InformationWeek February 2013 issue by Viraj Mehta

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Remote presence is the future t is always said that the real potential of a technology is achieved when organizations start looking at technologies or concepts beyond the traditional cost savings angle. Unified Communications (UC) is in a similar territory today. While recession initially powered the first wave of adoption of UC in India, the next wave of UC can totally transform sectors. As InformationWeek’s correspondents explore this theme in this issue, we found that UC is powering some innovative concepts and approaches. Take the case of Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, which recently launched a cross-campus technology initiative using technologies like telepresence and high definition video conferencing. Besides empowering research collaboration and knowledge sharing among the faculty and students, the initiative allows professors to conduct courses from any of their campus locations. As seen in this case, UC can be a big game changer for education, and enable institutions to take big strides in reducing the teacher-student ratio. Education is not the only sector — similar examples can be seen in sectors like pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing, banking and insurance. India Inc is also taking notes from the huge success of social networking platforms. Many enterprises are mimicking the features of social networking websites, and have started building internal enterprise social networks to facilitate collaboration. As UC technologies begin to mature, we can expect more such innovative examples. For example, during the recent elections in Gujarat, Chief Minister, Narendra Modi used 3D holographic projection technology to speak virtually at four cities simultaneously. Today, organizations typically use telepresence systems to communicate on a one-to-one basis. In the future, we can expect CEOs to use 3D holographic projection technologies to be present virtually in all places. And if you just had a smirk on your face thinking that technologies were no substitute for actually being in the office, think again! Today, a number of companies make telepresence robots that allow remote workers to not only see, hear and talk but also ‘walk’ in remote locations. The device which shows the face of the remote worker on a large video screen can be controlled remotely and made to walk and follow coworkers using its wheels (See article titled, ‘Attack of telepresence robots’ in this issue). While this is certainly ahead of its time, the possibilities are exciting. Doctors can monitor body movements of patients, while supervisors can navigate the shopfloor from a remote location. This is as close to teleporting that we can get today. We hope that you enjoy reading this issue, and continue to explore new and innovative ways of collaborating using technology.

While recession initially powered the first wave of adoption of UC in India, the next wave of UC can totally transform sectors

u Srikanth RP is Executive Editor of InformationWeek India. srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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contents Vo l u m e 2 | I ss u e 0 4 |

Fe b r u a r y 2 0 1 3

15 Cover Story How UC is transforming business processes across major sectors A number of major sectors such as education, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and BFSI are using the transformational power of UC to radically change their business processes

20 26

The emerging wave of enterprise social networks Companies like L&T Infotech, Cognizant, Persistent Systems and Sapient are leading the way in showing how businesses can use an enterprise social network to increase employee productivity, define workflows, and ensure greater collaboration and transparency Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

SoCloMo is new focus for UC vendors Growing acceptance of social media in the enterprise, and proliferation of smartphones and tablets is prompting vendors to add social, mobile and cloud-enabled features to their UC solutions

case study

36 37 39

7 lessons in social business Companies can learn from leaders in the use of social networking technology for business

Internet completes 30 years

By adopting Lync Server 2010 as its company-wide communications tool, KPIT Cummins has reduced communication costs by 35 percent

Exactly 30 years ago, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) switched from using Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol or TCP / IP — the basic foundation or the backbone for the Internet. Here are perspectives from eminent experts in the industry on how the Internet was 30 years back

feature

CIO Voice

Collaboration helps KPIT Cummins slash communication costs

6 steps to maximize your Unified Communications ROI UC vendors don’t like to admit how complicated it is to deploy today’s systems. Follow our plan to get the most out of your UC deployment

Attack of the telepresence robots! Several remote telepresence robots, which offer a “being there” experience have come to market over the past few years, and more are on the way Do you Twitter? Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/iweekindia

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3 transformational technology trends that we seem to be missing in 2013 Contrary to what most analysts are predicting, Udayan Banerjee, CTO, NIIT Technologies says that we are unlikely to hear success stories about Big Data in 2013 and that cloud will go down the “trough of disillusionment.” Banerjee details three transformational technology trends to watch out for in 2013

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

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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

interview 31 ‘Unified Communications on route to become pervasive’ Dinesh Malkani, MD, Collaboration Solutions, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cisco

interview 33 ‘Interoperability is the core need of the industry’ Marc Alexis Remond, Global Director, Enterprise Solutions and Market Development, Polycom

44 interview Can an Indian startup provide answers to global data center energy woes? Srinivas Varadarajan, CEO, VigyanLabs

48 interview ‘Connected devices will present new business opportunities for enterprises’ Kumud Kalia, Senior VP and CIO, Akamai

News

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

Oracle eyes huge growth from ‘democratization of BI’

INDEX..................................................................8 the Month in technology..................... 10

Red October claims 14 victims in India, says Kaspersky

[24]7 makes product debut with live chat solution

news analysis............................................. 14 opinion..............................................30, 61, 62 event.............................................................. 63

30 percent of businesses will be monetizing their information assets directly by 2016: Gartner

cio profile................................................... 64

Essar Group implements Sanovi DRM; cuts drill time by 75 percent

analyst angle........................................... 66

Social media apps expected to give CRM market new momentum

practical analysis................................. 69

secret cio.................................................... 65

global cio................................................... 68

down to business..................................... 70

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 7

Imprint

VOLUME 2 No. 04 n February 2013

Managing Director Printer & Publisher Associate Publisher & Director Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Principal Correspondent Principal Correspondent Senior Correspondent Copy Editor

: Joji George : Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar : Anees Ahmed : Brian Pereira : Srikanth RP : Jasmine Kohli : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) : Amrita Premrajan (New Delhi) : Shweta Nanda

Design Art Director Senior Visualiser Senior Graphic Designer Graphic Designer

: : : :

Marketing Marketing Head

: Samta Datta

online Manager—Product Dev. & Mktg. Deputy Manager—Online Web Designer Sr. User Interface Designer

: : : :

Deepjyoti Bhowmik Yogesh Naik Shailesh Vaidya Jinal Chheda, Sameer Surve

Viraj Mehta Nilesh Mungekar Nitin Lahare Aditi Kanade

Operations Head—Finance Director—Operations & Administration

: Yogesh Mudras : Satyendra Mehra

Management Service

: Jagruti Kudalkar

Sales Mumbai : Ranabir Das Manager- Sales ranabir.das@ubm.com (M) +91 9820097606 Marvin Dalmeida marvin.dalmeida@ubm.com (M) +91 8898022365 Bengaluru : Kangkan Mahanta Manager—Sales kangkan.mahanta@ubm.com (M) +91 89712 32344 Sudhir K sudhir.k@ubm.com (M) +91 9740776749 Delhi Manager—Sales : Rajeev Chauhan rajeev.chauhan@ubm.com (M) +91 98118 20301 Sanjay Khandelwal sanjay.khandelwal@ubm.com (M) +91 9811764515 Production Production Manager

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

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Editorial index Person & Organization Ashish Varerkar, L&T infotech...................................22 Anuj Bhalla, Wipro Technologies �� 60 Arun Shetty, Avaya India............................................27 Asheesh Raina, Gartner...............................................24 Ashish Pachory, Tata Teleservices............................59 CVG Prasad, ING Vysya Bank.....................................18 Dahnesh Dilkush, Cisco...............................................27 Dinesh Malkani, Cisco..................................................31 Dr R Venkateswaran, Persistent Systems �� 59 Fabrice Della Mea, Cisco Systems ..........................35 Hemal Shah, Dell India �� 57 Himanshu Goyal, IBM .................................................21 Himanshu Khanna, Tata Docomo...........................27 Janesh Moorjani, Cisco India �� 58 K P Unnikrishnan, Brocade �� 60 Katyayan Gupta, Forrester Research......................22 Kumud Kalia, Akamai...................................................48 Kunal Sinha, HealthcareMagic.................................50 Leslie Daigle, Internet Society..................................55 Mandar Marulkar, KPIT Cummins...........................36 Marc Alexis Remond, Polycom.................................33 Mohit Anand, Belkin....................................................24 Mukund Prasad, Welspun Group............................64 Neeraj Gill, Polycom......................................................27 Partha Iyengar, Gartner India ..................................56 Prasenjit Saha Happiest Minds Technologies �� 28 Prashanth Adiraju, Intel...............................................59 Prof. Bijendra Nath Jain, BITS Pilani........................16 Purshottam Purswami, Atos India .........................57 Radhakrishnan G, Biocon ..........................................17 Rajashree Natarajan, Cognizant.............................25 Rajat Sharma, Atul ........................................................16 Rohit Madhur, SAP India ............................................14 S Ramadorai, TCS �� 56 Sanchit Vir Gogia, IDC India.......................................25 Seemant Chaudhry, Citrix �� 58

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX

Shailesh N Davey, Zoho Corp...................................58

Company name Page No.

Website Sales Contact

Kyocera

www.KyoceraDocumentSolutions.co.in ContactUs@did.kyocera.com

IBM

3 www.ibm.com

stgflash@in.ibm.com

Ctrl S

marketing@ctrls.in

Subrat Mohanty, HDFC Standard Life Insurance �� 18

Interop

9 www.interop.in

salil.warior@ubm.com

Sunil Bhave, Fujitsu Consulting India �� 60

Siemens

23 www.siemens-enterprise.com india@siemens-enterprise.com

Sunil Dutt, RIM ...............................................................57

4 G World

Sunil Lalvani, RIM India �� 28

Cisco Microsoft

71 72

www.ctrls.in/mumbai-data-center

Shashank Upadhyay, Cognizant..............................22 Srinivas Varadarajan, VigyanLabs............................44

www.cisco.com/go/ucsbenchmarks www.cisco.in/servers

Vijay Mahajan, Mahindra & Mahindra...................19

www.windowsserver2012.in

Vint Cerf, Google ...........................................................55

microsoft.in/readynow

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News

T h e m o n t h i n t e c h n o lo g y Facebook’s Graph Search – your own personalized private social search engine Facebook undoubtedly holds a virtual goldmine of information. The real big advantage for Facebook is that this data is private, and cannot be accessed by any other competitor, such as Google. Facebook took a giant step to fully tap the huge potential of

this advantage by launching Graph Search — a feature that lets you find out information in a clustered or analytical way. The first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas: people, photos, places, and

interests. So you can perform simple queries to find people based on things they have shared with you, including their interests and profile info. Some examples are mentioned below: People: “Friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like tennis and live nearby,” etc. Photos: “Photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” “photos of my friends taken in New York,” “photos of the Eiffel Tower”, etc. Facebook has also clarified that Graph Search and web search are different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords.

Apple hits 40 billion app milestone Apple customers have downloaded more than 40 billion apps since July 2008, and that doesn’t include redownloads or updates, the company said. Almost 20 billion of those downloads occurred in 2012. Apple also said that it has more than 500 million active App Store accounts, a figure that’s particularly noteworthy when measured against the188 million active Amazon customer accounts. Eddy Cue, SVP of Internet software and services at Apple, in a statement said, “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.” Some developers

informationweek february 2013

certainly have been paid well, though according to research firm Distmo, a small number of top developers are collecting an increasing share of App Store revenue. In November 2012, according to the company, seven applications were responsible for 10 percent of Apple App Store revenue. Back in January 2012, 11 applications accounted for10 percent of revenues. Apple said that two leading App Store earners, game makers Backflip Studios and Supercell, received USD 100 million from Apple between them. For Apple, however, the revenue is good. To pay out USD 7 billion, Apple will have taken in USD10 billion in App Store sales, having kept 30 percent for itself.

RIM launches BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 RIM announced that BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, the newest iteration of the company’s mobility management platform, is available for download. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 preserves much of the management control offered in RIM’s now-retired Mobile Fusion platform, last updated in September. It also adds new capabilities for BlackBerry 10 and, with support for iOS and Android, refines its tools for wrangling the multi-OS environments many businesses and institutions have come to embrace. The product provides a single, web-based console that offers IT administrators the expected spectrum of management tools, including remote wipe and lock capabilities, the ability to push over-the-air updates to the workforce, granular user identity controls and an employee self-service portal for easier provisioning. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 also integrates two flashier features: BlackBerry World for Work, RIM’s new corporate app storefront, and BlackBerry Balance, which allows IT to control the corporate data on a device without interfering with the user’s personal content. Both features are desirable, particularly the latter, which many security professionals consider an ideal approach for handling enterprise data on employee-owned devices. The new capabilities will only function on BlackBerry 10 devices, though, making it unclear if the product will help RIM expand, or merely maintain, its current reach.

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Business Intelligence

Oracle eyes huge growth from ‘democratization of BI’ As competition intensifies, business analytics has become extremely important for organizations to gain insights from the massive amount of information being generated. With the need for faster decision making, organizations can no longer afford to restrict access to BI or analytics tools within the top management. Accordingly, many organizations are increasingly providing access of their BI tools to a broader audience, by making it easier for employees to access information via user friendly interfaces. “We see a big trend of democratization of BI. While earlier, usage of BI tools was restricted to the top management, today, we see usage percolating down to users,” says Vikash Mehrotra, Director EPM/BI, Oracle India A case in point is Indian Overseas Bank, which has deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to improve risk management and costing models to better allocate resources and minimize operational costs across branches. The bank has enabled close to 2,000 staff, including general, re-

gional, and branch managers, to make better decisions about where to place operational resources by analyzing and monitoring information — such as the status of customers accounts, changes to credit limits, loan repayment schedules, and income leakage — from core banking and treasury systems. Mehrotra also gives the example of the automotive sector, where dealers and salesmen today have access to BI tools, to enable them to make faster decisions. The suppliers to the automotive sector too have visibility of spare parts movement from the OEM to the various dealers. Similarly, in the FMCG sector, it is common to see the distributed sales force armed with BI tools on their handsets or smartphones. The opportunity for Oracle and other BI vendors is significant. For example, a NASSCOM and CRISIL report, states that the Indian analytics industry is expected to grow from the current level of USD 200 million and touch USD 1 billion by 2015. Oracle believes that this democratization of BI, where BI usage will grow

Vikash Mehrotra, Director EPM/BI, Oracle India

beyond the number of power users and involve thousands of people, will eventually transform the way BI tools are seen today. —Srikanth RP

Security

Red October claims 14 victims in India, says Kaspersky Kaspersky Lab recently published a new research report, which identified a huge cyber-espionage campaign targeting diplomatic, governmental and scientific research organizations in several countries, including India. What’s surprising is the fact that the attackers managed to evade detection of most antivirus products for more than five years. Explaining the finer aspects of the attack, Harry Cheung, MD- Kaspersky Labs Asia, APAC, said, “In October 2012, our experts initiated an investigation following a series of attacks that targeted the computer networks of international diplomatic service agencies. During this investigation it was revealed that this was a large cyber espionage

network. Our investigations show that the focus is on diplomatic, government agencies, research institutions, trade and military organizations, and the nuclear, oil, gas and aerospace industries. It is alarming that India has reported 14 cases of Red October. Our experts have discovered that files of various formats were stolen from infected systems.” Red October virus is sent through spear-phishing e-mails, and the e-mails are customized. Also, malicious e-mails included customized Trojan droppers. The malware has unique features that enable the attackers to “resurrect” infected machines. The module is embedded as a plug-in inside Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office installations, and provide the attackers a foolproof way to

regain access to a targeted system if the main malware body is discovered and removed, or if the system is patched. Additionally, it enables the attackers to steal data from mobile devices. Today, with the proliferation of mobile devices and adoption of cloud computing technologies, there could be potential vulnerabilities. “The cloud comes with its own share of security issues and there lies potential risk,” said Cheung. In the mobile space, Androidbased phones are more vulnerable to the attacks. Cheung said that enterprises must deploy updated antivirus software, patch operating systems, and use spam filtering and IPS. —Jasmine Kohli

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News IT- ITe s

[24]7 makes product debut with live chat solution In tune with its transition from pure-play business process outsourcing (BPO) to the products space, [24]7 recently launched a live chat solution that combines predictive and real-time decision making with Big Data analytics. The solution named [24]7 Assist is part of a larger family of cloudbased, cross-channel sales and customer service solutions powered by [24]7’s Predictive Experience platform. The chat solution is also the first product suite from the company globally and it has been developed entirely by a 175-member team in Bangalore, India. As part of its commitment to building products that improve customer experience, [24]7 plans to double this team in the next 7-8 months. Indicating good traction, the solution has already been signed up by seven clients from across verticals such as technology, telecommunications, financial services and retail. PC maker Lenovo and Australian integrated communications company, Optus, subsidiary of SingTel Group, are two of the referenceable clients. [24]7, which is on its journey of transitioning from a BPO to a product-focussed company, currently has a 60:40 ratio wherein 60 percent of the business comes from the BPO part and the remaining 40 percent comes from the innovative products space. The company aims to turn this ratio to

around 80:20 in the next five years, wherein the majority of their focus would be on the intuitive products, Shanmugam Nagarajan, Co-founder and Chief People Officer, [24]7 told InformationWeek. Interestingly, this shift comes at a time when emerging geographies such as Philippines have taken over the Indian BPO industry in terms of voice. From about USD 7 billion in 2009, the BPO market in Philippines is today valued at USD 11 billion, according to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines. Nagarajan admits that Philippines has indeed overtaken the voice-based BPO business from India and claims that their total number of employees in Philippines out number those in India, though the BPO industry in Philippines is just about six years old. In 2012, [24]7 acquired Voxify, provider of interactive voice response technology, and Tellme (acquired by Microsoft in 2007), hosted provider of speech recognition solutions to gain access to technologies that help in improving customer service. It was during this time that the company also underwent a rebranding changing its name from 24/7 Customer to [24]7 Inc. — Ayushman Baruah

B i g D ata

30 percent of businesses will be monetizing their information assets directly by 2016: Gartner The financial demands of storing and managing Big Data will lead 30 percent of businesses to directly or indirectly monetize their information assets by trading, bartering or outright selling them by 2016, according to Gartner. Many enterprises are starting to appreciate the real market value that their information assets have. However, the lack of expertise in handling Big Data and developing information products will create an opportunity for the growth of specialist intermediaries, acting as information brokers or resellers. “The need to justify the expense of accumulating and managing huge volumes of data has led many organizations to consider monetizing or productizing their information assets,” said Doug Laney, Research Vice President at Gartner. “For example, several retail-

informationweek february 2013

ers are already generating millions of dollars per year in incremental revenue by placing online their point-of-sale and other data for business partners to subscribe to.” Since many businesses are illequipped to introduce informationbased products, “information resellers”

will arise to help organizations develop and execute information asset monetization strategies. The opportunities for significant information-borne income will lead makers of web-connected products to ensure their offerings collect as much usage, location and system data as possible. One issue arising from the trend toward monetizing information assets is that traditional database management system and BI products and implementations are not well-suited to sharing data in a subscription-based manner. The implication is that new forms of the technology are emerging, focusing on cloud-based implementations that enable subscriber-based access and restricted access to segments of data. — InformationWeek News Network

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S o f t wa r e

Essar Group implements Sanovi DRM; cuts drill time by 75 percent Essar Group has implemented Sanovi DRM across critical corporate IT applications for recovery readiness. Covering critical ERP functions, the Sanovi DRM Suite is implemented across Essar’s primary and DR locations. Essar’s Oil & Steel division runs its production on SAP and its production planning on I2 applications. “The business has mandated a Recovery Point Objective of one hour and a Recovery time Objective of five hours, which the Corporate IT team was finding hard pressed to deliver before the Sanovi solution was put in place,” said Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT – Infrastructure, Essar. The DR solution for Essar aimed at overcoming the challenges faced by Essar, viz, lack of realtime monitoring of DR readiness,

incident management, application level replication of processes, as well as database. Sanovi DR solution automates the DR drills reducing dependency on expertise of individuals and significantly cutting down complexity of the processes. The unified DR management delivers real-time DR readiness validation and offer clear business and operational advantages. “The implementation of Sanovi’s DRM solution had major implications for our Disaster Recovery service operations. This function-rich tool has considerably reduced the effort for regular DR setup monitoring, management, report generation and DR drill activity. Our drill time per-cycle has gone down from 16 hours to four hours, and the team size deployed for managing the drill is

Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT – Infrastructure, Essar

reduced from 8 to two engineers,” said Prabhu. Essar has also streamlined its DR processes and increased its frequency of holding DRM drills to twice a year. — InformationWeek News Network

S o f t wa r e

Social media apps expected to give CRM market new momentum Organizations are unleashing the power of social and using the social media to transform their business processes and systems. Today, the way businesses are conducted regardless of geographies and boundaries, requires the enterprises to be connected on the go. According to a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, ‘The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,’ twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. According to the report, by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers — high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals — by 20 to 25 percent. Oracle believes in the huge potential of this medium and has accordingly drafted out a detailed strategy to address this market. Sunil Jose, VP-Applications, Oracle India says that while CRM as a technology is not new, Oracle’s CRM strategy, is to look at processes and technology, which are architected together to manage customer relationship by extracting the greatest value that a customer can see. Jose believes that we

are embracing a shift to Social CRM. “Today, instead of managing customers, we have to facilitate, collaborate, with customers, and have a dialogue with them — that’s exactly what social CRM is about,” he says. Social CRM can provide a more accurate and complete view of the customer by extending CRM capabilities to enhance collaboration and provide relevant, real-time insight from both internal and external sources. “Social media-enabled applications are expected to give the CRM market new momentum,” states Jose. With the proliferation of social media and increasing use of mobile devices, Social and mobile CRM are the top two trends expected in the CRM market in 2013. However, we will see more enterprises investing in social CRM and social relationship management (SRM) solutions as they get more popular. With mobile CRM, enterprises will be able to manage key customer relationships data in real time from handheld devices. The power of social technologies is pervasive and will be a challenge for organizations that refrain from implementing it. —Jasmine Kohli

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 13

News Analysis

SAP taps niche areas in cloud to grow beyond traditional base ERP giant SAP is tapping niche areas in the cloud arena such as sentiment analysis and travel management to grow beyond its traditional ERP base By Srikanth RP The immense potential of the Indian SMB market is well known. Market research firm, Zinnov, says that with over 50 million units, India has the largest number of SMBs across the world. While a majority of SMBs have global aspirations, they are way behind in technology adoption, a vital parameter for competing against global players. A majority of SMBs seldom adopt technology as it is either too expensive or too cumbersome to deploy. The cloud is a perfect technology for SMBs as it gives them the ability to conserve cash, and scale without technology infrastructure restrictions. Like other mainstream enterprise application vendors, ERP giant, SAP, has been quick to recognize the potential of this market, and has accordingly started offering a slew of options using the cloud route. The firm initially started offering solutions using the Business ByDesign (BYD) model and Business Intelligence (BI) model designed for the SMB sector. Today, as the demand from this sector has grown rapidly, SAP is expanding its cloud solutions portfolio. The firm has launched a new range of offerings including CRM OnDemand, Financials OnDemand and SAP Social Media Analytics. Rohit Madhur, Director- Cloud, SAP India, states, “We have structured our cloud portfolio into four major pillars: People, Money, Customers and Suppliers. All solutions under each pillar will be tightly integrated with each other. Customers also have the option of using these solutions as standalone offerings.” This strategy is in line with SAP’s thinking that enterprises may want to use new cloud-based applications in only one or two functions, such as HR or sales. These companies may want to

informationweek february 2013

“Sales and marketing departments can use sentiment analysis to better analyze customer sentiments to launch or cocreate products with customers”

Rohit Madhur

Director- Cloud, SAP India

use niche-based applications wherever there is a requirement. This positioning has helped SAP gain market share in several niche areas, where there is huge potential. For example, consider a simple solution such as TravelonDemand. The solution lessens the pain of business travel by providing an easy and efficient way to manage business travel, and manage travel from the pre-trip approval to the expense reporting stage. “Many large companies are surprised to see their cash flow being impacted, when suddenly employees file their expense reports in the last quarter. If an organization has a cloudbased travel expense model in place, then it can better predict the cash flow. For some companies, this can make the difference between a profitable and loss making quarter,” states Madhur.

Social power

SAP also sees huge potential in the sentiment analysis space. This solution lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs, and combines the information with CRM. “Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool and can be used by sales and marketing departments to better analyze customer sentiments and use this intelligence to launch or co-create products with

customers,” states Madhur. He says that as social media offers an opportunity to get unsolicited and genuine responses, organizations can get qualitative data at a fraction of the cost of doing traditional surveys. For example, a product company can better understand different ways their products can be used or the new categories where customers are expecting products. In this space, SAP has already signed names, such as HT Media, Luminous power and Zee Interactive. In addition, SAP sees a lot of potential in SMBs, which have not adopted technology solutions and are the right target for its full suite of ERP solutions. The firm already has a list of customers in this space such as Genotypic Technology, Ace Data Devices, Zinnov, iSat Network, Mithila Cars India, Yashas FRP Manufacturing and Asian Oilfield Service. With a huge base of installed customers to which it can sell niche cloud-based solutions, and a growing list of SMB customers, which Gartner estimates to be around 30 percent of the USD 79.8 billion IT spending market in India, SAP is well positioned to be a serious player in the cloud computing market in India. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Cover Story

How UC is transforming business processes across major sectors A number of major sectors such as education, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and BFSI are using the transformational power of UC to radically change their business processes By Jasmine Kohli

uring the recent state elections, various state ministers carried out rallies, speeches and campaigns in order to reach out to the masses and propagate their partyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agenda. Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat was altogether on a different cliff. Apart from the routine rallies and speeches, he chose to address the masses in four cities simultaneously by leveraging the power of technology. Narendra Modi intelligently

used technology and launched his election campaign for the assembly by addressing rallies in four cities simultaneously from a studio in Gandhinagar. Modi made a virtual presence in the four cities: Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot and Surat, with the help of 3D holographic technology and satellite link-ups Breaking away from the chains of traditional campaigning, Modi embarked upon the journey of virtual world, thereby defying all distance and time barriers. Why are

we talking about Modi in an article about Unified Communications? Simply, because, like Modi, many other Indian enterprises are using the technology to better communicate with employees, suppliers, partners and even customers in an increasingly connected world. If Modi had to use the traditional route, there was no way he could have physically reached out to a large audience. But by using a communication technology, he could virtually address more than 80 rallies

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Cover Story with more than 20,000 people in each center. This is simply the power of communications enabled by technology. Today, Unified Communications (UC) has become all pervasive, and has percolated to every business function. Not only has UC marked its footprint in politics but in other sectors too such as education, banking, insurance, and manufacturing. The power of Unified Communications allows people to communicate with one another, anywhere, anytime and on any device. To explore more about how UC is being used to gain competitive advantage, InformationWeek spoke to a few CIOs from various sectors to gauge how they are using the technology in their various spheres of business. We take a first look at education, where the power of UC can significantly alter the way education is being imparted in the country.

Education on transformation cliff

The Right to Education (RTE) Act-2009 mandates that there should not be more than “40 students per teacher” in a classroom. The challenge that confronts the education system in India is shortage of trained teachers. According to a Technopak Education Outlook report, “India will require 6 million more teachers by 2020 to attain the world average in terms of student-teacher ratio. This would mean a requirement to train 0.75 million teachers per annum, as against this the total capacity of all B.Ed. Colleges currently is only 0.25 million per annum.” Prof. Bijendra Nath Jain, Vice-

We use UC to conduct weekly meetings, and do generic interactions, as well as to conduct interviews and screening of candidates Rajat Sharma President – IT, Atul

Chancellor, BITS Pilani, explains with the help of an example. He says that the shortage of faculty members is two-pronged. First, the number of faculty members, who are adequately trained and qualified to teach courses and offer programmes to an increasingly large number of students is small. Secondly, he opines that the teaching population’s average age is way beyond 35-40 years. In the context of education and research in India, the major challenge is to get good quality faculty who would be able to teach courses and offer programmes to an increasingly large number of students. Jain explains this with a hypothetical example, “If I had 11,000 students and say 550 teachers, then the student ratio is 20:1. Now, if the number of enrollments increases to 15,000 students, then I need to employ 750 faculty members to maintain the same ratio of 20:1. This implies that I need to hire 200 more faculty members. This is a big challenge. Although in the next 2-3 years, I can hire 200 more faculty members, I have another challenge. The other challenge which confronts me at the same time is that 80 -100 of the faculty members will begin to retire. So, while looking for new faculty members, we also have to take

Telepresence reduces requirement for faculty members for running specialized courses, enabling them to spend more time in research Prof. Bijendra Nath Jain Vice-Chancellor, BITS Pilani

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into consideration the attrition rate as a result of retirement. So this becomes a huge challenge for us to expand our opportunities that we offer to young people in the country.” Qualitative education across the spectrum can be imparted with the usage of UC and technology can play a role to address this issue to a great extent. A case in point is Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, which along with BITSAA, its global alumni association, launched a first of its kind multi-million dollar cross-campus technology initiative named BITSConnect 2.0. Pioneering a unique model of multi-campus education in India, the initiative comprises immersive telepresence, high-definition video conferencing and live streaming technologies that are set to transform the learning experience by connecting all campuses at an unprecedented scale. The telepresence system provides avenues for research collaboration and knowledge sharing among BITS’ faculty and students, and for faceto-face communication between members of BITS’ leadership. This semester, BITS Pilani will offer more than 14 specialized electives to thousands of students across its campuses by professors working from any of its campuses. To collaborate, faculty and staff no longer need to travel for running 14 specialized courses in three campuses. Jain explains, “Traditionally, I would require 42 faculty members, whereas with telepresence, I need only 14 faculty members to conduct the course. So, my requirement for faculty members will reduce by 28, and these 28 faculty members can

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spend more time conducting research, as India needs an academicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s expertise in different topics. These academicians from across the world will be able to collaborate and mentor research projects in BITS via immersive telepresence.â&#x20AC;? Thus, UC can be a game changer for education. Going forward, UC can help institutions make big progress in reducing the teacherstudent ratio. Education is on the transformation journey where technology has made deep inroads. Many institutions are also exploring the option of delivering education via video. Today, delivering education to multiple schools through video gives a leeway to deliver the best expertise to the remotest corners of the country. The brick and mortar model of teaching does prevail but with technology the experience will be enhanced as its reach becomes pervasive. Students can interact with teachers across boundaries.

UC dose boosts pharmaceuticals sector

Indian pharmaceutical industry boasts to be the third largest producer of pharma products by volume and is

We can invite people to meetings via the conferencing tools and resolve a query at any point of time and avoid schedule overruns Radhakrishnan G CIO, Biocon

pegged at USD 20 billion. The industry is expected to grow at 15-20 percent annually. As India tries to position itself as a global pharmaceutical hub, a host of Indian companies are trying to use the power of Unified Communications to improve their operational efficiencies. Most pharmaceutical companies regularly collaborate across R&D and manufacturing setups for developing and monitoring product development. Unified Communication tools are a perfect fit as they improve business processes and cut down time. Many pharmaceutical companies are also discovering the power of UC tools to cut down on training related time for new products. UC tools are also being used to collaborate in a better way with suppliers and

external partners. The challenge of collaboration is critical as the pharmaceutical industry faces the challenge to drive innovation, while also reducing costs. Typically, companies in this industry face challenges in collaborating with clients, customers, and multiple offices for product development and R&D work, and in having discussions with multiple teams, groups and departments. Today, with the proliferation of Unified Communications, it does not matter where one is, as one can conduct virtual meetings, save time, incorporate changes and take faster decisions. Research in pharma is taking place on a global scale and travel comprises a large part of the

Sector Examples of companies using UC Education

Using telepresence system, this semester, BITS Pilani will be offering 14 specialized electives to thousands of students across its campuses with just 14 teachers, as compared to 42 faculty members it would have required earlier

Manufacturing

With the help of telepresence facility deployed at all offices, Tommy Hilfiger is now able to approve designs in a single day, as compared to 50 days it took earlier

Banking

Using applications like instant messaging, web meeting and audio meeting, ING Vysya Bank has reduced the need to rely on e-mails, as users can have group discussions in case business requirements emerge

Pharmaceuticals

Using interactive whiteboards, Biocon has improved the process of launching a new product

Insurance

HDFC Standard Life Insurance deployed UC to roll out its transformation programme in retail distribution channel, which is going to impact 400-500 odd braches and about 7,000-8,000 people

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Cover Story budget. Earlier, many hours were lost every year due to the time involved in travelling but today with the integration of technology into business, pharma companies can use those hours more productively. “Today, with interactive whiteboards, we are able to sign-off at every stage of development without the relevant people needing to get together in the same room. This has improved the process of launching a new pharmaceutical product,” says Radhakrishnan G, CIO of India’s largest biotech company, Biocon. With UC, the team at Biocon can view and annotate documents, and review and share notes at any point of time, thus eliminating the chances of details being misinterpreted. “With UC, we can call in experts for consultation at any point of time and avoid schedule overruns. Regardless of the platforms being used, we can invite people to meetings via the conferencing tools and resolve a query,” explains Radhakrishnan. This can be seen from the fact that many of the foreign scientists at Biocon use video conferencing for communications. Biocon also uses UC extensively for training purposes.

UC drives efficiencies for manufacturing sector

For manufacturers ‘time is money’ and time to market helps them gain an immediate competitive advantage. Many enterprises in the manufacturing vertical are confronted with the challenge to collaborate effectively and take decisions on the manufacturing innovation and streamline designs and production processes.

We used UC to roll out a large transformation programme in our retail distribution channel, which will impact 400-500 branches Subrat Mohanty,

Executive VP, HDFC Standard Life Insurance

A case in point is Tommy Hilfiger — the company’s team spent a lot of time travelling, attending meetings, sourcing fabrics, reviewing designs and approving designs in the far-flung areas. It used to take 50 days to approve the designs. Today, with the help of telepresence facility deployed at all Tommy Hilfiger offices, the staff meets in the designated virtual fitting room and then approves the designs in a single day. This saves time spent in travelling and improves productivity. Similarly, by implementing a highdefinition telepresence system, Eaton Corporation has reduced the overall operational costs and administrative overheads involved in arranging visas, travel and stay of the participants of a company meeting. The solution is enabling employees across the globe to collaborate and participate in team meetings. This is helping the company in taking quick decisions, which in turn enables it to introduce or release products faster. Post deployment of the solution, the company has registered great improvement in employee productivity, due to huge amount of time saved in travelling. The firm has already realized cost savings of ` 2.21 crore. Another example is that of

UC solutions enable users across departments to communicate with each other and avoid delays or compliance issues CVG Prasad

Chief Information Officer, ING Vysya Bank

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Mahindra & Mahindra, which uses UC for collaboration, file sharing, virtual meetings and for design collaboration. “Design collaboration is at a nascent stage. We use UC for design collaboration with our suppliers. Earlier, designs and drawings were shared with suppliers via e-mail. Typically, back and forth e-mail interaction led to loss of time and productivity. Now, with a common platform, we upload the design on the site and suppliers are able to view it; we are using our IM framework and people can collaborate well and view the design and suggest changes and incorporate the same in real time,” states Vijay Mahajan, Senior General Manager, Corporate IT, Mahindra & Mahindra. This collaboration has resulted in reduction of lead time for product development. Powered with the IM framework, it has helped the company in improving the quality of its decisions. The UC deployment at Mahindra is well-integrated with the mobile platform. “UC along with video is changing the way we work. The physical office concepts are changing; we are working with HR for flexi hours, and work from home options. The concept of UC anywhere is making this happen,” says Mahajan. Another case in point is Atul. The firm has manufacturing plants in various locations, and uses the power of UC to collaborate in a better way. “We use UC to conduct weekly meetings, and do generic interactions. We even use UC to conduct interviews and screening of candidates,” says Rajat Sharma, President – IT, Atul. The manufacturing sector is

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faced with constant pressure to remain profitable, as well as create new products and cut costs. This requires streamlining operations and productivity to improve innovation and shorten time to market, which can be achieved using UC. “With UC, we can gain deep visibility into supply chains. We can minimize the time to rework our processes, and enhance communication with employees. This leads to higher quality products and improved efficiency. This helps us take decisions with greater confidence and reduce or eliminate delays,” says Mukund Prasad, Group CIO, Welspun Group.

Banking on UC

In a regulated fiscal environment, Indian banks are dealing with multiple challenges such as risk, outreach in smaller towns and cities and a slowing economy. As new products get introduced in the market, bank employees at headquarters need to regularly collaborate with their branch colleagues to quickly exchange information. CVG Prasad, Chief Information Officer, ING Vysya Bank, explains this with the help of an example. “Banking has evolved rapidly over the last couple of years to address ever changing customer needs and compliance requirements. However, this has also resulted in complex process flows often requiring users across various departments to communicate with each other to avoid delays or compliance issues. Deploying solutions such as UC can surely improve employee productivity and increase collaboration.” ING Vysya Bank has deployed

With UC, we can gain visibility into supply chains and minimize the time to rework our processes. This leads to higher quality products Mukund Prasad

Group CIO, Welspun Group

Cisco CallManager solution along with Unity, Presence and meeting place solution. Applications like instant messaging, web meeting and audio meeting have provided users with facilities to get into a group and discuss, as and when business requirements emerge. This has improved user response and reduced the need to rely on e-mails as the only means of communication.

Insurance firms discover real potential of UC

Most insurance firms around the world are faced with key challenges across their value chains regarding customers, distributors, and workers. Insurers need to foster loyalty among the agents/brokers who distribute their products. The need to boost profitability through operational efficiency is critical. Insurance companies are using UC to collaborate in a better way across the entire ecosystem. “We use UC for training requirements, for interacting with distributors and for performance monitoring,” states Subrat Mohanty, Executive Vice President responsible for Strategy, Customer Relations, Persistency and Technology at HDFC Standard Life Insurance.

With UC, our suppliers are able to view a design and suggest changes in realtime, which saves time spent in back and forth e-mail interactions Vijay Mahajan, Senior General Manager, Corporate IT, Mahindra & Mahindra

Explaining the transformational power of UC, Mohanty says that the real power of UC was seen in a transformational project at his firm. “We ran a fairly large transformation programme in our retail distribution channel. This was going to impact 400-500 odd braches and about 7,0008,000 people. It was a 12 month transformation programme. We were changing a host of things in this programme — such as distribution structure, how we approach the customer and the kind of incentives given. The challenge, which confronted us during this transformation programme was that we could not be physically present at every center for the rollout. So we deployed UC to start rolling this initiative across the country,” states Mohanty.

UC percolating down to business processes

While UC has been used primarily for slashing travel costs, today, UC tools have been well integrated into business processes. Many Indian companies are using UC for design and architecture reviews, in large deal pursuits and for co-creating intellectual property. Using the same platform, many global companies hold virtual meetings for activities related to cross functional initiatives and discussions related to regional and global activities. In the long run, UC can be used effectively to deepen relationships with key customers, as many companies have done. u Jasmine Kohli jasmine.kohli@ubm.com

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hether it’s to update a status, ‘like’ a friend’s photo or browse through the stream of updates, logging on social media websites has become a part of daily routine for most of us. The trend is corroborated by Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, which says that consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites — roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile. Inspired by the success of such social networking platforms in the past few years, businesses are now replicating this model for designing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) that could connect company employees across different geographies and time zones. Businesses are exploring embedding of key enterprise-specific

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features like e-mail, locating subject matter experts, enabling discussions/ forums across domains, etc., within an ESN, thus, making it a common platform where exchange of ideas and information can take place seamlessly. This in turn would lead to increased employee productivity, transparency, and tangible business benefits for the company. The primary reason why ESN is gathering steam is the common understanding among technology solution providers and CIOs that the current generation, the Gen Y, is used to communicating through social media platforms and expects a similar, highly technology enabled workplace that promotes greater collaboration and faster communication. Due to huge demand from businesses, in the past few years, we saw quite a few technology startups emerging in the space of enterprise social networking. Following this, we

saw seasoned technology solution providers sensing the emerging ESN wave and acquiring startups in this space to appropriately equip their solutions portfolio. For example, Microsoft and VMware acquired Yammer and Socialcast respectively to tap into the emerging ESN opportunity. Certain technology vendors also came out with their own ESN solutions in the market. For example, Oracle’s Social Network, which apart from the standard social functionalities also includes business-specific pre-made integrations with Oracle Fusion CRM and Oracle Fusion HCM. Another example is that of IBM Connections, which not only includes all the regular features that an ESN should have — starting from the ability of building distinct user profiles, establishing connections, building communities, wikis, etc.,— but can also be integrated with existing applications

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via plug-ins.

ESN helps break down information silos within an organization and opens up the intellectual capital and content for employees

How ESNs can benefit enterprises

Imagine a Facebook-like ESN, complete with your profile, your connections and diverse closed and open work-groups, which you as an employee have to log into every day. It would not only be tightly integrated with your e-mails, but also with the key enterprise applications that you access, say for example, an ERP, HRMS or CRM. In essence, the ESN would become a single interface for conveniently receiving all the necessary work-related updates from various business apps. Consider a scenario where an employee applies for leaves on an HRMS system integrated with the ESN. The employee’s reporting manager would get an update about this in his/her ESN profile and he/she could approve it through the same window, without taking the pain of logging in separately on to the HRMS and repeatedly checking for any updates. This is exactly the kind of ESN interface that enterprises today dream of. The ESN serves as a vast virtual office tightly integrated with all the key enterprise applications and buzzing with employees collaborating in virtual groups to achieve their specific goals. However, without integration of the ESN with key business applications, such as e-mail, CRM, ERP and Microsoft SharePoint, the real benefits of an ESN can’t be tapped by an organization. “By integrating a social layer into common business applications such as e-mail, CRM, etc., an ESN provides teams and

Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager - IBM Collaboration Solutions, India / South Asia

communities with a seamless, up-to-the-moment view of what’s happening. This enables team members to dramatically reduce the time spent on e-mails, meetings and chasing down information, thus drastically improving productivity,” says, Vinod Krishnan, Director Sales Advanced Technologies, VMware. Traditionally, valuable information contained within business applications was kept in functional or departmental silos. ESN enables sharing of this valuable information across employees, resulting in more transparent, collaborative knowledge exchange across the organization. “ESN helps an organization break down information silos within an organization and opens up the intellectual capital and content so that employees can tap into this collective intelligence inside the organization, and thus improve productivity,” asserts Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager IBM Collaboration Solutions, India / South Asia. Giving us specific examples of how different teams within an enterprise could tap into the ESN according to their application, Goyal says that within an enterprise a sales team might use an ESN implementation to manage accounts more effectively, engage others in closing deals faster,

ESN enables team members to dramatically reduce the time spent on e-mails, meetings and chasing down information Vinod Krishnan

Director Sales - Advanced Technologies, VMware

and collaborate more closely with marketing. On the other hand, the IT staff and help desks, would use ESN to provide faster answers to technical questions, and the HR team would use it to increase employee engagement, improve learning and development, and create a dynamic knowledge base for all employees. Apart from this, corporate communications team could use this platform to improve organizational effectiveness by opening lines of communication and making it easier for employees to share ideas and find answers. “All of this results in in higher productivity, agility and innovation,” Goyal adds. Asheesh Raina, Principal Research Analyst Gartner India highlights that one of the major ways an organization can benefit from the ESN is by crowdsourcing ideas. That is, by enabling people from various geographically dispersed teams to virtually pool in their intellect through a common group to find solution to a specific project-related problem, rather than restricting it to a small team. This in effect shortens the traditional, long project lifecycles and directly benefits the business.

Early adopters

Decision of adopting an ESN within an enterprise and the way in which it will be utilized within an organization post-implementation, would largely depend on the kind of industry vertical it belongs to. “In India, product and software manufacturing companies and also professional services companies, like advertising firms are at the forefront of ESN adoption as many of them are currently utilizing

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Cover Story this platform to crowdsource ideas by pooling in collective intelligence of employees sitting in various geographies, primarily for brainstorming, ideation and collaboration to develop a product or an idea,” informs, Katyayan Gupta, Analyst & Connectivity Lead, Asia Pacific and Japan at Forrester Research. This is precisely the trend that we are witnessing in India, when it comes to ESN adoption. Let us now look at some Indian enterprises that have successfully implemented an ESN within their organization and are reaping its business benefits.

L&T Infotech’s CliquePoint

L&T Infotech has built its ESN solution, called CliquePoint, using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Through this implementation, the company has achieved two critical benefits: decrease in the number of e-mails sent across the enterprise and improved efficiency of drafting Request for Proposals (RFPs). “One of the most important concepts that we implemented within CliquePoint is that of closed communities, named ‘Ventures’ which

Currently, product and software manufacturing companies and professional services companies are at the forefront of ESN adoption in India Katyayan Gupta, Analyst & Connectivity Lead, Asia Pacific and Japan, Forrester Research is essentially a closed virtual group consisting of only those employees who are working on the same RFP or project. Today, all the RFPs are co-authored within these venture groups, thus presenting only one version of truth, unlike the previous scenario where there were multiple edited versions of RFPs transferred through e-mails, which was very cumbersome to compile in the end,” says Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager & Head - Microsoft Practice, L&T Infotech. Varerkar also elaborates on the workflow system that is integrated with CliquePoint, where there is a staging area that displays the status of all the RFP documents. Once the documents are co-authored, reviewed and approved, they enter

Company Name

Business Benefit of ESN

Cognizant

Better collaboration between geographically dispersed teams, by tracking the ‘Activity stream’, which reflects regular updates of recently performed project-linked activities by other teammates. 15 percent improvement in productivity

L&T Infotech

Belkin

Persistent System

Sapient

Decrease in the number of e-mails sent across the enterprise Improved efficiency in drafting RFPs Geographically dispersed teams can suggest innovations or upgrades for new or existing products Salesforce Chatter used by sales teams as a work tool to streamline sales communication and as a resource bank for best practices, promotion plans and client history Reduction in the management efforts and infrastructure costs by 30 percent Reduction in the time spent on management and execution of events by 20 percent due to increased collaboration Client-facing and internal teams use common collaboration spaces for sharing project-specific news and processes, and for gathering inputs on client deliverables

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a pre-publishing area and then a publishing area, thus going through a structured workflow. In the near future, the company plans to integrate its social collaboration platform with the backend line of business applications, like CRM and HRMS and get feeds from these applications to stream in directly on the ESN home page.

Cognizant’s C2

One of the pressing needs for Cognizant, a provider of IT, consulting, and BPO services was that the software projects that the company undertook for its clients demanded a global talent pool, cutting across diverse geographies to keep the delivery apace with changing business needs. Doing so required an ability to flow work seamlessly, exchange information and coordinate tasks well beyond levels seen today. To aid this, Cognizant implemented a company-wide, Web 2.0-based program management and knowledge sharing platform called Cognizant 2.0 (C2) in 2007. Giving an example of how C2 has enhanced collaboration between teams seated in different geographies, Shashank Upadhyay, Associate Director, Knowledge Management Team, Cognizant says, “We are a highly distributed team and I am based in Pune with a majority of my team members located in Chennai. Cognizant 2.0 enables me to see what’s really happening at any given point of time in the project or my network, just by looking at my ‘Activity stream’, which is essentially a list of recently performed activities by an individual on a website/network.” Benchmarking study within

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Cover Story Cognizant clearly shows that the projects that used C2 effectively performed better than those that did not. “There was 15 percent improvement in productivity in projects that used C2 effectively over the average value of productivity across projects. Also, there was 8 percent improvement in the ability to deliver projects on time and 7 percent improvement in the ability to deliver on-budget,” says, Rajashree Natarajan, Vice President, Knowledge Management, Cognizant. “C2 has not only helped us connect with employees across demographics, and communicate widely on a common platform, it has also helped us win deals, increase client stickiness and improve employee retention. It makes work more fun by giving a ‘social’ flavor and gives us an assurance that there are people to assist in times of need,” she adds.

Using ESN, our employees from any geography can suggest innovations or upgrades for new or existing products Mohit Anand

Managing Director, Belkin India Sub-continent

are now seamlessly merged and available on the company’s internal social network, called as Persistent Social. Some of the tangible benefits that the company experienced post implementation of ESN included reduction in the management efforts and infrastructure cost by 30 percent, and reduction in the time spent on management and execution of events by 20 percent due to collaboration through dedicated forums for such events.

Sapient’s Vox

Persistent Systems’ Persistent Social

Persistent Systems, a product outsourcing company, felt a pressing need for a unified communication stack that could integrate with the company’s existing systems, which included telephone, e-mail and video conferencing, besides wikis and newsgroups for information exchange. The company chose Cisco WebEx Social, an enterprise collaboration platform, which could provide benefits of social networking along with unified communications, business information and content management systems. Also, the company’s internal platforms such as Akshara, Knowledge Management platform and the wiki

Sapient, a global professional services company, is another example of an enterprise, which has successfully deployed an ESN. In the year 2010, the company launched Vox, its internal social network primarily to store and tap into the collective knowledge across the global teams. Most of Sapient’s content exchange on Vox today is related to the work it does for its clients. For example, Sapient has dozens of communities, where people can ask questions, share advice and find training related to areas like specific technology platforms, project management, user experience design, and quality assurance. Additionally, many of Sapient’s client-facing and internal teams

ESN shortens project lifecycles by enabling geographically dispersed teams to virtually pool in their intellect to find solution for a problem Asheesh Raina

Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

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have created collaboration spaces for sharing project-specific news and processes, or for gathering inputs on client deliverables.

Genpact’s Glue

Glue is Genpact’s internal collaboration platform, which was formally launched across the company in mid-2011. It today boasts of about 21,000 people on-board, who constitute the entire management layer and above. The company claims that it has partnered with one of the largest social collaboration software providers and customized it for the specific company needs. It has all the Web 2.0 features, which includes spaces of communities to collaborate, in the form of groups and for sharing pieces of documents, videos and photos Before the implementation of Glue, the company was using Microsoft SharePoint for internal collaboration for many years. Hence, it contained a huge knowledge base built over time, which constitutes the entire intellectual capital of Genpact. Understanding this, the company integrated SharePoint with Glue and made all the information seamlessly available through the ESN. Subroto Gupta, Vice President - Corporate Initiatives, Genpact highlights that they have also tightly woven strong content moderation system within Glue, using which the company regularly monitors what is being posted where.

Belkin implements Yammer and Chatter

The manufacturer of consumer electronics, Belkin, has implemented Yammer as a collaboration platform

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for its employees, to help them raise questions, debate trends and discuss announcements that pertain to the technology industry at large. It’s also a major source of internal feedback on products and customer services. “We have been using the platform for approximately 1.5 years with over 60 percent of the organization being active on Yammer. This platform is proving to be a great knowledge exchange platform, allowing our employees from any geography in the world, who might not even be a part of the design team, to suggest innovations or upgrades for new or existing products,” says Mohit Anand, Managing Director, Belkin India Subcontinent. What is interesting to note here is that apart from Yammer, the company has also implemented Salesforce Chatter as a mandatory collaboration platform specifically for its sales team. “We use the platform as a work tool to streamline our sales communication and also as a resource bank for best practices, promotion plans and client histories. It gives the senior leadership an opportunity to stay updated with team and product performance and allows them to give timely approvals through workflows. Also, it enables team managers to transparently view the performance of their teams and concentrate their efforts where they are required,” says Anand.

How to ensure successful ESN implementation

Unlike the usual technology implementation projects, an ESN implementation involves bringing in a strong cultural transformation within the business. In this context, a business leader, ideally a CEO should

ESN not only helps us connect with our employees across demographics, but also helps us win deals and increase client stickiness Rajashree Natarajan

Vice President, Knowledge Management, Cognizant

lead and manage the ESN project, while the CIO and the technology team should lead the implementation and support of ESN. Sanchit Vir Gogia, Principal Analyst – Emerging Technologies, IDC India says, “You can have a great ESN tool implemented within the enterprise, but the usage cannot be mandated by a CIO, as he is a technology leader, who of course leads the implementation and support of ESN. Ideally, an ESN project should be headed and championed by a business leader, preferably the CEO, who makes adoption of ESN a corporate mandate, thus leading the organizations to become completely social.” A recent research report from McKinsey Global Institute highlighted that the usage of an ESN within a large enterprise, can improve the productivity of knowledge workers by 20-25 percent and that the total e-mail use by knowledge workers could be reduced by 25 percent, freeing up 7-8 percent of work week for more productive activities. This thought is also resonated by a Gartner report, which says that social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities and by the year 2014, social networking services will replace e-mails as the

An ESN project should be headed and championed by a business leader, preferably the CEO, who makes adoption of ESN a corporate mandate Sanchit Vir Gogia

Principal Analyst – Emerging Technologies, IDC India

primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of the business users. These research reports coupled with the ESN use cases enumerated in the story clearly indicate that a well-chosen and properly implemented ESN could drastically improve employee productivity. Though ESN adoption rate in India is currently very low, it is being observed that the enterprises are now in the analysis phase — trying to understand the benefits that an ESN solution can bring to their enterprise and drawing learning from the experiences of their peers who have implemented an ESN. However, before investing in an ESN, CIOs first need to judiciously analyze why an enterprise really needs it and what purpose it can achieve which the existing collaboration tools within the enterprise can’t achieve. Once the purpose is defined, CIOs would need to carefully sift through various offerings in the market and choose the one which best fits the ESN strategy of the enterprise. Going forward, more and more Indian enterprises would be contemplating ESN implementations. The employees will look at ESN platforms as a single window that not only allows collaboration between employees across geographies, but also enables tight integration with the pre-existing unified communication solutions and various enterprise apps like SharePoint, CRM, ERP or HRMS.

u Amrita Premrajan amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

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Cover Story

ollaboration is changing the way the world works. With advancements in Unified Communication (UC) technologies, organizations across the world are able to communicate successfully, evading all geographic boundaries. As organizations across verticals are using UC tools to better engage with their stakeholders and increase business productivity, vendors are witnessing new trends emerging this year that are changing the dynamics of enterprise communication. Trends like social, mobile and cloud (SoCloMo) are breaking down traditional boundaries, and changing

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the way enterprises interact with their customers and partners.

THE VISUAL POWER

As per a Cisco report, Internet video will constitute 70 percent of all Internet traffic by 2016 in India. According to Dahnesh Dilkush, Director, Collaboration Business, ITeS & BFSI, Cisco India and SAARC, it becomes imperative for businesses to focus on ways in which they can accommodate this popular and preferred mode of communication in their IT frameworks. The integration of video technology into UC makes communications more personal than

ever for geographically dispersed teams, letting employees have richer face-to-face interactions, even when they are separated by thousands of miles. Video enables businesses to both collaborate more efficiently and significantly reduce travel costs. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Business video allows global teams and customers to collaborate more frequently, efficiently, and effectively. And, telepresence can be easily credited with giving video conferencing a smooth and incredibly efficient avatar. The days where video conferences had to be scheduled in advance with an IT team on site to provide support are passĂŠ now. Single touch, ultra-HD telepresence

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has transformed it. The spaces between global workspaces have been substantially reduced in the bargain reducing the need for travel,” says Dilkush. According to Neeraj Gill, Managing Director – India & SAARC, Polycom, video conferencing is no longer an immersive experience with a telepresence system in a fancy boardroom. “People are video conferencing right from their mobile phones, tablets and laptops for casual collaboration.” In this way, visual and mobility will be complementing each other.

CONVERGED PLATFORMS

In fact, the need of the industry is moving towards converged platforms. The advent of smartphones and tablets has given the push for the adoption of multiple modes of communication with the customer. “There is a lot of interest in integrated solutions as customers are looking for mobility-based applications and solutions. The need today is integrating communication with social media so as to respond to business needs in real time. Today, business growth greatly depends on how well their systems are connected to the clients. Reachability and availability becomes critical for both sales and support. Hence, the need for anytime and anywhere reachability will increase. The access required will be via all modes of communication- social media, mobile, fixed line, web, e-mail, chat, etc.,” says Himanshu Khanna, Head –Enterprise Products, Tata Docomo. Analysts predict that leveraging social media in the enterprise and with customers will emerge as the most important UC challenge

This year will definitely see a huge demand for integration of UC elements like social media into the traditional sales, service and support channels Neeraj Gill

Managing Director – India & SAARC, Polycom

of 2013. The social networking revolution is presenting companies with a new collaboration challenge: how to connect the UC platform, which provides real-time and presence-based communications, with enterprise social networking services. “This year will definitely see a huge demand for integration of UC elements like social media into the traditional sales, service and support channels,” says Gill of Polycom. While integrating social media with UC can facilitate communication both within an organization and externally with customers, most organizations only use the basic UC applications such as web-conferencing or instant messaging, says Sunil Lalvani – Director, Enterprise Sales, RIM India. “Having a clear set of policies, proven strategies, and an existing support community can prove to be effective when aided by UC/social media technology.”

THE VIRTUAL LEAP

Virtualization is the next critical phase in unified communications and it’s predicted to be a huge draw, especially for SMEs. In fact, according to Nemertes Research, over 42 percent companies plan to virtualize their UC applications, signalling it as the next phase in deploying communications

As video is a popular and preferred mode of communication, it becomes imperative for businesses to accommodate it in their IT frameworks Dahnesh Dilkush, Director, Collaboration Business, ITeS & BFSI, Cisco India and SAARC

across enterprises. Avaya recently announced its new communications architecture called Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment (Avaya Aura VE) for virtualized unified communications applications. “This solution helps businesses accelerate and simplify open, mobile collaboration across their organizations using a virtualized architecture,” says Arun Shetty, Head – UC Sales and Consulting, Avaya India. Most vendors are offering more cloud-based solutions this year. Cloud-based UC solutions enable large, medium and small enterprises to leverage business communications services, including IP telephony, audio and video conferencing, mobility and unified messaging on a pay-per-use basis. Research in Motion (RIM) says that the BlackBerry success has been built largely on the basis of one of the most secure private cloud solution available, and it continues to enhance their portfolio of offerings this year. Tata Docomo also sees huge potential in the space and claims to be the first to launch Hosted Campaign Manager service for their customers who need not invest in any infrastructure and can use the resources hosted on the cloud. “This year, we intend to broaden our product portfolio in cloud-based services by launching range of new products like IP Centrex, Web connect service, hosted IVR, unified messaging apart from augmenting the bouquet of cloud applications,” says Khanna of Docomo. Likewise, Polycom recently introduced the RealPresence CloudAXIS, a suite of software that runs on the Polycom RealPresence platform in private enterprise clouds or public clouds. “It securely extends

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Cover Story Unified Communications market in India l

As per 2012 half-yearly estimates, the UC market for application performance in India was pegged at ` 1304.1 crore and the services market at ` 512.7 Crore Source: Frost and Sullivan

The market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.4 percent to touch USD 1113.7 million by 2018

Unified Communications market in India is currently growing at a CAGR of about 23.5 percent

The market will see investments pouring in from the SMB space, which in turn is expected to grow at a steady CAGR of around 16 percent

Over USD 1.5 billion has been spent on UC hardware and software solutions over the last 4 years.

Source: Frost and Sullivan

Source: Netscribes

Source: Frost and Sullivan

enterprise-grade video and content collaboration outside the firewall to other businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) via a browser to enable truly ubiquitous video collaboration at the highest quality, reliability, and security,” says Gill.

OPEN WORLD

In the real world, enterprises will not have all their IT solutions from the same vendor as evolution continues in this field of solution development. Hence, it’s possible that these solutions might not be able to communicate with each other freely owing to interoperability challenges. This is the major challenge that limits the widespread adoption of UC solutions among businesses. This also limits enterprises from a free mix and match of components. To address this issue, companies are launching products based on open standards. For example, Cisco has developed products that support

open standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). “SIP not only allows for VoIP communication but also supports video, presence and instant messaging,” says Dilkush. On similar lines, Avaya claims that its video collaboration solutions are differentiated by their simplicity, performance, scalability and broad interoperability with multi-vendor video conferencing solutions and devices. “Depending on the device, a single click or swipe can launch what we like to call a ‘no-drama’ video collaboration session. They also bridge H.323 and SIP environments to offer investment protection for those with existing video conferencing systems or those who want to take advantage of video right away, but are still looking at next-generation environments,” says Shetty of Avaya. Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), a new HTML5 standard framework that enables the sharing of video, audio, and data directly between

Having a clear set of policies, proven strategies, and an existing support community can prove effective when aided by UC/social media technology Sunil Lalvani

Director, Enterprise Sales, RIM India

informationweek february 2013

web browsers, is also emerging as a new trend. While many vendors are looking at how WebRTC is evolving, most have not adopted it yet. “We will definitely look to support WebRTC but at this point, it is still not in a matured state,” says Prasenjit Saha, CEO, IMS and Security Business, Happiest Minds Technologies. Networking major Cisco also does not have any products announced yet, but is actively working on the WebRTC technology and considering where it may enhance its products. In the coming years, the demand for UC systems within enterprises will grow exponentially, as the businesses need the flexibility of these systems to connect directly with geographically dispersed teams, business partners, clients, suppliers or other third parties, and support the growing demand for mobility within the enterprise. Proliferation of consumer devices and social media and collaboration are further contributing to the uptick in UC investments. The critical next step in the space of unified communications is virtualization. Vendors are also betting big on cloud-based UC solutions and launching several products to target SMBs.

u Ayushman Baruah ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

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Opinion

5 points CIOs must consider while implementing an enterprise social network

Katyayan Gupta

ESN is not just about a technology implementation but about a cultural shift

http://www.on the web How enterprise social networking aids employee collaboration Read article at:

well chosen and properly implemented employee social network (ESN) can drastically improve collaboration and transparency, resulting in increased employee productivity. In order to build a successful enterprise social network, a CIO first needs to clearly define the ESN strategy for the enterprise, based on which he needs to sift through various offerings in the market and choose the one which best fits his needs. Here are 5 points that CIOs must consider to build a successful enterprise network:

2. Integration of corporate directory with ESN

1. Develop a strategy around ESN

If 20 employees are talking about what could be done better in the office, the management needs to monitor it, take feedback and take timely steps. Business analytics has become very important in this context of analyzing the employee sentiments in a timely manner and taking the required action. To closely monitor the analytics reports and to monitor the content that is flowing within an ESN, a separate content monitoring team needs to be set up.

Before implementing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN), it is important for a CIO to understand the requirements of the enterprise workforce and then analyze the kind of ESN that would be relevant for the organization. Once that is done CIOs have to develop a strong strategy around what needs to be achieved through the ESN implementation within the enterprise and how to motivate employees to shift from traditional e-mails to interacting purely through the ESN. This is because ESN is not just about a technology implementation but about a cultural shift, where post-ESN implementation employees would have to log into a collaboration platform rather than logging separately into e-mails and other enterprise applications. So this includes investing not only in the technology but also in pushing the use of ESN into the daily lives of employees that includes training the employees and working with them so that they adopt the platform.

Enterpriseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corporate directory should be integrated into the ESN so that the entire society is brought on to the network and every employee has the potential to connect to any other employee within the enterprise.

3. Personalization

The ESN should have provisions to enable user-personalization so that the network doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t look like another one of the enterprise tools that the employees need to login every day.

4. Analytics and need for a Content Monitoring Team

5. Integration with UC and enterprise applications

One of the major questions that a CIO needs to ask is whether it is possible to integrate the ESN with various enterprise applications and the existing UC solutions within the enterprise. This is important as after implementing an ESN, the enterprise can position it as a single window to access a complete suite of solutions for collaboration and communication. u Katyayan Gupta is Analyst &

Connectivity Lead, Asia Pacific and Japan at Forrester Research

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Opinion

Social enterprise 2013: Opportunities and obstacles

David F. Carr

Big changes such as integrating social tools with business take time. Remember that in slow-moving revolutions, the persistent are as likely to be successful as the bold

http://www.on the web Enterprise social networks: Must-have features guide Read article at:

informationweek february 2013

he enterprise social networking revolution has been a long time coming, and I don’t expect it to arrive in 2013. Talk of a “revolution” implies big changes, which take time. Constellation Research’s Alan Lepofsky predicts 2013 will be a year for less talking, more doing, as the need to explain social business basics fades and more companies put social tools to work solving practical problems. “For product vendors, 2013 will be less about creating shiny new features and more about helping their customers (and prospects) derive real business value from their platforms,” he writes. Lepofsky sees social task management going mainstream, as well as more and better integration between social tools and enterprise business applications. More enterprises will see the utility in creating custom apps that use the metaphors from the cloud and social media to tie together business processes that span multiple systems. I won’t try to summarize his full set of predictions, but I’m happy to endorse them for the most part. I’m just not confident that we will see a dramatic change in 2013. The rate of adoption might accelerate, but it will accelerate gradually, in fits and starts, having to overcome resistance at each stage. Consider the issue of integration between social apps and line-of-business systems. There is the potential for standards to help, and I’ve been watching for signs for that since the introduction of OpenSocial 2.0 in August 2011. A year later, we’ve started to see some of the potential of that technology as implemented in products from Jive Software and IBM. But it hasn’t exactly become an overnight sensation. It’s more at the stage of something that “demos well” for Jive and might sometimes win it an extra customer or two. But is it a widely accepted standard with clear practical benefits? No way, at least not yet. In addition to technical issues

such as integration, the obstacles include cultural ones such as leaders who are unsure how much they want to embrace transparency and open debate within their organizations. One obstacle has arguably gotten worse. Number two on my list of obstacles, back in January, was overcoming the negative connotations of “Facebook inside your enterprise.” By that, I meant some business leaders looked at internal social networking as an invitation to frivolous time-wasting. At the time, we assumed many leaders also would want to emulate Facebook as a business success. When my colleague Debra Donston-Miller wrote about how the Facebook IPO affected social business, we thought for sure the effect would be positive for social business firms and social business initiatives. That was before the stock went public and quickly lost half its value, partly because of technical and procedural screw-ups, but also because of doubts about the company’s business model. As a matter of guilt by association, the idea of social business saw its stock fall as well. If Facebook did not live up to its world-beating hype, however, it continued to plug away at building its business and proving the naysayers wrong. Now there are signs that Facebook might know how to make money in mobile after all, and the recent upward trend in its stock price has short sellers on the run. If there is a lesson to take from Facebook, maybe that’s it — persistence and focus. Will 2013 be the year of social business? Probably not, but who cares? The real question is, will it be that for you? Will this be the year you show that you know how to put social software to work in a way that pays off for your business? If your competitors don’t figure that out in 2013, so much the better. u David F. Carr is Editor of The BrainYard

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Interview

‘Unified Communications on route to become pervasive’

Dinesh Malkani, MD, Collaboration Solutions, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cisco shares how UC is evolving from a boardroom technology to become pervasive. Excerpts from an interview with Jasmine Kohli of InformationWeek

What is driving the adoption of Unified Communications (UC) among the enterprises? The distributed nature of work today demands the workforce to be connected on-the-go be it on-premises with customers, in home, office or car. The workforce relies upon a variety of applications and devices that run over multiple networks and operating systems, which keeps them connected. In order to collaborate effectively, anytime, anywhere, and on any device, workers need a unified workspace that ensures a consistent communication experience — no matter where their work takes them. Enterprises are increasingly recognizing the need to support this new workspace, which has moved beyond desktop, and deskphones. Even with access to phones or e-mails, today’s highly mobile workforce struggles to collaborate with remote colleagues, as these communication technologies do not provide a meeting environment that is comparable to physical meetings. This is precisely why UC is emerging as the need of the hour. A lot of organizations are already reaping the benefits in terms of enhanced worker flexibility and productivity, decreased costs, and improved customer service by embracing UC technologies. How can organizations benefit by investing in UC technologies? Please share how UC can help in improving external collaboration along with internal communication? Internally, UC gives users the power to seamlessly collaborate with another person on a project, even if the two users are in separate locations. The user can locate the person by accessing an interactive directory, engage in an instant messaging session, as well as conduct a voice call or a video call.

To understand how UC can help in improving external collaboration, let’s take an example of an organization with a number of branches. A client walks into one of the branches in order to seek an expert advice on home loans. The challenge such businesses face is, an analyst with domain knowledge for each vertical cannot be present in every branch. In such a scenario, a client can call an expert on a real-time basis using UC. This way, an expert with his domain expertise can help the client channelize and plan investments and eliminate rounds of back-and-forth e-mails and phone-tag. The power to integrate communications and real-time inputs with enterprise applications provides an external justification to collaborate and improve communications. How mature is the market for UC? Which verticals are primary adopters of UC technologies? Today, UC is no more a boardroom technology, it has swiped across the enterprise and embarked upon the trend to be pervasive. UC has entered the mainstream and is emerging as a serious business imperative and many enterprises are realizing the benefits that UC bring to their business. UC is primarily more immersive within emerging markets. In India, the adoption of UC is 20-30 percent across verticals. Banking, ITITeS, manufacturing, and government verticals are higher on the adoption curve. This is primarily because these verticals have project teams based across the globe. Many companies within these verticals have already registered manifold reduction in travel expenses, improved staff efficiency and productivity, and streamlined workgroup and collaboration projects. For example, take the case of Tommy Hilfiger. Earlier the company’s team spent a lot of time in travelling,

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 31

Interview

attending meetings, sourcing fabrics, reviewing designs and approving designs in the far-flung areas. It used to take 50 days to approve the designs. Today, with the help of telepresence facility deployed at all Tommy Hilfiger offices, the staff meets in the designated virtual fitting room and then approves the designs in a single day. What is your take on the convergence of UC and social media? The pace of change in the collaboration industry is much faster than it used to be. This is due to the changing workforce, growth of devices, and industry megatrends like cloud, BYOD etc. Also, the culture of an enterprise is demanding the need for greater collaboration. There are many things that are collectively driving the change in the way people collaborate. One of them is social media — it has taught people to communicate with each other effectively. When UC and social will come together to workforce, they will do the same thing. What would be the significant trends in the UC space? Three major trends will emerge in the UC space — firstly, UC will become pervasive, secondly it would get

informationweek february 2013

integrated in the business process, and thirdly video will become as easy as voice. What is Cisco’s strategy to tap the Indian market? Please tell us about some of the solutions Cisco has in the UC space. We have charted an aggressive growth plan in India for 2013 as the adoption rate in India is very high. One of our UC solutions, Cisco TelePresence VX Tactical (VX Tactical), is designed to bring the power of telepresence to field environments. A remarkable feature of this unit is its ruggedness — it has water-, sand-, impact-, chemical- and corrosionresistant case providing portability and durability. It is a unit that offers the benefits of mobility through a portable briefcase-style form factor and is ideal for use cases such as military, emergency response, and other industries such as oil and gas and construction where field work is required. Our another solution, Cisco TelePresence VX Tactical, offers a total solution approach including content sharing, recording, firewall traversal, and management capabilities. It is designed to truly extend the power of in-person to everyone, everywhere.

Due to the changing workforce, growth of devices, and industry megatrends like cloud and BYOD, the pace of change in the collaboration industry is much faster than it used to be

u Jasmine Kohli jasmine.kohli@ubm.

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Interview

‘Interoperability is the core need of the industry’ Please elaborate on a few megatrends that are driving the adoption of UC. In the coming years, which trends do you foresee in the space? A wide range of social, technological and economic trends have been influencing the growth and adoption of Unified Communications solutions over the past months. These include the use of high-definition video technology for a more immersive experience leading to greater adoption of HD technologies over standard definition solutions, acknowledgement of the need for greener IT, awareness about the benefits of system interoperability, evolution of managed services, and adoption of UC by SMEs, along with large enterprises to manage time and costs. Over the coming years, we will see a trend in the UC space to create solutions that hinge on technological innovation. Demand for mobility, collaboration, social networks and increased interactivity will drive innovation in the UC domain. How is cloud playing a role in accelerating UC adoption? How is Polycom planning to tap into cloud-based UC solutions market? Cloud-based solutions will spur the growth of UC and will help deliver solutions to a wider audience of consumers. We at Polycom have been investing extensively on this front. And some of our key initiatives include the launch of our cloud strategy to enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, Videoas-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to our customers. In India, Airtel and Tulip are already using Polycom’s RealPresence Platform to deliver VaaS solutions to SMBs and enterprises throughout India. These solutions

While some vendors propose a “rip and replace” strategy, no single vendor can provide a true end-to-end solution alone, says Marc Alexis Remond, Global Director, Enterprise Solutions and Market Development, Polycom. In an interview with Jasmine Kohli of InformationWeek, he discusses why improving interoperability of UC is a priority for the industry february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 33

Interview provide a differentiated offering for both small and large companies and further help drive the adoption of video collaboration. What is your perspective on the interoperability of UC? We believe that interoperability is the core need of the industry, as no single vendor is able to provide all the solutions under one roof. And while some vendors propose a “rip and replace” strategy, no one can step in and provide a true end-to-end solution alone. Interoperability will help drive video growth in the future,

student administration, course development to curriculum delivery and content management. In India too these solutions are being used to bring students closer, as well as to expose them to new and relevant global discussions. For example, we worked together with Microsoft on a global learning project titled DeforestACTION, to celebrate World Forestry Day. The event brought together over 3,600 students from six countries, in three sessions, during the course of the day. This also included three schools from Gurgaon, New Delhi. The event helped students come together and interact

being substituted by browser-based and software-based solutions. Besides, video phone adoption in the country is also increasing with a view to provide a good video experience to the middle and lower management in the company. In this regard, the attachment rate of desktop video with contact center is expected to gain an upswing in the short- to medium-term of the forecast period. Also, desktop virtualization is gradually surfacing in the video space in India. In the medium- to long-term timeframe, desktop virtualization could be embraced more by small and medium enterprises and implemented

Cloud-based solutions will spur the growth of UC and will help deliver solutions to a wider audience of consumers unlocking greater value, flexibility and investment protection for multivendor deployments. It will take video everywhere irrespective of the platform or network. Interoperability will also enable service providers to deploy open cloud-based unified communication and collaboration services, giving customers the capability to communicate outside their organizations and across their supply chain to suppliers, partners and customers. According to you, which verticals are using UC extensively? Please share examples of some sectors in India that are reaping the benefits of UC deployments. Unified Communications has helped transform businesses across the spectrum. Healthcare organizations use secure HD video to fuel innovation through new and emerging healthcare applications and to enhance patient/physician relationships. Schools are using video collaboration for distance learning. Video technology provides rich, interactive, visual solutions that impact all facets of education from

informationweek february 2013

with fellow students from different geographies and learn about the impact of illegal deforestation on flora and fauna around the world. Today, our collaborative conferencing technologies have extended their reach to major government agencies, including 90 percent of the top 20 e-government agencies worldwide. Manufacturing is another sector that is extensively using video collaboration to reduce time-to-market for new products by bringing distant teams together for remote design, knowledge management and transfer, quality assurance inspections, and remote troubleshooting of products. Some of the marquee customers who have installed our UC solutions include IFFCO, Essar Group, and Bajaj Group. Virtualization for voice and video has not gained much traction. Do you think the adoption is slated to increase in the coming years? Is Polycom venturing into the space of virtualizing UC apps? As per the Frost & Sullivan report titled, ‘Video Conferencing Endpoints & Infrastructure Market in India CY 2011’, executive systems are increasingly

either on the public or private cloud. This would drive the growth of software-based desktop solutions in the forecast period and impede the growth of executive systems. Hence, we have been building virtualization solutions into the video network by integrating operational systems for scheduling, billing, provisioning, and monitoring through the industry’s most robust, open suite of APIs. Our product, PolycomRealPresence Virtualization Manager (DMA), is a networkbased virtualization application for managing and distributing calls across collaboration networks. Polycom RealPresence Virtualization Manager (DMA) platform utilizes a centralized Active Directory database for simplifying and streamlining account management, logging and monitoring, thus lowering operation and administration costs. Utilizing a highly reliable and scalable processing architecture, the RealPresence Virtualization Manager is an integral solution in the PolycomRealPresence Platform, which maximizes and leverages existing infrastructure and investment. u Jasmine Kohli jasmine.kohli@ubm.com

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Interview

‘Employees want to bring in their own enterprise apps to the office’

With social collaboration increasing in a big way, Cisco is betting big on its flagship social product, Jabber. In an interview with Amrita Premrajan, Fabrice Della Mea, Director, Product Management, Cisco Systems tells us about the increasing importance of collaboration platforms

What is your observation about the emerging BYOD trend and how relevant is Cisco Jabber in this context, for the enterprise? Few years back, the IT departments were in the push mode where they picked the apps and tools, which they thought the employees would be happy to use. Then they defined specific IT policies and pushed it to the employees. Today, we can see a clear trend where employees want to bring their own devices to work and want to bring in their own enterprise apps to the office. This is a challenge for the IT department, as it is expected to be flexible enough to adapt to the different requests from employees. So the companies are at an inflexion point from where two things can happen. Either the enterprise can fight back or it can really adapt itself, embrace these trends and empower the employees to actually pick their own devices and apps and be much more connected. Observing the BYOD trend, we made a bold decision from the product portfolio standpoint, to expand horizontally, supporting multiple operating systems and devices — running natively on each of the different platforms so that we adapt ourselves to the need of the employees and the users tap into the benefits of Cisco Jabber using the device of their choice. Through Jabber, we put the IM modality and VoIP full stack on to different devices and then we went one step further and put video capability on different devices, specifically on the iPad. We put a lot of effort on the video capability and usability part of this in an iPad, so that we have native interoperability with surrounding environment of collaboration tools. What it means is that, an employee can use his iPad, with Jabber to call into a telepresence, or call a colleague on to any video-phone. You have opened up Jabber’s Software Development Kit

(SDK). How has this benefited your customers and partners? We are really investing a lot in the SDK to give the full power to our customers and partners, to take the foundation of what we have and go at it and do integrations that they want to do. For example, there was a partner who took our product and did integration within Gmail, where with the Jabber SDK integrated within Gmail, the user can start a call or an IM or a video call. We also have some PoCs where we did integration with different technology vendors who were offering various enterprise applications that companies usually deploy. The reason why we did this is because we understand that we are currently at the crossroads of merging of collaboration platforms within the line of business apps, either home grown or from technology vendors, thus blending together and reinforcing each other. Within an enterprise, where employees generally spend their entire day within a particular line of business app, adding a collaboration platform can actually make it far more efficient and productive for the user. For example, say an employee has to work within an enterprise app within a financial services company, say a loan approval process, which includes multiple levels of approvals in the workflow. Now in a traditional situation, it is impossible to tell the progress of a loan through the chain of approval process. But, if you bring the Jabber SDK and the module underneath within this app, you can see the presence of the persons involved in the chain and send a quick IM to that person to figure out the reason for the issue. If the person is not visible online in the app, this issue can even be escalated to a supervisor, with the module sending an IM automatically to the supervisor. u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 35

Case Study

Collaboration helps KPIT Cummins slash communication costs By adopting Lync Server 2010 as its company-wide communications tool, KPIT Cummins has reduced communication costs by 35 percent By Jasmine Kohli

PIT Cummins, a global IT consulting and product engineering partner, is focused on co-innovating domain intensive technology solutions for manufacturing corporations, and especially focuses on automotive, Hi-Tech, energy and utilities, and industrial verticals. It partners with more than 150 global manufacturing corporations, including Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), semiconductor companies and Tier1 companies. Being in the global space, the company’s employees were heavily dependent on international calls and travel for business purpose, as most of the company’s business deals have an offshore/onsite model. This led to increase in travel and communication costs for the company. The company was looking at a solution that enabled high-quality communication and collaboration for employees spread across locations and also met the company’s requirements regarding its future expansion plans. “With limited usage of video conferencing and high expenses and lack of infrastructure space, we were looking at a solution, which could help us curtail rising costs and increase the collaboration and productivity of our employees,” says Mandar Marulkar, Head IT infrastructure, KPIT Cummins. To help its employees communicate better internally and reduce costs, the company deployed messaging and collaboration solutions based on Microsoft technologies. The company adopted

informationweek february 2013

“Today, users can call within the organization across locations using their laptops or desktops, at no cost”

Mandar Marulkar

Head IT infrastructure, KPIT Cummins

Lync 2010 and Exchange 2010 for better collaboration among its 6,000 employees spread across 15 locations globally. The entire transition to Microsoft Lync and Exchange 2010 was completed in quick time and without any hassle with the support of Microsoft Partner. Post deployment, the company was able to streamline operations and improve productivity as employees did not have to switch programs to make a call or join a meeting. “We integrated Microsoft Lync (Instant messenger, Live meeting, Group Chat), MS Exchange 2010, Outlook 2010 and IP Telephony running on Cisco Call Manager so that users can see presence and interact using single interface. With this, the users can call within the organization across locations using their laptops or desktops rather than relying on their mobile phones or traditional IP phones, at no cost,” says Marulkar.

Collaboration impact

The deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 has empowered the company with features aimed at web and online services like database availability groups, which automate database-level disaster recovery.

Today, KPIT employees can call from anywhere using their IM, and take part in live meetings (audio, video, presentation) from anywhere using their laptops. With the federation services enabled, KPIT employees can now interact with customers using Microsoft Lync and also do Instant Messaging with other third-party messengers using the same Lync client. The employees also have access to collaboration tools like desktop sharing. In addition, the company’s IT team is using Lync to provide IT support to the company’s employees globally. “Our IT team uses Lync very effectively for providing IT support to global users by taking remote desktop control from the centralized service desk,” informs Marulkar. The deployment of Lync has enabled the company to significantly cut down on travel and communication costs — the company registered 15 percent reduction in travel costs and 35 percent reduction in communication costs annually. u Jasmine Kohli jasmine.kohli@ubm.com

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Feature

6 steps to maximize your Unified Communications ROI UC vendors don’t like to admit how complicated it is to deploy today’s systems. Follow our plan to get the most out of your UC deployment By Jeremy Littlejohn

unified communications initiative, when executed well, can add significant bottom-line value while shaving costs for most organizations. Companies that implement UC poorly, however, tend to wind up with very expensive dial tone — and confusion about why they can’t get the expected return on their investments. For most, poor ROI is the result of one hard truth: UC vendors don’t like to admit how complicated it is to successfully deploy today’s UC systems and then get employees to actually use the bells and whistles. Converging data and real-time communications networks requires a significant amount of planning, and IT and business users must have a full picture of the challenges that come with UC. The good news is that CIOs can

ensure that their organizations get the most out of UC by following our six-step plan to maximize ROI.

Define Your Expectations

The goal of UC is to unify the multitude of ways in which employees communicate. This raises the question, How do they communicate? Write down the major applications and services in use, including version numbers, and note the applicable users, purpose, and average volume of communications per day or week. Most of this information can be gathered from the apps themselves, and it will give you a high-level picture of which apps and services are most important to your organization.

UC Implementation Skills Test Need to determine what can be done in-house and when you should hire help? Take our skills test, rating both current and expected future levels of expertise in seven key areas.

Define Your ROI Model

In our experience, the challenge is not in getting ROI, but in quantifying it. To prove that the expected return is being realized, define metrics before the implementation begins. Specifically, determine what costs and revenues were associated with the old way your company communicated, and then calculate how much IT lowered those costs and increased revenues through UC. Sounds simple? Well, it isn’t. But it can be done. The first step is to identify the communications methods used. Next, work through savings and revenue numbers to determine the ROI on a perapplication basis. One UC application may replace the soft and hard costs of several different communications functions. In addition, UC applications may enhance the value of, for example, video conferencing by making the service easier to use and adding features, such as whiteboarding, thus extracting more ROI.

today £ 1 quarter ¯ 2 quarters Skill level where 1 = No experience, 10 = Expert Task

Outsource, Partner, Own partner Transition

Understand and communicate dial plan components (i.e., class of service)

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Describe and work with major UC protocols (i.e., XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE, H.323, H.264)

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Manage helpdesk ticketing system with voice/telephony components

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Troubleshooting skills and tools for packet-level analysis

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

SLA monitoring capabilities

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Network QoS configuration and troubleshooting experience

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

End user training capabilities and experience

1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Organize for success

To successfully implement and utilize UC, you must bring together multiple realms — network, systems, storage and data center. For some applications, such as HD video conferencing, you will need to bring in the facilities team. When your vendor or integrator performs predeployment design and assessments, be sure to involve all of the areas that UC will touch. In short, the implementation and use of UC must be approached like any other application that your employees access. The network plays a very large role in the overall success of the project,

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Feature but the entire infrastructure must work together in order to get the full benefit — and, yes, ROI.

Get your house in order

Rolling out UC apps like voice and video means that you will be asking your network to handle a significantly larger share of business communications than it is currently carrying. Layering on chat, presence, contact center and other real-time traffic can be a strain. Checking your network’s readiness for UC is essential to successful deployment. Make no mistake — modern networks can handle UC. However, you will only get only one shot at turning these features on and getting your corporate users excited about using them, so don’t let the network trip you up. Some of the common issues that we see while providing analytics services for UC environments, such as transmit discards on congested interfaces, are potential showstoppers. These types of errors cause deployment problems and quality issues and ultimately slow adoption and result in lower ROI. Getting a handle on such pitfalls early on will give you have a far greater chance of getting your full suite of UC features working together, and of your employees and customers using them.

Realize that bandwidth is not the answer

Forget about your bandwidth — it gives you a false sense of security. If the first answer you get from your IT staff regarding the network’s readiness for UC is that your company has 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps of bandwidth, so things should be fine, watch out. This can be a sign that your implementation team does not understand all the factors that play into a successful UC deployment. You must evaluate the quality of your network, not just the quantity of bandwidth in it. Bandwidth is, of course, an important factor, but a slavish focus

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on it can cause the main culprits in network performance problems to slink by unnoticed. Problems like dropped packets, which are typically caused by simple duplex mismatches, clocking issues on serial interfaces or instantaneous overutilization, among other factors, should not exist in a UC-ready network, and if left undiscovered and untreated, would wreak havoc. Consider that an HD video call can show significant degradation with as few as two dropped packets — these links have to operate perfectly, regardless of bandwidth. IT must take the time to thoroughly evaluate network quality, even if you feel that you have plenty of bandwidth room to grow. Another area of concern is the behavior of applications on your network that are not associated with your UC initiative, such as network backups and IP video surveillance. Identify and profile these applications, which in many cases are critical to the business for such functions as loss prevention. Learn how they perform throughout the day. Users of these applications will likely experience some change in performance as you dedicate network resources to UC applications. Be aware of this and proactive about communicating what they can expect to experience, and provide contacts whom stakeholders can call should problems arise.

Do a dry run

Finally, map out the major logical and physical paths that your UC traffic will traverse, and then test those paths to make sure they can handle the additional load and still provide an appropriate service level to other apps on the network. You can do this simulation for a relatively low cost, and there is really no downside. Some concerns that a simulation will address include: WAN service levels: Are you certain that your carrier is giving you the service level that you’re paying for? MPLS, in particular, can seem like a black box that you feed traffic into, and

then watch it get shot out the other end. But what happens in between can be significant and should be considered a potential problem with your UC deployment until you can quantify that your WAN is functioning properly. Cost savings: Using the Internet and extranets for UC applications like small-office voice and non-HD video conferencing can provide a major cost savings for the UC deployment, but will they work? Can you depend on your extranet and the Internet to provide the level of service that you require for voice or video? In some cases, you may be pleasantly surprised. In fact, you may decide that even a decreased level of performance is acceptable for certain uses when you can see the complete cost/benefit analysis based on actual data. Plan, measure, organize,test Properly executed, UC can be a fantastic success. In order to make sure your deployment falls into that category, remember a few guidelines: > Plan well in the beginning, examining your current communications channels. > Define how you will measure success, and establish a baseline so you will know where your ROI is coming from. > Organize for success by pulling in all relevant teams, not just network and telcom. > Test your environment thoroughly, including the WAN, so that you’ll know exactly what issues you have, and correct problems before you deploy UC applications. Unified Communications applications offer your organization tremendous opportunities to enhance and improve the customer and employee experience. At the same time, you can — and should — expect to lower your overall communications costs. How long it takes for that to happen will depend heavily on how quickly you can get past dial tone and on to using more advanced applications, like video and presence. Source: InformationWeek USA

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Feature

Several remote telepresence robots, which offer a “being there” experience have come to market over the past few years, and more are on the way By Rick Lehrbaum

Attack of the telepresence robots!

he growing trend toward telecommuting and outsourcing has driven companies to seek ways for remote workers and teams to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and effectively. This need has inspired a handful of innovative high-tech startups to create a new market: remote telepresence robots. Although remote workers and contractors have depended on realtime audio/video communications tools for many years, including Skype, Facetime, Google Talk, and various dedicated video conferencing equipment and service, nothing truly offered a “being there” — or better yet, “moving around there” — experience. What was lacking was the ability to work within the remote environment, chatting with managers and staff,

attending both scheduled and spontaneous meetings, and solving problems encountered through those interactions. Several remote telepresence robots have come to market over the past few years, and more are on the way. MantaroBot, Vgo, Anybots, and Suitable Technology are some of the companies that provide drivable remote telepresence robots.

Alien encounters?

What’s it like to encounter one of these robotic avatars wandering around your facility, and interact with it? “For all the newness of the Beam, locals often forget they are dealing with a person on an RPD, as opposed to in-person, in as little as 20 minutes,” says Scott Hassan, CEO of Suitable Technologies.

According to Hassan, the Beam’s design features a large LCD display and a minimum of “bells and whistles” that would tend to interfere with natural interactions. “As a result, meetings via Beam lose their novelty pretty quickly and both parties just get down to work.” How hard is it to remotely “drive” a telepresence robot? “Having some experience playing video games helps,” says Hassan. “The interface for the Beam’s remote pilot is very simple, and is picked up in a matter of minutes. Based, of course, on a limited sample size, those who are self-described gamers have been up and piloting the Beam in no time at all. The interface is very similar to a first-person shooter, but without the gun.” Source: InformationWeek USA

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Feature

lessons

in social business

ow can you maximize the use of social media and social software with employees, customers, and partners? Our digital publication The Brain- Yard (thebrainyard.com) decided to seek out and highlight companies that are well on the road to becoming truly social businesses. Ford is getting there. The automaker has embraced social media for marketing and customer support and encourages employees to share company content in social media— not as official spokespeople, but as proud employees. Ford is only at the beginning of bringing these things together in a true social business strategy, says Scott Monty, global director of social media. “A lot of people are talking about social business

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transformation, but to actually execute it at the enterprise level is really, really hard,” Monty says. One milestone: When Ford introduced a redesigned edition of the Ford Explorer in 2010, it skipped the conventional auto show unveiling to auto journalists in favor of simultaneous announcements in eight cities—and on Facebook. The Facebook campaign, created using tools from Buddy Media (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud), featured videos about the vehicle from the product managers and engineers. The Explorer “reveal” campaign attracted 99 million social media impressions and became the No. 1 trending term and the No. 2 search term for the day on Google. “We took that as an indicator we could be successful in social at the scale

Companies can learn from these leaders in the use of social networking technology for business By Debra Donston-Miller and David F. Carr we were used to in traditional media,” Monty says. Some companies point to a hard ROI on social collaboration — building materials manufacturer Cemex, for example, says it’s saving between USD 500,000 and USD 1 million a year through reduced travel and phone expense — but often the returns are softer. The Red Robin restaurant chain’s CIO looks for the true ROI from the business initiatives themselves with social collaboration as an accelerator. Part of the reason Red Robin adopted social collaboration software Yammer was it needed a tool that will let it “get out a message and get feedback immediately if assumptions aren’t playing out right, and we need to make modifications,” says Chris Laping, CIO and senior VP of business

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transformation. Yammer has been an important tool in assessing product introductions The BrainYard chose seven companies as examples of social business leaders: l Bonobos l Cemex l Ford l McKesson l Red Robin Gourmet Burgers l TD Bank l Unisys Here are seven lessons that emerged from these companies’ experiences.

Let Business Drive Technology, Not The Other Way Around

At Ford, social technology is helping accelerate the One Ford strategy aimed at breaking down organizational silos, a policy that CEO Alan Mulally established when he became CEO in 2006. Mulally wasn’t thinking in terms of social technologies when he first articulated that vision, but social tools present “just an amazing opportunity to start bridging these gaps,” Monty says. In addition to using social media in marketing, Ford established an enterprise social networking initiative using Yammer (although that may not be the final choice), to help employees make more spontaneous connections. To wit: When Monty was planning what became the Summer of Taurus campaign in 2009 to unveil the 2010 model of that car, he wrote a rough outline of what he wanted and posted it to Yammer. Within a week, a person from an IT group that normally didn’t work with marketing was able to show Monty a prototype he had built in his spare time, which evolved into a mashup with Bing Maps. In addition to connecting people who might not have otherwise, the social conversation substantially shortened what could have been a months-long process of gathering requirements for a traditional IT project. It also eliminated the need for hiring expensive outside developers.

Use Metrics To Measure Progress

McKesson sees specific gains as a

result of making purposeful use of social networking technologies and measuring the impact. The pharmaceutical distributor and healthcare information technology company is using social business technology to unify support for its software products in the electronic medical record and practice management markets. McKesson’s Physicians Practice Solutions had acquired several products in recent years and needed to consolidate support, services, documentation, account management, product development, and product management. McKesson is using SocialText’s social intranet platform to enable communication among employees in its various channels, including those dealing directly with customers or with valueadded resellers and those providing policy and product content. McKesson measures the

has been proven to reduce the amount of time they will spend on each call.

Identify New Opportunities

While companies that have had success with social media started with specific uses in mind, they stayed open minded to new areas to apply social technology and the social model itself. Men’s online fashion retailer Bonobos found that using Twitter and Facebook has led to interaction with customers with whom it has never had an email exchange or call. Once they engage on social media, however, they’ll not only interact but also bring friends into product discussions. “Turns out there are a lot of people for whom the bar to engagement is pretty low for social media,” says John Rote, VP of customer service for Bonobos. “They’re really happy to become excited brand advocates. You just have to meet them on their own terms—which, for a lot of

Measuring the performance of social initiatives against quantifiable metrics lets companies see what’s working and what needs to be fixed success of its social initiatives using key performance indicators. For example, since implementing social products and practices, the average speed to answer customer calls has decreased 66 percent and same-day resolution of customer concerns has improved by 12 percent , says Timothy Kelly, executive director of customer support. Measuring the performance of social initiatives against quantifiable metrics lets companies see what’s working and what needs to be fixed. Hard numbers can also be useful in terms of getting people — internally and externally—to buy into the use of social tools. It’s one thing to say that employees should use social technology because it will improve collaboration; it’s more powerful to tell, say, customer support representatives that the technology

people, are Twitter and Facebook.” People who interact with customer service using Facebook and Twitter also are more open to social promotions and marketing, Bonobos finds. “The more engagement we had from a service point of view, the more participation we had from a promotions and marketing point of view, and it was just this reinforcing kind of cycle where we have people come in and do referrals over social media,” Rote says. The company is now looking for new product insights from social networks. Bonobos representatives, for example, are active on the retailer’s Facebook page, inviting voting on Bonobos’ signature commemorative clothing and comment on preferred fabrics. Bonobos uses online software from Desk.com (which is owned by

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Feature Salesforce. com) to route service inquiries and customer cases to make sure they get addressed by the right people at the company, says Rote. Bonobos also created a Twitter handle for service inquiries: @bonobosninjas. Cemex is blending new social communication with existing tools. Cemex plans to extend its IBM Connections social platform by integrating email with it, so that employees can get Webbased email through the same portal they use for social communication. Cemex innovation director Gilberto Gar cia says email is “less important now internally, but more important externally,” and the company will leverage the new integration capabilities of Con nections to make it easier to use the two together. TD Bank did an early experiment to gauge employee interest in social interaction. It used simple tools to let employees comment on internal newsletter articles, and the results showed people would take the time to share their ideas about improving the business. For example, an article asking about bank workers’ biggest frustrations prompted one teller to suggest that a paperbased enrollment process could be handled much more efficiently online. Hundreds of other employees quickly voiced agreement and added ideas about how it should be done. “The idea had come up before, but until social [networking] amplified it, it

was not a priority,” says Wendy Arnott, TD Bank’s VP of social media and digital communications. The company also had done a number of acquisitions, and realized internal social networks were going to be a “game changer” for spanning these geographies, she says, and TD Bank subsequently implemented IBM Connections. For example, TD Bank provides wikis on which branch managers share ideas for better customer service. TD Bank also now has 20 social customer ervice representatives divided equally between Toronto and New Jersey who use Radian6 (part of Salesforce’s marketing cloud suite) to monitor social media and respond. Its TD Money Lounge Facebook page for Canada has about 150,000 fans. On LinkedIn, TD has a Canadian Business Community group that lets it host conversations about small business. And, the bank recently introduced TD Helps, a community section of its website where customers can ask questions and get answers. TD Helps launched in June, and as of October the staff had answered more than 14,000 questions. The bottom line is that social technology’s multifaceted nature— from monitoring social networks for product comments, to interacting with customers, to internal networks for employee collaboration— can present a challenge in terms of nailing down what you actually do with it, but it’s also an opportunity because it can

be applied so many ways.

Show Employees How Social Is Relevant To Their Jobs

Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance at Unisys, wishes she had started earlier to tailor training to different types of jobs. Focused training works, as does encouraging employees to share lessons about how social tools work or don’t in a particular job. “Nothing drives the adoption of something new more than a colleague telling you it works for them,” Burke says. Unisys’s social business initiative has succeeded partly because of a top-down push from executives who recognize its importance, Burke says, and because of the groundwork laid by prior knowledge management initiatives over the past decade. The IT services company uses NewsGator’s Social Sites for SharePoint as its company-wide enterprise social networking platform. Sales and marketing teams also use Salesforce’s Chatter collaboration software. John Knab, director of IT applications, doesn’t worry about the overlap because the trend is “everybody is going to have some social component to their platform.” Chatter may be the better tool for some sales-specific conversations, but salespeople also need access to NewsGator when they need to reach the broader organization. What’s most important is helping

Social is part of Red Robin’s recipe

hen Red Robin introduced a new Tavern Burger in April, the social collaboration technology Yammer proved to be an important part of refining the product. “The way we thought we’d get feedback was we thought the guests would get on Facebook,” says CIO Chris Laping. “What they did was they talked to the servers, the servers talked to the managers, and the managers got on Yammer.” Red Robin uses Yammer for its in-house social network, which it calls Yummer. Using those store manager discussions on the network, Red Robin refined the burger recipes and the operational processes in the restaurants in about four weeks—a process Laping estimates would have taken six

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months or more in the past. Without the shared feedback, execs would have been “scratching their heads” wondering why the product wasn’t performing better, he says. As Laping pushed the use of Yammer, he had the backing of CEO Steve Carley in keeping it free from too many rules, to encourage open discussions. Early on, a compliance officer tried to shut down a discussion about new mixed drink ideas, worrying that it could be interpreted as an endorsement of unapproved products in one of the most regulated parts of the restaurant business. But Red Robin is trying to revitalize its bar business, so the compliance official was told to back off and let the online brainstorming resume—with reminders that

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people in sales roles achieve the goal of “market agility,” says Burke. One example is using a mobile device to post a customer’s question to colleagues during a client meeting. Using a search of employee social profiles can find an expert in order to “get the answer before they even leave the office,” says Burke. “That’s impressive to the client.” In a case like that, the tool of choice would be News- Gator because it reaches more people, across different areas of expertise.

Overcome Cultural Challenges

Not everyone uses social networking outside work, some don’t like it, and there are a lot of fears and inhibitions about using the technology. Companies need to recognize this reality and not just foist social software upon employees unsupported and expect results. At Cemex, the support for and use of social media by the company’s top executives helped to increase trust in the community. To overcome resistance and fear of social media, Cemex went as far as creating 12 profiles of people who would use its internal social network— based on factors such as job, experience, and age—and tailored training and communications to each profile. “We did an analysis of different profiles within the company, and did a map to get to the hearts and minds of the people in the company,” says Cemex’s Garcia.

Those who successfully implement so cial software and practices have learned the importance of thoughtful rollout and ongoing support.

Don’t Hamstring Use

At the same time companies must win over employees who resist social networking, they also need to tap into the knowledge and energy of those that have been using Facebook and Twitter for years and are the true experts. Restaurant operator Red Robin made a conscious decision to implement its Yammer collaboration network without a lot of rules around how to use it, other than basic acceptable use policies. Restaurant workers adapted pretty readily to social media interaction because Yammer looked and functioned a lot like Facebook, which “they use in their daily lives,” says CIO Laping.

IT And Business Unit Leaders Must Work Together

Just because cloud-based social networking technology such as Yammer and Chatter can be put into place without the IT department doesn’t mean that should happen. At Red Robin, Laping also holds the title of senior VP of business transformation, meaning that in addition to IT he oversees training and the operations support team responsible for implementing new processes, like the actual kitchen and server routines for cooking a new

bartenders shouldn’t start serving any of these until they got corporate approval. When Carley joined the company as CEO in 2010, he elevated Laping’s role by adding the title of senior VP of business transformation. That means Laping also oversees training as well as an operations services group responsible for new processes in restaurants. Laping also has an unusually strong relationship with the marketing team, which has led to good coordination between social media initiatives and transactional systems, such as with the restaurant’s loyalty programs. Red Robin has embraced other consumer-inspired tech. Yummerversity, an iPad-based training program that incorporates Yammer and training software from Oracle, is being tested for a January launch, when Red Robin will

burger properly and presenting it to the customer. When Laping joined Red Robin in 2007, he saw that IT needed to get beyond systems maintenance activities by working more closely with business units. If IT isn’t in step with what groups such as marketing and operations need from technology, “it’s because we ourselves are holding us back, not because ‘the man’ is holding us down,” he says. Laping has leaned on this “trust relationship” between marketing and IT to become actively involved in setting social media marketing strategy, as well as work on programs such as the restaurant’s loyalty programs, where the participation of IT and marketing is required. Red Robin also has partnered with Plink a social rewards program that doles out points as Facebook credits that customers can use to make purchases in online games such as FarmVille. Indeed, more companies are embedding IT talent directly into departments such as marketing, something that should improve the use of social technology. This connection makes it more likely that companies will deploy social tools quickly as the business decides it needs them, but within a framework that considers data security, privacy policies, and integration with existing applications. The job of a social business leader is to find the right balance. Source: InformationWeek USA

boost the number of iPads in its restaurants from 700 to 1,000. Because good store managers spend more time on the restaurant floor than at a desk, they typically access social apps from their phones or from the iPads. Restaurant employees also use the iPads to maintain a wait list, recording mobile phone numbers so guests get a text message alert when their table is ready. The iPad app can be used to sign people up for the Red Robin loyalty program at the same time. Embracing social and mobile technologies shows employees that real change is coming, Laping says. It’s the app mentality applied to business. Says Laping, “Enterprise IT tools tend to be these huge Swiss army knives, whereas with social I get something more like my mobile app that gives me the one function I need right now.” —David F. Carr

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Interview

Can an Indian startup provide answers to global data center energy woes?

n September 2012, the New York Times carried a thought provoking article, which claimed that data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid. This received a huge amount of backlash from some industry veterans. The same article also estimated that globally data centers consume about 30 billion watts of electricity, which is roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Considering the amount of power data centers consume, the time has come for data center owners to seriously take a relook at their power conservation strategies. This is both a huge challenge and a massive opportunity. VigyanLabs, an Indian startup, believes that it has the answers. The company’s pedigree is impressive. VigyanLabs was founded in 2010 by a team of IIT-ians specializing in high-performance computing.

With more than 15 patents and a high patent hit ratio, VigyanLabs was recognized by NASSCOM as one of India’s top ten IT product startups of 2012. InformationWeek’s Srikanth RP spoke to SrinivasVaradarajan, CEO of VigyanLabs, who shares his perspective on the idea behind developing a product for this market, the market opportunity and why he thinks his company has an edge in this market. What motivated you or your team to come together to develop this solution? Can you explain or take me through the steps of the origin for the idea for developing this product? From day one we wanted to build clean and green IT solutions. We had the necessary experience to build such solutions. We felt that lot of energy was being wasted unnecessarily. We wanted to do something innovative in

India itself. We left our jobs and started creating our vision and mission. We spent couple of weeks thinking on our mission and vision. Our vision was to create an innovative science and technology company providing ‘clean and green solutions’. We got new laptops and observed that the battery did not last long enough and it also used to get hot. We did some more experiments and found that we could reduce the heat and extend battery life. We researched and found very few users enabled power savings, which are built into the devices, as it either affected usability or performance and sometimes both. We also researched existing patents and found there was no unique way of saving power across the IT infrastructure in a holistic way. Our idea was unique. It was in September 2008 that we setup a R&D lab in Mysore to start working on a prototype. By mid 2009, we had a prototype working on Win-

Using its patented software, startup VigyanLabs is trying to create a new market by promising its clients 30-40 percent reduction in power consumption InformationWeek’s Srikanth RP spoke to Srinivas Varadarajan, CEO of VigyanLabs, who shares his perspective on the idea behind developing a product for this market, the market opportunity and why he thinks his company has an edge in this space

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dows XP and could save more than 30 percent power. Subsequently, we did some more research and figured out that our new concept was applicable to a wide range of equipment. We started drafting our patent and were able to file it in the U.S. by Jan 2010. Around the same time we came up with the name IPMPlus. If you look at energy consumption for a typical corporate, which are the areas in your view, where power consumption can be significantly reduced, without impacting user experience or performance of a company? The key areas in a typical corporate IT ecosystem would include: l IT infrastructure (servers, desktops and tablets, network equipment). ROI can be realized through savings in power and better capacity utilization. l UPS, generators, batteries - These are not managed efficiently and often over-provisioned. l AC – More power is spent here due to poor design. It is important to note that as IT power consumption

ing a laptop or desktop. Users get into meetings, have coffee, lunch breaks and the monitors display screen savers. At the end of a typical day, many users fail to shutdown their machines, lights and printers. For example, when a user is away from his/her desktop there may be jobs running, downloads happening — you cannot power down the desktop. What IPMPlus does in this case is to turn off the monitor only, keep the CPU running until the background job or download is finished and if the user is still not using the desktop, it is put to sleep. Our patented ‘Application Sensor’ technology helps in finding out what can be turned off or moved to low power state. Once the user is back at his/her desktop the desktop comes back into normal mode in seconds. Even when the user is working on the desktop, all the components of the desktop may not be used. Our solution intelligently turns off components within the machine only when they are not required. IPMPlus provides soft meters using which organizations can calculate the power consumed by various IT infrastructure components, identify the

data centers, how different is your approach, and what does this approach translate to? Traditional way of power management in data center is the following: Procure energy efficient devices, use a BMS (building management system) for non-IT components, an EMS for the IT components, focus on airconditioning and hot/cold aisle, etc. Essentially, the IT and non-IT parts systems are separate silos. The IT and electrical capacity planning systems are not integrated. Our approach is more holistic. We measure, analyze and save. This is a single tool which can look at a wide variety of devices — right from a tablet/ PDA, desktop, printer, servers, network equipment, UPS, energy meter, etc. IPMPlus can measure the power consumption at node level (server/device), rack Level, UPS level, DC level on a continuous basis along with system utilization and load or performance. The solution assists in analyzing the usage pattern and applies policies to optimize the power usage. The analysis is end-to-end all the way from the electrical source to the equipment/server and the applications which use them. X ‘Watts’ saved on the server is more than

The key constraint in India is that businesses try to measure direct ROI to evaluate whether they should adopt our product rises, AC requirement also rises. A typical desktop emits as much heat as a human body. In an organization with 1,000 nodes and 1,000 employees, we need to provision AC for nearly 2,000 employee equivalent. This is based on our informal research. l Lighting, fans – These elements can be controlled through intelligent building automation For an organization having a huge IT infrastructure, you can imagine the savings when there are thousands of desktops and servers in a data center. Saving a few watts per day per device leads to hundreds of Megawatts saved. A watt saved is equal to 2 watts generated. If you look at a typical enterprise most of the end users will be either us-

components which use most power, determine peak load, plan for optimal UPS capacity and optimize power policies based on power costs and power source. On the server side, by using the ‘Application Sensor’ technology, components of the server hardware can be selectively turned off or moved to low power state, thus saving more than 30 percent power directly and 60 percent power indirectly. The solution also provides reports that identify utilization of server capacity, which further helps in consolidation and virtualization, which in turn further optimizes the power consumption. Compared to the traditional way of power management in

2 X watts saved at the DC level. IT load and utilization is aligned to the electrical load and capacity, which helps in optimizing the UPS, genset capacity planning and load. In this world of 24/7 operations, IT capacity management has to be dynamic and not static. Our solution enables adaptive polices to change IT capacity to meet the business needs; thus optimizing IT and electrical capacity. In a presentation on your website, you have referred to a Gartner report which states that the energy consumption of India’s information and communication technology infrastructure is forecast to grow by 30 percent to over 31 trillion-watt hours by 2014. If we

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Interview POWER DEMANDS IN DATA CENTERS Data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid Source: New York Times

Globally data centers consume about 30 billion watts of electricity â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which is roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants Source: New York Times

HOW VIGYANLABS CAN HELP The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solution IPMPlus provides soft meters, which enables organizations to calculate the power consumed by various IT infrastructure components, identify the components which use most power, determine peak load, plan for optimal UPS capacity and optimize power policies based on power cost and power source. Its 'Application Sensor' technology helps in finding out what can be turned off or moved to low power state, when the user is working or away from desktop. The technology also selectively turns off the components of the server hardware and move them to lower power state, thus saving more than 30 percent power directly and 60 percent power indirectly.

assume that your technology or similar technologies are used in data centers, what could be proposed reduction in emission levels? In our typical desktop computing implementations, we see about 20-40 percent power consumption reduction. Assuming CO2 emissions to be directly proportionate, we can say that CO2 emissions can be reduced by 2030 percent. This is the bare minimum reduction possible. If one considers that along with power consumption reduction various other factors such as AC requirements get reduced, power losses in distribution and AC-DC conversion are reduced, the effective CO2 emission reductions could be upto 50 percent. Your views on the potential of this technology in India. Are a majority of data centers considering such technologies in India? Is the market ripe for adoption? Yes, we see many corporate customers reaching out to us for adoption. The key constraint in India is that businesses try to measure direct ROI to evaluate whether they should adopt IPMPlus or not. Also, unlike developed countries, there are not enough regulatory pressures to go green. For example, we are finding German and French customers more willing to adopt our product

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without looking at direct power savings alone as they look at the ripple effects of power saving on the economy and environment as well. Our request to the Indian market would be to also factor in the intangible benefits that accrue due to reduction in their carbon footprint, while considering adoption of green technologies. Can you tell us the number of clients signed up till date? We are just commercializing the product. Most of our current implementations are seeing 30-40 percent reduction in power consumption. A case in point is Shri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering under Mysore University. The green initiative launched on thousand desktops in the college campus has helped it save 42 percent on its power bills. Other customers include firms, such as Mira Aditi, SJ College of Engineering, JSS CMS, Parasoft, T John College, PXX Legal, PXV Law Partners, SJCE-STEP and S&S Co. For some large customers, we are running pilots currently. Can you elaborate on the business strategy for this product? Are you targeting certain sectors (say, education or IT) where

the potential of adoption and the numbers are huge? We are adopting a two-pronged strategy. The first part of our strategy is for the global consumer market. We would like to move into the App Stores segment in a big way shortly for our IPMPlus Android and IPMPlus desktop editions. We are also working on various OEM partnerships in this space to ensure IPMPlus is built into the next generation of devices. The second part of our strategy is for the enterprise segment. Here, we are sector agnostic. To begin with, we feel that the banking sector due to its large desktop environment with wide geographical spread of retail branches could benefit a lot. IT/ITeS companies can shave off a significant percentage of their power costs by adopting IPMPlus given that the large ones such as Infy, TCS, Wipro, etc., have 100,000 plus nodes. Our product is architected for such scale and distributed environments. A similar opportunity lies in segments such as university campuses, retail chains, hospitals, etc, which have large number of desktops that are left unattended. On the server end, enterprises with own data centers and cloud service providers could benefit significantly. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Interview In the new world of cloud, Akamai is quickly transitioning itself into a provider of cloud optimization services. As new growth comes from emerging geographies and new platforms such as mobile, Akamai is relying on its stateof-the art IT infrastructure to power its growth. InformationWeek’s Srikanth RP spoke to Kumud Kalia, Senior VP and CIO, Akamai, who shares with us the opportunity and the challenges for being a CIO at Akamai, and how he is focusing on building an agile and efficient user experience for Akamai’s customers

‘Connected devices will present new business opportunities for enterprises’ As a CIO, what is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for you at Akamai? Even with access to phones or e-mails, today’s highly mobile workforce struggles to collaborate with remote colleagues, as these communication technologies do not provide a meeting environment that is comparable to physical meetings. This is precisely why UC is emerging as the need of the hour. A lot of organizations are already reaping the benefits in terms of enhanced worker flexibility and productivity, decreased costs, and improved customer service by embracing UC technologies. Akamai is a high growth technology company, which presents

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both challenges and opportunities. The methods and business processes that got Akamai to this point, where revenues are growing annually at double-digit from crossing the billion-dollar mark in 2010, will require retooling the company’s key business processes to provide continued scale and efficiency across a globalizing footprint, while we simultaneously diversify our product mix.

with other business leaders to ensure the company is equipped to enter new markets and launch innovative new products. It is just not acceptable to have any scaling limits within our infrastructure to support the company’s growth. We have monthly priority reviews to ensure we are selecting and executing the right initiatives and I sponsor those review meetings.

What kind of planning goes into designing an IT infrastructure that ensures that Akamai is well positioned to drive technology trends that define the future of the Internet? The planning happens hand-in-hand

If you had to pick some exciting new technologies that would impact the future of the Internet, what would those be? There are a lot of new technology trends breaking through the Internet at this point of time and a number

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of them are still to gain adoption. Internet usage via smartphones and other mobile devices is on the rise across the world; the cloud has been embraced by consumers and is now gaining ground with enterprises; social media has an immediacy and broad coverage that is revolutionizing business models. Online retail is still developing and improving. This all creates opportunities for new technologies and trends, such as Big Data —and we will continue to see the emergence of new technology concepts that are either derived from the Internet or depend on the Internet. In the future, how do you see the growth of the Internet and its impact on enterprises? In my opinion, the number of connected devices will just continue to grow and present new business opportunities for enterprises. It is not unusual now for households to have 10 or more Internet connected devices, but before long that will be 50 or 100 or more, as appliances, sensors and other goods become interconnected into ‘the Internet of everything’. 2010 was the first USD 1 billion year for Akamai. From then, how has Akamai progressed over the years in India? India is important for Akamai — we have a major office in Bangalore and now have opened up additional offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. Unlike many other companies where an India office may be for cost reasons alone, we rely on our Bangalore office to provide not only global operations support, but also export best practices into the rest of Akamai’s offices and support some of the leading product innovation through our engineering teams in Bangalore. In terms of business generated within India, it will grow as Indian adoption of the Internet for commerce grows. What is the significance of IPv6 and what is the

opportunity for Akamai? As the Internet of everything takes shape, the original addressing scheme of IPv4 will run out of addresses. While we can use some temporary workarounds to deal with this, ultimately we have to move to a new addressing scheme for which IPv6 was designed many years ago. While many companies have the resources to manage the conversion to IPv6, for some this will be either an overwhelming effort or a distraction. It is much better to connect via Akamai, as we will be able to partner with our customers in providing IPv6 support and conversion, enabling our customers to avoid the cost and time of doing their own conversions. For a long time, the Internet will be hybrid of the IPv4 and IPv6, and Akamai will allow companies to operate their current websites while offloading all of the interoperability challenges to Akamai. If you compare global trends and map them to India, what are the similarities and the differences? While cellular phone adoption in India has been dramatic over the last couple of decades, the rate of Internet adoption among Indian consumers has lagged compared to that of many other countries. A flourishing Internet in India will require substantial investment in telecom infrastructure, or broadband penetration will remain ‘low and slow.’ India will therefore be slower to adopt many other evolving Internet trends. For example, in the U.S. it’s common for people to stream movies via the Internet to their TV or mobile devices enabled by ubiquitous and affordable broadband capacity. On the other hand, the situation in India will drive new innovation, and this could lead to new Indian trends that diverge from global Internet behaviors.

We will continue to see the emergence of new technology concepts that are either derived from the Internet or depend on the Internet

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Interview

Healthcare portal aims to arrest rising trend of corporate health issues

ast year, a survey of ASSOCHAM, found out that due to demanding schedules, high stress and lack of physical activity, close to 72 percent of corporate employees were more prone to cardiovascular diseases. What was also alarming was the fact that around 55 percent of the survey respondents fell under the age bracket of 20-29 years, followed by 30-39 years (26 percent). Clearly, these trends point out to an unhealthy trend, whose root cause, unless identified can lead to disastrous issues for not only individuals, but corporates, as well. Healthcare portal, HealthcareMagic, is seeking to address this core issue, with its online platform that connects healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, dietitians, counselors, etc) to the end users online who have health

related questions. For example, if an online user wants to ask a cardiologyrelated question, a cardiologist will answer his questions for a small fee within a couple of hours. InformationWeek spoke to KunalSinha, Founder and CEO, HealthcareMagic, who says that corporate India is extremely unhealthy, and it is time that individuals, as well as organizations start using technology to cut down on health risks before they become serious issues. How did the idea for launching this portal come about? Post graduating from IIT Kanpur, I worked for IBM for a brief period, post which I along with few classmates built a company that sold mobile solutions to the BFSI vertical. This company was acquired by a public listed company. Post

which I knew I wanted to do something in the online space, this was in 2007— I wanted to start a venture, which could cater to online users. We zeroed in on HealthcareMagic because we realized that every individual has few nagging health questions to ask and do not know where to go, which results in ignoring the symptoms till things become critical. Individuals seek answers to everyday health questions like, “Why am I losing hair?” or “I think I get tired and gasp for breath after climbing few stairs,” but avoid going to a specialist for the same as time constrain or sheer laziness holds them back. Such users also seek out the answers on the Internet or they ask their friends and end up getting unqualified answers, or even worse get conflicting answers, which can be dangerous. HealthcareMagic was started to fill this

HealthcareMagic, an online platform that connects healthcare professionals, has made an impressive start by signing up more than 50 corporate clients such as BMW, SAP, McAfee and HSBC. InformationWeek spoke to Kunal Sinha, Founder and CEO, HealthcareMagic, who says it’s time for individuals, as well as organizations to start using technology to cut down on health risks before they become serious issues. Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Srikanth RP 50

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gap, so that individuals can ask questions to a qualified doctor online and get their answers within minutes. How does this work? HealthcareMagic is an online and offline platform that connects healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, dietitians, counselors, etc.) to the end users online who have health-related questions. For example, if an online user wants to ask a cardiology-related question, a cardiologist will answer to his questions for a small fee within a

HealthcareMagic is a game changer where proactive health services are concerned. Today, all the health services are geared when something happens to an individual, for example, health insurance. Users of HealthcareMagic get access to the following services online: ‘Ask a Doctor’ (general medical advice), ‘Ask a Specialist’ (advice for complex medical queries), ‘Speak to a Counselor’ (advice for stress and issues of a personal nature), ‘Speak to a Nutritionist’ (advice on what to eat and what not to

Do you use analytics to predict trends? What has the analysis of data shown? HealthcareMagic is built on a robust platform where there is heavy use of analytics. Analytics and results are created on the usage pattern by the employees. For example, the largest health issue in corporate India in decreasing order is: Increased BMI (Related to diet/activity), increased stress, thyroid problems amongst women and substance abuse amongst men (smoking/alcohol).

Lifestyle diseases are going to explode and cost of medical cover will sky rocket unless companies invest in early risk detection couple of hours. The user can see the answer at HealthcareMagic.com . The user can also attach reports/photos etc., with the question. HealthcareMagic services are being delivered through three channels today: l Online Retail – Where a user searches for a health condition online and reaches HealthcareMagic. com and pays through his credit card to ask questions. l Enterprise (Corporate) – HealthcareMagic has signed up with over 54 clients in India to provide services to its employees and dependants l Insurance Companies – HealthcareMagic services are bundled with health insurance policies and sold along with the policy. Two of the largest private health insurance companies in India are working with the company. How successful have you been in this venture? Can you elaborate on the number of clients signed up? Getting access to doctors and superspecialists online from your smart device was never heard of till HealthcareMagic was founded. Today, our platform is used by over 50 Corporate India customers like BMW, TATA AIA, SAP, McAfee, Akamai, Airbus, HSBC and more.

eat), ‘Speak to a Doctor on phone’, and 24-hour medical advocate support The services have been beneficial in a lot of ways. Some of these benefits include: l Better Health Awareness: Organizations battling increased insurance claims have started off with more health awareness towards the long-term goal of structured health interventions for their employees. Structured health intervention means better healthcare decisions, and hence less chance of claims in the long term. l Better Access: Employees and dependents enjoy huge advantage when compared to traditional healthcare service delivery models. This is simply because they don’t have to wait and they get access to some of the most experienced professionals right from the comfort of their home or office. They enjoy the advantage of our health advocates (customer care) who have vast experience in the way health problems need to be approached and managed. l Better Results: Instead of being just a cost, organizations are able to see return on investments in terms of employee health engagement and in terms of clear-cut experience sharing through our platform.

We would say corporate India is very unhealthy and would put the average health risk index between 60-65 on a scale of 100, where 100 stands for complete health. Corporate health is a ticking bomb as lifestyle diseases are going to explode/implode and cost of medical cover is going to sky rocket unless companies invest in early risk detection and risk management. In our analysis of several companies, 75 percent of employees who got diagnosed with elevated cholesterol had no idea that they were suffering from such a problem. The figures for elevated BP was even higher, 80 percent of employees who got diagnosed with elevated BP had no idea that they were suffering from such a problem. While your entire platform is based on the foundation of technology, what other technologies do you use (cloud computing, mobile platforms) to boost your efficiency and productivity? At HealthcareMagic, we use many technologies to boost our efficiency and productivity. Cloud computing and mobile platform are two of the key areas but we also use technologies around telephony, SMS, SEO and cache management for our website. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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CIO Voice

hese trends do not prominently appear in most of the technology predictions for 2013 that you would find on the Internet. Are we missing the forest for the trees? Or, am I seeing a wrong pattern? Let me argue my case.

Google is winning the ecosystem war

The nature of the ecosystem is changing. Earlier, ecosystems were built on familiarity, standardization, interoperability and supporting infrastructure. Familiarity: Once you are used to a way of working why would you want to change? Standardization: Why would IT want to complicate life by introducing variety? Interoperability: Who would want to develop a product, which cannot coexist with the most popular ecosystem? Supporting Infrastructure: People, expertise, add-on products, etc. However, the core product would not improve on its own just because more people are using it. User needs and user feedback had to be programmed into the next version. Herein lies the beauty of the next generation of services — be it Google Search, Google Map, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon or even Wikipedia. They improve on their own through learning algorithms. Learning algorithm are algorithms that become more accurate on their own when more people use it. A good example of Learning

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Algorithm is Google Search. Have you noticed how accurately it can understand misspelled words — words not in the dictionary, proper names, abbreviations, Indian regional language words, etc.? Have you noticed how accurate the autosuggest is? You would rarely have to type your complete search terms. It works so well even when you try to search something like an Indian regional language song. Microsoft came up with UI innovations in Bing but Google could easily adopt what worked well. I have not yet met anybody who prefers to use Bing over Google. IBM Watson won the Jeopardy! and had the ability to answer questions like a human. In May 2012, Google introduced “Knowledge Graph” and with that, you get direct answers to many questions in addition to the search results. Even if some service replicates the algorithm, it would not be as good because the usage database would be missing. It would be a chicken and egg situation because people will not use it as it is not as good and the algorithm would not become better because people do not use it as much. Same is the case with Google Maps. With more usage it becomes more accurate. Apple has already burnt its finger by trying to replace it. In 2013, this dominance will become more apparent and the challengers (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) would find it difficult to compete. Facebook: There are enough number of studies, which indicate that buying

influence of social media is very low. Amazon: Would you purchase without comparing price? Serious purchasing without price comparison is a no-no. Apple: Industry best kept secret is that new-generation Android phones are already superior to iPhones — and Steve Jobs is not around to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Microsoft: Right now they are clueless and busy defending their own turf.

The era of WIMP is over

WIMP: Windows, Icon, Mouse and Pointer. The future is touch, voice, gesture, visual augmentation, etc. There are many new ways to interact with the computer but the most important thing for 2013 is the transition to touch sensitive display devices. The road has already been laid by the success of touch phones and touch tablets. It is much more natural for us to touch the screen directly than to use a device like mouse to manipulate a small pointer in the screen. However, mobility and small screen size seem to have blinded us to the importance of touchscreen”. Somehow we seem to miss the point that user interface designed for WIMP does not work very well in touchscreen. The implication is that all existing user interfaces have to be redone in next few years. It is ironic that Microsoft has realized this and hence has created Windows 8 — and almost everybody has criticized that decision. In 2013, we will see touchscreens in all types of devices — not just

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smartphones and tablets. They will come in many different sizes — very small to very large. We are yet to figure out how best to design the UI for such screens. Hopefully, by the end of 2013, we would have made significant progress.

Impact of cloud is inversely proportional to the size of the entity

For individual, for scientific community, for startups and for SME sector cloud computing is a big deal. Larger the size of the organization lesser is the potential impact of cloud. Personal Cloud has already transformed our lives. Just think of the many cloud services you use: e-mail, social networking, address book, data storage service, photo sharing, video sharing , blogging, VOIP service, location-based services. Where would we be without these services? They have already transformed our lives. (I hope you do not have any doubt about these being cloud services!) For scientists, it means availability of unlimited computing power for short duration at affordable cost. Traditionally, such amount of computing power would not even be available in the most elitist of institutions. For startups, the scalability offered by cloud can make the difference between success and failure. They do not need to worry about under investing on hardware and failing to scale if they succeed. They also do not have to worry about over investing and running out of cash sooner. For SMEs, it means accessibility to software, which would be too costly otherwise. But as the size of the enterprise increases, the differentiator slowly vanishes. For large enterprises, the cost advantage of cloud is far from clear. Just because you can spin off an instance of a machine on a click of a button does not mean that the organization would become agile. If the ERP is moved from in-premise

to cloud, would it help in generating additional revenue? In Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology — cloud computing has been hovering around the peak for the last three years. In 2013, we may see it going down the “trough of disillusionment!” That brings us to the related item Big Data, which would not have come into focus without cloud computing. But would it have the broad based transformational impact that all analysts are predicting? My opinion is that for most of us it is like a solution in search of a problem. Whether I am right or wrong I can say with confidence that in 2013 you are unlikely to hear success stories about Big Data.

What about not so transformational trends?

Consumerization of IT is here to stay: IT has lost control of technology adoption cycle. It is controlled by the customers, internal users and the line of business. This is leading to the conflict between security and privacy on one side and usability and convenience on the other side: MDM and BYOD will be key concerns of enterprises.

The future is touch, voice, gesture, visual augmentation, etc. There are many new ways to interact with the computer but the most important thing for 2013 is the transition to touch sensitive display devices

Gamification is more of a buzzword: It is about tricking people to do what they would not do otherwise. Gamification would not work in the long run. For the brick and mortar technologies, 3D Printing does not appear to be ripe yet; though it has interesting possibilities. Also, in spite of all the hype, NFC is not likely to take off. In-memory computing, on the other hand, looks more promising. In certain situations, it can improve the performance by order of magnitude. However the real dark horse may just be AI and Robotics. It may be at the threshold of a breakthrough.

u Udayan Banerjee is CTO, NIIT Technologies

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Internet

Internet completes 30 years What would the world be without the Internet? No Facebook, no Google and no e-mail? What would be the Indian IT industry without the Internet? Exactly 30 years ago, on January 1, 1983, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) switched from using Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol or TCP / IP — the basic foundation or the backbone for the Internet. At InformationWeek, we are honored to present to you, perspectives from eminent experts in the industry on how the Internet was 30 years back and its transformational power: Vint Cerf, Father of the Internet and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google

“Let me take you back to a time when information tended to arrive on dead trees, and other mass media (television and radio). But 50 years ago, ideas were brewing that would change all of that. In the 1960s, the concept of ‘packet switching’ emerged to challenge conventional circuit switching for computer communication. Networks were built, including the ARPANET, led the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Out of that remarkably clairvoyant and successful effort experiments were undertaken supported by the private sector, such as Xerox PARC’s ethernet and DARPA’s packet radio and packet satellite experiments. Networked electronic mail burst on the scene in 1971 surprising many of us with its popularity. SRI International was far along in its implementation of the oN-Line System (NLS) that presaged the World Wide Web and the use of a mouse to interact in a direct way with text and images. From this fertile mix of networking explorations came the design and ultimate implementation of the early Internet, using the TCP/IP protocols. While the basic design was done in the 1970s, implementation on many computer operating systems took time. By 1981, however, it was apparent that these new computer communication protocols were mature enough to plan the launch an operational Internet. And so it was, on January 1, 1983, that the computers on all of the DARPA-sponsored networks were reconfigured to interwork across multiple packet networks. Apple astonished the commercial market with its Macintosh computer in a stunning announcement in 1984, capitalizing on concepts pioneered by Xerox PARC in its Alto personal work stations of the mid-late 1970s. In an unbroken chain from 1983 to the present, the Internet has facilitated paradigm-shifting changes in the economics of information access and production. The pace continues and there is no end in sight.”

Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer, Internet Society

“January 1, 1983, was an official ‘flag day’ for the ARPANET, which became what we know as the Internet. On that day, the collaborative operators of the existing networking hardware turned off the old networking protocol, NCP (network control protocol), and the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)-based Internet became the norm. This had been several years in the making — TCP/IP were initially specified in 1974, and formally published as standards in 1981 (RFC 791 and RFC 793). Archived e-mail messages show it took a lot of work to convince network operators that this could and should be done. The flag day was preceded by two test efforts: “Not all sites were preparing to convert over their protocols, so [Vint] Cerf, Jon Postel, and the TCP/IP team turned off the NCP network channel numbers on the ARPANET IMP’s for a full day in mid 1982, so that only sites using TCP/IP could still operate. To emphasize the point, they disabled NCP again for two days later that fall. The full switchover to TCP/IP was performed on January 1, 1983, without too many problems, although a few recalcitrant sites were down as long as three months while they retrofitted their systems,” according to Living Internet. Clearly, things were very different in that era — it was possible to change all equipment within a relatively brief period (12-18 months to get prepared for the flag day). In the 30 years that have followed, networking equipment has found its way into the oddest corners, embedded in the most arcane of devices, and much of the edge equipment is owned and operated by people whose livelihood is not network operations — it’s just plain folk, who have devices they expect to keep working day in and day out. The IP version that was deployed 30 years ago was

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Internet version 4, IPv4. For over a decade, it has been very clear that the sort of growth and dependence mentioned above meant that there were not enough addresses available to suit the growing networks’ needs. And, for about that long, we’ve had IPv4’s official successor (IPv6) defined and ready for production. But the world had changed, and the task of changing out impacted equipment was a few orders of magnitude more complex. It wasn’t possible to declare a flag day: the idea of some laggard site being knocked off the network for “a few months” is inconceivable. It would cause lawsuits, and possibly international incidents! For the last five years, the Internet Society has had a “Global Addressing” programme outlined as part of its technical activities. Our aim within that programme was always to ensure that the Internet remained completely connected end-to-end, globally, as a fundamental property of the Internet that underlies its ability to be the open platform for innovation that it has become. We didn’t call it the “IPv6 programme” because, at the time, we shared some of the industry uncertainty about whether or not IPv6 would ever be able to take off. As part of that programme, we hosted a couple of events where industry titans did their bit to step up to IPv6. In 2011, we hosted “World IPv6 Day,” wherein Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! agreed to turn on IPv6 on their main website for 24 hours. Their goal was to test whether it was supportable in production in a way that would keep their end users well connected and happy. They could. In the process, thousands of other websites took the opportunity to jump on the test flight bandwagon and proved, importantly, to themselves that they could do it too. In 2012, we hosted the World IPv6 Launch, wherein content providers (such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yahoo!) committed to turning IPv6 on for good, and challenged access providers to enable enough customers to get real IPv6 traffic hitting those v6-enabled websites. Operators stepped up. We’ve now shed any uncertainty about IPv6’s viability. In the past couple of years we have seen huge deployments of IPv6 technology all the way to the edge of broadband Internet services. But in 2013, we’re not talking about transition to IPv6 — IPv4 will continue to function for years to come, and the challenge the Internet technical community will continue working on will be to ensure that IPv6-only (and, eventually, IPv4-only) networks do not feel like “second class citizens.” And where we couldn’t write a single transition manual for IPv4 to IPv6, there are many, many resources to help you deploy IPv6. Richard Jimmerson, along with Ron Broersma and Richard’s recent hire, Jan Zorz, is responsible for the Internet Society’s contribution to the 2013 version of support for new network deployment: the Deploy360 Programme. Happy birthday, TCP/IP network! And Happy 2013 — where IPv6 is the new normal!”

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S Ramadorai, Vice Chairman, TCS

“The early days of the Internet came to us in the form of an easier e-mail system, slow and limited browsing experiences but also a sense of wonder that we were witnessing something that could evolve beyond our ability to see, at that time. And it has done just that. As a transformational medium for all of humanity, the Internet is unparalleled. It has greatly reduced distances —physical, geographical and social. If knowledge is power, it has put this power within the grasp of anyone with a mobile phone and a curious mind. This network has grown in a creative, unfettered manner, in the true spirit of multistakeholder partnership. It has created opportunities for innovation, entrepreneurship and global collaboration in problem-solving. This in turn is not just creating employment and economic success stories, but also creating new models to bridge the digital divide in countries like India. There are so many areas in our country, such as education, healthcare, vocational training and skills development, agri-services, financial inclusion, environment management, etc., where the Internet is enabling positive change. As hundreds of millions more of our citizens get Internet-enabled, typically through mobile devices, we will see more and more poverty alleviation and social empowerment. To my mind, what the Internet is doing for us today is still not as exciting as the promise of what it will do for us in the coming decades.”

Partha Iyengar, Country Manager – Research, Gartner India

“What would the world be like without the Internet? Huh? I don’t get the question? For all the ‘Digital Natives’ (those under the age of 30) reading this I am sure it just sent a cold shudder up your spine and you thought “Did life exist on the planet before the Internet?” or “I’d rather do without oxygen than the Internet!” Many of the Digital Immigrants (over 30) will probably experience a quick wave of nostalgia, for those days of sending letters (yes, snail-mail as it is called today) or faxes (the super-fast option of those days!) and the less frenetic pace of life it afforded us back then, without needing to respond to over 200 e-mails a day — do we do anything other than respond to e-mails in our work life? All requiring instant responses/decisions/gratification. And don’t even get me started on all those mindless twitteratis and their twitter-bie (Twitter+zombies) followers — why exactly is it important for us to know that @PriChop “splt cp of cfee @ bfast & hd to get a 2nd 1”? Get a life folks!

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Talk about an Internet driven treadmill that we can never get off of, and the scary thing is, most of us don’t want to get off it. In fact, a day without Internet has most of us getting into withdrawal symptoms with anxious eyes eagerly scanning our phones or tablets for the return of the blessed 3G symbol so we can plunge back into Facebook/ e-mail/Internet nirvana again! The other day I was at an airport and was observing a young person in front of me walking to the airport bus frantically pecking away at his iPad, even as he walked right into the side of the bus, missing the door by a mile. I remember thinking what could be that earth-shattering online that he is willing to risk his life. However, nostalgia aside, reality quickly sets in, and it becomes clear that the world would no longer function without the Internet. Almost every aspect of our life is controlled by ‘access’ today and if the Internet were to ‘disappear,’ it would be akin to sending us back to the stone age — especially for the Digital Natives. The increased ‘velocity of life’ that the Internet has driven is here to stay and there is no turning back the clock on it. So get used to it folks. And for those of us in the Indian IT industry – we’d be asking ‘What Indian IT industry?’, if the Internet did not exist! Happy surfing and may the Internet forces be with you!”

Purshottam Purswami, CTO, Atos India

“Let me give you an insight on how the Internet has evolved various different technologies and applications. Evolution of browsers: We had Netscape as the first browser followed by Opera and Microsoft bringing in Internet Explorer. For doing a project on web page presence it was a struggle to get the pages compatible to both Netscape and Internet Explorer. And then Netscape brought in JavaScript, which triggered the browser war, as there were some HTML tags or JavaScripts supported only in Netscape and few others only in Internet Explorer. This led the World Wide Web Consortium to bring in standards in these technologies. Today, browsers have matured enough and so have the standards, Evolution of technologies: HTML being static, there was no way one could add any dynamic content to the display. Cookies were adopted to store basic session based information into the client browser sandbox for reuse. Later JavaScript brought in some uniformity in content across the site. Businesses started to realize the importance of web presence and there emerged multiple companies, big and small, helping businesses to create websites. With new interfaces like smartphones and tablets, we see a wave in newer GUI standards.

Current scenario: Today, we are working on mobility and cloud architecture to deliver robust device agnostic solutions to our clients. Internet has evolved and with its evolution brought a huge change in the way people interact today. Social media has taken the whole world by storm and promises huge potential in newer services in various sectors. Organization like us, utilize these trends and believe that SoCloMo (social, cloud and mobile) would be the enabler of different services for businesses.”

Hemal Shah, CIO, Dell India

“We started out as PC’s Unlimited from a college dormitory selling assembled PCs, and went on to become a global company that pioneered the direct sales model. For Dell, the Internet was the greatest enabler. Back in the 80s and 90s we used various tools like Bulletin Boards and FTP via modem to serve customers and grow the business. With the advent of the World Wide Web, Dell was able to provide a gateway to customers in real time and enable a better relationship with them. Dell, in a very short span of time, has grown from a million dollar company to a multibillion dollar company in the Internet era. With ubiquitous mobile gadgets and cloud computing today, the nternet in its various forms will shape the technology industry and business in the coming years.”

Sunil Dutt, MD, India, RIM

The first Internet connections came to India in 1989. Net access was only available to the academic community through the Education and Research Network (ERNET) a project of the Department of Electronics (DoE). Two things made me think of the Internet as a “curious” phenomenon. DoE viewed it as a non-standard protocol that had no commercial applications (amazing when you look back, but that was how the net appeared); on the other hand, I remember a large global bank in Mumbai desperately wanting net access and being forced to become part of an academic research project so that they could send official e-mail to their offices in the U.S.! Clearly, businesses were early in being able to sniff the potential of the net while governments thought it was something for academic boffins! The net in those days was all about dial-up modems. If there is one thing I miss about the net, it is the sound of those modems clicking away and then the joy of a live connection. The best thing we could connect to was a Bulletin Board Service called CiX BBS (Cyber InfoExchange BBS), started by Bangalore-based Atul Chitnis, who is quite a legend in India’s web space. CiX became the focal point for geeks. It also provided us in India a taste for what online interaction could be. In those days, before anyone had

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Internet heard of social networking, the BBS was a networking hub! You could start a conversation, ask for help, download files (If I remember clearly, I downloaded my first game — was it Doom? — from a BBS) — all at speeds of a magnificent 9,600 to 28,800 bps! But who cared about speed then? It was techno-sparkle that got us. The most impressive BBS was ‘The Well’. It was started by two legends — Larry Brilliant, a doctor, and Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalogue. Stellar names hung out at ‘The Well’. You could have the most cerebral global conversation with intellectuals, scientists, poets, musicians and technologists at ‘The Well’. Even back then, the net was unmistakably one supersized global conversation.

Shailesh N Davey, Vice President & Co-Founder, Zoho Corp

“Try explaining this concept to a time traveler from 1980 — ‘computers owned by random people, delivering information via wires owned by somebody else, with no central control, at a world scale!’ But hard to imagine a world without Internet now. Just within the last 20 years, the Internet has become indispensable. Since its birth 30 years ago, the Internet has seen companies rise and fall, fall and rise, rise and rise — like Netscape, Apple and Google respectively. Internet’s effect on the business and personal worlds is comparable to the effect of printing press and electricity. Like the press, it has helped in the dissemination of information at the speed of light. And like electricity, it is touching every device now. It has added new words to the vocabulary like website, domain names, crowdsourcing, remote conferencing, cloud computing, Big Data, etc. It has spawned of new industries like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to new business models like freemium, ad supported, cloud delivered etc.”

Janesh Moorjani, President– Enterprise and Public Sector, Cisco India

“The future holds an image where almost everything, both people and things will join the Internet. More data will be processed and change the way we work, live, learn, and play. The Internet is nearly 11,000 days old. About 2.5 billion people and 37 billion things are expected to connect to the Internet by 2020. And Cisco believes this is just the beginning. This connection will perhaps be the biggest evolution we have ever experienced because 99 percent of things in the physical world are still unconnected. Cisco terms this transition as the ‘Internet of Everything,’ and believes it will drive the next

informationweek february 2013

wave of business innovation, productivity and customer engagement for years to come. Amazing things will happen when we connect the unconnected. The potential of the Internet, or the ‘Network-of-Networks’, is so vast that practically everything that we see and use can be connected and made to interact with one another. Things like medical devices (for monitored healthcare), buildings (for safety and disaster management), highways (for better traffic management) and much more can be connected seamlessly to change the way we interact with the outside world. The ‘Internet of Everything’ demands a distributed, application-centric networking, computing and storage platform that connects things in ways that just weren’t possible before. Such an explosion of new connections depends on Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled devices and more broadband access. An intelligent, manageable, highly secure infrastructure that can scale to support billions of connected devices is the need of the hour. The technology developments in the areas of cloud, Big Data, proliferation of video and mobile networking and network upgradation to IPv6 will play a critical role in connecting the unconnected. All these transitions represent incredible value for those who are able to create the processes needed to extract value from data in motion and act on it instantly. As people and context-aware machines gain access to more information, they will lead to new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented value for individuals, businesses, communities and countries across the world. The network is a vital platform for every connection. The evolution in network technology and services will uniquely position businesses, governments and other organizations to maximize the value and benefits they gain from the Internet by ensuring presence, starting from where the data originates till the destination. Cisco believes that this will go a long way to help bridge the divide between the present and the future.”

Seemant Chaudhry, Desktop Transformation Evangelist, India Subcontinent, Citrix

“The introduction of the Internet was definitely a revolution and it deeply impacted the way we used to work. I remember the void in communication that used to exist in the pre-Internet era — minimal collaboration among employees working in different locations, excessively long hours to source and exchange information between offices. While installing a new application, we solely had to rely on primitive storage media such as floppy disks, which had much lesser storage capacity and shorter life span, thus raising the risk of corrupted data. For software industries, the concept of software license or e-license didn’t exist,

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which meant we were not able to restrict the use or redistribution of software. We were also dependent on the usage of paper. Since there was no alternative, physical copies of brochures and quotations were sent through couriers and snail mails, which resulted in high turnaround time affecting the overall business scalability.”

Prashanth Adiraju, Director-New Platforms Business group, Intel South Asia

“30 years of the Internet and we are just getting started in terms of its influence. The future growth, pace of growth and magnitude of impact is going to be staggering. As access barriers get lowered, the influence will spread far and wide, impacting markets, children, youth, businesses, and governments at a magnitude or scale never seen before. Internet will become a utility and as envisioned we will have to “re-imagine” every aspect of our life — how we learn, how we buy, how we socialize, how we communicate, how we drive, how we consume news, how we work, how we govern, how we sleep, and a lot more. In the next few years, there will be devices 2X the world’s population that will interact with this powerful discovery ever known to mankind.”

Ashish Pachory, Head-IT, Tata Teleservices

“The Internet may be 30 today, bordering on middle age in our human terms, but in my experience it is still a budding teenager! I first encountered this phenomenon in 1994. I was in Switzerland for business, and was used to exchanging data on 1.2 MB floppy disks. True to this, my patrons provided me a floppy disk titled “World Wide Web” that could potentially access unlimited amounts of data (far more than1.2 MB!). Somewhat puzzled, I brought this disk to India, but found that we did not have the tools in my office to exploit it! In the early nineties, the world was yet to wake up from the era of EDP. Communications meant DoT POTS network, which completely failed to anticipate anything other than voice and telex. The Internet was clearly ahead of its time. Arrival of ISP’s on the scene proliferated Internet use. The ISP offered ‘dial-up’ access over phone lines, and a rudimentary browser. The first browser I recollect was Netscape with its constant meteor shower that gave you the assurance that something was going on, don’t give up! E-mail and chat were the killer apps. No one talked of speed. Just connecting and doing anything at all was an achievement! Considering that we did not have even the basic

technologies and systems, like abundant disk and system memory, communication bandwidth, software and graphics, the Internet was indeed a phenomenon waiting to happen. And it did happen. It had its ups and downs — hindered by Y2K, then spurred by Dotcom — but it never stopped happening. What an extraordinary transformation in 30 years! From being a mysterious, difficult to use, clunky and restricted system to something that has touched almost all of humanity in ways that no one could have imagined. And yet, this is just a beginning. In retrospect, I consider myself more fortunate than my kids. I have seen both worlds, from birth to infancy to teenage of the Internet. How can a generation, which gets bewildered over a delay of a few seconds while online 30,000 feet above the Atlantic, grasp the meaning of Internet evolution? They missed out on the fun, the thrill, the excitement — and the frustration at times — of watching the biggest phenomenon of our times take shape.”

Dr R Venkateswaran, CTO, Persistent Systems

“The Internet today connects 2.5 billion people (approximately 35 percent of the world population), enabling them to collaborate and interact with each other spanning geographic locations, and across diverse areas of work such as education, banking, commerce, healthcare, or simply information dissemination. The magnitude of the impact of the Internet in these last 30 years cannot be expressed easily in words. The vision of the Internet pioneers to keep the protocols non-proprietary, standardized, non-commercial, non-patentable and free from government interference has been instrumental to the success of the Internet. The layered approach to the design of TCP/IP, the protocol that drives today’s Internet, is a lesson in simplicity as each layer does selected things in the most efficient manner. This design has withstood the test of time — scaling to billions of users across heterogeneous systems while maintaining robustness through selforganizations and self-regulated congestion control mechanisms. As a graduate student of computer science in the late 80s and early 90s, the world of information opened up to me, thanks to e-mails, Usenet newsgroups, text-only browsers (such as Lynx) and search tools such as Gopher and Archie. These platforms provided a way to interact with people across the world, many of them unknown faces, yet bonded together as a fraternity of common interests. Opinions were freely expressed, often heated and vociferous, but never once crossing the boundary of unwritten etiquettes. Connecting up to this world through a 1200-baud (1.2 kbps) modem over the telephone line gave me a sense of thrill that is no less than the joy of

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Internet today’s Facebook or YouTube user. On this 30th year of the Internet, let us salute those visionaries of the Internet who defined and abided by the basic principles.They constantly innovated and selflessly supported Internet’s phenomenal growth through selfgoverned, consensus-driven guidelines and policies. On a personal front, my passion in this area has continued and kept me challenged and motivated throughout the past 22 years of my association.”

Sunil Bhave, Vice President, Fujitsu Consulting India

“Today, imagining life without the Internet is next to impossible. It has become an integral part of our lives, both professional and personal. Most businesses, banks, financial institutions, stock and commodity exchanges, and even government departments, are heavily dependent on Internet. Individuals use the Internet effectively for their personal communication needs, social networking, gaming, information exchange, and other entertainment purpose. Online business transaction volumes are constantly on the rise. The number of Internet users has exploded beyond wildest imaginations. Even though the advent of Internet can be traced back to early eighties (starting with usage of TCP/IP in 1983), for most folks Internet affected in a significant way almost a decade or so later. The first free Internet e-mail Hotmail was launched in 1996. And it was in mid-nineties where most businesses and individuals started looking at the Internet seriously. Initially, for most, folks use was limited to e-mail communication. Early days of Internet connectivity included usage of modem boxes (making unbelievable groaning sounds) and dial-up connections. Usage mostly was limited to sharing of key files. Subsequently ISPs started providing dial-up services to individuals creating larger user-base. Written or printed memos, notes and letters got replaced with their e-avatars over time. It is difficult to imagine, today, that transfer of files sometimes involved using floppy disks! And, connecting with people actually meant meeting them or talking to them. For good or bad, Internet has become a central part of the entire ecosystem and humanity. It has opened up new opportunities and challenges. It is up to everyone to make most of the opportunities.”

K. P. Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications

“The tremendous influence of the Internet on the lives/lifestyle of people is undeniable — from the way we source information to the way we work or live or

informationweek february 2013

communicate. The Internet comes into play in a large number of things we do everyday — be it shopping, entertainment, communication, business or information. Today, the way we are connected to each other through social networking sites regardless of distance, would be impossible to imagine in a pre-Internet era. Internet to our generation is as impactful as the discovery of iron was to the stone age man. As we all know more people on the planet today own gadgets connected to the Internet than a toothbrush! Everyone wishes to be connected to the Internet all the time, and a lot of us by more than one device. “

Anuj Bhalla, VP & BU Head, SIMS, Wipro Technologies

“Posed with the question ‘About a World without Internet’, it took me some time to gather my wits as such a world has become very difficult to imagine. Looking at the way today’s organizations and individuals have grown dependant on the Internet for their seemingly unlimited professional and personal interactions, I would say that without Internet we will be no better than fish out of water. Of the top ten global organizations with highest market capitalization, four organizations are directly in the business of Internet or related technology. This gives a fair idea about the importance of Internet in today’s world. Today, Internet is the spinal cord of all major communication. Organizations and communities depend enormously on e-mail, for real-time communication and collaboration. In the absence of the Internet, the delayed communications would have a domino effect on growth of businesses, lifestyle, and economies. Without Internet, we would not have known the ‘flat world’ as it exists today where people collaborate, compete and share with others of different cultures, backgrounds and languages. Education would end within the brick and mortar of schools and universities. Telecommunication to other parts of the world would have been the prerogative of the rich. Without Internet, The Indian outsourcing story would have remained just an aspirational ‘would have been’ story. Bangalore would probably have become famous for aviation rather than outsourcing A day without the Internet — No Google, Amazon, or Facebook — seems like the worst nightmare one could have! It is not an exaggeration to say that we live more of a virtual life than a real one. A day without the backbone of our virtual life would probably leave us paralyzed to the extent of being almost out of work and even unable to write about such a brilliant but painful and hopefully unlikely scenario.”

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Opinion

9 things

that you did not know about the Indian Cyber law

ndia does not have any law by the name of Cyber Law nor any law called as “The Data Protection Act.” India has one law encompassing IT related crimes, Data Protection related law and Internet related law and that is called The IT Act, 2000. The exact name of the law is “The Information Technology Act, 2000 as amended by the Information Technology (amendment) Act of 2008.” This law has to be read and applied along with The IT Rules. I have detailed below some of the crimes for which a common man can be punished with imprisonment up to three years or fine up to ` 5 lakh or both. Also, he can be arrested without warrant. l If anybody copies data (i.e .pdf files, .jpg files etc) in his pen drive or microSDcard without the permission of the owner. l If you download .mp3 or .mpeg4 songs from any website distributing free songs or videos. l If you cut or copy and then paste any data or information from any website without prior permission of the website owner for any material or financial gains. l If an employee keeps forwarding all his official e-mails from his official e-mail ID, i.e from empname@company.com to his personal e-mail ID, i.e to

empname@gmail.com. If you make somebody’s Facebook profile/e-mail/website to defraud or cheat people at large. l If you insert a pen drive in someone’s computer and that has virus or worms in it, and this is then passed in the computer or server you just accessed or the e-mails you forward has virus attached to it, which gets transmitted everywhere because of your forwarded e-mail. l If you by your activities crash somebody’s hard disk or break his monitor or destroy his computer. l If you delete files or folders or modify the content of files or folders of someone’s computer. l If you steal someone’s software program’s source code or change it or delete it thereby causing financial loss to someone or financial gain to yourself. Normally police can call you for investigation and arrest you immediately only because all the above sections are covered under Section 66 of The IT Act, 2000 and are cognizable. The silver lining is that section 66 is a bailable section so you can secure a bail or for that matter an anticipatory bail. l

Cyber law and security expert, Adv Prashant Mali, points out 9 things about the Indian cyber law, which can get you punished with imprisonment of up to three years

Adv Prashant Mali u Adv Prashant Mali is a renowned

Cyber Law and Cyber Security Expert

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Opinion

What will you choose to solve BYOD security issues: MDM or IRM?

Prabhakar Deshpande

Just because MDM is popular is no guarantee of its sanity. And just because IRM is not yet mainstream is no indication of its utility

http://www.on the web Can IRM solve security issues related to BYOD Read article at:

informationweek february 2013

984, a satirical novel, by George Orwell, set in fictional Oceania describes a society tyrannized by ‘The Party’ and its totalitarian ideology. The tyranny is headed by a character called Big Brother. The province is characterized by omnipresent government surveillance and public mind control. The omnipresent surveillance, is satirized, by a polemic — “Big Brother is Watching You.” The spectre of a ‘Big Brother’, watching you is strangely returning under the technological guise of Mobile Device Management (MDM) — a panacea it is claimed for all ailments caused by Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Employees bringing their own device carry an information security risk. However, considering the changing times, enterprises are being compelled to permit employees to bring their own device. Enterprises are wisely choosing to have a policy around BYOD. So far, so good! Now begins the bad news. Enterprises are increasingly adopting MDM as means to control BYOD. In MDM there is software downloaded on each mobile device and MDM manager can manage the device over the air. MDM should allow three areas of functionalities: security management (enforced password, device wipe, remote lock), software distribution (application downloader, application verification/support), and inventory management (memory blocking, configuration change, etc.) MDM allows a corporate to monitor even personal documents of employees. It would for instance allow a corporate to delete your personal photos, letters under the pretext of enterprise information security. But that is only half part of the story. MDM can be bypassed. A determined person can certainly find a way to smuggle out confidential information out of the corporate network. So on one hand MDM unnecessarily muddles into personal information, on another MDM cannot protect corporate information.

It essentially operates out of a flawed information security paradigm that protects infrastructure rather than information itself. Any infrastructure centric security paradigm, will be inadequately effective in a scenario, where due to ubiquitous networking, the IT perimeter of enterprise is difficult to define; and with BYOD IT perimeter is impossible to define. Hence, any infrastructure centric security paradigm such as MDM is doomed to fail miserably. What is needed to mitigate information security risks arising out of BYOD is an information centric security initiative that recognizes the nebulous nature of IT perimeter in an era of ubiquitous networking and telecommunication. Information Rights Management (IRM) fits the bill. IRM protects information by setting usage rights to information. IRM defines who can access information; for what purpose (view, edit, copy, print); when (dates and times), and where (which machines). Best of all these security restrictions stay with information, even after information has moved out of organization’s IT perimeters. In addition, these security policies can be changed any time. IRM is especially suited to BYOD. Because the security is attached to information, and the information stays protected on any device. And IRM does not interfere with employee’s personal information. IRM can be tailored to protect corporate information and can be used to assure that information will remain protected on any device. The choice between MDM and IRM for BYOD scenario is a no brainier. Just because MDM is popular is no guarantee of its sanity. And just because IRM for some strange reasons is not yet mainstream is no indication of its utility. MDM is like shaving in dark with an axe for a person, yet to grow a beard. Nip BYOD in bud, with a well-chosen IRM solution. u Prabhakar Deshpande is Product Evangelist, Seclore Technology

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Event

Security experts discuss risks in the financial industry

nformationWeek in association with CA Technologies, organized a knowledge-sharing forum for the IT community titled, ‘Managing risks and frauds in the financial industry.’ The session was initiated by InformationWeek’s Executive Editor, Srikanth RP. The speakers included Dr Onkar Nath, CISO, Central Bank of India; Pinaq Dudhwala, Financial Crime Prevention Group, ICICI Bank; Sougat Ghosh, Sr. Solution Strategist - Security, CA Technologies; and Govind Yadav, Solution Strategist – Advanced Authentication, CA Technologies. The speakers discussed various security challenges affecting the community in the BFSI space. Dr Onkar Nath in his session on RBI security guidelines, gave an analogy of helmet and exemplified that people wear a helmet only when the RTO makes it a punishable offence. Similarly, lack of following security standards needs to be made a punishable offence to better manage risks and frauds in the financial industry. Nath urged that in addition to implementing recommendations provided by various regulatory bodies, financial entities should remain vigilant and follow best practices in managing technology risks, electronic transactions, and potential frauds across various channels, outsourcing risks. Pinaq Dudhwala of ICICI Bank, in his session titled, ‘Leanings from the most intelligent frauds,’ said attacks today have shifted toward data as information is the crown jewel of any organization and leads to minting money. Bringing to front the security risks related to emerging trends of e-commerce and m-commerce, Dudhwala said, “Today, theft of goods and services via the credit card medium is on the rise and the point of sale and online mediums are more vulnerable.” From CA, Sougat Ghosh spoke on the topic, ‘Advancing information security measures for new age threats’, while Govind Yadav delivered a session on the topic, ‘Advanced authentication goes mainstream: Mobile and remote users are the norm.’

Sougat Ghosh, Sr. Solution Strategist - Security, CA Technologies

Dr Onkar Nath, CISO, Central bank of India

Pinaq Dudhwala, Chief Manager, Financial Crime Prevention Group, in ICICI Bank

Govind Yadav, Solution Strategist – Advanced Authentication, CA Technologies

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CIO Profile Images of Organization – By Gareth Morgan l What got you here Would not get you there – By Marshall Goldsmith

Career Track

Most important career influencer: My most important career influencers are Russi Mody, J J Irani (former CMD , Tata Steel) and Ajai Chowdhry (HCL), who were my seniors in my previous employment. I learnt a lot from them in my career progression.

Unknown talents (singing, painting etc): Singing.

Decision I wish I could do over: In my entire career span, I have taken all the decisions by taking into consideration the best interest of business, people and the organization ecosystem.

u As told to Jasmine Kohli

How long at the current company? I have been working with the Welspun Group for the past 3.5 years.

If I weren’t a CIO, I’d be... CEO of an organization!

Vision

The next big thing for my industry will be… l Business transformation through supply chain automation, shared services and enterprise PMO. l Mobile and public cloud computing. Advice for future CIOs: l Apart from the regular technical, operation and maintenance CIOs should more focus on the strategy and business transformation initiatives. l CIOs should work closely with business and align IT with the business to add maximum value and benefits.

On The Job

Top three initiatives l Primary and DR data center creation for the organization l Server consolidation and virtualization l Strategic outsourcing of IT How I measure IT effectiveness IT effectiveness can be measured by the following: l Operational excellence by reduction of costs (Low cost provider) l Customer intimacy (best total solution) l Saving time and meeting needs of customers and business users more quickly l Strategic planning and transformational initiatives l Increasing flexibility in the enterprise by building a scalable and reliable technical infrastructure that can be easily integrated where necessary to improve the flow of information across systems.

Personal

Leisure activities: Reading books. Best book read recently: l Why should anyone be led by you – By Rob Goffee & Gareth Jhon l Seven Languages of transformation – By Robert Kegan l Immunity to Change – By Robert Kegan

informationweek february 2013

Mukund Prasad Director Group HR, Business Transformation & Group CIO, Welspun Group

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Secret CIO

The problem with social collaboration on IT projects

John McGreavy

The buzzword of the day takes communications to a whole new level. It may ease implementation — or mean getting bogged down in consensus building

http://www.on the web What enterprise social networks lack: Purpose Read article at:

was just putting the finishing touches on our company’s BYOD policy when Sam, our CEO, dropped by for a chat. I eventually got around to the BYOD strategy, mentioning the planned move from company-issued BlackBerrys to employee-paid, personally owned devices of choice. “This is going to be a big change for some of our staff,” he said. “You better socialize this.” “Socialize” is one of the über-buzzwords of the day. Socializing generally involves communicating from one to many and, more important, encouraging much more feedback from and interaction among that many. For example, you might socialize your plan to replace Office 2010 with Office 365 by posting this information on the company blog and asking employees to weigh in with comments and suggestions, even alternatives. In the past, the IT organization would just make this decision and implement it. I’m now working through our new smartphone/tablet/personal device policy, and it’s clearly a high-touch, high-feel subject. In the past, my team would weigh the options, consider the overall business case and value drivers, and set a policy that we would then implement. But the past dealt with cell phones and laptops. With consumer devices, most employees have a much stronger opinion. Rather than come to us, the IT experts, for advice (“Which home PC would you suggest I buy?”), employees are now coming to us with advice (“The company should issue everyone iPhones, as I’ve found that they’re the best smartphones.”). Not only does socializing involve a fairly broad audience, but it also implies true interaction. And with that interaction comes the expectation that the mobile device approach our company ultimately will take won’t necessarily be the one my IT team would lay out if we were (no pun intended) left to our own devices.

We will start the process at the top. I will send a summary of the initial plan to our CEO, and I will then present it at our next senior leadership meeting. I will provide all of the answers to their questions. Members of the leadership will share it with their direct reports and ask them for feedback. Much of that feedback will come in the form of questions, which my team will answer, and I’ll communicate those answers back to the broader management team. This cycle will continue for a few iterations, before we open the discussion to employees and begin to zero in on the end point. This all may seem like an exercise in bureaucracy and CYA, but I have no doubt that the socializing process will produce a much easier implementation. But … and this is a big but: If the socializing process morphs into consensusbuilding, we’ll have a huge problem, because there’s no chance everyone will agree on what to do with smartphones, tablets, and other personally owned devices. At some point, our IT organization will have to make a decision based on our expertise, a decision that will be unpopular with employees. In the past, our IT organization’s approach was to get our hands on everything and manage the heck out of it. We negotiated cellular contracts, locked down rate plans, set policy on our BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, centralized billing and chargebacks, and monitored expenses. I slept very well at night. Adoption of personally owned, corporately enabled devices is very different. Centralized control will be expensive and will stifle the productivity benefits these new devices have to offer. There’s no right answer, but if socializing means coming to a collective agreement, we may be a BlackBerry customer for much longer than I thought. u The author, the real-life CIO of

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

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Analyst Angle

UC evolving from on-premise application to service-based offering

Parminder Saini

Declining telecom costs and shift to an OPEX-based investment model have led to increasing adoption of cloudbased or hosted services amongst Indian enterprises

ver the years, business dynamics have evolved considerably, resulting in the convergence of technology and solutions. The need for higher productivity has led to unification of various communication applications. Increasing globalization, consumerization of IT, and improved infrastructure has facilitated rich communication in form of pervasive video and context driven communication to meet enterprise demand. As per 2012 half-yearly estimates, the UC market for application performance in India was pegged at ` 1304.1 crore and the services market at ` 512.7 crore. Key factors contributing to the growth of the UC market include increasing adoption of data services across devices, mobility, smart cloud collaboration, and social data intelligence. Cloud-based services are expected to change the investment strategy of enterprises. Whether to move business critical information onto the public cloud infrastructure is a critical decision yet to be fully taken.

Trends in the Indian UC Market

http://www.on the web Changing landscape of Unified Communications market in India Read article at:

informationweek february 2013

Slowdown was witnessed in uptake of UC solutions by Indian enterprises in the first half of 2012 due to rupee depreciation and delayed decision cycles. It was also observed that several companies were gradually adopting soft phones and soft PBX for internal communications, which proved costeffective. Mobility and shift from pure voice to a voice and video infrastructure led vendors to either introduce video solutions in their portfolios, or enter strategic partnerships to offer complete UC solutions, including voice and video applications. Enterprises have been carefully investigating device-agnostic solutions around the latest trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). In coming years, this is expected to be a key consideration while selecting an apt communication strategy for enterprises.

Till recently, UC applications were implemented in silos. However, going forward, it is expected that consulting services will also contribute to a large extent, as end users are keen to assess the option of leveraging existing voice/ video infrastructure and integrating the same with advanced or newer technologies and applications. Declining telecom costs and shift to an OPEX-based investment model have led to increasing adoption of cloudbased or hosted services amongst Indian enterprises. While enterprises are keen to shift to this model, only a few applications, in phases, have been moved to the cloud due to security concerns. Another trend observed is enterprise implementation of an endto-end managed services model; not going by the vendor-led managed services approach, but the partner-led/ system integrator-led managed services approach. The vendor-led approach is not too prevalent in India, as end users perceive their service price positioning to be costlier than the partner-led approach. Service level agreements have been a key element in the case of partner led approach, where proven capabilities and expertise of the support staff have attracted enterprises to sign a managed services contract valid for a couple of years. It has been preferred primarily by large MNCs that plan to align communication strategies as per diverse global locations. Enterprises have shown active interest in rolling out software-based solutions rather than hardware-based products. Hence, the hosted/cloud services market is expected to grow faster than the managed services market. Unlike professional services, which has been dominated by system integrators and draw margins from maintenance and integration services, the UC as a service (UCaaS) market will witness high competition amongst vendors, system integrators (SI), and service providers (SP), each vying for a

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sizeable share.

Adoption of UC

The government and defense sectors in India have witnessed slowdown in UC adoption with respect to number of tenders floated in the market. Investments from the BFSI vertical also dropped due to deferred deployment plans. However, verticals like education, manufacturing, and hospitality have continued their investments in UC applications. Horizontal-wise large enterprises have continued to deploy UC solutions on a large scale, although cautiously and in a phased manner. Initial deployments include telephony, voice mail, and messaging, followed by other pieces of UC. Due to prevailing economic conditions, the small and medium business (SMB) segment also deferred deployments; hence slight decline was noticed in the first half of the year. Mid-market customers have now started considering virtualized servers to deploy collaborative solutions.

Way Forward

There are ample opportunities in the

Indian UC market for product vendors, partners, and telecom service providers in terms of offering premise-based or cloud-based or managed UC solutions. Partnerships are expected among service providers and vendors to build up infrastructure and services capabilities, as the market opens up with regards to deregulation of telecom policy on termination of public switched telephone networks (PSTN) and Internet Protocol (IP) trunks on the same infrastructure. Currently, telecom service providersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; level of engagement from a UC standpoint is low. Such engagements should be encouraged to further develop UC as a service portfolio. Outside the Indian market, most hosted IP telephony providers offer a combination of services like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) access and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking services, which represent an opportunity to leverage existing platforms for additional revenue streams from customers. Such services are expected to be replicated in India, as the UC market evolves.

Unlike professional services, which has been dominated by SIs and draws margins from maintenance and integration services, the UCaaS market will witness high competition amongst vendors, SIs, and service providers, each vying for a sizeable share

u Parminder Saini is Industry Manager, Information and Communication Technologies Practice, Frost & Sullivan

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 67

Global CIO

How IT can keep its strategic role in 2013

Chris Murphy

A columnist says this is the year IT may lose its seat at the strategy table. A focus on the end customer is key to avoiding that outcome

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

informationweek february 2013

alen Gruman at InfoWorld is offering a dire warning: 2013 is the year IT may lose its “seat at the table” in helping set business strategy. Gruman’s warning is worth a read, but he ignores the most important remedy: an IT focus on a company’s end customers. Gruman is downright gloomy in asserting that IT organizations have failed to become a strategic asset: “IT didn’t fundamentally change in the last decade — and has largely lost its chance to claim its spot at the strategic executives’ table. Sadly, despite all the talk about being strategic, IT’s focus in most companies has remained on core transactional and financial systems, and where its role has broadened has been in security enforcement, not enablement.” He cites as evidence IT’s resistance to trends such as consumerfriendly smartphones, tablets and cloud services: “IT organizations largely resisted, first claiming doomand-gloom scenarios, then raising security objections [that] didn’t even apply to the desktop. The pace of consumerization only accelerated, as it became clear that IT’s claims were of the Chicken Little or Boy Who Cried Wolf variety — not Cassandra’s warning of the Trojan Horse.” Gruman’s right that IT whiffed on the mobile revolution, too often reacting instead of leading. But BYOD policies aren’t the differencemaker between relevant and irrelevant IT organizations today. The difference comes from whether IT is helping the company provide services that are highly relevant to its end customers. Gruman also rightly points out that IT too often uses security as a reason to say no. But he doesn’t put much emphasis on the flip-side opportunity: IT’s deep knowledge of transactional systems is one of the

essential assets it must exploit to provide new, tech-powered services to customers. Consider what Sears is contemplating. It’s now analyzing petabytes of customer data and trying to provide real-time offers via smartphones to shoppers while they’re in its stores. Sears can’t do that data analysis and marketing without a deep understanding of its transactional systems — such as knowing what’s in stock in a store so that it’s not promoting a treadmill that’s sold out. Look at UPS’s new My Choice service, which lets customers reroute a package that’s already out on the road in a driver’s truck. CIO Dave Barnes describes the service as easy to imagine but hard to engineer. UPS’s customer database, its package-routing technology, its Web interface and its billing systems all had to be modified or accessed in a new way to deliver the new service. Look at the CUNA Mutual Group smartphone app that lets people apply for a car loan while they’re standing on a dealer’s lot. Building that app took a couple of IT pros, working with the business manager of that process, who understood the loan documentation and compliance process and related (cloud-based) software. IT leaders should heed Gruman’s stark warning that IT isn’t guaranteed a place in strategic discussions simply by the fact that technology is becoming more essential to the company. But to be relevant, IT pros at every level must spend 2013 improving their understanding of the needs of the company’s ultimate customer.

u Chris Murphy is Editor of

InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com

www.informationweek.in

Practical Analysis

Does Microsoft really need to make its own hardware?

Art Wittmann

Without some fundamental added value, Microsoft’s hardware offerings are likely to go the way of the Zune

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

teve Ballmer says Microsoft is seriously considering making more of its own hardware. It seems that even with the old guard of IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Sony and HP, and the new guard of Samsung, Lenovo, LG and Asus, and all those white-box manufacturers, Microsoft just can’t find a reliable design partner. Have we come full circle to where we started 50 years ago, when hardware and software were inextricably intertwined and necessarily provided by the same company? Looking at the actions of some of the world’s largest software houses, you could easily come to that conclusion. Microsoft now makes Surface, and it has made the Xbox for years. Google bought Motorola’s phone division, probably for its patent portfolio but also to make the Droids it thinks people want. Google also makes the Chromebook. Even Oracle had to have its own hardware division, though the performance of Sun doesn’t bear out the wisdom of that move. Its real play is purposebuilt machines such as Exadata and Exalogic. For the moment, put aside the question of whether the Oracles of the world are doing the right thing and focus on the trend as it relates to end users. Such moves start with Apple envy. After all, if Microsoft works with partners such as Intel or an ARM licensee to create reference designs, it would be hard to believe that manufacturers wouldn’t help make prototypes. Microsoft, Intel and system makers have collaborated to good effect in the past. Ultrabooks are a prime example: While they’re not revolutionary, Ultrabooks address most every problem users have with laptops, from weight to battery life to processing power to boot

time. They’re a major improvement over last-generation notebooks and netbooks. Intel produced the reference designs, and a few months later systems showed up from a variety of manufacturers. So what’s Microsoft’s problem with that model? The biggest problem is that it’s not what Apple does, and Apple’s share price has outperformed Microsoft’s consistently. It’s not that Microsoft’s products aren’t good enough and that better hardware integration is the answer. The problem is that they’re not good enough to displace entrenched products tied to an ecosystem investment, namely, Apple’s iTunes and App Store. Without some fundamental added value, Microsoft’s tablets are likely to go the way of the Zune. That’s not because Zune wasn’t a solid product; it might have been terrific, I never tried it. And the reason I never tried it is because I have an investment in iTunes and I know the iPod/iPad/ iPhone interface for playing music. What’s Microsoft’s big value add? For businesses it might be compatibility with Office. For consumers I have no idea what it would be — Xbox compatibility? This Apple-Microsoft dynamic reminds me of Ford’s breakthrough with the Mustang. Chevy was a close follower with the Camaro, and both were big sellers. Dodge made the Dart and Charger, both technically great cars that never really caught on. Microsoft’s third to market here. It had better have something more important than its Metro technology if it wants to compete, no matter who makes the hardware. 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.

february 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 69

Down to Business

When incremental IT change won’t cut it

Rob Preston

For pharma company Cipla and its new CIO, IT transformation is all or nothing

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

informationweek february 2013

o business technology buzzword gets worn out quite like “transformation,” but there’s no other way to describe what pharmaceutical company Cipla is embarking on. The 77-year-old company is one of the world’s largest generic drug makers, with a presence in more than 170 countries. But until sometime ago, it didn’t have a CIO and was the poster child for shadow IT. Each company department negotiated with tech vendors on its own, deployed its own systems, and then looped in the IT department, which consisted of 17 core internal people. Enter Arun Gupta, whom Cipla recruited in 2012 from retailer Shoppers Stop to bring discipline and vision to the company’s IT. Early on, in talking with colleagues and employees about their views of the company’s IT, Gupta says he heard three main complaints: IT doesn’t deliver what we need; we can’t get the information we need when we need it; and we have too many systems that don’t interoperate. It’s not for lack of investment. Cipla spends about 1 percent of its USD 1.4 billion in annual revenue on IT, and it’s “not shy about investing in people, processes and manufacturing facilities,” Gupta says. The problem was lack of coordination and oversight of the company’s myriad IT vendors and systems. Gupta’s first major step was to consolidate Cipla’s six data centers to a single collocated one and revamp its network around a mix of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and metro Ethernet links. The plan is to reduce more than 600 database servers to 100 and reduce the company’s scores of ERP, CRM, HR, document management, laboratory information management and other pharma-specific apps to about 15 total. Gupta says he’s also fixing Cipla’s “broken” implementations of Pilgrim (quality assurance and compliance) and IBM Cognos (BI) software. Looking to make a difference on

the frontlines, he’s focusing on Cipla’s medical reps: the employees who sell the company’s products to doctors. Cipla wants to enhance its reps’ engagement with doctors with a new offthe-shelf software tool that lets them share information on clinical trials and medical studies. The goal is to increase the average time a rep spends with a doctor from one minute to five. Gupta estimates that the new tool also helps reps save as much as three hours a day on planning and reporting activities. Gupta is also trying to get his arms around Cipla’s sprawling supply chain of distributors and resellers to improve on-time delivery. Cipla’s starting with process improvements, adopting theory of constraints methodologies before turning to technology. Next up is a big bang SAP ERP implementation — starting with financial accounting, sales and distribution, production planning and materials management, and purchase and order management — to replace 40-plus custom systems. Meantime, Gupta is building up Cipla’s in-house IT capabilities. A goal over the next 12 months is to add 35 IT specialists beyond those 17 in the core IT group. In the process, Cipla will gradually wean itself off its dependence on IT vendors, integrators and consultants — much like CIO Randy Mott is doing at General Motors. Gupta, like Mott, realizes he doesn’t have the luxury of making incremental changes. He figures Cipla is 10 to 15 years behind others when it comes to IT best practices, and all Cipla executives are under pressure to accelerate company growth to the 30 percent to 35 percent range. In the past, Cipla was averse to doing such a massive ERP implementation, for instance, “but now there’s no choice” Gupta says. “If we don’t do it, it will start impacting the business.” u Rob Preston is VP and Editor-in-Chief of InformationWeek. You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.