FOCAL POINT: CIOs and CMOs need to work in collaboration to make the whole big data story a success. PAGE 31
ChannelWorld STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs.50
Varadharajan V.S., CTO, Mukesh Infoserve, believes that cloud BI has the potential to be the next big thing.
Inside OCTOBER 2014 VOL. 8, ISSUE 7
News Analysis Developers should be wary of security risks regarding IoT, says Intel’s IoT chief, Doug Davis. PAGE 12
FOLLOW THE
DATA As more companies store data in the cloud, they’re increasingly crunching the numbers there, too. >>>PAGE 20
The Grill: Adrian Jones, Symantec, on why the company still remains a titanic force in the changing security world. PAGE 17 On Record: Adaire FoxMartin, SAP, on why Indian SMBs have the potential to be early adopters of newer technologies. PAGE 25
Feature With everyone buying into the tech hype, it is easy to lose sight of what these developments really do. It’s all about the future of work. Take a peek into what that will look like. PAGE 29
CHANNELWORLD.IN
n EDITOR’S NOTE
Vijay Ramachandran Lever Legacy Out “Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn’t fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit.” —George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara “…like a foolish man who built his house on sand.” —(New American Standard Bible, Matt. 7:26)
O
VER THE past half-decade, since the slowdown
set in, I’ve seen managements transform the way they view IT. Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, instead they fund business results. As a consequence, the approach towards deployment is rapidly shifting from an ‘as is-transition-to-be’ model which involved selecting a product or service, customizing it, and deploying the solution; to a paradigm that begins with identifying a business outcome, selecting the right product for the job, and finally adopting it in a best-practices or template model (with little or no customization) with rapid deployment. What IT departments offer businesses also needs a transformation. It can’t be about big data or mobility or the cloud or analytics or ERP or any other enterprise-class technology— instead it has to be about revenue growth, about customer outreach, about helping them build the right product or service rather than making the product right, and about profitable growth. The technology
is almost incidental. The strategy can’t be. Yet in all of this focus on business end-goals, I notice a marked reluctance on the part of enterprise IT to let go of legacy ecosystems. Research by our sister publication CIO reveals that legacy integration is the topmost reason for Indian organizations to defer or delay the adoption of technologies such as the cloud or analytics. Throw in the ‘related’ issue of inadequate updated skillsets, and the best of intentions come to naught.
n It’s time to insist
that all technology must come with an expiry date and head for the scrap heap.
Beyond encouraging a defensive attitude toward all that the IT department has crafted in the past, this enthusiasm for legacy does a fair amount of damage to the business as well as the IT department. Since over 80 percent of a typical IT budget is devoted to operating and maintaining legacy systems and workloads, not only implementing any new system or technology gets tougher, it’s also tougher to justify in business terms. This also ensures that the IT team’s focus is firmly on what has been, rather than what can be. Over time, this clearly means higher cost of operations and lower responsiveness. Tending to legacy hurts business. Period.
My real fear is that the emergence of ‘add-on’ technologies like in-memory analytics provides enough of a front-end polish, that prevents the much-needed re-architecturing of an organization’s core IT—backend infrastructure and aging applications. A murmur has begun about the need for timebound refresh of apps, infra and core processes. This will build into a chorus. It’s time, I believe, to insist that all technology must come with an expiry date. This is the reality that stares all solution providers in the face. No denying it. It also represents a great opportunity. An opportunity to help CIOs cover the gaps in their in-house skillsets. An opportunity to help build a phased path of migration out of legacy. An opportunity to make this not a one-time rip-andreplace, but an ongoing engagement that can help to embed you as a partner of choice. An opportunity to truly help clients futureproof while dealing with today’s struggles. This is going to be a leap of faith for both you and the client. Are you willing to give up on your own legacy practices? Are you up to the challenge? Write in and let me know. Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@ idgindia.com
OCTOBER 2014
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD
3
FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN
Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ OCTOBER 2014
■ NEWS DIGEST
■ NEWS ANALYSIS
09 Intel Transforms its DC | Intel’s
12 IDF 2014: Developers to Address Security Concerns | As
enterprise DC will be transformed
devices interconnect, developers
IOT by technologies such as silicon photonics, rack scale architecture, and software-defined systems. 10 Microsoft Azure Now Available for SAP Apps | Microsoft and
SAP have started delivering their global partnership in India, making Microsoft Azure available for mission critical SAP deployments. 10 SAP Updates its Analytics and Visualization Software | SAP
has made a series of updates to its
must be wary of security risks regarding IoT, says Intel’s IoT chief.
■ OPINION
03 Editorial: It’s time to insist that all technology must come with an expiry date, says Vijay Ramachandran. 34 PlainSpeak: Yogesh Gupta says companies should take a leaf from the page of Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, and aim to strike a fortune. 16 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry:
We’re in the dark age of computer security, but the rise of mobile and wearable devices with built-in biometrics could save us.
■ THE GRILL
17 Adrian Jones, President,
InfiniteInsight predictive software and Lumira data-visualization tool. This is done in a bid to shore up the company’s foothold in the analytics market.
Symantec, on why the company still remains a titanic force in this fast-changing security world.
11 VMware, Cisco Fix DC Vulnerabilities | VMware and
Cover Photograph by: SUJITH Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V
Cisco have released security fixes for vulnerabilities in networking virtualization that is used in DCs.
20 ■ COVER STORY
20 Follow the Data
Even though cloud-based business intelligence has been around for nearly a decade now, a recent trend is driving renewed interest in it: Companies are generating and storing more data in the cloud. It may well be the tipping point for cloud-based business intelligence. As more enterprises store data in the cloud, they are increasingly crunching the numbers there, too.
■ ON RECORD
21
25 Adaire Fox-Martin, President, SAP, APJ, says Indian small-to-medium enterprises have a great appetite to be early adopters of technology innovations like cloud computing.
FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN
Inside
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD ■ OCTOBER 2014
■ FAST TRACK
■ FOCAL POINT
31 Big Data: The Common Denominator BIG DATA: The lines between IT and mar-
keting are blurring in this age of digital marketing. CMOs now command more of the tech budget than any other executive
15 Vergis K.R., CEO, Uniware Systems, shares how a passion for being updated about
outside of the CIO. Therefore, CIOs and CMOs need to work in collaboration to make the whole big data story work.
■ FEATURE
29 The Future of Work the latest tech helped the company become one of the most advanced IT solution providers.
With Microsoft moving into a “mobile first, cloud first” world, an Apple smartwatch coming any day now, and everyone buying
28 Vinod Kumar, Managing Directo, Kernel-
sphere Technologies, explains how the three-
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Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello ■ EDITORIAL
Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran Executive Editors Yogesh Gupta Deputy Editor Sunil Shah Features Editor Shardha Subramanian Assistant Editors Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Special Correspondent Sneha Jha Principal Correspondents Aritra Sarkhel, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi. Senior Copy Editor Vinay Kumaar Video Editor Kshitish B.S. Lead Designers Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Senior Designer Unnikrishnan A.V. Trainee Journalists Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Sejuti Das, Vaishnavi J. Desai ■ SALES
& MARKETING
President Sales & Marketing Sudhir Kamath Vice President Sales Sudhir Argula Associate Publisher Parul Singh General Manager Marketing Siddharth Singh General Manager Sales Jaideep M. Manager Key Accounts Sakshee Bagri Manager Sales Support Nadira Hyder Senior Marketing Associates Arjun Punchappady Benjamin Jeevanraj, Cleanne Carol Serrao, Margaret Sunitha Dcosta Lead Designer Jithesh C.C. Senior Designer Laaljith C.K. Designers Vinoth P, Vivekanandan Management Trainee Aditya D. Sawant, Bhavya Mishra, Brijesh Saxena, Chitiz Gupta, Deepali Patel, Deepinder Singh, Eshant Oguri, Mayur R Shah, R. Venkat Raman ■ OPERATIONS
year-old company has emerged as an end-toend systems integrator in the SMB market.
into the cloud computing hype, it is easy to lose sight of what these developments do. It’s about the future of work. Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like. It’s all about four key areas.
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News
WHAT’S WITHIN
PAGE 10: Microsoft Extends Azure to SAP Applications PAGE 10: SAP Updates its Analytics and Visualization Apps PAGE 11: VMware and Cisco Fix Datacenter Vulnerabilities PAGE 12: Be Wary of IoT Security Risks: Intel’s IoT Chief
F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN
INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT
Intel Transforms its Datacenter
I
NTEL’S ENTERPRISE
datacenter will be transformed by technologies such as silicon photonics, rack scale architecture, and software-defined systems in the near future, the company claims, saying these technologies will help businesses meet digital services demands. Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Diane Bryant, general manager of the firm’s datacenter group, laid out the company’s vision for infrastructure
development. She said that current architectures are the main “limiter” as businesses come to terms with big data analytics, billions of connected devices, and critical workloads. “When we look out into the open and not-so-different future, we believe that the datacenter will look quite different from today,” she said. For Intel, the ability to pool compute, storage, and network resources through software-defined systems will be the key to future datacenter architectures.
“Infrastructure has got be easier to deploy, it has got to scale on demand, it has got to be fully automated, and it needs to deliver a consistent guaranteed user experience,” Bryant said. She added that softwaredefined infrastructure has become “critical and inevitable” for the industry. But with the concept of software-defined datacenter still in its infancy, Intel is one of the many companies that is collaborating on the creation of standards to spur deployments. This has meant participating in the OpenStack project, with Intel one of the top-code contributors to the Swift part of the project, Bryant said, as well as providing performance optimizations for Ceph storage. Meanwhile, network virtualization, which has begun to transform the infrastructure used by telecom firms, is also set to trickle down to the enterprise. This market is expected to be worth $50 billion (about Rs 3 lakh crore) to the suppliers. Intel said it now has 85 partners, including Oracle, HP, Citrix, and Dell, signed up for its Network Builders Program, as it aims to encourage adoption of software-defined networking.
OCTOBER 2014
—Matthew Finnegan INDIAN CHANNELWORLD
9
CLOUD SERVICES
Startups to Get Cloud Credit from Google Google has assembled a starter package to help startup businesses ramp up operations with free Google Cloud Platform services. Startups that qualify will get a $1,00,000 (about Rs 60 lakh) credit for Google Cloud Platform services, along with around-the-clock support and access to the
company’s technical solutions team. The program, called the ‘Google Cloud Platform for Startups,’ is restricted to startups that are part of a technology incubator or accelerator, or have been funded by a venture capital firm. Applicants must generate less than $5,00,000 (about Rs 3 crore) in annual revenue, and be less than five years old. Appealing to startups could help Google form a customer base around its cloud services, thereby reaping long-term benefits. -Joab Jackson
-
STRENGTHENING PARTNERSHIP
Microsoft Azure Now Available for SAP Apps
M
percent of IT spend in India SAP have started is aimed at transformationdelivering their al projects, specifically in global partnerthe areas of mobility, cloud, ship in India, making Miand big data. crosoft Azure available for Peter Gartenberg, genSAP applications. eral manager-enterprise According to the comand partner group, Micropany statement, Indian soft India, said, “Along with enterprises can now lever- SAP, we will deliver the age the flexibilbest applications ity and scalabiland services to ity of Microsoft customers on the of IT spend in India is Azure for miscloud. This will aimed at transformasion critical SAP help improve emtional projects in areas of mobility, deployments. ployee produccloud, and big data. Microsoft tivity, enhance Azure is an open workforce mocloud platform that enables bility, and drive increased users to build, deploy, and business value.” manage applications across Microsoft and SAP are a global network of Microextending their long-term soft-managed datacenters. partnership in three critiThe partnership is excal areas—enterprise cloud pected to deliver 200 to 300 computing, with businesspercent efficiency increase critical SAP application in IT infrastructure deploy- certification for Microsoft ment, and savings of 40 to Azure; improved interop75 percent on total ownererability between data ship costs with Azure’s pay- from SAP applications and per-use model. Microsoft Office, includAccording to a study by ing general availability consulting firm Zinnov, 30 of connectivity between ICROSOFT AND
30%
SAP Business Objects BI solutions and Microsoft’s Excel offering; and mobile productivity with expanded support for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. Deb Deep Sengupta, chief operating officer, SAP India, said, “SAP and Microsoft are among the most trusted vendors for Indian enterprises. With this partnership we are enabling SAP customers to extend their on-premise ERP deployment across cloud and mobile.” The SAP application certification for Microsoft Azure allows customers with existing SAP licenses to deploy SAP software on Microsoft Azure, thus safeguarding and increasing the value of their Microsoft and SAP investments, the company stated. Sujit Mohanty, technology infrastructure group head, Sonata, said, “We are thrilled to be selected as an early partner by Microsoft and SAP to take these unique solutions to market. Our proven track-record in mobility, BI, and analytics will help us deliver value to customers across industries and cloud configurations.” —Team ChannelWorld
ANALYTICS
SAP Updates its Analytics and Visualization Software SAP has made a series of updates to its InfiniteInsight predictive software and Lumira data-visualization tool. This is done in a bid to shore up the company’s foothold in the analytics market. According to the company statement, InfiniteInsight 7.0 adds the ability to use geospatial dimensions such as 10
latitude and longitude within predictive models. “This allows you to make the most of geographic data and provides you with much more information than simply using ZIP codes,” SAP said in a recent blog post regarding the release. Many companies use predictive modeling to take
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
Technology Update: The s/w makes use of geo-spatial data.
informed stabs at how customers will behave in the future, based on data sets that describe actions they took in the past.
Short Takes Citrix has appointed
Parag Arora as its area VP for Indian subcontinent to drive its enterprise and field sales, consulting services, technical pre-sales, and post-sales functions, across India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Arora has been with the company for over two and a half years now, and was leading its enterprise and public sector businesses.
Fujitsu has appointed
Andy Stevenson as its managing director for India, and territory leader for the Middle East and India. This is in line with the company’s stated goal, to serve its regional and global customers more efficiently and effectively. Andy Stevenson is a Fujitsu veteran and a senior executive with diverse international experience.
HCL Infosystems has
announced the appointment of Premkumar Seshadri as its executive vice chairman. He has been on the company board as a non-executive director since March 2014.
Support for geospatial data means an analyst could examine sequences of places customers visited, as well as segment customers based on their location, SAP said. InfiniteInsight 7.0 also boosts the application’s database support, in process adding coverage for Hadoop Hive 11 and 12, along with the existing Greenplum. The application is the result of SAP’s acquisition of KXEN last year. -Chris Kanaracus
SECURITY
VMware, Cisco Fix DC Vulnerabilities
V
MWARE AND Cisco Systems have released security fixes for serious vulnerabilities in networking virtualization and server software that is typically used in datacenters. Cisco patched a persistent denial-of-service vulnerability that could prevent the out-of-band management of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) E-Series Blade servers. These servers are deployed in Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2). The vulnerability is located in the SSH (Secure Shell) service of the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (Cisco IMC), a specialized micro-controller embedded in server motherboards that allows system administrators to monitor and manage servers from outside their OS. Cisco has released version 2.3.1 of its IMC firmware for UCS E-Series servers. Customers need to use the Host Upgrade Utility to deploy the new firmware. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team also published an alert about the issue. If left unpatched, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending a specially crafted packet to the vulnerable SSH server, forcing the IMC to become unresponsive. This could impact the availability of the entire server. “Recovery of the Cisco IMC will likely require a restart of the affected E-
Series Server via physical interaction with the blade’s power switch, or a restart of the ISR G2 router that the device is installed in,” Cisco said in an advisory. “A restart of the E-Series blades via the power switch will cause a loss of power to the operating system running on the device. A restart of the ISR G2 router will cause the loss of all traffic passing through the router while it restarts. This will also impact the blade servers installed in the device,” it added. VMware has released security updates for its NSX and vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) products in order to patch
what the company called “a critical information disclosure” vulnerability. The company’s advisory does not clarify what kind of information can be disclosed, but both these products are used for virtualizing network services. The VMware NSX allows datacenter administrators to create, provision, snapshot, delete, and restore complex networks
programmatically from the system by utilizing the underlying physical network just for packet forwarding. vCNS provides networking and security functionality for virtualized computing environments through services like a virtual firewall, virtual private network (VPN), load balancing, NAT, DHCP, and VXLANextended networks. —Lucian Constantin
Oracle Acquires Storage Company Front Porch Digital
Red Hat CTO Now Head of Google Cloud
Around
TheWorld HP Buys Cloud Provider Eucalyptus
HP has agreed to buy cloud platform provider Eucalyptus, in process stepping up its efforts in the growing field of cloud computing. Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will manage HP’s cloud business and report directly to Meg Whitman, HP’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer. Mickos, now senior vice president and general manager for HP Cloud, will manage and build out HP’s Helion portfolio. -Joab Jackson
OCTOBER 2014
Oracle has signed an agreement to acquire Front Porch Digital, a provider of technology for migrating, managing, and monetizing large-scale media content. The combination of Oracle with Front Porch is expected to create an enterprise-grade cloud and an on-premise content storage management offering to help organizations manage the migration, integration, storage, and delivery of rich media content, Oracle said. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Oracle said it expects the transaction to be closed this year. -John Ribeiro INDIAN CHANNELWORLD
11
Brian Stevens, former chief technology officer for Red Hat, is now managing Google Cloud. As Red Hat CTO, Stevens was instrumental in preparing the enterprise Linux software provider for the cloud, including its adoption of the OpenStack software for running cloud services. Although, Google has not yet announced that Stevens has joined the company, he is now vice president of Google cloud platforms. -Joab Jackson
n NEWS ANALYSIS
IDF 2014: Developers to
Address Security Concerns
As billions of devices get connected, developers must be wary of security risks regarding IoT, said Intel’s
IoT chief,
Doug Davis, at the Intel Developer Forum. By Matthew Finnegan
12
S
PEAKING AT the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel’s Internet of Things Chief Doug Davis said developers face challenges in creating IoT-related services—like around interoperability, manual provisioning of a number of devices, and security. “The fundamental gap that we hear from developers in creating solutions is that it is essential to be able to have trust in the device as well as in the data that they generate,” he said. “You have to be able to know that the device you are using is completely secure and the data that it is delivering back to the datacenter or cloud continues to be of high integrity throughout the lifecycle of that product.”
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
Data privacy is another area which must be at the forefront of developers’ minds as the IoT landscape matures. “When you get into confidentiality and privacy, a lot of it comes down to the manufacturer of the device itself, and their openness to ‘opt-in’ type of scenarios for the consumer using those devices,” said IBM’s vice president of WebSphere product management, Michael Curry. “So you really have to build it in at a technology layer first, and then you have to build it in at a practice layer.” DEVELOPER OPPORTUNITY Davis pointed to statistics which illustrate the size of the Internet of Things market, with 50 billion devices—from wearables to smart building sensors and
connected cars—expected to be linked by 2020. This will generate 35 zettabytes of data and enable $19 trillion (about Rs 1,140 lakh crore) of economic savings. It will be a multitrillion market by the end of the decade, according to analysts’ estimates. Achieving this level of connectivity will rely on an ecosystem of suppliers and developers that can create the vast range of new software and hardware, said Davis. “These are all big numbers, but the real reason to care about the Internet of Things is the impact it is going to have on our lives and the kind of things that you, as developers, can create by working together,” said Davis. “There are tremendous opportunities for developers—making us more efficient, making us safer, and allowing us to learn faster as we gain access to all of this information.” SPARKING INNOVATION Intel cited a number of innovative IoT projects where its range of processors and gateway products is applied. This included a project to monitor endangered rhinos through the use of Quark SOCs, 3G connectivity, and Intel Galileo computing boards attached via Kevlar ankle bracelets. Davis also highlighted a system developed by the startup SteadyServ to alert restaurant staff when a beer keg is empty, through a combination of embedded sensors and mobile apps. Another example is Saia Trucking, which uses a telemetry software solution from Vnomics and Intel processors in vehicle
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n NEWS ANALYSIS cabs to support real-time analytics, helping to make its freight trucks safer and more efficient. “By having such a powerful solution in the cab with the truck driver, we have seen dramatic improvement in fuel economy, with immediate feedback for the driver around progressive shifting,” said Brian Balius, president for transportation at SAIA Trucking, adding that efficiencies meant the company was saving up to $15 million (about Rs 90 crore) each year. Intel has been developing its embedded products for a number of years now, and its IoT group saw revenues reach $482 million (about Rs 2,892 crore) during the last quarter; this is up by 32 percent. This includes its Quark system on chips (SOCs), Atom processors, as well as the Edison platform, launched at IDF, which combines computation with communication capabilities. The company has also invested in the analytics platforms required to process large volumes of data generated by IoT, with its investment in Cloudera, as well as security and software with McAfee and Wind River. As part of its drive to further the adoption of IoT technologies, the company has also formed the Open Interconnect Consortium, along with Samsung, Broadcom and others, as well as the Industrial Internet Consortium with Cisco, AT&T, GE Software, and IBM. However, Intel is not the only firm to be leading open source standards development—its primary rival Qualcomm has also 14
Apple CEO Says iCloud Security Will Be Strengthened
A
pple, still reeling from the nude celebrity photo incident, plans to soon strengthen security around its iCloud storage service, according to CEO Tim Cook. The change consists primarily of new warnings when certain changes are made to an account, as well as implementation of two-factor authentication on iCloud accounts, Cook told The Wall Street Journal. iCloud accounts for more than a dozen celebrities were compromised by hackers who obtained their login credentials, possibly by guessing security questions or using passwordbreaking tools. The subsequent release of nude photos put Apple on the defense, with the company maintaining that its systems were not breached. Cook told the newspaper that Apple will begin sending e-mail and push notifications within two weeks to users whenever a new device is used to restore or log into an iCloud account, or when an account’s password is changed. With iCloud credentials, it is possible to download the entire contents of an account to a new device, including photographs,
launched its AllSeen Alliance along with partners such as Microsoft. Davis said that interoperability will be very important if IoT technologies are to proliferate. He said, “With all of these different types of data from end-point devices, different industries, and the desire to be able to look at combinations of data, data normalization becomes incredibly important in terms of being able to make all of these devices interoperable—they
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
text messages, call logs, address books, calendars and other information depending on what a person has chosen to store on iCloud. For iTunes, Apple has had a two-factor authentication feature, which involves entering a separate code to access an account. But that isn’t offered for iCloud, an apparent oversight. “Signing into iCloud in order to access say, your backed up photos, does not require twofactor authentication,” wrote Marc Rogers, a principal security researcher with Lookout Mobile Security, in a blog post. Besides, enabling Apple’s existing two-factor authentication would not have helped anyone involved in the latest leak, he added. The next version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, will certainly have an option to use two-factor authentication for iCloud accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported. Apple has maintained that the way its two-factor authentication mechanism is set up would have nonetheless still protected the accounts if it had been enabled by the victims.
have to be able to speak the same language in the long run.” WIDER ADOPTION According to John Magee, CMO of General Electric’s software arm, who also spoke at IDF, developers begin to expand their areas of focus across different industry verticals, helping to increase the use of IoT systems. “One of the interesting things we are seeing is that there is a lot more leverage between different
If it was on, the hackers wouldn’t have been able to see the security questions used to verify someone’s account in case of a lost password. With two-factor authentication off, the hackers could guess the security questions and gain further access. But it has also been theorized that attackers used a password-guessing tool against Apple’s Find My Phone service. Apple didn’t acknowledge a security issue with Find My Phone, but a brute-force script posted on GitHub had a note indicating that an API for the service allowed unlimited guesses of passwords. The API problem was later fixed, it said. In that scenario, two-factor authentication wouldn’t have mattered. The tool, called iBrute, might find the correct password, making it unnecessary for a hacker to get access to the security questions. It is also possible the celebrities were victims of phishing attacks, where hackers try to trick people into revealing their credentials by sending them a link to a look-alike but fraudulent web service. -Jeremy Kirk
industries, and developers are looking at patterns that are repeatable instead of just staying in their silos,” he said. “Industries such as healthcare, aviation, transportation, mining and so on have performance and maintenance and all kinds of other things in common, so it is possible to witness a lot of reuse in those areas. This kind of sharing is really going to easily accelerate the adoption of these IoT technologies.”
n FAST TRACK
Snapshot
Uniware Systems
Founded: 1991 Headquarters: Chennai Key Executives: Nirmal Kumar J.P., CMO; Dhanasekar S., CTO; Gladstone K.B., COO Revenue 2013-14: Rs 4 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 3.5 crore Principals: EMC, Dell, Cyberoam, VMware, Veeam, Kerio Key Business Activities: Datacenter: server, storage, virtualization, network; data security: DLO, application, CDP and HA solutions, gateway and end-point security, infrastructure management services, consultancy
We constantly validate emerging technologies for firstmover advantage, says Vergis K.R., CEO, Uniware Systems.
A
19-YEAR-OLD PLAYER in the Indian technology industry, Uniware Systems provides cutting edge solutions to more than 750 customers around the globe. “We constantly validate emerging technologies and introduce them to the market to gain first-mover advantage,” says Vergis K.R., CEO, Uniware Systems. This passion for technology has driven Uniware to stay focused over the years. It started from Vergis’ involvement in India’s first LAN at NIT Trichy, more than 25 years ago. “It is the thirst for keeping up with the latest technology wave which has made us one of the most advanced IT technology solution providers in India,” he says. Backed by its R&D team, which continuously evaluates latest tech-
nologies and products from around the globe, Uniware provides focused solutions and high-quality services to its target customers: medium enterprises. The company provides backup and protects more than a petabyte of customers’ data, providing
VERTICAL SPLIT 10%
Others
20%
Manufacturers and exporters
5%
Hospitality
5%
BFSI 5% Retail and utilities
20% IT/ITes
5%
Education
20% 5%
Government
Logistics
Photograph by SHARP IMAGE
Website: www.uniware.net VPN solutions to more than 75 cities across the globe. Today, the Chennaibased company boasts of maintaining over 2,000 virtual machines. Uniware is now planning to use multi-segment marketing, and address SMBs and corporate-level organizations to expand its existing product portfolio to new-market segments. But a major challenge in being an industry leader, according to Vergis, is maintaining the maturity levels of systems and processes while growing in a dynamically fluid environment. “We constantly try to keep up and improve all functions and aspects of our organization,” he says. To overome the challenge, a major strategy this year is streamlining processes with strict SLAs to increase customer satisfaction. Uniware is also planning to increase market penetration by adding a branch every year across India and by increasing its sales workforce in existing areas of operation. “Ninety percent of our service calls are handled by permanent resident personnel or online by our highlyqualified core staff. Our response time is almost instantaneous,” says Vergis. Today, the company has transitioned from providing solutions in almost every field of IT to focusing on new areas in datacenter infrastructure, big data, and security. n — Sejuti Das
SOURCE: Uniware Systems
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n OPINION
PASCAL-EMMANUEL GOBRY
Biometrics to the Rescue We’re in the dark age of computer security, but the rise of mobile and wearable devices with built-in biometrics could save us.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a writer and analyst who writes about technology, business strategy, economics, and other topics. 16
L
ET’S BE honest: computer security is broken. You
know it, I know it, we all know it. Post-Snowden, consumers and non-US companies are afraid for their data. Post-Target breach, corporations are more terrified of hackers than ever. While no system is perfect, and all will be prone to human error, there is a distinct sense that something needs to change. What’s more, in many enterprises, paranoid CIOs have paradoxically weakened security. The requirement of eleven different passwords, each eighteen letters long and containing a small letter, a big one, an asterisk,
and the blood of a virgin, means employees just write their passwords down on post-it notes and leave them lying around. Systems that can’t be easily accessed remotely means workers share documents on Dropbox, where—for instance—former employees can still have access to sensitive data. And so on. Again, there is no silver bullet, and no system will ever be perfect. But one trend that I think will arise in enterprise security is biometrics. Biometrics has always made a big sci-fi-like promise in making security work. It’s not a good movie if it doesn’t have someone in uniform submitting to a fingerprint, or retina, or voice, or blood sample scan to have access to some highsecurity bunker. And Apple’s Touch ID system has for the first time shown that it’s possible to have fingerprint identification that’s actually easy to use, inexpensive, and reasonably secure. Since this is an area where players like Apple and Samsung are ahead of the pack, one can expect biometrics to increase the consumerization of tech in the enterprise. Even the most recalcitrant CIOs will finally accept that properly-set-up iPhones
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
with the right software can be as secure as corporate-issued BlackBerries. There are other exciting potential applications of biometrics for security. For example, a startup named Bionym makes a bracelet called Nymi that measures your cardiac rhythm through you wrist to identify you. Only when you are wearing the bracelet (and it’s you) can you log in. For security-scared CIOs—that is to say, CIOs— this may prove irresistible. The combination of wearables and biometrics is attractive because, unlike a password, biometrics are only ever attached to one specific person. Wearables, being wearable, are harder to forget or misplace, at least in theory. And biometric signatures are (much) harder to fake, although of course nothing is impossible. It’s important to stress that there are no silver bullets and that no system will ever be 100 percent secure. But the combination of a real felt need for tighter security, increasing number of security-minded CIOs, and the improving technology of biometrics makes this an important future trend for enterprise mobile computing. n
Dossier Name: Adrian Jones Designation: President, Asia Pacific & Japan Company: Symantec Current Role: Jones is responsible for growing Symantec’s market position across APJ. He leads the overall business throughout aspects including sales, operations, and development. Jones also oversees Symantec’s alliances and channel partner strategies in the concerned region.
Ph o t o g r a p h by FOTO C O R P
Career Graph: Before Symantec, he was general manager and SVP of Oracle Asia Pacific, where he led the sales aspect of Oracle’s technology, systems, middleware, and applications business. Before that, he was SVP-APJ of ESSN at HP. He has also held senior positions for worldwide sales at McDATA and Quantum.
n THE GRILL
Adrian Jones, President, APAC, Symantec, on why the company still remains a titanic force in the fast-changing security world.
You joined Symantec few months after Steve Bennett was fired in March 2014—the company’s second CEO in less than two years. Did you feel threatened? When I joined, I didn’t look at the people but at the big opportunity I was getting with this $7 billion (about Rs 42,000 crore) software company in the fast-growing regions of APAC. People are obviously important, don’t get me wrong. Many executives in our new team—three-months to two-years old—have great, creative ideas that have the potential of a perfect recipe. Symantec has always had the right ingredients (read technologies) in its position as the world’s largest security company. Both new and established players are denting your market share. How will Symantec get back its mojo? I don’t think we ever lost it in the first place. We have more security products than these companies, and we do not educate customers on adopting end-point products, encryption technologies, or DLP. As an end-to-end provider from a data lifecycle perspective, we offer better and effective solutions. We have one of the largest cyber intelligence networks, protecting 200 million end points and monitoring 8.5 million
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n THE GRILL | ADRIAN JONES
We look at partners who help us create value. If they are beyond traditional security channels, we will engage with them. mails and other such traffic. We are driving data analytics to predict cyber security trends and educating customers about the need to be protected in the current threat landscape. As point solutions are being sold, enterprise channels in India have shifted loyalty. Why should they work with you? We have the most extensive portfolio for channels to sell, upsell, and cross-sell to an organization. You can buy FireEye—which can be passive or reactive—but it only reports and does not solve the problem. We ac-
BECAUSE
Better information EQUALS
tually solve customer problems. That’s the big difference. With the new government aggressive on digital India, we are aligning with large enterprises and government departments through channels to drive our business. We look at partner companies that will help us sell more security, more value, and more portfolio. If they are beyond traditional security channels, we will of course engage with them. Symantec’s Q1/2014 revenues rose by two percent. This is in line with technology companies ensuring healthy bottom lines. There was a 50 percent increase in profit earnings, though the guidance still remains flat for the year. But we are being bullish on our business trajectory regarding two major pillars—information management and information security. Big companies are moving to subscription and cloud, hence the change in top lines and bottom lines. Some major companies are struggling as they have altered their pricing models from onpremise to cloud this year. —Yogesh Gupta
“ We encourage partners to chalk out a long-term strategy, each time an organization needs a new security widget. - Andrew Littleproud, President, McAfee
Better business Read the latest interviews from the biggest names of leading IT organisations on their company direction, technology roadmap and channel strategies.
Read more at
www.channelworld.in/interviews
“ We are looking for disruptive partners who want to be a part of a big change in the industry. - Adam Judd, VP, Asia Pacific, Brocade
that a lot “ The common mistake folks make is
of vendor marketing that they think the channel can do ‘marketing’ for them. - Julie Parrish, SVP&CMO, NetApp
n COVER STORY
Follow
20
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
the DATA As more companies store data in the cloud, they’re increasingly crunching the numbers there, too.
By Nancy Gohring
E
VEN THOUGH cloud-based business intelligence has
been around for nearly a decade, a recent trend is driving renewed interest: Companies are generating and storing more data in the cloud. “What I think will happen is people will move the analytics app closer to the data,” says Joao Tapadinhas, a Gartner analyst. “As more data sources move to the cloud, it makes more sense to also adopt cloud BI solutions because that’s where the data is. It’s easier to connect to cloud data using a cloud solution.” Researchers at Gartner say that 2014 may be the tipping point for cloud BI. In each of the last four years, around 30 percent of respondents to a Gartner survey said they’d run their missioncritical BI in the cloud. This year, however, nearly half—45 percent—said they would adopt cloud BI. Historically, cloud BI products have been most appealing to smaller businesses, in part because those are less likely to have an IT department that can manage an on-premises product. However, analysts are starting to see larger companies adopting cloud BI, typically starting with individual groups or departments. Shifting data analytics to the cloud doesn’t come without its challenges, though. For example, it’s unlikely that all corporate data will move to the cloud, particularly in larger enterprises. That means many businesses will have to map data from both cloud and on-premises sources to the BI software, whether that software itself is on-premises or in the cloud. Also, bandwidth constraints may slow down data transfers and can lead to increased costs, if a business must upgrade its connectivity to improve data transfer. Nevertheless, some businesses have already adopted cloud BI services, analysts report anecdotally, though specific figures aren’t available. Many companies that have made the move say that the benefits--including fast time-to-market, no need to OCTOBER 2014
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n COVER STORY “No human I know of can . . . make business decisions based on data that hasn’t been brought together into a single source,” he says. The company needed BI, he says, because “we weren’t able to take data from multiple systems and connect that data logically and view that data in a UI so that we could understand what was going on.” He also wanted to let more people in the organization, like data analysts, assemble reports, rather than limiting report-making to technologists who mainly know how to code and interact with back-end databases. Plus, he needed a
maintain on-premises software, and simplicity of use—outweigh any downsides.
MIXING UP DATA SOURCES Take Millennial Media, which sells a mobile advertising platform. It needed to pull together data from disparate sources, both on site and in the cloud. Around two and a half years ago, Bob Hammond, CTO for Millennial, began looking into BI as a way to marry data from Salesforce with transactional and financial information from in-house systems and then let decision makers at the company visualize it.
system that was flexible so the software would be easy to maintain and it would be easy to create new use cases. Hammond eliminated on-premises BI software options in part because he didn’t want to incur the costs associated with managing and maintaining it. Time required to market was also important. Millennial ended up choosing a cloud BI offering from a San Francisco-based company and had its initial project in place in about three months. Subsequent projects have taken closer to a month to get up and running, Hammond says.
VARADHARAJAN V.S. CTO, Mukesh Infoserve
P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A
Cloud BI Will Set the Pace
Varadharajan V.S., CTO, Mukesh Infoserve, believes that though cloud BI is still nascent and the channel is not yet ready for it, it is the potential paradigm of the future. Being used to traditional ways, channel partners have a natural tendency of seeing anything in vogue as overrated. Chennai-based Mukesh Infoserve, too, thinks that the market of cloud BI hasn’t matured, and partners are not ready to try out such new concepts. 22
INDIAN CHANNELWORLD OCTOBER 2014
Varadharajan V.S., chief technology officer, director-enterprise sales, operations, and services sales, Mukesh Infoserve, says, “The cloud BI market will still take some more time to mature. In future, I am pretty sure that cloud is going to be a major player. While it is still taking time to develop, partners should build cloud capabilities and make themselves ready for being a potential cloud partner.” The company seems to be following its own advice. It is working on applications, based on the concept of cloud BI, which will provide sales and marketing executives with real-time data and other details. “We work a lot in the cloud-based business intelligence space with names like Spotfire and TIBCO, and are also working on a few open source projects. Eventually, some of these pieces might end up being a delivery model through cloud for customers who are interested in look at it,” says Varadharajan. Although channel partners now see their business opportunities being threatened as cloud computing eliminates some of the expertise of installation and setting up a new solution, they are still unsure about adopting it. According to Varadharajan, with an inhouse ERP already in place, not even 10 to 15 percent of the entire channel partner community currently has cloud BI. “I am not sure how cloud BI will gain success at this point of time. One can only try. Vendors should also take efforts to tell partners about the benefits of cloud BI, how to make use of it, and the business value proposition attached to it,” he says.
Partners prefer remaining in their comfort zones and sell traditional solutions. They are not yet ready to experiment at such major levels because they don’t know the real potential of those solutions. “We have expanded to technologies like business intelligence, which is considered a strategic investment area for many large enterprises, but we are trying to work on the cloud model with the help of cloud players and also consult customers by advocating the advantages of migrating to cloud. For the mid-market, cloud BI will take even more time to gain success,” he says. A majority of the partner community hasn’t gone through the cloud enablement process at a larger level, therefore most of them see the cloud as a competition to their regular business. “They need to understand this is a changing business model worldwide, which they would need to soon learn and implement. This will take time as cloud also has its own challenges such as costs and business model,” says Varadharajan. The company is now looking for opportunities to sell bundled solutions to customers, and has also signed multiyear service contracts with several prestigious clients. The solution provider has also developed mobile applications for sales force automation requirements. Currently, cloud is certainly overhyped in the market, but over the years, companies will possibly realize it as a new paradigm, says Varadharajan. —Sejuti Das
Sending on-premises data to the cloud didn’t turn out to be much of a problem for Millennial. Each day the company generates around 10 TB of raw data but transfers around 18 MB of compressed data to the cloud. “We do all the transformation of raw data into only the specific data we want in our systems before we transfer it into the cloud,” he says. Not all businesses do such a great job of managing that data transfer, though. “What we tend to see is it’s rather difficult to keep the amount of data moving between the database and the analytics tool small,” says Gartner’s Tapadinhas. In other words, keeping data transfers small is important in cloud BI to manage both costs and upload/download bandwidth issues. At Millennial, engineers handle the job of extracting data from the various sources and uploading it to the cloud. In addition, two data analysts have now created 500 reports. Around 40 additional people at Millennial have access to those reports and can combine them, drill down into them and create portfolios of reports to share. Building tiers of users, each with different permissions, allows more people in the organization to work with the data—but safely, Hammond says. That means business executives, who aren’t necessarily trained to be data scientists, have some latitude to combine and rework reports but are less likely to make mistakes because they don’t have the permission to, for instance, pull in new data from a back-end database, he says.
SPEED AND FLEXIBILITY DRIVE CLOUD ADOPTION Athenahealth, a provider of Web-based software services to medical practices, had most of the data it wanted to analyze in one place. A year ago, the company strategically set out to find a better way to track the hundreds of customer implementations it might be working on at any given time, says Adam Weinstein, director of core analytics at Athenahealth. “Because we have a cloud-based platform, and we have real-time access to see what’s going on,” he says. The biggest challenge: “Taking the data that we have about what our clients are doing and how they are progressing in
‘Large Ecosystems See Immense Value in Cloud BI’
ANOOP PAI DHUNGAT, CMD, Galaxy Automation
Anoop Pai Dhungat, CMD, Galaxy Automation, says that with the help of its cloud BI solution, the company helps customers derive tangible, actionable insights. Cloud BI will take off in a big way, or so believes Anoop Pai Dhungat, CMD of Mumbai’s Galaxy Automation, which started its journey with BI a couple of years ago. Galaxy has clearly established its premise through an active BI focus. Starting off with IBM Cognos, the company has since ventured into Qlik, a BI solution that it has taken to the next level. Most of Galaxy’s customers in the FMCG, pharma, and automotive sectors have data that is generated in different places. The main challenge for these labor-intensive industries is presenting the data in an integrated, reliable manthe entire implementation process, and turning that data into what we call a nerve center, or a way we can actively monitor exceptions to the process.” Athenahealth wanted a system that would collect information about every point in the implementation lifecycle in order to easily find problem areas. For instance, clients route their fax machines to the Athenahealth system. If no faxes are coming in for a given customer, it could mean the customer hasn’t yet rerouted the fax number. Or,
ner, and bringing it back on-premise. “When our Qlik practice took off well, we had to transition to do things a little differently,” says Dhungat This set Galaxy to get its cloud BI solution rolling to the cloud. The company was in talks with a consulting firm that helped it construct interfaces that would suck data onto the cloud directly from the point of sale. As a case in point, the solution provider applied this on one of its auto clients. In order to streamline the auto company’s data onslaught, Galaxy offered its Qlik Cloud BI solution. The cloud BI solution helped the client in several ways. First, dealers were able to feed in commercial and non-commercial data on a near realtime basis. Dealers also had access to standard data fed in by the company, such as manufacturing costs, and price points. Second, the client company sales managers could access the entire data zone. Third, the granularity of the data given through the solution was so good that the client sales managers got a micro as well as a macro view of activities on a near real-time basis. Combining the power of mobility on the cloud, Galaxy has devised a proprietary mobile app that helps field force move data onto the cloud. There are other add-ons that will be offered to clients. “In a traditional set-up, data gathered helps to dissect an action that has happened. With the advent of cloud, data points give customers tangible, actionable insights,” says Dhungat. —Shantheri Mallaya
for a long-time customer, if the percentage of fax information coming in increases relative to electronic information, that could mean someone mistakenly changed a setting. When Athenahealth started looking for a BI product that could meet its needs, it had a few additional requirements. The vendor “had to be able to move quickly because we had a fairly strict timeline, in the two- to threemonth time frame, to deliver on this project,” Weinstein says. OCTOBER 2014
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n COVER STORY
Cloud BI: A Steady Migration number of vendors marketing directly to end users with IT-avoidance messages, with respect to self-service capabilities, has grown. It is unlikely that large corporates will move entirely to the cloud. How can they utilize cloud BI to further their business interests? This is a kind Bhavish Sood, Research Direcof grey area since the opintor, Gartner, talks about how ion of regulators on this and why enterprises are intopic is largely missing. As creasingly adopting cloud BI. of now, 2014 Web analytics for 24 INDIAN CHANNELWORLD SEPTEMBER digital initiatives, and soWhat have been the major faccial analytics and business tors prompting the adoption of applications that have emcloud BI in India? Users have bedded BI and are partnerbeen frustrated with IT’s infacing, are going to be early ability to deliver new BI use adopters of cloud BI. cases in a timely manner. The Also, the company wanted a product that would meet analytics needs going forward, too. “We wanted to invest in more of a platform, not just a one-time solution,” he says. Weinstein quickly found that some of the large, traditional BI vendors were not going to be able to roll out Athenahealth’s initial project quickly enough. In addition, some were too complicated to use, potentially limiting future projects. Athenahealth considered products from the biggies, and then moved on to the cloud BI offerings, ultimately choosing one. Athenahealth didn’t run into problems with having most of its data stored on-premises and not in a cloud environment. The company has over 50,000 provider clients and tracks more than 100 metrics about each one every day, Weinstein says. That data is pulled from an internal datacenter into a separate internal data warehouse. From there, the relevant data is uploaded to the cloud provider. The data uploads happen automatically, as part of a process that the company has built using tools and scripts, some of which were provided by the cloud provider, he says. “It doesn’t keep me up at night,” Weinstein says of the process. He has to intervene only if there’s an error. “But that is part of our standard monitoring and would be expected as part of a complex data warehouse environment.” 24
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What are the major downsides of moving to cloud BI? Some downsides of migrating to cloud BI include high volumes of varying values needed to be triaged by IT; public cloud being used for non-business-critical information processing; and concern regarding privacy and data security when enterprise data is being integrated with external data sources. “Cloud washing” seems to be a major problem. How is it affecting organizations? How can they tackle it? In the BI world, this happens in a small way. There are hosted versions of BI platforms that do not have multi-tenancy built into their
POSSIBLE PITFALLS Millennial Media, Athenahealth and DMA (see “Early Adopter”), all say that using a cloud BI service definitely meets their needs. But there are a few roadblocks that all companies should look out for when considering cloud BI. One is “cloud washing.” Some vendors say they offer a cloud BI product but in fact may still require software that runs on users’ computers or may offer only cloud storage, says Gartner’s Tapadinhas. In that case, users may not get all the benefits of a true cloud offering, like offloading software maintenance. A cloud BI service might also not be as flexible as an on-premises offering. “Although they are quick to deploy, in some cases cloud BI solutions don’t offer enough customizations or at least not as much as we have now on-premises,” Tapadinhas says. On-premises products might also offer further more possibilities for integration with third party-products, he says. Plus, traditional BI tools have a broader feature set and may make a better option depending on what a company is trying to achieve, says Carsten Bange, founder and CEO of Business Application Research Center, an analyst firm. There’s also the chance that, like any cloud offering, a particular cloud business intelligence service might be slow.
architecture. It is masquerading as a SaaS BI offering. A careful evaluation of user provisioning and vendor virtualization support can uncover these traps. According to you, who are the biggest cloud BI players in the Indian market, and why? Most mega vendors like IBM, SAP, and Oracle have offerings in this space. There are niche vendors like BI:Retail too. Several consulting and system integration firms now have offerings that allow the porting of their analytical IP on the public cloud. This is offered as packaged analytics to clients. —Mayukh Mukherjee
“There are other issues, like performance and latency of cloud solutions,” Tapadinhas says. The transfer speed of data could be slow too. That could impact the reliability of the data analytics if users end up making decisions based on old data because the latest data hasn’t made it to the cloud BI tool. “This could be a real bottleneck,” Bange says. “Upload speeds are often not really good.” One common reason that companies give for passing up cloud BI--concern over privacy and security, given that BI products tend to analyze a company’s most important data--actually isn’t worth worrying about, some experts say. “Most cloud vendors tend to have more strict security processes and follow security certificates that are more advanced than most companies have internally,” Tapadinhas says. Whether a business goes with cloud BI or an on-premises product, Athenahealth’s Weinstein offers valuable advice. Once Athenahealth implemented its cloud BI service and workers were able to quickly access useful information, they were spotting a lot more issues than they used to. The company had to figure out how to respond to the increased number of problems that it found. “Net net it’s a good thing,” Weinstein says. “Just be prepared for what the transparency is going to bring.” n
ON RECORD n
Adaire Fox-Martin,
President, SAP, Asia Pacific Japan, says SMEs in India have a great appetite to be early adopters of technology innovations like cloud. By Yogesh Gupta
SAP’s cloud foray has widened its competition to include the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, and Amazon. What will put you on the top? FOX-MARTIN: The solutions of Workday and Salesforce are point-based for a limited set of functionality in a specific area. Over the last few months, we have been winning most deals against the competition. With regard to niche cloud players, we are competing in the western world, and not in emerging markets or nonEnglish speaking markets, where they don’t have a payroll that’s localized. The incredible part of SAP is the depth of its
solutions across 25 sectors. The breadth of our solutions is a lot broader too. The fact that we are doing cloud at scale and at profit—which is unusual for the market—also keeps us ahead. That’s making quite a bold statement. FOX-MARTIN: We did a reschedule of the company’s profit margin objectives down to 2017 because of the investments needed for the infrastructure to support could transition. The revenue models have changed from onpremise to cloud. Out of the global revenues of 22 billion euros, SAP aims to touch 3.5 billion by 2017.
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n ON RECORD | ADAIRE FOX-MARTIN Our advise to the market was clearly in alignment with our profitable cloud business delivery. This is not the case with other companies in this space. How important is HANA in SAP’s overall cloud story? FOX-MARTIN: HANA is SAP’s fastest moving product and it contributes a significant percentage to our revenues. Something sells only if the solution’s value proposition resonates with customers. Cloud simplifies software consumption, while HANA simplifies the platform, the cost of ownership, and the infrastructure required to run enterprise-wide systems. That cost of ownership, and the ability to demonstrate reliability and speed, means that you don’t need a second platform for analytics.
Any suggestions for channels to embark on a successful cloud journey? FOX-MARTIN: Channels should have a clear point of view regarding the various choices in the SAP world. The decision should be based on knowledge, industry, geography, and what would bring the best outcome for the customer. They have to articulate the value of that viewpoint. In the world of cloud and on-premise, partners need to highlight the differentiation factor of the solution to the customer. The whole partner model is transforming as people are understanding the extent of services around the cloud environment. Effectively understanding the differentiation, and delivering on the value proposition can make or break a partner.
Do you believe SMBs in India will become fast adopters of newer technologies like cloud? FOX-MARTIN: SMBs are growth and employment drivers in the APJ region. Technology innovations like cloud, mobility, and social, have the ability to create requirements for new consumer engagement models. These disruptive technologies are great levellers to help SMBs compete on a global scale. Cloud enables organizations to go live within a few weeks with a shorter time-to-value and better customer engagement through technology advancements from SAP. In a recent survey, 90 percent of SMBs in India agreed that cloud was a value proposition that provided a perfect platform for executing their businesses.
It is great to see the appetite of Indian SMBs to be early adopters of technology innovations like cloud. The cloud is unpredictable with varied pricing and consumption models. Wherein lies the sweet spot for SAP? FOX-MARTIN: With SAP’s portfolio, there is big opportunity in terms of customer requirements—be it HR, procurement, or financial requirements. The breadth and depth of what we offer is what our customers need. Focusing on the public sector—financial services, retail, and telecom—we ensure that we offer the broadest platform to customers and make sure the consumption is as easy and enjoyable as it possibly can be. n
n FAST TRACK
Snapshot
KernelSphere Technologies
Founded: 2011 Headquarters: Hyderabad Branches: Pune Key Executives: Jyoti Singh, Director-Training; T. Krishna Kishore, Director-Marketing Revenue 2013-14: Rs 6 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 3 crore Employees: 40 Principals: EMC, VMware, IBM, Cisco, Juniper Key Business Activities: System integration, datacenter solutions, virtualization, storage solutions, cloud services, enterprise management solutions
We are emerging as an end-to-end systems integrator, says Vinod Kumar, MD, KernelSphere Technologies.
T
HRIVING IN the fiercely
competitive market of Hyderabad was not easy for the three-year-old KernelSphere. “Convincing potential clients to have confidence in a relatively new player— the company has about a year and a half of experience in the solutions operations space—was a major problem,” says Vinod Kumar, managing director, KernelSphere Technologies. To overcome this, the company focused on solutions, resourcing, and training. It gained new clients through adequately educating them on the cost-cutting benefits of deploying a new technology. “There are many clients who still work on old computers. We educate them on how virtual desktops can help improve their environment in the era of enterprise mobility,” says Kumar. 28
However, not all companies were eager to spend on new technologies and place trust on a new company. KernelSphere conducted POCs to demonstrate the value proposition of its solutions. The company also has its own datacenter to cater to its
TECHNOLOGY SPLIT 40%
40%
Services
10%
Security SOURCE: KernelSphere Technologies
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Storage
10%
Networking
Ph o t o g r a p h by FOTO C O R P
Website: www.kernelsphere.com clients’ resource needs through its strong solutions and support teams. “We handhold clients for the first six months, and this sets us apart from competitors,” says Kumar. As a result, the company closed major deals across various verticals at the completion of its first year. Almost 70 percent of its revenues come from the pharma sector, with some of the major names being Dr. Reddy’s, Heterodrugs, Granules, and MSN Labs. More than 40 percent of revenues come from products, solutions, and services in the storage domain. “We place our bets on EMC Isilon becoming a major market mover in the future,” says Kumar. KernelSphere focuses more on SMBs, which today accounts for 85 percent of its clientele. The company is also diversifying and engaging in building its own hybrid cloud. “We will emerge as a cloud consultant, but not compete with Google or Microsoft,” says Kumar. Witnessing a 30 to 50 percent revenue growth each year, KernelSphere plans to open an office in Dubai to cater to client demands in the Middle East. “Internationally, we have successfully completed the hardware replacement and migration of a major business machine client in Afghanistan,” says Kumar. n — Mayukh Mukherjee
n FEATURE | CONSUMERIZATION OF IT ture can support all devices, not just some. Also, reconsider any plan that throws up artificial barriers to using certain devices. Recognize that this isn’t always possible in highly regulated fields, but also know that this is a worthy goal.
FUTURE OF WORK IS LOCATION-AGNOSTIC
TheFuture of Work
Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like. It’s all about four key areas. By Jonathan Hassell
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ITH MICROSOFT
moving into a “mobile first, cloud first” world, an Apple smartwatch coming any day now and everyone else buying into the cloud computing hype, it can be easy to lose sight of what all of these developments do: drive business forward by enabling employees to be more productive. Essentially, it’s about the future of work. But what might that look like? Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like. It’s all about four key areas.
FUTURE OF WORK IS DEVICE-AGNOSTIC In a result-oriented world, what comes out at the end is pretty much the only thing that matters. You hear bosses say, “I don’t care how many hours a day you work; I care about the fact that your work gets done.” Users feel the same way, only it’s about their tools rather than their subordinates. Users can get work done on a variety of devices. They want to use their personal devices, with which they are already familiar. Witness bring you own device (BYOD)
programs. They want to use a tablet when they’re consuming more than creating, they want to use e-mail on a smartphone to stay on top of their inbox between meetings, and they want to be reachable via voice, text, email, video chat and the like on any device, no matter what’s in their hands. In the future, users will have less and less patience at seemingly artificial restrictions on what device can’t support getting some piece of their daily grind accomplished. The takeaway for CIOs? Think hard about how your services and your infrastruc-
Today’s employees are mobile, even if their current jobs and roles don’t require travel. For most knowledge workers and white-collar professionals, work is no longer a nine-to-five engagement. You check email on a weekend. You finish a spreadsheet at night after you put the kids to bed. You comment on documents on Yammer or SharePoint first thing in the morning after colleagues in a different time zone have had a chance to get their hands on the work and iterate on it. It’s unclear whether IT has kept up with this style of work. Sure, you see SSL VPNs in big companies that purport to make it easy to connect from home, but is that really the case? Are you really enabling a frustrationfree experience by giving your employees laptop computers that take three minutes to fully boot up through the security checks and decryption process—and then making them connect through an SSL VPN just so they can download e-mail? Is that truly the best you can do? In the future of work, apps and operating systems will light up scenarios such that, whatever device you use, it’s the functional equivalent to being on the corporate network. We saw some of this with the DirectAccess feature that Microsoft enabled in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but this now
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n FEATURE | CONSUMERIZATION OF IT extends in Windows 8 and beyond. No more user-initiated tunneling. No more clunky laptops trying to boot up. A user will take a computer, unsleep it within a few seconds, and use it like he or she is on the corporate campus. The takeaway for IT? Make the boundary between your network and your users as transparent as you possibly can. Look for ways to securely remove from the user any perception that his or her services are degraded because they’re away from the office. Make your network always on, anywhere, everywhere.
FUTURE OF WORK IS WORKFLOW-DRIVEN Checklists, when consistently followed and applied, reduce the amount of errors and ambiguities in all sorts of high-pressure places,
from airline cockpits to hospital operating rooms. The concept is fairly simple: There are lots of little details to check and aspects to consider, so keeping them all in one place in a consistent way builds a path for success. The pilot or surgeon can truly focus on more important, more valuable tasks like actually flying the plane or removing the tumor, and not obsess over details. The future of work is already moving in this direction, abstracting away all of the IT detail from a user’s perspective and just getting their work in front of them. We already see a lot of this happening with the Office Graph that Microsoft has introduced. The system looks at your colleagues, your mail, and what you’re working on, then does computational
analysis and machine learning to automatically pop up relevant documents and conversations in one place. You don’t have to track where certain pieces of work are located, who has access to those pieces, and where the related conversation thread about that piece of work product is located and archived. The future of work will involve IT, systems, and devices taking care of the details of where things go and how to put them there. It will, in other words, take care of the workflow. The future of work is about elevating the level of work so that the true thoughts, the true development and the true driving forward of business can be done by knowledge workers without making them also fuss with the details of their systems, their networks, and
Mobilizing Your Sales Team is a Challenge
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HERE’S been a lot of talk about all the great benefits companies reap from mobilizing their workforce, especially those in sales and services who work mostly out in the field. Arm these road warriors with smartphones and tablets and awesome mobile apps, and you’ll be paid in kind with higher productivity and happier employees. But not all employees need to be mobilized, right? Tech staffers who report to the office every day don’t sound like prime candidates for iPads and mobile apps, but actually they are, says James Gordon, senior VP-IT at Needham Bank, a 180-employee community bank in Massachusetts. Needham Bank is a MobileIron customer and will be outfitting its five-person IT team with a new mobile app, called MobileIron Insight. On an iPad, an IT admin will be
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able to search for users and devices, tell whether mobile devices are in or out of compliance, troubleshoot issues, assign policies, unlock a device, and perform other mobile device management tasks. Ironically, before MobileIron Insight, Gordon and his team had to use a Windows desktop to manage their MobileIron environment of 115 devices. “Isn’t this a mobile world? Aren’t we mobile professionals?” Gordon says. “It was kind of laughable having to run to a Windowsbased computer.” Needham Bank isn’t alone. A Ponemon Institute study of 400 IT professionals found “agility and preparedness for change” was the most important factor to maintain an effective mobile strategy. However, mobilizing IT presents a big challenge. Let’s say an employee gets locked out of his or her mobile device
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at night or over the weekend. With MobileIron Insight, an admin can unlock the device. Given the dynamics of an always-on mobile culture, the employee can easily send a text, email or phone call, and, more importantly, expect the IT admin to solve the problem right away. “If you’re mobilizing all these processes, aren’t you by default getting extra hours of free work out of people? The answer is, sure,” Gordon says. Gordon plans to confront this by educating users about expectations when they file a help desk ticket. In return, a mobilized IT staff gets some flexibility working remotely. “If their kids have a doctor’s appointment or dance recital, I can say that’s fine but I still expect certain work to get done,” Gordon says.” — Tom Kaneshige
their organizations. At last, freedom from the pesky details of making your IT work. This is what users want. The test of a good IT service organization is how transparent it can be to users—and the future of work will make this goal and objective all the more important.
FUTURE OF WORK IS SERVICE-ORIENTED In IT, you used to get all sorts of kudos and accolades if you were responsible for developing and delivering a service oriented architecture. This meant you built services that could be accessed by other services—an architecture where services could talk to each other, consume whatever the other was offering and, in general, link up in a standards-based way. Come up a few thousand feet with me, though, and look at today’s landscape. We live in a world where most of us don’t necessarily want products. We’re more interested in experiences. We don’t necessarily crave one-time transactions. We’re looking to develop ongoing relationships. For example, we use our smartphones, but what do we do with them? We connect them, via apps, to services on the Internet. Getting things done will move in the same direction. To do work, we’ll need to connect to different services. We’ll expect availability to be constantly uninterrupted. We won’t want our systems to give us information just once; we’ll want our systems to deliver information to us over time. Finally, we’ll want our systems to predict what information will be useful to us, at what point that information would be useful, and then push it to us in a useful, non-intrusive way. n
Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT BIG DATA
BIG DATA: The Common Denominator CMOs now command more of the tech
budget than any other executive outside of the CIO. By Stephanie Overby
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HE LINES between
IT and marketing are blurring in the age of digital marketing. For that reason, it’s more important than ever that CIOs and CMO communicate consistently and effectively. This report was produced to examine this evolving relationship
as it pertains to big data in particular. CIOs and CMOs need to work in collaboration to make the whole big data story work. It’s a sign of the times that CMOs now spend more on technology than any corporate officer outside the CIO’s office. And the biggest driver of that tech
spending is big data, which accounts for 37 percent of the marketing technology budget, according to member-based advisory group CEB. Yet, as with many technology projects, CIOs and CMOs may not always see eye to eye on big data strategy and tactics. According to a recent survey of more than 1,100 senior marketing and IT executives by Accenture, 40 percent of CMOs believe their company’s IT team doesn’t understand the urgency of integrating new data sources into campaigns to address market conditions, while 43 percent of CIOs say marketing requirements and priorities change too often for them to keep up. Yet a strong partnership between IT and marketing is crucial if big data and analytics are to succeed. CMOs may increasingly take the lead on big data projects, but CIOs are the key to implementing, maintaining, and scaling these solutions. “Marketing is the driver of the big data car,” says Todd Merry, CMO of global hospitality and food service company Delaware North, “but it doesn’t go anywhere without IT.” Even more so than with other tech projects, CIOs and CMOs need each other to deliver actionable insights with big data and emerging data collection and analytics tools. “The CIO brings the expertise in determining the quality of the data, as well as the process of acquiring and analyzing it. The CMO brings the expertise of how the data can be used to drive business decisions. The CIO brings the knowledge of what’s possible—or could soon be possible— through technology, while
the CMO pushes IT further by asking the right questions, giving them the right ideas, and pushing them to find a way out,” says Anne Park Hopkins, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s CIO Practice. “This responsibility to leverage data to drive business strategies and business decisions, however, is shared.” We talked to a diverse group of CMOs and CIOs about how they work together to transform marketing with big data and analytics tools, how they ensure that big data is actionable and what they need from each other to get big data right.
DEFINING THE BIG DATA ROLES When it comes to analytics, it’s important that the CIO and the CMO explicitly agree on “who owns the initiatives, the role each leader will take on, and when and how they are expected to work together,” says Chris Curran, chief technologist for PwC’s advisory practice. At biotech company Biogen Idec, IT and marketing are exploring ways in which they can bring together wearable devices, patient relationship management, and big data to understand not just the broad patient population, but each individual patient. “This can help us understand not only how patients treat their diseases differently, but also how they respond to treatment differently— both physiologically and as a function of genetics,” says Greg Meyers, Biogen Idec’s VP-IT. This is meaningful in terms of how we market our products and how we research both current and future therapies.”
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n FOCAL POINT | BIG DATA To do that, both marketing and IT must be clear about what each brings to the table. “In my view, big data/advanced analytics is a three-legged stool,” says Meyers, who also spent a good portion of his career in marketing. The first is math—linear algebra, calculus, discrete math, and statistics. IT and marketing must build such skills jointly. The second leg is computer science. “Many of the technologies now available to us like Hadoop/Map-Reduce and NoSQL databases are inaccessible without some hardcore coding,” says Meyers. “These skills are often already in IT.” The third is the contextual understanding of the business. “While IT is getting better at being embedded into the business for a marketing project, its still the marketing team that is clear on formulating the questions or hypotheses that it is trying to uncover with analytics and what decisions will be made with the answers,” Meyers says. At Delaware North, the IT department makes sure all analytical capabilities work as advertised and provides the infrastructure, tools and technical acumen necessary for marketers to accomplish their big data and analytics goals and objectives, says CIO Kevin Quinlivan. But because it’s such a diverse company—it has its own destination resorts and national parks in addition to TD Garden and the Kennedy Space Center—marketing and IT divide and conquer when it comes to look for big data opportunities. “It’s often the marketers out in the field looking for innovative 32
Big Data Has No Vacancies
A
report by data-driven marketing specialist Infogroup Targeting Solutions found that companies are continuing to ramp up their spending on big data marketing initiatives in 2014 (62 percent of companies expect their big data marketing budgets to increase). However, most of those companies are focusing on technology, not people—57 percent of companies say they do not plan to hire new employees for their data efforts in 2014. That may be a costly error in the long run, says David McRae, president of Infogroup Targeting Solutions. “The survey findings also indicate that marketers are moving from the informationgathering stage to the analytics phase of big data adoption,” McRae says. “But a downturn in hiring could stall big data implementation, as the need for human capital is greatest during analysis and action stages.” “Big data is meaningless without manpower,” he adds. “While it’s exciting that most companies are making bigger investments in big data, marketers should not forget that it takes people to make sense of the information. Hiring before reaching the analytics stage enables companies to become data-led and act effectively on the data.” Of those marketers that are planning to hire for data-related positions this year, 59 percent plan to hire a data analyst or strategist. Infogroup surveyed nearly 400 marketers at the Direct Marketing Association’s DMA 2013 conference in October for its ‘Big Data’s Big Step’ report. It found that 54 percent of marketers have already invested in big data, and 61 percent of those early adopters already report positive ROI. Also, many marketers expect to start seeing a positive ROI in the next year (23 percent) or two (23 percent). Additionally, more than half of the early adopters say they are well into or past the initial data access phases of their initiatives, having conquered the challenges associated with data collection and cleansing. Those early adopters are now focusing on what Infogroup calls the second and third phases of adoption: insights and deployment. Marketers have also shifted perceptions in terms of the barriers they see to big data adoption. In 2012, Infogroup says half of respondents said analyzing or applying data would be their biggest data-related challenge in 2013. Fast-forward a year, and respondents say that budget limitations (35 percent), lack of quality data (27 percent), and limited tools and technology (25 percent) are the biggest challenges they face in using big data to deliver multichannel marketing programs. — Thor Olavsrud
ways to employ big data and analytics while IT continues to innovate the tools at the center of the organization,” says Quinlivan.
STARTING AT THE FINISH Today’s enterprise is swimming in data that could enable marketing transformation, but transforming that data into knowledge has proven difficult. “Businesses need actionable insights across all channels,” says Eddie Short, head of KPMG’s Insights Labs. “These so called ‘moments of truth’ are critical in building customer experience, and that means having the right data and predictive analyt-
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ics to be prepared for key customer interactions that could lead to cross-sell, upsell, or just having a truly engaged conversation with your customer.” The problem is that many organizations put technology before the business problem they’re actually trying to solve. “It’s often easy to get mesmerized by the vastness of big data or capabilities of the tools in the market today. Who hasn’t been captivated by a beautiful bit of data visualization or the distillation of mountains of data,” says Merry of Delaware North. CIOs can be a good check on the business value of
the latest shiny big data tool and force CMOs to put business outcome first. “Marketing is often used to take quick action and get quick results,” says Meyers of Biogen Idec. “Since much of this is still so new, and the technology so immature, its important we focus on the handful of things that really matter and spend the time together to work through an experiment and scale it up to something that can be sustainable for the long-haul.” “CMOs and marketing organizations need to hone their focus on both, the business questions they need answered and the de-
cisions they want to inform about, along with analytics,” says Suzanne Kounkel, principal and leader of Deloitte Consulting’s customer transformation practice. Without that emphasis on the end result, marketers often ask IT to aggregate, store, and host all available customer data, which is both costly and risky. “As a result, data aggregation often becomes a bottleneck due to the volume and velocity of digital data today, and the CMO can inadvertently task the CIO to create an extreme data environment,” Kounkel says. “Big data engineers can pull out swarms of data about a company’s current and future customers, yet not all of this information is valuable for a CMO,” says Samer Forzley, VP-marketing at Pythian, a data engineering company. “Instead of going overboard with the quantity of data, CMOs need to focus on quality, and only seek information that they can transform into sales.”
A CRITICAL LOOK AT BIG DATA VENDORS Marketing’s big data requirements can put a lot of stress on the already overloaded IT organizations. At Delaware North, marketing and IT have been working together for 30 years, but big data has put a particular strain on the relationship. “It’s also introducing a new set of vendors and partners, which is often disrupting existing IT relationships,” says Quinlivan. Marketing can ease some of the CIO’s stress by approaching the big data ecosystem of suppliers in a more focused way. “It’s not uncommon for marketing to want to use many
different agencies and buy many different off-the-shelf tools for different jobs,” says Meyers of Biogen Idec. “We try to show them the value of having inputs in as few places as possible. The more diverse your data sources, the harder it is to extract something useful.” Marketing should take advantage of investments already made by IT. “Small solutions are often incompatible with enterprisewide tools, making it difficult to access insights from elsewhere in the organization,” says KPMG’s Short. “CMOs should not try to recreate the wheel by building their own systems since these tools and capabilities likely already exist and can be provisioned by IT.”
marketing’s needs before they have them. Developing tools and systems that support Western Union’s 700 million transactions a year and delivers a unique customer experience to its hundreds of millions of customers is a challenge. “My team and I are highly engaged with marketing to understand the things they’re trying to do to drive revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce costs,” Thompson says. “We have to stay one step ahead of them in order to stay abreast of the technology.” Thompson’s team takes marketing’s strategic plan and extends it out two or three years so IT can build out the appropriate infrastructure to support
Lee, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s CMO practice. Syncsort CMO Gary Survis sees himself as marketing educator-in-chief for the IT group at the big data solutions company. “Marketing has changed dramatically in the last few years. We are being held accountable for results like never before, for the ability to understand our performance, for diagnostically identifying opportunities, and for making rapid changes to strategy based on analytics,” Survis explains. “A part of my job is to educate the entire organization, including IT, about what this new normal is for marketing.” Share everything, advises Merry of Delaware North— not just what’s coming next
Today’s enterprise is swimming in data that could enable marketing transformation, but transforming that data into knowledge has proven difficult. “Businesses need actionable insights across all channels,” says Eddie Short, head of KPMG’s Insights Labs. IT leaders can guide marketers through this emerging landscape. “The CIO can educate the marketing team on the possible, and how to achieve that possible with data and analytics,” says Korn Ferry’s Hopkins. At Western Union, executive VP-global operations and technology, CIO John “David” Thompson sees his role as one of technology sherpa for CMO Diane Scott and her marketing team. “We see them bump up against a challenge and we try to dig in and help them solve it,” Thompson says. “We’re their technology consultants.”
OPENING UP In order to provide that guidance, Thompson and his team must anticipate
big data efforts and bring in new capabilities to bear. CMOs can better position the IT group to support big data plans by being open. “My counterparts in IT truly want one thing from me above all else: transparency,” says Hope Neiman, Chief Marketing Officer of Tillster. “The more both teams can see the truth in the situation, understand what we’re doing and grasp the impact that each team brings to the client, the more they want to collaborate for a common goal.” “CMOs can connect the dots for CIOs, making clear how new business initiatives are linked with enterprise and big data knowledge around customer experience and behaviors,” says Katherine
month but what’s coming next year. “I let my CIO know what we are trying to achieve, why, and what the desired outcome and KPIs are,” Merry says. “And share the success, make sure that our leaders know that anything we as marketing achieve in this area couldn’t have been done without IT.” “To become a more effective partner with the marketing team, the CIO should regularly meet the CMO to understand the analytics issues that marketing is dealing with, and offer practical ways to address these—not just the technology aspect but also from a process optimization perspective,” advises Jonathan Block, VPtechnology at B2B advisory firm SiriusDecisions. n
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n PLAINSPEAK
YOGESH GUPTA
Become the Next Alibaba The 18th century tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves , and the Internet success of Alibaba in the 21st century have a conjoined thread—they are both fascinating , thrilling, and magical.
Yogesh Gupta is executive editor of ChannelWorld. He is a computer engineer. You can contact him at yogesh_ gupta@idgindia.com 34
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HEN JACK Ma, founder, Alibaba, said Open
Sesame at Wall Street, little did he know that he would strike gold in a big way. The Wall Street debut of the e-commerce giant’s $ 21.8 billion (about Rs 132,000 crore) IPO was a blockbuster. So big was its impact that it made Ma Asia’s second richest man, and dispelled the myth of a chinese company rocking US-born internet conglomerates. Few believed that this company, born in an apartment in Hangzhou, China a few decades ago, could emerge as the mover and shaker of the tech world. The company’s name and philosophy bears resemblance to the legendary tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Consider this: The shares of Ma’s Alibaba soared 40 percent on day one of the IPO listing. The number 40—a bizzare coincidence! The Arabian Nights story of the 18th century and the Internet success of the 21st century have a conjoined thread—they are both fascinating , thrilling, and magical. And, of course, both lead to a big fortune. In 1999, while addressing his employees, Ma emphasized on hard work— stressing on pushing the limits more than Americans—and on competing globally, not just within China. He believed that his Internet dream would come true one day; at a time when the industry expected the Internet bubble to burst anytime. Today, 15 years later, more than one PEs/VCs and large corporates are investing in e-commerce startups (including Indian B2C companies). What’s more, IoT (Internet of Things) has just surfaced as the next big wave. For technology providers too, the competition landscape has widened with cloud computing. Your next-door competitor might not be an immediate threat but a global or national cloud player might take your next-door customer.
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After quitting his university teaching job, Ma started Alibaba—initially for small businesses to buy and sell their goods online. Ma’s employees worked hard to fulfil his dream to become a global player to be listed on the Wall Street. But how did he get here? Ma believed in the synergy between power of the Internet and growth of SMBs in the years to come. And Jack infused this ambitious vision in his team and in the stakeholders of the company. So, ask yourself. As a modern technology company: Do you anticipate enterprise technology will be consumed in the same manner as it was a year ago? Do you believe storage-on-demand or services-on-cloud—as the cloud becomes mainstream—will be a reality? Have you injected the ‘software+services’ model in your organizations than the erstwhile ‘hardware-push’ sale? As a technology provider, if you have moved in the direction of technology trends and business realities, there is a goldmine at the end of the tunnel. It’s been fairytale journey that was worth the wait for Ma. And he got there by infusing investor trust to create a sustainable company. Share prices might fall and rise and fall. But he has taken home a real treasure. Just like Ali Baba’s faithful slave-girl in the folk tale foiled the plot of the forty thieves to keep the secret of the treasure. So, encourage the Alibabas in your company and shout Open Sesame to strike a big fortune! n
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