Information Week - August 2012 issue by Viraj Mehta

Edit

Deriving business benefit from social media collaboration he workplace is going through a major transformation. This is driven by a young tech-savvy workforce that is well-versed with the Internet, social media tools, and mobile devices. This workforce comes in with certain expectations from enterprise applications and systems. Yet many organizations struggle to adapt its infrastructure and policies to address their demands. So, for this issue we decided to focus on the collaboration and communications aspects of this transformation. We observed that organizations have only recently employed social media for community collaboration — for floating ideas among employees, partners, customers — and to evoke responses. But this is being done rather sporadically, and without a deeper understanding about how mass collaboration will achieve business objectives. These days organizations speak about Enterprise 2.0 and how they are going social. But that isn’t only about giving employees free access to social media applications like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — or enterprise grade tools like Jive, Jam, Webex, Chatter, Yammer, Skype, etc. There’s a lot more to it. The Social Organization (written by Anthony J Bradley & Mark P McDonald), purports that the social organization is about building participative communities for mass collaboration. It says organizations need to have a clear vision and a strategy for community collaboration. And the book tells us how to build these communities. Traditional corporate intranets that were mainly HR driven, are now becoming more interactive. It’s no longer a one-way communication with the organization talking down to its employees. The social intranet is about employees instantly communicating with other employees. It’s about teams or groups of people sharing ideas and collaborating on projects. We are talking about a collaborative decision making environment. It is also about everyone in the organization (irrespective of rank) being accessible to everyone else. Taking this a step further, the social intranet will also extend to the ecosystem of partners, customers, suppliers, franchisees, etc. And you see this in organizations like DBB Mudra Group, L&T Infotech, NIIT Technologies, iGate, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Persistent Systems (to name a few). In this issue our team of journalists bring you reports on how these organizations have successfully rolled out their collaborative environments, and how their respective businesses have benefitted. There are two related trends: One, e-mail for internal communications is diminishing. For instance, organizations such as Atos, L&T Infotech, and DBB Mudra have noted a significant drop in internal e-mails. Employees are increasingly opting for other forms of direct communication like desktop video conferencing, status updates, wall posts, instant and direct messaging. The other trend is that traditional enterprise applications are getting more social and are even being integrated into the social intranet. Our Principal Correspondent, Ayushman Baruah, reports how software vendors like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and others are building collaborative and social features into traditional offerings. This is mainly being done by acquiring IP from social media companies — Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer being the most recent example. Smaller ISVs like MangoSpring and Saba have built applications from the ground up for collaboration.

Organizations have only recently employed social media for community collaboration. But this is being done rather sporadically, without a deeper understanding about how mass collaboration will achieve business objectives

Follow me on Twitter

@brian9p

informationweek august 2012

u Brian Pereira is Editor of InformationWeek India. brian.pereira@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

contents Volume

Issue

August

2012

24 case study What an idea, Sirji! DDB Mudra Group’s mission is to create infectious ideas that influence behavior. Naturally, everything on its new enterprise social network starts with an idea

27 28

30 31

Social collaboration yields great benefits for Persistent Pune-based mid-sized IT services vendor, Persistent Systems has significantly improved its collaboration process by deploying Cisco’s enterprise collaboration platform, Quad

How social collaboration is transforming L&T Infotech The fast growing IT firm has developed an internal social collaboration solution that is helping in reducing time for responding to RFPs, tracking intellectual property developed, and in reducing the overall time for resource fulfillment and project development

cio voice lessons we learned from our social 32 7networking journey A year back, Yammer network at NIIT Technologies grew from almost nothing to cover 40 percent of its employees within two months, without any internal promotion. Since then the usage has been growing constantly. Udayan Banerjee, CTO at NIIT Technologies takes us through the success story and shares lessons learnt during the organization’s journey to become a ‘social’ enterprise

iGATE integrates with Patni on Microsoft SharePoint By adopting Microsoft SharePoint, iGATE was able to instill synergy among the diverse sets of people and policies on a common platform, post acquisition of Patni

How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud

feature landscape of Unified 38 Changing Communications market in India While on-premise Unified Communication solutions have already gained acceptance, UCaaS is also slowly gaining momentum

42 Enterprise apps get more social

WinHire Technologies is seeking to disrupt the recruitment market by building the world’s first video social recruitment portal

Do you Twitter? Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/iweekindia

Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

informationweek august 2012

Find us on Facebook at http://www.facebook. com/informationweekindia

Traditional enterprise applications are coming out of their ‘introverted’ back-ends and going social and mobile. They are evolving to include features that foster easy collaboration and information sharing among employees. Static corporate intranets, once one-sided communication tools, are now becoming dynamic with two-way communication tools If you’re on LinkedIN, reach us at http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=2249272

www.informationweek.in

THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

feature 45 Facebook-like social media comes to the office A company called MangoSpring is taking a consolidated and social approach to increase productivity in the workplace. Its MangoApps suite infuses communication and collaboration features with a Facebook-like interface in common enterprise applications

interview 50 ‘Organizations are driven by people, their speed and ability to adapt’ Gaurav Mehra, Co-founder, Saba Software and MD, Saba India

54 interview ‘HCL Meme Platform enables employees to connect, share, learn and grow ’ Prithvi Shergill, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Technologies

52 interview ‘Social media is gaining acceptance in understanding the sentiment on a stock’ Pravin Lal, Director, Sapient Global Markets

News

RCom launches new 3G tablet for ` 14,499 Google buys Sparrow to lift Gmail Windows 8 launch date revealed

EDITORIAL.........................................................4 INDEX..................................................................8 news analysis............................................. 18

VMware acquires DynamicOps

book review................................................ 47

VMware to acquire Nicira for USD 1.26 billion

social media experiences................... 56

Public cloud yet to hit inflection point in India: Zinnov

Dell KACE launches System Management Appliances for SMEs

Capgemini signs five-year IT services contract with Bayer Business Services Citrix expands R&D presence in India Wipro migrates to Microsoft Lync Server 2010

opinion.......................................................... 57 global cio interview............................. 62 secret cio.................................................... 65 technology & risks................................ 66 global cio....................................................67 practical analysis................................. 68 down to business..................................... 69

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 7

Imprint

VOLUME 1 No. 10 n August 2012

print online newsletters events research

Managing Director : Sanjeev Khaira : Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar Printer & Publisher Associate Publisher & Director : Anees Ahmed Editor-in-Chief : Brian Pereira Executive Editor : Srikanth RP Principal Correspondent : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) : Amrita Premrajan (New Delhi) Senior Correspondent Copy Editor : Shweta Nanda

Head Office UBM India Pvt Ltd, 1st floor, 119, Sagar Tech Plaza A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India. Tel: 022 6769 2400; Fax: 022 6769 2426

Design Art Director Senior Visualiser Senior Designer Designer Marketing Deputy Manager Deputy ManagerManagement Service online Manager—Product Dev. & Mktg. Deputy Manager—Online Web Designer Sr. User Interface Designer Operations Head—Finance Director—Operations & Administration

: Deepjyoti Bhowmik : Yogesh Naik : Shailesh Vaidya : Jinal Chheda, Sameer Surve : Sanket Karode : Jagruti Kudalkar : : : :

Viraj Mehta Nilesh Mungekar Nitin Lahare Aditi Kanade

: Yogesh Mudras : Satyendra Mehra

Sales Mumbai Manager- Sales : Marvin Dalmeida marvin.dalmeida@ubm.com (M) +91 8898022365 Bengaluru Manager—Sales : Kangkan Mahanta kangkan.mahanta@ubm.com (M) +91 89712 32344 Delhi Manager—Sales : Rajeev Chauhan rajeev.chauhan@ubm.com (M) +91 98118 20301 Production Production Manager

: Prakash (Sanjay) Adsul

Circulation & Logistics Deputy Manager

: Bajrang Shinde

Subscriptions & Database Senior Manager Database : Manoj Ambardekar manoj.ambardekar@ubm.com Assistant Manager : Deepanjali Chaurasia deepanjali.chaurasia@ubm.com

associate office- pune Jagdish Khaladkar, Sahayog Apartment 508 Narayan Peth, Patrya Maruti Chowk, Pune 411 030 Tel: 91 (020) 2445 1574 (M) 98230 38315 e-mail: jagdishk@vsnl.com International Associate Offices USA Huson International Media (West) Tiffany DeBie, Tiffany.debie@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 408 879 6666, Fax: +1 408 879 6669 (East) Dan Manioci, dan.manioci@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 212 268 3344, Fax: +1 212 268 3355 EMEA Huson International Media Gerry Rhoades Brown, gerry.rhoadesbrown@husonmedia.com Tel: +44 19325 64999, Fax: + 44 19325 64998 Japan Pacific Business (PBI) Shigenori Nagatomo, nagatomo-pbi@gol.com Tel: +81 3366 16138, Fax: +81 3366 16139 South Korea Young Media Young Baek, ymedia@chol.com Tel: +82 2227 34819; Fax : +82 2227 34866 Printed and Published by Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar on behalf of UBM India Pvt Ltd, 6th floor, 615-617, Sagar Tech Plaza A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India. Editor: Brian Pereira, Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt Ltd, Plot No 1c/716, Off Dadaji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027. RNI NO. MAH ENG/2011/39874

Editorial index Person & Organization Amit Goyal, iGATE..........................................................30 Animesh Srivastava, AGC Networks.......................39 Arun Shetty, Avaya........................................................40 Ashish Varerkar, L&T Infotech...................................28 Bikram Bedi, Oracle India ..........................................43 Chella Namasivayam M, iGATE.................................30 Dharmesh Chauhan, iGATE.......................................30 Dipen Shah, Kotak Securities....................................21 Gaurav Mehra, Saba Software .................................50 Giri Devanur, WinHire Technologies......................31 Himanshu Goyal, IBM .................................................43 Lee Thompson, Salesforce.com...............................44 Manish Panjwani, Accenture....................................58 Manjiri Ranade, Persistent Systems........................27 Minhaj Zia, Cisco ...........................................................39 Mukund Rao, iGATE......................................................39 N Chandrasekaran, TCS .............................................20 Neeraj Gill, Polycom .....................................................39 Oliver Bussmann, SAP .................................................62 Partha Iyengar, Gartner...............................................18 P Krishnakumar, Dell India.........................................56 Pravin Lal, Sapient Global Markets.........................52 Prithvi Shergill, HCL Technologies .........................54 Rajashree Natarajan, Cognizant..............................57 Raju Vegesna, Zoho .....................................................44 Ranjit Nambiar, HID Global .......................................22 Ravinder Raina, NEC India..........................................41 Rohit Ambosta, Financial Technologies...............41 Sanish KB, Gartner ........................................................40 Sanjay Manchanda, Microsoft India .....................44 SD Shibulal, Infosys.......................................................20

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Company name Page No.

Website Sales Contact

Sebastian Joseph, DDB Mudra Group...................24

IBM

2 www.ibm.com

ibm.com/puresystems/in

Sridhar Iyengar, ManageEngine .............................61

APC

3 www.SEreply.com

esupport@apc.com

Sunil Lalvani, RIM ..........................................................60

Zoho

5 www.zoho.com

india-sales@ManageEngien.com

IBM

9 www.ibm.com

ibm.com/in/xoffers

CIO Choice

16-17

contact@cio-choice.in

FSA

35 www.informationweek.in brian.pereira@ubm.com

Interop

48-49

www.interop.in

Eaton

www.eaton.com/powerquality/india EatonPowerQualityIndia@eaton.com

Juniper

www.juniper@dnbindia.in

www.cio-choice.in

salil.warior@ubm.com Priya Sharma

Udayan Banerjee, NIIT Technologies ....................32 V Balakrishnan, Infosys ...............................................20 Varad Kamini, Datamatics Global Services .........56 Vipin Thomas, MangoSpring....................................24 Vishwa Malhotra, MangoSpring .............................45

Important Every effort has been taken to avoid errors or omissions in this magazine. In spite of this, errors may creep in. Any mistake, error or discrepancy noted may be brought to our notice immediately. It is notified that neither the publisher, the editor or the seller will be responsible in respect of anything and the consequence of anything done or omitted to be done by any person in reliance upon the content herein. This disclaimer applies to all, whether subscriber to the magazine or not. For binding mistakes, misprints, missing pages, etc., the publisher’s liability is limited to replacement within one month of purchase. © All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Mumbai only. Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. UBM India Pvt 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.

informationweek august 2012

www.informationweek.in

How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud WinHire Technologies is seeking to disrupt the recruitment market by building the world’s first video social recruitment portal http://bit.ly/O79dAx

Varoon@noorav tweeted:

Cloud Computing - How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud http://www. informationweek.in/Cloud_Computing/12-07-17/How_a_ startup_is_seeking_to_disrupt_the_recruitment_industry_ by_using_the_cloud.aspx #cloud

Pat Gallagher@patsion tweeted:

How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud - InformationWeek India http://www.informationweek.in/Cloud_ Computing/12-07-17/How_a_startup_is_seeking_to_ disrupt_the_recruitment_industry_by_using_the_cloud. aspx #cloud

Hardik Shah@HardikShah81 tweeted:

How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud: As a late entrant, how do you... http://bit.ly/O5YpTk

Cloud-Workforce@CloudWorkforce tweeted: How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud - InformationWeek India

http://bit.ly/M4XEYy#cloudcomputing

To Hadoop or not to Hadoop Big Data technology has become synonymous with its technology poster child Hadoop. However, due to the transformative nature of Big Data, the approach needs to be business driven and requirement specific, not technology specific http://bit.ly/MO8ktS

SAP prepares to tap SMAC opportunity Here’s how SAP is realigning its entire product portfolio to move its customers from a “system of record” to a “system of engagement” so that they can do “business in the moment” bit.ly/MdEiOT

Benjamin Robbins@PaladorBenjamin tweeted:

How SAP is preparing to pursue mobile analytics -

http://www.informationweek.in/Software/12-07-10/ SAP_prepares_to_tap_SMAC_opportunity.aspx via @sapcio

Kevin R Benedict@krbenedict tweeted: @sapcio How #SAP is preparing to pursue #analyticsand #mobile

A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center Kiran Desai, VP and Business Head, Managed Services Business, Wipro Infotech, talks about the power management and cooling technologies deployed within Wipro’s LEED GOLD-certified Data Center in Greater Noida http://bit.ly/MsCLLi

Ray Hochstetler@RayHochstetler tweeted:

#GreenBuilding #News A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center: Wipro Enterprise Data Center was... http://bit.ly/O2nPjg#in

Building University@building_u tweeted:

A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center InformationWeek India: A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Center... http://bit.ly/NL6i0L#LEED #green

Green Corps@GreenCorps tweeted:

A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center InformationWeek India: A peek inside Wipro’...

http://bit.ly/NL6i0L#LEED #green

Content Savvy@ContentSavvyInc tweeted:

To #Hadoop or not to Hadoop: Why data should be requirement specific not #tech specific

http://goo.gl/t05Fm

Bizsensors@bizsensors tweeted:

InformationWeek – Storage - To Hadoop or not to Hadoop

http://www.informationweek.in/Storage/12-07-18/ To_Hadoop_or_not_to_Hadoop.aspx

informationweek august 2012

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter @iweekindia to get news on the latest trends and happenings in the world of IT & Technology with specific focus on India.

www.informationweek.in

Social Sphere Join us on facebook/informationweekindia

Home

Profile

Friends

Inbox

Wall Info Photos Boxes Discussions

InformationWeek India Share:

Post

Photo

Write something...

InformationWeek India We now have 3000 InformationWeek Fans! Thank you all the fans!

Like Comment Share l

InformationWeek India Ashish Vishnoi is our 3000th Fan. He gets a special prize.

Wall Info Friend Activity Photos Events Website

About

Like Comment Share l

InformationWeek is the leading news and information source for information...

Write a comment...

Fan of July

Like, Tag and Share us on Facebook

Anton Nirmal Raj is the Fan of the Month. He has completed his M.Phil from Bangalore University. He works with Xerox Global Services.

Get links to the latest news and information from the world of IT & Technology with specific focus to India. Read analysis, technology trends, interviews, case studies whitepapers, videos and blogs and much moreâ&#x20AC;Ś

Participate in quizzes and contests and win prizes!

Like Comment

Tag Photo

Like Comment l

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 11

News

T h e m o n t h i n t e c h n o lo g y RCom launches new 3G tablet for ` 14,499 Reliance Communications recently announced the launch of its new 3G Tablet on Android platform for ` 14,499. The tablet comes with a 7-inch touchscreen with Android 2.3 OS and a high speed processor of 1.4GHz. Its other features include 1024 x 600 screen resolution, 512 MB RAM, and 5 point touch experience. The lightweight (402g) Reliance 3G Tab comes with a 3.0 MP rear camera and a front camera, enables video calling and caters to both business users and the youth segment. The Reliance 3G Tab is supported by Reliance’s IP-based 3G network in 13 circles across 333 towns in the country. Reliance Communications is bundling the tablet with free benefits worth ` 6,250 to its 3G customers. Sanjay Behl, Group Head – Brand & Marketing, Reliance Communications, said, “In line with our endeavor to develop the device ecosystem, the new 3G TAB is sure to enhance customer experience on our seamless IP-enabled superior 3G network bundled with exciting offers at an affordable price point.”

Google buys Sparrow to lift Gmail Google has acquired Sparrow, the startup behind the well-regarded Sparrow e-mail client for iOS and OS X, for an undisclosed amount. Google already distributes a native iOS client for Gmail, its web-based e-mail service. The company says it intends to use Sparrow’s engineers to contribute to the ongoing development of Gmail, but declined to provide specifics. Since Larry Page became CEO last year, Google has put a greater emphasis on the appearance of its products and services — design and user interface — than it did previously. On its iTunes Store listing, Sparrow says there will be no further updates to its e-mail client, apart from maintenance and bug fixes. The Sparrow deal, Google’s fifth this year, comes with engineering talent that’s sure to be useful to Google. Co-founder and CTO Hoa Dinh Viet used to work for Apple, on iCal and iSync, and for Amazon, on its Kindle e-reader. Google may see an improved native e-mail client as a way to compete more effectively with Apple Mail. Apple Mail, available on both iOS and OS X, can be used to access multiple e-mail services, while the iOS Gmail client handles only Gmail. Turning Gmail for iOS into a service-agnostic e-mail client, perhaps for OS X as well as iOS, could help Google convince mail users to switch to its software.

informationweek august 2012

Windows 8 launch date revealed Microsoft revealed that its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system will be released to manufacturing in the first week of August, and new systems running the software will be generally available to the public on October 26. The new operating system will be available in just four editions: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise, and Windows 8 RT. The last is Microsoft’s official name for Windows On ARM, which will run on tablet chips manufactured by Qualcomm, Motorola, and Nvidia, as well as its own Surface tablet. The users of Windows Vista will be able to purchase and download Windows 8 Pro for USD 39.99.

VMware acquires DynamicOps VMware moved its vision of a software-defined data center a giant step forward with the acquisition of DynamicOps, a multi-hypervisor management firm that was spun out of Credit Swisse investment bank. DynamicOps brings VMware a service governor that can manage Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, and Oracle Xen-based hypervisors and Amazon Web Services’ proprietary version of Xen, Amazon Machine Images. VMware started out planning to manage the virtualized portion of the data center through its vSphere and vCenter virtual machine management software. With DynamicOps it will be able to manage other suppliers’ virtual machines as well, adding them to the on-premises, private cloud and extending its reach to workloads in the public cloud as well.

www.informationweek.in

Networking

VMware to acquire Nicira for USD 1.26 billion VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, a pioneer in software-defined networking (SDN) and a network virtualization player for open source initiatives. “VMware has led the server virtualization revolution, and we have the opportunity to do the same in datacenter and cloud networking,” said Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer, VMware. “The acquisition of Nicira adds to our portfolio of networking assets and positions VMware to be the industry leader in software-defined networking.” VMware will acquire Nicira for approximately USD 1.05 billion in cash plus approximately USD 210 million of assumed unvested equity awards. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the second half of 2012. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both VMware and Nicira and the stockholders of Nicira.

“The value we bring to customers lies in our open approach and the richness of capabilities in network virtualization,” said Martin Casado, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Nicira. “The combination of Nicira and VMware brings together two pioneering teams, and gives customers the industry leading SDN solution for any cloud environment, on any hypervisor in the enterprise and with Service Providers.” VMware plans to continue to support the open principles and technologies that have made Nicira solutions successful, including the Open vSwitch to connect physical networks and multiple hypervisors and the open extensibility framework to implement business-level policies from any cloud management system. This acquisition expands VMware’s networking portfolio, which includes the VMware vSphere virtual switching, VMware vCloud Director networking, vShield Network and security software defined services, and VXLAN protocol to provide a full suite of softwaredefined networking capabilities.

Martin Casado, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Nicira

As per the company, this will allow customers to create a pool of network capacity on top of any network infrastructure from which they can easily support tens of thousands of isolated virtual networks with the simplicity and operational ease of creating and managing virtual machines. —InformationWeek News Network

Cloud computing

Public cloud yet to hit inflection point in India: Zinnov Research firm, Zinnov, said the public cloud market has rapidly evolved in the last two years in India. With the current market at USD 160-192 million in CY11, public cloud in India is at a very nascent state and may not have hit the inflection point yet but the market indicates a future potential of reaching USD 685 million by CY14. There has been significant traction across the three forms of cloud — SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. The released study titled, “Public Cloud Opportunity in India,” reveals that the overall Indian market for cloud (both public and private) has grown steadily to reach USD 860912 million in CY11. Of the total pie, the study highlighted that the public cloud market comprises of 20-22 percent of the share, while the remaining 78-80 percent is accounted by the private cloud. SaaS market in India — largely dominated by e-mail, collaboration tools, and CRM/ ERP — currently stands at USD 123-143 million for CY11. The market has grown at a

CAGR of 46 percent from USD 56-67 million in CY09 until CY11. The PaaS and IaaS markets in India, on the other hand, are rapidly growing, though from a small base. The PaaS market in India stands at USD 1.5-2.5 million in CY11, which has grown at a CAGR of 75 percent from USD 0.5-1.5 million in CY09. IaaS market in India has shown promising growth with a CAGR of 84 percent, growing from a market share of USD 11-14 million in CY09 to USD 38-47 million in CY11. “Public cloud market is expected to grow at 55 percent CAGR in the near future and will become a default choice for new IT investments, especially in the SMB segment. We will not be surprised, if the cloud takes up more than 20 percent of the total Indian IT spend in the next couple of years. This would also mean that there will be a significant demand in the job market for cloud computing-related skills,” said Praveen Bhadada, Director-Market Expansion, Zinnov. —InformationWeek News Network

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 13

News H a r d wa r e

Dell KACE launches System Management Appliances for SMEs Dell has launched its KACE K Series Systems Management Appliances in India. Dell says that IT systems administrators can leverage these appliances to manage PCs and servers in a way that is comprehensive, yet easy-to-use and affordable. Dell KACE provides an appliance-based approach to systems management and its products are available as both physical and virtual appliances. The two products being launched in India are the K-1000 and K-2000 appliances, each having different functionality. In an exclusive pre-launch briefing with InformationWeek India, ahead of the launch, Rob Meinhardt, GM, Dell KACE said, “Our products are midmarket products and we are targeting the SME segment (organizations with 250–2,500 employees). These products are well received in companies that have IT generalists, and are favored because they are easy to deploy and manage.” Dell KACE did a customer survey and found that 60 percent of its customers could deploy the Dell KACE

management solutions help automate critical tasks such as hardware and software inventory, frequent software updates, maintenance of approved configurations, and security patching, allowing the IT administrator to effectively manage end points through a series of simple clicks from a webbased console. Unlike alternative point solutions that lack key functionality and integration, or enterprise-scale solutions that are costly and complex to install and maintain, Dell KACE K Series Systems Management Appliances fulfill the systems management needs of most organizations, from initial computer deployment to ongoing management and retirement. They provide support for heterogeneous environments (Windows, Mac and Linux) and any compatible hardware manufacturers’ platforms. They typically install in one day at a low total cost of ownership. Dell KACE Appliances are available in both physical and virtual form factors, directly from Dell or through its partners.

Dell KACE K2000 appliance

appliance within a week; 71 percent realized the ROI in 5–6 months. “Today’s systems management solutions don’t always address the needs of mid-sized customers, who want solutions that scale to meet the growing management needs of their networks — without ripping and replacing existing infrastructure. Dell KACE fills the gap between point solutions and complex, expensive management suites,” said Meinhardt. Notes from the official press release say that the appliance-based systems

informationweek august 2012

Additionally, Dell KACE has set up a product-agnostic online community ITNinja, offering IT professionals a way to search for answers and best practices, to a range of complex issues, through a game-like experience. Content from ITNinja can also be leveraged by Dell KACE customers directly through the Dell KACE Appliance Management Console, providing expertise contextually saving IT teams’ time on common computer administration tasks. Dell did not indicate the Rupee

Rob Meinhardt, General Manager , Dell KACE

pricing for the Dell KACE appliances. By dollar value, the K-1000 has an entry price of USD 10,000 while the K-2000 is priced USD 5,000 onwards. Dell KACE appliances sold in India will be serviced by a dedicated team from Dell standard support. Globally, Dell KACE appliances have been well received by government companies and retail organizations. “Over 40–50 percent of our global revenues come from public markets, where we sell to Federal and state/ local governments. And in commercial markets our product is best suited to distributed environments that have many offices or branches. We have sold to many retail organizations and education institutions. We have also sold to commercial banks that offer retail banking,” informed Meinhardt. KACE was an independent company until 2010, when it was acquired by Dell. KACE had a presence in India for the past 4–5 years through a partnership with Persistent Systems, Pune. Around 10-12 engineers at Persistent were involved in QA and engineering work on the KACE appliances. Incidentally, both companies had a common investor. —Brian Pereira

www.informationweek.in

C o l l a b o r at i o n

Services

Capgemini signs five-year IT services contract with Bayer Business Services Capgemini and Bayer Business Services recently signed a contract for the provision of IT services from India. The contract includes global application development and services, as well as

infrastructure services, including service management and will run over a period of five years. Bayer Business Services is the global competence center for IT and business services of the Bayer Group, a global enterprise with core competencies in the fields of health care, nutrition and

high-tech materials, headquartered in Germany. Under the terms of the contract, Capgemini will take over the operations of Bayer Business Services’ captive IT service center in Mumbai with approx 550 employees. “We are excited about our strategic partnership with Bayer and welcome the 550 transferring team members to the Capgemini family. The Bayer team comes with vast business and IT sector knowledge and will support our growth ambitions and transformational programs in India and globally,” said Aruna Jayanthi, CEO, Capgemini India. Capgemini will support the global business units of Bayer Business Services by supporting the 120,000 IT users of the Bayer Group worldwide, with a global team primarily from India but also with local support from Germany, USA, Brazil and China. Stephan Gerlich, Country Group Head, Bayer in India said, “This is a winwin scenario for both the companies. Our employees will benefit enormously from Capgemini’s range of services and portfolio mix to further their scope of activities.” —InformationWeek News Network

S o f t wa r e

Citrix expands R&D presence in India Citrix unveiled a new building on its Bangalore campus and announced its R&D presence in Hyderabad. With the expanded facility, Citrix India has the capacity to accommodate a total of 1,400 employees. The company also plans to hire 200 employees for their new facility in 2012. The two centers, an integral part of Citrix’s globally integrated R&D network, deliver online collaboration, data sharing, virtual desktops, cloud networking and cloud platform solutions for more than 260,000

customers. The company’s global R&D investment in 2011 amounted to approximately USD 350 million, more than 15 percent of Citrix’s net revenues. David Henshall, Executive VP -Operations, CFO and Treasurer, Citrix, said “Our investment in India has resulted in significant growth in this emerging market. The injection of the skills from India to Citrix’s globally integrated R&D network will help extend our differentiation in the marketplace.” —InformationWeek News Network

Wipro migrates to Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Wipro Technologies has migrated to Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which is being rolled out to all employees in phases across all worldwide locations. Since Wipro has a presence across multiple geographies, the company was keen to adopt a more optimal and seamless solution to enable better collaboration among users. “Lync Server 2010 provides us with a single solution for all modes of real-time communications,” said Ramesh Nagarajan, CIO, Wipro. “We also wanted the same solution to cater to our dial-in conferencing needs for users across the globe in different regions. This has been rapidly achieved for certain users in the U.S., and now is being planned for other regions, including India.” Lync Server 2010 allows employees to collaborate with co-workers anytime, anywhere using the Internet. It optimizes costs using web conferencing & video conferencing for interactive training and manages and finishes projects efficiently with desktop sharing and real-time communications within project teams. “The seamless integration with Microsoft Office 2010 products, such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Outlook 2010, makes it much easier to use. In fact, the integration with SharePoint 2010 is so seamless that people don’t even realize that it’s happening, but they use it all the time. It’s natural,” Nagarajan said. “It’s convenient to reach out to people, especially with Outlook integration.” —InformationWeek News Network

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 15

News Analysis

‘IT as engine room’ concept will drive innovation Research firm, Gartner, argues that without a world-class IT engine room, it will be difficult for IT to play a strategic role in the enterprise By Srikanth RP In these turbulent economic times, the IT function is now being called upon to not only reduce costs of existing business processes, but also showcase ways in which the adoption of technology can lead to higher business revenues and profits. However, this is easier said than done. A major focus of the IT function is still on keeping the lights on, and less on driving innovation. While the role of the IT function traditionally was to just support the business, the current economic conditions have altered the requirements drastically. “IT has a critical element of not only managing growth, but also innovation,” states Partha Iyengar, VP, Distinguished Analyst and Regional Research Director, India for Gartner. Iyengar argues that while many CIOs strive to be strategic, a significant part of the capability that IT delivers is not strategic to the business. When this starts to happen over a period of time, the control of a CIO on an organization’s IT budget will decrease. This is corroborated by a Gartner report, which states that by 2014, CIOs would have lost control over 25 percent of their IT

“CIOs will be under pressure to embrace the ‘IT Engine Room’ approach, as it will enable them to reduce ‘run’ costs, and invest on ‘grow’ & ‘transform’ activities”

Partha Iyengar, VP, Distinguished Analyst & Regional Research Director, Gartner, India

spending, and instead by 2017, the chief marketing officer’s IT spend will increase, as marketing becomes increasingly digitized — pointing to an increase in service providers and IT spend to be diversified to other segments.

Driving innovation while reducing costs

Against this context, the role of the ‘IT Engine Room’ — a concept of a stable, cost-optimized engine room that seeks to build worldclass competencies around rapidly providing commoditized IT at market-competitive pricing, is an idea whose time has come. Gartner says that the IT engine room represents a transition in both the perception of traditional IT and its underlying

strengths. “The key difference is the transition from a focus on managing assets to managing capabilities and outcomes in a way that better connects with how the consumers of those capabilities perceive value,” says Iyengar. For example, while the traditional IT function will focus on improving asset utilization as the measurement of success, the ‘IT as Engine Room’ approach may use variables such as ‘cost per business transaction’ as the measurement of success.(See Table: ‘IT as Engine Room vs IT as Cost Center’) This approach involves using IT to drive growth and innovation in the business, while simultaneously reducing the cost of day-to-day IT operations.

‘IT as Engine Room’ vs ‘IT as Cost Center

IT as Engine Room

IT as Cost Center

Success Measures

Cost per business transaction, operational quality and reliability

Asset utilization

Sourcing

Public or private cloud sourcing

Insourced or sole-sourced

Technology Environment

Advanced, highly architected, constantly evolving

Mature, extended useful life

Leadership Competencies

Operational costing, performance management, vendor orchestration and coordination, and risk management

Contract negotiation and asset life cycle management

informationweek august 2012

www.informationweek.in

Gartner Recommendations l

l l

Approach the move toward IT as an engine room as a journey with discrete phases. In the infrastructure environment, standardization, virtualization and incorporation of a process-centric approach are necessary steps on the journey Continue to apply tactical practices to boost return on IT assets Start a cloud initiative, probably in noncore services and in the “lower levels” (such as infrastructure as a service [IaaS] and platform as a service [PaaS]) of the cloud stack first Ensure the governance mechanisms that align investments to enterprise and business unit goals are fit for purpose

Changing the focus from Run to Transform

Given the fact that a major focus of CIOs is in keeping the lights on, a stable, costoptimized engine room, will help CIOs to change their focus from ‘run’ to ‘grow’ and ‘transform’. “In an economic climate where overall IT budgets are shrinking, it is imperative that organizations increase their IT spending on initiatives that are transformational and drive competitive advantage. This will put pressure on CIOs to embrace the ‘IT Engine Room’ approach, which will enable them to increase IT agility while reducing ‘run’ costs, and channeling a higher percentage of IT investment toward ‘grow’ and ‘transform’ activities,” opines Iyengar. Iyengar says that CIOs need to recognize this paradigm shift before they become an endangered species. “We have already seen IT budgets shifting to the business. We have also seen examples where the CIO has been replaced by someone from the business side. Hence, today, it has become imperative for CIOs to establish their credibility as a business leader instead of a technology leader,” states Iyengar. If CIOs adopt the ‘IT as Engine Room’ concept, they will have more time to focus on innovation. Enterprises will also benefit from more effective decision making as internal resources can be deployed on higher business value activities. In India, Iyengar gives the examples of organizations, such as Maruti Suzuki and Reliance Capital, who have ensured that the IT strategy dovetails with business strategy.

“In Maruti Suzuki and Reliance Capital, we have examples of organizations, which have strong linkage between IT and business. For example, in the case of Maruti Suzuki, a significant number of the CIO Rajesh Upppal’s staff is from the business. The organization has a rotation program which ensures that professionals from the business participate actively in formulating the IT strategy. Similarly, Reliance Capital uses advanced BPM to create platform-based business processes. As a result, they have a terrific amount of visibility into every process,” says Iyengar. While the ‘IT as Engine Room’ concept promises great benefits, enterprises too need to invest in acquiring the required skills, while ensuring quality and the predictability of the service. Gartner says that an effective IT engine room will be highly process-centric, leveraging ITIL, Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) and others in various aspects of IT service delivery. It also believes that it will be difficult to achieve the efficiencies, predictability and cost visibility within IT without the rigor and discipline that a process-centric approach delivers. Given the fact that organizations have been struggling for years to change the Run-transform ratio for a long time without any significant change, the ‘IT as Engine Room’ concept is a promising approach to alter the ratio and use IT to make the business more responsive and agile.

Today, it has become imperative for CIOs to establish their credibility as a business leader instead of a technology leader. CIOs need to recognize this paradigm shift before they become an endangered species

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 19

News Analysis

A tale of contrasts: TCS geared for strong growth; Infosys lags behind Employees exit as Infosys gives bleak guidance and low-key commentary; TCS reports secular and broad-based growth amid cheerful employees By Ayushman Baruah A few years ago, Infosys was undoubtedly the poster boy of Indian IT. It used to be said that when Infosys ‘sneezed’, the whole IT sector caught a ‘cold’. If Infosys gave a conservative guidance, it was assumed that the whole IT sector too would give a conservative or a bleak guidance. Today, Infosys is no longer considered the barometer for IT sector performance — the mantle has been comfortably taken over by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Asia’s largest IT services company. So, on July 12, when industry observers first heard that these two warhorses of Indian IT services, were declaring the results on the same day — it was unprecedented. Also, given that the two events probably occurred together for the first time in history, comparison was inevitable. Industry onlookers quickly noticed the contrasting style followed by the two leaders, which was aptly reflected in the guidance. For example, Infosys, for a change, restrained from giving a forecast for the next quarter indicating the enormous volatility in the market and delays in their customer’s decision-making cycle. The commentary from Infosys’ management was low-key and lacked confidence. In contrast, TCS, which traditionally does not make revenue and profit forecast, gave upbeat commentary about the future. Infosys’ dollar revenue guidance for the full year ended March 31, 2013 is expected to be at

informationweek august 2012

least USD 7.34 billion, a year-on-year growth of 5 percent, down from its April estimate of 8-10 percent growth. Interestingly, Infosys’ guidance of 5 percent is much lower than NASSCOM’s growth estimate of 11-14 percent for the industry in FY 2013. Commenting on the difference in growth projections, Infosys CFO V Balakrishnan said that NASSCOM’s forecast is “ambitious”. On the other hand, TCS management said the company is likely to deliver ahead of the NASSCOM’s guidance if the currency levels do not fluctuate too much. TCS beat street expectations with a 37.7 percent growth in revenue for the first quarter to ` 14,869 crore. Infosys’s topline for the quarter grew only 28.5 percent annually to ` 9,616 crore. TCS’ net profit for the quarter ended June 30, 2012 grew 37.4 percent to ` 3,318 crore as compared to Infosys

whose net profit for the quarter grew 32.9 percent to ` 2,289 crore for the quarter. In contrast to SD Shibulal, CEO of Infosys, who talked about volatility and delays in customer decision-making, N Chandrasekaran, CEO of TCS said, “We have seen strong, secular growth across all our service lines and industry segments driven by robust volumes from key markets like North America, Europe and the U.K. We have also absorbed impact of wage hikes and maintained our profitability in a volatile setting.” He added, “Looking ahead, TCS continues to see good demand from global corporations as they successfully navigate an increasingly complex environment. Our investments in new technologies and platforms are bearing fruit with increasing market traction and we are confident of playing a pivotal role in our customers’ future business evolution.” Reacting to the results and given that it failed to meet its dollar revenue guidance, the Infosys scrip fell sharply, tumbling down 8.15 percent to ` 2265.25 at the BSE on the close of July 12. TCS, which declared its results after market hours on July 12, opened on a bullish note on July 13 gaining nearly 4 percent during the day to close at ` 1249.65 on the BSE. “Despite the rationale given by Infosys for a bad quarterly performance, what is worrying is the FY13 guidance given by them. With this, it is now extremely important to understand as to what is the impact of Infosys 3.0 and what results it is giving. Needless to say, it has definitely impacted employee morale

www.informationweek.in

and has set a gloomy mood for the industry,” stated analyst firm Zinnov. Some other analysts such as Dipen Shah, Head of Research, Kotak Securities, said that TCS’ results were mixed, with its dollar revenues coming in above expectations whereas EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) margins coming in marginally lower than expected. “Average realizations moderated by about 1.3 percent, indicating some pressure from clients and mix change. The management has maintained its optimistic outlook despite the uncertain macro scene and in contrast to cautious comments from Infosys. The comments likely reflect good visibility from large accounts and better execution.” It’s also interesting to note that while TCS added just 29 new clients in the quarter ending June, Infosys added 51 new clients in the same quarter. However, a decline in pricing has obviously hurt revenues and margins. The results of these two top IT firms indicate that while the operating environment remains the same for both the firms, TCS has been able to manage the volatility in a better way.

IMPACT ON HUMAN RESOURCE

Infoscions, as Infosys employees are known as, have been unhappy for quite some time now. Last year, Infoscions were anxious about the leadership reshuffle in the company. Post founder NR Narayana Murthy’s retirement, there was uncertainty whether the new chairman would be among the founders or someone from outside. Amid lot of speculation from both employees and industry watchers, Infosys had announced prominent banker KV Kamath as the new chairman and co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan as co-chairman. While this issue was laid to rest with these announcements, employees soon got another reason to be dejected. When Infosys announced its decision to hold a wage hike in April this year, some adverse impact was certain to happen. Consequently, more than 8,000 people have quit the company in the first quarter ended June bringing the attrition rate to 14.9 percent. In

fact, Infosys was one of the few large IT companies not to give a salary hike to its employees this year. And the management told media persons during the Q1 results that they still have not taken a view on salary hike and that it will depend on the economic situation. An Infoscion who resigned from the company this May to join rival Cognizant, told InformationWeek on condition of anonymity, “I have been

policies are one reason which holds me back from trying in other companies. Also, TCS provides other helpful provisions like ‘leave without pay’ for higher education or child birth or child care. I have observed that these policies have really helped women associates hold on to their job, and return when the time is appropriate for them.” With high attrition and poor financial performance, it might appear as if all is over for Infosys. But that may

Today, Infosys is no longer considered the barometer for IT sector performance — the mantle has been comfortably taken over by TCS, Asia’s largest IT services company

working with Infosys for more than two years now but I could not see any growth or opportunities to work on customer onsite projects. Also, there were no talks about salary hike, so though it wasn’t an easy decision to leave a brand like Infosys, I finally decided to quit.” Another employee who has recently quit the company said that Infosys’ glory days have gone. “It is no longer the organization that neighbour’s would envy. The poor performance of the company in comparison to its peers makes all things worse (for the company).” In contrast, the attrition rate of TCS was lower at 12 percent. The utilization rate (excluding trainees) was at 81.3 percent and that including trainees was 72.3 percent. “We have been able to effectively increase our retention rate in the first quarter to over 88 percent and increase our utilization rates further. The on-boarding of current year’s trainees has begun,” said Ajoy Mukherjee, Executive Vice President and Global Head, Human Resources. Angana Baruah, an employee with TCS for five years now, believes TCS is a company anybody would give a second thought before deciding to switch, regardless of how lucrative the offer might be. “The fair and transparent

not be the fact. Sunil Goel, Director of GlobalHunt, an executive search company, believes Infosys’ future is secure. “It is an organization that is admired for professional approach, people development and its unique business model. The current situation is a flux of a financial result wherein the factors are global economy, dollar exchange rates, and some change in management approach, but largely it has been a people’s organization.” The current attrition level at Infosys, according to Goel, will continue for some time in the near term due to its poor results and communication outflow that Infosys is losing to its rivals. But whether this will be a continuing trend will depend upon the management’s ability to tackle the situation. If the leadership is able to communicate the short-term goals of the company and give a clear vision to its people for their career advancement within the organization, there may be sunny days ahead of the dark clouds surrounding Infosys today. On the contrary, TCS only needs to continue its steady performance and employeefriendly policies to retain its numero uno position in the industry. u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 21

News Analysis

Mobile phones set to provide access control with NFC With the advent of Near Field Communications (NFC), your humble smartphone could replace the access control card you use when you enter your company By Srikanth RP From playing games, clicking photographs, making presentations and watching movies, the definition of what a smartphone can do is expanding rapidly and will continue to expand in the future too. With the advent of a technology called Near Field Communications (NFC), you can now even lock and unlock doors. NFC is a short-range wireless communication technology standard that enables the exchange of data between devices over a distance of several centimeters. It’s one of several new platforms that can be used to hold virtualized credentials that previously were stored on contactless smartcards and used to open doors. “The same contactless credentials that are programmed to provide various levels of facility access can now be loaded onto a mobile handset and used with NFC for secure access. This eliminates the need to carry any other access credentials and makes it easier for security managers to track who is entering and exiting monitored access points,” says Ranjit Nambiar, Director of Sales, HID Global IAM - India and SAARC. Nambiar states that NFC-enabled phones can make other contactless transactions, including cashless payment and transit ticketing, data transfers including electronic business cards, and access to online digital content. This makes it easy to combine multiple virtual credentials on a single device for things like secure facility access and the ability to make cashless payments. Nambiar’s firm HID Global, in collaboration with Sony Corporation, has already developed a contactless smart card reader platform

informationweek august 2012

“NFC-enabled phones make it easier for security managers to track who is entering and exiting monitored access points”

Ranjit Nambiar Director of Sales, HID Global IAM - India and SAARC that embeds secure access control capabilities NFC functionality into laptops and other mobile devices. HID Global is also working with leading handset manufacturers and NFC semiconductor suppliers to embed NFC technology directly into phones to take full advantage of digital credentials. Recently, HID Global also announced its plan to support its iCLASS digital keys and mobile secure identity on NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphones. HID Global’s partnership with Research in Motion, manufacturers of the BlackBerry, will enable BlackBerry smartphone users to use iCLASS digital credentials for door access by simply holding their NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphone in front of a door reader in the same way physical smart cards are used today. Another technology access solution from HID called Secure Identity Object (SIO) will make it possible for enterprises to securely provision and safely embed digital credentials into a variety of mobile devices. “SIOs will provide an additional layer of security on top of device-specific security, acting as a data wrapper that provides additional key diversification, authentication and encryption, and guards against security penetration. Also, SIOs are created and bounded

to one device, preventing it from being copied to another device, thus protecting sites against cloned card attacks,” explains Nambiar.

Advantages of using NFC

The biggest advantage of NFC is the fact that the credentials can be digitally delivered to a person’s handset. For example, when you check into your hotel, you can gain access to your room using your NFC-enabled handset, and skip on the need to physically register yourself at the front desk. NFC-enabled handsets can be a boon for security administrators as they can also set time bound access controls to visit certain departments, with the ability to monitor entry and exit points. While the potential is great, a big hurdle is the limited availability of NFCenabled phones today. But that could change rapidly, as more NFC-enabled handsets enter the ecosystem. Research firm IMS Research estimates that 80 million units of NFC-enabled phones will be shipped this year. Nambiar says that as NFC-enabled phones become more prevalent, you could also see them getting adopted in homes. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

A look at how companies like DBB Mudra Group, L&T Infotech, NIIT Technologies, Persistent Systems and Cognizant have successfully rolled out social media initiatives

7 lessons we learned from our social networking journey: Udayan Banerjee

Changing Landscape of Unified Communications Market in India

Enterprise apps get more social

42 august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 23

case study

What an idea, Sirji! DDB Mudra Group’s mission is to create infectious ideas that influence behavior. Naturally, everything on its new enterprise social network starts with an idea By Brian Pereira

he DDB Mudra Group is India’s largest integrated marketing communications and services network. It has three agency networks, six specialist agencies and 11 SBUs with four key offerings: Media, OOH, Retail and Experiential. DDB Mudra Group, which is part the Omnicom/DDB Worldwide Group, has offices in 15 Indian cities, with representation at 20 plus other locations, giving it a comprehensive presence across the length and breadth of the country. It has more than 1,100 employees and a reach across 1,75,000 villages, 4,000 towns, 3,500 schools and nearly 7 million students. Its scope of services run the gamut through advertising, media planning & buying, digital & new media, data-driven marketing, health & lifestyle, OOH, retail design and visual merchandising, navigation solutions, experiential marketing (promotions, events, rural), trade marketing, youth marketing, localization pre-media services, content creation, strategy and design consultancy. Two years ago the Group was looking for a way to connect its employees across locations. DDB Mudra needed a system that provided for instant communication to its workforce. It also wanted its employees to collaborate on projects and access applications regardless of location. The average age of its employees is 25-30 years, with many of them travelling frequently. So it experimented with a corporate intranet. It also had various initiatives for knowledge management. This corporate portal was developed inhouse, but when DDB Mudra did a pilot run, it realized that there were few users. Sebastian Joseph, PresidentTechnology & FM, DDB Mudra Group, who was instrumental in initiating and driving this project says, “It

informationweek august 2012

was a structured approach wherein employees could log in and access the integrated applications. And they found it too rigid and structured. We realized that our users wanted an unstructured platform. At that time social networking sites like Facebook were drawing lots of users. Our young workforce wanted to instantly communicate the way they do in Facebook. So we started thinking about a more social interface for internal communication.” Vipin Thomas, Product Manager,

a single sign-on interface for all the applications. At that time employees had to log in separately to access individual applications. To meet this objective, all the applications had to be integrated into the DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network. And the third requirement was access to all information, anywhere, anytime. As we said earlier, DDB Mudra employees are dispersed across multiple locations in the country, and travel frequently. They also wanted to

“Our young workforce loves the new enterprise social network. But I think it will make a big impact when e-mail for internal communication is dead”

Sebastian Joseph

President-Technology & FM, DDB Mudra Group

MangoSpring, says, “Their earlier intranet had no social aspect to it. It was not dynamic, so users would visit and use it only when they were looking for something specific.” MangoSpring is the firm that developed DDB Mudra’s enterprise social network. Sebastian and his team embarked on a project to set up a communications and collaboration platform called the DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network.

Objectives

According to Sebastian, the primary objective for setting up the DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network was communication & collaboration. “We want people to ideate but their ideas shouldn’t be lost. All ideas should be captured and stored in a repository, so that we can revisit these ideas later.” The second objective was to have

access all the applications and the DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network using their personal mobile devices.

Challenges

The InformationWeek India editorial team spoke to a number of CIOs and product vendors for this cover story. The common consensus was “technology isn’t the challenge”. “Whenever organizations form these social initiatives, they look at two things: the technology challenges and the adoption/implementation challenges. The former is 15–20 percent. And the adoption challenges are 80 percent. To make collaboration work in your organization, you need to have a common objective among users. In our case, teams working on a project have a creative brief from the client, and work towards delivering on it,” says Sebastian. Sebastian and his team first

www.informationweek.in

evaluated products such as Jive, SharePoint, Tibco, etc. But these did not meet their specific requirements. Then MangoSpring, a vendor from Pune approached DDB Mudra Group. The MangoSpring team examined the current DDB Mudra Group’s systems, and offered its own applications, which were adapted for the enterprise. But there were certain challenges and much integration and customization to be done. Almost all the business applications at DDB Mudra Group are developed by an in-house team, so it took some time for the MangoSpring development team to understand the business use cases. DDB Mudra Group dedicated two of its employees to work on the project full-time, and it also offered a lot of support to MangoSpring. That approach

certainly helped; the two teams set up an 18 month roadmap for developing DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network. MangoSpring was now clear in terms of the features that DDB Mudra needed.

Implementation

The MangoApps suite of products was chosen as the communications and collaboration platform for DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network. The project was initiated 18 months ago (previous to July 2012) with a small set of users, mainly from Sebastian’s IT and Facilities Management team. This user group conducted the PoC (proof-of-concept) for 6-10 months. This PoC was done using MangoApps across web and mobile platforms. Later, the testing was extended to a larger group. MangoApps is an enterprise social

collaboration platform + social intranet. It comprises of a suite of six wellintegrated products. With MangoApps, which has an interface closely resembling Facebook, employees can collaborate and share information in a secure environment. The communication can be direct (direct messages) or in groups (status updates, wall posts, etc). External entities, such as partners and customers can also participate through this platform. (A detailed story about MangoSpring and its offerings appears elsewhere in this issue and also on www.informationweek.in) The application itself is built on an open-source platform with Ruby on Rails as the programming language. There are some components (thirdparty tools) that take care of Document Rights Management (a licensed

Salient features of DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network InformationWeek India witnessed a demonstration of DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network, and we are briefly outlining some of the key features: Ideas — Everything starts with an idea that comes from a user post. Users can review ideas and respond with comments or their own ideas. All ideas are converted into tasks; tasks are converted into a strategy and you have a project. Once the project is completed it ends up in a central repository.

RSS feeds — The capability to subscribe to RSS feeds for various news sources.

LDAP — The LDAP directory is integrated, so one can see a list of colleagues, their contact info, profile photo, and presence info.

Zero internal e-mail — The IT team at DDB Mudra Group developed an application that converts internal e-mail to posts that appear in a social interface. A user can use Outlook to send an e-mail, but the application scans the domain in the e-mail address. If it is in the Mudra domain, it is routed to Mudra Social Hub (instead of the e-mail gateway).

E-mail attachments as links — When attachments are sent internally, the actual file or document is not attached. Instead, a link to that file in the repository is sent.

Groups and Teams — Create teams or groups and invite members. Members will see all files uploaded in that group, group posts, Wikis, events, etc. The same can be done for projects.

Tasks — User posts can be converted to tasks through a menu option. Each task has a start and end date, and is listed in the Project Calendar.

Project Management — Tools for project scheduling and management are integrated. Project management charts (Gant, milestones, etc) are included.

DRM — A utility converts the document into an image — and it won’t allow you to print, e-mail, or make a copy of the image, or even capture the screen. Unless one has rights, there’s no way to print or e-mail the document.

Single sign-on — Moving away from a siloed approach, all enterprise applications can now be accessed from DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network with a single sign-on.

Multi-lingual — In preparation for a global roll-out, the application supports European and Asian language interfaces.

Privacy & Security — To maintain privacy, you can post in a closed group. In addition, there are traditional security controls like SSL-VPN, login, SMS-based twofactor authentication, etc.

Huddle — A video conferencing session with up to 10 users. User-to-user video conferencing on mobile devices is also possible.

File Huddle — All those who have rights to view the file can come into a huddle and collaborate on the document via a video session. They can also add tasks to the document or annotate it. The file owner reviews the file, sees all the associated comments and annotations, and then incorporates the suggestions and make changes in the actual document. This prevents multiple copies and multiple versions of the document.

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 25

case study software). Video conferencing and Huddle (explained in the box ‘Salient features of DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network’) are also enabled through third-party tools. Users do not need special software to access the DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network as it is browser-based. It also runs on mobile platforms such as iOS, BlackBerry, Windows phone, and Android. A lot of customization on MangoApps was needed and some of this customization (e-mail, for instance) was done by the IT team at DDB Mudra Group.

Benefits

DDB Mudra Group did a soft launch of its new communications and collaboration platform in April 2012. The platform is now being rolled out to all 1,000+ DDB Mudra Group employees in a phased manner. Initially people saw this as just another app, in addition to the ones they were already using. But Sebastian embraced it and got his team to use it, and that’s what accelerated the adoption. He uses it himself for adding tasks, creating ideas, etc. The other aspect is that DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network combines the

fun element (user posts, sharing photos, videos, chat etc) with serious elements (ideas, tasks, projects, applications). And everything can be accessed from the same window with a single sign-on for all applications. What’s more, all this can be accessed from a smartphone or tablet — just what its workforce wanted. Sebastian says it is too early to talk about the benefits, but he vehemently pronounces the “death of internal e-mail”. “The youth here love it. But I think it will make a big impact when e-mail for internal communication is dead. We will stop internal e-mails,” says Sebastian. Thomas of MangoSpring says his organization has been using MangoApps and he can see “many benefits”. “E-mail has reduced drastically, and employee engagement has improved a lot. Earlier e-mail was being sent user-to-user. But now since messages are posted on walls, others in the group also contribute to the discussion. So everyone in the team is on the same page at all times. If you post a question, anybody across the company would respond to it. There is

also a unified search feature. Because all the applications are integrated, the search query can be extended across applications and you get more accurate information,” says Thomas.

Roadmaps

Both DDB Mudra Group and MangoSpring have established roadmaps for evolving their collaboration platforms. DDB Mudra Group will roll out its enterprise applications in a phased manner. So far, DDB Mudra Group has rolled out Employee portal, Time Sheet and Facilities Management. Other apps that will eventually be rolled out are corporate dashboard, asset management system (AMS), Bridge (information gathering), domain management system, bug tracking system, estate management system, project management, new business development and facilities management system. “I believe that we need to continually introduce some freshness (to retain the excitement). That’s why we are doing phased roll-outs. In the coming months we plan to roll out apps like New Business Development, Lighthouse, Budget System, Asset Management System, and Dashboard,” informs Sebastian. Discussions are on with the DDB Worldwide Global CIO’s office for a global roll out across DDB Worldwide network. DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network will also extend to clients and vendors at a later stage. And as for MangoSpring, there are plans for integrating MangoApps with SAP CRM and Microsoft Dynamics. It recently introduced integration with other document repositories such as SharePoint, Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs. It also integrated its CRM module with Siebel CRM and Salesforce. DDB Mudra Group’s mission is to create infectious ideas that influence behavior. The first ideation they plan to carry out, using this initiative, is to seek a brand name for DDB Mudra Enterprise Social Network. And that idea could come from any of its employees. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

informationweek august 2012

www.informationweek.in

case study

fast growing company specializing in software product development services, Persistent Systems, was grappling with the challenges of communicating and sharing knowledge effectively with its workforce spread across multiple countries and different time zones. As a company focused on outsourced product development, it was crucial for Persistent to leverage its rich knowledge base for improving its competitiveness. “It was extremely important for us to improve our time to market by taking inputs from our knowledge base created over the years,” explains Manjiri Ranade, AVP-Operations, Persistent Systems. However, with information silos existing in wikis and other content management systems, Persistent faced a challenging task in effectively mining this information. Persistent wanted a single centralized platform so that its employees could access relevant information and collaborate with their peers — in a style which was similar to popular social media platforms. Persistent decided to go for Cisco’s Quad — an enterprise collaboration platform, which combines the power of social networking with real-time communications, and integrates with business and content management systems.

Leveraging the power of the community

The results, post deployment of the Cisco Quad platform, have been extremely encouraging. For example, in the past, identifying domain experts within the company was a

“Quad has allowed us to merge disparate platforms, which has enabled us to reduce the management efforts and infrastructure cost by 30 percent”

Manjiri Ranade

AVP-Operations, Persistent Systems

challenging task. Today, this can be done quickly and efficiently. As the platform provides streamlined content sharing and search capabilities, it lets approved employees post, view, edit, distribute, and search for any kind of content, regardless of where it is located, on an enterprise-wide scale. This is significant as Persistent has more than 7,000 employees located across different regions and countries. More importantly, a built-in policy management gives Persistent the capability to control any information or interaction deemed sensitive — whether it is posted in a community or wiki or in the form of a video or document. “With community posting combined with enterprise search for expertise location, we are now able to identify experts within the organization. Previously, it would take close to five days to search and identify resources with a particular expertise. Today, this has been reduced to just two days,” states Ranade. Quad has also enabled diverse virtual teams to collaborate and get work done by bringing together content, business apps,

communications, and enterprise social software into a single unified workspace. The enterprise social collaboration platform has improved the management of execution of events significantly. Ranade says that the time spent on management and execution of these events has been cut down by 20 percent. Quad has also helped Persistent to reduce and simplify its information architecture. “Quad has allowed us to merge disparate platforms. This has helped to reduce the management efforts and infrastructure cost by 30 percent. For example, our internal platforms such as Akshara, KM (Knowledge Management) and the wiki is now seamlessly merged and available on one platform,” says Ranade. Looking at the business potential of this platform, Persistent has invested in a Center of Excellence, which is developing value-add professional services and software extensions around the Cisco Quad platform. Persistent will gain from the experiences of using and deploying Quad internally, and use it for deploying this platform for other Fortune 1000 companies. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 27

case study

ow do you take advantage of the features that are exhibited by social mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, without compromising security? How do you ensure collaboration across multiple geographies and time zones effortlessly? How do you ensure near real-time sharing of information to improve business agility? L&T Infotech, a fast growing IT firm headquartered in Mumbai, was looking to explore solutions to these challenges by leveraging social techniques. The firm saw the convergence of communication and collaboration as a major factor influencing the way businesses are run, and wanted to innovate in the business of providing value to its clients. After conducting extensive research within and outside the company, the firm decided to build an internal social network that mirrored the user friendliness and interfaces of popular social networking tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn. “We realized that if we provided the right information at the right time and in the right context, we could transform the business,” says Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager & Head of Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech. With this goal in mind, L&T Infotech began to develop its enterprise social networking solution, which it named CliquePoint. Built using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation, the solution was designed to connect easily to its

informationweek august 2012

“Time for query resolution, planning and requirement management has reduced significantly, leading to 10-15 percent reduction in the time to market”

Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager & Head - Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech

existing IT environment. From concept to implementation, the solution was developed in four months.

the ability to create a venture, which is a closed transient community for collaboration.

Leveraging the power of communities

Building a social culture

Understanding the power of communities in the success of a social networking solution, the social networking solution has a ‘communities’ feature, where people with common interests can exchange ideas and best practices while following the activities of the community. CliquePoint also has a ‘personal collaboration’ feature, which provides people with comprehensive tools such as micro-blogs, blogs, and wikis, enabling them to connect and follow others and, more importantly, help in tracking relevant business events. But the most interesting feature that is adapted from social networking websites such as Twitter is the ability to follow important business events. Employees can subscribe and follow important events from their line of business (LOB) systems and collaborate over CliquePoint. Employees also have

Today, the enterprise social networking solution provides access to important business events, people profiles, and communities for collaboration and content sharing, and is quickly building a social culture within L&T Infotech. The social enterprise solution averages about 2,000+ visitors daily, has more than 200 blogs, more than 60 wikis, 20 communities, more than 3,000+ documents, and more than 80 ventures. The solution has not only helped employees in accessing relevant information, but also in finding relevant people and making connections. With more and more employees accessing the solution, the usage of e-mail has been reduced significantly as relevant information is available on a personal or community wall. Instead of employees searching for information, today relevant information reaches employees due to the ability to follow business events or people. As a result, e-mail

www.informationweek.in

usage has been reduced by a factor of 50 percent, while user productivity has improved significantly by a factor of 20 percent.

Transforming Business Processes

The enterprise social networking solution has made a huge impact in several important business processes across the firm. One of the process area’s that has been greatly benefited from the solution is the time taken to respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP). Previously, there used to be lot of e-mail chatter for research on a prospect and response document. Additionally, responsibility and task tracking was extremely cumbersome. “Today, the enterprise social networking solution helps employees in sharing information with ease. We have reduced e-mail chatter by 30 percent. All tasks are managed through ventures and coauthoring feature in SharePoint, which ensure parallel execution. This has led to overall reduction in time to respond by 10 to 15 percent during initial pilot runs. We also added a feature for news and market updates in venture, which enabled keyword-based market tracking. This enhanced the quality of market research data available to the RFP team,” explains Varerkar. Resource fulfillment is another process area where the enterprise social

networking solution is making a big impact. The firm uses the solution to track business events from the resource fulfillment system such as ‘new resource requirements’, ‘transfer notifications’ or ‘resource fulfillment status change’. This has helped in giving an immediate update to the concerned personnel regarding the current status. The resource fulfillment team has benefited from the possibility of creation of ventures or a closed group

Employees can subscribe and follow important events and collaborate over CliquePoint. Thus, instead of employees searching for information, relevant information reaches employees workspace for major fulfillment request on the fly. This has enabled the resource fulfillment team to collaboratively work and gather additional information about the requirement and identification of resources, manage CVs and selection of candidates. This has led to creation of a single communication channel and reduction in resource fulfillment time by 15 percent. All the initiatives within the technology office are now managed through ventures, creating a collaborative environment for team members to share information and

Social Revolution & Impact @ L&T Infotech

status updates. In addition to providing a single workspace for managing the project, one of the most important aspects that aided improvement in productivity and motivation of the team has been providing an open platform where everyone can share their views and ideas and help overall progress and success of the project. “Time for query resolution, reviews, planning and requirement management has been reduced significantly leading to

The social networking platform averages about 2,000+ visitors daily. It has 200+ blogs, 60+ wikis, 20 communities, 3,000+ documents, and 80+ ventures

E-mail usage reduced by a factor of 50 percent

Overall reduction in time by 10 to 15 percent to respond to RFPs

User productivity has improved significantly by a factor of 20 percent

Reduction in resource fulfillment time by 15 percent.

overall reduction in time to market in the range of 10 to 15 percent,” opines Varerkar. Most importantly, the platform has also provided the firm the ability to track Intellectual Property (IP) being developed. In the future, Varerkar says that the enterprise social networking solution will be connected to other LOBs such as CRM and the leave and attendance system. This will allow all the concerned personnel to track important business events, as well as query for information directly from the social platform. For example, one can then track leads or opportunities being created in CRM and possibly create a venture for a collaborative lead perusal team. Like other global and Indian companies, L&T Infotech is one more example of a firm that shows how a focus on enterprise social collaboration can not only foster collaboration, but can also lead to greater business benefits. In the future, as the firm grows and scales, the social networking platform will serve as a foundation for employees to quickly collaborate and accelerate business initiatives using the vast knowledge captured in the platform. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 29

case study

n 2011, when iGATE acquired Patni, the acquisition brought its own intranet, information management culture and resources. iGATE had a PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and an ASP-based intranet, while Patni had a SharePoint-based intranet. Integration was important, as employees found it inconvenient to find and navigate to information embedded in various systems. “Integrating the infrastructure across the two entities was key. This called for a single taxonomy across the combined entity which implied reclassification of existing content,” says Chella Namasivayam M, Chief Information Officer, iGATE. As the company started on this journey, effective and timely communication to employees was crucial. The company intranet was one such media. “We needed a unified intranet, a robust social computing platform, and a creative yet simplified knowledge management platform,” says Amit Goyal, Head – Information Systems, iGATE. Also, Patni had an online approval regime to ensure the quality of documents uploaded to the intranet, whereas iGATE had a manual system. As both the systems were on different technology platforms, they did not interoperate. Consequently, iGATE needed a solution that was agile and scalable.

THE INTEGRATION

iGATE began evaluating options including PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. Patni had already invested in SharePoint 2007 while iGATE was using PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. “We unanimously

informationweek august 2012

“iSpace provides a single window to access most commonly used apps. It has helped our employees be more productive and associate with the merged identity”

Chella Namasivayam M Chief Information Officer, iGATE

agreed to standardize on SharePoint Server 2010,” says Goyal. In 2011, iGATE began building its new intranet iSpace, a unified portal with secure role-based access to applications and information. “iSpace provides a single window to access most commonly used applications. It has helped our employees be more productive and effective, as well as associate with the new merged brand identity,” explains Chella. iGATE developed iSpace in just two months and the portal was operational in December 2011. Then, the knowledge management platform from both the companies had to be integrated. In April 2012, the company created a new knowledge management portal, iKen. Partho Sengupta, Head, Knowledge Management, iGATE says, “Developed over a period of six months, iKen is a dynamic knowledge management system that has simplified sharing.” Finally, VIVA, the customer collaboration portal was built in just six months with the goal of offering a structured, standardized, transparent, and real-time update of projects to customers. VIVA is said to help both parties accelerate business decisions.

THE TANGIBLE GAINS

With Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, iGATE has been able to create a better experience not only for its employees but also for its customers. The company improved its knowledge quotient by about 10 percent as per the Composite KM Index (CKMI). The company built stronger customer relationships with greater transparency and real-time view into project milestones. “With the ability to upload documents directly into the portal, we spend less time exchanging documents on e-mails, and also contribute to discussion forums in real time,” says Dharmesh Chauhan, Program Manager - IS, iGATE. Earlier, two separate intranets were maintained on two different platforms and different skill sets were required to maintain them. Synchronizing information between the two different intranets added additional overheads. “With iSpace in place, maintenance became easy and it helped save costs of USD 55,000 annually. This has been possible because of the significant reduction in data duplication,” says Goyal.

u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

case study

s a late entrant, how do you compete in a market that is already dominated by giants? As a small player with limited ability to capital, how do you scale up without any limits? Startup WinHire Technologies was grappling with these questions, as it rapidly scouted for solutions that could help the firm take advantage of technology and level the playing field with the giants. WinHire Technologies had a radically different idea. Instead of text-based resumes, the firm wanted to use videos and the reach of the Internet to simplify and improve the process of recruitment. “We wanted to leverage the power of the Internet and the popularity of videos to create the world’s first video social recruitment and networking website,” says Giri Devanur, CEO, WinHire Technologies. On the portal, a job aspirant can upload his or her video profile, and increase his or her chance of getting hired, as a video can even highlight personality attributes. While this concept is simple to understand, executing this business model was a huge challenge. As the firm wanted to leverage videos, WinHire needed to invest heavily in the support technologies and infrastructure. However, being an emerging enterprise, the firm did not want to invest heavily in capital expenditure upfront. After evaluating potential technology options, the firm realized that the cloud was perfectly suited to its needs.

Cloud power

WinHire selected IBM’s IaaS solution to develop and test its portal. The offering helped WinHire avoid upfront capital expenditure on computing infrastructure. Using the pay-as-you-

“We are a 100 percent cloud company. We live in the cloud and without the cloud we will be out of oxygen”

Giri Devanur

CEO, WinHire Technologies

go IaaS model, WinHire could globally deploy its application much faster via automation and rapid provisioning to create the required competitive edge. The IBM IaaS solution provided WinHire rapid access to multi-tenant shared cloud computing infrastructure that could be scaled to the needs of the business. “Using the cloud, we could put together a globally scalable infrastructure, with a significant cost benefit ratio of 1:80. More importantly, it has helped us in getting our infrastructure up and ready in just 15 days compared to the traditional timeframe of 6-8 months,” opines Devanur. WinHire’s business model is unique as the potential of social media in the recruiting process is not yet leveraged widely in the recruitment industry. By providing a platform for virtual interaction between job-seekers and recruiters, the firm is on its way to create a difference. For example, using the transformative power of the cloud, WinHire can build and implement a shared collaborative hiring capability, which would be able to address challenges like identity fraud in the recruitment process. It can also replace the early stage of faceless communication with interactive video interview capability.

The cloud gives WinHire the capability to plan and scale for the future. “When we have higher volumes of video resumes, we can quickly scale up without worrying about infrastructure-related issues,” states Devanur. The cloud capability also gives the firm the ability to test out its portal on new mobile platforms. WinHire is a perfect example of a company that owes its existence and its business model to the cloud. Without the cloud, the firm would have never been able to launch such a business model — especially when it had limited resources as a startup company. Devanur sums this up perfectly, when he says, “We are a 100 percent cloud company. We live in the cloud and without the cloud we will be out of oxygen.” If WinHire does succeed in disrupting the marketplace with its innovative approach, it can inspire many entrepreneurs who have a fantastic business model, but lack the resources to invest in the technology infrastructure. The cloud can level the playing field, and allow startups to compete in a much more effective manner, as it is already doing for a number of companies. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 31

cio voice

lessons we learned from our social networking journey

A year back, Yammer network at NIIT Technologies grew from almost nothing to cover 40 percent of its employees within two months, without any internal promotion. Since then the usage has been growing constantly. Udayan Banerjee, CTO at NIIT Technologies takes us through the success story and shares lessons learnt during the organization’s journey to become a ‘social’ enterprise

ny case study is about a success story and there are two ways to present it. The first way is to explain how series of deliberate and logical decisions have led to the success. The steps may include iteration and failure but those are presented as a part of the overall process. The process is based on a vision and a clear goal and the people behind knew what they were doing. There is a clear demonstration of cause and effect relationship. It is presented as a chain of action taken, each action resulting in a logical outcome with the underlying assumption that the process is repeatable for similar situation. The second way is to tell the truth. Real story rarely proceeds on a

informationweek august 2012

straight line. Initial plan gets modified or even abandoned, the vision evolves, the goal changes. There are many failures on the way and there are unexpected success, which are nowhere in the original vision. And, finally, there is some amount of luck and coincidence! Some of the successful steps taken would be the result of logical deliberation while others may be a result of organizational politics or taken to satisfy somebody’s gut feeling (whim?). Part of the result might just have happened because of the change in the environment or as a byproduct of some other decision. In other words, the real story is always messy! Our Yammer network grew from almost nothing to cover 40 percent of

our people within two months. This had happened without any internal promotion. This happened almost a year back and since then the usage has been growing continuously. Why did it happen? We don’t really have much of a clue! To be fair to us, we did have an Enterprise 2.0 roadmap which was initiated about two and a half years back. Even before we made our roadmap, I had also created a Yammer account but that was lying dormant with around 30 users. As a part of our roadmap we had rolled out wiki (using MediaWiki) with some success, a blog (using WordPress) with reasonable success and an Enterprise Social Media (using Elgg), which totally failed. I call blogging a reasonable success

www.informationweek.in

deadline. In Web 2.0 all these are supposed to happen in a voluntary, self organizing manner. How can these mechanisms coexist? l Web 2.0 hype - Solution in search of a problem: Any technology enthusiast will naturally be excited about wiki, blog, social networking etc. As a result, the first question that gets asked is, “What Web 2.0 tools can we use within the enterprise?” This is followed by the question, “Where can we apply these tools?” This is the wrong way of approaching any problem. The right way is to start with a business problem and search for the best way to solve that problem. l Small size of community: All Web 2.0 usage statistics indicate that only a small portion of any community becomes an active contributor — others are mere passive readers. To make any of these initiatives successful, significant number of people have to contribute. Because of the size of a typical organization, the chances of success of Web 2.0 initiative becomes very low. l Limiting impact of the organization boundary: Typical

because the stats compared quiet favorably with IBM’s published case study — IBM had approximately 1 in 25 employee blogging vs. our stats of 1 in 20. We analyzed the failure and concluded that to ensure success we need a social media that has a user interface similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. Of course, there were a group of people who thought we neither needed an enterprise social media platform nor will such a platform succeed. Doubts about usefulness of social media inside enterprise When we started this initiative, social media or social networking inside the enterprise was more commonly referred to as Web 2.0 in an enterprise or simply Enterprise 2.0. As with anything new, there are skeptics and they had their long list of reasons why it will not work. Here are some common reasons: l Incompatibility - Structured approach in enterprise vs self-organizing approach in Enterprise 2.0: Every organization has a clearly defined hierarchy. Goal setting and responsibility allocation is normally top down. Most activity has a clearly defined

social networking technologies work well in a social situation. It is about establishing links between people you know and expanding the chain through existing links; it is about expanding the horizon. Therefore, the whole process will lose its effectiveness if it is bound by the enterprise rules. l Conflicting need - Security restriction vs open access: In recent times, enterprises are highly conscious even paranoid about security needs, both physical as well as electronic. More and more checks and access restrictions are being implemented. Such a restrictive environment is in total conflict with the open culture and free access required for Web 2.0 to succeed.

Then, Yammer just took off!

Was there a conscious plan to adopt it? No. Did we promote it internally? No. Was there any correlation between our decision to look for a Facebook or LinkedIn lookalike platform and the takeoff of Yammer? Not likely — it happened more than three months after the decision. Though it is very tempting to state that they are

Yammer Users Base

Jun-12

Apr-12

Feb-12

Dec-11

Oct-11

Aug-11

Jun-11

Apr-10

Feb-11

Dec-10

Oct-10

Aug-10

Jun-10

Apr-10

Feb-10

Dec-09

Oct-09

Aug-09

Jun-09

Apr-09

Feb-09

Dec-08

Oct-08

(NIIT)

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 33

cio voice correlated, my discussion with the early adopters did not bring out any such correlation. Did top management participate? Did their participation help? Very likely — about a month after it started taking off, our CEO, head of HR and other senior managers joined in. The pace accelerated after that and it is visible in the graph.

What is Yammer?

Any organization can setup an account where people can login if they have an e-mail address in the specified domain of the organization. The interface is more like Google+ though there is no concept of a circle or friend.

What do people use Yammer for?

Basically it is used to share stuff — both light material like jokes and heavy stuff like technical articles. Several (more than 200) special interest groups have formed — some are very active while others are dormant. l People also crib about what they don’t like — available facilities, about the company, etc. Surprisingly, many of these complaints get addressed. l Any achievements, especially group achievements, gets posted and liked — it becomes an instant form of recognition. l Any posts by our CEO and other senior managers have been popular and generates quite a bit of discussion. l Some groups have used it to announce internal events. l Sometimes, it has also been used to get feedback before introducing something new. l People have tried using it for finding solution for technical problems and locating people with specific expertise, but other methods like sending e-mail to our “TechShare” mailing list has been more popular and effective. In a nutshell, people are using it effectively for different reasons but we still have no way to quantify the benefits.

Did we face any problems?

Once in a while, people post inappropriate jokes. All we had to do was to tell them that some people might find it offensive — they have taken it off voluntarily. Interested people have created a group for posting jokes with a warning, “All fun loving staff who wants to share jokes are welcome!! Serious types please beware before joining this group!! Your emotions are at stake!”

problems! Are these lessons of any use to you? May be, may be not. You should take each of these advices with a pinch of salt and see if it makes sense in your situation. I would not be surprised if you come up with a list which is diametrically opposite to this.

Where do we go from here? More often than not, when you

Top management participation helps in accelerating the pace of adoption of internal social media network. Any posts by senior managers generates quite a bit of discussion

informationweek august 2012

Initially our network security team was concerned but top management presence helped. Many of our people work in our customer environment where the network policies are dictated by the customer. So, for some people Yammer access is not possible during office hours.

What did we learn?

4 dos 1. Expect the unexpected — look at our Yammer success. 2. Senior management participation helps. To quote one of the early adopters, “where else will you get an opportunity to interact with our CEO?” 3. Be patient, collaboration does not happen overnight. 4. Better to treat your employees as adults — pointing out inappropriate behavior is generally sufficient. 3 don’ts 1) Do not try to sell social networking — it may be counter productive. 2) Do not look for a ROI — it may be difficult to quantify unless you fudge the figure. 3) Do not expect social networking to solve all problems — I am always suspicious of any solution, which promises to solve all

make future plans and an outside event happens that adversely affects your plan forcing you to go back to drawing board, scratch your head and come up with something different that takes care of the altered reality. Only once in a while, you come across a situation where the outside event gives a big fillip to whatever you had planned. With Microsoft acquisition of Yammer for USD 1.2 billion we find ourselves in the second situation where, over time, we can expect greater enterprise integration. So right now, we are watching.

u Udayan Banerjee is CTO at NIIT Technologies

www.informationweek.in

Infographic Why Indian companies can’t ignore social media An average Indian spends roughly 9.7 hours a week on multiple social networking services like Facebook and Twitter and other applications that enable chatting Source: Norton

LinkedIn has over 14 million users from India, making it the 2nd largest user base Twitter has nearly 14 million

Indian users

With 49 million users, India has the 3rd largest number of Facebook users in the world Source: www.checkfacebook.com

Indian employees ‘like’ the idea of ‘social workplace’ Of 5,000 employees surveyed in Indian workplace, 38% of respondents in the age bracket of 19 to 30 years (Gen Y) believed that use of social media for personal work is acceptable on the office floor

35% of the employees in the bracket of 31 to 48 years (Gen X) and 49 to 66 years (Baby Boomers) believed the same 33% of employees in India believed that it is okay to share work-related opinions on their social networks

JOBS

More than half (54%) of Indian employees prefer searching for jobs via social media rather than online job boards Source: Kelly Global Workforce Index

The business opportunity 83% firms in India agree that without social media activity, marketing strategies cannot hope to be successful

64% businesses in India use websites such as Twitter and Weibo to engage, connect with and inform existing customers

informationweek august 2012

49% companies devote up to 20% of their marketing budget to business social networking activity

In India 67% firms encourage their employees to join social networks such as Linkedin, Xing and Video, compared to 53% globally Source: Regus

www.informationweek.in

Business benefits of internal social network Social networking tools and internal wikis will

Between 2011 and 2016, the compound annual growth rate in spending for enterprise social collaboration software is expected to hit 42.4%

have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration Source: Forrester

Enterprise 2.0 will become a USD 4.6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking tools will garner the bulk of the money

Source: IDC

Source: Forrester

72% of the respondents report that their companies are deploying at least one technology, and more than 40% say that social networking and blogs are now in use. Of the existing technologies, 50% use social networking, 41% use blogs, 38% use video sharing and 23% have microblogs

Nearly 75% of the respondent said social media has increased the speed to access knowledge, 58% said it has reduced communication costs and 51% said it has increased speed to access internal experts Source McKinsey

Source: McKinsey

The business world is going social By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users Source: Gartner

Majority of businesses use social media to enhance their relationships with their customers. But more than half are also expanding their use of social media to drive innovation in their products and services, and for recruitment

More than 70% of organizations operating around the world are now active on social media Source: KPMG

The emerging markets of China, India and Brazil on average are 20-30% points more likely to use social media than counterparts in the U.K., Australia, Germany or Canada Source: KPMG

Source: KPMG

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 37

feature

While on-premise Unified Communication solutions have already gained acceptance, UCaaS is also slowly gaining momentum By Amrita Premrajan

ithin an enterprise there are multiple ways in which employees communicate and collaborate, which ranges from e-mails, voice, video to instant messaging. A Unified Communication (UC) platform brings together all these enterprise communication and collaboration applications, integrating them and providing a common user interface for all these applications. According to Forrester,

informationweek august 2012

this combination of presence and availability with voice, video, e-mail, and instant messaging makes it easier to communicate via the optimal path with employees, customers, and suppliers — and it ultimately streamlines business processes. IDC’s recently released annual Unified Communications and Collaboration Survey report, which canvassed opinion across the AsiaPacific countries, revealed the strong interest amongst enterprises for

Unified Communications (UC). Around 40 percent of the respondents have already deployed these solutions, nearly 35 percent are looking to rollout the services within one-two years, and the remaining are committed to trials.

Adoption of UC solutions in India

Organizations — both large and small — now understand the power of UC, which stands to offer a host of

www.informationweek.in

benefits. Talking about the increase in UC adoption being witnessed in the Indian market, Minhaj Zia, Director Collaboration, Cisco India and SAARC says, “These organizations realize that they can streamline their business processes and boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness. This awareness is pushing sales for UC in India and globally. Moreover, UC and its component technologies are speeding up businesses on their path to going green, while reducing carbon-heavy overheads.” It has been observed that UC in India is increasingly being adopted by businesses that are manpower intensive, but widely distributed. Animesh Srivastava, VP and Head - Sales (India & SAARC), AGC Networks, informs, “In India, Unified Communications is being aggressively adopted by industries, like BPO, IT/ ITes, telecom, logistics, government, hospitality and BFSI, which survive on global communications. Indian government, which can be easily called as the largest enterprise in India with the widest network, has collaboration needs that are higher than anyone else.” Neeraj Gill, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Polycom says, “The organizations are considering UC solutions to cut travel costs and ensure seamless collaboration between multi-geography teams when they work jointly on a project.” In the recent past, many Indian organizations have adopted Unified Communication Solutions. iGATE is one such organization that is using Unified Communications and benefitting from it immensely. The company is using Microsoft Lync for desktop sharing; TANDBERG, Cisco

In India, industries that survive on global communications like BPO, telecom, government, hospitality and BFSI are aggressively adopting UC Animesh Srivastava

VP and Head - Sales (India & SAARC), AGC Networks

solutions for video conferencing and Avaya communication equipment in the back-end. “We have a wide range of PBX systems from Alcatel, Nortel to Cisco-based video infrastructure. From Avaya Aura, we are able to use SIP protocol to connect to most of these systems and interoperate,” says Mukund Rao, Senior Manager - IT for architecting and deploying UC solutions at iGATE. Talking about how iGATE uses the UC infrastructure to its benefit, Rao says, “iGATE’s sales teams generally sit in foreign offices and the production/ delivery teams are located in India offices. There is a lot of dependency in communication between these sales and delivery teams, which sit in geographically separate regions. Both these teams now use this UC infrastructure to actively collaborate.” iGATE is also using the UC infrastructure for conducting video and conference calls — iGATE has an average of 600-700 video meetings every month. “iGATE’s CFO reviews the facilities across the locations over a video call. This video call is also conference with an audio call and people across geographies log in either for video call or conference call from their desk or mobile phone and the same content is streamed across to everyone,” updates Rao.

Organizations are realizing that they can streamline their business processes and boost productivity and reliability by adopting UC solutions Minhaj Zia

Director Collaboration, Cisco India and SAARC

The usage of UC across the organization facilitates faster collaboration, efficient working and substantial cost savings linked to travel — domestic and abroad. Likewise, Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL) is reaping the benefits of UC implementation. BORL implemented Unified Communications with IP Telephony to enable secure data, voice and video communication on the same network. The firm deployed collaboration tools like audio, desktop video and web conferencing to schedule and record meetings. Today, one time savings are attributed to avoiding pagers, saving on STD costs for voice communication, and travel costs which come to ` 73 lakh. Apart from this, the company is also saving approximately ` 82 lakh per annum on operational and maintenance costs. Another example is that of Gati, an express distribution and supply chain solutions company, which implemented a cost-effective video conferencing (VC) solution. The software-based VC facility was made available at 62 locations and is seamlessly integrated with high-end Polycom VC facility at key locations. All that is required for a user to be a part of video conferencing is a web camera and audio device. The biggest advantage of the facility is that the participants can get connected using a data card even while on-thego. External participants, such as customers/vendors can join the VC by clicking the web invite. The solution also allows sharing of the document on VC, enabling all participants to see the shared document. This has helped the company in conducting multi-location training sessions,

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 39

feature interviews and software application demonstrations. A leading player in the fertilizer industry in India, IFFCO, has deployed Polycom’s high-definition video conferencing network operating from the five main plants across the company and corporate headquarters to enhance the lines of communication between departments for more effective and streamlined business processes. Today, the company is using this solution for not only deliberations of plant officials with officials at corporate headquarters, but also for executing HR processes; conducting strategic meetings among leaders; reviewing production targets; broadcasting live audio and video messages to all plants; and for hosting small press conferences with media over video. The company is also utilizing the solution for doing annual employee appraisals — for which previously over 1,000 employees travelled to the company’s corporate headquarters in New Delhi each year. Post implementation of the solution, the company has recorded a saving of USD 200,000 a year, achieved 200 percent ROI in less than six months, and drastically reduced travel costs.

Major challenge that limits widespread adoption

Though the uptake of UC is reported to be exponential, there is one major challenge in the widespread adoption of UC solutions amongst the Indian businesses — the lack of interoperability between multi-vendor UC platforms that exist within an enterprise. Elaborating on this issue Zia

Matured markets are promoting hybrid implementations, where some UC applications are delivered via the cloud, while others are premises-based Sanish KB

Research Analyst, Gartner

says, “Not all phones, softphones, gateways, call managers are interoperable as they support some proprietary variant of a standard protocol. This limits enterprises from a free mix and match of components. The usage of open standards can tackle this issue. Many suppliers have developed products that support open standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP not only allows for VoIP communication but also supports video, fax, presence and instant messaging. Open standards are important because they provide a foundation that can be built upon.” To increase the adoption of UC, companies are launching products that are aimed at addressing the issue. A case in point is Vidyo, a fast growing video conferencing company, which launched an offering called VidyoWay to address the issue of interoperability between various video conferencing systems. VidyoWay is a free cloudbased B2B meeting place that seamlessly connects the most widely used video conferencing systems, including Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync clients and other H.323 and SIP-based room systems. It enables arranging a video conference meeting by a business, with their colleagues, partners, vendors and customers who might be the users of

An organization availing managed UC services will typically realize 15-20 percent improvement in the total cost of ownership Arun Shetty

Head - UC Sales and Consulting, Avaya – India

informationweek august 2012

disparate video conferencing systems. If participants don’t have access to any of these video conferencing technologies, a free mobile app from VidyoWay lets them join the meeting from a tablet or smartphone or even from an ordinary phone.

Managed UC in nascent stage in India

Managed Unified Communication services essentially means offering businesses an end-to-end UC solution with simplified provisioning and scheduling. Elaborating on the potential of managed UC services for Indian enterprises, Arun Shetty, Head - UC Sales and Consulting, Avaya – India, says, “Big enterprises today face challenges in managing existing communications environment and while moving to new businessimpacting technologies there may be several other challenges the organizations may have to face. There are issues, such as lack of resources, skills, tools, and ability to invest as far as CAPEX is concerned. What we are observing is that an organization availing managed services will typically realize 15-20 percent improvement in the total cost of ownership.” Though, currently the adoption of managed UC in India is not high, the companies have started considering the benefits of the model. A case in point is the recent partnership between Airtel and Avaya. “In April, we announced Airtel and Avaya’s strategic partnership, under which we are providing managed services to enhance contact center performance for the end users of Airtel. This operation is for India, Bangladesh (South Asia) and also African countries,” informs Shetty. Zia of Cisco is of the opinion that

www.informationweek.in

managed UC is an untapped market in India that looks quite promising. “In India, the market is still at a nascent stage in terms of adoption; however organizations across the board realize the potential that managed services have to offer and are considering the possibilities based on their business requirements. We see this as a huge opportunity and are working with service providers to attract new customers and increase revenue by offering a cost-effective managed unified communications solution for small businesses.”

UC-as-a-service: An exciting offering for SMBs

The majority of UC deployments to date have been on-premise-based solutions. However, with the advent of cloud computing and new business models, providers now are offering unified communications as a service (UCaaS). Though UCaaS solution is just taking off in the Indian market, this is an area which would attract a lot of interest in the near future, especially from the SMBs. “When UC is provided as a cloud service, small and medium businesses can focus less on the technology, and more on the priorities that contribute to growth. Delivering UC as a cloud service also guarantees ease of use, does not require specialized equipment or resources to maintain, and ensures rapid return on investment,” says Zia. Informing about the pattern of adoption of UCaaS in matured markets, Sanish KB, Research Analyst, Gartner says that in some of the matured markets both small or midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises are prepared to embrace UCaaS. Also, many SMBs believe that UCaaS is the only viable means of achieving UC functionality

given the costs, complexity and risks of the technology. “In matured markets, when it comes to enterprises, some of them opt for traditional premisesbased solutions, others take the UCaaS route with the belief that UCaaS specialists can deliver the services more efficiently than the enterprise can on its own. Both providers and users now promote hybrid implementations also, which calls for some UC applications to be delivered via the cloud (that is, UCaaS), while other applications are premises-based. As a general trend, a number of users prefer to keep their voice over IP (VoIP) and e-mail functionality premises-based, with the newer functionality (such as presence, video and conferencing) delivered in the cloud.” Looking at the scope for UCaaS in India, vendors are working towards making it a reality. “I would say that it would take another one or two years for UC on a cloud model to come into the picture. When that becomes a reality, the adoption of UC would witness significant increase,” says Ravinder Raina, Country Head Platform Solutions Group at NEC India.

Mobility can transform UC

Typically, a traditional IP PBX solution includes an IP phone that is fixed in the office. In the current era where every person is mobile, it is not practically possible for a person to carry an IP phone with him/ her when they are on the move. Vendors like BlackBerry have sensed this opportunity, and have launched products to cater to this need. The firm’s offering, BlackBerry Mobile Voice System converts the user’s BlackBerry device into an IP extension of his/her office PBX, thus providing the user with the facility of a

It would take one-two years for UC on a cloud model to come into the picture. When that becomes a reality, adoption of UC would witness significant increase Ravinder Raina

Country Head - Platform Solutions Group, NEC India

single number wherever he goes. “The user can make or receive all office calls through his office PBX just using the BlackBerry device,” says Sunil Lalvani, Director - Enterprise Sales (India), RIM. One early adopter is Financial Technologies, which operates one of the world’s largest networks of nine exchanges. “Mobility is important when directors and senior officials are travelling overseas. Typically, telephone related bills are expensive due to a huge number of conference calls, international roaming charges as well as charges incurred in data consumption. Today, using MVS, we can just link up to a Wi-Fi network and have a local PBX extension on our BlackBerry device. As a result, we have got about 50-60 percent savings on roaming costs,” states Rohit Ambosta - Vice President and Head ESG, Financial Technologies.

Conclusion

In India, UC solutions are being increasingly adopted by larger enterprises that have multiple offices spread in different geographies, and where collaboration between teams across locations is extremely critical for the business. Considering the investment costs, small and medium businesses have not really started contemplating on UC solutions. With the UCaaS market starting to take off, in the next few years, SMBs would get an opportunity to leverage these solutions within their limited budgets. Also the managed UC market is set to gain momentum amongst the large enterprises who would want to offload the operational and management jobs of their UC infrastructure to a vendor and focus on the core business functions. Going forward, enterprises should watch out for emerging technologies in the space of mobility and cloud solutions, which would dynamically influence UC solutions currently being offered in the market and change the way businesses communicate and collaborate. u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 41

feature

Enterprise apps get more social Traditional enterprise applications are coming out of their ‘introverted’ backends and going social and mobile. They are evolving to include features that foster easy collaboration and information sharing among employees. Static corporate intranets, once one-sided communication tools, are now becoming dynamic with two-way communication tools By Ayushman Baruah

ot long ago, social media applications got the stepmotherly treatment in enterprises. While some CIOs neglected it, others weren’t sure whether to embrace or wrestle. Things have changed much since then. While the latent demand was always there, the real potential and momentum has built up only in the last two years. Until then, customers were dabbling around with some of these social tools. This year software vendors are seeing more mature customers who are seriously considering integrating social media in their organizations.

informationweek august 2012

The global market for enterprise social software was worth just USD 0.9 billion in 2011, but IDC predicts this will rise to USD 4.5 billion over the next five years. Sales of social collaboration software are set to grow more than 40 percent a year till 2016. IDC also expects social software to encroach and possibly replace other collaboration applications throughout the forecast period, with sales growing at a CAGR of 43 percent. According to most vendors InformationWeek spoke with, customers are increasingly showing the desire to integrate social apps with their current applications. So, most of the

technologies offered in the market today have the ability to link up to their existing intranets without ripping or replacing them. Biggies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce are all chasing this market opportunity. But there are also smaller players like MangoSpring and Saba. IBM’s product is called Connections. Elaborating on the features of the social software, Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- IBM Social Business & Collaboration Solutions, IBM India/ South Asia says, “It (IBM Connections) has the ability to extract the content and make it available in a certain

www.informationweek.in

form, or the ability to connect to the customers’ ERPs or HR systems. The beauty of our technology is that we give the most modern social business tools to our customers without them having to rip and replace anything, but utilize the content or the pre-work they would have done in the past. As a matter of fact, we pretty much give the ability to use all the features, which we get on the three popular social networking sites from a Facebook, LinkedIn or a Twitter perspective.” Web applications company Zoho says it does two things when it comes to “social” in their enterprise applications. “First, integrating external social tools and second, building social features into the applications. Both are equally important. Regarding integrating with external social channels, our enterprise applications like Zoho CRM, Zoho Support, etc., contextually integrate with external apps like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn where information about a customer/prospect is pulled in from external channels and presented within the enterprise apps,” says Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho. Zoho claims a sizeable number of their customers to be using their Twitter and Facebook integrations to offer customer support using these social channels. “While adding a lead or prospect to the CRM system, they are linking that user to their Facebook and LinkedIn profile so that they know all the recent updates from their customers from these external social channels,” says Vegesna.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA APPS

There are numerous ways in which enterprises can make use of social media. One of the simplest examples

is how the HR department uses it for employee on-boarding. “When new employees join, it’s quite a mundane task for the HR department to keep training and re-training people. So with such tools what you could do is give an employee a login and password the moment he/ she joins and he/she would actually have access to the content, including videos, static content and ability to see himself in the hierarchy — and to connect with people. So essentially the mundane intranets which were onesided communication tools with static content have now become dynamic and two-way communication tools,” says Goyal of IBM. Sanjay Manchanda, Director Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India believes the social part has to be intimately woven into the fabric of the tools that people already use. “We have to create a connected social experience across the enterprise. Tools like Microsoft Lync have made it possible to have remote workers work as if they are no longer remote. They can see and hear their co-workers, have realtime conversations and share content as easily as if they sat next to each other. In some organizations almost every worker is remote at some point — they work at hours that enable them to do both — spend time with their family, and be available to work the hours needed to achieve their goals,” says Manchanda. In India, Microsoft has customers such as Infosys, MindTree, L&T Infotech, Wipro and Aditya Birla Financial Services that have built social networking sites within their enterprises. For example, MindTree has chosen Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for building PeopleHub, which is designed to

Today, mundane intranets, which were one-sided communication tools, with static content have become dynamic and two-way communication tools Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- IBM Social

Business & Collaboration Solutions, IBM India/South Asia

integrate the social networking capabilities of SharePoint, such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and communities. Infosys developed Infy Bubble using SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search. Infy Bubble today hosts about 80,000 profiles, 3,00,000 connections and has helped Infoscions tap into a larger talent and knowledge pool. In his article titled ‘Microsoft Office 2013 built for social sharing’ InformationWeek-Brainyard correspondent David Carr says social and cloud collaboration star in both the new consumer version of Office 365, enabled by SkyDrive and Skype, and the business versions built around SharePoint and Lync. (To read the full article, visit : http://bit.ly/NYiBbr) In the social space, Oracle is offering, WebCenter Portal, which delivers intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications. “This complete, open and integrated enterprise portal enables the development and deployment of internal and external portals and websites, composite applications and mash-ups, with integrated social and collaboration services and enterprise content management capabilities. Oracle WebCenter Portal helps optimize connections between people, information and applications, provides business activity streams so users can navigate, discover and access content in context, and offers dynamic personalization of applications, portals and sites so users have a customized experience,” says Bikram Bedi, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle India. Oracle is also focused on integrating social interactions into the CRM environment. By integrating Web 2.0 tools, all Oracle’s CRM products are equipped with social CRM capabilities. “As these new social intelligence tools integrate seamlessly with the existing IT environment, there is no need to replace the core existing applications. This is in line with our philosophy of protecting the existing investments made by our clients in enterprise applications,” says Bedi. Likewise, SAP is offering a collaborative decision making software, StreamWork. It connects to the SAP

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 43

Feature backend, so customers can pull purchase history or account history from the ERP into a collaborative decision making environment. SAP employees use StreamWork for collaboration; records of employee discussions are stored on the cloud, not on the client. SAP StreamWork is aimed at the “Facebook generation” of users and it allows them to create an activity and add people, who become part of the collaborative discussion. The solution also includes time management, coordinating tools, voting, video and discussion tools. In addition, there are iPad and BlackBerry apps for StreamWork. Salesforce.com, a pioneer in social collaboration, offers Chatter — a social network for connecting with coworkers to work together and be more productive. Given the strong demand for going social, Salesforce.com has built a special “social contacts” feature that enables users to import and view social network profiles and other social information for accounts, contacts, and leads, directly within Salesforce.com sales cloud and service clouds. Added capabilities such as Salesforce Radian6 enable organizations to become socially engaged with insights about social media through metrics, measurement, and sentiment & analytics reporting. “Generally, people are using Chatter to stay on top of what’s happening at work, share files, work more closely with each other, find internal experts, and reduce e-mail traffic. For example, a sales manager gets new insight into his/her team’s activities and can follow key opportunities so he/she always knows when something changes on an important deal. Again, consider a customer service representative on the phone with a customer, who

We believe that social part has to be intimately woven into the fabric of the tools that people already use Sanjay Manchanda,

Director - Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India

needs ideas to solve a new problem that doesn’t have a solution in the knowledge base yet. Within minutes of posting to a group on Chatter, several people chime in with suggestions,” says Lee Thompson, Senior Vice President – Corporate Sales, Salesforce.com.

ACQUIRING THE SOCIAL SPHERE

Many enterprise solution providers have gone the acquisition route to stay ahead of the social media curve. Way back in 2008, Cisco acquired a company called Jabber, a provider of presence and messaging software. Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, the industry-leading social media monitoring platform, for approximately USD 276 million in March 2011. In the same year, it also bought Rypple, a cloud-based social performance management company. The acquisition of Rypple marked Salesforce.com’s entry into the human capital management market for the social enterprise. Most recently in June this year, the company entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Buddy Media, a leading social media marketing platform for about USD 689 million. In May last year, Oracle announced the acquisition of Vitrue, a leading cloud-based social media marketing firm for an undisclosed sum. According to an Oracle statement, Vitrue’s social

To make enterprise applications social, two things are important — integrating external social tools and building social features into the applications Raju Vegesna

Chief Evangelist, Zoho

informationweek august 2012

media SaaS marketing applications help customers amplify their social community engagement by giving marketers the ability to develop campaigns from global to local, across multiple social networks and devices, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads. Then, through its USD 3.4-billion acquisition of SuccessFactors early this year, SAP got a collaboration tool called Jam. This tool has Facebook-like microblogging characteristics such as profiles, groups, activity streams, likes, etc. In the backdrop of so much industry consolidation, the latest one comes from Microsoft with its USD 1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks. Moving forward, Microsoft is said to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype. Microsoft completed the acquisition of video chat company Skype for USD 8.5 billion on October 13 last year.

CONCLUSION

With strong demand in the market, vendors are going all out to strengthen their social strategy by integrating social capabilities in traditional enterprise applications. While some vendors are building their own applications, others are acquiring specialist companies to stay competitive. As users are getting more and more addicted to social tools in their personal lives, enterprises are left with no other option but to embrace it. The demand will only shoot up in the days to come. u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

feature

Facebook-like social media comes to the office A company called MangoSpring is taking a consolidated and social approach to increase productivity in the workplace. Its MangoApps suite infuses communication and collaboration features with a Facebook-like interface in common enterprise applications By Brian Pereira

ocial media networks like Facebook have revolutionized the way we communicate with family and friends. But in the corporate world, Facebook may be frowned upon, even blocked at the corporate firewall. Using Facebook at work is generally considered “unproductive”. But now there’s a way to use similar communication and collaborative capabilities of Facebook in the corporate world, albeit through a different platform. MangoSpring, a Seattle-based company with a development team in Pune, is offering a social platform called MangoApps, that offers the best of the both worlds. A CIO in Mumbai who uses this tool says it combines the “fun element of Facebook with the seriousness of an enterprise app, through a simple interface.” MangoSpring is essentially adding a Social Layer on the top of enterprise apps — so far they have done this for e-mail, CRM, and Office documents — on a social intranet platform called MangoApps. The company is working with Indian customers to integrate HR and other enterprise apps with their social collaboration platform. MangoSpring, founded in 2007, has 3,000 customers in the U.S., and Europe, which are mostly small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In an exclusive tele-interview with InformationWeek India, Vishwa Malhotra, Co-Founder & CTO, MangoSpring explained the changing workplace trends, and how his company is responding to the new requirements of

today’s workforce. “We observed a trend in enterprises where multiple siloed applications were being used for communications and collaboration. Enterprises were using a separate application for e-mail, another for instant messaging, one for project management and another for task management. This siloed approach actually hinders productivity. But now the trend is to have collaboration and communications on one platform. And that’s why we evolved our solution into a single collaborative product,” says Malhotra. The company initially had an enterprise instant messaging product that later evolved to a broader enterprise communication platform. Today it has become an enterprise social collaboration and networking product. Malhotra admits that the inspiration came after observing Facebook’s success story with consumers. And likewise with LinkedIn and Twitter.

Applications

Malhotra says MangoSpring has a roadmap and will continually evolve its products. For now it is offering

MangoApps its enterprise social collaboration platform + social intranet. This enables employees to collaborate and share information in a secure environment. The interface is very similar to Facebook. External entities such as partners and customers can also participate through this platform. MangoApps offers a suite of enterprise applications that include document management, project management, task management, idea management, knowledge management, instant messaging, micro-blogging, video collaboration, etc. It is an integrated, modular, multi-tiered solution, and it can be hosted and managed in MangoSpring’s data center, or by customers on-premise, or on a private cloud. Then there’s social e-mail, by way of Ignite, a plug-in for MS Outlook. Ignite links your Outlook e-mail with SharePoint or some other data repository. It simplifies the process of saving e-mail attachments to SharePoint — or picking up files from SharePoint and attaching these to e-mail. When attaching files to internal e-mail messages, one can simply drag

“The trend today is to have collaboration and communications on one platform. So we evolved our solution into a single collaborative product”

Vishwa Malhotra

Co-Founder & CTO, MangoSpring

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 45

feature

the file from the central repository (shown in a window) into the body of the message. A link to the file is included in the mail — the actual file is not attached. This saves bandwidth and prevents users from storing copies of the same file in their inboxes. It also obviates the need to use file sharing services and gets round the company file size limitation for attachments. And, of course, it reduces the overhead of archived mail on the Exchange server. An application called Tandem makes it easier for users to share and collaborate on MS Office documents. Traditionally, a group of users working on a proposal create multiple versions of the document, and these need to be consolidated. And then, one needs to deal with multiple revisions made by each user (which version is the latest?) And users need to remember where they stored their files, as there are multiple options for storage available today. Tandem brings collaborative features to Microsoft Office. Users can work on the same file in real-time. Since documents are stored on the cloud, only a single copy of the file exists at all times. Changes made by users are reflected immediately. Tandem can also

informationweek august 2012

retain multiple versions of the file if required. And it incorporates comments, discussions and annotations from users, in the document itself. Finally, there’s Nexus, an app for Social CRM. It is a social layer built on top of CRM applications, such as Salesforce.com, Oracle-Siebel, and Microsoft Dynamics. There is a roadmap for supporting more CRM packages informs Malhotra.

Challenges

While MangoSpring’s customers are largely from the SME segment, Malhotra informs that large enterprises are also taking to this platform. But there are a set of challenges. “A common discussion is integration. Customers ask how do we integrate with existing business systems? Then there is another challenge wherein customers already have multiple solutions for collaboration, communication, project management, inventory management, HR etc. So our challenge is to build a business use case where MangoApps either replaces one or more of these existing systems and gives a simpler user interface — or it integrates with them,” says Malhotra.

Another challenge is deciding the location of the data. For instance, for an HR application, the customer must decide if the HR data continues to reside in the current system and accessed through a MangoApps interface, or should it reside in MangoApps entirely. Large customers who have made investments in traditional enterprise apps like SAP and Oracle, are likely to just use MangoApps as a social collaboration platform that draws data from the enterprise applications and offers an integrated view. But eventually, some of these enterprises may move their data and e-mail to the MangoApps platform because of its simple interface, unified view and useful collaborative features. Traditional makers of enterprise apps such as SAP and IBM-Lotus are not going to wait for that to happen. They have also added a social layer on top of their apps, offering a Facebook-like interface, with a unified view by way of the activity streams. Just look at SAP StreamWork or IBM Connections and compare those with MangoApps. We have reported about IBM Connections and SAP StreamWork in u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

book review

How to leverage community wisdom in organizations

The Social Organization How to use Social Media to tap the collective genius of your customers and employees Anthony J Bradley & Mark P McDonald Harvard Business Review Press

hat does it take to become a Social Organization? Does it simply mean getting all your employees to use social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook? Or is it about adopting enterprise collaboration tools and platforms with hip sounding names like WebEx, Jabber, Yammer, Chatter, and Jive? It’s all very well for your employees to use these tools, but how does this translate to business benefit and productivity? A common consensus is that organizations pursuing social media spend too much time mulling over the technology, the choice of tools, and about what they want to include in their policies. But without purpose and vision, it remains just that — another technology. We’ve had Wiki Technology for Wikis, for instance, the most prominent example being Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia — that is its definite objective. And for social media, the objective is mass collaboration. The keyword here is ‘mass’ and that means you need to have scale (lots of people) and plenty of user-to-user engagement. The real benefit comes when users (internal or external) form communities to share thoughts and ideas, and work cohesively on projects — irrespective of time zone and geographic boundaries. The opening chapter of this book tells how organizations such as CEMEX are benefitting from social media. It delves on the advantages, then explains the key components for collaboration. The following chapter helpfully explains how a collaborative community works, and the key components that are essential for mass collaboration. It is imperative to understand all this well to ensure a successful and engaging social media platform for your organization. Why do social media initiatives fail? What’s the correct approach to take to ensure success with social media? Some of the reasons outlined

in the fourth chapter are: too much focus on technology, insufficient knowledge about the principles of mass collaboration, lack of confidence, failure to understand where mass collaboration and communities can add business value. The approach for becoming a successful social media organization is three-pronged: you need to have a vision, strategy, should be able to adapt your social media policy to the existing structures of the organization. Have a vision statement that articulates why the organization believes in the importance of community collaboration. Follow this by a list of areas in the organization where collaboration can provide substantial benefits. Chapter four maps out various scenarios in which mass collaboration will succeed and fail. For instance, it is less suitable for deep analysis, yet more suitable for broad observation. Once you have the vision, start working on the strategy for community collaboration. Here you will identify the communities that will participate, how and when they will participate, and how the company will support them. Chapter five suggests a portfolio management approach in making strategy and investment decisions on community collaboration efforts. Just as you are about to launch the community, you need to have a clear understanding about what your expectations from this community are. Gartner, for instance, used a purpose roadmap to understand what it wanted from its collaborative environment. With its numerous mini case studies, models, process cycles, roadmaps, and practical checklists, this book serves as thorough guide for organizations that are serious about achieving success with social media, and deriving real business benefit from mass collaboration and participative communities. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 47

interview

‘Organizations are driven by people, their speed and ability to adapt’ What transformation trends do you observe in the workplace? When we started the company 15 years ago, our thesis was to help companies do better by focusing on their people processes. The only thing that keeps companies alive is how quickly they can change, and that amounts to their people. How do people adjust to change and take advantage of opportunity? For global companies it is not just employees; it’s about taking along the entire value chain: dealers, customers, suppliers, partners etc. We see that companies don’t look at solutions to help them with the people problem. In the U.S. it is about doing more with less, and in India it is about attrition and scaling. The biggest bottleneck is scaling a business in the wake of the massive shortage of talent. Yet every employee and person in the value chain needs to come up to speed on certain things. The use of systems to deal with people across the value chain has really set in during the last decade. The other thing that has happened

is that mobility and social networks like Facebook have come in and made people technology ready, where they already interact and behave in a certain fashion. Today, people enter the workforce and they are tech-savvy, working with their personal devices. And they walk into enterprises that don’t conform. These employees expect to have transparency, information, and connections to all other employees, and they expect all that instantaneously, from anywhere. Suddenly, technology and cultural expectations from the organization are massively different. So, companies look for ways to get their employees to do more, and to get them the information and knowledge they need, faster. The workplace is going through a massive transformation that has an element of generational shift, an element of technology shift (social networks), and how-will-itbe-delivered shift, where mobility becomes a critical element.

There is a gap between the traditional enterprise applications and the contemporary applications, particularly social media apps. How are employees and organizations coping? What is being done to bridge that gap? We think that there is a huge a gap. The technology platforms most large companies have deployed today are yesterday’s platforms. The new generation coming into this workforce has identified this gap. And rather than waiting for the company to close the gap, their employees are going outside the company (to use external sources) or leaving the company. Whether you like it or not, your employees are on Facebook and external sources, and they will use it to do the job, or they will quit if you stop them from using it. The vendors who provide these applications are trying very hard to change. We, for instance, have been investing in a solution for the past four years. It is a completely re-written application and we have not just added

Software vendors are rushing to adapt traditional enterprise offerings by adding a social layer on top — mainly through the acquisition route. But Saba, a company founded by ex-Oracle executives, has built an application from the ground up called Saba People Cloud. The Saba People Cloud is directed at the social enterprise with the aim of building transformative workplaces. Organizations around the world are using the Saba People Cloud to leverage their people networks to become more competitive through innovation, speed, agility, and trust. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek India, Gaurav Mehra, cofounder of Saba Software and MD, Saba India, shares his observations on workplace transformation and plans for launching and marketing the Saba People Cloud in India. Incidentally, this solution was developed by engineering teams in Mumbai and Pune 50

informationweek august 2012

www.informationweek.in

a social layer on top of an existing enterprise application. The traditional ERP companies are seeing their core revenues flatten or deteriorate, and are facing pressure from new generation cloud players like Workday and Infor. So, they are forced to acquire companies that make social media tools. We are seeing shifts at a faster rate, and the cloud is making that possible. I am unsure these companies are going to succeed by adding a social layer to their traditional enterprise apps. Because what we are seeing is something much deeper. The way people work is changing and because of that the tools that are going to drive part of that workplace are going to look very different. What is Saba People Cloud and how does it purport to transform the workplace? At its heart the Saba People Cloud says organizations are driven by their people, their speed and their ability to adapt. And the systems in the modern workplace must be people-centric. The core of our application is built around the people profile — we’ve put in much information about the people. This could be things that

our applications track, or it could be information that arises from elsewhere in the enterprise or in the business. Using that information you empower people to connect to whoever is most relevant to them, and to interact and collaborate with them, from any device. And to form groups and teams across the world, while still being able to tap into the formal applications that an organization requires. We bring all this together in a highly secure environment, which is also flexible and open. It can also be partitioned in ways the organization requires. But most importantly, it drives around the people. The Saba People Cloud offers everything that a social network would do: a real-time collaboration platform like WebEx, and couples it with the traditional people management elements of performance assessment, goal setting, formal learning and development, and compliance and certification — all in one system that’s seamlessly deployable within the company and beyond. What are the differentiators for your solution? How does it stack up against offerings from bigger vendors? We are the only platform that brings all of these together. Oracle does not bring real-time collaboration to the table. SAP has acquired a couple of cloud platforms, but these are formal players that know how to deliver performance reviews. Microsoft has been forced to acquire Yammer; SharePoint hasn’t taken them where they want to go in the collaboration space. What about all the other stuff that the enterprise systems require? Where do you go back into the value chain? Where do you go back into the people processes? We think all of this has to come together to make people systems happen. We think we offer the most comprehensive solution that doesn’t need anything else relative to people processes. We offer mobility and connectivity, but most importantly, we offer intelligence in the system.

What are your India launch plans? What are your target markets and segments? We will be launching Saba People Cloud in the second half of this year. But we are doing some pilot trials now. We already have customers here like TCS and HCL for our learning management solutions. We will focus on IT/ITES and BFSI companies. The latter has an interesting problem to solve with large extended workforces or loan and insurance agents. They need a bi-direction communications mechanism. Apart from addressing our traditional enterprise base, we will focus increasingly on young, fast-growing companies. Where is your company based? And where are your prime markets? We are headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. The founders of this company are all ex-Oracle people, so we are not too far from Oracle! About 60 percent of our customer base is in North America. The rest is in Europe, AsiaPacific, Japan, and Latin America. We have a small footprint in India, with sales offices in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. And there is engineering presence in Pune. The Saba Enterprise Suite was built in India (Mumbai and Pune). We also run a lot of cloud delivery from India, and we do support. We have entered India and China very formally, and this marks our entry into new growth territories like the Middle East. Does Saba People Cloud work on public or private cloud? We can offer the Saba People Cloud on both public and private clouds. In the large enterprise segment, we sell to governments around the world. We also provide dedicated cloud instances, if needed. You can use Saba People Cloud all the way from workplace collaboration to managed processes.

u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 51

interview

‘Social media is gaining acceptance in understanding the sentiment on a stock’ The adoption of social media platforms among the capital markets industry is increasingly on the rise. What according to you is the reason of the traction? There are two fundamental aspects of social media that makes it a highly promising trend for the capital markets industry: a) Fundamentally, social media enhances the efficiency of information dissemination through viral propagation. b) The analysis of data or text available on social media can be used to derive valuable inputs for decision making.

Pravin Lal, Director, Sapient Global Markets, discusses how the players in the capital market industry can tap into the wave of business opportunities presented by social media and shares examples of companies that are leveraging social media platform to drive business growth 52

informationweek august 2012

What kind of business opportunities can players in the capital markets cash in on by leveraging social media? Retail trading in capital markets is an obvious candidate for the applicability of social media since investors in the retail space are open to sharing tips on trading decisions. The informal sharing of trading tips/information on a social networking platform coupled with an integrated trading platform makes the entire trading process highly efficient. Investors now get to choose the person whose trading decisions they would want to follow rather than basing them on the recommendations of a broker. Sharing research reports and analysis with clients is another aspect that will capitalize this trend and change from the current form of client engagement. Research reports and analysis made available by the brokerages on their social media trading platform will help brokers demonstrate value to their clients as this will encourage a discussion among the clients. As a result, the retail brokerage firms providing a social media platform would be on a sweet spot for exploiting the power of social media.

In addition to retail investors sharing trading tips, social media is also gaining acceptance in understanding the sentiment on a stock. Research studies have indicated a strong correlation between social mood and stock prices. In a study published by Johan Bollen (Associate Professor, Indiana University), Huina Mao (Indiana University) and Xiao-Jun Zeng (the University of Manchester), the correlation between collective moods of millions with Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was studied. This study classified tweets in six different mood states: calm, alert, sure, vital, kind, and happy. The calm state had an 87.6 percent correlation with DJIA. The correlation between collective thoughts and moods of millions was found to provide an indication of the stock markets in the near future. Another study conducted by a researcher at the Pace University, in association with Famecount.com (which tracks brand popularity on social media), focused on establishing a correlation between social media popularity of key brands and their respective share prices. It tracked three brands — Starbucks, CocaCola and Nike — over a period of 10 months, and compared their social media popularity against the daily stock price movement. The study demonstrated that popularity of brand on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube showed direct correlation with the stock price. This aspect of social media has not just interested the academia, but has also found some real world commercial interest. For example, Derwent Capital, a U.K.-based hedge fund, is using Twitter to assess the social mood to predict stock market prices. The algorithm is based on a research paper, which found a correlation between the mood on social media and the stock market.

www.informationweek.in

Please share examples of companies that are applying social media platforms for retail trading. Many retail investors are already using social media for trading in multiple asset classes. For instance, online Forex trading website, currensee.com, allows users to build communities to share and discuss trades. Using this platform, the retail Forex traders around the world can share their trades in real time. It allows building trading friends based on trading profile. The users can then collaborate with their trading friends. For a capital markets-focused offering to leverage the power of a social media platform, it needs to be integrated with few downstream

each other, share ideas and validate their investments. Using this platform, the users can follow other members and learn the stocks they are trading in and also understand how they have achieved their results. Are there any regulatory norms that exist currently, which provide guidelines as to how companies in the capital markets space should be using social media platforms? What are the global and Indian norms? FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) regulations in the United States require every firm in the securities industry that communicates over social media to maintain a record of all those communications. As per

are finding a clear market. For instance, Sungard’s Portegent is a social media surveillance application, which monitors employees’ activities on social media. Going forward, how significant do you think social media would become for the capital markets industry? Social media adoption in the capital markets industry is only going to rise. As a platform, it helps in efficient dissemination of information, which makes it a very compelling proposition for this industry. Some participants have started adopting social media in their business interactions. Even if there are compliance-related challenges, the

Using a social media platform, investors can choose the person whose trading decisions they would want to follow rather than basing them on a broker’s recommendations applications like the trading application. Once the trading decision has been taken based on tips or following an expert, the user would like to input a trade. For example, Wall Street from Zecco, an application on Facebook, not only gives the users the ability to like a stock (thereby giving the ability to stay tuned to the stock’s latest development), but also allows users to enter their trades. One can also see the stocks that are liked by friends. In addition, the users can place the orders right from Facebook. Recommendation for investment to a group of clients is another area where social media finds applicability in the capital markets industry. Online brokerages, TradeKing and Zecco, which merged recently have been on the forefront of utilizing social media. Charles Schwab is also actively adopting social media in its interactions with its client base. E-trade, designed for retail brokerage customers, is offering an E-TRADE Community, which enables likeminded investors to connect with

the guidelines of the authority, firms must adopt policies and procedures reasonably designed to address communications that recommend a specific investment product. As a best practice, firms should consider prohibiting all interactive electronic communications that recommend a specific investment product and any link to such a recommendation unless a registered principal has approved the content. On similar lines, in March 2011, the Indian stock market regulator SEBI issued a circular to all market intermediaries, asking for a code of conduct for their employees on publishing unauthenticated news about companies to manipulate the market. Broking houses have been directed to ensure that access to blogs, chat forums and messenger sites is either restricted under supervision or not allowed. In addition, the logs of such site usages have to be maintained as records. As a result of these regulations, social media surveillance applications

benefits resulting from social media adoption far exceed the bottlenecks. With the popularity of social media growing exponentially in this space, the exchanges are not too far behind. CME group has over 750,000 followers on Twitter. NYSE Euronext has close to 90,000 followers. In India, NSE became the first exchange to have a presence on Twitter. Exchanges and indices across the globe have established a strong presence on the microblogging site. All participants in this business are coming up with a plan to use the power of social media in their business. Benefits of social media are best achieved only when there is active participation from all participants. Social media has built enough momentum in the last few years, and now it is not possible for any firm in this business to be completely out of it.

u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 53

interview

‘HCL Meme Platform enables employees to connect, share, learn and grow’

Prithvi Shergill, Chief Human Resources Officer, HCL Technologies tells us about HCL’s internal social network, Meme, and the way in which it is enabling quicker collaboration, faster information exchange and better connect amongst HCLites

informationweek august 2012

How important is building an internal social network for an organization? What are the major benefits that a business would derive out of investing in building an internal social network? Building an internal social networking platform for today’s modern workforce has become a necessity and is a business imperative. Today, majority of the organizational workforce is spread across different locations, therefore there is a huge need to bring them together onto one common platform where exchange of ideas, thought processes and viewpoints can take place seamlessly. Organizations are increasingly realizing the need to make the most of this evolutionary technology that enables faster communication, greater collaboration, and larger outreach. By integrating social media tools into its work space, an organization essentially aims to gain clarity in communicating with its employees, and increasing transparency thereafter. Please tell us about HCL’s internal social network — the HCL Meme Platform? In which year was the platform launched for the employees and how many HCLites are using this internal social network currently? HCL’s professional networking site called Meme was launched in April 2011 with the objective of aiding employees to connect, share, learn and grow by exchanging information. The platform provides an opportunity to employees with diverse functions, age-groups, nationalities, locations, etc., to connect with each other and feel part of the HCL family. From a functionality perspective, Meme allows users to create pages, send invitation requests, and post statuses and pictures — it includes all the popular features present in the

social networking platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We used PHP and Drupal Technology to develop the platform. Drupal is an excellent blend of CMS and Framework, and it has been rated as the best Open Source PHP CMS in the last couple of years. It took us six months to develop the platform and was initially launched for 150 employees, only for six months. Post sedulous enhancement Meme was launched for all the employees and till now the response has been overwhelming. What were the key drivers that motivated HCL Technologies to build an internal social network? HCL firmly believes that the value created for its customer base emanates from its employees. Hence, the company envisaged a platform, that enables faster and transparent communication among employees, irrespective of the location, job role etc. Employees in a collaborated mode reach a solution much faster as compared to each member looking at the query independently and then coming up with the solution. It also propagates the concept of a virtual workforce, which has now become a trend in most organizations. The need for facilitating simultaneous, real-time dialogue, discussions and collaboration across individuals necessitated the birth of Meme. Meme serves as a great platform for employees for exchanging information and ideas, learning through each other’s experiences (professional or personal), and knowledge upgradation by participating in discussions/forums across domains. The introduction of Meme has enabled our entire workforce to collaborate more efficiently by making information across the organization accessible to all. This platform has assisted

www.informationweek.in

employees in interacting, sharing views, and exchanging information and ideas on everything related to the organization. In a short span of time, Meme has become a reservoir of ideas, collaboration and common interests that fosters innovation. How are the employees at HCL Technologies using Meme Platform in a way that is improving collaboration vis-à-vis the previous scenario when Meme wasn’t in place? The core benefit that Meme as a social networking application offers is instant communication and collaboration. This trend of using social networking platforms to communicate instead of e-mails is more visible with the Gen Y workforce as they prefer instant responses when it comes to tackling work-related issues. With this trend, in the near future, employees will not be required to go through standard workflow systems to raise capital expenditure (CAPEX) requests, recruit skilled resources, make travel requests for business and look at policies anymore. Also, our senior leaders are using the social networking platform to post queries for employees and share their ideas on facing certain professional situations. This two-way communication instills a lot of faith in our employees and gives them a sense of inclusion, making them realize how their contributions impact the broader

picture in terms of the company’s overall performance. Meme is also being used by employees to hold discussions on several topics. For instance, in a discussion related to environment friendly initiatives at work, an employee recommended organization-wide “no printing days”. Today, this is being implemented and we have “printer holidays” where the printers remain unavailable for use, except for a few departments wherein the printers are absolutely essential for important operations.

Quick facts l

Launched in: April 2011

Users: Almost 65,537 registered users — as on June, 2012

There are currently 1,935 groups being run on Meme, ranging from Smile a While, where employees can participate in contests, to MEME on Mobile Feedback, where mobile users can share feedback and enhancement suggestions

79,395 photos have been uploaded in 20,704 albums

87,458 messages by 4810 Meme members have been sent over the platform — averaging about 18.18 per connected employee

There have been 3,187 queries in Ask HR tab

4,66,025 connections

65,618 status updates and 64,630 group wall updates

Apart from this, Meme has proved itself as the platform of the future — by accessing the employee information available on the platform, developers are writing several useful applications. For example, one of the applications allows employees to search for the nearest B+ blood group donor. Another application informs employees about an internal job post of matching skills — it runs in the background, and pops up on the employee’s screen when custom criteria are met. Then, there’s an answer finder that enables an employee to send a question to specific groups of individuals based on a criteria, and a resource finder that enables the company to find a resource with matching skills to solve a particular problem. Additionally, Meme is playing a key role for the global workforce to synchronize itself with the latest engagements on organizational, as well as personal front. For example, a group on Meme enables women to access a career coach who assists women employees plan work before and after maternity leave and a life coach to provide counseling. u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 55

Social Media Experiences

Getting social media right Dell, Datamatics and Wipro are the examples of companies that are reaping the benefits of social media by using the platform effectively for building brand awareness, improving employee engagement and gathering real-time feedback With the emergence of social media, since 2006 Dell has been connecting across the social web with customers through blogs, forums, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, as well as on Dell blogs. We use Twitter to quickly share information with people interested in our products and services, gather real-time dell feedback, and build relationships with customers and partners. We also use LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to promote jobs and give out employment branding-related content. Our Facebook page has a specialized ‘Job Search’ Widget through which people can search for jobs available at Dell anywhere in the world. We use Chatter from Salesforce.com across the enterprise as a way to further connections and conversations among Dell team members. Chatter delivers the familiar look and feel of social networking site like Facebook or Twitter to enterprise customers in a secure platform. With Chatter, updates on people and projects are automatically conveyed to employees. Further, our leaders post and share updates on Chatter, which gives our employees a chance to follow them, connect with them and interact with them on an open platform. Dell currently engages with stakeholders through the “four pillars” of the company’s social media ecosystem: Dell.com, which hosts ratings, reviews and customer feedback related to our products and services; Dell communities, such as IdeaStorm, a platform launched in 2007 that is designed to give voice to customers and enable sharing of ideas; External communities, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter; and through its 100,000 employees that use social networking sites. — P. Krishnakumar, Executive Director - Marketing, Dell India Opinion

At Datamatics, we are using the social media platform for enhancing brand awareness and also as an employee engagement tool. With regards to the employee communication in particular, it has helped us in increasing internal brand Datamatics awareness. We use various social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, Picasa and Blogsite, as each has its own benefits and reach. Besides the public social media platform, we have proprietary social media platform ‘i-Connect’. This is currently being used by all women employees. It has provided our women workforce a platform to share their thoughts, opinions, without any apprehension. We are also using our in-house social media analytics tools to gauge the market and internal sentiment. In a typical B2B scenario, generating leads or business value through social media has always been a challenge. However, we have been successful in using this medium effectively for lead generation. We have had prospective customers connecting with us through our Datamatics Facebook page, asking for demos. Also we have received requests for vendor partnerships through this medium. Besides these, we have been able to get better traction at the events that we participate globally, by generating interest through proper use of the social media channel. We were also selected in the Tourism Queensland’s Million Dollar Memo competition, where we were the only representatives from India competing against the likes of Yahoo!, Asus, etc., in Australia. —Varad Kamini – Head Corporate Communication, Datamatics Global Services Limited Opinion

informationweek august 2012

Wipro deploys LinkedIn to connect with target audience Wipro Technologies has deployed LinkedIn as the go-to marketing platform for reaching its target audience — mainly CIOs and CTOs — through Partner Messages and Display Advertising. With the partner messaging feature, Wipro can target its audience by parameters such as profile, seniority and geography. Through Partner Messages, targeted and spam-free e-mails can be sent. Display advertising refers to the banner advertisements, which can be targeted to specific individuals. For example, every time a CIO logs into his LinkedIn account, he/she can see a Wipro banner, explains Dhiman Mukherjee, DirectorMarketing Solutions, LinkedIn India. The Partner Messages delivered an open rate of around 18 percent, which according to LinkedIn is a good rate. “In a niche customer base, even if two persons give a positive response, it’s considered well,” said Mukherjee. The average campaign click through rate (CTR) from unique members stood at 0.69 percent. “The industry average for a non-targeted campaign is only about 0.5 percent,” said Mukherjee. Rahul Koul, Head- Digital Marketing & Thought Leadership, Wipro Technologies said, “We were able to reach over 90 percent decision-makers from companies with 10,000 plus employees. So, we have increased our investments by 110 percent in LinkedIn.” — Ayushman Baruah

www.informationweek.in

opinion

‘Projects that use Cognizant 2.0 perform better ’

Rajashree Natarajan

Cognizant’s program management and knowledge sharing platform has helped the company connect with employees across demographics, win deals and improve employee retention

http://www.on the web Why employees don’t like social apps Read article at:

he notion of “work” as a place where employees perform tasks in isolation from each other, as well as from partners and customers, has been losing relevance for some time. Tectonic shifts in the economy, society and technology are driving organizations to create an environment where work becomes a more fluid and intimate collaboration between employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders, delivering continuous business value. In 2007, we launched Cognizant 2.0 (C2), a company-wide, Web 2.0-based program management and knowledge sharing platform. Designed to facilitate seamless sharing of knowledge (i.e., best practices, process guidance and technological artifacts, etc.) across our global delivery network and with partners and clients, C2 is a Facebooklike platform that enables us to bring the best resources and most relevant expertise to any engagement. C2 provides a seamless platform for collaboration among geographically distributed project teams across Cognizant’s extended enterprise. Today, C2 provides a virtual “town square” for more than 130,000 Cognizant associates globally and well over 100,000 of our employees globally are using C2. These users have collaborated on hundreds of projects worldwide. Information is exchanged at a blistering pace, with over 1 million blog interactions and more than 100,000 Techforum queries. Our collaboration platform is already demonstrating tangible benefits, including a significant improvement in efficiency (defined as reduction of effort) through the use of social media tools, semantic search and standardized templates that provide process guidance to ensure higher quality and faster delivery of our global services. We have conducted several studies about the impact that C2 has had on

our business. In one study conducted along with Babson College, Boston, it was established that the users of the platform were more engaged with the company and this translated into lower attrition rates. The result of a study conducted within Cognizant clearly showed that projects that used Cognizant 2.0 effectively performed better than those that did not. Some of the key findings include 15 percent improvement in productivity in projects using C2 effectively over the average value of productivity across projects; 8 percent improvement in the ability to deliver projects on time ; and 7 percent improvement in the ability to deliver on-budget. As the next generation of work takes form, essential business activities — particularly those that are knowledge-based — require new platforms of collaboration to assemble expertise wherever it may reside, mine collective know-how to bring new offerings to market and to identify and serve more customers, more effectively. C2 is an innovative way of bringing social networking into the workplace to help create new communities of shared interest across the organization, as well as with business partners and customers. C2 has helped us connect with employees across demographics, communicate widely on a common platform, win deals, increase client stickiness and also improve employee retention. It makes work more fun by giving a ‘social’ flavor. It is essential to have such a virtual community platform for any organization to become truly global. Irrespective of which industry an organization belongs to, a common platform is critical to bringing people together. u Rajashree Natarajan is Vice

President, Knowledge Management, Cognizant

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 57

opinion

5 questions to answer when defining collaboration solutions

Manish Panjwani

To drive effective collaboration, an organization requires a solution based on needs-analysis, which connects the dots between the technologyenabled collaboration toolkits and a set of concrete business objectives

http://www.on the web Collaboration trumps innovation for CEOs Read article at:

informationweek august 2012

he basic technologyenabled collaboration toolkits and platforms, which support communication, coordination, and knowledge-sharing, have now become fairly mature. However, as the tools have matured, many enterprises have come to understand that even deploying a mature toolkit is not sufficient to drive effective collaboration. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needed is a collaboration solution based on a needs-analysis, which connects the dots between those tools and a set of concrete business objectives. Those objectives must be expressed in such a way that specific businesses are enhanced through a set of concrete collaborative activities. Organizations must come up with a systematic framework for thinking through this needs-analysis for collaboration solutions. The heart of such framework is a sequence of five key questions to consider. These questions begin with the end in mind, which means identifying concretely a specific business challenge the organization seeks to address, as opposed to operating under a more generalized assumption that more collaboration would be better. Once these objectives are defined, the framework helps the organization move step by step towards translating that business need into a specific process-oriented collaboration solution.

Business impacts benefit sought

Any analysis of collaborationtechnology needs must begin with an understanding of the specific kind of business benefit sought, meaning which process improvements to target with improved collaboration. Studies have shown that the enterprise that is able to foster effective collaboration stands to realize several concrete benefits including shorter delivery

cycles; higher quality products and services; innovation; organizational resilience; improved customer satisfaction; improved sales; deeper relationships between employees; and deeper relationships with partners and suppliers and customers. To begin with, organizations must identify these benefits along with contexts in which they are to be achieved.

Business processes targeted

Once the business impacts are identified, the organization must classify the various kinds of improvements to one or more business processes. In order to develop the strategy, the organization needs to develop a collaboration repertoire â&#x20AC;&#x201D; an understanding of the kinds of process improvement that collaboration (and collaboration technologies) can support. This is essentially identifying the key use cases. A successful collaboration initiative is also sure to encounter unexpected use cases, as well as those identified upfront. However, research reveals that only by identifying some target process changes explicitly at the outset, the organization can focus its efforts in the other streams of the strategy as well, ensuring it enables, supports, and embeds collaboration effectively. Because the uptake of collaboration depends heavily on network effects, getting a few, highly visible use cases working well is important for bootstrapping future efforts. Once the processes related to the targeted business impact are identified, the organization should classify which types of processes are targeted for change. Subsequently, it must determine what kind of changes are to be made to these processes to achieve targeted business impacts: are they essentially efficiency improvements, or require more dramatic restructuring of the process

www.informationweek.in

(such as through crowdsourcing). Finally, the organization must determine whether the scope of the process changes is limited to collaboration within the enterprise workforce, or includes crossenterprise collaboration and/or collaboration with consumers, as these broader collaboration efforts involve additional technical issues. This helps shape the thinking towards the desired solution.

Collaboration activities needed

roadblocks anticipated

The process improvement goals identified above can be boiled down to three main types of collaboration functions. They are: coordination and synchronization of joint activity, knowledge discovery and reuse, and synchronous and asynchronous discussion. These main functions are carried out through a set of more specific collaboration activities, the most common of which are outlined in the table ‘Collaboration activities grouped by function.’

While effective collaboration brings

major payoffs, it is only fair to acknowledge that collaboration can also be challenging. Every form of collaboration involves overhead, and that overhead can sometimes be significant. Collaborative technologies are important because collaboration is not easy. The obstacles to effective collaboration come in several forms. There are communication costs; the cost of having to negotiate a common process and stay synchronized; the cost of learning; and using the collaboration technology. Collaboration technologies exist to support the collaboration activities, and to help overcome the roadblocks to collaboration. However, the technologies themselves often suffer from technology-adoption roadblocks. Challenges with driving adoption of collaboration tools have been acknowledged for quite some time. One reason adoption can be challenging is that although effective collaboration has important benefits, participation is not without cost and risk to the participants. Collaboration tools can be challenging to learn, and it can be difficult to access. Another problem with collaboration is that any extra effort it takes, for instance,

Collaboration Activities Grouped by Function Collaboration Function

Collaboration Activity

Coordination and synchronization of joint activity

Delegation of work and status sharing

Establishing common understanding of a process or plan (people, process and work product structure)

Knowledge discovery and reuse

Expertise finding

Knowledge asset finding

Synchronous and asynchronous discussion

Synchronous discussion

Collaborative development of joint work products

High stakes decision-making

Brainstorming

Day-to-day team coordination

Impromptu sharing/meeting

Customer contact

Asynchronous communication

Threaded group discussions

Coordinated announcements

Digital water cooler

to coordinate with a colleague, or to search for assets to reuse — generally comes first, with the benefit coming later. People are notoriously resistant to making choices that involve paying upfront for benefit that will (probably) accrue later. Another problem is that collaboration sometimes benefits a different person than the one who must do the work.

Collaboration solutions required

The collaboration functions and activities are supported by a set of collaboration tools — each vendor offers a different set of tools, dividing up the overall space in slightly different ways, and covering different portions. However, there is a rough shape to the landscape, which can be described independent of the specific vendors. It is also fast moving, meaning that anything specific we say about the dynamics of the vendor space may have changed by the time you read it. Enabling the needed collaboration activities involves making basic technology tools available to target users along with required infrastructure, such as network of sufficient bandwidth and servers with appropriate storage. Supporting collaboration involves more than merely providing the required technology — it means marketing the available collaboration technologies and training target users on both — how they work, and how they can/ should be used — to achieve the targeted business priorities. Experience shows that making a good collaboration toolkit available to the workforce is necessary, but not sufficient to drive dramatic benefits from high-value collaboration. A systematic approach to crafting collaboration solutions that align to targeted processes makes the underlying technology much more effective. Addressing the above listed key issues helps shape an effective collaboration technology initiative. u Manish Panjwani is Managing

Director, Technology Growth Platform, Accenture, India

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 59

opinion

The impact of mobility on UC

Sunil Lalvani

Providing mobility solutions that can combine desk phone features with smartphones in terms of solution architecture and technology is the need of the hour

http://www.on the web Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education Read article at:

informationweek august 2012

here was a time when reaching people while they were not by their desks or were unavailable to answer their landlines and read a fax message was a huge problem. Today, there are mobile phones and e-mails that can be used anytime, anywhere. You can also connect with people by using social media platforms or by sending them an SMS or pinging them on BlackBerry Messenger. But the solution has given rise to a challenging, new predicament. Messages are being delivered over a variety of networks, from switched to broadcast, that range from LANs and WANs to GSM and 4G, from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to satellite and radio. As if that wasn’t complicated enough, messages are now being delivered over a variety of devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. This is getting more difficult for users to stay in the message stream since there is no single point of contact. To add to the complexity, each of these devices has its own contact and address book, its own calendaring system and its own environment of business contacts, colleagues, friends and family. This proliferation of communication channels has ironically been resulting in slow and poor process management, delays in execution, lags in delivering information to customers and clients and holdups in projects. The emerging solution is Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) that integrates devices, networks and information. Simply put, it straddles voice communication, data, IP telephony, video conferencing, Instant Messaging, contact books, calendars etc. and aims to unify them for ease of use. A global study called, “2012 Economic Impact of SIP in the Enterprise released in April 2012 by Sonus Networks” found that enterprises could save millions by implementing UCC infrastructure while increasing productivity by 23 percent or 1.2 hours per employee, per day. Faced with the challenge of

delivering UCC to reduce employee frustration and stress, CIOs also have a valuable efficiency gain and bottom line reason to consider UCC for the organization. UCC allows knowledge workers wherever they are — in the field, on shop floors, at home or in coffee shops — to make decisions faster, collaborate more efficiently, improve productivity and increase the velocity of business. From an enterprise perspective, mobility solutions have been quick to integrate directory information, organization PBX environments (ensuring cost savings, ease of use and consistency of experience), efficient conferencing features, data security and network integration to meet user expectations. Providing mobility solutions that can combine desk phone features with smartphones in terms of solution architecture and technology is the need of the hour. The solution should be able to deliver one user number, one caller ID and one voicemail box at office, home or on the road, as well as provide accessibility to all the features on an organization’s desk phone. For businesses keen to rationalize their communication and collaboration systems/ infrastructure, the key areas to address are: l One identity and extension for employees , while managing business and personal profiles. l Leveraging the most cost-effective voice policies regardless of the location. l Ability to integrate third-party applications and phone vendors. CIOs understand that in today’s business environment, where mobile work forces are growing, communication costs can spiral out of control. UCC ensures that voice and data costs are kept under check even as user satisfaction grows and long-term support costs are brought down. u Sunil Lalvani is Director, Enterprise Sales, Research In Motion, India

www.informationweek.in

Interview

‘We saw the emergence of Managed Services years ago’ Zoho Corp is a product-oriented company that helps enterprises manage IT infrastructure, with its ManageEngine products. In an interview with InformationWeek India, Sridhar Iyengar, VP-Product Management, ManageEngine (a division of Zoho Corp) explains how the company is evolving its products for on-demand access and managed services What kind of products do you offer under the ManageEngine brand? Fifteen years ago, we offered products for telecom network management that included frameworks, APIs, test and simulation tools, under the brand name WebNMS. We have never received funding and our growth has come through customer acquisitions. When the telecom bubble burst in 2001, we decided to diversify into other areas. And we started developing products under the ManageEngine brand in 2003. We created 30-plus products for network monitoring, application monitoring, server and desktop monitoring, storage management, a help desk product etc. We saw the emergence of managed services for enterprises a couple of years back. Remote Infrastructure Management or RIM is a delivery model for managed services. That’s when we launched a product called ManageEngine360. As the name suggests, it gives a 360 degree view of your entire IT infrastructure. Its features are integrated with the in-built ITIL help desk. This product is available for enterprises and also for RIM service providers.

How do your products differ from the best of breed products offered by bigger brands like Symantec? What are the product differentiators? We make products that are easy to use. And in terms of our structuring, we do not have a heavy sales model. Our products are available on the web for customers to try. Our product is built on an open platform, so it can integrate with third-party products through APIs and extensible frameworks. What are the target markets for you? ManageEngine is positioned mainly at the SMBs. Previously there wasn’t a comprehensive management tool specifically for SMBs and that’s where we saw an opportunity. We have 1,000-plus customers in India. WebNMS is a more mature product targeted at the tier-1 telecom equipment manufacturers. Apart from India, the U.S. is our largest market. Where do you position yourself in the ecosystem of service providers? What kind of partnerships do you have? We are a product company and we

decided not to get into services. There would be a need for services in the large enterprise segment, so we partner with a services company for the delivery. Our partner would take our product, wrap their services around it, and provide it as an end-to-end solution. In the managed services space, we have partners like Nokia Siemens, Tulip, Comviva, Zensar, WNS, Genpact, HCL, Firstsource, Orange Business Services, Collabra, TCS and Wipro. How are you adapting your ManageEngine products for the cloud. Do you plan to offer on-demand products? We are firm believers of taking new technology and applying it to existing products. We have a suite of on-demand business applications and that line of business is Zoho.com. We have taken that technology and applied it to ManageEngine, and today we do have some of these products offered through a SaaS model. For instance, we offer our Help Desk product and website monitoring products (Site 24x7) as on-demand products. Our MSP partners are deploying our IT360 integrated IT management solution in the cloud for their customers.

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 61

Global CIO Interview

‘I have to be a strategically innovative CIO’ Being the CIO of a technology company does have its advantages, especially when top management acknowledges the importance of IT. But the expectations are higher. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek India, Oliver Bussmann, EVP & CIO, SAP reveals how he is steering one of the world’s most admired companies through a mammoth transformation on a global scale. He talks about innovation, the three dimensions of his CIO role, how SAP has adapted its infrastructure for BYOD, the kind of interactions he has with SAP consultants, and emerging models in the consumption and delivery of IT services You are the CIO of an IT savvy company and everyone in top management will also be IT savvy. Globally, CIOs face a challenge in convincing top management about new projects, and in asking for budget expansion. Do you think you have an advantage? It is an advantage working in the IT industry, where there are tech-savvy executives. But the expectations are much higher in terms of identifying trends, introducing this into the company, and driving adoption. You need to look for people who drive innovation and build small teams; invest in people skills. You also have to play an active role to communicate within the company, and also externally about what IT is achieving, what are the accomplishments, the learning, and the key observations. In a tough economic climate, CIOs are being asked to justify their existence in the company. So, how is the CIO role being defined

informationweek august 2012

today and what will it be like in future? What is your role at SAP today? If I look back 22 years on my business role with IBM, Deutsche Bank, and Allianz, I see the CIO role from three dimensions. The last one I discovered with SAP. The first one is that you are expected to be the best-in-class as a functional CIO. We have to achieve operational excellence, driving the IT transformation through benchmarks, while ensuring the vendor portfolio, budget etc., is in good shape. Our performance is continuously measured and we have to prove that we are the best-in-class for providing infrastructure application services. The second dimension is to be a business transformational leader. A CIO has to be part of the business transformation, and actively drive the agenda. Without IT you cannot do automation, geographic expansion, introduce new channels, etc. The IT person is challenged with translating an aggressive business target into action.

I discovered the third dimension at SAP — as a CIO I have to be a strategically innovative CIO. There are two sub-dimensions here. One has direct impact on the products and services side. I can be the first “customer” in providing feedback on the product functionality, quality — and point out what’s missing, recommend what kind of applications we should add to our portfolio. So it’s about driving the learning curve up for our organization. So, a CIO has to find a role to drive product and service impact directly. The second sub-dimension is sharing experiences that you have with your own products and services with the outside world. Therefore, my team and I invest time in writing blogs and we share our observations, learning, and recommendations. SAP as a business has undergone a massive transformation in the last 10 years. There have been a number of company acquisitions and

www.informationweek.in

year. Also, we have to absorb these acquired companies in an efficient way. The other aspect of SAP’s strategy is geographic expansion. We have significant investment plans for Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC countries). The IT organization needs to ensure that it supports the business growth and our investments in markets. The other pillar is partner management. We are investing heavily in systems to automate our business with partners — partner relationship management, portals, etc. We want to ensure that the value chain is automated so that we can handle large volumes through the channel (instead of direct sales) for enterprises. So, IT is part of the core team to get SAP to its target revenue by 2015. IT and the CIO plays an important role to drive this business transformation.

a complete overhaul of its product line-up with new strategies. SAP is also going to new markets and turning its focus to the Asia-Pacific and Japan (whereas earlier there was a strong focus on the U.S. and European markets). As a CIO, what have you (and the IT function) done to support these business transformations? When I joined SAP in 2009, my mandate was to form a new IT strategy. So we studied the overall SAP strategy, and it is fundamentally driven by innovation and speed. We tried to innovate our existing portfolio in the area of in-memory technology through our HANA solution. We also acquired companies like Business Objects, Sybase, and recently SuccessFactors and Ariba (the Ariba acquistion will be completed in Q4 2012). So, what does that mean for an IT organization? Firstly, looking at organic growth — the whole development organization moved on to an organic approach. So to provide my organiza-

tion the infrastructure globally, we had to ensure that the whole provisioning of infrastructure services had to be accelerated, because they do projects in 60-90 days. The provisioning has to be done in a few days instead of weeks. Secondly, we had to be the first customer for everything that came out of the product organization — 12-18 months before general availability. So, we had to use HANA and in-memory technology ourselves. For mobility, we have over 50,000 mobile devices (over 17,000 iPads, 19,000 BlackBerrys, 13,000 iPhones, and 1,500 Android devices), that are fully managed, and 50 mobile apps. And on the analytics side, we use mobile BI and real-time business analytics. We are also the first customer for HR services on cloud. In a sense, we are the guinea pig (for new solutions we are about to introduce), to provide feedback to the product organization. For acquisitions, we set up an M&A factory. There are dedicated teams looking at potential acquisitions, and we do a number of acquisitions every

What are some of the innovations that you have introduced in your organization? There are two innovations that we introduced in the organization at an early stage. With the consumerization of IT, we discovered in 2010 that consumer products are coming into the organization. There were discussions about whether the iPad could have meaningful use in the enterprise. In 2010, there were no tools available to manage these iPads in a secure way. But we believed that it would take off as an enterprise device, and the adoption rate confirms that belief. Secondly, we are in the middle of a big change into a real-time enterprise business. My team has played a key role in implementing in-memory technology (for real-time analytics). We have a system that can put a 100 terabyte database in memory. We started using this technology in the summer of 2010 and now it is being integrated into our entire product portfolio. Now, we are driving our entire application landscape towards real-time architecture. I also see a lot of innovation on the software side. In a high-tech industry it is important to understand the value of these new innovations. We started with proof-of-concepts in the areas of cloud, analytics, in-memory, and

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 63

Global CIO Interview mobility. These were implemented by small teams of 4–5 people working on projects over 6–8 weeks. And if people were convinced we moved it into our traditional portfolio for mass deployments. This has gone from a few projects in 2010 to 5 percent of our project portfolio in 2012. Because we see the value in driving product innovation 12–18 months before general availability. During your recent press briefing in Mumbai (launch of mobile experience centers) you mentioned SAP is the second largest user of iPads. What kind of challenges has BYOD (bring your own device) posed and how have you tackled those challenges?

There are two major challenges: Firstly, it is not only an IT-related initiative. Thus, involving the local HR, finance, legal and data privacy experts is important. You can introduce a BYOD and infrastructure policy globally, but there are business partners involved in almost the same effort. We have learnt that you need to adapt a global framework for local business because there are legal, compliance, and financial differences that vary from country to country. So we started with a global initiative, and then moved on to a regional and country approach. Secondly, the involvement of business partners to drive the policy, and adapt to the infrastructure is crucial. If you have the infrastructure to manage corporate mobile devices, it is important

CIO-to-CIO You are the CIO of a leading IT organization where some members of your organization are leading SAP global consultants, who advise CIOs how to draw up their IT roadmap, how to increase value from IT investments, IT best practices, etc. In your capacity as IT head at SAP, what are the kind of interactions you have with these consultants? How do you set policies and demonstrate ROI in such a case? Do they advise you? Do their decisions override yours? As part of our delivery and sourcing model, we engage SAP consultants in our projects. But we treat them like another system integrator. For customer projects we work with TCS, Mahindra, Accenture, Capgemini, and with the SAP consulting organizations. So we apply the same business cases. If a business unit wants to start a project it is approved in our project portfolio, we have a governance structure for that. It goes through the usual business case validation, and then we have expectations for sourcing — it is split between onshore and offshore. And the vendor rates must fit with our financial targets (budget). That means our SAP consulting organization is in competition with other system integrators. The SAP consulting organization is a supplier, and I am pretty independent in my decisions. I oversee the governance, strategy, and direction for the IT organization at SAP. Depending on our project needs, I use the expertise of SAP consulting. Sometimes we use them for certain strategic projects, depending on the skills, financials, etc. Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp

informationweek august 2012

to reuse the same infrastructure for personal devices. We have adapted our infrastructure for BYOD in Asia, North America and Germany. What trends are you observing in the usage of social media in the workplace? How is SAP using social media internally and to collaborate with customers and partners? I think the line between corporate users and external partners and customers in the ecosystem will fade away. We also use social media tools for driving collaboration for project tasks. For instance, Jam is a Twitter-like social media tool that SuccessFactors is bringing to the SAP family. It has over 4 million users, both SAP employees and customers. So Jam offers internal employees, customers, and partners a place to go and share information. Many employees in corporations are reaching out through social media channels, and users are looking for trusted advisers to follow them, and to ask for advice. Interacting with users and customers, they share product information and get feedback about products and services. In the wake of the economic slowdown and the Eurozone crisis, do you see new models emerging for the delivery and consumption of IT? I see two things. There’s the global delivery model in onshore-offshore, in maximizing access to excellent resource pools globally, and also to improve different labor costs. For the delivery model, I see a shift to cloud services. There is a hybrid model emerging — SAP software running on-premise, connected to cloud services like SuccessFactors and Ariba. There is a shift from technical services to business processes and services; program management, and architecture jobs. And this will be accelerated by cloud services. So, the CIO of today has to be very clear about what’s the added value, how the delivery model can be efficient, and the shift to a hybrid cloud model. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

www.informationweek.in

Secret CIO

I’m a ‘tech savvy’ pro, but am I CIO timber?

John McGreavy

Our Secret CIO, John McGreavy, answers questions from our readers

http://www.on the web ‘Cloud computing can offer the CIO a new job position’ Read article at:

ear John: I am a 54-yearold, tech-savvy leader in my field, and I aspire to be more. Since the dawn of IT, I have studied and watched the industry with great interest. I am an expert in the packaging industry and have led teams of individuals as small as seven and as large as 125. Can you point me in the right direction as to resources or education I might require to break into a CIO position? I also have a bachelor’s degree in communications.--Looking for Guidance Dear looking for Guidance: I assume you didn’t grow up in the IT industry, that your core professional knowledge lies outside of IT. You want to move into an executive IT C-level position at a mature stage in your career. I’ll brush off the initial “good luck with that” reaction and suggest that your objective can indeed be realized. But consider the following: Problem 1: Effective CIOs must balance IT knowledge and business acumen. You have the latter, not the former. While you may understand the business implications of technology, your weakness will be in managing IT staff and their supplier organizations. Problem 2: You see yourself as a packaging industry expert, with no reference to IT. How many IT organizations pine for a CIO who hasn’t a clue about their jobs, interests, and challenges? Problem 3: Just how tech savvy are you? Do you understand the latest shop flooring scheduling technologies? Is Hana really the database of the future? How much unstructured data does your company process? What do you think of Jive? Java? Radian6? Are cloud services truly sent from heaven? CIOs must be current with technologies as they impact the enterprise. Consider the following advice: l Start a special project that will require IT capabilities. Get hands-on with the work, and learn from the IT

experts who are involved. Take on IT development work yourself, on your own time. Build an iOS application or two. l Read the terms and conditions of all of the click-through agreements you accept. l Develop a voracious appetite for industry information, gleaned from seminars, trade publications, research firms, and the like. Longer term, consider moving to a smaller company within your industry and changing jobs, in a role closer to what you’re now looking for. A smaller company will value your experience; in exchange, you want influence and/ or direct control over some aspect of technology. From then on, you can begin to develop your CIO-in-training credentials. Don’t jump to conclusions about being tech savvy too quickly. You likely mean that you have a fascination with how applied technology solves business problems. But liking music and becoming a professional musician are entirely different things. Let’s translate this tech interest into understanding. l Attend local CIO panels/conferences and establish relationships with CIOs. Set up a few lunches with the ones you meet, and talk with them about their strategies and priorities. l Establish contact with key IT vendors. Get to the packaging industry conferences, find the IT vendors there, and immerse yourself in their products. l Look for opportunities to present your views on IT innovation in your industry. Think about presenting your emerging CIO ideas to an audience. Nothing compels an individual to achieve a goal like believing in it. Start behaving like the CIO you wish to be. l

u The author, the real-life CIO of

a billion-dollar-plus company, offers advice to readers under the pseudonym John McGreavy

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 65

Technology & Risks

DR in the cloud: Lessons learned from the Amazon outage

Avinash Kadam

Despite all the planning, things will fail once in a while. In such a scenario, let’s not panic and fixate on absolutely uptime guarantees

http://www.on the web Virtualization makes DR automation possible Read article at:

informationweek august 2012

usiness continuity in the face of a disaster is a major concern of every CIO. One of the selling points of cloud services has been that they provide an excellent backup for IT services. One of the largest cloud services providers, Amazon, advertises its service for disaster recovery in a most compelling manner. Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Services) provides a 99.999999999 percent durability of its objects in a given year. This amazing number is backed by Amazon’s wellformulated security practices; it has data centers in multiple geographical regions, spread in multiple availability zones. And each availability zone is designed as an independent failure zone. So, if one availability zone fails, it should not impact others. Each of these zones has UPS and onsite backup generation facilities. Power is provided via different grids from independent power utilities. Even with this careful design, Amazon faced two breakdowns in its services in the month of June. On June 14, in a single availability zone in the U.S. East Region, there was a disruption of power, attributed to a power cable fault, which brought two power substations down. The backup generator took the load, but powered off due to overheating because of a defective cooling fan. The secondary backup power, which was provided by a completely separate power distribution circuit took over, but one of the circuit breakers was configured for a lower threshold and could not take the transferred load. Murphy’s law was evident in full force — if anything can go wrong, it will. Although the generator fan was fixed and the power restored in an hour and half, it took further three hours to return to normalcy. Second incidence happened on June 29, coincidently in the same availability zone. It started with an electric storm, which affected stability

of power lasting just 30 minutes. However, an unknown bug in the elastic load balancer created a huge backlog, which resulted in considerable time for resolving all the problems and bringing the situation to normalcy. So, the lesson to be learnt is, despite all the planning, things will go wrong. The fan belts might break, circuits breakers might trip, well tested generators might fail, and so on. Only 7 percent of the total elastic cloud instances were affected by the failure of one single availability zone. Customers who had ensured that they were operating from multiple geographic regions and multiple availability zones were unaffected. The cloud service providers will love to highlight this and make you build further redundancy in the services you opt for — of course paying more for it. But imagine a scenario where a major solar flare disturbs the electromagnetic field, disrupts all the radio communication and even knocks off electric grids. Will it not affect everyone? I am not being a doomsayer — I am just suggesting a more rational way out of this race. Let us take it for granted that things will fail once in a while — like a hale and hearty person, who can still catch a cold some time. Let us take all due precautions to have resilience, fault tolerance, redundancy, automatic failover and so on. But still, if sometime thing fails, let us not panic and fixate on absolutely uptime guarantees. A textbook scenario of entire air traffic coming to halt may generate many theoretical backup plans, but when it really happened in Europe, people were still able to get back home without really having made those backup plans. u Avinash Kadam is currently

Advisor – India Task Force for ISACA. Opinions expressed in the column are his personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of www.isaca.org. He can be contacted via e-mail avinash@awkadam.com

www.informationweek.in

Global CIO

Microsoft Surface: Enterprise tablet market isn’t enough

Chris Murphy

Windows 8 tablets will need to take off with consumers before CIOs will embrace them. Here’s why

LOGS Chris Murphy blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:

IOs will give Windows 8 tablets a close look. When I spoke to IT execs for an article on business uses of tablets earlier this year, everyone was interested in what Microsoft would be coming out with. There’s a big opportunity for a work-friendly tablet. iPads just don’t work very well with a lot of legacy enterprise software. Citrix Receiver lets you look at data, but you can’t really work in it, tech execs say. If Microsoft’s Surface tablet makes it easier to provide enterprise app access in the tablet format, that’s intriguing to a lot of CIOs. IT shops have a lot of Windows expertise in house; they’re light on iOS talent. They’d be interested in replacing laptops for some mobile workers. And that leads to an idea I’ve seen pop up in several Surface write-ups: that Surface will appeal to the enterprise, but we’ll have to wait and see about consumer markets. It’s a safe middle ground. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Surface either succeeds in consumer markets, or it doesn’t fly at all. Even enterprise IT needs some coolness factor. Several of the execs I spoke with for that tablet article described the iPad as the default choice for the project or pilot they had underway. They cited practical reasons, like the iPad’s features, familiarity, and development kit. But don’t underestimate the iPad cachet. “We’re in the fashion industry, and they’re what’s cool,” explained Neil Goodrich, Head of IT for Holly Hunt, a high-end home furnishing showroom. Bill Martin, CIO of the cruise line company Royal Caribbean, put iPads in every stateroom of its most recently renovated cruise ship. Why iPads? “That’s what the hotel team wanted,” Martin said. But he noted that choice could change over time if viable Windows tablets came into the market and Android tablets gained in popularity and stability. CIOs are far from the only voice

in picking personal technology for employees. A tablet in a salesperson’s hand is part of how a company presents itself, so the sales leadership is going to have a big say. Now, I do think the cool factor around tablets will fade, and employees won’t remain quite as insistent on iPads as the one acceptable tablet. Other companies will narrow the gap, even if the iPad keeps a step or a half step ahead. But there’s another reason Microsoft needs consumer success: viability. For companies to make a big bet on a tablet deployment, like giving them to all their salespeople, they want to know that device will be around awhile. Now, Apple doesn’t provide the kind of long-term product roadmap IT teams are used to getting for enterprise software, server, and PC lines. But for Martin at Royal Caribbean, the lack of a roadmap wasn’t a big issue. “It’s more around our confidence that the product has a viable life,” he said. Apple’s iPad has that. IT execs may not know which iPad features Apple will roll out next, but they know it will keep innovating. CIOs will be skeptical of any device that’s solely dependent on enterprise sales. Microsoft has bailed out on hardware endeavors before — Zune music players, the Kin phone — that didn’t take off. And Surface is an even riskier proposition than those hardware efforts, since a tablet could alienate Microsoft’s longtime hardware partners, including Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Would an enterprise-focused tablet be worth that risk? Microsoft recently demonstrated a very interesting tablet concept for knowledge workers, but it still has to prove to CIOs it’s committed to becoming a large-scale hardware maker. Winning over the consumer is part of winning over the CIO. u Chris Murphy is Editor of

InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 67

Practical Analysis

HP without Itanium: A three-pronged strategy

Art Wittmann

Regardless of how its trial against Oracle goes, there will be no new versions of Oracle software on Itanium. Here’s how HP might turn the page

LOGS Art Wittmann blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:

informationweek august 2012

s HP and Oracle battle in court over whether Oracle broke an agreement with HP to continue to port its software to HP’s high-end hardware platforms, one thing is clear: Customers who love Oracle on HP-UX/Integrity are going to have to make the hard choice of giving up one or both platforms. If the affinity is to HP-UX, customers are pretty much out of luck. According to court documents, HP has shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars in its relationship with Intel for Itanium, where Intel works as a contractor, designing and manufacturing the chip for HP. While HP could continue doing that, without Oracle software there’s virtually no point, and without Itanium, there’s no path forward for HP’s NonStop, OpenVMS, and UX operating systems. To make matters worse for HP, SAP has discontinued support of its Business Objects software on Itanium. HP could port its operating systems to Intel’s Xeon chip, but there’s no chance now that Oracle would support such a move, and it is unlikely SAP would either. The loss of HP-UX hurts HP much more than the loss of Itanium since HP supplies the entire ecosystem, including consulting, for HP-UX. A normal endof-life process for the chip could have resulted in a lot of consulting for HP. HP is embarking on a three-pronged strategy to bolster its server business, called Odyssey, Voyager, and Moonshot. Moonshot is by far the most forward-looking, and potentially disruptive of the three projects. It calls for developing high-density servers using low-power CPUs. Recently, HP and Intel announced that the Gemini line of servers would use an Atom chip called Centerton specifically made for the job. The idea is to put thousands of 64-bit x86 servers in a rack. Think of this approach as undoing the virtualization trend. So-called microservers cut out the virtualization middleman and provide scads of cheap servers to use as

you will. As interesting as Centerton and Gemini are, they really aren’t an answer for HP’s Business Critical Systems (BCS) customers. The Voyager project is, in my mind, the least interesting of the projects — the notion is to make servers smarter so that they’re easier to manage. The first instantiation of Voyager are the Proliant Gen8 servers. HP says the Proliants can monitor up to 1,600 system parameters so that system admins will know about potential failures long before they occur. The problem is that almost no one wants to pay for much “added value.” Buyers of these systems are sensitive to price, so there’s only so much innovating HP can do without pricing itself out of competition. This project also doesn’t do much for BCS customers. That leaves us with Odyssey, which is aimed directly at BCS customers. As part of Odyssey, HP says it will continue to release new versions of NonStop, OpenVMS, and HP-UX on these systems, but that’s predicated on the availability of Itanium chips. Given all that’s gone on, we expect that the two versions of Itanium now under development will be the last. At least in the long run (past 2016), the Windows and Linux components of Odyssey will be all that matters. HP’s goal for Windows and Linux is to beef them up with some features that its users like best on HP-UX and NonStop. In its press release on Odyssey, HP talks about supporting nPars (its proprietary virtualization system) and various diagnostic systems and fault tolerant features, a bit like the Voyager project but with a more receptive audience. While the audience may listen, they’ll also shop around. We suspect that HP will have a hard time holding on to this high-margin business no matter what it does. u Art Wittmann is Director of

InformationWeek Analytics, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can write to him at awittmann@techweb.com.

www.informationweek.in

Down to Business

Social collaboration: A work in progress

Rob Preston

Improving collaboration continues to top executive priority lists, so let’s revisit whether they’re “teasing out” the right tools and techniques

LOGS Rob Preston blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:

t’s been almost two years since I wrote a column titled “Down To Business: Why Some People ‘Dread’ Collaboration,” in which I cited a body of research that showed unsatisfactory user experiences with social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The Corporate Executive Board’s Shvetank Shah weighed in that part of the challenge in fostering collaboration is for organizations to acquire a better understanding of users’ workflows and the outcomes they want to achieve and then “tease out” the appropriate technologies, rather than just thrust collaboration platforms upon them. Improving collaboration continues to land on the strategic priority lists of CIOs and other company executives — 39 percentof executives in our Global CIO survey said they plan a major technology implementation in this area this year, making it No. 1 among 14 projects. So it’s worth revisiting whether they and their organizations are in fact teasing out the right tools and techniques. The short answer is that no one’s got enterprise collaboration all figured out yet, owing to the dizzying array of platforms (SharePoint, Google Sites, Drupal, Yammer, LotusLive, Salesforce. com Chatter, Jive, Cisco Quad), various web and video conferencing systems, and of course the legacy e-mail, IM, and other platforms. Add to that the varying personal, cultural, and some even say generational preferences. And I think we still do too much thrusting and not enough teasing out. In an October 2011 InformationWeek survey that asked about enterprise use of social collaboration tools, 53 percent of the 452 IT pros who responded reported heavy or moderate use of online company directories (including those with profiles and photos) at their

companies; 38 percent reported heavy or moderate use of team or company wikis; 30 percent of company discussion forums; and 28 percent of internal blogs. Those findings were little changed from a year earlier. But only 38 percent of the survey respondents characterized the overall success of their social collaboration tools as great or good. The rest rated them average (37 percent), fair (15 percent), or poor (10 percent). The findings of a more recent survey, which we conducted in April, were more upbeat: 51 percent of the 405 respondents said they were either satisfied (41 percent) or very satisfied (10 percent) with their companies’ social networking software. Only 32 percent were somewhat satisfied and 5 percent were unsatisfied. (The other 12 percent were still evaluating such software.) So it appears that users are becoming more comfortable with their companies’ social collaboration efforts. But pockets of discontent remain, our extensive reporting and research find. For some perspective, let’s step back a bit. In a thought-provoking blog post several years ago, current BrainYard columnist Venkatesh Rao made the case that the enterprise collaboration movement had lapsed into something of a “generational war” between advocates of social media tools and advocates of more structured knowledge management tools. Rao used as an example a tussle he had on a conference panel session with a middle-aged “architect of a major, moderately successful, stable, and decade-old KM effort.” “Where he advocated planning, I advocated ad hoc experimentation,” Rao wrote. “Where he advocated charters to declare expected value, I advocated a ‘you’ll-know-it-when-yousee-it’ approach to discovering value.

august 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 69

Down to Business Where he talked about convincing [subject matter experts], I argued that you should just watch for opinion leaders to emerge.” While Rao admitted to “setting the cat among the pigeons,” his “us vs. them” POV is still common among social networking/Enterprise 2.0 advocates (even if you don’t hear much about knowledge management these days). Long after I wrote the “Dread” column, in which I not only cited research but also related my personal frustrations with my company’s wiki, I stumbled upon a series of rebuttals to my column — posted on the very same wiki by our community manager and a few of his fellow E2.0 professionals — in which I was portrayed as the stodgy traditionalist. (I chanced upon that thread while searching for something else; no one had offered me the opportunity to collaborate with the rebutallists.) They made some valid points, the simplest of which is that you can’t

please everyone. Perhaps I pined for a “drop-in replacement” for my existing collaboration tools (mostly e-mail and IM), rather than accept something truly new and different and more effective, one commenter suggested. One respondent to our recent

informationweek august 2012

Enterprise Social Networking Vendor Evaluation Survey agreed: “The most challenging aspect of social networking for the enterprise is understanding the technology as it pertains to optimizing existing workflows. We tend to try to adapt social software to meet our (outdated) business processes, instead of seeing ‘how things could/should be’ and adjusting processes to take advantage of technology.” Fair enough. I’m never the first to embrace the latest technologies and approaches, but like most other professionals, I generally do get on board as a fairly fast follower once I see the utility. And I’m still not completely sold on enterprise social collaboration, at least my company’s brand. My original point wasn’t and isn’t that our company wiki (based on Jive software

and recently upgraded and renamed The Hub) is a poor platform for employee collaboration. It’s a good one. At its best, it’s a dynamic forum for discussing industry trends, business opportunities, ongoing programs, customer wins, product improvements, operational best practices, and myriad other issues.

Users are becoming more comfortable with their companies’ social collaboration efforts. But pockets of discontent remain

u Rob Preston is VP and Editor-in-Chief of InformationWeek. You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.