CIO July 1 2007 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The ediTor

Last month, we hosted the CIO Focus series on network infrastructure in three cities

Bridging the Gender Divide The IT industry is still male-centric but there is hope for Indian women.

— Mumbai, Bangalore and New Delhi. Nearly 150 IT leaders attended the three events, but just three were women. Of them, two attended the Bangalore event and the other showed up in Delhi. No woman was present at the Mumbai event. There is little research about gender issues in the Indian IT industry. But the U.S. has ample data. Last month, Sheila Greco Associates, a staffing and research firm based in Amsterdam, New York, released the results of its survey on women in IT. Here are some of its findings: The number of female IT leaders with the CIO title has risen. But the number of overall female IT leaders, including CTOs, has fallen. Female IT leaders feel lonely. Women in IT may enjoy They feel pressured to prove themselves a huge advantage over at work. other professionals because Women IT leaders have higher diversity they work in conditions in their staff. closest to a meritocracy. Nearly 90 percent of the women CIOs report to the CEO. Women are on par with men when it comes to salaries. I have deliberately left out a variety of numbers listed in the survey because they may be of little relevance to India. However, I will share one statistic: the number of women CIOs in the U.S. is about nine percent. How does this compare with our experience in India? Going by the appearances at our CIO Focus events, the number of women CIOs is probably less than 2 percent. Also interesting is the fact that we have featured just two women CIOs on our cover in 20 months. What does all this suggest about women in the Indian IT industry? What does it mean for women in IT? And what is its significance for diversity in the workplace? Obviously, Indian women have a lot of catching up to do. But it is no different from the case in other walks of life. The number of women engineers has grown manifold in recent years, and market forces — higher salaries and better growth opportunities — have led many to join the IT industry. Besides, women in IT may enjoy a huge advantage over other professionals because they work to global standards and in conditions closest to a meritocracy. Still, there are questions. Do women IT leaders need to do more? Or should their male counterparts do more? Do we need a catalyst to bridge the gender divide?

Bala Murali Krishna Executive Editor balamurali_k@cio.in

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Cover Story

Network Wonder| 30

How do you create a collaborative setting on legacy networks? You don’t. You get a new one. TCS did just that and is reaping dividends today. By Sunil Shah

30 Features

38 | Breaking SOA Bottlenecks Those who experiment with SOA on a small scale generally have a smooth ride. But start to scale, and obstacles emerge. Here are common choke points. By Galen Gruman

52 | VoIP: Good, Bad & Ugly Gold’s Gym, with 660 outlets in 26 countries, is sold on the idea of VoIP. But it has advice on how not to implement it and what to watch out for. By Paul Desmond

54 | Wireless Networks: Burning Questions Wireless networks might be mainstream, but that doesn’t mean they’re no-brainers. We’ve raised and attempted to answer some of the thornier questions you might still be dealing with. By John Cox

62 | Clean, Green Machines When VistaPrint revamped its data centers to contain rising energy costs, the company helped the planet along with its bottom line. By Stephanie Overby

Columns

22 | The Race to Innovation While it may seem that competition and collaboration are at odds, the most innovative IT shops find a way to blend the two productively. By Michael Schrage

26 | Think Before You Blog Blogs are the new leader’s medium of communication. But it’s best to watch what you say. The idea is to create a space for conversation, not controversy. By Michael Schrage more » Vol/2 | ISSUE/16

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content

(cont.) departments Trendlines | 15 Wireless | Wi-Fi Gets Home... Architecture | Enterprise Architecture: Starting

Essential Technology | 87 Network | 10 Gig Evolves into Fabrics

By Mario Apicella

From the Editor | 2 Bridging the Gender Divide | The IT industry is still male-centric but there is hope for Indian women. By Bala Murali Krishna

Endlines | 88 Crazy Questions that Stump the Help Desk | By Team CIO

Inbox | 14 NOW ONLINE For more opinions, features, analyses and updates, log on to our companion website and discover content designed to help you and your organization deploy IT strategically. Go to www.cio.in

c o.in

VIEW FROM THE TOP |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; 72 Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson & MD of Biocon, says it is essential in the business of biotechnology to identify research opportunities and strategize on them.

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Interview by Kanika Goswami Photo by Sr ivatsa Shandilya

Cove r: Imaging by Bi n esh Sreedh aran

Executive Expectations

Govern Managing the Overseas Citizen |â&#x20AC;&#x201A; 76 It is one thing to promise the Indian diaspora a warm welcome and quite another to assist them in working through the complex procedure of getting overseas-citizenship status. Automating part of the processes to the Overseas Citizenship of India is helping bridge the gap. Interview by Balaji Narasimhan 10

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ADVISORY BOARD Manage ment

Publisher & editor N. Bringi Dev

CEO Louis D’Mello Editorial Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran

Executive Editor Bala Murali Krishna

Bureau Head - North Sanjay Gupta

Special Correspondents Balaji Narasimhan

Kanika Goswami

Abnash Singh

Chief COPY EDITOR Kunal N. Talgeri

SENIOR COPY EDITOR Sunil Shah

Alaganandan Balaraman Vice president, Britannia Industries

Airtel

AMD

APC

Alok Kumar Global Head-Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services Anwer Bagdadi Senior VP & CTO, CFC International India Services Arun Gupta Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shopper’s Stop

D esign & Production

Arvind Tawde

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra

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Vikas Kapoor; Anil V.K.

ADC Krone

Group CIO, Mphasis

Senior Correspondent Gunjan Trivedi

Advertiser Index

Ashish K. Chauhan

Avaya

4&5

D-Link

Emerson

Fluke

President & CIO — IT Applications, Reliance Industries

Jinan K. Vijayan; Sani Mani Unnikrishnan A.V; Girish A.V MM Shanith; Anil T PC Anoop; Jithesh C.C. Suresh Nair, Prasanth T.R

Photography Srivatsa Shandilya

Production T.K. Karunakaran

T.K. Jayadeep

Marketing and Sales P, Intl’ & Special Projects Naveen Chand Singh V VP Sales Sudhir Kamath brand Manager Alok Anand Marketing Siddharth Singh Kishore Venkat Bangalore Mahantesh Godi Santosh Malleswara Ashish Kumar, Chetna Mehta Delhi Nitin Walia; Aveek Bhose; Neeraj Puri; Anandram B; Muneet Pal Singh; Gaurav Mehta Mumbai Parul Singh, Chetan T. Rai, Rishi Kapoor,Pradeep Nair Japan Tomoko Fujikawa USA Larry Arthur; Jo Ben-Atar

Singapore Michael Mullaney Events General Manager Rupesh Sreedharan Managers Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya Pooja Chhabra

C.N. Ram Head–IT, HDFC Bank Chinar S. Deshpande CIO, Pantaloon Retail Dr. Jai Menon Director (IT & Innovation) & Group CIO, Bharti Tele-Ventures

11, 19 & 83

Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints

IBM

Interface

M.D. Agrawal CM–IT, Refineries, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited Rajeev Shirodkar VP-IT, Raymond Rajesh Uppal

R&M

Rittal

SAS

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Chief GM IT & Distribution, Maruti Udyog Prof. R.T. Krishnan Professor, Corporate Strategy, IIM-Bangalore S. Gopalakrishnan CEO & Managing Director, Infosys Technologies Prof. S. Sadagopan Director, IIIT-Bangalore

Sigma Bite

S.R. Balasubramnian Executive VP (IT & Corporate Development), Godfrey Phillips Satish Das CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions

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

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Toward Users’ Perspective

The latest CIO event (‘CIO Focus: Network Infrastructure’, late-June) was useful in providing some perspective on the subject of general-purpose and dedicated networks, and their challenges. However, many aspects of network usage for voice, video, telecommuting did not come out clearly. I expected more inputs on the pros and cons of using private leased line network, broadband, Internet, VSAT, WIMAX, etcetera. The format of the event needs to revolve around common issues and challenges faced by user community to a greater extent. The audience interaction was dull, and I wished that more questions had come up. Still, the CIO Focus event continues to help me in networking with peers in the industry. Balagiridhar M. VP-IT, Wipro

Network Commandments Network infrastructure must be aligned to support the business operations. It should be agile. Network infrastructure is the backbone for the enterprise because it connects people operating from various locations to access business applications. Network infrastructure has to be reliable, available 100 percent of the time, scalable and flexible to meet the high growth of organizations. Network infrastructure 14

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must be interoperable to meet the connectivity needs of people to access business systems from anywhere, any place and any time in a secured way. The CIO and his team need to have a long-term vision in terms of planning the enterprise's network architecture. They need to be aware of both current and futuristic requirements in terms of locations to be connected, services to be available on the network, application to be accessed by people from these locations to support business operations and people on the move. Besides that, network infrastructure must be scalable and secured to be accessed by partners including customers, suppliers, vendors, etcetera. Building and managing network infrastructure is indeed complex, since it is in need of continuous improvement and needs a continual process to be in place for review and upgrade. V. SUBraMaNiaM CIO, Otis Elevator India

Move Over? The data points you have put across in your editorial (Threatened Existence, May 1 , 2007 ) outline the evolution of mature IT organizations. (The data points were: Top management expects CIOs to be more business savvy. Business managers are getting more clued into IT. Organizations are beginning to outsource all or a significant amount of their internal IT.) What Do You Think? We welcome your feedback on our articles, apart from your thoughts and suggestions. Write in to editor@cio.in. Letters may be edited for length or clarity.

Why do we see the business-savvy CIOs as a threat? New talent is coming from business, not technology; that’s good . The CIO role is evolving quicker than other CXOs. They represent the evolving world of IT. As I see it, most successful CIOs already experience these and those who don’t would love to. The frustrations and travails of maintenance are the reality of a few, and CIOs mired in such situations need to take corrective action, like change to IT companies or companies that have tasted success with their IT implementations. Why do we see the business-savvy CIOs as a threat? The new talent pool is coming from business and not technology; that’s good because technology has become a commodity which lends itself to outsourcing with ease. Most resources we are currently hiring are not technical, but typically from management institutes with a flair for technology. So is the CIO an endangered species ? The answer is a definite no. The CIO role has evolved quicker than other CXOs and the expectations and skill sets have moved towards business. I would say that business-focused CIOs can look forward to a new term 'Career In Overdrive'. arUN O. gUPTa, gUPT Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shoppers Stop

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Wi-Fi Gets Home... Bangalore’s sprawling residential complex, Diamond District, is now on Wi-Fi. Cisco has installed an alpha Wi-Fi network in a mesh architecture that ensures a ubiquitous network with seamless connectivity. Though Wi-Fi is not rocket science anymore, this network attempts to pass on the advantages of wireless connectivity to a residential complex of a significant size: 900 apartments, spread over 14.5 acres (with 6 acres of open space) and in a non-commercial environment. This may be the first initiative of its kind in such an environment. Though the technology is used widely in more developed urban centers like Singapore, it is in a fledgling state in India. It has made inroads mainly in technology parks and hotels, where it is part of a package deal. With an increasing number of offers in package deals that come with a home, almost all builders and developers are seriously considering the option of adding Wi-Fi to their list of amenities offered with the luxury homes they promote. Cisco’s as-yet-non-commercial initiative may just be what they are looking for. For now, the offer is powered by 20 Cisco Aironet 1500 Series LWAPP (Lightweight Access Point Protocol) outdoor mesh access points providing wireless LANs for outdoor networks. Four Cisco Aironet 1300 Series Wireless bridges provide high speed and cost effective wireless bridge functionality to the system. Each of the access points has a range of 200 meters, on an omnidirectional antenna, so the signal is uniformly strong, wherever the location.

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Enterprise Architecture:

Starting Within IT

Starting your forays into more mature architectural stages within the IT department itself lets you test approaches to make sure they work and reduces the chances that a botched effort in a business unit could kill further evolution, says Jim McGrane, former CIO of MeadWestvaco. Such inside-IT efforts also give CIOs the proof of concept they need to gain business buy-in. Plus, starting within IT disarms the common complaint that “CIOs like to change everyone else’s processes but their own,” he says.

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Merck is also taking this tack, says Joe Solfaro, executive director of information management. “We’re going to work our way from the inside out,” he says. At Merck, IT is using an integration platform to unify the messaging architecture at the company, which at first seemed to be a very IT-focused efficiency gain. But the effort is forcing IT to change its own internal operations and provides a natural interface with the business. “Layering information into a single bus gives us access to information that we know the business will want, such as process management,

and it gives us more visibility into business processes,” Solfaro says. Approaches such as the Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are good process methods to help IT transition to Stage 3, note both McGrane and Solfaro. “They help focus the organization on a process basis, and they force you to determine the value of services and to run like a business,” McGrane says.

— By Galen Gruman

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IT Roadmap Show Hits Hot Buttons The main feature at the opening of this year's Network World IT Roadmap conference was a series of quips about the current thinking on everything from mobility to VoIP and e-discovery. Asked if we were any closer to being able to carry a single mobile device, Craig Mathias, principal of the Farpoint Group, pulled two out of his pockets and said neither one is perfect. “One has a big screen and the other has a good keypad. One is better at voice, the other better at data. It’s what we call the single-device paradox.” And no, he said, they won’t be meshed anytime soon. The Network World representatives then turned the conversation to network management, asking if we’re getting better at it. “Fault management for routers? We don’t worry about that kind of stuff too much Johna Till anymore,” said Jim Metzler, president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates. "But we’re Johnson, not good at management that transcends president and resources, he said. Application service delivery, senior founding where you have to take into account the health partner of of everything between the client and the Nemertes on application, we stink at managing that.” VoIP: “You are Andreas Antonopoulos, senior VP and founding partner of Nemertes Research, said going to get the integration of management systems is blindsided by still an issue. “If you’re walking down a street desktop VoIP.” and see a building on fire, you don’t dial 911 for a chemical fire, 912 for a wood fire. We need to integrate systems to simplify their use.” Asked to give us a sense of where we stand on VoIP, Johna Till Johnson, president and senior founding partner of Nemertes, made a dire prediction: “You are going to get blindsided by desktop VoIP.” With Microsoft building VoIP into its productivity suite, companies need to decide whether VoIP is a desktop application or not, Johnson said. “I know one company that has desktop collaborative VoIP on the agenda for ‘07, and [infrastructure] VoIP slated for ‘08. They’ll have VoIP but no strategy for managing it. The back-end solution is much more complex than Microsoft understands.” On the topic of e-discovery, Antonopoulos said, “companies are gaining lots of experience by being sued all the time.” The big problem with e-discovery isn’t retention, he said, but knowing when you can destroy information and actually getting that done. “It is still more about process than technology.” Intelligence

...And Tags Visitors (From Page 15) Going forward, the potential uses of this technology are what make the initiative so interesting. Over the next year, theWi-Fi network can be used for various purposes. The more useful ones would be for security, identifying vehicles and locating kids within the campus premises. This could be done by integrating video surveillance and IP-based RFID tagging residents' vehicles, ensuring proper identification of the vehicles to be allowed inside. Right now, all the residents are not in the Wi-Fi net, many are not even aware of the new initiative, and almost half of them are still on an older Ethernet. There are also issues of interference from other household appliances, or from visitors' laptops, but Cisco sees no problems. Other large issues include bandwidth hacking and neighbors peeping over the network. The service provider says it will provide a proper firewalls-and-password set-up to take care of this sort of theft across walls. Despite all these hurdles, the idea of being connected by the pool, in the balcony and everywhere else in the complex, appeals to most residents. “A lot of my friends and neighbors are quite excited about this new development. Given a good commercial offer, we would like to move over from our Ethernet to Wi-Fi at a later date,” says Francis Franklyn, a resident. Today, between 40 and 50 people use the network on a typical day. “The peak hours are between 9 and 11 AM and then between 7 and 9 PM,” says Yedunandan Siddalingappa, technical marketing engineer, Cisco Systems. The growing popularity of the initiative, he says, has led to a few service providers and ISPs expressing their interest in taking the beta to the next stage. Wi-Fi may well be on its way into the residential Diamond District off Airport Road in Bangalore. Another feather in the silicon city’s IT cap.

— By Kanika Goswami

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AutomA Autom Ation A tion vs. mA mAn n M a n a g e M e n t For David hauser, automating the process of provisioning and patching some 500 servers with an IT operations staff of less than five people is what he considers management innovation. To start, the CTO and co-founder of GotVMail wants to be able to quickly roll out desktops to new staff. Founded in 2003, the company currently has 35 employees, but hauser says he expects that number to double in the next 12 months. “Automation was never intended to replace IT staff, just shift their attention to more compelling tasks,” he says. hauser recently demonstrated how he selects, deploys and maintains a pair of appliances from Kace to reduce manual labor, and more importantly secure his growing network of distributed data centers. “Patch management and policy enforcement were two of the big factors we had in selecting a network management system,” hauser says. netWOrK

The Kace system enables hauser’s staff to set policies and control application deployments on user machines. “We had a big security problem with people downloading and setting up applications to their machines themselves,” he says. To minimize user backlash, hauser has set up a self-provisioning feature within Kace that lets users select popular applications they would like to download to their desktop. Later on that day or overnight, the pre-tested and screened application would be provisioned to the machine. “We make sure it works and aligns with our policies before they download it, but you don’t want to completely restrict what they put on their machines,” he says.

— By Cara Garretson

Network access control (NAC) technologies can be applied to ensure that PCs dodn’t spread viruses across the network, as Curtis Simonson, senior technologist at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, demonstrated at a recent conference. “We wanted to prevent systems with viruses from getting on our network. And if they were on our network already, we wanted to prevent the spread of viruses,” he says. “We also wanted to prevent access to those we don’t want on our network.” Simonson tested and deployed Vernier Networks’ stand-alone NAC appliances to monitor machines gaining access to the network and assessing their patch and security status. The product works using single sign-on technologies in conjunction with his Windows domain authentication systems and checks if machines attempting to gain access to the network meet predefined security settings. The product is currently running in a relatively passive mode, tracking traffic and access attempts and alerting lab IT staff to anomalies. Simonson says he has yet to

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put Vernier’s technology to work blocking access to unauthorized devices or placing potentially infected machines on a virtual LAN to prevent a virus outbreak. “We are using NAC in a more protective than enforcement manner,” Simonson says. Part of the reason NAC projects can be categorized as active or passive, protective or enforcement, says Opus One senior partner Joel Snyder, is because the technology spans several domains within IT and relies upon knowledge of the network, the user and the access controls in place to function properly. “NAC is user-focused, network-based access control,” he explains. “The difference between firewall technology and NAC is the decision-making elements in NAC. NAC wants to be as close to the user as possible. NAC cares about who you are.” Snyder, who moderated an NAC panel and Simonson’s presentation, says NAC technologies will be daunting to even the most sophisticated IT shops because they cross multiple domains. Among the four primary requirements of NAC — authentication, environment, access control

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and management — management poses the most significant challenges, he says. “Inherently, NAC is impossible to manage because it combines authentication with network gear with end-point security with a policy server. All teams have to come together to manage this one solution,” Snyder says. “NAC is ‘big picture’ hard.”

— Cara Garretson REAL CIO WORLD | j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7

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Master data management, or MDM, is quietly sneaking up on SOA as the most overused IT buzzword — though vendors have yet to agree on exactly what MDM means. Currently being pushed by a plethora of BI, data warehousing and CrM vendors, among others, MDM boils down to this: a set of technologies to help enterprises better manage data flow, integrity and synchronization, plus a governance mechanism for enforcing data policies. MDM offers a tantalizing prospect: a “single version of the truth,” acquired from vast databases of internal assets, says James Kobielus, principal analyst for data management at Current Analysis. Early MDM acolytes say the transformation is a brutal combination of bridging technological silos and brokering accords between corporate turfs. At Wachovia, Senior VP rick Kochhar’s risk information strategy group is pursuing an MDM strategy to unite the disparate data in its four core divisions— corporate investment banking, wealth management, capital management, and retail and commercial banking. Kochhar’s first mission: Prepare the company for Basel II compliance. (the regulation requires banks to keep a three- to seven-year history of data). Wachovia will use Basel II as a springboard to unite its customer data. Wachovia is taking a phased approach to addressing the daunting cultural, business process and technology components of the MDM change. Kochhar has his work cut out for him: Wachovia, with rs 28,24,000 crore in assets, has completed 90 mergers during the past several years. One challenge is reconciling the differences between Wachovia’s and the merged companies’ data definitions. “Folks are easily able to articulate the technology components to get there,” Kochhar says, “but they have a much harder time with business processes and culture issues.” To ensure a smooth transition, Wachovia formed a risk data council (including prominent IT leaders), which has the final say on enterprisewide data disputes (how data sets are named or defined, for example). The company created data steward roles deeper down in each business to facilitate day-to-day decisions. Solving disputes early with established governance controls can save millions, since reconciliation costs add up quickly, Kochhar says. his advice for others beginning MDM planning? “Don’t start with the technology as the centerpiece of the solution. Start with corporate strategy.” enterPriSe architecture

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IT Executives Swap Simplification Stories i . t . M a n a g e M e n t Three IT executives from different industries are leveraging technologies, such as provisioning, knowledge databases and virtualization, to help reduce complexity in their organizations. Speaking at the recent Network World IT Roadmap conference, they participated in a panel discussion about the technical and managerial issues they face today and going forward. One area where all three speakers said technology has made an impact is in automating or simplifying tasks that would otherwise fall on staff shoulders. Coppin State University manages roughly 6,000 user accounts, including students, faculty, and employees. Adding new accounts and managing existing ones are mundane tasks that are best done by automation, says Ahmed El-Haggan, VP of IT and CIO of the university. “We found provisioning systems helps us; we set the rules and it works,” says El-Haggan At Nook Industries, a manufacturer of linear-motion components, learning the company’s product portfolio well enough to be able to sell them can take a year-and-and-a-half for new employees, says CEO Chris Nook. To shrink that, the company is building knowledge databases that act as learning tools for products such as screw jacks, which have 45,000 basic configurations and millions of potential combinations. Kyle Ohme, director of IT with Freeze.com, which hosts a number of Web sites for downloading desktop software, says the virtualization of his company’s server structure has helped reduce complexity significantly. Three years ago, the company embarked on a project to design and build an on-demand structure to support its growing Web sites. Today, the company can roll out or swap-out a server or storage component in a matter of minutes. This model has allowed Freeze.com to reduce at least two full-time server administrator positions to focus on other issues, says Ohme. — By Cara Garretson

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— By Thomas Wailgum

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How Dumb is Dumb Enough? i . t . M a n a g e M e n t It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since David Isenberg published his seminal paper, “The Rise of the Stupid Network.” For those who don’t know, here’s the story: Isenberg, then employed as a researcher at AT&T’s Bell Labs, challenged key networking premises. Specifically, he attacked the notion that networks should be designed around highly intelligent centralized control. Instead, he proposed that networks should be comprised of dumb transport in the middle, with intelligent user-controlled endpoints. His employer — which had invested millions of dollars developing highly intelligent centralized control systems — disagreed with that perspective, and they subsequently parted ways. It seems obvious that Isenberg was right, given the stratospheric success of the Internet. But if intelligent networks are obsolete, what’s behind the current vogue for 'applicationaware networking'? The most recent example is AT&T’s just-announced 'application acceleration' service, but whether it’s Cisco’s serviceoriented network architecture (SONA), Juniper’s application acceleration, or the deep-packet inspection by these vendors and

others (Nortel), the current trend is to equip network routers and switches with the ability to make on-the-fly decisions about how to handle traffic. In other words: Isenberg’s dumb network is getting smarter. Now, you could argue that adding intelligence to routers and switches isn’t exactly the same thing as creating 'highlyintelligent centralized control'. But that’s hairsplitting. After all, application-aware networking is about building intelligence back into the network. How bad an idea is that? Keep in mind that Isenberg wasn’t so much promoting a “network stupidity doctrine” as searching for a provocative way to highlight the emergence and viability of highly distributed IP-based networks. On that point, events have shown him to be 100 percent correct. But network architecture always embodies a fundamental tension between capability and control. 'Smarter' networks limit what you can do in the hopes of delivering guaranteed performance. 'Dumber' networks offer a sky’s-the-limit suite of choices, but limit performance guarantees. —By Johna Till Johnson

In healthcare, network dependability can literally be a matter of life and death, and federal law mandates security and privacy levels beyond those needed in any other verticals outside finance and national security. But many healthcare providers operate on shoestring budgets. So when Tuality healthcare, a 90-yearold not-for-profit integrated healthcare provider, designed its Wi-Fi network, it moved carefully. “We, as an industry, are not early adapters of unstable technology,” says Chris herrin, Tuality’s network services manager. The healthcare provider runs Tuality Community hospital, a 167-bed facility, as well as a 48-bed satellite hospital in nearby Forest Grove and clinics throughout the area. Tuality, however, is heavily networked on the wired side. “We are a Cisco shop with a multi-gigabyte backplane built on six Model 6500 routers that can take transmission speeds to tens of gigs,” herrin says. “right WireLeSS

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now, we are running at 6 to 8 gigs, and throughput is fabulous.” Tuality needs that speed to support its networked Picture Archival Computing System (PACS), which has become its lead application. With it the provider is replacing some of its traditional film images throughout its facilities, including operating theaters. It delivers images directly to doctors’ offices, which, since the doctors love, has helped change the minds of some physicians about using computers. It allows radiologists to read images at home, providing coverage for the emergency room evenings until 9 PM, after which an outsourcer, Virtual radiological Consultants, takes over for overnight emergencies. The radiologists access the images transmitted to them directly from the modality — X-ray, CAT or MrI — and either call or fax their reads to the emergency room. PACS saves Tuality money by eliminating film and developing costs and cutting

second- and third-shift personnel costs, and it has improved morale among the radiologists. But medical images are big and put heavy demands on the network. “We ran T1s to the radiologists’ homes because the service agreement with our Internet provider was not sufficient to handle the uptime,” herrin says. That’s why a 1,200-member organization has such a heavy-duty network infrastructure. — By Bert Latamore

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Avoid Pitfalls of Healthcare Wi-Fi Networks

Michael Schrageâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;

LEADERSHIP

The Race to

Innovation

While it may seem that competition and collaboration are at odds, the most innovative IT shops find a way to blend the two productively.

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ollaborate or compete? That’s a core strategic existing well of frustration and perceived opportunity. But if the target audience hasn’t yet perceived the potential question for organizations seeking margins and market share. When are they better off opportunity, they may treat such competitions as just gimmicky distractions. energetically competing against their rivals? This is a powerful and (relatively) innovative diagnostic. When are they wisest to collaborate and cooperate? That strategic question is even more important for the internal IT Run an internal competition around mash-ups, interfaces, marketplace. CIOs have to determine what will better drive tech support or some other IT-empowered business issue desirable results: more collaboration within their IT shops and see what kind of response you get. The size of the prize or encouraging smarter competition. The 'correct' answer, of and quality of recognition have to make sense, but you’ll be amazed at what does — and doesn’t — pop up. I was. course, is 'both'. Good luck. Unfortunately, most CIOs focus far less on the productive Indeed, you’ll find the conversation surrounding prize size, recognition and rewards role of competition versus speaks volumes about your collaboration than on the design shop’s competition culture. Will and deployment of productive a token dinner for two and an process. Our legitimate concerns enterprise attaboy from the CIO about process undermine rigorous motivate people? Or do you need thought and action around when cold, hard cash? Are you looking getting people to compete and getting for breakthrough ideas from a them to collaborate makes the most brilliant programmer? Or would sense. Too much of either can kill. As you rather have entries from Paracelsus, the 16th century Swiss programming pairs or trios? Do alchemist, keenly observed: “The you want lots of entries? Or do you dose makes the poison.” What’s the want the 'right' ones? right dosage? What’s the right mix? These aren’t rhetorical questions. These issues snapped to mind at 7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI The way you design a competition US CIO’s CIO 100 Symposium in San — particularly its rewards Diego, during a session on innovation — reveals your own values as a that I participated in with Capital One CIO Gregor Bailar and others. Bailar, inspired by an internal leader. To the extent you recognize, reward and celebrate competition run by CBS Marketwatch to encourage creative individual achievement, you may tacitly discourage mash-ups, imported the idea to his IT shop. The first time he collaboration. To the extent you pit teams against one another to come up with solutions, you discourage sharing ran the competition, he got far fewer entries than expected. and cooperation. And if competition in any form is seen as Now it’s not that Bailar doesn’t encourage or support Web 2.0-oriented innovation. Capital One is as innovative irrelevant to innovation, creativity and productivity, you’re running an IT shop that’s ignoring one of the greatest spurs a shop as you’ll find. The organizational reality is that sometimes internal competitions productively tap an to ingenuity known to history.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

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MICHAEL SCHRAGE KEYNOTE SPEAKER

7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI

7 SEPTEMBER 2007, NEW DELHI

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CIOs worldwide are impaled on the schizophrenic horns of At one global professional services firm, the CIO realized a leadership dilemma. IT organizations desperately need that office rivalry between regions had passed the point the efficiencies and innovations that internal competition of diminishing returns. There was literally no incentive can surface. Yet they have to promote greater knowledge for offices to share best practices — or any meaningful sharing and collaboration to encourage greater efficiencies information — at all. Not a single success story had anything in innovation communication and alignment. So which is the to do with cross-office collaboration. In fact, because the offices were actually ranked against one another, collaboration was better investment: rivalry or cooperation? effectively discouraged. Effecting Even though I’ve written books a change in incentives and culture about collaboration, my money’s on proved easy. An outside consultancy rivalry as the medium and method recommended the straightforward that deserves greater investment remedy of making 20 percent of the and ingenuity from CIOs. While regional CIO’s bonus contingent competition shouldn’t be a upon demonstrable knowledge dominant driver of your internal sharing and cost-savings between IT culture, it needs to be more than the units. The units were also ranked a spice: it has to be an essential on how collaborative they were. ingredient. Yes, competition for By contrast, another professional the sake of competition is dumb services firm IT shop was so — but so is collaboration for the collegial and collaborative that it sake of collaboration. You need 7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI passive-aggressively killed efforts to begin by learning how your to introduce IT innovations that existing IT culture defines the would upset the existing comity. contours of its collaboration versus The IT people did a better job of collaborating with each other cooperation landscape. While the answers aren’t easy, the path to finding them than with their internal clients. The clients came second. The is. Look at the three most common 'success stories' your result? The consultants bypassed IT and bootlegged budgeted organization tells when it’s reviewing past accomplishments. IT innovations on their own. The CIO was ultimately asked Then review the three most common 'abysmal failure' tales to leave, and a non-IT partner was put in charge. A few of the your people tell. Here’s the trick: don’t look for the heroes, surviving IT employees are unhappier, but the bulk of their villains, best practices or dumbest decisions. Instead, internal clients are not. Internal competition energized both examine the competitive versus collaborative dynamics of IT and its users. Leadership means defining and designing the kind of each project. What role did competition and rivalry play in the successes and the failures? How did cooperation and marketplace that’s best for your IT shop and enterprise. And it means having the courage to compete and sharing add value or induce paralysis? You’re guaranteed to discover your IT shop’s comfort zones collaborate and inspiring your people to do around rivalry and cooperation. Sometimes, feeling uncomfortable the same. CIO about competition is wonderful; other times, it signals the wrong kind of fear. Sometimes, collaborative, cooperative relationships indicate a well-run organization; then again, they can signal self- Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab’s eMarkets indulgent complacency. You need to know this. Initiative. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

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MICHAEL SCHRAGE KEYNOTE SPEAKER

7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI

7 SEPTEMBER 2007, NEW DELHI

THIS PRESENTATION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GREY MATTER: A THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES BY AIRTEL ENTERPRISE SERVICES

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Michael Schrageâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;

Making I.T. Work

Think Before

YouBlog

Blogs are the new leader's medium of communication. But it's best to watch what you say. The idea is to create a space for conversation, not controversy.

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Michael Schrage

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CIO with a global reputation in the financial As netizens well know, blogs and ego can be an intoxicating brew — services industry — and an ego to match accent on the ‘toxic’. Of course, several companies — IBM and Sun Microsystems come to mind — do an excellent job of integrating — decided to launch his own internal blog to inspire his team. He thought it would blogs into their communications infrastructures. Blogs at those companies become healthy platforms for collaboration as well as improve communications and boost morale. powerful tools for self-expression. The man BlackBerry-blogged from the world’s finest airport But should you — the CIO — have a blog? Is it worth the lounges, hotels and CIO conferences. For weeks, no thought was left unexpressed. A few thoughts were quite pithy; most time, effort and risk? Yes. Of course. Every C-level executive who has to manage expectations, strategic direction, morale, were self-indulgent piffle. His camera-phoned photos of uncertainty, risk and people’s time mountain views also invited smirks. should most certainly be doing a The CIO’s blog quickly became an inblog. Not doing a blog will become house IT joke. much like not doing e-mail; a willful Irritated and/or amused employees failure to communicate that sends a forwarded their favorite snippets to message all its own. colleagues and vendors. They weren’t In time, C-level blogging flattering. Worse yet, the firm’s help will be as prevalent as C-level desk and customer service personnel speeches, telecons and PowerPoint hated the cheap shots he fired at them in presentations. These blogs may not several ‘flogs’ — part flame, part blog. be done well, but how well they’re A few anonymous e-mails were done will say volumes about the quietly sent the CIO’s way suggesting executives’ style and substance — or improvement. A sensitive sort, he 7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI lack thereof. interpreted these criticisms as a As ostensible leaders of healthy sign he was hitting a nerve. digital innovation within their So instead of cooling off, he turned up organizations, CIOs should be at the heat. Bemused irritation became unhappy sniping. Barely a month later, his most biting blogs the leading — not bleeding — edge of these emerging media. ceased. The posting frequency plummeted from three-a-day As C-level business leaders, they should be living examples — and yes, experiments — of using digital tools to become to weekly. What happened? A friend of the CIO, who knew the man more effective executives. Lead by example. Blogs offer CIOs was hurting himself enterprisewide, made sure both HR a relatively fast, easy and cheap way to do just that. and corporate counsel got a good look at some of the choicer entries. Polite phone calls and e-mail exchanges ensued: Create Conversation, Not Controversy “It’s really not a good idea for these things to be so openly But what should I write? That’s precisely the wrong question. posted. Could create legal problems for us. I’m sure you The better question is: what do I want people to be talking understand.” Bye-bye, blogger. about — and doing — after reading my blog? Why? Come up

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

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MICHAEL SCHRAGE KEYNOTE SPEAKER

7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI

7 SEPTEMBER 2007, NEW DELHI

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Michael Schrage

Making i.T. Work

with decent answers to that and you’ll have a better than decent an internal blog discussing customer survey research or a PDF white paper debating outsourcing issues or a vendor’s FAQ blog. You’ll have a blog that creates conversation. The trick — and it is a trick — is to recognize that business response to a query or, yes, even columns in CIO completely blogs aren’t self-indulgent, self-expressions about what you misunderstands the power and purpose of the medium. You may or may not want all your people doing their think is important but interactive invitations to get others to appreciate what you think is important. Blogs are about deciding own blogs. You most surely want all your people aware of what kinds of conversations, connections and communications what matters and who they should be pinging if they need help, advice or support. Indeed, you want to encourage. you probably want your blog to be Lead by example. Does that mean seen as a hub where employees and you want customers and suppliers suppliers can meet and network to have access to your blog? Anyone on the Web links that you have in the enterprise? Or just your pointed to. organization? Do you want to invite Whether you — or your enterprise — and provide space for — comments — wants to take a 'let a thousand and contributions? How about bloggers bloom' approach is up to anonymous contributions? Will you you. You can be as top-down or as drag and drop e-mail exchanges into bottom-up as you feel is best for the your blog? How about project reviews firm. Asking people in your shop to and status reports? Do you see your propose blogging guidelines is an blog as a strategic communication 7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI excellent exercise in participatory tool? Or an interactive opportunity management and design. to manage and influence daily But whether blogs become as operations? If you had to guess, how prevalent as PowerPoint or not is secondary. The primary issue do you think your blog would evolve over time? The beauty of these simple questions is that they force is, what does your blog say about the kind of leader, manager C-level executives to think tactically and strategically about and communicator you aspire to be? What conversations both their professional priorities and the attention they does your blog create? What kind of linking does your blog want to call to them. That’s just as true for a PowerPoint facilitate? Bloggership isn’t leadership per se. But the example presentation, the budget spreadsheet and the urgent e-mail queue. They are about how we implement communications for of a good blog is an example of good leadership. Why? Because your people will take their cues from your blogging implementing IT. just as they do from your leadership style. Blogging is a skill that can and should be learned by C-level executives in It’s the Links That Make the Blog What makes blogs different? Think link. The cliché du jour is general — and CIOs in particular. that blogs are about the future of text and photos, podcasts, and Lead by example. CIO so on. True, but that wildly misses the point: truly dynamic blogs are about truly dynamic linking. Blogs are about the opportunity to link your insight with someone else’s — and have them link their insight to yours. Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab’s eMarkets Lead by example. Any blogging CIO who doesn’t link to, say, Initiative. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

MICHAEL SCHRAGE

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MICHAEL SCHRAGE KEYNOTE SPEAKER

7 SEPTEMBER 2007. NEW DELHI

7 SEPTEMBER 2007, NEW DELHI

THIS PRESENTATION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GREY MATTER: A THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES BY AIRTEL ENTERPRISE SERVICES

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“You need to have a

vision of the collaborative enterprise with a solid communication backbone and a set of soft and hard ROI goals.”

— Ananth Krishnan

Imaging by anil t

Photos by Srivatsa Shandilya

CTO, TCS

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network wonder by sunil shah

How do you create a collaborative setting in legacy networks? You don’t. You get a new one. TCS did just that and is reaping dividends today. “5 across:

O.K., Shib will produce a checking element (6 letters).” A clue in a crossword from The Hindu. Ananth Krishnan knew the answer was “Kibosh” — a simple anagram of the first two words. He knew it straightaway because crosswords, and reading, are favorite pastimes of the IIT alumni. But it took years of reading and training before Krishnan could crack The Hindu crossword in 15 minutes. It’s probably why he appreciates the man-years of knowledge it takes Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to create a world-class product — a process that could be significantly enhanced, and quickened, if the ideas of more people could be combined. How much business was TCS losing because a staffer with good ideas was stuck in a remote location and wasn’t able to share his knowledge with others soon enough, or sometimes not at all? Collaboration, believes Krishnan, the CTO at TCS, is Reader ROI: the way of the future. “Combination adds value more Steps toward a more than individual pieces,” he says. collaborative enterprise “What is true in today’s world is global development. How businesses can revamp Everyone has distributed teams with locations around their networks to stave off the world. How do you collaborate across all of these? stagnation How do you get software developers, sitting in multiple How a marketing campaign can locations, to work together as a team?” asks Krishnan. help change-management

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wasn’t readily available to the finance side of the company,” says Krishnan. “These inefficiencies are tolerable in a small organization; magnification would have made them intolerable.” But magnification, there would be. In 1998, TCS had 10,000 employees. Today, its employee strength is a shade under 90,000. Since 2001, its compound annual growth rate has been 30-plus percent. Clearly, their networks weren’t going to take them very far without serious upgrades. Project Ultimatix would get under the hood and fix that. “The goal of Ultimatix was to create one TCS for IT across the world,” says Krishnan, who was the key architect and business sponsor of the project.

a process digitization program that would take business processes and find a single way to deploy all of them. It says a lot about the work that went into that system, considering that the actual build of what is today known as Ultimatix took two years to create. Ultimatix went live in 2002. Successive releases have followed every year since then. At that time, says Krishnan, Ultimatix was among the largest deployments of the Oracle business suite anywhere in the world and also the most significant deployment of e-business. “Ultimatix was a landmark project not just for us, but also for Oracle,” says Krishnan. “Oracle hadn’t done something on this scale and with this In 1998, TCS was India’s number one IT plan for scalability. When Ultimatix first company by revenue and the fastest by released, we were about 26,000 people. growth. It was also the only Indian software But we knew that we would be four to five major in the world’s global IT 50. That times larger.” position, and the consequent responsibility, The first blueprint for Ultimatix was Ultimatix, says Krishnan, is the heart weighed heavily on the TCS leadership. The drawn up in 1999. It was conceptualized as of the company as far as business leaders needed to recalibrate its processes are concerned. “It vision, so they picked a goal: to be was like our ERP rollout.” The in the world’s top 10 by 2010. claim is not baseless. Ultimatix It was suddenly clear to them runs all internal processes, that their systems weren’t within including HR, finance and project kicking distance of the goal. “Our management at the core; employee internal IT structures would be self-service functions at the a key determinant — we knew second layer; and management that,” says Krishnan. “The plans Ultimatix: In 2002, Ultimatix brought TCS’s varied dashboards on top of that. for Ultimatix and Infinity were systems and global offices onto one giant carpet. The employee portal, which embedded in the TCS strategic The network consolidation project took three years looks the same throughout the objective of becoming a player to push through and has had successive releases world, is accessed by employees in the global top-10 of the IT every year. one ne benefit: The company CFo CF was able to achieve multiple jobs. These industry,” he adds, referring to to achieve financial closing and report to the board include information-based tasks like two key projects that sought to 15 days earlier than before. checking quality processes, reading upgrade the TCS network. At technology, ongoing conferences or that time, their internal IT, like Infinity: In 2005, Infinity provided TCS, the tools to useful TCS alliances. that most others, was a mosaic of collaborate better internally. These included more Some of the employee self-service country-specific systems. Worse, videoconferencing sites, VoIP, IM, blogs and wikis. functions include requests for each country’s IT was divvied up Stories poured in from across the world describing a travel and company guesthouses, in little silos of HR, finance, project new-found ease in exchanging ideas. It also shaved off advances, reimbursements, management. On their own, these a half percentage point in terms of revenue (Rs 17,200 allowances, leave, health insurance, systems did just fine, but put them crore) from TCS's travel bills. and reporting lost smart cards. all together and their inefficiencies From a business process stood out like a stain. COIN: In 2007, collaboration was given a chance to standpoint, Ultimatix serves as “Under the pre-Ultimatix be a revenue generator. The Co-Innovation Network an 'in' and 'out' box where team system, someone could be hired in took Infinity’s collaborative ability outside the walls of leaders and members can check one part of the company and this TCS into the larger world. Researchers, academics, on approvals for work they have information would not be available VCs and start-ups were all welcomed, allowing them done. The system also has areas for to the project deployment group. to work together. — S.S. appraisals and project management, And the information on revenue MIS, quality management, a project deployment group made In 1998, the 30th anniversary of TCS, the company’s leadership team asked itself the same question. The leaders needed to bring TCS’s far-flung operations closer together to tap the full potential of its engineers. By the following year, they had put together a plan that would, in its first stage, put all of TCS on a single network and in its second stage create a borderless, more collaborative network. Unbeknown to them, they were opening up a route toward a more collaborative environment — an idea that would get President Kalam’s attention.

Kitting Out for the Big Time

Collaboration Stage 1 On a Giant Network

3 Steps Towards a

Collaborative Enterprise

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knowledge management, and even an internal eBay-like setup. Putting together all the requirements for Ultimatix needed collaborative efforts from every department. About 100 people from IT worked on the project in addition to 20-25 users from each of the functional areas. Ultimatix’s primary data center sits in Mumbai and a back-up in Bangalore, and everyone accesses it via a Web browser. “The team size was about 200 at any point of time,” says Krishnan. “It was a substantial effort.”

Winning Over the Soldiers The effort paid off. Ultimatix has had efficiency benefits for the individual, the team and for the company as a whole. For employees, much of their contacts with the company — including applications for holidays or reimbursements — were suddenly automated. It made processing and response times much quicker. From a team’s perspective, the quality management system was put on an online interface. This meant that the allocation of teams, the products it created and the final billing to the customer were all automated. “For management, the amount of data we could get out of the system was dramatically better than what we were able to do from individual systems collated together,” says Krishnan. “A straightforward example is that our CFO is able to achieve financial closure and report to the board of directors within the first fortnight after closing. This is at least 15 days better than what it used to be before Ultimatix.” Still, it was doubtful if such improvements would cut it with management. After all, Ultimatix was eating into the time of almost 200 employees. “With Ultimatix, I wouldn’t say it was easy to sell,” says Krishnan, even though it was clear that the company’s strategic goal required such a system. In the end, he says, it was fully supported by CEO & MD S. Ramadorai and the TCS board. “I think I would have got approval for this project even if I wasn’t working for an IT company because this is about as necessary a part of the company’s growth plan as anything else, no matter what business the company was in,” says Krishnan. “We happened to be an IT company, so we

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Network Telescope After running Mahindra & Mahindra on the distributed architecture of SAP R/3 4.6B across eight datacenters for seven years, Arvind Tawde, VP & CIo, decided that the cost of maintaining the datacenters and the effort needed to continuously consolidate data from them was too much of an investment. In 2004, he started physically consolidating all eight datacenters into one in Mumbai and migrate to SAP R/3 4.7 on a centralized single-server architecture. The new MPlS-based network infrastructure would interconnect eight manufacturing locations, the corporate office, marketing headquarters, 33 area sales offices, four branch offices and two spare part depots. “We saw great savings coming out of the consolidation. over that, we saw value in the way the organization was enabled,” says Tawde. Here are some project figures to compare with: Arvind Tawde Timeline: overall, the project took nine months to VP & CIO, Mahindra & complete. Mahindra Team: A 100-strong, cross-functional team spearheaded the project with 75 consultants from implementation partners. Benefits: one server means that company-wide data available is available quicker. It also allows company-wide analytics to be generated from one server. The consolidation resulted in the cleaning of a huge master data. Mahindra & Mahindra’s material master went from 10 lakh records to 6 lakh. Role-based authorizations provided to all users of SAP 4.7, thereby increasing security levels of access and increased governance. Reduction in non-standard programs. Reduction in facilities management cost. Effective space utilization in the datacenter. Quicker response times to business needs in terms of new functions. — Gunjan Trivedi

executed it ourselves, but any company that was planning to grow 6x to 10x in the next 10 years won’t be able to without these efficiencies at the core.”

Collaboration Stage 2 Breaking Down Distance & Borders While it had put together a system that reduced the number of silos and brought core efficiencies, TCS was still some distance away from being a truly collaborative enterprise where employees’ knowledge could be tapped effectively. TCS-ers couldn’t, for example, exchange ideas that could turn

around a customer proposal quicker or brainstorm for a better product. Krishnan knew it was time to do away with the one-to-one contact characteristic of a small company. It was time to weave in the Infinity application into the Ultimatix platform. Project Infinity would give employees instant messaging (IM), knowledge communities, and the ability to find people with similar interests across the company. These tools would increase collaboration and result in faster turnaround and better work output. In an interview with InfoWorld, a sister publication of CIO that awarded Krishnan REAL CIO WORLD | j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7

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global helpdesk, based in Bangalore for his work on Infinity, Krishnan and Mumbai, and supported the says Infinity brought about a 5 entire TCS world, Krishnan says. percent increase in productivity. If “This meant that people doing Ultimatix was about making core internal IT support were freed business processes more efficient, Consolidate your hodge-podge of networks. up to do external IT support for the questions that Infinity would Creating one network out of multiple meshes is customers. Someone who was doing answer were: how are we going to the hardest part. It is important to get everyone on internal support became a revenuemake an increasingly global and board, because the requirements process includes all generating person,” he says. diverse TCS work with each other departments — without them, the network won’t be able Another aspect of Infinity that at the unit and the individual level? to break down entrenched silos. Watch how processes went down well with management How do we get them to collaborate like financial closing, a new metric for companies that was the new VoIP network, one better? How do we make them want to enter the Fortune list, speed up. of India’s largest captive VoIP reach out and create knowledge? networks at the time. It brought One TCS lab in Brazil says it was Create spaces for conversations. Throw in as many to the table telecommunications able to easily connect with a lab in Web 2.0 tools as you can. Giving people the tools they savings and had a clear two-andMumbai, thanks to Infinity. One of use outside their workplace like IM, VoIP and blogs will a-half year payback period, which the key benefits the lab cited was start the content generation that is so necessary for Krishnan says, was achieved. this: using IM got rid of cultural generating new ideas. You’ll need to put in a heavy-duty Then, there was the quantum leap and pronunciation differences network backbone to sustain these tools, but on the plus in the company's videoconferencing that could occur on the phone. side you’ll quickly see telecom and travel bills plunge. capabilities, which made travel and Today, despite the availability of its associated costs, unnecessary. voice, both teams prefer to use IM Open out the conversation. The more, the brighter “We went from less than two because it is clear, unambiguous — where brainstorming is concerned. By including the dozen videoconferencing sites to and instantaneous, Krishnan says. intellectual property of others in academic and research somewhere in the region of 300-400 Some of the stakeholders circles or those in the open source world, an enterprise can sites globally,” points out Krishnan. who were most influenced were open the doors to tomorrow’s treasures. Be sure to take The result: TCS reduced its sales, project delivery and the the lead. — S.S. travel costs by 40 percent and consulting teams, Krishnan telecommunication’s bills by a says. “One consulting team Corporate videos and collaboration in whopping 60 percent. Krishnan in Germany working with general were soft benefits that didn’t says travel bills alone at TCS dropped by counterparts in India sent me an e-mail come packaged with easy ROI. This side a half-percentage point as a proportion of saying that it was almost like being in the of Infinity was sold on a feel-good basis revenue — which is a lot, considering the same room with them,” says Krishnan. propped by success stories like those from company makes over Rs 18,000 crore. Infinity also helped employees make Brazil and Germany. In an interview with There were also softer benefits. Infinity requests for, say, a new PC and check another sister publication of CIO, Computer made TCS-ers feel like they worked for service levels on old requests. It offered a World, which also honored Krishnan with a truly professional and global enterprise. toll-free helpline using a standard sevenan award for his work on Infinity, Krishnan For example, the building management digit VoIP number (VoIP is among Infinity's says “I had to sell this pretty much on my systems of most TCS properties are most valuable contributions) and even a own reputation.” wired into Infinity. chat option with the global helpdesk. The “Employees are authorized to enter all helpdesk, according to Krishnan, takes offices in their home cities. When they visit about 50,000 calls a month. Winning Over the Generals another city, they book their travel and stay An unexpected beneficiary of Infinity’s To be safe, Krishnan also took another tack on the system, which passes that information collaborative offerings was internal to sell the project, one that all managements on to the building management system of the corporate communications, which was able understand well: cost savings. new city. This way, employees are authorized to run a 24-hour internal news broadcast “The good news,” says Krishnan “was to enter those offices for a specific period to all TCS offices in the world. These are that the hard ROI stories were good enough (depending on how long they’ve booked the presented on TV screens and desktops of to cover many [of Infinity’s] investments.” hotel). This adds so much from an employee’s every TCS employee. For example, Infinity gave TCS the ability perspective,” says Krishnan. “Everyone’s desktops change everyday to consolidate its IT infrastructure and IT with a new corporate message. And if Ram support like helpdesks. Before Infinity, TCS or anyone of the leadership team wants to had local support infrastructure in every Technical Challenges reach out with a video message, we can do city — at last count, it had 150 office in 39 Introducing new facilities like that very easily today,” says Krishnan. countries. Infinity consolidated these into a videoconferencing and VoIP, however,

Best Practices

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meant that the TCS network had to be revamped. These were not possible on the company’s legacy network — a mix of leased lines and VPN tunnels, says Krishnan. With the help of AT&T, its global provider, TCS changed to an MPLS circuit in 2006. Krishnan says that the India mesh will be set this year to an MPLS backbone. The international switch to MPLS (all countries except India), he says, was seamless and most TCS employees didn’t notice the change except for better quality of videoconferencing. The architectural challenges lay in ensuring that quality of service was maintained over an MPLS network. This included re-routing of traffic, so that packets didn’t have to make unnecessary double jumps from continent to continent, creating transmission lags. “We had to watch how our network was handling delay and jitters, and so on,” says Krishnan. “We realized, for example, that India to Latin America was a long haul and was originally designed by our provider to go via the U.S. because that’s how their international networks run. That created a double hop which caused visible delays in IP telephony. We measured this delay and found that they were above the limits for an IP call originating in India and going

Before Infinity, each country had its own collaboration networks. “Mail and messaging, for example, were countryspecific systems,” says Krishnan. “These were unified. Infinity consolidated something like 77 different mail domains into one. Five years ago, my business card would have read chennai.co.in or Braziltcs. com. Today, we are tcs.com worldwide.” From a technology standpoint, Krishnan says, it was a great implementation. The single-instance mailing system gave them the ability to hook mail, IM, KM and sign onto a global network. It also gave TCS the chance to consolidate over 100 different mail servers into 11 servers — seven in India and four globally. However, a lot of people didn’t initially take to the collaborative tools that Infinity offered. Some were initially skeptical about replacing face-to-face conversations with videoconferencing. Many were irked when they were asked to explain, in their travel requisitions, why they couldn’t use the videoconferencing facility instead of traveling. And some others felt videoconferencing undermined the status that travel to distant locales brought them. The TCS team knew it was critical to get staffers to use the facilities Infinity introduced because, unlike Ultimatix, some

The Infinity implementation allowed TCS to consolidate 100 mail servers into 11 servers — seven in India and four globally. to Brazil. We had to work through a lot of these challenges on the network side.” There were other challenges like building out 14 different solutions across communication, collaboration, security, travel, building management and other spaces. “Integrating them was a huge, intricate technical challenge,” says Krishnan, describing the effort of a 120-strong core IT team with batches of collaboration pilot users, totaling to about 150 people working over three years. 36

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of the collaboration tools on Infinity like KM weren’t crucial to their day-to-day work. And if staffers weren’t exchanging possibly groundbreaking ideas, it meant that all the money and effort TCS had pumped into Infinity was a waste.

Selling Collaboration Having been through the change management exercise with Ultimatix, the TCS team realized how daunting a task it was to influence behavioral change. They

also knew that the success of Infinity depended completely on its adoption. “We were sure we wanted change to happen through user conviction rather than coercion. Hence, we sought the assistance of graduates from premier business schools to help us ‘market’ the new solutions internally,” says Krishnan, referring to a marketing tactic that got a lot of attention outside TCS. The exercise initially involved over a year of campaigns, put together by a small creative team of IIM students. The campaigns continue even today, two years after Infinity’s launch, to sustain interest. Krishnan is so convinced by the success of the inexpensive tactic — as a percentage of the project total budget, the cost was negligible— that he is deploying it to sell an innovation program called COIN.This is the next stage of the project that will cast the collaboration net beyond the walls of TCS. “I think it is certainly useful to get the soft side of any IT program to be marketed as a change initiative. It is something I would certainly do again,” says Krishnan. But there is also the danger of “overcollaboration” — the focus is so much on collaboration that the actual outcome is put on the back burner. Another possible danger is overwhelming staffers with information. “There are risks, especially with today’s technology, in subscribing to too many RSS feeds or being hooked on to too many social networking sites,” Krishnan says. “But I am confident that individuals will have their own turn-off mechanisms. We don’t have any explicit barriers. I think it is up to the individual to figure it out.” Another area that needed a leadership role was the phased rollout on Infinity of 14 applications pertaining to building management, security, communications, etcetera. “For projects like Infinity, you need to have a vision of the collaborative enterprise with a solid communication backbone and a set of soft and hard ROI goals. Once these are fixed, you divide work into streams of projects,” says Krishnan. “In Infinity, every project from server consolidation to videoconferencing was on a different timeline, and everyone was aware of the vision.” A crystallized and articulate vision, says Krishnan, is critical to keep people

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anchored through an evolving project. In large and complex projects such as Infinity, he adds, and especially those that have ambitious goals but no proven path, it is important to get the vision right very early on. It is then important to allow flexibility in execution, he advises. It was also important in the rollout process, Krishnan says, to listen to customer feedback on different projects in different phases — not just for course correction but to accelerate an application’s deployment when it received positive feedback. “This is what happened with IM. It got user attention and was accelerated, but server consolidation was slower,” says Krishnan.

Collaboration Stage 3 Beyond Infinity & TCS As soon as Infinity found its rhythm, Krishnan’s team moved to the next logical step: extending Infinity to enable collaboration with the outside world. “In the next five years, we will be very open and collaborative and we will reach out to people,” says Krishnan. Some of that work has already started on the Co-Innovation Network (COIN), which was conceptualized in 2005 and launched in early 2007 by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. “COIN, as a framework, is about open innovation,” says Krishnan. The system encourages an organization-to-organization exchange of intellectual property in order to leverage everyone’s IP. A Silicon Valley start-up, Cassatt, created a piece of software that manages applications on a utility computing framework and was trying to sell it. The concept, according to Krishnan, was way ahead of its time. “We invited them into COIN,” he says. COIN promised to connect Cassatt

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What would you seek during network redesign in your enterprise?

A:Today, the emphasis

is on convergence. It also helps us to get better ROI. We typically look at a time horizon of five years.

— Ishwar Jha, senior VP (technology), Zee Telefilms

A:We would look to add

VoIP capabilities. Right now, we have no plans for adding video capabilities. To future-proof ourselves, we usually look at a horizon of 3 years.

— Subramanya C., Global CTo, HTMT

We last moved from DECnet to TCP/IP. We are now debating the benefits of dedicated vs. MPLS networks. We haven’t reached a consensus because needs vary based on security issues and response times. Most of our time horizons are linked to individual projects. Take ticketing, for instance. We want to move from around 700 to 3,500 terminals over the next two to three years.

with a range of other players. TCS also had started work on a similar project and other organizations like Enigmatic and Bladelogic had created complementary software. COIN now brought all of them together. Today, trial runs of Cassatt’s framework are ongoing with a TCS customer, with everyone involved participating. “If it becomes big, and it may not because many of these innovation projects have a risk element, it will be a shining example of what COIN can achieve,” says Krishnan. IP, he adds, stays with each company. TCS does not buy IP or invest in companies creating these IPs. The cost of a product that comes out of COIN is “a sum of the integrated IP values and hopefully delta more,” says Krishnan. “COIN is about making ourselves more successful as a business.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in TCS, others are still refining Ultimatix and Infinity. For example, the building management system in Chennai’s Tidel park has turnstiles that need additional paperwork for employees trying to get in. “We’re not perfect, but we’re getting there,” says Krishnan. The larger challenge of trying to leverage collaboration professionally remains. “The work culture that this generation is bringing into TCS,” says Krishnan, “is very open and collaborative. When we started Ultimatix, there were no blogs or wikis. The Web today is a very different Web from what it was 10 years ago.” Krishnan believes TCS is very “well-positioned to absorb the next generation of Web 2.0 tools, which allow people to create content together. This is a validation of the investments made in Ultimatix and Infinity. If we had tried to go to Web 2.0 from zero, it would have been a much harder jump.” CIO

— S.S. Mathur, general manager-It, Centre for Railway Information Systems senior copy editor sunil shah can be reached at sunil_shah@cio.in

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breaking SOA bottlenecks Those who experiment with SOA on a small scale generally have a smooth ride. But start to scale, and obstacles quickly emerge. Here are the common SOA choke points â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and their antidotes By Galen Gruman

Illustratio n by p c anoop

Enterprises embarking on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) journey need to know where they are going and how to make the right preparations. Fortunately, SOA has been around long enough for top-level best practices to emerge. And, frameworks and maturity models from vendors and consultancies are beginning to crystallize. So are the barriers and bottlenecks that thwart SOA efforts. Some are technical, but most are managerial â&#x20AC;&#x201D; tough issues that will put IT in new, often uncomfortable roles that may test Reader ROI: all participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; faith in whether IT and business are truly aligned. Last year, Mapping process to an AMR Research survey of 1,000 companies revealed that organizational and services management challenges were the reasons both IT and business respondents Organizational changes to cited for not pursuing SOA. better governance The good news is that by understanding these barriers, you can plot a way How to ensure integrity around them. Or at least prepare yourself for the encounter. of data

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Complexities of Managing SOA applications organizations are adopting serviceoriented architecture to ease the integration of applications, map business processes to software It structures and establish interoperability among diverse systems. y yet, for all its promise, soa can also complicate the It environment and disrupt operations it is intended to improve. a number of factors contribute to the complexity of managing soa applications: — the applications typically are multitier, and all of the components and their interactions must be monitored. — soa-based applications often are heterogeneous and cross physicalserver or public-private network boundaries. consequently, they must be monitored across platforms, and the extra hops make failures and performance bottlenecks more likely.

Getting the Concept If you don’t “get it,” you’re not going to get there. If you think that using WS-* standards, licensing an ESB (enterprise service bus), and deploying service registry means you’ve arrived, think again. All of the above may be desirable, depending on what you’re trying to do. But by themselves those piece parts won’t reap the savings or agility that SOA promises. “Maybe 20 percent of IT folks understand SOA and half of the rest think they do,” says Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of SOA Software. If you’re really going down the SOA path, your initial focus is on the basic map of business processes your company uses — and how those processes break down into business functions, both human and technological. Ultimately, SOA represents 4 0 j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7 | REAL CIO WORLD

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— because soa-based applications are relatively new, they often introduce unfamiliar elements to It administrators, and their use in rapidly changing environments means operating manuals, training and support infrastructure must be kept up-to-date. — because soa-based applications abstract underlying implementations, traditional performance testing during development may be insufficient to ensure performance in production. In addition, while the loose coupling of software services in soa environments adds flexibility, it may interfere with visibility and control. It organizations must extend their performance-management practices to meet these more complex, demanding soa environments where performance problems are

the IT view of business processes, while business process optimization and management become the business units’ view. Both center on business-driven enterprise architecture. It’s easy to miss what SOA is really about. For example, SOA is not integration, although it’s easy to see why people think so. XML, the one standard most closely associated with SOA, was originally designed to foster open, message-based alternatives to proprietary integration. But integrating applications is incidental to creating services that map to business functions — the underlying principle of SOA. Integration is a bridge; SOA is a whole new landscape. Likewise, you may have heard that SOA is all about code reuse, but that’s not true, either. “Reuse” is a programming

experienced more quickly and broadly than they are with traditional applications. to work effectively in soa t e n v i ro n m e n t s , application performance management (apM) should take a user perspective toward performance, tracking transactions across tiers and correlating results. they should cover Web servers, applications, application logic, application servers, middleware, network flow, database activity and all storage layers. by simulating real soa transactions to pinpoint problems before they affect users or partner systems, these tools can help ensure that services remain available continuously.

– team t cIo

term that refers to copying existing code and using it again it in different apps. SOA is about shared use. When multiple applications share the same service at runtime, that service provides a single point of control. Shared services are disruptive, increasing dependencies and raising questions about what it means to own a service and who should own it. SOA is an architectural concept not necessarily tied to any specific set of technologies. Think of it as a many-to-many topology: many services and many applications — and that’s pretty much it. Efforts to follow specific “patterns” or “styles” of SOA run the risk of locking you into one vendor’s technology and may ultimately impede agility.

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Hammering Out the Architecture

business and IT, says Thomas Erl, founder of the consultancy SOA Systems. “You’ll get a better-quality blueprint with all those perspectives,” he says. Ian Finley, a director at AMR Research, suggests that — especially in companies where previous architectural attempts resulted in reports no one read — a strategic planning group be created to drive the blueprint effort. Such a group is typically part of executive business management, rather than a bottom-up IT affair. Having and following the enterprise architecture can also avoid a classic mistake: treating SOA as a departmental issue. It is too big to tackle all at once, so it makes sense to implement SOA incrementally once there’s the overall reference architecture to guide you. But, many organizations take this incrementalism too far, starting SOA within a department in hopes of later figuring out how to transition to an enterprise-wide effort. That just leads to a continuation of departmental silos, each with its own SOA, says Neal Ruskin, chief architect at TD Ameritrade. Any departmental SOA effort must be done in the context of the overall enterprise architecture, so that all the incremental pieces actually work together over time. “You need to do endto-end process identification and analysis

first before embarking on any specific project,” agrees Harish Iyers, a senior solution architect at TCS.

Without an architecture, there is no SOA. “Architecture identifies the key components of your business and how they interact with you, to give you the The hands-on work for IT begins during overall structure,” says Hong Zhang, the phase of mapping processes to chief architect at General Motors. With services. This requires understanding that architectural blueprint in place, those processes from a business view, both business and IT can identify, build, requiring a true business-IT partnership. change, and manage services that attend IT can’t just work on requirements thrown to the business’s big-picture needs, not just over the wall; developers must understand those of a specific project. what the actual business goals and benefits Businesses can’t improve unless they are to understand what to deliver. understand what they are doing and There are several dangers in mapping what they want to do. That requires processes to services: defining them understanding the business processes, just for the current project’s needs, which companies often don’t do, instead defining them at the wrong level acting on instinct or autopilot. The of granularity, and building services processes exist, but because no one knows that aren’t needed. them, no one can improve them or develop Developers have to anticipate how the appropriate requirements for software, service (whether created from scratch whether traditional or services-based. or derived from a legacy application) And often, an organization discovers may be used in other processes, that it actually has multiple architectures so the service can be employed in in place, typically developed separately current and future projects. Typically, and within silos, notes John Daly, a vice an architectural team can provide president at the Keane consultancy. guidance here, based on an But, that doesn’t mean enterprises enterprise blueprint against which must spend months or years developing they can predict similar needs elsewhere. a detailed architectural blueprint before Blunders often occur in developing they can take action based on it. An effort services at the proper level of granularity. of several months involving business The more functions a service performs, managers and enterprise for example, the less likely architects can create the it can be used (in its entirety, basic blueprint a company at least) in other processes. needs to begin guiding But, developing services that its SOA effort; you fill in are singletons results in the details as you work on a hoard of services that are hard specific deployments. a Hurwitz & associates survey in october 2006 determined to compose into applications The effort to create the the top drivers for soa adoption. the leading trigger was or that have so much interblueprint also helps make expectation of greater reuse of existing and newly-built process communication that the business case and software. performance is unacceptably get business buy-in, says slow. It takes experience reuse 90 Santosh Mohanty, SOA to figure out the right balance practice director at Tata — to build molecules, not atoms Business flexibility 74 Consultancy Services (TCS). or compounds. ease of integration 70 “When the business value But enterprises should propositions are thought also anticipate that they will Speed of integration 58 through up front, success is end up with multiple levels Compliance 27 greater and more obvious,” of granularity, notes TCS’ he says. In fact, the blueprint Mohanty — the right level no. of respondents: 99. these are It executives of companies, more than should be designed through half of which have revenues in excess of $1 billion a partnership between (continued on page 48)

Scoping Out Services

Top Drivers for SOA Adoption

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(From Page 41) varies from service to service based on what specific functions are likely to be reused. For example, an authentication service may be fairly fine-grained, while a credit-check service may be fairly coarse-grained. Enthusiasm for SOA can lead to efforts to turn everything into services. That just wastes development effort and can complicate later projects. SOA is meant for environments where processes change frequently, so the ability to share a

are likely to have, how they are likely to interact with other services, and what their performance, security, and other requirements are. Only then can you build the right infrastructure for them and know what tools you may need. Yet, Manes estimates that nearly all enterprises adopting SOA start with the tools rather than the underlying business processes. And keep in mind you may already have many of the tools in place, such as a messaging system and a testing suite. “You could use the latest technology, or

data through transformation, scrubbing, and master-record systems. In the past, the effects of inconsistent data models and metadata could be confined to the interfaces between applications, usually through transformation efforts. In SOA, however, individual services that make up a composite application may use data from a variety of sources, so the data integrity problem can no longer be neatly contained. SOA requires an underlying data architecture, so no matter where the data originates, the metadata describing

SOA is for environments where processes change frequently,

so the ability to share a common service and replace it updates multiple processes with

the new approach.

common service and then replace it with a new version quickly updates multiple processes at once with the new approach. But many functions are static or slow to evolve, and play little with anyone in other areas of the organization. Leave them aside and focus on higher-priority tasks.

Timing the Technology Choice SOA is typically championed by technologists. That makes it easy to view SOA as merely a technology for which new tools can be bought — a premise vendors are all too happy to support. “But it doesn’t matter what technology you use to do SOA,” advises Anne Thomas Manes, a Burton Group analyst. After all, a key premise of SOA is that services are designed to work together regardless of the specific technologies they are based on. That’s why it’s a mistake to buy SOA infrastructure, governance, or development tools until you have your enterprise architecture in place, along with the operational architecture —’ that is, the design for how you will actually run your services. From those architectures, you’ll understand how many services you 48

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you could use legacy technology for your services,” says GM’s Zhang. SOA per se does not require new tools, though you may discover that having new tools can make the effort easier. For example, an ESB can consolidate messaging, logging, metrics, application management, and alerting functions into a common engine, simplifying the infrastructure, says Pete Conner, CTO of Primitive Logic. But you may have these functions already in the forms of messaging middleware, XML managers, and EAI systems. And you can’t assume that any specific ESB will do the job you need, as there is no standard definition of what an ESB should do, says Conner. “Often, an ESB is very much an extension of EAI; it’s about integration, not about reuse or contracts,” he warns.

Addressing the Data Problem One of the most unloved parts of IT is ensuring the integrity of data. Data comes from multiple sources —’ disparate applications, outside partners —’ typically with different assumptions about meaning and usage. That has led to difficult, ongoing efforts to rationalize

it is consistent enough to be understood the same way by all services using it. “At runtime, decisions are made by a set of rules that early on master data to be correct, so core data management and master data management is very important,” says Tata’s Mohanty. “SOA magnifies your data issues,” says Ed Vazquez, a vice president at the MomentumSI consultancy. “Before, you could paper those over, but not with SOA. A reusable service means reusable data.” This means different business units must finally agree on standards for things such as customer information, even if no one group uses all of that information, and that IT must focus its data-cleansing efforts on the sources of data rather than just on what makes it into the data warehouse. “That’s why at the same time you are defining the enterprise process model and architecture, you need to identify the entire data and semantic model,” says Tata’s Iyers. If you have a data mess on your hands, however, remember that cleaning it up will be time consuming, and will probably require long, boring meetings that involve the business side as the details of consistent data representation are ironed out.

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Governance, Governance, Governance By its very nature, an SOA encourages services to be shared across organizational boundaries. Among departments or business units, disputes arise over how to build, consume, modify, and retire services, as well as over levels of service availability. SOA breaches the usual departmental silos, so conventional management approaches tend to fall short. Many early adopters are feeling their way through these issues. “Governance is a hard sell and requires organizational change,” says Bobbie Young, CTO of Unisys. She recommends that organizations evaluate their capabilities to manage such change before going down an SOA path and discovering that endemic resistance blocks any real SOA benefit from being realized. In some cases, resistance may be unexpected. For example, although the SOA promise of agility through the composition of reusable services sounds appealing to business execs, it also can threaten some business leaders who place higher value on consistency and predictability. “Often, the CFO and COO like the fact that the system is inflexible because it makes it hard for the little guys to change the processes,” notes AMR analyst Finley. And the planning stage of an SOA can resemble Congress trying to pass a bill, he says. “There’s a huge amount of politics about how to standardize processes. It’s easier to say, ‘This is it.’” Inertia can also be a barrier, notes Keane’s Daly: “With SOA you’re talking about enterprise-wide standards and approaches. But most companies have so much invested in their systems that there’s no incentive to change or share.” Other governance issues center around control of the services that are developed. Typically, the service owner (usually the

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What Enterprise and Users Stand to Gain For many companies, the move to a service-oriented architecture (soa) can yield substantial rewards, including reduced operating costs and better customer service. but those benefits only show up after companies work through thorny problems like obtaining executive buy-in, shifting the way development groups operate and hammering out sometimes contentious new business rules, according to users at the open Group’s Enterprise architecture practitioners conference in san Diego. at Marriott International Inc., for example, soa has been identified as one of the corporation’s three strategic technology platforms, along with business intelligence and commercial off-the-shelf software, said John Whitridge, Marriott’s vice president of enterprise architecture. the bethesda, Md.-based company has tapped soa to help shorten development times and pull more value from legacy systems. “one of the primary benefits of soa is to get our solutions to market faster and anticipate and respond to competitive threats quicker,” Whitridge said. “We’re not taking soa as a rip-and-replace strategy. We’re trying to figure out how to use what we have and enhance it.” to that end, Marriott is working to mitigate some of the challenges a move toward an t soa can bring, he said. last year, the company revived its enterprise architecture group — which had dissolved because it was only staffed with employees dedicated to it part time — to lead the soa effort, Whitridge said. the company’s enterprise architecture team linked the benefits of an soa to Marriott’s corporate strategies of becoming more agile and growing. the group also designed a “maturity model,” essentially a road map that outlines the principles and guidelines for an soa plan and highlights some of the incremental benefits expected along the way. “It is very easy for It people to say, ‘Give me money and you will get benefits,’” Whitridge said. “[but] if you are doing cost avoidance ... how do you show you are 50% cheaper? Make the soa journey be something the business buys into.” – Heather Havenstein

creator) can veto any usage that compromises availability and has disproportionate sway over any proposed modifications to meet others’ needs. An architectural group can usually help resolve these issues, such as by ensuring modifications don’t hurt the owner; it can also separate the modifications into an additional service that works with the original service to deliver the new functionality without affecting the original owner. Although specifics vary from company to company, it’s becoming clear that there needs to be a central entity to establish and maintain policies for building and using services, including monitoring compliance and

resolving disputes. This can be a center of excellence, an architectural review board, a competency center, or a program office. This governing entity is usually composed of both business and IT staff, and it can be fluid in terms of who’s assigned to individual projects based on need and experience, suggests Ettienne Reinecke, CTO of the consultancy Dimension Data. This entity may also set targets and issue rewards and penalties, or leave that to other managers based on the central entity’s findings. How this central entity works depends greatly on the political culture of the enterprise, but it is important that this REAL CIO WORLD | j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7

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body — as well as the architects — have real authority to make decisions and enforce standards, the analysts and consultants we spoke with all agreed. Otherwise, departments will fall back to their old habits and have no penalty for doing so. “SOA needs a benevolent dictatorship. Otherwise it becomes a collection of fiefdoms,” says Keith Siever, CIO of Kemper Auto & Home Insurance, which has adopted the SOA approach. On the other hand, you don’t want a bureaucracy that puts unnecessary barriers in place, either. The sets of policies that underlie governance need to be organic, with a responsive feedback loop inclusive of all parties involved. And make sure policies are less stringent for services or SOA-related activities that are less mission-critical, such as mashups. Applying stringent, overly detailed policies across the board is one way to stifle SOA development — or to ensue that developers and others simply give up trying to follow the rules.

Changing Developer Culture Software developers are problem-solvers, and developing or reworking an application provides an opportunity to wade deep into a problem and solve it with new code. In SOA, development is not about creating new software but composing

software from available services. And when new services are needed, they need to be developed to solve not just the immediate problem, but to anticipate other uses in the future. This is a fundamental shift for developers, who will need training in service-oriented thinking as well as incentives to work in the SOA way. “The more you focus on immediate tactical requirements, the greater the risk is the service won’t work well with other services,” warns consultant Thomas Erl. Risks include inability to scale, service contracts that are too rigid, and inappropriate levels of granularity. Another issue is that services can introduce extra overhead, making performance management a more critical issue than in traditional development, says Kemper CIO Siever. “In SOA, you gain architectural simplicity but pay a performance penalty,” he says. One way to lighten that penalty is to be careful about adopting an ESB (enterprise service bus), which typically adds considerable overhead. “Not everything needs to be on the bus,” he notes — especially services with few interactions. He also suggested avoiding the use of BPEL (business process execution language) engines, which are used to orchestrate services and may also affect performance. Ultimately, however, he expects vendors to overcome performance issues as they redesign their development and runtime tools based on increased SOA

experience. IT will need to create the right frameworks, methodologies, training, and incentives to help developers make the mental shift to SOA, says Steve Rogers, chief architect for North America at the Capgemini consultancy. It often helps to have a centralized IT group so the overall enterprise architectural perspective is maintained from project to project, and so reuse opportunities are easier to identify and take advantage of, he adds. When IT is owned by specific departments, turf wars over services are more common, Rogers says. “It can be job security not to share,” notes Justin McPherson, a managing director at the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. A danger in how SOA is often presented — as rearranging existing services in some sort of assembly-line approach — is that developers may feel their work is less interesting and challenging, creating resistance to the SOA approach, warns Prashanth Ajjampur, chief architect at The Hartford insurance company. In fact, he sees service development as more challenging, akin to playing chess, where you have to think many moves ahead to anticipate the likely moves of your opponent.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-in Although most SOA bottlenecks relate to governance, some are technological. The biggest hazard is a lack of maturity in some standards necessary to create a reliable, available SOA —’ giving vendors the opportunity to lock in customers through the use of proprietary technologies.

In SOA, development is not about creating new software but composing software from available services.New services must be created

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Enterprise Architecture

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A number of Web services standards for integrating and orchestrating communication among services are well established and well understood, such as SOAP, XML, and WS-Security. Even when the standards are in place, however, vendors may implement or interpret things differently. “The vendors all say they’re following the standards, but when you look closely, they have their own versions of those standards,” notes Unisys’s Young. In some cases, that’s an intentional act by a vendor to support its own products, such as IBM’s use of WS-SRR for service registration in its WebSphere middleware, which is not compliant with standard UDDI registries, notes analyst Manes. Although IBM does deliver some registry information in UDDI format for use by other vendors’ tools, IBM’s own tools don’t use UDDI, she notes, in essence making IT maintain two approaches or go with an IBM-only one for simplicity. SAP also promotes its own interfaces, she notes, but not to the exclusion of others and not at the infrastructure level. In other cases, such as policy management and event processing, no mature standards exist, so vendors come up with their own approaches to fill the void. “There’s a danger that proprietary details will find their way into the service architecture, leading to vendor lock-in,” cautions consultant Thomas Erl. Even if IT avoids this problem, it ends up having to integrate the different expressions of its service policies across tools using transformation technology. “That can become a bottleneck,” he warns. One approach is to not embed policies in tools but to treat them as centrally available services, says Momentum SI’s Vazquez, so you avoid a web of point-to-point integrations that is hard to manage. For example, if you store policies centrally in a webMethods or Systinet registry for use at design time, you may make them available to be consumed at runtime by other tools. But such design-time registries don’t publish to a runtime broker like Actional’s, introducing synchronization issues, he notes.

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Erl suggests another approach: using XML to apply a standard set of schemas to data as essentially a runtime transformation service. “But this

S.O.A. ADOPTION

Over 80%

percent in a 2006 survey of 300 companies in wireless, retail, financial, manufacturing, and government said they planned to use SOA. Source: Yankee Group

requires a consistent application of the design standard, both within projects ands across project domains, Erl notes. Ultimately, Vazquez expects these issues to fall away, as vendors mature their technologies and agree on standards. Already, two new standards to help normalize the way servicebased applications are created, SCA (service component architecture) and SDO (service data objects), have broad industry backing and momentum. And Microsoft’s recently released WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) rolls up a stack of Web services protocols in various stages of maturity and should help establish them as de facto, widely adopted standards.

Putting Services to the Test When investigating SOA technology, expect to get pitches for SOA-specific testing tools. Traditional testing involves working with a complete application, but because SOA services can be used in multiple combinations both now and in the future, there is no clear end state to test against. “And there are more hidden dependencies in SOA,” says analyst Manes. That’s why testing needs to be handled differently. For example,

TD Ameritrade’s Neal Ruskin advises testing results and inputs one level upstream and one level downstream in the process stream where the service is expected to live. And because services typically interact with each other directly, rather than surfacing in some GUI like a conventional application, testing must be done at a different level. “You can’t have a bunch of people running the application on their screens,” observes Ruskin. Instead, you need to develop test cases that you run each time you change the service or compose an application with it. “You need to change test processes from ‘build and then test’ to ‘build and test continually,’” Ruskin says. This means that services must be designed to take responsibility for themselves, to check the inputs and outputs at runtime to identify potential errors and avoid propagating them through a process. But this does not require SOA-specific tools, notes Unisys’s Young. “If you have traceability, I’m not sure how it’s different from component architecture testing,” she says. But because most companies don’t actually test in this structured way, they may not have the right testing tools in place, whether they are developing for SOA or traditional architectures, Ruskin notes. The complexity of service monitoring and change management can seem a little overwhelming as your SOA scales. But remember: as long as the service interfaces remain unchanged, you should be able to fix or improve services without breaking anything. That, after all, is part of the beauty of SOA. CIO

Send your feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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network infrastructure special

VoIP

the good, bad & ugly

Gold's Gym, with 660 outlets in 26 countries, is sold on the idea of VoIP. But it has advice on how not to implement it and what to watch out for. Facing frequent outages in the DSL lines serving 50-plus corporateowned Gold’s gyms, Bobby Badugu knew it was time for a significant network upgrade. After conducting due diligence into the various options — including satellite, frame relay and a different DSL provider — he opted for a carrier-provided voice-over-IP (VoIP) service. That’s when the trouble began. In the following months, the VP of IT for Gold’s Gym learned valuable lessons 52

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about not only VoIP, but any major network project that involves upgrades to numerous, far-flung sites. The lessons include using a phased implementation process; establishing clear service-level agreements (SLA), including penalties; and conducting a thorough technology assessment to identify potential problems. When the rollout began in June 2006, it was scheduled to take eight weeks. As of mid-November, the data portion of the rollout was complete, but only about 20

percent of the voice lines have been ported to the VoIP network. Badugu remains bullish on VoIP, and expects benefits including a 35 to 40 percent savings in voice and data service costs, and already is saving Rs 2.4 lakh to Rs 4 lakh on his conference calling. But if he had to do it again, he’d do a few things differently.

Requirements Gold’s Gym started in 1965 with a single facility. Through a series of licensing deals

Illustratio n by p c anoop

By Paul Desmond

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network infrastructure

VoIP

special

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each location, we found more and more complexities in that process,” Badugu said. “We had six or seven parties involved. I really felt like some were pretty much learning the technology or learning the equipment.” Badugu also admits to shortcomings on his company’s part. “We didn’t know our environment,” he said. That included the types of phone systems installed in each location and whether they could connect to the T1 line. Even though he had been installing digital, IP-ready phone systems in all gyms, some didn’t have the required T1 card, which meant an additional expense, and others were still analog. Locating all the wiring closets was another challenge. For these reasons, Badugu decided to focus on bringing up the data side first and voice later. As a result, the eight-week implementation window passed and the company didn’t have all its T1s installed.

Voice Challenges The decision to delay voice proved prescient, as that side of the equation presented

VoIp adoption

Just over 50% of 132 companies in a 2006 Cutter Consortium survey said they were considering, or are in the process of deploying, VoIP technology. Source: World Bank

numerous challenges. Chief among them was porting existing phone numbers to the Qwest VoIP service. Gold’s Gym gave Qwest all its working telephone numbers and billing numbers to begin the porting process from various incumbent LECs. “Of the first five numbers we submitted, four failed,” he said, because the billing telephone numbers that Gold’s Gym had were different from those the LECs had. “Porting became a nightmare,” Badugu said. In some instances, he tried to forward calls from the old phone system to the new one. But that often was confusing for callers

who heard the phone ring once and then heard a short delay before it rang again. If two calls came in at the same time, the second would reach a busy signal. Now he is porting the main number for each gym, then assigning new numbers for each extension, which typically aren’t called directly. Badugu has a schedule from his LECs for when each number is supposed to be ported, and then he coordinates with phone technicians to ensure the new system is up and running properly. He is hoping to have all the numbers ported by year-end. Despite the challenging implementation, Badugu began realizing a savings of 20 percent on long distance once he got the T1s installed and switched all long-distance service to Qwest. Additionally, conference calls now are carried over the Qwest network, obviating the need for a third-party provider and saving at least Rs 2.4 lakh a month. As each gym is brought onto the VoIP network, he gets closer to his projected savings of 25 to to 30 percent on local calling costs. But if he had to do it over he would take a more phased approach. “We tried doing everything at once,” he said. That decision was driven by business needs, because the DSL network was so unreliable and because Qwest was urging Gold’s to sign a contract that included every gym. “I still think we should’ve done two or three gyms first and ensured these were OK.” He also advises mapping out details about the steps required to install any new technology and who is responsible for each step, along with contacts and escalation procedures, should things go awry: “If something fails, you have somewhere to go to keep the process moving.” Another must is technology assessment to identify items like phone systems that were analog or lacked T1 cards. “A site survey would’ve been good, with a detailed analysis of the phone systems, the phone numbers, how the hunt groups work, how the phone systems are configured, the number of workstations,” Badugu said. “For each location, if we had that upfront, it would’ve made life easier for everybody involved.” CIO All contents copyright 1995-2007 Network World. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Illustration by ANIL T

and M&As, the company grew to 660 gyms in 26 countries. Of the 550 US Gold’s gyms, most are franchises; about 50 are corporateowned. Badugu is responsible for providing network services to the corporate-owned gyms. Network services are particularly crucial to the gyms because they rely on a central server for everything from member data to the retail point-of-sale system. Badugu targeted satellite when he embarked on the upgrade project in February 2006, but he quickly learned that it wouldn’t provide enough bandwidth. He also wasn’t impressed with the available frame relay offerings, which he considered older and less flexible, and didn’t feel comfortable with a DSL service from a different provider. Then Badugu recalled a Qwest MPLS project from his consulting days. He called inquire about VPN service. “That’s where we started,” he said. “From there the proposal evolved to address a lot of our phone needs. That’s when the VoIP solution was proposed.” Once voice was on the table, Badugu called AT&T and Sprint to see what they had to offer. But their proposals were too voice-centric and didn’t have a strong strategy for combining voice and data, so Qwest won the day. The big driver for upgrading the voice network was reducing costs for local, longdistance and conference calling. “As we add gyms, those costs became astronomical,” Badugu said. At the same time, with its lean IT staff, the company struggled to manage the lines and ensure each was properly used. “We didn’t have the staff to monitor it every month and make sure we’re doing the right thing,” he said. He also didn’t have the staff or the desire to build a VoIP network. The plan was to install a T1 line to each gym and implement voice and data service when the circuits were installed. Badugu figured scheduling the T1s from various local exchange carriers (LEC) would be the most complicated issue. As it turned out, that was simple. But the Qwest subcontractors complicated matters. At each gym, one contractor would order, configure and install a router. Another configured and installed the firewall and hooked up the VPN tunnel. “As we did

network infrastructure special

Feature - 02 - Wireless Networks54 54

7/3/2007 1:04:17 PM

network infrastructure

Wireless

special

wireless networks:

burning questions Wireless networks might be mainstream, but that doesn’t mean they’re no-brainers. We’ve raised and attempted to answer some of the thornier questions you might still be dealing with. By John Cox

We’ve identified three, but we’ll treat one of them (denial of service) The other two threats are emblematic of two different human dynamics: one springs from the increasing cunning of attackers, the other from the continuing ignorance of users and even IT professionals about the nature of wireless threats. In 2006, researchers identified problems with wireless interface device drivers that could be exploited in various ways by attackers. Drivers function at the level of the operating system kernel, where malicious code potentially has access to all parts of the system. Typically, these driver vulnerabilities involve manipulating the lengths of specific pieces of information contained in the wireless management frames, causing a buffer overflow where a malicious payload can be executed, according to Andrew Lockhart, security analyst with Network Chemistry. “A driver will process these data elements whether or not [the adapter is] associated with an access point. So the combination of simply having a powered-on wireless card with a vulnerable driver can leave a user open to attack,” he says.

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Illustration by ANIL T

Illust ration by UNNIKRIS HNAN AV

What’s the biggest looming wireless/mobile security threat?

Wireless

network infrastructure special

The obvious solution is to replace the vulnerable drivers. But that is an ad hoc process. “In the Windows world, most wireless drivers are part of a third-party software package, so they don’t get updated with a Windows update, which makes it troublesome to eliminate the problem. It will likely be a problem for a while,” he says. Attackers are becoming smarter about what and how they attack, increasingly using evasion tactics to sidestep or confuse wireless intrusion detection/prevention applications (IDS/IPS). The long-term solution is smarter IDS/IPS systems that can more comprehensively monitor and analyze wireless traffic and behaviors. But researchers, such as those at Dartmouth College’s Project MAP (for measure, analyze and protect) are only in the early stages of such work. The second wireless threat is related to the fact that many mobile users seem to be not getting smarter about wireless security. “The biggest threat is people who use open Wi-Fi access points and don’t use encryption or VPNs,” says David Kotz, Dartmouth professor of computer science and one of the lead Project MAP researchers. “They trust some random hot spot operator or open access point somewhere with their personal or professional data. People are careless.” That’s putting it diplomatically. Security consultant Winn Schwartau likes to tell how his then-12-year-old son used a Windows-based Palm Treo to wirelessly eavesdrop on business executives using laptops or PDAs on an airport or other public Wi-Fi net. He routinely collected username/ password combinations to corporate nets. “My son had passwords to 40 of the Fortune 100 [nets],” he says. The key vulnerability was these users, even if they used an encrypted VPN tunnel to access the corporate net, repeatedly used an unencrypted wireless link to access Internet mail or other Web sites in the clear, allowing the younger Schwartau to collect information to access the user’s Web mail account. He then used it to send the user an e-mail from his own account. “I can then infect that machine, and have access to your VPN account,” Schwartau says. The inverse of this problem is allowing personal mobile devices, which have been 56

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exposed to the Internet in the wild, to connect to corporate nets. “Normal security standards and procedures are often ignored when users are allowed to connect their own devices,” says Lora Mellies, information security officer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “For instance, there may be no scheme to regularly back up the information, no firewall or anti-virus protection installed, and no use of encryption for confidentiality or [of] tokens/certificates for strong authentication.” “No one can define the perimeter [of the corporate net] anymore,” says Schwartau.

Wireless skills

30%

of respondents to CIO’s 2007 State of the CIO survey said that networking was one of the

top 5 skill sets

they needed the most from new hires during the current year. Source: World Bank

“The rule is: ‘Thou shalt connect nowhere except to the corporate network; once you’re there, you can do whatever you want, but we’ll be watching you.’”

What can I do to stop wireless denial-of-service attacks? Not much. There are two kinds of DoS attacks emerging. One uses radio waves to jam a wireless LAN (WLAN) access point or network access card. The other, more sophisticated, manipulates the 802.11n protocols to accomplish the same thing — blocking a radio from sending or receiving. A good example of jamming, though it’s unintentional, is caused by the microwave trucks used by TV stations covering the Boston Red Sox home games. In some cases, the tightly focused beams are not a problem for the baseball park’s unlicensed band

802.11 WLAN because they’re aimed away from the park to one of several towers. But in one case, the beam shot across the park, bounced off a bank of newly installed metal bleachers, and reflected back into the park, wiping out the WLAN. Red Sox IT Director Steve Conley says he could stand right next to a WLAN access point with a wireless notebook and still not be able to connect to it. Few homemade or commercial jammers come with the power of these commercial microwave systems. But for short distances, they don’t need a lot. Products available include pocket-sized jammer that can disrupt three frequencies up to 90 feet. It’s advertised as a way to disable spy cameras running on wireless links. Another palmsized model with a range of about 30 feet costs about Rs 11,600. “Interference is definitely an issue,” says Farpoint Group’s Craig Mathias. “We were able to construct some bad interference scenarios and show their impact. It was quite interesting to see how much damage could be done.” Currently, there’s no real countermeasure for a deliberate, focused jamming attack, except to quickly detect it, with a tool like Cognio Spectrum Analyzer. Once it’s located, you can use “crowbar remediation, to beat the crap out of it,” says Mathias. Less amenable to crowbars is the second type of DoS attack, the abuse of the 802.11 media access control (MAC) layer protocols by creating changes in drivers or firmware. “It causes the network card to misbehave with respect to the MAC protocols,” says David Kotz, professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. “Because the card isn’t being ‘fair’ in following the rules, it makes the net unusable to others.” One example would be to send deauthentication frames to a specific client, or broadcast them to all the clients, of a given access point. Obediently, the clients will disconnect from the access point. “Now most of them re-authenticate right away,” Kotz says. “But if the attack repeats, you’re getting these interruptions on your [Wi-Fi] phone or video stream.” For now, the response is the same as for jamming attacks: detect the problem as quickly as possible, find the offender as

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network infrastructure

Wireless

special

existing operations’ or ‘how can I provide new opportunities to grow revenue,’” says Bob Egan, chief analyst with TowerGroup, a consulting company. “These questions force you into thinking in a strategic mode versus an ad hoc mode.” In a 2006 TechRepublic survey, 370 US IT and business professionals said they were targeting the following applications for mobilization (respondents could pick more than one answer): intranet access (chosen by 23 percent), field service/data entry/data collection (21 percent), personal information management (19 percent), customer relationship management or sales force automation (16 percent), supply chain

quickly as possible, and send in “police with guns,” says Kotz. “But fundamentally, the long-term solution is to fix the protocol itself,” he says.

Will my company need to change to support enterprise mobility? Yes. A growing number of companies are moving beyond or even ignoring mobile email in favor of mobilizing line-of-business applications. “When you start rolling out these applications over a wider expanse, the questions become ‘how can I lower costs of

Network Attacks Foiled in the Past 12 Months How many attacks, including (but not limited to) viruses, hacks, t trojan horses and worms, against your company’s enterprise network defenses were attempted but foiled in the past 12 months? Mean number of network attacks foiled in the past 12 months = 331

16%

10%

More than 1,000

101-1,000

11%

17%

11-50

1-10

51-100

40%

None/ Don't know

note: based on 430 qualified respondents

Successful Network Attacks in the Past 12 Months Mean number of network attacks in the past 12 months = 39

24%

64%

More than 1,000 11-50

101-1,000 1-10

51-100 None/ Don't know

note: based ased on 430 qualified respondents; percentages do not add up to 100 due to rounding off.

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management (12 percent), and ERP (nearly 10 percent). The justification for making these applications mobile is increased worker productivity and efficiency, which was cited as ‘extremely significant’ by 35 percent of the same respondents. The two other top justifications (‘extremely significant’) were reduced costs, cited by nearly 30 percent, and improved data collection and accuracy, cited by 28 percent. In all three cases, larger percentages cited these justifications as ‘significant’. Successfully exploiting such applications and achieving these goals requires changes in such diverse areas as employee and manager responsibilities and accountability, network access and authentication, mobile device management, end user and wireless networking tech support, and security and data-protection policies and enforcement. “If you don’t actively manage [mobile] workforce issues, including human resources and psychological issues as well as technology, you don’t get the full value,” says John Girard, VP, Gartner. “In the end, the most important parts are the human parts: how do you monitor work, how do you assign responsibility, and do you understand what your team is doing?” For this, Gartner recommends consolidating an array of mobile provisioning, management and security functions (such as vulnerability assessment, security configuration, standard software image control, security and performance monitoring), shifting routine functions from the security group to the operations group, and forging joint policy development between those groups. One goal is to minimize the number of individual software products that target subsets of mobility issues but can’t share information and aren’t part of a strategic mobility plan.

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network infrastructure

Wireless

special

In an October 2006 report, the Venture Development Corp. estimated that the failure rates of some consumergrade mobile devices can exceed

20 percent per month.

“If you have different policies for different platforms [desktops, notebooks, smartphones], how do you maintain consistency?” Girard asks. “Most companies have a software distribution plan that works well for the desktop but less well for notebooks, and even less well for smartphones.” Or a well-developed method for backing up desktop PCs may ignore mobile devices completely, despite the growing amount of corporate data on them and the greater likelihood of loss, theft or hacks. “[Organizational changes] are all about controlling the flow of the company’s intellectual property — how to provision and protect the data on the net and on the devices — and all the responsibilities that go along with that,” says TowerGroup’s Bob Egan. Mobility becomes a system, or a system of systems that has to be viewed and treated as a whole. “With more and more users being mobile every day, we are paying a lot of attention not only to the uptime but also to the health of the system,” says Daver Malik, telecom engineer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “Careful watch on the system usage, capacity and trends is kept so as to prevent any undue disruption to the users.” One related aspect in preventing undue user disruption is tech support and the enterprise help desk. “Very few companies do a good job in supporting mobile workers,” says Jack Gold, principal of J. Gold Associates. “Their support infrastructure today is for desktop support: You can’t send a technician into the field to fix a [mobile] problem.” The tech support team needs new training, new

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tools, new policies and procedures to be able to effectively and quickly respond to mobility problems. An emerging alternative is to outsource some or all of these tasks to a new breed of managed services supplier. One example is Movero Technology, which handles all aspects of cellular-based device and application deployments for an enterprise.

How do I control costs in an expanding mobile and wireless environment? There are lots of costs in mobility: wireless and wired infrastructures; cellular voice and data plans, including roaming charges; the usage patterns of those plans; mobile device purchases; applications; software for device management; training; tech support. “Viewing this from a strategic perspective means these costs become more visible,” says TowerGroup’s Egan. A strategic mobility plan for the enterprise uncovers, identifies and quantifies the true costs of the typical piecemeal approach to enterprise mobility, and creates the possibility for systematically controlling and minimizing them, he says. This can be a shock to organizations that have handled mobility in an ad hoc way, Egan says. “Viewed from a strategic viewpoint, costs become more visible, so it seems like they’re much greater,” he says. A strategic plan can also make more visible the potential benefits of mobility, in terms of saving money or increasing revenues, an essential element in evaluating the needed investments. Egan says one of his biggest surprises was talking with auto rental giant Avis,

which was one of the first to have employees equipped with wireless handhelds, to meet customers in the parking lot as they returned their automobiles. The real benefit of the system was that it let Avis make an instant, on-the-spot decision about whether to keep the car for servicing, which costs money, or send it to auction. It was about where not to spend Avis’ cash. With a strategic plan, centralized and standardized device and software purchases are possible, a key element in rationalizing and reducing mobility costs. At the same time, changes in network infrastructure and in business processes can be budgeted and planned for. A mobile deployment can be frustrating and investments wasted if, say, an increase in data or transactions overwhelms back-end systems. “Utilize your fixed infrastructure to its maximum potential to support the expanding wireless/mobile environment,” says Malik of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. “A carefully developed plan for the fixed portion of the network (for example fiber) that is capable of supporting future expansions both in terms of size and technology is the key component of controlling the cost related to such expansions, as and when they happen.” Acquisition costs have to be managed for mobility just as they are for corporate desktops. “It’s very important to know the costs and ownership implications of everything you buy [for a mobile deployment],” says Gartner’s Girard. “Figure out what platforms you’re willing to support, and provide business groups and users the incentives for adopting those.” REAL CIO WORLD | j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7

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Wireless

network infrastructure special

Girard recommends a thorough inventory of the relevant tools, systems and services you already have, including software licenses. “Where have you already spent money?” he says. “Then, simplify. Ask yourself, ‘How do I reach fewer products, both to reduce complexity and reduce costs?’” A hidden element in cost calculations, according to Venture Development Corp. (VDC), is the impact of downtime and tech support if the mobile device, or some other part of the mobile system, fails. In an October 2006 report, VDC estimated that the failure rates of some consumer-grade mobile devices can exceed 20 percent per month. “In fact, the overall cost of downtime/lost productivity can represent up to 30 percent of the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a mobile device,” according to the report. VDC says device vendors are introducing new features and technologies to boost the durability and ruggedness of laptops and other handhelds. This includes the semi-rugged laptops, which can endure more rough handling than their consumergrade cousins, even though they can’t match military-grade devices. The higher initial capital cost for such devices is worth it, because the company avoids the much higher costs of downtime due to equipment failures. A strategic plan makes it possible to negotiate more aggressively with wireless carriers, refining cellular data plans tuned for various groups of users, minimizing overage charges in terms of rates and shared minutes or megabytes, and keeping international roaming charges in check, says consultant Jack Gold.

How will 802.11n highthroughput wireless LANs affect the corporate net? A surprising number of wireless LAN vendors have recently announced enterprise access points based on the draft IEEE 802.11n standard, promising throughput of 100M to 200Mbps per frequency band, or from three to six times that of today’s 11g and 11a nets. Whether network managers opt for the draft 11n products (certified interoperable 60

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What's important?

Number 2

on a CIO's priority list are network firewalls, according to the Global State of Information Security 2006. Network firewalls were fifth on the priority list in 2005 Source: World Bank

by the Wi-Fi Alliance) or wait for the final IEEE ratification in late 2008 or early 2009, they could face any of these four issues: overloading part of the wired infrastructure; overloading existing, older wireless LAN switches; forcing an upgrade to higher-powered Power-over-Ethernet; and repositioning and rewiring some number of existing wireless access points. Most of the new access points will come with one or even two Gigabit Ethernet ports. “We’re mostly ‘100 meg’ to our buildings,” says Michael Dickson, network analyst at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “[For 11n,], we’ll need gigabit switches in the closet with 10-gigabit uplinks. That’s a definite cost, almost a necessary cost for 11n.” “11n adds an incentive to go to ‘gigE’ [in the wired infrastructure],” says Craig Mathias, principal with Farpoint Group. One related issue with upgrading a cable plant, given the capacity of 11n, is whether to upgrade the Ethernet wall jacks, a decision about whether the wireless infrastructure becomes the principal means of network access. If existing wireless LAN controllers also lack the net capacity, and the needed processing power and memory to handle the increased traffic, they’ll have to be replaced, especially if the vendor has a purely centralized architecture with every packet running from each access point to the controller. Vendors have been upgrading their controllers over the past year with 11n in mind, sometimes also offloading the packet switching functions to the access

points, creating a distributed data plane. “With this kind of distributed data plane, there’s no bottleneck at the controller,” says Mathias. Benchmarking wireless performance to verify such things as workloads and traffic conditions is likely to become much more important for 11n nets. To do this, enterprises or systems integrators will use complex performance-testing tools, such as those from VeriWave and Azimuth Systems, which previously had been used mainly by radio chip makers and equipment manufacturers. “This will be a big thing down the road,” Mathias predicts. The Power over Ethernet (PoE) issue may catch some users by surprise. “The PoE infrastructure may have its upper limits tested by 11n deployments [that are] used to their maximum capabilities,” says Chris Silva, analyst at Forrester Research. PoE lets you run just one cable between switch and access point, instead of two, potentially a big cost saving. But the 11n access points draw more electricity than the 15.4 watts maximum provided by power injectors based on the IEEE 802.3af standard. That will at least double with a new standard, 802.3at, now being finalized. At least one vendor, Trapeze, has created new code that can let its just-announced 11n access point make use of existing PoE injectors, but there are tradeoffs in terms of performance. “The promise of 11n is more than simply going faster,” says Phil Belanger, managing director for Novarum. “The increased range of 11n will make it more practical to deploy large systems using the 5-GHz band, which has many more channels than the 2.4-GHz and has not been used very much to date. That, in turn, will enable much higher capacity wireless LANs. For many enterprises, a wireless network that delivers hundreds of megabits of capacity everywhere will be good enough to be the only network.” CIO

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Feature - 04- Why Green Is Bette62 62

7/3/2007 1:06:01 PM

network infrastructure

Data Centers

special

clean,

green machines When VistaPrint revamped its data centers to contain rising energy costs, the company helped the planet along with its bottom line. By Stephanie Overby

Il lustrat io n by MM SHANITH

Last summer, when Wendy Cebula was shopping for a new vehicle, energy efficiency and lower

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emissions topped her list of requirements, along with four-wheel drive (her family lives on a hill). Cebula, then CIO at VistaPrint, a Rs 608 crore online supplier of custom print services, eventually chose a hybrid model instead of the traditional SUV. Even though she didn’t think the incremental savings on gas would make up for the higher sticker price, she says “it was the right thing to do as a human being.” But as a corporate executive, Cebula, now VistaPrint’s COO, can’t lead with her heart. The right thing to do is whatever enables the business to grow. Those decisions come down to dollars and sense, not what’s best for the planet. But every now and then, the two converge. In late 2005, Cebula noticed her data center’s costs were growing. The company, Reader ROI: whose operations are almost completely automated, was adding 1 lakh customers How green data centers a month — and growing at nearly 60 percent a year. There was no sign that the save money demand for data needed to serve those customers would stabilize. When Cebula and Ways IT investment Aaron Branham, VistaPrint’s VP of technology and operations, dug into data center decisions affect the operations in detail, they discovered that energy costs were rising significantly. environment If there were some way to lower power costs or increase energy efficiency, they Strategies for reducing power consumption could cut expenses. To Cebula, an avid recycler who tries to impart environmental REAL CIO WORLD | j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7 6 3

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awareness to her kids, doing so would be a double win. She could do “what’s good for the environment and what’s good for the bottom line,” she explains. Until recently, the environmental impact of the data center was largely ignored. Today, energy experts estimate that data centers gobble up somewhere between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all electricity generated in the United States. At the top of the range, that’s about the amount of electricity it takes to power the entire state of Michigan for a year. Market research company IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher) estimates that companies spent Rs 104,400 crore to power and cool servers worldwide in 2005. That’s more than was spent to power all the commercial buildings in 17 states — from Delaware to Florida and west to Texas, according to the Department of Energy’s most recent energy consumption survey. And that’s not all. According to the Uptime Institute, a consortium of companies devoted to maximizing efficiency and uptime in the data center, more than 60 percent of

the power used to cool equipment in the data center is completely wasted. In fact, notes a recent study by the group, energy costs have replaced real estate as the primary data center expense. “Data centers that used to cost Rs 40 crore now cost Rs 400 crore,” says Jonathan Koomey, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “That kind of expenditure gets C-level attention.” It’s garnered government interest too. A federal law enacted in December compels the US Environmental Protection Agency to examine power consumption in data centers, evaluate what technology manufacturers are doing to increase energy efficiency and determine what incentives could convince companies to adopt more energy-efficient technology. The European Union is studying the level of carbon emissions from computer equipment. Down the road, local and federal governments in the United States and abroad may end up penalizing organizations that operate inefficient data centers, according to Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research VP. The combination of financial, environmental and legislative pressure will

Aaron Barnham, VistaPrint's VP of technology and operations, and COO Wendy Cebula used virtualization to cut data center energy costs.

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force IT organizations to develop greener data centers, says Kumar. By 2011, Gartner predicts, a quarter of new data centers will be designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum negative environmental impact. But what that means may vary by organization. “There’s no generally accepted, standardized way to build a green data center,” says Kumar. At VistaPrint, becoming green has proven easier than Cebula thought. The company bought more energy-efficient servers and improved utilization in its primary data center in Bermuda, steps that have reduced energy usage by 75 percent. As a result, the company expects to save nearly half a million dollars over three years and estimates it will reduce its output of carbon dioxide emissions by several hundred tons in this year alone. That’s equivalent to taking more than 100 cars off the road for a year. VistaPrint also decided to locate a new data center in Canada, where hydroelectric power — a renewable energy source — keeps power costs stable and has potential to lower VistaPrint’s electricity bills by another 70 percent. “We were able to reduce our footprint at a time when it was very important to us financially,” says Cebula. “And it’s much more green.”

High-Density Power Surge Back in 2000, when VistaPrint founder and CEO Robert Keane moved company headquarters from Paris to Waltham, Massachusetts, the fledgling operation was bringing in just over Rs 24 crore in annual sales (the company makes business cards and other printed products to order). During the next five years, the company (which is officially based in Bermuda) saw its revenue explode. VistaPrint outgrew its 7,000 square feet of suburban Boston office space and moved a few miles north to a Lexington, Massachusetts, location eight times larger. During those years, the company focused on automating and optimizing the product design and manufacturing process at its Venlo, Netherlands, plant. The only concern when purchasing equipment — whether for the company’s main Bermuda data center (which runs VistaPrint’s website and

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transaction systems and is hosted by Cable & Wireless) or for the one in Lexington (which supports internal systems and IT production) — was that the equipment work. As a result, VistaPrint procured a hodgepodge of servers: back-end systems, front-end systems and databases each ran on different gear, says Cebula. By 2004, VistaPrint got caught up in the blade craze, purchasing machines from IBM. In the fall of 2005, shortly before Cebula became CIO, VistaPrint’s then-COO, Alex Schowtka, hired Branham as director of IT operations. Branham thought blades were a mistake. The problem was the total power pull. “Blade servers look great on paper,” Branham says, “but you start piling them into a rack and suddenly you’re out of power, you’re out of AC.” VistaPrint wasn’t the only company that was getting burned by its decision to buy high-density equipment. With quality data center space priced at a premium, companies sought out more compact gear, and vendors obliged. “The focus was to get as much computer power in as small a package,” explains Gartner’s Kumar. “Energy was not part of the design mentality.” But blade servers need more power than less-dense hardware. A full rack of highdensity servers requires 20 to 30 kilowatts of electricity, while traditional data centers are designed to provide 2 to 3 kilowatts per rack. Meanwhile, according to the Uptime Institute, using high-density equipment triples or quadruples facility cooling costs. Energy prices have risen as well. CIOs who assumed that data center costs would decline as servers got cheaper and more powerful received a rude awakening. In what Kenneth Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, calls “the meltdown of Moore’s Law,” the energy required to power and cool Rs 40,000 worth of server equipment has skyrocketed from 8 watts in 2000 to 109 watts today — eroding some of the benefits of powerful chips. In the best-case scenario, says Brill, within five years it could take 157 watts to run Rs 40,000 worth of hardware; in the worst case, 1,650 watts. In fact, the blade server’s selling point — its size — has become irrelevant for some customers. Data center operators find themselves using only two servers in a rack 66

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designed for 10; packing any more than two money on servers without a solid business in a rack makes them too hard to cool. case. So Branham ran the numbers, focusing That was VistaPrint’s quandary. It was on power expenditures. the first Cable & Wireless customer in the Calculating the total energy consumption Bermuda data center to install blades. And of a server isn’t straightforward. How much the outsourcer was none too thrilled. Cable power a server consumes depends on how & Wireless wanted to limit VistaPrint to one you use it. “It’s not something that our blade server per rack. VistaPrint got them vendors talk about a lot,” says Cebula. The to agree to two servers per rack, but talk vendors were, nevertheless, able to provide started of an energy surcharge. For years, most outsourcers charged for data center space based on square footage, which did not take into account electricity Deploy virtual machines. Virtual servers save energy by costs. As a result, says enabling greater utilization of CPu capacity. Lawrence Berkeley’s Ko o m e y, the Use cleaner power. Factor the source of electricity outsourcers created into decisions to site new data centers. For example, a perverse incentive. hydroelectric power generates fewer emissions — and “If you charge by the costs less — than power plants run on fossil fuels. square foot, of course the customers want Buy energy-efficient equipment. Consider, for fully packed racks,” example, how much power a server will consume when Koomey says. you calculate the total cost of ownership. Vendors may not offer this information in their marketing materials, but you can ask them for it.

3 Tips for a

Cleaner Data Center

A Virtual Solution

For Branham, joining VistaPrint in September 2005 was like “a trip back in time.” He had spent the eight previous years at Monster.com and had seen data center operations expand from one server to 1,000. He had spent the past year working on server virtualization. But Branham saw bigger challenges at VistaPrint. “From afar it looks like a print company. But once you get inside, it’s really a technology company,” Branham says, noting that everything from sales to manufacturing to shipping is run largely on custom-built software. “At Monster,” says Branham, “we weren’t anywhere near this data-focused.” Like Monster in earlier days, VistaPrint wasn’t making the most efficient use of its data center. “They picked technologies that were right at the time, not right for where they were going.” Branham knew that virtualization would reduce power consumption. But Cebula knew that she wouldn’t convince anyone to spend more

data when asked. Using that information, Branham made the case for a greener data center crystal clear. Branham calculated that if VistaPrint continued to use blades, this solution (four racks housing eight IBM blade servers) would eat up approximately 32,000 watts (4,000 per server) and require 9.1 tons of air conditioning to cool. He estimated that the alternative, using eight HP Proliant DL 585 rack-mounted servers and 110 VMware instances, would require 5,500 watts (50 watts per virtual machine) and just 1.6 tons of AC. In addition, virtualization would enable VistaPrint to make better use of its CPU capacity. As is the case in many companies, VistaPrint was wasting additional energy by using only 20 percent of its server capacity. In a 24-hour period, the typical x86 server is used to only 5 percent or 10 percent of its capacity, says Gartner’s Kumar, while energy consumption in idle mode is 60 percent to

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80 percent of the energy consumed in use. But the development team was concerned about stability and performance in a virtual environment. A year earlier, the IT group had attempted virtualization on the blades. Running VMware on the high-density hardware had been a bust. Memory limitations on the blades limited performance and the number of instances that could be run on each server. So when Branham used the “V”-word again, the development group got nervous. Branham won them over with a pilot project that proved the performance case. Swapping in the new servers in the Bermuda data center would mean eating the investment VistaPrint had made in the blades. But Cebula and the executive management team couldn’t argue with the ROI. Over three years, the greener solution would save VistaPrint Rs 180 lakh — more than the cost of the hardware refresh.

Cleaner, Cheaper Electricity By the fall of 2006, competition over parking in VistaPrint’s Lexington lot led its leaders to conclude it was time to move again, to a bigger space across the street. As part of its earlier move in the summer of 2004, the company had inherited a

data center in the basement of its existing building. The “free data center,” as Branham calls it, housed 18 racks of equipment by the time he arrived. Most of the gear was used for internal IT and development. They’d probably want to move that operation across the street with them. Or would they? The rework of the data center in Bermuda got Cebula and Branham thinking. If they could cut energy costs by making different gear choices, was there anything to be gained by moving the bulk of the Lexington data center elsewhere? While researching the Bermuda data center revamp, Cebula had learned that the power market in Massachusetts was perhaps the most expensive one in North America. “Doing those cost comparisons opened our eyes and got us thinking about power at different possible locations.” VistaPrint had recently opened a 68,000square-foot manufacturing facility in Windsor, Canada, which could be expanded to accommodate a 100-rack data center. Cebula charged Branham with creating a business case for three options: building the new data center in the new Lexington space, building it in Windsor, or outsourcing it. Unlike most IT departments, VistaPrint had all the data it needed to make the analysis — from real estate costs to electric

bills. The majority of IT shops are in the dark about their data center energy costs because facilities management pays the bills. Facilities and IT tend to operate on different planes. “Facilities people know how much power is being used, but they don’t know anything about the equipment,” says Koomey. The result is what the Uptime Institute’s Brill calls “the invisible crisis.” IT has little incentive to make more conservative choices about power consumption, and the results are not sustainable. AFCOM, an association for data center professionals, predicts that power failures or power limits will halt data center operations at more than 90 percent of companies over the next five years. “Not a lot of IT people get down into the building of data centers,” admits Branham. “We definitely understand the total cost perspective,” says Cebula. “But even we were a bit surprised when doing the analysis of actual energy consumption.” This analysis revealed good news. Real estate costs would be cheaper in Canada (Rs 280 per square foot in Windsor versus Rs 1,098 in Lexington). But Windsor was a greener pasture in more ways than one. VistaPrint’s manufacturing facility is run on hydroelectric power, a renewable energy source that doesn’t entail fuel costs and

AFCOM, an association for data center professionals, predicts that power failures or power limits will halt data center

operations at over 90 percent of companies

over the next five years. comes at a lower and more stable price. That’s why data hogs like Yahoo and Google have recently begun building operations in the Northwest near the Columbia River, a source of hydroelectric power. “Any small difference in energy consumption or energy costs can make quite a difference,” says Kumar. Hydroelectric power also creates little air pollution. Sure enough, thanks to a 12-cent per kilowatt-hour difference in electricity prices, Branham figured he would save 6 8 j u LY 1 , 2 0 0 7 | REAL CIO WORLD

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more than Rs 52 lakh a year by locating in Canada. Those cost savings would improve as VistaPrint added racks to the facility — a near certainty at its current growth rate. Coupled with the discount on real estate, the Windsor option proved 10 percent cheaper than outsourcing — even with the capital expenditures. Not everyone can just up and move a data center to a cheaper real estate market with a renewable energy source. “Banks, for example, may need to be in downtown

Manhattan or central London,” says Kumar. “But what [VistaPrint is] doing makes a lot of sense for them.”

The Benefits of Green The Bermuda project (which was completed at the end of last year) enables VistaPrint to shave 25 percent from its future hosting costs. And VistaPrint’s Windsor data center is scheduled to open this month. Branham plans to move many of the systems hosted in Lexington there (where the new virtual

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machines initially will occupy 10 to 12 racks), and the facility will also provide disaster recovery for the Bermuda data center (a service the company outsourced to Cable & Wireless). Cebula says VistaPrint is trying to make other eco-friendly choices, outside of IT. For example, the company bought an extraction system for its plant that recovers more paper waste, which

VistaPrint can resell to recyclers. “What we’re finding is that the right thing to do environmentally and the right thing to do financially often go hand in hand,” she says. Some green options, like the new servers and the paper waste extractor, may involve up-front costs, Cebula says, but they usually pay for themselves and reap returns (such as revenue from reselling the

Fresh, Green Tech tools that can reduce your contribution to global warming. t Power-conscious chips: When it comes to energy efficiency, aMD has dominated a two-horse race with Intel, increasing the number of cores in its opteron chips while holding power consumption steady. Intel also markets its Xeon line of energyefficient server processors and recently announced it will begin making chips using a new insulating material that consumes less electricity, generates less heat and delivers faster processor speeds. now a startup, P.a. semi, is getting into the act with the development of its family of 64-bit, dual-core PWrficient processors. the company claims its chips will be three to four times more energy efficient than competing products. Energy-efficient servers: thermal engineering — once an afterthought — has become a critical limitation for servers. Manufacturers such as IbM, HewlettPackard and sun Microsystems have taken steps to redefine system design and improve internal blower and fan technologies. IbM touts its system z mainframe as a power-efficient alternative to high-density x86 servers for linux applications. sun, meanwhile, says its niagara servers use half the power and offer three times the performance compared with competitors’ machines. Better cooling and power supplies: Power supply vendors such as aPC and Emerson and HVaC manufacturers including sprayCool and Cooligy (which is owned by Emerson) are developing products that target global warming. these include systems that use carbon dioxide for cooling (in place of more harmful refrigerants), direct-current power supplies (more efficient than converting alternating current from the electrical grid) and more efficient in-chassis, in-rack, in-row cooling products. Green design: erver manufacturers and It t service providers have ideas for more efficient data center designs. HP is working on a next-generation modular data center prototype that incorporates virtualization and a closed-loop cooling system, among other features. sun Microsystems is touting its Project blackbox, a virtualized data center built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver energy, space and performance efficiencies. In addition, a who’s who of data center vendors is sponsoring a nonprofit It t user group called Green Grid, which focuses on best practices for managing data center power and cooling issues. Financial incentives: Customers of Pacific Gas & Electric are eligible for a rebate of up to rs 16 crore for virtualization projects that consolidate servers. the California utility also offers cash rebates for the installation of other energy-efficient products such as servers and HV HVaC equipment. the he EP EPa a is studying what other incentives might encourage businesses to adopt eco-friendly technologies.

excess paper and lower energy costs). Of course, not every green product or process has a payoff for everyone. Some of the new, environmentally friendly innovations in cooling technology, heat transfer and power supply for the data center (see “Fresh, Green Tech") didn’t make the list at VistaPrint. “I did look at the price for a natural gas generator,” Branham says. “But the prices for natural gas fluctuate widely. Most people stay with diesel.” Determining the environmental benefits of VistaPrint’s data center revamp is hard because of the complexities in how power is produced and consumed. But based on a model for calculating carbon emissions offered by Lawrence Berkeley, an average US company that cuts its electricity consumption the way VistaPrint did in Bermuda would reduce its carbon emissions by nearly 612 metric tons. Meanwhile, the benefits of VistaPrint’s data center changes go beyond saving money or saving the planet. Server standardization has made maintenance and upgrades easier. It’s also made IT more responsive to business needs. It used to take days to provision a new server in Bermuda. Now it takes minutes. “Business is much more satisfied with the time it takes to make changes or get new capacity,” says Cebula. “And with our better failover capabilities, we have fewer reductions in service.” VistaPrint recently had a VMware server go down in Bermuda, and all the instances that were running on it restarted on another server. Total downtime was less than 10 minutes, with no human intervention. The business doesn’t understand why service is better, says Cebula, “but they understand the better service.” And the money IT might have been throwing away on sky-high electric bills in Massachusetts can be fueled into more sound IT investments. “Green isn’t costing us money. Green is saving us money,” says Branham. “Interests are aligned.” CIO

Stephanie Overby is senior editor.Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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VIEW

from the TOP

Kiran MazumdarShaw, chairman & managing director of Biocon, says it is essential in the business of biotechnology to identify research opportunities and strategize on them.

View from the top is a series of interviews with CEOs and other C-level executives about the role of IT in their companies and what they expect from their CIOs.

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Driving The Future of Biotech Research

by Kanika Goswami From the 1990s into the turn of the century, biotechnology has come to be looked upon as one of the two prodigious children of the New Economy in India â&#x20AC;&#x201D; IT being the other. Biocon has fulfilled its promise, as have its counterparts in the IT industry, so much so that chairman and managing director, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, is now the face of the innovation-led biopharmaceuticals sector in the country. In the 29 years since its journey began, Biocon has developed a presence along the biotech value chain. Its subsidiaries, Syngene and Clinigene, have made a mark in drug discovery and clinical development, respectively. Finally, its commercialization track record of over 25 enzymes is best vindicated by the enterprise size of Rs 688 crore. Along the journey, it has evolved from an industrial enzymes company to an integrated biopharmaceutical company with strategic research initiatives. In this interview with CIO India, Mazumdar-Shaw talks about the growth story and the role of IT. Biocon's R&D operations are minimally manual, while monitoring of its research environment uses software to a large extent. Biocon has homegrown ERP applications, developed and customized according to its needs. Besides this technology backup, the organization takes care of intellectual property-related issues on high-end security software, which ensures that security mechanisms are in place. It comes as no surprise then that Mazumdar-Shaw places a high premium on her CIO who is at the forefront of most critical production processes.

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Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw expects I.T. to Develop integrated information systems in enterprise Enable innovation Align processes with regulatory compliances

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw:

There can never be finite goals. Achieving one set of goals results in a new set of goals. I am proud of what I have achieved in the country, but I believe that I have a long way to go in terms of global objectives.

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You are a scientist first and then an industrialist. Does such a duality interfere in business planning? I have always used my scientific background in addressing business opportunities. In a sector like biotechnology, this is vital. I would like to add that without a scientific background, it would be difficult to identify research opportunities and strategize

on them. Such an approach is core to our business.

In what circumstances did you tap IT toward building your company? How did you integrate the usage of IT in your processes?

Imaging by un nikrishn an av

CIO: You are the face of the biotechnology sector in India today. What had you envisaged for yourself? Have you reached your goals?

Information technology has been a powerful means to build MIS and ERP systems in our enterprise. In addition, we have used IT effectively in our R&D

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View from the Top

programs to track, monitor and integrate our research efforts with a view to preventing duplication and with the key objective of expediting programs to commercialization. Our production is also highly automated and calls for IT support. So, we do use IT extensively throughout our organization.

How do you make decisions on an implementation of a new technology that your CIO may be convinced about? Is cost an important factor? Whenever we opt for various IT systems, it has always been thought through by a group of people. I am glad that we invested in many of these systems when we did, as we have built on them over the years. Today, we are at a stage where we are transitioning from our in-house ERP system to a commercial one for regulatory reasons. Here, we are at a crossroads as each standard system has its plus and minus points. And we decide on the appropriate system based on the advice of our CIO and external consultants.

Can you shed some light on the extent of software usage in your research processes? Has it helped improve quality? And how has business benefited? Yes, we use IT and special software extensively in process control, project planning and, as I mentioned, in dovetailing our R&D programs with other aspects of regulatory compliances and commercialization. IT is a fundamental part of our research — our entire research and development information is based on Lotus Notes.

What role has IT played in terms of innovation? Do you plan on new 74

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and calls for a competent CIO to address these needs in a customized manner.

“Bioinformatics and IT tend to play an important role in innovations that involve designing smaller, new molecules.” products based on your IT capability and the expertise of your CIO? We have not leveraged IT to deliver on innovation as most of our programs are based on protein therapeutics where IT is used as a tool to construct clones, but not to develop new drug molecules. Bioinformatics and IT tend to play an important role in innovations that involve designing smaller, new molecules. Having said that, we have now begun using IT to engineering proteins, especially in conjugating PEG (polyethylene glycol) molecules, etcetera.

How would you describe the CIO’s involvement in Biocon’s growth? The CIO has had a key and an integral role to play at Biocon, for all the aforementioned reasons. Moreover, an ERP infrastructure for a biotech company is far more complex,

Syngene leverages the convergence of IT and biotechnology. How does this marriage add value to your processes? Syngene uses a lot of bioinformatics and CAD to design new molecules for a number of customers. This is followed with in vitro and in vivo studies to confirm optimal design.

Do you agree with the idea of the CIO being given free rein to implement processes or that he should have to convince the CEO and CFO? We need the CIO to have an independent interface with the CEO and CFO to invest in, and implement, IT systems.

Inventory management is another important aspect of business processes. Does IT help Biocon in this domain? Of course, this is an important part of MIS and ERP systems.

How do you see the Biocon group maintain its top slot for innovations as well as processes? We plan to achieve this by ensuring that we have a well-networked and integrated information system. We believe in sharing and leveraging knowledge. Without IT, this would be impossible. CIO

Special correspondent Kanika Goswami can be reached at kanika_g@cio.in

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Trendline_Nov11.indd 19

11/16/2011 11:56:19 AM

B.V. Gopinath, director of the foreigners division at the Ministry of Home Affairs, is refining an IT system that smoothens and infuses transparecy into the Overseas Citizenship of India process.

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Interview | B.V. Gopinath

By Balaji NarasimhaN

Overseas Citizen ManagIng thE

by an Il t

It is one thing to promise the Indian diaspora a warm welcome and quite another to assist them in working through the complex procedure of getting overseas-citizenship status. Automating part of the processes to the Overseas Citizenship of India is helping bridge the gap. If you are a foreign national

Ph ot oS by dr lo h Ia

I Ma gI ng

of Indian origin, the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) is your best bet to travel to and from India with ease, among other privileges. An OCI-status allots its holders many of the rights that Indian nationals enjoy — rights that about 1.34 lakh people have applied for. Some of the rights, including the right to invest and be employed in certain sectors are being debated by various government ministries to maintain the difference between OCI-holders and NRIs for reasons of national security. Still, OCI has a range of benefits. For instance, OCI-holders get lifelong free visa travel to India, which, in the case of PIOs (People of Indian Origin) is restricted to 15 years. An OCI is not required to register with a police station in India, while PIOs have to register with the local police authority if they intend to spend over 180 days in India. But as with most permits that include two nations — immigration, for example — structured processes are hard to introduce and final authorization would boil down to an interview.

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Interview | B.V. Gopinath To make matters worse, much confusion surrounds these processes: for instance, the question over who is eligible to apply for OCI. Many believe that it is a form of dual citizenship — when it is not, because the Constitution of India does not permit people to hold Indian citizenship and the citizenship of any other country simultaneously. The need of the hour was to create a system that would cut through such confusion and keep those in the application process updated. The Ministry of Home Affairs asked the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to build a system to administer online applications for OCI, track online status inquiries, and manage the electronic storage of submitted documents. From an e-governance perspective, the OCI process has presented several issues for consideration in its attempt to empower stakeholders and ensure public facilitation. The NIC was forced to re-engineer some process but, fortunately, did not encounter the usual problems relating to user buy-in. In this interview, B.V. Gopinath, director of foreigners division at the Ministry of Home Affairs, talks about the management of OCI functions, and the nature of computerization used to facilitate smooth functioning of this initiative.

allows dual citizenship in some form or the other. It may be clarified that what is being offered is OCI — not dual citizenship. What database do you maintain? How many entries does it contain?

We are using Oracle 10g as database for OCI. The number of OCI registrations granted is over 134,000. The NIC/MHA verifies OCI applications. Has this process been computerized?

The online status enquiry has been designed in such a way that applicants can

get information they need at each of the processing steps.”

CIO: When did computerization of the OCI process take off? B.V. GOpInath: The process of computerization started towards the end of September in 2005. The OCI became operational from December 2005. What are the IT systems being used?

At the server end, we have PIII servers with 512MB RAM and 3X72GB HDD. We use OS Linux AS release 3 along with Oracle 10g. At the client end, any PC with Internet connectivity and a scanner for scanning the images of the applicant is sufficient. And connectivity?

At the server end, the connectivity is on 78

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the back of NIC’s existing network NICNET, which is 4Mbps at Delhi IDC Center. On the client side, any connectivity of 64kbps or 128kbps depending upon local availability is enough to access the server. An OCI applicant needs to ensure that the country of current residence supports dual citizenship in some form or the other. Are such details captured by the IT system?

Dual citizenship exists in different forms in different countries. This cannot be captured in the system. We take a declaration from the applicant that his country of citizenship

The applications are categorized into two types: Post-enquiry cases, where there is, prima facie, nothing adverse against the applicant. (The applicant does not mention any adverse information and does not figure in the negative list.) In this category, OCI registration is granted to eligible persons, and their antecedents are checked by the ministry after grant of registration. Pre-enquiry cases, where there is, prima facie, adverse information available against the applicant, OCI registration to eligible persons is granted only after clearance by the ministry. Was there user resistance? How did you handle it?

The scheme was implemented through an innovative use of ICT. It is not the case of moving from a manual system to a computerized system. We did not face any resistance from the users because the Indian Missions were using computers in some way or the other. However, in the initial phases, we faced problems related to training. But, this was successfully done through e-mail clarifications with the Missions and, in extreme cases, through telephone. We have also opened a public e-mail account, through which emails from the public are replied by NIC/MHA team within 24 hours in most cases.

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Interview | B.V. Gopinath Did the computerized system enhance transparency and reduce corruption?

Each and every step of the processing of the application is being monitored by the ministry through an MIS developed by NIC. The stage-wise tracking of application status has been deployed in online status enquiry on the Ministry’s website. The online status enquiry has been designed in such a way that applicants can get information they need at each of the processing steps. This tracking mechanism, along with the e-mail support, has enhanced transparency and reduced chances of corruption. Further, a quarterly review meeting is held by joint secretary (foreigners) of the Ministry of Home Affairs with stakeholders, whereby various problems in implementation and suggestions for improvement are discussed. The issue of time-bound delivery of services is also discussed and reasons for pendency, mostly at the missions, are analyzed. Thanks to this, missions are also

playing a pro-active role in expeditious disposal of the applications.

Innovative documents Benefits notified

What impact has computerization had on the OCI project?

How flexible is the OCI system?

The system has been designed with due care and scope for further value additions. Therefore, the system is flexible enough to accommodate changes related to policies and enhancement of services.

The scheme was launched initially in September 2004 and there were lot of procedural formalities to be followed before one was granted OCI registration. Therefore, the scheme could not be implemented. The following significant changes were carried out for an efficient, transparent and people-friendly scheme: Simplification of application form Simplified procedures Bringing efficiency Process re-engineering Public facilitation Empowerment of stakeholders Online application by the applicants Online processing and centralized personalization of documents. Online status inquiry Management information system

What are your computerization plans for the next 12 months?

We are planning to launch the OCI Miscellaneous Services, which shall be offered to existing OCI card holders in the following instances: Change of passports Change of personal particulars Loss or mutilation of OCI documents Change of address, occupation, among other particulars. CIO Special correspondent Balaji Narasimhan can be reached at balaji_n@cio.in

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Choose Your Network Destiny

The first-ever series of CIO Focus: Network Infrastructure events centered on enterprise architecture choices. Does your organization warrant a generalpurpose network or a dedicated one? We asked three panels of IT leaders.

he state of network infrastructure in the country is, perhaps, eloquent testimony to the robust growth of India Inc. Investments have risen. Businesses have grown, as have enterprise needs. And, as the panelists at the CIO Focus: Network Infrastructure event in Mumbai noted, networks have come of age. As a consequence, a decision that CIOs face every now and then is the choice

between general-purpose networks and dedicated ones, or at times the decision to have both. The decision is seldom an easy one and has to consider the needs of business and the users. For this reason, CIO India made it the subject of discussion at the first series of network infrastructure events in Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi.

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An anecdote from Alaganandan Balaraman, executive VP for IT at Godfrey Philips, put the networks architecture situation in perspective. He recalled an approach during his days as an IT strategy consultant: “We would start the discussion on where our client’s business planning was headed. Where did he see the company three years later? Then, we would work backwards on the technology strategy to be followed.” Balaraman, a panelist at the New Delhi forum, said he noticed that most clients were not clear about the roadmap itself. However, they wanted an infrastructure and a network plan that would take care of their next three years, he said. “This required all our networks to be future-proofed,” he added. Planning does not come at a huge cost because it is not going to hold up business, but take T. Srinivasan (left), executive director of HP Software, stressed on the need for network care of potential business ideas, he pointed out. agility. Organizations also seek 24x7 connectivity to all its locations and at optimal This is relevant for choosing between the costs, said Vijay Srinivasan, COO (west) of Airtel Enterprise Services. efficiency of dedicated networks and the flexible ways of general-purpose networks. CIOs and technology heads had differing opinions on the 4,000-5,000. Hence, a dedicated network works best,” he felt. comparative effectiveness of both types. Atul Kumar, CIO of Syndicate Bank, was of the same view at the Tamal Chakravorty, CIO of Ericsson India, maintained that Bangalore panel discussion. “We had no connectivity issues when it systems critical for revenue streams — like railways and stock and came to a dedicated league, but the moment we start mixing other commodity trading companies — call for dedicated networks. Any requirements, there were many issues,” he explained. “It takes a disruptions will cause harm to the revenue streams, he asserted. lot of time to ascertain common requirements, and we felt it is Further, warehouses in far-flung areas also call for dedicated better to go for a dedicated network for core banking than mixing networks in order to ensure regular connectivity. it with other applications.” Further, security is critical in the banking “There are invoicing activities across warehouses. About 40sector, he noted. 50 simultaneous operations have to take place on a regular basis Gopal Shukla, director of the business systems group at everyday,” said Chakravorty. Dedicated networks also ensure Hindustan-Coca Cola, took the middle path. “The decision whether optimal utilization usage and lead to savings, he added. “If we used dedicated networks make sense or general ones depends on the SAP solutions for each of these, it would probably cost us about Rs kind of applications that are needed to be run on the network,” he said. He also reiterated Balaraman’s point about future business plans determining the nature of the network. Balaraman also noted another interesting development in the country. Over the last decade, the rate of technology adoption has increased manifold, he said, adding that what is therefore needed, more than anything else, is a scaleable network. A question arose thereof: since business is hard to predict in a five-year timeframe, wouldn’t it be a good idea to build a dedicated network that is more efficient? After achieving clarity on an important development, a CIO can review the options and build a new and more optimal network. Balaraman didn’t find the idea of outsourcing network management far-fetched. “How long does it take you to lay down the network? Depending on — Vijay Ramachandran the nature of business, we assume most people Editor-in-Chief , CIO

All enterprises tend to grapple with issues of managing scale and growth, especially in a period of boom.

CIO

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would like to outsource,” he said. “It would make sense to hand over the processes to someone to manage on your behalf.” This has another advantage: the service provider will try to comply with industry standards. So, you won’t mind revamping after three years.“Your service provider will also look to increase the response time — and the tradeoff Issues of connectivity in interior areas give CIOs added reason to opt for dedicated networks, said Atul Kumar (center), will be optimization CIO of Syndicate Bank. Col. Arvind Saksena (left), CIO of Air Deccan, and Shyam Sundar V., associate VP of Infosys’ InterNetworking Group, felt general-purpose and dedicated networks can be useful depending on the business need. of resources as well as technologies,” said Balaraman. the interior parts of the country. Business needs therefore require The Delhi panelists were asked if they would recommend dedicated networks, he added. Air Deccan uses a dedicated two parallel networks running without bothering about costs. network to run core applications. Sometimes, that’s a necessity rather than a luxury, said Shukla. Shyam Sundar, associate VP of Infosys’ InterNetworking Group, On the subject of bandwidth, the entire panel agreed that almost said his company runs one network for the day-to-day operations. all ISPs today can give high bandwidth at fairly low cost — a far This general purpose network is used for basic services like intranet, cry from the situation a decade ago. But this works only in metros IS applications, e-mail and others. It is important to realize that the because most of the smaller towns in India are still not very high network, by itself, is not a service, he asserted. “The network is a on the bandwidth map. platform and, because of this, my team comes up with network The Bangalore panel, in particular, concurred with its Delhi services that add value to the organization,” he added. counterpart on this observation relating to tier-2 cities. “In remote levels, the network is not available. Apart from BSNL, nobody else has presence when it comes to the network and yet there are Reaching Far & Wide issues. After all, private service providers look for a bulk network,” The Mumbai panel agreed that open and flexible networks make said Syndicate Bank’s Alok Kumar. Col. Arvind Saksena, CIO of more sense in fast-growing businesses. These help adapt to any Air Deccan, agreed that networks left a great deal to be desired in set of requirements, rather than being dedicated to specific apps. Shopper’s Stop CTO Arun Gupta recalled that in 2004 he decided to rip out the entire network infrastructure he himself had set up at Pfizer India. “The reason was simple: the network had become too rigid. It straitjacketed the business into a certain limited set of activities,” said Gupta, who previously headed IT at Pfizer. Such a move exemplifies the radical shift in a CIO’s perspective on network infrastructure, and underscores the beginning of the end of the view that networks have to be dedicated to monolithic applications that organizations ran. The Mumbai panel comprised Arun Pande, vice president of IT at Colgate Palmolive, Arvind Tawde, senior VP and CIO of Mahindra & Mahindra, Sumit Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications, besides Gupta. “The reality is that regardless of the market or vertical you work in, agility is the key,” Gupta said. — Bala Murali Krishna Executive Editor, CIO “You need to be resilient enough to react to market

Should the choice of network architecture be in line with the CIO's stated business need?

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Events had to figure out how to compress its apps when the connection came over the wireless network, apart from its own and third-party broadband networks. “We had created the infrastructure that not only provides differentiated service based on the applications, but also security on top of it as well through VPN services,” Chowdhury said. “This gives us a powerful way to reach out quickly to cater to our internal demands and also allows us to offer these services to our customers as well,” he added. Do CIOs have to grapple with ROI with respect to the kind of network choices they make? Tawde of Mahindra & Mahindra didn’t think so. “It is very difficult to find out business value in quantifiable terms against what your investment is,” he said. “This is only possible in certain applications where you can show direct savings. But, this primarily would be where IT automation has taken place.” Earlier, Mahindra & Mahindra’s IT organization had a distributed architecture with eight datacenters, which were consolidated into one. Tawde saw great savings coming out of that, but the value derived by enabling the organization was the bigger takeaway in his opinion. “Now, if I need to have visibility from my customer to my supplier, I can do that easily because it is all seamlessly integrated,” he explained. “Similarly, as we have already connected all our group companies with a comprehensive network, we have a lot of synergy within the group companies to be exploited,” Tawde said. “They can leverage not only the infrastructure that we have but also the knowledge.” Colgate Palmolive’s Pande concurred with Tawde. “All along, we have been saying that today, business is IT and business cannot be imagined without IT,” he said. “The way we should be looking at it should be the socioeconomic impact we will have if we do not have the infrastructure. Dependency of business on network is very high as it is the backbone of the business today. ROI, in that sense, is a nonissue.” With respect to investments, Pande said the CIO needs to figure out what he needs immediately, how he can build redundancy, and how he can scale up over a period of time. Instead of ROI c a lculations, The future plans of an enterprise must be determined before deciding on the abilities and nature of its network, felt the Chowdhury said, CIOs Delhi panel comprising Alaganandan Balaraman (left), executive VP for IT at Godfrey Philips; Tamal Chakravorty (center), CIO of Ericsson India; and Gopal Shukla, director of the business systems group at Hindustan-Coca Cola. should grapple more changes. If your IT infrastructure proves to be the bottleneck in doing so, then a CIO needs to start working on his resume.” To build the resilient network that is agile enough, “I am working with service providers, saying that I don’t care what bandwidth you deploy,” he said. “I expect my traffic patterns to go up and down as per my business needs. I’ll be telling the provider the traffic pattern and the seasonality of it, and the service provider in turn needs to tell me what kind of service he is going to offer me which can effectively address that,” he explained. Chowdhury agreed. For him, the agility of the flexible generalpurpose networks boils down to one factor: differentiated quality of service. The CIO of Reliance Communications manages the network that not only supports videoconferences all across the organization’s Web stores but also runs up to 10 high-quality videoconferences for his chairman. “The bandwidth required for his conferences is dedicated and different from the bandwidth required for all broadcast messages and group videoconferencing going on,” he said. “It is all riding on the same infrastructure. We try to figure out how we can provide the differentiated quality of service on the same network infrastructure, which is also running our telecom signaling, carrying our CDR traffic and WAN traffic for our organization.” Evidently, networks dedicated to specific apps cannot fulfill such requirements. Illustrating the resiliency and agility of general-purpose networks, Chowdhury recalled a recent situation where he was asked to roll out SAP across 76 new warehouses. “Since it was nearly impossible to reach out to these remote locations with conventional broadband, we used satellites at some place, dial-up connections over our CDMA network or the broadband connections of the local cable TV operators at other locations,” he said. The IT organization then

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Events

CIOs must seek to figure out how to provide a differentiated quality of service on their network infrastructure, felt the Mumbai panel. It featured Arun Pande (left), VP-IT of Colgate Palmolive India; Arvind Tawde, senior VP & CIO of Mahindra & Mahindra; moderator Vijay Ramachandran; Sumit Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications; and Arun Gupta, CTO of Shopper's Stop.

with the unpredictability of demand. “Nobody can easily predict the market. But you still need to be good at it (planning) as your annual operating plan depends on your ability to plan ahead,” he said. Saksena, in the Bangalore panel, noted that the concept of doing business is rapidly changing in order to meet consumer needs. Consumer patterns, he says, have never lasted for more than one or two years across the globe. At the same time, companies are aggressively using technology to beat competition. Since both consumer demands and technologies are changing so quickly, Saxena said it is imperative that one should concentrate on the technology one is likely to use over the next three years.

Future-proofing Networks With planning being essential for successful general-purpose networks, Gupta of Shopper’s Stop stressed on having clarity of objectives. “When I create a network, I have to look into the experiences my organization has gone through. I benchmark it with what people in developed world have already experienced and learnt from the process,” he said. “I apply the learning here with a little bit of give-and-take in terms of what kind of variability I can build into my system. I will let the service providers manage the resiliency in their offerings and let them figure out what they should do to meet the SLA we have agreed upon.” At the Delhi panel discussion, Ericsson’s Chakravorty said he does an ROI exercise for networks as well. “For an R&D-driven organization like ours, we make sure we have the right and robust network when we lay out the network. So at the end of the day, this network has an ROI,” he said. “Having a dedicated network there helps. It would definitely give them great usage; then they can 86

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deliver good performance and high productivity,” he added. Sundar in Bangalore shared the view, citing how Infosys developed its various campuses. “In 1999, there were a variety of technologies in the market, but we took a good decision to go with gigabit Ethernet,” he said. Though Infosys has since replaced many of the original products powering gigabit Ethernet, it has been able to maintain the architecture and even scale to 10 gigabit Ethernet on the core networks. It is all about the decision that one takes, and how one is able to scale in the future, he said. For CIOs using a dedicated network, one of the greatest fears is vendor lock-in. Saxena likened the scenario to a marriage: you have a wife, and you have to live with her. The best way to get around this is to help the vendor understand your requirements, and then ensure that he delivers what you want. Then it becomes a partnership both for his survival as well as yours, said Saksena. A general network should be planned such that, in the event of failure of the dedicated network, it should be able to take over some of the key functions of the dedicated network, he added. Sundar cottoned on to the marriage metaphor and said that to prevent vendor lock-in, one should take care in picking the right partner. This makes things much easier on issues like interoperability and staffing among several others, he said.

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Pundit

network infrastructure essential technology

special

10 Gig Evolves Into Fabrics Another step toward 10 Gig SANs? By Mario Apicella network | I am not suggesting that there is any conspiracy, but the recent announcement of FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a new proposed standard to consolidate transport for both Fibre Channel and Ethernet, was a great segue into another recent announcement — a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch. What’s so special about the new switch? In a nutshell, the EFX 1000 promises a lowlatency, very reliable 10 Gig fabric that should cost a fraction of the price of current solutions

Granath says that current switches are based on old architectures and weren’t quite designed to be part of a fabric. He also points out some major shortcomings, including high latency (which means supporting data transfers with costly large memory buffers), a high price per port, and high energy consumption. By contrast, Granath says the EFX 1000 will cost 80 percent less than similarly configured competitors and have just as moderate energy and space requirements. The

latency is even less for internal ports, coming in at 1.5 microseconds. Here’s how the switch takes advantage of the extremely low latency: each of those 12 cards mounts three proprietary ASIC that keep a careful watch on traffic. They immediately divert (in 10ms or less, Woven explains) data to an alternate route if there is a link failure or even a slowdown on the primary path. The EFX 1000’s expected price is a Rs 60,000 per port. Moreover, customers

The new switch deploys innovative technology that can maintain wire speed transfers when fully configured with 144, 10 Gig ports. and is open to a future move to 100 Gigabit Ethernet. (Yes, that’s 100 — I'm sure.) The common ground between this announcement from Woven Systems and FCoE is the central role that 10 Gig will play in the data centre. But do we really need yet another 10 Gig switch? And doesn’t 100 Gig exist just on paper at the moment? The answer to the second question is obviously yes, but here’s what Woven Systems had to say about the first question: “As servers become more powerful, they will need 10 Gig, but the switches on the market today are too expensive and are not optimised for data centre operations,” explains Derek Granath, VP, marketing, Woven Systems.

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new switch deploys innovative technology that can maintain wire speed transfers when fully configured with 144, 10 Gig ports. As for those 100 Gig claims, when it begins shipping, the EFX 1000 should be able to support up to 96 ports on the same chassis, says Woven Systems spokesfolk. Sounds like good investment protection, but what’s inside the switch? Count on having multiple redundant power supply modules and cooling fans in 10U of rack space, plus the ability to mount up to 12 cards, each hosting a dozen 10 Gig ports. The EFX 1000 should be able to control a fabric of 4,000 ports, keeping the external latency at or below 4 microseconds. The

shouldn’t have to suddenly depreciate previous investments because the switch is compatible with other gear, including 10 Gig switches from other vendors. There is little I didn’t like about the EFX 1000. On paper, it should give competing solutions a run for their money, but in the cutthroat storage world, the best — or the most promising, I should say — product doesn’t always prevail. Regardless, I can’t wait to see how other vendors will respond. CIO

Mario Apicella is a senior analyst at InfoWorld. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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network infrastructure special By team CIO

Crazy Questions that Stump the Help Desk Here are some of the funny responses to an article, Readers ask: Bizarre help desk questions we just can’t answer. ns te irectio d g in l to remo llow ing a too o s f u s ed t a ir s w u I Ju ses req elphia. ty purpo in Philad r

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