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LET THERE BE AUTOMATION R
THE TECHNICAL CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTING IT IN PUBLIC SECTOR ARE SMALL COMPARED WITH THE HUMAN CHALLENGES
ecently I heard an interesting story about how the work in a unit of Scooters India Ltd came to a standstill because the unit had run out of washers. Now washers may seem like minor components; made out of rubber, they cost about a rupee. But they are there to perform the important task of protecting two components that are in constant touch with each other. Without washers, the work can’t go on. The stock of washers could not be replenished in time as Scooters India maintains its inventory manually. The record register showed that there were close to 60000 washers in stock, in reality there were none. If the company had a proper Inventory Management System, it would have received a timely alert that the factory is about to run out of washers and the stocks could have been restored well in advance. Scooters India Ltd has initiated the process for getting an ERP solution, but the final implementation will take some time. On the other hand there is the PSU called BHEL, which is India’s largest engineering and manufacturing company of its kind. The company’s investment in R&D is amongst the highest in corporate India and it files almost one patent per day. Such achievement is not possible unless the organisation is making optimal use of Information Technology. The core functions in most units of BHEL are integrated through ERP. The company deploys an impressive array of IT solutions to bring efficiency and transparency in almost every area of its operations. The global advisory firm, Zinnov, has released a report on the PSU sector. The report states that the PSUs are on an average spending 2% of their revenues on IT. The maximum IT investment in the PSU space is happening in the BFSI and energy verticals. In FY 2012, the total IT investment by Indian PSUs is estimated by Zinnov to be in the range of $8.5 billion. The IT heads in the PSU sector show lot of personal interest in the IT solutions like Cloud, Big Data Analytics, Mobility, etc. If interest is there, then why can’t the Public Sector reap the benefits of these technologies? The problem lies in the process by which new technologies are procured and implemented in the PSU sector. The process is too complicated and IT projects often get mired in delays. This is why the operations in many PSUs continue to be manual, even though tremendous strides have been made in ERP during the last decade. The technical challenges of implementing IT in Public Sector are small compared with the human challenges. In fact, majority of the PSUs where systems continue to be manual are those where the human side of the equation is failing because the management or the workers are not fully convinced about the efficacy of IT systems. The IT implementations can be highly complex, visible and vital to the success of the business. It is easy for such complex projects to get entangled in endless coils of bureaucratic red tape. anoop.verma@expressindia.com
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THE DIGITAL TOUCH The education industry is now all set to have a facelift with a dash of technology. Heena Jhingan explores how technologies like cloud and mobility are leaving their imprint on the education space
Case study
feature
BLOSSOMING IN THE CLOUD
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Ferns N Petals is thriving in AWS Cloud, which offers a rich and fertile ground for catering to the needs of large numbers of customers.
TECHNOLOGIES IN VOGUE! The country’s top CIOs identify the key trends in Enterprise IT for 2014
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TOWERING OVER CHALLENGES TO TAKE IT FORWARD “A CIO should not only have domain knowledge, he must also be capable of identifying and nurturing talent”
A CLOUD FOR BETTER EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT
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Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. Ltd. automates its HR division with Ramco Systems' HCM on Cloud solution and connects around 3000 employees spread across 67 branch offices in India.
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interviews
CAPACITYBUILDING,SKILL DEVELOPMENTAND DIGITAL LITERACYFOR DIGITALINDIA
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At a recent workshop conducted in the presence of the Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad and Secretary, DeitY and other dignitaries,an MoU was signed between NIELIT and Intel.
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WITH THE SPEED OF FLASH With price of enterprise grade flash storage coming down and capabilities going up, the enterprises are reviewing their strategies for buying storage.
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» PM launches digital life certificate for pensioners
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RAVI KANT MALHAN Schneider Electric India
SUNDI BALU CIO - Telstra Global
BISHWANATH BHATTACHARYA CEO, HCL Services.
“HCLServices helps you build future readyData Centre” » Government uses Facebook to help ration card holders voice their complaints
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» Google partners Tata Comm for Cloud Interconnect » IBM, Twitter to partner on business data analytics
Group Manager, Systems Sales, System and Technology Group, IBM India/SA
“Asia is entering an age of living in the cloud”
in the news
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RAVI JAIN
“Paving way for smart cities ”
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» Idea Cellular working on launching of 4G service
Joint Secretary, Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises, Department of Heavy Industry, Government of India,
“We will invest $2.4 billion in our RISC-based Power platform”
ESOLUTIONS FOR TACKLING DEMAND SUPPLYGAP
» Nokia Networks bags 3G contract from Bharti Airtel for 3 circles
RAJESH KUMAR SINGH
Modernisation Through Information Technology
Public resources are limited, and the demand is high. This demand supply gap leads to cartelisation, crony capitalism, middlemen, bribing, and so on.
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Additional Secretary, Department of Heavy Industry, Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises
Technology for strengthening the public sector
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AMBUJ SHARMA
SANJAYJAJU Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Electronics and Communications
“Mee Seva - at your service” 54
STEPHEN BROBST Chief Technology Officer, Teradata Corporation
“There is scope for multiple technologies to co-exist” DECEMBER, 2014
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DIGITAL EDUCATION
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The education industry is now all set to have a facelift with a dash of technology. Heena Jhingan explores how technologies like cloud and mobility are leaving their imprint on the education space
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I Government tenders have started marking large proportion of their funds to ensure that there is improvement in the qualityof services. Ashok Mehta, President,Educomp Solutions Ltd
We have already deployed smart classes in a couple of Kendriya Vidyalayas in Chennai and Vizag, and also in some Armyand Airforce schools. Atul Kulshrestha, Chairman,Extramarks 10
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t is the stark reality that ICT has made deep inroads into the fabric of the education system. The use of devices and digital technologies has become so pervasive in our educational institutions that for many youngsters the tablets, smartphones and computers are tools for learning as well as for entertainment. Even the playschools are full of digital paraphernalia. The debate on whether ICT can be useful for improving the quality and scope of education is now all but over. Today every institution in the country is trying to make the best possible use of multimedia devices. Even the municipal schools are upgrading to smart boards and digital content. UK has launched an ambitious programme under which children as young as five can be taught coding. Companies like Microsoft and Google were involved in the designing of the new ICT curriculum in UK. In India, we are yet to take the giant leap where we can imagine 5 year olds having a tryst with coding. Here ICT is being mainly looked at as an answer to myriad ills that plague the nation’s education system — lack of quality teachers, abysmal infrastructure, etc. The education industry is convinced that through the effective use of technology it is possible for us to create an infrastructure that can meet the education related needs of the entire country. New technology must be integrated with the classrooms and teachers should be properly trained in using this technology. This can lead to improvement in the quality of instruction, as well as trained teachers will be able to remotely address students through video conferencing and other systems. The private sector players are seeing lot of new opportunities in the area of education. A report titled ‘India’s ELearning Market Outlook to FY2018 Increasing Technology Adoption to Drive Future Growth’, estimates that Indian e-learning market will grow at CAGR of 17.4% over the period FY2013 to FY2018. The growth rate is likely to accelerate, as the Indian e-Learning content market is expected to grow at a
CAGR of 18.4% from FY 2014 to FY 2018. The current K-12 school system in India is one of the largest in the world with more than 1.4 million schools with over 250 million students enrolled, reveals EY-FICCI report on the education sector in India. The report also finds that the schools have grown at a CAGR of 2.5% from 1.2 million in 2005 to 1.4 million in 2011 and enrolment has grown at a CAGR of 2.2% to reach 253 million students in 2011. Looking at the numbers alone one can imagine why the IT solution vendors are keen on laying their money on education vertical, across solutions from backoffice applications, content for digital classrooms, to client devices.
For smarter K-12 system “The K-12 segment is an interesting proposition, even though it is difficult. The difficulty is because the sector is not organised,” says Xavier Kurian, National Manager-Enterprise Product Marketing, Dell India. He explains that there are two massive sub sections under the Indian K12 system—the private and government schools. As per EY-FICCI 2014 report, about 54% of all 1.46 million K-12 schools in India, are managed by the Central/State governments and 21% are managed by local bodies/ municipal corporations. Private schools account for 25% of the total number of K-12 schools in India. According to Kurian the government educational institutions will see an increased demand for solutions around content delivery, connectivity, VDI (desktop virtualization), etc. However, the scale for these solutions in a private set up will be very different from that in a government school even though the solution remains the same. “We are already doing VDI projects for government institutions with a few 1000 students each,” he says. Most of the premium private schools have already deployed or piloted digital classes and are now marketing those to their advantage. However, the government schools continue to grapple with the problem of setting up basic computer labs. “In my estimate, out of about one lakh DECEMBER, 2014
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government schools nearly36000 have deployed ICT solutions,” says Ashok Mehta, President, Educomp Solutions Ltd. “This leaves a large proportion of market still untapped.” The government controlled section of the education space has been a laggard in ICT adoption due to the inherent challenges that this segment faces. The decision making is slower and in many instances there is very little enthusiasm for deploying new technologies. “More than anything else, it is the BOOT (build, own, operate, transfer ) method of deployment that makes the deployment cycles very long,” says Manish Sharma - Vice President of sales for NComputing’s Asia-Pacific region. “The government in its 11th plan aspired to bring about 6.5 lakh schools in the country under ICT, we are already in the 12th plan and the target still looks away,” Mehta says. “Thanks to the government’s new aggressive strategy, the industry’s hopes are renewed,” he adds. “Earlier, only the L1 players used to get the tender, but now government’s aspirations have got higher, in a bid to cover more schools, the government now involves more vendors and distributes orders to L2 and L3 bidders as well,” he explains. “What is more impressive is that now the government tenders not just focus on stetting up infrastructure or labs, they have also started marking large proportion of the funds to ensure that there is improvement in the quality of services. This means better training of teachers and ensuring access to students,” he says. “In 2004-08 the government focus was on developing infrastructure, but now other factors like power provisioning, etc., have also become central to vendor conversations with the government,” says Mehta. He informs that they have already conducted smart class pilot projects in government schools in Assam, Bihar, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. The cost of technology is one of the major barriers for schools in adopting technology. According to Atul Kulshrestha, Chairman, Extramarks, EXPRESS COMPUTER
Content is crucial for effective learning.The content needs to be adaptive and not just literal translation,and it will have to be carefully woven around the SMAC technology. Somnath Nag, Director-ISV& Enterprise Solutions, Alten Calsoft Labs
The campus networks sport enterprise-class features.This is indicative of the fact that there is significant improvement in the ways by which educational institutions implement networking hardware and software.
hardware alone for setting up a smart class costs up to Rs 1.20 lakh. “In many cases individual heads of government institutions or schools have been more proactive and managing budgets for smart classes. We have already deployed smart classes in a couple of Kendriya Vidyalayas in Chennai and Vizag , and also in some Army and Airforce schools,” he informs. On the client devices side too, price has acted as a spoiler as earlier the market was dominated by premium brands. Suneet Singh Tuli, President & CEO, Datawind, says that the education tablet market has become very competitive with major OEMs targeting solutions for this segment. There are two segments of tablets in the market, one is of high-end, feature-rich, tablets, and the other is of low-cost budget tablets. “With our product, we have been able to surface a new customer segment that was lying dormant and lost all this while in the din of premium product segment. This is the forgotten billion, whose aspirations to join the digital age were being inhibited by the affordability price tag for these budget conscious customers with low cost Android tablets that deliver both quality and value at the most discernible price. Our devices have found their way to the grass root communities in India and they are being used today for varied literacy missions and campaigns by several NGOs besides the everyday use,” Tuli says.
Mobility and cloud The higher education scenario is also witnessing major churning due to the advent of systems like Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) that is providing international students with alternative avenues for gaining education. India must continue to expand access to quality higher education while reducing costs. MOOCs could well be a key solution to India’s higher education woes. Indians are among the most aggressive users of MOOCs. In March 2014, of the 2.9 million registered users of Coursera , more than 250,000 were from India. The Indian registrations are second only to those DECEMBER, 2014
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DIGITAL EDUCATION
The educational institutions,as well as the corporates,are evaluating more effective ways of training the workforce. Shree Parthasarthy, Senior Director,Enterprise Risk Services,Deloitte India
We helped IIHTto deliver Learningas-a-Service to internal training centres and customers.We designed a SDN approach to deliver a solution for 20,000 students. Xavier Kurian National Manager-Enterprise Product Marketing,Dell India 12
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from the USA. MOOCs is grinding legitimisation to online learning. “IT is no more restricted to distance learning,” says Shree Parthasarthy, Senior Director, Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte India. “Improved last mile connectivity is supping greater adoption of IT by the vertical,” he adds. It is not just the educational institutions, but also the corporates that are evaluating more effective ways of training the workforce. The insurance and the medical professionals are increasingly relying on interactive content for training purposes. Karthik Padmanabhan, Country Head, Ecosystem Development at IBM Software, India and South Asia, observes that the Indian education market requires initiatives that will help in bridging the academia-skills gaps. “It requires a three-pronged approach,” he says. “Building and managing IT infrastructure through an Infrastructure Management Services construct with a combination of onpremise and cloud based solutions. Secondly, improving the employability of students by focusing on building skills for the future, around Big Data and analytics. Lastly, innovating methodologies of imparting education while customising the content and delivery options based on the individual learning requirements of the student.” “The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, Karunya University – Coimbatore, and the Shiv Nadar University (SNU) have selected IBM High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions to aid high-end research, refine processes and elevate the IT infrastructure in the universities,” says
Padmanabhan. Similarly, Kurian says, “We have helped IIHT to deliver Learning-as-aService to internal training centers and enterprise customers. We designed a Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach to deliver a solution for about 20,000 students and they can enjoy a concurrency of about 22%. We have also seen several HPC solution deployments by educational institutes engaged in research.” “Interestingly, social media has emerged as a useful platform for collaboration and learning,” adds Padmanabhan.
Connected campuses Interactions form the crux of IT investments in the education vertical today. The big things happening in this space are linked to the fact that all institutions want to enable connectivity, and develop infrastructure to facilitate ICT enabled education. In fact, BYOD is not a trend only at organisations, but also at educational institutions. These institutions are investing in enterprise-grade storage, networking solutions. Gone are the days of basic internet connectivity. The educational campus networks sport enterprise-class features, right from 24x7 connectivity and Wi-Fi coverage to multi-device support. That is a clear indication that there is a significant change in the way these institutions bought their switches, servers, cables and other networking hardware and software. Over the years institutions had been managing their back-ends using Excel sheets, but that too is beginning to change, led by private institutions. For instance Amity University has automated all its operations through the
According to the Calsoft Labs report,over 400 universities have been provided 1 Gbps connectivity or have been configured under the scheme and more than 14,000 colleges have been provided VPN connectivity till date DECEMBER, 2014
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intranet; it has an interactive intranet portal called Amizone, a home grown ERP system that can be accessed by students, faculty and parents. Similarly, Sharda University has automated and integrated its Admission, Finance, HR, Inventory, Hostel Management and Library systems with Oracle PeopleSoft ERP. The Oracle solution offers scalable online, selfservice interface for the institution’s 6500 students, faculty members and administrative staff. IBM P series Servers and IBM Storage have been deployed to support the ERP system. The Government of India has implemented several national as well as state specific schemes that run concurrent to large number of privately led IT initiatives at school and higher education levels. The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) is envisaged as a centrally sponsored scheme to leverage the potential of IT/ICT, in teaching and learning process for the benefit of all the learners in Higher Education Institutions in anytime, anywhere, mode. Content generation and connectivity, along with provision for access devices for institutions and learners are the major components of the mission. Going by a Calsoft Labs report, over 400 universities have been provided 1 Gbps connectivity or have been configured under the scheme and more than 14,000 colleges have also been provided VPN connectivity till date. The National Knowledge Network (NKN) and Connected Digital has launched an initiative to cover 1,000 institutions besides providing digital campuses, video - conference classrooms, wireless hotspots, laptops/desktops to all students of professional/ science courses and Wi-Fi connectivity in hostels.
Content and intelligence IT has undoubtedly become central to India’s growth story, and recently the industry has seen several ‘IT for education’ related sops being announced by various political parties. The Uttar EXPRESS COMPUTER
Pradesh government’s scheme to provide free laptop to students is an example of such projects. Parthasathy of Deloitte says these devices can solve no purpose if the ecosystem to support these systems is absent.“The device without connectivity and effective content is nothing but a box,” he says. Somnath Nag, Director-ISV & Enterprise Solutions, Alten Calsoft Labs agrees with him. “Content is crucial for effective learning. The content needs to be adaptive and not just literal translation.” According to Somnath, content will have to be carefully woven around SMAC technology. This is important especially in light of the fact that today we have a slew of new devices on which content is being consumed. “Rewriting content for HTML5 will mean additional
cost. Content needs to offer superior experience and at the same time it should be tightly integrated.” Even though open source learning management systems are available in the market they are not well integrated with analytics to lead to automatic learning paths. For instance, if a students reports weakness in a particular subject the learning management platform should be intelligent enough to identify the improved learning path for him, where gamification of the content could be one possibility. “The systems should be prepared to deal with 3D and multimedia content,” Nag says. He adds that digital education can really take off only when there is a consolidated approach for provisioning infrastructure, connectivity and content. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
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INTERVIEW AMBUJ SHARMA IAS
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TECHNOLOGY FOR STRENGTHENING THE PUBLIC SECTOR Ambuj Sharma, Additional Secretary, Department of Heavy Industry, Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises, spoke to Express Computer about how the PSU sector is using innovative technologies as stepping stone for their further development.
What is your view of the Information Technology solutions that are being used by leading Public Sector organisations like BHEL? The role of Information Technology and eGovernance in public sector is quite important, particularly for organisations like BHEL, which is under the administrative control of this department. BHEL is a Maharatna Company, it is India’s largest engineering and manufacturing enterprise in the energy-related/infrastructure sector. The company manufactures over 180 products in 30 major product groups. It caters to core sectors like power generation and transmission, transportation, telecommunication, renewable energy, etc. When you have such gigantic scale of operations, you simply can’t do without Information Technology systems for streamlining the tasks. The efficiency and transparency that we see in the operations of BHEL is also because the company has gone for the best possible Information Technology systems. What steps are being taken by the Department of Heavy Industry to strengthen the PSUs that come under its administrative control? Strengthening of the public sector requires multifaceted action points. The first thing we need to do is to strengthen them financially. The problem is that many of our PSUs are not adequately EXPRESS COMPUTER
funded. When the PSU is in a revival mode, the government is prepared to offer adequate budgetary support. Technology is also one of the key issues. At times the technology being used is simply outdated. The systems need to be modernised in such cases. All the IT and infrastructure related issues are managed by the PSUs themselves. They bring in new technologies after conducting internal evaluation of their operational needs. So, a lot of Capex infusion and technology infusion is required in the PSUs. Recently, the global market research firm Zinnov came up with a report that the Indian Public Sector Undertakings had spent $8.5 billion in FY12 on IT, more than 2% of their total revenues.What are your views on this? All PSUs are in favour of having best possible Information Technology systems. The procurement in PSUs is done through a system of strict guidelines, and there is lot of scope for post action checks and balances. This process is designed to ensure that the technology that is being procured is the most suitable one. However, we also need to keep in mind that it is difficult for anyone to keep pace with technology. Better systems can come into the market at any point of time and turn the older systems obsolete. But despite these challenges, the PSUs are doing quite well, when it comes to IT implementation. If you look at BHEL, the company is filing
almost one patent a day. They invest close of 2.5% of their turnover on R&D. Such achievements would not be possible without the use of latest Information Technology systems. Tell us about the Information Technology systems that are being implemented within the Department of Heavy Industry. The Department of Heavy Industry is making substantial use of Information Technology. The payroll system is completely digitised. We use IT systems for managing routine tasks like inventory control, storage, leave sanction, record maintenance, and much else. As of now the file movement is manual, but the eOffice system is being implemented. Once the implementation of eOffice is completed there will not be any file movement in hard copy. The Information Technology projects may not be enough to ensure a more efficient working environment, unless there is capacity building within the department. Do you think that there is adequate level of capacity building happening in the department? Of course, we have many trained people here to manage the IT systems. We also have a consultant. Then there is a service provider, and there is NIC for backup. So adequate technical support is being extended. Express Computer Team
DECEMBER, 2014
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INTERVIEW RAJESH KUMAR SINGH IAS
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MODERNISATION THROUGH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Rajesh Kumar Singh, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises, Department of Heavy Industry, Government of India, spoke to Express Computer about the IT implementations that are being carried out in the Public Sector Undertakings‌ What is your view of the ITimplementations that the PSE sector is having in India? BHEL, one of India’s largest engineering and manufacturing company, has a fullfledged ERP system. The company is doing very well. Over the years it has been able to use new solutions from IT to improve its efficiency and productivity. But not every PSU is doing as well as BHEL when it comes to IT implementations. For instance, at Scooters India Limited we are now trying to evolve a centralised ERP system. We are hopeful that soon all the PSUs will have the necessary IT systems in place for improving efficiency and transparency. Department of Heavy Industry (DHI) is developing ITmodules for implementation in Public Sector Units.Please tell us about the project. This project is currently in the planning stage. DHI is planning to develop IT modules for e-Office, Financial Management, Inventory Management, HR Management, Sales Management, etc. Once the modules are ready, all 32 PSUs under the administrative control of DHI will use them in their own organisation. As the needs of different PSUs vary according to the nature of their business and other factors, the modules will be such that each PSU can make appropriate changes to make the IT system compatible with their exact needs. The PSUs can make changes not only in the software that goes into the modules but also the hardware. Only the core system will be developed by DHI, the system that gets implemented will have all EXPRESS COMPUTER
kinds of improvements to meet the precise needs of any particular PSU. You said earlier that an ERP solution for Scooters India Ltd is in the works.What kind of improvements do you expect to bring with this ERP implementation? Recently the production at Scooters India Ltd came to a halt. When we tried to ascertain the reason for that we were told that on the inventory side we had run out of washer. Now washer is a very small component, it costs very less, but it performs the important task of protecting two components that are in constant touch with each other. The register that is manually maintained showed that roughly 60,000 washers are in the stock, but in reality there is no stock. It was then that we realised that the manual system for maintaining inventory does not work. If we had proper Inventory Management System, we could have been alerted in time that we are now close to running out of wasters and it is time to get more inventory. At Scooters India limited, we are in touch with leading Information Technology companies for the creation and implementation of an appropriate ERP solution. We are evaluating the ERP solutions that different IT companies are providing. Soon we will be coming up with a tender. How difficult is it to computerise the operations in Public Sector Units? Today all businesses understand that implementation of IT solutions is necessary for bringing efficiency to their
operations. But it is also true that any change is initially opposed by the system. This is true, not only for the PSUs, but for every entity. If you go deep into the human psychology, you will find that most people prefer status quo. Even in BHEL, the IT initiatives took up to an year to be fully implemented. And after the implementation, some of the employees were uncomfortable with the computerised system and they continued to use the manual system for few months. After that everyone in the organisation became comfortable with the IT systems and things became very smooth. Today there is no doubt in the mind of anyone that the company and its employees have benefitted immensely from the IT implementations. My point it is only after an Information Technology system has been fully implemented that most people will understand its benefits. Please tell us about the eGovernance systems that are being implemented internally by DHI. DHI is in the process of implementing the eOffice mission mode project. This project has already been implemented to a certain extent, as we have converted lot of files into e-files. Our leave management system is completely online. The tour management system is also online. We are not doing any paperwork for applying for leave or applying for tour. Recently we have started the Aadhaar linked biometric attendance system in the ministry. Express Computer Team
DECEMBER, 2014
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INTERVIEW RAVI JAIN IBM
www.expresscomputeronline.com
IBM has announced the launch of its next generation power systems built on open source. Ravi Jain, Group Manager, Systems Sales, System and Technology Group, IBM India/SA, talks to Pupul Dutta about the company's plans in this area.
“We will invest $2.4 billion in our RISC-based Power platform” Why is IBM opting for an open source server platform? There is a fundamental shift in the form of data that is collected and analysed by the businesses. Along with the data on transactions, the businesses are also amassing a wealth of data on how their clients interact with them. The velocity with which data is generated is increasing by the day. The clients need systems and tools to analyse it faster. Most of the innovations in the Big Data space have resulted in applications that are crunching amazing amounts of data. IBM is committed towards offering open technologies to its customers through Power8. The Power8 processor can be licensed and is open for development through the OpenPower Foundation. With OpenPower foundations, clients will be the beneficiary of specific ‘fit for purpose’ research and development efforts from not only IBM, but also from the various participants of the foundation. What kind of investments is IBM planning to make in these technologies? The investment being talked about are in 3 major areas. One, we have announced an investment of $2.4 billion in our RISC-based Power platform which with three-plus years of development will exploit the innovation of hundreds of IBM patents - underscoring IBM’s singular commitment to providing higher-value, open technologies to clients. Secondly, recognising Linux as a driving force for innovation, IBM last year committed $1 billion in new Linux and other open source technologies for IBM’s Power Systems servers. Major investments include new products, a growing network of five Power Systems Linux Centers around the world and the Power Development Platform, a no-charge development cloud for developers to test and port x86-based applications to the Power platform. Third is the investment in R&D along with the various members of the OpenPower foundation. The investment is in the areas of chip, motherboards, HPC Computing, I/O bandwidth, operating systems and much more. 20
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How do you see India as a market for this latest offering from IBM? The need for speed and performance is ever increasing. The businesses are clearly seeing IT as an enabler of revenues and no more a backend processing division. Due to the extreme performance delivered in minimum datacenter space, we expect Power8 to make inroads into the IT infrastructures at a fast pace. Our product launches have been received very well by our clients and some of the industry leaders are already onboard to champion the Power8 platform. The Indian market provides abundant opportunity for next generation banking, capital markets, government, online retail, manufacturing and pharmaceutical sectors. Today powerful forces – Big Data Analytics, cloud and mobile are redefining how business and governance gets done. IBM strategy in hardware space is all around leadership and innovation to support today’s core business applications and next-generation solutions with strong financial benefits, industry leading support and a highly skilled and vibrant ecosystem.
Recognising Linux as a driving force for innovation, IBM last year committed $1 billion in new Linux and other open source technologies for IBM’s Power Systems servers.
How do you see data center economies changing in the future? The data growth is incredible in both, structured and unstructured data. Analysing this wealth of data and acting on insights from that information fast is critically important and can really differentiate clients in their industries. IBM is the first one to understand that data will be the new natural resource. The ability to harvest deeper insights from the available sources of data will determine the competitive positions in most of the industries. It is a no brainer that one size does not fit all. So we are developing what we call Signature Solutions to help businesses take on some of their most critical needs. Some examples of Signature Solutions are the Power8 and the software defined storage environments. IBM is already conditioning the market for a new generation systems that are designed for data, available for open innovation platforms, and will deliver superior cloud economics. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
Unearthing minerals
www.omcltd.in
Enriching LIVES OMC is the highest profit making undertaking of State Government of Odisha. It sustains industrialisation of the state by providing Iron and Chrome ore to a large number of industries.
MAJOR CSR CONTRIBUTIONS OF OMC IN LAST 5 YEARS Rs.4.5 crores to Govt. ITI, Anandpur, Keonjhar for opening of new trade in Mechanic Mining Machinery. Rs.2 crores for development of Bidyadharpur-Kanpur road under Anandpur sub-division, Keonjhar. Rs.2.14 crores for development of Shree Jagannath Temple, Puri. Rs.60 lakhs to 7 Govt. ITI's for Procurement of Vehicles for Driving Training.
Rs.15.00 lakhs for Installation of a life size Statue of Utkal Gourav Madhusudan Das in the premises of Special Circuit House, Puri, Rs.14 lakhs to St. John Ambulance, Odisha State Center, Bhubaneswar for purchasing Ambulance. Rs.7 lakhs to women & child dev. dept. for Observation of International Day for Disabled.
Rs.56 lakhs for development of Saraswati Sishu Mandir, Barsuan, Sundargarh.
Rs.5 lakhs per annum to Swaviman for five years to conduct Anjali International Children's Festival.
Rs.40 lakhs per annum for 5 years to All Odisha Chess Association for Development of Chess in Odisha.
Rs.14 crores for construction of Road from Barsuan Chowk to Dalamukucha in Sundargarh.
Rs.37 lakhs for Renovation of Existing Stadium at Keonjhar.
Rs.369 crores to Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.
Rs. 32.14 lakhs for digging of borewell for drinking water of Bhuban Block of Dhenkanal District. Rs.32 lakhs for Renovation of Sanskruti Bhawan, Jajpur. Rs.15 lakhs for organizing Adivasi Mela-2014 at Adivasi Exhibition Ground, Bhubaneswar.
Rs.436 crores Sales tax to the State Government. Rs.882 crores Royalty to the State Government. Rs.1785 crores dividend to the State Government. Rs.2951 crores Income tax to the Central Government.
A GOLD CATEGORY STATE PSU
CIN : U13100OR1956SGC000313
OMC HOUSE, BHUBANESWAR-751001
surya
THE ODISHA MINING CORPORATION LIMITED
ADVERTORIAL
Odisha Mining Corporation Steering the Growth of Odisha hubaneswar headquarterd Odisha Mining Corporation Limited (OMC) was set up as a joint venture Company of Govt of Odisha and Govt of India to explore and harness mineral wealth of the State of Odisha and make value addition. Later in 1961, OMC became a wholly state-owned corporation of Govt. of Odisha. The major minerals mined by OMC are chrome, iron and manganese ore which cater to the requirement of mineral based industries such as steel, sponge iron, pig iron, ferro-manganese, ferro-chrome, etc.
B
Impressive Growth Path The growth of the professionally managed, OMC has been impressive over these years and today it stands as the largest State PSU in the mining sector of the country. It recorded the highest turn-over of Rs. 2756 crore in FY 2010-11.
OMC implements SAP Since 2004, OMC has adopted SAP software, an ERP tool, to streamline its business processes, bringing synergy in functional activities across the organization, handle numerous business locations and expanding volumes. It has helped in bringing greater transparency in financial transactions and effective monitoring and financial control enabling the organization to take informed and
timely decisions. For successfully implementing the ERP package, OMC was awarded with the Golden Peacock Award in 2006-07 by the Institute of Directors, New Delhi.
OMC has been classified as a
'Gold Category State PSU'. Today, OMC has regional offices at JK Road - Jajpur, Daitari – Keonjhar, Gandhamardan – Keonjhar, Barbil – Keonjhar, Bangur – Keonjhar, Koira – Sundargarh, Rayagada and Angul. Besides, there are mining offices / site offices in various mines under every region and one chrome Ore Benefication Plant (COBP) at Kaliapani. Besides, there is an export office at Paradeep.Today, 3197 personnel are on the rolls of OMC with 385 in the Executive position, while 2812 persons are on the non-executive personnel.
Status of Mineral Concessions OMC has 35 numbers of Mining Leases (Chromite – 11, Iron – 11, Iron & Manganese – 5, Manganese -3, Limestone – 1, and Gemstone -4). Besides, four numbers of mining leases (Iron – 1, Manganese – 1, Bauxite – 1 and Tin – 1) and six numbers of PL (Chinaclay – 1, Graphite – 1, Chromite -2 and Tin -2) have been granted in favour of OMC though the leases are yet to be executed. In addition to this, OMC has applied for a number of ML s which are pending at Govt. level for consideration.
ADVERTORIAL
Production OMC has shown consistent growth in the production of ore and ore concentrate over the last five years. The production of iron ore has increased substantially from 34 lakh tonnes in 2005-06 to about 8 million tonnes in 2008-09. Similarly the production of chrome ore and chrome concentrate has been fairly consistent in the last five years. At the present rate, OMC is producing about 10 percent of total iron ore production of the state and about 30 per cent of the total chrome ore production of the state. Presently, Daitari, Gandhamardan and Kurmitar (Khandadhar) are the major Iron ore mines of OMC whereas South Kaliapani is the main Chrome ore Mine of OMC. Bangur Chrome Ore Mine is the first and only underground mine of OMC.
Financial
Performance of OMC Due to the consistent good performance, OMC has recorded substantial profit in the last few years. In the process, it has contributed substantially to the exchequer of Govt. of India as well as Govt. of Odisha.
Domestic Sale The rates for domestic sale of Iron, Chrome and Manganese Ores are decided on e-auction basis. The sale of ore to buying units / industries is restricted to their capacity. Verification of the units / industries is done to ascertain their requirement of Ore. No ore is sold to traders except iron ore fines, manganese ore with less than 35% Mn. iron ore seized by government and nonmoving items. Iron ore is supplied to various units / industries. Chrome Ore is sold to Ferro Chrome units, Chemical Units and Refractory units.
New Projects of OMC Following the huge accumulated profits, OMC is in a position to undertake new projects which are essential to sustain its good performance in the long run. JV Projects – OMC has decided to diversify its activities and has entered into sectors such as coal and bauxite mining and power generation. A number of Joint Venture Companies have been formed / are in the process of formation. Own Projects – A number of projects have already been taken up / are being taken up by OMC to enhance the present performance level of the Company.
Corporate Social Responsibility OMC is committed to fulfill its obligation under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Other than undertaking development works itself in the vicinity of OMC Mines, huge amount of funds have also been placed with various district administrations for development activities in the concerned districts. OMC has also contributed about Rs. 359 crores to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund in the last five years. OMC has contributed Rs. 5 crores to Odisha Environment Management Fund to fulfill its commitment for a 'Clean and Green Environment. OMC has recently formulated and adopted CSR Policy wherein upto 5 per cent of the net profit of the Organization is set aside for CSR activities.
ADVERTORIAL
FEATURE
TECH TRENDS
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TECHNOLOGIES IN VOGUE! In a world where the IT marketplace is constantly buffeted by newer and better technologies, the vendors often find it difficult to decipher the exact nature of the solutions that the CIOs want. Express Computer interacted with the CIO community to learn about the key technology issues that kept them engaged in 2014 BY PUPUL DUTTA
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he term “Information Overload” was first coined by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling book Future Shock. It was a rather bleak picture of people being constantly barraged by surfeit of data and leading isolated lives that Toffler painted. But he was looking at the technology and media that was available in 1970s and trying to project it into the future to find how our lives would change in the coming decades. Toffler was right, today we have more information than what the earlier generations could ever dream of. But the deluge of data is not making our lives bleak, we now have enough computing power at our disposal to put the data to 24
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work so that the quality of our life becomes better. The year 2014 has been a watershed year for many IT technologies. The most noticeable trend is the move towards mobility. Mobile apps have become widely acceptable in the enterprise segment. In the government too we are seeing a significant traction towards mGovernance. From Indian Railways we have the IRCTC app. Another useful app, launched by the Ministry of Tourism, not only informs the user about the hot spots in a city, it also provides a glimpse of the place by using virtual reality. So it seems that the future to which technology has taken us is rather bright.
Instead of “Future Shock”, what we have is “Future Bright.” Express Computer interacted with several prominent CIOs to find their views on new innovations that they have implemented in 2014. As the technology implementations in the enterprise space get executed over a period of many years, the responses that we received are reflective of the long term trend in Enterprise IT space. While mobility has emerged as the clear frontrunner for 2014, lot of interest is also being taken in areas like analytics and social media tools. Turn the page to read the responses that Express Computer has received from the CIO community. DECEMBER, 2014
www.expresscomputeronline.com
T G DHANDAPANI
A BALAKRISHNAN
GROUP CIO, TVS MOTOR COMPANY LTD
MANAGING DIRECTOR, GEOJIT TECHNOLOGIES
T
O
ne has to understand that there are many tasks that can't be executed on desktops or laptops, it can be done only on mobile phones and tablets. Concentrating on those opportunities bring breakthrough benefits. One of the initiatives is the project in the paint shop. Improving transfer efficiency of the painting is the priority for factory manager. An application in the mobile that captures the items loaded in the jigs to control the movement of robots in accordance to size of the components by sensing jigs, brings around 12% improvement in transfer efficiency. But for mobility this idea couldn’t have been implemented due to constraints in loading areas. Cost of paint is one of the ‘A’ class items in EXPRESS COMPUTER
material spent. Another area we wanted to focus on was going closer to customer. An application has been developed for iOS, Android and Windows platforms that can be downloaded by the customer of TVS vehicles. Apart from many key information to keep the customer connected, it gives history of services done on the vehicle that will improve the resale value of the vehicle. The usage has increased significantly as it gives direct benefits to the customer. In reality, there is no thrill in using mobile unless we explore new opportunities through this technology. It (mobility app) was implemented in April 14 and started paying back from day one.
alking about technologies that have impacted the way we work, I would say it has to be mobile. It has given us significant advantages. We created a mobile app for business. In fact, ours was the first release in the country after the regulations came in (on mobile trading) and now about 13-14% of our business has moved to mobile. We created different applications for varieties of mobile operating systems like Android, Windows, iOS etc. We created the application for Windows 8 and released it the same day Microsoft launched the OS 8. These are some things that we could leverage in the market. Today significant number of clients and employees use this application. We also have internal application in mobile, wherein the senior management and field staff can work seamlessly and give information on the spot. In September 2010, we had started this development (of the application) was done in 2009. And a year after that SEBI had come out with a circular and we released the mobile trading the very next day. After four years, when we look back it was a wonderful move. On the day, the election results (May16, 2014) came in which the Modi government was victorious, we had about 100 thousand log ins in our mobile system for trading. e number of people who log in everyday has already exceeded 25,000. We plan to enhance this application and make it more productive. DECEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
TECH TRENDS
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VIJAY SETHI, VICE PRESIDENT & CIO, HERO MOTOCORP LTD
F
ocus on IT and innovation is deep rooted in Hero MotoCorp’s business strategy and the organisation continues to leverage the power of technology to remain current, well informed and able to make prompt decisions. In the last couple of years, the organisation has expanded its footprint from being a primarily Indian organisation to being present in more than 20 countries and has also forged strategic tie-ups with many global firms. IT plays a key role in all this. Over the years, we have been leveraging IT to generate value not just for the organisation but also for our business partners. Today Hero MotoCorp has a very strong technology base that includes world’s leading technologies like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance), BI (Business Intelligence and Analytics) supported by workflows, portals, mobile applications, self service applications and a very robust and scalable infrastructure and information security technologies. “Information and System Access Anytime Anywhere and 26
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Ease of Use” has been our driving force when it comes to providing systems and solutions designed for our end users. There is a dedicated budget for innovation and experimentation. Usage of cloud, mobility and social media in various parts of business today is norm and there is an increasing focus on analytics and innovation. Green is a major focus for us at Hero and is reflected in all aspects of our working and IT plays a key role in this – be it in digitally signed and electronically sent documents to partners, workflows within company, financial payments, customer loyalty program or our manufacturing. In October 2014, we took a major leap forward when we inaugurated our fourth plant and a Global Parts Centre (GPC) with a huge focus on sustainability. This complex (factory) is aptly termed as Garden Factory. It is not just physical aspects but automation at the world class levels. The GPC today is the most automated warehouse in the country leading to huge productivity gains. The automobile industry has one of the strongest value chain and partner eco systems on the supply side too including Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 suppliers. I am personally spear heading an industrywide initiative to standardise and EDI enable transactions between OEMs and suppliers and their suppliers and we are already seeing benefits of the same. DECEMBER, 2014
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SATISH PENDSE PRESIDENT, HIGHBAR TECHNOLOGIES LTD
T
he technology implementation that has delivered good results for us is CRM. Initially there was a perception that for the Engineering Construction business of HCC, which is mainly a B2B business with less number of customers (<75) and less transactions of high value (single transaction value averaging at Rs 500 crore), the high-end CRM solution such as SAP-CRM may be an overkill. However, while doing the product evaluation when the business team saw the features and the value that they can generate, the solution created enough pull. The business leadership started demanding its implementation and was ready to invest. Some of the benefits the business derived were reduction in the cycle time from opportunity to order closure, increasing the win rate, integration with ERP provided a single view of customer including status of existing orders and the ongoing bids as well as opportunities. We also had improved relationship with customers due to structured way of mapping the customer profile and more efficient tracking. There was reduced dependence on individual team members of business development team and institutionalisation of data, information and processes and lastly, there was improved monitoring, control and review of business development cycle.
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DECEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
TECH TRENDS
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VIVEK KHANNA VP - FINANCE & INFORMATION SYSTEM, HAVELLS INDIA LIMITED
A
bout 4-5 years back, we at Havells started implementing front end marketing activities and digitised our marketing systems which gave us extremely good results. One of the best initiatives started then was the ‘dealer portal’, created in 2008. The purpose of dealer portal was to give all the information to dealers and create complete transparency in our dealings with them. The main objective was to make them self reliant and ensure that they are not dependent on any back office or sales persons. So, all the reports, inventory list, orders etc were put out on this forum. Dealers slowly started accepting this portal and started using it as a result of which about 35% of our dealers’ sale came from the portal itself. This is one technology implementation we are very proud of as it has yielded results with people, who are not tech savvy and are mere shopkeepers . Lately, we have also extended this portal to mobile and dealers can now place the order through their smartphones. Initially, when we had started the portal many dealers complained that due to the lack of a computing device they could not log on to the portal. But now with the smartphones becoming a rage, the mobile application – M-connect is very handy. About 3% of our total orders are now coming from mobile phones. Dealer portal was created on SAP, using its standards. Mobility is more of a dollop application and hence, Java was used. Though it was implemented by a third party, we are fully managing it in-house. We also created another application for ‘last mile sale’ called Power Plus. Its a dollop application that works on SMS and we are also using SAP production planning module. It is a process by which some bills are generated. It is basically for electricians and retailers, who on sale of Havells product send us a PIN through SMS. In return they get credit points from us. These points can be en-cashed for purchase of any product of their choice, not necessarily Havells. They can also buy a motorbike if they have the required credit points. With this, we are incentivising retailers directly for sale of Havells products. Besides all these applications and programs, we have digitised all the departments and workflows. Now we are working on shop floor management and how best we can integrate more machinery.
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DECEMBER, 2014
VISHANT VORA DIRECTOR -TECHNOLOGY, VODAFONE INDIA
T
he adoption of new technologies in India has recently gained momentum. These emerging technologies provide an innovative framework to develop products, interact with customers and partners, improve operational efficiency and create differentiation in an ever changing, hyper competitive and complex market ecosystem. At the same time, with growing customer expectations, the strategic focus has moved from “Customer Relationship Management” to “Customer Experience Management”. Vodafone India is one of India’s leading cellular service providers with more than 170 million customers. We are continuously adopting new technologies in order to sustain our leadership and commitment towards enhancing customer experience. Some of these initiatives include High Definition (HD) Voice, Self-Organising Networks (SON) and cloud. HD Voice
technology provides superior voice quality to our customers. Self-Organising Networks (SON) is another step taken by Vodafone India towards customer experience improvement. It is an intelligent system that performs a real time diagnosis of the network. All underperforming cells and clusters of the network are identified and based on preconfigured algorithms, the network parameters are tweaked towards improving network performance and quality. The system, on its own, makes corrections leading to proactive resolution of issues. We have also embarked upon the journey to create a robust cloud computing stack. Some of our key IT applications, distributed across circles, have been migrated to cloud with many more in the pipeline. The implementation of cloud has delivered many benefits such as, rapid provisioning leading to quicker time to market, scalability, better service
availability, enhanced security and cost reduction. We have also made significant progress in our “Big Data” journey. We are now able to analyse the data feeds from various channels and get detailed in-depth insights. This has enabled us to take more informed decisions based on capabilities such as, social media analytics, over the top (OTT) application analytics and subscriber behaviour analytics. Our customers can now be approached with right product at the right time, thus enhancing the user experience and brand perception.
THOMSON THOMAS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT -BUSINESS SYSTEMS & TECHNOLOGY, HDFC LIFE
S
o far there have been three strong projects (technology implementation based) that we are very proud of. The first one being the implementation of a comprehensive Digitised Workflow across our business, second being our renewals and revival management system and in the last few years it has been our online Point of Sales system for the distribution channels. The PoS system branded as ‘Click2Buy’ enhances customer insurance purchase experience and also helps to increase productivity of HDFC Life’s distribution EXPRESS COMPUTER
channels. Each of these projects have had a big impact on the strategic initiatives of the company. Talking about some of the latest technologies like SMAC, we have been using social very effectively both internally and externally. We have the third largest number of fans (2.7 million) on Facebook in the entire BFSI sector, the first two being banks (which makes us no 1 in insurance). We use social collaboration internally and have implemented an Enterprise Social Network. As far as cloud is
concerned, we have already moved our Disaster Recovery to a cloud based solution and are working on moving more infrastructure to the cloud. We also have our video conferencing and a large group of mail users on the cloud. In terms of mobility, we have launched many applications for sales and prospects. Lastly, we have been using predictive models for over years now and are increasing the depth and breadth when it comes to analytics. We are also working on taking the output from analytics to feed real time decision support. DECEMBER, 2014
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INTERVIEW RAVI KANT MALHAN SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC INDIA
www.expresscomputeronline.com
“We prefer to work by what I like to call the 'bottom up, sleeves rolled up' approach, where we do everything from the basic planning to preparing the tenders,” says Ravi Kant Malhan, Director-Head Business Development-Smart Cities and Special Projects, Schneider Electric India. In conversation with Heena Jhingan.
Paving way for smart cities How would you describe a special project? A special project, by definition, is something complex, hugely diverse in customer environment and involving multiple stakeholders. One special project that comes to my mind is the one that we did for the Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd. We evaluated the work that they did in each and came to the conclusion that the sub-stations could easily be automated. In fact, Power Grid could have unmanned substations. We designed solutions through which it is possible to get a single window view of 200 sub-stations. This was a special project, not only because of the number of sites where the solution was implemented, but also because of the complexity of technologies being deployed. To execute this project four different business units of Schneider worked together – the energy division for the energy component, the power unit for the power machinery, the IT unit for the power in the APC and the UPS supply and the video business unit for the automation of the video surveillance. The Prime Minister has presented his vision for setting up 100 smart cities in India. What kind of opportunities do you see in the area of smart cities? We see a vast opportunity in the area of smart cities. But in order to deliver the right kind of technologies and systems, we must have comprehensive understanding of what is being envisioned, what is desirable, what is doable and what is the optimal cost of the project. We prefer to work by what I like to call the ‘bottom up, sleeves rolled up’ approach, where we do everything from the basic planning to preparing the tenders. The wonderful thing about this smart city project is that we don’t need to go to the market in this case, the market will come to us. There is a positive change in the way the decisions get made in the government. You don’t have to knock continuously at the doors of the authorities to be seen or heard. Decisions get taken swiftly.
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IT is obviously the key pillar of smart city projects. How well prepared is Schneider’s IT business unit to fulfill all the new requirements? The IT that is required for smart cities is already embedded across various business units. So the IT BU does not need to do anything specific for the project. The energy business unit at Schneider is currently handling the smart city vertical, and every solution here has got IT in it. We have the systems to ensure that there is smart use of energy, smart transportation, smart metering, etc. What kind of engagements with the third party partners are you developing to strengthen your grip over the smart cities business? We are a big a company and we like to do a lot of things ourselves, but the needs of the smart city projects is so complex that no single company can fulfill all the requirements on its own. Hence we have forged global partnerships with companies like IBM, Cisco and Accenture for planning. With Microsoft we have partnership for the cloud. These are serious engagements with companies that have a proven track record to deliver what the customers want.
The success of the smart city projects will depend on how successfully we can localise the production of the hardware components. For instance, smart lights, smart meters, etc., will have to be manufactured in India.
The government is hopeful that smart projects will lead to lot of work going to the IT companies based in India. Please tell us about the partnerships that you are building within the country? The success of the smart city projects will depend on how successfully we can localise the production of the hardware components. For instance, smart lights, smart meters, etc., will have to be manufactured in India. We will have to work with the manufacturers, who are capable of provide quality assurance. Only the best quality products can be used in smart cities. Partnerships are, by nature, very dynamic, some partnerships can be global, while others will be local. Even the local partnerships can at a later stage be scaled up so that they are global in scope. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW SUNDI BALU TELSTRA GLOBAL
www.expresscomputeronline.com
Sundi Balu, CIO - Telstra Global, spoke to Pankaj Maru about how enterprises in the Asia are taking advantage of cloud. He also sheds light on the impact that Telstra’s shift to 3G will have on customers. Excerpts…
“Asia is entering an age of living in the cloud” Telstra plans to move from 2G to 3G by 2016. What is the significance of this move? As a vast majority of our customers already use 3G or 4G devices on the Telstra Mobile Network, our 2G traffic accounts for less than 1 percent of our total network traffic. Over the next couple of years, we will work with the remaining 2G retail customers to help them transition to our 3G and 4G technologies. This will lead to superior coverage, faster speeds and a vast improvement in the number and quality of services.
services, and even scale business operations on demand. For instance, the key sales and service processes are already experiencing cycle-time reductions in the order of 20 to 30 percent. The learning that we have gained from our cloud deployment enables us to guide and support our customers in their journey into the cloud. In the Asia region what kind of trends do you see in cloud adoption? Asia is entering an age of living in the cloud. Over the past year, providers have discovered their individual and unique cloud plays and have expanded their services accordingly. For CIOs and their respective enterprises this is great time; they are increasingly turning towards the cloud to expand the scope of their businesses. Enterprises across the region are showing interest in hybrid cloud models, they are taking advantage of Infrastructure as a Service. By taking the hybrid approach in cloud initiatives, the enterprises can achieve valuable outcomes without having to worry about cost and security.
In this shift from 2G to 3G, what kind of technological challenges do you foresee? We don’t foresee too many challenges. In fact, for Telstra’s customers this may be a simple process. Many of them are already using 3G phones, but they have not upgraded their SIM card. A few of them may need to change to a compatible 3G/4G handset. We don’t expect any impact on the cloud services. What kind of impact will be there on your enterprise services and consumer services with your shift to 3G? In the short term, there will be no impact for any of our customers. We will continue to operate the 2G network till the end of 2016, so the customers who access the 2G network will continue to have access to various services for the next two years. They can switch over to 3G at any point of time during this period. To what extent is Telstra using cloud to drive the efficiency of its own business? At Telstra, we are willing to take advantage of the benefits of cloud and cloud based services by hosting our international IT architecture in it. Like all businesses, we are driven by outcomes and costs. It is crystal clear to everyone that cloud can help businesses in many ways so it is in our best interests to implement it. Every department in Telstra, from sales to service, product management and HR to finance, uses cloud and the associated services in some form. With cloud, we can now access information, tools and EXPRESS COMPUTER
By taking the hybrid approach in cloud initiatives, the enterprises can achieve valuable outcomes without having to worry about cost and security.
Can you give us an example of a company where the cloud solutions have been successfully deployed? TIAA Henderson Real Estate – the world’s third largest real estate investment management company – was able to launch its global operations in just nine months by using next-generation cloud based technologies. Working with Telstra, TH Real Estate built a complete business and technology suite from scratch, including high quality video conferencing and other collaboration tools, which were spread across 19 countries. At Telstra we are seeing a growing number of applications developed by businesses in the cloud, due to the platform’s flexibility. The idea is simple: buying relevant computing space to test an approach and then shutting if off again when the activity has run its course drives innovation while reducing risk. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
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IFFCO
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TOWERING OVER
CHALLENGES TO TAKE IT FORWARD
When S C Mittal started his career in the early 1970s, the word ‘IT’ was virtually unknown. “In those days we used the word ‘computerisation’,” says Mittal. In fact, “Computer” was the designation in some Government Departments in that era. BY ANOOP VERMA
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fter completing his PG Diploma in Computer Science, S C Mittal joined BHEL Ranipur, Haridwar, in 1974. Finding a computer on which he could work was the first major challenge that he faced. “Computers were a rarity then,” he says, “BHEL Ranipur, didn’t have one.” The only computer the organisation had was a Unit Record Machine (URM) in which programming was done by wires. There was no digital programming. Mittal used IBM 360 at Delhi University and IBM 1620 at SERC, Roorkee, for conducting the design related calculations for BHEL. “At times I slept on the sofa in Delhi University,” he reminisces. “I had to be around when my program was being compiled or executed on the IBM 360 to ensure that if there was any error in compilation or run time, I was there to fix it. If I missed the chance of getting the compilation or execution done, I could not be sure when the turn would come for my program to be run again.” There used to be a long queue for using the IBM 360. “I was the only professional with knowledge of programming in BHEL, Haridwar, at that time. The first assignment I got was design of Kaplan Runner of Hydro Turbine. A team of three persons – a design engineer, a draftsman and myself- was deputed to execute this challenging project. Fortran II and IV were used for the programming. The draftsman used to draw the design graph using the output derived by execution of computer program. The same was matched with the original blue print. After number of iterations, the parameters were decided. I had not heard the word reverse engineering at that time, but now I can relate that this was a reverse engineering project.” After two years in BHEL Haridwar, Mittal moved to Bokaro Steel Limited in 1976, where they had a relatively larger IT department with about 50 professionals. Bokaro Steel Limited owned an IBM 1401 to manage their data
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processing work. In this computer system, everything, be it source code, the runtime code, the sort utility, etc., were on paper cards. “Today such a machine would be fit for the museum,” laughs Mittal, “but for that era this was quite advanced.” The problem that the IT team at Bokaro Steel faced with the IBM 1401 was that at times the cards would get torn while being read. When this happened they had to manually punch the card. Mittal’s Team developed a software consisting of just six cards, which they called the bootstrap cards. These cards could be used to give instruction to the system that whatever the computer was going to compile must be stored on the magnetic disk media. It has also helped to store the Sort Utility of about 6000 cards on the magnetic disk. This innovation led to tremendous improvement in the reading speed of the machine. Mittal’s work was recognised by SAIL and he was awarded Metallurgists Day Award. A paper around this innovation was also published in Annual Journal of Computer Society Of India in 1980. In 1982, Mittal joined Modi Rubber Ltd, where he worked on a project for automation of manufacturing control processes of Tyres and Tubes. Then the 34
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company had purchased an Online Manufacturing and Control Package from ICIM. However, after working on it for more than one year, the company realised that the system was not suitable. The System, an MRP (Material Requirement Planning) package, was then developed and implemented by Mittal and his team. Not many people are aware of the fact that the ERP System has been conceived on the lines of MRP of that time. After a Three year stint in the company, Mittal moved to IFFCO in 1986.
Creation of computer culture “There were no computers in IFFCO Corporate Office, its marketing offices or plant, except a mini computer in one of the plants at Kalol, when I joined the organisation,” says Mittal. In fact, he was the first person to join the IT department at IFFCO Head Office. The first PC they purchased had only 10 KB memory. “Today the organisation is full of state of the art IT systems and when I look back from where we started three decades ago, I feel amazed by the progress we have made.” On joining, Mittal was asked by the management to visit IFFCO’s four plants and develop schemes for implementing computerisation there. “At all the plants
where I went, I met the heads of various departments and shared my ideas on IT with them,” says Mittal. “At first people were unenthusiastic, but when I gave a picture of the benefits of computerisation, they were interested.” After returning from his tour, he briefed the management about what could be done. Mittal was told by the management that he could hire few professionals from outside, but bulk of the members of the IT department had to be chosen from the existing employees at IFFCO and trained in the usage of IT. Setting up the department, finding a place to locate it, hiring suitable employees and purchase of computer systems were not the only problems that Mittal faced, he also needed to get the existing employees selected from within and trained by a professional body. In 1986, IFFCO purchased a minicomputer from Zenith Computer Limited. The first application that IFFCO IT team ran on it was the payroll application. Soon applications for marketing, sales and other areas were developed. After that the team ensured that all the four plants at IFFCO had their own data centers; suitable computers and professionals were hired to develop and implement computerisation in the plants. DECEMBER, 2014
As IFFCO has a large presence in the fertiliser marketing space, it was felt that the important marketing offices should be provided with their own computer systems. However, the organisation could not afford mini-computers in every marketing office. So they established a PC XT computer at five marketing zonal offices. Thus, began the process of computerisation of sales and distribution activity through computers. “Today it is common for the smallest office to be full of computers,” says Mittal, “but during those days we had to face lot of flak for spending the company’s money on computers. Few of our colleagues believed that we were wasting company’s funds. They were not ready to recognise the benefits of computerisation. But there were many others who strongly supported the initiatives of the IT department and we could carry on with our work.” Around 1990, IFFCO got satellite based connection to its plants and marketing zonal offices. It purchased 10 VSATs from NIC. One VSAT was installed in the corporate office in Delhi, 5 were placed in zonal offices and 4 in the plants. Thus, some form of digital communication started. But the connectivity speed was quite low as compared to what we have today, and the system could not be integrated with the Local Applications. From there we started making progress, soon there was a Local Area Network and then the reliable Wide Area Network.
Overcoming Challenges “Challenge,” Mittal says, “has always been
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S C MITTAL Current Designation
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Favourite Quotes:
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Favourite book Favourite destination Favourite gadget
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Senior Executive Director & Group CTO, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO); Director (IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited) ● Work is worship. ● IT is a team effort. Gita Florida iPad
there in my career because I had to work very hard to convince people about the benefits of IT.” His people skills were tested yet again in the 1992 when Dr U S Awasthi joined IFFCO as its Managing Director. He had a keen interest in usage of Information Technology (IT) and desired to have excellence in the working of organisation by deploying technology tools. He desired to have online Documentation System in various activities of IFFCO. With his encouragement and farsightedness, Mittal was able to outsource Facility Management of Computer Operations in
the year 1996 in spite of the reservations expressed by some people in the management. Eventually they went ahead with the plan for having one application code in the organisation. Prior to that, each unit in IFFCO had its own system like Payroll, Materials Management, Financial Accounting, etc. The Document Management System was implemented in 1995 in the Board Section for all board meetings agendas and minutes, including various Executive Meetings proceedings. The services of a major IT company was hired to develop first major enterprise wide suite of applications, but there were issues with the manpower deployed and the project could not be completed for two years. Finally Mittal and his team members decided that they needed to take a more proactive stance to complete the project. The economics were worked out and IFFCO IT Team took over the charge of project management, system analysis and design. As IFFCO did not have enough resources for development, they decided to use the services of the IT Company as a developer. The option worked out to be quite cheaper. This time they succeeded in developing and implementing Human Resource Management Software, a suite of 26 applications across the entire organisation. DECEMBER, 2014
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IFFCO
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“It was tough to implement the solution all across IFFCO. The unions were not convinced that this move was in the interest of the employees,” Mittal says. After lengthy discussions, IFFCO began the implementation of the solution in its Head Office, Marketing Central Office, the largest plant at Aonla and the North Central Zone, which then consisted of undivided Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This took a year. Soon the employees and the unions realised that the software was empowering the employees, as it led to lot of transparency, and after that all opposition to IT melted away. Today the IT solutions that IFFCO uses are fully optimised and are being run with seamless efficiency across all its units, departments and branches. During early 2000, IFFCO faced the difficult challenge of losing its key developers, as there was lot of opportunities in the market for such professionals. Around 15-20 professionals, who had some kind of computer experience, left over a span of two years. With the consent of Management, we changed the strategy and we began to take engineers from other working disciplines at the plants and training them. Though 50% of them had also left but the strategy has worked and remaining engineers have provided stability to the department. These professionals at a later stage became mentors to the new batch of engineering graduates that we recruited.
Using IT for efficiency The next challenge that Mittal faced came when it was time to change the software that was being used to manage the finances of the organisation. The government had mandated that IFFCO was one of the few organisations where International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) was to be implemented from 1st April 2011. At that time the Finance Management Software that IFFCO was using was about 10 years old. “We decided to go in for the ERP system from Oracle, which has the facility for IFRS in their software. The implementation of ERP in IFFCO was a complicated project, but we were able to complete it without any significant problems,” says Mittal. Many legacy applications like HRMS, Deposit Accounting, Sales and Distribution 36
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Challenge has always been there in my career because I had to work very hard to convince people about the benefits of IT.”
(eVikas), etc., were retained and interfaced with ERP. Some applications were developed as the ERP modules were not found suitable. A pictorial of ERP is given below. “It is not widely known that IFFCO is one of the first companies in India to develop and implement an e-procurement system,” says S C Mittal. “Our eprocurement system was developed in 2000, and it got implemented in 2002.” It was fully integrated with PKI and was fully compliant to IT Act 2000. Before implementation, interaction meetings with IFFCO’s vendors were organised in large cities in the countries like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Lucknow, Ahmedabad. Leading Cyber law experts also participated in these meetings to address the apprehensions of the vendors. Digital Certifying Agencies were associated to issue the Digital Certificates to the vendors. IFFCO has even sponsored 50% fee of the cost of getting these certificates to increase the response. IFFCO implemented first desktop based video conferencing in the year 2000. It has graduated to studio based system in 2006. Today, it has facilities to interact with 20 sites in one go. It has setup Video Conferencing facilities in all Units and State Marketing Offices, about 25 in number. The setup is used for Departmental Promotions, Board Meetings, AGMs, Reviews, Training, Policy Rollouts and even various event inaugurations. The ROI was achieved during first year of its implementations itself. Besides it has installed about 800 VOIP instruments for free interaction in the organisation. The organisation has installed Kisan Call Centre in its data centre with 14 call centers across the country on behalf of Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India, and is handling about 9 Lakh calls per month. This is the commitment of IFFCO towards the farmers and rural community. It is developing communities for value added services through its JV i.e IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited. IFFCO is also helping its partners by providing help in computerisation. The first such computerisation has been implemented for entire business operation of UP Pradesik Cooperative Federation, PCF. anoop.verma@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW BISHWANATH BHATTACHARYA HCL SERVICES
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“HCL manages thousands of end-to-end Data Centre assets, millions of network devices, double digit Peta byte of storage and Multi Gbps secured network links,” says Bishwanath Bhattacharya, CEO, HCL Services. In conversation with Express Computer. Excerpts…
“HCL Services helps you build future ready Data Centre” What is your view of the Data Centre segment in India? Currently, Indian Data Centre market is estimated to be between $ 3.5 and $ 4 billion. Organisations have been exploring the hybrid Data Centre approach. The CIO community in India understands that the structure of Data Centre must change. The demand is growing, but technology budgets have plateaued. Sectors like BFSI, PSU and ITES have stringent data security needs and they prefer to build their own captive Data Centre. Manufacturing, IT, Healthcare, Education and FMCG companies are more receptive to public cloud adoption. Service providers like Telecom, Cloud, DCSP, etc. based on the nature of their business; need to build their own Data Centres. Tell us about the work that HCL is doing in the Data Centre space? India’s largest Data Centre has been built and managed end-to-end by us. The world’s largest biometric, de-duplication and aut hentication system has been executed by us. We are in the process of executing one of the biggest High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster with 300 TFlops sustained performance. HCL has also been providing Public, Nested Private, Hybrid cloud services for the last 3 years. Our set of services offerings spans the entire Data Centre lifecycle consisting of● Consulting (design, assessment, consolidation & migration) ● Implementation/Integration (hybrid technology platforms within DC) ● SLA based Managed services (including hardware support services). HCL Services has developed Tefilla, which is an Enterprise Management platform and tool for monitoring and managing customer’s IT landscape remotely. Tefilla helps organisations meet business SLAs efficiently and cost effectively. EXPRESS COMPUTER
What is your long term strategy in this area? HCL has strong presence in key verticals like BFSI, Manufacturing and Public Sector. We are also expanding into other key verticals like healthcare and IT/ITES. On the portfolio front we plan to grow our Data Centre services as a complete stack with focus on emerging technologies like Software defined DC & IOT, smart cloudification for leveraging on the economics of infrastructure addressing the business challenges. Do you think that Indian enterprises are ready to embrace data centre services in a big way? India is a developing market; our enterprises are still far from realising the true potential of IT adoption. A recent Gartner survey shows that Data Centre and infrastructure are among the top three Technology Priorities for CIOs in 2014. Moreover, our new Government is planning to launch several new e-governance projects. So, in the medium term Data Centre services business is bound to see rapid growth. What kind of trends do you see in Data Centre Security? Today there is a gigantic increase in cyber attacks that an organisation has to bear. Gartner estimates that security spending on products and services will grow to $72 billion in 2014, representing a growth of 8.4% from 2013.
HCL has strong presence in key verticals like BFSI, Manufacturing and Public Sector. We are also expanding into other key verticals like healthcare and IT/ITES
How are HCL security services geared to address these emerging threats? We have developed alliances with leading security software companies to ensure that our clients have access to the best of the breed technology. The specific security related services that we provide include perimeter level threat management, identity and access management, tiered application access (Apps firewall), security incident and event management, vulnerability analysis, penetration testing and governance, regulation and control solutions. We are committed to set a new benchmark for service excellence and get recognised as ‘Gold Standard in IT Services’. DECEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
FERNS N PETALS
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Blossoming in the
Cloud Ferns N Petals is thriving in AWS Cloud, which offers a rich and fertile ground for catering to the needs of large numbers of customers. BY JASMINE DESAI
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owered by innovative solutions from the areas of mobility, social networking and cloud, e-commerce is now attracting new customers by the droves. Today the e-commerce organisations are seeing vast improvements in conversions and the size of average order values. Ferns N Petals, an online portal for flowers and other gift items, is no exception to this trend. The website is active in 156 countries and operates in geographies such as Europe, USA, Middle East and South East Asia.
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The website runs entirely on AWS platform. But the development of the appropriate cloud strategy has taken a lot planning on part of Ferns N Petals.
Why cloud! Ferns N Petals was initially using the traditional data centre model; its data centre was located in Mumbai. In course of time there was a significant rise in the number of customers visiting their website. Today Ferns N Petals has around 500,000 customers across the world who
visit their website every month. 90% of their traffic comes from India. On special occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or any other festive occasion, they have close to 1000 concurrent visitors on the website per second. On any normal day, there are around 300 concurrent users per second, and the highest traffic is at around 10 AM in the morning or 8 PM in the evening. Explains Manish Saini, Vice-President, Online Business, Ferns N Petals,”As the web traffic increased, it became difficult for us DECEMBER, 2014
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to predict the infrastructure capacity that would be needed when we are using the traditional data centre. Installing another data centre would incur large upfront capital cost and it would require substantial effort and resources. Hence we decided to opt for a cloud-based model.” The organisation conducted a comprehensive comparison between traditional data centre providers and the AWS model. The criteria used for the comparison considered the aspects of scalability, cost efficiency, monitoring and automation features, and flexibility. It was also considered the factor that the new system should have credibility across the globe. According to Saini, AWS was leading in every criteria and its rapid pace of innovation made it obvious that this was the solution that could remain viable for the long term.
The infrastructure from a traditional hosting provider will always lead to a monthly maintenance cost,which is not ideal for businesses.With AWS Ferns N Petals does not have to worry about maintaining or upgrading the infrastructure
The path to transformation Any migration to cloud-based set-up requires lot of planning. Ferns N Petals carried out multiple checks and preparation activities prior to the migration process . These included: ● Testing various types of workloads to understand the capacity needed and its associated cost. ● Application architecture review with disaster recovery and contingency planning. ● Deriving the peak performance throughput based on load testing. Based on the outcomes of their result, the organisation developed the cloud architecture for implementation which was followed by a data centre migration plan. The migration plan included a range of high-tech activities that had to be executed in perfect order. “From our side we did a perfect planning to ensure that the migration was foolproof and seamless,” says Saini. Security is a key area of concern in the cloud. This too had to be taken care of thoroughly. AWS offers some extremely robust security features, according to Saini. These include the setting up of secured servers with security keys, having strong ACL layer to manage the traffic restrictions as well as security groups, and the setting up of micro instance to control inbound and EXPRESS COMPUTER
outbound access to the servers. These features ensure that the data has been restricted to a limited and controlled user group. Another key strength of AWS, which is beneficial for companies like Ferns N Petals, is the Amazon CloudWatch solution. It provided Ferns N Petals with the ability of managing the servers remotely. The monitoring and support team can easily access the alarms and key statistics.
Testing the new system It took Ferns N Petals around 4-5 days to set up the environment and initiate a thorough testing. This also included failover planning and load testing. The implementation process was quite smooth, thanks to the detailed implementation plan. They also did a thorough analysis of AWS so that they could be aware of all the capabilities of the system, as well as the key activities that needed to be handled. Now the infrastructure of Ferns N Petals’ runs on AWS Cloud. They are utilising Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS APIs, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route53. “We find the Amazon Route53 to be an
extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end-users to our website. Amazon Route53 helps us in seamless DNS management,” says Saini. The company is running applications like Content Management System, Call Centre CRM, Vendor Extranet, Websites (for desktop and Mobile), Email SMTP (Amazon SES) and Content delivery on AWS.
Benefits of being on cloud The benefits of the implementation are crystal clear to everyone. Says Saini, “We wanted to ensure a great customer experience whenever they visit our websites so that we can retain our customers and thereby ensure repeat business.” Installing hardware servers would have entailed a huge rise in the expenditure, it would have brought in complications in the way that IT is managed. The infrastructure from a traditional hosting provider can lead to a monthly maintenance cost, which is not ideal for businesses. With AWS, Ferns N Petals does not have to worry about maintaining or upgrading the infrastructure. By using the AWS Cloud Platform, the company can add several new features to their website for enhancing customer experience. The Cloud Infrastructure can be scaled as per the business dynamics. The best thing is that they are only paying AWS for the services that they use, so there is no extra expenditure. “This is far more convenient and flexible as compared to the traditional data centre model,” asserts Saini. The AWS platform helps in maintaining high level of traffic, while keeping the IT infrastructure in working condition with minimum efforts. They are now free to focus on their core business. Through AWS they get alerts or notifications in case there is a glitch. Already AWS has suggested certain autoscaling and optimisation, which they are now in the process of implementing. The future plans of the company include the aspect of Cloud. The company is now planning to expand in UAE, where it will have the web address fernsnpetals.ae. This endeavour will require require one more server. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
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CASE STUDY
RAMCO SYSTEMS
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ACLOUD FOR
BETTER EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. Ltd. automates its HR division with Ramco Systems' HCM on Cloud solution and connects around 3000 employees spread across 67 branch offices in India BY PANKAJ MARU
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key problem that most large companies face is related to the management of large workforce that operate out ofdifferent geographies and time zones. This problem gets aggravated because in a bid to minimise operational costs, many companies don't keep dedicated HR persons for managing employees in different locations. They prefer to have centralised HR department of limited strength. Life insurer Star Union Dai-ichi (SUD) too faced the problem of efficiently managing around 3000 employees, as they are based in 67 branch offices located in different parts of the country.
Challenges Since SUD did not have any automated HR system in place, every HR related 40
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task, including time management and attendance, was being handled manually. Company was unable to create an automated PMS (Performance Management System) because it lacked an integrated and centralised HR data and operations management system. The management had very little scope for having real time access to 3000 employees based in branch offices. The records and data of all the employees were not visible to the management in a centralised and systematic way.There was no scope of offeringthe facility of online ESS (Employees Self Service) to the workforce. This affected the company's business processes linked tothe HR function and workers. “Everything was being done manually. Little bit of Excel was being used, but
there was lot of paperwork,” says Anil D’Souza, Head – HR, Star Union Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. Ltd. “I wanted to eliminate the use of paper based processes. This would have the benefit of freeing people who are involved in those time consuming manually run processes. They could get involved in more productive tasks. In December 2012, we started looking for technology to better manage the HR department,” adds D'Souza.
Solution Given those HR functions related issues, in March 2013, SUD's board started scouting for technology solution to suit its needs. D'Souza and his management reviewed numerous HR solutions from software vendors, including Oracle's DECEMBER, 2014
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PeopleSoft solution, Microsoft Dynamics, Polaris Adreline solution, Ramco Systems and others. Finally they selected Ramco HCM on Cloud – a cloud-based HR management solution.After initiating the deployment process in April, the twocore module of HCM suite, including staff administration, went live in October 2013. The subsequent modules like planning, workforce management, talent management, employee development, payroll and benefits went live in MarchApril this year. Ramco's solution had been selected after a careful evaluation of all the solutions available in the market.“In the past, I had used tools from Oracle, Tata Infotech and others, but when it comes to future enhancements, features or customisation, I feel Ramco's solution is more suitable for the needs of our EXPRESS COMPUTER
organisation,” opines D'Souza. The Ramco HCM solution was deployed without any major customisation to retain the solution's core functionalities. Star Union Dai-ichi is yet to fully evaluate thefinal price that it has paid for the automation of HR department; however, in view of D'Souza, the pricing of Ramco's solution is more competitive than that of others. “Ramco's pricing model is quite competitive. The value that it offers compares well with what others in the market are offering,” says D’Souza. “As Ramco is an Indian firm, in case there is a glitch, I can easily get in touch with Ramco’s top management and ask them to find a solution quickly, which is not the case with vendors like SAP or Oracle,” asserts D'Souza.
Benefits “Today, around 2600 employees on roll are live in our HR system that works across 67 branch offices in India,” informs D'Souza. “The schematic workflow and methodological planning has started bringing lot of benefits to the organisation,” adds D'Souza. The technology has helped in streamlining and automating many of the HR processes and workflows. This has led to reduction in costs and added to the efficiency. SUD has successfully eliminated the use of paper for various HR related functions. The company is now using online PMS and goal sheets for its employees. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
NIELIT
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CAPACITY E BUILDING,SKILL DEVELOPMENTAND DIGITALLITERACY FOR DIGITALINDIA By Dr. Ashwini Kumar Sharma, MD, National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT)
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ducation, vocational training and lifelong learning are the central pillars of employability, employment of workers and sustainable enterprise development, which contribute in achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty. Skills development, crucial for stimulating a sustainable development process, can make a significant contribution for facilitating the transition of workers from the informal sectors to the formal economy. The principles and values of decent work provide guidance for the design and delivery of skills development and are an effective way of managing socially just transitions. The ballpark figure of skilling 500 million Indians by 2022 includes skill development of 150 million by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC); 100 million by the
Ministry of Labor; 50 million by MHRD and the rest 230 million by 21 ministries, departments and various other organisations. The Indian IT/ ITES industry has been one of the great success stories of modern India. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has put in place many schemes for capacity building and development of skills in IT and Electronics and the schemes on Capacity Building and Skill Development are primarily being implemented by NIELIT. National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, or NIELIT as it is popularly known, is doing lot work for proliferation of eLiteracy among the masses and capacity building in the area of skill development in IT and Electronics. NIELIT has wide presence in the country, specially in the rural areas, through a network of 31 centres. NIELIT offers courses in the DECEMBER, 2014
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formal and the non-formal sectors of education, and is one of the national examination bodies which accredit training institutions for the conduct of courses in the non-formal sector. Besides a network of own centres, NIELIT is well represented in the country through its approximately 900 strong network of accredited training partners and about 5000+ CCC/BCC facilitation centres. It is also undertaking the implementation of many Government projects, besides the conduct of recruitment examinations on behalf of DeitY and its attached offices like STQC Dte, CeRT-IN, NIC etc. NIELIT has not only created an institutionalised model for the conduct of nation-wide examinations, both in the Online and the conventional modes, but has also made deep inroads to take skill development initiatives to the nook and corner of the country through synergy with other departments. In the recent past, NIELIT has diversified by introducing courses in new technologies such as Electronic System design and Manufacturing (ESDM), EXPRESS COMPUTER
At a recent workshop conducted in the presence of the Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad and Secretary, DeitY and other dignitaries, an MoU was signed between NIELIT (Dr.Ashwini Kumar Sharma, MD, NIELIT) and Intel (Ms. Debjani Ghosh, MD Intel - Asia Pacific) for vetting of NIELIT courses. [Pictures 1-5]
Geographical Information System (GIS), Cyber Security, IPR, Cloud Computing, e-Governance etc. Through the successful implementation of the PPP model, it has further extended its reach and the number of accredited training partners has increased from 500 to 850 within a span of just one year. To facilitate the model of making one person in every Indian family e-literate, NIELIT has identified more than 5000 facilitation centres, spread across the country, for training on CCC/BCC courses which equips a person to use a computer to undertake e-Governance transactions and other basic activities, like sending/receiving e-mails, browsing the internet, etc. The unique initiative of reinforcing existing NIELIT courses with ‘soft skill’ and ‘foreign language’ components have also added tremendous value, resulting in an increase in the employability of NIELIT qualifiers. Looking to the outreach of CSCs (Common Service Centre), which have got presence throughout the country, one out of six villages, we have tied up with CSC-SPV for training of VLE
(Village Level Entrepreneur) for training in our Digital Literacy course so that he/she can further take up training of other citizens in the village. Efforts are also being made for online assessment in the local language. The recently launched ‘Digital India’ mission aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. Envisaged by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Digital India shall be implemented in phases – from the current year till 2018. Digital India is transformational in nature and is aimed at ensuring that Government services are available to citizens electronically. It would also bring in public accountability through mandated electronic delivery of government services. The programme also envisions providing a ‘cradle-to-grave’ digital identity that is unique, lifelong and online. As Skill Development is one of the important pillars out of the nine pillars of ‘Digital india’, NIELIT has been entrusted to conduct examinations of 10 Lakh candidates in 18 months for Digital Literacy programs. DECEMBER, 2014
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FLASH STORAGE
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WITH THE SPEED OF
FLASH With price of enterprise grade flash storage coming down and capabilities going up, the enterprises are reviewing their strategies for buying storage. BY HEENA JHINGAN 44
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DECEMBER, 2014
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T
he winds of change have now started lashing against what has otherwise been the slowest moving component in the data center - Storage. Flash technology, which all this while was regarded as a technology for consumer segment, and commanded a price premium, has now fast forwarded into the enterprise sector. This in turn has led to a sea-change in the way enterprises buy storage. According to the industry watchers, 2013 is the year that flash became ‘standard equipment’ for mainstream storage arrays. In fact, the analysts believe, in recent years, few enterprise storage technologies have seen as rapid adoption as flash did in 2013. According to IDC, by 2016 the market for all-flash storage arrays will jump to $1.6 billion, with a 59% compound annual growth rate between 2012 and 2016. Santhosh D’Souza, Director - Systems Engineering at NetApp, says, “Flash has stirred a storm of sorts over the last couple of years. It has led to lot of innovation in the storage space.” “We shipped our first flash storage in 2009. In our lifetime we have sold about 111 PB of flash, and in the quarters (Feb-July) we have sold about 35 PB of flash. Of the 35,000 platforms that we have sold, all included some components of with flash component; about 1500 of them were allflash,” he adds.
Challenge of Data Explosion The CIOs today are facing the challenge of data explosion. The problem isn’t simply the growth. If that’s all there was to it, then data center administrators would simply fix more spindles, install a tape library, and send secondary data to the cloud where it becomes the provider’s problem. But the problem is also related to the speed at which applications operate. Processor and networking
speeds have kept up with application velocity and growth, but production storage has not. Flash is gradually making inroads into various components of data centers. Flash cards are being inserted in servers for specific workloads, and we see full-fledged flash deployment for server storage. The technology is best suited for IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), intensive environments like running OLTP (online transaction processing ) environments, reporting and batch runs. The other use cases are vertical specific, a sector like trading that demands greater ability to respond faster to the market, is a natural candidate for an all flash array deployment. One fundamental reason for flash to succeed is speed. Flash is said to be over 400 times faster than the rotating disks. The other reasons that put flash in an advantageous spot are the new trends like virtualization and cloud computing in the enterprise IT domain. These technologies, combined together have begun challenging the capabilities of traditional storage products. The traditional storage boxes or the arrays are getting strained while delivering the input/output storage requirements in the present day IT environments.
Vinod Ganesan, Director – Platform,Solutions & Services,Hitachi Data Systems, India
Performance and endurance Flash storage’s obvious claim to fame is speed, but IT managers know that speed alone cannot solve all of their storage problems, especially in a world of virtualization and cloud computing. The other factors like endurance and performance are equally critical for consideration while buying storage. Barun Lala, Director, Storage, HP India, observes that there has been a shift in the way flash was perceived till sometime back. “When flash SSDs came to the market there was a myth that they wear
Ever since flash was introduced as an enterprise-grade alternative to spinning disktechnology,vendors have been striving to overcome three obstacles: price,endurance,and reliability EXPRESS COMPUTER
The concept of tiering plays a vital role in a hybrid storage environment.
You do not need to rip and replace to deploy flash,reason being that almost all vendors are gradually moving to Openstack to deal with the OS perspective. Akhil Kamat, Brand Leader of IBM Storage, India/South Asia DECEMBER, 2014
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Some of the new generation applications need full throttle performance for which the ground up design of storage is required. Abhijit Potnis, Director of Technology SolutionsIndia and Saarc,EMC
For now,companies are buying hybrid flash-diskarrays to accelerate their SANs and are buying all-flash arrays to accelerate specific workloads like databases and virtual desktop infrastructure
As long as the OS has the capability to identify the hot data,most of the transactional environments can benefit from small flash investments. Santhosh D’Souza, Director - Systems Engineering at NetApp 46
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out easily,” he says, “so they were considered less reliable.” However, many vendors have addressed these concerns with wearleveling software. “But now the market has SSD drives that come with a 5 year warranty and earlier the capacity was much lower at 800 GB. In fact, HP’s solution supports features that can boost the capacity of the SSD drive to 1.92 TB,” Lala says. He claims that the company has set new benchmarks in the industry with allflash storage array space that lowers costs below $2 per usable gigabyte. “The efficiency of a data center is measured by performance per rack,” Lala explains. “Flash storage is much more energy efficient than hard disk drive (HDDs); some SSDs use 1/16th the energy of spinning disk systems.” Ever since Flash was introduced as an enterprise-grade alternative to spinning
disk technology, vendors have been striving to overcome three obstacles: price, endurance, and reliability. But the experts continue to be of the opinion that the enterprises need to take a cautious approach while deploying flash storage.
The OS and Architecture There is still a large proportion of consumer-grade flash being used for enterprise applications. The industry veterans observe that though catastrophic flash failures are rare, the durability of low-grade flash in high stress environments could be questionable. D’Souza of NetApp explains that in the conventional storage system, the OS was built for block hard disk drives. In such a traditional system when flash is introduced, it will have to do some extra work. If flash is introduced in an existing DECEMBER, 2014
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system, care needs to be taken about the OS compatibility of the two; else they will not be able to exchange workloads, Lala reasons. On the contrary, Akhil Kamat, Brand Leader of IBM Storage, India/South Asia, thinks Flash can easily be used to complement existing systems. “The beauty is that you do not need to rip and replace to deploy flash, reason being that almost all vendors are gradually moving to Openstack to deal with the OS perspective,” he says. Also, some of the new generation applications need full throttle performance for which the ground up design of storage is required, says Abhijit Potnis, Director of Technology SolutionsIndia and Saarc, EMC
Best of both worlds Flash, undoubtedly is growing, particularly as primary storage, or what is called Tier 1 storage; however, the socalled all-flash data centers are yet to become a reality. Traditionally, flash has been known for performance and HDD for the sake of capacity. Thus, to have the best of both the worlds, the CIOs are relying on a mixed storage environment. “The storage market is still overwhelmingly hybrid due to the data access patterns in the enterprises,” says D’Souza. “Only 20% of data is needed most of the times and rest 80% is needed only sometime. As long as the OS has the capability to identify the hot data, most of the transactional environments can benefit from small flash investments.” Vinod Ganesan, Director – Platform, Solutions & Services, Hitachi Data Systems, India, agrees. He says that SSD as a media was never designed to deal with the housekeeping functions. The issue was whether we can compromise performance for reliability or not. “The concept of tiering plays a vital role, in a hybrid storage environment,” he opines. Kamat stresses that investments in flash make sense only if the deployment justifies it. While using a mix of HDD and flash, the customer must understand how to consolidate his environment to get the right RoI and where to make flash the top layer. The CIOs should be able to identify if their VDI or SAP environment is large EXPRESS COMPUTER
There has been a shift in the way flash was perceived till sometime back. When flash SSDs came to the market there was a myth that they wear out easily,and thus were considered less reliable. Barun Lala, Director,storage,HP India
enough for flash deployment. He gives the example of one of his customers who cut their reporting time to half by using flash. He says, one of IBM’s customers, a top financial institution in India, endured performance and response time issues exposing service levels for a growing client base. They deployed IBM FlashSystem for providing support for post-trading application workloads. “The securities firm achieved a 134x reduction in average read latency, 47% reduction in restore time and 33% reduction in indexing time,” he asserts. He emphasises that companies should be able to use the right mix of technologies, along with flash. “Flash, virtualization and compression,” he says, “together have a huge impact. One of our customers did not need high IOPS, and their conventional storage solution was using set of specific features of an application. They were not prepared to deal with the storage required to run the full-fledged application. Once the company deployed flash they could use the complete bouquet, and even improve their inventory levels.” In case of a leading textile conglomerate in India, the company found performance issues in response time and reporting which were affecting service levels for customers and business partners. IBM Lab Services implemented preferred reads from the IBM FlashSystem virtualized by the IBM Storwize V7000 connected to IBM Power Systems using AIX LVM mirroring. The implementation, Kamat claims, helped the company achieve more than 50 percent improvement for read intensive queries and 50x reduction in read latency. The substantial gains in efficiency and performance allowed increased support of service levels enabling the textile company to focus on core competencies rather than infrastructure. Similarly, KPIT and Kotak Bank have deployed EMC’s flash solutions. Flash also helps in reducing licensing costs by about 45% because fewer CPUs are required for high IOPS with flash. “This way, flash provides a lower cost of DECEMBER, 2014
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FLASH STORAGE
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The full potential of flash to improve service levels is yet to be realised.This is primarily due to the unfamiliarity of the data center space with flash technology and the perception that it leads to rise in complexity and cost. Amit Malhotra, Amit Malhotra,Head – Systems Business,Oracle India
Traditionally,flash has been known for performance and HDD for the sake of capacity. Thus,to have the best of both the worlds,the CIOs are relying on a mixed storage environment 48
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ownership in performance-intensive environments.” Some early adopters of Flash have already benefited from the technology, the rest are beginning to show interest, says D’Souza.
Flash in future ING Vysya, one of NetApp’s customers was working on the competitor’s core banking environment. By deploying NetApp’s Cluster Data OnTap they made judicious use of flash and improved their back up. A Telco, another customer of NetApp was suffering from latency in HDD ecosystem; the telecom company did a PoC with them using flash. Another EDA company that concentrates on chip verification and development has been evaluating deployment of flash in their IT set up. Amit Malhotra, Head – Systems Business, Oracle India, points out that the escalating data growth, ongoing budgetary pressures, and increasing performance demands on IT infrastructure pose significant challenges to data centers today. “Enterprise flash storage technology promises a balanced solution. However, the full potential of flash to economically improve service levels has yet to be realised. This is primarily due to data center unfamiliarity with flash
technology and perceptions that it increases complexity and cost.” Potnis observes that Flash is currently being used in VDI products, and they also see adoption in development across IT \ITeS and in Financial and Telecom sectors. Most mature customers are ready to shift to Flash. He says that the next step will come when the enterprises begin to use Flash for in-memory databases. “The good news is that skepticism around Flash is getting diminished and we see many PoCs happening.” For now, companies are buying hybrid Flash-disk arrays to accelerate their SANs and are buying all-Flash arrays to accelerate specific workloads like databases and virtual desktop infrastructure. The price of flash has though come down, but the price is still quite high. That is why the market continues to be dominated by a mix of HDD and SSD. Potnis says the industry will see real change by 2017. Besides, not all vendors in the market are mature enough to offer the right kind of enterprise-grade storage. Even the established enterprise storage vendors are still updating their architectures to leverage flash, through both partnerships and acquisitions. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
INTERVIEW SANJAY JAJU IAS
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Sanjay Jaju, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Electronics and Communications, Government of Andhra Pradesh, shares his views with Express Computer on the status of eGovernance in the state.
Mee Seva - at your service In your opinion what are the key challenges that the new state of Andhra Pradesh faces in taking the agenda of eGovernance forward? When you are trying to deliver eGovernance services to people, there are bound to be a few challenges that one will have to overcome. The challenges that we face are related to the selection of best possible solutions for enabling delivery of integrated services to the citizens. We have to improve the availability of the citizen centric services in all rural areas. More modern technologies need to be incorporated in the delivery of citizen services. We also need to encourage citizen participation in decision making at appropriate levels. The question that we ask ourselves constantly is how to ensure quality in service delivery? Quality is of utmost importance. The people of this state, and the country, deserve better quality of services. We also need to keep in mind that in the long run eGovernance must be sustainable. We need to build capacity for sustaining eGovernance. What are the solutions to the challenges that you have talked about? We are working on the solutions to address the challenges that are there. We are defining and deploying unified eGovernance architecture for the state which is scalable, flexible and robust. The idea is to have ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ for better delivery of citizen services. Effort is being made to enable the use of latest technologies like Microsoft Whitespace Networking, Wi-Max, etc., which can provide last mile connectivity to remote areas. We are also working on services that can be provided through mobile devices. Mobile phones give an advantage of better coverage in the state. The reach of the social media is immense, so we are leveraging the social media tools to conduct surveys and encourage citizen participation in the process of governance. Further, for ensuring that the quality of service delivery is high we are recommending adherence to service levels and standards. The deployment of help desk interface can lead to improvement in quality of service. One thing that we need to keep in mind while using IT to provide services, is a check on the cost of IT infrastructure and hence, we are keen to adopt EXPRESS COMPUTER
technologies like cloud computing, which is highly cost effective.
What new innovations can we expect in Mee Seva in times to come? Are you planning to further strengthen Mee Seva by the use of new technologies? We are now planning to use mobile devices to further improve the reach of eGovernance services.This is being done under the “Mobile First” initiative. We are also going to have the transition to a Service Oriented Architecture.We also plan to use a Data Analytics platform for decision making.We are planning to use cloud computing to optimise “Mee Seva”infrastructure for delivery of more services with higher volumes.
The field of IT is evolving constantly. Is Andhra Pradesh planning to invest in new technologies for upgrading the existing infrastructure for eGovernance or create new infrastructure? Please tell us about your plans in this area. There is a possibility of upgrading the existing network capacity to higher bandwidths for delivery of higher volume of services. At the same time we are also thinking about extending the existing network to remote areas, which are still unconnected, through multiple technologies. One thing that is very important at this stage is the State Data Centre, this has to be in perfect order so that we are able to provide seamless services. We are also considering to deploy a centralised Data Analytics platform for executive decision making. As I said earlier, there is lot of scope for using social media tools and cloud computing to modernise the existing infrastructure. The Mee Seva initiative has brought lot of benefits to the people of the state. It is now being replicated in many other states of the country. In your opinion what are the factors that have led to the rapid replication of Mee Seva? Today Mee Seva is one of the most highly regarded eGovernance programmes in the country. This programme has served the needs of millions of citizens in the state. It boasts of an easily adaptable framework consisting of a web based front-end for accepting citizen requests. The programme also has a system for routing requests through web services to the relevant back office systems for request processing. The system facilitates extensive digitisation of citizen records related to income, community and birth certificates. The data can be stored in a repository for easy fulfilment of multiple request for the same. Mee Seva comes with a range of appropriate legislative measures to enable seamless delivery of citizen services. There is scope for revenue sharing by all stakeholders. The programme also supports intensive capacity building through online tools. Express Computer Team
DECEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
RAJESH AGGARWAL, IAS
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eSOLUTIONS FOR TACKLING DEMAND SUPPLYGAP Public resources are limited and the demand is high. This demand supply gap leads to cartelisation, crony capitalism, middlemen, bribing, and so on. BY RAJESH AGGARWAL
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dmissions to any class- from nursery to engineering to MBBS to civil services see 1000s of candidates per available seat; ditto for jobs of any kind; government lands available for housing or industry or schools or hospitals see applicants much more in numbers than availability of plots; resources like river waters for power plants or industry, 2G/3G spectrum, coal, sand etc., where usage
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rights or mining rights are given to private sector; PPP projects like electricity generation, road construction (in lieu of toll collection), railway metro (in lieu of some land usage rights) etc., â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all these are classic examples of Demand Supply Gap.
The Four Ways How do we ensure that rules of the game are well
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DECEMBER, 2014
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FEATURE
RAJESH AGGARWAL, IAS
defined, are transparent, are citizen/business/environment friendly, and there is an effective regulatory mechanism? How can technology ensure that there is no hanky-panky? This article tries to discuss these issues in a very simple, commonsensical language. There are four ways in which Demand Supply Gap is tackled: ● First Come First Served (FCFS or FIFO- First in First Out) ● Auction ● Lottery ● Merit based selection
First method is FIFO FIFO is most common in life. Entering a crowded bus, or an airport, or getting a boarding pass, purchasing a movie or air ticket, even getting into a lift- we are used to standing in lines and waiting for our turn. With computerisation, we now do not stand in lines, but software ensures FIFO is working- if you are late on the railway portal, you will get a waitlisted ticket, and so on. In government offices, theoretically FIFO is expected in issue of ration cards, driving license, property registration, getting a birth or caste certificate, etc. In reality, there is too much rush of applicants, and some government officials use this to delay things, to grant out of turn favours to some, and so on. Acts like Right to Information, Right to Guaranteed Service Delivery in a certain time, Citizen Charter indicating time to be taken for each service- if these are implemented in letter and spirit, things can be set right. Another, more effective way is to stop all manual processes, and go digital. 100% applications should be received online- the time stamp ensures first step of FIFO, and also no office can misplace these papers (deliberately or due to incompetence or due to genuine shortage of staff). If the backend processes are manual, then pasting these printouts on noticeboard daily and/or putting them on website brings transparency. If the backend is digital, and workflow is defined in the system, it dramatically brings down touch points (peons and inward/outward staff not required), and clever 52
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programming can automatically ensure FIFO. This is not a dream- this is happening in driving licenses, treasury bills and so on. The exception rules for jumping the queue are also built into the software – based on tatkal fees, or genuine need (if someone is retiring today or is having a surgery tomorrow, his bills need to be fast tracked by the treasury). If someone way down in the queue wants speedy service and greases his way, then it is a lottery to those who are above him and whose cases also get fast tracked (not too bad, eh?). Even in this digital workflow system, mischief happens by rejecting/withholding some applications by raising unnecessary queries. This needs to be tackled by simplifying the forms, and eliminating most of the attachments/documents required along with applications. In property registration, passports, visa, etc., the citizens now fill application online and then get interview/test time slot from the portal. This is also based on FIFO.
Second way of meeting Demand Supply Gap is Auction/Tender (a) If you want to buy something, and there are many sellers, you get quotations/estimates for them, and then
In reality,there is too much rush of applicants,and some government officials use this to delay things,to grant out of turn favours to some,and so on
decide on a combination of Quality and Price (mostly L1- the lowest quote). Government tenders and purchases can be made quite controversy free and we can discover true market price if competition is allowed (better drafted and neutral tender document not favouring a particular vendor or technology), if cartels are not formed (nobody should know who else is filling up the tender), and if the potential bidder is actually allowed to put his bid in (i.e. he does not get beaten up on the way to the manual box kept in the office of the executive engineer). This is possible only if tenders are well advertised, pre-RFP and pre-bid conferences are held properly, and most importantly, if eTender software solution is used. Equally important is that this eTender solution itself is not rigged (it needs to be certified by reputed organisations). In more and more Central Government Ministries and PSUs, as well as in many states, eTender is now becoming the norm. Studies show that adoption of eTenders almost doubles the participation (number of bidders) and decreases the cost/price by about 10%. (b) If you want to sell a thing, you usually want the Highest Price. (There is another method- Vickery Auctionswhere second highest price is charged from the highest bidder). Usually the bidder has a reserve price in mind, and bidders bid in open auction, increasing the price. Bids may also be received in sealed covers. A Dutch auction is a type of auction in which the auctioneer begins with a high asking price which is lowered until some participant is willing to accept the auctioneer’s price, or a predetermined reserve price(the seller’s minimum acceptable price) is reached. The winning participant pays the last announced price. This is also known as a clock auction or an open-outcry descending-price auction. Anyway, whichever method is used (sealed bids vs open bids; increasing or decreasing methods etc.), the online method of auctioning fetches much better prices, because bidders can not be threatened or bought out or cartel formed, as identity of bidders is not known. Government Sand Auctions, Spectrum Auctions, Coal mine auctions, Tendu Patta auctions, land auctions can DECEMBER, 2014
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be made much more transparent and much more revenue generating if online auction method guarantying full anonymity is used.
Third method is Lottery When a Housing Development Authority wants to give affordable houses to the citizens at a fixed price, and number of applicants is much more than the number of houses, what is the best way? It is the lottery. There are many ways of conducting lottery. Now a well-accepted method is that all applicants just fill up online forms, make some token payment online (or through bank counters which later on gives reconciled datasheet to the Housing Authority), and then conduct an online lottery whose results get posted on a website. One has to take care that citizens fill correct data (take their PAN card number, match it through software), do not fill multiple applications (use various de-dupe methods), and lottery software is not rigged (get code walk through and certification from reputed organisation). Lot of paperwork and long lines at counters can be avoided if all paperwork is done after lottery results, and only the winners and waitlisted people are called with original papers for verification.
Fourth method is Merit based selection In this case the selection criteria is spelt out in advance, and multiple applicants vie for lesser number of things. This could be admission to IIT or admission to Nursery school, any job recruitment, coal mine allocation, school land allotment, and so on. In this fourth method also, endto-end computerisation is not only efficient way of doing things, but it seems almost a necessity to achieve fairness and transparency. The Application process should be online, and every step of selection process should spell out the rejected applications and accepted applications after that stage, and final results should also be announced on website with as less time gap as possible.
Policy mix-up on deciding which of the four methods to use Should Telecom Spectrum be auctioned to EXPRESS COMPUTER
How do we ensure that rules of the game are well defined, are transparent,are citizen/business/environment friendly, and there is an effective regulatory mechanism? highest bidder, or should it be given at fixed, reasonable price to about dozen companies (using lottery or criteria based selection) so that customers get low priced service, while sufficient competition in the market also gets ensured? Should millions of kids struggle for a few thousand seats in IITs, or Civil Services, going through multiple stage selection process? Do you think “standard” will go down, if after preliminary stage, a lottery is held to decide the final list? Maybe instead of getting only rote-based-learning kids, a much more varied pool of skills and talents will come. Nursery School Admissions are sometimes FIFO based (a lot of schools follow this method – I see nothing wrong in it – as long as some insiders do not bypass the FIFO). Some schools secretly auction off the seats (“donations”). Some do lottery (especially in RTE free seats). Some do merit based selection- by interviewing the small kids and/or the parents. What do you think is the best method? Even if we use some method like giving preference to kids living within 5
kilometres, the number of applicants may be far higher than the number of seats. What about transfers and postings of Civil Servants, engineers, teachers? Which method should be used – FIFO or Auction or Lottery or Merit based? Auto-rickshaw or Taxi permits: which method should be used? Think of many more such examples, and debate in your group which policy should be used. You will find different people prescribing different policy for the same problem. Thus, there may be no unanimity on which is the best policy in a given situation. However, what is essential is that the policy for tackling demand supply gap in any field should be well thought out, and spelt out in detail in public domain with full justification why a particular method out of four options is being used. After a public debate, and a final decision based on the feedback, an end-to-end computerised process should be used to ensure transparent and fair selection. Rajesh Aggarwal is Principal Secretary (Information Technology),Government of Maharashtra
DECEMBER, 2014
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INTERVIEW STEPHEN BROBST TERADATA CORPORATION
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Stephen Brobst, Chief Technology Officer, Teradata Corporation, provides his views on the emerging trends in data management. In conversation with Jasmine Desai. Excerpts...
“There is scope for multiple technologies to co-exist” Teradata has acquired Revelytix and Hadapt. What kind of value will these companies bring to Teradata? Today there is scope for multiple technologies to co-exist. Hadapt was originally conceived to provide efficient access to distributed file system. This technology can enhance our software QueryGrid, which allows querying across multiple technologies. With the integration of Hadapt, the system will have better access to Hadoop distributed file systems. Thus, this acquisition is about bringing Hadoop closer to the ecosystem from an efficiency point of view. As far as Revelytix is concerned, this tool allows data scientists to analyse the abstract metadata and understand the patterns of relationship between data without having to go through the heavy ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process. Today there is dearth of data scientists.What can be done about this challenge? We currently have university programmes and industry programmes for developing new talent in this area. Also, there is increased maturity in these programmes, they are more advanced from the earlier programmes, which only taught technology. The modern data scientist must have the knowledge of both, business and technology. Presently, more sophisticated universities are doing multi-disciplinary programmes, where they bring together technology, business and experimental design in an integrated programme. Teradata helps these universities to develop curriculum, by providing material and technology that will accelerate the educational process. We have the Teradata University Network that makes this material available including in India. Also, we have made these tools easier to use, so there is no high expertise required. This in turn can bring capabilities to a broader audience. What is your view on Hadoop? There is so much hype around Hadoop and that many have developed the misconception that it can do everything. Hadoop is what Gartner calls 'peak of over-inflated expectations'. However, 54
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the solution is really good for certain applications. In a logical data warehouse, there will be relational technology and Hadoop technology, and they are going to work together. In Teradata this is called Unified Data Architecture.
Do you think the term ‘Big Data’ will become redundant? This issue arises because Big Data, as a concept, is in its infancy and there is certain hype attached to it.As it matures organisations will realise that it is just a part of the overall data ecosystem.This is especially true in India, where all data is Big Data. The term will basically lose meaning. Secondly, the term 'Big Data' is a bad term.The bigness of the data is not the interesting part.The interesting part is diversity of data.
Do you think data analytics in the cloud is something that organisations need to consider seriously? It makes sense for SMBs, which do not have the capacity of investing in their own set-up. Cloud is a huge thing for start-ups and SMBs. For large organisations it is more cost-effective to do private cloud. The cost of moving large volumes of data in public cloud is huge. Partially, because of the cloud hype, people have illusion that moving to the cloud will reduce cost drastically. But for a big company it is not cheap. Do not believe the hype, do the math. What factors do the companies need to consider as they zero in on the architecture of the data warehouse that can be most suitable for their needs? Business processes change all the time. Organisations should not have to change their data warehouse whenever there is change in business process. Data warehouse is based on a data model that is focused on data, which is at some level independent of the processes. Even if processes change, data still remains data. The relationship between data does not change even if one uses data differently, and because it is being shifted from one process to another. Properly deployed data warehouse with properly designed data models, can and should be able to change when business process changes over time. Organisations should deploy data warehouse knowing that business processes are going to change. The key is that organisations now need to be able to handle large volumes of data. They need to be able to scale and do it cost-effectively. Also, to handle big data we need capabilities that go beyond the traditional SQL programming modules. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
DECEMBER, 2014
NEWS MOBILITY
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Idea Cellular working on launching of 4G service
Nokia Networks bags 3G contract from Bharti Airtel for 3 circles NOKIA NETWORKS HAS bagged a 3G contract from Bharti Airtel that will help the latter enhance its 3G network in the Mumbai, West Bengal and Bihar telecom circles using Nokia’s latest Single RAN (radio access network) Advanced platform. The deal includes an India-first dual band, dual carrier 3G network implementation, refarming 900 MHz to complement Mumbai’s existing 3G network on 2100 MHz. This will enable improved 3G services for Bharti Airtel’s customers. EXPRESS COMPUTER
Abhay Savargaonkar, Director Network Services Group, Bharti Airtel said, “The association with Nokia will enable millions of customers to experience an enhanced 3G network in these circles.” Rohan Dhamija, Partner and Head of India and South Asia, Analysys Mason added, “With Indian subscribers increasingly looking for high-speed mobile broadband services, 3G is a very important technology option that operators in India need to embrace to fulfill the demands of their subscribers.”
IDEA CELLULAR IS working on the launch of 4G service in the country and as and when the ecosystem develops, it will be rolled out. The operator had registered an over Rs 1,000 crore mobile data revenue during the second quarter of the fiscal. “We are working on launching the 4G service in the country and as and when the eco system develops, we will roll out 4G,” Idea Cellular Ltd Deputy Managing Director Ambrish Jain told reporters here. Idea would be one of the early launchers of 4G in India, he said. In Kerala, the operator had acquired 10 mhz of contiguous 1800 spectrum to ensure the best 4G experience, he said adding this will help in unparallelled speed and downloads. The operator was committed to offer next generation mobile technologies in India. “We have acquired large quantum of spectrum in 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz bands through auction in the last few years to enable our over 143 million subscribers to access mobile Internet services on their devices,” he said. DECEMBER, 2014
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Google partners Tata Comm for Cloud Interconnect TATA COMMUNICATIONS said that it has become a Google Cloud Platform Authorized Services Partner. Under the terms of this agreement, Google’s new service, Google Cloud Interconnect will connect with Tata Communications’ IZO Public, a cloud enablement service that provides a dedicated and deterministic route, for businesses, into Google’s cloud. Through the IZO Public cloud enablement service, Tata Communications and Google will be collaborating to provide businesses with a simple and future-proof way to connect and build their cloud over the public Internet – providing unparalleled performance, reach, and capacity ensuring a consistently good user experience for enterprise endcustomers. The IZO Public cloud enablement service is part of Tata Communications’ IZO network platform for enhanced hybrid cloud enablement. The platform,
launched last week, takes the public internet and uniquely engineers it for predictable routing, together with enterprise cloud connectivity and interconnected data centres, backed by company’s global network. Today, over 24% of the world’s Internet routes travel over Tata Communications’ network and the company is the only Tier-1 provider that is in the top five by routes in five continents. With Google Cloud Interconnect connecting to the IZO Public cloud enablement service, Tata Communications continues to grow its IZO platform ecosystem – currently consisting of over 20 service providers covering countries accounting for 85% of the world’s GDP, three of the largest cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and over 50 data centres across the globe – the IZO network delivers the most comprehensive cloud enablement platform available today.
IBM,Twitter to partner on business data analytics TWITTER AND IBM have entered into a landmark partnership that will help transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. The alliance brings together Twitter data that distinctively represents the public pulse of the planet with IBM’s industry-leading cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services. “Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world – as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of 56
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trends,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and CEO. “This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work.” With the development of new solutions to improve business decisions across industries and professions, IBM and Twitter will be able to enrich existing enterprise data streams to improve business decisions. For example, the integration of social data with enterprise data can help accelerate product development by predicting long-term
trends or drive real-time demand forecasting based on real-time situations like weather patterns. IBM has established the world’s deepest portfolio in big data and analytics consulting and technology expertise based on experiences drawn from more than 40,000 data and analytics client engagements. This analytics portfolio spans research and development, solutions, software and hardware, and includes more than 15,000 analytics consultants, 4,000 analytics patents, 6,000 industry solution business partners, and 400 IBM mathematicians who are helping clients use big data to transform their organizations. DECEMBER, 2014
BUSINESS AVENUES
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Government uses Facebook to help ration card holders voice their complaints
PM launches digital life certificate for pensioners IN A BIG RELIEF to over a crore retired employees of government and PSUs, a pensioner can now digitally provide proof of his existence to authorities for continuity of pension every year instead of requiring to present himself physically or through a Life Certificate issued by specified authorities. The “Jeevan Pramaan” scheme, an Aadhaar-based Digital Life Certificate for pensioners, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi today, is one more enabling mechanism for the benefit of the common man after the push towards self-certification. “The proposed digital certification will do away with the requirement of a pensioner having to submit a physical Life Certificate in November each year, in order to ensure continuity of pension being credited into his account,” a PMO statement said. The Department of Electronics and IT has developed a software application which will enable the recording of the pensioner’s Aadhar number and biometric details from his 58
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mobile device or computer, by plugging in a biometric reading device. Key details of the pensioner, including date, time, and biometric information, will be uploaded to a central database on real-time basis, ultimately enabling the pension disbursing agency to access a Digital Life Certificate. This will conclusively establish that the pensioner was alive at the time of authentication, the statement said. The earlier requirement entailed that a pensioner either personally present himself before the pension disbursing agency, or submits a Life Certificate issued by authorities specified by the Central Pension Accounting Office (CPAO). At present, 50 lakh individuals draw pension from the central government alone. A similar number draw pension from State and Union Territory governments. Several PSUs also provide pension benefits besides which over 25 lakh retired personnel draw pension from the Armed Forces.
FOOD SUPPLIES AND Consumer Affairs has become the first department of the Delhi government to open a Facebook account to address the grievances of consumers with Ration offices and Fair Price Shops, and it has received over 4,000 queries/complaints since its launch a month ago. People can give suggestions, file complaints, upload photos and videos of any irregularity in Fair Price Shops and Ration offices on the department’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/cfood.delhi last month. “The purpose of the Facebook page is to provide an effective tool for two way communication between the department and lakhs of ration card holders and other people of Delhi,” said Secretary-cum-Commissioner Food Supplies and Consumer Affairs S S Yadav. Yadav said that the department has provided information regarding the rates and entitlement of specified food articles supplied by the department under the Public Distribution System on the Facebook page. Yadav said that the department has constituted a “Social–Media” group headed by an Assistant Commissioner to monitor the complaints, comments and queries received and provide the information to the people promptly and resolve their grievances. DECEMBER, 2014
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