Issue 5 aug 2013

FOCAL POINT: Recent advances in SDN promise to put softwaredefined datacenters within reach. PAGE 33

ChannelWorld STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs. 50

CUSTOM FEATURE | EMC

Network Techlab Director Atul H. Gosar: “EMC facilitates us to be competitive.

Its product range in the storage and backup domains offer good profitability.”

WHEN

MARGINS MATTER Business is tougher than ever. And sometimes the only thing between a sea of red and being profitable is choosing who you partner with.

3

WAYS TO BOOST PROFITS Turn Over

Partnering for Profitability Atul H. Gosar, Director, Network Techlab, shares how the company’s association with EMC has provided it with a competitive edge and a wide customer base, leading to increased profitability.

How has partnering with EMC resulted in profitability for your business?

Today, EMC is a market leader and technology innovator in the storage and backup domains. Also, these products offer good profitability for us as we constantly keep pace with evolving technology. So, partnering with them creates a lot of value for us. More than 20 percent of our revenues come from our storage business where BRS is the main contributor.

Enterprises contribute around 40 percent, while 60 percent of the revenues emerge from the SME segment. The extensive product range of EMC facilitates us to be competitive.

ATUL H. GOSAR, Director, Network Techlab

part of our solution package as relying solely on products is not lucrative for us.

How does EMC impact your top and bottom-lines?

How will your association with EMC ensure more business in the future?

To survive in today’s tough times, bottom-lines are extremely crucial for an enterprise partner. That’s why we focus on our bottom-line across the storage portfolio.

However, the profit margins in the SMB segment might be more than the enterprise segment.

We have also built services practice on the EMC portfolio. Besides, we have certified teams working on BRS and other offerings. The storage products are always bundled with services (like implementation and professional services) to create value addition for the customer and healthy bottom-lines for us. Also, the services portfolio forms a

In the last three quarters, we’ve seen significant changes in EMC’s partner policy. There has been enhanced training, especially for focused partners, to help elevate them to the next level. Being a focused partner, we are part of a series of interactions with EMC around services and new product engagement around BRS and unified storage. The market is moving towards converged infrastructure and EMC has great platforms like VCE and VSPEX. Most enterprise customers have multiple-vendor offerings in their infrastructure. But once they test EMC, all subsequent deals often are EMC only.

THREE WAYS TO BOOST PROFITS 1

Sell more solutionbased products and not just a box by aligning more services attached to the product. Investing in technical and good sales resources would help achieve this.

2

3

Align the team to sell adjacent product lines.

Instead of selling just storage or server, add solutions around deduplication, analytics, security, and leverage the offerings of the same vendor.

Leverage policies on additional bottom line through various partner programs like quarterly bundle programs, focus and growth partner program, and enterprise select program.

FOCAL POINT: Recent advances in SDN promise to put softwaredefined datacenters within reach. PAGE 33

ChannelWorld STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FOR SOLUTION PROVIDERS | COVER PRICE Rs. 50

ANOOP PAI DHUNGAT, Chairman and MD, Galaxy Business Solutions, is grabbing the opportunities that growing industries like BFSI and IT/ITES are throwing up.

Inside AUGUST 2013 VOL. 7, ISSUE 5

News Analysis

VITAL

VERTICALS A limp economy has dwarfed your business. But five verticals are standing tall and opening new doors. >>>Page 22

Industry analysts are split on how effective Ballmer’s reshaping of Microsoft will be for its future. PAGE 11 On Record: Chris Koziol, President and GM, Interaction Management, Aspect, speaks about the company’s renewed focus on enterprise channel partners. PAGE 18 The Grill: Sabrina Lin, VP, Commercial Business, APJ and Greater China, Cisco, on why the company is pushing the services agenda. PAGE 13

Opinion

Microsoft’s mobile strategy has been non-existent.

But it may be too soon to call for the last rites. It is breathing new life into its mobile strategy. PAGE 38

Feature

New technologies are popping security out of its physical box onto the virtual turf. Is your business ready to make the change? PAGE 30

CHANNELWORLD.IN

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

Millennial Musings

W

HAT IS happening to our young people? They

have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders… their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Would it surprise you that these bitter lines above don’t belong to any contemporary commentator, and instead were found on a Sumerian tablet from 4,500 years back? I guess its human nature to believe that the previous generation didn’t ever get it and subsequent one never earned it.

So here’s a candid confession, I believed this as well. A few years back, while dealing with a bunch of rookies, I thought this was a generation that I could never comprehend or connect with and were possibly aliens from another planet.

But, I’m a communicator at heart so there I was a couple of years ago determined to re-build my lines of communication with the Millennial Generation of 20-to-30year olds. Based on a bunch of research and personal interaction, what I’ve learned since then is amazing.

I think it’s important for you to understand this generation as well. Not just for the sake of the urban Millennials in your teams, but also because they are changing the DNA of Indian organizations, large and small, governmentowned and private.

With parents as rolemodels and a core belief in

the value of education, this is a group that clearly does not see integrity in shades of grey.

Brimming with hope they’re also far more civic minded and inclusive than our generation. Yet they remain strongly individualistic, self-reliant and expect respect (not the earned variety that we are familiar with).

Theirs is a successdriven cohort—extremely goal-oriented yet with an acute need to stick to specific lifestyle choices.

In the truest sense they are the Facebook and iPod generation, clearly rooted in technology and require

n The only way

to tap into this generation’s potential is to stop being hide-bound and traditional and to set them free.

to be connected 24/7. A PwC-CII study found that 47 percent will leave an employer with an Internet usage policy that “restricts their personality”, while 59 percent look at an employer’s “provision of cutting-edge technology” when considering a job.

At work, they hate the rigidity of corporate structures, like to build multiple networks, and love working out of office.

PwC-CII found that only 18 percent favored working from home or flexi-timings. They seem to be able to carve work and life into almost watertight compartments—so they’ll put in a few extra hours but will seldom take work home (only 4 percent expected to work from home).

They are feedback demons for the most part, with little interest in organizations that only do structured appraisals quarterly or annually—so prepare to sit down post

every project. And, they don’t care a fig for the structured training that most corporates indulge in, instead fancying on-thejob, experiential learning.

The PwC-CII research also found that while Millennials demand precise instructions and concrete goals on projects, they treasure the flexibility of being able to determine their own path on how to get to the finish line— micro managers beware!

While most mid-level managers I’ve interacted with have a low opinion of the Millennial work ethic, it’s also true that they enjoy projects which put them onto the radar of senior management or promise rapid professional advancement.

Contrast this with what organizational behavior experts dub “loyaltylite”—where they expect Millennials to move on with little heart-break from an employer for “trivial reasons”.

Through personal experience I can tell you that the only ways to tap into this generations potential is to stop being hide-bound, to set them free, to encourage learning, allow faster advancement and use the carrot and seldom the stick.  Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@ idgindia.com

AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

3

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n AUGUST 2013

■ NEWS DIGEST

■ OPINION

07 Rivals Get Together | Larry El-

03 Editorial: Vijay Ramachandran

lison and Marc Benioff’s long-running public feud appears to be over, with

says that the only way to tap into this generation’s potential is to stop being hide-bound and traditional and to set them free.

38 Preston Gralla: Microsoft’s

mobile strategy has been non- existent.

But it may be too soon to call for the last rites. The company is breathing in new life into its mobile strategy. both CEOs making a joint appearance at a tech event in the US. 08 PC Sales to Decline Again, Says Gartner | According to

■ THE GRILL

13 Sabrina Lin, VP, Commercial

Business, APJ and Greater China,

Gartner, worldwide sales of desktop and notebook PCs are set to decline by more than 10 percent.

08 Nokia to Acquire 50 Percent Stake in NSN | Nokia is to acquire

Siemens’ 50 percent stake in joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Finnish company after the transaction is completed.

10 HP will Call On the Smartphone | After the smoking $1.2

billion disaster that was WebOS, HP appears to have brushed itself off and is poised for a second go at the mobile market as its core PC business wobbles.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS 11 Is Microsoft Getting into a Tangle? | Industry analysts are

split on how effective Steve

13 Cisco, on why the company is pushing the services agenda.

■ FEATURE

30 Out of the Box

The advent of new technologies is now popping security out of its physical box onto the virtual turf.

Is your business ready?

22 ■ COVER STORY

22 Vital Verticals

Frozen IT budgets, cash flow crunch, inflationary pressures, and a whole lot of unexpected obstacles have pushed channel partners to the brink. But five verticals are standing tall and opening new doors for your business. These verticals are making a dull economy shine. These are filled with small gems of opportunity and have the potential to light up this fiscal and sky-rocket a channel partner’s profits.

Here are the big five that have the ability to change your business’ future.

■ CASE STUDY Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V. photograph by FOTOCORP

28 Building Bonds

Ballmer’s reshaping of the Redmond-based software-giant will be for its future.

How Hyderabad-based Olive Data Centre earned longterm business and a lasting friendship by building a complete open source mailing solution for A.P. Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank.

For more information Call : 1800 425 8970 email : marketing_in@trendmicro.com http://affinitypartner.trendmicro.com

Delhi : 91-11-42699000 Mumbai : 91-22-28395776 Bangalore : 91-80-40965068 www.trendmicro.co.in

Š 2012 Trend Micro, Inc. All rights reserved. Trend Micro and the t-ball logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trend Micro, Inc

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n AUGUST 2013

15 Focusing on

key technologies is the secret to our success, says Bhargav Balla, Founder and CEO, Ninth Dimension IT Solutions.

level, extending the abstraction to storage and networking. With advanced automation capabilities, administrators can pour on compute, storage, and networking resources as needed. In particular, recent advances in SDN promise to put the SDDC within reach.

35 Towards Elastic Datacenters SDDC: SDN has the potential to

revolutionize legacy datacenters by

■ ON RECORD

18 Chris Koziol, President and GM, Interac-

tion Management, Aspect, speaks about the

CHANNELWORLD Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India

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Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello n EDITORIAL

Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran Managing Editor T.M. Arun Kumar Executive Editor Gunjan Trivedi Associate Editors Sunil Shah,Yogesh Gupta Features Editor Shardha Subramanian Special Correspondents Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Principal Correspondents Anup Varier, Debarati Roy, Sneha Jha, Varsha Chidambaram Senior Correspondents Aritra Sarkhel, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao Senior Copy Editors Shreehari Paliath, Vinay Kumaar Lead Designers Jinan K.V., Pradeep Gulur, Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Senior Designers Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V. n SALES

35

company’s renewed focus on driving its India business through enterprise channel partners.

■ FOCAL POINT

33 Paving a New Path SDDC: SDN is breaking new ground in

datacenter efficiency. The software-defined datacenter takes virtualization to the next

closing the provisioning and management gap between networks and their compute and storage counterparts.

37 Making SDDC a Reality SDDC: The OpenDaylight Project—a

new open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation featuring every major networking player—promises to move the ball forward for SDN. Rather than hammer out new standards, the project aims to produce an extensible, open source, virtual networking platform atop existing standards.

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 08: PC Sales to Decline Again, Says Gartner PAGE 08: Nokia to Acquire 50 Percent Stake in NSN PAGE 10: HP will Call On the Smartphone PAGE 11: Is Microsoft Getting into a Tangle?

F I N D M O R E A R T I C L E S AT CHANNELWORLD.IN

PARTNERSHIP

Rivals Get

Together

L

ARRY ELLISON and

Marc Benioff’s longrunning public feud appears to be over, with the CEOs of Oracle and Salesforce.com making a joint appearance to extol the virtues of a new partnership they describe as financially sensible and strategically pragmatic.

“The best decision we ever made is to go with Oracle” for Salesforce.com’s infrastructure, Benioff said of a company he once accused of selling a “false cloud.”

Improvements for cloud computing in Oracle’s new 12c database “are extremely important” to Salesforce.com

and the vendor expects to cut its database server costs “in half,” he said. Ellison, who once called Salesforce.com’s platform a “roach motel” that is difficult for customers to migrate away from, had no such jibes.

“Salesforce.com and Oracle have some overlapping products, but there are far more opportunities to work together than to compete,” he said The companies announced a deal in which Salesforce. com, long a user of Oracle’s database, will standardize on Oracle’s Linux OS distribution, Java middleware, and Exadata server platform. In

turn, Oracle will integrate Salesforce.com’s software with its Fusion HCM (human capital management) and cloud-based financial software, and Salesforce. com will implement those products “throughout the company.”

In a joint conference call with the two CEOs, Benioff revealed that the deal is good for 12 years, not the nine years originally announced.

While there had been evidence of late that Salesforce. com wanted to move away from Oracle technology, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Oracle has “always been there for us,” Benioff said.

“Now we’re at a critical point in Salesforce.com’s history.

We have to make a decision.

Is the infrastructure we’ve built on Oracle going to take us through the next one or two decades? The answer is yes.” While it has never been clear how much of Benioff and Ellison’s feuding has been marketing-savvy theater rather than true animosity, the two CEOs treated each other with uncharacteristic warmth during the call.

Some customers and industry observers may be hoping Ellison and Benioff still trade a few public barbs now and again. “I certainly hope it’s not the end of the fun,” Benioff said.

AUGUST 2013

—Chris Kanaracus INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

7

SOFTWARE

The Road Ends Here Microsoft’s TechNet subscription service wasn’t a free lunch, but it was about the closest thing to it for IT pros and Microsoft enthusiasts, and soon it’ll be gone.

Microsoft announced that it would stop taking TechNet subscriptions as it phases in a set of free services that won’t be quite as sweet as the TechNet deal.

Microsoft says the TechNet site will not go away, just the

subscription service for software. TechNet subscriptions were an incredibly inexpensive way for IT professionals to get free access to a very long list of Microsoft software for evaluation purposes.

What Microsoft will provide in place of the TechNet subscription services are free services that will include a new TechNet Evaluation Center offering free evaluation software for limited periods of 90 to 180 days.

—Melissa Riofrio

-

PC MARKET

PC Sales to Decline Again, Says Gartner

W

market in the second half of 2013”. Gartner said that top and notein 2014 PC sales will slip book PCs are further to 289 million units set to decline by more than worldwide. However, it 10 percent. Shipments of predicts that the ‘ultramoPCs and notebook laptops bile’ category made up of are projected at 305 million ‘Chromebooks, thin and units for the year, according light clamshell designs, and to Gartner. That’s a decline slate and hybrid devices of almost 11 perrunning Wincent percent comdows 8’ will more pared with 2012 than double this which the firm year compared to is the expected decline in PC sales puts down to a last year and do in 2013 compared to need for mobility. roughly the same that recorded in the “Consumers again in 2014 previous year. want anytimereaching nearly Source: Gartner anywhere com40 million units. puting that allows them to Analysts say the attracconsume and create content tiveness of this category with ease, but also share will become more apparent and access that content later in the year when defrom a different portfolio of vices with Intel processors products. Mobility is para‘Bay Trail’ and ‘Haswell’ mount in both mature and running on Windows 8.1 emerging markets,” said will hit the market.

Carolina Milanesi, research It’s no surprise that Garnvice president at Gartner. ter predicts a big rise in the It also said it was down sales of both tablets and to “an adjustment in the mobile phones. They are channel to make room for expected to reach shipping new products hitting the levels of 202 million and 1.8 ORLDWIDE SALES of desk-

11%

billion units, representing growths of 67.9 percent and 4.3 percent respectively.

In terms of operating systems it is Google’s Android which is way out in the lead with an expected total of 866 million units shipped this year. Microsoft’s Windows comes in second with 339 million and Apple’s iOS and Mac OS in third with 296 million. A growth is expected for all three operating systems looking forward to 2014, namely Android to more than 1 billion. BlackBerry and ‘others’ are forecast to decline in both 2013 and 2014.

Gartner said that the iPad mini represented 60 percent of overall iOS sales in the first quarter of this year. A shift of consumers opting for basic cheaper tablets over models has apparently occurred quicker than expected.“Although the numbers seem to paint a clear picture of who the winner will be when it comes to operating systems in the device market the reality is that today ecosystem owners are challenged in having the same relevance in all segments,” said Milanesi.

—Chris Martin

MOBILE NETWORK

Nokia to Acquire 50 Percent Stake in NSN Nokia is to acquire Siemens’ 50 percent stake in joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Finnish company after the transaction is completed.

The handset maker is paying €1.7 billion (about Rs 13,200 crore) to acquire the stake in the mobile networks equipment 8

company. The Siemens name will be phased out, and a new name and brand will be announced at the closing of the transaction expected by the third quarter of this year. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of both Siemens and Nokia, and is subject to customary regulatory approvals. Nokia said it will support the current management plan for

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

BOUGHT: The Siemens name, in NSN, will be phased out soon.

Nokia Siemens Networks, including a restructuring plan already in progress. The current management and governance structure will stay in place, with Rajeev Suri

Short Takes  Mahindra

Satyam has merged with Tech Mahindra. The long-awaited formal merger was announced more than four years after the Mahindra & Mahindra Group acquired a controlling stake in the then fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services.  NASSCOM announced

that R. Chandrashekhar, former Secretary–Telecom, Government of India, will succeed current President Som Mittal to head the industry association’s executive body.

This was announced at the conclusion of its Executive Council meeting held at Pune.  Brother

International India announced the addition of three new mono laser products to its existing portfolio of mono laser, colour, and inkjet multifunction centers and printers. With this expansion strategy, targeted at emerging countries, the company aims to gain over 15 percent market share in the mono laser category by 2015.

continuing as CEO and Jesper Ovesen as executive chairman of the board of directors.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ operational headquarters will remain in Espoo, Finland.

Of the €1.7 billion purchase price, €1.5 billion (about Rs 9,300 crore) will be paid in cash at the closing of the transaction. The balance will be paid in the form of a secured loan from Siemens due one year from closing. Nokia said it has obtained committed bank financing for the cash portion.

—John Ribeiro

SMARTPHONES

HP will Call On the Smartphone

A

FTER THE smoking $1.2 billion (about Rs 7,200 crore) disaster that was WebOS, HP appears to have brushed itself off and is poised for a second go at the mobile market as its core PC business wobbles.

HP recently released the HP Slate 7, a $170 (about Rs 10,000) Android-powered tablet designed to undercut the competition and erase the bitter TouchPad taste from the mouths of consumers. Next up: A smartphone.

When a newspaper asked Yam Su Yin, HP’s senior director of consumer PCs and tablets for Asia-Pacific, about potential plans for an HP smartphone, Yam replied: “The answer is yes, but I cannot give a timetable.

It would be silly if we say no.

HP has to be in the game.”

Indeed it does in this increasingly mobile world. But would an HP’s first do-over foray into the smartphone market succeed in the US, or indeed, even appear here?

Don’t hold your breath.

Yam’s comment echoes what HP CEO Meg Whitman said all the way back in September 2012.

“We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device,” Whitman said in an interview with a television network.

“You know, there will be countries around the world where people may never own a tablet, or a PC, or a desktop,” she said. “They will do everything on the smartphone. We’re a com10

puting company; we have to take advantage of that form factor.”

Note the thrust of Whitman’s comments. She’s clearly saying that an HP smartphone would fill a niche in developing nations, where traditional computers are far less common than they are in countries like the US. Also note that Yam’s comments come from a director of the Asia-Pacific division, rather than a Western HP representative. Lenovo, HP’s arch-nemesis, took its first steps into the smartphone market by offering affordable Android devices in China and other developing markets, where the US’s

Around

TheWorld Inventor of the Mouse No More

Douglas Engelbart, a Silicon Valley engineer who invented the computer mouse and is credited with many of the concepts that underpin modern computing and the Internet, died at the age of 88.

From 1959 until 1977, at Standford Research (today called SRI International), he led the organization’s Augmentation Research Center, and in 1963 came up with the concept of the computer mouse. The mouse would go on to revolutionize personal computing, but the public didn’t get their first

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

Apple-Samsung duopoly isn’t so firmly entrenched.

On the surface, the comments by senior HP officials make it seem as though HP looks ready to do the same.

“Being late you have to create a different set of proposition,” Yam said. “There are still things that can be done.

It’s not late. When HP has

look at it until several years later.

—Martyn Williams

Oracle Slashes BI Software Prices

Oracle has quietly cut the list price of its flagship BI Foundation Suite significantly, possibly in response to increased market competition.

BI Foundation Suite was previously priced at $450,000 (about Rs 2.7 crore) per processor license, but on an official price list dated June 25, the cost is listed at $300,000 (about Rs 1.8 crore). However, a named user plus license remained listed at $3,675 (about Rs 2.2 lakh). BI Foundation Suite encompasses Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 11g, BI Publisher, Essbase, Scorecard and Strategy

a smartphone, it will give a differentiated experience.”

It’s hard to imagine HP being able to carve out much of a niche in the ultra-competitive low-end market, but if the company does decide to make a run at the U.S. arena, HP has an opportunity to shine.

—Brad Chacos

Management, and Essbase Analytics Link, according to an official whitepaper.

—Chris Kanaracus

HP Australia Fined $3 mn

The Federal Court has ordered HP Australia to pay a $3 million (about Rs 18 crore) civil penalty for making false or misleading claims to customers and retailers regarding consumer guarantee rights, according to a statement from Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

—Rimin Dutt

NEWS ANALYSIS n

Is Microsoft

Getting into a Tangle?

Industry analysts are split on how effective Ballmer’s reshaping of the company will be for its future.

By Juan Carlos Perez

S

TEVE BALLMER’S

grand plan to reinvent Microsoft has garnered mixed reviews from industry analysts, ranging from enthusiastic endorsements to frowning skepticism.

Some predict the reorganization will accomplish its goal of making Microsoft more efficient and innovative, and thus better able to compete against rivals like Apple, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Others are concerned that internal accountability will drop and the company will become less responsive to customer needs and market inflections. At the heart of the restructuring, announced last month, is the dissolution of the company’s five business units—the Business Division, which housed Office; Server & Tools, which included SQL Server and System Center; the Windows

Division; Online Services, which included Bing; and Entertainment and Devices, whose main product was the Xbox console.

They’re being replaced by four engineering groups organized by function, around operating systems, applications, cloud computing and devices, and by centralized groups for marketing, business development, strategy and research, finance, human resources, legal and operations.

Ballmer wants the company to operate more cohesively so it can build blockbuster products that cater to the needs of people both at home and at work in a variety of ways. “The form of delivery of our value will shift to really thinking about devices and services versus packaged software,” Ballmer said.

“We need to move forward as one Microsoft, with one strategy and one set of goals,” he added.

GIVING IT SHAPE Teams will work in an interdisciplinary fashion on all major projects to make sure efforts are in sync with the overall goals of the company, according to Ballmer.

Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, is skeptical of this shift from business units to functional groups.

“The business of business is business. Companies should be organized by major business units,

not by functional units,” he said. With this new setup, it may become harder for outsiders such as customers, partners, investors, and analysts to decipher Microsoft’s strategy and evaluate its performance, he said. In short, he fears there will be less transparency and visibility into the company.

“I would have preferred that there was a clear message they were going to continue to manage and report by business. Whether they structure [the company] that way or not is less material,” says Austin.

“The value of transparency is that it lets customers and investors make more informed decisions as to the level of accuracy or spin that are in Microsoft’s executive statements,” he added.

IDC analyst Al Gillen views the plan with more optimism, saying Microsoft is making necessary, bold changes. “Microsoft’s core business is being undermined by changes in the market and the company needs to be more responsive and think about things differently than it has in the past,” he said.

Among the main challenges Microsoft faces are the weak position of Windows in smartphones and tablets, where it lags far behind Android and iOS, and the increased competition against Office from rivals like Google that offer less expensive, cloud-hosted alternatives.

Microsoft has responded to those threats with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, and with Office 365, a suite that includes cloud-delivered versions of its productivity apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Web-hosted versions of its server prod-

AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

11

n NEWS ANALYSIS ucts like SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange.

However, Windows 8 and its version for ARM devices, Windows RT, launched in October, weren’t well-received, prompting Microsoft to prep an update called Windows 8.1 that will be released this year. Meanwhile, Office 365 continues to battle Google Apps and other competing communication and collaboration suites. For example, Microsoft spent $1.2 billion (about Rs 7,100 crore) a year ago to buy Yammer and boost SharePoint’s enterprise social networking capabilities.

BUILDING UNITS The four new engineering teams are the Operating Systems Engineering Group, led by Terry Myerson; the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, led by Julie Larson-Green; the Applications and Services Engineering Group, led by Qi Lu; and the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group, led by Satya Nadella.

“We’ll pull together into fewer core engineering groups, and we’ll pull together all the other functions and disciplines under leaders that work for me directly,” Ballmer said.

The Operating Systems Engineering Group will focus on Windows development for gaming consoles, mobile devices, PCs, and back-end server systems, including OS cloud services.

With this realignment, Microsoft is seeking a unified, common Windows presence and experience across those devices and systems, which it doesn’t have today and which enterprise customers especially could find compelling. “It’s important and a positive move to integrate all operating system devel12

opment into a single team,” Gillen said.

At the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, Larson-Green, until now one of the two Windows OS chiefs, will focus on all hardware development and their supply chain strategy. This group will also be in charge of “studios experiences” including games, music, video, and other entertainment.

Microsoft seems interested in boosting its efforts to build its own hardware, building on its experience developing the Xbox console and the Surface tablets, thus mimicking to an extent Apple’s successful model.

The Applications and Services Engineering Group will be in charge of applications and services technologies in productivity,

technologies, including technologies for datacenters, databases and enterprise IT systems and development tools. Its leader, Nadella, had been in charge of the Servers and Tools group, which had been performing well financially. A focus for this group will continue to be the company’s Azure cloud platform.

The Dynamics enterprise software products will continue to operate separately under Kirill Tatarinov, but report to Lu, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner and Tami Reller, the other former Windows chief who will now head the Marketing Group. As part of the plan, Craig Mundie will work on a “special project” until the end of this calendar year, and assume a consul-

Gillett said. What’s not clear to Gillett is how exactly this will be carried out, and he foresees it being a major endeavor. “I’m not seeing an overall head of products.

That concerns me,” he said.

Others view the “One Microsoft” effort with skepticism, especially if it results in a doubling-down on what critics call the “Microsoft first” strategy, which they blame for Microsoft’s reluctance, for example, to fully port Office to other operating systems like iOS and Android despite massive demand, in order to give Windows a competitive advantage. “[One Microsoft] should do wonders for CIOs who are all in for Microsoft, but it should strike fear in the heart of CIOs who were

Microsoft needed to do something and its making big changes that make sense. Now we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out. It will have to continue responding to the changes in the industry. communication, search and other information categories. It will be interesting to see how the realignment works in this group, since the Office stack and the consumer online services had traditionally belonged to separate groups.

However, with Office 365, those lines are blurring, in particular with the recent decision to mesh Skype, which is primarily a consumer IM and VoIP service, with its enterprise equivalent, Lync. In the press conference, Qi Lu said that whether it’s Bing, Office or Skype, Microsoft applications are all about helping people complete tasks and get work done. Meanwhile, the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group will be in charge of back-end

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

tant role starting in 2014.

Michael Osterman, from Osterman Research, views as positive the shift away from product-centric, siloed teams to a more unified approach that is focused on what customers need from devices and services. “This is a good thing,” he said.

“They need to realign the company to be more responsive to customers.”

The reorganization may yield a sharper marketing focus and strategy, an area where Microsoft has at times been weak, Osterman said. Frank Gillett, a Forrester Research analyst, concurs. “This demonstrates a commitment to build an integrated, coherent Microsoft experience. It wasn’t incoherent before, but it also wasn’t well-coordinated,”

hoping that Microsoft would decouple Office from Windows,” Austin said.

Over the years, Microsoft critics have suggested the company’s product lines are too diverse, and that certain businesses should be spun off as autonomous subsidiaries or even independent companies. Clearly, Ballmer has taken the opposite tack.

The implementation of the plan should take at least three months, maybe more, said Gillen, who considers this the company’s biggest reorganization ever. “Is this the only and last thing they’ll have to do? No. They’ll have to continue responding to changes in the industry, and they’ll have to continue adjusting the organizational structure,” he said. 

Dossier Name: Sabrina Lin Designation: VP, Commercial Business, Asia-Pacific, Japan, and Greater China Company: Cisco Present Role: Lin joined Cisco in 2006 and is responsible for growth and profitability of the commercial business through its network of more than 7000 partners and distributors.

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

Previous Assignments: Prior to joining Cisco, Lin held executive roles in HP with strategy, R&D, and services responsibilities, between 2003-06, in developed and emerging countries. She was also Co-founder of two start-up companies in the Silicon Valley engaged in education software research, online training, and social networking. She started her career in university research and teaching at Stanford University.

n THE GRILL

Sabrina Lin VP, Commercial Business, APJ and Greater China, Cisco, on why the company is pushing the services agenda and how it affects partners.

Cisco’s recently concluded Annual Partner Summit was interesting in many ways, especially with a renewed thrust on services.

Why was the messaging around services so strong this year? More than 97 percent of our business is driven through channels.

If you are so dependent on partners, you would want to ensure that partners also have reasons to work with you.

Therefore partner profitability becomes very important to us. We have seen that partners who have built their services portfolio are much more profitable than the ones that have less value-add. We wanted to share this observation with our partners and want them to focus on services in order to have a successful business model. Infact, it’s not something that we want them to do. This is what the industry demands.

Clearly, Cisco expects its partners to transition to a service-rich model. Do you want your traditional partners to leave their old baggage behind and quickly adopt a new method? We are not suggesting that they leave their old baggage behind. Our AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

13

n THE GRILL | SABRINA LIN that option, they are not going to choose you—it doesn’t matter if Cisco wants you to sell boxes or not.

Shouldn’t it then be a gradual transition?

Why was there a sense of urgency in that messaging? Customers are looking at service partners who focus on their entire IT and charge them on usage basis. Earlier, we did not have any metering mechanism. But thats changing now and becoming more sophisticated.

Customers want to measure your value based on the service level agreements you make with them. If you look at markets like Australia and New Zealand, cloud adoption is happening at a rapid pace. Customers there prefer the cloud model over the traditional on-premise model. We believe that other countries will also migrate that way. Therefore, our partners also have to change and that is why there was a sense of urgency in our messaging.

Partners who have built their services portfolio are much more profitable than the ones that have less value-add.

evolution is a good analogy here. Years ago, we started off with networking only. Today, we have evolved to be the largest IT provider. We knew that if we don’t go through that transition and add more technologies to our portfolio, we will be left behind. Similarly, our partners are not abandoning their traditional business. Those offerings are still profitable. It is just that they need to add on to increase their relevance to the customer because the customer demands are changing. Customers don’t want partners to sell IT the way they sold it before. They want to consume IT as a utility. As a partner, if you can’t offer 14

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

Partners have always offered services like support, consulting, remote monitoring, etcetera to customers. What exactly is this transition that they have to undergo?

Cisco’s services organization offers tools that enable our partners in a number of ways. These tools help them understand the customer network better; things like what kind of devices are active or inactive, where they are in terms of an upgrade cycle, etcetera. With such data analytics, partners can expect a lot of migration to happen at the customer’s end, which results in many up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. This, in turn allows partners to offer on-going monitoring services in an automated manner.

We provide them with various tools so that they can develop services.

Most importantly, we also have tools to help them turn their installed base into a cash cow. One of the things that Cisco quotes often, globally, is the fact that we have a $180 billion (about Rs 10 lakh crore) installed base of equipments. That is a very rich source of information for analytics.

Now, with the availability of analytics, it opens up a whole new source for partners to offer consulting, migration, and monitoring services.

All these are much more profitable because you’re becoming more and more intelligent. These are the kind

of transitions that we help our partners achieve.

Cisco’s reinforced commitment to the midmarket was another highlight at the Summit. So far, you have been known for selling enterprise-class, over-featured systems to the mid-market customers. What will change now? One of the key messages at the Summit was ‘build for mid-market’.

One example of this is our Unified Communications 6000 edition. Earlier, we were marketing it as an enterprise class product with a scalability of 60,000 users.While the new version definitely offers scalability, it has been designed keeping the mid-market customers in mind. So, to start with, we are investing on R&D specifically for the mid-market.

We are also working closely with partners who want to build up their commercial practices. We have come up with programs that offer incentives to such partners. We are doubling our investments in the mid-market channel.

Cisco currently has a big marketshare in the large enterprise space. We have much more room to grow in the midmarket. It will be 100 percent partner driven. Infact, we are coming up with a new mechanism wherein Cisco’s sales force will be compensated by the partners’ business. India is the first market in the region to embrace this model.

There has been speculation that SDN is bad for Cisco and that it could end Cisco’s networking dominance. Should your partners be worried? Currently, the people interested in SDN are service providers with very complex environments or very large enterprises that have many virtualization layers. SDN is in the experimental stage. When there was hype around SDN, Cisco’s stock price went down. People thought all the proprietary products and solutions were going to be replaced with white-labelled boxes. That was about 10 months back. Now, people have realized that Cisco can actually leverage existing installed base.

With the Cisco ONE environment, we are trying to build up the capability of opening up our programmability. We know that the world wants more flexibility in the network, because the future of IT is in the network. And, we know network better than anyone else.  —Radhika Nallayam

n FAST TRACK

Snapshot

Ninth Dimension IT Solutions

Founded: 2010 Headquarters: Bangalore Revenue 2011-12: Rs 6 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 9 crore Revenue 2013-14 (expected): Rs 18 crore Key Executives: Swamy Nanjundaiah, VP-Technology and Solutions; Sanjay Prasad-Chief Mentor Key Business Activities: Systems integration and consulting Key Principals: EMC Isilon, Dell, CommVault, Violin Memory, VMware Key Technologies: Virtualization, cloud, storage, data protection and migration

Focusing on key technologies is the secret to our success, says Bhargav Balla, Founder and CEO, Ninth Dimension.

U

P UNTIL 2010, Bhargav

Balla, CEO and Founder of Bangalore-based Ninth Dimension IT Solutions had been a part of many organizations in various sales positions. This provided him opportunities to engage with a number of entrepreneurial minds.

More importantly, it prompted him to start-up on his own. “I wanted to get out of the employee mode and cater to the needs of customers in an informed way,” says Balla.

But, Bangalore is the hub for all things IT. The intense competition was inevitable. Ninth Dimension had to step-up with smart, fresh methods to excite customers and be noticed. After a lot of ground work and customer interactions the company planned to focus on three

key technologies: Virtualization, storage, and cloud computing. “We wanted to cater to these three technology areas instead of focusing on all tech domains,” says Balla. This focused approach led the company

TECHNOLOGY SPLIT

5%

5%

Services Consulting

1%

2%

WAN Optimization

Cloud

47%

Storage

15%

Compute

10%

Virtualization

15%

P h o t o g r a p h b y D E LT R I M E D I A

Website: www.9thdimension.co.in

to implement an enterprise backup solution for the automobile giant Mercedes-Benz India’s R&D segment in a strategic collaboration with CommVault. It successfully executed this project for the client with impressive results. It changed the company’s fortunes.

Ninth Dimension, since its conception, has fought off a number of big competitors like the software security giant, Symantec. This has helped the company gain confidence and provided it with the momentum needed to reach its next milestone.

The SI clocked Rs 9 crore in 2012-13; an impressive number to hit for a three-year-old company.

It also added some big names like EMC, Dell, and VMware to its list of technology partners. Owing to such developments, Ninth Dimension has carved a niche for itself in the cluttered and cut-throat systems integration industry.

Currently, the organization is in the process of transitioning to a managed services provider. “If you look at the customer’s side of business, managed services and consulting are the hot areas to be in,” says Balla. He intends to make the most of this opportunity. 

Backup and Recovery

-Aritra Sarkhel

SOURCE: NINTH DIMENSION IT SOLUTIONS

AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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Insight Perfect Partner Sanjiv Khushu, Director and CEO, Emicro Data Technologies, talks about why NetApp is the perfect vendor for new-age enterprises.

How vital is the storage business for Emicro Data Technologies? Do you have a dedicated team for NetApp products?

Storage has been a major contributor. It will stay an important portfolio for us for the next two to three years. The storage portfolio in the multiple brands that we deal with contribute around 60 percent of the total revenues.

We have been associated with NetApp for four years now and are one of their Platinum partners. Our relationship has been quite

fruitful in terms of the quantum of business we execute. We have a focused team of over 15 people for NetApp which includes executives across sales, pre-sales, implementation, and support infrastructure.

Referral deals are important for vendors and their partners. How effective has this strategy been with NetApp? We specifically focus on IT/ITES, oil and gas, and BFSI. We have been extremely

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successful, particularly in IT/ITES. Here, we have replicated many success stories of NetApp implementations. These vertical specific customers constantly check with each other about the new technologies they use at their end. We have won deals at eight organizations in IT/ITES with this reference-based strategy.

How has NetApp helped you win deals compared to other vendors?

A project executed in the IT/ITES sector around four quarters ago was an important one. It was a conversion of an end-to-end IBM platform to a NetApp platform. We integrated file-level workload and block-level storage to the same box. DR strategy was also incorporated into the project. It was not only ROI for the customer, but it was also easy to use, with extremely good service from the NetApp–Emicro combination.

Another win was in the oil and gas sector. This was due to a reference by another existing customer in this sector for whom we deployed a NetApp technology. We provided NetApp solution for file-level storage and at a later stage, the customer added block-level to the same box without making further investments to the storage domain.

These were completely new customer acquisitions that we recorded due to NetApp. Today’s enterprises want technology solutions to solve their business pain-points. Has NetApp been just another tech vendor or has it evolved beyond that?

NetApp always addresses large business goals of the customers which is a different approach when compared to a vendor like EMC. The typical business requirements of today’s customers are high uptime, quick turnaround, fast implementation, and robust DR strategy, to list a few.

Most customers are fairly mature, from a storage perspective, as they have deployed atleast a generation of storage. Many enterprises move from an existing storage platform to NetApp due to its strong solutions pitch which revolves around consolidation and efficiency for the storage

platforms. Platforms like FlexPod and PureFlex are fairly complementary to the storage business and we are pursuing these newer technologies at customer-end.

The enterprise customers are also increasingly demanding opex models. Although NetApp does not have a financing arm, we do execute such deals through financial arrangement on our own.

“ The mid-market segment in India is compelling. We believe that our storage solutions address diversified customer needs for efficient storage functionalities at a higher ROI. Our partnership with Emicro Data Technologies has enabled us to address unique customer needs with a high precision, and provide them with solutions that result in flexibility and seamless scalability.”

— Rajeev Saxena, Director Sales, India Public Sector, Commercial and SAARC NetApp Marketing & Services infrastructure of an enterprise. NetApp is a great door opener for many deals. Eventually, we pursue a 360-degree view for various technologies at the customer-end.

How is the Indian market shaping up when it comes to unified storage architecture, FlexPod, and cloud? What is your roadmap as a NetApp partner?

Indian organizations are evaluating and experimenting with private cloud as they look at multi-tenancy within business units across the same infrastructure. NetApp has provided us the roadmap for cloud and we are definitely considering and accommodating it in our enterprise portfolio. The markets will increasingly move to technologies like FlexPod from the conventional platforms.

Desktop virtualization is extremely close to the storage portfolio. Then there is consolidation of the compute workloads towards a mix of converged systems and virtualized

Do you observe a peculiar pattern of buying storage across, both, enterprises and mid-market?

We have always focused on the enterprise segment, but the mid-market is growing substantially in India. Some customers are adopting complex technologies. We are now building the team for the mid-market too. The mid-market predominantly looks at capacity. Parameters could be different for enterprises. Organizations with firstgeneration of storage start with the basics like capacity and cost-acquisition. But mature enterprises often look at efficiency, DR strategy, and other new features across storage solutions.

How partner-friendly is NetApp in terms of profitability and other engagement terms that exist in the channel community?

Deal registration has been extremely good with NetApp. We have hardly seen any partner conflict. In terms of bottom-line, NetApp has always encouraged us to get into services. We have a two-pronged strategy for our services business with NetApp: Implementation or professional services (product implementation and integration with the existing infrastructure) and postwarranty services. The services business has increased our overall profitability with NetApp. As an ASP for NetApp, we have service locations at Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, and Delhi. We plan to open new locations in the western region at Ahmedabad and Baroda. Services should contribute 25 percent to our bottom-line in this financial year across product lines.

IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

ON RECORD n

Chris Koziol,

President and General Manager, Interaction Management, Aspect, speaks about the company’s renewed focus on driving its India business through enterprise channel partners.

By Yogesh Gupta

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

Aspect has been aggressive with its go-to-market strategy in India in the last few quarters. What takes priority for Aspect in 2013?

KOZIOL: Aspect has been in India for a while now servicing key verticals like BFSI, telecom, and a new vertical like e-Commerce.

We cater to international and domestic outsourcing companies. Our priority is to establish Aspect’s value proposition in the market.

We have, frankly, not done a good enough job lately with the Aspect brand in India. We want to build a reputation that can help execute and deliver results for customers. We have an industry veteran like Sanjay Gupta on board to lead the India operations. I want Aspect to be a place for innovations where the best minds work in the contact-center space.

What are the technology trends that are affecting the contact-center space globally? Is the scenario different in India?

KOZIOL: The dominant trend impacting the contact-center is mobile, and India is certainly at the forefront of the mobile revolution. Mobile is creating a scenario which is enabling consumers to choose when and how they want to interact with the company. It’s no longer just voice, though that bit is still dominant. But the new demographics interact on chat, SMS, text, email, and social networks which makes mobile a key enabler in delivering a profound impact.

Social media is another major trend. We call it a relationship revolution as consumers are no longer interacting in a way that a company wants them to. It is not a one-on-one conversation. The contactcenter has to reply many conversations real-time.

Apart from social and mobile, companies want to effectively deal with endto-end business process management. The earlier matrix around time to answer, average time to phone, etcetera, has now changed. Today’s consumers are expecting the contact-center to help them resolve issues quicker.

One of the driving forces is the development and deployment of a truly collaborative set of offerings for the new-age contactcenter. What’s Aspect’s role in this?

KOZIOL: Customer interaction on outbound communication is a significant portfolio of Aspect which

CHRIS KOZIOL | ON RECORD n has a majority share in India. In the ACD ( Automatic Call Distribution) market too, our unified blend architecture is our flagship solution which allows customers to allow inbound and outbound communication seamlessly. This flexible movement reduces overall cost of ownership.

It helps customers with workforce optimization suite of products, which includes performance management, quality management, dashboards tools for forecasting, and end-to-end resolution for the BPO industry.

will soon launch a unique solution for this market. For a 50- to 200- seat organization, we have competitive solutions. Companies like Cisco and Aspect can play at that level though they may not be designed to maximize the small business as both offer a benefit of platform continuity that a customer on a growth path is looking for.

Would Aspect continue with its dominant directto-customer model or will channels have a role too?

KOZIOL: Few quarters ago we realized that despite

integration focused, and add domain expertise.

The channel partner can be from a telephony background or those with CRM platforms. Some tool-sets are really interesting as the line between telephony and CRM is really diminishing. We are currently focused on A- and B-class cities as we prefer partners with a national presence to provide much needed geographic reach.

Do you compete with unified communications players like Cisco and Avaya?

KOZIOL: Aspect is not a

Video is significant, but not priority for us. The infrastructure and cost required for video in contact-centers includes speech analytics, recordings, and quality control which often leads to low ROI. Additionally, there are issues around economies of scale and efficiency. Investments are going into multi-channels as organizations want to respond quickly to phone calls, tweets, chats, and manage them in one interaction, which might not always need a video component.

Channels were a huge untapped opportunity. We realized we cannot scale faster and wider without leveraging partners with local understanding and resources.”

Another big area is relationship revolution where customer interactions are changing from single channel to multi-contact, and now omni-contact.

Companies are investing in social media due to customer demands and the change in demographics, mostly owing to the proliferation of smartphones.

Aspect Social not only looks at mining tweets and posts, but also puts the relevant data into the interaction process.

Does Aspect offer solutions for SMBs apart from those it offers large enterprises?

KOZIOL: Our solutions trickle down to enterprises of all sizes, but there is a certain price-point and a level of sophistication required due to the multichannel design of the solutions. We haven’t been very effective for organizations with 10 to 15 users, but

a strong channel component, there was not much focus. We have more than 150 channel partners worldwide. Channels were a huge untapped opportunity. We realized that we cannot scale faster and wider without leveraging partners who have local understanding and resources. The channel route is a major strategic initiative as we transform from a direct to an indirect model.

How are you building the channel ecosystem in India?

KOZIOL: We are now becoming a channel-centric company with partnerships at multiple levels. We are forging alliances with tier-1 partners involved in integrated and complex enterprise projects. We are identifying tier-2 channels mainly for SMEs. We need partners who are more process oriented,

unified communications infrastructure company, so we need to take advantage of their capabilities [other vendors] and products. For example, the new version of unified IP has a tight integration with Cisco UCCE (Unified Contact Center Enterprise). The real value addition lies around critical elements like analytics and customer experience.

What about R&D investments that have an increased focus around analytics and video?

KOZIOL: There has been a significant increase in the R&D budget on multi-channel enablement, integrating interactions with workforce optimization and back office process optimization, and how we can enable cloud.

There is lot of discussion around video from large infrastructure players like Cisco and Avaya because it will sell more hardware.

With well-established vendors present in India, what benefits can channel partners get by associating with Aspect?

KOZIOL: Unlike most vendors that target the top accounts or verticals, our solutions cater to both enterprises and the mid-market. India has a number of mid-market organizations, which is good for partners.

The end-to-end interaction suite including interaction management, contact-center solution, workforce optimization, back office optimization, and Social offer opportunities in services and annuity business for partners.

Globally, we have close to 60 engagements in a cloud or hosted environment on a subscription basis. We also want to work with MSPs who can invest in a cloud or hosted model with us in India. 

AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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Mehul Doshi, CEO,

Jainam Technologies Pvt. Ltd., says Juniper Networks’ Junos OS has helped his customers be more innovative, secure, and agile.

SECRET SAUCE FOR SUCCESS

How has your engagement with Juniper Networks been?

We started working with Juniper Networks by adopting their security solutions. Initially, our engagement in security gateway and intrusion detection was with Symantec. In 2004, Juniper Networks acquired NetScreen and has been using its expertise and innovation with Screen OS to further accelerate its business. For the first time, the industry saw the network security space change at such a fast pace. In 2006, we moved into a combined program of Symantec and Juniper Networks which enabled hardware refresh cycles on new Juniper platforms. Eventually, Symantec decided to exit the security gateway business and handed over the baton to Juniper Networks. Over the years, our customers have been able to sample the benefits of carrier grade hardware and Juniper’s secret sauce: The Junos OS. Can you describe what is unique about Juniper Networks Junos? How have you benefited from this innovation?

When we look at the Internet and its evolution, the one company that should be given credit for its success should be

Let’s Build the Best showcases stories of channel partners who have benefited from their relationship with Juniper Networks.

Juniper Networks. It has the vision to deliver a must-have OS way back in 1996.

That has resulted in the creation of Junos.

Some would say, it’s just another network OS. But Juniper Networks took the most courageous step to convert all the code from Screen OS—its cash cow, NetScreen operating system—to Junos. So we now have an operating system which powers the Internet and now addresses security convergence. The uniqueness of this operating system is that it’s not only common among routers, switches, and security devices but also allows an SDK integration and includes customization.

Our customers, who used Junos from an existing networking gear, faced a breakdown issue and called us for a solution. We offered the Juniper Network Routing Device under a proof-of-concept, instead of lending the device for a few days, and converted and migrated the previous configuration to Junos. As a result, customers, though apprehensive, are the biggest proponents of Junos as they learned that a monolithic operating system facing the Internet and MPLS routing with high availability are a drag on compute and performance.

From our customers’ perspective, the router they were using was at 72 percent peak utilization, and their network team observed that this could be one of the reasons behind the breakdown. When the Junos powered device was installed and configured, the utilization came down to 33 percent during the monthend. The customer thought we hadn’t routed all the traffic. All fears were addressed when its users called and said the transactions were now faster and that they could complete the submission across all WAN locations.

The traditional monolithic operating system which includes tightly coupled processes like file systems, procedure calls, and device drives cannot address the agility needs of the industry. The foundation of a rock solid modular system of Junos—which is programmable with complete integration—will also fulfill the need for innovation

“Our association with Jainam goes back to the NetScreen days. They are one of our Elite partners in India.

The team’s dedication and capability has helped them win and deploy Juniper’s networking and security solutions at a number of customer locations. It’s a great partnership and I look forward to building an even stronger collaboration with Jainam in the future.”

— Jitendra Gupta, Director-Channels, Juniper Networks India and SAARC

and growth of telecom companies in the SDN market.

The BGP advantage with Juniper was proven worldwide with 30 percent of the major service providers shifting to Juniper Networks.

What are the growth drivers you see with Juniper Networks? Are there any challenges you face in selling the solution?

Juniper Networks, from our perspective, is at Version 5 of its evolution. Version 1 was its telco thrust, credit for which should go to the secret sauce—Junos OS. Version 2 was the NetScreen driven security wave. Version 3 was its virtual chassis innovation which brought EX switching. Version 4 was the coverage of Juniper standardization across all product lines like security, switching, and routing.

Version 5 is the present, where it is increasing its depth of coverage within its solution and changing its portfolio to suit

the changing times. Security acquisition of Mykonos and using Altor virtualization security would help it become a leader in network security coverage for service providers and enterprises.

The growth drivers we see with Juniper Networks are based on our customer needs and requests to revamp the legacy monolithic routing operating system and migration to BGP MPLS private and public cloud.

As per statistics, the routing market refresh cycle is long overdue. While some customers would still delay their cycle we believe that the businesses that want agility and performance would not shy away from revamping their traditional assets. The challenges in selling the solution relates to market awareness among channels and customers. The outcome of a project should cover the platform advantage keeping in mind the next lifecycle of the network.

We feel customers should challenge their existing partners and vendors to share innovation and business gains which can be achieved with right planning. The skill sets of partners in engineering and architecture need to be not only technical but should also be mapped to the dynamic business agility of their customer needs for today and tomorrow.

How has Juniper Networks’ channel engagement and vision been?

Juniper Networks is committed to its channel vision which it has revamped constantly and executed well. It executes what it plans for and what it promises during closed-group partner events.

This has enabled high growth and success for us. Partners like consistency of message and execution and this is where Juniper Networks has succeeded.

This engagement has helped us resolve customer painpoints consistently.

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

Photograph by FOTOCORP

ANOOP PAI DHUNGAT Chairman and MD, Galaxy Business Solutions

n COVER STORY

VITAL VERTICALS A limp economy has dwarfed business opportunities. But five verticals are standing tall and opening new doors for your business.

By Debarati Roy and Radhika Nallayam

R

ECURRING RECESSION

is a nightmare for any business. Just when you thought you had sailed through a tremendously tough slump in the market, you’ve been greeted with another. Frozen IT budgets, cash flow crunch, inflationary pressures, and a whole lot of unexpected obstacles have become stale news.

And as the global economic growth remains extremely fragile, India stands to suffer. In fact, India’s economic growth had fallen to a decade low of 5 percent in the 2012-13 fiscal. And the rupee’s free fall is only making matters worse.

But all’s not lost. Channel partners can take heart from the fact that in the face of adversity business in some verticals is looking up. According to the findings of the CIO Mid-year Review 2013, in the last six months, IT spending in at least five industry verticals—BFSI, government, IT/ITES, manufacturing, and telecom—has been increasing steadily.

These verticals are making a dull economy shine as they are filled with small

gems of opportunity. Here’s why you should pay heed to these verticals.

Telecom’s Calling

For a long time, the telecom industry in India had been a typical example of the banes of plenty. Buried under the burden of regulatory compliance and fierce competition, companies in the telecom sector have been struggling to keep their heads above the water.

But things are looking up. Piggybacking on more than 868 million mobile subscriber base, and reforms introduced by TRAI and DOT, the telecom sector has got a new lease of life. As a result, since the beginning of 2013, some Indian telcos have raised tariffs by at least 30 percent either by increasing headline tariffs or reducing free minutes that will have a positive impact on the industry.

“After lying low for the last two years, mobile companies will definitely start investing in 2013 to gain more subscribers and bank on the new surge of data-related services on mobiles,” says Praveen Dwarkanath, director, MN World Enterprise.

That’s something Gaurav Jain, associate director at IDC’s India Consumer Mobility AUGUST 2013

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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n COVER STORY

Why Telecom is Vital l Increased FDI promises increased funds to strengthen IT infrastructure. This will

support growing data and voice needs. Government regulations are bringing in stability in the market.

BETTING ON: CRM, Document Management, Business Analytics, and Big Data

and Telecom Group, agrees with.

“Regulatory authorities like TRAI and DoT have been ushering in several reforms. As security laws tighten, mobile services providers will also be forced to invest significantly in compliance-related IT infrastructure, to be able to monitor what flows in and out of their networks,” he says.

This flood of data pushes the demand for technologies like business analytics, big data, and documentation automation. “One of the customers I am currently working is curious

about how he can leverage customer data to gain better business insights.

Organizations are re-engineering and leveraging data to increase sales,” says Dwarkanath.

But investing in these technologies calls for cold hard cash. Sure, the economy is down, but telecom’s coffers have reasons to rejoice. Last month, the government increased the FDI cap in telecom from 74 to 100 percent. “Steps like these will bring in some fresh investment to help telecom companies ramp up their operations and build the infrastruc-

Telecom companies will start investing in IT to gain more subscribers and bank on the demand for data services.”

PRAVEEN DWARKANATH, DIRECTOR, M.N. WORLD ENTERPRISE

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

ture to support the sector’s growth,” says Jain.

That, coupled with a surge of demand for data-related services, believe Jain and Dwarkanath will drive telecom operators to invest in IT. To further fuel this growth, the telecom department is trying to lower entry barriers for Internet service providers—to shore up broadband penetration levels—even as the government readies to roll out a Rs 21,000 crore national fibre optic network to take high-speed Internet to India’s hinterlands.

“With new 3G auctions in the offing, and the explosive growth of data moving in and out of networks, mobile operators will have to significantly invest in storage, compute, and network capabilities to cater to the demand,” says Dwarkanath.

That means more business for channel partners who are focusing on these technologies.

Bank on BFSI

Another industry that channel partners can place their bets on is BFSI. B. Shankar, director at Ashtech Infotech says, in terms of IT spending, BFSI is second only to the government sector.

According to a Gartner report, Indian banking and securities companies will spend Rs 422 billion on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of more than 13 percent from 2012. “The percentage of revenues that BFSI sets aside for IT is much higher than what companies in the manufacturing sector would spend. From core banking solutions to ATM transactions, IT forms the core of most banking operations,” says Shankar.

Apart from being an industry that’s inherently IT-savvy, new developments in the market are forcing banks to invest more in certain technologies to remain competitive and compliant.

“IT spend in this sector is driven primarily by regulatory compliance and security requirements of customers. Global banks make additional investments as they have to follow global compliance norms apart from RBI’s regulations,” says Anoop Pai Dhungat,

chairman and MD, Galaxy Business Solutions.

Another factor that has raised expectations from the BFSI sector is the licenses that RBI is issuing for new banks. This is the first time in more than a decade that fresh banking licenses will be issued.

“New entrants in the market would invest in the entire gamut of IT—from applications to building the entire IT infrastructure—to support operations,”says Shankar.

Shankar believes that spending by banks will also be driven by technologies like big data, analytics, and mobility. As the RBI plans to increase the penetration of banks and welcome new entrants, banks will have to figure out ways to reach the hinterlands without having to open physical branches.

“There are many villages in India that don’t have proper roads but have a mobile network. Both new and old banking players will try to leverage mobility for their field staff and agents to reach these untapped markets,” says Shankar.

Apart from the advent of these technologies in the mobility space, traditional requirements of storage, security, back-up, and DR have always been there, says Dhungat.

Another development that’s making BFSI a target for channel partners is RBI’s recent mandate: Banks need to stop collecting fresh post-dated cheques or EMI cheques in any center where electronic clearing (ECS) facility is available. The central bank’s latest directive on cheque truncation system (CTS) extends the validity of cheques issued in the old format until July 31, 2013, which means that many banks would have to invest in CTS, which according to Shankar is a huge market to align with.

“CTS could cost anything from Rs 30 lakh for a small bank to a crore or

Defense sector customers are sprucing up security. We have been witnessing an uptick in physical security and CCTV solutions.”

EDWARD JEEVAN, DIRECTOR, BINARY SYSTEMS

more for a large organization,” says Shankar. That’s a tempting market for channel partners.

Manufacturing Profit

The manufacturing industry in India has seen better days. But despite economic uncertainty, channel partners are excited about the prospects of the manufacturing sector. Interestingly, most channel partners are also quick to add that the bulk of the investment in IT will come from companies trying to maintain operational health and hygiene rather than

Why BFSI is Vital l New banking licenses will lead to new entrants in the market who need to build

their IT infrastructures to support operations. Also, banks have to comply with RBI’s new mandates around EDS and cheque truncation systems.

BETTING ON: Mobility, Analytics, Core-banking Applications, CTS

strategic planning.

“Manufacturing definitely has a huge potential to invest in IT. This is the right time to do so as business is not that aggressive and companies can plan their IT roadmap to be future ready,” says B. Nageshwar Gupta, MD, vCentric.

According to a Gartner report, Indian manufacturers and natural resources companies will spend Rs 40,800 crore on IT products and services in 2013, which is an increase of 9.1 percent from 2012. The key areas of investment would be ERP, SCM, CRM, manufacturing-specific applications, and virtualization.

Deepak Jadhav, director, VDA Infosolutions, attributes most of this growth to significant investments in upgrading or fine-tuning ERP systems. “As operating costs increase and companies are forced to save cost and improve bottomlines, there

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n COVER STORY While HANA has been around for almost two years now, Dwarkanath feels this is the right time for the technology to spread its wings. “Both these technologies are closely related to how ERPs operate. This will raise significant opportunities for channel partners who specialize in crossplatform integration, storage expansion and licensing,” he says.

Government Rules

With new banking licences in the offing, both new and old players will leverage mobility to reach rural markets.”

B. SHANKAR, DIRECTOR, ASHTECH INFOTECH

will be an affinity to move towards more efficiency and automation like inventory planning, production planning, and supply chain management,” says Jadhav.

Gupta lays bare the fact that despite ERP being one of the most basic business applications for a manufacturing firm, many companies—some with revenues of over Rs 500 crore— still rely on basic applications like Tally and Excel for payment processing and operations management. But it’s a good time for these companies to re-think their strategies as ERP

will improve operational efficiency to a great extent.

And that works wonders for companies stuck in a downturn. An HBR study points out that the 37 percent of companies that emerged as postrecession winners reduced costs selectively by focusing more on operational efficiency, even as they invested comprehensively in IT, R&D, and new assets. Other factors driving IT investment in the sector are Oracle’s 12 G roll out SAP’s in-memory range of computing solutions called HANA, says Dwarkanath.

Why Manufacturing is Vital l Despite a down economy, companies will invest in IT to automate operations,

strengthen ERP, and invest in technologies that can save costs and enhance employee productivity.

BETTING ON: ERP, BPM, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing 26

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The government sector has always been the big daddy when it comes to IT budgets. The sheer volume of opportunities makes it an extremely appealing market. Indian public sector IT spending is predicted to grow at a rate of 10-11 percent between 2012 and 2017, according to Forrester Research.

Manish Bahl, VP and country manager, Forrester India, believes that the major drivers of IT spending in this sector will be city or statelevel projects, rural healthcare initiatives, and computerization of taxrelated activities. He says SIs who are heavily focused on hardware should start looking at software and services as well, as organizations in the government sector are looking beyond box deployments. Multiple e-gov initiatives, state datacenter projects, the National Knowledge network, and the likes of JNNURM are huge and on-going opportunities.

Tier-2 partners seem to be more focused towards state-level projects.

Surat-based Innovative Telecom & Softwares has been bagging projects from multiple state government agencies. The SI is also working very closely with one of its principals’ smart city initiatives. “Our datacenter business has been growing steadily, with an overall growth in server, storage, networking, and to some extent virtualization as well.

Investments at this stage are happening around creating a robust infrastructure,” says Moin Shaikh, director, Innovative Telecom & Softwares.

Within government, the defense and education sectors look more promising. Bangalore-based Binary Systems, for example, has benefited by focusing on these areas. “Defense sector customers are in the process

Why Government is Vital l Large central government projects are underway. State-level initiatives to

improve infrastructure bring in new opportunities. E-governance initiatives ensure consistent business for all types of players.

BETTING ON: Datacenter Solutions, Physical Security, Software and Services

of sprucing up their security infrastructure. They are also investing heavily on R&D and expansion. So there is ample money spent there.

We have been witnessing surplus takers for physical security and CCTV solutions,” says Edward Jeevan, director, Binary Systems.

While Binary’s datacenter hardware business for the public sector has been on an upward swing, Jeevan is seeing more prospects around consulting and advisory services as well. He is now looking at partnerships with niche ISVs, to jointly offer solutions that are customized for each department.

Another factor that can make the government sector attractive is the prospect of large scale projects. “I am working on a project that’ll be rolled out in 14 states. The mandate on ‘no new policies to be declared by the government’ kicks in six months before the elections. That still leaves us with another four months.”

MN World’s engagement with the government sector is already bearing fruits. Government definitely seems like a safe market to invest in. However, Forrester’s Bahl warns that organizations need to be patient and not expect overnight returns from this customer.

buying behavior and consumption methods of customers are also changing. Mumbai-based Galaxy Office Automation has witnessed a two-digit growth in its business from this sector. So has Bangalorebased 3in Solutions, which is already driving more than 50 percent of its top line from the IT/ITES sector. What’s more, the company’s forecast for next quarter projects a whopping 40 percent growth from this vertical.

A combination of multiple factors appears to drive this growth. First, the domestic market for IT is growing fast. As a result, most IT companies have aggressive expansion and recruitment plans in place for next year. “Many of our customers in this space, especially global technology companies, are investing heavily on R&D, testing, and QA. That’s a big opportunity for us. India is being looked at as a global destination

Cutting-edge IT/ITES

for R&D initiatives, ” says Galaxy’s Dhungat. Consequently, the SI’s end-user computing business has seen a quantum leap.

Arun S.G., director, 3in Solutions, adds that India is gradually becoming the preferred location to set up headquarters for companies in the APAC region. Here, companies are trying to consolidate their IT buying decisions. “India is relatively cheap, has quality man power, and is more IT-savvy,” says Arun. It also helps SIs that customers in this sector have moved to the next level

A relatively vulnerable market, India’s IT/ITES sector seems to have shown resilience to challenging market conditions. The IT spend of this sector continues to rise, as existing players expand aggressively and newer players break into the market.

Bahl believes IT spend in this sector will grow at 8 percent, at least, for the next year.

IT/ITES is clearly a mature user of technologies and seems to be making wise investments in IT. The

of IT consumption. Private cloud adoption, for instance, is quite high, with IT companies consolidating multiple projects.

“Purchases are based on projects.

Earlier, these companies bought applications, hardware and software for every project they took up. But now, they give priority to factors such as resource utilization and provisioning,” says Dhungat.

While this means that customers would logically buy less hardware than before, it also means that they are looking for quality investments. For partners that means greater profitability.

Galaxy’s virtualization business, for example, has shot up in the last year. Desktop virtualization, especially, has been a cash cow for the company.

“IT companies are looking at virtualizing compute, storage, applications, and desktops. They are making wise infrastructure investments to increase scalability and flexibility,” says Dhungat. 3in Solutions has also widened its services portfolio to cash in on new opportunities.

There are large turn-key projects, too. The services companies, more than ever, are investing in IT to roll out large, highly-complex, multi-loca-

Why IT/ITES is Vital l Growing domestic market for IT is breathing new life into the market. Massive

investments around R&D by IT companies leads to vigorous recruitment and expansion plans.

BETTING ON: VDI, Server Virtualization, Datacenter Solutions

tion projects. As new players enter this space, they are opening up opportunities for green field projects as well.

Forrester’s Bahl says that future investments in this sector will be made towards technologies that improve customer experience and services. “You will see a lot of action around mobility, analytics, BI, productivity tools, and technologies that deliver a superior customer experience. That’s where the companies in this market are going to throw themselves at in the coming days,” he says. 

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n CASE STUDY

Building Bonds Olive Data Centre earned long-term business and a lasting friendship by building a complete open source mailing solution for Mahesh Bank. By Varsha Chidambaram

Q

UID PRO QUO. Conventional

wisdom tells us; always ask a favor in return for a favor.

But Pravin Mohite, CEO, Olive Data Centre, doesn’t care for conventional wisdom. The astute businessman that he is, Mohite believes business relationships cannot and 28

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

shouldn’t be transactional. He has a story that many can learn from.

Prior to Olive Data Centre, he spent a decade working in IT for the banking industry with heavy-weights like ICICI. Mohite started Olive Data Centre—an IT services venture of the 25-year-old Olive group—last year. With its rich ex-

pertise in open source technologies, the SI, was a trusted choice for many SME banks. A.P. Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank was going to be another addition.

Popularly known as Mahesh Bank, this SME bank is primarily focused on operations in Andhra Pradesh (Khammam, Vijayawada, Guntur, Rajahmundry, Visakhapatnam, and Warangal).

It’s a highly technology-driven bank, despite its relatively small size. The bank has its own core banking and mobile banking solutions which are on a secure IT platform. But, it lacked a secure mailing solution. Till about two years back, they were using 50

Photograph by SURESH

PRAVIN MOHITE, CEO, Olive Data Centre, offered a comprehensive solution to Mahesh Bank’s needs.

corporate Gmail licenses that were configured for 450 users. For its internal users, the bank was using a Linuxbased mailing platform. Operating two mailing systems in isolation was proving to be a hassle. Also, growing security dictums from RBI mandated it strengthen its security posture.

It started the search for an integrated, secure mailing solution that wouldn’t burn a hole in its pocket.

Soon, Milind Rajhans, Mahesh Bank’s senior manager-IT and CISO, realized this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. At first he turned to the usual and popular options like Microsoft Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes. Both were excellent products with great features, but ones that came at a notso-attractive price-point. But Rajhans knew that the need for an effective and secure mailing solution was urgent and business was willing to pay for it despite the budgetary constraints.

Things were about to take a dramatic turn.

KARMIC DESIGN Rajhans had a chance encounter with his old-friend Mohite. Both knew each other from Mohite’s days in banking. Their conversation—between reminisces of their past gaiety—soon turned to business and IT; a shared passion. Fortunately, for Rajhans, this was the time when he was trying to rebuild the design architecture at Mahesh Bank and was having trouble negotiating a deal with a vendor. As he discussed the situation with Mohite, his old-friend stepped in to offer a helping hand. In the days ahead, Olive Data Centre helped Mahesh Bank negotiate the contract with the vendor.

Mohite was successful in bringing down the deal from the initial offer price of Rs 7 crore to Rs 2.5 crore. He did this purely as a favor to a friend: He wasn’t expecting anything in return. But, to his surprise, this gesture, not only won him a long-term friendship, but it also garnered a long-term business contract.

With the architecture design project out of the way, Rajhans was ready to concentrate on the mailing solution. As a solution to Mahesh Bank’s mailing problem, Mohite proposed taking the open source route.

Snapshot Key Parties: Olive Data Centre, Mahesh Bank

Location: Hyderabad Implementation Time: One month Key People Involved: Srinivas Mudium, Project Manager; Vinayak Chikte and Jagjieet Singh, Deputy Managers; Avdesh Singh Yadav, Support Engineer, (all from Olive DC); and Milind Rajhans, Sr. Manager-IT and CISO, Mahesh Bank

Cost of Implementation: About Rs 25 lakh

Key Technologies: VMware Zimbra mailing solution, Ubuntu servers, data leakage prevention tools for e-mail

Post Implementation ROI: Enhanced interoperability, increased secure access to any device, anytime, improved administration, reduced costs in help-desk calls and IT support

But Rajhans wasn’t going to hand over the mailing project to Mohite simply based on their ingrained friendship. He had the option of going with big guns like Microsoft and IBM. In any case, what advantages could an open source option have to offer compared to the well-established modes?

For Mohite, his previous deed had won him the privilege of a hearing. He intended to make the most of it. He used the opportunity to demonstrate VMware’s open source mailing solution, Zimbra, at the bank’s premises.

That was a foot-in-the-door nevertheless, but more had to be done. The POC demonstrated that the Zimbra solution had all the features that the other two solutions (MS Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes) promised, but more importantly, it was cheaper and cost-effective. “The competition with Exchange was a tough one. To overcome it, we ran the POC for twos weeks,” says Mohite.

But Rajhans was still not convinced.

OPEN DILEMMA Open source, still, hadn’t given Rajhans enough reasons to supplant names like IBM and Microsoft.

Mohite’s instinct and experience kicked.

Having spent a significant amount of time in the banking industry, he knew that security concerns would always plague Rajhans, who was also the bank’s CISO. He knew the bank would value a data leakage prevention package that could protect e-mail attachments along with the proposed solution. This was going to be his unique selling-point and his pitch to bag the deal.

Flexibility is the edge that open source solutions have over any proprietary alternatives. Given its expertise in open source, Olive Data Centre was capable of bundling a DLP solution and integrating it with the Zimbra offering.

This wouldn’t have been possible with either Microsoft or IBM. That swung the deal in favor of Olive Data Centre.

“The TCO benefits tilted the bank towards Zimbra over Exchange,” says Mohite. Having delivered the essential, it was a no-brainer. Olive Data Centre had the deal in the bag.

And, Rajhans didn’t regret the decision. Olive Data Centre implemented the Zimbra solution on the Ubuntu platform, choosing the cluster mode. While this feature was available in the more expensive Red Hat Linux platform, Mohite suggested the bank move to Ubuntu. Rajhans agreed. This provided double redundancy such that if one server goes down, another one backs it up seamlessly.

“Olive Data Centre understood our business need, and because of Pravin’s background in banking, he could understand our requirement for integrating all applications with core banking.

He knew compliance took priority. No other vendor could have given us this sort of support,” says Rajhans.

The SI has deployed VMware’s e-mail and collaboration service to a diverse range of the bank’s users across remote locations and integrated it with external applications. It also deployed a Webmail access interface for the highly mobile user. All of this has reduced cost and administration efforts considerably. Today, Olive’s deployment has helped Mahesh Bank improve the performance of the IT help-desk and support, general administration, and user-productivity significantly. When Mohite agreed to help Rajhans, he did it out of goodwill. But as they say, good deeds never go unpaid.  AUGUST 2013

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OUT OF

THE BOX

The advent of new technologies is now popping security out of its physical box onto the virtual turf.

Is your business ready? By Yogesh Gupta

L

ET’S ADMIT it: We spend a

healthy chunk of our everyday lives in a virtual world. Today, social media, e-commerce, and its cousins have created a virtual world that could soon make the real world extinct.

That means a majority of the world’s data has already gone virtual. And a lot of that influences how business and IT function. While the concept of a virtual world and its benefits are something IT is not alien to—thanks to the many flavors of virtualization—what’s changing is the move to virtual security.

Predominantly physical in nature, the prowess of security appliances are beginning to make a mark in the virtual world too. As this transformation takes a definite shape, the

supporting ecosystem—channel partners and vendors—is at a cross road.

According to Gartner, by 2015, 20 percent of the deployments in the VPN/firewall market will be executed through a virtual switch on a hyper-visor instead of a physical security appliance.“This year, virtual firewalls accounted for 5 percent of the firewall market, compared to 2 percent last year. We see the large number of systems that are moving to virtual environments as main drivers accelerating virtual firewall sales,” says Eric Ahlm, research director, Gartner.

As virtualization and cloud gain ground across enterprises, deployment of security solutions too are following suit by moving into a virtual mode.

Security is a specialized domain.

Virtual UTM partners have more command over the customer. Wherever there is a virtual instance, it’s easier to manage a software-based appliance in that domain.”

VP-Sales, India and SAARC, Cyberoam SUNIL SHARMA,

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“For this fiscal, we have a target of minimum 2 percent of the total UTM numbers to emerge from virtual UTM in India,” says Sunil Sharma, Vice President-Sales, India and SAARC, Cyberoam.

“Not only security applications, but anything which has a software bend or is software-dominated will be based on a VM,” says Ashish Dhawan, managing director, Asia, Juniper Networks.

Now that datacenters are going virtual, there’s no point in keeping discrete appliances for which one needs to create a security perimeter, he says.

IN VIRTUAL MODE Networking giant, Cisco, reinforces the fact that new technologies are pushing for virtual security. “The story is quite simple: Virtualization and cloud computing have been the biggest drivers for this in the past two to three years,” says Diwakar Dayal, head-security sales, Cisco India and SAARC. “There is big impact on overall business because customers are consuming applications from the cloud and want greater security,” he says. (Read full interview with Dayal on Page 31) Physical security appliances, such as firewalls, are bottlenecks when it comes to virtual systems operations.

This is where virtual security appliances come good. “For example,” says Ahlm, “a virtual systems team may be able to move a server to a new location in hours, but security takes weeks to redesign. Moving security technologies closer to the virtual assets they protect and integrating them with virtual operations management makes business more agile and secure.”

With data going virtual, protecting it has become even more vital. “Enterprises will soon have a completely virtual resource of data. To protect it, it is best if the security or management appliance is in virtual mode too,” says Dhawan.

Primarily, some vendors believe, the customers with a mature cloud process—private or public, and enterprise customers who have implemented virtualization for optimization of resources—will take to this trend.

Which is why, the 2 percent target of virtual UTM will mostly feature enterprise customers which have

implemented virtualization for optimization of resources. According to Sharma at Cyberoam, 20 to 25 percent of the market will move to virtual UTM in India.

VENDOR-PARTNER EQUATION Gartner sees a split go-to-market strategy for virtual firewalls. “A number of traditional physical firewall vendors now have virtual firewalls.

These vendors take the channel route to reach security buying centers who wish to add virtual security appliances,” says Ahlm.

A few months ago, WatchGuard, for example, launched a virtual firewall for VMware. The company is bullish about its prospects in this market. “Earlier, we had launched UTM for hyper-visors. Now, we cover a majority of virtualization products for Microsoft and VMware,” says Mohit Puri, Country Manager, India & SAARC, WatchGuard.

Juniper Networks too doesn’t want to be left behind. Being an industry big-wig, it is unwilling to lose the firstmover advantage. It has launched a few related products, including the EX9200. In addition, it has launched a virtual wireless controller that provides security and management tools to wireless networks, for which the software resides on the virtual path.

Dhawan at Juniper believes that this would be the future of appliance-based products, sooner than later.

“Competition doesn’t have features like a central console/log report, and they usually always have a component of hardware. The uniqueness of our virtual UTM is that it is 100 percent software-based,” says Sharma at Cyberoam.

For channel partners, this softwarebased virtual UTM brings in higher

Security is Going Virtual Cisco is empowering its channels to address the virtual security landscape for enterprises.

Diwakar Dayal, head-Security Sales, Cisco India & SAARC, talks about the opportunities for partners.

wards new environments like cloud and mobile devices. Therefore, they need to address the new-age threat vector from a cloud and datacenter perspective. Those who do not adopt these practices will find it difficult to work on large projects.

Most security decisions are based on providing a secure datacenter where business critical and nonbusiness critical applications reside on the same virtual stack.

Why should channels look at virtual security solutions? Interest levels are high, and this is translating into definite business. The customers look for long-term, trustworthy partners to deliver the complete ecosystem of solutions. Datacenter, itself, is a volatile environment with too many moving parts.

As a leader in innovations around UCS, Nexus, and a fullfledged security practice, Cisco can stitch the story well into datacenters. There is no re-certification and no re-training required by the customer and partner from a manageability perspective.

What’s your partner strategy? Working through partners has been Cisco’s model. We have two partner sets: One focused on the virtual stack and the other could start with servers and then move to security and other technologies like collaboration and virtualization.

What are the pros and cons for partners by moving away from physical appliances? Enterprise partners have to understand that the game is shifting fast. The traditional threat of AV, a decade back, has moved more tothe margins and profitability. Which is why some vendors have rolled out training programs on virtual UTM for their channel partners. “The big plan is to align with virtualization partners.

Enterprises will soon have a completely virtual resource of data. To protect it, it would be best if the security or management appliance is also in the virtual form.”

ASHISH DHAWAN

Managing Director, Asia, Juniper Networks

What is the ROI for CIOs with virtual UTM versus physical UTM? Our solutions have the ability to segment, project the environment through a valid threat defence, and give all the visibility and control to the customer. In the traditional firewall, there is physical segregation.

But in the virtual environment, there could be two to three customers on the stack. Cisco virtual technology helps customers to segregate within the firewall. That’s where the ROI comes in.

—Yogesh Gupta

If you want to sell VM then we need to work with partners that work in the virtualization sphere,” says Dhawan.

Similarly, Cyberoam has rolled out a program to recruit, appoint, and develop the skill-sets of the existing partners of VMware and Microsoft.

“We have a readymade customer-base due to our expertise in software,” says Sharma.

Though there is an uptick in virtual UTM, its growth hasn’t really picked up. “We expect virtual security appliances to pick up by the second half of 2013. However, we have the roadmap ready and partners trained to traverse ably on this path,” says Puri. But the AUGUST 2013

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31

n FEATURE | SECURITY general consensus is that, within the security firewall space—from a datacenter perspective—across enterprise and commercial segment, the market is maturing and accommodating virtual security. In the commercial segment, which is more fragmented, channel partners will have to put solutions together.

“Today, security appliances that are software-based need to deliver performance and ensure ease of management to customers. With more products than anyone else, we are no longer a ‘security box company’, but a security solution provider. I believe this would be great for channel partners,” says Dhawan. Cyberoam’s Sharma agrees.

“Security itself is a specialized domain and virtual UTM partners have more command over customers. Wherever there is a virtual instance, it is easier to manage a software-based appliance in the domain that offers better performance and channels can get a subscription model,” he says.

WAIT AND WATCH But for security appliances to be a ubiquitous part of an organization’s

Moving security technologies closer to the virtual assets they protect, and integrating them with virtual operations management makes business more agile and secure.”

ERIC AHLM,

Research Director, Gartner

infrastructure, CIOs need to participate in the process. Are they?

“A big question for CIOs is: Who buys and maintains security operations or virtual systems operations?

If the main driver for moving to virtual firewalls is business agility, then it would make sense for virtual systems teams to own such technologies,” says Gartner’s Ahlm. “However, for some security teams, this creates a separation of duties. CIOs will need to find the balance between security and business operations,” he adds.

When it comes to verticals, education and manufacturing are expected to maintain a low profile. But most other verticals can be expected to add virtual UTM to their architecture in the next couple of years.

Another important segment in India is SMBs. They contribute nearly

FireEye Still Swears by Physical Appliances

F

IREEYE delivers a purpose-built and virtual machine-based security platform. This provides real-time threat protection to enterprises and governments, worldwide, against next generation cyber attacks.

“We have seen server virtualization across enterprises, but the clientto-Internet-mode is rare in the VM environment,” says Ramsunder Papineni, Regional Director-India & SAARC, FireEye. FireEye specializes in protecting customers when communicating through e-mail or the Internet. “Virtualization has not come into this space. So, bulk of our sales today are made by selling physical appliances. The industry is not mature for ‘client to Internet access’ to move to the virtual world yet,” he says.

We are not worried about virtual applications or virtual servers, says Papineni. “Our technology monitors the movement of e-mails. Whatever 32

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2013

applications are running in the architecture are replicated using the VM in our box. Our entire technology is based on virtualization that is built in it, although it is a physical appliance,” he says.

The VM in the security appliance is FireEye’s proprietary VM. “We do not depend on commercial VM as that software often becomes a target for hackers. To minimize the risk of attacking VM licenses we have our own VM in the appliance,” he says.

The adoption of virtualization is expected to increase across Indian enterprises as there’s a need for virtual appliances to propel SaaS and cloud.

“The technology world goes through a rapid evolution and when the virtual mode takes shape, we will definitely be leading the charge as we keep pace with changing technology and customer requirements at all times,” says Papineni.

—Yogesh Gupta

one-third to the UTM market’s revenues, according to strategy consulting firm AMI-Partners.

So, will SMBs prefer physical security appliances or would they hop on to the virtual appliance bandwagon? Puri believes it’ll be the former. “SMBs and the lower mid-market still focus on physical security appliances as they are yet to traverse the virtualization path,” he says. AMI’s study also revealed that Indian SMBs are attracted to the multi-functional all-in-one-box type of security applications which include end-point security, secure Web, and mail gateway. “SMBs are sticking to physical UTM, but as they utilize the benefits of cloud and virtualization better, they will move to virtual UTM,” says Sharma.

But, Dhawan believes there will be two kinds of SMB customers.

“One is the typical appliance-based and the other will be a softwarebased subscription model. We firmly believe in the second model,” he says, adding that all three models—appliances, softwarebased, and VM-based models—will exist for different segments.

Cisco understands the importance of the SMB market. It is already providing comprehensive partner training programs which cater to high-end virtual security for the SMB sector.

Companies slowly have to choose between the old and the new, which could mean the gradual demise of the physical appliance. But, much like in the case of the hybrid cloud, the physical and virtual world of security will have to co-exist. “Twenty to 30 percent of organizations might shift to the virtual mode by 2015 but 70 percent of the market will still rely on physical security appliances,” says Cyberoam’s Sharma.

The fact is that the jury is still out, but the move to the virtual world has begun. 

Focal Point EVERYTHING ABOUT SDDC

Paving

a New Path SDN is breaking new ground in datacenter efficiency. By Eric Knorr

T

HOSE WHO extol

the virtues of cloud computing tend to talk in generalities, using words like “agility” and “scalability” rather than describing exactly how such gains will materialize. But the technology foundation of the cloud boils down to one seminal advance: Virtualization. Virtualiza-

tion abstracts the resources delivered by hardware infrastructure from the hardware itself. The resources become elastic—“defined” by software rather than by admins crawling around the datacenter rerouting cables, standing up new boxes, or flipping physical switches. With server virtualization, for example,

VMware Makes the First Move

D

URING THE Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors, VMware presented its strategy on the growing importance of the software-defined data center (SDDC) by saying the move from the physical to a software-defined architecture is a necessary step toward delivering the cloud. Through the SDDC, VMware said it would extend the benefits of virtualization to all areas of the datacenter: Network, security, storage, and management.

As part of that vision, VMware revealed its intentions to merge the company’s homegrown vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) product line with the technology that it acquired last year by acquiring Nicira, an SDN startup. This new single-product family, dubbed VMware NSX, is based on a common technology foundation that works across multiple hypervisors and cloud management systems beyond those from VMware.

Hatem Naguib, vice president of Networking & Security at VMware, states, “VMware NSX paves the way for enterprises to rapidly deploy networking and security for any application, on any general purpose hardware, non-disruptively, by enabling the fundamental abstraction of networks from networking hardware— creating the virtual network.”

—David Marshall

you simply spin up as many VMs (virtual machines) as you need from a software console—and when demand spikes or when you deploy a new workload, you then spawn many more VMs to carry the bigger burden. The software-defined datacenter (SDDC) takes virtualization to the next level, extending the abstraction to storage and networking. With advanced automation capabilities, administrators can pour on compute, storage, and networking resources as needed.

The SDDC already provides the infrastructure for the chunk of the cloud managed by such monster service providers as Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Google.

These innovators have had both the extreme necessity and the technological resources to develop their own, proprietary softwaredefined datacenter solutions.

But today, we’re at the point

where standardized, often open source solutions are being developed for mainstream enterprise consumption. In particular, recent advances in SDN promise to put the SDDC within reach.

THE SDN TIPPING POINT Today, it’s relatively easy to manage server virtualization at scale. Through a software console admins can manipulate thousands of VMs, drawing on such advanced features as live migration, automated VM load balancing, and high-availability host clustering.

Such centralized management has not come quite so easily to networking. With conventional equipment, to reconfigure the network, admins must adjust individual devices manually. SDN aims to change all that. To make everything configurable from a central location, SDN separates the control plane from the data plane—creat-

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n FOCAL POINT | SDDC ing a central control point for a network full of switches and routers. For SDN to work, there needs to be a standard way for the control plane and data plane to communicate. The OpenFlow protocol stack, which establishes a standardized interface for controlling network switches, has given birth to a number of networking startups and enjoys the backing of Cisco, HP, and other established vendors. Of course the switches themselves need not be physical; they can be virtual switches that run on the servers themselves. For example, Open vSwitch, a popular open source virtual switch, gives priority to data flows directed by an OpenFlow controller. The OpenDaylight

for the SDDC into which various virtualization solutions plug in and work together. These clouds tend to have many moving parts, including virtualization management, metering and chargeback systems, automated configuration, and self-service provisioning.

Commercial vendors have been developing their own unified private cloud solutions for some time. VMware, for example, covers all the private cloud bases, including performance monitoring, workload-level selfservice, resource metering, and with the acquisition of Nicira nine months ago, an advanced SDN solution. In fact, it was former VMware CTO Steve Herrod who, in August 2012, coined the

Services that saw its initial release in 2008.

Another important player is Citrix, which handed its full-featured CloudStack solution to the Apache Software Foundation in April 2012.

In terms of industry momentum, however, OpenStack is the handsdown winner among open source private clouds.

A collaborative project launched by Rackspace and NASA in 2009, OpenStack now offers virtual machine management for every popular hypervisor and provides a robust framework for object storage and machine image management. Its most recent releases also include authentication

Soon we’ll have the ability to experiment iteratively with all sorts of new datacenter architectures that cross public clouds and private infrastructure.

Project—a new open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and backed by every major networking player—promises to move the ball forward for SDN. Rather than hammer out new standards, the project aims to produce an extensible, open source, virtual networking platform atop such existing standards asOpenFlow. Most exciting are the “northbound” REST APIs to the controller, atop which developers will be able to build new types of applications that run on the network itself for specialized security, network management, and so on.

THE HEAT’S ON The rise in SDN is elevating the viability of private cloud solutions, which provide a management framework 34

phrase “software-defined datacenter” in his official blog. Microsoft has stepped up its game with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, for the first time offering a complete private cloud solution. Through System Center, Microsoft now offers datacenter orchestration and workflow technologies to let IT pros design services and combinations of services as resource packages. System Center 2012 goes beyond Hyper-V to support multiple hypervisors; it also accepts management data from competing management tools. Perhaps the greatest excitement of all has centered on open source private cloud solutions. The first of these was Eucalyptus, a private cloud implementation of Amazon Web

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and dashboard monitoring services—as well as Quantum, into which admins can plug various SDN solutions. The prospects for this open source juggernaut rose sharply in March 2013 when IBM announced that all of its cloud offerings, both public and private, would be built on OpenStack. And at OpenStack’s most recent event in April, for the first time, several big enterprise customers were willing to talk about their OpenStack implementations, including Best Buy, Bloomberg, and Comcast. With the backing not only of IBM, but also Cisco, Dell, HP, NetApp, Red Hat, and VMware, OpenStack is the odds-on favorite to provide widely

accepted open source foundation for the cloud.

SOFTWARE-DEFINED EVERYTHING Is “the software-defined datacenter” just another way of saying “the cloud”?

Not really. “The cloud” is a marketing term for application, platform, or infrastructure services that internal or external customers procure on demand using Web forms. The SDDC is the mechanism through which those cloud services can be delivered most efficiently.

As SDN falls into place, the nearest-term benefit to enterprises will be the easing of the network bottleneck in virtualization.

Spinning up and moving around virtual machines has become almost too easy, but the network provisioning to accommodate big changes in virtual server loads has been hard manual labor by comparison. That will change over the next few years.

In the long run, who can say where the softwaredefined datacenter will lead? The fact is, the SDDC could only begin to happen now because up until the present, we have not had compute, storage, and networking hardware with the capacity to accommodate the overhead of virtualized everything. Now we do.

Soon we’ll have the ability to experiment iteratively with all sorts of new datacenter architectures that cross public clouds and private infrastructure. Just as no one at ARPANET in the 1970s could have anticipated YouTube, no one can predict where the ability to freely provision and configure abundant virtual resources will take us. 

Towards Elastic Datacenters SDN has the potential to make datacenters flexible and agile.

By Roy Chua and Matthew Palmer

S

OFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING

(SDN). You’ve heard about it. You’ve talked about it in hallways, in meetings, at conferences.

Chances are, you want try it in the not-too-distant future. But for all the interest in SDN, many people don’t truly understand what it is or what it means for their enterprise. Social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing have pushed traditional IT approaches to their limits, spurring incredible innovation in virtualization and automation. But although compute and storage have been able to scale by becoming flexible, agile, and virtualized, networks are the one place IT hasn’t virtualized. Enter SDN. In today’s cloud environments, administrators can spin up new compute and storage instances in minutes, only to be stymied for weeks by rigid and oftentimes manual datacenter operations on the network. SDN has the potential to revolutionize legacy datacenters by closing the provisioning and management gap between networks and their compute and storage counterparts.

WHAT IS SDN? At its most basic, SDN is an approach to networking that centralizes management of the network by separating the control logic to offdevice compute resources. SDN

also exposes programmable control APIs to allow applications to orchestrate and automate network services.

SDN increases efficiency by optimizing existing applications, services, and infrastructure. Removing the need for manual configuration of switches and routers reduces errors while allowing applications and services to scale with a speed impossible in legacy datacenters. Datacenter operators are looking to SDN approaches to fulfill one or more of three basic network needs: n Simplification and efficiency, through consolidation, standardization, and convergence. n Automation and scale, automate people, policy, and processes to help scale. n Assurance and compliance, use programmatic interfaces to reduce human errors and exercise consistent governance control; ensure compliance with policy templates a brief history of SDN. SDN seems inexorably intertwined with network virtualization and cloud computing, but the initial impetus for its development was innovation, not scalability. Prior to SDN, flexibility and choice in networking were an oxymoron. Then, as now, specialized hardware components housed proprietary, vendor-defined software, causing networks to become more fragmented

as they grew. Stanford University researchers wanted better ways to conduct networking research and experiment with new networking protocols. Denied access to the proprietary control logic in commercial switches and routers, they created an arrangement that replaced the closed, vendorspecific operating system with one supporting the OpenFlow API, a protocol designed specifically to expose the inner workings of a network switch to external programs. Researchers used the OpenFlow protocol to separate the control plane from the packet-forwarding plane in network devices, allowing them to modify the control logic to run outside the devices on powerful, inexpensive PCs. A single PC, playing the role of SDN controller, now could provide centralized control over the entire network.

Further, the logic that used to run on underpowered CPUs could be retooled to take advantage of multicore CPUs, huge memory spaces, solid-state disks, and global link-state and network flow visibility. Some purists still view OpenFlow as “true”

SDN, but most of the networking world accepts that SDN includes a wide range of approaches and protocols.

As innovations in cloud computing make it clear the network can’t keep up with more agile, virtualized compute and storage, people begin to see SDN as a practical solution for datacenter networks and the cloud.

SDN IN THE DATACENTER SDN offers incredible potential for flexibility, agility, and scalability in next-generation datacenters.

Certainly service providers see huge potential for SDN in areas such as service chaining, traffic engineering, bandwidth-on-demand, and dynamic WAN interconnects, but its greatest benefits will be realized through the implementation of network virtualization in the datacenter.

Debates abound over the relationship between SDN and network virtualization.

Depending on how you define SDN, some people contend it’s possible to achieve network virtualization without it. But the fact remains that network virtualization—abstracting logical

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networks from the underlying physical implementation—is the most prevalent use case for SDN technology today. When it comes to slicing the network, SDN solutions will be key for establishing multitenancy, or creating multiple, isolated virtual networks on the same physical network.

SDN enables you to programmatically create flexible network configurations so you can either connect different servers, firewalls, and load balancers into the existing infrastructure or replicate existing multitier network topologies without having to manually deal with cables or complex command-line operations.

SDN also allows administrators to stretch the network

of their private or public cloud spin-ups.

Enterprises will also see business value from SDN solutions in visibility and troubleshooting—namely, tap aggregation. Instead of having to physically place taps on relevant switch ports, an SDN solution can selectively inspect flows within the network. SDN solutions programmatically record to an analysis device to figure out what’s going on, potentially cutting troubleshooting time from weeks down to minutes. There are certainly other SDN use cases outside the datacenter, in campus and access networks, including follow-me services, advanced network access control, and even dynamic compartmentalized net-

pinnings of the technology.

These days, just about every networking vendor claims to offer some sort of “SDN” product. Layer 2-3 vendors are either embracing OpenFlow or spinning their own form of a flow-control and programmatic API. Layer 4-7 players are moving toward virtualizing their offerings and trying to fit into a software-centric SDN architecture so they can provide ondemand, elastic Layer 4-7 services.

A new battleground is brewing around virtual switches, which mirror what their physical counterparts do, only inside virtual machine hosts. Related to the concept of virtual switches is that of the overlay network. Favored by virtual-

SDN offers huge potential for flexibility and scalability in datacenters. Its benefits will be realized through the implementation of network virtualization in the datacenter. across racks within the datacenter or even across multiple datacenters or clouds. For automation and orchestration, SDN enables coordination and service insertion (firewall, IPS, load balancing, etcetera) across all resources, including networks, compute, and storage. SDN and network virtualization also enable cloud infrastructure providers to essentially run their own Amazon EC2like services. They can serve multiple departments or customers, providing each with their own isolated compute, storage, and network playground. SDN enables cloud orchestration platforms such as OpenStack and CloudStack to provide on-demand, multitenant networks as part 36

works for compliance. But the most immediate gains will be reaped in large datacenters, where SDN promises to substantially reduce operational costs. The jury is still out on whether SDN will result in significant reduction on the capital expense side. The commodity datacenter switch, touted by many as the new reality with SDN’s ascent, has yet to hit mainstream.

VENDOR APPROACHES The stakes in the swiftly evolving SDN space are high, and vendors are rushing in to establish a footing.

Traditional networking providers and upstarts alike are creating their own SDN frameworks and controllers, even as major stakeholders try to define the very under-

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ization platform vendors VMware and Microsoft, overlays “float” virtual network domains on top of a physical networking and virtualization infrastructure. Overlay approaches based on protocols such as VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN), NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation), and STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling) support the creation of millions of virtual networks that can exist on top of legacy physical infrastructures, moving the network intelligence to the “edge” of the network where virtual switches live. On the control front, established networking vendors such as Cisco, HP, IBM, Juniper, NEC, and startup Big Switch are building their own SDN

controllers, which translate application calls into OpenFlow or similar protocols, and in some cases function as a network operating system. Other vendors, including Arista, Brocade, and Extreme Networks, are making current and new switches SDN compatible by supporting OpenFlow and other programmatic APIs. In fact, most vendors are working to find ways for existing products to work with SDN capabilities, particularly when it comes to orchestration, management and analytics, and automation. Meanwhile, competing vendor-led consortiums are racing to establish SDN standards for the industry.

Industry giants Cisco and IBM came together to define an open source framework for SDN controllers and applications.

Supported by other networking heavy hitters, the initiative was folded into the Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Project to establish an SDN framework and speed SDN adoption.

Dell shunned the project in favor of starting an SDN standardization committee within the Object Management Group, a computer industry standards association. Time will tell whether the consortiums will provide the more transparent approach to SDN standardization they promise, or whether—as cynics fear— the industry-led initiatives will essentially trade one form of vendor lock-in for another.

Although it’s too soon to tell which SDN approaches will rule the datacenter or how they will impact traditional networking, it’s clear that SDN and programmatic APIs in the network are here to stay. 

OpenDaylight Project is Making SDDC a Reality A who’s-who of industry players are involved in this ambitious open source project. By Eric Knorr

M

ANUAL HARDWARE configura-

tion is the scourge of the modern datacenter. Server virtualization and pooled storage have gone a long way toward making infrastructure configurable on the fly via software, but the third leg of the stool, networking, has lagged behind with fragmented technology and standards.

The OpenDaylight Project—a new open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation featuring every major networking player —promises to move the ball forward for SDN. Rather than hammer out new standards, the project aims to produce an extensible, open source, virtual networking platform atop such existing standards as OpenFlow, which provides a universal interface through which either virtual or physical switches can be controlled via software.

The approach of OpenDaylight is similar to that of Hadoop or OpenStack, where industry players come together to develop core open source bits collaboratively, around which participants can add unique value. That roughly describes the Linux model as well, which may help explain why the Linux Foundation is hosting OpenDaylight.

“The Linux Foundation was contacted based on our experience and understanding of how to structure and

set up an open community that can foster innovation,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. He added that OpenDaylight, which will be written in Java, will be available under the Eclipse Public License.

COLLABORATION OR CONTROVERSY? It must be said that the politics of the OpenDaylight Project are mind-boggling.

Cisco is on board despite the fact that SDN is widely seen as a threat to the company’s dominant position—because, when the network is virtualized, switch hardware becomes more commoditized.

A cynic might be forgiven for wondering whether Cisco is there to rein things in rather than accelerate development.

Along with Cisco, the cavalcade of coopetition includes Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Citrix, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Red Hat, and VMware.

BigSwitch, perhaps the highest-profile SDN upstart, is planning to donate a big chunk of its Open SDN Suite, including controller code and distributed virtual routing service applications. Although VMware has signed on, it’s unclear how the proprietary technology developed by Nicira, the SDN startup acquired by VMware last summer, will fit in.

Another question is how OpenDaylight will affect other projects. Some have voiced frustration over the Open Network Foundation’s stewardship of the OpenFlow, so OpenDaylight could be a way to work around that organization. Also, OSI president Simon Phipps wonders why Project Crossbow, an open source network virtualization technology built into Solaris, appears to have no role in OpenDaylight.

THE ARCHITECTURE Zemlin described OpenDaylight as an extensible collection of technologies. “This project will focus on software and will deliver several components: An SDN con-

only standardized interface supported by many switch vendors, but OpenDaylight also plans to support other standards as well as proprietary interfaces as the project evolves. More exciting are the “northbound” REST APIs to the controller, atop which developers will be able to build new types of applications that run on the network itself for specialized security, network management, and so on. In support of this, Cisco is contributing an application framework, while Citrix is throwing in “an application controller that integrates Layer 4-7 network services for enabling application awareness and comprehensive control.”

Although the embargoed OpenDaylight announcement was somewhat short on detail, a couple of quick conclusions can be drawn.

One is that the future is now being hashed out in open source bits rather than standards committees. The rise in the importance of open source in the industry is simply stunning, with

Industry players focus on developing core open source bits collboratively, around which participants can add unique value. troller, protocol plug-ins, applications, virtual overlay network, and the architectural and the programmatic interfaces that tie those things together.”

This list is consistent with the basic premise of SDN, where the control and data planes are separated, with a central controller orchestrating the data flows of many physical or virtual switches (the latter running on generic server hardware). OpenFlow currently provides the

OpenDaylight serving as the latest confirmation.

More obviously, the amazing breadth of support for OpenDaylight signals new momentum for SDN. If the OpenDaylight Project can avoid getting bogged down in vendor politics, it could complete the last mile to the software defined datacenter in an industry-standard way that lowers costs for everyone. It could do for networking what OpenStack is doing for cloud computing. 

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n OPINION

PRESTON GRALLA

A New Lease of Life Microsoft’s mobile strategy has been nonexistent. But it may be too soon to call for the last rites. The software giant is breathing new life into its mobile strategy and hoping that the resurrection works like a charm.

Preston Gralla is a Computerworld.com contributing editor and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).

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M

ICROSOFT’S MOBILE computing initiatives have

been written off as DOA for years. But something has been happening while you weren’t looking: Microsoft is beginning to show flickering signs of life in the mobile sphere. Up to now, Microsoft’s failures to get a foothold in mobile computing have been spectacular. It had a smartphone operating system and a tablet years before Apple, but it could never capitalize on that head start. Internal turf wars, technology false starts, and a lack of been reanimated. Let’s put those numbers understanding about how people really want to use mobile devices all played a role in Microsoft’s mobile demise. The company’s low point may have been the 2010 release of the Kin, a phone that required a data contract but couldn’t run apps. After less than two months in the market, Microsoft mercifully pulled the plug. It was an expensive and embarrassing venture; Microsoft had paid an estimated $500 million (about Rs 3,000 crore) or more to buy the company that made the Kin, and it took a $240 million (about Rs 1,500 crore) writeoff for killing it.

Of course, Microsoft is nothing if not persistent when there are markets to be conquered. It’s still taking a whack at mobile, with Windows Phone and the Windows 8 and RT tablets. Still without much traction, though. The obituaries have been written, if not published. But it may be too soon to call for the last rites: People are starting to buy Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones.

Microsoft’s mobile numbers aren’t at the level it’s accustomed to in areas like desktop operating systems and productivity suites. Windows tablets are at 7.5 percent market share, according to Strategy Analytics. IDC says Windows Phone 8 devices were at 3.2 percent in the first quarter.

These figures aren’t likely to worry Apple and Google too much—yet. But they’re on the rise. The Microsoft mobile corpse has

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in perspective. Microsoft’s tablet share is dwarfed by Apple’s 48.2 percent and Android’s 43.4 percent. But a year ago, the Windows numbers were so insignificant that Strategy Analytics wasn’t even tracking them. As for Windows Phone, that minuscule 3.2 percent is enough to make it the third most popular smartphone operating system, surpassing BlackBerry’s 2.9 percent. Of course, Android, at 75 percent, enjoys the kind of market share that Microsoft is used to commanding. But momentum matters, and that’s something Apple is in a position to appreciate. Its iOS has a 17.3 percent market share. A year ago, it had 23 percent, against Windows Phone’s 2 percent. So, in 12 months, the gap between iOS and Windows Phone shrank from 21 percentage points to 14.1.

Can Microsoft capitalize on its momentum? I wouldn’t bet against it. It is poised to roll out budget smartphones, which will help with its strongest smartphone demographic, first-time buyers. And Microsoft has published design specs for 7-inch. Windows 8 tablets, which would help it compete in the fast-growing market for small tablets. So, while it’s true that Microsoft still lags well behind its competitors in mobile, it finally has a foothold in the market. And while the company has a tendency to blow early, firstto-market advantages, it’s much more successful when it has a second chance. 

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