Express Computer (Vol.27, No.5) May, 2016 by Indian Express

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WHY INDIA IS BECOMING A MAGNET FOR DATA CENTER PROVIDERS he Indian data center market is in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A huge push by the government that is keen to transform the nation digitally, coupled with a huge rise in the adoption of cloud, and an acceleration in the number of startups emerging almost every day is making India a hotbed for technology infrastructure providers. One look at the public announcements made this year, vindicates this trend. In February this year, DigitalOcean, the world’s second largest cloud computing provider announced that it plans to setup a data center in Bengaluru in 2016. More recently, Netmagic announced that it was planning to double its data center capacity over the next two years. Similarly, ESDS announced the launch of its second data center in Mumbai. ESDS is witnessing a boom in demand for data center services, and has publicly said that it expects to triple its revenue by next year. The world’s biggest players in this space, Amazon and Microsoft, have already committed to set up local data centers in India, to enable companies in regulated industries such as banking and insurance, to take advantage of local data residency. International data center players are expected to raise the level for scale and standards, that have not been traditionally seen in the Indian market. With the entry of international giants in this space, Indian players are too investing heavily in R&D to compete effectively in the marketplace. ESDS, for example, received India’s first cloud computing patent from the United States Trademark and Patent Office for its eNLight cloud platform, which enables real-time adjustments of CPU, RAM and other resources based on the resource requirements of virtual machines running in the cloud. Similarly, Netmagic, became the first cloud service provider in India to receive the CSA STAR certification, an industry benchmark for the specific security requirements of multitenant service providers. NxtGen provides cloud services both on-customer-premises or hosted from its data centers. This is to ensure that enterprises who have made investments in legacy infrastructure, can retain their existing infrastructure and envelop their current infrastructure with virtual infrastructure for hosting new applications. Besides the digital push by the government, India is also home to more than 50 million SMBs who are increasingly looking to upgrade their IT infrastructure. India is also home to the second largest developer population in the world. In a country which is increasingly going digital, data center players hence, have a huge opportunity. India is at the right inflection point, as the data center market is poised for further growth. If the Indian government can succeed in strengthening existing infrastructure with respect to issues like lack of regular power supply, it is only a matter of time before this trickle turns into a flood of opportunities.

BESIDES BEING HOME TO MORE THAN 50 MILLION SMBS, INDIA ALSO HAS THE SECOND LARGEST DEVELOPER POPULATION IN THE WORLD. INDIA IS HENCE, AT THE RIGHT INFLECTION POINT WITH RESPECT TO DATA CENTER GROWTH

srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

EXPRESS COMPUTER

MAY, 2016

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INDIA BECOMING THE NEW BATTLEFIELD FOR DATA CENTER PROVIDERS After the entry of Microsoft and IBM in the public cloud data center market, and with more to follow, the CIO will have to be a connoisseur in weighing cloud options

Case study

feature

SDN ON THE CUSP OF A MAINSTREAM SHIFT For organizations looking at digitally transforming themselves, SDN can be a stepping stone

8 4

HDFC BANK'S STRATEGY TO ENGAGE WITH STARTUPS Partnering with startups will enable the bank to accelerate its digital momentum

30 EXPRESS COMPUTER

HOW A MOBILE FIRST STRATEGY IS TRANSFORMING HDFC LIFE HOW TECHNOLOGY IS HELPING KARNATAKA MANAGE NATURAL CATASTROPHES HOW ANALYTICS HELPED THE MAHARASHTRA SALES TAX DEPARTMENT BOOST REVENUE COLLECTION

MAY, 2016

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feature 34

interviews

HOWAFOOD TECHNOLOGY STARTUP IS USING ANALYTICS AND IOTTO ENSURE FRESH MEALS

ANIKET

14 PATANGE Director Datacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric

Eatfresh banks on its technology expertise to better understand meal preferences

DCIM provides a holistic viewof the performance of a data center

opinion 40

EMAILSPOOFING: GETYOUR BASICS RIGHT

REDEFINING DATACENTERS OFTHE FUTURE

29 ABHIJIT POTNIS

Director Technology Solutions India and SAARC, EMC

Adoption of converged infrastructure and flash increasing in data centers

column 46

DIGITALDISRUPTION COMPELLING COMPANIES TO BECOME DIGITALENTERPRISES

33 VIKAS

GUPTA Head IT, Essar India

Digital transformation has created a rapidly changing business environment

Ample scope for the data localization policy to mature

event 48

THE EXPRESS DIGITAL GOVERNANCE SUMMIT JAMMU/ SHILLONG EDITION

HOWGOVERNMENT SERVICE DELIVERYCAN BE TRANSFORMED USING DIGITALINFRASTRUCTURE

MANISH CHANDRA Senior Director- Products, ShopClues

Mobile drives innovation at ShopClues SHAILENDER

44 KUMAR

in the news 56

» ESDS launches cloud data center in Mumbai

» IBM and Reliance Communications partner to accelerate adoption of cloud computing in India

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MD, Oracle India

» HYSEA organizes 24th edition of Annual Summit » Oracle launches ‘Startup Cloud Accelerator’ in Bangalore

Cloud is a natural fit in govt projects MAY, 2016

Vol 27. No. 5. May, 2016 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Ankush Kumar, Rashi Varshney Mumbai Jasmine Desai, Abhishek Raval DESIGN National Design Editor Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rushikesh Konka Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West and East Prabhas Jha - North Marketing Team Shankar Adaviyar Ranabir Das Ajanta Sengupta Amit Tiwari Mathen Mathew Navneet Negi Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Ashish Anchan PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia

MUMBAI Shankar Adaviyar, Ranabir Das The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 2nd Floor, Express Tower, Nariman Point Mumbai- 400 021 Board line: 022- 67440000 Ext. 527 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com Ranabir Das Mobile No. +91 9820097606 Email: Ranabir.das@expressindia.com Branch Offices NEW DELHI Prabhas Jha, Navneet Negi The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India. Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270 Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email id: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com Navneet Negi Mobile No. +918800523285 Email: navneet.negi@expressindia.com CHENNAI Mathen Mathew The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 8th Floor, East Wing, Sreyas Chamiers Towers New No.37/26 ( Old No.23 & 24/26) Chamiers Road, Teynampet, Chennai - 600 018 Mobile No. +91 9840826366 Email: mathen.mathew@expressindia.com BANGALORE Amit Kumar Tiwari The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile No. +91 8095502597 Email: amit.tiwari@expressindia.com HYDERABAD Amit Kumar Tiwari The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 6-3-885/7/B, Ground Floor, VV Mansion, Somaji Guda, Hyderabad – 500 082 Mobile No. +91 8095502597 Email: amit.tiwari@expressindia.com

KOLKATA Ajanta Sengupta The Indian Express (P) Ltd.. Business Publication Division, JL No. 29&30, NH-6, Mouza- Prasastha & Ankurhati, Vill & PO- Ankurhati, P.S.- Domjur (Nr. Ankurhati Check Bus Stop), Dist. Howrah- 711 409 Mobile: +91 9831182580 Email id: ajanta.sengupta@expressindia.com KOCHI Mathen Mathew The Indian Express (P) Ltd., Ground Floor, Sankoorikal Building, Kaloor – Kadavanthra Road, Kaloor, Kochi – 682 017 Mobile No. +91 9840826366 Email: mathen.mathew@expressindia.com COIMBATORE Mathen Mathew The Indian Express (P) Ltd. No. 205-B, 2nd Floor, Vivekanand Road, Opp. Rajarathinam Hospital, Ram Nagar, Coimbatore- 641 009, Mobile No. +91 9840826366 Email: mathen.mathew@expressindia.com AHMEDABAD Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express (P) Ltd. 3rd Floor, Sambhav House, Near Judges Bunglows, Bodakdev, Ahmedabad - 380 015, Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com BHOPAL Prabhas Jha The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India. Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270 Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email id: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com JAIPUR Prabhas Jha The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India. Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270, Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email id: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com

IMPORTANT Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express (P) Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

Express Computer® Reg. No. REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, RNI Regn. No. MAHENG/49926/90 Printed for the proprietors, The Indian Express (P) Ltd. by Ms. Vaidehi Thakar at Indigo Press, (India) Pvt. Ltd. Plot No. 1c/716, off Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 and Published from Express Towers, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021) Editor : Srikanth RP (*Responsible for selection of News under the PRB Act.) Copyright © 2016 The Indian Express (P) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.

EXPRESS COMPUTER

MAY, 2016

FEATURE

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SDN

ON THE CUSP OF A MAINSTREAM SHIFT For organizations looking at digitally transforming themselves, SDN can be a stepping stone BY JASMINE DESAI

ith more and more data getting generated, and with the rise of more connected machines, networks in data centers are under huge pressure. Analyst firms like Gartner have said that technologies like IoT will significantly change the data center. The research firm estimates that processing large volumes of IoT data in realtime will

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increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers. As a result, data center managers have to be better prepared to handle this increasing load. For example, existing data center WAN links are provisioned keeping in mind the moderate bandwidth requirements posed due to human interactions with applications. IoT will change this dramatically, as massive amounts of

small sensor data will flow into the data center for processing. Against this context, technologies like SDN (Software Defined Networking) will play a big role as administrators can write programs to dynamically manage network resources, rather than depend on the capacity of proprietary hardware. SDN hence can change the way data centers are built and managed. MAY, 2016

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A case in point is the J M Baxi Group, one of the biggest players in the shipping industry. "Shipping & logistics sector is going to be massively impacted by IoT, which makes the role of SDN very crucial. Presently, there is massive amount of labor intensive operations in the shipping industry. It is both a bad and good thing. It is bad as penetration of technology is hardly there in this EXPRESS COMPUTER

particular industry, but on the positive side, we have a huge canvas to work on," elucidates Prasad Patil, CTO, J M Baxi Group on why SDN matters to Shipping industry. He further explains that in the logistics industry, the container tracking, cargo tracking, the ability to pick-up route survey mapping directly from mobile devices or from camera, the

ability to read container serial numbers from cameras and immediately uploading it back into the system, the ability to have sensors to ensure that containers stacked in the yard are done exactly where you want to -- are all areas where IoT can be leveraged very effectively. With the usage of SDN, this can be done far more efficiently. Presently, all these activities are done MAY, 2016

FEATURE

SDN

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SDN makes significant financial sense for decision-makers in addition to many other benefits B S Nagarajan, Senior Director,Systems Engineering, VMware India

At least for the next 5â&#x20AC;&#x201C;10 years,there will be lot of co-existence of legacy network and SDN elements, which we call as a hybrid network Sreekanth SS, Principal Technology Architect,Engineering Services, Infosys 10

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manually to a large extent. No wonder, that with so much to do in this area, the network plays an integral role. Patil stresses that it cannot be done with a traditional network. "If one pushes mobility in this area, then it is going to be an amazing interplay of technologies driving this sector. This sector can leapfrog over a whole lot of cycles. SDN will be a very good technology for lot of organizations who have lot of legacy infrastructure and are looking at upgrading. In the shipping industry, there are lot of areas like project logistics, bulk logistics where SDN can be utilized. The next-gen challenges and disruptions which will overtake this sector will require a strong network backbone," he says. According to him, there will be huge amount of capability if systems from players in this area can directly communicate with government systems. If the turn-around time for transactions improves drastically then the ability to have ships turn-around in the port faster will be huge. Presently, it is slowed down due to manual processes and also because the sector is regulated. The amount of reach in terms of offices is really huge in the shipping industry as

there will be offices in each and every port and city. These have to be networked together. However, the challenge right now is that OEMs need to invest in this sector.

SDN paves the way for faster digital transformation A new report by Research and Markets notes that the software-defined data center market will hit $77.18 billion by the year 2020, which is up from the $21.78 billion it was expected to rake in for 2015. Indian businesses today are now accepting SDN as a serious investment decision. Says B S Nagarajan, Senior Director, Systems Engineering, VMware India, "SDN makes significant financial sense for decision-makers in addition to many other benefits it offers. The biggest of all is the reduced provisioning time that has a rolling effect on business agility and directly translates into cost-savings." Specific to India, Gartner states that server, storage and networking market amounts to approximately INR 15,300 crores, out of which at least 5-10% are SDN centric decisions. Sajan Paul, Director Systems Engineering - India & MAY, 2016

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SAARC at Juniper Networks giving his opinion states, "The networking landscape is in a state of rapid transformation in India. As business models evolve, new architectural approaches like SDN are increasingly being adopted to address many of the problems enterprises face. The separation of the control and data plane, along with the high programmability SDN offers through virtualization and simplified software centric network operations are just a few of its characteristics that can help enterprises.” Paul says that early use case scenarios of SDN are today centered on data center automation/orchestration and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). These two use cases address specific pain points in this era of massively scalable data centers and cloud-based service delivery. SDN allows the server (compute), storage and network to be treated like a single unit of function, dramatically improving the agility of service delivery and time-to-market. NFV on the other hand enables new business models and cloud-based value added services. States Anup Purohit, Chief Information Officer, Technology & Solutions Group, Yes Bank "The major use cases for SDN will be at the data center as it enhances the benefits of data center virtualization. It increases resource flexibility and utilization and reduces infrastructure costs and overheads. As of today, our bank has not adopted the SDN technology. However, we would be exploring it for our data center and critical hubs locations." The adoption rate for SDN may not be the highest but will soon attract the attention of customers who are looking for scalable data centres and mobility. “SDN paves the way for faster digital transformation, faster time-to-market, quicker network provisioning including customized network functions and independence from physical topology as it eliminates network-related restrictions,” states Nachiket Deshpande, Global Delivery Leader, Infrastructure Services, Cognizant. Mentioning more of its potential for EXPRESS COMPUTER

positive impact. Sreekanth SS, Principal Technology Architect, Engineering Services, Infosys gives an example of the medical industry. According to him, in the healthcare industry (hospitals), the medical equipment is frequently moved around and also the patient care data is sensitive and needs to be secured. One of the SDN based OEM product which Infosys works brings in the capability of plug and play connectivity when the equipment is moved around. It also provides a dynamic secure policy addition capability at the end point. In another instance, Infosys has been involved in bringing up enterprise service stack for a Telecom Service provider which enables enterprises to order connectivity services instantaneously using SDN.

SDN requires careful planning SDN is a disruptive technology and hence it requires careful planning and design for implementation. Sharing some insights on easing the implementation process, Sreekanth SS, Principal Technology Architect, Engineering Services, Infosys says, "At least for the next 5–10 years, there will be lot of coexistence of legacy network and SDN elements which we call as a hybrid network. The primary implementation challenge would be the interworking of legacy and SDN elements. This can be mitigated by choosing right orchestration layer and platform." He says that one of the key advantages SDN brings is the network management optimization because of the centralization through common SDN controller. However, if centralization is not done at the right layer, it will result in performance degradation. Choosing the SDN implementation at the right network layer is thus an important design aspect. Also, from a skill and culture perspective there is a huge shift. The traditional network management which was closer to operations will now evolve into a programming role in SDN scenario. This requires new skill development and understanding of concepts like data modeling. The IT sector is one of the sectors

Many of our clients have done proof-ofconcepts on SDN and some have already adopted it for non-production environments Nachiket Deshpande, Global Delivery Leader,Infrastructure Services,Cognizant.

When building a networking infrastructure,two tenets are always key - resiliency and agility Sajan Paul, Director,Systems Engineering - India & SAARC at Juniper Networks MAY, 2016

FEATURE

SDN

HOWSDN HELPED IIHTDELIVER LEARNING AS ASERVICE

ne example of successful implementation of SDN is that of IIHT Cloud Solutions.The firm wanted to deliver Learning-as-a-Service to internal training centers and enterprise customers based on a cost-effective IT training model that would reduce complexity and improve flexibility in delivering resource intensive IT certification programs.Through training centers located across India, IIHT delivers a portfolio of 50 courses and trains around 60,000 students each year.A critical challenge was to keep pace with the latest software versions and the required infrastructure. Shivajee Sharma, President and CIO, IIHT Cloud Solutions says,“To teach a participant how to build a private cloud requires at least three machines per student, and so in a classroom of 20 users, a training center needs to have 60 machines to deploy the needed training scenarios.Along with licenses and the RAM required per user, this isn’t an approach that can be financially or logistically sustained in the long-term by dedicated training organizations or corporations.” Due to the high costs associated with IT training delivery, IIHT Cloud Solutions decided to establish a public cloud to deliver e-learning cloud services to the training, testing, and development industry.“Most of the cloud providers in the marketplace cater to businesses requiring development and production environments. However, the capability required to host these applications is significantly less than what is required in a training environments.We wanted to have the capability to deliver infrastructure intensive technology training within a costeffective pricing model and allow organizations to build their own training programs without having to operate a private cloud,” says Sharma. Today, SDN has helped in simplifying network complexity with 90% reduction in port density. With the cloud model requiring 1,000 servers in the data center,

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reducing port density was critical.As a result the Dell solution consisting of Dell PowerEdge M610 servers housed in Dell PowerEdge M1000E blade enclosures and Dell PowerEdge R510 servers, Dell Networking Active Fabric, Dell Networking M6348 switches and M6220 switches and Dell PowerVault MD1220 direct attached storage, was chosen. Sharma explains,“Dell’s offering stood out because of their ability to reduce the overall port density by 75 % and reducing the switching environment by 90% through Dell Networking’s Active Fabric with the Dell Networking Z9000 switches. Instead of running six 1-Gigabit cables for each of the 1,000 servers, which is a complex core density to manage, with Active Fabric we have a total of seven core switches for the entire network.” They can support the quick provisioning of environments that support the simultaneous learning of 20,000 users through the 40 Gbps switch to switch interconnects. For example, to complete a 60 GB provisioning of a lab scenario used to take eight minutes, whereas now the data transfer rate has been reduced by 75

% due to the network throughput achieved.Training curriculum expanded after 70% decrease in network management. "We can now launch new courses within 15 days without requiring additional infrastructure or increasing management time,” says Sharma. Software-defined networking has helped IIHT Cloud Solutions create a unified management of the entire network, and centralized controllers increase programmability of network traffic without touching the hardware.This means network configurations can be quickly customized by IIHT Cloud Solutions network administrators automatically to the exact requirements for each customer within the training industry. Network latency has reduced and communication can occur across multiple domains through flattening the traditional threelayer hierarchy without impacting performance.This means the organization’s numerous training centers and global locations act as if they are connected to the same LAN, resulting in more users being able to be trained simultaneously.

MAY, 2016

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SDN SIGNIFIES SHIFTFROM HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

A Application-based policies will decouple high level application connectivity from the complicated details of network configuration Dr Siddhartha Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer, Persistent Systems:

lapping up SDN with lot of enthusiasm. Dr Siddhartha Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer, Persistent Systems says, " One of our goals is to have a seamless integration with a cloud platform, with a number of platforms we are developing. We are also expanding rapidly across different geos and having interfaces for setting policies and provisioning services across the network demand compute, storage and network for each individual employee. Application-based policies will decouple high level application connectivity from the complicated details of network configuration. This will lead to operational simplicity and hence lower the overheads. We need a way for applications to be deployed easily, scaled rapidly and without a need for having long lead times through our IT department for the network side of things. The success measure is to reduce application deployment times from weeks to minutes. SDN will provide a powerful framework for hosting and EXPRESS COMPUTER

ccording to a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast, the worldwide software-defined networking (SDN) market — comprising physical network infrastructure, virtualization/control software, SDN applications (including network and security services), and professional services — will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53.9% from 2014 to 2020 and will be worth nearly $12.5 billion in 2020. Software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization, and network programmability for datacenters at cloud-providers and enterprise networks. Although SDN initially found favor in hyperscale datacenters and at large-scale cloud

adding value to cloud automation solutions, which provide higher level workflow and process automation services, a single management interface to configure/re-configure networks across different sites/geo is extremely critical. The SDN implementation process is ongoing and will be completed over next two to three quarters at the organization.” Giving his view on impactful implementation of SDN, Paul of Juniper Networks says, "As such, when building a networking infrastructure, two tenets are always key - resiliency and agility. And SDN is the answer to these two critical factors. Specifically, the areas to pay attention to when setting-up your SDN infrastructure are: an Open Infastructure – allowing you to avoid vendor lock-in and which reduces operational expenses significantly, being standards-based – which allows interoperability and the ability to reuse existing infrastructure, and that of having a hybrid framework – where one

service providers, it is winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise datacenters across a broad range of vertical markets. While the physical network, encompassing data center switches, will still account for the largest single segment of the SDN market in 2020, the fastest growth will be found in the two software categories – the virtualization/control layer and SDN applications – which together will be worth approximately $5.9 billion. IDC expects the virtualization/control layer software market to reach $2.4 billion in 2020, with a CAGR of nearly 64% during the forecast period. SDN applications – including Layer 4-7 network and security services and analytics – are forecast to achieve a CAGR of 66% through 2020, when they will account for revenue of more than $3.5 billion.

must consider both an overlay (brownfield deployment) and an integrated approach (greenfield).” As the focus of enterprises is shifting towards IoT, SDN implementations are sure to mushroom in a slow yet steady manner. “While SDN is fast becoming a reality, it still has some way to go before it becomes industrialized in the market. Many of our clients have done proof-ofconcepts on SDN and some have already adopted it for non-production environments. There is already a significant adoption among telecom and cloud service providers due to their excessive use of network functions and specialized devices,” states Deshpande of Cognizant. In a digital era where new business models are challenging and disrupting industries rapidly, SDN as a technology will be in demand as Indian enterprises seek to quickly launch new services backed by technology. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

INTERVIEW ANIKET PATANGE SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

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Data centers are undergoing tremendous changes with the fast-paced needs of enterprises in the IoT age. Aniket Patange, Director - Datacenter Lifecycle Services, Schneider Electric gives an overview of how DCIM tools can be leveraged to maximize operational efficiency and security

DCIM provides a holistic view of the performance of a data center How are DCIM tools becoming critical for efficient functioning of data centers? As more and more data centers in India metamorphose into advanced, intelligent and efficient hubs for business apps, DCIM assumes great significance in bringing IT and facilities together. The goal of a DCIM initiative is to provide administrators with a holistic view of a data center's performance so that energy, equipment and floor space are used as efficiently as possible. DCIM tools are very critical especially in growing digital scenarios .Currently, all users use written logs, which helps in monitoring equipment in real-time although it is local. They have written logs which captures all critical operational parameters of the devices and equipment every one hour. This is repeated frequently so that they have a big database. Based on this, they can make informed decisions. However, this process is not automated which creates its own challenges. Firstly, one has to depend on the skills of the person who is handling the data center. To overcome this, we have a suite of DCIM software called StruxureWare. This enables administrators to automate operations and generate lots of statistical data which can be used for various purposes. For example, they can review the trends, view the performance of the equipment and make statistical analysis of performance of equipment by hourly basis and predict its failure. Which are the different consumption models for DCIM? Our DCIM tool can be consumed on-premise or through a service model where we offer customers periodic services in different ways. One model in services is that our team is stationed at the customer site. The second model is where all devices at the customer's data center is connected to our services bureau in Bangalore wherein we get live feed from these devices and their performance, and give timely feedback to the operations team at the customer's site. In terms of security, DCIM is a 14

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preventative tool which can detect potential threats and instantly detect weird patterns in devices. The third model is wherein we make periodic visits to a customer's site where we carry the software tool. We analyze the data we gather and over 2-3 day sessions that we have with the customers, we give them our inputs based on this data.

The most important business impact of DCIM tools would be cost reduction. Today, most of the traction is in the IT/ITES, BFSI and Telecom sectors. Due to DCIM tools,these enterprises are less likely to make mistakes.As a result,the associated downtime has come down drastically.

What is StruxureWare's differentiation point? There are three areas in a data center that we have to look at, i.e. power, cooling and space. There has to be optimization around all three of them to bring in a higher level of efficiency. From a differentiation perspective, our focus is on capacity of the loading and the capacity available in the data center. Most facilities are over a decade old and are built based on the data center designs that were available then. These are mostly under utilised. We map energy consumption of every rack. This information is useful to an operations team to use it to chargeback the respective teams as per the consumption. Another important feature is that of creating 'What if?" simulations. For every IT load that enters into the data center, one needs to find out if there is adequate power, cooling and space in the rack and if the rack can take that load. How can DCIM tools be leveraged in a data center in the IoT era? In the age of IoT, we are able to connect to all devices of customers across geographies through our services bureau. We have created a special M2M platform where devices directly communicate with our service bureau. The data which comes in is raw data. We use DCIM tools extensively to do first level of cleaning and analysis of data and then use different modules in the tool to populate important reserves. Since this tool is vendor agnostic, it can integrate several operating instructions coming out of several software solutions and devices, aggregate it and use it accordingly. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

ADVERTORIAL

WESTAFRICA’S LARGESTDATACENTRE RELIES ON HIGH-PERFORMANCE CABLING SOLUTIONS FROM SIEMON

Described by Nigeria’s minister for communication and technology,as “a very significant addition to the ICT infrastructure of Nigeria,”the MainOne Premier Tier III data centre opened earlier this year to deliver consistent,high-performance data storage and data security to support leading businesses,government agencies and major telecom operators across West Africa. Offering colocation,cloud and managed services,this 3,500 square metre,600-rack facility is interconnected with all major telecom operators and Internet service providers (ISPs) in Nigeria.It is also the only purposebuilt,commercial carrier neutral data centre in West Africa built to Uptime Institute Tier III specifications and in compliance with the TIA 942 data centre standard. By choosing high-bandwidth cabling systems from Siemon,a global provider of network and data centre cabling infrastructure solutions, MainOne ensured that the most solid and future-proof cabling infrastructure foundation was laid to support the company’s colocation customer base.Selecting best-in-class products was also essential for achieving TIER III classification that guarantee 99,98% availability. “To successfully establish a facility of this scale,it was crucial to bring together the best professionals in the trade,select top quality products and utilise the most up-to-date design methods,”explained Gbenga Adegbiji,Head of Capital Projects at MainOne “From cooling to power supply to IT infrastructure,we were looking for best-in-class suppliers.” In addition to product choice,cabling design expertise played a major role in the project.Siemon teamed up with their partner DBH Solutions who they have been working with to successfully complete projects in the data centre and office building space throughout Africa.With extensive expertise in data centre design,both Siemon and DBH Solutions were able to guide MainOne through the process of selecting and designing an infrastructure that their future customers could safely rely on. Gbenga Adegbiji said,“Siemon and DBH Solutions were excellent at helping us understand what our customers need and providing design advice and product solutions accordingly.They demonstrated how cabling adds value to the overall network infrastructure.” “Competition was fierce and we are therefore all the more pleased to

have won the tender to supply the complete end-to-end cabling infrastructure for such a prestigious project,”said Jide Olagbenro,Business Account Manager for West Africa at Siemon.“DBH Solutions has been instrumental in securing this project,and we are extremely pleased that they were awarded the installation work.” MainOne’s new facility was designed to meet the TIA 942 data centre standard that recommends cabling infrastructures be able to support at least 10 gigabit per second (Gb/s) applications and future migrations to 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s.In line with these requirements,MainOne selected Siemon’s high performance XGLO® Fibre Optic Cabling Systems with OS2 singlemode and OM3 multimode fibre and Siemon’s Z-MAX® 6A shielded end-to-end category 6A copper cabling system. Ideal for next generation backbone applications,The XGLO Fibre System exceeds all ANSI/TIA/EIA and ISO/IEC insertion loss and return loss requirements to provide 10 Gb/s performance and beyond.Siemon’s ZMAX 6A shielded system combines consistent best-in-class performance with the security and robust noise immunity of a shielded cabling system to easily support 10 Gb/s.It also provides the highest margins on all performance requirements for category 6A/class EA,including critical alien crosstalk parameters. For the MaineOne data centre,more than 2400 fibre links using 1200 pairs of multimode (OM3) fibre and 1200 pairs of singlemode (OS2) fibre were installed for the backbone infrastructure,which connects every cabinet to Cisco Nexus 7000 series core switches.With Siemon’s Z-MAX Shielded Category 6A copper system,MainOne was able to provide a bestin-class copper cabling solution to connect servers and work area outlets to access switches.To meet the TIER III classification,the cabling system was designed to be fully redundant. This new colocation data centre facility will allow MaineOne to support leading businesses in West Africa with a comprehensive portfolio of services,including colocation,cloud and managed services. “We are confident that with the high performance Siemon cabling solution we have deployed in our state-of-the-art facility,we will be able to provide quality and reliable services to our customers,concludes Funke Opeke,CEO at MainOne.”

Siemon Cabling Solutions Pvt Ltd

CONNECTING THE WORLD TO A HIGHER DATA CENTER STANDRED

D.No:6-3-248/F,Unit- G4,Le Benaka,Road No 1, Banjara Hills,Hyderabad- 500034 www.siemon.com www.facebook.com/siemonindia https://twitter.com/SiemonIndia

COVER STORY

Sept 28, 2015 Microsoft launched three cloud data centers (DC) in India

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Oct 13, 2015 IBM SoftLayer launches a cloud DC in Chennai

Feb 21, 2016 - DigitalOcean, worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second largest cloud computing provider announces plans to set-up a DC in Bengaluru in 2016

MAY, 2016

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s one can see from recent announcements, the action in the public cloud DC is happening thick and fast. It’s a perfect storm for the DC Industry. The government has taken up the task of Digital India. The work of laying out fibre optic cables as a part of the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) is running at a brisk pace; the Indian startup community has shown its vibrancy and the government has announced a dedicated programme for startups in the form of ‘Startup India, Stand up India’; the focus towards data localisation has also been growing - and especially after the entry of IBM, Microsoft and the plans announced by other foreign public cloud DC providers to set shops in India, there are more options available to the CIO. The Indian colocation providers are evolving and

March 7, 2016 - Oracle announced cloud machinea service which allows companies to bring the public cloud in their own data centers (on-premise); Oracle has also announced that it plans to set up its own data center in India later this year

Amazon has also announced plans to launch public cloud DCs in India

MAY, 2016

COVER STORY

Indian cloud providers are still developing in terms of self service & multiple platform options Daykin Creado CTO,ItzCash

The foreign public cloud DC providers have a networkof DCs globally.It allows them to scale with the wherewithal required Sanchit Vir Gogia Chief Analyst,Greyhound Research 18

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maturing towards providing cloud services. “Most of the Indian colocation providers are not traditional providers of cloud. They are aspiring to become cloud service providers but they are flexible offering colocation, rackspace and cloudbased services,” observes Santhosh Rao, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner. That said, some industry observers believe that the Indian providers are not true cloud providers. “The Indian cloud providers are still developing in terms of self service & multiple platform options that can be offered to customers,” points out Daykin Creado, CTO, ItzCash In this scenario, when it’s going to be foreign public cloud data center providers versus Indian cloud enabled managed hosting providers, CIOs should weigh the the pros and cons of both the Indian and foreign providers. However, Vikas Gupta, Head IT, Essar Group, quips, “It’s not about Indian or a foreign provider. What matters is how they deliver their services.”

Public cloud data center services: Indian vs foreign providers The foreign public cloud DC providers have a network of DCs globally. It allows them to scale with the wherewithal required for typical large scale volumes for selected business verticals. “These companies are able to cater to such large volumes easily compared to others. For example, when contracts are signed during provisioning of data center space across the Asia Pacific region, they have a network of data centers, which allows

them to scale better,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst, Greyhound Research. This adds as a huge advantage compared to the Indian providers who are primarily local. “While Indian providers do a decent job in catering to mid ticket clients, they face a problem to serve the companies having a global presence, which requires them to tie up with other global providers who will further provide services,” points out Gogia. They have to depend on other providers which can create unnecessary service level dependencies. “The foreign providers are mature and focused on being self-service. The consumer can log on to the website and select a payment option. In a couple of clicks he is ready to go. That’s how the cloud is supposed to be –simple to use, easy to provision, with on demand scale up, scale down and billing. This works very well for small to medium enterprises, startups etc who may not have any experience in running their own infrastructure or with unpredictable workloads. At one level it’s very good because they have brought in a level of standardisation to the cloud and done away with the need to have specialized inhouse skills to setup infrastructure for network, storage, compute, application servers, databases etc and they have the APIs to help automate provisioning, deployment and scale out. This is all done in a public and mostly transparent pricing manner,” says Creado. MAY, 2016

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The investments made in the kind of IT infrastructure hosted by foreign providers is very robust and hence the infrastructure on board the DCs is purpose built for cloud. “I know of a foreign provider whose entire IT infrastructure has been manufactured by a particular vendor. It’s massive. These are not just boxes deployed in the conventional sense. But their entire rack is like one server. The infrastructure that sits underneath the cloud solution doesn’t have common servers. They are custom designed and engineered to host the cloud solution and provide robust performance,” says Anup Purohit, CIO, Yes Bank.. Thus the foreign providers are able to deliver better performance, uptime and availability, security. It also results in those machines being equipped to take more load and offer better features. Few Indian providers have bought the regular size blade servers or just boxes as if it’s for individual customers. The strategy is to keep adding the boxes and host a cloud on it. From an applications perspective, the Indian providers face a major threat, however on the infrastructure front, there will be hardly any impact. “The foreign companies, since they also have a large portfolio of applications, which are standardised globally, they might be able to deliver it to the Indian companies at a reasonable price than Indian providers,” says Mani Kant Singh, Chief-IT & CISO, Orbis Financial Corporation. Hence there is a possibility that Indian providers start buying licenses from foreign providers to stay in the competition.

Indian managed cloud hosting providers: Where do they have the edge? The advantage with Indian providers is they understand the Indian market better. The foreign providers will take some time to understand the Indian mindset, buying mentality and how budgets are allocated. “Whereas the Indian public cloud providers have already stabilised themselves within the Indian ecosystem - the buying mindset, customisations required for the Indian corporates, the Indian bandwidth availability vs the capability. I don’t see much competition for the next 24 months,” says Mani Kant Singh. The cloud offerings by large foreign public cloud service providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure are highly elastic and agile and they provide resources via a rich and highly evolved self-service catalogue. “They are also in a better position to support complex deployments such as Big data and IoT when compared to India service providers. However, customers need to manage and maintain the deployment themselves or use the services of a managed service provider partner of these cloud providers. This creates some additional level of dependency” says Rao. As against this, Indian providers are more flexible in their contracts and support clients with their specific environment requirements, including legacy environments but are not as agile and elastic as AWS and Microsoft EXPRESS COMPUTER

MAY, 2016

COVER STORY

There is a possibilitythat Indian providers start buying licenses from foreign providers to stay in the competition Mani Kant Singh Chief - IT& CISO, HR,Orbis Financial Corporation

As far as licensing is concerned,the foreign providers offer a verycomplex model,which might land up the CIO in a tangle Anup Purohit CIO,Yes bank 20

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Azure” claims Rao. The communication aspect is important. “Indian CIOs can have face to face conversations with the local vendors. That’s not possible with players like Google. However in case if a company is an existing large consumer of the likes of Oracle or Microsoft, then a face to face meeting is possible,” The Indian CIOs want to meet in person. “They want to have a few meetings to build a comfort level. We are yet to have that trust factor in India,” says Piyush Somani, CEO, ESDS. The Indian providers do a fantastic job of handholding the company in its infancy. “I know of a company, which later came out with an IPO - when it launched operations - it required a lot more dedicated support, wherein the IT team was looking for a closed loop working with its providers. That’s where an Indian provider scored above a MNC public cloud provider,” says Gogia. The Indian providers are a lot more flexible compared to their foreign peers, who provide structured offerings. “They have a prepaid infrastructure services model which is more than a compute based pricing model. They have a different business model than a managed services flexible model of the Indian providers. This is a huge difference,” says Gogia. Anup Purohit, CIO, Yes bank does not see much difference between the technology, infrastructure provided by the foreign public cloud data center vis-a-vis Indian providers. “I have visited the data center sites of both the foreign and Indian providers,” he says. At times, Indian players are slightly better because they are flexible in meeting specific requirements from the clients. “The foreign providers at times, are stringent and inflexible to meet the needs. In the cloud offerings, the foreign public cloud data center providers are slightly better. This is from a bank’s perspective.” Yet the foreign providers may not live up to the expectations for every business application. It depends what the company decides to host on the public cloud. “I was evaluating moving the email on the public cloud and was studying a particular vendor. The study findings led me to go against the move,” says Purohit.

As far as licensing is concerned, the foreign providers offer a very complex model, which might land up the CIO in a tangle. “You need to be aware of licensing requirements when deploying software in the cloud. Given the plethora of already complex licensing metrics that differ from one enterprise vendor to the next, be it sockets versus cores, hard partitions versus virtual machines, x86 versus Sparc versus Power etc that exist in the on premise model, moving to the cloud further complicates this. One needs to be cognizant of the underlying infrastructure in the cloud where you are deploying your licenses to ensure that you are compliant with all licensing requirements be it for the application server, database etc. Also Disaster Recovery & its associated licensing requirements need to be carefully considered,” points out Creado.

Cloud adoption: Overall scenario So, how should CIOs strategise their cloud adoption? “So, for me, the entry of a foreign cloud data center provider would be impactful only when I require a cloud based solution which would be based on a business objective,” states Creado. There are certain inflection points to look out for when considering a cloud based solution. “These could be triggers like a hardware refresh, technology obsolescence or augmentation of capacity,” The other kind of inflection point is when launching a new product or a new service – how confident is the business on how much capacity is required - “do I want to buy three years Capex upfront or do I want to put the infrastructure on the cloud and see how the business scales? Depending on volume and how the business scales, it may be cost effective to invest the Capex rather than Opex in the long run - this is also sometimes a factor of what the CFO wants to do,” “All factors such as local presence, regulations, Managed Services contract considerations, Security, SLA’s, Latency for sensitive apps like telephony, online gaming etc do come into the consideration list for CIOs to make their decision regarding public cloud adoption,” says Sourabh Chatterjee, Senior VP, Head MAY, 2016

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In data center decisions,going in with someone you can trust and work over time in the long run is a key consideration Sourabh Chatterjee Senior VP,Head - Technology, Online Sales and Digital Marketing. Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

Technology, Online Sales and Digital Marketing, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance CIOs want to move to the cloud on their own terms. They are looking for choice between adopting a private, public or hybrid cloud model. “They are also seeking to leverage their existing IT assets while they make a smooth move to the public cloud. They are seeking options that offer hyper-scale, are compliant to in-country and global regulations, and offer enterprise-grade security and privacy,” says Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India. The Indian CIOs are not blindly putting everything on the public cloud. The journey of the Indian CIO to the public cloud has been very picky because of a number of reasons. A number of them have a lot of legacy systems already. Change management is very difficult. There are latency issues because at times the data centers are in the USA etc. “More importantly there are many applications which are running on a EXPRESS COMPUTER

CIOs want to move to the cloud on their own terms. Theyare looking for choice between adopting a private, public or hybrid cloud model Srikanth Karnakota

Indian providers are more flexible in their contracts and support clients with their specific environment requirements Santhosh Rao Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

Director – Server and Cloud Business,Microsoft India

single tenant model and to move them on a public cloud is very complex,” says Gogia. However the move towards the cloud has already started. “CIOs, to begin with are moving Infrastructure, DR, email to the public cloud. These are non mission critical applications and relatively easier to manage and less complex. No change management required. It’s a more definitive use case,” states Gogia. However, sometimes having to move ERP on a public cloud is complex. At times, organisations require response times of milliseconds. The public cloud cannot provide that response time. The use case is more complex in the applications space. More non complex applications like CRM, UC are now being moved to cloud. The CIOs are taking a more careful journey to the public cloud. To ensure compliance, security to work in a public cloud environment is very difficult than in a traditional environment. “To adopt public cloud also requires a lot of preparedness from inside the company. The IT decision makers should make sure

that the applications will work fine in the public cloud with equal amount of availability as was before. They also have to look at the cost impact,” says Gogia. Some companies are successfully undergoing that change and some are struggling to cope with the public cloud. Managing security in a single tenant application is easy but one has to be a few notches higher to manage security after the same application is ported to a public cloud, which is where companies are struggling. They will have to make changes internally to structures that change. It takes time for these practices to settle down in the organization. There is a consensus in the CIO community about the applicability of the cloud, the economies of scale it offers. However, like every technology, the cloud will take its own time to become mainstream. As more and more cloud standards get accepted, they can play a role in accelerating the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

CASE STUDY

HDFC LIFE

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HOW A

MOBILE FIRST STRATEGY IS TRANSFORMING

HDFC LIFE By adopting a comprehensive mobile-first strategy, HDFC Life has been able to improve employee productivity and scale down branch infrastructure significantly BY SRIKANTH RP

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MAY, 2016

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ost Indian insurance firms are looking at mobile enablement of their core applications. However, some firms like HDFC Life have taken it to a different level altogether, by adopting a comprehensive enterprise mobility strategy that boosts competitive advantage. “Implementing mobility successfully requires more than simply providing downloadable apps to customers, partners and employees. We must truly EXPRESS COMPUTER

ensure that we enhance the user experience and provide the functionality that users want and leverage the form factor of the device,” states Thomson Thomas, Chief Information Officer, HDFC Life. Under Thomson’s leadership, HDFC Life has come up with a comprehensive mobile strategy that touches every core aspect of HDFC Life’s business. The team has come up with a full fledged portfolio of applications which includes Tablet Applications (Mobile POS, Q&I, Mobile

Sales Diary (Lead Management System), Tablet & Mobile Applications Instakit (Content Management System, Group Calculator, Instalife, InstaVerify and InstaFR). These applications have been developed to meet the needs of end users and make him/her more efficient and productive in his or her line of work. For example, the HDFC Life InstaFR enables faster submission of customer documents during the form filling exercise and also in case of any further requirements (FR) called in the future. A MAY, 2016

CASE STUDY

HDFC LIFE

We are adopting a mobile-first strategy where any application, functionality or service we create will be available or designed on the mobile first followed by the other form factors like the desktop Thomson Thomas Chief Information Officer,HDFC Life

One of the key advantages of going mobile is the decreased turnaround time at different phases of the sales cycle 24

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sales person has to just click and upload the document. Similarly, the HDFC Life InstaVerify app enables customer verification process at the point of sale without any dependency on the call center. The verification process is quick and fraud proof. In addition, the sales team has been given a comprehensive sales kit called the HDFC Life Instakit, which is packed with content that the sales representative needs during a sales pitch.

The benefits of a mobile first strategy Keeping in mind the extreme competitiveness of the insurance industry, HDFC Life has taken a mobile first strategy. “We are adopting a mobilefirst strategy where any application,

functionality or service we create will be available or designed on the mobile first followed by the other form factors like the desktop,” states Thomson. One of the key advantages of going mobile is the decreased turnaround time at different phases of the sales cycle. These applications are effectively reducing the dependency of the front line sales person on the desktop or laptop. This in turn saves the transit time which reduces time for the complete sales cycle. As on date, 99% of all further documents required were submitted via InstaFR and 22 partners are using the mobile Group Calculators. In March 16, specifically, 71% of Cancer care policies were logged in via InstaLife and 50% of HDFC Life’s business was logged in via the MAY, 2016

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mobile channel. Over 50% of the sales force is already using these apps as they realise the benefits and this usage is growing month on month. The comprehensive mobile strategy has also helped in increasing the productivity of the sales personnel. “The quantum of sales will also increase when you make applications mobile. This helps the sales person to cover more customers in a day. We are also able to tap a newer segment of customers who are tech savvy,” states Thomson. Access to business information on the fly has also helped in increasing employee productivity in a big way, as they have complete access to all the information they need. Since the field force is now mobile, HDFC Life is also able to scale down the branch infrastructure. “We are also seeing the proposal to policy conversion TAT’s come down dramatically since the sales person has the ability to view and fulfil any requirements much more faster and he is now truly in control of his business,”

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explains Thomson.

Innovation leads the way Understanding the unique needs of the Indian market, HDFC Life has also innovated and come up with several features that have helped it improve its competitiveness in the extremely competitive Indian insurance industry. For example, customer approval for a policy is now possible using automated voice navigation. The app reads out important details of the policy and takes confirmation from the customer before the policy gets converted. The app takes images of the policy holder through mobile and uploads it as part of the instant verification of the customer. This has helped in reducing a significant number of calls to and from the call center. Another significant innovation which may set the benchmark for other apps in the industry is HDFC InstaLife. Specifically developed for handling the sensitive issue of ensuring insurance for

cancer care, the HDFC InstaLife app enables a distributor to sell the policy using only his phone. “We have made it easy and convenient for the customer to fill up the form. The app prompts a set of underwriting questions. The customer can sign on the document using the app, and it just takes about 4 minutes to fill up the form. Once the payment is done, the policy is issued immediately,” explains Thomson. Additionally, documents can now be submitted by sales people on the go, which was earlier done through branches. Dependency on branches has reduced and reduced the cycle time in case of multiple iterations for the same request for more documents. HDFC Life’s example shows how a series of small but extremely important steps can boost customer satisfaction and improve the organization’s competitiveness simultaneously. srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

CASE STUDY

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

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HOW TECHNOLOGY IS HELPING KARNATAKA MANAGE NATURAL CATASTROPHES A real time weather dashboard developed in Karnataka is enabling users to visualize real-time weather parameters such as rainfall, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed and direction BY RASHI VARSHNEY

atural catastrophes can cause massive destruction and can impact negatively the economic conditions of any nation or state. Since natural disasters cannot be eliminated, can technology be used to lessen the disastrous impact of a natural catastrophe? For example, when heavy rains wreaked havoc in Chennai with floods, could city authorities have planned a better evacuation? Could citizens have been better prepared? Could colleges have been closed? While there are no clear concrete answers, there is a ray of hope from the example of the Karnataka Government, which has used technology to improve its ability to respond to natural disasters. The Karnataka government has installed various sensors to monitor 26

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natural hazards and provide scientific input for preparedness and management of disasters. The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC), which is a common platform for various organizations in the area of natural disaster management, is providing real-time weather (15 minutes interval) related information forecasts, early warning and advisories for management of natural disasters in the state. The department realized the need to automate its weather data collection methods and use technology that supported quick analysis and generated reports and maps on time. The department partnered with ESRI India who developed an internal and external GIS portal for KSNDMC which helped it

Once the data comes in,we can run various analysis tests for each area, monitor how the rainfall is changing from a year-on-year perspective and provide predictions for future rainfall Agendra Kumar President,ESRI India MAY, 2016

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perform data analysis, data visualization and data retrieval. ESRI India Technologies (erstwhile NIIT GIS Ltd.) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) software and solutions provider. The company provided a real-time data inserting solution and developed the internal and external GIS portal. The solution was capable of handling large amounts of data, supporting real-time analysis of weather information and disseminating it in the form of alerts, reports, maps, charts and through emails, SMS and websites to end users. The aim was to automate and speed up processes to avoid errors due to manual interference. States Agendra Kumar, President, ESRI India, “Rain gauges and weather stations are linked to an Oracle database EXPRESS COMPUTER

Weather forecast available to the citizens as an SMS

Minimized human intervention in report generation through the automation of applications

Reduced time for report generation from 20 man hours to less than 30 minutes

which is further connected to a GIS system. Once the data comes in, we can run various analysis tests for each area, monitor how the rainfall is changing from a year-on-year perspective and provide predictions for future rainfall. The rest of

the tools involve putting the data on the map and publishing it on the website, where the data is accurate as of 15 minutes ago.” For the WebGIS system, KSNDMC uses ArcGIS. Two versions of the software – ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server – together form the heart of the solution and the application has been created using .NET. The rain gauge sensors are using Airtel and BSNL SIM cards. So the cost of collecting data and transmitting it is extremely cost-effective and is available pretty quickly across the state. Speaking about Chennai floods and other such disasters in the world, Kumar says that with the climate changing, there are certain areas that receive heavy rains and certain areas that are dry, so the MAY, 2016

CASE STUDY

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

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weather is changing very fast. “Such an application which has an automated rain monitoring system will be useful for every state. This definitely would have helped Chennai as the citizens were caught unaware. Hence, if there is a system where forecast is available to the citizens as an SMS, then people can be better prepared and local authorities can take quicker steps,” says he. For the state of Karnataka this solution is more important as the state has more rainfall, with three monsoon seasons. “The technology developed by the ESRI India team has been immensely helpful in efficiently handling ever growing data sets, checking errors in the reports/maps owing to manual interference and increasing the pace of data processing, report generation and information dissemination. KSNDMC’s use of technology has been appreciated by many national and international agencies working in similar areas,” says Dr GS Srinivasa Reddy Director, KSNDMC. There is also a forecasting system by weather forecasting agencies that the department provides through a portal to citizens. Citizens can create an account and log in and get triggered updates once they have registered their mobile number. The idea therefore was to predict the rainfall and make sure people and different government organizations are prepared to beat any eventuality which can become a disaster later on. “An example of this is the Karnataka customer care centre which received 3000 calls a day ago when the flooding in Tamil Nadu happened,” says Kumar.

Challenges of manual processes KSNDMC had installed over 6,000 Telemetric Rain Gauges (TRGs) and more than 750 Telemetric Weather Stations (TWSs) to transmit data every 15 minutes. Prior to using this technology, KSNDMC collected weather data manually and stored it in an MS-Access database. The database however, was unable to support quick analysis owing to limitations of size and performance. The data furthermore, was available in different formats such as MS Word, 28

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The solution developed by ESRI India has enabled KSNDMC to retrieve large amounts of data within milliseconds and send alerts like ‘high intensity rainfall’to end users on-the-fly MS Excel, MS Access, DBF, etc. and there were data redundancies in different machines. Also, the time taken to generate reports and maps ranged from 7.5 man hours to 20 man hours. The daily report generation process involved data downloads, data verification, data processing, map generation, formulation of the final report and dissemination of data to users via SMS. The process was cumbersome and time consuming, especially during the monsoon season.

Twenty man hours to less than 30 mins The real-time data inserting technology and the application developed by ESRI India has enabled KSNDMC to insert or retrieve large amounts of data within milliseconds and send alerts like ‘high intensity rainfall’ to end users on-the-fly. The deployment also helped the

government to minimize human intervention (physical presence of scientists) in report generation through the automation of applications and reduce the time taken for report generation, which was earlier around 20 man hours, to less than 30 minutes. Additionally, the solution now provides access to multiple users from various locations to a centralized database server in the new system. KSNDMC now send lakhs of automated SMSes and reports through the automated applications. The real time weather dashboard developed is enabling users to visualize real-time weather parameters such as rainfall, temperature, relative humidity and wind speed and direction. The portal meanwhile is helping public users to query the weather database. rashi.varshney@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

INTERVIEW ABHIJIT POTNIS EMC

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EMC is seeing a big opportunity in the converged infrastructure and software defined space, and foresees flash taking precedence. In conversation with Ankush Kumar, Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions - India and SAARC, EMC, shares his perspective on the trends in the Indian data center market

Adoption of converged infrastructure and flash increasing in data centers How has the Indian data center market evolved, and how do you see the opportunities for EMC? Data evolution has been a major trend in the industry and it is important to understand why there is a need for IT to evolve which has a direct impact on the data centers. So whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really happening is, until three years ago, IT was playing an enabler or supporting role to the business but as the Big 4 technologies i.e. social, mobility analytics and cloud gained momentum in the business and started taking a place in different types of businesses (car manufacturers, banks, telecom firms), the entire IT function started driving the business rather than just acting as an enabler. As different businesses started adopting and modernizing their data centers, we at EMC saw huge opportunities in the converged infrastructure and software defined data center space. We are also seeing flashâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;arrays taking precedence in the traditional business. What are some of the innovations that are happening in the Indian data center market? Over the years, we have seen that all flash economics and pricing has come down to realistic levels. We are seeing that the flash pricing in terms of overall TCO will overtake and will give better return of investment compared to rotating disks. So EMC has also declared that 2016 will be the year of all-flash. Apart from basic flash, converged infrastructure is a big trend. Adoption of converged infrastructure and flash is increasing in data centers in India. As IT is time bounded on delivering better results to business, the IT teams do not have time to build their own data center or build their own infrastructure. Hence, we are offering to them a bundle of converged infrastructure, essentially- computer, storage, networking, server everything in a bundle with a connected view. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to spend the time to build it in their own data center. They just have to build the applications on top rather than spending energy and effort in building the EXPRESS COMPUTER

infrastructure by themselves. How do you see the consumption of hybrid solutions in the storage market with respect to data center? How is the demand? As we go forward, hybrid is like yesterday. The flash costs are drastically dropping down and they are actually at the price of rotating disks. Hybrid will start going back rapidly from what has been seen in the past. Flash will start exploding as well. The demand is equally high in an enterprise, as this infrastructure is much quicker in responding to technology changes. Our motto is to use flash everywhere. We have been using it aggressively in hybrid as well. As flash prices come down and flash becomes more and more affordable, the role of flash will increase. How big is the element of cloud in the overall data centre market? What are the key trends in the cloud computing space in India? Customers need some of their applications to be backed up in public cloud. What we see specifically in India is that the customers have started to build their own private cloud in their own data centers. So there is activity in the public cloud but at the same time, data is under their control too in the private cloud. So what we will see is the hybrid cloud going forward. There will be other environment issues and security concerns, but hybrid cloud is the way forward for most customers now.

The demand for flash is high in an enterprise as this infrastructure is much quicker in responding to technology changes

Can you tell us anything about the adoption of flash services by your customers? One of our banking and finance customers implemented our XtremIO flash solutions and their end of the day operations which runs for hours reduced to minutes. One of our customers, KPIT used our flash solutions to reduce its back up window by 60 percent, ensuring 100 percent reliability, and achieving improved productivity of the data center team by over 30 percent. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

FEATURE

HDFC BANK

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[L-R] Munish Mittal, CIO, HDFC Bank, Ravi Narayanan, Country Head -Branch Banking & Retail Trade FX Business, HDFC Bank, Nitin Chugh Senior VP and Head of Digital Banking, HDFC Bank and Kartik Jain, EVP, Head Marketing & Customer Analytics, HDFC Bank listening to presentations from startup founders at the HDFC Digital Innovation Summit in Mumbai

HOW HDFC BANK IS LOOKING TO ACCELERATE ITS

DIGITAL MOMENTUM BY ENGAGING WITH STARTUPS In an era of digitization, existing business models are being disrupted by technology upstarts. To catch up, traditional players have to either match the speed of these disruptors, or take the help of technology startups to improve their competitiveness. However, if you are a bank like HDFC Bank, you not only innovate yourself, but also try to create a new ecosystem by engaging with startups BY ABHISHEK RAVAL 30

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MAY, 2016

www.expresscomputeronline.com

Identifying customer needs with unique strategy

These startups presented their ideas to the jury on March 3-4, 2016, in Mumbai and were evaluated on parameters such as Uniqueness and innovation, Business Potential, Usability and Scalability, and

The bank is rolling out digitization across the whole spectrum – be it the lending side, the payments side, the transaction banking side, deposit side, branch automation side or using the existing channels like ATMs to communicate with the customers. While a majority of innovations will come from inside the bank, the bank understands the importance of looking at problems from a fresh perspective – a view that startups can provide with their innovative solutions. “We are looking to digitize the entire bank and we have done most of it already. Anything new that fits into the overall blueprint that we have, which is to make the whole offering to the customer, which is already relationshipbased, if we can make it richer, more comprehensive and simpler, we will consider it,” says Nitin Chugh, Senior VP and Head of Digital Banking, HDFC Bank. Chugh’s statement explains the strategic view of HDFC Bank and its objective of tying up with startups. Take for instance, a startup such as Net Vigil Software (one of the shortlisted Fintech startups selected by the bank). This startup provides a ‘safetopay’ payment option which facilitates an offline payment mechanism. In rural India, where network connectivity is relatively poor, this innovation can greatly benefit rural consumers. Further, this idea is relevant in terms of inclusion because the offline payment functionality brings the customer and the merchant in the banking ambit. This also works out to HDFC Bank’s advantage as the bank’s focus recently has been rural India.

DFC Bank’s founder CEO, Aditya Puri’s several visits to the silicon valley and meeting with multiple startups has inspired the bank to accelerate its digital initiatives. Since Puri’s visit in 2014, the bank has changed gears and has launched several digital initiatives. The bank recently launched a Digital Innovation Summit and invited Fintech startups to showcase their technology solutions. It’s a win-win for both the bank and the startup community. The bank gets access to some of the best disruptive technologies in the market and for the startups, they get access to commercialise and promote their innovations.In a first-of-its-kind event in the BFSI space in the country, the summit received more than 100 entries from startups all over India. 30 start-ups were shortlisted to make presentation to the jury comprising senior management from digital banking, branch banking, marketing, IT, e-commerce and cards. The shortlisted startups were from diverse domains: payments, mobile innovation, analytics, cloud and compliance. HDFC Bank, announced five winners of the Digital Innovation Summit. The winners are from artificial intelligence, marketing, quality assurance, and payments (both mobile and biometric) domains. These start-ups get a chance to deploy their products in the Bank, post further evaluation on technical, business, security, and compliance parameters. The winners are:

compatibility with HDFC Bank’s business and technology platforms.

About 60% or 65% of India still lives in semi-urban and rural and 54% of the bank’s distribution network and branches are in these regions. Aditya Puri in one of his earlier interactions with Financial Express had said, “There’s also money to be made from doing business in semi-urban and rural areas. In a span of four or five years, more than a third of the bank’s business will come from these areas.” By partnering with startups such as Net Vigil Software, the bank can further realise the potential in the rural areas and also help achieve the bank’s objective to digitise the bank for customer convenience and extending the access of the banking products and services on the digital channel. The initiative of partnering with the Fintech startups is a part of the bank’s strategic focus on customer convenience, access and delight, using technology as an enabler. Says Ravi Narayanan, Country Head -Branch Banking & Retail Trade FX Business, HDFC Bank, “The purpose of digitization is to further the cause of financial inclusion and extend the involvement of the existing customers with the bank. Digitization also enables administrative and transactional convenience, which the customer is looking for.” With the proliferation of a mobile phone, tablets etc, the geographies have blurred, which is the reason why the bank has decided to go rural. “Today, if we say that 56-58% of our branch distribution is in the rural country market what we call as bharat, we are completely agnostic to where the customer is because I am having the complete custodianship of that relationship. Then comes the customer journey and convenience,” says Narayanan. Tagnpin, one of the winners of the

Name

Domain

Offering

Location

Senseforth Technologies

Artificial Intelligence

Customer Response System powered by Artificial Intelligence

Bengaluru

Tagnpin

Marketing

Customer Engagement

Gurgaon

Net Vigil Software

Mobile Payments

QR code based Mobile Payments

Mumbai

Bugclipper Technologies

Quality Assurance

In-app feedback and reporting tool

Mumbai

Tapits Technologies

Biometric Payments

Indore

EXPRESS COMPUTER

MAY, 2016

FEATURE

HDFC BANK

» www.expresscomputeronline.com

Partnering with Fintech startups is a part of the bank’s strategic focus on customer convenience, access and delight Ravi Narayanan Country Head -Branch Banking & Retail Trade FXBusiness,HDFC Bank

We are looking to digitize the entire bank and we have done most of it already Nitin Chugh Senior VP and Head of Digital Banking,HDFC Bank. 32

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While a majority of innovations will come from inside the bank,the bank understands the importance of looking at problems from a fresh perspective – a view that startups can provide with their innovative solutions Innovation summit is a good example of how the bank extends the customer engagement by giving timely and moment of truth offers. For example, a customer standing in line at a checkout counter in a retail chain gets an instant offer, if he has shopped over a prescribed limit. The customer gets an instant SMS from HDFC bank. It informs the customer about the nearest shop, where the bank has an offer. This is the capability which has come onto the mobile. This is called personalisation. “The behavioral, financial and transactional analytics is all coming together because of the availability of technology,” states Narayanan. Similarly, Senseforth Technologies has developed an Artificial Intelligence enabled technology to chat with the customers (acting as a customer service associate) and understand its intent by doing sentimental analysis. The technology also updates the changes made to the customer details during chat sessions with the backend systems. This

technology may prove to be extremely useful to HDFC Bank, for resolving customer queries quickly and doing timely updation of customer records. Another startup, Bugclipper technologies, enables a bank’s customers to report bugs, while Tapits Technologies, has a biometric payment system that claims to complete a payment transaction in approximately 7 seconds. As one can see, the objective is to digitize every part of the value chain. “We look at ourselves as a custodian of the customer relationship. The moment I say that we are custodians, it means that I would like to take care of the financial needs of the customer’s family at any point of time. When he thinks money, he should think HDFC Bank. That’s the bottomline behind business thought process behind any effort that we make,” states Narayanan. The constant focus has been to adopt solutions which can improve customer responsiveness in a big way. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

INTERVIEW

www.expresscomputeronline.com

VIKAS GUPTA ESSAR INDIA

AMPLE SCOPE FOR THE DATA LOCALIZATION POLICY TO MATURE While it’s fair to have the data reside in the country, it can be a challenge if a calamity strikes. This can even affect the DR site, says Vikas Gupta, Head IT, Essar India in an interview with Abhishek Raval Your views on the entry of international public cloud data centre (DC) providers after the Indian Government’s push for data localisation? From the times when Suzuki was allowed to bring in their Maruti, there have been revolutionary changes in the product availability as well as the price points at which they are available. So the entry of foreign partners should be looked at from the perspective of the product and services offering availability than a point that they pose a threat to their local and Indian counterparts. For foreign MNCs, it will be an adaptation challenge. Moreover, the Government’s push will help localization of a global product from giants, which may lead to yet another business opportunity. But a counterpoint on localization is that any data center has two facesPrimary and DR. No organization will prefer both the primary data center and DR in a single geography. From the perspective of data residing in the same country, it’s paradoxical. Then, what about a DR site, which is primarily set up as a fallback mechanism? What happens in the instance of a Tsunami like calamity, which has the potential to affect the primary and the DR site at the same time. Aren’t both the sites at stake? The larger issue is of data secrecy and ethics compared to data residing in the same country. For that purpose, regulators the world over should widen the scope of criteria to be set for setting up local DCs. It has to be widened beyond the point of localization. There is total justification in data localization - some reasons being regulatory; some related to data security, some may be due to political implications while some may be due to data EXPRESS COMPUTER

accessibility issues.

Regulators the world over should widen the scope of criteria to be set for setting up local DCs.It has to be widened beyond the point of localization.There is total justification in data localization - some related to data security; political implications while some may be due to data accessibility issues

Do you mean to say, the DR site need not be in India? I, by any means, am not for or against the DR site being located in India. Today cloud is more appreciable a business proposition than anytime earlier but is the threat of data piracy averted there? The mindset has changed from merely data secrecy and at the same time the data secrecy is not being compromised. Further from any organization’s perspective, there are other important customer related regulations which need to be put in place to avoid any misuse than merely the location of the data. The age of community sharing has probably arrived and that’s why probably we are talking of the fast paced adoption of cloud. Have you heard of “Global Seed Vault” in Svalbard? Well that’s the key to the existence, not the one that we are fearing today. Over a period of time, the regulations will mature to create a global seed vault for data too. What impact can natural catastrophes like the Tsunami have on the data center industry? The data center industry is driven by a few critical factors like cheaper bandwidth, abundance power availability, cheaper manpower etc. Over the last many years, places like Vietnam, Philippines, Australia have emerged. Earlier, the optic-fiber cable was not available across the globe. Wherever it was, the price was prohibitive. However now, they have been laid out at most of the global locations and the costs are also fairly cheap. So till the above concerns are addressed, any kind of calamity is bound to have a far reaching impact. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

FEATURE

EATFRESH

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HOW A FOOD TECHNOLOGY STARTUP IS USING ANALYTICS AND IoT TO ENSURE FRESH MEALS Eatfresh, a food technology player, is banking on its technology expertise to better understand meal preferences BY SRIKANTH RP

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he food industry is a tough and complex business as meals need to always remain fresh. Most meals once prepared cannot be carried forward. Hence, meals once prepared have to be sold, and delivered quickly. Predicting the right quantity of meals that will be ordered or consumed is also tough, as meal preferences change frequently. Can technology play a role? Eatfresh, a food technology player, is banking on its technology expertise to better understand meal preferences. Launched in August 2015, Eatfresh is an online platform which delivers high quality meals created by top rated chefs. The startup has sold more than 1 lakh meals till date. Similar to Uber in the cab industry, the startup has a chef-centric marketplace. It improves quality through

a feedback and rating mechanism that is integrated in every order. The firm uses technology in a big way â&#x20AC;&#x201C; right from procurement to delivery. It uses analytics to predict item wise menu and preferences on a daily and hourly basis. For example, it uses analytics to plot the historic data of meals ordered up to 10 am, 11 am,12 noon etc, in a particular hub, which tells it how many meals the firm needs to have ready at a particular time on any given day. This algorithm further adjusts the production patterns based on hub location, time of day, weekend/ weekday/holiday based on weightage and formula. From the predicted quantities obtained, the information flows to a recipe management system which maps raw materials to quantities so they can be MAY, 2016

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FoodTech or foodcommerce is a very unique e-commerce business.Our product catalog changes daily,the inventoryis replenished on the hour,we produce what we sell,and deliver in under 30 mins Jipy Mohanty CTO,Eatfresh.com

procured from certified, local vendors. Each chef's recipe is mapped to a detailed weight based formula which drives the entire production process. Explaining the challenges of a food e-commerce business, Jipy Mohanty, CTO, Eatfresh.com, says, ”FoodTech or food-commerce is a very unique ecommerce business. Our product catalog changes daily, the inventory is replenished on the hour, we produce what we sell, and deliver in under 30 mins. That’s little crazy for an ecommerce business isn’t it? Unlike traditional e-commerce, we have two huge spikes of order volume right around 12 pm for lunch and 8 pm for dinner. And, delivery has to be done within 20-30 minutes. So, imagine a system that has to orchestrate taking 100s of orders each hour, routing it to the EXPRESS COMPUTER

delivery hub closest to the customer, then helping the chef prepare and pack the right food for the right order, and then having a rider get it to the customer, all within 30 minutes or so.” The firm has ensured that order related data and other consumer data flows seamlessly through to planning, sourcing of each ingredient, and to production control.

IoT for ensuring quality Eatfresh has 6-8 devices (ovens and freezers) at each delivery hub that need to maintain their temperature within a very narrow error margin throughout the day. A significant temperature change means that the firm loses quite a bit of food and turns away lot of customers. With the constant flow of orders, it is humanely impossible to keep track of the

functioning of these devices. To monitor the temperature, the firm has placed high quality sensors (tolerant of the heat and humidity inside devices) that monitor the temperature every minute of the day and alert the firm as soon as there is a variation. This also helps in ensuring food safety at every step of the product cycle and maintain product quality. The system also auto-allocates and transfers order details and GPS coordinates to the delivery rider app, which allows the firm to track location of each delivery rider, performance, and delivery times. The real-time geo-location data of every delivery driver flows back into central systems for monitoring and escalation whenever an order gets delayed. srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

CASE STUDY

HOW

MSTD

A N A LY T I CS

HELPED

THE MAHARASHTRA SALES TAX DEPARTMENT BOOST REVENUE COLLECTION A comprehensive BI and datawarehousing solution gave MSTD the ability to detect frauds and do better financial forecasting BY JASMINE DESAI

ax evaders find various means to avoid paying governments their due—underreporting incomes or sales, overstating deductions, exemptions, or credits. This results in an adverse impact on the public services that citizens are entitled to. No other department is more aware of its repercussions than Maharashtra Sales Tax Department (MSTD). In a bid to plug such revenue leakages, sought to arrest evasion, whilst expanding its taxpayer base of 7,75,000 dealers, the department turned to BI and data warehousing solution. With 12,000 personnel, MSTD contributes a staggering two-thirds of the state’s revenue through Sales Tax and Value Added Taxes (VAT). The tax agency wanted to step up

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efforts to boost revenue collection. A revenue forecast model was conceptualized to set targets. However, the agency lacked appropriate tools to create accurate forecasting inputs and perform advanced analysis. Existing processes required streamlining through business process analytics to break the silos. Retrieving relevant analytics from vast chunks of data and gathering a consolidated view of its collections and operations was one of the biggest roadblock. To meet the above challenges, a robust and scalable technology foundation, comprising data integration and advanced business analysis, was envisaged. A business intelligence and data warehousing solution was seen by MSTD

as the ideal means to create such a foundation. MSTD selected Capgemini as a technology partner to overcome those challenges. Capgemini’s Tax and Welfare team supports agencies across the world to accomplish a digital transformation that prepares them to detect and rapidly combat tax evasion and deter noncompliance. Capgemini implemented an end-to-end business intelligence, data warehousing, and reporting solution from scratch, including installation of hardware, software, solution definition, and support. Capgemini team defined comprehensive solution architecture for MSTD using SAS Enterprise Data Integration Studio, SAS Enterprise Miner, and SAS/ETS, SAS Enterprise BI MAY, 2016

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Studio, powered by HP hardware. Comprising 1,000 database tables, over 600 ETL Jobs, 350 reports, and 30 dashboards, the solution integrates data extraction, storage, data mining, data analysis, and reporting tools. It automates the process of building sophisticated predictive models and enables detection of fraud through circular trading and predictive analysis. The project got implemented in a time span of 25 months.

Improved ability to prevent frauds Capgemini’s successful collaboration with MSTD resulted in a sophisticated data warehousing solution that enabled the MSTD to spot potentially fraudulent claims and expand its taxpayer base. The solution closes the gap between revenue owed and collected and detects erroneous patterns of financial reporting. Predictive analytics helps gather intelligence from different channels to incorporate the right inputs into the forecasting models. Vinay Kargaonkar, IPS, Special Inspector General of Police and Chief EXPRESS COMPUTER

Vigilance Officer, Maharashtra Sales Tax Department, said: “This initiative has brought a revolutionary change in the way we make decisions everyday- moving away from a person to a system based decision making. The CDA implementation also proved instrumental in controlling tax evasion.” The project is unique and first-of-itskind in India. Capgemini also implemented the Computerized Desk Audit (CDA) for MSTD to calculate the tax liability of dealers on the basis of 11 parameters. The CDA implementation performed by Capgemini helped MSTD accrue numerous benefits, including improved service delivery by actualizing Anywhere Anytime services for Website compliance, enabling improved dealer satisfaction due to easily available information, and bringing Government services closer to the doorsteps of citizens. Moreover, with CDA compliance, the dealers were spared the effort of attending before an audit officer. Involving dealers in the audit process upfront via CDA provided MSTD with an opportunity to respond to their tax

liabilities. In addition, the decreased cost of compliance and reduced response and resolution time helped MSTD save time and cost incurred by dealers. CDA was run on all dealers, enabling MSTD to additional tax revenue of more than INR 165 Cr till now from the date of implementation. The CDA implementation also freed human resources for 11 months from Business Audit work for additional tax cases, resulting in financial savings. MSTD is now well-equipped to collate data from various external agencies across Maharashtra, as well as the Indian Government, to identify tax evasion and stop revenue leakages. Additionally, robust reporting ensures MSTD has real-time access to accurate data at the right place and right time, replacing the manual processes. The project has achieved such unprecedented success that it is already being recognized with prestigious awards from industry bodies. jasmine.desai@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

INTERVIEW MANISH CHANDRA SHOPCLUES

MOBILE DRIVES INNOVATION AT SHOPCLUES The bulk of the transaction requests received by ShopClues are on mobile. The traffic coming on Shopclues.com through mobile device has shot up from 2% in April to 70% in September 2015. The company is witnessing a new prime time for commerce. It’s like, ‘commute to commerce’ because most of the transactions on mobile happen from 6pm to 12am. Manish Chandra, Senior Director- Products, ShopClues speaking to Abhishek Raval discusses, apart from mobile, ways on how e-commerce players can turn profitable using technology

At one of the Industry forums, when asked about the changes observed in the Indian retail scene in the recent past, Radhika Ghai Aggarwal, Co-Founder, Shopclues said that while there are various channels of retail consumption available to the Indian consumer, mobile is overtaking the conventional channels with a tremendous amount of speed. Please substantiate? The traffic coming on Shopclues.com through mobile device has shot up from 2% in April to 70% in September 2015. We are seeing a new prime time for commerce. It’s like, ‘commute to commerce’ because most of the transactions on mobile happen from 6pm to 12am. There are 2,50,000 merchants on the site. We have more than 7 million app downloads already. Recently we created a functionality on our app called ‘Neighbourhood Market’. It shows the number of merchants servicing a product in his vicinity. This tremendously increases the customer confidence to transact with us. There are two advantages. The quick product delivery and better service. Besides these obvious advantages, it also serves another purpose. The size of the pie of the India e-commerce market will continue to shoot upwards. These new shoppers will also find this option more convenient. This also results in creating efficiencies. The seller can dispatch the item and collect the money himself. Moreover we have a chat platform on the 38

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mobile. The sellers and customers can chat over the android app about the products. It’s an interface, very similar to WhatsApp. Where customers even bargain! A lot of interesting conversations happen, which gives good customer insights. They can bargain, ask about products, enquire on their orders etc. This is an ecosystem established by us to enable customers buy from the site using their mobile device. How have you empowered the merchants to use ShopClues.com? The merchants can promote their stores to the buyers near them by using a services platform laid out by ShopClues. We have recently launched the ‘SMS package’ for the merchants. They can send SMSs to their customers, just as they send fliers tucked inside the newspapers. The sellers can also set-up their own shops using our platform. We facilitate them to host a website of their own, powered by ShopClues. The price discovery, order checkouts, the order fulfillment will happen from ShopClues as it happens, but the merchant can create his own identity. Apart from the domain and renewal fees, there are no charges. Thus Mobile is a driver of innovation. ShopClues is in the process of building an e-commerce operating system on the cloud to power our Omni channel strategy, for e.g. It will act as an infrastructure platform for Shopclues.com. Any business

entity can integrate with ShopClues and use the platform to sell their products and in turn ShopClues can use their partner’s platform to sell its own products. ShopClues has exposed the platform using APIs, which is openly accessible. In this way, the cloud technology can make the ecommerce experience possible for merchants too. How ShopClues handles transaction volume spurt during the festive season To live up to the transaction fulfillment expectation during the festive season demands a thorough planning. Right from the Interface to the channel – desktop or the mobile has to be upgraded to show the best deals to the customers. The value delivered by the ‘Neighbourhood Market’ technique takes a different level altogether during the festive season, in reaching out to the customer with tremendous pace by cutting down the physical movement of the products to the extent possible. We plan to do it by teaming up with merchants across the country, esp. Metro cities. The customers can thus directly receive the products from the merchants nearest to their residential address. Thus the customer experience is retained. It also helps us in crunching the shipping time and shipping cost. This initiative can be of immense help in cases of delivering white goods like AC, refrigerator etc. The shipping costs for delivering these goods is very high. MAY, 2016

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creating their own interface to sell their respective products. Thus IT has enabled to take my platform to an altogether different level. The platform can be used by sellers to send SMSes to their customers about new offers and can even chat and bargain using the chat functionality available on the platform. The fee structure can be arrived at, based on certain conditions. Currently it’s free but there is a potential of levying a charge after it gains reasonable traction. This can be one way to improve the top line. The bottom line can be achieved by creating systemic efficiencies. Customer experience can be a decisive factor because it results in better and repeatable conversions. IT can be used to display relevant products to the customers on the basis of data gathered about the customer’s previous site visits and other data. The journey a typical customer goes through on the portal to make the transaction easier to close.

We are able to gauge with good amount of surety about the region of the customer. The Mobile phone has features to pinpoint the geography. Approximately 6065% of the traffic comes through mobile. The IP address of the customer is also an indicator. We also run algorithms on what products should be shown on the basis of historical trends. What learnings would you like to share from the Big sale days? There are failures. The nature of operations do change from season to season. The entire e-commerce industry in 2014 faced issues with the transportation. The orders were punched in at a lightening speed but the fulfillment was just not able to catch up. An alternate way to serve the orders is in the works to overcome the issue faced in 2014. There are also learnings around how differently can we show the product assortment to the customers. Our plans EXPRESS COMPUTER

to apply the learnings are at various stages of implementation. However, to test the technology for its feasibility is important before they go live. We are testing the operational and technology capabilities learned from the previous Big Sales campaigns during a ‘Thank You Sales campaign’ to celebrate One crore customers at ShopClues. How can technology play a role to convert e-commerce players from mere transaction guzzlers to being profitable? Nothing other than IT can make us profitable. We are in the retail business but a technology company. There’s nothing that we do that doesn’t have a technology component to it. Profitability can be achieved in various ways. There can be an e-commerce operating system on the cloud. ShopClues is running such a platform, which is an offering to the merchants in the country. So, it’s not only ShopClues who is getting orders. We also receive orders from many other channels too because they are using the platform and

ShopClues: Future plans Mobile will be the driving force. We are investing heavily on a few technologies. HyperLocal is one of them i.e location based technologies. Image based competencies is also something that we are working on. We have already crossed 2.5 lac sellers. This week we are celebrating 1 Cr buyers. There are also players, who have kiosks in village and towns in Tier 3 cities, who have hosted their websites on our cloud. They have small services like mobile recharge, groceries etc. We also have players who showcase our products, and take orders on our behalf. The website is created by the local business but the data is all powered by ShopClues. We are also working with a few start-ups and HyperLocal businesses, where they are using our platform to showcase the products using our platform. We are also working with Big brick and mortar retail chains to bring them online on our platform. The customer can check the orders on ShopClues and the nearest store of the respective retail chain will deliver the order. abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

OPINION CHANDRESH DEDHIA HEAD-IT, FERMENTA BIOTECH

EMAILSPOOFING: GETYOUR BASICS RIGHT Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email validation system designed to detect and prevent email spoofing

There are many instances where the IT team is unaware of the simple configuration that is required to increase the defensive capabilities against email spoofing attacks and that too without any investment and using the existing technologies available 40

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ou all would have read the news about the Flipkart CEO’s email being spoofed and an email requesting to transfer $80,000 sent to Flipkart CFO. This attempt didn’t succeed as the CFO did a call back to the CEO to check the reason and then the case came to light and a major scam was avoided. This isn’t something new and has been very prevalent since the last few years. The only thing I can say is that the attempts are more common now and gaining some front page news. Also our inherent email technology has failed to safeguard the consumers against such attacks. Email servers today support such technology to avoid Email Spoofing, Phishing and SPAM, but the default configurations are set to “Disable”. Email systems being a foundation to any enterprise, small, medium or big, strong security process needs to be in place to secure the email infrastructure. I came across many instances where the IT team is unaware of the simple configuration that is required to increase your defensive capabilities against such attacks and that too without any investment using the existing technologies available. I would like to share the process to ensure you make your email infrastructure secure against such email spoofing and increase defensive mechanism against Phishing and SPAM, below are the technical steps that you could share with your IT team for implementation.

Three Simple steps to Nirvana: #1 Enable SPF : Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a simple emailvalidation system designed to detect email spoofing by providing a mechanism to allow receiving mail exchangers to check if incoming mail from a domain comes from a host authorized by that domain’s administrators. The list of authorized sending hosts for a domain is

published in the Domain Name System (DNS) record for that domain in the form of a specially formatted TXT record. Email spam and phishing often use forged “from” addresses, so publishing and checking SPF records can be considered anti-spam techniques. SPF has to be configured through Domain/DNS control Panel. #2 DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method designed to detect email spoofing by providing a mechanism to allow receiving mail exchangers to check that incoming mail from a domain is authorized by that domain’s administrators. It is intended to prevent forged sender addresses in emails, a technique often used in phishing and email spam. DKIM allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain which is done using cryptographic authentication. DKIM has to be configured on the Email Server and Domain/DNS Control Panel. #3 DMARC : Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email validation system designed to detect and prevent email spoofing. It provides a mechanism which allows a receiving organization to check that incoming mail from a domain is authorized by that domain’s administrators and that the email (including attachments) has not been modified during transport. It is thus intended to combat certain techniques often used in phishing and email spam, such as emails with forged sender addresses that appear to originate from legitimate organizations. DMARC is specified in RFC 7489. DMARC is built on top of two existing mechanisms, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). It allows the sender of an email to publish a policy on which mechanism MAY, 2016

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(DKIM, SPF or both) is employed when sending email and how the receiver should deal with failures. Additionally, it provides a reporting mechanism of actions performed under those policies. It thus coordinates the results of DKIM and SPF and specifies under which circumstances the From: header field, which is often visible to end users, should be considered legitimate. DMARC settings give you option to Monitor, Quarantine and Reject the emails that are detected as Spoofed or SPAM. One must follow the below method to rule out any false positives. A conservative deployment cycle would resemble: EXPRESS COMPUTER

a. Monitor all. b. Quarantine 1%. c. Quarantine 5%. d. Quarantine 10%. e. Quarantine 25%. f. Quarantine 50%. g. Quarantine all. h. Reject 1%. i. Reject 5%. j. Reject 10%. k. Reject 25%. l. Reject 50%. m. Reject all. Attempt to remove the percentages as quickly as possible to complete the deployment. DMARC has to be configured through Domain/DNS Control Panel. Once all the three step configurations are

completed, log on to www.dmarcian.com and create a free account and follow the configuration instructions. In the dashboard, it will show you the status of the SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Any anomalies will be highlighted and a suggestion to reconfigure will be given. You could choose the buy the paid subscription which gives you in depth analytics and other features. It would be a huge support if you can like or share this article with your friends and colleagues to improve their defense mechanism and improve their email security infrastructure. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The author, Chandresh Dedhia, Head-IT, Fermenta Biotech MAY, 2016

OPINION GAURAV SHARMA IDC

REDEFINING DATACENTERS OFTHE FUTURE Traditional data centers for long have been perceived as repositories of equipment (to drive cost savings) and not data (information) in its true form to create competitiveness and differentiation

With heaps of structured and unstructured data arising out of sensors, edges and virtually infinite endpoints presenting new commercial opportunities every day, DC investments of the future would be concentrated on driving systems of engagement and insights rather than just maintaining the existing system of records 42

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rganizations world over are in the midst of a massive shift in the way they used to do business and engage with their customers, partners and entire extended ecosystem for decades. With the advent of 3rd platform and digital transformation, markets world over and across industries have paved way for hyper competition and user experience to be the two central themes on which business value of future would be based upon. The existing business models are being shaken to the core and agility in all forms of engagement, insights and action have become the need of hour. The heart of all this transformation remains to date IT and in turn, data centers that enable this massive shift to take form of business value. The digital transformation wave that we are witnessing would require IT to be redefined essentially in terms of speed and scale. However, traditional Data centers for long have been perceived as repositories of equipment (to drive cost savings) and not data (information) in its true form to create competitiveness and differentiation. Many of these traditional data centers are also not capable of supporting this massive growth and environments enabling the 3rd platform (software defined, hyper converged etc) via power, cooling, security or other resources and hence it's imperative that CIOs start to look at redirecting their investments towards third party services and evaluate their areas for increasing efficiencies basis actual and not perceived needs as in the past. Next gen infrastructure to support this hyper digital era would necessarily comprise of components like flash storage, hyper converged and software defined infrastructure and associated services to address agility barriers in service provisioning and capacity. This would require extensive standardization policies and automation initiatives to

enable the necessary tying of DC & IT spend to business goals and associated value. This would essentially lead to a diversified / hybrid IT environment that the IT teams should be ready to embrace as against the traditional ones. CIOs would therefore need to focus more and more on logical capacities, chargeback processes, services and bursty demands rather than physical asset ownership and maintenance alone. With the advent of IoT, mobility and cloud based services; applications, data formats and data sources start to change more frequently than ever before. This in turn, is resulting in redefining of an organization's edge (mobile devices, branches, appliances etc), customer behavior and associated engagement rules. With heaps of structured and unstructured data arising out of these sensors, edges and virtually infinite endpoints presenting new commercial opportunities every day, DC investments of the future would be concentrated on driving systems of engagement and insights rather than just maintaining the existing system of records. Another aspect of this transformation would be to realign the workloads (and add new ones at an agile rate) that would essentially bring about changes to the existing network architectures to support this exponential data traffic growth. Technologies like SDN and NFV would therefore be required in the LAN and enterprise WAN environments to address the agility and efficiency issues but more importantly, would allow the business teams to better visualize the relationship between IT consumption, cost and the value created out of it. Finally, with all the data getting created, IT being diversified and / or distributed and edges and endpoints getting redefined every day, data centers would face a daunting task of keeping speed with the risks, security, MAY, 2016

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governance and compliance issues presented every time. CIOs would therefore need to collaborate more with LoBs (line of business), make IT processes agile, embrace new standards, embed layered security and consider the complete lifecycles of both data (information) and equipments within and outside of datacenter (environment). This would also bring the environmental aspect and regulations into the picture where green credentials would start becoming more important for end-user organizations. EXPRESS COMPUTER

CIOs would need to focus more and more on logical capacities, chargeback processes, services and bursty demands rather than physical asset ownership and maintenance alone Data centers of the future would therefore be focused on enabling the business teams to convert insights into competitive advantage and not act as repositories of siloed equipment/ applications alone. Intelligent data

(center) placement and enabling secure and fast access would be the key to extract maximum value out of these information hubs going forward. The author is Manager-Enterprise & IPDS, IDC MAY, 2016

INTERVIEW SHAILENDER KUMAR ORACLE INDIA

www.expresscomputeronline.com

In a lot of government projects, the cloud can help remove barriers to costly technology, opening opportunities for new government services and products. Sudhir Chowdhary of Financial Express speaks with Shailender Kumar, MD, Oracle India

Cloud is a natural fit in govt projects What kind of role do you see Oracle playing in the Digital India initiative? We are quite excited about the government initiatives. Digital India, Make in India, Startup India, Skill India or others have generated a lot of positivity and awareness. We are investing to support this programme. We announced our new campus in Bangalore with $400 million investment. It will accommodate 10,000 employees including developers and this supports the ‘Make in India’ initiative since our developers will be creating Oracle software in India for the world. Then, we will be setting up incubation centres across our nine offices which will house substantial software and technology capabilities, tools, and training to help launch new technology startups and make them successful. The third is on Skills India and we announced that we will train more than 500,000 students each year through Oracle Academy. Additionally, we are talking to about 9 or 10 cities for smart city implementations. These are in varied areas like health management, traffic management, travel management and more. We have also developed prototypes with some of our public sector partners. We also announced the Oracle Cloud at Customer solution—a set of breakthrough services that gives regulated industries full control over their data and allows them to meet all data sovereignty and data residency requirements; enables workload portability between on-premises and cloud; provides a path to easily move Oracle and non-Oracle workloads between on-premises and the cloud and mitigates risk while still providing access to the latest cloud innovations. What kind of challenges/roadblocks do you think India will face in the process of digitisation? The first one will be skills. There is a big skills gap. According to industry data, only 6% of the population understands IT or digital. And if we want to have a digital India, we need to ensure people have the skill set to utilize and leverage it. And that’s the reason we started focusing very, very heavily on skills 44

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development. The second challenge could be time for executing these plans. What is Oracle’s perspective on the technology uptake of governments? Very high. Cloud computing services in India is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 22% during 2015-2020. Increased government spending on National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) and various e-governance portals, growing acceptance of cloud services among private enterprises including SMEs is expected to drive market growth. Department of electronics and IT in India launched Meghraj, a national cloud initiative to help the government leverage cloud computing for effective delivery of e-services. The government’s AppStore will host both cloud and non-cloud enabled applications that can easily be customised to meet the needs of different organisations. Also, the government has set up CloudVault—storage as a service. So, clearly there is a big opportunity for the government to modernise their IT to serve citizens, businesses and their own employees better. We are really excited with this opportunity.

There is a big skills gap.According to industry data, only 6% of the population understands IT or digital.And for digital India to be successful, people should have the skillsets to utilize and leverage it

What do you think is the role of cloud in governance? Technology today is considered as much a productive resource in an emerging economy like India, as land, labour and capital. To support inclusive growth and grow the GDP, technology can play a role. Cloud computing gives governments an opportunity to re-imagine technology as an affordable, operational expense. The easy and pervasive availability of enterprise technology delivered via cloud can fuel improved G2C or G2B interactions, business growth in large and small organisations and enable small businesses to compete with large enterprises. Major government IT organisations of developed nations (US, Canada, UK, Japan, Australia, South Korea) have defined their cloud strategy and are determined to run centralised government clouds. MAY, 2016

BUSINESS AVENUES

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MAY, 2016

COLUMN ANIL CHAWLA VERINT SYSTEMS INDIA

DIGITALDISRUPTION COMPELLING COMPANIES TO BECOME DIGITALENTERPRISES Digital transformation has created a rapidly changing business environment disrupting value chains and compelling companies to rethink nearly everything they do

igital transformation has created a rapidly changing business environment disrupting value chains and compelling companies to rethink nearly everything they do. Digital advancements are transforming work and organisations, Organisations that are not making the transition to digital enterprises are falling behind. According to a research conducted by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, 40% of today’s leading companies globally will be displaced from their market position in the next five years. The research adds that 75% of these companies have yet to address this risk by prioritising their digital strategy.

The Indian Scenario

Firms that enable an engaged workforce empower employees to do their best for continuous improvement and inspired customer engagements 46

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Internet penetration is expanding quickly in India. According to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the Internet penetration in India will hit the mark of 462 million users by end of June 2016 and the mobile Internet users in the country is estimated to be over 317 million by the same date(you can add smartphone shipments as an indicator as well). This is a clear indication of the fact that digital disruption is also a reality in India. As more devices capture more data, interact with more people and change the processes by which daily activities are carried out, digitisation will have a profound impact on organisations across industries.

The Two Fold Challenge In this rapidly evolving environment, the challenges faced by organizations are two fold– not only the challenge faced due to constantly increasing customer expectations for a simple, virtually painless experience but also the equally

intimidating challenge faced due to their employees and workforce. Today’s nextgeneration employees have become accustomed to unprecedented speed and information access, thus demanding the same in their work environments to enable their ability to meet these same demands from customers. Particularly with millennials, who make up the majority of contact center employees and want access to information and user interfaces similar to what they use personally. This digitally savvy workforce is more comfortable operating in a Omni Channel environment, thereby fostering the need for organisations to optimise and empower their next-generation employee workforce to be responsive to customer demands.

Digital Disruption – Impact on the Workforce Organisations that enable an “engaged” workforce empower employees to do their best for continuous improvement and inspired customer engagements. This directly impacts greater customer loyalty and overall business performance. Culturally, it is important to let employees know they are customer champions and play a role driving great experiences that leads to brand satisfaction. More than ever, engaged employees are the key to driving customer engagement and the customer experience. As such, organizations need to give employees access to the information and solutions they need to be champions for their customers, and help ensure that employees are comfortable in leveraging technology to support customer engagement in order to drive better customer experiences.

Empowering the Employees Successful organizations are MAY, 2016

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empowering employees with contextual data and analytics to help increase customer retention and help support all aspects of customer engagement. This can include insights into customer journeys or perhaps access to analyticsdriven data that can help employees ease customer effort and improve experiences in real time. In fact, access to analytics will continue to drive areas such as selfservice, social and mobile customer engagement, as well as direct digital interactions across channels such as chat and video. Providing employees with tools to make interaction more personal and productive often involves taking the context of previous interactions and providing actionable recommendations EXPRESS COMPUTER

to the agent. This context may exist in many places within the organization, but the information needs to be readily

Access to analytics will continue to drive areas such as self-service, social and mobile customer engagement, as well as direct digital interactions across channels such as chat and video

available, despite its location or age. After all, customers know the context of their interactions and expect the companies they engage with, to know it too. So it can be succinctly be said that, digital disruption is a phenomenon which is not only here to stay, but will pick up momentum. While this goes against everything traditional and forces organizations to evolve in keeping with the phenomenon, it will also ensure that the customer journey is mapped effectively and employees are empowered to service customers efficiently. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The author is Managing Director, EIS,Verint Systems India MAY, 2016

EVENT MICROSOFT

THE EXPRESS DIGITAL GOVERNANCE SUMMIT J A M M U

E D I T I O N

HOW EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES CAN BE USED FOR EFFECTIVE e-GOVERNANCE The Express Governance Series in Jammu and Shillong placed the spotlight on emerging technologies such as cloud, big data and analytics for enabling a new wave of innovation in e-governance BY MOHD UJALEY AND ANKUSH KUMAR

s part of the Indian Express Group’s mission to spread awareness on the power, potential and role of emerging technologies in creating a truly responsive government, the first edition of the Express Digital Governance Summit was organized in Jammu. The Express Digital Governance Summit aims to gather key practitioners of ICT to facilitate exchange of knowledge on emerging information technology initiatives that government organizations can use to bring efficiency and transparency to their operations. The first edition of the Express Governance Series Jammu organized by Express Computer in partnership with Microsoft, kicked off with a keynote address from Dr Pawan Kotwal, Divisional Commissioner, Jammu, Government of Jammu & Kashmir. Technology has changed the way things used to happen. It is an enabler of creating newer citizen centric service 48

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opportunities for the governments – this was the resounding message of Kotwal's speech. “Combination of technology and human resources must be nurtured to improve the living of the people in the country. And, better understanding and integration of emerging technologies

such as cloud, virtualization, analytics and last mile connectivity allow us to do that,” Kotwal said. A major attraction at the event was a demonstration of the functionalities of the Microsoft Lumia smartphone. The representative from Microsoft informed that the Lumia has eliminated the complexity with a simplified model that offers something for everyone. The delegates from different departments of the state government asked many questions on how the phone could be used for mobile enabling different functions of the government. While speaking about the role of emerging technologies such as cloud in driving productivity in the government department, Sourabh Ratta, Technology Solution Specialist, Microsoft presented a broad overview of Microsoft’s offerings in the cloud domain for the government organizations. Emphasizing on the criticality of data security, he said “We pay the highest attention to data security MAY, 2016

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(L-R) Mohd Ujaley, Principal Correspondent, Express Computer; Saadut Hussain, CEO, JaKeGA; Amit Sharma, Managing Director, SIDCO; Vikram Malhotra, Technology Specialist, Microsoft during the power panel discussion on the topic of “Emerging Technology for Effective e-Governance”.

and any data in Microsoft cloud is safe and secure.” Vikram Malhotra, Technology Specialist, Microsoft, informed the audience about the importance of visualization and analytics with his insightful presentation. He said, “It is important to understand the data centre. What data is present? What is important for you? How you can analyze the data for bringing more value and business to your organization and how government organizations can use it for improving their efficiency?” The event also hosted a power panel discussion moderated by Mohd Ujaley, Principal Correspondent, Express Computer on the topic of “Emerging Technology for Effective e-Governance”. The panel discussion saw the participation of senior government officials including EXPRESS COMPUTER

Amit Sharma, Managing Director, SIDCO; Saadut Hussain, CEO, JaKeGA and Vikram Malhotra, Technology Specialist, Microsoft. The panelists shared their view on the role of emerging technologies, challenges of last mile connectivity and present status of e-governance projects. Vikram Malhotra of Microsoft was of the view that cloud, virtualization and last mile connectivity had the potential to disrupt the e-governance space in the country. “Along with emerging technologies, last mile connectivity is the key for the success of e-governance programmes across the country,” said Malhotra. Agreeing with Malhotra, Amit Sharma, MD, SIDCO said that the Government of Jammu & Kashmir has taken many steps in the last few years to improve the overall status of the usage of

information technology in governance. He added that although the state has been little late compared to states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, it had the late-comer advantage of adopting already tested technology. Presenting the view of JaKeGA, Saadut Hussain, CEO, JaKeGa said that the state was heavily focusing on utilizing technology effectively in all the departments. The conference also witnessed an interesting presentation from Kavitha Babu, Sr. Attorney, Microsoft. She spoke on the topic of “Trusted Cloud for Government”. She highlighted different dimensions of security and privacy and shared how Microsoft was ensuring security for its clients including government organizations. mohd.ujaley @expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

EVENT MICROSOFT

THE EXPRESS DIGITAL GOVERNANCE SUMMIT S H I L L O N G

E D I T I O N

he second edition of the Express Digital Governance Summit was held in Shillong on 1st April 2016 with a keynote address on, ‘Leveraging Technology to Make Governance Smart’, by Timothy Dkhar, Sr. Technical Director and SIO , NIC , Meghalaya. Dkhar in his speech talked about some of the most innovative projects that were initiated by NIC like Dealer Management System, Kiran Tracking System, Pension Automation System and eDistrict. He also mentioned that NIC would soon be launching at least ten innovative mobile applications in the next few months which will be helpful for citizen service and can also be used by government departments. The elaborative keynote was followed by a presentation on how productivity could be enhanced in datacenters. Grover said that Microsoft was committed to driving innovations in the datacenters to improve efficiency and sustainability. “The company's cloud-scale datacenters provide the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for its 200-plus online services, including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive and Microsoft Azure,” pointed out Grover. The major highlight of the event was an interactive panel discussion on 'Emerging technologies and trends for effective e-Governance’, which was moderated by Ankush Kumar, Principal Correspondent, Express Computer. The panelists included Benos Lyngskor, Technical Director, NIC, Shillong; Ebenezer Lyngwa, Head-SeMT, Meghalaya, Basav Roychoudhury, Associate Professor, IIM, Shillong and Vikram Malhotra, Technology Solution Specialist, Microsoft. The panel stared with an open ended question to the panelists, who were asked to share their views on some of the emerging technologies impacting

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Timothy Dkhar, Sr. Technical Director and SIO , NIC , Meghalaya

eGovernance. Professor Basav elaborated that analytics can be used in eGovernance to figure out the requirement of the citizens in a proactive fashion without waiting for the citizens to demand for the service. Malhotra of Microsoft shared how the firm’s Smart Classroom programme was successfully implemented in Meghalaya. “This is a great example how technology in education is creating an environment where students and teachers communicate, collaborate, create, access and consume content using technology,” said he. Lyugwa of SeMT shared how the state had successfully leveraged some of the emerging technologies for effective egovernance. For instance, the state data

center has been cloud enabled. To provide safety and security to citizens, SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture has been implemented for streaming of images from CCTV cameras to centralized police control rooms. While Meghalaya has many problems and constraints like lack of proper infrastructure, it has made significant achievements in the field of e-governance. For example, a number of online applications have been implemented and e-governance services are being delivered electronically to citizens. An interactive technology presentation on ‘Power of Visualization & Data Analytics’ was made by Vikram Malhotra, Technology Solution Specialist, Microsoft. He shared how MAY, 2016

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(L to R) Benos Lyngskor, Technical Director, NIC, Shillong; Ebenezer Lyngwa, Head-SeMT, Meghalaya, Basav Roychoudhury, Associate Professor, IIM, Shillong, Vikram Malhotra, Technology Solution Specialist, Microsoft; Ankush Kumar, Principal Correspondent, Express Computer

Azure and PowerBI provided a complete set of services for data analytics from data processing up to visualisation, for developers, IT professionals and business users. With Azure, one can ingest data from multiple sources, from existing on-premise systems, SaaS services or directly from many other Azure services. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It can schedule and continuously process massive amounts of unstructured or semi-structured historical data from web clickstreams, social media, server logs, devices and sensors. Streaming services can be further used to process data in real-time, use predictive analysis to draw future recommendations and interact with visualizations of your data,â&#x20AC;? pointed out Malhotra. A special address was delivered by Prof. Gautam Barua, Mentor Director, EXPRESS COMPUTER

NIC Meghalaya would soon be launching at least 10 innovative mobile applications in the next few months which will be helpful for citizen service and can also be used by government departments.

IIT Guwahati. He spoke eloquently on the importance of planning in e-governance projects. Professor Barua gave a detailed view on how proper planning can lead to a better execution of e-governance projects. He shared indepth insights about digital participation of citizens, the importance of accurate data and how various innovative technologies could be used in utilizing data in a better way. The event was also graced by the presence of many key dignitaries: Dr Brahm Dev Tiwari, Secretary (Planning, Programme Implementation & Evaluation, Community & Rural Development )Meghalaya and Dr A.G Agangar, Director & Chief CEO, North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health & Medical Sciences. ankush.kumar@expressindia.com

MAY, 2016

EVENT ORACLE

HOWGOVERNMENTSERVICE DELIVERYCAN BE TRANSFORMED USING DIGITALINFRASTRUCTURE The Government summit at the Oracle CloudWorld 2016, Mumbai began with a presentation from Laura Ipsen, Senior VP, Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation on how Oracle looks at the smart city concept. It was followed by a panel discussion on the topic - Transform Govt service delivery: Digital Infrastructure as a utility to every citizen. The panelists included Laura Ipsen, Senior VP, Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation, J Satyanarayana, Advisor to Chief Minister, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Ajoy Mehta, MCGM Commissioner and V K Gautam, Principal Secretary, DIT, Govt of Maharashtra. BY ABHISHEK RAVAL

anelists at the discussion stressed on the need for transparency in government service delivery, which in turn will establish trustworthiness about the government among the citizens. The second factor is of inclusiveness. The citizens with no resources to consume government services should be equally empowered as any other citizen having access to a laptop or a mobile phone. Maharashtra’s Principal Secretary, DIT, V K Gautam, informed about the trained 35,000 digital assistants, who were delivering G2C services to the citizens in rural areas in Maharashtra. Satyanarayana raised a pertinent 52

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For cities to be smart, the throughput of the citizen services, transportation and everything that runs the city should be good

point of tightly looping government agencies to share citizen data among themselves. This will eliminate the frequent submission of the same documents by the citizens while availing for every other government service. “If the citizen has already submitted the data to one government agency, why is there a need for him to take the pain of submitting it all over again for any other government service,” asked Satyanarayana. The Aadhar platform, which already has citizen data can also be used to authenticate the citizens. The Government of Maharashtra is also trying to tread the same path. Gautam said that the CM of Maharashtra MAY, 2016

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[L-R] Sunil Jain, Managing Editor, The Financial Express, E Ravindran, Commissioner, KDMC, Dr. Nikhil Agarwal CEO Innovation Society, Govt. of AP, Pratap Padode, Founder & Dir., Smart Cities Council India, Rajiv Desai, Founder & CEO,3Di, Laura Ipsen SVP, Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation.

has challenged the IT department to build systems that would position the government to not ask the information from the citizens that the government already has. “For government jobs, there is no need to ask for the SSC, HSC exam certificates. The govt already has that data,” says Gautam. Talking about the challenges about delivering citizen services using digital infrastructure, Satyanarayana highlighted the challenge of extending the bandwidth right upto the doorsteps of far flung or remote areas. He emphasized that it is not only important to know how to deliver the bandwidth, but also the content in the form of government services has to be also well integrated at the backend. Especially, when the content is increasing in size, variety and volume. He also shared a novel technique that Andhra Pradesh has come up with to spread and lay down fibre optic cables in the state. Instead of having them underground, the cables are overlaid EXPRESS COMPUTER

upon the electric poles above the ground. Gautam later on opined that a fundamental shift in attitude in the way govt thinks about citizen services must happen. “The govt must shrink. If there are other entities who can do better, they must be given a chance,” he said. The govt should reach out to the people rather than the people having to come to the government for services. Satyanarayana aptly termed it as “serviceless service” On the potential of IoT, Gautam said that while IoT is already being used in a number of govt services, the setting up of security frameworks around them is of prime importance. IoT results in the generation of humongous data. Questions will be asked about the ownership of data. Satyanarayana said, in AP, the ownership of data lies with the principal state govt department under which the specific data type is managed. He spoke about a PoC the AP govt is doing with a private company to use social networking

capabilities to serve the citizens. “We are doing a PoC to do sentiment analysis on the data on social media platforms and the data residing on all the publicly available media channels to see how can it be used to suggest ways on how can we reduce school dropouts, infant mortality rate or maternal mortality.”

Managing Digital priorities and expectations The second panel discussion, titled ‘Digital City, Smart city project priorities and Digital expectations’ was moderated by Sunil Jain, Managing Editor, The Financial Express. Panelists included: Dr. Nikhil Agarwal, CEO, Innovation Society, Govt. of AP, E Ravindran, Commissioner, KDMC, Pratap Padode, Founder & Dir., Smart Cities Council India, Rajiv Desai, Founder & CEO,3Di and Laura Ipsen SVP, Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation. Sunil Jain spoke on the importance of how badly the country was in need of smart cities. He shared a statistic that MAY, 2016

EVENT ORACLE

Minnesota in USAis using thousands of sensors to collect water related data to predict flood warning. The electricity sub stations can be fitted with IoTsensors for preventive maintenance Laura Ipsen, Senior VP,Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation

Asmart cityis one that has smart transport with intelligent traffic analysis,which is well crafted to scale up to the population growth E Ravindran, Commissioner,KDMC 54

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[L-R] Laura Ipsen, Senior VP, Industries Solutions Group, Oracle Corporation, Camille Richardson, Principal Commercial Officer, U.S. Commercial Service, Mumbai, V K Gautam, Principal Secretary, DIT, GoM, J Satyanarayana, Advisor to Chief Minister, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Ajoy Mehta, MCGM Commissioner

due to indiscriminate urbanisation, every year until 2030, India will have to create urban and commercial space that is equivalent to the space of two Mumbai’s. In this scenario, 40% of the overall electricity will be consumed by transportation alone. If this happens, questions will arise on who will pay for the smart city infrastructure and how will the smart city help in reducing costs. E Ravindran, Commissioner, KDMC explained his definition of a smart city. “A smart city is one that has smart transport with intelligent traffic analysis, which is well crafted to scale up to the ever increasing population growth. This can be enabled by disruptive technologies that can be implemented quickly.” However, the definition of smart city is evolving. Dr. Nikhil Agarwal, CEO, Innovation Society, Govt. of AP,

pointed out that AP has 13 major cities on the new map after the separation from Telangana. None of them are smart. The work is on to have a smart layer on it. In the first smart cities list, Visakhapatnam and Kakinada were shortlisted for which no monetary allocations were made after the Telangana separation. Currently, AP is working on developing Amaravati as a capital city and a smart city. It’s built from scratch by partnering with the Singapore govt. Agarwal says, “By August 1, 2016, we plan to shift 27,000 government employees to the new secretariat under construction in Amaravati. In the next 10 years, 2 million people will start living in the city,” Citing the example of Los Angeles (LA), Rajiv Desai, Founder & CEO,3Di referred to how in any smart city, the three important components of people, processes and places should be taken care of. MAY, 2016

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envisioned to produce zero waste by 2025. Citizens have to pay extra charges if the waste created surpasses a threshold set by the govt authority. Technology platforms can play a formidable role in realising these solutions. They provide a universal base for various stakeholders to operate from. For example, citizen facing

It is not only important to know how to deliver the bandwidth,but also the content in the form of government services.Both have to be well integrated at the backend The Kalyan Dombivali Municipal Corporation will move the entire signalling management to a central location in the next six months. The plan is to have the same pole being used for signals, Wi-Fi and CCTVs. According to Ravindran, transport safety is also a critical area to be taken care of in any intelligent transportation network. Laura gave the example of San Franciso (SF) on how mobile apps (SFpark) can be used by citizens to park the car in a parking place nearest to the destination with the real time information on the space available, and how the govt is trying to create opportunities for citizens to use more public transport. Similarly, Los Angeles has GoLA app to provide real time traffic information. It has public APIs, wherein the citizens can post traffic related information, which acts as alerts for other citizens visiting the same locality. In Delhi too, there are car pooling apps to locate the car with odd - even numbers which is nearest to the citizenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s location. For waste management, Rajiv cited the example of LA. The city has EXPRESS COMPUTER

healthcare services can be delivered using a platform approach. Different stakeholders in the healthcare industry can come onboard. The panel also discussed the potential of IoT. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s already being used heavily in USA, Europe, and the Middle East. Minnesota in USA is using thousands of sensors to collect water related data to predict flood warning. The electricity sub stations can be fitted with IoT sensors for preventive maintenance. On how technology can play a role without any manual intervention, Nikhil cited the way AP has laid down their fibre optic cables, which will transform citizen service delivery. The state has taken a unique route. The cables are rolled out atop the electric wire poles at a cost of only 320 cr. in the period of 9 months. If the same was done the traditional way of laying the fibre underground,then it would have taken five years at a cost of 5000 cr. By June 2016, the goal is to every citizen will get a 40 gbps connectivity at $2 a month.

By putting fibre optic cables on top of electric poles instead of laying them underground,AP has taken a unique route, which will transform citizen service delivery Dr.Nikhil Agarwal, CEO Innovation Society,Govt.of AP

In any smart city, the three important components of people,processes and places should be taken care of Rajiv Desai,

abhishek.raval@expressindia.com

Founder & CEO,3Di MAY, 2016

NEWS CLOUD COMPUTING

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ESDS launches cloud data center in Mumbai

From L-R: Subhash Desai, Minister for Industries, Maharashtra; Devendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister, Maharashtra and Piyush Somani, CEO & MD, ESDS

EXUBERANT SUPPORT FOR Data Services(ESDS), a leading managed cloud service provider offering managed datacenter services, today announced the launch of its second datacenter in Mahape, Navi Mumbai. This Uptime Institute certified datacenter is part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) inked with the Government of Maharashtra with a Rs 200 crores investment. Additionally, the company aims to create 500 employment opportunities by 2017-18. Spread over a sprawling 80,000 sq ft, the cloud data center will offer private cloud and eNlight Public cloud hosting for customers. Additionally, the company also introduced its new product, eNlight 360 – an innovative next generation, on-premise hybrid cloud platform that is empowered by India’s only patented 56

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eNlight cloud’s auto scaling technology. This equips ESDS – a ‘Make in India’ brand, to offer large enterprises and SMEs with an auto-scalable and pay-perconsume cloud hosting solution that delivers always available and highly reliable compute roll-out of SaaS, PaaS & IaaS based portfolio. Re-emphasizing state’s commitment to strengthen IT Infrastructure, Devendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister, Maharashtra said, “Maharashtra has always been among the leading destinations providing quality infrastructure to companies and creating employment opportunities, especially in the IT sectors. Additionally, the country needs innovative technology solutions like the ESDS patented cloud and data centers to accelerate businesses in today’s digital economy.”

Subhash Desai, Minister for Industries, Maharashtra said, “We are committed to drive industrial growth in the state and this highlights the policy corridor we have created to fasten the approval to setup process. We are delighted to see innovative technology companies like ESDS from Maharashtra scaling new heights and this further highlights the entrepreneurship spirit in the state.” India is at the cusp of a digital evolution and cloud data centers are expected to play a critical role in shaping business transformation. Government and private sectors businesses are constantly looking for innovative IT solutions to empower their businesses. Also, organizations are increasingly focusing on their critical data and compute being stored within the country. In this context, Indian cloud datacenter players are best positioned to derive optimum business performance by addressing local regulations & network latency issues. Piyush Somani, CEO & MD, ESDS, said “Our new cloud data center and eNlight 360 on-premise hybrid cloud platform is a true testimony of our commitment to constantly innovate and raise industry benchmarks. Empowered with India’s only patented eNlight cloud, we are best poised to be the strategic partner fulfilling modern business demands for highly reliable, available and easily scalable IT infrastructure requirements. Additionally, we are keen to partner the government’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ campaigns that will drive connected economy, amplify business growth and project India as the innovation hub.” With this launch, ESDS has total data center footprint spread over 1,00,000 sq ft. floor space across its Mumbai & Nashik data centers. ESDS has also witnessed a growth in customer addition for its eNlight Cloud, a total of 300 enterprise clients in BFSI, Government, Retail, and Education sectors. MAY, 2016

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IBM and Reliance Communications partner to accelerate adoption of cloud computing in India

IBM TODAY ANNOUNCED that it is working with Reliance Communications to provide its customers with a complete portfolio of highly secure and scalable IaaS offerings running on the IBM Cloud. As one of India’s leading integrated telecommunication service providers, Reliance Communications has a client base of over 115 million, including over 39,000 large enterprises and small and medium business (SMBs) across industries. The company will not only offer IBM Cloud infrastructure services to its customers but it has also launched new offerings designed to provide end-toend integrated e-commerce services for India’s SMB market—all running on the IBM Cloud. “Indian enterprises are increasingly leveraging cloud for business transformation and require sophisticated new levels of support to expand their ecommerce operations. Through our partnership with IBM, customers will EXPRESS COMPUTER

instantly benefit from the added flexibility and global reach to be more competitive, especially as we look at new opportunities from the “Digital India” program,” said Braham Singh, SVP of Global Product Management, Reliance Communications (Enterprise) & Global Cloud Xchange. Recent research by IBM reveals communication service providers (CSPs) are recognising cloud services as a growing service line for their organisations, and integral to driving new revenue streams with customers. IBM is partnering with a number of leading CSPs in major markets including Bell Canada, Indostat, Telstra (Australia), Reliance (India) AT&T and Verizon. Cloud is a transformative growth engine for business, both enterprises and SMBs, across industries in India. SMBs are migrating on cloud and using cloudbased technologies to scale up their operations. Through this alliance Reliance Communications will be able to

provide enterprises, especially the SMBs, a robust infrastructure platform to run their important business applications. This will help them streamline their operations, increase efficiency and give them an option of pay as you use model. Reliance Communications’ longstanding relationships with enterprises will help drive widespread awareness and adoption of cloud services. “We are delighted to partner with Reliance Communications and support their efforts to offer our Cloud services in the Indian market. With a broad cloud portfolio, deep expertise and data privacy, the IBM Cloud offers businesses the ability to optimize its resources and investments to drive growth. With this collaboration, we will be able to address the requirements of organizations who have limited access to enterprise-grade cloud solutions” said Vivek Malhotra, Cloud Leader, IBM India / South Asia. MAY, 2016

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HYSEA organizes 24th edition of Annual Summit

Dr Srinubabu, MD, Omics International, receiving the Award from Shri K T Rama Rao, IT Minister, Govt of Telangana

Hyderabad Software Exporters Association, (HYSEA) organized the 24th edition of its Annual Summit and Awards 2016. This year the event was jointly organized with STPI, Hyderabad. The HYSEA Summit & Awards showcased the

buzzing innovation culture and the increase in startups and startup support activities in Hyderabad. This year the event was even more special as HYSEA celebrated its silver jubilee year of formation. The following awards were given:

Best Startup offshore Development Center

Black Knight India Solutions

Best Startup Indian company

Deepsea Technologies (India)

Best Indian SME

GGK Technologies

Best Established Offshore Development Centre (ODC)

Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab

Best ITeS company – MNC

Intellenet Global Services

Best ITeS company – Indian

OMICS International

Top Exporters [100-500 crores]

CA (India) Technologies and HSBC Software Development (India)

Top Exporters

Infosys,TCS,Wipro

CSR Award – Community Development

GE Exports

CSR Award – Community Development (SME) MicroSemi CSR Award – Environment Sustainability

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Infosys

Oracle launches ‘Startup Cloud Accelerator’in Bangalore ON THE HEELS of Oracle CEO Safra Catz’s meeting with Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and a series of investments announced as part of Oracle’s expansion in India and support of Digital India initiatives, the company has announced at Oracle CloudWorld that its first incubation centre will launch in India. Called the ‘Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator,” the centre was inaugurated by Oracle’s President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. Several more centres are slated to launch later in Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida, Pune, Trivandrum and Vijayawada. Oracle’s Sanket Atal, Group Vice President of Development, will be leading the initiative. “India is at an exciting phase of growth, innovation and development,” said Thomas Kurian. “Through the Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator and the growing popularity of cloud as an alternate computing model, we want to be the catalyst for new business ideas. We are committed to furthering the government of India’s ‘Startup India’ initiative. It matches our agenda of fostering entrepreneurship and promoting innovation by creating the right ecosystem for growth and development.” Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator is a global startup accelerator initiative by Oracle. Oracle India will lead the initiative for the company. With Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator, Oracle aims to help speed up a startup’s development through a combination of technical and business mentoring. The initiative targets midsize firms, including MSMEs. MAY, 2016

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