Express Computer June, 2017

INDIA’S LEADING IT MAGAZINE

WWW.COMPUTER.EXPRESSBPD.COM

EXPRESS COMPUTER AN INDIAN EXPRESS GROUP PUBLICATION

VOLUME NO. 28, NO.6, PAGES 20, JUNE, 2017, ` 75

@ExpComputer

8 | COVER STORY Noshin Kagalwalla, MD, SAS India

Push a Button Move Your Database to the Oracle Cloud

Same Database Same Standards Same Architecture

… or Back to Your Data Center

Push a Button Move Your Java Apps to the Oracle Cloud

Same Java Runtime Same Dev Tools Same Standards Same Architecture

‌ or Back toYour Data Center

cloud.oracle.com/java

Copyright Š 2017, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

INDIA’S LEADING IT MAGAZINE

WWW.COMPUTER.EXPRESSBPD.COM

@ExpComputer

EXPRESS COMPUTER AN INDIAN EXPRESS GROUP PUBLICATION

VOLUME NO. 28, NO.6, PAGES 20, JUNE, 2017, ` 75

12 | FEATURE GST: How Indian CIOs are preparing for India’s most ambitious tax reform

10 | FEATURE

16 | INTERVIEW

18 | CASE STUDY

16 | INTERVIEW

India Inc to continue to ride the digital juggernaut in 2017-18

Ajay Kaul, Director & GM - Head Government Business, Dell EMC

How Aegis moved from a distributed to centralized architecture solution

Parag Arora, Area Vice President & Country Head – India Subcontinent, Citrix

DEMOCRATIZING ANALYTICS With a 360 degree approach focused on bringing the power of analytics to everyone, SAS is looking at exponential growth in the Indian market

Find us on:

Contact us : 9599 110 156 I Website: panasonic.net/psn/products/hdvc/index.html I E-mail: kaushal.singh@in.panasonic.com

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

6 | EDIT MORE INSIDE

EXPRESS COMPUTER Vol 28. No. 6. June, 2017 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Ankush Kumar, Mumbai Nivedan Prakash, Abhishek Raval Bangalore Rachna Jha

COVER STORY Srikanth RP, Editor srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

India on the cusp of a huge digital transformation

DESIGN National Design Editor Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Vinayak Mestry Photo Editor Sandeep Patil

FEATURE

MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West and East Prabhas Jha - North

12 | GST: How Indian CIOs are preparing for India’s most ambitious tax reform

Marketing Team Kailash Purohit Ranabir Das Ajanta Sengupta Mathen Mathew Navneet Negi Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Ashish Anchan

EVENT

PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia 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® Regd.No.REGD.NO.MCS/066/201517. RNI Regn.No.49926/90.

Printed and Published by Vaidehi Thakar on behalf of The Indian Express (P) Limited and Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt.Ltd., Plot No.1C/716, Off. Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (East), Mumbai 400027 and Published at 2nd floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021.

Editor: Srikanth RP * * Responsible for selection of news under the PRB Act. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021) Copyright © 2017. 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.

MUMBAI 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 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 Prabhas Jha Mobile : +91 9899707440 Email id: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com

8| DEMOCRATIZING ANALYTICS

12 | BFSI Digital Leaders Summit 2017 Yes Bank is fully prepared for the digital era

S

trategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations – this famous quote by late professor and famous management guru, C K Prahalad, perhaps best exemplifies the aspirations of a huge number of companies in India. Indian firms have always been eager to experiment and create new business models using emerging technologies.

A number of recent initiatives taken by companies show how Indian firms have proactively adopted digital technologies. Enhancing customer service is a clear focus area. PNB MetLife, for example, has launched a virtual reality platform. Using a VR headset, customers can converse with a 3D simulated virtual insurance expert and get answers to their queries. Similarly, HDFC Bank has deployed an interactive humanoid called IRA in one of its branches in Mumbai, wherein the robot will guide customers to the relevant counters. abof.com, the Aditya Birla

A number of recent initiatives taken by companies show how Indian firms have proactively adopted digital technologies

Group’s fashion focused e-commerce site, has launched an AI-based personal fashion advisor, which will advise customers on what they can wear for specific occasions. ICICI Bank has deployed software bots in over 200 business process functions across the organization. Besides reducing the response time to customers by 60 percent, the bots perform over 10 lakh transactions on a daily basis, which enables ICICI

Navneet Negi Mobile No. +91 8800523285 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 Kailash Purohit The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile No. +91 9552537922, Email: kailash.purohit@expressindia.com

Bank to handle ever growing volumes with existing resources. Yes Bank has launched a digital banking service whereby any account holder can by using just a basic feature phone do money transfers, pay utility bills, and perform other mobile banking services.

Tata Motors has partnered with Microsoft to offer its customers a personalized experience. For example, based on the profile of the customer and the location they are driving, customers can receive route and shopping recommendations. Using cloud-based diagnostics, the company and the passengers will be able to leverage insights from vehicle data to improve health of the vehicle through preemptive alerts, which in turn will help in preventing warranty or recall issues.

Hero MotoCorp has setup a factory using the ‘Digital Twin’ concept. Using this concept, the company was able to create a digital model of its factory in Halol, even before a single step was taken with respect to construction. With the capability to digitally visualize the manufacturing facility, the company could make necessary changes and enhancements digitally before investing in physical facilities.

The above examples show the intent of Indian organizations to quickly adopt emerging technologies, and use it to their advantage. Perhaps the best example of a company which is using digital technologies to its advantage is Reliance Jio. The company signed up 1 million customers a day by leveraging eKYC. With just an Aadhaar number, a customer could cut through the maze of signing up and producing multiple documents and get his Reliance Jio connection activated within a few minutes.

The rising number of digital only business models (DBS Bank launching a mobile only bank last year and Koltak Mahindra Bank launching 811 – a savings account which can be opened instantly by a customer by using just the Aadhaar and PAN number), points out to a broader trend that is only set to accelerate.

HYDERABAD Kailash Purohit 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 9552537922, Email: kailash.purohit@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

KOLKATA Ajanta Sengupta, Debnarayan Dutta 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 : ajanta.sengupta@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

Debnarayan Dutta Mobile No. +91 9051150480, Email: debnarayan.dutta@expressindia.com

AHMEDABAD Ranabir Das The Indian Express (P) Ltd. 3rd Floor, Sambhav House, Near Judges Bunglows, Bodakdev, Ahmedabad - 380 015, Mobile No. +91 9820097606 Email: Ranabir.das@expressindia.com

14 | What can data analytics do for a nation?

15 | Analytics makes ‘designed for you’ possible

17 | FE CFO Awards: ‘15 lakh cr worth of banned notes may have returned, says Bibek Debroy

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: 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 : prabhas.jha@expressindia.com

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

8 | COVER STORY

DEMOCRATIZING ANALYTICS With a 360 degree approach focused on bringing the power of analytics to everyone, SAS is looking at exponential growth in the Indian market

Nivedan Prakash nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com

D

ata is the new oil, and has rightly become the new currency of the digital economy.

And India, perhaps, represents the biggest story in terms of opportunities for technology firms. The rapid adoption of smartphones, and the concurrent shift of enterprises towards a digital roadmap, and the encouraging policies of the

We have a strong presence in the government sector, wherein we are working closely with CBDT, CBEC and other state agencies for direct and indirect tax detection and prevention Noshin Kagalwalla, MD, SAS India

government for creating a digital ecosystem has lead to a market opportunity that is unique to India. As more firms go on the digital journey, data volumes are going up exponentially, and the consequent need for analytics solutions for finding insights from this data is also increasing at a fast clip.

Analytics firm, SAS India, is right in the center of this action, as it sees huge growth coming from almost every sector. “We have been consistently clocking

double digit year-on-year growth in India. We are probably one of the fastest growing subsidies in Asia Pacific. And we are witnessing growth in terms of employees, customer acquisition, as well as extending the relationship with the existing customer base,” says Noshin Kagalwalla, MD, SAS India.

Out of the all the countries, India contributes significantly to the overall SAS story. Started its operations way back in 1997, the company has since scaled up its presence and currently employs about 700 employees serving approximately 550 customers in the country.

The major share of its revenues from India comes from banking, telecommunication, government, manufacturing, and healthcare and lifesciences. In order to tap the huge growth opportunities available in India, the US-based technology giant is looking to invest heavily in the country, which is also its fastest growing market. In fact, SAS considers India as a very unique opportunity, especially the announcement of government’s Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives that offer huge investment opportunities for the company.

“With the Indian government increasingly pushing for a cashless economy to increase transparency in the system and demonetization being one of the significant steps taken by the government, there is great shift happening towards the digital platform. Increasing digitization also means new avenues for illegal activities and this brings the focus towards fraud detection using analytics. We have a strong presence in the government sector, wherein we are working

CASE STUDIES ILLUSTRATING THE WIDE RANGE OF ANALYTICAL APPLICATIONS IN INDIA HDFC Bank SAS provides a broad range of analytics solutions to help HDFC Bank make credit decicions, enhance its cross-sell and up-sell marketing, and comply with strict regulations. SAS, combined with the bank's CRM solution, helps HDFC Bank model its customer data and assign propensity to buy, spend and (for credit and debit cards) activate.

The bank uses SAS as part of a stringent and focused program for monitoring and identifying potentially fraudulent transactions.

Besides, using SAS, the bank interfaces to a credit-bureau report, validates the customer's identity and runs the application through various models – such as propensity to default.

State of Maharashtra The State of Maharashtra, which has over 120 million citizens, leverages SAS Data Management system to deduplicate myriad government databases. In a matter of four or five hours, the system pointed out potentially 1.5 million duplicate person names in the database. The state is saving upwards of $1 billion a year by eliminating duplicated benefits.

Data management offered the state officials the comfort to begin direct depositing and delivering certain types of benefits directly to citizen’s bank account, rather than having citizens visit multiple offices in an often pointless effort to avert fraud.

Asian Paints Idea Cellular

Axis Bank

The telecom major uses SAS Customer Intelligence and Analytics suite to help the organization grow its revenue from its base of more than 150 million customers. Idea is running analytically driven personalized marketing campaigns by micro segmenting its base to target the right product to the right customer.

The company produces over a 1000 campaigns per day and has seen over $100 million revenue growth as an ROI for this investment.

The bank has implemented SAS Analytics solution to centralize the analysis of bank data in order to find insights that improve decision making and give competitive advantage in terms of customer offerings and operational efficiencies. This has also resulted in reduction of credit costs over the long term. Analytics has been applied in its marketing campaigns as well, which is yielding great returns. While business and sales productivity have gone up, the operating expenses came down.

The country's leading paints company has deployed SAS Visual Analytics to get up-to-the-day visibility of outbound logistics and fleet performance enabling operational decision making. The company is now able to identify root-causes for damages by route, truck, mode, and product mix combination. Aiding to make informed decisions by securing intransit cargo and for mitigating damage incidents. Identifying data patterns like seasonality and trends for deeper investigations to indemnify against damages.

5 1 HDFC Bank

2

3

State of Maharashtra

4 Axis Bank

Idea Cellular

Asian Paints

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

|9

COVER STORY closely with CBDT, CBEC and other state agencies for direct and indirect tax detection and prevention,” highlights Kagalwalla.

From a public sector point of view, when it comes to integrating/ cleansing data and providing meaningful analytical insights, SAS is way ahead of its nearest competition. Currently, it is serving 5 state commercial tax departments and 3 state DES and also the Central Statistics ministry (MOSPI). Other SAS projects with repeatable analytics applications across states include applications such as Voice of Citizen, Chief Minister’s Dashboard, SRDH, etc.

The company is the only analytics OEM with presence in Education (NSDC), Employment (DGET), Agriculture (ICAR), Health care (ESIC and Ministry of Health ), Finance (FIU, CBEC, CBDT) sectors in the country.

Verticals driving growth The core solution areas driving revenue growth for SAS includes advanced analytics, data management, customer intelligence, risk management, and fraud intelligence. Apparently, 90 percent of its software revenue today comes from these core areas. And the company will continue to allocate its resources in these areas to drive future impact.

As SAS has been primarily a business analytics company, the larger pie of its revenue comes from advanced analytics. In fact, it has 31.6% market share in this domain, which is significantly higher than any of its competitors. Despite the onslaught of competition from startups, open source tools, and some established vendors, SAS has continued to dominate this market.

Citing the reason behind this high market share, Kagalwalla points out, “The real differentiator for us has been the way we look at advanced analytics. We believe that using the historical data or data that is there in the organization, one can predict an outcome like forecasting of sales or demand. And this approach will help customers get quantifiable benefits. Besides, we have used these solutions to provide industry specific solutions to the customers, who don’t want to buy technology for the sake of it. Along with technology, we also carry the expertise of understanding each of the verticals that we address. It is this combination of technology plus the domain expertise that is helping us gain a large market share in the area of advanced analytics.”

With regards to data management, the company believes that data is the key for unlocking its

Bank of India The commercial bank has implemented SAS Market Risk for Banking to improve risk management capabilities for both regulatory and internal requirements. The SAS data model also helped the bank to create a repository for the portfolio and market data with time stamps for easy retrieval at any point. With this, the bank is getting a consolidated picture from seven centers and portfolio positions in 17 currencies in one day. And risk reports that were once run quarterly are now being done daily.

value using analytics, hence data management is a vital precursor to analytics in the 'data to discovery' life cycle. Like analytics, SAS has been solving complex data quality related issues for years specifically in banking, telecom, manufacturing, and government sectors.

“We are witnessing Hadoop related technologies gaining momentum in the Indian market.

However, we also see that organizations are unable to really utilize and exploit data in Hadoop for what it is meant for i.e. analytics.

SAS data management technologies for Hadoop, more precisely SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, advocates self-service data management in Hadoop, bridges the Hadoop skill gap and simplifies movement of data from Hadoop to the Analytics Platform,” explains Kagalwalla.

Customer intelligence is the one solution stack where SAS has been successful in implementing customer value management solutions globally across industries.

Since the last couple of years, in addition to B2C enterprises such as banks and communication, its customer intelligence practice is serving a host of B2B players as well.

Kagalwalla states, “With digitization initiatives across the spectrum of industries, organizations today have started to ask question on value generated through the digital programs and approach to sustain it going forward.

Thus, the need of the hour now in today’s digital world is to do relevant and contextual customer targeted marketing intervention in real-time.

This is an undisputed right thing to do to stave off competition from influencing the customer, increasing customer loyalty, and thereby driving profitability. Our solutions use data, analytics and insights on prospects and customers to create relevant, individualized experiences in real time, which is not only oriented to deliver best customer experience but also maximize value from each customer.”

Open and cloud-ready, SAS Viya and its associated offerings provide a simple and unified computing platform that addresses all analytic questions, from small to large

Risk management – a big opportunity Another focus area has been risk management, wherein SAS provides a comprehensive solution for addressing all aspects that organizations risks including credit, market, operational and compliance risks. The company has been consistently rated as the category leader, wherein banks in India and globally have deployed its risk management solutions to manage risk and comply with regulatory requirements.

“The new challenge for financial standards - IFRS9 (International Financial Reporting Standards9) will require banks to accurately predict ECL (expected credit loss), which in turn, will require new credit loss models to be conceived based on analytics. In fact, we are already in the process of implementing IFRS9 at Standard Chartered and more than 40 banks globally. With regards to the domestic market, the company is already in talks with leading banks to deploy the related solutions,” asserts Kagalwalla.

As far as fraud intelligence is concerned, SAS solutions are being used by banks and government revenue agencies. The company is also venturing into newer verticals with respect to fraud detection such as telcos, mobile wallets, and e-business among others. In addition, offerings like the SAS Fraud Framework have been deployed at banks to detect financial crime patterns. The company is also making great strides in easing the investigation process through its new Visual Investigator offering.

“Our journey with tax fraud management started with Maharashtra Sales Tax Department.

One of the reputed customers in this domain includes CBEC (Central Board of Excise & Customs) and CBDT (Central Board of Direct Taxes). SAS fraud management solution is a central component in CBDT’s 'Project Insight' program for detecting direct tax fraud. Besides, the commercial tax departments across most of the states like Maharashtra, UP, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh among others are using SAS solutions for fraud management. Our solutions are helping the government in increasing its revenue collection,” says Kagalwalla.

Along with these core solution areas, the company has made inroads into data visualization space as well with its visual analytics solutions. SAS visual analytics provides an interactive user experience that combines advanced data visualization, an

Maruti Suzuki The auto manufacturer has deployed SAS Customer Intelligence and Demand-Driven Forecasting solutions to get a wholistic view of their customers in order to maintain the market leadership in the country.

This not only helped the company in maintaining and improving customer satisfaction but also crosssell, up-sell and repeat sell to its 10 million customers through a single database. With this approach, it achieved the growth of nearly 3 percent in just seven months.

easy-to-use interface, and powerful in-memory technology.

“About a decade ago, organizations used to have a small team of mathematicians / statisticians doing number crunching and providing relevant information. But today the visualization solutions have given organizations an ability to take swift business decisions. You don’t need to have a technical background to analyze the data and then take decisions. This is what we want to leverage through our data visualization solutions and invest in the coming days,” adds Kagalwalla.

Betting big on SAS Viya In order to modernize its existing analytics platform for the future of analytics, SAS has undertaken a $1 billion commitment and launched SAS Viya, which helps minimize the time between early-stage analytical exploration and the end result of business value. SAS Viya is the foundation of a suite of offerings, including machine learning, to address any analytic challenge.

Open and cloud-ready, SAS Viya and its associated offerings provide a simple and unified computing platform that addresses all analytic questions, from small to large. The simple and powerful architecture of SAS Viya ensures easy deployment in the cloud or onsite.

“The open SAS Viya architecture makes analytics accessible to anyone, and we want to build upon that openness by creating a community for knowledge sharing.

Users will be able to contribute code, procedures, visuals and services, and collaborate on ideas,” opines Kagalwalla.

Bridging the Skill-Gap Looking at the skill gap in the analytics space, SAS is putting a lot of effort in training people and churning out data scientists in the market. The company believes that data scientists are one of the most employable professionals in the world today. It is simply because analytical talent is in high demand.

The most effective data scientists can go beyond analysis and communicate what they have learned into actionable recommendations for clients as well as incorporating solutions into automated production systems.

Kagalwalla asserts, “Analytics is an area that we are looking to reskill the talent out there in the market. This is the reason why we impart training on the solution and services that we provide and then certify so that it can help bridging the skill gap. Today, customers want data scientists to be part of their

The advent of IoT has magnified the focus on real-time data processing and analytics. SAS Analytics for IoT covers the full IoT analytics life cycle – from data capture and integration to analytics and deployment

organization. The kind of value these people bring to the organization is pretty much established. If a person brings analytical understanding with the business expertise, then he or she becomes an asset for the organization.” The academy offers both classroom and blended learning programs that certify experts in the field of data science.

Investment areas Amongst the new technology areas, SAS is very bullish on Internet of Things (IoT). Looking at the applicability of IoT across verticals, the company is already geared up to address the burgeoning market opportunities.

And as IoT gets increasingly more complex with implementations moving from theory to reality, SAS is enhancing collaboration with partners like Cisco and Intel to drive analytics adoption with IoT. In this endeavor, the company has partnered with Cisco to take SAS ESP (Event Stream Processing) to Cisco's Edge for IoT stack. The companies are calling their combined capability edge-toenterprise analytics, and it is specifically targeted at IoT use cases. The reference architecture combines Cisco’s networking, edge and datacenter infrastructure with SAS’s capabilities in streaming and advanced analytics.

“The advent of IoT has magnified the focus on real-time data processing and analytics. SAS Event Stream Processing applies the power of analytics to fast-moving high throughput data while it is in motion and the edge,” states Kagalwalla.

He further adds, “IoT is more than just a convenience for consumers. It offers new sources of data and business operating models that can boost productivity in a variety of industries like

IIM Lucknow Reliance Energy With the implementation of SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting solution, the energy demand forecasting accuracy improved to 98.8 percent. One percent improvement in accuracy saves roughly $2.2 million in fines per year and potentially millions in avoided short-term power purchases. The company had a return on investment within six months of using the SAS solution.

Reliance can factor in information such as major factory shut downs, temperature variations, percent of multigeneration households in a given area, humidity, rainfall, daily sunset and sunrise information, and historic information on holiday usage.

To help prepare business students for analytics-intensive jobs in multiple industries, the institute is using SAS Education Analytical Suite with SAS Enteprise Miner to teach business analytics. This is helping students become proficient in one of the most critical skills needed for business professionals today i.e. data-driven decision making. Enrollment in the course has more than doubled in six years, and the insitute is working to include analytics and data mining education in more of the university’s business courses.

manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, telecommunications, utilities, etc.

SAS Analytics for IoT covers the full IoT analytics life cycle – from data capture and integration to analytics and deployment.”

In the field of artificial intelligence, SAS is combining existing analytical capabilities with modern techniques. SAS has been supporting AI technologies in analytics for decades and is already contributing critical components to the cognitive computing mix. These include unparalleled natural language processing and open, deep learning API (application programming interface) libraries sitting on top of advanced analytics, including the SAS Viya platform.

In order to tap opportunities in the cloud domain, the company has made SAS analytics available as a 'service', which will be delivered through SAS cloud. Results-as-aService model is another area where the company is going to invest heavily on. It has recently launched SAS Results, a cloud-based Resultsas-a-Service offering, to deliver advanced analytic insights especially to small and medium enterprises. SAS Results is ideal for organizations that have increasing demand for skilled analysts; lack resources, such as a data center or management bandwidth; face significant business problems that need swift resolution; and need to overcome limited budget and opportunities to increase headcount.

Scaling up the partner ecosystem SAS's strong partner ecosystem enables the company to give customers even more options and flexibility in terms of how they implement SAS software. The company is putting a strong effort towards scaling up the partners ecosystem in the country. They undergo the training and subsequently the certification. “We have been investing in partners, not just in India but globally as well,” he adds.

With the emergence of technologies like IoT and artificial intelligence, SAS is looking at engaging with specialized partners.

“Yes, we are looking at nextgeneration partners who are specialized in these areas. Besides, some of our existing partners are setting up special courses to learn these new technologies. Even the partners that we currently work with like TCS, Wipro, KPMG, PWC, Deloitte, and Infosys, are setting up a dedicated team,” concludes Kagalwalla.

Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Maharashtra DES used SAS Business Analytics to generate and analyze its key statistical reports. SAS frees DES' analysts from managing data, allowing focus on critical research anad analysis of data for effective socioeconomic decision making.

SAS technology empowered the organization to create expertise in analytics and information management so as to create decision support system in times to come. In addition, SAS disseminates DES data through an integrated environment involving Web-based scheduled and ad hoc reporting. DES enjoys the multilingual capabilities of SAS to satisfy regional language needs.

8 9

7 6 Bank of India

Maruti Suzuki

Reliance Energy

IIM Lucknow

10 Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Maharashtra

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

10 | FEATURE

India Inc to continue to ride the digital juggernaut in 2017-18 WHILE DIGITAL transformation was the trend in 2016-17, corporate India will continue with their digital transformation projects in FY 2017-18. As IT budgets will see an uptick, security budget will also see an uptrend, reports Abhishek Raval

MARICO LIMITED Girish Rao, Head - IT & Business Analytics, Marico Limited

W

e have been able to reduce the data crunching time, on a daily and monthly basis and get the sales leadership to have a visibility of what is happening in the market on a business real time situation. We have been able to intervene in situations where otherwise a one month wait was needed to really understand the situation in its comprehensiveness.

This is the impact that we have witnessed. The decisions makers are able to see the data in a much more insightful manner.

We have three different systems in the IT landscape. SAP is the core.

We have extended ERP applications on .NET. The endpoint applications are on Android. If the decision maker has to get the visibility of the entire process chain, typically, they have to traverse through these systems - one by one. So, earlier, information had to be stitched to get a one view of the data. After the analytics initiative, it’s readily available in real time. The data layer consolidates data from these systems and makes it available for analytics.

For example, our direct

BAJAJ ELECTRICALS LTD Pratap Gharge, Executive President & CIO, Bajaj Electricals Ltd

W

e have developed a CRM software in an after sales service kind of an application available on the web and mobile platform, for call center agents, outsourced service delivery franchisees and their technicians and the entire customer care internal team. This was one of the projects that gave us a tremendous impact because it helped us in improving our customer service delivery and satisfaction, which was a consumer centric initiative, which also helped us to have a control over technicians right from a geo tracking perspective to some kind of fictitious calls being recorded. Thus we got a good control over our service delivery costs. The IT department collaborated with other departments to seamlessly provide the services. Because of the mobile apps, the technicians are able to serve the customers more proactively than before. Even the call center agents were able to handle more calls due to the development of the intelligent software which reduces the number of screens required to navigate through to perform a particular action. In 2016-17, we have also started on the digital transformation journey, which will have a long term impact. The focus was on customer centric digital transformation. We have engaged a consultant who will help us in working on six tracks - social media, cloud, analytics, IoT, web presence and multi channel. The consumer will be the focus in all these areas.

Hitherto, the focus was on internal business operations and at the most, connecting our business partners.

Traditionally, we are always selling through conventional channels like trade channels, institutional channel or modern retail format. We were connected only upto the channel point but unaware about

procurement happens in SAP. We also have a large trader base, from whom we may not be purchasing directly. The purchase is done through our collection centers.

They are all mapped in SAP as one vendor. To get visibility into the multiple transactions which one collection center does in a day, we have to look at the .NET system.

Again, for example, to check for the efficiency in our buying, I have to look at the efficiency of the overall buying. Typically, this information was only arrived upon after consolidating data sitting in the .NET system, which is not from SAP. This is because, SAP is not mapped with the transactions carried out with individual farmers. Without the analytics programme, this information from the farmers would

have been lost. Today, with analytics, I am able to judge the efficiency of the collection center vis-à-vis us buying from the traders.

From a marketing point of view, I am able to look at primary sales, which is in SAP and compare it with how the market is moving in secondary as one process chain.

Earlier the secondary sales related data was available in another system.

They were not mapped as part of SAP. However the primary sales was mapped as part of SAP, so our sales to our customers, which is done by distributors is in SAP but what the distributor is selling to the retailer is available in a totally different system.

But with this analytics platform, we are now able to look at primary and secondary sales in one place, and in a single view.

mobile user base. This includes both company owned and employee owned mobile devices. The BDA can take on-the-spot business decisions based on the real time updates on their tablets and mobiles. They don’t have to call and ask for data. Essar has devised a BYOD policy and allows employee’s personal mobile devices on the network. The application access is need based.

There are many solutions that we have but HR and BDA had the most positive business impact.

An appliance based wireless solution has also been implemented. The access provided is seamless across any of the Essar’s guest house, sales, regional, or corporate office. There is no log in, password process. The access is seamless across the globe in more than 200 offices. The centralized controller is based in Mumbai and the redundant

controller is in Hazira. The access policies are operated from the central office. The local access point has a dumb device.

In 2016-17, we had taken a theme: Digital transformation. It will continue in 2017-18. While in some businesses, the BDA projects are still pending, there are businesses where we are doing automation, which will also continue in this year. We are also evaluating AI solutions. For multiple instances, we are planning to move DR instances on cloud.

Currently, about 20-25 projects are in full swing. On the enterprise mobility side, we are planning to move more apps on mobile.

In 2017-18, overall the IT spending has been raised by 10-15 percent and the major part is on security. The Essar group is in the final phase of setting up a Security Operations Center (SOC) for internal requirements.

their mobile phones. All this brought in business appreciation to our technology investments.

In the FY18 , our focus is on the following: SAP HANA implementation, GST compliance, business process optimization and process based organization, mobility and analytics dashboard, automation of our existing shared

accounting services, revamping our CRM system, revamping our L&D (Learning and Development) and HR systems and to make them 100 percent mobility driven, revamping our cloud and enterprise security investments and implementation of IoT solutions at our manufacturing facility in the state of Orissa.

ESSAR GROUP Jayantha Prabhu, Group CIO, Essar Group

I our end customers. We know about a customer only if a customer logs in a call with the call center. To ensure that we know every customer, an analytics track has been introduced.

The first phase started last year and the focus is on customer data acquisition. The customers are categorized as B2B and B2C. B2B includes Government institutions, private companies and builders.

Bajaj Electricals also undertakes turnkey lighting projects like illumination of Victoria Terminus station or Wankhede Stadium, Bandra Worli Sealink, petrol pumps, etc. These are some of the big projects completed in Mumbai. We also do rural electrification and transmission towers in the B2B segment. The focus is both on B2C, end customers as well as B2B, our existing customers about whom we have some information but we want to increase the engagement with them, and give them a good experience from any channel - like multi channel experience. There are 2-3 initiatives for customer acquisition - the retailer bonding programme, which entails providing a PoS mobile app to every retailer and asking them to take a scan on the QR code, may be the mobile number and the name of the customer at the PoS itself. The

retailers are given incentives if they get this information from the customer. Secondly, the customers can register their products on the website of Bajaj electricals.

Customers are incentivised for registering on the website. In 201718, the overall IT spending including security will be increased by 10 percent and 5-10 percent respectively. As far as new technology adoption is concerned, Bajaj Electricals has implemented Blockchain with multiple banks. The company’s entire banking operations is getting integrated through Blockchain. The channel financing products, the discounting requirements, payments, etc. As far as trends in the manufacturing sector is concerned, 3D printing will be a big trend. It can impact the designs of the manufacturing plants.

Moreover, robotics, automation are going to make our manufacturing more productive. Thus the quality of the work will enhance. Bajaj Electricals is not heavily into manufacturing. It has outsourced to multiple suppliers. We are primarily a marketing company, focussing on consumer data acquisition, big data analytics, to analyse the customer’s entire journey. We want to increase the customer’s experience as well as enhance the engagement.

n 2016-17, we have set up a global command centre to monitor, manage and maintain plants, dispersed geographically.

The processes, vehicle movements, CCTVs, decisions on raw material usage can be taken from this center.

This is because there are different technologies for producing steel and based on raw material availability (gas, power or coal), one can decide which plant to run optimally based on the business requirements. The command centre is live and this is the major initiative we have taken up.

The second initiative is in the space of HR. Essar is the only company in India to have selected all the 8 modules of SuccessFactors.

This has been done for all the 14,000 users in the Essar group.

Even globally, there are not many examples of companies having implemented all the modules.

Certain processes unavailable in SuccessFactors along with time management, automatic generation of appointment, appraisal letter have been developed indigenously in the HR core system. By filling up these gaps, the HR process is automated end-to-end. It’s on a hybrid cloud kind of a model. We do time management, payroll and ESS/MSS on-premise and using a single sign on, it is on ADSS Microsoft. It is integrated with the SuccessFactors cloud.

Essar has a huge enterprise

JSPL Vipul Anand, Group CIO, JSPL

JSW Dheeraj Sinha, Group CIO, JSW

J

SW is re-inventing itself in a way it has not done before. The buzz word today is digitalization. While being one of the most cost efficient producers, the digitization journey brings in the challenges to improve the best, find waste, make the processes more efficient. Customer intimacy is the new mantra. JSW wants to undertake digital transformation across Manufacturing, Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain (including logistics) functions. The key objective set for the journey was to enable effective adoption of modern digital tools for increasing productivity, operational efficiency and enhancing customer experience thereby increasing Revenue and EBITDA for the organization. The

digital transformation program should also enable the organization to embrace the digital culture.

The whole digitalization revolves around key critical components of the following: ● Developing the digital strategy and roadmap ● Pilot, develop prototypes and prepare for rollout of key disruptive ideas ● Identifying and kick-start implementation ● Setup and develop the core digital (COE) team ● Sustain with multiple waves of digitalization The methodology adopted was to do divergence – widening the horizon and understanding the art of possible. Next step is convergence – prioritizing the top opportunities to pursue and hence set up the strategy and digital roadmap. All the three steps are repetitive in nature and the work runs in sprints

or waves. Critical set of projects are at various stages of implementation and the value accrued is highly attractive.

This is still the initial period of digitalization within the Group and we have scratched just the surface of the projects. The complete organization structure for digitalization comprising of the Digital Board, Digital Leaders, Director –Digital Transformation and the Digital Center for Excellence has been created with governance structures.

Parallel tracks are running to enhance the capability and modernize the infrastructure, cloud adoption, analytics , mobility, security with a comprehensive view to ensure and enhance agility and delivery. I see a very exciting and a challenging period of transformation of the capabilities that JSW has, giving it the competitive advantage in the market place.

I

n FY2016-17, analytics and mobility were the two initiatives, which impacted the business for a faster decision making. In FY17, we created the analytics dashboard for business monitoring. Our business decision makers including the chairman used these dashboards with online on-hand information of our business spread across geographies.

Additionally, we have built in many mobile apps for the business executives to access and transact business through their mobiles.

Workers were able to apply for their leaves using smart phones while supervisors and HR could approve on the mobile app. Customers and dealers can buy our products using the partner mobile app and business decision makers can approve the purchase requests and any approval documents using

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

| 11

FEATURE EVEREST INDUSTRIES LTD Krishna Kant Mishra, CIO, Everest Industries Ltd

I

In 2016-17, the main theme was customer satisfaction.

We improvised in that area and mobile apps were developed for the sales team to make them aware about the customer (dealers, distributors) requirements.

In the first quarter of 2017-18, the focus will be on GST. Additionally, our SAP instance will be upgraded to SAP S/4 HANA. The roadmap is directed towards digitization of our decision making systems, solutions and analytics. In 201617, the focus was on analytics and mobility. In 2017-18, it’s again moving towards digital environment setup for all level of

systems along with analytics.

The last year’s initiatives had a positive business impact. We were able to reduce our cost.

Also, a lot of data which was unavailable to our sales team is now readily available. This has lessened the burden on the backend team, who earlier provided the required data. We have reduced the number of regional sales offices. Thus we are able to manage the business in a more efficient way. The benefits are attributed to the enterprise mobility initiative.

The customer portal developed last year enables the customer to log the complaint. Also, they can check their account on the portal without having to ask their sales person. The complaint registered by the customer is directly logged in the SAP system, which is available to the quality inspector.

He can now immediately schedule

a time, when the quality inspector will visit the location. This is also communicated to the customer,

who can now through the portal or mobile app check the complaint resolution status.

Earlier, the customer queried the sales person, who then called the sales office. The relevant query resolution was then communicated back either directly to the customer or the sales person.

Today, the benefits are multifold, for the senior management, especially for the sales force. For example, the zonal head, while he is on field visits can go through customer’s entire transaction history: the account balance, the kind of transactions done in the past and the complaints raised by him. At the same time, he can check what kind of commitment has been done by my team while visiting the specific customer. The IT budget has increased roughly by 5-10 percent. With the increase in investment, we have made a corresponding increase in networking, security.

we have moved away from the manual compilation or check-list

type of system to an automated compliance tool. Timely alerts,

escalations on delays and various kinds of reports are generated through this tool. This has reduced the workload of our secretarial departments across the group. We have initiated a process improvement activity to identify manual processes that complement the SAP and other applications with an aim to integrate all processes with a suitable BPM Tool.

In 2017-18, there are various IT initiatives on the anvil. Firstly, we are now evaluating a BPM tool suitable to develop a Business Process Management system for our EPC business. On G-Suite, we will roll out the ‘Android for Work’ to deliver applications on mobile devices to authorized employees to

increase their decision-making capabilities while they are mobile in a secure manner. On the IoT side, we are evaluating products and tools for centralized monitoring of our roof-top solar modules which are scattered across the country at more than four hundred locations. This will help in carrying out preventive maintenance and increasing productivity. This will also enable us to avoid placing manpower at many scattered sites by keeping a centralized work-force in a cluster and alerting them in time to attend to any call. In FY17-18, the IT security and overall IT spending is likely to be increased by 10 percent.

In 2017-18, investments in guest experience and operational efficiency improvements remain the key focus areas. In addition, we plan to make significant investments in machine learning and data sciences to better predict demand across our network and understand consumer behaviour. We also plan to make major investments in IoT and artificial intelligence to enhance in-stay guest experience by automation of check-in and check-out and other tasks like controlling room lighting or AC temperature. Natural Language Processing (NLP) will also be a major area for driving in-stay guest experience improvements.

With significant current and anticipated growth in our business, we are doubling down on technology investments in most areas. Information Security and protecting our guest's and partner's data stays utmost priority for us and we are continuing to increase focus and spending on IT security.

WOCKHARDT HOSPITALS

more of a battlefield now than ever before.

New areas of further exploiting new IT tools and methodologies are being explored more in the space of clinical outcome. All of us have probably experienced long

waiting time with thick medical record files while visiting a doctor. We are looking in this area closely. Our motto is Life Wins. So IT is definitely aligned with it to enhance the overall experience when someone visits Wockhardt.

LANCO GROUP Kaushal K Chaudhary, Executive Director - Group Head IT & IS, Lanco Group

I

n the last financial year, one of the major initiatives was the migration to cloud for our email service. We migrated from Zimbra-based in-premise email service to cloud-based G-Suite with many new features including collaboration. This has not only resulted in better user experience but also timely submission of collaborative project documentation.

The compliance tool was also implemented in 2016-17. In order to ensure compliance of all regulatory or policy requirements,

OYO ROOMS Anil Goel, Chief Technology Officer, OYO Rooms

I

n 2016-17, we have made significant technology investments in improving the guest experience, enabling our on-ground salesforce and improving efficiency of our endto-end operations. Our Krypton app for on-ground operations enhanced the hotel auditing capabilities resulting in further improvement in guest experience.

OYO Captain, our concierge service launched in December 2016, was also delivered using Krypton, and has helped us resolve most of the on-stay guest issues within minutes. Our MicroMarkets Demand app has significantly enhanced the efficiency and efficacy of our onground demand managers by providing them an intuitive and easy-to-use technology to carry out most of their functions.

MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA Rajesh Uppal, CIO, Maruti Suzuki India

M

aruti Suzuki has built competence and stayed ahead in terms of IT infrastructure. Being the largest passenger car maker in the country, IT is crucial backbone of our business operations involving dealers and vendors.

With the help of in-house developed systems, the nationwide network of over 2000 dealers is monitored on real time basis. Similarly the co-ordination with our domestic and international

suppliers is crucial. Maruti Suzuki has over 400 Tier-I suppliers and another 2,000 plus Tier-II suppliers. On the strength of the IT systems, the ordering and uninterrupted supplies are monitored round the clock by our operational teams. A robust IT infrastructure helps to keep a close track of component supplies and finished cars while in transit on a real time basis.

As the scale of operations increase and we expand to multiple locations, strong and well integrated IT infrastructure ensures a seamless business operation.

In line with the changing business dynamics, mobility,

Sumit Singh, CIO, Wockhardt Hospitals

I

n 2016-17, the Business Intelligence project that we did over the Qlik platform, fits the bill best, in terms of overall business impact. This was the foray for our organization into data mining and analytics domain. The ground work was started about 18 months earlier to create a custom model that best fit Wockhardt and now after having been in use for a while, we are finding more and more new use cases to better understand, control and make decisions for some of the key areas of operations. These include P/L, purchasing, resource deployment, equipment utilization, planning and forecasting, etc. We look forward to taking this further into other areas in the clinical sphere ahead.

In 2017-18, I want to make Wockhardt, a digital hospital. A kind of home delivery of medical services in addition to serving within the physical boundaries of the hospital is an area we look at with big possibilities in this year.

IT has a big role to play here.

We plan to retain or marginally increase our overall IT spend in this fiscal year.

Wockhardt Hospital has never shied away from making prudent IT investments and in the near future, we plan to upgrade some of the applications used. In the security space, it has been an ongoing effort to keep pace with latest advancements and not to fall behind. And hence, we are beefing up on end point security and control which has become

cloud and cybersecurity were the successful initiatives in 2016-17. Usage of mobile enabled business processes, especially for the mobile workforce within and in the extended organization proved impactful in terms of business operations and inducing process efficiencies.

Sales and service network is our strength and it is continuously expanding. In under 2 years, Maruti Suzuki’s car retail channel, NEXA has added 250 premium retail outlets across the country. The business associates are mapped by the IT network, which is maintained and developed by our in-house team. The upgradation of

HERO MOTOCORP Vijay Sethi, CIO & VP IS, Hero MotoCorp

I

n 2016-17, we have set up a factory in Halol using the ‘Digital Twin’ technology concept.

The entire factory was simulated, as to how would it look after it is ready for operations.

This is the first time a factory has been built in India using the digital twin technology. Thus we were able to avoid any layout, process related changes that might have been done afterwards.

As a consequence, the cost incurred, time taken was reduced in a big way. The rework level was slashed to a significant level.

From a marketing perspective, we worked heavily on social media, digital marketing. In the analytics space, we moved from the run of the mill Big Data systems to predictive analytics.

Another big focus was on mobility. We came up with very innovative features and templates with respect to mobile apps. We became the first company in the two wheeler segment to upload the user manuals on the mobile phones, which is linked to an individual’s number. The free service coupons for vehicle owners were digitized.

In the supply chain space, we did some projects linking our factories and suppliers.

This led to huge amount of savings in the organization. This was to the tune of 4-5 times the investment we made on the respective IT project. Each of the investments were of `1-2 crore each. In each of the areas - marketing, finance, supply chain, operations, sales, we undertook 1-2 big projects. On the enterprise analytics side, we converted the BI platform to SAP HANA. This was an action packed year on both the business and IT front.

In 2017-18, enterprise mobility, analytics, social media, linkages with suppliers, the digital twin simulations, all of these are ongoing and will continue.

One more project that I am personally handling in my capacity as a chairman of Society of Indian Automobile Manufactures (SIAM) IT is AutoDX, wherein we are linking and clubbing all the automotive industry into one single system. Last year we crossed 3 million transactions on that platform. This year, we are giving it a bigger thrust and connecting more companies and suppliers.

In 2017-18, we may continue to adopt IoT, augmented reality, virtual reality -- the PoCs for which were done last year. These initiatives will get a huge focus this year. The digital marketing piece will also be on our list. Last year, we moved the HR systems on the cloud and this year, we will make further developments in that area too.

Our IT budget is increasing by roughly fifty two percent this year. The huge jump in the IT budgets is due to adoption of advanced technologies like AR, VR, IoT, digitization and policy changes such as GST. Over the last 10 years, our IT budget has increased. This year, the jump has been significant. The IT security budget will also see a spurt.

network to meet the rising scale is utmost important for Maruti Suzuki. The financial year 2017-18 will definitely see even more work in the areas of mobility, cloud and cybersecurity. At the same time, GST and GRC will be in focus. Customer engagement using analytics, mobility and single view of customer (CRM) will also be focus areas in 2017-18. IT systems help Maruti Suzuki to track customer trends, grievances and demands. The analytical data derived from the network is of value for our engineers, to improve existing products and design future cars.

IT spending will be increased in line with the

growth in the size of our business, while IT security spending will also keep pace, accordingly. Digitization and mobility will play a big role in customer engagement initiatives and workforce efficiency enhancement. IoT will play an important role in the operational efficiency enhancement and customer engagement. There will be lot of opportunity areas on the cross-roads of various technologies (using IoT and analytics for enhancing business productivity and customer experience).

Emerging technologies like Blockchain will be evaluated with respect to their utility in the business.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

12 | FEATURE

GST: How Indian CIOs are preparing for India’s most ambitious tax reform with various stakeholders for a while now. We have done an impact analysis in our entire workflow and processes where we need to prepare for. Accordingly, IT systems, internal or vendor supported are going through the necessary enhancements.

I expect we should be fine from day one of GST coming in to effect.

OYO ROOMS Anil Goel, Chief Technology Officer, OYO Rooms

I THE ONE NATION, One Tax reform is set to be a challenge for Indian enterprises as they prepare to customize their internal systems with respect to different factors such as business process localization, tax computation and supply chain management. To understand how Indian enterprises are preparing for the GST era, Abhishek Raval spoke to CIOs across different verticals.

Here is a brief snapshot of their perspective HERO MOTOCORP Vijay Sethi, CIO & VP- IS, HeroMotoCorp

O

ur GST transition began in August 2016.

It’s not only helping us but also our partners in ensuring that the ecosystem is ready for GST. Conceptually, the way taxes were computed, will change from multiple taxes and subsume into State GST, Integrated GST and Central GST. As a result of these changes,

the business set up will change. Earlier, the location of plants, warehouses and offices were also governed by taxation. All this will change. The entire logic of how the taxes, costs and order value will be computed will change. We have SAP as ERP, so we have changed the tax procedures in the ERP and then the second part is to inject the software patches and programs with respect to the new taxation system. This is done in three phases after doing

consultation with various partners. By 15th June, we would be ready.

JSW Dheeraj Sinha, Group CIO, JSW

W

e have setup a GST business advisory and decision making Apex team. This is supported by individual business owners which in turn are supported by Tax and GST Compliance Advisory teams to help the business in taking the right decisions. Translations of directions in the systems is then a job of the IT teams which report back to the business teams for the project. This is one of the highly complex projects and touches the critical Record to Report, procure to Pay and Order to Cash cycles. It impacts all vendor, customer, material SKUs and there are significant changes in key processes in the above areas.

The Technology team is working along with the business and running it as a programme. The project has been on for more than 5 months now. The impact analysis of the new Tax

regime, the modifications needed in existing codes, the new changes brought

by GST are documented and system readiness is being done for the same.

Impact analysis on existing solutions and custom codes has also been done and rectifications are under way. While there are a still a lot of unknowns, the configuration work is almost ready and cut-over scenarios are under discussions.

As part of the preparations, mock environment for GST compliance has been created where all the testings are being done.

The vendor master, customer master, pricing procedures, pricing reviews are all tasks that are at various stages of readiness.

We will be reviewing our progress around the end of May to enable us to take business calls wherever needed and pending.

WOCKHARDT HOSPITALS Sumit Singh, CIO, Wockhardt Hospitals

W

e have been talking to and planning for GST

n preparation of GST, we are making investments in increasing flexibility of our tax systems so that we can implement different tax rate slabs for different sources of revenue i.e, Room rent, meals etc. at various jurisdiction levels i.e., Central, State and City, by merely changing the configuration.

ESSAR GROUP Jayantha Prabhu, Group CIO, Essar Group

W

e are working on customizing SAP as per the GST requirement.

On the IT side, we are ready. All the 8 SAP instances are completely GST compliant. For GST implementation, we are working with a third party organization. The group has set up a 10 member team for GST rollout.

BAJAJ ELECTRICALS LTD Pratap Gharge, Executive President & CIO, Bajaj Electricals Ltd

W

e have started two projects on the GST rollout preparation. One is focused on technology and the other on business. The business re-organization, because of GST may give us some benefits vis-a-vis

the other taxes. We will have to be ready to take the advantage. We are in the process of consultations with some of the warehouses, which are present mandatorily in selected states.

Henceforth these warehouses may not be required in the GST regime. This can lead to changes in the IT system.

As far as the GST taxation rollout itself, we have already started a rollout with one of our consultants for taking our ERP and applying the patches which are ready.

We use Oracle ERP. The patches are being tested.

We are almost ready and waiting for certain clarifications. As far as the new accounting standard is concerned, the Ind-AS, the IT is involved to the extent of whatever application changes are required. So, we are helping our finance department by extracting all the information in the format which can be given, which is the Ind- AS kind of a format. Broadly, we are helping in data extraction. Also certain modules are being developed on our intranet. App designing is also on to enable the IndAS process. The standard accounting practices of the ERP will not change.

Only the way certain reporting is done will change due to Ind-AS. We are trying to give the necessary tools to the finance department to extract data, which is to be reported as per the IndAS standards.

MARICO Girish Rao, Head - IT and Business Analytics, Marico

R

ight now, the focus is on transaction systems before we look at the analytics systems

because the jury is still out on how GST will change the situation on the ground. The stress currently is on transaction and data acquisition systems. Once we have a fair idea of how the situation will pan out, then we will look at analytics. Our estimate is that there will be a lag of atleast 3-4 months before the analytics platform becomes suitable for GST. Having said that, route optimization will be helpful because the state boundaries will have a lesser impact in that sense. It may also lead to relocation of depots etc.

Thus we are also trying to optimize the supply chain to position warehouses in places that will be friendly to supply chain rationalization.

EVEREST INDUSTRIES LTD

of analytics do we have to identify such vendors. We have made our SAP sandbox, and are implementing SAP nodes for doing the final configurations. We are doing the data cleansing for our customers and vendors.

We need to access the GSTN network through some GSTN Service Provider (GSP), also known as a Suvidha provider. The Govt has certified 34 GSPs who will be providing us services and it is mandatory for an enterprise to access the GSTN through a GSP, who has certain standard APIs provided by the GSTN. There will also be companies, known as Application Service Providers (ASP) , who will provide analytics and give us solution to file returns.

JSPL Krishna Kant Mishra, CIO, Everest Industries Ltd

Vipul Anand, Group CIO, JSPL

W

G

e are still in the process of finalizing our depot structure because the biggest impact will happen on our distribution network.

Currently, we are having about forty depots in the country. Going forward, the number will reduce subsequently. Thus the logistics costs will have the biggest impact. The evaluation is on for zeroing on the strategic locations for depots. As a consequence, IT will have a role in the seamless communication between departments.

Additionally, the SAP configurations will undergo change. It’s a major task. We need to create some more APIs for finding the vendors who are not suitable for the environment, which means if they are not complying then what kind

ST will have a huge impact on our business. We have already completed an impact analysis of GST across our business functions.

With the GST law passed, now our teams have been able to compile a formal document of impact of GST onto our business processes and systems.

Accordingly a task force has been formed to ensure that we implement necessary modifications onto our application platform to cater to the needs of GST impact.

While we are confident to be ready for GST across all our business locations , our larger worry is to make sure that our external stakeholders are ready and the infrastructure including portals and systems stay integrated in time as per GST needs.

INTERVIEW

“We are the only telco to reach 50 million IoT connections” THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT), is seen as a new industrial revolution, which is poised to support large-scale business transformation. In fact, organizations have started believing that IoT is critical for their future success. In an interaction with Nivedan Prakash, Satish Mittal, CTO, Vodafone Business Services, shares the company's growth story in the IoT space and how it is building up on this success going forward.

What sort of opportunities are you seeing in terms of expanding customer base and exploring new areas?

We are witnessing a good uptake of our business services. As enterprise customers are growing, they are investing into new technologies. This kind of trend brings us back into the forte, wherein the organizations are investing in cloud, IoT, and other digital technologies. All these are investments towards IT and telecom. This is where our story becomes very strong.

With regards to opportunities, I believe the government's digital agenda, especially post demonetization, has given the biggest push to plastic or mobile money. As a result, we have sold as much IoT connections (point of sale category) in the last 4 months as we have sold in the last 2 years. This has been a great and motivating journey for us.

What are the technology trends being witnessed in the country these days?

While technologies like

cloud and Big Data have been talked about, the good part is that they are now the ground realities. Analytics is no more on just a piece of paper; people have started using it. In fact, we have worked very closely with our enterprise customers to create a compelling analytics story for them.

Secondly, with regards to cloud, customers now don't ask 'why' but 'how' and 'when'.

Majority of the customers have started moving towards cloud wherein they are seeing the clear benefits. Thirdly, around 4-5 years back, we started talking about Machine to Machine (M2M). Now again, enterprises have started realizing the benefits of this technology.

Currently, we are in the era of IoT. Everyone in the market is upbeat about it and most of them want to start somewhere in this space. While a few may be on higher learning curve than others, it is gradually picking up. In terms of trends, be it cloud, everything mobile, and IoT – all these are actually happening.

Most importantly, today

everything is becoming an app.

And makes people hooked on to the mobile, as apps work best when you view it on your personal device. This is where mobility becomes ubiquitous for enterprise customers as well as consumers.

The other trend is that enterprise and personal boundaries are becoming weaker. For example, today, a smartphone is being used both in office as well as home. And these devices are carrying both office as well as personal apps.

This is where security concerns start penetrating in.

So, the efforts are now to go mobile but in a secured way.

And the same logic is being applied for cloud and IoT as well, where the focus is on securing them.

While you are talking about apps, there are rumours in the market that with the arrival of concept like chatbots, apps will soon die.

What's your take on this trend?

I think the aggregation of apps will start happening in order to provide convenience to

customers. But as far as chatbots are concerned, they will be complementary to the apps. For example, people use My Vodafone App to utilize all our services on a common platform. This is, in a way, helping the industry as well as user experience. It's a win-win situation for both. I believe both apps and chatbots will coexist. But yes, the aggregation will start happening, wherein there will be a Master App and then multiple apps within it.

Which are the key industry verticals driving the growth of Vodafone’s enterprise business?

Cloud is an important vertical for us. We are the only telco in the country to create a ‘marketplace’ for cloud-based offerings for customers who may not have a big IT setup with them, yet are looking for something simple to consume.

In the Vodafone Marketplace, customers purchase cloudbased Software-as-a-Service without requiring a big IT set up or a deep IT understanding.

It works on a self pay, self provisioned, and self fulfilment mechanism. We have launched very exciting products in this domain. For example, our customers can directly consume Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Workforce Essential from the marketplace. There is a wide array of products that help both large corporations as well as SMBs. Today, nobody wants to invest in Capex but instead look at consuming it as a service.

While there is an uptake of our cloud solutions amongst the large enterprises, we wanted to target the segment that is adaptable to change and ready-to-consume from

something which is already centralized and cloud-based.

In the SMB segment, we are approaching our customers both horizontally and vertically through packaged propositions which are specific to industries like banking, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, etc. The same goes for large enterprises as well.

Any update on your M2M offerings in terms of technological advancements?

In the IoT space, we are a leader in India as well as globally. We are the only telco to reach 50 million IoT connections recently and be present in the leadership quadrant of Gartner in the IoT domain. We offer cutting-edge IoT solutions which are already tried, tested, and implemented in the market.

The market today is fragmented. There are people who either develop an application, manufacture a device, or provide connectivity.

But the biggest challenge that arises is that machines cannot talk. To address this gap, we

are creating a solution whereby you can manage the lifecycle of a machine from anywhere in the world.

While we are looking at complete management, the second area of concern is security. We don't realize the threat an unsecured connection can create. Hence, there is a need of an architecture which is fully secured as well as manageable and provides a solution to the customers.

Which are the key focus areas for VBS when it comes to IT spend?

The major focus of our IT budget is on IoT and digital technologies. This is because we want to self-enable our customers as well as internal sales force and customerfacing employees. Another focus is on security, wherein we want to ensure how all these things stay secure while advancing our customers and employees towards mobility-enabled solutions. These are the areas where biggest investments are taking place.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

|13

EVENT

BFSI Digital Leaders Summit 2017 THE BFSI DIGITAL LEADERS SUMMIT saw the presence of India’s best thought leaders sharing insights from their digital journey

Rachna Jha rachna.jha@expressindia.com

I

ndia’s BFSI sector is witnessing a revolutionary transformation.

With encouraging policies from the government, there has been a big transition towards digitization.

Indian BFSI firms are in the midst of this action and have been experimenting with different digital models.

Most banking and financial service providers are hence hedging their bets on a comprehensive digital strategy as their future depends on it. Companies in this sector are conducting hackathons, publishing APIs for Fintech companies to build apps, and are going on an aggressive drive to improve customer service by adopting emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality and Blockchain.

Recognizing this tectonic shift that is underway in the BFSI sector, Express Computer launched the ‘BFSI Digital Leaders Summit’. This summit brought together the leading thought leaders in the BFSI domain, and highlighted technology-led business innovations from leading banks and financial services firms.

The event was presided by thought leaders such as Samrat Das,

in securing personal and professional data. It can protect the device from unauthorized hacking attacks.

CIO, PNB MetLife; Ritesh Pai, Country Head, Digital Banking, Yes Bank; Sukesh Jain, VP Enterprises, Samsung, Sameer Bhatia Country Manager, Seagate; Sitaram Venkat, Regional Sales Director, Dell India Pvt. Ltd., Sanjay Gupta, MD-India, Middle East, Aspect Software; Abhishant Pant, Fintech professional & Founder at Cashless Journey and Shiv Kumar Bhasin, CTO, State Bank of India.

Virtual presence In the first session Sameer Bhatia, CIO, PNB MetLife, discussed how virtual reality can transform customer’s experience and its importance. He said, “Digitalization without being business intrinsic is of n0o value”. He talked about the bank’s virtual reality platform conVRse. Describing conVRse, he said, “We have introduced two key innovations- conVRse which was built in partnership with LumenLab MetLife’s innovation center in Singapore. The second is Infinity -- a secure digital hub that allows you to create a digital legacy by enabling you to share important documents and memories with your nominees in case something were to happen to you”.

The next session was taken by

Shiv Kumar Bhasin, CTO, State Bank of India, where he described simplification of the technology. He said, “Designing the new business model is the key for a digital leader rather jumping on to the solution of the problem.” He continued with describing the significance of cloud to SBI and said, “Agility is one of the most important factors. The first thing that hampers the way of new business is the required hardware. It takes a lot of time to buy them. In such cases, it is important to have their own internal private cloud.

Building our own cloud brings a lot of agility and it will shorten the time for business services and applications.”

He also stated security as an important factor for transformation and there must be a right balance of customer convenience, security, and simplification.

Enhancing customer experience through digitization Another key session was taken by Sitaram Venkat, Regional Sales Director, Dell India, where he talked about the importance of the customer’s experience in digital transformation. He stated, “Our main objective is to help customers moving to the path of digital transformation. The products we

Yes Bank is fully prepared for the digital era

provide have solutions with the best value, and it also provides flexibility to the customers. We try to improve their performance, density, and scalability and reach”. He also stated the importance of agility in the digital transformation in BFSI sector.

Abhishant Pant, Fintech professional & Founder at Cashless Journey, spoke about how India is moving towards a cashless economy.

He said, “We must educate people about what it is and how they work and what benefits they can have.

This will be the main factor which can help turning society cashless.”

Sukesh Jain, VP Enterprise Business, Samsung highlighted how the banking sector was increasingly becoming digital. He also talked about different mobility solutions that are changing the world for business. “Samsung mobility solutions develop opportunities and help enterprises engage with customers in new and innovative ways. It boosts employee productivity,” he added. “We at Samsung bring three key aspects -security, biometric authentication, and integrated devices. These aspects directly affect enterprises and consumers. Samsung has accordingly created a platform called “Samsung Knox”, which helps

Reimagining customer experience A key session was taken by Sanjay Gupta, MD-India, Middle East, Aspect Software, who showcased his views on reimagining customer service in the digital world.

He said, “In India, only 65 percent of the consumers interact with multiple channels and not with what we think is the best channel.” After doing a research on multiple markets, Aspect identified that smartphone adoption was driving some key customer preferences trends.

Accordingly, Aspect launched its next gen customer engagement platform in India with the aim to empower enterprises with the tools which can help them in engaging their customer in a better way. Gupta said, “With the growing millennial and techno-savvy population, communication channels in India are stretching beyond options of email, chatting, voice messages, text messaging and social networking. It is also an important factor to transform the current contact centre infrastructure.”

Accordingly, Aspect has positioned itself to be a next generation self-service platform with an omni-channel, self-service suite which offers technologically advanced customer engagement solutions. The firm even has a chatbot feature, which when coupled with Natural Language Understanding, enhances customer service.

The significance of storage in digitization Sameer Bhatia, Country Manager, Seagate explained the critical role of storage. He highlighted how his company, Seagate could play an important role in the banking sector, especially in terms of the surveillance segment. “In India, security is the prime concern for individuals and organizations. India has some largest cities in the world

and surveillance systems here are essential for the country’s infrastructure. We act as like brands behind brands. Recently, India has a surge in the use of video surveillance by sectors like banking, finance services, insurance, etc. As a result, there is an increased amount of unstructured data being generated.”

He also spoke about how its HDD SkyHawak designed specifically for surveillance, can be useful to the BFSI sector. “It is equipped with the industry’s latest technologies and optimized for surveillance systems.

The increase in usage of surveillance cameras leads to a significant increase in the amount of data that needs to be stored. This in turn, will drive demand for larger and smarter storage solutions. We are first in the world to provide a purpose-built, optimized drive for surveillance systems. We provide them the solutions that are smart, safe, and secure for their surveillance applications.”

An extensive discussion on Blockchain The last session ended with a panel discussion which was conducted by Rohas Nagpal, Blockchain evangelist and Chief Blockchain Architect at Primechain Technologies Pvt. Ltd., which led to the discussion on how Blockchain was emerging as a revolutionary technology. The panelists discussed how it increases efficiency and lessens the chances of frauds. The panel also had a discussion on how efficient Blockchain is in terms of security and transparency in supply chains, global money systems, Government services, IoT, etc.

Panelists included Nilakantan Krishnan, ex-CIO, Muthoot Fincorp, Prasanna Lohar, Head of Technology (Digital Banking) at DCB Bank Ltd., Abhay Johorey, Head Digital, Consumer Bank at IDFC, Jayesh Shah, EVP & Head - Technology Initiatives at DHFL, Financial Services Group, Hiren Shah, HeadIT, Reliance General Insurance, and Joydeep Dutta, Group CTO, Central Depository Services Ltd (CDSL).

Indiabulls has made the process of home loans easy Rachna Jha

Rachna Jha rachna.jha@expressindia.com

A

t the BFSI Digital Leaders Summit 2017, Ritesh Pai, Digital Banking Head, Yes Bank, spoke about the different innovate steps which they consider revolutionary in the digital banking sector. “We have a lot of interoperable platforms. We were the first bank in India to launch the two-factor authentication with SMS based PIN, in 2004,” he said.

The private sector bank claims that design thinking is core to their product development. The bank upgrades its system to provide superior banking experience to its customers. In order to do that they keep on re-platforming the solutions and have re-launched new mobile apps. Yes Bank has launched a digital banking service, ‘SIMsePAY’, whereby any account holder can do money transfers, pay utility bills, and other mobile banking service without a smartphone or the Internet. “We are reaching out to the rural masses through SIMsePAY. Most of the people still have feature phones in India and we want to make the process easier for them,” said Pai. Social media has been an inseparable part of life these days.

People spent most of their time on social media platforms and find it quite interesting and convenient.

Keeping this into account, Yes Bank has introduced YES TAG, which allows the bank to connect with customers on social media and make banking as easier as handling their social media account. “Twitter, Facebook Messenger, We Chat, Telegram and Skype, customers can do banking transactions on these five messaging apps with YES TAG. Customers can check their balance, mini statement, fixed deposit details, cheque status and much more through messaging apps. Also, Rs 5000 daily, can be sent to

beneficiaries, registered on Retail NetBanking, from either of these messaging apps. Apart from that, customers can check their account balance, fixed deposit details, mini statement, last five transactions, request chequebook, account balance cheque status, and stop cheque through messaging apps,” Pai said.

The fund transfer, through YES TAG, can be done instantly anywhere, anytime at no cost and it is much secured as the transactions are secured with six-digit pass code. Yes Bank is the first bank in India to provide such a unique platform.

YES PAY, a digital wallet, is one other important convenient offering from Yes Bank that Pai talked about.

YES PAY enables tech-savvy

smartphone and social media users to register seamlessly and then spend wisely. “The application offers a free virtual card for online transactions and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) for seamless payments. It can be accessed through Facebook, without a separate registration,” he said. YES PAY facilitates offerings like Mobile/DTH recharge, pay bills, purchase of gift vouchers and avail discount coupons. This wallet does not require both the transacting parties to be registered on the wallet.

API is another important aspect on which Pai talked about. In order to offer a hassle-free service to its corporate customers, Yes Bank has come up with API banking. “There is a large scope to implement digital banking in B2B. API allows clients to access the bank’s transaction processing services from their ERP environment. It is an extremely secure manner as it need not create any file or log in to corporate net banking, transactions can be triggered as API calls the bank’s system through secured system integration between Corporate Customer’s ERP and Bank,” mentioned Pai. In addition, Pai also spoke about ART (Alliances, Relationships, and Technologies) approach which let them move further and achieve their goals. “We realized that the rapidly evolving landscape of financial technologies, all innovations in this space will not happen within the bank. For the sake of delivering better service, we look for alliances which could help us in doing so. So, we have partnered with Fintech companies to provide better banking experience to our customers,” he stated. Yes Bank has partnered with more than Fintech startups across different verticals including payments, regulatory technology, and wealth management.

Yes Bank also claims to have partnered with several insurance players in the country.

rachna.jha@expressindia.com

A

traditional method of seeking home loans has not been an easy task. Nafees Ahmed, Group CIO, Indiabulls Group, talked about it at BFSI Digital Leader Summit 2017 and explained how Indiabulls has done the technologyled business transformation and digitalized home loan business to make loan process easier. “Earlier the whole process used to be entirely branch based but now the branch is in your pocket using digitalized technology. You can just go online and start the application process”, said Nafees Ahmed.

Describing the easy home loan process offered by Indiabulls, he mentioned about the e-home loan service. “e-home loan service is a first of its kind, allowing applicants to avail home loans online. In terms of growth, last few years have been quite decent. But, the branch work was still an important thing to deal with. Many of the processes still involved customers going to the branches and getting involved in a lot of paperwork. While some companies use technology to reduce the manual process, they still provide an online application form and collect processing fee online.

There was no end-to-end platform where a customer can process the work hassle free. A customer could not digitally sign a loan proposal, submit documents electronically and get an approval based on documents all from a tablet or computer. We have taken into account all these issues to design this platform. We have integrated the e-signing facility that lets customers self-attest their documents using the OTP sent to their registered mobile number with Aadhar. Being a part of Sarfaesi Act, the government is also considering e-signing”. Through this process, Indiabulls has made the home loan

process convenient, quick, and transparent.

Considering the social media savvy era, Indiabulls has made special plans for ensuring that people can apply for loans on social media platforms. “People in the age group of 25-35, are social media savvy and spend a lot of time chatting on Facebook, by computer or smart phone. On Facebook, we don’t have to install an app. In comparing to using an app, it is more convenient to use Facebook. Keeping this in mind we have installed a bot on Facebook to process loan applications”, said Ahmed.

Application and servicing of a loan are two major functions of the Chatbot. Customers fill up an application form through a chat.

The bot pulls out all the information from a person’s social media profile and by asking various questions to the concerned person gets it validated. After validation, the bot

asks the questions mentioned in the application form. Then the customers have to upload the relevant documents like KYC. For servicing of a loan, customers can request a change in address, mobile number, and statement of account and all this can be done on a chatbot only. The bot and the e-home loan platform can go hand in hand together. The bot supplements our e-home loan platform.

Besides making the home loan process easier and convenient, this process also curtails the risk of forgery. “All transactions are done in a secure environment. All the documents are stored on a document management system. Our website is fully integrated with the loan management system and all the related documents are moved to the core loan management system.

They are available to the credit and operations teams to process the applications,” claimed Ahmed.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

14 | EVENT SAS GOVERNMENT ANALYTICS & INFORMATION SUMMIT 2017:

What can data analytics do for a nation?

WITH THE RISE of Big Data and the increase in technology availability, it would not be an exaggeration to say that going forward a data-driven government would be the norm, rather than unusual. The insights shared in the recent SAS ‘Government Analytics & Information Summit 2017’ explored the promise and potential of a country driven by intelligent insights enabled by analytics Mohd Ujaley mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com

U

nderstanding the critical importance of analytics to take effective decisions in the government space, the Indian Express Group partnered with SAS to launch a focused ‘Government Analytics & Information Summit 2017’ on 10th March at the Le Meridien, New Delhi.

This conference explored areas on how analytics can turbo charge government policy formation and help in designing citizen centric services.

In this forum, one of the panelists asked, “What can data analytics do for a nation?” The question seemed to be very broad, but the real answer lies in how the government is using technology including data analytics tools to improve the life of the citizens. With the rise of big data and the increase in technology availability, it would not be an exaggeration to say that going forward a data-driven government would be the norm, rather than the usual.

Embracing the new age of data In India, although both Central and state governments are embracing this new age of data, but the speed at which it is being done is very slow. But how slow and how long is no longer a question, the fact is that government organizations are collecting massive amount of data everyday and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushing for digital transactions and tech driven Goods & Service Tax (GST) round the corner, data

collection will further spur.

Hence, use of data analytics tools to make sense of the mammoth amount of data is an inevitable future. For example, GST alone is likely to create about 3 billion invoices per month. Can it survive without making sense of these invoices? Possibly not!

So, data analytics experts like Vishakha Dongre, who heads Public Sector Practice at SAS India believe that analytics will no longer be an after-thought, rather it will become an integral part of government service delivery.

Because government organizations need to know about the effectiveness of their service delivery and hence, they would require the tools to measure efficiency and performance. They need to know how much work is being completed in order to determine how well it is operating. “You require credible analysis of e-governance projects in our country,” she said.

Part of the reason why this is the case, is because several government agencies, particularly state governments, do not have automated work order systems. They instead rely heavily on manual procedures.

The departments that have work order systems are not utilizing them properly. The result is that they do not have the information that is useful for reporting or to make the best policy decisions.

Lack of foundational data Governments are also suffering from lack of foundational data. “We need different data sets for different policy making in the government but unfortunately, many a times, we do not have

We use data analytics tools to understand the need of the people who apply for passport. It helps us understand different data points leading to better utilisation of our resources at PSK

We need to integrate everything and understand the variety, velocity, volume and usability of the data in order to reduce cost and ultimately serve the people

Golok Kumar Simli

Regional P F Commissioner, Information Services, Ministry of Labour & Employment

Chief of Technology, Passport Seva Project, Ministry of External Affairs

V Ranganath

Government should use business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) for harnessing data and the aim should be to use government data to understand what is working for the people Dr A Santhosh Mathew Chairperson of National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE)

the right set of data,” stated Pulak Ghosh, Senior Fellow, Niti Ayog.

Ghosh gives an example of credit rating system of banks which help them in understanding the credit worthiness of a person before offering loans but he says that there is no such rating for people who are not part of the formal banking system, which limits their ability for credit.

“Can data analytics be used to develop credit score of underprivileged people who do not have access to formal banking,” asked Ghosh.

Agreeing with Gosh, Dongre of SAS said, “In government, there are different sets of challenges.

Many times, they do not have the right sets of data and in some cases if they have, they are not able to properly use it.” She mentioned that data analytics tool can be used to create income distribution of a village. “One can use mobile recharge pattern or other expense to decide the credit worthiness of a person who is not formally attached to a banking system,” she added.

Ex-Maharashtra IT secretary and now Joint Secretary in Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India, Rajesh Aggarwal agreed with the benefits enumerated by Ghosh and Dongre but he said

Underprivileged people need different level of attention. If you purely use algorithm to map their credit worthiness, there is a possibility that the same could be used against poor people to deny credit. We need use data for right perspective Rajesh Aggarwal Joint Secretary, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India.

“Underprivileged people need different levels of attention. If you purely use algorithm to map their credit worthiness, there is a possibility that same could be used against the poor people to deny credit. We need to have balance and use data for the right perspective.”

Discovery is moving out of the IT shop The good news is that data discovery is moving out of the

The usage of data analytics tools to make sense of the mammoth amount of data is an inevitable future IT shop and onto the user’s desktops. Current tools are enabling individuals to apply sophisticated visualization capabilities to vast amounts of existing data without writing code. With these new discovery tools, data access and analysis can now happen with higher speed.

India’s Passport Seva Project uses volumetric analysis to understand the seasonal fluctuation of the applicants across its Passport Seva Kendra (PSK).

Golok Kumar Simli, who heads the technology for Passport Seva Project at Ministry of External Affairs informed, “We use data analytics tools to understand the need of the people who apply for passport. It helps us understand different data points leading to better utilization of our resources at PSK.” Simli was of the view that improving data access and usage should be at the top of the list for government organizations as easy access to data saves time, reduces cost and accelerates decision making. “Discovery tools are helping in quickly transforming raw data into meaningful information but the government needs to further augment open-data initiatives like data.gov.in,” he added.

In its report on use data of analytics for the public sector, Accenture revealed that the challenges associated with

“the new normal” in the government are not so new anymore, yet public sector leaders are still striving to adapt to the profound political, societal and economic changes that have radically changed the operating context. “Simple survival techniques are not enough to satisfy rising citizen demands and dwindling budgets. Achieving high performance in the public sector requires reinventing public service delivery with government analytics to reduce costs, improve the quality of services and unleash technology to drive new insights,” stated the report.

The report also highlights the fact that there are heightened expectations from citizens which are driving the need for differentiated and personalized public services but dwindling budgets are limiting the ability of administrators and policy makers to meet citizens’ needs in the conventional way. Ghosh of Niti Ayog said, “Through insight-driven government analytics, the government can reduce costs and improve the quality of services.”

Variety, velocity, volume and usability with security V Ranganath, Regional P F Commissioner, Information Services, Ministry of Labour & Employment agreed with Ghosh and said that different organizations are collecting data at different places leading to silos. “We need to integrate everything and understand the variety, velocity, volume and usability of the data in order to reduce cost and ultimately serve the people.”

Reducing cost and raising revenue is the goal of any government. With the roll out of GST, the number of commercial tax payers will substantially increase leading to better revenue and compliance but it will also increase the volume of the data and possible vectors of cyber attacks.

“With the GST roll out, the number of tax payers will increase. About three billion invoices will be generated in one month. The data will be very critical for the country.

Therefore, privacy and security of the data has to be maintained,” said Pankaj Dikshit, Senior Vice President

(Technology & Risk) at GST Network.

Other experts also agreed with Dikshit that security will become a larger issue because there are more opportunities for compromise. “Rather than addressing the most common vulnerabilities through a secure central access point, the government should look to protect data at various levels and entry points to ensure that it is only accessible to users with proper authorization,” said Ghosh.

Is data lake an answer?

One of the most pressing challenges with government organizations is that most of the departments are collecting and storing data at different locations leading to lot of silos.

And, there is less interoperability of the data.

Ranganath is of the view that the government can create a data lake where all types of data can be stored. He believes this will enable the government to have a single source of truth.

Agreeing with Ranganath, Dikshit said, “If any government organization needs a data for policy making they can access from a data lake, this will address the problem of lack of foundation data in the government.”

Ghosh of Niti Ayog said that while ‘data lake’ as a concept is good, but in case of a security breach, all the data can be wiped out in one go. So it has a huge risk.

“I would suggest that data should be wherever it is, but we should make it interoperable and flexible,” he added.

Agreeing with Ghosh, Simli of Passport Seva Project said, “Rather than having a data lake, we need to think about collaboration such as how the police and Aadhaar can collaborate for verification of passport, leading to faster delivery of passports to citizens.”

“The government should use business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) for harnessing data and the aim should be to use government data to understand what is working for the people,” concluded Dr A Santhosh Mathew, who in his previous role at Ministry of Rural Affairs took care of IT, now Chairperson of National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).

We need different data sets for different policy making in the government but unfortunately, many a times, we do not have the right set of data Pulak Ghosh Senior Fellow, Niti Ayog

Data analytics will no longer be an afterthought, rather it will become an integral part of government service delivery. Because government organizations need to know about the effectiveness of their service delivery and hence, they would require the tools to measure efficiency and performance Vishakha Dongre Public Sector Practice Head, SAS India

With the GST roll out, the number of tax payers will increase. About three billion invoices will be generated in one month. The data will be very critical for the country. Therefore, privacy and security of the data has to be maintained Pankaj Dikshit Senior Vice President (Technology & Risk), GST Network

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

|15

EVENT SAS FORUM INDIA 2017

Analytics makes ‘designed for you’ possible

SAS RECENTLY HOSTED India’s largest analytics forum - SAS Forum India 2017. Focusing on the role of analytics across industries and its rising significance, experts from SAS and customers shared their insights across some important areas. We present below some important insights shared by thought leaders in the forum ◗ In the future, analytics will be about 'hyperpersonalization' ◗ In this digital era, the golden rule is to follow the C3 mantra be the 'catalyst' for change, build analytical 'culture', and 'commit' to deliver ◗ While creating value out of the digital strategy, organisations must treat IT spend as business expenses

TAMING THE DIGITAL LION V S Parthasarathy, Group CFO, Group CIO, Chairman Mahindra eMarket Ltd, Member of the Group Executive Board, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd

I

n the keynote address, V S Parthasarathy talked about the potential impact of digital disruption, which in today's time, can be termed as a fast-paced predator. The way digital technologies are changing the market dynamics and redefining the industries, it can be stated that digital disruption is omni-present as well as omni-potent. Rather, digital disruption is the 'new normal'.

In the digital disruption age, one has to be ready for the next move - be either defensive or attack.While creating value out of the digital strategy, organisations must treat IT spend as business expenses, focus on long term benefits rather than immediate returns, and use technology to reduce overall costs.

More importantly, the focus should be on two aspects - strategic partnership and new business models. With regards to the former, a collaboration first culture should be adopted across business units and technology should be harnessed to forge partnerships. As far as the latter is concerned, digital can be

FUTURE OF ANALYTICS

T

◗ The SAS data tools are mapped to the latest financial reporting standard IFRS 9. The tool helps navigate the IFRS 9 journey to gauge the credit worthiness of the customer

specifically for every single customer but also gets out the profitability from each customer.

The data tools are mapped to the latest financial reporting standard IFRS 9. The tool helps navigate the IFRS 9 journey to gauge the credit worthiness of the customer. SAS is working with the Income Tax department on ‘Project Insight’, an ambitious project to nab tax evaders in an non intrusive way and avoiding the routinely followed system of

ANALYTICS FOR TAX ADMINISTRATION

◗ SAS dominates 37 percent market share in the advanced analytics space, which is twice that of the closest competitor

search and seizure.

For SAS, there are many investment areas like IoT, cloud analytics. In an IoT scenario, Edge analytics can be used, when tons of data cannot be consolidated. SAS also provides applications to customers via cloud.

SAS VIYA: A POWERFUL, OPEN PLATFORM DESIGNED FOR ANALYTICAL CHALLENGES

Sanjeev Singh, Additional DG, Systems, CBDT

F

or CBDT, work is synonymous to challenges especially with the existence of the shadow economy with heavy reliance on cash.

The data resides in disparate locations and that too poor data quality makes it more difficult.

Another major challenge is of transfer-pricing, which means companies, in order to pay less taxes move their profits to low tax countries by doing inter-company transactions.

However with advanced data analytics, these challenges are slowly being reined in.

As far as data quality is concerned, the data validation models are designed, so that the wrong data is trapped. These data analytics tools, enriches information and data too.

The tools provide feedback to the information provider. Post demonetisation, close to forty five banks did not consolidate deposit related information. “We gave feedback to them, to aggregate the data, to make sure, the account holders are not showing deposits in different accounts,” said Sanjeev Singh, Additional DG, Systems, CBDT. The analytics also does similarity matching. If an honest taxpayer is willing to disclose his information,

seen as the way to build new business models, business innovation should be done using technological innovation, 'crowdsourcing' idea from within and outside, and creating 'corporate garage' within the organisation.

The industry is gradually transforming from IT to digital technology and now the focus is on areas like AI, cloud, analytics, IoT, 3D printing, social media & llatform, drones, blockchain, autonomous vehicles, etc.

“If we demystify analytics in the present scenario, it is helping enterprises in innovation, financial gain, decision making, and remaining customer focused. And in the future, analytics will be all about 'hyperpersonalization' such as digital assistants will predict your mood and play music, identity verification through facial detection, breakfast suggestion by analyzing data from health tracker, customized advertising by analyzing your purchase behaviour, banks will use predictive modelling to assess credit risk, etc,” said Parthasarathy .

In this digital era, the golden rule is to follow the C3 mantra - be the 'catalyst' for change, build analytical 'culture', and 'commit' to deliver.

◗ SAS is working with the Income Tax department on ‘Project Insight’, an ambitious project to nab tax evaders in an non intrusive way.

Noshin Kagalwalla, MD, SAS India remendous amount of data is being generated across all industries. For example, in an oil rig, 8 TB of data is generated per day. A Boeing 787 flight, generates a humongous 40 TB of data per hour. In most of the scenarios, way too much data remains unanalysed. Analytic tools can be used to make good of the raw data and the trends, knowledge should be made available across the length and the breadth of the organisation.

SAS dominates 37 percent market share in the advanced analytics space, which is twice that of the closest competitor. SAS uses open source technologies and makes data management available on the hadoop platform. The data analytics solutions not only provide customer experience that is designed

[L-R] Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director, SAS India; Harish Lade, VP- Systems & IT, Asian Paints; Munish Mittal, Group Head- IT & CIO, HDFC Bank; Marcio Dobal, Senior Region VP, SAS APAC; Ajay Meher, Senior VP & Head - IT and Post Production, Sony Pictures Networks; Dr Satish Modh, Director, Vivekanand Education Society's Institute Of Management Studies And Research (VESIMSR)

David Burgess, Global Analytics Lead, SAS APAC

◗ POOR data quality, transfer pricing, is a major challenge ◗ Analytics helps in identifying the trail of the network of companies, working in tandem in the same fraud ◗ An interesting aspect of geospatial analytics is also coming up, based on the affluence of the people living in the area then how can his characteristics be used to identify more such honest taxpayers who have the same traits.

“We have also found that the texts, footnotes that substantiate the monetary numbers give many signals of the intent of the taxpayer,” he added.

The data tools also helps in identifying the trail of the network of companies, working in tandem in the same fraud. An interesting aspect of geospatial analytics is also coming up, based on the affluence of the people living in the area.

S

AS Viya is an open platform that enables to submit code onto it using API and leverage the in-memory capabilities. SAS Viya can be used through a third party tool like Amazon Alexa, Jasper and it can be consumed through apps, web services or through a PPT tool.

TOWARDS A DIGITAL FIRST ORGANISATION Paul Abraham, COO, IndusInd Bank

I

ndusInd Bank’s digital strategy is centered on serving each customer separately based on his requirements and profile. Thus the customer segmentation strategy goes out of the window.

“We believe in having partnerships in the existing digital ecosystems,” said Paul Abraham, COO, IndusInd Bank. Initially, the bank was reticent about partnerships. Now, it is partnering with companies for vehicle loans.

They provide customised experiences based on the needs, risk profile of the customer. The companies also have expertise in getting funding, searching for the right vehicles etc. “So, once upon a time, when we were a financial product distributor, now we are moving on to a model of forging partnerships, which also helps in the optimum utilisation of capital,” he mentioned.

Importance of analytics The analytics tools, which were

◗ IndusInd Bank has moved from customer segmentation strategy to serving each customer separately based on the profile. ◗ The analytics tools, which were initially centered around data collection from a single department can now be federated and used by any employee ◗ The visual analytics tools gives a better sense of correlation

initially centered around data collection from a single department have now transformed to a stage where it can be federated and used by any authorised employee in the company. The data has been democratised. Especially the visual analytics tools gives a better sense of correlation.

Following are a few examples to explain how it helps. Raising interest rates on savings account gives high propensity to upsell compared to a fixed deposit account, even when the interest rate on both is the same.

Visual analytics helps in making these correlations.

“We found out using the visual analytics tools that the probability of fraud is higher when money is withdrawn in under one week of depositing it,” he stated.

The visual analytics also helps in making decisions on the retention programme of the truck vehicle loans. The tool has deciphered that the residual equity of the vehicle is the lowest in the first six months of the loan. So, the retention programme, rather than have for the entire period of the four year loan is now shifted to the first six months.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

16 | INTERVIEW

There has been a significant shift by the Govt in tech implementation WITH A VISION, to empower residents of India with a unique identity and a digital platform to authenticate anytime from anywhere, UIDAI is driving innovation and providing a platform for public and private agencies to develop Aadhaar linked digital applications. The US multinational tech major has invested a combined $12.7 billion in R&D over the last three years, resulting in tech leadership, innovation and a market-leading portfolio of high-end technologies, solutions and services. In a conversation with Ankush Kumar, Ajay Kaul, Director & GM - Head Government Business, Dell EMC speaks about the current focus of the company and the increased technology adoption by the government.

How do you evaluate digital transformation and its impact over the years?

This is a time of unprecedented change. Today’s digital transformation represents the arrival of a Fourth Industrial Revolution – one that is fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and relate to one UIDAI has led to another.

Previous driving industrial eras innovation and were driven by steam, coal and provide a platform electricity. This for public and one is driven by data. It is private agencies to ruthlessly develop Aadhaar redrawing the linked digital business landscape and applications reinventing our future. The Internet of Everything, an intelligent interconnected living network, pulsing with data and processing power, populated with digital devices, appliances and people, will transform the way every business in every industry

operates and citizen centric experience will be the key.

As many IT companies have seen huge business opportunities in government sales, how do you see the demand for IT solutions in the past 5 years from the government side?

Over the last five years, we have seen a significant shift in focus by the Government of India in terms of implementation of technology. The government has been investing in technology solutions in order to provide better governance to citizens. For instance, today, we all know how UIDAI has impacted every citizen’s day to day life. With a vision to empower residents of India with a unique identity and a digital platform to authenticate anytime from anywhere, UIDAI has led to driving innovation and provide a platform for public and private agencies to develop Aadhaar linked digital applications.

Similarly, the Digital India initiative and development of 100 smart cities in India has further led to increasing usage of technology to touch the lives of citizens of India. To support such

a vision and initiatives, the government has invested heavily in strong back-end IT. This is further validated by analyst reports which highlight the consistent increase in spending on IT by the Government of India.

What were the challenges earlier while dealing with the government?

Technology adoption in the government sector was lagging compared to enterprises. There were many factors involved which led to a delay in adoption and implementation of technology.

However, over the last few years, we have seen a significant interest to adopt technology to provide better governance to citizens.

Today, industry leaders have much higher and highly effective engagement levels with various central and state government bodies. There is higher interest and speed in implementation of new technologies to provide better governance.

How do you see the data center market in India?

India is a significant market for Dell EMC and we are seeing increased investments across verticals. According to Gartner,

From a security transformation point of view, our security solutions deliver business-driven security so organizations of all sizes can take command of their evolving security posture in an uncertain, high-risk world.

From a workforce transformation point of view, we have branded hardware, such as desktop PCs, notebooks and tablets, and branded peripherals, such as monitors, printers and projectors, as well as third-party software and peripherals. In all, we have the end-to-end solutions portfolio that can address every requirement of the customer and position us as the leaders in the IT market in India.

India IT spending is forecast to reach $72.4 billion in 2017, a 6.9 percent increase from 2016. From an IT transformation perspective, our solutions portfolio enables our enterprise customers’ digital transformation through our trusted hybrid cloud and Big Data solutions, built upon a modern data center infrastructure that incorporates industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage, and cyber security technologies.

How much is your focus on the data protection market? What is driving the growth of this market?

Proliferation of numerous devices has increased the number of end points that need to be protected by an organization from security breaches.

Considering the reality where organizations rely heavily to learn from data collected from every touch point in real time, it becomes extremely important for

them to protect their data from falling into the wrong hands. To address these concerns, our solutions portfolio has strong capabilities in securing customer data across the organization’s business units while simplifying regulatory compliance and enabling them to enjoy flexible management capabilities. It also enables them to reduce the Tell us about the company's expansion and investment plans for the next two years?

Innovation is at the core of Dell. To continue innovation which can maximize the benefits of technological advancements such as IoT, AI, VR, AR, it is important to have aggressive investments in R&D. Dell and EMC have invested a combined $12.7billion in R&D over the last three years, resulting in tech leadership, innovation and a market-leading portfolio of bestof-breed technologies, solutions and services ranging from the core to the edge to the cloud leading to 21,000 plus patents & patent applications. As Michael Dell has stated publicly, Dell Technologies will spend $4.5 billion on R&D per year going forward.

Transition to digital is not an option but a need of the hour GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS, face the challenge of providing efficient services quickly and securely. With an end to end portfolio of solutions, Citrix is betting big on the huge opportunities in the Indian government sector. The company believes that with its solutions, government agencies will be ready to deliver and receive digital information and services anytime, anywhere, and from any device—safely, securely and with fewer resources. In an exclusive interview with EC’s Ankush Kumar, Parag Arora, Area Vice President & Country Head – India Subcontinent, Citrix, shares his perspective on why the company is bullish on the opportunities unfolding due to the government’s Digital India initiatives Some edited excerpts: How do you think the digital infrastructure of the country can be made more robust so that it is easily accessible to every citizen?

We believe that going forward network availability and robustness will be a major contributor business growth.

Customer satisfaction The real game and usability changers for will play an ever Digital India are increasing role going to be in growth in success of technologies that organizations deliver device and platforms. independence, India is a geographically network dispersed independence and country and our location connectivity independence infrastructure must evolve to meet the needs of Digital India. Over the last few years the reliability of broadband/4G has improved significantly and approaching the availability offered by MPLS. Technologies that can aggregate multiple types of networks and accelerate application and data

access across the country will play a big role in accelerating digitization. Digital India needs a highly available network to take off and software defined networking technologies will help in delivering this in the next few years.

How can implementation of advanced technologies transform India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy?

Transition to Digital is not an option but a need of the hour. If we have to stay competitive on the global platform harnessing the power of our demographic through skilling is absolutely necessary.

Delivering tools and applications to enable skilling is the role Digital India can accelerate. At the same time we have to start looking beyond devices and network. The real game changers for Digital India are going to be technologies that deliver device independence, network independence and location independence. If we want to make the leap from a developing country to a developed country, then simplified and easy access to government platforms is going to be crucial.

Do you think PPP is the best model for India’s digital transformation?

The world of IT is a fast moving

one. Devices and technologies can change and be replaced every few months. We believe organizations perform best when they focus on their core competencies and leave the supporting roles for specialists in the relevant fields.

Government bodies should focus on regulatory and compliance actions and leave out supporting tasks like network management, application management and endpoint management to entities who specialize in their field. This way technologies and platforms deployed by the government bodies can stay at par with the technological shifts happening in the industry. We believe a best of breed solution stack outperforms an in-house developed solution on most occasions.

Why do you think cyber security is critical for Digital India?

We believe that technology can be a great liberator. It has the potential to enable business to focus on the apps and data people need to be productive, and eliminate the tremendous resource costs needed to manage the range of devices, platforms and tools. However, in today’s highly digitized environment attacks come from anywhere. With every step that India takes towards being a digital economy,

separation, countries like Japan and Korea have brought in regulations to ensure organizations data center traffic and Internet traffic do not mix.

the hacking targets go up exponentially. The threat actors themselves are growing more sophisticated and more organized.

From a business perspective, a ‘new normal’ of security is required – one where IT risks are communicated in business terms and IT safety is backed up by the right technology infrastructure and installations. Absorbing best practice from industry leaders allows companies to increase sales, save time, cut costs and foster better connections with customers. One way is network

In the ever evolving threat landscape, is the country well prepared to tackle large scale cyber security issues?

Indian organizations need to do more to protect themselves against attacks. In fact, 72 percent of businesses in India say it’s time for a new security framework, according to a survey by The Ponemon Institute conducted for Citrix. The recent incidents in the news where reputed institutions were impacted due to cyberattacks, only furthers this point.

Hacks like the 3.2 million debit cards being compromised, the SWIFT application hack and DC network compromises point to the need of a more comprehensive solution. When it comes to IT protection, the more security layers an organisation has in place, the more difficult it is for criminals to gain entry to their systems, apps and data. We need to take steps to drive organizations to isolate core apps from non-Internet based apps. We need to act fast to bring in stringent regulations for organizations to address cyber security.

How do you associate with Digital India initiative, what kind of opportunities and challenges do you foresee?

I feel Digital India is opportunity to skill and harness the power of over 1.2 billion Indians. Just imagine what would happen to our GDP if we had over a billion strong workforce in this country. To begin with we need to bite the bullet and start taking concrete steps towards creating and delivering skilling platform for the masses. Platforms must be highly available and accessible to everyone irrespective of location, network and device used.

With prominent technology players already existing in the market and working extensively on Digital India project, how are you planning to position your company?

We believe creating the platforms and applications is the easy part and the difficult part is delivering these platforms to the remotest part of this country in a usable manner. Citrix has put its engineering and R&D teams at work to develop a delivery platform that can address this challenge. We are today able to deliver applications, data and even entire desktops virtually to users over low bandwidth, high latency links.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

|17

EVENT FE CFO Awards: `15 lakh cr worth of banned notes may have returned, says Bibek Debroy

CFO of the Year, R Shankar Raman receives the award during the FE & ICICI Bank CFO Awards 2017

YM Deosthalee receives the Lifetime Achievement award during the FE & ICICI Bank CFO Awards 2017

Winners and the jury of the FE & ICICI Bank CFO Awards 2017 in Mumbai

bout ` 15 lakh crore of demonetised notes may have returned to the banking system, Bibek Debroy, member, NITI Aayog said at the FE CFO Awards 2017, adding that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was yet to release the official data. That was about 97% of value of the old ` 500 and ` 1,000 notes demonetised on November 8.

Debroy also said a solution to the problem of stressed assets could be expected in two weeks’ time.

“The finance ministry and the RBI are working on it and you can expect an announcement soon,” he said. There was reason, he said, to be optimistic on disinvestment and explained it would wrong to extrapolate from past performances. “There is a basket of central PSEs and while you may want to list some of them, in the case of a few others, you may want to shut down and in the rest you may want to bring down equity below 51%,” he said.

Delivering the keynote address at the FE CFO Awards 2017, Debroy said the

A

government expected the second Income Declaration Scheme (IDS II), which will end on March 31, to yield around ` 2 lakh crore. “My guess is, probably another ` 2 lakh crore will come into the system

by March-end,” he said. “This does not mean all the money that is back has become legitimate and has been converted into white. The scrutiny is going to happen now,” he cautioned, however, that while tax inspectors “go after the mala fide accounts, there is also the danger they would go after some bona fide ones.”

“The intention of demonetisation was not to address the black wealth that was not in the form of cash, it was only to address black money in form of cash, he added.

Debroy noted that the business environment in the country must be improved for every entrepreneur, pointing out that not every entrepreneur was necessarily a corporate entity. He added that a large part of entrepreneurship was in the informal economy, which was

CFO of the Year : R Shankar Raman Lifetime Achievement: YM Deosthalee

Turnover below ` 500 crore Rank

Manufacturing

Rank 1

Symphony Ltd.

Platinum

Rank 2

Caplin Point Laboratories Ltd.

Gold

Rank 3

La Opala RG Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Kewal Kiran Clothing Ltd.

Bronze

Rank

Services

Rank 1

Credit Analysis & Research Ltd.

Platinum

Rank 2

Thyrocare Technologies Ltd.

Gold

Rank 3

Accelya Kale Solutions Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Wonder La

Bronze

` 500 – 1,000 crore Rank

Manufacturing

Rank 1

Bajaj Corp. Ltd.

Platinum

Rank 2

Kitex Garments Ltd.

Gold

Rank 3

Hawkins Cooker Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Triveni Turbine Ltd.

Bronze

Rank

Services

Rank 1

Dr. Lal Pathlabs Ltd.

Platinum

Rank 2

Repco Home Finance Ltd.

Gold

Rank 3

GIC Housing Finance Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Navneet Education Ltd.

Bronze

` 1,000 crore plus Rank

Manufacturing

Rank 1

Coal India Ltd.

Platinum

Rank 2

Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd.

Gold

Rank 3

Ajanta Pharma Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Bajaj Auto Ltd.

Bronze

Rank

Services

Rank 1

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

Rank 2

Rural Electrification Corporation Ltd. Gold

Platinum

Rank 3

GRUH Finance Ltd.

Silver

Rank 4

Jagran Prakashan Ltd.

Bronze

Sunil Jain, Managing Editor of The Financial Express

why Prime Minister Narendra Modi had stressed on the importance of start-ups.

According to him, different sets of people interpret reforms differently. While for some it could mean stressed assets, privatisation or labour reforms, from the point of view of the government, it is very important that every citizen must get access to public goods and services. “Even after so many years of Independence, around 1 lakh of 6 lakh villages are deprived of basic services.

I am talking about food,

BUSINESS AVENUES

electricity, access to healthcare and education,” he said, adding that the government prioritises those services.

“So many years after Independence we are going to have a railway line in Northeast for the first time and it is very important,” Debroy said.

Three institutional changes, Debroy noted, were very important. The first change was higher devolution to the states following the recommendations of the 14th

Finance Commission which had suggested states get a share of 42%, way higher than the earlier 32%. “It was not easy for the government but they did it,” he observed. The other two were the recognition of the importance and the involvement of citizens.

Debroy was speaking at the first function to celebrate the country’s finest chief financial officers. Earlier in the evening, NS Kannan, executive director, ICICI Bank, said, “It is essential for us to recognise and reward the critical role

played by CFOs in organisations. The CFO today is the fulcrum of governance within the organisation, acting as the key internal representative of various stakeholders of the company.

Apart from helping companies protect their bottom lines, they act as the conscious keepers of the CEOs and boards. In fact, I would like to stress that the most important organisational role the CFO performs is ensuring that the CEO and the rest of the board members sleep well at night!”

EXPRESS COMPUTER | JUNE, 2017

18 | CASE STUDY HOW IT WORKS ◗ Within three years, all the Aegis centers were running on Citrix and XenServer, XenDesktop, XenApp, and NetScaler were all deployed together in a big bang approach ◗ “XenServer has helped consolidate the IT infrastructure, bringing the server footprint down by almost 40% while drastically shrinking the storage footprint by 60%, leading to cost savings ◗ The company has benefited significantly from having a central access to everything as it made the deployment and management of applications much easier and less time-consuming

How Aegis moved from a distributed to centralized architecture solution

BY MOVING FROM, a desktop to a thin client environment, Aegis has made the deployment and management of applications much easier and less time consuming Rachna Jha rachna.jha@expressindia.com

A

egis is a global outsourcing and technology services company which has operations in 46 locations across 9 countries with more than 40,000 employees. The Essar Group-owned company has around 25,000 staff serving the domestic market such as Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Technology, Telecom, Healthcare, Travel & Hospitality, Consumer Goods, Retail, and Energy & Utilities.

Every year the company manages over half a billion interactions for over 150 clients.

In India, Aegis operates

over 30 delivery centers across multiple cities. Each delivery center has an independent IT set up, be it an active directory or an anti-virus server. This distributed architecture brought challenges to the company. The distributed architecture brought along the problems of distributed data backup solutions and standalone storage across the enterprise. Apart from this, the management of desktops was an even bigger issue with too many sites and end points to look after and manage.

“Having a distributed architecture every site would have its own problems. So, when we actually wanted to install anything common across all sites we had bigger issues,” says Ganapathy

Subramaniyan, SVP, and CIO, Aegis.

Keeping these challenges in the account and finding solutions to these challenges, the company decided to switch towards a centralized architecture. The company identified virtualization, on both the server and desktop, as one of the key elements of its move towards a centralized approach. “After evaluating our server footprint we realized that virtualization was a key imperative to our growth strategy and, therefore, eased many of our business requirements across a distributed architecture,” explains Subramaniyan. The company’s need for moving from distributed to centralized architecture led them to deploy Citrix's virtualization solutions.

Citrix was preferred due to its offerings in desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and application delivery control. “Getting the entire portfolio from one vendor ensured seamless integration, improved customer experience,

Aegis’ need for moving from distributed to centralized architecture led them to deploy Citrix's virtualization solutions better management, and convenience,” states Subramaniyan.

Fast rollout Within three years, all the Aegis centers were running on Citrix and XenServer, XenDesktop, XenApp, and NetScaler were all deployed together in a big bang approach. The company has covered around 3,000 users on VDI with 9,000 users accessing applications delivered by XenApp. Both VDI and XenApp are hosted by 350 plus instances of XenServer.

Besides these two, some of the other workloads hosted on XenServer are the database, application servers and all Windows Infrastructure Services (AD, DHCP, etc.).

“XenServer has helped consolidate the IT infrastructure, bringing the server footprint down by almost 40% while drastically shrinking the storage footprint by 60%, leading to cost savings,” claims Subramaniyan. “Today our IT infrastructure runs like a welloiled machinery without any issues,” he adds.

Central access Aegis has benefitted on both the business and IT management front after moving to the Citrix environment.

Besides, the company has benefited significantly from having a central access to everything as it made the deployment and management of applications much easier and less time-consuming. “Before deployment, it was a significant challenge for our teams to roll out new applications that our

clients would want to install on some of the desktops across multiple sites. Now it is just a matter of few hours for us to release a new application across the organization as compared to what used to take days earlier,” says Subramaniyan. Also, on the compliance front, overall audits, as well as end-point audits, have become much easier because of the centralized architecture.

Considering everything is now consolidated and centrally done, the auditor is able to conduct the checks at the datacentre level and doesn’t have to visit individual delivery centers.

Apart from its product offerings, Citrix team also provided a value add by doing a health check and audit of the complete IT environment on which Citrix’s products were supposed to work. It offered recommendations around optimizing the entire IT infrastructure, including network parameters, network core configuration, WAN configuration, etc.

Having a distributed architecture every site would have its own problems. So, when we actually wanted to install anything common across all sites we had bigger issues Ganapathy Subramaniyan SVP, CIO, Aegis

Leading new ICT, building a better connected world

Nikhil Sharma, Huawei Telecommunication India Pvt Ltd

N

ikhil Sharma, Huawei Telecommunication India Pvt Ltd began his presentation in Technology Sabha, Visakhapatnam, by emphasizing how important information communication technology (ICT) has become to the world. He said that immense progress that has been made in different fields of life, ICT has played a key role and his organization is committed to

research, innovate and bring new things for the welfare of the people. “Huawei invests a lot of money on research and innovation and we will keep on doing this to ensure that we bring solutions that helps you,” said Sharma.

Praising the initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, specially focused on digital, he said, “Programmes such as Digital India, Make in India and demonetisation are steps in right direction. If India could continue, the days are not far when the country would fully digitized.” He added, “We believe in India and have invested heavily in the country.

We aim to help Indian companies and the government in their journey of digital transformation.”

In the Tech Sabha report published in the Express Computer May Issue, the name and designation of the speaker was incorrect. The corrected version appears above. We regret the error.

- Editor

REGD.NO.MCS/066/2015-17, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. MAHENG/49926/90