CIO Magazine September 15 Issue

leaderShIp BuSIneSS

TeChnOlOgy

VOL/06 | ISSUE/11

The winners of this year’s CIO 100 Award wield IT ingeniously to combat business’ thorniest challenges.

Page 36

SEptEmbER 15, 2011 | `100.00 ww w.CIO.IN

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Scale up from 10 KW to 2 MW as fast as your business needs it Now, align your back-up power to your business strategy through scalable, modular back-up power and power distribution

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The PDU – modular power’s newest frontier Our truly modular PDU technology holds the key to enabling you to quickly align IT capabilities to your business needs — literally in a snap! With the plug-in modular PDU, you don’t need to schedule outages as the modules can be added easily without system interruption at any time of the day. And you no longer have to predict your future power circuit needs. In fact, you can add circuits as fast as you add the power modules themselves. That’s right-sized scalability and flexibility!

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Contents Introduction UPS types Summary of UPS types Use of UPS types in the industry Conclusion Resources

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Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code 95713t Toll Free 1800 4254 877/272 ©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, Symmetra, and InfraStruxure are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies.

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From The Editor-in-Chief

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello E d i to r i a l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi

Features Editor Sunil Shah Senior Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian Senior correspondents Anup Varier, Sneha Jha, Varsha Chidambaram

Correspondent Debarati Roy

Trainee Journalists Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi Product manager Online Sreekant Sastry

The Business of Change True leaders are those who have the guts and the discipline to take on big decisions and see them through.

"One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

– Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

For the past six years, the CIO100 Awards have been more than a mere gathering of good projects or even a stand-up-and-be-counted moment.

The honor is above all a recognition of the people who have changed the way their organizations went about their business in uncertain times. Change, which was about building resolute, reusable frameworks. Change that accelerated collaboration and maximized knowledge-sharing. Change, which helped tackle the issues of scalability. Change that was about growing the business, and yes, about cutting cost. Change that went far beyond technology. Change that in all cases was spectacular, regardless of how much or limited the IT investment was.

The continuing aftershocks of the global recessionary quake have proved how uncertain and dynamically changing the economic landscape can be. Conventional wisdom and prudence held that this was not the time to take risks or plan anything new.

But the honorees this year have proved that such ‘wisdom’ was indeed the higher-risk option. They demonstrated that it is critical to focus on transformational shifts that will lead to reduced operational costs, increased flexibilities, and tangible business benefits.

Four hundred and ninety-nine organizations filled in the nomination form for the CIO100 Award as well as the seven special awards. To be a CIO100 award winner this year, companies and their IT leaders had to demonstrate that they were able to create new value using IT and execute their project well while being creative in both the manner and method of deployment.

The lessons that we learned from going over the hundreds of projects that were nominated and from the hundred that stood out, were thus: IT leadership entails a willingness to get into the game, a willingness to take on responsibility as well as a selfdisciplined ability to face big decisions, make them, and learn from their challenges.

This book thus, is not so much a compilation of organizations that benefited from IT as it is an anthology that celebrates change.

Salud.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in 2

Custo m Pu b l i s h i n g Principal Correspondents Aditya Kelekar, Gopal Kishore

Trainee Journalist Vinay Kumaar

Design & Production Lead Designers Jinan K V, Jithesh C.C, Vikas kapoor

Senior Designers Pradeep Gulur, Unnikrishnan A.V.

Designers Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh, Lalita Ramakrishna

Production Manager T. K. Karunakaran Ev e n t s & A u d i e n c e D e v e l op m e n t

Vice President Events Rupesh Sreedharan

Sr. Managers projects Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Asst. manager Tharuna Paul Senior executive Shwetha M.

Management Trainees Archana Ganapathy, Saurabh Pradeep Patil

Sales & Marketing

President Sales

& Marketing Sudhir Kamath

VP Sales Sudhir Argula

Asst. VP Sales Parul Singh AGM Marketing Siddharth Singh

Manager Key Accounts Kalyan Basu, Minaz Adenwala, Sakshee Bagri

Manager Sales Varun Dev Asst. Manager Marketing Ajay S. Chakravarthy

Associate Marketing Dinesh P. Asst. Manager Sales Support Nadira Hyder

Management Trainees Anuradha Hariharan Iyer, Benjamin Anthony Jeevan Raj, Rima Biswas Finance & Admin

Financial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T. P.

Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V. Asst. Manager

Credit Control Prachi Gupta

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

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027.

Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page

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9/15/2011 10:26:49 AM

The data that drives our world is evolving. Innovations in virtualisation, cloud computing, automation and sustainable IT aren’t just transforming your data centre — they’re opening up a new universe of possibilities for your business.

Because when there’s no centre, everything is within reach.

DATA HAS NO CENTRE As a trusted Cloud Ecosystem Integrator for its world-class clients, Infosys leads the way by adopting cloud internally. From boosting performance by seamlessly migrating to a cloud infrastructure, to reducing its environmental footprint by adopting innovations in green IT, Infosys is transforming its data centre in partnership with Hitachi Data Systems. Learn how at:

hds.com/nocentre

© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2011. All Rights Reserved.

HDS-16451 CIO Magazine India • Infosys • FP • 22.23cm x 27.6cm • Material due: September 5 • Posting Date: September 15

From The governing board

Gov e rn i n g BOARD Alok Kumar VP & Global Head-Internal IT& Shared Services, TCS

Life Beyond ERP As leaders it is our responsibility to show our partners the true power that comes from leveraging IT. Recently, I was reviewing the IT landscape of our entire value chain and I found that our business partners need to focus attention on the IT front . While interacting with their CEOs and CIOs, I could see that IT adoption was a concern area and that they needed a greater understanding of what it could deliver for them.

Although they had implemented industry-standard ERP suites, they were not leveraging them optimally.

They believed that their IT journey has reached an end with ERP. So, despite spending vast amounts of money, they couldn't see the tangible benefits of IT. Unless IT information and the business scenarios reconcile on real-time basis, faith in IT loses its meaning. For effective decision making, management needs reliable, accurate, and authentic information. IT systems can truly empower them with that.

ERP provides strong transaction systems, but life doesn't stop there. We need to think beyond that to reap true IT benefits. But before getting in the space of 'beyond ERP', we need to ensure that current IT systems (read ERP) are robust and that they have an effective reporting and control system.

In the manufacturing industry, shop floor systems, traceability systems, and quality systems are key differentiators. With next generation machines, data from the machines themselves can be integrated with IT systems to provided end-to-end visibility and ensure fool-proofing and traceability.

The CIO should work along with business users to analyze business KPIs coming out of ERPs and find ways to improve those KPIs using a process of continuous improvement and innovative solutions. If organizations can weed out inefficiencies, their efforts will translate into plum business benefits. By adopting these measures, for instance, we have reduced Maruti's inventory levels five times over the course of the last few years. We have also reached over 98 percent of service levels for our customers.

Another focus area is collaboration, by which I mean real-time information visibility or data interchange between customers and suppliers .

IT systems beyond ERP or ERP++, act as a differentiator from competition. But the life of any innovative solution is short so we have to continuously spin the wheel and keep on innovating to stay ahead.

Thanks to these strategies, our top line, bottom line, and customer satisfaction levels have also steadily improved.

Rajesh Uppal is Executive Officer IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India

Amrita Gangotra Director-IT (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel Anil Khopkar GM (MIS) & CIO, Bajaj Auto Atul Jayawant President Corporate IT & Group CIO, Aditya Birla Group C.N. Ram Group CIO, Essar Group Devesh Mathur Chief Technology & Services Officer, HSBC Gopal Shukla VP-Business Systems, Hindustan Coca-Cola Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints Murali Krishna K SVP & Group Head CCD, Infosys Technologies Navin Chadha IT Director, Vodafone Essar Pravir Vohra Group Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank Rajeev Batra CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices (MTS India) Rajesh Uppal Executive Officer IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India S. Anantha Sayana Head-Corporate IT, L&T Sanjay Jain CIO & Head Global Transformation Practice, WNS Global Services Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT V.V.R. Babu Group CIO, ITC

Bangalore: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, Phone: 080-3053 0300, Fax: 3058 6065 Delhi: New Bridge Buisness Centers, 5th and 6th Floor, Tower-B, Technolopolis.

Golf Course Road, Sector 54 Gurgaon- 122002, Haryana Phone: 0124-4626256, Fax: 0124-4375888 Mumbai: 201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex,Bandra (E), Mumbai 400 051, Phone: 022-3068 5000, Fax: 2659 2708

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9/15/2011 10:26:51 AM

Next-generation reputation-based technology The fastest, most effective endpoint protection anywhere Built for virtual environments

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* Sources: PassMark Software, “Enterprise Endpoint Protection Performance Benchmarks,” February 2011. AV-Test GmbH, “Remediation Testing Report” and “Real World Testing Report,” February 2011.

Copyright © 2011 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec Logo, and the Checkmark Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries.

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contents September 15, 2011 | Vol/6 | iSSue/11

49 | expand all around revenue generaTion Whether they are finding new ways to support expanding businesses or creating new channels for growth, this year’s CIO 100 winners are fattening their company’s bottom lines.

Feature by shubhra rishi

54 | iron out the Kinks eFFiCienCy But this year’s CIO 100 winners show you how to optimize business and grow the bottom line.

Feature by anup Varier

96 | 10 Tech Trends reshaping your Worlds FuTure oF TeChnology 3D printers that human organs, sensor networks, virtual humans, these are just some technologies that will drastically change our world in 10 years.

Feature by kim nash

57 | The honorees 2011 The definitive list of India's most creative CIOs and the ingenious achievements that got them into the ranks of the CIO 100.

36 | CIO 100 Cover STory | over vieW This year’s CIO 100 winners use IT creatively to fashion new offerings, open new markets, increase customer satisfaction, and iron out the kinks in the business— ultimately adding lasting value to the enterprise.

Feature by t team CiO

Compiled by shardha subramanian

64 | Creative minds The largest awards ceremony for IT excellence reveals new gems and shinier ideas. report by t team CiO

COVER: COVE R DESIGN By P RADEEP GULUR

38 | business’ hard edge

6 4

ProduCT develoPmenT It’s called competitive advantage and it’s what every CEO wants from his generals. This year’s CIO 100 award winners demonstrate how to employ IT creatively and produce new products and services out of nowhere.

Feature by Varsha Chidambaram

43 | beat all expectations CuSTomer managemenT In a world where price and quality are table stakes, more companies and their CIOs are finding that it is customer service that wins the day. This year’s CIO 100 winners show you how to excel at customer service.

Feature by debarati roy

more » 6

s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

CelebraTing exCellenCe “i genuinely believe that this is the best it event that happens in india ,” says Vijay sethi, VP & Chief information Officer, hero motoCorp.

VOL/6 | ISSUE/11

contents

(cont.) departments 2 | From the editor-in-Chief The Business of Change

By Vijay Ramachandran

4 | From the Governing Board CIO Role | Life Beyond ERP

By Rajesh Uppal, Maruti Suzuki India

11 | trendlines

5 7 4

Automobiles| Car Theft by Text Message Quick Take | IT’s Creativity Quotient Voices | Why Would CIOs Vacate the C-suite?

Devices | The iPad Lands on the Cockpit Mobile | Bumped Into Cash Social Media | War of the Worlds Cloud computing | Cloud: A Safe Haven Innovation | Japan's Power-House Cars Security | The Christian View of Hackers Cybercrime | Cyber Crime’s Frequent Flyers Career | 4 Résumé Mistakes You Make

18 | alert Insider Threat | Defang Your IT Staff Hacking | Defcon: Toys for Boys

101 | the New budget Conversation

|

FeaTure iT budgeT The way you spend on IT is changing. So is your relationship with the CFO. Feature by bill bulkeley

Columns 24

| The innovation disconnect

105 | essential technology Analytics | Big Data’s Treasure Trove Social Media | The Web of Big Data

110 | What We’re reading

52

Book Review | The Talent Masters

By Vijay Ramachandran

ThinK TanK Security consultants aren’t a shrewd breed but if you give them too much freedom—without laying down clear ground rules—your organization will suffer.

Column by Jeff Ello

28

| get a grip on your Consultants

underCover oFFiCer Security consultants aren’t a shrewd breed but if you give them too much freedom—without laying down clear ground rules—your organization will suffer.

Column by Anonymous

31

| The Way of the dinosaur

Cloud ComPuTing Neither CIOs or lower-level IT personnel are immune from the employment risks that cloud computing poses.

Column by Bernard Golden

8

s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 8

3 4

alTernaTive vieWS: is there a glass Ceiling in it?

They pilot planes and they run business.

But is a glass ceiling in IT limiting women?

Two CIOs debate.

VOL/6 /6 | ISSUE/11

Cio online

.in CIO adverTiSer index

Alcatel Lucent - emG

42 & 43

[ CI O MENTOR ]

Check point software technologies t

3+ Flap

Dell India

19, 71 + belly band

learn from the best

HID India

25

It's hard being a leader. You have to juggle multiple roles, align with business, and stay on top of multiple trends. But you don't have to do it alone. Take advice from CIO's governing board.

Read on the mentor tab on cio.in.

Hitachi Data systems India

77

Hp Converge Infrastructure

33

Hp Networking

38 & 39

Hp storage

13

Ibm India

1

Juniper Networks India

IFC+Flap

riverbed t technology India

IbC

rsA

15

sAs Institute (India)

79

schneider electric India

23 & 37

singapore telecommunications t

9 & 10

socomec

[ BO O K CLUB ]

[ DEBATE ]

is Jugaad a good thing?

We invited two CIOs to kick-start a debate on innovation. Read all about it in Alternate Views (page 34). Which side are you on? We also have more debates for you on www.cio.in Does Age Come in the Way of Technology Adoption?

Ayes Vs Nays Business-IT Alignment: Are Templates a Solution?

Ayes Vs Nays >> www.cio.in/cio-debates

Conversation starter

7

symantec software solutions

21

tata Consultancy services t

83 to 90

t tata t teleservices t trend micro

28 & 29 security booklet

t tulip t telecom

bC

t tyco electronics Corporation India

73

Books have been known to spark conversations and on page 110 you can find the genesis of one. Learn what your peers think of a book and then visit the all new CIO Book Club section online and join the conversation with your peers.

>> www.cio.in/bookclub

[ CI O 100 ] Celebrating india's most Creative CiOs Find out how India's most creative CIOs were feliciated in the CIO 100 2011 Awards and symposium Ceremony on page 36. And to learn of the projects that got them in the top 100, go online.

>> www.cio100.cio.in must read @ cio.in 10

>> Alert: How to Defang Your staff >> Column: The Innovation Disconnect >> Feature: The Top 10 Technologies Re-shaping the World

s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

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

VOL/6 | ISSUE/11

9/15/2011 10:27:28 AM

new

EDITED BY sharDha suBramanIan

*

hot

*

unexpected

Car Theft by Text Message

QUICK TAKE:

after breaking in. If someone really wants to steal a car, there are plenty of other methods that sound a lot easier. Keep in mind that this high-tech car hack is just a proof-of-concept, and it's not the first. In March this year, researchers described using a Trojan horse on an audio CD to break a car's defenses.

And that didn’t really spark off a wave of car thefts.

Bailey and Solnik are more concerned with how their text message hack could be used for more nefarious purposes, such as hacking ATMs, medical equipment or even power plants.

—By Jared Newman

It’s creativity Quotient

Creativity and technology are almost synonymous.

And there is no doubt that one influences the other. As CIO honored the 100 most creative geniuses in the Indian IT industry, Anup Varier spoke to Sebastian Joseph, president-technology and FM, Mudra Communications, about the influence technology and creativity have on each other, and what this could mean to enterprises. i n n o vAt i o n

can be applied to the user interface, user experience, functionality, etcetera. As a next step, you need to take your team through applications that have embraced creativity—like the iPhone, iPad and Mac applications. This would definitely showcase the various facets of creativity.

Is creativity aided or marred by technology?

Creativity has two parts: The thought process (thinking part) and the execution (doing part). Various technology tools that are available today definitely help in creative execution. But technology, to some extent, distracts the thought process; especially when one surfs the Internet.

Can creativity take precedence over timeliness in a project?

This is like the chicken and egg riddle. Under ideal circumstances, one would like to have a perfect mix of both these elements.

But that would be wishful thinking. We have had experiences where creativity took precedence because user experience was of paramount importance. But for an in-house ERP initiative, timeliness is more important.

What can be done to encourage creativity within IT teams?

First of all, one needs to identify and define the exact deliverables with reference to creativity. In IT, this

So how do you balance deadlines with creativity?

It depends on the project. We go with basic creative inputs if time is a factor. In such projects, creativity does take a back seat.

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

ImagE by photoS.com

A u t o m o b i l e s A recent report by the Associated Press paints a frightening picture: Hackers have learned to unlock a car's doors and start its engine simply by sending text messages to a vehicle's security system. Don Bailey and Mat Solnik, researchers from security firm iSec Partners, demonstrated such an attack on a Subaru Outback, using a laptop to send their messages and break into the vehicle.

As scary as all this sounds, in reality, the cause for alarm is practically nil. As the Associated Press article goes on to explain, hackers need a specific phone number to break into an in-car security system. To get that number, they must run a certain kind of network administration program, which can probe for vulnerable security devices by make and model. Then, the thief must get close to the target vehicle and run a hacking tool to see if that car is using a vulnerable security system.

After all that effort, the car's steering wheel may still be mechanically locked, preventing the hacker from driving away

Sebastian Joseph

REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

11

WhyWould CIOs Vacate the C-suite? vOICES:

Recently, two of the biggest names in the world of IT Steve Jobs and Narayana Murthy stepped out of their roles to pursue other interests.

Surprisingly, a majority of CIOs are open to the idea of giving up the cushioned comforts of a cabin to pursue other interests. Debarati Roy finds out why many CIOs are willing to vacate the C-suite.

CAreer

R.D. MALAv, VP-IT, Jindal Poly Films

trendlines

The younger generation always brings in fresh ideas and new concepts. I strongly believe in putting aside my ambitions to pave the way for new thoughts and ideas. As for CIOs, giving up the position can be extremely beneficial as it opens up more diverse and fulfilling experiences.

PRAvIn SAvAnT, CTO, Lowe Lintas India Professional satisfaction is a dynamic and relative concept. And sometimes in the pursuit of such a dynamic target, we end up ignoring our other abilities or never exploit them to the fullest. If I ever reach the level of satisfaction that I have been able to set significant benchmarks in my filed of work, I would be more than willing to move to the noble profession of teaching, mentoring and sharing my experiences with many other people, whose lives I wouldn’t have touched otherwise.

vALERIO FERnAnDES, General Manager-IT, Continental Automotive Components India If it ever came to a choice to follow my interests and passion, as opposed to career, I firmly believe I would opt for the former. After all, it is always better to do what you love, than being pushed into loving what you are doing.

12

S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

The iPad Lands on the Cockpit d e v i C e s If your love of both iPads and airplanes isn't satisfied by Flight Control HD alone, take note: Aspen Avionics has announced a new product called Connected Panel, which wirelessly connects an iPad to an aircraft’s avionics—the electronic systems that includes flight navigation, communications, monitoring, management, and more.

With the company’s technology, pilots will be able to handle standard piloting actions like tracking flight plans or tuning into different radio frequencies, straight from the iPad. iPad-enamored pilots have already begun using it for flight planning, flight logging, and reading related documents and charts. They have not, however, been able to integrate this information directly into aircraft control systems. Connected Panel changes that with new hardware, Aspen Avionics’s CG100 box.

After the box is installed behind the plane’s panel, it allows the iPad to connect via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The CG100 box also sports a USB port and flash memory storage. Once the iPad successfully connects with the box, pilots can begin using the tablet to control the plane’s onboard systems. The Aircraft Manager app is the first of Connected Panel Enabled apps; it downloads flight hours and aircraft performance data, which can then be sent to fleet or service managers. And Aspen Avionics says that it has already partnered with a number of aviation companies that plan to release Connected Panel Enabled applications of their own. The company also says it welcomes third-party apps, which it hopes will lead to further innovation with the Connected Panel technology.

“The exciting part is that we can only guess as to what developers and pilots will come up with. We are creating an open environment, an ecosystem if you will, and providing it to the aviation development community to see what they will do with it,” says Aspen Avionics vice president of marketing Brad Hayden.

Connected Panel is currently being marketed for general aviation aircrafts—single- or twin-engine propeller planes and helicopters—though the company says the technology could work its way into larger, commercial airplanes.

—By Alexandra Chang

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP FUJITSU

CASE STUDY

BENNETT, COLEMAN & CO.

bets on Fujitsu for Enhanced Flexibility Fujitsu FlexFrameTM for SAP R helped India’s largest media services conglomerate increase efficiency and reduce the complexity of operating the SAP infrastructure.

T

he Times of India was looking to drastically improve its infrastructure to avoid ‘downtimes’ and significantly enhance scalability. The challenge for the media house was to identify and install a flexible infrastructure that could scale up to meet increasing demands.

RELIABILITY IS KEY The Times Group is the largest media services conglomerate in India. It spans 12 publishing centres, 15 printing centres, 69 sales offices, over 8,000 employees, five dailies including two of the largest in the country with approx 4.3 million copies circulated daily, two leading magazines, 29 niche magazines and – reaching 2,468 cities and towns worldwide.

The group’s flagship, Times of India, published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. is the largest English daily newspaper in India as also the largest circulated English broadsheet daily newspaper in the world.

“From an enterprise computing perspective, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. looks at how technology can support its processes, from the flexibility, uptime, reliability and low maintenance perspective,” said Debashish Ghosh, Director, IT, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. “We don’t buy boxes, we look at solutions and we express our needs clearly to our IT infrastructure solution partners,” Ghosh said.

The newspaper was on the look-out for an efficient, flexible and reliable operating environment to support all its critical SAP applications. It saw the answer in Fujitsu’s innovative solution – FlexFrameTM for SAP R .

SMOOTH INTEGRATION “From our perspective, Fujitsu was in sync with our needs and requirements from a technology standpoint,” Ghosh said. Innovative solutions such as Fujitsu

FlexFrameTM for SAP R reduce ROI allowing for a cost-efficient growth path on demand.

“From the point of view of protecting the investment, what the company has bought in the last three years should be inter-operable with what it buys now and similarly three years forward,” he said.

“The architecture and the way SAP integrates into FlexFrame has given the publisher significant benefits due to enhanced application availability, utilization and flexibility,” he said. “Being a mission critical business application it was crucial that the team that helped with the design and installation of the solution understood the SAP landscape well,” he said.

“We carefully evaluated the market before we decided on Fujitsu as our technology partner. We settled on them because of the flexibility and robustness of the solution, and their passion and hunger for business alongwith a focus on customer satisfaction,” Ghosh said.

“In the years that Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. has used Fujitsu FlexFrameTM for SAP R , there has been no unplanned downtime, no headaches related to deliverables, and no mismatched expectations,” he said.

“In the last five years, business has grown between 3-4 times but the platform has

In the years that we has used Fujitsu FlexFrameTM for SAP R, there has been no unplanned downtime and no mismatched expectation” DEBASHISH GHOSH,

Director, IT, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd

AT A GLANCE Solution Fujitsu FlexFrameTM for SAP R Hardware: Complete rack-based solution running on x86 based PRIMERGY and SPARC-based Fujitsu server.

Software SAP ECC, SAP IS-Media, SAP BI and SAP Enterprise Portal Services Regular support via Fujitsu SAP SystemInspection Service

remained solid and flexible in terms of reliability and scalability,” he said.

The solution has provided the company with an integrated high-availability for all SAP systems by default. New applications and servers, whether physical or virtual, can be made available within minutes. Besides, shifting of applications from one server to another has been very easy, both for virtual and physical servers.

In the Flexframe framework, complex SAP landscapes are distributed flexibly across the servers, according to current requirements.

SAP services can be started on the best fitting server to optimize utilization.

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

Bumped Into Cash paypal recently announced a new mobile phone widget that will let smartphone users tap their phones together to exchange money. the android widget works on nFc technology installed on the phones to facilitate the transfer of funds. the "bump" trick works only by using two Samsung nexus S phones right now, but the widget will work with other devices in the future. the widget won't be in wide release until october.

Senior director of paypal mobile laura chambers says paypal has seen fast growth in consumer interest in mobile payment technology. "but at paypal, we've said all along that consumer behavior won't change unless we're able to offer an experience that's truly better than what's available today," chambers says. the new technology could find plenty of takers in the small business community, especially among boot-strap businesses that want to be able to take payments quickly and easily at the point of sale. but, like most services of this kind, its success will depend entirely on how widely available it is on all kinds of mobile devices and operating systems, and how many consumers find a reason to actually download it.

So, cool technology, and paypal seems like the right company to introduce it, but we'll have to wait and see if the new widget has real star quality.

—by matt hamblen

Cloud: A Safe Haven Contrary to popular belief, most information security leaders say the cloud betters security— except CISOs in Germany and Australia.

Cloud Computing

47% Information security has improved

10% Do not know

27% No change in information security

17% Information security has weakened

Source: global Information Security Survey, 2011

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War of the Worlds s o C i A l m e d i A With Google+, Google looks poised to challenge Facebook head-on. How do the companies stack up head to head? Here's a snapshot.

Users: Google has a clear edge globally, according to ComScore. Google reached a billion unique visitors worldwide in May, while Facebook rang in at 713.6 million.

Google's lead is narrower in the US, where it had 155 million unique visitors from desktop and laptop computers in May compared with Facebook's 140 million, the Nielsen Company reported. The Nielsen survey does not include mobile devices.

Facebook had a huge lead in time spent per person: More than 6 hours versus an hour and 20 minutes.

Bottom line: Google is still the Internet's leading brand in terms of number of users. Facebook has an enormous base of regular users who spend a considerable amount of time on its site—much more time than on Google. However, Facebook's users were not particularly happy with their experience last year.

Revenues: eMarketer estimates that Google had 38.5 percent of the online advertising market last year versus 4.6 percent for Facebook. The research firm estimates that Facebook's share will grow to seven percent this year compared with 40.8 percent for Google.

Bottom line: Google is considerably larger than Facebook in revenue and still growing, but Facebook looks to be expanding much faster.

Employees: This is a particularly tough metric, as Facebook doesn't release that data. The latest estimate, from an in-depth profile of COO Sheryl Sandberg in the recent issue of The New Yorker, came in at 2,500 employees. That's close to double the estimates reported for early 2010. Google reported 24,400 employees at the end of last year.

Bottom line: As with revenue, Google's employee count is substantially higher than Facebook's, but Facebook appears to be growing more rapidly.

The most likely winner? Social media users, who will benefit from two strong companies battling to improve their products to either keep or win over customers.

—By Sharon Machlis

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

IllUSt ratIonS by p radEEp gUlUr

trendlines

mobile

Japan's Power-House Cars

The Christian View of Hackers S e c u r i t y Internet hackers have acquired a dubious reputation, but an authoritative Vatican publication appears to rehabilitate them and traces parallels between hacker philosophy and the teachings of Christianity.

The surprisingly charitable view of hackers was expressed by Jesuit priest Father Antonio Spadaro in an article for the fortnightly magazine Civilta Cattolica, the text of which is vetted by the Vatican Secretariat of State prior to publication.

Hackers should not be confused with crackers, Spadaro writes, citing a definition penned by technology writer Eric S. Raymond: "Hackers build things, crackers break them." Hacker philosophy is playful but committed, encourages creativity and sharing, and opposes models of control, competition and private property, Spadaro observes approvingly.

The Jesuit priest, a literary critic and technology expert, also cited Tom Pittman, a member of California's Homebrew Computer Club, as an example of someone seeking a creative fusion of Christianity and technology.

Hacker ethics rejected a capitalistic, profit-oriented approach to work, eschewing idleness but favoring a flexible, creative approach that was respectful of the human dimension and natural rhythms, he said.

Spadaro emphasizes hackers' ingrained distrust of authority and preference for information sharing over horizontal social networks. He has particular praise for the collaborative knowledge-sharing model of Wikipedia, an example of networked intellectual collaboration that was capable of transforming the very idea of cultural production.

"To create the biggest collaborative encyclopedia of Internet it is estimated that it took around 100 million hours of intellectual work, which is the equivalent of the time the citizens of the United States spend watching ads on TV in a single weekend," Spadaro writes. —By Philip Willan

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day, the car would still retain enough power to make trips.

If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the stored energy in the battery can be released in the daytime when electricity costs are higher.

Some companies already offer dedicated lithium ion storage batteries for just this purpose.

Nissan's system accomplishes the same goal with the batteries already fitted in the car, which would be an advantage for owners of electric cars.

Nissan plans to commercialize the system sometime before April 2012, says Shiro Nagai, a spokesman for Nissan in Yokohama. Models for the overseas market will likely follow but will first have to be designed for local electricity supply systems, he says.

Nissan is announcing the system as energy saving measures are at the forefront of Japanese minds.

The Tokyo area suffered a series of blackouts in March, soon after the earthquake and tsunami that hit the region, and more are possible.

The potential shortfall in electricity supply has put the country on a power-saving mission.

Car companies like Nissan have shifted to a Saturday to Wednesday work week while other companies have adjusted work patterns. Lights have been dimmed across the country, escalators are switched off at railway stations and households are being urged to keep air conditioners off during the daytime.

As Nissan was announcing the new system, electricity demand in Tokyo was hovering around 37 billion watts, well below TEPCO's peak generating capacity for the day of 50 billion watts.

Last year on the same day, the Tokyo region was consuming over 55 billion watts at peak time. —By Martyn Williams REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

illust ration by pradeep gulur

hours) of electricity, which Nissan estimates is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days. That means if the system was used for a few hours during the

trendlines

In a twist on conventional charging for electric cars, Nissan has developed a system that allows a vehicle to supply electricity to power a house.

A prototype of the charging system running on a Nissan Leaf electric car was unveiled in Japan last month. The system can be used to supply electricity to a house during a power outage or shortage. A two-way charging device that would typically convert the household electricity supply to a voltage suitable for charging the car's battery can be reversed to feed power back into the household circuit.

The lithium ion batteries in a Leaf can store up to 24kWh (kilowatt

I n n o vat i o n

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Cyber Crime’s Frequent Flyers

trendlines

the domain’s Urls regularly being used by cyber criminals to spread rogue antivirus programs or conduct drive-by attacks," according to the Kaspersky report. "the popularity of .co.cc among cyber criminals is explained by the fact that the domain registrar allows third-level domain names to be registered for free or for a very low price," the report noted. "our research shows that google’s offensive has indeed resulted in cyber criminals using the .co.cc domains less frequently; however, they have merely started using the services of other domain zone registrars," it added. "therefore," it reasons, "it is difficult to say how successful google’s campaign has been. there is also the chance that legitimate, law-abiding domain owners have been inadvertently affected by google’s actions."

IllUStratIon by pradEEp gUlU r

Unsatisfied with stealing bank account information from their victims, cyber criminals steal frequent flyer miles, too. the miles are used as currency among some of the miscreants, according to a report released by the malware fighters at the Kaspersky lab.

"In one Irc [Internet relay chat] message, a cyber criminal was selling access to a brazilian botnet that sends spam in exchange for 60,000 miles, while, in another message, air miles were offered for stolen credit cards," Kaspersky analyst Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky wrote in the company's monthly malware statistics report. "this coincides with our predictions for 2011 in which we stated that cyber criminals would be interested in all kinds of information and ready to steal absolutely everything," he added. one ne of the most remarkable events during this year, the report says, was google's oogle's exclusion of more than 11 million Urls from the ".co. cc" domain, which is fourth largest domain in the world. "the he reason for such drastic measures was due to CyberCrime

—by John p. p mello Jr.

4 Résumé Mistakes You Make C A r e e r Howard Seidel, a career coach and partner with placement consulting firm Essex Partners, shares the four most common mistakes CIOs make in their résumés.

Lacks an overarching brand. CIOs make two common mistakes when it comes to branding: They either try to portray themselves as jacks-of-alltrades in order to appeal to as many employers as possible, or they attempt to depict themselves as whatever flavorof-the-month companies say they want in a CIO. The problem with portraying oneself as a generalist, says Seidel, is that it makes it hard for recruiters to determine your strengths. The issue with the latter approach is that when CIOs try to portray themselves as something they're not, hiring managers see right through it.

Lacks an executive summary. Good executive summaries are clear, concise and powerful. If a CIO's executive summary piques a recruiter's interest, the recruiter will continue reading.

Executive summaries are also key because they signal to recruiters the type of leader a CIO is and the kinds of positions that would best suit the CIO, given his or her expertise.

Lacks concrete accomplishments.

When writing about your work experience, include three to five specific business goals you accomplished, and your core responsibilities in each role you've held. "If you're portraying yourself as a transformational leader, you have to show your legacy in terms of how an organization was transformed through your accomplishments," says Seidel.

CIO.In

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visually overwhelming. Some IT executives feel compelled to pack their résumés with as many professional details, projects and responsibilities as possible, to provide recruiters and employers with a complete sense of their capabilities and backgrounds.

This approach often creates résumés that are difficult to read.

If a recruiter gives your résumé a quick scan and gets overwhelmed by bullets, adjectives or paragraphs of text, they won't know what information is most important to attach to, says Seidel, and they will quickly move on to the next résumé.

"Sometimes quantity drives out quality," he adds. "A lot of times, more is actually less. White space is really important," says Seidel.

—By Meridith Levinson

to find the hottest jobs in the Indian market visit itjobs.cio.in

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 6:17:29 PM

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Dell Compellent Automated Tiered Storage provides fully automated, hands-free subLUN tiering. Administrators use policy-based profiles to drive placement and movement of data. Users can choose predefined storage profiles or define their own. The profiles can specify not only the storage tiers to be utilized, but also the various disk types, rotational speeds and/or RAID levels within each tier. Profile settings can be changed at any time without downtime or disruption to the production environment.

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Because Dell Compellent was engineered with automated sub-LUN tiering in mind, other critical storage features such as Thin Provisioning, Fast Track and Enterprise Manager are tightly integrated with Data Progression. These technologies enable and maximize the benefits of Automated Tiered Storage, delivering the efficiency, performance and ease of management that organizations require.

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Enterprise Risk management

Defang Your IT Staff P

IMAGES by PHOTOS.COM

reventing external attacks to IT systems is a huge and critical task for most companies, but what are businesses doing to stop similar attacks from within? That’s a question that more companies should be asking themselves as internal IT sabotage cases regularly hit businesses hard.

Early in August, a former IT staff member for the US subsidiary of Japanese drug company, Shionogi, pleaded guilty to remotely infiltrating and sabotaging the company’s IT infrastructure. The damage scrambled the company’s operations for days and cost it over $800,000 in damages, according to IDG News Service.

The former employee, Jason Cornish, logged in to the network using a hidden virtual server he had previously created, then wiped out the company’s virtual servers one by one, taking out e-mail, order tracking, financial and other services.

IT security analysts say that incidents like this should be clear reminders that companies need to be working harder to fight against such attacks on a regular basis using basic security steps and common sense.

“The thing to do is to try to separate the duties out so that anything that happens would require collusion between more than one person to perpetuate fraud or do damage,” says Pete Lindstrom, an analyst with Spire Security. “The way you separate this is to have proactive steps and a logging or monitoring system that will record activity to other systems. It generates their tracks.”

The challenge, Lindstrom says, is that IT insiders know how to work around such protections. “A really clever attacker can do a lot to hide himself.”

findings

In the Public Eye CIOs believe that public disclosure regulations would influence how their company protects sensitve information.

Do not know 4.8%

Influential 36.7%

Not influential 7.7% Somewhat influential 14%

Extremely influential 36.7%

In addition to maintaining a separation of duties, it is important to know who you’re hiring to take on critical IT tasks. “Certainly you should be doing background checks,” Lindstrom says.

Companies should also work hard to limit the use of IT admin accounts that are shared between several people, he says. “It’s where you can run into problems,” Lindstrom says. “You should try to minimize that. Try to convince admins that they don’t really want the responsibility of all this access because as every cop knows, every crime is an inside job and if something happens, they’ll be an early suspect.”

Clearly delineating which IT staffers have specific privileges and responsibilities is crucial to preventing inside attacks, Lindstrom says.

62%

Of Indian CIOs would support governmentmandated public reporting of the number of reported threats or violations.

Source: Global Information Security Survey

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9/13/2011 6:22:41 PM

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EntErprisE risk managEmEnt

Dan Twing, president and COO of analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, says several important steps can be taken by companies to guard against internal sabotage before it occurs:

Create and maintain good documentation for networks and resources used by broad parts of the IT dept. That means having tightly-controlled records for passwords and access points, as well as clear documentation for the systems infrastructure from top to bottom, on-premises and off-premises. “There’s just so much that isn’t documented,” he says. “Some IT people don’t write things down so they can be the hero in an emergency and swoop in to fix things, or they are too lazy and they think that makes them indispensable.”

Maintain ‘super administrator’ access where possible so your company can maintain the highest level of control over your systems to prevent infiltration. Be sure that this is documented and controlled by only a few senior and trusted people.

Have fast and clear change procedures for administrative passwords so that no worker can make system changes once they leave the company. If they need

access for something, they can be given compartmentalized access which can be overseen by other trusted IT staffers.

“The more of this that you do, yes, you are slowed down a bit, but you gain control,” Twing says. “There’s always a trade-off.”

Use IT tools that allow you to set thresholds and alerts when there are unexpected activities inside the network. “Remember that you need to be monitoring internal processes and systems as much as you are monitoring your perimeters to keep hackers out,” he says. “At least you can stop something internal before it becomes big. Don’t just assume that your external perimeter is the only place where bad things can happen.”

Andrew Walls, a security analyst with Gartner, says the critical balance in all of this is ensuring that your IT people have the needed powers to get their jobs done while also setting limits to their overall control over the systems.

“Many organizations have this idea that IT is this arcane world and that the wizards who reside there have to always be trusted,” Walls says. “That idea went away a long time ago. The same rules that govern the rest of your company’s staff have to apply to your IT staff.”

[OnE :: LinEr]

“if you’re a C CiO and your company deals with the kind of sensitive personal data dealt with under the information technology r rules, 2011, then you need to be concerned.”

Pavan Duggal, aDvocaTe, a SuPreme courT T of InDIa In

In the recent Shionogi case, Walls says it is ironic that the former IT worker used licensed IT tools to cause harm from within the company. That could have been avoided if his network access had been removed immediately when he quit, Walls says. “In no uncertain terms, if you terminate a person from their employment, their access must disappear immediately, not in five or 20 hours. In many organizations, they actually start removing access privileges before the person is even gone. That’s what enabled this whole attack.”

In the Shionogi case, Cornish had resigned after an ongoing dispute, but the company hired him back as a contractor so he could finish a project for them, according to IDGNS. That might have been a fatal mistake, Walls says.

“I worry about an organization that says ‘we don’t like what this guy is doing so we’re going to turn him into a contractor and then allow him to keep access,’” Walls says. “If someone can’t be trusted, they shouldn’t have access to your environment.

What happened here to enable this to go on was that their user provisioning lifecycle was not handled well. If your system is so complicated that you cannot replace one member of your team quickly, then you have a bigger problem.”

One simple way to help prevent such problems, Walls says, is for business executives and the IT staff to actually get to know each other better so they work as a team and not as separate worlds.

“The business manager needs to have personal relationship with their IT managers and know them on a first name basis,” Walls says. “They need to talk with them regularly. A business needs to know when an IT person is going off the rails and the only way to do that is to have personal relationships and know each other. IT people shouldn’t be treated as a ‘geek squad’ at a separate table but as part of the company and part of the team.” CiO Todd R. Weiss covers enterprise applications, SaaS, CRM, and cloud computing for CIO.com. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Enterprise Risk management

Defcon: Toys for Boys

M

eet the Firefly. Israeli defense contractor Rafael Armament Development Authority calls it a “revolutionary concept in tactical intelligence,” but really it’s a wireless camera that’s shot 500 feet in the air by a grenade launcher. And if a couple of hackers at the Defcon hacking convention get their way, soon anyone will be able to buy this type of military grade technology for only US$500 (Rs 22,500) The Firefly can make the difference between life or death on the battlefield.

Soldiers shoot it off and for eight seconds it gives them a bird’s eye view of the terrain around them, tipping them off to enemy positions. Then it crashes back to earth.

Private citizens can’t buy these flying cameras, much less the 40mm grenade launchers used to shoot them. But Vlad Gostom and Joshua Marpet think they’d be great tools for a search and rescue operation, or maybe a boon to some local police force’s SWAT team. So they’re building their own version.

Eyes in the Sky They’re not the only people who have military-styled do-it-yourself technology on display at Defcon. Using off-the-shelf components Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins converted a surplus US Army drone into a flying wireless surveillance station that could be used to snoop on wireless networks or even mobile phone conversations. “Hackers have military tech envy, so they go about trying to replicate it,” says Jeff Moss, Defcon’s founder.

To the drone airplane makers, it’s simple human nature. “Everybody wishes they could have an F-22, no matter what they say,” says Tassey.

In addition to the spy drone and the grenade-launched camera, there is also software that could turn thousands of mobile phones into a spontaneous wireless network capable of passing 22

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messages around without the Internet or a cellular network. Creator Thomas Wilhelm calls his project Auto-BAHN, and he has released Android software that uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to help information hop from phone to phone.

These three Defcon hacking teams think their projects could save lives.

Tassey and Perkins say the drone could be used to locate mobile signals from survivors after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, and Wilhelm sees his project doing similar work. Once they’ve downloaded Auto-BAHN software, mobile users can connect to other Auto-BAHN phones within Wi-Fi or Bluetooth range— and passing on messages with a click of a button. “The idea is that under emergency circumstances you can get information to the proper emergency responders when there is no telecommunication network online,” says Wilhelm.

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And grenade-launched camera maker Vlad Gostrom was inspired to work on the device by his time as a ground searchand-rescue specialist with the US Civil Air Patrol in New Jersey. In the bush of the Pine Barrens, teams would constantly hit areas that they just couldn’t search over, leaving holes in their search coverage. “This would allow someone to actually achieve close to 100-percent coverage without going into a hazardous environment,” says Gostom.

These projects may never make it beyond the prototype stage, but they show that a good idea is just too hard for many hackers to resist. “More and more, people are finding out that the hacker community is not just about breaking things,” says Wilhelm. “It’s about fixing things.” CIO Robert McMillan covers computer security and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service.

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

Four out of five businesses that have pre-registered .XXX domain names have no direct connection to the adult porn industry, one of the UK’s largest registrars has confirmed.

The trend is a result of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) signing off earlier this year on a move to give all adult websites an .xxx domain. The aim was to make it easier to block adult websites. The problem with this, is that having .XXX as a possible domain does not mean porn providers will suddenly abandon established domains, which will continue in vast numbers, defeating filtering.

Easyspace, which produced the above, said that only 20 percent of the “hundreds” of businesses participating in the round of preregistrations through its services planned to use them for their intended purpose: Selling adult content.“As we expected, the early indications are that non-adult industry businesses have realized the need to protect trademarks and brands in dot XXX,” said Easyspace’s managing director, Sarah Haran.

For large companies protecting multiple domains, the costs could run into thousands a year, all profit that will go to companies such as Easyspace. With a single .XXX domain costing around $330 (Rs 15,000) per year, many believed it would become a huge tax on legitimate businesses desperate to protect trademarks against third parties.

— By John Dunn

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 6:22:52 PM

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Jeff Ello

Think Tank

The Innovation Disconnect The problem with IT innovation today is that businesses say they want it, but they really don’t. It might change too much.

I

t's true of love, life, and doubly so of business: When faced with uncertainty, we become slaves to the familiar, torturing logic to avoid discomfort, sacrificing all to appease the devils we know.

And that’s true of the way businesses look at technology today. Technology brings uncertainty to a business world that approaches problems with alliterative repetition: predictably producing pointless pre-programmed paranoia.

Changing that relationship—convincing others to change their outlook, entertain the unknown and re-evaluate what they take for granted—is the most difficult and valuable thing that IT leaders can do for their organization, career and life.

Bonfire of the Oblivious

Illust ration by ph otos.com

As technologists, we need to be clear: No matter what the business is, today technology is the business. The industry is irrelevant.

While the '90s were all about computers replacing tools, the first years of the 21st century have been about technology replacing whole industries.

There are no more phone companies; instead we have technology companies that specialize in communications. Cable companies no longer exist; they've been replaced by technology companies that specialize in media distribution. The purists are all gone. In one sector after another, when technology is ready to invade, the core competency becomes technology, and ‘the business’ becomes ‘whatever the technology allows it to be’.

Publishers and newspapers, comfortable in their prestige, have been decimated by competitors that have ridden a wave of new technologies. Book and video stores are being submerged in the flood of online/digital distribution, having ignored the 24

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Jeff Ello

Think Tank

Business is slave to the familiar, sold on the management logic of commoditizing, standardizing or outsourcing anything not viewed as ‘core competency’, choking off its capacity to deal with innovation in an act of auto-technologic asphyxiation. storm until it was upon them. The bulk of trading on the stock market occurs by algorithm, leaving traditional brokers and investors to fight over table scraps. Banks are so universally undifferentiated that people often choose one over another on the basis of website features and phone apps.

Technology allows every musician to be his own label while the establishment music industry suffers—not from piracy, but from its own inexplicable attachment to a business model that can only be maintained through legal and legislative manipulation.

Polaroid considered itself very technology-oriented, making huge investments in digital imaging in the '80s, but it never brought a single digital product to market. Just as the music industry doesn't understand how to make money off of free music, Polaroid couldn't imagine a business model based on free ‘film’. Polaroid hid in its comfort zone for another decade, and died there.

It doesn't have to be that way. Canon merged new tech with its familiar SLR cameras, inventively ushering in an era in which a $700 portrait camera is better at shooting movies than a $70,000 cinema camera from a few years ago. Canon competed against itself in its own markets, but in doing so, it has remained relevant and able to exert considerable influence on future events. Consequentially, the entertainment industry has exploded with new players and cheap, effective equipment.

How will that ripple effect end for Hollywood? Take a look at the publishing industry, the music industry, among others.

Ignorance is Not a Defense Many blame disruptive technology—innovations causing unexpected changes and unpredictable business outcomes.

But, while the theory explains what happens, it implies an unexpectedness that rarely exists for an average technologist.

Put another way, if someone stumbles on cold fusion today and puts it in stores for a couple of hundred dollars next week—that is disruptive—but that never happens. The innovations we deal with 99.9 percent of the time were predicted, chronicled and analyzed for years beforehand.

What business analysts call ‘disruptive’, technologists call ‘Tuesday’—a highly predictable consequence of Monday.

What we're really talking about is ‘disruptive ignorance’—an active denial of innovation causing forced, usually irrational, business reactions. Business is slave to the familiar, sold on the management logic of commoditizing, standardizing or outsourcing anything not viewed as ‘the core competency’,

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choking off its own capacity to deal with innovation in an act of auto-technologic asphyxiation.

Mortar Bored Consider a future victim. Academia is a complex industry with merits beyond education, but I will paint with a broad brush because the average consumer doesn't get to see the fine detail.

Just a few years ago, online degrees were met with much condescension in traditional academic circles. Yet enrollments show that people want them, surveys show that employers are warm to them, and once-obscure schools have become mainstream in the eyes of potential consumers. Academia has flirted with technology-based learning options for decades, but even today, we're still looking at Online Education 1.0—beta.

At best, it's just a digital peepshow of the existing collegiate process—replacing the classroom with video streams.

Academia invents much of the technology that revolutionizes other industries, but it has been conspicuously shy about upsetting its own apple cart. There are many reasons, but when you corner people on the question, it all comes back to comfort vs. uncertainty. Individually, everyone sees the potential, but collectively, there is great fear that higher education will be commoditized away—that faculty won't matter in a technology-based model. The outcome is uncertain and there is a natural hesitancy to dive in. Teaching is considered a prestigious, creative process, inextricably integrated into research and engagement, all fueled by the organic nature of ‘academic freedom’. Personally, I agree: Teaching is creative and important; I make similar arguments about IT—but if that is to be preserved, the customer must be preserved.

Over the past 20 years, average tuition doubled while average income and starting salaries stagnated or decreased— and that trend appears to be accelerating. Customers are much more open to alternatives, which means the whole industry is a prime target for an ‘iPhone moment’. But ironically, after a decade of commoditizing and demoting technology, in a process aptly dubbed ‘the incredible shrinking CIO’, higher education has largely driven away the creative, highly motivated base of technologists it now needs to prevent its own commoditization. Zombifying IT through ITIL and other '90s-style engines of self-obsolescence has the same effect in all industries: Talent flees bureaucracy and joins a technology company, often returning to steal the business.

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Think tank

Inevitably, all universities will be technology companies that happen to specialize in education and research. It's not a question of money, or prestige, or history, it's a question of valuing and inspiring innovation. Take Kahn Academy, for example: One guy, two years, and 2,300+ videos later, anyone, anywhere with access to YouTube can get a foundational education for free. No, that's no substitute for a focused, accredited degree at the moment, but this is one guy. Imagine what two, or heaven forbid, three, could accomplish.

Perhaps, like Polaroid confronted with digital technology, you don't think there's a business model for cheap education.

It wouldn't be ‘disruptive’ if most people did. Perhaps you don't think Google would ever consider giving away a high-quality education to gain an impressionable, highly integrated and ever-growing captive audience. I think it would be foolish not to try. The philosophy of pricing and positioning a degree as a compulsory pre-career debt hassle can easily become higher ed's greatest liability. Hello, Google U. It comes down to this: Academia is flush with brilliant people and access to technology. There is no industry better equipped to answer consumer desires through technology, creating a better, more marketable student in the process.

But academia suffers the same way other industries do: Technical mastery and distinctiveness are not considered core to the academic business model, creative technologists are not hired to lead, and geeks are not inspired to create marketable innovation.

Like many industries before it, academia knows what's coming, but sees embracing uncertainty as far more threatening. It often happens that way: The key to survival comes disguised as the doorway to oblivion.

Trolling Management The least innovative sentence of the last 50 years is "We need to be innovative." It's easy to pound our chests and shout it proudly, because everyone agrees. But when it comes down to the decisions that actually influence innovation, organizations whisper from the safety of their comfort zones: "We're scared."

That fear is expressed in many ways, but the most destructive is also the most obvious: IT has a personnel problem.

In fact, it's become so commonplace over the last decade that no one realizes that it's a dysfunction. Here's how it works: Everyone understands that innovation is good—in the abstract. When a group of non-technologists get together to hire a CIO, they're thinking ‘innovator’ and ‘leader’. They know technology is critical, Innovation's Chance but they feel a bit in the dark, uncertain of what to expect and To find out how you can increase how to ‘make innovation happen’. business creativity, read Let That's where things go tragically Innovation Bloom. Visit www.cio. in/mustread wrong and programming takes c o.in over. Information makes people 26

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When a group of nontechnologists get together to hire a CIO, they're thinking innovator’ and ‘leader’. But their list of needs calls for the exact opposite of an innovator. feel more in control, so they want an innovator/leader that is also highly structured, is detailed in reporting, and makes few independent decisions. In other words: the exact opposite of innovator/leader. The job description of CIO keeps shifting from ‘leader’ to ‘manager’, from ‘innovator’ to ‘bean counter’. The CIO looks a lot less like a technologist, the IT group functions more like custodial services, and so on until even the most ambitious technologists become stagnant and cynical. This is the erosive force that creates the stereotypical IT environment we have come to expect, leaving organizations so unable to cope with change that everything becomes ‘disruptive’. Dilbert isn't a comic strip; it's a documentary on this process.

The academic example is important because it shows that even those with a deep appreciation for the value of innovation can fall into the same trap.

Can it be changed? In short, no, not quickly. However, the optimist in me says that if just one person can take one small step out of their comfort zone for just one decision—that can change everything.

Technologists would be wise to take note: Save your anger and blame. If you want to truly help yourself, and your organization, then do the best work you can and influence everything you can. When the opportunities arise, organize your cohorts to make the outcome positive. If that's the hiring of a CIO, be there, tell them what you want, comment on the job posting, help write it if you can. Do it for every job posting.

Get people to take just one leap. Be unified, be clear and be passionate that the way forward is going to be uncomfortable, but lucrative. But again, save your anger and remember why most people wind up stuck in their comfort zones to begin with: They are being lied to, all the time, every day — but we'll talk about that later.

It is ironic, but a technologist's highest calling may very well be the de-programming of humans.

The uninspired state of business and technology: If Einstein worked in IT today, he'd be playing Portal instead of inventing the concept. CIO

Jeff Ello gives technology a nudge for the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Undercover Officer

Anonymous

Get a Grip on Your Consultants Security consultants aren’t a shrewd breed but if you give them too much freedom—without laying down clear ground rules—your organization will suffer.

M

y current boss, a CEO, defines a consultant as a person you pay to tell you what time it is from your own wristwatch.

I like that line. Having been on both sides of the game, as a consultant and a customer, my view is that definition is sometimes right on the money.

While there are some very good consultants out there, and some very good customers, they don’t necessarily communicate very well with each other. And that opens the door to problems (and, of course, to consultant jokes). I suppose if your intent is to gain outside confirmation of your own beliefs, hiring a consultant can be useful. But be prepared for the possibility that the consultant may return with an opposing view or advice.

A few days after I landed my present job, I was told that one of my performance objectives was to track the progress of the security consultants who had been hired and launched before I got here. They were brought in to “look things over and make recommendations to improve security.”

Once they were through looking and we had their reports, I was to review those reports and develop plans to implement the recommendations.

Sounded reasonable.

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Within days, however, I learned that things weren’t quite that simple: There wasn’t just one security consulting group on board; there were three, and all were nearly finished. Each had been hired by operations directors from different departments to perform a “comprehensive review of security,” but those hiring managers didn’t coordinate their efforts with each other or with the consultants. And, not being security professionals, the ops directors did not think themselves qualified to place any restraints on the consultants, which meant that, with no useful guidance from our end, the consultants pretty much had complete freedom.

That may sound bad, but wait, there’s more.

These consultants had mostly defense department experience and little background with the private sector, which meant they had no sense for business planning around P&Ls. When their reports came in it was no surprise to see that they were in different Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

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formats, that they contained both different and overlapping findings, and that they made different recommendations even in cases where the findings were the same!

Too Much Advice Can Be a Bad Thing I had expected some duplication.

But I was not prepared for the laborintensive development of a matrix, first to identify the more than 600 findings and recommendations, and then to decide which were different, which were duplicates and which were contradictory.

The net of all this was assimilating a little more than 100 separate findings and recommendations that may have made sense to the military, but did not translate very well to the private sector.

And here is the most irksome issue when hiring security consultants. They will walk away when finished. You, however, have to live with what they leave behind.

If your business is risk averse, like the Department of Defense, you may not bat an eye when you get the recommendation for a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter. But if your business is more accepting of risk, more in the mode of managing various risks, then you will want to see some more practical approaches to things like air quality assurance.

If you haven’t managed the consultant’s goals and objectives and have not placed any constraints on them, you will be caught between the proverbial rock (the consultants’ professional opinion) and a hard place (your reality). The key, therefore, to a successful relationship with security consultants is to clearly

Seeking Advice To learn more about security consultants, read Good Consultants, Bad Consultants on www.cio.in/mustread c o.in

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Here is the most irksome issue when hiring security consultants. They will walk away when finished. You, however, have to live with what they leave behind. define what you want to achieve through their service.

You’ll also be ahead of the game if you request that, for each recommendation the consultants make, they engineer the solution, cost it out and draft the budget justifications (in terms of ROI).

That way you’ll be prepared when it comes time to fight for the money. Also, have them provide an estimate on the impact to the annual operating budget of maintaining all the systems and gadgets they recommend you buy.

In our case, we pretty much created a monster. The ops directors who hired these experts had nothing but good intentions. But they gave the consultants too much freedom. This led to some equally well-intentioned recommendations that created a number of “round peg/square hole” problems for us. While 90 percent of their work was common sense, we were quickly reminded that the final 10 percent of performance accounts for 90 percent of the cost. So when I decided to ignore some of their more outrageous suggestions, I had to do a lot of homework some of it with the help of even more consultants to prove that doing it their way was either silly or flat-out wrong.

When one of the ops managers said, “What do you mean you aren’t going to follow their recommendation to install HEPA filters in our public building HVAC systems?” I had to explain exactly what a HEPA filter is (and its impact on standard HVAC design and our operating budget) before he stopped sniveling.

He had allocated a large slice of his discretionary budget to pay the consultant, so he expected us to follow

their advice. All of it. But I pointed out that in a public building a bad guy can simply walk in and spread bad things around that circumvent the filters. Even with my (I thought) lucid arguments, we unfortunately ended up hiring an engineering consultancy to study the impact and cost of installing respirator filters in a building HVAC system. The resulting study showed conclusively that it didn’t make any sense.

The consultants may as well have recommended we put canary cages in the food court to warn us when we are under chemical attack! In the end, we paid the engineering consultant a lot of money to tell us that the security consultants had made a silly recommendation that we were right to ignore.

Guide Events or Be Guided by Them So, OK, what is the lesson here? Never hire a consultant? No, of course not.

There are times when you will want to do this, no matter how good you are yourself. But before you go that route, make sure it is a deliberate decision and that you have a big hand in shaping the course of events.

First, it’s important to understand the difference between a security professional and a security practitioner.

A security professional may be certified by a recognized security association and have many years of experience in security but not be currently responsible for the security of any enterprise. A security practitioner is someone who is responsible for all or part of the security of an enterprise, whether or not he has any expertise in security at all. The best case is when the practitioner is also a

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Undercover Officer

AnOnymOUs

professional, and the professional has been a practitioner.

With that in mind, it’s appropriate to hire a security consultant: When nobody in the company has the requisite expertise.

When there may be a legitimate question of conflict of interest. If you were the champion last year of an unpopular security policy change, that change will be hard for you to look at without bias this year.

When, regardless of expertise or conflicts, nobody has the time to do it.

If you find yourself in one of these situations, here are some things to look into when selecting a security consultant: Get recommendations from professional contacts in your industry that you know and trust. If they were happy with a consultant, chances are you will be too.

Require consultants to submit team member résumés with their proposal.

You should look for senior team members who have been security practitioners.

Since a lot of these people come out of the Defense Department or a police department, look for recent experience in your business sector.

Call some former clients of the consultant and talk to them about their experience with this company; find out what they liked and disliked about the service they received.

Before any work commences, make sure you get formal non-disclosure agreements signed by each person involved in the security work. Also be sure to schedule a formal meeting where you set mutual ground rules for your work together, and schedule frequent status reports. Make sure you get to see the final draft before it goes to anyone. You should have no surprises at

the formal presentation of consultants’ findings or with their written reports, and you should be able to anticipate and answer questions from your boss and other higher-ups.

This isn’t to suggest a whitewash; simply, it’s best that your peers and your leadership hear about security problems and solutions from you rather than from the “experts.” After all, you hired these people to help you get better, not to make you or your company look bad.

Following this advice will enhance your experience with consultants, and ensure you present your company with a useful set of recommendations that improve security without breaking the bank or harming your credibility. CIO

This column is written anonymously by a real CSO. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Congratulate CIO & Its Partners

the winners of CIO100 Awards 2011

Anonimous_colunm.indd 4

Custom solutions Group AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE CONSULTANCY SERVICES IN ASSOCIATIONTATA WITH

TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT

PLUS As global capital markets become increasingly integrated, many countries are moving to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Voltas did not want to delay this project and rush for compliance later. Learn how Voltas greatly beneďŹ ted by proactively transitioning to IFRS on their own time table.

INTERVIEW Mahesh Manchi, CIO, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India stresses on the need for good integration between technology and processes.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

COUNTDOWN TO IFRS TRANSITION

VOLTAS SHOWS THE WAY Company Voltas Industry Manufacturing Offering Engineering solutions for a wide spectrum of industries

As global capital markets become increasingly integrated, many countries are moving to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Voltas did not want to delay this project and rush for compliance later. Learn how Voltas

greatly benefited by proactively transitioning to IFRS on their own time table.

Custom solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

W

ith the business world becoming more global, the need for a global financial reporting language, like IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) has emerged primarily to meet the information requirements of shareholders, lenders and other investors. India is one of the 100 odd countries that are moving towards IFRS convergence with a view to bring about uniformity in reporting systems globally, enabling businesses, finances and funds to access more opportunities.

Although full and unreserved compliance with IFRS is the main objective, many organizations are still not ready to move to IFRS. However, Voltas did not want to delay this project and rush for compliance later with insufficient resources and too little planning, leading to undesirable consequences.

TCS helped us in detailing out all the dimensions of this project which was crucial for a successful transition to IFRS.” ASMITA JUNNARKAR, CIO, Voltas

Benefits of IFRS Voltas, a Tata Enterprise, is one of the world’s premier engineering solutions providers. It offers solutions for a wide spectrum of industries in areas such as electro-mechanical projects, including heating ventilation and air conditioning, water management, textile machinery mining and construction. As a renowned international electromechanical project specialist, Voltas has executed numerous multi-million dollar turnkey projects in over 30 countries world wide. Some of the iconic projects executed in the recent past are the Burj Khalifa, Dubai, F1 track, Ferrari theme park, in Abu Dhabi, Changi Water Reclamation project in Singapore, Hyderabad International Airport and 9 of the 15 CWG stadiums in India, to name a few. In the international market, especially in the Middle East, it operates through its own branch offices as well as through subsidiaries and JV’s.

For Voltas, transitioning to the IFRS reporting standards meant reporting greater efficiencies in their financial processes, easier access to foreign capital markets, and improved empirical analysis capabilities resulting from consolidating multiple global divisions on one reporting standard. Hence, the management at Voltas was aware since long that transitioning to IFRS offered many benefits, one of them being compliance.

A cco rd i n g to A s m i ta Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas, “IFRS was more than just a technical accounting exercise and had to

be viewed as an important business priority. The IFRS revolution will have a significant impact on our financial position and performance, directly affecting the outcomes of valuation metrics that analysts use to measure and evaluate company performance.”

The IFRS Implementation impacts several areas of the business entity, from the presentation of accounts, the accounting policies and procedures ,the way legal documents are drafted , to the way the entity reviews its assets and their usage ,as well as its communications with the stakeholders and the way it conducts its business. The nature of this fundamental and pervasive impact of IFRS makes it imperative to devote sufficient planning and thought to this aspect with choices being made at the transition stage itself, as they determine the effect on the company and its operations. “Hence, a detailed analysis of all aspects of impact and change as well as all legal documentation and communication becomes necessary,” she adds.

IFRS was more than just a technical accounting exercise

and had to be viewed as an important business priority

Learning from Global Experience In early 2010, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs issued the road map for transition to IFRS. The first phase, included companies in Nifty 50 or BSE Sensex, and those whose securities are listed on stock exchanges outside India along with all the companies with a net worth of Rs 1,000 crore. These companies were to prepare and present financial statements using

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

Indian Accounting Standards converged with IFRS. The above companies had to convert their first balance sheet as on April 1, 2012, applying accounting standards convergent with IFRS if the accounting year ended on March 31. Despite uncertainty about timing, the management at Voltas was of the opinion that the ultimate adoption of IFRS in India was inevitable.

Vo l t a s d e c i d e d t o st a r t maintaining accounting books as per both IGAAP and IFRS with effect from 1st April 2010.

The fact that Voltas was an early adopter and decided to be ready to report under IFRS on their own timetable was a strategic business decision that needed full IT support to implement. In fact, with the objective of analyzing the adoption of IFRS

by European companies, the EU commissioned a survey on the implementation of IFRS in the EU. The results of the survey indicated that IFRS implementation in Europe had been challenging, but successful, and was generally seen as a positive development for EU financial reporting.

There was a widespread agreement that IFRS made financial statements easier to compare (across countries, competitors within the same industry sector and across industry sectors), and improved the overall quality of the consolidated financial statements. The survey also indicated that larger companies had prepared early, and had

Engaging the business units and embedding IFRS at the transaction level helped Voltas to drive

ANIL GEORGE, EVP-Corporate Affairs & CFO, Voltas

Challenges

If Voltas was to publish IFRS f i n a n c i a l st a t e m e n t s fo r 2011-12, which would require comparatives for 2010-11, standing in mid 2009-10; Asmita had only six months to develop a roadmap to convergence, and ensure that the IT system and accounts were ready. The adoption of IFRS required changes in the recognition, measurement and disclosure of many items in the financial statements. “Both financial and business systems needed to deliver the information required for compliance with IFRS. Accordingly, IT systems had to be modified so that the financial data that is generated conform to IFRS. It is important to note that such changes are not restricted to IT modules relating to general ledger entries or sub-ledger entries, but also affect applications such as asset management systems, financial instruments and payroll systems,” she adds.

“One size fits all” does not apply to IFRS and so began a journey which included assembling cross-functional teams from financial accounting, management accounting, tax and IT consulting partners.” As with any project, early planning and a complete understanding of the requirements were crucial for a successful transition to IFRS. “Voltas had to activate New GL functionality to migrate from classic GL to New GL using a service based migration approach with the SAP predefined scenario that included merging of FI ledgers, profit centre ledgers and document splitting. The key areas of coverage were activation of New GL Functionality, presentation of financial statements as per IFRS, asset accounting, revenue recognition, related party transactions and IFRS Reports,” she adds However, this demanded regular communication with the auditor and close co-ordination with the internal accounts team. It was critical that the data cleaning activities had to be started early.

Providing an example, Asmita says that the historical cost which was used in the previous accounting standard, now, had to be substituted with fair values for several balance sheet items, which enabled Voltas to know its true worth. For

a successful conversion project

As Voltas and other Indian businesses become more global in terms of their operations and investor base, there is little option but to go the IFRS way,”

devoted considerable resources to educating and training their boards, staff and investors.

Custom solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

example, intangible assets acquired in business combinations had to be recorded separately at fair value, and all financial instruments and investment properties would then be reflected at fair values, thereby providing a better measure of the current value of the net assets of the entity.

Key Learnings “There is no doubt that conversion to IFRS was a huge task and a big challenge - its revolutionary impact required a great deal of decisiveness and commitment.” says Asmita. The crucial lesson that the entire team learnt was that the devil is in the details.

“The team ensured the availability of additional test servers, enhancement of production servers for the final run and innumerable test runs. Another reason for the success of the project was that the same team handled the implementation end-to-end, and planned milestones, based on business user-availability. The team had to ensure that all functionalities were tested so that existing data did not get overwritten, and test migration was to cover all scenarios, including closing activities,” she reflects.

Dual Reporting Perhaps even more demanding than preparing the staff for IFRS is preparing the investors. Much of the hype around the introduction of IFRS has centered on how markets would react to large swings in reported figures. Voltas wanted to provide comparable data for the period 2010-11. Hence the system needed to support dual reporting, i.e., Indian GAAP for statutory reporting and IFRS for keeping comparable data ready.

This is where the foresight the management at Voltas displayed comes through; since they had decided that the implementation is best done at the business unit level rather than at the corporate level.

“By going for a top-down and bottom-up approach, the business units were involved earlier rather than later. Engaging the business units and embedding IFRS at the transaction level helped Voltas to drive a successful conversion project,” says Asmita.

Looking Forward to Certainty The Government may, at any point in time, effect all changes for the implementation by a certain date, and the onus will be on the company to comply with the requirements. The auditors will only have to comment on whether the management has properly complied with the norms or not.

Voltas EVP-Corporate Affairs & CFO, Mr. Anil George says, “The credit for fast forwarding the IFRS initiative in Voltas must go to my

OVERVIEW OF IFRS International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are principles-based Standards, Interpretations and the Framework adopted by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). IFRS implementation affects several areas of a business entity – presentation of accounts, accounting policies and procedures, drafting of legal documents, approach to assets and their usage, and communication with stakeholders.

IFRS has already been adopted by many countries in Asia and Europe and many more including the US will be adopting it from 2011-2016.

Over 100 countries are moving toward IFRS compliance to bring in uniformity in global reporting systems, enabling businesses and financial institutions to access more opportunities.

FDIs and FIIs are more comfortable with compatible accounting standards. Therefore, companies feel the need to recast their accounts in keeping with the globally accepted standards.

predecessor, Mr. Moiz Miyajiwala. From my own perspective, I was extremely pleased to see how the Finance and IT teams worked in perfect synchronization to make the entire exercise happen in a record time. The benefits of IFRS in providing more comparability among sectors, countries and companies are well known. Due to its universal appeal, it can also improve and initiate new relationships with investors, customers and suppliers across the globe financial statements that are in accordance with IFRS cuts across borders and over time, tends to facilitate the growth of business. As Voltas and other Indian businesses become more global in terms of their operations and investor base, there is little option but to go the IFRS way,”he adds.

Importantly, Asmita says that Voltas is looking forward to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs making a final decision about adopting IFRS in India. By transitioning in a proactive, planned manner, Voltas was able to do it at their own pace, and now has a much better system landscape. “In turn, we are able to further optimize our business processes, save costs, and increase IT’s strategic role within finance and business,” she says.

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW

MARRIAGES

THAT LAST To seize the moment, companies need to adequately marry technology with their processes, says Mahesh Manchi, CIO, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India.

MAHESH MANCHI, CIO, Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India.

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

In your organization, what has been IT’s biggest contribution to enhance profitability?

One of our key operations initiatives has helped beef up our bottomline. For many years, we used an offthe-shelf product for our hotel reservations. However, over the years, the reservation system underwent many changes — not all of which could be accommodated in our application. None of the other available products were a good fit for our system either. We decided to replace our application, the license fees of which were expensive, with an in-house, custom-built reservation engine. It took us almost a year to build the application, but the results were wonderful. Our agents found a great difference in the response time.

The other project that has boosted marketing is a feedback mechanism that ensures that a complaint from customers is instantly acted upon. The General Manager too is immediately notified over a SMS. At the same time, if a guest has had a happy experience, we lose no time in passing on the positive feedback to the Lead Management team, which converts potential members into members.

You have taken formal certifications from the Project Management Institute. Do you think CIOs can play the role of project managers in an internal project spanning many departments?

Though a formal management certification may not be essential for every CIO, I believe that being schooled in project management can greatly help in the thinking process. In the case of a CIO, it’s all the more imperative that while he or she is attentive to keeping the IT lights on, one does not not miss out on key opportunities to manage multidepartment projects. Some training in project management can help ensure that the focus is on attaining the desired outcome of the project. Stakeholder management becomes critical in a project that spans across departments, and while a good relationship manager may effectively deal with the stakeholder in terms of relationship, a good project manager does it while keeping in mind the project success.

What role do you think the IT department can play in an economic downturn?

The cascading effect of the downturn had reached us in late 2008. With work on new projects stalled, our team decided to look at keeping ourselves engaged and improving our functioning. Believing in our own competencies, we migrated operations to the new Operating Systems, Databases and Productivity Suites without engaging any consultants. The projects not only helped the team build their confidence, but also earned us praise from our internal customers, garnering a customer satisfaction index of 95%. I strongly believe that crisis brings out the best and during any downturn, all that is needed is reflection, confidence and team work.

Do you believe that if a CIO fails to understand business well, there’s the danger of his role getting marginalized?

Absolutely. From my organization perspective, if I build on the statement, ‘Customer is King’, then the ‘Consumer is Emperor’ and I mean it. If I don’t know my business well, I run the risk of facing the wrath of the Emperor. Not just getting marginalized, but getting bull-dozed!

World over, outstanding CIOs have moved on to become CEOs. What qualities do such CIOs possess in your opinion?

Because of technology’s linkages with all departments, a CIO is fortunate to have the perch from where he/she gets a complete oversight of all the functions. By acquiring a fair understanding of all the functions, the CIO is in a good position to test his/her wings for bigger roles. Moreover, businesses’ dependence on technology is increasing day by day. If the CIO is not adequately marrying technology with processes, then he/ she is going to lag behind.

Tell us about a project that saw you build cross-functional synergies?

In recent years, our industry has seen exponential growth in business. To ride this wave, we initiated a transformation project, where we examined our internal processes closely. The regular interactions I had with the CFO and CMO helped me appreciate their viewpoints much better — the CMO’s focus on topline growth and, likewise, the CFO’s concerns about the bottomline.

Do you think Social CRM is here to stay? Have you experimented with the same in your company?

Undoubtedly! In this age of instant gratification, being socially-challenged is the biggest risk. And in an industry like ours, it is just plain suicide.

We have dedicated teams that connect with our members on social platforms and reach out to them. One needs to experiment with different social media to find out what works best and therein lies the challenge.

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That’s certainty

The formula one racing car is the most complex and advanced car in the world, packing research in aerodynamics, engine technology, brakes, tyres and modelling. It has more in common with a jet plane than it does with a high performance car. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) works with Scuderia Ferrari before, during and in-between races to help their cars go even faster.

As one of the world’s fastest growing technology and business solutions providers, TCS ensures that all mechanical and electronic systems perform at their optimum under levels of extreme stress. Managing pressure and troubleshooting in a situation where every little advantage makes a huge difference. And of course, enabling Ferrari to experience certainty.

To learn how your business can experience certainty, visit www.tcs.com

Bernard Golden

Cloud Computing

The Way of the Dinosaur Neither CIOs or lower-level IT personnel are immune from the employment risks that cloud computing poses.

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Illustration by P HOTOS.CO M

e've seen many internal IT groups refuse to acknowledge any potential benefits or use cases for public cloud computing, while citing all the potential drawbacks at length. Why? To quote novelist Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." From the suspicion that many IT groups display toward public cloud services, it's not difficult to conclude that some—if not much—of the resistance from internal IT groups to the use of public cloud resources boils down to simple worry about unemployment.

Their bias shows up in the numbers. According to one piece of research, only seven percent of IT respondents say they would embrace public cloud computing, while 47 percent say they'd prefer a private cloud. It's tempting to interpret these results as reflecting a desire to avoid outsourcing because that's how many IT personnel see public cloud providers—as an outsourcer that will impact their jobs. After all, that was the result of the last outsourcing boom.

With that experience in mind, it's natural that IT personnel would resist using public cloud computing. Asking an infrastructure and operations (I&O) person what he or she thinks of public cloud computing is like asking a turkey what it thinks of Thanksgiving.

Here's the thing, though. If you're an I&O person, cloud computing—whether it's public or private—is a threat. Cloud computing represents virtualization supercharged by automation, and automation always threatens jobs—especially those of lowerskilled employees. It's the automation element of cloud computing— not virtualization—that is the cause of this redundancy.

The phenomenon of automation displacing low-skilled labor is nothing new. In manufacturing it has been occurring for decades.

Take for example the manufacturing output of the US against 31

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Bernard Golden

Cloud Computing

manufacturing employment. Even though the US manufactures far more today than in the past, far fewer people are employed in the sector.

Perhaps the right metaphor for the coming disruption of I&O is Henry Ford's invention of mass production. By automating the assembly line, he vastly increased productivity and vastly decreased the number of employees required to build a given number of cars.

With regard to cloud computing, though, the image of a single person monitoring an automated factory is more appropriate.

Because computing is digital, we can automate it rather than rely on humans to assemble the various parts.

The necessary skill in these automated, highly productive cloud environments is not basic installation and configuration; it's designing and implementing the systems that automate the environment—in other words, designing and implementing the information factory. The datacenter of the near future will have a standardized environment provided by a vendor. The organization will need the skills to operate this highly automated, standardized environment, which are much more complex than those needed to install and configure a single server. Being an I&O employee in the future is going to require a step-change in skills, and those who cannot make the transition will face significant career turbulence.

CIOs are Just as Vulnerable So what does this mean to the CIO or other senior IT management?

After all, this issue is all about lower-level employees, right?

Yes and no. I believe is that just as Henry Ford transformed the economics of the assembly factory, cloud computing is about to transform the economics of the information factory. IT organizations are about to face a challenge to their economics unlike any they have previously encountered. Simply put, IT organizations will come under pressure to meet the cost structures of the best-of-breed public providers.

This isn't about squeezing a couple of percent out of the budget by reducing travel and postponing training. This is an entirely different category of cost reduction: It requires a fundamental re-thinking of the costs throughout the datacenter, and that includes the legacy portion as well as any private cloud environment. Failing to re-think the delivery of services—and the organization necessary to deliver them—poses a threat to the job tenure of even the most senior IT executives. We've seen this previously in other areas of corporations, such as in HR. A new breed of outsourced HR service firms sprang up and proposed that companies could save money More Cloud Ideas by shifting out many of their HR functions. Many HR execs insisted To read more Bernard Golden that only their staff could provide columns and understand the necessary services to employees impact of the cloud, visit www.cio. in/mustread because of organizational familiarity, c o.in on-site access, better alignment with

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user organizations, etcetera. But in the end, economics won out.

Those HR executives who continued to run things the old way were eventually replaced by new ones who recognized that their job was providing cost-competitive services.

Similarly, successful IT executives in the future will be those who recognize that their job is infrastructure management at market rates, not asset ownership. If one accepts the information factory concept, then the question for CIOs is how to operate the factory (their IT departments) as efficiently as possible.

I sometimes think that the whole private vs. public cloud debate will pale in comparison to the legacy vs. SaaS carnage that is going to happen. By far the largest part of IT budgets is tied up in legacy systems that most IT organizations treat as unchangeable—too much work to do anything about other than to manage as simply as possible and with as little maintenance as possible.

But how can we justify sticking with an existing system when SaaS alternatives are so much cheaper? Just to cite one example, I recently met with a CIO who shifted off of an existing on-premise PeopleSoft system to the on-demand Workday application and

It's natural for some IT personnel to resist public cloud computing. Asking an infrastructure and operations person what they think of public cloud computing is like asking a turkey what it thinks of Thanksgiving. paid for the entire migration out of the first year of savings— with the savings from every year thereafter being gravy. Being a CIO without an aggressive plan to shift off of legacy systems (and I repeat, these represent by far the biggest proportion of IT budgets) when SaaS alternatives offer so much savings makes you extremely vulnerable.

We can say that the IT industry is in for more change in the next 10 years than it has seen in the last 30. The IT organization of 2021 will be unrecognizable to those steeped in long-established practices. In 10 year's time, we will look back on today's I&O practices the way we observe someone making a long-distance call in an old black-and-white movie: "Hello operator, get me New York." They had to do things that way? Just be sure you don't end up the IT equivalent of the switchboard supervisor. CIO Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of

Virtualization for Dummies. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Alternative Views

CIO Role

Is Jugaad a Good Thing?

We’ve introduced the world to jugaad and elevated it till it’s become a philosophy adopted by some of the world’s most-admired businesses. But is it creative improvisation or shortcut to shoddiness? Two CIOs debate.

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ndia is known as a country for jugaad, not only in the way we do business, but even in the way we live. Jugaad is quintessentially an Indian philosophy and is rooted in our culture. Here’s an example of what I mean. We are a deeply superstitious and religious people, evident from the fact that we consult astrologers before taking important decisions. But if the stars aren’t favorable, we resort to jugaad, usually in the form of a gemstone, a prayer, or a mantra.

Jugaad is creativity; its low-cost innovation.

Jugaad is what put the Tata’s Nano on the world map.

India is known for its ability to do more with less. That’s also jugaad. Today, this slogan is being chanted in corporate forums in the west as a great business strategy. Given today’s economic climate, this philosophy is finding relevance and acceptance. Why has India become an outsourcer’s delight? It’s

because of our innate ability to maximize resources and produce high-quality products and services.

I prefer solutions that are quick, cheap and get the job done. That is jugaad. Here’s an example. Our office was designed to accommodate 50 employees, with network connections built for as many. But soon we grew. One solution was to dismantle the existing architecture and re-do the entire design, sinking in a few lakh in the process.

Instead, we decided to attack the problem creatively. The network administrator installed a four-switch at the network point, such that now we can accommodate three people in the place originally meant for one.

We got the job done—at a much lower cost.

Sure it can create some discomfort, but we met organizational demands. In an ideal world, where there is no dearth of resources, money and time, jugaad is irrelevant. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

“India’s known for its ability to maximize resources and produce high-quality products and services. That’s jugaad.”

—Ramkumar Mohan,Sr.Manager-IT,Orbis Financial 34

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CIO Role

n north India, they’ve made these automobiles which are nothing but small vehicles put together by carpenters and loaded with a diesel engine. These vehicles are known for their poor brakes, and their inability to go faster than about 60 km/h.

It’s Jugaad, and it’s poor quality lives up to its name.

Jugaad has a lot of limitations. Jugaad is an ideation by an individual; to call it innovation is wrong. Innovation has to follow a cycle of process that should sustainable to solve a problem, and it should address an unstated need in the long-term. Jugaad, on the other hand, is a short-term fix.

Innovation is what Apple does. Apple’s products—be it the iPhone or the iPad— were designed to provide a long-term sustainable solution to unstated needs.

Jugaad is, at best, an innovative fix, a solution that bends the rules. All other English equivalents of jugaad be it hack or kludge, come with negative connotations.

Jugaad is championed as a solution that optimizes limited recourses. First, I believe the term ‘limited resources’ is used very loosely. More importantly, maximizing resources to boost productivity is not innovation, that’s just plain efficiency.

Four years ago, in my organization, we had a rather rudimentary contact

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Creativity in business is about providing cost-effective solutions that have sustainable benefits. Jugaad is, at best, a short-term fix.

—Anura gi Raman, Associate Director, BPEX Deployment Leader & Head IT, Motilal Oswal Securities center and were looking for a solution to improve the experience of our callers. One of the ways to do that was to listen in on a call and improve the performance of our agents. But the software we had at that time didn’t offer a facility to do that. That’s when the vendor suggested some jugaad; he suggested that we barge into a call from another extension. At that time it sounded like a good solution; it would meet our needs at no extra costs.

But the solution would not meet our needs in the long term; sure we could listen into a call, but we couldn’t record it, store it, or replay it.

Jugaad gives instant reprieve from a problem, but its effect soon wane out.

Creativity in business is about providing cost-effective solutions that have sustainable benefits. To forester creativity we need to set people free, and not bound them by rules and regulations or excuses of limited resources. CIO As told to Varsha Chidambaram Varsha Chidambaram is senior correspondent.

P hotos by fotocorp

Alternative Views

Send feedback to varsha_chidambaram@cio.in

10/3/2011 4:19:15 PM

Creative

Hundred

B y Te a m C I O

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This year’s CIO 100 winners use IT creatively to fashion new offerings, open new markets, increase customer satisfaction, and iron out the kinks in the business— ultimately adding lasting value to the enterprise.

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InsIde ThIs sTOry

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The IT department is a-changin’

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Business’ Hard Edge

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Beat All Expectations

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Expand All Around

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Iron Out the Kinks

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Honor Role

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Creative Minds

and businesses

couldn’t be happier. There is a new creative thought leader walking the halls of the enterprise and they go by the name of CIO. From Avinash Arora’s IT-enabled tractor for New Holland Fiat to Sebastian Joseph’s auditing solution for Mudra Communications’ clients, and from Umesh Jain’s mobile money for YES Bank to the way Thomson Thomas increased HDFC Standard Life Insurance’s renewal premiums by 46 percent, this year’s CIO 100 winners have raised the bar on ingenuity. Many of this year’s winners have also ensured that the IT department becomes a revenue generator, and that the it is a source of long-term value for both end customers and internal staff.

For the sixth year in a row, CIO is proud to celebrate India’s 100

finest CIOs, to throw light on their achievements and direct honor

This year’s CIO 100 winners ceate new products and services.

Winning projects that introduced new levels of customer loyalty.

Honorees who expanded business, and fashioned new growth channels.

CIO 100 recipients straighten out problems and fatten bottom lines.

A round-up of this year’s CIO 100: A list of India’s most creative CIOs.

Celebrating the CIO Creative 100 in a ceremony that will be remembered.

their way.

Presenting: the CIO 100.

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Companies Inside: Mudra Communications New Holland Fiat India YES Bank

Business’ hard edge

By Va rs h a C h i d a m ba ra m

It’s called competitive advantage and it’s what every CeO wants from his generals. This year’s CIO 100 award winners demonstrate how to employ IT creatively and produce new products and services out of nowhere.

We live in a fiercely-competitive world.

The strategies that

companies build everyday to gain competitive advantage aren’t too different from those put together by military chiefs in preparation for war: They are complex and intricate.

But if you take a step back and re-visit the basic rules of the game, a beautiful simplicity emerges. Business 101: The fastest way to win is to create something no one else can offer and corner a market all to yourself.

If you’re thinking that’s easier said than done, you’re right. For most

Fortunately, not all IT leaders fall into this category. A number of this year’s CIO 100 winners have used IT creatively to create new products or services for their companies, lending them heaps of competitive advantage.

companies, coming out with new

IT is the New Product

products and services feels like starting

If one of the hardest things to do in business is to create an entirely new product, it’s an even harder trick to pull in the world of tractor manufacturing. But hard’s not something Avinash Arora, director ICT (India and S.E. Asia), New Holland Fiat India, pays too much heed to.

About a year ago, Arora realized that if he could combine the power of the cloud and sensors with tractors, he could lend more intelligence to the huge machines, roll out an ITenabled tractor—and a new line of revenue. “Such a system still does not exist in any of India’s automobile industries, be it bikes or cars,” says Arora.

It’s an idea that’s raised New Holland Fiat to a completely different league.

Arora created a device that picks up data from a tractor using sensors and sends it back to both New Holland and its customers. The device captures various bits of data including oil pressure, engine water temperature, fuel levels, and how many hours an engine has been used.

His work is the stuff of CIO dreams: Being part of real product design.

all over again. Product creation is hard and time-consuming and few leader— including CIOs—want to bet their careers on it. That reluctance shows in the numbers: Only 13 percent of Indian CIOs say that their business perceives IT as a competitive differentiator, according to CIO research 38

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Avinash Arora, Director ICT (India and S.E. Asia), New Holland Fiat India, created a new type of tractor using IT—and a new line of revenue for his company.

Cover Story

Part of Arora’s inspiration came from wanting to help owners, tractor dealers, and the company itself with additional data. For the company, the new stream of data helps monitor the performance of its tractors in real time, enabling the product and design department to improve new models.

For owners—especially those who rent out their tractors, a popular practice in rural India—the data helps them keep tab on the health of their sizeable investment. It reminds them via SMS of when it’s time for service. A similar SMS is also sent to the dealercum-after-sale service operator. This alerts them of an impending service request, and gives them a head start in locating appropriate spare parts.

The IT-enabled tractor, which is slated to be released officially during Diwali, represented the first time that IT was collaborating with New Holland Fiat’s product and design department and it meant taking some relationships to a new level, says Arora. “The product design departments couldn’t fathom what sort of innovation IT could introduce that would complement their design. Initially, they had trouble accepting and incorporating it, but once the benefits were apparent there was no looking back,” says Arora.

New Service Offerings

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Sebastian Joseph, President Technology & FM, Mudra Communications, created a service that none of his competitors have, which allows Mudra’s clients to audit window display investments.

“Basing themselves on audit results, a client could better decide on what window space rent to give to retailers and ensure higher ROI,” says Joseph.

In the past, such an audit called for the deployment of impressive resources. It meant sending out people armed with paper questionnaires and cameras to retail stores where they took pictures and filled up questionnaires. All of this was then sent back to Mudra’s office for data entry, so that a report could be compiled—a process that Jospeh says could take many months.

In response, Joseph automated the audit process using a mobile app. He handed college students camera-phones pre-loaded with questions. All they now need to do is take some pictures, fill up the questionnaire, and send. “The data gathering process is completely automatic and on-line. No more messy amounts of paper or linking images to the right files. And results are available in real time—and they’re more accurate,” says Jospeh.

Photo by srivatsa

One of the fastest ways to create competitive advantage is by crafting a service offering so vastly different from your competition that clients have no choice but to work with you.

That’s exactly what Sebastian Joseph, president technology & FM, Mudra Communications, did with his award-winning project. The idea stemmed from a deep understanding of the advertising space, which showed that window displays (the type you see in retail stores advertising the latest line of clothing, for instance) was all the rage. But growing appeal of window displays meant that retail stores begun upping rentals for display space until costs skyrocketed. It became necessary for Mudra’s clients (who rent out window displays) to audit their investments.

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Cover Story

Umesh Jain, Senior President & CIO, YES Bank, created India’s first mobile money service, allowing even non-YES Bank customers to pay using their mobiles.

This new approach allowed Mudra to help one of its clients to audit 25,429 outlets across 93 Indian cities in just three months.

It improved the client’s window display management, allowing it to make more timely payments, which resulted in more satisfied retail partners who became more willing to share space.

“The initiative has proved to be a business differentiator for our clients. Competition 42

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does not currently have a solution such as ours,” says Joseph, living up to the old adage: There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.

Like Mudra and New Holland, YES Bank also produced a new ITenabled line of business. Already nurturing a reputation as one of the country’s most IT-friendly banks, YES Bank wanted to be the first to get on the mobile bandwagon.

So last year, it became the first Indian bank to provide mobile money services. That pioneering effort came as a result of the realization that a growing number of customers wanted to be able to make payments with the one thing they never left home with: Their mobile phones. “The key objective of Mobile Money Services (MMS) was to offer a payment solution on the mobile phone,” says Umesh Jain, senior president & CIO, YES Bank. “This has helped us in being perceived as the most creative bank in the country,” says Jain.

The service allows customers (who don’t have to own account with the bank) to carry virtual money on their phones and pay for services.

Once a customer had downloaded the YES Bank app and visited one of the banks partners (all Nokia outlets) to credit their YES Bank Mobile Money account, they can use their phone as an alternative to debit or credit cards.

Like most ingenious solutions, the idea made life simpler for everyone. It allows vendors, for example, to get paid, without having to invest in expensive credit card POS terminals. And it lowers the cost of servicing customers for the bank and opens a new world of convenience to users. ”I don’t need to hide the money I’ve earned from passengers who pay to me via MMS (mobile money services). I wish more students and other people sitting in my auto pay me by MMS,” says Sandeep Pati, an auto driver in Pune.

The bank currently hosts about 74,000 customers in Pune, Chandigarh, Panchkula, Mohali and Nashik. It reports that customers make about 43,000 transactions a month worth a total of about Rs 24 lakh.

“It enables the true ‘Anywhere Banking’,” says Jain. CIO Varsha Chidambaram is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

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Companies Inside: HDFC Standard Life Insurance Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India HSBC India India Infoline USHA International

Beat All

expectations

By Debarati Roy

In a world where price and quality are table stakes, more companies and their CIOs are finding that it is customer service that wins the day. This year’s CIO 100 winners show you how to excel at customer service.

How far would your company go to please your customers?

For Tesco’s Korea business, it meant changing its very name and the way it operates.

When Tesco entered the Korean market, it needed to dethrone E-Mart, which was the de facto shopping choice of a population that had little time to visit brick-and-mortar shops. Tesco reasoned that if people didn’t have the time to visit its stores, why not take the stores to the people? So, it changed its name to HomePlus and laced the glass walls of subway stations with pictures of its products, laid out just as like they’d be in a traditional supermarket.

Their ‘shelves’ featured QR codes (small squares made of black and white patterns much like bar codes) which passers-by can scan using their mobile phones, building up an e-cart as they walk. The customer can then make a mobile payment, and Tesco delivers their purchase to their homes.

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Tesco’s creative use of technology is just one example of how CIOs are enhancing customer service and satisfaction with IT. As they journey from technical head-honchos to business leader, understanding the customer and empowering them is a rising item on the CIO agenda.

According to the State of the Indian CIO Survey 2010, 21 percent of Indian CIOs said they were responsible for customer service over and above IT, a figure they expect will go up to 25 percent in 2011. And, 55 percent said they spent much of their time in 2010 improving customer service with IT, making it one of the top three most-worked-on business process in 2010.

The high number of customer-oriented projects winning this year’s CIO 100 Awards 2011, corroborate these numbers. In their attempt to build customer engagement, and increase customer retention and loyalty, Indian CIOs have gone beyond the call of duty to manipulate IT creatively and find new ways to care for the customer.

Attacking Customer Complaints Be it Korea or India, people get aggravated if they have to invest disproportionate amounts of time getting what they want. That’s a fate India Infoline didn’t want for itself. As one of India’s leading online brokerage houses, India Infoline has about 20,000 users visiting its website REAL CIO WORLD | s e p T e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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everyday. That’s 20,000 opportunities to either win traders—or turn them away.

An old version of India Infoline’s Trader Terminal was unable to handle increasing volumes of traffic. As a result, the company began receiving customer complaints regarding the unavailability of information or disruptions in trading. So, in December 2010, Sankarson Banerjee, CIO, India Infoline, decided to lead 16 in-house developers and completely re-architect the

Sankarson Banerjee, CIO, India Infoline, traveled to the ends of the country asking traders how he could improve their trading experience.

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Trader Terminal. Aptly enough, the project was called Avataar. “We transformed the earlier client-server version of the application into a hybrid model,” says Banerjee. “This allowed us to scale up and handle multiple asset classes and still have highly-reliable trade execution.”

The results are there for everyone to see. Customer service calls went down from 250 a day to less than 20 and delayed trades reduced from 30 percent to 2 percent.

Banerjee says he didn’t get those results from the comfort of his office. He drew inspiration by walking a mile in his customers’ shoes and understanding what they went through while trading with India Infoline. His search took him to some of the country’s most far-flung towns, including Mahuva (pop:52,000), a small port settlement on the outskirts of Bhavnagar, Gujarat, to meet an old franchisee holder. “He’s been with the company for about six years and would have made at least 600 complaint calls. After a point, everyone just assumed that he was a habitual complainer and stopped taking him seriously,” says Banerjee.

But Banerjee did. And he learnt that many of India Infoline’s traders operating from remote areas faced bad connectivity due to which they were disconnected frequently during the day. “Our systems were not geared to re-connect a 100 times a day, and the menu items had a few manual steps which slowed down the entire reconnecting process,” says Banerjee.

Banerjee released a beta version just to tackle such a problem. “I went to visit him in the winter of 2010 and the beta version was released in April 2011.

Since then he’s only made, maybe, two complaints,” says Banerjee.

While Banerjee covered about 50 locations to get a flavor of what his customers wanted, Subodh Dubey, Group CIO, USHA International, got the pulse of the customer by following them further down the supply chain.

The after-sales service function of Rs 1,350-crore Usha International was managed by company-authorized service centers. “We realized that this set up was affecting the organization’s brand as customers were at the mercy of service providers,” says Dubey.

So Dubey centralized the after-sales function so that complaints are now registered at a central, multi-lingual call center. The system allocates jobs to service centers, which alerts service engineers via mobile. “One of the greatest benefits of having a call center is that clients can speak to someone when they call. Everyone hates being placed on hold or being told to call back, so the call center has greatly increased customer satisfaction,” says Dubey.

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP STERIA

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

STRATEGIC IT INCORPORATION THE GAME CHANGER Mukesh Aghi, CEO of Steria India, provides his perspectives on why India is where real innovation is happening and how CIOs can transform business with the help of outsourcing.

DR. MUKESH AGHI Chief Executive Officer - Asia Pacific, and Group Executive Sales Director, Steria.

Organizations are increasingly adopting BPO to cut costs. How can they use the same to also innovate?

Innovation is about deploying creative and unique methods to drive new productivity or top line growth into the company. There are several levels of innovation possible - from process innovation, which involves a new look at the ways of performing tasks or activities, to business model innovation, which could be grander in scope. Within process innovation, again, some processes have more potential for impact than others.

Recent trends in the BPO world include leverage of newer technologies such as cloud computing and SaaS to further help drive down operating costs and optimize service delivery.

How can Steria help anticipate the changes Indian businesses need to make in order to develop and thrive in a fast-changing environment?

Today, India is where real innovation is happening, and we can customize our offerings and solutions to suit the country’s unique needs as we understand that business in India is not about applying solutions off the shelf.

Generally speaking, there is resurgence in the economy and therefore the CIOs’ agenda

solution that is more operationally effective, is shifting to manage this growth. Naturally, enabling customers to benefit further from in this diverse and geographically expansive their organization’s information. market, CIOs need to create key differentiators for their companies through technology.

For this, they obviously need to incorporate What are the critical factors that orgaIT strategically in different business operanizations need to ensure while considering tions. These transformaoutsourcing? tion programs are considThe key objective of ‘Smart outsourcing’ ‘smart outsourcing’ is ered game changers. is investing in a Given the mammoth to invest in a company’s size and scope of India’s core competency and company’s core ambitious IT-led transoutsource the non-core competency and formation projects such business to strong busioutsourcing nonas the 27 Mission Mode ness partners. It is escore business Projects, we should exsential for organizations pect several opportunito do the following fi ve operations. ties for participation and things before outsourccontribution. ing their operations.

How do you help your clients meet many of today’s common business challenges?

Client IT environments are inefficient and ineffective for a variety of reasons. Often, the velocity of business and the changes therein puts significant demands on IT systems to be flexible and agile.

There is a need to assess the maturity level of a customer as regards IT and therefore to offer solutions that best fit the problem and the environment as opposed to the most expensive or the newest solution.

These systems also need to align with organizational processes and the needs of people within. The right solutions need to be designed so that your requirements are met, allowing the generation of the best return on your investment possible.

We believe in a process-led approach to delivering our services, rather than just focusing on getting the technology right.

Working this way means we can deliver a

Define the key objectives and motivation of the outsourcing program.

Make sure the company and internal executives are ready to work alongside the outsourcing partners.

Define requirement with performance indicators.

Define the outsourcing strategy.

Review and manage relationships with outsourcers.

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

Cover Story

Within six months, the new system increased service levels by 50 percent.

Today, says Dubey, 65 percent of customer complaints are resolved within 24 hours.

Like Usha International, Parna Ghosh, division head-strategic IS of the Rs 5,400-crore Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, also wanted to gain more control of his company’s downstream activities to get closer with the customer. Only, he wanted to track customer complaints emanating from Honda Motorcycle’s dealer.

“Although customers are not directly in touch with Honda because we have a dealership network, improving customer satisfaction is one of the organization’s primary goals. And Honda was receiving many customer complaints ranging from sales delivery commitments to the quality and speed of service,” says Ghosh.

Ghosh, a self-proclaimed foodie, looked for a solution and was inspired by his favorite dish: The biryani. Like an experienced chef who carefully mixes spices to create a great biryani, Ghosh brought together multiple functions including sales and delivery to create an in-house portal. The idea, he says, was to provide them with a 360-degree view of any particular complaint. “I needed to enable people in various departments directly engaged with the customer to be able to serve them faster and better,” says Ghosh.

The new system introduced tremendous results. “The time it takes to resolve customer complaints has been reduced to an average of two to three from 10-to-15 days earlier. Also, by building the system in-house we saved about Rs 80 lakh,” says Ghosh.

Helping Customers Help You A 2009 survey by Greenfield Online found that Indian businesses lose up to Rs 11,640 crore in revenue a year because poor services force customers to abandon transactions or end relationships. But sometimes business is lost just because customers forget.

That’s especially true in the life insurance industry. When customers forget to renew 46

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Parna Ghosh, Division Head-Strategic Information Systems, Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, lowered the time it takes to resolve customer complaint from 15 days to just two.

their policies, they lapse, which is bad news for the customer and for the insurer. “Customers can only reap the benefits of a life insurance contract if they continue doing long-term business,” says Thomson Thomas, VP-business systems & technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance.

“And timely renewals help us build a sound, and sustainable business.”

Thomas looked around him and found that he was not the only one with the problem. “We try to map our challenges to established businesses that have similar challenges and study their response,” says Thomson. “In this case, we found a reasonable fit with the billing collection process of the telecom industry.”

That idea was the seed for MINT, a system that allows the Rs 9,000-crore HDFC Standard Life to have an organized way of reminding customers to renew their policies. It helps manage the premium collection process by automatically notifying contact center agents and HDFC Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 7:07:19 PM

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Cover Story

Thomson Thomas, VP-Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Standard Life Insurance, helped customers by reminding them to renew their policies and grew renewal premiums by 46 percent.

Life’s front office team, at different stages during a policy lapse.

The benefits of MINT cut both ways.

Customers gain because there’s less chance their policies will lapse and HDFC Standard Life drove up its policy renewal numbers, an important metric in the insurance industry.

Post the project, renewal premiums mushroomed from Rs 3,380 crore to Rs 4,945 crore, a 46 percent jump. And the 48

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company’s persistency ratio grew from 72 percent to 82 percent, which helped push it’s market share from 8.7 percent to 11.9 percent.

Some kilometers down the road, Devesh Mathur, COO, HSBC India, was also looking for a way to empower his clients and build loyalty. His aim was to allow a niche group of HSBC’s high profile customers to make better decisions about their investment portfolios.

A major chunk of HSBC’s customers are premier corporate account holders and NRIs who depend on service advisors to manage their portfolios and keep them updated about various products and services. “Though this group of customers is not averse to technology, we realized that they prefer and feel more assured when a human voice communicates with them, rather than the cold tone of an IVR,” says Mathur.

In response, Mathur introduced the video relationship manager which allows customers to interact with a team of HSBC’s advisors via video conference. “It was impossible for a comprehensive team of advisors available at each HSBC location,” says Mathur.

“Now we have a centralized team that’s available to customers worldwide over video conferencing.”

Along with this he introduced the Advance Global View Proposition, which gives HSBC’s globally dispersed customers a single view of all their accounts. And building on the goodwill these technologies created, he added a callback icon on HSBC’s website which allows customers to ask for a call-back from an advisor if they are interested in a new product.

“A customer might visit a website and show interest in a product, but will get in touch with the organization because the process of getting in touch is both time-consuming and discouraging,” he says.

All put together, these initiatives spurred cross-selling at HSBC, especially among its high-value and complex products and over the next five years, is expected to generate revenues of Rs 28.9 crore.

It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating: In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want. CIO Debarati Roy is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 7:07:31 PM

Companies Inside: Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services IndiaFirst Life Insurance Mercedes-Benz India Paradeep Phosphates Reliance Communications

Expand

All Around Whether they are finding new ways to support expanding businesses or creating new channels for growth or expanding within existing markets, this year’s CIO 100 winners are fattening their company’s bottom lines.

By Shubhra Rishi

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Steve Jobs said that. And he should know. Jobs redefined the term creativity when he gifted Apple to the world. Today, more than ever, businesses want to replicate Apple’s success, making creativity a top priority for leaders including the CIO. “Driving growth through innovation is not only possible, but becoming an imperative for many organizations,” says Puneesh Lamba, GM-IT and head-EA,

Punj

Lloyd.

Gartner

agrees. According to the research firm, by 2015, IT’s direct involvement in innovation development efforts, pattern-based

strategies,

and

harnessing the power of social networks could potentially increase enterprise revenue.

This year’s CIO 100 winners are already on that road. Here’s how

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Delivering New Channels Geojit BNP Paribas, with 24 years of in-depth broking experience in the Indian capital market faced a big challenge like many of its competitors: Shrinking revenues per transaction and rising costs. Aware of the growth of mobile phone penetration in India, CTO Balakrishnan A., grabbed the first opportunity (mobile trading was only allowed by the government in September of 2010) to develop a comprehensive mobile trading application.

“The objective of the application was to reach investors in every nook and corner of the country and tap into entry-level investors and the trading community,” says Balakrishnan.

Using Open Source software, his team integrated the company’s existing mid and back office systems with a mobile platform. Today, that allows Geojit’s traders to get their hands on market data, and news on the move. The new mobile app, which Balakrishnan says has been tested on over 1,500 Java-enabled phones, also lets traders to carry out transactions over mobile phones.

“It enables investors and traders to transact exactly like they would on trading terminals.

And customers can get alerts depending on their indications set,” says Balakrishnan.

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It’s too early to figure out how much the new channel has added to Geojit’s bottom line, but 50,000 customers, old and new, use the mobile platform, says Balakrishnan.

Another CIO 100 2011 winner who decided to create a new channel for business to flow in is Vinayak Khadye, CTO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance. For years the insurance sector’s offerings have been considered complex and dense. That’s a mindset IndiaFirst wanted to change by

increasing transparency in IndiaFirst’s products and services. It’s an agenda the company takes seriously. “We are the first life insurance company to make it mandatory for our sales force to show product audio video clips to customers. The AV explains the product in simple language and highlights key offerings of different plans. This is followed by a verification call to every customer to make sure that the insurance plan is not misunderstood by the customer.

Both the AV demonstration and the follow up call are linked to the KPI of each member of the sales team,” says Khadye.

Khadye wanted to take that idea of transparency further and create a new channel for the business. “Despite its products being suitable for distribution and service through the Internet, the insurance industry has not really leveraged the Internet.”

That was the idea behind Life Store, a complete, self-service online channel which provides an in-depth knowledge of insurance plans and allows customers to chose an insurance plan online and get post-sale self-service. “The platform provides value-added features such as simple step-by-step comparison of products, live video call, details about how and where a customer’s money is being invested, etcetera,” says Khadye.

Khadye expects the new channel to bring in 7.5 percent of IndiaFirst’s new business and 7.5 percent of its renewal premiums, adding up to about Rs 170 lakh in its first year, and about Rs 14 crore by its fifth.

Diversifying the Business

Vinayak Khadye, CTO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, created a new self-service channel that will add Rs 14 crore to the company’s coffers by its fifth year.

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Having innovation as part of a CIO’s portfolio can pose a severe challenge when an enterprise decides to expand into an adjacent line of business.

But that’s exactly the challenge that V. Seetaramaiah GM-IT, Paradeep Phosphates, faced head on when the Rs 3,500-crore fertilizer major decided to venture into pesticides.

“When PPL diversified into the pesticides business in June 2010, process owners declared it impossible to start operations without system support from day one. But the processes of the pesticides business are unique, completely different from the fertilizer processes and quite complex in nature,” says Seetaramaiah.

Adding to Seetaramaiah’s challenge was that he needed to facilitate the new business without buying a new ERP. But he attacked the problem and found a solution. “The business process configurability in SAP was creatively exploited to implement the new and extremely complex business Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

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requirements with negligible coded customization. But for this flexibility and creative design, it would have been impossible to implement the requirements of both, completely divergent businesses in a single application,” he says.

His work allowed the new company to get off the ground and within 10 months, the pesticide business saw a turnover of Rs 23 crore—using an existing sales force, dealer network, and IT infrastructure. “The pesticides system has more than paid for itself in 10 months,” says Seetaramaiah.

Finding More Customers Increasing a business’ customer base is hard work in most industries. But in the world’s second largest telecom market, with its cutthroat pricing strategies and its mobile number portability, it’s hard on an altogether new level.

Reliance Communications is key player in that sector. And CIO Alpna Doshi, wanted to create a way for the telecom giant to push out more campaigns to targeted audiences and increase the number of customers buying into Reliance communications’ products. That was the idea behind her award-winning project: A fullyautomated promotional framework, which helped launch more campaigns for various customer segments and reduced time-to-market from 30 days to a mere two days.

“It has helped launch more campaigns and promotional schemes for different customer segments and track customer response to a campaign immediately. Consequently, it increased revenue and reduced customer churn,” says Doshi.

At Mercedes-Benz India, Head of IT, Rajeev Jorapur, was also looking for ways to help expand the business. He realized that this could be done by tweaking the processes used by the sales force. “We wanted to redesign our retail processes so that our sales force could concentrate and focus more on interacting with our customers,” says Jorapur.

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V. Seetaramaiah, GM-IT, Paradeep Phosphates, creatively tweaked the fertilizer major’s systems to allow it to support an entirely new pesticide business that made Rs 23 crore in just 10 months.

So he developed a workflow based on a blend of lean process, automation, and system-driven proactive alerts. The system eliminated or re-assigned non-value-add activities to the backoffice. “This resulted in more regular and intense contacts with our customers, better followups, more proactive calling and better need-analysis. All of that enables the sales force to gain a deeper understanding of its customers, their driving habits, preferences, finances, and enables them to offer the right products to match the needs of the customer,” says Jorapur.

It also introduced 100 percent more leads than Mercedes had in 2010, 50 percent more volumes, and over 15 percent jump in customer satisfaction.

Steve Jobs would approve. CIO Shubhra Rishi is trainee journalist. Send feedback on this feature to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com.

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 7:07:43 PM

5 Days & 4 Nights|2 Destinations|2 Programs

cloud & Big data 2012

30 nov- 2 dec|pattaya 3-4 dec, 2011|Bangkok Where i i t roadndia’s gets d map ecided !

from BuzzWord to Business The Year Ahead is the most anticipated IT event of the year where leading CIOs and IT heads from India come together to explore the latest trends in technology and chart out their IT roadmap for the next year.

CIO is proud to bring you the fifth edition of The Year Ahead 2012 at Pattaya. With a blend of formal sessions and informal settings, this is the ideal platform for you to network with peers and deliberate on your IT strategy for the next year.

Also introducing ‘Cloud and Big Data 2012’, a dedicated symposium unveiling in Bangkok, that will update you with the latest trends and developments on Cloud Computing and Big Data.

To Participate, Contact rupesh rupesh sreedharan. sreedharan.

Email: rupesh_sreedharan@idgindia.com Phone: +91 9324220513

the Where eets m future ay! tod

program itinerary 30 nov- 2 dec: pattaya 6 themes @ year ahead m The

Year Ahead m Future Technologies m Business Transformation m Evolving Datacenter m Smart Enterprise m Innovation @ Work

3- 4 dec: Bangkok Cloud and Big data 2012 For MorE DETAIlS Visit www.cio.in/yearahead EvEnt By

hostEd By

Companies Inside: Maruti Suzuki Punj Lloyd Safexpress

Iron Out the Kinks

By a n u p Va r i e r

straightening out inefficacies in business processes is possibly among the most unsung acts of the IT leader. but this year’s CIO 100 winners, show you how to optimize business and grow the bottomline.

Optimizing your business with IT is like oiling the shock absorbers of your vehicle. It won’t make your car look any fancier, but it will definitely make the ride smoother. The fact that IT doesn’t always fatten the organization’s balance sheet, doesn’t warrant dismissing its contributions. Many business processes that were once manual are today unimaginable out of their digital or virtual form. Take e-mail. Mail used to mean something that concerned the India Postal Service and had very little to do with corporates like Yahoo!

Spend Watch

or Google till towards the turn of the

There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that organizations need to track their expenses effectively.

But in every organization, there are some processes that are difficult to keep a tab on due to the number of stakeholders and the ad hoc manner in which sub-tasks are performed. By virtue of the industry that it operates in, Punj Lloyd was afflicted by that very dilemma.

Punj Lloyd is a project-based organization with interests that range from EPC (engineering, procurement and construction), pipeline, tankages, construction, and offshore developments.

“Everything that we do, whether it’s constructing an oil refinery, building a highway, or laying a pipeline, is considered a separate project. Their value ranges from a few hundred to thousands of crore and hence each project runs its own P&L,” says Puneesh Lamba, GM-IT & head-EA. For Punj Lloyd, a company that runs multiple projects simultaneously across the globe, such an approach meant that the individual project teams were allowed to start spending without even defining their budgets in the company’s ERP. And even when a budget was defined, there were frequent over-runs and no way for the firm’s senior management to check which projects were over-budget. That’s because a project, on an average, has around 150 active tasks—each with their own independent budgets—making it was extremely difficult to monitor task-wise spending.

last century. But today, e-mail is taken for granted and is at the heart of all communications.

Modifying

business

processes

to achieve maximum efficiency is a constant endeavor for IT leaders.

Here are some of the ways in which your peers who have won the CIO 100 2011 Awards are helping their organization’s cause.

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“We had no visibility on a project’s profitability status,” says Lamba.

So he customized the company’s workflow, bringing a tighter integration between project accounting and the procurement module. This ensures that when a purchase order is raised by project teams in the procurement module, the system automatically checks in with the project accounting module and only approves a request if funds are available. “So if a budget is not defined in ERP, then that project team is not allowed to obtain funds,” says Lamba. This forces the project team to create a task-wise budget for the project, define it in ERP, and get it approved before proceeding. “The beauty of this solution isn’t only that it stopped further spending in each project task beyond budget, but it also ensured that key stakeholders receive alert mailers when spending reaches 80 percent of an allocated budget,” says Lamba. Such an alert system provides ample time to revise a budget, if required, and to ensure that projects don’t stop when budgets are exhausted.

This new solution also ensures that senior management has greater visibility into the task-wise expenditures of individual projects, says Lamba. “Disciplined spending from project teams ensured that 18 percent more project milestones were reached without overshooting their budget,” says Lamba. This transparency also enabled Punj Lloyd’s pre-sales team to get far more accurate information regarding the cost of a project, which helped them bid more precisely for similar projects, says Lamba.

Forecasting Demand Inaccurate demand forecasts adversely affect the bottomline of an enterprise. It is common knowledge that a forecast which is lower than the actual demand results in shortages and loss of sales; and higher-thanactual forecasts result in excess inventory and consequently higher carrying costs for

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Rajesh Uppal, Executive Officer IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India, boosted the spare parts business of India’s largest car company’s by 30 percent.

a company. But in today’s dynamic business environment, simple statistical forecasting models fall short and deliver insufficient precision. And had it not been for its IT team’s foresight, Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL), India’s largest passenger car company, would have had to face a similar challenge.

At Maruti, the availability of spare parts across its service network plays a crucial role in achieving customer satisfaction. It’s a complex operation involving about 37,000 SKUs and many regional distribution centers. “The complexity of managing the process has increased significantly with the exponential growth of the business, the need to handle obsolete parts, and the introduction of competitive products,” says Rajesh Uppal, executive officer IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India.

These factors led Maruti to implement an IT solution in the form of a spare parts demand REAL CIO WORLD | s e p T e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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forecasting and inventory optimization software. “This IT-based system is proving to be a real business enabler by helping MSIL gauge demand effectively and provide strategic and predictive insights into the spare parts market,” says Uppal.

The solution, says Uppal, improved forecast accuracy by 35 percent, lowered inventory by 20 percent, and increased revenues from spare parts by 30 percent.

“The solution enabled Maruti to capitalize on the opportunity in spare parts as a business so as to increase both top line and bottomline, both for MSIL and its business partners including spare part vendors and dealers,” says Uppal. “And it was a major contributor in winning Maruti the J.D.Power Customer Satisfaction Index award.”

Distribution Redefined An offline work system that involves manual intervention is not only inefficient but also a breeding ground for malpractice.

Safexpress, a major player in the logistics solutions industry in India, was burdened by such issues in their dealings with the vendors from whom they hire trucks for their daily operations.

Most Indian logistics companies do not own their fleets but hire trucks from vendors.

Safexpress, too, relies on over 70 lorry-hire vendors to provide it with a fleet of nearly 3,000 trucks. However, the documentation for loading and unloading of these trucks at the origin and destination were completely manual. This allowed less-than-honest drivers to work in cahoots with supervisors to load less than their truck’s optimum capacity and lower fuel consumption. The supervisor in charge of loading could then call for another truck from the open market to transport the remaining load and get his cut out of that deal.

At the destination, the person in-charge would manually write out a check based on the freight’s value and hand it over to the truck driver. The driver, in turn, passed the check to his manager for recording, reconciliation and bank-deposit. This entire loop had no audit trails either for financial processes or even for the weight carried by the truck.

In response, Head of IT, Shalabh Raizada, created a database of all the vendors 56

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Shalabh Raizada, Head-IT, Safexpress, found a way to bypass less-than-honest truck drivers and saved the logistics company Rs 18 crore annually.

Safexpress worked with and included the vehicle number of the trucks Safexpress used. He then interfaced this with the financial payables module which is accessible across over 208 locations. So now when a truck reaches its destination, its number is entered into the system, which automatically updates the financial module and demands that a vendor account be credited with a pre-determined amount. This setup helps reduce payout time to vendors from over eight days to less than 12 hours. This has helped the organization move out of an ad hoc, leaky, manual and offline method to a systems-oriented, transparent and auditable process which aids cash outflow visibility and facilitates the efficient transfer of cash.

And because the system also triggers an SMS to an operations manager if a supervisor does not load a truck optimally, Safexpress has been able to save Rs 18 crore annually from optimum capacity utilization.

That’s what they call win-win. CIO Anup Varier is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to anup_varier@idgindia.com

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The

Honorees 2011

C o m p i l e d B y S h a rd h a S u b ra m a n i a n

Tarun Pandey

Designation: Vice-President IT Company: Aditya Birla Financial Services Industry: BFSI Project: Unified Collaboration Additional Award: Special Award for Innovation

Manish Choksi

Designation: Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO Company: Asian Paints Industry: Manufacturing Project: Social Media Enabled Collaboration Additional Award: Special Award for Innovation

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Sankaranarayanan Raghavan

Pankaj Agrawal

Sanjay Malhotra

Dheeraj Sinha

Designation: Director-IT Company: Aegon Religare Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Automated Underwriting Additional Award: NA

Designation: Head-IT Governance & CISO Company: Aircel Industry: Telecom Project: Security Operations Center Additional Award: Special Award for Security

Rajat Sharma

Yogesh Zope

Amrita Gangotra

Dr. Jai Menon

Designation: President-IT & Global CIO Company: Atul Industry: Manufacturing Project: IIntegrated Accounts Payable and Digital Invoices Additional Award: NA

Designation: Vice-President IT Company: Bharat Forge Industry: Manufacturing Project: Storage Consolidation Additional Award: Special Award for Storage

Designation: Vice President-IT BS & e-BIZ Company: Amway India Industry: FMCG Project: Treasury System Additional Award: NA

Designation: Director-IT (India & South Asia) Company: Bharti Airtel Industry: Telecom Project: Integrated App Stack Additional Award: Special Award for Infrastructure

Designation: Head-IT Company: Apollo Tyres Industry: Manufacturing Project: Plant Integration with Management Additional Award: NA

Designation: Group CIO, Bharti Enterprises & Director-Global Innovation & IT, Bharti Airtel Company: Bharti Enterprises Industry: Telecom Project: Global IT Delivery Model Additional Award: Special Award for Innovation

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The Honorees 2011

Prashant Veer Singh

Rajesh Mohan

Karanbir Singh

Niranjan Bhalivade

A.K. Mohanty

Valerio Fernandes

Rajesh R. Nair

Designation: Vice President Company: Credit Suisse Business Analytics India Industry: Financial Accounting Project: Business Continuity Additional Award: Special Award for Security

Ramnath Iyer

Designation: CTO Company: Crisil Industry: Rating Agency Project: Ratings Workflow App Additional Award: NA

Srinibash Sahoo

Satyajit Sarker

Tamal Chakravorty

Jayantha Prabhu

Suneel Aradhye

Designation: CIO Company: Essar Steel Industry: Manufacturing Project: Variant Configuration in SAP Additional Award: NA

Designation: Director & Head-Technology Infrastructure Services Company: FIL India Business Services Industry: BFSI Project: Enterprise Monitoring Strategy Review Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Amit Gupta

Prashanth M.J.

Sanjeev Prasad

Balakrishnan A.

Prashanta Ghoshal

Johnny Paramian

Shailesh Joshi

Designation: CIO Company: Bharti Infratel Industry: Telecom Infrastructure Provider Project: Ops Management Center Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: General Manager-IT Company: Continental Automotive Components India Industry: Manufacturing Project: WAN Optimization Additional Award: Special Award for Networking

Designation: Regional Head-IT & Test (South Asia) Company: Ericsson India Industry: Telecom Project: Collaboration Suite Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: Senior VP & CIO Company: Genpact Industry: IT Project: Massive Infrastructure Transformation Additional Award: NA

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Designation: Join President-IT & Systems Company: Binani Industries Industry: Manufacturing Project: Diversified Group IT Strategy Additional Award: NA

Designation: CTO Company: Essar Group Industry: Conglomerate Project: Desktop Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Storage

Designation: CTO Company: Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services Industry: BFSI Project: Mobile Trading Systems Additional Award: NA

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Designation: Vice President-IT Company: BSES Industry: Utilities Project: Automation of Business Processes and Customer Care Additional Award: NA

Designation: Director-ITES Company: Geometric Industry: IT/ITES Project: Desktop Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: CIO Company: CEAT Industry: Manufacturing Project: CRM Solution for Dealers Additional Award: N.A

Designation: Senior VP & Head-Technology Company: DSP BlackRock Investment Managers Industry: BFSI Project: Tier 3 Datacenter Outsourcing/ Hosted Cloud Additional Award: NA

Designation: Group CIO Company: GMR Group Industry: Construction Project: Desktop Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: Head-IT Company: Central Bank of India Industry: BFSI Project: Internet Banking Additional Award: Special Award for Infrastructure

Designation: GM-IT Company: DTDC Courier & Cargo Industry: Logistics Project: Migration to Open Source (database, clients, servers, mail, social media) Additional Award: NA

Designation: CTO Company: Firstsource Solutions Industry: ITES Project: Transforming App Delivery Model Additional Award: Special Award for Infrastructure

Designation: Head-IT Company: Godrej Industries Industry: Conglomerate Project: Infrastructure Consolidation Additional Award: Special Award for Infrastructure

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

9/13/2011 7:29:17 PM

The Honorees 2011

Thomson Thomas

Vijay Sethi

N. Nataraj

Parna Ghosh

S.T. Sathiavageeswaran

Devesh Mathur

Veneeth Purushotaman

Designation: Head-Technology Company: HyperCity Retail Industry: Retail Project: Automated In-store Marcom Additional Award: NA

Pravir Vohra

Designation: President & Group CTO Company: ICICI Bank Industry: BFSI Project: Desktop Virtualization Additional Award: NA

Joydeep Dutta

S.C. Mittal

U.C. Dubey

Sankarson Banerjee

Vinayak Khadye

S. Ramasamy

Designation: Executive Director-Information Systems Company: Indian Oil Industry: Oil and gas Project: Automated e-Payments System Additional Award: NA

Chakrapani Perangur

Designation: CIO Company: Indus Towers Industry: Telecom Infrastructure Provider Project: Smart Tower Operations Additional Award: NA

C.V.G. Prasad

Murali Krishna K.

V.C. Kumanan

Subhasis Sarkar

R.D. Malav

Designation: VP-Business Systems & Technology Company: HDFC Standard Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Customer Renewal and Retention Additional Award: NA

Designation: Chief Technology & Services Officer Company: HSBC Bank Industry: BFSI Project: Alternative Service Delivery Channels Additional Award: Special Award for Innovation

Designation: Executive Director-IT Company: IFFCO-TOKIO General Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Online Rules Engine for Automobile Underwriting Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: CIO Company: ING Vysya Bank Industry: BFSI Project: Instantaneous Credit Payment System Additional Award: NA

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Designation: VP & CIO Company: Hero MotoCorp Industry: Manufacturing Project: Dealer Management System Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: CIO Company: IIFL Industry: BFSI Project: Trader Terminal Additional Award: NA

Designation: SVP & Group Head-CCD Company: Infosys Industry: IT/ITES Project: Storage Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Storage

Designation: CIO Company: Hexaware Technologies Industry: IT/ITES Project: Private Cloud Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: CTO Company: IndiaFirst Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Online Insurance Channel Additional Award: NA

Designation: Sr. DirectorInformation Technology Company: Infrastructure Development Finance Industry: BFSI Project: Energy Efficient Datacenter Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: Division HeadStrategic Information System Company: Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India Industry: Manufacturing Project: Customer Complaint Management System Additional Award: NA

Designation: CTO Company: ICICI Securities Industry: BFSI Project: Customer Engagement Platform Additional Award: NA

Designation: Divisional CIO Company: ITC Lifestyle Retailing Business Division Industry: Retail Project: Secondary Sales Tracking and Inventory Replenishment Additional Award: NA

Designation: Executive Director-Information Systems Company: Hindustan Petroleum Industry: Oil and gas Project: B2B Integration Additional Award: NA

Designation: Sr. Executive Director-MS & IT, & Group CTO Company: IFFCO Industry: Manufacturing Project: Integrated Info System (Updates to Farmers Over Mobile) Additional Award: NA

Designation: Vice President-IT Company: Jindal Poly Films Industry: Manufacturing Project: Private Cloud Additional Award: NA

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The Honorees 2011

Rakesh Mishra

Umesh Mehta

Sunil Mehta

Jagdish Lomte

Dhiresh Rustogi

Venkateswaran Krishnan

Vinay Khargonkar

Sanjay Choudhari

Daya Prakash

Pravin Savant

V.S. Parthasarathy

Girish Rao

Rajesh Uppal

Dr. Neena Pahuja

Hitesh Arora

Rajeev Jorapur

Sudhir Reddy

Rajeev Batra

Sebastian Joseph

Ajay Meher

Designation: Head-IT & Communication Company: Jindal Steel & Power Industry: Manufacturing Project: Document Management and BPM Additional Award: NA

Designation: Vice President-IT Company: L&T Finance Industry: BFSI Project: BPM and Post Dated Check Management Additional Award: NA

Designation: Group CIO & EVP-Finance & M&A Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Industry: Conglomerate Project: Business Intelligence and Analytics Additional Award: NA

Designation: Head-IT Company: Mercedes Benz Industry: Manufacturing Project: Retail Consultancy Project Additional Award: NA

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Designation: CIO Company: Jubilant Life Sciences Industry: Pharma and life sciences Project: Tier 3 Datacenter Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: Head-IS Company: L&T Industry: Manufacturing Project: Real-Time Collaboration System Additional Award: NA

Designation: Head-IT Company: Marico Industry: FMCG Project: Re-architecting IT Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: VP & CIO Company: MindTree Industry: IT/ITES Project: Unified Corporate Portal Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award and Special Award for Infrastructure

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Designation: Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia) Company: JWT Industry: Advertising Project: Network Consolidation and Public Cloud-based Communications Additional Award: Special Award for Networking

Designation: Head-IT Systems Company: L&T Power Industry: Utilities Project: Web-Based Document Management and Project Collaboration Suite Additional Award: NA

Designation: Executive Officer-IT & CIO Company: Maruti Suzuki India Industry: Manufacturing Project: Demand Forecasting and Inventory Optimization Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: CIO Company: MTS India (Sistema Shyam Teleservices) Industry: Telecom Project: Green Datacenters Additional Award: NA

Designation: CIO Company: KEC International Industry: Construction Project: Desktop Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Green IT

Designation: Head-IT Company: LG Electronics India Industry: Consumer Electronics Project: Partner Collaboration System Additional Award: NA

Designation: CIO Company: Max Healthcare Institute Industry: Services Project: Private (Hosted) Cloud Additional Award: NA

Designation: PresidentTechnology & FM Company: Mudra Communications Industry: Advertising Project: Mobile App Framework Additional Award: NA

Designation: Executive VP-IT Company: Kotak Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Integrated Internal Communications Solution Additional Award: NA

Designation: CTO Company: Lowe Lintas India Industry: Advertising Project: Collaboration and KM Platform Additional Award: NA

Designation: Director & Head-IT Company: Max New York Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Mobile Application to Track Sales Activity Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: Sr. VP-IT & New Media Company: Multi Screen Media Industry: Entertainment Project: Digital Asset Management Additional Award: NA

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The Honorees 2011

K.N.C. Nair

Avinash Arora

Designation: Director-ICT (India & S.E. Asia) Company: New Holland Fiat India Industry: Manufacturing Project: IT-enabled Tractor Additional Award: Special Award for Innovation

Rohan Deshpande

Designation: CTO Company: Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Industry: Advertising Project: Automation for Rural Marketing Additional Award: NA

V. Subramaniam

V. Seetaramaiah

Puneesh Lamba

Ajay Misra

David Briskman

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar Designation: President & CTO Company: Reliance Capital Industry: BFSI Project: Employee Exit Management System Additional Award: NA

Shashi Ravulapaty

Designation: Sr. Vice President & CTO Company: Reliance Capital Commercial Finance Industry: BFSI Project: Indexing of All Customer Documents Additional Award: Special Award for Security

Alpna J. Doshi

Dr. Sanjay Saraswat

Chandrasekaran Mohan

Shalabh Raizada

Mohammad Wasim

Arun Gupta

Dr. Selvam K.

Virender Pal

Muralidharan Ramachandran

Alok Kumar

Designation: Head-IT Company: Muthoot Group Industry: BFSI Project: Home-brewed Core Banking System Additional Award: NA

Designation: GM-IT & Head-Enterprise Apps Company: Punj Lloyd Industry: Construction Project: Budgetary Controls Solution and Remote Equipment Monitoring Additional Award: NA

Designation: CIO Company: Reliance Communications Industry: Telecom Project: Real Time Operational Data Store Additional Award: Special Award for Storage

Designation: CCA & Group CTO Company: Shoppers Stop Group Industry: Retail Project: Back Up and Recovery with High Uptime Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

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Designation: CIO Company: Punjab National Bank Industry: BFSI Project: Data Warehouse Additional Award: NA

Designation: CIO-Carrier Business Company: Reliance Globalcom Industry: Telecom/ Communications Project: Integrated Unified Communications Platform Additional Award: Special Award for Networking

Designation: Group CIO Company: Siva Industries and Holding Industry: Conglomerate Project: Private Cloud Additional Award: Special Award for Networking

Designation: VP & CIO Company: Ranbaxy Laboratories Industry: Pharmaceutical Project: Automation of Quality Management System Additional Award: NA

Designation: Head-IT Shared Services Company: Reliance Life Insurance Industry: BFSI Project: Agile Enterprise IT Architecture Additional Award: Hall of fame and Special Award for Networking

Designation: CTO Company: SpiceJet Industry: Aviation Project: Enterprise Process Consolidation Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: Director-IT & CIO (India & Gulf Area) Company: Otis Elevator Company India Industry: Manufacturing Project: Cross-team Integration to Support Operations Additional Award: NA

Designation: Head-IT Company: Safexpress Industry: Logistics Project: Freight Hauler Management System Additional Award: NA

Designation: CIO Company: Syntel Industry: IT/ITES Project: Enterprise Virtualization Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: GM-IT Company: Paradeep Phosphates Industry: Manufacturing Project: System to Take on Transactions of Diversified Entity Additional Award: NA

Designation: Director Company: Sapient Industry: IT Project: Private Cloud Additional Award: Special Award for Efficient Enterprise

Designation: VP & Global HeadInternal IT & Shared Services Company: TCS Industry: IT/ITES Project: Enhanced Storage for Faster Backup and Recovery Additional Award: Special Award for Storage

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9/13/2011 7:31:40 PM

The Honorees 2011

C.R. Narayanan

T.G. Dhandapani

Ravi Ramakrishnan

Deepak Rout

Subodh Dubey

Subrata Banerjee

Navin Chadha

Mukund Prasad

Sanjay Jain

Umesh Jain

Designation: CIO Company: Tulip Telecom Industry: Telecom Project: Integrated Salesforce.com with ERP Additional Award: NA

Designation: VP-IT Company: Vedanta Aluminium Industry: Manufacturing Project: Private Cloud Additional Award: Special Award for Infrastructure

Designation: Group CIO Company: TVS Motors Industry: Manufacturing Project: Database Management through Compression Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: IT Director Company: Vodafone Essar Industry: Telecom Project: Low-cost High Yield CRM Additional Award: Special Award for Security

Designation: Sr. GM-Global IT Company: UFLEX Industry: Manufacturing Project: Global MPLS Network Additional Award: NA

Designation: DirectorCorporate Strategy & Business Excellence, & Group CIO Company: Welspun Group Industry: Manufacturing Project: High Availability Datacenter Additional Award: NA

Designation: CISO Company: Uninor Industry: Telecom Project: Holistic Security Management Additional Award: NA

Designation: Group CIO & Head-Global Transformation Practice Company: WNS Global Services Industry: IT/ITES Project: Near Real Time Data Availability in a Disaster Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Designation: Group CIO Company: USHA International Industry: Manufacturing Project: Customer and Call Center Management Additional Award: NA

Designation: Sr. President & CIO Company: YES Bank Industry: BFSI Project: Mobile Banking Additional Award: Hall of Fame Award

Congratulate CIO & Its Partners

the winners of CIO100 Awards 2011

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EXTREME NETWORKS

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

THE DRIVE TOWARD GREENER DATA CENTERS Today’s network managers may realize bottom-line savings in energy and budget when IT operations and network equipment are centralized during the migration to virtualized networks, cloud computing and converged storage infrastructures.

What are the drivers for green data centers?

Increasing costs, the migration to cloud and virtualized network and converged storage infrastructures is driving the need for centralization. According to efficientdatacenters.com, “Implementing virtualization provides an incremental 8 percent reduction in total data center power.” This is good news for data centers motivated to go greener. Yet servers represent only a portion of data center resource utilization.

Network efficiency is likewise essential to delivering a greener data center.

Once an enterprise network switch is poweredon, top considerations include average wattage per port, power supply efficiency, the ability to dynamically adjust power on a port-by-port basis, as well as real-time monitoring.

How is green efficiency measured in data centers?

Overall data center efficiency includes power and cooling requirements for networking, servers, and storage as well as the ability to leverage low cost or even free cooling and other determinants of TCO. Beyond cost is the ongoing imperative for enterprises to increasingly demonstrate their CSR, one aspect of which is reducing their carbon footprint. Each country has its own standards. The efficiency of the networking equipment deployed directly impacts a data center’s green credentials. When engineering a data center, two key metrics to be aware of are: Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE).

No technology will remain “boss” of the data center without green credentials.

What is the magnitude of the issue?

According to a 2011 Greenpeace study, a single data center may draw the equivalent power of 80,000 US or 250,000 EU homes.

On a global basis, 2010 data center demand topped 330 Billion kWh. The study goes on to predict triple or quadruple power demand by 2020. Everywhere one turns, cloud demand is increasing, which means growing demand for data center networking capacity. As Arthur Cole says, “Going forward, speed and flexibility will define the data center, and that means networking is the new boss.” However, no technology — including networking — will remain “boss” of the data center without green credentials.

How green are Extreme Networks’ switches?

Extreme Networks’ switches support hot/cold aisle containment via front-back or back-front cooling, power monitoring, as well as switch interfaces that adapt to server power-down capabilities. Low power consumption results in a lower operating temperature which positively impacts airflow temperature. And, they promote longevity through stacking flexibility, ExtremeXOS upgradability, and shared hardware architecture across the portfolio that minimizes obsolescence. Then, we promote maximum recyclability when a product reaches end-of-life. From our Summit edge switches to our BlackDiamond core switches, we deliver energy saving designs to enterprises, data centers and service providers.

HARPREET CHADHA Vice President, Product Line Management Extreme Networks In his current role, Harpreet Chadha manages a wired-wireless networking portfolio for enterprises embracing rich user and device mobility, data centers evolving to virtualization and the cloud, and service providers building scalable mobile backhaul infrastructure.

Does the ExtremeXOS have built-in green applications?

Absolutely. One key ExtremeXOS capability is Intelligent Power Management. Building on our ExtremeXOS Universal Port capability of identifying the type of device connected to an interface and modifying the port parameters accordingly, ExtremeXOS Universal Port Manager continually samples the link for activity.

If there is no activity, power for the link is shut down, and the power is sampled at intervals for new activity. The other option is to automatically turn off power to certain interfaces using policy-based settings. This leverages the ExtremeXOS’ extensibility framework.

By creating this policy based on time-of-day, overall power costs may be reduced by up to 70%, achieving savings of up to 91% versus competitive chassis-based solutions based on Extreme Networks lab testing.

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

CIO 100 2011

Creative Minds The largest awards ceremony for excellence in IT leadership reveals new gems and shinier ideas.

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Amid the luminosity of chandeliers poised 23 feet above, surrounded by the grandeur of a 13,000 square foot ballroom, and sipping the celebratory spirit, sat India’s 100 most creative CIOs. In the sixth edition of its annual awards, the CIO 100, 2011, was a touch above the rest. On the 26th and 27th of August, the JW Marriott, Pune, played host to the country’s 100 most creative IT leaders, as their peers applauded their achievements.

Year after year, we salute IT leaders who beat the vagaries of the economy, outperform their competition, and set new benchmarks for business. This year was no different. While riding the waves of the upturn, combating fierce competition, and devising new strategies, some leaders fell by the way side. Others stood tall and strove to change the fortunes of their businesses.

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Creative Genius Engineer, innovator, entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker, corporate trainer. Alvin lee goes by many tags but he is known for one thing: the ability to inspire. He held India’s CIos spellbound as he shared his success story.

A True Transformer The poster boy of India’s Internet businesses, Hitesh oberoi, beroi, MD & CEo, CE Info Edge India, engaged the audience with the astounding story of an idea that almost failed, but also an idea that created a watershed moment in India’s online history.

Big Debate IT leaders from India’s most prestigious companies gathered in multiple roundtable meetings to discuss technology’s most thorny issues. Their conversations opened up a wealth of new strategies and innovative approaches.

And that called for ingenuity. Ingenuity that could enable growth, optimize business processes, create competitive advantage, and enhance customer service. Those that aced all of the above entered the ranks of the CIO100 creative IT leaders of 2011.

And those that did better than the best earned an additional special title. To honor their efforts, we presented 35 IT leaders with a special award in eight categories. But the special award winners need a special treat. So, CIO invited the Colonial Cousins, who created magic with their soulful music to bring the day to a close.

The second day started with Alvin Lee, founder of Beautiful Minds, a corporate training organization, who encouraged CIOs to believe in their ‘ridiculous’ ideas. This was followed by Sudhir Mehta, MD, Manforce Trucks, who urged CIOs to use creativity and technology to make the lives of the less fortunate better. In the last session, Hitesh Oberoi, MD & CEO, Info Edge India, told CIOs that no idea is ahead of its time.

Apart from the sessions, there were nine thought-provoking and insightful roundtables. As twilight arrived, CIO gave India its 100 most creative IT leaders.

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Twice Blessed Even among a gathering of India’s finest CIos, CI a small number of IT leaders stood out. These were CIo 100 2011’s Special Award winners. They were celebrated for their outstanding contribution in eight categories.

Hitting the Right Note At the end of two very packed days, CIos unwinded to the music of two of India’s more celebrated artists: Gary lawyer enthralled the audience with international hits and the Colonial Cousins won their hearts with Indian fusion.

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aCknowledgeMent staying there is another. Consistent excellence —year after year, across parameters including agility, boldness, and innovation

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Alvin lee, Author, cAstles cAn fly And innovAtion consultAnt

I am just not convinced by popular notions of innovation and believe that ad hoc incremental changes are not innovative if they do not have a holistic impact.”

two big ideas froM alvin lee’s talk “I refuse to bear grudges against those who rejected me. Those are the people who really put the ‘rage’ in ‘encourage’. I used the force of their rejections to propel me further.

First build castles in the air, and then build castles everywhere. If someone asks you to stop building castles in the air, just ignore them.

The story of my life is one of how we turned a family project into a product that achieved international awards—despite repeated rejection.

Make sure you are laughed at. It’s only when people say you have a ridiculous idea that you know you are on the right track. It is not enough to just think out-of-the box; one needs to take a step further and do things that are way beyond any box.

Don’t take it personally. I refuse to bear grudges against those who rejected me. Those are the people who really put the ‘rage’ in ‘encourage’.

I used the force of their rejections to propel me further.

Keynote Speaker Alvin lee Presented by :

sudhir MehtA, Md, MAnforce trucks

I believe we are all empowered to make a contribution in our own way that can have far reaching consequences. We are a privileged lot; let’s use this opportunity to give some of it back.”

three big deas froM sudhir Mehta’s talk “At Manforce, we walk the talk.

We’ve been engaging in a social experiment in collaboration with Dow Chemicals and ISRo to usher in a new advancement in the field of artificial limbs.

We’re on the brink of change. India is at the threshold of a new chapter of social revolution. As this social uprising drums up momentum, we need to reflect on our social and political responsibilities towards our country.

It’s time to step up. As business leaders, we need to play a mentoring role in transforming the social and political environment of our country.

And it’s not hard. Most Indian organizations have numerous in-house skills which when put to judicious use can make a huge difference. Every company can contribute, without impacting their bottom lines.

Contribution needs to go beyond money. Salesforce.com has a policy dictating its employees to spend one percent of their time towards making a contribution towards society.

Transformers at CIo 100 presented by:

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP MINDLANCE

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

GOOD DESIGN PRACTICES BEAR FRUITS AT MINDLANCE With its emphasis on proper design of programming applications, Mindlance’s solutions and services address customers’ IT challenges.

How can Mindlance help enterprises get the most out of their existing IT infrastructure to reduce operational costs and maximize availability and performance?

Companies today, whether small to mid-sized or large, suffer from a range of IT productivity inefficiencies: underutilized capacity, performance, and increased management costs.

Mindlance can help enterprises get the most out of their existing IT infrastructure in order to reduce operational costs and maximize availability and performance by encompassing front, back and middle offices, covering customers, suppliers, employees and partners, and involving various departments like strategizing, planning, manufacturing, servicing, etc.

We help eliminate the cost, complexity and performance issues of an under-utilized or inefficient IT infrastructure. Our customized solutions let you better manage costs and improve efficiency based on your business priorities instead of chasing rapidly changing business demands.

rates of customer retention in the industry.

Our Technology Consulting and System Integration team has the ability to deliver the latest technology and processes with the help of our strategic alliances with many OEM’s.

How do you help organizations overcome their challenges in aligning their business strategy with their IT operations?

Mindlance understands the challenges faced by various verticals of business and ensures the optimization of IT infrastructure to meet unique business needs for high availability, reliability and scalability. Our solutions are unique since we have a dedicated endto-end team of experts for each vertical rather than having the same team working on all verticals.

We use monitoring and testing technologies that deliver service assurance.

“We use monitoring and testing technologies that deliver service assurance”

Customers want to be confident that they are doing business with an organization that can consistently meet their expectations. As a business and technology consulting services provider, how can you ensure this?

Mindlance is an ISO 9001:2008 certified company which ensures best of quality management approach and highest value for customers.

Our ability to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations can be seen from our credentials of having one of the highest

Mindlance believes in the dictum - ‘Design before you code’. How does this approach provide value and advantage to your customers?

The most important thing you need to do to increase the success rate of a project is to fully define the project even before a single line of code is written. After the programmers have begun work, money drains out quickly.

Thus, designing beforehand what exactly is expected by the customer cuts a lot of their costs and enables them to foresee what they actually need. Framing a clear definition of the problem statement upfront is important for the success of the final product.

KAMAL SHARMA Group CIO & Business Unit Head, Mindlance Sharma has had extensive experience in IT strategy, business management, operational streamlining, and strategic planning. Under his leadership, Mindlance has been awarded “Leading Performer (High Growth SMBs category)” in the Karnataka STPI IT Export Awards event.

The market is swamped with innumerable me-too IT Service providers, all of whom make identical claims to deliver bottomline results. What is the competitive edge that Mindlance brings to the table?

Mindlance brings with it a vast and advanced set of skills from its decade old experience in the USA market. What makes us different from other IT service providers is our approach towards customers. We have one of the highest customer retention rates in the industry. We follow strict CRM and after-sales support policies. Our robust understanding of IT infrastructure, clubbed with skilled resources and process expertise in delivering quality services, makes us the best choice for managing our clients’ IT portfolio.

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

hitesh oberoi, Md & ceo, info edge indiA

With the help of technology we have been able to maintain our pole position in the market. And these are interesting times for Internet businesses. The Internet user base is expanding very fast as people leverage it more. “

three big ideas froM hitesh oberoi’s talk “When we set up shop, the Internet landscape in India was in its formative stage. This could have thwarted us but we had a firm belief in the potency of our business idea.

It’s imporant to have the courage of your convictions. When we set up shop in 1997, there were only 16,000 Internet users in the country. This narrow Internet user base could have thwarted our purpose of launching a job search portal but we had a firm belief in the potency of our business idea.

Some ideas are ahead of their time. When we started, the recruitment market was highly disorganized. We realized that if we could aggregate résumés and make it searchable recruiters would love it. It was revolutionary idea back then, today, we’re India’s most profitable Internet company.

See your ideas through. Our inflection point came in 2000 with the dotcom boom. We raised Rs 940 lakh. Then just as we hit our stride, the dotcom bust hit us. But we maintained a sharp focus on cost and that got us through.

Transformers at CIo 100 presented by:

sa re Ga ma In his inimitable style, Hariharan and leslie lewis, created magic with their soulful music.

the Glory of Winning CIo 100 winners basked in the limelight, applauded by their spouses and peers.

packed House CIos showed up in large numbers to attend the two daylong symposium and awards ceremony.

A Night Forever Indian IT’s finest, champagne from Spain, and a decadent ballroom: a great ceremony,

In All Its Grandeur CIo magazine played host to India’s most creative CIos in an extravagant evening that will be remembered.

His Golden Voice Few CIos could resist dancing to the deep baritone of international singing sensation, Gary lawyer.

In Conversation India’s most experienced IT leaders swapped war stories in multiple roundtables.

No party Without the Ladies CIos were accompanied by their spouses who spent the day taking Pune by storm. twice as Good A small number of CIos also won Special Awards in seven categories.

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CHANGE THE RULES OF NETWORKING.

THEY HAVE.

See why these companies are ready for what’s next.

Today, networking has become so complicated and cost-intensive, it can stifle innovation. That’s why HP has teamed with these and other leading companies to change the rules. HP Networking solutions, part of the HP Converged Infrastructure, simplify your network for greater flexibility, affordability, and dependability. So your IT department can spend less time on network management and more time on business innovation.

Change the rules at hp.com/networking/ChangeNow

Copyright © 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP NETWORKING

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT COMPREHENSIVE AND INTEGRATED NETWORK IS THE NEED OF THE HOUR HP is raising the bar through innovation to deliver a differentiated portfolio of networking solutions, complemented by global service and support capabilities.

What do enterprises look for in their networking solutions?

Customers are looking for networking solutions which are able to securely meet the demands of their future bandwidth requirement. They also need to reduce complexity, improve efficiency and achieve greater flexibility in their networking solutions.

HP’s integrated networking portfolio challenges the status quo with innovative technology that enables convergence across servers, storage and networking, at better economics to help enterprises deliver the results that matters most to them. Typically what one sees in the industry is a different architecture for data center, and a completely different one for campus or extended enterprise. On the other hand, FlexNetwork is comprehensive framework that encompasses the data center, campus and branch with comprehensive management across the entire framework.

How can enterprises adopt advanced technologies, yet significantly lower total cost of ownership?

Due to the number of wired and wireless devices connected to the network and increasing need for higher bandwidth, network manageability becomes crucial for enterprises to build an agile IT infrastructure.

What they need is a powerful, single point of management for their mission-critical, network. The HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) is designed on a service-oriented architecture that effectively integrates traditionally disparate management tools.

Moreever, IMC can be deployed across multiple servers to provide complete manage-

ment of resources, services and users. This ease of network manageability translates to lower cost of ownership.

Another important aspect for enterprises to control costs of maintenance is the warranty of their products. In fact, in a period of five years, forty percent of the equipment cost is used in obtaining support. Thus, HP has pioneered industry-leading lifetime warranties for its networking products. This helps enterprises reduce maintenance cost and avoid the risk of downtime.

How can enterprises ensure that their networking infrastructure meets industry standards, yet has the flexibility of multivendor interoperability?

HP Networking delivers advanced networking functionality, based on the principles of industry standards and multivendor interoperability. HP solutions can be incorporated into existing networks without disruption, thus bringing new levels of flexibility, security and simplified management to legacy environments.

HP Networking solutions leverage expertise developed over the last 25 years as well as offerings developed through industry collaboration and joint technology integration efforts. This enables clients to take advantage of market-driven innovation and adopt advanced technologies

Fresh innovation, strong alternatives and a businesscentric approach to network design is required.

What are the benefits that HP Networking brings to the table for enterprises with a large presence across India?

To drive complexity out of client operations, HP delivers “single pane of glass”

SUBHODEEP BHATTACHARYA Director, HP Networking, India.

Subhodeep is responsible for driving HP’s growth strategy in the networking segment.

Prior to this role, he was Country Manager, SMB Segment Marketing driving market growth and leadership across the SMB segment. He has over 17 years of experience in the IT industry.

management to confi gure, deploy and monitor the network. This enables common policy management, reduces human error and creates a consistent user experience across different access mediums.

HP is in a unique position to provide and end-to-end infrastructure and networking and bandwidth needs. Our portfolio spans from data centre networking, enterprise routing, security, LAN switching, branch office and mobility. This can help enterprises to have the same infrastructure and support at all their offices across India. Our warranty is just the beginning of what we include with our products. HP and its partners have a pan India presence to help make it easier for them to implement, use, and maintain our products.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with HP Networking

Orange CIos threw ideas around to service existing customers better and build robust systems to increase customer base.

NetApp Titled Change Your Game, the CIos in this roundtable discussed how IT can equip businesses with tools to make organizations agile.

CIO CReATIve 100

Round Tables T Dell CIos in this discussion believed that organizations that want to be efficient need to look at technologies like virtualization and UC.

Hp storage It was evident from this roundtable that CIos are looking past the cloud’s security concerns and are chalking strategies to exploit the platform.

Juniper The discussion circled around technologies like datacenter consolidation, mobility, cloud computing, and low cost bandwidth, that CIos are leveraging to drive innovation.

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emC CIos in this roundtable questioned the gap between what the cloud promises and what it delivers.

Websense CIos admitted that they are grappling with the security challenges that new technologies are bringing.

tCs CIos in this discussion shared how they are dealing with mobile devices and BYoD strategies invading their organizations.

tally IT leaders in this roundtable emphasized on the fact that in order to gain a competitive edge organizations need better visibility into their supply chains.

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CIO Hall Of fame They’ve been bold, they’ve been agile, they’ve been innovative, ingenious and creative.

Year after year, this bunch of extraordinary IT leaders have consistently found a way to contribute to their organization’s success and made their enterprises—like themselves— better than the best.

Virender Pal CTO, SpiceJet Why He Stands Apart: For consolidating the company’s financial systems, and creating an in-house BI. Industry: Aviation

Hitesh Arora Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks India, (second from left) and Som Satsangi, Director Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking HP India, (sixth from left) handed out the award.

Director & Head-IT, Max New York Life Insurance Why He Stands Apart: For deploying a mobile app to track sales activity.

Industry: BFSI

Amit Gupta Director & HeadTechnology Infra. Services, FIL India Business Services Why He Stands Apart: For deploying a solution that

saved the company from financial losses.

Industry: BFSI

Vijay Sethi VP & CIO, Hero MotoCorp Why He Stands Apart: For enhancing his customers buying experience by standardizing DMS. Industry: Manufacturing

C. Mohan Head-IT Shared Services, Reliance Capital Group Why He Stands Apart: For deploying a portal that helped customers buy insurance online.

Industry: BFSI

T.G. Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motors

Why He Stands Apart: For a simple solution that reduced transaction response time drastically.

Industry: Manufacturing

S. C. Mittal Sr. Exec. Dir. (MS and IT) & Group CTO, IFFCO Why He Stands Apart: For providing voicedbased agricultural and other related information to empower farmers.

Industry: Manufacturing

U. C. Dubey ED-IT, IFFCO-TOKIO General Insurance Why He Stands Apart: For automating the

underwriting process that checks losses.

Industry: BFSI

Arun Gupta CCA & Group CTO, Shoppers Stop Group Why He Stands Apart: For saving 100 man hours a day with a NAS platform for back up and recovery.

Industry: Retail

Sudhir Reddy VP & CIO, MindTree Why He Stands Apart: For a unified corporate portal that improved productivity.

Industry: IT/ITES

effICIent enterprIse

SpEcial Sp cial award awardS Efficiency might sound like a mundane word devoid of creativity.

But—interesting or not—it’s still an imperative. These CIOs have mastered the art of leveraging new technologies to solve these age-old problems.

V.C. Kumanan

Sally Stevens, Vice President, PG Platform Marketing, Dell (third from left) and Kevin Noreen, Marketing Director, System Management, Dell (third from right) handed out the award.

Sr. DirectorIT, Infrastructure Development Finance Company Why He Stands Apart: for putting in place an energy efficient TierIII datacenter with significant cost saving.

Industry: BFSI Employees: 600 Headquarters: Mumbai

Muralidharan Ramachandran CIO, Syntel

Why He Stands Apart: For aggressively deploying virtualization both in the datacenter and beyond to make provisioning agile while beefing up efficiency.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 18,000 Global Headquarters: Michigan

N. Nataraj CIO, Hexaware Technologies Why He Stands Apart: For rolling out a private

cloud which cut license costs by 30 percent while reducing support costs by 40 percent.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 6,000 Headquarters: Navi Mumbai

Mohammed Wasim Director, Sapient Why He Stands Apart: For rolling out a private cloud which brought down provisioning time and improved scalability.

Industry: IT

Employees: 10,000 Global Headquarters: Boston

Girish Rao Head-IT, Marico Why He Stands Apart: for completely revamping Marico’s IT landscape to bring in flexibility while reducing operational cost.

Industry: FMCG Employees: 1,500 Headquarters: Mumbai

Green edGe

SpEcial award awardS There aren’t many leaders in the corporate world who shout slogans of reduce, reuse, recycle.

But a handful that do—like our winners— are reaping the benefits of reducing their carbon footprints. We salute these leaders who have made the planet greener and their organizations richer.

Prashanta Ghoshal

Shrinivas Chebbi, Country General Manager & VP , APC

by Schneider Electric, (fourth from left) handed out the award.

Director-ITES, Geometric Why He Stands Apart: For cutting down IT infrastructure and costs significantly by rolling out desktop virtualization.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 3,900 Headquarters: Mumbai

Prashant Veer Singh CIO, Bharti Infratel Why He Stands Apart:

For greening tower operations through automation and analytics to slash fuel use.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 1,300 Headquarters: Gurgaon

footprint by deploying a multi-functional collaboration suite.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 9,500 Global Headquarters: Stockholm

Tamal Chakravarty

Jagdish K. Lomte

Regional Head-IT & Test (South Asia), Ericsson India Why He Stands Apart: For considerably reducing his organization’s carbon

CIO, KEC International Why He Stands Apart: For drastically cutting cost and energy use by adopting both server and desktop virtualization.

Industry: Construction

Employees: 4,200 Headquarters: Mumbai

Umesh Mehta CIO-India, Jubilant Life Sciences Why He Stands Apart: For building an eco-friendly Tier III datacenter expressly designed to be energy efficient.

Industry: Life Sciences Employees: 5,500 Headquarters: Noida

InfrastruCture SpEcial Sp cial award awardS The world is shrinking, and that is evident from the new technologies that are pooling all our worlds into one.

Likewise, these five CIOs have recognized the power of breaking down silos and creating an infrastructure where less is more.

Sudhir Reddy

Sanjay Jain, CEO, Tulip Telecom (third from left) and Deepinder Singh, Executive Director, Tulip Telecom (far right) handed out the award.

VP & CIO, MindTree Why He Stands Apart: For pioneering a unified, single window approach to enterprise applications to enhance productivity and reduce clutter.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 9,800 Headquarters: Bangalore

Prashanth M. J. CTO, Firstsource Why He Stands Apart: For reducing cost and cutting

downtime by totally transforming application delivery.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 26,413 Headquarters: Mumbai

Subrata Banerjee VP-IT, Vedanta Aluminium Why He Stands Apart: For designing a private cloud environment that helped to cut manufacturing cycles by up to 40 percent.

Industry: Manufacturing Employees: 9,000

Shailesh Joshi Head-IT, Godrej Industries Why He Stands Apart: For helping companies of the group save 40 percent in cost while improving manageability by massive infrastructure consolidation.

Industry: Conglomerate Employees: 5,000 Headquarters: Mumbai

Amrita Gangotra Director-IT (India & South Asia) Bharti Airtel Why She Stands Apart: For building an integrated application stack that boosted customer service while reducing revenue leakage.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 15,000 Headquarters: Delhi

InnOvatIOn

SpEcial award awardS without innovation creativity is just another idea. If Apple hadn’t believed in the iPad, if the Tatas hadn’t rolled out the Nano, the world would have been a different place. We honor those IT leaders that saw their inventions through and set new benchmarks.

Avinash Arora

Anand Sankaran, Senior Vice President and Business Head, India, Middle East and Africa, Wipro (fourth from left) handed out the award.

Director-ICT (India & S.E. Asia), New Holland Fiat India Why He Stands Apart: For envisioning and rolling out a first-of-itskind IT-enhanced tractor to improve customer delight.

Industry: Manufacturing Employees: 1,100 Headquarters: Mumbai

Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints

Why He Stands Apart: For developing a social-media based collaboration platform that augmented internal visibility.

Industry: Manufacturing Employees: 5,500 Headquarters: Mumbai

Devesh Mathur COO, HSBC Bank Why He Stands Apart: For creating alternative delivery channels utilizing a host of media including live video, to enhance customer service.

Industry: BFSI Employees: 6,055 Headquarters: Mumbai

Dr. Jai Menon Group CIO, Bharti Enterprises & DirectorGlobal Innovation & IT, Bharti Airtel, Bharti Enterprises Why He Stands Apart: For raising the bar on the quality of IT operations across 19 countries and all companies of the group, till a global talent pool emerged.

Industry: Telecom Operations: Over 21 countries Chairman & Group CEO: Sunil Mittal

Tarun Pandey VP-IT, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group Why He Stands Apart: For helping 15,000 employees of the group seamlessly collaborate while shaving cost by a third.

Industry: BFSI Employees: 15,000 Headquarters: Mumbai

netwOrkInG pIOneer

SpEcial award awardS connections matter.

That’s true outside corporate walls or behind closed doors. But in IT, connections are created by networks that run businesses. These five IT leaders stand tall because they have made distances irrelevant.

Valerio Fernandes GM-IT, Continental Automotive Components Why He Stands Apart: For reducing application latency and making users happy by changing WAN paradigms.

Industry: Manufacturing Employees: 1,300 Global Headquarters: Germany

Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, (third from left) handed out the award.

Dr. Selvam K. Group CIO, Siva Industries and Holdings Why He Stands Apart: For rolling out an

efficient single network architecture blueprint across the group for added effectiveness.

Industry: Conglomerate Employees: 1,500 Headquarters: Chennai

Chandrasekaran Mohan Head-IT Shared Services, Reliance Capital Group Why He Stands Apart: For transforming the organization’s core network architecture for greater flexibility and security.

Industry: BFSI

Employees: 1,250 Headquarters: Mumbai

Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT Why He Stands Apart: For a quantum increase in productivity, while saving cost by re-vamping his network ecosystem.

Industry: Advertising Employees: 800 Headquarters: Mumbai

Dr. Sanjay Saraswat CIO-Carrier Business,

Reliance Globalcom Why He Stands Apart: For architecting a stable and integrated unified communication platform across 230 countries.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 1,500 Headquarters: Navi Mumbai

seCurIty

SpEcial award awardS what about security?

It’s a question that filled awkward silences in boardroom meetings.

But for these five IT leaders, security isn’t an after thought. They stood guard and armed their organizations’ with new technolgies to fight new threats.

S. Ramasamy ED-IS, Indian Oil Why He Stands Apart: For keeping the oil giant’s IT infrastructure highly available by creating a multi-layered security framework.

Industry: Oil & Gas Employees: 35,000 Headquarters: Delhi

John McCormack, President, Websense, (fourth from left), handed out the award.

Pankaj Agrawal Head-IT Governance & CISO, Aircel Why He Stands Apart: For bridging gaps in

compliance and security by creating an effective integrated framework.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 6,000 Headquarters: Gurgaon

Rajesh R. Nair VP, Credit Suisse Business Analytics Why He Stands Apart: For safeguarding customer and stakeholder interests by mitigating risk appropriately.

Industry: Financial Accounting

Employees: 2,500 Headquarters: Mumbai

Shashi Kumar Ravulapaty Sr. VP & CTO, Reliance Commercial Finance Why He Stands Apart: For building a holistic model to ensure better visibility of the organization’s infrastructure and threats to its operating environment.

Industry: BFSI Employees: 1,000

Navin Chadha IT Director, Vodafone Essar Why He Stands Apart: For envisaging a data confidentiality strategy to effectively protect sensitive customer information, and have stricter adherence to regulations.

Industry: Telecom Employees: 9,700 Headquarters: Mumbai

stOraGe

SpEcial award awardS More people, more processes and more technology. And a lot more data. It’s an endless cycle. But some CIOs, like these five, have devised new ways to make storage limitless and smart.

Yogesh Zope

Manoj Chugh, President, EMC India & SAARC and Director–Global Accounts, EMC Asia Pacific & Japan, (far right) handed out the award.

Vice President IT, Bharat Forge Why He Stands Apart: For integrating storage to exponentially improve IT availability and performance.

Industry: Manufacturing Employees: 10,000 Headquarters: Pune

Jayantha Prabhu CTO, Essar Group, Why He Stands Apart: For scaling both performance and capacity simultaneously

by consolidation.

Industry: Conglomerate Employees: 70,000 Headquarters: Mumbai

Murali Krishna K. SVP & Group Head-CCD, Infosys Why He Stands Apart: For cutting recovery time from four days to four hours and gaining 30 percent more capacity.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 130,820 Headquarters: Bangalore

Alpna J. Doshi CIO, Reliance Communications, Why He Stands Apart: For reducing customer churn and speeding up go-to-market by providing a 360-degree view of enterprise data in real time.

Industry: Telecom Headquarters: Mumbai Chairman: Anil Ambani

Alok Kumar Vice President & Global Head-Internal IT & Shared Services, Tata

Consultancy Services Why He Stands Apart: For improving data availability and simplifying data recovery while reducing cost of storage.

Industry: IT/ITES Employees: 198,500 Headquarters: Mumbai

EVENT REPORT

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TALLY

EXPERIMENTS ON

EFFICIENCY

Shoaib Ahmed, President, Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd, articulates on the five most important mantras

to enable enterprises to create efficient business solutions.

he CIO Leadership Summit, which serves as an idea-sharing platform for IT leaders, upheld the same reputation through its latest edition. The latest CIO Leadership Summit, which had the theme ‘CIO++,’ witnessed a roundtable discussion and keynote speeches on different topics from different CIOs. As part of the Summit, Shoaib Ahmed, President of Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd, was invited to speak about ways to bring about efficiency in enterprise solutions. “How to design efficient solutions for business?” is one question that lurks in the minds of IT leaders. While the very process may seem difficult, there are quite a few ways to make it happen and quite a few lessons that would be of help on this journey. IT leaders of various organizations across the country got the opportunity to listen to some of those invaluable lessons in the recently concluded CIO Leadership Summit.

In his presentation titled “Design – Bringing Efficacy to Enterprise Solutions,” Ahmed articulated on the fi ve most important mantras for organizations to achieve this goal. Narrating a real life experience, he highlighted the significance of enterprises in the operation of SMBs/ SMEs and how enterprises prove to be a stepping stone in their success.

MANTRAS FOR EFFICIENT ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS: 1 Simple is Not Basic Successful products work with the Law of Conservation of Complexity – which means that complexity cannot be minimised – it can only be moved. In the creation of a simple product, the complexities have been absorbed.

2 Businesses Need Intuitive Solutions Ahmed stressed that good design should be removed from the realm of consciousness.

Today, customers are increasingly demanding instant gratification, thus causing an increase in the need for designs that are so intuitive that they become the behavior!

Citing an example of the early day’s cash registers used for billing in departmental stores, later replaced by POS machines – he said, these are hybrid devices between a cash register & PC, to help the operators shift easily to them. Tally’s core philosophy has been to design the product such that it mimics the human train of thought – for example Accounting on Computers.

3 Enterprise Systems Need to be Flexible He emphasized that enterprise systems

A system has to be implemented without halting business - like changing the wheels of a car while it is still moving.”

Shoaib Ahmed President, Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd

must be designed for business & process flexibility. Similar to life, business is full of daily exceptions that break well-set rules and hard-coded best practices. Yet vendors happily provide systems that are rigid and inflexible – all in the name of controls.

Enterprise systems must be designed for process and business flexibility – and not the other way round. The more processes are managed and reported within a system, there is improved efficiency, less fraud and misappropriation.

4 Implementation is a Continuous Process Implementation is not a one time exercise – but is a continuous process as the business evolves.

With Tally, the instant the product is installed is when a customer starts using it! It is the technology that embraces the continuous change and has been designed to support this.

5 Your Ecosystem Efficiency is Yours The supply ecosystem of any product or system needs the support of the principal company to streamline processes and build efficiency.

The principal company needs visibility into the ecosystem’s stocks and orders. Working together, efficiencies of the entire ecosystem can be improved.

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

5 Days & 4 Nights|2 Destinations|2 Programs

cloud & Big data 2012

30 nov- 2 dec|pattaya 3-4 dec, 2011|Bangkok Where i i t roadndia’s gets d map ecided !

from BuzzWord to Business The Year Ahead is the most anticipated IT event of the year where leading CIOs and IT heads from India come together to explore the latest trends in technology and chart out their IT roadmap for the next year.

CIO is proud to bring you the fifth edition of The Year Ahead 2012 at Pattaya. With a blend of formal sessions and informal settings, this is the ideal platform for you to network with peers and deliberate on your IT strategy for the next year.

Also introducing ‘Cloud and Big Data 2012’, a dedicated symposium unveiling in Bangkok, that will update you with the latest trends and developments on Cloud Computing and Big Data.

To Participate, Contact rupesh rupesh sreedharan. sreedharan.

Email: rupesh_sreedharan@idgindia.com Phone: +91 9324220513

the Where eets m future ay! tod

program itinerary 30 nov- 2 dec: pattaya 6 themes @ year ahead m The

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3- 4 dec: Bangkok Cloud and Big data 2012 For MorE DETAIlS Visit www.cio.in/yearahead EvEnt By

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FEATURE

SURVIVING & THRIVING IN THE ERA OF THE

EXPONENTIAL DATA CENTER

Within the datacenter, nearly every technology has undergone tremendous evolution. But the network itself has remained unchanged for nearly a decade. We’re at an inflection point today and it’s time for a new

network and a new approach to the data center.

By Sridhar Sarathy, Vice President, India Operations, Juniper Networks

D

atacenters are everywhere. They are the backbone of communication and commerce for billions of people and trillions of transactions, everyday. And within the datacenter, from storage to processing to virtualization, nearly every technology has undergone tremendous evolution, introducing more efficiency, speed, reliability and capability in the process. In comparison, the network has remained unchanged for nearly a decade, with legacy vendors simply adding more boxes in pursuit of bandwidth and scale.

Also, the demands placed on the datacenter are rising exponentially, and are now beyond what the current architectural approach can support by every measure. From a demand for processing to an increase in security threats to the need for reduction in operational costs and energy consumption, the data center is now massive and with it comes the need for solutions to handle this difficult reality.

In response to this challenge, virtualization has long been regarded as a silver bullet for nearly every issue in the data center.

Through virtualization, processing and storage resources within the data center can be used more efficiently and dynamically, enabling resource allocation to become automated in “the cloud”.

The trouble is that while servers and storage systems have evolved to fi t comfortably into the virtual world, the network, which connects all the other data center resources, has failed to evolve at the same rate. Legacy data center networks inhibit virtual machine mobility and their inherent complexity

Legacy tree structures impose varying levels of delay when delivering packets across the network.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP JUNIPER NETWORKS JUNIPER

makes it difficult to build larger, more efficient clouds.

Also, what is noteworthy is that while virtualization has been adopted as the rallying call in data center design, and while there have been a number of innovations delivered that have dramatically improved the situation, their ability to improve efficiency depends on the network itself.

The traditional approach to dealing with growing network demands is to simply grow the data center. The result is an unmanageable infrastructure that lacks mission critical functionalities.

We’re at an infl ection point today and it’s time for a new network and approach to the data center. A solution is urgently needed in order to avoid an increasingly painful set of consequences arising from problems that are most keenly felt at the world’s largest and most important data centers.

The solution is a single plain architecture that produces “any to any” availability of data center resources. Network simplicity breeds flexibility and long-term cost stability.

It is generally agreed that reducing conventional multi-layer networks to a fl at network switching “fabric” is the way to go, but, thus far, implementations of this concept have fallen short of the mark.

Network vendors have been attempting to build data center fabrics using their existing Ethernet switching components, but instead of focusing on the network, the focus has largely been on switches.

The need is to build a network that is fl at, single-layered and a simpler and more correct path to solve the most difficult of network problems.

That the solution should be a fl at fabric is a given. That it should adhere to network standards and not change the way applications, servers, storage, and other infrastructure components connect to the network is also a given. The brilliance

BENEFITS OF FABRIC TECHNOLOGY Flattening the network reduces the number of layers and weaves the remaining components into a common “fabric” that provides any port with dependable, high capacity connectivity to any other port, from any location.

Fabric technology enables multiple networking devices, such as switches, to be operated and managed as a single, logical device. By fundamentally reducing the number of networked devices to manage, fabric technologies dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with large data center networks, while improving performance and efficiency.

By reducing switching layers, a fabric will also reduce the number of switches that traffic has to pass through, eliminating the primary sources of delay and packet loss present in today’s hierarchical networks.

Since a fabric is also managed and provisioned as a single device, it vastly reduces the operational complexity of the data center network, accelerates application and user provisioning, and reduces common errors associated with switch configuration management that can impact application availability.

actually lies in the inherent simplification of the network: Push the intelligence to the edge of the fabric.

Minimize the amount of processing and hardware required to transport data across the fabric while maintaining anyto-any connectivity.

Enable the fabric to scale from tens of ports to thousands or even tens of thousands of ports while maintaining the simplest and most proven operational model - that of a single switch.

The challenge with describing new products that fundamentally transform the world around them is placing them in the right context to discuss and measure the revolution.

Simply put, a product which is focused on delivering the next generation data center will bring in the performance and operational simplicity of a single switch while delivering the scale and resilience of a network.

Fabrics engineered on this need of simplifying the network should be smarter and provide more powerful networking technology. It should deliver a quantum change in the total cost of ownership, remove the complexity associated with legacy networks and provide a clean sheet approach and foundation for building data centers for the next decade.

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

10 Disaster Recovery

Tech Trends rends

By Kim S. Nash

Reshaping Your World 9 6 s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

Future of Technology

3D printers that can print human organs, sensor networks, virtual humans and other technologies under development now will drastically change our world in the decade to come.

A

s computational power rises exponentially, not linearly, so does the rate of change—and that means the next 10 years should pack in far more technological change than the last 10.

Disruptive technology is, by its very nature, unpredictable, but it is still possible to look at the work being done by R&D labs around the world and see clues as to what the future holds. That’s the full-time job of Dave Evans, Cisco’s chief futurist and chief technologist for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).

At Cisco Live, Evans outlined what he believed to be the top 10 trends that will change the world in 10 years. Here is his list, with additional commentary based on interviews in the past year with numerous other industry analysts and visionaries.

Internet of Things 1The

We have passed the threshold where more things are connected to the Internet than people. The transition to IPv6 also supports seemingly limitless connectivity. Cisco IBSG predicts the number of Internetconnected things will reach 50 billion by 2020, which equates to more than six devices for every person on Earth. Many of us in the developed world already have three or more full-time devices connected to the Internet when factoring in PCs, smartphones, tablets, television devices and the like. Next up are sensor networks, using low-power sensors that “collect, transmit, analyze and distribute data on a massive scale,” says Evans.

Such sensors, based on standards like Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and Z-wave, are currently being used in both predictable and surprising ways. Zigbee is being embedded in smart appliances and smart meters. 6LoWPAN (over IPv6) is used

by Vint Cerf for his wine cellar climate-

Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

monitoring system. Z-Wave is the basis for Verizon’s smart home automation service.

But more creative uses are emerging, too. Sparked, a Dutch startup, implants sensors in the ears of cattle to monitor cows’ health and whereabouts. Sensors are being embedded in shoes, medicine like asthma inhalers, and medical exploratory surgery devices. There’s even a tree in Sweden wired with sensors that tweets its mood and thoughts, with a bit of translation help from an interpretive engine developed by Ericsson (@connectedtree or #ectree).

of the increase. By Cisco’s count, 91 percent of Internet data in 2015 will be video.

Much of Cisco’s development focus (not to mention its marketing) preaches that the so-called ‘zettaflood’ will require vastly improved networks to move more data, and not drop the ball (or the packets) of our beloved video.

of the Cloud 3Wisdom

Much of the zettaflood of data will be stored in the cloud. Certainly, most of it is being accessed by the cloud, rather than only on private networks. By 2020, one-third of all data will live in or pass through the cloud,

Just Big Data, Buta Zettaflood 2Not

About 5 exabytes of unique information were created in 2008. That’s 1 billion DVDs. Fast forward three years and we are creating 1.2 zettabytes, with one zettabyte equal to 1,024 exabytes. “This is the same as every person on Earth tweeting for 100 years, or 125 million years of your favorite one-hour TV show,” says Evans. Our love of high-definition video accounts for much

Cisco predicts. Global cloud services revenue will jump 20 percent per year, and IT spending on innovation and cloud computing could top $1 trillion by 2014. That’s enough to create the next Google.

“Already, the cloud is powerful enough to help us communicate through realtime language translation, increase our REAL CIO WORLD | s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

97

Future of Technology knowledge from access to powerful supercomputers such as Wolfram Alpha, and improve our health using computing platforms like IBM’s Watson in new ways,” says Evans. “We’re able to communicate in much richer ways.”

In addition to video, the computing power of the cloud delivered to endpoint devices changes our ability to communicate with things like real-time translation.

Right now, the voice search on an Android phone sends the query to the Google cloud to decipher and return results.

“We’ll see more intelligence built into communication. Things like contextual and location-based information.”

With an always-connected device, the network can be more granular with presence information, tapping into a personal sensor to know that a person’s asleep, and route an incoming call to voicemail. Or knowing that person is traveling at 60 mph in a car, and that this is not the time for a video call. (Of course, by then, we’ll probably all be using driverless Google cars, and be free to chat while our cars drive us around.)

4The Next ‘Net

Evans talks about his home as an example of the speed of network improvements.

Network performance has increased by 170,000 times since 1990, when he had just one telnet connection.

Today, Evans has 38 alwayson connections and more than 50Mbps of bandwidth, enough for telepresence, streaming movies and online games at the same time. Over the next 10 years, Evans expects the speed to his home to increase by 3 million times.

While most of the industry is focused on 40G and 100G, whole new forms of networks are also being created. Vint Cerf discusses the new protocols needed to build an interplanetary network, which can send data vast distances without being disturbed by latency.

Evans notes that multi-terabit networks using lasers are being 9 8 s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

explored. And early work is happening on a concept called ‘quantum networking’, based on quantum physics. This involves ‘quantum entanglement’ in which two particles are entangled after which they can be separated by any distance, and when one is changed, the other is also instantly changed. Production quantum networks are likely decades in the future.

World Gets Smaller 5The

With always-on connectivity, social networking has the power to change cultures, as we saw with the Egyptian Revolution, which led to the Arab Spring.

Social influences will continue to move rapidly between cultures.

A smaller world also means faster information dissemination. “Tweets from people in Japan during the recent earthquake were sent to followers even before the US Geological Survey could issue its official tsunami warning to Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California,” says Evans.

The capture, dissemination and consumption of events are going from neartime to real-time. This in turn will drive more rapid influence among cultures.

A technology called 3D printing will allow us to instantly manufacture any physical item—from food to bicycles—using printer technology.

This is strikingly like the replicator concept from Star Trek.

Power of Power 6The

The human population also continues to grow, and Evans estimates that a city with 1 million inhabitants will be built every month over the next two decades. More efficient methods to power those cities are becoming a necessity, particularly solar energy.

“Solar alone can meet our energy needs.

In fact, to address today’s global demand for energy, 25 solar super sites—each consisting of 36 square miles—could be erected. Compare this to the 170,000 square kilometers of forest area destroyed each year,” says Evans. Such a solar farm could be completed in just three years.

Technologies to make this more economically pragmatic are on their way. Earlier this year, Oregon State University researchers showed off a novel, relatively affordable, low-impact method to ‘print’ solar cells using an inkjet printer.

Earl Grey. Hot 7Tea.

More items will move from physical to virtual. Today, we download e-books and movies, rather than bound books and DVDs. A technology called 3D printing will allow us to instantly manufacture any physical item, from food to bicycles, using printer technology. This is strikingly like the replicator concept from Star Trek.

“3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is the process of joining Vol/6 | ISSUE/11

5 Days & 4 Nights|2 Destinations|2 Programs

cloud & Big data 2012

30 nov- 2 dec|pattaya 3-4 dec, 2011|Bangkok Where i i t roadndia’s gets d map ecided !

from BuzzWord to Business The Year Ahead is the most anticipated IT event of the year where leading CIOs and IT heads from India come together to explore the latest trends in technology and chart out their IT roadmap for the next year.

CIO is proud to bring you the fifth edition of The Year Ahead 2012 at Pattaya. With a blend of formal sessions and informal settings, this is the ideal platform for you to network with peers and deliberate on your IT strategy for the next year.

Also introducing ‘Cloud and Big Data 2012’, a dedicated symposium unveiling in Bangkok, that will update you with the latest trends and developments on Cloud Computing and Big Data.

To Participate, Contact rupesh rupesh sreedharan. sreedharan.

Email: rupesh_sreedharan@idgindia.com Phone: +91 9324220513

the Where eets m future ay! tod

program itinerary 30 nov- 2 dec: pattaya 6 themes @ year ahead m The

Year Ahead m Future Technologies m Business Transformation m Evolving Datacenter m Smart Enterprise m Innovation @ Work

3- 4 dec: Bangkok Cloud and Big data 2012 For MorE DETAIlS Visit www.cio.in/yearahead EvEnt By

hostEd By

Future of Technology materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer,” says Evans.

Already, things ranging from toys to cars to living structures are being printed and because the process is done by adding layers of materials on top of one another, they are printed fully assembled and decorated, too.

In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to print human organs,” says Evans.

Earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine printed a proof-of-concept kidney mold onstage at TED. It was not living tissue, but the point was well made even so.

Family Tree 8Another

Virtual humans, both physical (robots) and online avatars will be added to the workforce. “Already, animated characters can recognize speech, convert text to speech, and have knowledge of previous encounters,” says Evans.

By 2020, robots will be physically superior to humans. IBM’s Blue Brain project, for instance, is a 10-year mission to create a human brain using hardware and software. “They believe that within a

decade they’ll start to see consciousness emerge with this brain,” Evans says.

By 2025, the robot population will surpass the number of humans in the developed world.

By 2032, robots will be mentally superior to humans. And by 2035, robots could completely replace humans in the workforce.

Beyond that, we’ll see the creation of sophisticated avatars. Evans points to IBM’s Watson as a template for the virtual human.

Watson was able to answer a question by returning a single, accurate result. A patient may use a virtual machine instead of a WebMD search. Or hospitals can augment patient care with virtual machines.

Between now and then, augmented reality and gesture-based computing will enter our classrooms, medical facilities and communications, and transform them as well. “Already, machine vision enables users to take a picture of a Sudoku puzzle with their smartphone and have it solved almost immediately,” he notes.

There’s a Cure for That 9Yes,

“We think nothing of using pacemakers,” Evans points out. In the next 10 years, he believes medical technologies will grow vastly more sophisticated as computing power becomes available in smaller forms.

Devices such as nanobots and the ability to grow replacement organs from our own tissues will be the norm. “The ultimate integration may be brain-machine interfaces that eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries to live normal lives,” he says.

Today we have mind-controlled video games and wheelchairs, software by Intel that can scan the brain and tell what you are thinking and tools that can actually predict what you are going to do before you do it.

1 0 0 s e p t e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Feature_Tech_Trends.indd 54

or Borg?

10Humans

According to Stephen Hawking, “Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution.”

Taking the medical technology idea to the next level, healthy humans will be given the tools to augment themselves. Here are some examples: July 2009: Spanish researchers discover substance for photographic memory.

October 2009: Scientists develop the first artificial hand with feeling.

March 2010: Retina implants restore vision to blind patients.

June 2011: Texas Heart Institute develops a ‘spinning’ heart with no pulse, no clogs and no breakdowns.

While the early use of these technologies will be to repair unhealthy tissue or fix the consequences of brain injury, eventually designer enhancements will be available.

Ultimately, humans will use so much technology to mend, improve or enhance our bodies, that we will become the Borg.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil is pioneering this idea with a concept he calls singularity, the point at which man and machine merge and become a new species. Kurzweil says this will happen by 2054. Evans is not convinced about singularity, particularly in Kurzweil’s time frame. CIO Julie Bort is the editor of Network World’s Cisco Subnet community. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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new The Budge BudgeT ConversaTion ConversaT Conversa Tion The way you spend on IT is changing. So is your relationship with the CFO.

By Bill Bulkeley

Reader ROI: How shifts in technology direction changes the way you approach IT budgeting Why turning capex into opex isn’t always smart

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The march of technology is starting to shake up one of the most important relationships that CIOs have--the one with the chief financial officer.

CIOs need to start changing the way they talk with CFOs, not just at budget time, but throughout the year, CIOs and experts say. Cloud computing and consumerization trends, especially, are changing the nature of corporate IT and, with it, the way CIOs structure their IT budgets.

This shift is in its early days, but forwardlooking CIOs are beginning to think of themselves as providers of services rather than infrastructure. As such, they supervise operating expenditures, not capex, and approach the CFO as partners, not supplicants.

Robert Petrie, VP-IT at Pharmaceutical Product Development, which runs clinical trials for big drug companies, says decisions about provisioning new technologies are made based on “what makes the most sense from a business standpoint and from a financial standpoint.” But thanks to cloudbased infrastructure, SaaS, and employeesupplied devices, these decisions have

different budget implications than they used to, including how IT investments are governed and who pays the bills.

Questions of Cash Flow Cloud computing offers CIOs the opportunity to transform investments in corporate computer systems from capital expenditures into operating expenditures.

Instead of making a multimillion-dollar upfront investment in software licenses and computer-room servers, companies can arrange to pay for the same capabilities with monthly, per-user contracts. That means that when you want to deploy a new system, you have more funding options.

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IT Budget Getting new technology in monthly installments may benefit companies that need to cut capital expenses. For example, Joe Drouin, senior vice president and CIO at temporary-­help giant Kelly Services, says that when he joined the company three years ago, “We were suffering from a depreciation hangover” caused by a huge PeopleSoft implementation. That project won’t be completed until 2014, at a 10year cost of between $100 million and $110 million.

Years of heavy investment in servers and software had tied up millions of dollars, leaving Kelly with a limited ability to make new investments when business slumped during the recession.

The dramatic revenue declines during the recession had a painful effect on companies with high fixed costs. Many found that multiyear depreciation of capital goods resulted in big operating losses when gross profits shrink. Fixed costs and cyclical revenue are a bad combination.

When temporary hiring dried up, Kelly reported huge losses. It slashed capital spending, most of which goes for IT, from $31 million in 2008 to just $11 million in 2010.

Drouin says cloud computing provided a way to wean the IT department from capital spending right when Kelly needed it. Kelly now uses Salesforce.com for CRM and the Force.com platform as its

principal development environment. The company hosts its Microsoft e-mail and SharePoint collaboration applications in the cloud as well.

All the software is paid for as an operating expense.

“The necessity of the recession, when our capital pool dried up, fueled our acceleration into the cloud,” Drouin says. The capital spending in his budget this year is about half what it was at its peak in 2007, even though Kelly is implementing what he considers a normal amount of new IT initiatives.

Many companies also prefer to devote capital expenditures to revenue-generating projects like new factories or rail cars, rather than spend the budget on computers that don’t have a measurable impact on revenue.

But for some companies, avoiding capital spending isn’t a priority, and options such as leasing or making annual payments to an outsourcer provide a way to avoid making capital expenditures up front. Especially for large organizations, which have access to lowinterest loans and predictable depreciation schedules, whether to lay out capital for IT may simply be a question of cash flow.

In some cases, expensing might even be a mistake. Chris Potts, an independent IT strategist based in London, says that if an IT plan is part of a major corporate project like building a big factory, trying to expense IT could affect depreciation schedules for the whole plan.

The decision depends on “the current cost of capital and alternative investment vehicles,” says Craig Symons, an analyst with Forrester Research and former CIO at Gartner. Still, he says, the cloud provides flexibility to scale up or down. When a company controls its own infrastructure, “either you spend a lot up front and depreciate or you commit to multi-year operating leases.”

Bill Bowers, CFO of Newline Products, a maker of whiteboards and bulletin boards that does $15 million in annual sales, says that when he joined the company in 2008, it was planning a $250,000 installation of an ERP system from SAP. As he investigated the costs and funding dried up, he switched to NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP solution. Now Newline pays $99 per user per month, after an up-front $85,000 investment for customization and training.

Bowers, who used to work in finance for Motorola, over-seeing corporate IT functions in Asia, says that for big companies, the cloud may not have a significant financial benefit. When evaluating the alternatives, he found that “maybe from a payback analysis it’s a tossup,” between buying or renting. But he says, “When you’re in the cashflow world, cloud is the way to go.”

Who Makes IT Decisions?

Cloud computing provided a way for Joe Drouin, SVP and CIO at Kelly Services, to keep investing in IT while cutting capital spending.

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In addition to conversations about cash flow, the cloud raises questions of governance and cost allocation. Potts, the London-based consultant, notes that many companies stipulate board-level review for expenditures of a certain size, which assures that major IT initiatives get a careful vetting. He says that with piecemeal spending on cloud initiatives, the amounts spent might never trigger the appropriate review. “If the CIO is being responsible to investors, then they should want that kind of review,” he says. “The discipline of thinking about the budget creates governance.”

Steven Finnerty is vice president of technology and vendor services with Global Information Services at Applied Materials, which makes

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semiconductor, display and solar photovoltaic equipment. Finnerty likes paying for cloud services “by the drink” because the company’s business is cyclical, and he can adjust IT costs as business conditions change. But he agrees that the ability to expense IT monthly using a credit card could allow CFo CF os care about your budget, but they also want to a business unit head to bring in new technology understand the risks new technologies pose. without giving the IT staff a chance to clear it and make sure it fits with the company’s security Conversations with the CFO about cloud and consumer technologies go beyond the standards or data-preservation policies.

IT budget. CIOs need to apprise CFOs of any compliance and corporate governance “When business units take things into their implications that arise from new approaches to provisioning IT. own hands, they aren’t conscious of the need for At most companies, CFOs have direct responsibility for complying with architectural compliance or having a continuity regulations that cover data privacy, maintenance of financial records, and security of plan,” says Forrester’s Symons. CIOs need to make financial reporting systems. Under the 2002 sarbanes-Oxley Act, a CFO convicted sure the CFO understands why such rogue purchases of signing off on misleading or inaccurate financial statements could go to jail for 20 could threaten the company’s regulatory compliance years. Companies that carelessly allow employee health records to be lost or stolen or affect the value of other investments. But, Symons face large fines and public humiliation because they are required to notify major says, CIOs also “need to view themselves as solutions media outlets of any breach. brokers based on the needs of business and deliver Other countries may have data privacy regulations that further complicate moves the optimal solution.” to the cloud. Vendors say that Germany’s laws mandate that individuals’ records Drouin at Kelly Services says that the flexibility can’t be physically kept outside of Germany. The same applies to India. Other the cloud gives IT to move quickly can eliminate countries’ laws require that personal data be protected from access by unauthorized one excuse business units use to provide themselves people. with technology on their own. That helps assure many CIOs have nevertheless moved into the cloud despite compliance concerns. that IT spending goes through the IT budget. “It’s software security vendor Courion surveyed 384 large users and found that 48 made the rogue IT thing become kind of moot” at percent of respondents weren’t confident that a compliance audit of their cloud Kelly, he says. Rogue IT spending by department applications “would show that all user access is appropriate.” heads was “in some ways our own fault because the At the very least, CIOs should be able to outline the risks of cloud and businesses stopped asking us for quick things. We consumerization and explain the steps IT is taking to make sure the company’s data didn’t deliver.” management is as secure as ever. When you’re no longer locking everything down in But the cloud doesn’t only change the conversation an on-site datacenter, for instance, you need to negotiate terms of service covering about who decides what technology to buy; it also access to data and create ways to audit cloud and software-as-a-service providers. shifts the discussion of how IT costs are allocated. robert petrie, vice president of IT with pharmaceutical product Development, CIOs are divided on whether the new IT architecture which manages the data-intensive chore of running clinical trials for pharmaceutical always makes assigning costs easier. companies, says, “people are very sensitive about their data. If we are using Chargebacks, for example, are the bane of many multi-tenant, hosted applications, our clients audit us and make sure we have the CIOs’ existence. They can lead to contentious appropriate [security].” He adds: “This isn’t a reason that you can’t move to the arguments with business group heads who think cloud, but you have to perform due diligence and do security assessments.” they’re being over-charged for IT, hurting their —b.b profitability measures.

To hear some CIOs tell it, one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing may be that it puts a stop But others say it complicates the issue. Like many other IT to such arguments. “With cloud adoption and pay-per-consumption, organizations, The Hartford Financial Services Group has been we’re able to very granularly capture costs and charge them back to consolidating datacenters and centralizing IT to gain economies the point of value,” says Drouin. “It’s a real shift.” In the past, he says, of scale. That has increased the pressure over chargebacks, the IT department calculated charges primarily by multiplying total because division heads view IT as a service rather than as part costs by each business unit’s percentage of corporate revenue. Then of their domain, says Jim Eckerle, executive VP for strategic “you’d have discussions with people arguing that some divisions were initiatives and technology. more data intensive, so they should pay more.” Now he can charge Eckerle’s company has gone from seven datacenters to three and more precisely, based on the services business units consume. “If you will soon have just two—one of its own and a failover site run by IBM. need 200 seats of Force.com, here’s what it’s going to cost.” Drouin The company takes advantage of cloud-based services to simplify adds, “The COO, who I report to, and the CFO saw it drove a lot more chargebacks, Eckerle says, wherever “we can identify a reliable rigor around the investments. When you pay on the expense line, you metric…to correlate consumption with charges.” The Hartford uses can’t have a three-year time to ROI.”

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IT Budget Salesforce.com in its wealth-management practice and recently announced that it will move to virtualized desktops hosted by IBM. Yet he says cloud architecture makes chargebacks more difficult.

Because Hartford pays on a monthly basis, it’s a challenge to estimate its needs to assure the lowest possible price, he says.

Similarly, Otto Doll, CIO with the City of Minneapolis, says that while pay-by-the-sip services such as software are simple to allocate, cloud infrastructure increases the confusion over billing for shared services, including the costs incurred by the IT department in managing its cloud provider. Another problem comes when costs rise due to unforeseeable increases in infrastructure use, such as when citizens flock to city websites for information.

“If an election is close, and demand [from the public] for access to results leads the cloud provider to increase to 10 servers from five, the cloud provider has to send somebody the bill. Somehow I have to marry up the bill from the cloud with what I pay, and share it equitably across my client base,” Doll says.

Catching Up to Consumers While you’re figuring out how to govern and budget for cloud services, you also need to help CFOs wrestle with the implications of consumer IT. Like cloud, consumer devices that employees and customers use, along with online applications such as social networking that people use to get their work done, are changing how IT decisions are made and altering the company’s IT footprint.

Corporate IT isn’t just the computers in the datacenter anymore.

Considered broadly, it’s also the personal smartphones that employees use to book a business flight and the home PCs that they use to read e-mails late at night, says Potts, the independent strategist.

“The technology doesn’t appear on your books, but it’s part of your infrastructure.” Consumer IT, therefore, offers CIOs an opportunity to explain that IT’s role is much bigger than its annual spending.

“If a CFO starts with the IT budget as evidence of the value of IT, that’s a problem. There’s an opportunity to redirect people from the size of the budget to the value of the consumers using IT,” Potts says.

The CFO needs to know, however, that the value of consumer devices and apps to the enterprise isn’t always easily measured. Sure, you can avoid some investments in end-user devices by letting employees select and use their own smartphones and tablets, says Scott Archibald, IT practice leader with Bender Consulting. “Enterprises are looking to make this move because it involves less capital and labor investment.”

He notes that supporting consumer devices and keeping them secure can be costly. But he thinks “it seems safe to say that the corporate savings will be sufficient to move forward with these models even with an uptick in support costs.”

Nevertheless, CIOs say the real value of enabling the use of personal devices is employee satisfaction, which, though it can be measured, is hard to quantify financially. “We’ve tried to shift to letting people bring their own” devices, says Drouin of Kelly Services. “With SharePoint and e-mail in the cloud, that enabled us to use tablets and smartphones.

We could assure proper security.”

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IT Budget

Steven Finnerty VP of Technology and Vendor Services at Applied Materials’ GIS, says expensing IT with credit cards could affect compliance with corporate security and data policies.

to understand the ROI. Consumers who are used to Facebook chat and sharing videos on YouTube expect to have the same capabilities at work. If the company doesn’t provide them, they will use consumer networks if they think it will help them do their jobs more efficiently.

While using consumer applications may sometimes be appropriate, such as when communicating directly with consumers about your company’s products or services, CIOs may need to educate their CFOs about the trade-offs. Companies often worry about employees communicating about business over Facebook simply because it’s so easy. Recently, a Rhode Island hospital dismissed a doctor because she had discussed a patient, without naming him or her, on Facebook.

Notes Finnerty of Applied Materials, “If it’s in social media, you have to get out front and say, ‘We have an offering.’ Then we can put controls in place for security and compliance.” Even clear policies against using public social media will be violated if there isn’t an alternative. “If you say ‘no,’ it will probably still happen,” he says.

Ken Corriveau is CIO at ad-industry giant Omnicom, where workers are encouraged to use social media in order to keep up with the consumer world. For him, as for other CIOs, the new IT landscape of consumerization and cloud raises a host of questions, including financial ones. The company may start supporting employee smartphones, but that will require a monthly expense for reimbursements of phone bills. In the cloud, allocating storage expenses is a challenge.

“I’m having those conversations with the CFO,” he says. CIO Bill Bulkeley, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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A CLOSER LOOK AT big data

Mining and analyzing big data can help enterprises unearth their customers hobbies and activities and help them create targeted marketing campaigns.

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Big Data’s Treasure Trove

By Lucas Mearian

Analytics | As real time and batch analytics evolve using big data processing engines such as Hadoop, corporations will be able to track your activities, habits and locations with greater precision than ever thought.

"It will change our existing notions of privacy. A surveillance society is not only inevitable, it's worse. It's irresistible," says Jeff Jonas, a distinguished engineer with IBM. For businesses, knowing where people are by using geo-locational data will help them personalize advertising and marketing materials over the Web. For example, if a company knows a customer is in Aruba, it won't bother offering him or her advertising for restaurants in New York, but instead it may market sun-tanning lotion or scuba-diving excursions.

Knowing where people are will also determine with accuracy which potential customer is which. For example, if there are five people living in the US with the same name and the same date of birth, but live in different cities, knowing their locations at a given time verifies their identities.

"Just look at the last 10 years of address histories...it is very telling if this is the same person or not," Jonas says. "Two different things cannot occupy the same space at the same time."

Jonas says 600 billion electronic transactions are created in the US every day, much of which comes from geo-locational data generated by cell phones, which through cellular towers,

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triangulate a person's exact location at any time. Wireless providers have that data in real time. By looking at data over years, corporations can know how you spend your time, where you work, and with whom you're typically with.

"This is super food [for big data analytics]," Jonas says. "With 87 percent certainty, I can tell you where you'll be next Thursday at 5:35 p.m."

Big data, an industry term that refers to large data warehouses, includes machineand human-generated data. In 2010 alone, according to IDC, 1.5 zetabytes of this data was created, most of which was machinegenerated. Corporations filled their datacenter storage systems with about 16 exabytes of that data last year, according to Jason Hoffman, founder and chief scientist at cloud software provider Joyent.

Bill McColl, CEO of analytics engine vendor Cloudscale, says up until now, big data analytics has been about offline queries. But 90 percent of corporate data warehouse users say they want to move forward into a world with real-time analytics. "Companies know if they can

the enabler of what we can do with big data," says Baum, whose company was purchased by IBM last year. IBM's Netezza buyout was among a flurry of big data analytics vendor acquisitions over the past year, including EMC's purchase of Greenplum, and HP's purchase of Vertica.

Todd Papaioannou, VP of cloud architecture at Yahoo, says instead of thinking about big data analytics as the empowerment of corporate Big Brother, consumers should consider it as an enabler of a more personalized Web experience.

"If someone can deliver a more compelling, relevant experience for me as a consumer, then I don't mind it so much," he says.

Marc Parrish, VP of retention and loyalty marketing for bookseller Barnes & Noble, says machine-generated data growth has exploded since electronic book sales have taken off. For example, e-book sales outstripped hardback book sales on Amazon.com last year. "Our Web logs on how customers are using e-readers has produced 35TB of data and that will increase to 55TB this year," he says.

By looking at data over years, corporations can know how you spend your time,where you work,and with whom you're typically with. extract more insight from data faster than their competitors, they're going to win," McColl says.

Jim Baum, founder and CEO of Netezza, data warehousing provider, agrees with McColl. Baum argues that if a corporate user has to wait even three days to get an answer to an analytics query, the user won't bother asking a follow-up question that could mean gaining the real value of the information.

"If I can get an answer in real time, I will ask the next question and next question, and that'll be followed by another. Getting answers in near real time is critical. It's 1 0 6 SE P T E M BER 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

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With that data, the store can determine buyer behavior, such as what percent of customers purchase books based on their favorite author. "We have to decide with analytics on hand how we capture the customer's imagination and how we move forward," he says Other companies are using big data analytics to track the use of content on their websites in order to better tailor it to users' tastes. Sondra Russell, a metrics analyst with National Public Radio, says she needed a way to track website audience use trends in near real time. NPR offers podcasts, live streams, on-demand

1 . 5 ZB

The amount of machine generated big data created in 2010.

Source: IDC

streams, and other radio content on its website. Her organization had been using Web analytics engine Omniture, but it felt like she was trying to jam log-based data into a client-side tracking system that couldn't handle the volume.

Russell says NPR experienced query delays that at best were six to 12 hours and at worst, weeks long. The organization finally switched to Splunk's reporting tool, which crawls logs, metrics and other application, server and network data and indexes it in a searchable repository.

"I just want to know how many times someone listened to a program during a certain period of time," she says. "With Splunk, I had no delays between data appearing in a query folder and data appearing in reports. I can get any number of graphs without weeks of prep time."

IBM’s Jonas compared big data to puzzle pieces, saying until you take them to the table top and begin assembling them, you don't know what you have. That's where Hadoop, Cassandra, and other analytics engines come in. Hadoop is a distributed software file system, based on Google's MapReduce algorithm, which allows largescale computations (batch processing) to be performed across large server clusters in parallel. The computations can be performed on user or machinegenerated data, whether structured or unstructured. But Hadoop works best on unstructured random data sets, allowing analytics engines to more quickly gather information from queries.

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quickly pre-sort data in a batch process, regardless of the type of data: File or block.

They can also interface with any number of languages: Including C++, Java, Perl, Python and Ruby. Once sorted, a more specific analytical application is required to perform specific queries. Traditional databases can be considerably slower, requiring table-by-table analysis. They also do not scale nearly as well.

For example, Alfred Spector, VP of research and special initiatives at Google, says it's possible that a cluster of servers could include 16 million processors creating one MPP data warehouse.

"It doesn't seem there are any limitations other than good engineering required to get there," he says. Spector sees a day when distributed computing systems will offer Web developers what he calls "totally transparent processing," where the big data analytics engines learn over time to, say, translate file or block data into whatever language is preferred based on a user's profile history, or act as a moderator on a website, identifying spam and culling it out. " Yahoo has been the largest contributor to Hadoop to date, creating about 70 percent of the code. The search site uses it across all lines of its businesses, and has standardized on Apache Hadoop, favoring its open source attributes.

Papaioannou says Yahoo has 43,000 servers, many of which are configured in Hadoop clusters. By the end of the year, he expects his server farms to have grown to 60,000 because the site is generating 50TB of data per day and has stored more than 200 petabytes.

"Our approach is not to throw any data away," he says.

That is exactly what other corporations are hoping to accomplish: Use every piece of data to their businesses' advantage so that nothing goes to waste. CIO

Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Big Data on a Dime budget | If you've read anything about the phenomenon of big data, then you probably picture armies of servers chugging some form of the Hadoop ecosystem to crunch mountains of information streaming from internal corporate transactions, e-mails, instant messages, and Web logs or external social media interactions and public information.

Sounds expensive, right? Not necessarily. Thanks to cloud computing, freely available tools, and limitless free data, you can do major league big data analysis for a C-note.

At a GigaOm conference on big data recently, Pete Warden, described how he spent just $100 (about Rs 4,700) to scrape 500 million Web pages, including 220 million Facebook public profiles, using his own Web crawler and a 100-machine cluster running on Amazon EC2. He was able to analyze the information to match Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts with the e-mail accounts of users of his e-mail tool.

Warden has just announced the release of his Data Science Toolkit, a set of free tools and interfaces that enable you to analyze massive amounts of unstructured data. It includes OCR capabilities that can convert scanned images and PDFs to text files and tools for filtering geographic locations from news items and blogs. You can run it on a Hadoop cluster in an Amazon EC2 cloud or download the toolkit as a virtual machine.

Additionally, an eight-person company called Tap11 has a tool for tapping and analyzing 140 million tweets daily to help companies understand what users are saying about their brand and products. Client Goldman Sachs, for example, discovered a lot of talk about criminals and bonuses. Another financial planning tool startup called Bundle provides a service that taps Citi customer transaction data to allow users to discover how other people in their geographical area or the area they're moving to typically spend their money.

So it turns out big data doesn't necessarily cost big bucks, which means that the potential for hundreds of startups analyzing just about everything is enormous. It's a new frontier.

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The Web of Big Data An attractive application of Hadoop and other big data technologies is to analyze users' social media activities and behavior—sometimes without their express knowledge.

By Paul Krill

social media | The now-trendy concept of big data usually implies ever-growing hordes of data, including unstructured info posted on Facebook and Twitter, and ways of gleaning intelligence from all of it to create business opportunities. The concept, however, also carries with it risks for anyone opening up about themselves on

networks and even cell phones. "It's coming from sensors, it's coming from computers, it's coming from the Web," he says.

The strong interest of both IT and business units in big data is "about being able to harness it, and it's about being able to do something with it"—in essence, analyzing it, says Harris.

image by photos.com

The strong interest of both ITand business units in big data is about being able to harness it,and it's about being able to do something with it—in essence,analyzing it. the Internet and raises questions about who exactly owns all this data.

But the term "big data," claims GigaOm analyst Derrick Harris, is a bit of a misnomer; it's really about data from different sources, including social

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"The great thing about big data is we accumulate this amount of information and we have systems in place where we can use that for good," such as analyzing human genome information, says Mozilla developer evangelist Christian

Heilmann. Business analysts can study large data sets by renting servers for an hour, using technology such as Hadoop, he says. Given that growing interest, it's no surprise that vendors are starting to make moves to take advantage of big data.

Companies such as Echo and Cloudera are seeking their niche in the big data and social network data spaces.

"The big data play right now for these big multi-million-dollar companies is around activity data," says Chris Saad, vice president of strategy at Echo. Both enterprise IT and individual users are sure to see a growing menu of big data services available as data gathering grows in prominence.

For example, serving ventures such as media companies and ad agencies, Echo StreamServer pulls in social media data relevant to a client into a single stream. Echo, which cites companies such as Reuters as customers, captures data about clients on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as from the client's own sites. The clients can then create real-time experiences out of the data, Saad says. Clients get a "big unified data set" to develop applications such as forums and live blogging.

Cloudera offers its own distribution of Hadoop that serves as a platform for data management, and its Cloudera Enterprise provides large-scale data storage and analysis. Amr Awadallah, Cloudera's CTO, says the Hadoop distribution enables organizations to collect and combine social data and store it in a centralized data store. Users can then run MapReduce jobs to analyze this data for insight and factors such as new relationships.

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But Who Owns the Data?

Mozilla's Heilmann views big data as any information accumulated on the Web—any real-time data. But who specifically owns this data? "That's a very loaded conversation," he says.

"I think it's dangerous right now that the speed and beauty of these interfaces [on sites such as Facebook] make people give information away without realizing that they have done it," Heilmann says.

For example, people can upload photos of themselves intoxicated and a potential employer can view them for at least some time afterward.

"You have a real problem deleting anything from the Internet," Heilmann stresses. "As soon as you put it up there, it will be cached, it will be copied somewhere else. You should be very mature about what you put online."

GigaOm's Harris says ownership of the data depends on circumstances.

"Certainly, the companies generating it own the data," he says.

right to delete data, it still owns the data itself, he adds.

Thus, the data portability project for porting of social network data promotes the notion that users own their own data and social networks should make it easier for users to move it around. The effort has produced an initiative that aims to get sites to disclose what users can do with their data once it has been uploaded, says Saad, who in addition to his Echo job is co-founder of the Data Portability Project.

Still, Saad notes that in some cases users share ownership and custody of their data with the online services they use. "It's kind of like money in a bank. You own the money but you are basically giving it to the bank to safeguard and potentially use on your behalf," he says.

The issue is not just about privacy.

One of the tenets of big data is to analyze data from multiple sources to identify trends, business opportunities, market shifts, potential customers, customer

Although there is publicly owned data on the Web, Facebook and Twitter, for their part, own the data their users generate.

Although there is publicly owned data on the Web, Facebook and Twitter, for their part, own the data their users generate, Harris notes. And big data concepts such as data marketplaces have resulted, for example, in firms analyzing Twitter streams for a month at a time, Harris says. "There's a lot [of data] that's just available out there if you could harness it" and analyze it.

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sentiment, and a lot more. When big data tools analyze information available on the Web, do they really have the right to do so without permission of the owner?

"It really depends," Saad argues. "If you're publishing on the Internet, I think the social contract is such that people expect their data to be polled and crunched and indexed and used." On the other hand, "it's a little different when Facebook, is expected to be a private network and it continues to push the boundary of what part of your information is made public. That's when it's violating the social contract." CIO

Big Data’s New Trends Reality mining, tagging data at its source, and cloud reputation agencies are three of the emerging trends likely to come out of the explosion of big data.

Strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, says “reality mining”—the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment—is a major trend to emerge out of big data.“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he says.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity, and create value inside organizations.”

Dawson says an added emphasis for this type of data collection is research suggesting that organizations which use data-based decision making have been able to achieve 5 to 6 percent greater productivity.“That requires this kind of reality mining,” he says.“This requires all that data within the organization to be captured and used effectively.”

To enable effective data capture organizations would also have to transition away from the mass collection of unstructured data to a process where all data is tagged at the point of capture.

With the security of the public cloud being a major inhibitor to adoption, Dawson says cloud ratings agencies would likely emerge that would rate the security of cloud providers.

“This goes alongside the ‘reputation economy’. This decade is the one where reputation is driving almost everything— reputation of individuals, people’s influence on social media and the like,” he says.

—Tim Lohman

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bookclub what we’re reading

by Vijay Ramachandran

* The talent masters

Talented Tale Building a talent pipeline in your organization is never going to be an easy task, here’s how you can go about it.

IN SUMMARY: There are a host of

management tomes dedicated to pursuing either business excellence or quickly rising to dominant positions.

Jumping the S-Curve, however is about the hows and whys of organizations that make a succession of right moves.

Take the Sumitomo Group, for instance. One of the largest of kieretsu (a conglomeration of businesses linked together by cross-shareholdings to form a robust corporate structure), its roots lie in a 17th century book and medicine store in Kyoto founded by Masatomo Sumitomo. Over four centuries, the Group has thrived, getting into new markets and seeking new opportunities (copper smelting, mining, forestry and banking, to name just a few).

For authors Paul Nunes and Tim Breene, Sumitomo is the exception that proves the rule: “Many companies might be fortunate enough to launch one successful venture, but the vast majority will stumble badly when that business begins to mature.”

The book spectacularly trashes many management myths, from the overdependence on scale as a means to growth to choosing between high growth and high profit to even that old bromide about delayed gratification after years of effort.

Stimulating and full of practical advice and cases, Jumping the S-Curve, should be mandatory reading for all business executives. My recommendation: Get a

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copy for yourself and present one to your CEO. Read on for excerpts from reviews of this book from two of your peers who recommend it as heartily as me: At its core, the book puts forward the idea that performance and organizations follows an S-curve—start slowly as expertise is gained, scale rapidly as this advantage is translated into performance and then the plateau as others catch up and competitive advantage erodes.

Therefore, to sustain ‘outperformance’, companies need to catch multiple S-curves sequentially. The authors examine the prerequisites for this with several examples. Companies have to identify an insight, commit resources, develop deep capabilities before scaling it up and get talent to invest its skills over decades. Meanwhile they must identify the end of the current S-curve, let go of it and get on to the next one.

Interestingly, the authors identify key disruptors such as analytics, cloud computing, and mobility, which will shorten S-curves. The chief insight for me, though, was how relevant this framework is to personal performance.

CIO Book CLUB Log on to cio.in/bookclub to get your FREE Copy. Also, read reviews and post comments.

c o.in

Jumping The S-Curve : How

Great Companies Get On Top And Stay There B y Paul Nunes & Tim Breene Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press Price: Rs. 700 Applying these insights, CIOs should be able to identify platforms that deliver business benefits and achieve sustained outperformance in their careers!

VINOD SIVARAMA KRISHNAN, CIOGLOBAL, JUBILANT LIFE SCIENCES This book provides organizations ways and means to stay ahead. It lends insight into the various stages of business growth and the actions that need be taken at various stages to remain on top.

The authors conclude that high performance is about outperforming rivals again and again, even as the basis of competition in an industry or market changes. These will be possible only if an organization keeps a tab on understanding the hidden S-curves namely of competition, capability and talent, while avoiding knee-jerk reactions like retrenchment and belt tightening, which erode the chance for a recovery.

C.R. NARAYANAN, CIO, TULIP TELECOM Sounds interesting? We invite you to join the CIO Book Club. CIO Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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