Wednesday, June 19, 2013

IT News Head Lines (InformationWeek) 6/20/2013





CtrlS signs MoU with Siemens Convergence Creators to offer Secure Workforce Productivity Services
According to the MoU, CtrlS will leverage Siemens CVC’s product CONDIS to offer Secure Workforce Productivity Service targeted at increasing the workforce productivity of enterprise customers

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Polaris to implement MF distribution platform for Association of Mutual Funds in India
The implementation will provide AMFI order routing and payment mechanisms with connectivity to RTAs, AMCs, stock exchanges, depositories, banks and centralized KYC repository

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NETGEAR inaugurates SMB solutions centers in Bangalore
The company plans to invest substantially in opening demo centres across various strategic locations throughout India

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Publishing services firm saves USD 150,000 per year by moving to the cloud
Publishing company, MPS, is a great example that showcases the power of the cloud for publishers

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Move beyond automation, it’s time for autonomic computing
Today, the promise of automation is ironically contingent on manual intervention, says Chandrashekar Kakal of Infosys. He asserts autonomic computing represents the next evolutionary level in automation

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EMV migration imperative for secure banking
EMV cards provide much greater security and are far less vulnerable to security breaches than the currently prevalent magnetic stripe cards in India, says Lee Hon Kuan of Gemalto. He details how EMV implementation can provide better protection against fraud

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‘Security should be the goal, not compliance’: Bikash Barai, CEO, iViZ Security
Sharing his views on the compliance versus security debate, Bikash Barai, CEO, iViZ Security, says organizations that only run after compliance focus more on proving their security to auditors; this is similar to studying for marks versus studying for real understanding of a subject. In a detailed interaction with InformationWeek, he talks about emerging trends in the web application security space

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Cloud office systems total 8 percent of the overall office market and will rise to 33 percent by 2017: Gartner
The research firm estimates that there are currently about 50 million enterprise users of cloud office systems, and the number will grow to 695 million users by 2022

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Nokia Siemens Networks and Wipro's IT partnership model wins Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award 2013
The companies won the award in the ‘Wholesale Service Innovation’ category for the IT R&D Partnership Project

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Government of Andhra Pradesh deploys SAP solutions to provide better services to its stakeholders and citizens
The deployment is aimed at enhancing efficiency in financial transactions and transparency in operations

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YES BANK reduces printing by 40 percent by adopting Canon’s Managed Document Services
The bank has achieved standardization across locations and reduced approximately 30 percent of carbon footprint by adopting Canon MDS

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Dell India names Alok Ohrie as President & Managing Director
Sameer Garde, who previously led the Dell India Commercial business, has moved on to pursue career opportunities outside of the company.

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How Infosys is using cloud for infrastructure optimization
Using cloud, Infosys has managed to save around 82 percent of the environment that is energized through the cloud modules

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Security as profit center
Often security is thought of as a cost center; however, if information security is considered as an application that enables collaboration, it can legitimately claim to be a profit center, says Prabhakar Deshpande of Seclore Technology

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Rolta India bags contract for establishing National NAVTEX Network
The establishment of NAVTEX (Navigational Telex) network by Rolta will provide enhanced safety and security for maritime traffic in coastal waters of India

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NASSCOM receives 4,000 applications for 10,000 start-ups program
Under the program, NASSCOM will select 25 startups for angel funding and incubation

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By 2019, 90 percent of organizations will have personal data on IT systems that they don't own or control: Gartner
The research firm says that it’s time for organizations to create an exit strategy for the management of personal data

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Big Data: When cars can talk
The roads would be safer if cars could exchange information about traffic conditions and bad drivers. But are we ready to sacrifice privacy to save lives?

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Best practices for IP protection
Importance of protecting IP is different than protecting regular information assets, opines Amit Pradhan, CISO, Cipla. He details how organizations can build a strong IP strategy and choose the right technology to ensure security of their most valued asset

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DSCI launches ‘DSCI Lead Assessor for Privacy’ training and certification program
The aim of the program is to enable third-party assessments of service and user organizations based on DSCI Privacy Framework leading to DSCI Privacy Certification

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Indian enterprises see BYOD incorporation in a favorable light, reveals Dell survey
As per the findings of Dell CIO Enterprise Tablet Survey 2013, responses from more than 300 organizations show that a large group view BYOD incorporation in a favorable light, and will accordingly prioritize their mobile investments in 2013

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3 ways IT can support talent strategy
Technology that bolsters the talent strategy gives IT leaders an essential role shaping the business environment

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‘Cybercriminal activity in APAC set to grow exponentially’: Michael Sentonas, McAfee
With the threat landscape deteriorating globally, threats to enterprises in APAC will continue to grow exponentially, says Michael Sentonas, VP & CTO, APAC for McAfee. In an interview with InformationWeek, Sentonas opines that attackers have begun targeting low hanging fruit in the region more and more. He sheds light on evolving threats, techniques and culture

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From Tactics to Strategy
When culture is in conflict of any strategy, use tactics, opines DD Mishra, Former Head - IT, Governance & Outsourcing at Vodafone

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Microsoft India announces appointment of Karan Bajwa as new MD
As part of this planned transition, Sanket Akerkar, the current Managing Director, is moving back to the United States to take up another assignment in the company

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Three fourths of data breaches in India caused by human and system errors
A survey by Symantec and the Ponemon Institute states that Indian organizations experienced 12 percent increase in average total cost of a data breach

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Developing a collaborative supply chain strategy
From reduced risk and cost saving to easier expansion into new markets, collaborative supply chain offers several benefits. Let’s take a closer look at how organizations can ensure successful supply chain collaboration

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Rise of the Digital Citizen
India's public policy must align with the needs of its digital citizens or the positive wave we see in increased engagement with the government will suffer a setback

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Stepping up SMB security
SMBs are rarely protected to the same extent as large corporations but are subject to the same ever-changing threat landscape. Let’s look at the possible dangers that SMBs face and steps these businesses can take to protect their network

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Private cloud yields significant business benefits for Shoppers Stop
By adopting the private cloud, the retailer has drastically decreased the turnaround time of projects due to faster and easy provisioning of resources, which has resulted in faster initiation of business projects

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8 steps CIOs should take to maximize BYOD ROI
An effective BYOD program balances the organization’s requirements with the requirements of the employees. Here are key steps that enterprises need to take to ensure successful BYOD rollout

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Worldwide BI, CPM and analytics applications software market grew 7 percent in 2012: Gartner
Tough macroconditions and confusion related to emerging technology terms led to more muted market growth than in previous year

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Ensuring security in cloud computing environments
Delivery of IT services from the cloud assures both capital expense advantages and operation expense advantages. However, unless organizations ensure security of critical data in the cloud, they will not fully benefit from the advantages of cloud, says Kaushik Thakkar of Nevales Networks.

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8 IT hiring trends you can't ignore
Drill down on the latest trends in the IT labor market for job seekers and employers and get expert advice from an IT recruiter

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10 questions to ask before planning for the future IT organization
Executives agree that the old IT organization is on its way out. What’s less clear is what the next generation of enterprise IT will look like, but stale assumptions about future operating environments or available technologies won’t bring them any closer to the answer. Use these 10 questions to explore what all possible futures could mean for a completely re-designed IT department

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Big Data will grow past its hype by 2016: Gartner
The research firm says that once the technologies mature, and organizations learn how to deal with it, Big Data will become “just data

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Storage in your DNA
While the world continues to grapple with storage-related challenges, a tectonic shift can happen in the way we look at storage today as researchers in the European Bioinformatics Institute have discovered a new way of storing information in synthetic DNA molecules

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RSA’s Art Coviello points to Big Data approach to combat cyber security challenges
Executive Chairman of RSA says that leveraging Big Data approaches to security can help make the much-needed intelligence-driven security model a reality for organizations that face growing and sophisticated cyber-attacks

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How Hero MotoCorp is leveraging the cloud to enhance collaboration
Adoption of subscription-based Microsoft Windows Azure solution has enabled the company to collaborate across geographical boundaries with ease and flexibility

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HP announces new portfolio of application transformation software and services
HP’s applications strategy is centered on delivering a simplified architecture that enables clients to create applications that easily integrate with their traditional and cloud-based environments

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NISE to conduct program on cloud computing for business leaders
The program will give the leaders an understanding of how cloud computing and business can be woven together to add value to the bottom line of the enterprise

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Indian mobile data traffic to grow four times faster than fixed IP traffic from 2012 to 2017: Cisco
In India, non-PC accounted for 10 percent of the IP traffic in 2012, but by 2017 the non-PC share will grow to 53 percent, as per Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast

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Podar Education selects Ramco’s ERP on Cloud with HR and Talent Management
Under the agreement, Ramco ERP on Cloud will be addressing all business processes including finance, procurement, inventory, HR and payroll

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Indian firms investing heavily in social, mobile, analytics and cloud: PwC survey
As per the findings of the survey, India Inc’s investment consistently surpasses its global counterparts in all aspects of SMAC

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Twitter's two-factor authentication: 5 reasons to avoid
Two-step verification system has no provision for backup access or lost phones, doesn't address public username problem

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Indian Software – An exodus on the ‘Cards’?
Recent card breaches have been traced back to India, and can become a big problem for Indian software if it goes unchecked

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F-Secure enters Indian corporate security market in partnership with SP Soft
The company is targeting Indian SMBs with a cloud-based security solution for PCs and mobile devices

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Pakistan hit by targeted cyber attack out of India
Information-stealing malware campaign spreads via phishing email attachments posing as Indian military secrets

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Sameer Ratolikar elevated from CISO to CTO of Bank of India
One of India’s most well known CISOs has been elevated from CISO to CTO for taking strategic technology decisions for the bank

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7 IT skills help you get hired
Big data, mobile management and security smarts matter. See what other IT specialties will help you get ahead now

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Johnny English of information security
With technology trends changing rapidly, it is imperative that we train our information security professionals, asserts Prabhakar Deshpande of Seclore Technology. He opines that without training, our average information security professional will be the proverbial Johnny English – ‘He knows no fear; he knows no danger; he knows nothing'

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Mobile AV apps fail to detect disguised malware
Researchers test popular mobile antivirus apps on ability to detect repackaged, transformed versions of known Android malware

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Hackers use fake Facebook security check page to trick users
Trend Micro has come across a malware sample, which redirects users who visit Facebook to a spoofed page

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6 steps for a successful data security control implementation
It’s time to move from infrastructure-only security to infrastructure and data security control, asserts Neil Thacker, Security and Strategy officer, Websense. He shares six steps for a successful data security control implementation

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Your DNS server is helping DDoS attacks
Hackers are increasingly using making use of non-compromised, but misconfigured, public DNS servers to launch DDoS attacks

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Indian small businesses being increasingly targeted with virus-bearing mails, says Symantec
One in 661 emails was a phishing email for small Indian businesses and one in 248 emails carried a virus, reveals a recent Symantec survey

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How cybercriminals attack the cloud
What attacks are most likely against cloud computing environments? Here's a look -- and some advice

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Flaw in Android app allows hackers to take full control of Android smartphones bypassing lock screen
Bkav Internet Security Corporation has reported a critical flaw in Viber, which allows unauthorized users to take full control of Android smartphones

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How attackers choose which vulnerabilities to exploit
A look at how the bad guys choose their attack methods -- and what you can do about it

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Zero day attacks on the rise, warns Trend Micro
Trend Micro Q1 2013 security roundup report highlights concerns over Zero-Day vulnerabilities

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Indian organizations not confident of detecting and preventing security threats
Companies surveyed by Juniper Networks rated themselves 4.7 on a scale of 10 in terms of security efficacy

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How the cloud is enabling an umbrella of safety for school children
Startup Magnasoft Northstar has created an integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution using the cloud

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How video surveillance played a key role in identifying suspects in Boston Marathon bombing
Video surveillance and other information technologies played a huge role in identifying the two main suspects

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Microsoft discovers trojan that erases evidence of its existence
New trojan deletes its own components so researchers and forensics investigators can't analyze or identify it

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Mobile security gap giving undefended point of entry for cybercriminals: David Murphy, COO, Blue Coat Systems
David Murphy, President and COO of Blue Coat Systems explains why businesses need to close the mobile security gap

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Cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016: Gartner
A January 2013 Gartner survey on security spending shows high demand from security buyers for cloud-based security service offering

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Nearly 350K users have downloaded Bitcoin malware through Skype and Gtalk
Threats posed by Bitcoin malware are not just limited to Skype and Bitcoin mining, reveals a report by Cyberoam Threat Research Labs

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Certification for certification’s sake: Following the letter sans the spirit
ISO27k is the new 9k -- It's the new certification kid on the block, says Dinesh Bareja in this opinion piece, which chronicles how the scramble for certification may be diluting information security in the country

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Honeypot stings attackers with counterattacks
Researchers test the controversial concept of hacking back and gathering intelligence on attackers

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How consumerization of IT is impacting the CIO role
The rising trend of consumerization of IT is driving the shift in employee and enterprise expectations from IT, which is adding another layer of pressure on CIOs

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FireEye opens R&D center in Bangalore
Appoints McAfee veteran Sridhar Jayanthi as VP of R&D and MD of India Operations, and Ramsunder Papineni as regional sales director, India and SAARC

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Do Indian enterprises need a CISO?
How can an enterprise decide if it needs a CISO? Read this article to find out

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McAfee announces whitelisting security solution for Android-based embedded devices
The security solution resides in the Android kernel and provides protection from the installation or execution of a malicious application on an Android-based device

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Rogue clouds prevalent in nearly 90 percent of Indian organizations, says Symantec
According to a survey by Symantec, rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls

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Cybercriminals leverage huge interest in Google Glass to scam users
Researchers at Trend Micro warn that cybercriminals and scammers are using the hype created by Google Glass to scam people

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DSCI, Cisco collaborate to strengthen network security ecosystem in the country
Launch ‘Security Thought Leadership Program’ to bring together experts and industry leaders from across the country to address the changing threat landscape

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eScan launches its latest version with Cloud Security
eScan 14 has been developed to be very light on system resources and does not slowdown the user’s system

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How to safely access open public Wi-Fi networks
If you are not careful, your communications are open to everyone else on the network

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Out of date Android devices at risk
Researcher calls out mobile providers for not pushing regular updates to many Android devices

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MiniDuke espionage malware uses Twitter to infect PCs
Online espionage campaign sends malicious PDF documents to victims, and the infected PCs use Twitter to install malware that can copy and delete files

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Evernote hits 1 million user mark in India
On an average, Evernote added 92,000 users per month in India over the last 3 months

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Big Data will help enterprises gain advantage over sophisticated hackers: RSA’s Art Coviello
Executive Chairman of RSA says that Big Data can be a transformative solution for addressing security challenges

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The stupid emperor and the art of Information Security
Just like the emperor who marched on through the procession, wearing imaginary clothes, information security marches on protecting infrastructure

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Mobile phishing attacks on the rise, reveals Trend Micro
For 2012, Trend Micro has found 4,000 phishing URLs designed for the mobile Web

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After Twitter and Facebook, Microsoft experiences cyberattack
Microsoft has revealed that a small number of computers were infected by malicious software using similar techniques as experienced by other organizations

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Kaspersky unveils security solutions for businesses
Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business is aimed at helping businesses overcome the challenges in managing a secure and efficient network

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Google uses over 120 variables to stop hacking of Google accounts; claims reduction of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since 2011 peak
To prevent hacks, Google’s security system does more than just check if a password is correct

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Emerging technologies key focus at CSI IT2020
With the theme of ‘Making Emerging Technologies a Boardroom Agenda’, the annual conference of Computer Society of India – Mumbai Chapter featured tracks on Security, Mobility, Social Media, Big Data and Analytics

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Two factor authentication on the cloud
Extending two-factor authentication creates a layered security labyrinth in the otherwise elusive cloud, without sacrificing employee convenience

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‘Merging IT and marketing departments brings real benefits in terms of revenues’
Tell us about Adtelligence; what pains in the market were you trying to solve as you started the company.

The basic problem we are trying to solve is what we call “ultra-personalization.”  Put simply, we believe that every web experience can be made unique to the individual consumer in an automated, and rich fashion.  We are providing a digital concierge of sorts – to give consumers individualized treatment in a “commodity” world- right now we believe we are the best solution on the market for personalized user experiences of shops, websites and mobile apps.

Your tagline is “The Future of Marketing.”  How is Adtelligence the future of marketing

First of all, we love the world of marketing and want to make it better. That is our fundamental bias as we think the marketing of today is totally impersonal.
Today, the world of marketing is beset with partial solutions to personalization but few that delve deeply into the basic desire of the consumer to be able to get real-time, fully automated solutions that create personalized digital experiences on the fly. That is the future of marketing and we want to usher this era in. People should see what they like and should not receive just spam.
Are Digital Marketing and Social Marketing here to stay or is it a trend that will pass?
We do not subscribe to the notion that this will pass.  We believe both social and digital are inherent to the world we live in and that in fact they will start enriching larger parts of our lives as we go forward. We think that the Big Data trend empowers the digitalization of everything really fast. Social, web, mobile are parts of the puzzle.
Tell us about your typical customer scenario.  Who is the customer and what is needed?
Our typical scenario is one in which an e-commerce company or some other high-transaction web company wants to increase conversion to drive revenue, loyalty, or any end-action.  We believe that optimizing your core asset is the single biggest path to realizing success.  Thus, we consider ourselves the “revenue and retention” partner for our customers. Users just buy more, stay with their eyeballs longer on the site or just engage more with the content when you show something tailored to their interests and current situation or location.
Your product set (Social DSP +, Social Analytics+, Convert+) seems to be focused on optimization, personalization, and richer web experiences.  So many folks claim that so what makes these products different?
We believe we have an industry unique blend of machine-learning, proprietary algorithms coupled with a host of data sources. We concentrate on fully automated personalization since manual tools are not sophisticated enough to deal with the exponential rise in relevant consumer data and don’t connect this data to a high-end user experience.
What are your plans for global expansion?
Right now, we are very strong in Europe and plan to double-down in core geographies like Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Nordics, France and the UK. We service Asia through partners.
We recently announced the opening of our US office in Silicon Valley with an affiliate in Seattle. This quarter, we’ll also be launching a New York office.

From a philosophical standpoint, would you agree that marketing and technology are now a singularity- that one does not live without the other?

Great question but it’s no longer philosophical- its reality!  Marketing has been driven by data from time immemorial but now technology is able to provide much more.  Our Customers already merge IT and marketing departments as it brings real benefits in terms of revenues. HBR just published a study with shows 30 percent uplift when companies utilize the full data driven marketing approach. Social Analytics and marketing analytics are key – also to do real-time personalization our machine learning approach first analyses the data before you show the custom user experience on the site.
Somebody said data is the new oil and it will drive the whole economy. (Even as we prefer the Tesla approach). And it is not the oil/data which is missing. The right tools which automate the business processes to make money out of the data are the key. And that is what we providing here for the new digital marketing officer.
What is the one message you want all your customers (current and future) to know about the company?
We want to partner with you to improve your consumers’ experiences and thus drive your business.  We are eager to do everything we can to help with this to solve your Big Data challenge end to end; our customers’ customers are the suns around which our business revolves. That is not what you only learn in Silicon Valley but also in Germany.

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Dell Global CIO on how IT must adapt as business priorities change
What is your biggest challenge as a CIO?

The biggest challenge as a Dell CIO is you don’t have the luxury of time —you have a CEO who has acquired 18 companies in the last 30 or so months, and you need to integrate all of that. You have to determine how to be agile, how to be fast, and how to integrate all of those acquisitions quickly so that we can hit the ground running.

Your view on the impact on internal IT as Dell transformed itself from a PC supplier to a services-led organization.
We have always been a top supply chain company, and have world class systems that know how to design, fulfill and sell. For example, when we sell hardware, we can assign an SKU or an asset tag to the product. But, when you sell software or solutions, it requires digital fulfillment capabilities. You require subscription billing and software as-a-service capabilities. These are new things that the IT department needs to develop and drive.

During this transformation, what were the big challenges for the IT function?

The big challenge is prioritizing the right things. As you are continuing, you cannot stop running the business; you cannot stop having operational excellence. We had a good north star vision of where we wanted to go and then carved the roadmap and the road to get to that north star. Having that plan and vision of alignment with the business kind of ensures success.

One of the biggest challenges was in our software and services business. In our software business, it was the launch, and we had to assess whether we start from scratch and build the capabilities, whether we take our hardware base and modify, or whether we actually start with the base that one of the acquisitions had, and that’s actually what we did.

You also have an extremely innovative initiative called reverse mentoring where interns advice the company. Can you tell us more about this?

Reverse mentoring is a concept I picked up when I was in the auto industry, and evolved it myself. When you are trying to innovate, a lot of ideas come from the Gen Y coming in as interns. So, we look at them to do some reverse mentoring of our systems. For us, interns often offer a fresh perspective.

Can you give us some examples where the reverse mentoring process has helped you take a relook at existing processes?

One innovation that has come out of this initiative is our mergers and acquisitions playbook, which has changed a lot with the tremendous amount of new capabilities suggested. Interns have also contributed to improvements to the helpdesk. They could take one look at our incident tickets and say what is the problem and bring in improvements to the whole process. As an organization, you have to be smart enough to look for that fresh thinking. 

You also use Salesforce Chatter internally to gauge user satisfaction. How does this help your IT team?

While your system management tools may show that the systems are up 99.999 percent, you may actually find employees complaining on the internal social collaboration platform, Chatter, saying that the system is slow. Both are equally important. The clinical data may come from the trouble tickets being raised, while the pathological data is what my customers are writing about me. So, while my trouble tickets may say that the systems are in good shape, the customers may be writing on our social networking platform that the system is slow. The pathological data is critical for being a successful CIO. We have automated this aspect, so that we clearly know the systems or apps being affected.

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India aspires for IPv6 conversion by 2017
It seems like all over the world there's been significant talk about the need to move to IPv6, and little movement, but India is looking to lead the way in adopting the new standard.


Most countries are at a nascent stage of adoption, with IPv6 accounting for just 0.19 percent or 3.9 million of the total 2 billion Internet population in October 2012. And India is no exception with Google statistics showing the adoption rate in India now is just 0.27 percent. With the right planning and strategy along with support from regulatory bodies, India hopes to see a considerable uptake over the next few years.


IP growth is guaranteed in India considering it has close to 900 million mobile users, 23 million Internet users, and a broadband target of 600 million users by 2020 with new users coming in from 3G, LTE and cable digitization services. However, at present, of the 15,890 default-free prefixes allocated to 182 countries, only 6,405 are visible and though a large number of organizations from India have obtained prefixes, most of them are dormant.


The Indian government released an IPv6 Roadmap Ver-1 in 2010 that laid out some policies to help both the government and the private sector gear up for the transition. Institutional support was extended from the Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers and a new Center for Innovation for IPv6. Larger enterprises have started the process to keep pace with global transition, while telecom and Internet service providers have started sprucing up their network infrastructure and equipment, while investing in broadband spectrum.


Indeed, some innovative pilots have also been completed:

  • BHEL, one of India's largest PSUs has implemented IPv6 across all publicly available servers.
  • Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam is implementing an IPv6-enabled smart grid as proof of concept with support from the Department of Telecommunications, at the Mahindra Satyam Technology Center, Hyderabad.
  • E-commerce website, Flipkart made its site available on IPv6 for the World IPv6 launch on June 6, 2012 with dedicated efforts of four engineers over two weeks.
However, in the recently released IPv6 Roadmap Ver-2, the government says that there is little appreciation of the fact that "IPv6 adoption is an eventuality that is to be accepted and managed proactively... that it is prudent to implement it in a planner way rather than against time." As a consequence, funds for IPv6 have not been provisioned in the IT budgets by a majority of the government organizations. In addition, there is a severe shortage of skilled and trained IPv6 human resources and considerable legacy infrastructure and applications -- both of which would act as major obstacles to timely adoption.


Hence a new set of deliverables to complete transition by 2017 has been worked out. Some of them are:
  • All government organizations should prepare a detailed transition plan (with corresponding demand for grants) by December 2013 for complete transition to IPv6 (dual stack) by December 2017.
  • All new IP based services (cloud computing, datacenters, etc.) to be provisioned by government organizations should be on dual stack supporting IPv6 traffic.
  • By January 1, 2015, the public interface of all government customer-facing services should be dual stack supporting IPv6 traffic.
  • All new enterprise customer connections (both wireless and wireline) provided by service providers on or after January 1, 2014 should be capable of carrying IPv6 traffic either on dual stack or on native IPv6. They should also educate and encourage existing customers to switch over to IPv6.
  • All new retail wireline/wireless (LTE/GSM and CDMA)customer connections provided by service providers on or after June 30, 2014 shall be capable of carrying IPv6 traffic either on dual stack or on native IPv6.
  • All content and application providers should target to adopt IPv6 (dual stack) for new content and applications by June 30, 2014 and transition existing ones by January 1, 2015. From January 1, 2014 all ".in" domain registrations should be on dual stack and migration of existing ones should be complete by June 2014.
  • Mobile phone/data card dongles/ tablets and similar devices used for Internet access supporting GSM/CDMA version 2.5G and above sold in India on or after June 30, 2014 should be capable of carrying IPv6 traffic either on dual stack (IPv4v6) or on native IPv6.
  • All public cloud computing service/datacenter providers should target to adopt IPv6 (dual stack) by June 30, 2014.
It should be noted that the Reserve Bank of India has already instructed all payment gateways, financial institutions, banks and insurance companies to transit to IPv6 (dual stack) by June 30, 2013. The plan is well under way, and with so much government attention it is possible that India could be leading the way in IPv6 shortly. Our dear CIOs will no doubt be very busy for a while. Read More

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Infosys is my middle child, says Narayana Murthy on his return to Infosys
Infosys Limited announced today that the Company’s Board has appointed N R Narayana Murthy into the Board and executive leadership of the Company.  In a meeting held earlier today, the Board approved appointing Mr. N R Narayana Murthy as Executive Chairman of the Board and Additional Director with effect from June 1, 2013.


Murthy’s election as a Director would be placed for the consideration of the Company’s shareholders in the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 15, 2013. Subject to his election as a director at the AGM, the Board will take up in its meeting on June 15, 2013, the resolutions for convening an extraordinary general meeting within the requisite period, in order to seek approval from the shareholders for appointing him as the Executive Chairman and Whole-time Director for a period of five years commencing on June 1, 2013.


K V Kamath would step down from his position as Chairman of the Board and take up the position of Lead Independent Director effective June 1, 2013.


K V Kamath said, “The Board has taken this step keeping in mind the challenges that the technology industry and the Company faces and in the interest of all stakeholders, particularly shareholders large and small, who have asked for strengthening of the executive leadership during this challenging time. Murthy’s entrepreneurial and leadership record and the long experience he has had as a technology pioneer makes him eminently qualified to lead the company and provide strategic direction at this point in time.”


N R Narayana Murthy said, "This calling was sudden, unexpected, and most unusual. But, then, Infosys is my middle child. Therefore, I have put aside my plans-in-progress and accepted this responsibility. I am grateful to Mr. K V Kamath – the Chairman, the Board, and every Infoscion for giving me this opportunity. I intend to do my best to add value to the Company in this challenging situation."


During his five year term, Mr. Murthy would draw a token compensation of Rupee One per year.


S Gopalakrishnan would be re-designated Executive Vice Chairman effective June 1, 2013 and would primarily focus on key client relationships and broader industry issues. Mr. S D Shibulal would continue to be the Managing Director and CEO.


S Gopalakrishnan and S D Shibulal have requested that they draw a compensation of Rupee One per year. The Board has accepted their requests, subject to necessary shareholder and government approvals.


In order to function more effectively Narayana Murthy intends to create the Chairman’s office to assist him during his tenure and has requested the Board to permit him to put together a team for this function. The team will include his son, Dr Rohan Murty, as Narayana Murthy's executive assistant.


Rohan Murty is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University and has held fellowships at MIT, Caltech, and Microsoft Research. He has authored several papers and patents as part of his research on wireless and mobile computing.  If appointed,  Rohan Murty's term as Executive Assistant to the Chairman would be co-terminus with that of Narayana Murthy. Rohan Murty has requested that he should also be paid only a token compensation of Rupee One per year.


The Board has agreed to Narayana Murthy's requests, subject to necessary approvals. Read More

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Plancess partners with LurnQ taking the USD 2 billion engineering test preparation market online
LurnQ, a social online learning and teaching platform, is proud to announce its partnership with Plancess, India’s first company to provide study material for Engineering entrance examinations prepared by top hundred IIT-JEE rankers.The partnership will give Plancess LurnQ’s technology for running engineering test preparation courses online. This will enable Plancess to make the process of learning collaborative and engaging which could potentially bring about a transformation in the engineering test preparation industry, currently estimated to USD USD 2 billion in revenues and growing at 15 - 20 percent CAGR (CLSA analyst report on Indian Education Sector)
LurnQ’s partnership with Plancess enables learning to be a meaningful two-way process in an increasingly digitally networked society. For today’s learner, Internet is the preferred option to learn and according to experts, 50 percent of education will move online in the next ten years. India’s rapid adoption to the online medium is evident from the fact that it is the second largest country participating in online courses offered by the likes of Coursera.
“LurnQ offers a ubiquitous learning platform for a consistent and real-time learning experience”, said Tarun Mitra, CEO and founder, LurnQ. “Our social functionality helps in engaging the users with multiple options to learn collaboratively as one would experience in a classroom. The more powerful your network, the better your learning experience.”
“Using only videos to teach can be boring to both the teacher and learner and therefore LurnQ’s platform allows us to integrate different media types like text, videos, documents, images etc. into a single platform. This gives our learners a unified experience by offering learning in a personalized and structured format,” said Nitesh Salvi, Director and co-founder, Plancess. Read More

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Reliance Communications becomes first telco to offer Aadhar authentication across retail outlets
Reliance Communications, India's fully integrated telecommunications service provider, today announced that it is ready to offer the first of its kind Aadhar authentication process in the country post successful testing of the services in both company owned and non company owned retail outlets. Reliance becomes the first telecom operator in the country to test the concept of Aadhar authentication from a non company owned multi-brand small retail outlet. Reliance Communications is ready to launch the services across all circles post the necessary guidelines issued by DOT.


Mobile customers can soon walk into any retailer in the country with their respective Aadhar card, post which the retailer can share the customer’s Aadhar profile details along with the biometric authentication details online with UIDAI server for real time authentication of the identity of the customer. Post this authentication, the customer details can be fetched online from UIDAI server and the customer mobile connection can now be processed with Reliance Communications for immediate activation. The customer verification process is thus undertaken through Aadhar authentication.


Commenting on this occasion, Anurag Prashar, President – Services, Reliance Communications said, “We are delighted to be the first telecom operator in the country to test the concept of Aadhar authentication process at non company owned multi-brand small retail outlets successfully. This service is completely ready for national roll out and we are confident that RCOM will lead the industry in reaching out to every nook and corner of the country. This online paperless process for instant customer verification and subsequent mobile activation at all multi-brand small retail outlets is set to  provide a compelling new experience in terms of speed and convenience to our customers nationally.”



Aadhar online authentication process is a paperless and regulatory process to activate new mobile connection instantly. Reliance is the first telecom operator in the country to test the concept of Aadhar authentications from a non company owned multi brand small retail outlet. These non company owned multi brand small retail outlets spread across the country accounts for 90 percent of the new SIM cards sold every month. Read More

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Gemalto's electronic Identity software offers governments an unprecedented level of security
Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653), the world leader in digital security, today announced that its Sealys ID Motion smart card software dedicated to national government programs has received "Common Criteria EAL7 certification". EAL7, or Evaluation Assurance Level 7, represents the highest level of security assurance within the international security evaluation scheme, also known as Common Criteria.



By achieving this independent and government-recognized security certification, Gemalto has set a new landmark for government smart card security. It is the first time a smart card embedded software provides such a level of assurance. With Sealys ID Motion, clients will also benefit from a portfolio of applications, built from Gemalto's experience in over 80 government programs, to modernize public services and speed up the technical design phase with ready-made proven solutions.



Gemalto's Sealys ID Motion is a new turnkey end-to-end solution for advanced multi-issuer government projects with highly secured post-issuance capabilities. ID Motion offers the potential to deliver convenient and efficient access to numerous eGovernment services via a single card.

Furthermore, with ID Motion it is now possible to add new applications, such as healthcare and payment, to existing electronic ID cards after they are already deployed in the field, thereby protecting governments' investments and budgets.



"This certification represents a major milestone, as we intend ID Motion to be a significant step forward in securing eGovernment services," said Frédéric Trojani, Senior Vice President of the Government Programs Business Unit at Gemalto. "Sealys ID Motion brings together convenience, security and trust, which are the three critical success factors for the broad adoption of these services. It is a clear answer to governments' interest in multiservice platforms that can support different central and local authorities, be eServices ready and host third parties applications, such as transport, eSignatures and others." Read More

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Netmagic to open 100,000 sq ft Data Center in Bangalore
India's only datacenter infrastructure lifecycle management (DILM) company and subsidiary of NTT Communications (NTT Com), today announced that it is building a spanking new datacenter that will add a massive 1,00,000 sq ft of net floor space to Bangalore's supply constrained data center market. The new data center in Electronic City, "India Bangalore 2 Data Center" will be operational by December 2013. The company anticipates the capacity to be utilized by large IT/ITES companies looking for scalable and high quality data center space for their R&D centers as well as their end customers' space requirements.


The data center will add to the growing number of NTT Com's  data centers globally. NTT Com which is a member of NTT group, ranked no.1 in telecom industry in the Fortune Global 500, runs more than 140 data centers globally under its newly launched Nexcenter brand and holds a majority stake in Netmagic Solutions. This is the first data center in India to have benefitted from the collaborative engineering and operational expertise of NTT Com and Netmagic.


Netmagic has 7 datacenters in India including 4 in Mumbai and one each in Bangalore, Noida (Delhi-NCR) and Chennai. The 15 year old pioneer has over 700 people delivering services to over 1200 enterprise customers from across industry verticals.


The datacenter will deliver the entire range of services of Netmagic including managed co-location, dedicated hosting, IT infrastructure monitoring and management, security and cloud computing services.  The datacenter will offer co-location space with high power and cooling densities, and can offer not only individual racks, but also highly secure cages and enclosed server rooms to meet the requirements of large global enterprises. As with all of the company's data centers, connectivity from multiple telecom providers will be available from physically redundant paths allowing customers to architect on any network of their choice. The data center is designed with high levels of redundancies and a stringent focus on security, both physical and logical. Enterprises can expect further attention to detail with amenities such as highly secure material handling system based on bar coding and multiple checkpoints, adequate customer office space, dedicated storage space, and heavy equipment handling systems.


In addition to serving the needs of businesses located in and around Bangalore, the data center shall also act as a perfect place for large organizations across India and other geographies to establish their disaster recovery and business continuity sites.


Enterprises planning to migrate to any of Netmagic's data centers can avail of their data center migration management expertise that has been honed over several migration projects planned and managed for enterprises hosted in their data centers.


The company has already begun accepting orders for its managed hosting and co-location services. Netmagic is also offering complimentary migration service to the first three customers opting to move their current data center to Netmagic's new data center in Electronic City. Those interested can register here



Says Sharad Sanghi, CEO, Netmagic Solutions, "In India, customers want to have their data centers located as close as possible to their business operations. Our strategy is to accommodate this demand and ensure that our data centers are large enough to meet their needs as well as be efficient enough to be viable. While customers may come to us because of our location, they stay with us because of our service and ability to help their infrastructure evolve as their business does."


He adds, "A common misconception is that any building can be converted to offer data center services. A data center is engineered from the ground up to ensure the highest levels of security, fully redundant systems with secondary and even tertiary backup systems, massive cooling systems and onsite electricity generation. Hence, we encourage customers to understand these finer elements of engineering that go behind building a data center and understand that even in a co-location arrangement, how important it is to have an IT Infrastructure partner who can understand the criticality of your data and has the experience and competence to support customers accordingly 24x7. Read More

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Five strategic imperatives for emerging Indian IT service firms
Many emerging Indian IT service firms are still caught in a me-too strategy that offers customers few reasons to choose one company over another. While Indian IT and the BPO industry has always had the advantage of cost and talent, it is imperative for these firms to realize the next level of growth by re-thinking their positioning in terms of innovation, domain and industry expertise, and how they interact with their customers.


To make this shift, marketing needs to change its value proposition to the business by following five strategic imperatives:

#1 Compete on value and not price

“Position for value” is a simple statement that implies a lot: clear positioning that shows how your company creates value for your customer’s entire business (not just the IT function), supported by timely and relevant content from internal experts, refined by marketing and distributed through multiple channels.


Few companies do this well. The websites of emerging Indian IT and BPO providers, where this kind of positioning should be the first thing a potential customer sees, fail the “position for value” test. Instead, they suffer from the “everything for everybody” disease.


The cure is specialization and the thought leadership to back it up. The specialization can be around industry—or even customer, as account based marketers argue. It can also focus on service expertise or unique IP. Specialization allows you show how you’re different in a way that matters to your customer—and thought leadership supplies vivid evidence to back up your claim. Some successful companies who have demonstrated this well include Hexaware and NIIT Tech (travel), Persistent Systems (product development), MindTree (manufacturing), and KPIT Cummins (automotive).


Subject matter experts represent thought leadership embodied not in a report, but in a knowledgeable professional. ITSMA research shows that subject matter experts from solution providers are the single most credible source of information for buyers

#2 Be effective than being efficient
Doing things right or doing the right things; that’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Ideally you want both efficiency and effectiveness. But if you had to choose, you would do the right things imperfectly rather than the wrong things perfectly. Setting the right goals is the hard part.


The fact is that many managers are so mesmerized by ROI-type metrics that they fail to think outside the imperative of “doing more with less”—no matter what they’re getting “more” of. Are they getting downloads of ungated position papers that offer no way of tracking user engagement? Are they getting weak leads through email marketing rather than stronger ones through in-person seminars? Marketing should find new ways to help grow the business, not live out its days as a cost-minimizing utility buried in the cost-of-sales figure.


#3 Align around strategic customers
For key customers, those with ongoing business and the potential to generate new business, a transactional approach will not lead to the kind of intimacy necessary to strengthen and deepen the relationship


Instead of taking a one-to-many approach, sales can take the one-to-few or one-to-one approach of Account Based Marketing. ITSMA research shows that the more precisely companies segment and target their audience, the more relevant the message and the bigger the impact


Marketers should be working closely with the business unit leads and sales to develop a go-to-market strategy aligned with the targeted customer. Doing this requires market data, segmentation and targeting, clear and relevant messaging, sales enablement, and ongoing measurement. Marketing has a key role to play in each of these areas.

The marketing function can be perceived as a relationship builder and add value by bringing the organization together around the customer’s needs.

"Many of the Indian IT services companies are focused on changing customer perceptions about their companies as they desire to be viewed as high-value specialists, not low-cost generalists. Confirming this trend is ITSMA’s 2013 Marketing Budget and Trends study, where Indian respondents identified shifting the company’s brand reputation as one of the highest marketing priorities for the coming year, along with developing thought leadership that drives business, improving sales enablement, and building a more effective lead management and nurturing model.”


-- Dave Munn, President and CEO, ITSMA



#4 Build a digital and social strategy
Today, there is a change in both the tools available to connect to customers and an upheaval in how buyers consume information. In terms of tools, today’s marketers must bring skills in social media, web analytics, lead management, demand generation, web design and usability, thought leadership development, and other areas that barely existed five years ago.


As a result, marketing must also train and support an entirely new category of company spokespeople: employees and subject matter experts. The focus of the marketing conversation is shifting to SMEs, delivery consultants, and product and service managers, who may have little experience conversing in this way.


Instead of one-way broadcasting to customers and prospects, companies are shifting to a more open, two-way dialogue, with many different areas of the company—not just marketing or PR—engaging with customers and prospects. Finding the people to participate in social media conversations and convincing the organization that it is worthwhile to do so has become marketing’s responsibility. 


An increasing piece of the budget should go towards building integrated web presence—a task that is critical today and will only become more important tomorrow. A company may be perfectly positioned, but without a digital media strategy, including social, that positioning will never reach its audience

#5 Align your metrics with the business
Most marketers have never run a business, so they don’t speak the language of P&L owners. They aren’t using the same business key performance indicators (KPIs) that those in the business do. When the business is talking about orders, revenue, margins, cash, win rates and client satisfaction, marketers are talking about website hits, social media presence, and seminar attendance. The closest they come to speaking the language of the business is when they talk about filling the sales pipeline with qualified leads.


The solution is for marketing to use business KPIs, engage directly with clients, and take on higher-value-added activities such as developing market-led strategy. Aligning marketing metrics with business KPIs and reporting on the same KPIs as the rest of the business is difficult, but it is key to demonstrating the link between marketing activities and business results. Read More

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Phaneesh Murthy asked to step down as CEO of iGate after sexual harassment claim
iGATE Corporation announced today that its Board of Directors has decided to terminate the employment of President and CEO Phaneesh Murthy.


Concurrently, the Board has appointed Gerhard Watzinger as President and CEO on an interim basis. All changes are effective immediately.


The Board’s decision was made as a result of an investigation by outside legal counsel, engaged by the Board, of the facts and circumstances surrounding a relationship Murthy had with a subordinate employee and a claim of sexual harassment. The investigation, which is ongoing, has reached the finding that Murthy’s failure to report this relationship violated iGATE’s policy, as well as Murthy’s employment contract. The investigation has not uncovered any violation of iGATE’s harassment policy.


“The Board deliberated extensively on this matter,” said Sunil Wadhwani, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Board of iGATE. “We recognize the significant contributions Mr. Murthy has provided over the past ten years in helping to establish iGATE as a leader in the IT industry. He has worked hard to improve the value of iGATE, and we greatly appreciate his efforts. However, as a result of this violation of iGATE policy, we asked Murthy to step down.”


Gerhard Watzinger, age 52, is a successful 29-year IT industry veteran, who previously served as an executive at iGATE from 1998 to 2003 in a number of roles, including CEO of the iGATE Solutions business (formerly Mascot Systems). During his tenure, Watzinger drove iGATE Solutions’ transition from a U.S.-centric operation to an international organization across four continents, closed some of the largest deals in the company’s history and increased the company’s market value by over 150 percent. Watzinger returns to iGATE from INTEL / McAfee, where he was EVP and Chief Strategy Officer. Previously, Watzinger also served as CEO of both SafeBoot and APT International, Partner and Managing Director at Price Waterhouse and Managing Director at CapGemini.


“Murthy’s departure was not related in any way to the company's operational or financial performance, both of which remain strong,” said Ashok Trivedi, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Board of iGATE. “iGATE will continue to focus on creating value for our customers and shareholders, while upholding the highest ethical standards in every area of our business. We are fortunate to have Gerhard Watzinger returning to iGATE during this transition. Watzinger possesses deep knowledge of iGATE’s business and he assumes his responsibilities as our Interim President and CEO with the full support of the Board.”


“iGATE has great resources and a deep bench of talent from which to draw upon to further create shareholder value,” said Watzinger. “We have a clear strategy that has put us in this strong position to maintain our successes into the future. Continuing to execute this strategy is our top priority.”

Wadhwani and Trivedi will work closely with Watzinger during his tenure as Interim President and CEO to ensure a seamless transition.


A Search Committee within the Board of Directors has been created, which will oversee the process for the identification and selection of a new President and CEO. The Committee has been charged with selecting an experienced industry veteran to take over as the permanent President and CEO and drive long-term growth for iGATE, while upholding the highest ethical standards, personally and professionally.


Watzinger has taken himself out of consideration for the role of permanent President and CEO, but he will serve as Interim President and CEO until the selection process is complete. The company does not expect to make any additional structural or executive leadership changes in the near future. Read More

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Now, send money to your friends via Gmail
If search engine giant, Google has its way with sending money, as it does with searching information, sending money could be ridiculously simple. - in fact as simple as sending an e-mail.

Travis Green, Product Manager, Google Wallet, explains in a Google Official Gmail blog post, "Google Wallet is now integrated with Gmail, so you can quickly and securely send money to friends and family directly within Gmail -- even if they don’t have a Gmail address. It's free to send money if your bank account is linked to Google Wallet or using your Google Wallet Balance, and low fees apply to send money using your linked credit or debit card. "
send money via Gmail
To send money, all you have to do is hover over the attachment paperclip, click the $ icon to attach money to your message, enter the amount you wish to send, and press send - that is it.



As Google Wallet is integrated into Gmail, one can securely send money to friends and family in the US without leaving your Gmail inbox.


Google is rolling out this feature to US Gmail users who are aged over 18 years in the coming months.
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SAP gives ERP a facelift
SAP has redefined itself as a business-to-business-to-consumer company, co-CEO Bill McDermott declared on Tuesday at the company's annual Sapphire Conference. So it's now a "number-one priority" for the enterprise applications vendor to deliver "beautiful," consumer-grade user interfaces, he said.


McDermott's B2B2C message was wrapped in warnings about the dangers of failing to keep up with cloud, social, mobile and real-time expectations. These expectations are being set, he said, by the Millennial generation: 18- to 33-year-olds that are now "the biggest target market on earth" and "the driving force behind technology innovation," both as consumers and, increasingly, as employees.


On Wednesday the company was set to announce SAP Fiori, a collection of 25 HTML5 applications designed for desktop, tablet and smartphone interaction. Fiori means "to flower" or "blossom" in Italian, and it's meant to symbolize the renewal of SAP's core applications with clean, touch-friendly interfaces that look more like screens you'd see on Facebook or Amazon.com.


The list of Fiori apps is said to cover common workflow, lookup and self-service interactions with SAP's core apps, including approve-leave requests, travel expenses approvals, timesheets, paystub lookups, create sales orders, customer invoices and purchase-order tracking.


 The lightweight Fiori apps, which are available immediately and said by SAP to be easy to deploy, were selected and co-developed with input from customers, and customers including Colgate-Palmolive and Valero were early beta testers.


SAP's plans for interface upgrades were telegraphed last week by SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner, who mentioned the initiative during a press conference on the just-launched Hana Enterprise Cloud service. SAP isn't the only enterprise software vendor putting a fresh face on old ERP apps. Infor last month introduced a battery of new interfaces billed as having the look and feel of popular consumer websites.


McDermott didn't elaborate on the interfaces, but he covered all of SAP's usual bases during his keynote -- the company's "winning" innovation strategy, the ability of the Hana in-memory database to deliver "intelligent data at the speed of thought," SAP's "always open" partner ecosystem and so on. He also formally announced that the world of sports and entertainment is now a 25th vertical industry addressed by SAP.


That sports news prompted a panel discussion between McDermott and SAP customers Adam Silver, deputy commissioner of the NBA, Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of sports clothing manufacturer Under Armour, and moderator James Brown, host of the TV show "The NFL Today."


 Sports fits the B2B2C model well, McDermott said, because teams and leagues are digitizing their relationships with the fans. Silver explained that the NBA is using SAP Hana to power NBA.com/stats, a site that he said is generating twice the level of traffic since it was relaunched with 60 years of historical stats and the query capabilities of the in-memory database.


The 49ers co-developed a talent-scouting application with SAP, and York said the team is also working with SAP to design consumer-friendly "ticketless and cashless" transactions at its new stadium under construction and set to open in 2014. McDermott demonstrated how the scouting app will be recast as an HR talent review app for mainstream businesses.


Echoing SAP's strategy to innovate with software and let customers choose hardware, York said the 49ers decided against investing USD 60 million in a state-of-the-art scoreboard that would "inevitably become antiquated within five years." Instead it's investing in mobile apps and leveraging the investments of Bay area fans, "who spend more than USD 1,000 every 18 months on smartphones," he explained.


Under Armour CEO Plank explained the clothing manufacturer's 2006 choice of SAP as a move to a platform the company would "never outgrow." Since that time the company has grown from $300 million to more than USD 1.8 billion in annual sales. It recently upgraded to SAP Hana because crucial sales allocation reports were taking so long that shipments were being delayed.


"Today we're running 91 percent faster and we get goods to the consumer in a timely way, because there's nothing more expensive for us than an empty retail store fixture," Plank said.


In other announcements at Sapphire, SAP outlined a unified strategy and rebranding of its cloud portfolio as the SAP Hana Cloud Platform, but it wasn't clear what changed beyond the naming of cloud assets.


The company also announced SAP Mobile Secure, an expansion of the Afaria enterprise mobility management system available on-premises or as a cloud-based service. The broader platform ensures "enterprise-grade" security for devices, apps and content, according to SAP. New app security capabilities are provided by partner Mocana, which offers app-wrapping technology that reportedly secures corporate and third-party applications without having to write code.


It's not like consumers will suddenly be approving requisitions and purchase orders. But if SAP's internal-facing interfaces can be as clean and simple as Amazon.com, the thinking is that it will become that much easier to use mobile development tools to dream up pleasing self-service applications for customers. Read More

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Pharma giant Lupin deploys Microsoft Office 365; registers significant cost reductions
Lupin Limited recently deployed Microsoft Office 365 to simplify employee communication, gain business insights and share experiences across its offices in four continents. By providing the latest capabilities of Office 365, Lupin has enabled its 11,000 employees to communicate more effectively and efficiently while also reducing total costs by around 40 percent over a 3 year time period.
With operations spanning four continents, recent acquisitions in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America and its pharmaceutical products reaching over 100 countries, the growth of Lupin has been exponential. The ability to communicate effectively across locations amongst its 11,000 employee base was critical to the company. Lupin used multiple legacy systems for messaging and communication across different geographies, but as business grew rapidly, the company found its needs had exceeded the existing solution’s capabilities.
The company evaluated cloud services from leading service providers with the intention of moving to one standard, global solution to help employees better communicate within the company. The decision was eventually made in favor of Microsoft Office 365.
“Office 365 creates a more productive mobile workforce by providing employees access to e-mails, documents, contacts, and calendars - using a variety of devices from virtually any location. The first wave of our global rollout of Office 365 has successfully been able to unify our geographically diverse workforce providing them with the access they need anytime and anywhere, with tools that they are already familiar with. At the same time, we have been able to retire a number of legacy messaging systems and consolidate the footprint,” stated Mayur Danait, CIO, Lupin.
Benefits from Office 365 include:
Building a uniform organization identity and culture:
Exchange Online helped the communications and top management teams to engage with the employees better, be it sharing their vision, business plans and core strategies, or enabling them to build consensus and create a sense of belonging. Exchange Online further enabled the employees to connect with their colleagues globally.
Reduction in total costs: By moving to Office 365, Lupin reduced costs in a number of ways including personnel, hardware, facilities, and deployment expenses. From initial project ROI estimates, this could work out to as much as 40 percent over a 3 year time period.
Improved regulatory compliance with eDiscovery: Features such as e-mail archival, retention policies, legal hold, and the ability to integrate with third-party cloud-based archival and eDiscovery solutions enabled Lupin to meet with regulatory requirements across countries.


Effortless administration: Office 365 hosted services reduced the administration tasks like managing the overall landscape, provision users and necessary back-ups.





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What IT staffs want more than salary
A few weeks ago, I sat down to examine the data surrounding InformationWeek's 2013 IT Salary research for executives. You may be surprised that the data tells us salary isn't really what matters most to IT executives. The five things that matter most have NOTHING to do with compensation.


While you might think that IT execs' higher level of satisfaction with compensation might factor in here, digging into the data a little bit tells us a different story.
As I wrote in the report, "Compared with IT staff, who are either satisfied or very satisfied with their salaries 59 percent of the time, and satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs overall 63 percent of the time, IT execs are only a few percentage points better. Sixty-five percent of IT execs are very satisfied or satisfied with salaries, and 70 percent are very satisfied or satisfied overall with all aspects of their jobs. The slight edge over staff in these categories isn't quite the 'let them eat cake' level of smugness that IT staff might imagine."
All of which is to say: CIOs aren't significantly happier with their jobs or salaries than IT staff.
So what does matter to CIOs? Well, among the 340 CIOs who took our survey, the top answers for "what matters most to you about your job" were, in order: My opinion and knowledge are valued; Involvement in setting company strategy and determining goals; My work (job) is important to the company's success; Challenge of job/responsibility; and Corporate culture and values.
If you simplify these factors into five basic questions -- and if the answer is no -- they read very much like any employee's reasons to leave a job: Am I being listened to? Does my work matter? Is my work presenting an interesting challenge? and Am I working for people that I respect and like and who seem decent?
To some of us, this logic is patently obvious. Others with free-market-myopia will point to the finding in the research that shows that higher compensation is the No. 1 reason why IT executives look for a new job.
Yes, of course it is. All other things being equal, that is. When folks answer questions about what is most important to them, you can usually take them at their word. We can rest assured that folks would not accept a higher salary to work in hell. And, when they say that they would leave for more money, one can assume that they would take the job with a reasonable degree of confidence that the answers to the above five basic questions are "yes."
If it was just about salary, talented IT executives would simply change careers and become CFOs. After all, you could add 50 percent to your salary. I say this because I went comparison shopping at Salary.com to compare CIOs to CFOs. While Salary.com obviously has a different data set than InformationWeek's, and doesn't offer data for a job called "CIO" or "chief information officer," they do offer "top IT executive" data and call their category "chief information technology officer" -- close enough. Their data for the top IT exec showed a median salary as USD 192,000, with CFOs weighing in at around USD 300,000.
What conclusions can we draw from all of this?
If you're the CIO's boss, note that retention and motivation isn't just about compensation, although compensation matters.
If these five things matter to CIOs, it's not too much of a leap to say that they probably matter to staff. And, they likely matter to your most confident and employable staff, if you catch my drift. HR is busy crunching numbers to make sure that your salaries are reasonably close to industry. But only IT leadership can help with the big 5.
When hiring, do your best to express that the answers to the five basic questions are yes. Perhaps the best way to do this is to expose your candidates to others in the organization who seem reasonably happy, and allow the interview process to be a two-way street.
Finally, the most basic question of all is this: Why do we have people working for our organizations in the first place? To merely show up and do as asked? Or to do something on a higher level? We all want the next Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds to launch from our organizations, but just how do we get there?
I would suggest that the thinking of positive psychology pioneer Abraham Maslow provides a good way to frame this question. Maslow studied how exemplary people became that way, and theorized that there is a hierarchy of basic human needs. That is, once humans get past physiological and safety needs (which salary could be said to be a part of), only then can humans focus on higher goals and achieve "self actualization" higher purposes, whether that's doing work that earns a Nobel Prize or inventing a transformative product like the iPhone.
We constantly ask IT folks to focus on higher-purpose business goals outside of infrastructure. It's not such a leap to ask those who manage IT folks to focus on higher purposes as well. Is it?
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NCR appoints Navroze Dastur as its new MD for India
NCR Corporation  today announced that as part of the regional realignment of its management team, Navroze Dastur has been promoted to be the new managing director for NCR India, reporting to Jaivinder Gill who will now assume the role of Vice President – South Asia Pacific for Financial business.
Navroze has been with NCR for the past seven years as the senior general manager for strategic alliance and payment solutions responsible for charting the company's overall growth strategy for the payments business and partner alliances.
Commenting on the appointment, Gill said, “Navroze’ s close association with the banking and financial services industry, backed by his drive for continuous success and customer satisfaction, will ensure continued commitment and focus to execute NCR's market strategy for India, which remains an important growth engine for NCR globally.”
Navroze said, “NCR’s commitment towards making customer’s lives easier is demonstrated through our wide array of innovative solutions across financial, retail and mobile payment applications which is changing the way businesses interact with consumers. Maintaining its leadership position in the Indian ATM market, NCR has made significant investments that drive its goal of providing relevant solutions to the Indian market. I am extremely delighted to have the opportunity to add value and contribute towards achieving profitable growth for the company.”




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netCORE Solutions achieves the global ISO Certification
netCORE Solutions, an enterprise communication & digital marketing solutions company, today announced that it has achieved the global ISO certification - ISO 9001:2008 (Quality Management Standards) and ISO 27001:2005 (Information Security Management Standards.)
ISO 9001 is a set of international standard and guidance documents for quality management and quality assurance. To acquire this certification, a company needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.
ISO 27001 initiated a review of the security controls and processes used to manage Information Security at netCORE. It formally specifies a management system that is intended to bring information security under explicit management control.
Girish Nair, CEO, netCORE Solutions said, “We are determined to maintain this certification by performing audits and ensuring compliance to the ISO standards. These certifications represent our commitment to improve our products and services that will meet or exceed our customers’ expectations and reinforce our continual eagerness to improve.”
netCORE received its ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 27001:2005 registration from Nimbus Certifications Pvt. Ltd, an accredited registrar that performs assessment of management systems against requirements of national and international standards for quality and security.
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CIOs will need to manage both technology and business innovation to gain competitive advantage with Big Data: Gartner
CIOs must realize that innovation needs to go well beyond the technology used to manage Big Data, according to Gartner, Inc. To get maximum value, enterprises will need to seek and embrace innovation in the way business problems are analyzed with Big Data.
"Big Data requires an enterprise to embrace innovation on two levels," said Hung LeHong, Research Vice President at Gartner. "First, the technology itself is innovative. Second, enterprises must be willing to innovate in the way they do decision support and analytics. This second reason is not a technology challenge, but rather a process and change management challenge.
"Big Data technologies bring innovative ways of analyzing existing business problems and opportunities. New data sources and new analytics can improve the enterprise in ways that have never been leveraged before."
Big Data's ability to analyze unstructured data, large volumes and disparate sources leads to innovative opportunities. In most cases, there has been very little precedence for the ways Big Data can add value to an enterprise. It was never possible to run these kinds of analyses or access these new types of data. Seeking value from Big Data technologies requires innovative thinking and a willingness to accept and trust these sources and methods. CIOs should treat Big Data projects as innovation projects that will require change management efforts. The business will need time to trust new data sources and new analytics and enterprises should start small with pilots that put full transparency on the data, the analytics and the resulting insight.
However, Big Data isn't just about the large sources of external data, such as public social network data. Creative CIO thinking can unearth valuable information sources already inside the enterprise that are underused.
"Perhaps CIOs feel more comfortable starting with internal data sources, because the thinking is that much of it is already being managed by IT," said LeHong. "However, in many cases, these internal data sources are not controlled by IT at all. For example, call center recordings, security camera footage and operational data from manufacturing equipment all represent potential internal sources of data to investigate, but they are usually not under the control of IT."
Therefore, CIOs and their teams will need to work with the business to fully understand the pockets of data that are available. With some creative thinking, even data that is already captured data can be made richer. Enterprises that use Big Data technologies can afford to keep the full, raw data, building up rich sources of data that can provide new insight. However, CIOs will need to ensure that there is always a clear business purpose and outcome for storing this new data.
Internal data has an additional advantage. It is a good starting point for big data projects because the enterprise already owns the data, and it may be easier and/or less costly than accessing external data sources. Also, compared with external sources, the enterprise will be more likely to trust the internal data because it comes from enterprise systems, logs and other enterprise assets.
Some enterprises have used Big Data technologies to make existing analytics faster. Although technology may enable faster speed, getting business value from that speed often requires process changes.
Gartner research shows that early adopter enterprises that implemented faster analytical capabilities changed their processes to get the maximum benefit from the speed. For some enterprises, the speed in analysis provides the ability to include a full week of sales data when running analytics, such as price/promotion/markdown optimization. In the past, because these optimizations would take a day to run, Sunday's sales data often did not make it into the calculations. Now, with the ability to run the optimizations in minutes, enterprises can include the full week's data — making their optimizations immediately up to date with market activity.
"CIOs must ensure that Big Data projects that improve analytical speed always include a process redesign effort that aims at getting maximum benefit from that speed," said LeHong. "Before pursuing Big Data investments, ensure that the evaluating team has a clear understanding of how faster analytics will lead to an improved business outcome — and build this into the business case."
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Arista introduces industry’s fastest data center switch
The new enhancements to its modular switching platform will enable cloud networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and 1 million virtual machines.
With the fully programmable Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) software, customers can now achieve the level of automation necessary to build true Software Defined Networks.
The Arista 7500E offers 1,152 10GbE, 288 40GbE, or 96 100GbE wire-speed ports, making the Arista 7500E the fastest and most scalable data center Ethernet switch in the industry. The key improvements of the Arista 7500E compared to the first generation Arista 7500 are as follows:
  • Three times the fabric bandwidth at 30 Terabits per second
  • Three times the packet buffer at 144 Gigabyte per switch
  • Three times the control plane performance
  • Triple the power efficiency at less than 4 watts per 10GbE port
  • The industry’s first triple-speed 10/40/100GbE line card
  • Much larger L2 and L3 Table Sizes
  • Wirespeed VXLAN capability on every port
 The 7500E Series is a major engineering achievement, offering the industry’s highest throughput and three times the capability of the original Arista 7500 in every dimension - performance, density and power without a chassis upgrade,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s Chairman and Chief Development Officer. “It enables customers to build the world’s largest switching infrastructures that handle the most demanding workloads with ease.”

 

“The high density 40GbE and 100GbE interfaces, deep packet buffers, SDN features and the robustness of EOS makes the Arista 7500 an ideal spine platform for our network,” said Benjamin Nathan, Director, IT Operations and Infrastructure at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. “Arista continues to innovate on programmability with it's Linux based EOS and was a key factor in deciding on the 7500E for our Big Data needs."



 The Arista 7500E together with Arista EOS, delivers a set of advanced Software Defined Networking capabilities that support programmatic control, enhanced monitoring, and self-healing resilience to every aspect of the switch, including the following: 

•      Wirespeed VXLAN gateways that enable multi-tenant network virtualization

•      Precise advanced traffic monitoring with Arista LANZ, DANZ and Tap Aggregation

•      Rapid Automated Indication of Link-Loss (RAIL) for accelerated convergence in Big Data analytics and Hadoop applications

•      VM Tracer for network wide workload mobility and virtualization in VMware and OpenStack clouds

•      Distributed system health monitoring with real-time Health Tracer



Cloud networks have universally adopted a leaf-spine architecture, using Layer-3 load-balancing to provide scalable performance. With the Arista 7500E as the spine and Arista 7150/7050 as the leaf, these network topologies can support cloud data centers with more than 100,000 servers that deliver consistent performance for dynamically scaling workloads in public or private clouds, including Hadoop, Big Data, storage, Web 2.0, VM farms, and network virtualization. Read More

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How to train your employees for using social media the right way
Employees are human, which makes them unpredictable. Therefore, as a business leader you can leave nothing to chance about their use of social media, or your brand might suffer.
Maybe you've heard the story about the Whirlpool employee who tweeted a tasteless joke about Obama's grandmother during the last presidential election. Or how Microsoft drew heat last fall when one of the people who manage its Twitter account dissed conservative talking head Ann Coulter. Or the ad agency employee assigned to the Chrysler account, who used the @ChryslerAutos twitter account to skewer Detroit drivers -- and lost his agency the Chrysler business. Each of these stories shows how brands can be damaged by an employee's comments in social media. It doesn't matter whether the employee was acting with malice or merely using poor judgment.
There's no "undo" button on brand damage caused by employees who don't understand appropriate business use of social media.
What can you do? Start raising employees' social savvy the day they come on board. Make relationship training part of overall training for new employees. Social media is all about relationships. Your customers are online, connected and communicating with the rest of the marketplace. They're learning from each other about you and your competitors. You need to be part of that conversation, contributing in ways that build your brand.
To involve your employees in the social media conversation, you need clear, sound policies. You can find suggestions for developing your social media guidelines online: Associations Now offers a handy eight-point list. The Small Business Administration also offers useful social media guidelines for business.
Disseminating your company's social media policy is a required starting point -- but don't stop there. Telling your employees what to do and what not to do is only the beginning. To make it stick, provide a training program that includes interactive scenarios. Let employees practice what they've learned and give immediate feedback. Training is a good place to address questions about private vs. business use of social media. Make it rich with instruction, examples and practice opportunities.
But don't consider social media training a "one and done" activity, suitable for new hires only. Relationship training should be an ongoing component of your talent development. Your market is out there having conversations through technology, and your employees should be participating in those relationships.
Identify the socially savvy in your company and ensure they live and breathe your social media guidelines. They should, for example, understand and follow your company's policy on sharing confidential information. Once you're sure they're modeling the right behavior, encourage them to mentor others up, down and across the organization. Social is no place for traditional org charts.


Here's an opportunity to connect your social media-savvy young people with others to teach how to tweet, pin or blog. Let them model for others the relationship skills that make social conversations into brand builders: skills that work as well in "real life" as they do in the virtual community. I'm talking about being accurate, transparent and respectful of others' intellectual property and privacy.

Remember, you get the behavior you reward. To ensure your employees use social to build and nurture relationships, tie relationship-centric behavior to performance metrics and compensation.


Be specific about the behavior you're looking for -- what types of comments you expect employees to make on social platforms, with explicit examples of appropriate and inappropriate business use of social media. Once you've specified the behavior, communicate the reward.


Create metrics that tie social media activity to performance evaluation. When you distribute the guidelines, make the connection between behavior and reward clear to your employees. Although using social media is fun, it is an added responsibility for employees, and should be recognized in job descriptions and compensation structures. You might consider using a game-like system of rewards -- Badgeville is one example -- to recognize employees who excel at using social media to strengthen your bond with staff and highlight successful strategies.


You don't want to be the next company that has to try to get the genie back in the bottle after an unfortunate social media blast by one of your employees. Your first line of defense is your corporate culture; companies with integrity create few opportunities for employees to air grievances. Your second line of defense is a clearly defined policy on employees' use of social media within the business context. Your third line of defense is your dissemination of that policy, through training of new employees and followup formal and informal training, backed up by metrics tied to compensation/rewards that put your money where your mouth is.


What's the unifying theme behind my recommendations? Relationship economics. Leave nothing to chance about employees' use of social to nurture relationships, and your brand will shine like gold. Read More

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Why CIOs need to stop selling projects
It’s been two years in the role and I have been reasonably successful in changing the IT landscape modernizing the applications and infrastructure; many new applications have done well and have been acknowledged by the management. The IT team, some of which had spent decades in the company, too has undergone change with skill upgrades and their alignment to the new way of working. However, I have been finding it difficult to make big moves which I know will create business transformation.
I met an old teammate after a long time who had blossomed into a first time CIO. He had done well for himself and the company by taking them from what he described IT 1.0 to IT 2.0. He took the journey step by step reviewing the existing architecture and creating a roadmap that he systemically executed with ease. I remember him having an eye for detail and scrupulous in his approach. Proudly he explained his and his team’s handiwork, which was achieved despite the lack of overtly enthusiastic support from the business.
As he narrated his story, I could not help drawing parallels from a decade back when he worked in my team. He had imbibed the principles well and upgraded the team to deliver; he was now struggling to move to the next level where he was unable to find support from his peers or his Management who did not share his enthusiasm for the new initiatives. The company with a strong legacy and loyal customers had grown with the founder driving the business skilfully not just locally but globally as well.
My CIO friend had many ideas based on his understanding of the business; networking with peer CIOs and taking help from vendors, he had come up with a few projects which he had been attempting to sell to the leadership team. They did not share his excitement on the change and resultant outcomes; everything is working well, business growth is better than it was in the past. Why upset the applecart? He found it incredulous that despite a clear ROI no one was willing to take up the cause.
I dug deeper to figure out the key business drivers (inorganic growth), the makeup of the people (loyalists), the culture (conservative), the connect and receptiveness (cautious), and finally the sense of shared urgency (none). The business perceived the new initiatives as unnecessary and a distraction; they saw no need to change; why fix something that isn’t broken? It was evident that he was unable to make it their priority or convince them of the merits. So I pushed back and asked him to stop selling.
The current approach appears to be desperation from your side with an automatic pushback response. It is your project, your idea and not theirs; they don’t see any value in your projects, so stop selling and start asking questions. Take a different approach and start engaging them in a conversation on new possibilities that open up to them and make their lives simpler or make them winners. You have to stimulate and connect with different stakeholders across the chain to kindle interest.
In the current scenario even if the project were to get started, the possibility of successful deployment and effective use is relatively low; because it is an IT project and not a business project. I have observed many projects floundering when key process or business owners were not aligned to project deliverables. A challenged HR project where the CFO and CIO pushed the decision on better ROI; an ecommerce portal with reluctant or indifferent business stakeholders, a CRM disconnected from field operations!
Why do CIOs sell projects? There’s the hypothesis about being proactive and partner to the business, something to do with alignment. I believe that situation belongs to the past as it ends up in a situation where the wooing is all left to IT, business playing the role of a reluctant partner. Unless there is connect on both sides and endorsement from senior management, the CIO begins to appear desperate while others wonder why. So stop selling and start collaborating; proceed only if you find reciprocal acknowledgement of need.
Arun Gupta is CIO at Cipla 
The article first appeared in Arun Gupta's blog: http://cio-inverted.blogspot.in/2013/04/selling-projects.html  Read More

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Mu Sigma launches first certification program for Decision Scientists
Mu Sigma, one of the world’s largest Decision Sciences and analytics firms, today announced the world’s first certification program for decision scientists. The certification is offered through Mu Sigma’s training arm, Mu Sigma University (MSU). The certification is aimed at providing a validation for aspiring decision scientists with the requisite inter-disciplinary training in business, applied math, technology and behavioral sciences required for efficient client engagements.


While most companies refer to their analytics professionals as ‘data scientists’, Mu Sigma prefers ‘decision scientists’ – because the company is focused not just on creating analytics models, but also on helping companies make better decisions. “Decision scientists are not just number crunchers,” said Dhiraj Rajaram, CEO of Mu Sigma. “They are individuals who require an interdisciplinary approach that helps turn data into context-specific, objective insights that can foster better, quicker decision making throughout an organization. This is where real value exists. We hope that our Decision Scientist Certification will become widely accepted as a standard across the industry,” Rajaram added.

Mu Sigma designed the Certification Program to address several industry deficiencies, the two most prominent being:
  • The lack of standard qualification criteria for analytics and decision science professionals in terms of the requisite interdisciplinary skills and experience
  • The lack of defined career paths for decision science professionals
The certification program is available only for Mu Sigma employees. There are three levels of certification: Decision Scientist - Beginner (minimum 18 months of classroom and field experience, plus other criteria), Decision Scientist - Practitioner (minimum 33 months experience) and Decision Scientist - Manager (minimum 42 months experience).


Unlike professional university degrees, Mu Sigma’s Decision Scientist Certification Program incorporates significant amounts of practical experience in client engagements covering a variety of business problems and domains. The Program will not only certify, but also establish an industry-wide gold standard for qualified Decision Scientists. Additionally, the certification will help define a career path for the right professional.


“As the company that pioneered the practice of Decision Sciences, we feel a responsibility to help nurture and create the right talent for the industry,” said Rajaram. “With 2500 decision science professionals and over 75 Fortune 500 clients, Mu Sigma is uniquely qualified to provide this type of certification. We are really excited to kick start this program and help increase the pervasiveness of decision sciences within organizations.” 


“Mu Sigma has been a pioneer in the creation of analytical talent. This Decision Scientists certification program is a move in the direction of setting an industry standard for the “right talent,” said Pradeep K. Chintagunta, advisory board member, Mu Sigma and Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago. Read More

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Weird reasons not to hire someone
Wanted: network administrator. Must have five years of experience and powerful handwriting. Must be blood type O and a Capricorn. Low-slanting foreheads preferred. Scorpios and people with hat sizes larger than 7.5 need not apply.


You're unlikely to see that exact post on Monster or LinkedIn soon, but companies are doing some crazy things when hiring folks. And big-data isn't reversing this trend. In fact, it might make things worse.


There are companies in China and Australia that refuse to hire those born under certain zodiac signs, according to this Yahoo report.

The Toronto Sun reported that Xia, a spokeswoman for [a language training company], said that in her experience Scorpios and Virgos are often "feisty and critical." Xia said, "I hired people with those two star signs before, and they either liked quarrelling with colleagues or they could not do the job for long."


I'm a Scorpio, by the way, so I take some personal offense to this, in the same way I'd take offense to being told I look too young to buy beer (with more disbelief and humor than anything else). For the record, I think being feisty is one of my better qualities. I'm working on the critical part.


In Japan, it is common to factor blood type into hiring decisions, Discover magazine reported. Four of the 10 best-selling books there in 2008 discussed "the ways a blood type determines a person's personality." According to one popular book series:

    As are perfectionists and overanxious.

    Bs are cheerful, eccentric, and selfish.

    Os are curious, generous, and stubborn.

    ABs are artsy-fartsy, but totally mysterious and unpredictable.



I checked with Google Translate, but the Japanese don't seem to have a word for "fartsy."


Mashable discussed another hiring technique: graphology, or using handwriting to determine personality. Apparently, folks with writing that slants forward are more outgoing, and those with a backward slant are shy. Mashable didn't mention what it means if you dot your Is with little hearts, but I have a few guesses. A friend of mine named Dan used to write the rest of his name inside a giant D. I suspect hiring managers would have avoided that.


Of course, this type of stuff isn't new. The 19th century phrenologist George Combe hired servants by the bumps on their head. I have the bumpiest head I've ever seen (thankfully, I have not gone bald), so I'm guessing Combe would have hired me just to keep studying me.

All these methods have something in common: They rely on pseudoscience. I don't mean to trample anyone's beliefs, but there's no scientific proof that these fields show anything about job performance. Also, most of these methods focus more on personality than intelligence or skills. And companies have been giving personality tests for decades with no proof that they work. Companies are all seeking an edge in hiring, so they'll use anything -- phrenology, graphology, or even tyromancy (reading the future by watching cheese) -- to gain an edge. They're getting awfully close to using tests like these.


If you think this all a bunch of silly superstition, you're right. The problem is that big-data is leading to another round of silly superstitions based on loose affiliation with data. One such statistic is that people who live within 10 minutes of the office are 20 percent likelier to stay at a job at least six months than those who live 45 minutes away. Another one is that Xerox believes its ideal call center candidate uses more than one social network but fewer than four. I wonder if the fact that I never cancelled my Myspace account means I can't work for Xerox.


Let's face it. Hiring needs to be done the hard way -- listening carefully and getting to know the people you are interviewing. But companies will seek shortcuts forever. And as big-data gets bigger and better, maybe someone will find the killer app for hiring, or at least one that will let hiring managers skip the small talk. It certainly would be great if you could count on hiring the right person without having to worry about your intuition or your experience. What would an enterprise give for hiring the right person 100 percent of the time?


What do you think? Are you more than a collection of data or a writing sample? Can a company hire you based on the shape of your head? Would you submit to having your head felt up by a manager if you knew you had the perfect head for the job? Would you hire someone because the data told you this was the right person? Have you ever been denied a job for a silly reason? Tell us below. Read More

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Indian R&D centers of high-growth MNCs demonstrate greater value: Zinnov report
Zinnov has released its first-ever “Maturity Benchmarking Study”, based on a recent study of 220 product teams across 30+ MNC R&D centers in India. The study highlighted that the R&D story in India has clearly evolved – where the traditional mindset has been to pitch for any kind of work and then slowly gain higher ownership after building scale and competency vs. the current mindset where the focus is on doing high quality work right from the start at the India center. The study revealed that currently majority of teams assessed are in the middle of the maturity curve, with close to a tenth at the highest level of maturity.
The study also brought to light that product teams set up in the last 3 years are in general operating at higher maturity as compared to those that have been around a while. This is a clear indicator that products are being brought in at the right level of maturity from the start.
Preeti Anand, Engagement Managar, Zinnov said, “This trend of MNC R&D centers becoming more value focused is clearly visible in centers which have recently set up their India operations. Centers established in last three to five years have brought products at higher maturity to India as they see India as a destination not only for “resource access” but also for “market access”. Others have built significant volume over time to gain a greater mindshare at the headquarters and hence drive higher value work from India. In essence, the potential for higher, profitable growth exists where companies have effectively globalized operations to leverage local R&D talent in India for global growth.”
An interesting finding from the study showed that while cities like Bangalore have traditionally been R&D hubs, Pune surpasses Bangalore in terms of percentage of product teams in highest maturity stage. Twelve percent of product teams based out of Pune are in the Product Leadership stage as compared to 8 percent of teams in Bangalore. A key reason is that average age of product team inception in Pune is lower than Bangalore and reinforcing the finding that new centers in general are bringing products at the right level of maturity from the start.
Also, given India’s software expertise, the sector accounts for the highest proportion of teams in the Product Leadership stage. However, a recent entrant in higher maturity is healthcare. The healthcare market in emerging economies have witnessed significant growth in recent times and this in turn is driving higher value work to be delivered from the India center which has the advantage of local market access.
Center leadership has a key role to play in enabling higher value work to be delivered from the India center, the released study read. The type of leader at the helm has a natural play in driving both headcount and value growth. Hence it is imperative to have strong proactive leaders with global influence to maintain India’s attractiveness as an R&D destination.
The recent study also showed that among centers, which have been in India for over 5 years, those with largest R&D intensity are reaping maximum value by globalizing their R&D operations- close to 40 percent of their teams are in engineering and product leadership. This shows that India centers with significant volume also have a greater mindshare at the HQ and hence are able to drive higher value work from India. Further, senior-level engineering talent with in-depth product knowledge and strong domain expertise are key qualifiers for teams operating at higher maturity. Teams at higher maturity have close to 35 percent their headcount with more than 8 years of experience which lays a strong foundation for enabling higher ownership.
The study also found that customer proximity is another key maturity enabler. Product managers at higher maturity are responsible for managing outbound activities, apart from product definition and engineering activities, resulting in close interaction with customers and contribution to the end-to-end product development value chain. Interestingly, 56 percent of product leadership teams have a sales presence in India, with 60 percent of them developing products with focus on emerging markets.
Benefits of higher maturity include increased innovation, reduced attrition and higher revenue growth. The study found that product leadership teams have an innovation intensity 2.5X that of teams in engineering leadership. This index is the weighted average of patents, publications, research documents and new ideas generated and integrated in the product roadmap. While teams at the highest maturity saw an average attrition rate of 8.8 percent, the teams at the lowest maturity levels experienced 13.9 percent attrition on average. Teams with higher ownership do a better job of retaining its key talent. Revenue growth is a key benefit of higher maturity, with the Zinnov study finding that companies incurring double digit revenue growth in the last 3 years have effectively globalized operations to leverage local R&D talent in India for global growth.
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Facebook turns friends into IT support
Just as companies have warmed to the financial benefits of employee-supplied devices and have embraced the rent savings of offices that are open but smaller under the pretense of promoting interaction, Facebook has recognized the economic and security promise of deputizing users to provide customer support.


The social network, ever keen to increase user engagement, wants you to designate friends as Trusted Contacts who can restore access to your Facebook account "if you ever have trouble logging in." Don't call us, call a friend.


Why might you have trouble logging in? Facebook doesn't say. A hacked account is one possibility, but presumably anyone who hijacks your account could alter your Trusted Contact list. And Facebook maintains a separate account reset process for hacked accounts, at facebook.com/hacked.


The most common scenario for resorting to Trusted Contacts is a forgotten password. This could be a relatively frequent occurrence, given that Facebook tends to keep users logged in, thereby obviating the need to type one's password and making it easier to forget.


Account recovery processes, however, have a long history of insecurity. For example, in 2008, the Yahoo Mail account of then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was hacked when a University of Tennessee student reset the account password by answering what turned out to be obvious password recovery questions. The following year, Yahoo Mail's account recovery process was abused again to gain control over a Twitter administrative account.


A Facebook spokeswoman in an email said that there are also occasions when users lose access to the email account through which they log in to Facebook.


Facebook in a blog post suggests that the Trusted Contact account recovery process represents an improvement on answering security questions. "With trusted contacts, there's no need to worry about remembering the answer to your security question or filling out long web forms to prove who you are," the company says. "You can recover your account with help from your friends."


There's another security benefit too: Account compromises often occur as a result of social engineering attacks. While customer service personnel can be tricked into revealing personal information by people posing as account holders, friends presumably are less likely to be duped by an imposter soliciting sensitive data.


With Trusted Contacts, Facebook support personnel can expect fewer emails from users who can't log in to get their their social fix. What's more, Trusted Contacts could create a user retention halo effect: Users will probably be less likely to drift away from Facebook when their friends have entrusted them with the keys to their accounts. Read More

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By 2016, employees may have to bring their own devices to work, says Gartner
As enterprise bring your own device (BYOD) programs continue to become more commonplace, 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner


"BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades," said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs."


Gartner defines a BYOD strategy as an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and other users to use a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data. It typically spans smartphones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs. It may or may not include a subsidy.


BYOD drives innovation for CIOs and the business by increasing the number of mobile application users in the workforce. Rolling out applications throughout the workforce presents myriad new opportunities beyond traditional mobile email and communications. Applications such as time sheets, punch lists, site check-in/check-out, and employee self-service HR applications are just a few examples. Expanding access and driving innovation will ultimately be the legacy of the BYOD phenomenon.


"However, the business case for BYOD needs to be better evaluated," said Mr. Willis. "Most leaders do not understand the benefits, and only 22 percent believe they have made a strong business case. Like other elements of the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information), mobile initiatives are often exploratory and may not have a clearly defined and quantifiable goal, making IT planners uncomfortable. If you are offering BYOD, take advantage of the opportunity to show the rest of the organization the benefits it will bring to them and to the business."


While BYOD is occurring in companies and governments of all sizes, it is most prevalent in midsize and large organizations (USD 500 million to USD 5 billion in revenue, with 2,500 to 5,000 employees). BYOD also permits smaller companies to go mobile without a huge device and service investment. Adoption varies widely across the globe. Companies in the United States are twice as likely to allow BYOD as those in Europe, where BYOD has the lowest adoption of all the regions. In contrast, employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work.


How a well-managed BYOD program subsidizes the use of a personal device is critical, and can dramatically change the economics. Today, roughly half of BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement, and full reimbursement for all costs will become rare. Gartner believes that coupling the effect of mass market adoption with the steady declines in carrier fees, employers will gradually reduce their subsidies and as the number of workers using mobile devices expands, those who receive no subsidy whatsoever will grow.


"The enterprise should subsidize only the service plan on a smartphone," said Willis. "What happens if you buy a device for an employee and they leave the job a month later? How are you going to settle up? Better to keep it simple. The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs."


BYOD does increase risks and changes expectations for CIOs. Unsurprisingly, security is the top concern for BYOD. The risk of data leakage on mobile platforms is particularly acute. Some mobile devices are designed to share data in the cloud and have no general purpose file system for applications to share, increasing the potential for data to be easily duplicated between applications and moved between applications and the cloud.


However, in general, IT is catching up to the phenomenon of BYOD. More than half of organizations rate themselves high in security of corporate data for enterprise-owned mobile devices. This new confidence in the security posture to support BYOD is a reflection of more-mature tools and processes that address myriad needs in the security area.


"We're finally reaching the point where IT officially recognizes what has always been going on: People use their business device for nonwork purposes," said Willis. "They often use a personal device in business. Once you realize that, you'll understand you need to protect data in another way besides locking down the full device. It is essential that IT specify which platforms will be supported and how; what service levels a user should expect; what the user's own responsibilities and risks are; who qualifies; and that IT provides guidelines for employees purchasing a personal device for use at work, such as minimum requirements for operating systems." Read More

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LinkedIn now lets users add visual content to their profiles
If you are a creative person and want to jazz up your profile on LinkedIn, you can now do so. LinkedIn announced this in a recent blog post.

"For the first time, you will now have the ability to showcase your unique professional story using rich, visual content on your LinkedIn profile. This means you can illustrate your greatest achievements in the form of stunning images, compelling videos, innovative presentations and more. From the analyst who makes annual predictions on tech trends to the 3D animator who is looking to fund a new short film, the opportunities are limitless for how professionals can now use the LinkedIn profile to help showcase these unique stories in a visual way," LinkedIn said in the blog post.

To begin sharing your achievements and creations on your profile, simply select “edit” on your profile then follow the prompts in your “Summary,” “Experience” and “Education” sections.


This is a welcome step by LinkedIn, and will go a long way in helping professionals display a creative aspect of their work. Read More

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Now, just use a spoonful of water to charge your mobile phone
Swedish fuel cell pioneers have invented a clean source mobile charging solution in PowerTrekk, dubbed the world's first portable fuel cell charger that runs on ordinary water.
PowerTrekk is both a portable battery pack and fuel cell, intended for people who spend time away from the electricity grid. PowerTrekk provides instant power anywhere to electronic equipment such as cell phones, GPS-devices and cameras.


Powertrekk
PowerTrekk uses fuel cell technology which cleanly and efficiently converts hydrogen into electricity. Users simply insert the PowerTrekk Puck, add water to provide instant power on the go. Unlike solar chargers, fuel cell power is generated quickly (no waiting for sun harvesting) and reliably (speed of charging is not impacted by weather, solar position etc. and no power degradation like batteries).
All one has to do is to remove the fuel tray and insert a PowerTrekk Puck into the fuel compartment. Next, add water and fill the water tank. Re-attach the fuel tray, and connect the device you want to be charged using the supplied USB cable. Once a user presses the 'Power Transfer Button', the charger starts charging the device attached.


Powertrekk charge cell using water
When water is poured into a recyclable metal disc inside the unit, the fuel cell converts hydrogen into electricity. To operate, hydrogen must be supplied to the fuel cell, and the fuel cell must be exposed to the open air.


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Infosys awarded for tackling greenhouse gas emissions
Infosys, a global leader in consulting and technology, has been named a 2013 Environmental Tracking (ET) Carbon Ranking Leader for its greenhouse gas emissions and disclosure practices.
As part of the selection process, the Environmental Investment Organization, a climate change and finance think tank, assessed the carbon ranking of the 300 largest companies across the five BRICS countries, ranking Infosys in the top five companies.
Said S Gopalakrishnan, Founder and Executive Co-Chair, Infosys, “Sustainability has been one of the core values at Infosys for several years. We continuously strive to bring creative solutions to reduce our carbon emissions. As well as the environmental and cost benefits, a focus on environmental innovation has created a new business opportunity for us. We are now looking for ways to bring this expertise to the benefit of our clients, providing sustainability services to clients across the world.”


Sam Gill, CEO at the Environmental Investment Organisation, ““Whilst effective greenhouse gas emissions reporting is certainly not an easy task for any company it is excellent to see certain companies demonstrating that it can be done and to an ever increasingly higher standard. In light of 62 percent of companies in the ET Global 800 reporting incomplete data or no data at all, any company ranking within the top ten in their respective region should be viewed as a pioneering leader, constantly raising the bar for others around them. We actively encourage companies in their region to follow suit by publicly disclosing complete Greenhouse Gas emissions data across Scopes 1, 2 & 3.”


Key carbon reduction projects at Infosys include:

• The first use of radiant cooling air conditioning in a commercial building; utilising a new technique that involves circulating water in embedded pipes to chill rooms and reduce energy use

• Establishment of a 250 Kw solar plant on a campus in Jaipur and a 125 kW solar photo voltaic plant in Trivandrum

• Creation of an innovative way to notify employees leaving a building that they have left their computer on, and a system for them to remotely switch it off using their phone

• Rainwater harvesting in Mysore that reduced its fresh water consumption by 18 per cent in its first year, saving nearly 300 million litres of fresh water Read More

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QNAP Releases Turbo NAS TS-x21 and TS-x20 series for home users, featuring QTS 4.0 with Multi-window Operations, Cross-device File Synchronization and Smart Mobile Apps
QNAP Systems, has announced the release of the Turbo NAS TS-x21 and TS-x20 series for home users and home offices. The new models in the TS-x21 series are equipped with 2.0 GHz CPU, 1GB DDR3 RAM, and the TS-x20 series with 1.6 GHz CPU, 512MB DDR3 RAM. Both series deliver superior performance for daily routines in file storage, sharing, and data backup, and serve as ideal media centers for storing and sharing huge multimedia files.
The TS-x21 and TS-x20 series feature the brand-new Turbo NAS operating system QTS 4.0. The new QTS 4.0 integrates multi-window operations into the web-based user interface, adds cross-device file synchronization, several smart mobile apps, and more. In an era where almost everyone has at lease one mobile phone or tablet device, the QTS 4.0 fulfills people’s needs of mobile data access and synchronization, and storage for huge quantities of data. What’s more, the QTS 4.0’s multi-window user interface introduces users to an unprecedented NAS management experience. In addition, the multimedia applications and multi-tasking designs not only increase management efficiency but also transform home entertainment.
“The QTS 4.0 is a major evolution of QNAP’s software design,” commented Meiji Chang, general manager of QNAP. “It aims to reverse home users’ typical impressions towards the networked appliances as being complex and hard to use. The QTS 4.0 integrates Turbo NAS hardware design and features multi-window intelligence and smart mobile apps, making home digital data storing and management easier and multimedia entertainment more fun.”
Multi-window operations
The QTS 4.0 offers innovative desktop design to compliment smooth working efficiency. The multi-window design allows multi-tasking concurrently, and enables users to switch between each task to increase productivity. The QTS 4.0 intelligent desktop also includes a quick Start menu to quickly find desired applications, smart Dashboard with overview of system status, drag-and-drop icons to create desktop shortcuts or group shortcuts, multiple desktop to extend desktop work space, the smart Toolbar, and so on.
Cross-device file synchronization

Nowadays almost everyone has multiple devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers and desktop computers. The combination of Qsync and the Turbo NAS fulfills seamless file synchronization, enabling users to get the most recent files with their computers and mobile devices. It is useful for frequent travelers who wish to manage files and always wish to have the most recent files on each device. Qsync provides multiple ways of file synchronization and group file sharing, greatly enhancing the flexibility of collaboration.
Smart mobile apps
Users can easily access the Turbo NAS through mobile apps. The Qfile app allows remote access to the Turbo NAS and sharing files stored on the Turbo NAS. File uploading, downloading and management with Qfile is easy. The new Qfile function “auto upload from photo gallery” enables users to take photos with a mobile device and have the photos automatically uploaded on to the Turbo NAS. It works as a real-time backup for precious photos. The new Qfile HD app is specifically designed for iPads with an enhanced user interface. The Qmanager app is useful for remotely monitoring and controlling the Turbo NAS’s system status, services, downloading and backup tasks anytime, anywhere.
Integrated multimedia entertainment
The Turbo NAS provides versatile multimedia applications and acts as a media hub at home. The support of DLNA and AirPlay allows users to enjoy a TV experience in diverse ways. The rich applications make it easy and convenient to collect, manage and share huge collection of photos, music, and videos, enriching home entertainment.
QTS 4.0 key features include:
Intelligent desktop: multi-window, quick Start menu, smart Dashboard, drag-and-drop icons, multiple desktops, personal wallpapers, and smart Toolbar with desktop preferences, online resources, quick search, event notifications, event notifications, external device and background tasks;
File Station: supports photo thumbnails, photo setup with properties and privileges, moving files from local computers to File Station by drag-and-drop, recycle bin categorized by shared folders;
Photo Station: provides a new user interface, customized virtual slideshow by dragging and dropping photos, auto-sorting photos in a timeline, and photo tagging, photos and videos backup with Smart Import;


Music Station: provides new user interface and lyric editing; Media Library: supports file transcoding;


HappyGet: as a third party application that supports backing up YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and


Vimeo videos; Surveillance Station Pro: provides new user interface ,cross-browser support on PC with IE, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox;
App Center: provides more than 80 install-on-demand apps to increase diverse applications on the Turbo NAS;
myQNAPcloud.com: a new QNAP membership portal for managing registered Turbo NAS devices, accessing published NAS services, and quickly linking to start.qnap.com for online system setup without using a CD;


Qsync utility: creates a specific “Qsync” folder for users to simply drop files into, and automatically synchronizes the files to all of the devices that are linked to the Turbo NAS, with multiple ways of file synchronization and group file sharing;
QAirplay: supports browsing videos and photos stored on the Turbo NAS and playing on the TV via AirPlay-enabled devices;
Qfile/Qfile HD: supports auto upload from photo gallery;
Qmanager: supports remote setting for Wake on LAN and user permission for the Turbo NAS. Read More

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Indian financial institutions fare poorly in online User Experience
For an industry which sees online as the future, the research done by Kern Communications on User Experience (UX) is a revelation.  Out of 32 featured financial institutions, only 1 offers decent user experience to customers seeking car loans online. Other 31 rank far below an acceptable User  Interface Index . This means customers actually turn away from the banking websites due to poor usability. The leading bank has a UX Index score of 75.31, while the worst is 18.07. The runners-up have a UX Index of 58.32, poor enough to turn customers away. Although foreign banks do offer car loans in India, none offer them online.
New private banks lead the pack with an average score of 52.51. Contrary to popular belief, public sector banks actually provide overall better user experience than private banks. Out of 32, only 1 bank provides the complete process of applying for car loans online.
“Customers coming to websites of BFSI firms are being turned away due to poor experience. In most cases, Ripul Kumar users cannot quickly find the relevant information they are looking for. In our findings, it is clear that most firms fare poorly in parameters like navigation experience, information experience, recommendation experience and service acquisition experience,” says Ripul Kumar, Founder, Kern Communications.
The top 5 financial institutions in the UX Index, in alphabetical order are Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, State Bank of Hyderabad, and Tata Capital.
Kumar also points out that many BFSI companies view their Internet presence as a marketing brochure. “Most websites are designed in a way that are either of brochure quality or technical manual quality – neither of interest or use for their customers.”
Clearly, the BFSI sector needs to seriously look at enhancing its user experience. “With about 11.1 crore active Internet users in India, a lot of new Internet customers are being added in tier-2 cities, mostly on mobile. People are increasingly using the Internet for communication, social networking, entertainment, shopping, and getting information. With this revolution, a very important channel of information dissemination and customer acquisition has opened up—the Internet”, emphasizes Kumar on the importance of user experience for the BFSI sector. Read More

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Enterprise mobility key focus area for Indian CIOs in FY13-14, finds Ernst & Young and CIO KLUB survey
Improving the bottom line is the key focus for Indian CIOs in FY13-14, according to an industry study conducted by Ernst & Young and the CIO Klub. In its 5th edition, the annual report “Enterprise IT trends and investment 2013” is based on the survey of over 180 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from various companies across major industries.


The findings of the survey over the last five years highlight how CIO priorities have changed in response to the fluctuating economic scenario globally and in India. In 2009, cost reduction was a priority with shrinking markets and declining demand and in 2010, the mood was cautiously optimistic in tandem with visible growth for the year ahead. In 2011, in spite of the slow down, the mood was optimistic and organizations planned to take the plunge for large IT investments.


However, due to continued uncertain economic environment, the focus in 2012 shifted to create a lean, agile and resilient IT function. This year the focus has shifted outward and CIOs are concentrating on brining value to the business. While CIOs generally help businesses improve the top line, the current economic volatility is pushing them to look within and help businesses increase their bottom line. 

Devendra Parulekar, Advisory Partner, Ernst & Young said “The balance of Power is shifting to customers as consumerization of technology gains momentum. More than 60percent of CIOs plan to focus on customer-centric initiatives thereby enhancing the customer experience and providing them with easy and effective interface to collaborate with the business. Customer-centricity in turn is closely linked to customer relationship management, social media and enterprise mobility.”


Says Shirish Gariba - President, CIO KLUB, “The CEO cockpit view of the business is expected to drive mobility evolution. 62 percent of organizations are likely to implement, upgrade or evaluate mobile applications in the coming year.”
CIOs are working more and more towards enhancing the customer experience. Additionally, this IT enablement agenda is likely to be driven by business intelligence, analytics, budgeting, planning, consolidation, business workflows and mobile-based applications.
Cloud is expected to bridge the gap between consumerization of technology and the traditional enterprise application world. Increasing number of businesses are moving into the virtual world, supported by new technologies and driven by the need to lower their IT infrastructure and administrative costs while adopting a flexible and scalable model for IT. Though adoption of cloud services has gained impetus, the progress is still slow. This is not surprising, as the number of risks and challenges identified by respondents have remained fairly consistent over the years. Like any other transformational initiative, adoption of cloud also faces internal resistance as handing over the IT infrastructure and data security controls is an inherently uncomfortable situation for most senior managements. Another decisive factor for the slow adoption is the increased bandwidth and network costs that somewhat neutralizes the savings in internal infrastructure costs.
Improving effectiveness of the IT function to enhance the experience of internal customers and IT-enable their requirements is another important area that is expected to occupy the CIO mind-share. This has been on the participant CIOs’ agenda for the last three years. However, the focus is greater this year, with 52 percent of the respondents citing this as a priority, as compared to 42 percent in the previous year.
Focus on improving IT internally is consistent across the size of the organizations and sectors.In FY13-14, information security continues to feature in top priority list. However, the security investments are oriented towards reducing data risk posted by the consumerization of technology.  The survey reveals that organizations have already taken steps to address external threats, such as external hacking and are now focusing security investments in protection from internal threats.Mobile applications deployment is expected to gain momentum in 2013-14. 62 percent of respondents are likely to implement, upgrade or evaluate mobile applications in the coming year. More than 35 percent of the respondents, who have either implemented or are evaluating enterprise mobility with BYOD, are expected to consider mobile device management (MDM) and network access control (NAC) technologies to protect corporate data and mitigate the risk of unauthorized disclosure.
The survey also reveals that business leaders are extremely cautious with their investment plans this year, especially with the current uncertainties in the policy and regulatory environment and the spiraling costs. IT spend increase will be restricted to address inflation and rising costs. However, the outlook differs from sector to sector. For example, the automotive sector is not expected to witness high capital expenditure; 47 percent of the respondents from this sector expect the CAPEX to decrease as compared to the previous year and 33 percent expect it to remain constant. On the other hand, the pharmaceuticals and life sciences sector respondents have overwhelmingly voted to increase the capital and operational expenditure; 83 percent of the respondents have cited an increase in capital expenditure while 67 percent of the respondents have cited an increase in operational expenditure. It is surprising to note that this sector had adopted a very cautious approach the previous year. Respondents from the retail and consumer products sector have recognized business continuity as their priority, and 60percent of the respondents have confirmed this.
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How to manage Big Data through a compartmentalized framework
Every company is jumping onto the bandwagon when it comes to cloud computing and big data. According to a report on technology trends released by advisory service KPMG, big data is poised to grow from USD 5.4 billion in 2012 to USD 48 billion in 2016.


Enterprises are recognizing the value of big data and the insights it can provide. In a competitive economy, customers are looking for a personalized experience that leads them directly to what they want. On the other hand, businesses understand that data based insights can help them identify problem areas, make better business decisions and improve their business processes. Data Science (the science of analyzing big data) can bring visible positive for these requirements. Big Data is probably one unexploited competitive advantage that separates the leaders in every field from the followers hence, big data is in demand.
The question remains – how can your company implement an effective framework to execute Big Data Programs at your organization? This can be a tricky question when a large number of adoptions are reporting cost overruns or even failures.

Challenges in adoption of Big Data
Social networking sites, mobile applications, data center infrastructure, network equipment and business operations generate a massive amount of data every single day. While businesses can rejoice in the abundance of data, they are also struggling to find a balanced and effective method to harness this data. This can only be done by addressing some of the common challenges found in big data adoption, such as:
• Methods for storing data

• Defining how your organization stores data

• Identifying the most important data point

• Dealing with data that exceeds your expectation in size

• Implementing a proper analysis process

• Extreme complexity in data

• Talent crisis

• Data explosion and diversity

• Lack of self-service and automation of processes

• Challenges in cloud computing

• Operationalizing analytics

• Identifying the application that provides maximum value
• How to bypass the learning curve


The explosion of data, if handled correctly, can bring to the table a number of strategic competitive advantages. The best method to deal with data, if your organization is experiencing a road block in analyzing it, is to start collecting the data you care about and storing it into a big data platform like Hadoop till your data scientists catch up, and avoid taking a big bang approach.
Compartmentalized framework for Big Data adoption
The simplest way of adopting bid data is to implement a framework which can simplify the growing complexities in adoption of Big Data. A compartmentalized method of looking at implementation of Big Data can be the solution as the complexities get reduced to a problem or a matter of making tactical choices and implementing them.
The benefits of a structure such as this are that it is quick, economic and can lead to clear results. It pushes fact-based decision making and risk management, and the benefits of data can be planned.
However, given the methodical nature of this solution, it is best suited for implementation by a CXO or other top management, as committees often reach midway negotiated settlements within the organization, hampering the entire the purpose of this solution.


With big data claiming its place as an important driver in today’s business scenario, organizations are facing the necessity to deal with their issues in big data adoption. By adopting a framework and new approach like this, the Big Data program can be designed to deliver the maximum bang for the buck, starting yesterday. Effective implementation of the framework leads to positive business results – and that’s what every business, including yours, is really looking for!

- Aditya Yadav is currently the India R&D/ATS head at SunGard
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NIIT Technologies wins Rs 344 crore contract from Airports Authority of India
NIIT Technologies has recently announced that it has signed a multi-year contract with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for the implementation of Airport Operations Control Centers (AOCC), in partnership with SITA, the global air transport IT and communication specialist. This is the first multi airport project in Asia which will benefit AAI, its customer airlines, and its other stake-holders across 10 cities.
The Airport Management System and Resource Management System will be implemented and integrated by NIIT Technologies solution which has been supplied by SITA. The systems and their interfaces will help improve airport management by consolidating multiple sets of information and providing accurate real-time data from just one source.
Arvind Mehrotra, President, Asia-Pacific & Middle East, NIIT Technologies, said “We are delighted to have been chosen as a partner by AAI for the complete integration of IT systems enabling efficient utilization of airport infrastructure at the 10 airports in respective cities. AOCC will allow collaborative decision making for all the Airport operators in the day-to-day operations.”


He further added, “NIIT Technologies has leveraged its vast experience and solutions at 12 airports including Hong Kong, Singapore, Abu Dhabi for the project.”


The project is a key initiative undertaken by Civil Aviation ministry towards modernization of Indian airports to improve capacity utilization, passenger throughput enhancement, stakeholder management and process standardization. The project will be executed within the next 15 months at the airports in Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Pune, Thiruchirapalli, Thiruvananthapuram, Calicut, Mangalore, Guwahati and Jaipur. At the metro airports of Chennai and Kolkata Primary Data Centre and the Disaster Recovery Data Centre are also being established respectively. The project has a provision for extending the solution to additional 25 airports in India.
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LinkedIn Contacts: 5 must-know facts
LinkedIn is adding smarts to its contacts tool with the launch of LinkedIn Contacts. The new contact management system, which comes via LinkedIn's 2011 acquisition of Connected, enables users to integrate LinkedIn connections with contacts from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo applications, among others. Users can then manage those contacts, adding the potential to build better relationships. How does this change the way you use LinkedIn? A lot.
Here are five things you should know about LinkedIn Contacts.
1. Contacts are drawn from business sources
LinkedIn Contacts pulls in data from business-oriented sources such as Microsoft Outlook, including address books, email accounts and calendars.

2. It's available as a mobile app
LinkedIn Contacts is available both from LinkedIn.com and as an iPhone app, letting you use the new contacts management system on the go.

3. Valuable history Info provides context
Once all of your contacts are integrated, you can see details of past conversations and meetings directly from your contact's profile. You will also see things such as birthdays, new jobs and title changes. You can set reminders and make notes, making it easy to, for example, see at a glance what has gone down in the past between you and that person you have a meeting with this afternoon.

4. LinkedIn might soak up more of your time

All of this will likely increase the amount of time you spend on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has made several changes recently that have added more Facebook- and Twitter-like functionality to the platform, but LinkedIn still is a site users typically check periodically rather than live on during the course of the day. LinkedIn Contacts has the potential to make the network more social and less stodgy.

5. Service is invitation only
The new contacts features are invitation only right now. Get on the waitlist.


Does LinkedIn Contacts sound like something that will increase the time you spend on LinkedIn? Please let us know in the comments section below. Read More

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10 million smart glasses will be shipped by 2016, spurred by Google Glass
Shipments of smart glasses may rise to as high 6.6 million units in 2016, up from just 50,000 in 2012, for a total of 9.4 million units for the five-year period, according to an upside forecast from IMS Research, now part of IHS. Growth this year will climb 150 percent to 124,000 shipments, mostly driven by sales to developers, as presented in the high-end outlook in the attached figure. Expansion will really begin to accelerate in 2014 with the initial public availability of Google Glass, as shipment growth powers up to 250 percent, based on the optimistic forecast.
Smart glass products like Google Glass are wearable computers with a head-mounted display.

Google Glass this month began shipping to application developers who registered as early backers and paid the USD 1,500 price tag. This is expected to spur innovations in applications that should take Glass from early adopters to the mass market. As the developers get to work and Google encourages venture capitalists to back them, shipments will begin to surge to high volumes, according to the upside forecast.
However, the success of Google Glass will depend primarily on the applications developed for it. If developers fail to produce compelling software and uses for the devices, shipments could be significantly lower during the next several years.
“The applications are far more critical than the hardware when it comes to the success of Google Glass,” said Theo Ahadome, senior analyst at IHS. “In fact, the hardware is much less relevant to the growth of Google Glass than for any other personal communications device in recent history. This is because the utility of Google Glass is not readily apparent, so everything will depend on the appeal of the apps. This is why the smart glass market makes sense for a software-oriented organization like Google, despite the company’s limited previous success in developing hardware. Google is betting the house that developers will produce some compelling applications for Glass.”
The glass is half full
According to the optimistic scenario, developers will succeed in producing augmented reality applications for smart glasses that provide the user with information that can be safely and conveniently be integrated into casual use. Such applications typically are known as augmented reality, which involves adding a layer of computer-generated data to real-world people, places and things.


“The true success of Glass will be when it can provide some information to users not apparent when viewing people, places or things,” Ahadome said. “This information may include live updates for travel, location reviews and recommendations, nutritional information and matching personal preferences, and previous encounters to aid decision making. The upside for smart glasses will arise when they become a powerful information platform. In many ways, this is exactly what Google already does via other mediums, and also is why the upside scenario seems more likely.”

Broken glass
Under a more pessimistic scenario, IHS forecasts that only about 1 million smart glasses will be shipped through 2016.


According to this outlook, applications for smart glasses will be limited to some of those already displayed by Google in its Glass marketing. These include scenarios where smart glasses become more of a wearable camera device than a true augmented reality system. In this case, smart glasses will be mainly used for recording sports and other non-casual events, like jumping out of a plane, as demonstrated at the Google I/O developer conference in 2012.


However, Glass will face competition from alternative wearable camera devices already in the market, such as GoPro Hero or Recon MOD Live.


While the wearable camera market was worth more than USD 200 million in 2012, it is not the multibillion-dollar market that smart glasses can achieve with wider applicability.


“The less frequently consumers interact with any personal communications device, the less valuable it becomes,” Ahadome observed. “If smart glasses become devices that are used only occasionally, rather than all the time, they become less attractive and desirable to consumers.” Read More

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IT departments sitting on a ticking time bomb with Windows XP
IT departments are sitting on a ticking time bomb, and they don’t seem to care. We’re less than a year away from April 8, 2014, when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP.


What does that mean? No new patches, no security updates, and, let’s face it, probably a bunch of calls from Microsoft reps asking if they can help you. The funny thing is that while some of you made your migrations ages ago, others don’t intend to do it even in 2014. 48 percent of companies taking this poll said they had no intention of switching off XP even after support ended.


Clever readers will note that that survey was taken in 2010. Surely, they must have changed their minds by now, right? Not according to this article from late last year quoting analysts saying some companies will not switch in 2014. And most importantly, not according to Windows market share.


On the date that Windows 8 was released, 38 percent of enterprise computers still ran Windows XP. This was only slightly less than the 41 percent of consumer computers also running XP. Does that number sound as if it could possibly be reduced to zero in less than a year? Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner, expects at least 10 to 15 percent of you to be using XP after its expiration date.

The reasons for migrating are fairly clear. Better security, more reliability, and, most importantly, it is much cheaper to support computers with modern operating systems.


So what could people be thinking? For one, they’re worried about legacy systems. They don’t want to redesign all the apps they’ve built up in the decade they’ve used XP.


There are also companies making some interesting bets. One of the undeniable facts about older software is that you can expect fewer patches because the developer has had a decade to figure out the issues and security exploits. Is it possible that XP is safer because it is so old that all of the holes have been plugged? In addition, it is unlikely new malware would be developed for old systems. Malware is written for the juiciest targets. Older computers are, well, rather devoid of juice.


Still, people betting their enterprise’s security on these thoughts clearly have everything backward. Riding your OS into the ground means you’re passing up the opportunity to innovate throughout your application portfolio. Chances are that if you’re riding around with XP on all your machines in 2015 you’re missing the boat on mobile, cloud, and all sorts of other changes in the way your enterprise should be innovating.


It is clear that IT departments are starting to get how crazy it is. Nearly half of you didn’t intend to migrate in late 2010. By late 2012, it looked like about 15 percent of you were going to miss the boat. The arguments (and the missed opportunities) are starting to do their magic on CIOs. But if you’re one of the last holdouts, you need to ask yourself why. And then you need to tell us. Comment below.
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Dell’s Chennai R&D center playing crucial role in global transformation projects
Dell’s investment in developing its India Networking R&D as a global Centre of Excellence has come of age. The R&D centre acquired from Force10 Networks in 2010 now has development infrastructure across Product Lifecycle Management, Marketing &Sales, Research &Development and Operations & Support, enabling it to play a key role in Dell’s complete end-to-end solutions offering for customers across the globe.
“Dell Networking was early to recognize a transformation in the data center against a backdrop of changing workload requirements, virtualization technologies and cloud architectures. We developed a strategy to deliver innovative new fabric architectures and converged solutions that fundamentally change the cost-structures of data center networking. The India R&D facility will continue to serve as an innovation hub for Dell over the next few years,” said Tom Burns, Vice President and General Manager, Dell Networking
 “The team in Chennai is transforming the architecture and economics of the network, giving customers unprecedented scalability, simplicity, performance and efficiency. We are challenging the conventional wisdom and showing the industry that with Dell solutions, anything is possible,” said Simon Zarrin, Vice President Engineering, Networking, Dell.
Dell’s Networking R&D Centre has been leading global transformation projects in several domains like Servers, Networking and Storage. A year after announcing its intent to develop the Chennai operations as a Centre of Excellence and crucial R&D hub for Dell’s Networking business, the centre has already filed 37 invention disclosures as well as deployed 4 major productsin FY13 for customers globally.
Dell also recently announced the launch of its Active Fabric solutions, which had major contributions from the Chennai R&D centre.The Solution flattens the traditional data center network architecture using high-density and low-latency fixed-form factor 10/40GbE switches that can be deployed quickly and easily while reaching to hyper scale proportions. This enables customers to plan, design, build and monitor these fabrics with unbeatable speed and efficiency, with a potential reduction in deployment times by up to 86 percent.
Other major accomplishments from the Chennai centre include the development and launch of:


• MXL 10G/40GbE Blade switch: Blade switch combining with 12G servers and EqualLogic, Compellent storage for complete solutions for a Data Center

• Open Automation: Support for Citrix and Vmware, Smartscripts based on Perl/Python and plug-ins for Dell, Oracle and HP to help in managing virtualized devices in a network

• DFM 1.1:Web-based application for designing, configuring and managing distributed core networks

• FTOS 9.0: A major release for Z9000 (Distributed core switch) with VLT & IPv6support to help scale the customers network.


“Data center networking is going through significant transformation to meet the changing needs of end users, applications, virtualization, and IT administrators. The opportunity within this market is a sizeable USD 200 million in India alone and the Chennai R&D Centre is critical to Dell’s plans for tapping this market. The centre will continue to see more investments in infrastructure and human resources over the next year,” said Sreedhara Narayanaswamy, Executive Director and General Manager, Dell Networking R&D India.


Speaking on Dell’s Networking capabilities, customer IIHT Cloud Solutions said, “IIHT used Dell’s Server, Storage & Networking infrastructure to bring efficient and high performance cloud services to our students training on online labs. Today we can provide a cost-effective environment to train users on technology that provides an attractive pricing model for enterprise companies. This is because we have managed to reduce the total cost of ownership of our cloud solution by 65 percent primarily through the simplified management and a 45 percent decrease in energy consumption,” said Shivajee R Sharma, President and CIO, IIHT Cloud Solutions.


With skilled and qualified workforce easily available in Chennai, the city is now home to over 2/3rd of Dell’s networking global R&D human resources. The company is looking to add to its talent pool to strengthen its Chennai operations in the next few years. Read More

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HDFC Life recognized as Celent Model Insurer of Asia for 2013
HDFC Life, one of India’s leading private life insurance players, has been recognized as the Celent Model Insurer of Asia for 2013, which is the highest honor among the 17 technology initiatives which were selected as Model Insurer Component in the Asia Pacific region. The company has also received two Model Insurer Component awards namely Model Insurer Award in the area of Underwriting and the other in Distribution/New Business.


HDFC Life received these awards for the following two initiatives:

· Designing and developing a system which can be used at the point of sale which provides real time underwriting capability named ‘Click2Buy’.
· Implementing a portal in order to allow customers /agents to buy insurance policy online.
Speaking on this achievement,Thomson Thomas, CIO and SVP - Business Thomson ThomasSystems & Technology, HDFC Life said, “Being selected by Celent as a Model Insurer is a great honor by itself but receiving the Celent Model Insurer of Asia for the Year award is a remarkable achievement for the HDFC Life Technology team. This recognition is based largely due to a successful Business-Technology partnership and hence we decided to send the Project sponsor to receive this award on behalf of the Technology team - HDFC Life. These projects are aligned to the organization’s strategic theme on unique customer/distributor experience and are built based on an 'outside in' architecture.”


On receiving the award, Frederick D’Souza, SVP – Underwriting & Claims, HDFC Life said, “It is a proud moment for us to receive such prestigious awards by Celent. CLICK2BUY is yet another innovation by us as part of our strategic initiative. It is a step towards encompassing the entire journey from 'need based selling' to 'demat policies.' It is a sales tool with the objective of simplifying the insurance purchase process for customers, helping our sales team to submit a zero-defect proposal online via Internet.”


Click2buy is driven by a state of art rule engine, which ensures that every question required for underwriting a proposal is asked up-front.  On clicking the submit button, the underwriting decision or medical reports required to underwrite are communicated up-front to customers. The system sends an email to the customer with the copy of the proposal form immediately on submitting the proposal. In other words Click2buy enables the company’s sales team to underwrite and communicate the decision or requirement up-front right at the Point of Sale.


This system is already proving to be a game changer for HDFC Life and in the past has won the Asian BFSI Award 2012 in the ‘Underwriting Initiative of the year’ category.


The 3rd annual edition of Celent Model Insurer Asia Awards presented by Celent, a research and consulting firm, saw the best practices in the use of technology span key areas of the product and policyholder life cycle, including agent portal, analytics, business process management, claims, distribution/new business, infrastructure/architecture, policy administration, risk management, service, and underwriting across Asia Pacific region. The report also reviews IT best practices and measurable business results used in evaluating the Model Insurer Components. Read More

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Google App makes charity social
Google is testing an Android app called One Today that encourages users to donate one dollar per day to selected nonprofit organizations.
One Today is being offered in a limited pilot test to Android users in the United States. Google says it's providing the app as part of its longstanding commitment to supporting nonprofits and "doing good." Would-be users are directed to request an invitation from the One Today website. However, the app is presently available to any Android user via Google Play. The One Today website allows BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone users to request an invitation, suggesting support for those mobile platforms is planned.
The One Today app presents users with information about a different nonprofit project every day. Users can donate USD 1 to the project if they choose. The app is designed to learn from users' choices: The projects it presents are based on the kinds of projects users have supported in the past.
Those wishing to donate more than USD 1 must do so via social networking. A user can challenge friends, via Google+ or Twitter, for example, to donate by offering to match each of their USD 1 donations, up to a limit based on past spending patterns. If the match amount total isn't met by the user's friends, One Today will present the user's matching funds offer to other people in the One Today community, until each dollar has been matched.


The app's "give" button does not actually give anything, according to the One Today website. It records a pledge to donate. The app will periodically aggregate unpaid pledges and seek user approval to charge the user's credit card, via Google Wallet. Users can also elect to be billed via email and to pay on the Web. If the user decides not to fulfill a pledge, some of the app's features will be disabled until the balance is paid.


Unlike in-app billing or regular Google Play app sales, Google is not taking a 30 percent cut. The company says that nonprofits receive 98.1 percent of every dollar donated, with 1.9 percent going to cover credit card processing fees. A spokeswoman for Network for Good has said that the organization is not charging its usual 5 percent fee for donations through Google One Today.

Potential donors then need to consider the percentage of donations that the nonprofit in question actually directs toward programs, since nonprofits all have administrative and overhead expenses. Among the popular nonprofits listed at Charity Navigator, most direct 75 percent or more of donations to their programs.
According to Google, One Today donations will go to organizations' general operating funds, unless otherwise specified. Read More

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What I learned from our last outage
There’s an old expression that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Well, this outage damn near did kill my career at the USTA. Ultimately, it didn’t. Here are some of the lessons I learned from this experience.


1. There will always be people waiting in the weeds looking for an excuse to shoot you. When you give them this type of excuse they will be all over you like white on rice. You can’t control their venom or their efforts to have you fired. However you can control how you react to their attacks. An old colleague of mine once told me you should never wrestle a pig in the mud because the pig enjoys the mud and is more adept at wrestling in it than you are. No matter how bad you are being berated, you need to remain professional, above the fray, and focus on the solution going forward as opposed to getting sucked into “the blame game.”


2. Challenges create opportunity. While the organization had been reluctant to invest in the required technology infrastructure in the past, this unfortunate incident allowed me to petition them for the required investment to implement the tools and technology required to avoid these kinds of future challenges.


3. I learned that you are never as smart or talented as you seem when you are winning the game nor are you as stupid as you may seem when the stuff hits the fan.


4. Ultimately, “stuff happens.” It happens to everyone, no matter how smart, talented, or experienced you are. Your leadership is watching you to see how to respond under duress. Do you remain calm? Do you remain positive? Are you honest and transparent? Do you take accountability for the issue, or do you start pointing fingers?


In the end, how you handle defeat says more about you than how you handle success. People know that someone who never gets too high or too low can be counted on in the heat of the battle. They also want to see if you handle yourself with grace. I had an executive during our annual awards banquet after the US Open joke in front of the entire organization that “clearly Bonfante won’t be winning any awards this year.”


I walked out of that awards banquet embarrassed but determined. The following year my team was the first non-revenue producing part of the organization to ever win the annual US Open “Slammy” award.


I was fortunate enough to survive this experience and live to tell the tale. Let's hope you will be, too. Read More

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India’s mobile services market to reach 1.2 trillion rupees in 2013, says Gartner
India’s mobile services market will reach Rs.1.2 trillion in 2013, up 8 percent from 2012 revenue of Rs 1.1 trillion, according to Gartner.
“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 2 percent of worldwide mobile services revenue (in constant USD) in 2013.”
Indian telecom operators are faced with two major challenges – growing 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 commoditized 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. Smaller mobile broadband plans using a sachet-style usage pattern appeal to Indian consumers.”


As India plays catch up with the rest of the world in terms of mobile broadband adoption, telecom operators need to think of growing the top line through innovative services. Further rural expansion of mobile services will come at a cost. In India, innovation in utility apps that help bring efficiencies in a consumer’s life will bring in sustained revenue and will be relatively more difficult to replicate by new entrants. While social and video apps are doing extremely well in India, Verma said it is time to look beyond these and deliver apps that can have a sustained business model. Operators need to insert themselves into the value chain of these new apps and services. Read More

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IIT startup aims to redefine learning with personalized courses
While the Internet is a never ending reservoir of content and information, knowledge gained depends on the way content is structured to the ability and desire of the individual. IIT startup, Technium Labs, wants to fill in this vacuum with its learning management solution called LurnQ.
LurnQ accessible at LurnQ.com, provides social networking functionality such as ‘Learn Feeds’, likes from people, followers and opinions. It does this by aggregating content from all across the web on the basis of a user’s preferences, and presents a Facebook like news feed of relevant content to consume. LurnQ’s alpha version is a collection of applications, bundled into one SaaS platform. This includes a teaching app which helps one to create lessons on a variety of topics, a learning app which helps one to explore different lessons and use them for their personal learning based on topics of interest, and a library which can be used to save lessons for future use and reference.
InformationWeek spoke to CEO and Founder, Tarun Mitra, who tells us how his startup wants to differentiate itself.
Some edited excerpts from the interview
What was the idea behind launching LurnQ?
The Internet has been a key driver of economic growth in various industries in the past few years. The field of education has seen similar changes. There has been a demographic shift in the knowledge consumption pattern which favors the internet as a preferred medium to acquire knowledge. This makes personalization of content the key ingredient in a successful learning management solution.
The Internet is a rich source of information however, accessing this vast reservoir of scattered information on a particular topic in a stipulated time frame can be challenging.  LurnQ recognized the need of developing a learning management solution that can cumulate all the digital learning content from across the web, curate and filter it based on an individual’s learning preference.
LurnQ was founded in April 2011 primarily by me, Ramesh Nidadavolu (IIT- Bombay) and Devvrat Arya (IIT- Bombay). The team later expanded with Rajshekhar Ratrey (IIT- Bombay), Shobhit Vashistha (IIT- Bombay) and Vikas Verma (IIT- Bombay).
Searchers usually go to Google to research on topics or visit Wikipedia for more details. Why would they visit a site like LurnQ?
Learning options  are not limited to just Google and Wikipedia, there are a million of learning resources scattered across the web which makes it difficult to find relevant information. Also, at times the same information may be available in different formats online (text, audio, video, presentations, image etc.) which might make it difficult for a learner to ascertain the priority in which the information should be consumed. LurnQ provides a unified pre-indexed access to information and filters out everyting that is not of learning relevance to the user. LurnQ is a unified, socially styled, open online learning platform for learners and teachers. Our content is presented in the form of a ‘lesson’ which can be used for your personal learning or teaching.
How different is this from other websites such as Quora?
Quora is a question-and-answer website. LurnQ, on the other hand is a learning management system that can cumulate all the digital learning content from across the web, curate and filter it based on an individual’s learning preference. LurnQ is more inclined towards the concept of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) applied to an individual user.
Please describe your business model?
On the open web, LurnQ will always remain free for users to learn and teach. However, we have realized that LurnQ can be equally useful when deployed privately within business for continous learning and knowledge sharing. Similarly, private tutors or coaching centers can use LurnQ to offer their services in an online format. The LurnQ business version will be offered to such users for subscription fee (SaaS Model). In this manner we will have a business model similar to GitHub or WordPress.
Can you give us some details on the app through which custom courses can be designed?
LurnQ already offers a teaching app which helps you create lessons on a variety of topics. We are now working on a complete course app which will allow users to bundle multiple lessons as a course and have additional functionality to add assignments and various assessment tools to it.
Can you share some details on the content being hosted, number of courses created, number of monthly visitors on the site?
LurnQ caters to the entire universe of online audience and therefore hosts a wide variety of lessons on different topics. Targeted at individual learners on the open web to support the informal lifelong learning process, LurnQ delivers relevant and interesting content and provides easy to use tools for publishing and curating lessons. LurnQ has approximately 1000 lessons, over 30,000 monthly unique users and more than a million open learning resources. The company aims to achieve 100,000 monthly active users or a mid-5 digital global traffic ranking by the end of March 2013. Approximately, 35 percent of our visitors are returning visitors.
Any plans to partner with educational institutions to host their content or courses?
Yes, the course app is targeted at such an application. LurnQ has partnered with TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) as their knowledge partner and helps them document the information which their entrepreneurial/ investment/ startup conferences and summits produce. This enables TiE make their knowledge reusable which can be shared again to a much larger audience at any given point.
Future vision of LurnQ? What does the platform want to be in the next 5 years?

The team is continuously building on bettering its product and we aspire to develop LurnQ as the core learning utility that learners use every day ubiquitously on all devices to learn and manage their learning. We want to create a unified and personalized learning experience for our users in an increasingly overwhelming digital learning environment. LurnQ is relevant for everyone in general and to digital natives in particular. To realise this vision the team is working on the WAP version and native mobile apps as well.   Read More

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Social media gives Café Coffee Day the ability to co-create products with customers
Café Coffee Day or CCD as it is popularly known is one of the most well known brands in India having an active and popular social presence. With a fan base of over 2 million on Facebook, CCD uses social media intelligently to engage customers, get feedback and co-create new offerings with the help of the consumer. InformationWeek caught up with K Ramakrishnan, President - Marketing, Café Coffee Day, who shares why CCD has become a benchmark for marketing for other firms in the emerging world of social media

Can you give us a brief overview of your social media strategy?

We see social media as a perfect channel for customer engagements and making promotions and announcements. Social media is a great online replication of what happens in our Café Coffee Day outlets. People have conversations in our cafés around our brand, and the same is witnessed on social media platforms too. Similar to the physical world, we listen to conversations, but we do not interfere.

Our objective for social media is multi-fold. Firstly, we want to use social media as a medium to observe constant and periodic communication from the people who follow us. Secondly, we use social media as a megaphone for our customers to scream at us. For a brand of our size, it becomes a little difficult to monitor issues at every outlet of ours. When people highlight problems on social media, it gives us an opportunity to address them quickly. The third is the ability to co-create products or offerings with our customers. We also use social media to understand the strategic direction our business is taking.

How does the company engage itself with its customers using social media?

Social media allows us to be closer to the end customer. On social media, we are constantly asking our customers what would they like to see being served? What would they like to be changed? We can even ask them specifically what flavor of chocolate they like. When you ask these kind of questions – you would arrive at a clear brief about what people want from us as a brand. You could then go back and create a product and invite everyone to taste the product. So, you could initiate a conversation in the online medium and extend this in the physical world. When we hit the 1000 outlets mark, we cut a cake and invited our customers. When our customers are part of this activity, they remember this day and become part of our brand. At the end of the day, there has to be convergence of the social and physical worlds.

Can you tell us your perspective of the evolution of social media?

Over a period of time, social media has become a democratic form of expression as it is open to everyone. As a brand, it is necessary to have presence on every popular social media platform. The combination of social media coupled with location specific apps such as Facebook places or FourSquare can help in driving walk-ins.

How do you measure the success of your social media strategy?

Success can be measured by the number of people who follow you, and their level of engagements in terms of likes, or the number of posts they put online on your fan page.

How do you see the role of analytics in your overall marketing strategy?

We have a strong analytics initiative which we use to get intelligent insights on how our customers use our products. For example, we have our own prepaid cards called ‘Cafe Moments' which are designed to enable cashless transactions at all our outlets. Over a period of time, you can analyze the information about the usage of the card and gain insights at a café or consumer level. You can also customize different offers and see which ones have succeeded. The whole idea of analytics is to understand customer preferences. Read More

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Siemens and Teradata form global strategic partnership for Big Data in utility sector
Siemens Smart Grid Division and Teradata today announced a global strategic cooperation in the field of big data. Through this collaboration Siemens Smart Grid further optimizes its portfolio of solutions which will provide energy utilities with a much higher level of transparency on the status and activities in their networks. This will enable the customers of Siemens Smart Grid to improve reliability of their infrastructure and to run their grids more efficiently in an increasingly cost-sensitive environment.


Siemens and Teradata will be the first to offer end-to-end integration of operational data with smart meter data for analysis on a single platform, providing an entirely new view on the network. The companies are jointly developing data models - including providing further enhancements to Teradata’s industry leading Utilities Logical Data Model, the fundamental building block for utilities data analytics. The Teradata Utilities Logical Data Model provides the structure and standardization to address crucial business questions, makes data accessible, enables data to be reused in other applications, and allows fast and accurate communication with customers and regulators.


"Based on the broadest smart grid technology portfolio and our leading position in energy automation and meter data management, we know which data are key to an optimized operation of networks. Combined with Teradata’s expertise in analytic data solutions, we can provide our customers with relevant and valuable information allowing them to make faster and significantly more informed decisions," said Dr. Jan Mrosik, CEO of Siemens’ Smart Grid Division.


Teradata’s Unified Data Architecture is a secure and cost-effective framework for smarter data management, processing, and analytics that enables utilities to exploit all their big data – as huge quantities of data are called today. Data of this scale are generated when utilities operate infrastructure which the Siemens Smart Grid Division has upgraded from traditional networks to smart grids, with enhanced automation, new sensor technology, communication systems, and software applications. A good example are Smart Meter: 1,000,000 of these devices alone can produce a data volume of up to several petabyte a year. According to IMS Research today there are 178 million smart meters for energy installed, until 2016 this number is expected to rise to 343 million.


While utilities face an increasingly challenging business environment, the emerging IT evolution in the energy sector is proving to be a key competitive solution for utilities. To remain competitive and able to meet ever changing regulatory and economic requirements, utilities have to utilize both technological and commercial data generated at ever shorter intervals to optimize their systems. Only the ability to collect, organize and analyze this volume and variety of high-velocity data in a way relevant and accessible to business will bring real value to utilities.


Utilities can quickly assess costs and time needed to restore power if there is a blackout, and thus proactively provide their customers with better information. Queries about transmission losses relative to manufacturer types, geographical locations, and weather conditions will enable better planning of networks and load flows. Maintenance can be performed based on data about actual wear, rather than on a fixed cycle. Through the implementation of geographical data their workforce can be deployed more efficiently.


“Of course, just collecting and storing data doesn’t drive a cent of value to a utility’s bottom-line or help a utility’s customers understand their energy consumption,” said Hermann Wimmer, President, International, Teradata. “By integrating their data and running their analytics on the Teradata platform, utilities can apply intelligence to networks and use meter, asset and other sources of data to gain operational efficiency, improve service and increase customer satisfaction. That is where the value lies.” Read More

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What you need to succeed with Big Data
It’s great to have a big vision for big-data, but if you want to be successful, you may need to think small

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Big Data is a strategic priority for IT Managers in India, reveals Cisco survey
4 in 5 IT managers in India agree that Big Data will be a strategic priority for their companies in 2013

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TCS report highlights differences in approach of Big Data leaders and laggards
Leaders in Big Data differ most from the laggards in three main ways – where they analyze and process Big Data, the mix of data they use and their Big Data spend, says a research

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Ride the Big Data beast: The new normal for CMOs
Targeting customers with the highest propensity to buy determines ROMI (return on marketing investment) for today’s CMOs, and Big Data can play a big role in making this happen

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Overhaul of storage and server architecture enables PMC Bank to improve customer response time
Implementing server virtualization coupled with storage virtualization and automated storage tiering has enabled Punjab & Maharashtra Co-Operative (PMC) Bank to handle peak loads in real time, improve response time for customers and reduce business downtime

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Big Data testing: The challenge and the opportunity
The possibility of ‘unknown’ scenarios in Big Data testing is gigantic when compared to testing techniques for conventional applications. The scope and range of the data harness in Big Data applications will demand new benchmarks of Software Quality Assurance

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42 percent of IT leaders have invested in Big Data or plan to do so within a year: Gartner survey
2013 will be the year of larger scale adoption of Big Data technologies, says the research firm

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QNAP honored with technology of the year award
Flagship product, NAS TS-EC1279U-RP has been honored the 2013 Technology of the Year Award

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How InMobi tamed the Big Data elephant
Gaurav Agarwal, who leads the Data Analytics system at InMobi, shares his perspective on how InMobi handles Big Data, and the lessons learnt from building the analytics system

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Big Data can help governments cut budgets, reduce crime and save lives
SAP survey reveals great potential for Big Data in government but there are barriers to adoption

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Global Big Data revenue pegged at USD 11.4 billion; IBM leads all players
A new study by Wikibon says that the Big Data market is expected to reach USD 18.2 billion in 2013 – translating into a growth of 61 percent

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Infosys launches Big Data platform; promises eight times faster enterprise insights
The platform includes a rich visual interface with more than 50 customizable dashboards and 250 built-in algorithms

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Big Data Development tools too slow, says startup
Context Relevant, a modeling and analytics software developer, strives to make big data app development faster and less expensive for enterprises

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How Big Data analytics is set to transform social computing
Big Data has come a long way and is now poised to transform social computing and the way enterprises do business with benefits not possible previously. Let’s take a closer look

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Why is India’s UID Aadhar a Big Data challenge and opportunity?
Building the world’s largest biometric identity platform for authenticating the identity of 1.2 billion residents is a Big Data challenge and a big opportunity for improving governance

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How Big Data could help tame cancer
UK cancer scientists say a huge DNA database could help prolong the lives of some patients

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Facebook Open Compute project shapes Big Data hardware
Big data practitioners like Facebook, Goldman Sachs and Fidelity are setting the standards for cheaper, more efficient servers and systems from the likes of Applied Micro, AMD, Dell and Intel

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Kingston to unveil world’s largest capacity USB flash drive at 1 TB
The firm’s DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 is the world’s largest-capacity USB 3.0 Flash drive and will boast of transfer speeds up to 240MB/s (read) and 160MB/s (write)

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Why you will need a Big Data ethics expert
The looming issue in big data isn't technology but the privacy and ethics decisions associated with how, when and if results should be provided

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Tieto inks pact with NetIQ
Tieto chose NetIQ Cloud Manager to create Tieto Cloud Server, a cloud platform that allows customers to choose from pre-defined service packages based on capacity, storage, service level and business criticality requirements

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How an Indian legal firm is managing data with a tiered storage solution
Adoption of a tiered storage solution has enabled Amarchand Mangaldas to reclaim its existing storage capacity and reduce power requirements

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960,000 IT jobs will be created in Asia Pacific by 2015 to support Big Data, says Gartner
Big Data creates a new layer in the economy which is all about information, turning information, or data, into revenue, says research firm, Gartner

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Indian Big Data solutions market to reach USD 153.1 million by 2014: Study
The market opportunity has grown at a CAGR of 37.8 percent for the period 2011-2014

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Dell showcases how technology can drive business strategy
At INTEROP Mumbai 2012, Sridhar S, Director, Enterprise Solutions, Dell India, shared how CIOs can use emerging technologies to transform their IT functions from being tactical to delivering strategic value

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Tulip Telecom bags Rs 87.23 crore deal from UIDAI
Tulip will provide data center and associated services to UIDAI from Tulip Data City located in Bangalore

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How Hadoop cuts Big Data costs
Hadoop systems, including hardware and software, cost about USD 1,000 a terabyte, or as little as one-twentieth the cost of other data management technologies, says Cloudera exec

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Storing more in less
How storage vendors are innovating to help data center managers cope with Big Data and the information explosion

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EMC powers Tulip Telecom’s on-demand cloud storage and backup services
Tulip’s hosted data center will deliver managed backup & storage services using EMC storage technologies, to address the explosion of data in enterprises and the demand for utility-based storage

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HGST demonstrates industry's first 12Gb/s SAS SSD
Doubling Today’s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Speed, 12Gb/s SAS SSDs and HDDs will be the Drives of Choice for Future Generations of High-Performance Enterprise Servers and Storage Solutions

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Storage trends for 2012: Iomega
The year 2012 will see consumers moving from external hard drives to Network Attached Storage (NAS) products with cloud capabilities

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‘Dell is investing in IP to accelerate adoption of cloud computing'
Dell is betting big on cloud computing and investing substantial resources to build a comprehensive portfolio, says Joseph Kremer, President-APJ in an interview

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How Walmart plans to use Big Data
By analyzing the huge volume of data produced every day on social media, Walmart is trying to shape the future for retail

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'Due to sheer size of our databases, RCOM has been actively involved in Big Data solutions'
Alpna J Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications talks about the enormous growth of data and the solutions the company is using to handle it

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Iomega announces nationwide storage support services for SMBs
The company becomes the first storage vendor to provide a three-tiered support structure in India

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India leads in cloud storage adoption
A survey by IDC sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems reveals that the Indian market is the most mature in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies and has the highest usage levels of converged systems

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'Predictive analytics can help organizations gain a competitive edge'
Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager- Information Management Software Group at IBM India/South Asia discusses in detail about the importance of Big Data and predictive analytics in improving an organization’s products, services and customer experience

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Only 20 percent organizations in India have a formal information retention plan, says Symantec
To understand how enterprises are dealing with information management and availability challenge, Symantec recently conducted an Information Retention and eDiscovery survey

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Capgemini and EMC form global strategic alliance for cloud computing
The first offering to be rolled out by the alliance will be Storage-as-a-Service

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NetApp to create storage infrastructure for BSNL’s cloud services
The firm will partner with Sai InfoSystem to power cloud offerings by BSNL

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Can storage virtualization ease vendor lock in?
Storage virtualization systems let you use any vendor's hardware and bring it under a single storage services umbrella. It's not nirvana yet--but we're making progress

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India to see 85 percent growth in scale-out storage systems
Gartner says that accurate planning of storage resources is a huge challenge, which is in turn generating increased interest in scale-out systems

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World’s data more than doubling every two years, says study
Global digital data created in 2011 equal to every person in India tweeting 3 tweets per minute for 6,883 years non stop

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Storage maps the future of digital data
The future of storage management must be simple, cost efficient and environmentally friendly

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Storage demands reduced by 25 percent
Evalueserve has also been able to control the number of tape cartridges it was using for day-to-day backup by implementing a progressive incremental methodology for storage

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IBM is the leader in external disk storage market: IDC report
IBM had eight percentage points lead in comparison with its nearest competitor in revenue terms in the external disk storage market in Q1 2011

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How is cloud computing changing the role of Storage Administrators?
Cloud storage promises to change the way data centers manage and provision their storage assets

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Gulf Oil opts for IBM servers
Gulf Oil Corporation has selected IBM servers and storage technology to allow their Lubricants division to manage, track, and leverage information and processes more effectively

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EMC announces 40 new storage products in India
A highlight of today’s announcement is EMC’s new simplified unified storage solution for the SMB segment

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Schneider Electric launches IT infra solution for SMBs
New ‘InfraStruxure for SMB IT’ aims to tap Indian server room market worth over Rs 1000 crore in 2013 by offering benefits of reduced TCO and energy consumption by 20 percent, and space optimization by 30 percent

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Indian IT hardware industry may lose Rs 1000 crore over BIS standards compliance deadline, warns MAIT
The industry association says that the government needs to extend the implementation deadline by 6 months to avoid complete market chaos

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AMD captures highest ever market share in India
The firm bolstered its quarter performance with 20.1 percent market share in Q4 FY12, according to an IDC report

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Gartner: India Printer Copier and Multifunctional product shipments declined 4.7% in Q3, 2012
Organizations adopted a ‘wait and watch’ approach on their IT spending for peripheral devices

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Belkin aspires to touch USD 100-million mark in India by 2016
With a market share of 30 percent, Belkin is oscillating between the number one and two slots in the wireless networking space in India

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Vedanta ropes in IBM to enable strong business growth
The company has tied up with IBM to create a robust infrastructure for the resource planning system of its power business

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Is open source hardware IT's next big thing?
Open source hardware isn't just for hobbyists. Early corporate adopters can reap business benefits

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Oracle SPARC T4 server line crosses 100 server mark in four months
SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris have emerged as one of the fastest ramping server products in Oracle’s history

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IBM launches PureSystems – touts expertise, integration as differentiators
Big Blue recently announced a new category of "expert integrated systems", which the company claims is the first with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients

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Server vendors see big potential in Intel Xeon E5 processor
Major server providers, like IBM, HP and Dell are announcing products based on Intel Xeon E5 processor

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IBM tops India’s storage, non-x86 UNIX server market
IBM maintained its market leadership of the overall disk storage market in 2011 with 28.3 percent market share

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Intel’s Xeon E5 gets thumbs up from customers
At the formal launch of Xeon E5, the companies already using the product shared their experiences about it. Intel claims that the product will increase the performance by up to 80 percent and will reduce the latency by up to 30 percent compared to its previous generation processor

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HCL Infosystems wins Rs 278 crore order from ELCOT
The firm will provide 2 lakh units of HCL ME Laptops to Government and state aided schools and colleges across Tamil Nadu

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Manikchand group slashes power utilization by 60 percent
Conglomerate saves up to 30 percent in IT costs after implementing IBM BladeCenter solution

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MAIT foresees big impact of Global IT supply chain disruptions on India
Unprecedented rains and floods in Thailand has severely disrupted the global supply chain for many key components in the IT Hardware industry

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Building a leadership culture
Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director, HP India, shares unique insights on how organizations can identify and nurture successful leaders and managers early on

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs: The man, the method and classic jobs moments
Watch these classic Jobs videos -- performance and candid scenes. Steve Jobs jokes, chides and waxes eloquent discusses his thoughts on his childhood, his love of design, early work with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, views on Microsoft, Xerox PARC, innovation and, most poignantly, how to live life with an acute awareness of inevitable death

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IBM reveals chip that acts like human brain
IBM is testing a computer chip modeled on human neural processing, as it tries to create silicon better suited to real-world, multi-source data processing at low power

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D-Link India appoints Tushar Sighat as CEO
Sighat has been earlier associated with D-Link India for over 12 years and was also a member of the founding team

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HP jumps on SMB virtualization bandwagon
Rollout of entry-level servers, storage, and data-management options continues the wave of Goliath vendors launching hardware for David-size businesses

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Dell bets big on SMBs in India
Is focusing on the small and medium business (SMB) market in India with open, capable and affordable solutions

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Apple iCloud: Four hurdles for businesses
Apple's forthcoming file storage and synchronization service isn't quite ready for enterprises

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IBM emerges No 1 in the non-x86 UNIX server market
IBM maintained its leadership in the India Non-x86 Unix server market capturing 42.1 percent revenue market share in Q1 2011

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HP gears up to tap managed print services market in India
This is HP’s first-of-its-kind Enterprise Solutions Center in India to showcase innovation

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‘Next-gen services is the new focus for Dell’
India plays a pivotal role in Dell’s global services strategy. In fact Dell has 23,000 Indian employees (a quarter of its workforce) servicing global customers from delivery centers in India. Suresh Vaswani, EVP Dell Services and chairman of Dell India tells InformationWeek about his goal to build next generation service offerings and to grow Dell’s process capabilities on a global basis across industry verticals, service offerings and market segments

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Just Dial dials into open source
Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers more than 200 servers in Just Dial for its various Intranet and Extranet applications

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Trading platform goes virtual
With virtualization, the company has reduced the number of physical servers from 26 to five, cut power and cooling costs by 65 percent, improved CPU utilization

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Indian branded tablets are here. Any takers?
The local market for tablets is set to get very competitive as traditional Indian PC manufacturers launch their brands here

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Worldwide Q1 server shipments up 9 percent, revenue grew 17 percent: Gartner
The x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments

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Lenovo India management undergoes major revamp
Lenovo India has made new appointments to its management team in an attempt to strengthen the organization

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PC sales tumble as consumers, workers eye tablets
New market data shows that the iPad and Android-powered slates may be taking a bigger bite of the PC market than expected.

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HP advances 'Converged Infrastructure' strategy in India
With a list of 15 client wins in India, HP is finding acceptance for its ‘Converged Infrastructure’

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iPad 2: Five things Apple left out
Apple's second-generation iPad mostly impresses, but Apple still managed to leave some key technologies out

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Dell makes laptop battery recycling easier
Dell has announced the launch of its free laptop battery recycling program in India for consumers

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IBM to provide Bharti Infratel smarter cell towers
Bharti Infratel, a subsidiary of Bharti airtel, has chosen IBM to provide Intelligent Site Operations to more than 32,000 Bharti Infratel tower-sites spread across 11 telecom circles in India

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HCL Infosystems to provide 6,500 laptops to Keltron
HCL Infosystems have bagged the contract to provide over 6,500 units of laptops and netbooks from Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation (Keltron)

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CES: BodyMedia sends calorie and sleep data to your phone
The company's newest Armband uses Bluetooth to send over 5000 different health variables to your Android or Apple-based phone

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CES 2011: Android-based car stereo receives Internet services, iPod's music
It's time to put the smart phone back in the car. Sort of. Parrot's media console, running Android, offers a slightly different take on auto-tech.

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Hands-on with RIM Playbook at CES
After months of waiting, RIM finally let us touch, feel and use its Playbook tablet at CES; its first foray into the tablet market. As tablet hardware goes, this one stacks up nicely

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IBM in hybrid chip breakthrough
Technology could lead to exaflop computing—systems that can perform one million trillion calculations per second

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iPad, smartphones dragging down PC sales
Gartner lowers 2010 and 2011 forecasts for global PC shipments, as Apple and other tablets and smartphones cut into conventional computer shipments

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Server shipments up 13 percent for Q3 of 2010
Gartner report also observes that blade servers outpaced the other form factors, namely tower and rack servers, for the period

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FC Kohli honored with CSI Lifetime achievement award
The father of the Indian software industry and Padma Bhushan winner was bestowed this honor at CSI’s 45th Annual National Convention 2010 on November 25th, in Mumbai

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Methane powered laptops could arrive soon
Harvard researchers develop platinum-free solid-oxide fuel cells, which could be reliable and cheap enough for mobile technology

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Emerson network power unveils comprehensive DCIM strategy
Firm claims that the platform will enable dynamic infrastructure optimization

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Can mainframes do BI?
Analytics is achievable in mainframes when coupled with the right processors and algorithms

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Cyberoam unveils its new line of Wireless UTMs
Cyberoam claims that these appliances can reduce the overall cost of managing WLAN environments for SMBs

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Environmental Sustainability is becoming an important criterion in PC brand selection
Businesses are placing a greater emphasis on environmental sustainability in their choice of PC brand, according to new research from Gartner

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Laptop heat may cause 'Toasted Skin Syndrome'
A review of recent cases concludes with a call for heat shielding and warning labels for laptop computers

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802.11n certification booming
The Wi-Fi Alliance reports that more than 1,100 products have been certified since the launch of its Wi-Fi Certified 802.11n testing program

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Digital Payment Advisors will transform the payment landscape: Gartner
By encouraging the use of loyalty points and social currencies, DPA applications have the potential to change the way customers approach their choice of payment solution

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Harnessing mLearning for workforce training
There is little doubt that mLearning is the future of workplace learning. However, introducing mobile learning without a structured and reliable framework that guides our learning processes can be risky, says Vinay Pradhan of Skillsoft Software Services

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Tablet usage among India SMBs will continue to skyrocket: AMI
As per the findings of a research by AMI, tablet acquisition is expected to grow at 80 to 90 percent rates over the next two years

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Infosys collaborates with SAP to develop mobile apps for retail sector
Cooperation is aimed at enabling Consumer Packaged Goods Companies to gain critical business insights via wireless tablets and smartphones

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How Communications Service Providers can seize new business opportunities with OSS/BSS
The business support functions within OSS/BSS play an essential role in providing the flexibility that Communications Service Providers will need in the future, says Manoj Dawane of Ericsson India

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BlackBerry appoints Sunil Lalvani as managing director for India
Sunil Lalvani appointed MD at BlackBerry India. He moves up from his previous position as Director - Enterprise sales.

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Indian CIOs use tablets innovatively to push customer service excellence to new level
From real estate to the services sector, Indian enterprises are taking customer service standards to a new level by using tablets innovatively

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MHL to explore partnerships with Indian consumer electronics companies
Also intends to forge partnerships with Indian content developers, game publishers and mobile device manufacturers.

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Samsung launches Galaxy S4 in India priced at Rs 41,500
The device will be sold across 4 metro cities in the initial phase

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More than 50 percent of mobile apps deployed will be hybrid by 2016: Gartner
As per the research firm, with increased pressure on organizations to deploy mobile apps to accommodate mobile work styles of employees, more than half of the apps deployed by 2016 will be hybrid

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11 interesting use cases of enterprise mobility in Indian enterprises
From healthcare organizations, insurance firms to cement manufacturing companies and retail establishments, Indian companies across verticals are accruing significant business benefits by adopting enterprise mobility. InformationWeek takes a detailed look at 11 enterprises that are leading the way in showing how mobile platforms can be used innovatively to increase employee productivity, enhance customer service and bring in process efficiencies

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BYOD ROI: Intel sees annual productivity gain of 5 million hours from BYOD in 2012
The global consumerization initiative across offices in 65 countries has helped Intel’s employees save an average of 57 minutes daily

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ASUS announces the Nexus 7 tablet in India
The tablet comes with a textured tactile design for enhanced comfort measuring just 10.45mm thin and 340g light and featuring Android 4.2

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12 Google April Fool's day jokes
Google Nose, Gmail Blue and the shutdown of YouTube show that the search giant has a sense of humor

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BMW brings iPhone apps to dashboards
Drivers of newer BMW and Mini Cooper cars will be able to access their iPhone's music apps from the dashboard

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Government of Maharashtra joins hands with Microsoft to create apps for addressing social issues
Microsoft launched the Windows AppFest in Pune in collaboration with the Government of Maharashtra to ideate and create apps addressing social and civic issues

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Indian MVAS market set to grow to USD 9.5 billion in 2015: Wipro-IAMAI report
Report finds mEntertainment continues to be largest contributor to operator MVAS revenues

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Google eyes Android smartwatch
Google Android model would compete with Apple, Samsung smartwatches reportedly in the works

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BlackBerry World app store now offers 100,000 unique applications
BlackBerry World app store reaches a major milestone on the eve of the U.S. launch of the BlackBerry Z10

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If YouTube were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China and India
YouTube has revealed some extremely interesting stats in a blog post; it also now has more than a billion users every month

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How Nokia’s innovative mobile healthcare initiative is helping people fight diabetes
More than 70,000 consumers have completed the six-month program, having received free-of-charge mDiabetes alerts twice a week

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Indian government woos Android developers by launching app contest for public services
Under the m-governance initiative, the Government of India is inviting citizen developers to create mobile apps on Google’s Android platform

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Nimbuzz surpasses 150 million users
The company now boasts more than thirty seven million users in the Middle East and over forty one million in Rest of Asia including India

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BlackBerry's Secure Work Space technology promises separation of work and personal data and applications
The solution will separate and secure work and personal data on mobile devices to third party platforms

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Mumbaikars can use free Android App to book autorickshaw in real time by June
The hugely popular app is being used by more than 500 users in Gurgaon, and is set to be launched in Mumbai by June this year

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Android tablets well placed to overtake Apple’s iPad in tablet sales
Android-based tablets expanded their share of the market notably in 2012, and IDC expects that trend to continue in 2013

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Facebook News Feed: 5 coolest changes
Brighter, less cluttered and mobile-ready, Facebook's revamped News Feed has some positive improvements for users

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Now, an Indian Idol App for auditions
Sony Entertainment Television has opened audition for Indian Idol Junior online and through the Indian Idol Junior App

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Wipro launches cloud-based healthcare platform in partnership with Microsoft
The platform is primarily targeted at healthcare providers to deliver innovative solutions for remote fetal monitoring and cardiac care

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Android to dominate 2013 mobile app downloads
App developers may start targeting Google's Android platform ahead of Apple's iOS platform, says ABI Research

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First BlackBerry 10 software update improves Hub, Camera
BlackBerry Z10 owners who update their system software will see camera, messaging and battery performance gains

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Now, edit images on your mobile phone with Photoshop Touch
Adobe Systems India today announced the immediate availability of a new version of Adobe Photoshop Touch, optimized for iPhone, iPod touch, and Android smart phones

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Vodafone Business Services targets 20 percent of enterprise revenues from wireline services
Moving beyond mobility solutions, the firm is targeting wireline services as a key revenue driver

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Innovative mobile solutions can save lives, reduce student dropouts and cut carbon emissions, says GSMA
The GSMA believes that innovative mobile products and solutions can save USD 400 billion in healthcare costs, reduce student dropouts and cut carbon emissions by 27 million tonnes

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Is your smartphone watching your every move?
Apart from collecting data, apps on smartphones are actually selling your personal information for the highest bidder

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Uninor to refund unutilized pre-paid balances to customers in Mumbai
Refunds will be available at 12 Uninor company and franchisee stores to start with for a period of 15 days

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Is Google launching a tablet priced at just USD 99?
According to some press reports, Google is taking a new tablet all the way down to USD 99

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‘Employees want to bring in their own enterprise apps to the office’
With social collaboration increasing in a big way, Cisco is betting big on its flagship social product, Jabber. In an interview, Fabrice Della Mea, Director, Product Management, Cisco Systems tells us about the increasing importance of collaboration platforms

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How UC is transforming business processes across major sectors
A number of major sectors such as education, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and BFSI are using the transformational power of UC to radically change their business processes

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SoCloMo is new focus for UC vendors
Growing acceptance of social media in the enterprise, and proliferation of smartphones and tablets is prompting vendors to add social, mobile and cloud-enabled features to their UC solutions

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‘Unified Communications on route to become pervasive’
Dinesh Malkani, Managing Director, Collaboration Solutions, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cisco shares how UC is evolving from a boardroom technology to become pervasive. Excerpts from an interview with InformationWeek:

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Verizon introduces new Managed Unified Communications and Collaboration service for Microsoft Lync
Businesses can now leave UC&C service and infrastructure management to Verizon -- and focus on promoting greater adoption and productivity

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Adoption of video in Unified Communications on the rise in India
Aided by developments in the telecom and communications technology space, such as cloud computing and wireless networks like 3G and 4G, even smaller companies can now easily incorporate video into their collaboration tools

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ArcelorMittal to use UC as a service to cut costs
ArcelorMittal has chosen Siemens Enterprise Communications to deliver a global Private Cloud Service for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) based on a centralized OpenScape UCC Solution

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Changing landscape of Unified Communications market in India
While on-premise Unified Communication solutions have already gained acceptance, UCaaS is also slowly gaining momentum

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Will Atos have "Zero email" by 2013?
Organizations like Atos have set up initiatives to reduce the amount of internal email, which is deemed as a productivity damper. Here's Atos's plan to reduce email significantly, if not to zero

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Vidyo free cloud service bridges videoconferencing systems
VidyoWay will let users of Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, and Microsoft Lync talk to each other. In the meantime, Vidyo starts the conversation about how much better off they would be using its technology

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Unified Communications slashes communication costs for refinery
Bharat Oman Refineries recorded savings of Rs 73 lakh on communication and Rs 82 lakh per annum on operational and maintenance costs

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Cisco Cius: The little tablet that could
What chance does another tablet have in a crowded market? Cisco has cleverly made Cius the centerpiece of its suite of collaboration technologies and tools. We think it could succeed

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To lure Indian SMBs, Unified Communication providers must develop comprehensive solutions
UC in India will grow, when bundled with remotely managed services or hosted collaboration suites, says AMI

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'Indian men put in ‘extra’ effort to look good for a video conference business meeting'
A research conducted by Cable&Wireless Worldwide revealed that Indians are of the opinion that their appearances play a vital role in a face-to-face or a video conference with business associates as it helps to leave a good impression

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Cisco introduces 15 minute video conferencing system
Facing growing competition from Polycom, Vidyo, and others, Cisco introduces a low-cost unit designed to be set up and running in 15 minutes

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Polycom buys HP's Halo videoconferencing unit
Hewlett Packard said Polycom also will be a partner for telepresence and certain unified communications systems and will make its video applications available for HP's webOS platform

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Skype Deal: Collaboration is Microsoft's game to lose
Microsoft’s USD 8.5 billion deal to buy Skype shows it building around its strength in enterprise collaboration software. But will it squander its advantage?

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Why Microsoft plus Skype is an enterprising idea
If Microsoft can meld Skype and Lync, building a sensible enterprise and consumer offering while making Skype the de facto mobile unified communications platform, this may just be a winning combination

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Tackling the uncertainty of core network planning
To avoid breaking the economics of core network provisioning, service providers must extract every bit of cost out of their networks without compromising services or reducing quality of experience for their end users

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Videoconferencing, telepresence spending to double by 2015
Cisco-Tandberg, Avaya, Lifesize, and Polycom are focusing on conference room systems, projected as the area of greatest growth, according to Infonetics

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Why is Cisco betting big on video?
The networking giant believes that video will drive the next wave of communications for enterprises

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Cisco unifies enterprise communications with Jabber
Cisco rolled out Jabber, a unified communications application that brings together presence, instant messaging (IM), voice and video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing into a single consistent experience across PCs, Macs, tablets and smart phones

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Communication trends for 2011
Explore how communication will be influenced by Unified Communications, Video, Tablets, SIP Trunking and the cloud

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IBM’s cloud version of Lotus Notes finds good uptake in India
12 percent of Lotus Notes adoption has been via the cloud

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HP partners with IIIT-B to launch Network University
The University will aid IT professionals to advance their knowledge in the delivery of next-generation enterprise networks

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Unified Communications: The new mouthpiece in enterprises
Indian enterprises are taking UC beyond basic communications, by using forms such as UC-as-a-service and virtual teams, for R&D, training and client interactions

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Facebook becoming ultimate CRM system
The social network's latest messaging features point to a future in which you can contact someone wherever they are with a single click

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Verizon outlines top 10 technology trends for 2011
Technology trends include cloud, unified communications, convergence, mobile apps and IPv6

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The Office: Who needs it
60 percent of employees in study say they don't need to go into an office to be productive; IT execs worry about security of mobile workers

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Taj Hotels selects NEC as preferred network solution provider
NEC to provide IP telephone systems for eight new hotel locations

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Cisco to introduce home telepresence system
A USD 600 video conferencing system that includes a video camera and a device to connect to a HD TV will reportedly be launched by the network equipment maker

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Collaboration possibilities for organizations are 'infinite'
Right tools and right approach enhance the communication paradigm for employees

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Interop Mumbai 2010 kicks off
Opens up with keynotes which describe IT to be converging, networks going borderless

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BT delivers B2B telepresence solution for Wipro in India
BT’s B2B exchange connectivity will enable seamless video and voice communications between Wipro and its customers

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Microsoft, Polycom team on Unified Communications
Partnership will integrate voice, instant messaging, and videoconferencing for large enterprise, government, and SMB customers

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Educational training goes virtual at NIIT
The educational institute has conducted over 248 training sessions using the UC platform it deployed two years ago

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"Immersive telepresence has a great future"
Managing Director of Polycom India & SAARC, Neeraj Gill, says that Polycom is witnessing increased demand for telepresence solutions

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SIP gives Avaya a new ‘Aura’ in UC
Based on the open standard SIP protocol, Avaya Aura is an important milestone in the evolution of UC architecture

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The shape of UC to come: On-demand, personalized and ubiquitous
In the future, conversations will follow you from one device to another, and you will be able to collaborate from any device–yes, even your television set

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Spectranet and nivio to jointly offer hosted messaging and collaboration
The firm plans to offer a range of hosted solutions such as basic email solutions and high end enterprise applications based on the Microsoft Exchange platform

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Bharti Airtel, Cisco and Servion team up to provide hosted contact center solutions
The consortium is launching ‘customizable’ hosted contact center services

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Tata Communications and BT to extend Telepresence facilities to each other
Using the intercompany service, customers of both the companies can invite clients of the other service provider to join them in multipoint telepresence meetings

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‘Cisco will focus on Smart Connected Communities’
The network is getting smarter and Cisco wants to apply
intelligent networks in other industries through connected
communities. Naresh Wadhwa, President & Country Manager,
Cisco India & SAARC told Brian Pereira how Cisco plans to
achieve this through strategic alliances with domain experts.
Internet technology also has a major role in building connected
communities

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AGC Networks to be acquired by Essar Group
Essar will acquire Avaya’s stake in AGC Networks, previously known as Avaya GlobalConnect

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Unified Communications’ day has arrived
It seems that all those studies on collaboration along with a couple of years of Web 2.0 messaging have had their effect on us

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"Our products and technologies will be the foundation for Borderless Networks"
Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco tells us why she thinks that the troika of video, virtualization and cloud computing will push enterprise-level productivity to a new level

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Orange Business Services appoints Bala Mahadevan as India CEO
In this role, Mahadevan will be responsible for driving business growth for the company in India in the network related services and IT services domains

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Siemens Enterprise Communications and T-Systems now speak with one voice
This new agreement will let Siemens Enterprise Communications and T-Systems simplify migration

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Videoconferencing booming during flight ban
Travelers stranded by the Icelandic volcano are using telepresence and videoconferencing to stay in contact with their businesses

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CSC launches Unified Communications as a service
Targeted at Fortune 1000 companies, this offering is based on Cisco’s collaboration portfolio

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Tata DOCOMO to offer high-speed Wi-Fi services at international airports in Delhi and Hyderabad
It has inked partnership with GMR Airports to offer Wi-Fi services at Indira Gandhi International Airport - Terminal 3 in Delhi and Rajiv Gandhi Hyderabad International Airport, Hyderabad

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How Wikipedia plans to use mobile phones for empowering knowledge seekers
One of the world’s largest sources of information on the Internet, Wikipedia, is trying to deliver Wikipedia for free to mobile users in developing countries

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77 percent of Indian users use mobile for social media
A report on social media in India by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB, says that social media is being driven by mobile Internet users

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Google to launch Google Glasses that match your prescription
If Google’s plans go as intended, you will be able to add frames and lenses that match your prescription

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Facebook Graph Search: One group's early lessons
Farm Sanctuary shares lessons learned during its first steps with Facebook's new search engine, including privacy considerations

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Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Dell India, TCS and Bosch top Social Media effectiveness index in India
Blueocean market intelligence unveils results of study ranking Social Media Effectiveness of India’s most admired companies

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Should IT leaders ban work at home?
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just banned working at home. But she's a CEO of a company in need of turnaround, not an IT leader

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5 essential facts that you must know about Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7
Four months after debuting on Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10 has finally come to Windows 7. Here are the five essential facts users should know

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Google announces opening of Google Business Photos program in India
Search engine giant releases thousands of new indoor images of Indian businesses

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Cisco CEO John Chambers touts 'Internet of Everything' as cornerstone of it's strategy
Chambers urges business leaders to push open standards and cross-industry collaboration

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Google, Facebook, Ebay and Naukri among India’s most trusted Internet brands
Research by Trust Research Advisory firm finds out which brands are most trusted in India

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India contributes significantly to LinkedIn success story
With India’s top companies increasingly searching for talent on LinkedIn, and just 18 million of India’s 80 million workforce on LinkedIn, there is huge potential for the professional networking company to grow in its number two market

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11 ways to get around Twitter’s character limits
A change in Twitter’s t.co link wrapper means that your tweets have just got a bit shorter. Here is how to get around the limitations

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Internet turns 30: Jasmeet Singh, Portronics Digital
Jasmeet Singh, Director, Portronics Digital Pvt Limited shares his views on how life would be without the Internet

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Google India takes crowdsourcing route to improve quality of India maps
The search engine giant has announced Google’s first ever mapping competition called Mapathon 2013

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Mobile Internet connections will exceed world's population by 2017, says Cisco
Cisco Visual Networking Index forecast projects 13-fold growth in global mobile Internet data traffic from 2012- 2017

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Facebook, Google, Kaspersky and Microsoft come together under DSCI aegis to launch Internet safety campaign in Delhi
The campaign involves a college outreach programme in the top Indian metros - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata

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‘Connected devices will present new business opportunities for enterprises’: Akamai CIO
As new growth comes from emerging geographies and new platforms such as mobile, Akamai is relying on its state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to power its growth. Kumud Kalia, Senior VP and CIO, Akamai, shares with us the opportunity and the challenges for being a CIO at Akamai, and how he is focusing on building an agile and efficient user experience for Akamai’s customers

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Sunil Dutt, RIM takes a nostalgic look at the Internet
Sunil Dutt, MD, India, RIM takes a stroll down the memory lane and shares how the Internet was in its initial days in India

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Attitude towards customers does matter for Social Media success
Organizations can spend on social media listening products or hire social media experts, but it requires a real change in the attitude of a business towards how it treats its customers and other external stakeholders

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Internet key to poverty alleviation and social empowerment: S Ramadorai, TCS
S Ramadorai, Vice Chairman, TCS shares his views on the transformational power of the Internet

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5 things Facebook Graph search means for business
Graph Search creates new social business opportunities, but not without some elbow grease. Here's what you must do to take advantage

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Facebook’s Graph Search – your own personalized private social search engine
Graph Search allows you to find unique content that you or your friends have shared on Facebook with simple English language phrases

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Is social networking dominating e-mail?
According to survey results, social media is emerging as a preferred mode of communication, whereas e-mail communication has depreciated and is limited to only record-based communication

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The Internet celebrates its 30th birthday
Exactly 30 years ago, on January 1, 1983, the basic foundation for the Internet was laid down

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Indian Internet economy forecast to contribute Rs 10.8 trillion to the overall economy by 2016
India's Internet economy growth rate of 23 percent places it as the second fastest across the G-20 and ahead of many other developing nations in the G-20, as per a report by Boston Consulting Group

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India and APNIC reach agreement on National Internet registry
Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN) will be run by the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and serve ISPs within the country

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Global mobile Internet data traffic to grow 18-fold by 2016: Cisco
According to Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, global mobile data traffic will outgrow global fixed data traffic by three times during 2011-2016

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Google's bouncer ejects malware from Android market
Google is using a technology called Bouncer to monitor and remove malicious apps

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Google privacy change provokes outrage
One user profile and privacy policy to rule all of Google's services. Simple, or evil?

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CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom
Arun Sundararajan, NEC Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, discusses with InformationWeek the relevance of social media to the overall business, and how CIOs must handle social media

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2012: India gets set to adopt IPv6
HP partners with Government of Karnataka and IIIT-B to help enterprises adopt the new Internet address standard

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Google and O-Zone Networks partner to offer free Wi-Fi access
As per the deal, YouTube and Google+ users will get free Wi-Fi access across all O-Zone hotspots

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10 Wi-Fi trends to watch for in 2012
Several trends and developments are emerging and catching up to make a big impact on unabated growth of Wi-Fi. Ajay Kumar Gupta, WLAN Access and Security Specialist, elaborates on 10 such trends

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Compuware targets 50 percent of APM market in India
As the application performance management market is still in its nascent stages in India, the company is confident of becoming the numero uno player

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6 lakh account logins get compromised every day on Facebook
The statistic was revealed in an infographic published alongside an official Facebook blog post trumpeting new security features introduced by the firm

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Companies will generate 50 percent of web sales via social presence and mobile apps by 2015, says Gartner
As the number of mobile phones overtakes PCs, customers will use mobile browsers and applications as the main points of interaction, says Gartner

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Worldwide social media revenue to reach USD 14.9 billion in 2012, says Gartner
As per a report released by Gartner, worldwide social media revenue is forecast for a consistent growth

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Malware attacks up due to social media, reveals Global Survey
More than 50 percent of the respondents report an increase in malware due to social media use

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Social media for corporate networking or corporate espionage?
Today, corporates are looking at social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to broaden their online outreach. In a session at INTEROP Mumbai 2011, Abilash Sonwane, Senior-VP, Elitecore Technologies, talked about how social media networks are the next frontier of corporate espionage

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Social Media: Not a matter of choice anymore
Adoption of social media by enterprises is not a matter of choice anymore. It is a must, said Umesh Jain, CIO, YES BANK at INTEROP Mumbai 2011

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Internet as important as food and water, says Cisco study
A Cisco study reveals that nearly 95 percent of college students and young employees in India have admitted that the Internet is as important in their lives as water, food, air and shelter

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What Facebook should learn from George Lucas
Facebook's latest tweaks are reminiscent of the Star Wars creator's continued changes to his iconic films: No one asked for--or wanted--them

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Security issues to consider while migrating from IPv4 to IPv6
Despite its innumerable virtues, IPv6 is still vulnerable and poses various security threats

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How vulnerable are you in the virtual place?
As the Internet and new technologies grow, so do their vulnerabilities

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IPv6: The next-generation Internet
When IPv4 addresses are completely depleted, any business expansion, new service, smart device, anything Internet-related will need IP addresses that are IPv6

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Social media, mobility, analytics and cloud to redefine Indian software industry, says PwC report
The Indian companies in the top 100 emerging markets list bring combined revenue of USD 797 million. India ranks fifth among the emerging markets based on revenues. The findings are part of PwC’s Global 100 Software Leaders report, a revenue based study on the world’s top 100 software vendors.
The report also contains indices of the top 100 software vendors in North America, Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the emerging markets.
Commenting on the findings of the survey, Sanjay Dhawan, Leader, Technology, PwC India said, “The Indian IT industry has been primarily identified with software services and this focus has relegated the software products segment to the background. However, off late, we are seeing a change in the fortunes of this segment due to significant growth. Emerging technologies such as Social media, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are driving the growth in this segment and helping it move to the next level.”
The report is a clear indicator that the emerging markets are poised to play an increasingly pivotal role in the global software industry. Focus on innovation, growing talent pool and government support are just some of the advantages of this market segment.
A number of software product firms have grown over the last decade from a little over 100 in 2000 to nearly 2400 in 2013. According to the industry body NASSCOM, the revenue from the software product segment currently stands at 2.2 billion USD and is expected to reach 10 billion USD by 2020.
The findings from the research show that some key forces are causing deep structural changes in the industry, fundamentally reshaping how software companies do business:
  •  Software-as-a-Service is gaining traction: Although SaaS represented only 4.9 percent of the total software revenues in 2011; there is a consistent and significant shift towards SaaS. Perpetual licence revenue has been shrinking since 2004 while subscription revenue (including SaaS) is forecast to grow at a 17.5 percent compounded annual rate, amounting to 24 percent of total software revenue by 2016.


  •  Customer is king: With the adoption of intuitive cloud services, mobile devices and low-cost apps, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are no longer the sole decision makers in the software purchase process. The end users must be satisfied in order to retain and grow enterprise sales.
  •  Emerging hybrid models bring new challenges: There will be a range of business models from traditional licensed software  to pure SaaS and hybrid approaches, which will pose challenges for the vendors in the future. Vendors will need to identify and adopt new business models while trying to maintain revenues and profits during times, when the overall industry pricing is under pressure.
  • Priority on pricing: Pricing is paramount to the entire sector. With the rise in IT consumers via low and no cost online platforms, the software companies are already struggling to explain the difference in value between a low-cost mobile app and a full-strength, licensed enterprise software package.
While expressing his views on the impact of disruptive technology, Mark McCaffrey, PwC's Global Software Leader said, “Cloud computing has enabled SaaS to grow as a new business model. We expect the business models to continue to range from traditional licensing to SaaS subscriptions only for a short-term. Over time, we will see that a growing range of services and functions such as Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) will begin to emerge.”
According to PwC’s recent Future of Software Pricing Excellence report series, the top four companies surveyed earned less than 2 percent of the revenue generated from SaaS in 2011 while data from the top 100 companies indicates considerable movement. The SaaS revenue accounted for at least 40 percent of the software revenue for 10 companies on the Global 100 list. Industry consolidation and increasing globalization are also transforming the software sector. Acquisitions are viewed as R&D strategy and key to acquiring talent and building effective and efficient SaaS capabilities.
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Building a secure hybrid cloud strategy
The adoption of hybrid cloud (fusion of private and public cloud) is increasingly gaining popularity in the enterprise IT marketplace due to security concerns about outsourcing confidential company to cloud vendors. Finally, there is a solution in the cloud computing space, which is acceptable to everyone from CTOs/CIOs/hardware vendors and to public cloud service providers.
The economics too favors the Hybrid cloud –  a study by Joe Weinman, Senior Vice President, Telx shows the advantages of adopting the hybrid cloud model. (More in his blog http://cloudonomics.com/ or read his bestseller book  Cloudonomics : The Business Value of Cloud Computing.( ISBN 978-1-118-22996-5 - John Wiley & Sons.)
That said, the enterprises need to tread the hybrid cloud with caution because it has the risks and vulnerabilities of both the private and public cloud and hence it is important that a secure hybrid cloud architecture is designed before any deployment.
The enterprise security will have to be beefed up to meet the security available in public clouds or a secure integration must be achieved by using third-party security solutions.
These poses new challenges and the enterprises need to clearly see the cost benefit outcome of the hybrid strategy. I believe that in a long term of about three  years the hybrid strategy will provide a positive cash flow for the enterprise as the cost of public cloud computing diminishes.
All this calls for a new and skilled computing team in the enterprise and a CIO who understands GRC well. Without the right advisors and the required skills in the organization it may be prudent for the enterprise to continue with its private clouds, thus losing out on the economics of a hybrid cloud.
A quick solution would be to buy hybrid middleware solutions. However, these may not secure and protect the organizations digital assets.
An SIEM solution will also be needed in a world where the vulnerability and threats change in a landscape which is more like a quicksand rather than terra firma. The tactical strategy needed for computing in this hybrid cloud environment is far different from the staid enterprise computing environment.
The risks far outweigh the benefits of going hybrid without a secure architecture and security strategy and the investments in the right security tools and public and private cloud solutions.
LS Subramanian is a cloud evangelist who believes "The Future of Computing is the Cloud", he is the founder president of NISE.  Read More

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VMware reveals hybrid cloud details
VMware will establish four data centers in the U.S. in which it will host a cloud environment that's highly compatible to the one that its customers use in the VMware-virtualized portion of their on-premises data centers.


The new facilities will be "a seamless extension" of customer facilities where they will be able to shift workloads at will with a few virtualization management console commands. VMware is building commands into its vCloud Director product and the modules in its vCloud Suite to automatically provision a designated virtual machine with networking that connects between the customer's premises and a remote Hybrid Cloud Service data center.


VMware is not about to build a global chain of cloud data centers on the scale of a Facebook or Google. It's more likely to lease space in existing third-party facilities, equip them with its own hardware and software, and operate them as public cloud facilities. CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware, in making such a move, is not backing away from continued use of channel partners and existing data center partners, which include Bluelock, CSC and AT&T in the U.S. That list formerly included Dell as well, but Dell announced Monday it would no longer try to provide public cloud services.


 In an interview after the announcement Tuesday of Hybrid Cloud Service, Gelsinger said that VMware was creating model VMware public clouds in the four data centers -- locations unspecified -- that its many regional service providers could emulate.


By building new capabilities into its vCloud Automation Center product and its vSphere Management Console, the "network stretch and deploy" feature will become something customers can invoke from within a familiar management setting and use to move workloads out to a VMware Hybrid Cloud facility. VMware is also integrating Hybrid Cloud Service with other VMware products, including vCenter Operations, used for capacity and virtual system management, and VMware View, its desktop virtualization product.


One of the few surprises in the announcement, which had been anticipated for weeks, was that it will charge $0.13 an hour for a "fully redundant" 1 GB virtual machine with one processor in a "dedicated cloud" or an isolated server. That brings a secure and private virtual server in the VMware Hybrid Cloud Service to market priced slightly under one major competitor, Google Compute Engine, which is offering a midrange VM at USD 0.132 per hour. Amazon remains at a lower benchmark, USD 0.12 an hour for a medium server. Indeed, both Amazon and Google offer one virtual processor but 3.75 GB of memory, not 1 GB as VMware does, for their standard or medium-sized virtual machine.


The multi-tenant version of Hybrid Cloud Service comes in lower than the single-tenant offering. VMware is offering 1 GB servers with one virtual core at USD 0.045 an hour. Prices for larger servers, which most customers would need, were not listed in the announcement.


 VMware Hybrid Cloud will have limited availability through an early access program that starts in June. General availability in the U.S. is expected in the third quarter.


"We have become mission critical, we have become the new hardware, we have become the new environment customers rely on for the internal infrastructure," said CEO Pat Gelsinger at the start of the presentation. Hybrid Cloud Service will extend that reliance out into the public cloud, he said. Read More

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Google India targets SMBs; cuts pricing for Apps for Business by 45 percent
Google India today announced new affordable pricing for Google Apps for Business, with the aim to make it easier for small businesses in India to reap the benefits of working in the cloud.
New and existing customers in India will now pay INR 150 per user per month if they’re on the flexible plan, and INR 1500 per user per year on the annual plan — a 45 percent reduction on the previous price.
 Ricky Kapur, Director of Enterprise Sales, Asia said, “India is home to around 47 million small businesses, yet only 1 percent of these businesses are online. We hope that by making Google Apps more affordable, more small businesses in India will be able to move to the cloud and access a business-ready package of communication and collaboration tools.”
Google Apps offer easy solutions for web mail, calendars, cloud storage, and video meetings through Google’s consumer products, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Hangouts. These tools work together seamlessly, and all that’s needed to get up and running is an Internet-connected device.
With a 99.9 percent availability guarantee, zero scheduled downtime and 24/7 support, Google Apps, offers businesses security and support while removing the need to manage hardware, security updates or software patches.
Many businesses in India are already experiencing the benefits of working in the cloud with Google Apps, said the company’s press release.
Programs like India Get Your Business Online,  Women Entrepreneurs on the Web or our Google Business Groups are some of the other Google initiatives in India designed to help small businesses come online and use the web to succeed and grow.
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Can cloud influence India’s development path?
In February, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) announced the launch of “GI Cloud”, India’s national cloud initiative. This is a strategic, even inevitable move given that the Government of India has a vision that by 2020, when our nation’s population will have hit a high, so should its education, health and prosperity.
For several years now, the world has resorted to technology to influence its path of development.  Technology-led innovations in the delivery of affordable mass healthcare, mobility in the cause of financial inclusion, the Internet as a channel of distance education — these are all well documented success stories.  But now there’s an exciting and very real possibility to take giant strides towards the resolution of the nation’s most pressing problems. And it comes in the shape of the cloud.
DeitY is fully cognizant of what cloud computing can do for the Indian Government and the nation. It envisages that cloud can improve e-services delivery, standardization, integration and interoperability, not to mention the government’s ability to replicate and rollout successful initiatives across various states. The department also envisions that cloud computing could help cut costs by consolidating data centers; it could improve utilization of existing infrastructure and resources by replacing proprietary ownership of IT assets with multi-tenancy; and it could vastly improve an otherwise inefficient silo-based procurement process by aggregating demand. Just to put the scale of possibilities in perspective, it was estimated way back in 2011, that if two or more states were to switch to a private cloud to consume IT as a Service, they would save around Rs 6.50 billion from their budgetary allocation towards data center projects.
These are some of the reasons why the Government of India is accelerating its cloud adoption plans. We’ve already got “proof of concept” thanks to early adopters like the Jammu and Kashmir Government, which was the first one to practice cloud-based e-governance, and is using it to administer the issuance of birth and death certificates, ration cards, and other citizen services. Other reasons include the potential to reuse and share applications across departments and ministries with ease minus the cost and pain of individual deployment; the security of back-up infrastructure; the diversification of service vendors; the huge opportunity to promote e-governance and social development through mobile-cloud driven financial inclusion, healthcare awareness, etc.; and last but not the least, a smaller ecological footprint.
What’s more, the cloud could well be the next big opportunity for Indian exports, a vital parameter of the nation’s economic health. Therefore, the government is taking every measure to support the Indian IT industry, so that it can offer cloud computing knowhow and a range of services — from Software as a Service (SaaS)-based apps, remote prototyping to Platform as a Service offerings — to organizations around the world, and catapult the nation to the status of a premier cloud hub.
Clearly, between our country’s IT industry, technology leadership, and think tanks within the Government of India, we have enough expertise in cloud technology and implementation. Therefore, the 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard, which ranks India’s cloud computing policy environment a modest 17th among 24 countries, sparks some degree of concern. While this year’s ranking is an improvement over last year’s 19th place — a result of better intellectual property protection — the fact is that an IT frontrunner like India can easily be among the leaders on the list. With policies being drafted that focus on delivering improved security, privacy and compliance, along with the formulation of a robust regulatory framework, we are not far from realizing this ambition. And we are drawing on all our resources to get there fully aware that moving to the cloud is non-negotiable.
As the use of Cloud Computing increases, issues related to privacy, security and service quality need to be addressed through policies. In fact, many governments around the world are grappling with the same.
But above all, it’s heartening to note that our country is well on its way to defining a clear and comprehensive cloud policy directing cloud adoption by different government agencies. A pivotal agency, tasked with defining the standards governing the sourcing and consumption of cloud computing by these agencies, will speed us up on the right path. Against this backdrop, the DeitY’s agenda for 2013, which names increasing the public sector’s usage of cloud computing among 18 focus areas, is encouraging indeed.
The author is Executive Co-Chairman, Infosys
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‘Looking at BYOD as purely a cost savings vehicle is a mistake’: Chris Bedi, CIO, JDSU
In your view, what are the emerging technologies that are helping (or will help) organizations gain a competitive advantage?
Today, an organization’s competitive advantage is driven by its ability to provide customers with innovative solutions and deliver differentiated customer experience. Hence, emerging technologies in the areas of mobile, cloud, and Big Data that enable IT to improve customer experience will drive competitiveness for organizations.
Both mobile solutions and Big Data are emerging technologies that help us understand our customers’ behavior regarding how they consume products and services so that we can tailor solutions to better meet their needs.
How does IT help the organization identify and gain effective ROI from using these technologies?
It is very important for IT to go beyond the buzzwords and figure out how to leverage the emerging technologies, along with the existing ones, to drive business value. IT leaders must guard against jumping into large implementations without careful analysis of the value drivers for its organization.  The flexibility of cloud-based solutions offers the ability to rapidly prototype, try out new ideas, understand user behaviors, and of course correct where necessary.
How has IT evolved or is evolving to give the business a strategic value in this new world? Please give some examples.
IT can play an important role in driving strategic value for the business.  Some of this is continuing to do what IT organizations have done for years, i.e., drive business process efficiencies and automation, which provide businesses margin improvement and scale.  A key example here is implementing internal private clouds for R&D groups.  IT needs to provide high levels of automation and efficiency to R&D organizations, so they can focus on the end customer and delivering products. In addition, IT needs to leverage emerging technologies to deliver a differentiated customer experience.  Examples of this would be mobile applications and delivering customer intelligence using Big Data.
Today, there is hype about BYOD being still not prevalent across boards. What is your opinion?
A lot of companies are in early stages of exploring BYOD and are optimizing their implementations to suit their enterprises.  In addition to ensuring one’s information security foundation is ready for BYOD, one must also consider the company culture and employee readiness.
In my opinion, looking at BYOD as purely a cost savings vehicle is a mistake. The true value proposition of BYOD is increased employee productivity with reduced IT overhead.  Organizations that embrace BYOD as mechanism to allow employees to leverage whatever device they want to maximize productivity will have an increased likelihood of success.
What according to you will be the next wave in the evolution of virtualization?
Virtualization is a trend that we will continue to see evolve. At this stage, most organizations are pretty mature with their adoption of server virtualization technologies.  While virtualization started out with servers, it is now moving into the network space along with the move towards Software Defined Networks (SDN).  The next wave of virtualization will take place in the network layer with SDN becoming prevalent.
What trends do you observe in the communications, IT infrastructure and enterprise IT space on the spend front and adoption levels?
As business becomes more global and the workforce more mobile, unified communications platforms which deliver a consistent experience across all devices will be required.



In addition, I think we will see video communication in the enterprise become as ubiquitous as voice.  In our personal lives, we have already adopted video and the enterprise will be next. This will put a strain on existing enterprise networks.



IT will need to figure out how to deliver next generation unified communication strategies, including video, without large capital investments.  In the IT infrastructure area, I think we will see continued adoption of virtualization and leveraging the cloud for a number of traditional on premise IT services.















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The changing role of the modern CIO
As organizations move to capitalize on the expanding digital age, the modern Chief Information Officer is morphing into a frontline role with responsibilities embedded more deeply across the business. The ‘I’ in CIO no longer stands simply for ‘information’ as enterprises strive to use technology as a key enabler of innovation across all parts of their business.
Just about every C-suite executive wants a sizeable share of the enterprise IT budget to realize his goals and remain competitive. For organizations to succeed in this rapidly evolving technology environment, the modern CIOs must take action on multiple fronts.
They must be prepared for the spread of cloud and mobile computing, they need to manage the huge increase in Big Data and they should be considering new context-aware layers as part of their analytics services. Equally important, security measures need to be strengthened to combat an insidious growth in cybercrime.
It means that to stay ahead in this new world, the ‘I’ in CIO must also reflect ‘interpretation, improvement, interconnected and invasion’.
The Chief Interpretation Officer
The global explosion in structured and unstructured data presents a formidable challenge for organizations – and also a great opportunity. With the volume of digital data predicted to reach four zetabytes in 2013 (as per IDC Predictions 2013: Competing on the 3rd Platform) – almost 50 percent more than 2012 volumes – CIOs must find new and better ways of interpreting it.
To analyze Big Data from multiple sources in real-time to make it relevant, quantifiable and actionable, an organization needs a next generation optimized analytics infrastructure. The key goal is to exploit human information – consisting of social media and unstructured data – to improve the customer experience, manage brand reputation and drive innovation.
At its most advanced level of business enablement, analytics will also be able to model “what if” scenarios to improve enterprise agility. It will go beyond simply measuring and describing the past to providing an accurate insight into what is likely to happen to drive decision-making.
The Chief Improvement Officer
The trend towards cloud and mobile technologies continues to accelerate as organizations search for new ways to drive growth, increase flexibility and lower costs. Implementing private cloud or infrastructure-as-a-service allows organizations to take advantage of the latest hardware, software and services to meet current needs – no matter how much they change. But to realize the true benefits of these game changing technologies, companies must first realize that cloud and mobility are not inherently suited to every application within an enterprise IT portfolio.
Legacy applications that cannot run on these platforms risk becoming obsolete, which means a modernization program is a priority. By determining which applications are right for cloud and which are right for mobile, organizations can:
  • Improve time to market by selectively targeting applications that will drive the most business value
  • Increase responsiveness to enterprise priorities and changing demands of customers
  • Manage risk and maximize IT resources with a non-disruptive approach to assessing and transforming applications
  • Apply appropriate modernization strategies to reduce application costs and increase their value, while reducing infrastructure and operations costs.
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The Chief Interconnected Officer

The proliferation of mobile devices combined with the increase in volume, velocity and variety of data means employees and customers now expect to access information at anytime and anywhere. It is a trend, which is changing the way enterprises create value and drive competitive differentiation.
Integrating mobile-based applications with cloud will become a critical component of enterprise architectures in 2013 to help meet this demand. It will allow organizations to quickly create new services and business models to engage with customers.
To succeed, market leading mobile cloud applications will need to:
  • Understand user preferences and deliver highly personalized interaction
  • Seamlessly integrate information services and deliver them on multiple devices
  • Identify the user’s location and device
  • Understand the context including past interactions
  • Be highly responsive and truly scalable to support unpredictable growth patterns
While the benefits are significant, concerns about compliance, governance, security and privacy will be a barrier to adoption. Changing the way information is stored, accessed and shared – and bolstering comprehensive security across the enterprise – must be front of mind in such a converged mobile cloud environment. New policies will also have to address Big Data issues, non-traditional information sources and unstructured data.


The Chief Invasion Officer
Cybercrime is increasing in intensity and sophistication, costing organizations time, money and potentially their reputation.

A recent study named Cost of Cyber Crime Study by the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by HP found the occurrence of successful cyber-attacks on organizations has more than doubled in two years to 102 per week.
Information theft continues to represent the highest cost followed by disruption to business or lost productivity, with the average annualized cost of cybercrime across the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Japan totaling USD 5.3 million per year.
A worrying trend is that cyber criminals are becoming more aggressive, with attacks targeting foreign intelligence services, ‘hactivists’, organized crime and insiders.
Security is even more complex with the spread of cloud services because the entire ecosystem is no longer under a centralized organization’s control.
To reduce the risk, CIOs must be proactive and deliver a whole-of-enterprise response which:
  • Builds security into the fabric of each process or service early in the lifecycle, rather than trying to secure systems as an afterthought
  • Uses security intelligence which leverages multiple sources delivered in context so that threats can be detected before they do damage
  • Protects mission-critical business services such as e-commerce, supply chain or messaging systems that the enterprise relies on every day.
Foreseeing change
In such a dynamic and fast-moving IT environment, modern CIOs also need a fifth ‘I’ - the ‘insight’ or ‘intuition’ to predict the future. They have to anticipate next year’s trends and allocate their IT budget accordingly – across the entire enterprise.
CIOs who plan well and are strategically ready to take advantage of future technology changes will have more time to innovate.
The new role is all about having the adaptability and agility to unlock the immense potential of this exciting new digital age to create a market winning lead.

The author is Chief Technologist, Enterprise Services, HP India





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Narayana Hrudayalaya shows power of cloud in healthcare with estimated CAPEX savings of Rs 25 crore
Narayana Hrudayalaya began its cloud journey in 2010, forward looking for any enterprise, let alone one in the healthcare vertical. Narayana Hrudayalaya needed a solution that was scalable and reduced IT administrative overheads.
Thus, a decision was taken early on to go for a private cloud and the process was set in motion with a six-month proof of concept at one of its smaller unit hospitals in Jamshedpur with around 40 users logging into the cloud instance. Today, the service encompasses over 2,000 users across 23 facilities of the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group.
Srikanth Raman, CIO, Narayana Hrudayalaya states that the cloud has been central to Narayana Hrudayalaya’s goal of being the first Indian healthcare major to hit the 30,000 beds mark. Narayana Hrudayalaya’s private cloud hosts the group’s mission-critical front-end hospital applications, which serve patients, as well as backend ERP applications. “Thanks to the cloud deployment which uses HCL’s Blu enterprise cloud IaaS, it has been easy to standardize our master records, transactions processes and MIS,” says Raman. Patients at Narayana Hrudayalaya now only need to register once at any of the unit hospitals and the details are available across all group hospitals including the electronic medical records (EMRs).
According to Raman, from an ROI perspective, Narayana Hrudayalaya has seen a direct savings in CAPEX payouts and maintenance costs over a 5 to 7 year horizon, estimated at around Rs 25 crore. IaaS has negated the need for putting up in-house infrastructure and its own active DR. Any effort to do so would have involved CAPEX implications of over a crore for each facility.
Other indirect benefits are in fact huge and more relevant, Raman says. The nimbleness of the IT deployment has increased manifold. A new hospital can now be hooked to the standard IT platform in a week’s time as against months earlier.  Narayana Hrudayalaya’s MIS is standardized across the group and this transparency drives constant cost savings and service improvements. Also, concerns around data backup, DR, retaining skilled IT staff, etc. have been resolved.
Raman says, cloud-based IT systems integrated with mobility platforms are the future for all business, not only healthcare. The future he would like to see involves dependable public cloud services offerings by top notch private service providers, which integrate seamlessly with state-wide area networks, provided and maintained by the government as an infrastructure service.
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Large enterprises can save nearly USD 30 billion through SAP consolidation
Research released by HCL Enterprise Application Services (EAS) has revealed that globally large enterprises could save nearly USD 30 billion in total through consolidating their instances of SAP. The global survey of 225 CIOs focused on their organizations’ current and future usage of SAP, revealing that on average they had five separate instances of SAP operating across their business. In fact, more than a third (39 percent) stated they were running in excess of six instances. The findings also showed that on average the cost per user, per year of running SAP was USD 1,518 and by moving to a single instance large enterprises could potentially make savings of up to 25 percent.
“Many large enterprises have a global SAP footprint, yet have been unable to truly operate in a truly unified manner due to having a fragmented software landscape. For some, there are legitimate reasons for multiple instances such as country-specific requirements. However, for a significant majority it has been a result of mergers and acquisitions or multiple implementations across different areas of the business, which have never been rationalized or consolidated. As the research shows, such an environment can be very costly to support,” said Steve Cardell, President of Enterprise Application Services at HCL. “Whilst it may seem surprising, given the inherent logic and financial business case, there are clearly very substantial political and operational hurdles that can stand in the way of companies achieving a single instance. So we are now seeing large companies either making top-down decisions to drive through such changes or deciding it is the wrong battle to fight so instead are looking to improve integration between systems.”
The research also highlighted the prevalence of legacy SAP versions still being used as core operating platforms. The latest version of SAP (ECC 6) is only being used by just over a third (37 percent) of organizations, while more are using ECC 5 (54 percent) and SAP 4.7 (44 percent). This is a further indication that many enterprises have adopted a piecemeal approach towards upgrading their SAP environments as they have expanded their operations.
The survey went on to find out how large enterprises were planning to use SAP as part of their future operational IT strategy. When asked about their plans to use in-memory computing, more than three-quarters of CIOs said they planned to or had already deployed such technology. Not surprisingly, considering SAP’s push around SAP HANA, the vast majority (80 percent) of respondents said that the company’s in-memory technology will play a major role.
An increasing number of large enterprises were also embracing cloud services according to the research. Just under three-quarters (73 percent) of CIOs said that they had implemented cloud services in some way or form, and 74 percent said that SAP technology would play a significant role. Mobility was also a big area of focus for the majority of enterprises with 93 percent of CIOs saying they were planning to or already had a mobility strategy in place. Of those surveyed, more than half (53 percent) stated that SAP technology would be the cornerstone of their strategy.
“Trends such as mobility, cloud and Big Data are increasingly becoming catalysts for change at many organizations. Consequently, we are starting to see the evolution of traditional enterprise environments with users accessing the SAP technology on-premise, on-demand and on-device. At the same time in-memory computing promises to be a real game changer for many large enterprises. Products such as SAP Business Suite on HANA promise to reduce TCO and deliver efficiency savings to users by enabling them to do things faster and at a greater volume. Certainly, having fewer instances of SAP will make this journey a lot smoother for many organizations,” said James Riley, Global Head of Innovation at HCL EAS.
The global survey of 225 large enterprises with revenues in excess of USD 1 billion was commissioned by HCL EAS and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne.
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India has the potential to lead the world in the nexus of social, mobile and cloud: Gartner
India has the potential to lead the world in the adoption of the Nexus of Forces, which is the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social interaction, mobility, cloud and information, however for this to happen a number of technological and socioeconomic shifts must happen, according to Gartner, Inc.
The manner in which IT is used, developed and managed will change significantly, because of the Nexus of Forces, and the technologies that sit behind them. These pivotal technologies include the explosive use of media tablets, mobile applications, context-aware computing, the Internet of things, next-generation analytics and in-memory computing (IMC).
“However, for this to occur, new infrastructure will have to replace the old; new types of servers, networks and even data centers will have to be rolled out," said Rakesh Kumar, Research Vice President at Gartner. “A cash rich consumer base is required that is able to demand and take advantage of social, mobile and context-aware applications. Furthermore, established ways of behaving in education, shopping, banking, etc., will have to morph to take advantage of new technologies.”
Transformation of this nature is expensive and time-consuming. The economic, demographic and social outlook for western economies suggests that, for the next few years, such changes will be difficult to achieve. At first glance, India seems to be well-placed to embrace these changes — it has virtually no legacy systems, billions of dollars are being spent on developing new infrastructure, a wealthy, a well-educated middle class hungry for change, and the country is pivotal in the digital supply chain. Therefore, Gartner analysts said the question of whether India will be the first place to see the emergence of this new computing scenario is important.
“Based on current forecasts, India will become one of the world's biggest consumer economies during the next five years. By 2014, India will have more than 1 billion mobile subscribers. India will see a significant rollout of new IT infrastructure during the next five years in both the public and private sectors,” said Kumar.
Given the economic and demographic statistics, the improving levels of literacy and the large consumer base, India should be ideally positioned to take advantage of the Nexus of Forces. Entrepreneurs in region, such as Bangalore and Mumbai, should be able to create products that link these technologies together.
“While there are significant opportunities in India to lead in the Nexus of Forces, contrary forces are also at play. The uptake of social media remains quite low. There is a degree of ambivalence toward the use of social media for marketing by Indian retailers,” said Kumar. “Although it's easy to see how social media could grow rapidly during the next few years, privacy concerns and the cultural fabric of the country may suggest otherwise. Indians are, by nature, private people, focusing more on family than on other, large social groups. If the use of social media does not reach a substantial proportion of that young, affluent consumer base, then the benefits of the Nexus of Forces may not fully materialize.”
A second factor is the skepticism toward the cloud. Indian IT users feel that the public cloud remains immature for enterprise use. The major concerns reflect the ones that Gartner sees worldwide, namely, security, data retention and the maturity of the offerings. One specific issue is the belief that the underlying financial constructs of public cloud services do not add up.
“Many people feel that it would be difficult for public cloud operators to provide enterprise services that are lower than their internal costs. This view reflects the fact that most people still view the public cloud as a software as a service (SaaS) model, rather than infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or the platform as a service (PaaS) model. This carries complex financial and technical permutations in areas such as patch compatibility, testing of new applications and contract management,” Kumar said.



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Can a startup transform Indian agriculture by using the cloud?
In April 2013, a recent news update on farmers in different districts of Bengal throwing their produce of tomatoes on the road shocked viewers. These farmers were infuriated with the fact that wholesalers were offering them only 25 paise per kilo. If they sold at these prices, they would have incurred heavy losses as there was a massive mismatch between the production cost and the cost of selling. This is not a rare incident, as similar cases have been reported across the country for many years. Farmers have been even driven to take the adverse step of killing themselves due to poor crop yield.
While Indian agriculture has been the single largest source of employment in India, there is a big mismatch, as the yield does not match global standards. Startup CropIn Technology wants to change this scenario through its vision of digitizing agriculture by using a combination of cloud-based technologies and mobile phones to improve farm yield. Started by founder and CEO, Krishna Kumar, an engineer by profession, Kumar worked for more than four years with General Electric, and was a fast track executive with a great future in GE, having been one of the few selected ones for its Global Leadership program.
With a passion to bring state-of-the-art technology in agriculture, the founder left his lucrative job at GE and soon Kunal Prasad a childhood friend and classmate of Kumar joined him after completing his MBA as COO. Kumar brought in his experience from Tata Motors in dealer management. Later Chittaranjan Jena who had experience in supply chain management, joined as CTO.
Explaining the vision, Krishna Kumar, CEO, CropIn Technology, says, “CropIn Technology was established in August 2010 to develop and offer on a low cost pay-as-you-use product on an IT platform on cloud integrated with a Windows or Android-based smart mobile app. The vision was to bring affordable state-of-the-art technology in agriculture and the mission was to make every farm visible online, make every farmer adopt the best global agricultural practices and to make every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet global quality standards and thus become export worthy. This technology impacts the livelihood of farmers at the bottom of the pyramid by generating more productivity out of the same farm."
By using a mobile app developed by CropIn Technology, a surveyor can input details related to a farm and monitor the efficiency of a farm. Crops are regularly monitored on a thorough basis with respect to fertilizer sprayed and detection of pests, if any. Regular monitoring of fertilizers is essential to ensure that the crops exported are compliant with the required safety levels of different chemicals as prescribed by different countries for consumption. The mobile app captures information related to the farm surveyed and relays it back to a cloud-based server.

"CropIn technology impacts the livelihood of farmers at the bottom of the pyramid by generating more productivity out of the same farm"


Krishna Kumar CEO, CropIn Technology


The cloud plays a pivotal role in the success of the solution. “The cloud enables our customers to deploy this solution quickly, as it just takes five days to go live with this solution. From a speed and quality perspective, this is akin to a customer getting a Mercedes vis-à-vis a bullock cart,” states Kumar.
CropIn also uses BI to provide in-depth analytics to help farmers raise their productivity levels, and discover new opportunities. “By using our mobile app, 600 acres can be covered in one man day vis-à-vis the 90 man day period that is typically required. We have also been able to raise the farm productivity and acreage by a minimum of 10-15 percent. For large farms, the ROI can be quite significant,” explains Kumar.
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SOWING IN SEEDS FOR FUTURE GROWTH
While the initial six months were challenging for CropIn Technology, the first ray of hope came when Safal, the NDDB arm, asked the team to do a pilot. The success of the pilot attracted multinationals like Field Fresh and PepsiCo who asked for proof of concept and once they found that CropIn Technology platform was better than any other technology they had ever seen before, they placed orders on CropIn.
The challenges faced during these two years were to convince the four multinationals why they should trust a startup company and how this technology can transform agriculture for farmers, as well as for corporates. “We physically worked with these companies and their contract farmers in their farms, and understood the finer nuances of the agricultural business, their supply chains, the market dynamics and the customer needs at each process. We then modified and co-created and evolved the platform in all its sophistication that it is now today,” states Krishna.
The CropIn platform is also playing a key role in connecting farmers to financial institutions. Banks like HDFC are using this technology to provide unsecured loans to farmers. CropIn is helping HDFC Bank reach the farmer faster, collect the required information remotely and in real-time. This fuels up the loan process and cuts short the timelines, making loans available in a short span of time.
Going forward, CropIn is bringing its product solution on Windows 8 for mobile, which the company believes would enable it to address 85 percent of global mobile customers in the agri-business who want to download their mobile app on their Android or Windows mobiles to manage their farms on cloud. The opportunities are huge for CropIn across the agriculture landscape as the product can be customized to be used by the banks (to track the farmers who take loans from them), seed producers, contract farming companies, food processors, exporters, fertilizer companies, pesticide manufacturers, agriculture and horticulture research and development agencies to experiment or benchmark practices for best yield.
Today, CropIn has more than 15,000 acres of farms belonging to 8,000 and odd farmers, (some having less than half acre), using their product on IT platform and top multinationals including PepsiCo, Field-Fresh (A Bharti Entreprise), Omnikan (A division of Kankor Group), Technico (ITC Group), Tata Rallis, Euro Fruits, INI Farms and Garden Valley as its paying customers — a remarkable feat for a startup that began its commercial operations just in June 2011.
While India is already a known leader in producing commodities like milk, coconuts and black pepper, the opportunity to transform Indian agriculture is significant with the help of information technology. If CropIn succeeds in transforming even a minor part of our agriculture ecosystem, the catalyst effect on India could be truly huge and transformative in nature.

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Indian public cloud services market to reach USD 443 million in 2013
The public cloud services market in India is forecast to grow 36 percent in 2013 to total USD 443 million, up from USD 326 million in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continues as the fastest-growing segment of the market in India, growing 22.7 percent in 2012 to USD 43.1 million, and it is expected to grow 39.6 percent in 2013 to USD 60.2 million.


Software as a service (SaaS) continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market in India, comprising 36 percent of the total market in 2012. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, USD 4.2 billion will be spent on cloud services in India, USD 1.6 billion of which will be spent on SaaS.


"The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. "Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers."


Although there is wide variation between cloud services market sub segments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings. The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after SaaS, comprising 23 percent of the total market in 2012 in India, followed by cloud infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [SaaS]) at 13 percent, cloud advertising services at 12 percent, cloud management and security services at 11 percent, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at 5 percent.


Market dynamics vary substantially when considering the cloud services market size and market growth across the different regions of the world. In general, the emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa show the highest growth rates, while representing the smallest overall markets. China is the exception, being both a large and growing market. Likewise, the mature markets of North America, Western Europe, Japan and the mature Asia/Pacific countries constitute the larger, but slower-growth, markets.


"IT services providers, particularly those focused on delivering cloud services offerings or related services, must consider these disproportionately large mature markets if they want to play a leading role in cloud services growth worldwide," Anderson said. "Similarly, markets in Emerging Asia/Pacific, Greater China and Latin America should also be important considerations for IT services providers that want to capitalize on the high growth of these regions, particularly Latin America and Greater China." Read More

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Microsoft to invest USD 10.1 billion in tech megatrends: Kevin Turner
Microsoft will invest USD 10.1 billion this year in R&D across five technology megatrends. In 2012, the company spent over USD 9.5 billion in R&D, which it claims was more than what its nearest competitor spent. While most industry experts acknowledge cloud, social, mobility and Big Data to be the four mega trends in IT today, Kevin Turner, the company’s Chief Operating Officer said Microsoft has a fifth and an additional opportunity of “touch” that intersects all the other four technologies.              
“We are moving our entire ecosystem to touch. This won’t happen overnight but it already has strong momentum. Around 1.5 billion people in the world use Windows today and Windows 8 brings touch to the masses. Not only that, Windows 8 brings touch to all form factors with the Surface tablet, laptops, and PCs. Microsoft has more than doubled the number of Windows 8 devices since its launch in October 2012,” said Turner.          
Microsoft is also transforming itself from a software company to a devices and services company with the primary focus of delivering devices and services that people love and businesses need, Turner said at a Microsoft Executive Forum in Bangalore on Tuesday. He said Microsoft has the advantage of being present across all three types of businesses – consumers, businesses and advertisers.                          
Turner talked about Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud strategy and some of its key offerings on the cloud such as Office 365, Yammer, and Skype. Microsoft statistics revealed that with 300 million users, Skype drives one third of worldwide phone traffic. Since its launch in mid-2011, Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest growing business globally. “The new Office revolutionizes productivity for people and businesses and is a significant innovation across the four core areas of cloud, social, devices and IT control,” Turner said.                  
Turner also reinstated Microsoft’s commitment to security. According to a Secunia Vulnerability Report 2013, non-Microsoft vulnerabilities constituted 86 percent of the total number in 2012. The Common Vulnerability Exposures (CVE) count in Microsoft programs was 8.3 percent lower in 2012 than in 2011, indicating less vulnerability in Microsoft programs.        




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Maharashtra Government shows power of cloud with savings of Rs 50 crore
Virtual machines customized to your requirement for a measly Rs 4000 per month; ability to kick start projects quickly and a massive ROI of Rs 50 crore – this is just a glimpse of the potential of a technology like cloud computing for the Government. Led by an aggressive IT secretary in Rajesh Aggarwal, the Maharashtra government is showing other departments what one can achieve if technology is leveraged to its optimum.
Called MahaGov Cloud – a private cloud setup by DIT, Government of Maharashtra, the initiative seeks to provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services to various departments in Government of Maharashtra. Led by a passionate and enthusiastic IT secretary, Rajesh Aggarwal, the initiative has quietly transformed the way IT services are provisioned by the government.  Today, the MahaGov Cloud has been implemented in the State Data Centre and is extensively used by departments for website and application hosting.
The list of departments which use the cloud include departments like Public Health Dept, Mhada, DIT, Charity Commissioner, Textile, Law and Judiciary, Water Supply and Sanitation, IGRO, Food and Drugs, School Education, Social Justice, Relief & Rehabilitation, Forest Department, Rojgarvahini, Tribal, Bombay High court, UID, Solapur University, Sales Tax department and CIDCO.

"The cloud has already delivered approximate savings of Rs 50 crore on a conservative basis, and has given us the ability to accelerate projects of national importance"


Rajesh Aggarwal, IT Secretary, Maharashtra


“Our objective was to reduce the cost of providing IT services, while increasing the capacity of our IT team to kickstart projects with maximum flexibility and scalability. The cloud has already delivered approximate savings of Rs 50 crore on a conservative basis, and has given us the ability to accelerate projects of national importance,” says Maharashtra IT secretary, Rajesh Aggarwal. The Maharashtra SDC happens to be the first State Data Center (SDC) in the country to have a fully operational government cloud. It is also the only SDC in India to be a member of APNIC, making it vendor independent for internet bandwidth.
During implementation of MH-SDC, the State had conceptualized on implementing virtualization for efficient utilization of the infrastructure in SDC. Accordingly, a PoC on virtualization using VMWare and Microsoft Hyper V was started in November 2011 leading to implementation of fully operational cloud by May 2012.  To avoid dependence on a particular technology, MahaGov Cloud works on Microsoft as well as VMware. The VMware cloud has been chosen for critical applications, for now. Around 350 VMs were deployed in just 3 months as part of the MahaGov Cloud on Vmware.


Due to template and clone features, the time to provision a server along with OS and database has been reduced tremendously. Using feature of thin provision of storage and memory, resources are efficiently utilized and allocated as per the requirement and performance. The department is also taking advantage of features like live migration has helped the SDC team to manage planned maintenance without requiring any downtime of the application. The entire management and monitoring of cloud can be done using a dashboard with appropriate alerts and reports. To encourage adoption, the team is also conducting a series of awareness sessions on cloud for sharing knowledge.
Chargeback model – a first in the government

What’s also noteworthy and unique about the MahGov Cloud initiative is the fact that the department has in a first created a comprehensive rate chart for availing cloud services. Departments can pick and choose IT components as per their requirement. Departments can also access a self-provisioning portal for cloud.  To encourage adoption, initially, cloud services are being offered for free to all departments.


“We want to make the cloud self-sustainable. Based on initial capital and maintenance costs, we have devised a chargeback and metering mechanism.  Some departments are being served dummy bills so that they know how much is actually provisioned and consumed by them in the SDC. We are encouraging departments to host their applications on our SDC. The rate card has acted as a counterforce for containing costs and has also contributed in stabilizing and putting an upper cap for prices of standard services,” says Aggarwal.
Everything as a service

Having established the cloud as a basic platform, Maharashtra’s IT secretary is now experimenting with all possible options. Besides providing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS on a monthly basis, the department is offering Business Intelligence tools as a Service (BIaaS), GIS thematic map as a Service (GISaaS), API as a service and Survey as a Service and Authentication as a service.
“We want to provide every possible combination for government departments. Many senior government executives now carry iPads, and we want to encourage them to start experimenting with data by providing them with an interface to analyze using what-if-scenarios. We have a vision that all departments, commissionerates and organizations within Maharashtra should be able to use business intelligence reports and dashboards to perform analysis to get meaningful and actionable information,” states Aggarwal.
For example, dashboards have been created for tracking UID enrolment and comparison of enrolment data with Census data. The dashboards enable key insights into demographic profile of enrolled residents and also into the process and performance of enrolment. The state government has also implemented a tablet based application for conducting audit of UID enrolment centers and has made it available to other states over cloud. Dashboards have also been created for the transaction details of service delivery through Citizen Service Centers. Some interesting observations and information from the analysis of this data is currently being investigated to understand patterns of consumption of services across the state.
The GIS as a service has been rolled out to encourage and enable all departments to subscribe and avail the benefits of GIS. The future roadmap for GIS includes mapping of electricity meters in each household of Maharashtra and UID integration of the household data. Once the basic household data is mapped, and UID based integration is achieved, GIS would become the common platform for delivery of services and benefits across several schemes and programs.
The opportunity to accelerate

Apart from the huge cost savings, the real benefit is the opportunity to accelerate. Aggarwal gives the example of a department which had a project cost of Rs 20 crore, and would have required a timeframe of 6-7 months to setup the infrastructure. “We showed the department that by hosting the applications on our cloud, the department could reduce the significantly reduce the cost and accelerate the project. We reduced the cost from Rs 20 crore to Rs 5 crore and enabled the department to go live quickly. In many cases, if a project is started quickly, the effect can be transformational,” opines Aggarwal.
The Maharashtra government’s approach and aggressive embracement of cloud technologies is a superb case to showcase how a technology like cloud can be fully leveraged to bring about large scale transformation. If other state governments start going on the cloud path, the journey towards transformation of India will be faster and much more efficient.
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Wipro launches hosted VDI solution using Cisco UCS
Wipro has announced the launch of Wipro Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), a next generation hosted end user computing solution that will enable IT organizations to deliver a significantly enhanced and productive end user experience to any device, while reducing costs and improving security. The solution is built on Cisco and NetApp FlexPod infrastructure based on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) technology. This is the first Wipro hosted service launched from a portfolio of planned hosted XaaS solutions.



Wipro’s global computing utility for enterprise clients, iStructure, provides the platform for Wipro VDI as well as the company’s portfolio of XaaS services.  Wipro VDI is a complete, fully integrated solution, based on the desktop virtualization software from Citrix and VMware that offers better ease of management, continuity, security, compliance and control than traditional physical desktop infrastructures. This solution can be extended to deliver a complete virtual workspace that includes voice, video, rich media applications, end point transformation, and integration of unified communication and collaboration applications.



Pinaki Kar, President and CEO, Wipro Data Center Services said, “Today’s ever-increasing business need to reduce IT asset costs, while increasing security and agility is driving the demand for XaaS offerings. Enterprises are looking for tailored, cloud based solutions such as Wipro hosted VDI.  We’re thrilled to be working with Cisco to address these market needs with a truly unique portfolio of solutions.”



Commenting on the launch, Malay Verma, Vice President & Global Head for Cisco Business Unit, Wipro, said, “Wipro’s Cisco Business Unit delivers next-generation end-to-end productized industry solutions built on Cisco and partner technologies. Wipro’s hosted VDI solution integrates desktop virtualization with social collaboration thereby enhancing end user productivity, IT efficiency and business value for enterprises.”



“The modern workspace is changing rapidly, bringing opportunities for end users, IT, and organizations that embrace and manage these changes.  By adopting Wipro's as-a-service cloud-based VDI solution, built on the innovative Cisco UCS architecture, IT can increase business efficiency, productivity and agility by helping deliver an exceptionally flexible and highly secure workspace,” said John Thompson, Vice President, Cisco Global Enterprise Partner Organization.



Thomas Stanley, Vice President Global Alliances and Global System Integrators, NetApp, said, “Desktop virtualization has become a solution of choice for many IT organizations. Wipro’s hosted VDI solution, delivered on Cisco and NetApp FlexPod infrastructure, is the ideal platform for both scale up and scale out requirements of customers choosing to virtualize their desktop environments. The combination of NetApp software and storage with Wipro services further enhances the overall economic value of our joint solutions.”

Wipro is clearly tapping into a robust market niche.


According to Gartner, “In 2012, the IaaS market was USD 6.1 billion, and it is forecast to grow to USD 24.2 billion in 2016.  Cloud Compute Services continue to be a very high growth sub segment within the IaaS market with a CAGR of 42.6 percent.”  Read More

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Infor announces cloud initiative using Amazon Web Services to tackle Big Data
Infor today announced Infor Sky Vault a big data initiative that leverages Infor ION. Corporate data is fragmented across diverse commercial, legacy, and custom applications.  Using ION, customers can extract transactions formatted in industry standard XML documents and send that normalized data to the cloud for further analytics, helping them obtain meaningful insight to drive faster, better business decisions.


Recognizing these challenges, Infor is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable customers to accelerate time to insight from various transactional data streams. Among the planned features of Infor Sky Vault are:


· Pre-built, domain-specific business analytics, reporting and dashboards powered by Infor ION BI that incorporate industry and role best practices built on Infor ION Business Vault


· Cloud-optimized data repository powered by Amazon Redshift to more quickly, easily, and securely go-live and scale as data volumes grow


· Industry-leading workflow and integration platform with Infor ION to support application interoperability and data transition between on-premise and cloud

services from Infor Consulting Services to XML enable applications via the ‘ION Factory,’ which provides for rapid development of integrations to third party and custom systems and applications


Infor Sky Vault is planned to launch in the second half of this year with pre-defined content for Sales, Finance, and Production. Additional functional areas and industries will be added in subsequent iterations.

To help get customers started, assessment services will be offered in conjunction with Sky Vault to determine how fast customers can go from data to insights. Packaged services will also be available to integrate additional third party and custom applications.
"Companies want actionable intelligence from their data and they need it fast and at a reasonable price point,” said Steve Moroski, SVP, Platform Technologies, Infor. “The Infor Sky Vault initiative will focus on the relevant components to deliver insight: fast integration, parallel databases, cloud economics, speed to value, industry insight, and beautiful user experiences.  This is the formula for fast and broad adoption, where customers can get consistent, accurate, and useful data fast – in weeks not months or years."


"We designed Amazon Redshift to be fast, inexpensive, easy to use and secure and we’ve seen strong interest and adoption from customers,” said Terry Wise, AWS Director of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem. “We’re excited to help power Infor Sky Vault, a unique offering that will help customers extract value from critical business transactions.” Read More

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VMware adds interoperability with Ubuntu OpenStack cloud
VMware has contributed plug-ins to the OpenStack Project that guarantees the project's networking platform will recognize and work with virtual machines running under VMware's vSphere management environment and VMware's Nicira Network Virtualization Platform.

VMware acquired startup Nicira last July for USD 1.26 billion and has made its NVP the basis of future virtualized networking in what it terms "the software-defined data center." The Network Virtualization Platform from Nicira, a leader in OpenFlow network protocol concepts, is also the basis for the Quantum networking platform in OpenStack. Nicira was a heavy contributor to OpenStack before the acquisition, and it remains one now. At the OpenStack Summit on Tuesday, VMware gave these contributions a particular cast. Through close collaboration between Canonical and VMware, they will work inside the Ubuntu distribution of OpenStack, according to VMware's VP of vSphere product management Joshua Goodman.
Suse Linux and Red Hat also have distributions of OpenStack. Red Hat's KVM hypervisor is the one native to the OpenStack cloud open source code. Suse Linux is often cited as the version that works most closely with Windows Server and its hypervisor, Hyper-V. Both are keen competitors of VMware's ESX Server.


The move also reflects VMware's growing realization that it is likely to need to live with many OpenStack implementations in the future, despite its early hopes that its own cloud software stack, the vCloud Director suite, would be the basis of private and public clouds everywhere. The collaboration with Canonical gives it an OpenStack partner that is less an immediate competitor than either Red Hat or Suse.

VMware contributed the plug-ins for the Grizzly release of OpenStack, which came out April 4. Canonical has not yet included Grizzly in its version of OpenStack, but it plans to do so by the end of the month.


On Wednesday, Martin Casado, founder of Nicira and now chief architect of networking at VMware, posted a blog on the VMware website reading, "The transformation to the software-defined data center will take many forms, and VMware understands that many customers will want to piece together different technologies based on their requirements…
He said VMware is committed to having its virtualization environment work with OpenStack, despite perceived competition between them, and VMware has "almost doubled the number of developers working on OpenStack" compared to Nicira's previous level of contribution. Through its Nicira-acquired developers VMware was among the top ten contributors of code to the Grizzly release, he added. Read More

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Amazon's S3 now stores 2 trillion objects; handles 1.1 million requests per second
The power, potential and future growth of cloud is best exhibited by Amazon Web Services. In a recent blog post, Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, described the huge growth by sharing some interesting numbers.
"I'm pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second," said Barr in the blog post.
To put these numbers in perspective, Barr points out that our galaxy is estimated to contain about 400 billion stars. That works out to five objects for every star in the galaxy. Interestingly, the field of Paleodemography estimates that 100 billion people have been born on planet Earth. Each of them can have 20 S3 objects.
What is noteworthy is the fact it took AWS six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number.
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Red Hat announces establishment of partner network for cloud infrastructure solutions
Red Hat today announced partner support for its Red Hat OpenStack distribution, which graduated from a preview version to an Early Adopter Program today. In conjunction with this, Red Hat also announced the establishment of its Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, focused on building a robust ecosystem around the Red Hat OpenStack distribution and cloud infrastructure technologies, which is currently accepting nominations for early adopter partner participation.



Said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization, Red Hat, “As we're getting closer to delivering an enterprise-ready OpenStack offering backed by our award-winning commercial support, it’s extremely important that we collaborate to establish a vibrant ecosystem of partners with solutions and services that are designed to meet our customers' needs. We see that partners and customers are looking for standards to emerge within the OpenStack ecosystem, and Red Hat is here to deliver stable enterprise targets with which partners can develop, test and support solutions for joint customers.”


The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network is a multi-tiered program designed for third-party commercial companies that offer hardware, software and services for customers to implement cloud infrastructure solutions powered by Red Hat OpenStack. Building an ecosystem of third-party technology partners with solutions that have been tested, certified and supported is an important part of establishing customer confidence in Red Hat OpenStack. Responding to this need, a core element of the program is a certification process for technology partners to integrate and validate their solutions around Red Hat OpenStack.


“We have seen a tremendous interest in and pent-up demand for OpenStack from a broad range of Cisco’s most strategic customers, and we fully expect OpenStack to be widely adopted. Until now, there have been limited production-grade fully supported solutions available.  We are therefore excited to be exploring opportunities to expand our relationship to collaborate closely with Red Hat on the OpenStack cloud infrastructure,” said Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president, Cisco Services.
The program offers partners the opportunity to gain the necessary expertise with Red Hat OpenStack technologies, as well as key resources they need to test, certify and publish their solutions. Partners can certify with a single component of OpenStack such as Cinder, Swift or Quantum, or they may choose to certify with the entire set of OpenStack technologies as supported by Red Hat. As part of the program Red Hat will provide access to Red Hat OpenStack builds and roadmap, developer support and a range of go-to-market activities to assist in customer adoption.



“Intel and Red Hat have a long tradition of working together to address our joint enterprise customers’ challenges in the datacenter.Intel is excited to be an alliance member of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and to support Red Hat to deliver an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution. We are collaborating with Red Hat to embed security into Red Hat OpenStack solutions to improve security through Intel’s Trusted Compute Pools-- enabling an automated hardware root of trust to enforce and monitor cloud servers. Today’s announcement is evidence of the joint commitment to provide secure cloud infrastructure solutions to customers,” said Billy Cox, Director, Intel Datacenter Software Division.


Today hardware, software and services partners can join the program as an early adopter and gain access to Red Hat OpenStack builds, developer support and insight into the Red Hat OpenStack certification, which is slated to be fully available in line with the supported Red Hat OpenStack enterprise offering that is expected later this year.



The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network features three participation levels, in addition to the Alliance Tier:
  1. Red Hat OpenStack Premier: Unique and enterprise-ready partner integration with Red Hat OpenStack technologies
  2. Red Hat OpenStack Advanced: Certified technical compatibility with Red Hat OpenStack components, including but not limited to Cinder, Nova and Quantum
  3. Red Hat OpenStack Ready: Base-level compatibility with Red Hat OpenStack
Companies interested in being part of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network can begin participating as early adopters today. Technology certification as part of the Program is planned for later this year. Read More

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Storage trends to watch out for
The amount of data stored by organizations is growing remorselessly, and the effect of this growth on enterprise IT costs is driving both suppliers and buyers to explore new technologies and approaches to data storage. Currently, two of the biggest trends in data storage are the use of public cloud storage, and flash memory.
Because of network latencies, public storage clouds such as those operated by Amazon or Microsoft will never fully replace on-premise storage, to which they will always be a complement. But as data volumes continue to balloon, and increasing numbers of businesses decide to store data indefinitely, public storage clouds will inevitably become a commonplace home for business data that is not highly performance-sensitive. Public cloud storage promises many of the same benefits that have already caused the take-up of other cloud services. It is elastic and infinitely scalable, and carries highly predictable costs. By offloading responsibility for an infrastructure activity to a service provider, it allows IT departments to focus on the more directly productive work of improving or developing new applications.
All of the top-tier IT suppliers have now either launched or promised public storage services, or have begun reselling third-party services. Enterprise usage of cloud storage is greatly simplified by the usage of on-premise devices known as cloud storage gateways, and over the last three to four years sales of these devices have been steadily growing. The market for storage gateways was pioneered by a handful of start-up suppliers, but during 2012 cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft entered the sector.
Architecturally, flash memory is at the opposite end of the scale to public cloud storage. Flash is a blessing for IT, because it is solving the growing challenges created by the performance limitations of disk storage. A common misconception is that flash storage is expensive, and only suits exotic, high performance apps. The reality is that flash is already boosting performance and reducing costs in a range of other settings, including but not limited to mainstream database and front-office apps, Microsoft Exchange, and server and desktop virtualization.
Currently, the most common data center usage of flash memory is within conventional disk-based storage systems. Installing a relatively limited number of flash drives into these devices can improve their performance significantly, while also reducing their purchase price. Future usage of flash will follow this pattern, and for the foreseeable future flash will never be more than a complement to disk in enterprise storage systems. The biggest reason for this is that although flash costs are falling, disk drive costs per GB of capacity are falling even faster.
However, other ways of using flash within data centers are emerging, which represent a departure from conventional storage architectures that have become dominated by the use of centralized, shared storage systems. In future, data will continue to be stored in such systems, which will themselves comprise flash and disk storage. However, most frequently accessed data will be stored in flash drives located within servers, or inside large, flash-only storage systems — either as cache copies of centrally stored data, or as the primary, working copies of that data.
Because storage is a relatively slow-changing industry, wide adoption of these new architectures will take several years to complete. The market for central, shared storage systems is currently dominated by a handful of giant suppliers, who could lose their position if they do not move quickly enough to embrace flash in all its new forms.
Tim Stammers is Senior Analyst at Ovum, focusing on server and storage infrastructure, and covers the activities of vendors such as EMC, VMware, Microsoft, IBM, and HP
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Microsoft adds cloud chargeback to Windows server
Microsoft has teamed up with a third-party software producer to give Windows Server 2012 and the System Center management system its own billing and chargeback mechanism for use with Microsoft's Azure cloud services.


The third party is Cloud Cruiser, maker of the billing analytics and chargeback system, Cloud Cruiser Enterprise Edition. Cloud Cruiser isn't associated exclusively with Windows Azure cloud services. On the contrary, its system supports supplying billing information through HP Cloud Service Automation 3.1, VMware's vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services' operations API. It also supports supplying billing information with OpenStack-based clouds, including Rackspace, and cloud infrastructure built using Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud.


By building use of Cloud Cruiser into Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1, Microsoft is gaining an edge in supporting hybrid cloud operations in its Windows Server customer base. Chargeback is a key component enabling cloud computing and tying responsibility for use to business users.


The addition of Cloud Cruiser gives customers interested in hybrid cloud computing "the ability to deploy on-premises, in a hosted cloud and in Windows Azure," said Brian Hillger, director of server and tools marketing. If companies are striving for efficient operations with a combination of on-premises and public cloud computing, adding Cloud Cruiser can increase the effectiveness of such a combination, he said.


Part of the issue with hybrid cloud operation is company employees gain the ability to self provision virtual servers. IT management and business management may or may not be aware of what they're doing and what the likely bill is going to be. Gaining visibility into usage and the likely bill that will result is one of the functions of Cloud Cruiser.


"When customers spin up services across a diverse computing environment, costs can rocket out of control quickly," said Nick van der Zweep, Cloud Cruiser VP of products. By automating chargeback, IT managers can inform business users of the expense of the use associated with their activity and bill their respective departments, if that's the way the company has set up use of Azure. "The more self-service that public and private computing resources become, the more critical is the need for rich cost transparency and financial accountability," van der Zweep said. Read More

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Oracle prepares for next-generation cloud
Those tracking the IT industry will recall how IT moguls like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates once dismissed Cloud Computing, to protect the interests of their best-selling on-premise software. Well that was around the years 2005 - 2006. Today, both Larry and Bill have done a volte-face and changed their opinions about the Cloud. In fact Oracle (and Larry) suddenly began singing hosannas about the cloud at Oracle events in recent years. Then Oracle spokespersons began talking about their cloud strategy and the cloud enablement of products. Delivering a keynote at the Oracle CloudWorld 2013  event in Mumbai, Sandeep Mathur, Managing Director, Oracle India spoke about Oracle's "next generation cloud", shared the company's cloud strategy, and spoke about trends in the market, and new Oracle solutions.
Mathur began his keynote by revisiting some of the current market trends that are driving cloud adoption. He alluded to the splurge in connected devices (9 billion), of which 2 billion are smart phones. And all these smart devices are generating data -- posing a Big Data explosion. And by 2020, research shows there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet.
Mobility is also a trend that has accelerated in the last few years. As if to drive the point home, one of the Oracle speakers showed a photo of Pope Benedict's election in 2005 -- with crowd's in St. Peter's square. And then he showed a similar photo of Pope Francis' recent election -- this one with a lot of backlit mobile phone screens!
Another trend is social media. Customers are now on social and can express their views about your products and services on social media. Also, the young workforce is more comfortable communicating over social media, rather than email.
"There are 930 million mobile subscribers in India. By next year most enterprise applications within a company will support mobile. When you have close to a billion users (in India) in mobile, clearly your applications need to support mobile. And Social media is now driving one-to-one relationships between businesses and its customers," said Mathur.
Mathur alluded to the declining average age of the workforce. He said the young workforce is used to a different experience (for instance young people  are using less of email and more of social media to communicate). And the platform for this communication is mobile.

"We are going to keep reducing best-of-breed technology. We have 80 plus products, and are leaders with 60 of these. We will continue producing better independent products and then we want to make sure that we vertically integrate those products so that customers do not have to spend that cost on R&D. These products will be quick to deploy and make for agile platforms. And of course, these will be cloud-ready"


Sandeep Mathur, Managing Director, Oracle India


"Enterprises continue to use applications developed 10 - 15 years ago, that are not ready to address these market trends; this calls for a new set of applications. Most businesses leaders believe that cloud is the way for us to embrace this change and make your organization more available," said Mathur.
Product Strategy
Problem: There are too many best-of-breed products used in organizations. Integrating all these products and managing them using a plethora of management consoles is a nightmare for IT managers. Organizations also need to spend on R&D to integrate these products. Oracle (and other IT solutions vendors like SAP) are trying to simplify and reduce these costs -- by offering one product with a suite of well integrated applications -- all from the same company. Oracle believes this approach also makes it easier to manage the licenses and upgrades.
"We are going to keep reducing best-of-breed technology. We have 80 plus products, and are leaders with 60 of these. We will continue producing better independent products and then we want to make sure that we vertically integrate those products so that customers do not have to spend that cost on R&D. These products will be quick to deploy and make for agile platforms. And of course, these will be cloud-ready," said Mathur.
According to Mathur, Oracle is spending USD 5 billion this year, just to ensure that its products interoperate well with each other. Oracle is also developing a new set of applications that are ready to run on the second-generation cloud. It is also acquiring companies that have the technology and products that match its application objectives. It believes that the current set of applications cannot cater to the needs of the next generation workforce, which will be using mobile devices and will communicate through social media.
"By next year most enterprise applications will support mobile. The new set of applications will be business intelligence aware and socially aware.  We are also acquiring applications, and acquiring the best of breed in those particular categories. Our applications will run on-premise, in a private cloud or on a public cloud," said Mathur.
In March, Oracle quietly acquired start-up Nimbula, a maker of cloud management software. Interestingly, Nimbula's co-founder, Willem van Biljon, also helped build the Amazon cloud.
In the past, Oracle produced large applications like ERP and CRM that were broad-based and general -- for all verticals. Businesses bought these and then invested in R&D to tailor the application to its specific needs -- a laborious, time-consuming and expensive affair. Oracle is also going after niche segments and bringing out "verticalized" suites that are tailored for niches like Human Capital Management (HCM), talent management, health sciences, taxation, banking & financial services etc.
Long innings
Oracle is the world's largest provider of enterprise software and now also a leading maker of enterprise hardware used in data centers. It also offers systems and services to enterprise customers. The software behemoth entered the Indian market 20 years ago. To date it has more than 30,000 developers or R&D specialists based in India. It has grown its customer base to 8,000, and it enjoys a rich ecosystem of partners.
"India is an important market for us not just from a business standpoint but also for R&D, engineering, shared services -- and you can expect us to be here for a long time," said Mathur.
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'Cloud’s pay-per-use model makes expensive technology infrastructure accessible to smaller banks'
How different is the banking industry now as compared to earlier years? How are banks leveraging technology to improve processes? 

Today, banks and financial institutions are shifting their focus from a product-centric approach to a client-centric approach. They are reassessing their business fundamentals like profitability and client relationship management to improve client retention and cross-selling capabilities. Banks are deploying client profitability analytics to enhance performance by analyzing profitability at multiple levels. By increasing automation and leveraging the existing infrastructure banks are now looking to do more with less, balancing cost reduction with process improvements.
According to you, which emerging technologies have changed the face of banking sector? 

The Internet sparked the transformation from physical to electronic banking. Now mobile banking leads the pack. With increased adoption of smartphones and tablets, mobile banking is inarguably the forerunner. The iPhone and Android platforms have given a new definition of plug-and-play third-party applications. Today, almost all banks including the traditional ones are offering mobile banking facility. It is easier to check your account balance or recent transactions using mobile apps. You can also transfer funds using mobile banking. Emerging online banking capabilities are also gaining traction. In addition, online account opening and loan origination systems are becoming more popular.
Cloud computing’s pay-per-use model has made expensive technology infrastructure accessible to smaller institutions and banks. The applications hosted on cloud computing technologies create an easy-to-access, highly secured environment that provides reliable world-class infrastructure and application services in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Today, rural and cooperative banks are able to use this technology to automate and integrate their processes pertaining to deposits and loans.
With the advent of online banking, the world has become easy to access, but it comes with a lot of downside like security concerns, frauds etc. What is your perspective?
While the consumer must exercise good judgment in how they dispense their personal information, banks and financial services must also ensure a secure environment where customers can conduct their financial transactions. In this electronic age, where identity and data theft are becoming commonplace, it is essential for any bank / financial provider to take a proactive approach in identifying potential cyber-attack threats and the areas of vulnerability within their own infrastructure. And then adopt suitable solutions to match the threats. Some of the best online banking systems offer multi-layered security that act as deterrent to fraudsters.
What trend do you see in IT spend for the banking sector? Are the CIOs investing in technology or refraining from investment in this period of economic turmoil?
CIOs are definitely investing in technology; a significant amount is also channeled towards maintenance. This is also substantiated by industry reports – for example, Gartner predicts worldwide enterprise IT spending to total USD 2.679 trillion in 2013 and industry analysts at Ovum predict growth of 3.4 percent in the IT spend of retail banks around the world in 2013. Banking and securities is an IT-intensive industry, spending approximately three times as much on IT as a percentage of revenue than the average of all industries. This trend is expected to continue due to a significant amount of IT required to run activities such as lending, payments, trading and risk management.
Could you brief us about the new technology of floating & dynamic IVRs.

The basic concept of a floating IVR is one of prediction and presentation of a customized interaction layer. Each time a customer calls into an IVR he leaves behind a ‘footprint’ of behavior. Some of this footprint is captured in the contact center systems. Some elements of it are captured in the CRM systems and all the after call work the agent does.
The fundamental principle is to mine this information, form conclusions, predict what the customer is likely to be looking for – and present an appropriate menu of choices in real time. As the data sets get richer with more and more interactions the customer will find it easier and easier to use the system that then anticipates his every need. This does call for very robust IT systems since the data will be pulled in real time from all the enterprise application software for every call. What we are seeing in the early days of this idea is the need for these systems to be strengthened and made more robust to make this a reality.



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Google opens Compute Engine to cloud customers
Google recently opened its Compute Engine service to Cloud Platform Gold Support customers and simultaneously reduced Compute Engine prices.
Announced at Google I/O 2012, Google Compute Engine (GCE) competes with Amazon EC2 and other infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from the likes of Rackspace, SoftLayer, Savvis and Terremark. It provides computational infrastructure on demand in the form of virtual Linux machines that can perform sustained processing tasks. It's a lower-level service than Google App Engine, a platform-as-a-service offering that is simpler to use but is suited for a narrower range of tasks.
CGE had till now been available only by invitation. It's now available to Cloud Platform customers paying USD 400 per month for Google's Gold Support package. It's also less expensive: Google dropped Compute Engine prices 4 percent across the board.
When Google introduced GCE, Urs Holzle, SVP of technical infrastructure, claimed that Google Compute Engine delivers 50 percent more compute per dollar than other cloud providers, but he did not provide the data to support his assertion. Google didn't immediately respond to a request for further information about this.
In addition to its price reduction, Google has enhanced GCE with several new features. These include the ability to boot from persistent disks that have been mounted as the root file system, capture persistent disk snapshots, record and restore the content of network-resident persistent disks on demand, and attach and detach persistent disks from active instances.
Google has also improved its administration console, dubbed the Google Cloud Console. And it is providing five new instance type families and 16 new instance types.
European GCE customers now have two new supported zones in the area, which should improve performance and latency. Users who had maintained instances elsewhere can migrate their instances to the new zones with the gcutil command line tool.
As an example of how GCE compute power can be put to use, the company's Chrome team in Japan has created a demonstration game in Node.js called World Wide Maze Chrome Experiment that uses the structure of any website submitted to build a 3D marble maze.
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Accenture launches Public Cloud platform
In anticipation of the shift in demand toward the public cloud, Accenture has launched the Accenture Cloud Platform
As more and more clients are going digital, the Accenture Cloud Platform provides services and solutions designed to help organizations integrate and manage the hybrid cloud environments that span across multiple vendor platforms and are critical to providing ultimate flexibility and supporting emerging technologies.
The Accenture Cloud Platform represents an important next step in Accenture’s cloud strategy and reaffirms the company’s intent to providing cloud brokering and orchestration services that are growing in importance to clients.  As part of this strategic initiative, Accenture will invest more than USD 400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering the right cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third party offerings.
“Already in use on more than 200 projects, the Accenture Cloud Platform features proven technologies and business processes to help our clients make the safe journey to cloud,” said Jack Sepple, global senior managing director - Cloud, Accenture. “We foresee the growing use of public cloud services and are uniquely positioned to offer the best of breed from a variety of vendors. We are committed to moving our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings, broad ecosystem of alliance relationships, and large global client base to the cloud in all forms – public, private and hybrid.”
According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report, digital technology has become a strategic imperative and a tool of competitive intent for businesses today.  Supported by the cloud, technology trends like mobile, social collaboration and big data are changing the landscape as an increasing number of businesses go digital.  The Accenture Cloud Platform provides a secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready cloud integration system to support these critical changes. It provides management and control over cloud services that are being delivered to clients, whether by Accenture or from a third party provider such as Microsoft, SAP and others.
As part of its overall investment, Accenture has created expanded services on the Accenture Cloud Platform, including public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing and big data analytics solutions in the cloud.
Accenture has already worked on more than 4,000 cloud projects for clients, including over half of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 6,700 professionals trained in cloud. Accenture is consistently recognized for its industry leadership by leading independent analyst firms and software alliance partners.
According to industry analyst firm IDC1, the total market size for cloud will grow from approximately USD 40 billion in 2012 to USD 98 billion in 2016. This includes projections for software as a service (SaaS) to reach USD 37 billion, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to reach USD 30 billion, system infrastructure software as a service to reach USD 20 billion, and platform as a service (PaaS) to reach USD 10 billion by 2016. Read More

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IBM bets on open standards for its cloud services and software
IBM’s move towards an open cloud architecture, will ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of unsecured and difficult-to-manage offerings. Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and big data.


As the first step, the company unveiled a new cloud offering based on open cloud standards, including OpenStack that significantly speeds and simplifies managing an enterprise-grade cloud. For the first time, businesses have a core set of open source-based technologies to build enterprise-class cloud services that can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.


IBM’s India Software Labs in Bangalore has contributed significantly to the development of this platform by building the automation components, which allow easy management of the cloud. The lab has also helped build the cloud automation ecosystem of business partners and ISVs who will become cloud service providers.


“Standardization supports the flexibility and scalability needs of the businesses. The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities to meet their needs," said Vamsi Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM India/South Asia. “By leveraging OpenStack-based services, Indian cloud service providers can now build a platform to rapidly deliver services at an affordable cost.”

Based on customer-driven requirements, the new software, called IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, gives clients greater flexibility by removing the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services. With the new software, companies can quickly combine and deploy various cloud services onto the cloud infrastructure by lining up the compute, storage and network resources with an easy-to-use graphical interface.


The new IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator allows users to perform the following:
•    Build new cloud services in minutes by combining the power of pattern-based cloud delivery, with a graphical orchestrator for simple composition of cloud automation;

•    Reduce operational costs by automating application deployment and lifecycle management in the cloud: compute, storage and network configuration, human task automation, integration with third party tools, all delivered by an integrated cloud management platform and;

•    Simplify the end user consumption of cloud services, via an intuitive self-service portal, including the ability to measure the cost of cloud services with metering and charge-back capabilities.


The development of open industry standards has proven a critical turning point in the success of many technologies, such as the Internet and operating systems. For cloud computing to grow and mature similar to its predecessors, vendors must stop creating new cloud services that are incompatible.  A recent report by Booz & Company warned that without a more concerted effort to agree on such standards, and leadership on the part of major companies, the promise of cloud computing may never be reached.


IBM is applying its experience in supporting and validating open standards from Linux, Eclipse and Apache to cloud computing. Working with the IT community, IBM is helping to drive the open cloud world by:

•    Creating a 400-member strong Cloud Standards Customer Council that grew from about 50 members at launch;

•    Sponsoring OpenStack Foundation as a platinum and founding member, and as one of the top code and design contributors to all OpenStack projects;

•    Driving related cloud standards, such as Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration, Linked Data in the W3C and TOSCA in OASIS, to enhance cloud application portability;

•    Dedicating more than 500 developers on open cloud projects and;
•    Working closely with the OpenStack Foundation, along with its 8,200 members from 109 countries and 1,000 organizations.


IBM is one of the world’s largest private cloud vendors with more than 5,000 private cloud customers in 2012, which increased 100 percent year-over-year. IBM’s cloud portfolio, called SmartCloud, is based on a common code of interoperability, allowing clients to move between IBM’s private, hybrid and public cloud services.
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Manageability challenges of cloud computing: A consumer perspective
Cloud computing has the capability to revolutionize the conventional infrastructure landscape for any organization. Hence, in the past 3-4 years, we have seen several firms in the IT industry evolving cloud solutions across the areas of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Private cloud and public cloud technology providers have also made their impact.
On the other hand, the consumer industry has also been witnessing this evolution very cautiously. Big enterprises have actually embraced primitive cloud technologies well before this evolvution, by virtue of internal private cloud setup, backed by several virtualization technologies that prevailed 5-7 years back. Big enterprises have hence flavored their IT Landscape with such private cloud setups natively through various hypervisors such as VMware, HyperV, etc. The timing of the existence of such virtualization technologies forming internal private clouds and the evolvution of the full-fledged cloud computing industry is what I see as very vital, for several reasons. Both seem to co-exist even now and I see very few cases that might have taken over completely. I also see several of challenges that big enterprise consumers have been facing since past 4-5 years.
Some of the challenges faced by big enterprise consumers include:
• Big enterprises having IT landscape with several hypervisors working in heterogeneous environment looked for an open-end amalgamation with the third-party cloud technology providers (external private and public cloud service providers). Co-existence seemed to be the only choice and not a replacement merely for the fact that the “Cloud Computing Technology” was a new-bee, expecting to attain maturity over the coming years.
• Today’s cloud arena is driven by several vital mantras – “quick provisioning”, “easy manageability”, “effective OPEX model”, “dynamic resource availability,” etc. All these are result of a management layer that manages the cloud fabric and its flavors. These for obvious reasons did not prevail during the early virtualization days and hence I see disconnect between the way enterprises perceived early internal virtualization-based private clouds and the now cloud computing services.
• Adoption of heterogeneous virtualization technologies resulted into several internal private clouds and there exist no common manageable platform for such varied horizontal plane. Today’s Cloud technology providers claim several management platforms that support multi-hypervisors environments, however, they may limit themselves features by features when cross compared. Maturity of cloud platforms over the years should actually manage the old conventional private clouds seamlessly across the variances.
• There is always a contention within any organization to protect the existing investments and thus this becomes the first priority, wherein an enterprise with its internal private clouds would cautiously venture with external third-party cloud technology providers. The basic integration between both worlds comes out to be the first driver of such business case and I still see a lot of improvements in coming years to strengthen this engagement.
This list can go on. On the other hand, there are several reasons to feel good as well, against the ambiguity factors. Instead of enterprises venturing further into internal private cloud setups, there exist several simpler options to migrate to external cloud setups – private and public both.
Today, we see cloud services success stories across several segments of end users, typically with the SMEs, wherein initial huge CAPEX may not be the favored option always. Several green field implementations are being taken up with external cloud technologies and their offerings. It makes sense to venture right from scratch during such scenarios and derive quick results through external cloud service providers. Big enterprises have also adopted these approaches by embracing hybrid solutions – maintaining their internal private clouds, as well as porting critical applications/business functions to external cloud services.
Cloud technology has thus seen a varied range of end consumers tweaking their offerings since their initial evolvement. I believe this is backed by the basic fact that the cloud technology providers also realize that their offerings and solutions should protect the investments enterprises have already made and thus help them gain business value – for sure this implicitly results into their own success stories as well.
Dharmesh Rathod is Associate Vice President-IT Infrastructure and Projects Group at Essar
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Lack of purpose a major fail for social collaboration initiatives says Gartner
Although social technologies are employed by 70 percent of organizations, Gartner, Inc. said most social collaboration initiatives fail because they follow a worst practice approach of "provide and pray", leading to a 10 percent success rate.


"Without a well-crafted and compelling purpose, most social media initiatives will fail to deliver business value," said Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner. "This ‘provide and pray’ approach provides access to a social collaboration technology and prays something comes good of it, like a community forming and participants' interactions naturally delivering business value. As a result, this approach sees a 10 percent success rate, and the underlying reason is usually that the organization did not provide a compelling cause around which a community could form and be motivated to provide their time and knowledge. In other words, purpose was lacking."


Gartner's research into the social collaboration efforts of more than 1,000 organizations has identified several prominent patterns. The most apparent was that social collaboration initiatives that have a clear and compelling purpose from the outset tend to succeed. While this may seem obvious, the vast majority of organizations treat collaboration as a platform decision, rather than a solution to a specific business problem or a route to a desired outcome.


“Organizations approaching social collaboration in the "provide and pray" manner do not fully recognize the value of purpose and do not understand how to take an "architected" approach to it,” said Mr. Bradley. “Social collaboration efforts are a challenge for which enterprise architects are well suited, as these practitioners are often cross-disciplinary. They are able to work with social initiative leaders to define community purposes and condense these purposes into a strategy or road map which they can use to guide project teams during implementation.”


Enterprise architects should begin by helping organizations identify and define, at a high level, the target community for social collaboration. Having defined the audience, they should then identify the nature of the collaboration and the desired business outcome. "A well-defined purpose identifies who the participants are, what specific issue they are collaborating around, what value they will gain for themselves, and what value will be provided to the organization," said Mr. Bradley.


However, all purposes are not equal in terms of their ability to catalyze a community. For example, some purposes are stronger and best positioned early on, while others may thrive after achieving a critical mass of participation in a social community. Enterprise architects can help an organization evaluate the relative strengths of purposes and sequence their integration into a social collaboration initiative.


To assist them, Gartner has identified five characteristics of a good purpose:
  • Participant magnetism: The purpose should naturally motivate people to participate. This is the "what's in it for me" characteristic. Users should easily grasp its importance and the value of participating. The purpose must have meaning to the participants, and build within them a compelling need to participate. If you have to create interest among users, especially through costly incentives, you've chosen the wrong purpose.

  • Community draw: The purpose must resonate with enough people to catalyze a community and deliver robust user-generated content. The best communities are heavily unbalanced in their two-way approaches, meaning that the community contributes far more content than the supporting enterprise. Find out how powerful the purpose is for drawing in significant numbers of people and contributions.

  • Organizational value: The purpose should have a clear business outcome. This is the "what's in it for the organization" characteristic. Choose purposes where organizational value can be clearly measured and shared with the community as feedback and motivation to continue participating.

  • Low community risk: Choose low risk over high reward. The purpose, especially early in an organization’s social application maturity, should be low risk. This overall characteristic derives from four types of risk:
    1. Culture risk is the risk that the corporate culture is not conducive to mass collaboration.
    2. Adoption risk is the risk that people will not be inclined to collaborate on this subject or in this community.
    3. Information risk is the risk that the community's shared information will be sensitive in nature.
    4. Result risk is the risk that, even if a community forms, its interactions will not bear fruit.

  • Promoting evolution: Select purposes that you and the community can build on. Determine the dependencies between purposes. Some purposes have a more natural tendency to lead to others and to facilitate emergence, while that others are more subordinate. Those that have no dependencies but can lead to other purposes score higher.
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Eight approaches to Service Level Agreements on Public Cloud
When I discuss public cloud with experts, some argue that public cloud is also a different form of outsourcing. Though theoretically it may look like that, with my experience of managed services outsourcing, I would argue it is very different.


Public cloud is more of a commodity and has least resemblance to traditional managed services outsourcing than its other counterparts. One of the big differences is SLA where in managed services you have option of customization and negotiation for SLAs; you do not have the same flexibility in public cloud contracts as the services are available off the shelf. As per NIST definition of public cloud “On Demand Self Service” is an important characteristic without human intervention which makes public clouds more of a commodity.


Getting into wrong cloud provider or agreement can not only cause agony for business but it can have other implications on the people behind that decision.


I thought of capturing some of the points in this article which might need attention:


1.  Don’t just look at numbers:  The numbers may look lucrative but it is worth checking what it means as well. My advice is not just consider the uptime of 100 percent is better than 99.9 percent but what the provider is ready to commit if it in case it does not meet the SLA. Some contracts may say “X percent invoice credit for 60 minutes downtime 2X percent for up to 120 minutes and so on” while others might commit “10 percent invoice credit anytime annual uptime falls below 99.X percent”. It is also needed to check uptime record of the provider in last few years of operations to give you the additional confidence. Most established providers generally meet their SLA targets. The higher the impact to the provider, higher will be its commitment to maintain the SLA.


2.  Cost vs Penalty: While comparing cost of service and penalty, if the penalty of SLA failure is high you will be tempted but this is where there is a possibility of making mistakes. Proper due diligence of historical records and understanding of contract clauses is needed. Look at the impact of those penalties against the business losses it may cause and then take an informed decision about the cost part. My suggestion is to go for a better uptime even if it requires more expensive cloud as the provider is ready to invest in infrastructure availability and redundancy. If you see a provider whose service credit is very lucrative, please review carefully the exclusions. Many providers commit 100 percent of fees if the performance fails below a certain standard.

3.  Exclusions: Maintenance schedules needs to be understood carefully along with other exclusions. Planned downtimes are not covered in the uptime contracts but if your business is 24 X 7 how these downtimes impacts your services needs to be checked. You can use it as a parameter for benchmarking for different clouds. The timing of this maintenance schedule should be appropriate for your business. This is an important part of due diligence. In addition, check for any planned migrations by provider. Many contracts may exclude downtime due to virus attacks, sabotage, migration and hacking etc which needs careful review.

4. Study the cloud architecture: For SAAS and PAAS, it is necessary to look at the underlying providers and understand how each entity can impact SLA guarantee. No provider can claim that they never had any downtime and outages but unlike managed services, the consumer has least visibility and control over the situation and careful study is needed to minimize the risk of getting impacted.

5.  Expectation Setting: Due Diligence and expectation setting is necessary before we go for public cloud. Traditional managed services outsourcing has a different method of service delivery and we tend to negotiate or keep SLAs at a higher level than we generally would require. But in cloud this can make a huge difference in selection of a provider. Your other assessments for provider giving 99.95 percent could be better than the one providing 100 percent and you can make a compromise of 0.05 percent if that does not matter much for your business. Hence true understanding of what the SLA means to business and how far you can go for taking the risk must be covered in the due diligence for public cloud.

6. Definition of outage: This could vary for each provider and one needs to carefully examine what it means. For SLA contracts carefully study and compare the meanings. This can make dramatic changes to the meaning of availability which has an impact on your business. In addition, is performance degradation considered as an outage by the provider? At what level the availability is being calculated is also something needs to be compared to understand availability.

7. Service Improvements: Though cloud gives flexibility of termination, most cloud arrangements are long term and hence you need to know the roadmap of the provider for next several years before you lock yourself. What service improvements are expected and how it is going to help your business. This is an important part of the due diligence before your decision to move to cloud. Some research on this subject can work well for your decision.

8. Service Level Management (SLM) Approach: Understanding of how the SLM will be performed during an outage situation, how communication will happen, what will be the form of RCA and within how many days it will be provided etc. is necessary. It is also necessary to understand what monitoring and reporting approach has been adopted.




In Conclusion
So far, SLA could be least discussed part in many public cloud decisions but to me it should be the first thing to be taken care. Moreover, if the in-house capability does not exist for due diligence for public cloud, hiring experts will definitely make sense. Moreover, for SLAs, it is important to understand how the availability translates into business performance and impacts top line or bottom line. One should not be too much bothered about penalties but should focus on reliability of the provider to deliver commitments.
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OpenStack deployment tool goes Open Source
OpenStack is the open source success story of the contemporary era, a project that started as a gleam in the eye of Rackspace executives who wanted to compete with Amazon, and rapidly grew into a project with its own governing board and foundation.


It consists today of six distinct parts, all of them making progress on the problems that confront their individual areas of cloud computing. It's been criticized for lacking the beneficent dictator who, it used to be believed, was a necessary force behind a successful open source project. That was before the procedures of an open source development process -- and the ability to govern those seemingly chaotic procedures -- were well understood. The Apache Software Foundation and Linux kernel development process supplied the models.


 Even so, there are now so many contributors and so much activity behind OpenStack, not to mention $10 million in funding under its new organizational structure, that many observers believe it will be impossible for any single individual or software vendor to keep up. And therein sits the problem.


Imagine an IT manager who wants his production software to be a fixed, immutable thing until he decides to apply specific changes -- in a controlled way. He's considering OpenStack as the basis for his internal cloud infrastructure and, as he deliberates, he notices how the parts move slightly, shift out of focus, change color and take on new forms -- even as he looks. It's not the stable infrastructure he was thinking of, but more of a giant kaleidoscope. If OpenStack is his choice, he'll need another staff to keep up.


 That's one of the chief barriers to OpenStack adoption by IT staffs today. It's a work in progress, an impressive work, but the amount of motion inside the project is also impressive and threatens to increase the workload of an OpenStack adopter.


"You need to automate the deployment process. Otherwise, you'll have to do it with manual labor. It's not just OpenStack but all the other pieces of software that are key to making it work," says Boris Renski, co-founder and executive VP of Mirantis, one of the few OpenStack consulting firms, in an interview.


Mirantis has assembled a library of OpenStack components, which it periodically updates, tests for compatibility and deploys as a set in its consulting engagements. The library is named Fuel, and Mirantis announced Monday that Fuel is being made available as open source code under an Apache 2.0 license.


"It's in our DNA to make it open source," said Renski. Mirantis is an active contributor to the OpenStack project and its consultants have cut their teeth on working with open source code on many engagements.


Fuel is not a Mirantis distribution of OpenStack, like Suse's Linux or Red Hat's Linux or Canonical's Ubuntu OpenStack distributions. Rather, it's a set of components tested to work with all the mainstream distributions and get a new OpenStack user up and running in a fraction of the time it might take otherwise. It will handle configuration management using cookbooks that outline compatible code combinations. Once selected, Cobbler or Python scripts will automatically assemble the open source packages in the right configuration and sequence.


As far as Renski is concerned, Fuel "is the secret sauce of what we're doing here, building production-grade, OpenStack deployments." The release of his firm's "secret sauce" is being done to make the world more aware of Mirantis' skills and increase the uptake of OpenStack. If Mirantis expands the market with its move, chances are at least some of the new implementers will be contacting it for consulting services, especially if they've been satisfied with the assistance they got from Fuel.


It's not that new OpenStack users can't build their own clouds without Mirantis. But to build "really robust clouds," ones that are not fragile or likely to fail when something internal changes, takes the three years of experience that Mirantis has already acquired, Renski claimed.


A current user is PayPal, which is building out a private cloud as its future, strategic IT infrastructure inside of eBay. It's leveraging Fuel "to help transform our global infrastructure into an agile and open cloud platform," said Saran Mandair, senior director of platform engineering and operations at PayPal, in an email response to an inquiry. The library "has dramatically accelerated our OpenStack deployment," he added, without specifying what the length of deployment might have been without Fuel. OpenStack will drive about 9,000 servers for PayPal.


Mirantis consultants seek to train a customer's engineers in the use of the OpenStack through Fuel, which helps "dramatically compress the effort to build OpenStack infrastructure," Renski said. If Fuel powers more installations and eases their deployment, then OpenStack will come that much closer to becoming a de facto standard for private clouds, a development that will not hurt Mirantis prospects.


Mirantis is keeping Fuel neutral on the type of OpenStack cloud that it's being used to create. Piston, an OpenStack-based firm, has its own "very opinionated distribution of OpenStack" that relies on a memory device loaded with Piston that's plugged into the switch at the top of the server rack. In effect, it's a version of OpenStack that's been condensed into a quick-to-deploy version, and Mirantis stopped short of making Fuel able to deploy such versions. If a customer chooses one, that's fine, but Fuel was to remain as an arbitrator of more general purpose and mainstream deployments.


In addition, Mirantis constantly updates and adds to Fuel's capabilities, and it will be sharing those changes on a monthly basis, a rapid release pace by Linux distribution standards.


For OpenStack adopters that decide to use Fuel, that means they will be dependent on Mirantis' continued updates and its willingness to continue to make them open source -- its avowed intent. Alternatives exist, such as Juju or Chef, if for some reason Mirantis departed the scene. But for now, Mirantis is trying to change the nature of the game, accelerate the OpenStack adoption rate, and become a contender as the best candidate for enterprise private cloud infrastructure. Read More

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Adobe launches Creative Cloud in India
Adobe’s popular creative software such as Photoshop, Flash and Premier are among the most pirated. The reason for this is, everyone wants to use it but no one wants to buy it because of the huge one-time cost. With Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched in India today, you no longer need to pay upfront for the software and this will invariably tend to reduce software piracy. “With the easy of availability of products through the Creative Cloud and the attractive price points, we do see a significant impact on the piracy rate of our products,” Umang Bedi, Managing Director–South Asia, Adobe.  
This launch is also seen as a major shift in Adobe’s business model wherein it could be offering more software through the cloud in the days to come. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is aimed at giving creative professionals their first chance to experience a radical new way of accessing Adobe’s tools and services. Creative Cloud is a membership-based service that provides users with unlimited access to download and install all Creative Suite desktop applications like Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Muse, Adobe Edge tools and services, game developer tools and integration with Photoshop Touch apps.          
The company announced a very attractive promotional pricing that works out to be approximately INR 2,885 per month for its Creative Cloud for Teams (CCT) offering targeted at teams and SMB customer base. The regular pricing for CCT would work out to be approximately INR 4,040 per month once the promotions end on April 30, 2013. Additionally, the members also get cloud storage of 100GB (per CCT user) along with the ability to sync to any device enabling them to access files anywhere anytime.      
Available immediately, Adobe CCT is tailored for the small and medium businesses. It offers all the features in Creative Cloud, plus administrative tools, increased storage capacity, and expert services. It includes tools for easy management of virtual workgroups, expert support services, centralized administration for quick and easy deployment of new seats, centralized billing and efficient license management.  
The company also announced its plan to launch the Creative Cloud for Individuals (CCI) offering in India in the near future through its online store. CCI users will be able to avail monthly/annual membership and get 20 GB of cloud storage along with all the major features of Creative Cloud.
Speaking at the launch, Bedi said that since its release in the USA in April 2012, the creative sector has responded enthusiastically. “We’ve seen an incredible uptake, with more than one million individuals in the US and globally joining Adobe Creative Cloud. Our goal is to now make Creative Cloud the ultimate hub for creative professionals in India, where they can access the world’s best tools; store and collaborate across their workplace and ultimately showcase their creations. We are excited by the immense potential this holds for a country like India.”    
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Seven myths which prevent success of Cloud
Cloud is on the verge of becoming a mega trend and it is necessary we debate this topic to a great depth and discuss it openly to remove any confusion and look at cloud from a different window of opportunity. I have tried to capture here some of the myths which exist around cloud for a healthy debate in my endeavor to demystify. I am sure there are better opinions and views which are available than what is being presented here and it will be a pleasure to debate them on this forum.


1.  Cloud brings significant cost savings
This is debatable and this may not always be true. There could be situations where a cloud could be more expensive. We often overlook several associated costs to compute the cloud expense. More often this myth is created as rhetoric by product vendors to make a business case for cloud computing. If you are going for an OPEX model with public cloud, your accounting becomes simple but this also comes with an overhead of additional charges. The logic is same as buying a car and renting a car where renting over a long period is more expensive.


If you are having an environment where the resources are largely underutilized with occasional or seasonal peaks, the cloud option could bring cost advantage. The cost benefit analysis should incorporate the bandwidth usage, any license fees, cost of hosting etc vs server cost, maintenance, electricity/fuel, datacenter charges, staff salary and communication/connectivity, network charges etc. which will help us identify true benefits. The holistic benefits of depreciation, amortization, tax advantages and other financial parameters should also be factored in for exact calculation of possible advantage we are expected to get from cloud computing over a period of time and should be compared not in isolation.


2. Cloud will make CIO and existing IT team redundant
This is partially true for cloud. Everything depends on how you implement cloud. Most often for enterprise IT, the hybrid model is adopted as the best bit. This would mean you still may need to manage things internally but yes it may bring some amount of optimization necessary. In addition, this depends on level of cloud adoption happening for example SAAS, PAAS or IAAS. For SAAS, the dependency on IT team is lowest and for IAAS, it is highest. For large IT setups, we are yet to see full SAAS to come and possibly it may not happen in near future. But for SMBs, yes cloud has the capability of reducing the size but this would mean growth of cloud providers who will hire those skill sets which it is replacing elsewhere.


As regards to CIO, his/her role could be more important than what it is today as he/she will have more power in hand to support business. It only depends whether the CIO is business focused or technology focused. But chances are remote that it will have impact on the role of the CIO as you may still need someone to be managing your IT environment and deal with business demands.


3. If I am done with virtualization, there is not much benefit from cloud
This could be incorrect as cloud will open additional window of opportunity for optimization which is untapped through the virtualization. Most of the cloud computing platforms run on top of the existing virtualized environment to pull together the resources. Virtualization is a technique that allows you to run more than one server on the same hardware box. Cloud computing is not associated with a single box but it can run on several boxes to pool and glue them together to form a service. It has been developed as a concept which allows you to use the infrastructure as a service and extend it further to platform or software as a service.


4.  Cloud implementation is expensive and comes at a cost
One has to be informed about various options. Yes some COTS products can cost a lot but there are cheaper enterprise level options and open source cloud platforms available in the market. Some of the popular names which come are eucalyptus, Nimbus, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, CloudStack, OpenStack etc. Mostly the product vendors at times tend to confuse consumers. Due diligence is necessary before finalization of products to build the right perception about the cost, control, security and efficiency. Hiring a cloud consultant at times is a wiser idea in taking right decision before cloud adoption.


As far as running costs of cloud is concerned, the pay as you go services need a careful evaluation. Amazon public cloud comes with an option of providing EC2 reserve capacity which gives advantage of lower price than “pay as you go” option. Knowing consumption patterns will help in reducing the costs by making combination of reserve instance and pay as you go services in a manner that costs are optimal. In addition one needs to compare apple with apple as just comparing the server costs does not help. One has to compare overall DC, power, infrastructure, network,  fuel, support etc into account when making cost benefit analysis of cloud computing.


5.  Public cloud has significant security concerns

The same dilemma existed during outsourcing and we are discovering the wheel again. Most established cloud providers are using security standards which can be trusted and at times far higher than the consumers. You can check for security and compliance standards of the provider and choose the right provider who is closer to expectations. Not all cloud providers may have similar standards but there could be few who can truly address the level of security and control standards need to be followed.
The success of Salesforce has to some extent busted this myth. Moreover organizations have been sharing the sensitive payroll data with outsourced partners for decades. Outsourcing has allowed partners to manage the internal data as well and this has been there for some time. The resistance due to concerns of security over cloud is expected to fade away in time.


6.  Cloud will cannibalize existing hardware business
I was reading an interesting news on crn.com which states “IBM expects the adoption of cloud computing to add significant growth to its business over the next five years even as it cannibalizes much of its existing business.”  The growth of cloud will lead to growth of overall IT spends and if this continues, there will be more computing power needed. There will be some realignment of smaller business who survived on supporting and repairing the hardware and the traditional sources of IT revenue will undergo some course corrections but at an overall perspective, the cloud will help the growth of business of hardware manufactures as demand may go up.


7.  Anything or everything can be pushed into public cloud
Not everything is a candidate for public cloud immediately. The overdrive to put everything using a big bang approach should be reviewed with great caution. Often we see overdrive to put applications which consumes most resources towards public cloud but that could be counterproductive as we should look at those which consumes least and idle time is high.


In addition highly integrated business critical applications are not the right candidate for cloud immediately. From the practical perspective while small and medium business can have 100 percent public cloud implementation, large business will find combination of public and private cloud more interesting from both business and financial perspective. A thorough due diligence by consultants would be necessary before a decision is made what can move and what cannot move onto the cloud.


Many of these myths have been addressed on different forums and blogs by experts and eventually they will become history as the resistance to change becomes weaker over time.
 - The author is Founder & Managing Consultant, CIO Specialist
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‘Social interaction fosters a long-lasting customer loyalty’
Aspect Software, a global provider of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions, organized its annual event Aspect Customer Experience (ACE) India 2013, at Taj Fort Aguada Hotel in Goa. Held from 6-8 March 2013, ACE India 2013 focused on leveraging the power of social, mobile, and cloud technologies to keep pace with growing customer expectations and enhance customer experience and engagement.
Speaking to InformationWeek, Jagan Narendran, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Middle East, Aspect Software said, "The true value of the customer experience is derived from seeing from a customer’s point of view. Customer experience is critical in order to influence and monetize the experience and create more loyal, revenue-producing customers."
He said that today the widespread movement to retain customers and increase the customer base is compelling enterprises to understand the customer behavior and interactions. “Contact centers are a primary customer engagement point and increasingly a customer satisfaction vehicle, which automatically converts into a revenue generating engine for an enterprise. However, poor and latent connected contact centers and telephony infrastructures can negatively impact customer service and result in missed sales opportunities, causing potential damage to a company’s image," said Narendran.
He said social media sites are emerging as a great platform to improve customer experience and increase their engagement. He said that social media sites allow a two-way conversation, channeling a particular inquiry to those best equipped to respond to that query. “Today, consumers are tech-savvy and use mediums such as Twitter and Facebook to register complaints. If we do not engage with customers through social media then the consumer retention rate is bound to be low and an enterprise may lose upon its customer base. Social interaction fosters a long-lasting customer loyalty and helps grow bottomline for an organization,” added Narendran.










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Cisco launches cloud-based remote education platform for Indian classrooms
Creating a milestone in the Indian education market, Cisco today announced the Cisco Education Enabled Development (CEED 2700) solution. This collaborative, cloud-based video interaction solution will enable efficient delivery of education and skills development courses across the country, facilitating inclusive growth and empowering rural India. Codenamed ‘Dwara’ (after the Sanskrit word for portal to signify a doorway to a new future), the product is the first of Cisco’s ‘Internet of Everything’ solutions from India. Helping connect the unconnected, this solution will enable vast rural populations to access expert teachers and master trainers. Such training is nearly impossible in many areas outside urban centres.


‘CEED' is the second product to be launched from Cisco's India site with the intent of driving innovation from India to the rest of the world. With successful international compliance certified under FCC, CE and UL Labs, Cisco is fulfilling its vision to help transform education for the unprivileged by bringing down the cost of technology in education to about USD 1 per child per month.


Aravind Sitaraman, president, Inclusive Growth, Cisco, “CEED is Cisco’s first step towards bringing inclusive growth to rural areas using the latest technology at extremely affordable prices. It has the potential to revolutionize learning and skills development in this country and help the nation leapfrog several generations to realize its dream of becoming a developed nation by 2050.  For a fast developing nation like India, inclusive growth is key. We are probably the first company in the world to have a business unit focused on creating technologies and solutions to bring inclusive growth to under-served populations. We are very proud to have developed this product from our site in India and simultaneously realize our vision to bring cost of technology in education down to a very affordable USD 1 per child per month.”


‘CEED’ is a comprehensive integrated and open learning platform designed to utilize Cisco Collaboration suite to deliver cloud-driven live and hosted video and other content. With the enablement of remote teaching and learning, every rural school can now offer the same level of expert teaching that is available only to children in cities.  Similarly, the solution brings the skills of master trainers to youth in remote areas. An expert teacher or master trainer can bring in multiple classes in remote areas and teach them complex concepts as if he or she were right before the classes. The students can also ask real-time questions as if the teacher is in the class before them. By preserving this real-time interactive user experience, ‘CEED’ is an apt vehicle to bring advanced education and critical livelihood---generating job skills to populations in remote areas.


The CEED hardware is ruggedized and designed for harsh environments where temperature and dust can be high. It is energy efficient, using 40 percent less power and thus proving ideal for rural environments. With a built-in router that also acts as a Wi-Fi access point, a computer, and projection device, this solution allows multiple students using devices like the Aakash tablet that the government of India (GoI) is trying to develop, to share a single Internet connection. It can also facilitate connections to well-known education portals such as the one produced by GoI’s National Information Centre (NIC).


By virtualizing expert teachers and master trainers and making them available to under-served populations, Cisco believes that CEED is an ideal vehicle to achieve inclusive growth and therefore bridge the rural-urban gap. Read More

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Global public cloud services market to total USD 131 billion in 2013; IaaS continues to be fastest growing segment
The public cloud services market is forecast to grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to total USD 131 billion worldwide, up from USD 111 billion in 2012, according to Gartner. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continued as the fastest-growing segment of the market, growing 42.4 percent in 2012 to USD 6.1 billion and expected to grow 47.3 percent in 2013 to USD 9 billion.


Cloud advertising continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market, comprising 48 percent of the total market in 2012. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2016, USD 677 billion will be spent on cloud services worldwide, USD 310 billion of which will be spent on cloud advertising.


"The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. "Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers."


Although there is wide variation between cloud services market subsegments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings. The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after cloud advertising, comprising 28 percent of the total market in 2012, followed by cloud application services (software as a service [SaaS]) at 14.7 percent, cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) at 5.5 percent, cloud management and security services at 2.8 percent, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at one percent.


Market dynamics vary substantially when considering the cloud services market size and market growth across the different regions of the world. In general, the emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa show the highest growth rates, while representing the smallest overall markets. China is the exception, being both a large and growing market. Likewise, the mature markets of North America, Western Europe, Japan and the mature Asia/Pacific countries constitute the larger, but slower-growth, markets.

"Although forecast growth is generally high across all regions, the adoption of cloud services varies significantly by country. Providers should not assume that a generic strategy applied to specific countries or regions of the world will produce the same outcome when applied to other countries, even countries with similar market characteristics," said Anderson. "Local economic factors, regulatory issues, the local political climate, the diverse landscape of global and local providers, including noncloud providers, and other country-specific factors ensure a unique marketplace in each country and region."
North America is the largest region in the cloud services market, accounting for 59 percent of all new spending on cloud services from 2013 through 2016. Western Europe, despite the growth challenges in the region, remains the second-largest region and will account for 24 percent of all new spending during the same time period. However, the highest growth rates for cloud services continue to come from the emerging regions of Emerging Asia/Pacific (led by Indonesia and India), Greater China and Latin America (led by Argentina, Mexico and Brazil).


"IT services providers, particularly those focused on delivering cloud services offerings or related services, must consider these disproportionately large mature markets if they want to play a leading role in cloud services growth worldwide," Mr. Anderson said. "Similarly, markets in Emerging Asia/Pacific, Greater China and Latin America should also be important considerations for IT services providers that want to capitalize on the high growth of these regions, particularly Latin America and Greater China."
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World’s first cloud-based policy management solution for mobile network operators launched by Tata Communications
Tata Communications, today announced the world’s first cloud-based policy management solution that enables mobile network operators (MNOs) to create differentiated mobile data services quickly and with significantly less capital investment.
As mobile broadband subscribers increase, the service brings more efficient network optimization for a higher quality user experience. Developed in partnership with Allot Communications and Openet, Tata Communications’ Hosted Policy Engine allows MNOs to move beyond flat-rate data packages to deliver targeted data service offers for new revenue streams.
The Hosted Policy Engine is a pre-integrated policy management solution, which enforces traffic optimization and monetization policies in real-time, based on subscriber usage patterns across 2.5G, 3G, 4G and WiFi networks. This allows mobile operators to create targeted service packages to optimize network resources and revenue through tiered service plans for customers. The capital investment needed in a dedicated policy management approach has proved either cost-prohibitive, or lacked the flexibility needed to keep up with mobile broadband demand. Consequently, a large number of MNOs do not have effective policy management tools in place. Based on Openet’s Policy Charging and Rules Function, and Allot Service Gateway, the Hosted Policy Engine means MNOs can now implement policy management cost effectively.
“Mobile operators are under increasing pressure to maximize ROI on the mobile broadband solutions they deploy for their customers, but the sheer complexity of the mobile environment can mean that managing these services is overwhelming both in terms of volume of transactions and scale of investment needed,” said John Landau, Senior VP, Technology and Services Evolution, at Tata Communications. “Our goal with the Hosted Policy Engine is to provide a pre-integrated best-of-breed policy engine that delivers economies of scale for MNOs thanks to our cloud-based approach. It offers the benefits of market leading solution components, but with significantly less capex investment and no support requirements, opening up this solution to a large number of MNOs currently without satisfactory policy management.”
Said Shira Levine, Directing Analyst, Infonetics, “While the benefits of investing in next-generation policy management are clear – including more efficient use of network resources and the ability to create and deliver more innovative, personalised services – the cost and complexity of implementing these solutions remains a deterrent to many operators, particularly those in markets where capex spending remains constrained. A hosted solution offers a faster and more efficient way to get new services to market while also providing a more predictable cost structure. This is an appealing proposition to those operators that lack the resources or the budget to embark on a more traditional deployment of policy control and enforcement solutions.”
The industry-first policy management solution provides operators with a simple way to define and share policy application best practices, and to establish policy hubbing and consistent policy applications for roaming subscribers, thanks to its common platform and library of policy capabilities.
“Policy management has matured from being an access control function to a key platform for mobile broadband monetization and service innovation,” said Niall Norton, CEO at Openet. “Tata Communications’ Hosted Policy Engine brings the benefits of the industry-leading policy solution to a wider audience of MNOs through a new model with reduced deployment complexity, a lower cost of ownership and faster time to market.”

                   

“Allot Communications is pleased to be providing a flexible, 3GPP standards-based PCEF solution that allows MNOs to match service plans and policy enforcement to the digital lifestyle of their customers,” says Vin Costello, VP & General Manager of the Americas at Allot Communications. “Using Allot Service Gateway, Tata Communications’ Hosted Policy Engine is able to leverage the business intelligence in MNO networks in order to shape the digital lifestyle experiences of their subscribers and to capitalize on the network traffic they generate.” Read More

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Evolution from PC to personal cloud will drive invisible sensor-enabled devices
Consumers' digital lives have transitioned from the PC to a personal cloud-driven world that is driving a new type of interaction between consumers and their connected services, according to Gartner. Consumers will use and interact with a multitude of connected, sensor-enabled devices driven by applications and services to create cognizant ecosystems independent of a platform or operating system.


 "Cognizant computing evolves the connected device and personal cloud service into an activity of seamless and frictionless integration connected to sensor-driven 'invisible' devices that are optimized for a particular set of functions," said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Gartner. "This data and information can then be tied to other services across larger ecosystems, platforms and operating systems."


While cognizant computing is not a new concept, it is the natural evolution of a world driven not by devices but rather collections of applications and services that extend across multiple platforms and exist outside the realm of connected screens, such as phones, tablets, PCs or televisions.


As a result, applications are now 24/7 aware of action or inaction, need not be turned on or off and ultimately provide a greater amount of relevant information that can eventually drive behavior change. This is something that is not possible in stand-alone applications or devices. Consumers also don't have to adopt or make a commitment to a platform or service in total and can adopt through long-term interaction and purchases that are driven by short-term task-driven functions.


"One of the defining experiences of cognizant computing is that the devices that drive the experience fall into what we refer to as the invisible space. We define this as the combination of devices and services that unite to form an experience that is below the daily threshold of awareness," said Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner. "In practice, consumers will forget the devices are being carried, worn or used until they need to interact with them for control or to obtain feedback in terms of data or information."


Invisible and cognizant devices that range from wristwatches, key fobs, thermostats and shoes are the digital equivalent of undeveloped property that can become extraordinarily valuable to the user when linked to the appropriate services to extend their use. Although the ideas behind today's cognizant devices have been around for more than a decade, wearable technology, such as smart watches have, for the most part, failed to gain any traction with the consumer due to high costs, little perceived value, an emphasis on technology over form and the need for them to exist as stand-alone products and services that did not and could not tie into a larger ecosystem or platform.


"Personal cloud services and ecosystems are now the center of the digital consumer experience," said Gartenberg. "Combined with increasingly ubiquitous connections, cognizant devices offer new opportunities to drive new device adoption, grow personal cloud services and act as a tipping point for consumer platform adoption. As new digital devices decrease in size, tie into existing applications such as home automation and personal fitness, and increase in perceived user functionality as well as overall form, we will see an increase of multiple devices throughout the home and person that will trend into the invisible space." Read More

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Server virtualization: Top 5 security concerns
Eric Ahlm, Research Director, Gartner takes a closer look at how server virtualization can impact network security

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56 percent of security leaders believe current solutions are ineffective in managing mobile, BYOD and virtualization security: Cisco-DSCI study
According to the study, the current generation of security capabilities implemented by Indian organizations can protect them from traditional threats, but might not be enough to address the challenges of BYOD, mobility and virtualization

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Your 7-step guide for a highly effective VDI environment
Here’s a look at some of the key mistakes done by enterprises undertaking VDI journey and best practices for ensuring a successful VDI Implementation

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VMware ups R&D focus in India; to invest USD 120 million
Existing facilities in Bangalore will be consolidated into the new state-of-the-art premises, which will seat 2,700 employees when ready next year

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3 ways the cloud can complement virtualization
Virtual infrastructures -- what vendors like to call internal clouds -- can benefit from the public cloud in ways beyond data backup

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CA Technologies Reaches VCE Product Certification Milestone
25 offerings now certified to run on Vblock infrastructure platforms

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Virtualization brings major benefits to Wonder Cement
The company has achieved 98.5 percent business uptime and 60 percent power savings by implementing Citrix solutions for server, desktop and application virtualization

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Tata AIA Life Insurance deploys VMware vSphere for building cloud infrastructure
The VMware deployment has helped Tata AIA Insurance company to consolidate its IT infrastructure from more than 90 servers to only 10 servers

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Indian SMB space holds huge potential for server and desktop virtualization, says AMI
With only a small percent of organizations in the SMB space opting for virtualization, the potential for adoption is huge

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Unified architecture helps KPIT Cummins improve data center efficiencies
By choosing a unified architecture of networking, storage and computing, KPIT Cummins has significantly enhanced the efficiency of its IT infrastructure

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Enabling virtual machine security in unified cloud environments
As virtual machines grow in number, the challenges to secure them will also increase at an exponential pace. Raghuveer Krishna, Technical Director, MindTree explains the key security concerns

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Security drives majority of desktop virtualization deployments
92 percent of the organizations are adopting desktop virtualization to improve information security, according to a global research commissioned by Citrix

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What will eat your IT job?
HCL says virtualization and cloud technologies are automating the roles that it used to fill with lots of H-1B workers

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Virtualization helps K Raheja Corp cut energy costs, boost efficiencies
By consolidating and virtualizing its servers, the firm has achieved a drastic reduction in power consumption, with added benefits of improvement in performance and manageability

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Citrix rides desktop virtualization wave by signing up 1 lakh seats in 10 months
Major Indian clients who have adopted desktop virtualization solutions include Essar, Geometric and Perfetti Van Melle India

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Tiding over downtime challenges in a virtual environment
Virtualization has the capability of radically transforming computing by reducing costs and increasing agility. However, an effective downtime management strategy is crucial to fully reap these benefits

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Will Dell lead the x86 data center market?
Can Dell's vStart virtualized rack systems that integrate servers, switches, and storage lead a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars?

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Cisco, Citrix do video via virtual desktop
Technology sends HD video point-to-point through a virtual desktop infrastructure, bypassing the data center and cutting CPU and network consumption

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VMware Project Octopus: Dropbox alternative
VMware's enterprise-grade answer to Dropbox aims to balance effectiveness and IT control

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End of Microsoft XP support accelerating desktop virtualization
With less than thousand days to go until Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP, organizations are migrating to Windows 7 and tying their Windows 7 upgrades with desktop virtualization initiatives

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The great myth of cloud computing
The tools are viable and the payoff is real, but it’s not happening because hardly anyone has the time or money to do it

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How to maximize virtualization benefits with effective storage resources management
By implementing appropriate storage resource management tools, enterprises can overcome new challenges that virtualization introduces in the storage realm

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A practical approach to virtualization
In the drive towards virtualization, organizations must take the approach which gives unbiased opinion about their current infrastructure

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Majority of SMBs not protecting data on virtualized servers
A Symantec survey has found out that many small businesses are neglecting to protect their virtual environments

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How to deploy end to end desktop virtualization within 60 minutes
At INTEROP Mumbai 2011, join Raj Dhingra, Global CEO, NComputing, as he explains how an organization can deploy desktop virtualization within an hour

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4 ways to avoid desktop virtualization ROI traps
As the number of viable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) increase, enterprises must pay close attention to four key areas when making a decision

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Geometric virtualizes 250 desktops in desktop virtualization initiative
The firm has announced a large scale desktop virtualization implementation based on the Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) architecture with Cisco, NetApp and Citrix

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VMware unveils vSphere 5
The virtualization specialist has also released a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure technologies

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Orbis Financial’s IT goes virtual
With virtualization the company has saved USD 50,000 on physical hardware costs, USD 13,000 per annum on power and cooling and USD 15,000 per annum on maintenance and support

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Virtualization and cloud computing cannot be treated in isolation, says Symantec
Symantec says that virtualization is the first step towards cloud

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Hexaware virtualizes its DC
The consolidation initiative has enabled Hexaware to gain close to 25 percent reduction in upfront costs

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VMware introduces vFabric 5
vFabric 5 is an integrated application platform for virtual and cloud environments

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Euronet adopts open source virtualization
The company implemented Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in a phased manner by initially moving less critical applications onto the solution

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Big technology vendors form open virtualization alliance
Red Hat and IBM join with Intel, HP, BMC Software, Eucalyptus, and SUSE Linux to provide an alternative to VMware

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Virtualization leads to better CPU utilization
Server CPU utilization level increased from 20 percent to 80 percent and savings of ` 30,00,000 by deploying virtual machines instead of physical servers

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Virtualization helps PVM improve hardware utilization by 70 percent
Server virtualization freed server capacity to support long-term growth, minimized maintenance tasks and enabled resources to be allocated to applications as per requirement

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‘To capitalize on 3G, telcos need to efficiently handle data traffic’
Anil Pochiraju, Managing Director- India and SAARC at F5 Networks tells Vinita Gupta how Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) can help enterprises manage emerging information access demands thrown up due to technologies such as 3G

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2011 Outlook – Symantec
The number of applications and amount of data in virtual environments will grow significantly in 2011, says Anand Naik

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Innovators will lead the market in 2011
In 2011, ICT would again gain prominence as a tool for economic productivity

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Max New York Life insures itself with server virtualization
The virtualization initiative has helped in delivering a significant reduction in carbon emission — which is equivalent to the average emission of taking 64 cars off the road per year

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Desktop virtualization helps co-operative bank reduce TCO by 50 percent
Using VMware View, the AP Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank has lowered desktop maintenance costs by 75 percent

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LG and VMware join forces to accelerate enterprise adoption of employee owned smartphones
Partnership targets new methods for businesses to manage employee owned mobile devices

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How to maximize your investments in virtualization
What are the steps that a CIO can undertake to maximize investments made in virtualization?

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Credit card transactions likely in future public clouds
The PCI Security Standards Council has recognized virtualization as a safe technology; can cloud computing be far behind

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You cannot virtualize in a vacuum
Implementing virtualization without considering its impact on surrounding IT resources can lead to unexpected results

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Red Hat upskills IT professionals for cloud computing era
Adoption in cloud computing and virtualization technologies across Asia Pacific drives demand for an additional certification

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Energy is 12 percent of data center costs, says Gartner
Energy is rising faster than other category of data center expenses, and the rising population of servers is blamed. Can virtualization help?

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Citrix refreshes XenServer virtualization platform
Storage efficiency and cloud integration features reduce desktop virtualization costs and complexity, according to Citrix

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Telecom operators defying DoT’s Green Telecom Directive: Greenpeace
According to the organization, the telecom operators have failed to adhere to the deadline to publicly announce their carbon emissions as mandated in the Green Telecom Directive

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SAP’s journey to energy-efficient data centers
Raghavendra Rao, Vice President – IT, SAP Labs, Bangalore, shares insights on the measures the company has taken to improve efficiency of its data centers

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ITC Infotech unveils sustainability management solution
The product has been built with the aim of simplifying the process of sustainability management across the globe

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IT and environmental management
Companies experience various problems when they try to implement an environmental program as adequate IT systems are not in place to collect the data

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Organizations going green mostly to save costs
A survey by IDC and HP reveals that while most organizations have policies related to green printing and printers, few think green when it comes to procuring printing solutions. But the mindset is changing

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Gartner report recognizes Fujitsu’s green initiatives
Fujitsu, the ICT-based business solutions provider, is one of the vendors driving initiatives to reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) of ICT, according to a report by research firm Gartner and WWF

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Infosys BPO’s Jaipur building earns LEED India ‘Platinum’ rating
The first Platinum rated building for Infosys; will be the basis for all future Infosys buildings

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IBM, IIT Madras and IIT Kharagpur to jointly develop smarter power grids
Researchers from the company along with students will develop network architectures to collect data as well as analytics tools to provide valuable information to the grid operators

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Busting the Green Myth
Interop Mumbai 2010 got off to a 'energetic' start with a green session on Green IT

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Why IT is key to carbon reduction
By using IT, organizations can identify inefficiencies and make fact-based decisions on the carbon cost of their business

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MAIT lauds government for making e-waste rules draft public
The draft rules lay emphasis on producers to effectively manage and handle e-waste

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Ford saves more than one million dollars by switching off PCs at night
Simple step of powering down laptops and desktop PCs will help Ford save USD 1.2 million and reduce its carbon footprint by 16,000 to 25,000 metric tons annually

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Does Green IT make business sense?
Finding the right inflection points for “green” change is key for business success

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Why sustainable ICT is a vital element for business success
Sustainable ICT solutions can not only save costs, but can also help in bringing about a transformation in business

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BT Offers Tool for Tracking Video Conferencing Travel and Carbon Savings
Users document millions of dollars in annualized cost savings

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Zenith Infotech’s PROUD May Redefine Enterprise IT
An ambitious Indian product company is attempting to break into the niche space of centralized computing. Zenith Infotech’s product has the potential to firmly etch India’s name on the global map

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Switching to Power Saving Mode
Considering the inadequate power infrastructure in the country, a few solutions adopted at both the active and passive infrastructure levels can help organizations to actively address energy woes

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In Economic Cloud, Infosys Sees a Green Lining
As the demand and costs for computing power soar, a core team at Infosys is undertaking a series of green IT initiatives that could help in raising the bar for Green IT practices in the country

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Hardware Vendors Pledge Support for VMware's DPM Solution
Called Distributed Power Management (DPM), the solution is designed to lower power consumption in the datacenter by aggregating unused capacity and powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels

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Unique data center design manages space constraints
With the company having launched a Direct Market Access web portal for its customers, there was a need to have a data center with high bandwidth infrastructure to provide the level of high availability that online stock trading portals demand. The company decided to deploy the data center within its premises, leveraging on the high speed LAN network. However, it was challenged to accommodate the data center within a height of 10 feet, while providing a full-fledged data center infrastructure

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Plugging into a green future
Aiming to reduce its carbon footprint while reducing costs, improving productivity and overall efficiency, Applied Materials India launched ‘Operation Green.’

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CtrlS crosses Rs 100 crore in annuity revenue
The milestone comes within 6 months of initiating operations at the Mumbai datacenter and 5 years of incorporation

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Emerson and IBM combine software capabilities to tap USD 450 million DCIM market
IBM IT service management software integrates with Emerson Network Power’s Trellis platform

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Can an Indian startup provide answers to global data center energy woes?
Using its patented software, startup VigyanLabs is trying to create a new market by promising its clients 30-40 percent reduction in power consumption

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Mobile computing, virtualization and cloud driving data center complexity in Indian organizations: Symantec report
96 percent of organizations looking at information governance to address challenges

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VMware, EMC shakeup hints at data center's future
VMware CEO Maritz moves up to EMC chief strategist role and Gelsinger becomes VMware CEO, as virtualization changes how data centers are run. Take a look at EMC's larger vision

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How to not plan a data center
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built a bigger data center than it needed. Now the potential federal IT boondoggle is being turned into a storage center for data generated by remote sensors and cloud computing.

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A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center
Kiran Desai, VP and Business Head, Managed Services Business, Wipro Infotech, talks about the power management and cooling technologies deployed within Wipro’s LEED GOLD-certified Data Center in Greater Noida

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Towards the data center without walls
A Data Center Without Walls benefits both the cloud service provider or carrier and enterprise IT customers by creating seamless workflow movement and greater resource efficiencies

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Software-Defined data centers are future, says VMware CTO, Steve Herrod
VMware CTO Steve Herrod predicts that all data center resources will be virtualized and governed by a unified console

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Netmagic and Spectranet enter into strategic partnership
India's first multi-location commercial Datacenter-n-Datacenter worth Rs 200 crore to be set up in four cities as part of the partnership

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Acquisition by NTT Com will open up global market for Netmagic - Sharad Sanghi
Calling the acquisition a huge win-win deal for both Netmagic and NTT Communications Corporation, Netmagic’s CEO, Sharad Sanghi, says that this deal will help his firm access global markets

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Andhra Pradesh Government launches State Data Centre
Spread across 9000 square feet, the Data Centre has a storage capacity of 50 TB

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Data centers, DR, and private clouds now ‘on-demand’
Want a data center? A company is now offering it ‘on demand’ and claims you can have it in a few weeks. It claims you can save significantly with their on-demand private cloud and on-demand DR site; resources can be self-provisioned much faster

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Aircel reduces overall DC carbon footprint
The data center has helped in establishing service oriented architecture (SOA) that, in turn, has enabled fast rollouts pan-India without compromising on the flexibility to adapt to business requirements

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'Cloud optimized networks can help organizations solve business challenges'
At the Brocade Technology Day 2011 event at San Jose, Dave Stevens, CTO, Brocade spoke to Vinita Gupta about Brocade’s ways of extending data center-class capabilities to the network edge

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HP Networking becomes EAL 2 CC certified
HP is the first company in India to have leveraged the CC certification process, having met the rigorous security standards established by the CC framework, to ensure IT security

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Cisco introduces portable data centers
The containerized data centers house 16 racks and include chilled water cooling systems for enterprises that need a quick, flexible, and mobile computing power

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Smartlink Network Systems sells Digilink to Schneider
Smartlink Network Systems Ltd (SNSL) today announced that it is selling its Digilink Business to Schneider Electric India (Schneider) for Rs 5,030 million, under Business Transfer Agreement (BTA). The transaction would primarily include the transfer of the “Digilink” brand and trademarks, part of the manufacturing facility at Goa, the distribution network and employees who served Digilink. The company has agreed to a non-compete condition for a period of 5 years for the passive networking business.

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Tech giants push smart networking standard
Rivals Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, along with Cisco and IBM to name a few others, are overlooking their differences to promote programmable networking

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Juniper aims to flatten the network with QFabric
QFabric is Juniper’s vision of a single fabric to reduce network latency

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Ethernet fabric switching solutions to ease data center bottlenecks
Brocade introduces VCS technology and the VDX platform for virtualized data centers and cloud environments

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What will future data centers look like?
With the ability to add multiple cores in a single server, combined with virtualization capabilities, data centers of the future might be a fraction of the size they are today

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Does SSD make sense in the small data center?
The small data center with two to three servers may be an ideal match for disk form factor SSDs

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Emerging data center designs aimed at deriving highest compute performance per kilowatt
New data centers will be able to provide a 300 percent growth in capacity in 60 percent less space than existing data centers, according to Gartner

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Gartner survey shows data growth as the largest data center infrastructure challenge
More than half of respondents plan to expand capacity at existing data center sites by end of 2011

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“Dell will focus on standardization, simplification and automation of the environment”
Dell announced its Efficient Enterprise strategy last year, which is aimed at helping businesses reduce spending on IT infrastructure maintenance. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek India, Jim Merritt, President, Asia Pacific Japan, Large Enterprise, Dell gave Brian Pereira an update on Efficient Enterprise

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Linux replacing Windows in data centers
A Linux Foundation survey found increasing preference for the open source operating system in new server deployments

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Trimax wins Managed IT services project from Rajasthan Govt
As a part of the project, the company will manage end-to-end IT for various organizations of the State of Rajasthan

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Emerson Network Power launches new data center management tool
The firm recently introduced Avocent Data Center Planner, a visual infrastructure planning and management software solution

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'Organizations cannot run their IT infrastructure the same way for the next five years’
Steve Leonard, President, EMC Asia Pacific and Japan, shares his perspective on how organizations are
making their journey to the cloud

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Energy costs account for 12 percent of overall data center expenditures
Energy-related costs are the fastest-rising cost in the data center, say researchers at Gartner

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40 GbE will be an important technology for the data center
Paul Hooper, Chief Marketing Officer, Extreme Networks shares his perspective on the evolution of the cloud and why 40GbE will prove to be a powerful solution in the data center

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SafeNet teams up with NetApp to provide storage security
This collaboration will provide users with the ability to manage and protect on-premise, cloud-based and virtualized data storage

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Virtual environments bring in real challenges
While adoption of virtualization is growing at a fast clip, Indian enterprises are discovering new challenges in the virtual world

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Wipro launches data centers that can be set up in a week
Wipro Infotech announced the launch of FluidState data centers, which can be launched almost ten times faster than a conventional data center

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Data center power can be reduced by 50 percent, says IIT Delhi professor
Dr Preeti Ranjan Panda from IIT Delhi is working on a project to reduce power consumption in the data center by up to 50 percent

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IBM unveils Next-Generation mainframe
Big Blue calls new zEnterprise server a "data center in a box" that will appeal as much to CFOs as CIOs

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HP delivers new collaboration and consolidation solutions for SMBs
New offerings include server and storage solutions that HP claims will allow upto 56 percent reductions in total cost of ownership compared to traditional IT infrastructures

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10,000 cows can power 1 MW data center, says HP Labs
Research from HP Labs shows how the manure output of cows and the heat output of data centers can be combined to create an economically and environmentally sustainable operation

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IBM bets on ex5 to propel x86 market share
The firm’s eX5 architecture will allow enterprises to scale the memory in their data centers without having to buy new servers

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‘Systems are getting instrumented and increasingly interconnected’
If you were stumped by terms like ‘smart grids,’ ‘smarter
planet’ and ‘dynamic infrastructure’ and wondered how all this
would change the world, you’ve got to have a chat with Dr
P (Gopal) Gopalakrishnan, VP, IBM India Software Lab. Dr
Gopal has been tracking technology for years and contributes
to several major products from IBM in the areas of software
and systems. He told Brian Pereira about IBM’s Smarter
Planet and Dynamic Infrastructure visions and how these will
transform the data center

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‘Application owners want the infrastructure to be secure multi-tenant’
As data centers become increasingly virtualized there are a
new set of challenges to be tackled. Brian Pereira caught up
with Rajesh Janey, President – India and SAARC, NetApp,
to discuss customer concerns, and how NetApp is addressing these issues through its storage efficiency drive and solutions

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The role of open source in cloud infrastructure
Today, open source cloud platforms are winning the IaaS battle, open source storage and file systems are expanding their footprint, and open source databases are replacing closed source rivals. Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems explains why nearly everything is being snatched by open source software

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How open source helped People Interactive save more than Rs 80 lakh
The firm that owns the popular Indian matrimony website Shaadi.com, has saved huge costs related to licenses and maintenance by deploying Ubuntu Linux on more than 800 desktops

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SUSE to join Dell emerging solutions ecosystem
SUSE recently announced that the firm was selected to join Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem as an open source cloud solution provider

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Cloud, Mobility and Open Source will drive Indian application development market
The Indian application development software market is expected to reach more than USD 227 million in 2012, says research firm, Gartner

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India plays key role in Red Hat’s global plans
Besides playing a key role in the firm's R&D operations, Red Hat's entire product line is supported from India

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Amazon makes clever private cloud play
Partnership with Eucalyptus, the open-source purveyor of Amazon APIs, guarantees ongoing compatibility between public EC2 and private cloud operations

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How to reduce your cost and improve time to market by using open source NextGen portals
At INTEROP Mumbai 2011, Bharati Lele, Head - Innovation Labs, L&T Infotech, will deliver a session on why open source portals represent a great alternative to commercial portals

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Rains from private clouds percolate to SMBs
In India, a couple of small firms are demonstrating the true value of private clouds

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No more technology lock-in
As much as 90 percent reduction in connectivity, power and other recurring costs

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Adoption of open source infrastructure management tools on the rise
A growing number of Indian CIOs are considering open source network management tools to manage their infrastructure

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Open source vulnerabilities paint a target on Android
With smartphone exploits on the rise, an almost-successful attack against Android devices hints at future dangers

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Linux developers mull unified App Store
Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other distros are working on a framework for a universal application installer

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Indian CIOs open up to open source
Indian CIOs are opening up towards adoption of open source but it will not be a ‘rip and replace’ technology and will co-exist along with proprietary software

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Open source project server hacked, software rigged with backdoor trojan
ProFTPD File Transfer server software compromised by attackers; anyone who downloaded it between November 28 through December 2 most likely at risk

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Red Hat looks to strengthen its PaaS offerings with Makara acquisition
By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform, the company aims to offer a more comprehensive PaaS solution

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Microsoft supporting cloud open source code for Hyper-V
The software giant says its customers don't necessarily want a single hypervisor cloud, so it's supporting OpenStack

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Actuate partners with Wipro to drive open source BIRT adoption in India
Wipro Infotech will promote the use of Actuate products including Actuate BIRT among organizations in India

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Indian open standards policy for e-governance finalized
India's Department of IT (DIT) has approved a far-reaching policy on open standards for e-Governance

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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says software industry broken
Jim Whitehurst believes all vendors, not just Linux distributors, need to embrace open source development methods to improve quality and reduce cycle times

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mCarbon selects Red Hat Enterprise Linux for new infrastructure platform
Post implementation, mCarbon’s voicemail application has seen a steep increase in call attempts from 2 lakh to about 5 lakh in just two years without any drop in performance

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Go green with Open Source
Industry is adopting Open Source because of its many benefits and going green is one of the major ones

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Informatica aids information management with Marketplace
Informatica Marketplace provides a central location for the community members to contribute mappings, mapplets, connectors, templates, dictionaries, vertical solutions and more.

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Oracle releases 'Unbreakable' Linux kernel
Competition with Red Hat heats up with a modified Linux that Oracle says is best for running its software on its hardware

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Microsoft goes 'open' with Windows Azure
The company has announced the availability of a new set of developer tools and SDKs for open source developers to build applications for Windows Azure

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Symbian and Android to lead mobile OS market, says Gartner
The two operating systems will account for close to 60 percent of mobile OS sales by 2014

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Red Hat Linux helps NCDEX achieve 99.99 percent uptime
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NCDEX has designed a high-performance and cost-effective IT infrastructure that has delivered 99.99 percent uptime for its business applications

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Ubuntu 10.10 Linux released to beta
Distribution, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, speeds boot time, enhances cloud integration

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Red Hat leaps on to PaaS bandwagon
A key component of Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Red Hat PaaS will leverage JBoss Enterprise Middleware for open choice in application development and deployment

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Novell introduces cloud security service
The company is targeting more than 200 IaaS and 1300 SaaS and PaaS vendors with the service

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The idea of version 2.0 of any software will be dead - Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst
In an exclusive interview with Srikanth
RP and Harshal Kallyanpur, Red Hat CEO,
Jim Whitehurst details why the cloud can
be the mother of all lock-ins, why the idea
of version 2.0 of any software will be dead,
and why the new-world IT order will be led
by a different set of leaders

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Red Hat joins hands with Wipro to deliver open source solutions
Both organisations plan to collaborate in building integrated solutions on Red Hat technologies through joint investments in Wipro’s CoE

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Linux Foundation launches license compliance program
The non-profit foundation is trying to remove barriers to open source code adoption by easing compliance issues including providing code scanning tools that identify if open source code is linked to commercial code

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Cloud APIs get open source treatment
Red Hat, Rackspace, and others are taking an open approach

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How to build your own Linux cloud
Ubuntu lets you create your own Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure on commodity servers, plus it's interface-compatible with Amazon's EC2

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Red Hat integrates server and desktop virtualization
Red Hat claims that Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 will provide a single infrastructure from which customers can manage their server and desktop virtualization deployments

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Open source security solutions: An attractive alternative
Explore the pros and cons of adopting open source security solutions

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Rackspace announces open source cloud platform
OpenStack counts Intel, AMD and NASA among participants in the cloud computing project that may boost competition for market leading Amazon Web Services EC2

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SMBs lead Linux server OS adoption across India: Springboard
Constrained by limited budgets, Linux is proving to be the right platform for SMBs

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Red Hat powers Just Dial’s IT infrastructure
Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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Nine ways to avoid open source pitfalls
Follow these guidelines and avoid problems while still benefiting from what the open source software community has to offer

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Pentaho launches on demand open source BI
Rapid-deployment option promises ready-to-run dashboards, metrics and reports within 72 hours

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New open source OS will feature 'disposable' virtual machines
Invisible Things Lab building secure OS that better locks down the VM environment

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Open source databases pose unique security challenges
Most open source database platforms aren't supported by third-party database activity monitoring and security policy tools

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Linux proving disruptive in smartphone market
Android will run a third of the world's smartphones by 2015, and open source mobile operating systems from Intel, Nokia, and Samsung will also compete, says ABI Research

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DLP gets an open source boost
A new agent-based DLP discovery tool has been released to Google Code called OpenDLP

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