IT NEXT
APRIL 2011 / ` 75 VOLUME 02 / ISSUE 03
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SECURITY: Organisations need to proactively manage risk
STRATEGY: How to thrive during good and bad times
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DEALING WITH COLD STORAGE?
IT managers explore new technologies and techniques to deal with the data deluge Pg 12
40 BOSS TALK
INTERVIEW: Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior on how cloud brings value
How to handle crisis Pg 05
VOLUME 02 | ISSUE 03
EDITORIAL
Opportunities Galore As the year forays into the new fiscal, Indian
industries across the verticals exhibit strong
intentions of increasing their IT spending in 2011. The research groups endorse the positive sentiments prevailing. Gartner for instance, estimates the overall IT spending in India to be over $70 billion in
IT Next aims to create a knowledge platform for the IT manager fraternity. GEETHA NANDIKOTKUR
2011, which is beguiling. Another intriguing aspect is around RBI’s recent directive to all banks to have CIOs soon, which invariably opens up the opportunities for the potential CIOs. RBI’s IT vision, which directs that those banks having no CIOs and a steering committee, will have to have these positions implemented at the earliest, comes as blessing in disguise for the IT managers’ league. Not to forget that the banking sector is increasing its footprints across the upcountry market as part of its rural banking initiative. This would throw up immense technology deployment opportunities for the potential CIOs, as most of the banking technology runs on legacy frameworks. A good amount of scope for driving innovation around building new IT frameworks around security, systems, software, networking etc., can be explored. IT Next’s effort has always been to identify new leadership opportunities across the various sectors for the IT manager fraternity and create a knowledge platform around technologies that they resonate with. As part of this aspiration, the current issue on ‘Storage Special’ aimed at spotting some invigorating trends in the storage arena, which addressed the storage management issues that confronts IT managers. The thrust has been around discussing the pain points that you face in handling the humongous data and the task of managing it. Some intelligent methods followed by several IT managers in handling this data flood, besides driving innovations within the storage, while making way for future absorption, are some of the key takeaways.
Blogs To Watch! Emotionally Intelligent Signage: http://www.danpink.com/ Execupundit http://www.execupundit.com/ Three Star Leadership Blog http://blog.threestarleadership. com/ Leading Answers http://leadinganswers.typepad. com/leading_answers Your views and opinion matter to us. Send your feedback on stories and the magazine at editor@ itnext..in or SMS us at 567678 (type ITNEXT<space>your feedback)
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IT MANAGERS TAKE THE CUE
The panacea lies in how IT managers adapt to the changing trends, accept cloud and do intelligent provisioning while going green.
INSIGHTS
BOSS TALK
INTERVIEW
29 Risk Management 32 Proceed with Caution
How can you apply yesterday’s lessons to tomorrow’s IT strategy? Focus on transparency, governance, motivation and innovation— the keys to thriving during good economic times and bad.
36 Spot Cloud Organisations with compute capacity to spare can sell it to buyers looking to the cloud to perform short-term compute tasks
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05 Handling Crisis| Dr. P Nan-
dagopal, CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company
ITNEXT | A P R I L 2 0 1 1
BINESH SREEDHARAN
40 Cloud is real| Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Sr. VP & GMEnterprise, Cisco Systems
C OV ER DES IGN AN D IMAGING : BINESH S REED HARAN
Organisations need to manage risk proactively, protecting not just the infrastructure that data resides in, but also the information itself
ITNEXT.IN
MANAGEMENT Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Vikas Gupta
EDITORIAL
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32
Group Editor: R Giridhar Executive Editor: Geetha Nandikotkur Associate Editor: Shashwat DC Sr Correspondent: Jatinder Singh Copy Editor: Akshay Kapoor
PROCEED WITH CAUTION | Most successful executives focus their firm’s efforts to ensure that they plan for the proverbial “rainy day”.
OPINION
DESIGN
THE BIG Q
10 Money Wise: Re-shape the Data Centre |By A V Dhar-
makrishnan, Executive Director - Finance, Madras Cements
What IT managers need to look into before embarking on the Green route
15-MINUTE MANAGER
58 Learn to play & improve|
47 The Art of Managing |
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) facilitates flow of information between all of a firm’s business functions
CUBE CHAT “One should learn to do things smartly without generating much hype,” says Bhavita Saxena, DGMISBS, RFCL
SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh (09971794688) Brand Manager: Siddhant Raizada (09990388390) National Manager-Events & Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) National Manager -Print , Online & Events: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755) South: B N Raghavendra (09845381683)) North: Deepak Sharma (09811791110) West: Hafeez Shaikh (09833103611) Assistant Brand Manager: Swati Sharma Ad co-ordination/Scheduling: Kishan Singh
OFF THE SHELF
48 Tips & Tricks | How to
60 HCL launches new
speed up browsing
laptop and desktop series | A sneak preview of enterprise products, solutions and services
50 Tablet Glossary | What you
Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK Sr Visualiser: PC Anoop Sr Designers: Prasanth TR, Anil T, Joffy Jose Anoop Verma, NV Baiju, Vinod Shinde & Chander Dange Designers: Sristi Maurya, Suneesh K, Shigil N & Charu Dwivedi Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
53 Which way to Green? |
need to know before buying a tablet 51 Personal Development| ‘Give up’ to be successful 52 Training Calendar | A list of career booster courses
PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Sr. GM Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh, Mohamed Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh
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A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | ITNEXT
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INBOX
MIND MANAGEMENT | INSIGHT
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Thoughts + feelings + actions = attitudes = results. Here’s how a goal image and 17 seconds can help achieve positive results.
BY M A N I S H S I N H A
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SECURITY: Benefits of ISO 27001 certification for the enterprise
sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. They feed the conscious mind with information throughout the day and this often distracts our attention from our goals, which could be project delivery, team management, and risk analysis. Science says we live 90 per cent of our lives subconsciously which means our habits are stored in our subconscious and that’s why when we learn to write with the right hand, we continue to do so. If asked to write with our left hand, the shift in pattern doesn’t allow us to do so accurately. The subconscious has stored the instruction to write with the right hand, and to do otherwise triggers the thought that it would be difficult and hence the inability. The thoughts, ideas, expression, emotions our conscious mind chooses are accepted by our subconscious which doesn’t have the ability to think. So, it can’t reject a thought or an idea. And a thought, an idea or emotion we impose on it over and over becomes a habit. While we are unaware of some habits, which are the hidden results of our failures, they do reside in our subconscious. And they will stay there until we replace them with new thoughts and ideas (provided that moves us in the direction of our goal), chosen by your conscious mind. The subconscious is the basis for feelings and actions. If we feel bad, it means we’re having a bad thought about something consciously. If we think a positive thought, it helps us feel better. Every activity we perform has three basic parts: thoughts, feelings and actions, when added up they offer the result. The equation is thoughts + feelings + actions = attitudes = results To change the results we have to go back to the basics, i.e., thought which originates in our conscious mind first, which when accepted makes our brain cells work in that direction. Say you get a call from the CEO and he is very angry about a decision you made. The feedback is coming through your senses (hearing), if your conscious mind accepts his anger, it triggers feelings
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VDI: Virtualisation on the desktop makes good business sense
46 BOSS TALK
INTERVIEW: Sudhir Narang on transforming IT into Business Center
Managing people effectively Pg 04
SEE THE
FUTURE
IT managers share their experiences and insights in DEPLOYING & IMPLEMENTING TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, while industry analysts examine the road ahead. Pg 14
VOLUME 02 | ISSUE 02
SECOND SOLUTION
MARCH 2011 / ` 75 VOLUME 02 / ISSUE 02
As we play a number of roles simultaneously in our life, we do fail to achieve or maintain a balance between our professional and personal life. The same failure is experienced by a corporate house in terms of revenue leakage, employee retention, team management, sales graph and innovative strategies. If you had to recall memories from your past — your first day at college, your first boss, your favourite meal — your mind instantly supplies you with images. The point here is that we want to achieve goals but how often do we supply our mind with an image to that goal. The difference between how our conscious and sub c o n s c i o u s mind works is that the former chooses, accepts, rejects, and it is where a thought originates. And the latter must accept, can’t reject and can’t distinguish between real or imagined. Our conscious mind has the ability to think. Information and ideas flow from different sources and through our five senses, i.e.,
SEE THE FUTURE
e work with our mind but what makes all the difference is when we know how our mind works. It often explains why we get results we don’t want at all.
IT NEXT
17 THE
Case Studies on Lowe Lintas & Usha Martin Pg 26
MARCH 2011 IT NEXT THANKS ITS READERS FOR THE WARM RESPONSE http://www. scribd.com/ doc/25549135/ITNext-Vol-1-Issue-1
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.
I foresee Storage as a Service (SaaS) as a booming business. SMBs and even some large enterprises will at some point utilize these 3rd party services. Companies should concentrate on more important issues other storage. Storage can be managed by service providers who have dedicated & specialist teams to manage this & and this only. This also greatly enhances an organisation’s continuity and disaster recovery plans. Nice article & good research work.
884 views http://issuu.com/ itnext/docs/ it_next_issue_01_ dec09-jan10 108 views
READ THIS ISSUE ONLINE http://www.itnext. in/resources/ magazine
DHANANJAY ROKDE
I agree with Shantanu that a manager should treat his subordinates well. An effective manager should be able to inspire people down the line to get their work done rather rebuking or tossing the information. A person delegating should also be able to set the example by ‘doing’. I believe ‘managing’ for anyone is in continuously evolving and learning from experiences. The text written provides comprehensive information and is of great help. Cheers,
It was a very simple note, but very important .These small notes can change the way we do our daily activities . ASHU
It is true that members sharing their knowledge about the problem on hand with us and arriving with a probable solution collectively will generate interest in all members towards that problem and we can reach and implement the solution with ease. PARTHIBA R
The finding of the author is really nice. The issues are also well addressed. We look forward for tips and tricks to come out from this. I would appreciate if the author can continue with highlighting the
Today, modern networks are very complicated and proliferation of different internet enabled services has made understanding of the network infrastructure imperative. Step by step analysis of the problem always helps to resolve it in an optimum amount of time, provided the base work is already done. In today’s world, the use of gateway level security is a compulsion and every organisation has to have one. The first thing Mr. Ravinder should do is to check the MRTG graph provided by ISP for getting the bandwidth utilization report of upload and download from the company’s internal network. With this, he can confirm whether the problem is from his internal network or it is ISP that should be accounted for not providing the proper bandwidth or latency for the customer’s internet traffic. SATYA SUNDAR BRAHMACHARI
PARVESH KUMAR, QA Test Enginner
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SANDEEP JAIN, Policy Manager, ISFA
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3/4/2011 3:46:03 PM
IT NEXT VALUES YOUR FEEDBACK
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real issues in man management, as the IT industry is totally a man driven industry, which cannot be compared with any other industry where the products have been developed by machines.
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Erratum This refers to the cloud computing article “Some myths deflated,” published in the march issue of 2011. Please note that the data related to top risk associated with cloud computing had mistakenly mentioned IDC as a source, instead of Springboard. Error is regretted. —EDITOR (Note: Letters have been edited minimally, for brevity and clarity)
BOSS TALK | DR. P NANDAGOPAL
MANAGEMENT
Handling Crisis
T
he testimony of being a leader would manifest in the way a person handles the crisis, while remaining composed and lead the team. I would think that the best way to handle or get prepared for a crisis is to pre-empt one and have a backup plan. If we do not have a plan and are caught off-guard, the next best thing to do is to find a simple solution first and then go for a robust one later. A crisis could be managed well if all functional heads work together and share the burden of the IT managers. This gives them the confidence that the whole organisation is behind the IT team and vice versa. The point is that the crisis that IT managers face need not necessarily emerge from a systems failure or any other virus attack. Several external influences also leads to internal crisis and the IT managers are the first ones to be called for to find a solution, when it occurs. Certain external factors such as sudden regulatory or market changes compel the organisations to abandon one line of business and go for an alternate one within a short span and this demands a greater responsibility and leadership from the IT team, as the technology would drive this change. Every crisis impacts the IT heads who are severely stretched and tested. I would always advise my IT team and the managers to find some quick fix solutions to bring back the organisational credibility when hit by a crisis of any kind. Once the brake-fix tone is set, the next move will be to opt for robust and lasting solutions that will address the issue and prevent its recurrence. It is critical for the IT managers to think like business entrepreneurs and not necessarily as technocrats to find practical, customer friendly
“IT managers should find practical, customer friendly and cost-efficient solutions when crisis strikes.”
SUGGESTED READ
Too Big To Fail is on the battle to save Wall Street after the sub prime crisis. The book tells you how to understand and manage risks while responding to a crisis. BOOK NAME: TOO BIG TO FAIL WRITER: ANDHREW ROSS SORKIN PUBLISHER: PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA PRICE: RS. 499
and cost efficient solutions to a problem. In my opinion, IT leaders should develop listening skills, the ability to see others’ point of view, work prioritization, translating complex IT algorithms into simple words so that others can understand. For us, the sudden changes brought in by IRDA last year tested our already stretched resources to quickly withdraw the existing product lines and replace them with new ones in a matter of weeks. It was indeed a crisis. We had to roll out a new product “Ask-Apply -Get: Insurance in 3 minutes”, which demanded greater leadership from the IT team. The IT managers created a virtual life insurance company on the digital platform, accessible through the internet and phone amidst humongous challenges, which resulted in outperforming our time and financial targets. For us, IT was not about driving IT efficiency, it was about driving leadership and exuding entrepreneurial attitude, which saved us from losing the game. Dr P Nandagopal is CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company
A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | ITNEXT
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OPINION
MONEY WISE A V DHARMAKRISHNAN Executive Director - Finance, Madras Cements
Re-shape the Data Centre
F
rom a finance perspective, the primary parlance that I would adhere to is to drive the IT function to score goals across the business functions. There needs to be a rationale behind every IT strategy, every investment and every change. Justifying the rational behind reshaping the data centre is of top most priority for any organisation where investments get critical. To this end, budgeting would revolve around three areas, which includes, technologies for improving security of data centre, technologies that reduce power consumption in data centre and virtualisation along with cloud computing. Where is the need to re-shape the data centre? The existing de-centralized set up with separate servers in each of the factories working in silos posed major challenges with regard to information availability. The problem with this decentralized approach was that there was no ‘One View’ of the organisation. It was very difficult to administer ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and Change Management. The initiative to centralize the ERP application, receive the full benefit of the ERP software and an integrated single database, required reshaping of the entire data centre. The primary reason to reeshape the data centre is to control cost and by doing, we could check the cost around ERP implementation and customization, as the lion’s share of the IT spending goes into this. I
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“Data centre networks is an area which requires complete overhauling to make them technology ready.” have observed that the data center networks, in most cases, are not ready for the change, as they still rely on old architectures. This is an area that required complete overhauling, as it posed major constraint to accommodate new technologies. I would not like to view IT investments in terms of numbers, but as a catalyst, which drove qualitative improvement in customer service and helps us in retaining them.
The reshaping of the entire data center with the latest blade servers, SAN (Storage Area Network) storage etc., becomes essential to increase space for accommodating more hardware and to upgrade the airconditioning systems too. It is critical to bring 24 X 7 operations, so that the personnel is available round the clock for meeting any exigencies. IT managers play a key role in reshaping the data centre by exploring server, client and storage virtualisation technologies. They can judiciously outsource network monitoring and hardware maintenance to bring down costs. Revamping of the entire MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) infrastructure, absorption of additional firewalls, IDS (intrusion detection system), web filtering and security systems ensure protection from external attacks. Qualified DBAs (database administrators) and system administrators are are neccesity. To adapt to the changing needs, virtualisation technologies are being absorbed and the need for services on the cloud platform is critical. One can easily find 20% reduction in cost by opting for efficient airconditioning and power cooling which can drive a Green data centre. In my opinion, about 30% costs could be reduced by renegotiations with MPLS service providers. Also, remote server management outsourced to specialists can see major cost reduction. IT managers need to be clued into the budgeting part to understand the business aspects, which will help them in bringing greater operational efficiency. They are the key personnel in re-sizing the data centre and understanding the nitty gritties of technology and its use, which will enable them to drive the point across the business and finance heads.
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iPad 2 is no competition killer ANALYSIS | The Apple iPad’s success launched a market that Apple’s
PC and smartphone competitors have scrambled to join. Despite the competition, the iPad continues to hold more than 90% of the worldwide tablet market share, a percentage that analysts say will eventually erode. With the introduction of the thinner, lighter, faster and more
OMER CUST E SERVIC
IT managers poll on “how often do they request quotes for products and services”
(NUMBERS IN %)
Over 400 IT professionals from different industry sectors participated in the poll
10%
5%
Never
Twice a year
SOURCE: IT NEXT RESEARCH
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The Apple iPad 2 is lighter, thinner faster and full of features that were missing from the original.
ITNEXT | A P R I L 2 0 1 1
25%
38%
Once a year
Quarterly
31 23%
Depends on urgency
TRENDS DEALS PRODUCTS SERVICES PEOPLE
feature-rich iPad 2 on March 2, did Apple significantly fortify its standing? Not really, say analysts. Jeff Orr, with ABI Research, says that the added features have simply made the iPad 2 better able to compete against the aggressive efforts of Motorola, Samsung, HewlettPackard and the like. “Competitively, the addition of video cameras, a dualcore processor and HDMI [High-Definition Multimedia Interface] video output keeps iPad 2 in the running with other media tablets,” Orr wrote in a March 2 research note. “Apple’s content ecosystem and integration with other Apple products remains a point of differentiation for the company,” he added. Technology Business Research analyst Ken Hyers likewise doesn’t believe the iPad 2 rings a death knell for any Apple competitors. “The Apple ecosystem offers a lot of value to its customers, developers and accessory manufacturers, in terms of consistency of experience, due to the amount of control Apple exerts over the ecosystem,” he said. “Analyst J. Gold, with J. Gold Associates, called the iPad 2’s added features—a dual-core processor, better graphics, a programmable button — “expected.” He addded that what was still missing from the iPad 2—Flash support—makes it a key differentiator for RIM’s PlayBook and Android-running tablets. Source: eWeek
I LLUSTRATIO N: S HIG IL N
UPDATE I N D U S T R Y
SYMANTEC DATA LOSS PREVENTION 11
EPSON STYLUS PRO 4900 PRINTER
Symantec has announced that it will offer Symantec Data Loss Prevention 11, which will simplify detection and protection of enterprises’ most valuable information – their intellectual property.
Epson has launched the Epson Stylus Pro 4900, which is aapable of handling 17-inch wide media. It features Epson’s most advanced Micro Piezo TFP print head.
ASPIRE ONE HAPPY NETBOOK Adding to its Aspire range of netbooks, Acer has announced the launch of its new Aspire One Happy netbook. The 10.1” Aspire One Happy lets the user network, play and stay in touch longer.
Dell unveils storage strategy for India TECH TRENDS | Dell has unveiled
its storage portfolio, expanding existing solutions with the recent global acquisitions to give customers the choice to build an integrated storage infrastructure using different technologies such as fibre or iSCSI to meet their needs in the virtual era. Reiterating this storage focus, Dell also announced the India availability of solutions from its recent acquisition of Compellent Technologies, Inc. Compellent Technologies is a rapidly-growing provider of highly-virtualised storage solutions with automated data management features, including tiering and thin provisioning for
Open, capable, affordable storage solutions to support growing data
enterprise and cloud-computing environments. A key trend that has shaped the storage market in Indian enterprises is the massive growth of unstructured data. According to IDC, the digital
AROUND THE WORLD
universe is growing faster at a rate of 60% and is projected to be nearly 1,800 exabytes this year, a 10-fold increase over the past five years. Dell brings to market the most comprehensive storage portfolio in the industry across DAS, NAS, SAN and back-up solutions and strong FC-based solutions. A key trend is the growth of iSCSI storage solutions, and in this fastest growing storage technology, Dell is playing a pioneering role with EqualLogic, to make storage simple, affordable and capable. EqualLogic’s iSCSI approach is of particular interest to medium sized businesses, as it allows them the flexibility of larger enterprises, with simplicity of deployment and management, reducing cost and complexity.
QUICK BYTE
Bug erases 150,000 Gmail accounts Less than a percent of Gmail were in for a fright recently, when they experienced a blank inbox and a ‘Welcome to Gmail’ message awaiting them when they logged on. After the first of these users aired their plight on the Gmail Help Forum, Google estimated that approximately 500,000 Gmail accounts were reset, with about as many users losing their entire cache of mails, chats, and attachments. This serves as a reminder to stop trusting cloud storage, and to take backups!
S D SHIBULAL, COO OF INFOSYS, AMIDST FEARS OF A NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE IN JAPAN POST TSUNAMI:
“WE’VE GIVEN EMPLOYEES AN OPTION TO COME BACK AND RETURN WHEN THINGS GET BETTER. SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY REQUESTED FOR RELOCATION.”
A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | ITNEXT
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UPDATE
Why are your social media efforts failing? media can deliver significant enterprise value. They are: efforts are failing, because some enter• Enable collective intelligence for prises just don’t understand how to operational effectiveness employ social media to facilitate collec• Employ expertise location for tive behaviors, says a recent Gartner sales effectiveness report. “Social media is not an end in • Unearth emergent structures for and of itself — it is an enabler,” said operational effectiveness Anthony Bradley, Group Vice Presi• Increase sales through interest dent at Gartner. “Social media technolcultivation ogies are tools and, like any technology, • Engage in mass coordination for it is how people use those tools that rapid response delivers enterprise results,” he added. • Build relationship leverage for Bradley explained that through the brand awareness use of mass collaboration “Enterprises that at scales previously Number of understand the importance unachievable, social media users that Facebook has of harnessing the power technologies have greatly of collective behaviors to enhanced the business value drive positive business of collective behavior. Gartner change will be the ultimate believes that examining key winners with social media,” selected behaviors provides concluded Bradley. critical insight into how social
TECH TIDINGS | Many social media
500
MLN
India MFP market grew 10% in Q4 ’10 SERVICES | The combined serial inkjet and page printer, copier and Multifunction Product (MFP) market in India totaled 6,81,142 units in the fourth quarter of 2010, a 10% increase from the fourth quarter of 2009, according to Gartner “With the growth in IT sector and overall consumer confidence, there has been a spur in IT spending, including the Small and Midsize Business (SMB) and government sectors. Hence, most print vendors reported good growth,” said Amrita Choudhury, Research Analyst at Gartner. HP, Canon, Epson and
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There has been a spur in IT spending including the SMB and government sectors.
Samsung continued to be the top 4 vendors, accounting for 94% of total India printer market in Q4 of 2010. HP remained the leader in the Indian printer, copier and MFP market.
INTERVIEW ANAND NAIK, DIRECTOR, SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, SYMANTEC
IT NEXT: How big is the problem of managing unstructured data within enterprises? The management of unstructured data is recognized as one of the major unsolved problems across all industries. One of the biggest issues with managing unstructured data is that data is typically scattered on filers without divisional or owner organisation, so pulling detailed billing or reporting for divisions is difficult. Also, the IT team struggles with identifying old or irrelevant data, allocating storage to the appropriate business unit or department, and understanding data usage and consumption trends. Do you think social networks and Cloud are driving the change? Social networks generate volumes of user generated content. The space is also changing and evolving rapidly wherein new tools, applications and content are being shared every second. Cloud computing not only seamlessly integrates applications, but also facilitate “plug and play” modules and add-ons that reduce operational time and cost. The cloud will greatly change the way services are delivered in 2011. More organisations will leverage public and private clouds as they become highly available and hold the potential to provide significant cost savings and efficiencies to enterprises. Using social networking, millions deluge cyberspace with information and opinions. By Akshay Kapoor
UPDATE
Symantec’s new report measured the attitudes and practices of small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)
TECH TRENDS| Symantec has announced the India findings of its 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, which measured the attitudes and practices of Small- and Mid-sized Businesses (SMBs) and their customers toward disaster preparedness. The survey findings show that though SMBs in India are at risk, they are still not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. According to Vineet Sood, Head, Channels & Alliances, Symantec, “Findings from the research show that SMBs in India still haven’t recognized the tremendous impact of a disaster.
NEWS @
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BLOG
Simple planning can enable SMBs to protect their information in the event of a disaster, which in turn will help them build trust with their customers,” he added. The findings show that many SMBs do not understand the importance of disaster preparedness. 68% of the respondents do not have a plan in place. 50% said that it never occurred to them to put together a plan and 17% stated that disaster preparedness is not a priority for them. Despite warnings, most Indian SMBs are still not prepared for disasters, putting them at risk.
ID fraud victims decrease In releasing results of its 2011 Identity Fraud Survey Report, Javelin noted that the number of identity fraud victims decreased by 28% to 8.1 million adults in the United States, three million fewer victims than the prior year. The total amount of $37 billion in fraud was the smallest amount found in the eight years the study has been conducted. “Identity fraud, which is generally defined as the unauthorized use of another person’s personal information to achieve illicit financial gain, is changing as well as declining,” said James Van Dyke, President and founder of Javelin Strategy & Research. Van Dyke said that economic conditions may have contributed to some of the drop. Fraud generally moves opposite to retail sales -- when retail sales increase, fraud decreases, suggesting economic hardship as a contributor. “Increased security measures and law enforcement successes were also factors,” he said. New account and debit card fraud grew in popularity. New account fraud was most damaging and was responsible for the greatest fraud amount at $17 billion.
Source: www.infosecisland.com
SMBs in India not prepared for disasters
SECURITY
MAD CRICKET RUSH CRASHES WC WEBSITE 10 MILLION FANS SEEKING JUST 1000 TICKETS FOR THE 2011 CRICKET WORLD CUP FINAL CRASHED A WORLD CUP WEB SITE IN JUST 20 MINUTES, the official ticket agency revealed to the media.
“There was a limited supply of tickets and the demand was unprecedented. The website got completely overloaded. While we were prepared obviously for a surge, everyone tried to hit at the same time because we had given them a time. Any system has a certain capacity and if traffic keeps coming, systems get overloaded,” KyaZoonga CEO Neetu Bhatia told Reuters. A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | ITNEXT
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL
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IMAGING : BINES H S RE ED HARAN
STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
IT MANAGERS TAKE THE CUE The panacea lies in how they adapt to the changing trends, accept cloud and do intelligent provisioning while going green. BY N G E E T H A
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL As information technology becomes pervasive in every aspect of our lives, the explosion of data at a geometrical progression is inevitable. Recently, at a conference, there was discussion around the various factors that led to the increase in the data. Can you imagine, on planet Earth, four babies are born every second and 40 mobile devices are sold every second. Another appealing instance is that the growth in mobility and its application is so high that the statistics say 48 million people worldwide do not have access to electricity, but have mobile phones. The number would reach 125 million, who would have no electricity, but own a mobile by 2015. This is just one of the instances. What does it indicate? Obviously, it is data acceleration by the mobile users. Well, let us muse over what is bothering IT managers or the IT heads as far as storage is concerned. The growth in data within an organisation, with the users on the rise and with different options available to transact data, is the prime concern. More than that, the challenge lies in handling or dealing with this kind of data growth, which is stored all over, and in many manifestations.
Data Pace While analysts’ forecast on data growth has been astounding, the hardnosed thought behind this is that on an aver-
“New storage technologies are in the wish list of several IT heads to reduce their operational cost.” —SURAJIT SEN, DIRECTORMARKETING & CHANNEL, NETAPP
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age, every organisation has plans to spend about 15 to 20% of the IT budget on storage. Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner, opines that the CIOs and CFOs have learnt their lessons during the recession. The bottom line that he finds is that they have started spending on non-discretionary projects and working towards utilizing the data optimally. Munglani sees 2011 drawing good spending on storage from across the industry verticals. Focused verticals such as telecom, BFSI, ITES and media will invest heavily into storage this fiscal. While 18% revenue growth is expected in this year in data storage spending, Munglani expects 1,82,000 terabytes of storage to be shipped in this year. Government is the key vertical, which is contributing to this data invasion, as its current UID project is absorbing of 78 petabytes of data in each phase in each region. India, by its sheer size of economy and industry, occupies a significant position in the information economy. EMC’s Alok Tandon, Director-Strategic Alliances, admits multi-sectoral growth in the country and adoption of IT across these is driving storage needs forming CIO’s primary agenda. Analysts opine that while data already exceeds available storage space, the demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a CAGR of over 43% from 2008-2013. Sandeep K Dutta, Vice President, Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/ South Asia, attributes the information explosion to be driven by e-business, which is making storage a strategic investment priority for companies of all sizes. While the overall external storage disk market is shown to be declining owing to the drop in per terabyte cost, the corporate buying continues, as companies invest in new technologies that help them optimize and increase storage. IT Next’s internal survey with IT managers across various industry verticals inferred that majority of
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY them are consuming less than 20 terabytes of storage capacity within their organisation, which is not very structured. Companies associated with sectors like telecom, ITES, manufacturing and banking consume about 200 terabytes of storage. According to Netapp’s Surajit Sen, Director-Marketing & Channel, the unprecedented business-led IT transformation is forcing technology partners to provide solutions that help pre-empt the changing customer requirements and craft strategies that align to these needs. “New storage technologies are in the wish list of several IT heads to reduce their operational cost, while achieving better utilization rates,” maintains Sen. As the telecom segment struggles to understand technologies such as storage virtualisation, data de-duplication and backup solutions, trends clearly indicate that flexibility and efficiency continue to remain the cornerstones of creating a robust storage environment.
Coping with data deluge While coping with the data growth is key, the challenges faced by the IT managers with storage, be it with procurement, need etc., is to modularly scale up storage capacity and performance. Optimizing storage cost or performance using appropriate workloads is working on their minds. Prajwal S Kumar, Senior Manager, Associated Capsules Ltd., is challenged on the storage interoperability issues because not all vendors’ products interoperate, even though they claim to do so. Most agree that enterprises may have legacy systems and multiple OS, which are difficult to integrate; while managing a distributed architecture is difficult since different users who run different applications access the same information. There may be unpredictable demands due to events like unpredictable growth, holiday rush, and catastrophic events. The common challenge for all the IT managers is under utilization of storage space resulting in huge cost.
“Multi-sectoral growth and adoption of IT is driving storage needs and management.”
—ALOK TANDON, DIRECTORSTRATEGIC ALLIANCES, EMC
Shashi Mohan, Polaris Software Lab’s CTO, finds that there has always been the issue of over provisioning or under provisioning, besides network limitations for replication and other vaulting technologies. Ajay Kumar Dhir, Executive Director and Group CIO, Lanco Infratech Limited, believes that new standards like iSCSI, SATA etc. are already in various stages of maturity even though earlier standards like fiber channel have not been adopted very widely. Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President & General Manager-India, Hitachi Data Systems, clearly states that IT managers have the challenge of utilizing the storage optimally and managing it efficiently, as there is only 30% utilization vis-à-vis 70% wastage across the organisations.
Braced with new trends Challenged on the cost and efficient management, the IT managers seek respite with new technologies available. Shashi Mohan opines that the IT managers have the ability to cut down cost on native storage spaces on servers, disk infrastructure, tape, logistics of taping, backup software etc., while emerging with smart proposals that can get through their CFOs. Unified storage as service is one of the key trends that is evolving, which IT managers are forced to adapt to meet the demands in using a single storage solution for all types of workloads.
1,82,00OTB shipped in 2011 Source: Gartner
STORAGE SIZZLERS * Storage Virtualisation & Consolidation * Dynamic Provisioning * Adoption of SAS (Serial attached SCSI) * Data Compression tools * Automated tiering * Data –De-duplication methods * Small form factor drives much in vogue * Hybrid delivery model (partial cloud) * Cloud based storage delivery model * SSD (Solid State Drives) to scale up
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL
20% Every organisation plans to spend 20% of IT budget on storage.
What storage solutions are you currently using in your organisation? 80 70 60 50 40 30
54.3%
57.1%
51.4%
65.7%
SAN
Tape
Server
10
NAS
20
0
There are huge trends that the IT managers are betting on, but are currently following a few owing to certain constraints. Gartner’s Munglani opines that the storage pool is like a dead sea where almost 90% of the data is not taken stock of. However, the trends that Gartner would recommend would be around de-duplication and thin provisioning, which will drive better efficiency of handling storage. However, Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks, HP India, finds increasing use of storage virtualisation to maximize data center performance and reduce costs. IP based storage with next generation clustered scale-out iSCSI storage is specifically built to leverage the flexibility of Ethernet, making it possible for companies to eliminate management, performance and available roadblocks. Most agree that dynamic provisioning is gaining momentum as it becomes the foundation for cloud and for dynamic, high availability data centres. Virtual and automated tiering will be adopted by the data life cycle management. Serial Attached SCSI (SaS) will be adopted for increased availability and performance in enterprise storage systems.
Another trend the IT managers observe is that Small Form Factor Drives (SFF) will become prevalent for their power and cooling efficiencies. SFFs are 2.5 inch drives which consume about 6 to 8 watts of power as compared to Large Form Factor (LFF) 3.5 inch drives which consume about 12 to 15 watts. SSDs are being tried out though it has not become the core owing the acquisition cost being high. One of the IT managers remarks, “Use of SSDs doesn’t justify our storage investments at this point of time.” From a trend stand point, Kaushik Kumar, pre-sales, pricing & ordering Project Management, Orange Business Services, who uses over 500TB of data, explains that an organisation’s critical data is stored in premise with multiple backup data center in different geographical locations. The non critical data is used as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) on cloud while the Hybrid Model (where in the data is kept in the Cloud, but at the same time has a back in in-house premise) is catching up. Data compression with certain de-duplication tools is being tested to drive down the cost or delay the investments. The IT fraternity is trying out WAN acceleration tools to drive storage optimization.
Give Me More
“IP based storage with next gen clustered scaleout iSCSI storage is built to leverage the flexibility of Ethernet.” —PRAKASH KRISHNAMOORTHY, COUNTRY MANAGER, HP STORAGEWORKS, HP INDIA
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IT managers seem to have an insatiable appetite in consuming more data. While managing the existing storage is their top agenda, they intend to absorb more storage, which will result in more data coming into the fold. Orange’s Kaushik Kumar has aggressive plans in ramping up the storage capabilities on the Cloud and go in for new tools if required. While adding more storage is not a concern given the spend, IT managers are looking to get more from storage and drive optimal utilization of the existing storage and making way for newer absorption.
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
Data Tsunami: Manage Smartly
With over 70% of the total storage capacity being unstructured, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the task of IT managers to structure it judiciously is humongous
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Poorly designed or managed storage infrastructures put the entire business at risk in case of a catastrophic failure. Therefore, a huge responsibility rests on the IT managerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulders to use reliable equipment, tools, processes and policies to manage the data efficiently. It is not about bringing down cost; the CEOs and CFOs are eternally monitoring the IT managers who could make the data available at the click of a button to all the employees, while maintaining the confidentiality of the same. While storage subsystems, SANs, and backup/recovery technologies
are most commonly implemented, followed by NAS, DAS, and replication technologies, technologies such as storage virtualisation, Cloud (private and public), data compression, de-duplication, mirroring virtual backups, automatic tiering, dynamic provisioning etc., have also begin to emerge strongly. The IT Next survey, conducted across the IT managersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; league, indicated that majority of them deployed RAID solutions as part of their storage management strategy, followed by iSCSI and fibre channel. While NFS and Fibre
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL What storage-related technologies are you currently using? 80
Cashing on trends
70 60
0
68.6%
14.3%
Fiber Channel (FC) Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) iSCSI NFS CIFS RAID
10
54.3% 57.1%
30
22.9%
40
60%
22.9%
50
20
channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is slowly driving the IT manager’s interest, CFS seems to be still distant from deployment.
With over 70% of the total storage capacity being unstructured, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the task of IT managers to structure it judiciously is humongous. Storage virtualisation and Dynamic Provisioning has got into prominence amongst the IT managers, as these technologies enabled them to provision in a matter of minutes, simplifying performance tuning with automatic wide striping, and enabling on-demand capacity for an agile storage infrastructure. The hybrid and Cloud model is tested out and implemented, besides the data de-compression, storage consolidation and tiering done to drive efficiency. While there is no single solution that fits into the IT manager’s bill that enables him to achieve the desired effect, multiple options are tried out. In addition, the specific industry vertical determines the suitability of a particular solution. Kulin Takkar, Senior Vice President-IT, Group Infrastructure Head, Kotak Securities, went ahead to deploy storage virtualisation with certain business objectives. Kotak deployed IBM’s XIV storage to migrate
“We leveraged lower backup costs &shrunk backup & recovery windows by reducing redundant data.” —AJAY DHIR, ED AND GROUP CIO, LANCO INFRATECH
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the 6-terabyte production data from its existing DS8300 system using VMware’s VMotion capabilities. “While Kotak as a group used 80 terabytes of data, we wanted to replicate about 6 terabyte of product data on the new XIV platform to be accessed during downtime. Kotak moved the complete VMware Data to XIV and production data was also copied to the XIV storage under SVC,” he said. Using VDisk Mirroring, the SVC wrote the same data onto two storage regions residing in different Managed Disk Groups (MDGs) on different backend storage subsystems. Dhananjay Chandrashekar Rokde, Practice headInformation Security, Arcon Risk Control, who uses nearly 500 terabytes of data, has the charter to improve storage efficiency to 100%, ensuring 100% eco-friendly data center and technology operations in the next 26 months, besides reducing 50% of the in-house data storage operations. Besides Cloud based services, Rokde is using various technologies including direct activity snapshots, data dedupe, thin replication of data and virtual copies of data compression. Rokde has used 35% of the data to backup virtually on SAN using the HP software, while 80 terabytes has been archived on tape. A major portion of the data is going through the de-duplication process for smart delta updates. Take the case of Orange Business Services, which uses nearly 1,500 terabytes of data (being a service provider) and spends 30% of the total IT budget on storage and still aspires to absorb more. It was essential for Orange’s Kaushik Kumar, Project Manager, Orange Business Services, to check the data growth and find a way out. He opted for VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software that automates virtual machine failover, which supported geographically disbursed clustering services. Besides, Kumar observed that this solution provided features such as provisioning and monitoring of virtualised servers and storage across
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
“It was essential for us to check data growth and find solutions that bolstered storage management.” —KAUSHIK KUMAR, PROJECT MANAGER, ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES
What is the efficiency of utilization of storage systems in your organisation? 40 35 30 25 20
0
0%
5
8.6%
10
28.6%
15
37.1%
11.4%
TG Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motors Ltd., who has deployed Oracle 11G data compression to drive storage efficiency, further, bets on compression and deduplication techniques to improve storage utilization. Polaris’ Mohan is looking at tools that combine network caching and storage caching over long distance, but behaves as near as possible. He opines that this tool will eliminate replication to multiple sites and increase efficiency, which essentially is a QoS over Networked Storage model. Orange’s Kaushik Kumar intends to use Holostore (holographic storage) technology in future, which enables him to write and read data in an optical form, while ensuring fast access times.
The percentage of storage efficiency that most IT managers claim to have achieved using the new technologies.
2.9%
In-Store
40%
11.4%
tier 3 (SATA) storage level at location B. The tier 3 storage data is retained as backup and serves as business continuity planning. Location B sends the data to location A in the same fashion.” The benefit that Mohan finds with this process is that no special tools are used for transfer that comes native with storage; no manual intervention for the actual activity and backup and DR is covered in the same process. Most IT managers claim to have achieved over 40 to 50% storage efficiency using the new technologies, but opine that there is a lot more to be deployed or considered.
0 to 20% 21 to 30% 31 to 40% 41 to 60% 61 to 80% 81 to 100% More than 100%
platforms and helped in bolstering the storage management capabilities. Going with the peer trend, Ajay Kumar Dhir, Executive Director and Group CIO, Lanco Infratech Limited preferred using storage tiering as a process of moving data to different types of storage based on the value of the data. The process involved moving noncritical data from expensive storage resources to lower cost alternatives, creating significant savings in capital expenditures. “We leveraged the lower backup costs and shrunk backup and recovery windows by reducing the amount of redundant data backed up on a regular basis,” remarks Dhir. From a tiering and dynamic provisioning perspective, Lanco moved the files that were being actively used (last modified within the last six months) to storage that emphasized higher performance and availability. The non-critical data moved to storage that balanced performance and availability with lower cost. The least used data moved to low cost storage. The efficiency that Dhir saw with this method resulted in lower spending on disk capacity by 50 to 80%. The tiering of 40TB of data augmented the efficiency with cost-effective alternatives like serial ATA. The ITES player Polaris Software Lab’s case goes with the strong demand for business continuity, but without investment at individual locations. Polaris’s CTO Shashi Mohan faces the challenge of tape becoming expensive after a few years, with backup software, libraries, tapes getting obsolete and upgrades being expensive. Mohan was prompted to use the tiering model along with Snap Vault, Snap Shot and dedupe. Given the heavy 100TB data, Mohan had to find a way out to drive optimal utilization of storage and its efficiency. Mohan explained, “Assuming there are two locations, A & B, and both have storage on combined FC & SATA shelf. Virtual backups from tier 1 storage (FC) are moved from location A to low cost
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL
CASE STUDY: KOTAK SECURITIES LTD.
Virtualisation drew scalability and performance
K
otak Securities Ltd., a 100% subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank, is one of the oldest and largest stock brokers in the industry with offerings that include stock broking services for trading through the branch and the internet, investments in IPO, mutual funds and portfolio management services.
Business Situation With a network spanning over 400 cities with 1200 outlets, Kotak Securities has been growing rapidly, leading to an exponential increase in data volume. Some of the business benefits that Kulin Takkar, Senior Vice President-IT and Group Infrastucture Head, Kotak Securities wanted to witness. New Storage for various applications including VMware HA functionality for the production data Scalability to cater to future growth Disaster recovery capabilities for critical applications using asynchronous / long distance data replication Leverage the benefits of current storage infrastructure
Solution Implementation We evaluated multiple storage infra-
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structures from different vendors before settling on IBM’s XIV storage systems. While Kotak as a group used 80 terabytes of data, we wanted to replicate about 6 terabytes of product data on the new XIV platform. VMware data migration was done from the existing IBM’s DS8300 system to the XIV storage using VMotion capabilities. The production data was also moved to the XIV system, which would then act as a failover for the DS8300. As the data needed to be accessible 24/7, the XIV system needed to keep the data available in case of downtime.
“VMware data migration was done from IBM’s DS8300 system to the XIV storage using VMotion capabilities.” —KULIN TAKKAR, SR VP-IT, KOTAK SECURITIES
The new storage system was virtualised using IBM’s SVC (SAN Volume Controller) software, designed to take control and retain existing information.Using VDisk Mirroring, the SVC writes the same data onto two storage regions residing in different Managed Disk Groups (MDGs) on different back-end storage subsystems.
Benefits IBM incorporated industry-standard components in its storage system rather than specialized and vendorspecific components. The intelligent distribution algorithm and parallelism in the new storage infrastructure ensured that no single disk or component became a bottleneck. XIV enabled all disks to participate in the recovery to reduce downtime and avoid further failures. In case of a disk failure, performance is also maintained during the addition or removal of hardware by redistributing the load across all disks to keep the system balanced. Kotak Securities can therefore run critical business applications devoid of all issues. Using the snapshot functionalities, the XIV storage system helped create multiple copies for the testing and development requirements of Kotak Securities without impacting production. Data migration from other systems to XIV was achieved by using a phased approach. Finally, the thin provisioning capabilities of the XIV system allowed Kotak Securities to use less physical space and remain alert to any eventuality by constantly monitoring storage consumption and sending notifications when space utilization exceeded a user-defined threshold. Besides, Kotak saw a drastic reduction in the cost of per GB storage. Having used the storage virtualisation tool, we found per GB costing Rs 175, and if we had deployed enterprise tools to migrate the product data, every GB would have been around Rs 1000.
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
CASE STUDY: ASSOCIATED CAPSULES PVT. LTD.
ACPL consolidates storage for efficiency
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he key challenges that Prajwal S Kumar, Senior Manager-IT, Association Capsules Pvt. Ltd., is faced with, is configuring, provisioning and deploying effective storage systems and ensuring the simplification of storage management. ACPL followed the trend that storage virtualisation brought in, which maximized data centre performance with a reduced cost. The organisation, which used 12 terabyte of data storage that was spread unevenly and unstructured, thought of a few solutions, which helped in storage consolidation to achieve the desired result. Kumar and team went in for HP’s EVA 4400, SAN switch to port the entire data on the fibre channel. “We have stored five years of data in the servers. We tried to backup most of it on tape drives while frequently used data is stored on FC disks,” says Kumar. As part of the strategy, ACPL consolidated 5 terabytes of data using EVA 4400, a virtual storage tool that helped in effective tiering of the data across the fibre channel, tape libraries and autoloaders. “EVA 4400 not only helped in driving ease of management with Command View EVA software, but also enabled us to drive remote and local
remote replication capabilities and data archival with data de-duplication method,” according to Kumar. The company is implementing HP’s DV data protectors to drive backup efficiency, which automates data from tape and FC disk while helping in quick retrieval. The project is essentially targeted at archiving SAP applications, which is expected to reduce the current data base by 30%. The deployment of virtual arrays has enabled ACPL to drive over 65% storage efficiency. Kumar pointed out that by using EVA 4400, we have consolidated all
“The deployment of virtual arrays has enabled ACPL to drive over 65% storage efficiency.” — PRAJWAL S KUMAR, SENIOR MANAGER-IT, ASSOCIATION CAPSULES
the data in 1 box with raid 5 and 1 spare HDD and the point of failure is 0%. By implementing backup software, the backup window has reduced and the backup is handled from remote. By implementing clustering in Lotus, the company has uptime of email to 100%. The need for this pharmaceutical company to deploy this was to enhance application, service delivery and responsiveness, as well as facilitate more timely data protection to meet compliance and business objectives. It was felt that reducing the data could help in reducing the costs or defer upgrades to expand server, storage and network capacity, along with associated software license and maintenance fees. Tangible benefits were immense for ACPL, which deferred hardware and software upgrades and maximized usage of existing resources. Kumar opined that it enabled free space to facilitate consolidation and data migration to energy effective technologies, shortening time required for data protection, including file system scans and data movement. Going forward, ACPL would pursue storage technologies such as data de-duplication, Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID), thin provisioning and solid-state drives to drive energy efficiency that will cut down the storage power consumption pattern.
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COVER STORY | STORAGE
CLOUD STORAGE
Building Data Castle on the Cloud Cloud hype has stirred up interests and investments across the globe: Research has indicated that it has had cascading effect on the Indian community as well.
W While the word cloud computing is allpervasive, the term cloud storage, which is a sub category of the Cloud, sounds like it has something to do with the weather front and storm systems. However, it refers to saving data to an off-site storage system maintained by a
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third party. Well, the point of discussion is that how real is this and how well the IT managers and heads are catching up with this trend or is it just a masquerade. Sounding very pragmatic, Dhananjay Chandrashekar Rokde, Practice headInformation Security, Arcon Risk Control, foresees the concept and acronym Storage as a Service (StaaS) to be a booming business, as SMBs and large enterprises utilize these third party services. Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner opines that data center managers are beginning to consider the possibility of shifting non-essential workloads to a cloud provider, freeing up much-needed floor space, power and cooling, which can then be focused on more-critical production workloads, and extending the useful life of the data center.
Are you using any cloud and virtualisation solutions that affect your storage requirements?
Server virtualization 40.0% Storage virtualization 22.9% Internal cloud services 22.9% Private cloud services 2.9% Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 2.9% Platform as a Service PaaS (eg Sap By Design, Oracle on Demand, etc) 0.0% Software as a Service SaaS 11.4% Storage as a Service StaS 2.9% None 42.9%
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STORAGE | COVER STORY
Making sense
“Consolidated storage generates less heat and newer blade technology powers up CPUs only when required.” —DHANANJAY CHANDRASHEKAR ROKDE, PRACTICE HEAD-INFORMATION SECURITY, ARCON RISK CONTROL
The industry is flooded with several different cloud systems. Some have a very specific focus, such as storing web email messages or digital pictures and any form of digital data. However, the skepticism and the debate around cloud storage are to drive the point of ownership of the data. Most IT managers confront the issue of justifying the fact if the data belongs to the customer who originally saved data on the hardware or it belongs to the company that owns the physical infrastructure, storing the data in a cloud environment. Rokde is lured by the fact that the Cloud can control global warming to an extent of driving 30% reduction in energy consumption. “Consolidated storage generates less heat and newer blade technology powers up CPUs only when required or when the other infrastructure is overutilized,” observes Rokde. For Kaushik Kumar, Project Manager, Orange Business Services, the Cloud will facilitate the acceptance of management tools and instrumentation layers to provide endto-end transparency to ensure service level objectives. Despite the challenges around data security and availability, Orange Business will try to go in for the Hybrid model of data storage with ERP around the Cloud. Vendor like Hitachi Data Systems has evolved ways to drive dynamic infrastructure on Cloud and enabling its customers to provide non-disruptive business operations on cloud model. Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President & General Manager-India, Hitachi Data Systems, believes that there is a transition to the information Cloud which most of its customers are deploying.
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL
ANALYSTS SEE THAT BY 2012, UTILITY AND CLOUD-BASED SERVICES WOULD ACCOUNT FOR AT LEAST 50% OF ALL NEW DEMAND FOR MANAGED IT INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES. What are the top challenges that you face with respect to storage systems? 50
40
30
17.1%
28.6%
31.4%
28.6%
Difficulty proving ROI for storage solutions
Simplifying management of storage systems
Achieving savings on power, space, and cooling for storage systems
40%
Ensuring continuous data availablity/non-stop operations
22.9%
40% 37.1%
28.6%
Configuring, provisioning and deploying storage systems
40%
48.6% Modularly scaling up capacity and performance
10
Implementation of storage pooling/storage virtualization
20
24
Reliable disaster recovery and business continuity
Using a single storage architecture for all workload
Improving storage efficiency or better utilization of storage systems
Optimizing storage cost or performance by workload
0
Venugopal maintained that one of its customers, Infosys, is using cloud solutions in a phased manner, starting with virtualisation of all tier-2 storage for ease of management, thin provisioning and wide striping for optimized storage utilization and performance. It is said that if one is ready to start tiering data to the cloud, there are compelling reasons to get the file storage infrastructure ready now for the changes ahead. From a customer’s perspective, EMC’s Alok Tandon, Director, Channels and Strategic Alliances finds compelling reasons to go in cloud to contain IT budgets as it provides better management platform. Tandon observes that among the three most widely accepted forms of cloud computing models (external cloud, internal cloud and private cloud), the private cloud model seems to be more widely preferred by CIOs and IT managers, as it utilizes resources from both internal and external pools. EMC recommends a phased migration approach to the cloud, starting with consolidation, virtualisation, building security, effective tiering, de-duplication and then evaluate the cost of setting up private cloud. Since there are evidences of the SaaS model gaining momentum as part of the cloud trend, Netapp’s Surajit Sen, Director-Marketing & Channel, finds evolution of unified architecture to new levels, which supports new protocols like FCoE, iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS through a single wire to help increase efficiency, improve performance, and simplify management.
Taking stake Several IT heads are betting on the cloud revolution, making it their next wave. Ajay Kumar Dhir, Executive Director and Group CIO, Lanco Infratech Limited, is working his investments around planning Electronic Data Vault service (cloud based) in the near future.
As part of the strategy, Dhir is virtualising servers, storage, and building an internal private cloud to bring down costs. Lanco has no plans to move applications around CRM to public clouds and will gradually take a call on others. Dhir and team have plans to rope in Salesforce into the cloud scene soon, after having evaluated the RoI and TCO factors. Polaris Software Lab Ltd. goes by the fact that the Cloud is a valid infrastructure model for storage. According to Shashi Mohan, CTO, Polaris, “What you cannot see is what you get in the Cloud. When the entire idea of the Cloud is computing over an unknown infrastructure (CPU\RAM) and since computing requires data crunching, data is from storage. Polaris has absorbed private cloud server farms back-lined with NAS storage devices and Mohan is taking a stake around enhancing ILM policies, pondering over which byte of which data should go into which tier of storage. Audit the requirement; sometimesnative local disks are enough for business. The challenge has been around heterogeneous OS platform demands, unpredictable spike on load and backup window. With cloud on the move, with applications around databases on DB Farm and Middleware on Application farm, both serviced from central storage backbone, Polaris finds downtime to be minimal, and storage backbone taking care of capacity demand over a private cloud. Arcon’s Dhananjay and team have deployed sales force management and CRM applications on the cloud based delivery model and shortly intends to drive all the data on the cloud. As the impact of the Cloud is just beginning to be felt, few areas of the IT ecosystem will be left untouched by this disruptive change. Analysts see that by 2012, utility and cloud-based services would account for at least 50% of all new demand for managed IT infrastructure services.
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
GREEN STORAGE
Green is hot in storage While servers with high performance processors do consume a lot of power, releasing huge amount of heat, about 15-20% of the data center’s power consumption is storage based.
C Can you believe it? Analysts like Gartner drive the point that IT equipment worldwide is responsible for 2% of carbon emissions, which corresponds to the amounts of carbon emitted by airplanes. While servers with high performance processors do consume a lot of power, releasing huge amount of heat, about 15-20% of the data center’s power consumption is storage based. A testimony to this effect is evident from what Dhananjay Chandrashekar Rokde, Practice head-Information Security, Arcon Risk Control observes. “In a 2500 square feet data center, about 30% of power consumption is owed to storage, which is considered the hottest with blades around,” he says.
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL
80
What enterprise technologies and IT applications are currently used in your organisation?
70 60 50 40
31.4%
34.3% Financial/Accounting management (FMS)
65.7%
37.1%
HR Management Systems (HRM)
25.7%
Inventory Management
Content Management Systems (CMS)
48.6%
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
60%
65.1%
10
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
20
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
30
Databases
0
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Thus, it makes sense to consider saving energy in storage environments. In lieu of this, some vendors and customers are evaluating new technologies and strategies like MAID (Massive Array of Idle and Inactive Disks) and SSD (Solid State Disks). Storage bodies like SNIA is driving the Green Storage Initiative (GSI), which is dedicated to advancing energy efficiency and conservation in all networked storage technologies, and minimizing the environmental impact of data storage operations. Server and storage consolidation, dynamic provisioning, storage virtualisation, virtual back ups etc., are being tried out to bring down the storage related energy costs. Storage bodies, along with the vendors and customers, are bringing out certain metrics and standards. Some recommendations towards reducing the storage related energy cost would be to optimize data management by deleting unused data. In the information lifecycle management, store data according to performance and security needs using tape, disk, SAS versus SATA etc. One could consolidate direct attached storage to one external array for optimizing infrastructure. Using SATA drives over fibre channel disks is expected to drive down energy cost. The biggest challenge for the IT managers now is to adhere to the regulatory and compliance norms, which calls for the storage of data that is more than five years old.
Most vendors are evolving a Green strategy around their products and solutions and enabling their customers to adhere to the Green norms. For instance, IBM came up with Project Big Green, which laid the groundwork for what was needed to double the compute capacity in the given year with no increase in consumption or impact. Sandeep K Dutta, Vice PresidentStorage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India\South Asia opines that IT managers are joining the bandwagon of Green IT, making some form of investment and re-evaluating their business processes to their product lines in driving the Green concept.
Pursue the trend IT managers are conscious of the fact that saving power by using storage space more efficiently can cut down on wasted capacity, resulting in less spend on storage. Storage technologies such as data de-duplication, massive array of idle disks, thin provisioning and solid-state drives fascinate Prajwal S Kumar, Senior IT Manager, Associated Capsules Pvt. Ltd., who has witnessed energy efficiency benefits. The pattern that Ajay Dhir, Ajay Kumar Dhir, Executive Director and Group CIO, Lanco Infratech Limited, observes in storage is to go for 2.5 inch drives from the 3.5 inch ones, which will help in reducing the power consumption by half because of less mass to spin. The other formula that Dhir followed is also dynamic tiering, which is possible
“An automatic, intelligent way to allow disk spindles is to rotate slowly or switch off when not in use.” —SHASHI MOHAN, CTO, POLARIS SOFTWARE LAB
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STORAGE SPECIAL | COVER STORY
“Dynamic provisioning is a proven technology for reducing the cost and supports any number of drives.” —VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL, VP & GENERAL MANAGER-INDIA, HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS
with virtualisation, where the data does not need high performance drives like flash. Putting them on denser drives will reduce power consumption. Dhir informs that SSDs play an effective role in driving down energy cost, as it uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block. SSDs are more useful in driving down power cost, as they use microchips which retain data in non-volatile memory chip and contain no moving parts. Dhir has deployed employee and customer collaboration tools, besides evolving flexible working practices for a greener approach to IT. Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President & General Manager-India, Hitachi Data Systems, finds dynamic provisioning to be a proven technology for reducing the cost and supports any number of drives. Most IT managers believe that storage virtualisation provides a way to combine all those drives into one centrally manageable resource, which can benefit them via time and money savings. Dhir admits that storage virtualisation lets his firm make changes to the storage configuration without downtime, making data migrations more palatable for the internal customers. C Jagadees, Chief Engineer, ONGC, who uses nearly 100 terabytes of data, prefers to store on fiber channel, iSCSI, NFS and RAID. This leads to huge power consumption. Jagadees observes,
“While energy efficiency has been a key factor in deploying new systems, we are always looking at ways to drive it.” With the data still growing, Jagadees’s concern is to keep them under check, while working out investments around server virtualisation and storage consolidation with an effective back up solution. Shashi Mohan, CTO, Polaris Software Lab, recommends that an automatic, intelligent way to allow disk spindles is to rotate slowly or switch off when not in use. The use of SSDs, as Mohan explains, is not much in vogue, as it can be invested only where high performance is required, else it does not justify cost. The challenge for Jitendra Sanghrajka, AVP - EPM – Information Systems (IS), Infosys is increasing its energy cost, with over 300 terabytes of data running in the data centre. The solutions that he considered were storage consolidation at storage layers using varied branded virtualisation technology and replacing old technology infrastructure by energy efficient devices. However, the challenges for Sanghrajka in using green technologies are the predictable performance of these tools. Infosys has used HDS’ dynamic provisioning virtualisation solutions to drive the cost by moving the data from the high performance drives to lower power consuming drives without disrupting the data during migration.
2%
of carbon emissions is caused by IT equipment worldwide, which corresponds to amounts of carbon emitted by airplanes.
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FOR THE IT MANAGERS NOW IS TO ADHERE TO THE REGULATORY AND COMPLIANCE NORMS, WHICH CALLS FOR THE STORAGE OF DATA THAT IS MORE THAN FIVE YEARS OLD..
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COVER STORY | STORAGE SPECIAL CASE STUDY: TVS MOTOR COMPANY LTD.
Data Compression Saved 60% Storage Space
C
hennai headquartered $1.5 billion TVS Motor Company Ltd., which uses over 100 terabytes of data storage, finds hard to manage the data explosion. The company opined that it is not just adequate hardware that matters, but a correct management strategy to handle volumes as well. The key business issues that T G Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motor Company Ltd., had on his mind was rising storage cost storage, high data base response time, high transaction response time and high restoration time. The critical concern for him was insufficient storage space in both primary data and DR location for future database growth. As the IT head, Dhandapani’s clear objective had been to address the above challenges and find suitable solutions that helped him in managing the storage efficiently. After many deliberations, the IT head zeroed in on data compression technology.
Applications framework: SAP ERP 6.04 with FI CO, MM, PP, QM, HR, PM, SM PLM modules BI 7.01 SAP XI 7.0 to integrate SAP with three non SAP applications HP rx6600 servers with HPUX 11.31 and EVA 4400 storage Oracle DB is 11.2.0.1
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TVS Group opted for Oracle 11G Advanced Compression tool to drive storage efficiency. “The idea was to compress the database by archiving the rarely accessed data and check on the cost related to storage up gradation, which has been in the tune of Rs 60 lakhs periodically,” said Dhandapani.
Plan of Action The company initially upgraded the Oracle Version from 10g to 11g as its plan of action. It was time to test the Oracle compression in DVS and QAS servers, ensuring that no issues cropped up. The entire primary database was compressed using this tool. “As part of the compression process, we found more rows fit on a data block of the given size, without disturbing the database management system,” said Dhandapani. The company applied the same algorithm of compressing the database block and eliminating duplicate values. A single copy of the duplicate value is added to the symbol table with a short reference to the entry.
Outcome The IT head saw better utilization of storage, with the savings observed across all the systems to the tune of 60%. “We observed the data reduced from 8,751GB to 3,479 GB after the compression process, besides 50% improve-
“We observed the data reduced from 8,751GB to 3,479 GB after the compression process.” —T G DHANDAPANI, CIO, TVS MOTOR COMPANY LTD. ment in database response time and 25% improvement in transaction time,” Dhandapani explained. Data restoration time too got reduced from 15 hours to 4.5 hours.
Payback TVS group took notice of clear tangible benefits, having to postpone the investment decision on storage. SAP users experienced faster SAP system by 25% than earlier, risk mitigation by reducing the restoration time from 15 hours to 4.5 hours in case of any disaster. The entire activity was completed by the in-house small team. Further improvement to this, TVS plans to archive the rarely accessed date once in 3 months to maintain the DB growth and response time. “At TVS, given the nature of application diversity, penetration and compliance, the need for keeping the data digitally is increasing and hence the demand as well,” Dhandapani said.
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RISK MANAGEMENT | INSIGHT
n o i t a rm Info at
k s i R
Wikileaks has shown that organisations need to manage risk proactively, protecting not just the infrastructure that data resides in, but also the information itself BY JAT I N D E R S I N G H
T
he recent revelations made by the Julian Assange-led WikiLeaks have not only stormed governments around the globe, but also rang the warning bell for many IT managers, sitting in their comfort zones with outdated information security policies in the Web 2.0 world. According to industry experts, the Wiki-leaks incident (especially diplomatic cables) has confirmed that intentional data theft and copying are
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INSIGHT | RISK MANAGEMENT not limited to financial motivations alone. The political and ideological exploits can impact governments and non-governmental organisations in a massive way. As it appears, most of the new material on Wiki-leaks has been posted by insiders, giving a substantial challenge to companies that are grappling with flat security budgets, shifts in security policies, and a shortage of qualified IT staff. What’s more, the rise of mobility, social media and cloud based applications has posed a serious threat to information. And the worst part is that majority of organisations still don’t have the efficient risk management policy in place to fight with cyber criminals. In fact, experts believe that many of them are yet to fully grasp the seriousness and relevance of having such a policy in the first place, leaving a big hole in their entire security system.
Challenging times The industry estimates put the total losses associated with cyber crime at more than $1 trillion value in a year. In 2010, there have been at least 301 security breaches resulting in the exposure of more than 8.2 million records. Also, a webroot’s survey of 803 IT professionals at small and medium-sized companies reveals that Facebook, RSS feeds, and related Web 2.0-based malware is going to be more difficult to manage than e-mail based threats. The estimates suggest that while on one hand the fear is that the threats can
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Tips to Safeguard Your Digital Assets:
1 Do a regular risk assessment 2 Use genuine and licensed software and implement centralised and automatic management of security patches
3 Implement sound corporate IT governance in accordance of laws. 4 Expect targeted, complex threats 5 Besides the network perimeter, focus on increasing security as one moves towards the core which is the data
6 N otify employees when they try to send confidential data outside of the company.
7 Gain control over your entire network, with the help of identity & access management
8 Remove confidential data from Web posts before they are sent to social networking sites.
9 Use wi-fi security in case of deploying Wireless Access Points 10 Report breaches and incidences to designated authorities such as CERT-IN (www.cert-in.org.in) (As shared By Sanjay Bahl, Chief Security Officer, Microsoft and Shantanu Ghosh, Vice President, India Product Operations, Symantec)
arise from any unsuspected source, the problem gets really complicated when employees fail to be on the same page of security policies. “While the support of management and resource allocation is important, architecting security can only become effective and pervasive when everyone in the organisation are aware about security policies and follow it methodically,” says Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting.
“IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS NO LONGER RESTRICTED TO THE FOUR WALLS IN AN ORGANISATION, GIVEN THAT INFORMATION IS ACCESSED FROM MULTIPLE DEVICES AND PLATFORMS.” – Shantanu Ghosh, VP, India Product Operations, Symantec
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“The problem gets complicated since we have less of legislation for data and whatever is available is insufficient to deal with the present scenario plagued by cyber crimes. Also, as a country, we do not have a redressal chain or body for governance to ensure a better picture related to data for individuals and corporate,” says Jacob Livingstone, Manager (IT) at BEC.
Plan your security In today’s cyber age security, it is important that every business realized the need to have a strong risk management architecture, as they supported and protected their trade secrets, proprietary information, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of their customers or employees. “A good risk management will always force you to think about what your assets are, what will happen to you or your company’s assets if a catastrophic failure occurs. And, How likely it is for something to happen to them” says Thiru Vengadam, MD, IFS Solutions India.
RISK MANAGEMENT | INSIGHT According to Ashish Dhawan, Country Lead, Enterprise Business, Juniper Networks, the risk management policy should be planned keeping in view:Organisational objectives - To ensure the effects of uncertainty do not hinder the business objectives of the organisation Requires involvement of all relevant stakeholders Incorporate current industry drivers and trends as applicable to the organisation. Also, it is important to keep in mind to analyze the Return On Investment (ROI) before making any risk assessment plan, as spending more money on protecting your assets than the real value is always a bad idea.
“WE HAVE LESS OF LEGISLATION FOR DATA AND WHATEVER IS AVAILABLE IS INSUFFICIENT TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT SCENARIO PLAGUED BY CYBER CRIMES.” —Jacob Livingstone Manager (IT) at BEC
“ARCHITECTING FOR SECURITY CAN ONLY BECOME EFFECTIVE AND PERVASIVE WHEN EVERYONE IN THE FIRM ARE AWARE ABOUT SECURITY POLICIES AND FOLLOW IT RELIGIOUSLY.”
Steps to follow While putting policies in place is only a first step, the IT manager needs to make sure that these policies are effectively enforced in the organisation. While it might be impossible to completely eliminate risk in a challenging IT environment, IT managers are advised to adopt a risk-reduction strategy by implementing a solution that allows the organisation to prioritise security and compliance efforts based on risk level. First and foremost, it’s critical to develop awareness of IT risks; therefore, have a clear assessment of the organisation’s current requirements, capabilities and vulnerabilities. This stage involves identifying and classifying threats, issues, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses and prioratising them. The second phase revolves around quantifying business impacts, which is considered to be the most challenging and important, as it’s not possible to infer if it is positive or negative, without the taking cognizance of the IT head owing to its complexity. “While many solutions are available to solve these challenges, each offering its own set of features and functionality, an organisation should follow a criteria to evaluate these solutions by assessing their
— Prashant Mali President, Cyber Law Consulting
levels of risk mitiagation capabilities. It is critical to develop remediation roadmaps, and ultimately build effective, continuous IT risk management programmes,” advises Sh a nt a nu Gh o sh ,V P-P r o du c t , Symantec India. The third stage helps design a set of recommended solutions after a careful analysis of a problem. This phase also includes detailed costing analysis to keep costs and benefits of proposed initiatives aligned to organisational goals, which might be a custom based solution.“From our experience, we have to develop our own process. This is completely based on the individual company to company and certainly needs a customised business approach,” says Vishal Bisht, IT manager of Marksman Technologies. Once implementation of the first wave of IT risk solutions is
underway, organisations should institute programmes for continuous improvement and ongoing governance of their IT risk management programme. “The fundamental thread between all these rules is that there has to be a monitoring method put in place to see who is accessing the information and how it is being used. Technology alone is not enough for achieving this, but companies needs strong processes as well,” says Prakash Baskaran, Founder & CEO, Pawaa Software. In addition, in order to tackle the new age threats, enterprises should explore using the services from skilled professionals who can help to secure the digital data and to develop and automate IT policies. However, at the end of the day, it’s the ability to enforce a policy or continuously monitor the status against the policy over time that provides the real value.
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How can you apply yesterday’s lessons to tomorrow’s IT strategy? Focus on transparency, governance, motivation and innovation—the keys to thriving during good economic times and bad. BY P E T E R H I G H
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PHOTO GRAPHY: JAYAN K NARAYANAN
INSIGHT | STRATEGY
STRATEGY | INSIGHT
I
f you believe what many economists are now saying, we have emerged from a prolonged economic malaise and the United States is poised for growth. Good news surely, but IT leaders have suffered right along with other executives in the corporate suite during these bad old days. The recent downturn cost a lot of talented IT leaders their jobs. It seems, then, to be an appropriate time to ask: “What can IT leaders do today to prepare for the next downturn?” Having worked with a great number of CIOs on the principles of World Class IT (introduced in my book, World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs), I have learned that the most successful executives focus their organisation’s efforts to ensure that they plan for the proverbial “rainy day,” while simultaneously encouraging innovation. There are four main areas on which these leading executives typically focus: defining the present and future state; strengthening governance; motivating employees; and investing in the future.
Likewise, it is critically important to have an “as is” and “to be” understanding of the IT infrastructure that is in place; both scenarios should be represented in your infrastructure road map. By plotting software, hardware, applications, networks and such into a road map—and maintaining that road map—you will have a clear picture of which components of your infrastructure are on the verge of being implemented, which are being maintained and added to, and which should be retired. The CIO and other IT leaders must make it part of their jobs to engage in regular, formal and informal communications with their businessside colleagues. This is important in order to get a preview of strategy before it is fully formed and to engender trust with business colleagues. It will also enable you to suggest ideas to the
2 Strengthen Governance
PHOTO GRAPHY: PHOTOS .CO M
1 Defining the Present and Future State It is critically important to develop and maintain a skills inventory of the people in your department. First and foremost, this requires defining taxonomy relative to those skills. Then, it’s essential to have all employees document the skills they currently possess. This skills inventory should be refreshed whenever there is a new hire, and through each evaluation cycle, providing an “as is” picture of the skills of your staff. Develop a workforce plan reflecting the skills the IT department will need in the future based on where the company is headed, business and IT strategy, and so forth. This is the “to be” state of the staff’s skills. The gulf between the “as is” picture and the “to be” state should then be evaluated; this will drive your training, recruiting and vendorengagement strategies. Meaningful evaluations must be conducted to identify your best employees.
business. Weaving IT into the fabric of the strategic plans of the business is critical. IT leaders must push business leaders to articulate their plans in a uniform manner. This way, IT can easily digest those plans and use them as valuable inputs to the aforementioned workforce plan and infrastructure road map. It is especially important that IT leaders make themselves strategically relevant when times are good. Once the business articulates its plans, IT should contemplate what those plans collectively indicate in terms of IT imperatives. Sample questions to consider: What are the business intelligence needs of our company’s various divisions now? What will our needs be in 12 months? In 24 months? How do these needs impact the IT investments we need to make today in order to support that long-term vision?
“A GOOD IT MANAGER SHOULD NOT SHY AWAY FROM TAKING RESPONSIBILITIES. HE SHOULD BE WILLING TO WORK HARD TO ACHIEVE THE BEST RESULTS.” – Berjes Eric Shroff Manager – Information Technology (IT), Tata Services
Economic downturns and financial duress tend to lead enterprises and industries to toughen up their governance practices. All too often, we see these tightened controls relax again once dollars start to flow and budgets for IT projects increase. It’s smart, though, to retain rigorous governance practices in good times. This way, when the next downward cycle hits, your IT organisation will already have its practices fine-tuned, and it will not have to scramble to create processes applicable to distressed times. David Smoley, senior vice president and CIO of Flextronics International, says one key to his team’s success has been imitating the “lean” practices of his business partners. Although Flextronics, a provider of vertically integrated advanced design and electronics manufacturing services to original equipment manufacturers, recently announced record earnings, Smoley is in the midst of a global optimization campaign to continue to ensure that IT is operating as efficiently as possible. This begins with having a solid prioritization process.
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INSIGHT | STRATEGY By standardizing around criteria, it is possible to generate a true one to “n” list of projects across business units. The following criteria are of greatest importance to consider in building your prioritization process: strategic fit; return on investment; project interdependency; and project risk. You’ll also want to bolster portfoliomanagement practices. This includes having the right people in place, perhaps in a program-management office, and the right processes in place to ensure that data is entered in a timely fashion. It also includes investing in tools that will provide a window into the health of the portfolio, and allow for quick action to course-correct when necessary. Duane Anderson is CIO at Marquette Group, an advertising agency that
DEVELOP A WORK FORCE PLAN REFLECTING THE SKILLS THE IT DEPARTMENT WILL NEED IN THE FUTURE BASED ON WHERE THE COMPANY IS HEADED, BUSINESS AND IT STRATEGY. delivers qualified, local customers to national brands by designing integrated media strategies, and USMotivation, which focuses on incentive strategies, group travel and creative communications. Says Anderson: “We evaluated our IT portfolio and found we were focused on too many smaller projects that didn’t always align with our strategic goals and move the
Key Strategies Made During Recession: During the economic recession, our IT Capex budgets were frozen and even there were emphasis to be very prudent on the Opex spending, doing more with less was the theme to work with. Some of the decisions during the period were as under: Stretch life cycle of IT assets: We tried to utilize the existing end user hardware like desktops, laptops, printers to the extent possible. Upgrade to hardware like RAM and HDD augmentation though were considered but strictly on need basis. Desktops and laptops to new joinees were provided from the IT stock by doing minimal upgrade, as required. Review of Support and Services agreements: Since the downturn was prevalent all across, none of the vendor or service provider wanted to loose his existing business. We used this opportunity to renegotiate the existing support and services agreement for better price and also service levels and all of the existing vendors were more than willing to reconsider the earlier service levels and price points. Focus on compliance and adherence to IT policies: As an internal IT decision it was made very imperative that there was no IT downtime so that the business which was already on lower side was not hampered owing to an IT outage. Hence there was more focus on monitoring and compliance to ensure there were no security breaches. Knowledge sharing and upgradation of IT skills: Since the new projects were not forthcoming owing to held up Capex budgets, any idle time was utilized to enhance IT skills by knowledge sharing among the IT peers. Jitender Khanduja
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company, or our customers, forward. With senior leadership buy-in, we focused on a smaller number of highimpact projects and included these as part of our annual strategic planning function to ensure the most seniorlevel focus. This has allowed us to really move the dial on strategic efforts, such as growing our revenues non-linearly with costs and greatly increasing our customer-facing IT efforts.” Likewise, project management and execution must be contemplated. This requires having a robust development life cycle in place with stage gates at which projects can be continually evaluated. Although there may be different “flavors” of the life cycle to accommodate projects of different sizes, some principles should be common across all development efforts. For example, ensuring that projects are developed on-time, on-budget and on-scope is essential. These three metrics should be your baseline to determine the efficacy of the projectmanagement and execution practices. As part of your good governance efforts, you’ll want to focus on developing robust vendor-management practices. If you don’t already have solid project and portfolio-management practices in place, it is almost impossible to manage vendors to assure the highest level of value. Flextronics’ Smoley asserts that improved vendor-management practices have been a major factor in his team’s success: “We rely on our vendors to a great extent, and we have developed practices to ensure that we get the most out of them, while also treating them like true partners rather than like vendors.”.
STRATEGY | INSIGHT
3 Motivate Your Best Employees In the process of defining your organisation’s present and future state, you and your leadership team will have identified your best employees. It is especially important during downturns to motivate these employees. It is precisely during times of strife when the best employees are most needed— not only to ensure that work is accomplished efficiently and effectively, but also to motivate their fellow employees. This process begins at the top. You’ll need to focus on compensation and recognition to motivate such employees. Compensation might be difficult to maximize during a downturn, of course, as budgetary constraints can necessitate that employees forgo bonuses or salary increases. That’s why a comprehensive
recognition programme is needed. Good work should be identified and celebrated, and it is important that such celebration happen in a manner that makes employees comfortable and, therefore, motivated. You’ll also want to focus on a range of retention activities. These can include providing mentoring and career-planning forums; offering training so employees feel that they are improving their skills; and assigning the best employees to do the most interesting work. Tough times require strong cross-IT communications to deal with potential angst among employees. Uncertainty can breed discontent, and you’ll want to counter this with a solid, regular flow of information, including the creation of forums through which anxious employees can ask questions. ADP’s Capone, who has the IT departments of many different business lines reporting through to him, speaks of the need to create consistent communications across the company: “We have used a variety of media in order to get our message out across IT, whether it is through Enterprise 2.0 tools like blogs, or old-fashioned but effective Town Halls. The key is to communicate often and consistently.”
4 Invest in the Future
“IT MANAGERS NEED TO CHOOSE VENDORS JUST LIKE THEY WOULD CHOOSE FRIENDS. SO, KEEP THE DOORS OPEN FOR A SELECTED TRUSTED PARTNER, BASED ON PAST EXPERIENCES.” – Sunil Joshi President, Enterprise Business Unit, Tata Communications.
When your enterprise finds itself deep in the midst of major cost-cutting, it’s easy to forget about innovation. This is a mistake. In good times and bad, IT must have a solid process through which new ideas can germinate. Innovation is the number-one topic that arises in my numerous conversations with IT leaders. The problem is, after spending a long time in cost-cutting and survival modes, many IT organizations have lost their innovation “muscles,” so to speak. In rebuilding a culture of innovation, you need to assure your staff that, should they spend time on innovative ideas that ultimately fail, this will not reflect poorly on them. Attempts at innovation, by definition, will sometimes lead to failure, and it
PROJECT MANAGEMENT & EXECUTION REQUIRES A ROBUST DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE IN PLACE WITH STAGE GATES AT WHICH PROJECTS CAN BE CONTINUALLY EVALUATED. is important that you view these as opportunities to learn. Too often, innovation is viewed as an expensive and daunting undertaking. It’s seen as something your productdevelopment people do to create products and services that consumers crave. But innovation is essential throughout an organization in order to encourage growth. Capone advises CIOs to ”zealously tie projects to business value, and focus on ideas that are competitive differentiators.” If you want to remove roadblocks to innovation in your organisation, keep these three key factors in mind: • Innovation can be small in nature. • Innovation can be internally as well as externally focused. • Innovation can be related to processes as well as products and services. So, how do you generate ideas? By fostering an environment in which all team members are encouraged to contribute ideas. In addition, you’ll want to create a repository for new ideas that also houses the vestigial analysis of potential costs, benefits and business drivers behind each idea. Implementing these four business practices will keep your organization ahead of the competition during bad economic times and position your enterprise to excel as the economy recovers. Peter High is president of Metis Strategy, a boutique IT-strategy consultancy based in Washington, D.C.
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INSIGHT | CLOUD COMPUTING
SpotCloud
exploresthe utility Computing future
Organisations with compute capacity to spare can sell it to buyers looking to the cloud to perform shortterm compute tasks BY JAS O N B R O O KS
O
ne of the most popular images used to illustrate the concept of cloud computing is the electrical grid. The â&#x20AC;&#x153;cloudâ&#x20AC;? can be tricky to pin down, but everyone is familiar with plugging into a standardized socket and drawing the juice necessary to run many electrical devices from a network of large power plants.
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PHOTO GRAPHY: PHOTOS .CO M
CLOUD COMPUTING | INSIGHT Taking the image further, it stands to reason that if we’re headed toward a future where organisations can draw from a compute grid as needed, there ought to be a way to sell excess capacity back to the grid—particularly since companies are much more likely to be running their own data centers than their own power plants. Enter SpotCloud, a new service from cloud software provider Enomaly that enables organisations with compute capacity to spare to sell that capacity to buyers looking to the cloud to perform short-term compute tasks at lower costs— with different instance sizes, or from a farther-flung set of data centers than what an Amazon or a Rackspace might offer. I took SpotCloud for a spin from a buyer’s perspective. I created an account, added some funds with a credit card and launched virtual machine instances on a handful of compute providers. The service, which recently entered a public beta phase, worked as advertised: I was able to shop around among the listed providers, upload my own VMs (Virtual Machines) for deployment and access my instances over the network, mostly via SSH (Secure Shell). While I found a handful of small interface issues during my testing, the bigger questions surrounding the service boil down to customers figuring out that they may use this unusual service. While the major cloud players, such as Amazon, are working to build the case that their cloud services can meet or exceed organisations’ own data center standards for reliability and security, Enomaly is staking out the opposite end of the spectrum for SpotCloud. Enomaly describes SpotCloud as an opaque market, arranged to enable sellers to discount excess capacity without cannibalizing full-price inventory. Along similar lines, there are no service-level agreements on SpotCloud, and the only indication of the service level to expect from a particular provider is a 1 to 10 rating, which isn’t explicitly defined.
SpotCloud is an opaque market, arranged to enable sellers to discount excess capacity without cannibalizing full-price inventory.
With that said, I can imagine a number of testing uses for SpotCloud, and the ability to pick providers in particular geographical locations could come in handy for temporarily bulking up content delivery capacity around specific events. On the seller side, SpotCloud could emerge as an option for offsetting capital-equipment costs. However, in the short term, I see potential value in offering low-cost capacity on the market as a way to load-test an organisation’s virtualisation infrastructure. For buyers, the only costs associated with SpotCloud are for the compute hours consumed. For sellers, Enomaly takes a cut of up to 30 percent, and offering capacity on the market involves running Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform software on their host machines.
SPOTCLOUD COULD EMERGE AS AN OPTION FOR OFFSETTING CAPITALEQUIPMENT COSTS.
For SpotCloud, a bigger advantage than price, compared with Amazon, is a broader range of geographical locations for the hosting.
SpotCloud in the lab I signed up for a SpotCloud account at spotcloud.com by providing an e-mail address for a Google Account and logging in through Google’s authentication page. We maintain an eWEEK Labs Google Apps account, so I was able to administer SpotCloud accounts—suspending accounts and changing passwords, for instance—using Google’s tools. For most organisations, however, this Google-centricity will prove annoying. But Enomaly CTO Reuven Cohen told me that a separate authentication mechanism for SpotCloud is in the works. I added $10 to my account with a credit card payment and set off to browse the available virtual machine instances in the market. I found 103 instance types on offer from about 15 providers listed in a table. Each
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INSIGHT | CLOUD COMPUTING instance type was listed with the number of processors, amount of RAM, the country and city where the instance would be hosted, and a service quality rating of between 1 and 10. The rating isn’t clearly defined anywhere, and there’s no indication provided as to whether the provider has remaining capacity. For instance, when I spied instances with 24 processor cores and 32GB of RAM on offer for 75 cents an hour, I tried to start one, but the request failed without mentioning why. I was then able to launch a smaller instance size from the same provider. I could filter the table on minimum and maximum CPUs or memory, maximum cost and geographical location, but I couldn’t sort the table by any of its headings. I compared the hourly prices in the market to those on Amazon’s spot market for its own EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. When I checked, the spot price at Amazon for a 1 CPU instance with 617MB of RAM was .007 of a cent per hour. On the SpotCloud market, I found similarly sized instances ranging from .001 of a cent to 1 cent per hour. For Amazon’s larger-size spot instances, I again found SpotCloud offerings both above and below the Amazon asking price.
Going beyond price For SpotCloud, a bigger advantage than price, compared with Amazon, is a broader range of geographical locations for the hosting. While the service maintains a fairly small number of providers, they’re spread more broadly than the Amazon spot data centers are. On the other hand, among the items on the disadvantage side of the ledger— beyond the limited information about exactly who’s hosting your data—is the much sparser set of tools SpotCloud offers for managing instances. SpotCloud providers list available instances for limited terms—I found terms of between 6 and 168 hours—and the service doesn’t include tools for managing expiring terms. Also, when I picked out a provider and turned to launch an instance,
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There are no service-level agreements on SpotCloud, and the only indication of the service level to expect from a particular provider is a 1 to 10 rating.
There are a number of testing uses for SpotCloud, and the ability to pick providers in particular geographical locations could come in handy .
SpotCloud offered up a few sample instances from which to choose, but to use one of them, I had to download the image from their site and then upload it back into my account. While the selection of prebuilt VM images provided by Enomaly is limited, I found it fairly easy to create my own VM images for use on SpotCloud. Enomaly provides a small commandline application that I used to convert a raw disk image into a SpotCloud appliance. I used the command-line diskconversion tools that ship with Oracle’s VirtualBox to convert a VM I created with that application to a raw format, and then built a SpotCloud appliance from there. I performed a similar operation with a VMware image. On a few of my appliance-building adventures, I encountered an issue in which my VM would run, but its IP address status would remain indefinitely at “pending.” This may have
been due to an issue I’ve encountered in the past with moving Ubuntu-based VMs from one host to another, in which the OS expects its configured network adapter to have a particular MAC address. In these cases, I had to tweak my OS image to address the issue before uploading it. Beyond creating images for use with SpotCloud, I was able to use Enomaly’s command-line tool to carry out most operations available through the service’s web interface. I could list the providers and virtual machine types, spawn new instances based on my uploaded images and destroy running instances. The command-line tool authenticates with the SpotCloud service by creating a URL through which I logged in using the same Google log-in interface that serves the website. eWEEK Labs Editor in Chief Jason Brooks can be reached at jbrooks@eweek.com.
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INTERVIEW | PADMASREE WARRIOR
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PADMASREE WARRIOR | INTERVIEW
â&#x20AC;&#x153;CLOUD IS REAL AND DISRUPTIVE FORCEâ&#x20AC;? Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President and GM-Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business, Cisco Systems, believes that cloud computing is not just a phrase du jour. In conversation with N Geetha, Warrior explains how Cloud holds a great value proposition from the perspective of IT managers and the customers alike and how Cisco is driving its journey into the cloud.
How did you manage to get your cloud game on in a product company such as Cisco? When I joined Cisco as CTO over two years ago, our CEO John Chambers had a special assignment for me. I was given the task of developing a cloud computing strategy. It all began when I came up with the idea of doing something around the cloud at a time when the concept was very nascent. About 15 to 20 of us met during the weekends and evenings to whiteboard viewpoints and began to sketch some ideas. The group explored potential emerging applications and the role of the network in the Cloud. I made a presentation to the operating committee and to Chambers with recommendations on making the Cloud a huge priority. I ensured that Cisco would evolve its networking, security, policy and the converged infrastructure efforts accordingly.
Are all applications cloudready and real? What is your approach? Cloud is getting to be real now and turning to be disruptive in all ways. We started evangelizing private clouds before the term became mainstream. As far as the consumption pattern goes, convergence with web based infrastructure for information and telecommunication is driving the Cloud. IT organisations are moving quickly to adopt this. It is said that about 70% of the IT budgets are spent on infrastructure and 30% on applications. The trends that I see driving the Cloud movement are increased deployment of IP networks, network consumer devices, UC, scalable and low cost computing, convergence of networking, storage and technology refresh. The highly scalable and low cost compute around x86 framework is going to drive this adoption. The SaaS
based delivery model across various applications is being driven. When about 190 countries are building applications on the Facebook, having millions of users, the Cloud based delivery model will be all pervasive. We have threepronged approach towards the Cloud, which would be to drive the public cloud through service providers, single vendor stack approach and best of breed solutions by partnering with other technology partners.
What are the changing customer patterns that you observe in the enterprise, commercial and small business? Across any segment, the way organisations work is going to be different in future. It is going to be virtual, social, mobile and collaborative. For instance, it is critical to deliver enterprise application on a mobile platform in a virtualised environment.
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INTERVIEW | PADMASREE WARRIOR Differentiated delivery models, which can reduce the complexity and cost, will be a priority. It is essential to move our architectures to be offered on a virtualised platform with key guidelines and consistent design. Our architecture should be in a position to help customers reduce cost of maintenance and innovation. Besides, customers expect the technology architecture should be future ready with regard to mobility, capability, security and compliance, which have been our key objectives too.
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What are the top technology priorities for Cisco, which could influence the customers? We align our technological innovations with market realities and with the changing customer preferences. Based on that, the technology trends that we would rope in would be around- cloud computing, mobility, virtualisation, enterprise applications, IT management, business intelligence, Web 2.0, collaboration, networking, voice and data. The CIO or the IT head of any vertical today looks at the components that bring value to him as a packaged solution.
tomers, which is built all around the cloud architecture.
How is Cisco going to embed these technological trends within its own product priorities? We have partitioned the architecture into three areas to drive flexibility in adoption. For instance, the thrust areas are borderless architecture where the CIO or the IT heads aspire to connect from any device to any application with full authentication, verification and security from any network. Data center virtualisation architecture has also evolved to drive agility, efficiency and business transformation. Collaboration is the next step to create a new future workplace for the cus-
How compelling is it for customers to go in for your solutions and the renewed architectural framework? We intend to introduce technological evolutions much before our competitors take to them. For instance, we partnered with EMC and VMware to launch VCE, a joint venture that aims to accelerate the proliferation of virtualisation and private clouds. To get this more serious, we made it an exclusive business, headed by a CEO and appointed an exclusive Cloud CTO who reports to me. This is because we strongly believe that in about 18 months time,
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“IT MANAGERS ARE REQUIRED TO EXPLAIN A PARTICULAR TECHNOLOGICAL RELEVANCE TO THEM AND DRIVE THE POINT FOR ITS ADOPTION.” Cloud will be the dominant IT architecture across. From a Unified Storage perspective, we evolved a product under Nexus series, which came up with 7 million ports on the product on the UC fabric. About 10,000 customers have already deployed it. Juniper just brought out one fabric, which is being tested. I understand 46% of the custom-
PADMASREE WARRIOR | INTERVIEW Edition 3000 in an economical unified c o m mu n i c at i o n s platform designed for growing mid-sized businesses, and supports a capacity of 300 users across 10 sites.
Do you witness any shift in the buying strategies adopted by the Indian customers? I have observed profound changes in the buying patterns by the Indian consumers. Earlier they were more prone towards buying premise based infrastructure, but now they are looking at service in the infrastructure space. India is a fascinating market place. Customers are absorbing every technology that the developed markets deploy. Looking at the government sector, there is a strong desire to improve healthcare facilities using technology, increased productivity with enhanced collaboration tools. This will also generate a greater interest towards cloud adoption and borderless networks. ers choose Cisco fabric, while 25% choose HP. We are seeing a 25% year-onyear growth in the small business. This is one segment, which doesn’t care about technology or applications. They need ease of use and the right business architecture, which demand real time solutions that justify their investments. From an SMB standpoint, we launched UC 300 series, which is a complete collaboration system delivering everything a company with 2 to 24 users needs for business-class networking and voice communications. A three-year zero percent financing is available from Cisco Capital on this product. We launched UC manager business
Find other interviews online on the website www.itnext. in/resources/ interviews
Do you think IT managers are clued into decision making with regard to latest cloud architecture or other solutions? It entirely depends upon what they buy and how the message resonates. For instance, from my experience, I understand that collaboration services will strike the CEO’s mind immediately as it is associated with taking the organisation to the next level of growth. Th e sw i t ch i n g and management platforms will definitely enthuse the IT managers who would be in a better position to take the call. However, if certain applications around collaborative tools are localized, the IT managers are ready to innovate with you.
The IT managers are required to explain a particular technological relevance to the organisation and drive the point that if it is not adopted now, it loses its relevance later. We at Cisco, invest about 13% of our revenues on R&D, with a constant endeavour to innovate along with the customers across multiple vertical platforms. We enjoy a special relationship with our customers in the SMB space. About 34% of revenues from the products and innovations comes from the SMBs. Cisco’s R&D investment has been in the tune of $5.3 billion worldwide spent on product innovations based on the customer feedback and need. We have brought in 400 new products through our R&D effort. Our investments are categorized under five areas and a council is formed to call the shorts. They would be around enterprise, small business, commercial business, architecture based and cloud. There is always debates and discussion going around who would get the larger pie. As we witness the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries driving around 20 to 50% growth, India and China have been on the higher radar of growth. Our key investment focus is around the Indian market where we are roping in ISVs to drive cloud practices. As the CEO’s agenda is evolving and changing making a shift from driving operations to creating a differentiation, the IT managers need to align the strategy with this change. Cisco’s investments are around building new capabilities around cloud and hosted delivery models. .The IT Managers need to take the cue to adapt to this changing trend to save their infrastructure cost.
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EVENT | REPORT
ITNEXT.IN
Sharing for
Future Flexible IT begins with shared, virtualized infrastructure BY SIDDH A N T R A I Z A DA
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IT Managers listen to R Giridhar, Group Editor, on ways to adopt flexible IT solutions.
Rapidly evolving business environment has made IT leaders realize that the decisions they make now will not only reflect upon their competitive ability, but influence the long-term success of their business. It essentially drives the point that the conventional business model doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t justify the modern day business dynamics. It is critical to innovate and analyze the methods used and work out an innovative plan to adapt to the future requirement.
EVENT | REPORT
(L to R) - Surajit Sen, Director, Channels, Marketing & Alliances Netapp, Subroto Das, Chief Information Officer, Texmaco Ltd, Pradosh Roy, Chief Geophysicist, ONGC, and, Sanjeev Kumar, Executive VP and Group CIO, Adhunik Group of Industries at the panel
Pradosh Roy, Chief Geophysicist, ONGC
The audience getting to know the way organisation can transition to a shared IT infrastructure
They need is to deploy robust IT infrastructure and evaluate alternatives to cope with the changes in business direction. The solution lies in adhering to the new challenges and use a single architecture for all workloads. IT Next organized a discussion forum on flexible and efficient IT that could guide IT managers, in scaling performance and capacity on demand. The event was attended by over 40 IT managers who were in cognizance with the panelists’ opinions on taking the path of shared IT infrastructure. The key take ways has
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R Giridhar, Group Editor, 9.9 Media, at the dias
been around how these IT solutions on a single architectural framework enabled the organizations to scale up their operations, while retaining the security framework of the IT infrastructure. Key highlights of the discussion enveloped: π How to use one architecture for all workloads π Steps to optimize cost performance by workload π Ways to scale performance and capacity on demand π How to reduce complexity and enable IT as a service.
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15MINUTE MANAGER
TRAINING EDUCATION WORKPLACE COMPENSATION WORKFORCE TRENDS SKILLS DEVELOPMENT PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
WHAT TO LOOK IN A TABLET PAGE 50
Strategy: The Art of Managing THIS PAGE Tips & Tricks: Speed Up Browsing PAGE 48 Personal Development: Give up to be successful PAGE 51 Training Calendar Career booster courses PAGE 52
BY KAUSHIK KUMAR
PHOTOG RAPHY: PHOTO S .CO M
T
he market is getting demanding day by day, which is increasing the pressure on businesses and IT. In this ever growing business environment, numerous different processes, activities, and systems are used to run the business. These include numerous workflows and procedures; some manual, some automated; that may or may not be formally documented including a variety of departmental applications and legacy databases that are likely disjointed and not well-integrated. Moreover, difficulty in getting accurate data, timely information and improper interface of the complex business functions have been identified as the hurdles in the growth of any business. So, time and again, depending upon the velocity of the growing business needs, one or the other applications and planning systems have been introduced into the business world for crossing these hurdles and for achieving the required growth. They are: Management Information Systems (MIS) Integrated Information Systems (IIS) Enterprise Wide Systems (EWS) Material Resource Planning (MRP)
STRATEGY
THE ART OF MANAGING Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) facilitates flow of information between all of a firmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s business functions A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | ITNEXT
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TIPS & TRICKS
SPEED UP BROWSING
FACTS • Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents - If you’ve got a Google Docs or Gmail account, uploading or emailing a PDF gives you an option to view its as an HTML, which is going to come through a lot faster. • Use Safari or Opera, which are fast at loading web pages and rendering JavaScript and CSS templates.
Here are some hot keys that will help you speed up your internet experience. We have left some of the common ones out and kept the lesser-known ones. These hot keys apply across Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [T] -- Restore Last Closed Tab For those oops moments [Ctrl] + [+]/[-] -- Zoom In / Out - The simplest way to enlarge the contents of a web page [Ctrl] + [0] -- Default zoom - When things get too big or too small [ALT] + [D] -- Go to address bar - The quickest way to move on [Ctrl] + [E] -- Go to search bar - Once the browser fires up, it’s either search or address bar, right? [Ctrl] + [Enter] -- Auto complete a “.com” to an address and go - Who wants to type so much anyway? [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [D] -- Add a bookmark - So that you can come back to stuff you like [Ctrl] + [H] -- History - See where you’ve been quickly [Ctrl] + [Tab] -- Cycle to next tab - It’s the quickest way to navigate tabs
Use secure, automatic passwords - If your browser offers a master password option, use it.
[Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Tab] -- Cycle to previous tab - Same as above [F11] -- Go full-screen - because some things need a large screen
PHOTO GRAPHY: PHOTOS .CO M
Most organisations across the world have now realized that it is impossible to create and maintain a custom designed software package which will cater to all their requirements and also be completely up-to-date with market needs. Realizing the requirement of user organisations, the latest planning tool added to the above list is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which offers an integrated software solution to all the functions of an organisation. It integrates internal and external management information across an entire organisation, embracing finance/ accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organisation and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems can run on a variety of hardware and network configurations, typically employing a database to store data. Some of the major features of ERP and what it can do for the business system are as below: ERP facilitates company-wide Integrated information system, covering all functional areas like manufacturing, selling, receivables, inventory, accounts, human resources, purchases etc. ERP performs core corporate activities and increases customer service, thereby adding to the corporate image on a whole. ERP bridges the information gap across the organisation and is the only solution for better project management. ERP allows automatic introduction of latest technologies. ERP eliminates most of the business problems like productivity enhancements, customer service, cash management, inventory problems, quality problems, prompt delivery etc. ERP provides the opportunity of continually improving and refining business processes. ERP provides business intelligence tools like Decision Support Systems (DSS), Executive Information System
15-MINUTE MANAGER
“Inter-disciplinary approach evolves a better platform to resolve complex issues.” — Rahul Choudaha, Strategic Management Specialist
MISTAKES EVERY MANAGER SHOULD AVOID Don’t think you know everything there is to know. The learning process never ends, no matter how high you’ve climbed up the corporate ladder. Don’t hesitate to admit your faults and mistakes. Don’t try to prove you’re the boss.
“To become a leader of the future, It’s important to apply positive learnings from your failures” — Dr. B. Muthukumaran, CTO and Chief Consultant, Gemini Consultants
on’t think that just because you’re D the manager, you’re smarter than all your employees. on’t be rude. Being a superior just D does not give you that right. o not expect everything to remain D picture-perfect all the time. et priorities. Do the things that are S critical first instead of those that are not ake your employees into confidence T in all issues that relate to them or the work they do Source: 101-mistakes-managers-should-avoid, focus.com
(EIS), reporting, data mining and early warning systems for enabling people to make better decisions and thus improve their business processes. ERP enjoyed a great deal of popularity among large manufacturers in the mid to late 1990s. Most early ERP systems consisted of mainframe computers and software programmes that integrated the various smaller
systems used in different parts of a company. By the late 1990s, sales of ERP systems began to slow down. Some large manufacturers encountered problems implementing the systems, and others felt that ERP did not live up to its billing as a planning tool. Larger economic factors also influenced sales of ERP systems. In addition, a growing number of companies came to value
ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) INTEGRATES INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL MANAGEMENT INFORMATION ACROSS AN ENTIRE ORGANISATION.
the speed and flexibility of smaller, interconnected computer systems and no longer wanted to rely on a mainframe to run ERP software. Also, traditional ERP systems also had a number of drawbacks. For instance, the early systems tended to be large, complicated, and expensive. Implementation required an enormous time commitment from a company’s information technology department or outside professionals. In addition, because ERP systems affected most major departments in a company, they tended to create changes in many business processes. Putting ERP in place thus required new procedures, employee training, and both managerial and technical support. As a result, many companies found the changeover to ERP a slow and painful process. ERP companies are presently trying
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15-MINUTE MANAGER TABLET GLOSSARY
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE BUYING A TABLET?
Losing your mind trying to figure out the tablet specs? Confused with all the tech jargon being brandished about? We try to de-mystify all the confusion surrounding the tablets. What is a Tablet device? The tablet is essentially a device that is bigger than the smartphone, and is much smaller than the netbook/laptop. It does all things a smartphone does and can do most things a laptop does. What it offers is the extra portability and a better user experience with a bigger screen. Accelerometer: The job of this feature is to reformat the screen in portrait or landscape modes, depending on how the user is viewing it. Move the device, and the screen will change orientation automatically. Processor: The heart of the tablet device- this is what drives every activity which the device undertakes. Processor speeds are measured in MHz or GHz. The speeds of the processor have a huge bearing on the overall performance of the tablet device. Faster the processor speeds, better the performance, sometimes with battery life as a trade-off. RAM: Random Access Memory, it allows the operating system and apps to constantly write and delete data on this chunk of memory. The more RAM available, the faster the apps will respond, owing to the ability to access data faster. A fast processor, with not enough RAM creates a bottleneck. Screen Size: Measured in inches, the screen size will have a huge impact on the usage experience. Tablets are available in 5-inch, 7-inch and 10-inch screen sizes at the moment. Capacitive touchscreen: The screen which offers multi-touch capability is the capacitive touchscreen. It allows using multiple finger gestures to flick, zoom in, zoom out etc. Resistive Touchscreen: The touchscreen capability is very much there, but will not detect multi-touch gestures. This is the basic touchscreen experience. â&#x20AC;&#x2018;â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Vishal Mathur
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to expand the capacity of their product; that is why many of them are catering to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) instead of large organisations. The vendors of ERP systems have evolved to develop web-enabled systems, and expand their offerings up and down the supply chain. The latest ERP software programmes offer need-based applications. The firms need not be worried even if these software programmes were not available. They were given the liberty to purchase and install software programmes pertaining to that particular function. This advantage has helped to increase the scope of ERP not only among large firms, but also small and medium businesses. Traditional ERP was a very costly affair. Thanks to the intrusion of internet and e-commerce, they have played an important role in the evolution of ERP. Companies are trying to combine their supply chain management functions with the internet, so that suppliers can also have easy access to the information from anywhere in the world. ERP software is integrating the business processes within a company; vendors are working to merge the collaboration of suppliers, customers, and employees that work with them. The current day ERP applications are less complex to install and train. This has reduced the amount of time spent on ERP. Companies are thereby assured of spending lesser time for ERP. Following are the three important elements that have rejuvenated the functioning of ERP: Open Source ERP has done away with the hassles of paying license fees not only during installation, but also whenever a modification is made. Web enabled ERP helps in making the enterprise operations go online. Wireless ERP has made it possible for many elements to operate in ERP, which were otherwise not possible. same. Kaushik Kumar is Project Manager, Orange Business Services
15-MINUTE MANAGER
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
‘GIVE UP’ TO BE SUCCESSFUL Get to know the secret of being successful... BY S H A N TA N U S I N G H C H AU H A N
PH OTOGRAPHY: PHOTOS .CO M
O
nce there was king who couldn’t sleep at all. Being a king, he pulled all his resources to help him get a good night’s sleep. But absolutely nothing helped him. Finally, he asked for help from a know-it-all sage. The sage suggested that if he wears the shoes of the happiest person in the world, he will be cured. So, the king and all his subjects looked for the happiest person in the kingdom. Unfortunately, it was not an easy task. Most people were unhappy. At last, the king happened to find a smiling face of a poor old man whose condition was no better than a beggar.
He had that aura around him and a mystically happy face. The king went ahead and asked the person – “Are you the world’s happiest person?”. “Yes,” came the reply. The king looked at the sage and the wise old man responded in the affirmative; this was the world’s happiest person. The king was delighted and offered the poor man a million gold coins to hand over his shoes. The old man, with his mystical smile, told the king, “You may give me all the worldly wealth, which I neither yearn for nor deserve, but I have no shoes to offer to you since I have none”. The man knew that to be the world’s
happiest person, to live a real happy life, he had to give away all his worldly possessions. He followed the saying – “To gain something in life, you have to lose something”. I am going to tell you a secret, which will make you the world’s most successful man. It will make you an unstoppable force to which the world’s challenges will bow down and every difficult situation will show respect. Well, the secret is “giving up”. To start with, I am asking you to give away a few words; the words that constraint yourself to boundaries of what you can be or do. I am asking you give up the words on a piece of paper, your business card, your business title. In his book “The Leader who had no title”, author Robin Singh talks about how true leadership quality can only be developed if you show leadership in all situations and make this as the guiding principle in your life. How many times have you ignored a messy situation around you thinking that it is none of your business? It happens quite a while. Even in the work space, we ignore things which do not come under our purview. More often, you will find that
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15-MINUTE MANAGER
TRAINING CALENDAR
Career booster courses for you!
PROGRAMME
VENUE
DATES
IIM Kozhikode
April 25-30, 2011
IIM Kozhikode
April 04-08, 2011
Enhancing Managerial
Fore School of
14-15 April 2011
Effectiveness through Self
Management
General Management Program for Middle Level Managers Renewable Energy: Opportunity of the Century
Awareness Transcreativity
MICA
April 22-24, 2011
Effective Communication
IIM Ahmedabad
Apr25-29, 2011
Markstrat
MICA
April-26-29, 2011
Life Skills Orientation
IMT Ghaziabad
April 16-17, 2011
Finance for Engineers
IMT Ghaziabad
May 23-27, 2011
Marketing to the Bottom of
IIM Calcutta
May 9-12, 2011
IIM Calcutta
June 20-25, 2011
Strategies: Men and Women @ Work
Program for Mentors/ Counselors
the Pyramid Personal Growth & Group Development
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there will be hundreds of reasons why you should not be doing a thing than showing courage and leadership to do it. The aim of life is to achieve one’s full potential. We are always more than what we think we are. The only way to realize it is through persistent effort towards taking control of the situation, in place of ignoring or becoming it’s victim. Generally, while we choose to lead in some situation, we just ignore the other, and say things like, “It is not my job.” Don’t choose what to lead, but leading without a title, which will make you a manager that owns far too much than the designation on his card. Similarly, giving up confrontation to healthy discussion helps you achieve better relations with your peers. People have arguments because they believe that the other person will not understand. With this, they enter a discussion which becomes an argument. An argument only leads to an exchange of anger and no understanding. Before entering a potential confronting situation, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, think in his perspective and also clearly articulate in your mind what you want to achieve in this discussion. Giving up confrontation helps you achieve more from potentially explosive situations. Giving up is not always bad if you know what to give up. Remember the mantra of giving up: 1. Give up your title to be a leader to lead everywhere. Leading everywhere and in every situation will help you realize your full potential. 2. Give up confrontations to healthy discussions. Remember to put yourself in the other person’s shoes before you enter a potentially explosive situation. 3. Give up making choices while learning. Be a scholar of life. It will make you smarter. And smarter people run organisations and the world. 4. Give up being reactive. Remember, every one reacts, but only the winner chooses to act proactively. Shantanu Singh Chauhan is Director, New Initiatives, Value First
THE BIG
GREEN IT
WHICH WAY TO GREEN? EXPERT PANEL
RAVISH JHALA, SYSTEMS MANAGER TRIDENT, BANDRA KURLA
THE SITUATION...
CUT IT FROM HERE
It isn’t everyday that Agastya Chopra, Manager IT, is caught in a situation that he couldn’t handle. His company - ISC Corp - a leading stock-broking and wealth management firm, was planning to embrace Green in a major way. As part of the effort, the company had even prepared a blueprint on what would be the strategy roadmap, which covered all the usual points, namely, CFL bulbs, lower AC, lessening of print paper, thin clients, video conferencing, etc. Since the policy was being driven from the very top, namely the CEO’s desk, there was a lot of excitement and eagerness on adopting all the measures. ISC Corp. had mandated that the old hardware would be replaced by new power efficient Energy Star rated ones. Data center of ISC Corp was supposed to be revamped with latest servers from a leading organisation. And this change was giving Agastya sleepless nights. Your responses count. Log on to www.itnext.in/bigQ to submit your replies. The best entry will be published in the next print edition
RAJESH AGGARWAL SATISH IT MANAGER, MAHAJAN JINDAL PIPES AVP - DATA CENTRE AND IT INFRASTRUCTURE, CIBIL
As part of the change process, when he got down to actually evaluating the power usage within the datacenter, he was shocked to find that the bigger evil was the HVAC system that was consuming much of the power. But Agastya knew that the company was completely convinced about the new setup, and would not really buy into his logic. He was at his wit’s end and fumbling on what approach to take on this matter. It was then that he bumped into his old colleague Asif Shaikh, to whom he decided to confess his issues and seek advice. Asif suggested to Agastya to make a detailed study of the existing infrastructure and the power costs associated with it. Based on it, Agaysta would be required to frame a report on what measures need to be taken and what are the alternative options and their associated benefits. He emphasised the need to talk in RoI terms. Agastya was much relieved and agreed to Asif’s contention. As he started to work on the advice, he wondered:
NEXT
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THE BIG Q
THE BIG QUESTIONS... WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT ELEMENTS THAT AGASTYA NEEDS TO KEEP A TAB ON
?
BEFORE HE UNDERTAKES A DETAILED STUDY? SHOULD HE ONLY CONCENTRATE ON THE DATACENTER OR INCREASE HIS SCOPE TO OTHER TECH INFRASTRUCTURE?
?
WHAT SHOULD BE HIS APPROACH TO GET A MANAGEMENT BUYOUT ON HIS PLANS? HOW SHOULD HE PRESENT HIS STUDY AND WHAT ALL POINTS SHOULD HE BEAR IN MIND WHEN HE TALKS TO THE HIGHER MANAGEMENT ON THIS ISSUE?
HERE ARE THE ANSWERS... ‘CREATING SOUND POLICIES’ FIRST ANSWER
RAVISH JHALA Systems Manager Trident, Bandra Kurla About me: He has worked with Compaq NSP, Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, Mars Hotels and Restaurants and is now working with The Oberoi Group.
Going “Green,” as a concept, continues to gain traction in both popular and corporate cultures. The savings from green initiatives, both to companies, the Earth and employees’ peace of mind, can be significant. Agastya should do a study on sustainable computing parameters, like, extended lifecycles, energy efficiency, utilization and reuse and responsible recycling. As a technology manager, he should look for power usage, datacenter and technology management, but as business enabler, I recommend that Agastya should also look on the following to achieve good results: Sound policies create the foundation for sustainable computing and communicate executive-level support. Policies are the basis for standardized operational procedures and consistent execution. Establish a baseline, then set quantitative sustainability targets. Organisational dynamics often lead to idle technology, which is not easily visible or available for reuse. Maintaining a proper inventory of surplus systems can reduce procurement costs and increase agility, but maintaining too large of an inventory means that the assets are sitting idle for extended periods, thus losing value. Finding the right inventory levels is essential to increasing utilization. Need to involve the entire team, including support and operation to create a business case. Need to do a detailed study on space, cooling, design of room, etc... Look for technologies like VM, Cloud SaaS, IaaS, PaaS where you can reduce the load from the data centre. Power planning to be done well to avoid misuse of power. Look for Green products where you can save more energy. Evaluate solar power and its use to run night operations.
SECOND ANSWER It is always better that we invest in agile technology rather than blinding edge technologies and understand all alternatives before we kick-start the project. The business case should very simple, to the point, with simple graphs or survey and fact points about the current setup and the proposed setup. We should present to the management top three motivations for persuing Green IT operations and should elaborate further on cost and revenue by highlighting the following points: Reduce energy related expenses. Reduce other IT operating expenses. Improves the brand image of companies amongst customers and public. Articulate the business benefits of Green IT.
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THE BIG Q
â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;EXPLAIN OBJECTIVES REALISTICALLYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; FIRST ANSWER To undertake a detailed study, he should look at the following factors: Life of the current computer hardware Current power utilisation of the hardware Next 3 to 5 years of growth plan Checking the power rating of the existing device. Looking at better computing like converting all the high power consuming and radiation generating devices into low power and less radiation emitters. To develop Green IT, he should look at not only the data centre in terms of cooling and power efficiency, but also look at other electronic devices and how to make the office paperless as well.
SATISH MAHAJAN
SECOND ANSWER
AVP - Data Centre and IT Infrastructure CIBIL
Green means environment friendly. The IT manager should concentrate more on how this new generation hardware will generate less heat and utilise less power. He should find out that even if the cost is high, how will the hardware give him quick ROI. He should concentrate on facts and figures rather than talking about stories.
About me: He has two decades of rich experience in IT and has concentrated more on giving solutions problems.
He can start with: Objective of the study Explaining the objectives with realistic facts and figure What will be the budgeted cost of the overall project Break-up of the overall budget at the micro level Advantages of using these new hardware. How will he achieve the ROI on such a huge investment? Phases of project: How will he achieve ROI at each phase. This will give the management an idea as to how the IT manager is going to handle the whole Green project.
NEXT
D Vision for UC 2011 UNIUFNICIEATION
COMM
50
Over 100 IT Heads participated in the survey on their current preparedness of unified communication deployments
40
14%
Add Room
Upgrade room(s)
Move to desktop
18%
8%
0
6%
10
18%
20
No specific plans
Migrate to hi-definition
36%
30
Implement unified communication
SOURCE: 9.9 MEDIA RESEARCH
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THE BIG Q
‘DON’T TRY TO OVERSELL GREEN’ FIRST ANSWER Going Green is not an easy task, as Agastya would be realising now. There are as many ends to it as one can possibly imagine. Nevertheless, Agastya needs to do some analysis on what is achievable and what is not. First up, he should be clear about the brief on hand; there should not be any ambiguity about it. Has he been asked to formulate a roadmap, or has he been asked to follow one? There is an essential difference between the two. Any employee can have great ideas, but not all can frame policies. To start with, if he has been assigned to look after the data center, he should first concentrate on it, use it as a proof of concept and then extend the scope to other domains.
SECOND ANSWER
RAJESH AGGARWAL IT Manager, Jindal Pipes About me: He has spent the Last 8 years in ERP implementation
There are some things that Agastya needs to pay due attention to: Don’t bug the bosses with basics; they already know them. Showcase tangible benefits: Going green will save ‘X million’ is much better than ‘Green is good’ for the company. Always be ready for queries that you never thought of. Talk of industry standards, benchmarks and legislations to support your contention Be nice and short; don’t try to oversell. Finally, it will be advisable for Agastya to not to be a lone crusader and involve his boss, the CIO and CTO. If he can convince his immediate boss, that would be much handy for making a pitch to the higher ups.
NOTES NOTES
MORE RESOURCES
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The Datawarehouse Institute: http://www.tdwi.org
AD
CUBE CHAT | BHAVITA SAXENA
LEARN TO PLAY AND
IMPROVE “One should learn to do things smartly without generating much hype to get rid of the undue pressure to perform,” says Bhavita Saxena, DGM-ISBS, RFCL BY JATIN D E R S I N G H
W MY SUCESS
MANTRA To put in my best effort and not consider the results. This gives me the strength to step back when needed
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ith a little over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Bhavita Saxena, DGM-ISBS, RFCL, prefers taking the step-by-step approach to perfection. She considers herself to be a self-motivated person, who loves to try out new things. For her, success lies not in reaching the destination, but in making the journey and taking each step. Hence, it’s crucial for her to think strategically–always and be prepared for all eventualities. “My mantra is to put in my best effort and not consider the results. This gives me the strength to step back when needed,” she says. In a competitive world, where even small achievements can lead to adulation, Saxena advises in performing smartly without generating hype to get rid of “that undue
pressure to perform”. “One should know how to play the game—whether it’s a test or a one-day match,” she says with a smile. A keen observer of latest trends, she believes that one should act like a “change manager” and adjust to strategic shifts in the business environment. That is a lesson that should be learnt from a mentor and is one of the most important lessons in any profession. But, she doesn’t have just one mentor. “I admire former Prime Minister of India, Late Indira Gandhi, for her strength to stick by her choices. I admire Narayana Murthy for keeping his feet firmly on the ground and Kiran Bedi when it comes to her courage to doing things without any fear,” she states. “Having a role model is just 50% of the work. Remaining 50% is to find the right mentor,” she adds.
FACT FILE NAME: BHAVITA SA X E N A CURRENT D ES I G N AT I O N : DGM-ISBS CURRENT R O L E : IT HEAD WORK EXP E R I E N C E : 2008 – PRES E N T: D G M ISBS, RFC L LT D. 2004 -2008 : AC C O U N T MANAGER, B I R L AS O F T 2002-2004 : D E L I V E RY MANAGER, G E C A P I TA L INTERNAT I O N A L SERVICES / G E N PAC T 2000 -2002 : D E L I V E RY MANAGER, U M I T / ESAMSUNG U M I T INFOTECH 1995 – 200 0 : P R O J EC T MANAGER, X E R OX MODICORP
PHOTO GRAPHY: MADIS HE TT Y MANASA
HAVING A ROLE MODEL IS JUST 50% OF WORK. REMAINING 50% IS TO FIND THE RIGHT MENTOR When not at work, Saxena enjoys meditating and unlike several professionals, has one-onone conversations with colleagues. While she doesn’t call herself a voracious reader, Saxena enjoys books on spirituality and religion, which help her to remain “calm” when life gets too unpredictable. “My life has had some desperate moments. I was always surrounded by family and friends and received my strength to fight from them. However, I believe that my true strength lay within me. I may have struggled, but I could always look within me to find a way out,” she says candidly. While some moments are painful, there are those life-changing ones that make one happy–has she felt that in her life? “My most magical moment till date was when I received the Next100 award. It was unbelievable. It
took some time to sink in. When I processed it (information) finally, I felt on top of the world,” Saxena reveals. “Though the field of IT is considered to be ‘women-friendly’, climbing the promotion ladder is tough. This award was like an affirmation of my hard work. And, I believe, it also proved to be motivating for other women IT professionals, who wish to break the glass ceiling,” We had to ask – with an award already in her kitty, what is the next step? Is she ready to don the CIO hat? “I am ready for any role which gives me the opportunity to grow in terms of technical, managerial and humanitarian expertise. It’s the diversity of a portfolio which excites me, not the post or designation,” she signed off.
1990 -1995 : T E A M LEADER, T H E T I M ES O F INDIA GRO U P, D E L H I ACHIEVEM E N TS : WON “NEX T 1 0 0 F U T U R E CIO” 2010 AWA R D NLP MAST E R PRACTITI O N E R CERTIFIC AT I O N : SECURED S I X SIGMA GR E E N B E LT CERTIFIC AT I O N BY REDUCING D OW N T I M E OF 19 EXTR E M E LY CUSTOMER C R I T I C A L APPLICAT I O N S FAVORITE Q U OT E : LEARN FRO M YESTERDAY, L I V E FOR TODAY, H O P E FOR TOMO R R OW. T H E IMPORTAN T T H I N G IS NOT TO STO P QUESTION I N G – A L B E RT EINSTEIN FAVORITE B O O K : THE SEVEN S P I R I T UA L L AWS OF S U C C ES S BY DEEPAK CH O P R A
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UPDATE
OFF THE SHELF
A sneak preview of enterprise products, solutions and services
HCL launches new
laptop and desktop series
The devices aim to enhance customer experience with better performance
HCL Infosystems has unveiled its new KEY FEATURES range of laptops and desktops. The laptop *H CL Touch – One touch button for series - HCL ME 1014 and HCL ME 1015 customer service and desktop series – HCL Infiniti M A365 * EC2 – Data recovery in less than Pro – are packed with unique features 60 seconds embedded with latest technologies. *S PLIT ME – Automatically splits The newly launched HCL laptop and heavy files for easy mailing desktop series are amongst the first dualcore computers in India powered by the latest 2nd Generation Intel Core family of processors. The products are also available on quad-core platform. As per the company, the newly launched HCL computing devices ensure better customer experience with enhanced compute performance and better energy efficiency. They support faster encoding & decoding of different media formats, along with smooth HD playback with high visual quality and colour fidelity enhancements. With enhanced power efficiencies, higher standard ratings, visually better experience, faster conversions and data transfers, the new HCL desktops and laptops promise an enthralling experience for customers, says HCL. The new devices from HCL are empowered with features like multi-touch gesture touchpad for laptops, one touch in-built customer service button, etc.
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HP TouchPad – A review From what HP tells us and what we saw, the 9.7-inch TouchPad is 1.6 pounds and features a 1024-by-768 resolution screen. The TouchPad’s black/grey body is virtually devoid of buttons. There’s a volume button on one side, a power button on the other edge and a home button on the face. Unlike the iPad, the TouchPad has a front-facing camera; HP opted to not include a rear-facing one. The TouchPad runs webOS. Not webOS 2.0 or 2.1, mind you, but an as yet unnamed version of the touch-friendly OS. What’s built into the TouchPad, though, takes good advantage of the device’s larger screen. HP told us that most current webOS apps will work on the TouchPad and some will size up to fit the screen. HP showed us how smoothly the TouchPad can handle tasks like e-mail management, where you get a multi-paned window to see subject lines while reading the body of your messages. As you would expect, the TouchPad can manage music, photos, and videos with aplomb. PRODUCT FEATURES Capturing sequential shots is easier. • The TouchPad runs webOS • It features a 1024-by-768 resolution screen • TouchPad can handle tasks like e-mail management • It can print wirelessly to many printers • It has higher-quality audio on the device through the speakers and headphone jack • TouchPad’s black/grey body is virtually devoid of buttons.
UPDATE
Amkette launches wireless mouse for laptops
Stellar Drive Clone launched for Mac users
FEATURES
AMKETTE has launched Element – a luxury
• Scratch resistant piano finish for extra shine with a brushed metallic curvature • Specially crafted for laptop and netbook users • 2.4 GHz for good connectivity in a radius of up to 30ft • Rubberized sides for comfortable grip • Available in royal gold and silver colors • 1000 DPI sensor for high precision
laptop mouse, a specially crafted accessory in the colors-on-the-go range. As per the company, the Element has been designed specially for those who are cognizant about luxury and comfort. Element has a scratch-resistant body with a piano finish. The brushed metallic curvature of the mouse enhances the ‘element’ of style to functionality. The mouse, while travel-friendly and small, is packed with a host of features. The 2.4 GHz wireless technology gives good connectivity and augments the range and power of the mouse. The Plug & Forget Nano Receiver can be safely placed under the mouse during travel. The rubberized grip adds comfort to convenience. The 1000 DPI high precision sensor makes work much quicker. “The Element mouse allows users to have a luxurious laptop experience without compromising on functionality,” said Rajiv K Bapna, Director, Amkette. The Element mouse is available at a price of Rs. 795 and comes with a three-year warranty. Apart from 6000 retail outlets across India, this product is available nationwide in large format retail stores like e-Zone, Hypercity, Landmark, More and Jumbo as well.
Buffalo unveils new design of hard drive BUFFALO Technology has unveiled a new design of its Drive Station USB 2.0 hard drive with LEDs. As per the company, Buffalo’s Drive Station LED is an easy to use external hard drive for the simple addition of external storage to any device using a USB port. Also, one can see how much capacity is left on the drive with green and red LED indicator bar. “This drive features a sleek, attractive chassis that can be positioned vertically or horizontally, adapting to the location it is used in for efficient use of space,” said Susumu Kobayashi, Country Head, Buffalo Inc. As this works with PC and Mac, it makes it easier to access files from whichever computer the user is on. The device is available in the following capacities:- 1TB for Rs. 3700, 1.5TB for Rs. 4700, and, 2TB for Rs. 6000.
Stellar Information Systems, a creator and provider of advanced data recovery software and services, has announced the launch of the Mac hard drive clone utility “Stellar Drive Clone”. The launch is specifically targeted towards Mac customers, educators, developers and visionaries. According to the company, this software allows a user to clone his Mac hard drive in real-time. A user can create a mirror replica of his Mac drive or volumes onto a new destination drive and the same could be used to restore the data in situations like accidental formats or drive crash.Some features of this Drive Clone utility are cloning, imaging, restoration and creating a bootable DVD. It is available for Rs. 1650.
KEY ADVANTAGES * Plug and go with LED capacity meter. No software installation required * Integrated LED lights show how much capacity is left for recording favorite shows or storing your music, photo and data files * Turns on and off automatically with your computer * Eco friendly power saving mode * Goes into sleep mode while there is no access to Drive Station * Cuts down standby power consumption by up to 80% * Turbo PC & Turbo Copy
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BENQ XL2410T
UPDATE
INDULGE
It offers 3D gaming in an LED backlit glory. The hottest, the coolest and the funkiest next generation gadgets and devices for you
PRICE: `31,200
If you are an avid gamer, then we’ve got the right stuff for you! Get ready for some 3D gaming action with the Asus G53J and the Benq XL2410T. Or enjoy online gaming with the Razer Naga Molten mouse.
ASUS G53J It is claimed by the company as the world’s first gaming netbook with support for Nvidia 3D vision. It gives a rugged feel and look. PRICE: `112,499
HOT SONY NEX-5 With well-lit environments and outdoor shoots, this camera focusses fast.
NEW
SONY NWZ E454 It is a well rounded mid-range PMP
MAXTONE KPC-A5 It’s an entire PC retrofitted into a keyboard form factor. It’s basically a net-top without a screen and has huge space saving advantages.
PRICE: `6,990
PRICE: `34,990
PRICE: `14,590
RAZER NAGA MOLTEN SPL. EDITION It is a mouse designed for Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. PRICE: `4,990
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Like something? Want to share your objects of desire? Send us your wish-list or feedback to editor@itnext.in
UPDATE
OPEN DEBATE
BOOK FOR YOU A platform to air your views on latest developments and issues that impact you
Is your Vendor a Real Technology Partner?
AMAN MITTAL DEPUTY DIRECTOR, IT, LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY (LPU) With the IT Industry becoming complex these days, more and more products are turning digital. This has confused the buyers in terms of selection of the right product and price. The vendors usually help in two ways. One is by providing details on the variety of products available in the market by taking them through the facility line. Secondly, by providing a third party report which helps the buyer to take informed decisions. This helps the buyers select products that’ll be the best fit for their set up & to explain the usage of the product.
CHARU BHARGAVA ASSISTANT MANAGER-IT, SHEELA FOAM Today, vendors have become technology partners, as we don’t just buy a product, but buy the solution. When a vendor comes to us, they bring the technology with them. Being in the market, they are quite up to date on technological trends and new advancements, which they share while implementing the solutions. We always give preference to meet vendors who bring new technologies with them and help us to upgrade. Vendors now come with their full architecture, try to design the solutions as per our needs and then implement the solution.
MANISH SINHA HEAD IT, ON DOT COURIERS Modern trends such as mobile apps, SMS notifications, email updates, alerts, toll free numbers, 24/7 support are very much in use by vendors. They use effective helpdesk, ticket support and CRM systems. They also realized the potential power of getting in touch with their customers and getting recommendations. They are using different communication modes such as audio and video conferencing in order to conduct webinars, web ready references and testimonials. This helps them to get an edge over others. It is a vital aspect to get business going.
Creating and Managing Value TITLE: THE FOUR CORNERSTONES OF CORPORATE FINANCE. AUTHOR: TIM KOLLER, RICHARD DOBBS PUBLISHER: MCKINSEY & COMPANY INC. PRICE: RS 850
THE FINANCIAL crisis of 2008 rendered us all shy of taking risks. After all, the experience, observation, and intuition everyone seemed to have developed before the recession didn’t count for anything. The run-up to the financial crisis of 2008 is but one example of how easily financial myths, fads, and misconceptions overwhelm wisdom. Will life, henceforth, for stakeholders and investors be governed by the playsafe formula “low-risk, low-return,” as we are still nursing our wounds from the downturn? Not necessarily, if the four cornerstones of finance are kept in mind while taking financial decisions, believe Tim Koller, Richard Dobbs and Bill Huyett, partners at managementconsulting firm McKinsey & Company, in their ready-reckoner on long-term value creation – Value: The Four Cornerstones of Corporate Finance. The learning from the latest financial crisis and periods of economic bubbles and bursts throughout history has taught us that the laws of value creation and value measurement are timeless. IT NEXT VERDICT The book will help you to thoughtfully analyse the competitive dynamics of one’s industry, and make, and defend, decisions that will create value for investors and society at large.
Your views and opinion matter to us. Send us your feedback on stories and the magazine to the Editor at editor@itnext.in
STAR VALUE:
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MY LOG
SHASHWAT DC Associate Editor
Telepathy for Draupadi, Twitter for us
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ST
LU
IL
3 ESSENTIAL
READS RISK MANAGEMENT | INSIGHT
not limited to financial motivations alone. The political and ideological exploits can impact governments and non-governmental organisations in a massive way. As it appears, most of the new material on Wiki-leaks has been posted by insiders, giving a substantial challenge to companies that are grappling with flat security budgets, shifts in security policies, and a shortage of qualified IT staff. What’s more, the rise of mobility, social media and cloud based applications has posed a serious threat to information. And the worst part is that majority of organisations still don’t have the efficient risk management policy in place to fight with cyber criminals. In fact, experts believe that many of them are yet to fully grasp the seriousness and relevance of having such a policy in the first place, leaving a big hole in their entire security system.
ation Info atrm
Risk
Wikileaks has shown that organisations need to manage risk proactively, protecting not just the infrastructure that data resides in, but also the information itself BY JATINDER SINGH
Challenging times The industry estimates put the total losses associated with cyber crime at more than $1 trillion value in a year. In 2010, there have been at least 301 security breaches resulting in the exposure of more than 8.2 million records. Also, a webroot’s survey of 803 IT professionals at small and medium-sized companies reveals that Facebook, RSS feeds, and related Web 2.0-based malware is going to be more difficult to manage than e-mail based threats. The estimates suggest that while on one hand the fear is that the threats can
T
he recent revelations made by the Julian Assange-led WikiLeaks have not only stormed governments around the globe, but also rang the warning bell for many IT managers, sitting in their comfort zones with outdated information security policies in the Web 2.0 world. According to industry experts, the Wiki-leaks incident (especially diplomatic cables) has confirmed that intentional data theft and copying are
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Tips to Safeguard Your Digital Assets:
1 Do a regular risk assessment 2 Use genuine and licensed software and implement centralised and automatic management of security patches
3 Implement sound corporate IT governance in accordance of laws. 4 Expect targeted, complex threats 5 Besides the network perimeter, focus on increasing security as one moves towards the core which is the data
6 Notify employees when they try to send confidential data outside of the company.
7 Gain control over your entire network, with the help of identity & access management
8 Remove confidential data from Web posts before they are sent to social networking sites.
9 Use wi-fi security in case of deploying Wireless Access Points 10 Report breaches and incidences to designated authorities such as CERT-IN (www.cert-in.org.in) (As shared By Sanjay Bahl, Chief Security Officer, Microsoft and Shantanu Ghosh, Vice President, India Product Operations, Symantec)
arise from any unsuspected source, the problem gets really complicated when employees fail to be on the same page of security policies. “While the support of management and resource allocation is important, architecting security can only become effective and pervasive when everyone in the organisation are aware about security policies and follow it methodically,” says Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting.
“IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS NO LONGER RESTRICTED TO THE FOUR WALLS IN AN ORGANISATION, GIVEN THAT INFORMATION IS ACCESSED FROM MULTIPLE DEVICES AND PLATFORMS.” – Shantanu Ghosh, VP, India Product Operations, Symantec
“The problem gets complicated since we have less of legislation for data and whatever is available is insufficient to deal with the present scenario plagued by cyber crimes. Also, as a country, we do not have a redressal chain or body for governance to ensure a better picture related to data for individuals and corporate,” says Jacob Livingstone, Manager (IT) at BEC.
Plan your security In today’s cyber age security, it is important that every business realized the need to have a strong risk management architecture, as they supported and protected their trade secrets, proprietary information, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of their customers or employees. “A good risk management will always force you to think about what your assets are, what will happen to you or your company’s assets if a catastrophic failure occurs. And, How likely it is for something to happen to them” says Thiru Vengadam, MD, IFS Solutions India.
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Firms need to manage risk proactively. Pg 29 INSIGHT | STRATEGY
STRATEGY | INSIGHT
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f you believe what many economists are now saying, we have emerged from a prolonged economic malaise and the United States is poised for growth. Good news surely, but IT leaders have suffered right along with other executives in the corporate suite during these bad old days. The recent downturn cost a lot of talented IT leaders their jobs. It seems, then, to be an appropriate time to ask: “What can IT leaders do today to prepare for the next downturn?” Having worked with a great number of CIOs on the principles of World Class IT (introduced in my book, World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs), I have learned that the most successful executives focus their organisation’s efforts to ensure that they plan for the proverbial “rainy day,” while simultaneously encouraging innovation. There are four main areas on which these leading executives typically focus: defining the present and future state; strengthening governance; motivating employees; and investing in the future.
Likewise, it is critically important to have an “as is” and “to be” understanding of the IT infrastructure that is in place; both scenarios should be represented in your infrastructure road map. By plotting software, hardware, applications, networks and such into a road map—and maintaining that road map—you will have a clear picture of which components of your infrastructure are on the verge of being implemented, which are being maintained and added to, and which should be retired. The CIO and other IT leaders must make it part of their jobs to engage in regular, formal and informal communications with their businessside colleagues. This is important in order to get a preview of strategy before it is fully formed and to engender trust with business colleagues. It will also enable you to suggest ideas to the
PH OTO G R A PH Y: JAYA N K N A R AYA N A N
BY PETER HIGH
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It is critically important to develop and maintain a skills inventory of the people in your department. First and foremost, this requires defining taxonomy relative to those skills. Then, it’s essential to have all employees document the skills they currently possess. This skills inventory should be refreshed whenever there is a new hire, and through each evaluation cycle, providing an “as is” picture of the skills of your staff. Develop a workforce plan reflecting the skills the IT department will need in the future based on where the company is headed, business and IT strategy, and so forth. This is the “to be” state of the staff’s skills. The gulf between the “as is” picture and the “to be” state should then be evaluated; this will drive your training, recruiting and vendorengagement strategies. Meaningful evaluations must be conducted to identify your best employees.
business. Weaving IT into the fabric of the strategic plans of the business is critical. IT leaders must push business leaders to articulate their plans in a uniform manner. This way, IT can easily digest those plans and use them as valuable inputs to the aforementioned workforce plan and infrastructure road map. It is especially important that IT leaders make themselves strategically relevant when times are good. Once the business articulates its plans, IT should contemplate what those plans collectively indicate in terms of IT imperatives. Sample questions to consider: What are the business intelligence needs of our company’s various divisions now? What will our needs be in 12 months? In 24 months? How do these needs impact the IT investments we need to make today in order to support that long-term vision?
2 Strengthen Governance
1 Defining the Present and Future State
How can you apply yesterday’s lessons to tomorrow’s IT strategy? Focus on transparency, governance, motivation and innovation—the keys to thriving during good economic times and bad.
PHOTOG RAPHY: P HOTOS.COM
them. In a day's time, a BlackBerry representative visited her, took the handset, had it repaired and subsequently returned. Twitter empowered Ritra, much like telepathy did Draupadi. What surprised Ritra most was the sheer alarcity with which the company responded to her tweet, when all the correspondence to customer care fell on deaf ears. It is akin to brand management in cyberspace, ensuring that nothing untoward is spoken and the customers are happy. With Google now showing social media results on the search page, even incongrous tweets and Facebook update have become very critical for any brand. These days, more damage can be done by a disgruntled customer through social media than anything else. And companies are well understanding the same. With Twitter and FaceBook connecting millions multiple times in a day, even a small grouse can create a big cloud of negativity. All a layman needs is a good following on Twitter or Facebook to get the company to hear him out. Come to think of it, were a current Duryodhana stupid enough to set out on a similar misadventure with a tech-savvy Draupadi, I am sure it will be a tweet this time, which would read something like this, “#Duryodhana wishin 2 disrobe, Krsna need help URGENT! Do plz kck his *^%&.”.
“A GOOD IT MANAGER SHOULD NOT SHY AWAY FROM TAKING RESPONSIBILITIES. HE SHOULD BE WILLING TO WORK HARD TO ACHIEVE THE BEST RESULTS.” – Berjes Eric Shroff Manager – Information Technology (IT), Tata Services
Economic downturns and financial duress tend to lead enterprises and industries to toughen up their governance practices. All too often, we see these tightened controls relax again once dollars start to flow and budgets for IT projects increase. It’s smart, though, to retain rigorous governance practices in good times. This way, when the next downward cycle hits, your IT organisation will already have its practices fine-tuned, and it will not have to scramble to create processes applicable to distressed times. David Smoley, senior vice president and CIO of Flextronics International, says one key to his team’s success has been imitating the “lean” practices of his business partners. Although Flextronics, a provider of vertically integrated advanced design and electronics manufacturing services to original equipment manufacturers, recently announced record earnings, Smoley is in the midst of a global optimization campaign to continue to ensure that IT is operating as efficiently as possible. This begins with having a solid prioritization process.
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Here are the keys to thriving during good economic times and bad. Pg 32 CUBE CHAT | BHAVITA SAXENA
FAC T F I L E NAME: BHAVITA SAXENA CURRENT DESIGNATION: DGM-ISBS
LEARN TO PLAY AND
CURRENT ROLE: IT HEAD WORK EXPERIENCE: 2008 – PRESENT: DGM ISBS, RFCL LTD. 2004 -2008: ACCOUNT MANAGER, BIRL ASOFT 2002-2004: DELIVERY MANAGER, GE CAPITAL INTERNATIONAL SERVICES / GENPACT
IMPROVE
2000 -2002: DELIVERY MANAGER, UMIT / ESAMSUNG UMIT INFOTECH
“One should learn to do things smartly without generating much hype to get rid of the undue pressure to perform,” says Bhavita Saxena, DGM-ISBS, RFCL
1995 – 2000: PROJECT MANAGER, XEROX MODICORP
HAVING A ROLE MODEL IS JUST 50% OF WORK. REMAINING 50% IS TO FIND THE RIGHT MENTOR
BY JATINDER SINGH
W MY SUCESS
MANTRA To put in my best effort and not consider the results. This gives me the strength to step back when needed
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ith a little over two decades of experience in the IT industry, Bhavita Saxena, DGM-ISBS, RFCL, prefers taking the step-by-step approach to perfection. She considers herself to be a self-motivated person, who loves to try out new things. For her, success lies not in reaching the destination, but in making the journey and taking each step. Hence, it’s crucial for her to think strategically–always and be prepared for all eventualities. “My mantra is to put in my best effort and not consider the results. This gives me the strength to step back when needed,” she says. In a competitive world, where even small achievements can lead to adulation, Saxena advises in performing smartly without generating hype to get rid of “that undue
pressure to perform”. “One should know how to play the game—whether it’s a test or a one-day match,” she says with a smile. A keen observer of latest trends, she believes that one should act like a “change manager” and adjust to strategic shifts in the business environment. That is a lesson that should be learnt from a mentor and is one of the most important lessons in any profession. But, she doesn’t have just one mentor. “I admire former Prime Minister of India, Late Indira Gandhi, for her strength to stick by her choices. I admire Narayana Murthy for keeping his feet firmly on the ground and Kiran Bedi when it comes to her courage to doing things without any fear,” she states. “Having a role model is just 50% of the work. Remaining 50% is to find the right mentor,” she adds.
PH OTOG RAPH Y: MADI SH ETT Y MAN ASA
E
ons ago, lured into a game of dice, the Pandavas lost all their wealth and liberty at the hands of the wily Shakuni and the Kaurava Prince Duryodhana. Intoxicated with power, Duryodhana ordered his brother Dushashana to disrobe the Pandava queen Draupadi in full public view, so to forever shame the Pandavas. A distraught Draupadi, on finding no aid from her enslaved husbands or the courtiers, used telepathy to call upon Lord Krishna, who she considered as her brother, to come to her aid. Needless to say, Krishna did, and so the honor of the Pandavas was saved. Luckily for Draupadi, she had direct connect with someone who could help her out in times of distress. That was not the case with Ritra Jain, recently. Impressed by the glitzy looks, she had purchased a sleek BlackBerry device, only for it to conk off almost the next day. After much followups with the retail outlet and the company, a saddened Ritra, as a last resort, opened her Twitter account and punched in her sorrows. All that she wanted do was share views with her friends, get some sympathies and possibly forewarn followers against what she deemed as unsatisfactory service by the company. Much to her surprise, within an hour of her sad tweet, she recieved a call from the BlackBerry firm, asking about her issues with the phone and troubleshooting
R AT
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: ANOOP PC
A tech-savvy Draupadi would probably tweet a current Duryodhana to doom...
When not at work, Saxena enjoys meditating and unlike several professionals, has one-onone conversations with colleagues. While she doesn’t call herself a voracious reader, Saxena enjoys books on spirituality and religion, which help her to remain “calm” when life gets too unpredictable. “My life has had some desperate moments. I was always surrounded by family and friends and received my strength to fight from them. However, I believe that my true strength lay within me. I may have struggled, but I could always look within me to find a way out,” she says candidly. While some moments are painful, there are those life-changing ones that make one happy–has she felt that in her life? “My most magical moment till date was when I received the Next100 award. It was unbelievable. It
took some time to sink in. When I processed it (information) finally, I felt on top of the world,” Saxena reveals. “Though the field of IT is considered to be ‘women-friendly’, climbing the promotion ladder is tough. This award was like an affirmation of my hard work. And, I believe, it also proved to be motivating for other women IT professionals, who wish to break the glass ceiling,” We had to ask – with an award already in her kitty, what is the next step? Is she ready to don the CIO hat? “I am ready for any role which gives me the opportunity to grow in terms of technical, managerial and humanitarian expertise. It’s the diversity of a portfolio which excites me, not the post or designation,” she signed off.
1990 -1995: TEAM LEADER, THE TIMES OF INDIA GROUP, DELHI ACHIEVEMENTS: WON “NEXT 100 FUTURE CIO” 2010 AWARD NLP MASTER PRACTITIONER CERTIFICATION: SECURED SIX SIGMA GREEN BELT CERTIFICATION BY REDUCING DOWNTIME OF 19 EXTREMELY CUSTOMER CRITICAL APPLICATIONS FAVORITE QUOTE: LEARN FROM YESTERDAY, LIVE FOR TODAY, HOPE FOR TOMORROW. THE IMPORTANT THING IS NOT TO STOP QUESTIONING – ALBERT EINSTEIN FAVORITE BOOK: THE SEVEN SPIRITUAL L AWS OF SUCCESS BY DEEPAK CHOPRA
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An exclusive interaction with Bhavita Saxena, DGM-ISBS, RFCL Pg 58
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