IT Next- March 2013 by Manan Mushtaq

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MARCH 2013 / ` 100 Volume 04 / Issue 02

sTRATEGY Easy Steps to Implementing BI

boss Talk Pine Labs’ CEO on PoS Innovations

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Interview Attachmate’s Dohsung on Collaborating for Smart IT

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Editorial

Big Data--The Clear Winner How so? While Indian companies are still in pilot mode developing various prototypes to use big data in an effective manner, there are several used cases available globally on how big data has been leveraged to the fullest extent to gain competitive advantage. One big case for big data is the recent 2012 US election, where big data was declared winner. The Obama Campaign stirred up the motion of big data by driving a multi-pronged approach to seek necessary information. As per the CITO Research, the Obama campaign initiated a sophisticated use of social media; the refusal to leave any assumption unverified was unprecedented. The strategy encouraged supporters to volunteer personal information, comments, post photos and videos, donate funds, and importantly, to galvanise others. The result: 33 million Facebook “likes,” 240,000 YouTube subscribers, and 246 million YouTube page views. The campaign hired data scientists 5x larger than the 2008 campaign and mobile app users to give 4x more and the expanded program. Why am I saying all this? Because it is clear that the big data trend is a reality and that it is not only for a select few, but for everyone. Then what role does IT play and how can IT set a big data strategy? The current edition of IT Next’s cover feature on ‘Big data’ does throw light on a few interesting scenarios where IT teams are gearing up to derive value out of big data and making a big deal out of it. While the sponsor of a big data project is obviously from a business group, IT managers are the most sought after for applying appropriate methodology and tools to extract unstructured data from vast data sources and integrate it with structured data using the required tools. If big data has to be a clear winner, IT managers are the ones to call the winning shot.

“If big data has to be a clear winner, IT managers are the ones to call the winning shot” Geetha Nandikotkur

Blogs To Watch! The CXO in the NextGeneration Enterprise https://blogs.oracle.com/ webcenter/entry/the_cxo_in_ the_next CXO Expectations Still Clouded on Virtualization http://meship.com/ Blog/2011/06/14/cxoexpectations-still-clouded-onvirtualization/ The NEXT Quality professional http://nareshchoudhary. blogspot.in/ Information Optimized http://informationoptimized. com/blog/tag/cxo/ Professional Network for CIOs and IT Professionals ... http://www.ciozone.com/ index.php?option=com_ myblog&show=Open-Seasonon-CIOs.html&Itemid=713

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IT decision-makers are harnessing the benefits of big data to help businesses make intelligent decisions

interview

12 All about the 4 Vs Big Data’s 4 Vs are measured and mined by customers for RoI Calculation

16 Pilots, Now Projects Q&A with Akbar Ladak, Senior Consultant & Innovation Evangelist, CTO Office, Wipro Ltd

18 Right Big Data strategy Beyond Hype, vendors have explored big data to drive big deals

20B Making a big deal out of big data Senior IT Managers are harnessing the big data and seeing value

20C Big Mandate for Big data

Create a prototype using best practices It neXt

march 2013 / ` 100 voLume 04 / Issue 02

strateGy Easy Steps to Implementing BI

boss taLK Pine Labs’ CEO on PoS Innovations

30 Feature

IntervIew Attachmate’s Dohsung on Collaborating for Smart IT

Apply right controls to prevent risks PG 24

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ITDMs are harnessing the benefits of big data through a pilot program to help businesses Pg 10

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06 Pine Labs’ CEO Lokvir Kapoor on PoS innovations making the online transaction easy

30 Attachmate Group CIO Dohsung Yum on how to build a smart IT using a collaborative approach

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Apply right gears| IT managers must apply right levels of controls in the IT systems and processes to mitigate risks in core banking system

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Sivakumar Krishnan on how to apply right IT controls to mitigate core banking risks

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INBoX IT NEXT

FEBRUARY 2013 / ` 100 VOLUME 04 / ISSUE 1

FEATURE: Game Changers for a Cool Data Centre

BOSS TALK: How to be a business Advisor

INTERVIEW: BIG Q Emerson’s Khuti on the need Auditing is critical in for an aerial view of a DC Cloud Pg 35

MAKING IT A WIN-WIN VOLUME 04 | ISSUE 1

IT MANAGER’S GUIDE TO FORMULATING EFFECTIVE VENDOR MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES Pg 12 A 9.9 Media Publication

February 2013

IT NEXT thanks its Readers for the warm response

IT NEXT values your feedback

We want to know what you think about the magazine, and how we can make it a better read. Your comments will go a long way in making IT NEXT the preferred publication for the community. Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@itnext.in.

NEXT100 Process: I found the entire NEXT100 process to be excellent. It was indeed a very rigorous process and well thought out. I applied for the awards for various reasons: one was for self-evaluation, for my professional growth, for public recognition in the industry and for peer recognition. While the application was very simple, the most difficult aspects were the personality and management style tests; also, the jury interview which was difficult, but interesting. The jury interaction was provoking and in-depth. The jurymembers possessed sound technical expertise and domain knowledge and gauged the candidates with expertise. The discussions on leadership and business skills were quite good.

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Vinayak Laud NEXT100 Winner

The Vegas Experience It all began when we heard the news of Technology Premier League (TPL) advertising the Las Vegas trip for winners of the competition. Five of us represented our company based on the criteria provided by the organisers. We started preparing ourselves and landed at the beautiful resort “The Retreat” for the event. It was a sight worth seeing-- with stalwarts of IT from many top corporate present. The atmosphere around promised tough competition but we stayed focussed. Two days of hard work and determination left us with no time to realise the fact that we were declared winners. With all focus now on Las Vegas, we found ourselves at the US consulate for the Visa interview. Prince was the first to go and got through in two minutes. Kamlesh was next and he was rejected (empty passport…no visas…you know

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the reasons for rejection). Tabrez was third in line and when the consular officer heard Las Vegas as the destination for the third time, he became curious and checked whether we were travelling together. And then we found ourselves in a group interview rather than individual! The consular officer then reversed Kamlesh’s rejection and granted him a visa. Kamlesh thus became an exceptional case--of having a rejection letter but being granted a visa. Rajendra went to another counter but got his visa within no time although he had a blank passport. Rahul already had a valid US visa. Visa in hand, we set forth on a 36-hour flight eagerly waiting to land on American soil for the first time (except Rahul). We travelled in four different flights till we were at Casino land. The lights of Las Vegas simply mesmerised us. We had never seen a city so well lit, with musical fountains and foreigners from different lands and at untimely hours like 3 am. Casinos were open 24 hours. We tried our hand at some of the casino games, won a few and lost a lot, but it was an experience. Las Vegas is a small city by size and the open deck buses that took us through it gave us an overall glimpse of this happening place. We then boarded a bus on a fivehour journey that traversed through the desert region till we finally arrived at the man-made “Hoover Dam,” and later at the natural wonder, “The Grand Canyon”. It took us a whole day to complete this visit. Time ran so fast that it was pack up time. We decided not to sleep the last night as we had a flight to catch at 7 am. All of us were awake; imagine Tabrez and Kamlesh buying an Xbox at 1 am. That is Las Vegas for you. We made it back to Mumbai with cherised memories. Thanks to TPL to for this opportunity. Rahul Mahajan and team K Raheja Corp (Note: Letters have been edited minmally, for brevity and clarity)

Boss talk | LOKVIR KAPOOR

F i n a n c e M a n a geme n t

Innovation through PoS

growing population, rising incomes, urbanisation, the advent of modern retail, and a consumption-driven society present tremendous opportunity for growth for the payment technologies industry.

Payment solutions: then and now The payments industry is continuously seeing rapid growth and technological advancements as the market demands are increasing. The payment industry is utilising new technologies to become more dynamic, efficient and cost-effective.

“With FDI in retail, PoS solutions see new opportunities on the horizon. But the key will be innovation”

Unlocking the Challenges Before the new age innovative Point of Sale (PoS) systems were introduced, payment processing was a long, tedious and cumbersome process. Payment is a unique opportunity where retailers can make a connection with their customers. Lack of PoS systems affected customer service adversely. Multiple bank EDCs were required by the cash counter to process respective bank cards.

vendors can facilitate hosted service, which means that SMEs gets customised solutions.

New PoS drives better value

Suggestion BOX

Positive PoS Strides PoS solution providers are now creating a conducive environment for retail and enabling the service sector to grow. The edge lies in reduced cost of transaction processing, reduced cost of training of cashiers, offer loyalty programmes without incremental cost in infrastructure.

Benefits for SMEs PoS solution providers provide SMEs with a competitive advantage through the enhancement of customer service. A PoS solution can give them the strategic edge to meet challenges posed by their bigger competitors. Due to their small size and constraints in skill resources, SMEs often fail to expand offerings like loyalty or gift cards. PoS

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Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation Writer: Damian Ryan, Calvin Jones Publisher: Kogan Page Price: `1,250

A modern PoS solution facilitates much more than just transfer of money from one account to another. It facilitates not only a redundancy at every step of the payment process but also specialised MIS / specialised information. A new age PoS solution can facilitate rich MIS on: 1. Central aggregation of credit card transactions-transactions from all PoS terminals are all stored / archived in a central server and helps in the transaction reconciliation process. 2. Facility to upload bank Payment Advice file 3. Automatic bank reconciliation and transaction dispute management 4. Proactive alerts for better operational efficiency Over the next 10 years, several possible scenarios could set the stage for emerging payments technologies--innovative mechanisms like online, mobile and prepaid card payments--to redefine the payments technology landscape. With FDI in retail, PoS solutions see new opportunities on the horizon. But the key will be innovation. Lokvir Kapoor, CEO, Pine Labs

Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Data Center Summit 2013 13 – 14 May | Mumbai, India gartner.com/in/datacenter

Accelerate Innovation. Drive Transformation. Achieve Operational Excellence. Agenda Tracks: A Enable Business Growth, Productivity and Continuity B Data Center Technologies — Achieving Higher Levels of Efficiency and Flexibility C Delivering IT Operational Excellence and Driving Business Value

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HOT TOpICS • Managing data center cost and sustainability • Mobile and big data impact • Cloud and virtualization best practices • Convergence: next generation server, storage and networking technologies • Data center security, risk, and continuity • IT operations: trends and future outlook • IT leadership: how to engage with business and CIO

Save INR 5,500 off the standard conference rate Register using the promotion code DCI2AD1

Update I n d u s t r y

Digital information in 2012 equaled a stack of 5100 32 GB iPhone 5s

TECH TRENDS | EMC Corporation announced EMC-sponsored IDC Digital

Universe study, Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East--India”— which revealed that the digital universe in India will grow 23-fold between 2012 and 2020. The digital bits captured or created each year in India are expected to grow from 127 EB to 2.9 ZB between 2012 and 2020. India’s digital information explosion is being driven by proliferation of devices such as PCs and smartphones worldwide, increased Internet access

SECUYRIT

Spam levels at a five-year low The latest Kaspersky Lab data indicated the share of spam in email traffic decreased steadily throughout 2012 to hit a five-year low.

Source: Gartner’s CIO

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Percentage of spam in mail traffic

80%

Such a prolonged and substantial decrease in spam levels is unprecedented. The main reason behind the decrease in spam volume is the overall heightened level of antispam protection.

75% 70% 65% 60% 55% 50% Ja

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within emerging markets and the boost in data from machines such as surveillance cameras or smart meters. Other contributing factors include increasing machine-tomachine communication (M2M), falling cost of technology, and digitization of TV, among others. Over time, the distribution of the bits within the digital universe by country of origin will more and more closely mirror the distribution of population. Key findings of this Indiaspecific study include: Less than half a percent of all digital information is analysed today while 36 per cent would provide valuable insights making Big Data a significant opportunity for India. By 2020, India will see 25-fold growth of useful information, which should be an inspiration for the adoption of Big Data technologies and practices. Cloud adoption is growing fast and by 2020, 42 per cent of all digital information will be “touched” by the cloud While India’s digital universe is expected to grow by 50 per cent every year through 2020; the number of IT professionals managing it is estimated to grow in single digits only. Although cloud computing is at a nascent stage in India, it is already having an impact on the digital universe. The study reveals that 22 per cent of the digital universe in the country in 2012 was in some way “touched” by the cloud i.e. stored, transmitted, or processed. This is estimated to almost double by 2020 with 42 per cent of digital information to be touched by cloud, the highest in the world.

I LLUSTRATIOtN: photos.c om

India’s Digital Universe to grow to 2.9 ZB

trends deals products services people

A 100 Multimedia Player

Razer Edge gaming tablet

Oculus Rift

With the A100 multimedia player, the new-age variant of the 70s’ boom box, the firm has brought a worthy contender to the shelf and a useful companion for all kinds of music lovers. Priced at Rs 1285, the A100 is a good buy.

A mobile device touted to have the power of a full fledged PC desktop. Priced at $999 the Razer Edge, it will be shipped with Windows 8, a 3rd Gen IntelCore i5 for i7 CPU.

A virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift from Oculus. VR is a giant visor that straps to your head. It is at 720p HD resolution, exact specs have not been decided.

ILLUSTRATIOtN: Raj verma

Bombay Dyeing deploys Microsoft Dynamics AX Application tRENDS | Bombay Dyeing, India’s linen brand has deployed Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to gain business insights, ensure better inventory and stocks management, trend analysis and share unified experience to customers across its stores. With deployment of Dynamics AX 2012 under the nomenclature ‘Project Disha’, Bombay Dyeing has enhanced its operations, bringing in management efficiency that helps in effective and on-time business decisions. Phase I of the project has been rolled out in 9 company outlets with POS solutions providing walk-in customers a “complete shopping experience.” Phase II of the project

ERP system to enhance operations and management efficiency

will be rolled out in Mar-May 2013 that will connect 332 franchise outlets nationwide. Kirill Tatarinov, President, Microsoft Business Solutions Division said, “Our vision is to

Around The World

empower enterprise and midsize retailers around the world by delivering a complete shopping experience. Working with our retail customers, we provide a seamless and differentiating endto-end solution for point of sale (pos) multichannel management, store operations, e-commerce, merchandising, financials, supplychain and more. This enables retailers to gain insight, operate with agility, exceed consumer expectations, and build enduring loyalty with superior time to value. In other words helping them become a ‘Dynamic Retailer.” Bombay Dyeing wanted full visibility of stock data and had to manually manage most of its business processes. “we have witnessed productivity gains across various departments,” said Durgesh Mehta, Joint MD Bombay Dyeing.

quick byte

Ramco finds ERP uptake in global markets Ramco Systems, an enterprise software company focused on next generation Cloud ERP products has observed an uptake in the ERP business in the global markets and its revenues from overseas business stood at $ 12.36 million. P. R. Venketrama Raja, Vice Chairman & MD, Ramco, said, “Globally, we have started getting some very good market recognition for our Cloud offerings. Our future focus will be to build futuristic enterprise solutions for customers.

Peter Cochrane, CEO & Chairman at Cochrane Associates Ltd

“The ratchet of change just went ‘click’ and is the new stable, the new economy, and there is no going back, and what is in store is even more radical.”

m a r c H 2 0 1 3 | itnext

cover story | The big data journey

ON A

TEST DRIVE

IT decision-makers are harnessing the benefits of big data to help businesses make intelligent decisions by N G e e t h a i l lustr at i o n by m an av sac h dev D es i g n by R A J VE R MA

enior IT decision makers are always on the threshold of being bombarded with various innovations, be it about technology or market related. After the Cloud, the next hype has been around big data, which refers to the new universe of data being created by web interactions, social media, mobile and others. The obvious question from IT heads or senior IT managers have been ‘how relevant is big data and how does it matter to me?’ And it is encouraging to find that senior IT managers are in sync with the fact that big data affects everyone. However, there’s one aspect that’s clear, that the big data project obviously is not driven by IT. IT NEXT embarked on a cover story to analyse the big data trend and its impact on senior IT managers and their role in making a big deal out of big data. Most vendors say that big data is definitely considered to be a big deal by IT managers, without whose help the big data puzzle cannot be resolved. Most agree that IT teams are the support systems which extract value of big data using the necessary analytical tools, making it a structured form that enables businesses to use it for their competitive advantage.

PHOTO IMAG ING BY pe te rs on PJ

Big Data at Work IT managers do agree that big data is being harnessed; and there is hope, with big data analytic discovery vendors supporting the big data trend with the tools necessary to discover and co-relate with the structured data. However, skepticism prevails because of the data warehousing projects in the past that never provided the promised business outcome. In some cases, IT managers are relatively leery of making additional investments in big data and advanced analytics because of the complexity of their current analytics program. According to Balasubramaniam Vedagiri, VP & Head Enterprise Technology Solutions, Mphasis, and Next100 winner, using modeling tools and algorithms to harness the big data predictive analytics will define the winners in the next few years. “Big data is being used in supply chain management to understand a car maker’s sudden increase of defect rates in the field. Similarly, healthcare practices of millions of people are continually scanned and intervened as part of customer service,” says Vedagiri. IT teams argue that in order to be a true differentiator, the right data set needs to be chosen, on which the models that predict and optimise business outcome can be built. In this context, Vedagiri believes that even before bringing the analytics flavour to the fore, identification of the right business unit as a pilot is the first step. With the ability of big data to achieve optimised reports/dashboards on large data sets with many petabytes, the right business opportunities can be spotted by challenging the key functions.

“Big data users need to focus on the specific slices of the original diverse data sources to answer specific questions” Ramendra Mandal Country Manager, Qlik Tech India Pvt. Ltd.

While finding insights that can improve business decisionmaking is not without inherent challenges, the first step that Ramendra Mandal, Country Manager, QlikTech India Pvt. Ltd, recommends is to isolate the area that the business is interested in. ‘Big data users need to focus on the specific slices of the original diverse data sources which are useful for answering specific business questions, without losing sight of the bigger picture,” says Mandal. According to Mandal, the role of IT heads in this process is critical. Not only does he or she need to amplify the value of data, he or she also needs to understand how to unify the business around it. “CIOs also need to fine-tune their approach to technology and a big data technology strategy should generally follow a portfolio approach,” says Mandal. According to Qlik Tech, a portfolio approach means that CIOs don’t just use one technology to solve all their problems. For CIOs who are looking at big data, and who feel it’s important to their business, there must be tools in their tool box that enable them to search, understand, analyse and model the data.

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All about

the 4 Vs

Big data’s four ‘Vs’ are being measured and mined by customers for RoI calculation

dvocates of big data often argue that the big data has transitioned beyond hype and that it is for everyone. However, the value it brings in is to analyse how it matters to the user and how the traditional three Vs of big data--such as volume, velocity, variety--add value. Most vendors believe that volume is of less importance; what matters is the variety of data generated and the value it ushers in. This is what big data vendors have to say…

Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Head of Product & Strategy, Mu Sigma, says value, one of the ‘V’s, has been added recently; this indicates mining valuable pieces of data from the other data that does not matter; as a corollary to this, measurement of big data is relative as it indicates how well one can handle these three big data activities. These include: Store: Can you store all the data, whether persistent or transient? Process: Can you cleanse, enrich, calculate, translate, or run algorithms, analytics, or otherwise, against the data? Access: Can you retrieve, search, integrate, and visualise the data? Ramendra Mandal, Country Manager, QlikTech India Pvt. Ltd finds that customers are laying more thrust on the variety aspect of the data, which would help their business. Mandal reiterates that variety--and how to integrate varied data from different sources pose the greatest challenge to companies now. “The recent US elections have been a testimony to how big data is effectively generated and harnessed with a wide section of data scientists hired to generate the massive data in various forms and through varied sources,” says Mandal.

“The value is measured taking into account both the cost of technology and the value derived from big data used” Maneesh Sharma Head - Database and Technology, SAP India

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cover story | The big data journey The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40 per cent per year, and will grow 44X between 2009 and 2020. Although volume of data is the most visible parameter, it is not the only characteristic to measure big data. Sheshagiri Anegondi, Vice President, Technology, Oracle India, echoes the industry opinion: the four key characteristics that define Big Data are the 4 Vs which are measured by their capacities and performance. Volume: Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non traditional data. For instance, a single jet engine can generate 10TB of data in 30 minutes. With more than 25,000 airline flights per day, the daily volume of just this single data source runs into Petabytes. Velocity: Social media data streams--while not as massive as machine-generated data--produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day). Variety: Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well described and change slowly. In contrast; nontraditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Srikanth Karnakota, Director Server & Cloud business, emphasises that big data is getting to be a reality to be reckoned with Data explosion is driving the need to measure data, which is increasing by 10X in every 5 years. “IT heads face the task of using the volume of unstructured data and allocate it logically to make it structured information,” says Karnakota.

Measuring Opportunities

“The true Value of big data comes from the analysis of data across disparate types”

ies from batch integration and loading of data at predeterAccording to Maneesh Sharma, Head - Datamined intervals to real-time base and Technology, SAP India, big data Vivekanand Venugopal streaming of data. presents a number of opportunities, with the Vice President and “The value is measured takoptimists maintaining it has the power to revoGeneral Manager of ing into account both the cost lutionise business and drive growth over the Hitachi Data Systems India of technology and the value next decade; the more cautious claim that comderived from the use of big panies who successfully mine big data stand to data; the cost variable is imporderive significant business benefits. However, tant because it is a key defining there are fundamental obstacles that must be factor of what’s new with big data,” says Sharma. surmounted. “Firstly, big data calls for new infrastructures Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manthat can store data differently and process it regardless of the ager of Hitachi Data Systems India, points out that performance format--infrastructures that allow you to slice the data in difcharacteristics differ based on data types and storage infraferent ways. Secondly, big data requires specific tools that can structure needs to be fast enough to manage and process this search, understand, analyse and model the data downstream data regardless of its type.“The true Value of big data comes from the system,” says Sharma. from the analysis of data across disparate types to generate a “The second most important measurement is to understand competitive advantage for organisations,” says Venugopal. the combination of data sources and formats which matter to Venugopal reiterates that data is becoming more complex determine the validity of an application to be put under the today, and current storage architectures are unable to supbig data bracket,” Sharma opines. port these evolving user requirements. In order to extract Another measuring capsule is the speed at which infortrue ‘value’ from data, organisations will need to adopt mation arrives and is analysed and delivered. The velocity new approaches. of data moving through the systems of an organisation var-

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Pilots, now

Projects Customers process data at each scale and distribute insights Q: Is big data justifying its value? A: Big Data is absolutely delivering on value. Our customers who have chosen Hadoop, NoSQL and associated tools have managed not just to save substantially vis-à-vis traditional IT, but also to enable functionality that was earlier not possible from a commercial standpoint. With big data, we have enabled customers in Telecom, Insurance, Banking and Retail to deploy analytics capabilities at a fraction of the price of traditional IT

systems. We also empower them to process data at each scale and distribute insights to each decision-maker on the field. Big data has freed data-driven insights from the confines of the corner office.

Q: Do customers consider big data to be a big deal? A: We have had resistance from customers initially – especially in India. However, that has reduced substantially in the past two quarters. Of late, customers approach us themselves, convinced about big data and the need to deploy it. They now want us to formulate their big data strategy and transform their key business processes, including the insights that big data delivers. Earlier the discussion focused on “What is Big Data?” Now, customers talk about the timelines and deliverables of big data.

Q: Is big data just another analytical tool? A: Big data is not just another analytics tool. However, it allows analysis of data on a scale which was not possible earlier. Data collection has become easier and cheaper. Cost of data storage has also decreased. Big data enables reduction in the cost of data processing and analysis to gain business insights. This completes the missing link that truly enables a data-driven enterprise.

Q: Is big data on pilot mode or is it being exploited? A: Pilots that have been going on for the last 2-3 quarters are being transformed into projects and are going into production.

Q: Has it made a significant difference to IT decision-makers? A: It has absolutely made a significant difference to IT deci-

Akbar Ladak Senior Consultant & Innovation Evangelist CTO Office | Wipro Limited

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sion-makers. Decision-makers who are ahead of the curve are convinced of cost savings that big data could fetch, almost up to 50 per cent. They come to us after carefully analysing the nuances of big data, and our discussions centre around which business processes should be transformed first and how. This is a sea-change from the norm. It is fair to say that big data is changing the face of IT and the thought process of IT decision-makers.

Set Right Big Data

Strategy

Beyond the hype, vendors have explored big data to drive big deals

ost vendors who are betting on big data agree that big data does make sense and that enterprises truly find meaning in big data. Having said that, the strategy they set and the architecture they deploy to harness big data in a meaningful manner is also key. Analysts firm CITO Research indicates that there’s a mess of data out there, which can help IT heads build a more accurate model of their world; but without the right tools, it’s just that—a mess. There has been much discussion of the various platforms and mechanisms needed to process big data, but comparatively little discussion of how business people can actually explore it and gain insights. Vendors discuss what kind of strategies and architectures are being used to derive better results. Vishnu Bhavaraju, Regional Manager-Sales, EMC Greenplum, firmly believes that big data tactics need to be adopted by business stakeholders in any organisation and IT would support them in deploying the right architecture. According to him, there are pertinent questions which stakeholders must consider: a) Should I consider big data in expanding my warehouse? b) Should I use big data for information discovery? c) Should I use it for an archival platform? d) In case of a banking environment, should big data be used to resolve capital adequacy issues? e) In case of telecom, should it be used to gain insights into varied customer experiences and so on? “While there are vertical specific needs that big data would cater to, I would strongly recommend a unified analytical platform with which to harness big data in the most appropriate manner,” says EMC’s Bhavaraju. “This is to say that structured data would be a part of the RDBMS and unstructured data can be placed on the Hadoop analytics platform which would be co-related with the stored data to make it structured, for to use by business groups,” he adds.

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“IT managers need to maintain a log of important data required by the business” Srikanth Karnakota Director Server & Cloud business, Microsoft India

Cloud UPHOLDS BIG DATA As an enabler, THE Cloud helps customers in making a quick entry into big data

Cloud computing offers a relatively quick entry into big data analysis for customers who wish to experiment with this technology; they need to be careful not to create more silos in the process that will cause issues over time Cloud is another way of keeping your data with the additional flexibility of virtually unlimited storage space. In addition, the data processing infrastructure can be used from the Cloud. Google’s Big Query is an attempt towards that

The big data journey | cover story The need for real time functionality is both significant and growing; 80 per cent of companies have plans to move their big data to the Cloud or are considering the option. With Cloud computing able to offer unlimited resources on demand, it certainly is a very great enabler to expand big data analytics into the Cloud Infrastructure Cloud, Content Cloud and Information Cloud that build on existing IT investments to provide a single virtualisation platform for all data, is another booster to big data Content Cloud--a well-managed software and hardware stores that searches both structured and unstructured content to make sense of the ‘variety’ of big data CIOs looking at the cloud for big data need to carefully consider how much of risk they are putting their data to before deciding what aspects of big data to put on the Cloud

Srikanth Karnakota, Director Server & Cloud business, Microsoft India, affirms that verticals such as banking, manufacturing, retail, environmental sciences, healthcare and a few others are gaining valuable insights about the their organisations and customers, based not only on unstructured data that is outside of the cleansed data in a structured database, but also on data which was hitherto unknown using both on-premise and cloud based modules. According to Karnakota, algorithms suggest most customers are using SQL data base server as the backend to port their structured traditional data and the Azure cloud platform to deploy unstructured data. “Customers are increasingly using Excel platform to power big data for intelligent deposition of unstructured data and Hadoop open source to integrate it with the main data,” says Karnakota. According to him, as part of the

IT managers can put unlimited data resources of big data on the Cloud and use dynamic provisioning Big data as a service on the Cloud is emerging fast and there are industry specific service providers who offer the services Pay as you use model is emerging as the trend in big data as you put unstructured data on the Cloud While elasticity of the Cloud makes it ideal for big data analytics, there may be some disadvantages with the Cloud--its abstracted distributed backend can sometimes be problematic for big data analysis Many cloud providers are focused on working towards improving performance to provide customers greater computational capabilities for big data analytics. Besides, cloud providers do also provide a comprehensive suite of security measures to safeguard their clients’ data.

integration process, Hadoop Adapter is built in to create the necessary interface with BI tools. “It is important for IT managers to keep a log of important data required by the business during the integration process in both on-premise and cloud, and leverage predictive intelligent tools and search engines effectively,” says Karnakota.

Direct Benefits Qlik Tech has made a few strides in simplifying the user experience using big data. Ramendra Mandal, Country Manager, QlikTech India Pvt., maintains that by directly querying big data sources without a complicated ETL process, IT managers can open up vast information sources to business users who can leverage insights to create strategies that are more informed and make better decisions.

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cover story | The big data journey

“Big data tactics needs to be adopted by business stakeholders and IT will bring in right tools” Vishnu Bhavaraju Regional Manager-Sales at EMC Greenplum

Mandal recommends three ways to harness big data benefits: Leverage any data useful for analysis without scalability limitation via unified analysis Develop the capability to link data loaded in memory with big data sources for rapid, associative visual analysis using unique hybrid approach Deploy direct discovery tools for easy implementation, rapid app development experience to big data Mandal explains, “One of our customers, Autodesk, took a hybrid approach to pull data from 30 different data sources and created 11 dashboards to help business groups make real time decisions.” “IT managers’ task begins once businesses have isolated the slice of data they are interested in; they can

Source: CITO Research

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use standard BI techniques to uncover business insights. In other words, they have focused in on this data area and created an app around it; there’s nothing special about big data anymore because IT managers have already focused in on a specific area,” says Mandal. Mu Sigma, the big data vendor, argues that distributed computing has a big role in big data management. Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Head of Product & Strategy, Mu Sigma, says that the data sources themselves that are initially required come from disparate sources being both structured and unstructured. Handling this amount of data on a single stand-alone server or “scaled-up” servers using traditional database management systems will not only increase costs significantly, but also make analysis of the data all the more complex and time consuming. As a result, a distributed architecture generally built on NoSQL data stores is recommended to derive best benefits. The emergence of “Distributed” in-memory distributed computing for big data is a rising trend with up and coming technologies like Spark and Shark which helps to gain traction. However, newer architecture would not only contain batch-based infrastructures like Hadoop, but also different tools for different types of data and analyses; for example: 1) Hadoop/HDFS with Hive -> for batch unstructured/structured flat files

The big data journey | cover story 2) Flume/Avro/Strom with NoSQL DBs like HBase, Cassandra, MongoDBs -> for real time data 3) R/Mahout/DSL languages like cascading/scalding, python, shell scripts -> for advance analytics 4) GPUs/CPUs -> for powerful computation According to Sheshagiri Anegondi, Vice President, Technology, Oracle India, some critical areas that IT executives should keep in mind while approaching big data are: Aligning big data initiatives with specific business goals to create value through low-density and high

“Ensure centralised IT strategy to buy in for standards and governance, as users will want the other way round” Sheshagiri Anegondi Vice President, Technology, Oracle India

volumes of data: this is critical to ensure sponsorship and funding for the long run. “Ensure centralised IT strategy to buy in for standards and governance, as user departments may be tempted to buy in decentralised fashion (which can result in IT standards and governance being compromised). It is critical, therefore, that IT heads insist upfront on standards and governance not being compromised, while at the same time promoting agility,” elaborates Anegondi. Anegondi points out that the infrastructure required to support acquisition of big data must deliver low, predictable latency in both capturing data and in executing short, simple queries; handle very high transaction volumes, often in a distributed environment; and support flexible, dynamic data structures. He agrees that NoSQL databases are frequently used to acquire and store big data as they are well suited for dynamic data structures and are highly scalable. The data stored in a NoSQL database is typically of a high variety because the systems are intended to simply capture all data without categorising and parsing the data. Maneesh Sharma, Head - Database and Technology, SAP India, believes that big data needs to be viewed in the back drop of the challenges it poses to IT. According to him, IT is challenged by the high costs associated with the purchase and maintenance of hardware needed to accommodate large data volumes, while business users need quick, often real-time access to analyse this information in order to respond to ever-changing market conditions. “Customers need to adopt a new approach to Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence - one that enables them to analyse data from any source in real time to determine actionable patterns and trends,” explains Sharma. According to Sharma, customers are leveraging SAP HANA database, a state-of-the-art in-memory platform, which allows enterprises to cut out the complexity that has crept into IT environments. For example, Usha International Ltd (UIL), a multi-product consumer durable manufacturing, marketing and distribution company, has chosen SAP HANA™ on Business Warehouse (BW) to gain real-time visibility into its businesses, to improve operational excellence and achieve better business outcomes. Essar Group has chosen the SAP HANA platform and the 4.0 release of business intelligence (BI) solutions from the SAP Business Objects portfolio to strengthen its existing investments in SAP software and gain real-time visibility into businesses across all verticals. Hitach recommends a scientific method with regard to the conversations that surround Big Data. Vivekanand Venugopal, VP & GM of Hitachi Data Systems India, says,”Real time analytics are carried out by ‘Complex Processing Engines’ that help us understand customer issues.”

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MAKING A BIG DEAL

out of big data Senior IT managers have started harnessing the big data trend and seeing value

enior IT managers firmly believe that big data solutions are in pilot mode, and most companies have developed prototype and used cases to extend big data visualisation. Senior IT managers definitely are making a big deal of big data, making all efforts to capitalise on the big data wave. Besides possessing a deeper understanding of big data and its benefits, they are leveraging analytics and a well-defined architecture to make complex things simpler. Here is what they think of big dataâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perils, promises, and ways to fetch greater value out of it.

CASE STUDY | Mphasis

Making sense of Big Data

Big Data driven solutions are in the pilot stage and in some cases, we have developed a prototype and used Proof Of Concepts for extending big data into data visualisation space. Web crawlers are also used as web analytics/text analytics tools to aid in unstructured data analytics in retrieving context specific information from social media. The web scraping technique is used to extract data from web logs, Clickstream and other sources in analysing customer sentiments and behaviour patterns. In short, wherever large volumes are processed in streams it requires a differentiated approach to come up with a big data driven solution.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Big data is bundled with CRM, mobility, Enterprise App and cloudâ&#x20AC;? Balasubramaniam Vedagiri VP & Head - Enterprise Technology Solutions Mphasis, Next100 winner

cover story | The big data journey Measure 4 ‘V’s In an era of information explosion, over a billion bytes of data is generated daily--and this number continues to increase with each passing day. While big data has existed in different contours for quite a while, the dimensions of data have undergone a drastic change in recent times, thus making the entire process daunting. The volume of data is increasing every day and measured in Kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, Exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte (10 to the power of 24 bytes). With the advent of smarter devices like RFID and Smart meters, there is increase in the speed, number and frequency of transactions. Velocity is measured at xTB/second or yyy microseconds as patterns are detected from a few thousand transactions occurring per second. Information Convergence is the need of the hour since there exists a Variety of data sources. More and more types of data are being integrated and analyzed every day--both structured and unstructured. Variety measures include text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files and more.

Big Mandate for Big Data Critical Best practices that IT managers need to bear in mind in creating a prototype

Gather business requirements before gathering data and define a clear objective

Value is the new differentiator for big data. With new data integrated into the ecosystem for analysis, the Value of data has really grown to be a critical element as it directly impacts the insights, benefits and business processes within organisations.

Setting Right Strategies The trend towards big data is growing so rapidly that we cannot afford to dismiss it as hype. However, the need is to understand why traditional business intelligence/data warehousing cannot solve a given problem, as big data is not necessarily the only answer. Develop a minimal set of big data governance directives upfront. Big data governance is a chicken-and-egg problem-you can’t govern or secure what you haven’t explored. However, exploring vast datasets without governance and security introduces risk, and firms must address this. When launching big data initiatives, avoid getting too complicated too fast, and be prepared to scale once a solution catches on: keeping big data as small as is reasonable, reducing scope to the simplest, most valuable objectives.

environments. Then, after successfully executing such POCs, these can be operationalised in production using altogether more professional IT methods, modifying and optimising as required Avoid data duplications as much as possible; when it comes to big data, every redundant duplication incurs an incremental cost

Evaluate data requirements. This process usually requires inputs from all business stakeholders; analyse and ascertain what data is crucial and what is not, for any given use-case

Sandboxes for experimenting must not be frowned upon because while digging for useful/actionable insights in big data, we often don’t know a-priori what it is that we are looking for until we find it; allow for experiments without a clear sense of direction

Big data is never an IT driven project; identify a business sponsor for the project

IT should be ready with data sets and recommended solutions once business groups come up with their needs

Big data is required to solve business problems

IT should make big data a self-sustainable model where additional investment is not required to generate big data

Allow data scientists ‘room to breathe’ to construct their data experiments and prototypes using their preferred languages and programming

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IT managers need to build special capabilities collaborating with enterprise

“Allow data scientists ‘room to breathe’ to construct their data experiments and prototype” Deepinder Singh Dhingra Head of Product & Strategy, Mu Sigma

mobility to enable quicker data compiling methods IT teams need to take a holistic approach to big data pondering over how to evolve their core IT infrastructure to facilitate large big data projects For instance, discussions with IT heads on how to approach delivery of a big data reservoir would be beneficial.

Big data, big deals Big data is now being bundled with other technology domains like mobility, Customer Relationship Management, Cloud, Enterprise Applications, etc. Thus, any combination of one or more of these to create data sets drives the deal size to be larger than a big data requirement alone. Recently, we received an inquiry to provide some of the outcome from big data solutions to be made available on the mobile platform. With the Data Visualization layer on top of the Analytics engine, customers show more and more interest to have m-enabled versions. In similar vein, implementation criteria for large data sets interaction using Cloud (with the help of products like Cloudera) are also gaining a lot of traction.

Frequent

BREAKDOWNS

in Instrumentation Labs?

Sync with Vendors The logical sync among IT managers/developers and big data vendors is definitely in a phase which cannot be termed as ‘common ground’. With big data analytic discovery vendors like Datameer and Hadapt still in the process of being invented and have competing goals among them, IT managers are not sure when that would evolve. While Hadoop developers are trying to bring the big data platform to a broader user base, IT leaders are exploring options as they are unsure about how to proceed. Skepticism abounds based on past data warehousing projects that never provided the promised business outcome.

We can derive benefits from improved performance with predictive analytics, if the mechanism to source data from multiple locations and channels are properly planned by any organisation planning to launch big data initiatives. The infrastructure and IT architecture need to be upgraded for easy merging of data. Models built with an equal balance of complexity and ease of use would succeed. Finally, the processes and tools need to be simple and updated so as to enable proper use by the entire organisation. It is also very beneficial if the learnings and findings are amplified across the organisation for future rollouts. Some issues that restrict the full potential of big data need to be addressed. Policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability would need to be addressed in a big data world. Once reliability, manageability and performance improve, companies will increasingly need to integrate information from multiple data sources, often from third parties. Enabling access to data is critical for success.

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cover story | The big data journey

CASE STUDY | Magma

Making sense of Big Data

It’s a universal truth that data is getting bigger and more complex with every passing day. Financial Institutions (FI) have been handling huge data since long, and utilising their customer data to make decisions on customer profiling and take many more important strategic decisions, even if not termed big data.

New 4 Vs (volume, velocity, variety etc) Volume, Variety and Velocity have been considered the three parameters of big data for some time. Apart from these, there are many other keywords which are contenders for the 4th V. However, “Value” largely remains the winner amongst them and it surely needs to be considered as the 4th V.

Reduction in Complexity Let’s look at the scenario in financial institutions. Prospects traditionally are used to walking in to banks or financial institutions to seek loans. So far, it has been assumed that the borrower would explicitly state his/her need, based on which the decision to grant the loan or not is taken. Once the customer reaches out to the FI, the institution would initiate the next steps of collecting the KYC (Know Your Customer) documents. Based on the customer’s previous track records, institutions take a call as to whether to approve the required loan. Once the loan is disbursed, the recovery team would make timely calls or send field executives to collect the necessary EMIs for the pre-defined period till the loan is closed. However, with the change, the process has become simpler as the number of channels has increased. The customer can access the institution through its online portal or through its Facebook page, raise a request through the toll-free helpline for a loan, or even send out a Direct Message at Twitter. A customer may not be able to convey his/her needs explicitly in terms of loan amount, rate, tenure etc. To enable the predictive behaviour about the customer, to know him/her even before he/she has approached you, it would definitely require more data, and importantly, more information out of that data. Fortunately, most FIs have not been lagging behind in opening up multiple channels. However, the challenge would be to extract useful information out of that data. As Social and Mobile movements pick up speed among FIs, pretty soon they would find themselves submerged under a huge data pile, some of which not so useful. To make sense of the unstructured data, new strategies like big data would be necessitated as the relational database would not be able to create decisions from such a volume of data.

Big Data, Big Deals Big Data and Cloud would provide the computing power to handle Social and Mobile data. The Social presence would soon

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“On the systems design side, a 360-degree view of key entities of your business, like a customer or a loan account in financial services, would be the basic considerations which would help in defining products appropriately and finding the risk profile of a customer” Subhamoy Chakraborti GM-IT, Magma Fincorp Limited, Next100 winner

be a differentiating factor for service providers who have an urban/semi-urban client base with expendable incomes. On the systems design side, a 360-degree view of key entities of your business, like a customer or a loan account in financial services, would be the basic considerations. This would help in defining products appropriately, and finding the risk profile of a customer from different knowledge bases. Further, most importantly, it requires a complete solution instead of half-hearted effort to tackle big data. The attention has been on the analysis process once we capture the data. Considering the diverse data sources including unstructured data and its volume, network and infrastructure plans also need to be designed in detail.

hanks to the technological evolution, Indian Banks have not only been enabled to change the mode of transactions, but also drive the transactions at an alarming speed and in different formats. The trend applies to all banks and branches (over a lakh) including Scheduled Commercial Banks, Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) and Urban Cooperative Banks (UCBs). The new channels such as ATMs, Net Banking, Mobile Banking, Cards, IVRs and Branches, and surround systems like Treasury, DEMAT, NEFT, RTGS are leveraging the core banking services (CBS) systems. As the volume of transactions skyrocket through multiple channels, the environment gets exposed to various technological risks which cannot be ignored; hence, IT managers’ role in mitigating the risks by applying imperative controls becomes even more crucial. They face Herculean tasks and challenges in

streamlining the process and ensuring a risk free transaction. It has become imperative that IT managers idendified the critical challenges of core banking, besides enhancing the necessary skills and expertise to tackle crisis management and deploy best practices to make effective use of core banking services.

Core (Banking) Risks Amid increasing threats and security risks, IT managers need to work towards keeping the lights on and systems running, and work out an effective mitigating plan by putting in sufficient compensating controls. The key concerns that the IT manager has to confront would be: To ensure that the systems and services uptime are kept at near 100 per cent, the integrity of the systems and data are maintained at all costs; and last but not the least, the confidentiality of customer centric data is maintained by securing the data across the transaction life cycle. Understand the nuances of the Core Banking system to be able to launch new products successfully. The challenges arising out of some changes in the interest rates would also call for a shuffle in the testing wherein the system date in the test bed has to be taken forward at least by one quarter, to validate the accuracy of the system in computation of monthly interest accruals and the interest compounding. To manage the project team, provide quality assurance and manage stakeholder expectations amid tight deadlines. He should have a clear understanding of all the areas of Project Management namely, Project Integration Management,

“IT managers play a vital role in mitigating the core banking risks by applying imperative controls which is very crucial and this calls for streamlining the process and ensuring a risk free transaction” Sivakumar Krishnan, CISA Head – IT and Operations Bhartiya Samruddhi Finance Limited, BASIX Group Company

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Core banking it risks | insight

Apply

Right

Gear

Shifts to Mitigate Core Banking Risks IT managers must apply the right levels of controls in IT systems and processes to mitigate risks associated with the corebanking environment

Scope Management, Time Management, Cost Management etc., To ensure that the CBS and other systems within the bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perimeter are protected by strong firewalls to prevent any unauthorised access and to keep hackers at bay. He is also responsible for monitoring the honey pot, kept as a surveillance and early-warning tool to check any attempts/patterns of unauthorised use by hackers. To ensure that he has put policies and controls for access on BYOD devices when employees bring their own devices like tabs, mobiles and try to access the bank systems on wi-fi, etc.. To ensure capacity planning. The increasing volume of transactions on the CBS generates a huge amount of data and puts a

great deal of pressure on its storage and retrieval. The IT manager is responsible for capacity planning with enough storage devices to take care of the exponential growth of data. To ensure that proper daily data backups are taken for CBS and the backup media is transported off-site in a secured manner. If the bank has implemented mirroring of the production data at the DR/backup site, then he has to ensure that it happens normally. He has to periodically (at least once a year) conduct mock BCP ( Business Continuity Planning) testing from the DR Site to check preparedness, in case of a DR-like situation. He has to mobilise the Operations and business teams for conducting this exercise fruitfully. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are tested against the agreed objectives with the stakeholders, analysed

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I LLUSTRATIO N: manav sach dev

by S i va k uma r K ri s h n a n

and measures taken to correct any anomalies in the processes. He is responsible for ensuring that the fine-tuning of the database happens periodically, the historical data is moved to another location/ archived for better system performance. To make sure that all changes (fixes/ patches) moving into CBS production systems are approved by the Change Management committee; the down time, if any, is communicated well in advance to stake-holders and customers, if necessary; . proper rollback processes are in place in the event that the change has to be rolled back. Even emergency changes already applied have to be passed through the committee subsequently and ratified. To assist in Post Implementation Review (PIR). Once a major CBS project is rolled out into production, he is responsible for assisting in the PIR to gauge whether the benefits derived by the organisation are as per the quantified benefits initially projected by the business.

Handling Crisis in Core Banking e also has to handle challenges of unschedH uled power-cuts by taking steps to ensure uninterrupted power supply and uptime e must handle DR like situations and timely H escalations to stakeholders.

isable all USB, CD drive to D prevent data leakage and introduction of any infections/ worms into the system Set policies on Usage of IT Assets and BYOD Set policies on email usage Have set policies on OS Patch management, Endpoint security updates

Be an Expert

It is a pre-requisite for IT managers to possess good banking domain knowledge and be conversant with Errors associated to production, frauds, the features available on the CBS. He hardware or program failure and malicious should have knowledge of IT audits attack or damage by hackers, vendors and third with Risk assessment techniques to party mishandling data could result in a major determine whether the information crisis. Frauds happening in the system can make systems are properly protected and a bank defunct or can cause loss of goodwill. In controlled and provide value to the the event that a fraud is detected, the IT organisation. Likewise, an IT managmanager has to take strong measures to contain er should also have an understanding the fraud, by putting in adequate controls from of the organisation and its environboth the system perspective and process ment, and of factors which can affect perspective. He will be responsible for providing the entity, both external and internal. all relevant information to the internal audit Certain insights into how each of team for further investigation. the systems/ applications within the ecosystem talk and exchange Right Controls for Risks The IT manager sometimes also has to control information with CBS is necessary. Deploying certain best practices crises arising due to outsourcing of IT support Familiarization with when and how would help IT managers to overcome functions or IT systems. It may be due to vendor the off-line files/data exchanges octhe challenges associated with core failure, non-compliance with legal and regulatory cur, their frequencies and duration; banking services. These are the key requirements, contract terms not being met, as also how the off-line transaction imperatives that they can use to mitidisgruntled employees leaking customer data. takes place in the CBS gate risks and the controls they need Another very critical aspect is to to put in place: be aware of resource management Embrace COBIT and ITIL frame- management of people, resources, vendor, hardware and comworks for best practices pliance. He also needs to have adequate knowledge of Cloud offerCompliance to SOX, if any ings and create opportunities to leverage the benefits of Cloud by Ensure that the Service Delivery team/ outsourced vendors moving non-critical data from CBS to Cloud, thus freeing system are able to deliver as per defined SLAs resources and thereby ensuring enhanced performance. Develop a team for IS security management, form a committee for IT strategy Implement Sigma to ensure Quality Management Adopt Right Attributes Performance Optimisation & Sourcing Practices While it is mandatory to have been certified in the core security space, IT managers should carry the mandate of possessing good IT Balanced Scorecards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) interpersonal skills to deal with team members and also peers for End User training of all new systems moved into production ensuring proper closure of tasks. Sometimes, it will be necessary environment to align the team and re-shuffle members to different projects Segregation of Duties for reducing or eliminating business within the CBS as per the managementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s priority needs. With the risks through the introduction of compensating controls. For handful of resources at his disposal, he has to balance day-to-day example, a voucher in-putter cannot authorise a high value functions plus additional work loads of taking up project executransaction. A separate authoriser role should be created tion. With his domain knowledge, he is also looked upon at times Introduce stringent physical access controls, software to bring in operational process efficiencies/improvements and access controls automation in processes. Periodic change of passwords

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e must also ensure timely management of all H issues relating to in Firewalls, IDS/ IPS etc.

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Orcun Tezel, Director for Sales Engineering at Brocade and Edgar Dias, Regional Director Sales- India & SAARC answer questions from the round table participants about the benefits of Ethernet fabrics

orcun tezel, director for sales engineering at brocade congratul ating the participant who won a ipad in a lucky draw during the event

need to deliver more computing power, greater storage capacity and higher network performance? To discuss issues like these, IT Next and Brocade jointly organized a roundtable event in Bangalore themed â&#x20AC;&#x153;Breaking Boundaries: Boosting Data Center Performance with Fabric Architectures.â&#x20AC;? Orcun Tezel, Director for Sales Engineering at Brocade outlined the technology trends that are putting pressure on the existing data center infrastructure, and the technical challenges involved in boosting performance using conventional network components. He pointed to the fact that while trends like virtualisation and cloud are improving compute and storage utilization, they are also making it necessary to have high speed switching architectures in the data center to support throughput and ensure performance. He explained how traditional tree topologies used in data centers to connect switches induces limitations, and how Ethernet fabrics could deliver higher levels of performance, utilization, availability, and simplicity. In fact, he demonstrated how an Ethernet fabric makes perfect sense when you deploy server virtualization or storage networking using an Ethernet transport, since it eliminates the management of multiple switching layers, and enables scaling of network bandwidth without manual reconfiguration of switch ports and network policies. Following the presentation, there was an active discussion between Tezel and the other participants about the use, deployment and management of Ethernet fabric devices. Edgar Dias, Regional Director Sales- India &

Jethin Chandran, AVP for Infrastructure Management Services at Hexaware Technologies, describes the growing performance and management problems, and the need for improved net work technologies in the data center.

Decision-makers and senior professionals paying all attention to understand and grab the nuances of building effective net works and addressing the challenges

SAARC for Brocade, clarified some misconceptions about the proprietary nature of Ethernet fabrics, and emphasised how the technology is based on industry standards, is backward compatible with existing network devices, and will be inter-operable with products from multiple vendors..

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Dohsung Yum | interview

Collaborative Approach to Smart IT As the CIO of a large merged entity, Dohsung Yum, CIO, The Attachmate Group, had the tough task of ensuring a smooth IT integration of four businesses. As a veteran of the IT industry, Yum advises senior IT executives on how to plan IT strategy and work out an effective collaborative approach and a smart project plan in a merger scenario As the CIO of such a large entity, which has gone through several mergers and acquisitions, what are the inherent challenges such situations throw up? How can the IT team address these? Every new acquisition throws up a huge challenge to the IT team in its initial days. Th e At t ach m at e G r o up s mergers have been very different and unique. Each company has its own scope of operations and complexity with regard to the IT framework. The four entities are a) Novell - offers solutions in the collaboration, data management and end-point management space with its unique set-up b) SUSE – the Linux Platform for both enterprise server and desktop c) NetIQ – includes the entire group’s offering in terms of Secu-

rity & Compliance, Identity & Access, Disaster Recovery etc, and has its critical IT infrastructure in place and d) Attachmate – includes offerings in terminal emulation, legacy modernisation, managed file transfer and enterprise fraud management. In driving the integration, the role of IT is not just complex, but also an expensive proposition. In my opinion, it is not about technology alone, it is about the team’s adaptation to the business and culture of the enterprise. It is critical to understand what the business needs are and get the required coherence in the enterprise to drive smoother integration of IT processes and systems. In any large merger and acquisition, IT is put to a litmus test as the situation is chaotic, with several unknown factors and out-

comes. The primary reason is that most IT teams are caught up with short term gains and support and focused on core activities. What’s missing is a broad vision. What most IT managers forget is to reach out to the business partners and manage relationships, to make their task easier. I found that the only way to address challenges was to encourage my team to work closely with the business groups individually, wherever IT could be of use, whether finance, sales and marketing, HR or operations and understand the nuances. After the assessment, I brought in the required changes in the support system, technological deployment and processes. The biggest initiative that helped was a two way communication process between employees and IT, which helped us win half the battle.

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interview | Dohsung Yum How does an IT team decide on investment priorities during the integration process in any acquisition period? In any merger scenario, 100 per cent of the investment made is tied to the success of the company from a global perspective. In general, IT also gets a boost in terms of investment and the team plays a vital role in working out the investment modalities. Some of the key areas the IT team should focus on are: Taking into account all the necessary support activities for the business groups Fixing all the support and infrastructure tools necessary and working out training modules Getting a quick insight into the various barriers and work out ways to phase out Formalising and bringing in certain standardisation within the enterprise that can support hierarchy Collaboration among teams, which will help in working out better investment procedures How do you think collaboration helps in effective integration of processes and systems and standards? In the case of any large integration, such as ours, bringing in certain standardisation is a Herculean task. There are a few aspects that IT heads need to remember when it comes to evolving standards. They would include: It is not just IT infrastructure that calls for an effective integration strategy, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also about people. There are several IT heads with varied backgrounds The most pertinent question that my team faced was how to device a common IT strategy for all of the merger activity that can streamline the IT operations and framework and make it agile The question was about how save cost using core technologies while

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empowering the team and employees to make decisions in real time It was critical to make the systems more flexible and scalable for a clear interface with the existing IT platforms We also worked towards having a very scalable architecture and replaced many applications over the legacy ones. While some applications were integrated with the legacy ones, some were left unchanged, as they were very customer focused and operated as a standalone. For instance, the running CRM system Siebel, was integrated with the common system to enable sales teams to leverage this, as we decided not to have four different CRMs. Novell was running SAP CRM which continued from an ERP stand

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The most pertinent question that the IT team faced was how to device a common IT strategy for the merger activity to streamline operations and make it agileâ&#x20AC;? point; we decided to migrate to SAP. In the process, several costs had to be written off, despite the fact that a huge investment had been made in them. It was essential to drive down the cost of operations and capex as we moved ahead, as supporting the old applications was expensive.

What kind of project implementation strategy should one look for in such a scenario?

Dohsung Yum | interview to build a smart project. It also depends upon the technologies that both the business group and IT is betting on to drive better value and RoI. It is essential to follow these principles before embarking on a huge project plan: Align a basket of requests from the stakeholders Formalise the process of seeking inputs from the stakeholders Work out ways to analyse the responses\ information sought from the stakeholders Not to hesitate to ask questions about the costs, technologies, need and outcome of the project Call for a high-level meeting with the top management Work out cost benefit analysis to discuss how much ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s support system would cost to meet the requirement

The most important aspect is to make sure to design a well thought out plan. A few stringent plans would help the IT heads in having an edge. some of the best foot forward in such a scenario would be: It is important to have a project implementation plan which helps in sustaining and creating sufficient agility in the architecture to cater to the future expansion needs Having the right processes to imbibe the culture of every BU is mandatory - an aspect of project management It is critical to have stakeholders from the business group in the project, which can help devise a better project plan IT teams need to ask the stakeholders more questions if they have

Find other interviews online on the website www.itnext. in/resources/ interviews

As a contributing member of the leadership team, what according to you are the leadership skills necessary for budding CIOs? While IT managers need leadership skills if they need to scale up in the career, a mergers and acquisition scenario makes it mandatory to develop these skills at a faster pace. The reason is that IT managers need to be capable of addressing global challenges and drive global operations and, in some cases, handle global teams, which is quite a big task. They should develop the habit of addressing the team concerns and handle crisis management at various junctures and not just IT alone. Moving out of the core job of keeping the lights on, or keeping up the uptime, they ought to get into strategic mode and think at a macro level to run a global enterprise. To be a leader and build a vision of growth, IT managers should: Imbibe different cultures of a multi-national company Evolve an effective communcation tool and policy with the

staff of all Bus Understand competitive environment of the organisation Pick up market intelligence of the best practices Learn to process new ideas and be prepared to have open dialogues with the business teams Embrace vulnerabilities in IT Develop a collaborative framework to support all the communities spread across globally Start aligning with partners to leverage infrastructure support to make the task easy

What are the technologies that your group would be focusing on in this year? We would be laying thrust on cloud and social media platforms. For instance, one of our BUs launched CloudAccess soluiton, which is a self-contained virtual appliance that enables the IT team to extend a userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s single sign-on experience to SaaS or other cloud applications while keeping the access secure. It allows IT team to ensure that only appropriate users access information is protected while meeting compliance demands. What are the customer concerns with regard to cloud and how can it be resolved? Cloud-based applications and services contracted by business users usually circumvent existing IT access controls, making it difficult to ensure and certify that access is limited to approriate users. Unlike other cloud single signon products, Cloud Access includes an advanced provisioning engine that will automatically create, manage and disable accounts on supported applications. As users onboard, change roles, require additional access or depart the business, Cloud Access ensures that IT can secure and manage access to cloud based applications to prevent unauthorised access to services.

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15minute manager

training Education workplace compensation workforce trends skills development personal development

Page 36

Tech Strategy: Fitting Steps to BI THIS page Tips & Tricks: Speed Up Browsing page 36 Product Review-Dell Latitude 10 Page 38 Form IV-IT Next publication details Page 40

By Sunil S Ranka

efore initiating a BI project, it is crucial to understand that a well-implemented BI project never results in failure; and this is an established fact. It is just that RoIs are difficult to establish during the inception of the project. However, whatever the hiccups may be, the key imperative for IT managers is to initiate moves which are thoughtfully planned and suit enterprise needs. It revolves around right sizing of the solutions, having a structured vendor management policy in place to evaluate appropriate vendors, articulating the Service Level Agreements (SLA) unambiguously by using experts, and clearly spelling out the legal terms in the document, among others.

Size it Right

I LLUSTRATIO N: s hijil narayanan

Increase your browsing speed

Most IT managers always face the challenge of choosing the right tools and solutions which can meet their specific requirement. Many times, business expansion and growth does put them in a situation where the assessment becomes difficult, as a CIO cannot approve a strategy deploying all solutions available. IT managers could be overwhelmed by the idea of choosing a BI solution. The key is to choose a solution that can not only address the current need but also has the

TECH Strategy

Fitting Steps to BI IT managers have to be cautious while choosing the BI implementation vendor and bet on solutions that can fit the needs m a r c H 2 0 1 3 | itnext

15-MINUTE MANAGER

The first pre-requisite for selecting an appropriate BI solution or a vendor is to map the enterprise’s need. The selection would need IT heads to invite each vendor for an onsite presentation to explain their capability and features. After mapping current needs and tool/solution, an RFP should be sent out for selected vendors. A clear RFP with intricate details would win half the battle. A precise RFP must have the following elements: Introduction and Overview of the organisation Clear objective of RFP Description of desired solutions Keys dates (Date of proposal presentation, Pre-Proposal conference for clarification etc.) Solution/Vendor Evaluation criteria Proposal Delivery Instructions and key contacts Proposal Package Checklist Pre-requisites for submitting the proposals Based on the response, vendors should be shortlisted to the semi-finalist level; they should be given a detailed agenda with proven cases to demonstrate tool/ solution capability, spanning a few days in an onsite meeting. During the meetings, IT heads, key decision makers, business users, technical and functional architects should be involved. The agenda should be drafted clearly, allowing each key individual to interact with the vendor teams. In most cases, a good vendor is key to the success associated with a good vendor management policy.

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Tips & Tricks

Speed up browsing

App management Just what do you do when you have too many apps and extensions installed on your Chrome browser? You install another extension called Nexos (from the webstore) to make sense of all the other plugins installed and available on your PC. Nexos is an offline app which helps you organize everything from your bookmarks to your extensions and apps. Not only this, it also comes

Use secure, automatic passwords - If your browser offers a master password option, use it.

with built-in support to connect and access Google+, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Flickr, GitHub, Vimeo and Google Drive account all through its console. Install and access the Nexos app through a new tab. Its home screen shows management options like Apps and Extensions, Bookmarks, Images, Videos, etc. Click on the Settings gear wheel on the top-right. You will now see the Connections view of Nexos, handling your Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Google+, etc., connections. With Nexos installed in your Chrome browser, you can pick and choose which apps and extensions you want to keep active or disable. And also its connections menu feature lets you easily access data from your various social network and email accounts in one convenient place. Give this a try and see if it adds to your browsing experience.

I MAGING : hari das balan

Don’t Go by the Low Hanging Fruit

PHOTO /I LLUSTRATIO N/IMAG ING CRE DIT

scalability to adapt to changing needs and future business expansion and upgrades. Depending on the maturity of the organisation, pre-packaged Business Intelligence solutions give a good head start in most cases. In a packaged model, customisation is made possible to meet business expectations and increase efficiency. Experience shows that using a pre-packaged solution along with customisation requires business users to spend much time in applying the BI to churn out the required information and bring out customised reports.

15-MINUTE MANAGER

“Reference calls with the customer mentioned in the case is important to understand the detail of the work actually done in BI” — Sunil S Ranka, BI professional

Best Foot Forward by the BI Vendor Analysts such as Gartner, too, vouch that the CIO’s primary challenge is selecting an appropriate vendor who has the capability to address the pain points. Gartner’s CIO survey indicated, “Most of the CIOs believe their competitors make better use of information,” and strengthening the ‘information value chain’ is their number one challenge, and Business Intelligence tops priority. The presentation or skill of the people in the room should not mesmerise the IT teams; rather, they should provide greater insights into resources, processes, methodologies and, most important, implementation strategies. Templates of past work could establish vendors’ work details and knowledge. At times, vendors do showcase similar case studies, but organisations should pay attention to the size of the client presented, scope of work and, most importantly, the vendor’s role.

There have been cases where vendors have done just a staff augment in a similar industry, but ptroject a glorified industryuse case, just to get an edge. Reference calls with the customer mentioned in the case is important to understand the detail of the work actually done. IT heads should question themselves or visit vendor websites to eliminate the most obvious misfits. A good BI implementation vendor should bring in the following: A comprehensive experience in integrating silo technology components into a successful and usable BI platform A comprehensive understanding of Business Intelligence solutions Domain and functional expertise in the desired BI solution Implementation processes, approaches, methodologies and accelerators Programme governance framework Project implementation methodologies Test and Quality Assurance processes Change management processes

“There have been cases where vendors have done just a staff augment in a similar industry, but project a glorified industry use case, to just have an edge”

— Sunil S Ranka, BI professional

bi & Analystics to be fourth largest application sw segment * Business Intelligence (BI) software revenue will reach $13.8 billion by 2013 * BI to grow by 7 per cent * BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritise BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis * CIO appetite for BI is complemented by more-tactical buying in business units for departmental and workgroup analysis as well as for personal BI * The flip side is that in the near term, growth will be hampered by sluggish macro indicators, as well as by slowing sales cycles of multimillion-dollar end-to-end BI deals.

Communication plan details for executive briefing on a weekly, monthly and daily basis

Do not Succumb to Armtwisting Vendors tend to put in a lot of smaller clauses to cover any future liabilities, but enterprises should review the contract in detail and insist on periodic renewal rather than a long-term contract to avoid contract negotiation mistakes. Putting in place a vendor risk management policy is mandatory. There are no set rules or guidelines for any contract terms. Always have direct communication and channels open with all the key people involved. Acommon failure of vendor relationship is lack of communication and high expectations. Once the relationship is in place, don’t assume everything will go according to plan and be executed exactly as specified in the contract.

m a r c H 2 0 1 3 | itnext

15-MINUTE MANAGER

Dell Latitude 10 - For those on the move

Probably the first Windows 8 Pro tablet that you shall see in the Indian market, Latitude 10 is aimed at the corporate users who want to experience the best of both worlds - modern UI for media consumption and the Desktop UI for work. The Latitude 10 comes in an all-black body with a glossy front-finish and a mattefinish on the rear side. A 2.5 cm thick bezel surrounds the actual 10.1-inch display. There is a single Windows logo button sitting at the bottom-centre of the bezel and a decent 2.0 MP front-facing camera at the top. The Corning glass used for the display is scratch-resistant. Latitude 10 weighs around 658 grams, almost matching the iPad 4th gen in terms of weight (652 grams for the Wi-Fi version and 662 grams for the Wi-Fi+Cellular version). An 8.0MP camera is housed at the top edge and it also comes with a flash unit beside it. The 2-cell battery on its rear side is swappable thanks to a notch just below it. The speaker section of the Dell Latitude 10 is located on the left and right hand bottom edges on the rear side. The Latitude 10 houses an Intel Atom Z2760 dual-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz and has 2 GB of RAM. The unit we got had an SSD of 64GB capacity, but this can be upgraded to upto 256 GB. The USB port on the Latitude 10 allows you to connect your keyboard or mouse and use it as a regular laptop/desktop. It also comes with a stylus for those planning to use the touch interface on the desktop mode. The pen has a capacitive tip and a button on its side for emulating right click. The HDMI out port is a boon for corporate users who have to give presentations. The Latitude 10 can be connected to any HDTV which takes in an HDMI port and you can duplicate your tablet’s screen onto a bigger display. The battery life on the Latitude 10 is quite impressive. While performing our videoon-loop stress test we noticed that the tablet lasted for a good 5 hours. On normal usage, you can easily extract over 8 hours from the Latitude 10. This is again a plus point for corporate users on the move.With a price tag of Rs. 40,000, Dell Latitude 10 is targeted at business users on the move. It makes perfect sense for them. But the tablet is also great for someone who wants a device for media consumption as well Source: Thinkdigit.com as to do work.

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The vendor’s performance must be monitored constantly in the beginning. This should include requirements that are most critical to your business. The time, money and energy used to nurture a positive vendor relationship cannot be measured directly against the company’s bottom line. The vendor management process begins by selecting the right vendor for the right need. Squeezing a vendor on the price point would mean embarking on a journey where the vendor either provides low skilled talent or leaves the project halfway to accept a new project for a better deal. In either case, the enterprise would lose out. A periodic review of plans and deliverables with assured quality would always save the embarrassment of a failed relationship. At any point, organisations should not allow vendors to take the driving seat. There should be proper governance and periodic checks to validate the vendor’s work, responsibility and quality of delivery. Usually, organisations put in all efforts in selecting the vendor, but minimal or no effort in maintaining the relationship. It is incorrect to assume it’s only a vendors’ responsibility to keep the organisation happy; for a successful collaboration, it must be two-way. More importantly, it’s not just about the SLA and business delivery: organisations must look at the real value vendors bring. Depending upon the size of outsourcing, having a Vendor Management Office (VMO) would be a good idea. If not prepared for a full-scale VMO, you can establish an IT governance or standards body of employees from across the company to oversee purchasing policies and assess new vendor technologies and other offerings.

Nuts & Bolts of an SLA SLAs are a contractual agreement between the Vendor and Client Company detailing the level of services which would be provided. For instance, if bugs are not responded to within four hours of opening, there could be an escalation channel; if it continues to remain open with no activation even after 24 hours, a vendor company could be monetarily penalised.

I MAGING : hari das balan

Product review

15-MINUTE MANAGER

Form IV

Statement of ownership and other particulars about the publication, IT NEXT as per Rule 8 1.

Place of publication

Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd., A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110024

Periodicity of its publication

Monthly

Printer’s name Nationality

Vikas Gupta Indian

(a) Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

(b) If a foreigner, the country of origin

N.A.

Address

C-5/10, Safdarjung Development Area,

Publisher’s name Nationality

New Delhi-110024 Vikas Gupta Indian

(a) Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

(b) If a foreigner, the country of origin

N .A.

Address

A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110024

Editor’s name Nationality

Geetha Nandikotkur Indian

(a) Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

(b) If a foreigner, the country of origin

N.A.

Address

A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110024

Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital

Pramath Raj Sinha N-154 Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017. Vikas Gupta C-5/10 Safdarjung Development Area, New Delhi 110016 Asheesh Kumar Gupta 103, Tower II, The Palms, South City-1, Gurgaon 122001 Anuradha Das Mathur C-144, Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi 110017 Kanak Ranjan Ghosh BH-44, Sector II, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700091 Helion Venture Partners India II, LLC Les Cascades Building, Edith Cavell Street, Port Louis, Mauritius TVS Shriram Growth Fund I JE JayaLakshmi Estate # 29, Haddows Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai 600006 And Others

I, Vikas Gupta hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. Sd/Dated : 1st March, 2011 (Signature of Publisher)

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Writing an SLA could be a daunting task; most vendors have their own SLA templates, but the IT leaders should form a council and review all the details. At times, companies want an unrealistic and non-required SLA, causing higher costs and maintenance. For example, at one of the high tech network clients, the SLA council wanted the highest level of SLA with less than 8 hours of bug resolution time with each step documented with the root cause analysis (RCA) details. Adding such a demanding SLA to a non mission-critical application not only cost the client more, but maintaining the required documentation was overkill. So, there should not be a generic SLA for an entire organization; SLAs should be drafted carefully based on the need and importance of application. Also, all the required performance parameters with detailed individual party responsibilities should be documented and agreed upon. A typical SLA would include: * A statement on the expected duration of the agreement * A description of the applications and services covered by the agreement * Procedures for monitoring service levels * A schedule for remediation of outages and associated penalties, and * Problem-resolution procedures * Along with defining performance parameters, a set of metrics needs to define and measure the quality of vendor’s work. With Business Intelligence applications, quality measures could include data quality, rate of data load success, rate of defect resolution, and customer satisfaction, among others. What is important? IT heads or IT managers do face challenges while dealing with BI vendors. But making a detailed attempt in choosing a BI solution or vendor, based on that which best suits the business requirement with a detailed vendor management process and methodology would build a good relationship between organisations and vendors, leading to longterm success.

sco cto f custom series CISCOc|iIT NEXT CUSTOM SERIES

better because it takes a lot of complication out of the equation.

Next Gen UCS servers for Next Gen Computing

In a series of interactive articles, Cisco will shed more light on its Unified Computing System (UCS), thereby enabling CIOs to better manage their IT infrastructure

How has Cisco made server I/O more powerful and much simpler? Answer: One of the key differentiators of Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) with Intel® Xeon® processor is the way in which highcapacity server network access has been aggregated through Cisco Virtual Interface Cards and infused with built-in high performance virtual networking capabilities. In “pre-UCS” server system architectures, one of the main design considerations was the type and quantity of physical network adapters required. Networking, combined with computing sockets/cores/frequency/cache, system memory, and local disk are historically the primary resources considered in the balancing act of cost, physical space and power consumption, all of which are manifested in the

various permutations of server designs required to cover the myriad of workloads most efficiently. Think of these as your four server subsystem food groups. Architecture purists will remind us that everything outside the processors and their cache falls into the category of “I/O” but let’s not get pedantic because that will mess up my food group analogy. In Cisco UCS, I/O is effectively taken off the table as a design worry because every server gets its full USRDA of networking through the VIC: helping portions of bandwidth, rich with Fabric Extender technology vitamins that yield hundreds of Ethernet and FC adapters through one physical device. Gone are the days of hemming and hawing over how many mezz card slots your blade has or how many cards you’re going to need to feed that hungry stack of VM’s on your rack server. This simplification changes things for the

There is also a need for higher processing power for bringing new choices for design optimization. What is happening on this front? Answer: Cisco has been working hard making server networking better with improved and optimized efficiency. With the advent and advance of multi-core processing, the workhorse two socket server has become a real performance monster. In fact, for some applications the amount processing power required, relative to the other food groups I mentioned in my previous answer, is outstripped by the capabilities of the mainstream processor family, which in today’s incarnation is Intel’s Xeon E5 2600 series. In response to this phenomenon, Intel subdivided the Xeon lineup to include a new “EN” class of processors, the E5-2400 series, which ease back on the gas pedal of Moore’s law for designs that don’t require as much processing power in relation to local storage and memory. This creates a new class of cost & performance optimized systems for lighter workloads or for storage heavy systems (think big data) at the entry end of the portfolio. Three of our new UCS M3 series systems fall in this category: the B22, C22 and C24. At the same time, Intel has brought four socket server options, formerly the province of the mission critical, “EX” end of the spectrum, down into the mainstream. An example of this is our new UCS B420 blade. So if you want four socket core count and performance but don’t necessarily need the comprehensive RAS features of an EX class system, you now have a price/performance optimized solution for that need. For any queries regarding UCS, please send them to yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries

cto forum

The Chief TeChnology r c hfebruary 2 0 1 3 | itnext offiCer forum m a 07 2013

event Report |dc efficiency through cabling

Wiring the Data Center Cabling systems are the key to performance, efficiency and flexibility

ew technologies such as mobile computing, BYOD, virtualization, and cloud computing are putting increased strain on data center operations, demanding greater availability, reliability, and higher speed connectivity to meet business objectives. At the same time, data center managers increasingly face mandates to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide additional capacity to meet business needs. However, the performance of the data center depends on a complex inter-relationship between space utilisation, power management, cooling optimisation, and high-performance connectivity, all of which are essential to getting the maximum performance and

nikhil Banka, Technical managerwest, panduit expl ains the imporatnce of creating a unified physical infrastructure approach to boost dc performance

S Vas u nandan regi o nal sales di rec to r-i ndi a & S w as i a, pandu i t e l abo rat i ng t h e ne e d fo r i nnovat i v e c abli ng

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panelist along with R giridhar, group editor, 9.9 media, the moderator for the evening

dc efficiency through cabling | event Report uptime from critical systems and applications. Often the physical elements at the foundation of your IT infrastructure determine the data center’s performance, reliability, and success. To examine these issues, IT NEXT magazine, in partnership with Panduit and Sigmabyte Computers organized and event titled “Integrated Solutions for Data Center Efficiency” for IT infrastructure managers. S Vasunandan, Regional Sales Director for India & South West Asia for Panduit kicked off the session with an introduction to the company and its long history of delivering innovative cabling solutions. He also described the company’s extensive and tightly integrated portfolio of innovative physical infrastructure solutions, and mentioned the fact that Panduit collaborates closely with industry leaders like Cisco Systems, IBM, HP, Rockwell Automation and Johnson Controls to deliver comprehensive unified physical infrastructure-based solutions. He concluded his talk by pointing out that a robust IT infrastructure was necessary manage costs and meet sustainability goals, while reliably and costeffectively addressing challenges across business and technology domains. Nikhil Banka, Technical Manager–West for Panduit made a presentation on “Creating a Unified Physical Infrastructure”. He explained how trends like data center consolidation, server virtualization, and private cloud initiatives make silo-based approaches to designing, deploying, and managing the physical infrastructure a costly and time consuming process, and spoke about the need to adopt best practice methodologies that deliver robust, scalable physical infrastructures. He recommended that IT infrastructure managers look for integrated physical solutions that provide: Visibility and control for managing and automating real-time data processes Convergence of new technologies and high-speed data applications Operational efficiency through process improvement and IT initiatives, such as cooling conservation through energy efficient data cabinets Capacity management for greater real estate utilization Modular pods for high-density applications and reliable deployments Drawing on more than 20 years of personal experience in the cable installation business, Ketan Kothari, Managing Director of Sigma-Byte Computers explained the myths and facts of cabling. His talk was peppered with interesting anecdotes, and provided revealing insights about the wrong practices, design flaws and poor decisions that often compromise the proper functioning of network infrastructure and lead to sub-standard network performance. The session came to a close with a panel discussion on how to make the data center ready for the future.

ketan kothari, managing Director, sigma-by te computers pv t. ltd, el aborating on the my ths and facts of cabling technology and sharing some interesting anecdotes with the participants

a rapt audience comprising senior it managers paying complete attention to the panel discussion on ‘integrated solutions for data center efficiency’.

one of the participants of the event in a dialogue with nikhil banka of panduit to seek deeper insights into the technical aspects of cabling technology.

Participants in the deliberations included Kaushal Shah, Head-IT, Privi Organics; Niraj Godiwala, Deputy VP- IT Infrastructure, Capital First; Victor R Salve, Head – IT, Future Value Retail; and Shabbir Badra, Head–IT & GM, SI Group India. The panelists discussed the impact of trends like virtualisation, consolidation and cloud on data centers—and concurred that the trend was towards more compact and efficient facilities.

m a r c H 2 0 1 3 | itnext

update

open Debate

A platform to air your views on the latest developments and issues that impact you

Ways to Create a Winning Culture in Your Enterprise

Manish Sinha Senior IT Manager, Amtek IT managers can definitely contribute and sustain the winning culture if they pay attention to some of the key areas: Helpdesk Call Tracking and Analysis- it gives the understanding about the setup, service quality offered by team members, equipment conditions which are being used for providing services and based on this a manager could streamline routine issues. The other aspect is budget monitoring on a monthly basis with respect to capex approval as generally people prepare budget annually and but never monitor it monthly and reconciling it gives them a control on the budget.

Manish Shah GM-IT, Indusfila The first and foremost thing that IT Managers need to do is to get away from keeping the lights on activities. Appropriate use of tools, policies and processes can ensure maximum automation of these activities. IT, is by now, the back bone of nearly every organisation, and 24/7 availability, is a necessity and a given fact. The key focus should be on three areas such as a) Enhancing the user experience for both internal as well as external customers, b) Simplifying and increasing the robustness of the existing process flow, c) Creating additional revenue streams for the organisation. Be more agile being connected with all.

V SUBRAMANIAM Director - IT & CIO India & Gulf Area, OTIS Elevator Company (India) Ltd OTIS Elevator Company (India) Limited How do the IT managers contribute to bring in a winning culture in the enterpriseis is first by creating a winning attitude followed by winning team having focussed on common goal and duly aligned with high level of commitment, responsibility, accountability and sense of ownership in making things happen beyond barriers and limitations by maximizing their collective strengths as a winning Team. It is imperative and important to ensure the goals are clearly articulated and well defined.

book For you

Market Your Way to Growth: 8 Ways to Win Title: Market Your Way to Growth: 8 Ways to Win Author: Milton Kotler Philip Kotler Publisher: Times Group Books Pages: 240 Price: Rupees 385

Most CIOs are natural entrepreneurs. In todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mercurial economic environment, when there is slump in the economy and the regulatory environment is far from clear, CIOs are expected to come up with IT solutions that can lead to more efficiency and lower operating costs. This book by Milton Kotler and Philip Kotler can be of interest to the CIO community as it presents eight effective ways through which companies can ensure growth even in the slowest and the most mercurial economic environment. It has tips on how to increase your market share, develop a sizeable base of enthusiastic customers, build your brand, innovate, expand internationally, acquire other businesses, carve out a reputation for social responsibility, and achieve much else. The book has special section devoted to global companies that have decided to set up shop in India, Brazil and other high-growth economies. Ideas for those who have moved in these economies through M&As. IT NEXT Verdict The chapters are pretty focussed and present the eight growth strategies in a systematic format. But it is also true that we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have one-

Your views and opinion matter to us. Send us your feedback on stories and the magazine to the Editor at editor@itnext.in

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size fits all approach to international business. Star Value:

xt Gen uting

other food groups I mentioned in my previous answer, is outstripped by the capabiliADVERTORIAL ASK THE EXPERT ties of the mainstream processor family, which in today’s incarnation is Intel’s Xeon E5 2600 series. In response to this phenomenon, Intel subdivided the Xeon lineup to include a new “EN” class of processors, the E5-2400 series, which ease back on the gas pedal of Moore’s law for designs that don’t require as much processing power in relation to local storage and memory. This creates a new class of cost & performance optimized systems for lighter workloads or for storage heavy systems (think big data) at the entry end of the portfolio. various permutations of server designs Three of our new UCS M3 series systems required to cover the myriad of workloads fall in this category: the B22, C22 and C24. most efficiently. Think of these as your four At the same time, Intel has brought four server subsystem food groups. Architecsocket server options, formerly the provture purists will remind us that everything ince of the mission critical, “EX” end of the outside the processors and their cache spectrum, down into the mainstream. An falls into the category of “I/O” but let’s not example of this is our new UCS B420 blade. get pedantic because thatiswill mess up my SoA:ifThere you are want four socket count and Q: Centre for Sight India’s second-largest many resilient andcore robust applications ophthalmology chain with 44 centers across the that are available on a cloud model including ERP, food group analogy. performance but don’t necessarily need the country. We expect a turnover of more than `125 crore DW/BI and Disaster Recovery (DR). Disaster Recovery In Cisco UCS,The I/Ocompany is effectively taken leveraged comprehensive features of an EX class organisations can RAS also look to deploying a public this fiscal. has successfully private cloud to achieve real-time multi-location, multi- cloud, because they will not have to invest in trained off thebusiness table asintegration. a designWeworry because you have a price/performance manpower. Asnow the DR datacenter can be owned by are now looking up to our IT system, service providers to run these services, team to further strengthen this initiative and make every server gets its full USRDA of netoptimized solution for that need. there will be Centre for Sight a more resilient organisation. What no investment on the setting up of the DR datacenter. working through VIC: helping porsolutions can Ithe expect from my IT team when it comes For the rest of the applications, the existing environment For any queries regarding UCS, please send business intelligence, assetFabric management and new- needs to be examined. If the current running tions ofto bandwidth, rich with them to yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in applications have additional modules available, which age disaster management? are well tested and integrated for BI, CRM, SCM etc., Extender technology vitamins that yield they would enable easy integration. Many other hundreds of Ethernet and FC adaptstandard applications are also available that can help BROUGHT TO YOU BY get the datacenter upto speed on these aspects. ers through one physical device. Gone are the days of hemming and hawing over how many mezz card slots your Ashish Wattal blade has or how many cards you’re going National Product Manager– UCS to need to feed that hungry stack of VM’s on Cisco India & SAARC your rack server. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries This simplification changes things for the

articles, Cisco will shed Computing System CIOs to better manage

Dr Mahipal Sachdev Founder, Centre for Sight

cube chat | Atul Vij

Experiment & Innovate “I prefer to ensure that the next step is not taken unless the technology has been fully imbibed by the entire business ecosystem,” says Atul Vij, Vice President (Systems, IT & Improvement cell), Uno Minda Group By Asit Verma

F My success

mantra Impossible is not a fact, it’s just an opinion. Challenge the status quo

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or Atul Vij, IT is not just a profession. It is passion. He believes that if IT were harnessed properly in the country, India could be -come a much better place for its citizens. He dreams of being able to work with the Government to be able to influence policy and making the fruits of IT spread far and wide across the country. He is of the belief that IT person has to think and act like any quintessential entrepreneur. An IT professional also has to be like a scientist, who has an open mind and is ready to experiment with new ideas. He has to be like a thinker wearing different hats of devil’s advocate. Atul started his career in Management Consulting, specialising in strategy and implementation. It is here that he developed his passion for IT, which he used to the hilt for getting high levels of improvements in short durations of time. After joining the industry 10 years back, his

strategy has been to focus on shop floor improvements for gaining the strategic edge. “At work I am inspired by the idea of dreaming and planning for transformations. I love to experiment with new innovations, so that I can be instrumental in bringing about the change in a sustained manner,” says Atul. For Atul, it is a matter of pride that the organisation (Uno Minda Group)that he is a part of has grown very fast during the last few years. Uno Minda Group is known for its systems and shop floor practices. The group has been aspiring to be a pioneer in new technology. However, Atul does not believe in implementing new technology blindly. He says, “I prefer to ensure that the next step is not taken unless the technology has been fully imbibed by the entire business ecosystem. Being the first one to test the technology can, at times, become a cause for more pains than gains, as the new technology might not

cube chat

Fact File Full Nam e At ul Vi j C urrent d es ignat io n Vi ce Pres i d ent (System s , IT & Im provem ent cell )

PHOTO : Ji te n Gandhi

“An IT manager should have strong team building abilities. He should encourage team members to think out of the box to drive innovation” have been sorted out by the suppliers and other stakeholders.” As the head of the Group Systems, Atul leads the team that deploys SAP across all Minda / JV Plants. To an extent, Atul has a stoic attitude towards life. He thinks, that big or small, ultimately you have to overcome each and every challenge that life throws at you. One challenge that he likes to talk about is the one that he faced in 2008. In his own words, “We were in midst of blue print finalisation with IBM, when due to hard cost cutting measures we faced a directive to close down of all activities for an indefinite period, with team going back to original Units. We had a team of functional – non SAP trained persons. We got the go ahead to do local pilot on SAP Go Live with Consultant. The challenge was

to stabilise SAP, resolve all post Go Live issues in 4 months, without any Consultant support/ AMC. The subsequent Go Lives had to be done with in house team.” With pride apparent on his face, he adds, “I feel proud that we have done fresh SAP Go Lives across new Businesses/ managed amalgamations with own Team.” IT is not the only thing that keeps him engaged in the professional sphere. He also likes to get involved with shop floor persons engaging in their manufacturing activities. A people’s man of sorts, he likes to associate with his colleagues working in different departments. He loves to pick up techniques that will enable him to understand people better, and at the same time make himself understood better. He is also delving into things like handwriting analysis, Neuro Linguistic Programming and the like to develop his people skills.

C urrent role C IO, head i ng System s , lead ing SA P d eploym ent and other IT enabled auto m ations , syst em ’s and tech nical aud its at Uni ts , working wi th the Unit’ s team s fo r catalys ing im provem ent ini ti ati ves fo r prod ucti vit y im provem ent, co st red ucti on, quali t y and d elivery im provem ents Experti s e Deploym ent of strategic i ni ti at iv es fo r operational excellence and bus i nes s res ults , leveragi ng IT in the proc es s fully (and co ncurrent ly to uch ing the li v es of all invo lved in operati ons , financ e, co rporate) Wo rk experience 23 Years Favouri te boo k Auto bi ography of a Yogi Favouri te food Punjabi s picy foo d Favouri te d esti nat io n Hawaii Favouri te gad get for work L aptop Favouri te gad get for pers onal Mo bile

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my log

Sangita thakur varma Managing Editor, India Now

ust

r at i o n

: raj verma

Beyond the Glass Ceiling? Women may have stormed every citadel worth its name and broken every venerable glass ceiling, yet the debates surrounding them in the workplace refuse to die down. There are a number of studies that either deify or denigrate women managers. Biases exist undeniably, and women are as much to be blamed for feeding fodder to this gross mill. If we are to believe a study published in the Social Science Research Journal, women managers who have moved up the corporate ladder are the biggest obstacle in the path of their female subordinates and co-workers! Worse, they have a marked preference for male subordinates and support them. Since I am not a misandrist and have rather liberal views, I am all for this bonhomie at the workplace. In another vein, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has unleashed the same old debate with her famous quote women “still can’t have it all.” This coming from a woman, who one would have imagined had the world on her platter, can’t be dismissed as so much ‘woman talk’. Sandberg blames women’s conditioning that leads them to make early choices which do not end up in the boardroom. Personally, I cannot agree with either of the two views expressed above. The first seems to thrive on the stereotype of the envious --“Uski sari meri sari se safed

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kaise?” syndrome? While Sandberg seems to imply that women in 21st century are still being led unconsciously by the choices of their grandmothers. I think both are guilty of generalisation. While it is true that circumstantial evidence points to both situations being present still even in most advanced pockets of the globe, at the same time emerging nations like India are throwing up more women at the top of the corporate ladder than before. IT and finance, traditionally the two citadels that had fewer women at the top, have now a liberal sprinkling of women right from bottom up. It is typically a case of how you view the glass. Women today take informed choices and chucking career for family is a choice most make happily. But more than that today’s companies value what women bring to the workplace. From flexi-hours, second career options for women who have taken breaks for family, to extended maternity and paternity leaves—workplaces have become sensitised and accommodating. As a male manager what you must realise is that each woman is a powerhouse with a leadership spark waiting to be ignited. Just be that light and see the difference. Rest, as they say, is all heresy. And if you are the woman manager well: Does the glass ceiling really exist?

Ill

A Myth, Just Break it! This International Women’s Day, let’s actually do away with ‘man’ made jargons 3 Essential

reads

Attachment's CIO Dohsung Yum on Approach to Smart IT Pg 30

How to mitigate risks in core banking scenario using right set of IT Controls Pg 24

Atul Viz's success mantra lies in challenging the status quo Pg 46