Edit
CIOs should lead the business transformation t is a difficult and most trying time to be a CIO in India, and the rest of the world. In view of the business environment that changes so often, businesses are in a state of flux. Like a creature evolving itself over hundreds of years, to survive harsh conditions of its surroundings and predators, businesses change strategies, enter new markets, and move beyond traditional offerings— albeit at the speed of life. And today’s CIO has got to play a leadership role in this transformation. So while the CIO is planning new businesses strategies with other business heads, he is also going back to his IT side, and thinking how IT can support the new business mandate, in time. Earlier this year, InformationWeek USA conducted a survey among 203 IT leaders, all of them VP or C-level executives. The survey reveals that more than half the respondents (57 percent) worry they can’t implement new technologies fast enough. Just 32 percent of the business technology leaders are driving new products or services. And only 30 percent say their teams are creating a new revenue stream or business model. So clearly, IT needs to make innovation a priority and execute new projects faster. The survey suggests IT organizations need to focus on execution, not cliché concepts like ‘business-IT alignment.’ This survey is included in this issue. InformationWeek magazine instituted the Global CIO Award to acknowledge and recognize CIOs who are driving transformation. This annual award is presented to CIOs in recognition for their direct contribution to the business through strategic decisions, innovation and cutting edge projects. Last year, seven CIOs from leading Indian organizations spanning diverse industry verticals made it to our Global CIO List. In 2010, three Indian CIOs shared this honor. And in 2009, the year we introduced Global CIO in India, 10 Indian CIOs were honored along with 40 others from around the world. These top notch CIOs are now honorably inducted in the InformationWeek Global CIO Hall of Fame. This year (2012) we present the InformationWeek Global CIO Award to seven Indian CIOs. My team and the external jury believe these are absolutely the finest CIOs in India today. They will receive their awards at a ceremony at INTEROP Mumbai on October 10, 2012. Our cover story in this issue explains the whole process, the assessment parameters and the methodology. It profiles the InformationWeek Global CIOs for 2012 and also goes down the memory lane to honor past recipients of this award. Congratulations to all the winners! My team and I are also extremely grateful to the jury members, who, despite their busy schedules, carefully followed our guidelines and diligently went through the 10 shortlisted nominations and offered their scores. And special thanks to Rob Preston (VP and Editor-in-Chief ) and his team at InformationWeek USA, for participating in the jury this year, and offering their esteemed wisdom.
I
While the CIO is helping drive business strategy, he is also thinking how IT can support the new business mandate, in time
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u Brian Pereira is Editor of InformationWeek India. brian.pereira@ubm.com
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contents Vo l u m e 1 | I s s u e 1 1 |
September 2012
Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik
21 cover story CIOs must deliver business results Today’s CIOs are appraised on their strategies and innovative approaches to save costs, improve revenues, and boost customer satisfaction through cutting edge technology and innovation
the winners of global cio 2012 awards Amrita Gangotra
25
Bharti Airtel
26
LG Electronics India
27
Essar Group
28
Maruti Suzuki India
29
Bangalore International Airport
Daya Prakash
N Jayantha Prabhu
Rajesh Uppal
S Francis Rajan
32 Do you Twitter? Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/iweekindia
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informationweek september 2012
Shailesh Joshi
30
Godrej Industries
31
Indian Oil Corporation
S. Ramasamy
global cio 2011 Hall of fame
Find us on Facebook at http://www.facebook. com/informationweekindia
If you’re on LinkedIN, reach us at http://www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=2249272
www.informationweek.in
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY
feature
44
Evolving enterprise application landscape in India The rise of mobility and social networking technologies coupled with the emergence of cloud computing and robust BI and analytics tools is transforming the traditional enterprise applications landscape
case study
49
Mobile solution enables MSSL to enhance food safety An insight into how the business function and IT collaborated together to enable MSSL to control the usage of chemicals in its farms and give it a first-mover advantage in new geographies
12
16
54
interview
‘Analytics is becoming more socialized’ Mikael Hagstrom, Executive Vice President, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, SAS
INDEX..................................................................8
Tulip Telecom bags ` 87.23 crore deal from UIDAI
Worldwide IT outsourcing services spending to surpass USD 251 bn in 2012: Gartner
chirpings from twitterati................... 10 social sphere...............................................11 news analysis............................................. 18
Andhra Pradesh Tourism ties up with Mojostreet to help tourists
opinion.......................................................... 55
Check Point launches ThreatCloud – a collaborative network to fight cybercrime
analyst angle........................................... 65
Genpact, IIMU ink seven-year partnership
technology & risks.................................67
Only 17 percent of Asia Pacific CIOs involved in defining business strategies Infosys defragments IT with Cloud Ecosystem Hub
17
Highly popular television show, Satyamev Jayate, is a perfect example of how Big Data can be used to deliver maximum impact on society
Netmagic-Sanovi partner to offer DR-as-a-Service
India second most risk ridden data center location, reveals study
15
How Indian TV show Satyamev Jayate used Big Data to inspire the world
EDITORIAL.........................................................4
eBay deploys OpenStack cloud for R&D
14
case study
News
Cisco completes acquisition of NDS Group
13
52
60 percent of organizations in India struggling to manage digital information MindTree to widen SAP service portfolio
global cio................................................... 68 practical analysis................................. 69 down to business..................................... 70
september 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 7
Imprint
VOLUME 1 No. 11 n September 2012
print online newsletters events research
Managing Director : Sanjeev Khaira : Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar Printer & Publisher Associate Publisher & Director : Anees Ahmed Editor-in-Chief : Brian Pereira Executive Editor : Srikanth RP Principal Correspondent : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) : Amrita Premrajan (New Delhi) Senior Correspondent Copy Editor : Shweta Nanda
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Viraj Mehta Nilesh Mungekar Nitin Lahare Aditi Kanade
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associate office- pune Jagdish Khaladkar, Sahayog Apartment 508 Narayan Peth, Patrya Maruti Chowk, Pune 411 030 Tel: 91 (020) 2445 1574 (M) 98230 38315 e-mail: jagdishk@vsnl.com International Associate Offices USA Huson International Media (West) Tiffany DeBie, Tiffany.debie@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 408 879 6666, Fax: +1 408 879 6669 (East) Dan Manioci, dan.manioci@husonmedia.com Tel: +1 212 268 3344, Fax: +1 212 268 3355 EMEA Huson International Media Gerry Rhoades Brown, gerry.rhoadesbrown@husonmedia.com Tel: +44 19325 64999, Fax: + 44 19325 64998 Japan Pacific Business (PBI) Shigenori Nagatomo, nagatomo-pbi@gol.com Tel: +81 3366 16138, Fax: +81 3366 16139
Editorial index Person & Organization Akhilesh Tuteja, KPMG ................................................22 Amrita Gangotra, Bharti Airtel ................................25 Avinash Velhal, Atos International .........................48 Chaitanya Rajwade, Mahindra ShubhLabh Services .............................................................................49 David Briskman, Ranbaxy Laboratories................22 Daya Prakash, LG Electronics India ........................26 Debasish Pattanayak, Collabera .............................46 Dr Nilay Yajnik, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies..................................................24 Girish Rao, Marico..........................................................33 K T Rajan, Allergan ........................................................34 Kapil Sood, Oracle India..............................................46 LN Sundarrajan, Rewire...............................................46 Mayank Bathwal, BSLI..................................................20 Mikael Hagstrom, SAS ................................................54 Milind Joshi, AGC Networks......................................46 Monish Darda, Icertis ..................................................47 Mukund Deshpande, Persistent Systems ...........53 N Jayantha Prabhu, Essar Group ..........................27 N Nataraj, Hexaware Technologies.........................35 Pritha Choudhuri, Analytics Quotient ..................55
South Korea Young Media Young Baek, ymedia@chol.com Tel: +82 2227 34819; Fax : +82 2227 34866
Rajesh Uppal, Maruti Suzuki India .........................28
Printed and Published by Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar on behalf of UBM India Pvt Ltd, 6th floor, 615-617, Sagar Tech Plaza A, Andheri-Kurla Road, Saki Naka Junction, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400072, India. Editor: Brian Pereira, Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt Ltd, Plot No 1c/716, Off Dadaji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027.
S Ramasamy, Indian Oil Corporation ...................31
RNI NO. MAH ENG/2011/39874
Raju Vegesna, Zoho......................................................44 S Francis Rajan, Bangalore International Airport .............................29 Sanchit Vir Gogia, Forrester Research....................23 Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, Reliance Capital.........23 Shailesh Joshi, Godrej Industries ...........................30 Shanker Annaswamy, IBM India .............................20 Shyamala J, Ramco Systems ....................................47 Steve Durbin, Information Security Forum.........56 Sunil Bhave, Fujitsu Consulting India ...................46
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Company name Page No.
Website Sales Contact
Sunil Padmanabh, Gartner .......................................45 Suprakash Chaudhuri, SAP India............................46
IBM
2 www.ibm.com
ibm.com/puresystems/in
T G Dhandapani, TVS Motor Company.................34
Zoho
3 www.zoho.com
india-sales@ManageEngien.com
Umesh Jain, Yes Bank ..................................................33
IFSEC
5 www.ifsecindia.com
anupam.sah@ubm.com
V S Parthasarathy, Mahindra & Mahindra............32
IBM
9 www.ibm.com
ibm.com/in/xoffers
Vanitha Narayanan, IBM India/South Asia...........18
Interop
42-43
www.interop.in
salil.warior@ubm.com
Venkat Viswanathan, LatentView Analytics........45
Eaton
71
www.eaton.com/powerquality/india EatonPowerQualityIndia@eaton.com
APC
72 www.SEreply.com
esupport@apc.com
Vijay Mahajan, Mahindra & Mahindra ..................51 Vijay Sethi, Hero MotoCorp.......................................32
Important Every effort has been taken to avoid errors or omissions in this magazine. In spite of this, errors may creep in. Any mistake, error or discrepancy noted may be brought to our notice immediately. It is notified that neither the publisher, the editor or the seller will be responsible in respect of anything and the consequence of anything done or omitted to be done by any person in reliance upon the content herein. This disclaimer applies to all, whether subscriber to the magazine or not. For binding mistakes, misprints, missing pages, etc., the publisher’s liability is limited to replacement within one month of purchase. © All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Mumbai only. Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. UBM India Pvt Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.
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informationweek september 2012
www.informationweek.in
Deriving business benefit from social media collaboration Organizations have only recently employed social media for community collaboration. But this is being done rather sporadically, without a deeper understanding about how mass collaboration will achieve business objectives http://bit.ly/NQrnJ8
AndreasStiehler@AndreasStiehler tweeted: Deriving biz benefit 4m #socialmedia collaboration http://t.co/S0jQ2Qbf Is Email diminishing in your org as well?
Innerteams@innerteam tweeted:
Deriving business benefit from social media #collaboration #socbizhttp://t.co/txfc2pnn
Will iOS 6 bring new challenges for enterprise IT departments? The advanced mobility features in iOS 6 will likely fuel the trend towards BYOD even further; the increase in number of devices will increase the device management and security challenges http://bit.ly/RgpFAR
MokaFive@MokaFive tweeted:
“iOS 6 will likely fuel the trend towards #BYOD and bring your own app (BYOA) even further” Is your IT dept. prepared?
http://www.informationweek.in/Mobile/12-08-23/ Will_iOS_6_bring_new_challenges_for_enterprise_ IT_departments.aspx
Thomas Suarez@ThSuarez tweeted: Frank Leistner@kmjuggler tweeted:
Deriving biz benefit 4m #socialmedia collaboration http://t.co/S0jQ2Qbf Is Email diminishing in your org as well?
How the cloud is leveling the playing field for SMBs Small businesses are increasingly looking at the cloud as platform that not only reduces cost, but also enables them to focus on business growth and strategy rather than managing IT http://bit.ly/OWhEO6
Max Büchler@MaxBuchler tweeted:
It’s not just buying in expertise it’s all the rest: How the cloud is leveling the playing field for SMBs http://t.co/IuemMo7q #cloud
Will iOS 6 bring new challenges for enterprise IT departments? - InformationWeek India http://dlvr.
it/22clKC #iOSupdate
What every CIO needs to know about user experience design While CIOs are well prepared to deliver efficient and reliable technological solutions, they generally have little knowledge of the user experience field http://bit.ly/OlVbfI
SanjeevSamala@samalasa tweeted:
InformationWeek – Software >What every CIO needs to know about user experience design http://informationweek.in/Software/12-08-22/ What_every_CIO_needs_to_know_about_user_ experience_design.aspx via @iweekindia
Hardik Shah@HardikShah8 tweeted: Bizsensors@bizsensors tweeted:
Mike Michalik@mmichalik: Great post by IBM VP Ganesh Margabandhu>> How the cloud is leveling the playing field for #SMBs http://t.co/f95MDIuG #ibmcloud #India
SarderrCorr@corrsd tweeted:
How the cloud is leveling the playing field for SMBs http://bit.ly/MWOmwN #Cloudcomputing #IBMCloud #SMB’s
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informationweek september 2012
What every CIO needs to know about user experience design: With the commoditization of hardware and software http://bit.ly/OQkPFk
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News
T h e m o n t h i n t e c h n o lo g y Netmagic-Sanovi partner to offer DR-as-a-Service Netmagic Solutions, a managed IT hosting services firm and Sanovi Technologies, a provider of IT Disaster
Recovery Management (DRM) software products, have joined hands to offer Disaster Recovery (DR)-as-a-Service to support the business continuity and IT disaster recovery needs for enterprises. The DRaaS will use Sanovi’s CloudDRM software and Netmagic’s multi-location data centers and
Infrastructure Management Services for end-to-end management of DR operations. Customers can deploy their DR infrastructure either on physical and/or on virtual environment to meet their business requirements. The service provides built-in data replication, customizable DR SLAs that are monitored in real-time, automated DR drills, and tamper-proof audit and compliance reports. With this joint offering, Netmagic and Sanovi aim to help customers deploy a DR strategy without incurring huge upfront investments, provide assured DR SLAs, and reduce the business exposure to IT outages in a pay-as-you-grow model. The service can also be availed by customers who have their primary data centers in-house or with another data center provider.
Cisco completes acquisition of NDS Group Cisco announced that it has completed the acquisition of NDS Group, a provider of video software and content security solutions that enable service providers and media companies to securely deliver and monetize new video experiences. On March 15, 2012, Cisco announced a definitive agreement to acquire NDS. NDS’ software platform, customer segments and services model complement Cisco’s networked video offerings and accelerate the delivery of Videoscape, Cisco’s comprehensive platform that enables service providers and media companies to deliver next-generation video entertainment experiences, Through the NDS acquisition, Cisco has also expanded its global video footprint in new and emerging markets. “Through our combined expertise, we look forward to provide the next-generation TV experience that is more immersive, engaging and social, while helping to create new revenue opportunities for our service provider customers,” said Jesper Anderson, Senior VP and GM, Service Provider Video Technology Group. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco paid approximately USD 5 billion, including the repayment of debt and retention-based incentives, to acquire all the business and operations of NDS. NDS’ employees join Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group (SPVTG), led by Andersen. With the close of this transaction, Dr Abe Peled, formerly NDS Chairman and CEO, becomes Senior VP and Chief Strategist for Cisco’s Video and Collaboration Group, of which SPVTG is a part. Dr Peled reports to Marthin De Beer, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Video and Collaboration Group.
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informationweek september 2012
eBay deploys OpenStack cloud for R&D Online retailer and auction site eBay announced that it has been using Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) within the OpenStack open source environment to run some of its R&D operations. The move is one of the first by a high-profile company to build a cloud service using OpenStack. Nicira’s NVP within the OpenStack environment lets eBay spin up hundreds of on-demand virtual networks in which new web apps can be quickly tested and deployed. This process lets the company reduce or eliminate the time-consuming and error-prone task of manually reconfiguring network hardware. It also means eBay doesn’t have to worry about what type of hardware is used. OpenStack and Nicira are agnostic when it comes to gear, functioning just as well with obscure, low-cost products as with hardware manufactured by market leaders. This flexibility, in conjunction with the fact that virtual networks require fewer baremetal machines than conventional networks, results in both lower infrastructure costs and a more environmentally-friendly pipeline. “Working with Nicira we have removed the last big barrier, the network, from creating computing resources on demand. We can now provide these resources in a minute versus hours or days,” said, JC Martin, eBay’s Cloud Architect. —InformationWeek USA
www.informationweek.in
Storage
Tulip Telecom bags ` 87.23 crore deal from UIDAI Tulip Telecom, India’s leading enterprise data services provider, has won a project worth ` 87.23 crore for hosting data center space from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for its Unique ID project ‘Adhaar’. As per the deal, Tulip Telecom will host UIDAI servers from Tulip Data City based out of Bangalore. The duration of this project is three years and can be extended further to another year or two. “The normal duration of such deals is around 5-10 years though some government contracts like these initially come with a shorter duration. However, even this one is likely to be a 5-year deal as it is
extendable,” Deepinder Singh Bedi, Executive Director, Tulip Telecom told InformationWeek. Through this partnership, Tulip will provide premium data center space of 10,000 sq. ft. to UIDAI to host IT infrastructure that will power the world’s largest database. In addition to the data center space, Tulip will also be providing a support area of about 3,000 sq. ft. for requirements such as employee seating space and storage space. Lt. Col. HS Bedi, Chairman & Managing Director, Tulip Telecom said, “Tulip is honored to partner with the Government of India for such a prestigious project. We pride ourselves on best-in-class delivery
and infrastructure and look forward on working with one of India’s most innovative projects. This is an exciting opportunity for Tulip and the collaboration leverages our leadership in the data center space in India and represents a tremendous opportunity for partnership and growth.” Tulip Data City based in Bangalore is the world’s third largest and Asia’s largest data center. The facility will offer up to 900,000 sq feet of total data center space with a total planned power capacity of 100 MW. The multi-tiered facility is said to provide customers with both tier 4 and tier 3 data center spaces. —Ayushman Baruah
D ata c e n t e r
India second most risk ridden data center location, reveals study India emerged as the second most risk ridden data center location among the top 30 countries in a study conducted by Cushman & Wakefield and hurleypalmerflatt. The country ranked at the 29th place in the study ‘Data Centre Risk Index,’ which evaluated the risks to global data center facilities and international investment in business critical IT infrastructure. The study ranked countries according to the risks likely to affect the successful operation of a data center, such as energy costs, connectivity, and the likelihood of natural disasters or political instability. The U.S. topped the list, followed by the U.K., Germany, Iceland, Canada and Qatar. Hong Kong (rank seven) emerged as least risk location in Asia. Republic of Korea (South Korea), ranking at 13th position, was the second most attractive location in Asia. Main parameters on which India scored the lowest were ease of doing business, inflation, GDP per capita and corporation tax. India however ranked high on the parameters of cost of labour and sustainability. Criteria such as Quality of power and outages represents a challenge in India, which is often exacerbated by increasing IT loads. Stephen Whatling, Global Service Director at hurleypalmerflatt, said, “Indonesia, India and Brazil are all considered growth markets, but with barriers to entry, regulated markets and high energy costs they do score poorly relative to the more established economic markets. Connectivity is also a problem but as these markets continue
to be invested in and the infrastructure becomes more developed we would expect them to rise up the rankings.” Arvind Nandan, Executive Director, Consultancy, India, Cushman & Wakefield says, “India and key Asian economies remain preferred locations for DCs and have witnessed a growth in demand owing to various advantages. India offers the advantages of cost benefits and sustainability of operations. It is important to put in place various initiatives for developing other areas such as energy, bandwidth, improving business environment, data protection laws, etc., which can enhance the proposition for India.” —InformationWeek News Network
september 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 13
News I T- I T e S
Worldwide IT outsourcing services spending to surpass USD 251 bn in 2012: Gartner Worldwide spending for IT outsourcing (ITO) services is on pace to reach USD 251.7 billion in 2012, a 2.1 percent increase from 2011 spending of USD 246.6 billion, according to the latest outlook by Gartner. The fastest-growing segment within the ITO market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment. Cloud compute services are expected to grow 48.7 percent in 2012 to USD 5.0 billion, up from USD 3.4 billion in 2011. “Today, cloud compute services primarily provide automation of basic functions. As next-generation business applications come to market and existing applications are migrated to use automated operations and monitoring, increased value in terms of service consistency, agility and personnel reduction will be delivered,”
said Gregor Petri, Research Director at Gartner. “Continued privacy and compliance concerns may however negatively impact growth in some regions, especially if providers are slow in bringing localized solutions to market.” Data center outsourcing (DCO), a mature segment of the ITO market, represented 34.5 percent of the market in 2011, but growth is expected to decline by 1 percent in 2012. “The data center outsourcing market is at a major tipping point, where various data center processing systems will gradually be replaced by new delivery models through 2016,” said Bryan Britz, Research Director at Gartner. The application outsourcing (AO) segment is expected to reach USD 40.7 billion, a 2 percent increase from 2011 spending of USD 39.9 billion. This growth reflects needs
of enterprises to manage extensive legacy application environments and their commercial off-the-shelf packages that run the business. “Change is afoot in the AO market. The burdens of managing the legacy portfolio, along with the limitations of IT budgets, have shifted the enterprise buyers to be cautious and favor a more evolutionary approach to other application services, such as software as a service (SaaS),” said Britz. Spending on ITO in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow 1 percent in U.S. dollars in 2012 and exceed 2.5 percent growth in 2013. The growth is being driven by the large inflow of capital into Asia over the past three to five years, leading to the need among global and regional businesses to scale up their operations. —InformationWeek News Network
Mobile
Andhra Pradesh Tourism ties up with Mojostreet to help tourists Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (APTDC) recently announced its tie up with Mojostreet, a mobile application that helps people discover tourist locations nearby. “Our partnership with Mojostreet, a GPSenabled mobile application will make it easier for tourists to find information about nearby tourists spots, hotels, restaurants, banks, travel agencies and much more right on their mobile phones. This is a great step towards making our state even more tourist friendly using the latest mobile technology,” said Sandeep Kumar Sultania, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of APTDC. Through Mojostreet, APTDC will actively be reaching out to its tourists to provide all the information needed on places to stay, visit, shop, dine, etc. The
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informationweek september 2012
app will also provide users with contact information and GPS-enabled road directions using Google Maps. APTDC will also use Mojostreet to interact with its tourists, collect feedback and even provide special discounts at APTDC properties. Kalyan Manyam, CEO, Mojostreet said, “We are confident that Mojostreet users and tourists at large will benefit immensely from this association. We are looking forward to more such partnerships with tourism corporations across India.” Mojostreet is currently available for iPhone, Nokia Touch, Android, BlackBerry and Windows smartphones. The app can be downloaded for free from all major mobile application stores. —InformationWeek News Network
www.informationweek.in
IT- ITE S
Security
Check Point launches ThreatCloud – a collaborative network to fight cybercrime Check Point Software Technologies recently announced Check Point ThreatCloud — the first collaborative network to fight cybercrime — that gathers threat data from an innovative worldwide network of threat sensors and distributes threat intelligence to security gateways around the globe. With over 250 million addresses analyzed for bot discovery, 4.5 million malware signatures and 300,000 infected sites, Check Point
ThreatCloud will power new anti-bot and enhanced antivirus software blades by feeding threat updates directly to customers’ gateways, enabling them to enforce preemptive protection against advanced threats, such as bots, APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats), and other forms of sophisticated malware. Cybercriminals leveraging malware, bots and other forms of advanced threats often target multiple sites and organizations to increase the likelihood of an attack’s success. As many enterprises fight these threats separately, more than half of such threats are left undetected without a current way of sharing threat information across entities. ThreatCloud is dynamically updated based on an innovative global network of threat sensors and invites organizations to share threat
data and collaborate in the fight against modern malware. Customers can choose to collaborate by feeding ThreatCloud with their own threat data and can receive incoming protection updates through their security gateways with enriched threat intelligence. When new bots or malware threats are identified on an organization’s network, the malware identifier, such as the IP address, URL or DNS, is sent to the ThreatCloud and an update is distributed to their peers and customers around the world in a matter of seconds. ThreatCloud also includes other sources of threat data from the company’s install base of security gateways, Check Point research, and industry malware feeds. “Check Point Threatcloud is based on a global collaboration to increase volume, quality and speed of threat intelligence. This enables customers to quickly respond to threats and apply the appropriate protections to their gateways before they spread to the rest of the system,” said Bhaskar Bakthavatsalu, Regional Director – India & SAARC at Check Point Software Technologies. Check Point ThreatCloud sends collective threat information directly to security gateways and software blades, providing customers with realtime threat information and attack trends to enforce protection against bots, APTs and other sophisticated forms of malware. John Grady, Senior Analyst, security products at IDC Research, said, “Whether an organization has already been the target of an APT or is simply looking to apply new pre-emptive protections, Check Point’s ThreatCloud enabled software blades are a promising solution that allows customers around the world to leverage Check Point’s broad installed base and threat research expertise within their own environment.” —InformationWeek News Network
Genpact, IIMU ink seven-year partnership Genpact announced the signing of an agreement with the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur (IIMU), to create a knowledge partnership. Under this seven-year agreement, IIMU and Genpact will jointly develop a center for assetbased lending and finance and an analytics laboratory, which will give students the opportunity to solve real-time problems, work on proprietary and industry leading software tools and technology as well as get hands-on industry experience. Under the agreement, Genpact will offer summer internships to full-time students and set up a merit- based scholarship. Students who earn the post graduate diploma in management will be eligible for full-time employment at Genpact in its banking, analytics and finance businesses. IIMU and Genpact will also work together to create specializations in assetbased lending using application and practical software simulation to identify trends, assess risks, and predict emerging issues in the constantly evolving financial marketplace. “The business landscape in the financial sector is more complex and unpredictable than ever before. To address demands of this dynamic sector we need to create a platform where industry and academia can jointly work on these concerns. The IIMUGenpact Knowledge Partnership aims to create leaders for financial sector, advance knowledge in the field and in the process make a difference to the sector,” said Janat Shah, Director, Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur. —InformationWeek News Network
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News S o f t wa r e
Only 17 percent of Asia Pacific CIOs involved in defining business strategies Business leaders must embrace the true value of technology, according to ‘The Future Role of the CIO; Digital Literacy’ report by CA Technologies. The study reveals that 81 percent of the Asia Pacific CIOs interviewed believe a lack of digital literacy amongst senior executives could be hampering business growth. Only 20 percent of Asian CIOs in the study felt that their management fully understands the capabilities and impact of new and emerging technologies. A total of nine Asian markets were involved in the global survey, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The study revealed that while business leaders may lack digital literacy, they largely do understand the role of technology
in their organizations, where about 75 percent of Asian CIOs in the study felt their management team consider IT to be strategically important. Further, almost one-fifth (19 percent) of the CIOs interviewed believe the C-suite
does not understand the impact of new and emerging technologies. “Asian business leaders today have largely accepted that IT has a role to play in enhancing the
competitiveness of businesses. For IT to be truly transformational to businesses, leaders need to elevate the role of CIOs to be more strategic than operational,” said Lionel Lim, President, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies. As per the study, only 17 percent of CIOs are always involved in the strategic decision making process, impeding the digital strategic thinking of the senior leadership team. It highlights that almost a quarter of CIOs believe senior executives see IT as a cost of doing business, rather than as a means to grow the organization, make processes more efficient, and introduce greater agility and competitiveness. —InformationWeek News Network
Cloud Computing
Infosys defragments IT with Cloud Ecosystem Hub With 60 percent of enterprise workload projected to be on the hybrid cloud in the next 5-7 years, IT major Infosys recently launched the Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub, a solution that enables enterprises to manage their constantly evolving cloud ecosystem. With the Hub, businesses can accelerate time-to-market of cloud services by up to 40 percent, improve productivity by up to 20 percent and achieve cost-savings of up to 30 percent, Infosys said in a statement. “The solution is built taking an enterprise-centric view in managing an evolving cloud environment. It is important for enterprises to manage their fragmented IT setup,” Vishnu Bhat, Vice-President and Global Head - Cloud, Infosys told InformationWeek. “The Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub provides organizations a unified gateway to build, manage and govern their hybrid cloud ecosystem. This solution allows clients to fully realize the benefits from the long-standing promise of the cloud.” The Hub offers CIOs the ability to compare over 20 parameters such as quality of service and regulatory compliance through a dashboard that allows organizations to select and compare cloud services across multiple providers, similar to a price comparison site.
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The Hub is a modularised solution split into seven modules. The unified self-service catalog feature enables enterprises to quickly subscribe to relevant IT and business services across multiple environments. The solution can dynamically provision IT infrastructure and platforms on a hybrid cloud environment in minutes. The smart brokerage feature of the Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub provides an enterprise-wide decision support mechanism to select, compare and deploy cloud services from across providers. The Hub provides a single-window view of the enterprise cloud ecosystem and brings cohesion into an otherwise fragmented IT environment — across private and public cloud with on-premise IT. The solution enables easy monitoring of cloud resource usage and optimizes utilization. It provides consolidated metering and billing, thereby enabling service charge-backs. Infosys, which built a dedicated unit for cloud services about 18 months ago, today has over 3,000 cloud specialists, more than 150 cloud engagements and an ecosystem of over 30 partners around the world. —Ayushman Baruah
www.informationweek.in
S o f t wa r e
Security
60 percent of organizations in India struggling to manage digital information According to the Symantec’s State of Information Survey, business data in Indian organizations is expected to grow 67 percent in the next 12 months. From confidential customer information and intellectual property, to financial transactions, organizations in India possess massive amounts of information that not only enable them to be competitive and efficient, but also stay in business. However, with information spiraling rapidly, 60 percent of Indian businesses are struggling to effectively manage and protect their digital information. “ Our survey shows that only
15 percent of businesses in India can confidently use their business information without being either too permissive or too restrictive about its access,” said Anand Naik, MD- Sales, India and SAARC, Symantec, “Without the ability to properly protect their information assets, this data can become a liability.” The total size of information stored today by all businesses globally is 2.2 zettabytes. Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on average have 563 terabytes of data, compared with the average enterprise that has 100,000 terabytes. The survey also reveals that information is expected to grow 67 percent over the next year for enterprises and 178 percent for SMBs.
Globally, on average, enterprises spend USD 38 million annually on information, while SMBs spend USD 332,000. However, the yearly cost per employee for SMBs globally is a lot higher at USD 3,670, versus USD 3,297 for enterprise. For example, a typical 50-employee small business spends USD 183,500 on information management, whereas a large enterprise with 2,500 employees would spend USD 8.2 million. The survey also found that 89 percent of Indian organizations have lost information in the past year. These incidents have a significant impact: 31 percent of Indian organizations revealed that losing some/all of their information could lead to decreased revenues, apart from loss of customers (34 percent), increased expenses (33 percent) and brand damage (35 percent). Furthermore, 31 percent of respondents were unable to comply with government regulations and 40 percent faced similar challenges with external legal requirements around information management in the past year. In the last year, besides 89 percent of organizations losing information, 94 percent of businesses in India have had confidential information exposed outside of the company, and 31 percent have experienced compliance failures related to information. Another challenge is the amount of duplicate information businesses are storing — an average of 38 percent of data is duplicated. Storage utilization is also low, at only 23 percent within the firewall and 20 percent outside. All these risks and inefficiencies result in businesses spending more than necessary on storing and protecting their information. A key issue identified by 30 percent of businesses in India is information sprawl — the overwhelming growth of information that is unorganized, difficult to access and often duplicated elsewhere. —InformationWeek News Network
MindTree to widen SAP service portfolio MindTree announced that it will be making significant investments over the next twelve months in its SAP Practice to drive growth in its services business across major global markets. To achieve these goals, the company has appointed Arun Rangaraju as Senior Vice President and ERP Practice Head. With 18+ years of rich experience in the ERP space, including 6 years at SAP India, Arun joins MindTree with a mandate to grow the SAP Practice by over 70 percent in the next 12 months. MindTree targets to double its SAP headcount to achieve this goal. “Apart from doubling our headcount, we are investing in widening our services portfolio and building deep capabilities in emerging areas like HANA, Sybase Unwired Platform, SAP Test Automation and Solution Manager,” said Arun Rangaraju, Senior Vice President and ERP Practice Head. Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO & Managing Director, MindTree said, “Our customers continue to make significant investments in enterprise applications to achieve operational efficiency. We have successfully executed several cutting-edge SAP engagements for large global customers across various industries. I am confident that MindTree will deliver the depth of expertise and services that will help our customers optimize their IT spend and accelerate business growth.” —InformationWeek News Network
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News Analysis
IBM steers Smarter Planet initiative towards analytics
Enterprises will invest USD 120 billion in business analytics hardware, software and services by 2015. IBM is already pursuing the huge opportunity and is selling its smarter analytics solutions to banks, insurance companies, and telcos in India. But other verticals like healthcare, oil & gas, and manufacturing are also adopting analytics solutions to gain accurate business and customer insights for reducing errors, and mitigating fraud By Brian Pereira
When IBM introduced its Smarter Planet initiative four years ago, it was on the cusp of something “big”. The initiative is about building smarter systems that harness data from various systems to solve the world’s most pressing problems of power and water shortages, traffic congestion and the like — by building smart grids, water management systems, intelligent traffic management systems, and green buildings. IBM observed there was a huge amount of data being generated from various sources — by users on social networks, by transaction systems and devices, and by sensors. A marketing expert coined a term for this: ‘Big Data’. In fact, an IDC study shows that data is growing at the rate of 60 percent per year. Businesses striving to derive meaningful insights from all this data are increasingly adopting analytics solutions. A recent IDC Asia/Pacific Semiannual Business Analytics (BA) Software Tracker says the market in the region grew by 20.1 percent, and was worth USD 2,479.1 million in 2011. The BA software market is expected to slow down but still grow in 2012, followed by a recovery in 2013. Overall, the market is forecasted to grow at a 5-year CAGR of 12.3 percent to reach USD 4,432.7 million in 2016. IDC estimates enterprises will invest more than USD 120 billion by 2015 in analytics solutions across hardware, software and services.
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At its Smarter Analytics Media symposium in Bengaluru in August 2012, Shanker Annaswamy, Managing Director, IBM India said, “We are at an inflection point where we believe analytics has evolved from a business initiative to a business imperative. Companies that leverage analytics have 1.6 times better revenue, 2 times more profitability, and shareholder value has gone up 2.5 times.” Annaswamy was quoting IDC figures, but IBM has its own studies to prove this. CXO studies conducted by the Institute of Business Value (IBV), a joint initiative by IBM Global Business Services and MIT, show that top performing businesses use business analytics five times more than lower performers. In the study, CXOs say that technology and skills are going to be a fundamental factor. And CMOs are leveraging technology like analytics to get more insights into customer preferences. “We are at the start of a new wave where analytics drive businesses in a
smarter way,” said Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM India/South Asia. “It’s no longer about what’s within the enterprise; every enterprise is equally affected by the data outside the enterprise, as much as data within the enterprise. So it is about understanding the data outside the enterprise, and being astute about what is surrounding you.” While IBM has suddenly steered its Smarter Planet juggernaut towards Big Data analytics, other IT companies have a first mover advantage.
CATCHING UP
Teradata, SPSS, Sybase, and the SAS Institute were among the first to smell this opportunity, and have long been selling analytics solutions to businesses around the world. SPSS was acquired by IBM in 2009. Soon Oracle, SAP, EMC and HP jumped on to the Big Data and analytics bandwagon. So what are IBM’s chances in this lucrative market, which is nowadays driven by Big Data hype? IBM has a couple of strengths that
“We are at the start of a new wave where analytics drive businesses in a smarter way”
Vanitha Narayanan
Managing Partner, Global Business Services, IBM India/South Asia
www.informationweek.in
could position it neck-to-neck with the current market leader, in the shortterm. Firstly, it is the company with the largest number of patents in the world, with 500 patents just for analytics. Secondly, it has invested more than USD 16 billion for 30 acquisitions since 2005. Among the analytics and data companies it acquired are Cognos, SPSS, Netezza, RedPill Solutions, Coremetrics, i2 Limited, DemandTec, Emptoris, and Tealeaf Technology. And all these have been recognized leaders in BI, analytics, or data management. Thirdly, it has set up software labs and research centers in India and around the world to apply these patents, drive innovation, and integrate all the software and IP it acquired. And then it has a global army of consultants, technical professionals, and business partners to drive its analytics play. Not to forget its base of premium customers that include leading companies across industries (some are mentioned later in this story). “In addition to our workforce of 440,000 people across the world, we also have certified business partners to do the fulfilment. So we are very well positioned and have leadership in several areas, compared to any other company. We have leadership acquisitions in BI, driving business performance, trusted identity, and content management. We have invested in research labs and software labs across India. India is an important market for us, not only from a domestic perspective, but also globally,” said Annaswamy.
SECRET WEAPON
We believe IBM’s secret weapon that will help it attain leadership in the analytics space is an intelligent, wellintegrated system called Watson. Last year Watson was used in a popular U.S. TV game show called Jeopardy. And Watson has beaten many intelligent humans in the game! With its analytical and natural language processing capabilities, Watson is now being applied to solve problems in healthcare, for reducing financial fraud, and also for national & border security. The system goes into learning mode
IBM’s secret weapon that will help it attain leadership in the analytics space is an intelligent, well- integrated system called Watson
and builds a data bank by ingesting texts from (medical) journals over a period of a few months. And then it applies natural language processing to answer queries and solve problems. Potentially, Watson could be adapted to analyze and solve problems in banking, telecom, manufacturing and other sunrise industries. That’s why IBM invested (and continues to invest) over USD 2 billion in the development of Watson. InformationWeek reported on Watson in August 2011 for its special issue on ‘IT in Healthcare’. See the story in our ‘Past Issues’ section on www.informationweek.in.
IBM ANALYTICS IN TELECOM
For telecom, IBM has a base of premium customers in India. The most notable example is Bharti Infratel. Last year, IBM was awarded a contract from Bharti Infratel (a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel), which owns 32,000 tower sites across 11 telecom circles. The IBM solution combines sensors, data tracking and analytics solutions to offer real-time visibility and insight so that Bharti Infratel can centrally monitor and manage its large and distributed tower infrastructure. The solution helped the company automate the entire process, reduce costs and drive optimization, in addition to proactively preventing service outages. IBM is now working with another telco that has a base of 85 million
subscribers. It is applying its data warehousing and smart analytics solution on customer data and call data records to explore new ways in which the telco’s network can be used. Apart from Bharti Infratel, IBM won outsourcing deals from BSNL, Idea Cellular and Vodafone. In the first two decades, Indian telcos focused on developing their subscriber bases. However, the new focus is on retaining customers and offering personalized services. Telcos are engaging analytics solutions to understand usage and spending trends to cross-sell and up-sell new services.
IBM ANALYTICS IN BFSI
BFSI is another focus area for IBM and its focus has shifted to PSU banks, such as Punjab National Bank and State Bank of India. “The Indian public sector banks are done with core banking, and they are now at the start of the data warehouse and analytics journey. With core banking they got a set of operational reports, but now it is about understanding all the data about their customer,” said Narayanan. Annaswamy informed that IBM worked with a large PSU bank with a huge number of branches (he declined to name the bank). The bank had a very complex organizational structure with separate circles for retail and specialized business units catering to various segments
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News Analysis (corporate, rural, SMB, personal, etc) The top management did not have a consolidated view of business across all functions of the bank on a near real-time basis. It took a long time to consolidate the data from all its branches and business units, which meant a delay in generating reports. This in turn slowed the decision making process. “The CEO of the bank (we worked with) now has a dashboard that gives him parameters and indicators that help him take a (faster) decision and drive the bank’s performance — and this is what IBM is enabling. We also worked with a retail bank for their forecasting and demand projections. We helped them with their business intelligence unit and offered our forecasting model,” said Annaswamy. IBM said its Rapid Banking Analytics solution (developed at its Software Labs) can give these institutions a comprehensive view across claims and applications, customer service, workforce and overall performance. The solution facilitates management of risk, rural market penetration, growth/competition, market discipline & transparency, human resources management, customers’ retention and social & ethical practices. In the financial industry, analytics can also be used to check fraud. In fact two leading MNC banks in India have recently been in the news for their oversight in checking fraud and money laundering. Financial services organization, Birla Sun Life Insurance (BSLI), has deployed IBM Cognos TM1 solution to radically transform the entire planning cycle from forecasting and analysis processes to budgeting and profitability modelling. BSLI required a solution to help it streamline its spreadsheet planning and budgeting process for data coming from more than 600 branches, and multiple products. IBM Cognos TM1 helped the company to integrate operational and financial planning on demand, which can rapidly determine resource requirements and forecast future business performance. “With IBM’s Cognos TM1, we
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“We are at an inflection point where analytics has evolved from a business initiative to a business imperative”
Shanker Annaswamy
Managing Director, IBM India
are able to plan better and monitor performance at a granular level and thus manage profitability and capital more efficiently. The solution is easy to use which our finance team can learn easily with minimal change management or skills upgrade. Also, the finance team is able to support the solution for their business users with minimal support from the IT team,” says Mayank Bathwal, CFO & Head Institutional Sales, BSLI. Infinity Insurance, a leading “non-standard” insurance provider, is applying IBM analytics to more than 25,000 automobile claims processed each month in order to identify patterns in historic data. Infinity specializes in covering high-risk drivers. In the first three months, Infinity reduced the time needed to identify fraudulent claims from 14 days to 24 hours.
OTHER VERTICALS & APPLICATIONS
Apart from BFSI and telecom, IBM Smarter Analytics solutions are used in healthcare, oil & gas, manufacturing and other industries. “The boundaries between industries are blurring. If you are a retail bank, you are both a bank and a retailer. An e-retail company is both, a retail (shop) and an online business. So businesses are looking for benchmarks in areas where customers want to be served. They are looking beyond their industries for the best in class in their peer group,” said Narayanan. As we mentioned earlier, IBM is now applying Watson to solve problems in Healthcare. It believes predictive analytics can be used to reduce medical errors by up to 55 percent.
HMEL, a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and Mittal Energy Investment, has adopted a new IBM analyticsbased solution to boost business performance by better managing their financial data. The solution integrates information from various components of the manufacturing execution systems (MES), ERP, and control systems within the refinery and delivers a consolidated single view of the data. According to IBM, the new technology will help HMEL to analyze key corporate business processes including planned versus actual investments, production, and key performance indicators, among others. The system will generate near real-time information for HMEL business executives to make more intelligent decisions around optimizing productivity and margins. “The IBM analytics solution not only delivers the ability to access data consistently but also equips the organization with the power to interpret, transform and derive process operation actions from the information. It provides an industry standards based information model and associated integration techniques, enabling HMEL to turn data into information that can be accessed and delivered through web services,” IBM said in a statement. At the IBM Smarter Analytics Symposium, the writer also witnessed demos of solutions for social media analytics and fraud detection. (The writer was hosted by IBM India in Bengaluru)
u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm.com
www.informationweek.in
Amrita Gangotra
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Maruti Suzuki India
Daya Prakash
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Bangalore International Airport
N Jayantha Prabhu
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Godrej Industries
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Bharti Airtel
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LG Electronics India
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Essar Group
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Rajesh Uppal
S Francis Rajan
Shailesh Joshi
S. Ramasamy
Indian Oil Corporation
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CIOs must deliver business results Today’s CIOs are appraised on their strategies and innovative approaches to save costs, improve revenues, and boost customer satisfaction through cutting edge technology and innovation
2012
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odafone India CEO, Marten Pieters, said, India is the “most complicated” market to do business. And his sentiment was echoed by many presidents and prime ministers. The Indian business environment is stifled by red tape, slow decisions, and policy paralysis; it’s shaken by inflation and a slowing economy, and threatened by an uncertain future. Add to that, surprises like scams and uncertain taxation laws. In this tough environment, only the most agile businesses survive. So business strategies continuously change, products and services are customized, and there is consolidation. While unyielding business units are shut or downsized, new ones having market potential are introduced. And businesses are expanding, extending its tentacles towards rural shores, or into new markets overseas. The CIO, now considered a business leader, is well aware of this. CIOs huddle with the CFO, CEO and SBU heads to outline new business strategies. And they have to support new strategies and business plans with IT. These days CIOs worry if technology can deliver fast enough, as is evident in a survey done by InformationWeek USA, and republished in this issue. If a project misses its deadline, a lucrative business opportunity worth millions of dollars may be lost.
“I highly rated those accomplishments that had significant business impact through use of enabling technology across multiple countries” David Briskman VP & CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories
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By Team InformationWeek
That’s why CIOs are no longer appraised for ‘Business as Usual’ — routine work for keeping the lights on. To be an outstanding CIO today you need to do something radically different, which has a huge impact on business. You need to play a key role in the business transformation process. Being a first mover and innovator will keep your business ahead of the pack (read: competition). At a technical level, IT implementations can be extremely difficult. For instance, SAP roll-outs in an organization with hundreds or thousands of offices, is no easy task. But CEOs and CFOs are not evaluating performance on technical complexity; they look for business outcomes or benefits. “In my view, IT implementations with no significant impact on business lack the credibility to be rated as topnotch; in-fact such projects only bring to light the inability
Meet the Jury l
Rob Preston, VP and Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek, USA
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Chris Murphy, Editor, InformationWeek, USA
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Kailash Shirodkar, Publisher, UBM India
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Brian Pereira, Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek, India
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Srikanth RP, Executive Editor, InformationWeek, India
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Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President and CTO, Reliance Capital
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David Briskman, VP & CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories
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Dr Nilay Yajnik, Professor and Chairman – Information Systems Area, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai
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Sanchit Vir Gogia, Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research
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Akhilesh Tuteja, Head, IT Advisory & Partner, KPMG India
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of a CIO to add value outside the traditional role he/she is required to undertake,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research, who was one of the jury members that picked our Global CIOs this year. Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President and CTO, Reliance Capital, who is InformationWeek Global CIO 2010, describes a CIO’s role in business transformation. “A CIO’s performance gets measured by the success of how much IT has helped the business. It’s not about how successful has been the implementation of his project. So his performance is measured on parameters like increased sales, customer satisfaction, reduction in costs, etc. It’s also about the kind of influence that he has internally, which can create an enterprise impact,” said Phanasgaonkar. InformationWeek magazine instituted the Global CIO Award to acknowledge and recognize CIOs who are driving transformation. This annual award is presented to CIOs in recognition for their direct contribution to the business through strategic decisions, innovation and cutting edge projects. Last year, seven CIOs from leading Indian organizations spanning diverse industry verticals made it to our Global CIO List. In 2010, three Indian CIOs shared this honor. And in 2009, the year we introduced Global CIO in India, 10 Indian CIOs were honored along with 40 others from around the world. These top notch CIOs are now honorably inducted in the InformationWeek Global CIO Hall of Fame. This year we present the InformationWeek Global CIO Award to seven Indian CIOs.
HOW WE ASSESSED
This InformationWeek Global CIO 2012 awards process was conducted simultaneously in the U.S. and India in the JulySeptember timeframe. Our U.S. editors Rob Preston and Chris Murphy were on the jury and assessed Indian CIOs. In doing so, they were able to compare CIO agendas and performance of Indian CIOs with their U.S. counterparts. Earlier this year, InformationWeek USA conducted a survey of U.S. CIOs, which is included in this issue. While reading this survey, you will be able to compare priorities of U.S. and Indian CIOs. Since we had just seven awards for India this year (not 100), the jury had to apply many parameters and take some tough calls; the assessment was done at multiple levels. For India, we had three levels of assessment and two juries: an internal jury of InformationWeek editors and an external jury
“It was the ability to deliver business results powered by innovative technology that separated the winners” Rob Preston VP and Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek, USA
“IT implementations with no significant business impact only bring to light the inability of a CIO to add value outside the traditional role he/she is required to undertake” Sanchit Vir Gogia Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research
(See ‘Meet the Jury’). At the first level the InformationWeek editors scrutinized all the nominations that came in. Over a period of one month we received 33 valid nominations, with another 25 expressing their intent to nominate themselves, but backing out later. The InformationWeek India editors went through the 33 nominations and shortlisted down to 10. We applied certain filters. Some nominations were submitted by executives who were not IT Heads or CIOs — these were immediately disqualified. We assessed on parameters, such as experience & track record, consistency in performance, project innovation and business impact, leadership, character & integrity. We considered performance mostly in the current company (as you will see in the CIO profiles of the winners). We also looked at more recent projects (within the past two years). The judgment was also based on our observation through our frequent interactions with CIOs in India. CIOs who are in transition to new companies, or who have just resigned from their current positions could not be included in the shortlist. And we believe CIOs who have logged a few months in their current company, would need more time for their projects and initiatives to make a significant business impact. This is why some prominent and well-known CIOs did not make it to our shortlist, even though they satisfied most parameters.
External Jury
At the second level, the 10 shortlisted nominations were sent to an external jury, which included two past InformationWeek Global CIOs. The jury was primarily looking at the kind of impact the CIO’s projects and initiatives made on the business. The jury looked for the kind of influence that a CIO has among other C-Suite members and among peers in the rest of his/her organization. What is his/her involvement and participation in business strategy and strategic decisions? Who does the CIO report to and how much influence does he have? Scale and size were important considerations. What is the size of the organization and how complex is its structure? How diverse is its businesses? How large is the IT budget? The jury applied all these parameters (See ‘Jury Assessment Parameters’). Some jury members have been closely linked to the CIO community in India and have been tracking CIO performance for many years. In some instances, jury
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JURY ASSESSMENT PARAMETERS We applied the following parameters for shortlisting. These parameters were also used by the external jury at the next level. To avoid confusion, the CIO that applied for this award is hereafter referred to as ‘applicant’.
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What are the other responsibilities of the applicant, both internally and externally?
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Global exposure: Has the applicant worked at the international level? What kind of projects were done overseas either while working abroad or from Indian shores?
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Reporting structure: Does the applicant report to another IT head at the Group level? Or is the applicant a Group CIO/CTO with other IT heads (from SBUs) reporting to him/her? Does he report to the CEO or CFO?
Is the applicant part of the Executive Management Council/Committee (or equivalent) where he/she communicates directly with C-suite executives and is a part of strategic business decisions?
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Experience: Total number of years on the business side and in the IT function.
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Past awards, certifications and recognitions.
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Leadership: Have executives in the applicant’s team (past or present) moved on to leadership roles in the applicant’s organization or elsewhere?
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Consistent performance: How long has the applicant been with the current company? What has been his/her growth and track record in the current company? Growth in responsibilities.
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Consistency: CIOs in transition to new companies or those with less than a year’s experience in current company do not qualify.
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Visibility: We looked for their direct contribution to the business and what kind of impact their initiatives made on business — in terms of cost savings, improving efficiency levels, increasing revenue, improving services,
members conducted telephonic interviews with the finalists. Most of the nominations shortlisted are well articulated and the business impact was visible. Also, many of the CIOs are highly experienced. So it was a “tough choice” for the jury. “Choosing among so many truly outstanding business technology executives was no easy exercise. We evaluated each executive’s experience, accomplishments, and clout, but in the end, it was the ability to deliver business results powered by innovative technology that separated the winners,” said Rob Preston, VP and Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek USA. Dr Nilay Yajnik, Professor and Chairman – Information Systems Area, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies said, “I was looking for CIOs who made a significant impact through IT on their organization’s business objectives despite several hurdles which they and their organizations may have faced. The CIOs whom I shortlisted, in my opinion, had introduced innovative applications of IT which were a
“I shortlisted those CIOs who, in my opinion, had introduced innovative applications of IT, which were a global first of sorts” Dr. Nilay Yajnik Professor & Chairman, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies
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introducing new products and services, supporting business initiatives.
informationweek september 2012
global first of sorts.” Some of the nominations that we received had annexures with details of project implementations, but our jury was looking for the impact on business. They kept a sharp eye for figures and percentages relating to business benefits. “In looking through different people’s accomplishments, I highly rated those that had significant business impact through use of enabling technology across multiple countries. There were many successes that were very IT centric and others that were excellent but limited in scale. To be a global CIO, means the CEO talks about what IT does, not what he wish it could do,” said David Briskman, VP & CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories, who received this award in 2009. And at the third level of assessment, we received the scores for all the 10 shortlisted candidates from the jury members. To pick the seven finalists, the internal jury did a normalization process, comparing all the results and once again going through the nominations. To sum it up, a good CIO should be able to actively contribute to business growth and success. CIO performance is no longer assessed on implementing technology and managing projects — this can be done by technology and integration specialists. What really counts are the strategies and innovative approaches to save costs, improve revenues, boost customer satisfaction, and to provide better products and services through cutting edge technology and innovation. That’s how we chose our seven Global CIOs this year — who will receive the InformationWeek Global CIO 2012 Award at INTEROP Mumbai on October 10th, 2012.
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2012
Amrita Gangotra Bharti Airtel
Amrita Gangotra is the Director for Information Technology (India & South Asia) at Bharti Airtel, and is also a member of the Airtel Management Board. Bharti Airtel is a leading telecom company with a subscriber base of 200 million plus subscribers in India and South Asia. Being on the Airtel Management Board means her involvement in business transformation is high. And since her company is a telco, it is very dependent on technology. Amrita and her team look at how to bring in transformation through new revenue streams. In fact one of her KRAs is ‘Creation and monetization of new revenue streams’. Amrita says one way to introduce new streams is to look at other “neighbouring industries” like media and healthcare, for instance. Amrita and her team introduced various initiatives (many of them industry-firsts) that have created revenue for the organization. For instance, Airtel Money was launched in March 2012, and resonates with the country’s vision of financial inclusion. The platform, a first of its kind, brings banking to India’s unbanked population — an estimated 720 million people, of which, many own a mobile phone. This project involved complex integrations with the banking ecosystem, ensuring seamless on-boarding of merchants and partners, providing various features to the customers like P2P (Person-to-person), P2B (Person-to-bank) money transfers, multiple access channels, different wallets and spends through merchants. Another impacting project to Amrita’s credit is Cloud Enablement Platform (CLEP). Launching cloud services is a critical initiative for an integrated telecom service provider like Airtel. It leveraged its experience in the management of infrastructure and partnership with various SMBs/ enterprises, to offer the best of breed solutions over public
and private clouds. The idea was to provide a platform (market place) to the small and medium enterprises to come to an online portal and order for all its IT needs starting with network connectivity, mail, collaboration, accounting, etc., and run its business processes on the cloud. Last year, Amrita and her team implemented a project for SMS-based top-ups and recharging. Airtel did away with paper coupons, which had fixed denominations and distribution issues. And now most of Airtel’s prepaid revenues come from that platform. Another pioneering project that she led was the creation of a subscription engine for value-added services. And this was an industry first. The subscription engine usually belongs to the VAS partners and hence the customer experience is controlled by them. However, it’s the first time that an operator has an in-house subscription engine that gives higher governance and experience control. After the launch of subscription engine, there was significant improvement in customer satisfaction. Amrita has experience in information technology across FMCG, telecom and IT industries. Prior to her current assignment, Amrita was the CIO of Mobile Services, the largest business unit of Airtel. Additionally, she headed Airtel’s IT operations, governance across all lines of businesses (mobile, telemedia, and enterprise business), and B2C application innovation groups. She was part of the core team that developed the strategic IT outsourcing deals with IBM, Nortel and other vendors. Her work has received industry recognition, through many prestigious awards. As the President of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), India Chapter, she launched the Business Intelligence Forum in India. She also featured in the “Stree Super Achiever - 2008” CNBC Awaaz programme. Prior to joining Bharti, Amrita was the CIO and General Manager-IT Service Management for HCL Comnet. She provided consultation to large enterprises based in the U.S., U.K. and South East Asia for effective management of technology infrastructure through remote network operation centers. Amrita also worked with Nestle India and was involved in the implementation of a comprehensive ERP application across business groups in India that was a standard across Nestle Asia Pacific zone.
career track Track record Amrita Gangotra has logged 24 years including 10 years as an IT Head. She has experience in information technology across FMCG, telecom and IT industries. career achievements Prior to her current assignment, Amrita was the CIO at Mobile Services, the largest business unit of Airtel. Before joining Bharti, she was the CIO and GM-IT Service Management for HCL Comnet. She also served at Nestle India.
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2012
Daya Prakash LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd
Daya Prakash is Head-IT at LG Electronics India (LGEIL), a leading manufacturer of home appliances, computer products, TV & home entertainment systems, mobile, and commercial products. He has over 17 years of experience in the IT industry, managing IT Applications & Infrastructure. Prakash has been with LG since 2001 and has been at the forefront of LGEIL’s IT operations; he is responsible for the implementation of the latest technologies, and business process innovation to enhance organizational competitiveness. In the current year, his three top initiatives are a Sell-Out Management System, a Warehouse Management System, and a Customer Interaction Center. The Sell-Out Management System (SOMS) is LGEIL’s collaborative platform for Trade Partners. LGEIL’s operations are spread across the country — it has two manufacturing plants, 44 branch offices, 62 stock points and over 47 area offices. Branches sell products to a vast network of dealers, which consists of over 1,600 trade partners, over 33,500 sub-dealers, over 400 LG Shoppe (exclusive), and multi-brand outlets, etc. And the trade partner network is growing at rapid pace. LGEIL’s widespread operational network posed a big challenge for IT to enable tight business integration with its trade partners. To address this challenge, Prakash and his team developed SOMS platform, which gives end-to-end visibility to both LG and its trade partners and provides information in real time. Earlier, LG had visibility of sellthrough data but the key challenge was to gain visibility of sell out data. Post implementation of SOMS, the challenge has been resolved as the system helps in providing realtime information of sell out data and channel partners stock to get the stock of market situation, so that the sales &
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production strategy can be devised accordingly. Nearly 750 trade partners are accessing this system all over India. The second initiative is the Warehouse Management System (WMS). LG Warehouse Management System supports the management’s decision making process in consideration of stock utility and order management capability. It manages the entire warehouse storage operation from receiving of finished goods to delivery. Also, this system can be operated in collaboration with sales and the stock flow management system. With this system, LG can reduce operational cost and increase the just-intime (JIT) rate. This web-based system enabled checking enterprise-wide inventory from any LG location. And his third initiative is Customer Interaction Center (CIC), a project for moving the outsourced CIC capability in-house with the aim of providing word-class customer support services. With LG’s robust sales growth and focus on customer satisfaction, overall call volume increased manifold. And to handle this growth it needed a robust and well-managed CIC. The outsourced CIC capability was limited and could not match the fast pace growth of LG. To address this challenge, it decided to set up an LG-owned 400 seats CIC, to bring quality of service and cost efficiency, with increased call load. The project demonstrated certain LG innovations to achieve service improvements. For instance, Initiative ‘211’ which emphasizes on ‘service when you want’, has now been further expanded to the top 200 cities across India. This ensures that call service engineers take prior appointment with the customer within two hours of call registration, offer the customer a one hour time slot, and visit the customer within a day at the agreed time. Then there’s an innovative program called 103 Service (Thank You Service). Any premium customer who purchased a product gets three service calls during the first 12 months. If calls are made on the 10th day, 10th week and 10th month from the installation date, LG offers free service, demonstration/consultation, and AMC information. LGEIL won several awards for these initiatives. Before LGEIL, Prakash served at Aithent Technologies, IRIS Computers, and Unilink Software where he successfully led IT projects.
career track Track record Daya Prakash has logged over 17 years of experience. He’s been associated with LG Electronics since 2001. career achievements LG CSNet touched the life of millions of LG consumers by bringing over 1,000 third-party authorized service centers, call centers, and over 40 branch service operations on a single platform. Prakash is also credited with the integration of the global supply chain operations of LG.
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N Jayantha Prabhu Essar Group
N Jayantha Prabhu is Chief Technology Officer, Essar Group, India’s eminent business-conglomerate with leadership in sectors such as construction, mining, oil and gas, power, shipping, steel and telecommunications. With operations in more than 25 countries across five continents, the Group employs 75,000 people, and has revenues of over USD 27 billion. Jayantha has 20 years of experience in IT enablement in the global conglomerate manufacturing sector, and has been associated with the Essar Group since January 1999. Prior to Essar Group, he has worked with Lloyds Steel and Zenith. At Essar, he is responsible for establishing the company’s technical vision, and leading all aspects of the company’s technology development across all areas of IT. He has played an integral role in the company’s strategic direction, development, and future growth. He is the principal owner of Essar Group Enterprise Architecture Board – IT Infrastructure & Technology and is also acting as Chairman for the Global Technology Committee. He heads the IT Center of Excellence that is responsible for new technology evaluation, innovation and project rollout at Essar. His recent drive includes complete ownership of business transformation through IT solutions and innovations. He also leads the IT strategy management across the Group, which has resulted in several successful M&A assignments at a global level. Jayantha collaborates with six vertical-specific CIOs and reports to the Group CIO, CN Ram. He is responsible for managing a team of 70 professionals for a 20,000 user base at 98 locations and five data centers across the globe. Currently, he is in charge of IT infrastructure & technology project delivery / strategy, vendor alliance, new innovation, IT procurement, new technology evaluation / architecture,
and IT Centre of Excellence. His major accomplishments include the successful consolidation of the Essar Group IT team, which included the execution of IT Central Procurement Cell, and building a cohesive employee environment. This project resulted in 0 percent attrition in his team. In the 14 years spent in Essar, Jayantha has been primarily responsible for meeting the company’s IT requirements in sync with its exponential growth through greenfield implementations and inorganic acquisitions. He has led several projects and initiatives that have influenced the Essar Group at a global level. For instance, he successfully led the M&A IT Transition exercise for Essar during its acquisition of the Algoma Steel Plant in Canada, the steel plant in Zimbabwe, and the Stanlow Refinery in the U.K. These are multi-million dollar M&A initiatives where he demonstrated his leadership skills for the smooth IT Transition onboarding to Essar’s environment. His vision enabled spreading the benefits of Unified Communications (UC) within Essar establishments. This led to tremendous cost reduction through UC services such as video conferences, audio conferences, Microsoft Lync, VoIP, etc. On the virtualization front, he ensured that Essar was an early adopter of various hypervisors such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM PowerVM, Citrix VDI, etc. He also established a private cloud within Essar, making it the first company in the manufacturing industry to leap towards a public cloud service, starting with Microsoft Azure Public Cloud. Standardization and consolidation has been his mantras, and he drives his team to make the most by aligning these two key aspects within business goals. Jayantha, with a positive attitude of pulling up his sleeves during crisis situations, emphasizes that basics are your strong pillar while climbing the career ladder. He tells his team that basics should never be one’s weakness; instead conserve them and you will find wise amalgamation of basic and strategic — two skills one would want to excel in to become a leader. He is always seen with his team during professional and social occasions, and team work is the key ingredient of his success recipe.
career track Track record Jayantha has 20 years of experience in IT enablement in the global conglomerate manufacturing sector. He has been associated with the Essar Group since January 1999. career achievements His major accomplishments at Essar include consolidation of the IT team, which included execution of IT Central Procurement Cell, and building a cohesive employee environment. This resulted in 0 percent attrition in his team.
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2012
Rajesh Uppal Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.
Rajesh Uppal is Executive Director (IT) and CIO at Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL). Since joining MSIL in 1985, Uppal has led Maruti’s IT journey from a punch card generator to a completely technology driven enterprise. During his 30 years in the industry, Uppal has seen IT evolve from mainframes to cloud and tablets. He broadly defines the journey of Maruti IT in four stages: incubation, improving operational efficiencies, integrating the value chain and going global. Before his long innings at Maruti, he worked as an executive at BHEL. His IT mission statement is, “To create an environment which enables innovation & effective decision making by providing meaningful business insights for achieving strategic excellence across the entire value chain” — a paradigm shift from a mission 10 years back that was, “Stimulate the value chain for business excellence by providing innovative information systems using appropriate IT,” which nowadays is the “basic hygiene of IT”. Uppal has many industry firsts to his name; the accomplishments run across the landscape of the automotive sector. His accomplishments include justin-time systems implemented in the late 1990s that enable the automotive giant to work on less than 8 hours of inventory; an MES envisaged and implemented in early 2002 that gives the organization incomparable operational efficiency; a vehicle distribution and dealer management system launched in 2004 that gives a realtime market pulse across the nation from Maruti’s 3,000 plus dealer sales & service base; and an 8 million customer CRM solution providing “the single source of truth”. Uppal strongly believes that in IT, Nirvana is a myth; he has been consistently challenging his project teams to
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question the status quo and in the process creating new benchmarks in the industry. On these lines, he led an initiative in 2006, to tightly couple the global product design and manufacturing capabilities across the Suzuki Group of companies. The project was completed in 2012, resulting in reduction of time to market by 30 percent, enabling global sourcing capability that facilitates cost control and operational flexibility. Over the years, Uppal has balanced the art of identifying business opportunities and delivering innovative technology solutions — an art that has helped him excel and become a key member of the executive management board and the strategic forum at Maruti. In addition to IT, Uppal also headed the sales and dispatch business function at Maruti. As a part of his additional responsibility, Uppal leads the Gurgaon CSR initiative for MSIL to bring about sustainable social change. He also heads the initiative at MSIL to adopt government ITIs in a publicprivate partnership to improve the employment opportunities for the fresh workforce. Uppal’s most recent initiative was to establish a training academy that bridges the skill gap between the job roles of an individual. To start with, this will cater to Maruti employees and then will be extended across the value chain over a period of time. Uppal is excited about the opportunity to achieve the 2 million sales mark in a financial year, and is putting the pieces in place by leveraging technology in the areas of BI & analytics, cloud for vendors, mobility for sales force, and deploying vehicle forecasting tools to tap into changing market scenarios. Not bad for a person who regards his venture into IT as accidental! With a background in mechanical engineering, Uppal was keen to work on the shop floor at the beginning of his career. To get a firm foothold on the business side, he volunteered to head one of the business units at Maruti Suzuki, and learned the business side faster than he imagined. The rest was left to fate and destiny!
career track Track record Rajesh Uppal has 30 years of experience, including 27 years at MSIL, where he is IT Head and CIO for the past 14 years. Beyond IT, he also headed the sales and dispatch function. career achievements Among his many accomplishments are just-in-time systems implemented in late 1990s, an MES, a vehicle distribution and DMS launched in 2004, and an 8 million customer CRM solution.
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S Francis Rajan
Bangalore International Airport Ltd.
S Francis Rajan is Vice President, ICT at Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL), India’s first greenfield airport. He was instrumental in India’s modernization plan for airports. And this model was later replicated at Hyderabad and Mumbai airports, and at New Delhi’s T3 (Terminal 3). Rajan served the Air Transport Industry (ATI), at Indian Airlines for more than 22 years. Between 1983–86 he had the opportunity to participate in the first ever computerization project for airline bookings in India. And between 1997–98 he participated in a project of migration from one mainframe to another, with just 8 hours blackout, impacting 60 plus domestic and 23 international stations. He opted for VRS from Indian Airlines in July 2006, and accepted an offer to head the ICT department of BIAL. It turned out to be very challenging in more ways than one. Until then, India never had a private airport, and the government-owned AAI Airports business models were different; in the AAI (Airports Authority of India) model ICT services were operated and managed in a ‘siloed’ manner. The first task was to convince the management and the board that BIAL needed to go in for a paradigm shift in business model. The airport operator had to don the role of service provider for all ICT services in the airport campus. Being a greenfield airport, everything had to be built from ground zero. So Rajan and his team had to create the vision, mission and strategies for short-term, mid-term and longterm for ICT at BIAL. He thought about tariff models structured on a ‘Payas-you-grow’ model, with different priced components for services, benefitting the varied customer base. He created the service model and worked with the teams for defining the standard operating procedures for the entire services lifecycle, including the service billing. These Standard
Operating Procedures (SOPs) were presented to every client (110 presently) for their buy-in for the managed services model, on a minimum committed SLA of 99 percent uptime. With that as the backdrop, he successfully presented and received the board’s approval to be an ICT service provider (role play for the department), and also for an ‘in-source’ model for service delivery and support. So Rajan has been a ‘Transformationalist’ who introduced a paradigm shift in ICT Services, in how new age Indian airports transformed, and opted for the in-sourcing model to deliver ICT services. Apart from being a strategist, Rajan is also known for his strong executive leadership. He created vibrant ICT teams and established high credibility across the board. At BIAL, Rajan anchors the CIO and CISO roles, with over 90 professionals working and catering to 24X7 services — to support 120+ clients located on the airport campus. That speaks for the breadth and depth of the portfolio and the huge span of operations in the airports domain. Two decades in the air transport industry has given Rajan an adequate background in various business domains. As a CIO he believes that, instead of aligning IT with the organizational goals, it is always better to ingrain IT with the organization’s goals and objectives. And as a technology head, it is incumbent to bring to the table the right technology enabled solution that could enhance or better customer travel experiences, at all customer touch points, and the value proposition it brings in. Under Rajan’s stewardship BIAL received many awards for its ICT projects, including two InformationWeek EDGE awards in 2011. Rajan is on the advisory board of various CIO associations in India. And he speaks at many CIO and ATI forums. He is also a SITA council member and an active member of the Bangalore Chamber of Commerce. His personal interests are reading, music and chess.
career track Track record S Francis Rajan opted for VRS after 22 years in the air transport industry, serving Indian Airlines. But in 2006 he accepted the role of ICT Head for Bangalore International Airport Ltd. He is currently designated as the VP-ICT with the role play of CIO, CTO and CISO for BIAL. career achievements Prior to joining BIAL, Rajan had the opportunity to participate in the first computerization project for airline bookings, between 1983 – 86. He also participated in the project of migration from one mainframe to another, with just 8 hours blackout impacting 60 plus domestic and 23 international stations in 1997-98.
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2012
Shailesh Joshi Godrej Industries
For a person who would have become a commercial pilot, had fate not intervened and changed his plans, Shailesh Joshi, Vice President, Corporate-IT at Godrej Industries, has always been the soft-spoken CIO with a quiet demeanor, but with a big vision. Always a person who has let his work speak for him, Joshi has in his own quiet way contributed in a big way to the industry. Instrumental for introducing standardization and system-driven processes to the unorganized real-estate industry in India, Joshi played a pivotal role in introducing ERP to the real estate industry. After his pioneering move to implement SAP for K Raheja Corp (which also incidentally won the SAP ACE award), most real estate companies in India now have SAP as their ERP. A technocrat with more than 21 years of experience, Joshi has huge domain expertise and knowledge of the real estate sector. Appointed as IT head of Godrej Properties in 2008, Joshi was subsequently handed over the responsibility of the entire IT infrastructure at Godrej Industries, after the group witnessed his ability to use IT to lead the business. Joshi has a huge task on hand as the group is located in over 100 locations in India, with a presence in nearly 26 countries across the world, and has an annual turnover of more than USD 2.6 billion. More importantly, Joshi is establishing the foundation for accelerating the group’s strategy. He is evaluating software and new technologies while aligning the IT functions’ objectives with that of the company’s 10 x 10 vision where the growth rate is targeted 10 times in the next 10 years. As part of this vision, one of the most ambitious initiatives is the consolidation of IT infrastructure for all the companies in the group, which includes moving
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servers to a single data center (which were earlier scattered in various data centers), putting up a single MPLS WAN across all the locations of the group, signing up group level agreements with companies like SAP and Microsoft, and putting up a common DR center for the entire group. In the first phase, the project has already achieved a total saving of 40 percent in costs, with an improvement in service levels. For example, the common MPLS platform has significantly increased the bandwidth, which has helped in saving 40 percent on a recurring basis. Similarly, the consolidated licensing agreement for the group has resulted in 30-40 percent savings for the Godrej group. Using his knowledge of SAP, Joshi is also taking a lead role in implementing business analytics. To make effective business decisions, the group is now implementing SAP BI/BO with business-related reports and dashboards. Another major initiative is the HR IT transformation project, where the IT team led by Joshi is implementing systems which will put together a process of standardization for the HR function across the group, and ensure that the system is scalable for the future. All these efforts have not gone unnoticed, and he has been honored with several illustrious awards during his career, including InformationWeek EDGE awards in 2011. In this age of intense competition, Joshi recognizes that innovation, creativity, flair and an entrepreneurial spirit are important CIO skills. This approach has helped him provide business with innovative solutions and in finding technologies for applications in specific business areas. More importantly, he understands that IT must not be looked at as a tool that enables cost cutting, but as a tool that enables business growth.
career track Track record A technocrat with nearly 21 years of experience mostly in the senior management, Shailesh Joshi has had the opportunity to work in diverse companies that allowed him the liberty to work in various IT domains. He is currently designated as Vice President, Corporate IT, Godrej Industries. career achievements Joshi played a pivotal role in introducing ERP to the real estate industry. After his pioneering move to implement SAP for K Raheja Corp, most real estate companies in India now have SAP as their ERP. He is also playing a huge role in the consolidation of IT infrastructure for all the companies in the Group. In the first phase, the project has already achieved a total saving of 40 percent in costs.
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S. Ramasamy Indian Oil Corporation Ltd.
S Ramasamy is Executive Director (Information Systems), Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL), India’s flagship national oil company and a Fortune 500 company. It has business interests straddling the entire hydrocarbon value chain — from refining, pipeline transportation and marketing of petroleum products to natural gas and petrochemicals. IOCL has subsidiaries in Sri Lanka, Mauritius and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and is currently scouting for new business opportunities in the energy markets of Asia and Africa. In his current role, Ramasamy handles infrastructure, technology solutions, business applications and IT enabled business processes. A major project to his credit is the largest implementation of SAP ERP in an oil company in Southeast Asia. And now he provides consultations for SAP implementations in oil companies. During his 11 years as IT Head of IOCL, Ramasamy masterminded several projects like the implementation of Unified Single SAP Payroll across the corporation, developing and deploying a centralized SMS-based indenting system for customers, implementation of e-Collection and e-Payment using the existing infrastructure for automated B2B between oil companies, etc. IOCL was beleaguered by an inefficient and time consuming accounts payable process. Eager to weed out these issues, Ramasamy created an e-Payment process for employees and external vendors. The interface for e-Payment is integrated with SAP Payroll and it generates payment vouchers for making salary-related payments against pending liabilities. The project also facilitated a safe and secure process for carrying out online transactions with banks. By developing a mechanism for effective and timely management of funds, the project has helped IOCL save on
huge interest costs. Ramasamy is responsible for aligning IT with business processes for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of the corporation. He is involved in charting out the future course of IT deployments and endeavors, and exploring new avenues that lend themselves to automation through IT. Apart from these tasks, Ramasamy has other responsibilities at IOCL. For instance, he leads the young SAP consulting group, which has recently completed the SAP rollouts in Sri Lankan Petroleum companies on a competitive basis. He also manages the external reporting team and deliverables such as interim and annual financial statements, as well as the year-end audit report related to infrastructure, security, database growth, and various projects across IOCL. Ramasamy is endorsed for his path-breaking initiative in customization and implementation of SAP R/3 across all the operating units of the corporation, numbering around 797. This was a major challenge considering the mammoth size of IOCL. Based on SAP R/3 HCM module, a centralized uniform single payroll system could be implemented successfully across the organization. As a member of the Executive Management Committee, Ramasamy is bestowed with the responsibility of streamlining the business through information technology by identifying and prioritizing the technologies available, integrating that into the business, and finally protecting and managing it, thereby taking IT to a fathomable height. Ramasamy believes that people skills are more important than technology skills, so it is important to master this to get the best out of people. As an ardent articulator and meticulous planner, he emphasizes more on value creation than value delivery. He is a core believer of IT and thinks that the next big thing for the industry would be enhancing business value through emerging technologies like Big Data, Business Intelligence, mobile and cloud computing.
career track Track record S Ramasamy has 33 years of extensive experience in the petroleum industry. He has expertise in specialized functions like process operation, advance controls, optimization and information systems. career achievements Achieved double SAP certifications as Development Consultant on Net-weaver ABAP workbench and Solution Consultant on Net-weaver Business Information Warehouse.
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Hall of Fame (From our archives) 2 0 11
The following profiles were written in 2011 and reflect designations and achievements up to that point of time. Some CIOs may have moved on to different organizations.
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Vijay Sethi Vice President Information Systems and CIO, Hero MotoCorp
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S Parthasarathy or ‘Partha’ as he is fondly known, has a strong background in business. In the past 11 years at Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M), he took on the IT mantle and quickly adapted to this role, while continuing to drive key business initiatives for several group companies. He’s known to be a ‘multifaceted’ CIO who is adept with both business and technology aspects. One jury member said, “Partha has been spearheading multifarious activities and is highly visible on the IT landscape. He has articulated his role in the business well and has proved that he lives the IT role through great projects such as the SAP implementation. He is a great example of the CIO role changing in a big way.” Partha joined M&M in 2000 as Head of Information Technology & Performance Management. Today,
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ijay Sethi has extensive experience in developing and deploying IT strategies and plans, managing global deployment, maintaining enterprise-wide applications and infrastructure and implementing business continuity plans. He has traveled to more than 25 countries and led several IT integration projects for Global M&As. To quote one of the jury members, “Vijay demonstrates excellent mix of business and IT responsibilities, which many CIOs aspire to achieve. His contributions and increasing responsibilities with the business are commendable.” Of his 22 years in the industry, Sethi has served almost four years at his current company, Hero MotoCorp. He is responsible for IT initiatives across the organization. Sethi is also on the Enterprise Management team. This is the core leadership team, which makes cru-
Partha is Director at 19 group companies, including listed companies in various sectors. He is also a member of the Group Executive Board at M&M. Clearly, this puts him at the helm of business. As Group CIO, he took charge of the ambitious Project Harmony, which was initiated by his predecessor. This project is a group-wide initiative to achieve common processes on a single ERP platform (SAP). He is also leading initiatives on Information Security, Business Process Management (IT-BPR) and Knowledge Management. In addition, Partha led innovative projects on spend analysis, vendor rationalization and decision support system. Under his leadership the M&A team has executed more than 25 transactions/acquisitions across geographies. M&M has won a number of awards under Partha’s leadership.
cial business decisions. The sevenmember team includes the MD & CEO, the CFO and other business heads. Apart from this, Sethi heads certain cross functional teams within the organization — the teams that are formed to work on specific business issues (usually non-IT related). Sethi is also credited for driving certain projects and initiatives that have contributed to the business. The most notable one being the Dealer Management System (DMS) — an implementation of Siebel-based software at more than 500 dealer sites across country. He claims this was one of the largest IT projects undertaken by a manufacturing organization in India. He also spearheaded the Product Lifecycle Management System — an implementation of Siemens Team center-based software linking the R&D and manufacturing operations of the organization.
V S Parthasarathy Group CIO, Executive VP – Finance & M&A, Mahindra & Mahindra
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Girish Rao Head -IT, Marico
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he YES BANK is a new bank on the block. The jury felt that, under Umesh Jain’s leadership, YES BANK has taken many innovative initiatives, all having direct business benefits in terms of productivity enhancement and cost optimization. One jury member said, “Umesh has a lot of domain expertise and is converting fairly complex technologies like BI, mobile money services and identity management for business benefit. ” There are a number of business benefits to Jain’s credit. For instance, during the recession he brought down the technology expense from 15 percent OPEX to 9 percent OPEX, which translates to a saving of USD 5 million — and the bank’s business grew by almost 50 percent during that period. Jain helped in conceptualizing and implementing the IT capability framework and in taking most processes from maturity level 0 to key high level areas. These
n 2002, Girish Rao experienced a moment of pride, exhilaration, and triumph as Marico went live with its SAP implementation. It was the first implementation of Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) and BIW in the country. And as Marico expanded globally, Girish replicated that success in other markets such as South Africa, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Middle East, Vietnam, and the U.S. Truly, he qualifies as a ‘Global CIO.’ Rao is also doing something unique by way of Operation Pearl Necklace, which comprises eight sub-projects (or ‘pearls’). Rao and his team deployed GPS tracking and mobile technologies to help increase collaboration with vendors, and drive down costs of procurement to increase purchase efficiencies. A jury member was all praise for Rao’s contribution to these projects and said, “I really like what Girish is trying to do with mobile technology in the rural
include business alignment, technology governance, technology management, strategy, innovation, project portfolio management, application management, infrastructure management, vendor & financial management, architecture, risk management, and information security. He has led projects to transform the entire process chain from customer acquisition to customer service and customer retention. Jain has other responsibilities, such as the Technology & Business Solution Group. This domain includes retail banking, wealth management, cash and payments, trade finance, financial markets, risk, and microfinance, operations for all domains. The Enterprise areas include HR, finance and all other functions of the bank. He is also responsible for the technology infrastructure — the data center, networks, hardware and software.
areas. Girish has also done major implementations of SAP in Marico India and South Africa. He has also created a very able supply chain. So clearly, Girish has a touch with the semi-urban and the rural, and this is rare among CIOs.” Rao has a track record of 22 years, including a total of 18 at Marico. He plays numerous roles at the company, for instance, he is a part of the M&A task force responsible for due diligence. He contributes to the business task force for the new product development process and to the innovation task force that evaluates and assesses innovations within the organization. Apart from all this, Rao helps initiate business process changes along with the best business practices and the standardization of these within the group. He is also on the Management Committee, which drives strategic business plans and strategies for Marico.
Umesh Jain CIO, YES BANK
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K
K T Rajan Director – Operations , Information Services & Projects, Allergan India
D
handapani has a robust business background spanning 30 years. In his present role as Group CIO, TVS Motor Company, which he assumed in 2005, Dhandapani drives business strategies, standardizes business processes across the group, drives innovation and ensures that the IT infrastructure is secured to reduce risk. Apart from this, he is also involved in decisions related to technology deployment and IT spending. His contribution to the business is directly reflected in the projects he led and in the immediate ROI. Take for instance the project to digitize the NPD (new product development) process to reduce NPD lead time, so as to achieve target cost and quality. Under Dhandapani’s leadership and guidance, the NPD lead time was reduced from 24 months to 11 months — that’s more than a 50 percent time reduction. Or take the project to digitize lean manufacturing system with multiple
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T Rajan is well-known for his innovation and business initiatives. He’s also a risk taker and is known to embrace technologies that have not yet been proven. Rajan has logged 24 years in the industry, including 16 years as an IT Head. At Allergan, Rajan plays a diverse role and some of his responsibilities are: establishing subsidiaries of Global MNCs in emerging markets, setting up and commissioning of manufacturing facilities and managing large supply chain networks with a global footprint. He is also involved in research and development including clinical trials, regulatory and scientific affairs, project management, and sales & marketing. There are three key solutions to his credit that have propelled Allergan’s business performance: sales force automation, sales and supply chain management system, and enhancing employee engagement.
objectives of improving employee and asset productivity, service levels to customers and quality. Here the service level to customers was further improved from 87 percent to 98 percent. Dhandapani has also led the in-house development of the Dealer Management System — an ERP system for TVS Motor dealers, which is implemented across the group’s 10 companies. All these projects provided business benefits in the first year itself — yielding revenue of more than ` 60 crore across the group. Also, employee productivity was increased by more than 50 percent in several projects. Dhandapani is a member of Business Leadership Team (BLT). The high-level BLT is accountable for business results, driving market share and introducing new products and the entire operations and finance. It is responsible for business strategy formulation and execution and for driving business targets.
These have helped to double sales revenue in three years, and made Allergan India one of the most preferred employers in its sector. He conceptualized, developed and implemented a sales force automation solution about 10 years ago when PDAs and wireless communications were either non-existent or nascent. During the late 1990s, most supply chain management solutions were multi-centric, stock-point based and de-centralized. Rajan took a big risk of developing and implementing an online, integrated sales and supply chain solution on the Microsoft .Net platform, which was still in its Beta version. Apart from this, to reduce attrition rate by improving employee engagement, Rajan implemented a value-added service for cell phones, which would route e-mail messages as SMSes. Later, his team deployed an employee portal that has become a platform for professional discussions and personal sharing.
T G Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motor Company
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Global CIO Hall of Fame winners of Global CIO 2009 VIKAS GADRE ANANTHA SAYANA ARUN GUPTA ASHISH CHAUHAN DAVID BRISKMAN Dr JAI MENON N Nataraj Global CIO, Hexaware Technologies
A
s Global CIO of Hexaware, N Nataraj heads the global activities pertaining to IT in 33 countries; he is also responsible for Infosec Governance (IG). Backed by more than 20 years experience in IT, IS and security, he oversees both in-house service, as well as global practice at Hexaware. Nataraj is a member of the company’s senior management council, Org RISK Management team and also heads the Remote Infrastructure Management business. Nataraj has incubated and led revenue generating initiatives like infrastructure management services, and the cloud computing platform that has led to a significant revenue contribution. Some of his most notable projects that had a major impact on Hexaware’s business are HexaPower, HexaAnalytics, CRM in Hexaware, and HexaGreen. HexaPower and Analytics brought in resource optimization in PMO/support staff, resulting in savings of approximately ` 50 lakh per annum. Thanks to the closely integrated systems and the effortless analytics, it introduced enormous savings in manpower. Also, it reduced non-billable travel by 50 percent and slashed overall travel expenses by 30 percent. All this boosted Q2 operating margins by 49.8 percent (quarter-on-quarter). CRM introduced a 10 percent improvement in the productivity of the sales force. It introduced nearly 50-60 percent improvement in the responses to RFP/RFQ. The HexaGreen project led to 25 percent reduction in upfront investment, maintenance for 230 physical servers was no longer required and technical support cost was cut down by 40 percent. Hexaware won various awards for these projects. Notable among these are the InformationWeek EDGE Award for Innovation in IT (2010) and the Innovation Award (2007) from Robin Simpson, Chief Bureau, TIME magazine.
LAXMAN BADIGA PRAVIR VOHRA Dr SUMIT CHOWDHURY SUNIL MEHTA
winners of Global CIO 2010 Sandeep Phanasgaonkar C N Ram Manish Choksi
winners of Global CIO 2011 Vijay Sethi V S Parthasarathy Girish Rao Umesh Jain K T Rajan T G Dhandapani N Nataraj
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15 new rules for IT to live by IT needs to make innovation a priority and execute new projects faster. Just 32 percent of the business technology leaders we surveyed are driving new products or services, only 30 percent say their teams are creating a new revenue stream or business model, while 57 percent worry that they can’t implement new technologies fast enough. It’s time to rewrite the rules for how IT gets done By Chris Murphy
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About a fourth of respondents plan to rearchitect their data centers this year, and 20 percent already have. When it comes to using public cloud infrastructure, 26 percent have major plans for this year, but 38 percent have no plans to use public cloud services. Just 11 percent have a major public cloud implementation in place. When asked about innovation plans this year, IT leaders most often cite cutting costs (38 percent) and making business processes more efficient (37 percent). Those are the traditional goals for IT, ones IT needs to keep in focus, but they suggest an internal focus. Only 32 percent cite introducing an IT-led product or service, and 30 percent cite creating a new revenue stream or business model. Our survey doesn’t show a major shift happening in IT spending, but there are some signs of tightening. Fifty-eight percent are increasing spending over last year, compared with 61 percent in 2011, but 18 percent
IT organization concerns How great a concern is each of the following factors with regard to your IT organizations ability to support business goals? Please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “not a concern” and 5 is a “major concern.”
Don’t have good business unit relationships 2.3 2.5
Don’t have the right outsourcing relationships 2.3 2.3
Don’t have system to prioritize projects 2.5 2.7 Don’t understant our external customers well enought 2.5 NA
Don’t offer innovative, business-relevant ideas 2.7 NA
3.0 2.8 Don’t have enought IT infrastructure capacity 2.8 2.8
Don’t have the right IT skills
3.2
2011
14%
2012
Don’t have enought IT people
1 Not a concern
1 Not a concern
mobile apps today. IT organizations are often on the fringe of their companies’ social networking activities, something they need to change by making IT an indispensable partner in such efforts. The good news is that most companies are still figuring out their social strategy, so IT has the opportunity to position itself as a resource. Just 14 percent of companies have done a major project that incorporates social networks into their companies’ IT infrastructure. But 23 percent plan a major implementation this year. For companies without a clear social agenda, IT might need to be the catalyst: 34 percent of the leaders in our survey say their companies have no plans to make social networking part of their tech structure. In the data center, IT leaders continue to embrace server virtualization — a mere 8 percent have no plans to increase its use — but far fewer are pushing beyond virtualization to rethink the data center’s role.
Can’t implement fast enough to meet business goals 3.5 3.6 IT budgets are insufficient to meet goals 3.4 3.4
A
sk CIOs what they’re worried about, and the No. 1 answer is speed: 57 percent of the IT leaders who responded to our InformationWeek 2012 Global CIO Survey cite “can’t implement fast enough” as a top concern. The next biggest worry — not having enough budget — is fairly close, cited by 48 percent, followed by having no system to prioritize projects (22 percent), having a poor understanding of customers (17 percent) and having poor relationships with business units (15 percent). It’s an important finding from this year’s Global CIO survey of 203 IT leaders, all of them VP or C-level executives. It suggests IT organizations need to focus on execution, not tired concepts like “business-IT alignment.” IT leaders feel like they know what they need to do based on their strong customer and business understanding; it’s the pace of change that’s the biggest risk. In terms of technology priorities, the hottest project in IT is improving employee collaboration; 39 percent of IT leaders have a major implementation planned this year. There’s a growing sense that collaboration can be much better than it is, in two major ways: One, make it more social by mimicking the energy and ease of use of Facebook, and two, pull together video, messaging, data and voice with much less hassle. Close behind collaboration is getting apps on mobile devices, for which 38 percent plan a major implementation this year and another 25 percent plan to do in the next two years. Only 18 percent say they have a major implementation of
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are cutting, compared with just 13 percent a year ago. The rest are flat. We see similar caution around hiring: 31 percent say hiring is frozen, up from 26 percent last year. Only 4 percent says they’re likely to cut, though, same as last year. Fifty-three percent are looking to staff up, either broadly or in specialized skills, compared with 50 percent last year. One number that changed notably is that last year 19 percent of companies looked to hire contractors or outsourcers before full-time staff; this year that’s down to 11 percent. The Global CIO data shows how IT leaders are dealing with an incredibly fast-changing technology and business climate. Technology around cloud, mobile, analytics and social networking is evolving quickly, and IT feels the pressure to keep up and meet business demands. We think IT needs to adopt a new rulebook in order to tap into the opportunities these technologies present, and to deliver them at the speed businesses want to adopt them.
New IT Rulebook
No one’s going to complain about winning new business, but a recent deal to do contract unit repair work from more than 2,000 locations across North America posed a huge challenge for Flextronics’ IT team. The customer was in a hurry to get started, and Flextronics
had to first set up its IT systems that track products as they move through the product-repair process. The old model would have meant setting up a server in each of those locations, making sure the software ran properly from each, and training the on-site people to maintain it. “Speed was the challenge,” says Flextronics CIO David Smoley. So instead of using the old approach, Flextronics’ IT team deployed the software, which is custom-built on a Microsoft stack, using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. The software runs in Microsoft’s data center; the only software needed at the client’s factories is a web browser for workers to access that code. Now, getting that software into the Azure cloud wasn’t a simple liftand-drop maneuver — the Flextronics team had to rewrite 10-15 percent of its custom code. But it took less time and cost less than deploying the software the old way. The technology’s important here, since two or three years ago cloud computing wasn’t mature enough for such an implementation. But more important is the attitude of Smoley and the Flextronics IT team: Faced with a business need for speed and large-scale execution, they mapped a new approach. Amid increasing pressure in
Implementation plans Which of the following technologies and initiatives has your organization implemented or do you plan to implement within the next 24 months?
No. 15 | Treat tablets as workhorses
IT must be open minded about where iPads and Android tablets could make employees more productive. Replacing paper processes is a start — where are employees shuffling paper forms that could be handled more efficiently on tablets? Warehouses, hospitals, and cockpits are just a few of the places we’ve seen. Tablets aren’t for what a laptop does really well, like typing proposals. But their form factor makes them ideal for one-on-one engagement. Salespeople, for instance, are much more comfortable showing a video demo of a product using an iPad. In the first year of the iPad’s life, IT pros were hugely skeptical that tablets would matter much. In late 2010, half of the IT pros in our Outlook Survey strongly disagreed that they’d give even 10 percent of their workforces a tablet. A year later, after 32 million iPads had been sold in 2011, the percentage of skeptics dropped to 35 percent.Tablets speak to a broader need: for IT organizations to think of the “desktop” platform differently. The desktop is now a combination of at least three platforms — smartphone, tablet, and PC — and the lines among them are blurring.
21%
No. 14 | Blend video, messaging, data, and voice to improve collaboration
Deploying tablet computers 16% 27%
12% 18% Implementing ERP 33%
23%
23%
16%
24%
21%
25%
16% 22%
Rearchitecting data centers 20% 26%
Implementing CRM 35%
Providing unified communications 26% 25%
Providing videoconferencing 41% 17%
Using more software as a service 18% 33%
Getting applications on mobile devices 18% 38%
15% Improving information security 33% 36%
Improving collaboration among employees 39% 23%
27% 32% Expanding business intelligence 28% 30%
Increasing server virtualization 46%
Incorporating the public cloud into our technology infrastructure 25% 11% 26%
Major implementation planned in next 24 months
Incorporating social networks into our technology infrastructure 29% 14% 23%
Major implementation planned this year
14%
Major implmentation in place
areas such as time to market, global competition, and fickle customers, IT organizations must throw out the old rulebook. That sounds like a hoot — except that a new rulebook to replace it doesn’t exist. Here’s our start to that new IT rulebook, one that begs to be rewritten many times over.
The hottest project in IT is improving employee collaboration. There’s a growing sense that collaboration can be much better than it is, in two major ways. One, make it more social — mimic the energy and ease of use of Facebook. Two, pull together video, messaging, data, and voice with much less hassle, in a way that makes it a lot easier for employees to solve problems. For its top executive council, Procter & Gamble combines analytics
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(more on that later) with video in a boardroom-sized environment it calls the Business Sphere. This past year, P&G built 50 scaled-down versions of that collaboration environment for conference rooms in its offices worldwide. Now, CIO Filippo Passerini plans to blend messaging, video, and analytics to provide something similar on a desktop level, what P&G is calling Business Sphere Office. Passerini says the technology pieces aren’t new; what would be new is the combination of collaboration software, video, and data in an easier-to-use desktop tool, so it’s simple to pull in colleagues, including those with analytics expertise, as needed to solve problems. Jerry Johnson, CIO of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, also sees this convergence coming. It’s why he made a tour last month of Google, Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft, to learn more about their latest ideas. PNNL has the pieces — video, voice over IP, instant messaging, and e-mail — but Johnson wants to pull those together in a way that’s as easy to use as an iPhone. After his vendor tour, Johnson still isn’t convinced there’s an easy, one-vendor platform for pulling all those pieces together. But he is convinced that the technology is headed that way. Scientists at PNNL, a U.S. Department of Energy Lab, work with universities, businesses, and other government agencies worldwide, so this kind of digital collaboration will be increasingly vital.
No. 13 | Get socially savvy
IT organizations are often on the fringe of their companies’ social networking activities. They need to get immersed — not take them over, but make IT an indispensable partner. The good news is that most companies are still figuring out their social strategy, so IT has the opportunity to position itself as a resource. Just 14 percent of companies have done a major project that incorporates social networks into their company’s IT infrastructure, our Global CIO Survey finds. But 23 percent plan a major implementation this year. One way for IT to get involved is in monitoring what customers
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and partners are saying about their companies on social networks — so-called sentiment analysis. Such monitoring is a low priority today; just 37 percent of the IT leaders cite it as important. But it will grow in importance as more companies, even in business- to-business industries, use social networks as marketing and customer support channels. Companies may be able to launch social efforts like sentiment analysis without IT’s help. At Best Buy, sentiment analysis began in marketing research; Best Buy tapped IT when it saw opportunities to scale that analysis across the company. For companies without a clear social agenda, IT might need to be the catalyst: 34 percent of the leaders in our survey say their
Those percentages need to be higher. IT leaders have a ways to go to win over their marketing peers: 27 percent say their relationship with the marketing team is poor or neutral, compared with 22 percent who say that about their relationship with the finance team and 15 percent who say that about operations/ manufacturing. Data-driven marketing and social networking analytics are places where marketing and IT groups should have a natural bond, as well as in mobile apps and websites.
No. 11 | Use mobile to change the customer experience If you operate any physical space that people visit — a store, amusement park, hospital, funeral home — you need to think about people
IT organizations are often on the fringe of their companies’ social networking activities. They need to get immersed — not take them over, but make IT an indispensable partner companies have no plans to make social networking part of their tech structure.
No. 12 | Make the CMO IT’s new BFF
CIOs have long cozied up to the chief financial officer, and that’s fine. But most CFOs will forever see IT as an expense line, a support function that’s essential but not a true competitive differentiator. IT needs to be much more, especially as companies put technology directly in front of their customers, via mobile apps, e-commerce, and social networking, or actually embed technology in their products, from cars to soccer cleats. To truly make IT a revenue-driving force, CIOs need to make the CMO their new best friend. But if IT organizations want to hang with the CMO, they need to think like CMOs. Most IT organizations still see themselves as cost cutters and process improvers first. When asked about their innovation plans this year, only 32 percent cite introducing an IT-led product or service, and 30 percent cite creating a new revenue stream or business model.
accessing the mobile web there, on smartphones or tablets, and ask how that access changes their experience. Should you try to ban mobile, discourage it, or embrace it? Retailer Target recently sent a letter to suppliers, according to a Wall Street Journal article, asking them to help it combat “showrooming,” whereby shoppers check out products at its big-box stores and then buy them from online competitors at lower prices. If you’re a conventional retailer, will you encourage comparison shoppers by providing free Wi-Fi in your stores, or will you resist it, as Target is? If you run an amusement park, do you have an app to make the park easier to navigate — and easier for customers to rave about on their social networks, turning them into marketing machines? Vail ski resorts did exactly that with their mobile EpicMix app. Companies are realizing they need to improve their mobile presence: 63 percent of respondents to our Global CIO Survey say they’ll have a major effort under way this year or next to
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get apps onto mobile devices. Only 18 percent say they have a major implementation of mobile apps today.
No. 10 | Revive in-house, custom development
Smoley, the Flextronics CIO, looks over his IT career as mostly being in the packaged apps era. Compared with custom software built from scratch, packaged software was much more predictable. In that era, when a company wanted to add a capability, the default choice was to add a module to its core ERP platform. “‘Why not SAP?’ was the question you had to ask,” Smoley says. He thinks that mindset is changing. Cloud-based software alternatives are emerging, but Smoley also thinks companies will return to developing their own custom software more often. Some of those projects won’t even require heavy-duty coding — they’ll involve configuring cloud software as a platform to meet the company’s specific needs. Flextronics, for example, is experimenting with customizing its Service Now IT help desk cloud software to meet broader production needs, like tracking a manufacturing floor problem to make sure the right expert is contacted and the problem is followed through until it’s resolved. Skills are important here, as many IT shops’ development skills have atrophied. Just 40 percent of the IT managers who responded to our annual
U.S. IT Salary Survey consider app dev a critical skill, putting it 13th on our list of 15. Many companies don’t have the in-house chops to do this kind of work, and working with outside developers adds complexity. The key is to start with small projects, developing a team with custom coding skills. “Once you have that base, it becomes a tool that you can use in a lot of situations,” Smoley says.
No. 9 | Keep skills in touch with the times
Going back to our annual salary survey each of the past five years, it’s striking that there’s been almost zero change in the skills IT managers consider to be the most critical. Preparing reports, for instance, is still cited as critical by nearly half (48 percent) of the IT managers in our most recent survey, exactly the same as five years ago. Have we really made no progress automating reports in five years? Analyzing data remains at 56 percent, unchanged from 2008. Shouldn’t the rise of Big Data analytics have driven up the importance of that skill? Developing apps was considered critical by 40 percent of the management respondents to our most recent IT salary survey, up only slightly from 38 percent in 2008, despite the surge in mobile apps over the past two years. Worst is that seeking out new business opportunities was cited by only 24 percent of IT managers in our most recent survey, down from 29 percent in 2008 — and dead last among
Primary opportunity for CIOs What is the main opportunity for CIOs today?
1%
Other 1%
Free up cash for ongoing operation 3% 1%
Cut business and IT costs 12%
Increase employee producitivity via new collaboration tools 14% 18%
24% 23% Drive company-wide process innovation
Use customer/business data to influence new product and services and drive growth
15% Lead company’s sales and growth efforst on the Web specifically 7% 2% Move the company closer to its customers via Web 2.0 and other technologies 6% 6% Drive global standards and global business opportunities 5% 8%
2011
28% 26%
2012
the list of 15 skills we asked about. The skill considered most critical, cited by 80 percent of respondents in both 2012 and 2008, is aligning business and technology goals. If more IT managers focus on finding new business opportunities, the aligning part will take care of itself.
No. 8 | Think of ‘data center’ as a result, not a building
Server virtualization has been one of IT’s great ROI success stories — a mere 8 percent of respondents to our Global CIO Survey say they have no plans to increase its use. But far fewer IT leaders are pushing beyond virtualization to rethink the data center’s role. About a fourth of respondents plan to rearchitect their data centers this year, and 20 percent already have. When it comes to using public cloud infrastructure, 26 percent have major plans for this year but 38 percent have no plans to use public cloud services. Just 11 percent have a major public cloud implementation in place. Consider what Flextronics was able to accomplish with Microsoft’s Azure public cloud platform for one small but strategic computing initiative. Even if the public cloud isn’t the answer, and it often won’t be, you need to consider it as an option. Replicating the flexibility and responsiveness of the public cloud in-house, a highly virtualized private cloud is a viable long-term strategy. FedEx built a major new data center in Colorado as a private cloud environment. CIO Rob Carter calls the servers, storage, and networking “workload agnostic” computing — servers that run, say, route optimization software at peak planning times could run financial software at other times. It wasn’t easy, as FedEx had to rewrite apps so they run on one common platform of equipment, databases, and middleware. But the value is that it gives FedEx a new level of operating flexibility, which Carter expects will help IT move faster on new initiatives. For now, Carter doesn’t see a business need to ship computing capacity to a public cloud, but the infrastructure was built in a way that keeps that possibility open.
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No. 7 | Build a cloud-friendly IT shop
It’s not that every app should go to the cloud, but IT should consider the cloud for every app, and it needs policies that make it easy to add such software services. Yet less than half (47 percent) of the 511 tech pros who responded to our 2012 State of Cloud Computing Survey said their companies are using or plan to use cloud services in the coming year. Just over a fourth have no plans to use cloud services. Those using cloudbased apps like them — 81 percent say they’re better or equal to in-house options. Despite the fact that such apps can be launched more quickly at lower cost, IT organizations often wait for business units to push for them. IT needs to build models for purchasing, integration, monitoring, compliance, and support. Among companies using cloud apps, 47 percent rely on custom coding using the vendor’s API to connect internal systems to cloudbased software, rather than using an integration platform. To track cloud app performance, just 28 percent use their own advanced monitoring tools. A shocking 24 percent don’t monitor their cloud apps. Avnet CIO Steve Phillips has told his IT team that every software RFP must consider at least one softwareas-a-service option. To move a USD 26.5 billion-a-year global company, it can take that kind of directive from the CIO. Security concerns and compliance rules might scuttle using a cloud app, as could pure economics (monthly subscriptions aren’t always cheaper than conventional upfront payments and maintenance fees). But cloud software shouldn’t be overlooked because IT doesn’t have sound operating procedures around it.
No. 6 | Get ready for ‘bring your own cloud’
After initially resisting the movement, most IT shops are finally at peace with BYOD (bring your own device). Some CIOs are evangelists for it. Now IT shops need to ask themselves how they’ll respond when the BYOC (bring your own cloud) wave starts to crest. Think of these as personal clouds. Apple’s
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iCloud, for example, offers users 5 GB of free storage to access documents, music, and photos from any device, and Apple’s touting its new Mountain Lion operating system as the first Mac OS X release “built with iCloud in mind.” Dropbox, which has 45 million users, provides 2 GB of free storage space. Google has long been rumoured to be planning a storage service, but with Google Docs, it already offers a cloudbased option for collaborating and putting loads of content online. IT organizations can resist and then succumb, or they can help their companies’ employees figure out how to deal with these personal clouds. “I envision we’ll end up with a private Dropbox or iCloud or SkyDrive or something that can also integrate with a public cloud in some fashion,” says Johnson, the CIO of Pacific Northwest National Lab. And if PNNL builds that kind of in-house service, it could very well need a way to include both professional and personal data, he says.
No. 5 | Evolve security to be data aware
Information security used to focus solely on protecting the perimeter through network firewalls and remote access controls, Johnson notes. Today, PNNL’s security team focuses more on protecting the container via identity and access management, workstation firewalls, and configuration management on devices. Looking ahead, he sees a shift to “protecting the information”— knowing if a particular combination of user, device, and software can be trusted with access to a certain type of information. Perimeter
and container protections will remain, but companies will add informationaware security. “This is the new world of defense in depth,” Johnson says. The challenge for PNNL is to provide that kind of protection while letting scientists inside and outside the lab share increasingly large and sensitive data sets. “We jokingly say that cybersecurity put the ‘no’ in innovation,” Johnson says. There will always be tension between security and openness, but unless security leaders show an ability to balance risk and business need and solve problems, people won’t bother to ask for help.
No. 4 | Create analysis tools, not stale reports
The old BI methodology of delivering backward-looking reports doesn’t work anymore — even if you digitize that data and call those stale reports a dashboard. Instead, IT needs to provide data views that tell people what’s happening and also let them dig into why it’s happening and plot what to do about it. About one-fourth of the respondents to our Global CIO Survey cite getting better BI to employees more quickly among their three most-critical innovation plans for this year. Fifty-seven percent say they plan to expand BI this year or next. It’s essential that CIOs use those projects to provide decision-making tools, not just take-it-or-leave-it data. Passerini, Procter & Gamble’s CIO, argues that IT organizations shouldn’t even try to figure out all the data employees need to make decisions. Instead, they should create a firstclass way for employees to access and analyze data, which P&G has done by
IT Investment Plans for 2012 What is your organization’s approach this year to the following general types of IT projects or investments? Investing
Holding steady
Scaling back
New application development (i.e., new software projects) 63%
63%
Infrastructure upgrades (i.e., hardware investment, such as servers and PCs) 51% End user technology (e.g., Web 2.0-related projects) 37% New outsourcing engagements 31%
6%
51%
5%
37% 31%
9% 24%
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giving 58,000 employees a “cockpit” of data feeds that they can configure. Then IT must make sure there’s a clear channel for people to request data they don’t have. Passerini admits that this approach is “putting the cart before the horse,” because it creates a way for people to access data before the data exists. But the old model — waiting for IT pros to figure out what data execs want, collect and cleanse it, and then deliver it — has failed. Only once executives are talking about data, trying to use it to make real business decisions like whether to cut ad spending or improve store displays, will everyone have a stake in collecting the data and getting it right. IT can then respond to the “pull” for data, he says, rather than push out what it thinks is best.
No. 3 | Plan to adjust, don’t plan to be perfect
Rick Roy is CIO at CUNA Mutual Group, which provides services to credit unions, and he was meeting with his senior IT leadership early this year about their technology road maps, which generally look three to five years ahead. Someone asked about mobility. “I said: ‘I think the road map is one year, and everything we’re doing today might be throwaway in three to five years,’” Roy says. It surprised his team. He explained that they still need a strategic plan. But with the amount of change in mobile, Roy urged his team to be careful about costs. You can’t buy a fleet of mobile devices that require a three-year life span to deliver ROI, because the technology’s changing so fast they might be obsolete in 18 months. Listen to what’s not in Roy’s message: Wait and see how mobility shakes out before doing anything. There was a time when most IT shops could afford to be fast followers, waiting until a tech segment matured before jumping in. With consumerdriven tech cycles, IT needs to make sure it isn’t waiting and seeing its way to irrelevance. If a project involves consumer-driven technologies, like mobile devices, IT must adjust to their six- to 18- month product life cycles, not the classic two-to three-year
enterprise life cycle. PNNL’s IT organization lays out a long-term plan as a baseline, knowing that it will change. That way, if someone comes back the next year and wants to shift 180 degrees, Johnson can ask what has changed so drastically to require the shift.
was that the U.S. jobs recovery was coming too slowly? When a new project comes up, you need people calling IT for advice on how to make it happen on deadline. Too often, the stated or unstated feeling is, “If we call in IT, this will never get done in time.”
No. 2 | Deliver IT projects in weeks or months, not years
No. 1 | Really know who buys your product
As noted at the beginning of this story, the top worry for the IT leaders in our Global CIO Survey is that they can’t implement fast enough to meet business goals, cited by 57 percent of respondents. The next biggest worry — not having enough budget — is fairly close, cited by 48 percent, followed by having no system to prioritize projects (22 percent), having a poor understanding of customers (17 percent), and having poor relationships with business units (15 percent). Let this soak in a moment: IT leaders know what needs to be done, but the big problem is execution. Where do projects bog down: requirements, development, buying, testing, rework? For an example of the needed sense of urgency, consider the goings-on at Starbucks last fall. In the last week of August, Starbucks’ executives, led by CEO Howard Schultz, decided that the company should try to do something to help create jobs. By Nov. 1, the company had launched “Create Jobs For USA,” encouraging customers to donate USD 5 and get a wristband — money that, along with USD 5 million from the Starbucks Foundation, a nonprofit group would lend to small businesses with the goal of adding jobs. The project meant creating a new website (createjobsforusa.org) and a Facebook page with options to donate online. IT did some work, some was outsourced, but “IT is part of the discussion about whether something should be outsourced,” says Adam Brotman, Starbucks’ VP of Digital Ventures. Create Jobs wasn’t an IT project; it was a company project with an “as soon as possible” deadline, so IT couldn’t afford to gum up the works. Think Schultz would have accepted a sixmonth timeline when the whole point
IT leaders are pretty cocksure they have this one cold. Only 17 percent of the respondents to our Global CIO Survey say “understanding external customers” is a concern. The only factors they cite as less of a concern are having good business unit relationships (15 percent) and having the right outsourcing ties (13 percent). And yet, when we look at IT leaders’ priorities, they don’t look intensely focused on customers. Just 12 percent cite “engage customers in news ways” as one of their top innovation projects for 2012, and just 24 percent cite “improve customer service.” Cost cutting and process change lead the priority list, suggesting an internal focus. Business technology leaders need to make sure that the rank-and-file IT pros really understand what matters to their ultimate customers. At CME Group, the commodities exchange company that includes the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, IT pros test trading system upgrades from the offices of hedge fund customers, knowing that even millisecond disruptions matter to those traders. For Vanguard, the mutual fund company, all employees, from CIO Paul Heller to entry-level IT pros, take a turn answering phone calls from customers. When Stephen Gillett started as CIO of Starbucks in 2008, he spent his first week as a barista — and quickly learned how long it had been since the cash register systems had been upgraded. These are token gestures unless they turn into action. IT leaders must connect what they and their teams do to what customers want and need. They need to follow the lead of the 32 percent of IT leaders in our survey who say they’re driving new IT-led products. Source: InformationWeek
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Feature
Evolving enterprise application landscape in India
The rise of mobility and social networking technologies coupled with the emergence of cloud computing and robust BI and analytics tools is transforming the traditional enterprise applications landscape By Amrita Premrajan
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echnology developments in the last few years have transformed the traditional on-premise enterprise applications scenario drastically. While cloud computing has made it possible to deliver enterprise applications through the cloud on a pay-peruse subscription model, emerging technologies in the mobile space have opened up opportunities for enterprises to mobile-enable required enterprise apps for on-field workers and the C-level executives. And then there are BI and analytics tools, which are increasingly being integrated with core enterprise apps by businesses to gain competitive edge and devise business strategies based on the critical insights obtained with the help of these tools. Apart from this, the rising popularity of social media as a potential tool to tap more business and gain insights into customer sentiments is encouraging many enterprises to integrate social media with their CRM.
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We dig deeper into each of the areas and discuss how enterprise applications are innovating and evolving to accommodate these trends.
SMBs availing key enterprise apps through the cloud
Traditionally, large enterprises in India have believed in owning all their business applications and hosting and controlling them within the enterprise firewall. On the other hand, in the absence of funds required for a robust IT infrastructure to set up all required state-of-the-art business apps available with the vendors, SMBs have been relying on manual processes or some home-grown business applications. However, the emergence of cloud computing has drastically changed the way enterprise applications were delivered traditionally — business applications are now available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model where customers have to pay as per their usage of the applications. “SaaS
is ideal for SMBs that don’t have enough money and resources to spend on servers and manage systems and build dedicated IT teams. SaaS vendors like us become their dedicated IT department where they host their e-mails, financial information, customer information, etc.,” says Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho. Today, SMBs can avail enterprise applications ranging from ERP to CRM with most of the functionalities that on-premise software have, without worrying about the hassles of upgrades, maintenance and support, as the SaaS vendors continuously push new updates and fixes to the application, which are immediately available to the customer. Riding on the cloud computing wave, enterprise application vendors like Ramco, SAP and Oracle are offering many of their solutions on the SaaS model. Apart from the large players, the last few years have witnessed the emergence of several cloud computing
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startups in India ranging from companies like iWebNotes, which provides ERP on a SaaS model; BusinessIntelligenze, which provides BI on a SaaS model; to A2Zapps, which provides cloud-based collaborative desktop. (To know more about startups in the cloud computing space, read our story ‘India sees rise in the emergence of cloud-based startups’: http://bit.ly/TGLid1)
Large Enterprises moving non-core Apps to the cloud
As many large companies are wary of moving their core enterprise apps and data to the cloud, they are putting their non-core apps on the cloud. “SaaS solution is about low or no customization. Though they do provide flexibility, clients can expect minimal customization. Traditionally, large enterprise would have customized their enterprise apps beyond 30-40 percent, so it is difficult for them to live without that. Hence, large enterprises are looking at selectively moving their administrative functions onto the cloud and not the core enterprise apps. We see the emergence of hybrid model in India — with on-premise and cloud coexisting,” says Sunil Padmanabh, Research Director, Gartner. According to Padmanabh, cloud
“Cloud delivery model of applications like HCM, HRMS and CRM is gaining acceptance among large enterprises”
Sunil Padmanabh
Research Director, Gartner
delivery model of applications like HCM, HRMS and CRM is gaining acceptance among large enterprises. ERP surround apps are another example of applications that large businesses are moving to the cloud to ensure better comfort for stakeholders. ERP surround apps are applications that bridge the gap between traditional CRM and ERP like contract management, transportation management, and partner relationship management. Due to less stringent compliance requirements, these apps are easier to adapt to cloud and mobility. ICertis, a startup that offers such ERP surround products in the cloud, is leveraging this trend of large enterprises moving to the cloud for non-core applications. One of the company’s major customers is a large
SaaS: No guaranteed cost savings Most CIOs in India, view cloud as an option that allows them to achieve benefits, without any upfront investment as it requires minimal or no infrastructure and doesn’t involve any upgrade or maintenance costs. However, Sunil Padmanabh, Research Director, Gartner cautions the organizations to carefully examine the contract before considering the SaaS model.“Getting on to the cloud does not guarantee cost savings. If you decide to go the SaaS way, looking at SaaS contracting is very critical because generally they lock you in for a certain period of time, which means though it functions on a pay-as-you-go model, there is a lock-in period of around three years. Also, there are integration needs and data migration, end-user training and change management related costs that need to be factored in,” he says. This means the benefits of SaaS can be really tapped in by SMBs that do not have much legacy data or apps and they can directly jump on to a relevant SaaS solution, which fits their business requirements. But for the large enterprises, moving the core enterprise apps to the cloud is not realistic. That is why we are increasingly seeing the trend where large enterprises are looking at cloud computing solutions for many of their non-core apps. “Cloud might not be beneficial for CIOs who jump on it just for savings; those who are looking for cost and deployment simplicity will probably realize the true benefits of cloud,” Padmanabh asserts.
technology company that has moved to the cloud using ICertis Contract Life Cycle Management Solution. Today 150,000 plus employees of the company along with the associated vendors and contractors are accessing the Contract Life Cycle Management Solution through the cloud. Apart from this, some businesses in India have also started contemplating moving payroll to the cloud. “Payroll used to be traditionally outsourced but now payroll can also be deployed completely on cloud. This is very evident in North America and Europe. And now we are getting inquiries from Indian enterprises,” Padmanabh informs.
BI and Analytics tools becoming indispensable
As per Gartner’s 2012 CIO survey, analytics and BI emerged as top technology priority for CIOs in 2012. The trend is very prominent in India too — large enterprises are investing proactively in integrating BI and analytics tools with their core enterprise appls to churn out business critical information for C-level decision-making. “As recently as five years ago, selling the idea of analytics to India-based clients was very difficult. Over the last few years, by a combination of ideas injected by MNCs and a latent demand coming up, we have seen Indian corporations asking for more from their data,” says Venkat Viswanathan, CEO and Founder of LatentView Analytics, a startup in the space of analytics. Also, the need for real-time analysis of information is resulting in the heightened interest in in-memory computing. “The in-memory technologies are not restricted to BI and extend to the fundamental layer of database and
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Feature data warehouses that are the causes of the latency in reporting. Since a majority of data storage, calculation, aggregation, etc., happens on-disk, it substantially impacts the end-user experience,” informs Suprakash Chaudhuri, VP - Business Solutions, Database & Technology, SAP India. With the rise in the mobile workforce, enterprises today are also integrating their enterprise apps with Mobile BI. These solutions are gradually gaining traction as they enable C-level executives to use BI solutions on their mobile devices, enabling them to quickly access and drill down relevant information through dashboards. Looking at the opportunity, Mobile BI solution providers are offering reporting modules on mobile devices that enables senior managers to access reports on the go. Informing about a solution they have in the space, Milind Joshi , Senior VP - IT Services, AGC Networks, says, “We have a prototype that deploys the mobile reporting module on BlackBerry handsets. Various manufacturing reports such as production reports, dispatch reports, inventory reports and life cycle reports are available on the application.” Another key development in the context of analytics, is the emergence of Big Data analytics technologies — the organizations are using it to get critical insights and take important business decisions. “Traditionally, companies have been making business decisions based on the transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, there are multiple sources of data stored in nontraditional, less structured mediums such as weblogs, social media, e-mail, sensors, and photographs. When this
“More than 50 percent of transactions for enterprise apps will be done through mobile devices in a few years”
Debasish Pattanayak Senior VP & Director – Enterprise Solutions Business, Collabera
big (non-traditional) data is distilled and analyzed in combination with traditional enterprise data, enterprises can develop more insightful understanding of their business,” says Kapil Sood, VP, Systems Business, Oracle India. Predicting the market need for Big Data analytics technologies, many companies are launching products in the space. For example, Oracle recently launched its Big Data Appliance which includes a combination of Open Source software and specialized software developed to address enterprise Big Data requirements. Other big technology players like, SAP, EMC, and NetApp are also launching their Big Data offerings in the market. What is interesting is that we are also seeing the emergence of Big Data Analytics startups like LatentView Analytics and Nube Technologies that are currently tapping the international market and are highly optimistic about tapping the Indian market in the near future.
Extending Enterprise Apps to Mobile Devices According to a recent survey by CIO Research Centre in India, 94 percent of the respondent CIOs believe that enterprise mobility will be an important part of their
“Social CRM is being used by organizations for building the brand image and to know what clients are saying about their products”
Sunil Bhave
VP, Application Services, Fujitsu Consulting India
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organization’s IT strategy within the next one year. With the growth of usage of smartphones and tablets in enterprises, Indian organizations are increasingly mobile-enabling enterprise apps, which could allow getting or feeding critical information while on the move — resulting in time saving, increased productivity and direct business benefits. A case in point is Perfetti Van Melle, a FMCG giant, which has provided its salesforce with BlackBerry devices to reduce the time required for the reporting of market data. This has reduced the time required for forecasting sales and restocking the shelves of the customers from 15 days to just one day. This has also enabled the company’s top management to access reports on a web-based portal for analysis and has substantially improved customer satisfaction. Another example is that of advertising agency, Lowe Lintas, which has enabled the time-sheet app on BlackBerry devices of employees so that they can fill in time-sheet wherever they are and the fed information is reflected in a reporting dashboard made available for the senior management. Likewise, Mumbai-based startup Rewire has done about 25 proof of concepts for mobility apps. In one such PoC, a mobile app was connected to the back-end of core enterprise apps. “We developed an app for plant maintenance that interacts with ERP or Oracle in the backend to automate the resolution of a problem. The application takes into account the typical workflow in an organization for raising a ticket, procuring resources, and then resolving the ticket,” says LN Sundarrajan, Founder
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Director, Rewire. “The rapid penetration of smartphones and tablets and the reducing cost of data access over the last few years have placed a high demand on enterprise applications to provide information on mobile devices. A few years from now, it won’t be a surprise if more than 50 percent of the transactions for enterprise applications are done through mobile devices,” says Debasish Pattanayak, Senior VP & Director – Enterprise Solutions Business, Collabera.
Adding the Social Element
According to Gartner, social networks have the potential to deliver a new category of information based on social interactions. This information can be used to improve engagement with employees, customers, business partners, as well as create innovative business opportunities. One of the significant developments that has happened in this area is the emergence of ‘Social CRM,’ which includes integration of social media with CRM strategies. Gartner had reported in May 2012 that Social CRM is increasingly becoming important for lead generation and cross-selling and up-selling capabilities and for other functions that are key to a successful sales organization. And Gartner analysts expect worldwide market for social CRM software licenses and subscriptions to total USD 2.1 billion in 2012, up from 850 million in 2011. Sunil Bhave, Vice President, Application Services, Fujitsu Consulting India, says that Social CRM has moved into multi-touch point services and is being used not only to know what clients are saying about their products and services, but also for building the right brand image through active
“User experience expectations are growing in the enterprise apps space and users expect the same ease of use and features as consumer applications”
Monish Darda CTO, Icertis
interventions. “Cloud-based platforms are a step ahead here with their ability to seamlessly integrate with social networking platforms,” he says. Currently, most Indian enterprises are considering offerings that have the ability to integrate with their current enterprise apps, without ripping or replacing them. With strong demand in the market, vendors like SAP and Oracle have recently come out with offerings that act as social media connectors to the existing CRM solutions and enable the users to make use of the social intelligence aspect embedded in the solutions to get real-time understanding about customer sentiments and even respond to the customers in real-time.
User interface innovations in enterprise apps
With the coming of devices like iPads and smartphones, user interface of applications is emerging as an area of innovations in the enterprise apps space. “User Experience (UX) expectations are growing in the enterprise apps space and users expect the same ease of use and features as consumer applications,” says Monish Darda, CTO, Icertis. Understanding this need, Icertis is bringing innovations in the user
“As users will demand cross platform support to access apps on any device they use, we will witness a lot more emphasis on user interface innovations”
Shyamala J
Senior Vice President, Ramco Systems
experience of its offered applications. The startup is working on a Kinect interface to their Transportation Management System (which is a native cloud app) that will allow multiple people to efficiently work on a master transportation plan as they use gesture recognition to drag cargo on to waiting virtual trucks. “This immersive experience is expected to increase the efficiency of planning teams manyfold,” says Darda. Talking about how the area of user experience is going to change in the future, Shyamala J, Senior VP, Ramco Systems says, “We are likely to witness a lot more emphasis on user interface innovations and highly productive intuitive and graphical users interfaces. Users will demand cross platform support so that they can access applications on any device they use.” Many exciting innovations are happening in the front of enterprise mobility, cloud computing, analytics and social, and going forward these areas would continue to emerge as multiple dimensions of enterprise apps. In India, currently enterprises are in the phase of exploration and are selectively implementing those innovations in the enterprise apps front which have potential to give them tangible business benefits. Though today enterprise mobility, cloud computing, analytics and social are viewed in isolation with each other, going forward all these technologies would mature to become a part of the core enterprise application strategy of a business. u Amrita Premrajan
amrita.premrajan@ubm.com
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Feature
Will Atos have “Zero e-mail” by 2013? Organizations like Atos have set up initiatives to reduce the amount of internal e-mail, which is deemed as a productivity damper. Here’s Atos’s plan to reduce e-mail significantly, if not to zero By Brian Pereira
E
-mail may have been the biggest communications breakthrough in the 20th century, but these days it is becoming a necessary evil; e-mail is leading to information overload, and has a telling effect on employee productivity. A study from telephony company Fonality and research firm Webtorials shows that workers in small- and medium-sized businesses spend half their work day on “necessary, yet unproductive tasks, including routine communications and filtering incoming information and correspondence.” The survey was conducted between December 2010 and January 2011. Habitually checking, replying and forwarding e-mail takes up much of our time, both inside the office and outside — since this activity now extends to portable devices like smartphones and tablets. How many times do you draw your BlackBerry to check e-mails during your daily commute? At work, how often do you fire up Outlook to download the latest batch of mail? E-mail storage has also become a nightmare for CIOs and IT managers, who need to invest in additional storage capacity and deduplication technology. But such issues are likely to become a thing of the past for companies such as Atos, DDB Mudra Group, L&T Infotech and others, who are turning to social media for intra company communications. Atos goes so far as to call its policy “Zero e-mail” — although that is an aspirational title. We had earlier reported on DDB Mudra’s and L&T Infotech’s initiatives in the August issue of InformationWeek India: http://bit.ly/ RfacwT.
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“E-mail was affecting employee productivity and work-life balance, so we embarked on the initiative to reduce internal e-mail”
Avinash Velhal, Group CIO IMEA, VP, Head IT & Process, Atos International As part of its “Well Being at Work” program launched in 2009, to support its goal of being one of the best places to work, Atos implemented a number of initiatives to improve communication and information sharing across its organization. It continues to encourage its employees to use unified communications tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator (now called Lync), and it has also set up social community platforms (based on Jive and Wikiwi) for the exchange of ideas on diverse subjects. Going by the initial feedback, these tools immediately reduced e-mail by 10 to 20 percent. Avinash Velhal, Group CIO IMEA, Vice President, Head IT & Process, Atos International says, “We had set up an ambitious target of reducing internal e-mail to zero by 2013. I see this more of a cultural change rather than a technology change. E-mail was affecting employee productivity and work-life balance, so we embarked on this initiative to address those issues.” Velhal informs that this initiative is being rolled out in phases at Atos offices across the world, so it will take a while before the entire organization embraces social media and collaborative tools. The initiative was rolled out a year and a half ago. Velhal champions the Atos zero e-mail initiative in India. He says zero
e-mail is a visionary thing. “People find it hard to believe that our e-mail will be down to zero. But this is a vision that we have. It may not go down to zero, but we would definitely like to see people in our organization reducing the amount of e-mail, and increasingly turning to other tools for communication.” Atos has deployed Microsoft Lync for instant messaging among its employees across the globe. In addition, it has deployed knowledge management tools. All these communication and collaboration tools are accessible from a portal. Velhal informs that Atos will soon roll out its enterprise social network. Getting employees to use these tools may pose a challenge for Velhal and his team. But he says Atos has a chain of ambassadors in various business areas to drive awareness and to adapt the business processes. And he offers some words of advice. “You need to have it all accessible from a portal. You can’t force this on people. Instead, understand user requirements and provide the adequate tools. The interface should be simple,” says Velhal.
u Brian Pereira brian.pereira@ubm. com
www.informationweek.in
Case Study
Mobile solution enables MSSL to enhance food safety An insight into how the business function and IT collaborated together to enable MSSL to control the usage of chemicals in its farms and give it a first-mover advantage in new geographies By Srikanth RP
I
f you had the opportunity to watch actor Aamir Khan’s TV show ‘Satyamev Jayate’ on 24th June, 2012, you would be as alarmed as many of the citizens in our country. The show highlighted disturbing statistics on the food we consume everyday. For example, did you know that there are over 60 types of pesticides, which are banned all over the world, but are still used by Indian farmers? As a result, Indians end up consuming pesticides which are much higher than the permissible limit. What does this show have to do with IT and with Mahindra ShubhLabh
Services Limited (MSSL), the agribusiness company of the Mahindra Group? Let us explain. The company is in the business of exporting grapes to global markets situated in Europe, Africa and other Asian countries. Similar to the concern shown in the television show, the firm encountered a situation where it was facing a huge challenge in ensuring that the grapes it exported were compliant with the required safety levels of different chemicals as prescribed by different countries for consumption. However, this was easier said than done. The scale and complexity of ensuring compliance was extremely
challenging. For example, MSSL works with more than 200 farmers who grow grapes on the company’s behalf across more than 800 plots. To ensure compliance, the firm needed to closely monitor the usage of chemicals on the huge number of plots. To check the usage of chemicals, the firm employed field officers who were tasked with visiting farms and collecting information related to performance of the farm and the usage of various chemicals in the farm. Typically, field officers collected data from the field over an 8-10 days cycle, and reported this to a central authority. This delay often
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Case Study proved detrimental to the overall yield estimates and to the business itself. “As grape is an annual crop, it has a harvesting period of 11 months. During this time period, different chemicals are spread over the grapes to protect them from insects. Our challenge was to ensure that the usage of chemicals during this time period was monitored closely as this would have a direct impact on exports,” states Chaitanya Rajwade, Business Head, Mahindra ShubhLabh Services. As the clients of MSSL were extremely demanding on food safety, it was imperative for MSSL to ensure proper compliance as non-compliance could mean loss of business. With more than 75 different chemicals used on the farms, it was challenging for MSSL to monitor the usage across a large area. MSSL wanted to cut down the cycle time, and understand problems at an early stage to enable faster resolution of issues, if any. The firm also wanted to maintain the specified limit usage of chemicals as per European Union norms. This was extremely necessary as any violation could mean a huge loss in revenues.
Mapping the business process
MSSL consulted its corporate IT team and started exploring options on how it could leverage technology to address this issue. The business and IT function collaborated and brainstormed on how a relevant technology solution could help the business to export higher volumes of grapes with greater level of compliance. The business function led by
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“For the success of a solution, the business must clearly set expectations and the users need to be sure on the type of solution they want”
Chaitanya Rajwade
Business Head, Mahindra ShubhLabh Services
Rajwade, gave a detailed explanation of how the entire process worked, the challenges for operating in such an environment, and the comfort level of the field officers with respect to technology usage. One by one, the IT team, led by Vijay Mahajan, Senior General Manager, Corporate IT, Mahindra & Mahindra, started checking out the relevant technology options and mapped it to the requirements, challenges and the
was taken to deploy a solution based on Java-enabled mobile phones. The IT team created a simple mobile application that field officers can use to enter information related to the farm they are surveying and transmit it back immediately to a central server. Today, the project has addressed the need for an online data capturing system by field officers to facilitate immediate data collection and collation for churning out various
The mobile solution has helped MSSL in maintaining the specified limit usage of chemicals as per EU norms, which enabled it to achieve higher export volumes economic feasibility. “We first evaluated whether laptops could be used for capturing data, and then relaying the same to a central location where data could be collated for further analysis. This option was ruled out, as the fields were spread over different locations. Further, the availability of broadband connectivity was limited in rural areas, which impeded our plans to transfer data. Overall, the high cost of laptops was unsuitable from an economics perspective,” explains Mahajan.
Mobile solution enhances food safety
Understanding the unique nuances of the project, the IT team then started looking at various technology alternatives and proposed the same to the business. After a series of discussions, a unanimous decision
analytical reports. As a result, the business can understand problems at the initial stage itself and devise faster resolution. The time taken to collect data has been reduced significantly from an 8-10 days cycle to just two hours now. This in turn has helped in providing improved services to users due to this massive reduction in turnaround time. More importantly, the solution has helped the business in maintaining the specified limit usage of chemicals as per EU norms to enable achieve higher export volumes.
Finer aspects of collaboration
If one looks at the deployment of the solution and the overall benefits, there are a couple of high-level best practices that the business function and IT function have followed to get the best
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possible results for the overall business. Rajwade shares a few aspects of this collaboration: Set expectations clearly: The business must clearly set expectations and the users need to be sure on the type of solution they want. In this case, Rajwade’s team not only set expectations, but also explained the unique challenges such as literacy of the staff. These aspects have been extremely crucial in designing an appropriate mobile solution. As a result, the IT solution is designed to be easy to install and can run on any Java-enabled mobile phone. The application is userfriendly and easy enough to be able to be operated by semi-literate staff. For the ease of convenience, the first time installation of the mobile application can be done using Bluetooth. For upgrading the mobile application, the field officer can update the software using the synchronize option via a normal GPRS connection. Further, data can be sent to central server either through GPRS connection or through SMS gateway. As most field officers are comfortable sending an SMS, they do not face any issues in using the solution.
“Both IT and business function have to work together to ensure that as business dynamics change, the same has to be conveyed back to the IT function”
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Propose alternatives: While the business set expectations, the IT function also proposed a number of alternatives so that the business could choose the best relevant solution.
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Data collection time reduced from 8-10 days to just two hours now On-field estimation reduced from 15 days to 3 days Productivity improvement to the tune of 40 percent in the number of calls attended by field staff 20 percent increase in business in customer base
Vijay Mahajan, Senior GM, Corporate IT,
Mahindra & Mahindra
to work together to ensure that as business dynamics change, the same has to be conveyed back to the IT function. This ensures that the solution changes with the needs of the business. Rajwade says that the business should keep on regularly
of grapes from India. What’s more, thanks to the innovative IT solution, MSSL is now able to showcase and highlight the controls it has over the usage of chemicals in its farms. This has turned out to be a big competitive advantage, and in many cases, turned
Today, relevant information related to crops, such as yield estimates and the details of chemicals and packing used, is available online and can be accessed by the clients feeding the IT team with relevant insights, instead of giving them a long document with expectations.
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Identify common areas of responsibility: Both the functions should encourage and inspire the other function and understand the areas of synergy and responsibility. While the business can propose a business opportunity and challenge, the IT function can step in and make the business opportunity viable.
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Educate end users: Even if IT had designed an effective solution, the onus was on the business to convince the users to start using the application. The MSSL team spent a huge amount of time in convincing and encouraging the end users to feed in information on the mobile phone, instead of the conventional method of writing information on a piece of paper.
first-mover advantage
Today, MSSL is the largest exporter
out to be a door opener for the firm. The firm is highlighting this feature in its marketing promotions to garner more business, as no other competitor is using such a tool. Clients too are happy as they can access the relevant information related to their crops, such as yield estimate and the details of chemicals and packing used online. From one big customer in Europe, today it has signed three more customers. In actual terms, the business has reported 20 percent increase in its customer base. The availability of updated information has created an opportunity for data analysis in various ways, which in turn, has led to improved marketing campaigns and better planned sales calls. The success of the solution highlights the important fact that successfully transforming a business challenge into an opportunity is possible when successful collaboration happens across the enterprise. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com
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Case Study
How Indian TV show Satyamev Jayate used Big Data to inspire the world Highly popular television show, Satyamev Jayate, is a perfect example of how Big Data can be used to deliver maximum impact on society By Srikanth RP
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n 6th May 2012, as curious Indians sat down in front of their television sets to catch the first episode of ‘Satyamev Jayate’ — a television series focused on social issues in India, there was nervousness in the air. Besides the producers who were obviously eager to gauge how viewers rated the show, there was another team in the background who was waiting diligently to execute one of its toughest projects. This team was from Persistent Systems who was given the task of analyzing messages generated from social media. The show’s producers, in a first, wanted to analyze the messages that they would receive on social media to not only better plan future episodes, but also use the data to push for improved governance. For Persistent Systems, who had done many Big Data projects earlier, this project was unique and different as the scale and type of data that would be received was difficult to comprehend. “We had no precedent in the industry which could help us build a system. The data could come from in different formats from a variety of different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, websites, SMS polls and phone voice messages. This data needed to be analyzed immediately to understand the impact that the show had at an individual and society level. What made all this much more complex was the fact that we had no dry run,” says Mukund Deshpande, Head BI and Analytics Competency, Persistent Systems. All Persistent Systems could do is gauge the type of response that could
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be expected. An intense marketing activity and an actor as popular as Aamir Khan hosting the show meant that the show was expected to witness huge viewership and participation. Additionally, as the show was based on social issues, it was expected that a large amount of information would be required to be collected. While it had no operating guidelines, Persistent designed a system it believed was flexible enough to handle the load. “We did not know what to expect. We just said — let’s get ready for the firehose,” says Deshpande, referring to the huge avalanche of data that was expected from tweets and other platforms.
Finding a relevant tweet in a flood of information The huge popularity of the show surprised everybody. And then the flood of data began flowing in from all sources. The first episode on ‘female foeticide’ gathered 1.4 million
responses from all sources. The data was in different formats — text, audio and video and in different languages that modern India was comfortable with — English and Hinglish (Mixture of Hindi and English). As the popularity of the show grew, so did the tweets and the messages from different social networks. “We aggregated more than half a million tweets for season 1. We saw traffic of around 40,000 tweets on an average during the 90 minutes of the show and observed Twitter traffic used to be higher on Sunday and Monday. We followed a two-phased approach for the Live Analytics used during the show. We leveraged crowdsourcing for analysis and for deeper insights, we built algorithms to filter out the relevant tweets,” explains Deshpande. During the course of the engagement, there were close to 1,000 people divided into three groups involved at various stages of the development process. Persistent
Big Data Facts, Issues and impact @ Satyamev Jayate l
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The show created 14 million responses and made more than 1 billion impressions over the web Persistent had to analyze data which came in different formats from a variety of different sources such as Facebook, Twitter, websites, SMS polls and phone voice messages Persistent deployed 1,000 people, which were divided into three groups and were involved at various stages of the development process The analysis of Big Data has created a huge impact. The Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court has agreed in principle to set-up fast track courts in Jaipur to quickly resolve cases related to female foeticide. The Lok Sabha passed the child protection bill, which was pending for a long period of time.
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Satyamev Jayate Impact
Insights by
1,249,440,319 Connections 14,972,514 Responses 8,115,739 Community Members 97,796,924 In Donations decided to build a software platform to filter/tag contents in a systematic manner. This tool was developed by assembling an array of automated tools to parse the data and a userinterface for several analysts to process messages for deep analytics. The result is a cluster-based analysis along with trend, demographics and sentiment analysis for each message. The final step involved a manual check to find the latest and relevant top story. The results were aggregated and then further used for creating visualizations and dashboards. The analysis was done for all the 13 episodes over a thirteen week period. Persistent’s challenge was building the right taxonomy for helping the system automatically sort out messages and unearth the right ‘emotion’ from the message. Messages included personal experiences, messages of hope, requests for help, solutions to problems, opinions about the topic and suggestions for new episodes. More than 50 tags were considered per episode for the analysis, and every message was scanned for these tags. Sentiment analysis for a social topic is really complex. For example, given the topics addressed, such as female foeticide and medical malpractices, the tweets would be negative as it was more likely that the tweets used terms which were negative. But in reality, most people were positive and enthusiastic about the show. If a typical algorithm was used, most tweets were bound to be shown as negative. Persistent tweaked its algorithm on a constant basis, so that it could analyze and present the most relevant tweets.
The Big Data problem
Given the huge volume of data that needed to be analyzed instantly and on a constant basis, Persistent Systems had a tough task on hand. For example, in season 1, the show created 14 million responses and made more than 1 billion impressions over the web. This was a typical Big Data problem and made the task of data analytics challenging. Unlike other Big Data problems, in the case of ‘Satyamev Jayate’, the messages were varied and diverse. As the firm handled more and more data, Persistent kept on tweaking the system
to deliver the best results. The team created dashboards for the producers and created the most meaningful visualizations. This information was used by the team to validate the appreciation, hypothesis and assumptions about the show. The data was also made available on the impact section of the show’s website. When the Satyamev Jayate team spoke to the government leaders, the team from Persistent made sure that the team had the data to back its claims. The detailed analysis of data coupled with the persistence of the producers, has ensured that the information collected does not go to waste. For example, the Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court has agreed in principle to set up fast track courts in Jaipur to quickly resolve cases related to female foeticide. The Lok Sabha passed the child protection bill, which was pending for a long period of time.
Using Big Data for governance
“For Live Analytics used during the show, we leveraged crowdsourcing for analysis and built algorithms to filter out the relevant tweets”
Mukund Deshpande
Head BI & Analytics Competency, Persistent Systems
In the new era where everybody is connected with social or mobile connections, it is imperative that the government looks at these mediums to collect information. Today, most policy decisions are done using surveys that include only a small sample of respondents. This data is not representative of the whole country, and may be contained to a small region. By collecting and analyzing information, as Persistent has done, decisions and policy formulations can be done more accurately by using a larger set of data. u Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@ubm.com
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Interview
‘Analytics is becoming more socialized’ Business is changing at the ‘speed of life’ today. What are the bigger challenges that businesses are confronted with now? How can they use High Performance Analytics (HPA) to address these challenges? There is a global risk and most companies are trying to deal with the increase in the level of complexity. And they need a new technology to deal with that complexity. The new technology is Big Data, hyperconnectivity and real-time use — this is what we bring together in HPA. It can be applied in various areas like healthcare, unemployment, or private banking. How do organizations go about operationalizing their analytics? Now that we have the technology, the next challenge is skills — there is a shortage of analytical skills. To address this, we need to industrialize analytical skills. Teach organizations how a neural network works. How can you use neural networks to improve your (business) model? Henry Ford came up with this notion of building a car without the need to be an engineer. To me this is socialization of analytics. The new generation platforms allow this; with the previous generations you had to be a doctor to do this. Can you give us some scenarios in which High Performance Analytics is used? There are three important scenarios. One is the ability to interact with the data through user interfaces; the consumer-facing areas. Groups that are keen to know more about people will benefit from this. Then, you have applications that require speed and volume. This is for
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organizations that have large volumes of data, and these are typically banks and telecom companies. The third scenario is where you have to do a high volume of calculations, such as areas like micro-pricing and daily discounting. This is used in the retail sector, for instance. Can you tell us how your global customers are benefitting from HPA? Our customer, Royal Bank of Scotland, benefitted in all the three areas. As the bank was able to get the computational power it could do away with samples; it could use its customer’s (models). That was hundreds of millions of pound sterling (in savings). The models were more suitable as the training environments were better. Then you have the interface together with speed, in areas like grid environment. The bank got the customer facing agent to do the risk report, rather than using an internal application for this purpose. This provides a big business advantage when it comes to providing service to the client. And of course there’s the high computational opportunity to provide an extensive service platform to the clients. Effectively, the bank could let its client do real-time scenario planning and see what happens if they do a capital investment to reduce the number of defaults and to increase credit flows to small and medium enterprises, in order to drive inclusive growth.
u Brian Pereira
Analytics is becoming more mainstream thanks to simplified user interfaces and the affordability of computational power. Mikael Hagstrom, Executive Vice President, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, SAS tells InformationWeek India how a global customer has benefitted from High Performance Analytics
brian.pereira@ubm.com
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Opinion
What do clients expect from analytics companies today?
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Pritha Choudhuri
Corporations today look at analytics to provide datadriven insights for managing business operations; to fulfill this objective, three trends of data visualization, data democratization and storytelling have evolved
http://www.on the web How an Indian startup is redefining analytics using crowdsourcing Read article at:
f we look at the evolution of the analytics industry, we can identify two definite phases. The first phase was defined by data explosion. In 2005, the world’s digital data was pegged at 130 Exabytes. Corporations across the world turned to ‘data warehousing’ to manage their internal data. These data warehouses began to function as reservoirs for business intelligence leading to the birth of analytics. To enable business intelligence managers to efficiently study their internal data, a network of ‘analytics providers’ mushroomed agencies that worked on piece meal data chunks and presented corporations with three hundred page presentations of numbers, graphs and reports divorced from actionable market insight. However, expectations from the business intelligence function changed over the next five years. By 2010, when recession had hit most economies across the world, corporations looked at the ‘back room analytics boys’ to provide intelligence, which would impact business operations. Thus began the second phase of analytics, the evolution from ‘managing data’ to ‘managing business with insights from data.’ When corporations seek to manage business operations with data driven insights they need to accomplish three goals — they need to read data in a meaningful way, democratize data making it available across stakeholders and most importantly use data to answer business questions, which impact market operations. The three trends of data visualization, data democratization and storytelling evolved to fulfill these objectives. The first written word known to man was a picture. No matter how smart or analytical we are, the human brain doesn’t process large sheets of numbers, it stores pictures and impressions. The best way to
understand and represent information is through data visualization. Welldesigned infographics and animated data expose new patterns and relationships contained within a data set, which create an instant wow and help managers understand data simply. The second trend, data democratization, is better understood as the process of making data available across all business stakeholders. In a large corporation, data exists in many formats, scattered across different functions. Data access is usually controlled by a part of the organization that might not need to use the data to make business decisions. Data democratization lies in the sweet spot between analytics and technology. Easy-to-use tools and dashboards pull data across multiple sources, synergize diverse data sets into one usable format, model the data and provide managers with instant analytics. The third trend is that of storytelling or the ability to use data to answer questions which the business wants to understand. Armed with instant analytics, managers can finally use data to solve business problems. Storytelling equips managers with foresight. They stop asking the ‘what’ questions — ‘What is my market share vis-à-vis competition?’ and ‘What is the revenue performance of my new innovation?’ and start seeking the more strategic ‘why’ questions like ‘Why is my revenue growing in a scenario where my market share is stagnating?’ ‘Why are my new innovations cannibalizing my existing brands?’ The analytics company of the future will combine the skills of statisticians who build probability models, consultants who can ask and answer business questions, and imaginative analysts who have the skills of artists and the training of technologists. u Pritha Choudhuri is CEO, Analytics Quotient
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Opinion
Does Big Data mean big security issues?
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Steve Durbin
As Big Data becomes a potential gamechanger for businesses, the security risks become even greater
http://www.on the web How Hadoop cuts Big Data costs Read article at:
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he volume of data that businesses collect is exploding exponentially: this data comes from financial transactions, customer interactions, the supply chain, etc. Apart from that, there is data created by employees, contractors, partners and suppliers with the use of social networking sites, intranets, extranets, corporate wikis and so on. The amount of bytes being created on a daily basis is truly mind boggling. In 2011, IDC estimated that 1.8 billion Terabytes of data was created, 90 percent of which was created in a non-structured fashion. IDC further projects that unstructured data will grow at more than 60 percent compounded annually. The commercial impact of Big Data has the potential to generate significant productivity growth for a number of vertical sectors. It should also create healthy demand for talented individuals who are able to help organizations make sense of this growing volume of raw data. In short, Big Data presents an opportunity to create unprecedented business advantage and better service delivery. But what is Big Data? Big Data refers to performing increasingly sophisticated analysis on the massive amounts of data — sources such as mobile and online transactions, social media traffic and GPS coordinates now generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of Big Data every day, according to IBM. Pressure will mount on the organizations to embrace Big Data because of the enormous insights and competitive advantage it can provide. Computers will increasingly crunch numbers to find answers previously thought unknowable. According to Dr DJ Patil, Data Scientist in residence at Greylock Partners — the venture capital firm that helped launch LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pandora — amongst others, the opportunities can reach from improving products, spotting changes
in user patterns and needs along with helping make human connections along the lines of LinkedIn for instance. A research conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute points to Big Data having the ability to generate significant value and commercial impact — 60 percent potential increase in retailers’ operating margins, 0.7 percent increase in productivity in the U.S. Healthcare, translating into USD 300 billion value per year, not to mention the potential increased demand for deep analytical talent positions estimated at anything from 140,000 to 190,000. But this will also introduce new challenges, for example, poor quality information or untested models can send organizations off course. Big Data in the cloud will also create a host of potentially attractive targets.
Big Data, Big Issues
As Big Data becomes a potential gamechanger for businesses, the security risks become even greater. Users are becoming alarmed about how much data is being collected and how it is being used. With McKinsey estimating the commercial opportunity from personal location data alone to be anything from USD100 billion to USD 700 billion, guidelines and best practice on the collection, storage, usage and transfer of data both inside and outside the business are critical. The key security issues surrounding Big Data have so far tended to fall into the following five areas: l
Cyber Security – With more transactions, conversations, interactions and data now online, the incentives for cyber criminals have never been better. It’s not just the one-off data breaches or hacker attacks stories that hit the headlines, but those with far-reaching consequences that can mean reputational damage, legal liability and even financial ruin.
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Cyber resilience and preparedness strategies are crucial for Big Data. Big Data analytics could also help identify cyber criminal or zero-day attacks. l Data in the cloud – The pressure for businesses to quickly adopt and implement new technologies such as cloud services, often to support Big Data’s challenging storage and processing needs comes with unforeseen risks and consequences. Big Data in the cloud is a highly attractive target for harvesting and places more demand on businesses to get their secure cloud sourcing strategy right. Furthermore, importing data into a Big Data store in the cloud can result in the removal of permissions or confidentiality restrictions on the original data. l Consumerization – Together with the growth of Big Data is the proliferation of new mobile devices, which are used to gather, store, access and transfer data. The challenge for businesses is in managing and securing personal devices brought into the workplace by employees (BYOD) and balancing the need for security with productivity. Businesses should ensure that their employee acceptable usage policies are in place and they should continue to manage mobile devices in line with their established security policies. Businesses should also consider how they might use Big Data analytics tools to identify any misuse or unusual access to systems through remote login, mobile or other personal devices. l Interconnected Supply Chains – Organizations are part of often complex, global and interdependent supply chains, which can be their weakest link. There is a key role for information security in coordinating the contracting and provisioning of business relationships, including outsourcers, offshorers and supply chain and cloud providers. Big Data analytics has the potential to create an overarching view of an
organization’s supply chain security by analyzing high-risk suppliers’ data and comparing suppliers across different dimensions of information security risk. l Privacy – As larger amount of data is generated, stored and analyzed, privacy concerns are becoming an even bigger issue. Start planning for new data protection requirements as soon as possible, while monitoring for further legislative and regulatory developments not just in India, but also in other jurisdictions where your customers are based. If you’re holding foreign data, you may fall under foreign as well as local jurisdictions and regulations. You should also consider using Big Data analytics tools to identify where private personal information is being stored and how it is protected. So what can Indian organizations do? Businesses eager to adopt these new technologies for business benefit should set out clear good practice guidelines for Big Data. They need to understand the legal and other restrictions that may apply across multiple jurisdictions. Businesses should not underestimate the size of such a task since currently there are significant differences between the laws of different countries. They should also implement privacy best practices, designing them into the analytics programs they are using for Big Data, and build in transparency and accountability whilst considering the impact of Big Data usage on people, processes and technology. It goes without saying that securing both the data input and Big Data output presents a key challenge that can impact not just potential business campaigns and opportunities but also have far reaching legal implications. The only safe answer to dealing with this for Indian organizations is to stay agile, share knowledge with other likeminded organizations on best practices, anticipate and, if possible, influence changes to regulation rather than being caught when they suddenly appear.
Big Data in the cloud is a highly attractive target for harvesting and places more demand on businesses to get their secure cloud sourcing strategy right
u Steve Durbin is Global VP,
Information Security Forum
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Feature
Microsoft Office 2013 built for social sharing Social and cloud collaboration star in both the new consumer version of Office 365, enabled by SkyDrive and Skype, and the business versions built around SharePoint and Lync By David F. Carr
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nstall the preview of Office 15, and you’ll know something radical has changed the first time you click “save” on a new document. In the next version of Microsoft Office aimed at home users, the default location for saving a document is the cloud — Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. In the next version for business, the default will be to save to SharePoint. Or maybe SkyDrive Pro, a version of the cloud storage service featuring more enterprise controls. Of course, you can still store files to your local machine, or change the settings to make that the default — but Microsoft wants to make that the last choice on the list. SkyDrive, SharePoint, and other web locations for storing your document all come first, because when it’s stored on the web or your business network, it’s easier to share. At some point, Microsoft’s USD1.2 acquisition of Yammer will also factor into this picture, but with the deal not yet closed Microsoft offered no specifics on how Yammer will fit. One SharePoint engineer told me they were still figuring out the possibilities. Apart from cloud and social collaboration features, Microsoft is touting the touch screen functionality and consumerized user interface of the new Office, which it hopes will align with the Metro user interface design of Windows 8 to make Microsoft a player in the world of tablets currently dominated by the Apple iPad. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said this version of Office was designed to be “fast and fluid and touchable,” so that people will find it a pleasure to use.
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Meanwhile, after years of lagging in social software functionality, SharePoint is delivering what appears to be a competitive enterprise social networking experience. The new SharePoint news feed handles threaded discussions and all the social features you’d expect, such as the ability to “like” a post, mention another user by typing the ‘@’ symbol and getting a popup listing of contacts, typing ‘#’ for suggested hashmark tags, and so on. You develop your feeds by following people, topics, tags, documents, or groups. SharePoint is gaining group collaboration functionality, which it never really had before. Since some of the main things you share on SharePoint are Office documents, the news feed also makes it easy to preview those documents inline — paging through a presentation without the need to open it in PowerPoint, for example. Office 15 will eventually come to market as Office 2013, for those who install it as traditional software, or as an update to the Office 365
targeted at small to midsize businesses. Where the business editions employ SharePoint for file sharing, the consumer editions substitute SkyDrive. Where business users working in Outlook can see presence indicators that allow them to kick off Lync voice, video, or instant messaging sessions with other employees, consumer edition users will be able to do the same with Skype contacts. For good measure, Microsoft is promising to throw in 60 minutes per month of free international calling
subscription service. Microsoft still isn’t saying when the software will be commercially available or at what price. But it led by emphasizing the consumer experience it wants to deliver for moms organizing a PTA event or using online collaboration, or students doing online research and collaborating with their classmates. For the first time, Microsoft will be introducing a consumer edition of Office 365, a product originally
to landlines in 40 countries and cell phones in 7 countries. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is paying more attention to the threat posed by Google Apps, which includes a suite of web-based office productivity apps, and is working hard to show the value of combining cloud services with its traditional desktop software. Office 365 includes webbased document viewers and editors, which work much like the document
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editors in Google Apps, but they’re positioned as alternatives for quick access rather than the primary mode of interaction. “For us in the Office division, the cloud is not the browser,” P.J. Hough, Vice President of Office Program Manager, said in a presentation on Office for the Enterprise. “We’re using the cloud to deliver new experiences.” This model is similar to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which is primarily a subscription-based means of distributing updates to the Creative Suite design products to users ondemand, with some web-based services for designers as the icing on top of the cake. However, although the main deployment mode of the Office products is as installed applications, Microsoft uses an “application streaming” technique to speed downloads and allow you to start working with an application almost immediately, by delivering the most important parts of the code first. The Office product family is taking another cue from the worlds of mobile, social, and cloud by introducing an apps market for each of its products. Because these apps are based on web standards — HTML5, JavaScript, OAuth, and REST, together with Office-specific APIs — the same apps can work in both web and desktop contexts. For example, Hough showed the same Outlook extension — one that shows LinkedIn contact records for the people you’re e-mailing with--running in both Outlook Web Access and the desktop version. The Office 365 offering for home users will include subscription-based pricing for the traditional Microsoft Office desktop apps (which in the Home Premium Preview include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher) with software updates delivered as they become available. The cloud services that accompany the software allow users to sign into Office 365 from multiple devices and have their documents and settings follow them from one to the next. This same concept is available in business editions, although these include products like Lync and SharePoint as part of the cloud package. One nice touch: Office 365 will greet
you with a “welcome back” message, inviting you to pick up where you left off working, and taking you back to the section of the document you were working on when you last signed off. Microsoft sees this as a way of accommodating a variety of scenarios where you start a document at work, then finish it at home, or start it on your PC and finish it on your tablet. Collaboration also becomes a more integral part of working in Office. For example, if you’ve been collaborating on a document with several other employees, Word will display presence informa-
Samsung tablet running Windows 8 and Office, which he believes delivers “an experience equal to or better than the iPad.” As popular as Apple’s tablet is, in an enterprise setting “If an iPad can’t have the full Office experience and can’t have Lync, then it really is a hampered device,” he said. Douglas Besse, CIO of Creation Technologies, had a similar take. The new Office offers “seamless integration, going from app to app” in a way that “promises to improve productivity,” Creation Technologies is a contract electronics manufacturer with
Apart from cloud and social collaboration features, Microsoft is touting the touch screen functionality and consumerized user interface of the new Office, to make Microsoft a player in the world of tablets currently dominated by the Apple iPad tion for your collaborators, allowing you to see if one or both would be available to answer a question — and if so, allow you to launch a Lync chat or a PC-toPC call. Multiple tools in the suite now include a common “people card” popup screen that shows profile, contact, and presence information. Even the process of marking up a document with comments has become more social, supporting threaded discussions that can be displayed in the margin. “The improvement in the integration is really the key there,” said Bryan Garcia, CTO of Equifax, which is just starting to plan the introduction of enterprise social networking based on the improved social functionality of SharePoint. As a credit reporting firm operating in a regulated industry, Equifax has resisted the BYOD trend in the workplace, ruling out devices like the iPad, Garcia said. That’s why he is pleased to see Microsoft introducing a compelling tablet experience that includes Office. “An iPad for a consumer may be attractive, but what this allows me to do is say we can give the user a great usability experience and all the security and monitoring and controls we need can be there, too,” Garcia said. He has been working with one of a
operations in 14 locations around the world, so collaboration feature like being able to see who is available for a quick chat is valuable, Besse said. Microsoft also had several consumer and small business testers of the product on hand to tell their stories. As head of a non-profit that teaches children healthy living skills, Sajai Foundation CEO Melissa Hanson said she had experimented with using SkyDrive in the past but found it awkward. “Now because it’s by default, you always go there,” she said. That came in handy the other day when she was traveling and trying to work remotely with an employee putting together the foundation’s newsletter. Because the document she needed was in SkyDrive, she was able to retrieve it and share it easily. The only thing she hasn’t been able to do while the new Office was under wraps (and she was the only one in her organization with access) is really use it for more active collaboration. While she only has three employees, she also has board members who are all over the country. “This can be a way to link us all virtually and avoid flying them in,” Hanson said. Source: The BrainYard
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Feature
Sentiment analysis:
How companies now listen to the web
People are talking on social networks and websites about your products and brands. Using software to listen in takes new skills and tactics By Doug Henschen
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here’s Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networks, plus community-driven websites, all of them generating comments good and bad about your company, products, and rivals. The promise of a never-ending focus group (along with fear of not knowing what’s being said about you) has given rise to a fast-growing market for social media monitoring and sentiment analysis software and services. What could be better than letting technology magically comb the web to bring back and interpret brand-relevant comments? If only it were that simple. If you wade even ankle deep into social media monitoring, you quickly realize that it’s a much more nuanced problem than spotting positive or negative opinions. For starters, comments often have multiple meanings or gradations of meaning (see box “7 reasons why sentiment is hard to decipher online”). And when it comes to marketing research, the best insights often come with no mention of a specific company or its products. “The mistake people make is they just listen for brands and miss all the conversations,” says Frank Cotignola, consumer insights manager at Kraft Foods. “I tell people who are using this data to flip it around: Listen to what people are saying, and then see how your brand fits in.” Knowing what percentage of comments about a barbecue sauce brand are positive
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or negative may be far less valuable than gathering insight into what people like about barbecuing, how they cook, or how they’d like to cook. Cotignola and other seasoned miners of social media sentiment — at the likes of American Express, The Wall Street Journal, and the American Red Cross — say it takes a lot of human interpretation to get any value out of sentiment reports. While the technology is driven by marketing in most companies, IT shouldn’t sit on the sidelines, as it has a role in expanding use of sentiment analysis across the company.
This isn’t a survey
Pollsters and the news media routinely use sentiment analysis technology. The Wall Street Journal’s Sentiment Tracker is an infographic that shares public opinion about certain topics as expressed on Facebook and Twitter, using sentiment analysis software-asa-service from NetBase Solutions. Recent topics it has tackled include space-launch vendor SpaceX’s taking “One Small (Privatized) Step...” toward a commercial space program and
the Mark Zuckerberg “Hoodie-Gate” episode. Out of 1,000 Facebook and Twitter posts on Zuckerberg between May 7 and May 11, 47 percent were positive about him and his Wall Street backers wearing hoodie sweatshirts while pitching the Facebook IPO to investors, 41 percent were against it, 4 percent made comparisons to the Trayvon Martin case, and 8 percent cracked jokes, such as “Zuckerberg should have the decency to graduate to a pinstriped executive hoodie.” (Sentiment analysis can’t yet tell if a joke is actually funny.) The Journal has been careful not to present Sentiment Tracker as a scientific public opinion poll,
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as Twitter and Facebook users are younger and have higher incomes than the population at large. “It’s just very important for us to always make a distinction as to what this actually tells the reader, and not present it as something more than it is,” said Deputy Editor Ryan Sager, speaking at the recent Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York. The Journal’s editors have talked about weightier uses of sentiment analysis, such as a Candidate Tracker for the current election season. But here, too, they’d have to be clear about the biases of social media. “Ron Paul has always kind of had a very high and very positive Internet buzz because he’s Ron Paul, and that’s where his audience is,” Sager noted.
Channel Analysis
Product and service companies must also be aware of these “channel biases.” At the American Red Cross, Banafsheh Ghassemi, VP of Marketing and e-CRM customer experience, says the patterns of interaction differ by phone, postal mail, e-mail, and social media. A giant among charities, with more than 500,000 volunteers and 35,000 employees, the Red Cross
monitors social media comments made by volunteers, donors, and other constituents using the SaaS tools of Radian6, which Salesforce. com acquired last year. “For the Red Cross, social media is typically positive — they’re telling us how much they love us,” Ghassemi says. “But if they’re taking the time to write and e-mail or send us mail, chances are it’s negative. They either didn’t like something or they wanted to express an opinion or make a suggestion.” Social networks were not, for the most part, a source of love for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker during his recent election recall fight. Sentiment analytics vendor Topsy Labs found that tweets related to Walker generated a very low —1.999 sentiment score, while his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, registered a relatively neutral 0.932 score. Yet Walker carried 53 percent of the vote to stay in office. “In Walker’s case, Twitter wasn’t representative of the electorate, and it points up the need to choose your data carefully and interpret it with these biases in mind,” says Analyst Seth Grimes, who organizes the Sentiment Analysis
Symposium. Sentiment analysis technologies shouldn’t replace conventional research, such as in-person focus groups, Ghassemi says. Focus groups and surveys are important for getting more depth into ideas picked up in social media monitoring. But each channel requires different tactics. “The traditional researcher always wants to ask questions: Why do you use this product, and why do you use it that way?” Kraft’s Cotignola says. “With social media, you just stand back and listen, and you can’t ask, ‘Why did you say that?’ So it’s a cultural shift for researchers.” Kraft Foods has developed a Community Intelligence Portal to tap into consumer sentiments across social networks, blogs, and other websites. Like The Wall Street Journal, Kraft relies on the services of NetBase, one of the largest among the growing number of sentiment analytics vendors. NetBase continuously pulls comments from more than 100 million web sources into its ConsumerBase, a cloud-based database of consumer sentiment accessible via an API. NetBase runs natural language processing, analytics, as well as
7 reasons why sentiment is hard to decipher online Online comments don’t fall neatly into “positive” and “negative” buckets. There’s a range of consumer sentiment that challenges even the most sophisticated natural language processing technologies. At recent Sentiment Analysis Symposium, Catherine van Zuylen, VP of products at Attensity, a social analytics software vendor, provided this list of difficult comment-analysis problems: False negatives: The words “crying” and “crap” suggest negativity, but then there is “I was crying with joy” or “Holy crap! This is great.” Here’s where simplistic tools might be fooled. Relative sentiment: “I bought a Honda Accord.” Great for Honda but bad for Toyota. Compound sentiment: Doing work for movie studies, Attensity has had to make sense of comments such as “I loved the trailer but hated the movie.” Big mobile phone companies encounter mixed messages such as “I love the phone but hate the network.” Conditional sentiment: “If someone doesn’t call me back,
I’m never doing business with them again.” Or “I was really pissed, but then they gave me a refund.” Scoring sentiment: Vendors are expected to measure relative sentiment, but how positive is “I like it” versus “I really like it” versus “I love it”? Sentiment modifiers: “I bought an iPhone today :-)” or “Gotta love the cable company ;-<”. Emoticons are straightforward, but what words are they connected to? International sentiment: Japanese have unique emoticons, like (;_;) for crying. Italians tend to be far more effusive and grandiose, whereas Brits are generally drier and less effusive, making those relative scoring challenges mentioned earlier all the more complicated. Sophisticated systems can be optimized to handle these kind of problems, van Zuylen says. But analyst Seth Grimes says no amount of tuning will lead to perfection, so it’s best to focus the extra effort on developing insight about and acting on the majority of clear-cut sentiments.
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Feature machine-learning algorithms on top of this Big Data resource, to help customers spot and make sense of relevant comments. Cotignola says Kraft tries to “tune into the conversation” rather than just listen for brand mentions. “You have to listen when consumers talk about snacking, listen to what they say about the way they barbecue and what they use, and you have to listen to their emotions and feelings,” he says.
The Perpetual Research Machine
Those are some of the limitations of sentiment analytics. But there are several key advantages. First, social sites are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so social media analysis is a real-time tool that’s not subject to the time lags inherent in focus groups and surveys. Ghassemi of the Red Cross describes it as a “leading indicator” for her. “You can start to pick up on the signal in the noise right away, and once you spot a trend, you can go into your other channels and use conventional research to figure out what’s behind the trend,” she says. Timeliness is essential to the Red Cross because it’s often dealing with fast-breaking disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti, where the non-profit pioneered the use of text messaging for fundraising, collecting some USD 40 million within days to support ongoing relief efforts. It also listens to “on the ground” social chatter during disasters to learn where help is needed most. Meantime, it’s listening for everyday comments about the brand and people’s experiences at blood donation centers and health and safety courses it runs. By mixing network analysis (who is influencing whom) with sentiment analysis (insight into what they’re saying), companies can reach the most important influencers, not just the largest number of people, the way mass media can. Services such as Klout can help companies figure out who the “influencers” are for a particular topic or industry, and some
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of the sentiment analysis platforms have built-in features or add-ons to assess whether influential groups have positive, negative, or neutral opinions of a company or product. “Even though the reach of friends and family is much smaller than a TV or radio ad, they’re much more influential,” Ghassemi explains. “If your cousin announces on Twitter that he just gave blood and that he feels really good about it, chances are you will pay more attention to that than to an advertisement.” However, social channels can approach TV and radio reach if celebrities or big media create or amplify the social content. If that
notes that the number of charities has doubled over the last decade and that they’re all competing for donations and volunteers. “Social media has allowed me to look at any organization within the nonprofit sector to find out what they are doing that’s working and what’s not working,” she says. Just as for-profit companies have seen the power of social media — as in the 12 million views of the “United Airlines Breaks Guitars” YouTube video, or the incident in which Whirlpool’s customer service department displeased a blogger/customer with more than 1 million Twitter followers — the nonprofit world has also witnessed cautionary tales. Susan G. Komen for the Cure, for example, was engulfed in controversy after it pulled funding for Planned By mixing network Parenthood programs in late January. The breast analysis (who is cancer research charity influencing whom) with restored funding a few sentiment analysis, days later after a (Planned Parenthood-fueled) public companies can reach the outcry on social media and most important elsewhere, but the brand’s reputation suffered. influencers “We all learned a lot from the Susan G. Komen incident, and cousin happens to be we took it to heart,” Ghassemi says, actor Ashton Kutcher, including “not letting politics get he’d be instantly telling 11 mixed up with the mission” and using million people he just had social media listening to get ahead of a good (or bad) experience a controversy before it “takes on a life giving blood. of its own.”
Tracking Trends
A second big advantage of social media analysis is that it lets organizations track changes over time. “If consumers are really hurting, do you want to consider raising prices, or do you want to offer some sort of coupon or online offer?” says Cotignola of Kraft. “The great thing about this kind of data is that you can continue to look at it daily to see how things are trending.” A third advantage is that social media provide so much data about your competitors. The American Red Cross doesn’t think of other charities as rivals per se, but Ghassemi
Taking Action
When customer sentiments are positive, you actually want social media to help a message take on a life of its own. Author and American Express Executive Christopher Frank calls it “the flywheel effect,” and in his book Drinking From The Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning In Information, he offers a four-phase approach to putting the flywheel to work: listen, engage, measure, and learn. Many organizations use sentiment analysis technology to listen to and measure social media comments, Frank says, but few engage customers
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or quickly learn from social media to gain momentum. Among the exceptions, he says, are Dell and Procter & Gamble. Dell has a Radian6-powered social media listening command center, where the mantra posted on the wall is “listen, engage, act.” Average daily mentions of the Dell brand on Twitter have a greater reach than the combined circulation of the top 12 daily newspapers in the U.S., according to Dell. The company responds to service-related questions and complaints and monitors for consumer tastes and trends. Now Dell’s trying to market its experience: the American Red Cross, for example, worked with Dell to launch the Red Cross’s Digital Operations Center in March. Procter & Gamble was listening to the social buzz in late February when workers at the Daytona 500 were shown on national TV using Tide detergent to clean the track after a crash and fuel spill. Within days, P&G created a TV commercial, posted on YouTube, using footage of the incident. As a sportscaster narrated, talking about “a new use for laundry detergent,” captions read: “You keep inventing stains … we’ll keep inventing ways to get them out.” “P&G was just tracking the Tide brand, and all of a sudden their monitoring system just lit up,” Frank says. “Their social team responded quickly, and it speaks to the capability of being agile.” At American Express, where Frank is VP of the Global MarketPlace Insights Team, the company scrapes 150 million web sources in search of comments made in several languages. It has built a data cube that contains some 5 million conversations about the company, and it uses this resource, powered by a listening platform from Visible Technologies, for product and market research across the company. A separate department within American Express responds to individual customer complaints and questions on social media. But Frank says the company is moving toward centralized approaches and
standardization of tools. “Social usually starts with marketing and the product groups on the front lines with the customers, but very quickly you need to loop in IT to build out the capabilities,” he says.
resource doesn’t have to involve huge data volumes. Plenty of companies have built social media applications without getting into exotic platforms such as Hadoop. And about half of companies in our social networking survey monitoring their companies’ brands rely on search alerts from Choosing Technologies Google or Bing. According to InformationWeek’s 2012 Other functions needed on top Social Networking in the Enterprise of monitoring include CRM-based Survey, 54 percent of respondents routing capabilities, to send product familiar with their organizations’ queries to employees able to respond social networking monitoring tools to comments. Some companies will say marketing holds the primary want publishing and management responsibility for these tools. IT is in software with workflows that charge at about one-third. require an employee to get approval Social media is one tech spending before posting something; such area, along with web analytics and software might also make it easier to reuse content to answer oft-asked questions. Conversion-tracking features help companies turn Social sites are comments into sales leads. available 24 hours a day, Deeper analysis and understanding of comments seven days a week, so requires natural language social media analysis is processing capabilities, and many specialists a real-time tool that’s not in this software, such as subject to time lags Lexalytics and Lithium, have partnerships with social media management platform providers. Measurement capabilities help companies establish baselines on marketing automation customer sentiment and then track software, that is the effectiveness of advertising, public increasingly being led by relations, and social media campaigns. chief marketing officers. Frank says social media will Most often they use cloudincreasingly be seen as just a part of based service providers, the classic marketing funnel: moving such as Radian6 and NetBase, for the people from product awareness to foundational monitoring of social buying consideration to buying to media. Those vendors handle the advocating for the product. monitoring of data feeds from the With that context in mind, while a likes of Facebook and Twitter, and lot of sentiment analysis dashboards the screen scraping from other web highlight the red, negative sentiment sources that don’t offer APIs. versus the green, positive ones, “I’m American Express decided to trying to crack the code on the neutral develop its core social database sentiment,” Frank says. Those are wouldin-house to give it unfettered be buyers without entrenched feelings access to and control over the data. to overcome who can be moved to buy. American Express blends its data with In an election year, the parallel use for psychographic and demographic data social media monitoring is to tune into from third-party providers to support and influence those all-important swing fine-grained customer segmentation voters. and targeting. Companies analyzing sentiment about just their own brand and industry may find an in-house Source: InformationWeek USA
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Analyst Angle
Impact of cloud computing on Supply Chain Management
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Michael Dominy
Here are some key points to consider before switching to SaaS for Supply Chain Management
http://www.on the web Staying competitive means moving to the cloud
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lthough most supply chain organizations still prefer on-premises or hosted applications, interest in cloud-based supply chain management (SCM) technology is growing, especially for certain functions within SCM. By 2013, Gartner estimates this market will grow by 25 percent. The cloud-based delivery of SCM solutions presents opportunities and risks for supply chain leaders. In particular, software as a service (SaaS) offerings span the major SCM processes: plan, source, make and deliver. Adoption varies depending on the SCM process, complexity and level of process sophistication, as well as the size of the enterprise. Gartner recently surveyed 257 supply chain decision makers, which found that only 8 percent indicated that they selected SaaS/cloud as a deployment model during the last three years. However, this will double during the next three years, with SaaS/cloud representing 17 percent. Larger enterprises are less likely to use SaaS for SCM than smaller businesses, preferring onpremises or hosted applications due to process complexity, data integration requirements, advanced analytics and the need for industry functionality. It is also largely due to SaaS SCM solutions (in most SCM software categories) not yet reaching functional parity with leading onpremises SCM offerings. However, cloud-based options will continue to expand as organizations become more familiar with the technology that delivers an effective combination of functionality and cost efficiency. Generally speaking, supply chain planning, warehouse management and manufacturing applications have lower SaaS adoption rates, especially in large enterprises. Applications within supply chain execution, such as transportation management systems
and global trade management, have higher adoption rates, but on-premises still remains the more common deployment model, especially for large enterprises with complex requirements. Procurement applications have a high adoption rate, but we have observed differences between the applications used to support direct materials versus those used to support indirect materials. There is a higher rate of cloud usage for indirect materials sourcing and procurement. So why switch to SaaS for SCM? Well, here are a few reasons why it might make sense: Cost It can provide a low cost way to acquire SCM functionality. l Works around IT resource and budget constraints. l Supports highly distributed operational processes at a low cost if the SaaS provider has already built the integrations with supply chain partners. l Lower upfront costs. l
Speed Typically achieves faster time to deployment. l May recognize or demonstrate ROI faster. l Avoids delays associated with long IT project queues. l Quicker time to market for simple to moderate requirements. l Faster release of new features. l
Business value Enables SCM in small and midsize businesses. l Builds competencies prior to investing. l Tests the vendor application in a proof of concept or pilot. l Enables companies to try innovations at a lower cost, without any long-term commitment. l
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Analyst Angle l
Improves agility to respond to user requirements on an ongoing basis. l Often improves usability. SCM business users can take control of the decision to select and purchase SaaS solutions with little or no IT involvement, and the non-capital expense economic model makes it easier to buy a solution. However, the lack of IT involvement in SaaS SCM implementations can result in many problems, such as overly priced contracts, poorly negotiated service-level agreements (SLAs), stand-alone implementations that do not integrate with other technologies, as well as implementation and support issues. In addition, few users are equipped to fully handle the implementation and support of complex business applications. Irrespective of what SaaS vendors claim, these solutions still require some amount of implementation and support from IT. For example, data quality and integration with on-premises applications are often major stumbling blocks and require IT assistance. If the business and the vendor donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t secure IT support before the implementation, projects can be delayed significantly. The total cost of ownership (TCO) could also be more expensive for SaaS applications after five years, versus on-premises deployments for large enterprises with wellestablished data centers during the same time frame. Although SaaS can deliver multiple cost, service and business benefits to organizations, expectations and realization of these benefits for supply chains differ to some degree across industries, such as the consumer packaged goods (CPG), high-tech, industrial manufacturing and retail/ services industries.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). PaaS helps users extend and customize a cloud-based business application that is offered as a service, or ecosystem partners can build solutions that extend the functional footprint of a vendorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SaaS applications. Using PaaS for SCM has the potential to reduce the cost of development and integration. At this stage, it is too soon to say whether PaaS will enable enterprises to innovate their SCM processes faster than in the past. We do however rate the business value of PaaS as high in terms of enabling new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise. IaaS or infrastructure utility services (IUS), on the other hand, are the provision of outsourced, industrialized, asset-based IT infrastructure managed services (below the business application functional layer). It is attractive because it enables a vendor or user organization to better align compute load and costs, avoiding the issue of over investing in data center capacity. Although user adoption has been low so far, we anticipate that this will grow in the future as users look to realize some of the benefits of cloud through applications that were not initially designed for SaaS deployment. Having said that, we rate the business value of IaaS as low as it only slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will be difficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings. Current SaaS SCM applications in the market provide enough functionality at an economical subscription rate, offering little justification for users to buy an on-premises application and run it on an IaaS.
Although SaaS can deliver multiple cost, service and business benefits to organizations, expectations and realization of these benefits for supply chains differ to some degree across industries
Other cloud services impacting SCM
Two other areas having an impact on SCM, but to a much lesser degree are Platform as a Service (PaaS) and
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u Michael Dominy is Research Director, Gartner
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Technology & Risks
Are insiders a bigger threat than hackers?
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Avinash Kadam
We have a number of security measures to guard against external threats. But do we have security measures strong enough to defeat a knowledgeable insider?
http://www.on the web Can hackers target a pacemaker? Read article at:
e seem to be very well-equipped against external threats. We have tools and techniques to guard our physical perimeter as well as the network perimeter and we also ensure that our operating systems, databases and apps are well-secured. However, which of these security measures are strong enough to defeat a knowledgeable insider? The insider threat is ranked very high in every risk assessment exercise. There are a number of studies that identify that an insider can do more damage to an organization compared to all the hackers, attackers and organized cyber criminals put together. As usual, we first turn to various tools and techniques to detect an insider’s presence. The beginning point is using system logs like the remote access log, file access logs, mail server logs, database logs, phone records and so on. These logs are good for investigative purposes but how well could these be used for prevention of an insider crime? The classic approach of looking for people who work at odd hours may not apply nowadays as more and more employees are permitted to work from home. The next attempt is to use various intrusion detection techniques, anomaly-based and signature-based. The intrusion signatures are effective against an intruder who is an outsider. Developing such signatures for an insider who has legitimate access to sensitive information may not be possible. Still another approach is the honeypot approach, which involves the use of ‘honeytokens’. Honeytokens are digital entities like an Excel spreadsheet, Word document or a database record, which should not be accessed by any legitimate user. Any access to such a honeytoken might be an indication of an insider threat. This approach looks promising, but requires a lot of effort to select and install honeytokens around your information systems and monitor
them constantly. Yet another approach is to create a base profile for the system usage for a typical insider and then monitor the system usage patterns of authorized users with the previously established base profile to identify deviations. But the difficulty is to create accurate base profiles otherwise the system will generate a lot of false alarms. The insider attacks become even more alarming if a malicious programmer tries to insert malicious code or vulnerabilities in the software being developed and these are not detected by the software quality control team. The next level of complexity of insider threat is introduced by cloud computing as the definition of ‘insider’ gets substantially expanded. Now the insiders are not only the employees of the organization, but also the employees of the provider and even the other customers of the cloud service provider. Apart from that, with social networking, every person has a potential to become a threat if he or she reveals something sensitive about the organization. Insider threat involves knowing the mindset of a person, his/her motivation and other contributing factors leading to the crime. Technology does not appear to be a solution — we have to go back to the traditional approach of ensuring the right culture and ethics among the employees. They alone can be the eyes and ears of an organization that can see and detect something unusual happening in the surroundings and raise an alarm. A sense of responsibility in every employee can be the only way to prevent an intruder from carrying out the threat. This may look idealistic but I don’t think there can be a more effective approach. u Avinash Kadam is currently
Advisor – India Task Force for ISACA. Opinions expressed in the column are his personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of www.isaca.org. He can be contacted via e-mail avinash@awkadam.com
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Global CIO
For Vanguard CIO, running IT comes second
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Chris Murphy
Vanguard is bringing a true techie back in to lead IT, but his job will be about a lot more than technology
LOGS Chris Murphy blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:
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wo intriguing ideas I heard in the past week: One, a CIO should focus on running the company first, and on running IT second. Two, swapping CIOs — or executives in any position — can be a virtue in itself, because the change brings in new ideas and thinking. Those are my characterizations, and they’re surely oversimplications. But they’re ideas that I took away from talking with two executives, Paul Heller and John Marcante, about a recent executive shuffle at Vanguard, the mutual fund company. In the reorg, Marcante is the new CIO, and Heller moves from CIO to head of the retail investor group. Tim Buckley, who led IT before Heller and has most recently run retail, moves into the Chief Investment Officer position. Here’s some more thinking on these two ideas, which some IT pros aren’t going to like the sound of. 1. The CIO’s No. 1 job is to help run the company. Marcante, the new head of IT, gets a big promotion here because he’s now part of the senior executive team that includes CEO Bill McNabb. Every exec on that team is expected to take responsibility for the whole company’s performance, not just their fiefdom, whether it’s IT or any other. IT pros will like the sound of IT having a “seat at the table” on par with other business unit execs. But many hate the notion when the CIO is seen as part of a rotation for grooming a CEO or other top exec. They reckon it takes a person who has run data centers, written code, or set up and managed databases to lead technology strategy. Vanguard’s record suggests it thinks otherwise. The past two top IT execs, Heller and Buckley, were tech-smart business unit leaders rather than seasoned IT veterans. One reason this approach might make sense for Vanguard is precisely because the company depends so much on technology. Vanguard doesn’t have branches — its customers come in over
the web (its biggest channel), phone, or mail. So its business unit leaders are held accountable for making sure they have the technology they need to run their operations. But with Marcante, Vanguard is putting a true techie in charge of IT for the first time since the early 2000s. 2. Change is good in the executive ranks. “I did what I could for IT in six years,” Heller says, about why it’s a good time to move on. He recalls when longtime CEO John Brennan stepped down in 2008, and told the executive team that the 80-20 rule was taking over — in essence, that Vanguard got the 80 percent of the value he could bring, so why stick around wringing out the last 20 percent? Heller notes that Vanguard’s web group was a separate business unit a decade ago, and that setup worked to get it launched. But now the web’s inseparable from all of IT and operations. Marcante will have to bring plenty of creativity to deal with the technology change that’s ahead. Among the big challenges he’s focused on are mobility and video. Already 14 percent of Vanguard’s online interactions come via smartphone or tablet. The company will have to support those multiple platforms without breaking the bank, since Vanguard’s business model of providing low-cost funds depends on keeping its operating costs among the industry’s lowest. And as the quality of desktop videoconferencing improves and people become more comfortable with it, Vanguard will have to provide more face-to-face interactions. Marcante sees opportunity in that, being able to attract customers who want that one-on-one conversation before investing. Eventually, says Marcante, “I think we’re going to do that more than we do phone calls today.” u Chris Murphy is Editor of
InformationWeek. Write to Chris at cjmurphy@techweb.com
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Practical Analysis
Nicira buy validates VMware-EMC strategy
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Art Wittmann
EMC’s softwaredefined, “doesn’t matter what’s under the hood” strategy sets it apart from Cisco and the big server vendors
LOGS Art Wittmann blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:
ike a TV miniseries, EMC and VMware are playing out their shared vision of a software-defined data center. The plotline centered on VMware recently, as the company announced its intention to acquire network virtualization startup Nicira for a whopping USD1.26 billion. Nicira’s main product is the Network Virtualization Platform, which is mainly software that runs on servers and gateways attached to a data center network. With NVP, customers can define logical virtual networks for specific workloads. The NVP virtual switches running on each server take care of implementing the virtual network on the physical hardware. Nicira requires no special networking hardware; it can use older two- or three-tier network designs or the new data center fabrics in vogue with most of the networking hardware manufacturers. Currently, Nicira talks of cloud management through either OpenStack or vSphere. Its marquee customers may manage some vSphere clouds, but it’s likely that Nicira’s primary use is in KVM and XenServer OpenStack environments. It’s far too early to know how VMware will treat other cloud management environments, but we’re betting this deal is giving pause to some of Nicira’s largest customers. While Nicira’s software-only architecture fits perfectly into EMC and VMware’s shared vision of a softwaredefined data center, it will likely be at odds with VMware partner Cisco and even with many of EMC’s own products. Both VMware and Nicira are working to build smarts into a software layer that in many ways makes low-cost commodity servers, switches, and storage systems perform acceptably for enterprises and service providers. In its product literature, Nicira speaks of its customers often preferring high-performance commodity switches over (one assumes) the high-priced, feature-rich products from the likes of Cisco.
With its recent executive shuffle (EMC infrastructure President Pat Gelsinger heads to VMware as CEO, while VMware Chief Paul Maritz heads to EMC as CSO), EMC seems to be embracing the notion that growth in sales is likely to come from software-like private cloud management systems. As it does so, it’s creating an environment where commodity servers, storage, and networking will perform just as well as name-brand products. In many ways, this is exactly the opposite of what HP, IBM, Dell, Oracle, and Cisco are doing. All are pursuing a “better together” strategy that encourages customers to buy a complete line of data center gear and management software from a single vendor. EMC’s “doesn’t matter what’s under the hood” strategy is particularly problematic for partner Cisco. The strategies are divergent enough that we wonder about the stability of the VCE venture among VMware, Cisco, and EMC. VCE has some solid customers, but it has never quite taken off. It also leads to concerns about EMC’s dedication to its storage hardware business. We don’t expect that it’ll abandon the business anytime soon or even slow its development. We see in poll after poll that IT pros value reliability and performance above all other features, especially with storage. EMC has plenty to do within its own products to further its software-defined data center vision. Value-added services like deduplication from Avamar and Data Domain may embrace virtualization more strongly, or simply benefit from a more flexible network infrastructure. EMC’s late 2010 purchase of Isilon indicates that the company saw the trend to scale out storage systems coming, and Isilon’s OneFS software fits well into the software-defined vision. u Art Wittmann is Director of
InformationWeek Analytics, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can write to him at awittmann@techweb.com.
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Down to Business
Sorry, but outsourcing isn’t evil
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Rob Preston
Outsourcing remains pervasive in both the public and private sectors, and it’s not going away, despite the widespread backlash
LOGS Rob Preston blogs at InformationWeek. Check out his blogs at:
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utsourcing is the polarizing IT management issue of our time. Few if any IT practices are so widely embraced at the highest corporate levels, yet so widely derided by the rank and file, especially when the work that’s outsourced is moved offshore. On the message boards, outsourcing is blamed for everything from Dreamliner delays at Boeing to the second-quarter loss at Microsoft (despite the fact that a one-time, USD 6.2 billion financial write-down was the real cause). Outsourcing providers and customers are portrayed as miscreants and dolts. One critic, commenting on an InformationWeek column Allstate CIO Jim Ditmore wrote about his negative experiences with outsourcing earlier in his career, surmised: “Would it be correct for me to guess that a non-technical CIO and other ignorant CXOs made the decision to outsource? Were the screams of protest by knowledgeable ‘IT people’ (a.k.a. the drones) ignored because they were supposedly interested only in saving their own jobs? Can the sales process for the outsourcing deal be described as ‘people who don’t know what they’re selling telling lies to people who don’t know what they’re buying?’” Outsourcing’s also a political livewire. Even though the federal government outsources much of its work, IT and otherwise, to all manner of contractors, consultants, integrators, and other vendors — and some of that work makes its way offshore — the Obama administration talks about outsourcing as if it were worthy of an Un-American Activities investigation. Likewise, many executives still keep their companies’ large outsourcing contracts close to the vest, for fear of a public relations backlash. I’ve talked with plenty of CIOs who rave in private about their offshore vendors — but take the Fifth in public. There are exceptions to the trend, of
course. New General Motors CIO Randy Mott made national headlines recently after InformationWeek reported that he plans to reverse the automaker’s historical reliance on IT outsourcing — from a mix of 90 percent outsourced and 10 percent in-house staff to 10 percent outsourced and 90 percent in-house — in an attempt to execute projects faster and cultivate auto technology expertise internally. GM’s plan to hire thousands of people for four new software development centers in the U.S., probably is based in some measure on the fact that the company owes its existence to the USD 50 billion bailout funded by American taxpayers. Allstate’s Ditmore warns CIOs about handing off their critical intellectual property, much of it IT-related, to outsourcers. And don’t count on IT outsourcers to cut costs, he said. “While most small and midsized companies don’t have the scale to achieve cost parity with a large outsourcer,” Ditmore says, “nearly all large companies and many midsized ones do have that scale.” He argues for doing only small outsourcing deals, for which it’s easier to establish SLAs and measure performance. If so many leaders are so leery of outsourcing, why do so many organizations continue to do it? Because when these contracts and relationships are properly thought out, vetted, and managed, they can deliver strong results — especially when they’re tied to strategic business outcomes and not just brute cost savings. Outsourcers can bring hard-to-find expertise and fresh ways of thinking to some of the most pressing business technology challenges. Outsourcing isn’t a panacea for dysfunctional IT operations and management. But it’s not the devil some of its detractors make it out to be. u Rob Preston is VP and Editor-in-Chief of InformationWeek. You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.
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