Harvesting Mobility

AutomatingPatient Care

PAGE 44

LITTLE GIANTS

Shared Services Manifesto

PAGE 18

BEST OF BREED

Outsourcing Saga

PAGE 06

I BELIEVE

From Left: AVINASH ARORA, Director - IS, New Holland Fiat (India);S C MITTAL, Senior ED, Group CTO, IFFCO; SURESH A SHANMUGAM,

Head, BITS, M&M Financial Services; GIRISH RAO, Head IT, Marico

HarvestingMOBILITY

A 9.9 Media Publication

Volume 05 | Issue 22

July | 07 | 2010 | Rs.50Volume 05 | Issue 22

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Enterprise CIOs have sniffed big business opportunity in using mobile technology to connect with customers | PAGE 26

EDITORIALRAHUL NEEL MANI | [email protected]

3thectoforum.com 07 JULY 2010CTO FORUM

From Dreams to Reality:

Innovation is the link CIOs need to focus on

During my visit to United States late last month, I

got the opportunity to hear one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Jeffrey Katzenberg is the CEO of DreamWorks Ani-mation. With this opportunity came the privilege of seeing extended previews of a couple of megareleases from the ani-mation giant, including Kung Fu Panda 2 and Megamind. Without any exaggeration, Kung

from that hour-long speech, one statement stuck on. “Every single thing you see on-screen comes out of somebody's cre-ativity. It doesn't exist already. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamt. And to make these dreams a reality, one needed to be very innovative.”

Did he say something new, or radically different—perhaps not. Why then, do I remember it so clearly?

Because there is a message for all of us in what Katzenberg said. Five years ago, operational excellence was probably the key driver in a CIO’s life. Today, that is not all that you need to focus on. Innovation is now an insep-arable part of the job. It is the winning formula. And being the CIO you should be driving

Fu Panda blew my socks off! It was an incredible piece of ani-mation, full of action and emo-tion, painted in vibrant colours, texture and depth. There was a remarkable change from the earlier version of the film. Not that I am an ardent follower, but it was perhaps the most impres-sive piece of animation I had seen in my life.

Along with the preview, came Katzenberg's keynote. And

innovation. The ongoing thrust to innovate may have come from the need to reduce costs, but in the long term, you—as the CIO—are expected to create competitive advantage. There's no shortage of creative ideas for making business more competi-tive. All you need to do is to con-jure creative ideas that can be realised through innovation.

EDITOR’S PICK44 Automating Patient Care

RGCI's drive to integrate applications, streamlined administrative processes and made treatment procedures hassle-free for patients.

4 07 JULY 2010 thectoforum.comCTOFORUM

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COVER STORY

26 | Harvesting Mobility Enterprise CIOs have sniffed a big business opportunity in the rural parts. They have clearly understood the role mobile technology can play to help them serve customers in far-flung locations.

COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o K.P.T House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. TTC Ind. Area, Plot No. A-403, MIDC Mahape, Navi Mumbai 400709

COLUMNS06 | I BELIEVE:THE OUTSOURCING SAGA Rajeev Batra, CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices on taking calculated risks

56 | VIEW POINT: HP VS CISCO The odds seem to be in HP's favour. BY STEVE DUPLESSIE

FEATURES36 | NEXT HORIZONS: THE NEW MA-TRIX A special report on how to use technology to reshape your company.BY HONORIO PADRON AND ERIK DORR

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VOLUME 05 | ISSUE 22 | 07 JULY 2010

Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh

Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur

EDITORIALEditor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani

Executive Editor: Geetaj ChannanaResident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra

Associate Editor: Dominic KAssistant Editor: Aditya Kelekar

Principal Correspondent: Vinita GuptaCorrespondent: Sana Khan

DESIGNSr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan

Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK

Manager Design: Chander Shekhar Sr. Visualisers: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha

Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Suresh Kumar Designer: Sristi Maurya

Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

ADVISORY PANELAjay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limited

Anil Garg, CIO, DaburDavid Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy

Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej IndustriesManish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo

India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCoRaghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India

S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFLSantrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group

Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices

Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank

Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay

Vijay Mehra, Former Global CIO, Essar Group

SALES & MARKETINGVP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh

National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623)Product Manager: Rachit Kinger

Asst. Brand Manager: Arpita GanguliGM South: Vinodh K (09740714817)

Senior Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar SinghGM North: Lalit Arun (09582262959)

GM West: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755) Kolkata: Jayanta Bhattacharya (09331829284)

PRODUCTION & LOGISTICSSr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath

Production Executive: Vilas MhatreLogistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari,

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14 | BEST OF BREED:ANDROIDGROWS UP The underdog is ready to fight the big daddies of enterprise mobile tech market.

REGULARS

03 | EDITORIAL08 | ENTERPRISE

ROUND-UP49 | HIDDEN

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advertisers’ index

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14 53

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

20 | Blink Twice Every Second. Michael Sentonas, CTO, APAC, McAfee on putting research in the cloud and embracing whitelisting.

20

I BELIEVE


CURRENTCHALLENGE

BY RAJEEV BATRA CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices THE AUTHOR HAS over 15 years of experience in decision-making positions in the

IT departments of telcos.

LATE ENTRANTS IN THE OUTSOURCING DOMAIN FACED QUALITY ISSUES DUE TO STRETCHED RESOURCES OR LIMITED SKILLS

OUTSOURCING in IT has been prevalent in the mature economies since 1990’s, primarily to bridge the skill and resource availability gaps.

Turn of the century saw the advent of outsourcing in offshore model, where third world countries like India, Philippines, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and few others destinations started fulfilling the requirements of developed world, be it for software, applications, voice processing, data processing, manufacturing or logistics.

In early 2000’s with the increase in automation, there was a lot of inno-vation in the area of outsourcing. Resources and task fulfillment were no longer the prime drivers for outsourc-ing but business outcome and unlock-ing value became the mantra.

In India, the rapid growth in sever-al sectors likes telecommunications, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, hos-pitality, logistics, power and trans-port, required rapid IT automation with infusion of resources, processes and practices to sustain the scale and operations thereof.

Organisations at various stages of growth chose different models to suit their objective e.g. business transfor-mation, scale with speed, operational excellence, unlocking value etc.

The point of inflexion for IT out-sourcing in India came in early 2004, when a few path-breaking historical deals were done in the area of tele-communications and FMCG. One of these deals was a classic match of the vision of two big organisations; both were able to leverage each other’s strengths to have a win-win situa-tion. ‘One relied on scale with speed, while the other's vision centred around a utility computing, leading to both companies reaping huge ben-efits: be it reaching the top market position or increasing shareholders value or gaining many other such deals. Needless to say, at the time of agreement both organisations took and shared a calculated but huge risk, but at the end there was a big success story to tell.

Many other outsourcing deals fol-lowed. However, the advantage and USP gained by the early movers was not realised to its full extent by the late adopters of this model. Some of the late entrants even faced quality issues due to stretched resources or limited bandwidth of particular skills, leading to delays in delivery and over-all business dissatisfaction.

The Outsourcing SagaCalculated risk taking succeeds

CTOForum LinkedIn GroupJoin close to 400 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn group

for latest news and hot enterprise technology discussions.

Share your thoughts, participate in discussions and win

prizes for the most valuable contribution. You can join The

CTOForum group at:

www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2580450

One of the hot discussions on the group are:How do you treat your vendors – like a partner,

a service provider, or a mere salesman?

In IT, it is all about partnerships. We will not be able to

satisfy our end customers unless all pieces of the jigsaw

puzzle fit together perfectly. A closer comparison is with

an orchestra or a stage play. The end result is totally

dependent on each participant performing its role as per

the plan. If all partners work towards joint objectives, we

will never have to open the contract papers for missing

deliverables or SLAs.

—Asmita JunnarkarChief Information Officer at Voltas Limited.

In today's business world the use of words like service

provider, system integrator etc. are no longer valid. The

complexity and specialisations required in any industry

are challenges that need "collaboration" with specialists

for continued success. I have followed one simple golden

rule - there is no "I” and “You" with those who work with

you - even though they may be from different organisa-

tions. Only genuine collaboration and partnership bring

success. I consciously avoid using the word "vendor" in all

my interactions.

—KR SreenivasanCIO and CQH, Tata Capital Limited.

WISE BY FAILURESLearn from your failures. Don't just preach, practice it!

“By appraising failed projects, we learn what not to do the next time around. But by appraising successful projects, we learn what to do, and what to do better next time.”To read the full story go to:

http://www.thectoforum.com/content/wise-failures

CTOF Connect In a one-of-its-kind feature, the CIO of Hero Honda Motors India, Vijay Sethi, interviews Ravi Sud, the company's CFO, on what role IT should play in an organisation and how he uses IT to solve other problems. To read the full story go to:

thectoforum.com/content/my-trump-card

OPINION

SHARAT MATHUR GM-IT, Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS)


Enterprise

ROUND-UP

STORY INISDE

Flock announces that its new browser is built

on Chromium Pg 12

of business-es are likely or highly like-ly to acquire companies in the next 12 months

Jet Airways deploys SAP business intelligence tools. Helps enable faster decision-making. SAP'S analytic tools have helped Jet Airways quicken

the data availability process and speed up its decision-making process. The company has implemented the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning and Consolidation.

The main reason for the implementation was the growth in business and need for quicker data analysis.

Kavita Chopra, DGM- Budgeting and MIS, Jet Airways says, “I cannot put a value to the savings that we at have got due to this tool but with the help of the BO tool we have done the route profitability and cost allocation at the most granular level. We can find out a flight’s most

profitable route, landing navigation rate, oil consump-tion etc. It’s important to look at the Profit and Loss (P&L) of every aircraft. All this information is now avail-able in real time. We carry out the P&L on flights every week and depending on the future booking loads we can take the decision of combining two flights instead of fly-ing two separate flights.”

Before deploying this solution, the airline used to have reports on a transaction system. The BO tool has helped the airline in getting the reports on time and increased their decision ma king process.

—Vinita Gupta

57%DATA BRIEFING

SOURCE: RECENT ERNST & YOUNG STUDY

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Jamcracker's solution: Extends enterprise IT command and control to public and private cloud servicesJAMCRACKER, the unified cloud services delivery and manage-ment company has announced the Jamcracker Platform Enter-prise Edition. It addresses the growing problems associated with ad hoc cloud services adop-tion within corporate networks. The platform is a services deliv-ery and lifecycle management solution that aggregates all cloud services – public and/or private – within an enterprise and provides a central point of control.

The platform empowers IT departments to become a cloud service broker and offer any combination of cloud-based services to their organisation including private and public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS solutions. To enable enterprises to unify command and control for disparate cloud services, the Jamcracker Platform allows IT organisations to offer a catalogue of aggregated services with uni-fied provisioning, access control, administration, auditing, moni-toring, support, and departmental charge backs.

TheJamcracker Platform aggre-gates and delivers all cloud services from one integrated infrastructure, providing IT with unprecedented visibility and con-trol at the enterprise as well as at the department or line of busi-ness level. From a single manage-ment interface IT departments can centrally and consistently manage multiple cloud offerings.

“Many larger enterprises are struggling with the unauthorized and decentralized adoption of cloud services and are looking for a solution to control and manage these in the same way they man-age traditional IT assets,” said Steve Crawford, VP of Marketing and Business Development for Jamcracker. “The Jamcracker Platform enables IT departments to consolidate the delivery and management of private and public cloud services in order to incur the benefits of cloud com-puting, but not the risks.”

The Jamcracker Platform Enterprise Edition is available immediately from Jamcracker and its business partners worldwide.

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Next wave in global delivery models to focus on location portfolio. Findings from a new Everest study called Global Sourcing 2.0

THE MATURING global sourcing scenario has presented suppliers with a dynamic marketplace based on changing buyers need and demands. These buyer demands lay extreme emphasis on the need for next generation characteristics in global services models, marked by globally diversified delivery footprint, industrialised delivery approach, and a global talent pool for growth, according to Everest, a global con-sulting and research firm.

As the outsourcing industry evolves into a more sophisticated space, service provid-ers are looking for means of catering to the

highly progressed buyer needs, which go beyond labor cost arbitrage. These buyer preferences include an increased geo-graphic and services scope, sophisticated delivery requirements, and a more thought-ful approach towards a global sourcing portfolio centered around value maximiza-tion and risk management, according to a new Everest study, Global Sourcing 2.0 – Evolving Global Delivery Imperatives for Outsourcing Service Providers. Accordingly, service providers are re-evaluating their global delivery model designs to meet next-generation global sourcing challenges and

According to IDC, the social platforms market showed a YoY growth of 55.9%. The top 3 vendors in 2009 were IBM, Communispace, and Telligent.

opportunities. Locations portfolio, operating model and talent management emerge as key dimensions on which service providers are redesigning their delivery models. The Everest report analyses key global delivery trends, next generation imperatives, and discusses their implications for buyers and service providers.

“The evolution of the supplier delivery models is evident; more so with the indus-try dynamics to remain high on growth requirements, even when faced with an extreme competitive environment. As the buyers’ sourcing strategies and engage-ments mature, service providers are re-thinking their global delivery models to meet evolving buyer requirements related to location risk diversification, location-agnostic & consistent delivery experience, faster and lower cost transitions and deep domain expertise,” said Amneet Singh, Vice President, Research, Everest Group “We believe that a diversified and well-balanced location portfolio, industrialisation-driven operating model comprising global delivery suites and enabling infrastructure, and a rich and capable worldwide talent pool will be critical for suppliers to compete and be relevant in this next phase of global sourc-ing evolution,” added Singh.

“Understanding these global delivery trends holds importance for service provid-ers and buyers alike,” said Gaurav Gupta, Principal & Country Head, India, Everest Group. “While it is critical for service pro-viders to be aware of these imperatives and prepare to compete with the changing mar-ket paradigm, buyers need to incorporate and leverage these next-generation global delivery characteristics in their decision making to drive improved value from their sourcing programs,” added Gaurav.

The Everest Report, Global Sourcing 2.0 – Evolving Global Delivery Imperatives for Outsourcing Service Providers, is based on the analysis of global delivery trends of leading global and Indian service provid-ers, supplemented with discussions with buyers and service providers, and leverages Everest’s extensive experience in serving the global sourcing industry. The report presents the global delivery trends with per-tinent examples, data analysis and observa-tions, and draws important implications for service providers as well as buyers.

GLOBAL TRACKER

Growth in worldwide revenue for the social

platforms market

SOURCE: IDC

Year 2008 Year 2009

$237million

$369.7billion

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Worldwide IT Spending Growth Gartner revises earlier prediction of 5.3% growth to 3.9% for 2010

CHROMIUM TILT

The open source platform Chro-

mium just got a new shine. Flock,

the self-proclaimed Social Web

Browser, has announced that it

will use Chromium and discon-

tinue the use of Firefox's Gecko

engine in the development of its

browser.

Flock has been proud of its

new browser's speed. “As the first

major browser other than Google

Chrome to be built on the Chro-

mium platform, the new Flock is

blazingly fast!” CEO Shawn Har-

din said in a blog post.

“With Social becoming a new

way for everyone to engage, dis-

cover, work and play online, we

decided last year that it was time

to build a completely new and dif-

ferent version of Flock. Our goal

was to redesign Flock to meet the

needs of all active social media

users, and anyone who seeks

to better manage the volume of

information, media and relation-

ships they interact with online

each day,” Hardin said.

Hardin has touted the a new

feature in the browser that search-

es one's personal networks.

“The Web is fast-becoming the

Social Web. More and more users

around the world are discovering

the powerful benefits of being

connected. At Flock, we believe

passionately that this global phe-

nomenon is literally bringing the

Internet to life. It’s the beginning

of a new chapter in the history of

the Internet,” Hardin said.

WORLDWIDE IT spending

is forecast to total $3.350 tril-

lion in 2010, an increase of 3.9

percent from 2009 spending

of $3.225 trillion, according to

the latest outlook by Gartner,

Inc. Gartner has lowered its

outlook for the IT industry

from the first quarter of this

year when it forecast world-

wide IT spending to grow 5.3

percent, primarily due to the

devaluation of the euro ver-

sus the U.S. dollar since the

beginning of the year.

"The European sovereign

debt crisis is having an

impact on the outlook for

IT spending," said Richard

Gordon, research vice

president at Gartner. "The

U.S. dollar has strengthened

against the euro during the

second quarter of 2010, and

this trend will likely continue

in the second half of 2010,

which will put downward

pressure on U.S.-dollar-

denominated IT spending

growth."

"Longer-term, public-sec-

tor spending will be curtailed

in Europe as governments

struggle to bring budget defi-

cits under control during the

next five years and to reduce

debt during the next 10 years,"

Mr. Gordon said. "Private-sec-

tor economic activity will also

likely be hindered because of

the direct impact of austerity

measures on key government

suppliers and the indirect

impact caused by the 'ripple

effect.' An effective policy

response will be critical to

stimulate investment in gen-

eral and in IT in particular."

VERIZON BUSINESS a unit of Veri-zon Communications, is banking heavily on the adoption of cloud computing model for its future business growth.

The company has strengthened its extensive Asia-Pacific network infrastructure by opening a second data centre in Hong Kong. The new facility will enhance Verizon’s abil-ity to deliver new cloud and data centre services in the region — and provide direct access to Verizon’s global network — to meet the growing demand of the company’s

enterprise customers.Verizon already has many small

companies as its cloud service customers.

“Cloud is no longer a buzzword for us and we believe that the market is moving towards everything as a service. We are making significant investments in our cloud offerings,” said Joe Crawford, Executive Director, IT Solutions, Verizon Business.

The investment is a part of the $16.8 billion to $17.2 billion that Verizon Communications plans to

spend this year building, operat-ing and integrating its advanced, reliable and high-performance net-working and computing platforms.

“We continue to serve our pres-ence globally to better serve our multinational customers and to accelerate the delivery of next-generation cloud services,” said Yali Liu, Director of Asia-Pacific Net-work Planning, Verizon Business.

She added that the company will bring in new technologies to make cloud more cost effective, reliable and secure. Verizon also provides customers the flexibility to choose the geography where they would like to host their cloud services.

To address the issue of security and authentication, Verizon partnered with Novell in April this year. The solution called as Secure Access Services is an on-demand identity and access management service that aimed at enterprise clients to outsource their infrastructure and expertise required to extend and manage user access to cloud-based resources while maintaining control over policies and governance.

Verizon has also tied up with IBM and McAfee among others.

—By Ashwani Mishra. The cor-respondent visited Singapore on an invitation from Verizon for attending the press conference.

Cloud is real and here: Verizon Business. Opens second data centre in Hong Kong

percent, primarily due to the

wide IT spending to grow 5.3

year when it forecast world-

devaluation of the euro ver-

"Longer-term, public-sec-

tor spending will be curtailed

in Europe as governments

tor economic activity will also

Mr. Gordon said. "Private-sec-

likely be hindered because of

sus the U.S. dollar since the

FACT TICKER


BEST OF

BREED 5 Steps to Making Virtual Desktop a Reality Pg 16

FEATURE INSIDE

Let's face it, BlackBerry owns the enter-prise mobile tech market. There's no disputing that, but increasing numbers of analysts are raising the cry that RIM's stranglehold is giving way to Google's

relentless Android charge. The headline news is that, by some counts, Android already outsells iPhone in all markets – Motorola happily reports it cannot keep up with demand for its Android phones. The "hot" mobile tech phones of summer (iPhone 4G handsets aside) are shaping up to be Sprint's Evo and Samsung's Galaxy S, both running on Google's mobile OS.

"Android is the platform to watch," said Vinayak Naik, vice president, Content at AppDiscover, a mobile tech apps development company. "While BlackBerry might have the upper hand in enterprise markets and Apple might be showing great strides in the consumer market, we feel these two players will be ceding their pre-eminent position to Android in the next 12 to 18 months."

Apps are in, BlackBerry doesn't have enough, iPhone has the apps but it hasn't persuaded big business it is a serious mobility device. CIOs need to brace themselves for a stampede of employees seeking authorisation to use app-loving Android phones on company business.

What should you say?You should say "Yes", according to the experts.

There's a mounting acceptance of the need to look beyond BlackBerry in the enterprise. To wit, here are 10 reasons Android deserves consideration for employees who have outgrown BlackBerry and want a genuine mobile Internet experience:

1 The new OS (Android 2.2) makes it easy for enterprise to use Android phones, said Kevin

Kitagwa, director of Strategic Marketing at MIPS, a

AndroidGrows UpThe underdog is ready to fight the big daddies of enterprise mobile tech market. ROB MCGARVEY

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B E S T O F BR E E D MO B I L E T E CH N O LO GY M A RK E T

developer of processor architectures. "With better support for Microsoft Exchange (mail, calendar and global address books) and more enterprise security features such as remote wipe and password policies, Android 2.2 will make it easier for corporate IT departments to support it." Older versions of Android were undeniably bulky with enterprise email but Android 2.2 changes all that.

2 Great availability across networks also goes in favour of Android, says enterprise mobil-

ity expert Azita Arvani of The Arvani Group. Of course, BlackBerry can lay similar claims but iPhone cannot (it comes with AT&T lock in). You want Verizon? T-Mobile? Sprint? Android delivers choice. It's even on AT&T.

3 Ditto for device choices, as Google enlists an army of manufacturers, from

HTC to Motorola, to create Android phones. This makes it easier for a particular user to find the phone that matches their needs. It's also produced a range of price points to suit most budgets.

4 "Great integration with Google Maps and other location based services," says

Rushang Shah, director of marketing at CompanionLink Software, “can be a huge advantage in routing a mobile workforce to the right places at minimal cost.”

5 Tight integration with Google Voice means the mobile phone can easily be made a

component of a unified business communica-tions strategy. It also means the enterprise can make easy use of lower cost calling options.

6 A blizzard of apps: 50,000+ in the official Android apps

store alone, and independent apps stores now are sprouting up. Many apps are enterprise/productivity oriented. Yes, there are more apps for the iPhone, but there are more apps than anybody could possibly need available on Android.

7 At least some Android phones – for instance,

Sprint's EVO – can double as WiFi hotspots and, says analyst Mike Demler, an independent industry analyst based in San Jose, California, USA, that can help cut travel expenses (no need to pay exorbitant in-room WiFi access fees).

8 The open Android platform is a key advantage because it means that develop-

ment of the OS will continue at a fast pace.

9 That same open platform also means enterprise can introduce its own custom

changes, to better suit the particular busi-ness, said Eugene Goland, president of Data-Art, an application development company.

10 "Rapid OS update cycle leads to quicker fixes and resolution of issues," said

Shah. Fiddling with the OS can produce bad code but, in the Android universe, fixes tend to come very fast.

Does all this add up to a sweep for Android? Maybe, but consider this final point from Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise

Mobile who pointed out that the very openness of Android has bred fragmentation and increased incompatibility issues causing "headaches for IT," he said. Apps that run on Android 2.1 don't necessarily run on 1.6 and, even more problematic, every phone manufacturer is free to add some of their own code on top of the OS. This means a Motorola Android may behave very differently from an

HTC or a Samsung."This is the one disadvantage I see with

switching to Android," said Rosenthal who otherwise said he hears from ever mounting numbers of enterprise customers that they want more information on doing just that.

There is no counting BlackBerry out in enterprise, but there definitely also is a new kid on the block that is fast winning credibil-ity. It's too early to predict Android will topple BlackBerry, but it is isn't too early to pull up a seat to get a close-up view of what is shaping up as a brutal brawl for enterprise dollars.

As a busy freelance writer for more than 30

years, Rob McGarvey has written for many lead-

ing publications including NY Times and Harvard

Business Review. McGarvey covers CEOs, busi-

ness, high tech, human resources, real estate,

and the energy sector. This article is published

with prior permission from www.cioupdate.com.

9%IS THE MARKET

SHARE OF

ANDROID, WHICH

IS STILL 1/3RD OF

IPHONE'S FIGURES

5 Steps to MakingVirtual Desktop a RealityAn application audit will help you assess whether VDI makes sense for your organisation. BY DAVE STROM

While the idea of making virtual desktop a reality may not be on many IT radar screens yet, a few shops are beginning to implement these tools as a way of keeping their desktops inside the data centre where they can be more

readily managed, updated, and secured. The idea has some merit, particularly for those of us that began our computing careers in the mainframe era with 3270 terminals. But the road to total desktop virtualisation isn't easy, and can be overwhelming.

Before you consider VDI, do an applications audit and see how


G RE E N I T B E S T O F BR E E D

Virtual Access Suite. Part of your explorations here is to figure out which remote control protocols you will need to use, such as Win-dows Remote Desktop Connection.

STEP 5 Purchase thin clients or ordinary PCs for your endpoints. There are specialised thin client computers from HP, ChipPC, Wyse, Sun Ray, and Praim.com that offer cost and energy savings over ordinary PCs for your endpoints, but they also offer challenges in that they are usually under-powered devices that may not deliver all the applications or performance you require. Some thin clients only work with particular hypervisors and protocols too, so that is why we've saved this step until last. Some, such as the Wyse S-10-VDI, come bundled with the Leostream Broker clients to make things a bit easier.

One other factor to consider is smart card support, to enable users to login to their desktops easily and automatically.

As you can see, there is a lot of technology to evaluate, test, and deploy before you can be free from the traditional unmanaged desk-top that a user is free to use and abuse at will.

Dave Strom is a freelance writer living in St. Louis and the former editor-

in-chief of Network Computing magazine, DigitialLanding.com, and Tom's

Hardware.com. He has written two books and numerous articles on net-

working, the Internet, and IT security topics. He can be reached at david@

strom.com and his blog can be found at strominator.com. This article is

published with prior permission from www.cioupdate.com.

many of the following situations you have in your enterprise. The more you have, the more problems you will find with deploying VDI to these users: Bi-directional audio applications across your network Synchronizing PDAs and smartphones from your desktops Applications that depend on low-latency network connections Heavy graphics users such as CAD and desktop publishing Other oddball peripherals attached to your desktops such as scan-

ners and specialty printersHere are five steps to consider what it would take to fully deploy

VDI and how you could evolve towards this goal:

STEP 1 Pick your storage area network (SAN) and virtual machine (VM) hypervisor suppliers. You'll need to beef up both eventually, but if you don't have much experience with either, now is the time to get started. Just about any SAN vendor will work with VDI, but the key things to look for are scalability. Once you start saving all those desktop VMs to your SAN you can take up a lot more space.

There are four major VM hypervisor suppliers: VMware, Citrix Xen, Microsoft and Sun (listed in order of their suitability for VDI from best to least). All three sell VM servers such as VMware's ESX that are good solutions for VDI, but once you start down the path of one vendor's products, it isn't easy to switch or mix and match. So, make sure you are comfortable with these basic virtualisation tech-nology providers before proceeding.

Part of this step is looking at server hardware to house all of your VMs. Cisco's UCS is one worth looking at, because of the memory and VM density that you can support with this device. In one dem-onstration from VirtualStorm.com earlier this fall at VMworld, there were more than 400 VMs running Windows XP on each of six blades on a single device. Each XP instance had more than 90 GB of applications contained in its VDI image, which was very impressive.

STEP 2 Look at application streaming tools as a way to begin to deliver applications to your desktops. There are three major stream-ing providers here: VMware's ThinApp, Symantec's Endpoint Virtu-alisation Suite, and Microsoft's App-V. Microsoft and VMware both work best with their own hypervisors, while Symantec's can run on any platform. (To get an idea of how complex these streaming tools are, take a look at a screencast video that I prepared for Symantec.)

STEP 3 Gain experience with VM image management tools. Each of the major vendors offers a series of tools to make changes to the original VM instance that you want to duplicate and deploy across your enterprise. For example, VMware offers vSphere and View Composer. There are a number of third-party tools that are worth exploring here, because they offer more features and can scale across larger deployments. Two worth checking out are Liquid-WareLabs.com and VDIworks.com.

STEP 4 Look at connection brokers to manage how you will deploy your desktops. These products determine which protocol and remote desktop host is assigned to a particular user. They include such vendors as Citrix Desktop Broker for Presentation Server, Leo-Stream Virtual Desktop Connection Broker, and Quest Software's

Before you consider VDI, do an applications audit and see how many of the mentioned situations you have in your enterprise. The more you have, the more problems you will find with deploying VDI.

18 07 JULY 2010 thectoforum.comCTO FORUM

Essar has built a shared services environment for selected appli-cations across the group to improve time to market and reduce cost by leveraging a flexible IT model where resources can be provisioned on the fly as per business demand.

Aligning IT with businessAt Essar group, aligning IT with business strategy was a priority. As part of the IT plan, the company needed a new architectural framework that would allow the IT and business teams to closely align business and IT requirements for the group.

Over the period of last three years, Essar has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model, in the pro-cess taking many initiatives such as creation of a consolidated datacen-tre at Hazira, consolidation of IT infrastructure services for the entire group and deployment of blade servers and enterprise storage.Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group says that the group has done away with the concept of infrastructure owner-ship by individual companies of the group wherein the applications were installed on individual servers and there was not much importance given to the proper utilisation of the infrastructure.

The Shared Services Manifesto Challages

Essar needed a new ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK that would allow the IT and business teams to closely ALIGN THEIR REQUIREMENTS. BY VINITA GUPTA

CASE STUDY | ESSAR

19thectoforum.com 07 JULY 2010CTOFORUM

CA S E S T U DY B E S T O F BR E E D

COMPANY DASHBOARD

COMPANY NAME

Essar Group

BUSINESSESSteel, Oil & Gas, Power,

Communications,

Shipping Ports &

Logistics, Construction

and Minerals

REVENUE US$ 15 Billion

HEAD IT Jayantha Prabhu

INDIA HEADShashi Ruia, Chairman,

Essar Group

“Our infrastructure was ready for the next step of optimisa-tion – building a shared service model based on virtualisa-tion. After looking at the various technologies in the market that could help us in achieving our objective, we zeroed in on the BladeSystem Matrix Solution offered by HP.”

Shared service modelThe implementation was done in April 2010 at Essar’s Mum-bai office. When Essar started the project they discussed about the key elements to enable a shared services model and finally decided that the infrastructure had to be:

Service-oriented: Operating IT as a collection of services rather than one overseeing a collection of equipment and a pile of code. This is a radical departure from historical IT-as-a-cost-center approach.

Shared: Often IT is created in silos; many of these are aligned with individual group within departments within companies; each LOB had its own little IT department. One silo does things this way; another does basically the same thing, but in a different way, or with a different

product. A shared services approach consolidates opera-tions, eliminating and minimising silos, and making them actively cooperate. This consolidation is a prerequi-site to globally sharing resources and capabilities.

Standardised and simplified: The sharing or consolida-tion theme allows for standardisation. However, systems and interfaces have to be regularised and increasingly automated, further simplifying the environment.

Agile and effective: The goal of IT’s operating at the speed of business should be able to wrangle resources, to design, build, and run the services as per business needs.

“Later we decided which resources we wanted to pool together using virtualisation. We did not stop at just server virtualisation but looked at virtualisation of all the elements across the enterprise, this included server, stor-age and networking.”

Specific application templates had been developed to auto-matically provision resources for every new business user. A catalog of published service templates was published. Using a software tool, Essar then built a self-service portal for busi-nesses users to request for IT services on the fly.

Today the typical process for ordering a new service is described below.

Benefits of the projectEssar today addresses many different segments, each of which have been growing strongly in the last few years. The company has diversified into new areas and new business and has brought agility in their business. IT has been a key enabler to support this growth and agility in the market place.

With the shared services model, the company is now able to reduce the time taken to deploy new application infra-structure from months to minutes. This enables the group of companies to rapidly address new business opportunities and emerge stronger against competition globally.

“We are enabling continuous consolidation and virtualisa-tion. In comparison with traditional models where capacity planning is done in advance, the solution allows us to itera-tively repurpose virtualisation based on resource utilisation. This brings greater flexibility for us,” said Prabhu.

Future plansToday Essar has selected non-critical applications on this platform. Going forward the company plans to move all their critical applications on this platform.

Also, the existing setup has been deployed in produc-tion and will be used to consolidate the physical server environment to the blade matrix platform. The company plans to replicate the success of the implementation so that all new infrastructure deployments will be planned on shared services infrastructure. — [email protected]

JAYANTHA PRABHU, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technol-ogy, Essar Group has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model.

A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S


SENSOR APPROACH: McAfee is using telemetry sensors to keep a tab on malicious activity, says the company's CTO, APAC, Michael Sentonas.

With two new vulnerabilities discovered every second, traditional protection techniques are falling flat, says Michael Sentonas, CTO, APAC, McAfee, in an interaction with Geetaj Channana. He thinks that the industry has to look towards two solutions to overcome the new challenge: put the research in the cloud and embrace whitelisting.

M I CH A E L S E N TO N A S A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS


MICHAEL SENTONAS | MCAFEE

BLINK! Twice Lets start with talking about a technology that Indian

CTOs are looking at adopting – virtualisation. What are the kind of security challenges that a CTO can face in virtualised environments? How are they different from regular environments?As far as security is concerned, virtu-alisation extends some of the tradi-tional security issues and brings up new ones. It adds its own complexity and uniqueness. The same threats that you experience in a physical end-point or server also exist in a virtu-alised server or endpoint. Vulnerabil-ity in a Windows or Adobe platform is the same regardless of whether the server is physical or virtualised.

People always talk about the ulti-mate exploit in the virtual environ-ment... the exploitation of the hyper-visor. People like VMware, Citrix and IBM do a great job of securing their

hypervisors. Looking from the per-spective of VMware there hasn’t been a critical vulnerability in the hypervi-sor till date.

When businesses buy expensive hardware and then a hypervisor, they want to install many virtual guests on top of that hypervisor, but they do not want the complexity of installing security on every single guest that runs on top of that hypervisor. They just want to protect it in a hassle-free way and yet be effectively covered.

We as a company also share this vision. We ask: what is that we can do so that businesses can just plug into the hypervisor and be security at once for everything.

We are also working on a product to be released by the end of this year, which will arguably change the way security is looked at in the virtualised environment because of the fact that we are looking at reducing the

amount of weight of the endpoint that runs inside the virtual instance. This will ensure more efficient scan-ning, will use less resources and need less memory too.

There are talks that host based security is not working

as well now. Is there another option that they can use – like whitelisting?If you consider the traditional approach to research in security, I agree with you that we are com-ing to a point very quickly where it will become very expensive to do the research and put it into the endpoints. We detect around 47,000 new pieces of malware every day, and that's a lot. This is almost one every two seconds. How many end users you know would update their tech-nology once every two seconds; they can’t [and they won’t]. It is too inten-

Every Second



sive for them to do that. Typically it is done once every day.

Back in the early 2000s, we had a lot of time to work on. When a vulnerability was discovered and it entered the Ethernet; some of the biggest attacks of the times like the slammer or the love letter took six months to attack the end user. Around 2006-7, a term called zero-day vulnerability came up. This was because the vulnerability was discovered and it attacked the same day and the time to respond was sig-nificantly compressed.

In the early 2000s the focus was on blacklists. But as the time was compressed the industry responded by creating more predictive features in the technology. Now we are at that inflection point where we are saying that there are so many new vulnerabil-ities, it becomes very hard to research and it is very difficult to use predic-tive signatures because possibility of getting it wrong is always there. So, I think the whole industry has to look at two things: putting the research in the cloud and whitelisting.

As a security vendor we have more than 350 people working 24x7 and coming out with fixes, blacklists, predictive signatures, techniques and behavioural technologies that we put in the cloud and we want our customers to leverage that. One of the strategies that we’ve had for the last eighteen months is that every solution that McAfee provides is effectively a telemetry sensor. What this means is we are trying to gather information of our desktops, serv-ers, laptops and email systems and help feed a private McAfee security cloud with information about every IP address and application that we interact with. The reason for that is that we are grooming, what we believe to be, the largest reputation cloud in the industry to help people start to make reputation based deci-sions about using an application or interacting with an IP address. Eighteen months ago we enabled our endpoint technologies to lever-

The next thing that we talked about is whitelisting. That is exactly the way the industry needs to head in the next couple of years. We have just acquired a company called Solidcore that has a dynamic whitelisting technology. I think the proof of this technology came into the limelight at the time of the rover attack in January on Google and other companies. At that time we knew that at least 30 companies were impacted – now we know that the number was at least 500. The traditional technologies that were out there could not respond to that kind of an attack. This was because no one understood the kind of attack, even the reputation services were not help-ful as the IPs involved did not have a reputation rating. Our whitelisting technology, however, was able to stop that attack, immediately, without prior knowledge. We have held many hack-ing seminars where we have dem-onstrated the attack and how it could have been stopped. I am sure this is where the industry needs to go.

age that security cloud. Now we have our firewalls, email security solutions and IP technologies communicating with that cloud.

Can you illustrate how this is done?

You probably recall the July 4th weekend last year there was a very targeted attack at the US govern-ment organisation; that attack did not happen on July 4th. The attack started on May 29th, just that the main pay load happened on July 4th. The attackers were planning the attack from a long time ago. We were monitoring the malicious activity and were setting the repu-tation scores of the IP addresses linked to the activity. By the denial-of-service attack happened on July 4th, the firewalls connected to our security cloud had sensed that the reputation of these IP addresses is not good and they must not accept traffic originating from these addresses.

“There are no standards in the cloud environment today that could help people look at security in a unified manner globally”

There hasn’t

been a critical

vulnerability in

the hypervisor till

date.

It is very difficult

to use predictive

signatures

because

possibility of

getting it wrong is

always there.

We are quickly

coming to a

point where it

will become very

expensive to put

research into the

endpoints.

THINGS I BELIEVE IN



Let me go to another pain point that is there. We’ve seen a move

towards virtualisation and the cloud. But, there is certainly a problem of security when people are migrating from their current systems. What according to you are the biggest challenges?Migration is certainly a big challenge. Obviously when you are migrating you must have a contingency plan, a risk miti-gation plan and a disaster recovery plan to deal with such scenarios. People have the misconception that they can turn one off and turn the other one on – which obvi-ously is not going to happen. Most cloud operators are sensitive to this and they have good migration processes to ensure least amount of outage.

People have a lot of concerns about security when they are

moving to a public cloud environment. What according to you are the biggest challenges and solutions?There are no standards today that help

people look at security in a unified man-ner globally. Different standards are used in different countries. People use regular audits – quarterly, half yearly or yearly – to manage this situation. But, the problem is that the security landscape changes every minute. We at McAfee are working towards helping create these standards. What we are trying to do is create a cloud security pro-gram whereby an organisation not only goes through a periodic process but they also go through a daily assessment of their technol-ogy to make sure that the technology is free from malwares and security holes.

How different is it from having regular security patches?

Regular security patches do not tell you if you are vulnerable. What we are talking about is a process by which they can con-tinually access their technology and gauge what are the holes in the process. Once they know this, they would know how to protect their environment. This is even before a patch has been released. They could take

countermeasures before patching the vul-nerability to protect their environment.

Another important thing is the introduction of mobile devices on

the network. What is the kind of security risk associated with these? There has always been a big hype around security concerns with mobile devices. But, the reality is that there has not been any major attacks that have emerged from these devices.

With a lot of intellectual property and sen-sitive information sitting on these devices, the risk is now more severe. Since these devices are small and cheap they can be eas-ily lost and replaced, but the data on these devices cannot be retrieved. It is important to be able to manage a device after it is lost. On top of that, in the last 18 months or so, there has been an influx of applica-tions on these devices. There are hundreds of thousands of such applications that are floating on the internet – a lot which are not installed from authorised sources – they are not approved.

COVE R S TORY H A RVE S T I N G MO B I L I T Y


mobi lityharvesting

FROM LEFT:Suresh A Shanmugam, S C Mittal, Girish Rao and Avinash Arora

H A RVE S T I N G MO B I L I T Y COVE R S TORY


Enterprise CIOs have sniffed a big business opportunity in the rural parts of the country. They have understood clearly the role mobile technology innovation can play to help their business serve customers in far-flung locations.mobi lity

The increasing adoption of mobile usage in the rural areas has been another factor that has made a robust business case for delivering local, usable content over the mobile.

Anything and everything from weather updates, to farming tips, mandi prices to real-time business information can be delivered with ease and huge benefits. By providing reliable and comprehensive information on these subjects, companies have unwittingly helped improve productivity and increase earnings of the rural masses.

We share with you how some of the CIOs utilised mobile solutions and discovered that their efforts resulted in a rich source of inspiration, innovation and even profit for their mainstream business lines.

By Ashwani Mishra

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Periya Jakkhammal, a small time farmer of Theni district located in the southern part of

Tamil Nadu was invited to address the Conference of Education Ministers of Common Wealth Countries in July 2009 held in Malaysia. As an active member of IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited (IKSL), Jak-khammal spoke on how the use of mobile communication services helped improve income levels of women in her district in the field of goat and cow rearing.

In this case, IKSL partnered with Theni-based NGO Vidiyal and Common Wealth of Learning, an intergovernmental body of Commonwealth countries focusing on strengthening learning. The objective of IKSL was to provide voice messages and helpline on sheep/goat and cow rearing, women's rights and other areas of interest.

was a challenge. With increasing mobile penetration and lower costs over the last few years, we wanted people to reap maximum benefits using mobile phones,” says Mittal.

Empowering farmersIKSL in partnership with Airtel launched Value Added Services (VAS) through a Green SIM card. Using this card, farmers got access to a unique VAS platform that broadcasts 5 free voice messages in specific zones in the country and on various topics related to mandi (market) prices, farm-ing techniques, weather forecasts, dairy farming, animal husbandry, rural health initiatives, plant protection, employment opportunities, government schemes, etc.

“The primary focus of IKSL has been to leverage communications and provide relevant and location specific content to empower people in rural India,” says S C Mittal, Senior ED (Management Services & IT), Group CTO, IFFCO and Director, IKSL.

IKSL was established as a telecommunications subsidiary of The Indian Farmers Fertilizer Co-operative Ltd. (IFFCO) in 2007 in partnership with Bharti Airtel for empowering the famers. Prior to this, IFFCO was using kiosks to communicate with the rural population.

The focus of the mobile initiative was to provide information directly to the farm-ers, deliver location specific, time sensitive information and important alert and ensure that the services does not add economic strain on the farmers.

“People had to come to the kiosk and this

addressingrural concerns

raising hopes,

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited used mobile services to empower farmers in the remote areas of the country

“With increasing mobile penetration

and lower costs over the last few years, we

wanted people to reap maximum benefits

using mobile phones”

S C MittalSenior ED, Group CTO, IFFCO and

Director, IKSL



on a daily basis. Each voice message is of one minute duration. Other activities like mobile-based quiz, Phone In Programmes, etc. are also taken up.

In addition, the farmer can call on a dedi-cated helpline, manned by experts from various fields, to get answers to their spe-cific queries.

“ If an agent fails to resolve a particular query, it is escalated to a second tier of experts who address the required issues of the caller,” says Mittal.

There are around 60 experts spread in the country and the user base of IKSL has crossed 15 lakh across 18 states in the coun-try. On an average, there are around 400 to 600 calls received by the helpline each day.

However, during harvesting seasons, there is a significant increase in daily calls received.

IKSL is also working towards reducing the cost of calls made by the farmers to the helpline.“We are in talks with Airtel, and hope to reduce the costs by at least 30 to 40 per-cent,” says Mittal.

Similar to having a focused approach on sheep rearing for women in Theni, IKSL has also supported other communities like increasing the yield and improve the quality of basmati rice production in Haryana.

This was a project imple-mented in Karnal, Kaithal and Kurukshetra in part-nership with The Haryana State Cooperative Supply & Marketing Federation Ltd.(HAFED). Through the use of mobile services for the farmers in these parts, the output of bas-mati production increased by 25 percent as com-pared to last year.

“We plan to expand these services to a larger user base in the country,” says Mittal.

SNAP SHOTOrganisation

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Limited

Challenge Empowerment of

people living in rural IndiaImprove decision

making ability of farmers by delivering location and time specific information and alerts

Solution Launched mobile

Value Added Services (VAS) through a Green SIM card in partnership with Bharti AirtelA dedicated Helpline

for resolution of agricluture and other village related issues by a team of experts

Benefits The solution has

seen rural upliftment of farmers in many statesOver 15 lakh users

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the fogclearing

Poor visibility on seed prices meant that Marico often paid more than what was required. An in-house developed mobile application empowered its field staff with the information they needed.

“With CFMS, we have clear visibility of farmer level data. It has improved reaction time, reduced damages for crops and improved productivity”

Girish RaoHead IT Solutions, Marico



Marico, one of India’s fastest growing consumer products and services companies, has been

following the process of contract farming for several years. The process of contract farming involves cultivating and harvesting for and on behalf of business establishments or govern-ment agencies and forward-ing the produce at a pre-determined price. In return, the contracted farmers are offered a good price against their farm produce.

The contracted farmers grow kardi (safflower oil) for Marico, a key ingredient in Marico’s Saffola brand. The primary reason for the company to go for contract farming of seeds in India was in order to ensure stability of supplies.

Due to instability of the market in the last couple of years, kardi as a crop had to compete with other cash crops like gram.

“Despite being on contract, farmers would start grow-ing other crops. This meant that there was no assurance of supplies and we ended importing oil. This impacted our top and bottom line in terms of availability of raw material,” says Girish Rao, Head IT Solutions, Marico.

Getting farm facts rightTo address this concern, Marico went live with a Contract Farming Management System (CFMS) late last year. For this, field personnel (agriculture representatives) were provided with mobile phones that hosted an in-house developed application using J2ME technology to capture farm data.

The company made use of Global Posi-

tioning System (GPS) to track their per-sonnel who validated the standing crops, checked whether what was contracted by the farmer was farmed or not, looked for insect infestation, and whether they would get the required harvest during the end of the cycle.

It also captures requisite data when the farmer sells the produce in the market.

The data captured on the mobile device is relayed to a central system every thirty minutes. Even if there is no signal, the device keeps storing the data and sends it when the signal is available or when the personnel visit the nearest branch office after a day’s work.

“With CFMS, we have a very good visibility of farmer level data. It has improved our reaction time to farmer queries, reduced damages for crops and improved produc-tivity,” says Rao.

The company witnessed increase in productivity by 30 percent and reduction in crop damage by 50 percent as com-pared to the previous year.

No fooling usUsing a J2ME application, the company created a portal that now allows the com-pany's buying agents to send kardi-related information to the portal in real-time from various mandis (markets) using their mobile phones.

As a result the company now has better visibility into the prices and this is used to take immediate decisions like buying from a market with good quality and low price. The data is also posted in the Business Intelli-gence (BI) system for conducting long-term strategic analysis. “Previously, there was delay in providing information to the buy-

ers who needed to take a decision on what quantity to buy and at what price,” says Rao.

Marico has been able to get an additional average discount of Rs 1-2 per kg from the market price after deploying this system. This has added around Rs. 1-2 crore to their bottom-line.

Also, the turnaround time for getting market information has been reduced to a day or two from 8-10 days earlier.

“This process has real time data capturing. It is like an in-house stock exchange which provides market information in terms of arrivals and posts rates at the various mandis (markets) across the nation,” says Rao.

The local buying agents can now concen-trate on keeping a tab on the material and price movements rather than spending time in relaying the market information verbally to the central team.


Marico Limited

ChallengeEnsure stability of

suppliesKeep a check on

contract farmersMarket price visibility

SolutionProvided mobile-

based applications for its personnelUsed GPS for

trackingCreated a portal for

price information and business analysis

BenefitsImproved reaction

time to farmer queriesIncrease in

productivity by 30 percentReduction in crop

damage by 50 percentAddition of Rs 1-2

crore to their bottom-lineReduction in

turnaround time from 8 days to 1-2 days

GODREJ AGROVET, a subsidiary of Godrej

Industries, is a diversified agribusiness com-

pany with interests in animal feed, oil palm

plantations, agrochemicals and poultry. The

company has been using mobile applications

for its palm oil business.

The company has issued RFID cards to farm-

ers. So when a farmer brings his produce to a

collection agent (CA), a handheld device scans

the RFID card of the farmer to read details

like name, bank in which he has an account,

address, etc. The CA then prints the receipt of

the produce.

When a CA prints receipt slips, a SMS goes to

the staff at the oil factory; and they know what

produce is coming in. The farmer then takes

the same slip to the taluka office to get benefits

from the government. Slips are a pre-printed-

number controlled, legal document.

—At the time of talking, Suresh Bhise was

IT Head at Godrej Agrovet Limited

RFIDs Ease Collection Problems

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the right mix“We have captured the data in transit money (accounts receivables) using SMS inte-gration with ERP. The data is available for on-line financial parameters validation all the time and is updated every time the transaction takes place,” says Arora.

Order booking can now be out of the pre-defined MOP only or under exceptional cases in which a dealer can demand on the spot order booking and shipment request or could book an advance order.

Order approval is auto-mated through a workflow based on defined business rules; the process is web-based and integrated with

the mobile system. Approval triggers can be automatically sent, obviating the need for anyone to be physically present in the plant or warehouse.

An auto mail is generated the moment an order is submitted by the CBU or the dealer. The approving authority gets a clear picture of the status of the order particulars and financial parameters with green /red

New Holland Fiat India, a wholly owned subsidiary of CNH Global – a leading agricultural

equipment company – is a majority owned subsidiary of the Fiat Group.

Previously, tractor requirements within the company were booked in an offline batch mode at the head office. Also, order booking process was not integrated with the monthly forecast submitted by Commercial Business Units (CBUs). The CBU members consist of people from sales, service and parts business.

The tracking was manual and feedback was not instantaneous. Moreover there was a huge amount of paper work that was involved in order to approve any sales order for which the credit limit differed from the usually accepted limit.

When the company decided to expand and sell tractors directly in the rural areas of the country, it realised that lack of infrastructure in these parts would hamper business growth.

For fixing these challenges and so as to bring more transparency in the overall pro-cess, the IT team developed a new online web ordering system that would smoothen operations of Sales Order Management (SOM), invoicing and shipment of consign-ments to customers.

“We integrated our ERP, web services and mobile technology in such a way that any shipment that takes place from the plant is communicated directly to our dealers and CBUs,” says Avinash Arora, Director - IS (India & S E Asia), New Holland Fiat (India).

So the moment a dealer or CBU places an order and it is confirmed and accepted, the dealer/CBU gets a message on his mobile. “The system is now much more agile, the processes transparent and the results accurate,” Arora says.

During the time of booking the order, a CBU user associ-ated with the dealer or the dealer himself is equipped with the latest information on the stocks. Such information includes advances to end customers and the status of all other finan-cial parameters that are mandatory to be validated by the commercial processes viz. bank guarantee and security deposit status of the dealer, MOP (monthly operating plans) figures, outstanding, payment plan for the month, status of transit money, etc.


New Holland Fiat (India) Pvt. Ltd

ChallengeManual tacking of

orders; feedback was not instantaneousLack of infrastructure

in rural areas

SolutionIntegrated ERP, web

services and mobile technology

BenefitsAutomation of

processIncreased visibility

and transparency

New Holland Fiat India integrated its ERP, web services and mobile technology to smoothen processes of Sales Order Management (SOM), invoicing and shipment of consignments



coloured buttons. A click on the relevant button triggers the processes to move for-ward either for order processing and subse-quent shipment or cancellation.

The order is registered using an auto function system (AFS) that allows writing of an intelligent program in the ERP. In this case, it was written using a BaaN tool. This program keeps running in the background and integrates the ERP and mobile solution.

If a particular dealer is able to satisfacto-rily meet all the financial parameters, an invoice is generated and gets published on the web. This also reaches the dealers' mobile phone and provides details regard-ing the order placed, shipment made and the invoice number and the amount, if any, that needs to be paid.

VOLTAS is India's leading air

conditioning, refrigeration and

engineering services company.

Voltas aimed for its sales

team to be more flexible in

responding to market dynamics

and more accountable by

requiring it to document all sales

commitments.

So for its consumer business

i.e. windows air conditioning,

the company deployed SAP

application on smart phones

for its employees. The module

deployed in this case is the sales

and distribution module. This

service will enable field sales per-

sonnel to capture sales orders/

book order, register a cheque

receipt etc. on the mobile.

“The project is currently in the

pilot phase and should be over

within a period of two months,”

says Asmita Junnarkar, CIO,

Voltas Limited.

Additionally it will help manag-

ers to release the sales and credit

blocks. The maximum number of

users for this mobile application

would be around 150. The mobile

technology is provided by Sybase

for tight integration with SAP.

Voltas has also rolled out

mobile solutions in its engineer-

ing equipments business where

the sales team captures leads

coming from various sources

like government agencies etc.

Here the sales personnel of the

company have been given access

to a pre-sales application on their

smart phones.

A module called business

journey plan is also installed on

the mobile devices. When sales

personnel visit a customer, they

can capture the details of the

customer visit with excerpts of

the discussion on their mobile

application. All the customer

visits are captured in this mod-

ule and a visit plan is also avail-

able in the form of a calendar in

the mobile.

Reducing the Heat in Sales Processes

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“The system is now much

more agile, the processes

transparent and the results

accurate”

Avinash AroraDirector - IS (India & S E Asia),

New Holland Fiat (India)



To expand its reach and quicken the delivery of its services across remote areas in the country, Mahindra Finance equipped its field task force with a mobile solution

into the villageshandhelds march

“The mobile service enables our executives to know the exact amount to be collected and provide a receipt anywhere, anytime.”

Suresh A ShanmugamHead, BITS, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited



Mahindra & Mahindra Finan-cial Services Ltd. (MMFSL), part of the Mahindra Group, is one

of India’s leading non-banking finance companies focused on the rural and semi urban sector. It provides finance for utility vehicles, tractors and cars and has a network of 459 offices.

MMFSL was expanding rapidly across the Indian sub-continent, particularly to remote locations, rural villages and semi-urban towns. To facilitate this reach, the company needed to have new branches fully opera-tional in quick time.

Lack of basic infrastructure at the new branches was posing as a significant road-block. Vehicle dealers also needed financing information on time to compete effectively with other players. The company required a scalable IT infrastructure to support the grow-ing number of branches and employees.

“Deploying mobile solutions was our biggest bet to address all the above issues,” says Suresh A Shanmugam, Head, Business Information Technology Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited.

In the earlier legacy environment, depen-dency on local systems was low; all recorded data was captured in the database at the head office, written on compact discs (CDs) and sent to other locations as per branch requirements.

Since the customer base of the company consisted main-ly of farmers and transport-ers, with little or no exposure to technology, the mobile was the preferred medium to cater to their demands at their doorstep.

For meeting the business requirements, the new mobility infrastructure had to enable deployment of applications quickly and without any disruption to existing services.

The field task force needed to be connected to the company's system to gain access to the business support solutions and ensure that the monthly instalments from the 1.3

million customers were collected when they were due. Shanmugam and his team set out

to do just that. To empower rural remote services and do so in an effective manner, Shanmugam deployed e-Point of Sale (ePos) devices. These devices ran on open source software and provided access at the last mile, acting like a mini mobile branch. By using such mobile services and by deploying automated SMS solutions, business queries could be resolved much faster.

The business team's demand were clear: it wanted to process queries on a loan application and sanction the same within two days. This is now possible from all MMFSL-connected locations. The field force now extracts and captures information in real time. Internal users can

now check status of collections at any given point of time thereby enhancing their effi-ciency levels.

Around 80 percent of the company’s col-lection was done through cash which had its own problems. “By deploying this mobile service our executives now know the exact amount to be collected from the client and they can also provide a receipt anywhere and at anytime,” says Shanmugam. Other features of the mobile device system include biometric thumb impression, combined touch screen display for input and output, customer voice recording, RFID solution to trace the exact location of the executive, cus-tomer signature capturing etc.

With the mobile solution in place, loans can now be disbursed quickly, often in less than two hours. Data duplicity at the back-end is eliminated. It has also resulted in best practices and compliance for the company to instill not only best process and procedures but also to comply with regula-tor/ trade bodies related to commerce trade and finance. —[email protected]


Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd.

ChallengeNeeded to open new

branches in quick timeMaking information

available to all stakeholders

SolutionOpen Source

architecture, no licensing cost Common device for

multiple verticals

BenefitsInstant Loan

disbursement within two hoursCustomer service at

door stepNo duplicity of data

THE INDIAN TELECOM

INDUSTRY is one of the fastest

growing in the world and India is

projected to become the second

largest telecom market globally

by 2010.

This VAS industry in India is

now growing by around 60%

year on year. It is quite clear that

mobile phones will be critical to

deliver services in remote and

rural areas in India.

Approximately 70 percent

of the Indian population lives

in rural areas, accounting for a

subscriber base of close to 100

million mobile users. With the

rural population expected to

reach more than 830 million in

2010, it is estimated that 100

million new rural subscribers will

be added by then.

Out-of-the-box thinking and

new strategies will be critical for

delivering services and content

that addresses this growing rural

market and build a successful

revenue model.

The not-for-profit sector is also

making use of data services to

help rural populations manage

their lives more effectively.

Thomson Reuters, has been

updating over one lakh farmers

in the country with the latest

market trends, weather forecast,

and crop information via its

SMS-based service. Telco compa-

nies too have take the cue. Tata

indicom, has started a project in

a district in Gujarat that allows

farmers to operate their irrigation

pumps from remote locations

without the having to travel to the

farm. Nokia has also joined the

fray, offering Life Tools Services,

by means of which they offer

agricultural information and edu-

cational information to people in

both rural and urban areas.

Most studies on the VAS

market infer that, in addition, the

services that cater to the non-

urban areas will have to be cre-

ated in a number of languages to

provide locally relevant content

such as agricultural commodity

prices, weather information and

access to government services

and information.

According to a whitepaper

titled Mobile Value Added

Services in India by Accenture,

a major potential – and to date

largely untapped – market for

VAS is in the provision of services

for enterprises. From simple

applications such as using SMS

for scheduling appointments

to streaming product videos to

a salesperson’s mobile phone,

the applications could offer con-

siderable first-mover advantage

for service providers who can

address this market quickly.

Beyond the Urban Consumer

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NEXTHORIZONS


Let’s face it – social media, smartpads and a host of other cloud options are here to stay.

AUTHOR SAYS

Today we’re in the midst of several technology paradigm shifts. These changes greatly impact organisations and CIOs worldwide.

First, there’s the computing hardware shift. Previously, you could only use a com-puter by accessing a mainframe using a terminal. Then came desktops. Mainframes did not go away. We simply changed our primary interface device. Next came laptops. Mainframes and desktops still didn’t go away, but the laptop became the interface device of choice.

Now, the power of a laptop is being put in the palm of our hand with smartphones and smartpads. And because this device is a phone, a multimedia computer, a video conferencing platform, a still and video camera, a locator and navigator, and a game and entertainment centre that is with us 24/7, the devices are transforming all areas of our life.

The second shift is in software and soft-ware distribution. We went from enterprise level software for mainframes to personal and business packages for our desktops and laptops. Now we have the "app" software revolution. Again, the old doesn’t go away, but the primary tool of choice is changing.

A special report on how to use technology to reshape your company. BY DANIEL BURRUS

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The New Matrix


You can’t have people think-ing that the IT department is holding the company back. Instead, you need to be helping them move forward. Granted, it’s human nature to protect and defend the status quo, and there are some security concerns with the emerging technologies. But at the same time, you have to remember the old adage, “It’s easier to ride a horse in the direc-

tion that it’s going.” In this case, the horses of technology are going in a new direction at a pace and speed we’ve never seen before. It’s time for CIOs to pay attention to this and do more than just go along for a ride.

Case in point: In January 1993, IBM knew the future of its company and it was the most admired company on the planet. But the horses of technology changed direction. By the end of 1993, IBM was getting close to going out of business. It missed the shift. But IBM is not the only case. Many other companies have missed the shift. Think about it: When was the last time you bought something from Polaroid?

Now we have another gigantic techno-logical shift taking place, and the last people who should miss it are the CIOs and the IT department. The shift is here, it’s easy to see, and it’s as plain as day. Therefore, it’s time to start directing the horse on the journey.

Opportunities aboundSince ELAs are just now emerging, it’s the perfect opportunity for CIOs to be on the forefront of the revolution. ELAs are often internal company apps, and the IT depart-ment should be the one involved and in charge of developing them.

Here’s an example of how an enterprise level purchasing app could work: Suppose you work at a manufacturing plant and want to purchase an item. The moment you discover the need, you can pull up the company’s purchasing app on your smart phone. You can place your order, see all the pre-approved items that fit your need, and select what you want. When you click on the item, you can get an instant approval or denial. If there’s a denial because your request doesn’t meet pre-defined purchase parameters established by the company’s head of purchasing, you can get a justifica-

And because apps allow us to personalise our devices to suit our unique needs, this revolution will grow rapidly.

With apps becoming more popular, it’s now time to explore the third shift which is the emergence of a new level of apps... what I’ll call enterprise level apps (ELA). These are apps customised for such wide-scale applications as purchasing, logistics, sup-ply chain management, sales, and military security, just to name a few. These apps are designed not only to make people more pro-ductive in their work, but also to do some of the work for them.

For example, in the medical field, they’ll be ELAs for disease management, for patient records, and for remote diagnostics. The app will be more like an essential tool to perform a specific function rather than an ancillary item. Combine this with the real-time data revolution that’s also taking place, and you can see how groundbreaking enterprise apps are.

Never before have people been able to get information and data in their hand even as the data is just being generated. So when something occurs, is produced, or a need arises, that information is immediately vis-ible to anyone authorised to see it in the exact way they want and need it to be. To have that visibility and have it with you 24/7 is both powerful and amazing. Instead of just having real-time data, companies are redefining themselves and transitioning into real-time enterprises, which means they are using real-time data to make better decisions faster.

Of course, all these shifts present some real-time challenges to CIOs. As the CIO or IT expert in your company, you need to understand the depth of this revolution.

Recognise the changeHistorically, CIOs are used to having control over the company’s technology, and they like everything to be behind the bulletproof enterprise IT veil. Many CIOs and IT pro-fessionals are not happy with the increased focus on cloud computing, yet that’s pre-cisely what their company’s staff is using when they use their personal computers to search Google or access other applications in the cloud.

This dislike for cloud computing is understandable. It is, after all, outside of

the control of the IT network that the CIO and his or her staff have worked so hard to develop and secure. But let’s face it – apps, SaaS, social media, smart phones, smart pads and a host of other cloud options that your employees use – both at home and increasingly at work – are here to stay.

Consider this: In early 2010, there were 150,000 apps in the Apple store alone. Now we’re close to 300,000 apps with billions of downloads. So it’s growing fast, with no indication of slowing down.

Working as a strategic consultant to large organisations, provides me the opportu-nity to observe how CIOs work from close quarters – I’m amazed at how many CIOs are not embracing this paradigm shift. As a CIO, you have to ask yourself, “Will there be more apps in the cloud option, including audio, video, storage, and apps, next year than there is this year?" The answer will be a resounding: “Yes!” You can’t ignore it. Many of your own people and your own executives are using cloud-based services right now. And if they are more productive at home by using these apps than they are at the workplace, and are doing things that are more advanced on their smart phones and smart pads (at least in their minds), then the CIO has a problem.

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T E CH N O LO GY S H I F T S N E X T H OR I ZO N S

Companies are redefining themselves and transitioning into real-time enterprises, which means they are using real-time data to make better decisions faster.


visual real estate and broader bandwidth connection. Many new TVs are also 3D equipped, meaning that your apps could be 3D, too. As you can see, this is a game changer. Smart CIOs need to stay ahead of this evo-lution and help redefine their company accordingly.

Using the paradigmsAll these revolutions, and

especially the app revolution, are enabling companies to redefine who they are, what they offer, and how they offer it … and they’re enabling the CIO to have a big role in the redefining process. In this case, the current technology shifts are actually tools of creation. As a result, you can help your company create new products, new services, and entire new markets something most CIOs have played a role in, but now have an opportunity to lead.

Here are some ways to do that:First, look at your products, services, or

industry and see how today’s new technolo-gies can help you redefine things.

When it comes to your company and your industry, ask yourself some key questions, such as:

What is growing and what is shrinking? What is the direction of change based on the impact of new technology? (For example: getting more energy efficient is not a trend, it’s long-term; similarly, getting more virtual is long-term.) and based on where things are going, is there a way to use technology to create new opportunities?

Next, look at how technology is affecting your customers in your industry right now. Examine the overall customer experience as well as who is buying your offerings. For example, when ultra-light aviation came about, the first ultra-light aircraft were basi-cally hang-gliders with engines. The FAA decided not to get involved with it, which meant people didn’t need a pilot’s license to fly an ultra-light. As a result, the first manu-facturers targeted that demographic people who wanted to fly but who didn’t have the time or money to get a pilot’s license. One company thought they could get a better customer, so they asked, “Why not redefine the market?”

Rather than target those who didn’t have

tion and take steps to move forward to make that purchase happen. At the same time, everyone involved in the purchase can have instant access to that request and its status.

Here’s another example: With a security app for a military base or other lock-down area, if an incident, such as a fire, occurs on the premises, everyone on location can know exactly what happened and where the incident is all from their phone and from the minute it occurs. Depending on your rank or position, you can know where to go and what to do. You can see the location of the fire extinguishers and other emergency tools. If there is an explosion and you need to go to a secure place, you can see where to go and how to get there. You can locate different emergency exits quickly from the palm of your hand.

These are just two small examples. Other kinds of enterprise level apps can include internal and secure versions of popular social media platforms such as Twitter to quickly solve problems, Facebook to con-

nect disconnected engineers, and YouTube to create how-to videos. Companies that have already embraced such initiatives are creating stunning results because they’re using technology to enhance collaboration and com-munication among employees without exposing the company to threats from outside the network.

In addition to creating enter-prise level apps, the CIO should be looking at creating apps they can offer to their customers/clients and the public in general. Such apps may even open a new revenue stream for the company.

The next levelAside from directing the creation of the vari-ous apps, the CIO also needs to be looking at where the app will be used. Currently, people think of apps as being primarily for smart phones. But what about the new smartpad revolution Apple launched with its iPad? Some smartphone apps are com-patible with smartpads. But even the com-panies who make these apps aren’t thinking big enough … both literally and figuratively. Since the smartpads have bigger screens and more processing power, why should they do the same thing as the phone app? Why not take advantage of that extra space and power and come up with a new class of apps that can do things the phone apps can’t? These are key questions CIOs must think about and address if they want their company to be a serious player in the future app market.

But that’s just the beginning....The next evolution is apps for the smart television think iTV. Today’s newer televisions are Internet enabled. (And, by the way, all our devices will be Internet enabled one day.) That means the processor and the televi-sion browser are built into the TV set so you don’t have to plug a computer into your television. The TV is the computer.

This will drive the IPTV revolution even faster. Because it’s essentially TV over the Internet versus on cable and satellite, many Millennials use IPTV to solve all of their wired television viewing needs. Knowing this, it’s only logical that your company will also want to produce television level apps. However, now you have even more

N E X T H OR I ZO N S T E CH N O LO GY S H I F T S

Today’s CIOs must also look at how the company as a whole can use technology to redefine itself in the marketplace.

24/7VISIBILITY

IS HELPING

ORGANISATIONS

TAKE DECISIONS

FASTER


T E CH N O LO GY S H I F T S N E X T H OR I ZO N S

a license (and who had less disposable income), this company decided to target commercial jet pilots and flight instructors. After all, these people loved to fly and they had money; however, because of their jobs, flying had become more automated and less fun. Then the company went one step further and redefined the ultra-light itself by adding a stick and rudder and instrument controls. They made the ultra light more like an airplane rather than a hang-glider, which better appealed to their new target market. The company went on to being highly successful, all because they redefined who their customer was and then made product changes accordingly.

So when it comes to your customers, ask yourself some key questions, such as:

Is there a better customer? (For example, maybe you’re selling to a customer who is focused on the lowest price.)

Who is your ideal customer?Is there a customer you don’t have but

should have?Could you use technology to redefine your

product and attract that customer?Is there a way to use technology to

enhance your product or service in some way that opens up a market or creates a new market for you?

Finally, look at the specific ways in which you compete in the marketplace as well as what makes your company unique. Then decide how technology can redefine the way you compete. For example, at one time, Polaroid was the king of instant photogra-phy. But then technology and digital pho-tography changed their industry, and the way they competed (instant photography) changed but Polaroid didn’t change with it. Instead, they made the mistake many busi-nesses do: they used technology to get more efficient and lower their costs but failed to create new products and markets.

Similarly, Kodak was failing for over a decade. Finally, they looked at how they com-peted in the past as well as what it would take to compete in the future. That’s when they embraced digital photography. And while they still have some traditional film labs across the country, it’s their digital products division that’s most profitable today.

The moral: The longer you wait to redefine how you compete, the harder it is to survive. However, when you pinpoint a way to use

technology to compete better, you create new revenue streams. So when it comes to competing in a technology-driven age, ask yourself some key questions, such as:

Is there a way you can use technology to redefine how you compete?

Is there a way you can use technology to change your product or how you service people?

Is there a way you can use technology to redefine your customer’s experience?

Yes, the technology revolutions we’re currently experiencing are redefining how companies make money, how professionals work and how consumers buy. They’re also redefining the strategic role CIOs play in the company, enabling CIOs to have a bigger hand in external product/service creation, industry standards and the company’s long-term vision. No longer can CIOs keep their focus on data protection and company net-works (although those will always be key job functions). Today’s CIOs must also look at how the company as a whole can use tech-nology to redefine itself in the marketplace.

From mobile finance and banking to geo-social networking tools, every vertical from real estate to manufacturing is going to be redefined in a short period of time. No CIO can afford to move slowly, otherwise, he or she may miss the opportunity entirely.

Embrace the future You also have to realise that using technol-ogy such as apps, smart phones, and smart pads to redefine your company does not mean that you throw security out the win-

dow. You simply need to rethink security. With the cost of hardware continuing to decrease and with bandwidth and process-ing power continuing to increase, it’s easy to predict that cloud computing, apps, smart phones, and smart pads will gain even more popularity. As a CIO, that can mean one of two things for you: 1) it can be a major headache, or 2) it can be a major opportu-nity. The difference is in how you look at the shifts and how you embrace the future.Ultimately, staying ahead and breaking new grounds during a technology-driven transfor-mation is indeed possible. It’s all about look-ing at where the market is going rather than where it is today. It’s about looking at where your customer is evolving, not where they used to be. When you change your mindset, ask some key questions, and then take action on what the answers reveal. When you do that you can use today’s technology paradigm shifts to redefine your company, improve operations, create new revenue streams, and experience higher profits than ever before.

— Daniel Burrus is one of the world’s leading

technology forecasters and business strate-

gists, and is the author of six books, including

Technotrends (1993, Reed Business Informa-

tion, Inc.), which has been translated into over a

dozen languages. He is the founder and CEO of

Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm

that monitors global advancements in technology

driven trends to help clients better understand

how technological, social, and business forces are

converging.This article has been published with

prior permission from www.cioupdate.com.

Change Now, It is the Only ConstantTHE CLASSIC example is

Amazon.com. When they first

started the business, they used

technology to redefine how

people sell books. But they

didn’t stop there. They then

expanded to other products

and redefined how nearly every-

thing was sold. Then they rede-

fined again. Because they have

a large IT, logistics, and ware-

house system that is not 100%

in use at any one time, they

now rent out their enterprise

IT platform and warehousing

space to other companies. So

they are not only redefining an

industry, they’re also redefining

themselves.

Another now classic example

is Apple. Back in early 2000,

before they launched the iPod

and iPhone, most people

thought Apple was quickly

going out of business. That’s

when the company redefined

themselves around music.

Later they redefined again

with the iPhone, which lead a

telecommunications revolu-

tion. Now they’re doing it again

with the iPad by creating a new

class of personal computer.

Like Amazon.com, Apple has

redefined themselves as well as

their industry.


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POINTS4

FOUR IMPORTANT AREAS OF GOVERNANCE

PEOPLE: Success of any

organisation is

directly linked to the

engagement of its

members

TECHNOLOGY:Is at the foundation

of the information

governance framework

POLICY:Instead of focusing

on limits, focus on

outcomes

RISK MANAGEMENT:

Means identifying the

magnitude and impact

of non compliance

Want your organisation to be proactive rather than reactive? Try information governance. BY KIMBERLY SAMUELSON

A LITTLE REGULATIONCAN BE A GOOD THING!

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This information is an asset to the organisation because it allows better decision making. But at the same time, the information needs to have some controls around it. Simply put, in order to be more agile, organisations must better manage their information by putting a governance strategy into place.

Governance implementation is often thought of as a journey. Just as you won’t reach your organisation’s goals in a few days, you won’t solidify your governance plan in a couple of meetings. I’ve read a lot of material that suggests that one should create a road map for governance. While this is useful, I like to think of governance as a framework. A framework is an incom-plete, though concrete, solution to a recur-ring problem. A framework has physical components upon which the user may build elements. Frameworks allow policies to be created, conflicts to be resolved and are flexible enough to foster the provision of services to business units. Simply put, information frameworks allow us to create a structure for aligning control with agility.

The information governance framework has four parts: people, policies, technology and risk management. People and policies are the organisational enablers, supported by the discipline of risk management, which is shored up by technology. This allows resources and risk to be managed while fostering the creation of information value. In the same way as blood pumping through the body provides the body parts with ener-gy and strength, this information gives the business units power and agility. Ultimately, the goal of the governance framework is two-fold: compliance to regulations and value creation. A controlled yet flexible gov-ernance framework fosters agility in busi-ness processes and service delivery.

The Fab FourThe four areas of governance are important enough to discuss in more detail. Every successful information management endea-vour that we’ve seen has been organised in this manner. Implementing a governance structure allows your organisation to be pro-active rather than reactive.

People - It’s so important to start with the human element. The success of any organisational endeavour is directly linked

becomes an asset rather than a liability? How can we use our information to oper-ate more successfully? What controls do we need to put into place?”

While many approach information management from a technology nuts-and-bolts standpoint, what is often not addressed is the top-down, strategic management of information. I like to explain it this way: You’ve seen the trees, now let’s view the forest.

Step back for a second and consider the adaption of information management within an enterprise. When your organisa-tion first implemented information man-agement, I bet it was all about "finding and filing". You had paper files, electronic docu-ments, etc. and you had to put them some-where so that you could easily find them. Essentially, you were setting up a central point of information control.

Then you started to consider how much valuable information could be found in your business critical applications such as ERP, CRM and GIS and you thought about your users and the fact they had to toggle around three or four applications to get the infor-mation they needed to do their job. You then made the bold move of using your content management system as a sort of integrative middleware, so the information delivery to your users became much more dynamic.

You’ve approached information man-agement from an enterprise technology perspective and you are rightfully proud of

the way you provide services to your users. Then it happens (insert ominous music here!) that an e-discovery request is made, a new compliance initiative rears its ugly head, or you get notification of an audit ... So now what?

It’s time for top-down. It’s time to plan an information governance strategy.

Governance roadmaps and frameworksEvery organisation or enterprise has an overarching goal. To reach this goal it is necessary to coordinate activities and make a plan. In today’s economic climate, that goal may be simply to survive. In order to increase its chances for survival, an organisation must be agile. In order to be agile, an organisation needs its “information lifeblood” to be available, consistent and reliable.

“The information governance framework has four parts: people, policies, technology and risk management.”

As a speaker at many technology events, I get to see the reaction the phrase "information governance" elicits — I’ve seen everything from eye rolls to head nods. “Easy for you to say. Try and implement it!” said one particularly feisty individual. “Yeah, we are still trying to figure it out,” grumbles another. I am employed by a developer of an enterprise content management (ECM) software vendor and clients constantly express that they are overwhelmed by the wealth of their own information: “What should we keep? What should we purge? How do we manage information so that it


“Every organisation or enterprise has an overarching goal. To reach this goal it is necessary to coordinate activities and make a plan. In today’s economic climate, that goal may be

simply to survive. In order to increase its chances for survival, an organisation must be agile.”

TE CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE I N F O R M AT I O N G OVE RN A N CE

to the engagement of the members of the organisation. If the needs of management and staff aren’t considered, you might as well shut off the lights and go home. Infor-mation management is truly a collabora-tive process. Make sure you have executive sponsorship, but don’t forget to engage your consumer in the strategy.

Be reflective of the needs of your clients rather than definitive. Use IT as the enabler, but it’s not always necessary that they take the lead. The most successful strategic implementations form a stakeholder com-mittee that includes department heads, consumers, legal, technologists and records managers. But, before you put together a large group, let me caution you: Although all organisations want governance decisions to represent the interests of all stakeholders, the best committees assign clear responsi-bilities for each decision to individuals who can accept accountability for outcomes.

A good governance structure allows staff to work in the most efficient and effec-tive way possible by giving them access to information assets. And don’t forget about usability. If implementations of information management controls are cumbersome, they will fail. It’s amazing how easily staff will get around your controls or refuse to use your system if it isn’t useful. The reason most information governance efforts falter is that they don’t keep the business units' methods of working in mind.

Policy - There’s no one-size-fits-all sugges-tion I can make in terms of governance poli-cies, but I have a few suggestions. Instead of focusing on limits, focus on outcomes. When you approach policy-making in this manner, your business units are much more likely to cooperate as they will see value.Rather than have staff members wait in line

at a records counter for information, con-sider implementing a controlled system that allows instant, individualised information access. This way it’s less about lock-down and more about empowerment.

Approach your information like an asset, from a portfolio perspective. You don’t look at your bank account in terms of individual one dollar bills; don’t view your information that way.

Finally, consider standardisation. Meta-data or data about data is your information DNA. Consistency here will pay dividends and make compliance and auditing less painful. Standardisation is an enabler of agility. By standardising foundational com-ponents, you become more agile.

Technology - Technology is at the foun-dation of the information governance framework. When planning your enter-prise, be agile in your systems approach. Consider implementing an enterprise content management application. A lot of organisations use applications such as a geographic information system (GIS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) as points of control or platforms to deploy shared services. Implementing this type of technology will introduce automation to your information management and automation ensures consistency.

There are three common avenues you can take in terms of ECM implementations:

The first is ECM as the single point of control for complete information lifecycle management. A rules-based structure is key, but don’t forget about the quality of the information you capture. Remember a con-tent repository is only as good as the content it manages. As a wise person once said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

The second approach involves looking

at your information architecture from the user perspective. Here’s your opportunity to be agile in your technology implementa-tion. This method is known as “dynamic personalisation.” Dynamic personalisation allows the user to access information in the manner and environment in which the user is most comfortable. The user can access the ECM application directly or through any other application through which the user works. In this case, think of ECM as a sort of integrative middleware. Middleware, by design, makes the sharing of information resources transparent to users. It provides consistency, automation and security.

The third approach is the implementation of ECM as a shared service platform. This is most often implemented by governance-mature organisations. Enterprise informa-tion management is literally that — infor-mation shared across business units or functions. This is particularly attractive to technology departments as it allows them to develop business processes that can be repeated across the enterprise allowing optimal resource efficiency, cost and service performance.

Risk Management - From an information management perspective, risk manage-ment means identifying the magnitude and impact of non compliance; most often as it relates to record-keeping. As regulators and agencies now undertake closer scrutiny of organisations, it is more crucial than ever to be sure that information is consistent, reliable and available. A well-vetted records management policy is crucial here.

Remember that records management needs to be deployed from an enterprise perspective across the entire portfolio of information assets. Technology is really effective as it ensures consistency. Ide-

ally, the records management structure can be implemented transparently. This allows busi-ness units to work in the most efficient way possible, but the organisation’s record-keeping integrity is still intact. Technol-ogy also allows you to establish monitoring and auditing pro-cesses to ensure proof of com-pliance and transparency. Look at the risk mitigation effort in a positive light. As crazy as it may sound, regulatory oversight can be a unify-ing concept for business.

One of the most intrusive risk manage-ment situations is the e-discovery process. At its most elementary level, e-discovery is enterprise search, production and auditing of information. This is an arduous process that can be somewhat alleviated by an estab-lished information governance framework and stringent records management policies.

I N F O R M AT I O N G OVE RN A N CE T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE

Technology is again helpful as it allows you to cast a wide net and narrow down as needed. The framework you proactively build on the front-end will make this process less painful.

Disparate governance efforts, no matter how well they are implemented, cannot alone promise information gover-nance. Mature organisations rely on organisational structures such as frameworks that are

simple, coherent and transparent and that engage both staff and management. If we define successful organisations as those best able to thrive in their current environ-ment, and we consider information the lifeblood of organisations, then an informa-tion governance strategy is crucial for all organisations to implement. Agile, adapt-able organisations leverage their informa-tion as an asset. These organisations have

mitigated risk, established standards and, most importantly, leveraged their informa-tion into quality decisions.

About the author:

A 17-year software industry veteran and a

frequent presenter at industry events, Kimberly

Samuelson is director of government strategy

at Laserfiche. She joined Laserfiche in 2001

as a regional manager and has served the

company in several roles, including creative

director and director of government market-

ing. Samuelson specialises in developing and

delivering compelling content about ECM for the

government market. Her background combines

extensive marketing and business develop-

ment experience. Kimberly can be contacted

at [email protected]. This article has

been published with prior permission from www.

cioupdate.com.

$ 1.5TRILLION WAS LOST

IN PRODUCTIVITY

AS A RESULT OF

INFORMATION

OVERLOAD


LI T T LE G IANT S I T I N M E D I C I N E

AUTOMATINGThe Research Centre's drive to integrate applications will streamline administrative processes and make treatment procedures hassle-free for patients. BY SANA KHAN

COMPANY DASHBOARD

COMPANY:Rajiv Gandhi Cancer

Institute & Research

Centre.

REVENUE:Rs 106 crore

NUMBER OF PATIENTS HANDLED:Approx 16,000 per

year

NUMBER OF BEDS: 241

NUMBER OF SERVERS:17 servers

NUMBER OF TERMINALS:250

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES:750

APPLICATIONS RUNNING:6

PATIENT CARE

PH

OT

OS

BY

SU

BH

OJI

T P

AU

L

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Vishal Kakkar, Head - IT Operations at Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute & Research Centre

(RGCI), PV Jaishankar, Advisor IT, member of Governing Council, RGCI and S.Sundaresan,

GM – Finance & Head IT, RGCI


I T I N M E D I C I N E L I T T LE G IANT S

PATIENTS UNDERGOING cancer treatment put up a brave face. After seeing them go through the trauma and costs typical of the treatment, hospital admin-istrators know that the least they can do is make the

admission procedures and the process of conducting tests painless.The management of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute (RGCI) and

Research Centre knew the reality, and wanted to change things. They had seen how things are: the chaos in hospitals and the long and cumbersome processes take a toll on the patients and their families. A patient who is registered in the hospital typically has to go through many steps: from meeting different doctors to getting multiple tests done to being administered life saving medicine or treatment. Moreover, at each of these steps, the patient is typically required to make payments, and so, considerable time is lost before the patient can start treatment.

An equally time-consuming aspect of hospital treatment involves non-medical or administrative procedures, which need to be carried out parallel to medical procedures. Besides collection of patients' bills and fees, their treatment records have to be maintained and reports have to be generated – all forming an integral part of the patient’s hospital experience, and, if not handled efficiently, adding to their woes.

Recognising the special needs of patients coming to them, the management of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre felt the need to make this experience less harrowing to the patients and their kin. The potential of harnessing IT to transform patient care was recognised to make the procedures less cumbersome and eliminate the scope of errors in the medical process.

THE INSTITUTION'S JOURNEYIn 1996, a group of philanthro-pists came together to draw the plans for a specialised hospital for cancer in Delhi. The leading name at that time was the Tata Memorial of Mumbai but the extreme pressure on the very lim-ited resources and the growing number of cancer patients led to the birth of Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre. From the beginning, the philosophy behind this institution has been to provide for the complete care of cancer patients and to improve the quality of their life.

Around four years ago, in 2006, problems related to availability of

patient data were causing a strain on the hospital staff. The manage-ment decided that it was time to have an integrated patient record system: one that would record patient information from the time they registered to the time they are discharged. The in between steps of consultation, administering of medication, surgeries, therapies, testing, scanning, payments, prescriptions – all had to fall within the purview of the new IT system. This was going to be a first of its kind implementation in the country.

To achieve this goal, the administration came up with the idea of computerising all their records, both medical and non-medical, thereby reducing human intervention and making the process more efficient and patient-friendly.

It was decided to computerise all records and procedures of the hospital – clinical, non-clinical and imaging. The challenge in this change lay in the integration of different solutions addressing vari-ous aspects.

THE INTEGRATION DRIVEThe management and doctors of the hospital envisioned a solution which would be able to address the end-to-end needs of not only patients and the medical process but also those of the hospital’s administration. The IT team of RGCI, headed by Vishal Kakkar, spent almost two years to find an “off the shelf” application which would address their needs; however, no such solution existed. Most big IT players had not delved too deep into the problems of hospitals and healthcare so far, as this was in the government domain till about a

decade and a half back. The appli-cations available could provide only piece-meal solutions.

The managing committee, the administration and some pioneers amongst the medical fraternity of RGCI jointly took a decision to create a new applica-tion which was patient friendly and could also help in effective administration. At this point, Kakkar, realising the expertise that would be required to bring in this sea change in the hospi-tal’s use of IT, decided to engage

with E-Gestalt, a consultant in integrated IT solutions. E-Gestalt was given the mandate to provide an effective interface between different clinical, non-clinical and imaging solutions.

After testing a number of softwares, E-Gestalt zeroed in to a few applications: Vista clinical software for medical processes, PARAS

“TO OVERCOME CULTURAL AND

HABITUAL RESISTANCE, A ‘CHAMPION’ WHO

COULD ENDORSE AND LEAD THE CHANGE, WAS GIVEN THE CHARGE OF

‘CONVERTING’ THE REST OF THE TEAM.”


LI T T LE G IANT S I T I N M E D I C I N E

for non-clinical processes and PACS (Picture Archiving Commu-nication System by Fujifilms) to manage the imaging the institute. E-Gestalt was involved right from the stage of shaping contracts and looking into policies of implementation to the project finally going live in September 2010.

Once online, the entire process of treatment will follow a set pat-tern. A patient would register with the hospital and will be issued a card with a unique bar code. The patient name and information will be directly sent to the doctor’s schedule and he would be intimated that there is a patient in waiting along with the billing information. The doctor would examine the patient and recommend a few tests, say a scan. His recommendation would be directed to the two scan-ning machines in the hospital and the patient would automatically be put in waiting on both. After making the payment, the patient would walk up to a machine and his scan would be executed. The report and the image would be sent back to the doctor who would feed his prescription into the system. The prescription would be read by the pharmacy inventory and the medicines would be made available. In certain drugs like the one used for chemotherapy, where fixing of dosages is a highly sensitive matter, this too is taken up by the machine and made ready for the patient.

There has been a lot of collaboration between the different players who have come together to turn this dream into a reality. The princi-pal consultant from E-Gestalt, Inderdeep, has been stationed in the hospital for over a year now. His familiarity with the hospital func-tions and relationship with doctors’ and management is indicative of the collaboration between the technical and operational players in this implementation. Sundaresan, GM Finance and Head IT, RGCI, says the focus has been very clear for the team throughout and it is to reduce the pain of the patients.

REAPING THE GAINSThere are other benefits for the hospital. The turnaround time has decreased as the movement of the patients is faster. The real time updation of all records including those of the accounts has led to

greater efficiency and made micro level costing analysis possible. In Sundaresan’s view, the six crore investment in purchasing the appli-cations and hiring the expert for this integration implementation will yield returns within a short duration because of these benefits.

At the same time, the minimising of human intervention in these processes has reduced the scope of error. The system is designed such that at no level does the information transfer takes place with-out the user appending a digital signature to it. Hence, all doctors and medical staff need to verify the information being fed-in before sending it off to another department for use.

The transformation from the age old hand-written prescriptions to all details being captured on a machine has not been easy. Follow-ing the example of the Midland Hospital in the USA, RGCI began the practice of identifying ‘champions’ from amongst the different teams. Hence a pioneer who could endorse and lead the change was given the charge of “converting” the rest of the team. The ‘champion’ was trained and equipped to handle queries and smoothen out the process of inter departmental communication. This approach was a huge success in overcoming cultural and habitual resistance.

This implementation will also give a major boost to the cancer research that RGCI undertakes. The statistics and data of the large number of patients coming to the institute for treatment, is a gold-mine for cancer researchers and doctors, world over. Moreover, merging of non-clinical information like regional distribution, occupation etc is bound to throw new light on the causes and early detection of the disease.

However, there are operational situations which the hospital needs to be geared for: power cuts and unavailability of internet being the most basic ones. Even though backup plans for such situations are clearly defined, the feasibility of these will only be tested once the entire system goes live in September this year. Some departments have already made the switch and others are still in transition mode. Meanwhile the old patient records are being scanned and made available online. —[email protected]

“ IT IS SIMPLE TO ADDRESS THE “HOW” PART OF PATIENT CARE, WE ARE TRYING TO ADDRESS THE “WHY” PART THROUGH THIS PROGRAM.” DR. DEWANClinical-IT Champion, Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute

“THE FOCUS HAS BEEN VERY CLEAR FOR THE TEAM THROUGHOUT AND IT IS TO REDUCE

THE PAIN OF THE PATIENTS.”SUNDARESAN

GM Finance and Head IT, RGCI


16 Enterprise Architecture StrategiesA close study of big enterprises throws interesting resultsWE’VE been spending time thinking through the differences in implement-ing new or improving existing EA (enterprise architecture) capabilities for smaller, say a few billion in revenue, and larger firms in the Fortune 100 or thereabouts. Because the larger firms tend to have many complex, often unrelated business units, the role of centralised IT functions can also be quite complex, even unclear. Further-more, centralised enterprise functions have many challenges in driving stan-dards throughout diverse, geographi-cally scattered units.

Here is our hard-earned list of strategies, observations, insights and lessons learned over a collective 55+ years of EA and IT strategy work with over 100 companies. See what you think and what you would add (or disagree with).

1.An exhaustive enterprise level blue-print is virtually impossible to build – it’s too big and no one will buy-in

2.The best strategy blends a direc-tion-setting enterprise blueprint and business unit and domain blueprints

3.Centralised accountability for the EA function is a predictor of success

“business architecture” teams report-ing to the business (or dual reporting to business and IT)

11.Leading companies have refer-ence architectures in place for 90% of the technical domains

12.Your senior enterprise architects must have the right cultural skills and awareness to integrate well with upstream business partners and downstream technical users

13.High performance groups main-tain consistent, formalised EA involve-ment in the SDLC to translate blue-prints into sufficiently detailed starting architectures for each project as well as accurate cost and resource estimates

14.Mature organisations target 40% EA resource time for strategic planning and 60% on SDLC tasks, and typically err on spending more time on SDLC tasks

15.Strong credibility and trust amongst business and IT partners is a predictor of EA success. Credibility has typically been gained via joint strategic planning efforts. Co-authored by David Baker, Partner

and Chief Architect at Diamond Manage-

ment & Technology Consultants

4.A centralised team of architects is critical in driving EA standards and approaches

5.Architects must be assigned to projects as core team members (60%+ of total EA FTEs) rather than “advisors”

6.EA should be measured in two ways: business capabilities delivered and costs of core services

7.Measure EA as an asset – what does it cost to provide the service and what return does the business get from the business capabilities delivered?

8.Architecture leadership requires strong management, business opera-tions and technology skills, most likely in three different types of peo-ple; don’t expect your chief architect to run the EA function

9.Methods and governance must be integrated into existing work processes (eg. project approvals, sys-tems development life cycle (SDLC) ) rather than a new overlay

10. Enterprise Architecture is not always the best name for communi-cating; maybe Strategy & Planning or Enterprise Transformation is better

10.The best large companies have

THINKINGBEYONDCHRIS CURRAN | [email protected] CHRIS CURRAN is Diamond Management

& Technology Consultants’ chief technology

officer and managing partner of the firm’s

technology practice. He writes the CIO

Dashboard blog at www.ciodashboard.com

Centralised enterprise functions have many challenges in driving standards throughout diverse, geographi-cally scat-tered units

advts.indd 56 12/22/2009 3:02:47 PM

The Alternate WayOpen Source Alternatives for Industry ApplicationsRECENT conversations with insurance, bio-

tech and hospitality companies highlight growing interest in open source models for industry vertical apps. These firms are con-sidering opening up and sharing parts of their core business applications, not just infrastructure or common enterprise sys-tems like HR or financials. While none of these examples are straight-forward open source where all of the code is freely accessi-ble and the code development is crowd-sourced, they liberally borrow from the ideas of libre and gratis.

In the insurance case, a deal is far from done, but it’s a big deal to even have this kind of conversation in a very conservative industry. Here’s a little more context around one of the open source alternatives.

Insurance carriers consider open source developmentInsurance carriers use three primary systems

– one that evaluates and prices risk (under-writing), one to keep track of customers and policies (policy administration) and one to process claims (uh…claims!). There are also a few other important systems used to research and set pricing, to create and configure new products, but those are the basic three.

As is the case in many other industries, there are only a few large software players (CSC, IBM, etc.) who have more established offerings but tend to be slower to include new ideas and architectures. There are also a handful of upstarts who tend to bring more innovative capabilities but who are largely unproven. When it is time for a carrier to upgrade one or more of the three core systems or to add one to support a new busi-ness line or geography, they are faced with the age old question: larger/slower/known vendor or smaller/faster/unknown vendor?

We have three insurance clients who are currently asking this exact question – each

of them are adding new products and/or markets and think that going outside to a smaller/faster/unknown vendor will give them speed advantages. Interestingly, they are all looking at the same vendor, which got me and my partner Mark Purowitz think-ing: Could there be a way to share more across these companies who are competitive in at least some markets?

We have started to discuss the idea of an open model in which, with unanimous approval, extensions to the core vendor soft-ware would be developed once and shared across the three (and maybe more) firms. Some call this model “open periphery” since the core is proprietary but the extensions on the periphery could be made open.

It’s great to see this kind of co-opetition (a word first coined in 1913) around a complex problem like complex industry application development. Hopefully, they can get past the lawyers and make it happen.

TH I N K I N G B E YO N D O P E N S O U R C E


HIDDENTANGENT

The technology drivers. The enterprise was always the driver but consumer technology is close at heels.

parent company made some mis-takes along the line to make it easier.

The IBM PC, on the other hand originated for the enterprise and got to its critical mass using office productivity as the killer application. When people were comfortable using computers in the office, they wanted to have them at home too and use it for things that they even thought possible until sometime ago. The internet (again an invention for the enterprise) just sealed the place of the PC at home and made it a neces-sity instead of a luxury.

Thus, the enterprise has always ruled the way we use our computers. But that is something that is changing rapidly. And, ironically, one company that is one of the biggest drivers of this change is the one that lost out to the PC – Apple. We all know about the iPod, iPhone and the iPad, so I would not waste your time and my ink in describing them here. Another aspect that has changed the user experience and brought more and more people to use the internet is Facebook, Twitter and other social apps.

What these applications are doing to the industry is something that is worth

WHO drives technology? Let me just put this question in context and divide the usage of tech-nology in two broad buckets of enter-prise and personal technology. When we think of enterprise technology, it's data centres, server farms et al that come to one's mind; personal tech-nology on the other hand includes handheld devices, televisions, etc.

Now, let me answer the above ques-tion. Enterprise has always been a driver of technology in this world. Be it personal computers or handhelds – enterprises have dictated what will become mainstream. This has main-ly been because of the numbers that it provides in terms of technology usage and sales for vendors.

Companies like Apple had a tough time convincing people that they would need a computer at home with the Macintosh. Devices like the Commodore 64 were great consumer devices. They sold more than 30 mil-lion units making it the most sold single model personal computer of all times.

That party, though, didn't last for-ever; the IBM PC clones took over and killed the Commodore. Also, the

noting. They are making consumers the driving force in how enterprise software and processes are designed.

While I was speaking to James Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, he made a very interesting comment. He said that the users in office are now looking for Facebook- and Google-like functionality in business applications and they want it free of cost.

The users are now more aware of the computer than ever and are more comfortable in using them than they were ever before. But, the flip side is that they want absolutely slick soft-ware to work with that is bug free.

The other part of the whole chang-ing world order is the devices that have taken over the world by mil-lions. Be it the Blackberry, iPhone, Android or other smart phones, they have changed the way people interact with each other and the device itself.

The time is not too far when we would have enterprise software running on iPads and the so-called app-phones. One of the first enter-prise apps to be available on the iPad was WebEx online meeting platform by Cisco. The others are not far behind.

THE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum

“Though the Commodore had great devices, they simply could not sustain; the IBM PC clones took over.”

GEETAJ CHANNANA [email protected]


In an exclusive interview Dave Donatelli, EVP and GM, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP spoke to Rahul Neel Mani in Las Vegas during HP Tech Forum on Converged Infrastructure.

INFRASTRUCTURE MEANS ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

CONVERGED


Issues like infrastructure consolidation are causing

fresh pain. What’s a leading IT innovator like HP doing to address such a problem?Indeed, one of the biggest problems that enterprises face today is infra-structure sprawl. This sprawl hurts the ability of enterprises to innovate. Surveys suggest that 70 percent of the IT dollars are spent on maintain-ing legacy infrastructure. Only about 30 percent of funds remain to be spent on something that makes IT a real hero for businesses, which is bringing about new innovations such as new applications that help gain access into new areas. At HP, the whole R&D is focused towards solv-ing these problems.

Are there more challenges than just infrastructure

sprawl and maintaining legacy IT?Indeed there are! The pace of tech-nological change is enormous. The changes that we see today are mostly generational changes which don’t come too often. What do we really mean by these changes? Let me explain to you. For over two decades, the industry was busy in developing products that were based on individual silos. As a result the user got a server silo, a networking silo, a storage silo and to manage all of this, a management silo. All put together, these are major pain areas for a CIO from a management perspective. There is a lot of chal-lenge in keeping these silos in sync with change. There was a need for breaking down these silos and cre-ate a unified infrastructure, which stitches everything together.

HP is well positioned to take advantage of these remarkable changes in the world of computing. As a result of our customer-centric

innovation, we came out with a con-cept called HP Converged Infrastruc-ture. There is a very strong reason for everyone to believe that HP is, in reality, the only company which has its own servers, storage, networking and management portfolios. We have both the ability and product portfolio to design an integrated, converged infrastructure from the ground-up. And the most important thing is that enterprise users don’t have to wait for it for years. This is available now.

What does Converged Infra-structure mean to the users?

In precise terms, Converged Infra-structure is a blueprint for the futur-istic data centres that replace the inflexible IT silos. This is achieved by converging server, storage and networks with facilities – all man-aged through a common manage-ment platform. As a result, you get an infrastructure that delivers a new level of simplicity, integration and automation that can accelerate the desired business outcomes.

The solution supports core virtu-alisation across all layers in the stack including the network, storage and server. HP is uniquely positioned at and committed to supporting vari-ous flavours of virtualisations like HyperV, VMWare and others...But at the same time, if the users want

to run their infrastructure in a non-virtualised environment, the HP Converged Infrastructure supports that equally strongly. This infrastruc-ture offers a great amount of resil-iency – from a single machine-high availability to a global high mission-critical availability. You can have data running across different conti-nents replicated to ensure that you have a resilient infrastructure. The Converged Infrastructure supports modern IT users by not only meeting their dynamically changing business needs but also by effecting savings in maintaining legacy IT.

Which new HP products are part of this solution?

Converged Infrastructure is our bold answer to the demands from custom-ers asking to get rid of complex solu-tions that have sprawled across their environment. This is the most sig-nificant advancement in the past four years in the HP BladeSystem solutions which include new servers as well as innovations in HP Virtual Connect and HP BladeSystem Matrix. Apart from that, HP has also announced power management technologies that optimise energy usage and provide control over IT systems. HP has also leapfrogged in storage software space introducing new levels of simplicity and automation through a single, uni-fied architecture for data deduplication.

First breakthrough innovation is HP ProLiant G7 blades and serv-ers. The G7 promises to deliver cost savings in as little as 30 days. HP realised that to perform optimally, servers must have a balanced archi-tecture across CPU, input/output (I/O) and memory. The new HP ProLiant scale-up servers deliver innovations in automation that allow clients to speed application delivery and more effectively utilise IT.

DAVE D O N AT E L L I N O H O LDS BARR E D

NAME:Dave Donatelli

DESIGNATION:Executive VP and

General Manager

ORGANISATION:Enterprise Servers,

Storage and

Networking, HP

PREVIOUS JOB ROLE:President, EMC

Storage Division

DOSSIER

“The changes that we see today are mostly generational changes which don’t come too often.”


N O H O LDS BARR E D DAVE D O N AT E L L I

Second important announcement is HP Vir-tual Connect. It combines data and storage networks to eliminate sprawl. Virtual Con-nect will deliver automated, wire-once con-nectivity to any network, eliminating up to 95 percent of sprawl at the network edge. Virtual Connect FlexFabric module is a single device that connects servers to any Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI network eliminating the need for multiple interconnects.

The third one is HP BladeSystem Matrix software which simplifies IT environments with one-touch, self-service provisioning of applications. It also enables private clouds by allowing clients to deploy complex IT environments in less time. It helps users in reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 56 percent compared to traditional IT infrastructures.

The fourth one is HP Intelligent Power Discovery. It is yet another industry-first from HP for green data centres that cre-ates an automated, energy-aware network between HP ProLiant servers, third-party facility management tools and data centre power grids. By accurately provisioning energy, data centre managers can extend the life of their data centres and save millions.

Finally, HP StoreOnce is HP’s answer to automate data deduplication across the enterprise with a single unified architecture. It not only eliminates the complexity of multiple deduplication processes and prod-ucts, but also improves productivity and data management efficiency.

Don’t you think it will lead to a lot of proprietary lock-in as far as the

customers are concerned?Many business users ask me this question. My answer to this is very simple. Those who have worked with HP — customers and partners alike — know that we are totally committed to working on standards that help in keeping the infrastructure open. The foundation of Converged Infrastructure is based on open standards. Users can buy as little or as much as they want to buy. They can also replace us with anything they want. The infrastructure is orchestrated which means that the software and machines do the work which was earlier done manually and this ensures that errors don’t occur. Finally, the converged infrastructure is mod-ular. A user can start with smaller pieces

as per his/her needs and grow as large as possible as the business grows. I can assure you that unlike others, we convert our vision into reality in a promised timeframe. A lot of these products that you see today from HP were part of our vision few years ago and today it is all part of reality.

It took ten years to refresh the basic architecture of some of the most

promising technologies from HP. What went in those ten years of research? What is the result? Customers want technology architectures to have a significant life span. It is quite a substantial investment. Obviously we do bring out new generations of products from that architecture but the latter doesn’t change too often. There is always a trade-off between changing too fast and letting them exist for too long.

Our forecasts about IT infrastructure convergence have proved to be true. Hav-ing predicted convergence, we designed the bladed infrastructure. In fact, it is the only one out there in the market for the classic product. Earlier these products were developed on 100 percent custom hardware.

Redesigning these products so that they are built on acceptable industry standards required a lot of technical research and work. That’s what we have been working on for all these years. We all love the end result, which, today, takes the form of a simplified solution for customers. If you look at the holistic approach of HP Converged Infra-structure with open standards, it is some-thing really unheard in the industry.

How is the HP Consultancy Services division shaping up?

The HP Consultancy Service helps cus-tomers create an architecture which helps them adopt convergence. It can also help customers in implementing the appropriate technologies in their data centres or even run their converged infrastructure through HP services group. Finally, HP facilitates its partners who can then work with the cus-tomers to set up the converged infrastruc-ture. It is all about customer choices. But we want to offer the largest array of choices a customer can think about.

—[email protected]

“HP is committed to working on standards which help users in keeping their infrastructure open.”

53thectoforum.com 07 JULY 2010 CTO FORUM

HIDE TIME | CIO PROFILE

AJAY KUMAR MEHER Vice President – IT & New Media, Sony Entertainment Network, Multi Screen Media

A LEARNER ALL HIS LIFE... Meher swears by the need for constant learning. With his one-hour-a-day learning rule for his team, he wishes to infect them too. There's simply no time for any learning, he says. “Those who have personal interest, progress rapidly, but for those who don't, the compuslory gives them the push they need!” he says.

TIME TO SHARE... The learning habit has helped the team members contribute to plans that are backed by strong research, Meher asserts. So as to reap maximum gains, Meher asks individual team members to share with the group about their learning during meetings held once a month. There's an extra bonus – the activity has helped some members develop their presentation skills!

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well as his applicaion development prowess. In his last stint with Philips, where he worked for ten years, he was the Senior Manager and responsible for WAN, Notes Mails and applications, Internet setup and applications. “The role of the CIO is to understand business and IT

SOMETIMES the most important lessons are the ones we learn in our child-hood. And so has it been with Ajay Kumar Meher, Vice President – IT & New Media, Sony Entertainment Network, Multi Screen Media. “Do your job with your 100% effort and the result will fall in-line,” Meher remembers his mother's advice from the time he was a tinytot. “Those are the words I hold close to my heart even today,” Meher said.

IT’s every activity should be on the basis of business outcome, Meher believes. “Think like the CEO or the business head of the organisation and IT strategy will form an integral part of your thought process.” At Multi Screen Media, Meher says, there is close scrutiny before any IT activity is sanctioned. “Is the activity helping in top-line growth ? Is it helping in reducing operational cost? is it improving efficiencies?...we ask ourselves all these questions.”

Meher joined Multi Screen Media (MSM) in 2007; prior to that he worked in capacities that tested him on his network administration capacities as

Teach Thyself. It Works


53thectoforum.com 07 JULY 2010 CTO FORUM

Favourite book. “The Goal” written by Goldratt.

The book talks about theory of constrain (TOC). I like the

book as this helped me in providing a different aspect to

look into constrain and how to eliminate it. As for the

quote...Walt Disney's If you can dream it, you can do it.

Favourite album. Meher loves to listen to old

Hindi music. Mohd. Rafi is his favorite. “A glass of

wine/beer with Rafi is my style of meditation,” he

quips!

Favourite movie. A big fan of movies, Meher's

favourites are comedies. “My latest favourite is 3 Idiots,

he says. I watch movies to get relaxed and any movie

doing that helps me do that is good for me,” he says.

Memories to cherish. Every new trip overrides my

memory of last trip, Meher says. This summer the Meher

family – Ajay along with wife, Jolly, and school-going

daughters Priya and Riya – went to the queen of hills

“Nainital” and the forest of Corbett.

Snap Shotboth and my core IT assignments have helped me understand the language of IT,” he said. Meher says that his cumulative knowledge of applications and infrastructure as well as the business knowledge that he has gained over the course of time has helped him to lead IT.

At MSM, Meher needs to make sure he has a talented team. To ensure this, he has adopted a practice of nurturing talent in-house. “We have built a study hour per day kind of culture, where every employee is encouraged to leave his work for one hour and study whatever he/she wants,” he says. That has helped foster sharing of knowledge among colleagues by creating a formal platform to enable it, he says. “This has helped me build a knowledge base in the team itself which has helped us cope with the changing and demanding require-ments of the broadcast industry.”

As a business enabler, IT and New Media has provided a technological edge to the organisation, Meher asserts. In recent years, Meher's team had under-taken SAP implementation, digital content transfer to the broadcast center and implementation of a rights and broadcast management system. “These deployments have helped business to improve its efficiencies and also lower the operational costs,” he said.

Meher loves to cook and listen to music in his free time. Going on vacations with family and friends is another of his favourite activities. “As a family we play many in-door games or go on long drives together,” Meher shares. These activities help Meher destress and get back to work with renewed vigour. “Can there be greater joy than a smiling family welcoming you after a long day at work?” Meher asks. —By Aditya Kelekar

54 07 JULY 2010 thectoforum.comCTO FORUM


VIEWPOINT


ing is just that–packaging. It’s not a sustainable value proposition that justifies a huge margin profile. Cisco has sold about 1,000 UCS systems over the last year, I think. HP ships 8,500 servers a DAY.

To get to scale, Cisco is going to have to buy someone. Dell? That would be awesome and give them scale–but awfully expensively. Who else? They can’t buy IBM or HP, or Intel, so who else is there? That means they have to do it organically–which will cost a fortune and drag down earnings in my estimation–let alone the distraction it will cause.

Now for HP and networking, the opposite is true. Networking margins for HP will be GREAT! They will be closer to 50%–twice that of servers–even if they price at 50% of Cisco. HP already has 5,000 people trained on the products and is aggressively hiring salespeople. HP will find no real trouble convincing shops to let them start as a legitimate number two. Once they are in, who knows? No matter what, Cisco will be forced

CISCO walked into HP’s bread and butter by hopping into the server space. I’m not sure they really thought this through all the way. HP countered by buying 3Com–wanting to become #2 (for now anyway) in the enterprise networking space.

HP is going to win this battle. Here’s why:

It’s all about the margin structure. Cisco has enjoyed roughly 70% margins in core networking forever, because they have had no real com-petition for the last 15 years. They have not pushed the commodity envelope and passed on savings to the market – because they didn’t have to. Now, they are addicted to that contribution margin – it funds every-thing else they do.

IF (note the big IF) Cisco become successful in servers, they will only do so by changing their margin pro-file. They will not ultimately be able to sustain margins in excess of HP or IBM or Dell because they simply can’t buy at anywhere near the levels of the big server guys. Nifty packag-

to either lower their pricing and eat margin or cede market share. I sus-pect they will be forced to cede share, as once they drop pricing their whole model breaks. Final thoughts here:1. HP only has to show minor, con-sistent share gains to win.2. HP has a much deeper overall portfolio versus Cisco. Cisco has networking and telepresence. HP has everything and the kitchen sink.3. Cisco can be outsold. Their domi-nance has allowed them to move from hunters to farmers over the years. 4. If Cisco is committed to the server space, they almost are forced to pick up the last big piece–storage.5. HP has always pushed the com-modity envelope. It will be bad enough that HP gets a foothold in core networking and forces a one time price correction–but they won’t stop there. They will keep on forcing it year over year. At least that is what history tells me.

(In my next column I will forecast the

course that IBM and Oracle will take.)

HP vs Cisco The odds seem to be

in HP's favour

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STEVE DUPLESSIE | [email protected]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Duplessie

is the founder of

and Senior Analyst

at the Enterprise

Strategy Group.

Recognised

worldwide as

the leading

independent

authority on

enterprise storage,

Steve has also

consistently been

ranked as one of

the most influential

IT analysts. You

can track Steve’s

blog at http://www.

thebiggertruth.com

Harvesting Mobility

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