Information Week India Issue February 2012 by Viraj Mehta

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Make BI simple, for everyone

Gartner says that less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations’ standard BI tools use the technology today

n a recent trip overseas, I explored the in-flight entertainment system. The touchscreen interface made navigating through a menu of entertainment content a breeze. The ‘Moving Map’ and flight information features offered real-time information on the airplane’s location, height and speed. It informed me about the time left for the journey, distance to the destination and the current time over the present position, at the origin and destination. With all this information, I could make decisions like whether there is enough time to watch another movie or to take a short nap. The point is, this information is timely and relevant in that scenario (a long flight with plenty of time to spare), but would not be of much help once I am on the ground. The other point is that all this information is put together by a sophisticated system that’s linked to a mobile radar, that in turn communicates with an overhead satellite. Yet I do not see all this complexity; it’s lodged in the avionics bay, perhaps on the deck below. Well, the experience of using business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools in business is quite similar. BI is equally sophisticated and it can take months to deploy and integrate. However, unlike in-flight entertainment systems, BI interfaces are not all that intuitive and require training and orientation. As a result, we find only top rung managers using BI/analytics tools, which are slow to take off in enterprises today. Gartner says that less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations’ standard BI tools use the technology today. Gartner attributes this low adoption to the fact that traditional tools and approaches to BI are often too difficult to use, slow to respond or deliver content of limited relevance. In this issue our editorial team explores how Indian organizations are using BI tools to derive business value. Moving beyond the traditional ways of deploying BI, these organizations have found new uses for it. Bharti Infratel, for instance, uses a BI solution to analyze data on the state of each cell tower, and converts this data into real-time actionable intelligence that enables the firm to make better decisions and identify areas of optimization. We also observe that BI tools are becoming more personal, social and mobile. As the mobile workforce continues to grow in India, there are increased expectations for BI on-the-go — workers want to access information on their mobile devices and share the analysis and insights with co-workers or partners in a social way. And hence we are seeing a demand for mobile BI solutions, SaaS tools, BI appliances and enterprise applications embedded with social capabilities.

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

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contents Vo l u m e 1 | I ss u e 0 4 |

Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 2

Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

21 cover story India Inc finds new ways to unlock business value from BI From creating new products, providing personalized services and even improving financial inclusion, India Inc is going beyond the traditional ways of deploying BI

BI evolving to be more personal, social and mobile

The rise of mobile workers coupled with the emergence of technologies like cloud and in-memory is changing the way BI is consumed and delivered

CIO Voice

Why YES Bank developed its own BI solution Going against the established trend of buying off-theshelf BI solutions or products, YES Bank’s CIO, Umesh Jain, took a pioneering step to develop its own BI solution, called Kaleidoscope. Umesh Jain shares his perspective with InformationWeek

case study

feature

How Ford is using Google’s prediction engine to build self learning cars Using historical data, car maker Ford is collaborating with Google to develop software that will help its cars predict the best route that drivers can take to save energy and time

‘Smarter’ cell towers boost Bharti Infratel’s business

Learning Outcomes, a Pune-based startup is trying to identify root causes of learning inefficiencies by using predictive analytics

Adoption of data tracking and analytics solution from IBM has enabled Bharti Infratel to monitor in real-time its 33,000+ tower sites distributed across 11 telecom circles in India, resulting in significant business benefits Do you Twitter? Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/iweekindia

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Improving education using predictive analytics

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

Indian startup looks to reshape analytics field using managed crowdsourcing model Startup CrowdANALYTIX has found a unique way to improve algorithms of analytic solutions by leveraging the power of the crowd

If you’re on LinkedIN, reach us at http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=2249272

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cover story interview

‘Our competitors, who talk about in-memory analytics in India, do not understand analytics’ In contrast to the in-memory buzz going around the industry, Teradata’s CTO Stephen Brobst believes that the Indian market is not ready for such a technology — primarily due to price. Excerpts from an exclusive interview

‘At LinkedIn, features and development are data driven’ From approximately 3 million members in 2009 to more than 13 million members today, LinkedIn India is clearly on a roll. As India’s largest professional network, it relies heavily on using business insights from the huge amount of data that it has at its disposal. Ganesh Krishnan, Head- India Technology Center, LinkedIn, tells InformationWeek, how LinkedIn uses analytics to provide users with information relevant to them in a professional context

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44 46

3 BI trends every CIO must understand BI moves from the back room to the conference room and travels beyond enterprise walls, while really Big Data drives strategy

5 resolutions for better BI in 2012 Make business intelligence easy to use, deploy, afford, administer and embed

48 50

3 keys to analytics success Businesses need to overcome cultural barriers, like resistance to change, to get most bang for their analytics buck, a study shows

5 mobile BI tips for SMBs Do you have a good answer when users inevitably ask: Can I get this on my mobile device?

opinion

4 areas you need to address to master Big Data

Analytics: Turning information into insight

The art of fluent Master Data Management

Data analytics can backfire without experts

Mobility 2012: The wireless analytics revolution

EDITORIAL.........................................................4

Xerox India to focus on services business

INDEX..................................................................8

Wipro shows positive sentiments, Q3 net up 10 percent Torry Harris India set to recruit more than 400 people in H1 2012

feature

News 2012: India gets set to adopt IPv6

THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

Chirpings from twitterati................... 10 Social Sphere...............................................11 interview, Joseph Kremer, President-APJ, Dell........................................ 58 event.............................................................. 60 analyst angle........................................... 63

Essar becomes first firm to adopt HP’s ePrint in India

secret cio.................................................... 64

HDFC Securities launches mobile trading apps

global CIO....................................................67

Infosys Q3 net up 33.3 percent, lowers guidance

down to business..................................... 69

technology & risks................................ 65

practical analysis................................. 68

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

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Person & Organization Vishal Awal, Xerox South Asia �� 12 Akash Sahni, Oracle India �� 28 Alistair Rennie, IBM �� 60 Angel Diaz, IBM �� 62 Aparna Kumar, HDFC Bank �� 23 Ashwini Kuber, KPIT Cummins �� 27 Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Mu Sigma �� Dhiraj Trivedi, Royal Orchid Hotels �� 24 Divyabh Mishra, CrowdANALYTIX �� 39 Dr Ponani Gopalakrishnan, IBM India Software Lab �� 52 Dr Tanuj Nandan, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology �� 23 Ganesh Krishnan, LinkedIn �� 42 Glen Rabie, Yellowfin �� 28 James Richardson, Gartner �� 29 Jayantha Prabhu, Essar Group �� 17 Johannes Kristinsson, Ford Research and Innovation �� 33 Joseph Kremer, Dell �� 58 Kevin Eggleston, Hitachi Data Systems Asia-Pacific �� 18 Kishore Rajgopal, CrowdANALYTIX �� 39 Maneesh Sharma, SAP India �� 17 Prashant Tewari, IBM India/South Asia �� 27 Prashant Veer Singh, Bharti Infratel �� 35 Rishi Kar, Learning Outcomes �� 36 Rohan Deshpande, Ogilvy & Mather �� 24

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Company name Page No. IBM Zoho Icreate Fujitsu Biz Secure EMC Microworld e-scan Interop Announce 2012 Cloud Connect IBM Event Webcast Dell Juniper

Editorial index

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Salil Godika, Happiest Minds Technologies �� 29 Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, Reliance Capital �� 22 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director, W3C �� 62 Srinivasan Rengarajan, Collabera Solutions �� 54 Stephen Brobst, Teradata �� 40 Steve Jones, Capgemini �� 51 Sumanth Tarigopula, HP India �� 27 Sunny Neogi, Aditi Technologies �� 28 Umesh Jain, YES Bank �� 30

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Mobiles can be used for listening, interacting, recording, questioning, reporting and responding – which is what learning is all about, says Sunil Lalvani of RIM http://bit.ly/AoOhls

Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education

BRUCE QUARTERMAN tweeted:

Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education: The mobile technology is also helping them record observations and complete assignments....

bit.ly/xGkS0M

Gary C. Partridge tweeted:

Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education: Using mobile technology, innovators can enhance and improve current education processes http://bit.ly/x20qPA

Geaux Bare tweeted:

Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education: Mobile Assisted Learning is helping Millennials use voice recognition http://bit.ly/zEs4b8

jacklynn tweeted:

Education 2.0: Mobile technology in education: The question is truly simple for those who want to ride the mobile wave http://bit.ly/zw2zQf

‘Cloud security platforms can help manage mobile devices’

Arun Sundararajan, NEC Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, discusses with InformationWeek the relevance of social media to the overall business, and how CIOs must handle social media http://bit.ly/zvIS8s

WebMoneyAdvice tweeted:

CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom bit.ly/yNKN6c

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CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom - InformationWeek India bit.ly/xQPb0L #socialmedia

Eric A Billoud. tweeted:

CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom bit.ly/zbo0Fk

Mobile app development gains traction in the Indian enterprise Mobile solutions offer businesses the speed of delivery and faster decision making, which directly impacts a company’s bottomline http://bit.ly/wyr6u6

As mobile devices continue to invade workplace, more vendors will undoubtedly bet big on cloud security platforms for mobile device management, says Steve Rowland, Vice President APAC, Blue Coat Systems in an interview http://bit.ly/Aalafi

Hardik Shah tweeted:

VFP (virusfreephone) tweeted:

India’s rapidly evolving enterprise mobility market is set to touch USD1b by mid-2015 from the current USD244m: Zinnov bit.ly/xAJ1WY

‘Cloud security platforms can help manage mobile devices’ - InformationWeek India: Cloud security platforms can help manage mobile devices’ http://bit.ly/w96S5x virusfreephone

Mobile Cloud Network tweeted:

#Mobile #Cloud ‘Cloud security platforms can help manage mobile devices’: However, mobile devices including laptops, iOS devices and those running Android typically roam to other networks as the end-user takes the device to home and for business visits. bit.ly/wNeqPX #TCN

CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom

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Mobile app development gains traction in the Indian enterprise: Mobile solutions offer businesses the speed of delivery bit.ly/A9Vdln

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January 12 at 4:14 pm

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

News

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Services

Xerox India to focus on services business The managed print services (MPS) market is increasingly growing. As per Photizo Group, the leading research and transformation firm for the MPS market, with a 27 percent year-on-year growth in 2010 revenue, the MPS market indicates a 20 percent CAGR (2010-15) and is forecast to top USD 78 billion in 2015. The research firm also listed India as the fastest growing country for MPS. This report shows that there is a huge opportunity for MPS vendors in India such as Xerox India.

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twork Vishal Awal, Executive Director - Services, Xerox South Asia

Xerox India is not only focusing on MPS but on its entire services portfolio, which includes Communications and Marketing Services (CMS) and Document Transaction Processing Services (DTPS). Sectors like BFSI, telecom, retail, consumer goods and IT/ ITES look very promising to Xerox India to accelerate its services business. Xerox India claims to be the only player in the market that has the capability of streamlining the entire value chain for its customers. Vishal Awal, Executive Director - Services, Xerox South Asia says, “There is an immediate need of MPS in the Indian market and the next logical step is printrelated jobs that are outsourced. We

informationweek february 2012

have in-house end-to-end capabilities to transform and optimize business process and document management value chain. This is a key differentiator that Xerox brings to large enterprises in India. While several players offer compartmentalized solutions in these domains, the capability of streamlining the entire value chain is something that is unique to Xerox.” Xerox India is looking at ways to expand its services business. The company has formed an alliance with Cisco, to provide its customers cloudbased services and solutions combining network intelligence and print. The two companies hope to use this partnership to improve efficiency for the workforce with solutions such as mobile printing. The company is not just looking at partnerships but also acquisitions. For instance, in 2010 the company acquired Affiliated Computer Services (ACS). Through ACS, Xerox integrates MPS into the IT infrastructure to help businesses convert paper into digital, simplifying and speeding up workflows in ways that save time and money. “Through our acquisition of ACS, we are now in business process and IT outsourcing, offering global services from claims reimbursement, electronic health records, and automated toll transaction to customer care centers and HR benefits management. The acquisition also added BPO and IT outsourcing capabilities to our expertise,” elaborates Awal. As a part of its market strategy for 2012, Xerox India has a two-pronged approach. It will continue to accelerate its services business with focus on the fast growing verticals like BFSI and telecom. The company will also focus on the simplification of print infrastructure, robust security features and productivity enhancement technologies like mobile and cloud printing.

2012: India gets set to adopt IPv6 With the reservoir of available IP addresses fast depleting, governments around the world are putting finishing touches to their plans to migrate their country’s Internet infrastructure to the new IPv6 protocol, which offers billions of new addresses. The Government of India has set a deadline of March 31, 2012 for all service providers to transition to IPv6. The Government of Karnataka (GoK) has taken a major initiative to help enterprises make the transition, through a public-private project. It signed a partnership agreement with the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B) and technology vendor HP to conduct a pilot project to help organizations in Karnataka through a smooth transition to IPv6. The objectives of the project are to identify major challenges for organizations in adopting IPv6; develop solutions for these challenges through technology and process improvements; provide advice and resources for enterprises and government bodies in Karnataka; and promote the adoption of IPv6 in other Indian states. “Expanding communication networks and limited availability of IPv4 address space, has necessitated the need to shift to IPv6 by March 2012,” said Hon. M N Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary to Government , Department of IT, BT, S&T and eGovernance, Govt of Karnataka. “Partnerships such as this help spread awareness regarding this new mandate to all public and private sector companies.” —InformationWeek News Network

—Vinita Gupta

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I T- I T E S

Wipro shows positive sentiments, Q3 net up 10 percent Wipro reported marginally-higherthan-expected performance for the third quarter of FY 2011-12, backed by the rupee depreciation and last year’s company-wide restructuring. The firm declared a consolidated Q3 net profit of ` 1,457 crore, an increase of 10 percent annually and 12 percent sequentially. The topline for the quarter grew 28 percent year-on-year to ` 9,997 crore. The company’s flagship IT services revenue for the quarter in dollar terms grew 2.2 percent sequentially 12 percent annually to USD 1,505 million. The IT services segment, which contributed 76 percent of the total revenue, added 5,004 employees during the quarter taking the total headcount

to 1, 36,734. Wipro’s voluntary annualized attrition of 14.2 percent was lowest in eight quarters, signalling that employees have embraced the ongoing changes at the company. Looking ahead for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, Wipro said it expected revenues from its IT services to be in the range from USD 1,520 million to USD 1,550 million. This compares to rival Infosys’ tepid to flat growth projection for the quarter ended March 31, 2012. On the technology front, cloud, mobility, big data and analytics continue to gain momentum. Wipro CEO TK Kurien said that its cloud business won 20 deals during the quarter. —Ayushman Baruah

S o f t wa r e

Torry Harris India set to recruit more than 400 people in H1 2012 Torry Harris Business Solutions, a niche IT services firm specializing in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Mobile App development and Cloud integration recently announced it is recruiting more than 400 people in the first half of the year 2012, spurred

by the success of several initiatives in the integration, SOA and Mobile App Development areas in the Telecommunications domain. The recruits will start joining the company from the beginning of the year 2012 as per the hiring targets for the first two quarters of the year. “This is a great opportunity for the new hires, since they will be exposed early on to leading edge technologies such as Service-oriented Architecture, Cloud Integration and development of mobile apps for businesses” said Shuba Sridhar, Regional Manager (Technical Services), Torry Harris Business Solutions. The fast-paced growth of the company’s European operations coupled with its good performance in emerging markets like Africa, has continued to create a healthy demand. —InformationWeek News Network

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

News CLOUD Computing

IT- IT E S

Essar becomes first firm to adopt HP’s ePrint in India

Infosys Q3 net up 33.3 percent, lowers guidance

Printing was a major concern for Essar Group’s mobile workers. To take a printout of even a single document, mobile workers had to hunt for the local IT support staff and the nearest printer. In order to counter these challenges, Essar Group wanted a solution that enabled mobile workers to print documents from their handheld devices (in this case BlackBerry smartphone) regardless of the location of the company’s network. Thus, the company adopted HP ePrint Enterprise solution, which is a cloud-based service that enables users to easily search for and print to a company’s networked printer. With the ePrint Enterprise solution, mobile workers at Essar are now able to print and distribute documents to their team staff at the push of a button on their mobile devices. “With ePrint Enterprise, we have

eliminated the inconvenience caused to our executives, as earlier they had to stop their work mid-way to print a document,” says Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group. Today, employees are just required to type in key search terms or use the GPS capabilities of the smartphone to quickly find a convenient printer. Security was a major criteria, before adopting this cloud-based printing solution for Essar. Prabhu informs, “The solution has security features that an enterprise customer requires — for example, the data does not leave their enterprise network and can be integrated with well-known user authentication solutions.” The use of HP ePrint at Essar has now been extended to 1,000 smartphone users and soon will be extended to the remaining 5,000 mobile users. —Vinita Gupta

Mo b i l i t y

HDFC Securities launches mobile trading apps HDFC Securities, a subsidiary of HDFC Bank, has announced the availability of a Trading Engine for mobiles. As per the company, mobile trading apps are available on Android, BlackBerry and Microsoft Window-based phones as well as on tablets. The apps will facilitate clients to trade, transact and receive market information anytime, anywhere. Customers can use these apps to place orders in equities and derivatives, get stock quotes, online hold/release of funds and securities, track market movements and positions, place off-market orders

informationweek february 2012

etc. Aided by 256-bit encryption, these apps ensure that the transactions remain under foolproof security. Jyotheesh Kumar, Head-Marketing, HDFC Securities, said, “By the end of this month, our iPhone apps for phone and tablets would also go live. We see mobile technology as a harbinger for growth.” HDFC Securities had earlier introduced MIDlet-based mobile apps in 2011, which was the company’s first step in taking online trading to phones. —InformationWeek News Network

Bangalore-based Infosys posted a better-than-expected 33.3 percent growth in Q3 net profit to ` 2,372 crore. The topline for IT bellwether grew 30.8 percent year-on-year and 14.8 percent sequentially to ` 9,298 crore during the quarter. Analysts attribute the growth in profits mainly to the rupee depreciation. “Since majority revenue comes from exports of services, Infosys and other companies are bound to witness a jump in profitability” said Praveen Bhadada, Director, Zinnov Management Consulting. In the back of a severe European crisis, the company lowered its dollar revenue guidance for the fiscal ending March 31, 2012 to grow 16.4 percent; down from 17.1 percent to 19.1 percent projected in Q2 ended September 2011. Some analysts believe the weakening of the rupee is not the only factor for the growth in profits. Partha Iyengar, VP and Regional Research Director, Gartner, said, “Profitability growth of 33 percent is obviously driven by more than just an 8 percent currency drop. The head-winds of the severe EU issues are undoubtedly there, but, similar to the 2009 recession, this is going to be a test of the Indian companies’ willingness to lower the cost of IT for enterprises in the Euro zone’.” Infosys added 3,266 employees during the quarter to take the total headcount to 145,088. It added 49 clients during the quarter which totals to 665 clients as of December 31, 2011. On the technology front, Infosys continued to gain momentum in the areas of cloud, mobility and its core banking solution, Finacle. The company’s cloud practice won 15 deals during the quarter while Finacle won 10 deals. —Ayushman Baruah

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News Analysis

SAP accelerates HANA drive in India Dubbed as the next big opportunity for SAP after SAP R/3; the ERP giant is gradually building a list of reference customers for HANA in India By Srikanth RP

Already the fastest growing subsidiary of SAP AG, SAP India now has the opportunity to accelerate growth due to HANA — a product that is touted as a game-changer and one that will alter the enterprise applications landscape globally, and in India too. HANA is seen as the next big thing in enterprise IT due to its ability to analyze large amount of information quickly. Compared to traditional methods, HANA (High Performance Analytic Appliance) uses in-memory technologies. In this approach, information is processed in RAM, instead of being read from disks. This improves performance in a significant way as it allows real-time crunching and analysis of data. For example, Colgate cut down processing time from 77 minutes to

informationweek february 2012

13 seconds using HANA. Similarly, NRI, a research and consulting services provider, was able to use SAP HANA to analyze traffic information in Tokyo, and gained the ability to search through 360 million data records in approximately one second. Lenovo plans to use SAP HANA to process 1.8 million contract records with multiple attributes in less than a second. This real-time analysis of information provides a great strategic advantage to organizations. This is significant when you consider the fact that most organizations today are finding it exceedingly difficult to handle vast amounts of data. For example, a recent survey conducted by Hitachi Data Systems in association with market analyst firm IDC revealed that about 70 percent of respondents in India believed that the demand of the business for deeper analysis

outpaces the ability for their systems to ensure the data they have is relevant, timely and useful. In other words, their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it. With HANA, SAP has an opportunity to address this challenge. “Most CFOs today want to look at the costing and profitability parameters of a project in real-time, as sometimes, dynamic market situations require quick answers and quicker decision making. HANA enables enterprises to do this instantly today,” explains Maneesh Sharma, HeadBusiness Analytics and Technology, SAP India.

Sowing in the seeds of HANA SAP is doing a number of pilots on SAP HANA with a number of customers in India, and has already signed on big names such as Essar and Infosys. Essar

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is a huge conglomerate operating in more than 25 countries across five continents. Due to a presence across multiple sectors, the group generates a huge amount of information. With different systems for different lines of businesses, the amount of data that the group analyzes for reporting is to the tune of 3 TB. Explaining the challenge of analyzing this huge data set, Jayantha Prabhu, Chief Technology Officer, Essar Group, says, “The key challenge in analyzing the huge amount of data is the capability of the system to crunch the data within a defined time frame. While we are able to get the operational reports from the BW warehouse, the real-time analytics is always a constraint due to the time required for generation of the report.” Post deployment of HANA, this is no longer a challenge. “SAP HANA will enhance the decision making capabilities of the management with the ability to run queries on the information at timelines which were not possible earlier. This will increase the flexibility to respond to the dynamic requirements of the business,” explains Prabhu. Access to consistent real-time data will improve Essar’s forecasting abilities as well as provide intelligence on how to redirect the business, based on recent events, customer relationships, product plans and market variations. Further, the ability to pull in data from any source means that information can be pulled in and analyzed from any source. Prabhu says that with SAP HANA, Essar also has the capability of consolidating the database of the existing Business Warehouse solution from SAP into

HANA, which will further improve operational reporting performance. Another company that is doing a pilot on SAP HANA is Infosys. The software giant has utilized SAP HANA to understand profitability by project

the potential of a game-changer like HANA. We are approaching each sector with a scenario-based solution. For example, for the telecom sector, it could be churn management,” says Sharma. Every company that deals with

“SAP HANA enhances decision making with its ability to run queries on the information at timelines which were not possible earlier”

Jayantha Prabhu

Chief Technology Officer, Essar Group

and conduct “what-if” analysis on the fly with granular revenue and cost data. The pilot is a real-time simulation of project financials. Infosys will use HANA to simulate margins starting from company levels and drill down to P&L owners and individual projects. Managers and leaders will be able to view current margin information in real-time and make real-time simulations to take corrective actions. Business leaders can explore and interact with key variables that affect a project’s profitability and do analysis at all levels within the company. Globally, SAP has built a list of reference customers in different verticals, which it will use for accelerating adoption in India. SAP’s Sharma says that almost every vertical looks promising in India. These include traditional sectors such as BFSI, retail, telecom, oil & gas and media. “For HANA, we are not limited by the traditional ERP view. We have just scratched the surface of fully tapping

“We have just scratched the surface of fully tapping the potential of a gamechanger like HANA”

Maneesh Sharma

Head - Business Analytics and Technology, SAP India

a lot of data is a potential candidate for SAP HANA. For example, consider refineries. Every minute, prices in the market change, and refineries have to take decisions accordingly, as it impacts their Gross Refining Margin. The key challenge for calculating this GRM margin is the volume of data to be processed, and the disparate systems from where the information needs to be fetched. Refineries can leverage HANA for real-time GRM tracking and simulation. Hourly GRM visibility is of strategic importance to production planners, traders and executives and impact the profitability of a refinery in a significant manner. The strategic importance of India can be gauged from the fact that SAP has launched a CoE for HANA in India, with its partner HP. Similarly, global consulting major, Capgemini, has also set up a competency centre in Mumbai to support HANA. Every year, the enterprise IT industry looks out for major innovations that dramatically alter the way the industry consumes or delivers IT. HANA could be a potential candidate. If HANA does succeed in living up to its full potential, we can see profound changes in the way the world looks at business intelligence.

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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News Analysis

Hitachi plugs into cloud for new growth opportunities A known name in the world of enterprise storage, Hitachi Data Systems has laid out a comprehensive strategy to take advantage of opportunities related to Big Data analytics By Srikanth RP Recently, Hitachi Data Systems aligned its product and solutions portfolio around a three-tiered strategy focused on the cloud. This consists of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud that Hitachi says will build on existing IT investments to provide a single virtualization platform for all data. While the infrastructure cloud will help enterprises unify server, storage and networking silos, the content cloud will use intelligent tools to enable data indexing, search and discovery across data types. The third component, called the information cloud, has the capability to connect data sets, reveal patterns across them and bring to surface actionable information and new insights to business users. The information cloud has been launched at a time when organizations are finding it exceedingly difficult to handle vast amounts of data. A recent survey conducted by Hitachi Data Systems in association with market analyst firm IDC revealed that about 70 percent of respondents in India believed that their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it.

Making sense of unstructured data

A major contributor to this heady growth of storage is related to unstructured data, which can come in the form of e-mails, videos or medical records. “The biggest challenge is undoubtedly unstructured data, which is growing at 10 times the rate at which traditional data is growing,” says Kevin Eggleston, Senior VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems AsiaPacific. Eggleston says that the biggest advantage that Hitachi has today is that it can help customers get business insights from their data, even if it is stored across different data systems from different vendors. For example, using the content cloud, content can be stored independently from the application that created it. The lifespan of some data can be 30 years or more, while the applications that created the data may only exist for a few years. Hence, it is critical to free the data from the underlying application. Once freed, the data can be further analyzed to reveal intelligent insights.

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A case in point is Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, one of the largest hospitals in Austria. The hospital is using the content cloud to consolidate patient information for its lab, radiology and unstructured content management systems, and associated metadata, to provide a consolidated view to its National eHealth application and the hospital’s own clinician portal. “You cannot deliver insights from Big Data unless you look at all the sources of information. With information cloud, we are talking about a system that looks more like a global file system, and customers could seek intelligent insights by

“With information cloud, customers can seek intelligent insights by combining info from different sources on the fly”

Kevin Eggleston Senior VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems AsiaPacific

combining information from different data sources on the fly,” says Eggleston. As Hitachi uses object-based storage, it has the capability to not only store unstructured data, but also the associated metadata that describes the object. Objects can be in the form of CT scans or video surveillance recordings. “By comparing and analyzing thousands of video surveillance recordings or CT scans in the cloud, we can draw business value and find patterns, which previously could not be identified,” explains Eggleston. Hitachi believes it has an edge in this area, as it can leverage the domain expertise of its parent group, which has presence across different sectors such as energy, healthcare, urban transportation and utility. Hitachi Data Systems is already on a fast growth track in India. The Asia-Pacific region happens to be the fastest growing region for it, and India leads the growth in the region. With its three-tier strategy, Hitachi is well positioned to reap benefits of a converged play, and sustain the momentum. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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BI Facts

Source: Gartner 20

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Cover Story

From creating new products, providing personalized services and even improving financial inclusion, India Inc is going beyond the traditional ways of deploying BI By Vinita Gupta, Amrita Premrajan and Srikanth RP

oving beyond using BI for corporate reporting, Indian enterprises have gradually started using BI to create new business opportunities and improve business processes. While companies in the service sector are using BI to improve customer service and deliver personalized services, infrastructure companies are using the power of analytics to improve existing business processes using insights provided by the analysis of data. Take the example of Bharti Infratel, a tower infrastructure company that operates a mammoth network of 33,000 tower sites in 11 telecom circles. The scale of the network and limited access and visibility of tower sites made it difficult for the firm

to track and manage performance. Today, it uses a solution from IBM to analyze data on the state of each cell tower, and converts this into real-time actionable intelligence. As a result, the firm can make better decisions, and identify areas of optimization. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The solution has provided insights for identifying multiple opportunities related to fuel and energy optimization resulting in opportunities to save millions of rupees,â&#x20AC;? states Prashant Veer Singh, CIO, Bharti Infratel. The solution has already helped the firm in saving ` 28 million due to reduction of fuel and carbon emissions.

Creating differentiated products

While insights delivered from using BI

are being used by multiple companies to identify areas where costs can be saved, the real big competitive edge comes from the ability to create differentiated products. A case in point is Reliance Capital. The firm grew with the rapid growth that India experienced in the last few years. The moment of reckoning came during the recession, where sales came under pressure and costs needed to be driven down. The firm started looking at analytics in a big way and chose SAS Business Analytics for getting insights required for operating in a new environment. It used BI tools to analyze why renewals were decreasing or why claims were increasing â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and what could be done about it. In a difficult market environment, the firm improved its competitiveness by

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

Cover Story using the information intelligently to create differential pricing to reward its better-value customers. “Business analytics helps us understand our customers in a better way. No matter what product or service, we can be more sensitive to customer requirements, which in turn, can strengthen the relationship between us and our customers,” says Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President and CTO, Reliance Capital. Today, Reliance Capital uses analytics to support decisions in terms of what products to introduce, in which markets, how much money to spend and how best to manage risk. Creating unique products that are customized for each individual can lead to significant customer satisfaction, and drive market share. Take the case of an industry such as automobiles, where typically automobile insurance is charged based on the customer’s age, address and gender. But this does not take into account the driving habits of a driver. A good driver is charged the same as perhaps, a bad driver if they share the same age, region and gender. “This is completely unfair,” says Stephen Brobst, CTO at Teradata. As a 21-year old, Brobst faced this issue himself — the cost of his automobile insurance was more than his car, just because he was a 21-year-old unmarried male who lived in Boston — the highest risk driving place in the US.

“With business analytics, we can be more sensitive to customer requirements and strengthen our relationship with them”

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar

President and CTO, Reliance Capital Analytics can provide the right answer, and help insurance companies create new products. Brobst gives the example of an automobile insurance company in North America, which created differentiated pricing of its insurance products based on the driving habits of its customers. To attract customers, the company decided to offer its customers discounts, if they allowed the firm to put a black box, which monitored driving habits in their car. Once the customer agrees, information on location and speed is collected at specified periods of time. This information is subsequently used by the firm to create different types of insurance charges based on driving habits of customers.

Innovating in the services industry

In the services industry, service providers often have to innovate and offer more value for their client’s money. This goes beyond cutting costs, and BI is a powerful tool that can be intelligently leveraged to

create more value. Consider the example of Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), a giant in the advertising and marketing domain. Last year, O&M started a business unit in Bangalore wherein the company decided to provide analytics on its client’s customer data. The analytics solution helps O&M’s clients understand how, when, what and in which particular market their products needs to be marketed. “The analytics offering helps our client to better understand their end-customer’s needs and requirements, and accordingly invest on advertising and marketing. It also helps us to do the advertising and marketing in a much more accurate way. For example, a North American retail chain got insights into spending patterns of customers on commodities. The firm used this intelligence to improve the marketing on commodities that weren’t doing well,” states Rohan Deshpande, CTO, Ogilvy & Mather (O&M). Deshpande says, earlier advertising was only done to create brand awareness, while BI was used to

A BI solution from IBM has helped Bharti Infratel, a tower infrastructure company, to save ` 28 million due to reduction of fuel and carbon emissions

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just collect reports. Today, BI is being used to drive sales, besides helping its clients develop better strategies for profiling customer segments and gain better insights.

Improving governance

Government organizations, primarily due to the scale at which they operate, generate a huge amount of information. Finding actionable intelligence in this ocean of information is a huge challenge — this is where BI can play a huge role. Intelligently used, the inputs provided by BI can be used to guide policy formulation and aid decision making. Consider India’s ambitious goal of financial inclusion — wherein every citizen will get access to a host of financial services. Analytics can play a big role in making this happen. “Credit analytics can play a leading role in facilitating financial inclusion, especially for those individuals who are dependent on small-sized loans,” opines Dr Tanuj Nandan, Associate Professor, School of Management Studies, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, who has co-authored a comprehensive paper on how analytics can be applied in e-governance. Credit analytics is a mode of loan assessment wherein borrower profiles are used for assessment of creditworthiness, rather than assessment of each individual loan applicant. Borrower characteristics

“Today, we are using BI to understand not just real-time needs but also to predict future needs of the next generation”

Aparna Kumar VP - IT, HDFC Bank are combined with credit histories to generate an assessment of potential borrower behavior. This leads to the automation of the approval process, and therefore allows speedier and cheaper assessment of applications, and in turn translates into lower cost loans. The analytical model used for assessment can be engineered to achieve low rates of errors in assessment. Dr Nandan believes that credit analytics will allow reaching out to large amount of people and reducing the time required to process the loan, and thereby form a reliable way of getting more and more people under the umbrella of the financial service sector. Unibanka — a bank in Latvia has employed predictive analytics to achieve this goal. Banks in several Latin American nations have also started the use of analytical models for credit assessment. Another potential advantage of the use of credit analytics is that it permits the classification of borrowers by risk-class, which enables the application of different rates of

interest to better borrowers and risky borrowers. With the help of predictive analytics, the bank can penalize the more risky borrowers and incentivize good repayment habits through lower interest rates for timely servicing of loans. BI can also be used to proactively fight epidemics as the use of analytics can help in predicting the spread of the disease and in creating mechanisms to prevent the outbreak of the disease. For example, a project called Integrated Disease Surveillance is being implemented by the National Informatics Center (NIC) in Andhra Pradesh. Once a disease crosses a certain threshold, an alert is immediately generated and sent to district officials through an SMS. This has enabled health officials to use mobile phones to immediately transmit data from the field; enabling data collectors to use this information effectively for taking quick decisions. Using this solution, the state could detect an incidence of Anthrax, which was detected in a district with no prior history. Early detection of the virus

Reliance Capital is using analytics to support decisions in terms of what products to introduce, in which markets, how much money to spend and how best to manage risk

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

Cover Story helped in preventing an outbreak.

Understanding new mediums

As customer expectations change, enterprises will need to be proactive in identifying customer likes and dislikes. “Enriching the customer experience is where BI will play a huge role. Today, we are using BI to understand not just real time needs but also in predicting future needs of the next generation,” states Aparna Kumar, VP, IT, HDFC Bank. This could involve understanding the platforms that the next generation is most comfortable in using. For example, if the young generation is comfortable using a mobile phone or a social media website to do a banking transaction, then the bank has to invest sufficient resources in making the experience a pleasurable one. HDFC Bank’s peer, ICICI Bank, took a few footsteps in this direction, when it announced that it will join social media platform Facebook, where it plans to allow its customers to access their bank accounts, among other services. Another example of a company which is using BI to find actionable information from social media is the Royal Orchid Group of Hotels, which is using every possible opportunity that it gets to better understand customer behaviour. With 80 percent of the traffic on its website coming

“Earlier, BI was used to just collect reports. Today, it is being used to drive sales, besides helping to develop better strategies and gain better insights”

Rohan Deshpande CTO, Ogilvy & Mather

from social media networks, the opportunity is huge. Consumer inputs are taken seriously and by analyzing consumer behaviour, the group gets deep insight into the requirements of its customers. It then utilizes this data to improve on services or build on existing ones or create new possibilities for increasing sales and productivity. “Analytics will help us model and build social relationships with consumers, thereby providing them with the ability to customize their own requirements. This would enable us to understand different levels of data for analysis, and allow us to target specific audience profiles at various time frames to maximize on opportunities,” states Dhiraj Trivedi, Assistant Vice President of Revenue Management & Electronic Distribution, Royal Orchid Hotels. Established companies, which have already used BI optimally, are now looking at new fronts. Mahindra & Mahindra group, for example, has built a sustainability dashboard to meet the group-wide

need of reporting on a variety of environmental performance criteria. The dashboard helps organizations that are part of the Mahindra group to manage, analyze and report their carbon footprints and energy consumption ratios. As the economy forces companies to adopt new ways of cutting down costs while simultaneously increasing revenues and profits, expect companies to innovate on how they can use BI. While the leaders will extend the usage of BI to new areas, new companies will leverage emerging technologies such as the cloud to improve their competitiveness. BI is a catalyst for growth, and any investment made in BI is bound to help organizations strategize better and with more clarity and direction.

u Vinita Gupta vinita.gupta@ubm.com

Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

National Informatics Center (NIC) in Andhra Pradesh used analytics to detect an incidence of Anthrax in the state. The early detection of the virus helped in predicting the spread of the disease and in creating mechanisms to prevent its outbreak

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Cover Story

BI evolving to be more personal, social and mobile The rise of mobile workers coupled with the emergence of technologies like cloud and in-memory is changing the way BI is consumed and delivered By Ayushman Baruah

ith data growing exponentially, there is greater pressure on organizations to analyze the data and extract meaningful information, instead of just storing it. This challenge of analyzing huge amount of data, fashionably known as Big Data, is forcing enterprises to look at new ways of accessing or deploying BI. Another growing trend is the rapid consumerization of IT, where people not only want to access their information on the mobile phone of their choice, but also want to share this information or analysis real-time with their counterparts in a social way. Technology vendors have been

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quick to react to this demand, and accordingly, the market has witnessed the rapid advancement of SaaS offerings, mobile BI, BI appliances, and enterprise applications embedded with social capabilities. As a result, enterprises now have a huge range of new deployment options for BI.

Mobile BI takes off

In India, specifically, as the mobile workforce continues to grow, offering BI on the mobile platform is gradually gaining traction. “Customers need a mobile strategy to quickly manage and analyze today’s explosion of data — turning it into meaningful decision-ready information, and then deliver that data to end users at the point of decision, and back again. In India, we are seeing organizations move from planning to deployment of mobile BI, but at a slower adoption rate than anticipated,” says Maneesh Sharma, HeadBusiness Analytics and Technology, SAP India. Factors like reduction in 3G tariff and the arrival of 4G LTE bandwidth are also increasing the adoption of mobile BI. “The arrival of high-end smartphones on operating systems like iOS, Android, etc. will drive utilization. Usage cases around field maintenance and sales operations are

visible in the region. Executive dashboards seem to be another area where mobile BI requirements are emerging,” says Prashant Tewari, Country Manger, Business Analytics, IBM India/South Asia. This trend is likely to grow as more information workers go mobile. This trend is corroborated by a Gartner report, which states that by 2013, more than 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed by handheld devices, and the number of BI users will increase substantially and include a more mainstream audience. Mobile BI or BI-on-the-go will get more prominence as the availability and adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices continue to explode. Business analytics firm Mu Sigma however cautions that while mobile BI, as a technology, is already mainstream, it may take a couple of years before it fully matures. “It should be borne in mind that when we say ‘mobile,’ the focus is primarily on tablet devices, as opposed to smartphones. The tablet form of mobile devices is ideal from the point-of-view of BI consumption, exploration and collaboration. Smartphones, however, are not quite suited to display BI frontends, and less activity is seen in this space,” asserts Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Head of Innovation & Development, Mu Sigma.

Power of In-Memory

With the emergence of technology solutions such as SAP HANA, inmemory analytics has again become an area of focus for vendors and

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enterprises. The need for realtime analysis of information is providing the impetus for in-memory technologies. “The in-memory technologies are not restricted to BI and extend to the fundamental layer of database and data warehouses that are the causes of the latency in reporting. Since a majority of data storage, calculation, aggregation, etc, takes place on disk, it substantially impacts the end-user experience,” says Sharma of SAP. With the advent of 64-bit computing and the steep decline in prices, in-memory analytics is taking off. The traditional BI systems while all-encompassing had a few drawbacks such as poor flexibility, diminished scope of analysis and relatively slow response times. “Inmemory analytics has advantages such as fast queries against Big Data, less need for aggregates and real-time end-user analysis. This would breach the boundaries to uncover the next big frontier,” says Sumanth Tarigopula, Director, Best Shore Application Services, HP India. Unanimously, speed is the foremost reason for in-memory BI to gain rapid adoption. “In-memory BI removes the biggest bottleneck of slow access of data, which has prompted mega vendors like Oracle, SAP, IBM, MicroStrategy and Microsoft to join the bandwagon. In-memory BI will make further impact to reduce time-to-render, time reduction in slice and dice of data and will be very popular by moving the analysis power in close proximity of the device used by BI user rather than on backend servers,” says Ashwini Kuber, Business Leader - eBiz Practice, KPIT Cummins.

“The arrival of high-end smartphones on operating systems like iOS and Android will drive mobile BI utilization”

Prashant Tewari

Country Manger, Business Analytics, IBM India/South Asia names include SAP HANA and IBM Netezza. Appliances like IBM Netezza also offer users the choice to scale from 1 TB to 1.5 petabytes and allow users to perform rapid analysis of large data volumes. Similarly, HP has collaborated with Microsoft for the HP Business Decision Appliance. As the BI solution is pre-tested, it takes away the pain of configuring and testing out the solution. However, there are others who believe appliance-based BI will suffer network externalities and lack of standardization in the fast developing technology era. “The use may be limited due to specific use of the appliance, disparate data sources, lack of standardization of data (clickstream, scanner or social networking data) coming from various system of records. Context-based BI data gathering and analysis would be another challenge for appliance-

based BI. There will be low acceptance due to high cost of appliances as well,” says Kuber of KPIT Cummins.

Cloud as a delivery platform

BI delivered on the cloud is also gaining heat. According to IT analysts, the BI tools market will see a compounded annual growth rate of 6.9 percent through 2014, and cloud will further drive the adoption and growth rate of BI because of factors like cost benefits and speed of deployment. “By deploying BI solutions on a cloud-based computing architecture, organizations can analyze their data and take informed decisions in a timely and cost-effective manner. While cloud computing offers compelling benefits in terms of high efficiency, high availability, elastic scalability and fast deployments,

Will BI appliances get accepted?

With easy deployment options, appliance-based BI is also gaining popularity. Oracle, a major proponent of bundled appliances, recently made available its Big Data Appliance, which is designed to work alongside Oracle Database 11g, its Exadata appliance and its recent Exalytics appliance for BI applications. Other popular

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Cover Story customer concerns around security, compliance and quality of service need to be addressed,” says Akash Sahni, Sales Director, EPM & BI Applications, Oracle India. That said, cloud-based BI is still in its infancy. “The cloud does not make a good platform for I/O intensive operations such as BI. For BI to be successful on the cloud, we need to have the ability to scale-out block computing,” cautions Sunny Neogi, Director-Marketing of Aditi Technologies.

Do It Yourself BI

There is a clear shift towards selfservice BI as it offers business users both power and flexibility reducing their dependence on IT. Self-service BI products allow business users to quickly respond to changes, and ask and answer their own questions, while avoiding long turnaround times typically experienced in IT operations. “Data can be explored in different ways simply through a few clicks, rather than by requesting for updated

queries or reports. The advent of userfriendly, in-memory tools requiring very minimal development effort is making self-service BI possible,” says Dhingra of Mu Sigma. For the last decade, BI adoption rates in companies were about 20-25 percent, which means that on an average only about one fifth of the employees actually had access to the BI tools and interfaces. In this context, self-service BI is seeing an increase in adoption as companies are working to extend BI across all employees. “Plenty of recent BI product upgrades are purely for the sake of self-service BI and improvements in systems administration and

management. BI clients are increasingly requesting for the minimal need for IT staff/support, which is one of the top requirements in the list of factors driving interest in SaaS or cloud-based BI,” says Kuber of KPIT Cummins. Industry experts however feel the self-service BI platform would need a complete business focus for it to be fully functional. “All the end-users need to be educated on the functionality and capability of the self-service BI platform. The technology components need to align the vision/direction set for self-service BI. The BI platform should be designed to provide a stable, scalable environment. A common well-defined process needs to be defined to support the end users of self-service BI and bind the people with the technology,” says Tarigopula of HP India. The range of options for deploying BI has helped in extending BI even to smaller companies. BI software has historically been the domain of larger enterprises — mainly due to skill, time and cost required to implement, but today it’s being used by businesses of all sizes. Salil Godika, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer of Happiest Minds Technologies says that the advent of cloud, appliance model, faster and

How to increase adoption of BI One of the reasons why business intelligence and analytics has been slow to take off in organizations is that these solutions are not simple enough for everyone to use. Gartner says that less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations’ standard business intelligence (BI) tools use the technology today. Gartner attributes this low adoption to the fact that traditional tools and approaches to BI are often too difficult to use, slow to respond or deliver content of limited relevance. A company in Australia saw this as an opportunity back in 2003, and is now offering a BI solution with

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simplified interfaces and informative dashboards, that can even run on tablets. The Australia-based Yellowfin claims that customers of traditional BI solutions, such as IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects are abandoning those solutions in favor of its own BI suite called Yellowfin 6. According to release notes on its website, Yellowfin was founded “to tackle the problems its founders had experienced with more traditional players in this market.” It saw that existing tools “were highly complex, expensive and designed for technical resources — not business people.” Its founders believe that all business

users should be able to use BI and analytics tools. Speaking to InformationWeek Glen Rabie, CEO, Yellowfin said, “The product has been developed recently so you won’t find the complexity that you find in Business Objects and Cognos. It’s an end-to-end integrated application. So you install one product and it can run your entire BI infrastructure. To do the same in Cognos or Business Objects you need six different products.” Enterprises look for BI solutions that are easy to deploy, maintain, administer and use. Further, the solution should have a good

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more agile BI implementations are leading to democratization of BI. “Mid-size and small-size organizations or business units of bigger companies are making BI a cornerstone of their business strategy.” While the overall BI market is concentrated among several large vendors, the market for self-service BI is wide open. Self-service BI is increasingly being embraced because it lowers dependence on IT and reduces IT-related support and maintenance costs by creating a self-sufficient user base. The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) recognizes self-service BI as one of the emerging trends for 2012.

“Advent of cloud, appliance model, faster and more agile BI implementations are leading to democratization of BI”

Salil Godika

Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Happiest Minds Technologies

communicate and collaborate over its enterprise social messaging platform called Tibbr (similar to Twitter but

The social side of BI

Social BI is gaining popularity as user shared information available on the Internet is booming. Enterprises are allowing secure access to business data to multiple stakeholders who need to provide their inputs to a business situation/ decision. Social BI tools allow users to edit and annotate content online, and seamlessly collaborate during data exploration and decision making. Many mainstream BI tools are adding social BI capabilities.For instance, Tibco Spotfire recently came out with a platform that allowed its users to

query response rate and easy reporting tools. Yellowfin is offering a lightweight solution with slick user interfaces and drag-and-drop reporting that “can be deployed within a week,” whereas traditional BI solutions take months to deploy. Enterprises also stress that information captured from various sources should be relevant and well integrated. BI solutions with such features will see faster adoption among all enterprise users. And Gartner even goes so far as to predict the consumerization of BI technology. “The fact of the matter is that BI is not pervasive and adoption

BI is not in line with the investment made by most firms. Almost every organization could improve, if its stakeholders had easier access to well-integrated information, and if they analyzed that information to manage performance and make decisions,” said James Richardson, Research Director at Gartner. “The consumerization of BI technology offers a means for it to break out and reach many more users, by offering faster, more user-friendly and more relevant BI.” Yellowfin claims that with the latest release of its BI solution (Yellowfin 6) even non-technical

for the enterprise). Similarly, SAS has a hosted solution called ‘SAS Social Media Analytics,’ which enables organizations to act on intelligence collected from online conversations on professional and consumergenerated media sites. Going forward, as data explodes at a faster rate, one can expect organizations to start looking at the cloud to integrate multiple data sources, and provide analytics on the fly. In line with the current trends, one can also expect businesses to embrace emerging technologies such as in-memory to perform real-time analysis of information. But the biggest and most significant trend is the emergence of self-service BI — a trend that will provide the power of analytics in the hands of information workers and push enterprise productivity to a new level. u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

business users have the ability to perform sophisticated data analysis and report building functions independently. The new release of Yellowfin includes: l A new native application for the iPad that delivers a consumer oriented mobile reporting and analytics experience. l An upgraded User Interface (UI) for improved navigation, analysis and independent report building. l Improved content syndication capabilities.

— Brian Pereira

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CIO Voice

Why YES Bank developed its own BI solution Going against the established trend of buying off-the-shelf BI solutions or products, YES Bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CIO, Umesh Jain, took a pioneering step to develop its own BI solution, called Kaleidoscope. Umesh Jain shares his perspective with Srikanth RP of InformationWeek

n any bank, stakeholders need a variety of information to efficiently perform their responsibilities. Such timely, accurate and relevant information forearms business users to serve multiple areas right from risk intelligence, customer intelligence, and operational intelligence to financial intelligence. In the highly competitive banking industry, proper understanding of the customer, his likes/dislikes, and behavior patterns are critical for customer retention, acquisition and cross-selling and thus form the core need for business intelligence. While the IT world is filled with a plethora of BI solutions, platforms and implementers, typical challenges include: l Sky rocketing costs of the solution and implementation. l Never ending problems in integrating data from across applications, which in turn is the heart of BI. l Extremely long implementation timelines with vendors. l Constant need to liaise with implementation partners/vendors for enhancements and changes. l A skewed view of disseminating information to various business intelligence users, leading to the information being extended only to few users in the department with no defined actionables. Such problems inevitably result in cost and schedule overruns in integration efforts, leading to most BI implementations being either cursory in nature or total failures. YES Bank followed a unique approach to attack the same objectives but with much simpler, achievable and low-cost architecture and has successfully implemented the same. Our BI solution, Kaleidoscope is YES Bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customized inâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;house business intelligence solution that aims at providing financial, operational, risk & regulatory and productivity related information. It offers analysis relevant to various YES Bank stakeholders in a completely automated manner, empowering them to take on-time, well-informed business-critical decisions.

Our approach

Umesh Jain, CIO, YES Bank

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We realized that business intelligence lies in the organization. Hence, to make the BI implementation successful, we have to tap this domain expertise and build the business intelligence application around it. Business and IT function partnered to identify the

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information that the BI solution was required to generate and circulated the same to all the users. This was aligned with the organizational policy. A Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BICoE) was set up constituting key technology and business users. Today, the entire BI program is being run in-house using inhouse expertise and without any implementation partner, using a freeware LogiXML as the reporting frontend integrated with a custombuilt application. The entire BI strategy has been developed and divided into phases with clear deliverables for each phase. 2008-2010 Hindsight

2010-2011 Insights

Based on the requirements, a data warehouse has been created where the information from across YES Bank’s various applications has been integrated, and several product and customer marts have been developed. A complete hierarchy has also been developed to provide role-based access to Kaleidoscope. One of the key facts of YES Bank’s BI Solution, which makes it unique in the industry is the time required to

implement the solution — the entire application was extended to production within a short period of just two months. Today, YES Bank has in-house capability for all future enhancements and constant re-alignment with the bank’s strategy. Our BI solution, Kaleidoscope has been extended to the lowest user in the bank and not just a few power users. The BI solution is actionable — the information is integrated with actions to make sure that users act upon the information. Information pertaining to management decisions, as well as day-to-day operational tasks is provided. The bank also has 2010-2012 Line of Sight

2011-2012 Foresight

complete focus on all aspects, such as Retail Liabilities, Corporate Assets, Operational Risk and Asset Liability Management. With ‘Customer OneView’ being integrated in Kaleidoscope, users are able to view all the relationships of a customer with YES Bank at the click of a button, enabling superior service and better cross-selling opportunities.

Our BI solution, Kaleidoscope, offers analysis relevant to various YES Bank’s stakeholders in a completely automated manner, empowering them to take on-time, well-informed business-critical decisions

—As told to Srikanth RP

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

Case Study

How is using Google’s prediction engine to build self learning cars Car: Good morning, are you going to work? Driver: Yes.

Car: Your vehicle performance has been optimized for your trip.

Using historical data, car maker Ford is collaborating with Google to develop software that will help its cars predict the best route that drivers can take to save energy and time By Srikanth RP

f car maker Ford’s experiment in making self learning cars takes off, your car will never be the same again. Using the power of the cloud to analyze historical data of routes, traffic and driver usage, Ford is partnering with Google to create software that will give its cars the capability to predict the destination and the most energy efficient route. Ford will use Google’s new Prediction API, a cloud-based analytics service that contains a suite of algorithms with the ability of analyzing historical business data and the capability to predict future trends or outcome.

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Here’s how this system would work. After a vehicle owner opts in to use the service, an encrypted driver data usage profile is built based on routes and time of travel. In essence, the system learns key information about how the driver is using the vehicle and where he wants to go. The system analyzes driving habits, knowledge of routes and combines it with real-time traffic information to suggest the best possible energyefficient route. “We saw the Google Prediction API as a great way for us to complement our existing prediction research. By providing the system with historic usage data on how particular vehicles had been driven, we were able

to quickly perform prediction on where the user would go from any specific location, date and/or time of day,” explains Johannes Kristinsson, Systems Architect, Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design, Ford Research and Innovation. But, why does the car need to know the destination, when the driver himself knows the destination? Kristinsson explains, “The driving factor behind the destination prediction is the ability for the vehicle itself to always know, or have a good guess where the driver is going. There are countless reasons why this would be useful. To start with the most obvious — destination entry in the navigation system can be

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greatly enhanced if you don’t have to enter a full address or find a specific favorite. This can also increase the usage of navigation systems even on regular repeated ‘familiar’ trips, allowing traffic warnings along your route and many other related features that require you to know the current destination.” While previous attempts at empowering the driver have been confined to infotainment, navigation or real-time traffic updates, Ford’s experiment takes it a step further. For example, certain zones in Europe have restrictions which state that cars need to drive only in electric mode to lower emissions. In such cases, if the car’s system already knows that it is going to enter a particular zone, it can automatically program itself to save energy over the total distance of the journey, so that there is enough battery power when one is traveling within the only electric-mode zone.

aggregating data of multiple users in a particular zone could then be used to suggest better routes for existing and new users. This will specifically be useful for drivers who are driving down a specific route the first time. Ford’s example of using analytics to improve customer satisfaction is just the beginning. While destination prediction is the goal today, in the future it could expand to newer areas. “Destination prediction is not the only way prediction could be used in the automotive industry. Our cars are getting increasingly more technological and to manage all the new features and functions without distracting or overwhelming drivers, we need to make our cars ‘smarter’. Prediction is an integral part of that. Whether it is to predict where you are going or how you will use your car, prediction technology has the potential to make the car smarter,

“Prediction technology has the potential to make our cars smarter, fuel efficient, and tailored to individual needs”

Johannes Kristinsson

Systems Architect, Vehicle Controls Architecture & Algorithm Design, Ford Research & Innovation

“The vehicle itself could be made to operate much smarter if it knows the upcoming route. For example, Hybrid and Electrified vehicles can optimize energy usage depending on where they will be driven. Ford has demonstrated a concept feature for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) called ‘GreenZone’ where the driver can define geographic areas where he/she wants to drive the vehicle using electricity rather than gas. If the vehicle knows where it is going, it will also know which part of the trip will be inside one of these zones, and can plan ahead to save enough electric energy for electric driving within these zones,” explains Kristinsson. The intelligence gathered from

more fuel efficient, and in general more tailored to your individual needs,” states Kristinsson. One area where cloud-based analytics could be applied in a significant way could be in preventing accidents. For example, if a particular curve on a road is accident prone, the system could warn the driver to slow down, or even reduce the speed itself. Over time, we could see technologies like this playing a lead role in cutting down congestion, reduce energy and most importantly — save lives.

Ford’s example of using analytics to improve customer satisfaction is just the beginning. While destination prediction is the goal today, in the future it could expand to newer areas

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Case Study

‘Smarter’ cell towers boost Bharti Infratel’s business Adoption of data tracking and analytics solution from IBM has enabled Bharti Infratel to monitor in real-time its 33,000+ tower sites distributed across 11 telecom circles in India, resulting in significant business benefits By Amrita Premrajan

harti Infratel, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, is one of the fastest growing telecom tower infrastructure providers, and has presence in 18 states of India. The company manages a tower footprint of 33,000+ tower sites in 11 telecom circles — most of which include some of the toughest terrains and remotest of locations (mostly rural or Tier-2/ Tier-3 cities) across the country. The company is credited with pioneering the concept of passive infrastructure sharing in India. Passive infrastructure enables various telecom operators to avail the same passive non-electronic infrastructure that includes tower and shelter for housing the Base Transceiver Stations, the onsite power supply equipment (diesel generators and battery banks) transmission room, as well as services related to installation, maintenance, repair, overhauling and upgradation. The operators only have to obtain their own ‘active infrastructure’, which is electronic equipment that include base tower station, switches, antennas, transceivers and associated equipment. Such a ‘passive infrastructure sharing’ model enables operators to save a significant sum of money on CAPEX and OPEX. As it was operating at such a large scale in providing passive infrastructure sharing services to telecom operators, Bharti Infratel was facing a major challenge. The company had limited access and visibility of tower sites and assets, which led to dependence on manual monitoring and processes. This in

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turn led to difficulty in tracking and managing SLAs and providing accurate billing to customer tenants. It was also facing challenges in governing the company’s vendors, suppliers and partners. Also, due to lack of operational visibility, and unavailability of centralized data capture and analytics, there was no well-defined path to long-term strategic improvements.

The need for smarter cell towers

There was a strong need to implement a solution that enabled central monitoring and management of Bharti Infratel’s large and distributed tower infrastructure along with process orchestration and tracking operational processes. That is when the Innovation & IT Team of Bharti Infratel introduced the SMART-IT initiative by deciding to implement the 3IM Methodology (Instrument, Interconnect, Intelligent & Management). It also introduced a fully automated 24x7 operations center, which was conceived as the ‘Brain of Tower Operations’ to handle preventive and breakdown maintenance at sites. The company chose IBM as its technology partner in order to make its 33,000+ tower-sites smart and intelligent. The solution, IBM Intelligent Site Operations, combines sensors, data tracking and analytics. The freshly designed, developed and integrated solution was introduced to connect new sensors installed on the tower/passive infrastructure equipment. The solution works

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by collecting data on the basis of each cell tower such as energy consumption (including supply from the mains, generators and battery), fuel consumption and alarms. This data is then fed into the centralized monitoring system built on IBM’s Tivoli Suite of products, which thereafter helps in analyzing trends through domain-specific rules, and converts data into actionable intelligence outcomes. These outcomes are used to drive process workflows and are relayed to the onsite field workforce for a timely closure. At the final stage, the analytics system processes all received inputs and data to identify possible opportunities of optimization within the operations. IBM Intelligent Site Operations also integrates third-party sensors and controllers with IBM Tivoli Netcool for network and service management; IBM Maximo for enterprise asset management; IBM Cognos for dashboards and analytics; and IBM ILOG, a value-added part of the solution, for complex workflow and rules. This project was started off in March 2009 and was completed by September 2011, in three phases.

Business Impact

The intelligent site operations has led to process automation and real-time site and asset monitoring, which has resulted in less frequent trips by field engineers to the site. The solution provides the facility of bi-directional communication with the sites, with features like OTA (Over-The-Air), which help to distribute new software updates to remote tower sites or address any kind of provisioning requirement, without the need of

physically visiting the site. The solution provides insights to process performance, asset performance and energy analytics. The company is able to identify energy optimization opportunities, detect anomalies, and proactively prevent service outages. Due to the fuel and energy optimization opportunities, the company has already saved about ` 28 million by saving 0.72 million litres of fuel between April to October 2011. “Real-time site and asset monitoring with effective preventive maintenance process mapped in the system has resulted in optimal asset performance, reduced OPEX costs and lower fuel consumption directly contributing to higher operational savings and a greener environment,” elaborates Prashant Veer Singh, CIO, Bharti Infratel. More than 600,000 events are received by the system, in a single day on which the passive infrastructure domain intelligence is applied, reducing the tickets to less than 1-2 per day per site, thereby converting raw events from the sites to proactive ‘real’ intelligent actionable(s). The solution has also enabled effective management of partner ecosystem by making available vendor scorecards, real-time data and various other KPIs on parameters like QoS and SLAs. The company registered 29 percent drop in site outage incidents from June to December 2011, which meant there was a marked improvement in site uptime. This became a business opportunity for the company, as improved site uptime enabled it to attract new clients, generating more revenues.

Benefits at a glance l

0.72 million liters of fuel savings and 1,670 metric tons of CO2 emission reduction from April to October 2011, which translated to savings of ` 28 million 58 percent reduction in siteoutage incidents per site/ month 36 percent drop in critical sitedown incidents 50 percent reduction in diesel generator fault incidents and 43 percent drop in battery fault incidents per site/day 30 percent improvement in site uptime performance on a per site per month basis

“Real-time site and asset monitoring with effective preventive maintenance process mapped in the system has resulted in reduced OPEX costs”

Prashant Veer Singh CIO, Bharti Infratel

u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

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Feature

Learning Outcomes, a Pune-based startup is trying to identify root causes of learning inefficiencies by using predictive analytics By Srikanth RP

f the hundreds of Hindi films released every year in India, one film, ‘3 Idiots,’ stood out. Not only because of the humor and well etched out characters — but also because it made us take a relook at the current Indian education system. For most Indians, learning is limited and confined to what is written in the textbook. Learning in most cases is aimed at scoring maximum marks in the exam, and not acquiring knowledge. So is there a way out? Well, if the efforts of a Pune-based startup, Learning Outcomes, take off then we may see a much needed change in our education system. The firm seeks to address the challenge of improving student learning outcomes, as well as identifying teaching gaps by creating a remedial learning environment using predictive analytics tools. Analytics plays a significant role in designing the firm’s products. “We use predictive analytics to understand and simulate student learning potential, predict student performance and help plan for intervention by teachers and parents,” explains Rishi Kar, Founder and

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CEO, Learning Outcomes. The key objectives of using analytics are to understand drivers of student learning, identify patterns in learning gaps (for individual students as well as the entire class), and help a teacher understand topics and specific skill sets or aptitudes for which a particular student needs assistance. This is done using the data present in routine school assessments — in a manner that enables a student to improve from assessment to assessment. By using predictive analytics tools, Learning Outcomes creates solutions that help teachers design better assessments. By having a pulse on learning patterns and predicted outcome, a teacher can alter his/her assessment goal and hence manage learning expectations of the class. Post the assessment, predictive analytics helps in understanding student preferences, biases and focus area from the student response data. Kar says that predictive analytics tools can play a huge role in improving the quality of education, as one can find out student potential. “This shifts the focus from grades and marks as

the only metric of student learning measurement and enables students, parents and teachers to understand about development and learning behavior of each child. Analytic tools can also help in planning for intervention and enable focused and remedial learning. This helps students and teachers engage in corrective measures to ensure that no student falls back or faces a situation where it’s too late,” opines Kar. Today, analytics is hardly used in the education sector. Analysis of information about the education system also rarely happens. “Currently, predictive analytics is barely used in the Indian education sector — especially Indian schools. One of the major reasons for this is lack of access and availability of academic and learning data. It is also very important to understand the context of education and learning and marry predictive analytics with the various educational frameworks. This is another pain point as most of the predictive analytics practitioners are not well-versed with or have not spent enough time researching about the process and system of education,” says Kar. Learning Outcomes is seeing this as an opportunity and plans to enter into higher education by introducing the power of predictive analytics in colleges. Kar says that by using predictive analytics tools, the country can shape the way students learn, develop skills and ultimately get placed in a profession of their interest. In this age of competition, the focus is on getting results. This can gauged from the huge number of coaching classes that have mushroomed all across the country. The education system needs a big transformation and that can only happen when we capture the right information and measure the same against defined benchmarks. By using analytics, the much needed transformation can happen, as the root cause of inefficiencies can be identified and addressed. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Feature

rowdsourcing — the art of using the power of the crowd to solve problems has been used for several functions and tasks. Typically, problems are broadcasted to an unknown group of people using the Internet, and solutions are sought. Common areas that are crowdsourced include designing a logo or developing a product. The keyword here is the community as every crowdsourced project harnesses the power of the community, and it is the community which contributes and ranks ideas to classify the strongest ideas. Can the crowdsourcing model be applied to analytics? An Indian startup, CrowdANALYTIX thinks it can, and has come out with a unique model to harness the power of crowdsourcing.

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“Most businesses that have attempted to leverage the crowd so far have been confined to either the software industry or simple problem solving. With our experience in the outsourcing industry, we knew that a better model would be needed to handle more complex tasks. This prompted us to evolve the crowdsourcing model further into what we call the ‘Managed Crowdsourcing’ model, where we orchestrate the process of understanding and breaking down the problem into well-defined challenges that the crowd can then attack. These challenges are posed to the crowd as contests,” explains Kishore Rajgopal, CEO and Co-Founder, CrowdANALYTIX, who established the company with Divyabh Mishra, Founder and President.

Unlike other crowdsourcing processes, CrowdANALYTIX has a well defined template. As a first step, the firm understands the requirements of a client and collects the data necessary for the modeling challenge. This is done by a lead analyst, who is also responsible for managing the contest and validating the responses. The firm creates a contest with details on what’s expected from the modeling challenge including the method for validating the submitted models. Participants are then invited to contribute in the contest. Each participant is allowed to submit multiple responses. For example, in a contest, that the firm executed for ‘Predicting the quality of red and white wines,’ CrowdANALYTIX received over 200 model submissions from over 150 participants located

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in 15 countries around the world. Models were evaluated almost in real-time and top ten models were maintained throughout the contest on a leaderboard, which was updated on a daily basis. The model that was finally accepted as the winning one was 400 percent more optimized than the client’s expectations.

Improving business processes

The benefits for end clients are huge as this approach not only solves the issue of talent crunch, but it’s fee is also lower than what traditional analytic firms charge. And more importantly, it ensures an improvement in business processes. “Our approach ensures that the model received by companies is optimum and at a fraction of the cost of what traditional analytics services firms would charge. A one percent improvement in a model’s predictive power can translate into millions of dollars added to the bottom line,” says Rajgopal. Today, all analysis is done on a private cloud-based platform, which is prepared with the client’s specifications. As this is a cloud-based infrastructure, this has the ability to handle Big Data with the capacity to scale. The company says that its pricing is 25-30 percent lower than the best alternative sources of consulting and outsourcing.

Addressing talent crunch

CrowdANALYTIX has hit a sweet spot — globally, there is a talent crunch for good data analysts. While technology is evolving, access to quality talent is still a huge issue. A recent report commissioned by EMC Corporation confirms this trend. The EMC Data Science study released in December 2011 revealed that there is a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. More importantly, the study noted that only one-third of companies are able to effectively use new data to assist their business decision making, gain competitive advantage, drive productivity growth, yield innovation

Kishore Rajgopal, CEO and Co-Founder, CrowdANALYTIX and Divyabh Mishra, Founder and President, CrowdANALYTIX

and reveal customer insights. This has worked to CrowdANALYTIX’s advantage. Rajgopal explains, “Statistical analysis is an area where there are several extremely talented and highly qualified professionals globally who choose to work as consultants and don’t like being confined to organizations. This unique aspect combined with the fact that good talent is scarce and spread out globally, we felt our model would add tremendous value by just getting businesses access to this pool of talent.”

Capitalizing on first mover advantage

CrowdANALYTIX is in a rare space — there is perhaps just one global company, Kaggle, which has a similar business model. However, Rajgopal is quick to point out the key difference. Says he, “We have a first-mover advantage. Kaggle is a company that also does something similar but there’s a key difference between them and us. For Kaggle, crowdsourcing analytics is a business model. It is their primary pitch. For CrowdAanalytix, crowdsourcing of analytics is a delivery model.” The company is initially focusing on building a strong community and executing a few beta projects. In India, the firm has already executed a project for an Indian customer, who wanted to optimize the process of sourcing of second hand aircraft parts globally for an Indian aerospace consulting firm. The objective — get the community to arrive at ways of minimizing risks and

maximizing profits in sourcing of aircraft parts globally. If CrowdANALYTIX’s model takes off as its founders have envisaged, then analytics could truly become affordable to every company. “With the advent of social media, a deluge of data has not only hit the large companies but also SMEs. With this model, analytics will become affordable and accessible by SMEs too. Additionally, more complex and rare data analytics challenges that don’t get addressed due to lack of access to the right talent, will start getting solved more frequently,” predicts Rajgopal. By leveraging the power of the crowd to transform analytics, CrowdANALYTIX is pioneering a new approach that will be closely watched by other companies. Though not strictly comparable, a close example with a similar approach is Kaggle, which has a community of over 25,000 professionals, including computer scientists, statisticians and academics. The crowdsourcing model by firms like Kaggle has been used by big companies such as Ford and Microsoft. While the opportunity is huge, the success of the model will be judged on the quality of the algorithms that are developed by this approach, and the time taken to develop a specific algorithm. If CrowdANALYTIX is successful, ‘managed crowdsourcing’ could become a familiar buzzword, as outsourcing was a decade back. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Interview

‘Our competitors, who talk about in-memory analytics in India, do not understand analytics’ What is your take on Big Data analytics? I think the term Big Data is not apt as bigness is the least interesting part. Volume of the data is important but volume is not new; diversity of data is. Big Data is not just the ERP

media platforms, companies and banks do a lot of analysis, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis, to collect the data. The complexity of such data is much higher. Big Data also includes sensor and

Data analytics, which cannot be done with traditional database analytics. How should CIOs handle the tremendous growth of unstructured data? I don’t believe that any data is

In contrast to the in-memory buzz going around the industry, Teradata’s CTO Stephen Brobst believes that the Indian market is not ready for such a technology — primarily due to price. Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Vinita Gupta and billing systems — it is also the clickstream data from the Internet and microblog entries on Facebook. For instance, customers blog about their experiences with various banks and companies. To understand what the customers are saying on social

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rich media data like voice recording, videos and so on. In London, for example, while travelling from work to home, a person’s video is captured at least 150 times. This data is used for analyzing crime and homeland security. Analysis of this data is Big

unstructured. We have to overcome this myth that anything that is not in rows or columns is unstructured. The blogs and videos are structured, but non-traditional data. It is difficult for CIOs to handle the non-traditional data as it does not match the

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traditional data, which existed in the form of rows and columns. CIOs are struggling to get value from non-traditional data. The key point for CIOs is to use new capabilities like the non-SQL methods of accessing the data. In Teradata we use both — the open source implementation (Hadoop) and the Aster Data technology (that uses MapReduce as an extension of SQL). This technology develops polymorphic file systems that can change shapes according to the data. How can BI/ analytics help businesses to grow? Organizations are getting smarter by not only using BI/analytics for collecting information, but also by using it for analyzing customers’ experiences and preferences. They further use this information to create new products. For example, an automobile insurance company in North America created a new product that helped it in doing customized pricing based

one year, the insurance company just collects the data and analyzes it to figure out different types of insurance charges based on driving habits of customers. For example, if a data scientist finds out that a particular customer never drives above the speed limit, then the customer gets a discount. On the other hand, if a customer shows risky driving habits, then the company charges him more as high car speed can lead to accidents, and in turn lead to more cost to the automobile insurance company. How would Teradata differentiate itself from its competi-

tors? We are growing in double digits. We are taking market share away from our competitors because we are not confused; we only focus on analytics. Our competitors are still using old technologies to solve analytics problems, but it doesn’t work pretty well. It is like using a hammer to put a screw in the wall. A case in point

in high-performance storage and the remaining 80 percent of the data to be in low-cost storage. CIOs want an environment that allows both — optimization for price and performance and optimization for price and storage. In the Indian market, it is very important as the market consumes high volumes of data and is very sensitive towards price. We measure the relevance of data and automatically migrate hot data in the high-performance storage and cold data in low-cost storage. It is completely automatic as today’s hot data will be tomorrow’s cold data. Other database vendors have to manually do this and thus require an army of database managers, which in turn increases the TCO of the company. What according to you are the upcoming analytics trends for 2012? Consumer intelligence is emerging as a new trend and the banking sector is the most aggressive adopter of

Organizations are not just using BI/analytics for collecting information but also for understanding customers better on the driving habits of customers. Typically, a traditional automobile insurance is charged based on the customer’s age, address and gender. But this is completely unfair, as a good driver is also charged more. I have faced this myself — the cost of my automobile insurance was more than my car, just because I was a 21-yearold, unmarried male who lived in Boston (the highest risk driving place in the US). After analyzing several such customer experiences, the automobile insurance company (Teradata customer) decided to allow its customers to get discounts on their automobile insurance if they put a black box in their car. The black box monitors customers’ driving habits. One sample of data is collected every second that includes location and velocity (speed and directions). For

is, Bank of America, which was not able to scale up with our competitor’s solution. On the other hand, with our solution the bank was able to save USD 80 million in two years. Leading companies like Walmart, eBay, Vodafone, AT&T, British Airways and United Airlines are also our customers. Some of our competitors, who talk about in-memory analytics in India, do not understand analytics because the cost per terabyte of in-memory is at least 50 times the cost of mechanical disk drives. The Indian market cannot tolerate that kind of cost and more importantly we do not access all data equally and frequently. It is economically irrational to store all the data at memory prices. From the massive data available, we frequently access only 20 percent of the data. So, customers want that 20 percent of data to be

this trend, which is still in its initial stages. For example, banks allow their retail banking customers to directly access their data from the bank’s data warehouse through Internet banking. By using this service, customers document all their cash transactions on the bank’s website. This helps banks to track individual customers and different categories where they spend. In India, high-end customers would we be the first ones to ride the wave. And eventually, because of the proliferation of Internet access, consumer intelligence would become available to everybody. Other than BFSI, sectors such as retail, energy providers, and telecommunications will adopt this growing trend. u Vinita Gupta vinita.gupta@ubm.com

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

Interview

‘At , features and development are data driven’ From approximately 3 million members in 2009 to more than 13 million members today, LinkedIn India is clearly on a roll. As India’s largest professional network, it relies heavily on using business insights from the huge amount of data that it has at its disposal. Ganesh Krishnan, HeadIndia Technology Center, LinkedIn, tells Srikanth RP from InformationWeek, how LinkedIn uses analytics to provide users with information relevant to them in a professional context As an enterprise social network, LinkedIn is used by many professionals. In this context, what are the typical opportunities and challenges when it comes to dealing with large volumes of information? LinkedIn has over 135 million members globally of which over 13 million are in India. Data generated by users creates plenty of opportunities for us, our members and brands. The opportunities far outweigh the challenges. The large volumes of data created on the back of cutting-edge technology and scalable infrastructure enables us to create solutions that benefit professionals and enterprises. As networks become more focused on audiences and consumers look for

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relevant and contextual information, this data enables us to enhance the entire usage experience. This kind of information will help brands target communication at professionals and gain insights from them. How does LinkedIn use BI / analytics internally to boost its competitiveness? Business insights and analysis is critical to what we deliver to brands and members in India. We have a very potent member base of professionals who are educated and many are in decision-making capacities. This makes LinkedIn an attractive platform to engage with professionals. How do we drive our competitiveness? By delivering value to enterprises and users. Because of

profile data, tools like ‘People you may know, ’ ‘Groups you may like,’ ‘ Jobs you may be interested in,’ and our referral engine add value to how LinkedIn provides users with information relevant to them in a professional context. Beyond this, our Marketing Solutions team helps brands create engagement opportunities with right audiences based on factors such as education, designation, location and so on. What’s more important is that outcomes from all these brand engagement activities are measurable thus giving insights into how consumers have reacted to their communication. Brands have used LinkedIn Company Pages, Groups and Polls. Some companies like American Express are using LinkedIn APIs to

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create engaging experiences with our members. How can an enterprise use BI / analytics tools (Signal, Swarm) from LinkedIn? All our tools were designed to provide insights about the professional sphere. Whether it is Groups, Answers or Polls, the quality of conversations there provides enterprises with insights and counsel on topics relevant to their business. Signal and Swarm are two new tools that provide a deeper level of insights to businesses and professionals. LinkedIn Signal is making it easy for all professionals to glean only the most relevant insights from the neverending stream of status updates and news within their network. In other words, Signal allows all professionals to derive value from the constant online conversations. If you want to visualize data generated on LinkedIn, then Swarm is the tool that can enable those insights. LinkedIn Swarm visualizes LinkedIn’s most recent company and titles searches, jobs posted, and blog entries.

LinkedIn Swarm visualizes LinkedIn’s most recent company and titles searches, jobs posted, blog entries and shares articles as a moving tag cloud. With more than 135 million members globally, visually depicting, interpreting and classifying the massive amount of data generated by humans is a massive challenge. The above example shows most searched companies in the IT job function on a particular day To see Swarm in action, point your browsers to http://swarm.linkedinlabs.com/

details like page views, unique visitors, clicks and follower ecosystem. Given that this wealth of data is available for free, it is important that enterprises keep a track of conversations and results on various LinkedIn tools. Such

From an analytics perspective, what are the exciting developments that we can expect from LinkedIn? Innovation is at the core of our business. It is important that we

The insights derived out of our data continues to make LinkedIn a preferred platform for professionals, as well as brands and recruiters To provide enterprises with more insights, ‘Company Pages’ have a number of tools that provide analysis. Enterprises use LinkedIn to track employee movements within their company through the ‘Follow Company’ tool and also map out employee backgrounds against their industry. Product Recommendations on Company Pages help businesses understand what professionals are discussing about their offerings. Analysis tools provide enterprises insights on where professionals live, where they come from, educational backgrounds, and common skills among other information. The ‘Analytics’ tab gives access to

insights can help enterprises take decisions, identify trends and deliver the best results to their clients or for their businesses. What is the importance or significance of BI / analytics for your firm? Data is a key aspect of what we do and features that the site provides. It also helps marketers and HR professionals to make the best use of LinkedIn. The insights and analysis derived out of our data continues to make LinkedIn a preferred platform for professionals, as well as brands and recruiters looking to engage with our audiences.

provide our members with solutions that continue to make them productive and successful. We have a strong talent pool and I am sure we will see many more tools that will benefit professionals. As we move ahead, we will seek to make more use of data. At LinkedIn, features and development are both data driven. How our members use the website helps us understand how we can improve our offerings, create value and deliver a relevant service that will help make professionals productive and successful. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Feature

3 BI trends every CIO must understand BI moves from the back room to the conference room and travels beyond enterprise walls, while really Big Data drives strategy By Eric Lundquist

nthony Perez is having a great NBA season. While you won’t find his stats on the sports page, his activities with the Orlando Magic should be influencing your business intelligence strategy. The Magic’s use of BI tools represents one of the three big trends in this technology sector. What are those trends? One is that BI is moving from a backroom

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IT function to an integral part of strategic business planning. Two is that companies are applying BI to more external sources — to social network conversations, for instance, to gauge customer sentiment, or to industry spending data. Three is the use of what I call RBD (really Big Data) to drive corporate strategy. I spent some time with Salesforce. com Executive VP (and Business Objects founder) Alex Dayon

discussing the intersection of BI and social networks, and I’ll use Google Correlate as an example of really Big Data — but first back to the Orlando Magic.

From Back Room To Conference Room

I first spoke with Perez, the Magic’s director of business strategy, about a year ago, when he was getting some major BI projects off the ground —

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and before the NBA season almost became a washout — and I got an update from him a week or so ago. Perez has built the Magic’s BI capabilities and ultimately its business operations on a foundation of SAS Institute products, but his projects would sound familiar to any eventdriven company regardless of BI product vendor. Whether companies are managing sporting events, conferences, airline flights, or hotel rooms, their revenue opportunities exist for only a defined period. Empty seats at the arena represent lost revenues that can’t be recovered, same as empty airline seats and hotel rooms. The Magic’s most loyal and predictable customers are its season ticket holders, the sports franchise equivalent to frequent flyers and hotel loyalty cardholders. The Magic is using BI to track the purchasing of season ticket customers; make exclusive offers to them before, during, and after games; and in a nod to the trend of customer enablement, provide them with an easy digital capability to resell tickets for games they can’t attend. Next on the project list: Build out revenue opportunity and tracking programs for individual game ticket buyers using bar codes. For example, fans would be encouraged to allow their ticket bar codes to be scanned at concession stands when they make a purchase. The incentive could be entry into a drawing for courtside seats at an upcoming game. The bar code scan, the credit card info, and courtside tickets all add up to more information about the ticket holder — within the Magic’s strict privacy rules. Also on the project list is to let more senior managers do data analyses themselves rather than have to wait for reports. Magic coach Stan Van Gundy and his staff have become big proponents of using BI tools to analyze opponents and chart game strategy. Pre-game BI can be detailed to every possible lineup, player scoring and rebounding matchups, and shooting percentages. Those pregame stats can then be adjusted in real time based on opposing lineups

and injuries. Clearly, BI has a learning curve, and it can be pricey, but once senior managers latch on to its capabilities, the execs that were reluctant to open their checkbooks can become the biggest proponents. The lesson for CIOs: Focus not on the technology, nor on vague business benefits, but on specific ways BI can deliver revenues, increase customer loyalty, and create new market segments. As for where the Magic’s star center, Dwight Howard, will end up playing, I’m not sure even advanced BI tools can predict that.

BI Meets The Customer Cloud

BI is moving well beyond analysis of internal data. It’s now about

which need to be pulled into the BI system and analyzed in real time. The information must be presented in a user interface that senior executives can manage and query and pushed to mobile devices. The traditional structure of an analytics department producing a regular set of defined reports is far removed from this socialnetwork-driven BI.

Really Big Data

Big Data has become one of the biggest tech buzzwords over the past year, and while there’s no standard definition, McKinsey provides a good overview. Big Data can include weather statistics, demographic trends, healthcare information, and essentially any other dataset that

CIOs need to focus on specific ways BI can deliver revenues, increase customer loyalty and create new market segments

understanding customer sentiment on social networks; building profiles of customers, suppliers, and partners; and managing your company’s interactions with those external parties. “You are now bringing customers and partners into the business social networks, and the cloud has been a huge enabler of this capability,” says Salesforce.com’s Dayon. In the past, BI was as static as the internal data being analyzed. It tended to deal with past trends rather than current conditions. The value of BI today is having an outward focus based on real-time information, including competitor pricing and customer sentiments expressed on social networks. For CIOs and other business executives, applying BI to the customer cloud will require new technology skills. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + activities all have different application interfaces,

stretches conventional storage and analytics systems. Correlating company and supplier data with customer brand sentiments and data on macro areas like population trends was beyond the capabilities of BI systems a few years ago. If you want to acquire an understanding of correlation capabilities without spending a huge amount (or any) money, a good place to start is Google Correlate, a way to look at trends behind Google searches. Which state in the U.S. has the highest correlation between cloud computing and middleware? That would be Maryland. While that’s a bit of a trivial exercise, Google Correlate lets users develop all types of queries. A recent National Public Radio report on Correlate takes a deeper dive. Incorporating really Big Datasets like Google searches into your BI activities may be the next BI frontier. Source: InformationWeek USA

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Feature

5 solutions

re r e t t e b r fo 2 1 0 2 n i BI Make business intelligence easy to use, deploy, afford, administer and embed By Doug Henschen

ervasive BI has been a much talked-about goal for business intelligence vendors and practitioners alike for more than five years. The idea was that BI tools weren’t being deployed and used widely enough to promote fact-based decision making. It’s definitely time to give up the dream of pervasive BI and move on to a better goal. The pervasive BI push was tied to research that showed that BI adoption rates were stuck at about 25 percent — meaning that at companies using BI, on an average only about a quarter of employees actually had access to the tools and interfaces. Some vendors, notably Microsoft, blamed rival’s

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expensive and hard-to-use tools. Others blamed practitioners and their cultures; if only these firms would form BI centers of excellence and get the tools into the hands of more employees, users would naturally give up on reflexive, gut-feel decision making and rely instead on the numbers. From numbers-driven decisions, better outcomes would naturally flow. Our recently released InformationWeek 2012 BI and Information Management Trends report shows that the quest for pervasive BI remains elusive as ever. Likewise, Cindi Howson’s Successful BI report shows adoption rates remain stuck at around 25 percent. Low adoption rates are a symptom

of the underlying problem that many BI products are too complicated, expensive and separated from actual work to become a part of day-to-day decision making. Here are five keepit-simple resolutions to focus on BI software usability, manageability, and deployment approaches: 1. Make sure it’s easy to use. Complexity has long been among the top complaints about BI software, and it’s still right up there. When presented with 15 possible answers to the question “what are the barriers to adopting BI products enterprisewide?,” 45 percent of respondents cite “ease-ofuse challenges with complex software/ less technically savvy employees.” The choice is a close second to “data quality problems,” an information management challenge cited by 46 percent of respondents. If iPhone, iPad and many smartphone and tablet apps have taught us anything, it’s that very sophisticated software can also be made to be easy to use. Going forward, “poor user training” should not be an excuse for low software adoption rates or failed pilot projects. If prospective users can’t begin to make sense of unfamiliar interfaces without training, let that be your first warning sign that the software is too complicated. If you’re already invested in a product that new users find hard to use, it’s up to your developers to come up with simplified dashboards or interfaces that can deliver meaningful insights in an easily digestible way. 2. Make sure it’s easy to deploy. Asked to cite the most important features to look for when purchasing a BI product or selecting a vendor, 63 percent select “ease of implementation” as the top choice among 13 possible answers. It’s pretty amazing that a deployment characteristic outclassed usability criteria such as “fast data exploration, query and analysis capabilities.” How can you ensure that a BI product is easy to deploy? Start by insisting on multiple references, and be sure to talk to people who were involved in deployments of the product and version you’re vetting. If you’re an existing customer considering an

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upgrade, it’s easy enough to check out what fellow customers are saying in user group forums. In fact, many online and social network forums are operated by independent user groups, and you’re even more likely to hear the unvarnished truth there. 3. Make sure it’s affordable. Respondents cite Microsoft as the most widely used BI software supplier by far, tapped by 46 percent of respondents, planned for use by an additional 7 percent, and being evaluated by another 15 percent. That’s no surprise given that Microsoft includes its BI software as part of other products, which proves that affordability matters more than people might let on. To clarify, Microsoft BI is by no means free in that you have to have enterprise licenses of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint. But those licenses give them access to Reporting Services, Integration Services and Analysis Services delivered through SQL Server, Office Excel as an all-purpose interface for crunching and visualizing data, and SharePoint as a place to publish and collaborate on analyses. That’s Microsoft BI, and the bundling strategy has catapulted the company to the top of the BI heap (in terms of numbers of users) in little more than five years. Many find Microsoft BI to be more like a developer’s toolkit than what they want in a BI suite, since it’s up to developers to build out query, reporting and application interfaces that other suites include. So needs vary and one size definitely does not fit all, but Microsoft’s success shows cost matters. When we asked about factors driving interest in software-as-a-service/ cloud-computing-based BI/analytics,” the number-one answer (cited by 55 percent) is “low overall cost” and the number three answer (cited by 39 percent) is “low initial cost.” 4. Make sure it’s easy to administer. “Self-service BI” and improvements in systems administration and management have been familiar themes in plenty of recent BI product upgrades, but there are signs vendors haven’t done enough. “Minimal need for IT staff/support” draws the second

highest response (cited by 46 percent of respondents) on the list of factors driving interest in SaaS/cloud-based BI. What’s more, the hegemony of corporate-standard BI appears to be slipping, with only 41 percent of this year’s respondents agreeing that their firms have standardized on “one or a few products,” down from 47 percent last year. That hints that departments and line-of-business units aren’t waiting for IT. Instead they’re embracing fleetfooted alternatives including SaaS services and hosted solutions that require minimal IT support. Here again, an ounce of research before you buy could save you a pound of support burden. Reference customers can tell you about IT staff requirements

performance indicators and other forms or decision-support directly into their business applications and workflows. Our survey respondents rank “exception management” second and “embedded BI” fourth on a list of 11 leading-edge BI capabilities. Exception management means spotting problem transactions, workflow bottlenecks or emerging risks, so it’s as much about blending of BI/analytics and applications as is embedded BI. To support embedded BI, look for rich BI/analytics services capabilities and event-aware integration capabilities. An event might be the initiation or completion of an order, an alert that a process is taking longer than expected or a trigger when inventories have

Times are changing, processing power is now cheap, and applications vendors are increasingly embedding BI into their software

and the time and effort required to develop and deploy new applications, dashboards and reports. 5. Make sure it’s embeddable. It’s important to remember that BI emerged as a separate category in the ‘80s and ‘90s only because the reporting and analysis capabilities built into applications were so inadequate. Separate warehouses and analytical processing power also kept missioncritical transactional systems from browning out under the added burden of analytical loads. Times are changing, processing power is now dirt cheap, and applications vendors are increasingly embedding BI into their software. SAP is even talking about doing away with the separation between BI and apps with the aid of in-memory technology. With this move, BI blends back into the application domain. Yes, companies tend to have many applications and data sources that might beg for an independent BI platform. Even so, organizations are looking to embed dashboards, key

reached a critical threshold. These are capabilities that Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in particular have talked up because they bridge the gap between applications and BI. Also, it’s time to stop measuring BI success by the seat. BI started out as a Band-Aid, and there’s no reason it should be enshrined as something everybody must aspire to use. Decision support should be delivered in the context of the decision, and that might be within an enterprise application, an e-mail inbox, a process workflow, a wellintegrated dashboard, a collaborative interface, a mobile interface or even a social network interaction. The ultimate measure of BI success is not how many people touch it, but to what degree it optimizes stocking, ordering, fulfillment, sales forecasting, days sales outstanding, financial planning, customer satisfaction and so on. Business value delivered is the difference between BI success and failure. Source: InformationWeek USA

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Feature

analytics success

Businesses need to overcome cultural barriers, like resistance to change, to get most bang for their analytics buck, a study shows By Paul McDougall 48

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hile talk of so-called Big Data technologies like Hadoop and sophisticated BI software dominates the conversation when it comes to enterprise analytics, an organization’s ability to successfully employ information depends more on its culture than any particular technology it uses, a study contends. The study by IBM and MIT Sloan Management Review found that there are three keys to building an analyticsready business: instilling a data-oriented culture, hiring or developing managers who are information literate, and maintaining analytics expertise at the staff level. “Companies that have all three use analytics to deliver advantage in the marketplace,” said David Kiron, Executive Editor, MSMR. IBM and Sloan based their research on a survey of 4,500 global executives. Some 44 percent said they frequently encounter cultural barriers, such as organizational resistance to new ideas or business methods, to analytics adoption, while just 24 percent said technology was the business impediment to employing analytics to make decisions. The study’s backers concluded that executives need to break down those cultural barriers if their organizations are going to get the most bang for the buck on their analytics technology spend. “Our research shows that the early and aggressive adopters of analytics make significant gains in both performance and overall competiveness,” said Fred Balboni, IBM’s Global Leader for Business Analytics and Optimization. “These

indicators point to an urgent need for organizations to foster a data-oriented culture and drive an analytics strategy that embeds fact-based insights into decisions and processes at every level of business.” IBM and MIT’s findings may explain why companies are having difficulty integrating information into their operations. According to another study, the BI Scorecard 2011 Successful BI Survey, only 26 percent of organizations ranked their BI initiatives as “very successful.” IBM has a stake in making sure companies are able to use analytics. Big Blue has invested billions of dollars over the past several years developing information management technologies with strong analytics components. Recently, IBM introduced a network analytics appliance for communications service providers based on technology it gained through its USD 1.7 billion buyout of Netezza and its USD 4.9 billion acquisition of Cognos. And for healthcare providers, it unveiled a content analytics tool that uses artificial intelligence algorithms from the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson. In addition to Netezza and Cognos, it’s scooped up a host of smaller players, including Platform Computing, i2, and Algorithmics. IBM noted that, on a daily basis, businesses and individuals generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sources as diverse as smart sensors embedded in bridges and tunnels to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Source: InformationWeek USA

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Feature

ou’ve stepped up to real business intelligence (BI). Do you have a good answer when users inevitably ask: Can I get this on my mobile device? Answering that question is part of the raison d’etre at BI company JackBe, which focuses its efforts on “real-time intelligence” — particularly of the type that field reps and other in-the-trenches staff need to make data-driven decisions. “We tend to do best when the kinds of people we’re helping are what we would call operational,” said Chris Warner, Vice President - Marketing, JackBe. “These aren’t necessarily the guys who sit in glass offices and look at big [key performance indicator] dashboards. These are folks who are on the ground where data is very, very fluid.” That translates to a growing need for mobile BI — and in the case of the operational user, not only the data itself but the ability to manipulate that data. JackBe has spent more than a year mobilizing its Presto platform and soon will launch those enhancements. In an interview with InformationWeek, Warner and JackBe CTO John Crupi shared their top five tips for successfully extending a BI deployment to a mobile platform such as Apple’s iPad, another tablet, or smartphones.

Focus on key applications. The most successful mobile BI deployments he sees in working with JackBe clients are those that focus on a small number of mission-critical applications for end users rather than a kitchen-sink strategy, said Crupi. “The reason why is there’s a lot to learn,” he said. That includes the development perspective, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) versus IT-managed policy decision, security, and other considerations. “Start with something that does one or two things well.”

2 50

Don’t boil the ocean. The same mindset should govern the data sources and

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of dashboards will be designed specifically for those displays rather than simply re-purposed from a desktop UI. “Anybody in the field, no matter who they are, can have access to these dashboards,” he said.

Do you have a good answer when users inevitably ask: Can I get this on my mobile device? By Kevin Casey infrastructure behind a mobile strategy, Crupi said. He cites the example of RFPs that attempt to cover every possible data source or scenario in a mobile deployment. “They throw everything in there and are coming at it that they’re going to build this massive infrastructure to manage [mobile] apps when they don’t even have a single app yet,” Crupi said. “In a large number of cases, that just doesn’t work out.”

Think dashboards for tablets. Crupi believes that BI dashboards and tablet interfaces are a natural fit — so much so that an increasing number

Extend the app portal to the device. “Think of the device as another entry point into the enterprise,” Crupi said. “That’s where you authenticate and authorize, and that’s where you have access to the apps.” In other words, give end users access to the menu directly on their device. Warner added that this becomes increasingly important for SMBs and other organizations that start small and quickly begin expanding their mobile deployment. That’s all the more true in self-service environments where end users can create their own applications with visual tools, said Warner. “The minute you have more than a handful [of apps], you need the menu or catalog — the app portal,” he said. That approach enables users to share apps across the organization — and, if supported, even rate and comment on them a la social recommendations.

Embrace HTML5. Along similar scalability lines, Crupi and Warner are big proponents of HTML5, especially in multi-platform environments, BYOD or otherwise. That’s particularly true for SMBs with tight development resources. Instead of building and re-building native apps for each platform— and re-building again when those platforms change — do the development once in HTML5. “HTML5 lets [SMBs] address a different issue, which is not whether to do mobile but what platform to do mobile on,” said Warner. “The mobile market is somewhat chaotic, and the safe bet is to make a bet on everybody. The way to do that nowadays seems to be HTML5.” Source: InformationWeek USA

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Opinion

4 areas you need to address to master Big Data

Steve Jones

To get most value out of Big Data, companies must first turn the mass of disparate internal and external data into easily measurable information that can be controlled and exploited

http://www.on the web Surviving the data explosion Read article at: http://bit.ly/fb8KkS

any industry analysts and advisors are looking at Big Data as being the next frontier for business competition and innovation. The first question, of course, is “what is Big Data?” The definition is hugely variable depending on different sources, but tends to refer to massive explosion of information now available to organizations.

Big Data, big opportunity

The ‘Big Data’ phenomenon has seen a massive explosion in the amount of information both generated by and available to organizations. The value of that data is becoming ever more critical, not only offering greater insight into markets and opportunities, but in some industries, such as financial services, also providing the vital basis for regulatory compliance. The explosion of social media and customer information is impacting all businesses and the rise in behavioral analysis provides a great opportunity for consumer insights. However, to get value out of Big Data, companies must first turn the mass of disparate internal and external data into easily accessible, measurable information that can be controlled and exploited. At the heart of Big Data, is the ability to ask questions about what will happen and receive more accurate answers than has been possible until now. The challenge is therefore, to quickly identify what should be retained, avoid duplication where possible and make good use of the information that is generated — in short, to turn Big Data into Big Information. There are a number of fundamental areas that organizations must address in order to get the most value from Big Data. These include: l Data quality – ‘Garbage in, garbage out’: Any analytical model will only be as good as the quality of information put into it so businesses

need sources of information they can trust, known to be reliable. This is compounded by Big Data as the more inaccurate data any analysis is based on, the more extreme the wrong result will be. For example, Capgemini worked with a major consumer goods manufacturer recently to address data quality. While looking at an addressable market for a new product, it found 6 million more people actually living there than originally documented, highlighting the inaccuracy of the data. l Security – Anonymizing information: One risk of Big Data, particularly with customer information is that any information leak or breach would be massive in scale and risk breaching European privacy legislation. Master Data Management (MDM) provides a simple way of making information anonymous by omitting any identifying data from full profile information and linking back to an individual master data ‘key’ held separately for identification. l Data governance – The framework to drive long-term success: To make sense of Big Data, it must be analyzed around a clearly defined structure. This requires careful planning around data standards and policies to ensure that the rules are in place to govern relationships between data and ensure accuracy of results. l Information is a core asset – Treat it as such: Information is one of the most valuable business assets a company might own, and the more complex it is, the more valuable it becomes. As such, companies need to ensure they pay careful attention to managing this information as a key asset and treat it as such. u Steve Jones is Global Head -Master Data Management, Capgemini

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

Opinion

Analytics: Turning information into insight

Dr. Ponani Gopalakrishnan

Organizations know they can reap huge benefits from capturing and analyzing the massive amount of data available. Yet at the same time, most have no idea how to effectively turn this information into insight

http://www.on the web How to successfully implement an analytics methodology Read article at: http://bit.ly/fkYUkD

informationweek february 2012

o understand how radically the nature of data is changing, consider a few facts: l Every day, people and systems are creating equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks. l Every month, people send out a billion Tweets and post 30 billion messages on Facebook. An astonishing 90 percent of the world’s data was created in just the past two years. All this data presents a huge opportunity and a massive challenge. Organizations know they can reap huge benefits from capturing and analyzing the massive amount of data available. Yet at the same time, most have no idea how to do this effectively or how to efficiently share those insights with employees. A recent survey revealed that 60 percent CIOs agreed that they have more data than they can use effectively. Yet, four out of five of the business leaders said that data is a vital source of competitive advantage. The challenge that organizations are facing isn’t really about data explosion. It is velocity of data, the pace of change and a variety of data resulting from different media that is posing significant challenges. Imagine if you could analyze 12 billion TB of Tweets being created each day to figure out what people are saying about your products, to identify who are the key influencers within your target demographics or to track new market opportunities. What if hospitals could use thousands of sensor readings collected every hour per patient in ICUs to analyze patient’s health, days earlier than what is possible by traditional techniques. What if you could make risk decisions, such as whether or not someone qualifies for credit, in minutes

by analyzing real-time transactional data, while the client is still on the phone or in the office. As these new sources of data continue to grow in volume, variety and velocity, so does the potential of this data to revolutionize decisionmaking processes in every industry. An organization can gain an edge with analytics by identifying a trend, problem or opportunity, seconds or even microseconds before a customer. As more and more data is being produced each day, it has a very short half-life. Organizations must be able to analyze this data in real-time if they wish to get insights from this data. Turning information into insight means that organizations have to coordinate their business and information strategies by applying right technologies; creating tight partnerships between CIOs and rest of the executive team; investing in skills; and being committed to the kind of cultural change that allows quick decision making. These are daunting tasks, but some basic approaches can help organizations tackle them: l

Develop analytical skills: Analytics used to be the province of math or statistical specialists in an organization. But going forward, every single department of an organization will need the skills necessary to efficiently collect and make sense of these new streams of data. Not simply to process it, but to learn new ways of examining that data and innovate around unexpected insights. Organizations need to make sure that a broader group of employees learn analytical skills, either through classes with outside programs or internal training.

Spread out analytics: Today’s society, with increasing number of smartphones, iPads,

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and laptops, is defined by mobility. Employees, customers, and partners on the move are connected like never before. Organizations need to experiment with and develop software and applications that allow employees to analyze any data about their business, including sales, customers and financial information by using dashboards and scorecards, from anywhere. Every professional — from doctor to banker or insurer require applications that help make sense of the data on the run. l

Rethink predictive analytics: The tech industry has talked about the promise of predictive analytics for a long time, but the ability to collect a lot of data more cheaply is creating the era of predictive analytics. The reality is that the sheer amount and complexity of today’s data means that there is no way to manually extract value from it. Advanced techniques are needed to sift through — and make sense of data. An explosion of new services that showcase predictive analytics are emerging, ranging from new kinds of mapping tools to IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which interacts with natural language questions.

Turn to cloud: Cloud computing, which lets organizations bring together, crunch, and share data more efficiently and productively, provides an ideal opportunity for experimenting on data use. That’s because today’s cloud services include the kind of sophisticated analytics tools that can make sense of massive amounts of unstructured data from a range of sources, including social networks, mobile devices and sensors. It’s the perfect test bed for organizations to try out new ways of analyzing different kinds of data and learn how to apply those insights to business. Predictive analytics is gaining importance as organizations have l

become aggressive in seeking data from beyond the scope of their own organizations to integrate it with internal data. It is helping organizations anticipate change so that they can plan and carry out strategies that improve outcomes. By applying predictive analytics solutions to available data, an organization can uncover unexpected patterns and associations and develop models to guide frontline interactions. This means organizations can ensure better customer retention, sell additional services to current customers, develop successful products and identify and minimize fraud and risks. Predictive analytics gives the knowledge to predict — and the power to act. The performance gap between leaders and laggards is widening. Organizations that apply advanced analytics successfully have 33 percent higher revenue growth and 12 times more profit growth than those who don’t. If there was ever a time for being smart about analytics, it’s now.

An organization can gain an edge with analytics by identifying a trend, problem or opportunity, seconds or even microseconds before a customer

u Dr. Ponani Gopalakrishnan is

Vice President, IBM India Software Lab

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Opinion

The art of fluent Master Data Management

Srinivasan Rengarajan

Organizations across the globe have been collecting massive amounts of data for intelligent decision making. How successful have they been?

http://www.on the web Mastering Master Data Management Read article at: http://bit.ly/pv43Ia

informationweek february 2012

he global economic crisis was an eye opener for most organizations, which in spite of adequate data at their disposal, failed to get a true, distilled, comprehensive view of their health. Organizations have realized that there’s more to transforming data into information than heavy-duty reporting and analytical software. They have realized that ‘Change’ is the only constant when it comes to business data. According to Postal Facts 2011, a study by the US Postal Service, over 41.5 million address changes were recorded in 2010, thereby voiding customer information in countless databases. This is just the start! Now, these very customers change jobs, make purchases, get married, change phone numbers and relocate to different cities over time. Can you imagine the consequences, if such changes are not captured by organizations, which in turn feed these data into systems that carry out critical decisions based on these data? An alarming picture indeed! This problem is widespread. Large numbers of mergers and acquisitions of corporate giants during the last economic crisis has triggered organizations to strategically look at managing and maintaining master data, which is a heterogeneous mix of customer information, product information, inventory information, agreements and accounts and vendor and supplier information — all generated and currently stored in specific line-of-business systems.

The problem of information silos

Information silos are a major contributor to an organization’s master data concerns. In most organizations, master data is self-contained in numerous departmental data systems, which rarely need to interact with each other. In an elusive attempt to solve the

information silos issue, organizations across the globe have implemented multiple “single view” solutions like a data warehouse or an operational data store — in reality, which in most organizations, also tend to be siloed. At best, this is a good complement to an effective master management solution.

“Right” version approach to MDM

Organizations need to start thinking beyond the “Single” view approach to find the “Right” version of data — right information, delivered and processed at the right time. This is the exact objective of MDM. Essentially, “Management” is the key to master data management — MDM is not a system that creates new master data; rather, it is a system that helps organizations manage their master data residing in disparate systems. In organizations with multiple siloed systems, a right version MDM system will capture the right product information from the right system at the right time; this information is generated using a single process to ensure data is validated and complete, after which this information is broadcast. Once the system is in place, the MDM solution can automatically send the data and automate the individual business processes required to set up the new data item in each of the separate applications. MDM is inevitable. Having said this, don’t let master data ‘master’ you! A single view MDM solution is often impractical to implement and has a limited scope. A viable alternative is the “right” view MDM solution, which does not replace the information silos but establishes communication channels between them to optimize the use of existing data. u Srinivasan Rengarajan is Program

Manager – Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (DWBI) Practice at Collabera Solutions

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Opinion

Data analytics can backfire without experts

Jeff Chasney

Software vendors will tell you their analytics tools provide complete “solutions,” but skip skilled statisticians for the heavy lifting at your own peril

http://www.on the web 12 Top Big Data Analytics Players Read article at: http://bit.ly/o1XZfZ

ver since the economic collapse of 2008, your senior management team has been clamoring for improved information and analyses to make quicker and better decisions. So this strong demand finally justified your buying one of those nouveau business analytics packages a year ago. However, while your team has quickly developed several new analytical reports and graphs, they don’t seem to offer anything more informative and decisive than was available before. In fact, a few of those fancy reports have added more confusion than clarity and may have even been flat out wrong! What happened? Did you buy a lemon product? Probably not. It’s far more likely that you thought your organization was buying a “solution” when it was buying a “tool.” If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone. Vendors are experts at selling their analytics products as magical software that can discover noteworthy trends, exceptions, and anomalies and automatically yield epiphanic reports. Let’s compare the problem to cabinet making. Advanced tools have made it quicker and easier to build high-quality cabinetry, but such is the case when used only by skilled craftspeople. I’m pretty good with a hammer, but the improved tools don’t enable me to miraculously create beautiful cabinets. You might be thinking that the rudimentary mathematical and statistical methods that underlie business analytics are just not that difficult. You shouldn’t need an expert; this is stuff you learned in your Statistics 101 class, right? Wrong. You’ve likely fallen prey to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which stipulates that once novices have learned the general concepts of a

particular subject, they assume they “know it all.” Essentially, the less you know about a subject, the less you think there is to know. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said: “In the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” If not our programmers and financial analysts, then who? It’s a job for the skilled statistician and industrial engineer. This is the key ingredient missing in your recipe. In fact, it’s the only key ingredient; every other one has alternatives and substitutes. Not convinced? Let’s consider a real world example (company name changed to protect the guilty). Studies have consistently reported that one out of 20 retail merchandise employees commits company theft. Given this high incidence, the “MakeIt Co.” initiated a “Fraud Identification” project. In the first phase, an established team decided to identify and report probable fraud based on the “case work” of the company’s Security and Internal Audit department. Based on a review of numerous prior cases, the SIA determined that in 80 percent of the cases where it found coupon redemptions totaling more than 10 percent of sales for a given employee on a given day, fraud was involved. A programmer analyst designed a “High Risk Fraud” report. The employee with the highest number of coupon redemptions was called into the manager’s office. He was shown his top ranking on the “High Risk Fraud” report and asked to explain his questionable activity. Embarrassed and humiliated, the employee resigned. One week later, he filed a complaint against the company. In its brief, the company cited that historical investigations proved there to be an “80 percent probability that employees with such coupon

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

Opinion redemption activity were stealing.” MakeIt defended its position that “80 percent probability is certainly in the realm of high risk.” The plaintiff’s attorneys agreed that an 80 percent probability would constitute a high risk, but they alleged that MakeIt’s computation of that probability was incorrect. They argued that the actual probability was 17 percent, which constituted a low risk. How in the world did the plaintiff’s attorneys arrive at 17 percent? Well, in addition to knowing that “in 80 percent of cases reviewed, high coupon redemptions were the result of employee theft,” the

company also knew that “1 out of 20 employees perform some type of theft.” Indeed, the Fraud Identification project was initiated based on this initial fact. What does that have to do with the matter? Everything! In determining the probability that an employee is a thief, MakeIt must take into account both facts, calculating the probability using Baye’s Probability Rule, a complicated formula well known to statisticians but foreign to most others. Indeed, the plaintiff’s attorneys were correct! The company issued a formal apology to the former employee, who was promptly reinstated to his former position and compensated for the emotional distress. MakeIt discontinued its “Fraud Report” and canceled the Fraud Identification project. There are many other examples

informationweek february 2012

of forecasting gone awry, misstated trends, and flawed market basket analyses. Here are the key takeaways: l The Dunning-Kruger effect leads us to underestimate the skills necessary to perform meaningful data analyses. As a result, incorrect mathematical/statistical methods are applied and erroneous (and sometimes misleading) results are presented. l The key ingredient to successful business analytics is the involvement of a skilled statistician (or industrial engineer, depending on the subject matter). l The particular tools chosen to

perform the analytics are of little importance. l You can’t buy a “solution” to your analytical needs. You must enlist well-educated and trained specialists to perform the analyses and deliver meaningful results. One final observation: The cost for your organization to acquire business analytics tools will likely be much higher than the cost of acquiring statistical talent. And the cost of incorrect analyses, and the resulting misguided decisions/directions, could be an even more significant cost to your company — and ultimately to your career.

The key ingredient to successful business analytics is the involvement of a skilled statistician

u Jeff Chasney is executive VP of

strategic planning and CIO with CKE Restaurants Inc., which operates the Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, and other restaurant brands

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Opinion

Mobility 2012: The wireless analytics revolution

Craig Mathias

The biggest trend in wireless and mobility for 2012 doesn’t have a lot to do with radio technology, but it means everything to the future of what remains the hottest corner of IT

http://www.on the web Mobile Device Management On The Edge Read article at: http://bit.ly/vSySFa

f there’s one term that comes up around here practically every day, it’s analytics. You might think that analysts of wireless and mobile technology spend all day in discussions of the obscure alphabet soup of our curious little end of IT, and such used to be true. Arguing the fine points of OFDMA vs. CDMA and MIMO as applied to LTE has its value, but, just as we’ve seen with mobile operations management and enterprise mobility management, the benefits of any innovation in IT need to be gauged in a framework more related to the productivity of people than the productivity of bits flying through the air. And the key to all of that, and the most important theme in mobility for 2012, I believe, is analytics. Now, at face value, there’s really nothing new here; after all, isn’t analytics just another name for data mining or artificial intelligence or whatever all that cool stuff was called in the past? Well, yes and no. Analytics at its core is about insight and the extraction of meaning and value, and, reducing the capability to its minimal form, everyone is familiar with the wide range of management reports generated by just about every system that keeps IT humming. But the analysis in this case is really being performed by humans, isn’t it? It’s one thing to plow through a multi-page report filled with charts and graphs, and quite another to see the patterns running through the data, and even more still to be able to apply all of that to the formulation of an optimal strategy and take action based on the insights gleaned. And, let’s face it, busy IT managers today simply don’t have the time to think about what all that data means. The question, then, is: Why not apply analytics intelligently and automatically, without involving more human CPU cycles? What’s at work, then, with Analytics

2012, is the new power liberated by automated systems, imitating human decision-making under more focused and dispassionate circumstances than is possible for most of us, and evolving to the point where insights can be realized and actions taken without human intervention. Previously called heuristics, a branch of AI, analytics promises much smarter and costeffective mobile networks going forward. Running out of capacity on your wireless LAN? Channels and power levels can be automatically reconfigured today — so how about we add the capability to automatically specify the deployment of additional access points and graphically show us where these should be installed? Minimizing telecoms expense by shifting in-building cellular calls to Wi-Fi is a great idea — so let’s automate that by enforcing policy without the need for that painful call from the finance department. Optimizing traffic flows on the fly? Ditto. The result in each case is higher performance, improved capacity, and, thus, improved user productivity. Note that the value here is being realized via upper-level services rather the more traditional Layer-1 improvements, and those consequential benefits will be realized by applications across the board. Sure, we’ll see some amazing new radios in 2012 (gigabit wireless LANs, anyone?), and wireless technology will continue to advance. But the most important development in wireless and mobility will be automating the optimization of wireless and mobile resources. And, as the fallout from the recession will be with us for some time, the fact that the savings realized here will in many cases pay for the needed upgrades in software and systems is simply the icing on the cake. u Craig Mathias is a Principal with

Farpoint Group, a wireless and mobile advisory firm based in Ashland, MA

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Interview

‘Dell is investing in IP to accelerate adoption of cloud’ Is Dell planning to be a cloud provider by offering servers and storage-as-a-service? Dell recently announced a substantial commitment to the cloud. We have plans to invest USD 1 billion in multiple data centers around the world to provide our customers access to public and private cloud technologies. We have acquired Boomi (a SaaS integration leader)

our customer’s needs. It is inevitable that customers will have a mix of SaaS applications from multiple vendors using multiple clouds. As companies continue to adopt more business services outsourcing, a lot of their critical information will reside in the systems and clouds of business service providers. A federated cloud model ensures that IT can continue to provide the central values of provisioning,

Dell is betting big on cloud computing and investing substantial resources to build a comprehensive portfolio, says Joseph Kremer, President-APJ in an interview with Vinita Gupta and announced vStart (a ready-torun virtual infrastructure). We are also investing in IP that can help customers accelerate the adoption of cloud computing and SaaS. Our strategy is to unify physical and virtual; evolutionary and revolutionary; public and private; an open, yet integrated IT solution. Additionally, Dell is building a set of more specific cloud-based services, such as backup and archival in the cloud. In some cases, specific industry-based solutions (such as medical archival and learning management) are being delivered via our cloud. Also, to ensure that customers are able to take full advantage of the cloud, it is important to focus on applications. Hence, we have development, testing and integration expertise around Java and .Net environments. Does Dell believe in the concept of federated cloud services? Yes, we believe in the concept of federated cloud services. This is where Dell would provide its customers both Dell and third-party based cloud services, matching the SLAs, costs and

informationweek february 2012

securing, monitoring and managing the information of the organization, even if the delivery infrastructure belongs to someone else. Please elaborate on Dell’s increased commitment in the storage space and future strategies. Dell sees storage as one of the key drivers in technology industry today and is betting big on this space. Dell has invested substantial resources in the last 12-18 months to build a comprehensive portfolio. Three years ago, Dell embarked on a mission to help change the way our customers purchase, implement and deploy storage. Successful acquisition and integration of EqualLogic in 2007 was the first step in implementing this strategy. As we build on this strategy, Dell will advance the optimization capabilities of the platforms through the integration of Exanet’s highperformance, scalable file system and Ocarina’s content-aware optimization. Also, the acquisition of Compellent fulfilled two strategic objectives for Dell. One of these is obvious — an enterprise-scale storage platform. The second was to add new, industry-

leading IP to our portfolio. These include dynamic storage tiering and thin provisioning, as well as a storage platform asset that can be run as software on a standard Intel server. How has the rise in popularity of smartphones/tablets impacted Dell’s laptop/PC business? Dell believes tablets and smartphones are complementary devices for enterprise and small- and medium business users, and even consumers who seek an ecosystem of devices to create and consume personal and professional content. We believe more devices will come on to a corporation’s network and the profile and number of those devices will have different footprints and usage models (i.e. consumption vs. creation of data, etc). But at the end of the day, we think smartphones and tablets will complement existing laptops/PCs. Dell’s mobility products are geared towards prosumers who look at technology to combine their entertainment and social connections with business needs. u Vinita Gupta vinita.gupta@ubm.com

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Event

Social business is the new paradigm At Lotusphere 2012, IBM infuses analytics into social media tools to make businesses more social. Announces next generation of socially-enabled products for a social-savvy workforce By Brian Pereira

he workforce is getting younger and more mobile. Social media and hightech mobile devices are a way of life with this generation. And organizations are adapting to their way of working by embracing social media tools and mobility. To keep up, IT vendors like IBM are infusing elements of social media into traditional

enterprise tools — to provide a more collaborative way of working, in an environment that fosters collective intelligence. IBM calls this new paradigm the “social business” and it believes this can make an organization more efficient and profitable. This was the overarching theme at Lotusphere 2012, which was held between January 16 – 18, 2012 in Orlando, Florida.

Activate it. 3

Capture it.

Socialize it.

Analyze it. Govern it. 5

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At Lotusphere 2012, IBM announced the next generation of its social networking platform, IBM Connections. IBM also rebranded all the LotusLive and cloud services under the new moniker IBM SmartCloud for social business. In addition, IBM announced that it will be launching the social edition of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino “sometime this year,” although the beta is now available. And a new browserbased office productivity tool is in the offing; InformationWeek got an exclusive preview of IBM Docs. Delivering the opening remarks at Lotusphere 2012, Alistair Rennie, GM, Collaboration Solutions, IBM, said, “We define social business as the application of social networking tools and culture to business roles, processes and outcomes. Social behaviour is not new. It simply implies working in a community instead of being in isolation. What’s new about this idea is that platforms are merging to allow this kind of community and all the things we value about community like sharing ideas, expertise, a sense of purpose, trust — to transcend time and place. And to have those interactions persist so that they can be reused, analysed, and you can learn from them….in context of what people are working on or doing. So it leads to an idea that we call collective intelligence.” IBM is also bringing analytics to 1

Alistair Rennie, GM, Collaboration Solutions, IBM

Jeanette Horan, CIO, IBM

Manoj Saxena, GM, Watson Solution, IBM

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director, W3C

Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Software Solutions Group

Jeff Schick, VP, Social Business, IBM

www.informationweek.in

social business and this is seen in the new version of IBM Connections. The social networking tool integrates blogs, wikis, activities, and streams from social networking sites; streams for enterprise applications like SAP and Sugar CRM. In addition, it has integrated e-mail and calendaring services (from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes). According to IBM, this level of integration offers a single view of all activities, allows for instant collaboration and gives the ability to build social communities among internal and external customers. The Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third-party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company’s content, including e-mail and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an Activity Stream, is expected to allow employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook

posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications, electronically sign documents, and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience. For example, an employee could share a document with colleagues, approve a transaction from a SAP system, act on a notification required in a business process like an insurance claim, and share content such as status updates and files, all from IBM Connections. The embedded experience and single point of access allows users to have insights at their fingertips, and share data from any place, whether on the road or in the office. One of the key findings from the 2011 IBM Social Business Jam — an online, real-time discussion with 4,000 participants, was that social business activities need to be integrated and aligned with business processes to be truly effective. To help clients address this challenge, IBM is announcing IBM

Connections Enterprise Content Edition, an integrated social content management solution that combines the scalability of social networking with enterprise content management and enhanced compliance and control features sought by users in regulated industries. Designed to manage the entire life cycle of office documents, web and social content, IBM Connections Enterprise Content Edition increases the ability to share knowledge, gain expertise and create high-value content quickly through advanced content, document management and workflow use cases.

MOBILITY

In response to the burgeoning mobile workforce, expected to reach more than 1.19 billion people by 2013, IBM’s new social software supports the most popular mobile devices, including tablets. IBM is announcing the beta release of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, Social Edition, a social-enabled messaging and collaboration platform

IBM Docs may be real competition for Google Docs

t the recently concluded Lotusphere 2012 in Florida, IBM executives gave InformationWeek India an exclusive preview of IBM Docs — a new product in the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business portfolio. IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software that all work in the cloud. As of now, there is no client or desktop edition of IBM Docs; IBM however continues to offer a client/desktop office productivity suite called LotusLive Symphony. IBM Docs is now in beta and you can experience it or contribute through a community initiative called Lotus Greenhouse. IBM Docs allows organizations, both inside and outside the firewall, to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents in the cloud to improve productivity. Authors will be able to store and share documents in IBM SmartCloud, co-edit documents in real time or assign users sections of the document so they can work privately easing the management of multiple revisions from multiple authors in team-based documents. But haven’t we seen that in some product before? What’s the differentiator? During an exclusive preview of IBM Docs, Jeanette

Barlow, Product Manager, IBM said, “We are socially enabling the document process. We did not want to build just an editor. We wanted to create a solution that tackled the problems that arise when teams work together and collaborate on documents.” We observed co-editing in real-time, the ability to assign sections in a document to different people and a more meaningful way to track versions and audit changes attributed to different users. IBM has a strong foothold in the enterprise space and Google Docs (which has been favoured by many organizations) may have some real competition soon! But we’ll have to watch out for IBM’s pricing details, and Google may have an advantage here. Google also has an established enterprise base for its Google Docs offering in India with organizations like India Infoline and Zensar Technologies using it extensively. By the end of this year IBM will have both — a rich client and a cloud-based solution for office productivity. The latter will be a web-based solution based on HTML 5, and will not require browser plug-ins. So it would definitely be a draw for enterprises that just need basic editing and do not want to incur huge costs on client licenses.

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Event built on open standards that provides users with the ability to act on any work flow process directly within the e-mail inbox. Whether accessing e-mail from a browser or desktop, or sharing videos and files, users no longer have to travel to a third-party site. In addition, with the embedded experience of social mail, users are more efficient when engaging in activities and more responsive to day-to-day tasks. The simplicity of doing all these tasks on a tablet was also demonstrated at Lotusphere 2012. IBM intends to support mail, calendaring and contacts in a beta release of IBM Lotus Notes Traveler for Microsoft Windows Phone on Nokia and HTC devices; the beta is expected in the first half of 2012. IBM is also introducing a new, lower-cost program for BlackBerry users to access e-mail in the cloud. Built on IBM Mobile Enterprise Services and the sophisticated security of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, IBM is bringing the type of security and reliability expectations of on-premise

e-mail to cloud e-mail environments, including built-in end-user and administrative controls for mobile device management.

WORKING SMARTER

A few clients present at Lotusphere 2012 explained how IBM’s social media tools could help them gain real-time access to data and to collaborate with experts across geographies to offer better professional advice and services to customers. At Boston Children’s Hospital for instance, paramedics collaborate over video to offer timely treatment and save lives. GAD (a large banking institution in Germany) is evaluating the use of IBM Docs in a private cloud in 2012 to facilitate browser-based document creation and change management. Approximately 450 banks will be able to reduce costs and become more responsive to their customers through GAD’s bank21 solution. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise

apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016, reaching USD 6.4 billion, compared with USD 600 million. At the same time, organizations are embracing social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.

CONCLUSION

While widespread use of social networking tools for collaboration in business is still some time away, it is really the marketing and branding teams that are using these tools to their vantage. Infusing elements of social media into its enterprise offerings might be a clever way for IBM to draw enterprises to Lotus Notes, Domino, Symphony, Cognos and its other offerings. The tight integration and information flows between all these enterprise tools might be a big draw. The writer was hosted by IBM in Florida, USA

Web inventor foretells the next wave

veryone was waiting to hear Sir Tim BernersLee on the second day of Lotusphere 2012 at Orlando, Florida, on 17 January 2012. He spoke of link data and how it was becoming increasingly important in socially connected communities. Very recently, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is led by Berners-Lee, made some recommendations in a report on how standards around social networking could lead to innovation in business. “We are moving from a web of documents, which people do not understand, to things like calendars and address cards, which are understandable. When you pack all this together you can get to a person and to their friends, and go through the music they like and find other important things like which town they were born in. You can do all these things using all the data you had access to,” said Berners-Lee. This concept will allow you to link across and compare data from different applications, added BernersLee. So an address book and another application might be able to share some of the fields. Because the data is stored separately from the applications, it will become easier to move data sets from one application to another. The inventor of the Web also made references to

informationweek february 2012

the W3C’s Social Business Community Group. W3C is an international community where member organizations and the public work together to develop web standards. In a recently published report, the W3C outlines how the Social Business Community Group will evolve social networking standards around customer-driven use cases. This report is the outcome of the Social Business Jam, an online event that occurred last November. The event, which used IBM’s Collaboration Jam platform, explored how standards around social networking, such as those developed by the Federated Social Web XG, could lead to increased innovation throughout the business cycle. Later in the day, Angel Diaz, VP - Software Standards and Cloud, IBM offered more details. “The W3C’s Social Business Community will define use cases for evolving standards; the W3C will take those standards to the different standards bodies to make sure that they work well together. IBM will contribute its use cases,” said Diaz. Concluding his keynote, Berners-Lee said, “The thing that I am excited about is the way social business is arising and how people are collaborating through this new power of linked data.”

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Analyst Angle

Mobile BI, finally

Bhavish Sood

Mobile BI has the potential to transform corporate decision making when combined with business processes that are also mobile enabled

http://www.on the web Mobile BI apps target iPad Read article at: http://bit.ly/xfLddI

ecision making is not something that happens only in the office or the boardroom. Decisions are made on the road, in warehouses, in client meetings and in airport lounges. A decision maker often needs quick access to few key metrics to enable broader input into the decision at hand. And this is where mobile business intelligence (BI) comes into the picture Mobile BI has the potential to transform corporate decision making when combined with business processes that are also mobile enabled. Gartner predicts that by 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices. Until the release of the Apple iPad in 2010, BI was struggling to gain traction on handheld devices, mainly due to the small screen size of devices. While simple charts could be shown on the screen, the corresponding text was often unreadable and the user had to constantly zoom in and out of the chart to understand the larger context, among many other challenges. That all changed when the BI vendor community saw iPad as the ideal BI consumption device. The end-user community also saw gesture-driven tablets as the ideal device to bring highly interactive BI applications to the frontline. Although, the original focus of organizations was firmly on Apple products, Android and Microsoft are emerging as alternative platforms. The adoption and use of multitouch media tablets in addition to smartphones has the potential to disrupt the overall BI platform market, including product design centers, software, controls and user interface design. BI dashboards on mobile devices are fundamentally touchenabled versions of their siblings running on a desktop or laptop. However, some vendors are adding BIspecific gestures for the tablet platform. We are only at the beginning of mobile BI. There are many potential enhancements to currently available

devices and applications. Devices will turn into more than visualization gadgets and become transactional platforms. The inclusion of mobile versions of statistical or data mining models for the execution of all sorts of algorithms will enable better planning and what-if scenarios directly on the tablet, without any connection to a server. By 2013, we will see adoption of mobile BI in diverse industries, such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing and transportation. Many BI applications will go far beyond simple information delivery, essentially turning the mobile device into a processing platform, where information flows to and from the device. On the flip side, cost is an issue. Although, the software mostly comes free with the BI platform, one is required to invest in devices (capital expenditure) and bandwidth (operating expenditure). Rapid adoption of mobile BI can also lead to increased pressure on back-end systems that may need to be upgraded. There is no doubt that mobile BI draws much attention, however Gartner believes the adoption of BI technology will lag behind somewhat, despite the proliferation of mobile devices. This will be most organizationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; first attempt at figuring out areas where mobile BI can be used. At the same time, organizations are still struggling with rather mundane BI issues and are not ready to invest in yet another idea. At the end of the day, organizations should not forget that mobile forms a tiny fraction of the overall investment in BI infrastructure. With all the excitement about a finally usable mobile BI device, organizations still need to invest bulk of their resources in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;plumbing layersâ&#x20AC;? of the BI stack, such as data warehouse, data integration, data quality and the core BI engine. u Bhavish Sood is a Research Director

at Gartner, covering analytical applications, database management systems, BI and data management for the Asia-Pacific region

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Secret CIO

Time for technology leaders to get nosy

John McGreavy

If you’re in a senior technology function, you must have, or develop, a genuine interest in various business disciplines

http://www.on the web CISOs morph into business leaders Read article at: http://bit.ly/oxQO8s

informationweek february 2012

he expanding role of the CIO is a hot topic in management consulting and academic circles. While this expansion may not be formal within your company, bet on the fact that change is under way. I feel it. The opportunities for my CIO peers and I to stick our noses into others’ business are growing every day. Fortunately, I have a genuine interest in many business areas. If you’re in a senior technology function, I hope you have or can develop such an interest. You need it — now. Maybe you can fake it. I suspect that feigning interest is a decent approach and will get you more influence in a particular line of business. But then it’s pretty easy, and embarrassing, when you’re inevitably called out. Here are a few areas where I’m getting more involved. Our customers and potential customers are industrial companies, and we’re late in establishing connections to them via social media and other web channels. Vic, our VP of marketing, realizes that much of the global business community’s marketing efforts are moving in this direction. And for our young guns in marketing, who grew up on Facebook and now Twitter and use Google in place of personal knowledge, that’s just a given. Vic and I are now working together to understand how these customers learn, shop, and buy online. You might think this is really a marketing play, and as a CIO, I should simply enable access to the appropriate platforms. But this isn’t the approach we’re taking. Online search is evolving daily. Understanding the technical implications of authority and indexability, for example, is relevant. Creating digital media in a way that can be efficiently managed and accessed from many different entry points requires well-designed data architectures. Different rendering platforms,

from smartphones to tablets to PCs, require different content design and branding approaches. A close partnership with marketing is a must if we’re to be successful in this area. I’m also sticking my nose into our HR director’s business. A new recruiting strategy is on Rich’s to-do list, and I can help him with that. Is LinkedIn part of that strategy? What about commercial e-recruiting technologies and services? Should we integrate all of those directly with our HRIS? Are we using any social listening tools to find out what our employees and customers are saying about us? Our customer service organization now relies on GPS-based technologies to get the right technicians to the right clients. A few years ago this was all done on paper. This afternoon, I will be meeting with Sandra, our VP of client care, to explain how locationaware and event-based real-time alert systems can take our service to another level. While Sandra is a customer service wizard, locationbased technologies are entirely new to her. I need to help her see the possibilities, and she needs to help me understand key drivers of customer satisfaction. If you’re a vendor in our industry, consider my evolving role as you look for ways to build your business with me and my organization. I may not need help with your products; I may need a better understanding of manufacturing fundamentals. Or I may need to quickly learn the intricacies of foreign exchange hedging or reverse auction bidding. Our conversations need to change. Sticking my nose into others’ business is becoming a careerbuilding move. And I have the right nose for the job. u The author, the real-life CIO of a

billion-dollar-plus company, shares his experiences under the pseudonym John McGreavy

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Technology & Risks

How safe is wireless communication?

Avinash Kadam

Our lives have become heavily dependent on wireless communication. But how safe are these wireless electronic devices?

http://www.on the web Wire(less) secure than you think Read article at: http://bit.ly/9iTEko

ur lives have become heavily dependent on wireless communication — Wi-Fi routers for Internet connectivity, Wi-Max for high-speed wireless communication, satellite communication for TV channels and GPS for finding our way. We also use TV remotes, cordless phones, mouse and keyboards. The list of devices keeps growing by the day. The most prominent among wireless communication devices is the mobile phone — which has become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. These mobile phones require ubiquitous mobile towers to ensure that we get adequate signal strength anywhere we go. So, it is indeed alarming when we come across news items highlighting serious health risks — ranging from loss of memory, lack of concentration to brain cancer — posed by mobile phones and towers. In fact, all the above mentioned wireless communication devices use radio frequency in microwave range. This means we are surrounded by devices that radiate harmful electromagnetic frequencies. In view of these concerns and keeping in mind that the use of wireless devices is only going to accelerate further, World Health Organization (WHO) has established The International EMF (Electromagnetic Fields) project “to assess health and environmental effects of exposure to static and time varying electric and magnetic fields in the frequency range 0-300 GHz.” WHO has classified mobile phone radiation on the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) as “possibly carcinogenic.” This means that there “could be some risk” of carcinogenicity, so additional research into long-term, heavy use of mobile phones needs to be conducted. As a preventive measure, WHO suggests users to keep a safe distance from devices emitting EMF.

EMF radiation is categorized in two types — ionizing and nonionizing. Ionizing radiation has enough energy to ionize particles and is emitted by cosmic rays, X-rays, Gamma rays, high level of nuclear waste, etc. The effects are well-known and safety limits are stringent. Mobile phones and other wireless communication devices fall in the category of non-ionizing EMF radiation, which is still under study. Non-ionizing type of EMF radiation does not have enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules and does not damage the DNA structure. However, this radiation type could be absorbed by the human body. The rate at which radiation is absorbed by the human body is measured by the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). Regulators have set the SAR limit for mobile handsets to 1.6 Watts/Kg, averaged over a gram of tissue. SAR values for handsets are usually within this limit. This in simple terms means maximum 18 to 24 minutes of mobile usage per day, which is definitely not the case for many of us. More critical is the effect of multiple mobile towers and other wireless devices, which should be measured by the total transmitted emission power density. The total exposure limit for this is adopted at 9.2 Watts/m2 for India. Actual measurements should be periodically published for individual localities, especially for crowded localities. These measurements will serve as an eye opener for everyone. Dangers of EMF radiation are still being studied. However, let us be cautious. It was just 50 years back that consuming hydrogenated cooking oil and smoking cigarettes were not considered carcinogenic.

u Avinash Kadam is at MIEL e-Security Pvt. Ltd. He can be contacted via e-mail awkadam@mielesecurity.com

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Global CIO

IT’s 2012 resolution: Stop the hand-wringing

Chris Murphy

How can the myth of IT’s shrinking relevance persist, with so many companies making huge bets based on their faith in technology?

LOGS Chris Murphy blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at: http://www.informationweek. com/authors/1115

ere’s a goal we can all embrace for 2012: no more existential hand-wringing about whether IT has a promising role, future, value, or purpose. IT has to be the only profession that spends so much time questioning its own existence. Instead, let’s just accept this truth as self-evident: A company is underperforming if it doesn’t have top-flight IT. Employees won’t have the insights they need to make good decisions. They’ll waste time in their work with colleagues and outsiders. They’ll disappoint customers by missing shipments, appointments, payments. And most damning of all, those underachievers won’t have the technology capabilities to pull off game-changing business initiatives. How does this myth of IT’s shrinking relevance persist, when so many companies are driving extraordinary results, making huge bets, and taking huge risks based on their faith in emerging technologies? Limit the sample size to just one month, and you’re awash in proof points. l GE pledged to spend USD 1 billion creating a software center that’ll hire 400 engineers and other staff in Silicon Valley. GE sees that companies’ insatiable demand for data will soon include a whole lot more stuff — machines at every critical point in an operation that report back on how they’re performing. GE calls it the “industrial Internet,” and managing that information will be one of the great Big Data challenges ahead of us. GE already has a software business taking in billions in revenue, and it expects double-digit growth through 2015. GE uses its own software to do things like monitor more than 1,000 gas turbines worldwide that generate electricity. l In a consumer twist on the industrial

Internet, Adidas introduced the USD 338 AdiZero F50 soccer cleat, which has a removable chip that records distance, speed, and turns, then transmits that data to a smartphone or laptop. Adidas bills the shoe as a training tool. It feels a bit like tech for tech’s sake today — but never underestimate the sporting world’s demand for data. l Toyota and Intel announced they’re doing joint research on in-vehicle multimedia systems, including communications between cars and smartphones and new interfaces to convey all the data cars are collecting. l In Meg Whitman’s first big executive move since taking over as HewlettPackard’s CEO in September, she hired a top IT leader: Boeing’s John Hinshaw, who steps into an expanded role that includes overseeing IT, process improvement, and shared services such as procurement. All of these examples demand that IT organizations build new and deeper internal and external relationships, particularly with marketing and product development teams. Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett, InformationWeek’s 2011 Chief of the Year, describes his role-and that of any successful leader at his company this way: “You have to be gifted in the art we brought you in to do, ... but that’s not enough. You have to be skilled in the art of leading and forming relationships with people.” Such skills are in demand at every level of IT. For companies that have them, 2012 will be another year of proving the creative and indispensable force that IT is.

u Chris Murphy is Editor of

InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com

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Practical Analysis

10 IT shifts in 2012

f you’re tired of end-of-year punditry backed up by nothing but speculation, take a look at these enterprise IT trends and the hard data behind them from our research.

1. Not all IT budget news is bleak. In our Outlook 2012 survey,

Art Wittmann

Put predictions aside: InformationWeek Research yields hard data about what’s up (analytics) and down (Windows Mobile) in 2012. Take a look at your peers’ IT plans

18 percent of those polled say their budgets will increase by more than 10 percent — and just 6 percent say they’ll be hit with a decrease of the same amount. However, the largest faction, 28 percent, see flat budgets on the horizon.

2. Cloud services are increasingly being used for disaster recovery.

In 2010, 34 percent of IT pros said they were using or considering cloudbased services as part of their BC/DR strategies. In 2011, that number climbed to 43 percent. The biggest reason not to do DR in the cloud remains security, respondents say.

3. It’s been a banner year for data analytics. For the first time, less than

half of respondents cite data quality problems as the biggest barrier to BI/ analytics adoption. However, 46 percent say quality is still the leading concern, followed closely by ease-of-use worries, in the face of complex analytics packages.

4. Cloud progress will slow down a bit in 2012. At this time last year, our

LOGS Art Wittmann blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at: http://www.informationweek. com/authors/6044

cloud survey found 60 percent more IT organizations reporting using cloud services: 31 percent vs. 18 percent the previous year. This year, there was a measly two-point gain, with 33 percent of respondents saying that they’re using cloud services.

5. Windows 8 Server’s prospects are good. Win Mobile’s, not so much. Already, 63 percent of

you say you’ll run Windows 8 on at least 50 percent of your servers. Only 30 percent of respondents say they’ll run the phone/tablet version on that fraction of these devices.

6. It’s still not the year of unified communications. Two years ago,

30 percent of you reported having UC deployed. That number has now risen

informationweek february 2012

to 36 percent. Today, as was the case two years ago, other projects just have a higher priority.

7. IT’s prevailing attitude toward tablets has flipped 180 degrees.

For three years, we’ve asked IT pros whether tablets would be a “non-event.” Finally, for 2012, IT pros are somewhat disagreeing with the “non-event” statement — though you’re still on the fence as to whether tablets will be the chosen tool of road warriors, and whether you’ll provide support. Our bet? They will be, you will support them in pretty substantial numbers during the next few years.

8. Server memory configurations are way up. Remarkably little changed

in our annual State of Servers survey — except memory configurations. We saw a 50 percent increase in the number of servers configured with 33 GB to 64 GB of memory, and a whopping 100 percent increase in the number of boxes configured with 65 GB to 128 GB. No wonder users revolted against VMware’s 2011 move to price its software based on server memory used.

9. IT no longer leads the charge to monitor social networking. In 2010, 44 percent of you reported that IT was on the hook for monitoring activity on social networking sites. In 2012, just 32 percent of our respondents will be doing the monitoring. That 12 point drop is offset by a 13 point increase in the number of respondents who report that marketing departments now take the lead in monitoring these sites.

10. You’re serious about server virtualization. If you don’t plan to

virtualize the majority of servers by the end of 2012, you’ll be in the minority. The largest growth came in respondents who say they’ll virtualize 75 percent to 90 percent of servers. Just 13 percent planned to do that back in 2010: This year, the number almost doubled, to 25 percent citing that goal.

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

Top 10 tech acquisitions of 2011

Rob Preston

Among the trends that drove the biggest M&A deals: software as a service, mobility, big data, and social networking

LOGS Rob Preston blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at: http://www.informationweek. com/authors/showAuthor. jhtml?authorID=1026

hile 2011 wasn’t a year of historically huge tech merger and acquisition deals, activity was nonetheless vigorous. Google alone bought more than 20 companies, while the likes of HP, Oracle, SAP, Dell, and Microsoft rounded out their mature product portfolios with acquisitions. Among the strongest riptides in enterprise IT M&A: software-as-a-service (SaaS), mobility, Big Data, and social networking. What follows, in reverse order, is a take on the 10 most important (though not necessarily the largest) enterprise IT acquisitions of 2011. Not included in this list are the big OEM-oriented deals: Western Digital’s USD 4.3 billion deal to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, for instance, or Texas Instruments’ USD 6.5 billion acquisition of National Semiconductor. VMware and Socialcast: Virtualization market leader VMware isn’t immune to social business fever, acquiring Socialcast, a maker of cloud-based communications and collaboration software that mimics the interaction style of social networks, but with the security, management, and integration functions of an enterprise system. The Socialcast deal (terms weren’t disclosed) followed two other cloud acquisitions by VMware: slideware maker SlideRocket in April and open source e-mail software maker Zimbra in January 2010.

SAS Institute and Assetlink: This acquisition (no price tag was disclosed) isn’t top 10 tech M&A material unto itself, but it’s important in the context of the red hot trend it represents: the move by CMOs to apply analytics to their ad campaigns, promotions, social outreaches, and other marketing programs in order to prove and refine their effectiveness. Assetlink acquisition by SAS, announced in February, followed like-minded deals by IBM (it shelled out USD 480 million for Unica in October 2010) and

Teradata (USD 525 million for Aprimo in December 2010). Dell and Force10: Dell’s acquisition of switching vendor Force10 Networks (financial terms weren’t disclosed), following its USD 960 million deal in December 2010 to acquire storage virtualization vendor Compellent Technologies, enhances its credibility as a big league data center supplier, alongside Cisco, HP and Brocade. Force10’s market share is small — just 1 percent, according to Dell’Oro estimates around the time of the July 2011 deal — but its technology is considered first rate.

Microsoft and Skype: Among the biggest tech deals of 2011, Microsoft’s USD 8.5 billion acquisition of Skype is also emblematic of one of the biggest CIO trends: the consumerization of enterprise IT. The lines between business and consumer IT are blurring, and Microsoft is looking to capitalize on that trend by integrating the consumer-oriented Skype videochat software with its enterprise unified communications and messaging platforms. Speaking of consumerization, will 2012 be the year Microsoft finally lands Yahoo?

Oracle and RightNow: It’s almost as if Larry Ellison plunked down USD 1.5 billion of Oracle’s money to get back at a former protege, Marc Benioff, whose Salesforce.com and its cloud-based services have been stealing most of the thunder in enterprise software. Within weeks of his orchestrated rebuff of Benioff at the Oracle OpenWorld conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Ellison announced Oracle would be acquiring RightNow, a leading maker of SaaS-based customer service and management apps and a semicompetitor to Salesforce. Oracle, one of the tech industry’s most acquisitive companies, isn’t too concerned about overlapping

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

Down to Business products when it comes to buying into hot markets. Oracle had previously introduced its suite of enterprise software, Fusion, with a cloud-based option for CRM, as well as a hosted version of its PeopleSoft software licensed on a per-user, per-month basis. Salesforce.com and Radian6: It wasn’t among the biggest of tech acquisitions in 2011, a cash and stock deal valued at about USD 320 million, but it’s strategically important to one of the industry’s hottest vendors, as Salesforce.com pushes its “social enterprise” agenda, including its Twitter-like Chatter service. Radian6, a maker of social media monitoring and analytics services, has since become the basis of Salesforce’s Social Marketing Cloud, a collection of services it rolled out in November to help companies manage their brands and engage with customers across the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

AT&T and T-Mobile: The biggest tech deal of 2011 (USD 39 billion) is actually the biggest non-starter, as competitors, regulators, trustbusters, lobbyists, and politicians dig in to stop this merger of the No. 2 and No. 4 U.S. mobile carriers. AT&T said in November that it’s withdrawing its merger application from the FCC to focus instead on winning the antitrust lawsuit the Department of Justice had filed against it in August. Meantime, AT&T is reportedly trying to sell a sizable portion of T-Mobile’s assets to a smaller mobile carrier in order to sway the DOJ. AT&T’s incentive to compromise: It will owe T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom USD 6 billion in cash and compensation should the deal fall apart. Two telecom M&A deals in 2011 with more immediate implications for enterprise customers are Verizon’s USD 1.4 billion acquisition of cloud pioneer Terremark and CenturyLink’s USD 3.7 billion acquisition of cloud and hosted service provider Savvis.

Google and Motorola Mobility: Google’s USD 12.5 billion deal to acquire

informationweek february 2012

this Motorola spinoff, a maker of smartphones and set-top boxes, was the second-largest tech deal of 2011. The deal, which still must pass regulatory muster, is a clear sign that Google intends to take on Apple — and to a lesser extent RIM and Microsoft/Nokia — as a supplier of tightly integrated mobile devices, namely its Android operating system on Motorola smartphone and tablet hardware. Motorola’s extensive patent portfolio also appealed to Google, as it seeks to fend off Apple and Microsoft lawsuits claiming Android squats on some of its intellectual property. HP and Autonomy: This USD 10.3 billion deal was the biggest enterprise software acquisition of the year — too big, according to many pundits, as the price tag was almost 12 times Autonomy’s 2010 revenue. But HP’s CEO at the time, Leo Apotheker, since ousted and replaced by Meg Whitman, needed to make a splash amid investor concerns that the hottest IT markets were passing HP by. And no question, Autonomy’s no slouch. It’s a leader in enterprise content management software — search, archiving, e-discovery, and more — helping customers make sense of their big (unstructured) data.

SAP and SuccessFactors: SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott told InformationWeek in October that SAP was ready to “let the tiger out of the cage” when it comes to cloud computing. Its USD 3.4 billion deal to buy SuccessFactors, a maker of cloud-based HR, recruitment, and collaboration software, announced a month later, opened that cage. And by naming SuccessFactors’ dynamic CEO, Lars Dalgaard, to head up its cloud business, SAP is finally moving beyond its roots as an on-premises software company and its half-hearted early attempt at SaaS, Business ByDesign, aimed at midsize customers. Expect SAP to move even more aggressively into the cloud, through acquisition or internal development — probably both.

Google’s USD 12.5 billion deal to acquire Motorola Mobility, a maker of smartphones and set-top boxes,is a clear sign that Google intends to take on Apple — and to a lesser extent RIM and Microsoft/ Nokia

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