ChannelWorld August 2014 Isuue 5

FOCAL POINT: How hardware/software application challenges faced by cloud-based environments can be addresed. PAGE 35

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

Rajesh Bhatia, MD, CCS Computers, hires for cultural fit, rather than technical or managerial skills.

Inside AUGUST 2014 VOL. 8, ISSUE 5

News Analysis Hackers target small firms to get to the big guys.

Here’s how companies can step up their game. PAGE 16

A FEW

GOOD MEN Successfully holding on to your best staff has a lot to do with how you hire them. Think cultural fit, not technical skill. >>PAGE 24

The Grill: Alan Atkinson, Dell, believes the company’s converged infrastructure is the future of the softwaredefined world. PAGE 21 On Record: Tyson Garrett, Arbor Networks, on the big opportunities for enterprise channels beyond nextgeneration firewalls. PAGE 18

Feature How social media has become a necessary part of the formula for success. PAGE 32

Case Study A long-standing relationship helps VDA Infosolutions bag a win-win deal. PAGE 34

CHANNELWORLD.IN

n EDITOR’S NOTE

Vijay Ramachandran

Hybrid Blooms

W

HEN I first wrote an edit on cloud computing

six years ago, there was buzz around SOA, server virtualization was turning to magma and an enterprise-class cloud was little more than vaporware. You’d think that after so many moons and increased maturity, cloud computing would be gathering momentum, and at a goodly pace. The typical large enterprise, one expects, would set up a highly virtualized environment, increase automation, add in an orchestration layer, throw in better manageability, migrate apps and voila— the private cloud.

So would it surprise you to note that that’s not how enterprise cloud strategy is playing out?

A little over six months ago, conversations that I’d been having with a host of CIOs pointed to a new trend emerging. A trend, substantiated by research by CIO India (a sister publication of ChannelWorld). India Inc. was beginning to see a surge in a “hybrid first” model emerging across enterprises, big and small.

The latest data from the State of the CIO: MidYear Study indicates that this trend, this trickle, has turned into a raging torrent, with 49 percent of Indian mid-to large enterprises choosing a hybrid strategy.

These companies and their CIOs believe that doing so provides them with bet4

ter performance, higher control, lower cost and improved reliability.

I’m not surprised at this hybrid surge. If you take today’s business demands of efficiency, agility and speed, add the blurry business horizon, with a generous helping of business endgoals and stir in the acute shortage of internal IT talent, most organizations are staring at a recipe for catastrophic business failure.

CIOs in trying to avoid this would have few options than to move some workloads to the public cloud, while keeping the more critical ones within

n This trickle,

has turned into a raging torrent, with 49 percent of Indian mid-to large enterprises choosing a hybrid strategy.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

the perimeter. CIO research squares with this, given that the top three workloads moving to the public cloud are mail and messaging, collaboration and externally-facing Web-apps.

Then there’s also the increase in datacenter complexity that’s being driven by increasing data volumes, a rise in the quantum of business critical applications and, of course, virtualization. Complexity, that has a direct bearing on increasing the cost of doing business. Thus, 39 percent of CIOs move less critical systems and processes to the cloud.

Increasingly, however, I’m observing a few midsized organizations begin the move to the public cloud early. Earlier than even putting a ‘private cloud’ in place!

Yet whichever path gets chosen, it leads to one inescapable destination—the here and now and future of

the cloud is hybrid. Companies might choose to keep some data and applications at home to escape issues with latency or compliance, the rest will need homes elsewhere—homes that will be rented. Homes that they will rent from you on behalf of your principals.

And, CIO research points to foundational gaps in cloud strategies of enterprises which should fuel a hybrid approach—39 percent can’t architect for it; 42 percent don’t have governance in place; 53 percent are clueless about legal ramifications, and 31 percent don’t have plans to train staff for it—something that should help solution providers gain more clients in the cloud space.

When the path isn’t in question, it’s a given that the scrutiny of the landscape increases. I suspect that this will also lead to aggressive conversations on pricing, SLAs, audits, controls, and the levels of confidentiality they can expect as clients. If you haven’t begun having such conversations, prepare for them.

The higher business velocity and cost efficiency that hybrid models offer seem to indicate that managements will lean that way.

Are you prepared to catch the changing current?  Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of ChannelWorld. Contact him at vijay_ramachandran@ idgindia.com

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Inside INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n AUGUST 2014

■ NEWS DIGEST 11 Rise of Digital Risk Officers |

By 2017, one-third of large enter-

■ OPINION

04 Editorial: The hybrid cloud

surge has turned into a raging torrent, says Vijay Ramachandran.

38 PlainSpeak: Yogesh Gupta

says that the concept of survival of the fittest, showcased in the movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, has valuable lessons for the channel community.

23 Michael Santarcangelo: To

prises engaging in digital business models will have a digital risk officer role or equivalent, says Gartner.

ensure BYOD increases value and security requires different thinking and an approach that brings people together in a series of conversations.

14 MS’ Hybrid Storage to Cut 60 Percent Costs | Microsoft’s

■ THE GRILL

hybrid storage offering, StorSimple, has new hardware and cloud management features that promises cost reduction upto 60 percent and better data protection.

21 Alan Atkinson, VP & GM, Dell Storage, believes the company’s

14 IBM Invests $3 Billion in Chips for Cloud, Big Data | IBM has

announced a $3 billion research and development investment to create a new generation of semiconductors for cloud, big data and cognitive systems.

15 Tablet Sales Dip as Market Matures | For the first time, the year-

over-year tablet sales have fallen by 14 percent because of the rise of low-end, smaller, seven-inch tablets, according to analyst firm NPD.

■ NEWS ANALYSIS

24 converged infrastructure makes a powerful story for the softwaredefined world.

■ COVER STORY

■ ON RECORD

Good Men

18 Tyson Garrett, Channel &

Alliance Director, APAC, Arbor

16 Locking Up Your Data | Hackers

Cover Design by UNNIKRISHNAN A.V

are increasingly targeting small firms to get to the big guys. Here’s what companies need to do to step up their game.

24 A Few

As organizations struggle to adjust to the new growth economy, finding top talent is one of their biggest challenges. Hiring for the right cultural fit can be more important than focusing on technical skills alone and can help companies improve employee retention, engagement and loyalty.

■ CASE STUDY

34 Built to Last Networks, on the big opportunities for enterprise channels beyond next-generation firewalls.

Its long-standing relationship with KPIT Technologies helped VDA Infosolutions bag a deal that was a win-win for both companies.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS CUSTOM GROUP INTERVIEW FORTINET HP

The real value for customers is the innovation that happens at HP Labs, and the vendor along with its set of partners and end-customers benefits from the entire process.

TALK STORAGE,

TALK HP

Anirudh Shrotriya, Director, Shro Systems, talks about his company’s long-standing association with HP and how the storage giant’s innovations in virtualization are beneficial to both the end-customers and channel partners.

By Aritra Sarkhel How long has Shro Systems been associated with HP? Shro Systems is a 25-year veteran in the IT solutions space. We have dealt with many vendors over the years, but the only vendor with whom we have been associated since the beginning is HP. We have held on to this extremely loyal association over the years, especially on the infrastructure side, wherein we interface only with HP. It’s been a wonderful, profitable, and mutually beneficial association.

How has HP helped you and your endcustomers in enhancing your competencies?

The USP of HP, which separates it from the other vendors in the market, is the fact that it’s an extremely channel-friendly company.

Its focus lies on how the channel can deliver the best service to end-customers more effectively. They have a lot of technological

innovations going on back in their labs, which are passed on to the channel by means of various training and enablement programs.

We have been fortunate enough to attend these sessions regularly. At Shro systems, we place a lot of importance on certifications, which basically means that our engineers and sales personnel spend a lot of time learning about new solutions, so that they are well-prepared to go meet end-customers and present HP’s solutions in a much better way. The real value for customers is the innovation that happens at HP Labs, and the vendor along with its set of partners and endcustomers benefits from the entire process.

Which industry segments are making the best use of virtualization technology?

Virtualization is a huge technology domain today. The IT/ITeS segment has been excessively using virtualization and has

been at the forefront of adoption. The other industry verticals besides IT/ITeS which make great use of virtualization are manufacturing and BFSI. However, the technology has been gaining traction in other verticals as well. Be it server, storage, or network, every component of the IT infrastructure requires virtualization technology. What varies according to the vertical is customers’ budgetary spend. Luckily, we are into many verticals, as a result of which we are seeing adoption in most of them.

What are the benefits of HP’s portfolio of virtualization solutions?

Customers can realize benefits in each and every workload they manage. Existing customers find it extremely easy and simple to manage storage arrays with HP’s storage stack. Even the archiving and recovery tasks take less time, thereby reducing the need for costly system administration or other tools required for storage management. In fact, the last two to three years have been phenomenal. I am very excited about HP’s acquisition of 3PAR, which is exceptional in providing multi-tenant, thin, and elastic storage and ideal for any customer expecting unprecedented growth of data.

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

FOR BREAKING NEWS, GO TO CHANNELWORLD.IN

Inside

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD n AUGUST 2014

■ FAST TRACK

20 Kailash Gupta, Director, ETSC Computers,

■ FOCAL POINT

35 SDN to the Rescue SDN AND VIRTUALIZED NETWORKS:

Cloud-based technologies are constantly developing to better optimize the world of wireless and IoT. The one aspect that has been overlooked, though, is the poor hardware/software performance. Here’s how

believes in the philosophy of good service is good

application challenges faced by cloudbased environments can be addressed by integrating SDN and NFV technologies and using them in an efficient way.

■ FEATURE

business and wants to be recognized as a complete solution provider.

31 Ashwinder Pal Singh Puri, Director, Apee Eskay Enterprises, has immense faith in his company’s in-house capabilities. And that, he believes, keeps it ahead of its competitors.

32 The Social Media Circle In a world where things are constantly changing, like business models, people and technology, social media and networking have become a necessary part of the formula for success. Here are eight ways employees

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Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello n EDITORIAL

Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran Executive Editors Gunjan Trivedi, Yogesh Gupta Deputy Editor Sunil Shah Features Editor Shardha Subramanian Assistant Editors Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Special Correspondent Sneha Jha Principal Correspondents Aritra Sarkhel, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi.

Senior Correspondent Eric Ernest Senior Copy Editor Vinay Kumaar Video Editor Kshitish B.S. Lead Designers Pradeep Gulur, Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Senior Designers Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V. Trainee Journalists Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Vaishnavi J. Desai Trainee Sejuti Das n SALES

& MARKETING

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can build credibility, both personally and professionally, through social media.

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Canon India Pvt Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IBC

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News

WHAT’S WITHIN

PAGE 14: Microsoft’s Hybrid Storage Cuts 60 Percent of Costs PAGE 14: IBM Invests $3 Billion in Next-gen Chips PAGE 15: Tablet Sales to Significantly Fall This Year, Says NPD PAGE 16: SMBs Need to Be Vary of Hackers

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

RISK MANAGEMENT

Rise of Digital Risk Officers

A

CCORDING TO

Gartner, more than half of digital businesses will suffer major service failures by 2020, due to the inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk. Gartner has named digital risk management as the next evolution in enterprise risk and security for digital businesses by expanding the scope of technologies protected.

IT, operational technology, the Internet of Things and physical security technologies will have interdependencies that require a

risk-based approach to governance and management.

More than half of CEOs will have senior “digital” leader roles in their staff by the end of 2015, according to the 2014 CEO and Senior Executive Survey by Gartner.

Gartner said that by 2017, one-third of large enterprises engaging in digital business models will also have a digital risk officer (DRO) role or equivalent.

Gartner vice president and analyst, Paul Proctor, said digital risk officers would require a mix of business acumen and un-

derstanding with sufficient technical knowledge to assess and make recommendations for addressing digital business risk.

“Many traditional security officers will change their titles to digital risk and security officers, but without material change in their scope, mandate, and skills they will not fulfill this role in its entirety,” Proctor said.

However, the mandate and scope of a DRO is very different than a chief information security officer.

The DRO will manage risk at an executive level across digital business units working directly with peers in legal, privacy, compliance, digital marketing, digital sales and digital operations. The impact of this new structure on IT and IT security operations is expected to be minimal, particularly in those enterprises that have already appointed a chief risk officer.

However, the potential impact on the culture of IT and IT security teams is major. “IT, IoT and physical security form a new superset of technology that challenges the ability of existing organizational structures, skill sets and tools to consistently and adequately assess, define and manage technology risks,” a Gartner statement said.

AUGUST 2014

—Brian Karlovsky INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

11

PRODUCTS

MS Office 365 Gets a Makeover Microsoft will revamp its Office 365 lineup for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), adding features, dropping prices and increasing the flexibility to mix and match them with Office 365 plans for enterprises and with stand-alone applications.

The changes are the result of feedback from part-

ners and existing Office 365 customers, and are intended to make the Office 365 application suite more attractive to SMBs and easier to market for channel resellers.

The new Office 365 plans will launch in October.

It wii be equivalent to the existing Midsize Business, but will costs less. It includes the full suite of Office productivity applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, as well as the cloud versions of the Office servers, including Exchange Online, Lync Online and SharePoint Online.

-Juan Carlos Perez

HOTLINE VIEW FROM THE TOP

Brewing a Winning Formula

Ashish Dhawan, MD – India & SAARC Operations at Juniper Networks, elaborates on the company’s renewed channel strategy which has partners’ empowerment as its core value.

Technology is in a constant flux. How do you see Juniper Networks fitting in this dynamic space?

The whole world is moving towards virtualizing all aspects of IT. From software, hardware to services, everything is moving towards

SDN and deliver an entire datacenter which is available through a single control plane.

We are the people who transform datacenters. We build datacenters that can efficiently deliver low latency applications. We help service providers ensure they

invest back in those who have invested in us, to make sure they get the best returns. Our Partner Advantage program, which was launched in 2012, currently supports 12,000 partners. It basically has been one of the most successful

We have built very aggressive plans for expansion in tier-2 and tier-3 locations.

We have also planned a number of vertical-focused initiatives to enable the next level of growth in 2014-15.

Ashish Dhawan Managing Director - India and SAARC, Juniper Networks virtualization, and most of it is further shifting to the cloud.

Juniper Networks sits in a very interesting area here. Most of our apps reside on the cloud (both private and public), with mobile platforms being the primary medium of consuming these applications.

Today’s datacenters have to be transformed in order to handle the modern requirements of applications.

This calls for an architectural revamp, so that all users consume the platform at all times and experience seamless performance. Second, with the growth in the number of datacenters, networking vendors like us also get the opportunity to integrate virtualization platforms with

can launch 3G/4G services without latency, performance or quality hindrances. We build both mobile data backbones and mobile data backhaul networks. To top it all, we provide security at all these layers.

You took over as Juniper Networks’ India head recently.

What have you been telling your partners since then?

We are a completely partner-centric company. We believe in improving our partners’ bottom lines through business and product innovation. We also strongly believe in doing more with less.

Juniper Networks does not believe in over-distributing its products through hundreds of channel partners. We

partner programs because of these reasons.

How do you see FY 201415 panning out for your partners?

The industry is continuing to grow and is expanding into newer sectors such as education, hospitality, and healthcare.

We see huge scope for growth in these sectors with the advent of the new government. Additionally, we have built very aggressive plans for expansion in tier-2 and tier-3 locations. We have also planned a number of vertical-focused initiatives to enable the next level of growth in 2014-15. Today, we have got a total of 300-

odd partners including 12 elite partners. We also aim to upgrade our partners’ skills by ensuring that they efficiently deliver new age solutions such as cloud and mobility to end-customers.

We also ensure that their bottom lines are strong. It’s our commitment to keep their businesses healthy.

What learnings from the previous fiscal year came to play while crafting your new channel strategy and roadmap?

We are highly focused this year on ensuring that our partners align their resources to Juniper Networks’ strategy. Last year, a lot of partners faced business turbulence because of the bad economy. We are committed to make sure the health of their business is back in shape and that they grow with us rapidly.

How is Juniper Networks’ new marketing initiative, Market Access, shaping up and delivering?

Very well, actually. Through this program, we have tried to achieve more with partners in markets where we have limited presence; for example, tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Here, we work with these partners so that they can make more investments and work with Juniper Networks to develop that market. And we assess demands and come up with different kinds of marketing initiatives to help the partners.

Juniper Networks announcedenhancements Secure solution that helps mitigate complex attacks b leveraging security in

IDG SERVICES

PRODUCT SHOWCASE

FIREWALL FOR THE FUTURE EVENTS

Juniper Networks offers next-generation firewall (NGFW) protection

Getting Together for Growth Juniper Networks held its India Partner Summit 2014 in Goa from May 20-22. The Summit was attended by various channel partners, distributors, and Juniper Networks’ Strategic Alliance (JSA). At the Summit, Juniper Networks’ leadership team shared its vision and strategy, besides conducting panel discussions on next-gen technology trends and business dynamics.The Summit also had a

session by Mitch Lewis, Vice President of Partners, APAC, on channel priorities and a presentation by Ashish Dhawan, MD – India and SAARC, Juniper Networks. It served as the perfect platform for channel partners to interact with Juniper Networks’ India leadership team and the organization’s senior executives to help them (partners) capitalize on the tremendous opportunities available.

“Always On Enterprise” Channel Roadshow To extend its tier-2 focus through the newly formed distribution relationship with Cadensworth India, Juniper Networks conducted roadshows in May and June in four cities of India: Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kolkata; and one SAARC city: Dhaka.

This collaborative effort helped reach out to existing partners including customers to showcase the

“Always On” campaign that covers campus and branch, security, wireless, and datacenter solutions.

With the participation of 95 customer organizations and 60 partner organizations building mindshare for incremental business funnel for tier-2 distribution business, the event proved to be a win-win for both Juniper Networks as well as the channel partners.

NEWS UPDATE

Juniper Networks Delivers the First Holistic DDoS Protection Solution Juniper Networks recently announced enhancements to its DDoS Secure solution that helps companiesmitigatecomplexattacks by effectively leveraging security intelligence throughout the network fabric,takingthemonestepcloserto building a High-IQ network.

These new enhancements allow attacks detected by DDoS Secure at thenetworkandapplication-layertobe stopped closer to the source by using networking protocols to make the Juniper Networks’ MX Series routers functionasenforcementpoints.

Networks recently enhancementstoitsDDoS ution that helps companies mplex attacks by effectively g security intelligence

This approach provides enterprises and service providers a more efficient wayofstoppingthevolumetricattacks that can potentially cripple a network.

It also mitigates other popular DDoS attackmethods.

Sharing further information, Paul Scanlon, director of product management, Juniper Networks, said, “More than ever, businesses need to protect themselves against massive and complex DDoS attacks.

With these new capabilities in an intelligent mitigation system,

we are equipping companies to engage key network capabilities to coordinate advanced protection simply and giving them the intelligence to adapt defenses actively and extend enforcement to the edge, allowing businesses to protect their critical services even under extreme attack conditions. By leveraging the intelligence and information inherent in the system, DDoS Secure is providing yet another capability in helping our customers build High-IQ Networks.”

with application awareness, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and extensive rolebased user control options, plus best-in-class unified threat management (UTM).

NGFW services are available across the full line of SRX Series Services Gateways and can perform full packet inspection, applying security policies based on Layer 7

information. As a result, organizations can create security policies based on the application running across the network, the user receiving or sending network traffic, or the content traveling across the network—a strategy that protects IT environments against threats, manages how network bandwidth is allocated, and controls who has access to what resources.

SRX Series Services Gateways come in a broad range of models from all-inone security and networking appliances to highly scalable, high-performance chassis solutions that can be centrally managed using Junos Space Security Director. Additional security services can be costeffectively added to existing SRX Series platforms.

Authorized Distributor

-

STORAGE

MS’ Hybrid Storage to Cut 60 Percent Costs

M

ability to expand overall coming out with storage in the cloud and new hardware add disaster protections. and cloud manStorSimple Virtual Apagement features for its pliance supports the funchybrid storage offering that tionality of the on-premises promises lower costs and StorSimple hardware exbetter data protection. cept that it is deployed on The new products invirtual machines within the clude two models of the Azure cloud. Paired with new StorSimple StorSimple hard8000 storage arware at customer ray that are tied sites, the virtual StorSimple’s data into a manageappliance can storage capacity, ment platform run applications enabling optimum and a virtual in the Azure data protection. storage applicloud by accessance. The packing virtual volage is called Microsoft umes uploaded to the cloud Azure StorSimple. from the storage arrays.

With it, customers can This arrangement cut storage costs by 40 to enables running new ap60 percent, receive faster plications in Azure that disaster recovery and acuse cloud-based snapshots cess detailed views of storof historical data without age status, says Microsoft. having to access it in the The hardware—Storcorporate data center, thus Simple 8100 and 8600—ties avoiding disruption of datadata between SSD and center workloads.

HHD drives, but also with Virtual Appliance can storage within the Azure play a role in disaster recloud. This hybrid archicovery in Azure as well. tecture gives customers the Applications that have been ICROSOFT IS

500 Tb

virtualized in an Azure StorSimple array can be restarted on virtual machines within Azure using data that has been uploaded there beforehand. Once the on-site customer data center has been restored, any changes to the data in the cloud that were made during the restoration process are downloaded from the cloud, Microsoft says.

On-premises data is uploaded to Azure as cloud snapshots. The cloud data is de-duplicated so it takes up less space and is synced with on-site data. Once in the cloud it can be used not only for disaster recovery but also for development and testing applications, search and application migration, Microsoft adds.

The cloud-based management platform gives a central console for all the StorSimple storage arrays throughout an enterprise as well as the storage within the Azure cloud. This enables applying central policies and gives access to all arrays automatically, says Mike Schutz, general manager-product marketing, Microsoft’s Server and Tools Division.

IBM Invests $3 Billion in Chips for Cloud, Big Data

14

opment programs to overcome the challenges in making ever-more-powerful chips.

“The simple scaling of semiconductors died almost 10 years ago and the interesting thing is that people have been quietly able to hide that,” says Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation in the company.

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

 Knowlarity, a cloud telephony solutions provider, has appointed RAH Infotech as its IT distributor in India. It will offer Knowlarity products and services to the partner community. This appointment is a strategy to strengthen Knowlarity’s position in India and SAARC countries.  Teradata has appointed Sunil Jose as the managing director of its India operations. He will be responsible for the overall management and strategic direction of Teradata’s India business, as well as overseeing sales and customer management, professional services, support, alliances, and marketing initiatives.  McAfee survey states that Indian internet users place an indicative value of Rs 25 lakh on their digital assets stored across their digital devices. The survey, was aimed at analyzing and evaluating the perceived worth of digital assets of Indian respondents.

—By Tim Greene

IT TRENDS

IBM has announced a $3 billion (about Rs 18 thousand crore) research and development investment to create a new generation of semiconductors geared for cloud, big data and cognitive systems.

Over the next five years, Big Blue says it will use the money to fund two broad research and early-stage devel-

Short Takes

Big Money: Investing in new chips will transform computing.

He notes that semiconducotrs still continue to scale down; it’s just that individual components have reached their physical limits.

“There have been fundamental changes in the materials,” Meyerson says. “10 years ago, it was very clear that the gate oxide in semiconductors became small and useless.”

Meyerson says he hopes that IBM’s research efforts will pay off in new semiconductors that will transform the very nature of computing, allowing powerful big data analytics to become as pervasive in the future as the hand calculator is in the present.

-Thor Olavsrud

DEVICES

Tablet Sales Dip as Market Matures

T

HE STRATOSPHERIC

growth of the tablet market may be leveling off. For the first time, the year-overyear tablet sales have fallen, analyst firm NPD DisplaySearch has reported.

NPD declined to break out specific numbers, but said that based on its sales data for the first quarter, tablet sales had declined compared with the same period last year.

About 285 million tablets will be sold in 2014, the firm said, representing a lower number than it had originally expected. In 2014, the year-over-year growth rate of tablet PCs will fall to just 14 percent and by 2017 will slow to single digits.

The culprit appears to be low-end, smaller seveninch tablets, which have historically driven the overall growth of the tablet market. Even this segment now appears to be saturated though.

“Tablet PC demand in 2014 is being affected in emerging regions and in China, where many local white-box brands have experienced lower-than-expected shipment growth,” said Hisakazu Torii, VP, smart application research at NPD DisplaySearch.

“Most major brands have recently reduced their business plans for this year.

There is a risk that the replacement cycle for tablet PCs and other such devices will lengthen beyond the one to two year range, unless, obviously, brands can

develop more attractive usability scenarios.”

Shipments of notebook PCs fared far better than expected during the first quarter, the firm said, which was helped by commercial shipments and users replacing older PCs that run on Windows XP, whose official support ended earlier this year.

In general, though, NPD’s trends reflect a slower growth rate in tablets, a rise in “ultraslim” notebooks, and an overall decline in the traditional notebook market.

NPD’s numbers seem to be borne out by results from companies like Samsung, who put out a supple-

mentary statement of what went wrong. “In the case of tablets, sales were sluggish due to a longer replacement cycle than that of smartphones, which is usually between two to three years,” the company said.

In May, IDC lowered its own tablet (and hybrid notebook) forecast for 2014 to 245.4 million units, down from the previous forecast of 260.9 million units.

Around

TheWorld 2.4 Billion Devices Shipped Worldwide This Year

According to Gartner, the worldwide combined shipments of devices like PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones, will reach 2.4 billion units in 2014. This will be a 4.2 percent increase from 2013.

Gartner’s report states that the global PC market, which suffered a 9.5 percent contraction in 2013, should only see a 2.9 percent decline in this year because of a number of customers upgrading their systems.

-FY Teng AUGUST 2014

Juniper Appoints New Leaders in APAC

Juniper Networks announced a series of senior appointments in the AsiaPacific region. The new appointments, which span sales, systems engineering, marketing and partners, will reportedly help position the company to capitalize on the highest growth opportunities in APAC as customers migrate to High-IQ Networks and bestin-class cloud environments.

-Team ChannelWorld

Oracle to Release 115 Security Patches

Oracle is planning to release 115 security patches for vulnerabilities affecting a wide array of its products, including its flagship database, Java INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

15

The revised number represents a 12.1 percent growth rate over 2013.

For its part, Gartner, an IT advisory firm, said that tablet shipments will increase to 256 million this year, up from 207 million last year.

Tablet shipments will probably climb to 321 million in 2015, overtaking PCs, the firm predicted.

—Mark Hachman

SE, Fusion Middleware, and business applications.

The update includes fixes for 20 weaknesses in Java SE, all of which can be exploited by an attacker remotely, without the need for login credentials.

Some 29 fixes are for Oracle’s Fusion Middleware suite. Affected middleware components include BI Publisher, GlassFish Server, HTTP Server, JDeveloper, WebCenter Portal, and WebLogic Server. Six other patches were released for Oracle’s database.

-Chris Kanaracus

n NEWS ANALYSIS

Locking Up Your Data

Hackers are increasingly targeting small firms to get to the big guys.

Here’s what companies need to do to step up their game.

Jen A. Miller

16

S

MALL AND medium-sized businesses may think they’re immune to the kinds of attacks that wreaked havoc on Target last year, but they’re susceptible to the same nefarious forces—sometimes even more so, as they can easily lead hackers to a bigger and better prize.

The Target breach was huge. Both CEO Gregg Steinhafel and CIO Beth Jacob have resigned. Cards were affected across financial institutions -- 10 percent at big banks, 14 percent at credit unions and nine percent at community banks, according to a Discover Financial Services

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

study. Overall, 84 percent of financial institutions were impacted; after a typical data breach, that number is only 29 percent. Since the Target breach, other retailers have been affected, including Neiman Marcus, eBay and P.F. Chang’s.

It’s easy to think that your small business won’t be affected by hackers, says Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm and think tank dedicated to advancing privacy and data protection practices. “Large companies have a bull’s eye on their backs. A lot of small companies thought they were immune. It’s just at

small company. Who’s going to hack them?”

A lot of people, it turns out. SMBs face some challenges that are the same as their larger counter partners, but some that are unique to them, too.

YOU ARE THE COMPANY YOU KEEP Target’s failure was a holistic one, says Mark Hammond, senior director of security consulting for Neohapsis Security Services, a security and risk management consulting company specializing in mobile and cloud security services. “One of the things that stuck out was the way partners are managed in the organization. It’s not just technology. There’s also people and processes filling in all the pieces of the puzzle.”

This is why a small business can be a different kind of target,s especially if it provides a service to a larger company. Hackers used Target’s heating and air conditioning contractor as a gateway; subsequent failures on the security chain lead to a successful attack.

Poneman gives the additional example of a defense contractor client that had proprietary information stolen by hackers. “Getting into this defense contractor’s system, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 100,” he says.

Instead, hackers focused on smaller companies that worked for the contractor and hacked their way in that way.

That’s why employees and vendors are important.

“You have to be a little less trusting,” says Poneman.

The culprit here was a janitorial service hired by the small business that worked

with the defense contractor. Conduct the proper background checks—not just for your employees, but any vendors you hire to help your business.

STOLEN DATA ENDS UP ON BLACK MARKET Of the 40 million cards stolen, anywhere from 1 to 3 million were successfully sold on the black market.

Many were used not in physical brick-and-mortar stores but, rather, on online outlets selling high-end goods such as laptops, watches or jewelry that could easily be resold, says Liron Damri, COO, Forter, an Israeli-based firm that offers fraud protection to small and medium sized online merchants.

“Fraudsters won’t necessarily to back to eBay or Target or Neiman Marcus and try to use those credit cards in those systems because their systems are very strong,” he says. “They will try to take advantage of those medium-sized merchants and get money out of them.”

Fraud charges work differently for online companies vs. brick-and-mortar stores. “If somebody steals a credit card and tries to make a transaction, the merchant will be covered and insured by the credit card company,” Damri says.

“If an online merchant is processing that credit card transaction, the person who would be liable for any damage is the online merchant. They are the ones liable to ‘card not present’ transactions.”

CREDIT CARDS WILL GET MORE SECURE, BUT ONLY IN STORES The biggest change that we’ll see in the future of

The Biggest Data Breaches of 2014 (So Far)

A

survey of data breaches in the first six months of this year shows an increasing number of incidents in which data, including names and addresses, credit card and social security numbers, and medical records was lost to criminals or exposed.

Here are the top five data breaches of the first half of 2014.

eBay

The online retailer suffered one of the biggest data breaches yet reported by an online retailer. Attackers compromised a “small number of employee log-in credentials” between late February and early March to gain access to the company’s network and, through it, compromised a huge database. The breach is thought to have affected the majority of the company’s 145 million members.

Michaels Stores

The point-of-sale systems at 54 Michaels and Aaron Brothers stores “were attacked by criminals using highly sophisticated malware” between May 2013 and January 2014. The company said up to 2.6 million payment card numbers and expiration dates at Michaels stores and 400,000 at Aaron Brothers could have been obtained in the attack

credit card security, says Hammond, is a move toward the European format of chip-and-PIN. All U.S. Target stores will have chip-and-PIN readers by September, and Target will begin issuing chip-and-PIN Target REDcards by the first quarter of 2015, according to the retailer.

This won’t be a failsafe solution, though. A side effect could be what we already see in Europe, where hackers focus more attention at online transactions.

These aren’t affected by chip-and-pin security, as no card is present.

“The key impact of this will be a drop in the amount

Variable Annuity Life Insurance Co.

A former financial adviser at the company was found in possession of a thumb drive that contained details on 774,723 of the company’s customers. The drive was provided to the company by law enforcement as the result of a search warrant served on the former adviser. The thumb drive included full or partial social security numbers.

Spec’s

A 17-month-long “criminal attack” on the Texas wine retailer’s network resulted in the loss of information of as many as 550,000 customers. The intrusion began in October 2012 and affected 34 of the company’s stores across the state. It continued until as late as March 20 this year, and the company fears hackers got away with all customer details.

St. Joseph Health System

A server at the Texas health care provider was attacked between December 16 and 18 last year.

It contained “approximately 405,000 former and current patients’, employees’ and some employees’ beneficiaries’ information.” As with many other hacks, an investigation wasn’t able to determine if the data was accessed or stolen.

-Martyn Williams

of fraud in the real world,” says Damri. “On the other hand, it will push fraudsters to the online world where you don’t have to show the pin and where you don’t have to swipe the card.”

FAIL TO PLAN AND YOU PLAN TO FAIL In such a complex threat environment, your company should have a plan in place in case fraud happens. This plan should include your immediate response, including which employees will do what, as well as regulatory information about what you need to disclose when. “You should run fire drills to

make sure you’re ready,” Ponemon adds.

This might not seem like much. It might even seem silly. But a poor response to a data breach could be huge. Already, the average data breach costs a company $3.5 million (about Rs 21 hundred crore), according to an IBM study that was conducted with the Ponemon Institute. Not having a plan raises those costs 10 to 15 percent, Ponemon says.

You can hire a consultancy firm to draft an Incident Response Plan and conduct penetrating testing to check your security status. 

AUGUST 2014

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Photograph by KAPIL SHROFF

ON RECORD n

Tyson Garrett,

Channel & Alliance Director, APAC, Arbor Networks, on the big opportunities for enterprise channels beyond next-generation firewalls.

By Yogesh Gupta

18

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

Which technology trends do you intend to capitalize on this year?

GARRETT: In the late 90s, the US Defence Agency Research Projects Administration (DARPA) project started funding us, and today, we have evolved to a company measuring Internet traffic flow. More than 90 percent of tier-1 service providers are our clients.

Today, more companies are adopting different models of the cloud and looking for ways to leverage it. To that end, we have a mutlitier approach that connects on-premise devices to the cloud. But when it comes to cloud computing, security is a major concern. To ward off security threats, Arbor

cloud DDOS protection is used by service providers and enterprises. And here’s where Arbor’s security analytics product is becoming relevant.

Will the cloud’s growth spell the end of hardware appliances?

GARRETT: We understand that for most enterprises it will not be cloud all the way and we are being pragmatic about that. For some enterprises, pure software and virtualization are the main components of cloud computing.

But true core Internet demands maximum performance that can be delivered through Arbor’s high-end ASIC (application-

TYSON GARRETT | ON RECORD n specific integrated circuit) devices. Hence hardware appliances will co-exist within organizations.

Enterprises want the complete story and empowering channels towards the big opportunity—in the form of cloud computing— is our strategy. If partners don’t evolve with this transition, customers will move to more evolved partners.

The traditional challenges of customizing elongates time-to-market and erodes a company’s competitive advantage. On the other hand, organizations can sign for a demo within minutes and start applications instantly on the cloud.

What slice of the security portfolio do you cover compared to traditional security players?

GARRETT: When it comes

to security solutions—like DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions—Arbor has always been about visibility. Back in the late 90’s, Arbor offered traffic visibility to customers with actionable intelligence on the state of their network.

Our security portfolio includes our Pravail IPS product. These are stateless devices that are placed in front of the network to protect IPS and firewall.

Also, the Pravail network security intelligence product helps identify attacks.

And the Pravail security analytics product provides real-time intelligence by continuously examining historic traffic to find zero day attacks. Visualization and user interface of our products provides customers with easily accessible data intelligence.

A finite set of security channel partners sell your competition’s solutions as well. Isn’t that a risk?

GARRETT: Partnership is about trust between partners and us. It is not that we want them to sell only our products, nor do they expect us to work only with them. We are not signing 50-odd new partners in a region. With M-Tech as India’s VAD, we have focused on tier-1 and tier-2 partners.

We want security-focused partners who are well equipped with adequate training to support their customers through the full product lifecycle.

Our key markets are midmarket and the enterprise space, though we are relevant to most companies— irrespective of size—where data (availability and criticality) is key and IP needs

protection. Partners can pitch Arbor in a horizontal manner across verticals, though ITES and e-commerce form our dominant customer set.

Does Arbor compete with McAfee/Symantec offerings or new players like FireEye and Palo Alto?

GARRETT: We don’t believe in the term ‘next-generation firewalls’. It is more of a marketing term. Earlier, firewall and IPS were installed in case of a breach and then it was the ‘next generation firewall’ five years ago.

Organizations should realize that timely detection of a security breach results in better prevention.

That’s why we have the ability to identify, understand and act accordingly to protect organizations. 

n FAST TRACK

Snapshot

ETSC Computers

Founded: 1985 Headquarters: Jaipur Key Executives: Mamta Gupta, Director; Shyam Sharma, Administration and Accounts Revenue 2013-14: Rs 10.43 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 3.2 crore Employees: 11 Principals: HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Epson, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe Key Business Activities: IT Infrastructure, Enterprise Applications, Networking, Cloud

We want to be recognized as a complete solution provider, says Kailash Gupta, Director, ETSC Computers.

A

FIRM BELIEVER in the

philosophy of good service is good business, ETSC Computers’ success stems from its focus on customer satisfaction. The company has come a long way since its inception in 1985. And that’s evident from the fact that the company posted a more than 300 percent growth in the last fiscal—from Rs 3 crore to Rs 10 crore.

The credit for that, says ETSC’s Director Kailash Gupta, goes to the company’s will to reinvent itself— and provide quality service to its customers. “We’ve always selected products and aligned them with the companies that believe in providing quality service,” says Gupta.

In addition, Gupta says, the company analyzes its business at the end of every year and updates 20

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

its product portfolio according to market trends.

But it wasn’t always this rosy.

During its initial days, the company battled with shrinking margins, increase in defaults, and low return on investments. Gupta sought guidance

VERTICAL SPLIT 5%

Education/Nonprofit 5% Telecom

5%

5%

Others

Construction/ Real Estate

5%

Healthcare/ Pharma

5%

BFSI

40%

Government

10%

IT/ITES/BPO

20%

Manufacturing SOURCE: ETSC COMPUTERS

Photograph by SHAILESH

Website: www.etsc.in

from his elder brother and was able to overcome these challenges.

Today, the Jaipur-based company provides complete IT solutions to real estate, education, government, telecom, and manufacturing segments. It also works with major vendors like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and EMC. Apart from these vendors, ETSC had worked very closely with Wipro for more than 20 years. In fact it was an exclusive distributor for Wipro’s range of peripherals and services in Rajasthan in 1991. However in 2012, ETSC decided to voluntarily end its business association with Wipro but smartly made up for the loss it bore by associating with HP, ACER and DELL as business partners and marketing their products and solutions to Wipro’s captive accounts.

Despite these roadblocks, ETSC was able to achieve outstanding revenue this year. And that’s partly because, according to Gupta, the company strives to provide best quality products and services to its customers. He says after sales services play the most important role in narrowing down principals and products.

Going forward, ETSC plans to expand its business. It wants to launch a software startup. “We want to be recognized as a complete solution provider. Our new startup will focus entirely on offering software solutions,” says Gupta.  —Team ChannelWorld

Dossier Name: Alan Atkinson Designation: Vice President & General Manager, Dell Storage Company: Dell Profile/Roles and Responsibilities: Atkinson leads all product management and operations for Dell’s storage business. Atkinson joined Dell in May 2012 as vice president and general manager of Dell Compellent storage.

Previous Experience: Previously, Atkinson was president and CEO at Xiotech (now XIO Technologies) and transitioned to chairman of the board in November 2011. Prior to XIO, he was VP of the storage software group at EMC following the acquisition of WysDM Software, which he co-founded. Atkinson also held the position of SVP of engineering and product marketing at StorageNetworks, which he saw through to a successful IPO.

VP & GM, Dell Storage, believes the company’s converged infrastructure makes a powerful story for the softwaredefined world.

It seems like Dell is in a hurry to be an end-to-end player. Haven’t you overlooked some loose ends in your solutions strategy?

You can never do things too fast, you just do them well. We are in a pretty solid market share position on PCs and servers. Given these, it is the smartest transition to being a solution provider.

Over the last couple of years, we have acquired 24 companies, including

Photograph by SUJITH

Alan Atkinson

How has your rich experience helped you shape Dell’s offerings, given that the company is now making its way into being an endto-end solutions player? My background brings in a couple of things. We spend a lot of time talking to customers. I have been a part of successful start-ups and have an SMB perspective, which makes you react to the market quickly.

We are in the most dynamic environment ever; the datacenter doesn’t look like it did a decade ago. We are moving to a cloud and software-defined world.

Start-ups create the right kind of disruption and the urgency to do things quickly. So, I guess, that is the key element in my career that spills over to Dell, though I can’t take total credit for it. We are a team driving the thought.

n THE GRILL

AUGUST 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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n THE GRILL | ALAN ATKINSON

Converged platforms are higher value solutions that we drive. In time, the sales motion in the industry is going to move in this direction.” about five in storage itself. If you look at what we did, the real challenge is to turn a sum of them into a part of the whole. We’ve market share in the server and IP space and we’ve a powerful combination that can help leverage these strengths to go-to-market. That reflects in our software-defined strategy.

What, in reality, is Dell’s software-defined storage strategy? So, we take this platform, an entire stack, say the Dell XC series, comprising our PowerEdge servers, capabilities in VDI, besides

BECAUSE

Better information EQUALS

other virtualized business applications. We have tied up with Nutanix, and we combine their Webscale technology and take a converged platform to the customer. This becomes critical and relevant in a world that is largely gravitating towards software.

So, a converged platform will eventually cannibalize the hardware, wont it? That is an interesting question, given that the converged platform runs on hardware.

I would see it as a higher value sale. In time, the sales motion will change into a more solutions mode. But we know that this is not unique to Dell.

How will this paradigm shift affect your long relationship with pure-play companies such as EMC? Honestly, I can’t say. But from a Dell strategy standpoint, the long and short of it is that we are in a unique position. We have a powerful set of partners. Early indications say the converged infrastructure story will be well received by all stakeholders—be it customers or partners.  —Shantheri Mallaya

“ We encourage partners to chalk out a long-term strategy, each time an organization needs a new security widget.

- Andrew Littleproud, President, McAfee

Better business Read the latest interviews from the biggest names of leading IT organisations on their company direction, technology roadmap and channel strategies.

Read more at

www.channelworld.in/interviews

“ We are looking for disruptive partners who want to be a part of a big change in the industry.

- Adam Judd, VP, Asia Pacific, Brocade

that a lot “ The common mistake folks make is

of vendor marketing that they think the channel can do ‘marketing’ for them.

- Julie Parrish, SVP&CMO, NetApp

n OPINION

MICHAEL SANTARCANGELO

BYOD: Legal Drill

A

S BRING your own device (BYOD) reshapes the To ensure way organizations handle technology, how do we BYOD handle the uncertainty of legal liability and increases security concerns? The answer lies in considering value while also increasing how BYOD changes the entire organization. Change is scary.

More so when the impact of the change, including legal security liabilities, are unclear and relatively untested. requires including elements like: Device selection, The key is in how the technical, legal, different how people envision using the devices, and other uncertainties are handled. Getwhat data and networks they need access ting it right requires constructive converthinking and to, and the like. sations with stakeholders and influencers. an approach Expect this process to take time. Larger, Here are three key steps in holding promore complex organizations take more ductive conversations: that brings time. Focus on bringing the right people people together Embrace Uncertainty together and allowing each the opportunity to contribute to the mapping. This Acknowledge that BYOD introduces in a series of provides the legal, security, and IT team, change. From allowing individuals their conversations. own devices, to shifting the way we pro- and everyone else involved the opportuvide security, and adapting the legal and operational consequences. It’s natural to resist and fight change (at least on the part of security professionals).

However, the key to implementing BYOD in a way that increases security and reduces legal liability is to embrace the uncertainty. People don’t actually expect you to know everything.

The legal counsel doesn’t have all the answers, either. The business people seeking BYOD aren’t entirely sure of the range of situations and conditions in which they’ll use it.

Take the lead and explain that uncertainty is okay. It sets up an opportunity to come together and collaborate; this is in contrast to obtuse declarative statements or enforcing draconian policies.

Michael Santarcangelo is the catalyst smart leaders count on to take friction out of communication and amplify value. He is the author of Into the Breach.

Bring Visibility to the Process Embracing uncertainty leads to the opportunity to gather the right people and bring visibility to the entire BYOD process. Visually map out how it works,

nity for an understanding of the process.

Once the approach is outlined, guide people through the welcomed changes in their processes. As they envision and describe the flow, that’s the time to ask questions about what needs to be protected. This means everyone has a voice in explaining the benefits and potential risks of the changes.

Engage in Communication Messaging is one-way. And worse, messaging doesn’t always work (for a variety of reasons). Yet many teams still work to produce the “perfect” message only to succumb to the perfect message fallacy.

Relying on messaging to address the security challenges and legal liability concerns only increases the friction in communication that jeopardizes the effort.

Instead, of relying on messaging, hastily written e-mails, and other forms of “communication” that hamper conversation, get face-to-face and engage in dialog. Do this when possible.  AUGUST 2014

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n COVER STORY

A Few GOOD M

Hiring for the right cultural fit can be more important than focusing on technical skills alone and can help companies improve employee retention, engagement and loyalty.

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companies to focus less on skills and experience and more on cultural fit and development potential, says Chris Duchesne, vice president of Workplace Solutions, Care.com.

“At many forward-thinking companies, the leadership and hiring teams understand that technology changes so rapidly, more important than discrete skills is an employee’s cultural fit and their ability to transfer their skills, experience and values to new technologies, new endeavors, and new paths. You can always teach and/ or acquire new skills and gain new experiences, but it’s hard to ‘teach’ culture,” Duchesne says.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE

D MEN

By Sharon Florentine

A

S ORGANIZATIONS struggle

to adjust to the new growth economy, finding top talent is one of their biggest challenges. According to a recent study from Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2014, “Critical new skills are scarce—and their uneven distribution around the world is forcing companies to develop innovative new ways to find people, develop capabilities and share expertise.”

But equally important is retaining talent once you’ve found it— making sure that your efforts to identify, recruit and develop talent aren’t in vain. Sourcing and hiring with retention in mind requires

The book Tribal Leadership by David Logan, John King, and Halee FischerWright emphasizes the importance of workplace culture and how it can contribute to a more successful workplace. The authors found that organizations that stress cultural fit find that, within their workforce, “fear and stress go down as the ‘interpersonal friction’ of working together decreases; people seek employment in the company and stay, taking the company a long way towards winning the war for talent; organizational learning becomes effortless, with the tribe actively teaching its members the latest thinking and practices; people’s overall health statistics improve. Injury rates and sick days go down; and most exciting ... is that [employees] report feeling more alive and having more fun” in such a workplace, according to the book.

Identifying talent that fits culturally within your organization can be a huge step towards employee engagement, satisfaction and long-term retention.

IDENTIFYING YOUR CULTURE Workplace culture is, at its heart, making sure that your employees’ values, mission and personality align with those of your company, says Todd Raphael, editor-in-chief of recruiting site ERE.net.

“Hiring for cultural fit above skills is a great idea, because you never know how much an employee will be developing, growing and AUGUST 2014

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25

n COVER STORY changing over time—they could be in a completely different role by next year,” Raphael says. “And it makes sense to do so based on the industry and market you’re in, too: If you’re an accounting company,

for instance, you don’t necessarily want to hire someone who’s chaotic and extremely creative. If you’re a cutthroat, uber-competitive, cuttingedge company, you don’t want to hire someone who’s very laid-back

and not as driven by competition, for instance,” Raphael says.

How do you identify someone who’s a good cultural fit? For some organizations, it’s as easy as noticing what they wear, says Care.com’s Duchesne. One

Employees Satisfaction Drives Customer Satisfaction Rajesh Bhatia, managing director, CCS Computers, explains why he focuses on employee satisfaction and how he ensures low attrition.

Delhi-headquartered CCS Computers has over 488 employees and clocked over Rs 165 crore in revenues last fiscal. But what’s more interesting about it is its single-digit rate of attrition—a rate it’s maintained for over five years.

How does it retain staffers in an industry afflicted by high attrition?

“We have had a fixed HR policy for a decade; with no major changes, immaterial of market conditions.

Our philosophy has stayed steadfast: Employee satisfaction drives customer satisfaction; it results in repeat business and customer retention,” says Rajesh Bhatia, founder and MD, CCS Computers.

An HR policy that doesn’t waver with time, also helps ensure smooth business operatio, he says.

The company’s retention success has a lot to do with the way it hires.

Bhatia believes it’s smarter to hire people who fit a company’s culture, rather than for their technical or managerial skills. “Technical skills can be developed through in-house training programs—provided a new employee can gel well with the organization’s culture. Plus, employees who fit in culturally are better equipped to adapt to changes in their role,” he says.

Bhatia strongly believes in enhancing the skillsets of existing team members in line with emerging technologies. This strategy, however, requires a clear business roadmap, he says.

To help hone staff skillsets, the company has a fully-equipped, inhouse technology center with the latest technologies at its head office,

26

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which helps enhance employee skills.

“We also run various personality development and soft-skill training programs from time-to-time to keep the employees motivated,” he says.

With the bulk of its revenues—almost 85 percent—from government contracts, the defense sector, and PSUs, keeping its employees motivated is extremely important. Government projects, more than private sector deals, tend to create stress in partner organizations, partially due to the tender process, the difficulty in collecting payments, and stringent SLAs. “This segment demands a strong HR policy, and employeefriendly policies, which we have adhered to at our end,” says Bhatia.

CCS Computers expects to add 10 percent more employees, and two or three branches, in the next year. A low attrition rate, combined with enhanced employee productivity, will help it get there.

And this will help him drive more revenues.

“Employee satisfaction remains a key factor to attain customer satisfaction.

A satisfied customer results in repeat business, leads to lower opportunity cost, and better productivity. Employees are my true partners in business, says Bhatia.

—Yogesh Gupta

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n COVER STORY large manufacturer of snowboarding equipment, for example, advises potential candidates not to wear a suit to an interview; in fact, if someone does arrive wearing a suit, they’re instantly discounted as not being a good cultural fit, simply based on how they’re dressed, Raphael says.

For startup Grammarly.com, an automated proofreading tool for Englishlanguage writers, making sure new hires are a good cultural fit means candidates are assessed based on the acronym EAGER (Ethical, Adaptable, Gritty, Empathetic and Remarkable), says Grammarly’s CEO Brad Hoover.

“We codified our culture profile with one word—EAGER. Assessing skills is relatively straightforward, but culture fit is much more difficult, especially if the culture is not defined, so that was priority number one for us,” Hoover says.

“Our hiring process is much more efficient because of this filter—we spend much less time getting to a final decision and we’ve been really successful at making the right hiring decisions,” he says.

PUTTING EAGER TO WORK The acronym EAGER stands for all qualities Grammarly.com looks for in its employees. Potential hires are introduced to and approved by the company’s executive team, and then hiring teams are formed based on that potential employee’s role and who they’ll be working for and with, Hoover says.

The first letter stands for Ethical, and Hoover explains that “with an ethical team, we can trust each other and put lots of responsibility in the hands of everyone on the team.”

This is critical in a startup with only about 70 team members split between offices in San Francisco and Kiev, Ukraine. The second letter stands for Adaptable: The ability to embrace change and learn in order to evolve and succeed, Hoover says.

“Our people must apply a positive, problem-solving attitude to whatever they’re doing,” he says.

“They’ve got to be looking out for potential problems and proactively thinking—either individually or collectively—about how to solve them.”

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INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

The Future of Hiring in India: PwC Consulting Padmaja Alaganandan, ED-Consulting, PwC Consulting, says the way Indian companies look at their workforce will change: The middle and lower rungs will be hired on a project- or part-time basis.

What are the most pronounced trends in hiring in modern Indian organizations? First, hiring has not been taking place in great numbers across industries; not the way it did say four to five years ago.

While no one theory fits all, traditionally, the lower end of the hiring pyramid has always been heavier than the top. This essentially helps keep the weighted average cost of manpower as close to constant as possible.

As growth slows, and with time, the lower-end moves to the middle, and the cost associated with people becomes substantial. Organizations tend to do quick calculations; so they are left with options of either optimizing the use of this newly-grown middle management, or shrinking the size of the lower- or the middle-end, so that they can keep the weighted cost of manpower in check.

So, what will organizational hierarchy look like five years down the line? The focus will be on individual equity (personal brand) rather than on organizational brand. In effect, employers will gravitate towards a flexible model. The core of any organization will have full time people on board. The middle and lower ends are going to have an ecosystem of partners, specialists and consultants, who will come onboard on a project- or part-time basis. They will be hired for their credibility and commitment, they will deliver, and then move on. Everything is going to be very time-bound, with no long-term contracts.

Is this model pragmatic in the long run? These are pragmatic models that will define the HR landscape, and have started evolving in certain industries in India, like it did, years ago, in the West.

It is rooted in sound economics, and considers new-gen employees, who don’t visualize a 10-year career graph in one organization.

—As told to Shantheri Mallaya

The G is for Gritty, Hoover says, which emphasizes the need for both passion and perseverance when going after long-term goals.

“This is especially important for a startup; to do whatever it takes to get the job done whenever it is necessary,” he says. “As tech companies grow, teams can’t grow as quickly as the user base, so it’s hard for the hiring and onboarding process to keep up as the demand for the product grows. We want our people to have the grit to persevere, even when it’s difficult.”

The second E, for Empathetic, simply means treating others as you want to be treated, to work more effectively as a team, Hoover says. Ac-

tive listening and constantly “putting yourself in another’s shoes” are key elements of empathy, he says.

“We care about this because of the implications of communication. At a foundational level, that requires mutual respect, and that’s based on empathy,” he says. Finally, the R is for Remarkable. Being remarkable, Hoover says, involves being recognized for being exceptional, but also humble.

“We want our people to be exceptional in their own right, but also to seek out others and learn from them.

It’s hard enough to find remarkable people, but the ‘humble’ part of it involves the recognition that there are so many things you don’t know, and

then finding a mentor or teacher to help you learn those things,” he says.

THROW OUT THE RESUME A June 2013 Gallup poll of more than 150,000 US workers found that a whopping 70 percent of respondents either hated their jobs or felt disengaged, and of the main reasons cited, “poor management” and “poor cultural fit” were at the top of the list.

Sean Storin, CEO and co-founder of recruiting and networking site One Degree, says these statistics are what prompted him and his team to develop One Degree to address the staggering number of bad hires and try to identify better employees based on culture, mission and values.

“We’d heard that something like 89 percent of people leave a job because they’re not happy. Even if that statistic is overblown, even if it’s only 50 percent, that’s an epidemic,” he says, “And it’s as bad for the employees as it is for the business.”

One Degree is an online career network that claims to place culture, values and mission above all else when matching candidates and potential employers, Storin says. The site does not include resumes, nor does it include job postings; instead, he says, candidates sign up and answer questions based around cultural categories to find companies and roles that would best fit for their interests, values and their lifestyle.

There are three distinct ecospheres that lead to good hiring, Storin says, what a candidate knows, how the candidate lives and what the candidate wants.

“The ‘How I Live’ piece outlines the type of personal values a candidate has, and how that translates into their fitting into your organization. And the ‘What I Want’ piece is an opportunity to express exactly what would make candidates happy in a work environment. The last piece is extremely important, and it’s something candidates are not often faced with—it’s empowering for them to have this be a major part of the hiring conversation,” Storin says.

One Degree does use search, networking and messaging functionality like in traditional job search sites like LinkedIn, Storin says, but it also incorporates algorithms to identify cultural traits and alignment with specific indus-

tries, companies and roles. The model was similar to algorithms like those used in music discovery and playback software Pandora.

“We looked at companies doing things very well in other capacities; Pandora, for instance, is using all these metrics and algorithms to match users with music they might like based on things like syncopation and beats-per-minute.

We felt this was the key to the future of employment search and answered the question of how to integrate culture into

the equation,” Storin says.

He adds that the information gathered by One Degree’s questions is also beneficial for hiring companies, and that while candidates can fill out the site’s questionnaires in under five minutes, most users spend around four to five times that amount of time on the site —a conversion rate of 40 percent.

“It’s a coup for these huge companies to know these things about their potential hires,” Storin says. “And we already see a much greater level of engagement

HR MATTERS: COMFORT VS COMPLACENCE Low attrition is not about complacence, but comfort and loyalty, says Rajeev Krishnaswamy, Director, Infobahn Technical Solutions.

There are many reasons to look up to Infobahn Technical Solutions. But one of the more interesting ones is its very low attrition. Director Rajeev Krishnaswamy says most employees stay with the company for eight to 10 years.

A number of factors can be attributed to this phenomenon, including the fact that many of Infobahn’s staffers are of the same age group. Another reason could be the fact that a core set of employees have been around since the company’s launch, which means they have grown within the organization, become comfortable in its working environment, and share the values and the culture of the company.

But does that mean employees have become too comfortable? No, refutes Krishnaswamy, “We do not nurture complacence. Performance and consistency are a given.”

Going the extra mile helps. Krishnaswamy observes that there is huge demand for training, skill upgradation, and keeping pace with changing laws. Infobahn categorizes its skills refresh needs into multiple buckets: Technical, HR (soft skills), and finance.

For soft skills and finance, the company invites experts to the office.

“In this era of compliances and confusing tax laws, expert views are invaluable to us as well as our employees,” Krishnaswamy says.

Infobahn is now in hiring mode and has handed over all HR activity to a senior consultant since the last year. “New people will come. But, certain core values won’t change,” says Krishnaswamy.

—By Shantheri Mallaya

AUGUST 2014

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n COVER STORY

VENDORS: WE WON’T POACH, BUT WE WON’T CLOSE OUR DOORS

Ideally, we don’t poach employees from our partners. If a partner’s employee wants to move, there are many ways to do it. The unwritten agreement is we won’t poach from partner ecosystems.”

“While poaching is not the way ahead, channels have to pull up their socks and address employee aspirations.

Maybe, churn is a good thing. The skillsets partners need today are also changing rapidly.”

“Research has shown that inspired people don’t leave organizations. Detached people are the first ones to exit. If detached people leave and a roster is maintained of that attrition, it serves little purpose.”

ANIL VALLURI, President,

ASHISH DHAWAN, MD,

DR. ALOK BHARADWAJ,

India & SAARC, NetApp

Juniper Networks India

and interest from candidates because we are based on culture,” he says.

“Recruiters should be addressing cultural fit already, and some of them are, but as far as it being a general practice, they just don’t have the time

EVP, Canon India

or the bandwidth to go in detail,” Storin says. “So many are reduced to just scanning resumes, looking for keywords and plugging holes, and then companies wind up with bad hires, unhappy employees and disengaged

STAY AHEAD! SUBSCRIBE TO FREE E-NEWSLETTERS FROM

Log on to www.channelworld.in

Pro-active poaching is a nono. It’s a clear policy: We are not going to poach from partners. The reality, however, is employees want to move to OEMs to enhance their careers.”

SANJAY ROHATGI, President-Sales, Symantec India

workers, and that equals attrition,” he says. “If employees are engaged and feel like they are part of a larger entity that mirrors their beliefs and values, they are more likely to stay when presented with a challenge,” Storin says. 

n FAST TRACK

Snapshot

Apee Eskay Enterprises

Founded: 1988 Headquarters: New Delhi Key Executives: J. P. Singh, CEO; Suprit Kaur Puri, Director; Dinesh Pal Singh Puri, VP-Sales Revenue 2013-14: Rs 19 crore Revenue 2012-13: Rs 16 crore Employees: 175 Principals: TE, CommScope, Cisco, R&M, Molex, Panduit Key Business Activities: Passive Infrastructure Provider

P h o t o g r a p h b y S U M E E T S AW H N E Y

Website: www.apsk.net

In-house capabilities keep us ahead of competition, says Ashwinder Puri (R), MD, Apee Eskay Enterprises.

W

HILE CHANNEL

players are in a rat race to get into core IT, Apee Eskay Enterprises is focused on the passive networking space. And it isn’t hard to see why. With over two decades of experience behind it—in this fiercely competitive space—the company today is a major player in the passive networking field.

“We are among the top 10 passive SIs in India. We are in the passive cabling part of the network, where we implement passive infrastructure projects,” says Ashwinder Pal Singh Puri, MD, Apee Eskay Enterprises .

Founded in 1988, Apee Eskay Enterprises set out as an electrical contracting company. Post the IT boom in 1990, a lot more projects started coming its way, and with a little push from its clients, the Delhi-based com-

pany ventured out and installed a passive networking service.

Apee Eskay Enterprises has immense faith in its in-house capabilities. It does not outsource, and handles the entire project implementation process internally,

VERTICAL SPLIT 4% 8%

1%

Education Others

5%

Hospitality

Government

2%

BFSI

2%

Logistics

27% IT/ITes

51%

Retail and Utilities

ensuring superior quality of services and better project management. This, the company feels, keeps it ahead of its competitors.

“Employees at the company are trained and certified regularly by cabling OEMs. Our attrition rate is also low. Out of 170 employees, almost 80 have been with us for over a decade,” says Dinesh Pal Singh Puri, vice president-sales, Apee Eskay Enterprises.

The company has majorly aligned itself with tier-I partners like IBM, Wipro, Infosys, TCS and HCL. These partners extensively bid for turnkey projects that require tier-II partners like Apee Eskay Enterprises to step in. The compansy provides technical and implementation support at the back-end and concentrates on network installation of such projects.

Among some of the big projects that the company has bagged, Puri says that the entire passive infrastructure network at Delhi airport’s Terminal Three (T3) was undertaken by the company. It has also been maintaining the passive infrastructure at Maruti Suzuki’s plants in Gurgaon and Manesar, and R&D facilities in Rohtak, for two decades now.

According to Puri, the company has plans to diversify into the active implementations space and has tied up with players like Cisco and Juniper for the same. It is also diversifying into distributed antenna system (DAS) implementations for ISP convergence in buildings.  —Team ChannelWorld

SOURCE: Apee Eskay Enterprises

AUGUST 2014

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n FEATURE | SOCIAL NETWORKING on average four to five years while IT pros average somewhere around three.

Looking for a job is hard work and takes a long time. In surveys, a majority of people find their next position via an introduction through networking. What that means is that social media and social networking have become woven into the fabric of the job search process. In addition to that reality, there are other compelling reasons to join in.

IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK

The Social Media Circle

In a world where things are constantly changing, social media has become a necessary part of the formula for success. By Rich Hein

N

ETWORKING AS an executive in

any profession or industry is possibly one of the most valuable ways to build credibility both personally and professionally. It won’t happen naturally and requires significant investments both in time and fostering business relationships, but can yield long lasting ROI both in business, leveraging referrals, new business, and opportunities to advance your

32

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own career,” says Laura McGarrity, VPmarketing at Mondo, an IT sourcing and staffing firm.

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES If nothing else motivates you about social networking then consider this: The days of working for one or even two companies for your entire career have all but gone away. Those days have given way to a world where CIOs last

Finding your next job is one reason but there are a few more for CIOs and IT managers to consider, such as immediate feedback. Social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have given people who care enough to get involved and interact at a one-on-one level with their customers, their peers, and their staff. Places like Twitter require a tough skin, but the payoff is honest feedback from the people who use your service.

Services like Twitter offer almost immediate feedback, which comes in handy when a new product, service or feature is launched. Sage IT managers and CIOs monitor these places to see how their user base is reacting and interacting to their new launches. “Twitter is a tremendous asset for tech professionals. It feeds the need for instantaneous response,” says Shravan Goli, president of Dice.

BUILDING YOUR DREAM TEAM Hiring IT pros has become increasingly difficult, as headhunters and staffing firms can be cost-prohibitive for some businesses. But thanks to places like LinkedIn, SpiceWorks and various job boards there are more places than ever to look for fresh talent.

LinkedIn is especially helpful in finding the passive candidates for your team, allowing you to search for people by geography, years of experience and various skills, among other things. “I use LinkedIn to connect with others, whether it be potential candidates for a job opening I may have, vendors, usually through group discussions, or with other IT leaders,” says Jeffrey Hurley, VP and head of technology for Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

CREATING A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT In order to innovate, companies need to

create more collaborative user-friendly environments. Social media and the Web are providing the tools to make that happen. More teams are staying connected with suites like Campfire, Yammer and other online collaboration tools. To stay relevant you need to be where the innovation happens, and if it’s in one of these collaboration suites, then you better get involved or get left behind.

BEING AN INDUSTRY THOUGHT LEADER How will people know about your genius if you aren’t out there sharing your experiences? Whatever you do, whatever industry you are in, the Internet has a place for you to interact with like-minded professionals that facilitate collaboration and sharing.

Demonstrate through your postings that you are an engaged and informed leader that knows what’s going on within your specific industry. “You can raise your profile in other ways too—answering questions on Stack, contributing to an Open Source proj-

ect, marketing your own Open Source project on SourceForge. With the new recruiting tools that aggregate information, recruiters are expecting to see passion related to your work. So, I recommend tech professionals do something to show that commitment to their craft,” says Goli.

SOCIAL NETWORKING ONLINE While there are thousands of articles that cover the various ways to network on the different social networks available, the problem according to career coach and strategist Donald Burns, is a lack of focus. Many people fall into the trap of blindly networking with everyone when the key is to be more focused. “...many people start ‘networking’ because they’ve been ordered to do so—beaten over the head to keep networking—but just connecting with people is not enough. You must be connecting with people to reach a target.

In my humble opinion, that’s the problem with ‘networking’, people aren’t clear about what they’re after. When a job seeker has a clear target, a red-hot

Social Life at Work

P

EARSON’S viral campaign to get employees across its 411 subsidiaries using a new enterprise social networking (ESN) tool, achieved 80 percent adoption within six months.

Last year, the UK-based multinational, which owns publishers Penguin Random House and the Financial Times group decided to implement the software’s enterprise social network (ESN) to get employees to discuss business solutions and share valuable information across the group’s global brands.

Neo, Pearson’s customized Jive software, is a hub similar to Facebook, with employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, document sharing and group workspaces. Pearson employees are currently using it to connect with users in different continents and share business solutions across the separate brands. Prior to deploying Neo the human resources and internal communication team were navigating 134 different intranets.

To achieve critical mass without an enforced roll-out, logins were created for employees and marketeers. Communica-

tions and senior executives were encouraged to begin using the community and spread the word. Collaboration across the expanding Pearson portfolio is also crucial for retaining employees, Kim England, Pearson’s head of internal communications, said.

Neo uses gamification to keep employees using the software including a competitive point system for the amount of connections a user makes across the network. The tool offers a reputation center where employees can view their current and completed “missions” and the points and badges they have earned.

Managers can customize “missions” with more than 130 specific actions they want employees to engage in to accomplish business goals. These capabilities are powered by Bunchball.

Pearson is currently working with the ESN provider to turn its data and anecdotal evidence into hard numbers to quantify the ROI. It will also analyze the results of its next engagement survey to measure impact.

— By Margi Murphy

passionate, well-defined position at a particular company—then connecting with the right people is much easier,” says Burns.

START A BLOG OR COLUMN Many of us work in our various industries with the intention to become thought leaders. Writing a blog is great way to share your knowledge, insight and show off your troubleshooting prowess. “Creating content is a powerful way to build your personal and professional brand online,” says McGarrity. When most of us are interested in doing something new, one of the first things we do is search the Web to find someone who has been down this road before to get an idea of what to expect.

“Have a content strategy. Create content, share data, multimedia, photos, and engage in conversation with content creators. Relevancy and frequency is the name of the game. Have a goal, be transparent, be conversational, be YOU, and get engaged,” says McGarrity.

There are various outlets you can use but most experts agree that having your own branded site, especially in the technology world, is the best way to go.

OFFLINE NETWORKING Social media is a great tool but it’s important to remember that it’s not all done from behind a desk. Ultimately, nothing is better than meeting someone face to face.

“Going offline and meeting faceto-face allows you to go deeper with individuals. I look at online networking as ‘casting a net’ and offline (F2F) networking as ‘spear fishing.’ When you go wide, you get to see what others are talking about and what challenges they have, but when you are offline that is really when you get into the details,” says Tushar Patel, VP-Marketing for Innotas, a company that specializes in IT Project and Portfolio Management Services.

In a world where things are constantly changing, like business models, people and technology, social media and networking have become a necessary part of the formula for success. To stay relevant in the upper echelons of the tech world requires the ability to engage others where ever they may be, whether it’s your development team, the board room, a conference or a meetup.  AUGUST 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

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n CASE STUDY

Built to Last

Its long-standing relationship with KPIT Technologies helped VDA Infosolutions bag a deal that was a win-win for both companies.

B

USINESSES BUILT on the foundation of old and trusted relationships make for mutually beneficial and long-lasting partnerships. And one company has mastered the art of leveraging its relationship to take its business ahead.

Mumbai-based VDA Infosolutions bagged a large all-flash storage project from Pune-based KPIT Technologies, piggybacking on its relationship with KPIT. “The project was a revamp of a three-year old implementation that we had done with Vblock. The revamp

ASHUTOSH DEUSKAR, Founder Director, VDA Infosolutions

was done in June this year and the implementation was just concluded,” says Ashutosh Deuskar, founder-director, VDA Infosolutions.

The seeds of the project Deuskar is referring to stem from the fact that VDA Infosolutions and KPIT Technologies share a unique relationship, which began three years ago when the solution provider introduced the company to the VCE Vblock System featuring EMC VNX unified storage.

Partnering with VDA, KPIT reportedly had been the first company in India and APAC to implement the

Snapshot Key Parties: KPIT Technologies, VDA Infosolutions

Location: Pune Implementation Time: One month

(approx.)

Challenges Faced: The existing VDI infrastructure at KPIT Technologies was not able to keep up with the application rush Key Technologies: VDI, SAS-based storage

Key Vendors: EMC, Cisco

Vblock architecture for its private cloud and roll out as many as 800 virtual desktops, besides adopting a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure disaster recovery solution. KPIT had also invested in two additional Vblocks for its test and development environment and disaster recovery for its virtual desktop infrastructure.

Given these earlier investments, VDA was the right partner for KPIT to fall back on for its refresh plan as well.

The project included expanding KPIT’s VDI infrastructure from the existing 1,600 clients to 2,300. The company was confronting limitations with its existing compute and storage to support the VDI expansion. The existing SAS-based storage was inept in keeping up during peak hours, hence there was an urgent need to opt for a tech refresh.

Besides upgrading compute, VDA has counseled KPIT to opt for an allflash array to remove storage bottlenecks and optimize power and space.

“Under the project we will add 10TB of EMC’s XtremIO for VDI storage to avoid boot storm. The remaining 40TB will be on SAS-based storage. We will also add 8TB of flash to the existing 90TB of SAP database,” says Vikas Save, founder-director of VDA. KPIT would have normally required 1,300 SAS drives using 14 kVA of power and three racks of space. With all-flash, it apparently needs only 25 drives using 0.9 kVA of power and 6U space to give the same performance.  —Shantheri Mallaya

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Focal Point

EVERYTHING ABOUT SDN AND VIRTUALIZED NETWORKS

SDN TO THE

RESCUE How H/S application challenges faced by cloud-based environments can be addressed. By Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi

A

S AN industry, we have been looking at cloud-based technologies both from private and public structure and have been thinking of how best to design, engineer, and develop such technologies to better optimize the world

of wireless and the Internet of Everything.

But one aspect that has not been discussed at length is how poorly hardware and software performs in cloud-based environments. I want to discuss some of the challenges that the industry is facing and some potential

solutions that can help create and bring a new revolution to the world of Wide Area Networks (WAN), along with the automation of practically every humanto-human and human-tomachine interface.

Currently, there are two technologies being discussed almost everywhere—software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). While these vary in structure according to vendors, clearly, all of them attack certain aspects of the mobile carrier network or Tier-I landline networks.

Let me give you my twocents on what these technologies must address: SDN must create a more agile network with the development of an open northbound interface. This becomes an enabler for service providers (SPs) to reduce time-to-market for service introduction, reduce capex unit cost by focusing network elements (NEs) to just move traffic, and reducing opex unit cost for network services that take significant human capital cost to deliver, such as establishing protection and restoration or providing new connectivity services.

NFV must enable SPs to provide new services, and hence, new incremental revenue, by replacing dedicated hardware/software located on the customer premise, for example, DVR, storage, firewall and others.

Cloud computing, on the other hand, must enable enterprises to leverage shared and scalable computing resources, hardware and software to impact their capex and opex unit costs.

These promises are expected to deliver a much better total cost of

ownership (TCO), with lower opex and in essence support fully moving to a hardware-agnostic or an independent model, offering further savings.

About a decade ago, I predicted that the battleground in the 21st century would be all about software and not hardware. Although hardware is needed, it is the role of software to optimize all five functions above using new state-of-the-art technologies such as SDN and NFV. The problem that can become very complicated is that enterprise customers’ networks and appliances are not designed for multiple tenants, pay-for-play or ondemand services. However, SDN and NFV are fundamentally designed for such functions. That means that it is imperative for CXOs to sponsor corporate-wide programs to move into SDN and NFV, offering capabilities to drive higher revenues while competing for device replacements at the network margins from mobile access points up to WANs. SDN, by itself, is not really a new technology and has been in existence since 2006. It has been used to mainly improve data center performance, since the concept of big central offices with large Class 4/5 switches is pretty much obsolete in the 21st century.

But SDN has a long way to go to deliver an agile network. Today’s management of transport networks does not match the agility of the cloud-based services being deployed on them. These two have to converge to bring the transport agility into the 21st century for service delivery. Why should it take weeks and months to establish a new enterprise

AUGUST 2014

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD

35

n FOCAL POINT | SDN AND VIRTUALIZED NETWORKS customer on an SP network?

Why should it take weeks and months to provision highspeed point-to-point connectivity with specific protection requirements? SDN has yet to deliver just that.

NFV, in contrast, was introduced between 2010 and 2012 to operators in order to improve service time-tomarket and network flexibility and allow a smooth transition to the cloud with significantly lower opex. In my view, the sky is the limit on NFV. For any onsite services (storage, firewall and DVR), whether today or in the future, NFV gives SPs the opportunity to deliver both consumers and enterprises major benefits, such as having a turn-key solution that lowers costs and improves quality of service (QoS).

The initial applications of SDN and NFV have changed greatly over the past few years. Earlier, SDN focused mainly on cloud orchestration and networking, while NFV mainly focused on IPbased protocols and capabilities such as DNS, DHCP, DPI, firewalls, gateways, and traffic management.

From my perspective, I believe NFV has already taken over Layer 4-7 of the SDN movement by delivering lower capex and cycle time, creating a competitive supply of innovative applications by third parties and introducing control abstractions to foster innovations that carriers need in order to compete with difficult, all over-the-top players.

Let’s also note that the new world requires openness in almost every API layer of the network from access to the core. The issue is legacy systems and processes that need to be changed in order to adapt to the new world of SDN and NFV. 36

Private Cloud Guide for Tech Management Leaders

C

loud has become vital for every enterprise’s tech management strategy, but designing a robust cloud strategy is not easy. Success with a private cloud comes only through embracing the true cloud model of self-service, full automation, and business and developer agility.

There are things that every tech manager should know about private cloud to avoid over-investment, missed deadlines, and strategies that limit better engagement with internal customers.

A majority of enterprises today claim private cloud adoption, but in reality they have an improved virtualization environment that uses a private cloud software for tech management practices.

There has been an emergence of four private cloud approaches that are being driven by very different strategies— reflecting different priorities, budgets, sizes, keys to success, vendor selection criteria, and challenges—and thus, have variant scopes and outcomes.

Over the past 10 years, the major focus of tech management investment has been on improving operational efficiency, but today’s leading enterprises focus on the business aspect of it.

Also, transformational hybrid cloud strategies can be an arduous process. It’s not the net-new resources that slow private cloud adoption, but connecting these environments to your legacy systems of records, operational processes, and help desk systems.

Along with this, achieving cloud economics within a private cloud environment needs a large, diverse user base, highly standardized costs, a pervasive chargeback system, and aggressive capacity planning and consolidation practices.

Achieving ROI with a private cloud also isn’t that straightforward and should not be your primary justification for the effort. Designing and implementing incentives that reward change while showing a promising career path is essential for a successful private cloud strategy.

- Forrester Report

Nowhere is this more critical than the mobile and Tier-I landline carriers.

In essence, these sectors need to change all analog processes using legacy systems into digital processes, in which NFV can easily fit.

That transition may take years, if not a decade, before it is fully implemented.

But the question is whether MNOs and Tier-I carriers can wait that long to implement NFV and get the most optimized set of solutions in order to compete globally.

My guess is no, they cannot wait and stay com-

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

petitive. Mobile network operators (MNOs) and TierI land-line carriers need to aggressively and quickly implement NFV to remain competitive. I’ll tell you how.

A significant amount of innovation both from the vendor and carrier side is needed to turn these into real, actionable plans to finally change the structure and essence of what we had been dealing with for many decades (WAN). It is time to bring a new revolution to this space, especially around 4G LTE. Adding billions of devices to the net-

work drives this complexity even higher, which, in turn, drives the need for higher speed of integration.

I believe that if we look at the centralized control plane architecture of SDN along with the virtualized nature of NFV, one can allow network administrators to place network resources where they can deliver the best customer experience at the lowest cost while minimizing even churn in every aspect of the process, especially throughout the wireless world.

This could also mean that we may need to place resources at the edge of the network, using policy-based management and real intelligence driven by devices and networks.

The role of IT can easily be defined as building high-level configuration and policy statements, which can then flow through the distributed infrastructure via Open Flow. This eliminates the need to reconfigure network devices each time an endpoint, service or application is added or moved, or when a policy changes.

The implications of such a scenario about a decade ago would have been to bring more innovation with lower cycle time and costs. The time has finally arrived for this to be done using both SDN and NFV, working in harmony.

I believe one of the most elegant ways to design such high, rich-based technologies is to distribute the architecture while building redundancies and other parameters discussed in several sections of this blog.

Let’s examine the operations side of it and what applications are most suited for NFV/SDN.

My top choices, given the industry, are—consumer CPE, service assurance, SLA monitoring, Network policy control and charging, tunneling gateway, traffic management including deep packet inspection with massive amounts of data, VoIP signaling, network engineering and optimization, and networkbased security respectively.

The first parts of the wireless network to be converted will be those that involve fewer data centers and are latency-tolerant.Things like policy and authentication and all those corerelated activities are what are needed for the first step in operationalizing both SDN and NFV for mobile network operators.

From the operational view, all network-based functions can be virtual-

ized. However, my recommendation is to prioritize them based on the amount of legacy systems and databases that exist and get the biggest value, and then move down the list until the network is fully NFV-ready.

What we already know about data plane workloads are often I/O-bound and/ or memory-bound. Clearly, as I stated above, software layers as its configuration matters the most. As a result, there are a significant number of standards, such as ETSI GS NFV-PER and others that are being worked on. Vendors are getting ready to make noise in this space.

From mobile network operators’ perspectives, it is important to start executing with dedicated NFV teams driven by CIOs. The priority is to explore the possi-

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bilities of new architectures and how analog processes can be changed to digital processes. Then these ideas must be combined and analyzed with many trials and experiments to get an optimized model for implementation. You will get one chance for implementation, but many chances of testing to develop the best and most optimized solutions in the NFV space.

My final thoughts and recommendations are to challenge your teams to ask how both SDN and NFV functions can work in harmony, including within data centers from public to private, from orchestration to automation and finally hybrid-based cloud models, using both SDN and NFV. The other challenge is to enable agile and robust hardware and software

connectivity and automation of human-to-human and human-to-machine interfaces as they exist in the wild, to seize opportunities created by the rapid development of endpoint and mobile devices and the Internet of Things.

If such a plan is executed with ease and without a flaw, it will allow practically any MNO to deliver a bestin-class implementation in cost, capability and cycle time while maintaining lower capex.

If the next-generation networks can achieve these goals, it can be surely used for significant innovation as we move towards the Internet of Everything and grab a bigger share of this massive $19 trillion (about Rs 1,140 lakh crore) in the new revenues projected to be available by 2020. ď Ž

n PLAINSPEAK

YOGESH GUPTA

Transformers Reloaded The newlyreleased Transformers: Age of Extinction became a boxoffice hit.But behind the movie’s highoctane action sequences are lessons for the channel community: transform and evolve—or risk extinction.

Yogesh Gupta is executive editor at ChannelWorld. He is a computer engineer from Mumbai University. You can contact him at yogesh_ gupta@idgindia.com 38

W

HEN MICHAEL Bay directed Transformers: Age of

Extinction with gigantic autobots in varied forms, it fascinated cinema buffs globally--yet again. Its rumbustious box office collections are a testament to how big a blockbuster it is. In case you’re wondering if I’m reviewing the movie, I’m not. For me, the title and the ability of the film’s heroes (machines) to transform and evolve is spoton for any modern organization and its stakeholders.

The suffix ‘Age of Extinction’ fits uncannily into a recent 2014 report by consultancy firm RIS. Its research indicates the hurried extinction of two archaic business models for technology channel companies.

Traditional resellers (system integrators, as defined by RIS) are struggling to maintain revenues in the light of virtualization and SaaS offerings. And the migration of traditional independent software vendors (ISVs) to an application service provider (ASP) model has been the most exciting trend in the channels in the past decade, according to a Hong Kong-based independent IT analyst and consultancy firm.

Surprised? The writing was always on the wall, loud and clear.

Both trends hold true for India too, though at varied levels of adoption by partners. Technology companies are not investing effort and money--beyond a point-in building an ecosystem of ‘plain vanilla’ resellers or ‘all-in-one’ systems integrators.

Channel companies focused around virtualization, cloud computing, SaaS, big data, and SDx are undoubtedly the preferred partners for a majority of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and CIOs. These niche channel companies are likely to have blockbuster balance sheets.

The RIS report, which analyzed growth trends of top 8,000 channel partners in Asia, accentuates the need for channels to raise their own service capabilities and become solution providers with cloud resale

INDIAN CHANNELWORLD AUGUST 2014

services and their own branded services around domain specialization.

Extinction is a bitter term, but that’s the darn truth for generic solution providers as technologies become more vertical-specific and enterprise solutions get more niche.

Your target audience (CIOs and IT managers) too look at you as the transformers of IT world--the technology experts who can help impart business benefits to their companies.

Just as movie lovers think that the cost of watching a movie is worth its price, thanks to special effects sequences that explode on the screen, organizations too expect something unexpected. This can come in the form of top-notch technologies that justify ROI and keep them ahead of competition.

I am certain that you and your teams are perfectly aligned with the latest technologies so that you can be the de facto solution provider to your customer set. The business environment, unlike the film’s sequel, does not wait for a couple of years for your transformation process. The transition in the real world is dynamic, swift, and non-fictional.

Evolve or perish to your competitors in the game of survival and the quest for excellence.

Be the real transformers in the technology space with high-octane action and Dolby sound, to announce your arrival or your revival as a proficient technology provider.

Pack the exact arsenal in accurate quantities in your armor to enthrall your audience.

Transform. Rise. Fire. 