the the fiscal year. Money doesn't grow on trees, even in fruitful kind of gear and services that BYOD requires, the less likely you California, so Chris Cruz, deputy director and CIO at the state's are to be able to find a job. It's a vicious cycle, and BYOD feeds Department of Health Care Services, decided to cut costs by no right into it. longer supplying or paying for smartphones at all but instead Now, what about the problems with mixing work and requiring employees to use their own smartphones—at their personal life on the same device? Say you write to your sweetie own expense. The state employee unions aren't happy about from your phone and then the company wants to dig into your this, so it isn't a done deal yet. But it's still a bad sign of what's text messages and e-mails. Where are you then? It's your phone, in store for workers. but it holds a lot of the company's data. Whose rights will prevail BYOD is a slippery slope. It started because we loved our in these situations? tech toys and wanted to use them for work. That was great for What happens if the office insists that you update your executives who could afford to buy the latest and greatest iPad software and you're left with a brick instead of a phone or tablet? every time Apple released one. But when BYOD becomes a As I see it, we're on our way to an economy where the reaction requirement, it's a pain for those in the upper salary brackets, to BYOD goes from, "Gee, it's so neat that I can use my gadget at and a de facto cut in pay for those who don't make the big bucks. work," to,"Jeez, to keep this lousy job, I have to pay for my own And we're talking about some major expenses. For instance, hardware and services, and I have no privacy." in my own case, my voice and data plan runs me over $1,500 In other words, BYOD is going to transform from being a (ap p r ox i m at e l y Rs. neat benefit to being a painful job requirement. Just remember, 82,500) a year. I'm selfI warned you. CIO BYOD Challenge employed, so that's To learn about BYOD’s effect on part of my cost of doing personal data, read Making Sense business. It shouldn't be of the Work-Personal Device Blur part of an employee's cost Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is a renowned writer who has been covering on www.cio.in c o.in of keeping a job. technology for close to two decades. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

20

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VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

9/24/2012 3:56:32 PM

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CIO_magazine_0901_45505y_IN.indd 1

8/10/2012 3:29:38 PM

Undercover Officer

ANONYMOUS

E-Mail Extortion: A Sordid Tale One CSO’s account of the dark side of security that goes beyond hackers and thieves.

I

have a paranoid security team. Which is good. I also have paranoid users who don’t trust security people. Which is not so good. I discovered this a few years back when a co-worker came into my office, red in the face, eyes puffy and greatly upset. “What on earth is the problem?” I asked in my best official-yet-caring management voice. Between sobs, she explained that, a week earlier, she had gotten an e-mail about the then upcoming Olympics in Greece.

Since her nephew was hoping to be on the US track team, my co-worker was hoping to learn something that might help him. It took a while for a webpage to open up, but when it did, she read all about Greece and the Olympics.

Two days later, she got an e-mail from an unknown address asking for $50 (about Rs 2,750) or they would tell her management that she had been surfing pornography sites. They even said they could prove she had downloaded child pornography!“They even told me which directory it was in on my computer,” she cried.

“And sure enough, when I looked there, I found the most disgusting pictures,” she added, sobbing.

This was one of the most conservative people I know, and of course she would never do such a thing. She had even asked me once if it was OK to write a personal letter on her desktop and print it off on one of our laser printers.

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The Olympic site was immediately suspect to her because it had taken so long to load the pages.

“My computer is never that slow,” she said.

“Did you pay them?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But they sent another e-mail this morning reminding me I had only two days left to pay them. So I figured I’d better talk to you about it.”

Unfortunately, security sometimes involves dealing with scumbags who prey on others. I knew immediately that this was an extortion attempt, and calmed her fears. And, as I said, we have a pretty good security crew. Wonderfully paranoid. So I set them on a path to track down the offending organization and get to the bottom of what was going on.

First reports came rolling in almost instantly.

My co-worker had kept all her e-mails from VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

9/24/2012 4:10:42 PM

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP VMWARE

CLOUD CORNER Thought Leadership on

The Next Step: What IT Needs to Do to Maximize the Cloud PARTHA SENGUPTA Head-IT Shared Services, ITC

Don’t confuse large-scale consolidation with cloud computing. A private cloud requires a service catalogue—and for IT to really get into business’ shoes.

We don’t doubt the power of virtualization. And, since it’s one of the primary components of the cloud, we don’t doubt the cloud either. In fact, cloud computing, especially its private form, is definitely a reality today among large corporations.

However, a problem occurs when people mistake large-scale consolidation for cloud computing. The cloud is much more than basic consolidation using virtualization. It only really starts to become a cloud when governance structures, adequate monitoring and managing capabilities are thrown in. In my opinion, you only have a private cloud when each function is available as a service catalogue for a de-

partment or a business to pick and choose. That’s why, it’s vital for IT to evolve its mindset and clearly represent the value of IT to the business. Here, the framework of Val-IT helps. This standard helps apportion the cost of IT by department or by business.

With a catalogued set of functional services in conjunction with the Val-IT framework, IT can now independently justify costs and determine returns.

This helps CEOs and CFOs better understand IT costs and returns, and get clearer answers for their questions. For its flexibility, granularity and manageability, the private cloud is becoming increasingly appealing to senior executives.

T. SRINIVASAN Managing Director, VMware India & SAARC

To maximize their cloud investments, organizations need to create a holistic strategy and also need to align to changes in the way applications are built.

I agree with Partha. Virtualization—and from there, the cloud—have become almost de rigueur today, from a stage a few years ago, when they faced resistance. Proof of this is our significantly increased customer base in India.

Today, organizations need to build on their virtualization, private cloud, and public cloud investments as part of a long-term strategy to maximize the benefits of the cloud. This will help IT rationalize opportunistic cloud investments into a cohesive strategy and prevent short-term investments from becoming computing silos in the future.

Today, the cloud era is driving a transformation in applications. Currently, most are built with Open Source development frameworks, deployed on lightweight application containers, run on virtual infrastructure and are data-intensive. This is driving a transition in the type of technologies our customers are using to build, run and manage these new applications on the cloud. Solutions like the VMware vFabric Suite seeks to address the complexity and cost of traditional Java platforms, providing a simple, lightweight development and runtime optimized for VMware cloud infrastructure.

Undercover Officer

ANONYMOUS

the extortionist, and had not turned off her system since the files were transferred to it, so the IS people had a pretty good look at logs and files to find out what they could reconstruct and get some ideas. They could see that she had, indeed, gotten the e-mail and then clicked on the URL, just as she said.

Logs on her system showed an FTP file transfer from an IP address in Bulgaria. In all, there were three files that were named the same as the three we found on her system. They also found some text and GIF files about Greece. The system keeps 20 days’ worth of file caches on what users have viewed on the Web, and if you know where to go on the system, you can see all of it.

The team copied everything to a CD. They also copied her Internet and website caches to CD in case we needed them later. They made a complete copy of her hard drive and burned that to a DVD. “Looks as if things happened just as she said,” the internal information security manager told me.

After that, we checked her e-mail client and the server backups. She had received an e-mail two days after the initial message asking for money and a credit card number. Luckily, she didn’t give them one.

Here’s the interesting part, though.

When we were checking the firewall access logs, we found that the same IP address was active 27 times that day to other end-user systems on our network. Twenty-seven times! We did

The Security Drill To know more about increasing security awareness in your organization, read Security Bootcamp on www.cio.in

c o.in

24

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It seems e-mail extortions happen a lot more often than most people think. Most companies don’t have a team to block this stuff, and many employees never say anything for fear of losing their job. some checking and found that at least 15 other employees were hit with the same scam on the same day.

Why hadn’t anyone told us? I was completely aghast.

That’s when I learned about the paranoid users. Some knew it was a scam, but some were truly afraid of losing their job. A few confessed to visiting porn sites on their computer at home and thought this was related.

Three employees responded to the threat by divulging credit card numbers and now have problems with charges on their card.

We told them what was going on and had them call their credit card companies right away.

Then we put some blocks in our e-mail filters to kill off any more e-mails like that one. We blocked the IP addresses from FTP and Web access in case the same culprits try it again.

We decided to do the same procedure again if they change addresses or e-mail message types.

Filtering is a very on-or-off type of experience. We don’t usually pick up any changes in the attack automatically, and so we decided to see a sample to tune the filters and kill off other variants of the message as well. It was the same problem we had with the spam filters. Spammers have an easy time tweaking messages to get around any filters we set up.

What fun. Security gets messy when it involves employees’ privacy and protection from things like this. I have had to deal with the lovelorn stalker

e-mail and the vicious ex-spouse mail several times.

This was my first extortion scam, but it turned out, it wasn’t the first that my company dealt with.

“We have this down to a science,” my security team told me proudly.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Why haven’t I known about the others?”

“They happened before you came to work here,” they explained. But they happened.

Apparently, we’ve had get-richquick schemes, extortion by people claiming to know where users live and to be watching them, and one that targeted parents and claiming that their kids were being watched. All kinds of awful nonsense. “We usually put in the blocks, save the data to CD, call the FBI and send them copies of what we find,” they told me. “It’s like a fire drill for us now. We know what to do automatically.”

“How often does something happen?” I wondered.

“Oh, probably 10 or so times a year....”

It seems it happens a lot more often than most people think. Most companies don’t have an internal information security department to investigate and block this stuff, and many employees never say anything about it for fear of losing their job.

One of my fed buddies told me that the government estimates that several million dollars are lost by employees every year to this sort of activity.

VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

9/24/2012 4:10:42 PM

Ajay Meher

Ajit Manocha

MULTI SCREEN MEDIA

SYNGENE

Ashwani Tikoo

Baljinder Singh

CSC INDIA

Jijy Oommen

GMR

Parna Ghosh

HONDA MOTORCYCLE AND SCOOTER

Rajesh Mohan

VISAKHAPATNAM STEEL PLANT

Sanjeev Kumar

ADHUNIK GROUP OF INDUSTRIES

Sri Karumbati SSS

M.Thyagaraj ONGC

V.Srinivas

Valerio Fernandes

Kapil Pal

Rakesh Bhatt

Satish Das

V.S.Parthasarathy

L&T

BPCL

Chandan Sinha GHCL

Mukesh Jain ICICI BANK

BHARTI INFRATEL

Ramnath Iyer CRISIL

DTDC

Sunil Sevak

A.K.Kaushik

Maj. Prashant Singh

Satyajit Sarker

COGNIZANT

Srinivasa Narasimhaiah

HYPERCITY

C.V.G.Prasad

ING VYSYA BANK

TITAN INDUSTRIES

NOVO NORDISK SERVICE CENTRE INDIA PVT.

Veneeth Purushotaman

CONTINENTAL AUTOMOTIVE COMPONENTS

BILCARE

C.S.Ramesh

ICICI LOMBARD

HPCL

CIBIL

Manoj Arora

L&T GENERAL INSURANCE

S.T.Sathiavageeswaran

Sudesh Puthran

INDUS TOWERS

IDFC

Ram Medury

BAJAJ FINANCE

Chakrapani Perangur

Pramod Pawar

SHEELA FOAM

A.K.Mohanty

CENTRAL BANK OF INDIA

V.C.Kumanan

PEPSICO

Pertisth Mankotia

GENPACT

NAGARJUNA FERTILIZERS & CHEMICALS

Bhupendra Pant

Joydeep Dutta

Sanjeev Prasad

BHARTI AIRTEL

L&T - EWAC ALLOYS

ICICI SECURITIES

P.K.Nijhawan

Amrita Gangotra

YES BANK

ITC

HINDUSTAN ZINC

Rajeswara Rao

BINANI INDUSTRIES

Amit Sethi

B.K.Bhatta

EXL SERVICE

Johny Paramian

BAJAJ CAPITAL

Amit Phadke

ACCELYA KALE SOLUTIONS

S.Ramasamy

G.S.Ravi Kumar GATI

Sebastian Joseph

DDB MUDRA GROUP

Suresh Shanmugam

Anil Khatri

SAP INDIA PVT

Damon Frost P&G, INDIA

Murali Krishna INFOSYS

Pushpinder Singh BANK OF INDIA

S.Ravishankar

LAKSHMI VILAS BANK

V.Seetaramaiah

PARADEEP PHOSPHATES

Sunil Mehta

INDIAN OIL MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA FINANCIAL SERVICES JWT INDIA

B.Venkatakrishnan

MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA MAHINDRA VEHICLE MANUFACTURERS

Venkatesh Natarajan ASHOK LEYLAND

Venu Madduri NSL GROUP

Anil Veer

ARICENT TECHNOLOGIES

Devesh Mathur HSBC

Muralidharan Ramachandran SYNTEL

Rajeev Jorapur

MERCEDES-BENZ INDIA

Sachin Jain

EVALUESERVE.COM

Shailesh Joshi

GODREJ INDUSTRIES

Subodh Dubey

USHA INTERNATIONAL

Vilakshan Jakhu BPTP

Anthony Thomas

Arijit Bhattacharjee

VODAFONE INDIA

Dhiren Savla

Girish Rao

RADICO KHAITAN

N.Nataraj

MARICO

V.V.Padmanabham

HEXAWARE

ATUL LTD.

WNS GLOBAL SERVICES

Farhan Khan

VFS GLOBAL

Rajat Sharma

Ashish Mathur

ITC - HOTELS DIVISION

Pankaj Agrawal

BRITANNIA INDUSTRIES

AIRCEL

N.Rajendran

NATIONAL PAYMENTS CORPORATION OF INDIA

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar RELIANCE CAPITAL

Shalabh Raizada SAFEXPRESS

Suneel Aradhye

S.K.Singh

S.K.Ravulapaty

Tarun Pandey

AMWAY INDIA

V.S.Krishnan

Yatendra Kumar

GOKALDAS EXPORTS

Sharat Airani

FORBES MARSHALL

ESSAR STEEL INDIA ADITYA BIRLA FINANCIAL SERVICES GROUP

WALMART INDIA

MTS INDIA

Sanjay Malhotra

HAMDARD LABORATORIES

RELIANCE COMMERCIAL FINANCE

Rajeev Batra

Sunil Sirohi NIIT

Yogesh Zope

BHARAT FORGE

Ashish Pachory

TATA TELESERVICES

Jayantha Prabhu ESSAR GROUP

Parakh Dave

FUTURE GROUP

Rajesh Chopra

EIH - THE OBEROI GROUP

Sanjay Saraswat

RELIANCE GLOBALCOM

Shekar Kamath

ADITYA BIRLA CUSTOMER SERVICES

Canon India congratulates you as the winner of “CIO 1002012” Award for bringing innovation and creativity in IT Domain. As pioneers of innovative technology in printing & document management industry, we are privileged to help you with our customized document management solutions Dr. Alok Bharadwaj Sr. Vice President, Canon

Thomson Thomas

HDFC STANDARD LIFE INSURANCE

R. C. Dhup NTPC

Canon India Pvt Ltd. 7th & 8th Floor, Tower B Building # 5 DLF Cyber Terraces, DLF Phase III Gurgaon - 122002 Telephone : 0124-4160000 Fax : 0124-4160011

Undercover Officer

ANONYMOUS

I arranged for a company meeting to let everyone know what was going on and what we were doing about it. At the end of the meeting, I asked why it was that almost 30 people knew and yet only one came forward to tell us.

“We were afraid of losing our jobs,” said one employee.

“Why was that?” I asked.

“Because the former CSO had several people fired because she suspected falsely that they had visited porn sites.

Some of us went to bat for them and told her they didn’t do it, but she insisted that their activities were chronic and that she had logs off the Web filtering system that proved they were chronic offenders,” the employee answered.

Several others chimed in: “We can’t trust the security department to hear our side of the story, so it’s better to keep quiet.”

Checking back with the security

teams, I found out that the rumors were true about my predecessor and that people were fired for what she thought was porn-surfing during office hours on company equipment.

The technology staff tried to explain to her that what she thought was surfing was really those pop-up browser ads for porn sites. Some legit websites allow sponsored pop-ups for the porn-ad industry, and those erroneously make it look like the employee is frequenting porn sites.

Sometimes, the pop-ups keep coming up and that means that their activities look repetitive toward a porn IP address that they may never have actually visited on their own.

But the former CSO wouldn’t take the time to listen, so some employees got fired for visiting porn sites they never actually visited.

Well, at least I now know why I’ve

been treated as The Great Unwashed by some employees. Many security tyrants out there don’t consider all angles to a potential security problem. And that’s worrying.

At least, my co-worker’s problem with pornography was solved, and the employees know that I am not the Ogre of Security Departments Past.

Let’s hope that will stick with them for a while.

Nevertheless, I’ll need to continue to educate employees about security and try to figure out how to get them to trust my new security regime. CIO

This column is written anonymously by a real CSO. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Layered Defenses: Securing Your Applications Securing your applications has never been more important, and there are lots of ways to do just that—as long as you don’t mind using layered defenses.

Addressing the Human Element for Data Security Regardless of the technical steps you take to secure your assets, you can't achieve much without focusing on the most vulnerable element of your organization: Your employees.

READ MORE ARTICLES ONLINE

How CIOs Can Learn to Catch Insider Crime Research shows that CIOs rarely discover the internal security threats that can ruin companies, even though it frequently involves IT systems. Here's what needs to change.

BYOD Strategy to Satisfy both Users and CIOs Mobility and BYOD are knocking on IT's doors, and CIOs are not sure whether to welcome them or turn them away.

WWW.CIO.IN/ARTICLES

Anonymous_Column_September2012.indd 6

9/24/2012 4:10:42 PM

THE

OVER B y Te a m C I O

This year’s crop of CIO 100 winners demonstrate how IT can excel despite the multitude of challenges that face it and the businesses it supports.

We live in tough times. No argument there. But in the midst of tighter

Featuring 100 winners, 20 Super Achievers

and 100 finalists of CIO 100 2012.

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budgets, more frequent business requests, projects that need to be turned around faster and with 3x the return on investment, some CIOs are still finding ways to carry their businesses to the next level.

These CIOs prove everyday that IT can make a real difference despite the challenges they face and for that they are this year’s CIO 100.

For the uninitiated, the CIO 100 Awards, a 24-year-old tradition of honoring exceptional work that began in the US, has now become the most coveted recognition among CIOs worldwide. In its seventh year in India, the award has evoked the same aspiration, going by the huge number of entries we received this year.

Four hundred and ninety one organizations filled out the nomination form for the CIO100 Award as well as the seven special awards, totaling an amazing 672 projects. It goes unsaid that the competition was severe.

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SU P E R LEAGUE

WINNER

Pg

33

Pg

209

Pg

146

CIO 100 Winners

The Super League

CIO 100 Finalists

Read the project profiles of the 100 most hard-hitting IT leaders of 2012.

These 20 IT leaders have the distinction of excelling year after year.

They might not be CIO 100 winners, but they’re still streets ahead of the pack.

To be a CIO 100 award winner this year, companies and their IT leaders had to demonstrate technology initiatives that had significant business benefits, positively impacted business process, been technologically innovative, and demonstrated creativity.

These four key selection criteria were identified and given weightages by the six members of the CIO100 Awards Advisory Board. The distinguished members of the Advisory Board were Gary Beach, publisher emeritus, CIO Magazine; Jaideep Mehta, country manager, IDC India; Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan, professor of corporate strategy, IIM-Bangalore; Prof. S. Sadagopan, director, IIIT-Bangalore; Dr. Sridhar Mitta, managing director and founder, NextWealth Entrepreneurs; and, Sudhir Sethi, founder chairman and managing director IDG Ventures India.

Both technology innovation and creativity in implementation were accorded an average weight of 1.6 each by the board; impact on business process edged higher at 2.3, and the average weight for significant business impact judged to be 4.2.

Each application was reviewed by a jury of CIO editors, who evaluated them according to the four selection criteria and then applied the weightages recommended by the

32

FINALIST

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Pg

238

The Many Facets of Excellence Highlights from the largest gathering of India’s top IT leaders under one roof.

advisory board. The awards jury examined how each organization stacked up against the others in the pool, and sought to honor only the most interesting initiatives for the CIO 100 honor.

Organizations and their projects were ranked by score and the top 200 were shortlisted as finalists. These 200 nominations were then subjected to enhanced scrutiny, until the final 100 honorees were identified.

Read on to find out how these 100 winners—and the 100 finalists—impacted their businesses and earned their place among India’s top 200 CIOs.

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WINNERS The CIO 100 2012 Winners drove technology initiatives that had significant business benefits, positively impacted business processes, were technologically innovative, and demonstrated creativity.

WINNERS LIST Ajay Kumar Meher .......................................................112 Ajit Manocha ................................................................131 Amit Phadke ..................................................................35 Amit Sethi .................................................................... 145 Amrita Gangotra............................................................52 Ananta Kumar Mohanty ...............................................58 Anil Khatri.....................................................................128 Anil Kumar Kaushik.......................................................50 Anil Veer..........................................................................42 Anthony Thomas ..........................................................141 Arijit Bhattacharjee .....................................................100 Ashish Mathur .............................................................144 Ashish Pachory............................................................133 Ashwani Tikoo................................................................64 B. Venkatakrishnan ..................................................... 107 Baljinder Singh ............................................ Not featured Bhujay Kumar Bhatta ...................................................99 Bhupendra Pant ..........................................................102 C.S. Ramesh .................................................................136 Chakrapani Perangur ....................................................94 Chandan Sinha ..............................................................76 Damon Frost ................................................................ 122 Devesh Mathur ............................................................134 Dhiren Savla .................................................................139 Dr. N. Rajendran ...........................................................114 Farhan Khan .................................................................123 G.S. Ravi Kumar ............................................................. 74 Girish Rao.....................................................................108 Jayantha Prabhu ...........................................................68 Jijy Oommen..................................................................45 Johny Paramian.............................................................77 Joydeep Dutta............................................................... 91 K.V.S.S. Rajeswara Rao................................................140 Kapil Pal.........................................................................121 M. Thyagarajulu ............................................................119 Maj. Prashant Veer Singh..............................................53 Manoj Arora....................................................................54 Mukesh Kumar Jain ......................................................89 Murali Krishna K ............................................................95 N. Nataraj .......................................................................84 P.K. Nijhawan .................................................................86 Pankaj Agrawal..............................................................39 Parakh Dave ...................................................................73 Parna Ghosh ..................................................................87 Pertisth Mankotia ........................................................129 Pramod Pawar .............................................................103 Prasad C.V.G. ..................................................................98 Pushpinder Singh ..........................................................48 R. Muralidharan ........................................................... 132 R.C. Dhup......................................................Not Featured

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Rajat Sharma .................................................................44 Rajeev Batra.................................................................. 111 Rajeev Jorapur ............................................................. 110 Rajesh Chopra ...............................................................67 Rajesh Mohan ................................................................55 Rakesh Bhatt .................................................................46 Ram Kalyan Medury..................................................... 90 Ramnath Iyer .................................................................63 S. Ramasamy .................................................................92 S. Ravishankar ............................................................. 135 S.T. Sathiavageeswaran ................................................85 Sachin Jain .....................................................................70 Sandeep Phanasgaonkar ........................................... 124 Sanjay Malhotra ........................................................... 40 Sanjay Saraswat ..........................................................126 Sanjay Singh ................................................................. 80 Sanjeev Kumar ..............................................................36 Sanjeev Prasad ..............................................................75 Satish Kumar Das......................................................... 60 Satyajit Sarker ...............................................................66 Sebastian Joseph ..........................................................65 Shailesh Joshi ................................................................78 Shalabh Raizada ......................................................... 127 Sharat Airani ..................................................................72 Shashi Kumar Ravulapaty .......................................... 125 Shekar Kamath..............................................................37 Sri Karumbati ..............................................................130 Srinivasa N. ...................................................................117 Subodh Dubey .............................................................138 Sudesh Puthran.............................................................62 Suneel Aradhye..............................................................69 Sunil Mehta .................................................................. 101 Sunil Sevak...................................................................104 Sunil Sirohi ....................................................................116 Suresh A. Shanmugam ...............................................105 Tarun Pandey .................................................................38 Thomson Thomas ......................................................... 81 V. Seetaramaiah...........................................................120 V. Srinivas ......................................................................113 V.C. Kumanan.................................................................96 V.S. Parthasarathy .......................................................106 V.V. Padmanabham........................................................57 Valerio Fernandes.......................................................... 61 Veneeth Purushottaman ..............................................88 Venkatesh Natarajan.....................................................43 Venu Gopal Madduri.....................................................118 Vilakshan Jakhu.............................................................56 Vinod Sivarama Krishnan ........................................... 142 Yatendra Kumar.............................................................79 Yogesh Zope ...................................................................49

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The erstwhile Kale Consultants, now a part of the Accelya Group, needed infrastructure that could scale as the company grew, one that promised lower capex, high uptime, low maintenance, and fast provisioning for its customers. Amit Phadke, VP-systems and technology, Accelya Kale Solutions, found a way to do all of that.

Earlier, multiple servers (application, Web, FTP, etcetera) were procured for each customer, creating large capex costs.

Worse, procuring and provisioning used to take anywhere between six to eight weeks. This made handling peak capacity

or sudden increases in compute load a significant challenge.

Phadke segregated the problem into two: Application and database.

He created pool of application servers based on service offerings and compute requirements. With advanced virtualization of application and Web tier servers, provisioning for customers has become faster. This has also made systems more agile and scalable and ensures better SLAs. The project also helped Phadke cut capex, and new server procurement costs by freeing up a lot of existing resources.

WINNER Company Name:

Accelya Kale Solutions Industry:

IT/ITeS Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

1,600

Amit Phadke Accelya Kale Solutions

IT Team Internal:

50 EVP:

Satish Ambe

2012

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When the Adhunik Group planned to build India’s largest pellet plant, the responsibility to support it with a world-class IT system fell on Sanjeev Kumar, group CIO and group president business, Adhunik Group.

First, Kumar decided to implement Honeywell Automation for complete plant control. The system captures production and consumption of all ingredients automatically from electronic tags installed at various points. A unique adaptor then deciphers Honeywell’s proprietary data base and populates BI cubes that interface with a data

warehouse. This gives the plant realtime cost computation of products being produced for profitability analysis, and therefore better decision making.

Another big challenge in Kumar’s way was implementing SAP in a record time of 10 weeks to ensure that when the plant opened, its IT backbone was ready.

Braving the odds, Kumar and his team have given Adhunik an IT system that streamlines processes and workflow, uses real-time data from the plant for BI and decision-making, and simplifies adaptation to changes in tax regulations and other legal acts.

WINNER Company:

Adhunik Group of Industries Industry:

Conglomerate Headquarters:

Kolkata Employees:

Sanjeev Kumar Adhunik Group of Industries

4,000 Internal IT Team:

30 Managing Director:

Manoj Agarwal

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Aditya Birla Customer Services

Shekar Kamath Aditya Birla Customer Services If you have a broad investment portfolio, you’ve probably dreamt of a platform that can give you a single view of your portfolio—and hopefully manage it from one place. Shekar Kamath, vice president and head IT, Aditya Birla Customer Services, made that dream come true, with a platform called MyUniverse.

MyUniverse is a money management platform that aggregates information from across a consumer’s portfolio whether they are online like banks, insurance, credit cards, bills, home loans, brokerages, or offline like property and gold.

Plus, by using a hybrid cloud in the backend, the system has access to a unique

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Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai IT Team Outsourced:

advisory rules engine which analyzes investments, incomes, and expenditures to provide consumers with customized financial planning advice. Some of the functional algorithms like aggregation of portfolio across brokerages, Money Snapshot and trend analysis, are unique.

MyUniverse not only offers customers the ability to pay all their bills using a single gateway but also to transact in MFs, equities, and insurance. MyUniverse was voted Product of the Year 2012, in the financial services product innovation category, in a survey conducted by Nielsen across 30,000 people who voted across 36 markets.

Over 100 at peak MD (Aditya Birla Money) and CEO Aditya Birla Money Mart:

Sudhakar Ramasubramanian

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Aditya Birla Financial Services Group

Tarun Pandey Aditya Birla Financial Services Group

Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Typically, to prepare

for a horizon of at least two years, any BFSI organization with interests in multiple verticals over-provisions its IT infrastructure and associated software.

Aditya Birla Financial Services Group (a conglomerate of financial services companies within the Aditya Birla Group) took a call to depart from the norm.

Tarun Pandey, VP-IT, ABFSG, decided to use virtualization and the cloud to streamline provisioning and increase utilization across the group—as well as reduce IT infrastructure procurement and maintenance challenges and costs.

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The result of his work is probably first and biggest cloud in the financial services space and the largest deployment on Microsoft Hyper-V VMs in the country. The organization-wide IaaS platform reduced the footprint—and costs—of servers and storage and increased server utilization from 10 to about 50 percent at the group level. And if you account for the number of servers and racks ABFSG avoided buying and the fact that they sidestepped paying for virtualization license fees (because Hyper-V came bundled with Windows Server OS), Pandey has saved ABFSG over ten times its investment in less than a year.

Over 15, 000 IT Team Internal:

50 CEO:

Ajay Srinivasan

WINNER

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Aircel operates in

a highly regulated industry. Aircel has outsourced some key elements of its operations. The outsourced staff handles a lot of customer data. Hence, third-party security governance is of utmost importance.

Pankaj Agrawal, CISO, Aircel, created a third-party risk management framework that includes vendor risk classification, based on the nature of outsourced operations and the sensitivity of data being handled by the vendor.

It consists of a check-list that provides information like which policy statement is applicable to which function. This is

mapped with actions required by each function to ensure compliance. Each business function’s manager submits a report with risk factors and action taken. This is validated by the security team and compliance dashboards are published—pan-India—for each business function. These dashboards are presented to security steering committees. The function heads are expected to explain the lack of compliance and commit timelines to enhance compliance levels.

This has helped Aircel maintain high standards of corporate security governance in business operations.

WINNER Company Name:

Aircel Industry:

Telecommunications Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

5,500

Pankaj Agrawal Aircel

IT Team Internal:

75 COO:

Jean-Pascal Van Overbeke

2012

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39

Amway India needed

to let go of its intranet that wasn’t able to live up to the expectations of its new breed of employees.

So, it made way for a new and betterequipped interaction architecture that would meet the requirements of techsavvy employees. The new intranet, known as IndiaConnect, was designed

by Amway India’s VP-IT, BS & ebiz, Sanjay Malhotra, and fulfills the five key requirements of providing an interactive intranet portal, single sign-on capability, access to departmental sites, automation of 13 business processes (travel requisition,

travel expense, rewards and recognition, and vendor bills processing among others), and a robust document repository.

As expected, IndiaConnect has helped Amway increase employee productivity through collaboration, and reducing turnaround-time for individual processes.

The company’s green initiative has received a boost, too, in that the number of paper documents exchanged or circulated among employees has come down drastically. IndiaConnect’s strong architecture has made sure that people get anytime, anywhere access to all crucial business information they require.

WINNER Company Name:

Amway India Enterprises Industry:

Retail and Distribution Headquarters:

Noida Employees:

500

Sanjay Malhotra Amway India Enterprises

IT Team Internal:

24 MD and CEO:

William S. Pinckney

2012

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The

Logical Choice for Security

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For information on HID Global’s innovative line of smart card readers, visit hidglobal.com/smartcard/CIO

2012 Company Name:

Aricent Group Industry:

IT/ITeS

Anil Veer Aricent Group

Global Headquarters:

New Jersey Employees:

Aricent Group is a global innovation and technology services company with a presence in 20 countries.

Earlier, the IT environment at Aricent was more locally focused. Anil Veer, VP– IT, Aricent Group, decided to change that and drove a mega project to overhaul the IT infrastructure of the organization and strengthen information security. To this end, he implemented a shared services model, centralized technical assistance, optimized network and communication infrastructure, adopted virtualization and cloud computing and consolidated the datacenter. He also initiated projects

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11,000 for vendor consolidation, integration of collaboration services and application rationalization at a global level.

The network infrastructure has been re-architected according to global standards with multiple Internet service providers and WAN optimization. This increased the network capacity by 11 percent, reduced support costs by 10 percent thus achieving better data traffic engineering. HD video and audio conferencing services for collaboration have increased by 75 percent.

Successful call ratio is above 97 percent which improved employee productivity and reduced employee travel costs dramatically.

IT Team Internal:

128 CEO:

Sudip Nandy

WINNER

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Ashok Leyland formed

joint ventures with Nissan Motor Company (Japan) for LCVs and John Deere (USA) for construction equipment to enhance its product portfolio. The company needed to provide both its business partners with a reliable CRM and dealer management system.

To that end, Venkatesh Natarajan, special director-IT, Ashok Leyland, integrated SAP CRM and DMS with the OEM’s SAP for real-time data transfer and faster operations. This is a common ecosystem for dealers across the country. In this system, a purchase order is created at the dealer’s

end and a sales order at the OEM. Dispatch details flow from OEM to the dealer. Post sale, the system automatically activates warranties for the end customer. In addition, it also generates dealer-wise performance reports, and assists the sales team with a simplified approach to convert leads to opportunities.

The system also prompts Ashok Leyland’s partners about duplicate customer accounts across the dealer network. They can also extract dealer sell-out data for demand forecasting. The system is truly a one-stop shop for all Ashok Leyland’s business partners.

WINNER Company Name:

Ashok Leyland Industry:

Automotive Headquarters:

Chennai Employees:

Over 15,000

Venkatesh Natarajan Ashok Leyland

IT Team Internal:

110 IT Team Outsourced:

90

2012

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Atul, a chemical company, procures over 28,000 materials a year to produce 4,000 SKUs, which makes material procurement a critical function.

Poor material procurement practices could lead to long procurement times, delayed payments to vendors, and inflated inventories.

To avoid these problems, president of IT, Rajat Sharma, rolled out a four-module, almost zero cost, Open-source solution that brought more transparency and efficiency to Atul’s procure-to-payment cycle. The solution includes a vendor portal, which allows many vendors to quote their

price. Clubbed with that is a quotation comparison system to help the company make smarters purchase decisions. It also has an electronic receipt settlement system which automates accounts payable invoices; and is topped off with a dashboard that throws up MIS alerts and notifications and highlights exceptions. All the pieces are integrated with Atul’s ERP. The solution cut the time to process a procurement request from about eight days to two, optimized on-hand inventory from 60 days to 53, and shrunk the delay in generating a vendor’s account payable invoice from three days to instantly.

WINNER Company Name:

Atul Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Atul, Gujarat Employees:

2,600

Rajat Sharma Atul

IT Team Internal:

33 Chairman and MD:

Sunil S. Lalbhai

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Bajaj Capital Industry:

BFSI

Jijy Oommen Bajaj Capital

Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

Bajaj Capital spent

plenty on marketing but it wasn’t sure it was getting the appropriate returns. Part of the problem was that the leads marketing found were not centralized and weren’t always followed up in time. As a result, marketing wasn’t able to quantify its performance, which made it hard to justify marketing investments.

So, Jijy Oommen, EVP-technology, Bajaj Capital, created a centralized sales CRM and lead management system, which pumps all leads—from various marketing channels including BTL (below the line), search engine, e-mail, social media,

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mobile, and IVR, among others—into one system, making it easier to follow up.

These leads are visible to call centers in charge of fixing appointments with clients. Once an appointment is arranged, sales executives are informed of upcoming client meetings via SMS and e-mail. If an appointment status is not updated by a sales executive within a defined time, the system automatically initiates escalation. Post a meeting, the status of that opportunity is updated, which in turn, updates the daily activity report of a sales executive.

5,000 IT Team Internal:

50 Group CEO:

Anil Chopra

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Bajaj Finserv Lending Industry:

BFSI

Rakesh Bhatt Bajaj Finserv Lending

Headquarters:

Pune Employees:

Rakesh Bhatt, COO, Bajaj Finserv Lending (BFL), found a way to make the process of disbursing and applying for loans—for consumer durables—easier. Bhatt wanted to eliminate the amount of time and documentation a customer needs to submit to avail a loan. The answer lay in an EMI card. This card is like acts as a pre-approved loan and is given to customers who have a good track record of repaying loans.

Customers can now walk into a store, select a product and swipe their EMI card.

The dealer enters the product’s price and code, and a customer enters his PIN—just like a debit/credit card. Swipe hits vendor’s NOC,

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1,500 vendor sends details like DOB, limit, and product code to BFL, which authenticates it and sends charge slip details to vendor host. Vendor passes it onto the dealer and POS generates a charge slip, completing the transaction. Customers can buy products on zero percent finance, besides using the loan amount remaining in the card for future purchases.

This innovation has been a gamechanger in terms of customer service.

Approving loans is now a matter of seconds, and the need for tedious documentation has been eliminated. Even loan receipts are handed over instantly.

IT Team Internal:

22 CEO:

Rajeev Jain

WINNER

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AD

Despite having 3,752

branches spread across India, the Bank of India wanted more ways to comply with RBI’s directive to create more financial inclusion among the 2,992 villages (with a population above 2,000) that were allocated to the bank as well as the 35,754 villages (with populations below 2,000.)

The bank IT-enabled financial inclusion strategy, driven by GM Pushpinder Singh, helps the bank ensure that the financial inclusion push also contributes to the bank’s bottom line.

Singh ensured his initiatives were integrated with the bank’s core banking

system, so that India’s poor could have many of the same facilities their city-cousins get. This includes offerings like savings accounts, recurring deposit accounts with ‘limit’ features like overdrafts, kisan credit cards, and general purpose credit cards. The banks also offers daily deposit schemes and micro-insurance. Singh also integrated the use of handhelds into his strategy, allowing business correspondents to become a pointof-sale for micro pension schemes, thirdparty products like gold coins, and act as micro-ATMs as well. Customers can also interact with the bank using smart cards or kiosks.

WINNER Company Name:

Bank of India Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Over 41,000

Pushpinder Singh Bank of India

IT Team Internal:

Over 300 Chairman and MD:

Alok K. Misra

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Bharat Forge Industry:

Manufacturing

Yogesh Zope Bharat Forge

Headquarters:

Pune Employees:

Like many old

business houses, companies within the Kalyani Group used various payroll and time attendance systems to manage its 10,000-strong workforce.

Also, its HR departments used paper-based processes, relying extensively on forms, spreadsheets, and manual processes. As the group diversified into power, infrastructure and non-auto businesses, it became imperative to get itself a more efficient workforce management system.

To that end, Yogesh Zope, group CTO, Kalyani Group, implemented a broad project that integrated not only automated workforce management but also took into account

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10,000 the lifecycle of multiple HR processes. The far-reaching project eliminated manual processes from recruitment, payroll management, appraisals, time card and attendance management, shift scheduling, health insurance, and training management among others. The system is run off the group’s intranet, as a shared service, and also has a Web presence, shrinking HR manpower needs by 30 percent. It has helped the group end attendance leakages; reduce the time required to process appraisal forms by 75 percent and payroll reconciliation by 85 percent, and create a single window for HR-related issues.

IT Team Internal:

42 Chairman and MD:

Baba Kalyani

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2012 Company Name:

Bharat Petroleum Industry:

Oil and Gas

Anil Kumar Kaushik Bharat Petroleum

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Bharat Petroleum is

one of India’s largest organizations. Its strategy to retain its leadership position was its belief in changing with the times. By cleverly timing a large-scale induction of virtualization technology into the IT infrastructure during a hardware refresh cycle, Anil Kumar Kaushik, GM-infrastructure and services, Bharat Petroleum, paved the way for further growth.

The project was envisioned with 10 important goals: Achieve redundancy, consolidate database and OS licenses, minimize technology risks, optimize

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Over 14,000 network architecture, secure the architecture, ease administration, have a three-tier datacenter architecture, consolidate server hardware, reduce resource provision cycles, and take a step towards a private cloud.

Thanks to the project, the company has been able to enjoy a 30 percent reduction in manpower by reducing the number of hours spent in managing infrastructure. Also, 40 percent reduction in datacenter expenditure, and 50 percent reduction in server outages have proven that the project is headed in the right direction.

IT Team Internal:

160 Chairman and MD:

R. K. Singh

WINNER

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‘You can’t please everybody’ say some people. Amrita Gangotra, director-IT, India and South Asia, Bharti Airtel, isn’t one of those people. With her new project, she transformed Airtel’s website into an ‘everything anywhere’ marketplace where users can re-charge, pay bills, and buy or upgrade products.

It’s now possible, for instance, for customers to pay their postpaid bills by clicking on their e-bills or recharge their DTH accounts using Airtel Money.

She also helped 200 million customers help themselves, by enabling ‘Selfcare’ abilities across multiple channels

including Web, WAP, IVR, USSD, and SMS channels. Finally, she enhanced the “content discovery experience” by revamping Airtel’s WAP site to include features like federated search and editorial content, among others.

Today, the self-care platform attracts 600 million hits a month. With its launch, the number of calls to Airtel’s call centers have shrunk significantly, leading to huge operational savings. And within a few months of the new WAP site, average page views per day have increased by 200 percent, unique users increased by 65 percent, and page hits doubled.

WINNER Company Name:

Bharti Airtel Industry:

Telecommunications Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

14,000

Amrita Gangotra Bharti Airtel

IT Team Internal:

300 in India and South Asia CEO:

Sanjay Kapoor

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Bharti Infratel Industry:

Telecommunications

Maj. Prashant Veer Singh Bharti Infratel

Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

Bharti Infratel was battling with a lack of integrated business applications and manual processes. This hindered the operations of 33,000 towers in the country. It also resulted in inaccurate billing and loss of productivity due to multiple MIS executives working on manual data—among other issues.

To address such challenges, Prashant Veer Singh, CIO, Bharti Infratel, initiated the Infratel Enterprise Suite (IES) project. The solution integrates six COTS applications—ERP, BI, SCM, CRM, DMS, and asset management— from different vendors through an ESB (enterprise

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4,800 service bus). This integrated application stack ensures a single data entry channel, which enables accurate and integrated reporting across application stacks.

Today, Bharti Infratel saves $4 million (Rs 22.2 crore) per annum due to automation of infrastructure asset issuance, over $7 million (Rs 38.8 crore) due to reduction in inventory value.

The system also improved deployment monitoring which ensured 20 percent faster tower construction. It also reduced pending invoice payables by 82 percent.

Internal IT Team:

25 CEO:

Devender Singh Rawat

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Bilcare provides integrated R&D consultancy and outsourcing solutions in critical areas of brand protection, brand management technologies, clinical supplies and packaging solutions to the global pharmaceutical industry. Manoj Arora, CIO, Bilcare, developed a cloud-based ‘Track & Trace’ business-platform-as-a-service platform to help Bilcare’s customers keep a more watchful eye on their supply chains.

Based on new-age technologies like services oriented architecture and SAP Net Weaver Mobile and (MI & PI) Process Exchange Infrastructure, the solution is scalable to diverse industries and

supply chain challenges, and can be made available to customers in addition to the core portfolio of Bilcare offerings. The service successfully integrates customers and third-party vendors to handle selfservice data exchange over mobile and Web portal for billions of records and millions of online transactions.

The system integrates over 20 supply chain sites including thirdparty manufacturing locations, in-line production systems, and warehouses. The initiative is a classic example on how a CIO can innovatively transform IT into a revenue generator.

WINNER Company Name:

Bilcare Industry:

Services Headquarters:

Pune Employees:

1,200

Manoj Arora Bilcare

IT Team Internal:

15 Chairman and MD:

Mohan Bhandari

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Binani Industries Industry:

Conglomerate

Rajesh Mohan Binani Industries

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Binani Industries is going global, with ambitions to conquer markets in China, UAE, and East Africa. But crossing borders also entails integrating information and software licensing, and implementing a global compliance program. That’s exactly what Joint President at Binani Industries, Rajesh Mohan, has done.

Mohan’s D2I (Data to Information to Insight) initiative integrates business information from 42-odd group companies at three levels: It consolidates business information, it consolidates software assets, and it implements a global compliance program. The system created a corporate

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2,500 information platform that gathers data from diverse transaction systems, including SCADA data across group companies and provides management with financial consolidation in GAAP, a global spend control system, a group business score card, and business analytics. Mohan says his vendors could not reference similar environments in India.

It also consolidates and manages software assets to use software resources more optimally. Finally, it established a process of on-going monitoring and assurance of software assets utilization and compliance globally.

IT Team Internal:

28 Exec. VC and MD:

Sunil Sethy

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2012 Company:

BPTP Industry:

Real Estate

Vilakshan Jakhu BPTP

Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

Building beautiful homes

is not easy. Nor is getting a single picture of your clients across their lifecycle. But Vilakshan Jakhu, SVP and CIO, BPTP, has mastered the trick. Jakhu integrated BPTP’s CRM with its ERP to be able to focus better on areas like customer service, sales force automation, business analytics and online marketing. That level of integration, he says, has never been done before in the Indian real estate industry.

The new CRM system gives BPTP a 360-degree view of its customers across their lifecycle starting from

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825 lead generation to mortgage and from possession agreements and all the way to facility management once a home has been handed over.

The system also captures and manages leads with its ability to read SMS and e-mails sent to the sales team. It has the ability to gauge the quality of a lead. It assists the marketing team by managing campaigns, and tracking leads until they turn into opportunities. It helps BPTP’s relationship managers, brokers, and customer service executives manage their work better, which leads to more clarity across the system.

IT Team Internal:

47 Chairman and MD:

Kabul Chawla

WINNER

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Britannia Industries is

India’s second most trusted brand. The company decided to empower its salesforce to sustain its leading position in the industry.

V.V. Padmanabham, head-corporate IT, Britannia Industries, devised a handheld solution—IT apps loaded on a mobile device—for the company’s sales force.

This hand-held carries relevant data—like product names and details—and algorithms to assist the sales force to meet daily targets.

The intelligent algorithm tracks daily sales targets in real time.

“On a usual day, our sales reps cover 35 retail outlets (six days a week) each

and sell products according to the predefined priorities. They have to remember all of Britannia’s over 250 products for effective customer engagement. Failure to do so lead to inefficient sales calls,” says Padmanabham. The mobile solution helped the sales force do just that and achieve daily deliverables like sales targets and bringing in new customers.

The project is expected to increase the company’s top-line by 10 percent and its bottom line by 20 percent just by improving sales call efficiency. It also reduces the nonvalue added time spent by salesmen—one hour in billing—to just 10 minutes.

WINNER Company Name:

Britannia Industries Industry:

FMCG Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

2,000

V. V. Padmanabham Britannia Industries

IT Team Internal:

14 Managing Director:

Vinita Bali

2012

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For an institution that’s over a 100 years-old, technology plays a critical role at the Central Bank of India. Take, for example, how Ananta Kumar Mohanty, head-IT projects, Central Bank of India, decided to simplify mobile banking to make it easier for the bank’s customers to avail the facility. He came up with a unique idea that allows customers to get their account information using the oldest trick in the book: The missed call.

Using this facility, customers can get information about their last three transactions, and the balance in their accounts through an SMS by giving a

missed call from a registered mobile number to a specified number. The bank has also implemented push SMS alerts whereby its customers receive SMS alerts in a choice of 15 languages for various banking transactions.

Mohanty and his team have also implemented other facilities such as online tax payments supporting several government agencies, kiosk banking, online share-trading, registration of mobile numbers through ATMs, and a centralized customer care center among many others, providing this centenarian bank a new lease of life.

WINNER Company Name:

Central Bank of India Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

37,106

Ananta Kumar Mohanty Central Bank of India

IT Team Internal:

465 Chairman and MD:

Mohan Vasant Tanksale

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Satish Kumar Das Cognizant Technology Solutions Cognizant Technolog y Solutions (CTS) wanted to ensure that its infrastructure capable of making critical services available to deliver critical 24/7 projects. To achieve this, it had to strengthen its current infrastructure, processes and systems, and collaboration between business groups and internal support teams. It also had to identify and mitigate infrastructure and continuity risks.

To that end, Satish Kumar Das, CSO and VP, divided the project into two phases based on business priority. Cross functional groups were created to complete risk assessments and identify single points

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Industry:

IT/ITeS Global Headquarters:

New Jersey Employees:

of failure in terms of technology, processes and people. Das reviewed them and defined mitigation strategies across a definite time zone (immediate, medium, and long-term).

The project has provided CTS with a standardized pre-announced annual calendar for maintenance activities and BCP. This has reduced unplanned outages. The company has drawn a list of infrastructure requirements that are now mandatory for all new facilities that are being built for 24X7 critical projects.

The project has also been able to put in new processes to track, record, and review outages.

1,40,000 IT Team Internal:

300 CEO:

Francisco D’Souza

WINNER

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After a year of consolidation in 2010, the IT division at Continental Automotive Components (India), an auto parts manufacturer, wanted to ensure that its IT systems were prepared for the sudden spurt in growth the company envisaged. One of the ways it could do that was to automate business and manufacturing processes using IT. Valerio Fernandes, GM-IT, Continental Automotive Components (India), says the IT team approached 2011 with this motto: Arise, awake and rest not until you automate. They identified two functions— purchase and manufacturing execution—where IT could

remove a significant number of obstacles by automating and streamlining processes.

By automating the purchase process—the manual process created many delays and used a lot of paper as approvals had to be obtained from numerous people—Continental cut short approval time, increased traceability, and lowered paper use by 30 percent.

And by automating the interface between its manufacturing execution system and SAP, Fernandes removed errors caused by manual intervention, introduced real-time information on products raw materials, and improved the shop floor’s ability to have justin-time inventory.

Valerio Fernandes Continental Automotive Components (India)

WINNER Company Name:

Continental Automotive Components (India) Industry:

Automotive Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

1,500 IT Team Internal:

9 Managing Director:

Claude D’Gama Rose

2012

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Credit Information Bureau India (CIBIL) primarily offers credit reports to banks. But recent regulations have allowed individuals to get a report from CIBIL. However, one of the main challenges was to authenticate an individual before delivering a credit report. Also, an individual could raise disputes and resolving them would lead to increased overhead costs as it requires multiple interactions with banks. The existing process was manual and inefficient.

Sudesh Puthran, CIO, CIBIL, automated the entire process including payments for credit reports, customer authentication,

and the delivery of reports. Consumers can now enter their details on the company’s website—which is verified using a SaaS-based authentication engine—and pay through an online gateway (making DDs irrelevant). The back-end process of tracking disputes raised by individuals, which was earlier tracked on Excel, is now automated using workflow process in the company’s CRM application.

The automation project has enabled CIBIL to deliver consumer credit reports in 24-48 hours for about 60 percent of requests, as compared to 14-21 days previously. It has also resulted in reducing the workload for dispute resolution team by 25 percent.

Sudesh Puthran Credit Information Bureau India

WINNER Company Name:

Credit Information Bureau India Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

81 IT Team Internal:

12 CEO:

Arun Thukral

2012

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2012 Company Name:

CRISIL Industry:

BFSI

Ramnath Iyer

CRISIL

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

To ensure business

continuity and meet compliance needs, CRISIL set up its DR site way back in 2006. But its explosive growth demanded higher infrastructure resiliency at a fraction of the cost and a reduced RTO and RPO. Ramnath Iyer, CTO, CRISIL, first implemented a file and e-mail archiving system, which reduced storage space and the time required for backups. The team then re-architected CRISIL’s WAN and Internet infrastructure, resulting in shortened data replication windows. Now all locations can be re-directed to either the production or warm or cold DR within

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4,500 a few minutes. Iyer also upgraded his DR site to improve the RTO and RPO and set up a near- and far-DR. For the near-DR—which is configured to recover from infrastructure specific incidents—the RTO is less than five minutes while the RPO is virtually zero.

The far-DR on the other hand, has an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of a maximum 4 hours depending on the application. This DR is configured to recover from sitespecific disasters. This represents a 75 percent reduction when compared to the previous setup.

CEO:

Roopa Kudva

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

CSC India Industry:

IT/ITeS

Ashwani Tikoo CSC India

Headquarters:

Chennai Employees:

CSC India acquired

iSOFT— one of the world’s leading providers of advanced healthcare IT solutions—in 2011. Both companies were running on disparate solutions.

Ashwani Tikoo, CIO, CSC India, did his part in driving IT-based business growth by integrating his organization’s IT infrastructure with iSOFT. About 80 percent of iSOFT’s servers and about 70 percent of its storage boxes were older than six years. This led to several complications including excess electricity consumption. Tikoo realized that the best way to deal with this challenge would be

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24,000 to deploy a new datacenter module that would refresh and consolidate iSOFT’s IT infrastructure.

The consolidation drive’s effectiveness is evident from the fact that CSC India has been able to save about Rs 2 crore per annum in just the first phase. Electricity consumption has come down considerably because the new module followed CSC’s green IT program. The icing on the cake for CSC India would be the final phase of the project in which its infrastructure will become completely cloud-ready.

IT Team Internal:

5 President and MD:

Brian J. Manning

WINNER

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Sebastian Joseph, presidenttechnology & FM, DDB Mudra Group, realized that the company’s existing processes were cumbersome, time consuming, resource hungry and were ridden with inefficiencies. Documents scattered across over 25 physical locations made data collation an arduous task.

Besides, the process was hamstrung with a lack of accessibility and inaccuracies.

Joseph developed a Web-based, integrated facility management portal that provides a comprehensive view of all administration and facility management related transactions of the group. The

initiative helps the organization keep track of its property (new leases, lease renewals, lease payments), travel management (domestic, international, local cabs, hotels), attendance management, utility bills/ services management, and brand and dispatch management. Apart from these, it also manages budgets and sends alert to all stakeholders about lease expiry or renewal, insurance claims, resignations and new recruits.

This has rid the company of inaccurate data, cumbersome processes and inefficiencies. And has made the administrative process more transparent.

WINNER Company Name:

DDB Mudra Group Industry:

Advertising Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Over 1,100

Sebastian Joseph DDB Mudra Group

IT Team Internal:

8 MD and Group CEO:

Madhukar Kamath

2012

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At DTDC Courier & Cargo, service efficiency and transparency are part of its core values. However, one of the biggest challenges in meeting these values was its inability to provide real-time status delivery updates to its customers, who wanted to know exactly when their packages reached their destination. Previously, this data was entered by delivery executives at the end of a day, which did not reflect a true delivery status.

Satyajit Sarker, GM-IT, DTDC Courier & Cargo, began working on a project termed simply as ‘Mobile Update’. It was not just the name, but the concept and execution

that were kept simple, functional and inexpensive. The team developed a Java application which field personnel could use to send delivery updates to the company’s central ERP servers through GPRS from low-cost mobile phones—as opposed to the expensive—-about Rs 1 lakh—devices that DTDC’s MNC counterparts use.

The project has helped DTDC employees save precious hours in tedious data entry and provided its customers with real-time updates. This solution also resolved the challenge of getting delivery updates from remote locations, which could previously be delayed by up to a few days.

WINNER Company Name:

DTDC Courier & Cargo Industry:

Logistics Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

6,000

Satyajit Sarker DTDC Courier & Cargo

IT Team Internal:

200 Chairman and MD:

Subhasish Chakraborty

2012

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2012 Company Name:

EIH (A member of The Oberoi Group) Industry:

Hospitality

Rajesh Chopra EIH Under the aegis of The Oberoi Group, EIH, operates hotels and cruisers in five countries under the Oberoi and Trident brands. True to its promise of providing quality service, the Group was looking for a non-intrusive online guest feedback system—one that didn’t interfere with a guest’s privacy and removes the possibility of any solicitation during check-in.

Rajesh Chopra, senior VP-IT, EIH, implemented a cloud-based system which collects data from the hotel reservation system through a daily batch process and sends the online link to guests requesting their feedback during their stay at the

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Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees: hotel. This allows the hotel to ensure high guest satisfaction levels by exceeding their expectations during their stay. It also provides an opportunity for the hotel to do a service recovery. The guest responses are integrated with Outlook through a workflow and the dashboards are generated based on real-time information flow in the system.

At the end of each month, guest satisfaction scores are reviewed by top management.

The system helps Oberoi fulfill its mission to extend the expectation of its guests through its unremitting dedication to provide its customers with near-perfect customer service.

Over 10,000 IT Team Internal:

45 Joint MD and CEO:

Vikram Oberoi

WINNER

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2012 Company:

Essar Group Industry:

Conglomerate

Jayantha Prabhu Essar Group

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Essar was scouting

for a way to expel infrastructure constraints and rein in the operating costs and TCO of its applications. It also wanted to trim the deployment time of apps and simplify their development and maintenance.

To do all of that Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group, implemented a cloud version of two of Essar’s apps and examined the business case for migrating them to Microsoft Azure.

Today, for the first time in Essar’s history, two of its apps are hosted on an external cloud. The entire the project was executed in just six weeks—from understanding the

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75,000 apps to final migration, including handover and training.

The project helped Essar realize handsome savings. It reduced capex and opex by 70 percent. It shrunk infrastructure management overheads, datacenter costs, and complexity. It also introduced on-demand compute and storage, brought in common application and database architectures, simplified development and maintenance and increased operational flexibility. Essar accrued a net savings of 51 percent per month by deploying applications on Azure. In phase-II, six more applications will move to the cloud.

IT Team Internal:

Over 800 Chairman:

Shashi Ruia

WINNER

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Essar Steel India

is a global producer of steel with a footprint in India, North America, the Middle East and Asia.

In order to meet legal requirements, four legal entities (Hazira Pipe Mill, Hazira Plate, Essar Steel Hazira and Essar Steel Orissa) were merged with Essar Steel India (ESTIL).

The company needed a single SAP company code. To this end, the company created new plants under the existing company code of ESTIL and moved the data into the same.

Suneel Aradhye, CIO, Essar Steel India, initiated the project in multiple phases. All the data from multiple entities was merged into one. Due to this project the company

could also perform other activities like legal merger, plant integration, and merging various SAP and non-SAP landscapes. Aradhye has also automated the stock movement within the plants reducing administrative time and effort by 70 percent.

The company now has a combined order status visibility, optimized sales order entry, co-ordinated material flow across plants, and a common forecasting platform for sales. Also, data migration happened without affecting the existing data at ESTIL. The entire project was completed in-house without external help.

WINNER Company Name:

Essar Steel India Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Over 4,500

Suneel Aradhye Essar Steel India

IT Team Internal:

Over 15 MD and CEO:

Dilip Oommen

2012

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It takes guts to break convention. Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve.com, has that guts.

When he realized that the traditional way of managing datacenters proved to be a hurdle in the company’s growth, he decided to do away with it, and embarked on a complete datacenter transformation journey.

The traditional way meant that the company had to add more physical resources to existing systems whenever they got a new project. This added to their infrastructure woes, as a result of which, delivery of services faced a setback as well. With the datacenter transformation project, Jain wanted to reduce the number of physical servers, optimize and

scale the SAN, reduce power, cooling and real estate expenditure, improve redundancy, and create a private cloud in the end.

Jain’s decision to break convention lets Evalueserve.com enjoy several benefits now, namely: Reduction of more than 100 physical servers to just four, adding capacity to the existing setup through hybrid storage techniques, reduction in the headcount of the core datacenter team, reduction of backup and restore window by 50 percent, and faster provisioning of infrastructure for client projects. Cost of power consumption has come down drastically by almost 60 percent.

WINNER Company Name:

Evalueserve.com Industry:

IT/ITeS Global Headquarters:

California Employees:

Sachin Jain Evalueserve.com

1,900 IT Team Internal:

42 CEO:

Marc Vollenweider

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Forbes Marshall Industry:

Manufacturing

Sharat Airani

Forbes Marshall

Headquarters:

Pune Employees:

Having invested early

in IT systems, Forbes Marshall was running static legacy systems with high license and maintenance costs. There was a need to reduce internal administration efforts and costs, enhance end-user experience and promote collaboration among employees.

Sharat Airani, chief-IT (systems and security), Forbes Marshall, realized that the best approach would be to host the company’s e-mail system on Google Apps.

Airani migrated over 1,000 e-mail accounts and conducted customized training. The team also installed Google Message Security, Open LDAP, Google

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1,200 Apps Directory Sync, single sign-on and Apps Scripts processes, have enhanced productivity and security.

This has resulted in 43 percent savings in upfront licenses in the first year alone, while reducing e-mail client support by 80 percent. Employees have access to familiar collaboration and messaging tools and better e-mail capacity enhanced with search functionality which has resulted in better productivity.

The company has also benefited by worldwide disaster recovery, integration, and device independence.

IT Team Internal:

21 Global Director-IT:

A.M.Kolah

WINNER

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The Future Group serves around 220 million customers who buy products supplied by over 30,000 small, medium and large entrepreneurs to the company.

That amount of inventory is hard to keep on top of. So Group CIO and CTO, Parakh Dave, implemented a secure Wi-fi store infrastructure using a Cisco platform and about 2,000 Cisco Wi-fi devices in conjunction with Motorola handheld devices.

The solution gives backend employees the ability to manage inventory more efficiently, thereby lowering the cost of inventory management. For example, staff

can now perform stock corrections by matching book data with physical stock.

The company’s internal application team developed the mobility application on .NET and ensured that it integrates with the Future Group’s ERP systems for inventory, price and stock check purposes.

This is also used to audit stock and maintain a cycle count.

The project has helped improve employee productivity by allowing members of the backend operations team to come to the front end of business and empowering them to access information on demand over Wi-fi enabled mobile devices.

WINNER Company Name:

Future Group Industry:

Retail Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

36,000

Parakh Dave Future Group

IT Team Internal:

Over 300 Joint MD:

Rakesh Biyani

2012

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Gati, a Secunderabad-based express distribution and supply chain solutions company operates a fleet of 4,000 vehicles, and three marine vessels.

To strengthen its booking processes, and shrink the time its field force spent at customers’ premises, CIO G.S. Ravi Kumar decided to go mobile.

Using low-end handheld mobile devices, field personnel can now capture airway bill details and push them to Gati’s ERP in real time—and, crucially, generate a package label sticker using a handheld mobile printer, all at the customer’s premises.

“The innovative part was interfacing a mobile handset with a mobile handheld printer. And what’s unique is the printing of a barcode sticker. It was a challenge to print a sticker, which is very thick, from a light, paper receipt printer,” says Kumar.

In an industry where getting a package to its destination on time is critical, the solution gives Gati more control over the entire shipping process.

It also brought down pickup time drastically and ensured end-to-end visibility of packages at various points of transit, thanks of the use of barcodes.

WINNER Company Name:

Gati Industry:

Logistics Headquarters:

Secunderabad Employees:

3,500

G.S. Ravikumar Gati

IT Team Internal:

60 Founder and CEO:

Mahendra Agarwal

2012

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2012 Company:

Genpact Industry:

IT/ITeS

Sanjeev Prasad Genpact

Headquarters:

Bermuda Employees:

Genpact, India’s largest BPO service provider, is always on the hunt for ways to increase profitability by lowering IT costs. Hence Sanjeev Prasad, SVP, Genpact, launched a multi-point project to rein in costs.

Prasad and his team took a granular look at all IT-related costs including AMC contracts, telecom use, the productivity of applications and servers, and capacity re-utilization, among others. By introducing a slew of measures including on-premises cloud solutions, public-cloud based solutions, bandwidth compression and acceleration techniques, and by

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Over 56,000 deploying thin clients that supported lower bandwidth usage, among other initiatives, his team saved the company millions of dollars. The IT team also standardized one of its key business workflow applications leading to support simplification and consolidated its internal phone system with office landlines.

The results are gratifying. In 2010, IT cost—across Genpact—added up to 7 percent of revenue. Post the project, it’s now 6.2 percent, which increases Genpact’s profitability and makes it more competitive compared to its rivals.

IT Team Internal:

300 CEO:

Tiger Tyagarajan

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2012 Company Name:

GHCL Industry:

Manufacturing

Chandan Sinha GHCL

Headquarters:

Noida Employees:

In the last

two decades, GHCL India has evolved into a global chemical and textile company with a strong customer focus and a commitment to deliver highquality products. Being an IT-savvy organization, GHCL’s CIO, Chandan Sinha, decided to invest in the cloud for the company’s business applications and collaboration.

A new cloud-based e-mail system on a SaaS model was deployed for all users, which replaced the legacy mailing system hosted internally. Sinha and his team invested in a secure private cloud, making GHCL’s core ERP easily accessible using the Internet.

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2,500 All other business applications including procurement, sales and marketing, as well the company’s intranet and workflow management, were deployed on a public cloud. Finally, a collaboration tool containing features such as e-mail, calendars, instant chat, audio and video-conference was deployed on the cloud for employees on the move.

The business applications on the cloud have had an uptime of over 99 percent, which has improved overall productivity.

Routine maintenance and server upkeep is now outsourced, which allows IT to focus on innovation and participate more in the business.

IT team internal:

10 CEO-Strategy:

R.S. Jalan

WINNER

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GMR needed an innovative IT system that could monitor its highways business. It wanted an effective governance mechanism that required minimal manual intervention, especially in remote places on highways. Johny Paramian, CIO, GMR, had just the solution.

Paramian integrated the company’s toll management system with its ERP. The toll details (revenue and vehicle) are fed to the ERP system on an hourly basis along with the revenue entries for the previous 24 hours. Other transactions like materials management, general accounting, and investment management are also carried out in the ERP. This data is fed into BPC

(business planning and consolidation).

The BPC provides a platform for different business functions to arrive at the annual operating plan. Once frozen, the actual figures are compared on a daily basis. This quick feedback mechanism is useful for effective decision-making. A BI tool sits on top of the entire system and provides alerts. IP cameras capture all activities of the toll plazas in key locations and feed it to control rooms.

This system handles all day-to-day operations of the company’s toll plazas efficiently. The solution’s effectiveness stems from the successful management of three different toll-based highways in the country.

WINNER

Company Name:

GMR Group Industry:

Infrastructure Headquarters:

Bangalore

Johny Paramian GMR Group

CEO-Strategy:

Parmit Chadha

2012

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Godrej Industries (GIL)

needs no introduction. It is one of the largest conglomerates in India and the world.

As a group, the company’s vision was to become the most trusted and innovative Indian brand and grow up to 10 times in the next decade. For GIL, the vision also translated into many HR imperatives. This included building a strong leadership pipeline, selecting and identifying the right people for the right jobs, and driving a performancebased culture. “All these imperatives require a strong HR technology platform which aid in decision-making,” says Shailesh Joshi, vice president and head-IT, Godrej Industries.

To this end, Joshi decided to move to a cloudbased HR solution. The company invested in a SaaS-based human capital management platform to meet its current and future business needs. The new platform has moved talent, recruitment, and compensation management systems to the cloud. The company has launched a dedicated HR portal with a single, integrated interface, lending quick, easy, and just-in-time access to data.

The project has reduced the cycle time of various HR processes by 33 percent.

The company expects to save Rs 2 crore on different HR technology contracts.

WINNER Company Name:

Godrej Industries Industry:

Conglomerate Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

About 10,000

Shailesh Joshi Godrej Industries

IT Team Internal:

15 Chairman:

Adi Godrej

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Gokaldas Exports Industry:

Manufacturing

Yatendra Kumar Gokaldas Exports

Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

Employees, more than any other resource, are the most integral part of a company’s success. In a vertical, where competition is cut-throat, and growth depends on volumes, productivity is of utmost importance. In order to make sure that the employees of Gokaldas Exports give their 100 percent during work hours, Yatendra Kumar, head-IT, Gokaldas Exports, came up with a real-time shop floor monitoring and tracking solution.

The solution, engineered with products from different telecom vendors, provides complete visibility of the shop floor. The solution uses videoconferencing, mobile and

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30,000 Open Source technologies. The sole objective of this project is to capture enforced idleness and abnormalities in the factory. The captured data is sent to the individuals concerned so that they take corrective measures. The solution is highly comprehensive in that it provides analytic details of time lost, along with the reasons for it, thereby ensuring that managers know what needs to be corrected.

As a result of this monitoring and tracking system, the operational efficiency and productivity of Gokaldas Export’s employees has risen to great levels. The organization is able to enjoy cost savings of close to Rs 6 crore, thanks to enhanced efficiency.

IT Team Internal:

23 MD and CEO:

Gautam Chakravarti

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Hamdard Laboratories Industry:

Pharmaceuticals

Sanjay Singh

Hamdard Laboratories India

Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

Hamdard Labs, India,

is a 106-year-old healthcare organization which offers over 600 natural and herb-based products to over 500,000 outlets in India.

Hamdard’s challenge was that its secondary sales process was manual with little or no MIS. As a result, it couldn’t forecast demand accurately. “At times, due to the lack of information, the factories produced goods which were not required, and were unnecessarily added to inventory,” says senior GM-IT, Sanjay Singh.

His project, titled Duniya-e-Hamdard, is a secondary sales management system which was deployed at Hamdard’s top

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700 150 stockists. “It allowed us to track sales at each stockist, inventory levels at each stockist, demand for each of our products, and the performance of our sales team,” says Singh.

In addition, Singh and team implemented a BI tool that analyses data from stockist locations and uses it to determine performance and trends.

As a result, Hamdard’s monthly sales have already seen an 80-plus percent increase over the previous year and the timeliness, reliability, and accuracy of its data has improved, making management more confident.

IT Team Internal:

13 CEO:

Abdul Majeed

WINNER

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For HDFC Standard Life Insurance, security is of utmost importance as it needs to collect and use a variety of sensitive and personal customer information.

Leakage of confidential customer and organizational information is a major threat and poses regulatory impact and financial and reputational loss. With emphasis on data protection as part of its ISO 27001 implementation, Thomson Thomas, SVPbusiness systems and technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance, has laid down the framework for data visibility, compliance, data classification, vigilance, and security training.

Thomas deployed a central security incident and event management (SIEM) tool that lets the company monitor all devices. He also deployed a log monitoring tool that can assist in identifying the health of critical systems, privilege user activity, recent attack on critical systems—such as firewalls, IPS and online applications— and can perform root cause analysis of any such incident.

HDFC Life is now able to save a considerable amount of money and time through security automation, coupled with faster incident handling and lower storage costs.

Thomson Thomas HDFC Standard Life Insurance

WINNER Company Name:

HDFC Standard Life Insurance Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

13,787 IT Team Internal:

58 CEO:

Amitabh Chaudhry

2012

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EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

RAVI CHAUHAN is the managing director of Juniper Networks for the SAARC region.

Chauhan’s purview covers India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

He is responsible for the sales and operations of Juniper Networks throughout the sub-region. Chauhan, previously managing director at Nortel India, brings over 20 years enterprise and service provider business development experience to Juniper.

BRIDGING THE ENTERPRISE’S NEEDS

TOMORROW’S TECHNOLOGIES The growing spread of cloud computing and mobility are creating more interconnected and more complex networks. In this interview Ravi Chauhan, MD, Juniper Networks for the SAARC region, talks about how Juniper Networks is getting in the driver’s seat in the push to fix network challenges stemming from these new technolgy trends.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP JUNIPER NETWORKS Technology is in a constant flux. How do you see Juniper Networks fitting in this ever-so dynamic space?

Today there are three IT trends that form a virtuous circle so that any advancement in one space automatically contributes to advances in other areas. The first is cloud computing. Fundamentally, it is a more costefficient and effective way to consolidate data in one place. This consolidation of data results in more security and protection and also allows data to be accessed anywhere, and at anytime.

The second trend is the consumerization of IT driven by the proliferation of smart devices, revolutionizing the way data is consumed. Data, which is centralized in the cloud, is being accessed using always-on, always-present smart devices. So, the utility of the cloud increases with the increased distribution of smart devices. Similarly, the utility of smart devices is enhanced if data can be accessed from a centralized location.

The third trend is the positive impact of the first two on network bandwidth. Pipes have become fatter, and with considerable reductions in cost, this will only get better. At Juniper Networks, we are at the center of this trio of trends. We are involved in building the cloud, enabling smart devices, and interconnecting the two.

With the cloud, the datacenter is evolving. How is network keeping pace?

With the advent of the cloud, scale has become huge and datacenters have gotten larger. Today, a typical datacenter, which plays a pivotal role in enabling a cloud platform, houses multiples of thousands of server, storage, security and networking devices, which are interconnected to each other.

A typical switch has a maximum of 48 ports. Normally, all devices are connected through switches to the network, which are in turn, interconnected for resilience and redundancy thus adding multiple layers of connections and forming a multi-layered tree structure. This tree structure creates latency. Every time a packet hops from one port to another, there is a latency of five micro seconds. Across a complex, completely meshed tree structure of ports, latency adds up, adversely impacting user experience.

Manageability must be a constraint?

Yes. Take for instance, a set-up with a large number of servers under the security shadow of a firewall. In a virtualized environment, if a server is dragged and dropped between domains there is a good possibility that it

may fall outside the firewall shadow and would hence require tight policies and rules.

So, we have to proactively ensure that the destination domain has uniform policies as the source domain. A seemingly easier solution to this problem is to move the firewall up the tree structure to have a larger security policy shadow over multiple branches of devices. But as it moves up, it becomes unmanageable and impractical as no firewall can do filtering at such a global level.

What’s Juniper’s solution?

To solve most such problems, Juniper came up with QFabric. In simple terms, it is one, big switch. A large network cluster is generally called a fabric as all servers, storage and firewalls hang off it. QFabric can reduce the latency—by five micro seconds—within a datacenter by ensuring that source to destination is just one hop away. This effectively helps a datacenter scale to accommodate any number of payload devices.

“All the industry pundits and analysts agree that our fabric design is a stepchange and an inflection point.”

With QFabric, a firewall’s policies and rules encompass the complete fabric. Even if you move virtual servers, they’d still be governed by security policies as the firewall is now effectively operating at the top of the tree level. Because we don’t need thousands of devices to be powered up and connected just to maintain that network fabric, this becomes much more compact as it is reduced to a cluster of just 10 to 15 QFabric switches.

This eases manageability like none other.

The fabric design is the industry’s answer to old challenges and we have a head-start in this area. All the industry pundits and analysts agree that our fabric design is a stepchange and an inflection point.

We also ensure that whatever we do, we have a quantifiable, economic justification for customers investing in QFabric.

What about smart devices in that virtuous circle you spoke about?

We understand the problem that enterprises face with smart devices. Smart devices store corporate and personal data, and can be a potential risk to organizations.

Hence, smart devices need to be protected before they can be allowed access to the corporate network.

Another problem is keeping pace with multiple mobility platforms. This is usually beyond the IT budgets of most organizations.

With this in mind, we have built a platform called Junos Pulse, which can be downloaded from respective app stores and installed on all devices irrespective of their platform.

It secures the smart devices’ platform. It gives complete control of smart devices back to the organization’s datacenter, which can then implement its own security policies.

The task of dealing with the tech deluge is then left to Juniper Networks. We constantly keep a tab on what’s coming up in this space and continue to update Junos Pulse to handle newer platforms. This makes life much easier for organizations.

For example, AT&T in the US provides a service to remotely manage, secure, access and wipe smart devices to its individual or corporate consumers. This service runs on the Junos Pulse platform. In India, Essar chose us to enable their BYOD strategy to keep pace with technology.

We are also helping telecom companies re-engineer their back-ends to address the data deluge that is being created with the proliferation of standards like 3G, and would be created with 4G. In fact, since 4G is pure play IP connectivity, we are working with telecom operators to completely transform the innards of their networks to deal with this unprecedented data handling capability.

We are in a sweet spot, as everything is becoming IP at scale with an inherent need for security. We have a deep focus in these areas with a very strong value-proposition for our customers. We are the thought leader for all things IP.

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

Hexaware Technologies, a leading global IT and BPO services company, was looking to protect critical workloads across its Mumbai and Chennai private clouds. It also wanted to improve the SLA of its mission-critical applications.

N. Nataraj, global CIO, Hexaware Technologies, initiated a cloud-based DR rollout, enabling the company to scale to hundreds of virtual machines per cluster.

The unique aspect of this project was that the DR workflow could be automated, resulting in better resource utilization and management—along with enhancing data protection. Other highlights include

conducting live DR tests for all critical servers at short notice and the ability to replicate between multiple clouds to achieve higher availability. The team also integrated the DR workflow with existing IT monitoring tools for co-ordinated failover.

This project has ensured that Hexaware has flexible RPOs of 15 minutes to 24 hours based on project needs and allows the organization to replicate only the most recent data to increase network efficiency.

The current deployment ensures complete control of the recovery process at the failover site, while backup related cost has reduced by almost 70 percent.

WINNER Company Name:

Hexaware Technologies Industry:

IT/ITeS Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

8,600

N. Nataraj Hexaware Technologies

IT Team Internal:

125 Vice Chairman and CEO:

Chandrasekar P. R.

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Hindustan Petroleum Industry:

S. T. Sathiavageeswaran Hindustan Petroleum

Oil and Gas Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

No organization—in any industry—can ever get rid of documentation, but it can certainly eliminate the complexity involved. S. T. Sathiavageeswaran, executive directorinformation systems, Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), designed an online file note generation system that is transforming HPCL’s environment into a paperless one.

HPCL, being a public sector enterprise, requires its executives to submit proposals along with other relevant documents in a file, which will then be circulated to various managers—sometimes located at different parts of the country. On an

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11,123 average, HPCL sees more than 12,000 files. Sathiavageeswaran’s team created an online e-file generation application that has made the whole process much simpler. The whole cycle of creating the proposals, sending them for approval, and preserving the documents electronically has dramatically cut down the number of paper documents used.

The e-file application has turned out to be a great boon to HPCL and its executives, especially those in marketing. The approval cycle time has gone down to a great extent.

Also, the system can retain these e-files— almost 12,000 to 15,000 of them—easily.

IT Team Internal:

207 MD and Chairman:

S. Roy Choudhury

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85

2012 Company Name:

Hindustan Zinc Industry:

Manufacturing

Pawan K. Nijhawan Hindustan Zinc

Headquarters:

Udaipur Employees:

Hindustan Zinc, a Vedanta Group company, produces over 1,064,000 tons a year of metal. To produce such huge volumes consistently, it’s essential that plant equipment is well maintained. But at HZL, plant technicians, who visit each machine, did not have access to SAP onsite. So their observations had to be inputted later on, leading to delays and errors, which led to equipment down time.

To overcome these bottlenecks, VP-IT, Pawan Nijhawan rolled out SAP’s Mobile Asset Management application on handheld devices. These handhelds

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6,190 have RFID readers which detect RFID tags on all critical equipment. When a handheld senses an RFID tag all the basic nformation from that machine is collected to handheld device. And unless a technician pairs his device with an RFID tag, he can not feed data, ensuring that technicians actually make site visits and not feed in old data.

Their observations are then synced with HZL’s SAP using Wi-fi. Engineers can also raise notifications while still onsite for immediate action. The application also works off-line. The project has enhanced HZL’s plant efficiency and productivity.

IT Team Internal:

39 CEO and Whole-time Director:

Akhilesh Joshi

WINNER

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Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Honda Motor Company—the world’s largest manufacturer of two-wheelers. The company has two plants in Manesar and Bhiwari.

The company’s logistics planning, which took into account truck availability, cash, transport, dealer’s demand, and factory production, was done manually. It needed an efficient system to enable integrated business planning based on Honda’s business strategy.

Parna Ghosh, operating head-strategic information system, Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India, implemented a business planning tool with an optimized logistics tool.

This business planning tool automates the whole process integrating SAP, legacy, and logistics system. It is an end-to-end integrated planning tool to optimize Honda’s dispatch planning, and also enables sharing real-time information with the dealer. The solution also shares logistics information with about 500 Honda dealers.

The solution helped the company garner accurate forecast capability for demandbased production forecasting. Today, Honda enjoys real-time data visibility in of its supply chain, and the system also detects faults and alerts personnel.

Parna Ghosh Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India

WINNER Company Name:

Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Industry:

Automotive Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

10,000 IT Team Internal:

31 President and CEO:

Keita Muramatsu

2012

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Like many large retailers, HyperCITY, constantly tweaks the use of its floor space to maximize sales. One of the ways it wanted to do that was by integrating planogram data with sales data. (Planograms are visual representations of a store). The idea was to push planograms frequently to different stores, informing store managers where to position both slow and fast moving products.

During the project, HyperCITY’s business head-technology and supply chain, Veneeth Purushottaman, decided to go a step further by integrating the planogram tool with auto replenishment systems (these automate the process of replenishing retail outlets and

warehouses based on forecasted demand.)

By combining these systems—a first for the retailer’s vendors—Purushottaman gave HyperCITY stores that looked good—and had more correct levels of inventory.

This innovation brought down inventory levels by 30 to 40 percent in certain categories and 20 percent overall, ensuring project ROI well within two years. It also ensured less clutter in HyperCITY’s back stores (where fast-moving food products that need daily replenishment are stored)— helping HyperCITY obtain certification in cleanliness, health and hygiene, an important accreditation for a food retailer.

WINNER Company Name:

HyperCITY Retail India Industry:

Retail Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Veneeth Purushottaman HyperCITY Retail India

1,500 IT Team Internal:

10 CEO:

Mark Ashman

2012

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2012 Company Name:

ICICI Bank Industry:

BFSI

Mukesh Kumar Jain ICICI Bank

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

ICIC Bank is second-largest bank in the country by assets. It’s that size and the fact that it launched different applications at different times that made it hard for the bank to get a holistic view of its millions of customers. To help, CTO Mukesh Kumar Jain created a solution called iSense. It’s a single-window application that interacts with over 20 customer applications on a real time basis, giving ICICI’s staffers a 360-degree view of their customers.

It’s paramount, says Jain, to have a single platform for all 2,500-plus branches, and the bank’s call center, so that staffers get a single view of the

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58,276 customer. “iSense helped create backend architecture for seamless access, thereby creating a framework leveraged by all front-end applications. The framework is already the backbone of self-service kiosks, and the Facebook application,” he says. iSense, reduced costs by employing efficient data management, better compliance, and fewer errors. It also lowered turnaround time for customer queries. “We have witnessed an increase in sales and customer service with crossselling opportunities,” says Jain.

IT Team Internal:

477 MD and CEO:

Chanda Kochhar

WINNER

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89

2012 Company Name:

ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company

Ram Kalyan Medury ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company

Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai In its continuous quest

to enhance its topline, bottom-line, and customer service, ICICI Lombard General Insurance turned to one of the most soughtafter, new technologies: Mobility.

Ram Kalyan Medury, VP-technology, ICICI Lombard, launched an enterprise mobility initiative. With technology standards in enterprise mobility still nascent, the team experimented with various mobile platforms and technology before choosing the Android platform for internal enterprise mobility solutions.

For end-consumer applications, it chose a hybrid approach (a mix of cross-platform

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and native development). This mix and match model enabled the quick roll out of apps to multiple platforms while the native model allowed rich user interaction for specific features that involved device hardware capabilities.

The mobile initiative has made it easy for customers to buy or renew a policy, it has also ensured prompt customer service by making the claims process seamless. Claims personnel can use the mobile app to pull up their claim-case details, take pictures, tag them to various categories and complete the entire workflow on field, increasing their productivity by upto 30 to 40 percent.

Employees:

6,000 IT Team Internal:

100 MD and CEO:

Bhargav Dasgupta

WINNER

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Being in a fiercely competitive industry, ICICI Securities is constantly looking for ways to make its sales team more efficient. Joydeep Dutta, CTO, ICICI Securities, realized that a tablet-equipped sales team would be an ideal solution as they are usually on the move, meeting prospective customers or working from home. Dutta and his team developed a tablet application which could meet the unique requirements of the sales team. They took care of small details such as synchronizing data to tablets just in case a sales person suffers an Internet outage right before pitching to a big client. Dutta and his team

enabled tablet-friendly marketing content extending to presentations, brochures, and other sales collaterals which provided unique opportunities to interact—which wasn’t possible with glossy, but static, sales brochures.

Enhanced functions such as demos, presentations, financial calculators, and periodic research recommendations enable sales managers to pitch products more effectively. They can also refer to other training resources on the go to help them close a sale. This has resulted in significantly reducing lead time, apart from creating a positive impression on the customer.

WINNER Company Name:

ICICI Securities Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

3,850

Joydeep Dutta

ICICI Securities

IT Team Internal:

150 MD and CEO:

Anup Bagchi

2012

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Data explosion is one of the biggest problems challenging enterprise IT today.

But S. Ramasamy, executive director (IS), Indian Oil, turned this challenging situation into an opportunity to optimize ERP and also create a more efficient DR strategy alongside.

Ramasamy used the stripe-andmirror-everything (SAME) methodology of storage virtualization to achieve a sub-second response time of ERP and SAP process integration middleware application for more than 7,000 concurrent users. There is an improved utilization of the storage sub-systems,

easier management, higher availability and replication optimization.

Besides this, Ramasamy also designed a DR plan in which the primary datacenter and local disaster recovery site exist on the same SAN and LAN segment. The active production infrastructure is distributed between primary site and local DR site.

More than 80 percent of all local DR sites are put to productive use. By creating mirror copies of online redo-logs on file systems of remote storage system at the local DR site, Ramasamy has also ensured zero loss of data.

WINNER Company Name:

Indian Oil Industry:

Oil and Gas Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

36,585

S. Ramasamy

Indian Oil

IT Team Internal:

340 Director (Finance and HR):

Praveen Kumar Goyal

2012

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP SOFTWARE

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

BUILDING A HIGH PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISE In order to stay ahead, CIOs and IT executives need a digitized and automated system that continuously measures, communicates, and improves IT performance.

Enterprises are increasingly becoming to drive continuous improvement in a mobile and fluid. Should CIOs add metrics meaningful manner. and performance management to the mix?

Cloud delivery, virtualization, and mobile How can HP help enterprises perform betdevices are bringing in new products, serter by gaining comprehensive, connected, vice delivery methods, financial and busiand flexible control over IT? ness models. In this context, CIOs need to The IT performance system should provide focus more than ever on supporting busithe flexibility for IT to move fast, leverage ness strategy, and delivering business existing capabilities, operate in a heterovalue—all the while reducing costs—in a geneous landscape, and exploit new techvery transparent manner. What IT leaders nology and opportunities to drive better need today is a finely-tuned performance business outcomes. system. They need an automated, dashHP uniquely addresses this need with board-driven, comprehensive technology the HP IT Performance Suite. The suite is solution—customizable at the industry’s first systhe CIO and departmental tematic approach to digiCIOs in level—that provides detize the sensing, measurtoday’s modern tailed visibility into every ing, and instrumentation enterprises should aspect of IT performance. processes of the entire have a performance In short, they need a IT-controlled landscape system—a means to method to systematically into a single consolidated transparently measure, manage IT overall while view for IT leaders and and manage progress providing a means to betpractitioners. The HP IT against the goals they ter demonstrate IT’s efPerformance Suite is the have to achieve.” fectiveness, efficiency, foundation for customized and value to the business.

IT performance systems.

How can organizations determine what KPIs to track at what level of the IT organization?

While there are no hard rules, there are a number of best practices to consider as CIOs structure their own systems to measure performance and create scorecards.

For instance, a few well-selected KPIs on each leader’s and individual contributor’s scorecard are more likely to be successfully executed than a comprehensive, but, overwhelming one.

By constantly testing, measuring, and comparing KPIs internally and against industry peers, CIOs can set benchmarks

With the suite, HP delivers the industry’s deepest and broadest coverage of IT-controlled assets and investments, making it possible to build a secure and comprehensive operational environment for hybrid service delivery.

It also gives executives the industry’s first cascaded optimization system for mastering the business of IT. How can HP tailor an organization’s performance system to help CIOs meet the unique needs of their business?

At HP, we take a role-based approach for out-of-the-box customization. We are devel-

AMIT CHATTERJEE Country Director, HP Software India Chatterjee incubated the software business for HP, taking the company to a market-leading position. With over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, Chatterjee is always keen to introduce new businesses, and undertake initiatives to help the company grow.

oping the HP IT Performance Suite in persona-focused editions, beginning with the CIO Edition, which is available now. This edition brings together the core capabilities a CIO needs in order to get an overview of the financial and health portfolio of the IT organization. It includes more than 50 out-of-the-box KPIs to make information and analysis available to deliver IT value, customer satisfaction, operational excellence, and future orientation.

The foundation of the CIO Edition is an in-built analytical and data platform. This gives IT executives pre-built data extraction and loading from component solutions into the IT data model, consolidating measurements from the entire suite into bestpractice business measures and KPIs.

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

2012 Company Name:

Indus Towers Industry:

Telecommunications

Chakrapani Perangur Indus Towers

Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

Indus Towers is the largest telecom tower company in the world. It has a presence in 16 telecom circles in India, and has recently achieved 220,000 tenancies, a first in the telecom tower industry globally.

With such a wide footprint, the company has the tricky job of ensuring that equipment at tower sites does not fail—or risk tarnishing its reputation as a provider of safe and uninterrupted services. Working on the principle that prevention is better than cure, Chakrapani Perangur, CIO, Indus Towers, devised a predictive maintenance project, which

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1,500 ensures that a breakdown, or a fire, is averted before it starts.

The solution gathers real-time alarms and data from the company’s Tower Operations Center application and runs it through predictive algorithms, looking for patterns based on history, site conditions and seasons, to help the operations and maintenance teams prevent a failure before its occurs.

The project, which is active on all 110,000 of Indus’ towers in India, is improving the company’s operating efficiencies, and extending the life its equipment.

IT Team Internal:

25 CEO:

Shantha Raju

WINNER

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At Infosys, Murali Krishna K., SVP and head-CCD, and his team are responsible for managing an infrastructure platform hosted in multiple datacenters with over 900 physical and virtual servers, over half a petabyte of data and heterogeneous technology platforms. The conventional datacenter design was highly resilient, but the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) was as high as 32 hours and required manual intervention. Also, the backup window and restoration time were increasing rapidly with data growth.

Murali Krishna used storage clustering, high performance NAS, and metro

clustering to automate DR, enabling mission critical services to be up and running in the secondary datacenters almost instantaneously—even in case of a disaster at one of the datacenters.

It reduced RTO from 32 hours to less than an hour and eliminated the risk of human errors and the time lag due to human intervention. It has also reduced Recovery Point Objective for file share services from 24 hours to near zero, reduced backup window by more than 50 percent and increased savings on storage cost by 75 percent through archival of files share.

WINNER Company Name:

Infosys Industry:

IT/ITeS Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

151,151

Murali Krishna K. Infosys

IT Team Internal:

Over 900 MD and CEO:

S.D. Shibulal

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When IDFC undertook a strategic decision to centralize its IT facilities, it began journey that few companies, anywhere in the world, have been able to finish. The project made IDFC the first financial services company in India to be awarded a Tier III Facilities Certification by the Uptime Institute.

“The Uptime Institute’s Tier III classified design and facilities certification is tough to achieve. It’s possibly the most stringent of standards and there are very few datacenters in the world that have been able pass this test,” says V.C. Kumanan, senior director, IDFC. “To conceive this idea of not

just building operational sustainability but to get it audited and certified by the Uptime Institute speaks of the strong will towards better governance.”

Kumanan also ensured that IDFC broke a new record when it became the first in the Indian financial services industry to have received both Green Data Center Certification and the Tier III DC Certification.

The project, which started in June 2010, gives IDFC an assured uptime of 99.98 percent, assures its stakeholders of high availability and differentiates IDFC from the pack.

WINNER Company Name:

IDFC Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Chennai Employees:

592

V.C. Kumanan

IDFC

IT Team Internal:

19 Vice Chairman and MD:

Rajiv B. Lall

2012

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP PATH

The Path That Leads to Innovation Daya Prakash, Head-IT, LG Electronics, shares how Path Infotech helped LG replace an inflexible, time consuming and error-prone database management system with an intelligent, cost effective, and innovative one.

Daya Prakash is Head-IT at LG Electronics. He has been working at LG for the past 11 years.

With an experience of over 16 years, Prakash is among some of the most innovative CIOs in India. He is currently pursuing a PhD in management.

What prompted you to automate your database management system?

A: Back in 2005, most of our database management functions were manual. For example, database monitoring—to know which applications or queries are resource hungry and whether they are running within set threshold limits—was done manually by an in-house team. And, during peak seasons, we would hire services. Depending on a manual workflow made us inflexible, was time consuming, and increased the risk of errors. In addition, most of my IT resources were tied up in mundane operational tasks, leaving no time for strategic innovation.

As your application bouquet increased, how important was it to engage with a partner to strengthen backend operations?

A: We have always believed in creating meaningful partnerships and outsourcing most of our administrative work. Path Infotech has been engaging with us since 2005. It supports our Oracle e-Business Suite database and a couple of other workflow and business systems. However, by 2007 as systems became more complex and the number of applications increased, we realized that we needed to streamline processes and innovate in order to achieve cost optimization and improve processes. With Path Infotech using Quest Foglight Technology, we were able to automate our database management system, free up existing resources, instantly generate reports and understand existing and developing database performance conditions.

How do you ensure that your backend is scalable during peak seasons?

A: Today, most of our resources are free to focus on strategic initiatives, thanks to Foglight.

It helps us generate reports which provide us with historical data to study and map the load on our backend and applications during peak seasons. Automating resource provisioning has also helped us become more agile and flexible in predicting our capacity utilization, peak requirements, and pre-determining the number of resources that can be allocated.

The IT team now has better visibility on what type of applications are about to be rolled out and can plan resources accordingly.

Tell us how Path Infotech helped you achieve this?

A: Path played a very strategic role in conceptualizing the journey we started in 2005 and its efforts have borne fruit. It has helped us enrich application functionality with a focus on enhancing productivity. With better management at the backend, one can fine-tune applications to ensure better performance and delivery time. This has not only resulted in high availability of core business applications but also helped us reduce application management cost.

What do you look for in a service provider?

A: It is of utmost importance to us that service providers are able to understand and envision the long-term perspective of our engagement.

They need to understand both our operational

and strategic goals and co-create a path forward. Path Infotech has been with us in this journey of innovation, cost optimization, and ensuring better service delivery. We know Path Infotech enough to trust that they will deliver. We started small with certain peripheral applications and then we built intelligence around that. This was followed by more mission-critical applications and now we are looking forward to taking most of our core applications on the automated platform.

We are now working towards bringing in innovation both from a service excellence and a cost optimization point of view.

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

2012 Company Name:

ING Vysya Bank Industry:

BFSI

C.V.G. Prasad

ING Vysya Bank

Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

ING Vysya Bank research demonstrated that customers were having a hard time deciding where to invest their money, given the volatility of the stock market. The problem with stable products like fixed deposits (FD), they said, is that they were fixed; the lack of liquidity prevented them from moving money to equity or property markets when the opportunity arose.

So, the bank devised an industry-first offering called ING Fixed Deposit Plus.

ING Fixed Deposit Plus is unique because it allows customers to be liquid, almost mercurial, in their approach to investing,

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10,000 by enabling them to withdraw money put into an FD at anytime—even pre-maturely— thereby creating high liquidity.

But nothing says liquidity like the ability to create an FD over SMS, which is exactly what CIO C.V.G. Prasad allowed existing customers to do. “FD on SMS is an industry first,” he says. “If a customer already has an account with us, they can just SMS their account number, the FD amount to book, and the tenure. It’s that simple.”

Thanks to FD over SMS, which was conceptualized and launched in just 60 days, ING Vysya’s retail FD inflows have increased by over a 100 percent from target locations.

IT Team Internal:

60 MD and CEO:

Shailendra Bhandari

WINNER

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Traditionally, critical apps

like ERP and CRM are run in a proprietary RISC UNIX environment. But, recently, customers, like ITC, find themselves left with a single choice of UNIX vendor. “With such a narrow choice of RISC-based systems, ITC perceived a huge risk in the long run,” says Bhujay Kumar Bhatta, operation manager-IT shared services.

To de-risk the company, Bhatta created an alternate platform strategy. The strategy required studying future trends in server hardware and OS development. And ensuring that the new platform matched or bettered the performance and reliability of

the RISC platform, enabled IT to give ITC cloud-like benefits including elasticity and agility, and lowered the cost of ownership.

Bhatta chose SUSE Linux for SAP and Redhat for other important apps and ensured ITC didn’t depend on a single vendor. The same applied to server hardware. Over the next two years, he will replace old RISC servers. Existing SAP servers will be migrated to Linux-Xeon based environments. Apart from a direct benefit thanks to the low-cost Xeon-Linux environment, this will free up a huge amount space, lower IT’s power and cooling needs—in line with ITC’s green drive.

WINNER Company Name:

ITC Industry:

Conglomerate Headquarters:

Kolkata Employees:

26,000

Bhujay Kumar Bhatta ITC

IT Team Internal:

350 Director Finance and IT:

Pradip Dhobale

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ITC Hotels have been synonymous with great hospitality and luxury.

True to its name, Arijit Bhattacharjee, GM-information systems, ITC-Hotels Division, conceptualized an innovative idea to enhance a guest’s in-room experience.

He provided the hotel’s guests with unified command and control of all in-room devices and on-demand services such as access to movies and music, requesting food and beverages, housekeeping, surfing the Internet on television wirelessly on an Apple iPad. The Apple iPad is connected to an IP controller which interprets the command

from the iPad and issues the instruction to various in-room devices. A first of its kind in the Indian hospitality industry, the technology uses an open standards solution at the back-end and integrates with the HMS (hotel management system), POS, video-ondemand services and IPTV. It also enhances the guest experience through an active CRM. This, for example, captures a guest’s usage pattern and enhances his experience by replicating the choices he would have made at an earlier stay across ITC hotels. The project also supports ITC’s green initiatives by eliminating paperbased brochures and conserves energy.

WINNER Company Name:

ITC-Hotels Division Industry:

Hospitality Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

5,602

Arijit Bhattacharjee

ITC-Hotels Division

IT Team Internal:

40 EVP-IT and Procurement:

Arun Pathak

2012

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At advertising and communications agency JWT, Sunil Mehta, SVP & Area systems director-Central Asia, wanted an all-encompassing system to ensure that any product JWT makes—from television commercials to radio jingles and everything in between—is recorded and translated into a digital format from idea to final product.

“We developed a simple campaign and performance management system called CLEAR with our technology partner,” says Mehta. “The system records any activity like client briefs or refinements. It’s an endto-end brief-to-broadcast system. And it takes only between three to eight days to

implement, and is the fastest to train users on,” says Mehta.

Among its many benefits, CLEAR allows digital assets to be transmitted almost instantaneously for viewing, approval, publishing or broadcasting, reducing lead time taken for each activity, thereby saving resources, cost, and time. It also monitors the progress of projects and sends out reminders to ensure each activity is completed within a stipulated time. This, in turn, ensures that resources are used more effectively. One survey showed an overall net savings of about 300 man- months, and Rs 4.5 crore annually.

WINNER Company Name:

JWT India Industry:

Advertising Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

800

Sunil Mehta JWT India

IT Team Internal:

12 CEO:

Colvyn Harris

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When L&T Welding

Product Business merged with EWAC Alloys in July 2011, IT got only three weeks to give the new business essential functionalities. As an interim solution, the IT team, led by head of IT Bhupendra Pant, created basic sales and marketing functionalities on EWAC’s ERP so that the business could start operating as one entity.

Pant’s longer term solution, called Project Fusion, needed to bring together all the manufacturing and sales functionalities of both entities, which meant SAP systems from both had to be fused together seamlessly. And it needed to be strong

enough to support the future needs of EWAC. “Project Fusion is all about leveraging IT to optimize business processes after the merger and simultaneously bring down operational cost,” he says.

Today, Project Fusion gives 350 L&TEWAC employees from two manufacturing plants and six sales offices a robust ERP platform. L&T-EWAC enjoys faster and better material planning, reduced inventory and improved service levels with better compliance and control systems. It also has an online dealer management portal to connect 250 stockists with L&T-EWAC’s ERP and channel financing partner, L&T Finance.

WINNER Company Name:

L&T-EWAC Alloys Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

350

Bhupendra Pant L&T EWAC Alloys

IT Team Internal:

4 Chief Executive:

A. Shivkumar

2012

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2012 Company Name:

L&T General Insurance Industry:

BFSI

Pramod Pawar L&T General Insurance

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

L&T General Insurance’s project TILT (Technology Innovations at L&T Insurance) is a greenfield implementation program to build a single platform that integrates key functions and seamlessly connect users through any interface of their choice,” says Pramod Pawar, head-IT, L&T General Insurance.

The platform was built to benefit key stakeholders including consumers, business partners and interconnected departments like operations, sales, and underwriting teams, among others. Its business aim was to help the company achieve wider distribution, multiple

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275 product launches, and higher service standards. The project has redefined the way motor insurance is sold, says Pawar. Among other things, it ensures anytime, anywhere policy issuance and administration. TILT’s highly configurable and parameterized system also enabled L&T General Insurance to launch 28 products in eight months. And thanks to its Web-based instant policy issuance, distribution teams are able to issue policies within 20 minutes. It has also enhanced the company’s speed-to-market capability by at least 18 months and enterprise productivity by 15 percent.

IT Team Internal:

8 CEO and Whole-time Director:

Joydeep Roy

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Larsen & Toubro Industry:

Sunil Sevak Larsen & Toubro

Manufacturing and Infrastructure Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Larsen & Toubro has four major datacenters, which house four business operations. One of the four, its corporate datacenter at Mumbai, began to hit its scalability, space, power, and cooling ceiling.

This limited L&T’s ability to meet growth and accommodate new business lines.

To fix the problem, L&T’s head of enterprise IT infrastructure, Sunil Sevak, built a new, Tier-III, private-cloud datacenter.

The primary challenge was migrating from the existing datacenter to the new one without disruption. Eighty enterprise apps used by over 45,000 employees and involving 650 servers had to be moved without downtime.

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At L&T’s Shared Service Center unit, which processes salaries and employee benefits, the migration meant handling 28 systems and 4.5 TB data with planned downtime of just four hours.

Today, the new datacenter offers on-demand hosting, on-demand provisioning of servers and storage space within one hour, the potential to introduce a pay-per-use model, and has a PUE rating of 1.60, compared to the old datacenter’s 2.1 It was also able to accommodate two new businesses, which would have had a capex costs of Rs 25 lakh and recurring investment of Rs 50 lakh.

45,000 IT Team Internal:

25 MD and CEO:

K. Venkataramanan

WINNER

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Mahindra

&

Mahindra

Financial Services (MMFSL) is a non banking finance company (NBFC), which provides loans, and distributes insurance and mutual funds, among other services.

It has a network of around 600 branches and around 8,000 hand-held devices, and focuses on the rural and semiurban sector.

Its attempt to find ways for rural customers to avail of its services, like getting a loan, was met with challenges including low literacy levels and poor rural infrastructure. To find a solution, Suresh A. Shanmugam, head-business

information, MMFSL, created a unique model for rural populations of over 2.5 million. The initiative uses existing channels like handhelds, non-branded mobiles, and available channel solutions like kiosks, to hasten loan processing. His initiative has made it easier for MMFSL to disburse loans and helped MMFSL be more financially inclusive. Earlier business users depended on the back office and were required to do a lot of manual work, which ensured it took two days to disburse a loan. Today, rural folk can avail a loan within two hours with minimum enquiry and documentation.

Suresh A. Shanmugam Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services

WINNER Company:

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

13,440 IT Team Internal:

36 Managing Director:

Ramesh G. Iyer

2012

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Crafting

a

Web-enabled

employee self-care portal is a viable proposition for most companies. But creating a single instance employee portal for over 66 companies within a conglomerate is a Herculean task.

But V.S. Parthasarathy, group CIO, EVPfinance and M&A, member of the Group Executive Board, Mahindra & Mahindra, made it possible. He created a Webbased tool for the company’s employees and management. All the transactions related to an employee’s lifecycle—from recruitment to retirement—are managed on this portal. It also provides managers

with a performance management system, senior management with a BI dashboard, GRC authorization, and an online travel management system.

Despite its magnitude, Parthasarathy was instrumental in keeping the project on track. His initiative enhanced employee productivity by providing information at one spot. It facilitated the faster resolution of managerial approvals through workflows. The processing time for approvals and payment has reduced dramatically because it’s now handled on online medium.

WINNER Company Name:

Mahindra & Mahindra Industry:

Conglomerate Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

1,44,000

V.S. Parthasarathy Mahindra & Mahindra

IT Team Internal:

Over 160 Vice Chairman and MD:

Anand Mahindra

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers

B. Venkatakrishnan Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers (MVML) located at Chakan, Pune was built as a green-field facility.

The company’s management wanted to build a state-of-the-art datacenter to support the business needs of the new facility.

B. Venkatakrishnan, head-IT, MVML, collated all the requirements and used innovative re-engineering techniques to achieve this. The infrastructure development for the new business started with converting temporary sheds to mini datacenters for providing services such as VOIP, ERP, and e-mail.

The team simultaneous rollouts of MES

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Industry:

Automotive Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

systems in various process units, while managing the entire setup to meet global and industry standards. It also met audit and compliance requirements and maintained the production setup without compromising security.

The datacenter development project was accomplished within 100 days. Due to this, the start of production and launch dates were achieved well in advance.

The solution has built-in resilience to support upcoming facilities while having the redundancy to withstand level-1 and level-2 type disruptions.

1,44,000 IT Team Internal:

14 CEO:

Vijay Dhongde

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Marico Industry:

Consumer Goods Headquarters:

Girish Rao Marico

Mumbai Employees:

2,000 Marico is one of India’s big brands and thanks to its presence in seven international locations and 50 locations across India, managing backups had become a challenge.

“Managing backups took us two to three hours everyday over LAN. Also, data restoration, irrespective of size, used to consume a minimum of one to two hours,” says head-IT Girish Rao. The company has about 1,200 PCs and laptops and 60 virtual servers and the problem affected both end users and administrators.

“Launching the Risk Management Through Data De-duplication Project

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enables machine backup globally across the Marico group to a central site,” says Rao. De-duplication helps reduce storage costs and centrally back up data, even over low bandwidth. The initiative also launched an organization-wide backup policy. The project ensures that the size of backup data does not increase linearly with an increase in data or machines. “Currently, our backup storage has reduced from 125 TB to 5TB with 96 percent de-duplication.

A single backup administrator manages backups for about 700-800 machines across 35 locations. And end-users save about 30 minutes a day,” says Rao.

IT Team Internal:

30 CFO:

Milind Sarwate

WINNER

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP

CASE STUDY

Dish TV Alleviates Storage Woes with HP P4000 The HP P4000 storage solution eases storage pressures and availability issues at DTH entertainment giant Dish TV.

D

ish TV is India’s first direct-to-home (DTH) entertainment service provider.

The company is a division of Zee Network Enterprise (Essel Group Venture) and . Dish TV was incorporated by Zee Network to transform TV viewing. It not only transmits high quality programs through satellite, but also gives complete control to customers on selecting channels and paying for them.

SURMOUNTING STORAGE CHALLENGES Since its inception in 2004, Dish TV pioneer has been growing at a blistering pace, and has been continually widening its customer base.

Dish TV had about 12 million customers as of March 2012.

However, it began to feel growth pangs from its steady expansion. The organization was using qmail service for its employees, but as employee strength increased, the then existing process started posing a challenge for the IT department. Emails, instead of being stored on the server, were stored on a user’s qmail server. This created challenges relating to storage and resource utilization.

The organization wanted enterprise-class storage to ensure better backup and centralized control over the entire process.

TWO CHALLENGES, ONE SOLUTION Manprit Singh, DGM-IT, Dish TV, resolved to fix the situation. He decided to deploy a solution which could ease the pressure on IT. However, he wanted a cost-effective solution that would not require the organization to incur immediate capex expense. He, also, wanted to it to be scalable-on-demand, and have the ablility upgrade without any downtime. The ultimate choice was an Exchange 2010 deployment.

Singh assessed the business requirements, and evaluated the available solutions that could meet the perceived business goals.

He finally zeroed in on HP P4000 scale-out, IP-based storage. “The P4000 storage provides enterprise-class features such as storage

virtualization, and wide-striping that delivers better performance at IP technology,” says Singh. The project was executed in three months and went live in May 2012.

Singh was also faced with another predicament. His organization was looking to upgrade its 2,000-seater call center with both in-bound and out-bound features. But given the hyper competitive nature of the industry, and the criticality of business processes, they could ill afford a performance constraint in the form of downtime.

“Since any downtime would have a direct impact on revenue, we scouted for a robust and highly-available infrastructure. The one option we had was the traditional servers and storage stack. But we decided to explore the second option of deploying a technology with a lower TCO and high scalability,” says Singh. The solution to this was, again, HP P4000 storage system with high performance in terms of input/output operations per second (IOPS). This deployment went live in August 2012.

The same solution met the twin objectives that the organization wanted to achieve.

During deployment, Singh says he didn’t face any challenges relating to hardware. It

One option we had was the traditional servers and storage stack. But we decided to explore a second option of deploying a technology with a lower TCO and high scalability.”

MANPRIT SINGH, DGM-IT, Dish TV

was more or less a plug-and-play solution.

But there were migration challenges as they migrated the live environment from qmail to Exchange 2010, and were also moving to enterprise BlackBerry. Singh surmounted these challenges through rigorous planning and a well-executed, phased approach to implementation.

BENEFITS GALORE The deployment of HP P4000 storage technology has enhanced business continuity, and ensured that the application keeps running even if one of the storage controllers goes down.

At the same time, storage clustering has enabled consolidation of multiple storage nodes into pools of storage. All available capacity and performance is aggregated and passed on to every volume in the cluster. As storage needs increase, the HP P4000 G2 can scale performance and capacity.

Similarly, network RAID stripes and protects multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure in the HP P4000 G2 SAN. Applications have continuous data availability in the event of a disk, controller, storage node, power, network, or site failure.

Overall, the HP P4000 deployment has paved the way for other enterprise projects like application automation, development of work flow, paperless office, and digitalization.

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

As car sales picked up momentum, Mercedes-Benz India, was encumbered by a supply-side constraint in its factory.

Also, competition was getting fiercer, and the battle for market share was eroding the company’s profitability.

Rajeev Jorapur, head-IT, Mercedes-Benz India, needed to bolster the company’s profitability by driving down costs. He decided to bring a high level of transparency in the company’s cost structure using a judicious blend of processes, technology, methods, and tools. Jorapur began this BPR exercise by re-designing key business processes.

Next, he enhanced both transaction and analytical systems to support the re-engineered processes. This helped tremendously. Take demand forecasting for example. Due to lack of transparency in the process, there were problems of vehicle stockouts and excess inventory. The BPR exercise provided the company with an eDealer DMS. It allowed dealers to put up their ‘non-moving’ allocations for other dealers to be picked up online. This has resulted in better aligning supply and demand through-out the network.

The simplicity of the solution resulted in achieving remarkable business benefits with very little upfront investment.

WINNER Company Name:

Mercedes-Benz India Industry:

Automotive Headquarters:

Pune Employees:

550

Rajeev Jorapur Mercedes-Benz India

IT Team Internal:

14 MD and CEO:

Peter Honegg

2012

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2012 Company Name:

MTS India Industry:

Rajeev Batra MTS India (Sistema Shyam Teleservices)

Telecommunications Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

Gaining market share

in an uncertain economy, when the telecom industry’s roots have been shaken is a tough task. But MTS India’s ambition was undeterred. MTS’ belief that a customer relationship management (CRM) system must assume a greater role in a company’s growth prompted it to migrate its Indian operations from a homegrown CRM to a completely new one.

Headed by Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS India, the migration initiative takes all critical IT application stacks on a converged OSS/BSS platform that is capable of supporting 30 million users

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4,500 worldwide. All key IT areas, such as inventory, mediation, order management, provisioning, and billing, are taken care of by this new CRM system. The main objectives are to enhance customer management, normalize workflow, reduce manpower dependency, and reduce cost per subscriber.

The benefits of this system are the ability to introduce new services within a short time, high availability, enhanced customer connect, single-point management of customers, and reduced costs per customer.

IT Team Internal:

300 President and CEO:

Vsevolod Rozanov

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Multi Screen Media Industry:

Broadcast

Ajay Kumar Meher Multi Screen Media

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Multi Screen Media (MSM)— previously known as SET India—is Sony Entertainment Television’s subsidiary in India. MSM Worldwide was running on four separate systems with disintegrated business processes. This led to inefficiencies, and increased manpower requirements. Also, manual processes increased the risk of human errors and revenue losses.

Ajay Kumar Meher, senior vice president-IT and post production, MSM, decided to implement a broadcast management system (BMS), to create an efficient enterprise. BMS integrates

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500 and streamlines content management, airtime scheduling and media trafficking.

It also consolidates many of the tasks performed by the programming, traffic, finance, marketing, sales, and operations departments. This system has been implemented in all nine primary channels of MSM in India and 14 international channels worldwide. It also integrates with many external systems like SAP for better efficiency.

By streamlining and automating multiple business processes BMS has reduced the time-to-go-on-air by one day with 100 percent efficiency.

IT Team Internal:

18 CEO:

Man Jit Singh

WINNER

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In its journey to become India’s most valuable plant nutrition company and still adhere multiple regulations, Nagarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals (NFCL), needed to de-merge its fertilizer and oil business into two separate legal entities. One of the new entities needed to undergo a name change (to Kakinada Fertilizers) before it could be re-christened Nagarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals.

“In a project of this nature, to protect existing data, organizations need to invest in server and storage infrastructure and application licenses, which, conservatively, would cost 0.5X

the current spend,” says V. Srinivas, CIO, NFCL. “However, we decided to restructure the existing SAP storage and server setup to use all available spare capacities.”

The strategy, which was conceived and implemented in just two months by an in-house team, saved NFCL time and about Rs 100 lakh in equipment it didn’t have to buy—while adhering to existing licensing agreements of various software application vendors. The downtime of the SAP application was nine days, two days less than planned.

WINNER Company Name:

Nagarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Hyderabad Employees:

V. Srinivas Nagarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals

1,790 IT Team Internal:

31 Managing Director:

K. Rahul Raju

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Migrating a nation-wide critical financial process from one application to another requires loads of diligence and expertise. As the Head-Networks, IS and Datacenter at the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Dr. N. Rajendran carried out this initiative with utmost care, and succeeded.

The National Financial Switch (NFS) is the application responsible for ATM switching among different banks for inter-bank ATM transactions. The Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), which was responsible for the functioning of the NFS,

wanted to concentrate more on research, and therefore, the responsibility of handling this process fell in the hands of the NPCI. The process was, then, moved from INFINET application to NPCINet. NPCINet’s robust architecture currently supports 102 member banks with more than one lakh ATMs and about 7 million transactions per day, collectively. The peak volume of transactions can reach 9 million.

The migration has offered banks a highly resilient network with 24x7 support at both the primary and secondary datacenters of NPCI. Besides, the datacenter has also achieved 100 percent uptime.

Dr. N. Rajendran National Payments Corporation of India

WINNER Company Name:

National Payments Corporation of India Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

250 IT Team Internal:

70 MD and CEO:

A.P. Hoda

2012

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TE CONNECTIVITY

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

GAINING REAL-TIME VISIBILITY INTO THE NETWORK The physical layer, often consisting of many thousands of individual cables and connectors can often remain a ‘blind spot’. Better visibility can reveal vital data that’s the key to the efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness of a network.

MYLARAIAH J.N. Country Technical and Marketing Manager, TE Connectivity Mylaraiah brings 16 years of experience to structured cabling solutions, including practical knowledge in the areas of technology transfer, product engineering, marketing and sales. He’s worked as a consultant and project manager, designing SCS for large premises, campuses, and datacenters.

How do you create infrastructure that responds with agility to rapidly-changing, dynamic business needs?

The way forward for manufacturers and designers is to look at designing solutions and using products that will align with virtualization and cloud computing. This will provide the benefits of agility, efficiency and availability while building a more secure environment for cloudbased data. Agility is all about making quick changes in direction, with minimum effort and maximum control. From an infrastructure perspective, this generally involves higher bandwidth applications and higher capacity.

Of equal importance is a forward-thinking approach to the initial infrastructure design.

CIOs must trust that cloud service providers will deliver services that are always available and, in turn, datacenter providers have to trust that infrastructure service providers will provide the building blocks on which datacenters are built. Infrastructure built on connectivity, that is standards compliant, independently-verified, and from a well-established supplier, is critical to achieve a highly available datacenter.

A well thought-out infrastructure design

can reduce both initial capex and ongoing energy consumption.

What effects have virtualization and cloud-based services had on the network?

Cloud computing presents new opportunities as well as new challenges for IT. Computing services, platforms, software and applications that would traditionally have been located on an organization’s network are migrating to the cloud. Cloud-based services have influenced networks particularly with regard to WAN links to ensure each office has a secure and fast network link to the cloud whether its hosted or private. As more services move to the cloud, the connection and its efficiency needs to increase accordingly, and we have observed increased adoption of clustering of firewalls and network equipment.

How can enterprises gain better visibility into their networks, thus getting access to vital information that could result in higher availability?

Investment in virtualization and cloud-based services can result in a fluid and less tangible operational environment. However, there’s one element of the network that’s lagged in terms of process automation and network visibility: The physical layer. Often consisting of many thousands of individual cables, connectors and connections, this can remain a ‘blind spot’ that, with better visibility, could reveal vital information that is the key to the efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness of a network.

A managed connectivity solution can utilize software to accurately document physical infrastructure. More organizations are realizing that documenting and controlling the physical layer is vital to providing reliable and highly

available networks. When used in conjunction with automatic infrastructure management hardware, all patching changes are recorded automatically and documentation is always accurate. A powerful network discovery tool can discover all active network devices and document and track this equipment in real time.

Can you give us some examples of how some of your smart connectivity solutions can help Indian enterprises?

What if you could view your network in real time? At TE, we have the Quareo Managed Connectivity, which delivers fully-automated documentation of the network during various stages of its lifecycle, greatly reducing the cost to manage it, while delivering unprecedented accuracy and automation.

This provides high availability through increased automation, improved diagnostics and reduced downtime, while reducing opex through more efficient change management, asset provisioning and utilization. It also results in improved ITIL process through 100 percent accurate real-time physical location information. This can prove invaluable to security and compliance providing full integration of the physical layer with the virtual world within available NMS and DCIM software to enhance visibility and control of the whole network.

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

2012 Company Name:

NIIT Industry:

Education Headquarters:

Sunil Sirohi NIIT

Gurgaon Employees:

One of NIIT’s

business lines—the School Learning Solutions—is on an exponential growth path. Innovative new product lines and a portfolio of existing ones created demand, which management wanted to tap.

“Business was planning to add sales people in the hundreds. It became pretty clear that we needed a CRM system. Hence, nCRM (NIIT CRM) was born,” says Sunil Sirohi, CTO and VP, information resources, NIIT, who designed a full-featured customer relationship management product called nCRM. nCRM seamlessly integrates different aspects of the sales process from leads to

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3,700 deals and from delivery to billing. It’s has an intuitive UI that provides users the ability to configure multiple sales processes for different products or business lines, allows them to make changes when business processes change, and offers them integrated analytics. All of this ensured that nCRM was adopted quickly.

NIIT is reaping multiple advantages with nCRm. “Managing sales is simpler even with twice the sales staff. There has been a five-fold increase in lead generation due to better sales staff management, and three-fold increase in deal closures,” says Sirohi.

IT Team Internal:

150 CEO:

Vijay Thadani

WINNER

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It’s not everyday that one hears stories of a company that builds a team from absolutely nothing to one that supports a 35,000-strong organization.

But that’s exactly what Novo Nordisk did when it set up an Indian unit with one person and expanded to about 70 experienced employees—in just 2.5 years.

The idea was to set up a sister unit in India for Novo Nordisk’s corporate IT unit and take over systems and services from the headquarters. This was in line with the organization’s plans to globalize rapidly and widen its customer base.

The sister unit, based in Bangalore,

currently carries out system management for over 10 enterprise applications out of the 40-plus applications used by the company globally.

The transfer of services to the sister unit has given Novo Nordisk’s IT and Corporate Development team a flexible service catalog at varying costs. By creating a global delivery model, the company has established an efficient cost base for IT management. The setup has also given the company a way to gain access to talent and resources, thereby increasing productivity and quality.

WINNER Company Name:

Novo Nordisk IT Global Service Centre Industry:

Healthcare Headquarters:

Bagsvaerd, Denmark Employees:

Srinivasa N. Novo Nordisk IT Global Service Centre

35,000 IT Team Internal:

300 Corp. VP GSC-Bangalore:

Sanjeev Shishoo

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The Hyderabad-based agricultural company, NSL Group produces a staggering 1.5 crore packets of seeds annually. Documenting the supply of seeds was done manually earlier, which created a lot of complications including data entry errors. Sometimes, this also resulted in delays in dispatch and revenue losses.

The company’s Group VP-IT, Venu Gopal Madduri’s idea to attach barcodes to each packet, right at the time of packaging, has proven to be the best solution to counter the problem. This bar-coding process, which is done both at the packet level and carton level, has eliminated the

need to enter dispatch data manually, thus ensuring 100 percent data accuracy. The system has also been integrated with the company’s ERP. This advancement has helped employees handle dispatches more efficiently. There are no more data entry errors or wrong dispatches. Also, the project has given senior management complete and real-time visibility over the supply chain. On the same note, the company’s annual revenue is also expected to increase due to fewer delays in dispatches which used to result in revenue losses.

WINNER Company Name:

NSL Group Industry:

Agriculture Headquarters:

Hyderabad Employees:

Over 14,000

Venu Gopal Madduri NSL Group

IT Team Internal:

Over 60 Chairman and MD:

M. Prabhakar Rao

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Oil and Natural Gas Corporation

M. Thyagarajulu Oil and Natural Gas Corporation ONGC is one of the largest oil and gas companies in Asia, and produces 77 percent of India’s crude oil and 81 percent of its natural gas. M. Thyagarajulu, advisor-IT designed an enterprise SCADA system on a unified platform to consolidate the company’s operations. The SCADA system picks up operational parameters from 159 remote offshore well platforms and 247 onshore production installations, among others, and provides real-time data and control of field operations through an integrated captive network.

The system was implemented using a three-tiered architecture. “We have used

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Industry:

Oil and Gas Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

the foundation field bus technology for the first time. It was an in-house brownfield implementation interfacing operations at over 15,000 points and over 3,000 people coordinating to perform hot works and shutdowns without compromising production or targets,” he says.

With this SCADA system, ONGC has seen an increased recovery of hydrocarbons and higher returns by way of real-time field interventions. It also encourages asset level analysis for valueadded operations, which has maximized production by extending drilling performance.

30,000 IT Team Internal:

850 Chairman and MD:

Sudhir Vasudeva

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2012 Company Name:

Paradeep Phosphates Industry:

Manufacturing

V. Seetharamaiah Paradeep Phosphates

Headquarters:

Bhubaneswar Employees:

One of the reforms that the Indian government’s Department of Fertilizers (DOF) put up in 2010 was the introduction of a mobile-based Fertilizer Monitoring System (mFMS). This made it compulsory for fertilizer manufacturers to upload their transactions to the system daily. To comply, Paradeep Phosphates it decided to upgrade its network and portable devices.

Since the company’s earlier MPLS WAN provided minimal connectivity speeds and employees’ PDAs were restricted to a single OS, Paradeep’s GM-IT, V. Seetharamaiah decided to move these transactions to a Web-based WAN, and a

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1,000 Web-based portal to facilitate easy upload.

The project, titled Sales and Logistics Execution System (SALES), contains a Web portal designed on Java that is used by sales and accounts personnel.

Transactions related to all sales processes are updated in SAP as well.

The SALES project has enabled faster and easier data updates for employees.

Most importantly, it has also turned out to be Paradeep Phosphates’ best strategy to fulfill the DOF’s mandate. SALES has also given the company 24x7 availability, and its employees ease of access irrespective of place and time.

IT Team Internal:

15 Managing Director:

S.S. Nandurdikar

WINNER

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Manufacturing organizations of PepsiCo’s stature rely heavily on their distribution chains. In order to equip their distributors with a way to capture secondary sales data, the company created a go-to-market solution called SAMNA. The solution, designed by PepsiCo’s IT team, involves deploying handheld devices at the distributors’ end. The company’s SAP environment, which handles primary sales information, is the source of inventory data for SAMNA. Salespeople can retrieve information on stocks and promotional schemes by logging into the SAMNA portal, and use

the same for daily transactions such as order capturing, invoicing, and reporting.

SAMNA’s MIS reports give distributors visibility of the business, and the sales reports help them in reconciliation and billing.

The solution has the distinction of being one of the largest secondary-sales solutions in the country. Apart from letting distributors gain visibility on the supply chain, thereby increasing employee productivity, SAMNA has also aided PepsiCo in understanding sales patterns, resulting in better market analysis.

WINNER Company Name:

PepsiCo Industry:

Food and Beverages Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

3,500

Kapil Pal PepsiCo

IT Team Internal:

80 President-India Region:

Manu Anand

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To adhere to the value of employee empowerment—which is one of the reasons for P&G India’s continuous growth—amid a rapidly evolving economic landscape, the company embarked on the Indian Digital Workplace project. This project addresses key business priorities of cost savings, employee productivity and satisfaction, and sustainability.

Spearheaded by Damon Frost, associate director-IT, P&G India, the project provided employees with a plethora of integrated tools that foster collaboration. Frost was able to achieve this with a combination of networking and collaboration tools, BYOD,

anywhere online file sharing via the cloud, video collaboration capabilities allowing connectivity to key sites, next-generation e-mail, and the ability to print from any location, to name a few.

The project has benefited P&G India by enabling effective collaboration between key strategic partners and multi-functional teams including HR, legal, finance, sales, and product supply. The company now saves 30 minutes per employee per day on average. Frugal innovation has improved productivity by step-changing productivity at one-third of the cost and one-tenth the responsiveness.

WINNER

Company Name:

Procter & Gamble, India Industry:

FMCG Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Damon Frost Procter & Gamble, India

Over 2,500 MD and CEO:

Shantanu Khosla

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Radico Khaitan Industry:

Manufacturing

Farhan Khan Radico Khaitan

Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

In order to maintain quality, comply with government regulations, and enable faster decision making, Radico Khaitan realized it needed to revamp its IT infrastructure.

The company had an ERP that was 11 yearsold and could not fulfill the government’s mandate of submitting reports in a format prescribed by the IFRS. Also, top executives of the company required a better system that enabled effective decision-making to keep pace with a dynamic market. At the same time, Khaitan’s pan-India presence prompted the company to come up with a way to unify its dispersed workforce.

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Over 1,000 Farhan Khan, AVP-IT, Radico Khaitan, decided to follow a three-pronged approach: Upgrade SAP to comply with IFRS, add a BI and business planning and consolidation (BCP) layer to the application portfolio for faster decision-making, and deploy UC to help its dispersed workforce collaborate.

The company expects this process re-engineering to save around Rs 10-11 crore by the next financial year. The implementation of UC has connected the whole workforce through chat, audio and video capabilities, document sharing, and BYOD. This is expected to make training easier and more cost-effective.

IT Team Internal:

28 Managing Director:

Abhishek Khaitan

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2012 Company Name:

Reliance Capital Industry:

BFSI

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar Reliance Capital

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

When most organizations in the BFSI sector moved away from the cloud, citing security concerns, Reliance Capital swam against the tide. Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and group CTO, Reliance Capital, has moved the company’s native e-mail, collaboration solutions, and some business applications to Google Apps.

With the cloud, the company can improve sales efficiency and employee productivity by providing access to real-time data from anywhere, anytime, and any device. The company can also create learning centers on the cloud, for example, and build departmental Intranet sites—without writing a single line of

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Over 15,000 code—and share sites between teams, or even a customer or partner. More importantly, the cloud provides employees the ability to create and edit files simultaneously with their teams and exchange ideas and feedback.

Phanasgaonkar has ensured that security is taken care of with features like: Control over who shares data and how, 24/7 access to data, real-time back-up, and strong authentication and encryption.

By moving to the cloud, Reliance Capital has provided its employees with freedom from cubicles, created an atmosphere that fosters collaboration, reduced TCO, and has shrank employees’ overall dependence on IT.

IT Team Internal:

Over 100 Group CEO:

Sam Ghosh

WINNER

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Reliance Commercial Finance is part of Reliance Capital and is among the fastest-growing non-banking financial companies in India, with operations in 66 locations.

But like almost all players in the industry, one of its standard processes, the process of verification, was manual. The workflow involved multiple stakeholders and started from raising a verification request (by credit managers) to completing field and other verification jobs by feet on street up to and finally submitting a report. This meant that the verification process could take up to seven days.

So CTO Shashikumar Ravulapaty introduced end-to-end process automation and brought the company’s external vendors under the same umbrella, a move that benefited customers, internal stakeholders and vendors.

It also shrunk verification TAT to two days.

“The credit department, which carries out the underwriting process, benefited the most. We have not only reduced the TAT of the verification process but also changed the approach of the entire process by automating it through a Web platform.

The department is now able to allocate requests to each agency and track TAT for each request,” says Ravulapaty.

Shashi Kumar Ravulapaty Reliance Commercial Finance

WINNER Company Name:

Reliance Commercial Finance Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai IT Team Internal:

12 IT Team Outsourced:

10 CEO:

K.V. Srinivasan

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The order fulfillment process at Reliance Globalcom was rigid and time consuming; with 14 stages that needed to be completed to process a new or changed order.

This could take up to four to six weeks. Any modification to the order meant re-doing all the steps, leading to waste of time and delay in delivering services to customers. Also, price-quoting for an order was a tedious manual process. Sanjay Saraswat, CIOcarrier business, Reliance Globalcom, healed the company’s woes with a sales process re-engineering and automated pricing system.

The project delivered a flexible fourstage order fulfillment process which

provided various teams the flexibility to fulfill or modify an order within 48 hours. The pricing process was completely automated with proprietary algorithms built to calculate pricing for orders, not just based on an order’s attributes, but also on available capacity, demand and historical pricing trends. The pricing team can now provide instant quotes—instead of a weekly cycle—to the sales team.

The project has also reduced operations cost by 50 percent due to a reduction of sales-stages and automated pricing. It also prevents revenue leakage by ensuring proper margin on pricing.

WINNER Company Name:

Reliance Globalcom Industry:

Telecommunications Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

1,500

Dr. Sanjay Saraswat Reliance Globalcom

IT Team Internal:

50 CEO:

Punit Garg

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Safexpress Industry:

Logistics

Shalabh Raizada Safexpress

Headquarters:

New Delhi Employees:

When Safexpress decided

to do away with its de-centralized client server legacy application and move to a Web-based centralized transportation management system (TMS), it was putting the livelihood of over 350 customer associates on the line.

But instead of asking them to leave, Shalabh Raizada, VP-IT, Safexpress, up-skilled the 350 desk-based associates to handle multiple customers and focus on revenue collection, a chronic pain area for the organization.

Customer associates are now business development managers (BDMs).

To support them in their new role, Raizada developed an application—Proton—which

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1,500 was integrated with the company’s TMS. This app shows the complete status of all the consignments of a BDM’s customer. Any deviation is flagged to the BDM, prompting him to take action. Proton also creates weekly meet-your-customer tasks. This provides BDMs with a list of customers they need to meet. Another task alerts them about contracts that are about to expire. And contract renewal meetings often lead to upward price revisions.

A BDM now meets on an average of three to four customers a day instead of one or two.

Proton has provided the company a way to retain customers, keep a tab on revenue, and improve efficiency.

IT Team Internal:

40 Chairman and MD:

Pawan Jain

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

SAP India Industry:

IT/ITeS Headquarters:

Anil Khatri SAP India

Bangalore Employees:

In a bid to create a workplace that ensures high levels of connectivity and convenience, SAP India decided to offer its employees an enterprise-wide mobility platform in 2010. But in early 2012, the BYOD revolution was widespread and SAP India decided to provide its employees with a BYOD platform.

In order to make this a reality, Anil Khatri, head IT-South Asia, SAP India, adopted a device-agnostic strategy that would allow employees use the device of their choice. Khatri, with help from SAP Global IT, implemented software that in one stroke automatically installs e-mails

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5,500 and VPN configurations, security policies, default root certificates, and internal links.

It also secures the device, manages it, and delivers mobile apps from the company’s app store.

The BYOD strategy has provided the organization with a ton of benefits.

Employee productivity has increased significantly. The strategy has also given employees the ability to transact in realtime, anytime, anywhere. It has also introduced a community-based support platform for employees to collaborate and share ideas.

IT Team Internal:

40 Managing Director:

Peter Gartenberg

WINNER

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Some companies are identified by their brand names. Like Sheela Foam, the producer of the Sleepwell brand of mattresses. The company’s revenue took a beating when unauthorized dealers began selling its products. The company realized it was high time they nipped the issue in the bud.

The company’s Head of IT, Pertisth Mankotia created an RFID-based system that would restore customers’ and dealers’ confidence in Sheela Foam. Each mattress now has an RFID tag inside, which enables the company to track the product from factory to distributor to

dealer. This method has made tracking a much easier process, compared with the earlier mechanism of tracking mattresses with the help of a unique product serial number on the MRP label. The RFID tag provides visibility to the company across the entire supply chain and lets the company find which distributor or dealer sent Sheela Foam’s mattresses to unauthorized dealers.

Apart from providing the company with a tool to track its goods efficiently, this system is also expected to add about Rs 3.5 crore to the company’s annual revenues.

WINNER Company Name:

Sheela Foam Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Uttar Pradesh Employees:

Over 2,000

Pertisth Mankotia Sheela Foam

IT Team Internal:

40 Managing Director:

Rahul Gautam

2012

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Ensuring—on a real time basis— that expensive factory equipment is used optimally is vital to any manufacturing set up.

Sri Karumbati, the CIO of Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs (SSSS), came up with a solution to make this a reality. The automatic data acquisition system for machines in active production collects information on uptime and downtime, causes for downtime, and other production data.

Karumbati used a combination of innovative technologies such as touch-based human machine interfaces (HMI), and programmable logic controllers (PLC) in this implementation.

The data acquisition system is connected to a

server in the datacenter, specially dedicated to data acquisition and processing. Employees and management can access this data through an interface available on the Internet. The data collected from this system aids production staff in analyzing the performance of the machines. The same can be used in calculating performance incentives too.

The company can now find out the causes for downtime and take corrective action promptly. Machine utilization rate has gone up by about 20 percent. The greatest recognition the implementation has received is being chosen as a technology demonstrator for other auto component manufacturers.

Sri Karumbati Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs

WINNER Company Name:

Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

2,000 IT Team Internal:

9 Joint MD:

Ravi Machani

2012

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2012 Company:

Syngene International Industry:

Ajit Manocha Syngene International Syngene International has helped deploy ‘Watson LIMS’ (Laboratory Information Management Systems) at clinical research organization Clinigene International becoming the first company to successfully do so.

LIMS is like an ERP system for labs: It manages processes end-to-end. The biggest challenge in these solutions is to integrate them with complex heterogeneous instruments from different vendors. Led by Ajit Manocha, general manager, Syngene International, LIMS is accurate and precise and follows the principles of data integrity, audit trails and backward traceability.

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Research and Manufacturing Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

The solution has been validated by all regulatory bodies.

Watson LIMS has helped Clinigene International overcome the challenges of manual sample handling, processing and traceability. This has increased Clinigene’s sample analysis capability by a 100 percent per year while keeping manpower numbers unchanged. Thanks to the solution, Clinigene International has bagged a Rs 3-crore project, the largest ever awarded in the space. The successful implementation has also boosted the image of Syngene International among their prospective clients.

2,000 IT Team Internal:

16 Director:

Peter Bains

WINNER

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2012 Company:

Syntel Industry:

Telecom

R. Muralidharan Syntel

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

The service desk of a BPO servicing global clients represents the very nucleus of action. Syntel, a leading IT outsourcer, has rolled out a global service-desk team replacing six individual service desks for 21 sites covering 20,000 employees worldwide in record time.

The IT functions at Syntel was dependent on multiple ticketing and monitoring consoles across locations, which slowed them down from reacting to business critical IT issues. R. Muralidharan, CIO, Syntel, helped simplify the discreet IT support processes through the project Global Command Center (GCC)—a managed

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20,060 service provider platform designed and implemented with multi-tenant architecture. The platform integrates nine enterprise management tools and provides a smart platform for IT service support and delivery teams to manage the support and service requirements of Syntel’s business users globally.

This platform gives users a dashboard to help co-relate data thereby improving their SLA response, while reducing operational complexity and cost. Syntel is currently working on a strategy to leverage this platform to offer services to its customers.

IT Team Internal:

Over 150 CEO:

Prashant Ranade

WINNER

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Call records detail (CDRs) are a lifeline for telecom companies. Not only does TRAI mandate that they retain them for 12 months, even multiple teams within a telco require CDR data spanning months to meet their business objectives.

Tata Teleservices (TTL), the parent company of Tata DOCOMO, generates over a billion CDRs a day. Storing and maintaining multiple copies of this data increased its storage footprint while guzzling volumes of power. It also exposed them to data security threats.

To address these challenges, Ashish Pachory, CIO, TTL, consolidated the CDR

data with an ILM framework. A tiered storage approach coupled with storage virtualization and a BI layer ensured that data was stored, archived, and retrieved efficiently to help teams extract relevant information fast.

TTL saved 40 percent infrastructure costs with the tiered approach and has eliminated the need to store multiple copies of CDRs and superfluous data across the organization. This saved storage space, and associated costs. The granular data analysis is anticipated to increase revenues by 20 percent.

WINNER Company Name:

Tata Teleservices Industry:

Telecom Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

10,000

Ashish Pachory Tata Teleservices

IT Team Internal:

70 Managing Director:

N. Srinath

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Devesh Mathur, COO, India, HSBC India, believes that during an economic downturn, banks that turn to strategic, sustainable cost reduction programs—as opposed to tactical ones—achieve longterm business benefits. To steer HSBC India towards that goal, Mathur launched a ‘Strategic Cost Management’ program, which included reviewing IT costs with a zero-cost-base lens, and benchmarking them against peer banks in India and bestin-class HSBC sites.

He found opportunities to augment efficiencies within IT storage costs, rationalize the consumption of non-

profitable segments, and lower vendor AMCs and value-added services. In addition, he rationalized other “run the bank” cost. As a result, his team lowered IT costs by over $2 crore (about Rs 110 crore), while supporting greater volumes.

He also used telecommunications to connect relationship mangers to customers, increasing up-selling and cross selling prospects. Combined (savings and new business), the IT department created revenue worth $ 4.5 crore (about Rs 247 crore), which contributed significantly to making HSBC’s retail business in India profitable for the first time.

WINNER Company Name:

HSBC India Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Devesh Mathur The Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation India

4,778 IT Team Internal:

102 CEO:

Stuart Milne

2012

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2012 Company Name:

The Lakshmi Vilas Bank Industry:

BFSI

S. Ravishankar The Lakshmi Vilas Bank

Headquarters:

Tamil Nadu Employees:

Staff training across branches for every new product, service or government regulation can be a tedious task for the BFSI sector. S. Ravishankar, GM, The Lakshmi Vilas Bank, reduced the travel time and cost associated with training with an e-learning program that enables simultaneous training sessions across all branches.

The e-learning application leverages the bank’s intranet portal Mynet. This project was implemented within a short span of three months. It enables the staff training team to prepare and upload training material which can be accessed only by authorized employees.

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3,300 The system has in-built security tools to prevent printing or downloading of study materials. The system automatically sends e-mails to respective branches once study materials are uploaded. Post-training, participants can also be evaluated on their competencies through questionnaires available on the application.

The project has reduced training costs and ensured optimum participation.

Through this application, the company had conducted its internal Clerical to Officer Promotion test covering 200 employees and was able to declare the results immediately.

It has also saved travel and lodging costs.

IT Team Internal:

90 MD and CEO:

P.R. Somasundaram

WINNER

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2012 Company Name:

Titan Industries Industry:

Manufacturing

C.S. Ramesh Titan Industries

Headquarters:

Bangalore Employees:

Over 90 percent

of orders at Titan Eye+, Titan’s eyewear business, are unique. That much customization, without a real-time way to connect stores with manufacturing units, created pressure on delivery times.

“Every prescription lens is unique and needs to be produced or procured separately and tracked throughout the logistics process along with corresponding frames. This requirement was not supported by existing systems on account of a lack of integration,” says C.S. Ramesh, head-IT, Watches and Accessories Division.

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Over 6,000 So Ramesh extended SAP ERP ISR to the retail stores, allowing orders to be entered and be available almost instantaneously at the manufacturing plants. He also used SAP Batch management to lower the number of variants possible. “This is probably the first time anyone in the industry has deployed it.

It lowered the number of SKUs drastically, from 20,000 to less than 500,” he says.

The project shrunk delivery lead time.

“We have seen a 20 percent improvement in our customer order delivery alignment and product quality issues have reduced by 5 percent. Customer satisfaction has improved by 20 percent,” says Ramesh.

IT Team Internal:

100 Managing Director:

Bhaskar Bhat

WINNER

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

GREEN IT

FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE It’s true that green IT reduces costs and improves efficiency but it also contributes toward building long-term competitive advantage. Here’s how CIOs can harness the power of green IT to get ahead of the pack.

DAVID BLUMANIS

VP-Datacenter Solutions & Key Account Management, APAC & Japan, Schneider Electric David Blumanis is the VP-Datacenter Solutions and key account management, APAC & Japan, Schneider Electric. Prior to joining the company, Blumanis has managed one of the largest datacenters during his tenure at Telstra. He is also a former CIO.

Is pushing a green IT agenda seen as being cost-effective?

As IT budgets become more stringent, it will become an imperative for organizations to save costs by improving energy efficiency and adopting ‘greener’ modes of operation. Green IT is acknowledged as a strategic technology that will play a fundamental role in reengineering business and production processes to reduce carbon footprint. With datacenter requirements and cost of energy resources rising, companies would be forced to identify sustainability-based strategies and decrease IT-related CO2 emissions to gain long-term competitive advantage and integrate environmental aspects into their corporate strategy.

Should organizations consider creating a long-term strategy for sustainable IT? Sustainability is about developing a model that takes all the dimensions of the sustainable business universe into consideration and help businesses grow and prosper in the long-

term. These strategies help organizations resist the cyclical upturns and downturns of the economy. By designing processes that leverage resources effectively, organizations can make a significant impact on the social, environmental, political and cultural consequences.

provides energy efficient products and technologies in the physical infrastructure domain which includes power, cooling, racks, security and surveillance that can bring down energy costs by 30 percent. Our datacenter infrastructure management solutions and energy management systems allow us to create hybrid or high density datacenters. Our “ A datacenter’s expertise in datacenter arelectricity bill over chitectural designs helps 10 years is equivalent us build datacenters that can be modular, scalable to the sum spent and flexible, thus reducing building it in the wastage to a large extent.

But why is energy efficiency still secondary in most organizations?

Traditionally, the metrics of IT success has been delivering reliable information services, high application performance and availabilfirst place. ” ity. Energy efficiency has been ignored due to an atHow can Schneider help titude that reliability and efCIOs build greener IT ficiency are mutually excluinfrastructure? sive goals. However, companies should realize Companies are constantly looking for ways to that the same methods used to maintain relireduce their energy costs. Therefore, the dataability, when properly applied, are also useful center is a great starting point. Controlling to drive efficiency. Smart provisioning, operacosts, reducing power bills by opting for energy tion and maintenance of IT infrastructure will efficient components and resources have bedecrease the dependance on redundant layers come an important priority for CIOs. Schneider of hardware. Schneider Electric is leading the Electric, the leader in building green dataceneffort to realize this goal through the combined ters, is therefore a perfect partner to help CIOs application of energy efficient systems and achieve better reduction in costs and build ecoreliability-centered services. friendly facilities.

How can CIOs use green practices to create an enterprise-wide impact?

Contrary to popular belief, a traditional datacenter model increases the opex cost of a company by at least 60 percent. Within an IT infrastructure, a datacenter’s electricity bill over 10 years is equivalent to the sum spent building it in the first place. Schneider Electric

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

Usha International, one of the leading consumer durable companies of India and part of the Siddharth Shriram Group, has always been committed to leveraging IT for business.

Along with its unprecedented growth, UIL was also facing an increase in its 450 GB business warehouse at 40GB per month.

As a result, business analytics reporting was a challenge with long data load times.

As a result, Subodh Dubey, group CIO, Usha International, implemented a platform for real-time BI using in-memory technology.

“We wanted to implement an applicationbased solution for superior data analytics.

The system helps query large amounts of information from multiple types of data sources at speeds and volumes like never before. It instantly captures massive amounts of transactional data to explore data from virtually any source,” says Dubey.

Today, the project has helped UIL reduce its database size from 419GB to 47GB. The company saw a 75 percent performance improvement in reporting and analysis with Windows data load time becoming eight times faster. The inventory ageing report— inventory in stock that is getting old—which used to take six to seven hours to generate is now done in four to five minutes.

WINNER Company Name:

Usha International Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

1,600

Subodh Dubey

Usha International

IT Team Internal:

45 CEO:

Dinesh Chhabra

2012

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2012 Company Name:

VFS Global Services Industry:

IT/ITeS

Dhiren Savla

VFS Global Services

Global Headquarters:

London Employees:

With diversified operations in 69 countries and over 610 offices, VFS Global Services needed a high-availability, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure to support its service delivery commitments.

Dhiren Savla, CIO, VFS Global Services, designed a hybrid solution that combined MPLS and IPSEC VPN to overhaul the company’s network.

The company uses a fault-tolerant MPLS in India, but attempted to create a similar network with high availability across the globe. But this was not technically feasible or commercially viable. A hybrid solution of MPLS

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6,000 network and IPSEC VPN connectivity balanced both value and cost. It was also an imperative for the company to build redundancy to meet SLA requirements.

This project was coupled with expanding interoperable global datacenters in an effective way. Some of the businesses and activities required high utilization of infrastructure for specific duration for which Savla decided to have secure infrastructure-on-demand set-up.

This brought huge operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction levels went up significantly.

IT Team Internal:

66 MD and CEO:

Zubin Karkaria

WINNER

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139

The Visakhapatnam Steel Plant had a number of challenges with its network.

There was no redundancy between core and distribution switches, its backbone bandwidth was limited to 1Gbps, and, since the entire network was in a single broadcast domain, any small fault or loop in the network brought down the entire network.

To address these challenges, K.V.S.S. Rajeswara Rao, deputy GM-in-charge (IT), Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, RINL, revamped the existing, unstructured, flatdesign, ethernet-based network. The new design is based on a three-tier network architecture with core, distribution and

access layers. One of the project’s key objectives was to upgrade the bandwidth of the campus network from 1Gbps to 10Gbps in the core to distribution layers.

Apart from this, the project provisions redundant links from core to distribution levels. Post-implementation, there is complete redundancy between core and distribution switches with mesh network architecture between distribution switches.

The backbone bandwidth has increased to 10Gbps so that there is no constraint on the network for adding any new services.

The network efficiency has improved tremendously.

K.V.S.S. Rajeswara Rao Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, RINL

WINNER Company:

Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, RINL Industry:

Manufacturing Headquarters:

Visakhapatnam Employees:

18,079 IT Team Internal:

90 Chairman and MD:

A.P. Choudhary

2012

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2012 Company:

Vodafone India Industry:

Telecom

Anthony Thomas Vodafone India

Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

Vodafone India’s history of inorganic growth left with it multiple business systems supporting two business areas: Prepaid customer lifecycle, and point-of-sale and inventory. “This limited crucial business processes such as unified customer service to prepaid customers, and a standardized process for point-of-sale and activations across the 23 circles, among others,” says CIO Anthony Thomas.

Project Unify, envisaged by Thomas, fixes that. It has two sub-projects: The Unified Prepaid Support System and the Centralised Point of Sale. The first serves

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Over 10,000 as a common centralized platform which lets teams define and control the prepaid business, and still has enough flexibility to cater to local needs.

The latter is a repository of SIMs, handsets, paper vouchers, and data cards, which helps manage sales, inventory, customer registration, and the servicing of handsets.

Project Unify gives Vodafone faster decision making, swifter time-to-market for new products and services, and higher turnaround times for customer service and new activations.

IT Team Internal:

Over 100 CEO:

Marten Pieters

WINNER

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141

2012 Company Name:

Walmart India Industry:

Retail/Wholesale

Vinod Sivarama Krishnan Walmart India

Headquarters:

Gurgaon Employees:

The business development executives (BDAs) at Walmart India needed a sales order management system that captures accurate, near real-time information of inventory and product pricing—on the move. At the same time, the company needed to weed out manual processes that are time consuming and error-prone.

To facilitate this, Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, CIO and SVP, Walmart India, came up with Lakshya—a sales order system. Lakshya enables BDAs to use a small mobile device to take a store order from a kirana store in a remote location.

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5,000 It also helps customer compare prices from competitors, check stock quantity, and confirm an order right at the customer’s doorstep.

Lakshyahelps improve the overall efficiency of the company’s BDAs through faster payment collection and billing.

It also acts as a marketing tool for the BDAs to showcase more relevant items to members hence generating more orders from the stores. The system also helps the company monitor a BDA’s performance.

The project has improved the efficiency of BDAs by 25 percent by streamlining and automating processes.

Internal IT Team:

34 MD and CEO:

Raj Jain

WINNER

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As part of a multi-million dollar outsourcing deal, WNS Global Services was responsible for building, and managing the network connecting a client’s location to WNS’ delivery centers in India and Manila. And it needed to carry data, voice, and multimedia simultaneously.

“Instead of using traditional IPLC’s or using WNS-owned L2 MPLS network, the technology team worked out a way to deliver a cost-effective, resilient, scalable solution with a service provider that met the project’s timelines, and did not incur major capital expense,” says Ashish Mathur, CTO, WNS Global Services.

Working with a cross-departmental team, Mathur successfully built a 100 Mbps network capable of carrying voice, data, multimedia, and integrated it with the client’s network. He initially integrated and built for 40 Mbps (just in seven weeks) and increased that capacity and footprint within six months to scale up to 100 Mbps.

The network provides instant connectivity to the client’s enterprise network and applications across Australia. Mathur’s efforts paid off as the project provided a bouquet of benefits to the client.

WINNER Company:

WNS Global Services Industry:

IT/ITeS Headquarters:

Mumbai Employees:

25,939

Ashish Mathur WNS Global Services

IT Team Internal:

250 Group CEO:

Keshav R. Murugesh

2012

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2012 Company Name:

Yes Bank Industry:

BFSI Headquarters:

Amit Sethi Yes Bank

Mumbai Employees:

A large number of migrant workers use the anytime, anywhere banking module offered by various banks to deposit money in their home accounts.

But, the current set up forces daily wage workers to lose out on precious work hours. Yes Bank wanted to change that.

For remittance services, a bank needs a vast branch network. Amit Sethi, senior president and CIO, Yes Bank, realized that with just over 250 branches across India, this was not a feasible option. The initiative, domestic remittance service aimed at realigning the available infrastructure of banking correspondent agents (BCA)—

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Over 6,000 sub-agents—and leveraging the available NEFT technology platform to facilitate the public to deposit cash at these BCA outlets and request for remitting money to any of the 85,000 bank branches across the country.

The transaction volumes have grown exponentially and the bank is looking to accommodate requests from 22 additional BCA partners with large franchisee networks of about 20,000 retailers each. Using the existing resources of the franchisee networks, the company has not spent any extra money on technology.

IT Team Internal:

75 MD and CEO:

Dr. Rana Kapoor

WINNER

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FINALISTS Of the 672 nominations in the running, the CIO 100 finalists made it to the top 200. Their path-breaking ideas and remarkable effort left over 400 contestants behind.

FINALISTS Adarsh R. ....................................................................172 Alpna Doshi ...............................................................190 Aman Sood ............................................................... 169 Anibandha Mukhopadhyay ..................................... 193 Anoop Handa ...........................................................160 Arup Choudhury ......................................................160 Avinash G. Jhangiani .................................................191 Balakrishnan A..........................................................161 C.R. Narayanan .........................................................206 Chella Namasivayam M. .......................................... 165 Dinesh Chandna ........................................................178 Dinesh Kumar ........................................................... 152 Dr. J.S. Sodhi ............................................................. 149 Dr. Selvam K. ............................................................. 195 Francis Rajan............................................................. 152 G. Murugesan.............................................................178 G.S. Rao ......................................................................172 Gopal Rangaraj .........................................................190 Harnath Babu ........................................................... 150 Heramba Naik ...........................................................203 Jayakumar M ............................................................ 156 Jitendra Mishra..........................................................157 K. Suresh ................................................................. 200 K.N.C. Nair ..................................................................181 Kamal Karnatak ........................................................ 192 Kamal Sharma ..........................................................180 Kishore Hirani ........................................................... 162 Lt. Col. (Retd) Shankar Gurkha ............................... 163 M.K. Mittal ................................................................. 148 M.P. Ranga Rao ..........................................................157 M.V. Sreeram ..............................................................191 Makarand Sawant .................................................... 155 Manoj Kumar .............................................................167 Mukesh Kumar .........................................................202 Mukul Jain ................................................................. 156 Mukund Prasad ........................................................207 Muralidhara H.S........................................................206 Naagesh Karra .......................................................... 195 Nagesh Aswartha .................................................... 196 Niranjan Bhalivade ................................................... 153 P.L. Chockalingam .................................................... 194 Pradeep Kumar Yadav..............................................208 Prasanth Puliakottu ..................................................197 Pratap Patjoshi ......................................................... 168 Pratap S. Gharge .......................................................151 Pravin Savant .............................................................177 R. Sundararajan .........................................................173 Radhakrishnan G. ..................................................... 153 Raghu Kumar Paruchuri ......................................... 200 Rahul Puri.................................................................. 170

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Rahul Sharma ........................................................... 184 Rahul V. Mahajan ....................................................... 171 Rajeev Mittal ............................................................. 189 Rajendra Deshpande................................................ 194 Rajesh Nair................................................................ 154 Rakesh Mishra .......................................................... 169 Ramakrishnan S. ......................................................202 Ramesh Janarathanam ........................................... 154 Ranendra Datta ........................................................ 193 Ravi Ramakrishnan ..................................................207 Rohan Deshpande .................................................... 184 S. Sekar ..................................................................... 201 S. Srinivasan ............................................................. 198 Samir Kumar Mandal ............................................... 164 Sandipan Chattopadhyay ......................................... 171 Sanjay Chaudhari ......................................................174 Sanjay Chowdhry ......................................................161 Sanjay Jhamb ............................................................181 Sankaranarayanan Raghavan ................................. 148 Sankarson Banerjee................................................. 166 Santosh Singh .......................................................... 155 Saradindu Paul ......................................................... 158 Satyen Naik ............................................................... 198 Sesanka Pemmaraju ................................................ 165 Sharad Agarwal ........................................................ 192 Shivkumar Pandey ................................................... 196 Srinivas Tata.............................................................. 159 Sriram Krishnan ........................................................167 Subhasish Saha ........................................................ 150 Sudesh Agarwal .........................................................174 Sunil Kumar Soni...................................................... 159 Suresh Kumar........................................................... 162 Sushil Tolani .............................................................. 149 T.S. Purushothaman................................................. 189 Tamilvel N .................................................................. 199 Tejas Shah ..................................................................151 Umesh Mehta ........................................................... 170 V. Ranganathan Iyer ................................................. 168 V.K. Anand ..................................................................179 Vinay A. Khargonkar ..................................................173 Vinayak Khadye ........................................................ 166 Vineet Bansal ............................................................180 Virendra Bansal .........................................................177 Vishad Rahangdale .................................................. 158 Vishal Salvi ............................................................... 164 Anand Sengupta........................................Not featured Balvinder Singh ........................................Not featured Balakrishna Rao ........................................Not featured Girish Pillai .................................................Not featured Meghraj Khatri ...........................................Not featured

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2012

Manoj Kumar Mittal, Aegis Logistics

(500+ EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The Aegis Group provides supply chain management services to the Indian petroleum and chemical industry by storing, moving and distributing petroleum and chemical products. The company has seen exponential growth with its annual turnover increasing from Rs 305 crore in 200910 to Rs 4,635 crore in 2011-12. The group is targeting an annual turnover of Rs 6,000 crore during the current year and the responsibility of shouldering the backend support for such growth falls on Manoj Kumar Mittal, head-IT, Aegis Logistics.

Being a service organization, Aegis needed a robust disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan to ensure 99.9 percent availability of its ERP. Mittal built a hot DR site with real-time replication of data, primaryto-DR site switch-over in 15 minutes, and zero or minimal data loss.

This business continuity plan has helped instill confidence in Aegis and its customers. Aegis can now be assured of uninterrupted services to its customers which has given it a strategic competitive advantage. Also, the operational risks for the IT team have been minimized.

Sankarnarayanan Raghavan, AEGON Religare Life Insurance Company (2,000 EMPLOYEES) The relationship between companies and their customers has always been a two-way street—more so in the life insurance vertical. Customers depend on the insurance company for their insurance benefits, and the company depends on its customers for revenue. But many a time, customers don’t pay—or forget to pay— their premiums on time. This adversely impacts both the company and the customer. As a small step to set things right, AEGON Religare Life Insurance’s Director of IT, Sankarnarayanan Raghavan created an automated system that would handle renewal and lapse calling.

The automated system is a combination of IVR, CRM, and ETL (extract, transform and load) technologies. Now, customers receive reminder calls automatically to renew their policies. Customers also receive another reminder seven days, and 14 days after the due date if they fail to pay the premium.

Consequently, this system has brought down the agent intervention rate for payments to 30 percent. The company also holds the distinction of being the only life insurance company to implement survey-by-phone method to gauge customer satisfaction.

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2012

Sushil Tolani, Altisource Business Solutions (6,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Altisource provides mortgage, financial and technology services to government agencies, mortgage bankers, credit unions, and financial services companies across the country.

Hence, business continuity is of utmost importance. But the company’s DR site in Bangalore was crumbling under pressure of a growing business.

Additionally, the company’s primary datacenter at Norcross, in the US, was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. It had a mix of disparate non-virtualized servers, had several failure points, and was difficult to scale.

Sushil Tolani, CIO, Altisource, decided to build a DR datacenter at Denver ground up. Over a period of time, this DR site would become the primary datacenter and the Norcross one would act as a DR site. This would help the company revamp the Norcross DC without business disruption. The new datacenter—equipped with the latest technology—was built at a cost of less than $18 million (Rs 99 crore).

The new DC has RTO and RPO of less than four hours.

The project, in its first phase, has provided the organization with the much needed agile and flexible backend to support its business operations.

Dr. J.S. Sodhi, Amity (5,000 EMPLOYEES) With more than 100 institutions and 85,000 students, Amity doesn’t need introduction. The university has been striving to provide its students with best-in-class, uniform education—with equal opportunities—irrespective of where they have enrolled.

Instead of investing in an expensive video conferencing solution, Dr. J.S. Sodhi, AVP, Amity, blended two existing technologies—e-learning software and surveillance cameras, which are used for distance learning and general surveillance—to achieve this goal. Amity students and teachers can now share audio, video, PPTs, and intellectual resources across over a 100 campuses of the group over MPLS through the e-learning solution. Lectures by eminent domain experts are recorded and stored in the university’s intranet portal. So in case a student misses a lecture, he could view it on the portal.

This concept was developed in-house by Sodhi and his team and hence was a zero-cost project. The project benefits over 95,000 students and has helped the university reduce the travel costs of domain experts who deliver lectures by 80 percent. Thanks to the project, now students in remote locations are exposed to more opportunities to learn.

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2012

Subhasish Saha, Apeejay Surrendra Group (600 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Apeejay Surrendra Group, which completed 100 years of business in 2010, has not let age dampen its zest for growth. But the company was finding it hard to continue with its existing IT infrastructure—which couldn’t even accommodate 30 percent annual storage growth. This is when Subhasish Saha, CTO, Apeejay Surrendra Group, decided to embark on a virtualization project: Fusion.

Saha had virtualized servers in 2008, but it wasn’t scalable and flexible to virtualize all its existing servers.

Also, the existing storage technologies were not supportive of newer disk types like SAS and Flash (SSD). Fusion was a server virtualization and SAN restructuring initiative with data tearing to boost performance, thin provisioning to optimize deployment, and automatic space utilization.

This solution can scale up to 150 TB of storage space and can support requirement of 1,500 business servers.

Fusion can take care of server needs for another seven years and has helped save close to Rs 25 lakh in capex for new servers. It has also helped save 6 percent datacenter power costs, reduced 16 percent cooling cost, and also reduced server space utilization by 70 percent.

Harnath Babu, Aviva Life Insurance

( 500 EMPLOYEES) (4,

When the world-wide Web becomes the primary address for consumers, smart organizations change the way they deliver products and services. By allowing consumers to buy policies online, Harnath Babu, VP, Aviva Life Insurance, has earned Aviva thousands of online customers and millions in premiums.

What’s unique about his system is that it’s built in-house using Open Source technologies, including JBoss, Rabbit MQ, Linux OS, Drools (business rules engine), Struts (Web application framework), etcetera. The system offers customers a seamless purchasing experience. It helps them decide how much they should be insured for, fill out the appropriate forms (existing customers can enter the customer IDs), and use its sophisticated underwriting system to decide instantly whether a policy can be issued instantly or not. On successful completion of a transaction, e-mail and SMS messages are sent to the customer.

The system, says Babu, is designed to have a modular and flexible architecture, which allows it to be re-used and enables sales on other channels. And it’s been tested successfully for high concurrency and scalability.

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2012

Tejas Shah, Axis Asset Management Company (500+ EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Axis Bank is a leading distributor of mutual fund schemes floated by the Axis Asset Management Company.

The bank has over 12,000 staffers in 1,600 branches in over 1,000 Indian cities who drive sales of mutual funds. But it’s up to Axis Asset Management Company (Axis AMC) to ensure the bank’s employees know the different products well enough not to sell the wrong ones—and that no data entry errors creep into filled up forms.

To fix those problems, Tejas Shah, VP-IT, Axis AMC, built My Life Plan—a first-of-its-kind attempt in the mutual fund industry. First, the tool helps the bank’s staffers figure out the best product to sell customers (based on their goals, which could range from buying a house to planning for a world tour) within 15 minutes—doing away entirely with the need to train the bank’s staffers in different MF products.

Then it eliminates paper—and its associated data entry errors—by generating a pre-filled application form based on data that’s auto imported from Finacle. Using bar codes, Shah ensures that data entry is never repeated at any stage post acceptance—at the bank or at Karvy—so that they aren’t rejected.

Pratap Gharge, Bajaj Electricals (1,500 EMPLOYEES) Dealing effectively with mobility, BYOD, and security is one of the top worries hogging CIO mindshare today. Pratap Gharge, EVP and CIO, Bajaj Electricals, found a way to address all these concerns by going down the VDI path.

Gharge implemented virtual desktop interface technology using a private cloud and server virtualization components. Out of 800 desktops due for replacement in the current financial year, 150 have already been replaced with thin clients. The project ‘Private Cloud-based Virtual Desktop Delivery’ has allowed Gharge to formulate a BYOD strategy without having to worry about data security. Today the delivery of all applications—including Windows-based apps—is possible on any device.

Apart from fostering a green IT environment, the project has cut electricity costs from desktops by 90 percent. It helps the company be more compliant by not allowing users to load pirated music, videos, or software.

It also shrunk the time it takes to provision a desktop from about five weeks to 30 minutes, and eliminated the cost and risks associated with data recovery in the event of a disk crash.

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2012

Dinesh Kumar, Bajaj Group-Power Division (5,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The Bajaj Power Division has already made a significant contribution to India’s electricity generation, and is gearing up to do more. The company required a strong IT setup to back its growth. Therefore, its President-IT and CIO, Dinesh Kumar, planned an enterprise-wide ERP implementation to bring about business process transformation. The onus was on the solution to overcome current shortfalls and fill gaps created by home-grown applications.

Apart from providing an enterprise-oriented integrated system, the ERP also turned the company into a processoriented organization. It filled conspicuous gaps in several processes such as contract management, milestone-based payment solutions, and fuel management, among others.

The greatest achievement of the solution is reducing the time taken to complete the order-to-cash cycle by 30 percent. The reporting time for different processes has also gone down from weeks to hours. Operational efficiency has received a boost due to 10 percent reduction in cycle time.

Another remarkable benefit on the employees’ side has been the reduction in payroll time from 15 to five days.

Francis Rajan, Bangalore International Airport (750 EMPLOYEES) The steady growth in the number of passengers traveling by airplanes, and of air traffic management systems is a telling tale of India’s growth. However, such growth does not come without its challenges. Francis Rajan, VP-IT and Communication Technology, BIAL realized that it was time to create a robust storage network framework that is highly available—both for the airport’s operations as well as its customers. It was also important to meet recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) commitments for different business processes.

By deploying an enterprise-class storage system, BIAL has been able to address its storage requirements. The architecture has also been designed in such a way that it supports multi-vendor systems, thereby letting the company introduce multiple products.

The system’s usage of different disk technologies has given BIAL the dual benefits of cost reduction, and future-proofing. Besides, the solution’s snapshot and clone functionalities make the system ready to be used as a DR system for clients and group companies. Also, RPO time has come down from 12 hours to an hour.

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2012

Radhakrishnan G. Biocon (4,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Focusing on innovation and delivering affordable healthcare solutions to patients, partners and healthcare systems across the globe has been Biocon’s motto. And true to his company’s culture Radhakrishnan G., AVP-systems, Biocon, loves to innovate and help his organization function better.

Radhakrishnan’s CRM-based, customized tender management software is the first of its kind in the Indian pharma industry. The solution allows the company to create a lot of market and competitive intelligence reports. This application has a customized approach to achieve a 360-degree view of the tender management process and enables better MIS for planning, achieving targets, and faster turnaround times.

It helps to centralize data and provides universal access to the tender database through any Web-enabled device. The online application accommodates assigning, qualifying, submitting and updating tenders and can capture key tender metrics to develop a strategy relevant to the external environment.

The system can analyze trends on tender fluctuations, personnel performance, competition and task reports. This helps Biocon achieve a more streamlined and transparent tender management process.

Niranjan Bhalivade, CEAT (5,000 EMPLOYEES) To help CEAT get a better grip on the road to success, Niranjan Bhalivade, CIO, CEAT, decided to find ways to increase the efficiency of the company’s field staff, its territory leaders, and give CEAT a better understanding of its different markets.

“A tool was required to capture information from the field and collate it at an all-India level. Also, it was imperative to improve the quality of calls of sales people and monitor them through these initiatives,” says Bhalivade.

The mobile-based system (Galaxy tablets) he implemented allows the 350-strong sales force to plan their routes more effectively, decide which towns to focus on, and includes dashboards so that they can access information that helps close sales. It also helps territory leaders monitor sales staff, different sales schemes, and market share; track incentives and sales-against-plan across categories; improve collections; and manage leads among others.

Finally, the increased amount of real time information in the system now allows management to react faster, making the company more alert and agile.

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2012

Rajesh R. Nair, Credit Suisse Business Management (India) (1,000 EMPLOYEES )

FINALIST

Credit Suisse Business Management (India) is a global financial services company. For its first branch in India, the company required an alternate site—a DR site—which functions like a primary office, in case the latter goes down.

Rajesh R. Nair, VP-Business Continuity, Credit Suisse, identified an alternate site taking these factors into account: Risk exposure, cost advantage, operational feasibility, and ability to set up quickly. The team zeroed in on a site which was one of the bank’s group entities. This reduced costs and also resulted in quick approvals resulting in easy installation.

The IT implementation involved installing key infrastructure components like the RBI RTGS terminals and applications such as NDS. Leased lines to connect to international locations and primary offices to allow replication capabilities were also laid out.

Leveraging existing facilities of the bank’s group entity and its global application infrastructure footprint has ensured a hot standby site, which could be used without any major technology changes. The bank is now compliant with all regulatory requirements, and adheres to its promise of being a premier bank by boosting customer confidence.

Ramesh Janarathanam, Crompton Greaves (9,000 EMPLOYEES ) Crompton Greaves (CG) began acquiring many units outside India after 2005. As a result, the company had multiple ERP instances from SAP, IFS, MFG Pro, SAGE, and Timber spread across 17 units in India and 19 units across nine countries.

Ramesh Janarathanam, GM-IT, Crompton Greaves, realized that the company needed to integrate its operations and move to a single ERP instance. It also needed to cater to the growth targets set for the next five years. To achieve this, Janarathanam started an infrastructure overhaul exercise. This included a hardware refresh, updating its ERP to the latest versions (Oracle to version 10g and SAP to version ECC 6.0 EHP5), and enabling a unicode upgrade for multi-language support, among others.

CG can now consolidate procurement for customer needs while efficiently managing funds and inventory for all its production units. This has resulted in faster response to business needs. This project has significantly lowered TCO, and helped CG meet its growth target for the next five years.

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Makarand Sawant, Deepak Fertilizers & Petrochemicals (1,800 EMPLOYEES )

FINALIST

Deepak Fertilizers & Petrochemicals (DFPCL) is among India’s leading producers of industrial chemicals and fertilizers with a global footprint. The company is now focused on global growth, drawing strengths from its existing product and plant synergies and adding new product lines and plants.

However, its existing IT infrastructure could not keep up with its expansion plans and the conglomerate was looking to expand its datacenter.

To this end, Makarand Sawant, AGM-IT, Deepak Fertilizers & Petrochemicals, built a new TIER II datacenter with intelligent LAN and load-balanced MPLS WAN infrastructure. The team also implemented enterprise security architecture for 14 locations on MPLS WAN, resulting in enhanced security. Sawant also set up a service desk solution that supports ITIL best practices for ITSM. The tool performs a critical role in the organization by ensuring employee productivity across the organization and communication between IT and the business.

Other enhancements in the datacenter have resulted in high performance of its enterprise IT and security architecture, ensured business continuity and high availability.

Santosh Singh, Dharampal Satyapal (1,800 EMPLOYEES ) Dharampal Satyapal (DS) is a diversified conglomerate that has a strong presence in sectors like F&B and hospitality.

With an expanding portfolio of products leading to more employees, the group was looking to redesign its employee management process.

Santosh Singh, associate VP-IT, Dharampal Satyapal, created a platform to manage the end-to-end processes in an employee’s lifecycle. It is also integrated with different applications—like payroll, F&A, HR—that were running on different platforms. The key modules include workforce analytics (including hiring based on approved organizational structure), compensation analytics (reimbursement, taxation, loans), performance analytics (KRA and competency-based systems) among others.

The organization now has a fully automated payout system and can plan manpower requirements for different departments and succession strategies, based on employee skill set quickly and effectively. The solution has also reduced duplicity of work thus improving productivity. This has helped the company realize business value by increasing operational efficiency while reducing costs.

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2012

Mukul Jain, DLF Pramerica Life Insurance Company (2,300 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

DLF Pramerica Life Insurance (DPLI) is a joint venture between DLF and Prudential International Insurance Holdings, a US-based financial services leader. Realizing the potential in small towns and rural areas, the company was banking on IT to provide them an edge.

Mukul Jain, CIO, DLF Pramerica Life Insurance Company, realized that communication is the vital element that can make the difference to DPLI’s fortunes in rural India. To enable the sales team to reach out efficiently to its audience, Jain equipped them with tablets with a host of pre-loaded tools such as insurance calculators and benefit illustrations. The field personnel also used these tablets—which were equipped with 3G and GPRS—to process applications thus lowering the policy processing time and increasing data quality due to reduced manual intervention. This also helped in processing policies in real-time due to back-end integration with the company’s core policy admin system.

The project has increased market coverage, enhanced customer experience, encouraged better quality of sales, enabled faster policy processing time, and reduced data errors and costs.

Jayakumar M., Eastern Condiments (2,500 EMPLOYEES) Eastern Condiments started as a family-managed business and soon transformed into a professionally-run organization by adopting sound corporate governance practices. However, it was not until a defamation attack on the brand that it jumped on the social media bandwagon, and then there was no looking back.

Jayakumar M., head-IT, Eastern Condiments, initially used social media to implement a solid and instantaneous reputation management system. Since then, it has helped the business open a conversation with its customers and stakeholders and streamline its innovation cycles. These include the ability to receive quick feedback on products and services, speed up knowledge discovery, solicit ideas from a wider pool of talent, and invite external audiences to share better recipes.

The platform, which is primarily used by the marketing, communications and sales teams, has also seen traction among other employees and is bridging the gap between employees and management. It has also led to a shift in strategy and helped the company expand into new market segments due to the emergence of new social-media-enabled business model.

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Jitendra Mishra, Elder Pharmaceuticals (4,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Elder Pharmaceuticals has a very simple business strategy: To introduce new concepts and products rather than competing in already fiercely competitive markets.

In order to do this, it has created an extensive intellectual asset base and a powerful R&D division.

Jitendra Mishra, CIO, Elder Pharmaceuticals, wanted to set up a cost-effective collaboration platform which would be the hub of knowledge for employees around the globe. This would leverage existing internal knowledge assets, help employees share information, provide them assistance, and help them learn from past performance.

Mishra and his team set up a corporate intranet site called the Elder emPower portal which would serve as a single window for all IT processes, including business applications and workflow management.

The portal also ensured that staff members have access to the most up-to-date corporate information and data.

These include tasks such as submitting expense or leave requests, online appraisals, and many other features. The one-stop solution has resulted in improved productivity and decision-making by reducing redundant tasks.

M.P. Ranga Rao, Electronics Corporation of India (4,000 EMPLOYEES) Electronics Corporation of India (ECIL) was setup under the Department of Atomic Energy to generate a strong, indigenous, capability in the field of professional grade electronics. ECIL’s mission is to consolidate its status as a valued national asset in the area of strategic electronics with specific focus on atomic energy, defense, security and critical sectors of national importance. The company is engaged in the design, development, manufacture and marketing of several products with emphasis on three technology lines: Computers, control systems and communications.

The organization was looking to enhance its information security systems in order to be compliant with regulatory requirements and keep in line with its vision of being selfreliant in strategic electronics.

M. P. Ranga Rao, CISO, ECIL, implemented an enterprisewide information security management system. This centrally managed, policy-based, security solution takes a granular based approach for all information assets thus ensuring integrity, confidentiality, and availability at all times. This has also helped the organization to mitigate and reduce risks to acceptable levels.

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2012

Saradindu Paul, Electrosteel Castings (1,200 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Electrosteel Castings is the leading manufacturer and worldwide supplier of Ductile Iron Pipes and Fittings. The company was looking to create a data network for an area of 6.5 km covering 29 plants and offices, to support more than 1,000 end-clients. It also wanted to enable them to use applications such as SAP, exchange e-mail and access the Internet.

For Saradindu Paul, AVP-Corporate IT, Electrosteel Castings, the biggest challenge in creating this network was the Greenfield nature of the project coupled with a lack of skilled manpower, poor support from local vendors, and reluctance of data link service providers at remote locations.

But Paul was determined. He built a network completely on wireless technology, despite constant signal disruptions due to extensive construction work. The team has also set up a wireless video surveillance which can be remotely operated and is available over the Web. The system is built using 11 IP cameras mounted on tall structures of the plant, like chimneys, and self-supported towers at strategic locations.

This network also supports videoconferencing in four locations across different geographies.

Vishad Rahangdale, Electrotherm India (2,500 EMPLOYEES) Electrotherm India is the only Indian company with indigenously developed world class technologies. The company was looking to transform its IT Infrastructure, communicate effectively and securely, while reducing its carbon footprint, as it embarked on a journey of recovery from the global meltdown to consolidate and develop pathbreaking new products.

To achieve that, Vishad Rahangdale, CIO, Electrotherm India, initiated a slew of projects. First he designed a cloud-based, cost efficient, highly flexible, and scalable infrastructure. He created a unified solution platform for employees to collaborate and share information, provided access to private cloud for all applications, and deployed a centralized security assurance and policy system. The team also optimized existing resources and deployed access-controlled document management systems.

This has resulted in standardized operation with flexible options such as BYOD and has ensured complete security with the help of an integrated DLP solution. It has also succeeded in reducing the company’s carbon footprint. The printing costs have reduced to Rs 2.5 lakh from Rs 15 lakh per annum.

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Srinivas Tata, Essar Projects (India) (3,700 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

With an expanding geography and operations in a wide array of sectors, it was extremely complex for Essar Projects (India) to monitor KPIs. A single view of the operational and financial truth was missing.

The company required a reporting platform which could integrate all the reporting requirements of the company’s management, perform trend analysis and forecasting, and has the capability to drill-down each KPI at the corporate level to its strategic business units.

Srinivas Tata, CIO, Essar Projects (India), integrated seven dashboards (CEO, finance, business development, HR, health, safety and environment, equipment / asset utilization and maintenance and risk analysis) into a single SAP-based MIS. Data from various systems is now pulled in the SAP business warehouse, analyzed, and a snapshot of actionable information is provided to senior management.

The Web-based dashboard has reduced the time taken to select financial data by 30 percent and improved the efficiency of the reporting process by 20 percent. It has also provided the company with a competitive edge as top management can now interpret data quickly and effectively.

Sunil Kumar Soni, Ester Industries (500 EMPLOYEES) Ester Industries is one of India’s leading producers of polyester films and engineering plastics. To address growing customer demands and business, the company wanted to upgrade its ERP and hardware with minimum downtime and investment.

To address these needs, Sunil Kumar Soni, CIO, Ester Industries, set up a new server infrastructure. He started with a blade server technology with chassis that was scalable—it can be populated with up to 14 blades.

With virtual blade servers, the organization was able to maintain the requisite instances for quality, development and production. The old ERP (ECC 4.7) was running on a virtual environment. This allowed data to be migrated as is from the old to the new hardware. A different virtual environment on the same physical servers was used to setup the new ERP (ECC 6) and data was moved to the new setup. The servers are linked to a consolidated storage on fiber, reducing total planned downtime.

The new server infrastructure allows Ester’s application workloads to be distributed in a virtual environment, saving additional expenses and creating a robust and flexible IT environment.

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2012

Arup Choudhury, Eveready Industries India (2,400 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Upgrading core business applications is a challenge by any measure. So when Eveready Industries decided it needed to upgrade its ERP to the latest instance (Oracle eBusiness suite from R11.10.2 to R12.1.3) to ensure IFRS compliance, CIO Arup Choudhury got ready for a large complex project.

Only, he found a more elegant solution.

Traditionally, complex ERP upgrades require engaging a consulting firm to do requirement analysis, map the differences between the two releases, transform processes wherever necessary, and then test the application before deployment. It can take up to a year and cost a packet.

Choudhury avoided all of these problems by finding and testing a SaaS solution from Panaya. Choudhury and his team downloaded an agent from Panaya and installed it in the R11 instance. This agent extracted code and usage details and uploaded it to its portal. After analyzing the data for 48 hours, it suggested what needed to be done to make the upgrade work.

The solution, which Choudhury took a big risk on and required much testing, allowed Eveready to complete its upgrade in three months—without any external help. And it saved the company about Rs 90 lakh.

Anoop Handa, Fullerton India Credit Company (6,200 EMPLOYEES) For Fullerton India, lending to its five member groups in rural India—as part of its financial inclusion initiative— was creating security issues. The company needed to enable centralized control over field collection data and prevent fraud related to manual receipts and cash accounting. Also, recording OTRR-based collections and weekly meeting attendance is critical to the company.

Anoop Handa, CIO, Fullerton India Credit Company, deployed a solution which would incorporate straight through processing of weekly field collections onto a centrally hosted core-lending platform. Using biometric handheld devices, these weekly meetings are completed within 30 minutes where cash is collected, accounted for, receipts printed, and attendance marked for about 50 people.

Biometric authentication acts as a credit surrogate. These handheld devices also reverse sync with the core lending platform to automatically update collections accounting.

This improved customer service and process efficiency by saving time and effort. One field officer can now conduct about five meetings in half a day. Checks and balances regarding collection performance, attendance, and cash handling at branches can be centrally monitored.

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Sanjay Chowdhry, General Cable Energy India (200+ EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

General Cable India, a subsidiary of General Cable Corporation, USA, serves the growing market for energy infrastructure and construction cables in India. The company manufactures a wide range of wires and cables for customers in industry verticals like telecommunications, utilities, transport and logistics. General Cable India set up its first Indian plant in Baddi, Himanchal Pradesh in April 2012 and with the growth of the company came the need for a standardized IT system.

Sanjay Chowdhry, head-IT, General Cable Energy India, opted out of expensive, off-the-shelf ERP software and chose a product called LX by Infor. The ERP system has brought in operational excellence by smoothening and automating processes. Modules like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, manage-the-enterprise-plan-to-build, among others cover all business processes including customer orders, order processing, bill payments, invoicing, accounting, financial consolidation, plant management, and production planning and management. Chowdhry has also integrated iTAX Software with the ERP to provide indirect taxation reports, registers, forms, eTDS filing, export forms and annexure.

A. Balakrishnan, Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services (2,675 EMPLOYEES) Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services is a leading retail financial services company with over 6 lakh clients and a network of over 546 offices. But as customer interest in financial instruments waned and exchange volumes dropped, Geojit Paribas, whose brick-and-mortar and offline model created overheads, felt the pressure.

“We initiated a project to rollout more products and services using online channels. The idea was to lower operating and HR costs, retain clients, and grab more market share,” says CTO A. Balakrishnan.

The product portfolio launched in conjunction with the initiative is called Smart Plus. It includes equity SIPs, alerts through mobile and the Web, Marketwatch over mobile, and Trailing Stop Loss, among others. Plus, Balakrishnan’s team rolled out mobile solutions for multiple platforms, virtualized more, and implemented more products with intelligence to help customer cut their losses.

The result of this multi-pronged approach is that, “40 percent of our business comes from online and 60 percent of it is from mobile devices,” says Balakrishnan. And the company lowered headcount from 3,300 to 2,700 and closed 12 branches.

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2012

Suresh Kumar, Grant Thornton India (1,200 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Grant Thornton is one of the oldest and prominent accountancy firms with over 1,000 professionals in India.

The company generates a plethora of client engagement data and other business critical information that had to be streamlined—and stored centrally for regulatory compliance.

Suresh Kumar, CIO and partner, Grant Thornton, deployed an automated business data collation solution which allows fast, secure, and optimized data collation over the corporate network without disrupting users. The solution is built on open source technologies. The system is scalable up to any level—without any software licensing costs. The solution also offers automated backup storage with zero user intervention. It also sends e-mail reminders to users who have missed backing up their data. The system allows synchronization of user data using Rsync protocol which is initiated and controlled using a custom developed client application installed on every corporate laptop.

At present, the project has achieved compliance requirements of storing business critical information centrally on a fully redundant and highly available NAS/SAN.

Kishore Hirani, Gujarat Gas Company (600 EMPLOYEES) Gujarat Gas Company (GGCL) distributes gas to about 360,000 industrial, commercial, and domestic customers; and CNG to over 181,600 vehicles. Although the company had a disaster recovery (DR) setup for its mission critical applications, it suffered from worryingly high recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). A previous disaster had left the company with days of downtime.

Under GM-IT, Kishore Hirani’s watch, GGCL invested in an enterprise-wide business continuity strategy.

Hirani and his team designed a DR setup, reducing GGCL’s backup window of 24 hours to less than 12 hours, drastically shrinking RPO from 48-96 hours to zero, and delivering 99.9 percent uptime.

The setup was established with three-way data replication for near-line and far disaster recovery sites. The real-time replication from the production site to near-line storage helps the business achieve zero-data loss in any eventuality.

Additionally, it brought significant cost savings due to simplified and automated replication and recovery. It also helped GGCL achieve an almost 50 percent performance improvement in business applications like SAP and billing.

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Lt. Col. Shankar Gurkha, Gujarat Industries Power Company (558 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Being a public sector enterprise, the purchase department of Gujarat Industries Power Company (GIPCL) has to use a streamlined purchase process where materials or services are procured through a competitive bidding process.

But its tender processing for procurements was manual. As a result, it lacked transparency and created long lead times for purchases. GIPCL did use a third-party online tendering system, on payment basis, for higher-value tenders, but that wasn’t really cutting it. “The response from vendors was not satisfactory and delays in procurement affected business severely,” says DGM-IT, Shankar Gurkha.

After much deliberation, an in-house development approach was adopted and Gurkha and his team designed an e-tendering system, which provides GIPCL’s purchase department with a secure Web platform for the online procurement of material and services.

The project is already reaping benefits. The cost of the project was recovered within two months of the project’s launch and GIPCL saved Rs 6.8 lakh in the first year. The lead time for procurement has been cut to a single day in emergency cases.

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When IT Analytics and Cricket Go Hand in Hand With technology like analytics and video analysis being used extensively, cricket has evolved phenomenally over time.

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2012

Samir Mandal, Haldia Petrochemicals (1,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Haldia Petrochemicals (HPL) is a joint venture between the Government of West Bengal, the Chatterjee group, the Tatas and IOCL. Samir Mandal, GM-IT, Haldia Petrochemicals, wanted to invest in a more robust, reliable, and scalable IT security system to enable secure access to internal IT resources via the Internet.

Mandal convinced his management to invest in a secured access gateway with optimal network performance. He implemented internal and external firewalls that segregate users and server zones, among other things. The new security framework has ensured authentication, authorization, audit trail and protection of HPL’s assets from internal and external threats.

As a result, the company is now able to perform online sales transactions worth Rs 6,000 crore per year. It also managed to save opex of Rs 50 lakh annually. The company discovered that it received approximately 60 percent spam mails and 10-20 percent unsolicited attacks from different ports. But the company was able to block them, thanks to the new framework.

Vishal Salvi, HDFC Bank (66,076 EMPLOYEES) With growing external threats, and the increasing usage of online and mobile channels, the banking sector has been strengthening its security posture. In line with that, Vishal Salvi, CISO and SVP, HDFC, wanted to invest in a solution which would prevent the unauthorized movement of the bank’s confidential data.

Using Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention Suite, Salvi divided the project in three phases. In the first phase, Salvi identified sensitive data, and ascertained common exit points for such data. In the second phase, monitoring controls were de-centralized, allowing the business and HR to independently review and address potential data loss incidents. This lowered overheads on the information security team and allowed the business to suggest policy revisions in order to lower false-positives. The last phase involved gradually ‘blocking’ transfers of sensitive data after consulting stakeholders and analyzing incidents recorded in the system over time.

Today, a dashboard is published to the bank’s Information Security Committee on a quarterly basis, and directives from the committee are used to strengthen policies and incident management process.

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S. Pemmaraju, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India (5,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Last year, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India took over Sierra Atlantic, an IT services company. The erstwhile Sierra Atlantic had a physical server farm of over 300 Intel, Linux and RISC-based servers and Sesanka Pemmaraju, director-IS and chief-information security, and his team, virtualized them into a private cloud. This reduced opex costs for power, cooling, administration, and addressed continuous demand for server allocation. “We have also organized VM templates for developers to test and develop applications on a virtual platform. We’re now able to deploy single or multiple VM’s in minutes,” he says.

Server management became easy with virtualization and centralized administration. The datacenter currently supports both 32 and 64 bit platforms and a wide range of operating systems. Also, application and database cloning and provisioning has been further simplified.

The private cloud lowered HCSSIL’s datacenter opex costs by 35 percent, while its datacenter footprint has shrunk by 70 percent. “Post deployment, server and application provisioning time has reduced from 12 hours to less than 60 minutes,” says Pemmaraju.

Chella Namasivayam M., iGate Global Solutions (27,432 EMPLOYEES) Faced with a growing number of users accessing corporate assets while on the move, and an increasing number of security incidents stemming from viruses, malware, and other modern threats, iGate decided to implement a secure Web gateway project with Websense.

Using a hybrid solution from Websense, iGate can enforce its Internet usage policy—on any device—in the cloud and protect corporate and roaming users from malware, viruses, spyware, etcetera. A data loss prevention solution from the same vendor helps the IT/ITeS player monitor and protect sensitive information from being leaked on the Web, and reduce its exposure to security breaches.

“The real-time scanning and categorization capabilities of the solution also enable us to give our employees access to social networking and other Web 2.0 content without compromising security or creating legal liability risks,” says Chella Namasivayam, CIO, iGate Global Solutions.

In addition, the project offers iGate centralized policy management and the ability to optimize bandwidth. A reporting server is configured to consolidate all Internet access logs for reporting and forensic reasons.

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2012

Vinayak Khadye, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company (1,400 EMPLOYEES )

FINALIST

The effectiveness of any insurance plan depends on the speed at which an insurer can settle a claim in case of emergencies. IndiaFirst Life Insurance (IFL) came up with a novel way to expedite its claims process. IndiaFirst’s vision of settling cash-less claims within two hours of discharge intimation has become a reality with the introduction of its pre-paid insurance card system.

At a basic level, the project is an integration of the core insurance system, core banking system, pre-paid card system, and health claim management system. Under this system, IFL procures non-personalized cards from the issuing bank, pre-loads them with a low value, and dispatches the cards to customers along with insurance policy documents. When a customer is admitted to a hospital, he can swipe the card at a POS machine to settle claims.

The health card can be used only at hospitals in the IFL / TPA network, and the hospitals send the final bills to IFL for final payment. The introduction of the health card has been of great use to people in medical emergencies.

Sankarson Banerjee, Indiainfoline (18,000 EMPLOYEES ) One of India’s leading brokerage houses, Indiainfoline (IIFL) has grown rapidly and has transformed from an equity research firm into a financial powerhouse. A key initiative fueling that transformation is CIO Sankarson Banerjee’s decision to outsource a significant chunk of IIFL’s IT. The long-term IT outsourcing partnership covers a centralized helpdesk, desk-side support, network, storage, and datacenter hosting technology, among others. This, says Banerjee, reduces people dependency and points of failure, and gives more business value to existing applications.

The partnership, he says, uses an outcome-based SLAbased model, not the more conventional resource or partSLA approach.

Already the outsourcing strategy has resulted in a 30 percent reduction in call volumes from users, a 20 percent improvement in user satisfaction, and an ‘abandoned call’ ratio of less than five percent—a world-class level. First call resolution rate also increased, while average call duration is kept at less than three minutes.

“Much of IIFL’s key business is delivered by users involved in real-time transactions and the ability to respond to them faster means increased trading transactions,” he says.

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Sriram Krishnan, ING Life Insurance (6,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

To increase the speed and the number of insurance policies it converts from proposals to policies, ING Life Insurance automated the underwriting process and enabled its branches offices to accept risk and issue policies to customers in real time.

This is different from its earlier process in which insurance forms and documents received at branches were scanned and sent to data entry locations and then given to underwriters.

Today, customer service executives at 350 branches use an interactive interface which allows them to capture information from proposals and submit it for acceptance. If there are additional underwriting requirements needed from customer, or shortfalls in premium, they are highlighted immediately, ensuring that proposals are converted faster and customers have a more pleasant experience.

The project required integrating.Net pages with AS400 in a complex environment using two BPM solutions. But today the Web-based solution can be also deployed at the locations of the ING Life Insurance’s partners and on handheld devices. Krishnan expects the number of cases processed using the new system to increase by over 40 percent this year.

Manoj Kumar, Jai Suspension Systems (1,200 EMPLOYEES) Jai Suspension Systems, a subsidiary of Jamna Auto Industries, has been a trusted supplier of tapered leaf and parabolic springs to major Indian commercial vehicle manufacturers for over 50 years. To promote sales and better service quality, the company decided to employ a simple yet efficient technology.

Manoj Kumar, AGM-IT, Jai Suspension Systems, has inserted a unique number in the barcode on the company’s aftermarket products. When a customer sends this number to the company through an SMS, a customer care executive calls the customer and takes his feedback about the product along with personal information like birthday, anniversary, etcetera. The company wishes customers and sends gifts based on this information. Each number carries some reward points that get accumulated in the customer’s account—depending on the product—and can be redeemed.

This has helped the company enjoy a substantial increase in sales volume. Having a clear idea about the distribution network also helps its employees to focus on problem areas by reaching them directly. Its market share in the aftermarket segment has increased from 10 to 12 percent.

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V. Ranganathan Iyer, Jay Bharat Maruti Group (16,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

When in 2010, the Indian automotive industry was feeling the heat of the slowdown, Jay Bharat Maruti’s management decided to run against the grain and invest in an ERP. The timing was great because it allowed the company to gather its best minds together for requirement analysis.

In a rare show of business interest in IT, the project’s steering committee was headed by the CMD and included corporate finance, corporate purchase, corporate IT, and three business group heads. Plus, the core team had only seven IT members—and over 30 members from the business side.

“Members moved from the business to understand IT and shouldered the responsibility of understanding, learning what configuration is all about, implementing, and maintaining the same,” says V. Ranganathan Iyer, group CIO, JBM Group. Iyer and his team ensured the group’s business leaders were trained in the technology, enabling them to configure and maintain the ERP system post-deployment.

All that interest resulted in a smooth single-instance ERP deployment across the group. Today, the ERP project, codenamed Touchstone, helps the group with the decision support system it promised.

Pratap Patjoshi, JCB India (1,260 EMPLOYEES) JCB India is India’s largest manufacturer of earthmoving and construction equipment.

It wanted to empower its dealer sales force—even those based out of some of India’s remotest locations—with the ability to capture customer information and sales leads on the move.

To do that, Pratap Pat Joshi, GM and CIO at JCB India, turned to a mobile solution.

Multiple mobile platforms are now integrated with the company’s CRM and ERP systems. Users can now capture customer data and feed it via their mobiles to a central server. This enables users to perform real-time online transactions. Users can also assess market trends, competitor information, and current market share on their mobiles. Access is available offline, and other locations like mining sites and coal fields—where GSM is unavailable.

The system is designed to capture data offline, and transmit it to the server when Web access is restored.

The project improved forecast accuracy, reduced cycle time, and improved conversion rates. It has also improved overall sales decision-making due to access to timely data.

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2012

Aman Sood, JDA Software Group (3,400 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

With 14 offices in the US, 23 international locations, and over 3,000 employees, JDA Software delivers supply chain management solutions to customers across the world. In India, it’s rapid time-to-value and 24/7 functional and technical support requirements meant that it needed to improve its infrastructure. So the company decided to revamp its second-largest datacenter situated in Bangalore, covering 3,200 sq.ft.

“We needed to improve the reliability, availability and maintainability of the DC and ensure that it was ready for expected organic and inorganic growth. It was necessary that the DC was maintained as per world-class standards,” says Aman Sood, director-IT, JDA Software.

The revamp improved floor space utilization and cooling efficiency, and it brought in 100 percent power redundancy to the level of each device and service. Sood’s team was also able to sustain 100 percent accurate information regarding asset and inventory management. The project shrunk the company’s physical server footprint by 24 percent and rack footprint by 36 percent. It has also helped increase cooling efficiency by 16 percent and shut down one HVAC unit.

Rakesh Mishra, Jindal Steel and Power (4,500 EMPLOYEES) For its upcoming greenfield 12.5 MTPA integrated steel and power plant in Angul, the $2.3 billion Jindal Steel & Power wanted to have the highest level of availability for its business applications, including its ERP, and other business applications. But JSPL’s head-IT&C, Rakesh Mishra, faced a challenge: The whole plant was in project stage, which meant that fixed communication infrastructure—whether it was for data, voice or video— was out of question.

“The only possible alternative was wireless infrastructure,” says Mishra, who created a RF wireless setup across the various project sites in Angul, which including a colony campus, covers over 5,000 acres. The project called “One Connection, Many Solutions” carries data from 25 business applications including SAP, serves as the backbone for a video surveillance network (with 81 CCTV cameras), and links an IP phone network and cable TV for the 540 inhabitants of the colony.

“Such a huge wireless network is one of the largest and most diverse wireless networks established in India. It is one of a kind,” says Mishra.

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2012

Rahul Puri, Jubilant FoodWorks (14,000 EMPLOYEES )

FINALIST

Jubilant FoodWorks is the master franchisee for the fastest-growing Dominos pizza country in the world and is India’s market leader with a 70 percent share in the pizza home delivery segment.

The rising demand for home deliveries got Rahul Puri, AVP-IT & CISO, Jubilant FoodWorks, to devise a mobile ordering application for the growing population of smart phone users. The application helps customers perform a one-click re-order from a previously saved preference, and is available as a native application for major mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry and J2ME. The application also allows customers to view and use the complete menu to place an order directly with identified Domino’s stores. It also accepts all online coupons introduced by Domino’s Pizza India. To place an order using the app, customers need to register via their mobile number and SMS pin verification.

The project lent Jubilant competitive advantage, by making it the first among its peers to provide a pan-India mobile order solution, says Puri.

Umesh Mehta, Jubilant Life Sciences (6,300 EMPLOYEES) Jubilant Life Sciences is a global pharmaceutical and life sciences company. Like any manufacturing company, Jubilant treasured its assets—plant and machinery. To reduce application maintenance costs and to better track and maintain its assets the company turned to its CIO, Umesh Mehta.

Jubilant had implemented an asset management application in 2008 covering four plants. But each plant existed as a separate instance on a separate physical server. The processes mapped across these plants were incongruent and adhered only to local plant requirements. Mehta decided to consolidate asset management and plant maintenance over a virtualized environment. This would reduce capex and opex costs of implementing and maintaining them.

The project was implemented in a record time of four months. It saved application costs by rationalizing licenses across already implemented sites and used these rationalized licenses for two new plants that were brought under the project. It also reduced application maintenance cost by introducing common processes, forms, and reports across the enterprise.

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2012

Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Just Dial (6,200 EMPLOYEES )

FINALIST

Providing local search services over the phone, the Web, and SMS, Just Dial has successfully carved itself a niche in the Indian user’s mind. But Just Dial’s CEO, V.S.S. Mani wanted to do more for Just Dial’s users. He didn’t just want to give them a list of businesses offering a certain service, like spas, in a certain area. He wanted a way to help them figure out which one to go to using the most authentic indicator: User reviews.

To enable that, the company’s CTO, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, created a solution that collated reviews from millions of unique users creating reviews on multiple channels. “We update ratings collated from 11 call centers— and other mediums including the Web, and WAP. We also segregate them according to a user’s social circle—by allowing them to tag their friends by their phone numbers— making a review that much more credible,” he says.

Thanks to a contest Just Dial launched to drive up the number of reviews, the company currently has 13 million ratings. And a graphical representation of the reviews— across a time frame—helps Just Dial’s staff perform detailed analysis.

Rahul V. Mahajan, K. Raheja (1,400 EMPLOYEES) K. Raheja has multiple lines of business with independent organization hierarchies for business segments. Frequent transfers of users across departments, locations, and business segments required frequent change of user profiles. This needed to be regularly updated in the authorization profiles of users. With 104 company codes, 170 divisions, over 800 plant codes in the system, over 380 SAP users and over 1,400 ESS users, this was a complex challenge.

Rahul V. Mahajan, AVP-IT, K. Raheja, came up with the idea of a self-service authorization portal for SAP users, wherein they can perform transactions on their own for: User ID creations, modifications, and authorization management. The portal is integrated with SAP. The solution enables proactive tracking of usage of a particular license category at the time of user ID creation. Users can use the online SAP authorization portal for their authorization activities including new SAP ID, change in profile, and change in organizational elements, etcetera.

This saves time and reduces human intervention, while ensuring ease of use and licensing compliance.

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2012

Adarsh R., Kerala Financial Corporation (262 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Kerala Financial Corporation (KFC) has been supporting industrial growth by relentlessly promoting entrepreneurship in the Indian state of Kerala—for the last sixty years. But one of its processes, the sale of seized properties was done manually. The company used to conduct this through a system of closed-tender and posttender negotiation. This procedure was risky because nondiscretionary officers could finalize a sale after negotiations and bidders could form a cartel before the auction.

Adarsh R., AGM-systems, Kerala Financial Corporation, decided to change that. He automated the system and created an e-property sale portal. By resorting to an online public auction, there’s no scope for cartels to operate, making the entire process transparent.

Photos and videos of the property are uploaded against each property to enable the bidder to have a close look at the property before bidding. The borrower can also view the sale process. Today, the project has helped the company introduce wider property coverage with more participation in auctions. It has also reduced KFC’s advertising costs.

G.S. Rao, KSK Energy Ventures (1,200+ EMPLOYEES) Beginning its journey commissioning a small 20MW power plant at Kasargod, Kerala, to being known as a champion of merchant power plants 10 years later, KSK Energy Ventures has come a long way. To help the company keep pace with this growth, the company’s CIO, G.S. Rao, created a state-of-the-art datacenter, one that kept in mind costs and ROI. “It’s very well-structured and has minimal-investment infrastructure that will provide support for a very long time. To ensure ROI, we put a great deal of forethought and planning to ensure resources were optimized and downtime was brought to a minimum,” says Rao. Rao also endeavored—and managed—to move all critical systems and services without disruption. As a back up, his team also devised an alternate route, a DR site ready with minimal access downtime of three to four hours, ensuring business transactions remain uninterrupted.

The result is a datacenter that provides 98.5 percent up-time; anytime, anywhere access; and 24/7 support to KSK Energy Ventures’ staff at its headquarters, branch offices, and plant sites. The datacenter was launched on August 15, 2011.

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2012

Vinay A. Khargonkar, Larsen & Toubro Heavy Engineering (3,000+ EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

L&T’s Heavy Engineering division manufactures and supplies custom designed and engineered equipment to coresector industries and the defense sector. In the crucial sector it operates in, there is no scope for missed deadlines.

To help improve control and eliminate delays, Vinay Khargaonkar, head-IT, L&T Heavy Engineering, deployed a common reporting layer across the division’s four large enterprise systems using a BI suite. The idea was to improve supply chain visibility across multiple business functions.

These systems included PLM, ERP, and Critical Chain Project Management and Planning, among others.

The IT team then extended the reporting solution to track key business parameters by deploying business dashboards to enhance data-driven decision making. The dashboards monitored on-time delivery, financials, delivery performance index, safety statistics, and HR, among others.

“We have now seen a reduction in cycle time in various supply chain operations and eliminated data redundancy and manual errors by introducing system controls. Real time status availability has also improved delivery time,” says Khargaonkar.

R. Sundara Rajan, L&T Infrastructure Development Projects (650 EMPLOYEES) L&T IDPL develops roads, metros and ports in public private partnership mode. Currently, it has over 1,100 km of roads under development with an investment of about Rs 12,000 crore.

One of the issues it faces is dealing with preconstruction activities. “The challenge is enormous. They include removing trees, demolishing existing structures, covering or shifting electrical and water supply utilities, etcetera. We felt the need for specialized software to help us monitor these activities,” says head- IS, R. Sundara Rajan. These activities are critical for the success of a project because delays affect project deadlines resulting in cost overruns and delays in commercial toll operations.

So last year, Rajan and his team designed “Strip Chart (PC)” software to quicken pre-construction activities. A visual strip chart provides the status of pre-construction activities and the ‘clearance’ status of any section of a project. Details of various pre-construction activities are also available to stakeholders online. The software brought in visibility to all stakeholders including construction contractors.

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Sanjay Chaudhari, L&T Power (7,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

L&T Power started with six projects. Many of these projects were cruising at top speed and needed a system that could streamline the process of material inspection. To fulfil quality audit needs, materials ready for shipment need to be inspected against pre-defined quality standards. This process was disjointed, leading to a waste of time.

Sanjay Chaudhari, head-IT services, L&T Power, created a real-time, online portal—vendor call management system (VCMS). This system involves the company’s quality team, vendors, and third-party inspection agencies (TPIA). When material is ready for dispatch, the vendor raises an inspection call online. The quality team responds by assigning the call to a team member or a TPIA. After visiting the vendor, the person who attended the call fills out an online material inspection report with all the details. The L&T quality team accepts or rejects this report. The system also sends SMS and e-mail alerts to respective stakeholders.

VCMS has crunched the turnaround time from 14 to three days. It also enables speedier project execution, a critical requirement as 60-75 percent of payments are related to the supply of equipment.

Sudesh Agarwal, Landmark Group (5,000+ EMPLOYEES) The Landmark Group, which owns the Lifestyle retail chain among others, runs a loyalty card scheme called The Inner Circle. To help make the shopping experience of Landmark’s customers’ more rewarding, VP-IT Sudesh Agarwal put together the back end needed to launch a new scheme called The Inner Circle Platinum Credit Card. The project cost Rs 50 lakh and called for the integration of the group’s CRM and transaction systems.

The Inner Circle Platinum Credit Card is unique in several ways. Owners of the credit card are awarded up to 9 points for every Rs 100 spent and rewards can be redeemed at a value of 70 paisa per point. It can be used across Landmark Group stores like Lifestyle, Home Centre and Spar. Also, the card carries no joining or annual fees, and comes loaded with Lifestyle gift vouchers worth Rs 2,500.

The multi-benefit card has been offered to the group’s customers in conjunction with the Standard Chartered bank. “It was a natural decision to partner with SCB since it’s synonymous for high quality and trust,” says Agarwal. “The Inner Circle-Standard Chartered Bank Branded Credit Card will help us get a bigger share of our customer’s retail spends.”

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EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT SAMEER GARDE President & MD, India Commercial Business, Dell India Sameer Garde leads the India sales and marketing teams that deliver innovative and practical technology solutions to consumers, small-and-medium businesses, public institutions and large enterprises. Garde has a background in sales and marketing and has previously worked with organizations like Nestle, Pepsi and Whirlpool. Garde has earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Delhi and a Masters in Business Administration from IIM Calcutta.

Converged Infrastructure and Secure Mobility Can Transform Business Sameer Garde, President & MD, India Commercial Business, Dell India, shares the benefits of converged infrastructure, and how Dell can help Indian CIOs fend off mobile worries.

Can enterprises really benefit from the cloud without compromising security?

The cloud is slowly becoming an accepted means of storage and data management in India but it’s constantly hampered by security concerns. Enterprises need to be aware that the cloud’s as secure as they wish it to be. It is the responsibility of enterprises to take necessary security measures like constant mon-

itoring, maintaining records, frequent password changes (and protecting them), among others. Enterprises must also ascertain that their staffers are aware of security risks and that they take measures to ensure security.

If these guidelines are followed religiously, there is no reason to turn away from the cloud for information management because you are afraid of compromising security.

What are the hard benefits associated with converged infrastructure?

An ideal datacenter is one that is designed to surmount present, as well as future, IT challenges and match organizational, technical and operational requirements. A major challenge faced by contemporary datacenters is their inability to meet performance benchmarks and agility.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP DELL

Converged infrastructure helps companies shift their IT focus from maintaining disparate devices in datacenters to directing a single landscape of servers—both physical and virtual—and storage. Bringing together compute, storage, networking and management can speed application and IT service delivery, while lowering costs.

Whether you’re seeking faster infrastructure deployment or simpler administration for reduced costs, convergence should always be about driving customer outcomes by helping IT deliver more efficient and agile application and IT services.

Here are some examples of how Dell helps customers leverage convergence to drive superior outcomes: By moving from limited physical convergence to broad and full convergence, organizations can drive greater efficiency, lower their space needs and reduce IT energy consumption.

It drives process convergence, enabling a single administrator to perform multiple functions, which reduces operational costs, increases manageability and speeds up application and IT service delivery.

With greater software and hardware convergence, Dell enables improved performance and application availability— helping the business achieve greater results.

It enables convergence across IT service delivery paradigms—whether it’s onpremise, via private clouds, or off-premise public clouds.

The most important point is to choose a partner who has the capability to deliver end-end solutions based on open standards, thereby allowing you to derive value from best-of-breed solutions customized to your company’s individual needs.

How does Dell help CIOs with the challenges of mobile platforms?

Today, the mobile environment is shifting from limited connectivity to always-on and anywhere; from one device doing multiple tasks to many devices doing many tasks.

These trends present new challenges for IT. Mobile devices provide access to business data from virtually anywhere. And that means business data is flowing outside a secure network.

Dell helps build layered mobile security that provides the same level of control on mobile devices as any other part of your network, reducing potential risks. Dell

can provide scalable, standardized, efficient security solutions across business lifecycles. We offer the deep expertise that organizations need to plan, manage and monitor their security requirements.

Dell’s mobility solution offers to: Deliver multi-platform security, visibility, control, provisioning, and cost savings Free IT resources, save money and simplify management Better security and increase productivity Our easy-to-use, comprehensive and affordable systems management solution called Dell KACE™ K1000 Management Appliance is designed to enhance endpoint security by identifying and fixing vulnerabilities across end nodes. It also helps manage and enforce compliance with company policies across desktops, laptops and servers, helping reduce the risk of malware, spyware and viruses compromising endpoints.

“India has around 35,000 mid-market customers and we have about 27,000 of them in our database.”

Dell SonicWALL delivers robust, affordable and easily manageable Internet security solutions to protect the network resources of branch offices and small businesses. Dell SonicWALL’s scalable security provides secure data communications and protects online transactions with a solution that your business won’t outgrow.

Describe to us the fundamentally shifts happening at Dell.

Dell’s global transformation, over the last few years, to become a complete solutions player corresponds to dramatic changes in the industry. We now have the strongestever product and services portfolio avail-

able in the market. We have also acquired significant new skills and capabilities by announcing 16 strategic acquisitions in a little over two years with six of them in 2012 alone; namely AppAssure, SonicWALL, Wyse Technology, Clerity Solutions, Make Technologies and Quest Software.

Dell has re-organized its operations, optimized its global supply chain and put in place a world-class management team— all to provide solutions with the best value, and the greatest ease of use and flexibility.

Dell owns over 40 percent of the Indian mid-market in the IT segment.

What are Dell’s plans for further growth in this area?

India is the first geography for Dell, in which we have defined and categorized the mid-market segment as the big opportunity. Dell India refers to this opportunity as the ‘Growth Market’. We have identified markets beyond the top eight cities as the future growth-markets, for our broadened products and solutions portfolio.

Forty percent of the Indian IT market is mid-market and 85 percent of that sits in the top 25 cities. India has around 35,000 mid-market customers and we have about 27,000 of them in our database. This is because we have a direct and a robust channel model which gives us a clear advantage. Therefore, we consider the mid-market segment as Dell’s “market of the future”.

Dell’s mid-market design philosophy is aimed at providing customers with open systems that are highly affordable, user friendly, and easy to scale to meet the needs of growing organizations. We have also identified markets in the country’s top eight cities as future growth-markets to broaden our products and solutions portfolio.

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

2012

Pravin Savant, Lintas India (840 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

To beef up its initiatives in the hinterland, advertising agency Lintas India launched Linterland, its rural marketing and communication division. Its main objective was to help marketers gain an understanding of rural markets to design effective marketing strategies. But cost prohibitive physical distribution, the non-availability of retail outlets, and the widespread nature of rural geography made it difficult to ensure adequate returns on marketing investments.

Pravin Savant, CTO, Lintas India, created Linscan, a strategic rural marketing software that helps marketers tap the most potential markets across India. Linscan is a Webbased GIS and analytical solution which uses mobiles to offer real-time field force management. This ensures that planned activities are actually carried out in the right areas and according to schedule. This includes live surveys that provide real-time consumer feedback.

The software enables Linterland to prioritize markets at a micro level based on quantitative and qualitative analysis. It also helps to plan distribution points across geographies, and identify the right media options that will lead to cost-effective marketing initiatives.

Virendra Kumar Bansal, Luminous Power Technologies (5,000 EMPLOYEES) Power back-up solutions provider Luminous Power Technologies was single-mindedly focused on making its customers happy. So much so that it wanted to achieve 100 percent customer satisfaction. But, manual processes came in the way of servicing over 5 million customers.

To change that, Virendra Kumar Bansal, group CIO, Luminous Power Technologies, initiated a project to automate these manual processes. The automated system handles service calls at call centers and automatically transfers them to the respective service center.

The system also sends an SMS to the customer and the respective engineer informing them about the amount of time it would take to resolve issues. It also generates e-mails about a call’s status and escalates calls automatically.

The project shrunk the time consumed in handling complaints and sharpened accuracy by ensuring that the correct amount is billed to the customer. This has taken the company a step closer to its target: 100 percent customer satisfaction.

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G. Murugesan, Madras Cements (2,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

In a bid to acquire a laser sharp visibility on its assets, dealer networks, inventory and business partners, Madras Cements formulated an exhaustive mechanism that would help it stay on top of its business.

G. Murugesan, GM-IT, Madras Cements, devised an innovative strategy. He integrated Google Maps with the company’s ERP API on the corporate intranet. This project, MCL-GeoApps, is a GIS-based system which facilitates capturing, storing, analyzing, and managing information with respect to its business boundaries. It provides the company with location intelligence of its dealers, business partners, and competitors on Google Maps. It also denotes boundaries of all of the company’s land assets—mining leases, factory boundaries, wind mill locations—on Google maps. It also provides the company with the exact position of railway wagons carrying its cement.

This helps the organization safeguard its assets, plan ahead, and develop business better. The project has introduced many ancillary benefits in the form of accurate demand forecasting, inventory control, and efficient supply chain management.

Dinesh Chandna, Magma Fincorp

(5,000 EMPLOYEES)

Like other asset finance companies, Magma Fincorp takes a keen interest in collections. The challenge, however, was that its collection force ran on manual processes, affecting its productivity. Dinesh Chandna, SVP & CIO, Magma Fincorp, appreciated the need automate the work of the collection field force, and did it with handhelds. He worked in conjunction with receivables management, and accounts and to bring out the process changes.

Chandna adopted a phased approach to the deployment.

The first phase kicked off by automating the process of basic collection and money receipts. In subsequent phases, the field force was allowed to deposit collected money at SBI branch offices directly, thereby reducing travel time.

In the new system, the field force’s daily activity is tracked by directly monitoring of their daily assigned tasks, increasing control over their activities. Field investigation has contracted loan generation time benefiting end customers in the long run. Besides empowering the company with a strategic advantage, the project has improved customer satisfaction, contracted overall time of collections, automated the deposits of collections, and augmented productivity.

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2012

Vijay K. Anand, Malwa Cotton Spinning Mills (5,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Traditionally, Malwa Cotton Spinning Mills relied on antiquated technology. Its highly-integrated legacy systems ran on SCO UNIX servers using Ingres 6.4 on Intel-based platforms from IBM, Dell and HCL. However, in 2009, the organization faced a grave challenge. It found that SCO UNIX and Ingres RDBMS were not portable to any of the new Intelbased servers from its hardware manufacturers. This meant that if any of its servers broke down, business would come to a halt.

Upgrading to newer technologies was the need of the hour.

Vijay K. Anand, SVP-IT and management services, Malwa Cotton Spinning Mills, undertook a project to design and develop an in-house ERP. The organization opted for modulewise development, testing and implementation. It created a two-way bridge between MS SQL and Ingres database, to replicate data at the click of a key. This ensured that the older database system could work seamlessly with the modules of the new ERP system. This integrated business application is suitable for the textile manufacturer. The enterprise has plans to package this in-house ERP and market it to the textile industry vertical.

Gartner: 5 Things a Private Cloud is NOT Research firm Gartner says there's still a lot of market confusion on exactly what cloud technology is. The firm has released a list of five things the cloud is not.

When Geeks Mix with Business People One of the most common complaints geeks hear from business people is that they deliver things that don't work.

It’s important to get into their shoes.

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How BYOD Has Changed the IT Landscape It will be increasingly hard to just say 'no' to the growing BYOD crowd, especially with the arrival of new tools, and demand from senior executives.

When IT Analytics and Cricket Go Hand in Hand With technology like analytics and video analysis being used extensively, cricket has evolved phenomenally over time.

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2012

Vineet Bansal, Mankind Pharma (6,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Delhi-based pharmaceutical company Mankind Pharma was suffering from the challenges of an enterprisewide SAP implementation. The organization was undergoing a SAP deployment at 55 carrying and forwarding agency (C&F) locations scattered across the country and the project entailed comprehensive training of C&F users. But the geographically-dispersed location of its C&Fs threatened to paralyze the process.

To address the issue, Mankind explored the idea of creating a completely customized, user-friendly solution, which could provide the company with all the benefits of an ERP—with minimal training. In keeping with this imperative, Vineet Bansal, GM-IT-SAP, Mankind Pharma, developed customized interfaces which were similar to the company’s legacy application, thereby easing the learning curve for users. The interfaces are easily comprehensible and aligned to various business processes, he says. Since the project required a high degree of customization, Bansal executed several tests with actual users to make it bug free.

Post-implementation, the lead time to process orders has come down from 8-10 minutes to one-two minutes.

Kamal Sharma, Mindlance (2,400 EMPLOYEES) Mindlance is a global outsourcing company that has a presence in four countries, with about 16 locations in 28 states across the globe out of which 14 branches are in India.

The company required a solution to reduce its overall calling cost, both roaming and local. Kamal Sharma, group CIO and ITIM SBU head, Mindlance, implemented a global telecom infrastructure that provides seamless interconnectivity across geographies, different types of media and different service providers.

Sharma has eliminated the use of PSTN or network IDs. A massive dial plan on the lines of ITU (International Telecom Union) standards accommodates any increase in capacity.

The system has increased scalability by 400 percent, employee productivity by 28 percent and overall revenue by 25 percent. It also helped reduce opex costs by 34 percent and created a massive connectivity system that provisions the base physical layer of connectivity for all branches, service production centers and management headquarters globally.

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2012

K.N.C. Nair, Muthoot Group (27,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Muthoot Group, the largest gold loan NBFC in India boasts a vast geographical footprint of over 4,000 branches across the country. A substantial number of these branches are in the hinterland. This makes it a challenge to implement a core-banking solution. It also had to reduce communication costs.

To achieve this, K.N.C. Nair, GM-IT, Muthoot Group, designed a hybrid connectivity model with VPN broadband as the primary network for its smaller branches and MPLS for very large branches (with client VPN as secondary network).

The Muthoot WAN runs its mission critical transaction processing applications and back-office operations using a homegrown CBS application. Since real-time loan processing from over 4,000 branches involves heavy data transmission, the CBS is fine-tuned to use minimum bandwidth to improve response time, and save costs.

Equipped with a secure, stable, and robust network, the company provides superior customer experience. The robust WAN infrastructure helps it integrate various customer-friendly business applications to derive competitive advantage.

Sanjay Jhamb, Nokia India (3,000 EMPLOYEES) Making optimum use of resources is a fundamental principle for business growth. Sanjay Jhamb, sr. managerinfrastructure and operations, area operations, India, Middle East and Africa, Nokia, put this principle to practice to save money for the organization.

By re-using existing IT hardware and streamlining new purchases, Jhamb was able to bring down the amount spent on IT equipment dramatically. As part of this panIndia project, Jhamb and his team created an action plan with multiple strategies. This included identifying laptops, desktops, and peripherals fit for reuse, physically auditing and allocating asset numbers, segregating non-working machines for repair, changing the existing process for approving new purchases, and components such as RAM and hard disk from unused machines.

Through this project, Nokia India saved about Rs 3.5 crore in six months. Out of the 764 assets identified for reuse, 626 have been brought back to use, thereby increasing asset reuse ratio to 80 percent. Interestingly, this project has also been of tremendous help to the company in fulfilling its CSR and brand build objectives.

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EVENT REPORT

Video Collaboration:

The New Standard in Communication

In roundtable discussions held in Mumbai and New Delhi, Indian CIOs from leading organizations discussed

how video conferencing transformed their businesses—and how they plan to utilize it further for continuous growth.

he evolutionary path video conferencing (VC) is taking makes it clear that the technology will see increased adoption in the near future. VC innovation, today, is taking place on smaller screens like those of smartphones, and tablets. In response to this demand, vendors have to formulate strategies that account for desktop and mobile applications. They also have to make their time-honored, roombased systems easier to deploy.

The best part about VC is its ability to provide tangible business benefits. In roundtable discussions held in Mumbai and New Delhi and organized by CIO Magazine, in association with Polycom, IT decision-makers from leading Indian organizations shared how VC provided their companies with several benefits. They also discussed strategies to make the best use of the technology.

Enhancing Internal and External Connects Deploying a VC solution does not only help CIOs cut travel costs, but also substantially improves collaboration levels by connecting senior management and internal stakeholders. That’s what happened at Blue Star. “We have about 15-16 offices, and our remote factory locations are connected with them through VC, said Rahul Mehta, sr. GM-IT at Blue Star. “It helps cross-functional teams like production and sales management meet for product development, quality management, and service-related issues.”

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP POLYCOM In addition, VC has had a positive impact on HR processes, especially with recruitment and appraisals. Sunil Mehta, SVP and area systems director, Central Asia, JWT, said, “We have been conducting recruitment drives that include interviews and appraisals over video. Also, it comes handy in most instances that involve one-to-many communication like broadcasts and workshops.”

Today’s executives demand VC because it gives them better work-life balance. Business demands it because it needs more immediate reports, and multi-cultural organizations want it because it fosters trust and improves communication with remote teams. Take IOCL’s example S. Ramasamy, executive director-IS at IOCL, said, “We have undertaken a new initiative called “Face to Face” to garner employee interest in internal policies. This lets employees ask HR-related queries and receive answers over video. The same is recorded and broadcast to each employee over webcast, as well as uploaded on our corporate website. VC also helps us handle our internal training programs seamlessly and simultaneously across 700-odd locations.”

“Like everyone here has said, video needs to move out of the boardroom and conference room and onto desktops and mobiles. People want to be out, collaborating seamlessly.”

NEERAJ GILL, Director, India & SAARC, Polycom

estate prices that hinder dealers who need space to display products,” he said. “We have begun using video to display our products in all variants at popular shopping centers and malls. These are not just photographs, but animations based on 3D dynamics that provide a realistic experience. The increased interest among customers wanting to go for a test drive today is phenomenal.”

“Pretty much all business functions can benefit from video collaboration.

And Polycom provides end-points that work well in multi-vendor environments.”

MARC REMOND, Global Director, Enterprise Solutions and Market Development, Polycom Anil Veer, VP-IT at Aricent Technologies, follows a similar approach. “We’ve begun using video as a utility, just like e-mail. With disparate teams across 40-odd locations in various time zones including the US, UK, China, and Vietnam, collaboration is our topmost priority. Our internal reviews, budget reviews, CXO meets, and even budgetary meetings are held over VC.” Apart from fostering internal collaboration, video platforms, also introduce a new approach to external customers. That’s something Suhas Mhaskar, GM-corporate IT at Mahindra & Mahindra, found out.

“A serious concern in the automobile manufacturing industry are sky-rocketing real

Pushing for Management Buy-in Such increased connect, especially with end-customers, coupled with the ability to lower costs makes it easy to get management buy-in for VC. “Traditional mindsets make it painful to convince managements to invest in a particular technology. For us, that mindset change happened when we chose telepresence. It was the game-changer. We’re now actively moving towards unifying VC, telepresence and Lync to step up our game and connecting internal processes to suppliers as well as dealers.”

The No Challenge Approach Like any other technology, deploying VC requires diligence to ensure smooth use. “It’s imperative to give special attention to the back-end network and supporting technologies for the effective functioning of a VC setup.

An oversight here can negatively impact user experience,” said P. V. Shrungarkar, head-IT, L&T EBG. “That’s why unified collaboration based on an open standards platform has become our priority. The platform must be able to handle 200 million codecs and has to be fail-safe and redundant at the same time,” he said.

In summary, Marc Remond, global director, enterprise solutions and market development at Polycom, reminded the panelists of the benefits of VC. “Studies have shown that 30 percent of the costs associated with travel, carbon emissions, and other eco-unfriendly activities can be reduced with the help of collaboration technology. The costs and time associated with HR processes can be reduced by 19 percent, too. On the marketing front, irrespective of whether you’re launching a natural product or manufactured one, collaboration technology can bring down delivery time by 30 percent.

Pretty much all business functions can benefit from video collaboration. Polycom’s technology partnerships with leading vendors gives it the ability to provide end-points that work well in multi-vendor environments.”

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

2012

Rohan Deshpande, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (1,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Oglivy & Mather Worldwide is the third-largest advertising agency in India and its Indian arm is ranked among the most creative offices in the entire Ogilvy network.

Rohan Deshpande, CTO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, realized the importance of internal collaboration to help its staff keep up with the company’s growth. He created a complete workflow management system with content and storage management. The system allows business and creative teams to collaborate internally as well as with clients to ensure deliveries apart from effective archival. The new workflow system at O&M Worldwide today manages all content: Audio, video and imagery. It also facilitates data archival for at least seven to 10 years. The workflow management and collaboration software was created in-house. While storage and content management solutions were bought and integrated with the in-house solution.

The workflow management tool has helped the company improve process efficiency to ensure timely deliveries.

Overall, this has helped O&M scale up its international business where clients look for workflow efficiency as well as data availability.

Rahul Sharma, Oxigen Services (330 EMPLOYEES) The current instability in the economic landscape, both at the national level and globally, has prompted organizations to do more with less. Rahul Sharma, AVP-network operations at Oxigen Services, leveraged the potential of virtualization to shrink operating costs, increase scalability, and expedite server provisioning.

Using a combination of products sourced from leading vendors—that enable deduplication, thin provisioning, and snap mirroring—Sharma consolidated more than 125 physical servers on a virtual environment spread across 20 blade servers.

As a result of this consolidation drive, Oxigen Services now enjoys the dual benefits of high availability, and significant cost savings. The organization has seen a cost saving of around Rs 25 lakh in annual opex, and an overall saving of more than Rs 1 crore.

On the infrastructure side, the project gave Oxigen Services the much required capability of scaling up as and when required. As a result, both operational efficiency and competitiveness have increased, thereby boosting business.

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airtel brings a smile to your business airtel business offers a slew of business applications and solutions that can make your employees happier by making them more efficient.

Inside Solutions Bound to Make Your Enterprise Smile: MATE: Mobile Application Tools for the Enterprise.

Managed Video communications.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP AIRTEL

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

Quick and Hassle-free Collaboration Najib Khan talks about how airtel’s business mobility and video conferencing solutions—spanning various functions—can help Indian enterprises improve the efficiency of their staffers and boost productivity Najib Khan is CMO for airtel business. He has over 20 years of experience in telecom. He has many firsts to his credit, including the roll out of MPLS network for Bharti in the enterprise market and pioneering unique solutions based on GSM technology.

How can organizations create a truly mobile workforce by empowering them with access to business applications on the move? airtel business believes in providing solutions that make it easy for people to do real, useful work from anywhere and in a manner they choose. This helps them accomplish more, each day. To create a truly mobile workforce, airtel business offers Mobile Appication Tools for Enterprise or airtel MATE. With a large proportion of the workforce such as sales and project teams being on the move, organizations benefit by enabling its employees to work from anywhere. airtel MATE provides a suite of mobile apps that provide access to real-time data on the move without compromising security. Employees can easily access business apps, and fetch and input data with their mobile devices. For instance, one of our most popular apps is the sales force automation tool. Sales teams can relay sales figures, stock positions and competition inputs in real-time, from the field. The organization benefits with real-time data and employees can achieve more each day, thereby creating more smiles per cubicle!

How can enterprises avoid having to deal with multiple vendors and still have solutions tailored for their specific needs?

The market is currently cluttered with multiple players offering piecemeal solutins to enterprise mobility. While these solutions look attractive, it can become a management nightmare to ensure smooth execution and continuity. airtel’s solutions are a one-stop shop that go from inception to deployment and management. Solutions are conceived, procured, deployed and managed under one roof—giving customers the benefit of enjoying enterprise mobility without having to manage multiple vendors. airtel also offers business mobility solutions that spans functions and organizational needs. This gives customers an added advantage of having a single partner for all their mobility requirements. airtel can meet the varied needs of a single organization with airtel MATE, from sales force automation apps for sales to leave tracking apps for HR to collection and billing apps for finance teams.

True mobility is complimented by an effective video conferencing solution. How can enterprises deploy VC solutions without implementation hassles?

More organizations are realizing the benefits of video conferencing not just to reduce travel time and costs, but also for more effective collaboration. The traditional notion that setting a VC facility requires complicated hardware setups is a thing of the past with solutions such as desktop or tablet VC from airtel, which are as simple as installing a client on one’s desktop or tablet and getting started.

To put it simply, managed VC removes operational hassles as it does not require the

business to make capex investments such as equipment and real estate. The entire management cost is borne by the service provider.

Businesses don’t have to worry about scalability, technology upgrades, multiple path availability, or geographic redundancy as they can leverage the service provider’s huge capacity. Additionally, our state-of-the-art VNOC enables us to monitor and manage the performance of video conferencing services.

Can you give us some examples of how Indian companies have benefitted from VC to boost productivity?

A managed VC model provides a hassle-free experience compared to traditional VC. With these simple and effective mobile video solutions, video is no longer a feature that’s available only to senior management. One customer, a leading player in the power sector, recently deployed managed VC. They are now easily able to conduct board meetings, HR interviews, and training and knowledge management sessions. They have also witnessed a massive reduction in travel costs and much higher productivity. The biggest benefit is the positive change the solution brought to the organization’s overall culture by creating an environment where employees engage proactively with one another.

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

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

2012

Rajeev Mittal, Piaggio Vehicles (1,700 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Piaggio Vehicle was setting up a new factory for manufacturing Vespa scooters and the automotive company realized that to maintain quality it needed to automate its shop floor operations.

The company’s shop floor suffered from inconsistencies and manual errors that impacted quality and productivity. Rajeev Mittal, head-IT and IS, Piaggio Vehicles, deployed RF sensors to monitor the manufacturing process. Every vehicle passes through three shops: Fabrication, paint and assembly. Tablets capture the inputs and outputs from various shops (fabrication, paint, and assembly shop). The RF scanners monitor the progress of vehicle manufacturing and critical inputs like torque, record visual defects, capture quality parameters and also interface with ERP for final production capturing.

This gives tremendous benefits to business in terms of online and real-time transaction capturing, data visibility, and quality of vehicle produced and inventory management.

T. S. Purushothaman, Reliance BIG Entertainment (4,900 EMPLOYEES) Reliance BIG Entertainment wanted to improve the efficiency of the organization by monitoring the use of its assets. This would give the company a better idea of the availability and profitability of its assets. The company also wanted to enhance its ability to handle higher transaction volumes.

T.S. Purushothaman, VP-IT, Reliance BIG Entertainment, created a mechanism to monitor organization-wide use of assets. This mechanism would mainly generate reports on the availability of title rights, finances, sales, and royalty among others. It would encompass a wide range of information—from various sources—such as supplier/client information, contract information, program information, rights information, and amortization.

As a result, Reliance BIG Entertainment has reduced the complexity involved in royalty calculation, thereby saving a lot of man hours. Also, the organization is now able to exploit rights for licensing and targeting opportunities, increase regulatory compliance, reduce time and fees to be invested in legal issues and audits.

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2012

Alpna J. Doshi, Reliance Communications (15,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Voice, video and 3G data are going to be the primary revenue drivers for telcos in the coming years. Alpna Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications, is prepared to grab a share of those with Reliance 3G Video Delivery Service—a robust video delivery platform.

It provides 3G users an interactive platform to view adaptively streamed video content across a slew of devices and multiple OSes. It also allows users to watch live video channels. Reliance’s in-house team developed the solution that is built with components like open source content management system, video management server, and video delivery system’s streaming server. This delivers video content to various end-user devices. It also detects network changes and adjusts according to bandwidth availability.

The service provides users with uninterrupted transition between low and high network coverage areas, doesn’t require device memory, supports all streaming protocol of devices and various technologies. Adaptive rendering provides seamless video viewing to low and high-end gadgets, irrespective of their specs.

Gopal Rangaraj, Reliance Life Sciences (760 EMPLOYEES) In the biopharmaceutical sector, plasma (blood serum that contains 6.5 to 8 grams percent of a complex mixture of proteins, including albumin, globulin, and fibrinogen) is an important raw material. That’s why Reliance Life Sciences has a dedicated plasma procurement group (PPG).

The company sources plasma from different parts of India and the world. Its supply chain encompasses a series of complex business operations—handling of cold shipments, sampling, warehousing, and QC—taken care of by the PPG, manually. It was hard for the PPG to scale up, manage supplies from different sources, and track inflows.

To fix this, Gopal Rangaraj, VP-IT, Reliance Life Sciences, created a Web-based tool—Plasma Tracker—that integrates with SAP modules and automates the supply chain. The tracker follows plasma supplies from the supplier banks till the plasma bags are made available for production, after all the tests are carried out and documented.

Today, the organization is able to track consignments, identify shortages and alert the PPG, identify gaps between the volume of plasma quoted and the volume received, and process higher volumes of plasma through a well-defined process.

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2012

Avinash Jhangiani, Reliance MediaWorks (BIG Cinemas) (1,200 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Reliance MediaWorks wanted to gain an upper hand over its competitors. And to achieve that it needed to develop deeper relationships with customers, and increase brand loyalty.

The company turned to Avinash Jhangiani, CIO, global head IT and Digital, Reliance MediaWorks. He created a digital ecosystem that blended three platforms—Web, mobile, and social—into one. He leveraged social trends and implemented digital technologies to enhance customer experience, increase brand advocacy, and improve customer collaboration for product innovation.

For example, with IT’s help the company implemented a Hollywood Club loyalty card program that uses CRM and analytics to increase destination preference, frequency and revenue through consumer profile-based promotions and advertising. The company also used Bluetooth to enhance in-cinema experience with real-time content and exclusive offers. It used interactive QR codes to connect consumers with engaging online experiences.

This transformation has provided Reliance MediaWorks with an improved social influence, reduced movie marketing costs, and increased online ticket sales.

Sreeram Maddury, Reliance Power (1,500 EMPLOYEES) With the increasing need to create a paperless office, Sreeram Maddury, VP, Reliance Power, embarked on an e-documentation project. Maddury’s aim was to have a single document managing repository across the business to facilitate the storage and dissemination of e-documents.

Maddury launched an EDMS (electronic document management system) that fulfilled the company’s pressing needs in project plan monitoring, asset management, engineering processes and document management, and collaboration management, among other things.

The EDMS aids in pre-loading documents and drawings, setting up a standard taxonomy, document dissemination, review and approval, and returning documents to external agencies.

By creating a single document repository across the business, the EDMS has helped Reliance Power enjoy several benefits. It has improved operational reliability by providing correct information, improved operational effectiveness by providing faster and easy access to information, enabled effective monitoring of compliance, and ensured quality assurance.

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2012

Sharad Agarwal, Religare Finvest (900 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Religare Finvest (RFL) focuses on financing SMEs. With an expanding customer base and increasing service calls, the company was looking for an efficient CRM solution to enhance its customer relationships, while using it as an opportunity to cross-sell.

Sharad Agarwal, EVP-head IT, operations, quality and PMO office, implemented a hosted, Web-based, CRM solution, which was seamlessly integrated with seven internal applications. These include core lending, HR, LDAP and AD, work flow, document management and e-mail, providing real time updates to users. The solution provides a 360-degree view of client accounts to the customer service team. A totally configurable workflow makes it easy for the user to manage the process end-toend. The solution is also coupled with a robust escalation engine which ensures queries adhere to SLAs. This has enabled the organization to increase the efficiency and tracking of customer service queries, while reducing TAT, resulting in enhanced customer service.

It now has an effective data analytical capability, which helps improve decision-making.

Kamal Karnatak, RJ Corp (5,000 EMPLOYEES) A complete visibility of the supply chain is a mark of a successful manufacturing company. Kamal Karnatak, senior VP and group CIO, RJ Corp, wanted to empower his organization with that visibility. Along the way, he would also weed out the company’s aging inventory, and control the supply chain.

Karnatak formulated a mechanism that allows the biggest bottler of Pepsi in South Asia, to track finished goods (bottle cases) from the point of manufacture to the destination— covering the entire distribution chain—using hand-held terminals, label printers and applicators (LPA), fixed mount scanners (FMS), and bar codes. The system creates a link between the consumer pack (bottle), retail pack (case) and handling unit (pallet). The same information is utilized at the time of dispatch so that complete traceability of finished goods is available for quick reference as and when needed by different business stakeholders.

The solution eliminated the need to scan each individual case during dispatch by up to 95 percent. It has also improved resource utilization and operational efficiency.

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2012

Anibandha Mukhopadhyay, Royal Infraconstru (300 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

What Royal Infraconstru, an infrastructure development company, needed was a transformed IT infrastructure. As the company’s CIO, this responsibility fell on Anibandha Mukhopadhyay’s shoulders. The company’s homegrown software for procurement and financial accounting—which were not integrated—were not robust enough to support business growth. As a result, the company was battling with redundant technology, a lack of support and the non-availability of critical information at the right time. This paved the way for business loss.

With the objective of adopting industry standard practices, integrating different business functions, improving human capital and assets utilization, and improving financial management, Mukhopadhyay implemented an ERP system.

Royal Infraconstru has tasted tremendous success with this ERP implementation. It allows its not-so-tech-savvy employees to have better control on projects, timelines, inventory, work-in-progress, and equipment performance.

The system has also enabled quicker decision-making with the help of prompt and accurate MIS reporting.

Ranendra Datta, SABMiller India (1,934 EMPLOYEES) SABMiller India’s daily backup time was a whopping 21-23 hours. This affected server, database, and application performance. In some cases, this lengthy process also affected customer satisfaction. In a bid to reduce backup time to less than 10 hours, the company’s VP-IT, Ranendra Datta, came up with project Backup.

As part of the project, the IT team implemented two tape drives, and tweaked backup robotics. One of the tape drives was configured to run multiple robotics, whereas the other was responsible only for ERP-related data backup processes. A few amendments to the backup policies along with some basic hygiene improvement resulted in further reduction in data backup loads. The servers were assigned different backup times, based on the load of data they dealt with it. Fine-tuning the backup services on the OS made sure that the utilization of server resources was optimized when the backup schedule was on.

The brewing giant is now able to take care of failed backups or backups with errors. As a result of its efforts in optimizing, and tweaking policies, SABMiller India has now reduced the backup time from 23 hours to seven hours.

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2012

Rajendra Deshpande, Serco Global Services (50,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Serco Global Services is a leading BPO provider.

In 2011, Serco acquired Intelenet Global Services. Postacquisition, the top priority was to integrate the IT environments and architecture across Sparsh BPO, Serco India BPO, and other domestic business units which were under Intelenet Global Services.

Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Serco Global Services, initiated a project—Project One—that did the following: Infrastructure consolidation, asset management, vendor rationalization and re-negotiations, voice infrastructure consolidation, centralization of manpower costs, and consolidation of apps. The centralization of IT project management, service management, and infrastructure support has increased business uptime and reduced the time to implement new projects. It has resulted in the standardization of architecture, policies, procedures and other key organizational resources.

By redesigning the network infrastructure, Deshpande’s team was able to create a simple, robust infrastructure that enhanced application performance. The project has saved Rs 70 crore, while ensuring zero client attrition rate, thanks to a smooth transition across platforms.

P.L. Chockalingam, Sesa Goa (4,000 EMPLOYEES) Sesa Goa is India’s largest iron ore producer and exporter in the private sector. The company had automated its exploration and mine planning, processing, and transportation systems. Its ERP was integrated with its transportation systems (only RFID tracking for road transport)—but not with its other systems. Also, ore mining systems were not automated.

To fix this, P. L. Chockalingam, AVP-risk management and IT, Sesa Goa, decided to roll out an integrated automation system across the iron ore mining value chain. This system has an integrated mining command and control center (IMCCC) to integrate all the existing and new systems. This increases productivity by carrying out dynamic allocation of dump trucks to excavators in mines. The company also deployed a GPS-based truck dispatch system to increase the visibility of the movement of goods between mines, storage locations, jetties, barges and ships. Both these systems are integrated with the company’s ERP. The company has saved over Rs 58 crore through automation. It has also improved customer service and employee productivity.

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2012

Naagesh Karra, Shriram Life Insurance (3,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

If offering a wide range of services is an added advantage to a company’s customers, offering an easy way to manage all of them is one for the company’s employees.

Shriram Life Insurance’s VP and CTO, Naagesh Karra made life easier for over 3,000 employees by creating a generic software application.

Named Shrilife Enterprise, this application covers the entire spectrum of a life insurance activity, right from new proposal deposit receipt to claims processing, and benefit payout. This core application brings various activities— such as launching new life insurance products, new customers, services related to existing policies and various benefit pay-outs—on one platform. This was one of the basic requirements of the organization.

The new software has revolutionized the way new products and services are launched in Shriram Life Insurance. The company’s go-to-market time has decreased considerably, enabling it to launch new services within a very short span of time. On the other hand, change management for employees has also become easier.

Dr. Selvam K., Siva Industries and Holdings

(1,000 EMPLOYEES)

Siva Industries and Holdings’ journey began in 1986.

Today, it’s a diversified conglomerate. The company entered the shipping business in 2008 with Siva Shipping. The new company was operating independently with a distributed architecture and multiple ERP’s in different countries.

With no established workflow between different functions, e-mail communications updated various financial entries. Hence, the company suffered from delayed closure of accounting and mismanaged invoices. It also maintained separate application systems for its accounting and operation activities. Business reports were generated manually and then consolidated outside the system. Dr. Selvam K., group CIO, Siva Industries and Holdings, realized that the company needed a unified application to achieve centralized control of these transactional activities. He launched a business process transformation project by consolidating its multiple ERP systems into a single SAP system.

Today, all the thirteen Siva Shipping companies have been configured in one ERP system. The project has ensured that accurate data is available in the financial system. Automated report generation has helped advance the monthly management report date by 10 days.

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2012

Nagesh Aswartha, SPML Infra (2,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Drainage Board needed a system to better control and monitor water supply to urban citizens. SPML Infra’s Head-IT, Nagesh Aswartha helped the board do exactly that.

Aswartha created a Water Management Information System (WMIS). This system is a comprehensive enterprise management solution specifically designed for the needs of water distribution companies. The system includes ERP for different processes, utility billing, and comprehensive reporting among others that’s perfect for water distribution companies. It is also equipped with GIS and networking tools that simulate data—currently only for the city of Dharwad and its 30,000 water connections. It also provides the city with network asset, billing and customer information, O&M, finance and demand management.

The WMIS impacts almost all domains of water distribution including demand forecasting, load analysis, identifying nonrevenue water, utility performance audits, cash management, and various other such activities. Its network management has given the water board the ability to plan water supply for nearly 30,000 water connections throughout Dharwad.

Shivkumar Pandey, Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance (2,000 EMPLOYEES) Data is the backbone of IT, and a strong storage infrastructure is the backbone of data. Having said that, it is well-known that financial institutions feel the need for quick data backup and retrieval more than any other industry, considering regulatory norms. And the need for 24x7 access to business data make business continuity and disaster recovery setup even more critical. Shivkumar Pandey, head–IT infrastructure and security, Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance, decided to take this issue head-on and established a DR site and enhanced the performance of the company’s datacenters.

Using technology from leading vendors, Pandey created a robust dual-layer security architecture. The system also takes care of preventing critical database corruption by recovering data at any given point of time. Another noteworthy feature of the DR site is the automation of workflow and real-time monitoring of the two important DR metrics: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Also, manned NOC & SOC services ensure that critical data is available 24x7.

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2012

Prasanth Puliakottu, Sterlite Technologies (1,500 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

IT’s goal is to make work simpler and faster for business, and Sterlite Technologies’ CIO, Prasanth Puliakottu made it possible in his organization through standardization, automation, and the integration of business processes.

Sterlite was plagued with multiple issues such as disconnect between processes, the lack of a system to measure cycle time of processes, the massive generation of paper documents, and a difficulty in searching physical documents. The IT team came up with a single remedy for all these issues, and christened it SmartProcess. The solution mainly provides a mechanism to integrate the company’s ERP, content management system, and other business applications with Google’s cloud. Its reach extends across different departments of the company and optimizes almost all business processes.

The project has optimized the processes of goods receipts, supplier payments, sales orders, and customer supply of goods. By eliminating the need for paper documents, the solution has also turned into a green IT initiative. The project also enables better collaboration between different teams.

Are your plans for the year ahead still undecided?

How are CIOs prepping for the post-PC era?

What are the main concerns CIOs have for 2013?

How will IT budgets be structured in 2013?

What should a CIO’s appetite for risk be for the next year?

The Turn to page 204 for more clarity...

IT Blueprint for 2013

2012

S. Srinivasan, Sundram Fasteners (4,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

One of Sundram Fasteners’ (SFL) biggest customers is Maruti Suzuki. Maruti purchases all its tappets from the company. The tappet manufacturing procedure involves several vital processes such as turning, heat treatment, grinding, etching, inspection, packing, and dispatch. SFL’s tappet manufacturing plant had the responsibility of producing the manufacturing history of each and every tappet produced in the plant. This process was complex because the tappets, irrespective of whether they are completed or under production, were grouped in the same batches. Therefore, SFL required a way to create a distinction between the two.

To fix this, S. Srinivasan, CIO, SFL, introduced a second parameter called job order number, along with the already existing batch number. This combination helped SFL differentiate between finished and unfinished batches.

The project has gone a long way in helping SFL’s production chain function better. The tappet plant has been able to account for each and every individual piece it produces—this despite the fact that they produce around half a million pieces every month. The unit has a stock discrepancy rate of zero percent.

Satyen Naik, SUMUL Dairy (1,200 EMPLOYEES) SUMUL Dairy (Surat District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union), one of the largest milk co-operative unions of Gujarat, procures milk from village level societies. These societies use automatic milk collection to manage their production and it was important for SUMUL to monitor these societies.

Satyen Naik, head-IT, SUMUL, used a combination of GPRS and Android-based mobile platforms to capture data from the AMCs of more than 450 co-operative societies and 3,000 milk retailers. This helped to eliminate instances of fraud as data manipulation could be prevented. This also enabled SUMUL to perform a central audit, enhancing productivity, and reducing costs. These measures have helped SUMUL enhance farmer satisfaction by ensuring that they are paid on time, and move from away from a cash-based process.

MIS, reports, charts, and alerts can be generated out of this data. This has helped SUMUL spot trends such as milk quantity, price and average fat by society, while an analytics engine arms SUMUL with forecasts. The IT team also installed GPS trackers on the trucks to monitor milk collection by route which can help analyze unusual activities.

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Tamilvel N, TAKE Solutions (1,200 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

TAKE Solutions is a global IT company with expertise in life sciences, supply chain, enterprise solutions and global delivery. By adopting a SaaS model, the company has sealed their commitment to a greener environment.

Tamilvel N., VP-global IT, TAKE Solutions, deployed a bunch of solutions to take the company closer to its green target. He helped the company switch over from a traditional datacenter to a high density virtualization model which delivers software through SaaS. The new green datacenter has a cooling containment and a surveillance system for rack level security. In addition, the company has developed Web streaming solutions such that their teams can now conduct video conference and avoid traveling. These conferencing rooms have additional power-saving lighting with sensors which switches off after two minutes in the absence of movement.

The green strategies employed have helped the company save 30 percent in cooling costs. They have upped the utilization of its servers and the UPS efficiency has escalated to 95 percent.

Is cloud on your horizon for 2013?

What are the hidden costs of a cloud strategy?

Can sourcing's governance model be extended to the cloud?

What workloads can best be optimised for the cloud?

How do organization manage the transition from physical to virtual to the cloud?

The Turn to page 204 for more clarity...

IT Blueprint for 2013

2012

K. Suresh, Tata AIG General Insurance Company (1,350 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

In the last two years, TATA AIG General Insurance Company, has grown by 40 percent, recording the highest growth rate among its peers and leading the market in liability, marine cargo, personal accident, travel, and extended warranties. And it owes its success to a strategic roadmap that leverages IT. K. Suresh, head-it, TATA AIG General Insurance Company, designed a technology strategy that includes two key ingredients: First, a new CRM application that improved customer service delivery capabilities, making it the No 1 in customer service in the insurance industry, according to the company. Second, the enablement of e-commerce and selfservice through online and mobile application platforms.

Besides this, the company also consolidated its datacenter leading to a saving of over Rs 30 lakh in operating expenditure.

The strategy helped the insurer expand into new channels like the Web and mobiles. Today, customers can not only issue policies, but also notify claims, and track the status of already notified claims, online. The insurer has also managed to expand its presence in Tier II and Tier III cities, and launch newer products across emerging market segments.

Raghu Kumar Paruchuri, Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division (550 EMPLOYEES) Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division (Tata SED) designs and produces defense systems and boasts of many prestigious partnerships including ones with the Indian army and the Indian Air force. At the last Defense Exposition held in Delhi, the company made a remarkable display of their products Network Center capabilities.

The launchers and guns produced by TATA SED are located inside their Bangalore facility and couldn’t obviously be brought to the expo. Instead, Raghu Kumar Paruchuri, head-IT and business applications, Tata SED, established a point-to-point 4Mbps COS 1 link that connected the equipment with its controllers located at the demo facility in Pragati Maidan in Delhi, allowing visitors to control the guns. He also arranged for a network camera at the Bangalore facility which captured the live feed and relayed it to a display screens at the stall.

Thanks to this, business delegates present at the expo got an impressive preview of Tata SED’s products.

Such was the success of the show that Rahul Chaudhry, CEO, Tata Power SED, remarked that it placed them in a different class of Defense Prime.

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S. Sekar, The Karur Vysya Bank (5,673 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The Karur Vysya Bank receives on an average of 2,500 requests to open accounts a day across its 453 branches, but was able to process only 1,500 accounts because every form had to couriered and validated manually at a central processing center located in Coimbatore.

Lead by deputy GM, S. Sekar, the bank teamed up with CAMS, which has 450 branches across the country. They mapped the bank’s branches to the closest CAMS office. Now a bank’s employee sitting in Amristar, for example, hands over the account opening forms they collected for the day to a CAMs’ employee, who then scans and uploads the forms to the central processing center.

Today, irrespective of volume, all forms are processed on the same day they are received. To facilitate validation, Sekar’s team designed an image-based workflow wherein every element of data is entered by two operators and an auto-matching tool validates them. The solution combines IaaS and SaaS models to provide the business with the much needed scalability.

Today, the bank can open 2,500 account in under three hours. The solution has empowered the bank to conduct more campaigns and bring in large volumes of business.

How can collaboration cover the extended enterprise?

Can collaboration provide organization with hard ROI?

Is collaboration going to bridge the gap

How do organizations handle moving to a more collaborative workspace?

in 2013?

The Turn to page 204 for more clarity...

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2012

Mukesh Kumar, TPG Wholesale (2200 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The apparel and general merchandise business contributes to about 80 percent of TPG Wholesale’s total business. The company has started to procure and distribute products in ‘case lots’ as opposed to ‘singlelots’. Case lots are produced, packaged and sold in preset quantities. While this is not a new process, says Mukesh Kumar, CIO, TPG Wholesale, “the Indian retail community is yet to use it effectively.

This business process reengineering, called pre-pack optimization in this case, streamlines business processes by cutting down unwanted activities, thereby enhancing supply chain profitability. Kumar, who re-engineered the company’s IT systems to enable this, went through the complex job of re-configuring the retailer’s core SAP. Strict adherence to process was crucial for the success of the project, and this was achieved by rigorous training and frequent quality checks.

Since the implementation, supply chain efficiency has tripled, as has warehouse operations capacity, giving the company a competitive edge in the fragmented Rs 2,750,000 crore Indian retail market.

Ramakrishnan S., Tractors and Farm Equipment (2,620 EMPLOYEES) Despite a volatile market, Tractors and Farm Equipment (TAFE) has had a good year and has seen sales growing. It owes a great deal of that success to improved production planning through an integrated daily work manufacturing solution called the Daily Work Management Solution.

The solution, spearheaded by Ramakrishnan S., CIO and CTO, TAFE, takes daily production planning and line sequencing data from the company’s ERP and auto-guides the entire manufacturing process. This includes directing operators to pick up the right components for a certain type of tractor, and alerting operators when wrong materials are loaded. The solution also captures pre-defined quality parameters from production equipment and can stop a line if these are not met.

The solution uses multiple technologies such as barcode readers and firmware to create a more controlled manufacturing environment.

The project has greatly reduced line stoppages that hindered production, and has significantly improved items that are ‘first time right,’ leading to overall improvement in both productivity and efficiency.

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Heramba Naik, TRL Krosaki Refractories (1,478 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

TRL Krosaki Refractories (formerly Tata Refractories) has pioneered refractory production in India. The company was running on a workgroup-based system and did not have a centralized control over the entire system. As a result, it faced frequent virus attacks, poor health conditions of systems, and frequent breakdowns.

To eliminate these issues, Heramba Naik, GM-ICT and CIO, TRL Krosaki Refractories, decided to migrate from a workgroup system to domain controller system. The team implemented the Active Directory system along with DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) Server, WSUS, DNS and SEPM (Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager) with managed clients. The system controls the entire computer network of all the company’s offices. Implementations of VPN clients at all locations enable executives to use ERP on-the-move. The team has also secured its IT infrastructure with a comprehensive security solution.

The project has resulted in zero downtime. The PC maintenance cost has reduced by 30 percent. Optimizing bandwidth has saved Rs 20 lakh per year. The project has also enhanced employee productivity substantially.

Is mobility an answer to your prayers for a better 2013?

How can mobility best bridge the gap between data and devices?

How can organizations better address the impact of mobility on core infrastructure?

How do organizations strike a balance between accessibility and security?

The Turn to page 204 for more clarity...

IT Blueprint for 2013

The

IT Blueprint for 2013 29, 30 November 2012 | Mumbai

Event By

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29, 30 November will see 250 of India’s best CIOs debating over 4 key themes while planning the IT roadmap for the Year Ahead.

Here’s your chance to be a part of it.

The Year Ahead

Mobility

Begin The Year Ahead with an industry wide overview and review of findings of our most exhaustive survey- The State of the CIO magazine.

94% of CIOs believe that Mobility will be an important part of their organization's future IT strategy. Understand why and get all questions about Mobility answered.

Keynote

Keynote

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Tomi Ahonen,

Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine.

World’s leading authority mobility in business.

Cloud

Collaboration

Is cloud inevitable for organisations?

Understand all you need to know about this $350 Billion growing worldwide industry and its future at the event.

Collaboration has been rated as one of the most important things for a CIO to know in 2013. Understand everything there’s to know about Collaboration and prepare for a better 2013.

Keynote

Jack Shaw, worldwide industry thought leader in cloud and virtualization.

Be part of the plan. Contact: Sponsor: parul_singh@idgindia.com Call: 9820635148

Know more: www.CIOYearAhead.in

Register: rupesh_sreedharan@idgindia.com Call: 9324220513

Keynote

Mike Dover, heading New paradigm, a world-class think tank and technology and marketing thought leader.

2012

Muralidhara H.S., TTK Prestige (1,152 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

TTK Prestige is the country’s largest kitchen appliance manufacturer. The company operates 360 franchises called Prestige Smart Kitchens (PSKs) that function as standalone showrooms for their products.

These franchises were not connected to TTK’s central ERP that was housed at the company’s datacenter and as a result, business was plagued by inefficient manual processes.

Muralidhara H.S., SAP-COE, TTK Prestige, automated the transaction and reporting of PSKs through a .NET connection.

With a POS software and a broadband connection, the PSKs can now access and transact with the central ERP which continues to be housed as an on-prime application at the datacenter. Muralidhara also designed a financial package for the franchises to keep track of their profit and loss status.

All data relating to sales, invoices, and receipts issued that were earlier lost can now be captured giving TTK’s management a clear insight into sales patterns. It has also improved the company’s billing and inventory management, giving it greater credit control. The customer data captured has allowed them to implement a royalty program to encourage repeat customers.

C.R. Narayanan, Tulip Telecom (3,500 EMPLOYEES) Tulip Telecom recently came into the limelight when it built what it claims is Asia’s largest datacenter for customers.

So it’s not surprising that with its own datacenter, it decided to consolidate with technological maturity.

The idea of consolidation came to C.R. Narayanan, CIO, Tulip Telecom, when he noticed the server sprawl at the company’s Delhi datacenter comprising 48 servers, occupying six racks. The datacenter consumed about 25 KW, he remembers. That’s when Narayan decided it was time for server virtualization. The entire migration from a physical to a virtual environment was done during non-office hours over 45 days.

That datacenter’s current infrastructure now occupies a little more than half a rack. Server virtualization has helped Tulip Telecom free up many racks, amounting to about Rs 30 lakh per year. Power consumption by the datacenter has reduced to 8 KW, lowering power and cooling expenses by Rs 17 lakh per year.

Over all, the server virtualization project has helped Tulip Telecom save almost Rs 55 lakh per year, while furthering its commitment to greener datacenters.

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Ravi Ramakrishnan, Uflex (2,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

Uflex is one of the world’s leading producers of flexible packaging materials. The IT team based in India provides services to all the company’s branches located across the world. The group was looking to consolidate its IT infrastructure to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Ravi Ramakrishnan, senior GM-global IT, UFLEX, initiated a project to consolidate disparate ERP applications across its manufacturing business. However, the challenge was to do this with zero downtime. This was crucial as these facilities work 24/7 all through the year. And any downtime would result in bringing these operations to a halt. The team had to ensure that the data migration did not affect costumer services.

But Ramakrishnan managed to jump over these hurdles.

The project has helped to eliminate duplication of ad-hoc reports, while ensuring that future BI and analytics solutions have just one common repository to interact with. The project was a first step toward the consolidation of other businesses.

The project saves costs on licensing, reduces the effort in managing multiple ERP instances, and the time to roll out a new country facility.

Mukund Prasad, Welspun Group (24,000 EMPLOYEES) Welspun exports several products—like towels, rugs, sheets, bathrobes—to JC Penney, a large US retailer. The client wanted Welspun to serve their weekly replenishment orders.

Mukund Prasad, director-group HR, Business Transformation and group CIO, implemented a business process automation solution for order fulfillment. It used SAP PI, SAP ERP and RF Scanners. The system automates the various processes of order fulfillment from receipt of order to delivery of goods. Welspun’s SAP system creates a sale order for each store in real time. Cartons are created for each order.

Carton barcodes are scanned by RF scanners that scan a carton label and pick the correct material and verify the quantity to be packed by scanning the UPC of the material. After a carton is packed it is placed on a pallet, which is transferred to the shipping area. Cartons are scanned again and loaded in containers and bill is sent to the customer.

The system automated various processes of order fulfillment from receipt of order to delivery of goods. The project has reduced the annual recurring cost by more than 80 percent and the initial capital cost is expected to be recovered within 20 months.

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2012

Pradeep Kumar Yadav, ZTE Telecom India (5,000 EMPLOYEES)

FINALIST

The gradual uptake in 3G and the launch of 4G in India reflects the mood of Indian telcos who are pitching their growth on high speed data services. Little wonder then that ZTE Telecom’s high speed wireless network—with speeds up to 40 MBPS—is making them a favorite among their clients.

The company has rolled out 4G Network, IPTV, and interactive gaming applications for one of the leading telecom operators. The biggest constraint to streaming of voice, data, and high-definition video has always been prohibitive bandwidth costs. But Pradeep Kumar Yadav, CIO, ZTE Telecom, has taken an ingenious approach to data structure and coding that allows a faster Bit rate and thus saves 90 percent cost. This solution uses multiple channels and devices to create a true connected world experience for users. Given that 4G networks are notorious for their security, Yadav put special focus on ensuring security compliance as per DoT. By slashing bandwidth costs, ZTE Telecom’s clients have established supremacy over their competition. Since this innovation, the conversion of new customers has increased by 22 percent.

TD Bank Gets Social to Cash-in on IT-business Teamwork A case study on communications in BFSI

DDB Mudra Introduces VC-on-mobile A case study on mobility in services

Narayana Hrudayalaya Prescribes Cloud to Deliver Better Healthcare Services

READ MORE CASE STUDIES ONLINE

A case study on cloud computing in pharma and healthcare

LG Improves Customer Service with the Help of Channel Partners A case study on application management in manufacturing

ICICI Lombard General Insurance Boosts User Experience with Mobile App

WWW.CIO.IN/CASESTUDIES

A case study on mobility in insurance

SU P E R LEAGUE

They have been innovative, ingenious, bold, and creative— but with extraordinary flair. To salute those IT leaders who have consistently outdone themselves, CIO honored 20 CIOs with the Super Achievers Award.

SUPERLEAGUE Alok Kumar ............................................................235 Amit Gupta..............................................................216 Avinash Arora.........................................................225 David Briskman ......................................................231 Daya Prakash .........................................................222 Dhandapani Ganapathy ........................................236 Dr. Jai Menon ..........................................................213 Karan B. Singh ........................................................214 M. Suresh ................................................................218 Mahesh Kumar Pinnamaneni ...............................212 Manish Choksi ........................................................ 211 Rajesh Uppal ..........................................................223 S.S. Sharma ............................................................221 Subhash Chand Mittal ...........................................219 Sudhir Kumar Reddy.............................................224 Tamal Chakravarthy ...............................................215 Umesh Chandra Dubey.........................................220 V. Subramaniam ....................................................230 Vijay Sethi ...............................................................217 Virender Pal............................................................234

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Manish Choksi

Asian Paints

Asian Paints had been using the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) platform for sales reporting and analysis for some years now.

However, the rest of the organization meets its information and reporting needs via reports from various platforms and enriches the same using Excel. Manish Choksi, chiefCorporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints, identified the need to transform the BI and analytics landscape. Driven by Choksi’s vision, Asian Paints invested in BI to build the framework for improving reporting, analytical, and decision-making capability.

The business critical BI initiative will set the foundation for future analytics (structured and unstructured data), predictive intelligence, and social analytics.

The BI initiative cut across all business units and functions presenting an opportunity to take a fresh look at performance measurement like: Align cross functional informational needs, set-up a common data model framework, and facilitated transition from a process- and application-centric to an information-centric organization. The platform is live and the benefits are flowing in. Early signs of usage indicate that the project has achieved its goals.

Company Name: Asian

SU P E R LEAGUE

Paints

Industry: Manufacturing Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 5,000 IT team Internal: 100 IT team Outsourced: 25 MD & CEO: K.B.S. Anand

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Mahesh Kumar Pinnamaneni Aurobindo Pharma

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: Aurobindo Pharma Industry: Pharmaceutical Headquarters: Hyderabad Employees: 8,000 IT team internal: 50 IT team outsourced: 40 MD: N. Govindarajan

Hyderabad-based, pharmaceutical Aurobindo Pharma suffered from limited visibility of its inventory. As a result, manufacturing was always made-to-order, says Pinnamaneni Mahesh Kumar, CIO, Aurobindo Pharma.

But orders took time to deliver—about 120 to 150 days—given the number of inputs required to make a drug, and the company’s poor visibility in the supply schedule of different raw materials for different SKUs, including something as seemingly trivial as packaging material. Thanks to these delays the company was forced to pay penalties, which impacted its profitability.

To fix this, Kumar used Oracle’s Advanced Supply Chain Planning and Optimization product, to synchronize demand and supply. The solution brought down average inventory to 15 percent and took inventory turns up by 10 percent.

The effort of planning and re-planning shrunk by 90 percent thanks to stable weekly planning schedules. It also bettered forecast accuracy and fill rates, improved Aurobindo’s relationship with its suppliers, and enhanced communication to customers regarding the schedule of deliveries.

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Dr. Jai Menon

Bharti Enterprises

Bharti Airtel is one of the world’s largest telcos with a presence in 20 countries across India, South Asia, and Africa. To simplify its operations across boundaries and increase manageability and visibility, Dr. Jai Menon, group director-global innovation and IT, Bharti Airtel, conceptualized the Airtel ERP Global Single Instance (GSI).

The three-step project started with in-country/hub deployments across three countries in India and South Asia, and 17 countries in Africa. This was followed by a colossal consolidation across Africa into single instance, and finally the global GSI implementation. GSI backs both the tactical and long-term vision of the company. It supports multiple currencies, is multilingual, provides single cash management across 20 countries bringing in discipline and manageability in partner management, financial controls and reporting, a global unified view for management and it ensures regulatory compliance in local geographies.

It centralizes book closures and provides a single interface for internal employees and suppliers, making Bharti Airtel a more structured organization, either to work for or to work with.

Company Name: Bharti

SU P E R LEAGUE

Enterprises

Industry: Conglomerate Headquarters: Gurgaon Chairman: Sunil

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Mittal

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K.B. Singh BSES Reliance ADA Group

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name:

BSES Reliance ADA Group Industry: Utilities Headquarters: New Employees:

Delhi

11,300

IT team internal: 75 IT team outsourced: 76 CEO: Gopal 214

Saxena

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The primary role of an electricity distribution utility, like BSES Reliance ADA Group, is to arrange quality power for its consumers. But buying power in optimal amounts is tricky, given that power needs fluctuate wildly, sometimes 10 times the long average. That’s where Karan Bir Singh, VP-IT, BSES Reliance ADA Group, comes in.

“The solution helps us predict Delhi’s appetite for power more accurately and save on both overbuying and last-minute scouting for power. It also lowers operational costs,” says Singh.

Singh teamed up with the SAS Institute to implement PALMS (Power and Load Management System), to help BSES provide an electricity demand forecast, a day ahead, every 15 minutes. The forecast model is based on algorithms, historical demand data, temperature data, humidity data and even holidays or large events, and uses technologies like SAS Load Forecasting Engine and SAS Smart Load Forecaster.

The system has increased forecast accuracy and consistency up to 99 percent, automated processes to eliminate human error.

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Tamal Chakravorty

Ericsson India

Ericsson India manages about 1,500 FSOs (field service officers)—a mix of in-house and externally hired resources from authorized service providers. FSO engineers are intimated on their WAP devices to reach a site and fix a problem. Since they are contractual workers, it was a challenge for Ericsson to track headcount, time sheets, and ensure data security.

Tamal Chakravorty, regional head-IT delivery, decided to provide FSOs with laptops. This laptop has a feature which enables users to get a fresh update of the OS and security patches every time they log in.

So, in case of problems, a new OS image can be installed in five minutes from a cloud-based console—this is critical because an FSO gets only 30 minutes to fix a problem at a site.

FSOs have access to Google Apps and can fill in their time sheets or report back their location. The laptops are also equipped with GPS and can report back to a central console on a user’s movements. Ericsson India can also send a trouble ticket to an FSO’s WAP device to reach a site based on his location.

The project helped Ericsson cut 26 percent in IT costs, while improving the efficiency and productivity of its field workforce.

Company Name: Ericsson

SU P E R LEAGUE

India

Industry: Telecommunications Headquarters: Gurgaon Employees: 11,000 IT team internal:

37

IT team outsourced: 240 Head of Region RINA:

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Fredrik Jejdling

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Amit Gupta FIL India Business Services

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name:

FIL India Business Services Industry: BFSI Headquarters: Gurgaon Employees: 1,600 IT team internal: 180 Country Head-India Services:

Nitin Seth

Given its size, asset management is crucial for FIL India Business Services.

It improves the budgeting, purchase, utilization, management, control, and security of assets across the entire enterprise.

In keeping with changes in technology, the organization identified the need to replace its existing asset management tool built on older technology. The existing system threw up multiple challenges including inconsistencies in usage and interpretations of the tool, high opex, slow response time, and inconsistent reporting.

Amit Gupta, director-technology infrastructure services, FIL India Business Services, eliminated these inefficiencies by deploying a global asset management solution over the cloud. The Saas-based solution, supporting 26 countries, curbed capex costs by 50 percent and run-thebusiness costs by 25 percent, lowered the response time of the tool by approximately 50 percent and shrunk manual and cumbersome work effort by 60 percent. It also resulted in a consolidated set of tools and data repositories that minimize and constrain the rate at which errors may be introduced into the asset repository.

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Vijay Sethi

Hero MotoCorp

The world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer, Hero MotoCorp, was encumbered by manual HR processes to manage performance and organizational talent development. The whole cycle starting from the identification of employee training to imparting training was a manually-driven exercise and involved vast amounts of effort in compilation, monitoring and tracking. The lack of integration between the learning process and performance management process sometimes resulted in training that was not aligned to real need.

Vijay Sethi, vice president and CIO, Hero MotoCorp, identified a way out of this quandary. He automated the performance appraisal and training processes. Project ‘Online HR System’ ensured that whatever development needs were identified for employees during periodic performance review cycles were catered to and that employee training was imparted in that area. The project, which was the result of an organizational focus on talent development, helps Hero MotoCorp identify, track, monitor and analyze its progress on the talent development front.

Company Name: Hero

SU P E R LEAGUE

MotoCorp

Industry: Automotive Headquarters: New

Delhi

Employees: 5,000+ IT team internal: 50 IT team outsourced: 175+ CEO: Pawan VOL/7 | ISSUE/11

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M. Suresh Hyundai Motor India

SU P E R LEAGUE

Hyundai Motor India (HMIL) is

Company Name: Hyundai

Motor India

Industry: Automotive Headquarters: Kancheepuram Employees: 8,834 IT team internal: 96 IT team outsourced: 22 MD & CEO: B.S. Seo

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the largest passenger car exporter and the second largest car manufacturer in India.

To cater to rising demand and support its growth, HMIL was looking to enhance its manufacturing and production efficiency.

M. Suresh, director-ADM Group, Hyundai Motor India, came up with a way to automate the line feeding systems. He developed a system which could feed data to the assembly line using a PDA. Feeding requirement is calculated based on vehicle master plan from the company’s MES. For calculating feeding requirement, the system considers production plan, material requirement and KANBAN master data. This data includes feeder information, feeding lead time, line capacity, supply area, storage locations and other information. The feeder collects material required for the line from a storage location and confirms this in his PDA. The stock is immediately reduced at the storage area and increased on the line side.

This has helped HMIL increase efficiency and cut costs by eliminating material feeding errors at the shop floor, avoiding surprise line stoppages, and running a justin-time inventory.

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Subhash Chand Mittal IFFCO Indian Farmers Fertilizer Co-operative (IFFCO) wanted to streamline its business processes across plants in disparate locations. The organization was also striving to achieve better budgetary controls, variance analysis, and create what-if scenarios. It identified the need to replace a range of home-grown applications used discretely across plants with a single centralized system.

Subhash Chand Mittal, senior ED (MS and IT) and group CTO, IFFCO, devised a strategy to surmount these challenges. He deployed an ERP and integrated it with various legacy apps and also built a BI tool for planning and control, variance analysis, what-if analysis, and forecasting in the areas of budget preparation, control and cost of production.

The twin project has consolidated IT services which has led to optimization of human resources, hardware and software, better software license, maintenance, and backup management, and a robust DR setup. It also provided a uniform master data management across all plants. Automation of COP (cost of production) process improved control and accuracy over costing data.

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: IFFCO Industry: Agriculture Headquarters: New

Delhi

Employees: 6,300 IT team internal: 80 IT team outsourced: 40 MD: Dr. U.S. Awasthi

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U.C. Dubey

IFFCO-Tokio General Insurance

Moving to Web-based integrated systems to provide policy issuance over-thecounter has resulted in the mushrooming of different business models for IFFCO-Tokio General Insurance. This meant that an automobile manufacturer could include a policy issuance system in its DMS and travel portals with ticketing solutions—providing the customer with the ability to compare rates across different insurance providers.

To cater to these needs, the company had deployed islands of disparate solutions.

U. C. Dubey, executive director-IT, IFFCO-Tokio General Insurance, created Sanyojak, an in-house solution for B-to-B partner integration. Partners use their core business system for vehicle sale or travel ticketing and this data is transformed and sent to IFFCO Tokio’s system via Sanyojak.

Policies are issued and sent to partners’ system. The project includes a configurable transformation engine to transform data from various partners. Now, adding new partners doesn’t need development effort.

This has helped the organization in adding many new business partners and reducing the time to market, thus generating

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: IFFCO-Tokio

General Insurance

Industry: BFSI Headquarters: Gurgaon Employees: 900 IT team internal: 42 IT team outsourced: 12 MD & CEO: Rakesh

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S.S. Sharma JK Tyre & Industries

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To address rising market demands,

Company Name: JK Tyre

& Industries

Industry: Manufacturing Headquarters: New

Delhi

Employees: 8,000 IT team internal: 25 IT team outsourced: 15 P & D: A.K. Bajoria

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JK Tyre & Industries embarked on a journey to optimize its supply chain by scheduling its shop floor processes.

S.S. Sharma, chief GM-IT, JK Tyre & Industries, implemented a shop-floor scheduling and constraint-based production planning system. The model for shop-floor scheduling was designed after considering plant uptime, skill inventory, bill of material, etcetera. The process starts with interactive demand forecasting. Then, the system creates a plant-wise and consolidated capacity planning which is moderated to make it more realistic. It generates a production plan for each plant and prepares the sales distribution plan for plants and sales offices. This plan is passed through heuristic and optimization runs.

The production plan converts into a shop-floor schedule that’s followed by the workforce on the shop-floor. Backlogs created during the production cycle due to low efficiency are considered automatically in the next day’s schedule.

The project has helped eliminate human errors in planning and shop-floor scheduling, making it more productive.

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Daya Prakash

LG Electronics India

LG has always strived to stand by its commitment to provide world-class service to its customers. That promise came under pressure with the robust growth in the company’s sales, combined with a growing focus on customer satisfaction—both of which increased call volumes at LG’s outsourced customer interaction center (CIC).

“The capability of the outsourced customer interaction center to enhance its levels and meet LG’s quality norms was limited and it couldn’t be expected that they would match LG’s fast pace,” says Daya Prakash, head-IT, LG India. “To address this challenge, we decided to setup an LG-owned 400-seat CIC. It would bring more quality to service, bring in cost efficiency—even with an increased call load.”

Prakash designed the overall infrastructure and implemented the project to bring all calls from 1,130 service locations to a single one with some load shared with an outsourced location at Mumbai. The project ensured high availability and better informed staff manning phones. It also brought about more manpower efficiency and greater cost efficiency.

Company Name: LG

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Electronics India

Industry: Manufacturing Headquarters: Seoul, South

Korea

Employees: 3,400 IT team internal: 100 MD: Soon

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Rajesh Uppal Maruti Suzuki India In its quest to develop competitive global products, Maruti Suzuki India conceptualized a project to converge its group companies through a global system.

The initiative, christened integrated bill of materials project, unifies various processes related to product design, development and manufacturing within Suzuki group companies. This was done to provide a single source of truth and setup a standardized global system for its subsidiaries and suppliers. It facilitates employees to share their ideas and skills for product design, cost control, and quality practices.

Rajesh Uppal, executive director IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India, spearheaded the enterprise-wide transformation project.

He orchestrated the reengineering of all business processes for compliance to global practices while maintaining the operational flexibility for regional needs.

Unified product design and manufacturing capability equips the car manufacturer for global product launches. The system ensures faster time to market and boosts operational efficiency. It imbibes collaborative working and tightly glues product development activities.

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name:

Maruti Suzuki India Industry: Automotive Headquarters: New

Delhi

Employees: 9,000 IT team internal: 70 MD & CEO: S. Nakanishi

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Sudhir Kumar Reddy MindTree

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Company Name: MindTree Industry: IT/ITeS Headquarters: Bangalore Employees: 10,500 IT team internal: 80 IT team outsourced: 30 COO: Parthasarathy

N.S.

MindTree couldn’t get as many new recruits on-board and trained as fast as it needed. Part of the problem was that it could accommodate only 1,000 campus hires at one time and creating new capacity was expensive, about Rs 3 lakh per seat. Another challenge was that all the software required for training were captured as part of a single image, which was 18GB and it took up to 15 days to image-train PC’s.

But delays created by on-boarding and training meant recruits were not ready to staff projects, which affected profitability.

Sudhir Kumar Reddy, VP and CIO, MindTree, met the challenge of on-boarding and training over 2,500 campus hires.

He decoupled seating and made everyone productive with flexi-seating. Reddy architected a comprehensive training environment by deploying laptops, a robust wireless network, and an app virtualization environment. The system delivered a MindTree gold image (4GB) on notebooks as part of an employee’s entry policy. Now MindTree can handle a larger trainee pool creating physical space. Reddy’s project also shrunk the TAT for a training environment setup from 15 days to two hours.

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Avinash Arora New Holland Fiat (India) Farm equipment manufacturer New Holland Tractors India aims to offer best-in-class services to its customers. In line with this vision, it appreciated the need among farmers and other stakeholders to monitor the health and performance of their machines, like tractors.

To address that need, Avinash Arora, director-ICT (India and South East Asia), New Holland Fiat (India), created SKY WATCH, a first-of-its-kind tractor variant (it’s been patented) that uses GPS/GPRS and on-board sensors to constantly monitor the health of tractors, harvesters, and earth moving machines. For instance, it monitors the clogging of air filters, which are extremely vital for tractors to work efficiently. “We devised a system that monitors the percentage of air being clogged and sends alerts to customers, dealer technicians, field service engineers and updates the back-end database (to keep the company informed of tractors operations in the field),” says Arora.

Among other indicators, SKY WATCH monitors the temperature of the water in the radiator, oil pressure, and how long a machine has been running continuously. It also offers location tracking.

Company Name: New

Fiat (India)

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Holland

Headquarters: Greater

Noida

Employees: 1,500 IT team internal:

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POWERED BY

BSE EXPERIENCES THE NEW WITH EMC If the BSE wanted to hold on to its place as one of the world’s most important bourses and give its customers a real taste of its new tag line, it would have to fix challenges with its storage sub-systems. That’s where EMC steps in.

Company BSE

Industry Exchange

Offering Trading

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago, something happened in Asia for the first time. The BSE—formerly known as the Bombay Stock Exchange—was born.

Back in the 1850s, India’s earliest Indian stock-brokers began meeting under banyan trees, first in front of the Mumbai’s Town Hall, where Horniman Circle is now situated, and then later at the junction of Meadows Street, what is now called Mahatma Gandhi Road. In 1875, these stockbrokers moved to Dalal Street and established Asia’s first bourse, the BSE. The BSE has a long and extensive heritage of operational and technological excellence. Over the years, it has grown into one of India’s leading exchange groups, and an efficient capital-raising platform for the Indian corporate sector.

With a focus on new business opportunities, products and service innovations, and technological upgrades, the BSE has always striven to push the envelope on all fronts. And in line with that, a few years ago, the BSE adopted a new tag line that reflected a strategic shift in its approach,

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

With the new storage solutions, our goals of enhanced performance, faster project execution, and improved customer experience were met. We were fortunate to have a specialized team from EMC for the migration process. It enabled us to work together, define our expectations, and achieve our goals.”

KERSI TAVADIA CIO, BSE

attitude and business focus. The new outlook is meant to position the bourse better in the eyes of its customers as a national, multi-asset financial infrastructure institution. That tagline was Experience the New. But to do that, the BSE had to first release itself from the challenges of the old.

SCALING LEGACY Given BSE’s heavy dependency on data, it was only natural that the new direction called for an evolution of platforms and technologies. In line with that, BSE’s CIO, Kersi Tavadia, and his team, realized it was time to revamp the exchange’s storage subsystem. It hosted several real-time applications that required the highest levels of availability and performance and it was fast running out of capacity and wasn’t able to scale up efficiently.

Kersi and his team kept a close tab on identifying bottlenecks in systems and effectuating changes in technologies, both tactically and strategically. They found that critical data in multiple silos and a lack of single replication technology were putting additional pressure on the organization’s information storage strategy.

So, the BSE’s IT team turned to EMC to create an effective, centralized storage environment that would offer enhanced performance and robust replication technology.

This would not only improve the storage environment’s scalability but also strengthened the organization’s business continuity planning (BCP) initiatives.

The question was: Could EMC offer them a solution that would meet the BSE’s multiple needs and still offer a near price-to-value proposition?

To understand the magnitude of the BSE’s challenge it’s critical to recognize just how large it is. The BSE

is a corporatized and de-mutualized entity that has a broad shareholder base. It includes two leading global exchanges, the Deutsche Bourse and the Singapore Exchange, as strategic partners. BSE provides an efficient and transparent market for trading in equity, debt instruments, derivatives, mutual funds.

The scale at which BSE operates and grows continuously is a phenomenon in itself. The BSE is the world’s number one bourse in terms of listed members, with over 5,000 companies listed on it. It is the world’s fifth most-active exchange in terms of transactions.

In total it commands market capitalization of $1.06 trillion (about Rs 58 lakh crore) as of May 15, 2012.

It is the first exchange in India and only the second in the world to be ISO 9001:2000 certified. It is also the first exchange in the country and second in the world to receive Information Security Management System Standard BS 7799-2-2002 certification for its On-Line trading System (BOLT).

That’s an impressive reputation, one that could be tarnished by an unreliable storage ecosystem. Storage subsystems have always been considered the most critical support platform for infrastructure running an organization with this scale, capacity and throughput. And at BSE, they were fast running out of storage capacity.

“Moreover, there was also no single replication technology available to take care of the volume and update the disaster recovery site. We’ve been running different storage boxes working in silos. This added to our power consumption. This surely wasn’t conducive for the scale of enterprise growth we were witnessing,” recalls Tavadia.

An unreliable storage environment could

endanger the reputation that the BSE has built over 137 years. Storage subsystems have always been considered a critical platform for running an organization with this scale, capacity and throughput.

The stock exchange’s IT team took stock of the storage subsystems’ current requirements and mapped it to the rate at which the organization was scaling up.

Estimating year-on-year growth, the team sized up a storage solution for a three-year horizon.

“Our needs were pretty clear. We were looking for innovative technology from the market leaders that offered specialized replication techniques. Considering the kind of IT ecosystem we ran, we were leaning towards solutions that were inherently vendor agnostic.

Quite naturally, we wanted all of this with crystal clear price-performance benefits,” points out Tavadia.

CONSOLIDATING GOOD The existing storage subsystem at BSE was midrange and came from multiple vendors. If BSE’s IT team wanted to ensure that they could support the exchange’s growth, its first step was to consolidate the enterprise’s storage platform.

The consolidation required that the storage environment would be scalable in terms of sheer capacity because it was to host a number of real-time applications that required the highest level of availability and performance.

Towards that end EMC proposed its flagship storage offering, the Symmetrix.

“Since we were dealing with EMC for the first time, we deliberated on every aspect of the solution, both from technical as well as business standpoints.

The solution was analyzed from a risk-assessment and mitigation perspective, along with well-defined fallback measures and liabilities,” says Tavadia. “It turned out to be a good learning exercise as we also compared competitive products and gained good insight into prevailing technological advancements.”

Tavadia’s team eventually chose to deploy Symmetrix DMX4 solutions at its production and DR datacenters with NAS functionality for shared storage. The solutions were implemented with about a 100 TB of raw capacity at each site, with storage-based replication duly configured. This was deployed with enough flexibility to support the BSE application topology.

By design, most of the BSE’s mission-critical applications were hosted at the production datacenter with replication to the DR Symmetrix solution. A few applications were also hosted at the DR site that replicated the production datacenter Symmetrix solution. This ensured that resources at both the sites were used optimally.

The solution also offers the organization advanced features for performance and optimization, including dynamic cache partitioning, optimizer and priority controls. The on-board NAS functionality offers private shared storage to each department for common documents and also hosts a public shared storage

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

section for all corporate documents. This shared storage has been configured for file-level recovery and is replicated to the DR site.

MIGRATING TO THE NEW “We wanted to setup a centralized storage environment with robust replication technology,” says Tavadia. “With the new storage solutions, our perceived goals of enhanced performance, faster project execution, and improved customer experience were met. Post-implementation, we were also able to demonstrate seamless DR drills and significantly strengthened our BCP initiatives.”.

The migration process was executed in a phased manner. Existing infrastructure was used in parallel for the first quarter, while the migration to the newer subsystem was being carried out. The AMC for the existing storage was eventually discontinued and the

storage was powered off, saving substantial amounts in operational, power, and AMC costs.

It also turned out to be easy to secure management buy-in for this migration. While the earlier investment for the existing storage environment had already depreciated in value, the high performance demand from newer applications, the need to setup a fully optimized DR site, and the demand to be able to handle scalability effectively underscored the requirement clearly. Moving to the new storage solution was the only way forward.

“We were fortunate to have a specialized team from EMC for the migration process. It enabled us to work together, define our expectations, and achieve our goals in timely and efficient manner,” says Tavadia.

With such timely technological updates, the BSE continues to keep intact a 137-year-old legacy of creating value for its stakeholders and the financial system.

Extracting Value from Big Data Anantharaman Balakrishnan, VP Sales-BFSI, West and East Regions, EMC, says digital data helps organizations to be more strategic and drive stronger business growth.

How are organizations using new storage technologies to keep pace with data and business growth?

To keep pace with digital information growth, organizations are looking to improve their information storage and management policies. They are also adopting ‘efficiency technologies’ such as Flash, FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering), FAST Cache and deduplication.

Organizations are also accelerating their journey towards cloud computing, which will not only help them manage

data deluge but also provide cost-savings, and better IT and business agility.

Organizations need to consider big data analytics as well. Digital data presents an opportunity to be more strategic and drive stronger and predictable business growth.

So, what does it take to keep data accessible, traceable and secure, especially in the BFSI sector?

Organizations in the BFSI sector need to manage information and enable access to

Today, organizations understand the value hidden within huge volumes of digital data. They will significantly increase their investment in big data analytics in the next few years.”

A. BALAKRISHNAN

VP Sales-BFSI, West and East Regions, EMC

their customers. The challenge of managing large content volumes is exacerbated by regulatory and legal demands. A sound information management strategy in a BFSI organization must consist of a robust storage platform that enables data storage, accessibility, backup, recovery, and security. They also need a document archiving and presentation solution that can store bank statements in a standard format for digital preservation and Webbased retrieval. A strategy that keeps digital information at the core—and its services around it—is the key to enablement.

How can organizations transform data storage from a commodity to an enabler of innovation and growth?

That’s already happening, thanks to big data. Today, organizations understand the value hidden within huge volumes of digital data. Organizations will significantly increase their investment in big data analytics in the next few years and enjoy the benefits that come with it: Business growth and innovation.

V. Subramaniam

Otis Elevator Company (India)

Like almost all manufacturers, the Otis Elevator Company (India), makes money from servicing the elevators, escalators, and moving walkways it sells.

Today, it has about 50,000 units under maintenance across India.

Three years ago, it started taking its service business more seriously and built an integrated suite of applications called Service Integrated System (SIS), that would help it provide world-class service. Today, SIS has eight sub-systems, including ones that deal with repairs or ones that automate the process of getting spares. Each subsystem is a full-fledged app and is integrated to manage all aspects of service operations. “This is a well-thought out, strategic initiative based on process standardization and optimization by applying VSPM (value stream process mapping) principles. It has functionalities and features that enhance service operations and ease of use for users, it has performance metrics, dashboards, and reports for performance monitoring and analysis, which are used for review and action so that we can achieve breakthrough performance in service and manage service operations effectively,� says Subramaniam.

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: Otis

Elevator Company (India)

Industry: Manufacuring Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 2,500+ IT team internal: 7 IT team outsourced:

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David Briskman Ranbaxy Laboratories

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David Briskman, VP & CIO,

Company Name: Ranbaxy

Laboratories

Industry:Pharmaceutical Headquarters: Gurgaon Employees: 15,000 IT team internal: 102 IT team outsourced: 240 MD & CEO: Arun

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Sawhney

Ranbaxy Laboratories, diagnosed latent inefficiencies in artwork management, which was a manual process. The existing system was plagued with a lack of visibility. It was difficult to trace the current status of the artwork and difficult to figure out what or who was holding it up for approval. There was no document repository where all the artwork could be stored for future reference. The manual artwork management system failed to adhere to the regulations of various countries.

These inconsistencies in processes mired decision-making. Briskman decided to assuage the pain points by automating the existing labor-intensive artwork management process and minimizing the risk of missing or losing data. Electronic management of artwork reduced the costs associated with paper artwork. Equipped with the ability to better control access to artwork management the company now provides role-based access to users. It can now create new artwork designs faster by centrally managing information and removing latency in review.

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EVENT REPORT

MAXI MAXIMUM AGILITY In a roundtable discussion on accelerating transformation Indian CIOs discussed the challenges they faced and how SAP could help.

“Today, HANA with SAP helps us generate reports that used to take 15 hours earlier in just 15 minutes.”

“IT departments must take the initiative to push the business into adopting new technologies to drive innovation.”

JAYANTHA PRABHU,

SANJOY SEN,

Group CTO, Essar Group

August 03, 2012

07.40 PM

Divisional CIO, ITC

August 03, 2012

07.55 PM

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP SAP

T

oday’s uncertain business environment puts IT leaders under more pressure than they’ve possibly ever witnessed. Short business horizons means that business executives are pushing IT departments harder with a higher number of projects, each with shorter timelines, and smaller ROI windows.

“The challenge today,” says Ranga Ramani, VP-IT infrastructure, Vodafone, “is performing this balancing act between prioritizing different projects, and delivering on schedule.”

One solution before CIOs is to use technology to create more agility and increase their ability to stay on top of a wider, faster stream of business requests. That’s a way out Jayantha Prabhu, group CTO at Essar Group, has taken. “Today, HANA with SAP helps us generate reports that used to take 15 hours earlier in just 15 minutes,” he says. “This is key because at Essar, we’re focusing on bringing together real-time information using analytics and dashboard across our global facilities.”

A challenge before CIOs who want agility is getting it without investing unnecessarily. That’s something Manish Choksi, chief-corporate strategy and CIO, Asian Paints, agrees with. “A lot of us have invested in core transaction platforms like SAP. CIOs need not necessarily rip out expensive investments in the back end, but should, rather, focus on transforming either using existing technology, or investing intelligently in technology.”

Sanjoy Sen, divisional CIO at ITC, also believes in investing intelligently in technology. “A big example of IT driven innovation at ITC is e-choupal. It has

transformed the lives of many Indian villages.

Similarly, IT departments must take the initiative to push the business into adopting new technologies to drive innovation.”

At the same time, CIOs need to guard against the very real threat of both business and IT abandoning the need to stay compliant with multiple regulations because they are in a hurry to move forward.

But CIOs using SAP need to worry much less about that. “SAP has defined business process standards derived from experience from multiindustry exposure. When violated, business is sure to go down in terms of business continuity and performance,” says Greg Pike, SVP Global Communications for Active Global Support, SAP. “As we move into the intricate details of data consistency, we must ensure that we know the problems before they hit the users—a direction we all have to head to together with value realization,” he says.

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

“In uncertain times, responsible managers get ahead by looking for more data. Hence, the requirement for data analytics goes up.”

“By fixing disintegrated infrastructure with SAP, we can address the mind-boggling hidden costs that seap through our IT investments.”

ALOK GOEL,

M.D. AGARWAL,

COO, SAP India

August 03, 2012

08.10 PM

Head-IT, BPCL

August 03, 2012

08.35 PM

Virender Pal

SpiceJet

Part of SpiceJet’s success is built on its strong relationship with travel agents and corporate customers. Virender Pal, CTO, SpiceJet, wanted to strengthen those ties. After analyzing the challenges of both communities, he figured a way for SpiceJet to help them—and create competitive advantage for itself.

“All airlines handle their travel agents and their sub-agents. This number can run up to above 500 and is a cost burden.

And since typical travel agents are not IT oriented, they follow legacy processes to do bookings. Airlines also have to manage bank deposits and reports. It’s a lot paper work,” says Pal. To help, Pal’s team created Agent+.

It allows travel agents to manage subagents, their sales, bookings, finances, and commissions without depending on SpiceJet. For corporate customers, Agent+ integrates with their intranets, extending the power to book tickets to users, eliminating the need for travel desks, thus lowering their costs.

SpiceJet is the only airline that offers this solution for its business partners, says Pal. “This has created additional revenue for SpiceJet as we now have more reach with travel agents.”

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: SpiceJet Industry: Aviation Headquarters: Gurgaon Employees: 5,000+ IT team internal: 18 IT team outsourced: CEO: Neil

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Alok Kumar Tata Consultancy Services

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Company: Tata Industry:

Consultancy Services

IT/ITeS

Headquarters: Mumbai Employees: 238,583 IT team internal: 3,000+ MD & CEO: Natarajan

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Chandrasekaran

It’s critical for TCS to manage the lifecycle of its employees, from hiring and imparting process and technology skills, to facilitating performance monitoring and career growth.

Alok Kumar, VP and global head-internal IT and shared services, TCS, fortified this process by deploying a global talent lifecycle management solution. It standardized multiple processes across the world and is used by over 240,000 staffers. It comprises a global recruitment portal for experienced talent, and a new campus portal for fresh graduates. Over 2 lakh university graduates and 1 lakh experienced candidates registered on the portals last year. Then there is the integrated competency and learning management system, which manages all training needs. It contains 2,076 role definitions, 3,438 competencies, and over 25,000 catalogue courses. These systems track talent needs—and their availability— by geographies, ensuring TCS inducts the right talent at the right time. It also has a module that identifies and grooms high potential employees. Using this solution, TCS was able to integrate over 70,400 professionals into its workforce last year.

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T.G. Dhandapani TVS Motor Company To empower executives at the TVS Motor Company, the third-largest twowheeler manufacturer in India, to do their jobs while on the go, T.G. Dhandapani, CIO, TVS, conceived the “TVS Mobile Solution”.

The initiative is divided into three levels.

At the hygiene level TVS Mobile Solution provides work-flow for approval for 18 processes like leave, for instance. Also it provides 22 status reports from sales to quality.

“Performance dashboards impel operating executives to take corrective action and improve performance,” says Dhandapani.

At second level, what Dhandapani calls the operational excellence level, the solution provides alerts for damage control. At strategic level, it enables field executives to stay closer to their customers and promote sales. Around 35 dashboards are available on mobile phones (on multiple platforms) and iPads to help management understand the performance of business better and drive growth. With more access to data from the field, the mobile solution will help management to take more customer-centric decisions and guarantee timely data flow for TVS’ on-field staff.

SU P E R LEAGUE

Company Name: TVS

Motor Company

Industry: Automotive Headquarters: Hosur, Tamil Employees:

Nadu

8,000

IT team internal: 80 IT team outsourced: 16 President & CEO: K.N. Radhakrishnan

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Event Report KEYNOTE SPEAKER

The Art of Creating That WOW Factor A very common problem that people—at almost all levels and functions—face is knowing what to do, but not how to do it. Innovation is one such area where organizations grapple with this problem. Jonar Nader, in his keynote speech titled Cracking the Innovation Conundrum, shed light on how CIOs can sow the seeds of innovation in their companies.

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PAUL DUNN Speaker and Mentor The ‘Wizard of WOW’, Paul Dunn, is the marketing guru behind the success of many ground-breaking business ventures. He wrote an innovative software that became the basis for one of Australia’s early technological successes—the Hartley Computer. He formed The Results Corporation (TRC) and grew it into a $20 million company serving 23,000 businesses. Paul’s audio and video programs are now in use by over 156,000 businesses around the world.

I

magine walking into a reputed, international coffee chain and paying a hefty sum for a cup of ordinary cappuccino. Most of us are likely to buy that cup of coffee because we need it and the chain just happens to be selling it.

And once a while, we would complain that an ordinary cup shouldn’t be so expensive.

Now imagine a small cafe beside your office or home where the same regular cup of cappuccino is decorated with innovative art on the coffee’s foam. Done with the help of an ordinary toothpick, six seconds and zero additional input costs, the rosetta created with cream adds a WOW factor. Now suddenly, you’ve added a level of experience

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to that cup of coffee. There’s a lesson here: Sometimes creating a WOW factor just needs good intentions.

Creating WOW was the crux of keynote speaker, Paul Dunn’s, presentation. Dunn believes that creating that WOW factor is not as hard as it seems because WOW transcends logic. People are willing to pay more for a rosetta on their coffee because its the brewers intention to make a customer happy and walking the extra mile for the customer wins them over.

“True value is not in the work you do, but the work you inspire others to do. Leaders should successfully absorb stress to create flow so that their teams can continue to be productive.”

Dunn also talked about how important it is for leaders to be inspired and inspire people. He spoke about the passion needed to create ideas that revolutionize businessas-usual attitudes and emphasized on the fact that leaders needs to believe in themselves before they can ask others to believe in them. Another key input was the need for passion. He drew on examples from legends like Steve Jobs who were not just passionate about computing and the product itself, but what the product meant to Apple’s customers.

Dunn then empathized with leaders and said that the overwhelming world of digital information is transforming people into digital goldfish (a goldfish has a memory span of nine seconds), which makes it tougher for leaders and their organizations to leave a mark behind and strike a

connection with their customers. The conventional methods of connecting won’t not work anymore, he said. Leaders must realize that the way successful leadership was conventionally defined is changing.

“The true value is not in the work that you do, but the work that you inspire others to do. Leaders should successfully absorb stress to create flow so that their teams can continue to be productive,” he said.

To become someone who can innovate and inspire people around them, Dunn suggested that leaders cultivate a few qualities within themselves. He laid emphasis on how words matter and how redefining an old process in a new way can actually make people sit up and notice the wonderful work that a team is doing.

Dunn strongly recommended the use of inspirational and invigorating words to keep team morale high. Among other virtues, he suggested that leaders build in themselves he said authenticity, transparency, clarity and generosity, were important.

Dunn drew examples from people like Bill gates, Steve Jobs, Vijay Mallya, and said that whether it is through innovation or branding, each of these great leaders also had something else in common. “All of these people are what they are because of the questions they ask. The creator is always asking what, team players ask who, and process oriented people ask how, but the bottomline remains that they all ask questions,” Dunn said.

Keynote Speaker Presented by :

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HCL TECHNOLOGIES

CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

The Managed Services Gambit CIOs, on a roundtable organized by CIO and HCL Technologies, explored how managed services could help them with their current set of challenges.

B

eing a CIO today is possibly tougher than it’s ever been before. IT budgets are going in the opposite direction of the demands on IT. The business wants to ensure that customer service is not compromised, compliance mandates continue to proliferate, and the complexity of IT is only increasing. In short, the expectations from IT are increasing (or remain the same, at best), while the resources to deliver are changing for the worse. What’s a CIO to do?

To discuss these issues, and find a new approach to the challenge, CIO and HCL Technologies organized a roundtable discussion with some of India’s top IT leaders at the CIO100 2012 Awards held at Hyderabad.

Mukul Jain, SVP and head-IT, DLF Pramerica Life Insurance, broached the topic of declining IT budgets. He said that an organization’s IT budgets are constantly monitored, and as the impact of the global economic recession becomes local, IT have to operate with significantly smaller budgets than they did before. “We are fortunate that our products and launches have been received well. However, we realized that a new approach is required to address these constraints and moving to an opex-based model seemed like an ideal solution,” he said.

That’s exactly what HCL Technologies wants to give its clients, said Rajesh Thakur, sales head, India Business, at HCL Technologies. The key value proposition of managed services is to deliver “predictable services at a predictable cost” with

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continuous improvements and proactive value addition, he said. “The key benefit to the customer is that they have to pay less for the same quality of service or get a higher quality of service for the same price over successive years.”

Sanjay Jhamb, head-IT, Nokia India, believes in the managed services Thakur is taking about but for another reason than opex. “It makes more sense to let the experts deliver a service rather than develop resources in-house. But, it’s important to have watertight SLAs and clearly defined business objectives.”

However, Ajay Kumar Meher, senior VP-IT and post production, Multi Screen Media, said that more than just managing SLAs and monitoring deliverables, managed service providers should be sensitive to business needs.

“Trust and transparency are the key factors rather than defining the scope of managed services based on just contractual agreements,” he said.

Thakur agreed with Meher. “The key in any managed services engagement is flexibility in contracting and willingness to run the extra mile with clients.”

Damon Frost, associate director, Procter & Gamble Global Business Services, said that CIOs should focus on optimizing IT operations and processes supporting their most businesscritical applications and services. “At P&G, we take a proactive approach to business needs and see managed services as a strategic plank to deliver capability to the organization.

We leverage our partners, who are experts in their specific areas, to deliver that, and we expect them to continue to stay abreast of all the core technologies,” he said.

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

EFFICIENCY S P EC I A L AWA R D

DELL CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

EFFICIENT ENTERPRISE SPECIAL AWARD

Tarun Pandey

Anil Veer

Vice President-IT, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group Profile on page 38

Vice President-IT, Aricent Group Profile on page 42

Maj. Prashant Veer Singh Chief Information Officer, Bharti Infratel Profile on page 53

Sunil Sevak

Srinivasa N.

Head-Enterprise IT Infrastructure, L&T Profile on page 104

Director, IT-GSC Bangalore Novo Nordisk Profile on page 117

Presented by

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Event Report

CIO Conversations An exchange of ideas, insights and opinions

Managed Services

Is an Opex Approach Viable?

Managed services, metered payments, leasing, pay-per-use or payper-transaction have been the buzzwords in the industry for quite some time now. But are organizations comfortable switching to an opex-based or services model for their IT requirements? CIOs at the CIO 100 Symposium discuss.

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Sudhir Reddy

On the CIO Conversation Panel:

VP & CIO, MindTree I believe that I shouldn’t have to manage something that is managed very well by someone else. That said, it’s critical to find the right vendor when opting for a managed service. We enabled managed print services at MindTree, and the biggest advantage was that it consolidates all printers into one bill and provides reporting functions, too. I don’t have to take care of the up-keep of printers, or manage supplies like ink and toner. With the help of managed services, I currently run a ration of one printer per 100 employees, which we’re trying to take to one per 150.

Sudhir Reddy VP & CIO, MindTree

Joydeep Dutta CTO, ICICI Securities

Financial services as an industry is much more regulated than others. Hence, it is not very friendly to outsourcing or managed services. We outsource a few non-core activities and some IT infrastructure to our group company, ICICI Bank.

Other activities such as datacenter hosting and managed call centers are also outsourced to the group. While using a shared services approach for account opening, collections and loan servicing enables billing on a quantifiable basis, other things like datacenter outsourcing are not transactional-based and cannot be quantified.

Even when outsourcing to a group company there are risks involved, and we have a committee to oversee these projects which look into SLAs and exit strategies.

Joydeep Dutta

Dr. Alok Bharadwaj

SVP, Canon India

CTO, ICICI Securities

Dr. Alok Bharadwaj

SVP, Canon India

There is a huge transformation that is taking place in the way IT models are being deployed. For instance, in the document management space, we notice that there are tangible benefits in terms of cost containment and control, efficiency and sustainability, risk mitigation and compliance, and ensuring user satisfaction. While the CFO will appreciate the reduced costs associated with printing, the CIO benefits from increased vendor accountability. Given the far-reaching, but largely concealed, impact of printing on most organizations’ balance sheet, an MPS offers an innovative approach to re-gaining control over costs.

Thomson Thomas SVP-IT & Head Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance

Thomson Thomas

SVP-IT & Head Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance We were looking to have a fixed, long-term opex-based approach in terms of setting up IT infrastructure, but found it difficult to find a vendor who would be able to partner with us for a period of 10 years. This is not surprising because with the constantly evolving technology landscape, the visibility of any solution offered to us was under two years. In this uncertain environment, we realized that going traditional is the best option. I strongly believe that if organizations have the capacity to fund themselves, then they should control that capacity and not outsource it.

Baljinder Singh Global Head of Technology, Information Security and Business Continuity, EXL Service

Baljinder Singh

Global Head of Technology, Information Security and Business Continuity, EXL Service

This CIO Conversation was presented by :

Increasingly, organizations realize the need to focus on core competencies and align their IT strategy to business objectives. It’s important for them to focus on their customers and products and create products that are unique.

To do this, they must leverage the ecosystem and work with best-of-breed providers. If there’s someone who offers a specialized service, then it makes sense to partner with them.

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EXECUTIVE

VIEWPOINT

Bridging Distances with Video Collaboration Tata Communications’ Integrated Business Video Services provide video solutions that enable businesses to connect to their regional and global offices, their customers and partners.

Indian CIOs are warming up to the idea of deploying enterprise video across geographies. What are the factors driving this trend?

Most organisations today are facing similar challenges: a growing number of remote and virtual employees, the rising costs and stress of business travel, the need to make decisions faster than ever before and the desire to be ecologically responsible. These challenges are increasing pressure on CIOs everywhere to find alternatives to in-person collaboration.

At the same time, corporate IT has evolved and is providing more user-focused IT solutions. These go beyond providing assets and support services and are aimed to enable teams to improve productivity. In the past 5 to 10 years, we have seen the internet; mobiles and broadband technologies redefine our way of life. Keeping pace with this, collaboration tools have become business-critical and add value in many ways.

All these factors have created a significant level of interest in enterprise-wide video solutions and we are seeing considerable growth in the uptake of enterprise video.

How do you think organizations can best leverage enterprise video for internal and external collaboration?

We have moved from enabling a basic level of collaboration which focuses on employees within an organisation to enabling interaction across organisations. Hence, in today’s context, a network-centric approach is essential to maximise the benefits of the available collaboration technologies.

In fact, a recent global study conducted by a leading business research and consulting firm , found that collaboration tools were of great use in areas of business where a large number of people interact, for instance R&D, sales and marketing, etc. When CIOs implement efficient processes, achieve faster time-to-market and reduce cycle times, they can extract more value from their collaboration investments. Hence, if CIOs can identify opportunities to shrink the time needed to make critical business decisions, enterprise video is the best technology to invest in.

Poor bandwidth and a lack of interoperability are constraints in the adoption of enterprise video. How does Tata Communications help CIOs address this?

There are various reasons to explain the low penetration of video conferencing. Tata Communications, through its Integrated Business Video Service (IBVS), has tried to address these limitations by building an easy way to deploy a managed service offering.

Tata Communications can help enable better adoption of enterprise video as we offer turnkey deployments of video conferencing, Telepresence end-points and infrastructure and managed services for a complete range of management and support services. We also, have the world’s largest public room network, with nearly 50 rooms now live across major global cities and our open exchange policy allows any customer to connect to our services, regardless of their choice of video end-points (standards-based) network. We have built

RAJESH MENON VP & Business Development Head-Managed Services, Tata Communications Menon has an experience of 18 years in the communications industry, and he currently leads Tata Communications’ business development team for Enterprise Voice and Collaboration services in India.

inter-carrier B2B and carrier alliance partnerships to further extend the reach of our customer’s video calling capability thereby creating a video exchange which expands the reach of the customer—regardless of service provider. All this combined equates to the broadest and widest reaching Telepresence network in the world, making it a truly global collaboration tool.

Regarding cultural barriers, we have observed that the new generation is more receptive to video usage. They are comfortable with the changing technology because they frequently use it. They are more familiar with making phone calls in open plan offices and video conferencing, especially with a head set, is as private as a phone call. High bandwidth availability was an issue some years ago, but with rapid advances in technology and an ever increasing network touching new cities and towns, this concern is getting addressed.

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etter collaboration! Better business: Once viewed largely as a way to reduce the financial and environmental burden of travel, video collaboration tools are now delivering a host of compelling business benefits.

With Video Collaboration, you can give your business the benefit of extended global reach, increase in productivity, reduction in the cost of travel, strong relationships with clients, colleagues and a lot more!

Joining the Dots Video Collaboration can transform the way people communicate for business. Tata Communications’ Integrated Business Video Services is the way businesses will collaborate in the future - effectively anytime, anywhere, across the globe with this immersive, inclusive and cost-effective solution.

Features and Privileges Tata Communications’ Integrated Business Video Services is a comprehensive portfolio that provides you with the flexibility to design your video network as per the needs at each location, ensuring greater access to video and

resulting in increased utilisation, productivity and an overall higher ROI. A wide range of equipment options to choose from; based on the specific video need for any location.

Tata Communications offers a complete range of video conferencing and telepresence solutions, including: Turnkey deployment of video conferencing and telepresence end-points and associated infrastructure Managed services for a complete range of management and support services, tailored to your enterprise’s requirements Inter-company services supporting secure, global, B2B calling across a wide variety of end-points Inter-carrier B2B and carrier alliance partnerships to further extend the reach of our customer’s video calling capability World’s largest public room network with 43 rooms now live across major global cities and growing Open Exchange policy that allows any customer to connect to our services, regardless of their choice of network services provider

Conferencing Services – Exchange Inter-Exchange Customers of other exchanges

Global Meeting Alliance Carrier partnerships extending global reach

Public Rooms

Largest global network of public TP suites

Enterprise Customers Enterprises and institutions around the globe

A Budget-friendly Video Solution: The solution not only saves costs for organisations but is also a great investment: Lower TCO: Lower costs, simpler installation, easier management, low bandwidth.

Faster ROI: Higher utilisation, better interconnectivity Simplified Billing Models: Flexible billing schemes Investment Protection: Hosted model, hence technology protection

SO WHY CHOOSE US? By choosing us, you choose the world’s largest open Telepresence ecosystem with expanded inter-connectivity options through Tata Communications’ Global Meeting Exchange™ Telepresence inter-exchange network. We can connect you to other video-enabled facilities, not currently owned by you in your network, globally. With us, you can create an integrated video linkage for the entire organisation, connecting you to a network of world-class video hot-spots across the globe.

More Immersive. More inclusive.

More Cost-Effective To know more, please contact us at 1800 209 8765 or email us at business@tatacommunications.com www.tatacommunications.com/ telepresence

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

5 Inter-Exchange Connections (#1 in Industry)

SP Partner Ecosystem(Unique in Industry)

Nearly 50 Public Rooms in 22 Countries (World’s Largest Network)

Multiple Enterprise Customers (Top 3 in the Industry)

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP ENTERPRISE

CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

The Converged Cloud The ability to use different types of clouds and traditional IT sourcing models is both a boon and a bane. IT leaders discussed how to find simplicity in a converged cloud.

M

any enterprises worldwide have adopted cloud computing to meet the unprecedented demand for resources, applications, and services. In this hybrid world of IT delivery choices that CIOs must now come to terms with, the onus is on IT leaders to determine which of their current and future technology projects would benefit most from which model. The choice is not always easy. Some projects that the business wants immediately seem to fit the cloud perfectly. Yet, many of these face integration and security challenges.

To find out how Indian IT leaders are managing this balancing act, CIO magazine in collaboration with HP Enterprise, organized a roundtable on the sidelines of the CIO100 2012 Awards held at Hyderabad.

Venkatesh Natarajan, special director-IT, Ashok Leyland, said that CIOs need to be ready to provide their users with the technology services needed to enable innovative business opportunities and respond to new customer demands. “A shared model is efficient as long as users are happy with the services they are provided. The challenge arises when they start demanding unique services and applications,” he said.

According to Sudhir Rao, CTO, Enterprise Services, HP, organizations need an IT environment that leverages the best of traditional IT, private cloud, managed cloud, and public cloud.

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In this environment, the IT mix and individual service deployment models can change as business requirements change.

“The benefits you receive from these investments can speed innovation, enhance agility, and improve financial management. “But a hybrid delivery environment needs to be implemented in the right way,” he added.

According to Susanta Bhattacharya, general managerStrategic Enterprise Services, HP, today’s CIOs require a converged delivery model. A converged cloud strategy provides simplicity, speed, reduced cost risk, and compliance. That’s something that HP Enterprise can provide, he said. “HP’s Converged Cloud is a common architectural foundation across traditional IT and private, managed and public clouds,” he said.

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

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

GREEN IT S P EC I A L AWA R D

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

GREEN CRUSADER SPECIAL AWARD

Sachin Jain

Baljinder Singh

V.C. Kumanan

Bhujay Bhatta

Damon Frost

Chief Information Officer, Evalueserve.com Profile on page 70

SVP & Global HeadTechnology, IS & BCP, EXL Service Profile on page 71

Senior Director, IDFC Profile on page 96

Operation Manager-IT Shared Services, ITC Profile on page 99

Associate DirectorInformation Technology, Procter & Gamble, India Profile on page 122

Presented by

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EMC Forum is an all-expenses-paid program for a qualified audience comprising CIOs/CTOs/Head IT and top IT executives and decision makers. To register, please visit www.emcforum.in

November 8 & 9, 2012 | Grand Hyatt, Mumbai Get ready for EMC Forum 2012- an IT showcase that can transform your IT, your business and you.

With a dedicated day for CIOs on the 8th of November, you can expect to hear from global experts, and learn why cloud computing and virtualisation are key to mastering the new IT realities and how you can unlock the value in Big Data for your business.

What Can CIOs Expect at EMC Forum 2012: TRANSFORM IT

Learn how cloud computing transforms IT systems, and realize the benefits of IT as a Service model.

TRANSFORM BUSINESS

Discover how EMC solutions enable Big Data initiatives that transform your business.

TRANSFORM YOURSELF

Expand your IT and Big Data skillset, network with peers and learn how to maximize ROI via EMC solutions.

It is the perfect platform to discover the knowledge, skills and support that will transform you to meet the challenges ahead.

BE THERE!

ALSO INTRODUCING

EMC TRANSFORMERS AWARDS

Event Report

CIO Conversations An exchange of ideas, insights and opinions

A Peek into Tomorrow:

Delivering the Future of Work Mobility, cloud computing, and virtualization, among other technologies and technology delivery mechanisms are changing the way business is conducted. In a panel discussion at the CIO 100 Symposium, CIOs and experts discussed how these new trends would affect our working lives.

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Vijay Sethi

On the CIO Conversation Panel:

VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp Mobility has dramatically changed the way employees work. A few years ago, having a laptop for work was a privilege that only a few enjoyed. Today, employees expect all enterprise services to be delivered on their mobile devices, irrespective of model. Since all apps were designed keeping in mind the PC, a great deal of tweaking is required to deliver the same levels of user experience on mobile devices. CIOs can deliver consistent user experience by focusing on effectiveness, rather than on efficiency.

Vijay Sethi VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp

Sukumar Rajagopal SVP, CIO & Head of Innovation, Cognizant

I firmly believe that IT is the biggest lever of innovation. One pressing issue in the minds of IT decision-makers today is: “How can IT be used to identify business problems and overcome them with innovation?” For example, one of the problems our company faced was making the transition from working on small screens—that of employee mobile devices—on weekends to a larger screen on a weekday. In doing that, we learnt to look at business problems from business’ perspective, and use IT as an enabler to deliver innovation.

Vinod Sivaramakrishnan CIO, Walmart India

What is fascinating about mobility and other emerging technologies is how much easier work has become for people at the end-user level. At the same time, setting up the required facilities for them has become a difficult task for the IT team at the back-end. Since Walmart has shops at various places, the complications we faced were the scale of implementation and the speed of response. Getting the back-end right will make it easy to get processes right.

Technology was not mature enough to achieve this a few years ago. Thankfully, it is now.

Amit Sethi

Sukumar Rajagopal SVP, CIO & Head of Innovation, Cognizant

Vinod Sivaramakrishnan CIO, Walmart India

Amit Sethi Sr. President and CIO, YES Bank

Sr. President and CIO, YES Bank

The one term that business associates with the cloud is on-demand and in some cases lower cost. By adopting the cloud, organizations are embracing a total opex model instead of a more traditional capex model in the case of hardware and services. Being in the banking sector, we are a fairly riskaverse organization. So, the adoption of cloud computing will slow but certain. The cloud’s promise of saving time lost in implementation is a main driver. One approach that is very effective is doing a phased implementation.

T.G. Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motors

T.G. Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motors There are two angles to the “virtualization-as-a-competitive differentiator” aspect: One is from the IT point of view and the other is from the business’ perspective. Virtualization will play a major role as far as optimizing or automating operations is concerned. As a CIO, I’ll be able to show cost savings, high availability and a host of other benefits stemming out of virtualization.

But this constitutes only a fraction of what a CFO expects from the technology. I’ve seen that the benefits of virtualization are just hygiene factors, and not critical success factors.

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This CIO Conversation was presented by :

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CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP SOFTWARE

The Compliance Conundrum Compliance issues have bothered organizations and their CIOs for eons. IT leaders from India's most highly-regulated sectors came together to find a solution.

I

f technology has become a business enabler, IT compliance has also evolved into a more complex beast for CIOs. In the sidelines of the CIO100 2012 Awards held at Hyderabad, CIOs from some of India’s most prestigious organizations discussed the importance of building a better foundation for IT compliance.

“A lot of budget share goes into compliance. Also, IT systems aren't flexible enough to adhere to regulations swiftly,” said Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices. "During the recent Assam crisis, TRAI restricted SMSes to five per day. A lot of companies in our sector did not anticipate this. Therefore, there’s a need to ensure flexibility in our IT systems.”

While flexibility is important for the telecom sector, the BFSI sector—which is also highly regulated—feels that too much flexibility, especially when it comes to audits, isn’t a great idea. ICICI Bank’s Head-IT, Mukesh Jain, allows vendors to perform audits in the bank on only one condition. “I allow audits to be conducted only if I, as a CIO, can rationalize its usage. That’s because software auditors and ven-

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dors continuously change their software tools and methodology. ” Jain says that in recent years, the overall time that a CIO has to spend managing compliance has gone up by 300 percent. ICICI Bank has to comply with multiple regulators, where global regulatory requirements can be stringent. “Apart from the large number of audits that we conduct each year, another challenge is that the people conducting these audits have little or no field experience which can become a bottleneck.”

But some CIOs have found ways around the compliance conundrum. For a company like TCS that has large-scale operations, Alok Kumar, VP and global head-internal IT and Shared Services, said compliance isn’t a huge challenge. “Ideally, if employees are trained, processes are in place, reporting tools are upto-date, downloads are restricted only to a few executives, one can handle compliance in IT,” he said. Kumar and his team developed their own risk audit compliance toolset to manage security incidents such as detection and removal of unauthorized applications within the organization.

That said, Amit Chatterjee, country director, HP Software India, believes that compliance is not about technology. “One has to know how to handle automation. Automation has to be backed up with a solid process, the process has to be backed up with skilled resources, and your auditor has to be equipped and empowered enough to understand this domain. Only then it’s possible to be 100 percent compliant.”

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

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

SECURITY S P EC I A L AWA R D

WEBSENSE CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

SECURITY SUPREMO SPECIAL AWARD

Manoj Arora

Rajesh Mohan

Satish Das

Thomson Thomas

Sanjay Malhotra

Chief Information Officer, Bilcare Profile on page 54

Joint President, Binani Industries Profile on page 55

Chief Security Officer & VP, Cognizant Technology Solutions Profile on page 60

SVP-Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance Profile on page 81

Vice President-Information Technology, BS & ebiz-IT, Amway India Profile on page 40

Presented by

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Event Report KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Cracking the Innovation Conundrum A very common problem that people—at almost all levels and functions— face is knowing what to do, but not how to do it. Innovation is one such area where organizations grapple with this problem. Jonar Nader, in his keynote speech titled Cracking the Innovation Conundrum, shed light on how CIOs can sow the seeds of innovation in their companies.

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JONAR NADER Author and Consultant Jonar Nader is the author of many best-selling books including Prentice Hall’s Illustrated Dictionary of Computing and How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People. He is a cofounder of the Australian Information Technology Society. For over 20 years, Nader has conducted courses on technology, leadership, management, thinking skills, employee engagement, and teamwork, among others.

O

ne of the most pressing concerns facing organizations across the world is how to traverse the next mile of innovation. It’s extra challenging today given the dynamic market enterprises work in, one defined by customer demands that keep increasing every single day.

To help Indian IT leaders at the CIO 100 Symposium 2012 figure out how they can drive innovation in their companies, CIO magazine invited author and consultant Jonar Nader to speak at the event. Nader is an expert in marketing, sales, management, and other vital business functions, and he

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opened by telling CIOs how organizations have started laying emphasis on doing things innovatively.

“In our organization, we have a person whose only job is to monitor the websites of Fortune 500 companies, and figure out what these companies are desperately trying to tell the world. A few years ago, the one word that was common to a majority of these sites was ‘quality’. Today, it is ‘innovation’,” he said.

“CIOs spend a lot of time just managing IT systems, which is not a good practice. They should delegate as much work as possible to their subordinates and concentrate on innovation.”

Talking about the reasons companies fail in the process of innovation, Nader pointed tobeing content with whatever the business has achieved, tending to relax once things start going smoothly, and a severe lack of understanding of a problem’s root cause as stumbling stones in the path to innovation.

“CIOs spend a lot of time just managing IT systems, which is not a good practice.

They should delegate as much work as possible to their subordinates and concentrate on innovation,” he said.

However, he added that innovation was not something restricted to the C-suite and that it has to be a part of the DNA of a company’s work culture.

Innovation, as history has proven to mankind in various instances, is sometimes a product of frustration, and sometimes of accident, he said. Nader cited the examples of Almon Strowger,

the man who created and patented the electromagnetic telephone exchange; Charles Goodyear, the man who discovered the process of vulcanizing rubber; and the discovery of the microwave oven. He laid great emphasis on empowering employees to identify shortcomings wherever they find them. He went further and suggested that companies give their employees the authority to suggest reforms for these issues. “Just like an FBI officer who can flash his badge where necessary, an employee must use the power vested in him to bring about change,” he said.

While on the tough exercise of innovation, it is fairlyeasy to lose sight of the goal and get diverted to different goals. One such devious goal would be the search for excellence, said Nader. According to him, excellence, because it’s a long-term goal, does not let people have a sense of “now.”

Another practice Nader stressed on is WoW—Worth or Wealth. “Any product you come up with,” he said, “must add either worth or wealth to your customers.”

He said that a great level of diligence and commitment is required to take care of the minutest detail ins creating a product or delivering a service.

Finally, highlighting the fact that sustenance is as important as establishment, Nader said that innovation has to be continuous, and that the onus is on CIOs to refresh innovation as and when required.

Keynote Speaker Presented by :

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CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP JUNIPER

Bringing More Value to the Table A tougher market puts pressure on IT to show its value to the business. A roundtable

by CIO and Juniper Networks sought to figure out ways to do that.

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e live in an economy in flux. For CIOs that means shorter rollout timelines and smaller ROI windows.

And it requires re-looking at the value proposition of enterprise IT. That requires new thinking. To kickstart the conversation, CIO and Juniper Networks held a roundtable on the sidelines of the CIO100 2012 Awards, where leading Indian CIOs discussed what they needed to do to bring greater value to the business.

One school of thought believes that CIOs can create more agility—and support the business better—by outsourcing the IT department. But many CIOs are wary of that strategy. “The key question that remains is the quality of support and maintenance.

Vendors come up with innovative ways of selling products but not maintaining it,” said Girish Rao, head-IT, Marico. “With nil support, CIOs are forced to look within and build infrastructure on their own.”

Others say that outsourcing is needed. “Either companies do not have the right talent or outsourcing is required so that companies can focus on their core business. We’ve learnt

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from experience that the kind of workforce that can exploit technology to the maximum is the one that built it,” said Ravi Chauhan, MD, Juniper Networks, explaining why he believes outsourcing partners have a greater ability to extract more from technology.

Another topic of discussion was the metric that’s used to justify IT investments. “These metrics depend on industry and business imperatives.

In general insurance, for example, our top line is determined by cash availability and the bottom line depends on collections,” said Sharad Agarwal, EVP and head-IT, quality and PMO office-Lending Business at Religare Finvest. “So, swapping out one accounting system for another is a TCO project that, while possibly important, is not going to win out over one that provides tools to my sales force. In any case, very few organizations revisit their ROI or TCO targets after a project is executed.”

Sunil Sirohi, VP-information resources at NIIT, suggested that one way around this problem of justifying IT costs, was to get business units to fund IT infrastructure projects. He also believes that the current set of metrics is flawed. “Neither ROI nor TCO accounts for every cost or every financial benefit that may ripple from a project,” he said.

If the panelists disagreed on other points, they all agreed on one thing: CIOs must understand the goals of their enterprises if they want their IT investments to result in transformational change. “With a new value proposition, the relative framework also needs to be in line,” said Francis Rajan, VP-ICT at Bangalore International Airport.

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

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

STORAGE S P EC I A L AWA R D

EMC CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

INFORMATION MASTERMIND SPECIAL AWARD

Rajeev Jorapur

Ashish Pachory

Head-Information Technology, Mercedes-Benz India Profile on page 110

CI O, Tata Teleservices Profile on page 133

Vinod Sivarama Krishnan CIO and SVP, Walmart India Profile on page 142

N. Nataraj

Murali Krishna K.

Global Chief Information Officer, Hexaware Technologies Profile on page 84

SVP and Head-Computers and Communications Department, Infosys Profile on page 95

Presented by

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CIO Conversations An exchange of ideas, insights and opinions

Making the Cloud Rain Business:

What will It Take?

Amidst the clamor to adopt the cloud, it’s clear that Indian CIOs remain cautious, preferring a more deliberate, step-by-step approach. In a panel discussion held at the CIO 100 Symposium to figure out their challenges, and how enterprises could access the benefits of the cloud faster, new light was shed on what IT leaders and industry stalwarts think should be on their checklist while embracing the cloud.

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Ashwani Tikoo

On the CIO Conversation Panel:

CIO, CSC India

A CIO should factor in all the parameters he can think of before embarking on a journey to the cloud. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Hence all organizations cannot jump on the cloud bandwagon before they evaluate their own enterprise landscapes and assess the benefits that they can derive from the cloud. In the course of their cloud journey, organizations are compelled to virtualize their applications. While putting applications onto a virtualized environment, CIOs should make well-thought-through decisions as to which applications can be transported as they are, and which need to be tweaked before being put on a virtualized platform.

T. Srinivasan MD, VMware India & SAARC

As the cloud gains prominence in the technology landscape, we will see IT organizations change and morph. They will adapt to new ways of running the whole business of IT, which could be a completely software-defined datacenter. Once enterprises virtualize their storage and servers, they will also have to re-format their structures. It’s no longer just an infrastructure-andcloud issue, but also a people-and-process issue that CIOs need to look at.

Private cloud implementations will tend towards automation, self service, ease-of-use, and hence, IT-as-a-service.

Ashwani Tikoo CIO, CSC India

T. Srinivasan MD, VMware India & SAARC

Ramnath Iyer CTO, CRISIL

Ramnath Iyer CTO, CRISIL

We are not adopting a big-bang approach to the cloud. We are not taking a rocket to the cloud, rather a hot air balloon that we will slowly heat up, use to survey the landscape, and then heat up a bit more. And if I am on the cloud, it means I need a parachute. Our journey will be planned cautiously with a primary and secondary parachute. That said, in our journey to the cloud, we completely virtualized our server environment in 2009, and in the following year, we virtualized our storage. Even our database is now getting virtualized. But I am still not ready for the cloud. We are going to approach the cloud as a service, and leave it to the service provider to figure out the infrastructure.

Anil Veer VP-IT, Aricent Group

Anil Veer VP-IT, Aricent Group

The journey to the cloud begins with a mindset that’s willing to embrace the cloud platform. The second milestone of the journey is virtualization.

Cloud computing is driving companies to enforce virtualization and datacenter consolidation for greater cost control and efficiency. Hence, storage and server virtualization is the second step to the cloud as it sets up the base infrastructure. As a part of their cloud journey, organizations are also beginning to move applications to the cloud.

Anthony Thomas

Anthony Thomas CIO, Vodafone India

This CIO Conversation was presented by :

CIO, Vodafone India

We are still taking baby steps towards our cloud deployment. But we are uniquely positioned vis-à-vis our customers since we have our own network.

So beyond platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service, we also have network-as-a-service. This is a distinct advantage for us.

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CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP MCAFEE

Managing Enterprise Security

In a roundtable organized by CIO and McAfee, CIOs discussed the challenges they face in managing security and some possible solutions.

S

ankarson Banerjee, CIO, IIFL, put it best: “The problem with security is that one never knows how much is enough.” That was a sentiment that many IT leaders, at a roundtable run by CIO and McAfee, agree with. Their discussion ranged from the challenges of battling bigger, better, faster technology specs and sophisticated cyber criminals, to dealing with social media. They also talked about the paradigm shift in the way people consume and disseminate information, and the need for security policies to be tweaked constantly to align with business needs and consumer behavior.

Banerjee, who focused on the security challenges of properly supporting social technologies, employee-owned mobile devices, and cloud services, was worried about the lack of attention security receives. “Security inevitably becomes the first area to be hit when budgets are low,” he said.

Another area of interest within the group was the skill sets needed to manage security in an environment peppered with cloud implementations and virtualization. “Security is not a function where buying and plugging in technology works.

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Security is a man-power intensive job and given the complex environments of today’s datacenters, expertise really makes a difference,” said K. Suresh, head-IT, TATA AIG General Insurance.

Given that users are the weakest link in the security chain, panelists talked about ways to ensure that staffers didn’t open up security holes. “While communicating the importance of security best practices, our tendency, till date, has been very prescriptive. At IIFL, we are trying to remove those 40-page lists of do’s and don’ts to inculcate a culture based on human discretion and judgment,” said Banerjee.

Yogesh Zope, group CIO, Bharat Forge, pointed out the disconnect between various teams like IT, legal, HR and emphasized on the need for collaboration between them to create a comprehensive security strategy in which the entire organization is accountable for information security—not just IT. Addressing these issues, Jagdish Mahapatra, MD India and SAARC, McAfee, said that companies should leverage the global intelligence generated by various security service providers and be more proactive in identifying and preparing for various threats. “As IT environments get more complex, the highlight of any security strategy should be the process of managing security rather than the features that the latest tool boasts of,” Mahapatra added.

While there’s no silver bullet for security, Mahapatra expressed optimism that by being proactive in identifying possible threats, CIOs can mitigate or minimize the effect of these threats on the business.

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

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

INFRASTRUCTURE S P EC I A L AWA R D

TULIP TELECOM CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

INFRASTRUCTURE SPECIAL AWARD

Anil Kumar Kaushik GM-Infrastructure and Services, BPCL Profile on page 50

Ramnath N. Iyer

Suneel Aradhye

B. Venkatakrishnan

R. Muralidharan

Chief Technology Officer, CRISIL Profile on page 63

Chief Information Officer, Essar Steel India Profile on page 69

Head-Information Technology, Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Profile on page 107

Chief Information Officer, Syntel Profile on page 132

Presented by

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Event Report

CIO Conversations An exchange of ideas, insights and opinions

Sustainable Computing:

Creating Value and Cost Savings As operating costs rise, resources become more scarce, and the demand that organizations be more green becomes more shrill, it’s important for CIOs to help their companies find ways to shrink their carbon footprint. A panel discussion at the CIO 100 Symposium, brought together some of India’s leading CIOs to discuss how.

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Alok Kumar VP and Global Head, Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services

On the CIO Conversation Panel:

Creating sustainable computing requires a long-term approach towards the adoption of sustainable practices that combine the benefits of being environmentally friendly, of elevating an organization’s brand value, and of cost savings. At TCS, we’ve already taken the first steps by adopting alternate power sources.

Though the contribution of these sources is not large at the moment, these programs demonstrate TCS’s belief in being green. We also conduct quizzes to help employees be more ‘green’ aware, this will ease our journey up the green gradient.

Alok Kumar

David Blumanis

David Blumanis

VP Datacenter Solutions and Key Account Management Asia Pacific and Japan, Schneider Electric An unstable economy, rising energy costs, increased energy consumption and government intervention will inevitably lead most organizations to become environmentally conscious. This realization will lead CIOs to acknowledge green IT as a strategic business objective that will play a fundamental role in reengineering business processes to reduce carbon footprint and induce cost savings. A CIO is required to extend his vision to the entire IT facility including datacenters. To help CIOs of these organizations, we have ‘StruXureware’ management and monitoring software. The system facilitates measuring, benchmarking, monitoring, and managing the environmental and social footprint of an organization. It is an effective way to adapt green IT and reduce opex cost by 20-50 percent.”

VP and Global Head, Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services

VP Data Centre Solutions and Key Account Management Asia Pacific and Japan, Schneider Electric

Sunil Mehta SVP & Area Systems Director Central Asia, JWT India

Sunil Mehta SVP & Area Systems Director-Central Asia, JWT India

When I initially introduced the concept of video conferencing, people were apprehensive. But when the organization, including our management, realized the immense cost and time savings from employee travel and the increase in productivity, not to mention our shrinking carbon footprint, everyone applauded.

CIOs have a great opportunity in transforming CSR or compliance into a leadership role because they are best equipped to address enterprise-wide change, with their experience in leading transformational initiatives.

Ashish Mathur CTO, WNS

Ashish Mathur CTO, WNS

Though datacenters represent only a small portion of an organization’s overall energy consumption, CIOs are ideally positioned to work on CSR initiatives because they know how technologies like video conferencing, virtualization, and application portfolio rationalization, among others, can help a company reduce its carbon footprint. Going green is a long-term process for companies with legacy infrastructure, but CIOs can start with smaller projects and gradually move forward.

G.S. Ravi Kumar CIO, Gati

G.S. Ravi Kumar CIO, Gati

The broader view of green IT goes beyond datacenter operations. But by leveraging IT to streamline business processes and reduce waste, CIOs can deliver maximum environmental and cost-reduction benefits. Thanks to the general awareness around the subject today, a lot of CEOs have begun to understand and appreciate the benefits of green IT. Initially, there could be questions about how practical technologies like alternate power and green IT are—because infrastructure wasn’t built to support these systems—but I am positive that this will change.

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP NETAPP

CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

Staying Ahead with Agile Data Submerged under a flood of data, Indian CIOs are looking for new ways to manage and store data and infuse data agility in their organizations.

A

swift wave of data deluge is sweeping across enterprise IT. The CIO community concedes that the amount of data that enterprises are dealing with is exploding at an alarming pace. As emerging trends like BYOD, enterprise social media and big data make their presence felt, CIOs will have to grapple with swathes of data inundating their organizations. IT departments are struggling to manage the scope, scale, and complexity of inflexible storage infrastructures. This was the overriding point of a roundtable discussion in the sidelines of the CIO100 2012 Awards held at Hyderabad.

Sudhir Reddy, VP and CIO, MindTree, threw light on the tectonic shifts happening in the technology landscape and its ramifications on data agility. “Seven to eight years back, we talked only about structured data but we have now shifted our focus to unstructured data. Organizations should adopt utility-class storage that is reasonably robust coupled with a good indexing mechanism,” he said.

Sharing the perspective of the telecom sector Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS India, underscored that efficient data management is not just about regulatory norms but also about being ahead of the pack. “You have to verify the CAP (customer acquisition form) within a certain time-frame otherwise you cannot activate the connection. Regulatory agencies require reports onthe-fly, so your data management has to be very agile,” he said.

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Amit Sethi, sr. president and CIO-Technology Solutions Group, Yes Bank, stated that data is growing at a phenomenal rate.

“Managing storage is not just about buying servers. It’s about scale and power constraints. Then there are regulatory challenges related to storing customer data,” he said. CIOs agreed that organizations should leverage service analytics, automation and end-user provisioning to meet these needs.

“There is an explosion of devices. There are two aspects to this. The first aspect is that the datacenter has to be agile and it has to respond swiftly to business demands. The second is to make data agile, relevant, and immortal to build intelligence around it,” said Krithiwas Neelakantan, director channel and alliance-India and SAARC, NetApp. This event report is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

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WINNING IN THE

NEW NORMAL

PRESENTED BY

PLATINUM PARTNER

There’s a new normal out there, one defined by uncertainty,the need to do more with less,increased security threats, shorter ROI windows, and new mediums including social media and mobiles. To help CIOs figure out how to help their companies persevere despite these changes, CIO magazine organized the CIO Summit in collaboration with its partners. The event brought together experts from different fields who elaborated on the various ways CIOs could adjust to the new normal. Here are the highlights from the summit.

GOLD PARTNER

ASSOCIATE PARTNERS

Presentation

THE CFO: FRIEND OR FOE? CORT ISERNHAGEN

VP, Industry Insights-International, IDC

Presentation

PREPARING THE ENTERPRISE FOR CYBER WAR SURESH SRINIVASAN

Lead Cyber Security Initiatives at Vodafone India’s Technology Security team.

Panel Discussion

WINNING IN THE NEW NORMAL

IT decision-makers from India’s leading organizations share insights on persevering during testing times.

I

n his presentation The CFO: Friend or Foe?, Cort Isernhagen, VP, industry insights -international, IDC, shared ideas on how IT decision-makers can convince CFOs to invest in a particular technology.

“IDC’s recent studies and surveys,” said Isernhagen, “have revealed that the topmost priority of CFOs is ROI to the business. Speed-to-market is a highly critical factor they consider while making technology investments.” He added that CFOs do feel that IT is a source of competitive differentiation. CIOs, he said, should take steps to leverage IT’s potential to improve operational efficiency, support innovative products and services, and improve customer-client relationships.

Most importantly, he said, CIOs must learn to consider themselves strategists, not just technologists. One important strategy Isernhagen emphasized was working with IT equipment suppliers to find ways to justify the need for the technology in terms of business benefits. “If your vendor can’t help you in this, you’re probably with the wrong one,” he said.

O

f late, cyber criminals seem to have gained an edge over enterprise security. Suresh Srinivasan, who heads cyber security initiatives within Vodafone India’s Technology Security team, believes that merely investing in high-end technology and plugging it in cannot rescue the enterprise from this threat.

Srinivasan observed that managing security is like being in the armed forces: basic levels of preparedness, involving external audits and third-party verifications, aren’t a great help when a real attack is under way.

He also pointed out that these audits only check a particular sample, for particular duration, for the most part; they don’t test a complete process. Srinivasan emphasized the need for regular drills to hone the alertness of an incident response team, and regular exercises that benchmark a team’s detection and reporting skills, besides improving the organization’s ability to mitigate the impact of an attack. “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war,” he said.

W

hile the previous recession came like a bolt out of the blue, the impending one—some call it a slowdown, not a complete recession—has been giving hints of its arrival to organizations that have been paying attention.

In a panel discussion, Indian IT decision-makers shared their insights on persevering during testing times. Avinash Arora, director-IS (India and S.E. Asia), New Holland Fiat India, said, “IT is the only function that glues all other business functions together. We made use of BI and analytics in our organization to identify prospective market expansions, and growth opportunities.”

Stressing on the need for CIOs to get into the shoes of other C-level business executives while pitching a proposal, S.C. Mittal, IFFCO’s sr. executive director (MS & IT) and group CTO, said, “CEOs look for productivity and efficiency improvement, whereas CFOs are focused on ROI. Your technological investment must bring out a blend of both.”

Presentation

INSIGHTS FROM CIO MAGAZINE’S MID-YEAR REVIEW SURVEY VIJAY RAMACHANDRAN Editor-in-Chief at IDG Media

Presentation

STRENGTHENING THE MARKETING– TECHNOLOGY BOND MANISH VIJ

Founder, Vun Network and Enterpreneur in Digital Media and eCommerce

Presentation

A FINE BALANCE BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL AND DIGITAL MARKETING ABHEEK SINGHI

Partner and Director, The Boston Consulting Group India

A

ccording to CIO’s MidYear Review Survey, the economic uncertainty has taken Indian CIOs by surprise. The good news is that compared to six months ago, fewer CIOs say the business environment is challenging.

Interestingly, the gap between the leaders and the laggards is increasing, pointed out Vijay Ramachandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media. He added that despite high levels of pressure, 58 percent of Indian CIOs are confident they can meet the needs of business. This is despite the fact that 47 percent say business horizons have shrunk to just six months, which means CIOs have even less time to implement IT projects.

This last trend has, no doubt, affected CIOs, 70 percent of whom have felt increased stress levels in the last six months.

Despite the stress, 68 percent are satisfied or more than satisfied with their jobs.

Responding to frequent changes in business and a lack of business accountability for IT projects still remains a CIOs’ biggest challenge, said Ramachandran.

M

anish Vij, founder, Vun Network and entrepreneur in digital media and eCommerce, spoke about how marketing and technology are rapidly converging in today’s alwayson, customer-centric, and connected business environment. According to Vij, with half a billion mobile users in India, and 100 million Internet users (a number that’s increasing at over 30 percent a year), the digital channel is the most flexible, efficient, and scalable means to acquire, service and retain customers, and expand a company’s customer base. This dynamic business environment presents organizations with huge opportunities to expand and deepen their customer bases, he said.

“This rapidly evolving digital world, with its plethora of devices and growing culture of interactivity, gives companies a limitless range of ways to touch their customers—actual and potential—and IT has a huge role to play in enabling this medium,” he said.

F

inancial experts believe that we are living in bad times for business—worse than anything the world has seen before. However, Abheek Singhi, partner and director, The Boston Consulting Group–India, begs to differ.

Singhi believes that today’s perceptions are shaped largely by the digital media and online conversations, and CIOs can leverage the same channels to change popular perceptions among consumers and build lon-term relationships focused around trust and innovation.

Singhi believes that multiple new media touch points have opened doors for enterprises to touch the lives of consumers more easily and more effectively.

While Singhi laid stress on the growing importance of online mechanisms to build brands, he also pointed out that successful businesses are those that create a strategy that encompasses both the conventional and modern platforms for brand building and help them complement each other.

Presentation

THE EMERGENCE OF SERVICES: AN IDC STUDY JAIDEEP MEHTA

Vice President and Country Manager, IDC

Presentation

MAKING CLOUD SECURITY EASY MAHENDRA NEGI

COO/CFO, Representative Director, Trend Micro

Round Table

C FOR CONVENIENCE. C FOR CLOUD

In a roundtable run by CIO magazine and Verizon, leading CIOs discussed strategies to make the best use of cloud computing.

J

aideep Mehta, VP and country

manager,

IDC,

firmly believes that Indian enterprise IT is poised to undergo significant growth and changes. He said that India Inc, across verticals, is moving to, what he called, next-generation solutions.

About 40 percent of a CIO’s time is spent in procuring technology. But, Mehta said, CIOs need to shift their focus on strategic decisions to achieve business goals. He said the future of Indian enterprise IT will be molded by mobile devices and broadband networks. With millions of new mobile units kicking into the market —and enterprises—every month, the numbers back up the idea of a portable workplace. It’s an idea which has been in CIOs’ minds for a decade, he said. The rise of mobiles requires new processes and a revised way of thinking, he said.

The journey to the cloud is also not going to be smooth. “Expect to make mistakes,” he said. “And don’t forget to learn from them.”

M

ahendra CFO,

Negi

COO/

representative

director, Trend Micro, spoke

about the driving forces behind the security climate in distributed companies.

He highlighted several examples of security threats Trend Micro faced, and how it overcame them. According to Negi, distribution and variety imply complexity, and therefore new risks. These include different legal environments in which companies have to interact, thus increasing the costs and the effort behind compliance.

Difficulties in establishing trusted environments for international collaboration and the deployment of new technologies add to the complexity, he said.

“Enterprises embrace the cloud primarily for economic reasons. Data security, data residency, and regulatory compliance are top concerns. IT consumerization and low costs make the cloud easily accessible. Moving to the cloud means the loss of a traditional perimeter defense. Finding equivalent technologies and deploying them in the cloud are often ignored at project initiation phase,” he said.

G

iven the cloud’s growing popularity, it’s critical to exchange ideas of how it can be leveraged to benefit enterprises. That’s what a roundtable discussion by CIO and Verizon sought to do.

Soumitra Wadalkar, CTO-telecom, Tech Mahindra, shared how it helped his company. “One of the greatest areas the cloud has helped us in is employee training. We use it to provide Web-based training to new recruits before they report for work, which allows them to be more prepared.”

Shedding light on how Verizon can accelerate the adoption of the cloud, Prashant Gupta, solutions head, Indian and SAARC, Verizon, said, “There is no one cloud solution that fits all. Customization is required on different levels, and Verizon’s expertise plays a vital role in meeting varying needs.”

According to Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and CTO, Reliance Capital, any cloud strategy can be successful once four important challenges are overcome: User authentication, securing connection, validating end-point devices, and screening the data moving out of the cloud.

Round Table

VIDEO COLLABORATION: THE NEW STANDARD IN COMMUNICATION Indian CIOs cutting across verticals discuss the benefits video conferencing bring their businesses.

Round Table

AFTER THE STORM: WHAT TO TELL YOUR CEO IT leaders from big league organizations swap secrets on getting management for security projects.

I

n roundtable discussions held by CIO Magazine, in association with Polycom, in Mumbai and New Delhi, IT decision-makers from leading organizations shared how VC benefitted their companies.

At Blue Star, Rahul Mehta, sr. GM-IT, realized that VC not only lowers travel costs, but also improves collaboration. “We have about 15-16 offices, and our remote factory locations are connected with them through VC,” said Mehta. “It helps cross-functional teams like production and sales management meet for product development, quality management, and service-related issues.”

VC also introduces a new approach to external customers. That’s something Suhas Mhaskar, GM-corporate IT at Mahindra & Mahindra, found out. “A serious concern in the automobile manufacturing are sky-rocketing real estate prices that hinder dealers who need space to display products,” he said. “We begun using video to display our products in all variants at popular shopping centers and malls.

These are not just photographs, but animations based on 3D dynamics that provide a realistic experience. The increased interest among customers wanting to go for a test drive today is phenomenal.”

In closing, Marc Remond, global director, enterprise solutions and market development at Polycom, reminded the panelists of the benefits of VC. “Studies have shown that 30 percent of the costs associated with travel, carbon emissions, and other eco-unfriendly activities can be reduced with collaboration technology. The costs and time associated with HR processes can be cut by 19 percent. On the marketing front, collaboration can bring down delivery time by 30 percent. Pretty much all business functions can benefit from video collaboration.

E

very couple of years information security faces a new horror, a malevolent force that aims to end life as we know it. Today, we face a malicious threat made worse by its malignant name: Advanced Persistent Threat.

Enterprises have to face a number of brutal truths, one of which is that social engineering is now the number one threat vector, that the new perimeter are human beings, and that anyone can be phished given the right context. This is why the most critical component of a strategy to take on an APT attack has to be incident response. The CIOs participating in a roundtable discussion during the CIO Summit 2012 delved deeper on different ways— and challenges—to create such a strategy.

The panelists stressed on how miniscule security budgets are in Indian organizations, due to both business apathy and the inability of CIOs to get management buy-in. They shared the challengeof presenting a case for security to their CEOs and boards—and the kind of conversations they think they should have. One of their observations was that managements don’t really see the need for a security strategy unless the business is hit hard. Then, it’s the CIO on the chopping board, said Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO, Syntel.

“If organizations are planning responses as an attack unfolds, they are too late,” said M.D. Agrawal, GM-IT (Refineries), BPCL. The panelists also agreed that organizations need to focus on closing their exposure windows and limiting potential damage by compartmentalizing systems, stopping sensitive data from leaking, and going back to the core principles of IT security such as least privilege and defense-in-depth.

Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

INNOVATION S P EC I A L AWA R D

WIPRO CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

INNOVATION ARCHITECT SPECIAL AWARD

S.T.Sathiavageeswaran

Mukesh Kumar

Ram Medury

Kapil Pal

Devesh Mathur

Executive Director-Information Systems, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Profile on page 85

Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank Profile on page 89

Vice President-Technology, ICICI Lombard Profile on page 90

Head-Information Technology, PepsiCo Profile on page 121

Chief Operations Officer, The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Profile on page 134

Presented by

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA COMMUNICATIONS

CIO100 2012 I Roundtable Discussions

Gaining a Video Edge Business Videoconferencing has finally started to grab attention. With VC services gaining more maturity, CIOs are leveraging the technology for business growth.

T

hough videoconferencing (VC) has been a part of enterprise IT for quite some time now, the technology has just started to gain traction. Continuous innovations on the technology front and increasing demands—due to consumerisation of IT—from employees are driving the adoption of VC. To find better ways to leverage the power of VC, CIO gathered IT leaders from some of India’s most sought-after organisations.

“We have eight VC-based initiatives in Essar. One noteworthy initiative is in our Essar Academy, where we recruit ITI students, and provide them vocational training through VC. One trainer at a central location provides interactive training sessions to students who are located at different places,” said Jayantha Prabhu, Group CTO, Essar Group. He added that the company uses VC for its employees as well.

Aricent Technologies has a similar story. “VC is inevitable today. We have laid out a special VC infrastructure for CXOs and defined a standard class-of-service on our MPLS cloud. The

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objective is to provide high-quality service to our CXOs. We strongly believe that the more an organisation collaborates, the more it stays ahead,” said Anil Veer, VP-IT at Aricent Technologies.

“The discussion about business video has to move from being end-point-centric to creating a network-centric setup. Our strategy centres on facilitating an open, global ecosystem that moves business video from an intracompany experience to a collaboration tool with worldwide reach. Tata Communications’ Global Meeting Exchange™ is one of the broadest and widest-reaching Telepresence networks available today. This network has connectivity to all Tata Communications’ private Telepresence rooms as well as the customers of service providers with whom it has inter-exchange connectivity agreements in place, and vice versa. Tata Communications’ Global Meeting Exchange ™ also serves as a gateway to its public room Telepresence network with nearly 50 rooms across five continents. We also spearheaded The Global Meeting Alliance™, an open business video ecosystem which provides participating enterprises and service providers with greater global reach, lower TCO and an optimal user experience. All these factors show our continued commitment to driving an open business video environment that enables global connectivity and reach for video customers, regardless of service provider or location.” said Rajesh Menon, VP and Head, Business Development-Managed Services, Tata Communications.

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

REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2

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Event Report SPECIAL AWARDS

NETWORKING S P EC I A L AWA R D

JUNIPER NETWORKS CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

NETWORKING PIONEER SPECIAL AWARD

N. Jayantha Prabhu Chief Technology Officer, Essar Group Profile on page 68

V. Seetaramaiah

Rajeswara Rao

Dhiren Savla

Ashish Mathur

GM-Information Technology, Paradeep Phosphates Profile on page 120

Deputy General Manager-incharge (IT), Visakhapatnam Steel Plant Profile on page 140

Chief Information Officer, VFS Global Group Profile on page 139

Chief Technology Officer, WNS Global Services Profile on page 144

Presented by

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GETTING OFF

SKID ROW The manufacturing sector in India has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Needless to say, IT decision-makers have played a tremendous behind-thescenes role in this growth story. However, the true mark of greatness lies in how the captain steers his ship in difficult times. In the CIO Manufacturing Summit, eminent IT leaders discussed strategies to emerge successful in a difficult economic climate.

PARTNERS

Irrespective of the product that is marketed, today’s

consumers demand to be treated as distinct, holistic, and multifaceted individuals.”

TARUN CHAUHAN

Managing Partner, JWT India

STAYING RELEVANT

TO TODAY’S CONSUMERS The difference between a happy and a satisfied customer is the difference between good and great business. Here’s how CIOs can create that difference.

T

arun Chauhan, managing partner, JWT India, spoke about why it is important for organizations to spot new trends in the consumer space in order to stay competitive. Getting inside the mind of the consumer is essential to develop market-relevant products.

The purchasing decision is an increasingly complex process involving social, technological, cultural, geographic, and environmental factors, he said.

Based on a survey by Roper Reports Worldwide, Chauhan said that India is a young country with 61 percent of the population between the age group of 20 and 29, and they live in an assertive, opinionated, and hugely optimistic society. This

makes it difficult to crack trends for companies.

“Advertising is a mirror of what happens in the consumer space,” said Chauhan, as he highlighted nine trends which are influencing consumer mindset. He stressed that Indians are going global—signifying de-terrorization, increasing acceptance of global culture, and the emergence of the borderless world.

Due to rising consciousness, more questions are being asked, more knowledge sought, and the youth are no longer followers, but supporters with a unique sense of identity.

He also said that the Internet and technology have become a way of life, especially among the youth.

Some of the other trends included

how friends have become the new family, how Indians are striving to strike a balance between modernity and tradition, and how adopting a healthier lifestyle has become the norm.

According to Chauhan, irrespective of whether it’s an IT solution or a soft drink that is being marketed, today’s consumers demand to be treated as distinct, holistic, and multi-faceted individuals. Confronted with an ever-widening array of products, and armed with an unprecedented awareness of the social, health, and environmental impact, consumers expect products that more accurately answer their evolving needs and desires.

The Road to Excellence

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V. SUBRAMANIAM Director-IT & CIO (India & Gulf Area), Otis Elevators

. Subramaniam, director-IT and CIO (India & Gulf Area), Otis Elevators, explained how manufacturing companies can foster agility and champion excellence using IT. Providing insights from his experience, Subramaniam said that many successful cases from various industries have demonstrated the effectiveness of lean manufacturing concepts. However, the emphasis is now on the ability to adapt to changing business environments. Responding to changes, and taking advantage of them through strategic utilization of managerial and manufacturing tools are the pivotal concepts of agile manufacturing, he added. He also highlighted IT’s role in improving customer experience while building partnerships and fostering the right relationships.

Supply Chain: Fixing Weak Links

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very business aims to please the customer. But ensuring that products and services reach customers on time is one of the most complicated processes. The rigmarole of supply chain management bothers every CIO but Arun Gupta, the CIO of Cipla believes that it is a problem that should worry organizations as a whole. Gupta pointed to two problems that intensify the situation: Misaligned business requirements and reactive IT systems.

Gupta said CIOs need proactive systems that can forecast accurately and bring dealers, suppliers, and manufacturers on a single platform. By leveraging technologies like mobility, dealer management portals, and big data, CIOs can create a flexible supply chain that can help products reach consumers.

ARUN GUPTA CIO, Cipla

Maximizing Performance to Deliver Secure, Scalable, and Reliable Mobility

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SAJAN PAUL Director-Systems Engineering, Juniper Networks

s more users go mobile, wireless LANs will become even more critical, said Sajan Paul, director– systems engineering, Juniper Networks.

According to Paul, the increasing range of mobility services has made unification and secure management an imperative.

Additional security capabilities and mobile device management are also essential to successfully deliver secure connectivity and consistent experience to users on multiple devices.

“With Wi-Fi set to overtake wired network traffic by 2015, WLAN management plays a key role in an enterprise’s network strategy.

Good management tools optimize wireless resource availability, simplify troubleshooting, and minimize total cost of ownership,” Paul said. However, many WLAN management solutions are inflexible and difficult to use, he added.

Social Business Discovery: A Brand New Way to Understand Business

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n his presentation titled Business Discovery and Collaborative DecisionMaking, Paul Rajesh, head-product presales, QlikView India, said, “Effective leaders use technology to strengthen customer experience, eliminate costly internal distortions, and amplify the enterprise.”

Based on a survey from NASSCOM, Paul said that increasing enterprise growth, and attracting and retaining new customers are the top business priorities for CIOs, while analytics, BI, and mobility are the key technology priorities.

According to Rajesh, organizations are moving away from making decisions based purely on hard numbers, and are relying more on inputs from the world around them, including conversations with others.

With social business discovery, they can collaboratively generate shared insights in real-time to make innovative decisions more rapidly.

PAUL RAJESH Head-Product Pre-sales, Qlikview India

The Theory of CIO Evolution

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PRAVIR VOHRA Former President & Group CTO, ICICI Bank

IOs have evolved from being backend support personnel to change agents. This evolution is even more significant because the way business reacts to market dynamics is also evolving.

Pravir Vohra, former president and group CTO, ICICI Bank, said, “With innovation, CIOs can become Chief Change Officers as they can positively transform the way an organization does business.”

Vohra mentioned that CIOs need to develop a sharp understanding of ever-changing technology, and become proficient in business and leadership skills to achieve this goal. He also felt that CIOs are best positioned to analyze organizational needs because IT is the only function that speaks to all other siloed functions. As IT projects move from being budget-oriented to value-oriented, it seems that the time is ripe for CIOs to take the next step.

Harnessing the Power of a Smartly Connected Enterprise

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IOs are constantly under pressure to find new, innovative ways to meet employee and customer demands.

Emerging technology trends are creating a fundamental shift in how organizations access, use, and dissipate information. The proliferation of these technologies means that the underlying network needs to be strong enough to support them.

Chandrashekar G., country head-product management, enterprise business, HP Networking India, says that networks not only need to be efficient to be able to utilize available resources to the maximum, but also smart enough to create a unified platform for networking, management, and security. “A unified architecture that enables enterprises to fully harness the power of media-rich content, virtualization, mobility, and cloud computing is going to be the future of networking,” he says.

CHANDRASHEKAR G. Head-Product Management, Enterprise Business, HP Networking India

Smart and Tough Mobility Rolled Into One

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GUNJAN SACHDEV National Business Head & GM, Panasonic India

ore and more CIOs are expected to enable their field staff to stay connected, responsive, and collaborate with their organizations faster. They also need to help employees gain access to company information onthe-go to increase productivity. But IT leaders are also grappling with the issue of choice of devices that can withstand the tough conditions outside the perimeter of the office.

Gunjan Sachdev, national business head and GM, Panasonic India, points out that the general perception has been that extremely rugged devices are expensive and increase TCO. However, with the Panasonic Toughbook series, CIOs can get faster ROI, and provide employees the flexibility to work from anytime, anywhere. The device is currently being used in various industries, and is helping many organizations worldwide to improve collaboration and business.

A Two-Step Process to Business Agility

Z

ara, a retail store, overtook GAP to be crowned as one of the best retail stores in the world. They did so by mapping what customers require and using technology to fill that gap in the least possible time. Zara is a perfect example of what businesses want from their CIOs today: Agility.

According to Rajiv Pillai, chief technology evangelist, Wipro Infotech, business agility and efficiency is a two-step process. “It’s a combination of optimizing available resources and transforming capabilities,” he says. Virtualization and cloud computing enable optimization, and through mobility, CIOs can transform the process of sending and receiving information. CIOs can enhance business agility with these solutions in a secure and efficient way.

RAJIV PILLAI Chief Technology Evangelist, Wipro Infotech

Open House: Manufacturing the Case of IT

Ninad Katkar, Head-Commercial Business, Juniper Networks, and Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media, discussed the many ways that manufacturing companies can optimize costs.

I

ndia’s manufacturing industry has been grappling with the challenges of a bad economy.

To be able to keep their heads above the water, organizations

in the manufacturing sector— especially in the APAC region—are focusing on cost optimization.

“To optimize costs, most organizations are integrating their

We seem to forget that the right products are made from the right processes and a robust infrastructure.”

NINAD KATKAR, Head-Commercial Business, Juniper Networks

processes. IT teams are creating a centralized set up across the value chain to help multiple functions work as a single team. Today, we also need to connect with customers and mine data better to stay ahead of the pack,” says V. Subramaniam, director-IT and CIO-India and Gulf Area, Otis.

Cost optimization is one thing, but have Indian companies been too focused on getting the product right than making the right product? “It’s true that grabbing market share has become more important than innovating for the right product.

But involving ourselves to tweak our product is essentially how we learn to make the right product,” said Anil Khopkar, VP-MIS, Bajaj Auto. “Our processes aren’t evolved to completely bring in optimization.” And to create the right product, manufacturing companies need to look at benchmarks, said Ninad Katkar, head of commercial business, Juniper Networks.

“But we seem to forget that the right products are made from the right processes and a robust infrastructure,” he said.

Most Indian companies have achieved the mandatory global standards only in pockets. The internal policies help them churn out better process regulations. ” BHUPENDRA PANT,

Head-IT, L&T EWAC Alloys

Event Report KEYNOTE SPEAKER

How to Ensure Technology Doesn’t Blindside You Noted speaker, author and politician, Jim Harris spoke to CIOs on paradigm-changing technology—how to avoid being the next Kodak. It was a presentation that plenty of heads nodding in agreement.

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t the CIO 100 Symposium 2012 held at Hyderabad on 6th & 7th September, public speaker and management consultant Jim Harris spoke to CIOs on how to avoid being blindsided by technology trends.

He began with examples of how large, well-funded companies have been caught off-guard in the past. Take the case of Napster, he said, and how an 18-year-old kid, Sean Fanning, blindsided a $40 billion industry by changing how music was

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distributed. He went on to other examples.

“Apple, and not any of the record labels, reinvented the music industry in an age of digital distribution. Being blindsided can affect all industries. Digital photography, for example, blindsided Polaroid and Kodak,” he said.

An industry shift has begun again, he said. Nokia, for example, sold 422 million camera phones last year, that’s’ more than the number of cameras Kodak ever sold!

And the speed of change is accelerating, he added. “It took the radio 20 years to attract

10 million users and television took half that time. but Hotmail and Napster did the same in a matter of months,” Harris said.

One of the reasons organizations get blindsided is because most companies are set up with expensive process structures, something new entrants aren’t tied down by. “These are a bunch of kids fuelled by caffeine and pizza working at warehouses and they have no idea of your cost structure.

Worse, they don’t care,” he said.

So, how do CIOs deal with this sort of change? New technology, mergers, market

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JIM HARRIS Author and Speaker Jim Harris is one of North America’s foremost management consultants and public speakers on change and leadership. His most recent book, Blindsided! is a No.1 international bestseller.

He is also the author of The Learning Paradox, which appeared on numerous bestseller lists, and co-author of The 100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada. He is also an environmentalist, and a politician. From 2003 to 2006, Harris was the leader of the Green Party of Canada.

competition have made the business landscape more chaotic and complex. In this time of uncertainty, even the most successful companies are threatened, and every decision maker is looking for a trustworthy vision of the future.

The best route, according to Harris, is to separate form from function. “For example, banking is essential but banks are not. Only a quarter of Kenyan citizens have a bank account. You can go to any one of the 20,000 M-Pesa kiosks that sells mobile phones and transfer cash to your family or buy and sell stock shares. Imagine the change possible by amalgamating such branchless banking into rural Indian context,” he said.

“It’s is easier to step on a dragon’s egg than a dragon,” he said quoting

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Confucius, as he emphasized on the need to understand internal problems to an extent that every step becomes predictive rather than reactive.

“When you have disruptive innovation at hand, you will see staggering growth.

Sure in the backend, you’ve to worry about challenges like bandwidth, but when you’re rolling in money that’s not the real issue,” Harris explained.

He concluded by asking CIOs to question themselves on how prepared they really are. What percentage of your IT budget is aimed at mobile optimization, he asked.

How do we use IT to unleash our talent and insights to a level of 100 percent?

In closing he asked: “What’s the definition of insanity? It’s to continue

doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results every time. Have you begun to do things differently?”

Keynote Speaker Presented by :

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CIO Conversations An exchange of ideas, insights and opinions

The Cloud Promise: Transforming Business, Yet Staying Sane At a panel discussion at the CIO 100 Symposium held at Hyderabad, CIOs who had walked the talk explored how best businesses could leverage the cloud, keep it cost-effective, mitigate risk, and address issue of scale, flexibility and elasticity. Their verdict: Go hybrid!

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On the CIO Conversation Panel: Murali Krishna K. VP and Head-CCD, Infosys Technologies Our cloud story has evolved over the past three-and-a-half years.

We thought it would be about gaining better security and improved agility. But it’s turned out to be so much more—cost reduction is huge, scalability is fantastic, security metrics look awesome, user experience is superb and operational excellence is off the scale. We’ve experienced great end-user adoption and seen incredible demand from the business.

Tarun Pandey VP-IT, Aditya Birla Financial Services

Enterprises need to appreciate that the cloud is only a mechanism of delivering value to stakeholders, be that cost optimization or better risk posture or enhanced agility. We never treated the cloud as a traditional project, we looked at it as changing the way we delivered service, how we measured it, and how we fostered excellence. And, that’s why we succeeded.

Murali Krishna K. VP and Head-CCD, Infosys Technologies

Tarun Pandey VP-IT, Aditya Birla Financial Services

Anand Kamath

Anand Kamath

Engineering Director, Cloud and Datacenter Management Team, Microsoft IDC The primary considerations that determine an organization’s cloud approach are security, performance and scale. At Microsoft, we review which applications need to be moved to the cloud and depending on the business imperative we leverage either the public or the private cloud, in a hybrid approach. This has helped us maintain data consistency, be rigorously compliant, and offer a uniform user experience, while enhancing operational efficiency.

Engineering Director, Cloud and Datacenter Management Team, Microsoft IDC

Rinosh Jacob Kurian Enterprise Architect, UST Global

Rinosh Jacob Kurian Enterprise Architect, UST Global

The cloud is actually about how business processes can be integrated with the new landscape. Such integration needs adaptors and components that are pre-built to save time and effort—that’s what made a hybrid approach so exciting for us. While a private cloud implementation provides longterm TCO benefits, a hybrid approach allows organizations to derive immediate business value.

Rajendra Prasad Raju AVP, Apollo Health Street

Rajendra Prasad Raju AVP, Apollo Health Street The smart way to incorporate cloud computing into an organization’s DNA is to take a phased approach. It took our team nine months to get our first application on the cloud. But two years down, we’ve really accelerated the pace of transformation and moved 90 percent of our applications to the cloud including business-critical ones like ERP. A phased approach not just helps a CIO learn and adapt to the new dynamic, but also helps in delivering milestone-based business goals, in line with market demand.

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This CIO Conversation was presented by :

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP MICROSOFT

more than 200 cloud services creates a virtuous cycle for the development of Windows Server and Windows Azure.

With the cloud OS, customers are able to use familiar application development and management tools, as well as common data, identity and virtualization platforms, across private, third-party, and the Windows Azure public cloud. They can carry their current skills, experience, and investments forward. And quite naturally, customers can transition to the cloud on their own terms taking advantage of the product portfolio offered by Office 365, Dynamics Online, Windows Server, and private cloud with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012.

Windows Server 2012: Stairway to the Cloud Srikanth Karnakota, Country Head-Server & Cloud Business, Microsoft, says that Windows Server 2012 will help CIOs realize the promise of cloud computing.

Why is Windows Server 2012 a big deal for CIOs? As CIOs get ready for cloud computing, they’ll need a platform that can perform the role of a cloud OS. To that end—with Windows Server 2012— we have essentially looked at three scenarios: Go beyond virtualization; run every app on every form of the cloud, and respond to business users with more agility.

We have added hundreds of features in this release—there are significant enhancements and represents our best work. For example, there is a 16X growth in the number of virtual processes that can run in a VM. We used to run four, and now we can run 64 processes in a box. Similarly, memory allocation per server can go from the standard 64GB to 1TB per VM. These are just fantastic scale and performance numbers in terms of what

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customers can get on the platform today.

The new OS is built from the cloud up to help customers achieve a modern datacenter without boundaries. And enterprise customers are already betting on Windows Server 2012 to realize the promise of cloud computing. It is indeed a historic and monumental moment for us to launch the Windows Server 2012.

Given how dynamic cloud evolution is, why should enterprises rely on Microsoft and its version of the cloud OS? Our unique legacy of delivering the most widely used operating systems, applications, and global cloud services, position Microsoft to deliver the cloud OS best. If you look at Microsoft, there’s an abundance of expertise in terms of running largescale services. Our experience and learning from running petabyte-sized datacenters to deliver

How much of your experience with Microsoft Azure influenced what you have done with Windows Server?

As I said, the best thing about Microsoft is its legacy of running both commercial and consumer apps and being able to learn quickly from large-scale deployments. Azure is a great example. Bits of Azure are built from Windows Server and we are adding hundreds of thousands of users every day on Azure. We looked at that level of scale and figured out the app symmetry between the two platforms of private cloud running Windows Server and Microsoft Azure, and how they interact seamlessly. That’s where you’d find enormous value when you are trying to break boundaries.

The real value of the cloud OS is giving CIOs the power and flexibility to choose between a private cloud, a partner-hosted or a public cloud, on their own terms and through devices such as Windows 8—where customers get indepth app insights, and are not compromising anything. This is where, I think, some of the learning from running Azure on a large-scale has been pumped back into Windows Server and they work hand-in-glove with each other.

This interview is brought to you by the IDG Custom Solutions Group and Microsoft.

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Event Report HALL OF FAME

CIO HALL OF FAME

HP INDIA CONGRATULATES THE WINNERS OF THE

HALL OF FAME AWARD

Sanjay Malhotra

Murali Krishna

Ajay Kumar Meher

Parayil Sebastian Joseph

Prasad C.V.G

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar

N. Nataraj

Sunil Mehta

Shashi Kumar Ravulapaty

Veneeth Purushotaman

Girish Rao

Dhiren Savla

Joydeep Dutta

Rajeev Batra

Vice President-IT, BS & ebiz, Amway India Profile on page 40

President-Technology & FM, DDB Mudra Group Profile on page 65

Global Chief Information Officer Hexaware Technologies Profile on page 84

Business Head-IT & Supply Chain, HyperCity Retail India Profile on page 88

Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Securities Profile on page 91

SVP & Head-CCD, Infosys Profile on page 95

Chief Information Officer, ING Vysya Bank Profile on page 98

SVP & Area Systems DirectorCentral Asia, JWT India Profile on page 101

Head-Information Technology, Marico Profile on page 108

SVP-IT & Post Production, Multi Screen Media Profile on page 112

President and Group CTO, Reliance Capital Profile on page 124

Chief Technology Officer, Reliance Commercial Finance Profile on page 125

Chief Information Officer, VFS Global Group Profile on page 139

Chief Information Officer, MTS India Profile on page 111

Presented by

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finish

B Y C A S S A N D R A K H AW

Recently, researchers discovered that a certain breed of harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave in a way that is not dissimilar from the way Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for data transfer. They're calling them the 'Anternet'.

Stanford Professor of Computer Science Balaji Prabhakar—along with his colleague Deborah Gordon, a biology professor—came to the realization that the algorithm utilized by the ants to determine how much food is available is essentially the same as the one used in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

The also researchers discovered that the ants mirrored two other phases of TCP. One phase, which is known as "slow start," is an algorithm that TCP uses to control congestion within the network by transmitting a large wave of packets to gauge available bandwidth; harvester ants apparently work using a similar principle: They first send out foragers to determine availability before fine-tuning the rate of outgoing foragers. Similarly, there is a protocol known as time-out that occurs when a data transfer link is broken or disrupted. And sure enough, harvester ants behave much the same: If foragers do not return after more than twenty minutes, no more harvester ants are sent out.

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IMAGE BY P HOTOS.COM

The Ant Story

Lenovo® recommends Windows® 7 Professional.

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© Lenovo 2012. All rights reserved. Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, For Those Who Do and ThinkCentre are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Core, Core Inside, vPro and vPro Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Lenovo reserves the right to alter product offering and is not responsible for photographic or typographic errors.

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