CIO December 15, 2014 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

SOLD ON DIGITAL MARKETING

Marico's IT-led digital marketing push. 13 LOCK, STOCK, AND BARREL

www.cio.in

What moving wholesale to the public cloud means. 18 BRAND MOBILITY

At TVS Motor Company, mobility is brand identity. 17 HAS THE CDO ARRIVED?

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B U S I N E SS T EC H N O LO G Y L E A D E R S H I P

Three Indian CIOs debate the relevance of the role. 82

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2015

Tech-tonic SHIFT

Changes in the business environment and technology will make 2015 an interesting year. Here's how to prepare. 32

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PLUS

CIO Year Ahead 2015

The highlights of one of the biggest events of the year, where IT's roadmap for 2015 is decided.. 68 12/19/2014 7:08:01 PM

SYSTEM X

JOINS LENOVO.

A BRAND-NEW DAY FOR DATA CENTER INNOVATION. THE POWER OF SYNERGY

The defining moment for data centers is now. As System x® joins forces with Lenovo, it opens up a world of possibilities for businesses to build their future. System x, featuring Intel® Xeon® processors, is a broad portfolio of data center solutions ranked #1 for reliability1, support and customer satisfaction2. With expertise from over thirty years in the x86 industry, we consistently deliver innovations for businesses like yours helping you read the marketplace better and accelerate growth. CREATING TOMORROW’S DATA CENTER

System x in your data center lets you securely handle the simplest to the most complex workloads, make the most of cloud and analytics, and fulfill opportunities. With our heritage and newly gained momentum, we are set to give you the tools to shape your tomorrow.

Lenovo and System x create greater value: Read the TBR review at ibm.com/futureofx/in

ITIC 2014 - 2015 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report, May 2014. System x Servers ranked #1 in 1Q14 TBR Customer Satisfaction Survey. © Lenovo 2014. All rights reserved. Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, For Those Who Do and System x are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as property of others.

1 2

VOLUME 10, NO. 2

December 15, 2014 2015 Tech-tonic Shift

Start

From the Editor in Chief 2 Trending 3 Numbers You Need 4 Quick Fix 6 Career Path 8 News Scan 10 World View 12

Grow

If the past year is anything to go by, the new year will bring in change and disruption at a faster pace than ever. Here’s how to prepare. COVER STORY

I N N OVAT I O N & B U S I N E S S VA LU E

BY TEAM CIO

Marico sold on digital marketing 13 London college flies high with aerial robots 14 Mobility takes TVS’ brand image forward 15 Naukri.com employs IT to help hire right 16 Humility brings out the best in a leader 17

YEAR AHEAD 2015 Highlights from one

of the biggest event of the year.

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COVER DESIGN BY VIKAS KAPOOR AND UNNIKRISHNAN A.V.

P E E R A DV I C E

Do we need CDOs? 82 How to know what to look for 85 Why CIOs should play two roles 86 How YES BANK leverages IT to stay agile 87

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How ASSG embraced the public cloud 18 Five learnings CIOs and VCs can exchange 20 NASA leases airfield to tech giant 21 Robots fight drug smuggling underwater 21 Want to lure talent? Write job postings 26 Tribulations of a digital transition 27 Relearn your security lessons 30

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Astronauts stroll in space to repair robotic systems 88

www.cio.in

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12/20/2014 2:55:51 PM

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Creative Clutter start

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk? —Albert Einstein

I was at the soft launch of a vehicle manufacturer’s newest plant the other day. As I was being taken around I saw the almost standard exhortations for keeping the plant accident free, maintaining discipline, and urging tidiness. What did surprise me was that the signs continued even at the executive workstations, away from the shopfloor; pithy slogans that asked for power consumption to be cut, and desks to be kept tidy! That last bit was both amusing and embarrassing—I haven’t been known to ever keep a clutter-free desk or workbench. All our lives (and certainly mine), we’ve been told to get “organized”, as if it were a prerequisite for success in life. In almost similar terms, being messy often attracts universal condemnation. So it was with a lot of interest I recently went over research that observes that that a cluttered desk isn’t necessarily a vice, and might even be a virtue! In a study covered in the journal Psychological Science, Dr. Kathleen Vohs, PhD, of the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, found that working in a tidy room encourages people to do socially responsible, normatively “good” things like eat healthfully and give to charity. But working in a messy room seems to help them try new things, take more risk and come up with creative ideas. “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,” Dr Vohs observes. “Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe,” she adds. This might also have to do with the mental frameworks that a more disciplined environment imposes. The researchers are continuing to investigate whether these effects might even transfer to a virtual environment: like the Internet. Preliminary findings suggest that the tidiness of a webpage predicts the same kind of behaviors. Not cleaning out my desk has got to be one of my resolutions for the new year! Here’s wishing you a delightfully messy 2015, full of creative solutions and happiness.

PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO

Louis D’Mello

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR DEPUTY EDITOR FEATURES EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITORS PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS VIDEO EDITORS LEAD DESIGNERS SENIOR DESIGNERS TRAINEE JOURNALISTS

Vijay Ramachandran Yogesh Gupta Sunil Shah Shardha Subramanian Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Aritra Sarkhel, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao Kshitish B.S., Vasu N. Arjun Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Unnikrishnan A.V., Laaljith C.K. Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Sejuti Das Vaishnavi Desai

SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT SALES GM MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER SALES MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS MANAGER SALES SUPPORT SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES MARKETING ASSOCIATE LEAD DESIGNER MANAGEMENT TRAINEES

Sudhir Kamath Sudhir Argula Siddharth Singh Jaideep M. Sakshee Bagri Nadira Hyder Arjun Punchappady, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Cleanne Serrao, Margaret DCosta Varsh Shetty Jithesh C.C. Aditya Sawant, Bhavya Mishra, Brijesh Saxena, Chitiz Gupta, Deepali Patel, Deepinder Singh, Eshant Oguri, Mayur Shah, R. Venkat Raman

OPERATIONS VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS FINANCIAL CONTROLLER CIO SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION MANAGER OPERATIONS EA TO THE CEO MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL ASSISTANT MGR. ACCOUNTS

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

ADVERTISER INDEX Lenovo (India) Pvt. Ltd.,

IFC

Canon India Pvt Ltd

22 - 25

Cisco Systems India Pvt. Ltd

IBC &11

Cyberoam Technologies Pvt. Ltd

HP IPG

Ricoh India Ltd

Inno

SAS Institute (India) Pvt Ltd

Schneider Electric IT Business India Pvt Ltd. Starcom of Denuo Ltd Taiwan Branch-Delta Vodafone India Ltd ( Corp) WatchGuard Technolgoies Inc

19 7 Insert 28 & 29

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

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027. Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

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| www.cio.in

12/20/2014 2:47:34 PM

start TRENDING

Japanese Robots Care for the Aged

without prints to ,

This AI System Codes Like You The mission of Google’s DeepMind Technologies startup is to solve

intelligence. Now, researchers there have developed an artificial intelligence system that can mimic some of the brain’s memory skills and even program like a human. The researchers developed a kind of neural network that can use external memory, allowing it to learn and perform tasks based on stored data. Neural networks are interconnected computational “neurons.” While conventional neural networks have lacked readable and writeable memory, they have been used in machine-learning and pattern-recognition applications such as computer vision and speech recognition. The Neural Turing Machine (NTM) that DeepMind researchers have been working on, combines a neural network controller with a memory bank, giving it the ability to learn to store and retrieve information. The system’s name refers to computer pioneer Alan Turing’s formulation of computers as machines having working memory for storage and retrieval of data. The researchers put the NTM through a series of tests including tasks such as copying and sorting blocks of data. Compared to a conventional neural net, the NTM was able to learn faster and copy longer data sequences with fewer errors. They found that its approach to the problem was comparable to that of a human programmer working on a low-level programming language. The NTM “can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples,” DeepMind’s Alex Graves, Greg Wayne, and Ivo Danihelka wrote in a research paper available on the arXiv repository. –By Tim Hornyak

If you’re growing old in Japan, chances are you’ll have some form of robotic help in the future. The Japanese government is continuing to push robots and robotic services as a solution for the country’s shrinking and aging population. Care for seniors took a prominent spot at the Japan Robot Week trade show in Tokyo, where Osaka startup RT Works has been showing off a prototype connected walker. The Encore Smart looks a bit like a shopping cart, has handlebars and brakes above its cargo basket. It has six-axis motion sensors that can automatically trigger motors to help push it up an incline or brakes to slow it down on a decline. The walker’s communication capabilities can also help caregivers monitor them. A GPS unit and a voice guidance function for getting around, can relay location data via linked computers so caregivers can see where users are and how far they’ve walked on a given day. If the walker goes outside of a predefined zone, it will send an alert to caregivers via smartphone. Another device is talking robotic dolls to keep elderly people company, devices that can automatically suction waste from bedridden patients and others that keep a watchful eye over patients with dementia. One of the latter is a sensor unit called Owlsight from Tokyo startup Ideaquest. It’s a long cylinder equipped with a camera and a class 1 near-infrared laser that shines thousands of beams over the bed of a patient. Infrared sensors detect patients’ movements and neural network algorithms can interpret them. If the system determines that a patient is leaving the bed or falling off, it alerts caregivers. Owlsight can also send a message to nurses when it detects that a patient’s breathing has stopped. —By Tim Hornyak

ted,

I M A G E S O U R C E : T H I N K S TO C K . C O M

Road,

www.cio.in

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12/19/2014 4:33:10 PM

India Inc: IT Means Business start

A global study reveals that Indian organizations are taking their IT departments more seriously than their western counterparts. BY I S H A N B H AT TAC H A RYA

The role of IT departments in Indian oranizations is

gradually becoming more business-centric. Even though India is yet to match up to the digitization standards of the US, but when it comes to adopting business roles, our IT leaders are way ahead of other countries. A global study done by CA Technologies reveals that 71 percent of India’s top management considers IT to be fundamental to the organization’s success or very strategically important, compared to 51 percent in the US. The signifance of the IT department in India becomes more visible as 92 percent of top IT executives report to the CEO or the senior-most officer in the organization. The changing role of IT is highlighted by the revelation that 90 percent of Indian IT staff firmly believes in big changes in the role of the IT department happening in the next five years. This mindset however, is missing in the US IT staff, as only 42 percent of them feel that their roles will change and become more business-centric. With IT departments becoming more customer-facing, their contribution in businesses is gradually increasing. As much as 52 percent of Indian IT leaders today perceive

their department as a service broker or consultant to LOBs, rather than solely a provider of IT services and solutions. As the role of IT continues to change, its budget also gets more focused on new ideas and innovations. Indian IT leaders are investing 63 percent of their IT budget in delivering new services and products, and in the next three years, this spending is expected to grow by 3 percent, the CA Technologies study reveals. The study also found that in India, 55 percent of the IT spend today is occuring outside of the IT department—and the number is only expected to grow. However, the changing role of IT does not make IT leaders shift their focus. The survey reveals that 49 percent of Indian IT leaders think their primary role is still to keep the company’s critical data secure and 45 percent feel that maintaining the organization’s infrastructure and applications is their chief job.

Ishan Bhattacharya is trainee journalist. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

In the New League

Indian CIOs Love Change

Indian IT leaders are way ahead of their US counterparts when it comes to accepting change and adopting to the new roles coming their way .

Businesses view Indian CIOs as partners.

Firms that believe that big changes will happen in the IT dept.

Of India’s top management considers IT to be fundamental to the organization’s success.

India US

90% 42%

Top management considers IT to be strategically important 71%

India 51%

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71 percent

52 percent

Of Indian IT leaders today perceive their department as a service broker or consultant to LOBs.

| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 4:33:10 PM

quiFIX ck Drive your Suitcase Around

start

The X-mobility motorized wheel concept can be controlled by mobile devices.

ure, your suitcase may have wheels, but can it be driven around? At Japan’s Ceatec 2014 tech expo, automotive components maker Denso demonstarted an in-wheel motor system concept that can move relatively lighter loads around at the touch of a smartphone or tablet. The X-mobility system consists of a platform equipped with either three or four wheels depending on the setup. Each of the spherical wheels contains a motor with a battery, a decelerator, a controller, sensors, and a bluetooth communications module. The device can rotate in place as its wheels use infrared sensors to communicate their position to one another. A smartphone and a tablet app called X-mobi can control the wheeled system, which can carry up to 15 kilograms. – Tim Hornyak

For more articles, see: www.cio.in/article

WORTH READING Scaling Up: How to Build a Meaningful Business BOOK

By Verne Harnish Harnish and his co-authors share practical techniques to help entrepreneurs grow an industry and actually have fun. The book includes a series of new One-Page tools like the famous Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, which more than 40,000 firms have used. Amazon.in Rs 1,514

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How to Ace Your Board of Directors Presentation ALWAYS remember to describe your goal early in your presentation. This helps create a foundation of understanding for your conversation with the board of directors. Focus your updates, funding requests, and other topics through the lens of how they will benefit the end user, customer, or the business, or how they will affect the budget. Keep your PowerPoint slides minimal and to the point. The board will stay engaged when you connect your messages to concepts they can relate to and understand. SOMETIMES it may be helpful to do some advance work, reaching out to board members who aren’t tech-savvy before the meeting. Tell them what you’ll be discussing and what impact it may have on the business. This gives them time to ask questions in private and alert you to any concerns about your idea ahead of time. Then, in your formal presentation, you may choose to involve those same people in your presentation. This shows that you are confident and pay attention to detail, and it builds goodwill. NEVER be so comfortable in how much you know that you forget to engage your audience. More than 90 percent of your impact as a presenter is based on the effectiveness of your voice tone and body language, including eye contact. Reading slides or notes to the board implies a lack of confidence. If there is something distracting about your communication style, your board will never hear what you’re saying. Do a practice run in front of family, friends or (even better) a video camera.

Karlyn Lothery is president of Lothery and Associates, a strategic communications firm. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 4:33:12 PM

The power behind competitiveness

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careerPATH

Learn the Digital Lingo start

A one-day class promises to teach digital literacy and break down the ‘language barrier’ between IT and business executives. BY S H A R O N F LO R E N T I N E

When executives and IT teams aren’t speaking the same language, projects fail, time and money is wasted, and collaboration and productivity suffers. But Decoded is looking to help overcome the ‘language barrier’ and enhance collaboration between IT teams and C-level executives through one-day digital literacy classes.

CIOs, CFOs, CEOs are all trying to decipher the digital world, without an understanding of the vocabulary used by IT and developers. —LIZ LUKAS, CEO, DECODED

Overcoming the Tech Language Barrier Having at least a working knowledge of the digital world, data, and code is now an essential skill for C-level executives, says Decoded CEO Liz Lukas. These executives fail to grasp the critical concepts and knowledge of the new digital era, and don’t know where to go to attain this knowledge, she says. “One of our clients said, ‘I’m one sentence away from being found out in a meeting. I have no idea what I’m talking about, and if my teams knew how clueless I was, it would be a big problem,’” Lukas says. “There are two main market issues Decoded addresses: The shift to the digital space by everything

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from commerce to applications to communications, and the lack of available time for learning the insand-outs of this new digital reality,” Lukas says.

Instant Applications To conquer these challenges and empower both C-level executives and their IT teams, three core one-day workshops bridge the gap and overcome the language barrier, Lukas says. Code_in a Day is an introduction to code designed to go under the hood and show executives how developers build and power the digital world, Lukas says. This workshop, she says, delves into the processes and complexities developers face and gives a deeper understanding of how developers work.

Data_in a Day is focused on demystifying big data, Lukas says, and allows executives to access data, derive insights and then present that data in a visual way. Future_Technologies in a Day discusses the intersection of code, data, and the Internet of Things, Lukas says. Executives learn how opensource code, data, and hardware are combined to create technology.

Beyond Advertising and Marketing “The advertising and marketing space was one of the pioneers in the digital space, so it made sense to start there,” she says. “But this is a ubiquitous issue. CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, COOs are all trying to decipher the digital world and are rethinking their businesses, but without an understanding of the vocabulary used by IT and developers, and without knowing how IT and digital concepts and practices fit together within the business,” she says. Without a lot of time to attend courses or master these topics on their own, many C-level execs were faking it, she says. “What these programs do is give executives the foundation for better strategic conversations. If they have a better understanding of how coding and data processes work, realistic expectations of their speed and power, then they have a context in which to make business decisions,” Lukas says. Sharon Florentine covers IT careers and datacenter topics.

| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 4:33:12 PM

www.cyberoam.com

Turning CIO into the next-generation catalyst Cyberoam NGFWs enable enterprise CIOs harness IT & network transformation with insights beyond security, helping them innovate, monetize and differentiate.

Key business benefits of Cyberoam NGFWs to CIOs: • Next-generation threat protection (also secures critical infrastructure / SCADA networks)

• Wirespeed gigabit performance • Visibility into BYOD and Virtual environments • Easy compliance • On-appliance Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Also available through

NICSI / NIC

Cyberoam Product Line : Network security appliances (Next-Generation Firewalls/UTMs)

Centralized Management (Hardware & Virtual)

Centralized Reporting

news scan

start 10

Mozilla Tries Virtual Reality Web Development

Mozilla launched a virtual reality Website in hopes of inspiring others to build their own. Featuring demos including a fly-through of coastal British Columbia and a 360-degree view of the Arctic, MozVR.com is intended to offer a “native VR” Web experience, Mozilla technologists said in a statement. Mozilla will use the site to share these experiences, offer resources, and showcase work from developers in the VR Web community. Using the site requires a VRenabled build of Firefox. —InfoWorld (US)

Indian IT Firm to Build UK Smart City

Indian IT giant Tech Mahindra announced that it has partnered with The Open University and Milton Keynes Council in a bid to help turn the urban area into a smart city. The new partnership between the three organizations will focus on developing smart city technologies across energy, transport, electric vehicles, connected ecosystems, and IoT. —Techworld.com

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DDOS Attacks of 2015 to Come from India

India, Vietnam, and Indonesia have a large number of insecure smartphones coming online, making them the big botnet sources for next year’s distributed denial of service attacks, according to a report released by Black Lotus Communications, a DDOS mitigation vendor. “They have a lot of young people just getting their smartphones, specifically Android smartphones,” said Frank Ip, the company’s VP-Business Development. These new users are more susceptible to phishing, and are less aware of how to secure their devices, he said. A smartphone combined with wireless networks in extremely large numbers can be a significant threat. —CSO (US)

IBM Taps Twitter’s Data to Drive Business Insights

IBM and Twitter proclaim that they will “change the way business decisions are made” by integrating Twitter data into IBM analytics tools, developing mission-critical apps for enterprises and training 10,000 outside consultants to create other custom apps. Twitter and IBM want to bring structure and context to the 500 million tweets that are posted every day. Although most companies still base their business decisions on an incredibly small set of data, the companies are confident that tweets deserve to play a much greater role. Twitter said many enterprises have shown a growing interest in its data and that more deals will be coming soon. —CIO (US)

Deutsche Bank to Create Digital Innovation Labs

Deutsche Bank is one of many banks that are shifting their focus to digitization in the face of new competition. Deutsche Bank is preparing to launch a series of ‘innovation labs’ alongside IBM, Microsoft, and Indian outsourcing firm HCL, in a bid to improve its digital banking services and fend off competiton from tech firms. The German lender is expected to set up labs in Berlin, London and Palo Alto, with the aim of partnering with local startups, according to sources close to the Wall Street Journal. The bank also intends to send staff from across all business units to the labs in order to provide insights on how to enhance customer experience and improve internal processes. —Computerworld UK

Intel Doubles Capacity of its Datacenter SSD

Intel announced upgrades to its Solid-State Drive DC S3500 Series of products that now offer up to 1.6 TB of capacity, double of what the previous generation had. Intel also announced it has boosted the capacity of its M.2 form factor flash expansion card so that it can be used as a mass storage device and not simply a client boot drive. Intel added to the M.2 card the same features that it had previously only offered in larger form factor SSDs, such as hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption and power loss protection. The M.2 card could also be used as mass storage for digital signage and customerfacing devices such as digital slot machines. —Computerworld US

HP and Michael Bastian Enter Wearables with a Watch

HP and Michael Bastian are betting that style trumps substance for their first smartwatch collaboration. The MB Chronowing is a 44mm stainless steel watch for men. It has a monochrome LCD display, but with a metallic ring in one corner that encircles a small clock face. The rest of the screen is dedicated to information from a paired iPhone or Android phone, while indicators for battery and connectivity sit outside the right edge of the screen. —PC World (US)

| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 4:33:12 PM

world Fresh Ideas from Around the Globe

vıew

start

Computer Model Predicts Where Ebola is Most Likely to Hit Next

L O N D O N A scientist has visualized which countries are most susceptible to an Ebola outbreak using Wolfram technologies. Dr. Marco Thiel from Aberdeen University combined publicly available data including population and population density, which is built into Wolfram Mathematica’s databases, with transport networks to calculate which countries are most at risk of an Ebola outbreak. Thiel was able to represent the airport where the first outbreak occurred, a layer around this represented all the airports that could be reached with one connection flight and the next to be infected. Flight connection patterns through the model revealed that some European countries are more susceptible than others because of their flight paths. www.Techworld.com

France is the Wifi Capital of the World

FRANCE There will be 47.7 million public wifi hotspots

deployed worldwide by the end of 2014, with France leading the way, according to research. The research from analyst Maravedis Rethink shows that over the next four years, global hotspot numbers will grow to over 340 million, nearly one wifi hotspot for every 20 people on earth by 2018. This compares to one wifi hotspot for every 150 people today. Today, France has the most hotspots in total, followed by the US and the UK. The research says wifi will be available on 60 percent of planes and 11 percent of trains by 2018. This compares to only 16 percent of planes and three percent of trains now. Computerworld UK

Phone is the Key

F R A M I N G H A M Hilton and Starwood guests can soon unlock their rooms via a smartphone app. Starwood has upgraded 30,000 room locks in nearly 150 hotels so they can be unlocked with the new app. Hilton is planning to enable guests to do the same thing in its 600,000 rooms next year. The mobile app will allow guests access to various areas of each property that require a room key, such as the executive floors, elevators, and parking facilities, among others. www.computerworld.com

App That Translates and Eases Tour

TOKYO NTT DoCoMo wants travelers to Japan to say more than just “sayonara” when they hear Japanese. The

mobile carrier is introducing an app that can instantly translate spoken Japanese into English and other languages and vice versa. The app comes with a list of more than 700 phrases such as “what dishes are recommended?” to provide more situation-specific translation help. Users can also save their favorite translations to play them whenever the need arises. It’s meant to give users a more tailored and accurate experience than bare-bones translation apps, which can be iffy at the best of times when it comes to accurate translation. IDG News Service

–Compiled by IDG News Service from CIO magazine affiliates worldwide

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| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 4:33:13 PM

grow innovation and business value

Sold On Digital Marketing

Marico’s CIO is joining hands with marketing folks to enhance the company’s digital marketing initiatives. By Madhav Mohan

With rapid explosion of the Internet and social media, the stage is set for a digital feat. Chef Vikas Khanna doling out some healthy recipes on YouTube with Marico’s Saffola Masala Oats, promises the customers to be ‘The Fit Foodie’. These interactive campaigns strike an immediate connect with the audience. This is what you call direct customer engagement or digital marketing in real time. This is the new challenge and opportunity as customers are spending more time on the Internet and the number is growing at 20 percent. As long as technology continues to advance, digital marketing will evolve. Having said that, the more the people see the content, better the familiarity with the brand helping the businesses to develop trust and rapport with the audience. At the same time, it helps businesses to generate ROI, experience business growth and sustain cut throat competition in this digital age. It is now more important than ever to tap into demographic-specific, digital content. “To reach out to the next generation and tune into large size of the population, digital marketing is

•••••••••••••  36% of Indian CISOs say their security spending will increase by 11-30%, compared to only 20% of global CISOs. GISS 2015 •••••••••••••

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crunch

Cordoning Off Mobile Initiatives

grow

Indian CISOs have launched the following initiatives to

important,” says Girish Rao, head-IT and address mobile security risks. Finally, they seem to be taking Business Analytics at Marico. MDM seriously as it’s in the third place. Rao says that traditional marketing channels suffer from a lag as there’s no instantaMobile security strategy 67% neous communication. Strong authentication on devices 56% A major share of the credit for the digitizaMobile device-management (MDM)/mobile-access management (MAM) software 54% tion goes to the rapid growth of smartphones and tablets. These smart devices have taken Device encryption 50% the digital wave to the next level. “As consumProtection of corporate e-mail and calendaring on employee- and user-owned devices 48% ers are becoming IT savvy and mobility is getting more penetration, the only way to Ban of user-owned devices in the workplace 41% reach out to the consumers is in the social Internal app store for employee mobile devices 41% and digital way,” says Rao. SOURCE: GISS 2015 Social media is a great ambassador to the cause of digital marketing, says Rao. “Digital media is everywhere and consumers can access the information from anywhere. It helps you to find out what is working and what isn’t in real time.” Having a coordinated customer experience will give “Digital insights into the user’s buying marketing patterns and online behavior. The data can be mined further is important A new arena for flying the next generation of aerial robots or drones is to be confor improved customer-specific to reach out structed at Imperial College London. strategies. A consolidated view to the next The robots have a range of potential of customer preferences and applications, including search and rescue, generation.” expectations across all chanwildlife conservation and inspection and nels–web, social media, point of —Girish Rao, Head-IT and repair of industrial facilities, particularly in sale, and so on is important to Business Analytics, Marico hazardous environments. Drones are a welldrive better results. established tool of warfare. In digital marketing, he says his role is to ensure IT takes these Professor Alice Gast, president of Impeinitiatives: Getting web strategy, mobility, technicalities from the rial College London, said: “Aerial robotics partners and ensure its execution, and ensure collaboration with have a tremendous range of applications, and Imperial is well-equipped to play a pivmarketing agencies, and see that there are no loose ends left. otal role in this nascent industry. It will also But the ultimate goal and the motive behind these strategies be one of only a handful of facilities in the is to drive traffic. To improve the online business and to gain betworld that will be able to test hybrid aerial ter visibility than their competitors, Marico has laser focus on robots that can fly and then dive into water, Search Engine Optimization. Rao says, “Functionality of the webwhich could be beneficial in the future for site, social media marketing, video marketing, website design are search and rescue missions. the key elements playing an important role in digital marketing.” Imperial aims to capitalize on its position Digital era has arrived and is here to stay. Better traffic and as one of the UK’s leading centers for aerial engagement with the consumer are some of the many advanrobotics research with the development of a tages that could be looked at. Marico definitely has its strategies new state-of-the-art laboratory at its South Kensington campus. in place and digital lessons to pass on.

UK College Builds Flying Robots Lab

Send feedback to madhav_mohan@idgindia.com

—Antony Savvas

•••••••••••• 80% of Indian CISOs say their organizations’ security spending is allocated according to its most profitable lines of business. GISS 2015•••••••••••••

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[Q+A]

Brand Mobility

T.G. Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motor Company, overhauled his shop floor operations using two technologies—M2M and mobility. He elucidates how an unaccustomed approach to technology helped him elevate the company’s brand image. BY R A D H I K A N A L L AYA M A N D S H W E TA R AO Mobility is typically used to enable the field force or as a medium to connect with customers. How has TVS used this technology in its manufacturing facility? On the manufacturing side, we have utilized mobility in various ways. We use mobility and M2M solutions extensively on the automation front in our shop floors. It helps us to improve productivity and enhance production.

The use of mobility and M2M directly influenced the company’s brand essence. Quality control is another key area where we looked at using mobility. In a shop floor, there are a lot of process parameters that need to be captured and controlled so that we react before the problem occurs or at least immediately after the problem occurs. We cannot afford to wait and waste time, which leads to aggregation of cost. At the same time, we also cannot compromise on quality. Have you been able to extend the benefits beyond the walls of a shop floor?

We have used these technologies to improve traceability, which has

assumed a lot of importance in the automobile sector. For instance, imagine a scenario where we have to recall a few vehicles in the market in which we have identified a problem. How do we do that? We can’t call back all the thousands or even lakhs of vehicles from that particular batch which hit the market. We should be able to call back those hundred vehicles that have probably gone defective. Automation using mobility and M2M made this possible for us. The cost saving is quite substantial too. How is this different from the earlier scenario when the pro-

cesses were largely manual?

We used to take long sheets, go over each and every parameter, aggregate the values and manually prepare the process control chart. Every such chart has an upper and lower control limit. So we had to ensure that each value adheres to these two limits. Otherwise we would face quality and cost issues. When it’s manually done, the reaction time is very long. Even if a problem is identified, rectification sometimes used to take as long as 24 hours. So the items produced during those 24 hours would have quality problems. So we used to have much stronger and stringent quality parameters. That increased the cost as well. The reaction time now is much faster. It has been brought down to 1-2 hours. That helped us in controlling the cost and ensuring quality in a more effective way. What has been the business ROI of these initiatives?

It’s quite encouraging. Some of the problems are addressed much faster. Our PDCA (plan-do-check-act) cycle has improved a lot. It has resulted in significant quality improvement. Above all, this has directly influenced our brand essence. For instance, we are now able to offer up to five years extended warranty as opposed to one or two years. That brings us a special stature in the market today. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

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VIEW from the TOP Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Executive VC of Info Edge

grow

Employing IT The Founder and Executive VC of Info Edge believes in taking hiring to the next level with constant innovation and the launch of new products. BY M A D H AV M O H A N

competition all around us, we believe that we are on firm ground. How are you using IT to gain a competitive edge?

Naukri.com is continuously working both in terms of software and hardware to gain competitive edge, Sanjeev Bikhchandani is one of those entrepreneurs who aim high. An alumni but focus is more on software. At of St. Stephens College, Delhi University, and Indian Institute of Managethe same time, Naukri.com is workment, Ahmedabad, Bikhchandani quit his job in 1990 and decided to make ing very hard to innovate. Innovation a bold move. He started his own company, Naukri.com. It was an idea that is our hallmark. Every year we have started the journey. As he saw his friends read the last pages of a magazine around 100 innovations be it big or to look at job classifieds, Bikhchandani realized the need for a job portal. His small, with many visible on the site. Midas touch worked. Naukri.com became the first Internet firm to be listed When it is a website, people continuon Indian stock exchanges. Naukri.com has gained a lot of credence and is ously innovate. We work one of the top job portals in India. Today, the site has received t owa r d s i mp r ov i n g great acceptance among Indians. Bikhchandani has created The technology search algorithms and an empire with several Internet properties: Jeevansathi.com , 99acres.com, Shiksha and others and the biggest client network landscape has launching new product and features. on Naukri.com. Excerpts from an interview:

Naukri is the oldest dot.com venture and now you have Jeevansathi.com, Shiksha. com, and 99 acres. How has the technology landscape changed since 1997?

changed. This is the age of startups. And finding talent on platforms is easier.

The technology landscape has changed tremendously since 1997. Currently, it has become a lot easier to launch a website in terms of technology and platform. It is very important now than ever to write an original code. This is the age of startups. Finding talent on platforms like Lamp Stack is much easier. Lamp Stack is a Web development platform which uses Apache as the Web server, Linux as the operating system, MySQL as the relational database management system and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. What differentiates Naukri.com from other online job portals?

As compared to other online job portals, Naukri.com is the single largest repository of resumes. There are about 3.8 crore resumes. With 50,000 clients and about 12,000 resumes received daily, we are the ultimate destination for job hunters. Though there is

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Naukri.com is the first online job portal. How do you plan to take hiring to the next level with the company?

Naukri.com has plans to take hiring to the next level by innovating and launching new products. Recently, Naukri. com launched an employee referral platform, career site manager, and salary benchmarking tool. In days to come, the company will be launching Naukri Premium for premium candidates. Hence, there is a constant effort to move ahead and always keep the innovation mode on. Madhav Mohan is a trainee journalist. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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CIO LEADERSHIP

The C in CIO isn’t for Celebrity

The CIO role commands respect. But the best IT leaders have a powerful but rarely discussed trait: Humility. BY DA N R O B E RT S A N D B R I A N P. WAT S O N

ong time CIO Steve Bandrowczak has accomShurts objects to corporate cultures where workers in the field plished a lot in his career: He’s run large global are mere minions of headquarters staff. He thinks his people organizations, spoken on the biggest stages and are more valuable to the company than he is. driven impressive results. But he still sets aside Humble leaders also know they need to lean on others 30 minutes each day to learn something new. for advice and counsel. When Carol Zierhoffer was CIO of That’s a big commitment for a globe-trotting executive ITT, she had to do a 180-degree turn from centralizing the who sleeps more nights at 35,000 feet than conglomerate’s systems and processes to he can count. Why is he so diligent about conWhile too many decentralizing them so that ITT could be tinuous learning? As seasoned as he is, Bansplit into three companies. people are drowczak says he recognizes he will never knew she couldn’t do it alone. asking, “What’s OneZierhoffer know it all, so he’s always looking to improve. of her first decisions was to solicit in it for me?” His curiosity is a formidable tool. insights from peers at companies like humble leaders Motorola, Cardinal Health, and Altria, all After many years as a CIO at companies such as Nortel, Lenovo, and DHL, Bandrowof whom had managed corporate breakups. ask, “How can czak is now senior vice president for global She received some spot-on advice not only I help you?” business services at Hewlett-Packard. He’s about the IT operations, but also about how one of the several CIOs profiled in our book, to retain her best talent. Confessions of a Successful CIO, who demonstrates a powerful yet rarely mentioned leadership quality: Humility. And Let’s Talk About Us in this digital age, dominated by selfies (look at me!) and clutBut the most striking evidence of a humble leader? When their tered with self-described “visionary” leaders, it’s time for some organizations succeed, these CIOs talk about “we” and “our.” collective introspection. When something goes wrong, they talk about “I” and “my.” The problem is that too many other business leaders don’t. We cringe at how often we find executives who are proud Be Proud of Humility and self-important. Humble people tend to be more likeable Studies have found humility to be a valuable executive and more respectable—qualities you just can’t buy. While too asset. A September 2013 study by a team at the University of many people are asking, “What’s in it for me?” humble leaders Washington’s Foster School of Business found that workers ask, “How can I help you?” who thought their managers were more humble were more Will you speak openly and confidently about your failengaged in their work and less likely to seek employment elseures? Will you seek advice from your network—and give where. A May 2014 study by Catalyst found similar results. advice without expecting something in return? While interviewing the CIOs in our book, we found it Those are just a few of the questions current and aspiring refreshing that the best leaders share this trait. Yes, they’re leaders must ask themselves. As Sheleen Quish, another great confident, but it’s not ego-driven. CIO, told us recently: “Don’t lose your humility in the job. The There are easy ways to spot a humble leader. For one, they ‘C’ in ‘CXO’ does not stand for ‘celebrity.’” talk openly and honestly about failure. Wayne Shurts, CTO at Sysco, starts leadership discussions by talking about mistakes. The results of one failure, early in his career at Nabisco, Dan Roberts is CEO of Ouellette and Associates. Brian P. Watson are “ingrained in my soul,” Shurts says. The humble CIO will writes and speaks about IT leadership. Send feedback to editor@ also emphasize his people’s importance more than his own. cio.in

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leadership and operational excellence

Taking IT Public

How Apeejay Stya and Svran Group centralized its infrastructure and reduced capex cost by moving to the public cloud. BY I S H A N B H AT TAC H A RYA

Apeejay Stya and Svran Group is one of those family run businesses which adopted technology

long time ago. Founded in 1942, Apeejay Stya Group, is a leading Indian industrial and investment house with a strong presence in sectors like automotive, chemicals and plastics, distribution, logistics and retail, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, and many others. It has several alliances and foreign collaborations with a significant presence in Europe, Middle East, and East Asia. But the company had been looking for a solution to help it centralize its infrastructure and storage. And that’s when it decided to make a bold move. At a time when Indian IT leaders are shying away from shifting their infrastructure completely to the public cloud, Aditya Berlia, member-Management Board, Apeejay

Aditya Berlia, Member-Management Board, Apeejay Stya and Svran Group, says the capex cost and upgrade cycle reduced after moving the infrastructure to the public cloud.

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Towards an Energy Efficient Datacenter Environment As datacenters look to cut energy costs by lowering energy consumption, methods that involve active control of energy costs in real-time are being explored. And one way to get there is to introduce new technologies to the datacenter environment.

nergy consumption is a growing concern for datacenters. Advances in server equipment technologies and increased demand for computing power have increased load densities in the computer room, which in turn, has caused corresponding increases in datacenter power consumption. The total magnitude of datacenter energy consumption, including network and storage equipment, is now estimated to be between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all electricity generated. An exacerbating factor for the increase in energy consumption is the trend toward increasing load density in the computer room. There are a lot of ways to reduce datacenter energy consumption. Reducing the IT electrical load is an obvious way of reducing energy consumption, since the IT load also affects the amount of cooling power required to remove heat from this equipment. The increasing power consumption by datacenters is, therefore, an indicator of the increased demand for computing power. Reductions in IT electrical load must therefore be made in ways other than hardware efficiency improvements.

Cutting Down Energy Consumption One such datacenter

technique to address energy challenges, is

server virtualization, in which the server environment is controlled based on perceived server activity. Server virtualization can itself be viewed as a growing trend that includes storage virtualization, network virtualization, and workload management. These are elements that can help eliminate server sprawl and make more efficient use of the available server resources. Large gains in efficiency may also be achieved by increasing the cooling efficiency of the environmental system: Free cooling, water-side economizers, liquid cooling at the computer equipment rack level, and “fine tuning” of the system. This infrastructure allows tracking of energy consumption as a function of time down to the desired level, giving a clear measure of the effectiveness of energy reduction techniques. If energy reduction techniques are staged so that they are implemented at different times, this infrastructure gives insight into the effectiveness of each technique. Energy modeling enables calculations to predict the energy use of the system in question as various parameters change. For datacenters, energy modeling is a powerful tool that deciphers and reveals how to make an entire facility, or a group of facilities, more efficient. A fundamental reason to employ energy modeling is to establish the baseline—the starting point—of energy efficiency efforts. It also allows to

predict future energy use by tracking changes in operating parameters such as equipment change-outs or raisedfloor additions. Once baselines and benchmarks are established for the important energy metrics, data continues to be gathered over time and analyzed in order to understand energy usage patterns and trends. Such trends can be used to help identify improvement potential in key equipment, and thereby, reduce energy costs in the long run.

Schneider Electric Recommends Leverage server virtualization to control energy consumption Use techniques like free cooling, water-side economizers, and liquid cooling to reduce energy costs Employ energy modeling techniques to make your facilities more energy efficient Analyze energy consumption on a regular basis to predict future energy usage patterns

This feature is brought to you by

For more information and stories, visit: http://www.greenenterpriseit.com/ Contact Us: Email: indiainfo@apcc.com Phone: 1800 4254 272

IDG SERVICES

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Stya and Svran Group, decided to took a leap of faith. “We experimented with multiple datacenter points but the complexity and connectivity remained an issue. It was only in 2008—when cloud computing emerged—that we realized it was the solution we were looking for,” says Berlia.

run

Going Public

Apeejay Stya and Svran Group has always been a discreet combination of small- and medium- sized companies. Although all these companies were guided by a central IT committee, each one had chosen a different set of IT solutions. “Some of the older companies were running on FoxPro and the new ones had Custom VB.Net, some ran SAP and others Tally. The challenge was to manage all these infrastructures simultaneously,” says Berlia. That’s why Berlia wanted to centralize IT systems and get rid of the chaos. One way to do that? Public cloud. “Shifting completely to the public cloud is a very rare thing. But our philosophy was to have a centralized system in which all the information can be stored, processed, and accessed,” Berlia says. The shift to the cloud proved beneficial. The company was able to bring all its information, from diverse storage systems to one place, so that one core IT team can handle, interact, and access it. Another reason for the company to move to the public cloud was to tackle legacy. “Legacy is a huge issue. A lot of legacy players are now surprised to see that we are using their apps on the cloud,” Berlia says. Berlia pointed out that avoiding proprietary software network plague helps deal with legacy issues. “Getting into the software and out of it costs more than licensing. In the next one or two years , we’ll stop using ERP systems as we are comfortable using data systems in the cloud,” he says. This has also helped Berlia make changes to business processes in no time. Berlia says, if a business process changes on an ERP tomorrow, it will probably take three months and a hefty sum to update. Normally , according to Berlia, to get a VPS up and running takes five working days. “But on the cloud, it took us only three minutes,” Berlia says. That’s not the only benefit the company got. “By replicating our entire IT infrastructure on the public cloud, we have cut down the number of servers by 80 percent, our capex cost and upgrade cycles went down by 90 percent,” Berlia says. The cloud has also reduced the time taken to move infrastructure across the world. “Today, I can move my entire infrastructure from Singapore to Tokyo, Tokyo to New Jersey within 10 minutes,” he adds.

Things You Need to Know A NEW LEARNING

THINK ABOUT CLOUD LIKE A FUTURIST. The cloud is still one of the most important enterprise technologies, but it’s also one of the most hyped, especially given the buzz surrounding the SMAC stack. Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners said the cloud is entering its “second front” and is no longer just a way to host HR or CRM systems. He added that cloud disruption is far from over and has yet to reach its full potential in the enterprise so CIOs should still pay close attention.

ENTERPRISES NEED TO DELIVER EASY-TOUSE TECH. “The CIO role is to change and deliver new technology to your customer at least every three months,” said Colangelo of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Colangelo began exploring storage technologies because his customers were already using them on their own, for free. Colangelo urged vendors to roll out new versions of their products as technology evolves; otherwise they will be left in the dust by users and competitors.

PUT THE CUSTOMER BEFORE THE TECHNOLOGY. Skok said he meets often with CIOs who are trying to figure out the next greatest technology to adopt. He said CIOs should take a step back and consider something else first. “I try to invest in companies with people who particularly understand the business problem of the CIO. The companies that can understand the customer’s point of view are going to be the best to deal with,” he said. From the VC perspective, Skok recommended that CIOs look for companies that don’t just present technology but lay out a plan for how they will build a unique relationship with your company in order to best serve your customers.

VCS SHOULDN’T THINK OF CROWDFUNDING AS A THREAT. Though it’s a disruptor to VCs, Skok said he doesn’t think crowdfunding will put him out of business. Instead, it’s a positive thing for all sides of the technology landscape. “It’s a good collaborative means for people to get access to capital,” he said. He said VCs are not just about capital but serve as advisers to technology companies.

CIOS SHOULDN’T IGNORE OPEN SOURCE. “For recruiting and retaining talent, open source is critical,” Skok said. Skok added that showing that you’ve been involved in open source can be a competitive differentiator for companies and a way for developers to create a personal brand. “Many enterprises are now getting kudos for the fact that they’ve contributed to [open source] projects,” he said.

Send feedback to editor@cio.in

— Lauren Brousell

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POPULAR SCIENCE

NASA Leases Airfield to Google Google is paying $1.16 billion (about Rs 6,960 crore) over the initial 60-year lease term. BY J O H N R I B E I R O

oogle is paying US$1.16 billion (about

Rs 6,960 crore) over 60 years to lease from NASA the Moffett Federal Airfield in California. The Internet giant plans to renovate and use the historic Hangar One, originally built to house airships, for research, development, assembly and testing in the areas of “space exploration, aviation, rover/robotics, and other emerging technologies,” NASA said. NASA has estimated that the lease will save it about $6.3 million (about Rs 3,780 lakh) each year in maintenance and operation costs besides providing $1.16 billion (about Rs 6960 crore) in rent over the initial 60-year lease term. MFA is at present maintained by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Google is also spending over $200 million (about Rs 1,200 crore) to restore the hangars and to set up a public education facility on the airfield. NASA said in February it and the US General Services Administration (GSA) had selected Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures as the preferred lessee to run the

Underwater Robot Cops They may not be as quick or efficient as airport sniffer dogs, but robots are getting ready to take the fight against drug smuggling underwater. Researchers at MIT are working on submersible machines that could use ultrasound to find drugs hidden on ships. Their prototype, which looks like a bowling ball, is designed to move along the hulls of ships. It could use ultrasound scanning to detect hollow spaces in false hulls and propeller shafts where drugs might be stashed.

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Moffett Federal Airfield and restore Hangar One, and began negotiations with it. Under a request for proposal in May 2013, the airfield will also support government and controlled public and private flight operations. The airfield is used by H211, a company controlled by Google executives who use it for their private jets, and the company was criticized for getting fuel at a discount from the government for running the jets. Consumer Watchdog, a long-time Google critic, criticized the lease of the airfield to Google, claiming that it gives the company “unprecedented control of a federal facility to use as its own playground.” The US Representative Anna G. Eshoo, a Democrat from California, said the lease agreement “honors Moffett Field and Hangar One as part of the US Naval history, while looking to the future by promoting research into space, aviation and other emerging technologies.”

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

Developed by grad student Sampriti Bhattacharyya and Harry Asada, a professor of engineering at MIT, the robot is divided into two halves, one waterproof and the other water-permeable. The former houses a rechargeable lithium battery and electronics, while the latter contains six pumps that force water out through tubes, driving the bot forward. The robot can move between 0.5 and 1 meter per second while pressed against the hull of a ship, and its battery charge lasts about 40 minutes. The submersible was made using 3D-printed structural elements, meaning it could be manufactured for as little as US$600. That’s cheap

enough to allow a swarm robot approach, with dozens of machines working in unison to ferret out contraband. The prototype was recently presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Chicago, but tests so far have focused on whether it can travel in a straight line and stay in contact with an underwater surface. It still has to be equipped with an ultrasound sensor. The researchers hope to add improvements such as batteries that can recharge wirelessly and changes to the propulsion system that would extend operating time to 100 minutes per charge. —Tim Hornyak

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THE WHEEL OF

DIGITIZATION Technology is breaking new ground every day. But at the same time, Indian organizations havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t completely gone digital yet. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how Canon is changing that with its range of digitization solutions. By Sejuti Das

oday, it has become increasingly important for businesses to make faster decisions to get ahead of competition. Therefore, enterprises are aiming for business efficacy, enhanced turnaround time, cost reduction, and serviceability. Enterprises are looking for value-driven solutions for continuous process enhancements within organizations. With the emergence of information and communications technology, policy-makers are facing challenges of ensuring

Canon advertorial.indd 1

that individuals and companies make the best possible use of network and applications. One way to do this is to employ digitization tools that have the potential to create dramatic economic, social, and political impact. Considering the new Companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Act, today, the focus is to minimize the amount of paper work. It is usually not possible to do away with paper work when it comes to things like audit trails. But one should focus on areas where it is possible, like employee onboarding, for example.

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ADVERTORIAL CANON

In order to herald the era of digitization, Canon has launched Canon Business Services (CBS). With this, Canon’s Office Imaging Solution Division (OIS) has expanded its offerings, becoming a provider of digital document management services and print room services. As an organization, CBS understands and apprehends the requirements of Indian companies by enabling them to outsource information intensive processes, communications, and administrative functions. It also aids companies in streamlining their printing infrastructure and improve their processes. One such company is The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). It used to take months for the company to digitize documents of a single department because it used to contain lakhs of pages. That’s when it turned to CBS. “Canon’s digitization solution helped us to digitize documents of two departments. Canon’s process oriented approach is capable of handling a large volume of documents and it also has the ability to manage the involvement of many people. The complete process is divided into sub-processes and each sub-process is executed by different teams to ensure quality in digitization,” says Jagdish Mutharia, senior IT Manager, TERI. Mutharia says that these documents are imported into an online document repository to store them in a structured format, and make them easily accessible at any time to all stakeholders. “This, in turn, removed the dependency on selective custodians of hard copy documents and also saved a lot of physical storage space. It has also eliminated the hybrid system (soft and hard copy) that used to confuse users,” he says. Today, digitization has made TERI’s processes even more efficient. “Nowadays, users of different departments do not make their own set of hard copy documents. New documents received by these departments are now digitized to make the latest documents available to end users without any delay. There is no back-log created for digitization,” Mutharia says.

Canon advertorial.indd 2

Canon Business Services helped us digitize documents of two departments. CBS’ process-oriented approach is capable of handling a large volume of documents and people.” JAGDISH MUTHARIA, Senior IT Manager, TERI

TERI’s success is being replicated in several other large organizations. That’s because, Canon’s OIS division

The Benefits Digitization provides a broader and enhanced access to a wider community. Digitization provides institutional and strategic benefits. It also integrates an organization’s procedures for disaster recovery and backups. It provides uniform management of information from paper and digital sources. It significantly reduces space required for storage and also brings down printing costs. Digitization improves business process efficiency, quality, and consistency. Digitization integrates records with digital systems and improves accessibility and facilitates better knowledge sharing.

focuses on providing supreme document management solutions to large enterprises, SMEs, and the government

sector. It also provides unmatched A3 MFPs, exclusive document and production scanners, solutions, services and Managed Document Services (MDS). Canon’s MDS is presently managing end-to-end printing infrastructure for several large customers in India. For large enterprises, printing and digitization is a non-core capability and moving to experts like Canon has helped them restructure, be efficient, decrease administration work and cost overheads. Canon Business Services has also played an important role in getting secure, confidential, digitized results and eco-friendly printing. With MDS becoming an imperative, a number of companies, today, are looking at more futuristic consolidated solutions. The company’s document imaging brings years of experience, profound knowledge of industry’s best practices, a range of technology solutions and Six Sigma-based quality and performance management tools. Subsequently, Canon’s clients are experiencing betterquality document workflows, reduced costs, improved security and more efficacious regulatory compliance while securing valuable information assets. Today, Canon’s MDS solutions contribute about 25 percent to the OIS division’s business returns. Managed Print Services’ contracts are expected to produce 40 percent of revenues by end of this fiscal. The company witnessed a YoY growth of 8 percent in the year 2013. And that’s a mark of a company that’s revolutionizing digitization.

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TOWARDS A

DIGITAL WORLD A paperless office is a powerful one. Smart CIOs have realized that and are exploring opportunities to digitize their organizations. And to do that, they are turning to Canon Business Services. By Ishan Bhattacharya

n 2012, there were over 1,600 incidents of data loss followed by 1,453 incidents in 2013. This has made organizations across the world sit up and understand the importance of security. And this concern for security isn’t just limited to private sector organizations. Government establishments are equally concerned about data loss, especially after 4.82 crore data pages

were lost in a fire at the Mumbai Secretariat in 2013. But security is a problem that stems from storage. If documents aren’t stored within the four walls of an organization, there’s a good chance that they would be safe. “Document digitization helps in storage. This also makes it easier for organizations to quickly find the information they need in a click. That said, hard copies cannot

The Benefits Canon Business Services provides a platform for organizations to outsource information intensive processes, communications, and administrative functions. At the same time, it also enables organizations to save costs.

Ensures Optimization

Canon Business Services (CBS) includes document scanning, document optimization, document tagging, and secure storage, resulting in over 45 percent optimization in data management.

Enhances Security

Canon’s document digitization, helps safely store data on hard drives and professionally archive documents to increase operational efficiency.

Speeds Up Data Retrieval

CBS offers expertise in document digitization. It also makes it easier for organizations to quickly find the information they need in a click.

Increases Efficiency It improves operational performance, helps organizations gain competitive advantage, and meet growing business needs without compromising existing infrastructure.

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be destroyed completely, we could dump them in a warehouse instead of keeping them in our office,” says John Cherian, IT director, Infrastructure and Operations-India Market, Philips Electronics India. With an increasing demand for faster decision making, organizations are aiming for business efficiency, cost reduction, security, improved turnaround time, and serviceability. They are looking for value drivensolutions for continuous process improvements. Today, organizations around the world face the challenge of adopting technologies that can help improve operational performance, gain competitive advantage, and meet the growing business needs of their organizations without compromising the existing infrastructure. That’s where Canon Business Services can help. It provides a platform for organizations to outsource information intensive processes, communications, and administrative functions. At the same time, it also enables organizations to save costs. That’s critical in a world that’s gradually moving from a capex-heavy to an opex-based model. It isn’t hard to see why organizations are sold on the idea of a managed services model. “We look at document digitization as a full end-to-end managed services model. Otherwise you have to buy the equipment, worry about storage, and hire personnel to look after it. If document digitization is available in an SLA-based model, it makes more

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ADVERTORIAL CANON

sense to move to a more opex type of environment rather than getting the capex and getting the assets in the book,” says Cherian. While capex-opex considerations might not always tilt the balance in the favor of managed services, there’s no doubt that these services go a long way in improving efficiency. “Although document digitization is not directly linked to capex and opex costs, but at the same time, it directly impacts how I manage my documents and how efficiently I organize documents. The implementation of such a solution however falls on the opex model,” says Subramanyam Putrevu, CIO, Mindtree. It is that efficiency that most organizations are looking for. Consider this: Today, an employee wastes 35 percent of his or her work time in looking for documents with a 67 percent chance of data loss due to irresponsible handling. By 2015, 85 percent of organizations will be unable to exploit data for competitive advantages. That’s a problem that Canon’s document digitization solution can easily solve. It safely stores data on hard drives and archives documents to increase operational efficiency. It enables seamless management of documents in your organization. “Currently, some form of digitization is already there right from the time employees join our organization. Document digitization certainly helps us in a great way when it comes to searching for employee

Document digitization certainly helps us in a great way when it comes to tracking employee information and this is where we have implemented document digitization within our context of the organization.” SUBRAMANYAM PUTREVU CIO, Mindtree

information and this is where we have implemented document digitization,” says Putrevu. That’s something Cherian agrees with. “Document digitization is key for organizations. But at the same time, I think it’s also important to have some kind of intelligence in the digitization path. There should be some mechanism to check whether a document which is already digitized has proper indexing and is not duplicated,” says Cherian. Putrevu also says that he wants to see all the documents they have— that is mainly, contracts and financial documents—to be digitized. “In these areas, particularly, we have not gone

About Canon Business Services Canon Business Services is the newly developed business processing arm, created to help organizations better focus on their core business. Through the outsourcing of information intensive functions, executives are better empowered to focus on key revenue generators of business. Canon Business Services offering includes digitization and archival; and print room services. Companies find value through cost savings, process change, extremely elevated levels of business efficiency, improved material economies of scale and productivity; and improved compliance and quality management.

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through the complete document lifecycle, but we see a lot of value in digitizing these, majorly in terms of how we organize, manage, and use these documents,” says Putrevu. Canon Business Services (CBS) includes document scanning, document optimization, document tagging, and secure storage, resulting in over 45 percent optimization in data management, zero data loss and it also frees up real estate space. CBS offers expertise in document digitization, optical character recognition, intelligent character recognition, CD and DVD duplication, coding and indexing and records management. And that’s how CBS helps businesses to find precise solutions for their digitization problems, by managing their complete digitization needs.

This feature is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Canon India

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HIRING MANAGER

Fishing for Talent

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To lure great hires, CIOs need to be deeply involved in writing IT job postingsinstead of leaving it to an HR admin. BY K R I S T E N L A M O R E AU X

rganizations tend to fall into two the off-target résumés. “Don’t say ‘six years of Oracle categories when it comes to posting job Database expertise’ say ‘six to eight years of experience openings: Those with crappy job ads and using relational databases, with Oracle preferred.’” those that have a clue. CIOs who have a Sander says technical skills become outdated very clue are involved in the process rather quickly. “Software offerings change faster than you will than relying solely on an HR admin to “post something change your employees. You need someone who can learn on the site.” quickly and adapt,” he says. “In my experience, fit with the Steve Heilenman, CIO at Computer Aid, a privately company culture, an innovative and driven can-do attitude, held global IT services provider, not only has a clue; he and a well-rounded set of industry-relevant experiences, successfully hires 20 to 30 people each year for his IT team, are much more accurate predictors of success than a in a company that annually hires 300 to 500 employees specific technical skill or experience.” overall. How? Steve writes the job descriptions for his For lower level positions, job descriptions will naturally direct reports and reviews every IT job posting. be more specific about IT tools, but every job description “We try to include as much as possible from actual and advertisement should mention soft skills and company descriptions in advertisements so that the culture, too. Every job candidate can get a good understanding “Soft skills can tip the balance of the role and our expectations,” between two candidates, so let your description and Heilenman says. “It is just as important candidates know the profile of who will advertisement for the candidate to feel comfortable with be successful inside your organization,” should mention the role as it is for us to feel good about Khatnani says. “Technical skills can soft skills and the candidate.” always be advanced through training; company culture. soft skills are ingrained qualities of Similarly, Larry Bilker, senior vice president and CIO at Continuity Logic, the individual.” says job descriptions for a CIO’s direct Candidates are looking for companies reports should be written by the CIO. that provide not just career growth but “environments that are energetic, offer work-life balance, and have positive value systems,” says Khatnani. Sorting Through the Pile When you think of your job ads, are you giving Of course, these days résumé overload is a big problem. candidates a reason to join your organization? Don’t let “No matter how accurate and specific you are, with today’s social media and disgruntled employee sites be your online and social media networks, you are always going candidates’ only clues to corporate culture. Craft your to be plagued with thousands of applicants, the majority strategic vision into a story that’s accurate but also of whom do not meet the requirements you so carefully focused on what’s important to them. Every candidate crafted and communicated,” says Mark Sander, former CIO wants to be seen as a person, so acknowledge that life at Church and Dwight. “Finding ways to effectively and exists outside of work; if you don’t, prepare to watch your efficiently sort through the pile is the challenge.” retention rate plummet. So should you cast a wide net, or be ultra-specific to avoid being buried? Sanjay Khatnani, managing partner at J2 Solutions, a technology and business consulting firm, recommends “specific but not granular” job descriptions Kristen Lamoreaux is president and CEO of Lamoreaux Search, to ensure a sufficient flow of job candidates and yet limit which finds IT professionals for hiring managers.

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TECH : : RADAR The Digital Transition Challenge

As today’s companies pursue an all-digital business model, they face significant challenges. B Y L A U R E N B R O U S E L L

he newest buzzword in IT is digital enter-

Shifting Company Culture

prise—a company with all-digital customer To become a fully digital company, people and internal interactions, processes, jobs, and informaprocesses have to evolve and embrace the change. IDEX, for tion that’s fast and easy to access. one, wants to move past its traditional, specialty engineered Companies that go through digital pumps, fire suppression equipment, and flow meters and transformations do risk losing some traditional customgrow earnings 15 percent each year, CIO James MacLennan ers. Increasingly, though, customers expect to interact says. “How do we create information as a product or serwith companies through digital channels. For example, vice? It’s a huge culture shift,” he says. “I’m used to creating Cars.com started as a digital company. It was originally products that are all about distribution and logistics–and created as an online classified ad service, but has evolved we’re changing that to bits and bytes.” its customer base to include car dealerships, consumers looking to buy cars, and advertisers looking to target Data-driven Products and Services potential customers. Many companies that didn’t traditionBill Swislow, senior vice president “We are able to ally offer digital products and services of products and CIO of Cars.com, now see valuable opportunities to do so. monetize when says consumers have adopted digital Marquette Group, a digital marketing customers are quickly—20 million people use the site, and advertising agency, used to provide on our site, with and 90 percent buy a car within weeks— clients with mostly print ads and only a tracking and but the B2B side of the business has small percentage was digital. Now they cookies, and we been slower. That should change. are 60/40 thanks to new digital efforts. “We not only are able to monetize The IT and marketing departments can resell other when [customers] are on our site, with at Marquette Group worked together to publishers’ ads.” modern technology around tracking roll out a tool called LeadStream, which Bill S., SVP-Products & CIO, Cars.com and cookies, but we can resell other publets clients target customer ads based on lishers’ ads,” he says. “We know what location. Once users post location-based [visitors] did on our site and can follow them as they go ads, they can log into the tool and view the performance of to other sites.” each based on KPIs and corporate metrics. Since the system is built on software as a service, David Lenzen, executive vice president of sales and marketing, New Revenue Streams and Investments says the company can easily deploy it over and over again Mohit Kapoor, CIO of credit information provider Tranwith different clients. sUnion, says the company has always been data-driven but tries to differentiate itself by acting faster upon data and analytics. For example, TransUnion helps people Technology Infrastructure and Tools evaluate whether their health insurance covers certain Culture change and employee productivity in the digital benefits; more often than not, Kapoor says, people are enterprise can’t start without the proper technology infraactually covered but don’t realize it. structure and tools in place. At TransUnion, Kapoor says Previously, it took the company a month to gather pre-screens for new customers happen faster online. “You the data. Now, with advanced analytics, it can figure out have to do it in real-time, when they are still there,” he says. the answer in less than six hours. “This was tangible, “Now, we’re able to tie somebody from their cookie to their real, revenue-generating business that was two to three ZIP code. It’s very different with the customer than it was people within the analytics group working with IT,” he two to three years ago.” says. “They figured it out and we gave them the environment. Now it’s a pretty significant business–with little investment.” Send feeback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

SCOTT ROBERTSON, VP, Asia Pacific and Japan, WatchGuard Technologies took over this role in 2012, after leading the company’s turnaround in ANZ region with over 40 percent year-on-year growth. Prior to joining WatchGuard in 2007, Robertson was General Manager, Asia Pacific for CRYPTOCard, a network authentication company. Earlier, Robertson managed enterprise sales and services business for Microsoft. He was also Regional Sales Manager for Visio, responsible for the direct and in-direct sales business before Microsoft acquired the company in 2000.

Officat iorerro odi aliatio Guarding the moluptaquis dus. Digital Gateway New and sophisticated threats are giving organizations sleepless nights. But WatchGuard, at the forefront of innovative technology, is the perfect alibi for CIOs. What definite opportunities do you foresee in India Inc. and how is WatchGuard geared to dominate the security landscape? The Indian economy is undergoing tremendous change since the April elections. We’ve seen an increase in investment to fund new IT projects that include questions around network and data security.

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The Indian market seeks many requirements from network security. Quality and value top the priority list and WatchGuard’s NGFW and UTM products provide a unique fit for local businesses in that aspect. The global recognition from industry experts such as Gartner, NSS Labs, InfoTech, and Frost and Sullivan positions our technology at the very top of the network security value chain.

How will the security landscape evolve in 2015? The security threat landscape will evolve at an incredible rate making it extremely tough for any vendor to keep pace with the change. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are dominating headlines with recent, significant breaches at RSA, JP Morgan, and Target. The Target case is unique as it was the first time a CEO

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW WATCHGUARD

of a multibillion dollar corporation was fired due to a network security breach. The CEO may not be held responsible for network security decisions, but is accountable for the brand and revenue performance of the company. More than 40 million consumers’ credit card information was exposed in November 2013, just before the busiest Christmas holiday period. Imagine the impact on consumers, the brand and ultimately the company’s revenue. We added APT capability to our product line earlier this year. In addition we see a significant increase in the volume of encrypted traffic across networks with many top Internet sites already defaulting to https including Facebook and Google. This requires additional processing power at the gateway and again our architecture and investment in the latest Intel Pentium and Celeron processors provides us up to 149 percent faster processing of encrypted traffic than other NGFW’s and UTM’s. Why should CIOs partner with you amid the huge transformation of security requirements with the advent of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud)? At WatchGuard, we don’t build phones, network equipment or servers, we concentrate only on security and when your focus is 100 percent on it you become really good at it. We are one of the fastest growing NGFW and UTM vendors in APAC. We partner with specialized vendors who deliver the most comprehensive security platform available. The latest Intel multi-purpose Pentium and Celeron processors allows WatchGuard’s NGFW and UTM appliances to scan more security services faster than anyone else. We leverage best in class solutions from AVG, Websense, Trend Micro, LastLine, and others to deliver enterprise-level security. WatchGuard Dimension provides market-leading visualization tools to view, report, and manage policies that can improve network security and performance.

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How uniquely does WatchGuard Dimension address the big data roadmap for organizations? When you think about a network breach or a security incident, you first tend to look at the logs. The part of the challenge here is that every piece of traffic on the network creates a log. Imagine the number of logs created each day. You may receive 100 e-mails a day and reply to 50. That creates 150 lines of log data. If a breach happens then the IT department is tasked to scan through

At WatchGuard, we don’t build phones, network equipment or servers, we only concentrate on security. When your focus is 100 percent you become really good at it.”

150 lines of data to review a single user. Now multiply that by 100 users, a 1000 or 10,000 and it quickly becomes an insurmountable task. That is where WatchGuard Dimension provides a unique visualization tool to help collate all of that data and provide reports that allow IT to quickly determine: The highest user of bandwidth, who is accessing inappropriate websites, what viruses/attacks were blocked, and answers to many more important IT and security questions.

considered acceptable use of Internet resources and other network activity. Communicate the policy to all staff and ensure new staff are advised of the AUP upon joining the organization. Implement technology that can police and successfully enforce the policy and report on activity and breaches. Use the reporting tools to monitor and review network traffic for anomalies and use the data to refine and improve policies for better network performance. And finally, engage line managers when setting up and refining new AUPs. Does WatchGuard have the arsenal to suffice the key requirements of modern organizations in India? Indian customers are astute buyers and they do have complex network challenges. Often these challenges must be met with a limited IT budget of which security is only a portion. This poses a real task for the CIO: How to adequately protect the network and corporate data without investing the entire IT budget in security alone? At WatchGuard, we ensure our customers derive true business value from their investments. WatchGuard has been successfully protecting Indian businesses for over a decade with thousands of customers across BFSI, Government, Retail, Education, Manufacturing, Services, and others. For example, Adarsh Bank deployed over 600 appliances to secure branch connectivity seamlessly and Jagran Prakashan reduced manpower costs by 35 percent and costly bandwidth use. These are just a few examples of how WatchGuard NGFW and UTM solutions provide true business value to local Indian businesses.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with WatchGuard

Any significant do’s for CIOs to build a robust security posture in their organizations? CIOs should set up an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that clearly defines what is

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Refresher Course: Relearning Security Lessons

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Two vulnerabilities are examples of problems that could have been avoided if we had just applied the already learnt lessons. BY K E N N E T H VA N W Y K

on’t look now, but we’ve failed to anticipate our attackers’ next moves—again. Yes, in the last several months, we’ve seen attacks and vulnerabilities that again illustrate how our attackers are able to adapt to new technologies, while we fail to protect those new technologies, even from problems we already understand and should be able to prevent. Consider two specific problems we’ve seen in recent months: Attacks on embedded devices such as point-of-sale (POS) terminals used for credit card payments, and the recently published weaknesses in USB devices. Although the two are hugely different in technical specifics, there’s a common thread to be found when we look at them a bit. The POS problem was vividly demonstrated at the end of 2013, when the Target chain was the victim of an attack on its POS terminals in which the attackers were able to modify the firmware on the terminals and hijack credit card account data during legitimate transactions. The malware used in the attack simply looked through the POS terminals’ RAM for plain-text credit card data and, when found, copied it and delivered it to the attackers via a network connection. It turns out that the firmware on the POS devices was in essence just a specialized version of a generalpurpose operating system and just as susceptible to attack as its general-purpose cousin.

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In the case of USB weaknesses, it’s not an operating system that gets attacked, but the underlying protocols used to talk to the devices. Using network commands that date to the world of SCSI peripherals, a USB storage device can be made to behave like another type of USB device, such as a keyboard, which can then be programmed to perform various attacks on a host computer. The thing that strikes me about

we failed to apply lessons that we should have already learned. Who on earth could have thought that it was a good idea to have a device I/O bus on which a device can redefine its own type—that is, change itself from a storage device to a “keyboard,” thereby allowing a malicious device to “type” commands and attack the host system. Surely that sort of weakness should have been discovered in a threat model

By failing to apply to new technologies the security lessons that we all already understand, we’re giving our adversaries far too many soft targets to go after. these two examples, different as they are in their technical details, is that they both illustrate how we’re failing to apply security lessons we should have already learned. In the case of POS terminals, we should be applying the lessons we learned from protecting our desktop and server operating systems. These include the principle of least privilege and other things straight out of Saltzer and Schroeder’s seminal work from way back in the 1970s. At the very least, the administrative accounts on those terminals should have been better locked down, and the read-write access to them should have been better controlled. The USB weakness admittedly is a lower-level vulnerability, and in a technology that has been deployed for several years. But there too,

of the USB architecture. By failing to apply to new technologies the security lessons that we all already understand, we’re giving our adversaries far too many soft targets to go after. It becomes an endless game of “whack-a-mole” in which we’re forever reacting to the latest emergencies. Only by learning from our mistakes can we ever hope to deploy new technologies that our adversaries aren’t easily and readily able to attack. We’ve simply got to do better than our current track record.

With more than 20 years in the security field, Kenneth van Wyk has worked at Carnegie Mellon University, the US Department of Defense, ParaProtect, and others. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/19/2014 5:24:33 PM

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2015

Tech-tonic Shift

If the past year is anything to go by, the new year will bring in change and disruption at a faster pace than ever. Here’s how to prepare. D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 14

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ime flies. And as if trying to keep up with changing technology trends, the CIO role is undergoing a tectonic change. These changes are driven by rising expectations from the business, rapidly-changing market dynamics, and an onslaught of new and disruptive technologies. None of this is new, but here’s what is. As we enter 2015, the CIO role will see yet another change. Tomorrow’s leaders will require new ways of thinking. The CIO will need to be an existentialist and a technologist to determine that very important question: What next? CIOs will also need to be business strategists, teachers, tech evangelists, negotiators and much else. To answer the ‘what next’ question, CIOs will have to turn to technology. They will take cues from today’s trends. In the age of digital transformation, users and customers have become mor e demanding; today ensuring a mobile, social and omni-channel experience just gets you in the door. Then CIOs are expected to harness the power of the cloud and analytics and other emerging technologies to deliver more projects, with lean teams, to drive business growth. CIO magazine’s own research indicates that Indian CIOs deliver 3.8 times more projects today than they did in 2008. Many of those projects will be driven by new business imperatives, and technology-enabled opportunities to create revenue and slash costs. Behind many of the ideas that will arise in 2015 will be technology. Read on to find out which technologies will make a big impact in 2015 and how you can prepare.

Reaching for the Clouds

Getting Mobility Right

Security: Hard Lessons Learnt

Behind the Numbers

The Social Business

The Secret Code for SDN

The Real Price of Outsourcing

The New Game Plan

Room to Grow

Finding Your Digital Future

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COVER STORY :: Cloud Computing

Reaching for the Clouds

Not yet dominating enterprise IT, but progressing at a steady rate, cloud will continue its ascent next year.

artin Slominis had a problem familiar to lots of IT executives: His staff didn’t have the capacity to fulfill all the demands users put on his department. So he did what technologists do best and used technology to solve the problem. Specifically, he turned to cloud computing. “Cloud was an easy way to multiply our resources,” says Slominis, vice president of management information systems at the Wayne State University Physician Group in Detroit. His organization started moving applications to the cloud several years ago to save money, increase agility, and improve flexibility while reducing the maintenance work his team had to handle.

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Slominis wasn’t looking for small gains: He needed a gamechanger. So early on he moved one of the organization’s missioncritical systems, a billing-related application, to the cloud. He says about 25 percent of his 20-plus apps are now in the cloud. Moving to the cloud has indeed delivered benefits, Slominis says. It has saved money and has enabled the 60-plus members of his IT team to be more nimble and responsive. Encouraged, he’s planning to move more applications (though not all) to the cloud, determining which should make the leap by weighing factors such as cost, security requirements, the need for agility, and whether and to what degree the system in question will have to scale.

A L L I M A G E S F R O M T H I K S TO C K

M A RY K . P R AT T

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COVER STORY :: Cloud Computing

So far, that evaluation process has led to a hybrid environment of software as a service, on-premises apps, and infrastructure as a service. The experience of the Wayne State University Physician Group is representative of where many leading organizations stand when it comes to cloud computing. Although they have a mix of on-premises and cloud offerings, they increasingly see cloud as a means of transforming the IT operation—and the business units it supports. Getting there, though, will take longer than the hype around cloud suggests. A cloud migration involves “a ramp-up,” says Gartner Analyst David Mitchell Smith. “One of the myths is that it’s all or nothing. But it doesn’t happen that way,” he explains. “It’s more workload by workload, application by application. It’s not, ‘we’ll turn everything off and move [to the cloud].’” He says he has seen companies move beyond viewing the cloud as simply a cost-saver, as some did in the early days, to recognizing that its attributes—such as its elastic, scalable, and self-service nature—can deliver big gains for an organization. That, in part, explains the rise of the cloud-first mantra in many enterprise IT departments. And while that outlook is becoming increasingly common, Smith says IT operations are all over the map when it comes to adoption; there’s no typical IT shop. Some have moved large chunks of their operations into the cloud, others little or none. He also notes that even IT leaders have varying definitions of what constitutes the cloud and cloud-based services. Computerworld’s Forecast survey confirms that cloud computing is progressing but is far from dominating the enterprise IT landscape. Of 194 IT executives polled in May and June, 25 percent said that they have moved some enterprise applications to the cloud, with more to come, and 10 percent said that they have moved some enterprise applications to the cloud but have no plans to migrate anything else. Meanwhile, 14 percent reported that they have moved documents, storage, and email and calendar tools to the cloud, and 9 percent said that they are moving some or all of their datacenter and/or networking infrastructure to the cloud. Only 7 percent of the respondents reported moving mission-critical enterprise applications to the cloud. Moreover, 16 percent of the respondents to the Computerworld survey listed cloud computing as the single most important technology project that their IT departments are working on right now, and 18 percent said that they consider it to be the no. 1 disruptive technology that will impact their organizations over the next three to five years.

“We’re making a very big push now to the cloud,” says Young, who is IT director at OK International, a global manufacturer of bench tools and equipment used in 3D printing and electronics and industrial product assembly. His IT department supports about 260 users at the company’s Garden Grove, California, headquarters, a manufacturing site in China and a distribution facility in the UK. However, he says OK International’s ERP and document management systems will continue to be hosted internally. The company just invested in the hardware to run those systems last year because it didn’t have the network bandwidth necessary to push all of that data to the cloud. Plus, executives are hesitant to move mission-critical applications to the cloud because they still have concerns about security and response time. Those barriers are coming down, though. Young says OK International recently upgraded its network capacity, making the use of cloud-based offerings a more viable option—even for the ERP and document management systems. Moreover, vendors are continuing to prove that their systems are secure and reliable, and they’re adding contract language to address those points—all of which reassures executives who were once skeptical that mission-critical applications can securely run in the cloud. “It’s proven itself. And I think most companies are seeing that now it’s not a matter of if, it’s when,” Young says. Forrester Research Analyst James Staten says Young’s approach mirrors the overall strategy that he’s seeing user

Cloud continues to be stymied by security concerns, but companies see it offering too many benefits to resist.

A Thoughtful Approach to the Cloud Joseph Young agrees that cloud computing is a key technology for the upcoming year and beyond.

organizations adopt throughout the market. “Everything in IT tends to move dramatically slower than most people think it will. And that’s definitely the case with the cloud,” he says.

Gaining Confidence in the Cloud The apps making the move to the cloud are even more indicative of how far companies have come, where they are now and where they’ll be in the future, Staten says. Several years ago, companies refused to put many core applications in the cloud because they had concerns about security and control. Today, many enterprises have a number of significant cloudbased apps, such as those running HR functions, although they continue to keep mission-critical software in-house. But now if they decline to move a system to the cloud, it’s often because the migration would be a complex undertaking,

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COVER STORY :: Cloud Computing

Managing IT in the New Paradigm

not because they have lingering fears about cloud technology. “It’s not because the cloud isn’t ready. It’s usually because the application architecture makes it difficult to move to cloud computFreeing IT staffers from the drudgery of maintenance chores is a big ing,” Staten says. benefit of a move to the cloud. Ultimately, “everyone ends up being But that transformation needs to be well managed for the organization hybrid,” he says. “They can have static hostto fully realize all of the benefits of cloud computing, say experienced IT ing and pay-per-use and even colocation.” leaders. Wayne State University Physician Group learned that lesson when Constellation Research Analyst Holger it moved further into the cloud. Mueller concurs: “Everything is in play,” he “We did have to ramp up [the staff’s] vendor-management and projectsays. “It’s just a question of readiness, timing, management skills,” says Martin Slominis, vice president of management and the offering being there.” information systems. Cloud adoption does continue to be styHe hired project managers on a contract basis at first and then moved mied by security concerns, highly customsome into permanent positions. ized software, and the complexity of systems, He also transformed managers who once supervised developers into he says, but companies see cloud computing managers who oversee vendors. Similarly, OK International IT Director as offering too many benefits to resist. Joseph Young says he found that he had to refocus his team’s time and As a result, the real issue moving forward talent as his company moved to the cloud. is how to harness those benefits to enable “Cloud shifts them to more strategic roles and more knowledge work transformation. “As we move more into digirather than keeping lights on,” he says, noting that the shift also allowed tal transformation, the real challenge is the his team to spend more time interacting with users—a development that lack of best practices. helps to advance business objectives. “You’re less maintenance and more “Companies that can develop best practices strategic and implementing new technologies, which makes it far more on how to harness these new cloud-based challenging and value-added.” technologies will differentiate themselves Young says he has sponsored training for his employees to help in the market,” Mueller says. improve their communication and project management skills. Toward that end, IT leaders are now seeForrester Research Analyst James Staten says IT leaders not only have ing cloud as a philosophy, a transformative to redeploy staff in more productive ways as they migrate to the cloud— paradigm that shapes how they structure they also need to retool their own approach as they relinquish control of their IT shops to increase the value they some systems and operations and refocus on the pieces that still remain in bring to their organizations. their domain. “A lot of people look at cloud as just a tech“It means understanding a shared responsibility,” Staten says. “They nology, but we look at it as much deeper than have to understand that there’s a leap of faith because you’re trusting a a technology. Cloud is an operating model third party, and you do that and know you can cover the gaps.” for IT and our business. We’re really looking to transform [how we operate],” says Chris — Mary K. Pratt Drumgoole, who is chief operating officer for IT at General Electric and is leading the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company’s cloud transformation. applications, where there are no migration issues. But even Drumgoole says other business functions that currently though entrenched systems are harder to move, migrating require on-premises systems for other reasons—complexity, pays off in more ways than one. perhaps, or lingering concerns about security and availabilFirst, a migration produces the oft-cited benefits of cloud ity—will one day migrate to the cloud, too. computing: The access, agility, and flexibility that make it possible to scale up and down easily and deliver new functionality to users quickly. Tackling Apps That are Tougher to Move But a move to the cloud also creates an opportunity to Over the past few years GE has moved to a public-cloud-first assess your IT infrastructure and streamline operations. mentality, Drumgoole says, and that philosophy picked up And such benefits fuel further movement toward the cloud. steam in the past 12 to 18 months. “The benefit here is much deeper than saving dollars in “Our choice is almost always public first, because we think IT,” he explains. “It’s really around transforming how you the world will end up in a public cloud model. But we aren’t think about applications and technology. That’s why we’re quite there yet, so we have some internal and hybrid soludoing this.” tions,” Drumgoole says. Customized off-the-shelf software tools are among the most challenging systems to move, he says. Not surprisingly, it’s easiest to apply the cloud-first philosophy to brand-new Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW AKAMAI

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

CLOUD READY Srinivas Padmanabharao, Director Product Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan, Akamai, says more CIOs are going to adopt the cloud in 2015 and shares some of the challenges and solutions in front of them. What are the key technology trends for 2015 and how should CIOs prepare? Many CIOs in India are looking to adopt cloud computing. When CIOs adopt the public cloud there are three things they need to be cognizant of: Availability, performance and security. CIOs looking to derive benefits from cloud computing need to make sure that the end-user experience is as good as it can be. How is Akamai helping? As a community, CIOs are looking to adopt the cloud in an increasing manner. But according to our State of the Internet report, if you compare Q1 2013 with Q2 2014, the average Internet speed in India only went up from 1.2 MB per second to 1.9 MB per second. As a point of contrast, Internet speed in South Korea went up from 9.5 MB per second to 24.5 MB per second during the same period. Given that scenario, as a CIO, if I have to deliver applications, I have to be cognizant of the capacity of a network to deliver an experience. What’s Akamai doing about this? Akamai has a whole bunch of solutions known as situational performance solutions that deliver the experience users want, on any device or network they choose to use. We can tailor the experience of the end user to match their particular situation. Ensuring great user experience is important because if users don’t adopt an application then the investment that’s been made in that initiative is called into question. Security is another concern you mentioned. How can Akamai help there?

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The way enterprises deal with security is to have on-premise solutions, which are basically gate-keeper solutions that ensure only good traffic gets to their applications. But today, the reality is that the size and the complexity of attacks is increasing exponentially. For example, we recently saw an attack that was as big as 320 gigabits per second. Onpremise solutions will be severely challenged in dealing with such largesized attacks. Security needs to move to cloudbased solutions. Akamai can provide

“Akamai’s vision is to deliver secure Web experiences that are available to users anywhere in the world. Going forward, we will continue to build on it.” the biggest cloud-based security solution, after all, we have one of the biggest networks. We can help defend customers against the largest attacks out there. We have a managed-service offering that allows CIOs to take away the pain of managing security on dayto-day and hour-to-hour basis, and

Srinivas P., Director Product Marketing, APAC and Japan, Akamai

move it to experienced personnel who will monitor their network and traffic. Akamai talks about an intelligent platform, what is that? The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a global network of servers spread across over 2,000 locations and a 100 countries. A platform of this scale allows Akamai to be within one hop of over 90 percent of the world’s Internet users allowing us to deliver unparalleled end user experiences—whatever the device, location or network. It also provides the scale to secure digital properties from the largest size attacks. So organizations looking to leverage the internet for commerce, supplier/partner/employee engagement or delivering content, news or entertainment—whatever their need, can leverage the power of the Akamai Intelligent Platform to deliver engaging end user experiences.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Akamai

19-12-2014 03:09:13 PM

COVER STORY :: Mobility

Getting Mobility Right

As mobile device management continues to morph, consider what’s ‘good enough’ for what you need right now—and don’t neglect the user experience, whatever else you do. R O B E RT L . M I TC H E L L

he rapid pace of innovation in mobile devices and software has made managing it all a moving target, but the proliferation of userowned devices at work means businesses cannot wait to beef up their support infrastructure. So how do you choose the right tool set, given all the activity? It’s not easy: Mobile device management (MDM) software vendors are adding new features every three to six months, on average. Also, as vendors have consolidated MDM tools, they have evolved into enterprise mobile management (EMM) suites, all-purpose Swiss Army knives that cover the gamut from

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device policy controls to application, content, network, and service management. “2014 will be the battle of the big vendors. It is the year they will make a run at enterprises that want stability and scale,” says Maribel Lopez, principal at Lopez Research. As a result, it’s the year to review your EMM strategy—or to develop one if you haven’t already. If you have not done so yet, you’re not alone. According to a Aberdeen Group survey of 320 IT organizations, 75 percent had a bring your own device (BYOD) program in place, but half of those were taking an “anything goes” approach to managing the mobile ecosystem—which is to say, little or no management at all.

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COVER STORY :: Mobility

“That’s a big concern,” says Andrew Borg, who was research director at Aberdeen when the survey was completed. As mobility morphs from a peripheral concern to a core IT service, it’s inevitable that more organizations will move toward the adoption of EMM software. Here are a few things to think about before making that purchase.

Put Your Current Needs Front and Center Finding the right EMM tool set depends not only on which one has the most features, but which has the feature sets that best meet your organization’s requirements. “There’s no single list of what’s important and what’s not. It’s all about your use case,” says Philippe Winthrop, global mobility evangelist at Computer Sciences Corporation. “If you have zero interest in supporting one mobile platform then it doesn’t matter if the EMM has insane capabilities on that platform,” he says. So start with the business tasks you’re trying to support, figure out what tools and feature sets are required and drill down from there. Are you using corporate owned, personally enabled (COPE) phones? They are owned by the company and can be configured and managed just like a BYOD device, offering containerization or other technologies to segment personal apps and data away from the corporate apps and content. Do your employees travel to offices abroad? If so, a seemingly esoteric feature like geo-fencing—a feature that enables device management policy changes which is based on a phone’s GPS location—could be all-important to stay in compliance with each country’s privacy regulations. “Having a mobile device management that can change the policy of all kinds of devices as it crosses from one country to another is one of those great features that organizations don’t know they need yet,” says Daniel Eckert, managing director in the advisory practice at PwC. It’s also important to understand whose devices you need to manage. Is it just employees, or do you need to include contractors, temporary workers, business partners or even customers? Another concern: Is the EMM suite extensible enough to support other wireless endpoint devices, such as mobile printers and scanners? “We even had a request for Google Glass,” says Eckert. “And I would expect, with wearable smart watches coming down the pipe, that we’ll see more of those in the enterprise in the next two years.” Versatility in EMM software is the key in a world where mobile OSes and endpoint devices change every year, says Michael DiSabato, research vice president at Gartner for Technical Professionals. The fluidity of the environment makes the choice of a tool more of a tactical decision than a strategic one, he adds.

Suites Rule IT should look for best of suite, rather than best of breed, says Lopez. Administrators don’t want eight different tools to manage, she says, which is why the market will still continue to consolidate. “You’re looking for something that’s not amazing at everything but that is great at some things and good enough for some of others.” The way some features are delivered—and the level of integration within a suite—can vary. Vendors may have developed most capabilities natively, but many have acquired features through acquisition, or have added them through partnerships. “A single solution is better for security, providing that the user experience doesn’t get trashed in the process,” says Gartner’s DiSabato. But don’t be afraid to go best of class for important capabilities if the suite you’re using isn’t up to snuff in one key area, says Winthrop. “We have one major customer with an MDM solution, but when it comes to mobile application management (MAM) they’re looking for best of breed. Even though the MDM offering includes MAM capabilities it’s not sufficient for their needs.” There is one worry with suites over best-of-breed tools, says Lopez, and that’s the potential for some features to fall behind those offered by smaller, more nimble competitors. “Startups are very good at thinking out of the box. That’s a huge handicap for any big company,” she says.

Mobility is moving toward workspace aggregation, where the same resources can be accessed from any endpoint. User Experience is Paramount BYOD has put the end user in the driver’s seat, so it’s vital to get hands-on time with the tools before a full deployment. “The user and the employee are the key arbiters of adoption,” Aberdeen’s Borg says. “Polling your employees about their experiences is increasingly important.” “The only thing that matters is the user experience,” says Gartner’s DiSabato. Unfortunately, the MDM policy controls that many businesses have put into place haven’t fared well with users. “The number of companies we work with who say the CEO doesn’t like the MDM they deployed is in the high three hundreds out of over 500 clients,” he says. Things like user self-provisioning and mobile application delivery should be transparent and scalable, he says.

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Mobility: Revolutionizing the IT Landscape

Mobility is on the verge of breaking out in the enterprise, a mega-shift wrought with great opportunities and big challenges that will forever change the face of companies, IT departments, employees, and customer relationships. Traditional businesses will become mobile app developers. CIOs will take on the roles of mobile architects and integrators. And customers will communicate with companies in a new and mobile way. By 2015, most companies will adopt mandatory BYOD programs for many workers, says Bryan Taylor, research director at Gartner. This means employees will have to fork out hundreds of dollars for a smartphone and maybe a tablet or PC merely as a condition of employment. Companies won’t stand to gain huge cost savings from these mandates and reimbursement savings. Gartner predicts that the typical organization will spend more than $300 (about Rs 18,000) per employee annually for mobile applications, security, management, and support. CIOs have been outcasts in the enterprise mobility movement. Here’s a jaw-dropping stat from Aberdeen Group: When it comes to mobile software initiatives, IT’s budget control decreased by 51 percent year over year, whereas the CEO’s budget influence increased by 64 percent and line-ofbusiness manager’s by 69 percent. For CIOs the good news is that companies are starting to realize that their mobility strategy is too important to be left to a grassroots movement with tech-neophyte decision makers often swayed by a slick PowerPoint presentation from a tech vendor. Companies need the CIO more than ever, says Aberdeen Group’s Research Director Andrew Borg. His job is to look ahead and protect the investment. This means the CIO will need to architect a mobile strategy and tactically pull together and integrate the many shadow mobile tech within the company, in order to wring out mobile workforce efficiencies and cost savings. Michael Rodger, vice president of hotel systems and infrastructure at Four Seasons Hotels, says that mobility has made IT a major stakeholder in the company. Four Seasons Hotel is in the midst of an iPad and iPod Touch pilot project at five hotels. The goal is to better serve the affluent, tech savvy guests who stay at Four Seasons Hotels. Competition in the hospitality industry is fierce, Rodger’s says, with hotels trying to one-up each other through the use of the latest mobile gadgets. Now mobile devices make sense for the housekeeper, the valet, the concierge who wants to sit down with a guest in the lobby and provide information via an iPad. “Every touchpoint has a use case for mobility, and that wasn’t true five years ago,” Rodgers says.

a full-featured EMM service, there are cloud-based services and managed service providers that can do the job. Having an MDM that can change the policy of a device as it crosses from one country to another is one of those great features that organizations don’t know they need yet.

Future Proofing

While mobile device management is mature, other elements of EMM are still evolving. “Now people are all crazy about mobile application management, but the next thing will be context, and content, and then data management,” Lopez says. Most enterprises start by controlling the device, and then add secure access to business contacts, calendar, and email—along with file sync capabilities—to solve what DiSabato calls “the Dropbox problem.” The next step, he says, will be integrating mobile into business process improvement and collaboration. “How do you make a decision without having to go back to the office and fire up an application? “That’s all rolled into EMM services, and we think that over the next year you’ll see a huge upsurge in this activity,” he says. Mobility management is gradually moving toward workspace aggregation, where the user can have access to the same resources from any sort of endpoint device. The goal, DiSabato says, is to integrate virtualization and the user experience “so that when I write an app in Windows and access it on a server with an iPad it goes from keyboardand mouse-centric to looking like an iOS app. Somewhere between the app and the iPad, a miracle will occur.” Given how rapidly mobile technology is moving, Winthrop tells — Tom Kaneshige clients to look for a vendor that has the resources and flexibility to adapt quickly to change. The key to choosing the right tool suite, he says, is to standardize on an EMM, but Users should be able to bring their own devices to work and to “standardize it flexibly.” have them comply with policy in a way that’s not onerous to them, says Borg. And if your organization doesn’t have the expertise to build a mobile support team that can rise to the challenge of supporting Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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COVER STORY :: Security

Security: Hard Lessons Learnt

If we learn from the security breaches that happened in 2014, then this year should be a banner year in security education. Here are some lessons. M A R I A KO R O LOV

ccording to the Open Security Foundation, three out of 10 of the all-time worst security breaches happened this year. That includes 173 million records from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, 145 million records at Ebay, and 104 million records from the Korea Credit Bureau. And that’s not counting the 1.2 billion user names and passwords reportedly stolen by Russian hackers, or the 220 million records discovered stolen from gaming sites in South Korea. 2014 is well on its way to replace 2013 as the highest year on record for exposed records, according to the Open

Security Foundation and Richmond, Virginia-based Risk Based Security. If we learn from our mistakes, then this year should be a banner year in security education. Here are some lessons.

It’s Time to Take Staffing Seriously The biggest security hole in information security might not be technical at all. “Roughly 40 percent of security roles are vacant in 2014,” said Jacob West, CTO of Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Security Products. “And when you look at senior security roles, that vacancy rate is nearly 49 percent. No matter what technology we use, no matter how we try to secure our systems, if we’re

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COVER STORY :: Security

going into this war with almost half of our army unstaffed, we’re going to see our adversaries be successful.” West was referring to a study published this spring by the Ponemon Institute, which also showed that 70 percent of respondents said that their security organizations were understaffed. The chief reason? According to 43 percent of respondents, the organizations weren’t really offering competitive salaries. Companies might want to reconsider their security staffing budgets in the wake of another Ponemon study published in May, which showed that the average total cost of a data breach increased 15 percent to $3.5 million (about Rs 18 crore), and the average cost paid for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information increased more than 9 percent.

Know Your Code

Over the past 10 years, many organizations have adopted software security best practices, building in security at a fundamental level. However, that only applies to the basic-level code they write themselves. “One of the big points that was really brought to light this year—and vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Heartbleed really made this point—is that enterprises don’t write the majority of software themselves,” said HP’s West. “Software is in fact composed rather than written. We take commercial components and open source components and build a little bit of proprietary on top of that.”

So why aren’t penetration tests exposing potential security holes so that companies can fix them? “It’s very simple,” said Thompson. “Penetration test reports are generally lies.” Or, to be less blunt, penetration testers are more constrained in what they can and cannot do, compared to actual hackers. “You can’t impersonate someone because that’s not how we do things here,” Thompson said. “You can’t set up a phishing site associated with a Facebook profile because that’s going too far.” Actual hackers—who are already breaking the law anyway, by hacking into a company—might not be averse to breaking other laws, as well. A white hat security firm might be less willing to, say, get into a company by going after the systems of its customers or vendors. Or impersonate government officials, or damage equipment, or hijack actual social media accounts owned by friends or family members of company employees.

Physical Security, Meet Cybersecurity Agents of a foreign group recently went after an organization on the East Coast, circumventing firewalls, extracting data on its leadership, and getting information about upcoming events— and the facilities where those events would be taking place. “Authorities believed it was part of the pre-operational planning of the group,” said John Cohen, who until recently was the anti-terrorism coordinator and acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. “There’s a blending together of physical security and cybersecurity,” said Cohen, who is now the chief strategy adviser at Frisco, Texas-based security vendor Encryptics LLC. It can go the other way, too, with a physical break-in opening the way to digital theft via compromised equipment. Enterprise security must become more holistic. The thieves who broke into a field office could have been looking for easy-to-fence electronics, or they could have been planting keyloggers.

How a company reacts to a breach can make a big difference. Both Target’s CEO and CIO lost their jobs because of this reason. As a result, some organizations spent weeks—even months— trying to inventory their systems and figure out where they’d used the vulnerable version of SSL. Organizations need to start with a thorough understanding of what applications they’re using, where and how they’re using them, and their relative importance. Automated scanning systems might help with some of this, but at the end of the day, “the rubber has to hit the road,” West said. “It takes human effort.”

Pen Tests are Lies Penetration tests are a common part of security audits. In fact, they’re required under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. “Every single company that’s been breached has had a penetration test report that says that people can’t get in—or if they can get it, it’s not important,” said J.J. Thompson, CEO of Rook Security, a penetration testing company in Indianapolis.

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Plan for Failure, Part 1 If you knew with certainty that hackers were going to get into your systems, what would you do differently? After this year’s high-profile breaches, a lot of people are asking themselves that question, and starting to look at security differently. “The way that I look at it, and the people I talk to on a day to day basis look at it, there’s a switch in mentality,” said Scott Barlow, the chair of the CompTIA’s IT Security Community and vice president of product management at Boston’s Reflexion Networks. “Businesses are assuming that their data will be exposed, or is already exposed, and they’re taking steps.” Those steps include encrypting data on employee desktops, in file servers, even email.

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CSOs Can Help CIOs Talk Security to the Board Most CIOs are not security experts, but in the board room they need to be. Thanks to the CSO, they don’t have to do it alone. Behind the scenes, they can help prepare the CIO, offering advice on how to interpret the company’s threat levels, boiling down the most relevant information and communicating it, early and often, so the C-suite will pay attention. “The challenges when you take on the CIO role or an executive role are that you don’t think all about security,” said Michael Hart, vice president and CIO of Petwell Partners, during a panel discussion at CIO Perspectives Houston. “You rely on the CISO.” The panelists, which included IT and security executives, discussed common assumptions about security risks, ways to get your business colleagues to take those risks seriously and best practices to use at your companies. When preparing for a board presentation or a meeting with C-level executives, the first thing a CIO should do is ask the CSO to bring the conversation about security down to the most basic level and put it into terms that everyone from the most junior employee to the CEO can understand. “You don’t want to talk ISO speak. Learn to talk to the business,” Hart said. “That’s one of the challenges I have, to make sure all lines across the company are from the business perspective.” Next, to set expectations and shape the company’s thinking, the CSO should provide context around today’s risks and show how they are different from yesterday’s challenges. Samuel Sutton, computer scientist at the FBI, Houston Cyber Squad, said the stakes are much higher in today’s threat landscape. “It used to be about the single, lonely

And a process called tokenization replaces bank card numbers with randomly generated codes, or tokens, even before they leave point of sale devices. Only the payment processor knows the real numbers—the retailers get tokens, which are completely worthless to any hackers who break into their systems. That turns the payment processors into targets—but then, they always have been. “Guys are already going after us,” said Paul Kleinschnitz, senior vice president and general manager of Cyber-security Solutions for FirstData, which accounts for about 40 percent of the payment processing in the US. Meanwhile, the Targets and the Home Depots will be insulated from the risk of losing the payment data. “We are pulling that burden away from the merchants and managing it,” Kleinschnitz said.

Plan for Failure, Part 2 If JP Morgan can be breached, every company is vulnerable. “Even if you have the best security in place, there’s still a chance

hacker just getting access,” he said. “Now instead of getting access, it’s how can I turn it into a dollar—that changes the ball game” he said.

Armed With Intelligence and Analysis

Another aspect of breaches today is that they are no longer being swept under the rug. “It used to be that the victims suffered this by themselves, isolated and alone,” Sutton said. Today, thanks to intelligence, analysis, and white papers, victims can educate themselves on how to handle a breach, he added. Sutton also cautioned CIOs to not rest easy. Instead, assume you will be attacked and focus on the prevention and response plan. “The reality is that there are two networks out there, those that are hacked and those that [you] don’t know are hacked,” Sutton said. Executives will likely pay less attention to the fact that there are many prevalent threats and more attention to how those threats could affect their lines of business. To prepare the CIO for that part of the conversation, the CSO should outline the impact of a security breach on the business in terms of hard cost and soft cost. Sutton recommended using examples of soft cost to show how a breach will affect the stock price, the cost of freebies to win customers back or the lag time of hiring a new C-suite executive. Lastly, it’s critical to involve the legal department, which, Sutton says, can never happen too early. “Please get legal folks involved early on before your data is on fire,” he said. “Help us, help you.”

— Lauren Brousel

that you may be breached,” said Peter Toren, an attorney specializing in computer crimes at Washington D.C. law firm Weisbrod Matteis & Copley. Toren was also a federal prosecutor for eight years, in the Justice Department’s computer crimes division. How a company reacts to that breach can make a big difference. Both Target’s CEO and CIO lost their jobs this spring as a result of the problems the company had in dealing with the consequences of its 40 million payment card accounts breach late last year. “It came out in drips,” said Toren. “It was the death of a thousand cuts.” Companies need to be prepared to deal with a breach transparently and promptly—and preparations have to start long before a breach ever happens. “They need to have a plan in place and work with a public relations firm beforehand,” he said. “Not just bring one in after the horse is out of the barn.” Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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COVER STORY :: Analytics

Behind the Numbers

Big data analytics and practices are moving quickly. Here’s what you need to know to stay ahead of the game. R O B E RT L . M I TC H E L L

ill Loconzolo, vice president of data engineering at Intuit, jumped into a data lake with both feet. Dean Abbott, chief data scientist at Smarter Remarketer, made a beeline for the cloud. The leading edge of big data and analytics, which includes data lakes for holding vast stores of data in its native format and, of course, cloud computing, is a moving target, both say. And while the technology options are far from mature, waiting simply isn’t an option. “The reality is that the tools are still emerging, and the promise of the [Hadoop] platform is not at the level it needs to be for business to rely on it,” says Loconzolo. But the dis-

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ciplines of big data and analytics are evolving so quickly that businesses need to wade in or risk being left behind. “In the past, emerging technologies might have taken years to mature,” he says. “Now people iterate and drive solutions in a matter of months—or weeks.” So what are the top emerging technologies and trends that should be on your watch list—or in your test lab? Computerworld asked IT leaders, consultants and industry analysts to weigh in. Here’s their list.

Big Data Analytics in the Cloud Hadoop, a framework and set of tools for processing very large data sets, was originally designed to work on clusters of physical machines. That has changed.

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COVER STORY :: Analytics

“Now an increasing number of technologies are available for processing data in the cloud,” says Brian Hopkins, an analyst at Forrester Research. Examples include Amazon’s Redshift hosted BI data warehouse, Google’s BigQuery data analytics service, IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform, and Amazon’s Kinesis data processing service. “The future state of big data will be a hybrid of onpremises and cloud,” he says. Smarter Remarketer, a provider of SaaS-based retail analytics, segmentation, and marketing services, recently moved from an in-house Hadoop and MongoDB database infrastructure to the Amazon Redshift, a cloud-based data warehouse. The Indianapolis-based company collects online and brickand-mortar retail sales and customer demographic data, as well as real-time behavioral data and then analyzes that information to help retailers create targeted messaging to elicit a desired response on the part of shoppers, in some cases in real time. Redshift was more cost-effective for Smart Remarketer’s data needs, Abbott says, especially since it has extensive reporting capabilities for structured data. And as a hosted offering, it’s both scalable and relatively easy to use. “It’s cheaper to expand on virtual machines than buy physical machines to manage ourselves,” he says. For its part, Mountain View, California-based Intuit has moved cautiously toward cloud analytics because it needs a secure, stable, and auditable environment. For now, the financial software company is keeping everything within its private Intuit Analytics Cloud. “We’re partnering with Amazon and Cloudera on how to have a public-private, highly available and secure analytic cloud that can span both worlds, but no one has solved this yet,” says Loconzolo. However, a move to the cloud is inevitable for a company like Intuit that sells products that run in the cloud. “It will get to a point where it will be cost-prohibitive to move all of that data to a private cloud,” he says.

Hadoop: The New Enterprise Data OS

prise data lake or enterprise data hub, turns that model on its head, says Chris Curran, principal and chief technologist in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ US advisory practice. “It says we’ll take these data sources and dump them all into a big Hadoop repository, and we won’t try to design a data model beforehand,” he says. Instead, it provides tools for people to analyze the data, along with a high-level definition of what data exists in the lake. “People build the views into the data as they go along. It’s a very incremental, organic model for building a large-scale database,” Curran says. On the downside, the people who use it must be highly skilled.

SQL on Hadoop: Faster, Better If you’re a smart coder and mathematician, you can drop data in and do an analysis on anything in Hadoop. That’s the promise—and the problem, says Mark Beyer, an analyst at Gartner. “I need someone to put it into a format and language structure that I’m familiar with,” he says. That’s where SQL for Hadoop products come in, although any familiar language could work, says Beyer. Tools that support SQL-like querying let business users who already understand SQL apply similar techniques to that data. SQL on Hadoop “opens the door to Hadoop in the enterprise,” Hopkins says, because businesses don’t need to make an investment in high-end data scientists and business analysts who can write scripts using Java, JavaScript, and Python—something Hadoop users have traditionally needed to do. These tools are nothing new. Apache Hive has offered a structured a structured, SQL-like query language for Hadoop for

With so many emerging trends around analytics, organizations should create conditions to allow data scientists to experiment.

Distributed analytic frameworks, such as MapReduce, are evolving into distributed resource managers that are gradually turning Hadoop into a general-purpose data operating system, says Hopkins. With these systems, he says, “you can perform many different data manipulations and analytics operations by plugging them into Hadoop as the distributed file storage system.” Intuit is already building on its Hadoop foundation. “Our strategy is to leverage the Hadoop Distributed File System, which works closely with MapReduce and Hadoop, as a long-term strategy to enable all types of interactions with people and products,” says Loconzolo.

Big Data Lakes Traditional database theory dictates that you design the data set before entering any data. A data lake, also called an enter-

some time. But commercial alternatives from Cloudera, Pivotal Software, IBM and other vendors not only offer much higher performance, but also are getting faster all the time. That makes the technology a good fit for “iterative analytics,” where an analyst asks one question, receives an answer, and then asks another one. That type of work has traditionally required building a data warehouse.

Deep Learning Deep learning, a set of machine-learning techniques based on neural networking, is still evolving but shows great potential for solving business problems, says Hopkins. “Deep learning enables computers to recognize items of interest in large quantities of unstructured and binary data,

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Get Started with Advanced Data Analytics Customers are becoming more demanding as they change the way they interact with organizations; looking for faster, easier ways to engage, when and where it’s convenient for them. Advanced analytics isn’t as daunting as it seems, start as you would with any business project; define your objectives and determine how you’ll achieve those. Here’s a standard formula you can use to achieve your data analytics goals.

Start Small

Bite off just a little and show how quickly you can realize a business outcome that will resonate. If you are not currently using segmentation, then the insights from a ‘natural’ segmentation analysis will provide insight into your customer base. A second stage is then to use advanced analytics to diagnoze what the key drivers are of specific behaviors.

Assess Your Position On the Analytics Maturity Curve

This is important to identifying the types of projects you are ready to tackle. If you don’t have a strategy in place, get someone to help you formulate that view by engaging with both the business and IT areas of your organization. It’s likely that pockets of your business are using analytics in some form.

Prepare for Business Change

In most cases, shifting to an advanced analytics driven environment requires significant business change. Ensure you have someone who can engage with your stakeholders and manage the business change for you.

big difference between older machine learning and emerging deep learning methods,” Hopkins says.

In-memory Analytics The use of in-memory databases to speed up analytic processing is increasingly popular and moreover, highly beneficial in the right setting, says Beyer. In fact, many businesses are already leveraging hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP)— allowing transactions and analytic processing to reside in the same inmemory database. But there’s a lot of hype around HTAP, and businesses have been overusing it, Beyer says. For systems where the user needs to see the same data in the same way many times during the day—and there’s no significant change in the data—in-memory is a waste of money.

Staying One Step Ahead

With so many emerging trends around big data and analytics, IT organizations need to create conditions that will allow analysts and Understand Your Data data scientists to experiment. Understand what you have; what you don’t have; where you can access additional, “You need a way to evaluate, prouseful data; how you can technically combine that into useable information; and totype, and eventually integrate ultimately, what will help set you apart from your competition. some of these technologies into the business,” says Curran. Start with a Strategy “IT managers and implementAs with all key business exercises, we can’t stress enough how essential a ers cannot use lack of maturity as strategy is to confirming the current and future states that you’re looking for. In an excuse to halt experimentation,” addition to your data strategy as outlined above, your analytics strategy must says Beyer. define the business problems you’re trying to solve. Initially, only a few people—the You’ll need a clear set of analytics objectives and an understanding of the most skilled analysts and data sciappropriate data analysis techniques that are required to meet those objectives. entists—need to experiment. As Albert Einstein once said, information is not knowledge. What we now Then those advanced users and have however, is an accessible way to turn terabytes of information and data into IT should jointly determine when knowledge and use that to change the way we operate. to deliver new resources to the rest This is a game changer; it’s a way to challenge the status quo and innovate of the organization. while achieving business benefit along the way. And IT shouldn’t necessarily rein in analysts who want to move — Cameron Wall ahead full-throttle. Rather, Beyer says, IT needs to work with analysts to “put a variable-speed throttle on these and to deduce relationships without needing specific models new high-powered tools.” or programming instructions,” he says. In one example, a deep learning algorithm that examined data from Wikipedia learned on its own that California and Texas are both states in the US. “It doesn’t have to be modeled to understand the concept of a state and country, and that’s a Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/19/2014 5:54:11 PM

CUSTOM INTERVIEW SAS

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

ANALYTICS ADVANTAGE Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director-Sales, Marketing and Alliances, SAS, shares why analytics is crucial in helping organizations create business value and gain competitive advantage. Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director-Sales, Marketing and Alliances, SAS

Can you highlight three technology megatrends in analytics for 2015? Today, in India, the top most priority for CIOs is to explore how they can deploy analytics. From a trend perspective, what we are seeing is a huge amount of data growth which is posing a lot of challenges. As a result, in-memory analytics is gaining more and more importance. Gone are the days, when people had the tolerance to wait for results to be generated by a system. Today, businesses have realized that delay can cost them dearly. That makes in-memory very important. That’s why organizations are actively considering Hadoop, as it’s a compelling option. Hadoop offers a great data store at a fraction of the cost. From a user adoption point of view, BI is moving out of the confines of the boardroom to people across the organization. It’s empowering people on the ground to take decisions based on facts. So delivering analytical insights on the device they use most often is critical. The days of reactive analytics are behind us. Now customers want to predict the outcomes. They want to deploy advanced analytics. Going forward, I won’t be surprised if in memory, Hadoop, and predictive analytics becomes a way of doing business.

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How can analytics go beyond a tech tool to help CIOs gain competitive edge? If you look at the analytics continuum, there are eight levels—like basic reporting and ad-hoc querying—that help organizations know about the events that have already taken place. But do they help them gain competitive edge? Maybe not. The real competitive advantage comes from areas like forecasting, predicting, modelling, and optimization. For

“SAS is a leader in the analytics market and is perfectly positioned to strengthen its leadership by working closely with customers.” instance, SAS has empowered a large automotive company in India to perform forecasting in order to understand the demand for its vehicles. In another case, an energy utility company is determining its future energy consumption by forecasting in every 15 minutes with an accuracy level of 95 percent. A number of organizations are using these tools to gain competitive advantage.

For analytics to be a success, the problem definition needs to be clear. It’s important to define the problem so that it makes it easy to measure. The quality of data is where you would want to start. Today, data is pouring in from everywhere. With social media, we don’t know what people are saying, or if what the person who’s saying it is relevant. That’s why it’s important to have the right data strategy in place. That’s where visualization comes into picture. You should present data in a way that’s easy for users to consume. That’s where SAS can help. SAS is a leader in the analytics market and is perfectly positioned to strengthen its leadership as organizations continue to deploy analytics. What will be SAS’ strategy in 2015? As CIO’s research, has pointed out, analytics brings the single-biggest growth opportunity for Indian organizations. As far as our strategy is concerned, we plan to work closely with our customers. That has been SAS’ strategy globally, and that’s why we still continue to hold 50 percent of the market share in India.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with SAS

With SMAC gaining ground, what‘s the recipe for a great analytics strategy?

19-12-2014 03:29:24 PM

COVER STORY :: Social Media

The Social Business

While businesses are struggling to adopt and integrate social processes, two companies have successfully embraced the social business trend and are reaping the benefits. KRISTIN BURNHAM

wo-thirds of businesses report they use social technologies for marketing and other purposes, but they don’t integrate it into their business processes, according to AIIM’s 2012 “Social in the Flow” report. Thirty-seven percent expect social media will be used regularly across their entire business over the next two years, and only 9 percent see it as being completely integrated. While a majority of businesses still struggle to adopt and integrate social processes, language learning company Rosetta Stone and Internet radio company Pandora have-successfullyembraced the social business trend and are reaping the benefits. Over the last few years, Rosetta Stone has swapped out about

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70 percent of its technology infrastructure, including its ecommerce systems and internal technology applications, for SaaS offerings. Pandora, too, has turned to the cloud—100 percent of its business operations are now SaaS-based. Both companies use Salesforce.com services today and both report improvements in collaboration, communication, and productivity, though it wasn’t without challenges. Here’s a look at how Pandora and Rosetta Stone navigated security concerns.

Addressing Social Security Concerns “We’re a 20-year-old company and we knew we needed to change,” says Rosetta Stone CIO Pradeep Mannakkara, who joined the company in mid-2011.

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COVER STORY :: Social Media

Rosetta Stone was already a proponent of social media—it has more than 1.5 million Facebook fans from pages in nine different languages—but it had yet to adopt a strategy to better communicate with and connect its 1,700 employees worldwide. “When you have a lot of these teams in offices all around the world relying on email, travel, and phone, you don’t get as much done,” Mannakkara says. “Our workforce is somewhat younger, too, and they use social tools in their personal lives. They kind of expect it at work now,” he says. About a year ago, Mannakkara and his team piloted Chatter, Salesforce’s collaboration tool, twice: First in a group of a couple hundred users, and then in his tech group of about 100 employees. And while the pilots were successful and Chatter has since been rolled out to all Rosetta Stone employees, he admits he was skeptical at first. “What if someone posts something inappropriate? How do you manage that? What about confidentiality? I had a lot of questions and heard a lot of debates. But what it comes down to is this: Technology is evolving and you can’t try to police and control everything,” he says. “It got to a point where some of these conversations were silly. This is the sort of thing that stops progress.” Security was also a consideration at Pandora, a Salesforce and Chatter customer “since day one,” says Richard Rothschild, vice president of Information Services. Rothschild joined Pandora in November 2011 after the company adopted Salesforce. Pandora became a cloud-based company about three years ago, he says, and since joining, he’s helped onboard many SaaS applications. “We’ve kind of grown up with Salesforce. The reality is that data is more secure in the cloud because it’s harder to access it since it exists in many places,” he says. “These software companies are much more invested in system security than we could ever be because it’s their lifeblood. We could never be as good at managing security as them.” Pandora employs about 700 people.

alleviate email clutter and help employees keep in touch and collaborate with others around the world. “Change can be hard to embrace. Some employees were concerned about someone saying something inappropriate,” he says. “We told them that these things might happen, but it will correct itself. Our culture is that we want to know if employees have problems. Tell us. Regardless of how bad it may seem, if we don’t acknowledge it we can’t fix it.”

Realizing the Social Business Benefits Pandora deployed Salesforce and Chatter before Rothschild joined the company in 2011. He says that transitioning the company to the cloud was integral to the company going public in mid-2011. “I dont think we could have gone public if we had to support something like Oracle and hire the people to run it,” he says. “For a business like ours, the cost-savings have been really important.” Pandora’s gains aren’t just cost-savings. Rothschild says Chatter has improved the way employees communicate. The sales group, for example, uses Chatter as its primary means of communication. Rothschild’s IT group of 15 employees uses the tool to plan meetings and the company uses it to organize social events like potluck dinners and announce music groups that come to perform every week. “I wouldn’t say it reduces the amount of conversation, but it’s more centralized, in real-time, and it feels more casual,” he says. Rosetta Stone’s Mannakkara says Chatter has decreased the amount of email they send and receive.

Gauge the temperature of the team by implementing social in small bits. Feel out their tolerance and make them see its benefits.

Navigating Corporate Culture Mannakkara says that Rosetta Stone executives were onboard, for the most part, with the Chatter implementation. But not all businesses have that luxury, he acknowledges. “You need to gauge the temperature of the exec team by doing a bite-sized implementation,” Mannakkara says. “You need to feel out their tolerance for social and pitch it to them in a way so they see the benefits.” When Mannakkara pitched Chatter to his executive team, he focused on it as a communication tool to achieve better productivity. He highlighted how employees wanted to hear more from the executive team, and this was an easy way to get the job done. “Plus, part of it is just having executives get exposure to the technology and others who have seen it work,” he says. “Then they’re not as afraid of the technology.” Next was convincing employees that this tool was beneficial and safe. Mannakkara says they highlighted how it could

“Having a conversation on email drives me crazy,” he says. “If we have more than two or three threads, the rule is to pick up the phone or start a Google Hangout.” Both Rosetta Stone employees and its executive team have embraced Chatter fully. Mannakkara says that they display a Chatter feed during company meetings so the CEO can answer questions asked by employees from around the world. “He has two Macs in his office that rotate through our Facebook pages, our website and Chatter,” he says. Pandora’s Rothschild says because the company has no hardware or software to contend with, they’re able to focus their efforts elsewhere. “We don’t spend any time worrying about what version of database we have or what our network is doing,” he says. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/19/2014 5:54:15 PM

COVER STORY :: SDN

The Secret Code for SDN

In order to ace the software-defined networking challenge, organizations need two things: Education and a solid understanding of their current network. JIM DUFFY

aking the leap to SDN? Don’t jump in blind. It helps to know what software-defined networking is, first off, and then what it can do for you. Then it’s smart to know all the inner workings of an SDN controller and the differences between products offered by established vendors and start-ups. Last, learn your own network—will it even support SDN or require a wholesale rip-and-replace? And then learn from your peers about their experiences. Here’s an 11-tip guide on how to prep for SDNs: Educate yourself on it: Many organizations still do not know what software-defined networking is, what it’s comprised of, and

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how they might benefit from it. It’s obvious, but familiarity is the first step to understanding how SDN can help or hinder your enterprise network. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon Web Services regularly tout the benefits and steer the standards work, but those organizations are not mainstream; they are on the bleeding edge of everything in compute and networking. Read up on the various flavors and iterations of SDN, what’s new, what’s old, etc. You may even come up with your own definition. Know what you want to do: Goldman Sachs wants open standards, commodity scale architectures, independent and programmatic data and control planes, virtualized layer 4-7 services, merchant this, open source that... Pretty much the whole ball of wax across all of its networks. SDN was targeted initially at the

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW AVAYA

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

DEFINING CHANGE Sami Ammous, Global Growth Markets Technology Office Lead, Avaya, shares how the company is helping CIOs adapt to new technology trends. Sami Ammous, Global Growth Markets Technology Office Lead, Avaya

What will be the biggest tech trends in 2015? How can Avaya help Indian CIOs adapt to these trends? The biggest trend we see is adoption of cloud computing. We also see a big focus on mobility and things like social media. What we are seeing a little differently when it comes to cloud computing is that CIOs almost do not care where the technology is and what it does. What they do care about is business outcome. So, if you go and ask CIOs what are your biggest challenges today, they will say: ‘Business is telling me to deliver something but technology is a hindrance.’ So, CIOs want to get rid of this and business will ultimately want results. At Avaya, we focus on delivering business results and not just technology. What sets the Indian market apart is that here small to medium size businesses have grown tremendously. Avaya provides solutions to help small and mid-size companies compete with large enterprises. Do you see a change in the cloud model that all these market segments are adopting in terms of public, private, and hybrid? If you look at why organizations adopt the cloud, you will find different reasons. The driver for large

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companies to adopt cloud computing is cost. Here, flexibility becomes a secondary component. On the other hand, small companies want flexibility for ease of doing business, as they have limited capital. This disconnect between the two segments reveals that large companies are moving more towards private and hybrid clouds and the smaller and mid-sized ones are moving more towards the public cloud.

“Businesses care about outcome. That’s why our solutions focus on delivering business results and not just technology.” You’re a leader in contact center solutions. How does Avaya see technology enhancing customer experience? As an organization, apart from providing contact center solutions, we are a leading player in unified communications and collaboration solutions and we also have a very rich networking portfolio. Mobility, today, is the biggest driver of customer engagement and experience. What’s interesting is that companies are growing and offering these services

outside their call centers. Social, mobile, chats, and videos apply to both sides of the table: Employees and customers. Do you feel that the proliferation of mobile devices will encourage organizations to implement video conferencing solutions? Adoption of video conferencing has been quite low. That’s primarily because of cumbersome video conferencing systems. The second challenge is expensive bandwidth. However, these two elements are being resolved by Avaya and by players outside of Avaya as well. In terms of bandwidth, it is dropping for fixed and mobile devices, which is a big door-opener for us. We look at video as a mobility tool and not just as a collaboration tool. Our solutions ensure that while using a mobile device, only a fraction of bandwidth is consumed, if there is WiFi, it will increase the bandwidth. It also ensures that when someone walks into a room with a conference system in place, it will transfer the conference into the in-room system and deliver a full HD experience.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Avaya

19-12-2014 03:13:07 PM

COVER STORY :: SDN

datacenter but now the enterprise WAN is a prime focus for the automation and orchestration benefits of SDN. Do you want a centralized or distributed control plane? Why or why not? Some of the more compelling SDN applications are analytics and packet monitoring due to SDN’s ability to rapidly steer traffic with just a few mouse clicks. Orchestrating and automating the network through software can save on capital and operational expenses as well, proponents say. Determine what your goal or objective is with SDN and implement accordingly, yet prudently, gradually. Consider security implications: Centralizing all control of the SDN may make life easier for the network operator; but it may also offer a single point of catastrophic failure or attack for a hacker or malicious content. How would a controller deal with outages that require re-routing of traffic? If a hacker gains control of your controller, could that intruder bring your network to its knees? Think about where to start: As mentioned above, SDN was initially and still is targeted at the datacenter where much of the automation and orchestration, capital and operational cost reduction benefits are obvious. But the enterprise WAN is now being mentioned more frequently as a prime focus for SDN. WANs can equally benefit from the automation and simplified management SDNs bring, proponents say. Major IT trends such as SaaS, private clouds, BYOD, mobility and voice/data convergence are stressing the quality of links in an enterprise WAN. And WAN links now require improved security, lower latency, higher reliability, and support for any device in any location to accommodate these trends. SDNs can help enterprise IT accom-

structure, VMware’s NSX, HP’s Virtual Application Networks, Juniper’s Contrail, etc. Know how they differ—physical/virtual underlays, network virtualization overlays, OpenFlow-based forwarding and flow management—and how they are similar. Take into account the implementation with what you’re trying to accomplish. Peruse their application ecosystems for solutions to your problems. Peruse open source and whitebox offerings: Hey, if it works for Google... There are perhaps no more sophisticated or complicated datacenters than those of the Webscale companies. They find a lot of their solutions in off-the-shelf hardware and software, like merchant silicon-based switches from Original Design Manufacturers and open source software. And the OpenDaylight Project has developed an open source SDN framework from the code of multiple established vendors in case any enterprises are worried about downloading SDN from the “community.” But the Googles of the world add a lot of their own secret sauce and cobble all this stuff together by themselves. Open source and whitebox switches may be up to the SDN task, but you’ll have to design, install, operate, manage, maintain, service and support the infrastructure by yourself. Unless you opt to purchase from a partnership like Dell and Cumulus... Determine the functionality you need from an SDN controller: Ethan Banks has written a treatise for us on what to look for in an SDN controller. Such considerations include performance, capacity, topology, capability and functionality, openness vs. vendor uniqueness (lock-in), and others. But Banks concludes that enterprises must conduct due diligence on their networks and what they want SDN to do on it, in addition to thoroughly educating themselves on the controller itself. Learn from experiences and best practices of your peers: Goldman Sachs is all in. It’s been doing SDNs before the technology was called that. Now the financial firm wants a little more consistency, uniformity and openness. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is all in—it’s looking to SDN and a private cloud to bring the network up to where the school’s virtualization is. Marist College is all in—the school is bullish on OpenFlow as a way to interconnect data centers over optical fiber. It’s using open source controllers as well as server monitors. It’s moving workloads between datacenters, experimenting with scalability, researching SDNs, and can share a wealth of experience. Bloomberg has a purpose-built SDN for traffic monitoring and tapping of financial application development, and is also looking at how an SDN overlay scales for onboarding and off-boarding inter-cloud users. All users agree on one thing: go slow with SDN. Consider the impact on your existing network: SDN is leaving many older switches behind. Before making the leap to SDNs, it might be helpful to know how much of a leap is required.

SDN is leaving older switches behind, but before making the leap it will be helpful to know how much of the leap is required. plish this without the expense of upgrading individual WAN links, advocates say, and can allow for application and traffic prioritization, ease of provisioning and enhanced security. Weigh how to start: Start small, those with experience say. Carve out a small slice of a test and development network for SDN experimentation instead of going for the whole shebang. That way, if anything goes wrong, you’re not affecting the whole production network. Once things are humming along nicely, you can gradually meld the SDN pilot back into the production network and carve out another little piece to transition over. And when things are running smoothly, SDN can facilitate the combination of the development and operations networks into a single DevOps environment. Evaluate different vendor offerings: Know the ins and outs of the major, established vendors and their SDN/programmable network offerings: Cisco’s Application Centric Infra-

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12/19/2014 5:54:19 PM

COVER STORY :: Sourcing

The Real Price of Outsourcing

Here are the alternatives for outsourcing customers to determine whether their IT service providers’ pricing remains competitive with the market. S T E P H A N I E OV E R B Y

or better or worse, invoking the benchmarking clause in an outsourcing contract can spell trouble. IT suppliers contend that benchmarking has been used by some customers as an unfair negotiation tool to drive down costs. And industry experts point out that creating true apples-for-apples comparisons can be difficult as outsourcing relationships are about more than cost. “One of the key elements to a successful, collaborative sourcing relationship is governance and trust. Benchmarking can often signify the ‘beginning of the end’ to that collaborative, working relationship,” says David Bates, partner in the business and technology sourcing practice of law firm Mayer Brown. “If a benchmarking clause is exercised by the

customer, it demonstrates a lack of satisfaction and trust on behalf of the customer and shows a breakdown in the governance of the relationship.” That doesn’t mean the benchmarking clause is dead. But there are five effective alternatives that outsourcing customers can consider to determine whether their IT service providers’ pricing remains competitive with the market.

Transparent Pricing Methodologies One alternative is a transparent pricing methodology. The more information an organization has about services and delivery, the better it can understand pricing relative to the market. IT service providers can be reticent to provide such clarity, however. “A supplier may be reluctant to provide transparent

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How to Build a Better IT Outsourcing Strategy

Benchmarking is an important tool to ensure competitive pricing over the course of an IT outsourcing deal. And while benchmarking clauses remain standard in most outsourcing contracts, fewer customers have been invoking their rights to compare their service provider’s costs to market averages in recent years. “Partly this was a function of the recession. Consulting budgets fell victim as companies were squeezed for resources, so overall there was little being done in the way of benchmarking and related services,” says Howard Davies, managing director at outsourcing consultancy Alsbridge. In addition to being too expensive, IT leaders complained that benchmarking exercises took too long and were less relevant. “As multi-vendor models became more prevalent, and as contract terms became shorter, it just made less and less sense to spend several months doing an expensive benchmark for one of many contracts that would soon expire anyway,” Davies says. Today’s outsourcing customers, eager to take advantage of a competitive outsourcing market, are returning to benchmarking—but not the costly, drawnout exercise of old. They, along with their suppliers, are exploring several ways to build a better benchmarking exercise that benefits both parties.

Increased Automation

Neither customer nor providers can afford a months-long process, particularly when deals are shorter and smaller in scope. Automation can hasten results. “A long and costly benchmark just doesn’t make sense in today’s market,” says Davies. “Traditionally, data collection alone would take weeks, with both advisor and client teams laboriously filling out spreadsheets. Now, much of that work is being done with automated tools.”

Decreased Frequency

When deals were longer, benchmarking clauses were written to permit outsourcing customers to benchmark frequently—often annually. “As the deals shortened to three and five years, it is not uncommon for a customer to have the opportunity to benchmark only once during the initial term and then periodically thereafter depending on the length of the renewal terms, if any,” says Matt Karlyn, partner in the Technology Transactions practice group of law firm Cooley. “So, that’s a key change.”

— Stephanie Overby

that benchmarking makes little sense. But that doesn’t mean customers should leave prices unchecked. They can negotiate an automatic downward adjustment based on certain triggers, such as the customer maintaining an agreed minimum volume over a period of months or the vendor failing to reach certain service levels in a given period. Such automatic downward adjustments can also apply on any extension or rollover of the relationship. But, says Bates, “agreeing on the triggers which would lead to such downward adjustment can prove difficult. It requires a good understanding of the services to be outsourced and usually places the onus on the customer to behave in a certain manner in order to secure the reduction in costs.”

Automatic Renegotiation Automatic renegotiation is a similar tactic that can be employed for longer contracts during which the environment might change impacting the cost structures of IT services. “Suppliers should, over time, become more efficient and cost-effective at providing the services, taking advantage of synergies and lessons learned as the contract progresses,” says Paul. However suppliers may have little incentive to agree to such a clause. “Automatic renegotiation may not be welcomed by a supplier seeking to retain those savings for itself,” says Bates. “There is little incentive for a supplier unless some sort of gain-share is agreed between the parties.”

Informal Benchmarking pricing to its customers, not wishing to give away what it considers commercially sensitive information, leaving customers in the dark as to how the costs for their services are structured,” says Megan Paul, an associate at Mayer Brown. “Consultants can often bridge this gap and educate customers in how different services are priced.” The drawback is the additional cost of retaining those consultants. In addition, some vendors may be incapable of providing such comprehensive data. In those cases, say Bates and Paul, a cost-plus model can provide some lucidity.

If there is no formal, contractual benchmarking process in an agreement, a customer can still undertake an informal benchmarking exercise. He conducts the exercise based on information obtained without any vendor participation. And there are no automatic consequences or other contractual processes for dealing with the outcome of the benchmarking. Nonetheless, it can be a powerful tool in renegotiation. “The timing of the exercise is important,” says Paul. “If conducted at a time before renegotiation, it can incentivize a supplier to provide competitive pricing.”

Automatic Downward Adjustment In some cases, such as short deals that last a couple of years or exist on rolling one-year terms, customer and supplier may agree

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12/19/2014 5:59:38 PM

CUSTOM INTERVIEW CANON

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

DIGITAL INNOVATION K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, Office Imaging Solution Division, Canon India, on how Canon is aligning to changes in the printing domain and its customers. Talk to us about the changes in printing in the last year and in 2015. Earlier, products used to have either only printing or photocopy capabilities, then we had multifunction devices with printing, photocopying and faxing features all rolled up in one device. Today, most of our technologies have features that can scan documents and put them directly into a central repository or any particular folder of the user’s choice—creating a tab in the multifunction device itself. We have also launched products with hard discs that have high capabilities and can act like mini file servers. We’ve noticed that CIOs are also becoming responsible for IT peripheral products. About 40 percent of calls made to help desks are related to printing. So now CIOs want a technology that can automate processes. Most people today don’t just want a product, they want a complete solution. Canon has always been at the forefront of bringing innovative products to customers. With our expertise and solutions, we will strengthen our ability to meet the printing needs of professionals. Is India Inc getting on the MDS and digitization bandwagon fast enough? In case of MPS, India is progressing very fast. If you look at the public sector, a large percentage has already moved to the level 1 phase of managed print services. Within next five years, India as a whole will move completely to MPS. The concept of digitization in the government sector is now at an inflection point. The effects of a progressively digitized world are now reaching into

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every aspect of our lives because of three forces—consumer pull, technology pull, and economic benefits—each strongly reinforcing one another. Digitization helps more than one person access images at once from anywhere at any time. It also helps optimize the existing resources in the print environment and also facilitates disaster recovery. There’s been a lot of debate around organizations going paperless. Going paperless has been a trend for years, and the effort has transformed from an extremely hyped and unlikely

“Canon has always been at the forefront of bringing innovative products to customers. And we will strengthen our ability to meet the printing needs of professionals.” goal to a possible option for many enterprises. But, there are a lot of situations where going paperless can be a little tricky. So, we believe that printing will always exist; how you manage this is the real deal.

K. Bhaskhar, Sr. Director, Office Imaging Solutions, Canon India

With Canon’s MPS, CIOs can reduce costs, increase productivity, heighten security, improve sustainability, and track printing. Is Canon also targeting the mid-market and SMB segment in India? Apart from MPS, Canon also has Canon Business Services, which offers digitization services, and business cloud services. In business cloud services, we have sales automation, HR management, customized workflow automation, and records management, all designed for SMBs. There is huge potential in the SMB segment, which will move from traditional printing to organized printing. Canon understands the needs of SMBs and provides them with a basket of software solutions to cater to workflow and print management architecture. SMB customers are becoming more vigilant about amount of costs associated with printing, and Canon’s solutions can lower their printing cost by 20-25 percent.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Canon India

19-12-2014 03:18:22 PM

COVER STORY :: Infrastructure Management

The New Game Plan

Many CIOs are now looking at IT Infrastructure management as an effective means to drive business transformation. Here’s how to strategize better. R A M A M U RT H Y P R A B H A L A A N D R A H U L M . J O S H I

uch has been said about best practices in IT management to tide over the economic downturn. Under everincreasing pressure, many CIOs are now looking at IT Infrastructure management as an effective means to drive business transformation. While most organizations are keen to join in, there are some strategies that may be employed to get quick wins. The sheer pace of change in the technology space has allowed organizations to outsource key activities that would have otherwise consumed crucial internal resources. Management of IT infrastructure is one of the areas that can be outsourced to a

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third party. Studies indicate that up to 80 to 85 percent of management activities can be done remotely thus decreasing costs. With the emergence of solutions such as cloud computing, SaaS, and utility computing models, enterprises can now offload their IT assets by subscribing to IT service components without having to actually acquire hardware. This has proven to be useful especially at a time when almost every other day a new technological acronym is born.

Improving Productivity and Rationalizing Costs As hard pressed CIOs continue to focus on boosting productivity while reducing costs, large projects may not be financially

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COVER STORY :: Infrastructure Management

viable at this time. However, all is not lost since there are proven strategies available for CIOs to address the challenge of supporting the business with a reduced IT spend. We recommend a three-phased approach to tackle the issue of cost optimization, innovation, and business-IT alignment to achieve the overarching objective of a lean and efficient IT driving business growth. Before implementing these strategies, CIOs need to do a robust risk assessment and benefit analysis to determine how these will impact the organization. Rather than being swayed by the hype surrounding some of these strategies, they need to gather information and evaluate the impact carefully. Many of these strategies assume that the organizations have capabilities to undertake such transformation programs. However, it is necessary that CIOs do a realistic capability analysis and if required, moderate the goals. CIOs will need to prepare a detailed roadmap on how to acquire the required capabilities. A prudent selection of partners and trusted vendors can significantly hasten the process of acquiring the capability. A critical element is to balance tactical objectives with longterm strategic objectives. While the downturn has forced many CIOs to cut deeply into the organization costs to gain tactical advantage, it is also imperative that they not compromise on the long-term strategies and put the organization at risk during the upturn. We believe that by following this three step approach where each step builds on the other, CIOs can deliver the promised benefits to the enterprise. CIOs need to consider realistic benefits that can be achieved through the strategies.

Short Term: Cleanup

build appropriate support models with relevant service levels. This allows IT to reduce service levels of up to 30 to 40 percent of application portfolios leading up to 20 percent reduction in costs.

Medium Term: Reduce Complexity Consolidate support, platforms, and technologies: After elimination of redundant applications, it is prudent to consolidate the application infrastructure and support. Strategies for consolidation could include shared Services, infrastructure consolidation, enterprise architecture consolidation, and consolidation of application support. Why not open source? Open source products can be considered a feasible alternative to proprietary products. There are positives and negatives to this, based on the criticality of the use for which an open source product is being implemented. The adoption of open source products is recommended after taking into consideration the maturity of the product and its supportability. Lack of available support is a major hindrance to adoption. CIOs need to make a decision on the correct time to implement these products in their environment. Based on the available data, niche implementation of open source in the Web and middleware platforms has delivered more than 25 percent reduction in licensing costs for customers. Standardize IT processes and operations: CIOs can bring in service management best practices; apply six sigma and lean principles to streamline the process of maintenance and support. Typically, organizations may achieve 5 to 10 percent savings in operational costs due to standardization of processes

Remember to document business values of strategies. Even if they don’t bring cost savings, they are crucial.

Defer discretionary spending: This is relatively easy to achieve, but care must be taken in identifying the projects that are to be shelved. While application upgrade projects are underway, CIOs should scrutinize the benefits of these projects and defer implementation of these upgrades if they are not critical for business. CIOs should review all projects and prioritize them depending on the cost-benefit outcomes. It is also recommended that future direction and growth be accounted for while doing the rationalization exercise. DecoAssion little or never used applications: CIOs should consider rationalization of applications as a strategy for reducing costs of IT operations. Elimination of redundant applications is a must in cleaning up the application inventory and reducing support costs. Such a move is an extremely useful lever while dealing with organizations that have grown through M&A or that are organized based on lines of business. Application portfolio based view of support costs: CIOs need to re-evaluate the cost of managing application portfolios and adjust the service levels based on the utility and criticality of these portfolios in consultation with business partners. One approach for achieving this is to build an inventory of applications, classify the applications maintenance and support needs based on core, sunset and new generation applications and then

through improved productivity. These savings vary depending on the nature of the operations. Automate manual IT tasks: CIOs need to automate routine activities to reduce manual effort and achieve higher process maturity in operations. Some activities that are natural candidates for automation include reporting, weekly and daily application check, alert monitoring, problem identification etc. We have seen organizations achieve 10 to 20 percent savings due to automation of processes. Companies must investigate the cost benefits of implementing Run Book Automation (RBA) solutions for operations. RBA tools have matured over the past couple of years and have helped organizations realize substantial savings on operational costs. A task based automation approach could lead to benefits of up to 8 to 10 percent within the first three months. We have seen this consistently work well across 40 varied IT environments with varying degrees of maturity.

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Strategic Thinking Drives IT Infrastructure Results

Long Term: Business Innovation

Assess alternate delivery models: CIOs need to consider alternate delivery models to get faster cost benefits. Some of the delivery models that can be successfully deployed include As a result of the confluence of disruptors such as cloud technology, mobile, social transaction-based pricing models for media, and big data and analytics, organizations today are rethinking their IT support and maintenance, pay-asinfrastructure from the ground up—and it’s not just IT architects and datacenter you-go models, catalog-based pricing leaders involved. models, unit of work-based pricing Business leaders across the C-suite are looking to IT infrastructure as models, managed application operafundamental to driving competitive advantage and helping them optimize tions models, and cloud computing. revenue and profit, and they are paying close attention, according to a new The above strategies have been study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics. In the used well as transformation levers study, 40 percent of companies indicated that non-IT functions will be involved in banking and healthcare verticals. in making infrastructure decisions in areas such as end-user devices, security, Our experience suggests that signifiand cloud computing. cant upfront benefits can be achieved “You don’t often see the foundation of a building, but we all know it’s critically by choosing strategies that can be important,” says Jacqueline Woods, co-author of the report and global vice implemented without significant president for Growth Solutions in the Systems and Technology Group at IBM. “IT change management to begin with. infrastructure has that same intrinsic value.” For example, a leading investment “The biggest takeaway was the recognition that IT infrastructure enables bank saw a 15 to 20 percent reduction competitive advantage,” she adds. “It allows us to lean into workloads and the in TCO due to consolidation of service trends for analytics, mobile, and social. When we’re able to fully leverage those desk and movement from a T&M to trends through technology, we get an advantage.” a UoW model. The second phase is a Even so, less than one-third of IT executives said they are effectively strategic initiative that could involve collaborating with line-of-business leaders to provide IT infrastructure solutions levers like consolidation of technology to support their business. The study surveyed 750 IT executives—CIOs, CTOs, and and standardization of processes. other senior IT leaders—in 19 industries and 18 countries. In the case of healthcare customThe study found that more than 70 percent of senior IT executives perceive ers, rationalization of technology and IT infrastructure as essential to enabling competitive advantage or optimizing software licenses lead to a reduction revenue and profit. But even with that recognition, only about one-third of of 5 percent TCO to the IT organizarespondents felt their IT infrastructure was prepared to address the demands tion. Platform consolidation and autoimposed by mobile technology, social media, big data, and cloud computing. Fewer mation can lead to a further savings than 10 percent of companies reported that their IT infrastructure was fully of more than 10 percent in the next prepared to meet the demands. six months. The 17 percent of companies deemed Strategic IT Connectors in the study A key point to remember is to were significantly more prepared to address infrastructure requirements than document the business value of the Siloed Operators, including greater preparedness in the areas of cloud (52 percent strategies mentioned above. While versus 10 percent), mobility (36 percent versus 28 percent) and analytics and big some strategies may bring immedidata (44 percent versus 39 percent). ate cost savings, others may not—but “They took a position and point of view on IT infrastructure that was not they will be crucial nevertheless. tactical but more strategic in nature,” Woods says. “They also tended to be more For example, building a framework collaborative at the enterprise level, focused on utilizing infrastructure as a around Configuration Management catalyst to drive business results.” Database (CMDB) may require a significant one time effort—but the — Thor Olavsrud rewards are visible when a platform migration is underway. In conclusion, it is important that Process control: There is a need to evaluate the change and in these trying economic conditions CIOs utilize all available release management processes of applications, infrastrucstrategies and avenues to deliver more with less. ture, etc. CIOs need to implement stringent change control They must use this opportunity to build a strong process mechanisms to curb unauthorized change, which lead to and technology foundation to prepare their organization for unavailability of business applications and productivity the next upturn. loss. IT organizations could save 5 to 8 percent in unplanned costs and better compliance to federal regulations through this. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/19/2014 5:59:43 PM

CUSTOM INTERVIEW HCL SERVICES

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

WINNING STRATEGY Biswanath Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Services, talks about how the company can help IT leaders manage their infrastructure and stay ahead of competition.

Biswanath Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Services

It’s been just a month since you joined HCL. According to you, what’s HCL’s USP? I recently came on board at HCL Services, and the learning experience has been great. HCL Services is starting afresh post its transformation. We have a strong services footprint and a robust stakeholder landscape that includes customers, partners, and OEMs. We have over three decades of experience behind us in leading the IT landscape in India, across both public and private sectors. That’s why we are capable of addressing the business needs of any market segment. We have also executed some complex projects that include managing thousands of servers and storage devices. What will the analytics and cloud market look like in 2015? There’s a huge opportunity for business intelligence and analytics in India. Over the last three to five years, enterprise data has grown multiple folds across both private and public sectors. And going forward, organizations will rely more on data analytics for generating intelligent business insights. Organizations, today, are going for different types of cloud environments-private, public, and hybrid--based on their requirements. However, enterprise customers in India are still apprehensive

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about putting their critical applications on the cloud. Additionally, organizations have realized the importance of information management. It is crucial to ensure that information can be sourced, processed and analyzed quickly to contribute to faster and better decision-making. This is a key success factor and a weapon to beat competition. How is HCL meeting the demand for cloud computing? At HCL, we have our own public cloud. This is primarily for Infrastructure-as-a-

“HCL is now starting fresh with a very strong services footprint. Our offerings can cater to any Indian market segment.” Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery-as-aservice (DRaaS) and Backup-as-a-service (BaaS). Today, customers are looking for a hybrid-cloud model to move their low-end applications on to the cloud. At the same time, we are helping customers manage their on-premise infrastructure, remote infrastructure, and datacenters.

Our strategy is to start by addressing topend enterprises and then reach out to the mid-market segment. The mid-market segment in India is huge. We already have a strategy to address the mid-market directly as well as through our channel partners. We have created a mid-market ecosystem from a GTM, delivery, and practices point of view. The mid-market segment will be addressed through a customized set of services that will help them support business growth and innovation. Our midmarket offering--enterprise management suite (EMS)--will help organizations achieve high business value while maintaining the focus on low costs and high efficiency, for example, Monitoring-as-a-service and Asset tracking-as-a-service. We are reaching out to the mid-market segment through our trusted channel partners. What are your plans for 2015? We have created a ‘Transformations Office’ through which we want to achieve our goals. We have set benchmarks for each of our activities. We will be driving over 100 initiatives in the coming year and strive to achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction through continuous innovations, and embark on our journey of excellence towards attaining a high performance-”Gold Standards.”

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with HCL Services

What’s HCL’s services strategy for the mid-market and SMBs?

20-12-2014 10:32:10 AM

COVER STORY :: Datacenter

Room to Grow Capacity planning of a datacenter requires deep technical knowledge and should answer questions concerning buying patterns.

T H O M A S A . L I M O N C E L L I , S T R ATA R . C H A LU P A N D C H R I S T I N A J . H O G A N

apacity planning needs to provide answers to two questions: What are you going to need to buy in the coming year? And when are you going to need to buy it? From that information, you can calculate the amount of capacity you expect to need for each resource by the end of the following year with a simple formula: Future Resources = Current Usage x (1 + Normal Growth + Planned Growth) + Headroom You can then calculate for each resource the additional capacity that you need to purchase: Additional Resources = Future Resources ñ Current Resources

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Perform this calculation for each resource, whether or not you think you will need more capacity. It is okay to reach the conclusion that you don’t need any more network bandwidth in the coming year. It is not okay to be taken by surprise and run out of network bandwidth because you didn’t consider it in your capacity planning.

Current Usage Before you can consider buying additional equipment, you need to understand what you currently have available and how much of it you are using. Before you can assess what you have, you need a complete list of all the things that are required to provide the service.

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12/19/2014 5:59:48 PM

COVER STORY :: Datacenter

What to Track If you are providing Internet-based services, the two most obvious things needed are some machines to provide the service and a connection to the Internet. Some machines may be generic machines that are later customized to perform given tasks, whereas others may be specialized appliances. Going deeper into these items, machines have CPUs, caches, RAM, storage and network. Connecting to the Internet requires a local network, routers, switches and a connection to at least one ISP. Going deeper still, network cards, routers, switches, cables and storage devices all have bandwidth limitations. Some appliances may have higher-end network cards that need special cabling and interfaces on the network gear. All networked devices need IP addresses. Taking one step back, all devices run some sort of operating system, and some run additional software. The operating systems and software may require licenses and maintenance contracts. Data and configuration information on the devices may need backing up to yet more systems. Stepping even farther back, machines need to be installed in a datacenter that meets their power and environment needs. The number and type of racks in the datacenter, the power and cooling capacity and the available floor space all need to be tracked. Datacenters may provide additional per-machine services, such as console service. For companies that have multiple datacenters and points of presence, there may be links between those sites that also have capacity limits. How Much Do You Have There is no substitute for a good up-to-date inventory database for keeping track of your assets. The inventory database should be kept up to date by making it a core component in the ordering, provisioning and decommissioning processes. An up-to-date inventory system gives you the data you need to find out how much of each resource you have. It should also be used to track the software license and maintenance contract inventory, and the contracted amount of resources that are available from third parties.

Time series: A sequence of data points measured at equally spaced time intervals. For example, data from monitoring systems.

How Much Are You Using Now Identify the limiting resources for each service. Your monitoring system is likely already collecting resource use data for CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth. Typically it collects this data at a higher frequency than required for capacity planning. A summarization or statistical sample may be sufficient for planning purposes and will generally simplify calculations. Combining this data with the data from the inventory system will show how much spare capacity you currently have. Tracking everything in the inventory database and using a limited set of standard hardware configurations also makes it easy to specify how much space, power, cooling, and other datacenter resources are used per device.

Normal Growth

The monitoring system directly provides data on current usage and current capacity. It can also supply the normal growth rate for the preceding years. Look for any noticeable step changes in usage, and see if these correspond to a particular event, such as the roll-out of a new product or a special marketing drive. If the offset due to that event persists for the rest of the year, calculate the change and subtract it from subsequent data to avoid including this event-driven change in the normal growth calculation. Plot the data from

Provide capacity for two datacenters to be down simultaneously. This prepares you for unexpected downtime.

Terms to Know QPS: Queries per second. Usually how many web hits or API calls received per second. Active Users: The number of users who have accessed the service in the specified timeframe. MAU: Monthly active users. The number of users who have accessed the service in the last month. Engagement: How many times on average an active user performs a particular transaction. Primary resource: The one system-level resource that is the main limiting factor for the service. Capacity limit: The point at which performance starts to degrade rapidly or become unpredictable. Core driver: A factor that strongly drives demand for a primary resource.

as many years as possible on a graph, to determine if the normal growth rate is linear or follows some other trend.

Planned Growth The second step is estimating additional growth due to marketing and business events, such as new product launches or new features. Use the data from any changes detected in the first step to validate the assumptions about expected growth.

Headroom Headroom is the amount of excess capacity that is considered routine. Any service will have usage spikes or edge conditions that require extended resource usage occasionally. To prevent these edge conditions from triggering outages, spare resources must be routinely available. How much headroom is needed for any given service is a business decision. Since

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COVER STORY :: Datacenter

excess capacity is largely unused capacity, by its very nature it represents potentially wasted investment. Thus, a financially responsible company wants to balance the potential for service interruption with the desire to conserve finances. Your monitoring data should be picking up these resource spikes and providing hard statistical data on when, where and how often they occur. Data on outages and postmortem reports are also key in determining reasonable headroom.

Resiliency

Reliable services also need additional capacity to meet their SLAs. The additional capacity allows for some components to fail, without the end users experiencing an outage or service degradation. The additional capacity needs to be in a different failure domain; otherwise, a single outage could take down both the primary machines and the spare capacity that should be available to take over the load. Failure domains also should be considered at a large scale, typically at the datacenter level. Spreading the service capacity across many failure domains reduces the additional capacity required for handling the resiliency requirements, which is the most cost-effective way to provide this capacity. The gold standard is to provide enough capacity for two datacenters to be down at the same time. This permits one to be down for planned maintenance while the organization remains prepared for another datacenter going down unexpectedly.

Timetable Most companies plan their budgets annually, with expenditures split into quarters. Based on your expected normal growth and planned growth bursts, you can map out when you need the resources to be available. Working backward from that date, you need to figure out how long it takes from “go” until the resources are available.

Disruptions Force Datacenter Changes Disruptive factors force dramatic changes in the datacenter market by year-end 2016, according to Gartner. A Gartner report found highly disruptive competition, big cloud provider dominance, economic warfare, and nationalism will occur with different intensities over different time frames. However, at least two of these factors will drive significant disruption within the next three years. Gartner Vice President and distinguished Analyst, Joe Skorupa, forecasts that Chinese suppliers will increase their share of the datacenter infrastructure market by 2 percent by the end of 2017, at the expense of western companies, partly due to increasing anti-US sentiment. He also says that expansion of the big cloud providers will spell the end of growth for traditional datacenter vendors, partners will become competitors and the ‘Snowden effect’ leads buyers to believe that none of the large multinational providers are trustworthy, so emphasis shifts to in-countrydeveloped technologies. Although, on the surface, the DC market is poised for growth, existing assumptions regarding the ongoing growth of the DC market are unlikely to be realised, according to the report. “They rely heavily on the current base of traditional enterprise IT end users, and a vendor community that is more likely to support the status quo, rather than introduce risk and break the enterprise IT mould,” the report said. “While there is some heightened tension as former partners now compete, no one wants an all-out slugfest because everyone is addicted to the high 50 per cent or more gross margins in storage and networking hardware and DC infrastructure software,” the report said. The report said there were numerous potentially disruptive technologies, including software-defined networking and softwaredefined storage, network function virtualization, extreme low-energy processors and webscale-integrated infrastructure. The SaaS/cloud-first approach to new, high-growth workloads means that growth in infrastructure hardware is generally aligned to webscale architectures. While workloads may not run more efficiently in the cloud, providers ensure that excess capacity is used, in some cases, at lower prices to ensure highest utilisation, and, therefore, highest monetary return for the provider. “Software vendors will have to invest more to ensure their applications are compatible with a wider range of hardware, or pick and choose which hardware vendors to work with,” the report said.

Advanced Capacity Planning Large, high-growth environments such as popular Internet services require a different approach to capacity planning. Standard enterprise-style capacity planning techniques are often insufficient. The customer base may change rapidly in ways that are hard to predict, requiring deeper and more frequent statistical analysis of the service monitoring data to detect significant changes in usage trends more quickly. Capacity planners will need to be familiar with concepts

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– Brian Karvolsky

such as QPS, active users, engagement, primary resources, capacity limit and core drivers.

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12/19/2014 5:59:53 PM

CUSTOM INTERVIEW LENOVO

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

DATACENTER DYNAMICS Siddhesh S. Naik, Director-Sales, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo, on the company’s datacenter strategy and what CIOs should watch out for while investing. What are some of the key trends in the datacenter space that CIOs need to take into account while planning their datacenter strategies? A CIO’s strategy around the datacenter will be influenced by significant datacenter trends we’ve seen during the last two quarters, which are a function of the change in the paradigm of the business. First, there is the security concern with BYOD and the proliferation of mobile devices. The other trend is around agility and speed. Even if we look at our own consumer business, a significant part of it has turned online. And in the e-marketplace, an e-commerce company has to push 25,000 phones in 2.3 seconds. One ponders as to whether the backend is agile enough to support that type of requirement. The last part, which is absolutely critical, is efficiency. We look at efficiency in terms of the performance of servers and power and cooling. What is Lenovo’s datacenter strategy for India? For Lenovo, it has been a lock, stock, and barrel transition from IBM, both globally and in India, with 7,000 people, globally, making the transition. This includes sales and R&D teams and all products and patents associated with the business. The technology edge always existed with IBM, and now, we will bring in Lenovo’s abilities around efficiencies and scale. In the datacenter space, we will combine our servers with a package. Lenovo will OEM storage from IBM. There is also a component of datacenter

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networking as a part of our portfolio. As Lenovo continues its PC+ strategy, we will add Motorola as the mobile component. This increases and completes our total portfolio from a Lenovo perspective for enterprises to leverage upon. Lenovo has acquired customers in VLE, which cuts across verticals. The focus will be around BFSI, manufacturing and the government. What’s the journey from a PC manufacturer to an enterprise solutions company been like? Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005. Today, we have a 20 percent market

“Efficiency, speed, and security are the three pillars of a datacenter and CIOs today want more out of the existing infrastructure with respect to these three.” share in the PC market. We have the distinct ability to acquire and integrate acquisitions seamlessly. In this growth story, the role of the entire ecosystem has been invaluable. Our partners have grown with us.

Siddhesh S. Naik, Director-Sales, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo

CIOs have to keep in mind that as one gets into a boom period, there’s a tendency to invest and only to later realize that you’ve ended up with a humongous amount of infrastructure. It’s a good idea for CIOs to be prudent with their datacenter investments. The other aspect is the cloud, which has become a buzzword. The important judgment call that a CIO has to make is that with the core applications, where multi-tenancy is not possible, does it make sense to go with the cloud? How cloud ready is Lenovo? Lenovo will be partnering with the ecosystem. This means, in the public cloud space, we will leverage public cloud providers, and managed service providers. In the private cloud, we have the capability to build a solution, the resource of which lies with the labs in India. So, we have complete wherewithal for the cloud plan.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Lenovo

What pitfalls should CIOs avoid with their datacenter strategy?

19-12-2014 03:27:18 PM

COVER STORY :: Digital Transformation

Finding Your Digital Future

To align with the rest of the world, Western Union must transform itself into a digital company, while also preserving its core business, that has provided so much for so long. KIM NASH

hen Western Union sent its first telegrams across the frontiers of America in 1851, it struggled against companies with competing, incompatible technologies. Years of fierce wheeling and dealing helped Western Union acquire and neutralize rivals. Then a prestigious 1860 contract to build the first coast-tocoast telegram system—which critics incorrectly said would never work—solidified the company’s dominance. Even the eventual spread of the telephone and radio didn’t derail the company, partly because by that time, Western Union had diversified from simply moving words to moving money, too.

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But a history of scrappy transformation doesn’t guarantee the future. Western Union’s business is conducted mainly in person, and in cash, in a world where money cards, digital currency, and mobile payments are proliferating. A friend can pay you back for his bar tab with a text message. Bitcoins can buy you a spot on a Virgin Galactic rocket. Big banks, meanwhile, are horning in on Western Union’s market: The estimated two billion people worldwide who don’t have checking, savings or credit accounts. To anticipate where new, profitable niches will emerge and to keep costs in line, Western Union must transform itself into a digital company. But it also wants to preserve the core business that has provided so much for so long.

| www.cio.in

12/19/2014 5:59:55 PM

COVER STORY :: Digital Transformation

CEO Hikmet Ersek says he searched for months to find the right CIO to lead the effort. And two years into the job, that man, David Thompson, says Web and mobile technologies, along with a few irreplaceable proprietary systems, will be critical. But, Thompson says, big data may matter most of all. Analytics could help Western Union sidestep the mistakes of familiar failures like Blockbuster and Borders. Understanding how people react to global migration pressures, geopolitical struggles, economic changes and natural disasters will shape Western Union’s products and pricing, says Thompson, who is also executive vice president of global operations. “My team is starting to wake up to the fact that they’re a partner in something that’s really changing our company.” CEO Ersek is pleased with progress so far, but says, “We have a long way to go.”

Creative Destruction Upheaval in the financial services industry is being created by established players and entrepreneurs alike. Market-leading banks and credit unions offer mobile apps and on-the-spot loans. Startups are devising new ways to buy and sell with mobile phone swipes, scans and text messages. Bitcoins and other virtual currencies are now taken seriously by federal officials. These changes portend a “moment of creative destruction,” says Lisa Servon, a professor at The New School who focuses on economic development and urban poverty. “Western Union sees the writing on the wall and, like everyone, is trying to figure out how to leverage new technology to improve their own services.” The question is whether Western Union will be fast and bold enough to emerge as a winner in the game of digital disruption. A slew of startups are clamoring to topple Western Union in the money-transfer business. “Establishing an infrastructure to operate legally and efficiently in a variety of countries will take some doing for startups,” says Denee Carrington, a senior analyst at Forrester. “But Western Union can’t just count on the fact that it’s hard to insulate them forever.” Western Union’s Ersek contends the company is already digital internally, conducting an average of 28 transactions per second. The real change the CEO wants is in extending digital capabilities to customers directly. But timing is everything. If Western Union overhauls basic customer interactions by throwing a lot of new technology at consumers, it risks alienating and losing them. If the company moves too slowly, competitors will steal its customers. Analyzing customer behavior will help Western Union find the right pace, he says, reeling off a series of IT-based ideas, such as analyzing what customers do in social media and measuring the results of online and mobile marketing campaigns.

Details, details, details are important to him, to hone strategy. “We want to know when a Filipino customer in the UK goes to church on Sunday,” he says, by way of example. That way, Western Union can create customized products based on those life details. The Philippines is one of the most popular destinations for money transfers. Maybe a customer is in a family mood after church and will send money back home if offered a Sunday discount. “Not many companies have such global data.” Western Union’s customers are both an asset and a risk. They don’t have bank accounts for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’re unemployed or they’ve abused accounts in the past. Maybe they have too little money to open an account. Maybe they can’t or don’t want to provide social security numbers at all. If Western Union is right in estimating that 2 billion people are unbanked and under-banked worldwide, that’s 28 percent of the Earth’s population who, by definition, even global behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank don’t reach. Western Union’s customer database, therefore, is of “enormous value,” Ersek says. “You can’t imagine.” Western Union also hedges currency exchange rates, profiting from the difference between what it paid when it bought a currency and the rate it charges customers when they come into a store. This foreign exchange revenue is a growing part of total sales—24 percent in 2012, up from 21 percent in 2011. “If you look at cost relative to income, [these customers] spend much more on financial services than you and I,” Servon

Two billion people are underbanked worldwide. Western Union’s customer database, therefore, is of enormous value. says. “But I don’t know that there’s any way else to send $100 (about Rs 6000) to Philippines every two weeks.”

IT for Better Business As with its “magic eye” high-speed fax machine in the 1950s, the company is trying to stay ahead of customers, to offer them more choices when they’re ready. In just the past two years, Western Union has obtained 52 patents for inventions, including various kinds of mobile transactions, refundable prepaid transaction cards, and a system that lets you transfer money using the wireless technology in your car. Last year, the company got a patent for technology that transmits fingerprints, facial geometry and other biometric data during a financial transaction. Sometimes, birth certificates, identity cards and other documents for verifying identifica-

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Get Ready for Digital Business: Gartner

There’s a “digital business” revolution coming and IT security professionals need to grasp the significance early on to be prepared to address whatever security needs arise. That was the message from Gartner Analyst Jorge Lopez in the closing keynote at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit. Digital business isn’t simply represented by what will be a growth in the so-called “Internet of Things.” IoT connectivity will be part of cars, trash cans, road sensors, medical devices, clothing, toys, parking meters, LED lighting and much more. Beyond this, the digital business revolution means what will happen with the information that can be gleaned from IoT and shared for business purposes. Gartner defines digital business as “the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical world.” The main example that Lopez, who heads up Gartner’s digital business area of research, gave was how a car crash might be handled in the future through IoT input to fire and police, insurance companies and even hospitals. The individual’s smartphone would likely play a role in data collection because it could sense a sudden and unusual stop caused by the car crash, said Lopez. The smartphone might be able to collect data from the car’s various systems. That data could be sent to insurance companies immediately to have them record the crash in their records and find repair shops willing to bid to fix damage. “The video evidence could be assembled and sent to an attorney,” Lopez said. IT security professionals—Gartner says they may be called “digital risk officers” in the future—need to recognize the implications of these changes, which could arrive quickly, adding trillions in economic value in the coming years. There may arise the new corporate role of the “chief digital officer” or “chief data officer” to drive these changes. But Lopez said he expects the rush to appoint “chief digital officer” in companies might not catch on right away because it would imply one person was responsible for driving “digital business” while it’s really up to every facet of a company to re-invent itself to discover the possibilities. Lopez also predicted that the tech industry will expand around this. “By 2020 and you must start understanding how to manage digital business, a multi-million dollar market,” he said to the IT security professionals. It will be up to security pros to craft the security controls for this future world but right now, no one knows what they will be.

for example. In India, it’s analyzing customer trends and doing segmentation. In China, modeling risk and demographic analysis. Improving e-commerce is a top priority for the company this year, something Wall Street investors frequently question executives about. Compared to regular retailers, Western Union does little business online, and it aims to change that. Electronic channels accounted for 2 percent of revenue in 2010. Now that number is 5 percent. Aside from attracting customers who want to send funds and pay bills online, the website offers the company other financial benefits. Namely, Western Union doesn’t have to pay commissions to a sending agent online, though it does have to pay credit card fees. Right now, while Ersek and Thompson spend money to enhance the site, transactions there carry lower margins than those conducted in physical stores. But by 2015, the margins are expected to be up to par, Scott Scheirman, the CFO, recently told investors.

ROI on the CIO

One big investment Western Union’s CEO has made is swapping out one CIO for a new, more expensive one from outside the industry. John Dick, who was CIO from 2008 to 2012, was reportedly asked to leave, telling an audience at a For— Ellen Messmer rester conference that Ersek sought someone with different skills. A Western Union spokesman confirms that the company rethought the CIO position. tion are scarce, as in remote areas of the Philippines. There, “The role and priorities of the position were realigned Western Union won permission from regulators to use finaround our technology and operations needs to better drive gerprints instead. our customer-centric strategy,” he says, declining to comment The idea came from a local Western Union team, including further. Dick, who is now CIO at staffing firm Towers Watson, an IT staff member, CIO Thompson says. Having technologists didn’t respond to a request for comment. stationed in various global locations helps the IT group tune If Western Union is right in estimating that two billion into cultural norms and nuances, he says. “I don’t want us to people are under-banked worldwide, that’s 28 percent of the be a big monolith in corporate that doesn’t understand.” Earth’s population. Western Union’s customer database, thereSince he arrived, Thompson has been trying to make IT fore, is of enormous value. more responsive to business needs. He has built up analytics muscle with a Hadoop cluster and Tableau reporting tools. He also put six data scientists in strategic locations—two in the US, two in India and two in China. Plus, each team specializes in different areas. In the US, the data scientists are experts in e-commerce and mobile analytics, Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/19/2014 5:59:57 PM

CUSTOM INTERVIEW BMC

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

DIGITAL DIRECTION Sachin Chawla, Country Manager, BMC Software India, on how Indian CIOs should start the journey to the ‘digital enterprise’ in 2015.

Sachin Chawla, Country Manager, BMC Software India

What are the key business imperatives that organizations should focus on to be a digital enterprise? Change or die is the scenario for businesses today. They are looking at ways to transform themselves in this digital era. However, IT departments should also prepare themselves in order to cross this chasm. Some of that preparation comes from intuitive experience. BMC’s ‘Smart IT’ is a good example. It is built around how different business stakeholders interact with IT. It is a crowd-sourced, mobile way of interacting. It’s a new and faster way for users to interact with the IT department. The solution helps to ease the friction between IT and its users. Actionable intelligence, on the other hand, helps the IT department in making informed decision by making sense of the data available. Adaptive automation is another aspect in the digital business world. The transformation to digital business wouldn’t be possible unless and until a CIO industrializes or automates the back-end. What are some of the do’s and don’ts for CIOs to make this transition to the digital era possible? Focus on people is the most important factor for this transition. A CIO or any

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business unit for that matter, has to think of new ways to engage their stakeholders in an intuitive way which is easier, faster, and more productive. High speed innovation is another critical aspect. You have to come out with the right services and applications at the front-end, which transforms the way business is run today. At the same time, the back-end needs to be more efficient and automated. These three things should happen simultaneously if you want to become a digital enterprise.

“The transformation to digital business wouldn’t be possible unless and until a CIO industrializes or automates the back-end.” Do you think India Inc. is geared up for the SMAC revolution? Where will BMC focus in the coming year? I think all the four components work hand in hand, and we have been focusing on all these four aspects of SMAC. Social and mobile, specifically, are putting a lot of pressure on businesses today. IT is radically

changing the way we fundamentally communicate with each other and also with businesses. SMAC will change the way we do business and the way IT looks at business. IT organizations should also be able to embrace that change and become more vibrant. How has IT management changed over the years? We have seen a lot of difference in the last couple of years. India is a very infrastructure-dense market. About three years ago, infrastructure players were taking most of the money from CIOs. But CIOs have realized that just adding more hardware is not going to solve their operational problems. So they are looking at smarter ways to address the pain points. The focus is now on operational efficiency, productivity, faster roll-out of services, and cost savings. Mundane infrastructure monitoring has been happening in this industry for a long while. But what was lacking is a service down frame work, which allows CIOs to quickly drill-down the root cause for a downtime, and that is where we are heading.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with BMC

19-12-2014 03:14:50 PM

TECH SPOTLIGHTS

DEMO PARTNERS

THOUGHT LEADERS

ASSOCIATE PARTNERS

TECH EXPERT

ROUNDTABLES

EVENT BY

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HOSTED BY

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veryone gets exactly 365 days in a year. The only difference is what we do with them. In the last eight years, that’s what has been the aim of the CIO Year Ahead conference—to bring technology in perspective, and provide a platform for IT leaders to help them transform their businesses in the new year. As India Inc. prepares for the year ahead, our mission is to caution IT decision-makers of stiff competition from new players in the market, of tumultuous business cycles, skill shortages, and of new technologies— like mobile, social, cloud, and analytics—that will continue to play a crucial role in driving business growth. The main purpose of asking you to gear up for the coming year is to push you to seek answers to the questions plaguing you: Are you satisfied with yourself as a CIO in your profession? Satisfied but wanting to move? Are you looking at new funding models for your business? Are you taking up additional roles apart from the CIO role? What technologies should be in your bucket list for the next year? We derived insights from CIO Research in order to provide you an in-depth know-how on the technologies that are changing the game and how should CIOs use them strategically to meet business outcomes. The aim of the Tech Spotlights identified for this year—curated from our comprehensive State of the CIO Survey 2014—is to help you refine your plans for the next year. The aim of this year’s CIO Year Ahead 2015 event held at ITC Grand Chola, Chennai, was to help you do just that: Create a roadmap for 2015. Here are the highlights.

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SPEAKERS

The State of the CIO: What It’s like to Be You

Challenges in the Networked World

CIO RESEARCH INDICATES THAT THE NEXT YEAR APPEARS TO BE GREAT FOR I.T. DEPARTMENTS, AND GOOD FOR BUSINESSES.”

THE INTERNET LOOKS GOOD FROM OUTSIDE BUT IN REALITY IT IS NOT THAT SIMPLE.” Srinivas Padmanabharao, Director-Product Marketing, APAC and Japan, Akamai Technologies

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media

“

n the last 10 years, the CIO profession has really transformed with changing business demands and customer expectations,” said Vijay Ramachandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media, as he discussed the findings of CIO research at the CIO Year Ahead 2015 held in Chennai. One of the insights he shared, based on the State of the CIO Survey 2015, is that this year, Indian businesses are clearer about what they want from IT departments than they have been in the past. This puts more pressure on IT to deliver projects in shorter timelines. “Today, CIOs are delivering 3.8 times the number of projects they were in 2008,” said Ramachandran. He added that Indian CIOs are executing that additional work with smaller teams, without all the necessary competencies. The challenge of inadequate skillsets isn’t new, he said. It’s been a problem for the last six years that the State of the CIO Survey 2014 has been conducted. Right now, inadequate internal skillsets are visible around emerging technologies such as cloud computing, mobility, and social media. While CIOs need to cultivate these competencies, other issues also need to be addressed. “There’s a need for CIOs to have a better appreciation of legal issues and contracts, to understand new funding models, and to chalk out integration and legacy challenges in the next year,” said Ramachandran. According to the State of the CIO 2014 research, a bulk of Indian CIOs have huge expectations from the government, said Ramanchandran. “While the euphoria of CIOs was a little tempered after the government completed 100 days, they still expect a lot from the government,” said Ramanchandran.

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he Internet by its very nature is real-time. Sure, it provides immediate access to information, but it can also throw problems at you with equal speed and little warning. Cloud computing, something we all have to deal with in our everyday businesses, is the subset of the same platform. “If you are to succeed in cloud initiatives, it is important to understand what is happening with the Internet and its challenges,” Srinivas Padmanabharao, director, Product Marketing, APAC and Japan, Akamai Technologies, said. The slowing down of the Internet as a medium of communication is the primary challenge. In 2012, a typical page size was 788 kb and today it is 1,622 kb. The average page load time in 2012 was 6.6 seconds and now it is 10.7 seconds. “People’s patience is running out. Slow performance of applications and website content reduces engagement with the end user posing a serious problem for businesses,” Padmanabharao said. The next challenge with the Internet is security. “Every single day you hear news about people losing data and websites being defaced. If you are in a business trying to deliver applications to consumers, employees or third-party providers over the Internet, security becomes a big challenge,” Padmanabharao says. Capacity is the third challenge. Statistics say that 25,000 tbps is required to handle the load of 2.5 billion viewers watching prime time TV at a speed of 10 mbps. Among the major Internet traffic-carrying networks, Akamai claims to be at a 400 tbps. “Sure, the Internet looks good from outside, but in reality, it is not that simple,” Padmanabharao says.

19-12-2014 02:57:28 PM

Agility Dominates Modern Datacenters

Trust Equation is the Success Mantra

WHILE ORGANIZATIONS ARE PRONOUNCED AS CREDIBLE AND RELIABLE, IT’S THE PEOPLE THAT MAKE COMPANIES WHAT THEY ARE.”

LENOVO HELPS ORGANIZATIONS JOIN THE JOURNEY TO RISE ABOVE THE CLOUD.” Siddhesh S. Naik, Director Sales, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo

ith the rise of mobility and analytics, the modern datacenter needs to be secure, scalable, efficient, reliable, and agile. Increasingly, cloud delivery apps are in vogue and there has been an exponential rise in investments for marketing analysis. This has necessitated and catalyzed the emergence of agile software-defined infrastructure. Research shows about 59 percent of businesses desire operational efficiency from analytical tools. However, the major concerns for a datacenter are its vulnerability to security breaches, huge management costs, flat budgets, revenue, and bottom line losses. “Research shows that by 2020, there will be around 30 billion connected devices. Existing infrastructure might not be able to meet the deluge, resulting in losses,” Siddhesh S. Naik, director-Sales, Enterprise Business Group, Lenovo, said. Lenovo’s System X business, previously part of IBM, is now core to Lenovo’s strategy for the upscale datacenter. This business group, known as the Enterprise Business Group, with high end portfolio offerings from enterprise servers right up to supercomputers, positions itself as a keen datacenter solutions player. The 7000+ people, strong Enterprise Business Group has transitioned from IBM seamlessly and is now part of Lenovo’s key action plan for emerging technologies. One of the company’s latest offerings, the M5 platform, has a record 131 percent performance jump vis-à-vis its predecessors. Despite some pain points in the encryption key management scenario, the M5 platform holds the key to help organizations make the journey to the modern datacenter.

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Mithileshwar Jha, Professor, IIM-B

t is always believed that a business completely dedicated to services will have only one thing to worry: profits. But, Mithileshwar Jha, professor, IIM-B, says the pure essence of service lies in three things: Serving people, bonding with them, and gaining their trust. These three elements will also help to have a mutual, meaningful growth and peace of mind. Trust relationships are essential to do business today, but the challenge lies in creating a framework to logically evaluate and understand trust. The keystone is the Trust Equation: A deconstructive, logical model of trustworthiness that can be used to help your organization. The Trust Equation uses four variables to measure trustworthiness—credibility, reliability, intimacy, and selforientation. The combination of these variables results in the following equation: Trust = credibility + reliability + intimacy/ self orientation. “Credibility has to do with the words we speak, reliability is related to our actions, intimacy points out to the security or safety felt when trusting someone with something, and selforientation specifies to the person’s focus—whether its selfcentric, or for the other person,” Professor Jha said. CIOs who want to play a strategic role in their organizations should apply all these variables together to have a seamless trust model for their business. The real key is identifying trust and influence as aspects of a single entity and not as separate attributes to be implemented independently. “While organizations are often pronounced as credible and reliable, it’s actually the people within the organizations that make those companies what they are,” Professor Jha said.

19-12-2014 02:57:32 PM

ROUNDTABLES

Grasping the New Security Landscape Technologies like mobility, social media, cloud, and analytics have once again brought security concerns to the fore. Top Indian CIOs discussed ways to combat them. By Shubhra Rishi

ORGANIZATIONS NEED TO TAKE A TOP-DOWN VIEW OF SECURITY. THIS IS LIKELY TO HAVE A HIGHER IMPACT ON RISK MITIGATION.” Girish Gargeshwari, Head - Commercial & SMB Business, McAfee. Part of Intel Security

s internal and external threats continue to rise, investments in the security space are growing considerably. According to the Global Information Security Survey 2015, a staggering 78 percent of CIOs spent more on security management and planning in 2014—a significant increase from 59 percent last year. The threat landscape is concurrent with the adoption of the SMAC stack, which is considered to be great levers of productivity. As the number of end points increase, the threats will also rise. As we allow people to collaborate in the digital world in order to improve productivity, we need to put in place new regulations in order to curb internal and external threats,” said Prashanta Ghoshal, director-IT Solutions and Services, Geometric, in a roundtable, held on the sidelines of CIO Year Ahead 2015. When it comes to security a lot depends on the internal culture of an organization. “We need to manage data, policies, and people. We can protect structured data by enforcing policies with various tools and processes, but the real challenge is unstructured data created from different systems and stored in various devices which requires a new set of rules and framework to manage,” said Titus Gunaseelan, head-IT, JM Financial Services. Apart from framing policies, in order to strengthen an organization’s security posture, it’ll need robust security tools. “We at Intel Security, are trying to build a threat intelligence

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framework that can quickly alert and control malicious threats and risks that are compromising a user’s environment,” said Yuvraj Pradhan, Team Lead-SE, McAfee. Part of Intel Security. There’s also a need to create security awareness within firms.“Organizations need to take a top-down view of security both in terms of education, awareness and implementation. This is likely to have a higher impact on risk mitigation. But involving external partners and experts to support the process is a good practice as well,” said Girish Gargeshwari, Head-Commercial and SMB Business, McAfee. Part of Intel Security. But there’s only so much an organization can enforce. “We need to accept that every security solution will face some amount of user resistance. There’s nothing you can do to stop it,” said Sachin Gupta, CIO, Bennett Coleman & Company.

19-12-2014 02:57:36 PM

Accelerate Digitization, Increase Efficiency Legal barriers hinder a paperless office. But Indian CIOs are finding new ways to create a more digitized infrastructure to increase efficiency. By Ishan Bhattacharya

PAPERWORK CAN EXTEND PROJECTS FOR A YEAR OR TWO. DIGITIZATION CAN SOLVE THAT PROBLEM.” K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, Office Imaging Solutions Group, Canon

igitization is not a new concept. Companies have digitized processes in the past, but now the need is more urgent than ever. A significant shift is happening in the digital transformation scenario. It is the fact that enterprises are optimizing processes, keeping the user in mind. One critical point that emerges from this transformation is enterprise security. So, businesses will shift some key areas to service providers. “Today, business is demanding. We operate across almost 13,000 kilometres in India and over 6,500 kilometres in China. Suddenly, there is a big demand for documentation and maintenance of beats. The most important thing for us right now is designing engineering drawings and storing them,” said Sudhir Kanvinde, CIO, IL&FS Transportation Networks. Digitization is of great help during long-term projects or when there is a need to reassess a certain strategy. “Sometimes a project might go on for a year or two. It might so happen that after a few years a CIO might realize that he has to re-work on the project. The entire process becomes a bit irritating and the project gets pushed in a shell. Digitization, in these situations, can be a great solution,” said K. Bhaskhar, senior director, Office Imaging Solutions Group, Canon.

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The focus today, considering the new Company’s Act, is to minimize paper work. But it is not possible to do away with it altogether when it comes to things like audit trails said Darshan Appayanna, CIO, Happiest Minds Technologies. “But we are focusing on areas where digitization is possible. Employee onboarding is an example of that. All our offers are digitized and automated through the system,” he said. “Our focus this year is to have the approval tracks for each of the legal and regulatory documents digitized,” Appayanna added. Another problem CIOs expect digitization to solve is storage. “We are looking for something that can centralize our storage,” said Kanvinde. When employees visit the sites, he said, they come up with a lot of changes and that impacts data volume. That’s something that digitization promises to fix.

19-12-2014 02:57:44 PM

SPEAKERS

The CAMS Manifestation is for Real

Analytics: How Numbers Drive Growth

CAMS IS REAL. BUT THE CRITICAL PIECE IS TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE ORGANIZATION REALLY NEEDS.”

I WANT TO BREAK THE MYTH THAT ORGANIZATIONS REQUIRE A DATA SCIENTIST TO COMMENCE THEIR ANALYTICS JOURNEY.” Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director-Sales, Marketing and Alliances, SAS Institute

Lingaraju Sawkar, Director–Integrated Technology Services, IBM India

loud, analytics, mobile, and social (CAMS) are technologies that are here to stay. With LOBs becoming more prominent, organizations see value in investing in emerging technologies. Lingaraju Sawkar, director-Integrated Technology Services, IBM India, said, “The transition from traditional IT to hyper digitization, especially in domains such as marketing have led to a massive rethink about where to head next”. IBM positions itself as a CAMS solutions provider which helps organizations focus on the systems of engagement vis-à-vis the earlier prevalent systems of record. With investments to the tune of $1.2 billion (about Rs 7200 crore) for Softlayer, the Big Blue’s India plan for CAMs is to deliver value to customers around it. Sawkar pointed out that the greatest challenge ahead for an organization is to understand the problem on hand and formulate a secure, and scalable CAMS strategy. Sawkar said, “CAMS is real and it is here. But, the critical piece to note before embarking is to comprehend what the organization really needs.” Discussions are key. For cloud, it is important for organizations to analyze what they need—storage-based cloud, hybrid or an application-sourced model. Sawkar said, “A sound financial model to incorporate chargeback mechanisms should be in place.” With mobile, it is key to have a network that supports the burgeoning possibilities of mobile computing. “IBM’s recent collaboration with Apple is significant from a MobileFirst standpoint,” said Sawkar.

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he importance of data in an organization has been reinforced in the last few years. A Gartner survey reveals that more than 73 percent of organizations have invested or plan to invest in big data in the next two years. The CIO Midyear Review 2014 also revealed that a large number of Indian CIOs no longer consider big data an overhyped technology. “Data has become strategic to an organization’s growth and in the last few years, more and more organizations are making decisions based on the intelligence derived from the data,” said Ashit Panjwani, executive director-Sales, Marketing and Alliances at SAS Institute, on the sidelines of the CIO Year Ahead 2015. He also spoke about how business intelligence and analytics has become a top priority for Indian organizations. Panjwani stressed on the importance of defining an organization’s analytics strategy. From deciding what kind of platform you are going to use—whether it’s cloud or gridbased systems, in-database, in-memory or high-performance analytics—to the value that you wish to obtain from the data. The objective of having an analytics initiative is to make decisions that you are confident of. “Organizations need to identify their biggest competitive differentiator such that the analytics initiative will ensure they create unique products and services,” said Panjwani. Analytics, he said, has empowered CIOs to overcome the data challenges and cease the opportunity that the market offers. Quoting Jim Collins, author of How the Mighty Fall, Panjwani said whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you. And the only way to figure that out is by leveraging the power of analytics.

19-12-2014 02:57:46 PM

Driving Business With Managed Print Services

Transcend to the Next Level

WE TRY TO BRING IN VALUE TO OUR CUSTOMERS AND CREATE A BREAKTHROUGH ARCHITECTURE FOR PRINTING REQUIREMENTS.”

THE MOOT POINT OF THE NEW CIO ROLE IS THAT THE LARGER AGENDA CANNOT ANYMORE BE I.T. ALONE.”

K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, Office Imaging Solution Division, Canon India

hough we’ve seen a lot of organizations succeed and benefit with managed print services, we feel a lot of businesses have not yet completely migrated to managed print services,” said K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, Office Imaging Solution Division, Canon India at CIO Year Ahead 2015. Canon Managed Print Services ensure business benefits, such as greater control over printed documents, more efficient workflows, improved productivity, faster print processes, and lower expenditure. According to Bhaskhar, two things matter the most to any organization and these cannot be outsourced: It’s people and paper. Paper goes through a lot of processes in a business, such as getting printed, archived, retrieved, and destroyed. Canon, he said, helps manage printed documents beyond just archival and retrieval. With MPS, organizations can deal with each and every step a document goes through in an enterprise. “With digitization, we achieve archival with segregated lifespan along with cautiously designed features such as privacy and accessibility. But the most crucial aspect of managing documents is indexing. It makes documents more understandable, retrievable, and makes sure that they are not manipulated,” Bhaskhar said. For large businesses, printing and digitization is non-core and adopting Canon Business Services can help streamline their printing and digitization, lower overheads, and create more efficiency. Bhaskhar said, “Canon Business Services plays a significant role in offering confidential, secure and digitized results. With MDS becoming popular, large number of companies are now looking towards more advanced solutions.”

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Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media

or some years now, research has constantly indicated that the fine line between the various LOBs is blurring, giving room for speculation that the CIO role might become redundant. While it is clear that CIOs will not cease to exist, but what can they do to reinvent himself? Till a few years ago, CIOs were told that they should graduate to being evangelists and business strategists. Now, while IT still remains the focal point, there are 12 new exciting roles that the CIO can contemplate in order to chart the course, suggested Vijay Ramachandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media. Ship Breaker, the first role, would challenge the CIO to break legacy. “Break what exists and see what happens,” said Ramachandran. The other CIO personas of Data Cruncher, Sandman, Gambler, Negotiator, Power Lifter, Evangelist, Marketer, Gardener, Teacher, and Magician are clarion calls for the CIO to transcend to the next level. The last role, Tiger, refers to the survival instinct of the CIO, who has to be as resilient. “One failed project does not mean the end,” he said. Ramachandran highlighted, “The moot point of the new CIO role is that the larger agenda cannot anymore be IT alone, and distinctly calls for the CIO to move out of his comfort zone and drive change that can empower the business.” Quoting fine examples from the real world, Ramachandran highlighted that many CIOs have already walked this path of playing new roles as a matter of choice, but these transitions are now inevitable for the larger community to truly move beyond tomorrow.

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ROUNDTABLES

THE MAIN CONCERN, TODAY, IS NOT‘WHY CLOUD,’ BUT ‘HOW TO GET TO CLOUD,’ AND THE JOURNEY TOWARDS THE SAME HAS COMMENCED FOR MANY ORGANIZATIONS IN INDIA.” Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales, Microsoft

Getting Real With the Cloud Cloud computing has been a huge disruptor. But what does it really take to move to the cloud? Top CIOs discussed the strategies they are using to migrate. By Sejuti Das

he speed of cloud adoption is being driven by the massive growth in modern data, applications, and devices. CIOs of India Inc., too, are eager about gauging the true potential of the cloud, but their enthusiasm is often tampered by practical issues like cost of moving to the cloud and security standards. To understand the true value of cloud computing and how CIOs weigh their current cloud journey, CIO, in association with Microsoft, conducted a round table at the CIO Year Ahead 2015 in Chennai. “We primarily deal with selling and installing wind turbines, and we have a huge field force of employees. Therefore, there is high demand for mobility and cloud for us to have real-time information anywhere, anytime, and we have fulfilled that requirement well,” Karthik Galdinus, GM-IT, Gamesa Wind Turbines, said. That’s something, P.C. Joseph, VP-Infrastructure, Wells Fargo, agrees with, “Although security has always been a major issue with adoption of the public cloud, for us cloud computing is a part of the ongoing process of virtualization and convergence of infrastructure,” he said.

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“We utilize the cloud to help people connect with customers, build new products, and execute risk management practices,” Joseph added. Microsoft, in India and globally, has been taking massive strides to boost the adoption of cloud computing. “The main concern today is not ‘why cloud,’ but ‘how to get to cloud,’ and the journey towards the same has commenced for many organizations in India. We have the technical expertise to understand CIOs’ needs and accordingly offer them innovative solutions with the flexibility to integrate them with their individual requirements,” Sudhir Nayar, director-Partner Sales, Microsoft, said. IT heads agreed that there has been a change in the attitude toward the cloud among users. CIOs are also familiar with the growing proliferation of mobile devices and applications, which has significantly improved cloud adoption. “We will continue to invest, innovate, and serve your needs. For us, cloud is the only way to go forward,” Microsoft’s Nayar said.

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AT CA TECHNOLOGIES, WE HAVE THE ABILITY TO COMBINE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE WITH INFRASTRUCTURE.” Abhilash Purushothaman, Director-Solution Sales, Head-Enterprise Management Business, India and SAARC, CA Technologies

Application Economy: Start at the End User To minimize degraded application performance and optimize end-user satisfaction, IT must modify its approach to application performance management. By Madhav Mohan

e are living in an application-driven economy. Organizations are under tremendous pressure to deliver more services at a faster rate while providing a flawless end-user experience. These pressures can lead to complex, composite applications built over time that span physical, virtual, hybrid-cloud, and legacy environments, making it difficult for IT teams to ensure optimal performance, provide that flawless experience end users demand, and reduce complexity. CA Technologies, in association with CIO, conducted a roundtable in Chennai, to discuss critical issues regarding the management of mission-critical applications and end-user expectations attached to it. Asserting the need to view mission-critical applications from the perspective of the end-user, Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Serco Global Services, said that his company’s revenue model is based on application response. “In the BPO sector, most applications are under the control of the end-user. Our revenue model is based on application response. We have to proactively identify application performance from the perspective of the ones who are doing the transaction and also who are consuming the services,” he said.

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To address mission-critical requirements, IT must modify its approach to application performance management. However, Ananth Nagrajan, CIO, Sun TV Network, said that development and operations in IT is a well-oiled machine, but it is a challenge for organizations in the media sector. “End users modify the requirements to a certain extent as they see it evolving in front of their eyes. The cycle between development and operationalizing an application is definitely more rapid and interactive today,” he said. Different verticals are experiencing applications differently, but they remain critical to achieving business objectives for all. “At CA Technologies, we have the ability to combine application performance with infrastructure. A lot of people are using technology to drive business analytics. The ABA segment (app behavior analytics) is critical,” Abhilash Purushothaman, directorSolution Sales and head of Enterprise Management Business, India and SAARC, CA Technologies, said. Assuring the reliability of complex, mission-critical applications and delivering a flawless end-user experience is of utmost importance. Powered by

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SPEAKERS

Help Employees Better Engage with Customers

EMPLOYEES USE THE CHANNELS THAT SUIT THEM AND NOT WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO USE.”

CIOs’ Journey to the Digital World

I.T. USERS ARE LOOKING FOR APPLICATIONS THAT ARE INTUITIVE IN NATURE. THEY EXPECT HIGH-SPEED INNOVATION FROM I.T.” Sachin Chawla, Country Manager, BMC Software India

Sami Ammous, Global Growth Markets Technology Office Lead, Avaya

he difference between customer engagement and employee engagement is increasingly diminishing. Today, transactions are shifting from the contact center to the back office and as a result, enterprises are now using their best resources to access and make sense of contact center information instead of relying on agents. “We want to leverage the best channel available to customers. It is no longer ‘any channel any time,’ but ‘all the channels all the time.’ Your employees are going to use channels that suit them and not the ones you want them to use. Sometimes they might prefer mobile phones, sometimes laptops, and sometimes they might just want to use a desktop for accessing websites that aren’t mobile-friendly,” Sami Ammous, Global Growth Markets Technology Office Lead, Avaya, said. Providing relevant information to employees when they are engaging with customers becomes very critical. It is difficult to act solely on a caller’s name, Ammous said. To be able to do that, he said, one needs to understand who they are, why they are calling, and what kind of an interaction the person has had with the caller previously. Keeping all this information handy will help serve customers better, said Ammous. “If you, as CIOs, go ahead and ask your networking staff what consumes most of their time, 80 percent of them will say it is troubleshooting and figuring out ways to make sure the network stays up. So, to address such issues Avaya came up with a technology called ‘fabric connect.’ It is basically one single network and hence, not complicated at all,” Ammous said.

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he digital economy has become a reality today. Thus, businesses are expecting more from IT in this digital era than ever before. It is imperative for IT to become more relevant and vibrant. Hinting at how the digital world will evolve in the future, Sachin Chawla, country manager, BMC Software India, said, “There are already more than 5.3 billion connected devices in the world. Behind every single connected device, there is a service. This opens up new ways for CIOs to interact with their stakeholders—their customers, their partners, and their employees. CIOs have to embrace that change.” Today, IT is no different from business. That’s why it’s very important to have an industrialized back-end. A very impressive front-end app is of no use if one can’t assure efficient service delivery to customers, Chawla said. BMC’s recommendation to CIOs is to focus on some important business imperatives. “First comes intuitive experience. IT users are looking for applications that are intuitive in nature. They expect highspeed innovation from IT. BMC’s Smart IT application, for instance, is a crowd-sourced, mobile-driven enterprise tool, it is a new game altogether,” Chawla said. According to Chawla, BMC has solutions delivered around a whole set of business aspects. For instance, the company also wants to help IT have a service-down approach to infrastructure. Chawla believes that it’s important for CIOs to look at solving operational challenges through operational tools. It’s important to ensure that processes are automated and compliance is done on the fly.

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Strategic Thinking Leads the Way

Turn Emerging Tech to Your Advantage

A CIO NEEDS TO BE A STRATEGIST. HE NEEDS TO CHALLENGE THE BUSINESS INFRASTRUCTURE AND IT INVESTMENTS.”

S. Raghunath, Professor, IIM-B

ever before in the history of mankind has IT assumed such a critical role in influencing both regulation and business models. In accordance with the trend, CIOs can introduce strategic thinking for an upward swing in the growth of their companies. “A CIO needs to be a strategist, questioning every product line and service. Making use of his position, he needs to challenge the business infrastructure and IT investments,” S. Raghunath, professor, IIM-B, says. Raghunath explained this with a perfect example. Zara, a vertically-integrated seller, needed sophistication in its IT infrastructure. “Zara was looking at the changing trends and had to dish-out its entire back-end to come to terms with current business opportunities. The top management of the company thought that a sophisticated ERP—which the competitors have—is exactly what Zara should have.” Raghunath stressed on the fact that CIOs opposed this idea. When they looked at the IT infrastructure requirement, they found that the point-of-sale at every retail store needed to be tracked. The IT and investment requirements were different from that of their competitors. Talking about customer relationship, Raghunath says, “It is no longer about transactions and deals, but about enduring relationships. The more you mine data, the more you follow the customer category, and the better you understand how to augment your services and product lines.” He also emphasized on engaging with youngsters and working as a team. “They know exactly what’s current and you have the experience and vision to take that business model forward,” Raghunath says.

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EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO RESHAPE THE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE AND WORK.” Dr. Arun Kumar Jain, Professor, IIM-Lucknow

instein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other as though everything is a miracle.” The persistent procession of emerging technologies is unfolding on many aspects. Almost every innovation is billed to feature in the ever-growing list of the ‘next big things’. Not every evolving technology will change the business— but some really do have the potential to disturb the status quo, change the way people live and work, and reorganize value pools. Dr. Arun Kumar Jain, professor, IIM-Lucknow says, “Emerging technologies—including the mobile, internet, applications, and advanced genomics—have the potential to radically change, alter, and reshape the world in which we live and work.” He says that the computer is no more a moron, as once stated by a management consultant, Peter Ducker. “It is rather challenging the human intelligence in many interesting ways.” According to Jain, a knowledge driven economy is one in which the generation and the abuse of new knowledge play a crucial part in the creation of economy and wealth. That’s the major reason why new, young, and fresh engineers are paid crore-plus salaries. Reaching out to the customers is an important aspect for all CIOs to keep in mind, because users are technology dependent in today’s modern world. Jain says, “Build a strong relationship with the customer, create a rapport and understand their present situation, measure their business problems and produce the solutions they need. The next challenge is to create value for your customers.”

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SPEAKERS

Simplifying IT Infrastructure Management

Making Applications More Productive

WE CAN BUILD HETEROGENEOUS TECHNOLOGIES WHICH CAN HELP CIOs BECOME MORE FUTURISTIC.”

OUR COMPANY ENSURES USER ACCEPTANCE AND INCREASED USER SATISFACTION.”

Biswanath Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Services

ven though there are numerous enterprise solutions available in the market today, for a CIO, things still remain complicated and challenging when it comes to managing IT infrastructure. To help IT leaders better manage their infrastructure, solution providers must have a robust portfolio in place which includes consulting, managed services, operations, and implementation. Citing the problems Indian enterprises face when it comes to managing IT infrastructure, HCL is building a product called Taffila to address the same. “Taffila is an enterprise management software which is being developed by 60-plus R&D engineers for the past six years and it can manage, monitor, and alert the IT infrastructure. The product module also includes asset management and service desk. The solution has both enterprise and SMB customers,” said Biswanath Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Services. In the past few years many industries faced challenges pertaining to talent acquisition, fast turn-around time, and other such things. But the crucial part is it is difficult for a CIO and his limited staff to address all these problems simultaneously. In situations like these the role of a service provider becomes extremely important. “In the last couple of years Indian business have changed a lot. Time to market competition has crept in a big way culminating in increased pressure for CIOs. IT today has a big role to play, especially when it comes to cost optimization,” Bhattacharya said. Bhattacharya said that companies like HCL, can build heterogeneous technologies which can take some burden off from a CIO’s shoulder and help them manage people and infrastructure, and be futuristic too.

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Sivakumar Ramamurthy, COO, Anunta Tech

here are many reasons Indian companies are turning to the cloud, but there’s one that cuts across c-suites: The desire to increase productivity. “We believe that moving away from application deployment to application delivery can help reach productivity targets. From the surveys we have been doing for the past five years, we’ve found that 48 to 50 percent of the time, IT departments need to be told by end users that they have a problem. This means that there is a fundamental drift needed in the way IT is managed,” Sivakumar Ramamurthy, COO, Anunta Tech, said. He said that the company has algorithms written in such a way that even before end users expect a service impact, they will have an auto solution service in place. “Almost 70 percent of the times we have been able to predict such incidents before it reaches the end user. For example, we have helped a large enterprise which has its manufacturing centers in remote places in India and users all over, to increase availability of systems for end users,” he said. IT departments spend millions buying software licenses and introducing applications, but at the end of the day, if these applications don’t increase productivity, companies lose out. “Anunta ensures user acceptance and increased user satisfaction. Our entire focus is on end-user computing and managing it. All the company’s SLAs are related to performance and we spend time with clients and try to understand the kind of applications they use and what is critical to users to create impact,” Ramamurthy said.

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Information at Your Fingertips

Helping Enterprises Get Cloud Ready

WE HAVE STAYED IN HARMONY WITH CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS WITH INNOVATIVE CLIENT MANAGEMENT TOOLS.”

WE HELP ORGANIZATIONS CREATE AN AGILE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIRED FOR THEIR APPLICATIONS.” Atul Ahuja, MD, Softline India

Rajesh Ganesan, Director-Product Management, ManageEngine

here’s no doubt that, today, enterprise IT management is very complex, inefficient, and expensive. But there’s a way out. Rajesh Ganesan, director-Product Management, ManageEngine, highlighted how ManageEngine can simplify IT management with affordable software that offers the ease of use SMBs need and the powerful features large enterprises demand. At the CIO Year Ahead 2015 event, held in Chennai, Ganesan said that the major responsibility of a CIO is to facilitate or to make information accessible in a fast, efficient, and accurate manner. CIOs can also help businesses mine data and provide important insights. That’s where companies like ManageEngine come into the picture. “We have a family of products like Active Directory Management Suit, IT Service Management Suit, IT Operations Management, and IT Security Management Suit that will manage your networks, datacenters, business applications, and IT services and security,” Ganesan said. According to Ganesan, a CIO is always aware of what he wants, but the challenge is to articulate it to someone else. Zoho Reports, an online reporting and business intelligence service, can easily analyze business data and create insightful reports and dashboards for informed decision-making. It helps in accessing reports from mobile devices, integrate them with your applications, create insightful reports, upload and sync data from anywhere, analyze and track business performance, and share reports online. “With Zoho reports, we have stayed in harmony with customer expectations with innovative client management tools that benefit IT infrastructure,” Ganesan said.

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n the age of digital transformation, it’s only a matter of time before all Indian organizations move to the cloud, said Atul Ahuja, MD, Softline India, while speaking at the CIO Year Ahead 2015 event. A provider of information technology services, consulting and outsourcing services, Softline helps over 60,000 global clients in the field of IT services and solutions, cloud software and services, tech consulting, and licensing and software delivery. According to Zinnov research, the cloud computing market in India is expected to reach over $1 billion in 2015. Ahuja says that a number of organizations face challenges when they take their applications and critical workflows to different cloud vendors. “We help these organizations with a layer of cloud orchestration and help them create an agile cloud infrastructure required for their applications,” said Ahuja. In the area of technology consulting, Ahuja stresses that Softline is building capabilities to facilitate faster user adoption of the cloud for its customers who have commenced their cloud journey, and help them become more cloud-ready. Softline’s largest revenue comes from deploying Microsoft workloads. Ahuja believes that the company’s partnership with Microsoft will help clients latch on to the opportunities presented by the cloud. Sudhir Nayar, director, partner sales, Microsoft India, who shared the stage with Ahuja, said, “We need partners such as Softline, who possess global experience, to translate the benefits of cloud services to enterprises. We will continue to work with Softline to help it deliver superior value to customers in India.”

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connect peer advice from India’s veteran CIOs

SOUNDING BOARD

Has the CDO Arrived?

Three CIOs talk about the emerging role of chief data officers and what it means to Indian organizations. V I JAY S E T H I , H E RO MOTO COR P

CDA IS THE WAY TO GO

Vijay Sethi, Senior Vice President and CIO, Hero MotoCorp

ing to me, is just restricted to managing data. I’d rather go for ‘chief data analyst’ because today, it is all about analytics and taking decisions based on that data. What companies need is someone who can analyze data to get meaningful insights out of it—a CDA. A CDO will only get into the details of the right file sizes; he might replicate data from one server to another, or put its details on flash drives. Eventually, he will get lost in the maze of technology. I feel a CDA is a business-oriented rather than a technology-oriented role. The CDA is a business executive, and not a technician. He will know what kind of analytics will be helpful for an enterprise in order to coordinate with all its functions. He has to drive results regarding something beyond technology, something that leads to a clear business outcome. For this, someone with an IT background and an MBA, who has not started his career as a network or hardware engineer, will be perfect. He will be able to give an overview of the entire organization.

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Tamal Chakravorty, Director-IT and Test, Ericsson Global Services India

Sunil Mehta, SVP and Area Systems Director, Central Asia, JWT

I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y T H I N K S TO C K

‘Chief data officer’ may not be the right terminology because the role of a CDO, accord-

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Available on

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TAKE

Note

Data leads to information which incidentally leads to intelligence. Changing the mind sets of the people in an organization is a great challenge. I feel most organizations do not have an analytical mind set, and one has to learn to go way beyond graphs and charts. TA M A L C H A K R AVORT Y, E R IC SSON G LOBA L S E RV IC E S I N DI A

connect

FIRST, IDENTIFY YOUR DATA REQUIREMENTS

When Ericsson offshored to India, analytics was just another vertical

where globally cheaper resources could be used. But all of a sudden, I see analytics being one important, business-facing function, at least in the IT department. Businesses want to see numbers and they come from all kinds of sources today—excels, SAP, Internet, mailers. A CDO would know what to look for, but not where it can be found. For example, why do you think retailers struggle with information points or the lack of it? It is because half of them do not know what to look for. They want social media data, internal data, excel data, raw data, paper data, barcoded data, and general market intelligence data all meshed into one, to tell them how they can source the right product. They forget that there are hundreds of footfalls, and they can’t really say how many products were bought, so a CDO may not be of help here. I would say there should be virtual officers not on a leadership level, but within each team to manage two data sources—one that helps the company grow its revenue and other that controls governance. If a CIO’s information management team can churn and produce good reports, the virtual business team can make use of it. This would help the company build a data bank of the top 50 crucial data packages whose sources could be SAP, excels, social media, or newspapers. These should be reviewed by a competent CDO from time to time. S U N I L M E H TA , J W T

CIOS SHOULD DOUBLE AS CDOS Trying to create a new vertical altogether—a CDO—would be wrong. We

will have to see how it evolves into a concrete function over some period of time. Not all CIOs handle data analytics. At times, it is outsourced to a third party. If I have to do a lot of data analytics, I would hire a young candidate who is a statistician or a fresh scientist with four to five years of experience to singlehandedly work in the department. However, I do believe that the CDOs will be an added support within the current structure of back-end support teams. As on today, a company like SAS that is playing with large volumes of data with all kinds of research tools doesn’t have a CDO. Alibaba, China’s biggest online e-commerce company that clocked one million sales in its first 18 minutes, handled the challenges of big data without a CDO. CIOs should appoint someone to handle data in a focused manner. For instance, a person with a good statistical background who is researchoriented will fit the bill. They will do the research, interpret data, churn out the report, and analyze it. Their permutations and combinations will bring out the desired results. Additionally, a CIO should consider taking on the mantle of a CDO and convert every challenge into an opportunity.

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Social Media Drive

WATCH Today, social media is creating new benchmarks. Corporates are trying hard to leverage it and derive business benefits. Oriflame, the cosmetics company, has a full-blown social media strategy for customer engagement. Mehak Khanna, Social Media Specialist of the company speaks about why a matured policy around social media should go beyond gathering ‘likes’ and ‘followers.’ She also talks about how social media enables better customer engagement and experience. Watch this video to learn more about how you can use social media to create customer impact.

http://www.cio.in/cio-tv/social-mediadrives-better-customer-engagementmehak-khanna-oriflame

CFO Data Woes ANALYZE Information used to be a CFO’s best friend. That’s less and less true, say CFOs, given the challenges that come with today’s data. According to a survey, CFOs take decisions based on all the information available to them. Yet, despite hankering for data, CFOs say their decision-making has slowed down, thanks to information overload. And that’s not all. A lack of training in data analytics and technological incompatibilities have further added to the woes. Check out our by the numbers section to know more.

http://www.cio.in/by-the-numbers/ we-can-t-handle-data-cfos

Uber Cool Technology READ From a non-descript start-up five years ago, to a phenomenal global player, Uber’s success is hailed in some quarters and despised in others. But the fact remains that its disruptive business model has forced both Indian cab service operators and consumers to sit up and take notice. Read more to know about the tech taxi company.

http://www.cio.in/feature/uber-a-disruptive-tech-player%2C-not-a-meretaxi-service

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IT STRATEGY

Is the Darn Thing On?

Sometimes, solving a problem is as simple as knowing what to look for. BY S T E P H E N B A L Z AC

was having dinner recently at the home of a friend, seemed to have no interest in helping one another. Rather, a doctor with extremely impressive diagnostic skills. whenever something went wrong or customers reported a Since I spent many years in the high-tech business, as problem, the only thing to get fixed was the blame. People an engineer and as a manager, he said to me, “Steve, would work long hours and make it obvious they were doing my computer backups aren’t running. Would you so, yet productivity was remarkably poor considering how mind taking a quick look?” long everyone appeared to be working. Meetings were an As I did so, he explained all the things he’d tried to do exercise in one-upmanship. Firing the worst offenders and to fix his problem: Re-installing the software, trying to do hiring other people hadn’t solved anything. backups at different times, verifying that the cables were When I was called in, I asked how long this had been all attached, sacrificing a latte, and so on. As he finished, I going on. “I don’t know. Months. Maybe a year. It’s been getreached over and turned on the external ting worse for a long time.” hard drive.Problem solved. I spent the next two weeks observing It’s knowing what Why couldn’t my friend see this really the business. Since they’d already made to look for, what to simple answer? Because he didn’t know any number of attempts to fix the problem what to look for and therefore was dis- ignore, and having and nothing had worked, it would have tracted by all the things that didn’t matter. a perspective on been silly to just jump in with another A lot of problems come down to the same “solution.” Compared to the hard drive the problem that thing. Here’s another example. or the falling student, this situation was One of my jujitsu students once came makes finding a a bit more complicated. to me and said, “Sensei, I can’t fall anyIt wasn’t until I was allowed to sit in on solution possible. more. I used to be able to fall easily, but some performance reviews that the solunow every fall just hurts.” tion revealed itself. Being a sympathetic and considerate sensei, I immeAt the risk of oversimplifying what was a complex situdiately called over another student and had him throw ation, the fundamental problem was that the bad behavior her. And then throw her again. And again, while I sat and was being rewarded. Project went well, but you couldn’t watched. He kept throwing, and she kept falling, until I figprove you had contributed sufficiently? Poor review. Project ured out that she was doing the equivalent of not turning on went badly but you could show all the times you had stood the external hard drive. Just a slight over-rotation of her body up and fought for the “right” answer? Good review. And so was all it took to transform the fall into a very unpleasant it went. Teamwork was talked about, but selfishness was experience. Once I identified the problem, though, it was rewarded. Once the problem was correctly identified, fixing amazingly simple to correct. it was eminently doable. The most difficult part was taking Afterwards, I asked her how long she’d been tolerating some deeply rooted beliefs about what should work and those painful falls. “A few weeks,” was the reply. replacing them with facts about what would actually work. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” You have to have the right person looking at the prob“I figured the problem would go away.” lem from the outside. It’s knowing what to look for, what A commendable attitude, if you don’t mind unnecesto ignore, and having a perspective on the problem that sary pain. Sometimes, the best way to see something is to makes finding a solution possible. get someone to look from the outside. I was called in to a large engineering organization to Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational help them figure out why they were stuck. Team members development. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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LEADINGEDGE

connect

Perks of a Vague Career 86

Moving back and forth between roles can help you see how to switch between measuring your own productivity. BY PAU L G L E N

After nearly two decades of focusing on the management side of IT, I’ve been writing code lately—and loving it. This wasn’t a deliberate, considered career move or a midlife return to the glory days; it was merely a confluence of circumstances. In the course of working on a client’s project, it became clear that this particular work needed to be done, and there was no one else around to do it, so I dove in. When I was less secure as a manager, I would have considered a return to coding a humiliating demotion. Instead, what I experienced felt more like a joyful homecoming. It reminded me of what had drawn me to a technical career in the first place. It also got me thinking about the transformation of the IT work landscape. We have all read countless laments about the destruction of the traditional career path, which used to lead one steadily higher in the organization. We all know by now that job security is dead, that outsourcing has transformed the work landscape and that loyalty is now the rarest of commodities among both employers and employees. But when I found myself stepping into an old role after years of doing something else, I started to think about the upsides of today’s unstructured careers and discovered several benefits that are worth noting: Variety. It’s true that you need focus to excel in your field of choice, whether that’s working hands-on with technology or managing the people who do. But occasional excursions are both fun and useful. And if you are primarily a technical manager, a midcareer stint in hands-on work offers the chance to become more intimately familiar with new technologies while refreshing the experience of being on the receiving end of managerial mandates. You can then return to your regular role with renewed vigor and realism.

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A sense of accomplishment. Managing other people can be fulfilling work, but your sense of accomplishment can be ambiguous. If a manager looks in the mirror at the end of any given day and asks, “Was I successful today?” the only honest answer is, “I don’t know. Check back in a couple of years.” Time horizons are long, and clear-cut victories are rare. An occasional return to hands-on work offers the opportunity to feel the rush of immediate feedback that comes with unambiguous success and failure: “It compiled and gave the right answers!” Flexibility of self-measurement. New managers often struggle with their sense of self-worth. As individual contributors, they could measure themselves by their own production. As new managers, they grapple with the demands of their new role, and it’s difficult to let go of what had always been a reliable measuring stick. And their self-esteem can take a tumble when they apply it in new circumstances. They can be burdened by the knowledge that they haven’t written a single code in months. Not knowing how to evaluate their effectiveness in the new role, they decide that they must be bad at their job because they spend all of their time in meetings. Too often we make self-limiting assumptions about position, status, and the need to rigidly follow an established career path. But there’s a lot to be said for enjoying whatever work is right in front of you. Paul Glen is the CEO of Leading Geeks. Send feedback to editor@ cio.in

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[CXO AGENDA]

IT-led Sustainable Banking Namita Vikas, Senior President and Country Head-Responsible Banking and Chief Sustainability Officer, YES BANK, talks technology. BY YOGESH GUPTA How did the role of a chief sustainability officer come about at YES BANK?

YES BANK institutionalized Responsible Banking, infused expertise, and developed innovative products and services that create stakeholder value. The objective is to link sustainability and inclusivity to create a CSR and sustainable development benchmark

and environmental parameters. One example is YES Money, a domestic remittance model YES BANK innovated three years ago with the help of IT innovation, and inclusive and social banking teams. The whole challenge of migrant labor standing in long bank queues was solved by leveraging handheld devices through business correspondent network or kirana stores.

We leverage technology to stay cost conscious, agile, and environment friendly. for YES BANK in India. That’s how the role of a chief sustainability officer came into existence. We help the industry figure out how sustainable development can be integrated with the business. The triple bottom line— ethos of people, planet, and prosperity—important. We have a structured framework around environment and social risk analysis to create positive impact towards our portfolio assets. My role is well integrated with tremendous support from Rana Kapoor, the MD and CEO, and the board of YES BANK.

Today, technology facilitates remittance within 15 seconds. Site Environment Management Systems at our unmanned offsite ATMs resulted in a massive reduction in electricity costs. Being an ISO 14001:2004 certified bank we have a 5 percent intensity reduction target (greenhouse gas emissions reduction). As an entrepreneur-spirited bank, we have been early users of technology. We leverage technology to stay cost conscious, agile, and environment friendly. In collaboration with the IT team, we enforced double-sided printing, and no-color printing.

user base, which would otherwise have banked with us by coming to the bank—using vehicles that create emissions. Another example is a recent pilot project, called YES Kisan Dairy Plus, in South India. This is a payment system that helps small milk producers get instant payments for their sale to the partnering dairy, without having to wait for days to get paid. These producers get instant credit confirmations on their mobile devices. This is a successful example of financial inclusion.

What about social media?

We are very active on social media and have 1.2 million fans on Facebook, 2.4 lakh followers on Twitter, and 22,000 followers on LinkedIn. We have a strong social media marketing team that delivers impactful campaigns. One of the largest social movements is ‘YES! I am the Change,’ a nationwide social filmmaking challenge initiated by the YES Foundation, for which they received 50,000 registrations and over 1,700 film submissions. Brick-and-mortar models have limitations in terms of quality and delivery for employability training. We created a learning management system on the Web, mobiles, textbooks, computer-based training, and DTH to reach every nook and corner of India. Creating social impact with technology is the future and a major breakthrough to reach 1.3 billion people in India.

What is responsible banking?

Responsible banking is about ensuring long-term business success by contributing towards economic, social,

Are mobile devices helping sustainability initiatives?

Yogesh Gupta is executive editor. Send

Absolutely. We have a large mobile

gupta@idgindia.com

feedback on this interview to yogesh_

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finish

leadership and operational excellence

A Walk to Repair system, along with cooling pump, and a television camera on the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency set their spacesuits to internal battery power and then stepped outside of an airlock to begin their work. Inside the spacecraft, flight engineer Barry Wilmore operated the robotic arm to move Gerst around the space station during the spacewalk. Wilmore was also acting as the spacewalk coordinator, overseeing his partners’ work. Robotic arm Canadarm2 and Dextre moved along the station’s truss. Dextre, a Canadianbuilt two-armed robot that stands 12-feet tall and has a 30-foot wing span, was used to reach into cargo ships and unload supplies, spare parts, and scientific supplies brought to the orbiter from the cargo craft. —Sharon Gaudin

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I M A G E B Y A P O D. N A S A . G OV

Two astronauts in October began what is expected to be a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to repair a robotics

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12/19/2014 6:43:03 PM

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With Intel ® Xeon® processor For more performance information, visit cisco.com/go/ucsbenchmarks. 1. Cisco UCS C220 M3 server SPECjbb2013 Multi-JVM score of 62,393 max-jOPS, 23,505 critical-jOPS, based on 2-socket x86-based results published on www.spec.org as of 1/1/2014. SPEC® and SPECjbb® are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. 2. Based on TPC Benchmark C Results on 2 Processor Systems as of 1/1/2014. Cisco UCS C240 M3 High-Density Rack Server with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Standard Edition One, 1,609,186.39 tpmC, $0.47/tpmC, available 9/27/12 compared to IBM Power 780 Server Model 9179-MHB with IBM DB2 9.5, 1,200,011.00 tpmC, $0.69/tpmC, available 10/13/10. TPC Benchmark C® is a trademark of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPC). The performance results described here are derived from detailed benchmark results available at http://www.spec.org and http://www.tpc.org as of 1-15-2013. 3. Based on Cisco UCS B200 M3 #1 score of 1,017,639 employees per hour on the Oracle E-Business Suite R12 (12.1.3) Extra-Large Model Payroll Benchmark as of 1/1/2014. Full benchmark report available at http://www.oracle.com/us/ solutions/ benchmark/apps-benchmark/ results-166922.html ©2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. All third-party products belong to the companies that own them. Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Cisco UCS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and XeonInside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.