CIO December 2010

leAdership

VOL/06 | ISSUe/02

Business

Technology

Anil KhopKAr, VP (mIS), bajaj Auto, got two budgets cleared in one year.

How To Get What You Want The budgeting season is rolling in.

Are you ready?Page 38

December 15, 2010 | `100.00 ww w.CIO.IN

VieW froM THe ToP r. Sarabeswar on IT’s potential in construction.

Courage under fire How Satyam faced the fallout of the scam.

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Sterlite Technologies, India Infoline and 2,999,998 other businesses have gone Google.

“Going Google” means switching your business to Google Apps: an online email, calendar, and document program that’s based on the web. Learn more at www.google.co.in/gonegoogle.

© 2010 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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16/11/10 2:23:12 PM

Soundboard

SMART STORAGE HELPS FLEXIBLE IT HAPPEN Flexible IT is an approach to build an IT architecture that includes storage as a critical enabler of shared IT infrastructure.

In a world where yesterday’s IT practices can no longer affordably cope with the new realities of growth and pace of business, Flexible IT enables organizations to provide affordable, always-ready IT at the speed of today’s business decisions. Netapp’s approach to shared IT infrastructure revolves around making it part of an overall customer solution that includes Netapp’s shared storage solutions. These solutions work harmoniously with hypervisors, servers, network and management components from technology partners such as BMC, Cisco, Intel, and VMware. In this model, the next generation of flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure will encompass the following: Unified architecture - use a single architecture for all workloads.

A storage architecture that allows you to scale in multiple dimensions.

Integrating the storage architecture with industry partners to make managing the shared IT infrastructure easier.

Greater options to consolidate infrastructure, such as a unified connection for network cabling and better rack density.

Flexible building blocks that can be ordered as a single SKU to simplify deployment of shared IT infrastructure.

Sunil Sirohi, Vice President- Information Resources, NIIT Limited, sees the value of storage in a IT-as-a-service environment.

“Storage as a service is the direction which leads users to consume storage resources on demand and pay only for what is used. It will also enable enterprises to dynamically provision storage resources, making them more responsive to changing business demands”, he says.

New Buying Criteria: Today’s decisions can set the foundation

for a Flexible IT architecture in the future, enabling organizations to efficiently deliver IT services that drive business impact. Today’s virtualization, cloud-based IT services, cost containment, and

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP NETAPP

EXPERT VIEW RAJESH JANEY President - NetApp India & SAARC

Is Your IT as Flexible as Your Business Needs it to Be? There’s major market shift underway, reasons - explosion in data in Datacenters, preponderance of siloed infrastructure and the inherent inefficiencies existing in traditional technologies, architectures and datacenter processes. IT leaders realize that they need to think differently - the decisions made now will affect the long-term success of their businesses.

For the first time in history IT organizations have an external yardstick to benchmark their performance against. CIOs would be under serious pressure if a service provider can offer higher SLAs at lower costs. Leaders are weighing their options between outsourcing or building a more flexible, efficient infrastructure—or may be both. Both options require a more dynamic, flexible, and efficient IT infrastructure.

NetApp offers a comprehensive portfolio of new platform features and solutions that will help our customers’ transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure.

green IT initiatives require storage that is more adaptable than ever before. The key is asking the right questions in the RFPs and choosing vendors who can provide measurable proof of being able to deliver on these new IT realities.

Storage for Scale: Storage infrastructure has to be able to scale on the fly as business grows and data increases. Today’s storage architecture should deliver extreme efficiency that increases with scale and remains flexible no matter how big a growth the business sees.

Efficiency: Storage efficiency isn’t just a single feature, it’s an approach to building and managing a storage architecture.It requires solutions with a combination of capabilities that maximize operational, organizational, and business efficiency. Highly efficient solutions significantly reduce data center space requirements and the associated power and cooling costs.

Unified Architecture: Change is the only constant in today’s

While data is growing everyday, its value can be seen only if you are able to quickly find the right information from terabytes of storage.”

SUNIL SIROHI, VP- INFORMATION RESOURCES, NIIT LIMITED

business. To keep IT, and specifically storage, aligned with this trend, the choice of the storage architecture should support multiple protocols, including NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel and FCoE. A unified set of tools and processes greatly reduces complexity and drives down costs. This feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

Bernard Golden

Cloud Computing

Undercover Cloud There’s probably a lot more cloud computing present in your organization than you know. Why it’s time to re-question some of your cloud assumptions.

I

continue to encounter an interesting phenomenon regarding cloud computing as I speak at conferences, present to IT groups, and talk to businesspeople. Most people recognize the importance of cloud computing and acknowledge its relevance to their environments. However, one thing I often hear is that "it's mostly used by SMB organizations." And, people add, even if large companies are using public clouds, it's for "unimportant" applications. The canonical example offered by people making this observation is that "no one is moving SAP to the cloud."

What I find interesting about these discussions is how poorly they match my experience and observations. From our experience, Amazon and its fellow on-demand cloud providers like Rackspace are being used by large organizations quite a bit, for important applications, and certainly the use is increasing. So why the disconnect between actual facts on the ground and perception?

Drawing a Parallel

Illust ration by p hotos.com

I've long thought that the rise of on-demand cloud computing reminds me a lot of the adoption of Open Source, and that perspective was reinforced by a couple of blog posts I read by Stephen O'Grady of the analyst firm RedMonk.

The first is his discussion—titled Meet the New Kingmakers, Same as the Old Kingmakers—about a Forrester report analyzing Open Source adoption within enterprises. The report found significant use and O'Grady mildly criticized Forrester for coming to a conclusion that RedMonk did four years ago. RedMonk, he explains, believes that developers are the true decision makers in organizations and from its interactions with those type of folks, RedMonk knew years ago that Open Source was being used in a big way. Forrester, he notes, surveyed CIOs and senior IT decision 30

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Bernard Golden

Cloud Computing

makers—that is, management. He quotes a post by former Red Hat sales exec Billy Marshall that "CIOs are the last to know," meaning, IT organizational decisions are actually made bottom up, and that senior management perception lags reality by a significant margin.

O'Grady states: "We are founded upon the idea that developers are the single most important constituency in technology." Both O'Grady and Marshall emphasize that developers use Open Source because it makes doing their job easier.

The implication for organizations is that decisions made by developers create commitments for their organizations. The result is that two or three years down the road, these organizations ‘discover’ technology decisions and applications that are based on choices made by developers without organizational review.

This may account for the curious lack of respect given to Amazon on the part of IT organizations and vendors. Vendors primarily seek to talk to senior management, those who control budgets—and who often miss the reality of what developers are doing. Consequently, they won't be telling vendors how much public cloud is being used, and the vendors will respond with the time-honored "we don't really see them much in competitive situations" (I used to hear this a lot from proprietary software vendors about the Open Source alternatives to their products).

Make no mistake about it, developers are using public cloud computing—a lot. We certainly see it in our daily business interactions. The high level of usage (and its clandestine nature) was illustrated at a recent conference when one CIO noted that while going through expense reimbursement reports, he found 50 different cloud computing accounts being used by developers.

The reason? It's easier for developers to obtain computing resources from a public cloud provider than undergo the extended waits typical of the existing compute environments.

The upshot of all this is that today decisions are being made by developers about the use of cloud computing that upper levels of the organization are unaware of. Which means, in a year or two, IT organizations will discover new public cloud-based apps that they had no idea were being placed in those cloud environments.

The Ramifications Of this Trend Watch for the ‘cloud boomerang’. Organizations will be taking on operational responsibility for applications located in cloud environments for which they are unprepared. They will need to quickly get up to speed on the cloud environment and learn how to operate an application within it. This will include the need to retrofit monitoring, security, and Contrarian View management into applications, as developers often fail to address these To read Bernard Golden’s Case areas because they are not required Against Private Clouds, visit for application functionality. We www.cio.in/mustread c o.in refer to this responsibility migration as the ‘cloud boomerang’.

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Action: You should have your operations people evaluate how to take over operational responsibility for external cloud apps.

Be ready for more compliance checks. Compliance requirements will need to be analyzed for these ‘discovered’ applications. Changes to the applications, or even migration from their initial cloud hosting locations, may be required to bring the applications into conformance with the requirements of governmental and industry laws and regulations. Given the significant semantic differences among IaaS public cloud provider functionality, this will be more challenging than item number one.

Action: You should set up a remediation team with skills in these different areas so that you are prepared to respond when an unknown application running on the public cloud surfaces.

Pay attention to changes in investment. Investment patterns of IT spend will be modified in a stealthy fashion. This change will happen not deliberately, but unconsciously. While public cloud computing is relatively inexpensive (the complaint of

Developers are the true decision makers in organizations. They brought Open Source to the enterprise years ago. And make no mistake about it, developers are using public cloud computing. vendors as described in the second of O'Grady's posts), the costs mount up as applications scale and as applications multiply like rabbits (as they inevitably do—that was certainly the pattern with Open Source). At some point, someone will notice that a bunch of money is being spent on public cloud computing and will call for the cloud spend to be curtailed, while others will assess the benefits being achieved by those cloud applications and conclude that maybe the cost cuts should fall on the internal IT budget.

Action: You should have your finance people looking through expense reports and have others sniffing around to see what use of public cloud computing is being done in other parts of the organization. Don't be the last to know.

And by the way, that shibboleth about "no one's going to run SAP up in the cloud"? In a somewhat ironic milestone recently, SAP announced that a portion of its on-demand offering has been migrated to AWS. Perhaps a new example of how public cloud computing isn't sufficient to meet the real needs of enterprises needs to be found. CIO

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in

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12/9/2010 4:24:52 PM

Rob Koplowitz

Collaboration

Social Media: Lighting Up Innovation Most companies use social networks to share knowledge and improve corporate communications. But others use it to drive innovation. Which one are you?

T

Illust ration by P hotos.com

he collaboration landscape is no longer about isolated groups of people that work together to complete a specific job. Today, enterprise collaboration extends more broadly across the organization, encouraging partnerships across teams that might not have previously worked together. What's the reason behind this shift?

It stems from social technologies in the workforce, converting companies from a ‘need-to-know’ environment to a ‘need-to-share’ culture that promotes an open collaboration approach where sharing is the norm and information control is at the discretion of the individual. This shift toward increased collaboration is apparent, even as enterprises emerge from the economic downturn. In fact, 65 percent of organizations now support at least one Web 2.0 technology for internal or external collaboration and communication purposes.

Why? Because they want to find, fund, and reward new ideas that will move the company in a new direction to gain greater market share and earn larger profits.

These new ideas will start to become the reality (and in some cases already have) as the Millennials enter the workforce. These digital natives bring with them a technology fluency that Baby Boomers simply don't have, introducing new norms for how to manage time and accomplish tasks. They wield social and real-time communication tools to influence their peers and the world around them, helping to amplify the conversations employees have every day. This is great news for firms looking to enhance their innovation strategies. As firms move toward greater levels of sharing as part of embracing the changing workforce and the wide availability of social software platforms designed for business, the drive for innovation within the organization starts to naturally occur.

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Rob Koplowitz

Collaboration

Forrester's current working definition of Web 2.0 helps to shed some light on the connection between innovation and the larger trend toward enterprise 2.0 and the emerging social enterprise.

Web 2.0 is a set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures. The first half of the definition represents long-standing goals for any good content and collaboration professional. But the second half is quite new, very disruptive, and incredibly powerful. Many firms see Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, and social networks as tactical because they help workers capture and share knowledge, manage projects, and drive improved corporate communications. Yet, some organizations apply these tools to drive very high-level strategic goals—24 percent of organizations use Web 2.0 tools to help foster innovation.

organizations in 2010. In many cases, innovation centers are based within IT with a dedicated executive leading the initiative.

The alignment between the head of innovation and C-level executives is critical as it provides the innovation team with tangible goals and fights the misconception that innovation is about brainstorming all day without accountability.

Take Southwest Airlines as an example of a company dedicated to embracing innovation initiatives. Southwest is no stranger to innovation. A pioneer in profitable, customerservice-oriented business travel for a low price, they've thrived in some very challenging times for the airline industry. When Forrester asked nearly 4,600 consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies, based on usefulness, usability, and enjoyability of the experience, Southwest was the top ranked of seven large airlines. So how do they plan to maintain that edge in a competitive market?

Southwest Airlines invested in innovation software that captures, shares, and rates ideas. By harnessing its creative workforce, Southwest recognized the opportunity to drive new and unexpected areas for improvement.

In the coming months, we can expect to see Web 2.0 technology playing an even more vital role in fostering innovation. Why? Because the most successful innovation programs are: Visible: People are more likely to participate in innovation initiatives that are well publicized and transparent and Web 2.0 tools allow people to ask questions, share ideas, and discover what people outside of one small piece of the corporate hierarchy are doing.

Respectful: Web 2.0 tools support real-time and ongoing dialogue that is conversational, free of red tape, and representative of different points of view.

Inclusive: Web 2.0 tools help break down organizational and cultural barriers such as time differences. They work well in a decentralized multinational corporation that seeks to cultivate a so-called "innovation network" of employees, vendors, partners, and customers.

But most importantly, social tools promote open collaboration that encourages the sharing of ideas which might not have been possible without them. This approach can set the innovation pipeline process in motion.

Benefiting from Social Innovation Large businesses are responding to the perfect storm of economic, social, and technological change by creating innovation centers. Seventy-six percent of enterprise IT professionals made increasing capacity for innovation a high priority for their Vol/6 | ISSUE/02

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The company invested in an innovation initiative using Spigit's enterprise offering—a software platform for capturing, sharing, and rating ideas. By harnessing the creative and motivated workforce, Southwest recognized the opportunity to break out and drive new and unexpected areas for improvement. According to the head of innovation initiatives, Southwest's innovation program helps the company in two ways: First with initiatives that lower costs and improve customer service directly drive a better customer experience; and second by reaching out to the broad Southwest employee base, they not only have more and potentially better ideas, they also provide the employees with more power to contribute to the success of the company.

Southwest's innovation program highlights the cultural shift to a ‘need-to-share’ organization that embraces social technologies to fuel innovative breakthroughs. Although not all organizations are ready to make this transition, there are some best practices to consider when working toward a successful social and, as a result, enterprise innovation program. It will be essential to have executive support to coordinate communication from the top, while still keeping the idea generators involved throughout the entire process. Above all else, the organization needs to be ready for an innovation initiative Be a Social Animal to avoid an early launch that will see little benefit. CIO To find out how Indian CIOs are using social media read The New Wall Street at www.cio.in

c o.in

Rob Koplowitz is a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Send feedback on this column to editor@ cio.in

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12/10/2010 5:17:32 PM

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP ESSN

CASE STUDY

SCALING UP WITH

SUPERDOME A

cross-platform migration of a core ERP that runs business critical applications is a task in itself for most IT teams. At Britannia however, the SAP ERP migration took on a whole new dimension since the migration method undertaken was not a standard SAP recommended one.

The Landscape Britannia’s SAP environment consists of different components like SAP ECC 5.0, SAP

Britannia Industries Limited consolidates its mission critical applications on the HP Superdome 2.

DB2 from version 8.2 to 9.5, and deploy a powerful computing platform. Thankfully for V. V. Padmanabham, Head, Corporate IT at Britannia, getting management buy-in was not difficult as the company was looking for a long term IT strategy. They realized that to sustain their 20 percent year on year growth, IT infrastructure would be pivotal.

This was around the same time that HP introduced its Superdome 2 platform and Britannia saw value in it. Britannia upgraded

In great measure, the success of the project was due to the extensive research, meticulous planning and testing that preceded the execution.”

V. V. PADMANABHAM, Head, Corporate IT, Britannia

“The Superdome 2 was the ideal choice for Britannia to address the load on its earlier infrastructure, as well as make the SAP consolidation possible.

BARUN LALA, Director - Business Critical Servers, HP India BI 7.0 and SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0, all using DB2 as the database. These components were running off different servers and the company wanted to bring them all under one homogenous platform. At the same time, the growing number of users (600 users at 100 locations at that time), placed tremendous load on the compute infrastructure. As CPU utilization was peaking close to 90 percent, an upgrade was on the cards.

A Mighty Migration Britannia’s approach was three pronged -consolidate the SAP environment, upgrade

their compute platform to the HP Superdome 2, and planned to consolidate their SAP environment to it A standard SAP exportimport method would have taken up to five days to complete, and this downtime was unacceptable for Britannia.

Says Padmanabham, emphasizing the criticality of the project, “In our line of work, even a day’s loss of sale is not recoverable.

This would translate to less availability of products to sell to the distributors and would have a cascading effect in terms of actual sales. Hence, keeping the downtime to the bare minimum was extremely critical.”

They had to fi nd a quicker, yet safe method of carrying out their migration – it was after all their core SAP ERP that was under migration. HP and Britannia decided to use Redirected Backup – Restore method to migrate 2.6TB of the DB2 database used by SAP ERP. Since this method was not a SAP recommended one, it was a bold move for HP and Britannia’s IT team to go ahead. They spent more than two months in planning, fervently researching the process and fi nally testing the feasibility.

When they had fi ne tuned the process and learnt from the testing environment, they were ready for the actual migration. The team had meticulously planned the entire operation right down to listing the time taken for each process, to the precision of a minute.

Benefits Compared to their existing servers, the Superdome 2’s computing power was a world apart. Britannia was able to run all the SAP processes in parallel without issues.

The actual SAP migration took less than 36 hours. Padmanabham elaborates, “Apart from the fact that we acquired rich virtualization capabilities and long term benefits in the Superdome 2, the hyper threading support in the DB2 9.5 has resulted in efficient use of the CPU” With the Superdome 2 offering reduced downtime and superior compute powers coupled with the newer DB2 version and SAP consolidation, Britannia’s ERP and infrastructure is poised for the high growth rates the company is seeing.

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

EVENT REPORT

Taking IT From

Cost to Profit

Businesses are at a tipping point with the number of virtual machines deployed being higher than the number of physical machines. So, virtualization tools need to be more resilient than the physical hardware it runs on top of.

T

he service offering model of various components of IT (SaaS, IaaS, etc) have redefined the way IT works.

The credit for making IT- as- a - Service possible, in a large part, goes to the technology of virtualization. The technology holds immense potential, not only to service providers but to individual businesses as well. From making possible private clouds to bringing in efficiency and ease of management, virtualization is set to continue as a key element of IT. The CIO magazine, in association with VMware discussed issues pertaining to building a comprehensive, integrated strategy for infrastructure, application platform and end-user computing.

Building Blocks to Virtulization At the application or service layer, cloud computing offers a new service consumption approach that applies

standardization and automation to enable rapid service provisioning. Instead of waiting for manual IT procurement and provisioning processes, lines of business are able to consume services as and when they need them.

Meanwhile, IT retains control over policies and billing that govern service usage. Adopting cloud computing does not necessitate a “rip and replace� approach for existing infrastructure. With VMware, one can leverage current investments to transform an inhouse datacenter into a private cloud environment.

VMware offers a pragmatic path that lets businesses encapsulate legacy applications and move them to a modern cloud computing environment with uncompromised security, ease of manageability, quality of service and compliance adherence. Businesses can evolve to an on-demand, highly available and highly

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP VMWARE

secure cloud computing model—with automated service levels and standardized access—to immediately deliver cost efficiency and business agility.

Richard McAniff, Chief Development Officer and Executive Vice President Research and Development, VMware, spoke on the journey to cloud computing. Quoting a Forrester report, he said, 70 percent of IT spends today is on maintenance. At the same time, even in this post recession period, IT managers are being asked to do more with less, he added.

Business – IT alignment This explains the primary reason for companies to move toward virtualization - the desire to get more out of their infrastructure and save on Capex. Giving an example of the benefits of virtualization and management solutions, Richard explained how Bajaj Auto, the world’s fourth largest manufacturer of motorcycles, reduced the number of servers they used by 75 percent, while improving availability from 98 to 99 percent, and eliminating downtime when migrating workloads. It is important to note

here that while on the face of it, we might see only a one percent increase in uptime, it also implies a reduction of downtime by half. Richard continued saying that as businesses mature along the virtualization journey, they are looking to improve the quality of service (QoS) – increase the resiliency of the applications by taking to a virtualized environment. As far as costs are concerned, the savings can be seen by instant verification and deployment, without waiting for several weeks or months as in the case of most other projects. Finally, the next logical step would be to improve business agility and evolve to IT- as- a - Service using the cloud computing architecture. This aligns perfectly with the business-centric approach of IT, where it is moving from being a cost centre to a profit centre.

IT at a tipping point Highlighting a reality that is a cause of concern, Richard said that businesses are at a tipping point now, with the number of virtual machines being deployed being higher than the number of physical machines. This makes it critical for the hypervisor and associated tools to work from the very first day of implementation.

It also needs to be as resilient, if not more, than the physical hardware it runs on top of. The implications of this is that the traditional role of the operating system (OS) is changing, where the OS no longer controls the hardware and the key focus for innovation is that the virtualization layer is really the “new infrastructure”.

Desktop Virtualization

“The key focus for innovation is that the virtualization layer is really the new infrastructure” RICHARD MCANIFF, Chief Development Officer and Executive VP – R&D, VMware

Richard addressed the security concerns pertaining to stray applications and entry of users into the virtualized environment by saying the key is to move away from the device centric world. Speaking of desktop virtualization, he said the focus should be on ‘personal computing’ and not ‘personal computers’. This is where applications designed for the cloud come into fore, where end users can securely access and manage their information using multiple devices.

Taking an evolutionary approach to virtualization Post the insights Richard shared, he took questions from the floor. Responding to Vijay Doddavaram, GM - ITS(I) Texas Instruments (India) Pvt. Ltd., on how certain legacy

applications are not designed for virtual environments, he said, while virtualization is no doubt a revolution, it needs to be approached as an evolution. While acknowledging that newer applications are better suited to take advantage of virtualization, even legacy ones benefi t from the elasticity and flexibility provided in a virtual environment since resources can be allocated on a case by case basis.

When asked about the criteria to decide between moving to a public or a private cloud, by Jayanta Lahiri, SR VP, Accenture Services, he said that critical applications can be inside the firewall due to security concerns. However, for deploying a simple application without the hassles of approvals, he suggested using the public cloud.

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