Iweek May 2013 issue by Viraj Mehta

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Why the cloud has a ‘Gold’ lining for India s cloud computing a big hyped up technology or is it living up to the reputation of being a transformational agent? As with any other technology, after the huge initial dust of hype and opinion — both positive and negative — has settled down, enterprises now are beginning to see clear value. Initially led by IT service firms like Infosys, Wipro and Hexaware, who used the private cloud efficiently to quickly provision servers for IT projects of varying duration and platforms, the adoption of cloud is now mainstream and can be seen across almost every sector. Besides large firms like Essar, Maruti Suzuki, Hero MotoCorp who are seeing real ROI, the cloud has also proved to be beneficial for healthcare providers like Narayana Hrudayalaya who are seeing huge savings related to their capital expenditure on IT. But the real surprise in the pack is the Government of Maharashtra. The Government of Maharashtra, led by a passionate IT secretary, has quietly transformed the way government departments use IT. With savings of ` 50 crore on a conservative basis, and the ability to kickstart big projects quickly, the Maharashtra Government’s use of cloud is an excellent example, which shows the real power of the cloud in the government. The potential for large scale transformation using the cloud is huge, and this is corroborated by statistics given by independent firms and associations. For example, a study by NASSCOM and Deloitte estimates that the Indian cloud computing market will reach USD 16 billion by 2020. Similarly, a Microsoft-IDC study says that cloud computing will generate over 2 million jobs in India by 2015. Thanks to the cloud, new business models are emerging. Bangalorebased startup, Magnasoft NorthStar, has created an integrated child and school bus tracking system using the cloud. Another firm, CropIn Technology, is using the cloud to raise farm productivity and acreage, and helping farmers ensure that harvested crops meet best global agricultural practices. Apna Technologies uses sensors installed on the side of railway tracks to transmit data related to defective wheels and axles in real-time to cloud-based servers, for ensuring railway safety. WinHire Technologies, which is seeking to disrupt the recruitment market by building the world’s first video social recruitment portal, owes its entire existence to the cloud. While these examples and statistics of growth are impressive, they indicate just a glimpse of the immense potential and transformation that is possible from the adoption of cloud computing technologies. For a country like India, the importance of a technology like cloud computing is more as a majority of small and medium enterprises (more than 50 million) who cannot afford technology in the current form can now afford to adopt the latest technologies and compete effectively in the marketplace — similar to how most Indians skipped the landline to adopt the cellphone a decade back. Whichever way you look at it — the cloud is truly shining for India Inc.

For a country like India, the importance of a technology like cloud computing is more as a majority of small and medium enterprises who cannot afford technology in the current form can now afford to adopt the latest technologies and compete effectively in the marketplace

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

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18 Cover Story How India Inc is unlocking the transformational power of cloud From government, manufacturing, IT-ITeS to retail, utilities and healthcare, companies across major sectors are taking advantage of the cloudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential to transform internal operations, customer relationships and industry value chains. Considering the benefits of the cloud like cost flexibility, business scalability, and ecosystem connectivity, leading companies across verticals are rapidly adopting cloud-based strategies. InformationWeek team spoke to major companies across sectors that are deriving excellent ROI and business benefits by embracing the cloud

Government 18 Manufacturing 20 IT-ITes 23 Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

BFSI 27 Retail 29 Healthcare 35 Utilities 37

case study

Telecom 39

Vendors eye golden opportunity in cloud As CIOs look to accelerate their investments in cloud, vendors are building new services and products on the cloud platform to capture the massive market opportunity

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How Intel improved its business agility using the cloud With 80 percent of new business services delivered through its enterprise private cloud, and huge cost savings, Intel has transformed its business using the cloud

Publishing services firm saves USD 150,000 per year by moving to the cloud Publishing company, MPS, is a great example that showcases the power of the cloud for publishers

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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY

interview 44 ‘Cloud is influencing a tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world’

5 ways to avoid costly cloud surprises

Dr Werner Vogels CTO, Amazon

How can you avoid cost overruns with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Amazon and other cloud services? Cloud usage assessment vendors Cloudability and Cloudyn share tips

feature 59

64 CIO Life

Companies battle talent crunch in the cloud Companies focused on cloud computing agree there is a serious shortage of cloud computing skills, which needs to be overcome with professional training and re-skilling

event

62 feature

‘My inspirations from life’ Girish Rao CIO, Marico

EDITORIAL �� 4

4G World India: Industry defines 4G roadmap Top telecom executives participate in the inaugural edition of UBM’s 4G World India to discuss the best strategy to develop mobile broadband ecosystem in the country

INDEX �� 8

news analysis �� 11, 14, 15

News

Microsoft discovers trojan that erases evidence of its existence

thought Leader ��52, 53, 54

IT spend by PSUs in India valued at USD 8.5 bn in FY 2012

opinion �� 56, 57, 58

Cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016: Gartner

global cio �� 69

Facebook users can influence Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra and Gujarat

down to business �� 70

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News It Spend

Security

Microsoft discovers trojan that erases evidence of its existence Researchers at Microsoft have spotted a Trojan downloader that does something very savvy yet rare: It deletes its own components so researchers and forensics investigators can’t analyze or identify it. The so-called Win32/Nemim.gen!A Trojan is also unusual in that unlike most Trojan downloaders that are put in place to deliver the real payload, this Trojan is also the payload, according to Jonathan San Jose, a member of Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center. But the researchers lucked out and found some pieces of the malware. “Most URLs that this trojan attempts to connect to for downloading are currently unavailable, but we got lucky and were able to find some of its components to investigate further,” San Jose wrote in a blog post. Nemim.gen’s ability to delete its components can wreak havoc for forensics investigators and malware hunters. “This prevents the files from being isolated and analysed. Thus, during analysis of the downloader, we may not easily find any downloaded component files on the system; even when using file recovery tools, we may see somewhat suspicious deleted file names but we may be unable to recover the correct content of the file,” San Jose said. Malware increasingly is becoming more sophisticated, and the more advanced attackers are employing techniques to fly under the radar. Jaime Blasco, Labs Manager at Alien Vault Labs, says he’s seeing more malware with built-in anti-forensics

features as well as the ability to deter investigators. “In the case of Nemin, it is a clever idea since the analysts won’t be able to determine the origin of the infection, and the infrastructure used to infect the systems will remain undiscovered for a longer period,” he says. “In addition, most of the security companies rely on automatic environments that execute and emulate malicious programs. We have seen how more and more malware families are beginning to add capabilities to detect these environments and deter emulation. We have also seen some malware samples that only get activated if they detect human clicking activity on the system.” Microsoft found two components of the Trojan that it downloads and runs, including a file infector and a passwordstealer. The file infector, which Microsoft identified as Virus:Win32/Nemim. gen!A, tries to infect executable files in removable drives. The password-stealer, PWS:Win32/Nemim.A, targets user credentials in e-mail accounts, Windows Messenger/Live Messenger, Gmail Notifier, Google Desktop, and Google Talk. The Trojan sometimes appears as part of a display graphics driver in order to camouflage itself, typically as a file called igfxext.exe, according to Microsoft. “If you’re infected with TrojanDownloader:Win32/Nemim. gen!A, we recommend you change all account passwords after you’ve cleaned your system, as it’s likely you’ve also encountered PWS:Win32/Nemim.A, the password-stealer,” San Jose said. — Kelly Jackson Higgins, DarkReading

IT spend by PSUs in India valued at USD 8.5 bn in FY 2012 According to the findings of a report by Zinnov, Public Sector Units (PSUs) in the Indian economy account for USD 383 billion of turnover in FY 12 with a revenue growth of 11 percent since 2009. The sector gives employment to 1.4 million with 40 percent of PSU companies operating in the manufacturing sector. The report highlights that the investment in technology is the key trend, which is shaping up the growth of the sector. IT spend accounts for nearly 2 percent of total PSU revenues — higher than most other verticals. Energy and BFSI are the major PSU verticals for IT investments. Praveen Bhadada, Director – Market Expansion, Zinnov said, “PSUs have started looking at IT to address the global competition. Examples like SBI which has done one of the largest Core Banking Solution implementation globally or BPCL which has made early investments in Big Data make the segment very lucrative for the technology companies” The report concluded that Indian PSUs are expected to witness a turnover of over USD 1 trillion by 2020 and a large part of the growth will be attributed to investments in modern forms of IT including cloud, Big Data and mobility. —InformationWeek News Network

may 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 9

News Cloud Computing

Cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016: Gartner By 2015, 10 percent of overall IT security enterprise product capabilities will be delivered in the cloud, according to Gartner. The services are also driving changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure e-mail and secure web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM). Gartner expects the cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016. “Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloudbased security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly,” said Eric Ahlm, Research Director, Gartner. The highest-consumed cloud-based security service is e-mail security service, with 74 percent of respondents rating

this as the top service. Furthermore, 27 percent of the respondents indicated they were considering deploying tokenization as a cloud service. Regulatory compliance measures to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), for example, are driving much interest in the service. Another area that is likely to experience high growth is security information and event management (SIEM) as a service. “The overall customer demand for numerous cloud security services presents an opportunity for partnering with cloud services brokers,” said Ahlm. “The customer demand for a brokerage becomes apparent as organizations move more assets to the cloud and require multiple security services to span multiple clouds and/or mixtures of clouds and on-premises.” — InformationWeek News Network

Social Media

Facebook users can influence Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra and Gujarat According to the study ‘Social Media & Lok Sabha Elections,’ by IRIS Knowledge Foundation, supported by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), there are 160 High Impact Constituencies out of the total of 543 constituencies, which will likely be influenced by social media during the next general elections. The report also finds that there are a total of 67 constituencies, which have been identified as Medium Impact constituencies, while the rest of the constituencies have been identified as Low Impact Constituencies or No impact

informationweek may 2013

constituencies. The corresponding numbers are 60 out of 543 in the Low Impact category and the remaining 256 out of 543 are in the No Impact Category. Maharashtra has the most High Impact Constituencies (21), followed by Gujarat (17). High Impact Constituencies are those where the numbers of Facebook users are more than the margin of victory of the winner in the last Lok Sabha election, or where Facebook users account for over 10 percent of the voting population. According to the report, 67 out of the 543 constituencies have

been identified as Medium Impact constituencies. The Medium Impact constituencies are those where it has been assumed that a Facebook user can influence one other voter who may not be on Facebook. Constituencies where the total number of Facebook users is in excess of 5 percent of the voting population. The rest of the constituencies have been identified as Low Impact Constituencies or No impact constituencies. — InformationWeek News Network

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News Analysis

Emkor set to tap the 10 million Indian SMB market with its BFaaS offering Indian startup, Emkor Solutions, targeting the emerging and mid-market Indian enterprise segment, has introduced a Business Function as a Service (BFaaS) offering, which is an end-to-end offering of many core business functions, powered by partnerships with established technology vendors like Microsoft, Dell, Citrix, QlikView and more By Amrita Premrajan A recent study by Zinnov reports that there is an addressable opportunity of 10 million small and medium businesses in India as on date and that this opportunity is set to increase to 11 million by 2015. The report makes it clear that India is fast emerging as a hotbed of small and medium enterprises. But one of the biggest challenges that these companies face is being able to scale up fast, stand shoulder to shoulder with the large enterprises and compete with them by bringing out innovative offerings that differentiates them from the established large players in the same industry vertical. The need of SMBs to have a technology infrastructure at par with the large enterprises coupled with the twin challenges of lack of enough funds and inability to retain technology talent is today motivating the SMBs to look at cloud offerings that could bring them all the enterprise-class business apps on a convenient pay per use model. Tapping this opportunity in the Indian market, we saw many cloud computing startups emerging in India in the past few years. An interesting

addition to the Indian cloud computing startups has been Emkor Solutions, which is targeting the emerging and mid-market ranging from ` 50 crore to ` 2,000 crore. The company is offering to take care of the entire business function stack of its client company starting from its HRMS, CRM to its ERP. Though, this may sound quite ambitious for a technology startup, Emkor has got into a lot of alliances and partnered with established technology vendors. “We have partnered with technology companies like Microsoft, Dell, Citrix, Seclore, Websense and more. Most of the applications we provide through the cloud are Microsoft-centric. For ERP, we use Microsoft Dynamics Navision and AX; for CRM we use Microsoft CRM; and HR is a part of AX or Navision,” says Vikram Dham, CEO & Co Founder, Emkor Solutions. “For offering BI to our customers, we have partnered with QlikView and we also do BI through Microsoft SQL server, which has now evolved into a very good BI tool. We provide Data Loss Prevention as a part of our service, which only the largest of the largest enterprises are currently using and there are many SMEs who have not even heard of this,” adds Dham. Since the company offers

end-to-end IT solutions as a service, Dham calls the bundled offerings as Business Functions as a Service (BFaaS). Elaborating on how the apps are published at the client’s end, he says, “There are two ways in which we publish the applications. One is through Citrix XenDesktop, where we virtualize the entire range of desktops at the clients’ end and Citrix XenApp, where we virtualize the application, though the preferred way is to virtualize the entire desktop.” In the model that Emkor works on, the customers are basically outsourcing their IT infrastructure to the vendor, thus offloading all the management and scaling up needs of the company. Dham believes that its clients for BFaaS would eventually not need an IT manager and that there would be a single neck to choke, which would be that of the vendor, for any issue faced in future with respect to IT. This, according to him will tackle the challenge SMBs are currently facing in terms of attracting and retaining technology talent.

The cloud security aspect No matter how much the benefits of the cloud are being talked about,

april 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 11

News Analysis ‘security’ is still top of mind of even budding enterprises. “Eighteen months ago when we started our journey, the biggest challenge was convincing the SMB mid-market mindset of India to take the data out of their own four walls,” Dham says. He goes on to elaborate that the real security issue is not external, but internal in nature. “When you go and meet an SMB, say any distributor, a retail company or say a manufacturer in India, we realize that files and financial data are lying in silos — in factories, distribution houses, corporate offices and there is absolutely no governance. There are no levels of security and anyone can grab any data, copy anything on a USB stick or a CD drive or transfer via mail. This brings out the fact that most of the security threat is internal and not external, as is generally perceived.” Dham makes no bones about the fact that, in the process of delivering BFaaS to its clients, the company’s data does reside on Emkor’s servers but he highlights about the safeguards the company has put into place in order to ensure security of the client data. “Yes, it is true that we do have access to the client’s data but we ensure that only select few people have access to this data. As a part of our arrangement we offer last 10 years worth of security verification and check to the client, so that they can very easily tell, if there is any conflict of interest.” Dham further informs about how the company ensures safety of client data in case a current employee leaves the organization. “The biggest aspect of our solution is that any employee who leaves to join the competition won’t be able to carry any corporate data along with them. This is because we use Citrix VDI to publish the applications and

informationweek april 2013

“I believe that we are very close to the inflexion point — 18 months maybe — after which we will see more companies asking for cloud than on-premise”

Vikram Dham

CEO & Co Founder, Emkor Solutions

nothing is saved on the client device but on the cloud,” he says.

Relevance of cloud for SMBs

On why cloud computing is highly beneficial for companies that are starting up, Dham gives us interesting numbers and says, “We have done TCO calculation according to which over a three-year period, a company with 100 information workers will spend close to ` 4 crore in four years in their IT spends, which includes an ERP, HRMS, CRM, a good messaging system and 2-3 support people. But if the customer adopts BFaaS, we would be able to offer all these applications on an OPEX model where there would be spending ` 2.2 crore over 4 years.” Addressing the concern of vendor lock-in which the companies generally have, Dham adds, “We just charge an advance cost, which includes implementation. Rest comes in as a monthly fee, so there are no handcuffs and no lock-ins.” Cloud computing has been long touted as a business enabler for SMBs who wish to scale up real fast. Giving us a perspective on how this market is set to fare in the near future, Dham says, “From where I see it, 80 percent of all emerging and mid-market companies will be on the cloud within next five years, enabling them to become

flexible, agile and achieve faster time to market. I believe that we are very close to the inflexion point — 18 months maybe — after which we will see more companies asking for cloud than onpremise.” Currently, the company boasts of seven clients in total. Some of them being Advance Surfactant India, a ` 1,500 crore company in the business of industrial chemicals and surfactants; Bravia International, a Dubai-based distribution company; and Greentech, which is into plant automation. Dham makes it clear that SMBs are fast realizing the increasing relevance of cloud computing solutions for their businesses. With a lot of cloud computing solution providers in the market — ranging from the one providing plain-vanilla business apps like ERP and CRM on the cloud, to the ones providing customized solutions for specific use cases, SMBs today have many good choices at hand. This in turn will open up a new game in the near future where we would see cloud-enabled SMBs standing next to large enterprises and competing with them to tap the same market.

u Amrita Premrajan

amrita.premrajan@ubm.com

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News Analysis

How the cloud is enabling an umbrella of safety for school children Startup Magnasoft NorthStar has created an integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution using the cloud By Srikanth RP How safe is your child when he or she travels to school? Well, if you take a look at some statistics shared by Magnasoft Northstar, an Indian startup based out of Bangalore, you would be appalled. Sample some of these eye popping statistics: 9 out of every 100,000 children are killed in transportationrelated incidents in India. 41 percent of child deaths are caused because of transportation accidents. 1 child is injured or killed in India every 3 minutes; 1 child is injured or killed in road accidents in India every 5 minutes. More and more children are being molested in school buses and in schools across India every day. To address this serious issue, Magnasoft NorthStar, has created a cloudbased solution based on AWS. NorthStar has created an integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution that ensures a child’s safety and security when he or she travels to and from school. The solution communicates with AWS servers every 10 seconds and automatically sends alerts and notifications to authorized users. NorthStar’s solution tracks school buses, vans and other vehicles used to transport students and ensures their safety and security. It notifies parents of their child’s impending arrival at pick-up and drop-off stops, allows a parent to remotely view their children while they’re travelling on the bus, automatically detects attendance and reduces truancy, enables schools to monitor and reduce unsafe driving and helps schools reduce transportation costs by optimizing bus routes. “We charge a monthly subscription fee to schools (per bus) or to parents (per child). The subscription fee de-

informationweek may 2013

“We charge a monthly subscription fee to schools per bus or to parents per child. The fee depends on the level and quality of service they need”

Kunal Ashar, Head of Product Development Division, Magnasoft NorthStar

pends on the safety services that they’re using, the level of safety they need, and the quality of service they need,” explains Kunal Ashar, Head of Product Development Division, Magnasoft NorthStar.

The cloud as a foundation

As India’s first provider of a comprehensive, integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution that ensures children’s safety and security when they travel to and from school, it was important for Magnasoft NorthStar to be able to quickly and efficiently launch its solution into the market. “The cloud was a natural fit for us. During our beta phase, we hosted and managed dedicated hardware. However, our on-premise infrastructure proved to be a challenge with limited reliability, scalability and agility and increasing capital requirements to grow and maintain the infrastructure. Moving to the cloud enabled us to overcome these challenges in a cost effective and efficient manner,” states Ashar. Ashar believes that the key differentiator and an important aspect of its solution is the ability to consistently provide real-time updates to parents, with minimal or zero downtime. “Since moving to the cloud, we have been able to increase our ability to provide these

updates from 85 to 100 percent. It’s been a selling point for us — we claim and provide 99.9 percent uptime which none of our competitors are able to provide,” emphasizes Ashar. NorthStar’s in-house Command Center receives a constant stream of data and alerts from the cloud, and the operators of the command center are able to analyze the data and alerts, and provide immediate feedback to the schools, parents and bus drivers. The firm treats school bus and children’s safety as a mission-critical service, which has prompted it to ensure that its SMS messages/alerts to parents, schools and police (in cases of accidents) are guaranteed to be delivered in 6 seconds. NorthStar is saving 40 percent of its costs versus renting or purchasing dedicated hardware and hosting it on its own. Now with the AWS services, its roll-outs are 60 percent faster (down from 3 days to 1 day per release). NorthStar is already working with 67 schools in India and is safeguarding over 35,000 students. Of the many success stories around cloud in India, NorthStar is one more example of the power of the cloud in transforming society and creating a safer world. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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News Analysis

Can a startup transform Indian agriculture by using the cloud? Using a cloud-based platform, startup CropIn Technology is aiming to empower the Indian farmer by making every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet best global agricultural practices By Srikanth RP In April 2013, a recent news update on farmers in different districts of Bengal throwing their produce of tomatoes on the road shocked viewers. These farmers were infuriated with the fact that wholesalers were offering them only 25 paise per kilo. If they sold at these prices, they would have incurred heavy losses as there was a massive mismatch between the production cost and the cost of selling. This is not a rare incident, as similar cases have been reported across the country for many years. Farmers have been even driven to take the adverse step of killing themselves due to poor crop yield. While Indian agriculture has been the single largest source of employment in India, there is a big mismatch, as the yield does not match global standards. Startup CropIn Technology wants to change this scenario through its vision of digitizing agriculture by using a combination of cloud-based technologies and mobile phones to improve farm yield. Started by founder and CEO, Krishna Kumar, an engineer by profession, Kumar worked for more than four years with General Electric, and was a fast track executive with a great future in GE, having been one of the few selected ones for its Global Leadership program. With a passion to bring state-ofthe-art technology in agriculture, the founder left his lucrative job at GE and soon Kunal Prasad a childhood friend and classmate of Kumar joined him after completing his MBA as COO. Kumar brought in his experience from Tata Motors in dealer management. Later Chittaranjan Jena

“CropIn technology impacts the livelihood of farmers at the bottom of the pyramid by generating more productivity out of the same farm”

Krishna Kumar

CEO, CropIn Technology

who had experience in supply chain management, joined as CTO. Explaining the vision, Krishna Kumar, CEO, CropIn Technology, says, “CropIn Technology was established in August 2010 to develop and offer on a low cost pay-as-you-use product on an IT platform on cloud integrated with a Windows or Android-based smart mobile app. The vision was to bring affordable state-of-the-art technology in agriculture and the mission was to make every farm visible online, make every farmer adopt the best global agricultural practices and to make every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet global quality standards and thus become export worthy. This technology impacts the livelihood of farmers at the bottom of the pyramid by generating more productivity out of the same farm.” By using a mobile app developed by CropIn Technology, a surveyor can input details related to a farm and monitor the efficiency of a farm. Crops are regularly monitored on a thorough basis with respect to fertilizer sprayed and detection of pests, if any. Regular monitoring of fertilizers is essential to ensure that the crops exported are compliant with the required

safety levels of different chemicals as prescribed by different countries for consumption. The mobile app captures information related to the farm surveyed and relays it back to a cloudbased server. The cloud plays a pivotal role in the success of the solution. “The cloud enables our customers to deploy this solution quickly, as it just takes five days to go live with this solution. From a speed and quality perspective, this is akin to a customer getting a Mercedes vis-à-vis a bullock cart,” states Kumar. CropIn also uses BI to provide indepth analytics to help farmers raise their productivity levels, and discover new opportunities. “By using our mobile app, 600 acres can be covered in one man day vis-à-vis the 90 man day period that is typically required. We have also been able to raise the farm productivity and acreage by a minimum of 10-15 percent. For large farms, the ROI can be quite significant,” explains Kumar.

Sowing in seeds for future growth

While the initial six months were challenging for CropIn Technology, the first ray of hope came when Safal,

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News Analysis the NDDB arm, asked the team to do a pilot. The success of the pilot attracted multinationals like Field Fresh and PepsiCo who asked for proof of concept and once they found that CropIn Technology platform was better than any other technology they had ever seen before, they placed orders on CropIn. The challenges faced during these two years were to convince the four multinationals why they should trust a startup company and how this technology can transform agriculture for farmers, as well as for corporates. “We physically worked with these companies and their contract farmers in their farms, and understood the finer nuances of the agricultural business, their supply chains, the market dynamics and the customer needs at each process. We then modified and co-created and evolved the platform in all its sophistication that it is now today,” states Krishna. The CropIn platform is also playing a key role in connecting farmers to financial institutions. Banks like HDFC are using this technology to provide unsecured loans to farmers. CropIn is helping HDFC Bank reach the farmer faster, collect the required information remotely and in real-time. This fuels up the loan process and cuts short the timelines, making loans available in a short span of time. Going forward, CropIn is bringing its product solution on Windows 8 for mobile, which the company believes would enable it to address 85 percent of global mobile customers in the agri-business who want to download their mobile app on their Android or Windows mobiles to manage their farms on cloud. The opportunities are huge for CropIn across the agriculture landscape as the product can be customized to be used by the banks (to track the farmers who take loans

Benefits at a glance With CropIn app, 600 acres can be covered in one man day vis-àvis the 90 man day period that is typically required

It helps farmers raise the farm productivity and acreage by a minimum of 10-15 percent l The app fuels up the loan process for farmers by helping banks reach the farmers faster and collect required information remotely l

from them), seed producers, contract farming companies, food processors, exporters, fertilizer companies, pesticide manufacturers, agriculture and horticulture research and development agencies to experiment or benchmark practices for best yield. Today, CropIn has more than 15,000 acres of farms belonging to 8,000 and odd farmers, (some having less than half acre), using their product on IT platform and top multinationals including PepsiCo, Field-Fresh (A Bharti Entreprise), Omnikan (A division of Kankor Group), Technico (ITC Group), Tata Rallis, Euro Fruits, INI Farms and Garden Valley as its paying customers — a remarkable feat for a startup that began its commercial operations just in June 2011. While India is already a known leader in producing commodities like milk, coconuts and black pepper, the opportunity to transform Indian agriculture is significant with the help of information technology. If CropIn succeeds in transforming even a minor part of our agriculture ecosystem, the catalyst effect on India could be truly huge and transformative in nature.

Going forward, CropIn is bringing its product solution on Windows 8 for mobile, which would enable it to address 85 percent of global mobile customers in the agri-business who want to download their mobile app on their Android or Windows mobiles to manage their farms on cloud

u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Cover Story

How India Inc is unlocking the transformational power of cloud From government, manufacturing, IT-ITeS to retail, utilities and healthcare, companies across major sectors are taking advantage of the cloudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential to transform internal operations, customer relationships and industry value chains. Considering the benefits of the cloud like cost flexibility, business scalability, and ecosystem connectivity, leading companies across verticals are rapidly adopting cloud-based strategies. InformationWeek team spoke to major companies across sectors that are deriving excellent ROI and business benefits by embracing the cloud By InformationWeek team

Government 18 Manufacturing 20 IT-ITes 23 BFSI 27 Retail 29 Healthcare 35 Utilities 37 Telecom 39 may 2013 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 17

Cover Story

Government using cloud to transform the way IT services are provisioned Ever since the government realized the transformational power of technology in delivering public services, government bodies have been increasingly exploring emerging technologies to streamline processes and increase efficiencies. Cloud is one such technology, which the government is focusing on as it scores over traditional IT because it is more efficient and flexible, and enables better collaboration among users, departments and organizations. Srikanth RP takes a detailed look at how Maharashtra Government is innovatively using cloud and is leading the way in showing other government departments how the cloud can be a real transformational force within the government Maharashtra Government: Shows power of cloud with savings of ` 50 crore

irtual machines customized to your requirement for a measly ` 4,000 per month; ability to kickstart projects quickly and a massive ROI of ` 50 crore — this is just a glimpse of the potential of a technology like cloud computing for the government. Led by an aggressive IT secretary, Rajesh Aggarwal, the Maharashtra Government is showing other departments what one can achieve if technology is leveraged to its optimum. Called MahaGov Cloud — a private cloud setup by DIT, Government of Maharashtra, the initiative seeks to provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services to various departments in the Government of Maharashtra. Led by Aggarwal, the initiative has quietly transformed the way IT services are provisioned by the government. Today, the MahaGov Cloud has been implemented in the State Data Centre and is extensively used by departments for website and application hosting. The list of departments that use the cloud include departments like Public Health Dept, Mhada, DIT, Charity Commissioner, Textile, Law and Judiciary, Water Supply and Sanitation, IGRO, Food and Drugs, School Education, Social Justice, Relief

informationweek may 2013

Rajesh AgGarwal IT Secretary, State Government of Maharashtra

& Rehabilitation, Forest Department, Rojgarwahini, Tribal, Bombay High Court, UID, Solapur University, Sales Tax department and CIDCO. “Our objective was to reduce the cost of providing IT services, while increasing the capacity of our IT team to kickstart projects with maximum flexibility and scalability. The cloud has already delivered approximate savings of ` 50 crore on a conservative basis, and has given us the ability to accelerate projects of national importance,” says Maharashtra IT secretary, Rajesh Aggarwal. The

Maharashtra SDC happens to be the first State Data Center (SDC) in the country to have a fully operational government cloud. It is also the only SDC in India to be a member of APNIC, making it vendor independent for Internet bandwidth. During implementation of MHSDC, the state had conceptualized on implementing virtualization for efficient utilization of the infrastructure in SDC. Accordingly, a PoC on virtualization using VMware and Microsoft Hyper V was started in November 2011 leading to implementation of fully operational cloud by May 2012. To avoid dependence on a particular technology, MahaGov Cloud works on Microsoft as well as VMware. The VMware cloud has been chosen for critical applications, for now. Around 350 VMs were deployed in just three months as part of the MahaGov Cloud on VMware. Due to the template and clone features, the time to provision a server along with OS and database has been reduced tremendously. Using feature of thin provision of storage and memory, resources are efficiently utilized and allocated as per the requirement and performance. The department is also taking advantage of features

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like live migration, which has helped the SDC team to manage planned maintenance without requiring any downtime of the application. The entire management and monitoring of the cloud can be done using a dashboard with appropriate alerts and reports. To encourage adoption, the team is also conducting a series of awareness sessions on cloud for sharing knowledge.

Chargeback model – a first in the government

What’s also noteworthy and unique about the MahGov Cloud initiative is the fact that the department has in a first created a comprehensive rate chart for availing cloud services. Departments can pick and choose IT components as per their requirement. Departments can also access a self-provisioning portal for the cloud. To encourage adoption, initially, cloud services are being offered for free to all departments. “We want to make the cloud selfsustainable. Based on initial capital and maintenance costs, we have devised a chargeback and metering mechanism. Some departments are being served dummy bills so that they know how much is actually provisioned and consumed by them in the SDC. We are encouraging departments to host their applications on our SDC. The rate card has acted as a counterforce for containing costs and has also contributed in stabilizing and putting an upper cap for prices of standard services,” says Aggarwal.

Everything as a service

Having established the cloud as a basic platform, Maharashtra’s IT secretary is now experimenting with all the possible options. Besides providing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on a monthly basis, the department is offering Business Intelligence tools as a Service (BIaaS),

HIGHLIGHTS

Around 350 VMs were deployed in just 3 months as part of the MahaGov Cloud on Vmware

By hosting its application on cloud, one of the government departments could reduce the cost from ` 20 crore to ` 5 crore and accelerate the project

Due to template and clone features, the time to provision a server along with OS and database has been reduced tremendously

delivery through Citizen Service Centers. Some interesting observations and information from the analysis of this data is currently being investigated to understand patterns of consumption of services across the state. The GIS as a service has been rolled out to encourage and enable all departments to subscribe and avail the benefits of GIS. The future roadmap for GIS includes mapping of electricity meters in each household of Maharashtra and UID integration of the household data. Once the basic household data is mapped, and UID based integration is achieved, GIS would become the common platform for delivery of services and benefits across several schemes and programs.

GIS thematic map as a Service (GISaaS), API as a service, Survey as a Service and Authentication as a service. “We want to provide every The opportunity to possible combination for government accelerate departments. Many senior government Apart from the huge cost savings, executives now carry iPads, and we the real benefit is the opportunity want to encourage them to start to accelerate. Aggarwal gives the experimenting with data by providing example of a department, which had them with an interface to analyze using a project cost of ` 20 crore, and would what-if-scenarios. We have a vision that have required a timeframe of 6-7 all departments, commissionerates months to setup the infrastructure. and organizations within Maharashtra “We showed the department that by should be able to use business hosting the applications on our cloud, intelligence reports and dashboards the department could significantly to perform analysis to get meaningful reduce the cost and accelerate the and actionable information,” states project. We reduced the cost from Aggarwal. ` 20 crore to ` 5 crore and enabled the For example, dashboards have been department to go live quickly. In many created for tracking UID enrolment cases, if a project is started quickly, and comparison of enrolment data the effect can be transformational,” with census data. The dashboards opines Aggarwal. enable key insights into demographic The Maharashtra government’s profile of enrolled residents and also approach and aggressive embracement into the process and performance of cloud technologies is a superb case of enrolment. The state government to showcase how a technology like has also implemented a tablet-based can be fully leveraged to bring Keen to connect with to cloud the world’s leading cloud application for conducting audit of about large scale transformation. If solution providers? Be at Cloud Connect India. UID enrolment centers and has made other state governments start going it available to other states over cloud. on the cloud path, the journey towards Dashboards have alsoRegister been createdat http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p transformation of India will be faster for the transaction details of service and much more efficient.

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Cover Story

Manufacturers use cloud to drive efficiencies

Many organizations in the manufacturing sector have channelized the power of cloud to enhance collaboration between colleagues, partners and suppliers, regardless of geographical locations. Jasmine Kohli spoke to some pioneering companies in this sector who are demonstrating the real power of cloud by showing a marked improvement in business productivity and quantitative ROI Essar Group: Demonstrating the real power of cloud with superb ROI

aving built a robust infrastructure foundation using virtualization, the Essar Group journey toward the cloud is expanding quickly; it recognized that a key ingredient to attain success in a competitive industry was providing superior customer service, enabled through a robust technology backbone. It, therefore, constantly started looking for ways to use technology to enhance value for its enterprise customers. As it looked around at different options, the group recognized that cloud computing as a technology could be used for reducing capital expenditure, improving application availability, and bringing about business process improvements. With this objective in mind, the group started consolidating and virtualizing its IT infrastructure. The virtualization drive, which started in the year 2008, focused on desktop virtualization and server virtualization. The group used technologies from firms such as Microsoft, VMware, HP and Citrix in this initiative, which formed the base foundation for the private cloud. Simultaneously, the group started evaluating public cloud offerings from service providers. Before choosing the applications to be considered for moving to the public cloud, the group looked at factors such as application portability, backend support, and application criticality in terms of

informationweek may 2013

Jayantha Prabhu CTO, Essar Group

business and service operations. “A cautious approach was adopted to host applications, as well as to migrate servers from physical to virtual, considering aspects such as performance experience on public and private cloud, information security requirements, and a detailed cost analysis with comparative data sheets for future plans. After evaluating potential cloud service models and providers, we chose Microsoft Azure’s public cloud infrastructure,” says Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group. Essar has also deployed its Performance Management and Talent Management systems on the cloud by availing the services of SuccessFactors which is a SaaS solution provider, recently acquired by SAP. Presently

75,000 employees from over 200 locations across the globe are using this solution for the appraisal process. The solution has already been used for the mid-year review and final appraisal for the year 2011–2012. The solution is integrated with Microsoft Active directory and other systems like SAP HR and Integrated Learning systems. A training solution by DRONA has been deployed over the public cloud, which allows Essar employees to access training modules while on the move and at a time of their convenience. As a result of its cloud computing initiatives, the group has been able to reduce its cost of maintaining IT infrastructure, in addition to freeing up IT resources to deliver innovative IT services. The group has improved its IT infrastructure performance due to centralized administration, a more agile IT infrastructure, and reduced data center footprint. “This is the first public cloud adoption in the manufacturing industry segment in India, and has given Essar tremendous cost savings and high ROI. For example, net savings per month by deploying applications on Azure is to the tune of 51 percent,” adds Prabhu. In the coming months, Essar has promising plans to leverage its cloud computing capabilities. “Dynamic resourcing with respect to compute, memory and storage will be the

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key drivers behind creating private clouds within the Essar group. We have several business units under Essar Group, which at times calls for dedicated infrastructure, and segregation of setups and solutions. In-house private clouds will result into better optimization of existing investments, shorten turnaround time for requirement fulfillments, enhance our scalability options — all this under an effective charge back model,” emphasizes Prabhu. The group also plans to initiate SAP Development/ QA environments, internal test beds and mailing services using the cloud. The cloud also gives the business enhanced agility particularly in dynamic scenarios such as mergers

HIGHLIGHTS

51 percent cost savings per month — possible due to migrating applications on the public cloud

Estimated savings of ` 10 crore per annum due to virtual desktop solution

Turnaround time for provisioning IT infrastructure has gone down from a period of 45-60 days to just 2-3 working days

and acquisitions. While the cloud has delivered multiple benefits related to costs and efficiencies, at a broad level, the group is now more nimble-footed

and faces minimal downtime and service disruptions. The cloud has already translated into 51 percent cost savings per month — possible due to migrating applications on the public cloud. By using the virtual desktop solution, the Essar Group estimates that it will save ` 10 crore per annum. The cloud transformation journey has helped in reducing the overall data center footprint. The group has already reduced 150 servers, which has translated into energy savings to the tune of an impressive 71 percent. More importantly, the turnaround time for provisioning IT infrastructure has gone down from a period of 45-60 days to just 2-3 working days now.

Hero MotoCorp: Cloud for Collaboration

ero MotoCorp, a leading two wheeler motorcycle manufacturer based in India has huge focus on operational efficiencies and customer relationships. Hero MotoCorp has a strong IT base and is a pioneer in adopting leading edge technologies. The technology landscape in Hero MotoCorp has been under a transformation phase since the last few years and it has been a continuous effort to leverage technology to innovate and bring about positive business outcomes. In all these initiatives, cloud is a major thrust area. “We extensively use public cloud service offerings for hosting and sharing of information with our partners — using offerings under ‘Infrastructure as a service’. We have also used niche security services / monitoring services — using offerings under ‘Security as a service’; Social Media Analytics where we use big data analytics as a service and monitor various KPIs — using offerings under ‘Analytics as a service’ and now we are exploring various other areas where we can use specialized software/ applications — using offerings under ‘Application or Software as a service’,” says Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp.

Vijay Sethi CIO, Hero MotoCorp

Hero MotoCorp has opted for a Microsoft Azure solution customized by PC Solutions, which has helped it collaborate across geographical boundaries with ease and flexibility. Various technical and design teams of Hero MotoCorp are based out of Europe, North America and India. Since these teams have to work in coherence with each other and often work together on different assignments, their work needs to be shared with the teams at other locations. While collaborating with each other, care had to be taken that there was no potential threat to the Intellectual Property being developed

while sharing was happening. “We had a decentralized team working from different geographical locations and needed to collaborate in a secure manner. We were earlier using a cloud solution, which posed a lot of security and tracking challenges in the documents being shared. To cater to these challenges, we developed a solution based on the Microsoft Azure platform, which provided a reliable, secure platform where storage, service support and security issues were being taken care of as per their business requirements. With Azure we have created a separate data collaboration and content sharing portal,” states Sethi. The subscription based Microsoft Windows Azure provides the firm a platform to develop a customized tool, which is meeting its requirements perfectly. At the same time, it protects business communications and sensitive information by meeting internal and regulatory compliance requirements and guarantees 99.99 percent uptime, while simultaneously reducing backup and storage risks. The built in disaster recovery and geo replication that is available with Microsoft Windows Azure ensures that there is no data loss on the cloud

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Cover Story from the data center even in the case of any physical issues at the data center. Hence, there is no need to take manual backups and maintain on-premise storage of the data that is already being replicated on the Azure Cloud. Other major initiative in the area of cloud computing, which the firm has undertaken is the Dealer Management System (DMS). Hero Motocorp was confronted with the DMS communication challenge or challenge of micro managing of multiple point of contact with dealers vis-à-vis tracking customer information, sales and service trends, defect analysis. To tackle this, a DMS that connects all dealers on a cloud model, was implemented. “The need to put dealers on a single platform was due to multiple processes being carried on between dealers and Hero MotoCorp,” says Sethi. For example, the Hero MotoCorp’s sales and marketing team interacted with all their dealers separately. Secondly, manual

HIGHLIGHTS

One of the largest community clouds in the country with over 700 dealers connected

Built-in disaster recovery and geo replication that is available with Microsoft Windows Azure ensures that there is no data loss on the cloud from the data center even in the case of any physical issues at the data center

inventory or sales updates implied greater chances of errors in inventory management at both Hero MotoCorp and the dealer. Also, the biggest pain point was prices being updated on a real-time basis and keeping up with products and spare part prices was a task. To address these issues, the firm decided to put all the company’s dealers on a single platform. DMS is a community cloud hosted by Hero MotoCorp where the application hosted by Hero is accessed

by all its dealers. “By adopting the cloud route, we have significantly reduced the time for deployment and overall costs. This is one of the largest community clouds in the country with all our dealers being part of it today,” says Sethi. The DMS aims at making uniform the processes at all its dealerships — be it in terms of sales, spare parts, service or others. “Today, our DMS connects all our channel partners through an integrated system with the primary objective of enhancing our customer’s buying and after-sales experience, resulting from the standardization of customer facing processes at our dealerships. The system is running at all our dealerships (more than 700) now,” says Sethi. Post implementation, Sethi says that the firm has replaced ‘Customer Satisfaction’ with ‘Customer Delight’ and the firm has achieved this by bringing in uniformity in customer contacts and ensuring a single version of truth in terms of information and ensuring availability of information real time — all keeping the customer as the focal point.

Maruti Suzuki: Empowering dealers using cloud

Rajesh Uppal CIO, Maruti Suzuki India

ne of the earliest adopters of cloud computing, Maruti Suzuki India started its cloud computing journey about seven years back, when it created a private cloud for empowering its dealers. The objective was to give its dealers access to applications hosted on the private

informationweek may 2013

cloud. Most of these dealers did not have the financial or technological capability to avail of cloud-based services. “Benefits from the private cloud platform are ease of manageability and helping our dealers run their business, with a nominal subscription fee. Today, we have 2,000 distributors and 15,000 concurrent users,” states Rajesh Uppal, CIO, Maruti Suzuki India. After tasting huge success in its private cloud deployment, Maruti has now adopted a public cloud offering from Microsoft in the form of Microsoft Azure. The public cloud offering assures Maruti Suzuki the time-tested benefits of scale and security. Accordingly, Maruti Suzuki India moved a lot of applications on Windows Azure platform including customer-facing applications. Leveraging the cloud, Maruti Suzuki India has been able to move 23

HIGHLIGHTS

2,000 distributors and 15,000 concurrent users accessing private cloud

23 applications deployed on Microsoft Azure public cloud in a short span of three weeks

applications in a very short span of time — in a span of just three weeks. Managing, maintaining and securing the in-house infrastructure for customer applications is a challenging task — and this has been one of the top reasons for moving customer facing applications to the cloud. “Using a solution like Windows Azure has resulted in significant savings for Maruti India. Security and manageability were two main drivers behind choosing Windows Azure,” states Uppal.

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Cloud yields significant benefits for IT companies The IT sector has always been at the forefront of adopting any technology and cloud is no different. Most companies in the sector began their cloud journey with the implementation of private cloud mainly for quickly provisioning servers for different projects. Today, the cloud has become a vital part of their strategy. Ayushman Baruah has more details Infosys: Using cloud for infrastructure optimization

Muralikrishna K, VP and Head, Computers & Communication Division, Infosys

nfosys started using the cloud in mid-2008 primarily for automation and things around it. The basic focus was built around how Infosys can move closer to IT users, Infosys clients and its partner ecosystem. “It is about harvesting different cloud forms for developing and co-creating a concept including the go-to-market and one that is primarily focused on building the whole lifecycle,” says Muralikrishna K, VP and Head, Computers & Communication Division, Infosys. In the last three years, Infosys invested close to USD 4 million on concept development and co-creation, which was very limited to hardware with some amount of software. Muralikrishna says that the investment would go up by another USD 4-5 million as the demand for cloud is really huge.

“The key intention of implementing the cloud was security and experience, not cost. In terms of real estate, at one third the cost of the current data center, it enables to energize around 3,000 to 4,000 virtual server class machines.” The company built an elaborate stack of three clouds: an internal cloud called MyCloud for development and collaboration; a Collab Cloud for the internal users and partners; and a production cloud called Datacenter Microcosm for clients. Infosys currently has 40 customers leveraging these products. “MyCloud is a very Intranet-focused cloud, which enables us to easily develop 50 to 100 virtual servers in 15 minutes, provisioned and configured for projects with full control to start and stop the servers. It is completely integrated to our project management system and helps in identifying who is working on a particular project so that only that particular individual is given access. Collab Cloud is about how Infosys works with research bodies, customers, and technology partners where they actually co-create a database to share IP. Infosys does not allow any external resource to come into the network and develop this. Through Collab Cloud, Infosys has its own security card called INA Card where the IP is created and Infosys ensures how best it can be used. Finally, Datacenter Microcosm is a production cloud purposed to serve applications and solutions developed by various

HIGHLIGHTS

The company’s MyCloud enables it to develop 50 to 100 virtual servers in 15 minutes, provisioned and configured for projects with full control to start and stop the servers

Infosys has managed to save around 82 percent of the environment that is energized through the cloud modules

business units (Infosys IP), leveraging cloud deployment models, powering Infosys non-linear growth engines,” says Muralikrishna. The cloud has resulted in an infrastructure optimization across the company. In terms of applications, Infosys has migrated couple of applications to Microsoft Azure platform, including corporate applications, video conferencing, web conferencing and audio conferencing. It uses private cloud to host its CAPEXintensive internal IT and hybrid cloud to host IT services for its partners. From a functional perspective, the development and test environment has been automated. In terms of experience and adoption, Infosys achieved 85 percent utilization. In terms of power, Infosys has managed to save around 82 percent of the environment that is energized through the cloud modules.

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Cover Story Mindtree: Cloud for increasing productivity and cost savings

t Mindtree, cloud awareness existed for about three years now but the company began to make serious inroads in cloud adoption from last year. The company began its cloud journey by setting up a private cloud from an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) point of view. “Being an IT services company, we have a lot of requirements for lab setups, which come as we take up more projects within our verticals, and we have to deploy that quickly. Today, within a four-hour time period, we turn around a virtual set-up for projects so they are able to productively utilize it and move forward quickly. We have about 400 odd virtual machines (VMs) right now, and it continues to grow,” says Sudhir Reddy, CIO, Mindtree. The cost savings with IaaS comes from two angles. First, data center footprint is minimal, and second, server sprawl does not happen. “Our 400 VMs are running on 25 odd servers — that was not thinkable at one point in time. If you need 400 machines, you know how much space you would need in the data center, and how much power and cooling you would need. Today, 25 servers are serving that need and that is one area where we are getting cost savings. It is also sustainable in terms of cooling and energy costs,” says Reddy. With the VMs in the private cloud, Reddy is also seeing cost savings in terms of risk mitigation. “We have complete control on what software we deploy and whether we are using licensed software or not. In the past, we could not control if people downloaded software that puts the company at risk. Today, that is almost non-existent because the central private cloud management team has complete control over what packages are installed in which VMs, and at any point if they detect any anomaly, they have the ability to shut down or erase the VM and warn the customer who is using it and so on,” explains Reddy. In productivity terms, cloud has brought down the turnaround time to four hours, and the company is now able to charge project teams

informationweek may 2013

Sudhir Reddy CIO, Mindtree

only for the time they have utilized the VM. “In the past, if they wanted a lab landscape, they had to purchase that server, even if they used it only for six months. But today, they don’t have to do that. The infrastructure investment is being made centrally by my Corporate Buyers team, and we are able to dish out that same infrastructure to several people for periods of time. So they are able to pay lower costs, get faster turnaround, and overall, Mindtree is able to benefit,” says Reddy. Mindtree is cautiously testing a bunch of SaaS apps as well. “We built an application to be sold to our customers and we actually drank our own champagne,” says Reddy. The learning management system is on the cloud and built on MS Azure platform and it is being consumed and utilized by Mindtree. The private cloud investment at Mindtree is to the tune of USD 300,000-400,000. Reddy says that

HIGHLIGHTS

The company’s 400 VMs today run on nearly 25 servers, which results in significant cost savings in terms of power, cooling and energy costs

Using Office 365, the company is now actively moving into CYOD (Choose your own device) for employees

if the contracts signed for Office 365, Exchange, Lync, and eventually SharePoint migration to cloud, are to be included, that possibly could be in the range USD 600,000-800,000 as an extra benefit. Reddy clarifies that this actually is only a subjective number. “With Microsoft Enterprise Agreement contract, it is all bundled and very hard to separate per se. If you look at LMS as a tool itself, we pay something to the tune of below USD 10,000 annually, because all we do is pay for subscription for hosting the application, based on the number of connections, and duration it is being used.” Moving ahead, Mindtree plans to retain on-premise all that is core and integrated with respect to the platform strategy. However, anything like e-mail, Lync, or any peripheral application like talent acquisition and learning management would be moved to the cloud. According to Reddy, a combination of public and private cloud (hybrid) will be the trend and the user will not realize the difference. This year, Mindtree will be rolling out MS Office 365, Exchange and Lync completely over the cloud. Office 365 for Mindtree is important also for a different reason. While the company already had BYOD, iPads and mobile devices in particular segments, it is now actively moving into CYOD (Choose your own device) for employees, for those who want to work on Apple vs. Windows or something else. “We are giving that provision and we also realize an employee could be working on multiple devices simultaneously, which could be a tablet or laptop or a smartphone,” says Reddy. Historically, Microsoft licenses were device-specific but with this current contract, Reddy informs they have moved into user-specific licensing with Office 365, which gives per user the ability to use that license for five devices. Employees hence can use MS Office not only on a laptop, but also on a tablet, mobile phone, and two other devices.

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Happiest Minds Technologies: Leveraging cloud to increase scalability

Darshan Appayanna CIO, IT Services, Happiest Minds

s a company that just completed its first full year of operations, Happiest Minds had a distinct advantage of leveraging disruptive technologies without having to worry about legacy. “We use Microsoft’s enterprise cloud offering, Office365 for our e-mail system, communication and collaboration platform (Lync Online) and document/content management platform (SharePoint Online),” says

Darshan Appayanna, CIO, IT Services, Happiest Minds. “In addition, our CRM system is on Salesforce.com, our payroll system is outsourced and hosted in a private cloud, and our development environments are hosted on a virtual private cloud in-house.” The company’s most critical tool — communication — has benefitted the most from its cloud strategy. The company has been able to scale this critical infrastructure to meet the needs of more than 800 people in the first year of operation with just a click of a button. Using cloud, the company is able to scale and support the business demands, with minimal capital investment and a very lean IT support team of seven people, which in turn results in significant cost savings. Cloud usage has also resulted in increase in employee productivity for Happiest Minds as employees are able to access information and critical systems from anywhere and any device. Happiest Minds has adopted both private and public cloud flavors for its internal needs. “Where contractual and legal requirements warrant us to

HIGHLIGHTS

Ability to scale and support the business demands, with minimal capital investment and a very lean IT support team of seven people

Increased employee productivity as employees can access information from anywhere and any device

Minimized support costs and improved customer service

have information in-house, we have opted for a virtual private cloud hosted in house. We have used public cloud where we need scalability, availability, and accessibility to address the ever changing business needs. We plan to use a hybrid cloud this fiscal as we have a better understanding of the usage patterns of key systems and infrastructure and the horsepower required to run our business. We will leverage an in-house private cloud infrastructure to support normal loads and use the public cloud for elasticity,” says Appayanna.

Hexaware: Unleashing the true potential of cloud with significant cost savings

N Nataraj CIO, Hexaware

exaware’s cloud journey began as early as 2009 right in the middle of the global economic slowdown when the need of the hour was to do more with less. The mid-tier

IT services company faced various challenges related to solving specific customer problems, establishing development and test environments for smaller projects, providing custom solutions depending on the project requirements, resolving client specific access issues, recommendations and processes, and chargeback. Hexaware has strategically built its private cloud called RAINMAKER by leveraging NetApp & EMC’s multi-tenant storage solutions and VMware’s vCloud Director. RAINMAKER currently provides two models for private cloud services for its internal users: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). With IaaS, Hexaware can use infrastructure resources (compute, network, and storage) as a service, while PaaS provides a complete application

HIGHLIGHTS

The server provisioning cycle time reduced from 46 days to 40 minutes

Average server cost went down from USD 2,000 to USD 700

Hardware utilization increased from 10 percent to about 60 percent

platform as a service. “As part of the benefits, the server provisioning cycle time reduced from 46 days to 40 minutes, average server cost went down from USD 2,000 to USD 700, hardware utilization increased from 10 percent to about 60 percent, and hardware deployment cost reduced 55 percent. The other benefits are in terms of saving energy

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Cover Story costs (going green), easier deployment of licenses, and higher scalability and elasticity,” says N Nataraj, CIO, Hexaware. Hexaware’s private cloud also enabled a self-service portal environment, centralized management and capacity planning, increased flexibility in higher resource management, and support for multiple operating system, middleware stack

and application workload. Hexaware’s cloud journey that spanned three phases is in its final phase now, wherein all critical applications too have been migrated to the cloud. This clearly suggests the maturity level the company has reached in terms of cloud. While in the first phase, the company migrated to the cloud all its noncritical applications like R&D and test

environments, in the second phase, it moved its customer environments. With a total investment to the tune of USD 1 million, today Hexaware has almost 85 percent of its environment on the cloud. “With all computing infrastructure and application stack delivered on demand, we have been able to achieve our vision of enabling every move we make with IT,” says Nataraj.

Syntel: Cloud for achieving higher asset utilization

yntel’s cloud journey started three years ago with data center consolidation and subsequent virtualization. Syntel consolidated close to 11 data centers into four. As part of virtualization, it has migrated more than 200 servers of ageing hardware onto VMware virtualization platform. With growth, Syntel decided to go for a heterogeneous environment and also adopted Microsoft Hyper V platform for its virtualization needs. Syntel has deployed an IaaS private cloud using the Microsoft System Center 2012 stack, which is used for its internal development and testing infrastructure. Syntel has a two-stage strategy where the company decided to go ahead with the deployment of private cloud, which can leverage the existing investments on virtualization and infrastructure available internally. A full blown private cloud based on Microsoft System Center stack version 2012 (SP1) has already been implemented. The entire internal test and development environment for all internal applications runs on this private cloud platform. Some of Syntel’s business functions have been transformed using the cloud. For its infrastructure teams, adoption of private cloud has been extremely helpful to achieve automation and efficiency of asset utilization. “With private cloud adoption, we managed to remove dependency on infrastructure teams to provision hardware, servers, set up platforms, etc,” says Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO, Syntel. The development team that is

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Muralidharan Ramachandran CIO, Syntel

responsible for Syntel’s enterprise applications is one of the other major beneficiaries of this adoption. “Today, these teams enjoy complete control and freedom over utilization of hardware earmarked for them. Besides getting complete control over the hardware, they are able to use, re-use and make any necessary modifications needed at their will without intervention of IT infrastructure team,” says Ramachandran. “Today, at Syntel, when any business owner demands a new VM, it is made available in 24 minutes as against 26 hours. The process of

HIGHLIGHTS

A new VM can be made available to a business user in 24 minutes as against 26 hours

The company has brought down VM instance deployment time to less than 30 minutes

requesting a VM also doesn’t take more than a few minutes.” In the next few years, Syntel has two major goals — to achieve agility and maximum return on investment. “Private cloud brought new perspective of automation for us. Bringing down VM instance deployment time to less than 30 minutes is a major achievement, considering the size of the Syntel data center team and the number of requests we serve. Today, we are not only able to deliver at speed but also at an attractive cost,” says Ramachandran. In addition, Syntel’s private cloud has also given them greater control of security, compliance and quality of service (QoS). “It has helped us get better control on our compliance due to automated provisioning. This has led to better QoS and ultimately helped us improve our overall security posture,” says Ramachandran. The investment has primarily been in terms of hardware, software and human resources. Syntel has created a joint team consisting of members from its Cloud Practice, Infrastructure Management Services and internal IT team for its efforts to deploy and manage its cloud initiatives. Apart from setting up and managing the existing private cloud, the team is working on enhancing the capabilities of this cloud and also deploying a cloud using the OpenStack framework. Syntel has a clear plan to extend the private cloud infrastructure to other workloads and is also looking at leveraging the public cloud, thus creating a hybrid cloud environment.

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BFSI sector moves to cloud to lower operating costs From zero up-front capital requirement, shared service delivery via the Internet, to pay-per-use environment, and agility, the cloud model offers a number of benefits to the BFSI sector. Jasmine Kohli spoke to some firms in this sector to understand how the technology is transforming this sector Fullerton India Credit Company: Cloud for business continuity

Anoop Handa CIO, Fullerton India

ullerton India, a non-banking finance company, operates in 300 towns and cities and over 12, 500 villages across urban and rural India and has nearly 1 million customers. Being in the highly competitive financial market, any unplanned

downtime means disruption in business operations, which results in significant financial losses and impacts customer service. To meet its objective of ensuring business continuity and operational resiliency for its clients’ critical financial transactions and gain the ability to process a large number of financial transactions at the lowest cost, the company turned to the cloud. It adopted IBM’s SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery, a cloudbased disaster recovery service. “We run our critical applications from a data center in Navi Mumbai. Disaster preparedness and recovery is imperative in today’s world as any downtime implies huge financial losses and impacts customer service. With platform-as-a-service increasingly gaining popularity, we decided to explore the cloud route and opted for disaster recovery in the cloud,” informs Anoop Handa, CIO, Fullerton India.

The company chose the cloud model to ensure protection of its critical data at an alternate site and gain the ability to recover data and infrastructure during times of disruption. Adoption of the cloud-based disaster recovery solution has significantly enhanced the data recovery procedure for the company. “Today, the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in real-time is 4 hours and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is 4 to 8 hours,” says Handa. Using the cloud’s flexible, cost effective, ‘pay per use’ operating model, the company has been able to avoid huge capital investments. “By adopting the cloud model, we have saved on the initial CAPEX in setting up the infrastructure. Apart from this, with the pay-per-use model of cloud, our saving would be 10-15 percent on an average,” states Handa.

ICICI Bank: Driving cost efficiency using private cloud

CICI Bank, India’s leading private bank, has been at the forefront of adopting technology to maintain its competitive edge and cloud is one such technology. With cloud becoming a buzzword, the bank decided to leverage the technology and ventured on its cloud computing journey nearly seven years back, when it started virtualizing its x86 servers. Over this period, the bank has virtualized a large part of its servers and storage with the help of different virtualizing tools. Today, the bank has the capability to allocate these resources across ICICI Bank & Group Companies as

per requirement; and the billing happens based on usage. “We have primarily adopted private cloud to cater to the needs of ICICI Bank & Group Companies. We have accrued significant benefits post adoption of the cloud in the form of ease of administration, transparency and cost efficiency,” says Mukesh Kumar Jain, Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank. In future, the bank plans to continue to further evaluate opportunity areas offered by the cloud. “Faster deployment without any intervention and increased transparency are the key focus areas,” adds Jain.

Mukesh Kumar Jain Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank

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Cover Story SVC Bank: Extending cloud to smaller banks

Ravikiran Mankikar Chief General Manager, ShamraoVithal Co-op Bank

lthough a number of banks and co-operatives have adopted cloud, ShamraoVithal Cooperative (SVC) Bank has taken its cloud initiative several notches up. One of the oldest co-operatives in India, SVC Bank has developed a federated cloud, named Genius, and is offering it to smaller counterparts. Ravikiran Mankikar, Chief General Manager, ShamraoVithal Co-op Bank says, “We have set up an infrastructure, wherein other smaller banks are

able to use the bank’s same physical infrastructure in shared mode. In this model, other banks do not have to invest in the infrastructure; they have to pay as per usage.” Although smaller co-operative banks need technology, they face budget constraints. This initiative of the bank is aimed at helping these smaller banks to consume shared resources including hardware, software and banking software. “Federated cloud is not a business venture or a way of just sharing the spare space. The motive behind the same is to help the smaller banks with our technological expertise in addition to the banking requirements,” states Mankikar. This can further help each bank in extending its financial services, which will in turn benefit customers. “By sharing our technology, networking of all such banks can be explored to increase the reach of individual banks, thereby expanding their business operations and forming strategic mutually beneficial alliances. This in turn will benefit the customers of all the banks,” explains Mankikar.

Principal Pnb: Cloud-based e-mail solution

financial asset management company, Principal Pnb Asset Management Company, was facing business challenges with legacy e-mail system, IT infrastructure management, higher energy utilization and software licensing management. The company decided to leverage cloud technology to address these challenges by implementing a cloud-based e-mail and collaboration solution as a replacement to its on-premise e-mail infrastructure. Accordingly, the company approached Mindlance for the deployment of Microsoft Online BPOS Solutions. The solution is web-based and is implemented locally in places like Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Lucknow, Jammu, Patna, Hyderabad and Indore.

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Harish Balakrishna, CTO, Principal Pnb Asset Management Company, says, “The adoption of the solution has enabled us to have full-proof business continuity and disaster recovery management. Post deployment of the solution, our employees have a stateof-the-art large e-mail solution with up to 40 GB storage and additional features like instant messaging, audio/ video and instant messaging for conferencing and collaboration.” The solution has enabled the company to reduce carbon footprint and energy utilization and also enabled better control on end-user software utilization and manageability. “The deployment of the solution has led to significant cost savings on hardware, software, maintenance and operational costs,” adds Balakrishna.

Federal Bank: Cloud ensures optimal IT usage

ew years back, Federal Bank started collecting more information about cloud computing. The bank then realized that it already had cloud in a small form within its environment — the bank was providing virtualized servers for its development environment. Going a step further, the bank also issued virtual desktops to some specific users like administrators. Today, the bank has half of its servers running on cloud infrastructure. “Today, every CIO/CTO is under pressure to reduce expenditure on IT. Business demands more software deployment and reduction in response time. To achieve improvement in efficiency and to better utilize resources, cloud is a sure shot answer. The cloud infrastructure is also bettering our efficiency, availability and security. People who were looking at cloud with suspicion are now preparing themselves to adopt the technology in large scale,” says Johnson K Jose, Deputy General Manager - IT Dept, Federal Bank. Considering the safety of critical applications, the bank adopted the private cloud model. “Since we belong to the BFSI segment, preferred flavor is the private cloud. That does not mean that we are averse to public cloud infrastructure. We have shifted some of our non-core services to the public cloud space, which when compared to the ones hosted in a private cloud are few,” says Jose. Jose asserts that the best measureable benefit of a cloud infrastructure is the optimal use of hardware infrastructure. “In a dedicated environment, wastage of hardware is inevitable. Another advantage is that the cloud offers lowest time to go live for a server platform for deploying software. This translates into a lower time to market. Pay per use is another concept that helps in reducing the expenditure, which translates into lower cost of services to the customers,” he says.

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Retailers incur huge cost savings by taking the cloud route While brick and mortar retailers like Globus and Shoppers Stop are increasingly finding great business benefits with private cloud implementations and moving certain business apps on the public cloud, the e-commerce retailers like Snapdeal.com and Flipkart.com are building their businesses on public cloud platforms, which enable them to scale up quickly but with just a fraction of investment that on-premise infrastructure demands. Amrita Premrajan spoke to some big players in the retail space to see how Indian retailers are tapping the cloud to drive their businesses Shoppers Stop: Private cloud drastically decreases project implementation time

Ranjit Satyanath, Sr. General Manager Solutions & Technology, Shoppers Stop

hoppers Stop, promoted by K Raheja Corp, is a household name in modern retailing in India. About three years back, the company figured out that most of the servers in its data center were under-utilized, which was leading to wastage of costly computing resources and also the limited IT resources were finding it extremely difficult to manage them. Thus, Shoppers Stop undertook an initiative of creating its own private cloud. For most of its business applications, the company used VMware’s virtualization technology

but for some Oracle specific applications the company had to use Oracle’s virtualization technology. Since this implementation, majority of the company’s business applications have been hosted on the private cloud. Giving us more insights about the benefits the company derived, Ranjit Satyanath, Sr. General Manager - Solutions & Technology, Shoppers Stop says, “Earlier, our outsourced data center charged us per kilowatt of power consumed. And as soon as we consolidated the servers the amount of power consumed automatically came down.” Added to this, the company, which had a small internal IT team, was relieved of the day-to-day maintenance of the cumbersome IT infrastructure and started focusing on building business-critical solutions for the company. “Also, the turnaround time (TAT) for the implementation of projects reduced drastically because being on the cloud model, when the project had to go online, we started allocating slices of CPU and memory without any delay. This saved a lot of time and effort earlier invested in the traditional process of taking

HIGHLIGHTS

Drastic decrease in TAT of projects due to faster and easy provisioning of resources, resulting in faster initiation of business projects

Building a private cloud improved the utilization of servers and automatically brought down the amount of power consumed

Huge amount of savings in time and effort for provisioning servers

approvals for budget needed to buy new servers and then following up with the whole procurement cycle,” he adds. In the context of public cloud adoption within Shoppers Stop, till recently the company’s e-commerce platform was hosted on the cloud. But since the company that provided the e-commerce service recently exited from India, Shoppers Stop has in-sourced it temporarily onpremise. Shoppers Stop is now actively evaluating various public cloud vendors and intends to move its e-commerce platform back on the cloud very soon.

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Cover Story Snapdeal: Cloud gives ability to scale

Amitabh Mishra VP- Engineering, Snapdeal.com

napdeal, a three year old e-commerce site, is one of India’s fastest growing e-commerce sites, which boasts of around 18 + million users as of date. Interestingly, the company’s technology platform, which is the backbone of the entire e-commerce business is hosted on a public cloud and is the reason why this startup could scale up so fast. Snapdeal’s data center is hosted by Netmagic and more than 95 percent of its technology platform is hosted on

Amazon Web Services (AWS), except a part of the financial systems, which is running in a private hosted space that is managed internally by the company. “When I say that the Snapdeal website is running on Amazon Web Services platform it includes a whole bunch of components that involves not just the website or the mobile site but also the order management system, catalogue management system, content management system, inventory management system, vendor management system, finance system and many more such connected business apps,” informs Amitabh Mishra, VP- Engineering at Snapdeal.com. Mishra informs that the reason why the company could grow so fast in a matter of three years, scaling up from just few thousand orders a day to now tens of thousands of orders a day is because of the cloud’s ability to scale up and down as per usage requirements. Today, the company has close to 250 servers hosted on the cloud and it is a team of just four people who manage these servers. Another significant business

HIGHLIGHTS

Snapdeal saved on the huge capital for building and maintaining about 250 servers on premise, by hosting all of them on the cloud

The company has saved the investment involved for hiring and retaining about 15 more IT resources that would have been needed in the on-premise scenario

benefit that Snapdeal obtained is the convenience of scaling up as and when required and then shutting the servers off when the need ends. “We are big in terms of data analytics and data crunching, which drives our business intelligence. This enables us to take critical business decisions like where to put the marketing money, how to allocate resources, which product category needs more attention in terms of marketing, etc. Being on the cloud allows us to conveniently spin up servers on demand, work through them and shut them off at even an hour’s notice,” says Mishra.

Zovi: Saves USD 200,000 of annual operating expenses due to cloud

Satish Mani CTO, Engineering Leadership, Zovi

ovi is a Bangalore-based private label fashion e-commerce startup. In the e-commerce business, the primary need is to

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maintain consistency of the service for customers and any company in this business needs to have a robust infrastructure to match the architectural needs. To achieve this, as a startup it was impossible for Zovi to think of an on-premise solution that called for huge investments. So the company resorted to AWS cloud computing platform. Satish Mani, CTO, Engineering Leadership, Zovi says, “Using the AWS Cloud platform, it took us only three months to develop, deploy and have our system deliver revenue to the business. Today, we have gone from 50 visitors a day to 100,000 visitors with no developer/infrastructure intervention required since we deployed the AWS cloud solution.” Mani informs us that AWS has

HIGHLIGHTS

Company saved USD 1 million in initial capital expenses for hardware and saved USD 200,000 of annual operating expenses

Easy scalability from 50 visitors to 100,000 visitors per day in just few minutes

helped Zovi save USD 1 million in initial capital expenses for hardware and USD 200,000 of annual operating expenses. “We are also able to save months of development man-days and scale dramatically from 50 visitors to 100,000 visitors per day in a matter of minutes without any of our internal team’s intervention,” Mani adds.

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Future Group: Private cloud brings down maintenance costs by 20-40 percent

Parakh Dave CIO & CTO, Future Group

uture Group is one of the pioneers of Indian retail, which reaches out to its customers through multiple retail formats like Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, KB Fairprice and more. The retail major whose data center is hosted at Sify in Vashi, Maharashtra, was quite ahead of its time when about four and a half years ago, the company decided to take charge of its distributed systems and set about to consolidate the server and storage

architecture into a centralized private cloud. Parakh Dave, CIO and CTO at Future Group, elaborating about this initiative says, “Today if you look at Future Group’s data center, we are about 90 percent virtualized, both in the server and storage front. And today, the entire group is consuming services ranging from loyalty program systems, gift voucher and gift card systems and payment systems, from the private cloud.” For virtualization, the company availed services of Citrix, VMWare and also solutions from Oracle as some of the infrastructure of the company is from Sun Microsystems. “The impending managing and maintaining costs that the company would have incurred if virtualization was not done has dropped anywhere between 20-40 percent and this is driving significant business value for us,” says Dave. While taking major steps in building and maintaining a private cloud, the company also started subscribing to certain public cloud

HIGHLIGHTS

Reduction in maintenance costs by 20-40 percent

Cloud-based POS is implemented

at one of the concepts within the Future Lifestyle fashion that is generating 400-crore plus business

services. For instance, about a year ago, the company deployed cloudbased Point of Sales (POS), where the POS business app is hosted in public cloud from where it connects back to the company’s private cloud. “Cloudbased POS is currently implemented at one of the concepts within the Future Lifestyle fashion that is generating 400-crore-plus business,” shares Dave. Apart from this, the company also consumes certain other applications on public cloud that range from office productivity tools like Office 365, collaboration tools like Cisco Webex and more.

Globus Stores: Chooses cloud platform for e-commerce solution

Meheriar Patel CTO & Head – eCommerce, Globus Stores

lobus Stores, a part of Rajan Raheja Group, is a renowned retail clothing chain launched in 1998. The company’s CTO & Head – eCommerce, Meheriar Patel tells

us that the company is seriously utilizing cloud computing as a strategic means to reduce the turnaround time (TAT) in providing the business with new solutions that are secure and user friendly using which they can support the business better. One of the major adoptions of cloud computing by Globus came in about three years back when it was facing a business need to launch its e-commerce business initiative within two months flat. At this point, implementation of an in-house ecommerce solution was evaluated, and it was found that this would take Globus anywhere between 6-8 months to get everything up and running. And as the company had just two months of time at hand to achieve this, it started evaluating

HIGHLIGHTS

Adopting Amazon’s PaaS cloud solution for its e-commerce business initiative made Globus spend just one third of what it would have spent if the solution was implemented in house

Company plans to move its DR on the public cloud in the near future and avail benefits from the pay-asyou-use model

various cloud solution providers and finally zeroed in on Amazon Cloud. “Three years back we had a clear deliverable where we needed to launch our e-commerce platform in two months flat. To deliver the solution to the business, without any

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Cover Story delay, we decided to adopt PaaS cloud solution for our e-commerce business initiative and we hosted this on Amazon cloud. By collaborating with the partner, within a short timeline of two months, we completed a huge amount of work with respect to look and feel, integration, products online, payment gateways path, logistics part, integration with merchandising, which is the back-end system and more,” informs Patel. Elaborating on the benefits that Globus has derived out of the solution, Patel highlights that currently the company is spending only one-third of the cost that it would have to incur, had it implemented the e-commerce solution in-house. He also informs that the PaaS solution gave the company great assurance in terms of security and the platform availability. “Cloud also gives you the freedom

to adopt APIs, feasibility in terms of testing, in terms of what others have done and also enables quick implementation and adoption. Also, management of the involved infrastructure is now the job of the cloud provider and this takes away a big headache off the IT teams who can now focus on building solutions that can transform businesses,” he adds. Another important utilization of cloud, which the company has been working on for the last one year is building a Data Recovery (DR) strategy, wherein the company could host its DR in the cloud. Patel informs us that the company is looking to associate with a public cloud service provider who could become a trusted partner and can provide the company a platform for DR that is hosted within India. “We are looking to tie up with a partner who during emergency can

provide us the required space, keep the back-end ready to have the data replicated on the servers. Here we will follow standards to check whether accuracy and consistencies are maintained between the databases and that they are up and running when we face a problem,” adds Patel. Adopting DR in the cloud is in fact a very cost-effective method of achieving back-up and restore in case of emergency. This is because now the company wouldn’t need to build and maintain a separate DR site by investing a lot of capital but only pay as per its usage of the cloud infrastructure. Telling us about what is planned for Globus with respect to cloud, Patel says, “In terms of roadmap, we are looking at developing a mobile strategy on the cloud. Also, we are looking at hosting some of the non-mission critical apps on the public cloud.”

Flipkart: Reaping benefits of private cloud via open source virtualization

Amod Malviya SVP, Head of Engineering, Flipkart

ounded in the year 2007 by two IIT-Delhi graduates, Sachin and Binny Bansal, Flipkart.com, is one of the largest e-commerce brands that we have witnessed in India. This e-commerce major avails the colocation services of Netmagic and hosts its servers in its facility. Gauging the kind of business benefits that private cloud can draw, this e-commerce major decided

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to consolidate and virtualize its server architecture to build a private cloud. But unlike the norm of using hypervisor technologies from virtualization vendors, the company chose the open source path to achieve abstraction of the virtual machines from the physical hardware. Amod Malviya, SVP, Head of Engineering, Flipkart says, “Most traditional cloud setups end up using virtualization technologies of the hypervisor kind to create virtual machine abstractions. But we ended up implementing OpenVZ, an open source technology, which uses the partitioned container approach, is much more lightweight than run-ofthe-mill virtualization technologies and is also available for free. Likewise, we use a collection of open source technologies to abstract out our storage layer.” Elaborating on the benefits that Flipkart has received out of creating a private cloud using open source technologies, Malviya says, “When you run a traditional virtualization set

HIGHLIGHTS

Flipkart virtualized its server and storage architecture to build a private cloud at zero cost, using open source technologies

The company obtained benefits of virtualization without having to experience performance hit ranging between of 5-10 percent, which is generally experienced while using hypervisor-based virtualization implementations

up, there is a performance hit ranging between 5-10 percent. But with OpenVZ implementation, we were not only able to simulate the same abstraction of virtual machines, but also achieved this without having to observe any performance hit. This approach works for us, and ends up giving us better benefit as it also comes at zero cost and we do not need to invest any money here.”

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Healthcare looks bullish on cloud, innovations abound The healthcare segment has always been conservative in its adoption of IT owing to a shortage of the requisite skill-sets and the lack of an upfront ROI. In the words of one CIO at a healthcare startup, a hospital might invest straight up in a CAT scanner, but IT budgets continue to languish for the lack of demonstrable ROI. But this might not necessarily be true for all enterprises in this segment, we find. Indeed a few have been pioneers in the adoption of cloud across segments. Each has an innovative story to tell and cloud technology has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for many. More and more firms are getting on the bandwagon, leveraging cloud in ways that are transforming healthcare in the country. Varun Haran takes a look at some pioneers Narayana Hrudayalaya: Fuelling growth, resilience with the cloud

arayana Hrudayalaya began its cloud journey in 2010, forward looking for any enterprise, let alone one in the healthcare vertical. Narayana Hrudayalaya needed a solution that was scalable and reduced IT administrative overheads. Thus, a decision was taken early on to go for a private cloud and the process was set in motion with a six-month proof of concept at one of its smaller unit hospitals in Jamshedpur with around 40 users logging into the cloud instance. Today, the service encompasses over 2,000 users across 23 facilities of the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group. Srikanth Raman, CIO, Narayana Hrudayalaya states that the cloud has been central to Narayana Hrudayalaya’s goal of being the first Indian healthcare major to hit the 30,000 beds mark. Narayana Hrudayalaya’s private cloud hosts the group’s mission-critical front-end hospital applications, which serve patients, as well as backend ERP applications. “Thanks to the cloud deployment which uses HCL’s Blu

enterprise cloud IaaS, it has been easy to standardize our master records, transactions processes and MIS,” says Raman. Patients at Narayana Hrudayalaya now only need to register once at any of the unit hospitals and the details are available across all group hospitals including the electronic medical records (EMRs). According to Raman, from an ROI perspective, Narayana Hrudayalaya has seen a direct savings in CAPEX payouts and maintenance costs over a 5 to 7 year horizon, estimated at around ` 25 crore. IaaS has negated the need for putting up in-house infrastructure and its own active DR. Any effort to do so would have involved CAPEX implications of over a crore for each facility. Other indirect benefits are in fact huge and more relevant, Raman says. The nimbleness of the IT deployment has increased manifold. A new hospital can now be hooked to the standard IT platform in a week’s time as against months earlier. Narayana Hrudayalaya’s MIS is standardized across the

HIGHLIGHTS

Direct savings in CAPEX payouts and maintenance costs over a 5 to 7 year horizon, estimated at around ` 25 crore

MIS is standardized across the group, which drives cost savings and service improvements

group and this transparency drives constant cost savings and service improvements. Also, concerns around data backup, DR, retaining skilled IT staff, etc. have been resolved. Raman says, cloud-based IT systems integrated with mobility platforms are the future for all business, not only healthcare. The future he would like to see involves dependable public cloud services offerings by top notch private service providers, which integrate seamlessly with statewide area networks, provided and maintained by the government as an infrastructure service.

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Cover Story HealthFore Technologies: Innovating delivery of healthcare

ealthFore Technologies (formerly Religare technologies) is in the business of conceptualizing, creating and offering products and platforms for healthcare that support high-quality patient care, which include electronic recordkeeping, electronic disease registries, Internet communication with patients and electronic prescribing. Pankaj Vaish, CEO, HealthFore, says, “In very simplistic terms, the expectation from Health Information Technology is that it should be able to deliver fully functional care systems that can offer coordinated care in a cost effective manner with minimal scope for errors.” HealthFore currently offers a complete Enterprise Health System (Magnum Infinity) including a powerful Imaging solution (Magnum Imaging) that can either be integrated with existing enterprise systems or hosted as a standalone imaging system on the cloud. Using the Magnum Infinity application, HealthFore has been able to transform process automation of

a patient’s journey at a private acute care facility in India by offering the application completely hosted on a cloud model. From an ROI perspective, the major driving factors for the shift towards cloud include easy and scalable access to computing hardware and storage, reduced upfront capital expenditure requirements, technology obsolescence mitigation and anywhere access. HealthFore’s clients have been able to completely eliminate the need to hire and maintain a technical team onsite to manage software related implementation and support tasks, which results in significant cost savings. There is substantial cost saving for the care provider as the upfront CAPEX investment is minimal. With the Magnum Imaging Solution offering on the cloud, the diagnostic labs no longer need to maintain a pool of radiologists and specialists (which are always in short supply) in-house. The solution extends the facility to access images anywhere and anytime with streaming technology and has

a secured (128-bit encryption) data transfer with efficient compression and fault-tolerant streaming algorithms. In addition, complete diagnostic test reading and reporting services can be carried out remotely from any location. An important measurable benefit for HealthFore was savings in implementation costs. According to Vaish, the time to configure and implement a cloud solution is 30-40 percent lower than a traditional onsite deployment. In future, HealthFore expects to focus on offering solutions, which support partial cloud enablement depending on the client needs, says Vaish. One scenario that is being envisaged in future is a large healthcare enterprise going in for onsite deployment of the enterprise HIS and Imaging system but requiring a cloud-based deployment of value added solutions including patient portals/ vendor portals/ staff portals and mobile health applications that are seamlessly integrated with the onsite application.

Karma Healthcare: Public cloud spurs flexible and robust growth

arma Healthcare’s bid for cloud was spurred back in 2007 when it was at a critical juncture in its growth. Sudden expansion plans further placed the thrust for automating processes and streamlining operations. D N Trivedi, Chief Executive Officer, Karma Healthcare recalls that the decision to move to the public cloud was made then by the management. After evaluating multiple vendors, Karma decided to go with Ramco’s ERP on the cloud-based on its product strength, flexible pricing model and commitment to service and support. Trivedi informs that Karma’s cloud transition has been smooth, and took less than 11 days to complete. “Karma went live with Ramco ERP on cloud and the process of migrating data from a legacy ERP to a GenY cloud solution was hassle free,” he says. The business requirement was for a

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solution that would primarily remove CAPEX expenses and bring down IT costs. The pay-per-use model of Ramco ERP and an anytime, anywhere access has helped address Karma’s requirements. With its ERP on cloud, Karma has been able to automate key processes, monitor the stock transfers and cash flow. The public cloud implementation has made it possible to streamline and integrate various divergent processes and obtain real-time information that has helped in obtaining a better boardroom view, with clearer results. From an ROI perspective, adopting Ramco ERP on cloud has brought about many benefits. Karma has availed effective inventory planning. For instance, earlier the average time for holding inventory was 76 days, which has been brought down to 33 days. The public cloud has helped Karma

manage its complex channel model. Karma serves multi-channels like dealers, distributors, hospitals, medical institutions and various government agencies, in addition to end users. Further, being able to generate online financial and management reports with consistent and accurate information flow has resulted in excellent operation visibility. “With the solution now being available on iPads and mobiles, access to the ERP has become extremely flexible,” says Trivedi. Additionally, a new user interface has improved the business process significantly, making it simpler and more user friendly. Karma plans to stay updated with new features and trends to keep its competitive edge. The public cloud using Ramco ERP has also enabled Karma to meet its regulatory and compliance-related requirements.

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Cloud power on an upsurge in the utilities and oil & gas sector IT in the power sector has largely been a blink and you’ll miss affair. But that situation is changing rapidly. Cloud adoption is on a rapid rise in the utilities and oil & gas sector. Companies are acknowledging the massive business benefits accruing from the cloud and indeed finding innovative solutions to their specific set of business requirements. As one CIO puts it, cloud is here to stay in the power sector. However, due to the traditionally conservative nature of this industry, companies foraying into the sector are mostly adopting the private flavor of cloud. Varun Haran spoke to companies in the sector to understand their cloud journey Thermax: Cloud brings flexibility, security and outreach to remote locations

Anil Nadkarni CIO, Thermax

hermax’s core business involves setting up and managing power plants and attendant infrastructure. According to Anil Nadkarni, CIO, Thermax, location is a big factor in the company’s business. “With power plants being serviced in far flung locations, connecting and setting up IT infrastructure in each location would have entailed huge costs and struggle,” he says. Thermax addressed cloud in two ways. The first cloud was looked at to move things like training, product brochures, etc. A public cloud is used for this purpose. Today, Thermax uses

a cloud solution to train all its agents and the solution tracks the training intensity of the participants. The second application of the cloud was with a view to create a protected environment for documents and other collateral. A private cloud is used for this. This is the cloud on which key applications in Thermax are available. This cloud used Citrix VDI technology allowing users to access data anytime, anywhere using any device but ensures that no data can be sent, copied or shared. Thus, while public cloud is used for corporate and agent training, the private cloud ensures the availability of solutions that can be used for business access. Using the thin client architecture has resulted in a massive cost advantage to the tune of 50-60 percent. Having eliminated the need for on-site infrastructure, the thin client architecture ensures that cheap reliable computing is available anywhere, anytime. “Bandwidth problems are also no longer an issue, since no data transfer really takes place with all the computing and backend processing happening within Thermax’s LAN. The thin clients merely display images, which have a low

HIGHLIGHTS

Using the thin client architecture has resulted in a massive cost advantage to the tune of 50-60 percent

Use of cloud ensures BYOD security, while at the same time brings financial gains in the form of capital cost savings from people bringing in their own devices

bandwidth requirement (as low as 20k bit per terminal),” says Nadkarni. Savings with the private VDI cloud has been across the board including power savings, manpower considerations, savings on infrastructure costs and so forth. Nadkarni also highlights various benefits, including: (1) Ease of access, (2) Future proofing, (3) Energy costs (new technology ensures far less electrical consumption, thereby avoiding the heat generation and all the other associated issues with it), (4) Data security (Since data is available at a central depository it is easily accessible while ensuring that no exfiltration takes place) and (5) Data backup & restoration (as data is available at one centralized location).

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Cover Story Essar Oil: Leveraging cloud for virtualization and centralized management

Gaurang Doshi, Associate Vice President - IT Infrastructure & Projects Group, Aegis Limited

ssar Oil wanted an environment that provided a high level of flexibility to meet its needs, while at the same time being easy to manage and cost-effective to run. Intrigued by the capabilities and possibilities of a private cloud environment, Essar Oil evaluated several virtualization technologies. According to Gaurang Doshi, Associate Vice President - IT Infrastructure & Projects Group, Aegis

Limited, Essar Oil chose to deploy the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system, with Hyper-V technology as the foundation. The two key ingredients of the private cloud solution that were aimed for were virtualization and centralized management. To maximize the benefits of a private cloud environment, Essar Oil has deployed Microsoft System Centre solutions to help simplify server management. By leveraging the cloud, Essar has consolidated its server environment, while reducing the number of administrative tasks performed by the IT staff. The company has been able to reduce costs, boost application availability, and align its IT processes to its business goals, in addition to ensuring that any future business needs are met. From an ROI perspective, by virtualizing its server environment, the company has been able to add more server functionality without incurring the costs of new servers. Essar Oil has gone from 70 servers to 45— a 35

percent decrease. Hardware costs have been significantly reduced by up to 69 percent. Additionally, virtualized hardware reduces power and cooling energy consumption by 22 percent for Essar Oil, while ensuring reliability and availability. Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, IT personnel have gained a simple-to-use management solution to maximize virtual environment performance. Routine process automation is also being done by administrators using the same, which reduces administrative overheads and saves time. Using Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, the company is now able to replicate its virtual environment seamlessly to its disaster recovery environment. “Plans are afoot to acquire new servers for the virtual environment to increase ROI, subject to application compatibility,” says Doshi. Going forward, Essar Oil plans to further evaluate servers, which are hosted on physical boxes to a virtual environment.

GSPC: Cloud boosts efficiencies in oil & gas exploration, power generation

SPC is an integrated energy company with interests in oil & gas exploration and distribution, and power generation and distribution. Private cloud has been implemented for SAP since 2004 in a three-tier architecture for HR accounting and inventory limited to one location. However, when there was a business need to expand to other functions and other group companies like GSPL, Gujarat Gas, Oil & Gas terminal (OGT) and GSPC power plant operations, the company decided to expand the private cloud to meet business requirements. The business focus was the integration of SAP with mechanisms used to track the history of seismic exploration data and present it to the business team. Further, there was a need to analyze this seismic data and control business parameters based on the exploration through SAP.

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Accordingly, the company moved business functions like project systems, plant maintenance, quality control, production planning and all other utilities and plant-based systems into the cloud, in addition to the initial implementation for HR, accounting and inventory. The decision to execute a cloud implementation was taken considering that initially the SAP was limited to the corporate office and was location based. A need was felt to come out of this bounded architecture. Today, the SAP cloud has been rolled out across the group and is accessible everywhere and is location independent. Sudhir Mittal, GM- IT at GSPC, says, “From an ROI perspective, a lot of benefits have been received from the private cloud — both tangible and intangible. The SAP cloud implementation has optimized

our transaction cycle.” Today, only a common support team for all the business functions is required at the central location enabling GSPC to streamline the processes centrally. The cloud implementation has had a significant impact on operational timeframes, as well as the technical and human resources. Mittal says, “Overall savings on all fronts would constitute to over 50 percent as against the alternative to the cloud. The turnaround time for transactions has been reduced from more than a week to real time, being location independent.” Mittal feels that as far as the oil & gas and power sector is concerned, private cloud is going to be what most enterprises prefer citing security concerns, in addition to retention. Mittal expects to continue GSPC’s cloud journey. The benchmark he says, will be based on the business need and cost.

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How telecom is deriving efficiencies out of cloud Telecom vertical is a highly data intensive industry vertical that needs to run multiple business applications every single day — majority of them being customer-centric applications. In such a competitive business environment, the telecom service providers are looking at consolidating their IT infrastructure into a private cloud that brings in much needed efficiency and agility for the business. Amrita Premrajan takes a look at how MTS is benefitting by adopting the cloud model MTS: Improves its operational KPIs and SLAs with private cloud implementation

Rajeev Batra CIO, MTS

n an extremely competitive and fast growing industry, telecom service providers face multiple challenges. Besides volume growth, telecom service providers have to also ensure that their margins are sustained even as new agile competitors cut costs. To improve their chances of winning in this landscape, telecom service providers have to constantly innovate and deliver new value added services. But the success of new services is uncertain, and lack of adoption can in many cases create a danger to the survival of the company as initial capital expenditure is high. In these situations, the cloud can help telecom

operators de-risk their business model, and launch new services without any substantial investment. Depending on the success of the service launched, it can decide to upscale the infrastructure and even consider a public cloud, if required. The elasticity and flexibility provided by a cloud model allows telecom service providers to quickly adapt to a changing business environment cost effectively. As the entire environment can be managed and provisioned centrally, it leads to huge cost efficiencies in addition to advantages of standardization. A private cloud model also helps the IT team in understanding, measuring and monitoring the IT usage across different services. A case in point is MTS India, the mobile telephony services brand of Sistema Shyam TeleServices, a renowned telecom service provider in India. The company’s nerve center of business operations are the two state-of-the-art Green Data Centers in Noida and Chennai. Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS India strongly believes that cloud computing solutions actually provide a viable alternative to the traditional task of maintaining IT infrastructure so that IT can focus on creating valuegenerating differentiated services. The company has deployed a

HIGHLIGHTS

Private cloud has led to improvement in operational KPIs and SLAs

Reduction in infrastructure costs due to consolidation of IT environment

private cloud model for its own consumption with the primary motivators for this implementation being optimization of hardware cost and data center space. “Given that we were a greenfield setup approximately four years ago and cutting edge technologies were available, it helped in having optimized manpower and infrastructure through use of virtualization and shared concepts from the very beginning,” says Batra. Talking about the benefits that the private cloud implementation has brought in, Batra says, “One of the key benefits that the company has derived is the reduction in infrastructure cost, decrease in TAT for change requests and improvement on our operational KPIs/SLAs. Apart from IT, the business functions, which have been transformed by using cloud, are Customer Service Delivery (CSD), Sales and Distribution Network.”

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Cover Story

loud computing today forms an integral part of every CIO’s IT strategy because of the innumerable benefits and ROI that it offers. The fact is substantiated by the results of VMware Cloud Index 2012, according to which 54 percent of senior IT professionals surveyed in India consider cloud computing as a top business priority. Not surprisingly, vendors are seeing gold lining in cloud and cloud computing forms an integral part of every vendor’s solution stack. Most of them are aiming to offer integrated solutions for building and managing a complete cloud infrastructure that meets the most critical needs of IT. For example, Microsoft offers a

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comprehensive set of technologies and solutions for customers to help them adopt and realize the benefits of the cloud model. According to Microsoft, using its technologies, customers can really transition to the cloud in a way that makes most sense for them. “They can do it on their terms,” says Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft. “Customers who want to run specific full-fledged services in the cloud like mail, collaboration, CRM, etc, can use our online services like Office 365 and Dynamics Online. Customers who want to run infrastructure and apps on premise, and yet want the benefits of the cloud can leverage the Microsoft

private cloud, powered by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012. Also, customers who run large-scale applications in the cloud can leverage Windows Azure, which provides both PaaS and IaaS capabilities. And what they can do is really mix and match these set of models (hybrid model) in a manner that makes the most sense for their business. We are seeing many customers do that, and manage all of them together holistically, with our System Center product,” says Karnakota. Similarly, another vendor in the space, SAP has launched its cloudbased ERP software SAP Business ByDesign targeted specifically at the SMEs. While SAP does not share

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country-wise break up of revenues, Pravin Agarwala, Head and VP, ByDesign Suite, SAP Labs India told InformationWeek that globally SAP has grown around 92 percent in all cloud categories and almost 350 percent in SAP ByDesign. This clearly marks an uptick in the demand for cloud-based solutions. Seeing the demand, last year HP too launched its Converged Cloud strategy that enables hybrid delivery with the right mix of on-site and off-site cloud services depending on their customers’ specific environment and needs. It enables deployment of services across traditional, private, managed (virtual private), and public cloud environments. “HP Converged Cloud has a common consumption experience regardless of the type of cloud delivery. This approach to cloud is unique to HP and gives enterprises agility, flexibility and portability. It delivers advantages like payas-you-go models, elasticity, and ‘cloud bursting’. But it also addresses enterprise need for data sovereignty, information privacy and proximity to other applications,” says Sudhir Rao, Chief Technologist, Enterprise Services, HP India. Engineered for the enterprise, HP Converged Cloud extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, applications and information to provide choice, confidence and consistency. “It offers choice through an open, standards-based approach supporting multiple hypervisors, operating systems and development environments, as well as a heterogeneous infrastructure and an extensible partner ecosystem. It offers confidence through a

Our converged approach to cloud gives enterprises agility and portability, and also addresses their need for data sovereignty and information privacy Sudhir Rao

Chief Technologist, Enterprise Services, HP India

management and security offering that spans information, applications and infrastructure. Finally, it offers consistency through a single common architecture,” says Rao. Likewise, IBM too is betting big on the cloud by helping its clients build their private cloud and support it with the required services. Towards the end of last year and beginning of this year, IBM launched its SmartCloud Enteprise+, which is a managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) kind of platform for clients. “SmartCloud Enteprise is an IaaS where we bring our software technologies and some of our ISV capabilities on the SmartCloud Enterprise. It then transforms into a PaaS and that PaaS is being leveraged by multiple clients and we call that offering as a SmartCloud Application Service (SCAS). SCAS has elements of middleware, which collaborate very nicely with infrastructure. Eventually, we are delivering PaaS to the clients to cover the entire lifecycle of applications with combined capabilities,” says Dharanibalan Gurunathan, Executive – Offerings Management & Development, GTS, IBM, India/South Asia. IBM says that information security has always been a top-of-the-mind agenda for the company. “When

Customers are looking at a hybrid model and architecting the cloud in a manner that suits their specific requirements Srikanth Karnakota

Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft

we set up any kind of capability which is likely to be shared, we adhere to multiple standards that we have internally within IBM, which predominately revolve around privileged identity management and access management. We have got detailed standards on enterprise security where we actually subject multi-tenant capabilities to various levels of security and segment the traffic into various parts. We have teams that constantly monitor and manage our cloud point of delivery from our managed security services, which kind of make sure there is minimal intervention in any way possible and minimal disruption in any form on the solution and application, which are deployed on our cloud platform,” says Gurunathan. As part of its commitment to security, IBM offers SmartCloud Managed Backup, which protects critical business data with cloudbased managed solutions. “It offers flexible support for your heterogeneous IT environment, end-to-end backup service helps ensure nearly 100 percent utilization rate as you pay only for what you back up, without up-front capital investments. It ensures faster access to and recovery of your business environment with minimal disruption, and eases management of various industry regulation requirements,” says Gurunathan. Along similar lines, VMware is investing significantly in building new services on the cloud platform. Most recently at VMworld 2012, VMware unveiled its vCloud Suite 5.1 which according to the company is the first solution to deliver the softwaredefined data center. “The vCloud

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Cover Story suite integrates VMware’s leading virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, simplifying the adoption of cloud era technologies. VMware vCloud Suite is an integrated solution for building and managing a complete cloud infrastructure that meets IT’s most critical needs. vCloud Suite fulfils the promise of the software-defined data center by pooling industry-standard hardware and running each layer of the data center as software-defined services,” says Balaji Rao, Director Sales, India & SAARC, VMware. VMware has also set its vision on a bigger picture of virtualization. After dominating the server virtualization landscape, the firm is now looking to virtualize every possible IT component in a data center with its SoftwareDefined Data Center (SDN) strategy. “SDN is redefining the boundaries between hardware and software. After server virtualization, the next logical step is to virtualize networks, storage and security,” says Bogomil Balkansky, Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Products, VMware. VMware has also announced its plans to extend the SDN with a hybrid cloud service offering. “The hybrid cloud is a natural extension of our SDN strategy. It will allow our existing 480,000 customers to reap the benefits of the public cloud without changing existing applications while using a common management, orchestration, networking and security model,” states Balkansky.

SECURING THE CLOUD

When it comes to cloud computing, most vendors believe Indian enterprises are hardly any different from enterprises around the world.

While the infra is common to all our tenants, we strictly maintain separate database tables per tenant, therefore eliminating any cross-over of user data Jagdish Mahapatra

MD, McAfee India & SAARC

They have similar security concerns and issues with letting a third party manage their security for them. Consequently, all vendors are committed to educating customers on security-related issues and providing secure cloud solutions. According to McAfee (an Intel company), the most commonly stated security concern by enterprises for using cloud services is data security. Customers question whether their end user data will be shared or leaked in any way breaching privacy laws. The second concern is often around standards for cloud providers. McAfee alleviates the first concern about data security through education. “Our decade-long experience in providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to over 10 million endpoints/ users has established high levels of trust from the customer base. In addition, our SaaS solutions are built on a multi-tenant, highly scalable architecture. While the infrastructure is common to all tenants or customers, we strictly maintain separate database tables per tenant, therefore eliminating any cross-over of user data. Also, our data centers have physical security allowing only authorized personnel to enter and have access to the hardware. Also, our data center and infrastructure is disaster recovery ready allowing for

We subject multi-tenant capabilities to various levels of security and segment the traffic into various parts Dharanibalan Gurunathan, Executive – Offerings Management & Development, GTS, IBM, India/South Asia

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redundancy and recovery, should there be a need,” says Jagdish Mahapatra, MD, McAfee India & SAARC. The second concern about cloud standards is addressed by the company’s Cloud Secure offering, which is a program designed to ensure the security of applications delivered via the fast-growing cloud ecosystem. This program aims to help SaaS and cloud providers grow their businesses by overcoming securityrelated concerns. In addition, McAfee is actively participating in industry consortiums like Cloud Security Alliance to define security standards to further promote cloud adoption among enterprises. Together, Intel and McAfee are taking a holistic approach to address cloud security challenges and establish confidence in the use of private, public and hybrid clouds. “The shared mission of Intel and McAfee is to enable worry-free cloud computing that is more secure than the traditional, best-in-class enterprise IT security. Both companies are focused on four areas to deliver better security for cloud environments while also enabling a broad range of open, interoperable security solutions via industry collaboration. These include securing cloud data centers, securing network connections, securing devices that connect to cloud services and accelerating the development of unified standards for cloud security,” says Mahapatra. The immediate priority for McAfee in India will be helping businesses lower costs and operate more efficiently with their SaaS-based e-mail, web and endpoint security solutions, which are among their fastest growing solution segments. The company also

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plans to continue to build on their successful telco strategy for enabling India’s top telecom operators and providers with cloud security solutions within India’s market. Another major player in the space, Oracle, too says that security, regulatory compliance and quality of service continue to be seen as top challenges and concerns impacting the growth of cloud adoption. “Cloud and compliance are often treated as opposing forces. While cloud encourages dynamism, compliance enforces caution and control. Data breach investigations have shown that security controls must be multi-layered to protect against threats that range from account misuse to SQL injection attacks. In addition, the ever-changing regulatory landscape and renewed focus on privacy demonstrates the need for solutions to be transparent and cost effective to deploy. Another concern is quality of service, since public clouds may not be able to fully guarantee service level agreement in terms of performance and availability,” says Sunil Jose, VP – Applications, Oracle India. VMware agrees that CIOs looking to adopt the cloud have often expressed concerns about data privacy, loss of control over data, vendor lock-in/lack of interoperability, IT security and latency among others. VMware observed in a survey conducted with Forrester Research that most of the survey respondents felt that concerns on data privacy was a prime barrier to adoption.

FORMS OF CLOUD

McAfee sees a demand uptick for both public and private cloud. Its strategy is “security from, in and for the cloud.” Security from the cloud is what McAfee calls Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), which includes endpoint/

they want to run in a private cloud desktop, e-mail, web and vulnerability and run within their data center, management security offerings. All for specific factors like compliance, of this is delivered from the cloud high-performance, mission-critical with centralized management and workloads etc. So, customers are reporting built on a multi-tenant, looking at a hybrid model and scalable architecture. “We have over architecting the cloud in a manner 10 million endpoints/users of our that suits their specific requirements SaaS offerings worldwide, which is a and what makes the most sense for testament of the growth in the public them,” says Karnakota. cloud space,” says Mahapatra. VMware too believes no single Security in the cloud is what McAfee cloud can provide an answer to an calls Global Threat Intelligence (GTI), organization’s dynamically changing which proactively protects McAfee IT requirements. “CIOs need a cloud users ahead of rapidly evolving cyber infrastructure tailored to meet their threats. All of its SaaS offerings have unique requirements and not take GTI enablement to ensure that the a ‘one-cloud-fits-all’ approach like protection gap is minimized. “Large most cloud offerings. It should be government agencies or enterprises uniquely aligned to the organization’s which are highly regulated may not business and its approach to IT, while have the option to use a public cloud. In also being able to leverage existing such situations, private clouds present investments in IT. We believe that a an option that is efficient, cost-efficient hybrid cloud is the way ahead as it and highly scalable,” says Mahapatra. would help CIOs address some of their On the other hand, Oracle concerns on security and availability believes that 2013 will mark the year while letting them to take advantage of the hybrid cloud, where a single of the best of both the private and application can span both private and public cloud models,” says Rao. public clouds and can be managed in According to Agarwal of SAP a federated manner. “This is because Labs India, the small and medium hybrid cloud is a strategic mix of (SME) and medium enterprise (ME) private and public infrastructures. segment would gravitate more Although it is not a new concept, we towards public cloud, while in the will see enterprises moving beyond large enterprise space, the preference the discussion around it and actually would be for the hybrid model, which demanding flexibility to seamlessly Keen to connect with theallow world’s leading cloud customers to protect their move their application from public to to will investments besides leveraging private or hybrid cloud from their cloud solution providers? Be at Cloud Connect India.the benefits of cloud for new applications. providers. Organizations will begin As the cloud computing market to split workloads for the public and Register at http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p continues to mature in India, vendors private cloud environments to ensure are keen to address the primary increased productivity and decreased concerns impacting the cloud growth. chances of outages,” says Jose. Vendors are focusing on developing Microsoft echoes the same with thousands ofand industry secure integratedpeers cloud solutions thought thatNetwork more and more to make more and more organizations customers are adopting the hybrid at Cloud Connect India. join the cloud bandwagon. cloud environment. “There are certain workloads and services for which http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p they want to use public cloud. At the u Ayushman Baruah ayushman.baruah@ubm.com same time, there are applications

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Harness cloud opportunity for your business at Cloud Connect India.

Interview

‘Cloud is influencing a tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world’ Amazon has been a pioneer in cloud and has inspired several other companies to take the cloud route. Can you take us through the initial years when cloud computing was a relatively unknown phenomenon? After over a decade of building and running the highly scalable web application, Amazon.com, the company realized that it had developed a core competency in operating massive scale technology infrastructure and data centers, and embarked on a much broader mission of serving a new customer segment — developers and businesses — with a platform of web services they can use to build (and be paid for) sophisticated, scalable applications. In 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”), an Amazon. com company, officially began offering customers access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform. Before AWS launched in 2006, businesses would take on the massive

capital investment of building their own infrastructure or contract with a vendor for a fixed amount of data center capacity that they might or might not use. This choice either meant paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Businesses spent time and money managing their own data centers or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. The platform of technology infrastructure services that comprise AWS has grown rapidly since the launch of the first service since March 2006. Innovation continues after the services are launched as AWS continues to listen to customers and consistently add new features, updates and additional services at a fast pace. Much like its parent company Amazon. com, AWS is focused on running its business efficiently and passing the cost savings along to customers. As

AWS has grown, it continues to use its scale to operate more efficiently and lower prices for customers. What were some of the early experiences from companies — specifically developers? When we first started AWS in 2006, many developer customers and startups were among the early adopters. Our developer customers wanted the flexibility to build their applications the way they want to — they didn’t want to be locked into a particular programming model, language, or operating system. The developers aren’t forced to use our entire suite of services — they can use one or any combination of the AWS services, it’s their choice. They aren’t limited to a set amount of storage, bandwidth, or computing resources —they can use as much or as little as they wish, and only pay for what they use. So, developers can use AWS for virtually anything — from full web applications, batch processing to simple storage. Hence, AWS has helped

One of the most well-known and respected thought leaders in the cloud computing space, Dr Werner Vogels leads Amazon’s charge for driving the company’s technology vision in the capacity of a CTO. In a detailed interaction with Srikanth RP, Dr Vogels shares interesting details about Amazon’s scale, its early days, examples of customers who are using the full potential of the cloud, and his vision of how he sees the future of the cloud 44

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Interview level the playing field for developers and startup companies to leverage AWS to build their businesses and compete in the global market. Many of the early adopters in India have grown quickly and successfully, including Hungama, redBus, Kuliza, Druva, Excelsoft, Greytip among many others. How has Amazon’s technology evolved over the past few years? What kind of planning goes into designing an IT infrastructure that ensures that Amazon is well positioned to drive technology trends that define the future of the cloud? We have innovated over 30 technology services in the cloud since 2006, which includes compute, storage, content delivery, databases, application services, management

Your perspective on how cloud services have transformed the IT landscape? What has been the impact on the developer, the enterprise and the service provider? Here are a few examples that illustrate how cloud has transformed the IT landscape and its impact: l In a traditional physical environment, a typical approach would involve signing multiple years of contracts that are locked in with traditional IT vendors or service providers, co-location facilities, or even building new data centers for disaster recovery. It’s hard to swallow the outlay of time and huge capital required for set up and maintenance when, under normal circumstances, this infrastructure is under-utilized and hugely over-provisioned.

you can select which sets of data or applications, for which business divisions, at which locations and determine its uptime depending on its criticality. You can fine-tune them anytime according to the changing business conditions. You can even test and create mock disaster scenarios in the cloud very easily. l Vast amount of data exists in organizations which continues to grow in leaps and bounds. In today’s competitive environment, effectively leveraging large scale data can be critical to business success. Data can uncover deep insights about customer behavior, help improve quality and cost of operations, drive innovative product features, and ultimately increase the bottom line.

Data analytics is no longer the purview of large enterprises — the cloud has leveled the playing field to allow organizations of all sizes to compete in the Big Data arena and deployment, networking, content delivery, etc., that our customers can easily build their applications or services and run them on AWS cloud. One of the reasons we believe companies are adopting these services so quickly is because of our rapid innovation based on customer feedback. Our process is to release a service that is useful to a lot of people, get customer feedback and rapidly add the enhanced or new features based in large part on what customers want and need from the services. There’s really no substitute for the accelerated learning we’ve had from working with hundreds of thousands of customers with every imaginable use case. We are also relentless about driving efficiencies and passing along the cost savings to our customers. We’ve lowered our prices 27 times since 2006 without any competitive pressure. Amazon is very comfortable with running high volume, low margin businesses which is very different from other traditional IT vendors.

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Importantly, it is hard to predict if these long-term commitments will work accordingly when disaster strikes and meanwhile, you have been paying for the upfront commitment of this disaster recovery infrastructure year-afteryear under uncertainty. Disaster recovery implementation in the cloud is much cost effective and simpler than traditional disaster recovery solutions. You can completely automate the process and bring up an entire cloud environment within minutes. The beauty of having a business continuity strategy implemented in the cloud is that it automatically gives you higher availability across different geographic regions without any major modifications in deployment and data replication strategies. You have the flexibility of implementing disaster recovery measures with fine grain control that meet your users and line-ofbusiness requirement. For example,

With the cloud, businesses can roll out hundreds or thousands of servers, even those with high performance computing power, in a matter of minutes and pay for what they actually use. They are able to store huge amount of data at a very low cost in the cloud. This helps businesses drive down costs significantly, while enabling them to analyze enormous amount of data quickly, giving businesses, researchers, analysts and developers the competitive advantage . Through the cloud, data analytics is no longer the purview of large enterprises. Every young business launching today knows they must integrate data collection and analytics from the start. In order to compete in today’s market; these companies must have a deep understanding of their customers’ behavior, allowing them to continuously improve how they serve them. Launching

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a business with a minimally viable product and then rapidly iterating in the direction that customers lead them is becoming a standard approach to success. However, this cannot be done without efficient, scalable data analytics. The cloud has leveled the playing field to allow organizations of all sizes to compete in the Big Data arena. l We are also seeing tremendous rise in entrepreneurial activities across the world. Many startups are driving hard to innovate and get their product in the hands of customers at neck breaking speeds. For example, with millions of smartphone users worldwide and multitude of applications, mobile developers and the businesses they serve need scalable infrastructure to develop and host the backend

so that they can quickly move forward with successful ones. Cloud has revolutionized and sped up an organization’s application development cycle, encouraging innovation and creativity. Can you give us an insight into Amazon’s IT infrastructure, its complexity and the scale? Here a few things that we can share publicly that gives you an idea of the scale: l AWS platform includes more than 30 different services in categories like storage, compute, databases, deployment and management, content delivery, messaging, monitoring among others. Customers can choose any combination of services that best meet their needs.

institutions and government agencies. More than 300 government agencies and 1,500 academic institutions worldwide are using AWS. Here are some examples of how our customers are using AWS to save costs and increase their business agility: Samsung uses the AWS platform of technology infrastructure services to build its Smart Hub application. The Smart Hub application allows users of Smart TV and Blu-ray players to access content of third-party providers. With every user’s request, Smart Hub application authenticates devices, delivers apps and content, pushes notifications across multiple devices. Samsung’s cloud deployment strategy has saved CAPEX by USD 34 million and reduced OPEX by 85 percent. If Samsung were to use the traditional

Cloud has revolutionized and sped up an organization’s application development cycle, encouraging innovation and creativity services. With the cloud, mobile developers are no longer worried about managing infrastructure resources, which is often either not their core competence or they simply don’t want to spend time on it. They are now able to focus on building sophisticated, scalable products and accelerating them to the market. In addition, mobile developers are able to leverage the prowess of the cloud for fast, complex processing of their application services before delivering the presentation layer across multiple form factors and devices to ensure great user experience. Realistically, not all products or applications will be an immediate runaway success and some innovations will take time to reach their full potential. The cloud provides a low cost way for engineers, product developers and even marketing folks to experiment new ideas and test feasibility within a short timeframe

Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a USD 5 billion enterprise (circa 2003). l Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores more than 1 trillion objects and regularly peaks at 835,000 requests per second. l AWS doubled its global region footprint in the year 2011 and is available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. We have a total of 9 AWS Regions around the world. If you had to name some classic cloud customers who show the real potential of the cloud, who would they be, and why? AWS has hundreds of thousands of customers in over 190 countries from startups, small-to-medium companies, large enterprises, educational

on-premise data center, it would have spent USD 34 million dollars in hardware and maintenance expenses during the first two years. Within Unilever, the Research and Development department includes over 6,000 specialists stationed in 20 countries throughout the world. Unilever Research and Development recently began an e-Science program that runs on AWS. The program uses AWS to do genomic research and compare the genetic diversity of healthy and unhealthy genes to develop new products. For example, comparing a healthy mouth with one with gingivitis by identifying the shared genes amongst these two can be very helpful in developing the next generation of toothpaste. By using AWS, Unilever is able to reduce its research and development time and speed up innovation. Gene analysis now takes hours, instead of weeks, and the company has increased productivity five-fold. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Interview (JPL) has sent a robot to every planet in the solar system and relies on AWS as an integral part of its missions. The Mars Exploration Rover continuously generates large volumes of data that JPL processes, analyzes and stores on AWS from the control room in Pasadena, Calif. By moving to AWS, Lamborghini, a world famous manufacturer of elite, luxury sports cars, based in Italy, was able to prepare the development and test environment for its website in a couple of days. The website went online in less than one month and was able to support a 250 percent increase in traffic around the launch of its new Aventador J sports car. Lamborghini reduced the cost of its infrastructure by 50 percent with AWS, while at the same time achieving better performance and scalability. Today,

undifferentiated infrastructure, supports innovation and allows them to focus on businesscritical activities. Just look at the change that is happening at the CIO level — most of the CIOs have always wanted to have a seat at the board. But in the old world of traditional IT, they were more focused on cutting costs and were perceived as the blocker to innovation, instead of an enabler. The radical change that cloud brings for CIOs is that they can now be the enabler for innovation and can be seen as an essential business partner, to help companies move forward. l New licensing models: The transparency of price structure and flexibility offered by cloud computing today has led to

come from this world where they have been in full control of their technology resources; thus compelling enterprise IT to adapt to the new world. To remain relevant, CIOs are now beginning to take control — they want the ability to choose what they want, when they want it and how much they are willing to pay. For example, they will demand that licensing models meet their expectations rather than that of the vendors. There is also a change happening in enterprise IT, being influenced by the richness of apps experience available in the consumer world, which makes the old world of enterprise IT looks like old science fiction. Cloud is enabling quicker apps development, better

We are seeing a shift in IT, driven largely by business units that embrace cloud services, to break away old practice and mindset to stay relevant in the new world of the cloud Lamborghini’s time-to-market is close to zero. How do you see the future of the cloud? What new capabilities or innovations can we expect in the next five years? Cloud Computing has brought significant positive change in both IT and businesses. We have seen initiatives by individual business units in enterprises that are no longer taking ‘no’ for an answer as the cloud-based infrastructure services are easily accessible by those who want to experiment new ideas or push new frontier for the company. We are seeing a shift in IT, driven largely by business units that embrace cloud services, to break away decades of old practice and mindset in order to stay relevant in the new world of the cloud: l IT as a business enabler: The IT department now wants to be seen as an enabler of innovation. The cloud frees IT resources from the heavy lifting of the

informationweek may 2013

transformative change. It’s now about putting the buyer (the customers) back at the driver’s seat. In the new world, customers do not want a forced lock-in by any vendors. Today, cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow anyone to access any combination of services at a transparent pricing structure via multiple platforms, multiple programming languages, and multiple operating systems; companies can grow and shrink the usage quickly based on business requirements, and pay for what they actually consume — because flexibility is what customer wants. l The consumerization of IT: In the consumer world, decisions about technology are often based on functionalities, offered at a price and speed that they want. In short, the consumers are in charge. New workforce and leaders embracing this new technology infrastructure

integration of services with mobile devices and growing consumer apps. Ultimately we will see an assimilation of consumer and enterprise IT, creating innovative services that are highly adaptable to changes, driving a whole new set of business opportunities, generating new revenue streams, which will largely be driven by cloud services. l Customers are in control: In the new world, cloud providers like AWS are making it easy for customers to get either into or out of the cloud, giving customer the choices to pick any combination of services that best suits their needs. In short, the new world of IT puts customers in control. They have the ability to walk away easily if they’re not getting what they want, whether that’s in terms of features, performance, reliability or support. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Case Study

rocessor giant, Intel, is a superb example of a technology company that shows the full potential of the cloud for transforming business. Intel began its cloud journey in 2009, when it adopted a multi-year enterprise cloud computing strategy. It also started actively implementing a private cloud architecture to support its business. Today, 80 percent of the new services are deployed within the cloud, using self-service provisioning to quickly deliver solutions. To achieve even higher levels of agility and efficiency, Intel has created a roadmap to public-private (hybrid) cloud. By applying key lessons from its Design Grid Computing environment (deployed between 2006 and 2008), Intel started an architectural transition focused on building a secure, serviceoriented enterprise private cloud for its office and enterprise environment. Accelerated virtualization and building an on-demand, self-service, and measured services capability played a critical first-step role in this endeavor, along with addressing security, manageability, automation, metering, and employee use model considerations. In 2012, Intel implemented its first fully integrated hybrid cloud for IaaS, allowing it to quickly launch capabilities where it had no data center presence and scale larger than it could do internally. “In 2012, we launched our first fully integrated, secure hybrid cloud to support our software development teams worldwide. Our hybrid cloud enables our developers to launch services in five to 10 days in a new location instead of having to wait 90 to 120

days for a data center to be retrofitted. Consumer-facing web services can now be quickly scaled for global presence,” states Liam Keating, Intel IT Director, APAC, China & Japan. Intel’s hybrid cloud hosting strategy enables increased flexibility, allowing it to dynamically adjust capacity within its public and private hosting environments across a wide selection of suppliers. This flexibility is particularly valuable when launching consumer-facing web services, which require high availability and may have unpredictable demand cycles. This year, Intel took into production an open source private cloud environment that enables it to provide a complete infrastructure as a service (IaaS). “Our open source and self-service model enables us to deliver new capacity faster and at lower cost, allowing us to extend the value of our private cloud to more usages. This supports our roadmap for increasing scalability, solutions, and cost efficiency,” says Keating.

Resourcing for the federated, interoperable, and open cloud

The move to an open hybrid cloud demanded new approaches and expertise as Intel sought to transform data center solutions into consumable services that could be quickly obtained through an open cloud infrastructure. To more effectively implement its open hybrid cloud, Intel formed three new disciplines: cloud engineering, cloud system administration, and cloud integration/ brokering. This new operating model broke down traditional organizational

“Our hybrid cloud enables our developers to launch services in five to 10 days in a new location instead of having to wait 90 to 120 days for a data center to be retrofitted. Consumer-facing web services can now be quickly scaled for global presence”

Liam Keating

Intel IT Director, APAC China & Japan

boundaries, requiring IT employees in these new roles to develop broad technical knowledge to understand multiple areas of the business. Addressing this requirement will also help Intel move at a fast pace as it embraces more open source solutions, increases collaboration, and looks for more opportunities to automate processes.

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Case Study On-demand self-service

Building on a foundation of virtualized infrastructure, Intel dramatically decreased the time it took to acquire new capacity using selfservice provisioning and extensive automation. “Self-service is now the norm. Most new services are now delivered in 10 minutes or less in our private cloud. In contrast, just three years ago, server provisioning in the traditional IT environment typically took as long as 90 days,” exclaims Keating. Intel IT is also delivering costeffective social media capabilities faster to meet business needs. Intel has transitioned from a customdeveloped solution to a commercially available software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with external cloud hosting and on-demand self-service. “Moving our social media platform to cloud services enabled us to deliver 650 percent more social media projects over the last two years. We also saved USD 1.6 million — a 52 percent reduction in the overall cost of service,” states Keating. Intel marketing teams around the world engage customers through short-term marketing campaigns using agency-developed microsites to promote specific programs, contests, or products. By centralizing the hosting for microsites through an external cloud provider, Intel IT enabled a secure solution for rapidly launching targeted campaigns. This self-service capability can fully provision a hardware stack in less than an hour while saving Intel USD 1.1 million a year. With the goal of accelerating the development time for cloud-aware web applications, Intel launched its first production pilot for platform-asa-service (PaaS) on its private cloud using open source software. The result is a 5x reduction in development time through a combination of self-service, on-demand tools and automation. In addition, about 10,000 Intel software engineers are now using an application lifecycle management solution created by Intel IT that enables them to begin designing

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Intel’s key takeaways from deploying cloud Cloud terminology: Lot of new terms, phrases and approaches. Common language across the organization is critical for the success of the program

Support from the top management is critical. This is a transformational change inside IT and also for the business

Cloud will bring you closer to the business. Partnerships are very critical. Technology is the easier part and equal focus is needed on business processes

Prioritize efforts. This is a multi-year journey and transformation. Set milestones, monitor progress, evolve and re-set goals

Business intelligence (BI) is important. Understand what is changing, establish KPIs, implement measured services and drive transparency inside IT and with business

Business benefit will generate value. There is a need to utilize a combination of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS to solve business requirements

packaged applications for devices in just minutes instead of having to wait a day or longer for the tools they need. To enable Intel’s services businesses to meet unpredictable spikes in demand, the IT team increased flexibility by deploying a rapid, elastic infrastructure-as-aservice scaling solution to support externally facing Internet applications. This SaaS/PaaS self-service solution built on Intel’s private cloud gives its software product teams on-demand delivery of application and product lifecycle management.

Measurable ROI

Intel IT’s cloud innovations are helping transform the business, enabling Intel to gain multi-level benefits across many areas. These benefits are improving business agility and velocity, while reducing operating costs. To help accelerate revenue growth and deepen engagement with customers, Intel is extending cloud usage across its business environment and making rapid progress towards its goal of a secure, interoperable and open hybrid cloud. Through its private cloud, Intel has realized cost savings amounting to USD 15 million from 2011 to 2012, as well as increased velocity and agility in delivering new capabilities and applications. “Cost efficiencies are

only one benefit and not the biggest benefit we have found. The biggest business value of cloud comes from agility,” states Keating. Business agility comes from a combination of multiple factors. For example, time to deploy new infrastructure services has decreased from 3 hours in 2010 to less than 10 minutes in 2012. Time to launch a new web application has decreased from 70 days in 2011 to less than a day in 2012. Today, 80 percent of new business services are delivered through its enterprise private cloud. With over 75 percent of the office and enterprise data center environment virtualized, Intel is progressing well in its vision for moving to a federated and open cloud. “Open cloud means that the cloud utilizes open standard formats and interfaces for rapid adoption and interoperability. In addition, the cloud is built using community supported open source technologies,” explains Keating. Intel’s open cloud vision includes landing applications in minutes, using the cloud for bursting capacity and utilizing SaaS for non-differentiated apps. The ultimate goal is to be highly automated with lower cost with fewer resources. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Case Study

Publishing services firm saves USD 150,000 per year by moving to the cloud Publishing company, MPS, is a great example that showcases the power of the cloud for publishers By Srikanth RP

publishing services company, MPS, handles everything from the production of publishers’ book, journal, or magazine right through to subscription management and BPO services. The firm’s services also include digital publishing, interactive learning and multimedia, and creative design. With more and more publishing services going digital, coupled with the huge growth, MPS’ data center and hosting provider in the U.S. was unable to meet its SLAs related to application uptime and response time to users. Also, its own on-premises servers were becoming old and obsolete, which it needed to replace. This prompted the firm to consider a technology like cloud. “We realized that the hosting contract and the hardware servers were no longer viable in meeting our business requirements. Therefore, we took a decision that the cloud was going to be the new world of IT strategy for MPS. We now have the flexibility of scaling up or down the infrastructure resources as our business requirements change,” says Arun Goyal, Senior VP and Head IT, MPS. MPS uses Amazon EC2 in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment for add-on security in the AWS US East Region. As of now, only the infrastructure, which was previously hosted outside has been moved to AWS. The firm’s production servers are still hosted internally. MPS will gradually move them in phases by running

“Besides eliminating our CAPEX, cloud enables us to save USD 150,000 per year in both capital and operating expenses”

Arun Goyal

Senior Vice President and Head IT, MPS

ning initiative,” states Goyal. proof-of-concepts, conduct overall cost benefit analysis and plan a migration strategy. cloud rainS huge savings Today, MPS runs 67 websites/apps Using the AWS cloud platform has Keen to connect with to helped the world’s leading cloud on AWS. This includes ContentStore, it free up more resources, as the solution Cloud Connect which is a hosted e-bookproviders? delivery and BeITat team no longer needs toIndia. be involved distribution platform with features for in the procurement, installation, testconverting, showcasing, marketing,at andhttp://bit.ly/ZznZ6p ing and maintenance of hardware Register distributing content in multiple ways. infrastructure. The IT team can now ContentStore drives e-book sales over work more constructively to serve the the web and mobile platforms includcompany’s new initiatives and customer ing iPad, Android, and web apps. Other services. Network with thousands“Besides of industry peers noteworthy websites include Nature immediately eliminating all at Cloud Connect India. Publishing Group and Springer. our capital expenses (CAPEX) and bringSince deploying the AWS Cloud ing it down to zero, we save at least platform, the firm has experienced USD 150,000 per year in both capital http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p great cost savings. The cloud also gives and operating expenses,” exclaims the firm business resilience. “We can Goyal. now easily use the multiple Availability By moving to the AWS Cloud, MPS Zones in AWS US East Region for our no longer needs to pay for hosting production workloads, ensuring contracts, get intoand hassles of negotiaRegister nowhigh for Cloud Connect get resilience of our services for our customtion, or worry about depreciation and discounts! ers and employees. This is anattractive important maintenance of hardware infrastructure. IT initiative and AWS Cloud provides us In addition, its operating expenses have the immediate tools that we http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p can use to also reduced by 20 percent. accelerate our business continuity planu Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

Harness cloud opportunity for your business at Cloud Connect India. http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p

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Hear from 60 plus premier speakers across 3 tracks at Cloud Connect.

Thought Leader

Can cloud influence India’s development path?

n February, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) announced the launch of “GI Cloud”, India’s national cloud initiative. This is a strategic, even inevitable move given that the Government of India has a vision that by 2020, when our nation’s population will have hit a high, so should its education, health and prosperity. For several years now, the world has resorted to technology to influence its path of development. Technology-led innovations in the delivery of affordable mass healthcare, mobility in the cause of financial inclusion, the Internet as a channel of distance education — these are all well documented success stories. But now there’s an exciting and very real possibility to take giant strides towards the resolution of the nation’s most pressing problems. And it comes in the shape of the cloud. DeitY is fully cognizant of what cloud computing can do for the Indian Government and the nation. It envisages that cloud can improve e-services delivery, standardization, integration and interoperability, not to mention the government’s ability to replicate and rollout successful initiatives across various states. The department also envisions that cloud computing could help cut costs by consolidating data centers; it could improve utilization of existing infrastructure and resources by replacing proprietary ownership of IT assets with multi-tenancy; and it could vastly improve an otherwise inefficient silo-based procurement process by aggregating demand. Just to put the scale of possibilities in perspective, it was estimated way back in 2011, that if two or more states were to switch to a private cloud to consume IT as a Service, they would save around ` 6.50 billion from their budgetary allocation towards data center projects. These are some of the reasons why the Government of India is accelerating its cloud adoption plans. We’ve already got “proof of concept” thanks to early adopters like the Jammu and Kashmir

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Government, which was the first one to practice cloud-based e-governance, and is using it to administer the issuance of birth and death certificates, ration cards, and other citizen services. Other reasons include the potential to reuse and share applications across departments and ministries with ease minus the cost and pain of individual deployment; the security of back-up infrastructure; the

an IT frontrunner like India can easily be among the leaders on the list. With policies being drafted that focus on delivering improved security, privacy and compliance, along with the formulation of a robust regulatory framework, we are not far from realizing this ambition. And we are drawing on all our resources to get there fully aware that moving to the cloud is non-negotiable.

Cloud presents an exciting and very real possibility to take giant strides towards the resolution of the nation’s most pressing problems diversification of service vendors; the huge opportunity to promote e-governance and social development through mobile-cloud driven financial inclusion, healthcare awareness, etc.; and last but not the least, a smaller ecological footprint. What’s more, the cloud could well be the next big opportunity for Indian exports, a vital parameter of the nation’s economic health. Therefore, the government is taking every measure to support the Indian IT industry, so that it can offer cloud computing knowhow and a range of services — from Software as a Service (SaaS)-based apps, remote prototyping to Platform as a Service offerings — to organizations around the world, and catapult the nation to the status of a premier cloud hub. Clearly, between our country’s IT industry, technology leadership, and think tanks within the Government of India, we have enough expertise in cloud technology and implementation. Therefore, the 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, which ranks India’s cloud computing policy environment a modest 17th among 24 countries, sparks some degree of concern. While this year’s ranking is an improvement over last year’s 19th place — a result of better intellectual property protection — the fact is that

But above all, it’s heartening to note that our country is well on its way to defining a clear and comprehensive cloud policy directing cloud adoption by different government agencies. A pivotal agency, tasked with defining the standards governing the sourcing and consumption of cloud computing by these agencies, will speed us up on the right path. Against this backdrop, the DeitY’s agenda for 2013, which names increasing the public sector’s usage of cloud computing among 18 focus areas, is encouraging indeed.

u S Gopalakrishnan is Executive Co-Chairman, Infosys

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Thought Leader

Defining the next phase of the cloud journey

he IT industry exhibited great resilience while weathering a number of uncertainties over the past year, which included a cautious global business environment that prompted companies here to hold back on their investments, and a weak rupee that impacted the IT decisions of many companies. However, we continued to see a growing adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technologies through the year as there has been a greater maturity and understanding among customers on the business benefits of virtualization and cloud computing technologies. Our discussions with customers are really about how fast they can virtualize and how fast they can move to the cloud. It’s no longer about if they are going to virtualize anymore, it is about when and how fast can they do it. The findings of our third annual VMware Cloud Index 2012, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, reveal that 81 percent of the respondents agree that virtualization is highly critical to enable cloud computing and 94 percent have leveraged or are planning to leverage virtualization in their organizations. The study also shows that there is a surge in cloud usage in India where half (50 percent) of respondents in the country state that they have already adopted cloud solutions or approaches — a 25 percent growth over 2011. An additional 30 percent of respondents declared that they are currently planning to deploy cloud solutions within the next 18 months, highlighting the growing cloud opportunity in India. Clearly, the market has matured with a better understanding and adoption of virtualization and cloud computing among organizations and many are already planning their next big move for their data centers. Based on our understanding, we believe that trends like Software-

Defined Data Center and Enterprise Mobility will play a big role.

Software-Defined Data center

The software-defined data center delivers on the promise of cloud computing for agile, elastic, efficient, and reliable IT services by extending the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the data center — compute, storage, networking, and the associated availability and security services. The software-defined data center architecture abstracts all hardware resources and pools them into aggregate capacity, enabling automation to safely and efficiently dole it out as needed for applications. Tenants or customers utilizing the software-defined data center can have their own virtual data centers with a logically isolated collection of all the virtual compute, storage, networking and security resources they are used to. Rather than mask the inherent rigidity of specialized hardware under a tangle of scripts, the software-defined data center leapfrogs these constraints to change the way all the data center services are delivered. The net result for organizations will be transformative — the softwaredefined data center will help deliver strategic advantage to the business by providing the same benefits for IT as a whole that virtualization delivered for computing and memory.

lives and woe to the IT organization that doesn’t provide access to modern easy-to-use, business compliant technologies that enable a productive workforce. Fail to do that and your IT organiztion is on the road to obsolescent. This brings us to BYOD, which is a great advance for users — buy and use what you want, when you want it. No longer are users tethered to an uncool corporate-sanctioned device that was approved three years ago. And lastly, the multi-device workspace. We use many different devices throughout the day. Most users have 2-3 devices that they use at different times and places depending on context. Given this landscape, from an end-user computing strategy, businesses today need to embrace all of the above and do so in a way that is manageable, cost-effective, secure and compliant. They should also give users access to their “stuff” across all their devices safely, securely and efficiently. In order to accomplish this, IT needs to embrace technologies that will give them the ability to manage user business identity, and deliver business applications and data across a multitude of devices. In this new and modern world, identity and policies should follow a human, not a device — and IT needs to move away from physical device management.

Enabling enterprise mobility

The year 2013 is seen by many as the era of multi-device mobile workspace, BYOD and the consumerization of IT. Consumerization of IT doesn’t mean encouraging users to use unaccountable, non-compliant consumer services to get their work done. But it does mean that IT has competition! IT is no longer the only game in the town. Users are far more sophisticated in 2013 — they use tools and technologies in their personal

u T Srinivasan is Managing Director, VMware India & SAARC

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Thought Leader

The role of open source in cloud infrastructure

hy is it that open source wins in infrastructure software? Why do websites run on Cassandra and MongoDB? Why are the biggest clouds in the world built on Linux and open source hypervisors? How come the leading cloud management platforms are open source? The answer is surprisingly simple. The solution has emerged over the past two decades thanks to Apache, Linux, MySQL and other enormously popular software technologies. When you provide software to people who can and want to develop or maintain software themselves, the code needs to be open. If you provide software to a consumer or to a business, it’s about the service and the business benefits, not about openness per se. It turns out that the openness requirement by professionals is a generic phenomenon. Anyone can love chicken biryani, but those who enjoy cooking or who are professional chefs will want to know the specifics of how it is prepared and what it contains. The connoisseur and enthusiast require access to the details — not just to have the ability to do the same, but for the ability to verify the quality and modify to fit their needs. The casual consumer will just focus on the experience and the benefits. As the world goes wild on mobile apps, social networks and Big Data deployments, the underlying infrastructure is changing. From what we had in the client/server and the web era, we are now moving to cloud infrastructures. In our existing app deployments, software is the brittle part and resilience is built into the hardware infrastructure. In the new world, this changes. It must be assumed that infrastructure will fail every now and then, and it’s up to the app developer to build resilience into the software layer. A very concrete example of this is Netflix, where they have a deliberate process called the Chaos Monkey that brings down compute instances to push the apps (and their developers) to make sure they can survive such failures. The result is higher

informationweek may 2013

uptime and greater resiliency. The shift to a cloud paradigm for hardware and software infrastructure is causing disruption across the entire landscape. We see new development frameworks, configuration management tools, databases, cloud platforms, storage solutions, networking solutions, and so on. Nearly everything is up for grabs. And nearly everything is being snatched up by open source software. Linux and the KVM hypervisors are becoming the industry norm. Cloud platforms such as Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula are winning the IaaS battle. Storage and file systems such as Riak, Ceph and Swift are expanding their footprint. Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase, Neo4J and other databases are replacing closed source rivals. In this situation, it is very difficult to bring to market a closed source product. No matter how good your technology may be, it is not exciting for the targeted users if they can’t “see under the hood,” so to speak. But open source is also not a business panacea. Although the forefathers who wrote the open source licenses did not intend to stifle business opportunities, it so happened that business models built around open source software are a particularly tricky subject. There are numerous open source projects that reached impressive popularity among users but failed to provide a significant revenue opportunity for its creators. If that happens, it helps little that your code is open. Free code exists, but free lunches don’t. Open source developers need to be paid just like closed source developers. Many attempts have been made to create the perfect business model for open source software. Two main categories have emerged: foundation-based open source projects with multiple productizers (think Linux, Eclipse, and OpenStack) and company-based open source projects with a singular vendor (think JBoss, MySQL, MongoDB, and Eucalyptus). Both models can work wonderfully for vendors and customers, as well as users. The foundation model

tends to not provide financial reward to the original innovator nor the software developers. It rewards the corporation that becomes the leading distributor. The singular model tends to reward the original innovator and the key employees of that company. But in the modern cloud world, it’s not enough to have open source code and a functional business model. We must also take into account interfaces. We must learn to quickly couple and decouple software, and to move workloads from one infrastructure to another. To do this successfully, we need well-defined and commonly accepted APIs. You could say that in 80s, the common standard was the x86 architecture, in 90s open source software became the common standard, and now an additional 15 years later, it is APIs that form the common standard. Young software developers develop on EC2. EC2 is of course a service of Amazon Web Services, but more importantly it represents a new API way of looking at things. It’s the new frontier of openness. And for that reason, the leading software innovations of our times will be EC2 compatible.

u Marten Mickos, is the CEO of

Eucalyptus Systems. A veteran of open source, infrastructure software and global businesses, he was previously CEO of MySQL AB where he grew the company from garage startup to the second largest open source company in the world.

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Opinion

approaches to Service Level Agreements on public cloud

hen I discuss public cloud with experts, some argue that public cloud is also a different form of outsourcing. Though theoretically it may look like that, however, with my experience of managed services outsourcing, I would argue it is very different. One of the big differences is SLA. In managed services you have the option of customization and negotiation for SLAs; you do not have the same flexibility in public cloud contracts as the services are available off the shelf. Getting into wrong cloud provider or agreement can not only cause agony for business but it can have other implications on the people behind that decision. Let’s look at some of the points that need attention: 1. Don’t just look at numbers: The numbers may look lucrative but it is worth checking what it means as well. My advice is don’t just consider the uptime of 100 percent is better than 99.9 percent; consider what the provider is ready to commit in case it does not meet the SLA. Some contracts may say “X percent invoice credit for 60 minutes downtime 2X percent for up to 120 minutes and so on” while others might commit “10 percent invoice credit anytime annual uptime falls below 99.X percent”. One also needs to check uptime record of the provider in the last few years. 2. Cost vs Penalty: While comparing cost of service and penalty, if the penalty of SLA failure is high you will be tempted but this is where there is a possibility of making mistakes. Proper due diligence of historical records and understanding of contract clauses is needed. Look at the impact of those penalties against the business losses it may cause and then take an informed decision about the cost part. My suggestion is to go for a better uptime even if it requires more expensive cloud as the provider is ready to invest in infrastructure availability and redundancy. If

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you see a provider whose service credit is very lucrative, please review carefully the exclusions. 3. Exclusions: Maintenance schedules need to be understood carefully along with other exclusions. Planned downtimes are not covered in the uptime contracts but if your business is 24 X 7 how these downtimes impact your services needs to be checked. In addition, check for any planned migrations by provider. Many contracts may exclude downtime due to virus attacks, sabotage, migration and hacking, etc., which needs careful review. 4. Study the cloud architecture: For SaaS and PaaS, it is necessary to look at the underlying providers and understand how each entity can impact SLA guarantee. No provider can claim that they never had any downtime but unlike managed services, the consumer has least visibility and control over the situation and careful study is needed to minimize the risk of getting impacted. 5. Expectation setting: Due diligence and expectation setting is necessary before going for public cloud. Traditional managed services outsourcing has a different method of service delivery and we tend to negotiate or keep SLAs at a higher level than we generally would require. But in cloud this can make a huge difference in the selection of a provider. Your other assessments for provider giving 99.95 percent could be better than the one providing 100 percent and you can make a compromise of 0.05 percent if that does not matter much for your business. Hence, true understanding of what the SLA means to the business and how far you can go for taking the risk must be covered . 6. Definition of outage: This could vary for each provider and one needs to carefully examine what it means. For SLA contracts carefully study and compare the meanings. This can make dramatic changes to the meaning of availability, which has an impact on

your business. In addition, is performance degradation considered as an outage by the provider? At what level the availability is being calculated is also something that needs to be compared to understand availability. 7. Service Improvements: Though cloud gives flexibility of termination, most cloud arrangements are long term. Hence, you need to know the roadmap of the provider for next several years before you lock yourself. 8. Service Level Management (SLM) Approach: Understanding of how the SLM will be performed during an outage, how communication will happen, what will be the form of RCA and within how many days it will be provided, etc., is necessary. It is also necessary to understand what monitoring and reporting approach has been adopted. If the in-house capability does not exist for due diligence for public cloud, hiring experts will definitely make sense. Also, for SLAs, it is important to understand how the availability translates into business performance and impacts top line or bottom line. One should not be too much bothered about penalties but should focus on reliability of the provider to deliver commitments.

u DD Mishra is Founder & Managing Consultant, CIO Specialist

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Opinion

10 services to consider when starting a SaaS business

ast year, we saw an opportunity in designing an app for marketing and creative teams, as most of them currently use a general purpose collaboration tool. We wanted to help them grow their business by making it easy to plan, organize and track all their digital marketing projects in one place. With this objective, we set out to build Brightpod. We planned the design and the features that would be included into the minimum viable product. In addition, we made a list of tools that we would use to help us power-up the app — hosting, marketing, customer engagement, analytics etc. So, while the team was busy developing Brightpod I started trying out a dozen or so tools. I was looking at a set of tools that not only allowed my team members to do their job well, but also which they loved using. Here are 10 services you should consider when starting a SaaS business: 1. Cloud Hosting: Instead of paying huge upfront fees on a dedicated server why not sign up for Rackspace Cloud or Amazon EC2 and pay ondemand. I prefer Rackspace Cloud as they have a “managed” option where their team will help you set up and monitor your servers, load balancers, cloud databases etc. This frees up your time to focus on your business — build software and engage with customers. 2. Beanstalk App: This is where your code lives. Beanstalk allows designers and developers to store source code, track changes, and collaborate with their team through Git, Subversion and Mercurial version control systems. Wonder how companies update their apps on a daily basis and roll back if something goes wrong? Well, a tool like Beanstalk will allow your team to do just that.

3. KISSMetrics: This will help you analyze how people use your app and how they convert to paying customers. As software designers we build features but seldom analyze how popular it is. A tool like KISSMetrics will easily tell you which features are most popular and who is using them. 4. Intercom: Intercom is a customer relationship management and messaging tool for web businesses. Running a web business can be impersonal as you don’t see your customers face to face. Hence, what is important to the success of your business is understanding your customers and getting in touch with them (and letting them get in touch with you easily) at the right time. This is where Intercom steps in. 5. Postmark App: If your app sends out e-mails to your customers (transactional mail) then it is better to use a service like Postmark, Sendgrid or Amazon SES. This is better than running your own mail servers and digging into mail logs when something doesn’t go right.

to send them newsletters. Most startups use MailChimp as they offer a free plan for upto 2,000 subscribers. 9. HipChat: Communication is the most important aspect of a successful remote team. We keep HipChat open all day to communicate with marketing or development folks. This is faster than e-mail. Recently, HipChat started offering a free plan to teams of five or less. 10. Pingdom: Your website and app are online. The last thing you need to do is to monitor your infrastructure for reports on uptime and downtime. Pingdom’s free plan allows us to monitor our servers from different locations around the world. The thing I love about SaaS is that we all can use world-class software to power-up our business and pay for it monthly. Unlike before, where we had to purchase the entire software and even run it on our own servers.

6. Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is a nifty little tool. Through Crazy Egg’s visual heat map and scroll map reports you can get an understanding of how your visitors engage with your website. If people are not signing up to your app then Crazy Egg is one of the tools that lets you see what they are doing on the webpage. 7. New Relic: New Relic will help your development team monitor your servers from the comfort of their chairs. This app is always open on our developer machines so that we can pinpoint performance issues with Brightpod in real time. 8. MailChimp: E-mail is still the best way to get in touch with your customers and MailChimp makes it extremely easy

u Sahil Parikh, is an author, web

entrepreneur and founder of Synage Software — a technology company in India that successfully pioneered one of India’s first home-grown SaaS products, DeskAway in 2007 and Brightpod in 2012.

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Opinion

Manageability challenges of cloud computing: A consumer perspective

n the past 3-4 years, we have seen several firms in the IT industry evolving cloud solutions across the areas of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Private cloud and public cloud technology providers have also made their impact. On the other hand, the consumer industry has been witnessing this evolution very cautiously. Big enterprises have actually embraced primitive cloud technologies well before this evolution, by virtue of internal private cloud setup, backed by several virtualization technologies that prevailed 5-7 years back. The timing of the existence of such virtualization technologies forming internal private clouds and the evolution of the full-fledged cloud computing industry is what I see as very vital, for several reasons. Both seem to co-exist even now and I see very few cases that might have taken over completely. Some of the challenges faced by big enterprise consumers include: l Big enterprises having IT landscape with several hypervisors working in heterogeneous environment looked for an open-end amalgamation with the third-party cloud technology providers (external private and public cloud service providers). Co-existence seemed to be the only choice and not a replacement merely for the fact that cloud computing was a new-bee, expecting to attain maturity over the coming years. l Today’s cloud arena is driven by several vital mantras — “quick provisioning”, “easy manageability”, “effective OPEX model”, “dynamic resource availability,” etc. All these

tions are being taken up with external are a result of a management layer cloud technologies and their offerings. that manages the cloud fabric and It makes sense to venture right from its flavors. These for obvious reasons scratch during such scenarios and dedid not prevail during the early rive quick results through external cloud virtualization days and hence I see service providers. Big enterprises have a disconnect between the way also adopted these approaches by ementerprises perceived early internal bracing hybrid solutions — maintaining virtualization-based private clouds their internal private clouds, as well as and current cloud services. l Adoption of heterogeneous virtuporting critical apps/business functions to external cloud services. alization technologies resulted in Keen toprivate connect world’s leading cloud technology has thus seen a several internal cloudswith and to theCloud range ofConnect end consumers tweaksolution providers? at Cloud India. there exists no common manage- Bevaried ing their offerings since its initial evolveable platform for such a varied ment. I believe this is backed by the landscape. Today’sRegister cloud technology at http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p basic fact that the technology providers providers claim several managealso realize that their offerings and solument platforms that support multitions should protect the investments hypervisors environments, however, enterprises have already made — this they may limit themselves feature Network thousands of industry peers implicitly results into their own success by feature when crosswith compared. l There is always a contention stories as well. within at Cloud Connect India. any organization to protect existing investments. So, an enterprise with http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p its internal private cloud would cautiously venture with external thirdparty cloud technology providers. The basic integration between both worlds comes out to be the first Register now for Cloud Connect and get driver of such a business case and attractive discounts! I still see a lot of improvements in the coming years to strengthen this http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p engagement. On the other hand, there are several reasons to feel good as well, against the ambiguity factors. Instead of enterprises venturing further into internal private Harness cloud opportunity for your cloud setups, there exist several simpler business at Cloud Connect India. options to migrate to external cloud setups — private and public both. http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p Today, we see several cloud success u Dharmesh Rathod is Associate VPstories across several segments of end IT Infrastructure and Projects Group at Essar users. Several greenfield implementa-

Hear from 60 plus premier speakers across 3 tracks at Cloud Connect. Register at http://bit.ly/ZznZ6p

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Feature

he demand-supply gap between the requirement and availability of skills in cloud computing is fast widening. A recent Zinnov-EMC study suggests that India would require at least 100,000 professionals in private cloud alone by 2015 and we are clearly not positioned to address this mammoth surge in demand. The availability of “skilled” IT workers for cloud computing will be a persistent and pervasive challenge, according

to a Microsoft-IDC research titled “Climate Change: Cloud’s Impact on IT Organizations and Staffing”. IDC estimates that the overall number of IT positions in end-user organizations worldwide will grow at a CAGR of 4.3 percent between 2011 and 2015 and reach 29.3 million in 2015. Interestingly, cloud-related skills represent virtually all of the growth opportunities in IT worldwide and will grow 26 percent annually through 2015. IDC believes there could be as

many as 7 million cloud-related jobs in IT worldwide by 2015. Of the 7 million jobs, the Asia-Pacific will adopt private IT cloud services more aggressively than EMEA or North America. According to the study, two factors that would strongly impact cloudrelated IT job creation in the region are: (a) Public infrastructure challenges, which will help spur investment in private IT cloud services (b) In the emerging market, spending on IT cloud services will be subject to less

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Feature ‘legacy drag’ than in developed regions. The primary reason though for such high job numbers is the immense IT workforce in the region. Cloud-related IT jobs will grow at 32 percent per year to more than 2.3 million in the Asia-Pacific by the end of 2015. Hiring managers at organizations are finding it increasingly challenging to find candidates with relevant skillsets for cloud computing. There are as many as 1.7 million open requisitions for cloud-related IT jobs worldwide in 2012, according to the Microsoft-IDC research. The single most important factor hiring managers cite for failing to fill those jobs is a lack of appropriately skilled candidates. Certification, training, and experience are three of the top four most important characteristics hiring managers rely on in selecting a candidate for a cloud-related job, “potential” being the most important criterion for selection. “We agree that there is a shortage of relevant talent given that these technologies are new and have gained prominence over a short period of time. However, it might be interesting to note that disruptive trends and technologies today take only few months to scale to reach a critical mass, unlike in the past where it took years or decades. This factor alone contributes to the shortage of talent across the globe for disruptive technologies. As a result, it has led to a war-for-talent amongst companies,” says Atul Sood, GM & Global Head, Cloud Practice & Delivery, Wipro Technologies. Gopalakrishna Bylahalli, VP & CTO, Happiest Minds admits that they too are facing shortage of right cloud skills. “This is mainly because of three reasons: first, cloud is a vast subject; second, people have still not transformed to

“We are seeing good traction for our course in cloud and expect about 30,000 engineering students to go through this course this year”

Krishna Kant, Head – EMC Academic Alliance, South East Asia and Russia, EMC work on a virtualized environment; and third not many are skilled to explore the power of cloud through multi-tenancy.”

BRIDGING THE GAP

To address this demand-supply gap, companies focused on cloud computing are working on re-skilling their existing staff and equipping fresh engineering graduates with the required skill sets. For instance, in early 2012, EMC designed a cloud infrastructure services (CIS) course to educate students about cloud deployment and service models, cloud infrastructure and key considerations in migrating to cloud computing. “We are seeing good traction for this course and we expect about 30,000 engineering students to go through this course this year,” says Krishna Kant, Head – EMC Academic Alliance, South East Asia and Russia, EMC. The Microsoft-IDC report reinstates that employers most often rely on a trusted third party to prepare a candidate when building or acquiring new skill sets. “Sometimes that third party is another enterprise, a competitor, a supplier, or even a client. However, early adopters rely on training and, in some cases, certification of candidates to be assured of relevant competence and

“There is a shortage of talent across the globe for disruptive technologies, which is leading to a war-for-talent among companies”

sufficient capability,” the report stated. Sood of Wipro Technologies asserts that academia can play a significant role in helping bridge this skill gap. “It would be in the right interest of academia to introduce courses that will be the building blocks of tomorrow. Industry practitioners can then partner with these future technologists to craft business propositions that will provide unique differentiations to organizations.” Mid-tier IT services company Happiest Minds, overcomes the lack of cloud resource pool by training its people on different cloud stacks, which it has created internally. “We also partner with cloud technology providers, which allows us to access their technology for training and certification. Additionally, we get our people formally certified through leading cloud technology providers,” says Bylahalli of Happiest Minds. In future, it seems all areas of the IT organization will be affected by transition to the cloud. In fact, Kant of EMC points out some of the new positions cloud will give birth to, including cloud application architects, cloud software engineers, cloud system administrators, cloud capacity planners, cloud financial analysts, cloud computing architects, and cloud network engineers. With demand to grow manifold, finding people with right cloud skills will emerge as a huge challenge for the companies in the coming years. Companies can only overcome this challenge by creating a sound strategy and emphasizing on relevant training and certifications.

Atul Sood, GM & Global Head, Cloud

Practice & Delivery, Wipro Technologies

informationweek may 2013

Ayushman Baruah ayushman.baruah@ubm.com

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Feature

ways to avoid costly cloud surprises How can you avoid cost overruns with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Amazon and other cloud services? Cloud usage assessment vendors Cloudability and Cloudyn share tips By Charles Babcock

se of infrastructure as service is growing, but do users know what they’re doing in the cloud? Two critical analyses would suggest that they don’t. Cloudyn is one of several usage assessment and optimization firms that have been started to serve cloud customers. These new companies often make a basic online service available for free, upping the ante with monthly charges once users discover how much they can learn from the monitoring and diagnostic services. Cloudyn and another such firm, Cloudability, for example, charge USD 49 a month for usage analysis and reporting. The two paired up at Cloud Connect 2013, a UBM Tech event in Santa Clara, Calif., to offer snapshots of their customers’ cloud practices and how those practices could be improved. Fifty-eight percent run their cloud applications in an uncontrolled

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fashion, changing the application frequently but not studying how well it’s running on its initially selected server and or figuring out where to run it for optimum cost effectiveness, said Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner in the session, “Best Practices in Cloud Optimization.” “Eighty percent of instances are underutilized,” he said, suggesting that the IT practice of overprovisioning in the data center has carried over to the cloud. Fifteen percent were overusing their server instances, meaning customers were experiencing delays in getting responses or some traffic wasn’t able to access the business’s cloud application. A 15 percent overutilization rate probably corresponds to a 7 percent loss of business, said Wagner. Wagner derived those figures from looking at aggregated data from 450 Cloudyn customers over the last 12 months. Four percent of those customers were spending USD 1 million or more a year with Amazon

Web Services, although most were spending far less. One of the most striking details to pop out of the study, however, was that 16 percent of the use of AWS Elastic Block Store, the persistent disk storage associated with a running instance, “are unattached and subject to deletion,” Wagner told an audience of about 35 attendees at the session. In other words, the original running instance had most likely been decommissioned but the ESB volume left intact, useless but still being charged for. Average CPU utilization is 17 percent. Maximum RAM utilization is 64 percent, he said. These figures are higher than typical data center studies, which have pegged average CPU utilization in the range of 8 percent to 12 percent. Even so, they show a margin where significant savings could be realized. Although customers reviewing these figures might conclude there is a danger of being charged too much in the cloud, Wagner said

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the opposite. “Cloud vendors love charging less,” he said, posting the slogan on the screen, and adding, “This is not a typo.” Cloud vendors want their services to be an economic alternative to IT operations in the data center and would like a clear economic advantage to emerge in customers’ eyes. Unused resources for which customers are automatically charged harm that goal. Amazon Web Services periodically boasts of price cuts, many of them small and only a few of them affecting its core EC2 compute service. Nevertheless, graphs of cloud services can show a steady price decline. Amazon in particular offers a price advantage to customers who sign up for reserved instances, paying an upfront fee for guaranteed access to a defined amount of service for a year. But 81 percent of Cloudyn customers’ instances are running in the moreexpensive, on-demand mode. To use reserved instances, companies must know what their steady state usage is and purchase that as reserved instance capacity, said Wagner. It’s actually optimal to purchase a little above the steady state usage so that occasional peaks don’t trigger frequent firing up of supplemental ondemand instances to cover the traffic. Mat Ellis, CEO of Cloudability, analyzed spending by 6,000 companies amounting to USD 400 million. One of the most interesting details he put on the screen was a chart showing how much of that spending took place in AWS’ U.S. East data center complex in Ashburn, Va., as opposed to other regions, such as U.S. West in Washington State or Northern California. U.S. East accounted for the bulk of AWS customer traffic. U.S. East accounts for 66 percent to 70 percent of Amazon traffic, according to the chart. “This hasn’t changed over a two-year period, despite three major outages” at the site, said Ellis. But his main focus was on how his customers spent their money in the cloud, not where they spent it. Ellis said he fired up server instances once himself in U.S. West, as opposed to his

usual target of U.S. East, and forgot about them, leading to a charge of USD 1,600 for resources he never used. No one is immune to setting themselves up for overage charges, he said. Among other examples he cited, one customer, a software development company, budgeted for everything it used during the work week over the course of a year, not realizing development teams left everything running on weekends and holidays as well. It had a budget of several million dollars for cloud use; the final bill came in for USD 350,000 beyond what it had budgeted. Another company was aware

using a service provider into one bill, instead of getting several. It might qualify you for a volume price break, Ellis advised. And use AWS’ reserved instances, whenever possible, for its hourly rate reduction. Only 20 percent of Cloudability’s customers use reserved instances, he noted.

Go On A “Diet”

Watch for how your usage varies and try to right size your servers. Employ Amazon’s autoscaling to fire up more instances when you need them and decommission them during much of the time when you don’t. Meanwhile, you might be able to

Cloud vendors want their services to be an economic alternative to IT operations in the data center. Unused resources for which customers are charged harm that goal of its regular business and IT cloud bill but didn’t know its five-member development and operations team also was spending USD 5,000 a month in the cloud. The result: an unexpected USD 60,000 bill. Ellis outlined the following five steps to avoid surprises.

Determine Your Usage

Check Usage

Seek Out Price Breaks

“Don’t accept, ‘Oh, we don’t use all that much,’” he said. Cloud services report usage monthly with the bill, and reports are available on usage as the month progresses for customers who care to ask for them. And, of course, third-party usage tracking services such as Cloudability and Cloudyn can help with graphic and detailed bills. Check every month to see whether you’re using the resources that your employees have initiated. Look for signs of low usage and start asking questions. Consolidate all employees

downsize your 24-hour-a-day server to something more appropriate.

Tag Your Resources

Use tags to label your resources. This lets you know what resources are being used for and seek explanations when usage goes up. Current cloud billing tends to be poorly labeled. When you can see the bill is bigger it can still be hard to see why. Charge back to users, and keep users informed with weekly updates, Ellis said. A questioner in the audience pointed out that cloud usage was basically undoing the gains inside the data center of virtualization — consolidating applications on fewer servers. Now users were initiating more servers outside the data center with low usage rates, all over again. Both Wagner and Ellis conceded that was “somewhat true today, but it’s early in cloud usage” and better usage patterns will restore the savings.

Source: InformationWeek USA

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CIO Life

‘My inspirations from life’

irish Rao shares his lessons from early childhood, his upbringing and how he has learnt to learn something from every person, and to convert challenges into opportunities. Always looking at the bigger picture in life, Girish’s career graph is an inspiring lesson to every person who wants to make it big in life. Here is Girish Rao in his own words: Born and brought up in Mumbai, the city with a ‘never-say-die’ spirit, there were several early lessons for me, that have shaped me into the individual and the professional that I am today. Just like the transformation of a cocoon into a butterfly, I have imbibed several qualities and traits that have helped me transform from a child born into a family with a never-say-die spirit, into an individual who sees every challenge as a stepping stone that will lead him to a bigger opportunity or goal in life. Challenges have always encouraged me, rather than set me back. Some early lessons in life came from my immediate family, and these lessons have proved to be invaluable in the larger context of life — personal as well as professional. Childhood was fun for me, but challenging for my parents who aspired and worked extremely hard to provide me a decent education. Though we stayed in a small house and had economic limitations, my parents ensured that my ambitions and aspirations were never suppressed. I have been fortunate to have parents who were forward looking and wanted to ensure that their children got educated in an English-medium school — even while realizing that it would impact their financial condition in a huge way. I was a little above average student academically, and Geography, Science and Maths were some of my favorite subjects. My first big lesson in life came from none other than my mother — perhaps that’s one reason why the role of a mother is so important in a child’s life – as thoughts of your mother shape your

informationweek may 2013

life and your future too. Early on in life, I used to observe how my mother used to manage everything in the house with limited financial resources. I always used to observe how brilliantly she managed within the limited resources she had. This changed my thought process completely, and even today, when I am presented with a problem or a challenge, I look at how I can make the best out the constraints that are in front of me. ‘Doing more with less’ was a mantra I learnt from my mother years back, though today, this is a common mantra often repeated by management gurus. DR or Disaster Recovery may be an often repeated term in management circles, and even a regulation today — but my first understanding of a DR plan came from my mother. Contingency planning came naturally to my mother, who used to always reserve and keep a backup from the minimal resources she used to have at her disposal. I also learnt some early lessons in ‘contingency planning’ from my mother, who used to make traditional savories at home to earn some extra money. This money proved to be useful for emergency purposes. I would observe and participate in preparing the same. Even today whenever I feel stressed, I take to cooking to de-stress myself.

Music in the genes

We come from a family of musicians. My grandfather was a musician, and my father wanted me to be a tabla player. I started early and was well-versed with playing tabla at the age of 9; I have played the instrument with well-known Ghazal singers. As Indian music is all about improvisation and creativity, this helped me ingrain a value of innovation and improvisation in whatever I do. I always feel that there is a better way to do things — one has to just discover the same.

First touch of computers

When I was in the 10th standard, our school had organized a demo of what a computer looked like. Professor Narula

Winner of several awards including the Global CIO award from InformationWeek, Girish Rao, CIO, Marico is a man whose success in life shows that timetested values of hard work and persistence and ability to think big always pay off in the long run. In an inspiring interview, he shares with Srikanth RP, his key inspirations from life, and the lessons learnt from every individual www.informationweek.in

of Abacus Computers gave us a demo. My first glance at the computer made me realize that it was an opportunity for me to do something different in life. Professor Narula also started conducting computer training classes at the school. Though I was fascinated with the idea of learning computers, my only problem was the princely ` 275 that was to be paid for attending the classes. As money was limited, my family initially resisted the idea, and saw this more as a luxury. However, my persistence paid off, and I succeeded in convincing my father. I joined the classes, and learnt BASIC — my first experience with programming. After completing the classes, I decided to do something in this field. At that time though I never knew that this would turn out to be my career, I was nevertheless extremely interested, and patiently waited for opportunities that would help me explore the fascinating and interesting world of computers. It is said that when you want something really hard in life, the whole universe conspires to make it happen. Though I wanted to learn computers, the odds against me were huge. Computer education was expensive, and I did not have the resources. I was nevertheless optimistic that an opportunity would come that would help me learn. An opportunity did come and I grabbed it with both hands. During this period, I got an opportunity to work with a share registry firm called Sharepro Services. Though the job was of data entry, I saw this as an opportunity to make some money that would come in handy for my education that I wanted to pursue in the field of computers. This was also an apt job for me, as it gave me an opportunity to work on computers. There was an added benefit — the same company also had a training center, which used to train people on computers. While working for Sharepro, I realized the importance of upgrading my education. I wanted to do a course in COBOL — the dominant computer programming language then. However, doing a course was expensive — as I had to shell out an amount of ` 2,500.

My college started early, and after attending classes in college, I used to go to job. Simultaneously, I utilized my skills in music to take tuitions, and also for participating in concerts. My daily schedule was something like this: attend college in morning, go to Sharepro Services for doing data entry, and then finally, take music classes. While time management was extremely difficult, the objective was simple — save and generate money for my education. Money was extremely important, and I used to walk about 45 minutes a day to save money. Through all these activities, I earned enough money to fund my own education. These initial lessons in life taught me some core skills, which have helped me become more successful in my career. Everything I did at that time was aligned to the larger goal, i.e. to learn computers.

Never say ‘no’ to any challenge or opportunity

administration jobs as a person who was doing the print related job had left the organization. Similarly, when an opportunity came for managing backups, I took up this opportunity too. In short, I took every opportunity to learn everything I could in IT. Later on, when a key faculty member who used to teach COBOL left, I put my hand up and stepped into the role of a trainer. This period at Sharepro taught me the importance of looking at every challenge as a big opportunity to learn something new in life. I also used to pick up magazines from shops that sold used computer books. I learnt programming language ‘C’ by looking at old books. Life keeps on offering us many opportunities; a small opportunity may

n “Do not develop a love for your ow ideas and solution. It tends to be restrictive and growth becomes e” incremental rather than disruptiv

While working for Sharepro, I learnt several skills. The most important thing is probably the ability to think clearly. For example, while I learned COBOL at a sister concern of Sharepro, I did not always have access to a computer to practice the commands. To address this challenge, I wrote problems on a piece of paper. This exercise gave me conceptual clarity, and gave me the ability to clearly think through any problem. This also gave me the capability to do a mental walkthrough of how things could be executed. I still have those written notes with me, and even today, I use the same approach when faced with a problem or challenge. I also realized quite early in my life to always look at the bigger picture. For example, you may be given a small task and you may refuse it without realizing the long-term benefits. For example, when I was working in Sharepro as a data entry operator, there was an opportunity to do print-related

turn out to be a major career change for you. If you have the passion and the interest for a certain field, you should leverage every possible opportunity to ensure that you are well-connected and well-read on that domain.

The big leap

If you wait patiently and hone your knowledge and ability, you can take a big stride in your career. For me, a turning point in my career came when I joined Garware Paints as a management trainee. Traveling from home to office (Khar to Ghodbunder Road at Thane) was a big issue due to the distance. While I was working at Garware Paints, I received a message from one of my students who had joined Marico. Marico had a pertinent and challenging problem. One of its PCs was not booting and the importance of that PC can be gauged from the fact that this PC was the only PC then in the whole company.

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CIO Life I realized at that time that every skill counts — many small and mundane jobs may turn out to be exactly what you need to solve the big problem. For example, using the hardware and software skills learned during my stint at Sharepro, I managed to solve the problem and helped Marico recover 4-5 months of data. Subsequently, when the vacancy came up, I was offered a role in their IT department. I started my IT career as a developer-cum-administrator. In those times, there was no systems of automated backup, I took upon myself to do the same as well as other jobs like cabling, crimping, solving hardware issues on the servers. Gradually, as applications we being built , I started expanding my scope of work and started understanding functions like finance, materials and supply chain. I was part of the core team, which evaluated a host of ERP solutions to get the right fit for Marico. We evaluated close to 14 ERP solutions, and finally zeroed in on SAP. This exercise gave me an insight into how business works from a managerial perspective and key aspects of decision making and solution selection. I cut my teeth in playing a big part in the SAP ERP implementation. My role in leading all the technical aspects of the SAP implementation gave me a wider perspective of the impact that IT can have on business objectives and deliverables. Despite huge challenges, we managed to complete the implementation six months before the go-live date. This experience changed my perspective completely, and gave me the experience to learn and plan for big projects.

AdviSe for the younger generation

Today, a lot of youngsters make shortterm plans and career moves, without looking at the big picture. I believe youngsters must always expand their scope of work and look at ways to learn something from every situation, opportunity and challenge. During the SAP implementation, we did not have a reference case in India, and no peer or industry leader

informationweek may 2013

to look up to. We did our entire SAP implementation in just 9 months — and we took a stretched goal. As a team, we realized that if you have to progress, you have to stretch yourself. Technologists must also learn to present their technology solutions to business in a way that the business understands clearly. For example, during the SAP implementation, while implementing the technology solution was a challenge, the bigger challenge was change management and encouraging users to use the solution. We handled the ‘change management’ issue by communicating extensively with our employees, as some of them had the impression that they would lose their jobs because of the ERP implementation.

Move out of your comfort zone

It is critical to network. IT people restrict themselves to their own peers and to their own set of challenges. Exposing yourself to diverse people and diverse skills help them to adapt faster and also anticipate challenges in other domains. It also increases their versatility and ability to look at solutions beyond IT. Be a part of several forums to start with. This will also hone your time management skills. Do not develop a love for your own ideas and solution. It tends to be restrictive and growth becomes incremental rather than disruptive. In short, I would advise anyone planning a career in IT to have a long-

lly “Short-term failures are also equa important for long-term success. The final truth is – there are no shortcuts in life”

It is also extremely important to move out of your comfort zone, and look at ways to challenge yourself. When you are in a field like IT, you cannot stay stagnant. You will have to learn to challenge existing perceptions and accepted notions. One needs to think whether the experience and knowledge from other sectors can be applied to other sectors. For example, can I use CRM that I use in my B2B environment and use it for my distributors? Another example is the usage of SMS. Most marketers were using this medium for one way communication. We used SMS to take service quality feedback from customers of our subsidiary, Kaya Clinic. This simple application has helped us retain our customers as customers feel that the company cares for them. CIOs also need to broaden their horizon beyond IT. In other words, IT has to move beyond IT. For example, in this era of smartphones and robots, should the knowledge of a CIO be confined to IT? If robots can be deployed in factories to automate processes and boost productivity, can a CIO be oblivious to that fact?

term aspect. One should also learn to pace himself or herself in life. This could be in five-year intervals. Whatever you do should complement your long term vision or goal. Think big, but act small. Short-term results are also extremely important, as they are the means to a bigger goal. Short-term failures are also equally important for long-term success. The final truth is — there are no shortcuts in life. Keep yourself grounded and your focus should be on ‘need’ vis-à-vis ‘greed’. This has its roots in spirituality as needs are limited, but greed is unlimited. One needs to be conscious of how much is enough! In the long run, I would like to be known as a ‘business leader’ than a technology leader. Though IT has made great progress, there is still a perception that ‘IT’ is an enabler. I would like to change that perception to position ‘IT’ as a direct business contributor. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com

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Event

he first edition of the 4G World India conference and expo, held at Gurgaon’s Epicenter on April 25-26, 2013, saw an electric atmosphere and participation from the entire ICT community. Organized by UBM India, the two day event saw collective participation of more than one thousand exhibitors, delegates and speakers—discussing the best way to monetize 4G networks, optimize 4G services, and leverage mobile devices and applications for profit. A number of senior telecom executives came together to throw insights on critical aspects like regulatory considerations, policy making, small cells, mobile backhaul and customer experience optimization solutions, to mobile devices and new business models.

Full House

The event was started with a huge response to the inaugural session comprising of Keynote address by Arvind Bali, Director and CEO; Videocon Telecom and exclusive telco business leader roundtable: ‘4G- enabling the next wave of telecom growth in India’; and Operator presentation by Abhay Savargankar, Chief of Network Operations, India and South Asia, Bharti Airtel. The opening session witnessed the participation of major telcos and Government PSUs and was attended by over four hundred delegates and industry experts. Speaking at the 4G World India, Bali said that the company plans to roll-out networks in some selective circles initially. Bali added that device ecosystem is one of the major

challenges for 4G in India and device availability and cost will catalyze the ecosystem going ahead. The other top telecom executives who made their presence felt during the session included Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer at Aircel; AK Bhargava, Director – Operations, Bharat Broadband Nigam Limited; RK Bahuguna, Managing Director, Railtel; Rajiv Bawa, Chief Representative Officer, Telenor; Vikram Tiwathia, Associate Director General, COAI; KK Minocha, Deputy Director General, Department of Telecommunications; Dr CS Rao, President, Reliance Communications; Vimal Wakhlu, CMD of Telecom Consultants of India Limited, DOT; Sanjay Rohatgi, Managing Director, Service Provider , Cisco - India and SAARC. The session was moderated by Berge Ayvazian, Senior Consultant, Heavy Reading. In his presentation, Savargaonkar said that the demand for data is growing rapidly in the country. “In

the long run, networks would need to incorporate small cells and WiFi to overcome these challenges,” he said. Bharti is the only operator to have launched the 4G services in the country. It has launched services in Kolkata, Bengaluru, Pune and Chandigarh. The leaders concluded the session with a call for collaboration between various stakeholders of the industry to develop the mobile broadband ecosystem in a way where resources could be used optimally, resulting in better return on investment.

Industry advocates spectrum at right price

The second session of the day included presentation on Mobile Backhaul from Michael Nielsen, VP-Packet Networking, Ciena communications; and Panel discussion on Regulatory and spectrum Issues. The panelists for regulatory session included eminent experts like Anil

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Event

Prakash- Secretary General, ITU-APT Foundation on India; Satyen Gupta, ExPrincipal Advisor, TRAI, Hon. Secretary General, NGN Forum; Vikram Tiwathia, Associate Director General, COAI; and Mahesh Khera, President, Broadband India Forum. The panel was moderated by Vikram Tiwathia. The panelists opined that the spectrum availability is going to play a significant role in achieving the scale in 4G services. Earlier in the day, a similar opinion was shared by Dr CS Rao of Reliance Communications, who said that “Spectrum should be provided to the telcos at the right price. Further spectrum harmonization is also required.” One of the highlights of the first day of the event was a presentation by Atsuhisa Shirai, Director, International Roaming, Global Business Division, NTT Docomo. It was of special interest for the Indian telcos since NTT Docomo is one of the few players globally to have launched 4G services. The day concluded by technology sessions on 4G RAN, HetNets, Wi-Fi and small cells; 4G network evolution and monetization and next generation packet core and backhaul. Top executives who spoke at length during these roundtable discussions included Dr Venkatesh Sunkad, General Manager – RAN Strategy and Architecture, Vodafone India; Sandeep Gupta, Head - Radio (SAE), Bharti Airtel; Suresh Nair, Small Cell Forum; Joe Zeto, Director, Product Marketing, Ixia; Debjani De, Senior Architect, Radisys; Dr. Mohd. Shakouri, Chairman, WiMAX Forum; Bijender Yadav, Director – Network Planning & Projects, Sistema

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Shyam Teleservices; Tuuli Sarvillina, Group Product Manager, Mobile Routing Business Unit, Tellabs;Deepak Saxena, AVP – Network Services, Idea Cellular; Viswanathan Ramaswamy, SVP - Technology Strategy and Architecture, Vodafone India; Hemant Malik – CTO, Juniper Networks; Navneet Dhingra, Head of Mobile Broad Band (MBB) Core for Region India, Nokia Siemens Networks; Balaji Kulothungan, CEO, PointRed Teleco and Michael Nielsen, VP - Packet Networking, Ciena Communications. The third session of the day also saw presentations from Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director, Juniper Networks; Jaswant Boyat, Technical Director - SP India & SAARC, Cisco Systems India; and Berge Ayvazian, Senior Consultant, Heavy Reading.

New growth areas and challenges

After the blockbuster first day, the second day started with Robert Sewell, Head of Technology Solutions, Aircel giving keynote address on the best way to monetize 4G networks in India, followed by highly engaging presentations from Gulzar Azad, Head of Access, Google India; and Steve Northridge, Product Marketing Director, Oracle Communications. During his presentation at 4G World India, Azad said that broadband cannot be scaled unless the country manages to scale fixed infrastructure. “It is going to be more and more challenging [scale the mobile broadband]. There are number of issues with quality which are also suppressing the demand,” Azad said.

The panelists for the sessions comprised of Ari Banerjee, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading; Nitin Bhandari, AVP, New Products & Partnerships, Vodafone India; Joby Babu, Chief Operating Officer, Nimbuzz; Steve Northridge, Product Marketing Director of Oracle Communications; Sethumadhavan Srinivasan, Director, Strategy & Marketing, Huawei India; Geeta Gurnani, Telecom Solutions and Business Development Lead, IBM India South Asia; Anupam Vasudev, CMO, Aircel India; Anand Narang, Director, Marketing - Devices, Huawei India; Shwetank Dixit, Web Evangelist, Opera Software and Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO, DataWind. It was for the first time that the conference covered the device ecosystem as well, which is considered to play an important role in the mobile broadband revolution. While discussing the 4G roadmap, Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of Datawind says that, big screen devices will drive more video consumption, which is crucial for driving the 4G growth. The vendor partners of the event included Ciena Corp., Oracle Corp., Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, Qualcomm, Vidyo, Persistent, Huawei, IBM, Radisys, Pointred, Ixia, PeerApp and Tellabs. Additionally, the event also received support from industry bodies such as WiMAX Forum, ISP Association of India (ISPAI),COAI, Small Cell Forum, BWCI, ITU-APT and Broadband India Forum. u Jatinder Singh, is Principal

Correspondent, Light Reading India

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Global CIO

7 tech trends CIOs call overrated

Chris Murphy

IT leaders share their opinions on “the most overrated IT movement.” Do some of these buzzwords bug you?

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

he beauty of any tech buzzword is that its time will pass. Remember when it was “e”- everything? Much of that nonsense fell away, leaving reasonable options such as ecommerce and e-books. Or how about “web services?” The ugly side of tech buzzwords, of course, is that something new always steps up to replace them. People are getting fed up with Big Data and cloud computing lately — many believe in the concept but are irked that the terms cover so much landscape that they become meaningless. For InformationWeek’s CIO Profiles series, we always ask tech leaders what they consider to be the most overrated IT movement. Here are seven areas these leaders cited:

Cloud Computing ROI

Outsourcing

Anthony DeCanti, UniGroup CIO: “It’s not that I don’t support or believe that [cloud computing is] going to happen, it’s just that there are so many case studies that are simply not true. There is still a lot of work to be done to make it easier and more affordable.” Kenneth Shulman, Broadview Networks CIO: “If you read the trade press uncritically, you’d conclude that if you’re not outsourcing help desk, support or development, you’re missing the boat. Frankly, it has its place and offers benefits, but there are hidden costs that are often overlooked.”

Business-Tech Misalignment

Zack Hicks, Toyota CIO: “I hate hearing complaints about not having a business strategy. Businesses do have strategies, but they don’t exist in a leather-bound book. You just have to spend time with your business leaders and you’ll find out their plans and needs.”

Big Data Over Small Data

Ken Harris, Shaklee CIO: “I’m not convinced that Big Data for most

companies is a promising investment right now. We haven’t learned how to handle small data well, let alone throw Big Data on there. That isn’t to say there aren’t some companies for whom Big Data could be a game changer, but most companies don’t even effectively handle small data.” Or, for another take on where Big Data’s overrated, here’s John Tonnison, Tech Data CIO: “The idea of ‘Big Data’ being a new, breakout discipline and movement. We’ve all been capturing, storing, mining, tuning and looking for patterns in masses of data from the moment we started to measure disk space in terabytes.”

Consumerization Of IT

Cloud Computing Ease Of Use

Steve Mills, Rackspace CIO: “People use technology more in their personal lives than they did a decade ago, but this feels like a consequence of Moore’s Law applied over a few decades. The fact that people can now use the same tools at home and at work is a big opportunity. It’s up to the IT shop to stay ahead on relevant technologies and keep updating tools to make the workplace productive and fun.”

Richard Thomas, Quintiles CIO: “The cloud is still too complicated. Anything that’s as hyped as it has been is unlikely to meet expectations. The cloud has tremendous possibilities — and I’m a huge proponent — but we need a reality check.”

Tech Panaceas

Keith J. Figlioli, Premier CIO: “The IT industry tends to come up with a big, sexy term to try and get the mainstream to adopt all the things that term can solve, when it usually can’t. The industry needs to walk a fine line on overmarketing IT compared with what we’re actually trying to accomplish.” u Chris Murphy is Editor of

InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com

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Down to Business

CIOs must embrace digital business

Rob Preston

The title ‘chief digital officer’ may yet go the way of the ‘chief evangelist,’ but the digital business movement is a force CIOs can’t ignore

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

informationweek may 2013

n his magazine cover story, “Goodbye IT, Hello Digital Business,” InformationWeek editor Chris Murphy exhorts IT organizations to get out of their “back-office, support-the-business role” and finally become developers of “products and apps that customers use directly” — that is, take the reins of the modern “digital business.” Those CIOs who aren’t at the center of their companies’ e-commerce, social networking, mobile app and CRM initiatives risk being shunted into an infrastructure and operations role — to the non-growth, non-happening parts of their companies. Consider the digital business that Starbucks has become. Since creating Digital Ventures, a marketingIT partnership funded like a startup in 2009, Starbucks has become a retail leader in mobile payments, improved its loyalty card system with complementary smartphone apps and other innovations, and created a nationwide digital network that offers free in-store Wi-Fi and third-party content. Those responsibilities now fall mainly to Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman. Starbucks CIO Curt Gartner, meantime, oversees what the company calls global technology and engineering services, including retail technology, software engineering, information security, finance systems and global infrastructure. Both sets of responsibilities are critical, and both executives are members of Starbucks’ senior leadership team. And while Garner’s responsibilities appear to paint him into the “infrastructure and operations” corner, he led the revamp of the company’s entire in-store retail system, which greatly improved Starbucks’ traditional customer service and is the platform for in-store mobile payments. Or consider the evolving role of Dow Chemical’s long-time CIO, David Kepler, who recently added the title of Chief Sustainability Officer and appended “business services” to his CIO title. Dave Bent, CIO of office supply

wholesaler United Stationers, added the title of VP of e-business services as he took on responsibility for a business unit that sells marketing services and software to United’s retail customers. Titles come and go. This isn’t about the title — chief digital officer may yet go the way of the chief evangelist. It’s about the role of business technology leaders in a commercial world that puts a premium on innovation and growth and considers everything else a cost center. As I argued in a recent column, “Are The CIO and IT organization replaceable?” CIOs must be technically savvy just as CFOs must be financially savvy. But CIOs are in a unique position to take on more of a central innovation role, as their IT organizations are “already intertwined (or should be) with every other company department,” I wrote. And in keeping with the digital business mantra, they must take on formal customer-facing responsibilities outside of traditional IT — in e-commerce, customer loyalty, product development and other core business areas. This isn’t to suggest that every CIO needs to run a business and be a rain maker. At the other extreme, however, our recent Global CIO survey finds that the customer-facing CIO is still the rare exception. Only 33 percent of the 188 IT executives who responded to our survey said their key IT staffers regularly visit with customers, only 23 percent said their CIOs regularly visit with customers, and a scant 19 percent said their CIO leads their company’s e-commerce or customer-facing web operations. Speaking at a breakfast meeting in Tampa recently, I asked the audience of mostly CIOs: Who among you meets regularly with customers? One or two hands went up. The prevailing sentiment: We know we should get out more, but we’re just too busy with dayto-day operations. u Rob Preston is VP and Editor-in-Chief of InformationWeek. You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.