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editorial
yashvendra singh | yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

The Next-Gen Platform


SMAC promises to transform a CIO into a revenue generator
he latest acronym doing the rounds in CIO circles is SMAC. Short for Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud, it is being touted as the next genplatform for enterprises. While all these technologies have been discussed at length in a piecemeal manner, it is only now that experts are clubbing them together in a stack. This approach has stemmed from the fact that CIOs are increasingly encountering unsuccessful implementation of

these new technologies. There have been instances where implementation of BYOD policies has led to increase in costs and security issues. Deploying social media tools has decreased productivity, while efforts at customising functionality have neutralised cost savings through cloud computing. Hence, the need to deploy these technologies as a stack and accrue meaningful results. SMAC stack can lead to business process improvements.

editors pick 26

SMAC Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud are collectively being touted as the new platform. CIOs are leveraging this stack for enhancing productivity and profitability

Analyst reports have conclusively proven that these technologies help an enterprise take faster and informed decisions, foster innovation, cut the time to market, and increase the speed of various processes. But there is also a word of caution here. All these hot technologies may not be right for all businesses. Not every enterprise may have the same urgency and need to deploy the SMAC components. The more visionary CIOs realise the fact that while traditional IT systems (ERP, for instance) may help in calculating money, they have to turn to such new and emerging technologies if they have to make money. And this is critical for a CIO, who is no longer just the custodian of enterprise IT. A CIO is also a revenue generator. By leveraging this new platform, a CIO can not only turn into

a revenue generator but also elevate himself within his firm. There are very few companies that have embraced the complete SMAC stack. However, there are corporates that have deployed some of its components, and are looking at implementing the remaining ones too. The case studies, which form this issues cover feature, make for an interesting read. When it comes to SMAC, the choice ahead of CIOs is crystal clear. They can either guide and power their enterprises ahead on it or relinquish the managerial and financial control they possess. So what have you decided?

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The Chief Technology Officer Forum

may 13
Conte nts thectoforum.com

26

Cover Story

26| SMAC Social, Mobile,

Columns

Analytics and Cloud are collectively being touted as the new platform. CIOs are leveraging this stack for enhancing productivity and profitability
S P I N E

08 | I believe: don't change technology for the heck of it


By SC Mittal

48 | viewpoint: hp's moonshot


By steve duplessie

CTO FORUM

Technology for Growth and Governance

May | 07 | 2013 | 50 Volume 08 | Issue 18

Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling

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 Kakson House, Plot Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301

Features
THE NEXT-GEN PLATFORM
SOCIAL, MOBILE, ANALYTICS and CLOUD are collectively being touted as the new platform. CIOs are leveraging this stack for enhancing productivity and profitability Page 28 HPs Perfect Moonshot
PAGE 48

DEFENSIBLE IS NOT THE SAME AS SECURE | ALWAYS ON AND CONNECTED Volume 08 | Issue 18

22 | Best of breed: always on and connected


PAGE 18

VIEWPOINT

A 9.9 Media Publication

Hybrid cloud will grow in future

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

Cover design by: anil t

The Accenture survey 2013 reveals some startling facts on enterprise mobility

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www.cioandleader.com
Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Managing Editor: Rachit Kinger Consulting Editor: Atanu Kumar Das Assistant Editor: Akhilesh Shukla Correspondent: Debashis Sarkar DEsign Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Sr. Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Directors: Atul Deshmukh & Anil T Sr. Visualisers: Manav Sachdev & Shokeen Saifi Visualiser: NV Baiju Sr. Designers: Raj Kishore Verma, Shigil Narayanan & Haridas Balan Designers: Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ Midhun Mohan & Pradeep G Nair MARCOM Designer: Rahul Babu STUDIO Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi advisory Panel Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IT, ICICI Bank Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Sr Consultant, NMEICT (National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology) Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp Vishal Salvi, CISO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Sales & Marketing National Manager Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (+91 98804 36623) National Sales Manager: Vinodh K (+91 97407 14817) Assistant General Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar Singh (+91 97407 61921) BRAND & EVENTS Brand Manager: Jigyasa Kishore (+91 98107 70298) Product Manager-CSO Forum: Astha Nagrath (+91 99020 93002) Manager: Sharath Kumar (+91 84529 49090) Assistant Manager: Rajat Ahluwalia (+91 98998 90049) Assistant Brand Managers: Nupur Chauhan (+91 98713 12202) Vinay Vashistha (+91 99102 34345) Assistant Manager Corporate Initiatives (Events): Deepika Sharma Associate Corporate Initiatives (Events): Naveen Kumar Production & Logistics Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh. Published at Office No. B201-B202, Arjun Centre B Wing, Station Road, Govandi (East), Mumbai-400088. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd., A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in

18
A Question of answers

18 | Hybrid cloud will grow in future Angira Agrawal, AVP and Head, Cloud, NEC India, talks to CTO Forum about
NEC's cloud aggregation platform

40

46

RegulArs

02 | Editorial 10 | letters 12 |  Enterprise Round-up

40 | tecH FOR GOVERNANCE: hardening is hard if you're doing it right


If you are following a checklist, hardening is not hard

46 | next horizons: it driving firms to go digital


Accenture's Technology Vision 2013 report highlights the latest IT developments

Dell IFC Qualispace 1 Microsoft 3, IBC, BC HP 6, 7 ESDS 9 SAS Institute 11 Zenith 15 Cisco 17 Emerson 29-37
This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

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07 may 2013

IT MAY BE TIME TO TAKE YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE GROUND.

photo credit: getty images

2012 - INDIA IS STILL HOME TO 41% OF THE WORLD'S POOREST.


For India to truly change, we need to address this issue. PRADAN is powered by the belief that the best minds in the country need to work at the grassroots to change the face of poverty in India. Their teams have been working with endemically poor communities for 30 years with some amazing results. Their focus is to work with women and tribal communities across the poorest districts of India. They have introduced models, which have helped entire communities find livelihoods and emerge from poverty. They have touched over 1 million people, changing their lives in a range of ways from ensuring food and livelihood, to creating choice and dignity. They pictured the change. And changed the picture.
It may be time to take your head out of the ground. Donate now to help change the picture. For any further information on how you can help, please visit 30.pradan.net or send an email to campaign@pradan.net. You could choose to either make a personal donation or join hands with PRADAN as part of your CSR initiatives.

PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT ACTION

picture the change | change the picture


9.9 Media supports PRADAN.

I Believe

By SC Mittal, Group CTO, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited


the author is responsible for the overall computerisation plans and its development/ roll out in the organisation.

Dont change tech for the heck of it

current challenge
to use BI in a way that it helps iffco to reduce procurement cost

CIO should be cautious while deploying any new technology


With technology changing very fast, it is very important for CIOs to make the right deployments in their company. I have always believed that there is no use of changing technology just for the heck of it. For example, we at Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO)

have been using technologies that have lasted for more than two decades. For example, we started using Lotus Notes in 1993-94 and are still using it. There have been many vendors who have tried to convince us that we need upgrade to a new solution. However, I have seen that employees within the organisation were very happy using Lotus Notes. Besides, as an organisation we were not getting less productive by using the application. We have constantly updated the solution and even today Lotus Notes is used across all IFFCO locations within the country as well as abroad. Another example is of a Document Management Software which has been in use since 1995. It is not a very big brand but the application satisfied the company needs and so we didn't migrate to any other software. One may think that I am very rigid and don't change or migrate to newer technology. But this is not the case. Wherever I find a genuine case to migrate, to a new software or an application, I go ahead. The only thing I ask myself is whether the new doployment will to be helpful to our organisation in the long run or not. Once I get an affirmative answer, I look out for options to replace a particular application. In this financial year, one of the key focus areas for IFFCO is to apply business analytics in a big way as I believe this will help in reducing the procurement costs in the organisation. We are a 100 percent co-operative organisation and do a lot of procurement from the international market. There have been instances that whenever India and China goes to the international market for procurement, the prices increase. So by business analytics, we can find out what is the best way to procure raw materials from the international market.

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LETTERS
COVE R S TO RY R U P E E S AV E D I S R U P E E E A R N E D R U P E E S AV E D I S R U P E E E A R N E D COVE R S TO RY

CIOs are identifying every opportunity to save. They are consolidating vendors, rationalising the mix of products and services, and eliminating wasteful expenditure. They are not shying away from negotiating better discounts with vendors. By conducting an analysis of their IT spend, they are reducing capital and operational costs, increasing efficiency and agility with an aim to achieve faster and better ROI
By Akhilesh Shukla
S P I N E

Design By Pradeep G Nair Imaging By Peterson PJ


CTO FOR UM

Rupee Earned
Gover nance

Rupee Saved is

CTOForum LinkedIn Group


Join over 900 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:
April | 07 | 2013 Volum | 50 e 08 | Issue 16
THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM

Techno logy for Growth and

28

CTO FORUM
07 APRIL 2013

THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER FORUM

pee Earn ed
CIOs oppo are identifyi ng ev are co rtunity to sa rationali nsolida ve. Thery ting ve ey and se sing the mi ndors, rvices, x of pro elimina ducts ting wa and inc ste reasing ROI Pag
e 28

Ru ee Savep Ru d is

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07 APRIL 2013

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www.linkedin.com/ groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450

THE DATA CLEANS E | FIND ING AND RETA INING IT TALE NT

Some of the hot discussions on the group are:


S How CompSmart anies Manage BYOD
PAGE 42

NEXT HOR IZON

Virtual CTO/CIO A long term IT partner for your business growth This is a model that SMBs are slowly waking up to. While their IT head can chip away with his day-to-day activities, an external help (a part time CIO) can give their IT a proper direction and can review performance to ensure the company's objectives are met.

A QUE STION OF ANS WERS

CIOs Ne to Rectied Bottle neckfy s


PAGE 16

CIO&LEADER. COM

are CTOs more interested in satisfying the CFO & Board rather than the consumer?

CTO is aligned to the CFO and the Board in that order, the CTO will have to also be good at resume writing as he will not last too long. But then the question arises, is the CFO aligned to the Consumer? If he is not, then even he may be in hot water sooner or later.
arun gupta, CIO, Cipla

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community. Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@thectoforum.com Yasmin Jetha, CIO, Bupa

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Volum e 08 | Issue 16

A 9.9

Media

Publicatio

Khwaja Saifuddin, Sales Director, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, Western Digital, talks about storage utilisation

Balasubramanian S R Business & IT Consultant

http://www. cioandleader.com/ cioleaders/features/10001/ciosrectify-bottlenecks

Opinion how to create high performing teams


Yasmin Jetha, CIO of Bupa, talks about her inexhaustible energy
Yasmin Jetha has done it all. She is the CIO of Bupa. She was previously the Chief Operating Officer of Financial Times. To read the full story go to: http://www.cioandleader. com/cioleaders/features/10049/create-performingteams

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

FEATURE Inside

Round-up
illuSTRATION BY raj verma

Enterprise

Enterprises Lack Confidence in Detecting Threats


Pg 14

analytic services

GE Plans to invest $105 million in Pivotal Will enable it to create new


the Internet will also transform industries like aviation, rail, energy, oil and gas, infrastructure and healthcare, connecting human insight with machine intelligence, advanced analytics and low-cost-sensing to drive new levels of productivity and efficiency for global industries. Paul Maritz, CEO, Pivotal, said, We are experiencing a major change in the wide-scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructure and the transformation of how apps will be built and used based on cloud and mobility. This transformation is also happening in enterprises.

Pivotal, the company setting the new standard for enterprise PaaS, today announced that GE plans to invest approximately $105 million in Pivotal. The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GEs ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment in Pivotal and new business agreement align with GEs focus on the Industrial Internet. Over the past two decades, technology has connected people globally and created unprecedented opportunities for business and consumers. In the next decade,

$34
billion
Is the worth of global fab foundry

Data Briefing

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E nte rpri se Round -up

They Narayana Said it Murthy


At the launch of the Annual Survey of Indias City-Systems, Murthy said resources can be mobilised if you have quality leaders.

How do breaches occur? 76 percent of network intrusions exploited weak or stolen credentials
The one-two combo of hacking and malware struck less often this round, but definitely isnt down for the count. Filtering out the large number of physical ATM skimming incidents shows exploitation of weak and stolen credentials still standing in the ring. According to Wade Baker, Principal Author for the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR), the proportion of breaches incorporating social tactics like phishing was four times higher in 2012. Credit the rise of this challenger to its widespread use in targeted espionage campaigns. Correlated with the 14 percent of breaches tied to insiders, privilege misuse weighs in at 13 percent. Insider actions ranged from simple card skimming to far more complicated plots to smuggle corporate IP to competitors. These attacks, aimed at paralysing or disrupting systems, also have significant costs because they impair business and operations. The bottomline is that unfortunately, no organisation is immune to a data breach in this day and age, said Wade Baker. The report indicated that the 52 per cent of the respondents stated hacking to be the tool for data breach, 40 per cent said incorporated malware and 35 percent found the breaches involving physical attacks.

I dont know of any institution, whether its a company or a state that has made consistent progress unless you have strong competent and altruistic leaders.
Narayana Murthy, Chairman Emeritus, Infosys Limited

illuSTRATION BY raj verma

Quick Byte on printers

illuSTRATION BY raj verma

The combined printer shipments in India rose 5.4 percent to 6,76,263 units in the fourth quarter of 2012, compared with the same period of last year, while total end-user spending grew 27 per cent to $219.8 million

The Chief Technology Officer Forum

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13

E nte rpri se Round -up

Ravi Chauhan, managing director India and SAARC, Juniper Networks According to Larry Ponemon, Chairman & Founder, Ponemon Institute, respondents in Australia, China, India and Japan share common challenges in securing their organisations networks such as web-based attacks and denial of service attacks. It is interesting to observe that despite being armed with emerging network security technologies, organisations in Asia Pacific find themselves to be sitting ducks for external threats. Organisations need to reflect on the shortcomings of their existing inside-out approach and seriously consider investing in a more comprehensive and holistic approach to network security in order to keep pace with a constantly evolving threat landscape, says Ponemon.

illuSTRATION BY raj verma

network security technologies are said to be addressing partial security threats


Juniper Networks , the industry leader in network innovation, today announced the findings of a new Ponemon Institute report, which revealed that on average the security posture of Indian organisations surveyed is only 4.7 based on a scale of 10 being very effective. The Efficacy of Emerging Network Security Technologies study, commissioned globally by Juniper Networks, shows securing web traffic is by far the most significant network security concern for the majority of organizations (64 percent) surveyed. However, less than half (46 percent) of

Enterprises Lack Confidence in Detecting Threats Emerging

News Highlights
This report uncovered key concerns and security threats that the 554 Indian IT and IT security professionals surveyed encountered within their organisation on a daily basis, with theft of their organisations intellectual property being one of the top security concerns that keeps them up at night. Organisations believe that their emerging network technologies only partly address their security concerns 63 percent of those surveyed say emerging network security technologies only address part of the security threats facing their organisations. Majority of the respondents (55 percent) surveyed say that their organisations prioritise emerging network security technologies to curtail inside-out threats rather than a more holistic approach to security. 50 percent say blocking of IP addresses in not an effective security measure. Organisations are critical of their network security posture; rate them below average in detecting and preventing cyber attacks On an average, respondents say the security posture of their organisation is only 4.7 based on a scale of 10 being very effective. 52 per cent of the respondents say emerging network security technologies used by their organisations are dependent upon the in-house personnel who possess the knowledge and expertise to operate them effectively.

respondents agreed that emerging network security technologies are not as effective as they should be and do not minimise attacks that bring down web applications or block unwarranted Internet traffic. Security remains a major concern among organisations. The Ponemon Institute report reveals that even emerging network security technologies are not as effective as they should be. Companies need to review their security investment weighting, to assess whether the areas of greatest risk are receiving adequate attention and how they can address serious security threats, says

Global Tracker

IT Infrastructure

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The Chief Technology Officer Forum

Source: gartner

According to Gartner, worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending

fell by 16.1 per cent to $37.8 billion in 2012

ADVERTORIAL

ask the expert

Vijay Kumar Arora Founder, LT Foods


Q: LT Foods is the leading processor and exporter of packaged basmati rice. We are a ` 2,000 crore company with 1,100 people across the globe. We use an upgraded ERP Hardware platform, and intranet for internal communication with employees, and an enhanced BI application for data analysis. Looking at the long term, we plan to actively manage the short, mid- and long-term viability of our technology and services portfolio as a portfolio to monitor contributions according to business case parameters and service level agreements. We also want to develop expertise in business process reengineering and shore up any weakness in solution design and deployment. A: A datacenter or DC has many layers of disparate applications, each of which behave differently from the other. Some of these applications are multithreaded like the Web Server Apps. Cisco has a framework of architectures called CVDs (Cisco Validated Design) which provide architectural guidelines for different types of workloads. These designs are certified to co-exist with multiple storage solutions and other applications like DB, Exchange, Virtualization, SharePoint etc.They can be implemented based on the specific guidelines that we have created using best practices for multiple solutions.

Ashish Wattal
National Product Manager UCS Cisco India & SAARC
Intel , the Intel logo, Xeon , and Xeon inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries

E nte rpri se Round -up

IT Spend by PSUs in India Valued at $8.5 bn PSUs leveraging technology to establish transparency

innov, a market expansion and globalization advisory firm, today released its report on Indian PSU landscape capturing interesting facts and figures on the burgeoning PSU segment in India. According to the report findings, Public sector units (PSUs) in the Indian economy account for $383 billion of turnover in FY 12 with a revenue growth of 11 percent since 2009. The sector gives employment to 1.4 million with 40 percent of PSU companies operating in the manufacturing sector.

The report highlights that the investment in technology is the key trend which is shaping up the growth of the sector. PSUs are looking at investing into technology to help address the challenges they faced in early years of transition towards establishing a more transparent and accountable organisation, reduce the cost of production and enhance productivity and customer reach. IT spend accounts for two per cent of total PSU revenues higher than most other verticals. According to the report findings, energy and BFSI are the major PSU verticals for IT investments. Further the report talks about some of the major challenges which have impacted the growth of the Indian PSU sector. Presently the major challenge faced by the PSU sector is the Talent Related Challenges resulting in lack of performance incentives in terms of recognition and accelerated growth paths for workforce giving rise to productivity challenges. In addition to this, other challenges like lack of quantitative benchmarks against domestic private companies or global equivalents is affecting the performance of the sector while broad based decision making structure is resulting into the lack of accountability. Talking about the findings from the study, Praveen Bhadada, Director Market Expansion, Zinnov said, India is a hub of 225 PSUs operating across verticals, with 16 of these companies featuring in the global list of top 2000 companies. With their growing size and dominance, PSUs have started looking at IT to address the global competition. Examples like SBI which has done one of the largest core banking solution implementation globally or BPCL which has made early investments in big data make the segment very lucrative for the technology companies

semiconductor

Fact ticker

Indias Mobile Services Market to Reach ` 1.2 Trillion in 2013


Mobile connections to reach 770 million
Indias mobile services market will reach `1.2 trillion in 2013, up 8 per cent from 2012 revenue of `1.1 trillion, according to Gartner, inc. Mobile connections will grow to 770 million in 2013, an 11 per cent increase from 712 million connections in 2012. The mobile market in India will continue to face challenges if average revenue per unit (ARPU) does

not grow significantly, said Shalini Verma, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner. If the prevailing conditions do not change in the Indian telecom market, India will account for 12 percent worldwide mobile connections, but just two percent of worldwide mobile services revenue in 2013. Indian telecom operators are faced with two major challenges grow-

ing their profit margin in the face of intense competition and successfully competing with over the top service providers, such as Facebook and WhatsApp. As mobile voice services continue to get commoditised in the country with the increased use of voice over IP (VoIP) and the probable termination of national roaming charges, mobile broadband is the area of opportunity for operators, said Verma. India has a phenomenal pent up demand for mobile broadband and local mobile apps that solve everyday problems for consumers.

ndia's semiconductor consumption reached $8 billion in 2012, a 7.4 percent increase from 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. This was in contrast to the global trend as worldwide semiconductor revenue declined 2.6 percent to reach $299.9 billion in 2012, said Gartne in a press release. "The worldwide semiconductor industry suffered serious disruption in 2012. Excess inventory in the supply chain was the key factor," said Ganesh Ramamoorthy, research director at Gartner. "High inventory levels affected semiconductor consumption in India as well during 2012. However, a relatively better domestic economic climate and growth in consumer spending helped semiconductor consumption growth in India," added Ramamoorthy. Of the three key electronic devices - mobile phones, PCs and LCD TVs, which account for over 70 percent of India's overall semiconductor consumption, Gartner said, LCD TV saw the biggest growth of nearly 45 percent in terms of semiconductor consumption during 2012, while mobile phones' semiconductor consumption grew by 5.7 percent and PCs declined by 0.3 percent. "With the global semiconductor industry poised for a rebound starting in the second quarter of 2013, we expect semiconductor consumption in India to also grow. "

image By photos.com

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A Question of answers

A n g i r a Ag r awa l

Hybrid Cloud

Angira Agrawal | VP & Head, NEC India

Will Grow in Future


Can you share the details of your partnership with Aircel to offer cloud services? We have signed a strategic partnership with Aircel for Software as a Service (SaaS), where NEC will provide the Cloud Aggregation Platform along with a portfolio of Cloud offerings toAircel, which has a large customer base. Aircel will be responsible for managing the end-to-end customer relationships, including presales and sales engagements, delivery and support, and billing and contractual relationships.

Angira Agrawal, AVP and Head Cloud, NEC India, talks to CTO Forum about NEC's cloud aggregation platform and the challenges in the cloud computing space in India
Aircel and NEC will start with a software applications portfolio, which could then subsequently extend to other Cloud offerings. The focus will be on enterprise grade offerings, such as collaboration, CRM, ERP, HRMS, business suite, video conferencing, etc. The software services can be adapted to suit a wide variety of business roles, from sales and support, to internal workgroups providing increased efficiencies and greater workforce productivity. NEC has built up a carrier grade cloud aggregation platform through its engagements with multiple service providers across the globe.
What need do you see for cloud aggregation service in Indian enterprises? As consumerization of cloud computing has emerged in the enterprise, it has brought with it varying levels of confusion about the options and the needs they best meet. This provides an opportunity for providers offering cloud services especially the ones specializing in the cloud aggregator or brokerage model to step in and

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Advantage Customers: One of the benefits of cloud computing is its ease of adoption for technology leaders

A Question of answers

A n g i r a Ag r awa l

address this confusion, by providing customers a portfolio from which they can choose the best options that meet their needs. These, of course keeping in mind the ease of use and the budgets set by the customer. Given the economics of the cloud and the new business models emerging around the delivery of cloud-based services, organisations could create and deliver these new ICT services at a potentially lower cost compared with conventional approaches. However, many technological and business aspects of cloud are still evolving.
What are customers' expectations from cloud computing? How prominent is the growth for public, private and hybrid clouds? Customers expect the following: Industry standard security practices, financial advantages (including immediate costs savings, but also lower TCO), consulting on the best practices to adopt, and flexibility to migrate in and out of cloud computing as business needs change. The challenge comes in when some customers start believing that Cloud can solve all problems which is not really true. Public cloud is growing in both small and medium enterprise segments, but also in large enterprises we have seen this happen for standard SaaS services such as CRM, Email and Collaboration, Project management, BaaS, for example. Private cloud adoption has been primarily in the large enterprises we have seen this for mainly IaaS, StaaS. Hybrid cloud is a good way for large and medium enterprises to transition certain services to the public cloud examples include where an ERP has been implemented, and now there is a need for a CRM the latter being on cloud, but working with the ERP on premise; another example could be having private IaaS to meet standard compute loads, but using a public IaaS service to meet the variability at the end of the month or during peak loads. We believe that hybrid

There is tremendous potential for the adoption of cloud computing in India


cloud will grow over the next few years, as large enterprises transition to having more public cloud services working closely with inhouse services, including the overall integration and deployments associated.
What uptake for cloud computing are you observing in India? Over the past few years, the growth of cloud computing adoption has been growing, but in the past few months, we have seen this penetrate strongly across segments. While IT in large enterprises has been investing significantly in building private cloud infrastructure to cater to the needs of various units within their organisation, the units themselves are emerging from the closet, and turning out to be the largest adopters of public cloud computing. The mid and small enterprises are increasingly looking towards public cloud computing to meet their immediate and long term needs. An additional thing we have

things I Believe in
Private cloud adoption has been primarily in the large enterprises.   Hybrid cloud will grow over the next few years.  The mid and small enterprises are increasingly looking towards public cloud computing.

noticed is that the larger and mid enterprises are looking for end to end solutions, including not only the core cloud computing offering, but also the integration, customisation and deployments.
Cloud migration is still not as seamless as it is thought out to be, leading to lock-in situation for enterprises. How do you ensure that the customer doesnt feel locked-in to your cloud? One of the benefits of cloud computing is the ease of adoption however, most providers do not make it easy to migrate out, should the customer grow out of their services. At NEC, we recognize that this is an immediate barrier to cloud adoption, and have put in industry standard practices for customers to both migrate in and out of our cloud offerings. While migrating the actual data is not so difficult, we also consult with customers to ensure that they can manage their workflows too.

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B E S T OF B R E E D

mobility

Breed
hats not necessarily news. The idea of giving employees the ability to exchange data with corporate servers no matter where they are, using a device that fits in their hand, stopped being the stuff of science fiction long ago. Only slightly newer is the idea of being able to interact with customers and prospects no matter where they are, along with the ability to enhance customer intimacy and revenues. Whats really compelling, though: the speed at which the mobility market is maturing. One-third of the IT executives surveyed cited mobility as one of their top-two priorities, but 75 percent put it among their top five. Thats a big commitment for a technology that only became viable less than five years ago. At the same time, overall investment in mobility is increasing. Companies that invested heavily in mobility in 2011 decreased their investment in 2012. That may seem counterintuitivea lack of support, perhapsbut it actually indicates a willingness to invest as a way to quickly determine what works and what doesnt. With that early experience, those enterprises are more knowledgeable about how to target their mobility investment. Conversely, companies that spent little on mobility in 2011 increased their investment in 2012. Theyre playing catch-up because its become inescapably clear that mobility is not only crucial to their business, but its aiding their

Best of

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Mobility market is maturing fast

Always on and Connected


The Accenture survey reveals some startling facts on enterprise mobility
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B E S T OF B R E E D

competitors. Furthermore, 50 percent of companies have done work to implement their mobile strategy within the next year, up from 41percent last year.

Challenges and Opportunities

As companies make the move to integrate their mobility strategy into their business, they understand thatespecially for a new, and in some areas, immature, technology some common challenges remain. When asked to name the barriers that kept them from addressing or implementing their mobile priorities, IT executives cited several percent of respondents are developing an concerns. Data security, especially with data API strategy to go hand in hand with their on devices that have not been issued by mobility strategy. With an evolution to API corporate IT, i.e.; Bring Your Own Device platforms, enterprises can build mobile (BYOD), topped the list, cited by 45 percent applications to access legacy systems. But of respondents. Cost and budget concerns opportunities outnumber the challenges. IT were cited by 41percent of respondents. Its executives can already map the link between not that mobile devices arent reasonably social networking and collaboration tools priced, but most CIOs are still focusing on through mobilitythat is, finding the maintenance rather than innovation, leavright person or information quickly either ing little budget to invest in cutting edge through social communication tools for the technologies like mobility. At the same enterprise or shared data repositories in the time, employees dont need laptops and cloud. When asked to rank their top three tablets and smartphones, and neither does mobile features, 45 percent of respondents IT want to support nor does the business cited knowledge sharing and 40 percent want to pay for them. But, barring the use cited collaboration. More than most new of a single mobile device, which represents technologies, the ability to drive revenue the best combination for deployment? Even through mobility is clear for IT executives so, the confusion over the best device isnt too. Payment and commerce services are stopping progress toward a mobile centric becoming a top priority across industry verIT architecture. ticals, cited by 38 percent of respondents. Enterprises view tablets almost as important as smartphones, with 85 percent of respondents saying they support smartThe Way Forward phones and 78 percent saying they support What about companies that may not be as tablets (talk about a technology that has far along as their competitorshow should become part of mainstream usage quickly). they invest in mobility? Interestingly, their That means concerns about letting employpath need not be that much different from ees use their own devices (aka BYOD) may companies already investing in mobility. not be as prevalent as previously thought. According to the survey results, key areas of Finally, 31 percent reported investment include allocating lack of interoperability with budget for mobile initiatives, current systems as an issue. such as hardware and applicaTheres a wealth of corporate tion development; retraining data locked into legacy systems staff to handle management that may not be accessible to of mobile devices and applicawill be the size of mobile devices. tions; and hiring more mobile cloud security One way of exposing data expertise within their ranks. in existing systems is through Given the demand for mobile services market transforming existing services skills, its also not surprising by 2016 with modern APIs and gatethat many companies plan to way services. Thats why 54 leverage external experts to

Enterprises view tablets almost as important as smartphones, with 85 percent of respondents saying they support smartphones
develop or implement those strategies. At the same time, companies need to identify where within their own organisations or industries they can get the most benefit from mobile deployment. From there, they should conduct gap analysis to identify what they need to do to catch up to peers or competitors and ideally get ahead. While enterprises mobile strategies are maturing, there are still many potential opportunities for taking advantage of the technology, especially as the boundaries of what constitutes mobile computing expands. Its telling that among the three areas the survey covered, machineto-machine capabilities were among the least cited. The idea of adding connected products to the arsenal of tablets and smartphones for better communications and analytics is nascent but growingsome logistics companies are adding sensors to packaging to better report where packages are along their journey. Perhaps less prosaic but just as important is the effort to ensure a complete and viable solution from the user experience with the mobile hardware to the backend systems themselves; improving the efficacy of the combination of visual simplicity and underlying complexity. Finally, theres the potential of analyticsprocessing massive amounts of real-time data captured by mobile devices to improve not just business but the overall customer experience. Only 25 percent of respondents consider analytics an important mobile feature, but the chances are high for that percentage to increase as enterprises realise the value of aggregated realtime data and responses. As mature as mobile strategies have become, there is still headroom and potential for enterprises to do more, just as they are still finding ways to make web technology more efficient.
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$4.2bn

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Managing Mobility
The two-city BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management Forum provided valuable insights to enterprise tech leaders
Audience sharing their thoughts during the event.

Event

Sunil Lalvani, Enterprise Sales Director, BlackBerry India, addressing the participants during the event.

ith the aim to create awareness amongst enterprise IT decision influencers around its latest mobility management solution -- Enterprise Service 10 BlackBerry, in partnership with CTO Forum, recently organised a two-city event. The half-day event, called BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Management Forum, held in Mumbai and Bangalore witnessed participation from top enterprise technology decision makers. The BlackBerry team threw more light on its complete enterprise

W
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Applications loaded on a BlackBerry Z10 device.

portfolio, designed to help technology leaders deliver device management, security, applications and unified communications to keep their business moving. Explaining what all could be done through the companys latest offering, Sunil Lalvani,

Enterprise Sales Director, BlackBerry India, said, With BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, business leaders create value by empowering employees to be more productive and better equipped to serve customers. BlackBerry enables organisations to embrace consumerisation by enabling enterprises to manage complex fleets of mobile devices. It satisfies the full range of security needs -- from a basic level up to very high levels of security and control. The

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solution enables a truly integrated voice, messaging, PIM, apps and social experience built for business users. It delivers a comprehensive business and productivity app portfolio, an enterprise-grade app management framework and a low-cost app development environment. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 provides an integrated, end-to-end solution that perfectly balances end user and corporate needs, he said. Speaking on the occasion, Mark Amsez, Director, Enterprise Product Management, BlackBerry Worldwide Team, said, BlackBerry offers the only device management solution to fully manage BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 devices plus Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. It enables the management of multiple different devices per user and manages both corporate-owned and personal-owned (BYOD) devices together. He said, The solution satisfies the full range of security needs; from a basic level up to the high security and control needs of government and regulated industries. Through the solution, technology practitioners can manage all devices and users through a single platform and management console. While explaining BlackBerrys app ecosystem, Annie Mathew, Director, Alliances and Business Development, BlackBerry, said, BlackBerry 10 delivers a comprehensive business and productivity app portfolio, an enterprise-grade app management framework and a low-cost app development environment. The BlackBerry World storefront offers strong business, productivity and personal app selection. It is easy to port, develop, integrate, deploy, secure and manage enterprise apps to mobilise your own business apps. The BlackBerry Balance and BlackBerry World for Work provide seamless corporate app

Mark Amsez, Director, Enterprise Product Management, BlackBerry Worldwide Team, addressing the CIOs during the event.

Participants sharing their views at the BlackBerry Forum.

Annie Mathew, Director, Alliances and Business Development, BlackBerry, delivering her presentation on the app eco system.

BlackBerry enables firms to embrace consumerisation by enabling enterprises to manage complex fleets of mobile devices
Sunil Lalvani, BlackBerry India
storefront management and user experience, she said. The participants were also apprised of BlackBerrys Unified Communicationsand Collaboration capabilities. According to BlackBerry, it enables a truly integrated voice, messaging, PIM, apps and social

experience built for business users, delivering more effortless collaboration between employees, partners and customers. The solution offers high-performance synchronization of multiple sources of email, IM, social feeds, calendar and PIM through to BlackBerry Hub. BlackBerry Messenger provides a unique instant messaging and collaboration tool. The event also saw participants experiencing the power of BlackBerry 10 devices and enterprise mobility management solutions through hands-on demonstrations. They got insights into BlackBerrys complete business and productivity app portfolio, and app management framework and were able to discuss the specifics of their mobile solution with BlackBerry enterprise team face-to-face.

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THE NEXT-GEN PLATFORM


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Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud are collectively being touted as the new platform. CIOs are leveraging this stack for enhancing productivity and profitability
By Akilesh Shukla
Design By

Pradeep Illustrations By Anil T

he IT space will transform to the third platform in 2013, so say experts. Dubbed as 'SMAC' which encompasses mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and big data analytics, the third platform is all that todays CIOs care about. The growth of the third platform has been exponential in the last couple of years and many companies have become very productive and profitable by leveraging it. We present some of the best implementations of Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud, and how CIOs are reaping benefits from them
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OCIAL INTEGRATION
iGATE, is a global IT services company with a talent pool of over 27,000 employees. It provides full-spectrum consulting, technology and business process outsourcing, and product and engineering solutions. The company has over three decades of IT Services experience. Powered by the iTOPS (Integrated Technology and Operations) platform, it delivers effective solutions to over 300 active global clients, including a large number of Fortune 1000 companies. iGATE chose Microsoft SharePoint Server to achieve this. Today SharePoint powers their intranetiSpace, knowledge management portaliKen, and the customer collaboration portal, VIVA. All these help employees bond, share ideas, and exchange best

iGATE successfully used a common platform for communication and collaboration to integrate people
practices in real time. With consolidation, iGATE saves costs, reduces IT overheads, and increases its knowledge index by 10 per cent each quarter. The Challenge iGATE enters a new era by coming together with Patni Computer Systems. In 2011, when iGATE acquired Patni, the acquisition brought its own intranet, information management culture and resources. iGATE had a PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and an ASP-based intranet, while Patni had a SharePoint-based intranet. Integration was important, as employees found it inconvenient to find and navigate to information embedded in various systems. Integrating

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the infrastructure across the two entities was key. This called for a single taxonomy across the combined entity which implied reclassification of existing content, comments Chella Namasivayam M, Chief Information Officer, iGATE. As the company started on this journey, from planning to execution, effective and timely communication to employees on various aspects of planning, process change and policies was crucial. The company intranet was one such media. Patni had an online approval regime to ensure quality of documents uploaded to the intranet, whereas iGATE had a manual system. Some of the module names in the existing intranets were not descriptive enough, so employees would take longer to find relevant information. As both the systems were on different technology platforms, they did not interoperate. iGATE needed a solution that was agile and scalable. The Solution iGATE began evaluating options including PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. Patni had already invested in SharePoint 2007 while iGATE was using PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal for its intranet. The skills on PeopleSoft were limited, the time to market and maintenance costs were high. In 2011, iGATE began building its new intranet iSpace, a unified portal with secure role based access to applications and information. iSpace provides a single window to access most commonly used applications, explains Chella. It has helped our employees be more productive and effective, as well as, associate with the new merged brand identity. iGATE developed iSpace in just two months and the portal was operational in December 2011. The knowledge management platform from both the companies had to be integrated. In April 2012, the company created a new knowledge management

CRM system, CASPER, built on Siebel. VIVA, the customer collaboration portal built in just six months, with the goal of offering a structured, standardised, transparent, and, real time update of projects to customers. VIVA helps both parties accelerate business decisions. Workspaces for each project facilitates information sharing and collaboration amongst sales teams, subject matter experts, solution architects, delivery managers and associated key stakeholders. For iGATE employees, access to Viva is via the single sign-on along with other line of business applications, while customers access it using forms-based authentication. The Benefits iGATE is using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create a better experience not only for its employees but also for its customers. Instant and targeted access to information and expertise helps employees perform better. Availability of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal resources was very rare in the market and maintenance was expensive. By standardising on SharePoint we saved about $55,000 annually. IGATE's customers now appreciate the transparency and real time view into project milestones. With the ability to upload documents directly into the portal they spend less time exchanging documents on emails, and also, contribute to discussion forums in real time. Earlier, two separate intranets were maintained, on two different platforms and different skill sets were required to maintain them. Synchronising information between the two different intranets added additional overheads. Earlier when any communication had to be sent to employees, it used to be updated on two different intranets. Having one intranet to consolidate all information has made overall communications effective and easy.

iSpace provides a single window to access most commonly used applications


Chella Namasivayam M
CIO, iGATE
portal, iKen. Partho Sengupta, Head Knowledge Management, iGATE says, Developed over a period of six months, iKen is a dynamic and flexible knowledge management system that has simplified and eased sharing. The knowledge management platform from both the companies had to be integrated. In April 2012, the company created a new knowledge management portal, iKen. iKen integrates with PeopleSoft 9 to display detailed people profiles and ease expertise search. It also integrates with the companys

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DIALING GROWTH
Perfetti Van Melle Italy was incorporated
in 1946 by the two Perfetti brothers Ambrogio and Egidio, in a small town called Lainate just outside of Milan. Perfetti Van Melle is the worlds third largest confectionery group with its presence in over 150 countries worldwide. Under its umbrella, Perfetti markets some of the most popular global brands like Alpenliebe, Mentos, Happydent, Big Babol and Fruittella. Perfetti has a strong workforce of 19,000 people in 35 operating companies through-

OBILE

Confectionery Giant Perfetti Van Melle has adopted smart phones to save time, money and boost productivity of the organisation
out the world and is very active in Asia -Pacific region, South-East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Perfetti S.p.A. acquired Van Melle N.V. in March 2001, which was an important step for the Group to strengthen its position in the market, expand the product propositions and increase the dominance across markets. In India its brand are present at 3.2 million retail outlets. Of the 500+ employees, PVM has a sales force of more than 300 employees.

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The Challenge To forecast sales and restock the shelves of their customers, distribution sales executives at PVM India had to visit various stores in their regional markets and fill out daily inventory paper reports. These reports were done by hand and were used to track inventory information at retail outlets and refill product orders. Reports were done two or three times per week; once completed, they needed to be couriered to the head office so the results could be consolidated, uploaded into the company database and orders could be fulfilled. The entire process could take up to 15 days and generated approximately 50,000 couriered documents each year. As the information changes many hands, chances of human error could be not be denied, which can lead to some business loss. The process was lengthy and was consuming lot of man hours. This is besides the cost of 50,000 couriers a year. The Solution The company was looking for effective mobile solution for its work force. The priority was that it should be effective, user friendly at the same time do not burn a hole in the organisations pocket. The decsion makers gave a thought of distributing laptops to employee. But it came out that it was way to expensive following the cost of licensees and hardware. As a result they decided in favour of a smart phone. PVM India equipped its distribution sales executives with the Blackberry Curve 9300 smartphone. PVM India found the portability of the devices and the advanced security that comes with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to be more cost-effective than laptops. The PVM India sales team can now send their market reports from their BlackBerry smartphones using email and web-based portals. The new user

The BlackBerry Curve smartphone gives us better visibility into our daily sales operations and that helps us make decisions that potentially boost sales and control our inventory. Our sales operations have improved substantially since we deployed BlackBerry smartphones
Basant Chaturvedi, Controller, ICT, PVM India

friendly process reduced the turnaround time from 15 days to less than one day. PVM India is gaining the advantage of being more timely and flexible in its business decisions and has substantially improved customer satisfaction, since stores rarely run out of stock. Besides, they has completely done way the courier services. The chances of human error was also reduced. In addition, the GPS feature of the BlackBerry smartphones helps PVM India track the sales executives locations, which helps to effectively dispatch employees to the customers in need. There has been a 25 percent increase in the number of sales visits conducted by PVM India since they started using BlackBerry smartphones in their business. Now, the field employees also have more time to spend on other business activities, such as researching competitor information prior to sales visits. The BlackBerry Curve smartphone gives us better visibility into our daily sales operations and that helps us make decisions that potentially boost sales and

control our inventory. Our sales operations have improved substantially since we deployed BlackBerry smartphones, Basant Chaturvedi, Controller, Information & Communication Technology, PVM India The Benefits BlackBerry smartphones and paperless reporting has contributed to reducing the carbon footprint of the company, not only saving paper costs by approximately INR 89,000 (almost USD 2,000) per year, but also enhancing the companys image as a socially responsible organisation. So far, the company estimates the BlackBerry solution has saved approximately INR 3.06 million (USD 66,500) in deploying BlackBerry smartphones instead of laptops, software licenses and courier cost over six months, with another estimated INR 5 million (USD 108,890) expected to be saved within the next six months. Besides the cost saving the efficiency of the employee has improved the turn around time has reduced.

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NALYTICS
INSIGHTS TO NEW HEIGHTS
Usha International wanted to continue building on this success with fast and market-driven business decisions. It choose SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA to enable lightning-quick data analysis
Usha International Limited is a multi product consumer durable manufacturing, marketing and distribution company. Usha's product portfolio include fan, engines, motors, pump-sets, sewing machine, appliances, drinking water coolers, dispensers and auto component. Headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana and having a work force of 2200, Usha is one of the trusted name in its industry.
The Problem Usha has always been an innovator in product design and in its use of technology. Since 2000, for example, Usha has used SAP software to help gain competitive advantage by improving process efficiency. But just as Indias demand for consumer products has grown, so too has the complexity of running a business that spans a nation of more than 1.2 billion

TAKING BUSINESS

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people. Usha now has more than 33 warehouses, 70 company-owned retail stores, and a distribution network of more than 14,000 dealers. To stay ahead of the competition, Usha needs full visibility across this widespread supply chain and the ability to respond rapidly to changing market demands. We have a lot of business data, says Subodh Dubey, group CIO at Usha International Limited. To take full advantage of this resource, we need high-performance business analytics as well. That means faster data loads and faster query response times. With these goals in mind, Usha leaders decided to take their business intelligence capabilities to unprecedented new levels. And to help ensure that their business intelligence platform was built on a solid and reliable data foundation, they chose the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component to run on the SAP HANA database. The Solution Usha knew what it needed even faster performance from its SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component, which had been growing by more than 20 percent annually in recent years. Initially, we considered adding new storage hardware for the database running on SAP NetWeaver BW, notes Dubey, but SAP helped us examine our other options. The project team, which included SAP Consulting and value engineering experts, analysed the companys needs and developed a comprehensive business case. Both approaches were fully examined: adding new hardware or replacing the existing database with the SAP HANA database. With SAP HANA, company leaders saw the opportunity to pull days of lag time

held regular review meetings and ensured that the project was staffed with the right analytics skillsets. This approach helped Usha complete the entire project in only four weeks rolling out the solution to 16 branch offices, 30 depots, and 4 manufacturing plants. In doing so, the company established a future-ready platform for its enterprisewide business intelligence strategy The Benefits SAP HANA has significantly improved system performance in terms of data compression, data loads, and query response times. This means faster reporting and better informed decision making. Usha leaders were amazed when a recent request for inventory data was answered almost instantly online. Usha will also be using complex runtime data analysis and the ability to prototype different business scenarios to build a more demanddriven supply chain. Inventory levels have already been reduced and, in some instances, out-of-date inventory eliminated. The result is better cash flow and lower inventory carrying costs. The ability to quickly analyse secondary sales data and check progress against monthly sales also helps the sales force achieve established targets. Reports on cash flow and daily sales are now available at the click of a button, says Dubey, and for the first time, we have sales visibility down to the individual SKU and territory. In the coming months, Usha expects to more than double the number of employees using SAP HANA. The company intends to roll out the functionality to other areas of the business, such as manufacturing and human resources. Usha also wants to integrate its SAP Business Objects BI solutions and, ultimately, the SAP planning and consolidation application with SAP NetWeaver BW.

Ultimately, we recognised that SAP HANA could deliver the high performance analytics we were looking for
Subodh Dubey
Group CIO, Usha
out of their data-gathering processes, and they appreciated the ability to integrate a variety of data sources. Ultimately, we recognised that SAP HANA could deliver the high performance analytics we were looking for, notes Dubey. As an early adopter of the technology in India, Usha worked with a dedicated SAP Ramp-Up coach and utilized SAP Enterprise Support services throughout the implementation process. The company

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JOURNEY INTO THE CLOUD


Headquartered in Springfield, Illinois, H. D. Smith is among the largest national full-line, full-service wholesalers providing a complete line of prescription products, OTCs, HBAs, home healthcare products, durable medical equipment, seasonal merchandise and a wide array of marketing programs to retail pharmacies, regional chains and health systems. The aims to be preferred, customer-focused, national supplier of healthcare products and business solutions improving the quality,

LOUD

H.D. Smith deployed cloud computing for scalability and agility to support thousands of customers and suppliers
safety and cost of patient care while maintaining the highest level of efficiency. The company, founded in 1954 has around 1000 employees on board and specialise in reliable product distribution, innovative programs and advanced technologies.

The Challenge The company sought to transform its IT infrastructure to support its strategy to control costs and improve patient outcomes. The IT managers realised that a datacenter

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was going to be a costly investment that would not provide the capabilities necessary to execute business across the finance, IT, and operations departments. David Guzman, CIO, H. D. Smith, says As a management team we decided to focus energy on how to serve the customer, how to bring solutions to market faster, how to leverage this challenging market. Thats why H. D. Smith approached CSC and became an enthusiast of CSCs Enterprise Cloud. Cloud really isnt a choice, its a compelling imperative from the economics to the quick response capabilities of this technology, he says.

easy to collaborate with vendor on best practices for keeping the infrastructure secure. They chose a solution to secure few core business processes in their own environment. It allowed them to utilise the capacity and scalability of the cloud while protecting core applications. The company was also able to add a Disaster Recovery solution that they did not have before. Now the data was constantly backed up so that if something does go wrong they wont lose any essential business

The Solution HD Smith partnered with CSC using the WAVE approach through migrating workloads one WAVE at a time. HD Smith currently has core applications, such as order and ecommerce platforms, on cloud. After deciding in favor of cloud, in the first phase they moved email, x86 workloads, and core development environment to the cloud. The second phase of adoption was focused on transforming applications and the platforms they run on to adopt management practices. In the third phase the company focused on building solutions, services, and applications for the future of HD Smith. This process helped the company to identify workload that were immediately ready to move to the cloud to make the process more efficient. H. D. Smith took a gigantic steps toward realising their vision by adopting cloud computing in waves. We took all our existing applications and workloads even the legacy applications and moved them to the cloud platform, says Guzman. Initially the IT managers has apprehension of security over cloud environment, but they realised that it was

We took all our existing applications and workloads even the legacy applications and moved them to the cloud platform
David Guzman,
CIO, H.D. Smith

The Benefits The company realised the first advantage of working in a could model was process excellence. The application was hosted in secure zone, with features including disaster recovery and efficient development, test and quality assurance. It had good processes around release management and patch management, service management and change management. They are now prepare to scale in the future. With cloud computing the company has the scale and agility to support thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of customers and suppliers. Cloud gives them perfect scalability to add resources when they need them. The cloud has given HD Smith the ability to help then meet management challenges.that simplifies growth. According to Guzman, while it may be a bold, audacious statement to think that H. D. Smith can be the leader in controlling healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes, its all about what may sound like a corny, old-fashioned notion, about caring about country and caring about each other and caring about people. Thats really part and parcel of who H. D. Smith is today. HD Smith also eliminated data center footprint and refresh aging infrastructure. Besides, the IT budget moved to opex-based IT from capital intensive opex model.

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Business is Driving SMAC


Rajarshi Sengupta, Senior Director, Deloitte India, talks about the rising trend of SMAC among enterprises 36
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We are hearing a lot about social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC), and their potential for the enterprise. Is it really creating value for enterprises or is it just hype? We are certainly seeing mobile and analytics creating significant value for clients in India. From a mobility perspective, we are seeing increasing projects by clients in varied sectors such as financial services (insurance), pharma, FMCG where clients have to deal with independent financial advisors or a third dealer /distributor network outside the purview of their organisation. enter-

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prise apps (or enterprise level mobility solutions) are being positioned by clients to have such agents carry tablets so that a) the client can get faster feedback on the customer interaction (b) the agent can have a shorter TAT (turnaround time) for converting a client (c) the client is able to push relevant data to the end customer. The ability to gather such data which was hitherto not available serves as a powerful input for feeding the analytics engine.From an analytics perspective, we are seeing enormous leverage in the Indian market with value add. Most of the focus so far has been on customer analytics, and around a 360 view of the customer, but increasingly we are seeing analytics focused on supply chain, around workforce which are having an impact in the Indian marketplace. We have real live customers who are working on such solutions and are taking the results and integrating it into their decisions and business processes. Similarly, from a social perspective, we still see the use in primarily two categories risk and sentiment analytics. This is where clients scan the social media sites to take into cognizance any complaints/issues/ negative imagery of the client. The second is using social media as a channel for promoting a brand or services. This is till somewhat nascent. In our experience, cloud adoption in India is still not at the level it was expected to be. However, some products for risk and sentiment analytics and also CRM solutions do run on cloud based solutions and are finding increasing adoption. The main issues in India seem to be around security concerns. It is also the case for clients who have sunk cost into infrastructure, the logic of converting CAPEX to OPEX does not work seamlessly as the CAPEX has already been made. Also, for clients to leverage cloud, a degree of application portfolio management is needed by which they determine which applications they are comfortable in putting out into a cloud and which they would like to keep with them.
Some CIOs are adopting these technologies following the hype, but fail to get good results. How can they leverage these technologies to get meaningful results? Where we have seen such technologies deliver value is where they have been tied in

From an analytics perspective, we are seeing enormous leverage in the Indian market with value add. Most of the focus so far has been on customer analytics
Rajarshi Sengupta,
Senior Director, Deloitte India
to business goals or business transformations and have been business driven. Cases where such applications of technology have been tied back to key strategic imperatives eg reduce employee churn or have a 360 view of the customer have worked well.
How does SMAC helps organisation to deliver future of work in terms of connectivity, collaboration, real time and productive? As explained earlier, mobility solutions or enterprise mobile apps or enterprise appstores are coming into the picture that allows people to be connected to parts of their organisation which are on the fringe

/ edge or third party systems (dealer / distributors/ independent financial agents). This also allows for real time feedback (or at least quasi real time) feedback to be sent back on the basis of which decisions about a customer / a SCM problem can be taken. In terms of collaboration, the move towards a Social Business (which is more Business to Employee than Business to Consumer or B2B) is reflected in the increasing use of Social Media tools like Yammer within an organisation. This allows for real time collaboration and feedback.
CIOs are prioritising analytics, cloud and mobile strategies to stay in step with their rapidly changing customer bases. Do you agree with the statement? Yes. The main drivers are from business which is trying to understand customers better and to connect to the edges of the enterprise from the core via the paradigm of outside-in architecture. So CIOs are having to understand a host of issues around such applications including integration, security and governance. We see Analytics and mobility on almost every agenda now. How are industries prioritising social, mobile, analytics and cloud? Almost all industries are heavily involved in analytics. The applications range from customer, workforce, supply chain et al. In some cases there are fraud analytics also being used. From a mobile perspective, any industry which has to work with an extended dealer/agent system is finding ways to leverage enterprise apps. From an early adopter perspective we see financial services, FMCG and Pharma in the mobility area. All companies are investing in social. There are some concerns too. Do you think that mobility could emerge as the Trojan Horse? No. There will certainly be quite a few challenges, in terms of CIOs having to deal with BYOD and the need to connect to third party systems. However, that is where the needed security architecture and governance mechanisms need to kick in. The CIO also has to understand that increasingly a working population will come in who will ask for mobility solutions in the workplace.

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T E C H FOR G O V E R N A N C E

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POINTS

in assessing vulnerability, if youre following a check list, hardening is not hard  like most things in security, some thinking is involved the worst offenders deliver with a quality that is inversely proportional to the prices they charge vulnerability testing in general is not a small subject what to do with the risk will be slow and difficult

illustration by raj verma

In assessing vulnerability, if youre following a check list, hardening is not hard


By Ian Tibble

Doing It Right
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is hard. If its not hard, then there are two possibilities. One is that the maturity of information security in the organisation is at such a level that security happens both effectively and transparently its fully integrated into the fabric of BAU processes and many of said processes are fully automated with accurate results. The second (far more likely given the reality of security in 2013) is that the hardening is not well implemented.
For the purpose of this diatribe, let us first define hardening so that we can all be reading from the same hymn sheet. When Im talking about hardening here, the theme is one of first assessing vulnerability, then addressing the business risk presented by the vulnerability. This can apply to applications, or operating systems, or any aspect of risk assessment on corporate infrastructure. In assessing vulnerability, if youre following a check list, hardening is not hard - in fact a parrot can repeat pearls of wisdom from a check list. But the result of merely following a check list will be either wide open critical hosts or over-spending on security usually the former. For sure, critical production systems will be impacted, and I dont mean in a positive way. You see, like most things in security, some thinking is involved. It does suit the agenda of many in this field to pretend that security analysis can be reduced down to parrotfashion recital of a check list. Unfortunately though, some neural activity is required, at least if gaining the trust of our customers (C-levels, other business units, home users, etc) is important to us. The actual contents of the check list should be the easy part, although unfortunately as of 2013, we all seem to be using different versions of the check list, and some versions are appallingly lacking. The worst offenders here deliver with a quality that is inversely proportional to the prices they charge and these are usually external auditors from big

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, hardening

ability scanning results in inaccuracy, large numbers of false positives, wasted resources, and annoyed operations and development teams. This is not a problem with any particular tool, although some of them are especially bad. It is a limitation of the concept of unauthenticated testing, which amounts to little more than pure guesswork in vulnerability assessment. How about the growing numbers of vulnerability management products out there (which do not manage vulnerability, they make an attempt at assessing vulnerability)? Well, most of them are either purely an expensive graphical interface to [insert free/ open source scanner name], or if the tool was designed to make a serious attempt at accurate vulnerability assessment (more of them do not), then the tests will be lacking or over-done, inaccurate, and / or doing the scanning in an insecure way (e.g. the applicafour consultancies, all of whom have very tion is run over a public URL, with the result decent check lists, but who also fail to ensure that all of your configuration data, including that Consultants use said check list. There admin passwords, are held by an untrusted are plenty of cases where the auditor knocks third party). up their own garage'y style shell script for In one case, a very expensive VM product testing. In one case i witnessed not so long literally does nothing other than port scan. It ago, the script for testing RedHat Enterprise is configured with hundreds of test patterns Linux consisted of 6 tests (!) and one of the for different types of target (MS Windows, tests showed a misunderstanding of the pur*nix, etc) but if you're familiar with your OS pose of the /etc/ftpusers file. configurations,you will look at the tool output But the focus here is not on the methods and be immediately suspicious. I ran the tool deployed by auditors, its more general than against a Linux and Windows test target and that. Vulnerability testing in general is not packet sniffed the scanning engines probe a small subject.I have posted previously on attempts. In summary, the tool does nothing. the subject of manual network penetration It just produces a long list of configuration testing. In summary: there will be a need for items (so effectively a kind of Security Stansome businesses to show auditors that their dard for the target) without actually testing for perimeter has been assessed by a trusted the existence of vulnerability. third party, but in terms of pure value, very So the overall principle: the company few businesses should be paying for the stan[hopefully] has a security standard for each dard two week delivery with a four person major operating system and database on their team. For businesses to see any real value network and each item in the standard needs in a network penetration test, their security to be tested for all, or some of has to be at a certain level of the information asset hosts in maturity. Most businesses are the organisation, depending on nowhere near that level. the overall strategy and network Then there is the subject of architecture. As of the time of automated, unauthenticated writing, there will need to be scanning techniques which was the some manual/scripted augmenI have also written about contribution of tation of automatic vulnerability extensively, both inan earlier postand in Chapter Five of SAAS to the cloud assessment processes. So once armed with a list of Security De-engineering. In market in 2012 vulnerabilities, what does one summary, the methodology do with it? The vulnerability used in unauthenticated vulner-

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assessment is the first step. What has to happen after that? Can Security just toss the report over to ops and hope for the best? Yes, they can, but this wouldnt make them very popular and also there needs to be some input from security regarding the actual risk to the business. Taking the typical function of operations teams (I commented on the functions and relationships between security and operations inan earlier post), if there is no input from security, then every risk mitigation that meets any kind of an impact will be blocked. There are some security service providers/ consultancies who offer a testing AND a subsequent hardening service. They want to offer both detection AND a solution, and this is very innovative and noble of them. However, how many security vulnerabilities can be addressed blindly without impacting critical production processes? Rhetorical question: can applications be broken by applying security fixes? If I remove the setuid bit from a root owned X Window related binary, it probably has no effect on business processes. Right? What if operations teams can no

longer authenticate via their usual graphical interface? This is at least a little bit disruptive. In practice, as it turns out, if you look at a Security Standard for a core technology, lets take Oracle 11g as an example: how many of the numerous elements of a Security Standard can we say can be implemented without fear of breaking applications, limiting access for users or administrators, or generally just making trouble-shooting of critical applications a lot less efficient? The answer is: not many. Dependencies and other problems can come from surprising sources. Who in the organisation knows about dependencies and the complexities of production systems? Usually that would be IT / Network Operations. And how about application - related dependencies? That would be application architects, or just generally we'll say dev teams as theyre so affectionately referred to these days. So the point: even if security does have admin access to IT resources (rare), is the risk mitigation/hardening a job purely for security? Of course the answer is a resounding no, and the same goes for IT Operations.

So, operations and applications architects bring knowledge of the complexities of apps and infrastructure to the table. Security brings knowledge of the network architecture (data flows, firewall configurations, network device configurations), the risk of each vulnerability (how hard is to exploit and what is the impact?), and the importance to the business of information assets/applications. Armed with the aforementioned knowledge, informed and sensible decisions on what to do with the risk (accept, mitigate, work around, or transfer) can be madeby the organisation, not by security, or operations. The early days of deciding what to do with the risk will be slow and difficult and there might even be some feisty exchanges, but eventually, addressing the risk becomes a mature, documented process that almost melts into the background hum of the machinery of a business.
This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

Defensible is Not the Same as Secure


By Rafal Los

Whydefensibleis a state we should be striving for as enterprise security professionals.


efensible as a goal for enterprises to replace the notion ofsecure is an outdated and broken descriptor for anything in today's hyper-connected, modern world. This post goes through the five basic ideas behind defensibility and whydefensibleis a state we should be striving for as enterprise security professionals. This is the first of 5 blog posts explaining the core concepts of 'defensible'.

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While apparentlynot everyone agrees, the term defensible is amuch more appropriateterm when describing your enterprise posture. There are a few reasons for this, but at the core of this we must under-

stand that the term defensibleis not concrete and does not imply a binary state. Unlikesecure, which does imply a binary state (youre either secure or youre not), defensible offers no such promise. Lets be honest though, anyone who truly believes anything is really secure just has to wait a few minutes until theyre proven wrong... This leads me to the major problem I have with the word secure there is no such state. If were honest with ourselves and our businesses, we have to admit that there is no such thing as secure. In order to mitigate the problem with the binary state of secure, we add modifiers such as reasonably secure or inadequately secure, but those are not well accepted when the board room demands an assurance of security.

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Defensible means that youve positioned the right defenses in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons to defend against the right adversary
Defensible on the other hand, does not give assurance or imply any concrete state. This fits the model of the hyper-connected world we live in where at any given time anything can be broken with enough cycles or scrutiny. Defensible is not a guarantee, or an assurance against hacking or a breach and I think this is the most important point. While secure is used as an assurance that a breach will not befall our enterprise, defensible is something else entirely, and makes no such guarantees. I can already hear people cringing... Whereas secure tends to focus onpreventionof a breach,defensiblefocuses as much on prevention as it does on adjustment, detection, response and restoration of service. Therein lays the magic. You can now tell your CEO or board that while you will continue to will be the size of allocate resources to prevention, you acknowledge that its impossible to be 100 percent secure. cloud services Youll now strive to bedefensible. market in india by Defensible means that youve designed your infra2017 structure to be able to patch when needed without business disruption, to adapt to adversaries and changing technical and business conditions, and contain a breach-in-progress. What does Defensible Mean? Admittedly, it wont be simple to just tell the Chief Executive of So, if defensible doesnt give us a guarantee against being hacked or your enterprise that you cant guarantee an absolute level of secure. breached like secure does what does it imply? What guarantees I also believe that rational people understand this, and if your execudoes defensible provide us? tives and board are worth their salt, they'll also understand, if you I think that defensible is even a stronger word thansecureif you present this properly. look at it right. While defensible isnotsecure. I believe, in fact, that it is better Defensible means that youve positioned the right defenses in the and more appropriate for the enterprise. right place, at the right time, for the right reasons to defend against the right adversary. Defensible also means that your environment, infrastructure is built Rafal Los, Principal, Strategic Security Services, with HP Enterprise Secusuch that it can adapt to failure when/if it happens. Yep, thats a lot of rity Services, brings a pragmatic approach to enterprise security. Combining things that have to line up without guaranteeing you wont get breached. nearly 15 years of technical, consulting and management skills in Information Josh Corman has a pyramid model that has defensible infrastructure as Security, Rafal draws on his extensive experience to help organisations build the base for a strong security program. This is the absolute truth. intelligent, defensible and operationally efficient security programmes. Defensible is a stronger concept than security because it has one magic This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. component that secure lacks the built-in ability todetect, respond, For more features and opinions on information security and risk managerestorefrom malice. ment, please refer to Infosec Island.

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HORIZONS

NEXT

IT Driving Firms to Go Digital


Accentures Technology Vision 2013 report highlights IT developments that will have a significant impact on businesses
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he convergence of social media, mobile computing, analytics and the cloud is transforming the way businesses operate, and companies that adopt available technologies to go digital will be better positioned to take advantage of rapidly shifting business opportunities and leap ahead of the competition, according to a new report by Accenture. TheAccenture Technology Vision 2013report finds that because technology has become core to virtually every aspect of a business, every business is a digital business and that all senior leaders not just CIOs must be able to understand, embrace and drive value from new technologies that affect their organisation. Todays software, for example, has the potential to change the very business model of a company or industry in the future, according to the report. Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 259,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Organisations and their leaders need to hit the reset button on how they use technology to drive market differentiation, deepen customer relationships, and deliver growth

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and profitability, said Paul Daugherty, Accentures chief technology officer. Our latest Technology Vision report finds that the technology for accomplishing these business goals is available today, but that adopting a new digital mindset is required to harness the potential. The power and reach of converging IT trends such as mobility and cloud means that business leaders need to understand the implications of a software-driven, connected everything world. The AccenAs a result the relevant data isnt captured. ture Technology Vision 2013 report looks Whats needed is a strategy that sees data more at the future of enterprise IT and makes as a supply chain than a warehouse. Its about recommendations for how companies can asking the questions that need to be answered take advantage of technology and software to first and ness where applications, systems, improve their competitiveness, operations networks and communications channels are and business results. These include: constantly changing is one of the most Leverage Technology to Create Digital challenging aspects of enterprise IT. Relationships at Scale:While technology While the virtualisation of servers, storgives organisations the ability to understand age and other parts of IT infrastructure has their customers better than ever, most resulted in unprecedented levels of flexibility, enterprises are not taking full advantage of the network has been largely untouched by it to build deeper, richer relationships that virtualisation until now. can improve customer loyalty significantly. Software-defined networking (SDN), where While mobile computing, social networks the network is managed through software and context-based services have increased instead of through hardware, provides a giant connections with consumers, many comleap forward in enterprise flexibility. panies have lost customer intimacy in the With SDN, organisations can reconfigure process. These connections have been the connectivity of systems without changing viewed as another communication or transthe physical characteristics making it easiactional channel rather than opportunities er for businesses to manage change, integrate to improve relationships. cloud services and get more return from their Businesses are at an inflection point network investments. enabled by new technologies that can take Be Active Not Just Defensive With customer relationships beyond transactions Security:Despite recent advances in security and deliver more personalised interactions, technology, safeguarding the digital business said Daugherty. remains a challenge. Effectively developing meaningful relaThe entry points for an attack are constantly tionships at scale requires a real change in expanding across more devices, more syshow companies approach these strategies tems, more people and a broader infrastrucand implement a new unified approach ture. As a result, optimal IT security needs to across IT and the business. go further than prevention. Design for Analytics to Get the Right Recognissing that attackers will Data:Most of todays enterget through, enterprises must stay prise software applications are one step ahead of them.ITs core designed for a specific function challenge is to not only stay curand capture only the data needed rent with the latest in security, but to complete that function. to get smarter about understandOrganisations use existing data will be the ing and engaging the enemy and as an input to make strategic global BI market be able to adapt the enterprises decisions and often find that information gaps arise because spending by the defenses to match the threat. Security architectures need to important questions werent foryear 2016 remain flexible and incorporate mulated when the applications active defenses to deal with the were being designed.

Effectively developing meaningful relationships at scale requires a real change in how companies approach these strategies and implement a new unified approach across IT
constantly changing field of security threats. The Cloud Is Here Now is the Time to Prepare the Enterprise:Technologies underpinning cloud are pervasive and here to stay, and the benefits are numerous: helping companies differentiate their business, get their products and services to market faster, enhance operational efficiency, and respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges. The question for enterprises isnt whyshould we use cloud? but rather, howshould we use cloud? Many organisations are already embedding cloud with their legacy systems and traditional software to create hybrid environments. This requires a clear understanding of, and approach to, the skills, architecture, governance and security required, whether its the applications, platforms or IT infrastructure thats in the cloud. The challenge for businesses in todays digital landscape is to reimagine themselves in the context of an increasingly software-driven world, said Daugherty.To succeed, organisationsmust leverage IT innovations to derive insights that enable them to optimise their enterprise, take advantage of emerging opportunities, strengthen customer loyalty, and deliver better business outcomes. For nearly 15 years, Accenture has been looking across the enterprise landscape to identifyemerging IT trendsthat hold the greatest potential to disrupt businesses and industries.

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About the Methodology


Accentures Technology Vision is developed annually by theAccenture Technology Labs. For the 2013 report, Accenture researchers and scientists developed hypotheses about information technology developments that will have a significant impact on businesses over the next three to five years.
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Innovating at Startup Speed


Led by a recruit from the startup world, Nationwide Insurance is combining collaboration and APIs to reinvent the way it creates applications
By Tony Kontzer

t wasnt long ago that the application programming interface borrowed from his startup background and spearheaded the or API, as its popularly known was regarded as little more company's adoption of competitive hackathons, in which technithan a play thing for programming geeks and as something that cal teams spend the night playing with APIs in an effort to invent was of little value in the big picture of running a business. new applications for the portal. So far, Nationwides hackathons are But in an age in which applications are designed to be able delivering in spades. The first such event, held last July, was won by a to draw data and additional functionality from numerous other team that leveraged an API for a software as a service application that sources, the API, which enables disparate applications offers movie, restaurant and other discounts to Nationwide to communicate and even borrow from each other, has employees. The problem? Most employees werent willing become integral to achieving the kind of agility that to visit a third-party site to find discounts in their areas. The companies need to thrive. solution? Bring the discounts to the employees via API calls The rising importance of APIs is on full display and display them with a map-like interface that shows up in surge in digital at Nationwide Insurance, an 80-year-old giant in an a workers customised portal view. Not only did the applicommerce industry not exactly known for fast-moving IT innovacation deliver value to Nationwides employees, it greatly tion. Nationwide Insurance recruited Jeff Schumann market in india increased the use of the third-party app that Nationwide from the world of startups five years ago with a specific had been paying for. It also netted each member of the fiveby 2013 purpose: To inject Nationwide with the type of agility person development team two days off of work. and mindset normally found at startups, and which At the company's second hackathon, one team tried to the Columbus, Ohio, company needed if it was to keep tackle a more daunting area: approvals. Recognising that pace with a fast-moving marketplace. employees who were tasked with approving time-off requests, budget Just because were in the insurance space, and were in a highly changes, equipment purchases and the like had to log in to a different regulated area of the business world, its still possible for us to be system for each approval, the team set out to build an app that would innovative, says Schumann, who was originally hired as a business leverage APIs for each of those systems, thus allowing employees to analyst on the collaborative services team and is now product owner access and complete all of their pending approvals from a single app. of enterprise collaboration. The effort proved too ambitious to complete in a single night, After spending his first few years with the company championbut the value was so clear that the resulting app, dubbed My ing the use of social media and collaboration tools, Schumann Approvals, has evolved into a full-blown IT initiative. Now Nationoversaw the creation of an internal SharePoint portal to serve as a wide is gearing up for its third hackathon on Feb. 28, when the collaborative workspace for employees. With that platform in place, focus will be on human resources apps. The largest gathering the next step was to populate it with useful applications. Schumann yet is expected as many as 100 developers may attend and

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Even the largest companies can behave more like startups with the right encouragement
there's been advanced buzz about a couple of planned apps. One team will attempt to use APIs to consolidate the company's threesystem gauntlet for requesting time off into a single app, while another team will work with PeopleSoft APIs to simplify employee access to paycheck data. The success of Nationwides hackathons has convinced Schumann that even the largest companies can behave more like startups with the right encouragement. We can be agile as a company, Schumann says. I don't think just because we're an insurance company with 45,000 employees, that's a reason for us to be slow.
This article was first published in CIO Insight. For more stories please visit www.cioinsight.com.

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VIEWPOINT
Steve Duplessie | steve.duplessie@esg-global.com

Aptly Named

I was a bit surprised at the lack of interest in HPs Moonshot announcement by the big media. I suppose I understand the complexity combined with HPs less than stellar PR maneuvers over the last few years could keep some folks at bay, but this announcement has all the makings of a MASSIVE and exciting outcome. If we start with the mainframe as the first commercial computing architecture to change the world and the multiple trillions of dollars of value it has subsequently createdas the initial mega wave in enterprise processing, one can see what is possible when the stars align in this area.Then the RISC processor and the mini-computer eramaybe not trillions created, but certainly many billions, and the stage was set for DISTRIBUTED processingand business was changed yet again. Fast forward to the x86 era and you witnessed it happen all over again. This time Intel and Microsoft were the primary beneficiaries, but a few thousand others did just fine as wellfrom Cisco to Dell and beyond. Trillions of dollars of value created.

Lives changed. Business changed. Now HP is looking to take ARM and Atom and upset the trillion dollar apple cart again. Initially taking this stuff to webscale environments, of which there are TRUCKLOADS nowbut sooner or later, taking it right down main street. New players will emerge, as they always do, and old ones will be replaced or re-tooled (Intel makes the Atom chipsbut unfortunately, they sell for pennies on the dollar compared to x86and no, they cant just raise the pricing if the market takes off because Atom is how they play in mobile - and thats not something they can run from. Intel is boxed in, no matter what they say publicly.). Atom is effectively x86 to apps but it costs zip, consumes way less power, and has a small footprint kind of what the world wants. ARM is even lower power, smaller, powerful, and CHEAPER. It runs Linuxso it erases your web servers, raid controllers, networking systems, etc. Anywhere there is a specialized embedded processor, HP can plop a blade theoretically, and collapse func-

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 Steves blog at http://www. thebiggertruth.com

tions like never before. So while they position for webscalewhat they really mean is this packaging could be considered the ultimate converged infrastructure. Think of your iPad as a blade, that happens to have more power than NASA had globally only ten years agothat can assume any personality you wantwhich plops into a filing cabinet that holds a zillion other bladesand runs on gerbil gasses (I think I saw this while touring HP labs). Oh yeah, they need no cooling either, comparatively. So way smaller, way cheaper, way less power and cooling, far denser, morphable personalities...and they run the stuff I run today? For x86 to take off, it needed to convince the market that this was a good idea. No such requirement here. The fact is a ton of companies that rely on webscale for their livelihood will perish without SOMEONE delivering this type of capabilityand soon. x86 is greatbut was never designed for hyper-scale out that is the DNA of the service provider market, the SaaS market, and soon the EVERY market.

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HPs Moonshot

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