InformationWeek India June 2011 Leader Issue by Viraj Mehta

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Life begins at 69!

was pleasantly surprised to receive an email directly from Ashok Soota in late January. After all, it is rather unusual for a former Wipro Infotech CEO to be writing directly to a journalist (no PR and Corporate Communications involved this time). So I hit the ‘reply’ button and wished Soota all the best for his next venture. I also expressed my desire to meet him whenever he was ready. He graciously agreed. A few emails later I found myself perched in his comfortable living room in Bengaluru. Soota told me that the media had created a distorted view about his reasons for leaving MindTree. There was “too much speculation”, he said. Our Principal Correspondent Ayushman Baruah (with me for this interview) reports on Soota’s plans for his new venture Happiest Minds. In this story Soota speaks freely about his three-pronged strategy and the six lines of business. In a second interview for our cover story, Soota tells us about leadership qualities and the attributes he looks for in people. It seems just about everyone wants to work under his leadership. And this aspiration is reciprocated by Soota, who says, “In the IT business, it’s great to be surrounded by young people who energize you.” At 69, when most people hang up their boots, Soota has embarked on a new journey with Happiest Minds. We wondered how he keeps going forward with such energy and enthusiasm. “I think it’s about enjoying the work you do. If you enjoy your work, it’s not work anymore. It’s partly fun, partly hobby, partly challenge. In fact, it’s the work that keeps me going and feeling young.” We took the plane to New Delhi to meet another ageless and energetic person. After building India’s strongest IT brand over the past 34 years, Ajai Chowdhry makes way for a new CEO at HCL Infosystems. Since 1999 he has participated on various high-level government committees to make recommendations for boosting electronics and semiconductor output in India. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek, Chowdhury speaks passionately about what he wishes for the hardware industry in India. The other ageless wonder is S Ramadorai, Vice Chairman of TCS. Ramadorai’s leadership saw TCS expand in an accelerated way. When he stepped down as CEO in 2009, TCS had more than 140,000 employees spread across 42 countries, with revenues of more than USD 6 billion. Our Sr. Associate Editor, Srikanth RP asks Ramadorai to share some great insights on leadership. We hope you enjoy our collector’s issue on leadership.

“If you enjoy your work, it’s not work anymore. It’s partly fun, partly hobby, partly challenge. In fact, it’s the work that keeps me going and feeling young” —Ashok Soota, Chairman & MD, Happiest Minds

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

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contents Vo l u m e

I s s u e

0 1

J u n e

2 0 1 1

Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

Leadership Series

Interviews & Opinion Articles from Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s IT thought leaders

25 by invitation

25 28

interview

Sudhakar Ram Managing Director & CEO, Mastek

Neelam Dhawan Managing Director, HP India

Dr Ganesh Natarajan

Dr. Matt Barney and Aarti Shyamsunder

Vice Chairman & CEO of Zensar Technologies

Infosys Leadership Institute

VR Ferose Managing Director, SAP Labs India

Raj Saraf

Hemal Patel

S Ramadorai

Ajai Chowdhry

Dr. Anand Deshpande

Ashok Soota

Vice Chairman, TCS

CEO, HCL Infosystems

MD, Persistent Systems

Chairman and MD, Happiest Minds

CP Gurnani CEO, Mahindra Satyam

Chairman, Zenith Computers

CEO, Elitecore Technologies

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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

interview

58 ‘Smart water grids can help in overcoming water availability and quality issues’ Dr Cameron Brooks, Director, Smarter Water Management, IBM Big Green Innovations

61 ‘Acquisition of Sun was a strategic fit’ Sandeep Mathur, Managing Director, Oracle India

News Happiest Minds to focus on strategic differentiation Steria eyes government sector for its RFID solution

India PC software piracy rate declines 10 percent since 2004: BSA Fortinet to focus on key verticals in India

news analysis NComputing device changing education landscape With more than three lakh Virtual Desktops deployed in a short span of three years, NComputing is fast becoming a standard for delivering education through computers in India. Here’s why it is likely to succeed

Leading the Infosys way With its leaders stepping down, Infosys is going through one of its most transformational phases, and industry observers are keen to know what happens next

62 ‘Cloud computing is driving the next wave of data fragmentation’ Peter Ku, Director, Financial Service Solutions Marketing, Informatica

64 Brocade to optimize the cloud environment Dave Stevens, CTO, Brocade Technology

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

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

book review................................................ 65

technology & risk................................... 66

Global CIO....................................................67

analyst angle........................................... 68

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

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

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 7

Imprint

VOLUME 3 NO. 01 n June 2011

print online newsletters events research

Managing Director Printer & Publisher Director Group Commercial Director Editor Senior Associate Editor Principal Correspondent Principal Correspondent Senior Correspondent Senior Copy Editor

: Sanjeev Khaira : Sajid Yusuf Desai : Kailash Shirodkar : Pankaj Jain : Brian Pereira : Srikanth RP : Vinita Gupta : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) : Pratibha Verma (New Delhi) : Bhaswati Das

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

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Ajai Chowdhry, HCL Infosystems........................46

associate office- pune Jagdish Khaladkar, Sahayog Apartment 508 Narayan Peth, Patrya Maruti Chowk, Pune 411 030 Tel: 91 (020) 2445 1574 (M) 98230 38315 e-mail: jagdishk@vsnl.com

Anand Deshpande, Persistent Systems............50

International Associate Offices USA Huson International Media (West) Tiffany DeBie, Tiffany.debie@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 408 879 6666, Fax: +1 408 879 6669

C P Gurnani, Mahindra Satyam............................55

(East) Dan Manioci, dan.manioci@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 212 268 3344, Fax: +1 212 268 3355

Ashok Soota, Happiest Minds..............................10

Dr Cameron Brooks, IBM Big Green Innovations...................................58 Dave Stevens, Brocade...........................................64 Dr Ganesh Natarajan,

EMEA Huson International Media Gerry Rhoades Brown, gerry.rhoadesbrown@husonmedia.com Tel: +44 19325 64999, Fax: + 44 19325 64998

Zensar Technologies................................................30

Japan Pacific Business (PBI) Shigenori Nagatomo, nagatomo-pbi@gol.com Tel: +81 3366 16138, Fax: +81 3366 16139

Karthik Ananth,

South Korea Young Media Young Baek, ymedia@chol.com Tel: +82 2227 34819; Fax : +82 2227 34866 Printed and Published by Sajid Yusuf Desai on behalf of UBM India Pvt Ltd, 6th floor, 615-617, Sagar Tech Plaza A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India. Editor: Brian Pereira, Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt Ltd, Plot No 1c/716, Off Dadaji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027. RNI NO. MAH ENG/2001/4730

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Company name Page No.

Editorial index Person & Organization

Website Sales Contact

IBM

5 www.ibm.com

APC

9 www.apc.com/promo

indiainfo@apcc.com

ZOHO Development

www.ManageEngine.com/it360

sales@manageengine.com

Socomec

www.socomec-ups.co.in

info.ups.in@socomec-ups.co.in

Juniper

23 www.juniper.net

IBM

71 www.ibm.com

Juniper

72 www.juniper.net

Hemal Patel, Elitecore Technologies..................38

Zinnov Management Consulting.......................18 Dr Matt Barney and Aarti Shyamsunder, Infosys Leadership Institute..................................32 Mukesh Aghi, Steria.................................................10 Neelam Dhawan, HP India ...................................28 Peter Ku, Informatica...............................................62 Raj Dhingra, Ncomputing......................................14 Raj Saraf, Zenith Computers.................................36 S Ramadorai, TCS......................................................42 Sandeep Mathur, Oracle India ............................61 Sudhakar Ram, Mastek...........................................25 Vishak Raman, Fortinet...........................................12 VR Feroze, SAP Labs India .....................................34

Important Every effort has been taken to avoid errors or omissions in this magazine. In spite of this, errors may creep in. Any mistake, error or discrepancy noted may be brought to our notice immediately. It is notified that neither the publisher, the editor or the seller will be responsible in respect of anything and the consequence of anything done or omitted to be done by any person in reliance upon the content herein. This disclaimer applies to all, whether subscriber to the magazine or not. For binding mistakes, misprints, missing pages, etc., the publisher’s liability is limited to replacement within one month of purchase. © All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Mumbai only. Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. UBM India Pvt Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

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News exclusive

Happiest Minds to focus on strategic differentiation Bangalore-based start-up Happiest Minds Technologies plans to differentiate itself from the competition at a strategy level. Ashok Soota, chairman and MD of the company announced the establishment of this new business venture on April 5, just three days after he left MindTree, the company he co-founded with nine others in 1999. Happiest Minds will have three components to its strategy. “The first element of our strategy is to use disruptive new technologies like mobility, analytics, social CRM and unified communications, which are very good entry points. These could be packaged and used appropriately in new solutions. The second element is the industry group and the third element includes the solutions that we plan to be known for,” said Soota. “It is the intersection of all three that will make the strategy unique.” In contrast to many other midsized companies, Happiest Minds

does not want to position itself as a niche company. Soota cautions companies that are too niche as they may lose out on a large share of the addressable market. “Sometimes the niche developed by mid-sized firms disappears as the larger players move into every conceivable niche with the added ability to put in much more resources. The other danger in being too narrow is that it may be difficult to say where focus ends and contraction begins,” he said. Happiest Minds would have six lines of businesses, namely IT services, R&D services, product engineering services, remote infrastructure management, testing and consulting. It aims to rapidly establish itself as a global player with plans to open offices in various cities in the US, Continental Europe, UK, Japan, Singapore and India. The company also aims to be the fastest IT services firm from India to reach USD 100 million in revenue. The fastest so far to touch that mark has been MindTree,

which reached revenues of USD 100 million in six years. Happiest Minds is expected to be formally launched for customer delivery within five months of the announcement of its founding in April. “This period will be utilized in setting up the infrastructure and the team and also getting some initial trial orders and customers in place,” Soota said. —Ayushman Baruah

government

Steria eyes government sector for its RFID solution Steria is seeing traction in the Indian RFID market which grew by 119 percent in 2010 over the previous year and is expected to grow to USD 197 million by 2014 (Source: Frost and Sullivan). Taking a cue from this development, Steria recently announced its partnership with Neology to provide RFID solutions. The company will bring its RFID experience to India and tap different sectors. Mukesh Aghi, chairman and CEO, Steria, India says, “We are bringing those solutions here that have worked well in European environments. We have a strong traffic management system and by deploying RFID solution, it becomes easy to track vehicles and do the management.” Steria is also planning to tap the insurance sector. In the insurance sector, the present model which is used in India would see a change. Insurance companies in Europe have already changed their old model to a pay-per-use model. In this model, RFID deployed in the car, monitors its

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movement through GPRS system. The car is registered with the insurance company and they can track the number of hours that the car was driven from point A to point B and charge accordingly. In cases such as this, if you drive less you pay less, and if you drive more you pay more. “RFID can also be used in pharma sector for checking fraud,” Aghi adds. While Neology, its partner company, brings to the alliance its manufacturing expertise in RFID chip designing, and device development for the backend, Steria on the other hand would develop customized software which would be written on RFID chip for specific industry which would be connected through GPRS system. These software will enable monitoring and governing agencies enforce rules efficiently to reduce security lapses. —Pratibha Verma

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News S o f t wa r e

security

India PC software piracy rate declines 10 percent since 2004: BSA

Fortinet to focus on key verticals in India

First – the good news. Software PC piracy rate has been steadily declining in India. From 74 percent in 2004, the software piracy rate has declined to 64 percent in 2010. While the 10 percentage point drop is pleasing to the industry, the rate at which piracy needs to decline leaves much to be desired. For example, compared to 65 percent in 2009, the software PC piracy rate has declined to 64 percent — a single percentage drop. These are among the findings of the 8th Annual IDC-Business Software Alliance (BSA) 2010 Global Software Piracy Study,

India. To support her view, Mishra quotes statistics from the report which states that while the number of PCs shipped to emerging economies like India in 2010 accounted to more than 50 percent of the world total, paid software licenses accounted for less than 20 percent of global sales in 2010. The report also cites the changing nature of the hardware landscape that has made an impact on curbing piracy. For example, the rising share of laptops in the enterprise has been one of the reasons for the drop in piracy.

which researches and evaluates the state of software piracy around the world. With this rate, the commercial value of unlicensed software installed on personal computers in India touched USD 2.739 billion in 2010, whereas the global losses stood at USD 59 billion. “Overall software piracy rates have to decline at a much more accelerated pace to balance the commensurate increase in the number of PCs shipped,” says Lizum Mishra, Director of Business Software Alliance,

The report says that since laptops tend to have more legitimate software bundled with them at the point of sale than desktops, and they account for an increasing share of the PC market. Over a period of time, as tablets and smartphones start nibbling away at the market share of the PC, one can expect a more significant drop in software piracy. The steady decline of assemblers is also one of the key reasons for the drop in piracy.

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Fortinet, global network security provider and leader in unified threat management (UTM) solutions, will be focusing on key verticals such as telecom and government as part of their growth strategy in India. Vishak Raman, regional director for India and Saarc, Fortinet, said, “One of my top priorities is to accelerate high-end market penetration, focusing on the key telecom and government verticals, which both represent a strong business opportunity with increased pressure on regulations on one hand and the advent of 3G and Wimax technologies on the other.” According to IDC, Fortinet is the market leader in the UTM space both in terms of units and revenue. “The UTM market is recognized as the fastest growing segment of the network security market,” said Raman. “In order to maintain market leadership in this rapidly growing and increasingly competitive landscape, it is critical for us to continue to focus on our technology value proposition and innovation, as well as to affirm our strong commitment in the Indian market by increasing our sales and support resources to guarantee customer satisfaction and sustain our growth.” In line with its efforts to retain the top slot in UTM, Fortinet also announced the launch of FortiGate-3140B, a consolidated security appliance, designed for large enterprises and data centers requiring maximum firewall, VPN and IPS performance. —Ayushman Baruah

—Srikanth RP

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News Analysis

NComputing device changing education landscape With more than three lakh Virtual Desktops deployed in a short span of three years, NComputing is fast becoming a standard for delivering education through computers in India. Here’s why it is likely to succeed By Brian Pereira

et another IT company is attempting to bridge the digital divide in India. NComputing has introduced an energy efficient shared computing solution that takes the cost per seat for personal computing to a new level. It is working with a number of state governments and has already deployed its solution at organizations such as ESIC (Employee State Insurance Corporation) and Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL). NComputing is offering a turnkey virtual desktop solution (VDI) called ‘Classroom in the Box’. With this solution, the cost per seat for a computer is about ` 4,000. In contrast, the cost of an unbranded PC is typically ` 15,000. NComputing claims its unique technology for shared computing can reduce the cost of computing infrastructure by 50 percent. And since this is a ‘thin client’ solution, it is power efficient, consuming a few watts. The virtual desktop company has worked with the government of Andhra Pradesh (AP) to bring lowcost computing access to schools. The AP government evaluated several solutions and after considering the challenges typical to the state it opted for a shared computing solution, with low initial investment that uses minimal power. It finally chose NComputing’s solution for 1.8 million users in schools across the state. “The total savings from energy in the Andhra Pradesh project was about ` 80 crore. And there were huge savings in acquisition costs as well. The two factors that resonate the highest

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“The two factors that resonate the highest in India are faster ROI and savings from energy”

Raj Dhingra

CEO, NComputing

in India are faster ROI and savings from energy,” said Raj Dhingra, CEO, NComputing. “A PC consumes 110 watts and by contrast an NComputing solution consumes between 1 – 3 watts. So customers are telling us just the energy savings in a three-year period pays for the investment.”

TURNKEY SOLUTION

But NComputing’s strategy is to provide a turnkey solution that is easy to deploy and manage. And hence it is re-launching and rebranding its solution as ‘Classroom in a Box’ for the education sector. Dhingra informs that Classroom in a box is “a pre-validated, pre-tested and pre-configured” vertical specific solution. While the focus is on the education sector for now, NComputing will also pursue the SME/SMB and Enterprise segments. “More than half of the total number of Indian states have deployed NComputing solutions in their schools. Andhra Pradesh deployed our solution in 5,000 schools and recently, the government of Punjab selected our solution for nearly 500 schools. MKCL has deployed NComputing solutions in 5,000 learning centers and in about

700 digital schools,” informed Dhingra. Many of these learning centers are in remote locations, where power is scarce. So NComputing has an advantage here since its low-power devices can run longer off UPS devices. That means classroom sessions can extend from two hours (using PCs), to say, five or six hours. The other advantage is the cost. And these smart terminals can also process multimedia content because these have a system on chip.

SECURITY

With one PC servicing 10 – 11 NComputing devices in a shared PC configuration, it is now possible for millions of users to have access at an affordable cost. But the high level security features in the device is also drawing the attention of public services institutions like ESIC. “Our devices have very high security and do not leave any trace of data on the client/terminal. And that was of very high value to ESIC, because of the sensitivity of the data,” said Manish Sharma, Vice President, Asia Pacific, NComputing. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

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News Analysis

Leading the Infosys way With its leaders stepping down, Infosys is going through one of its most transformational phases, and industry observers are keen to know what happens next By Ayushman Baruah Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. —Peter F. Drucker

he founders of Infosys, the country’s second largest software exporter, have been leaders who have, more often than not, managed to do the right things in the right way. Under the leadership of NR Narayana Murthy, one of the key founders and the longest serving CEO of the company (1981-2002), Infosys emerged as one of the finest IT companies globally and a hallmark of corporate governance. In fact, Murthy became the iconic figure and face of Infosys. Nandan Nilekani was the other poster boy of Infosys who became a role model not just for the company but for millions of Indians including the crème de la crème. Nilekani attained a more global stature after his idea inspired Thomas Friedman to write the international bestseller The world is flat. In the boardroom, Nilekani was known to be the mediator who brought debaters to a consensus, an innate quality of any leader.

The Big Four NR Narayana Murthy appointed chairman emeritus KV Kamath named as chairman of the board S Gopalakrishnan named as the co-chairman of the board SD Shibulal named as CEO and MD In 2009, Nilekani stepped down as co-chairman from the Infosys board to head the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) project as a cabinet minister. The resignation of Nilekani was so far perhaps the most significant exits within Infosys until April this year when the company saw a string of exits and leadership changes. While some of the changes appeared abrupt, most of them were well orchestrated.

During the company’s Q4’11 results, Infosys co-founder K Dinesh along with board member and HR director TV Mohandas Pai had announced their resignations from the IT bellwether in pursuit of their personal endeavors. “Dinesh, who will retire by rotation at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) to be held on June 11, has expressed his intention not to seek re-appointment,” Infosys said in a statement. Pai’s resignation, however, seemed a little abrupt to the extent that industry observers came up with the theory that he had resigned for not being considered for the CEO’s post. Pai, however, denied this outright saying that he was making way for young leaders to take over. In fact, at Infosys, leaders stepping down to give way to the next generation is not something quite new. In 2002, Murthy stepped down as the CEO to give way to Nilekani, who later stepped down to give the top chair to S (Kris) Gopalakrishnan. In 2006, Pai stepped down as the CFO paving the way for V Balakrishnan. Most recently, Kris stepped aside to give the CEO’s

NR Narayana Murthy

S Gopalkrishnan

SD Shibulal

Chairman Emeritus, Infosys

Co-chairman, Infosys

CEO & MD, Infosys

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News Analysis chair to SD Shibulal, the last of the cofounders to make it to the hot seat. Amid much speculation on April 30, Infosys’ board of directors announced other leadership changes, which were broadly in line with industry expectations. Veteran banker KV Kamath has been roped in from ICICI Bank for the position of chairman to replace Murthy who retires on August 20 this year. Kris has been elevated to the position of co-chairman. Murthy has been named chairman emeritus, an advisory position, for lifelong. The appointments are effective August 21, 2011. All eyes are now on the ‘holy triad’ (Kamath, Kris and Shibulal), to see how they will reshape Infosys in the postMurthy era. But the recent changes that took place at Infosys are phenomenal in nature. No other company has, in the recent past, witnessed such magnitude of top-level movements in such a short span. But Infosys has managed to portray a fairly swift transition to the world. The changes were such that there was little scope for too many disagreements, both within and outside the company. With Kris as the co-chairman, the company has ensured two things. First, it ensured that Kris got a much-deserved promotion. Second, the air of scepticism about a nonfounder taking over Murthy was cleared as Kris would be working closely with Kamath on all major decision-making processes. While Kamath is a seasoned business transformation leader with proven expertise in the banking vertical, Kris will continue to add value with his technical expertise and deep understanding of the company. As an “outsider” Kamath will bring in a different perspective, giving the leadership an out-of-body view of the company. And it certainly helps to listen to an outsider’s views on policy and governance. “It’s too early to judge whether the transition is a successful one or not but the fact that they have retained the two founders — Kris and Shibulal — at top positions shows a lot of alignment in the leadership change,” said Karthik Ananth, Director-Market Expansion, Zinnov Management Consulting.

informationweek june 2011

Rebranded Infosys Ltd As part of its broad Infosys 3.0 vision of being a global services organization and less of a technology company, Infosys Technologies announced it will be renamed as Infosys Ltd.

One of the major debates on the leadership change has been around the founder/non-founder issue. Most of the Infoscions InformationWeek spoke with, said that while they would prefer a founder at the helm, they would not mind a non-founder if he is able to run the company well. Employees of Infosys are informally called ‘Infoscions’. “We have a lot of expectations from Kamath as he is a known figure in the

verticals as these may hamper our growth in the organization. Most people stick to Infosys for the growth opportunities such as going on overseas projects,” said another Infosys employee. Industry observers feel it would be interesting to see what happens after all the founders are gone. “After the founders are gone, the DNA of the organization will determine the fate of Infosys. The success of Infosys will depend upon whether the DNA of the founders has been replicated in the organization or not,” said Ananth of Zinnov. Infosys however is clear about its succession plans. The company claims to have a strong pool of leaders at the senior- and mid-management level who are well placed to move to leadership roles. “We have a minimum of 100

Most of the Infoscions InformationWeek spoke with, said that while they would prefer a founder at the helm, they would not mind a non-founder if he is able to run the company well industry with a proven track record,” said an Infosys employee on condition of anonymity. Some employees feel the founder versus non-founder is a non-issue as long as the opportunities keep coming in. “We are fine with any good person taking over from Murthy but we fear too many changes in structures and

Must read Also see the book review of Leadership @ Infosys and an article by its co-author Dr. Matt Barney elsewhere in this issue.

senior executives who are already prepared to take over as CEOs of midtier companies,” a top Infosys official said. The Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) set up in 2001 in Mysore has been grooming its employees with a variety of individual and organizational development sessions helping them become leaders of tomorrow. Given that Infosys comes with a fairytale-like success story with a funding capital of USD 200 (about `10,000 in value then) borrowed from Sudha Murthy (Narayana Murthy’s wife), its founders will forever remain in the hearts of every Infoscion. But as far as the company’s future is concerned, it does not matter who is holding the reins as long as the leader is a visionary and a doer with similar DNA as its founders.

u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

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Special Technology Feature

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 19

Mobility Changes Network Landscape The need to be connected to the network 24/7 is helping it evolve in its best way.

orporate IT network, which used to be small and confined to an organization, has become global. Now, the workforce, who is equipped with gadgets, mobile and tablets want to be connected to their peers and friends 24/7. Therefore, CIOs are demanding robust and efficient IT network to improve the productivity of their employees. Trends in networks Companies want to have strong network system. Taking a cue from this demand, network providers like Juniper, Cisco and others have been designing their networking products in such a

informationweek june 2011

way that CIOs could take the best out of them. The industry has changed with the change in the behavior of employees who work at all the places with gadgets like mobile and tablets. Throwing light on the recent trend in network, Ashish Dhawan, Juniper Director- Enterprise, India and South Asia, says, “Companies are making sure that whatever business they are running, they should have the best application so that their workforce is productive and for that they require a very good network. The technology is enabling the workforce to be mobile and productive through tablets, smartphones and applications like unified communications. They want

some of the fastest networking devices like switches and routers etc.” He adds, “CIOs are not only demanding fast network but something which could consume less power and less space. They want to reduce cost. So, we are making networking devices that connect to the datacenter as fast as possible whether it is wired or wireless making sure that the distributed network across the campus is absolutely robust and provide all the features that an employee requires in a network. There has to be right amount of security to the application, right amount of uptime and right amount of performance.” As the efficiency of datacenters increase by virtualization, the need

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Special Technology Feature

for network speed becomes more pronounced. To address this challenge, and to speed up virtualized datacenters, Juniper had designed QFabric, a networking solution to address latency problems. Coping with the growing cost of scaling datacenters to drive revenue and to meet rising demands driven by cloud computing and mobile Internet, QFabric was engineered. Juniper claims that the fabric is ten times fast, uses 77 percent less power, requires 27 percent fewer networking devices, occupies 90 percent less data center floor space, and delivers a nine times reduction in operating resources than the nearest competitive offering. Sridhar Sarathy, Vice President, India operations, Juniper says, “Datacenters have evolved from traditional datacenters to virtualized datacenters but no improvement was seen in the network space until we came up with Qfabric. Speed was never an issue earlier but as the traffic on the network increases, the need for speed becomes more prominent. QFabric flattens the network by reducing the number of hubs. The sub-networks in the datacenter will not have to be maintained and applications on datacenters can be easily upgraded. Juniper partners IBM, NetApp, CA Technologies and VMware also believe that the QFabric architecture will help address market requirements for datacenter networking and cloud. Borderless networks Earlier, organizations had defined models for phones, laptops or any other end points which they would allow into their network. But, now the times have changed and individual users have their own devices including smart phones (iphone, android, mac etc) which are needed to be given access. Hence, the device border is now broken. Likewise they would like to have a workplace experience from where ever they connect – home, airports etc. And this user access needs to be fully secured without compromising the policies of the enterprises. So, the location border

is broken to drive flexibility, productivity and the changing business needs. More and more organizations are in the journey to implement these working environments due to the blurring borders. There are three market transitions driving the Borderless Networks Architecture. According to Cisco, the first transition is mobility. The mobility is becoming extremely pervasive in organizations, and in fact it is expected that over the next three years around 1.5 billion new network mobile devices would move into the enterprise. The resources however that are being provided to support those devices are not growing at anywhere near the same level. Harvinder S Rajwant, Vice President, Borderless Networks –

using it on their private network but the quality of video was really bad. Hence we came up with a comprehensive video strategy wherein we made it possible for the enterprise customer to easily deploy immersive quality video using our Telepresence product and solution,” explains Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Cisco India & SAARC. The adoption of video was further spurred by Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg. Cisco has a cloud-based collaboration tool, WebEx and has also developed a unified communication tool--video call control strategy so that people can join video sessions using different devices. It also created a telepresence exchange which allows companies to go from one service provider to another due to the feature of global public directory.

“The CIOs are not only demanding fast network but something which could consume less power and less space. They want to reduce cost.” Ashish Dhawan, Juniper Director, Enterprise, India and South Asia Security, Cisco says, “There is another transition happening which is around video. As the video grows aggressively in organizations, the concern rises whether networks can cope up with this explosion. One more transition is happening around changes to the workplace experience where organizations, if they want to be nimble, if they want to be agile, if they want to be collaborative, have to break down the silos and the borders that exist within their organization and the outside world.” Cisco in 2006 introduced TelePresence that changed the way videoconferencing was understood and used. It brought video, for enterprises, into the mainstream. “Five years ago, enterprises were deploying video conferencing equipments and they were

Network Security The traditional network and physical perimeter is no longer the only border where information must be defended. Collaboration, IT consumerization, mobility, and new computing technologies are increasing productivity while presenting new security requirements. There is greater pressure on IT to meet the demands of a dynamic workforce both in terms of service delivery and security challenges. New solutions are needed to protect borderless networks and to help further improve business efficiencies in the mean time. CIOs face challenges from business and technological aspects. Some of the challenges are compliance and risk management, reputation loss, the need to meet business objectives, emergence

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of new technology, and globalization. Today, challenges also result from the need to integrate technology in order to better manage security solutions, lower total cost of ownership, along with the need to address challenges of hiring and retaining talent. Rajwant says, “Today, the demand for anytime, anywhere, any-device network access has become a workplace mandate but has also introduced new, complex IT challenges, especially with respect to security. According to Cisco’s report on Connected Technology World (2010), the demand to work from anywhere, with the user’s device of choice is increasing dramatically, as is the demand to use video to enhance communications. IT managers hence need to look at an architectural approach to network and security. Cisco’s Borderless

and getting visibility. Since there are not many work devices available, organizations would have to support a variety of personal devices to work.” As networks interact with the cloud, there are areas that must be secured to ensure smooth transfer of data to and from the cloud through cloud networking anti-malware support, access controls, configuration controls for acceptable network connections and IPsec or SSL VPN client support. Junipers’ SSL VPN ensures that remote and mobile employees, customers and partners have secure anytime, anywhere access to corporate resources and applications. Dhawan says, “The new trend is VPN SSL speed. It is 128 bit encryption. We are the leaders in SSL, as far as new devices are concerned. We have 50% market share. We have security software attached with it, which enables organizations to get into a VPN tunnel

“As the video grows aggressively in organizations, the concern rises whether networks can cope up with this explosion.” Harvinder S Rajwant, Vice President, Borderless Networks – Security, Cisco Networks architecture helps IT adapt to rapid changes arising from the consumerization of technology and shifting work models. The architecture delivers user services that enhance borderless security, performance, and mobility to heighten business agility.” Companies are finding it a bit challenging when they allow workforce to bring their own devices to the organization. Njemanze says, “Smart organizations are finding ways to coexist with the latest technology. So, they don’t stop them from bringing their devices to the organization but they ask them to register their device with network. So, rather than excluding personal devices they are embracing them and doing little more monitoring

informationweek june 2011

via browser which is very convenient.” According to a survey organized by Frost and Sullivan, 65 percent of the CIOs believe that risks associated with Data Security are causing major disquiet in today’s IT environment, followed by spyware, virus, worms, and trojan horses. However, network and content security, followed by data security, were expressed as the topmost priorities for CIOs in security management this year. Hugh Njemanze, CTO, ArcSight says, “Enterprises are starting to look at their log management needs as an enterprise initiative rather than just the network thing or just the security thing. They have all the firewalls in place but they look into the next layer of efficiency

where they can be very strategic and analyze what incidents are occurring.” According to Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, Regional Director – India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies, “Organizations should look at security as a business enabler. Check Point 3D Security views security as a 3-dimensional business process that combines policies, people and enforcement that provide stronger protection across various layers of security, which includes network, data and endpoints. With the ever changing threat landscape, to achieve the level of protection currently needed, security needs to grow from a mere collection of disparate technologies to an effective business process. With 3D Security, organizations can now be certain of implementing a blueprint for security that goes beyond just technology to ensure the integrity of all information and assets of your organization.” Commenting on the security spending aspect for enterprises in the current scenario, Anand Rangachary, Managing Director, Frost & Sullivan, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, states, “IT security spending as a percentage of revenues continues to be relatively low in India when compared to other fast-growing economies in the world. Eighty percent of Indian companies agree that IT security is a vital component and advocate that they have a proper plan for the same in future.” “However, 48 percent of the companies spend only 1-5 percent of their total revenues on IT security, and 15 percent state that they do not have any fixed allocation for the same as it is purely demand-based. Even though the percentage of spending is relatively low, concerns regarding threats remain high in the agenda of key decision makers in enterprises. Lack of employee awareness, combined with difficulty in enforcing policies, was expressed as the major challenge in security management today,” he adds. Data network was the only thing that professionals were worried about earlier but now a number of applications

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are present. These applications vary threats. Dhawan says, “If you have unified communication integrated in your data network, your instant messaging in various forms goes through this. There was a huge trend in some of the very popular messenger platform. Through messenger they used to corrupt the corporate account.” Border breakdown Border breakdown also presents some challenges to the IT organization which includes security challenges. Rajwant says, “There are primarily three sorts of borders that are being broken down. The first border is associated with location. In the past, the IT organization simply had to provide connectivity within the four walls of the enterprise that then extended to a branch. Now the borders of the workforce are breaking

software as a service and infrastructure as a service,” Rajwant adds. To overcome these challenges, Cisco launched Borderless Networks in October 2009. These are Cisco’s holistic, next generation vision and architecture that deliver the borderless experience. The borderless architectural experience allows employees, customers, and partners to connect and communicate anytime, anywhere, on any device in a manner that is seamless, secure, and reliable. Cisco delivers on this architecture through video, green and security network services that are embedded across its routing, switching, wireless, and security platforms to form a comprehensive borderless networking solution. Recent analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds that the market, covering 14 Asia-Pacific countries, is expected to

“Network compliance is evolving in India. Companies which work with global customers look for compliance. It’s not very prevalent. Nasscom is creating awareness in terms of need of the security.” Srikant Vissamsetti, VP, Network Security McAfee down; organizations need to provide connectivity and extended reach to mobile workers, customers, partners and suppliers. So the location border has steadily been broken down. “The second border that’s being broken down is around devices. As a result of IT consumerization, there are a range of devices that need to be supported on the network. And, the third is the application border which is fairly recent innovation. In the past, the organization simply had to provide connectivity to the applications in the organization, whether they were external-facing applications or internal-facing applications; and these applications resided within the four walls of the enterprise. That’s changed now. New models have introduced based on

informationweek june 2011

register a modest CAGR of 7.5 percent from 2009 to 2015, to gross revenue of just over Rs 14,696.08 cr by end of 2015. IT Security Laws in India Security laws in India are not very stringent compared to the Western countries and therefore, CIOs are not pressurized to deploy security measures. Njemanze says, “Legal implications on disclosures are much stronger in western world than in India. There are many breaches which happen here but they never get disclosed. Some companies get away by paying compensation. Indians don’t have too much pressure on compliance as there are too many laws around

compliance. The IT security Act doesn’t have any teeth, which means it is not stringent. Last year, DoT came up with compliance draft for telecommunication companies which said that if there is an outage for upto two hours, the first outage would be charged to the tune of 12cr and the second outage to the tune of 50cr and the third one to the tune of 70cr. On March this year, RBI also came up with draft compliance document which talks about how banking and financial sector should be complying with rules and regulations that RBI has set in place.” It is seen that the IT and ITes companies have been complying with laws. They are quite mature in terms of deploying security. Some of them follow laws because they also have to maintain quality to satisfy their global customers. They have to show their customers they are complying with rules and regulations. But, other industries would still take time to mature in this space. Srikant Vissamsetti, VP, Network Security, says, “Network compliance is evolving in India. Companies which work with global customers look for compliance. It’s not very prevalent. Nasscom is creating awareness in terms of need of the security. The cost is a big issue for them and they demand just one security solution which could take care of the entire network. They do ask for consolidation security solution but it is important to understand the entire network and accordingly deploy security solutions at each level where breach could take place. Security breach can have long lasting repercussions. It damages the brand and adversely affects the business.” Organizations like DSCI (Data Security Council of India) and CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) have been creating security awareness in India. It has also been helping companies to have accountability framework and ecosystem around its best practices. As the awareness penetrates in India, companies would be more conscious about security which is evolving with the evolution of networks.

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Leadership Series

By Invitation

The three P’s of leadership Leadership is all about honoring People, keeping Promises and being driven by Possibilities. Sudhakar Ram shares his encounters with people who have demonstrated fine leadership values u By Sudhakar Ram,

Managing Director & CEO, Mastek

Mastek has always been driven by possibility. Our vision is to raise the game that Indian companies have played so far. We believe that Indian industry has to graduate from labor arbitrage to true value creation

rom one leader, I saw how tough love really works. Another leader showed me the value of connecting with, and acknowledging people at lower levels. From another leader, I saw how workers appreciate the freedom to do their jobs as they see fit. I’ve known leaders who focus on delivering on time and on budget. And leaders who emphasize doing things by the book, following all the internal rules. Many of these stories are about people who I have encountered in my 27-year journey at Mastek. And some of them are people who have inspired me in my life outside Mastek. All these examples of leadership can work, if tempered with other leadership traits. Leadership is a hot topic, obviously. Anyone who aspires to become a leader, or whoever wants to be a better leader, thinks about how he or she can be more effective. I’d like to share a few of my own encounters with great leaders in the course of building Mastek. These stories all center on the theme of 3 P’s: People, Promises and Possibilities. After all, leadership is about honoring people, keeping promises and being driven by possibilities.

HONORING PEOPLE

Names of all persons mentioned in this article are fictitious.

True leaders put others ahead of themselves. They are willing to invest the time and effort to help others become successful. I have been fortunate to learn from Raju, who has done a marvelous job leading and mentoring young staffers, both professionally and personally. Raju looks like a bristly, asocial type. But people who have worked under him,

especially youngsters, swear by him. His direct, no-nonsense style and insistence holds people to high technical and professional standards — and helps mould individuals lifelong. Raju had no qualms about asking me tough questions that would set me rethinking my path and priorities. There’s no better example of ‘tough love’ than Raju, who taught me that you don’t necessarily need to be nice to people to effectively lead them. Toughness is often more appropriate. Krishna taught me the importance of acknowledging and appreciating people at lower levels: drivers, watchmen, peons etc. He would interact with them at a personal level, visit their houses, know their family issues and always look for ways to improve their quality of life. He lit up every room with his concern for people and his infectious enthusiasm. He had the unique ability to get people to believe in themselves and discover strengths they barely recognized. He raised performance across the board by raising the confidence and morale of his people. Barry, on the other hand, wins the hearts and minds of people by giving them all the space and freedom they need. He handpicks new people himself, subjecting them to a thorough selection process. And he doesn’t give up on under-performers as long as their attitude is right. Barry is the kind of person people love to work for; he ensures that they are very clear about their expectations and deliverables, and then he backs them to the hilt to make them succeed. To me, Barry is a role model in winning the confidence and trust of your team. (I suspect that Barry and M S Dhoni are pretty similar

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 25

Leadership Series

By Invitation although I don’t know Dhoni well enough to say that with certainty). We have tried to build a distinctive culture at Mastek, a culture of openness and respect for people. Many times, we tend to put people before profits. In the few instances that we’ve put profits first, it has backfired. Small wonder that so many Mastekeers remain emotionally connected to Mastek, even when they have moved on. I’ve heard many of them say, “Once a Mastekeer, always a Mastekeer”.

KEEPING PROMISES

Leaders need to walk the walk, talk the talk and walk the talk. Integrity, the ability to keep your promises, is a cornerstone of leadership

informationweek june 2011

Leaders need to walk the walk, talk the talk and walk the talk. Integrity, the ability to keep your promises, is a cornerstone of leadership. People lose faith in the system and themselves when they have leaders without integrity. We were fortunate to have Vimla, a delivery leader who could bring in the most complex programs within the agreed time and budgets. Customers had great confidence in her promises and trusted her with their missioncritical programs. I admired Vimla’s complete focus on delivering to her commitments. She was great at picking the right team and aligning them to the program goals. She trusted them completely. She would plan and replan constantly, adjusting tasks and assignments based on changing project realities. She would stay on top of every deliverable till the goalpost was reached and the program was successful. Then she would ensure that the teams were duly acknowledged and rewarded for their good work. It was this quality that worked for us in large programs like the London Congestion Charging scheme. Raj showed me the value of his relentless focus on delivering on his promises. While successful in delivering projects in a timely manner, as a company, there were areas where Mastek’s process disciplines were not as tight, like in filling timesheets. These processes were not so important in delivering the immediate project but were vital in building a knowledge base and metrics to estimate new projects. Raj took on this challenge of ensuring 100 percent compliance to

every process. He delivered in a short period of time, much to our delight. I was amazed by his method. He did not fire anyone or upset anyone; he simply refused to accept non-compliance. He was willing to support the foot-draggers in any way they needed, but not dilute the goal in any way. In my personal life, my wife Girija is my role model for keeping promises. She not only keeps track of our family and social commitments, but makes sure we fulfill them. She is a great planner, is meticulous about thinking through every detail, and remains tremendously focused on the task till it is done to her high standards. I’m fortunate that my daughter Samvitha has the same commitment to promises. Girish has built an amazing institution called Snehelaya, an NGO focused on improving the lot of sex-workers and their children in Ahmednagar. Girish, who teaches political science in the local college, inspires many of his students to join his NGO after graduation. He has built a solid cadre of youngsters who put themselves at risk in rescuing minor girls from prostitution. Girish’s organization-building capabilities are remarkable in terms of his ability to delegate and rely on his next levels of leadership — making himself almost redundant if required. Mastek continually strives to deliver on our commitments and promises to our clients. We try to undertake transformational programs: the client has huge expectations, but sometimes the scope and requirements are unclear, and must evolve over time. Our teams aim to collaborate with clients and other consortium partners in adapting to changes on a dynamic basis while sticking to the agreed time frame. We are always working to do better, however.

DRIVEN BY POSSIBILITY

My favorite book on leadership is The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Zander and Ben Zander. The authors share this nice story: A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects of expanding business there. One sends back a

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telegram saying, ‘Situation hopeless stop No one wears shoe’. The other writes back triumphantly ‘Glorious business opportunity stop They have no shoes’. Leaders see possibilities in people and situations where others see no hope. Take young Dharmesh, who presents a smiling face and positive attitude whenever we talk. He is probably the youngest author to publish a book on IT security. While others complain about the lack of opportunities, Dharmesh views every role as an opportunity to develop himself and team members, all contributing to the client and the company. A hands-on techie, he seeks out trainees and inspires them to be curious about everything — technology, the client, the company. His basic curiosity about what’s so and what’s possible is a powerful inspiration. Innovation is contagious. Behind Ravi’s easy going nature lies a strong passion for the possible: applying design thinking principles to the entire practice of co-creating solutions that can transform businesses. In researching design thinking with external consultants, Ravi has been inspired by practitioners from industrial design firms like Ideo, people who start the design process from first principles. Ravi enrolls people to design thinking in multiple ways. He set up a D-School, participates in complete projects, contributes to solutions architecture review sessions, and joins casual conversations with solution designers. His style is extremely persuasive and welcoming. He is a classic example of leading by doing from the ground up. I am eternally grateful to Peter, one of our early clients, who saw the potential in Mastek and entrusted us with increasing responsibility. That stretched us as a company and built our capabilities. Demonstrating more confidence in us than we had in ourselves, he entrusted us with the London Congestion Charging application. This is a program that helped us build enormous confidence. Peter showed how to spot potential and trust your instincts as a leader. He took a big risk with us, and his bets paid off

with a resoundingly successful program for the city of London, for our client and for us. I am fortunate in being associated with Murali, a truly unassuming leader. Passionate about providing employment to rural youth, Murali has enrolled some of us to get-together and founded a venture called ‘Rural Shores’. The organization’s mediumterm mission is to set up over 200 BPO centers in rural areas to provide job opportunities, urban-quality work, to 100,000 educated village youth close to their own homes. Murali believes that rural youth will be happier and more productive working in their home environment than in cities where they are forced to migrate. Today Rural Shores is considered a leader in the rural BPO space, with over a dozen large customers, eight centers and an innovation award from Nasscom. Padmini Aunty, a dynamic visionary who is approaching 80, has been an inspiration to me for her passion for children. She looked at the poor quality of education in Governmentrun schools in Chennai and set out to save as many children as she could by providing them a more meaningful education. She and her Trust have adopted over a dozen kindergarten and balwadi environments in Chennai to provide the children with free Montessori education. At Mastek we believe that Indian industry has to graduate from labor arbitrage to true value creation. We have been on this path for the last 29 years taking on some of the most exciting and challenging programs in the world. Our business and technology specialists have worked with demanding clients and competent technology partners in building and delivering applications that have created high impact for countries, cities and companies. We measure ourselves on a new metric, Return on Talent, by leveraging our people to create the highest impact for our clients and ourselves. The leadership path is an exciting one for all. There are plenty of opportunities for people who are brave enough to take the plunge. Are you game?

My wife Girija is my role model for keeping promises. She not only keeps track of our family and social commitments, but makes sure we fulfill them

LOGS Follow Sudhakar Ram online Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ sudhakarram Blog: http://sudhakarram.blogspot. com/ Articles: http://www. thenewconstructs.com

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 27

Leadership Series

By Invitation

Building a leadership culture

u By Neelam Dhawan,

Managing Director, HP India

It’s imperative that an organization identifies and nurtures successful leaders and managers early on. This is where the company culture and HR processes are extremely critical

informationweek june 2011

ver the years of my professional career, I’ve had to contemplate and sometimes change my view of what successful leadership comprises of, and what makes a person a truly effective manager. The IT industry is very unique, in that it presents some of the most challenging conditions to any leader or manager. The rate at which technology innovation and evolution happens in IT is perhaps unparalleled across industries. You can plan and hinge your organization’s success on one technology, only to realize later that another disruptive innovation has captured your customers’ needs. Technology and information decentralization puts more power in the hands of your customers and a good leader and manager needs to account for this. The latest technologies are presenting today’s IT business leaders and managers with complex situations that need to be dealt with in real-time, as opposed to hours and days previously. The need of the hour is visionary leaders and astute managers. Leadership and management in my opinion are two sides of the same coin. You cannot expect the leadership to be the face of the company, devoid of a competent management structure to provide the requisite planning, execution and problem solving needed to achieve success. Likewise, you cannot have execution and management success without hinging it upon a greater vision driven by a sound strategy. That demonstrates poor leadership. Thomas Alva Edison put it very succinctly by saying, “vision without execution is hallucination”. However, an IT analyst summed up the opposite saying, “execution without vision will drive you off a cliff.” In my opinion, both aptly describe the varied but critical roles that leadership and

management play in any organization. It’s imperative therefore that an organization identifies and nurtures successful leaders and managers early on. This is where the company culture and HR processes are extremely critical. The HP Way is the foundation on which our talent management and leadership development process is built on. Much of my leadership style is influenced by the tenets outlined in the HP Way. While today the creed may seem a common place, when you have employees that have spent the better part of a decade and more at HP, I believe there is still merit in it. From the very beginning, founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had a very unique idea about what it meant to manage, and it was not something that everyone else understood. They believed that employees needed to understand how they could contribute to society and succeed as a profitable business. Both founders were products of the Great Depression and it influenced their views on the responsibility of management. They believed that the responsibility of management was not solely and primarily to shareholders, but also to its employees, to its customers and to the community at large. Today, when leaders are inexorably linked to shareholder success and quarterly results, there’s substance to contemplate in this approach.

LEADERSHIP VS MANAGEMENT

Good leaders have an ability to outline a large and challenging vision. I use the word challenging here with a lot of forethought. Many corporate leaders fall into the trap of creating a vision that seems extremely compelling, but may be too ambitious. Vaulting ambition then overleaps itself and falls on the other side. The reason I add ‘challenging’ to the vision is that it leads to the second characteristic I believe

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a good leader should possess — the ability to inspire and motivate a large number of employees into believing in the vision and the challenge in achieving it. It is about building trust in the vision and showcasing the courage of conviction even in the face of unsurpassable odds. Third, a leader needs to hinge the vision on a sound strategy that is lucid and specific. The strategy needs to have a unique advantage intrinsic to the company. Leaders cannot operate in isolation and a strong management structure is critical. The difference between a leader and a manager is that while the former defines the vision, strategy and organizational culture, an effective manager operates within that culture to, in a sense, ‘walk the talk’. A good manager leads from the front and doesn’t hide when tough decisions or situations arise. Passion is what defines these managers, whether it is the passion for success, customers or team members.

LEADERSHIP AT HP

At HP, our vision is to provide seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. In India, my leadership team and I are involved in taking that vision, and translating that into making HP the most admired company in the country. In order to realize that goal, we need to think beyond the idea of scale as a definition for respect and admiration by our peers and customers. Instead, it involves empowering our employees so that they are not fearful of taking calculated risks focused on winning greater mindshare with our customers. What contributes to HP’s strength as a company is its emphasis on gaining employees’ trust and feel respected by management. Our employees’ perception about HP plays a critical role in how we execute the vision and goals we set for ourselves. Ultimately if they believe that they are working for a successful company, it consequently fosters even greater success. Personally, I believe that helping employees overcome the fear of failure eliminates underachievement and fosters an atmosphere of risk

Commandments for good Leadership

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Good leaders must have an ability to outline a large and challenging vision. A leader should have the ability to inspire and motivate a large number of employees into believing in the vision and the challenge in achieving it. A leader needs to hinge the vision on a sound strategy that is lucid and specific. Leaders cannot operate in isolation and a strong management structure is critical. Leadership and management are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have leadership be the face of the company, devoid of a competent management structure to provide the requisite planning, execution and problem solving needed to achieve success. You cannot have execution and management success without hinging it upon a greater vision driven by a sound strategy. That demonstrates poor leadership

taking and innovation. It also means reassuring them that they have the capability to succeed at a task. My leadership style involves setting goals and tasks and creating an organization that is high on delivering results. I don’t believe in micro-managing on a task unless the team is new and short on experience for a project. Otherwise, delegation and setting clear goals and timelines are ways to empower a team. I have realized that in order to achieve the best results, teams need to know what is expected of them and, no matter how difficult, feedback should be provided constructively. When a company’s leaders and managers can align all employees to look at their role and function in the context of a career and less as a job, there are significant upsides to be achieved in the near and long-term. Ultimately, it may be a team that wins or loses a deal, but that should not stand in the way of personal accountability for results. Attributes like openness, flexibility, collaboration and profit-sharing owe their origin to our founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard who, decades ago, incorporated these into the value system of their fledgling firm.

My leadership style involves setting goals and tasks and creating an organization that is high on delivering results

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 29

Leadership Series

By Invitation

Leadership in times of flux

Today, some of the major IT companies are facing question marks with respect to leadership. In these times of great change, leaders need to demonstrate a shared vision for the company and take a collaborative approach for building confidence, writes Dr Ganesh Natarajan u By Dr Ganesh Natarajan,

Vice Chairman & CEO of Zensar Technologies

Leadership in times of flux is a difficult art and needs leaders to combine processes and people orientation, blend business logic and approach problems with an open mind rather than apply packaged quick fix solutions to complex problems

informationweek june 2011

t seems almost inevitable that the first year of any new decade should see some shakeup in the Information and Business Services industry in India. The formation of Infosys in 1981 would certainly have been the beginning of the professionalization of the IT services industry which would take Brand India to such global prominence in the next three decades. The launch of Aptech in 1991 as a worthy competitor to NIIT set off a race for supremacy in computer education, which was bruising at times but spearheaded a revolution in programming careers that would serve the industry well for the future. The dotcom bust in 2001 led to the maturing of both the IT and BPO industry. In 2011, it would appear to be the questions regarding the leadership in giants like Wipro and Infosys that will need quick answers to determine the course of the industry in this decade and lead us to our committed tryst with a two hundred billion destiny by 2020. My personal experience of leading teams and companies also bears this out and the challenges of enabling turnarounds, initially at Aptech in the nineties and then at Zensar in 2001 has taught me quite a few lessons on the role of leaders in setting flawed companies on the path to survival, transformation and success. Aptech was a poor “me-too” competitor to NIIT in the early nineties but took the road less travelled in its aggressive and inclusive franchise strategy which saw it catch and overtake the leader in the middle of the nineties. It then went on

to repeat its domestic successes in over forty countries, becoming the market leader in computer training in China and creating a chain of brands — ASSET and ARENA to name two, that took it to success by the end of the decade. The story of Zensar which is the subject of a forthcoming case study on Innovation being developed at the Harvard Business School is that of leadership through innovation. Trying to build a software company in the initial years of the new millennium would have been impossible through the traditional model and the conscious choice to develop and market a “different point of view” has been the secret to success for a company which has grown from two services in IT to an end-to-end IT and Business solutions firm with Fortune 100 and FTES 100 clients in discerning markets and a dominant market share in emerging markets like South Africa. Investments in all aspects of innovation — products and services, processes and business models have led to customer recognition of the differentiators and the ambidextrous approach to incremental innovation on one hand and radical innovation of solution architectures and multi-location collaborative solution development has provided an impetus to the realization of the company’s vision to be a true transformation partner to global corporations.

Collective goals

The leadership role in this transformation cannot be overemphasised. Any company with a

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defective or defunct business model suffers from lack of confidence and in a people-centric business like IT or BPO, one of the first tasks of leadership is to develop and articulate a shared vision for the company. Harvard Business School in its 2010 case study on Vision Communities at Zensar has expounded on the development of this initiative where young graduates rub shoulders with the CEO and members of the top leadership team to devise, revise and implement strategies for the organization. The leadership has also played a major role in Zensar’s evolution to a connected organization through a collaborative approach to building confidence in all constituents — global associates through diversity and inclusion councils, young women through the Women for Excellence groups are two examples of this. The ability to integrate every individual aspiration with the collective goal of business transformation through empowered Associate relations executives who partner with the line managers to instill a sense of purpose of ownership at different levels through the organization is also a feature of this transformation that ensures scalability even as the organization has grown fifteen times in size in the last decade.

Connected Organizations

Leadership in times of flux is a difficult art and needs leaders to use left and right brain thinking, combine processes and people orientation, blend business logic with high emotional quotient and approach problems with an open mind rather than apply packaged quick fix solutions to complex problems. The “connected organization” approach has also lent itself well to NASSCOM’s unique success in building a connected industry. The fact that industry CEOs are willing to come to the table and address common global trade, talent management and innovation issues while keeping the inter-firm competitive rivalry aside is due to the excellent leadership provided initially by Dewang Mehta, followed by Kiran Karnik and now Som Mittal who have demonstrated the inclusive culture that differentiates this industry today.

Dr Ganesh Natarajan: The turnaround specialist 1.

Aptech: Aptech was a poor “me-too” competitor to NIIT in the early nineties but took the road less travelled in its aggressive and inclusive franchise strategy which saw it catch and overtake the leader in the middle of the nineties. It then went on to repeat its domestic successes in over forty countries, becoming the market leader in computer training in China and creating a chain of brands — ASSET and ARENA to name two that it took to success by the end of the decade

2. Zensar: The story of Zensar which is the subject of a forthcoming case study on Innovation being developed at the Harvard Business School is that of leadership through innovation. Trying to build a software company in the initial years of the new millennium would have been impossible through the traditional model and the conscious choice to develop and market a “different point of view” has been the secret to success for a company which has grown fifteen times in size in the last decade

As the industry moves towards the goals that the NASSCOM-McKinsey study on 2009 has articulated, it is necessary for industry CEOs and leadership teams to stand firm and committed to all corporate and industry causes. There will be internal issues galore, not least of which is the need to find innovative methods to source and train large numbers of industry aspirants to feed the talent engines. External pressures, including repressive visa policies and non tariff barriers to the free execution of projects across geographic boundaries will continue to thwart the progress of the offshore outsourcing and solutions business and it will need dynamic and nimble leadership to proactively engage with all the industry stakeholders including Governments, academic institutions and financing agencies to ensure unhampered growth. This industry has seen many great leaders including FC Kohli, Ramadorai, Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji and Nandan Nilekani blazing new trails for corporate India and a new generation will now have to take the baton and continue to lead the country to success in the race for global success!

As the industry moves towards the goals that the NASSCOMMcKinsey study on 2009 has articulated, it is necessary for industry CEOs and leadership teams to stand firm and committed to all corporate and industry causes

u As told to Srikanth RP

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 31

Leadership Series

By Invitation

Assessing leader performance

u By Dr. Matt Barney and

Aarti Shyamsunder, Infosys Leadership Institute

Research has shown that there is great value in using predictors of leadership such as personality traits, values and motives as one of the decision points in making selection decisions about leadership

hile we don’t have all the answers to the important question (‘How can we assess leader performance?), as IndustrialOrganizational Psychologists, we have the advantage of being trained in a science we can draw upon to offer some guidance based on years of research. To measure leader performance, we need to step back and look at the measurement of job performance in general. This is a problem that has vexed organizations for decades, so much so that it has given rise to thousands of publications in the organizational sciences. Job performance is “the total expected value to the organization of the discrete behavioral episodes that an individual carries out over a standard period of time” (Motowidlo, 2003, p.39). In a landmark publication in 1992, Jim Austin and Pete Villanova described the “Criterion Problem” as the difficulties involved in measuring performance because it is multidimensional, dynamic and appropriate for different purposes. It also describes the contamination from values and biases whether they be to measure a leader’s on-the-job behavior, business outcomes, or being a good organizational “citizen” (Austin & Villanova, 1992). What about measuring leadership? A review of the research literature reveals the following approaches.

Trait Theories

The earliest approach was the “Great Man” (or “Great Person”, to be politically correct) or ‘trait’ theory of leadership. People who subscribed to this view believed that leaders were special people, born with very unique traits such as charisma, intelligence, drive and power. Leader Behavior Approach: When trait research failed to explain

informationweek june 2011

leadership completely, scholars switched to focus on what leaders really do that sets them apart. This gave rise to a number of studies on leader behaviors, most of them crystallizing on the idea that there are two or three major sets of behaviors that leaders engage in. One set, called ‘Initiating Structure’, involves taskoriented behavior such as setting goals, defining metrics and planning projects. The other set of key behaviors, called ‘Showing Consideration’, revolve around relationship building, especially with followers or employees. Later, another set of behaviors called ‘Contextual Performance’ or ‘Organizational Citizenship Behaviors’ outlined a new set of performance criteria. This is the idea that there are certain things leaders and employees do that are discretionary, not always directly or formally rewarded, and may be beyond the prescriptions of the job description. Helping others proactively, defusing inter-personal conflict, demonstrating organizational loyalty, sacrificing time and effort over and above the call of duty — all fall within this realm of contextual performance. The view that leadership is about leader behaviors has a lot of support, with researchers coming up with clever ways to define and classify all the behaviors that leaders engage in into taxonomies, competency models and performance models. One such popular taxonomy (Borman & Brush, 1993) describes 18 behavioral ‘megadimensions’ of performance. Every organization (perhaps with the help of a consulting firm) can create their own set of behavioral dimensions that define leadership in their context. Infosys for instance, uses a leadership performance model which contains seven key dimensions (Barney, 2010): Strategic Leadership, Operational Leadership, Talent Leadership, Change Leadership, Content

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(Thought) Leadership, Relationship and Networking Leadership, and Entrepreneurial Leadership. (Ed: These forms of leadership are well articulated in Dr. Barney’s book Leadership @ Infosys, reviewed in this issue).

Situational / Interactionist Theories of Leadership Then there are leadership approaches that define leadership more in terms of the interactions between the leaders and their environment. These include approaches which look at the leader-follower relationship (e.g. LMX or Leader Member Exchange Theory) or elements of Transformational Leadership. Moving beyond the immediate relationship between the leader and follower(s) are approaches that describe leaders interactions with the larger context — the business context, market conditions and economic turbulence, all affecting leadership perceptions and effectiveness.

measuring leader performance

Today, we try to use all the best from prior models in measuring leader performance. Research has shown that there is great value in using predictors of leadership such as personality traits (e.g. extraversion and conscientiousness), values (e.g. integrity) and motives (e.g. motivation to lead, need for achievement) as one of the decision points in making selection decisions about leadership. After all, these are great markers for potential—some of which may or may not be realized in one’s current job, but which may underlie future greatness. A more common approach is to measure what leaders do or leader behaviors (Motowidlo, 2003). Leader performance is the expected organizational value of what leaders do. Results are the end-state that may be influenced by what leaders do. Both performance and results are influenced by behaviors but also have other drivers. For instance, a sales manager who influences (leader behavior) his salesperson to proactively approach

you (employee behavior) in a retail store might sell you a product (performance) which adds to the profitability of the store (results). Of course, whether you buy the product or not is not entirely dependent on the sales manager, or salesperson — maybe you don’t like the product as well as the competition’s, or lack the money for it. Similarly, profitability of the store isn’t solely dependent on the actions of the store’s leader either — the economy, location, brand-management and quality of goods, amongst other factors, affect those results. As such, a clean way to measure performance of individuals is by measuring their ‘behavior’ which is under their control. This also allows for organizational scientists to develop an understanding of the processes that govern employee selection, training, motivation and situational factors which all influence how one performs at work. Thus, by defining leader performance primarily in terms of behaviors that can make a difference to organizational goal accomplishment, organizations can start focusing on developing “uncontaminated”, welloperationalized measures of expected performance. This approach also offers answers to the debate around the criterion problem, by allowing for variability over time and situation, over motivation and ability levels. Another unique interdisciplinary approach to measuring leader effectiveness comes from one of the authors’ own research program. The Cue See Model blends methods from a variety of organizational sciences to clarify how performance must realize ultimate business goals. It suggests that leaders create value for customers by ensuring that all parts of the organization perform above targets for quality, cost, quantity and cycle time (Barney, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). Unlike the behavioral approaches, the Cue See approach suggests that clarifying and tracking goals may help leaders and employees adapt behaviors to realize shared objectives. In this way, leader performance may be assessed by its impact on employees, operations and ultimate organizational objectives.

Leaders create value for customers by ensuring that all parts of the organization perform above targets for quality, cost, quantity and cycle time

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 33

Leadership Series

By Invitation

The leadership equation

u By VR Ferose,

Managing Director, SAP Labs India

Most often people are unaware or underrate their potential; therefore it is the job of a leader to make people believe that a seemingly impossible task is indeed possible.

informationweek june 2011

Leadership is characterized by a combination of various characteristics. Besides the ability to motivate and inspire, leaders also need to take full responsibility of their decisions. VR Feroze shares some important lessons of leadership that have been exhibited by leaders from different sectors of society

ran in a marathon for the first time in 2008. It was in Delhi and a half marathon, which meant that I had to run for 21.1 kms. It took me three months to prepare and get in shape for the event. On the D-day, I was excited and confident of completing the race within a reasonable time. I started on a good note and everything was going smoothly for 15 kms. The problem then began. My legs started hurting and gradually the pain became excruciating. I was sure that my legs would collapse. The thought of quitting, however, was more painful. It was then that I heard a heavy breathing behind me. After a few minutes, the sound overtook me. To my great surprise, it belonged to someone who was more than double my age, as imprinted on the backside of his T-shirt was a message and it read “Dr. Roy, Born 1932”. I was stunned, as the man who just ran ahead of me was 76 years old and he was running faster and more confidently than me, who was 34. With their eyes rooted to the message on the T-shirt, were over 30 runners, behind him. He was their inspiration and motivation, and became mine too. I shut my mind to the pain and just followed him. Before, I realized, I had crossed the finish line and that too at a much faster time than I ever thought I could. Had Dr. Roy not passed

me, I probably would never have completed the race. What Dr. Roy did that day, is what leaders are supposed to do — inspire and motivate their team to greater success. A leader who cannot do this, will not be an effective leader at all. However, the ability to motivate and inspire alone does not make a leader. It is a combination of various characteristics.

Unleashing potential

Most often people are unaware or underrate their potential; therefore it is the job of a leader to make people believe that a seemingly impossible task is indeed possible. Leaders should create a dream and make people believe in them, question the status quo and push them to go beyond boundaries. Franz Stampfl, the coach of Roger Bannister, the former English athlete did just that. For nine years, before Roger broke the mile mark in less than four minutes in 1954, the world record for a mile was four minutes, 1.4 seconds, held by Sweden’s Gunder Haegg. No one attempted to break it, as nobody thought it was possible. Stampfl believed that Roger could do it and he made it happen. In an interview later, Roger said that his coach broke his psychological barrier as he made him feel that he could and had to do it. That is the mark of a true leader. Leaders need good advisors, people who are subject matter experts and who would not hesitate

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to give an unbiased opinion or an honest view. However, the onus to the final decision lies with the leader. U.S. President Harry S. Truman summed it up with a sign on his desk which read ‘The buck stops here’. It is the responsibility of the leader to take the final call. Most decisions are not black or white nor do they come backed with data or logic. They have to be taken in the spur of the moment leaving the leader with nothing to lean on but instincts. President Obama took a daring call to approve a raid into the sovereign territory of Pakistan despite being told that it was not a certainty that Osama bin Laden was there. Had this mission misfired, the consequences would have been significant, admitted the President in a recent interview. This is a big risk that every leader should be willing to take. Not just that, sometimes leaders are expected to take tough decisions. They should stick their neck out. At the end of the day, leaders are respected if they are seen to be bold and are able to get things done. As the popular saying goes ‘Everyone admires the bold, no one honors the timid’. To me, the hallmark of a great leader is the ability to take bold decisions despite advice to the contrary. A great leader wins through actions and not arguments.

Different styles of leadership

Different situations call for different styles of leadership. Winston Churchill was a great war-time leader, who inspired not only the British leaders, but British citizens as well, through his attitude of optimism and fortitude. Post war, the people of Britain probably needed a different kind of leader who could lead them during peace. Likewise in the history of Indian cricket, Ganguly was the most appropriate person to lead the team when the country needed an aggressive Captain. However, when the country needed a more sober person who could lead the team and represent it as an ambassador for the game, Kumble was the preferred choice.

True leaders should have... 1

Leaders should create a dream and make people believe in them

Different situations call for different styles of leadership

A key attribute of a leader is knowing when to STOP

An effective leader needs to invest time and effort to make sure there is no discontinuity

Charisma is a very important quality for a leader. This is a powerful way to lead people — the way John F. Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru, arguably the most charismatic leaders, did. However, charisma by itself will not suffice as leaders have to deliver and be known for the things done and to get done. Often overlooked is the critical issue of succession planning. Many leaders tend to underrate this need and thereby leave a void in the top position when they move on. An effective leader needs to invest time and effort to make sure there is no discontinuity.

Knowing when to stop

A key attribute of a leader is knowing when to STOP. Many leaders fail to realize this. Despite numerous requests from people, Dr. Abdul Kalam did not give his consent for being the President of India for the second term. As a true leader, he knew when to STOP. The ability to know when to call it quits is a remarkable quality that leaders should have. Accomplishing a task and moving on calls for courage. Several leaders spoil their glorious track record by clinging on to their positions and moving out much later then when they are supposed to. Case in point, Michael Schumacher who recently admitted that his second season of his comeback was not ‘enjoyable.’ He won a record, seven titles and 91 grand prix, called it quits in 2006 and came back in 2010 to witness a series of failures. He should have walked out in glory. Great leaders know not to go past the mark they aimed for. So set a goal, and when you reach it, STOP.

A key attribute of a leader is knowing when to STOP. Many leaders fail to realize this

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 35

Leadership Series

By Invitation

Leading with a strong product focus

u By Raj Saraf,

Chairman, Zenith Computers

informationweek june 2011

Product leadership is about bringing in the latest technologies first, and making these affordable and accessible to the masses. But timing and market acceptance is also important. One should also have foresight and analysis to identify the scope of the market and your chances for success

began my career selling semi-conductors to computer companies. Before that I mulled about going into instrumentation and consumer electronics (digital clocks). Zenith launched its first computer in 1980. At that time there were five or six Indian companies making computers (Nelco, DCM, HCL, PCI etc) but each had its own operating system and was a closed system. Initially, we sold two or three machines a month. Companies brought our computers on the strength of features. Our strategy was to sell to the bigger companies first (Glaxo, Voltas, Hindustan Lever, Telco); once we did that, the smaller companies started buying our products. Our strategy was also to go with the latest technology. Initially we launched an 8-bit machine with the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and the Unix operating system. We later launched a 16-bit machine with the 8086 processor and the MS DOS operating system. There was a good response for this product. In 1987 we became the first company in India to introduce Local Area Networking (LAN). To spread awareness about networking, we came up with one-act plays â&#x20AC;&#x201D; our staff enacted roles to show how distributed computing works. We went a step further and then did connectivity with small machines and mainframes (which were common at that time). But we moved too fast and the country was not prepared for this kind of network architecture.

We were also the first to introduce a notebook in 1991, then priced at ` 2 lakh. And in the last three years we have been selling the all-in-one PC (earlier known as panel PC), which other manufacturers introduced only recently. So we identify a technology that is new in the West and then bring it to this country first, at an affordable price point. We want everyone to use this technology. When we launched the home PC in 1997 or 1998, we showed that the PC can also be used in the home. At that time the Internet was not widely available in India and information was not easily available. There were import restrictions too. So we brought in affordable computing for the masses and also spread awareness at all levels, ranging from home users to institutions like ISRO. We sold our PCs through 500 shops all over the country, touching even remote places like Leh.

PRODUCT FOCUS

One of our mistakes was not getting into the software business, like Wipro and HCL. At the beginning we decided that we do not want to do a service business as we are a product company. We eventually got into software and services, and formed Zenith Infotech. Essentially we are a products company, that introduces the latest technology in the country. We want to become a global company, but we will continue to offer products. My children Devita and Akash Saraf, who head the other business units, do so with the same vision.

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Devita started with the digital signage business in 2007 and expanded to TVs and monitors. Her company, Vu Technologies, launched the intelligent TV two years ago. In this product we installed the PC in a TV. It’s only now that you see Samsung and LG advertising their Smart TVs. But I believe ours is a far superior product. Last year we entered the cloud computing space with a product called PROUD (Private Cloud Computing). For this we acquired an R&D company in Belgium and created the entire stack. Every month we sell 1,000 units of PROUD overseas. Again the strategy is to sell overseas first and then sell locally. Zenith is also the only company in India that invested ` 200 crore for hardware development for overseas markets.

INNOVATING FOR MASSES

We recently entered the telepresence market with a video solution branded as Vu TelePresence. There was a gap in the market. At the low end there is Skype and at a higher level you have solutions from Polycom, Tandberg and Cisco, which are all highly priced. So we identified an opportunity for a solution under ` 2 lakh. To take telepresence to the masses we devised a concept of video PCOs, branded as Vu Telepoints. This went operational last June with 11 telepoints in Mumbai and Delhi. We have a partnership with MTNL, but are looking at 500 – 600 points all over the country through a franchise model. We will also tie-up with business centers in the country. The booking for usage of these telepoints will be done centrally through our website. And the cost for usage would be ` 10 per minute. So once again, we have taken a highend technology and brought it to the masses; in this case telepresence has moved from the conference room to common meeting rooms for the general public. We also have Vu Telepoints in the US and other countries. In fact 90 percent of our business for Cloud and Vu Telepresence comes from overseas and the rest is from India. We are also about to launch our

range of tablets in India, but have refrained from getting into the mobile handset business. The mobile phone business will eventually become like the assembled PC business in the country. Marketing costs are high and there are too many players. It is also a pure hardware business and anyone can assemble hardware. So we choose not to get into this business.

LEADERSHIP WISDOM

I believe hard work is a must to attain leadership. You should also have the foresight to identify the scope of the market and your chances for success. Some of the products that we launched were ahead of their time, and therefore they failed in the market. An example is our artificial intelligence product. You should also be able to fathom the price drops that are notorious in the technology industry. The biggest strength is to identify a particular technology and implement it at the best price point. Always compete with the big players — if you compete with the small players you will eventually get eliminated. In the TV space, for example, we compete with Samsung and Sony. And we create a product differential between our products and theirs. While launching Vu Telepresence, we accepted that there will always be a problem with bandwidth all over the world. That is not in our control. So we designed the product with certain innovation so that it consumes less bandwidth, yet renders in HD video. Second, we sell it at an affordable price point so that everyone can use the product.

The strategy is to sell overseas first and then sell locally. Zenith is the only company in India that invested Rs 200 crore for hardware development for overseas markets

LOOKING AHEAD

I don’t plan to retire any time soon. I have a passion for bringing the latest technology into India. But when you introduce cutting edge products, the timing has to be good. We aim to be a USD 1 billion company by 2015 — currently we are about ` 1,000 core. We expect growth to come from the telepresence and cloud businesses. u As told to Brian Pereira

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 37

Leadership Series

By Invitation

‘I owe much of my success to my people’

u By Hemal Patel, CEO, Elitecore Technologies

Hemal Patel is a well-known figure on Wall Street, having designed the trading floor infrastructure for several financial institutions there. He takes us through his roller coaster entrepreneurial ride and candidly discusses strategies for business leadership. Patel has now achieved a leadership position in his fourth venture, Elitecore Technologies. He shares his people leadership strategies in this article

Transparency has always been a byword in my company strategy and vision. And the company strategy is visible at all levels in the organization

informationweek june 2011

have been living in the US for 25 years and began my career on Wall Street. During the first 15 years of my career, I designed trading floor infrastructure for major financial institutions on Wall Street. These institutions are huge; for instance, Chase Manhattan Bank’s Forex trading floor has a trading volume of USD 16 billion a day. In 1995 my Spanish partner joined me in opening an Internet Service Provider business in Puerto Rico. But this was a USD 3.5 million mistake. We later realized that ISP is a retail business that cannot be run remotely. We were too focused on technology and neglected sales and marketing. The third factor that affected this business was the billing solution that we purchased; the Internet is very dynamic and so the product changes almost daily. It’s the same with Telecom. But our billing system could not support such dynamics. Eventually we sold this business for just USD 100,000 but I wasn’t disheartened. Leaving my expensive mistakes behind, I moved to the next chapter of my career. In 1998 I invested a million dollars setting up an ISP business in Gujarat, called IceNet. This time we were successful and went to the No. 1 position within a year. So that gave me a lot of confidence. I analyzed my past mistakes and took steps not to repeat those again. We got a local partner to run the retail business. The partner

was good in sales and marketing too. And we wrote our own billing solution. Finally we sold this business to YOU Telecom. For my fourth venture (Elitecore) I wanted to do something radically different. I decided to form a product company with a global sales distribution channel and R&D right from India. The second challenge was to set it up in my home state, Gujarat. The Gujarat base helped because of the excellent infrastructure and connectivity. The cost of resources and real estate was low when we set up operations in Gujarat, back in 1999. This helped me keep my product and manufacturing cost low. These savings enable us to spend more on the partner. Of course the VCs did not like the idea of me setting up operations in Ahmedabad, which was then not as established as say, Bangalore or Hyderabad. They also did not like my initial idea of focusing on emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East (instead of going to developed markets). But after 2005, all the VCs were eyeing India and that negative sentiment changed. By that time I was already established. I started with 15 people and capital of USD 500,000 and by 2007 I had 100 people and USD 6 million in revenue. That made me choosy in selecting a financer and I selected the US-based Carlyle Group in 2008. Today we have 550 employees

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and we sell through 55 distributors and 3,000 resellers in 90 countries — from our headquarters in Ahmedabad. Speaking of achievements, in the financial world we are EBITDA positive unlike all our competitors. I am 22 percent and all the competitors are less than 10 percent. Our R&D costs are just 7 – 8 percent. We are also in the visionary quadrant on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

STRATEGIC MOVES

Because of the pricing of our products we are purely a channel business and work extensively with partners. We fund our partners to employ people and set up offices around the world. R&D and all operations (except worldwide distribution) happen from India. We have sales offices and worldwide distribution in the US. The customs regulations are not so harsh there (as in India) and that’s why we follow this model. The goal that we set in the last three years was to be in the top two. But we found that difficult to achieve and thought of revising that goal. But we said we should stick to our original goal. And after adding good people to the team we are now at No. 1 in India for the Cyberoam UTM appliance product (according to IDC). We now aspire to reach this position by 2012 in other markets like Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. We will go to selective countries in Europe (the top 6) as the market and competition in that continent are tremendous. The US market is different; we suffered a huge loss in 2007. The cost of marketing in the US is huge and the market is very diverse. There are two routes to achieving product leadership: you can have a completely different product, but your efforts and costs for educating the market will be huge. The other alternative is to make the same product that is superior to the competition, feature wise — and this is the route we chose. Our strategy was to go to Tier-2 and Tier-3 distributors in the Europe market. We found that Tier-1 distributors (also called value-added distributors) do

not deliver on the ‘value’ part. Then we move up the value chain. We also offer free training to our channel partners and good support. We’ve also set up a dedicated partner desk for support. Since we sell a premium product it is important to carefully control the finance structure. If you falter in this effort you will lose money. And we realized that automation will play a major role here. There are automated alerts and reminders for subscriptions. We have invested in this and have also designed a partner portal. About 70 percent of our revenue comes from network security (Cyberoam). We have two other businesses: Crestel telecom billing solutions and 24 Online.

LEADING PEOPLE

I owe much of my success to the people who work for me. I am good in grooming people. There is trust and I make them fully accountable. They are fairly responsible and are free to execute their own strategy. Transparency has always been a byword in my company strategy and vision. And the company strategy is visible at all levels in the organization. We practice an open-door policy and anyone is free to bypass the chain of command in their communication. Difference of opinion is taken as a base in our learning. Everyone is given a three-year roadmap, and the expectations are outlined. So personal growth has been defined upfront. KRAs and matrices are defined and these are aligned to the business goals. Soft skills are also important. If you take people for coffee and discuss other things, like films for instance, it can boost motivational levels. Yes, there are people who do not see eye-to-eye. You cannot bring emotions into business matters. Conflicts need to be resolved using hard logic. Always stay focused on the business goals. I would like people to take on the leadership role. So I delegate tasks and empower people.

Everyone is given a three-year roadmap, and the expectations are outlined. So personal growth has been defined upfront. KRAs and matrices are defined and these are aligned to the business goals

u As told to Brian Pereira

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 39

Leadership Series

Interview

‘Individual brilliance needs to be subservient to team goals’ The name, S Ramadorai needs no introduction. Joining as a trainee engineer, Ramadorai rose through the ranks and took over as CEO in 1996. Ramadorai’s leadership saw TCS expand in an accelerated way. When he took over as the CEO, TCS had 6,000 employees with revenues of just USD 600 million. When he stepped down as CEO in 2009, TCS had more than 140,000 employees spread across 42 countries, and revenues of more than USD 6 billion. He is currently Vice Chairman of TCS. In an exclusive interview with Srikanth RP of InformationWeek, Ramadorai shares some great insights on leadership from his vast experience. Under your leadership, TCS became one of the biggest IT brands with sustained revenues and profits. Can you share with us some of the key initiatives taken by you? My focus as a leader was broadly on planning and directing technology development, building strong relationships with customers, as well as other stakeholders like academic institutions and alliance partners. My focus was also on building TCS’ Research and Development and Innovation capabilities. Some of our key initiatives included: Taking TCS Global: TCS became a truly global firm with an ever-expanding global footprint with over 142 offices spread across 42 countries, and over 800 global clients. Many of these clients were Fortune 500 companies. Some client relationships extended over several years, even decades. We also led the industry in expanding our global footprint into new and key markets like Latin America, China and Eastern Europe.

informationweek june 2011

ä Global delivery: We pioneered the concept of a global network delivery model (GNDM) by setting up development centers across five continents — thereby allowing our customers to leverage a global talent pool for their operations worldwide. ä Commitment to Quality: Our rigorous commitment to quality ensured that TCS maintained its leadership position with the largest number of centers and professionals working at SEI’s CMM Level 5. TCS became the world’s first organization to achieve an integrated Enterprise wide Maturity Level 5 on both Capability Maturity model and People Capability Maturity model. ä Digitization of the company: In an effort to empower decision-making and enable decentralization and enhance the skills of our employees, we initiated an ambitious digitization project several years ago. TCS leadership today uses a variety of on-line dashboards, to assess the performance of their functions with a capability to drill down to various

I have taken care to ensure that the people around me don’t necessarily reflect my own thinking, but are bright and willing to challenge and question the way ‘things are’, with a view to further improvement

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levels of detail — thereby examining current or potential problem areas with great effectiveness. ä Knowledge Partnerships: We built partnerships with premier academic institutions globally, leading to great exchange of ideas between academia and industry, which has been crucial to the development of not only TCS, but the Indian IT industry as a whole. Some of these alliances included Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Rotterdam School of Management and University of California, besides IITs and other Indian universities. Our business partnerships were across the board, with technology leaders like IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, HP, Compaq, SAP, Oracle and dozens more. ä Nation Building: From our very inception, India was part of our DNA, and not just another tactical opportunity or market segment. It is

because of our commitment and our wanting to make a tangible difference to the development of our country. I have always believed that applying technology to our environment and our challenges is absolutely necessary if we want to touch the lives of our citizens, if we want to transform industries and enable better governance. TCS followed this belief, by executing mission critical projects for India, such as the National Stock Exchange, MCA 21, Reserve Bank of India, Passport Seva among many others. Can you share with us some of your experiences at TCS where you have successfully managed huge challenges through innovative leadership strategies? As a business leader, one continually faces challenges such as global competition, economic slowdowns,

Indian companies must help Fortune 100 companies enhance their business performance, and further their strategic interests on a global scale, rather than focus only on helping them drive down business costs

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Leadership Series

Interview

It is during difficult times that one can learn and improve, reflect and ask fundamental questions like - are you doing the right thing? What are you compromising during a tight period? During such times, there needs to be continuous positive reinforcement and motivation

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diversifying the client-base, margin expansion etc. The key to facing these challenges is to constantly innovate, diversify and adapt to each situation. In this context, investing and believing in your people and your teams is critical. Our initial years as a business entity were most challenging. The India of the early-1970s was an entirely different India from the one we see today. A number of policies and government regulations were not favorable to business. We had to continuously convince people in power, and give business commitments that were very difficult to meet. However, these were challenges that taught us how to ‘do more with less’. Our patience and diligence paid good dividends. As did the company’s clear intention to work with a sense of purpose and a desire to make a difference, to increase its knowledge and capabilities outside the country, influence the policy makers and then bringing these experiences back into the country when the Indian market began to liberalize and open up. Another challenging period was the lead-up to, and eventual public listing of TCS in 2004. It was a billion dollar IPO and the learning curve was steep. However, it was an exciting and exhilarating phase in TCS’ history. A significant challenge I faced during my tenure as CEO was also, to ‘future-enable’ TCS. While we were industry leaders for decades earlier, we needed to create structures and processes to enable empowerment of our leadership teams, mechanisms to institutionalize excellence, and make technology investments that would drive future growth. In other words, have a roadmap to transition TCS from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’. The economic slowdown that began in 2008 would count among the toughest phases in my career. Apart from businesses in all our markets globally being impacted, there were the indirect effects of job cuts in developed markets, changing regulatory regimes and visa constraints. Today’s challenge for Indian companies is to keep moving forward from an application development and maintenance mind-set, to continuously

offer more value-added, well integrated services such as consulting, infrastructure management and BPO. One should be enabling Fortune 100 companies enhance their business performance, and further their strategic interests on a global scale, rather than focus only on helping them drive down business costs. I have also always believed that every challenge presents an opportunity, and it is during such difficult times that one can learn and improve, reflect and ask fundamental questions like — are you doing the right thing? What are you compromising during a tight period? During such times, there needs to be continuous positive reinforcement and motivation. Today, some of your closest competitors have serious leadership issues, while TCS seems to have managed it smoothly. Could you share with us your experiences on how leadership can be successfully transitioned? For me ‘spotting talent’ has been a way of life. I have taken care to ensure that the people around me don’t necessarily reflect my own thinking, but are bright and willing to challenge and question the way ‘things are’, with a view to further improvement. In this endeavor, I have also tried to kill hierarchy, so that fresh thinking can find expression, and be heard. I took office as the CEO in 1996, and so had the benefit of many years (thirteen) to identify and nurture talent. This was a period when I could expose talented TCS executives to wide and diverse sets of responsibilities, share in their vision, test their commitment to operational excellence and evaluate their people-handling and team building skills. Other qualities I looked for was a powerful personal value system, as well as the capability to be looked up to as a ‘role model’. Age was a criteria, but certainly not ‘the’ prime criteria for a successor. It was also clear to me that the successor needed a reasonably long tenure to grow the company to further heights. So I was ready to step aside on day one of the new CEO’s tenure. In the

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one and half years since, Chandra’s and TCS’ performance has been exemplary. We have extended our lead in the market along several dimensions, and consolidated our position as the industry leader. He has carried TCS’ leadership teams with him on this journey. In closing, I must mention that I was keen to be measured not just by the past, but what I helped create for the future! What do you think are some of the most important lessons in leadership that you have learnt from your illustrious seniors (such as FC Kohli)? It would be fair to say that I have learnt from my seniors — and also from my peer groups and teams — throughout my life. But if I were to list out a few critical lessons in leadership, these would be: #1 Always look out for high quality talent and challenge them in their work. If I have to say what I do rather well, I think I can look at a person, have a brief conversation with them and say — with reasonable confidence — whether he or she would be good for an organization like TCS. #2 Don’t surround yourself with only one group or one type of people. Get out of your office, and talk to your employees in person, ideally without their supervisors present. I believe that getting tied in to the same set of people around you, keeps you unidirectional in thinking and action, which may not be an ideal situation in the complex, dynamic business world of today. #3 Be conscious of and nurture a co-operative and collaborate atmosphere in your business. Place your talent internally based on both IQ and EQ. If a brilliant employee is also difficult to deal with, give the employee a role where he or she could work alone. If that doesn’t work, ask them to leave. I have always believed that in our kind of business, individual brilliance needs to be subservient to team goals and team achievements. How do you make people work together as good human beings and much as highly qualified professionals? That is a difficult task and is a skill that

Five characteristics that Ramadorai looks for in a good leader #1 The ability to listen #2 The ability to motivate through personal drive and energy #3 The ability to seek and find people that may be more talented than you and get them to work with you #4 To demonstrate high levels of professional and personal integrity, and fairness in conduct #5 The ability to show your team what they could accomplish, even if it is not apparent to them.

leaders need to develop over time. #4 Keep your business units to a manageable size. It not only makes for better quality of management oversight, but also creates tremendous opportunities for your talented young executives to grow, flower and demonstrate leadership of their own. What is your vision for your company? What would you like TCS to be? TCS is today a truly global, multinational organization with world-class standards. My vision for TCS is for it to become a ‘transformational entity’. For this to happen, investments would need to continue in technology, R&D, human capital and in business innovations. And these innovations would need to be successfully monetized. TCS would need to take forward thinking around empowering leadership, and the unshakable commitment to the Tata value system, ethical conduct and transparency in dealings. It would continue to be a socially responsible corporate citizen, and remain committed to engagement with both the communities we serve as well as with broader global business sustainability issues. TCS would need to extract deeper synergies from its successful business acquisitions, and continue to uphold its industry leadership status. If we do this right, TCS’ vision would not be the realizing of a financial target, but rather an enabler for great business results to follow.

The TCS leadership today uses a variety of on-line dashboards,to assess the performance of their functions with a capability to drill down to various levels of detail — thereby examining current or potential problem areas with great effectiveness

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Brand leadership has a huge association with trust After building India’s strongest IT brand over the past 34 years, IT legend and Padma Bhushan awardee Ajai Chowdhry makes way for a new CEO at HCL Infosystems. Since 1999 he has participated on various high-level government committees to make recommendations for boosting electronics and semiconductor output in India. He led the prime minister’s task force and five of his recommendations were recently selected for the National Electronic Mission. In a candid interview with Brian Pereira of InformationWeek he talks about brand leadership, customer leadership, change leadership, strategic leadership and the legacy he wants to leave behind HCL Infosystems was a leading manufacturer of PC hardware in the 1990s. Later you went into services and system integration. What’s your vision for HCL Infosystems today and where do you want to take the company in future? Our focus on hardware continues because that is where we created the Indian IT hardware market. There really wasn’t any hardware market when we started selling and creating products in India. We were the country’s first internally designed product for the marketplace. So our focus has always remained on hardware. Originally, we launched products in the SME market and then went into the enterprise market. We’ve had a very strong connect with the B2B market, and then of course, the focus on government, as it is a large buyer. To be a leader in the B2B market the most important things is quality of service. That’s why we set up our service capabilities all over the country. We’ve had a deep focus on customer satisfaction and services right from the beginning. Later on we created the home PC market with our first product called ‘Beanstalk’. Although we are a very entrepreneur type company, we also have a lot of entrepreneurs inside the company, who come up with ideas like Beanstalk. On that (hardware strengths), we kept building the service capability. Initially it was just warranty services and then we added maintenance contract services. Then we went on to offer facilities management for clients all over the country. We give them uptimes and deliver services in accordance with SLAs. This has escalated to higher value-added services. We went from maintenance contracts to facilities management, and then to remote infrastructure management. Our

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big focus is now on infrastructure management services. We created the system integration business on the strength of infrastructure management. In the systems integration business, typically 70 – 80 percent is hardware (servers, desktops, notebooks). We do large system integration projects all over the country and we do projects where customers need service anywhere. For instance, six months ago, we dedicated AFNet (Air Force network) to the country. We partnered with BSNL and delivered a service that integrated a communication network over 180 bases of the Indian Air Force. It is a very large and unique project. It’s now a country-wide video based network and we just installed bomb-proof datacenters at six locations. This is a highly specialized work. Going forward we will continue to see growth in system integration and the infrastructure services area. We have created many services around infrastructure that are going to be global. Within the organization itself we are creating some services that are currently delivered domestically, but they would go global too. You have spent a lot of time with customers. So what is your view on Customer Leadership? Customers want to be heard and that’s the key for us. Our management team spends a lot of time listening to and working with customers. We conduct 80 to 100 user meets in 40–50 cities around the country. In these meets, we tell customers about the new technology challenges they are likely to face in running their IT departments. Secondly, we give them an update on products and services the company is introducing, so that they are abreast with our progress/roadmap. Thirdly, we seek feedback on our services and products. We do a third-party customer satisfaction survey. We also do our own survey on an annual basis. And then we do a customer satisfaction audit during our 80-100 user meets. All this gives us rich inputs on customer requirements and we respond to this. We have deep knowledge databases on each

customer’s requirements. In fact a lot of services that we’ve created over the years have actually been suggested by customers. What are the tenets for good Change Leadership? What’s the most effective way to get people to accept change? How do you do this? Change is constant. The co-founders of this company are all entrepreneurs and by nature, entrepreneurs are eternal optimists and infectious optimists. So, optimism is a part of us. With that, you bring in the changes that you want to introduce. Whenever you want to look at a change, you give people a vision of what it will achieve. And once you passionately carry forward that in your vision, it amounts to leadership. Change has to come as a part of our strategy. You bring these two (vision and change) and communicate it with a lot of passion and optimism — and that’s when change gets accepted. You need to jot down the plan for your change. And you must overcommunicate change. You just can’t make the change and expect people to follow it. Instead, explain the reason for the change. Don’t just make change and expect people to accept it. Work on each level of people and get them to accept the change. For example, we have a new CEO (Harsh Chitale) and he has created a new program called ‘Aspire.’ This will bring about a lot of changes. The Aspire presentation is communicated at all levels in the organization. I have a very special way of communicating with people. HR has created a communication platform called ‘Coffee with Ajai’. I meet 70-80 people in a designated room and all of us carry a coffee mug. In these coffee meetings, people are allowed to discuss anything. But first, I ask them to take off their hats (department hat, division hat, vertical hat). We avoid personal discussions but they can ask me any question about the company and the business performance. We agree and disagree on issues. That’s how you carry forward the whole agenda for change.

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Interview that many manufacturers exist and they provide services in the country. So we wondered how we could differentiate. We came up with this idea called ‘Touch’. We asked ourselves how we can touch the customer. And so we put a special HCL Touch key on all our laptops. This is essentially a service key that connects the customer to a 24x7 service center. We were the first to do this. If a customer is facing a technical problem with his laptop, and if he’s connected to the Net, he can simply press the HCL Touch key. That would enable him to instantly chat online with a technician from our service center. And that’s how we created product differentiation.

Whenever you want to look at a change you give people a vision of what it will achieve. And once you passionately carry forward that in your vision, it amounts to leadership. Change has to come as a part of our strategy

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How have you attained Strategic Leadership at HCL? How have you achieved a unique positioning and differentiation at HCL? You can have differentiation only when you create a strategy that will take you to leadership. When we embarked on the system integration business seven years ago, we stated our intent to be the country’s leading system integrator and we created a strategy around which we would grow. We observed the trend happening all over the world: most IT organizations were getting into every part of the IT business. HP, for instance, was initially a box company. They went and bought a services company. So they became box plus services company. Then they started adding software into that portfolio. So every company was becoming a full solution house. We saw that much ahead of it happening and decided to get into system integration; we saw that a lot of customers preferred having one party doing everything for them. And that strategy helped us get into a leadership position. Others followed us, but since we were one of the first ones to get into this market, we have a very large experiential base today, which gives us the benefit. When we were considering laptop manufacture three years ago, we knew

The media hails HCL as a powerful brand builder and a leading IT brand. What makes a brand strong and how does a company attain Brand Leadership? Brand leadership comes from a phenomenal amount of trust around a brand. When people think of that brand they think, if I buy this brand, this will work for me. So it has a huge association with trust. Behind the trust sits the quality and reliability of the product, and great service. Your product might be great, but if your service is poor, you get nowhere. Also, your brand needs to have a connect with innovation. Whether it’s marketing innovation, service innovation, or product innovation, whichever way you look at innovation, you must have pieces of that in your whole strategy. Six or seven years ago, we did market research on our brand. We were keen to know how our brand was perceived. We also did a TV campaign with the theme ‘Technology touches lives’. This campaign did not talk about products but it communicated what our brand delivers. There was an anecdote of a guy in a remote part of Kerala who is trying to get to a bank. But there is no bank there. So he uses his HCL hand-held device to perform banking transactions. That sent out the message that HCL delivers tools for banking services. We used similar anecdotes to build our brand. And we followed that up with market research to constantly create saliency for our brand.

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IMRB had done market research on our brand. And it said that the HCL brand has the highest brand recall among IT brands in the country. And that’s what the saliency work helped us to achieve. How would you describe your leadership style? It’s participative. Leaders and managers are different. Leadership is all about having a vision and strategy and then being able to get the trust of the people to take that vision forward. But management is about execution of the strategy. But you need to ensure that you don’t overmanage the company. If you do that, you are not a leader. You must allow others to manage the company. You must be able to guide, mentor and motivate them—to actually manage—while you provide the vision and the strategy. That’s the kind of work a leader must do, if he wants to make his company successful. He needs to trust his people. If you don’t trust them then don’t expect trust from them. What are your views on succession planning? What are you doing to groom the next leaders at HCL? We have a program called ‘I LEAD’ that we have deeply implemented right through the company. We hold development centers for every level of the organization, where we assess the managerial capability that we have at every level. Once we have assessed the managerial capabilities of various people, then we work on development on those people. We identify who needs communication skills, leadership skills, and innovation skills. We define all these things and then start training them. Once we design the development program and put them through training, we constantly assess them. We have worked out who is the successor at every level, and at different verticals and different horizontals. My succession plan was done ahead of time. I told the board that at age 60, I don’t want to run day-to-day operations. I just want to be the CEO. So the nominations committee

evaluated people internally through a development center exercise and started to look for people from outside. They appointed an external consultant who brought in people from outside. They also looked at insiders and then made recommendations to the board. And that’s how we selected Mr. Chitale to be our next CEO. I did the final interviews with him and approved him. So it was all very well-planned. Top leaders want to leave behind a legacy. How would you like to be remembered? Legacy happens on its own — you don’t need to work for it. If you have helped create an organization or an industry, then you leave a legacy behind. Since 1999 I have worked on three big committees of the government, where my single objective is to create a hardware manufacturing ecosystem in the country. We have done it on our own (as a company). We have created R&D and we manufacture products, and this is rare among Indian companies. Parallel to that, I personally believe that India needs a vibrant electronic hardware industry. So from 1999, when NDA government was in power, I was part of prime ministerial task force for hardware. The prime minister had created only a software task force. But I insisted on creating a hardware task force, and they did so. We wrote the whole story on hardware, but it didn’t get implemented. In 2005 Pramod Mahajan (who was then the union minister for IT and Communications) asked me to head another committee on hardware. But only one aspect of what we suggested was implemented — they created a semi-conductor manufacturing policy. In 2009, the current government asked me to write a policy. It took me three and a half months to create that policy. Finally, in 2011, five big pieces of that policy are getting implemented. Now we are seeing each of these being approved by the cabinet. So that is what I call legacy. If the electronic ecosystem happens in this country, then I would feel very proud that I played a part.

Brand leadership comes from a phenomenal amount of trust around a brand. When people think of that brand they think, if I buy this brand, this will work for me. Behind the trust sits the quality and reliability of the product, and great service

u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

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‘Articulate your

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values system’ Persistent Systems has quickly grown to become a USD 170 million company with 300 customers and 6,400 employees. Founder Dr. Anand Deshpande tells Brian Pereira how his company is grooming potential leaders to succeed him and the current leadership team What was the vision when you founded Persistent Systems in 1990? After accomplishing my degree in Computer Science in India, I was working in the US for about 18 months at HP. But I wanted to return to India and was eager to do an exciting technology project from India. So this was the main motivation for founding Persistent Systems. In the first few years most of us at Persistent were writing code, and we did a small number of projects. At that time talent was scarce in India and the infrastructure here was poor. Despite this, we grew rapidly in the early years too. We got listed in April 2010 as a mid-tier company. Our objective is to grow the company significantly in the next few years. We believe the market space and potential is huge for us. We work with product companies in an outsourced software product development model. Your company has won the Nasscom Innovation award and the media says innovation is the secret of your success. So how do you define innovation? Can you give us examples of innovation at

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Persistent Systems? We have teams that look at new technology on an on-going basis. We try to make sure that we are on the cutting edge of technology. We also look for ways to work with customers who have innovative ideas. Our teams are challenged to look for new ways to do business, new technologies to explore, and new products that we can build together with our customers. When you demand more from enthusiastic and energetic people, you get new ideas and innovation. Then you take the ideas and build something (products). What do you think is crucial for product leadership? Product leadership depends on how your customers accept your products. So it is the customers who define the leadership. As a leader how do you get people with conflicting ideas to work together? As a company we have a certain mission that we all agree upon. There is no conflict on the main objective of the company. If you have disagreement on high level goals, then you cannot really work together. There may be

different ways to get to the common goal/mission. You want to encourage people to share their ideas, and have a constructive argument to identify what is the best way to achieve the objective. Having conflicting ideas is a good thing because it allows you to evaluate multiple aspects of getting to your destination, without having to fail on any one approach. What’s your approach to mentoring people? How do you bring out the best in people? When you work with people, you

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Product leadership depends on how your customers accept your products. So it is the customers who define the leadership work on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. I look for a person’s strengths and give that person enough room to apply their strengths to their work. It’s also about giving people space to operate and flexibility to make decisions. How do you define your leadership style? Is it autocratic, democratic, participative or free reign? I don’t think I am autocratic leader. I form the vision and suggest the way ahead. Beyond that I encourage people to take calls and make their own decisions. I am happy to help them get to the goal. What are the three most important values that you demonstrate as a leader? Can you cite some incidents that demonstrate leadership values at the workplace? In a leadership role your leadership values system needs to be clearly articulated. We have a code of conduct to follow and we are very firm about any violation of this code. The second aspect is trust — you need to trust the persons you work with and they need to trust you. Trust is an important aspect of leadership. Thirdly, you need to be transparent in what you are doing and in what you expect from others. What are the steps that leaders can take to overcome their own natural fears so that they can encourage the people they are leading to do the same? There are times when leaders feel insecure. If I give a person enough responsibilities, then what is left for me? What’s left for me to do in future? That can be a challenge for many people. So you need to keep defining

goals to stretch the organization, so that there is enough room for everyone to do more. As you stretch your goals you grow the base for the company and also create more room for yourself and more opportunities for others. So unless you keep stretching your ambition, you will stagnate yourself and others below you. What are you doing to groom the next generation of leaders at Persistent? There are multiple initiatives. For several years, we ran a program called the Arjuna program. We selected 50 people from the company for this one-year program. We spent time evaluating the skills of these potential leaders, as they will eventually lead the company in a few years. We teach them how to lead teams through various activities. For this we work with Professor Ashok Korwar (ex IIM-A). Then we have another program for 60 people, called LEAP. These are people who work closely with me, and some are likely to succeed me. They are all fully aware about what’s happening in the company; there’s enough exposure, across various functions. When it comes to succession planning, should the baton be passed on to an insider or an outsider? Does it have to be a cofounder or family member? I do believe that the best person for the job need not be the co-founder or a family member. It makes sense to pass the baton to the number two person in the company, rather than to an outsider. An internal person has a better understanding of the company. So you should groom the successor over a period of time. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

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‘It’s imperative to assess the value system of the leader’ When one is a CEO for the better part of one’s career, one masters the qualities of leadership. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek, Ashok Soota, chairman and MD, Happiest Minds tells Brian Pereira and Ayushman Baruah what he looks for in people when he assembles teams. It seems everyone wants to be led by Soota — he received hundreds of job applications when he announced his latest venture

Is it good to have young people at the CEOlevel or do you think the role is better suited to someone with more experience? To begin with my own experience, I became the CEO of a company at the age of 34 and the CEO of a business unit even four to five years earlier. So, half my life, I have been a CEO or higher. I do believe that it’s better to have CEOs, as opposed to say an executive chairman, who is younger. Certainly, you will see this in the new organization that I am setting up where almost all the senior positions will be filled with people who are around their early to mid-forties, and I think that’s a good age to have enough experience behind you to become the CEO of a company, or the CEO of a business unit. What are the characteristics of a good leader? What are the qualities you look for while putting a team in place? There are a couple of things. First and foremost, it’s imperative to assess the value system of the person. The second quality I look for, especially when you are putting the team in place, is to see if the person is adequately complementing the team. The other important quality is about being a team player. Then you get into the experience, expertise and the skills they bring in, which varies from position to position. For instance, for front-end positions like the CEO of a business line or an industry manager, you look at the relationships they bring into the business. In operational roles or people-related functions, you look for people who are good at managing change. In fact, as a common quality, most people should be good change agents.

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When you come across people with conflicting ideas, how do you get them to work together? I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sense that we actually get the degree of conflict that we often visualise. More often than not, people see the common good and work together. It is the logic that dictates the decision. Second, if you have chosen people with complementary capabilities, they are interested in learning from each other rather than getting into conflicts. To get people to work together, you need to align the team together in the same direction through a common set of values. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your approach to mentoring? How do you bring out the best in people? I can give you examples of how it has worked for me in the past. Shriram Refrigeration was an unprofitable company for four straight years. As the CEO of the company, I facilitated a complete turnaround, making it profitable in the very first year and taking it to a position of leadership in each of its product lines. All this was done with almost the same team in place. The right approach is to build confidence in the team, think through the problems together, strategize together, and layout a shared vision. You should never rely on fear, even in the most difficult of situations. Instead you should say this is a challenge, which we can overcome together. In my Wipro Infotech days, the company in its second year had started to lose momentum. The reason being that part of the attention was drifting away to thinking if we should start a software company when it was actually a computer company. Again, we accelerated the growth of the company with literally the same team, and became the largest computer company in the country. My approach to mentoring is to be a role model and help others fulfil their own potential.

When we work this way, we have a huge multiplier impact on developing people. What is the difference between management and leadership? Leadership is about creating a shared vision, articulating your values, mentoring, guiding and carrying the team with you. Management is about planning, analyzing, forecasting, and structured decision making. The point is both are equally important and you need both sides to become successful in any business. What are the important aspects of succession planning? At what stage should it be communicated to the person? I believe that not only should it be communicated to the concerned person but to the others as well, say the contenders. More often than not, there are two or three contenders for the same position. So, you need to communicate well to the others (who did not qualify for the post) about their gaps and let them appreciate the fairness of the decision. For senior positions, they should be informed at least two to three years before the actual succession takes place. This is what I did in the past and it helped the leader to be ready for his new role. What are the three most important values you demonstrated as a leader? Can you cite some incidents that demonstrate your leadership values in the work place? This is a question to which I believe you should really seek a response from people who have worked with me. Still, let me attempt to articulate some aspects of my leadership which, I feel, were important. First, I think I demonstrated transparency in every respect. Second, was creating a shared vision. Anecdotal illustration of both these is

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Interview Refrigeration, a sick loss-making company; for growing two industries within Wipro — the computer and software; for creating MindTree, perhaps the fastest growing start-up in the IT space; and of course now for Happiest Minds. But if I have to name one thing that integrates all of them together, it is for creating organizations that are recognized for their highest standards of corporate governance and seen as great places to work in.

I do believe that it’s better to have CEOs, as opposed to say an executive chairman, who is younger

the huge emphasis on communication: I personally addressed incoming groups on the Mission, Vision and Values; I have sent out over 240 communications to the team under my signature label of “Snapshots”. I even shared my own annual objectives versus actuals with the entire leadership team as I considered myself accountable to them. The third aspect of leadership I wanted my colleagues to imbibe was the importance of giving back and that our most satisfying moments are when we give and not receive. These were demonstrated by the way we celebrated our milestones — contributing to meals for children in the name of our team/customers on achieving USD 100 million of revenue; creating an eco-forest on Bangalore outskirts for our 10th anniversary. Money was much better spent than having a party! Top leaders want to leave behind a lasting legacy. What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind? I think I have left behind multiple legacies already. If by legacy you mean what I would like to be remembered for, it would be for a couple of things. For turning around Shriram

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Was MindTree over-dependent on you as evidenced by market reaction to your exit? How does a company avoid becoming over dependent on a leader? Let me answer the second part first. Most good companies have a defined succession plan and a development plan for the future leaders to avoid a situation of over-dependence. With regards to MindTree, there certainly was a well-defined succession plan. Yet there could have been a perception of over-dependence which led to what you indicate was an over-reaction from the market. There is a strong and competent leadership in place and in course of time the market will again judge the company by its performance rather than the presence or absence of one individual. At 69, when most people think about retiring, you have embarked on a new journey with Happiest Minds? What keeps you going? I think it’s about enjoying the work you do. If you enjoy your work, it’s not work anymore. It’s partly fun, partly hobby, partly challenge. In fact, it’s the work that keeps me going and feeling young. Also, in the IT business, it’s great to be surrounded by young people who energize you.

In a candid chat with InformationWeek, elsewhere in this issue, Ashok Soota speaks freely about his vision and plans for Happiest Minds. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

Ayushman Baruah ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

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Interview

‘I always believed in creating leadership from within’

The true strength of a leader is known in crisis situations. So, when Tech Mahindra took over fraud-tainted Satyam, the CEO of Mahindra Satyam, CP Gurnani, had a gigantic task in hand. Besides ensuring survival of the company, Gurnani also had to ensure that customers and employees had the necessary confidence in the company. Today, Satyam is back from the brink in a new avatar, and a huge percentage of the credit goes to its CEO. In an exclusive interview with Vinita Gupta from InformationWeek, CP Gurnani, CEO, Mahindra Satyam shares some important lessons on leadership, and tells us why the Satyam-to-Mahindra Satyam story has been his greatest achievement Tell us about your journey to the top and how you’ve grown your business and organization? My journey has always been adventurous. For me crisis is relative, while it destroys morale, it also signifies opportunities for the better. In a career spanning over 30 years, I have made certain crucial decisions which were instrumental in shaping the future of these companies. There were many immediate, short term or long term decisions taken but the key has always been to have a vision coupled with a supportive and collaborative team to make this possible. Whether it was Perot Systems or Mahindra Satyam I have always believed in creating the leadership from within. For instance at Mahindra Satyam, I have encouraged young people to be part of the Shadow Board who work with the CXO team and influence the decisionmaking process. The key to build a successful organization is good governance, establishing employee connect, strong focus on technology and innovation, while ensuring that the business is always profitable and the customer adds some value by doing business with us. What do you feel has been your greatest workrelated accomplishment? Satyam to Mahindra Satyam story has been my greatest achievement. Today after more than two years, the company stands tall and has proved that misdeeds of a person cannot affect the company as a whole. Mahindra Satyam today has tremendous confidence in its people and their capabilities in delivery excellence, extended and differentiated service offerings, and domain expertise. My priority is to re-energize the company and leverage these strengths effectively for our customers’ business and growth. Since the acquisition by Tech

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Leadership Series

Interview Mahindra in 2009, we have been able to retain the best talent across the organization, who have demonstrated faith in our resurgence. Right now we are at the threshold of creating a brand. What would you describe as your leadership style? Give examples of how you practice this Lead by example. There is no better way really. Practice what you preach, bring people together, and create a courageous, connected and agile organization. I believe that the biggest challenge is achieving genuine “connectedness” between Talent Strategy and Business Strategy. A wide range of people processes often take place without a clear relationship with the ultimate aims and culture of the business. At Mahindra Satyam, we are guided by our “courageous, connected and agile” culture. Courageous — to stand up for what we believe in. Connected — the force that urges us to ally, affiliate, enter into mutual relationships and grow through cooperative behavior. Agile — characterized by agility, lightness, ease of movement, nimble and mental alertness. Our Shadow Board is a fine example of what I am trying to achieve. It is a unique concept which identifies eight to nine dynamic and enterprising Associates who put in their thoughts together and, provide new inputs for the strategic and operational business plans of Mahindra Satyam. After the Satyam controversy, how difficult was it for you as a leader to retain the confidence of the existing customer and grow the company As part of our transformation to cope with the crisis, we focused on promoting and measuring the “delight quotient” — be it with our customers, or within the organization (with our associates). Some other imperative measures we took were: l Responding to the changing needs and expectations of our customers speedily, courteously and effectively l Injecting a new level of financial

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rigor, transparency and corporate governance l Maintaining high service standards l Expanding skill sets l Improving geographic coverage l Focusing on R&D and innovation The other priorities were around developing a balanced and derisked business mix across verticals, technologies and geographies. All these and timely communication /interface with our customers eased the active and latent anxiety, and business continued unaffected. You are passionate about mentoring the younger generation to create quality leadership for a better tomorrow. So how do you really attain this? Can you give us some examples. Irrespective of multiple things which you do at a given point of the day, performance is of utmost importance. When we talk about performance, it’s not only the pool of talent, it is the whole talent within an eco-system that nurtures the growth ecology. Personally, I wish to mentor 30 young leaders, below the age of 30 years, and the ones who are raring to innovate. At Mahindra Satyam we also have a high-potential group created called Global Leadership Cadre (GLC) Program — which is an exclusive forum comprising high potential Associates, who display intent and ability to go beyond expectations. Some of the engagement activities around ‘Fun & Connect’ are also being managed by young associates who are given independent charge to run the show of associate delight. The ‘Fun Officers’ also have a mandate to engage fellow associates in community activities. From my viewpoint, all the above concepts foster ‘collective leadership’.

As part of our transformation to cope with the crisis, we focused on promoting and measuring the “delight quotient” – be it with our customers, or within the organization

How to do you get your people to accept your ideas, goals and vision? I believe in taking an inclusive approach. Building ideas and concepts through consensus actually increases accountability and team spirit. In our three-year transformational journey, we need to walk, and not run amok.

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Forums and huddles are more of what you will see in our offices than isolated functioning. What are the three most important values you demonstrate as a leader? Can you cite some examples that demonstrate leadership values in the workplace? Actually, the three most important values of a true leader are : 1) Who accept no limits, 2) Foster alternative thinking and 3) Drive positive change and helps people rise. A case in point is the way we managed the FIFA World Cup marketing campaign. The goal behind this massive global corporate branding & marketing campaign was to convey that Mahindra Satyam still stands tall. The USP was to build everything in-house — right from the designing of creative materials to vendor management — it was done by the Marketing and Communications team of MSat. Tell us about the characteristics of a true leader. The ones who catalyze “Rise”. To me, leader is one who exhibits positivism —the childlike quality of looking at the world with optimism, disciplined energy — to believe in self-discipline and keep going with determination, learnability —the curiosity to embrace new ideas and thoughts and synthesize different, even contradictory, viewpoints, influencability — overcome social and other hurdles to influence people in the right direction and ambiguity tolerance — handling incorrect, inconsistent or incomplete data as way of life. They are my “Risators”. What are the steps that leaders can take to overcome their own fears so that they can create conditions that encourage people they are leading to do the same? Cite some examples Fear is a natural trait. One must convert fear into a weapon. Sportspeople do that all the time. I have met several seasoned professionals who still go weak in the knees before a critical meeting. But this sense of apprehension makes them

stay alert and deliver precisely and with relevance. However, deep rooted fear or psychotic/neurotic breakdowns are something that need attention. I have always believed in the power of environment — and encourage my associates to make mistakes. My favorite Board Room line is ‘have no’ one right answer. Actually have too many wrong answers! With each question and a wrong answer, we can eliminate and reach our solution in a fool-proof manner”. What are your views on succession planning? Should it remain within wthe family or do you believe it is about having the best talent from the industry (externally)? This is a slightly open-ended question and quite relative. Succession planning should rise above familial constraints to bring about brilliance and foster excellence for the future. In the business environment, both dynastic and employee-driven models exist, with their individual advantages/ disadvantages. I don’t necessarily believe in the adage – “the king is dead, long live the king” being spoken to any heir apparent. I am a great advocate of Charles Darwin and believe in his theory of the “fittest”.

One must convert fear into a weapon. Sportspeople do that all the time. I have met several seasoned professionals who still go weak in the knees before a critical meeting

u Vinita Gupta vinita.gupta@ubm.com

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Interview

ndia’s high growth of population coupled with growing industrialization and urbanization has led to a situation where the demand for water could soon outpace the supply. Can IT come to the rescue? IBM believes that it can, and is applying its knowledge and expertise of sensor networks and analytics to create smarter systems.

5 percent increase in government spending. Also, a lack of usable water would have a negative impact across all industries and in all corners of the world. Water deficits, which are already spurring heavy grain imports in numerous smaller countries, may soon do the same in larger countries, such as India and China. Smart water grid can help overcome water availability as well as water quality

equipment, water pumps and valves to collection pipes, water storage basins and laboratory equipment. The ability to monitor these systems in real-time means that potential problems such as a burst water main, a slow leak, a clogged drain or a hazardous sewage overflow can be quickly identified and resolved – or even predicted and prevented. The system even taps into geospatial

‘Smart water grids can help in overcoming water availability and quality issues’ Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Dr Cameron Brooks, Director, Smarter Water Management, IBM Big Green Innovations How relevant is the concept of Smart Water Grid to India? Regardless of industry or geography, smarter water management remains an issue faced by everyone on the planet. While the world’s population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. Within the next fifty years, the world population is expected to increase by another 40 to 50 percent. With this population, growth — coupled with ever-growing industrialization and urbanization — the demand for water could soon outpace the supply. There is a high socio-economic cost associated with a water shortage or lack of access to clean, drinkable water. According to some estimates for every percent of water that becomes unusable, 200,000 jobs may be lost, which could lead to a 5.7 percent drop in disposable income on a per capita basis and a

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issues — two areas critical for India. Can India with a legacy of scattered and old crumbling infrastructure use this concept effectively? How can a utility company with a legacy infrastructure adopt a smart water grid? Smart water management is all about applying monitoring and management technologies to help reduce the use of water, as well as related energy and chemicals. Managing water resources would include monitoring rivers, water reservoirs and pipes. Increasingly, utilities are transitioning to digital smart grids that collect data from networks of sensors and use advanced analytics to glean insight from that data. Smarter water management technologies can help companies reduce pollution, improve drinking water quality and increase the supply of usable water with a real-time advanced analytics system that tracks and reports on the condition of an infrastructure from filtration

data to pinpoint the exact location of problem areas. And as an added benefit, consumers who get a detailed breakdown of their water-use tend to modify their consumption patterns accordingly. While information technology is not going to directly increase the water supply — it can guide us as to more efficient use. Smart water grid is not a onetime technology but rather a road map to help water providers reach a more efficient, dynamic system. No matter where they are on the roadmap solutions exist to help them move along — whether it is simple data integration and monitoring to more sophisticated sensor networks and analytics. Please describe the key technologies that will be part of the Smart Water Grid (sensors, analytics) and how will these help in smarter management and deployment of water? While many cities around the world are dealing with drought, water shortage, and pollution, fortunately advanced information technology

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tools are now available to analyze the quality of water, and the effectiveness of treatment and distribution infrastructures. Knowledge developed through this type of analysis can be used to help curtail pollution and stem inefficiencies. These new advancements in technology can help create more intelligent water systems, which will benefit our communities and our environment over the next

We have a unique opportunity, and unique ability, to apply our combined expertise in high performance computing, sensor networks and advanced analytics across a wide variety of water management challenges. With this ability, scientists can bring together a diverse set of information incorporating weather and climate changes, flood patterns, reservoir activity and more to

In an interview with Srikanth RP, Dr Cameron Brooks, Director, Smarter Water Management, IBM Big Green Innovations, tells us how smarter water management techniques can help governments to avoid water crisis situations century. To deal with this challenge, cities will need to take steps to reduce water waste, prevent runoff pollution in rivers and lakes, and purify water to make it drinkable and reduce the energy used in the transportation of water. Interactive meters and sensors can be integrated into water and energy systems, providing realtime, accurate information about our water consumption so that we will be able to make better decisions about how and when we use this valuable resource. Some of the key technologies include sensors, meters, detectors, cameras, networks, mobile phones, telemetry, asset management tools, predictive analytics, models (flood, water quality, pipe networks), decision support systems, visualization tools, GIS, etc. How will ‘Smart Water Grids’ change the way water is consumed or distributed in the country? Will it make consumers or businesses more intelligent in deciding how they want to consume water?

develop new insights and innovations for smarter water management. We’re modeling and simulating flash flooding scenarios, water management infrastructures, reservoir systems and more to develop new innovations for predicting, managing and sometimes even preventing events that might otherwise have a negative impact on a region’s water supply. Can you name some of the smarter water management projects IBM is involved in? IBM is working with utility companies around the world including DC Water, the Fukuoka District Waterworks in Japan, Power and Water Corporation in Australia, the Sacramento Area Sewer District, the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to modernize the management of aging water and sewer infrastructures. And as part of our Smart City project in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, we are analyzing data from the city’s

sewage and plumbing systems to determine where water is being wasted and how access to clean drinking water can be improved. IBM is also working with the city of San Francisco to help reduce pollution in the water that surrounds the city on three sides — the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The city is using IBM software for smarter management of its 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities. In Malta, IBM is collaborating to build a nationwide system that will contain 250,000 interactive energy and water meters and thousands of sensors on both the energy grid and the water infrastructure to enable proactive management that anticipates problems, and optimizes water and energy supply together. The system will also provide Maltese citizens with better information on water and energy consumption, enabling them to make better decisions about how and when to use resources. What is your strategy for Smart Water Grids in India? We are developing solutions for around the world and India is a very important growth market for us. We are working with our partners to see how the pieces integrate across the value chain in the region. IBM has expanded water management capabilities around the world by establishing Centers of Excellence (COE) for Water Management. The goal of these COEs is to enable close collaboration with our clients and water industry experts and help all types of organizations better use information technology to solve water management problems worldwide. COEs identify and “bundle” technology, knowledge and expertise drawn from IBM and our international partners. What we need today is intense collaboration amongst the stakeholders across geographies and the water ecosystem. As water management issues continue to mount and costs continue to increase, information technology and collaborative innovation

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Interview Smart ‘Water’ initiatives In Malta, IBM is collaborating to build a nationwide system that will contain 250,000 interactive energy and water meters and thousands of sensors on both the energy grid and the water infrastructure to enable proactive management that anticipates problems, and optimizes water and energy supply together. l IBM is working with the city of San Francisco, California, to help reduce pollution in the water that surrounds the city. The city is using IBM software for smarter management of its 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities. l A city in Southern California, where drought is all too common, is using IBM software to manage a leading edge sewage treatment plant. Here, sewage runs through an advanced filtration system that removes bacteria, viruses, chemicals, toxic heavy metals, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. l

will play an instrumental role helping communities, businesses, and governments deal with the tremendous complexity ahead. The combination of volumes of data, the need for mining across different and new data types and the demand for real-time responses require a new kind of water management intelligence and models that encompasses scalable, statistical algorithms, and massive parallel approaches. Current data infrastructures limited in scalability and interoperability inhibit timely and effective decision-making across departments and organizations. Next generation water management systems need to be more flexible while providing more robust realtime analytics, modeling, and decision support capabilities. Also, it is important to interlock with funding agencies such as World Bank, IFC as well as NGOs. The concept of river linking project has been mooted by various government authorities and leaders. Do you believe, with Smart Water Grids, this concept can be executed fruitfully? If yes, what do you think will be the benefits? At IBM, our priority is to help

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utility companies transform energy, environmental and sustainability issues into opportunities that positively impact the world. IBM experts are working with utility companies globally to add a layer of digital intelligence to their grids. Indeed, it is imperative for the world to evolve smart water grids. For instance, Rivers for Tomorrow is a partnership between IBM and The Nature Conservancy. IBM is providing a state-of-the-art support system for a free, online application that will provide easy access to data and computer models to help watershed managers assess how land use affects water quality. In New York, the Hudson River and its estuary system has a technology-based monitoring and forecasting network designed to control pollution and harmful runoff. With advances in technology — sophisticated sensor networks, smart meters, deep computing and analytics — we can be smarter about how we manage our planet’s water. We can monitor, measure and analyze entire water ecosystems, from rivers and reservoirs to the pumps and pipes in our homes. We can give all the people, organizations, businesses, communities and nations dependent on a continuing supply of freshwater — that is, all of us — a single, reliable, up-to-the-minute and actionable view of water use. But that’s just the first drop. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Interview

‘Acquisition of Sun was a strategic fit’ Sandeep Mathur, the recently-appointed managing director of Oracle India spoke with Ayushman Baruah of InformationWeek on the company’s positioning, plans and relevance in the Indian market How would you position Oracle as a company, especially after Sun’s acquisition? Our common theme in terms of IT has been to reduce complexity by simplifying the systems, and thereafter use the savings in cost to innovate. Oracle positions itself as being in the business of providing complete open integrated systems. When we say complete, we would like to be in the business of providing a complete stack of solutions that our customers use to solve their enterprise business problems. Our acquisition of Sun in that sense was a very strategic fit because it helped us build the complete stack with operating system, virtualization, hardware, storage, database, middleware, applications and process applications. All our products also conform to open standards, and are integrated as they all work together. They are assimilated in such a fashion that customers can derive big business value out of them. Oracle has launched two appliances — namely Exadata and Exalogic in the past — which also signify the importance of Sun’s acquisition. How different is the India market? Enterprise customers everywhere have similar requirements, and especially in India, they have huge appetite for high-performance systems. Most enterprises here in India, are investing in innovation and the scalability is very

high especially in the telecom and banking sector. Telecom, manufacturing retail distribution (MRD), BFSI, and public sector are some of our key focus verticals in India. We have about 7,000 customers in India, which are a mix of enterprises and SMBs. What’s your game plan to stay ahead of your competitors like Microsoft and IBM? We look at what we can do best and we try to offer choice to our customers. Clearly, in the database and middleware front, we are the market leader. We are focusing on verticalspecific applications which are built for solving a particular problem in a particular industry. An example would be our utility application for billing. This has, in fact, been our strategy and our acquisitions have been on these lines. For instance, we acquired i-flex, which is a company for the banking environment. What is your strategy for the cloud? We are in the business of helping customers create their own cloud infrastructures which could either be a public or a private cloud setup. The trend points towards a mix of private and public cloud (hybrid cloud) model with open standards. While companies will be using private cloud for their own internal applications, they may have to go to the public cloud for

some of their public messaging and applications. Oracle has a comprehensive set of cloud computing offerings that are complete, open and integrated — spanning applications, middleware, database, operating systems, virtualization, servers, storage, networking and management of the entire stack. These include building and managing private PaaS and IaaS clouds. Today, enterprises have the option to choose from various cloud models that have a number of compelling business benefits. However, issues pertaining to security, performance and associated costs overpower these benefits and make the decision for organizations difficult. Oracle specifically designed Exalogic Elastic Cloud to provide enterprises with a foundation for secure, missioncritical private clouds capable of virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity. Exalogic is the ideal platform for applications of all types, from smallscale departmental applications to the largest and most demanding ERP and mainframe applications. It’s supposed to be the world’s first and only integrated cloud machine — hardware and software engineered together to provide a ‘cloud in a box’.

u Ayushman Baruah

ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

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Interview

s cloud-based applications grow in adoption, many enterprise customers are facing an issue with respect to data integration between cloud and on premise applications. To address this issue, Informatica has released a cloud-based service that enables organizations to integrate data between cloud-based applications and other legacy applications. Peter Ku, Director, Financial Service Solutions Marketing, Informatica, shares with Srikanth RP the significance of this service Why do you think integration is an issue in SaaS or cloud based applications? By design, SaaS applications are meant to be easier to implement and easier to use. The subscription pricing model is very attractive to divisions and departments of large companies. The end result can be a SaaS sprawl if there is no IT and business alignment and a clear strategy to deliver timely, relevant data across these applications.

‘Cloud computing is driving the next wave of data fragmentation’ SaaS applications must be able to seamlessly integrate with existing on-premise applications, databases and files if they are going to be well adopted and deliver a rapid ROI. How does Informatica’s cloudbased integration-as-a-service resolve this issue? Can you give us some examples to explain this? The Informatica cloud is built from the ground up for line of business self-service. We developed a brand new user interface specifically for SaaS application administrators and application owners. The Informatica cloud takes advantage of our core enterprise platform by leveraging our run-time PowerCenter engine. The result is very high performance and throughput. We are processing 80,000

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jobs per day and integrating more than 500 million records per day. How will enterprises benefit from cloud-based data integration with usagebased pricing? Request you to compare this with a traditional integration scenario and explain the advantages? The usage-based billing model we recently introduced with Informatica Cloud Express is revolutionary. It allows an organization to sign up with their credit card for a month-tomonth subscription and be charged based on the volume of records they integrate. This means if there is a big event or a migration project, you will pay more that month and then return to a flat rate if you’re requirements are

less significant the following month. We are initially targeting the low end of the market with this model and Informatica Cloud Express is initially only for Salesforce customers. For more complex requirements, we have basic, standard and enterprise editions. Recently Informatica announced a partnership with NetSuite for two-tier ERP. What do you think is the significance of twotier ERP for enterprises today? Increasingly, enterprises are looking to SaaS-based ERP options for divisions and departments instead of purchasing more software from vendors like Oracle and SAP. What they need, however, is seamless integration with these legacy systems. Informatica has partnered with

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Netsuite to enable this “two-tier ERP” approach and we are extremely excited about the opportunity. Research firm Ovum recently noted that Informatica has transformed from an ETL vendor to a leader in data integration? Can you tell us how have acquisitions helped your firm achieve this positioning and what is the roadmap for the future? Under Sohaib Abbasi’s leadership as

Informatica has successfully acquired five companies including: Applimation (application information lifecycle management) Address Doctor (address validation), Agent Logic (complex event processing), Siperian (master data management) and 29West (ultra messaging). Today Informatica is playing an increasingly critical role in helping customers around the world solve their business and IT challenges associated around data.

boundaries. Social Computing allows organizations to go beyond traditional business management: holistic brand management including proactive customer engagement and timely consumer sentiment analysis. The new era of social computing is fueling an unprecedented explosive growth of data. Mobile Computing is making pervasive computing and connectivity a reality. The new mobile devices

Peter Ku, Director, Informatica Peter Ku is Director, Financial Service Solutions Marketing with Informatica. At Informatica, Ku is responsible for driving product strategy, messaging, and positioning for its data governance and integration competency centres. Ku has over 15 years of product marketing and management experience with Ellie Mae, Dorado, Iteration Software (acquired by Oracle), Sagent (acquired by Pitney Bowes), Visa International, and Providian Bancorp

To deliver rapid ROI, SaaS applications must be able to seamlessly integrate with existing on-premise applications chairman and CEO, Informatica has expanded from delivering the market one technology offering in 2004, which was ETL, to in 2011 offering a comprehensive platform comprising eight technology areas including: data integration, data quality, master data management, information lifecycle management, cloud data integration, complex event processing, B2B data exchange and ultra messaging. In addition to growing organically, Informatica has further advanced the company’s technology leadership and expand the addressable market even further by pursuing strategic acquisition. During the past two years

If you had to forecast big trends that would fundamentally change the data integration landscape, what would they be? Over the next five years, the industry will be shaped by the current nexus of megatrends: Cloud Computing, Social Computing and Mobile Computing. As a consequence, these trends are elevating data integration as one of the most strategic technologies. Cloud Computing is driven by the compelling value proposition: lower cost and better results. However, the platform shift to cloud computing is driving the next wave of data fragmentation, across enterprise

are raising the importance of both integrating geospatial data for location-based services and enabling near-universal data access from any device. In addition to the three trends above, Big Data will continue to be at the top of organizations mind due to the unprecedented explosive growth of data, led by social data. Big data will require big changes in the technology stack and Hadoop is the best approach to handle big data. For the large volumes of social data, only parallel processing of Hadoop delivers acceptable performance. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Interview

Brocade to optimize the cloud environment At the Brocade Technology Day 2011 event at San Jose, Dave Stevens, the CTO in an exclusive interview talked to Vinita Gupta about Brocade’s ways of extending data center-class capabilities to the network edge How have datacenters changed over the past few years? Do you see a change in preference of certain technologies? The datacenters have changed over the past few years. Today they are both larger and smaller in nature, smaller — as virtualization technology had reduced the space and energy of the datacenters. For instance instead of using 10 physical servers, one virtual server can be used. But at the same time it’s becoming larger as the datacenter applications and information are mounting up. The companies are moving from client/server, utility computing and datacenter virtualization to virtual environment that will provide business agility and financial efficiency. According to Gartner, 86 percent of the server workloads will be virtualized by 2018. Emerging workloads and technologies are driving the need for high-performance, scaled-out shared storage fabrics. Fibre Channel fabrics are the premier choice for highly virtualized data centers and cloud architectures. Today the companies are looking at datacenters with no walls — that means applications can reside anywhere. Thus cloud computing technology is picking up. What is the significance of ‘Cloud optimized networks’ for enterprises? One of the most compelling reasons for migrating to the cloud is greater agility

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in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Building a cloudoptimized network that spans multiple IT architectures and applications can help organizations solve a wide range of business challenges. However, they first need to understand their challenges and goals before they can decide what type of cloud makes the most business sense. We provide capabilities to address public, private and hybrid cloud challenges. We have introduced the Brocade Cloudplex architecture for virtualization and cloud-optimized networks. Cloudplex is an open, extensible framework that will help organizations migrate into a cloud environment. This architecture will be the innovative foundation on which Brocade plans to deliver technologies, products and services during the next three to five years. Last year Brocade announced the VDX 6720 switches that had incorporated the Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) technology, how is the product doing in the market (adoption rate)? In 2008, Brocade acquired Foundry Networks to build the cloud mission. We are now bringing together highend Ethernet technology and the best of Fibre Channel innovation. Last year we launched the VDX 6720 switches, the first product that incorporates VCS (Virtual Cluster Switching) technology. The VDX 6720 switches were shipped

in February 2011. In just three months, we have signed about 100 customers — indicating that the product is doing well in the market. The companies are adopting VCS technology as it transforms data center networks through certain innovations that are optimized for highly virtualized and cloud environments. With the help of this technology, the companies need not configure switches that are added to the network. The close competitor of Brocade is betting big on video (it is estimated that 91 percent of internet traffic will consist of video by 2013). How is Brocade planning to tap this market? We have no plans to tap the video market. We are a specialized storage network company and unlike our competitors we do not want to keep on changing our focus by selling solutions like video or phone. What are the company’ s future plans? About 16 to 20 percent of our investment goes into R&D. We would keep on innovating technologies like fibre channel, fabric adapter, VCS etc. This year we have introduced CloudOptimized SANs, DCX 8510 Backbone, 1860 Fabric Adapter and many more products. u Vinita Gupta vinita.gupta@ubm.com

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Book Review

Leading with values

Leadership @ Infosys Edited by: Dr. Matt Barney Portfolio Penguin Pages: 226 Price: Rs 699

Must read Do read our News Analysis story ‘Leading the Infosys way’ and Dr. Barney’s article ‘Assessing Leader Performance’ in this issue.

uch has been written about Infosys’s mega leadership change on April 30th this year. Its new leaders (Kamath, Shibulal and Gopalakrishnan) are outspoken about their leadership styles and future agenda for Infosys. Before I bought this book, I wondered how Infosys picked its leaders — did it have a process akin to the highly secretive papal conclave? How would it select its future leaders with the last of its co-founders taking charge? Leadership @ Infosys provides these answers in intricate detail. Infosys is one of the most admired companies in the world; its unique business principles and culture have been extolled in Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. Infosys has won the admiration of global leaders like Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and celebrities such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. This recognition comes from the exemplary leadership values, the strong focus on corporate governance, and the high standards followed by this global business solutions company. Its top management and founders are highly obsessed with these values, which are mentioned throughout the book. In the foreword, Murthy and Gopalakrishnan write: “We believe our values are one element that will sustain Infosys into the future. We’ve always led with our values.” One of Infosys’s key values is leadership by example: “Leaders must follow the same rules and policies as other employees; leaders must be completely committed to Infosys and work harder than others.” And this is what creates the moral authority to lead. For instance, when Murthy took his wife on business trips, he reimbursed the company the difference for travel and lodging. And when families of its founders visit the company, they pay for meals in the company canteen. Salaries are always paid on time, even when funds are tight. Employees on the bench were not retrenched during the global recession. Infosys

has never taken any short-cuts, never compromised its core value system, or side-stepped the law to accelerate or influence business transactions. It is such values that Infosys wants to instill in its future leaders. And so, it is rather meticulous in its approach to grooming future and current leaders. Infosys set up its Learning and Development (L&D) Group in January 2000. Within that it commissioned the Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) in 2001 at its Mysore campus. The ILI formalized leadership training and developed a nine factor model for leadership behaviors required for effective performance. In October 2009, ILI was recognized to provide heightened focus of leadership development needs of the senior-most and high potential leaders known as ‘Tier leaders.’ The ILI applies the Rasch family of psychometric methods to effectively gauge the attributes relevant to selecting and growing leaders. The authors suggest that leaders can use Rasch Measurement for their development. Then there is a battery of advanced leadership assessments that use multisource computer adaptive instruments, multisource surveys (360 degree surveys) and analysis using the Many Facet Rasch Model (MFRM) to remove biases and to make the assessment fair, accurate and precise. The book also chronicles Infosys’s journey from its origins in 1981, with just seven employees on its payroll—to a multi-billion dollar global services company, with 1,13,796 employees (end 2010) and a footprint in 23 countries. It highlights the company’s milestones, the tough calls, failures, and successes; there is plenty of trivia and lesser known facts about the company. I also enjoyed the chapters on various forms of leadership (change leadership, strategic leadership, content leadership etc), written by other authors. I’m now waiting for NR Narayana Murthy to write his book on Infosys. u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com

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Technology & Risks

Are you bugged?

Avinash Kadam

It has got much simpler to keep track of someone, who is not careful with the help of spy software being offered by a number of companies

http://www.on the web Facebook scammers invite over 10 million people to bogus event Read article at: http://bit.ly/jhGJ0J

informationweek june 2011

e have been following all the action drama about the killing of the most wanted terrorist on earth with great interest. We were impressed that there was no telephone or internet connection to the safe house and that even the trash was being burnt. The human contact, the only bridge connecting to the outside world, proved to be the proverbial weakest link. It was monitored with great patience and perseverance, and finally it was the tapping of a phone call made by this human contact that yielded success. Consider how easy it is to keep track of someone, who is not as careful as the most wanted terrorist on earth. I came across this range of spy phone software being offered by a number of companies. If the claims are to be believed, all that you need for this software is the physical possession of the target phone instrument for merely five minutes, and an internet connection. You can download the software to the phone and be in the business of spying. You can gift this ‘bugged’ phone, or sell it, or just return it from where you had borrowed it for a few minutes. This phone is now at your beck and call. By sending SMS to it, you can do the following things: l You can remotely switch on the phone and use it as a pocket microphone to listen to all the surrounding conversations l You can intercept a phone conversation and listen without disturbing, becoming a silent party to a conference call l Even if you are not currently connected to your victim, you will still get copies of sms sent by your victim like a bcc: and also the list of all numbers called by your victim l You will also be able to track the victim and get its exact location, if the target phone has its GPS activated l If your victim changes his/her SIM card, the software will send a SMS to you informing the new number

to be monitored. The software is linked to the target phone’s IMEI number and will not be removed unless removed by you through a command from your phone. How does one know if someone has bugged your phone? The entire operation is very silent, very stealthy. The bugged phone does not show any sign nor display any messages when it receives a command from the monitoring phone. The only tell-tale sign is the target mobile phone’s bill. All the spying SMS sent to the monitoring phone will, of course, appear in the target’s phone bill. So, scrutinize your phone bill carefully and check all the sms entries. The tip to the budding spy, given by the software vendor, is to keep changing the monitor phone’s SIM card frequently to avoid being detected. So what are the preventive measures? l Do not lend your phone to anyone l Do not let your phone be out of your sight l Do not accept a gift phone. It may be the proverbial Trojan horse l Do not buy a second hand phone. It may be a bargain, but you may get more than you bargained for l Buy the phone from an official dealer only, preferably in an unopened package You may not dispense with these precautions merely because you are not in the category of someone being tracked with the might of surveillance forces. Someone may be just curious about your business or personal activities and may plant the bug in your phone, since it is so easy. The spy software vendors are also offering franchisee opportunities ‘to earn thousands of dollars’ to anyone who wants to provide this service. So beware. You may be bugged. And of course, do not try to buy the software, you may be conned. u Avinash Kadam is at MIEL e-Security

Pvt. Ltd. He can be contacted via email awkadam@mielesecurity.com

www.informationweek.in

Global CIO

Business execs, not technologists, leading tech innovation

Chris Murphy

So says a top exec from Indian service provider Infosys, which is spending more time with CFOs and business unit leaders as those execs drive more IT projects

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

nfosys senior VP Ashok Vemuri works with many of the service provider’s biggest clients, as leader of its U.S. practice and global head of its banking and capital markets practice. And what he’s seeing should have every CIO asking: Is my team a key part of our company’s tech innovation strategy? Infosys just reported its yearend financial results: net income up 19 percent from a year ago, on 26 percent higher revenue. However, its fourth-quarter profit and year-ahead sales projection were below analysts’ forecasts. To move up the value chain, Infosys is trying to get more work focused on what it calls business innovation, particularly tech-centric projects that directly touch clients’ customers and products. For examples, it’s working with retailers to deliver a mobile checkout app on the iPad; developing a text message/voice-mail alert system for a government agency to alert residents to natural disasters; and helping banks build new systems for risk management. For Infosys, working on these projects and interacting with these executives require it to hire people with a new set of skills. It puts a premium on people with deep industry knowledge and context, along with a strong technical grounding. “You typically get maybe 15 minutes in front of the CFO,” Vemuri says. “If you’re not able to sell your story to her in those 15 minutes, you’ll be out of the door before you know it. These are not the typical technology conversations.” The kinds of skills Infosys is seeking are also the kinds of skills IT organizations need to have — and highlight. Their people must understand business goals, anticipate business needs, spot industry trends, and apply technology to solve very specific problems.

Infosys views tech projects in three big buckets: optimization, which is conventional outsourcing of IT operations and application development, with an emphasis on cost cutting; transformation, which is focused on reinventing the IT systems to support growth initiatives; and business innovation, which includes tech-driven product innovations, efforts like an iPad app for retail employees to check customers out. Here are Vemuri’s insights into a few areas, based on what he’s hearing from customers: On Cloud Computing: As recently as a year ago, different units of the same bank didn’t even want to share IT resources. Even a private cloud was too big a leap. Vemuri contends that most companies also don’t have the skills to build and run cloud platforms. Infosys likewise is having to hire and then train people in those skills. “You need an absolutely new discipline of engineering,” he says. Vemuri’s pitch, naturally, is that companies should let Infosys spend the money retraining its people, rather than do it themselves. On Hard-To-Find Skills: Infosys estimates salaries will rise 10 percent to 11percent for its employees in India this year, and two to three percent elsewhere. But it’ll have to pay even higher premiums for these innovation skills it’s after. IT architecture skills fall into that realm. So do specialized industry skills — people who have worked on bank regulatory compliance. On U.S. Companies’ IT Plans: Infosys sees the U.S. as a “re-emerging market,” Vemuri says, it is ready to make significant investments, especially on customer-facing projects, as well as those related to new regulations, such as Dodd-Frank in banking. IT teams should be watching it too. u Chris Murphy is Editor of

InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 67

Analyst Angle

Why CEOs should stop limiting IT budgets

Nigel Fenwick

The best way CEOs can get the most value from IT and avoid limiting the potential upside from new technology investments is to remove the cap on new IT investments altogether

LOGS To read more of Nigel Fenwick’s blogs, check out his blogs at: http://blogs.forrester.com/ nigel_fenwick

informationweek june 2011

s CEOs put IT budgets under pressure year after year, CIOs and their teams focus on balancing money spent on running the business (RTB) versus money spent on growing the business (GTB). By decreasing the percentage of their budget spent on maintenance and ongoing operations (RTB), they aim to have a greater share of their budget to spend on projects that grow the business. In the best IT organizations, the ratio can sometimes approach 50:50 — however; a more typical ratio is 70 percent RTB and 30 percent GTB. Unfortunately, such practices suggest an incremental budget cycle — one that looks at the prior year’s spend to determine the next year’s budget. While this may be appropriate for the RTB portion of the IT budget, it is far from ideal for the GTB portion. Incremental budgeting for GTB results in enormous tradeoffs being made as part of the IT governance process, with steering committees making decisions on which projects can be funded based upon the IT and business strategy. Anyone from outside of IT who has worked through IT governance committees understands just how challenging that process can be. And the ultimate result of such tradeoffs is that sometimes valuable projects go unfunded or shadow-IT projects spring up to avoid the process altogether.

How CEOs can get more value from IT

The best way CEOs can get the most value from IT and avoid limiting the potential upside from new technology investments is to remove the cap on new IT investments altogether. That’s not to suggest CEOs should give CIOs a blank check. Instead, CEOs should hold departmental executives and lines of business accountable to fund technology initiatives, paying for

preferred projects out of their own P&Ls, with each project backed by a solid business case. Instead of CIOs parsing out limited IT funds against scarce IT resources, IT’s role becomes that of business partner — helping leaders figure out how to get their projects completed, sometimes with IT resources and sometimes using outside vendors. This process puts a natural cap on IT investments (since projects that drain the P&L need substantial payback down the road). Unfortunately, there are still challenges with this process such as: l Funding enterprise-wide, multiyear projects. l Preventing silos of automation where shared solutions would be more economical overall. l Funding core infrastructure and architecture projects. Of course, there are several solutions to these challenges. Some CIOs go a step further and charge all IT costs back to other business departments or divisions. “Unfortunately, many IT organizations are incapable of providing the level of information required to do this,” suggests Craig Symons, an expert on IT financial transparency. For example, CIOs must translate the RTB budget and allocate by service, business process, LOB, capability, etc. This implies demonstrating best practices in asset management, applications portfolio management, service portfolio management, and financial management. “The result is transparency and information that business leaders and governance committees can use to make rational business decisions about their IT investments, both RTB and GTB.”

u Nigel Fenwick is VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

www.informationweek.in

Practical Analysis

Secrets to IT leadership success

Art Wittmann

Embrace new technologies, keep things simple, and don’t get bogged down in the daily drudge of existing systems

Also see the article by Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India on “Building a leadership culture’ in this issue.

hat makes for good IT leadership? It’s a bit like asking what’s the meaning of life. The simple answers never satisfy, and the complex ones are, well, often too complex and personal to apply generally. But there are elements of collaboration, open thinking, technical understanding, and lots of personal energy and drive that seem to be a part of a successful CIO’s makeup. It’s more than just good ideas; it’s the ability to sell them to C-level colleagues, along with having their trust that you’ll deliver. This point was re-emphasized to me as I listened to three CIOs talk at last week’s InformationWeek 500 conference about how they’d applied their craft to improve products and drive new revenue for their companies. One of them, the IT chief for a large cruise ship company, discussed extensive IT innovations that made the experience on his company’s largest ship, which holds some 6,000 passengers, a good one. Another runs IT for clothing retailer whose primary customers are teenage girls. The third’s company is a B-to-B distributor of goods ranging from office to janitorial supplies. One presentation was about cool ways to make a monstrous ship more serviceable, the next was about marketing to teen girls where they live (on Facebook), and the third looked at providing all the online services needed by small businesses to compete against the likes of OfficeMax and Staples. I tried to find some commonality in these three IT leaders’ successes. It wasn’t as simple as listening to customers. I doubt a 50-year-old CIO could really listen to a 15-year-old girl and discern what he should do for the business. Nor would the SMBs being eaten alive by the OfficeMaxes of the world have known that they needed their distributor to provide a full-on SaaS-based Web

offering so their services would compete with the big guys. Nor was it as simple as listening to internal business partners. No one outside of IT would have thought to rent iPhones to cruise ship passengers and put Wi-Fi tethers on their kids so that parents could manage the on-ship experience and keep track of their families all with one user-friendly device. No one else at the office supply distributor would have thought to put themselves into the Web hosting business. That idea also had to come from IT. These are the sorts of innovations that change a company’s fortunes. None of them can be done by the tech group alone, and none of them could be done without it. What these IT leaders have done is embraced new technologies and augmented their own IT capabilities to create new revenue streams. In every case, they started their discussions by talking about just how difficult these projects were, and yet the products and services they created all emphasize simplicity and a keen understanding of what their constituent audience needs-even if that audience didn’t know that that particular innovation was what they wanted and needed. One point of all three executives made was the need to get past thinking about internal systems. If you’re spending all your time worried about the HR system, or server uptime, or network performance, or database contracts, you aren’t doing what you could be for the business. Of course, you have to have those important internal systems in place, but that’s when the fun starts. That’s when it’s time to change the business. 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.

june 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 69

Down to Business

Why some people ‘dread’ collaboration

Rob Preston

If workers use certain collaboration tools just because they’re compelled to do so, they’ll get lost in the white noise of misplaced communications

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

informationweek june 2011

f a business imperative ever sent out mixed IT signals, it’s collaboration. Consider three recent research findings: l Among the business priorities Gartner forecast for 2010 based on a survey of 1,586 CIOs, at least four of the top six were related to collaboration: improve business processes, increase the use of information, improve workforce effectiveness, and manage change initiatives. Through 2012, the advisory firm predicts, more than 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail as IT organizations “struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution.” l In its survey of 500-plus executives in 17 countries, Kelton Research found that more than 80 percent of respondents think that enterprisewide collaboration is the key to their companies’ success, and 75 percent of them said their companies plan to increase their use of communications and collaboration tools in the coming year. However, a fourth of respondents said they “dread” collaborating because of the amount of time and energy it wastes. l In a survey of 53 client companies, the Corporate Executive Board finds that user adoption of socalled Enterprise 2.0 technologies lags initial deployment by five to eight quarters. Technologies such as wikis, social networking, and predictive markets are falling short of adoption targets, while mobile technologies, room-based telepresence, unified communications, and synchronous project planning systems are meeting or exceeding expectations.

Part of the challenge in fostering collaboration, says Shvetank Shah, executive director of the CEB’s IT practice, is for IT organizations to get a better understanding of end users’ workflows and the outcomes they hope to achieve, and then “tease out” the appropriate technologies. Our own editorial organization is a case in point. Audio conference calls, e-mail, and instant messaging are our collaboration tools of choice. We also make selective use of room-based videoconferencing and Web-based document collaboration systems. Enter “the wiki.” Suddenly, we were told, most of the company’s collaboration needed to happen on the new company platform. Post it in the appropriate wiki section. Part of an e-mail discussion longer than three responses? If people use wikis — or any collaboration tool — just because they’re compelled to do so, they’ll get lost in the white noise of misplaced communications. Any personal technology that needs to be “driven” to end users through relentless training and pestering is going to peter out, especially if that technology adds three steps to what was previously a functional one-step process. There are two kinds of collaboration: the kind that stimulates new ideas, solves problems, enhances teamwork, and distributes expertise; and the kind people use to cover their butts and show off in front of their peers and bosses. The first kind tends to propagate naturally, feeding off the culture of an organization; the second kind happens when the methods and tools are force fit, rendering collaboration an exercise unto itself.

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